At 11:29 AM 5/3/03 -0700, James A. Donald wrote:
On 3 May 2003 at 9:49, John Kelsey wrote:
Maybe the direction of technology will ultimately lead to the collapse of the nation state and the rise of David Friedman style anarchocapitalist protection agencies to replace it (good luck solving the military defense problem!)
Against the Soviet Union in its prime, or against the Nazi commie alliance, an anarcho capitalist america would have been in deep trouble, if it had the same level of technology as the actually existent america had back then.
This is the core question: What happens when the anarchocapitalist society and the aggressive authoritarian one have similar technology levels? It's easy to see how just about any social organization will work for defending yourself from enemies at a much lower technology level. But when the forces are within spitting distance of having the same technology, social organization becomes very important. If one side is organized as several hundred independent, overlapping protection agencies, some with mutual defense treaties, others without them, while the other is organized as a centralized army, it looks to me like the centralized forces have huge advantages. ...
Current enemies are not much, because americans have a technological lead. Americans have a technological lead because america is the close to the most capitalist country in the world, and it is the most capitalist large country. An anarcho capitalist America would in time have an even greater technological lead.
This is the interesting question: Would the anarchocapitalist society have and keep an advantage? I don't think you can answer it except by experiment, but it's at least as feasible to me that the right kind of authoritarian state might be pretty damned good at keeping up with an anarchocapitalist one for technology, and would be better at some technology. (Think of what you can learn about engineered diseases when you have a big population of "volunteers" from your political prisons to experiment on, a la Draka.) And the biggest problem is that an open society won't keep things secret all that well. That's good for progress--you can't predict who is going to make the next breakthrough--but it's not so good for security. But it's hard to see why a technically adept authoritarian society couldn't keep up by simply reading the open literature and planting a few spies. Especially if it could also occasionally manage a takeover, or an ideological conversion. As an example of this, think of NSA and related agencies, vis-a-vis the public crypto community. I'm sure they never had any idea of some of the stuff that's been done in academic cryptography before it was published. But they still have an advantage, because they don't publish and we do. Nor is "technologically adept authoritarian society" an obvious contradiction, no matter how nice it would be if it were. Germany wasn't exactly a hotbed of classical liberal thought before the two world wars, and certainly wasn't a free society once the Nazis took over, and yet it was unambiguously able to do high tech well. The USSR was basically a third-world country, complete with starving peasants, and yet was able to keep up with the West in military technology for many years.
--digsig James A. Donald
--John Kelsey, kelsey.j@ix.netcom.com PGP: FA48 3237 9AD5 30AC EEDD BBC8 2A80 6948 4CAA F259