On Friday, May 16, 2003, at 07:58 PM, Declan McCullagh wrote:
On Fri, May 16, 2003 at 10:55:50AM -0700, Tim May wrote:
-- public choice analysis (who benefits?) -- market distortions (markets are ignored) -- rent-seeking (control of resources means continuing rent); shakedowns, governments banning competition for its monopolies -- central planning (inefficient allocation) -- laws no longer connected to morality, but to rent-seeking (gov't. running gambling) -- a general inattention to market, as politicians are not spending their own money (hence bad investments in urban renewal, factory subsidies, highways, railroads, etc.)--their own money is not at risk.
All that is right, of course, and very concise. I guess I'm inefficient because I wrote a piece recently that used many more words to say the same thing. :) See below. It's on nanotech pork barreling and public choice.
Actually, I wasn't very concise. I listed a laundry list of loosely-related ideas...somewhere in there is a coherent and concise theory. However, since some of the ideas have won their authors Nobel Prizes in Economics, and since they themselves have not distilled the point into a single theorem (a la Coase's Theorem, which is also related, but I won't get into that here), listing the examples is all that I could do. The general theme is purpose "the purpose of life." The purpose of any lifeform, or at least the outcome after competition and selection, is furtherance of life. Whether genotype or phenotype, whether actual instance of a lifeform or the DNA. The purpose of a U.S. politician is to be reelected. Nothing else matters. So the politician will say anything he has to say to be reelected. And he will spend money that is not his own to be reelected. Likewise, the purpose of Congress as a generalized lifeform is to perpetuate itself, to grow, to become more dominant. It passes laws to insulate itself from competition, it spins a web of confusing and conflicting laws to ensure its survival. The purpose of the judicial system is to ensure its role as the priesthood, interpreting the confusing and conflicting laws as the seers and priests of ancient times interpreted the signs of the gods. And so, for lifeforms such as the U.N., the Hague, Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party, etc. This is Nietzsche's "Beyond Good and Evil" writ large. Politicians mouth words about good and evil and morality and campaign reform and protecting the children, but the real reason they act is out of self-interest. This is the larger theme behind all of the examples Declan says I concisely described. The key is to place limits on this ability to act as a devouring lifeform. Most libertarians are, I think, aware of this at a deep level. Most favor the Cincinnattus approach to government: Cincinnattus (spelling?) was the Roman general who wanted to work his farm. Other Romans, in Rome, wanted him to lead Rome. He did so, for some amount of time (I forget how long), then went back to his farm. However, most politicians view politics as their life's work...or at least the best-paying job they're ever likely to get. A Congressvarmint earns something like $130,000 a year, plus numerous fringe benefits (cars, staff, fuckable interns, speaking engagements which pay more $$$, graft opportunities, junkets to Carribbean islands, and so on). A moderate dullard like Gary Condit from Modesto, California can do better as Congressman, distributing other people's money to whomever will suport his continuing career, than he can as a fertilizer salesman in his home town (like that other famous Modesto resident, Scott Peterson, accused of killing his wife Lacy). Hence Washington, D.C. is itself a lifeform, intent on surviving, growing, solidifying its power, proliferating, and generally acting as invasive weed. Political kudzu. Instead of meeting for a few months out of each year, with the politicians otherwise back in their home districts, it's of course a year-round affair now, with most of the politicians (and their staffs, who are about 20 times as numerous, more if departments of the Executive branch are counted) making the political capital their primary residence. With many who lose in elections remaining in Washington as undersecretaries of something (I just noticed Asa Hutchinson, a former Congressman, is now some kind of undersecretary at HHS) or as think tank employees...they would rather stay on in McLean or Adams-Morgan or Bethesda or Vienna than go back to Skedunktity Junction, Tennessee. I hesitate to call this a "bionomic interpretation," especially as I never really bothered to learn what "bionomics" was all about, but it's a kind of biological interpretation. Or, quoting Nietzsche once again, it's a "will to power." (No accident that N. was the first profound thinker to come after Darwin restructured everything people had thought about the world.) Entities at nearly all levels seek power, seek life, try to suppress competition. The challenge is to find ways to limit the grown of invasive weed entities like government (of whatever ideological form...the Baathists were in many ways no worse than the Republicrats). Ayn Rand expressed this in terms of disputing altruism, which is the flip side of saying that organisms seek power or act in self-interest. (She was a Nietzschian, at least originally, but later found something to disagree with him about, and in typical Rand fashion, declared him to be some kind of corrupt thinker. Hilarious.) So, Declan, this is a less concise, restatement of the examples. Again, close to "public choice theory." But also close to natural selection. And ultimately, a market system (of sorts, with various distortions caused by men with guns). Where crypto comes in, of the form we call anarchocapitalism or cryptoanarchy, is that it short-circuits or bypasses some of the centralized control mechanisms. Which is not altogether new, as the telephone did this, as decentralized distribution did, and so on. (Which is a reason Russia had but one major city that all sought to move to, but the U.S. has long had many major cities....most people I know have no stinking desire to live in either Washington or NYC or LA.) But relating crypto and digital money and data havens to political ideology is another major topic, so I'll stop here. However, you mention nanotechnology, which I have had some interest in for a couple of decades (via Eric Drexler, Ralph Merkle, Ted Kaehler, and the nanotechnology discussion group in Palo Alto in the early 90s), so I will make a few comments:
-Declan
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The best case for a government subsidy of R&D is to fund vital research that the private sector would fail to do on its own. Proponents of government nanotech funding argue that, as in other "basic research" areas, corporations have only short-term profit horizons. They say that government must pay for basic research because that's not profitable--only applied research is.
Some of the nanotech advocates have long-argued for a "Moonshot" approach, an Apollo Program for nanotech. Gag! We tried to argue with them that this was a terrible idea, that Apollo _itself_ was a terrible approach to going into space in general. The chip industry did not need significant amounts of government money. It is an oft-repeated and bogus claim that chips came from government money. While government spent some money buying circa-1960 technology for Minuteman missiles, for example, the commercial development was way ahead. I could give a dozen more examples. Anyone who was at either Fairchild or TI in the 60s or Intel or Mostek or AMD in the 70s could trivially dispute the claim that the core developments of those decades came from government largesse.
This point has some validity, but there are three counter-arguments. First, private sources will pay for basic research. It may not be at the level that all researchers would prefer, but if it can lead to applied research results, the private sector will still do some of it. Second, nanotechnology includes a mix of early-stage research and late-stage research. Third, by having private funders, you avoid the public choice problems.
Most of the important spending in Silicon Valley was not of research, but was of _feeders_. By this I mean the rise of various companies supplying feedstocks: silicon wafers of sufficient purity, liquid nitrogen (even plumbed under some streets by vendors), photoprojection printers, test equipment, pure chemicals, laminar flow hoods, and on and on. It is this _ecology_ of suppliers and customers that gave us the striking advances in chip technology (and similar advances in aircraft, in biotech, in computers in general, in software, and so on). By contrast, Apollo gave us a dozen spacecraft, of which half were used. Nanotech will need the same ecology of suppliers and customers cited above. Government cannot provide this. However, it is in the interest of some "nanotech leaders" that they be the ones to disperse the money of others, that they become the dominant nanotech lifeform. Whether individuals or committees (some in Washington, even), they will seek to perpetuate and expand. (In some cases, the "nanotech leaders" will be the Congressmen who try to build a career, and later business gig, on shaping nanotech policy. In other cases, it will be early pioneers of nanotech who are unhappy with the industrial focus of work and wish to get it back it back to the pure vision (I decline to name a name here). In other cases, it will just be the usual plodders and dullards who see setting nanotech policy as their only hope for some measure of job security. We've seen this many times before. (Which is not to say this did not happen during the rise of Silicon Valley. In fact, companies and those in them would like to do the same thing. There is no doubt that my former employer, Intel, would like to be the dominant lifeform for at least as long as the remaining careers and retirement living of its employees! I, too, would like to see it continue to dominate--at least until I can sell my remaining stock! This is not surprising. Altruism is not why companies like Intel or Apple or Microsoft exist. However--and this is important!--they lack the power to force their customers to continue to buy from them, as companies like Packard (the car company, not the monitor company) and U.S. Steel and United Airlines found out. Or, in the chip business, as Mostek and Monolithic Memories and Rheem Semiconductor found out. This is the difference between "markets with coercion" and "markets without coercion.") (There are deep, and unexplored here, connections between the initiation of force and distortions of markets. Organisms have long used force--claws and teeth and clubs and guns--as a means of competing for food or mates, for controlling territory, for collecting rent. Much could be said here about the connections with initiation of force, Schelling points for rights in uncoerced transactions, the role of untraceability (and hence unreachability in the physical world) in some of the interesting crypto uses, and anarchocapitalism in general. We seek ways to reduce or remove the ability of men with guns to force us to give them money or other things of value.)
Real-world subsidies rarely, if ever, follow the ideal found in economics textbooks. Instead, government-funded R&D in the real world is subject to the lobbying and rent-seeking that takes place whenever government dangles money.
Yep, this author is making the same list of points I made: rent-seeking, public choice theory, dangling money...all part of the general will to power principle. Rest of article not commented on. I urge Cypherpunks to listen to their (likely) natural inner voices telling them government subsidies have rarely worked and have often done great harm. No government funding for nanotech, or digital money, or _anything_. So, this article is no longer concise. Such is life.
--Tim May, Occupied America "They that give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -- Benjamin Franklin, 1759.