Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks

[Tim May]

On Dec 31, 2003, at 10:51 AM, Tim May wrote:
>>
>> Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life 
>> (from his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires 
>> and landmines and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or 
>> physical needs. So this system has served him pretty well, insofar as 
>> there was a place for him to apply his skills in order to make his 
>> $$$. That system was payed for by somebody else's taxes, and now it's 
>> asking (well, demanding from) him for some $$$ that he apparently can 
>> easily afford.
>
> Nonsense. The chip companies were NOT "payed for by somebody else's 
> taxes." (Nor was the invention of the IC or the microprocessor paid 
> for by DARPA or anyone else in government, despite factually incorrect 
> lore to the contrary. I was there, at least for the onset of the 
> micro, and I can say precisely what role government contracts played: 
> none.)
>
> Engineers and scientists who work an estimated 8 months out of each 
> year to pay their taxes (Federal plus state plus local plus payroll 
> plus property plus sales plus.....) see the minority layabouts working 
> not one _day_ for their "entitlements" and "benefits" and "social 
> services."

I'm going to elaborate on this point, as there seems to be a growing 
meme in the tech culture (especially amongst the anti-free trade, 
twentysomething, self-described "geeks") that somehow government built 
or paid for technology, business, high tech, etc.

What built our "system" was essentially a _compact_, an agreement 
codified in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and even centuries of 
common law that a bunch of things would happen:

-- that interference in the business choices of a business would be 
minimal

-- that failing businesses would not be bailed out (and, indeed, none 
of the leading companies in 1850 last much beyond 1900, few in business 
in 1900 are still dominant, etc.)

-- that owners, employers, etc. and their employees, customers, etc. 
would themselves negotiate wages, prices, benefits, etc., without a 
top-down order about who might be employed, at what rates, etc.

(This of course began to change when the socialists assumed power in 
the 1930s, and then dramatically changed when the Great Society 
socialists assumed power in 1961. It then came to be seen as the role 
of government to set wages, to force businesses to deal with those they 
wished not to, to let debtors off without repaying debts or even having 
their kneecaps smashed, etc. This was the start of the Era of 
Entitlements, when some ethnic groups decided that reading be for 
whitey and that they would coast on freebies paid for by the "suckas" 
still working.)

This compact, based essentially on voluntary interaction in trade, 
employment, and investment, worked quite well for many decades. This 
compact, this way of doing things which is usually called "liberty" or 
"laissez faire," was not "built" by government...until relatively 
recent times the size of government was small and tax rates for most 
workers and investors were low. What made the system work was that the 
system largely worked on the "non-initiation of force" principle, which 
is what begets voluntary transactions. If a person thought he was not 
being paid enough, it was his option to go elsewhere, to start his own 
business, etc. If a business wanted to raise or lower prices, their 
option. Customers were free to purchase or not.

The meme which Tyler Durden and John Young--not surprising to me that 
both are Manhattanites, representing the East Coast view of 
capitalism--are popularizing is the one that says that what made 
companies successful was *government spending*, not this compact which 
needed little or no government role, and that this makes government 
intervention in business justifiable. Even more mendacious is the claim 
that those who worked hard and risked their capital by investing in 
companies are profiting at the expense of the "less privileged."

"You are successful because of the taxes paid by the less-privileged, 
so now it is right that you be taxed at high rates so that welfare 
benefits can be maintained." is the essential message here.

This is hokum. Very few U.S. or even European and Asian businesses were 
built with public funds. Neither Sony nor Honda, two examples of 
post-war successes, were built by MITI (MITI, in fact, frequently 
criticized Sony and Honda for the courses they pursued...meanwhile MITI 
was funding the now-defunct TRON microprocessor and the Fifth 
Generation Computer, utterly missing out on workstations, PCs, modern 
microprocessors, CAD, routers, and the Internet).

None of Intel's achievements, whether the first dynamic RAM (the 1101), 
the first EPROM, the first microprocessor, the first single board 
computer, the first...., etc., was paid for by any kind of DARPA or DOD 
or government grant. In fact, the military was pissed off at us for not 
developing their kind of "mil-spec" components, for not bidding on 
military contracts. We made our products by selling to those who wanted 
to buy them. Period. And we risked our savings by buying stock in the 
company and others of its kind.

Make a list of companies of the past 50 years, in the U.S., Japan, and 
Europe, and virtually none of them had significant U.S. funding. Sure, 
some of them had a lot of government purchases...aircraft companies, 
for example, will almost always end up selling heavily to national 
governments. But Boeing beat out Convair (on the 707 vs. 880 race) for 
very basic reasons. Likewise, Boeing again "bet the company" on the 
747, between 1965 and 1970. It succeeded, and only partly because of 
government purchases. Mostly it was just competency.

And so on. The best examples are in Silicon Valley, now being taxed at 
cumulative rates exceeding 75%. For what? To pay mostly for things they 
will not, and cannot, ever benefit from.

This is one of the reasons Intel and other companies are expanding so 
rapidly in other countries, places where the work force is not made up 
of increasingly illiterate high school kids, mall rats, and whiggers. 
In China and India and Malaysia they have no translation of "reading be 
for whitey."

In 30 years America and Europe are going to be in a precarious position.

--Tim May


"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the
people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some
rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no
majority has a right to deprive them of." -- Albert Gallatin of the New 
York Historical Society, October 7, 1789