Why are there so many statists and communists here on this list now?

[John Kelsey]

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 at ix.netcom.com
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