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

[Trei, Peter]

> On Mon, May 05, 2003 at 08:12:15AM -0400, John Kelsey wrote:
> > 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. 
> 
An anarchocapitalist society is capable of much
swifter innovation than a centralized one - I think 
we agree on that (see Cold War for many 
examples).

However, I don't think that a authoritarian society 
can absorb and use innovations gleaned from a
decentralized one of similar size at a pace high 
enough to keep up.

The barrier is that the centralized society requires
some gating mechanism to decide *which* innovations
to adopt. This gating mechanism (presumably a 
government ministry of some sort) has to vet innovations
not only for 'is it useful?' but also for 'in the long term, 
will it undermine our central control?'. This mechanism
has a limited bandwidth, and acts as a limiting factor
in the centralized societies ability to absorb innovation.

Examples are numerous; the tight restrictions on 
Internet access in many authoritarian countries is
just one of the most recent. 

Peter Trei