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When Libertarians Attack Free Software
binarybits writes 'I've got a new article analyzing the unfortunate tendency of libertarian and free-market organizations to attack free software. The latest example is a policy analyst at the Heartland Institute who attacks network neutrality regulations by arguing that advocates have 'unwittingly bought into' the 'radical agenda' of the free software movement. I argue that in reality, the free market and free software are entirely compatible, and libertarians are shooting themselves in the foot by antagonizing the free software movement.'
Liberarians tend to focus on "my freedom" more than on "your freedom".
no, I don't have a sig
It serves my own purposes. As a developer I am not interested in licensing and IP. That kind of crap is for big corporations. My interests lie in being a paid expert where I go from one company to another and get paid to integrate or fix their free software based products. For small indepedent businesspeople, free software is a major asset. We can share the non-competitive aspects of the software. Operating systems, webservers, etc are all commodities. The important bits are where they are configured and customized for a businesses' needs, rather than licensing the software itself.
Free software isn't socialism, it's the new capitalism. It's the small guy capitalism.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Is it just me, or is anyone else put off by people tooting their own horn by submitting their blog postings as stories? I mean, the guy seems to have something serious to say and seems readable, but geez, let someone else submit it to Slashdot, it doesn't look so much like self-serving aggrandizement or driving your page views up by slashdot effect...
Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. -- L. Long
I wrote this here years ago, but it bears repeating: Libertarianism is the carrying out of fascism by other means. The one thing it precisely does not guarantee is liberty.
Ah, but those ten seconds of pure unadulterated anarcho-capitalism, before someone with power and money realizes that no rules means they get to make the rules, would be fucking sweet. =)
The enemies of Democracy are
Not all self-described libertarians agree or use the same arguments on every subject.
The Ron Paul and Lew Rockwell style libertarians oppose net neutrality because they oppose the government regulating the internet in any fashion. They view it as a slippery slope which will lead to many draconian regulations and eventual loss of many freedoms now enjoyed.
The Cato Institute, which is considered a libertarian think tank is often made fun of by the LRC and Paul supporters, usually for good reasons.
Libertarianism, like most isms have a large umbrella to hide under.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
Do not confuse capitalism with the free market.
The "most prized product" -- the goal -- of capitalism is greater wealth for the aristocrats who control the capital.
The free market doesn't have a goal; the whole idea is that it's a decentralized system of actors each pursuing their own goals. Under certain circumstances -- when buyers and sellers meet with equal power, full knowledge, and no externalization of costs -- it can produce reduced costs and better goods and services for the consumer.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
"An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory."
I like libertarian philiosophy myself, but the nuts in the crowd can't understand that markets/politics is a synthesis of human psychology and behaviors perturbed by random events, and doesn't have some underlying grand unified theory like physics. Real life has, and always will be, a muddle.
While "Libertarian", in principle, comes down to a fairly tight set of notions about state noninterference, there are in practice a large number of ostensible "libertarians" that are pretty much strictly anti-regulation and pro-(specific)business, rather than libertarian as such.
Anyone who is against the activities of a group of volunteers, doing as they wish with the fruits of their labor, and offering goods under their chosen terms(Yes Virginia, the GPL is simply a voluntary private contract, not some conspiracy to oppress you) just because there isn't enough money and market-rhetoric involved is a damn shoddy libertarian. Of course, anyone who argues against the environmental regulations that prevent people from unilaterally poisoning my person and property is also a damn shoddy libertarian, and we have masses of those.
While certain flavors of market capitalism(and potentially even limited liability corporations) can be libertarian arrangements, anybody who mistakes supporting those for being a libertarian is, as they say, Doin' it Wrong.
The self-described libertarians who oppose free software and other radically egalitarian concepts aren't really libertarians in the sense of Ron Paul or the Libertarian Party. They're Capitalists or Plutocratics who simply want to be free of external restrictions on their ability to make money. But in our society's not-terribly-nuanced way of speaking about politics, anybody who is opposed to the State but isn't trying to replace it with the Church, gets labeled "libertarian".
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
This just shows the utter hypocrisy of the libertarians. I've said all along that libertarians really want corporate feudalism, or at least they have been completely co-opted by corporate feudalists. Libertarians, in general, feel they are superior to everyone else. They also feel that it is a natural right for the elite to profit from the plebeians. When anything threatens their real agenda, they will set aside their supposed ideals to destroy it. Free software reduces the ability of the elite to profit off of the 'inferior people' of the world, and therefore it must be destroyed. Unions, even though they are a product of free association, also threaten libertarians ability to exploit others, and so you will never find a libertarian who is pro union, even though, according to their ideals, they should be.
The thing is, Libertarians always have such high levels of cognitive dissonance, they do not realize this is what they are doing. They firmly believe they are 'good' people, because being a 'good' person goes along with their image of themselves as vastly superior beings, so they will never look at all the ways their ideals and actions work to oppress the less fortunate. In their minds, they are helping the less fortunate by exploiting them.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
A simple test that I ask big-L Libertarians to engage in before I will discuss anything political with them on the internet:
Explain, in your own words, how the internet as it is presently could possibly have come to exist under a Libertarian political structure. In order to be taken seriously, Be sure to account for how we would have moved beyond the walled-garden networks of the late 80's early 90's, cite ARPAnet, and reference current backbone peering economics, including the recent maneuvering by Google which prompted the whole network neutrality debate in the first place.
Nobody's passed it yet.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
Actually, a lot of them focus on the freedoms of their imaginary future selves and on the vast fortunes they are surely going to amass. See Joe the Plumber. So they end up defending big corporations and rich people, even if those pollute and exploit. The free market rhetoric is just a facade to sound somewhat reasonable.
Libertarianism itself has valuable insights and should be taken seriously. It is spoiled by those who read Ayn Rand as teenagers and took up a professional career in corporate sponsored think tank libertarianism.
I would agree with the anti-net neutrality people if the network had been built without resorting to eminent domain and artificial monolopies.
You can't ask for special government favors to get your infrastructure built and then all of a sudden "come to libertarian Jesus" and demand to be free of government regulation.
You cannot have a free market once economic power starts to accumulate, as it will in the absence of regulation; nor you have a free market with regulation.
The "free market", thusly, cannot really exist, except for a very brief period at the beginning before clout accumulates and capitalism takes hold. It's a philosophical fiction; a Utopia by definition. Marxism is more realistic.
--srj/mmv
Yes, one can't place any of the blame for our current society, where one of the biggest problems facing the lower class is an overabundance of cheap food, complex electrical equipment made from components brought from all corners of the earth is available for a few minute's work, and loudmouths who are not of the aristocracy have enough economic stability to sit on their butts and debate these things, on capitalism and free markets at all. Surely all of these innovations occur daily in those socialist utopias the world has produced year in and year out.
Corporations may exist for profit, but their ability to extract profit from the underclass is the only reason that technology is available to you and me, and not just some hobbyhorse for the rich.
It's telling that the first line of the Wiki is "Libertarianism is a term adopted by a broad spectrum of political philosophies". The first line of the second paragraph is "All forms of libertarianism support strong personal rights to life and liberty, but do not agree on the subject of property".
So how can we have a discussion which is fundamentally about questioning the libertarian stance on property when there isn't one?
To me libertarianism derives from liberty and hence the fundamental rule is everybody should be free to do as they please, provided that does not encroach on the equal rights of others, at which point a fair and just balance must be struck. (If you "get it" you'll realise everything past the first comma is redundant.) For what it's worth I certainly do not agree with the elimination of the state because a) the state (or at least judiciary) is necessary to arbitrate and enforce "a fair and just balance" b) there are major practical considerations such as markets not being perfect.
To relate to the OP, I have a suspicion my take fundamentally agrees to that of the author but the article loses itself in the detail while fundamentally the debate is about principle. Talk of a "bottom-up, participatory structure" and so on is not relevant. The question is, does free software impinge on the rights of others? My answer is of course not. It may be difficult for paid-software to compete, but nobody has a right to do well in the market place, they only have the right to try.
Try as you might, you'll never separate libertarianism from racism.
Even if a libertarian isn't personally racist, they see things like the civil rights act and the fair housing act (and the associated enforcement costs) as the government sticking it's nose where it doesn't belong, so at the very least a libertarian world view enables racism.
It's not based on freedom and personal choice, it's based on a lack of restrictions. Similar concepts, but there's an important semantic difference: the first implies regulation to make sure that choice and freedom an ensured(and is thusly self-compromising); the second just crosses it's metaphorical fingers and hopes that things stay unrestricted. They don't and can't, of course.
"Good and right" or "ethical" has nothing to do with it, especially since "good and right" are highly subjective terms and certainly when dealing with government or the lack thereof. What's good and right and ethical to you can very easily seem selfish and uncaring and highly unethical to someone else because they're suffering for the lack of regulation. A lack of restrictions on you can, and does, incur restrictions upon others. That's not very ethical (by your definition), is it?
What you're advocating, more or less, is a degree of socialism, except that you don't want to call it that. There must be some kind of regulation to ensure a functioning social contract, otherwise ad-hoc regulation happens as soon as power starts to accumulate, and those ad-hoc structures can very easily be bad and wrong and unethical.
The original point though, is that an unregulated, completely free market has a lifespan that makes mayflies look like Methusela. It can't exist because the accumulation of power, which happens no matter what, negates it's existence. Marxism, at least, doesn't completely self-contradict itself, despite being almost as ignorant of the reality of human society.
Calling it "good and right" or "ethical" is disingenuous.
--srj/mmv
Can you imagine what would happen if other markets went the way of OSS and FSF ideals? You'd get a few finished products and a lot of half-baked, half-finished products. You'll have to supply your own containers when shopping for soup at the market, and provide your botulism test because the kitchen hadn't gotten around to it yet. You go to buy a car, but someone decided to break with convention and try a new brake design. He's delivered the car in a .5 Alpha and makes a small note that the brake fluid/master cylinder/wheel interface isn't ready yet.
Yeah... I'm so glad everything in today's world is all finished products. The version of Windows is final, never needs patches or fixes. Since everything is so nicely tested cars never have recalls for things like spontaneous fires or fuel leaking. I am so glad when you go shopping you can be 100% confident that the meat you just bought has no harmful gut bacteria since the slaughterhouse would surely not chop open the intestines of the animal while butchering it. The industry does such a good of regulating itself behind closed doors that if we saw how well they operate internally we couldn't possibly find a single way of improving it, because the system that a dozen infallible geniuses think up is a billion times better than what you and I and a billion other people could ever devise.
</sarcasm>
Wake up! THE MAN is as fallible as anybody else. Just because it's open doesn't mean it's unfinished or half-baked.
Sharing of both Free and proprietary software is already restricted by force (copyright law). RMS approves of this use of force only for the purposes of preserving the four freedoms of Free software. The true libertarian solution would be to abolish copyright altogether.
(sigh)
And when all the ISPs "independently" decide to start charging every time you access google? Will you move to another country?
I'm in a similar situation: my ISP has defined some policies that I don't agree with but all the available "alternatives" do exactly the same thing!
What would a libertarian do?
Since "free market" cannot exist without a government to enforce property rights, or to simply keep the population density required to have an economy specialized enough to qualify as a market without people killing each other, any and all market failures have government involvment, as do market successes.
Actually, it is. The more money you have, the easier it is to make more, since you can expand your business, hire more people, open side stores, etc. This means that free market - indeed, any unregulated economy - is inherently unstable, since success breeds success and any small initial differences are magnified exponentially as time passes. This is true of markets of any scale, up to and including the whole world.
Think about it: why do large companies get more subsidies than small ones? Because they can afford to give more bribes than smaller ones. They have more money, thus wield more power, and consequently can use that power to get more. It's exactly like landed aristocracy, by the virtue of owning land and thus being able to afford a private army, could then use that army to tax the people working that land and get an even bigger army.
It's not the government that's the problem, but rather any large concentration of power. Once a company or a private individual has that, it can bribe the government to bust an union, or it can hire thugs of its own to do it. Either way, it's anyone having that kind of power that's the source of hte problem.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
How about the black market and drugs? A "Free" market in the drug trade becomes rapidly overcome by an oligarchy of competing organized criminal interests who, when not taking on each other, will do their best to prevent or co-op upstarts in the name of reducing competition.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
Oh yeah, it's only regulations that make costs high. You could start an ISP out of pocket if not for those horrible regulations. All you have to do is set up some equipment and then politely ask Comcast if you can use their cable... wait... Okay, you have to lay your own cable, and politely ask everyone in the city if you can dig up their yards to lay a redundant cable line. That will be nice and cheap, and efficient too! Free market at work!
The enemies of Democracy are
Libertarianism is basically the Marxism of the Right. If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation. Like Marxism, it aspires, overtly or covertly, to reduce social life to economics. And like Marxism, it has its historical myths and a genius for making its followers feel like an elect unbound by the moral rules of their society.
And to ensure the "-1 Flamebait"...
Government is the Great Satan. All Evil comes from Government, and all Good from the Market, according to the Ayatollah Rand.
"You can kill the revolutionary, but you can't kill the revolution."-- Fred Hampton