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.'

Comments

Explained by a Simple Formula

[eldavojohn]

I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services. Now, the scientific formula for deciding the positive effectiveness of this is: (customer's percieved value)/(actual retail cost)

So you can see that as the actual retail cost approaches zero, the positive effects of capitalism approach infinity! Unfortunately when the actual cost is zero, it's undefined and your interpretation may vary.

Basically I suggest open source software people instruct these complaining parties to donate a penny or fraction of a penny to once again make them look like the epitome of our capitalistic system at work. Anyone else (who isn't stupid) may continue to use it for free and -- at least in the case of open source software -- enjoy unparalleled benefits like being able to modify and redistribute the source let alone view it. Problem solved.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Anonymous Coward]

This is actually a pretty accurate post when considered from the point of view of capitalism's proponents. They bypass the moral discussion (with respect to individual freedom, personal autonomy, mutual voluntary association, etc) and go straight for the purely utilitarian side-effects (the efficiency of the market with respect to the quality of goods and prices). It seems as though they have conceded the battle where it should have been won, and so whenever perceived downsides to the free market arise (i.e. places where the free markets do not produce a good that collectively is felt as "necessary"), it becomes merely a matter of utilitarian convenience to abandon those principles for a more collectivist approach.

Another effect is that things like free software, communes, etc. are often considered socialistic or communistic in nature when they exist only as a result of mutual voluntary consent, the epitome of free market capitalism.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Mr. Slippery]

I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services.

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.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Red Flayer]

Now, the scientific formula for deciding the positive effectiveness of this is: (customer's percieved value)/(actual retail cost)

Your formula is missing a term.

The formula should be: [(customer's actual value received) + (customer's bad information value)] / [(price paid by customer) + (other transaction costs)]

For the numerator addition: I could value something at $1000, but if it only really benefits me $500, that's important in terms of systemic effects. This is where marketing, branding, incomplete information, TCO, FUD, etc all come into play.

For the denominator, this is the one that helps your point. The other transaction costs prevent your ratio from ever being undefined, so you can go ahead and remove that clause from your analysis.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[abigor]

Adam Smith was a proponent of a regulated free market, precisely the opposite of what you stated.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[FiveDozenWhales]

I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the
free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise
the quality of the products and services.

Funny how a system designed to concentrate wealth in those who already control is does so little for the end consumers.

Funny how most of the time, an unregulated market increases the cost of items taht should be dirt-cheap, until they're an unaffordable luxury to most people.

And how the quality of the products and services doesn't matter, so long as you can dupe or force people into buying it.

In fact, non-free software (e.g., Windows and other Microsoft wares) is a great example of this. Is Office 7 worth $400? Nope, but because it's a free market, the price gets inflated to this point. Is Vista a good product? Nope, but because the industry is regulated only by those in control of it (i.e. Microsoft) hundreds of thousands of people were essentially forced to buy it anyway.

I fail to see how capitalism, a system which places power in the hands of those seeking only to promote their own profit, and who see the people in the system simply as another resource to be exploited, is supposed to benefit anyone other than those who control the wealth, and hence the power.

Remember, the "free market" is not free. It is manipulated like a puppet by those who hold the reins, those who do not care about your wellbeing or options in life.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[nine-times]

I posit that one of the most prized products of Capitalism and the free market is to reduce the cost for the end consumer and raise the quality of the products and services. Now, the scientific formula for deciding the positive effectiveness of this is: (customer's percieved value)/(actual retail cost)

Isn't that kind of stuff a little hard to measure scientifically when the customer's perceived value is relatively arbitrary and irrational? The same customer can perceive the same item at wildly different values depending on context.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[vertinox]

Do not confuse capitalism with the free market.

I concur. After all Thomas Jefferson wrote many scathing letters against corporations and even proposed that laws be used to limit them.

After all... Corporations like the British East India Company were the ones that caused the revolutionaries to rise up in the first place.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[fredjh]

I'm a self proclaimed libertarian, and FOSS certainly does fit within my ideologies, although net neutrality doesn't.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[sarhjinian]

Do not confuse capitalism with the free market.

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.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[mdarksbane]

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.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[AP31R0N]

i want to go to the regulated free market to by some fresh frozen jumbo shrimp.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[ChipMonk]

if you value something at $1000, its value and benefit to you is $1000; there is no "objective" value to anything.

Not quite. If both buyer and seller agree that the value of some "thing" is $1000, enough to exchange "thing" for cash, then that is its objective value. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks the value of the "thing" should be.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[WED Fan]

This is actually a pretty accurate post when considered from the point of view of capitalism's proponents. They bypass the moral discussion (with respect to individual freedom, personal autonomy, mutual voluntary association, etc)

Telling.

Many anti-Capitalists would, if they had their way, remove THE CHOICE of capitalism and free-market, thus obviating the messy moral issues.

Of course, it is that removal of CHOICE that is the greatest moral threat.

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.

I prefer capitalism, even the messed up version we have here in the U.S. to what most anti-capitalists have in mind. At least it lets me choose my morals.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Abreu]

However, please remember that a completely unfettered free market tends irremediably to end up in an oligarchy

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Totenglocke]

I'm not sure if your post could be any farther from the truth. People pay $400 because they're dumb enough to think that it's worth it. It's the same reason that they stuck with the pre-installed Vista instead of installing something else - because they chose not to. This has nothing to do with capitalism. People will lie, cheat, and steal in any system. The only thing is, when it happens in socialism / communism, people like you say "that person didn't follow the rules". When it happens in capitalism, you lie and claim that it's capitalisms fault that some people lie / cheat / steal.

Capitalism is the only socio-economic policy that allows freedom and gives people a chance to improve their lives dramatically. Just because some people are scum or stupid doesn't make the system flawed. There are stupid assholes in every group of people (just look at the people who are fanboys of any product / company). By your logic, since there are griefers in WoW, WoW is evil. Hold people accountable for their actions - don't blame the system when someone cheats.

I would write more, but I'm doing this on my iPhone and it takes too long to type.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[That's Unpossible!]

Funny how most of the time, an unregulated market increases the cost of items taht should be dirt-cheap, until they're an unaffordable luxury to most people.

This is demonstrably ludicrous. A free market necessarily pushes the prices of abundant items lower and lower through competition. One example, check the price of hard drive storage now. Compare it through the years.

And how the quality of the products and services doesn't matter, so long as you can dupe or force people into buying it.

Well, it's a free market. If you're stupid enough to be duped, yeah that'll happen. It also provides you the opportunity for a smart shopper to get a great value.

In fact, non-free software (e.g., Windows and other Microsoft wares) is a great example of this. Is Office 7 worth $400? Nope, but because it's a free market, the price gets inflated to this point.

Just because YOU don't value an office suite at this price doesn't mean the price is inflated. People are buying it at this price at a level Microsoft is comfortable with. You also have the choice of several free office suites, and a cheaper office suite from Apple. So why do you care that office is expensive? Is it because you find that it really is better than the other office suites I mentioned? If so, perhaps this is why it's cost is higher?

If people stopped buying it at that price, Microsoft would lower the price.

Is Vista a good product? Nope, but because the industry is regulated only by those in control of it (i.e. Microsoft) hundreds of thousands of people were essentially forced to buy it anyway.

Forced to buy it? Ha. I bought Snow Leopard for $29. Many people bought Linux for $0.

Remember, the "free market" is not free. It is manipulated like a puppet by those who hold the reins, those who do not care about your wellbeing or options in life.

Ahh, really. So I must be mistaken when I see Google in control of search on the internet, having only been around a decade or so. They came out of nowhere with great technology, and through capitalism, were able to best giants at the time like Microsoft, Yahoo, AltaVista, et. al.

Apple was started out of a garage. HP was started out of a garage. YOU can start your own company today, and build it up to greatness, if you can execute well and have something people want. That is the power of capitalism.

Grow up.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Grishnakh]

e.g. having a central bank that rewards its allies while looting the people,

This sounds like a jab against the Federal Reserve. The problem with the Fed is that it's privately owned and controlled. They have central banks in European countries too, but those banks are government-owned and controlled, and they don't seem to have all the problems the USA's Federal Reserve has.

Now, we could argue over whether a central bank is a good idea at all, but the USA didn't seem to do too hot without one before the Great Depression, so it seems like a necessary evil, but only when it's run by the government, which unlike any private institution is ultimately accountable to the people.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[kwiqsilver]

True libertarians do not believe in Adam Smith's philosophy. At most it's a baby step in the right direction.

We follow the philosophy of people like von Mises or Murray Rothbard: every individual has a right to his life, liberty, and everything derived from it (e.g. his income and property) and as long as he does not interfere with the rights of others, he should be free to act in his own self interest.

The modern corporate state is anathema to this view. We are Jeffersonians, and the ruling elite (of both major parties--which most libertarians don't consider to be any different) are Hamiltonians. We have these mega-corps, because the politicians and bureaucrats are in the pockets of big business, and no matter how campaign financing gets reformed, they always will be, as long as they have the power to write and enforce laws. The regulations in place to "protect the consumers" are designed by the big companies to eliminate the competition. Why does Wal-Mart want to increase minimum wage? Because they believe in a glorious society where everyone is wealthy? Or because they can afford it, while the mom-n-pops that they haven't yet killed off, who are barely scraping by, can't afford it?

Big, bloated, inefficient government leads to big, bloated, inefficient corps, with no real innovation or market competition.

I don't know a single true libertarian who has any issue with open source; ESR is well known as a libertarian. Many of us do have issues with RMS and his line of thinking. In addition to being an admitted socialist, he has implied, if not outright stated, that he would like to use force to make all software free as in speech. Libertarianism says that the owners of software should decide how to release it, and the market (i.e. we, the customers) should decide with our dollars whether to support them or not.

Libertarians oppose "net neutrality" because there's nothing neutral about it. It's some group forcing what it thinks is right onto others. If Commcast wants to start charging you more every time you request a page from Google, let them. Do you think people will be more loyal to Commcast and stop using Google, or more loyal to Google and ditch Commcast? If you live someplace where you're stuck with a single cable company or phone company due to a government granted monopoly (more regulation screwing the customers for the benefit of a corp) or a very rural residence, then you might get screwed. But as technology advances (and regulations disappear), we'll have dozens of choices for net access, and the marketplace will act to reduce prices, as it does in all other fields.

The other, and more insidious, downside to "net neutrality" is where it will lead. Governments never shrink willingly, they only grow. The income tax, which was never supposed to exceed 1% or affect anyone other than a few hundred super-rich, now takes a third of the average American's earnings. Interstate commerce, which at one point meant goods shipped across state lines for sale in another state, now includes customers at a restaurant (they could be from out of state, after all), ducks (the do migrate across state lines), and even marijuana grown in California and sold in California to residents of California (the sale of local grown goods reduces the need for imports, affecting interstate commerce). Does anyone honestly expect the Feds not to follow up net neutrality with a powergrab for more? Federal online sales tax anyone? Federal licensing for "broadcasting" a website or blog? Federal control of what you can say on a blog about politics? Federal regulations on encryption, requiring a backdoor, so they can monitor everything? And how about, complete government control over the entire internet? It is an "essential service" like roads, or health care, much too important to be left to the whim of the free market. Sounds lovely, doesn't it?

Most so called libertarian think tanks, like Cato, have been corrupted by the corporatists (i.e. Republi-crats) and shill for big business. Even the Libertarian Party (capital-L is the party, lowercase-l is the philosophy) has started to turn into a beltway insider group.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Toonol]

Marxism is more realistic.

Despite evidence?

The free market is a simple consequence of individual freedom. Just as free speech is good and right, but there may need to be some regulation on edge cases, the free market is good and right, with regulation needed only on extremes. In both cases, the less regulation the better. Capitalism generally leads to a better standard of living than other economic system, but that's not why I support it; I support it because it's the only ethical economic system. The only economic system based on freedom and personal choice.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[gbarules2999]

Groucho Marx is a fine man; Slashdot should leave him alone.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Toonol]

Obviously, we do not have the said ideal circumstances.

No argument there.

It is not necessarily the case that the value function of the optimizer is exactly what we want. For instance, the free market doesn't care if disabled people die, but we do.

I disagree with this. The free market is a collection of individually acting humans, and optimizes for the values of those humans. If "WE" care about disabled people, so will the market. I suspect it's simply the case that "WE" as a collective do not care as much as "WE" the individual claim to. Although, there seems to be strong evidence that the more free the economy, the greater the rate of charitable giving. Compare US vs EU, and then EU to, say, the Middle East or China.

Even if the free market can be proven to reach optimum eventually, this says nothing about the convergence rate. And given that the premisses (such as the technology level) aren't static, we are chasing a moving target, which means convergence rate matters.

True, although the question about convergence needs to be stated in the context of relative rates. In other words... I certainly wouldn't trust mixed-markets to adapt faster.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[betterunixthanunix]

Irrelevant. In a truly free market -- one that is free of regulation -- there will eventually a single winner for every segment of the market, and that winner will follow its best interests and prevent anyone from ever becoming a serious competitor. That is why the government must occasionally break up monopolies -- effectively resetting the market so that competition can continue.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[sarhjinian]

The only economic system based on freedom and personal choice.

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.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[BitZtream]

'the goal' of 'free market' is to let anyone do what they want, and that is actually something that only people with power want as it allows them to ensure they remain the people with power.

What you refer to is not free market, its utopian market where everyone is good to each other and loves bunnies and kitty cats.

That will never exist.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[ElectricTurtle]

I have yet to see a society that is not, at its heart and soul, essentially an oligarchy.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[amoeba1911]

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.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[ultranova]

As an example, see how Microsoft basically muscled its way into the console market simple because it had resources derived from its "victory" in an unrelated sector. If the incumbent becomes stagnant, there is always the possibility that a major player from a related sector can come in and eat their lunch.

So not only will we get a single monopoly per market segment, but eventually some company will manage to get them all and get total control of the entire economy.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[david_thornley]

Would you care to name a market of significant size that wasn't regulated to a significant extent by the government? Once you name a few, I'll look at how the oligarchies form in them.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Mprx]

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.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[bennomatic]

Despite evidence?

What evidence? Despite many claims by governments over the last century that they are based on Marxist tenets, that they are socialist, that they are the people's democracies, they have typically, in fact been dictatorships or oligarchies.

Unfortunately, as lofty as Marx's own goals might have been, the people who have walked the path that he paved--or who claim to have tried to walk that path--typically get distracted by their own greed and power, and end up no better than the robber barons who run much of industry in the capitalist world.

Looking back, I realize that you weren't claiming that Marxism wouldn't be better, but rather challenging the assertion that it is more realistic. Maybe I've just added fuel to that argument.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[t0y]

(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?

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[DuBois]

“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.” — Marx (Groucho)

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[ultranova]

Name one case where this happened without the assistance of the government. And by the "assistance" of the government I mean subsidies (railroads, ISPs), physical force (historical: using the government to put down unions), copyrights (RIAA), patents (Intel/AMD) and monopolies directly created by government policies (cell phone companies -- because of how the wireless spectrum is sold).

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.

And don't take this to mean that some of these might be useful, some of them might be. My point is just that the monopoly-creating tendency isn't the free market.

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.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[coaxial]

In a free market you'd simply have a cartel freeze out the new would-be competitors through anti-competitive actions, including pressuring common suppliers to not sell to the competitor. That's why we have regulation. It corrects problems in the market.

If you want to know what an unregulated free market looks like, you just have to look at the 19th century America, or modern China. (Spoiler Alert! It sucks for everyone except for the hyperwealthy.)

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[cynical kane]

I'll name two. Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[RiotingPacifist]

If the incumbent becomes stagnant, there is always the possibility that a major player from a related sector can come in and eat their lunch.

And if they do not then they keep becoming monopolies (in the practical sense this does not require 100% market share), in more and more sectors till they run everything (only unlike communism you do not get a vote to say how they run it)

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Despite evidence?

The evidence is right there in the part of the grandparent's post that you chose to edit out of your reply to it. Marxism was a response to these observed facts of human behaviour, an attempt to prevent the accumulation of wealth by (with today's hindsight) making everyone equally poor. It can and does work. A Marxist dictatorship which actively stifles any uncontrolled concentrations of power could continue doing that for a while. These governments fall when they allow freedoms and stop oppressing their opposition groups.

Free markets, on the other hand, destroy themselves very quickly through the centralization of power. Markets destroy themselves faster than they used to because of today's lower costs of transportation and reproduction of information. This centralization of power is self-encouraging as the most powerful business is seen as the one to go to, smaller players face barriers to entry, and larger players can have more efficient operations and greater access to resources.

In short: If Wal-Mart is the only place to go for 40 miles and no potential entrepreneur can buy anything for less than Wal-Mart can sell it for, there is no free market.

If you are still not convinced, think about why anarchy has a bad reputation and why Somalia, Gaza, and the Pakistani tribal territories are not the nicest places in the world despite the near-total lack of Government[TM] interference. Social structures face the same effects as economic structures.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Korin43]

I should've phrased that better. I meant monopolies that use their influence to raise prices. Steel and oil were extremely cheap while Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil were big. Had they used their influence to keep prices high, they would've been replaced by other businesses (or burned all of their money away buying up competitors).

Although, that does remind me of something I missed. It could be possible for one company to own 100% of the resources. It would take quite a bit of money to buy 100% of any product, but I guess it can't be discounted.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Think about it: why do large companies get more subsidies than small ones?

If your goal is to show that the government is not the problem with the creation of monopolies then using subsidies, which by definition are from the government, isn't really the best place to start.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[epine]

Marxism is more realistic.

Despite evidence?

Judged on ambition, rhetoric, and failure, the evidence that AI can't work is at least as compelling as the evidence that Marxism can't work.

I don't particular wish to see Marxism successfully debugged, and from time to time I wonder what kind of anti-nirvana AI might lead to. The killer-app for AI seems to be circumventing the "Are you human?" question, and it's heavily funded by the fastest growing sector of the global economy.

Misha Glenny investigates global crime networks

Likewise, the failures of Marxism 50 years ago have about as much present relevance as the failures of AI 50 years ago. The world has changed. Furthermore, the old binary world view has become increasingly less relevant.

Hans Rosling: Let my dataset change your mindset

Many different outcomes, which fail to line up nicely on either side of the gym according to gender and bench space.

At their most naive, a libertarian reasons "big government can't be right, so small government can't be wrong". The device here is to make size the defining factor. But it's not. There are tolerable large governments (Sweden and Singapore could be doing a lot worse) and execrable small governments.

Here is quite a different theory about why size matters in government.

Bruce Bueno de Mesquita on Democracies and Dictatorships | Library of Economics and Liberty

The basic idea is that corruption in government is in an inverse relation with the size of the ruling coalition. If the coalition is diffuse enough, the honcho in chief must sway the coalition through the creation of public goods; if small enough, the coalition can be bought through private corruption.

My personal beef with libertarianism is the naive suspension of emergent behaviour: that personal liberty is some kind of magic stable equilibrium point. The usual argument is "except for all the rest" meaning everyone who thinks government is part of the solution spoiling the situation. Kind of like telling someone driving in Sao Paulo for the first time "you won't crash if you don't flinch". All those white and yellow lines are overrated. Who needs them?

How to Cross the Street in Rome

For all its counterintuitive sense, crossing the street like a Roman can be summed up in one sentence: Step off the curb with a confident stride and the traffic will stop. But for the amateur street crosser, wait for a native to cross and then follow. Watch as they step off the curb with what appears to be reckless but suave abandon and, like Moses parting the Red Sea, the traffic magically stops.

I read that as a pretty good summary for the libertarian model of how to reform government. I'd like better insight into the "magically stops" part. Something more sophisticated than "size matters". Perhaps something that takes into account Sapolsky as a leading authority on emergent behaviour.

Back to coalitions and public goods, open source is pretty much the definition of a public good. It's highly compatible with a subtle form of libertarianism not well suited for shouting about from roof tops. My sense of it is that the cohort of subtle libertarians is a pretty small voice in the weeds.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[node 3]

The problem is capitalism encourages the "sheer profit only (and screw everything else)" mindset, and discourages any actual caring about the effects of their actions on others, sometimes even outright *punishing* people who do the right thing.

You're right that there are good capitalists (good people who are capitalists, not people who are good at being capitalists) out there. But they can only be good capitalists by being bad capitalists (by *not* being good at being a capitalist). They have to give up some potential profit for the benefit of others.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[tmosley]

How do monopolies erect barriers to competition? Simple, they get the government to institute regulations while claiming that they will help to prevent monopolies from forming, even while it is abundantly clear that all monopolies are created thanks to force applied by the government.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[commodore64_love]

Net neutrality is needed because Comcast/Verizon/et al operate monopolies, and take away choice.

The solution is to remove the perversion of the market - revoke the exclusive licenses that state/local governments granted to Comcast/Verizon/et al. Restore the free/liberated market so people have power to choose.

BTW, per usual, the Slashdot summary is poor. If you read the frakking article it says clear as day,

The free software movement is textbook example of the libertarian thesis: its a private, voluntary community producing public goods without a dime of taxpayer support. Some leaders of the free software movement dont realize theyre walking libertarian case studies, and some have an unfortunate tendency to employ left-wing rhetoric to describe what theyre doing. But if you look at the substance of their views, and even more if you look at their actions, its hard to find anything for libertarians to object to. ..... The libertarian quarrel with socialism isnt with their egalitarianism, but with their willingness to impose that egalitarianism by force of law. Libertarians argue that free markets and robust civil society are good for the poor precisely because they are bottom-up, participatory structures that give every individual the opportunity to make the most of their own lives.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[commodore64_love]

>>>Libertarians oppose "net neutrality" because there's nothing neutral about it. It's some group forcing what it thinks is right onto others. If Commcast wants to start charging you more every time you request a page from Google, let them.
>>>

I would support this view *if and only if* Comcast's government-granted exclusive license (monopoly) was revoked, and a free/liberated market restored. Until that happens Comcast needs to be restrained by the government from abusing its monopoly, just the same way the Power and Telephone monopolies are restrained/regulated.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Chris Burke]

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!

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[toadlife]

-The Great Depression lasted from Oct. 24, 1929 until about 1940.

The depression lasted until 1940 only if you redefine what an economic depression is. Before the 'the new deal failed' crowd started trying to rewrite history, a depression was defined as a period of very rapid economic contraction. By the classic definition the great depression ended in 1933.

You do realize many people believe that the Fed actually created the Depression to consolidate power for themselves right?

Lots of people believe stupid things. For example, people today think that our economic collapse of 2008 was caused by poor people buying houses they could not afford. The fact that some (or a bunch) of people believe something doesn't automatically lend credence to it.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[Chris Burke]

we got three wireless internet providers blanketing our city

Three overlapping service providers? That's nice. Too bad if the government dropped all of its regulations, you'd be fubar because interference would be through the roof. Oh but right, businesses would just play nice with the spectrum, and never try to deliberately degrade a competitor's service.

You get more of something when you tax it less, you get less of something when you tax it more. This is fifth grade economics.

Maybe you should have stayed in school. Taxes are not the only costs associated with things. There is such a thing as a natural monopoly. I guess those are sixth grade topics.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[kborer]

Nothing has objective or inherent value. Some muddy water on the side of the road seems worthless to those walking by but would be priceless to someone dying of thirst. The price of something changes based on the subjective values of everyone participating in the market.

That is why there is little math in economic science. People assign ordinal values to things (item 1 is more valuable to me than item 2), but not cardinal numbers (item 1 is worth X). The price of something is not an objective value, nor even an average subjective value, but merely a historical fact that specifies at what price something sold for in a specific exchange. Consider how shares of the same stock can sell at wildly different prices at essentially the same time.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[im_thatoneguy]

Ways I can keep you out of the market just off the top of my head:

Sell at a loss my product until you go away.
Steal your idea and sell it for less thanks to my huge existing manufacturing infrastructure.
Tell all my partners that working with you will result in millions in lost business.
Spend millions spreading false research that your product is dangerous. It gives you cancer!

Usually the easiest way to keep a competitor from entering the market is to kill you while there's little to no profit in helping the little guy survive.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[scotch]

If that was true, then governments would be able to make property rights "disappear" with a mere stroke of the pen.

Don't they do that now? eminent domain?

The history of the 20th century shows us that property rights are innate in the nature of man.

That's a pretty brief history when talking about the "nature of man". I don't think property rights are universal to human cultures.

Re:Explained by a Simple Formula

[node 3]

Any rational view of capitalism realizes that there is a limit to 'screw everything' profit, and the more people you screw, the sooner your profitable days will be over.

Only collectively. Individually, the only "rational" view is the fast-profits model.

The reason is, if you take the long-term approach, and everyone else doesn't, you've given up short-term profits, and everyone else has ruined the long-term profits model.

But if we take a collectivist view on the topic, and put into place regulations which forbid, or at the very least, sufficiently discourage, the unsustainable short-term profit seeking, then the rational individual capitalists can make solid decisions which both benefit them in the short-term, while benefiting everyone in the long-term, which ensures that the capitalist will have the opportunity to continue to make a profit, instead of having the carpet pulled out from under him.

"Heartland Institute"?

[John Hasler]

Where did you get the idea that these guys are libertatians?

Re:"Heartland Institute"?

[eldavojohn]

Where did you get the idea that these guys are libertatians?

From their about page:

Heartland has been endorsed by some of the country's leading scholars, public policy experts, and elected officials. Dr. Milton Friedman calls Heartland "a highly effective libertarian institute."

Basically they don't want to label themselves as Libertarian because that would foolishly scare away potential non-Libertarians from reading their work. Instead they rely on their publications to speak for their views instead of a label with baggage. If you're an economist, however, you recognize them for what they are: predominantly libertarian with hints of conservatism. Popular knowledge agrees.

Re:"Heartland Institute"?

[megamerican]

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.

Re:"Heartland Institute"?

[shutdown -p now]

I'm not sure but a libertarian would be opposed to open source software's free concept as it's anti capitalism.

There's no reason why a libertarian would be opposed to FLOSS, so long as it is not mandated by the government. Most certainly, giving something away for free, with (GPL) or without (BSDL) strings attached is not contrary to libertarianism.

Free as in no monetary value is not a libertarian principal it's a socialist/communist point of view.

Not really. Socialist point of view isn't "free", it's all about "fair": "from everyone according to their abilities, to everyone according to their contribution". This implies some measurement of the "contribution" to allot the proportional share; this needs not be money in usual sense of the word, but in effect it's still money, and the share is therefore definitely not free.

Communism is money-free, true, but its fundamental difference is that it's completely money-free. Short of anarcho-communism (which is fringe even within communism itself), this implies some form of government that keeps an eye on the economy so it stays that way. That is non-libertarian, not the "free" part.

Re:"Heartland Institute"?

[tverbeek]

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".

Re:"Heartland Institute"?

[multi io]

Instead they rely on their publications to speak for their views instead of a label with baggage.

Well, on their web site's header they apparently rely on a lot of dead people to speak for their views. The undeniable advantage of that is that dead people can no longer answer back, so you can quite easily add authority to an anti-net-neutrality article by associating yourself with Ben Franklin, even though nobody will ever know what the man would've had to say about the issue :-P

Re:"Heartland Institute"?

[Wonko the Sane]

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.

Re:"Heartland Institute"?

[PitaBred]

Lew Rockwell also supports idiocy about not using vaccines. Forgive me if I take anything they have to say with a big grain of salt... they've proven that they aren't terribly connected to logic or science.

who's freedom?

[X10]

Liberarians tend to focus on "my freedom" more than on "your freedom".

Re:who's freedom?

[Murpster]

Stop getting your definition of libertarian from Glenn Beck. Those people aren't libertarians, they're just Republicans who don't want to pay taxes.

Re:who's freedom?

[MikeRT]

That's because most libertarians are selfish bastards at heart. They are not concerned with such collectivist notions as creating a sustainable free society. Rather, it's all about maximizing their ability to put any chemical or object in their body they want, keep all of their money and hire the cheapest labor they can get.

I say this as a political libertarian with social conservative sensibilities. The single biggest reason why libertarianism is going nowhere is because it's such an unfocused movement that grabs whatever liberty it can and that doesn't even pretend to have a higher vision than "I'll get mine." That turns off most voters. Even though under a libertarian system there'd be no corporate welfare at all (since there'd be a simple tax code and subsidizes would be outlawed in the constitution), their behavior gives normal, non-ideological people good reason to believe that a libertarian government would look like a plutocratic-kleptocratic oligarchy of rich people burdening the poor while enriching themselves, and vice totally out of control because libertarians never talk about the practical matter of **regulating vice** so it's like buying beer, not a free-for-all where any store can legally sell your kid crack.

Re:who's freedom?

[jimbolauski]

Here are a few things most libertarians favor, legalized drugs, ending of the licensing of barbers, doctors, lawyers, ... , no public schools, a Federal Government who's only job is have a military to protect it's citizens, maintain roads, and settle disputes between states. It is not so much greed as it is minimizing government and having personal responsibility for one's own welfare. Libertarians do not care about giving away software for free they just have a problem with the ideologies of many of the people in the open source community, who tend to favor a cradle to grave from of government.

Re:who's freedom?

[ChrisMaple]

That is because most Libertarians association freedom with greed rather than freedom with responsibility.

That's one of the most misleading, ungrammatical, and silly sentences I've ever read. There is no direct association between freedom and responsibility, any more than between slavery and responsibility, freedom and irresponsibilty, etc.. Freedom allows a person to follow his best interests, and to use the word "greed" for that is to use a loaded term that not libertarians, but the opponents of libertarians, would use.

Although the world includes masochists, for sane people the idea that the purpose of freedom is to give you more opportunities to hurt yourself is wrong. The purpose of freedom is to give individuals the opportunity to better themselves, and to say "Libertarians association freedom with greed" is to attempt to slur both libertarians and freedom.

Re:who's freedom?

[Rob Riggs]

The market has proven itself wholly incapable of regulating itself. What now?

Re:who's freedom?

[FlyingSquidStudios]

ending of the licensing of barbers, doctors, lawyers

Damn you government, making sure doctors aren't practicing medicine without knowing what they're doing! If I want to be able to offer people neurosurgery or transplant one person's head onto another person's ass in my unclean apartment, never having been to medical school, that should be my right!

Re:who's freedom?

[alvinrod]

I'd certainly be fine with allowing you to offer that service, but you'd be hard-pressed to find many customers if you didn't have any training or experience. If you were to misrepresent your medical training or experience, that would fall under existing fraud laws. Even if you were certified by some government body, does that necessarily ensure that you won't screw up? If it did there wouldn't be any need for malpractice insurance or lawsuits.

If you feel it is important for the Federal government to certify doctors (or other professions) I suggest amending the Constitution to afford it that power. Otherwise leave it to the state governments or the people. It's very likely that doing so would result in a similar outcome in terms of doctor certification by a state body or an independent organization that exists to perform this function. It's also likely that such an system would not result in any organization that is better or worse that the current system.

Re:who's freedom?

[starfliz]

sarcasm isn't a substitute for an argument.

I find it odd that only a government can guarantee these things. The same government that can't balance a ledger. I simply will never agree with someone that think 600+ people playing politics in washington know what is best for 307,765,999 people by writing a law. Despite your sarcasm, if someone did want to get their brain-ass transplant in your unclean apartment (go clean it you dirty person) then they will do it despite the government.

I am not going to to pretend that the government has magical power to fly around protecting us.

Re:who's freedom?

[shutdown -p now]

That's because most libertarians are selfish bastards at heart. They are not concerned with such collectivist notions as creating a sustainable free society. Rather, it's all about maximizing their ability to put any chemical or object in their body they want, keep all of their money and hire the cheapest labor they can get.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I used to be a libertarian in my student days (not anymore - see my sig...). Back then, it was definitely not about about any of the things that you mention.

"Ability to put any chemical or object in their body they want?" - never did that. I don't even smoke, I never even tried any kind of drug, and I drink alcohol very rarely and in small quantities (normally because it's something fairly expensive, too, like liqueur or icewine).

"Keep all of their money" - didn't really have much money to keep. Didn't pay any taxes either as it was.

"Hire the cheapest labor they can get" - as a student, I was the cheapest labor someone could get...

So why was I a libertarian, then? Because I genuinely believed in the underlying philosophy: that freedom is most important, and that the only just society is the one that maximizes freedom, including economic one, even when that has potential negative effect for other people. I was also convinced that it would lead to a more efficient society in utilitarian sense, but that was just icing on the cake. Doing the "right thing" was more important in the end (just like Stallman, who says that you should use FOSS even when it's worse than alternatives, because FOSS is inherently good and ideologically right).

Another part of it was the perceived elegance of the simplicity of libertarian constructs. Supply and demand. Rational choice. Your freedom ends where my nose begins. The idea of a few simple rules, which, together, describe an elegant and seemingly self-consistent system, is extremely attractive to a tech geek.

Where I was wrong? In not accounting for the weirdness of human as an animal, and a social one at that. In not realizing that most people, most of the time, are not rational thinkers (they think they are, but rationalization happens postfactum to explain the choice made - there have been several definite studies on that). In ignoring the fact that most people aren't willing to stand up to defend their slightest freedoms, which opens the door for anyone wishing power to take it, at the costs of other's freedoms, slowly - step by step - until a libertarian paradise transforms into an oligarchical corporatist and/or fascist state. Simply put, libertarianism

That's because most libertarians are selfish bastards at heart. They are not concerned with such collectivist notions as creating a sustainable free society. Rather, it's all about maximizing their ability to put any chemical or object in their body they want, keep all of their money and hire the cheapest labor they can get.

I wouldn't be so sure about that. I used to be a libertarian in my student days (not anymore - see my sig...). Back then, it was definitely not about about any of the things that you mention.

"Ability to put any chemical or object in their body they want?" - never did that. I don't even smoke, I never even tried any kind of drug, and I drink alcohol very rarely and in small quantities (normally because it's something fairly expensive, too, like liqueur or icewine).

"Keep all of their money" - didn't really have much money to keep. Didn't pay any taxes either as it was.

"Hire the cheapest labor they can get" - as a student, I was the cheapest labor someone could get...

So why was I a libertarian, then? Because I genuinely believed in the underlying philosophy: that freedom is most important, and that the only just society is the one that maximizes freedom, including economic one, even when that has potential negative effect for other people. I was also convinced that it would lead to a mo

Re:who's freedom?

[the bear troll]

you'd be hard-pressed to find many customers if you didn't have any training or experience

You greatly overestimate human rationality. Just look at the insanely profitable New Age "movement" and holistic medicine industry, snake oil sells. Imagine if those people could call themselves medical doctors.

Where have you been?

[lyinhart]

A better op-ed on this very subject was published by libertarian think thank The Cato Institute over two years ago: http://www.cato.org/tech/tk/070622-tk.html

Re:Where have you been?

[moniker]

Am I missing something?

The CATO article you linked and the posted article linked above are written by the same person. Look at the authors.

Who knows... maybe the guy doesn't get around to reading his own stuff.

Not a universal libertarian belief

[hansamurai]

I consider myself a libertarian and I'm a fan of FOSS simply because of the liberty and control it gives me over my computer and the software I use.

My opinion has nothing to do with the free market, but if anything, FOSS lowers the barrier of entry into the software market incredibly, allowing anyone with a computer with the opportunity to participate in the market.

Re:Not a universal libertarian belief

[bnenning]

I don't see why libertarians object to this?

Most don't. The ones who do are either confused by the occasional Marxist-sounding rhetoric used by some free software advocates, or are actually corporate shills pretending to be libertarians. The Cato Institute has some excellent papers on the topic: they support free software in general, and oppose software patents and the DMCA because they stifle innovation and competition.

Libertarians calling others a 'radical agenda'?

[cshbell]

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.

Re:Libertarians calling others a 'radical agenda'?

[TheBilgeRat]

I would love to hear your rationale behind this fallacious statement.

Re:Libertarians calling others a 'radical agenda'?

[Chris Burke]

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. =)

Re:Libertarians calling others a 'radical agenda'?

[tmosley]

Therefore, in order to counter this fascism, we must find these evil libertarians and drag them out of their beds in the night and take them to concen...sorry, HAPPY camps, where they will be re-educated/incinerated in ovens.

Honestly, how can you think that a philosophy that is fundamentally pacifist can be in any way similar to an inherently violent ideology like fascism? That's like saying that white is black because it becomes black over time, therefore black is less black than white.

Not all Libertarians are Free Market

[WinterSolstice]

That particular variety of Libertarian is more what people in the US think of, but they tend to really be more like republicans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism

Sort of like not all democrats want abortions and the destruction of the military, not all republicans want freedom and religious facism, and not all greens walk to work :)
Not all libertarians are facists, or communists, or free-market/anti-market - take your pick.
Most just want maximal individual freedoms with minimal government.

I'd say the F/OSS market is the BEST expression of Libertarian though, especially the Limited BSD/MIT style licenses. The GPL, well, that's another debate ;)

Re:Not all Libertarians are Free Market

[selven]

Copyright is not property, and it is not a right. So no, libertarians are not pro-restrictive copyright.

Copyright

[Hatta]

The GPL requires copyright to be enforced. You can't place terms (such as releasing the source code) on distribution if distribution is already completely legal. Copyright is a government interference in the market, using force to set up temporary monopolies. If I understand libertarianism, that's a bad thing. So under the libertarian ideal, there would be no copyright, and so no GNU software.

Re:Copyright

[Abcd1234]

whenever an RIAA story comes out, that the artists (read: Labels) have a right to their property, both real and intellectual

Again, you're presupposing that "intellectual property" is actually property. A true libertarian would acknowledge that this isn't the case, as intellectual property is purely a government contrivance. ie, without the government, the idea of IP simply doesn't work in practice, as you need the government to enforce artificial scarcity in order for that "property" to be of any true value.

Libertarian that likes free software

[OrangeTide]

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.

Re:Libertarian that likes free software

[sorak]

Free software isn't socialism, it's the new capitalism. It's the small guy capitalism.

I've always thought of it as this. Opposition to free software is the broken window fallacy. We keep paying for the same products time and again for the good of the economy. The concept that we make money building on past accomplishments should be a good thing.

Not a Libertarian...just throwing in my $0.02

Please Read My Blog

[ddillman]

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...

Re:Please Read My Blog

[Blakey Rat]

If the article's good, it's good. If it's not, it's not... doesn't matter to me where it's published, or who tells me about it (even if it's the person who wrote it.)

The real problem is that Slashdot rubber-stamps terrible articles all the time. If they only linked to really good articles on blogs, I doubt anybody would mind.

Why do Librarians hate America?

[Gothmolly]

Why do the nation's librarians have such an axe to grind?

Re:Why do Librarians hate America?

[TimeElf1]

I would suppose it is because of all the kids that come to the library with questions they want to axe.

Be forced to be free?

[martiniturbide]

The doubt that I always had is: It is good to force you to be free? (GNU GPL)? or is it better to have the freedom to decide to be free or not ?(FreeBSD)?

I'd just like to point out...

[Thalaric]

Speaking as a registered libertarian, not everything in a capitalist system is done for profit (just ask the NRA or the EFF). And sometimes even innovation is done for innovation's sake.

Of course, that software is inherently "information" is what makes this work (avoiding the economic problem of scarcity). "Knowledge" doesn't cost anything to pass on. I think where those right(er) wing libertarians get their signals crossed. They assume that because we currently have an idea of "Intellectual Property" that it is in some way a fundamental freedom. Or that because we currently have corporations that can exist as entities they fundamentally are. These are just assumptions built into our system, not facts. I don't remember reading anything in Locke about intelectual property rights. And I don't see how giving software away for free is anti-capitalist.

An old Ronald Reagan quote is still true...

[MetricT]

"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.

Re:An old Ronald Reagan quote is still true...

[Abcd1234]

"An economist is someone who sees something that works in practice and wonders if it would work in theory."

I like libertarian philiosophy myself

That's amusing, given that libertarians hold precisely the opposite view, in that much like communists, they have a cool theory, and have this deluded notion that it would actually work in practice. It'd be funny, it if weren't for the fact that their bizarre notions have been used to drive economic policy...

Re:An old Ronald Reagan quote is still true...

[Moridin42]

Interesting.. A quote about economists from a guy who didn't know dick about the economy. Implicitly equating economists with libertarians. And then implying that physics isn't real life. Very curious.

Libertarian Establishment

[DZComposer]

The reason behind this is simple: Libertarians (or at least the "think tank" Establishment branch of them) equate freedom with being able to make as much money for yourself as you can, and do with that money whatever you please.

The problem with FOSS in their eyes is that it prevents the proprietary software companies from making as much money as they want.

They don't want a "free market" in the classical sense. To them "free market" means "free to be anti-competitive and free from government safety/environmental regulations."

They only care about making money for themselves, and to hell with everyone else.

A true free-market economy is as much of a pipe dream as a true Communist one. Greed and lust for power corrupt both of these ideologies before they ever get fully established.

I'll grant that many rank-and-file Libertarians do not think this way, but the most vocal part of the Libertarian movement sure seems to.

Not terribly surprising...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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.

Net neutrality is NOT FOSS!

[digsbo]

Net neutrality uses government regulations to enforce policy on a network which is privately owned and leased. It is a violation of the property rights of the network owner. This is unrelated to, and separate from, FOSS, in which the ownership is provided freely (which has some different meanings given the particular license/copyright). Two different issues philosophically, and poorly understood in TFA.

Re:Net neutrality is NOT FOSS!

[MightyYar]

Net neutrality uses government regulations to enforce policy on a network which is privately owned and leased.

That statement is true, but doesn't tell the whole story. That network was built with government help. It's funny to me that these companies are willing to use anti-libertarian things like eminent domain and then hide behind libertarian principles when it suits them. The minute they use eminent domain their networks cease to be private.

Any true...

[Darkness404]

Any true libertarian recognizes that copyright is an artificial regulation produced by the government and therefore should be reduced to a minimum length (think 5-20 years or so), or abolished and the DMCA further reduces a free economy. If we have sane copyright, reduced patents (Again is government regulation of an economy), and less government involvement (so governments can't mandate closed standards) we essentially have the perfect system for free software. Propriatary software can still exist but it is checked by the fact that people can legally use it after a certain sane amount of time, little to no patents, the ability to decompile and redistribute modified sources would make it be a free economy for both authors of software and consumers. Think of it this way, we might have Windows 9X in the public domain by now, we can decompile it and use it as more or less of a backend for WINE to emulate Windows, while NT might not yet be in the public domain, a lot of legacy programs are still used, this would get us one step closer to a perfect Linux system.

Any libertarian who is against government intervention should be against copyright, and even though RMS might be against a state in which there is no or a very weak copyright, it is a plus for both free software and consumers.

Exploitation is the most prized product

[spun]

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.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[interkin3tic]

Libertarians, in general, feel they are superior to everyone else.

I dislike libertarianism as much as the next non-libertarian, but I do have to say that's not quite fair. EVERYONE feels superior to everyone else if they're being honest. Except me, I don't think I'm superior to everyone else, I alone am not deluded like everyone else, because I'm smarter. My unparalleled sexiness probably doesn't hurt my lack of self delusions either.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[feepness]

and so you will never find a libertarian who is pro union, even though, according to their ideals, they should be.

I consider myself a libertarian, though I don't always espouse the exact party line of the big 'L' Libertarians.

I fully support unions as a group of freely associating group of people.

Also, I don't consider myself better than others, even those who would tell me that I think I am.

I do believe that the freest market possible provides the greatest benefit to the most individuals, though many people who also believe this are unclear that unfettered capitalism will lead to capital concentration and a non-free market. Therefore regulation is required to approximate one. A true free market is simply a thought experiment and target, it can never be achieved anymore than a marxist economy could.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[spun]

See, if all libertarians were as reasonable as you I wouldn't diss on you guys so much. :)

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[feepness]

You can believe in 'l'iberatianism without being a 'L'ibertarian. It's unfortunate that party chose that name. The Democrats aren't the 'P'rogressives so you can remain progressive even when the Democrats start shoveling more troops into Afghanistan and raining money on Wall Street. Similarly the Republicans aren't the 'C'onservatives so you can remain conservative even when Republicans are blowing up the size of Federal Government and borrowing every cent they can.

The 'L'ibertarian party lost me several years ago. I still believe social and economic freedom of libertarianism are good goals to pursue. Unfortunately, like most conservatives, I don't have a party. Even worse, the party that has abandoned my beliefs stole the name.

I can't mention believing in 'l'ibertarianism without being directed to lp.org which I pretty much disagree with at least half their platform.

So I pretty much just nod my head and smile when politics comes up these days. Surprisingly people seem to really like that.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[bhima]

My feeling is that after the disaster that was the Bush Administration the brand name of " Libertarianism" came into vogue... so there are a lot of folks running around calling themselves Libertarians when they actually are not.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[tcrown007]

You're completely out of sync with what most libertarians believe. Many libertarians would abolish corporations completely, as the government does not have the power to grant any "rights" to a non person entity. Given that a libertarian would likely take the argument that far, the idea that they *want* corporate feudalism is just absurd on its face. Please stop espousing ideas that are so far from the truth.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[QuantumRiff]

nd so you will never find a libertarian who is pro union, even though, according to their ideals, they should be.

I am a registered Libertarian, and am very pro Union. I am not a fan of "union shops" where just to get employment, you are forced to be in a union. For me, that is a little to close to "you have to be $Religion to work here". I am a firm believer that people can choose to join, or choose not to (and choose to leave) if they wish.

I'm also very much against anything done at the federal level, and handing things like Medicare and such to the states (including healthcare reform.) But yes, I do believe in universal healthcare, but it should be an option, and done by the states, (or groups of states, if they decide to band together).

Many, many people don't toe their parties lines.. Dear god, look at the log cabin republicans. Gay people in the republican party!

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[Anonymous Coward]

You won't see all libertarians support unions, precisely because we believe in free association. Any philosophy taken too far is destructive--and we often believe government intervention has gone too far--which tends to make unions a good alternative.

I'm fairly young--I can't really remember a time when unions appeared to do something beneficial in my life. Teachers unions have prevented me from getting tenured university faculty fired or even meaningfully reprimanded despite clear evidence of academic misconduct and blatant plagiarism.

Teachers unions have prevented my father from investigating outright financial fraud in school districts.

Steel mill unions have prevented friends of mine who graduated from getting meaningful employment without joining them.

Now--I did have *a* friend who worked summers at a steel mill, and because of union regs--when he opted for working double shifts on holiday weekends after a long week, and there was nobody more senior who wanted it--he could get something like 4x pay. He was able to cover two years tuition by working 60 hour weeks each summer. But he also had weird crap he had to do. He *had* to take certain breaks, *had* to take a lunch, couldn't sit down alone with a supervisor to ask questions. Couldn't get training from some individuals. It reminded me of an episode of Futurama where Hermes got a fishing license "Great Scott--it's not a birth certificate--it's a fishing license, and it's Mandatory!" (or something like that)

Unions did a lot of good when they broke the bastards running coal mines, auto plants, and probably some other places. But--they went too far and now interfere with free association to further the unbounded greed of their own members. Sorry...just like the unions broke big industry...it's time to break the unions until they can stop behaving like little children.

Bottom Line/Core Premise:
      When a faculty member who had six students expelled in one semester for plagiarism for offense that were mostly really issues of improper citation (not doing it correctly, doing it in the wrong place, putting a footnote on the last paragraph instead of the first in one case...), commits the same offense but far more egregiously--not only ripping off other schools in their course content without attribution, but publishing material from other universities under their own name. They need to be fired. No hearings, no "tenure"--just fire them. Teachers unions need to be broken.

So yes--you won't see libertarians support unions just because we're pro choice. People should be able to think for themselves, act responsibly for themselves, and not be forced to toe some line with bullshit "solidarity" where nobody can be reprimanded because of some sort of mythical status symbol. Unions centralize power--they just do it away from the nominal government of "the state".

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[FlyingSquidStudios]

Don't blame the above poster, blame the people who have the media's attention that call themselves Libertarians. The Cato Instutute, usually described as the main Libertarian think tank organization, is very pro-corporate and very anti-unions. It sounds like the self-proclaimed Libertarians here on Slashdot need to either take back their name or find a new one because right now, 'libertarian' has become as distorted a label as 'liberal.' If you look up the classic definition of 'liberal,' you'll wonder what the hell people like Limbaugh are on about.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[Hobophile]

I think we can all agree that what we need is a new federal agency to identify the true Libertarians.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[Efreet]

I've never seen a political group where all or even a decisive majority of its members were reasonable people.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[mcgrew]

You're confsing libertarians with Libertarians. Many if not most libertarians don't agree with much that the Libertarian Party espouses. libertarians (small L) think anything should be legal so long as it doesn't hurt anyone but ourselves, Libertarians think anything should be legal except actions that hurt them personally (like taxes and regulations to prevent them from ripping off the poor).

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[Chris Burke]

Maybe if you didn't get your libertarian news/opinion pieces from places that are anti-libertarian, you might realize that most of us are reasonable.

Sadly enough, my first impressions of Libertarianism came not from anti-libertarian sources, but from listening to Libertarians themselves and in the vast majority of cases they were anything but reasonable. It started off nice-sounding -- "less government, more freedom" -- which is why I kept listening, but given enough time they always ended up essentially espousing anarcho-capitalism (even if they didn't call it that, though some did). At which point I can't help but laugh, as I would to anyone saying they were going to guarantee my freedom with "anarcho-" anything, because anarchy lasts exactly long enough for someone strong enough to impose their own rules which will always be in their own favor.

It also didn't help when they started talking about Ayn Rand, since I hadn't realized at the time that she was such an inspiration for certain branches of Libertarianism, but did think that The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were two of the most hateful books I'd ever had the displeasure of reading.

Anyway, since then, I've had discussions with reasonable libertarians, and I realize that my initial impression was in a way a stereotype, but that association has still lingered. Sadly the reasonable libertarians I've known haven't included any of the candidates for office that I've been aware of.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[ducomputergeek]

More accurately, there are a large number of old Goldwater Conservatives who have stopped identifying themselves as Republicans after the Bush years and are currently lacking another label other than Independents. Generally we're the small federal government, lower federal taxes, pro-individual freedom types who think the religious right can go F-themselves.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[Rene S. Hollan]

Libertarianism certainly allows for FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software, as I think even RMS calls it these days), in the sense that it does not prohibit either altruism (giving something away), or cooperation (working together).

However, to argue, as RMS does, that non-free software is somehow "immoral", IS anti-libertarian, because libertarians certainly do not prohibit the existence of proprietary software -- many, of the Open Source camp do think it is a bad deal, however.

Now, to effectively compete against proprietary software, when marketed to the masses, FLOSS likely requires advertising and marketing-"spin" around it, if for no other reason than to combat the competition's advertising and FUD. And, this has to be funded somehow, leading to the "support model" of funding FLOSS development.

One either has to reduce one's costs (by developing a program that simplifies some aspect of their life which they might wish to share), or earn revenue (by selling something around something one otherwise gives away), or what one does is unsustainable. A widely popular FLOSS program will die on the vine if the bandwidth costs of it's distribution can not be paid SOMEHOW (donations, becoming part of a larger project, hosted on a site that absorbs these costs (e.g. Sourceforge), etc.

Now, for those of us who have the skills to take, and improve FLOSS, the overhead of advertising and marketing are unnecessary: we know a good thing when we see it. But, programmers, and good programmers in particular, are a rare breed.

I often wonder if the aggregation mechanism that permits FLOSS and Proprietary software to work together (distributed together, but running together only in the most tenuous of relationships) isn't serendipitous: Non-free drivers that permit free applications, while a potentially dangerous trap, at least get those applications USED, and thus NOTICED. It's a form of "free advertising" for the app. It creates an incentive to replace the non-free parts when the app becomes popular. Similarly, "less free" (LGPL) code gets noticed because of all the proprietary apps that can use it. BSD licenses take this to a further degree in that non-free forks of otherwise free code are permitted.

So we get the SUSE vs. GNU/Linux vs. Debian vs. Ubuntu vs. BSD wars where the differences are often ideological.

As a libertarian, I see this choice as HEALTHY for the marketplace of FLOSS, and how it works with, and against, proprietary code, to the benefit of both.

I doubt very much if FLOSS would flourish like it does if copyright law permitted RMS to include anti-aggregation clauses in the GPL, even as he opposes ALL non-free software.

Proprietary software is dangerous, and arguably anti-social, but this does not mean it is not occasionally useful until something better comes along. I wonder how many programmers are paid well enough to produce proprietary code so that they can devote some of their leisure time toward producing FLOSS code. I have produced proprietary code for use in embedded devices (arguably not useful to have free) for decades, and now spend much of my time aggregating FLOSS code, with proper license deference, with much smaller amounts of proprietary code in far more complex embedded devices (where the argument of user control is far more compelling). I could not do this if proprietary code were, as RMS might wish, illegal. I take the libertarian stance that "Let the user chose to accept the license, or not," so long as the choice is an informed one.

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[TheCarp]

I have spent many years identifying as a libertarian socialist, or anarchist, or just libertarian. I have never really been much of a conservative....but damn... let me tell you something. I like Barry Goldwater.

When I read his statement on gays in the military ("Homosexuals have served honorably in military service since the time of the ancient Greeks" was, I believe, a pretty good approximation of a direct quote) or on why marijuana should be legalized... I realized I was reading the statements of a sane individual who could be reasoned with.

Sure, any of us may (and I know I am just as guilty as many others) go off and make sensational statements. However, the ability to be just down to earth and willing to discuss the actual issues in a rational manner is something to be looked up to and strived for.

I wish that more of the people who call themselves conservatives today were more like old Barry.

-Steve

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[coaxial]

You're completely out of sync with what most libertarians believe. Many libertarians would abolish corporations completely, as the government does not have the power to grant any "rights" to a non person entity. Given that a libertarian would likely take the argument that far, the idea that they *want* corporate feudalism is just absurd on its face. Please stop espousing ideas that are so far from the truth.

Fine. They want Feudalism.

Or as Kim Stanley Robinson put it, "That's libertarians for you - anarchists who want police protection from their slaves. "

Re:Exploitation is the most prized product

[ultranova]

Before political financing reform in Canada esentially banned union funding of political parties, unions traditionally made the bulk of their donations to socialist parties out of MANDATORY dues workers had to pay to obtain employment, even if those workers were not socialist and never voted for a socialist party in their lives.

What happens if the owner of the place I'm working for decides to support a right-wing party, one I'd never vote for myself? Is that okay? I mean, I can't work in the place without supporting - through my labour - that party, just like I couldn't work in a union shop without supporting a left-wing one.

The only difference I can see is that the union shop ends up paying me less due to the union dues, which may or may not be compensated or even turned into a larger effective wage by union negotiating a better base wage.

Simple test

[fahrvergnugen]

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.

Re:Simple test

[Thalaric]

Before I can take your question seriously you have to define "Libertarian political structure".

How about, how could a limited government with the help of academia and/or independant business interests create a network? For example, take 18th century new england turnpike construction or 19th century railroad networks and accompanying telegraph networks. I choose such an early example because you have to go that far back to find a small government.

Regarding the walled-garden, it's inevitable since the worth of the network is proportional to the number of people on it. Unless there's a monopoly force at work, at some stage all networks must to interconnect.

Re:Simple test

[TheSync]

Explain, in your own words, how the internet as it is presently could possibly have come to exist under a Libertarian political structure

You ever hear of FIDO Net? Or UUCP? Or for that matter Telenet?

Here is the story: there were plenty of network efforts both by volunteers over modems and corporations largely over X.25. When I was in college, we had a Telenet connection to many other schools and a new-fanged "Internet" connection. The idea of hooking up networks was not a unique concept, but it is true that TCP/IP protocol (largely government funded) was in the right place at the right time (although we almost went ATM). There were several government-funded higher speed networks that took off at the same time that FIDO Net was linking the BBS world and UUCP was linking Unix boxes over modems. But it took privately built networks (UUNET, DIGEX, PSI) to bring the Internet to commercial businesses and non-university/non-military users. Commercial traffic was actually banned from the government-funded networks at first.

I was an early employee of one of the first major nationwide DS-3 speed ISPs. We never worried much about government regulation, because government had no real clue what we were doing. We had porn servers. We peered with whom we wanted to and under what circumstances we wanted to. No "net neutrality". And there were instances of peering conflict between networks, but eventually calm heads prevailed and the Internet survived intact.

I'll also give props to government-funded CERN for coming up with HTTP, and more importantly NCSA for coming up with the Mosaic web browser, but there was plenty of Internet going on (email, Usenet, Gopher, ftp, etc.) before the WWW.

Re:Simple test

[Thalaric]

In order to be talking about a limited government you have to talk about Pre-Civil War economies, since after the civil war the government had lot more federal power. The first railway networks circa 1860, that connected the east to the midwest, were funded by private stock market initiatives.

Re:Ceci n'est pas une pipe

[blueg3]

No true Irishman would call them libertarians.

John Galt complex

[ex-geek]

Liberarians tend to focus on "my freedom" more than on "your freedom".

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.

Par for the course

[alanmusician]

While I tend toward moderate libertarian ideals myself, this is a great example of why I always end up feeling alienated from the party itself. They always end up harping on legalizing hard drugs, having your own private tank, or some other extremist nonsense, and when they're not doing that they're pulling stuff like this that isn't even in line with their supposed values. There are some brilliant men in the party, but they usually end up taking a back seat to the louder-speaking loonies.

Re:Par for the course

[mcgrew]

They always end up harping on legalizing hard drugs

OK, look, if you don't believe you should be able to ruin your life any way you want, how can you say you're for liberty? If you want to smoke crack why should I stop you? Now, if you steal from me to buy your dope, that's a different matter. The stealing should be illegal, not the dope.

old customs die hard

[grrrgrrr]

I thought libertarian and free-market organizations would have disbanded by now because of the bank deregulation and economic catastrophe. These opinions seem a bit dated and a bit out of touch today. But I guess there are all kinds of old fashioned ideologies still around like religions but do we really care about what they think of free software? So why do we care here?

Re: old customs die hard

[2obvious4u]

I see you've been drinking from the two-party cool-aid. The two party propaganda machine misdiagnosed the issues that caused the financial meltdown.

The market is unstable with natural rises and falls. The government through regulation tried to remove the falls without removing the rises. They put off the inevitable decline in the market through regulations and incentives; the entire time the market needed to correct itself with a downward trend, yet the FED through manipulation of interest rates and Congress through legislation increases home ownership kept building an unsustainable bubble. The market for the past 50 years has needed to have a major correction, but whenever the market tried to correct itself the FED or the Congress would step in. This time in order to keep the bubble inflated the Government directly intervened with two 750 billion dollar spending bills. Without the TARPS the market would have corrected itself and would be much more stable going forward. The dramatic decline in the market is a direct result of government intervention.

What we have done is traded a strong recession/market correction for long term inflation. The value of the dollar is in decline and will continue to decline until the US fixes its balance sheet. The Obama administration doesn't believe that a strong dollar is important, they are of the opinion that it will improve exports. However as the dollar weakens so does America's ability to get credit. Also as the dollar weakens it has the potential to loose its place as the de-facto currency for commodity exchanges (think oil). If/when another currency becomes the trading standard for oil, America's oil based economy will tank.

Re: old customs die hard

[MightyYar]

Nice troll. I'll bite.

Read about the Federal Reserve and it's role in banking. Then get back to me and tell me with a straight face that we have a "free market" in the US.

It is true that our banking system is very market-oriented, and I probably even agree with you that regulation is needed to avoid large boom and bust cycles at the cost of overall efficiency. But don't get disingenuous with your critiques.

Re: old customs die hard

[2obvious4u]

I probably even agree with you that regulation is needed to avoid large boom and bust cycles at the cost of overall efficiency.

Before the Fed there were no "large" boom and bust cycles, there were much smaller "corrections" of the market. The Fed then started attempting to fix "corrections" which would allow the market to over inflate and then burst causing a larger correction than would naturally occur. The large boom bust cycles are a byproduct of market manipulation by the Fed.

I'm not in the abolish the fed camp or in the gold standard camp, but having the Fed maintain a fixed interest rate and a fixed money supply (i.e. no printing extra money) regardless of emergencies in the market would do wonders for the economy.

Quite a troll by Tim B. Lee

[daemonenwind]

If you look under the covers, every article quoted by the blog post presented talk about linux in terms of POLICY DECISIONS by GOVERNMENT ENTITIES.

When Munich went Linux, it made some open source folks realize that, if Linux had a hard road getting adoption by the likes of Dell and HP, then they could go the Apple route and be a government mandate (think schools)

And so people began lobbying to get laws passed mandating the use of open-source tools by various government bodies.

For example, in one of the articles (Open Source Socialism by Sonia Arrison) Lee quotes:

But the pressing question is not whether open source can make its creators money, or its purported advantages over proprietary software. The current issue is whether government should be used to force an increase in open source deployment. A good deal of the frenzy is a reaction to the success of Microsoft. ....(my snip)....

Microsoft has market power because it creates products that satisfy technology needs at the right price. If the open source community's products better satisfy those needs at a better price, then it shouldn't be necessary to legislate the use of open source in government departments, as some California activists suggested in August. It also shouldn't be necessary to legislate smaller items like the exact parts of a state's information technology (IT) infrastructure that must remain open, as Perens wants to do.

If a government agency chooses to use an open or mixed system for efficiency and cost reasons, that is fine. But forcing the taxpayer's IT budget to favor one type of system over another for purely political reasons is wrong and antithetical to the spirit of the open source community.

This is the primary concern of the libertarians - that choice is not mandated by legislative fiat. We should let the experts employed by the states decide what they'll run.

I expect most folks reading Slashdot would feel the same way, in their own job.

Libertarian / Laissez Faire / Free Market

[Bob9113]

Everybody wants to wrap themselves in the flag of the free market, and claim that their view is the definition of free market. Let me take a quick moment to define a few terms:

Free Market: Objective is to maximize the efficiency of allocation of resources by maximizing the ability of people to make rational, informed, free decisions on how to transact liquid wealth.

Laissez Faire: Believes that the objective of the free market can best be achieved by minimizing government involvement in corporate decision making (typically except those decisions regarding contracts, copyright, trademark, patents, and trade dress).

Libertarian: Believes that the objective of the free market can best be achieved by minimizing government involvement in all decision making (typically except those decisions regarding contracts, copyright, trademark, patents, and trade dress).

Capitalism: Believes that the objective of the free market can best be achieved by maximizing return on capital.

The proponents of each of the latter three beliefs above profess that their belief system is synonymous with the free market. However, since they are all explicitly maximizing or minimizing different things than what the free market maximizes, it is not by definition that they are synonymous. Hence their hypothesis of synonymity is subject to analysis and disproof -- even if you fully accept the primacy of the free market.

Re:Libertarian / Laissez Faire / Free Market

[dirkdodgers]

Markets don't have objectives; people have objectives. A "free market" is simply a market that has the quality or state of being free. How you got from here to there I can not fathom.

"Free" here means nothing more than "unencumbered." A market that is unencumbered is a market in which buyers and sellers are able to exchange the goods and services each posses at any rate, in any quantity, and at any time. Free is simple.

A market, free or not, has no objective. It is not rational. It cares not for maximization or minimization. It does not know of distribution of wealth. It is not right or wrong, and is no respecter of persons, even of their relative freedom or lack thereof. All these are irrelevant to whether or not a market is free.

Participants in a market may be moral or immoral, but a market is neither.

Without Copyright the GPL woudn't be necessary.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The GPL requires copyright to be enforced. You can't place terms (such as releasing the source code) on distribution if distribution is already completely legal.

The GPL exists to fix a problem with Copyright law: If you release a work in the public domain, somebody can make a modified version, copyright THAT, and enforce it against YOU. They can also create a compilation of a number of public domain works and copyright the compilation.

This means, for instance, that some commercial entity could fix a bug in or add a feature to your public-domain software product and you couldn't make the equivalent fix or add the equivalent feature. Or they could construct a distribution (ala Red Had or Debian) and copyright it, and no equivalent could be made - first Linux distribution gets a monopoly on Linux distributions.

GPL and most other FOSS licenses head this off by maintaining the copyright and using the licensing terms on the underlying work to deny adding such restrictions to derived works and compilations.

But without copyright the restrictions couldn't be added. Sure, something like the GPL would be unenforceable. But if someone were to release a bug fix or upgrade, anyone could reverse-engineer it and include the fix/upgrade in another version of the public-domain work. If someone made a compilation, anyone else could make a similar or identical compilation. Or they could just copy the fixed/upgraded version or compilation. So the GPL's purpose - allowing software set free to STAY free - would be realized and the GPL would be unnecessary.

Re:Without Copyright the GPL woudn't be necessary.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I've reverse-engineered a lot of code from stripped object back to source. It got more difficult to do manually with some of the odd flows that RISC processors do and progressively more optimizing compilers, but it's hardly impossible. And there are fine tools to support it now.

Once you get to uncommented source for something where you roughly understand the program's function it's usually pretty easy to figure out what the author intended. Then you can comment it.

The fun part is finding errors. (I recall one where I was reverse-engineering a Unix driver and identified a place where the programmer had written (approximately) "if (a=b)" when he meant "if (a==b)". It was doubly fun to feed this back to a guy in the OS group - especially when I walked him through the code to the statement and he asked about a nearby assertion which had been conditionally not-compiled into the object that I was working from. He hadn't really internalized that I'd decompiled to source until I pointed out that I couldn't see the assertion. B-) )

Re:WTF?

[martiniturbide]

Sure, GNU GPL forces you to be free if you want to improve a software. While FreeBSD code doesn't force you.

Not all libertarians are the same

[roc97007]

I'd like to point out that Libertarians do not all have the same beliefs. We tend not to blindly adhere to every plank of some party platform.

This particular libertarian thinks that if you create a product, you have the right to charge whatever you want for it, including nothing. I personally don't see how a free market proponent can argue differently. Sometimes it takes a free or extremely cheap product to bust up a monopoly, when legal and market maneuvers continue to force a price that the product is no longer worth. I think any real Libertarian would argue against government intervention, but there's something extremely satisfying in watching regular people successfully compete against software giants in their spare time. I would argue strongly that this is how the free market is supposed to work. If you're trying to charge a high price for something that another person is giving away for free, chances are there's something wrong with your business model.

I thought government FOSS is about cost and access

[Ungrounded Lightning]

[Argument that pushing FOSS mandates for government operations is an interference in the free market - consisting of government purchasing agents "expertly" and "freely" choosing proprietary software.]

I was under the impression that the pushing of FOSS in government was about several other things:

  1) Keeping public documents and channels of required communications with government in freely readable formats, rather than locked up in proprietary formats that require those governed to purchase compatible software and/or agree to licensing terms in order to communicate.

  2) Keeping the details of the operation of government open and auditable, rather than exposing it to malware inside of black-box software products.

  3) Cost containment - imposed on the government by its citizens, who are the primary payers of the taxes that pay for the government's IT operation.

1) and 2) are clearly "open information" issues, where it's obvious which choice is "open". Only 3) even touches on either "free market" or "choice in software" ideals that you claim are being violated. And given that governments (in republics at least) are supposed to be agencies of their citizens, this decision is properly the right of those citizens if they chose to issue such policy directives to their hired agents rather than relying solely on the agents' judgement.

can we define libertarian?

[DaveGod]

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.

Re:These are not libertarians

[AndersOSU]

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.

Not speaking for all libertarians

[Digypro]

While this may be the opinion of the small group of libertarians who did this study, I know for a fact that many proponents of the Austrian School of Economics would not agree. The Austrian school forms a basis for libertarian philosophy. There are several Austrians who argue against IP altogether, so I see this as a misrepresentation of the platform. Look up Stephan Kinsella for instance.

Confusion is the Real prize of the game

[openfrog]

Political and economic liberalism have emerged as massive public movement(s) during the course of the 18th century. Ever since, the anti-liberals have been hard at work and libertarianism is just one late inventions of the right to confuse minds by turning liberalism into its opposite. To convince yourself of this, just look at any libertarian website: on any issue, the right agenda is advanced and the left one attacked or derided.

Re:There is a simple solution

[mcgrew]

But I'm by no means an anarchist. Anarchy leads to monarchy. I'm for government, I'm against victimless "crime" laws. I'm for regulation; government isn't supposed to protect me from me, it's supposed to protect me from you.

Government shouldn't protect me from dope dealers by outlawing dope, they should protect me from dope dealers by regulating the dope business. And taxing it, BTW.

Black market as an example

[Xaedalus]

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.

Re:There is a simple solution

[mcgrew]

When people say 'libertarian' they mean 'anarchist.'

No, they mean freedom. The name derives from "liberty". Just because some anarchists equate anarchy with liberty doesn't mean all do.

I may be getting long in the tooth, but I wasn't around in the late 1800s and don't see what people back then called libertarianism has anything at all to do with what I call it today.

In the late 1800s "gay" meant "joyful and carefree". What someone meant by a term two centuries ago has little bearing to today's use of many words. Libertarian means "don't try to protect me from myself".

Re:MOD PARENT UP!!!!!

[Hatta]

If you want a non-neutral network, feel free to build your own. That is the libertarian way. The US taxpayers paid for this infrastructure and should have a say in how it is run.

Re:These are not libertarians

[DdJ]

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.

Very often the case. But is it necessarily the case?

Remember, the subset of libertarians that are completely opposed to any regulation of any kind at all ever is an extremely small set, the anarcho-libertarians. Almost all libertarians support some regulation.

Is it possible to use regulations of the sort that most libertarians could support to combat racism, sexism, or other prejudices?

I don't intend to provide the answer here (because I don't have time to write a master's thesis right now). But I don't think it has to be impossible.

The angle I'd probably start from is, a lot of times, such prejudices (if actually expressed as behavior) can be regarded as fraud. If you advertise a job with one set of requirements, and then fill it by another set of requirements that you never mentioned, you are doing something fraudulent. And punishment of outright fraud is something that even a lot of fairly extreme libertarians and capitalists (and heck, even Objectivists!) can enthusiastically support.

(Yeah, I know that's just the kernel of the seed of the beginnings of the argument. I know a lot more reasoning than that would be required to make it.)

Try This

[DesScorp]

"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."

Try as you might, you'll never separate liberalism from socialism.

Even if a liberal isn't personally socialist, they see things like property rights and individual achievement (and the lack of government power thereof) as unfairness, so at the very least a liberal world view enables socialism.

Karma Burning Friday

[ssintercept]

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.

libertarianism is the mirror image of communism

[circletimessquare]

communism believes human altruism trumps all, selfishness can only result in wrong, and so selfishness must be stamped out. they imagine the future to be an egalitarian community of equally deserving middle class peers, achieved via the state deciding what is best for all. the result is a group of poor people lorded over by an autocrat who is the state, since decision making must reside somewhere if everyone else relinquishes it

libertarianism believes human selfishness trumps all, altruism can only result in wrong, and altruism must be stamped out. they imagine the future to be a balanced federation of equally successful middle class peers, achieved via the natural self-correcting effects of the market. the result is a group of poor people lorded over by a monopolist who takes advantage of the natural imperfections in the market better than anyone else

both libertarianism and communism are equally flawed ideologies destined for the dustbin of history. both had their heydey in the last century and today are really nothing more than philosophical anachronisms no one serious should consider for very long. regard them with the same bemused interest as any other bizarre curiosity of belief from mankind's past

the truth is that human nature is a paradoxical mix of altruistic and selfish impulses. therefore, any valid political philosophy which claims to be able to lead men must reflect this mix as well. any political philosophy which ignores man's essential altruism or ignores man's essential selfishness cannot lead men for very long, we grow disillusioned when we see the fruits of folly

the market fundamentalism of libertarianism or agrarian fundamentalism of communism are, like any other form of fundamentalism, simplistic overstatings of human nature, and always result in tragedy and suffering

Useful Idiots

[cmholm]

The Heartland Institute uses libertarian concepts, but from its start has been a front for wealthy conservative industrialists(1). As TFA describes the HI's report, it's the kind of libertarianism that is only concerned with limiting the power of the state, and is mute over injustices perpetrated by parties other than the state(2).

Mr. Bee is correct to note that although Stallman, et al, are not libertarians, the F/OSS community is in substance a real-life expression of a libertarian ideal. Market competition is a destroyer of marketable value, down to the logical zero. Profit arises from something monopolized, be it an idea, a process, or a thing... like the only gas station for the next 100 miles. F/OSS theoretically zeros out the marketability of software, but unlocks other kinds of value for the consumer.

Getting back to the HI report, Mr. Moglen claims not to like network neutrality based on the language of F/OSS evangelists. The fact is, his paymasters in telecom - in a federal move to make telecom competitive - did compete for a time, until they decided they'd rather enjoy the monopolist's profit by merging, than continue to the nirvana of its creative destruction.

Re:Really?

[tmosley]

The Microsoft monopoly was created by the government's legalization of the ludicrous notion of intellectual property. This encouraged Bill Gates and other Microsoft officials to begin hoarding patents and suing anyone else out of the market.

For a full explanation, have a look at this.

Re:Really?

[im_thatoneguy]

Yes the Ludicrous notion of intellectual property. Ludicrous to people who don't profit personally from intellectual property.

All property is intellectual property. What makes an atom so much more significant than a pattern? If I own an ounce of gold should I be able swap it for a crafted gold ornament of equal weight? Why not? They're both just gold!

What you're saying is that inventors shouldn't be compensated for their inventions. Artists shouldn't be compensated for their art. Authors shouldn't be compensated for their books. If you're an author and you want to make money from your story how do you do that without intellectual property? Let's say an agent runs across your story. They tear out the hand crafted binding and run it through a scanner. It's a NY Times best seller. But the author gets nothing. After all, it's just imaginary property, he who prints it and distributes it is the only person who made "Real" property. Maybe they didn't even put your name on it. Why should they, the author has no claim to it, it's just imaginary property.

The only thing that throwing out the ludicrous notion of intellectual property would accomplish is completely cement the power into the hands of the corporations who have the capital and infrastructure to out compete other corporations. The individual would have no ownership. The individual would have no control. This is the "Free market" that most non-interventionists advocate. A world where corporations are free to rob the public blind. I'm sure the CEO of the printing company which does nothing but sell pirated books would be payed handsomely for producing so much real product. I hope the CEO would feel charity for the authors he prints and give them a check out of good will. But that's all anyone who doesn't deal in tangible products would ever get. Charity. Maybe fans of the author would donate on their webpage, like a beggar on the street. Maybe they could sell some merchandise through their webpage, and maybe some people would buy the overpriced 'official' merchandise off the author's webpage instead of all the higher quality, less expensive similar merchandise available at any other store. But who knows.

Because that's what 'free market' is all about. It's about looking out for the freedom to do as you please, regardless of the consequences for anyone else. It's the freedom from government so that corporations of unchecked and unaccountable institutions can use their power and control to enslave and rob the population blind.

Step 1) Lay waste to the competition and establish a monopoly.
Step 2) Impose absurd demands on the workers that they must accept since they have no other choice of employment.
Step 3) Profit.

These aren't paranoid fantasies... this is history.