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Capitalists Who Fear Change
bill_mcgonigle writes "In his essay 'Capitalists Who Fear Change,' author Jeffrey Tucker takes on 'wimps who don't want to improve.' From DMCA take-downs on 3D printing files to the constant refrain that every new form of music recording will 'kill music,' Mr. Tucker observes, 'Through our long history of improvement, every upgrade and every shift from old to new inspired panic. The biggest panic typically comes from the producers themselves who resent the way the market process destabilizes their business model.' He analyzes how the markets move the march of technology ever forward. He takes on patents, copyrights, tariffs, and protectionism of entrenched interests in general, with guarded optimism: 'The promise of the future is nothing short of spectacular — provided that those who lack the imagination to see the potential here don't get their way.'"
Once the average home can contain everything needed to produce consumer items, there will be no more reason for big business.
Imagine a set of 3d printers, automated chemical labs, vapor-deposited chip fab in your garage. Maybe even a programmable genetic engineering machine and a computer controlled hydroponic garden to produce your food. You'd never go to the store again.
Hidden behind the scenes of this discussions is the inherent and unquestioned assumption that capitalism is good.
Note that I'm not saying it's not. I'm just saying that there is an entrenched belief here even stronger than religion. The arguments all seem to be "whose definition of capitalism" and "One True Scotsman" type of arguments. But under it all is the (again) unquestioned assumption that capitalism (appropriately defined, of course) is the One True Way of resource management.
Again, in this I'm not questioning capitalism, I'm questioning the degree to which it has become a base assumption.
So here's a bit of a progression...
1 - Democracy and elections are good - not because they generate the best government, but because when properly executed, they peacefully remove and replace the government. Sometimes the replacement is better, sometimes worse, but at the very least, the replacement process is less disruptive and wasteful than a bloody revolution. If democracy were really working well, principally if the electorate chose to educate themselves well, governance would get incrementally better, where "better" is defined by a majority of the people. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
2 - Capitalism is good - not because it does the best job of distributing resources, but because when properly executed, bad players in the system exit and others take their place. If the market were properly transparent, and properly policed, even if only by its participants, the job of distributing resources would get incrementally better. Things may not be happening that way, currently.
There is nothing sacrosanct about the "profit motive". It's a nod to human nature, recognizing that personal gain can be highly motivating. Other than that motivational factor, "profit" is simply inefficiency in moving goods from supplier to consumer. The real idea behind the "free market" is that it harnesses chaos - a sort of natural selection of a wide array of ideas. When incumbants are able to suppress emergents, the free market is failing.
It's amusing/astonishing/sad that people rail at the thought of economic central planning by a government, yet accept economic central planning by entrenched market incumbants. It's not the government that's the enemy, it's the central planning, by whatever party. Some amount of chaos must exist, some continual level of instability, or the system isn't really working.
Food for thought...
In a world with nuclear bombs, genetically engineered virii, and other results of high technology becoming widely available, "human nature" is no longer good enough. If we don't start doing better than "human nature", we'll probably stop doing. Thinking about it a little, we're more likely to crash our society, crash our population, lose our technology, and be lucky to work our way back to a feudal steam age. (The easy energy is gone. The easy resources are gone, perhaps accessible in landfills, perhaps locked up in alloys that need high energy and high-tech to get out.)
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.