It reminds me of an article I read years ago in a magazine about solar power. A guy decided to go off grid with solar panels and battery back up. He was living in Chicago. He called around to find out who regulated this sort of thing, where he needed to apply for permits or whatever.
He learned that there wasn't a governing body. So he realized that as long as he didn't do anything stupid (a la burn the building down), he was pretty much free to do as he pleased.
If you are responsible, freedom of that sort is empowering. If you are not, you wind up being the jerk that causes regulations to be written and permitting processes to be created, ruining it for everyone.
I can't remember if it was on HN or reddit, but there was a comment//post about how a job site operated similar to this.
To heavily paraphrase over the gist of the second-hand account from the boss: "Our workplace will be rule-free until people start abusing it. When someone goes overboard, a rule against their abuse will be created under their name which will be applicable to everybody; if you think that rule bullshit, go thank that person and a talk with your manager will always be welcome. We do this out of respect for you, our employees; you have our trust until you prove we don't."
I'd never, ever consider working a place like that, as it places the power in the hand of managers who may decide something I consider perfectly reasonable is "abuse", and use this "under their name" bit to harass people. Which means I can't evaluate if the company will be a decent work place or a sweatshop.
To me, this is disrespectful to employees in the extreme. It shows a total disregard for the power disparity that exists, which makes rules more important for clarity for employees than for the company.
If they wanted to be respectful to their employees: Set rules, and create a mechanism for asking for exemptions and be lenient with the.
Otherwise they're asking me to trust that they will not abuse their power.
You'd rather they set rules than treat people like grownups? You say the proposed way of treating people like grownups can be abused. You are correct in that, but you forget that "rules plus a mechanism for asking for exemptions" can also be abused, and has been, often.
I would rather work at a company with few rules than one where there is red tape around everything. For example, at my current company I don't even have root access on the machines I develop on, and I have to submit tickets to IT to get anything installed or changed. One time I asked them to install Docker and was met with suspicion. IT said they would investigate, and months later it is still is not installed.
I am currently a contractor//temp at a particular company. I am there to do particular work in order to support the real people doing their real jobs for The Company.
Often times I come against some form of permissions issue which prevents me from doing my job because of my non-real status. Because of red tape and nothing else I promise you, nothing about "but proprietary data" or anything like that. It may be root access to a specific computer, it may be casual access to a particular online processing system. "Oh, just go to the group github and... oh, you can't. Let me find a thumb drive and the latest release..." or "Can you access the group's shared data access website yet? ... but, we filed a bug about your access for this a few months ago, and still nothing? Are you sure? Can you try again and send me the error and cc IT?" ... and so on. Everyone's frustrated; I do what I can, push it up the chain, make the noise to maintain hope for improvement.
That's fine, but "no rules unless you mess up" is very different, because it forces you to basically try to second guess what a number of different managers will consider messing up.
Ask yourself why your current company has that rule, and consider if they could do it in a more practical way without making you guess. E.g. put dev servers on a separate network segment.
Stupid rules are worse than no rules, but if you join a place with stupid rules at least you know what you're going to. Because in reality there are rules in the "no rules" place too - they're just unwritten conventions you have to learn by trial and error.
Why do you feel like you need root access? In my experience, there are pretty much zero real reasons for a dev to need that level of access in a company that has an IT dept. IT may have good reasons not to let you mess around. If you want more access, I suggest you have a conversation with them and make a good business case for why it's a good thing. If you can't, then you probably don't need it and they would be right to deny it to you.
Because I'm a developer and I need to install things to develop. For whatever reason, the vast majority of windows packages require admin to install.
If you think it's great that I have to open a ticket to IT every time I want to update VSCode or install Python or Node or whatever, that's good for you, but I find it cumbersome and annoying and would rather work for a company that gives me root and trusts that I won't install viruses.
I read your previous comment as you wanting access to the servers that your code will run on. I'm guessing from the reference to VSCode that you're talking about your local work machine, so I apologise for my mistake and I agree, you should have trust from your company to look after your own work machine as you see fit.
Yes, my local work machine is completely locked down by corporate IT. They have a list of "pre-approved" things we can install like Chrome and Firefox and Notepad++, but everything else requires a ticket...
I'm a bit ambivalent about this. On the one hand, rules are stupid and red tape is one of the most annoying things about offices. On the other hand, rules also protect the employees from bad managers. If everything is allowed until "someone goes overboard", this basically allows the managers to make up rules after the fact to punish people they don't like.
> rules also protect the employees from bad managers
To offer the other side of the coin: I am currently working in a situation where the rules are protecting bad managers against employees.
My current manger is clearly lacking in "good" manager skills, and his direct manager is protecting him. A group of my coworkers is working together "to survive" the both of them. Hopeful questions about re-orgs are asked, regular private meetings about sub-group self-reliance are held. "I'm worried about ageism", "I've lost total hope with this manager", "I'm in survival mode", and similar quotes are regular weekly features.
The team has clear and obvious elevation in productivity and moral when the manager is absent [vacation, off-site business, sick, whatever]. The manager's manager doesn't want to hear it; "just work together" type of "advice". Yea ok that's been tried for a long time now, it's time for departures or re-orgs and those are the solutions at this point.
I am a big believer in "That government is best which governs least." I raised two 2xE sons (gifted plus special needs) and one of the best things I did was to only create minimal, very logical rules that they could respect and understand.
For example: "I need to be able to walk to the dresser and closet without hurting myself so I can put clothes away." This was clear and sensible instructions for deciding for themselves where they could leave toys out and where they couldn't. The reason for it was also readily grasped and something they could agree with. It wasn't just abstract "I am in charge, you will do as you are told!" type BS.
"There are rules, but we don't tell you what they are. It is up to you to guess. Once the group think moves too much in wild direction, we will pick up someone we don't like and make him/her an example"
It's sometimes called organizational scar tissue. But what about making it an organizational scab instead? Have the damage-control rules in an organization be time-limited? Those freedoms people keep abusing would get repeated temporary restrictions and eventually a permanent ruling, but one-time problems would not weigh down the organization forever.
I'm starting to get metaphysical about IP leases. (Request, grant, revokation, expiration.)
As in: leases are a cure all for all of societial and organizational woes. I'm having trouble articulating my thoughts. But the basic notion is give all the cruft a TTL, after which the cruft cleans itself up.
---
Want a new tax, or tax break? Sure. It expires in 36 months. Want an extension? Then ask again and we'll reassess.
Want to bring dogs into the office? Sure. Let's try it for 6 months.
Want to provision a new customer of a critical service? Sure. Here's your token. It expires in 2 days.
--
Hat tip to Bill Joy, Jini, JXTA, etc for lifting the lease notion up the OSI stack.
Hat tip to The Utopia of Rules by David Graeber for describing how organizational scars/scabs come to be.
I'm not yet sure how, if ZeroTrust Networking extends this model, metaphor.
I'm not sure I would want to operate in a country where the tax situation was likely to change drastically from one term to another. If I need Tea Party people to agree on frequent tax extensions, even the sensible/proven ones, I see nothing but zigzag and uncertainty instead of actual, planned forward progress.
If lease times are predictable and actually honored by the government, I'm pretty sure people would handle it.
That said, maybe tax reform is not the right place to try this idea. But I like it WRT regulation, and especially office rules - having an expiration date helps not getting stuck with obsolete regulations.
I hear ya. My state’s progressives have been trying to end ~500 tax breaks for years. Whereas reauthorizing taxes, budgets, appropriations is a cyclic fight, these frikkin tax bresks are untouchable. My notion is to apply the rules, mechanics to both ends. Wishful thinking, I know.
This reminds me of the "no pictures at your desk rule" at a company I contracted at. everyone was allowed to have pictures at their desk until the guy put up a hundred pictures from his side photography business.
We have a bunch of regulations on that stuff in Chicago now. I don't know if it was the same guy, but some people got upset because they thought solar panels were super ugly.
Disclaimer: This is off the top of my head from stuff I read in the paper five or more years ago. I can't find any articles now, but I have looked into the permitting process and it looks like a pain in the butt.
> I don't know if it was the same guy, but some people got upset because they thought solar panels were super ugly.
This is a sad aspect of living in a high-density society. A lot of people are not only boring themselves, but they excessively want everyone else to be boring too.
Another way of saying this is that they have preferences about their immediate living environment and express those preferences through the political process, as is their right.
Without some risk, however. You may never succeed in breaking the binds that keep us in the dark.
I think the canonical example is something like the Wright Brothers first flight in Kitty Hawk, NC. Of course living in more agrarian times helps when you have an impromptu airport runway in your backyard. But the "permissionless innovation" theory probably concludes the reason we are not driving around in flying cars just yet is precisely due to government hamstringing the great inventor.
Particularly with strong AI the proposal comes up often: why not create a sandbox? Let the risk takers run their experiments and insulate the general public from their consequences. Allocate a few abandoned oil rigs off the coast of Venezuela and let anyone with a rocket design attempt a launch ;)
Things similar to the Wright Flyer are still allowed by default in the US in similar geographic areas. The weight limit under FAA regulation part 103 is lower - 254 pounds empty weight, rather than the Wright Flyer's 605 pounds empty weight - but material science has advanced since then, so the restriction isn't that severe.
Ultra-light aircraft is very much regulated under philosophy of "if you aren't endangering others, well, it's your funeral".
Source: I've halfway convinced myself to shell out the $10k or so for a motorized paraglider rig + lessons. Pretty much what I'd need to do is sign up for lessons, buy gear, and make sure I stay out of the way of big planes and protected wilderness areas. I don't technically need to sign up for lessons, but, well, it's my funeral.
> But the "permissionless innovation" theory probably concludes the reason we are not driving around in flying cars just yet is precisely due to government hamstringing the great inventor.
I don't think the "permissionless innovation" theory is something to be applied in isolation. It only covers some aspects of human endeavour.
The reason we're not all in flying cars right now are twofold:
1. Flying is much less energy-efficient than driving on a solid surface, since you need to expend additional energy to maintain altitude.
2. Humanity as a whole has proven beyond doubt that regular people are nowhere near responsible enough to safely operate regular cars, and the kind of accidents that happen on the roads every day would have much more disastrous consequences if they happened in the air.
Self-driving tech might eventually solve 2., but we're not there yet today, so one can't blame governments for not allowing things that can not be done safely with today's technology. And even with 2. solved, the market still likely won't accept flying cars due to 1. A better/cheaper solution for vertical stacking of transport is the boring one[0].
> Particularly with strong AI the proposal comes up often: why not create a sandbox? Let the risk takers run their experiments and insulate the general public from their consequences.
With strong AI this proposal is particularly dumb for all the reasons covered under the search terms of "AI alignment problem", "AI control problem" and "unfriendly AI".
> Allocate a few abandoned oil rigs off the coast of Venezuela and let anyone with a rocket design attempt a launch ;)
See: Copenhagen Suborbitals. If you want to experiment with aerospace, it's generally doable, though expensive due to the nature of the task (and the fact that the difference between an orbital rocket and an ICBM is only in payload).
> Flying is much less energy-efficient than driving on a solid surface
Small aircraft get 10-20 mpg, and the world record is over 60 mpg. Energy efficiency might be a reason why ground transport would continue to exist, but I'm skeptical that it's the fundamental obstacle to "flying cars"
And since there is a lot more space in the air than on the road, the "self driving" problem is probably much easier.
It's true that the failure modes are a lot worse, not just for human error but for mechanical failures. But it's actually somewhat plausible to me that 100 years of unregulated innovation would have given us some kind of personal air transport.
> With strong AI this proposal is particularly dumb
Yes. So of course AI development is pretty much the only thing in the world that isn't regulated at all. Does this increase your confidence in regulation as a social technology?
I think this applies not only at large (government) scale, but on a smaller scale, as well: from single companies to whole industrial sectors.
I personally witnessed various (non tech) companies that self-organized their tech arm in a way that was for every practical purpose impossible to innovate: "You can certainly go on with your proposal, provided that you get the authorization from depts A, B and C, and that your changes have absolutely no impact on how they operate".
This is a very important point the author is making. There are so many areas that are by default, non-innovation tolerant: for instance housing and transportation. If you dictate the size and placement of every last nut and bolt, it leaves little/no room for innovation, making it impossible to make progress.
How many of the people praising permissionless innovation are also condemning Facebook/Twitter/Google for allowing their platforms to be used for political purposes? If that's you, you're being inconsistent because permissionless innovation is exactly how those companies got into that pickle. Sometimes innovation has dangers or negative consequences. It's not always unreasonable to have a "review cycle" where those can be recognized, measured, and possibly ameliorated (or at least accounted for) before too much harm is done. There should be a tendency toward permissionless innovation, but just saying anyone should be allowed to run any experiment they want on their neighbors is taking it too far.
This reminds me of some parts of Pieter Hintjens' book Social Architecture. He advocates that open source projects practice "optimistic merging" where essentially any patch that is well-formed should be accepted, without value judgement (though they may be reverted later). He argues that counterintuitively, this leads to better results than having gatekeepers. It seems pretty extreme, but similar in spirit to the idea of permissionless innovation.
Interesting that the article does not mention The Precautionary Principle [1], which is the opposite of 'permissionless innovation'. As an example, a society could decide that the rollout of driverless car technology would disrupt jobs and communities so severely that it either shouldn't be done or should be done slowly.
As a long time econtalk listener I am kind of disappointed with this week's episode. I don't feel like they really elaborated beyond "we should have permissionless innovation"
My thoughts as well. They were basically saying that too much regulation/central planning is bad and a central authority cannot decide whether something is a good business idea, then talk for a long time about this fuzzy metaphor about dancing.
Same here. It was my first episode of econtalk. There were thought provoking points; i.e. focusing more on systemic mistakes rather than small ones as a result of permitting decision making at the local level (a la N. Taleb). However, it could've been told in 1/3rd the duration. I'll give it another go given this episode might have been one off.
I don't really get the article on the one hand he's complaining about the government picking winners, like the solar failure. On the other he's heralding a service that closed it's api and is built on one of the largest government picks of all time. CompuServe, AOL had solutions long before the internet.
What if Darpa had decided to build an infrastructure on top of compuserve, aol, and prodigy. the whole world would look completely different.
His point is that innovation is both something that we all want, yet something that is often inadvertently stifled by regulators or competitors. Perhaps the energy innovation that would benefit society most is not pursued because it's too lucrative to pursue solar (the government's "winner"). Perhaps there are streaming video/music innovations we will never see because there is so much red tape put up by Disney, etc.
>His point is that innovation is both something that we all want, yet something that is often best decided by the market, not by regulators or competitors. Perhaps the energy innovation that would benefit society most is not pursued because it's too lucrative to invest in solar.
As a generalisation, I think that solar "subsidies" are a two-part problem. First off, the government is refusing to price the negative externalities of greenhouse gas emissions (in part due to the republicans largely refusing to acknowledge the externalities even exist), which distorts the value of solar by implicitly subsidising fossil fuels.
Second, people acknowledge that solar needs to be made more viable and attempt to correct the market by adding a subsidy to solar instead of removing the subsidy from fossil fuels.
I think this exposes a fundamental flaw in common neoliberal ideology today - the notion that the way to remove market distortions is for government to do less, not more. This is clearly absurd, since climate change will cause trillions of dollars of property damage, and penalising property damage is basically the government's job.
For most inventions, having starting capital/resources and free time to innovate is a much bigger factor. If a place laws are against invention the inventor can move to more hospitable region(he has time and money after all).
Haven’t read the article, but will. Just wanted to share with the world ;) this brilliant insight i has while showering: this permission to innovate is the only redeeming factor - it there’s any - to Capitalism. All other systems of the past tend to stifle this (Real Socialism, Absolute Monarchies, Bureaucratic Fascism, etc...) and even Capitalism itself in its later stages.
Devise a social organization that focuses on protecting and encouraging this freedom
It's more specific. It's saying regulation should be largely post-hoc or with clearly defined before-hand rules. Instead, many people need permits (&c) for things where they're already following the rules. That creates a procedural barrier to change of any kind, and therefore is a massive handout to incumbents and crushes the most valuable part of a competitive market.
While the libertarian agrees with you in principle, the rest of me has been mugged by reality and has seen more than a few environmental disasters that have resulted from essential zero protection from bad actors dumping in the commons. E.g. ocean microplastic is a huge problem and has a lot to do with absolutely zero oversight from regulators on what can be used as packaging material. This is a big problem that we need to come to terms with, sooner rather than later.
Sure, but that's not a counterexample. The point isn't that absolutely everything should be permitted, it's that restrictions should only be reactions to evidence of harm. Requiring advance permission for new packaging materials wouldn't have prevented the ocean microplastic disaster unless the permission system was so restrictive that we'd still be arguing about whether it should be legal to weave baskets to carry grain instead of having to try to carry the stuff in your bare hands. The right time to put restrictions on disposable plastic packaging is now that it's proven harmful.
You must find the easy libertarians to debate. The answer is that maximizing liberty involves minimizing net aggressions, and externalities are aggressions. Therefore, a society is more free if the government proactively prevents/taxes/regulates certain types of externalities that are impractical to deal with in individual lawsuits (non-localized pollution fits this bill perfectly). In the case of smog, the most common interpretation is levying a carbon/pollutant tax such that the tax generates sufficient revenue to offset the damage. For something like mercury that has extreme, more localized effects, it would be perfectly reasonable and in-line with non-aggression-based philosophy to outright criminalize certain types of disposal.
Compare this to progressives, who want to protect the environment but have no metric or process for measuring how much environment to protect and how/why, other than what appeals to their emotions, so they deal with everything case-by-case and inconsistently. In general, this leads to broad, draconian regulations in some domains (like not allowing people to create ponds on their property) and a lack of progress in other domains (CO2 emissions and waste disposal, for example).
> And yes, the carbon tax is a libertarian concept.
Actually, it's not.
Pretty much everything I've read by the libertarians (Rothbardians really) about carbon taxes either call it a wealth redistribution scheme (which the original inventor[0] intended it to be) or a case illustrating how the true tragedy of the commons is the fact that the commons exist at all.
So, for your mercury example, the libertarian solution would be for the owner of the polluted water supply to hunt down the source of the contamination and seek restitution for the damaged caused.
As far as I can tell No True Libertarian has ever conceded that The State has the legal or ethical right to tax or outlaw anything (other than theft, fraud and coercion), ever.
No True Scotsman! Just like you are closely aligned with Fidel Castro and other autocrats on all issues, because you probably believe in socializing certain things, right? :)
Libertarians are extremely intellectually diverse in their politics -- anecdotally, much more so than conservatives and progressives combined (population size adjusted). Old school Libertarians -- the ones often associated with the birth of the movement (and the ones quoted by Democrats to avoid intellectual debate) -- tend to lean heavily conservative and have an oversimplified view of either the non-aggression principle, the imperfect nature of the world, or both. Milton Friedman is an example of one of the first prominent libertarians to start considering alternative approaches for externalities.
Do I care who first coined the term carbon tax? Nope; it's not about scoring points for your team. The fact of the matter is that the idea of a carbon/pollution/externality-offsetting tax arises naturally from the non-aggression principle, as I described.
> So, for your mercury example, the libertarian solution would be for the owner of the polluted water supply to hunt down the source of the contamination and seek restitution for the damaged caused.
I didn't realize you spoke on behalf of true libertarians!
Tell me, what would you do today if someone dumped mercury in your yard? The same thing -- just because there are laws, does not mean you don't have to deal with people breaking them. And regardless, no, mercury has non-localized and criminal effects (poisoning is a form of assault). If someone threw a couch or some other localized non-poisonous pollution in their neighbor's yard, then yes, that is generally a matter for the civil courts. As it is now, even though littering is illegal.
> The fact of the matter is that the idea of a carbon/pollution/externality-offsetting tax arises naturally from the non-aggression principle, as I described.
Which begs the question on how one collects taxes without aggression?
> And regardless, no, mercury has non-localized and criminal effects (poisoning is a form of assault).
So you criminalize the "assault" then you don't need gov't watchdogs tracking all uses of mercury to ensure it doesn't end up on some poor sap's lawn because once you give them the power to outlaw one thing you give them the power to outlaw whatever they want.
> Which begs the question on how one collects taxes without aggression?
That is what the Rothbardians do not understand -- there is always aggression in the world. What you do not understand is that even though there is aggression in the world (i.e. we don't live in a perfect world where people don't game the system), that does not mean we should not seek to minimize it. To minimize aggression (and thereby maximize freedom) is a non-trivial and ever-changing optimization exercise.
For example, if by levying a tariff or property tax, a freedom-maximizing society's government is able to fund a standing army to prevent other governments from conquering a society, it is presumed that net aggression is minimized (i.e., from the standpoint of the citizenry who are being aggressed upon by their government in the form on involuntary taxes, because otherwise we can assume a different government would take its place, which would most likely not be a freedom maximizing government (or it wouldn't have been forming empires in the first place)).
> So you criminalize the "assault" then you don't need gov't watchdogs tracking all uses of mercury to ensure it doesn't end up on some poor sap's lawn because once you give them the power to outlaw one thing you give them the power to outlaw whatever they want.
Not sure what you're getting at here, if anything. I see no connection between 'lack of government watchdog employing mass surveillance to track all thermometers in the country' and society falling apart. Nor do I see the converse as an actual solution to mercury pollution -- do you?? So they track it, then what? How? What happens when thrown-out thermometers break and run off into the storm drain? What happens when somebody throws out mercury on some poor sap's lawn anyway? This is the second time you've made this invalid point -- people will break the law sometimes. There is punishment for that in both of these proposed systems. How is yours any more effective?
There will always be littering, and I whole-heartedly support generic clean-up efforts to counteract the summation of small, non-enforceable aggressions, that are not already assumed in externality taxes along the supply chain (like people dropping gum on the sidewalk, etc.) On the topic of those externality taxes, here's an example: purchaser of a combustible manufacturing fuel used to create cigarettes is charged an externality tax for the inherent environmental cost of using the fuel. Then the smoker pays a different tax to pay for the externality inherent in using the cigarette. Such a thing would not be fair for gum, though, because most people do not drop gum on the ground -- it isn't inherent so why should the Sean Spicer's of the world bear an outsized burden of the cost for cleanup?
Not really. His plan calls for the proceeds of the taxes to be returned to every adult in equal portions. The "redistribution" is from people who pollute more to people who pollute less, not from the rich to the poor.
Meanwhile, so-called environmentalists and social justice advocates helped to defeat a proposed carbon tax in Washington state, specifically because it returned the revenue to the public (specifically targeting the poor) rather than spending it on their preferred government programs: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09112016/washington-state...
Unfortunately, the Libertarian Party (capital L) does not fully embrace this line of thinking in their official platform. However, it's a logical interpretation of their base philosophy to which I subscribe, and many of the millennial libertarians I know have more progressive interpretations that address externalities.
From the perspective of a consequential (results-driven) libertarian rather than deontological (morally-driven), it's arguable.
A libertarian generally opposes government involvement because it creates inefficient pricing errors in the economy, such as subsidies. The argument for a carbon tax is that, for those who believe in climate change, it will actually minimize the current pricing error by taking into account the externalities that the carbon will create.
The only question is then what the tax should be priced at, and by whom, in order to accurately reflect the damage.
At some point, the government either needs to generate bids for a contract in the free market (subject to the cronyism of government officials) or do it in-house (inefficient). We need a government, so every implementation of any policy you can think of can potentially suffer from a combination of these two factors -- I hardly see that as a hole in this approach.
> who pays for the people who make the determination?
China and the Fed, obviously -- same as now. If you are trying to shoot down these ideas because you don't think I believe in any taxation, you're really walking into a trap here. The quoted cost for undoing damage clearly takes into account bureaucratic / managerial overhead, as would any contract.
That doesn't sound very open-minded. How many great arguments are you ignoring because they don't support larger, more intrusive governments?
The point is, you don't know.
I don't support larger, more intrusive governments. But I think his Twitter example is bad. Twitter has no externalities so it shouldn't need government approval which it actually didn't need. So there was no problem. The only permission needed was from investors who had to cough up the money.
Instead of railing against solar power maybe he should also rail against the massive subsidies the oil industry gets through decades long military intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere. He also doesn't touch more complex areas such as nuclear energy for example. Is it OK for everybody to do "Permissionless Innovation" on reactor designs and from time to time one of them blows up? I hope the author will move close to one of these innovation paradises.
"The only permission [Twitter] needed was from investors who had to cough up the money."
That was his point.
"Instead of railing against solar power..."
Irrelevant what-about-ism.
"Is it OK for everybody to do "Permissionless Innovation" on reactor designs ..."
I will tell you that you don't really understand what the author is saying. But you won't believe that. You will continue to believe the author must be stupid.
He's just pointing out that more innovation happens when people don't have to seek permission (from the government or from other companies) in order to innovate, and uses some examples to illustrate the point.
Twitter is just one valid example among many that have emerged in the internet era; the whole reason we've seen so much innovation in internet-related technologies in the past 20 years is that the innovation could be done without asking anyone's permission.
Concerns are now growing that with Google, Amazon, Facebook etc are becoming such powerful gatekeepers that the freedom to innovate is declining. You'd likely find he'd support government actions to reverse that trend.
There's no grand anti-government agenda in this or any other of Munger's work [1]. As an economist and political scientist, he repeatedly makes the sensible point that government should limit its activities to what helps society and avoid doing things that harm society. Obviously there's vast scope for debate about what that really means, which is why he writes articles like this one, to examine the issues in detail.
On this point:
Instead of railing against solar power maybe he should also rail against the massive subsidies the oil industry gets through decades long military intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere.
He's not railing, just commenting. And in his other work he's extremely critical of the US government's interventions in the Middle East. But this article isn't about that.
[1] He's highly critical of both the Republicans and the Democrats due to their corporate cronyism and militarism, but that's very different to being critical of government altogether.
I am actually quite sympathetic to libertarian thought but I never hear any concrete suggestions for dealing with complex issues like nuclear power safety, pollution (especially toxins where the effect is not that clear), public health, food safety and others.
For example: Innovation in self-driving cars would be much quicker if there was no regulation but how do you balance that against people not wanting to get run over by a car with buggy software? This would be an interesting discussion. Twitter is just a too easy example.
I don't fundamentally disagree with the article but this is ridiculous:
> People sometimes ask me, “What is the most important concept in political economy?” The answer is easy, but subtle: permissionless innovation, a strong presumption in favor of allowing experimentation with new technologies and with new business platforms that use those technologies.
Surely the ideas of capital, labor, markets, property, etc. are more important concepts in political economy?
For those who care about this sort of thing (NOT trying to bring up any political debates):
Learn Liberty is project of the Institute for Humane Studies, a libertarian-focused nonprofit with Charles Koch and other conservative businessmen and politicians on its Board of Directors.
"Learn Liberty" is an ideologically driven organization whose goal is to promote pro-corporate policies by masking them in radical free market libertarian rhetoric.
How dare anyone promote the most successful anti-poverty economic tool ever invented - letting people freely exchange labor and goods in a system of laws and contracts.
Don't believe me? Look at when China implemented free market reforms then look at when their economy began decades of massive growth. China used to have 500 million people who had never owned a toothbrush. Now all the toothbrushes in the world are made there.
I don't think the availability of toothbrushes offers a real defense of capitalism.
Do I get to freely exchange my labor? Isn't it more like I'm required to exchange it in order to stay alive. And, in most cases arn't I required to exchange a whole lot of my available labor in order to make ends meet?
I would expect the most powerful anti-poverty economic tool to have clear and demonstrable gains against poverty, obvious implementation and very few detractors. But that doesn't appear to be the case...
"And, in most cases arn't I required to exchange a whole lot of my available labor in order to make ends meet?"
Yes. You need to do things that make other peoples lives better if you want other people to do things that make your life better.
What has lead you people to think the opposite of this is the more moral position?
"I would expect the most powerful anti-poverty economic tool to have clear and demonstrable gains against poverty..."
Scoreboard. Seriously, the story of the 20th (and 21st) century eradication of poverty is told over and over again. How have you not seen any of it? You need to honestly answer that to yourself. How. Have. You. Not. Seen. ANY. Of. It?
"...obvious implementation..."
What you mean here is that you want to see the control board that is used to dial up capitalism with a resulting reduction in poverty. That's how anti-capitalists do things. They command and control. That is not how capitalism and emergent order works. It is a system that cannot be fully realised within any individual person's brain.
Market capitalism is akin to a neural network with a billion features, a billion hidden layers with a billion modes in each, a billion output nodes, which is constantly training on new and old data. Anyone who claims to be able to control the result with any sort of precision should be laughed off the planet.
"... and very few detractors."
Ha! Would you ever place that same requirement on your own preferred economic system? No way! The people who are against your system are blinded by ideology, right?
Right so there's a difference between the dictionary definition of capitalism, and the current system in the USA where money has replaced democracy and you can get away with anything as long as you're rich enough. Look at AirBnB, Lyft, Uber, Carl Icahn, oil companies, etc.
The author is obviously not against regulation - deregulation is the crazy idea that there can be too many regulations that end up being harmful to progress and safety, but that some lesser level of regulations are still necessary.
Think this is obviously untrue? In some places you can't wash someone else's hat without being certified and bonded. Maybe you think that's a good regulation, but you'd be in the minority.
I don't think he was against relation but he mentions in the interview what kind of regulations actually stops even starting businesses like building a hospital only if other hospitals sign that city needs another one. He had other examples too.
No mention of intellectual property. It isn’t government regulation that prevents people from innovating. It’s government protection of their innovation that incents them.
Joe has a patent on the widget. I can’t make a widget without violating his patent. I get a patent on an improved widget. Joe can’t manufacture the improvement. He’s incented to cooperate with me and I’m incented to innovate. Incented, not stifled.
Just allowing copying incents manufacture but not innovation. Even China is moving in the IP direction.
Joe has a patent on the widget. You can't make an improved widget without either getting permission from Joe, or breaking patent law. So you don't invent your improved widget, you don't patent it, and if Joe is not interested in innovating, nobody else won't do it either. The world becomes poorer.
(In reality: enter China, who doesn't give a fuck and innovates anyway.)
(In real reality: unfortunately, the Chinese government is starting to enforce western IP more and more, due to economical pressures from the west.)
You might not invent the improved widget but I would. Essentially all patents are improvements.
Berkeley invents CRISPR. Broad Institute invents improved CRISPR.
In a parallel universe, does John Galt invent CRISPR? Let's see. He'd have to spend millions on development and then wouldn't be able to recoup that because anyone could copy it. So no, Galt doesn't do this. He's free to do this but there's no incentive for him to do it.
Galt's world seems more like:
From each according to their ability
To each according to their need
That's now how IP law works. If you invent material improvements on prior art, you are entitled to a patent as well, so long as you can articulate the material differences to the patent office.
This isn't how technology works any more. It's _extremely_ hard to make e.g. video codec that doesn't use patented techniques. What happens for things like that is the invention is a new technique, that gets rolled up with all the existing techniques and released in the next version of MPEG. Licensees pay MPEG-LA and it disburses to the members.
Similar for chip design techniques, online stores and so on.
Then there's network effects. If you build a better class of phone, do you have to build out a whole new non-interoperable phone network in order to get it deployed?
He learned that there wasn't a governing body. So he realized that as long as he didn't do anything stupid (a la burn the building down), he was pretty much free to do as he pleased.
If you are responsible, freedom of that sort is empowering. If you are not, you wind up being the jerk that causes regulations to be written and permitting processes to be created, ruining it for everyone.