When Libertarians Attack Free Software 944
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.'
Re:"Heartland Institute"? (Score:5, Informative)
Where did you get the idea that these guys are libertatians?
From their about page [heartland.org]:
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 [wikipedia.org].
Where have you been? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Explained by a Simple Formula (Score:0, Informative)
Adam Smith was not against government regulatory power. You should go back and read his work again.
Re:Explained by a Simple Formula (Score:5, Informative)
Adam Smith was a proponent of a regulated free market, precisely the opposite of what you stated.
Re:who's freedom? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:"Heartland Institute"? (Score:3, Informative)
Well, on their web site [heartland.org]'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:Simple test (Score:4, Informative)
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:Exploitation is the most prized product (Score:2, Informative)
Look... there are many kinds of libertarians. Many libertarians are exactly as you describe, yet many are not.
Libertarians run the gamut from near-anarchists to fiscally responsible 'liberals'(Democrats?). The term is becoming useless, unless you're talking specifically about the Libertarian political party.
Speaking for myself, I believe I have the right to profit off of anyone to whom I provide a service to. I don't think that makes me elite - I reserve that same right for anyone.
My agenda is freedom. Freedom from coercion. That's why I favor a smaller government and a simple set of rules to abide by. I like my government like I like my software, if you will. I'm not sure how that promotes corporate feudalism. Could you explain that for me?
Unions, when a product of free association, are perfectly acceptable to myself and the few 'libertarians' I know. When they are a product of coercion and violence, I reject them entirely.
Re:Explained by a Simple Formula (Score:3, Informative)
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:WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not a universal libertarian belief (Score:5, Informative)
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 [cato.org] and the DMCA [cato.org] because they stifle innovation and competition.
Re:Par for the course (Score:1, Informative)
Interview with Michael Cloud [theadvocates.org]
"Finally, I found that I could get a rise out of people with over-the-top, in-your-face, shocking statements about libertarianism. So I went from ineffective conversations to actually losing friends and alienating people."
Re:Explained by a Simple Formula (Score:5, Informative)
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: old customs die hard (Score:3, Informative)
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.
On libertarianism&Oblig FSP, Reason Magazine L (Score:1, Informative)
This thread really demonstrates how narrowly most /.'ers view libertarianism, which isn't surprising considering the recent antics of the national LP like nominating that fraud Bob Barr and the ridiculous wikipedia article. As a voluntaryist/anarchist/"little l" libertarian, I'd like to point out that the philosophy of individual liberty requires as an absolute, the respect of everyone else's liberty first and foremost, provided they are not harming anyone or anyone's property (generally speaking. discussions on property rights abound. libertarians would never oppose voluntary communes, etc. as long as violence is not used to force others to participate). This boils down to the non-aggression principle [lewrockwell.com]. Because of this ultimately respectfully pacifist ethos, most libertarians do not actively seek to suppress fringe speech or otherwise interfere with the nonviolent activities of other individuals. This does not mean that they agree with said (often crazy) speech. For instance, I've never even heard of the Heartland Institute, nor any of the other allegedly-libertarian organizations or individuals referenced in TFA for attacking free software. Free software is incredibly libertarian, though telling me how I can or cannot prioritize traffic on my network is not. My customers are not forced to remain so.
People interested in individual liberty should check out The Free State Project [freestateproject.org] and Reason Magazine [reason.com]. For fun, check out Free Talk Live [freetalklive.com], a liberty-oriented radio show that takes calls on absolutely any subject and reports regularly on the FSP.
Re:Exploitation is the most prized product (Score:3, Informative)
You're confsing libertarians [wikipedia.org] with Libertarians [wikipedia.org]. 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).
Not speaking for all libertarians (Score:3, Informative)
Re: old customs die hard (Score:3, Informative)
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:Simple test (Score:4, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org]? Or UUCP [wikipedia.org]? Or for that matter Telenet [wikipedia.org]?
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:Explained by a Simple Formula (Score:4, Informative)
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 (Score:4, Informative)
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 [nytimes.com]. (Spoiler Alert! It sucks for everyone except for the hyperwealthy.)
Re:Explained by a Simple Formula (Score:3, Informative)
I'll name two. Carnegie Steel, Standard Oil.
Re:Explained by a Simple Formula (Score:2, Informative)
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 (Score:3, Informative)
Marxism is more realistic.
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 [ted.com]
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 [ted.com]
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 [econtalk.org]
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 [worldhum.com]
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 (Score:2, Informative)
>>>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.
>>>
False.
The false part is when you say they "prevent" new competition from rising. In a FREE market, there is no way for a monopolist (like me for example) to stop a newbie (like you) from creating a product. I can kill you, but that's illegal. I could burn down your factory, but that too is illegal. Bottom line: there's nothing I can do to stop you from entering, because the market is open to all entrepreneurs who wish to enter.
Therefore the only way a monopoly can happen is for me to get government to grant me an exclusive license. That is what Comcast has done in may towns across this nation. That's not a free market; it's a closed market and according to libertarians should never be allowed to happen. Government should not be handing-out monopolies. The government should take a minimal approach - regulation, but that's it.
Look up Von Mises on wikipedia and
study his ideas (Austrian economics).
Re:Explained by a Simple Formula (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
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:Really? (Score:3, Informative)
For a full explanation, have a look at this. [tunes.org]