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Permissionless innovation

learnliberty.org

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Re: Permissionless innovation

#31

Post by lend000 »

titzer wrote: post #29
lend000 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comm…

I've literally never heard a libertarian argue that before.

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.

Re: Permissionless innovation

#32

Post by __s »

titzer wrote: post #29
lend000 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comm…

I've literally never heard a libertarian argue that before.

No true Scotsman fallacy

Re: Permissionless innovation

#33

Post by KODeKarnage »

maxxxxx wrote: post #28
KODeKarnage wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

How about you explain it? Obviously I don't understand what he's saying.

A fruitless exercise. The same pathology that prevents you from understanding his article, would prevent you from understanding further explanation.

Go back. Read the article again. Multiple times. And TRY to do it fairly. TRY to recognise your biases and presumptions.

If you are incapable of doing that, then what chance would other people have of successfully explaining it?

Re: Permissionless innovation

#34

Post by symstym »

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.

Re: Permissionless innovation

#35

Post by maxxxxx »

lend000 wrote: post #27
maxxxxx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libertarians never have a concrete answer for that.

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 comm…

" levying a carbon/pollutant tax such that the tax generates sufficient revenue to offset the damage"

Who determines what the damage is and who pays for the people who make the determination?

Re: Permissionless innovation

#36

Post by lend000 »

maxxxxx wrote: post #35
lend000 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 comm…

" levying a carbon/pollutant tax such that the tax generates sufficient revenue to offset the damage" Who determines what the damage is and who pays for the people who make the determination?

I quickly found this link which quotes $1000/ton of CO2:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/06/switzerland-giant-new...

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.

Re: Permissionless innovation

#37

Post by Maxious »

Mz wrote: post #21

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…

Similar story about net metering, power companies didn't initially have policies one way or another about feeding solar back in to the grid to reduce power bills https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/reversing-the-grid/

Re: Permissionless innovation

#38

Post by Declanomous »

Mz wrote: post #21

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…

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.

Here's a pdf (warning) of all of the hoops you need to jump through to install solar in Chicago: https://www.cityofchicago.org/content/dam/city/depts/bldgs/g...

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.

Re: Permissionless innovation

#39

Post by UncleEntity »

lend000 wrote: post #27
maxxxxx wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Libertarians never have a concrete answer for that.

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 comm…

> 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.

[0] https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/08/09/the-unsung-inve...

Re: Permissionless innovation

#40

Post by tomhoward »

maxxxxx wrote: post #28
KODeKarnage wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

How about you explain it? Obviously I don't understand what he's saying.

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.

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