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Comment by wycats | Hacker News Reader

It's not surprising that Ron Paul would be against SOPA.

That said, libertarians like Paul would have been against funding the projects that led to the Internet, and are today against funding similar government projects that might lead to future innovations.

In many cases, innovations are bootstrapped by government funding or research, and then handed off to an appropriate role by the free market. Libertarians are usually against regulating the private market once the handoff has occurred (for good in many cases, and definitely in this case), but they are usually against the initial government bootstrapping.

It's easy to imagine attacking the initial ARPA work on privacy, anti-military, or anti-elitism grounds, and I could easily imagine it losing its funding today, decried as a boondoggle that was useless for regular Americans, who of course would never have access to a computer, with taxpayers footing the bill.

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It's often assumed that without the ARPA the internet never would have existed. ARPA, however, is just one of many "internets" that sprung up over the years. There was also FIDOnet, Prodigy, BIX, Compuserve, MCInet, etc. Everyone with more than one computer thought to hook them together. Heck, even some friends of mine invented their own internet back in the 70's.

If it wasn't ARPA, it would have been something else.

The examples you listed arrived after ARPA. CompuServe, which arrived pretty early in the greater scheme, was founded in 1969 as a time sharing computer service. It wasn't until quite a bit later that it became a packet-switched computer network, likely in response to the success of ARPAnet's implementation.

In contrast, the plans for ARPAnet were finished in 1968, and the system was operational in 1969. The concept was pretty pie in the sky at the time, and it's likely that the success of ARPA led to commercial implementations of packet-switched networks.

Additionally, the early private networks did not have the character of the "public Internet" which is a crucial component of the Internet we know and love today. Indeed, the reason we care about SOPA is that the public Internet, and not a patchwork of private internets, won the day.

You really believe connecting two computers would not happen without government "bootstrapping"? I hope this is not a serious position.

I personally enjoy your simplistic vision of how an economy works. It's as simple as having the government water little seeds of innovation, and to simply hand it off to the "free market" to flourish and capitalize.

You see, entrepreneurs operate in a market, in which they compete to create value. A monopoly on violence is not an entrepreneurial entity.

See my other response on this thread. My comment here was based entirely on what actually happened, not some theoretical view of how economies work in the abstract.

> My comment here was based entirely on what actually happened

I'm not disagreeing with your historical account, just what you derived from it.

You're essentially arguing networks would never exist unless the U.S government made it happen -- and that's why government must act as an "entrepreneur". I hear you, I'm saying this is naive and without evidence, and most likely exists to support your opinions of central planning. It's been tried, I recommend you investigate the history behind that (hint: it doesn't end well).

Your argument here takes my claim that there are cases where government infrastructure bootstrapping (interstate highways, Internet) is useful and concludes that I would be in favor of a command-and-control economy.

This is a classic reductio ad absurdum fallacy, and only works if your concept of how the economy works is very ideological.

You're confusing principle with ideology. We're discussing central planning verses distributed planning. I'm for a distributed economy that resembles a p2p network. I support p2p networks because it's robust and lacks a single point of failure -- and it's difficult to corrupt. You're saying, p2p networks will never work, because it's too ideological. Ok, cool story bro. But why is a centralized protocol better? That's what I want to know. There is no "hybrid" protocol, if a protocol is contingent on a centralized aspect, then it's a centralized protocol. Just because you have no principle doesn't make your ideology "moderate".

the real world is more complicated than you think it is. it's not a binary choice between p2p networks and command and control economies.

bring your analogy back to the real world. the fact that government funds research does not preclude additional research. maybe the internet would have been invented without government funding, maybe not; i don't know, and neither do you.

the point is that it's good to fund research because it can progress research. your analogy makes no sense, because "p2p" and "centralized protocol" are not mutually exclusive. in the current world, the government funds research, but (in general), it doesn't prevent anyone from funding research, so if you want to fund your own research, you can.

there's no hybrid protocol, but the real world is a hybrid system. some research is privately funded, some is publicly funded. i think its good that way

My comment here was based entirely on what actually happened, not some theoretical view of how economies work in the abstract.

Then you aren't allowed to speculate abstractly on how economies work. You are relying on one data point with no control group.

You know, I've just about had enough of libertarians and conservatives claiming such moral superiority of their economic world view that they perceive any disagreement with it as obviously wrong.

I was replying to a parent comment that claimed that ARPA wasn't particularly important in the greater scheme of things ("If it wasn't ARPA, it would have been something else"). I replied by pointing out that even when ARPA did exist, it took quite some time before the free market started churning out Internet alternatives (none of which really survived, by the way), so perhaps the initial bootstrapping was useful. I also pointed out the the ARPA internet defined the character of the "public internet", which most people here think is vastly superior to the walled garden alternatives that the free market cooked up years later.

I didn't go into a long treatise on economics because that wasn't the point I was responding to. Just because I don't take every tangentially related opportunity to evangelize my personal thinking on economics does not mean that I'm ignorant about economics.

I've said this before to people who take a moralistic tone on economics: if you are a true believer of purely free market economics thinking, please take the time to read extensively from respected economists who disagree with your world view. There are plenty of Nobel Prize winning economists who disagree with your position, so it shouldn't be hard.

I, personally, have a somewhat nuanced (read: "not unprincipled") view largely because I have read extensively from people with radically different positions on economics. It really helps.

I demand half your salary. My economic theory permits me to take this from you. Don't worry, it's supported by academia and Paul Krugman, therefore you love it. Following your logic, this represents virtue.

Yes, there's a wide array of economic theories. It's the equivalent of religion. Everyone has their own belief. Libertarians believe people shouldn't impose their beliefs on others. Why are you against choice? Shouldn't I get to choose how I invest my earnings? Do your theories trump my liberty?

I accept this argument, but please don't claim that it has anything to do with a misunderstanding of economic theory.

Thank you.

Fair enough, my brain is tired :)

However if a project was useful for military it would have gotten the funding from military budget. I don't think Ron Paul wants to dismantle the military.

I think Ron Paul would consider ARPA to be military pork, and he is in favor of a drastically smaller military, so things like ARPA would likely end up on the cutting room floor as "pet projects" etc.

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