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If not armed teachers, if not gun-free zones, if not gun bans, if not granting to the government an exclusive domain for security and the threat of violence, what is the answer? The least satisfying answer is actually the right one: we do not know precisely how to secure schools. We – “we” as in intellectuals, pundits, or society in general – do not know how to secure banks, jewelry stores, shopping malls, or casinos. How can we find out? By devolving that responsibility to institutions themselves, you allow the emergence of security solutions that are adaptive to the particular conditions of time and place.
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Let us not forget the contribution of free economies to making life safer. It wasn’t the regulations that made the difference. It was the innovations in the context of free enterprise.
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Some great minds are remembered mostly for one moment in time, a momentous action or revelatory piece of writing. Such is the case for John Perry Barlow, who died on February 7, 2018. Born in 1947, he was a remarkable visionary, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead who later became a founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which defends your rights as a citizen of the digital age. He is the author of the Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace.
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People talk often of how technology is disruptive. That’s only part of the story. Technology also serves the oldest values and the most ancient aspirations of the human experience, and does so in a way that is organically peaceful with how we live. It’s the much-maligned market economy that makes it all possible, and does so without elections, speeches, legislation, and scary leaders we don’t like. We should love markets more than we do. Their proven benevolence forms a beautiful narrative history of our lives, connects the generations, and points to a bright future.
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To my mind, Creative Commons is an imperfect solution to a major problem, while the best solution would simply leave the whole problem of production, ownership, and attribution to the market itself. But that is not the world we yet live in. Until then, it’s a beautiful thing that the market has found a stop-gap solution to the intractable problems caused by one-size-fits-all standards of legislative imposition.
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Private property rights are the foundation of free enterprise. Without property rights trade will be suppressed and pushed underground. Growth is strangled and good people resort to dealing with corrupt officials and black market sellers just to get through their lives. We are all made worse off when authorities have excessive discretion, and without proof of criminal guilt, no one should have their hard-earned possessions taken away.
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The net effect of all of this has been to ruin our bathrooms. You might not realize it because the change has been slow, extending over 25 years. Only by encountering a bathroom with original fixtures from the 1940s can you perceive the full horror of what has happened. Our showers are lame, our toilets don’t work, our pipes are dirty, and everything is less sanitary. Chalk it up as yet another thing that government has ruined.
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For centuries, for millennia, we’ve relied on government to stop invasions of person and property. We live more safely than ever before, thanks to market-based technological improvements, not reliance on government. It was once believed that only government could provide security; this debate dates back centuries. Now we learn otherwise. We get security from the same source that provides us food, clothing, and shelter: the matrix of voluntary exchange and free exercise of human creativity.
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Sombart’s leftism became rightism but it was made of the same substance always: a loathing of regular people in their free choices and a longing for history to follow his own imaginings of what should be rather than what is. Such is the core of socialist ideology: a delusion rooted in snobbery and, above all else, intellectual pretense.
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In the 19th century liberalism was used to describe the people who believed in liberty, a creed unifying the belief in free markets with the beliefs in freedom of speech and the press.
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Let business fend for itself, competitively serving consumers rather than lobbying for government privileges.
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This is the second in a series of three articles about blockchain-enabled “smart contracts” and their ability to address retail fraud.
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