The technological revolution and freedom at Catallaxy Files

My esteemed IPA colleague, and good friend of the Catallaxy blog, Chris Berg, has written another fine piece. Appearing in today?s edition of The Age newspaper, Berg writes about the ?creatively destructive? properties of internet spin?off applications, such as Bitcoin and 3D printing, which promise to substantially undermine the effectiveness of state authority and empower individual creativity.

There are too many highlights in Berg?s piece to mention here, but I?ll cite just one:

The economic consequences of these innovations are huge. But economies are used to change. One of the advantages of a free market is how it is able to adapt. Absolutely, those adaptations aren?t always pretty. The shift from a manufacturing to a service economy has been traumatic for some. When we can make custom industrial products in our own home, what happens to all the companies and workers doing that now? Yet we?ve been through this sort of rapid industrial change many times. And we always end up more prosperous.

The piece does, I think, allude to an answer, but one of the profound questions posed by technological change is on what balance of probability will these indeed undermine the state?s policy effectiveness? Will online and other technologies eventually sow the seeds for the undermining of economically retrograde and liberty eroding taxes and regulations? Would such undermining eventually lead to the withering of the state?

There are many writers in the modern liberal tradition drawing rather optimistic conclusions; in other words, the internet and other technologies will eventually undermine the fiscal and legal bases of the state, ushering in an enlarged scope for the exercise of individual freedom.

In the late 1990s the great British liberal economist Arthur Seldon nominated the internet, or ?capitalism by keyboard? as one technological means through which individuals can escape the burdens of over?government:

The Web will cost time to use to the full, but it will also save time by discovering information almost instantaneously about intending purchases. It will thus raise what Hayek called ?the discovery process? of the free market, still often ?imperfect,? to unimagined heights of ?perfection.?

No one will have to pay more than the lowest possible price anywhere in the world. ? no government will be able to charge more in taxes for its services than the market can supply at lower prices around the globe.

Seldon also favourably referred to electronic money, scientific innovations, black markets, personal services and bartering, migration and affluence as other means by which peoples can escape the oppressions imposed by governments.

In an interesting book released recently, the British Conservative MP Douglas Carswell argues that the unsustainable cost structures underpinning contemporary governmental leviathan are increasingly being exposed by technologies, and that people will discover via technology new ways to achieve previously untold levels of prosperity.

Below is an interesting passage among many from Carswell?s book, The End of Politics:

The digital revolution ? which is only just beginning ? will mean hyper?personalisation, and less deference to experts. Instead of leaving it to an elite to make generic choices for the rest of us, we will decide things for ourselves ? including what opinions we hold.

Intellectually, it will become much harder to justify seeking to arrange human affairs on the basis of grand design. Financially, it will be much harder to pay for it. Unable to manipulate the money or count on a solid tax base, the old bureaucratic state will become progressively more unaffordable.

In his book An Army of Davids, Glenn Reynolds (well known for his Instapundit.com website) describes how all manner of technological innovations, from the iPhone to nanotechnology, have the potential to economically and socially empower the individual, and in the process undermining the stultifying structure of bureaucracy and increasing the velocity of the winds of structural change through industries.

On the other hand, while not ruling out the potential for technological innovations to undo the politicisation of societies, Tyler Cowen, in an important presentation to the Mont Pelerin Society a few years ago (publicly available copy of presentation here), persuasively illustrated how governmental authorities co?opted technological improvements in communications and transportation to collect taxes and enforce its laws, and disseminate its propaganda, more swiftly than was previously the case.

Both effects, liberating and non?liberating, are evident in practice, so it is inappropriate to construe the optimistic view as portraying technologies as a panacea for the realisation of a radical upscale in the extent of individual freedoms in our lifetimes. To be fair, nobody I?ve read who is pointing out the beneficial, freeing effects of technology is suggesting that.

Nonetheless if one is pressed to make a judgment call as to the implications of technological developments for freedom, I think on balance that technological change will continue to prove to be a kind servant to human freedom. (This statement implies that, on balance, I believe that technologies, from the printing press to the internet have, indeed, clearly extended the bounds of freedom more often than not.)

At the very least, most individuals have an abiding interest in freedom and so will discover ingenious ways to employ the internet and other technologies that would help push humanity, even if unintentionally and gradually, in a pro?freedom direction.

There can be little doubt that political actors with an abiding interest in influencing, not necessarily freeing, others, will simultaneously try to utilise technologies in ways to expunge new?found freedoms. For instance, high?cost and indebted governments will, sadly and unconscionably, continue to use technologies to hound high?wealth taxpayers to the ends of the earth. Nonetheless, Arthur Seldon?s statement that ?science and the human spirit will remain two or three decisive steps ahead? will tend to ring true in this regard.

Source: http://catallaxyfiles.com/2013/04/21/the-technological-revolution-and-freedom/

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