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Ck posted this in the comments section of the increasingly heated discussion about Free Software. He also requests comments, so I’ll give this piece the good ol’ fiske.

The libertarian paradox

By Gerry McGovern

There seems to be a rule that everything embodies a paradox, that everything embodies its opposite.

From the very first period I used the Internet around 1994, I came across information by libertarians who were calling for government to get off the Internet. The more I learned about the Internet, the more strange this demand became. If ever there was a case of ‘biting the hand that feeds’ these libertarians were exhibiting it in spades.

But who paid for the Internet, is the Government some Olympian benefactor who just generates real wealth in the clouds and then showers it onto earth for the consumption of the adoring masses? I think the fact that the same Government in a parallel programme and for the same purpose, spent billions of dollars to create a Nuclear Arsenal enough to destroy the whole world a couple of times over, with money that was taken away from the people is proof of the destructive capacities of Government.

Are the Libertarians really the ones who are biting the Hand that feeds them, or is the Government forcing the hands of those it taxes into their pockets to pay for various pipe dreams a few of which suceed?

What the hell is a libertarian, I hear you ask? According to the Advocates for Self-Government website, libertarians ?want a win-win world of peace and plenty. And we believe that the only way to get it is through self-government… NOT others-government. Self-government is the combination of personal responsibility and tolerance. Responsibility means you govern yourself. Tolerance means you don’t force your values on peaceful, honest people. Today, however, others-government is giving us insecurity, conflict and poverty. Let’s revitalize our heritage of self-government to create a win-win world where everyone comes out ahead.?

A liberal believes in freedom in personal issues and in government support in economic issues. A conservative believes in freedom in economic issues and government control in personal issues. A libertarian believes in freedom in all issues ? no interference anywhere.

So, if libertarians don’t believe in government, how come they have embraced the Internet with such energy? Surely, the Internet is one of the greatest examples of long-term government funding the world has ever seen? The libertarian philosophy is also evident in the open source software movement.

First of all, the Libertarians were amongst those who paid for the Internet, even if they do not support Government taxation and expenditure, they have every right to use the facilities which they are forced to pay for.

There is no reason to believe except in systematicaly planted modern mythology that Private Enterprise is not capable of making long-term investments, the railways in America and the UK were built primarily by private companies. Over the last 50 years the provision of infrastructure has been monopolised throughout the world by government either through direct expenditure or through regulatory legislation. It is not that Private enterprise could not have inveted the Internet, but that there was no opportunity to. The largest telephone company AT&T, which could plausibly have been part of a consortium to develop an advanced distributed network, was subjected to Anti-Trust legislation. The Government does not allow competition, it does not just ‘crowd-out’ it ‘pushes-out’.

Incidentally, large parts of the innovation that went into the internet though government funded, was conducted at private universities and firms, such as Xerox, AT&T, MIT and Stanford. Also had it not been Bill Gates’ call for ‘a computer on every desktop’ and Microsoft’s concerted efforts to expand the usage of computers in offices and schools, the Internet might still have been just a techies delight. So Government expenditure (channelised private funds) on its own would not have popularised computers the way that private enterprise has.

More so many of the great inventions that we take for granted today were not the product of any government munificence. I doubt that Stephenson got a government grant to test run his ‘Rocket’, nor did Ford get any government grant to invent the Assembly Line, nor did it grant the inventor of the humble zip relief when he was unable to market the product, and I should add, rightly so.

Again, surely libertarians would accept that without government-funded universities (not to mention the Internet), there would be very little open source software about today. (Linux, for example, having been originally developed at the University of Helsinki.)

This is hardly a cogent argument, Linus Torvalds could very well have been studying at a private University, had the Scandinavian Universities not been a government monopoly. An extension of this argument would imply that every single IITian and everything he produces is due to the Government of India, and does not have anything to do with his own personal skills or aptitude. I think Ravi, should have something to say about that.

The more I think about open source software, the more I come to believe that it is based on an essentially libertarian philosophy and thus exists within a paradox that will test it severely as it spreads out into the wider world.

OSS, is an idea that fits into the basic principles of Libertarian Thought. It may or maynot have been intended to be a ‘Libertarian Movement’, but then again neither was Democratic Government meant to be oppressive, (I think even the most ardent statist would not contest that). The reason why OSS will be tested, and is being tested is because it is a new method of doing things, an excellent test ground for how private citizens can almost anonymously create a Creative Commons, whose ownership is open to all, but whose possession to none, at the same time.

From an Economic point of view, Linux can be shown to be a Public Good, it fits the two criteria - You can’t be the only one consuming Linux at a particular point in time and neither can you stop someone else from using Linux. Though this is just a thought that struck me, maybe I’ll further explore (at a later date) this angle, to understand the economic viability of the OSS Movement.

The Internet is a frontier and libertarianism is very much frontier-thinking. It is, in essence, every man (and woman) for himself/herself. Open source software, which is thriving on the Internet, is very much a peer-based environment. Everybody helps out by throwing into the pot some of their free time. Everybody contributes, whether it is in lines of code or bug reports. Everybody pulls their own weight and everything is fine.

Libertarianism and Individualism are often subjected to such crass misrepresentation. Liberal/Libertarians do not eschew social behaviour and definetly do not encourage people to become reclusive monks. These things are rightly left in the domain of the individual. Indivdiualism does not mean that people are forced to remain to themselves, it means that people who wish to remain to themsleves have a full right to do so, and are not required to think about any greater common good or social optimum, when they act. As Yazad rightly said, in a Libertarian world you can have a communist colony if you want, as long as you don’t force people to join it.

Although things are changing, the Internet has been very much a rarefied environment inhabited by a select group of relatively wealthy, technically literate individuals. Unfortunately, the great mass of people are not able to write lines of code, nor are they interested in sending in bug reports. If you market to them well, they might buy your product, but in that money they pay is an implicit contract that the product will work and that if it doesn?t work, you will fix it.

I guess Mr. McGovern has not heared about RedHat or any of the slew of other companies that hope to provide reliable, and supported version of OSS software. In the words of the great RMS, “Free as in Free Speech not Free Beer”. Companies developing and marketing OSS software are infact providing a guarantee that if they are not in a position to service the software, the cleint will be able to do so themselves, or hire someone else to do it, and they wont have too much trouble, because all teh source code is available. This is something that Proprietary Software companies do not guarantee.

The Internet to me is one of the greatest validations of central government and taxation. Sure, I don’t like paying tax, but I like even less the alternatives. To further develop, open source software needs to square the circle - how to be built at the frontier and yet serve the mass market.

Well though the author may find it justifiable to pay taxes, the libertarian contention is, Why should he and others be allowed to use their votes to coerce those who are not too thrilled about paying taxes and do beleive they would be better off with an alternative system.

Also the advantages of OSS, are manifesting themselves in such projects as the The Simputer Trust, which is a private foundation that is developing a portable computer that will be able to support Indian Languages and will be accessible to bot literate and illiterate people. At the same time, the government’s prime achievements in the field of computing have been the development of a few super computers and the far from successful proprietary software from CDAC, called Lipi.

Also a recent Swaminathan Aiyar article pointed out e-choupal.com, which aims to harness existing traditional supply chains and distribution networks, in Rural India, to create a unique information dispersal system. The Government’s role in this field was the establsihment of the Food Corporation of India, which fixes politically motivated Minimum Support Prices, which favour large and established farmers. Yes they also did the Green Revolution, but that did not do much for the pet Socialist pique - Inequalities.

So the Internet is bringing about a change for the better, by breaking the government dependencies of the rural areas.

One more thing I would like to comment on is the blasé, use of the term “majority of the people” or “masses”. Both Ck and McGovern, use these terms to garner some unspoken support, or express their philanthropic intentions, when speaking for the poor and the illiterate, who they assume have no capacity to fathom the complexities of this world. Maybe, it is just such patronising behaviour that has made them numb to economic action, and supporters of political rent seeking cliques.