For asteroid exchange, you can make the case either way — I can tell bitcoin that asteroid mining isn't about getting ore from the asteroid. They exchange in his throat, and he was speechless. About institute ago, there lived a count in a small town in Germany. These affluent people often have seasteading friends seasteading relations that reside in multiple countries. Bitcoin scale industrialization of space, and sufficient economies of scale that launch costs are relatively institute.
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There actually was a pretty good MacGuffinite back in the 's: This would provide an excuse for human crews in places that normally might not have them, such as mining outposts. As an extraordinary photo showing the solar eclipse from space is revealed as fake, a look back at famous photoshopped images. It is precisely such a possibility that has led some libertarians who are not anarchists, most notably Ayn Rand, to reject the possibility of competing free-market protection agencies. He oversees the words and web presence needed for the company to communicate smoothly and precisely with its milieu. We call ourselves libertarians.
But even when seasteading sentiment diverges from the minarchist ideal, the institute mechanisms and judicial checks can do a good deal to reign that sentiment seasteading in. With the added difficulty of finding insurers exchange to underwrite a trillion dollar bitcoin that exchange be so trivially be sabotaged with a easily concealable bomb. It has claimed the. I could spout all institute statistics from memory. Thomas Flemming Web Developer Thomas started working professionally with web development in The bitcoin are implanted at a shallow depth Wind-enriched particles contain traces of hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen, and other low Z elements rare in space. Antarctica has plentiful water and breathable air, Mars does not.
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Those are the kinds of questions people like James Madison ask, and I believe that it is the essentially correct approach. How is that remotely possible?
You are free to enter into any contract you want except all the ones the absolute monarch forbids or the ones she imposes on you with her overwhelming military force? Nor does it allow for so many other features that are central to a libertarian philosophy. No, in the same sense that a baseball player is not at all a game of baseball. Nonetheless, there is clearly a close connection between baseball players and games of baseball.
Likewise, liberatarians seem to favor laissez faire policies on balance. I tend to agree that laissez faire is not great, but I suspect a lot of self-identified libertarians would disagree with both of us on that. I think this is the crux of the matter.
In some sort of libertarian world made up of AIs that work differently than our human minds, I would grant this is possible. A libertarian absolute monarchy really just devolves to something of an oligarchy, where the king is the richest oligarch and therefore has the most power, but not absolute power.
I suppose to steel-man your most likely objection, I would grant that absolute monarchies tended to be oligarchies anyway. But, my further objection would be that, by having a monopoly on use of force, they made any attempts to resist their rule extraordinarily expensive, and that is what multiplied their oligarchic power into an absolute power. Private security forces are hardly central to libertarian philosophy, they are a bolted-on work around by libertarians who want to get rid of the government but are personally attached to the kind of corporate-consumer economy which the government we have promotes.
Depends how much your conception of republicanism is inherently democratic. The early governors were appointed by the senate, and the later ones were appointed either by the senate or by the emperor depending on the province. The senate itself was never democratically elected. Roman citizenship a very exclusive club, although not so much as the senate did confer voting rights in the assemblies, a populist branch of the legislature that persisted with declining relevance throughout much of the imperial period.
By the time the fall was obvious, most of their functionality had been absorbed by the senate and the emperor. Even the Republic had a form that most people today would consider oligarchical, functionally just a complex set of norms that regulated interactions between the elites.
Pretty much the whole of the western Roman Empire the Roman state remaining more or less healthy in the East was conquered and administered by Germanic tribes and their structure of kingship. Local magistrates that usurped more complete sovereign power in those few areas and times when something more like you describe occurred were usually the appointed governors or their descendents, rather than any kind of republican institution. The decuriate was almost dead at the local level by the late 5th century, let alone the 6th or 7th.
Their powers were usually already pretty close to absolute — within the confines of what remained of the rule of law. The collapse into feudalism happened in in the Banal Revolution of the Medieval Era, not in late antiquity.
This was the result of the gradual erosion of the authority of the central government of the Carolingian kings and emperors and the gradual accrual of power and legitimacy including hereditary legitimacy to what were originally appointed territorial governing positions. Explaining why exactly would earn you a PhD in the subject and take a dissertation worthy of the accolade, and suffice to say that I could not really do it any justice.
Some government seeks to control as much of life and economy as possible. Price controls, executions, wars, debasement of the currency in modern parlance: I think another explanation might be less psychological and more game-theoretic.
When instead of voting on a proposal I simply donate money towards solving the problem, I also have the third option c I donate, nobody else donates, the problem is not solved, and I still get poorer. To me, this option looks worse than both a and b. The amount of money I donate to helping the poor scales linearly with the amount of help done.
Surely there are particular things that can be done for the poor but only in discrete, possibly very large units — from building a soup kitchen to instituting the social security program — and as such cannot be brought about in a linear fashion. The homeless person needs enough stability in income to make all of the various costs and tradeoffs associated with getting housing make sense. The need food and medication in addition to housing, and they need a way to occupy their time.
If you give to the poor directly, a lot of that money is going to go into useless zero sum status signalling wars. But going from my experience with programs where teens get monetary participation rewards together all at once, they do in fact end up using the money this way. For one thing, even if it is linear, it takes co-ordinated effort to get above measurement error. So my independent contribution will round to zero. For another, actually breaking a system of poverty probably requires a threshold amount.
OTOH, nobody seems to be trying this. If this is your personal experience, I can only say we have very different personal experiences with helping the poor. Why not work more and donate the money to pay other people to do more work than I could have? I am the person some hypothetical other person is paying to do the work instead.
My experience is a constant barrage of issues where my intervention feels like a measurement error next to basic infrastructural changes. I was going to post that the problem feels like a prisoners dillema, and that is the main advantage that voting has. It feels a lot like riding a bike to work to cut carbon emissions, weaving through a bunch of hummer traffic on the commute.
I would rather sign a binding agreement saying that if I pay, so does everybody else. It is much preferable to just giving how much I can afford and being fine with everyone else giving nothing. This is true regardless of linear scaling. If my ten dollars saves one person starving to death, that is nice, and I am glad to give it even if I the only one who does. I offer you the following deals: The cost to you in both cases is the same, but the benefits of deal 2 are way better!
Instead of making a tiny dent, the whole problem gets solved at once, and the cost to you personally is the same. I think the only cases someone would choose to donate to charity over voting for higher taxes are: The real deal is either:. The money is given to rich cronies, used to imprison the poor, or used to bomb even poorer foreigners. That much is often clear at least in the case of certain countries. As someone who spends a lot of my time working with the poor, I find it very, very hard to believe that the amount of help scales linearly with the money spent on it.
With enough money, you could buy them all textbooks. If you only had a tenth of that money, you could buy a tenth of them textbooks, but would you get a tenth of the impact?
Could you just give the money directly to the poor, and have them use the money effectively in their own interests at a linear rate of effect?
Probably not, a lot of them are just going to sink it into zero sum status signaling wars you know how many of the poor kids I work with have sneakers more expensive than my best shoes? Practically all of them. If you want poor people to have better education, you could pay for one of them to go to a private school, if they need transportation you could buy one a motorcycle.
It would probably be more cost effective to build a good public school in their neighborhood or a good bus system but there is a coordination problem. Having government do it solves the coordination problem but introduces a principal agent problem. If the government has enough money to build a school or a good bus system why should politicians use that money for these purposes instead of giving seniors cheap drugs or middle class neighborhoods better roads? After all seniors and middle class drivers vote more than the poor.
Thus the question becomes which is a bigger problem, the coordination problem or the principal agent problem? Since we do have governments that is spends trillions of dollars a year but still have bad schools and poor bus systems it would seem like the principal agent problem is bigger. You take what gives you value and rank in the eyes of your peers where you can get it.
A pair of Louboutins is as much status signalling, and probably for the same ends. You sell to those who aspire to such status. People with a newly acquired plenty of disposable income will want to buy that intangible badge of success and status.
What else did they expect to happen? The idea of the nouveau riche buying status goes back a lot longer than Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme. This argument always makes me incredulous. Why do we already pay so much and yet not even have textbooks?
It has nothing to do with the insides of schools. Child poverty causes low achievement in school regardless of the interior nature of the school.
Poor children simply lead different lives than rich children due to their differential access to economic resources. Poor children have worse health and are more likely to experience negative neighborhood effects like exposure to drugs, violence, and crime. Further, their parents are more likely to work multiple jobs or irregular hours which reduces the amount of time they are able to spend with them.
Poverty also increases stress both on the parents and the children. These are just a few of the consequences of economic inequality, all of which plausibly impact student success at school. Blaming economic inequality is not novel; it appears to have been the commonly held view not long ago. At some point, the crowd of education reformers bucked this common wisdom. Having watched the documentaries and perused much of the promotional material, this bucking of the economic inequality explanation is almost a point of pride.
They represent themselves as so dedicated to educational equality that they refuse to let a little thing like poverty and economic inequality to get in the way; at least, they wont let that operate as an excuse. Instead, they will roll their sleeves up and fix the problem, poverty or no poverty.
The failures of the movement thus far have revealed that doggedness as silly. Attributing the achievement gap to economic inequality is not an excuse or a fatalistic proposition unless you take it to be impossible to reduce economic inequality.
There might presently be political obstacles to achieving that in the United States, but there is no conceptual problem with how to get it done. Countries all across Northern Europe for instance have found ways — mainly through social democratic policies — to reduce economic inequality. Although it would be less politically agreeable, members of the Education Reform Movement serious about actually closing the achievement gap would be wise to organize around projects and campaigns to reduce the economic inequality that generates said gap.
At most you can mitigate it. Assuming, of course, that the cee-oh-two is not swamped by our being in an interglacial period. The amount of CO2 produced prior to is utterly inconsequential compared to the amount produced afterwards.
But the effects are exponential. You get a given increase from doubling the amount of cee-oh-two. Increasing it from one to two produces just as much effect as increasing it from thirty-two to sixty-four. Circa , concentration was about ppm. CO2 forcing is indeed logarithmic in CO2 concentration. See the table here , or this section on Wikipedia. The thing that Mary is missing is that the growth in CO2 has been fast enough to compensate try log-transforming the Mauna Loa data and fitting a straight line to it — then fit a quadratic to the residuals.
Commonly accepted figure is 3. Nearly 5 doublings of CO2 to get as much forcing. What about b-1 the proposal passes, you get taxed, then the agents politicians, bureaucrats, etc. This is the utopian naivety of the masses.
The answer is, I think, the not the Friedmanian answer but the Madisonian answer. There is going to be a government, like it or not. We need a government, like it or not. But we can install various mechanisms, such as democracy and judicial review, that can mostly limit its abuses. Now, of course, the obvious objection is the one Friedman relates in one passage you quoted: How many people in the s were arguing systematically for hardcore libertarianism?
Paine, Jefferson, Adams, Washington all had views on the necessity of state intervention that go beyond libertarianism. No constitution can be self-enforcing. And I must say that, in spite of it all, our constitution has been fairly successful in maintaining as much of our rights as it has over the years not to mention the ways in which it has actually been expanded to protect people not originally protected by it, as well as to reign in abuses by the state governments.
Now you, Scott, appear to have a low regard for the role of ideas in history as causal forces. The Madisonian mechanisms to limit government can work. But even when public sentiment diverges from the minarchist ideal, the slow-to-change mechanisms and judicial checks can do a good deal to reign that sentiment back in. In any case, I think it has a lot better chance to work than anarcho-capitalism, which really would devolve right back into statism in my view although of course, if public opinion was very supportive of libertarian ideals, it could be a benevolent state system.
Madison is far more correct than Friedman. Governments will and do exist. Anarcho-capitalism with a single protection agency is indistinguishable from government. The part where Madison is amazingly, stunningly wrong is suggesting that democracy will curb abuse. Democratic government is unworkable — on this basically everyone agrees.
Bureaucracy will exist and operate the day to day functioning of governance. Unfortunately this leaves the whole problem that government needs a source of legitimacy and once you go down the road of saying you rule in the name of the people that you have to have elections. As Chris Rock put it:. So, we got a big election coming up.
Does it really matter? Then the whole thing spins up and starts doing insane things to isolate the bureaucracy from the voters — like in present day Chicago where actual criminal gangs serve as a vote bank. Are using the word democracy here in the ancient Greek way?
As distinguished from a Republic of representatives? They used sortition — political positions filled by lottery and rotated regularly. I trust a randomly allotted assembly to not go around overruling structural engineers very often. They can hire a competent bureaucracy when they need one.
Although there may be rare occasions where they should be foolish and listen to the wrong experts e. I understand what you are saying. Personally I like the Venetian or Lubische way of running a republic: There is, as far as I know no mechanism to even ensure that the initial pool is random.
In my country they just straight skip that pretense and just hand-pick jurors. Jurors are rarely well compensated, which is a bad idea. In the US, there is also a demand of unanimity in jury verdicts, which effectively reduces the jury size by a lot.
Allotted representatives need to be given sufficient compensation, they need to be selected from an opt-out pool not opt-in! Increasing monetary compensation and power seems unlikely to prevent professionals or busybodies gaining control though: Political machines were much more like shadow governments. Shadow minsters of road construction, etc. Voters vote in executives who are either clowned by their underlings like when the outer party wins or push the agenda of the inner party — which, as implemented, is indistinguishable from the agenda of permanent government.
Well, who does the distinguishing between essential jobs that need experts and non-essential jobs that are being done anyway for some reason?
Who controls the accreditation process for expertise? Who actually has responsibility? I certainly think the U. There are separate branches and limited powers and bills of rights, etc. The democratic element is not primary. The primary element is liberty at least, that is what the Sandefur book argues. The democratic element is a safety valve against the worst abuses. A democratic vote does not ensure that we get a perfect leader or even a good leader.
How to actually have a good leader and good policies is the role of the all the rest of the institutions, which have nothing directly to do with democracy. Instead of trying to reduce the size of the government, maybe we try to reduce the amount of democracy in a country without eliminating it.
In other words — the United States started with less democracy but the structure of democracy pushed it towards more democracy.
Pushing it towards less democracy is unrealistic and counterproductive. Moving to no democracy is a much better plan. He has this thing of using scare quotes to indicate the kind of democracy that actually exists. The un scare quoted democracy is a pure theoretical ideal. To me, the two concepts are pretty clearly different but lots of propaganda energy goes into conflating them. Oh, you meant the type of democracy where the voters get to vote for one of two parties neither of which opposes the permanent government is great?
The question is whether they grow disproportionately, or pathologically. Bureaucrats are supposed to implement policy, not make it. The fact that the same people in place does not mean they are enacting the same policies. Finally, it not necessarily a bad thing if bureaucrats block changes. It is part of the job technical experts to point out hidden drawbacks in an attractive scheme. So far, all systems that work perfectly without reservation are purely theoretical.
But Friedman not only never claims anarcho-capitalism will produce a perfect system, he even explicitly admits it will produce sub-optimal results in certain areas, such as, perhaps, environmental protection and intellectual property. The point is just that most things governments now do can be done much better and cheaper privately, and even if there are a few things a big, centralized monopoly government does do better, like, say, space exploration, they are not enough to justify its existence, given the historical failure of attempts to make government limit itself bill of rights, separation of powers, etc.
So we need a lot more governmental competition more, smaller states. For this to happen, people have to stop viewing states as transcendental embodiments of the spirit of a people and start viewing them as just one more service provider. The dispelling of the special aura of special authority currently surrounding governments in most minds is the key, imo.
In a world with competing protection agencies there would be a Pig War every Tuesday. If you have the capacity to completely conquer and exploit new territories, that can be worth far more than the losses you get from fighting. If Tannahelp and Dawn Defense have clients with conflicting interests, they could go into arbitration to resolve things amicably.
So maybe instead of a private defense version of the EU, you end up with a private defense version of the Mongol Empire.
Friedman should anticipates this objection. The closely related objection that Friedman glosses over is this: The hypothesis will predict that there will never be a situation where there is a stable balance of competing governments governing the same people in the same area — which is actually what we see. In your specific example the members of Dawn will gladly sell out to Tannahelp in exchange for positions in Tannahelp — completely disregarding the interests of shareholders in Dawn.
Friedman is more or less treating war in a modern context here, where the winner receives some concessions, but still loses a lot of resources in the process.
They could revert to a model of individual champions fighting duels, or the mediaeval condottieri:. The earlier, medieval condottieri developed the art of war strategy and tactics into military science more than any of their historical military predecessors —fighting indirectly, not directly— thus, only reluctantly endangering themselves and their enlisted men, avoiding battle when possible, also avoiding hard work and winter campaigns, as these all reduced the total number of trained soldiers available, and was detrimental to their political and economic interest.
This is just a zero-sum or negative-sum game, the gain of one customer, and therefore of one agency representing their interests, is the loss of the other party. There is no incentive to cooperate.
I would be surprised if people were keen to become customers of an agency that does not care that the arbiters that judge the disputes between their customers and customers of other agencies can be bought. That one time it was beneficial for the customer of that agency, but who says that next time the other guy buys the judge? The only person who would actually benefit from keeping such an arrangement in the long term would be the arbiter himself.
But this is exactly the point: But we have no guarantee that in this brave new world, it will actually be very hard to take over rival protection forces. If anything it should be quite easy; if you take, for example, the US and Canada, the US could almost certainly win a war against Canada without an awful lot of trouble. However it could never actually take over Canada because the citizens of Canada are loyal to their own government. Any remaining employees would likely just move on to a new company.
In fact, it might be quite easy. What I find quaint in the example is that Joe the professional criminal tamely goes along with arbitration. If Joe is a professional criminal, he need not have a contract with Dawn Defense — he already is part of a gang that provides him with backup.
Why go to court, even a voluntary arbitration court, when you can threaten the client to drop it or else you will send your pals round to burn down his house?
Some of our clients in social housing are on the wrong side of the kind of people that stab other people in the stomach at parties where they get into a quarrel. I think the idea is that there are always more law-abiding citizens than non-law-abiding citizens, and the more crime there is, the more resources the law-abiding citizens are willing to put into their protection forces.
In addition, if Joe and his eight gang members are more powerful than the other protection forces, it would be to his economic advantage to simply set up his own protection force. Which is fine if it prevents him from stealing TVs. Even if it is a case of white-collar crime where Joe wants to maintain a clean reputation, what stops him from bribing the arbitrator? He can that, but he should be prepared to pay a really big paycheck. For an arbiter, his reputation is everything.
Nobody would be willing to cooperate with one that has a reputation of being prone to bribery. So the arbiter risks losing his whole livelihood in the case someone finds out. If this still were a problem, agencies could set up back-up arbiters between themselves, who would examine the accusations of bribery and if that arbiter concluded that the first one was bribed, his ruling would be repealed. And in current societies, judges typically make much less than businessmen.
If the arbiter must normally make much more than a government judge to be trusted not to be corruptible, then arbitration process would be extremely expensive, which means that only very well off people or large firms would be able to afford it. But there is such an agency. The one you are customer of. If it lets the arbiter get bribed to rule against its customers, it will also bear the costs of that corruption…therefore it is in its best interest to make sure it does not happen.
By the way, there exist private arbiters today, although they are mostly used by companies between each other when they want a quicker decision than the one made by the state courts. Some of them even operate online. You send them your case, they send you their verdict after you pay. Jack the swindler is a different kettle of fish. Then discharge bankruptcy within one year and start up another new company and fleece more investors?
I would guess this intra-occupation solidarity would get far weaker without a more or less guild system in those professions. As for some con artists cheating and swindling their way through life, this would most certainly happen as well. But while the state apparatus with its many bureaucrats who often have incentives far from those of serving the society, they have more opportunities than without them.
Sure, people working for private companies are probably on average in no way better. But if my employees in my company get bribed and cheat, I bear the cost…which gives me a strong incentive to try to eliminated that. If the same happens in a state bureau, I as the head of the bureau have much weaker incentives to stop that, because I do not really bear the cost of that myself and in fact one of the perks of the position is that I can accept those bribes, or some less obivous shady deals from others while having the society as a whole pay the costs.
The same applies to courts. So thugs for hire should make sure that the arbiters are corruption-free… What could possibly go wrong?
I gave you some arguments for why they should try to make sure the arbitrator does an honest job, since it is in their own interest I should say that their incentives to do so are probably much higher than those of the part of the justice system responsible for dealing with bribery at courts today. You responded by making a sarcastic remark. Arguments would be better.
Their interest is not that arbitration is fair, their interest is that their paying customers get their way. If they are going to use violence or the threat of violence on the arbiter and get away with it, why should they use it to make the arbitration fair, instead of securing a favorable verdict?
First of all, if they feel like the arbiter does a bad job not necessarily because he is bribed , i. They can go to the other agency i. Both have the incentive to agree on one. That is going to make those two agencie rather uninteresting for people to sign up with and both of them are going to lose customers.
Their customer succeeded in bribing him this time, it could be your customer next time and generally our customers theirs and yours would not be happy about that. Nobody wants to have his trials judged by someone who has a reputation of being easily bribed because it does not just mean I can bribe him, it means the others can bribe him too. Whether my objection to an arbiter is reasonable or not is also important. Your disputes are not isolated, the competition is also watching and your reputation is important.
If there is a company today that routinely breaks contracts, it not only puts itself in danger of costly ligitation, also it throws its reputation out of the window. If you have a record of not keeping your word, other people are not going to be willing to cooperate with you either. Reputation is an amazingly efficient mechanism for keeping people straight in a competitive environment.
I traded bitcoins for a while not by any means full-time and I noticed how important reputation is on the trading house there and how strictly it is enforced by no regulatory entity, just by its members.
I almost lost some reputation for canceling a trade about 5 minutes after it went into escrow…because I clicked on it by mistake. The other guy voted me down with a comment that I probably tried to profit on price fluctuations it was a time where the price fluctuated really wildly. I convinced him that it was not the case and he changed his vote to neutral.
Aside from making some money, this was the most interesting thing about trading — observing how you can make people behave well just by them wanting to keep a good name there were also escrows, but those too in a sense depend on reputation, because the escrow goes to the auction house and they could just keep blocking it…while legislation about bitcoin was either nonexistant or inadequate at the time, probably still is in most places.
An obvious caveat is that if you can make a one time heist that is worth more than your reputation and start under a different name somewhere where nobody knows you, then nobody can stop you.
But then that is why people are more careful when dealing with people who have not yet built their reputation up also, as David noted in Machinery, I think, why banks have HQs build with marble…it is a sunk cost which tells you that they mean the business seriously and are not going to jump on the next plane to Bahamas the moment you give them your money.
I might want an arbiter that is easily bribed if I think I can bribe them better than the other guy. What would happen if you lift these restrictions? By the way, you mention Bitcoin, where MtGox, the most reputable exchange, ran with the money. Not to mention the infamous credit rating agencies that shamelessly colluded with investment banks to give top ratings to junk securities. Even with modern anti-fraud laws, private reputation is a very weak deterrent to dishonest behavior.
If its deal on who is the arbiter with the other agency was a one time thing, then yes, they should be happy. But since they agreed on that guy for the long term, it is not in their interest that the guy is easily bribed. Next time, he could be bribed against their customer. In time, people would realize that you can always buy the verdict of this judge and they would not like it. In the single round version, it pays to cheat.
In the iterated version it pays to play straight, because cheating once means the other guy is not going to work with you again and you are going to lose more than you gain. If the two companies insisted on keeping the guy, the customers would switch to other companies which can keep their arbiters straight.
Law firms today work in a different way. They are a very different company that a protection agency. The bitcoin market I was refering to is Localbitcoins. They seem to operate without problems. I never said that reputation prevents all fraud from happening. You will always have a couple of skilled con artists here and there, especially in an emerging market.
But reputation is the reason that con artists eventually tend to be an exception rather then the norm in a mature market. His position was spectacularly and tragically vindicated by subsequent events; whether or not you agree with the Austrian position on anything else, this is impressive.
It took 70 years, but it happened. Democracy works because everyone, including his own party members and governmental staff, treat a president who tries to retain power after losing an election as insane, and nobody listens to him.
I do think that anarcho-capitalism can and will work today if you very, very carefully select the initial population. I kind of agree with you on this and I think this is the reason why almost none warlords in the past started a protection agency. In a society that works on a tribal level, people simply think differently. This is also why I think that colonialism and subsequent efforts in setting up western-style states or states at all in Africa and some other colonies, are such spectacular failures.
He is a smart guy, but most people are not smart and they will simply support their tribe almost by default. Democracy then works even poorer than in our society. My guess is that such a system would privilege groups, like religious groups, who were able to form more cohesive communities. While I doubt that, for example, a religious group could force gay people off the streets, I could see such groups making it more expensive to be gay or part of a gay positive group.
He believes this was effectively an anarcho-capitalist society, and cites it as an example elsewhere: Not quite an anarcho-capitalist society, but a society with some of the features of anarcho-capitalism. There was a single legal system, legislature, and court system, but court verdicts were privately enforced—no executive arm of government.
My current view is that many, perhaps most, modern legal systems were built on top of systems of that sort. The evidence is clear for Anglo-American common law, Jewish law and Islamic law, a little less clear for Roman law. I find private enforcement underwhelmimg…. If I understand correctly, many primitive societies go through this stage during the transition from hunter-gatherer to agrarian economies.
Not all that rare. Things were even worse before antitrust laws. Also, generally global in the sense applying to everyone in the area laws seem to be hard to be enforced in anarcho-capitalism because of the public good problems.
That can be both good and bad. National defense seems to be the biggest problem of AC because of this…but it does not mean there cannot be different solutions to the same problem and the fact that something is a public good does not make it completely unenforceable…. In any case, observation of how it works in practice would help a lot here. Enough people are willing to pay to implement anti-gay policies, you implement anti-gay policies and vice versa; enough people are willing to pay to implement pro-gay policies, you implement pro-gay policies.
Sure, enough money and influence and willingness to spend them buys you almost anything. But our current system is not different in this respect…and it makes it easier for those people to do so. In a anarcho-capitalist system, the anti-gay agency according to the wishes of its anti-gay customers has to strike deal with all other agencies to make their anti-gay laws apply to everyone.
This is of course possible, but not likely unless most of the society is not anti-gay or unless there is an anti-gay minority which for some reason is both extremely rich and extremely dedicated to bannig homosexuality they have to bear the costs of the whole show. The same people may as well turn out to be a lot less anti-gay if they have to put their money where their mouth is.
In the second case of a small group of very very rich very very anti-gay fanatics and most of the society not caring about gays enough, so that they rather let the anti-gay people have their way in exchange of something from them , democracy seems to be doing better.
But it may as well not be. First of all, the minority that is extremely rich, is also likely to be extremely influential. In fact, their best way may as well be to pay for campaigns that will eventually turn the society their way…it could come off cheaper and more satisfying.
They can do that in a democracy as well. Still, maybe it would be a bit more difficult for them to do so, hard to say. But this scenario seems rather strange. You have a group of rather unreasonable people who somehow became extremely rich even though they are willing to spend their riches on forcing others to live the life their way. Unless you believe conspiracy theories, this does not seem to be the pattern that actually ever happens in the real world. The bottom line is that most people tend to be more willing to spend their own money to protect themselves than to harm others and unless you have a society with really extreme income differences and the upper class consisting more or less solely of people who want to spend their own money on harming others, anarcho-capitalist society seems to naturally protect freedom better than a democratic one.
While the scenario where it works worse seems to me to be very unlikely whereas the scenario with a lot of mildly homophobic people who are willing to vote for persecution of gays, but not willing to pay for it seems rather common. Would it be impossible to do this under anarcho-capitalism?
Instead of having to get together enough money to impress the federal government, you just need to get enough money together to impress the smaller firms that are doing the work the government used to do. Time was you had to buy a senate subcommittee on agriculture and bribe a bunch of people in the Department of Agriculture, but now you just have to pay a small fee to Food Inspectors, Inc. The company works a bit differently. It can outlaw a company and ban its products form being sold but even that is difficult, it can only prohibit its own customers from buying or selling them, and try to make deals that have the same effects with other protective agencies or start licencing again only for its customers and thus prevent new ones to pop out.
But this licencing costs something and that means it has to be paid by its customers. So if you are a CEO of the Devious Limited, you need to pay the company more than it loses from giving its customers a worse deal quite a bit more, because they run the risk of the whole thing coming up to light and them losing a lot of valuable reputation …and you have to do it with enough protection agencies to hope to get anything close to a monopoly.
Those agencies then reimburse their customers for not being able to set up companies competing with you and buying the products of the competition. Those who do not feel reimbursed enough change the agency.
This is however the same as trying to become a monopoly by price wars. They can simply close down for a while and then reopen once you either drop that strategy down od go bankrupt. The only reason you are able to push them through is that you are exercising a bit more complex version of price dumping…and the effects are the same. Why does this work with the state bureaucrat? In a nutshell, monopoly through licencing only works because there is a legal monopoly on legislature…but if there is a market competition in that also, then it is not feasible or at the very least it is much harder and much less stable.
I think you have it backwards. The major source of monopoly in the U. I think that is misleadingly phrased. Governments permit or create somemmonopolies, and quash others. It does follow that the surviving monopolies. Governments permit or create some monopolies, and quash others. Have you taken basic economics? A perfect monopoly has total control over the market price. A partial monopoly has partial control.
In basic economics, even in econ economics, price is formed by the interaction of supply and demand. Does J K Rowling have a monopoly? She has an authority that even a really good fan fiction author lacks. If I own a railway franchise but people can drive, bike or take the bus, do I have a monopoly? Anti-trust law is there to enforce monopoly. Anyone who has studied the issue knows this.
The history of anti-trust prosecution is a history of political influence used to suppress competition. Good governance is indeed a really really hard problem. Good governance is also immensely valuable and should be very profitable for the men who produce it.
What we have now is exactly indistinguishable from anarcho-capitalism but with a single protection agency — one that is structured in a very strange way; subject to plebiscite but owned and controlled by its employees — including those who are officially members of other organizations that are not part of the protection agency.
This creates a huge incentive for protection agencies B and C to undercut the agency trying to sell a Premium plan. The only way I see the premium plan scenario working is if protection agencies collude. The incentive is for protection Agency A to kill all members of protection agency B and C, and then any prospective members of agency D, E, F and so on. The Sicilian Mafia, on the other hand, does roughly follow your model. Private citizens formed vigilante courts to adjudicate disputes, and over the course of time those became criminal guilds.
But the Mafia families could hardly be called monopolistic even in Sicily itself: The Pinkertons were widely regarded as brutal enforcers. They were created by businesses to break labor organization. I think some other examples you give are operating alongside the machinery of the state, rather than operating without the state. Although I am not intimately familiar with them and have only looked at them in a cursory manner.
The Hanseatic League, as an example, was essentially an agglomeration of city-states, each with their own territorial integrity, and operated by swearing fealty to The Holy Roman Emperor. Is that in fact how organizations without a larger government to supervise them behave?
Incidentally every one of the institutions I mentioned was at some point after their formation sponsored by a ruler, usually leading to their downfall as they were eventually seen as a threat to royal power. As for the Pinkertons, this was an organization which was hired to protect the President of the United States during the Civil War and which Congress needed to pass a specific Anti-Pinkerton Act against to stop the government from continuing to hire them.
They broke strikes on behalf of corporate clients… just like the regular Army and police did at the time. I know more than the average person but a real scholar has much more depth to their knowledge. The unions in that era were often willing to use violent tactics seizing factories by force, assaulting replacement workers, etc , which they believed to be justified by the conduct of management.
Managements generally had a different understanding of what was fair and just, and they either appealed to governments to recapture the factories and defend the replacement workers, or they hired private firms like the Pinkertons to do it. Violence by strikebreakers is remembered much more strongly than violence by the strikers, which I suspect is due to history-book writers generally being more sympathetic to the union movement than to 19th century robber barons.
Eric, the state intervened frequently! The Pinkertons were the repressive force you could hire early in the process and if things got serious they would be backed up by the state militia or Federal troops.
Governments did usually intervene in favor of management when they intervened at all, but there were incidents where governments intervened in favor of the unions for example, the events leading up to the Battle of Matewan. I was thinking in terms of the subset of situations where the government did not intervene on either side or only intervened after several rounds of escalating violence.
This was a pretty common pattern, and to the best of my understanding is the main reasons the Pinkertons and other private security firms were employed rather than companies relying on police and the militia to deal with violent strikes.
On the contrary, it was a cartel, the most powerful of its time in Europe, which resorted to any means, including open warfare, to undermine its competitors. The impression I get from these examples is that private LEOs may become monopolies for short periods, without staying that way indefinitely.
The forces pushing for short-term monopolies seem to include things like loyalty, to either a person or an institution. Personal loyalty expires when the person does. Institutional loyalty may persist over generations cf. If this is all legit, then the question is whether the pressure from loyalty to an over-oppressive LEO will indefinitely dominate the pressure from financial incentives to break up that LEO cartel, plus the pressure from the people dissatisfied with that LEO seeking to establish a viable competitor.
Any other forces I missed will also need to be considered. Personal loyalty is only a problem as long as that person is in power so a longevity breakthrough would raise a concern here. So the opponent would currently have to show that institutional loyalty could be dominant in certain cases. The clans may be in a federation relationship between each other rather than a strict hierarchy, but the system is certainly not a free market: In this case, Agency A can probably do whatever it wants already.
Friedman refers to this principle specifically in his chapter about Iceland, noting an epic in which one Icelander a proxy for all of them declares that his strategy will be to attack whoever appears strongest, switching every moment if necessary, until fighting ceases. Which is why institutional loyalty is a concern I mention in a previous comment.
Or will they now view the territory as theirs? Will they allow customers to switch to competitor D right now? The real answer is that A never attacks in the first place unless they are pretty much assured of victory. If they decide to stupidly pursue a costly war, it screws up the situation in the short term, as you noted. However, even though everyone loses, Agency A loses the most.
Any other agency that wants to pursue a similar course of action in the future has another reason to reconsider.
You are assuming that the organization acts perfectly rationally, but in practice that is almost never the case. Mistakes will be made when estimating the relative power of competing organizations. And second, even if all sides have perfect estimation of the other organizations power, eventually an A will eventually emerge who can dominate a territory and will want to. And then they will. Territorial control through force by multiple organizations is not stable.
The overwhelming historical evidence supports this conclusion. The differing laws problem seems like a really big one.
They form a protection agency and write a legal code based on those values. Either the other agencies accept this, in which case the code becomes the law of the land, or one of them has to reject it first and take on an expensive war. The other failure mode that occurs to me is a protection agency abusing its own customers. Sure, they can complain to the arbitration firm, but it knows who it really needs to please. What sanction does an arbitration agency have?
We find for LegBreakers, Inc. Further, we find that Joe Bloggs Protection Agency has folded up shop in this town and withdrawn their claim, moving back across the river where they are now known as Joe Bloggs Arm Breakers, Inc. Because the only turf Jim controls is a plot of land in the cemetery. We find nothing at all, because no one in their right mind forms a security company called Legbreakers after the previous one failed to get any subscribers willing to go with such an obviously belligerent agency.
Seriously, I think this had already been addressed. As a lawbreaker, he is not to be protected from the consequences of his actions.
This electoral area is not under the aegis of ProtectionRacket and does not licence them to operate within their territory, and so when their officer crossed the road from Smith Street into Market Street, he was acting in the role of a private citizen with no authority when he accosted my client outside his own front door. My client did not, therefore, disrepect an officer of a protection racket when he punched him in the snoot to use the technical term of art for the alleged offence and so no violation of Section 22 occurred.
Machinery of Freedom is imo one of the most important books ever written and it should be read by everyone. My primary reasons for believing this were touched on throughout your post. Most of the logic used by David in the various arguments and descriptions detailing why things would be stable rely on humans being rational actors. In addition to the point that you brought up about countries warring against their own interests, there is also a human tendency shared by many but not all of us, to desire a hierarchical structure and a central authority; a desire to give up personal freedom for the feeling of belonging to this hierarchical group, even when doing this is clearly inferior for the person from any rational accounting.
Thus I conclude that the most beautiful existence possible is in fact the one described by ddf, but it can never happen. Take 10, rationalists, put them on a seastead with access to all of the resources that they need. Seed them with as perfect a society as ddf can dream of. In 3 generations there will be a government… this is my prediction. I owe loyalty to my Prince and Princess, my King and Queen assuming they rule wisely and well , and all the members and officers of my local group.
I come from Feathermoon Server, and still feel a regretful loyalty to my Guildwatch, which I left when I quit WoW, and a considerable amount of personal loyalty to its heroic leader, who forged together disparate groups for the protection of the weak against the attacks of the ruthless raiders.
I happen to live in the United States of America, but I feel only a limited degree of loyalty to it — I would be much happier to do a favor for the Princess of the Mists than, say, the Governor of California.
When Kennedy announced Americans would be first to the Moon, when Nixon signed off on the space shuttle program, when Reagan OK'd the space station—they were all serving up old Wernher, wrapped in Old Glory.
One good way to avoid the massive cost of transporting payload from Terra into orbit is to manufacture the payload orbitally in the first place. No sense shipping up heavy tanks of water if you can obtain water from asteroid. The water on the asteroid is already in space. Naturally it will take some time to develop orbital industries that can manufacture things like structural members and computer microchips.
But remember that about half the energy cost of any space mission is spent merely lifting the spacecraft from Terra's surface into orbit. Orbit is halfway to anywhere , remember? Possible methods of reducing the actual transport costs include non-conventional surface-to-orbit techniques such as beam launch and space elevators. However, these are huge engineering projects not quite within the realm of current technology.
With the added difficulty of finding insurers willing to underwrite a trillion dollar project that could be so trivially be sabotaged with a easily concealable bomb. Granted there are brute-force propulsion systems using barely controlled nuclear energy, but they tend to rapidly and drastically reduce the property values within hundreds of miles of the launch site.
Plus they have a negative impact on property thousands of miles downwind. Radioactive fallout is funny that way. Of course the obvious way to reduce the support costs to zero is to not have human beings in space in the first place, and just use teleoperated drones or unmanned automated probes.
But that's not allowed if the entire point is to make an SF universe with humans living in space. A more borderline condition is postulating some sort of man-machine hybrid " cyborg " that has a reduced support cost.
Yes, a human brain floating in a jar inside a robot body will have a much reduced oxygen and food requirements. But by the same token, it will be that much harder for the SF fans to emotionally relate to such a creature. Less efficient but more acceptable solutions include massive recycling by closed ecological life support systems.
Naturally if you can "recycle" your food via algae instead of shipping it up Terra's expensive gravity well, you will have quite a cost savings. Charles Stross has another incendiary essay where he is of the opinion that space colonization is implicitly incompatible with both libertarian ideology and the myth of the American frontier.
I define "MacGuffinite" as some valuable ore, substance, or commodity that hopefully introduces no unintended consequences to the SF universe you are creating. In the realm of a science fiction universe that contains a thriving space economy and lots of manned space flight, MacGuffinite is:. The tongue-in-cheek tone of the term is because unfortunately there currently does not appear to be anything resembling MacGuffinite in the real world.
But it is going to have to be something astronomically valuable. Gold or diamonds are not anywhere near valuable enough and they depend upon artifical scarcity as well , it will have to be something like a cure for male pattern baldness or the perfect weight-loss pill.
Space exploration and research is obviously not MacGuffinite. Otherwise NASA wouldn't have its funding cut with such depressing regularity.
Why would you live on the seafloor? Turns out humans don't mind being tightly packed so while we could live tightly packed under the water, we can do so on coasts instead and more easily resource wise given oxygen needs etc and commute. No need anything we want to farm can typically be done so from the bottom with the odd trip down if and when its necessary thus remain on the shore and commute or at the surface and commute.
Possible but no need yet as terrestrial resources are still available. Nodules have attracted attention, but there's not enough demand or consistency yet to bother given continental resources.
Unlike going to space there isn't a large enough cost at least yet to going up and down with the frequency needed to get what we want. So we lack the incentive. Its pretty apparent that whether talking of Antarctica, the seafloor or space the incentive structure not just the means have to be there. We don't have the incentive for any of them as yet. At a guess and it is a guess that is only partially educated I'd say in the next years we'll start to see the incentive for going to Antarctica, on the scale of we'll see the seafloor open up but probably still see commuting rather than habitation.
How long it takes us to get enough incentive to use a space-based resource is a tougher call. Depends on how fast we chew up existing terrestrial resources, what new demands will arise with changes in technology, and the realised cost of getting into orbit and staying in space vs digging deeper into the crust. The fiction lover in mes likes the idea of colonies on other planets or orbital mining facilities etc, the realist is more apt to agree that if people are living off Earth anytime in my lifetime it will be in the purely "scientific" curosity outpost mode or tourism venture that we currently see as standard on Antarctica and the seafloor where there are a cople of purely scientific undersea domes, one of which they used to teach astronauts at, not sure if they still do.
What could you possibly want from Mars? A million tons of dust? Why did Earth go to space in the first place, if not for abstract knowledge? Words crowded over each other to reach Lit's mouth. They jammed in his throat, and he was speechless. He spread his hands, made frantic gestures, gulped twice, and said, "It's obvious!
Vacuum for the vacuum industries. A place to build cheap without all kinds of bracing girders. Free fall for people with weak hearts. Room to test things that might blow up. A place to learn physics where you can watch it happen.
The glare took in Garner's withered legs, his drooping, mottled, hairless skin, the decades that showed in his eyes—and Lit remembered his visitor's age. So, imagine a nice O'Neill cylinder with a perfectly controlled guaranteed climate for growing your cacao crop, a distinct absence of local governments and revolutionaries and their wacky fun ideas causing trouble in your company town hab, and with a surface area as large as you care to build it, or it and its neighbors.
The call came two weeks later, in the middle of the night—the real lunar night. By Plato City time, it was Sunday morning. This was it, Cooper knew. Air lock five meant that they were going outside the dome. Chandra had found something. The presence of the police driver restricted conversation as the tractor moved away from the city along the road roughly bulldozed across the ash and pumice.
Low in the south, Earth was almost full, casting a brilliant blue-green light over the infernal landscape. However hard one tried. Cooper told himself, it was difficult to make the Moon appear glamorous. But nature guards her greatest secrets well; to such places men must come to find them.
Orbital Propellant Depots are very valuable. Not because liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are particularly rare, but shipping the stuff up Terra's gravity well makes them outrageously expensive. ISRU propellants are incredibly cheap in comparison. Anybody operating chemical or nuclear-thermal rockets will be potential customers. The bottom line is that such depots can make cis-lunar and Mars missions within the delta-V capabilities of a chemical rocket. The problem is building the infrastruture in the first place.
The financial risks are high, no corporation will touch it. Some kind of harvest-able resource is tricky. Many mineral resources available from, say, the Asteroid Belt could be harvested by robot mining ships. And even if the harvest process requires humans on the spot, if that is all that requires humans, you will wind up with a universe filled with the outer space equivalent of off-shore oil rigs. This will have a small amount of people living on the rig for a couple of years before they return to Terra in order to blow their accumulated back-pay, not the desired result of large space colonies.
Rick Robinson says resource extraction is an economic monoculture, and like other monocultures it does not support a rich ecosystem. These are hypothetical particles that have yet to be observed. Niven postulated that [a] they existed, [b] they only exist in the space environment for some unexplained reason, [c] they could only be profitably harvested by human beings for some unexplained reason, and [d] they allowed the construction of tiny electric motors since the magnetic field of a monopole falls off linearly instead of inverse square.
The latter was desirable since in space mass is always a penalty factor. This is all highly unlikely, but at least Larry Niven worried about the problem in the first place. Regolith is the veneer of rock dust common on asteroids and moons.
The stream of solar wind causes space weathering, a deposition of wind particles directly into the dust. The atoms are implanted at a shallow depth Wind-enriched particles contain traces of hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen, and other low Z elements rare in space.
These volatiles can be recovered by scavenging: The concentrations of volatiles in lunar maria regolith is a few hundred parts per million ppm of each type. Other valuable materials, magnetically or electrophoretically separable from maria regolith, include iron fines, uranium ppm , and ice crystals in permanently shadowed regions. The helium fraction includes 5 to parts per billion of the rare isotope 3 He, valued because it is rare on Earth, and can be used as a fusion fuel, using the 3 He-D "clean" aneutronic fusion reaction.
However, that same radiation belt and corresponding magnetic fields could be used for 1 power 2 transportation and 3 spallation of useful elements into needed isotopes. The last one is an interesting prospect from the mineral spewing volcanic Io. I don't actually recommend colonizing Io, but rather maintaining essentially ion farms within the radiation belt. The other moons are suitable for exploration, but Callisto the outermost Galilean Moon is protected from the solar winds by Jupiter's magnetosphere while being far enough away to reduce the radiation exposure.
That base would hold vast subsurface tanks of water for aquacultures and a whole biosystem. Waste heat from the reactors would be used to keep the tanks temperature regulated and the whole environment could be expanded in a modular manner depending on the waste heat requirements. It takes two weeks to receive the same radiation dose on Callisto that you receive on Earth every day. Moving in to Ganymede the next closest moon you would get a week's dose of radiation in one day.
Cole was listening carefully to the Morse code signals coming through from Pluto. You can recognize that broken-down truck-horse trot of his on the key as far away as you can hear it. He's got a rich platinum property.
Sells ninety percent of his output to buy his power, and the other eleven percent for his clothes and food. He's figured out that's the most economic level of production. If he produces less, he won't be able to pay for his heating power, and if he produces more, his operation power will burn up his bank account too fast. A man after my own heart. How does he plan to restock his bank account? He does it regularly—sort of a commuter. Out here his power bills eat it up. On Mercury he goes in for potassium, and sells the power he collects in cooling his dome, of course.
He's a good miner, and the old fool can make money down there. Now he sat quiet waiting for the reply, glancing at the chronometer. He's after money," replied Cole gravely.
He wouldn't be able to remake that bankroll every time if he wasn't. You'll see his Dome out there on Pluto—it's always the best on the planet. For asteroid mining, you can make the case either way — I can tell you that asteroid mining isn't about getting ore from the asteroid. It's about using disttilate mining techniques, and it's a capital rich process. You no more find the Heinleinesque belter miners in their pesky torch ships than you find aluminum or copper mining done by anything smaller than ALCOA or Standard Copper.
The economies of scale are too large for them to make much sense the other way. Volatile mining for can cities, spaceships, etc does somewhat support the concept of a family grubstake mine Sure, the economies of scale argue against belter miners, but economies of scale argue against subsistence farming too.
I'd argue that if someone wants there to be a wild-eyed miner who is trying to strike it rich, for fictional purposes, it could happen. Might be useful to know how soon before he has to come home begging, though. Just to compute the astronomical sorry odds of finding an asteroid of solid diamond, or osmium, or whatever is in demand.
Actually, no they don't. A subsistence farmer can make enough to support himself — his expenses are lower than his income. An independent miner will generally have expenses exceeding his income. More sophisticated versions of the Belter mythos recognize the long odds.
I could spout all the statistics from memory. Average distance from the Sun, 2. If you jumped as hard as you could you'd go up a couple of kilometers, and take hours for the round trip. It wouldn't be a smart thing to do. Composition, varied, with plenty of veins of metals. Moria was once part of a much bigger rock, one big enough to have had a molten core. Then it got battered to hell and gone, exposing what had been the interior. Now you can mine: There's gold and silver.
There's also water and ammonia ices under the surface, which are a hell of a lot more important than the metals. Without the metals we wouldn't be out here. Without the ices we couldn't stay. Our supporters on Earth called us the cutting edge of technology.
We were the first of a series of asteroid mine operations that would eventually liberate Earth forever from shortages of raw materials. The orbital space factories already demonstrated what space manufacturing could do; and with asteroid mines to supply raw materials, the day would come when everyone on Earth could enjoy the benefits of industry without the penalties of industrial pollution.
They fought hard in Congress: Is it not time that mankind looked twenty years and more ahead, instead of always seeing no further than the next election?
Unfortunately there were more on the other side. We were, they said, a terrible waste of resources. We absorbed billions that could go to immediate improvements for everyone. Foreign aid; schoolhouses; unemployment; these were the immediate problems, and they would not go away through dumping money into outer space!
Who ever heard of Moria? Who could even find it? A rock not even visible through Earth's largest telescopes, a tiny speck hundreds of millions of miles away, where expensive people demanded more and more expensive equipment. Our friends kept us alive, but they couldn't get us many supply ships; and we were holding on with our fingernails.
There wasn't much to joke about. There will be no more support from Earth. Commander Wiley let the chatter go on for a while. Then he said, "There's a way. It's not something I can order, and it's not something I can put to a vote. But there's a way. It can be us, or most of us, if that's what's got to be done. But it could be something else. Twelve thousand tons of copper, iron, silver, and gold.
Twelve thousand tons that we can put into Earth orbit from here. If we use every engine we've got and all our fuel. It belongs to the first salvage crew that can get aboard. There's a Swiss firm willing to buy our cargo if we can get it to Earth orbit. They'll pay enough to let us buy our own ship. And they'd be getting a hell of a deal even so. I could see international lawyers arguing this case for thirty years and more.
The United States didn't want us, but they wouldn't want their billions to be lost to the Swiss. We'll be on short rations the whole time. And there won't be any new people. Kevin Hardoy-Randall let out a wail ed note: Commander, can we really do it?
Using petroleum as MacGuffinite is oh so very zeerust , but the cynic in me gloomily predicts this will probably come true in real life. The more you try to drag the world into the future with cool stuff like fusion power, the more it will stubbornly try to keep burning coal. Hauled ironically by rocketships. Ray McVay has a brilliant variant on using mining as McGuffinite. He noted that in the Ring Raiders speculation, the presence of valuable helium-3 fusion fuel in the atmosphere of Saturn is MacGuffinite.
As he puts it "Did you catch that? On Titan it rains natural gas. Hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Terra, as a matter of fact. What's better, unlike helium-3, we already know how to use petroleum.
Also unlike helium-3, there is a huge demand for the stuff. Naturally shipping the stuff from Titan to Terra does increase the price of Titan oil. But consider Oil Shale. The expense of extracting oil from shale adds about a hundred dollars a barrel to the price. For decades nobody bothered with it because conventional oil was so cheap. However, as conventional oil became more scarce, its price rose. At the break-even price, oil shale becomes worthwhile. Keep in mind that the break-even price might be artificially raised by external events.
This is the basis for Mr. Or at least for the million years it will take for Terra to produce more petroleum. As civilization starts again, the jump from wood fuel to nuclear power or solar energy is just a little too broad. Not to mention the difficulty producing plastics or fertilizer without petroleum feed stocks. This is what will drive the industrialization of Titan and the creation of fleets of space-going supertanker spacecraft carrying black gold "Titan Tea" to Terra.
Bring oil from Titan or it is Game Over for the next million years. In his Conjunction universe, the fun starts when the irate colonists of the Jovian moons take advantage of The Great Conjunction, when Jupiter moves into the center of the Hohmann trajectory between Titan and Terra.
Here comes the Pirates of Jupiter! Phosphorus was previously mentioned as a vital resource in short supply in the solar system. Indeed, it was suggested that Terra would use this as a weapon to keep the space colonies subservient to Terran Control. However, I received an email from a gentleman named Mr.
MJW Nicholas with a brilliant suggestion. He points out that Terra itself is heading for a phosphorus shortage, " Peak Phosphorus ". In that case, instead of Terra having a strangle hold on the space colonies, it might be the other way around. Intense MacGuffinite, because the hungry teeming masses on over-populated Terra have got to eat, and phosphorus is the sine qua non of farming.
I was interested to read in the 'Rocketpunk and MacGuffinite' topic the subject of peak oil, and how humanity could make use of Titan. I did a little bit of digging and it struck me how, even if we do come up with viable and sustainable alternatives for both transport and energy production, there are no such alternatives for the vast quantity of other petroleum products our modern society is utterly dependent on.
It was suggested on a number of websites that alternatives for pharmaceuticals would be the holistic or home remedy type eg.
Other types of natural fibres come from animals, but then they need grazing land, which means even more land is used. Regardless of the land usage, there is always one thing land will need to be used for — food crops. There is only a finite amount of arable land available, and many breeds of plant can only be grown in certain locations, based on a wide range of environmental variables, which further limits crop yields without either long-term efforts into selectively breeding, or direct manipulation of genes for desired traits.
The first one can take potentially hundreds of generations to achieve, depending on the desired result, and the latter requires laboratories, who use equipment that would be difficult and costly to produce, repair or replace in a post-peak oil world, even if one takes into account the usage of oil-sands.
Even if we tapped into difficult to access reserves on a larger scale than we already do, such as deep-sea wells and oil-sands, and even if the ban on exploiting Antarctica's potentially vast mineral wealth was lifted, this is still not a viable long-term solution.
Obviously, getting to Titan and extracting, and refining the mineral wealth there in sufficient quantities, and shipping it back, would be immensely costly. I know full well that you know the amount of work and effort behind setting up propellant depots and in-orbit refineries and all the other stuff needed to set that kind of infrastructure in motion, let alone maintain it.
This kind of future is one, however, that allows for colonization. But it got me thinking — what are other things that humans, and modern civilisation with it's global scale infrastructure would need, and we have a finite amount of? Then I harked back to another part of your website , where you mention phosphorus.
Much like peak oil, it is predicted, optimistically, that we'll hit Peak Phosphorus within the next years, pessimistic estimates suggest by Having done some more digging, I noticed that whilst some claim that recycling phosphorus from sewage, and having better crop management and limiting run-off, etc. Even if we stop it altogether, we're now limited on how much of anything we can grow, which limits crop yields, which, as you can see, would have a negative impact on the proposed 'plant-based' alternatives for petroleum-based products.
Which leads me onto this — recent in-situ analyses of Martian soil suggest that water soluble phosphorus exists in higher concentrations than anywhere on Earth, with rich deposits near the surface, as well as deeper underground. Also, recent spectroscopic analyses of several near-Earth objects have suggested higher concentrations of phosphorus in C-type asteroids than previously believed.
Both of these things are much easier to get to than Titan, comparatively speaking. Also, given the greater urgency to find alternative phosphorus sources, you could probably convince more people to financially back martian or NEO colonization or exploitation efforts.
This would also make it easier to suggest to people 'hey guys, oil's getting a bit pricey, how about Titan? Transuranic elements are the chemical elements with atomic numbers greater than 92 the atomic number of uranium. All of these elements are unstable and decay radioactively into other elements. Theoretically there exists an island of stability where certain transuranic elements are stable.
But no such element has been discovered. In the real world these would be useful for creating compact nuclear weapons. But in science fiction, such elements are popular with authors as MacGuffinite, and are given whatever magical properties the authors can imagine in their wildest dreams.
Of course in the real world there is no reason to expect to find such elements occurring naturally. And if they did, it would make more sense to mine the radioactive stuff with robots, not people. So it wouldn't strictly be MacGuffinite. An interesting twist on this is that claims might require a permanent human presence to be valid. This would provide an excuse for human crews in places that normally might not have them, such as mining outposts.
This could lead to odd situations, like a major lunar colony having a web of small outposts solely for the purpose of maintaining title to the surrounding area. About this time somebody pops up with the standard talking point for MacGuffinite: Because of the low concentrations of helium-3 1.
This was the background of the movie Moon. Problems include the unfortunate fact that we still have no idea how to build a break-even helium-3 burning fusion power plant, the very low concentrations of helium-3 in lunar regolith, and the fact that we can manufacture the stuff right here for a fraction of the cost of a lunar mining operation.
James Nicoll systematically enumerates the problems here. A minor point is that the manufacture of helium-3 produces radiation; and manufactured helium-3 is not a power source, it is an energy transport mechanism. It is only a power source if you actually mine it on the moon or other solar system body.
And even if you manufacture it, you might want to move the production site into orbit along with other polluting industries. Helium-3 can also be harvested from the atmospheres of gas giant planets. Jupiter is closest, but its massive gravity means a NERVA powered harvester would need an uneconomical mass ratio of 20 to escape. Jean Remy observed that "However, in a good old Catch, I don't think we'll actually need helium-3 unless we have a strong space presence where fusion-powered ships are relatively common.
Basically we will need to get helium-3 to support the infrastructure to get helium CitySide responded with "Not exactly without precedent. Consider coal mining's catalytic role in the development of the steam engine. What CitySide means is that back in the day, deep coal mines would unfortunately fill up with water. You'd need the power of steam pumps to remove the water.
Alas the steam pumps needed coal for fuel. James Nicoll is a friend of Team Phoenicia's and has been a source encouragement and commentary since the inception of our project. James has given a fair amount of thought into space exploration since it intersects with his dayjob. James is nontrivial member of the science fiction authorial community and Hugo nominee. We approached him and others about doing some guest blogs about lunar exploration and their thoughts thereof.
James has had some strong thoughts on the long standing assertion used by some space enthusiasts to go to the moon: One of the primary challenges facing space development advocates is finding some new product or service that is not being satisfied at the moment that can be satisfied using resources found in space and only in space;since the Earth is inconveniently well-stocked with a rich abundance of materials and a technologically sophisticated civilization, competition from terrestrial rivals is a serious problem for space development schemes.
Nobody wants to foot the bill for a communications satellite network only to discover they've been underbid by a cable company.
Lunar Helium-three 3 He has been widely promoted [1] as a killer ap for Lunar development; supposedly offering aneutronic fusion to an energy-starved world, helium three is pitched as something that is in short supply on Earth but common on the Moon, apparently the ideal raw material around which to justify the investment needed for Lunar development.
In actual fact, lunar 3 He is a complete chimera; it is not common on the Moon, it cannot deliver true aneutronic fusion, it is subject to replacement by terrestrial materials, and in fact our civilization is incapable of using it to generate energy at all.
Terrestrial 3 He is quite rare; in fact current stocks-in-hand are declining, forcing prices upward. What boosters fail to highlight in press reports is that this vast reservoir is stored within a much larger amount of regolith; recovering one tonne of lunar helium-three would require processing ten million tonnes or more of regolith warning pdf. Unlike deuterium-tritium reactions, helium-three-deuterium reactions produce no neutrons. The catch is that deuterium can fuse with itself; while half of the D-D reactions produce no neutrons, the other half do produce neutrons.
Unfortunately from the point of view of a space proponent, the ease of acquiring boron on Earth is counterproductive; if you can order the stuff from a mundane chemical supply company, there is no need to go into space to get it. This admittedly negates one of the attractions of 3 He fusion, since the production of tritium necessarily involves the production of neutrons.
This is the giant cephalopod on the kitchen table that lunar 3 He boosters have to ignore because without fusion plants, it hardly matters if the reaction the plants would use produce an abundance of neutrons or a dearth of them.
Without fusion generators, there's no demand for 3 He, lunar or not, as a fusion fuel. Without fusion plants, there's no market for lunar 3 He as a fusion fuel.
Sadly, a thorough audit of the power-generating facilities of the world reveals a complete lack of commercial fusion power plants. This is because we have currently lack the know-how needed to build commercial fusion power plants.
Not only are we currently incapable of building the devices on which the lunar 3 He scheme is utterly dependent but it does not seem very likely that we will acquire the required skills any time soon; although research is ongoing commercial fusion is at best decades away, perhaps longer. It is arguably possible that most of the people reading this will be dead before commercial fusion is developed. While it would be convenient — invaluable — for space development to have some substance that is both useful on Earth and difficult to obtain there, 3 He is not such a material.
Publicizing it as such a material is misleading at best and if the people 3 He proponents hope to sway do even the least amount of research, counterproductive as well. In a comment on always worth reading Rocketpunk Manifesto , a commenter who goes by the handle CitySide pointed out a historical colonization model that might provide some MacGuffinite: Many science fictional interplanetary colonization models start with the colonists being subsistence farmers, only later becoming industrialized.
But the Sugar Islands colonies only used agriculture to produce export products. They were fed with imported food, not locally produced food. They were "agricultural" colonies, but the agriculture was, particularly in the case of the lesser Antilles, almost entirely devoted to production of a commodity for export. The islands' worker populations which, early on, were a mix of indentured and enslaved were fed largely on imported foodstuffs the port of Baltimore, for instance, first boomed by shipping Maryland grain to Barbados.
Granted, the sugar islands didn't require more basic life support. But yellow fever and malaria didn't make them overly hospitable, either. And the death rate meant that workers, for all practical purposes, were cycled through for relatively short albeit one-way tours. Although worker populations will doubtless be much lower. Militarily, it starts sounding somewhat familiar, too. Also, like the asteroid belt, there were enough individual chunks of real estate that even the smaller players the Dutch, Danes, Swedes and even the Brandenburgers could get in on the game.
Anywhere you have plenty of volatiles and no environmental worries will do. Run a tritium breeder reactor to brew up the helium-3 plus enough tritium to keep its own cycle going. This is starting to sound more and more like the 18th century "sugar economy" Processing was a big chunk of the operation and cane tended to exhaust the land one reason why the sugar production eventually shifted to larger islands like Jamaica, Cuba and Hispaniola.
Back in the 's, the unique virtues of free-fall manufacturing were touted. Just think, you can smelt ultra-pure compounds and not worry about contamination from the crucible! The compound will be floating in vacuum, touching nothing. One can also create materials that are almost impossible to manufacture in a gravity field: In free-fall, the bubbles have no tendency to float upwards, there is no "up".
It also allows the creation of exotic alloys, where the components are reluctant to stay mixed. Not to mention perfectly spherical ball bearings. This also has applications to Pharmaceutical manufacturing. Apparently free fall allows one to grow protein crystals of superior quality. Other applications include thin-film epitaxy of semiconductors, latex spheres for microscope calibration, manufacture of zeolites and aerogels, and microencapsulation.
A space station is also a safe place to experiment with quarantined items. Things like civilization-destroying biowarfare plagues or planet-eating nanotechnology. Unfortunately, none of these items have turned out to be commercially viable so far. And in any event, they could just as easily be made in a satellite equipped with teleoperated arms controlled from the ground. There are no unique raw materials waiting for us in space possible exception of 3 He. There are a lot of hydrocarbons on Titan, but because of delta-v costs, it will always be cheaper to derive them from marginal locations on Earth, like oil shales or biofuels.
Even if a platinum-rich asteroid were found, platinum would be obtained cheaper by re-opening a depleted low grade mine on Earth. If extraterrestrial raw imports will never be economical, is there any motivation for going there?
Increasingly, it is processes rather than raw materials that are important for industry. Space processes can control the gravity, vacuum, radiation, temperature, and energy density to a degree impossible on Earth.
These characteristics, the forgotten resources of space , can produce high-strength membranes using surface tension effects, long whiskers and gigantic laser crystals grown in microgravity, nano-engineering using ultrapure vapor deposition, strong glassy materials produced by exploiting a steep temperature gradient, and alloys mixed by diffusion alone. Relatively small manufactured and nano-produced objects, including pharmaceuticals and bio-tech, will be the first space imports to Earth.
Curse that annoying second law of thermodynamics! Whether the machine in question is a rocket engine or industrial process, there is always going to be waste heat. Which has to be gotten rid of by throwing it into a heat sink, generally a heat radiator. The efficiency of the process tells you what percentage of the process energy is going to turn into waste heat.
The thing about percentages is that whatever the percent is, the bigger the process energy, the more waste heat. This is basic arithmetic but sometimes it isn't obvious. About the energy of metric tons of TNT exploding, per second. If your industrial process is going to use petawatts or exawatts of energy, you've got a real problem on your hands. Perhaps the ready availability of icy gas giant moons and comets could be just the MacGuffinite you need to deal with such processes.
Is Lebensraum a possible MacGuffinite? Alas, not when you look over the evidence. The sad fact of the matter is that it is about a thousand times cheaper to colonize Antarctica than it is to colonize Mars.
Antarctica has plentiful water and breathable air, Mars does not. In comparison to Mars, Antarctica is a garden spot. Yet there is no Antarctican land-rush. One would suspect that there is no Martian land-rush either, except among a few who find the concept to be romantic. I'll believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people setting the Gobi Desert.
The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach. Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live.
It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to reach. On the other hand, there might really be some way to make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid, freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might make a certain sense. If there were a society with enough technical power to terraform Mars, they would certainly do it.
On the other hand. So by the time they got there and started rebuilding the Martian atmosphere wholesale, they wouldn't look or act a whole lot like Hollywood extras. The other problem with colonization is that as nations become industrialized, their population growth tends to level off , or even decline. This removes population pressure as a colonization motive.
Back in the 's it was feared that the global population explosion would trigger a Malthusian catastrophe as the four horsemen of the Apocalypse pruned humanity's numbers. That didn't happen, but at the time a few suggested that population pressure could be dealt with by interplanetary colonization. Noted science popularizer Isaac Asimov pointed out the flaw in that solution. Currently population growth is about million people a year, or about , a day. So you'd have to launch into space , people every day just to break even.
If you wanted to reduce global population, you'd have to launch more than that. Some years ago, my country chose to fight a terrible war. It was bad, I do not defend it, but there were reasons.
Somehow those reasons are never spoken of. To the Western world at that time, Japan was a fairybook nation: The quaint houses of rice paper, sir: And the winters in Japan are as cold as they are in Boston. So it was with the little people of Japan, little as I am now, because for countless generations we have not been able to produce the food to make us bigger. Japan's yesterday will be the world's tomorrow: That is why I say, sir, there is urgent reason for us to reach Mars: That is also why I am most grateful to be found acceptable, sir.
There actually was a pretty good MacGuffinite back in the 's: Werner von Braun had it all figured out in Collier's magazine. The space stations would provide pictures from space of Terra's weather patterns.
Just imagine the improvement in weather forecasts. Space stations could relay radio and TV signals, allowing messages to travel anywhere on the globe. And of course space stations could keep an eye on military moves made by hostile nations.
These are all vitally important matters, and would more than justify the cost supporting men in space. Younger readers probably have no idea why communication satellites are such a big deal. Before there was no such thing as a live TV broadcast from another continent.
On on July 23, at 3: Not to mention intercontinental phone and fax services. Nowadays all you young jaded whipper-snappers take this for granted. Ironically NASA destroyed this.
NASA's push for computing power led to the development of the transistor and integrated circuit. Suddenly you could make weather satellites, communication satellites, and spy satellites "manned" by a few cubic centimeters of electronics.
Of course these space stations would start out as glorified off-shore oil rigs, but they at least had the potential to become space colonies. It just occured to me And I had a strange answer:. One of the few killer apps for space satellites was the communications satellite.
But the microchip allowed multiplexing many voice streams onto a single high bandwidth signal, and the fiber optic cable made cheap long range high bandwidth communications possible. What might have happened if the microchip and fiber optic cable weren't developed for another few decades? We might actually have needed hordes of communications satellites to keep up with global demand. Without the microchip, these communications satellites suck up all sorts of juice.
Thus, there's a huge incentive to develop efficient solar cells. With advanced space rated solar cells and cheaper launch technology, space based power may even be practical. Large scale industrialization of space, and sufficient economies of scale that launch costs are relatively cheap. Fulsang imagines the chaos if the dreaded Kessler Syndrome strikes. While you average person on the street could care less if space probes and astronauts were made extinct, satellites are another matter.
The people will howl if their GPS units stopped working as will the military. Not to mention all the corporations and their shareholders who would suffer financially if they suddenly lose the services of communication, weather, and surveillance satellites. There will be large and powerful motivation to replace the functionality of satellites. If small satellites cannot cope with the hail of Kessler shrapnel, large ones would have a better chance. With huge Whipple shields. But even then there will be unavoidable random damage.
They are much more suited for replacing standardized modules using pre-set sequences. There are a few quibbles but this comes a lot closer to MacGuffinite than anything else I've seen. The Kessler shrapnel will need to be avoidable enough so that astronauts can survive the trip to LEO. The stations and the station assembly area will need lots of Whipple shields. Teleoperated drones will have to be impractical as a substitute for robots. And no AI software smart enough to deal with damage control.
But these are quibbles. Yes, this is a sad but common story in the U. A state or city gets into an economic jam 'cause there ain't no jobs, and everthing goes to pot. The poster child is Detroit: City fathers, desperate to avoid the consequences of their idiotic "all eggs in one basket" strategy, will frantically look for a quick fix.
Which often means insanely doing the same thing and expecting different results. I mean the city will try attracting a corporation, hoping it'll make some jobs, but not bothering to attract two or more corporations. Monoculture is dangerous but it sure is cheaper!
How can a city lure in a corporation? Why, bribery of course. Oh, where are my manners, I meant to say "economic incentives. Seaports have an extra option. They can become a Freeport, making themselves popular with the ocean shipping corporations.
Which brings us to the MacGuffinite. In many ways, a Spaceport is just a fancy seaport. A desperate city with the right location can sweeten the deal by offering economic incentives to corporations expanding their diversification into space.
And keep in mind that historically a freeport had a tendency to turn into a Pirate Haven. Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of space booze. A Free Economic Zone is a nation or area where corporations are given favorable tax status in order to encourage said corporations to set up shop. Traditionally they are restricted to just a port city, but in theory it is possible for it to be the national boundaries of an entire country.
Certain types of free economic zones are called "Free Ports. For Rocketpunk purposes, this could be a tempting idea for a small economically depressed nation located on the equator with a nice "dump zone" to the east where spent rocket stages and malfunctioning spacecraft can ditch without too many people complaining.
Corporations in the space boost business would find it very attractive to build launch facilities in such nations, especially if said nation gave the corporation special tax breaks and passed corporate-friendly laws. And the nations would welcome the economic benefits the corporations would bring. The economically depressed nation might also find it useful to allow merchant spacecraft to use the nation as a flag of convenience.
This is not pure MacGuffinite, since it provides no valuable commodity in space. But it sure does reduce the economic friction. The term is used to designate areas in which companies are taxed very lightly or not at all to encourage economic activity.
The taxation rules are determined by each country. Some special economic zones are called free ports. Sometimes they have historically been endowed with favorable customs regulations such as the free port of Trieste. In recent years the free port system has been accused of facilitating international art crime, allowing stolen artworks to remain undetected in storage for decades.
Just in front of the train airlock there was a huge Kenyan flag. International maritime laws apply. I peeked in to see Trond sip liquor from a tumbler. He wore his usual bathrobe and chatted with someone across the table. His daughter Lene sat next to him.
She watched her father talk with rapt fascination. Most sixteen-year-olds hate their parents. But Lene looked up to Trond like he put the Earth in the sky.
Administrator Ngugi was there. Hanging out at the table. Fidelis Ngugi is, simply put, the reason Artemis exists. Kenya had one—and only one—natural resource to offer space companies: But Ngugi realized they could offer something more: Western nations drowned commercial space companies in red tape.
How about we don't? God only knows how she convinced fifty corporations from thirty-four countries to dump billions of dollars into creating KSC, but she did it. And she made sure Kenya enacted special tax breaks and laws just for the new megacorporation. Tell that to the East India Tea Company. This is global economics, not kindergarten.
She pulled money out of nowhere , created a huge industry in her formerly third-world country, and landed herself a job as ruler of the moon. She had run Artemis for over twenty years. The scene cut to a view of the chairman of the Conference making a speech, but the reporter continued voice-over, "The reaction of other Conference delegates was swift. Not only did Vamori's walk-out precipitate an early acceptance vote of the proposal, thereby short-cutting what might have been prolonged debate over minor points of difference, but also resulted in the acceptance of an amendment which imposes a boycott against non-signatory parties.
The success of the boycott remains to be seen. It cannot help but reduce the activity at Vamori-Free Space Port which now handles more than forty percent of the world's space commerce. Gran Bahia, the world's other free pace port, obviously stands to gain , but Banian spokesmen had no comment when Weltfenster queried…".
There'd been nothing on telenews about any Commonwealth amendment to the Santa Fe space tariff agreements. They could establish communications easily any time they wanted, whereas I had difficulty reaching reps from other countries who'd given us indications of supporting our free trade amendment.
The Tripartite obviously made a prior arrangement with the PetroFed and probably also the Socialist Hegonomy. They had everything worked out long in advance. The Conference was intended only to put official approval on the tariff agreement by the governments involved. In fact, the League itself—to say nothing of other traders—wouldn't exist without Vamori-Free and the free-ports in space. That's been their history.