The Largest Libertarian Society in History
While the near-disaster of SOPA and PIPA is still fresh on everyone's mind this is an ideal opportunity to discuss the largest libertarian society in history. The society that brought the SOPA and PIPA legislation to a halt and that brought you to read this essay. The society of the Internet.
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The same people who defeated the government's attack through voluntary action express doubt about the efficacy, fairness, and capability of the free market and the core concepts of a libertarian society. Immersed daily in the largest, most anonymous, most libertarian society ever to exist, they fail to recognize it for the miracle that it is, or to recognize the compelling forces that make it work.
Billions of people utilize trillions of dollars worth of unbelievably decentralized infrastructure to locate obscure information, share common interests, accomplish common goals, trade freely among themselves, select from a range of products that dwarfs those available in any other venue, and start and dissolve almost completely-unregulated businesses at a pace that is simply unprecedented in history. Innovation and the creative destruction of organizations based on failed concepts occur at a rate that was simply unimaginable just a few short years ago. Even the near-total destruction of several pre-Internet industries raised few eyebrows, given the tremendous increase in utility to the consumer. (Encyclopedia companies and travel agencies are examples that spring quickly to mind.)
Millions of people cruelly oppressed in the physical realm have utilized this freest and most cooperative of societies to organize and strike back against their oppressors, ushering in a new era of freedom and democracy outside the Internet that strives to replicate the free society they have discovered online.
Even here in the relatively free United States, activists have organized movements against oppressive government activities that span the political spectrum from the Occupy movement to the raw milk movement, from gay rights to protests against foreign entanglements and other actions of an ever-expanding government. Such widespread activism was unheard of just a generation ago.
Yet many Netizens claim that there has never been a successful libertarian society in all of history, while living squarely in the middle of that which they swear has never existed. Indeed, this most libertarian of societies shows every sign of leading by example to unparalled freedom around the world for citizens of all territorial governments.
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Many Netizens who are supporters of government intrusion into the physical realm also fail to recognize that the internet/tech business is one of the most vibrant sectors of a moribund economy, actively creating wealth and jobs, precisely because the governments of the world haven't yet figured out how to aggressively intervene in cyberspace the way they do in physical space. In the case of the devices used to utilize the Internet, the regulation is minimal, and as a result we have seen a huge expansion in the types of devices capable of connecting to the Internet over the last few years, a trend that shows no signs of stopping. The Internet is bringing about a transformation of the physical world everywhere they intersect.
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Although common wisdom is that the guiding hand of the state is needed for the success of large, complex projects, the Internet is one of the most complex technological achievements of mankind, and it has evolved as rapidly as it has in large part because those involved have taken it upon themselves to form coalitions and work together on those aspects that most interested them, without waiting for a government-funded master plan to tell them what they could or could not do.
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The dizzying array of standards that have evolved without government involvement themselves give lie to the concept that goverment is required as a standardizing body. Even fraudulent behavior, once thought the nemesis of the anonymous freedom of the Internet, has largely been defeated not by government regulation, but by education and voluntary changes in behavior by both businesses and consumers wishing to see the Internet mature from its early days as a playground to the location of trillions of dollars of real business transactions that we inhabit today.
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The Internet is among the great human achievements; a shining example of the superiority of Mises' "Human Action" over centralized planning. Welcome to Libertopia.
