@ Shaun Pilkington … in doing so, most of the core participants (the few hundred who did the bulk of the work) became relatively rich as they exploited their valuable knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the systems that now run everything …

@ Kaze no Kae … the open source movement [...] completely discredits the idea that financial reward is a prerequisite for innovation.

It’s ok – don’t feel under any pressure to actually read the comments you’re responding to.

In any case, you’re assuming that the existence of some innovators who are (you say) willing to innovate without financial reward implies that all innovators are, or (at least) that we do not need or want the innovations of differently-motivated innovators. Logic isn’t your forte, is it?

@ Kaze no Kae

Intellectual Property
Open-source software. There’s a lot of it out there, and in my experience if there’s lots of commercial options and lots of open-source options then the best one is likely to be open-source.

Open Source is a case in point. I am, I must confess, a LAMP developer, working with Linux, Apache, PHP and MYSQL – the open-source ’stack’ that makes up around 90% of the world’s web servers. And where did the amazing thing grow up? Oh bugger me it was the Capitalist West while the Soviet Union had collapsed into the weird kleptocracy we see today. It grew up because the West recognised intellectual property which gave the programmers the individual freedom to choose to give their work away for free. And in doing so, most of the core participants (the few hundred who did the bulk of the work) became relatively rich as they exploited their valuable knowledge of the nuts and bolts of the systems that now run everything from your washing machine to this website to your Sky + box via various weapons guidance systems and nuclear computers!

No system of committees will ever, ever, do something like that since it would require a conscious decision to give up power in a way that a coder choosing to give away their code isn’t (psychologically speaking) and if you think differently then you need to spend more time on committees until you realise what they make people become!

Actually, the Marxist dialectic is all about analysing those wants and needs, desires and impulses and their effect on the course of history.

Marxism is at its best when it is at its most analytical. It is at its worst where it becomes prescriptive because it extrapolates out it’s flawed model into the future magnifying the effects of flaws. It is also clearly scientific in the strict Newtonian sense that was orthodox at the time – I do wonder what Marx would’ve written if he’d been born a hundred years later and the certainties of physics he sought to apply had been kicked askew by the arrival of quantum theory?

Marxism, at it’s root, fails to understand that people are basically just animals. We have wants and needs, desires and impulses and (this is also where ‘economics’ per se reveals itself as ‘the dismal science) don’t usually, if ever, act as perfectly rational consumers. Not only does Marxism ignore the role of greed in the nature of humanity but it also ignores the importance of the desire to improve one’s lot, to invent or even to get rich in driving forward innovation.
Actually, the Marxist dialectic is all about analysing those wants and needs, desires and impulses and their effect on the course of history.

Intellectual Property
Open-source software. There’s a lot of it out there, and in my experience if there’s lots of commercial options and lots of open-source options then the best one is likely to be open-source.

@ Kaze no Kae I don’t deny that socialism is fallible

That’s handy because that’s the fundamental failure of all professed-socialist/communist states on Earth to date: a fundamental inability to comprehend that a system created by and consciously operated by humans subject to (irational) drives, wants and desired leading to unforeseen consequences.

Marxism, at it’s root, fails to understand that people are basically just animals. We have wants and needs, desires and impulses and (this is also where ‘economics’ per se reveals itself as ‘the dismal science) don’t usually, if ever, act as perfectly rational consumers. Not only does Marxism ignore the role of greed in the nature of humanity but it also ignores the importance of the desire to improve one’s lot, to invent or even to get rich in driving forward innovation.

The dismal record of the USSR on Intellectual Property is directly, DIRECTLY, related to it’s inability to enjoy the techno-economic boom of the personal computer era which multiplied western wealth (and weapons efficacy – the so-called ‘force multiplier’) to the extent that we could just about afford to bankrupt the USSR in a nuclear arms race. The lack of reward for innovation and invention, the pig-headed belief that everything belonged to the state as an embodiment of the people, ensured that the Soviet Union could not compete in terms of output. Ironically, I’d also argue that today we in the West are repeating that mistake over interpreting copyright online but that’s a different whinge!

Then, we could know that the CRB staff were totally incorruptible, and could employ enough of them to CRB-check everyone. Then, having solved unemployment, we could solve crime as well!

If the employer who used to employ me reaches the same conclusion, there will be no job for me to go back to! And so on, leaving no private-sector jobs at all!

I’ll just have to take a State job. Maybe I could be the one to announce each month that unemployment has ended and that everyone has a useful and fulfilling job?

Gosh. It must be so wonderful, to have such powers of insight as to be able to assess and ex post facto weigh up for another the merits of a decision for them, and to realise on their behalf what would be the better choice for them.

Life is so unfair, that this ability is granted only to socialists, and denied to those that believe in personal freedom and responsibility.

I realise now, I must acknowledge the true path, and reverse my morally reprehensible decision. I shall, tomorrow morning, return to the job that I held before, and sack the 30 people who I now employ. I am sure that they will understand.

Rather a long time, I seem to recall. Does that tell you something?
You do see intermittent sparks of resistance. It often doesn’t catch on because of this thing called cultural hegemony (social conditioning which causes people to become disillusioned about their own power to effect change, accept the status quo as a fact of life, reject alternatives without proper consideration, etc etc)