Post to a private Act Party Network
It’s hard for me.
I remain committed to the classical liberal ideas that bought me to Act and had me stand as a candidate in 3 elections – the idea that individual lives and individual freedom matter, and that any attempt to force those to be subjugated to any form of central control is to be avoided.
However, where I seem to have parted from the majority is how I view markets in that deeper context.
Certainly over most of the last few hundred years markets have been strongly associated with freedom, and the current trends of exponential expansion of computation and automation are breaking that association (I have run a software company for 30 years – so have some practical experience in these matters – not all theory).
We now have the practical ability to fully automate the production and distribution of a large and exponentially expanding set of goods and services.
If we were really committed to a universal respect for life and liberty, that would be great news, yet our existing systemic response has been to shore up and expand a set of Intellectual Property laws that are there purely to prevent the sort of universal abundance that is possible, and to maintain a system of profitable, marketable scarcity.
So in this age of exponential growth of computation (doubling in under a year now), I now see markets and the default value sets and incentive structures that evolve from them, as the single greatest existential risk to us all.
So I am all in favour of minimal government, and I am also in favour of universal cooperation (empowered by distributed networks and distributed automated production systems) and the freedom such cooperation would deliver.
