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Posted by adam.dada on August 1st, 2006
CHICAGO, IL
by A.B. Dada
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In response to an article posted at Slashdot, I wrote the following:
I’ve always hated doomsday scenarios because they completely ignore what the market (that’s billions of individuals looking to better themselves regardless of what government says is good and evil) has provided us over the years. Everything that doomsdayers say is evil is part of the market giving us better lives — engines, industrialization replacing human labor, commoditization of common goods and needs, etc.
They say “CO2 will kill us all” and I say the market may provide us a better life because of a rougher environment. We’ve seen science fiction talk about living in bubble/dome cities, but why would this be bad? Can you imagine what life would be like if we did have better control over our local environments? Would a bubbled city offer a better life for millions in the upper north, people who deal with more winter than summer? Would we see better air scrubbers providing better air? Would we see better control over irrigation and drought?
Who knows. I know that I trust that out of the billions of humans today we’ll find a few who can find the utility and invention needed to create tomorrow’s world. I don’t like to think of us living in vaults because that “invention” is based on yesterday’s technology. Yesterday’s technology came out of need created by the time before yesterday. Tomorrow’s technology will come out of need we face today. Don’t sell the future short, especially considering how far we’ve come in the past 1000 years, 200 years, 100 years, 50 years and 10 years. Humanity is not going to go away, it will just find ways to make life better no matter what seems to happen to the world around us.
Does that mean we should ignore “the environment” or “the poor” or the other big words? Absolutely not. What we need to do is consider the local system rather than the global system — the local system that we can make better. We also need to consider who is the worst polluter, the worst destroyer of human ingenuity and invention, the worst murderer of future geniuses and the worst controller/waster of our resources and expansion — that would be the State in each case. The State wastes a huge portion of oil on warmongering and control; it wastes a huge portion of useful labor in maintaining that control; it wastes opportunities by overregulating industries based on yesterday’s problems rather than tomorrow’s needs; it wastes a huge portion of resources by attempting to prevent change and by creating weapons and items to instill fear in the residents and “the enemy.”
It is those who are against what the State does that are giving us the most opportunity; the anti-State inventor who finds ways around the controls and regulations that actually make our lives worse in the future. The State has no desire to make your life better — it only wants to maintain and increase control over your life. Yet there are billions of people out there, and it is the individuals who look to meet current and future needs that make your life better. They have to, because if they don’t, you won’t buy from them — you won’t sustain their attempt to make their lives better by providing for what you want and need. No regulation and no use of force can do that.
Discuss this article at the anarcho-capitalism forum.
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A.B. Dada is the founder and editor of the Global Unanimocracy Network. He lives in the Chicago, IL region where he works as an business relations consultant and incubator entrepreneur. E-mail A.B. Dada with news links or comments on this report.