As a collective, yes. But what's the incentive for any one individual to attempt to innovate, especially given the high chance of his attempt failing? He might as well just wait for someone else to innovate.
Indeed everyone else will wait for someone else. Prisoner's Dilemma. Oops.
If that individual has progeny to nurture and protect, I would think that individual would take measures to innovate methods to do so, including grouping together with other individuals with common goals. Even if he or she didn't, the survival instinct would still persist. If that grouping no longer serves those inviduals, then they would likely want to disband it, especially if there were a sub-group of parasitic individuals within it that existed simply to maintain that group if that was their only method of survival.
If you're going to cop out with intellectual laziness rather than provide your own opinions and observations, I think I am justified in referring to someone else's work on this topic who has addressed everything you are anemically trying to assert: http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/why_govt_doesnt_work....
Thank you for the reference. There was no need to be rude.
Regarding the title of the reference, I'm happy to accept that government doesn't work, but I can't understand why libertarians think that libertarianism does. I shall save further comment until I've had a look at the reference.
How is flippantly pointing out some simplified abstraction like the Prisoner's Dilemma not rude? Anyway:
"In Game Theory, simple mathematical ``games´´ such as the prisoner's dilemma or the ``chicken´´ race, model situations where there is a potential benefit for players in finding a way to coordinate their action. All the ``theorems´´ about such games merely restate in formal terms the informal hypotheses that were put in the model. It certainly does not follow that government is the right way to achieve this coordination — though such is precisely the non sequitur claim of statists. Actually, it is possible to apply game theory to compare coordination through government coercion with coordination through market competition; and this exercise in game theory will easily show how dreadful the effects of government intervention are."
Libertarian thinking is predicated on the concept of minimal government, such as the author of that document (who was the Libertarian Party candidate for President). I'm confused as to why you would accept that government doesn't work, yet think that is somehow in conflict with libertarianism.
Having now read it, it doesn't deal with my original point which is essentially:
Libertarianism risks outsourcing manufacture of vital goods to foreign states of dubious intent, leaving domestic industry to die with no means of resurrecting it in an emergency.
The closest the above reference comes to dealing with this issue is:
* with free international trade, nobody will want to attack Libland because they can get at all its resources cheaply anyway, and
* Xia won't actually be able to invade Libland because they'll be too busy dealing with their own citizens, who, impressed by Libland's affluence, are too busy trying to convince Xia's rulers to convert to Libertarianism.
