The road trips are always about the heroic actions of people like Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and their amazing automobiles, right? Never, never did it get told that those road trips were only made possible by Eisenhower’s completion of the highway system.
That's interesting. Because Cassady and Kerouac's road trips in "On the Road" happened in 1947, 1949, and 1950 [0]. Construction of the Interstate Highway System didn't begin until 1956, and didn't finish until 1992 [1].
However, if we conspicuously omit the name "Kerouac" and that most famous of American counterculture roadtrips, then like Fred Turner, we too can conclude that no fun ("heroic!") roadtrips happened prior to intervention by the Federal Government.
You probably don't realize it, but the interstates were built over an earlier system of federal highways (heard of Route 66? That's I-40.). Before federal highways, you could buy "maps" along the lines of "when you see an intersection that looks like this picture, turn right." That thuggish federal jackboot stomping on your face forever can be kind of helpful, eh?
The interstates were built over an earlier system of federal highways...
Which is a complete misnomer, as US numbered highways were and still are maintained by state and local governments [1].
I grew up near the "birthplace of Route 66" so yeah, I've heard of it. It was maintained and improved by a private organization (imagine that!) [2] until the federal interstate push of the 1950s.
According to your own source US numbered highways were funded in large part by the federal government:
"Behind the scenes, the federal aid program had begun with the passage of the Federal Aid Road Act of 1916, providing 50% monetary support from the federal government for improvement of major roads. The Federal Aid Highway Act of 1921 limited the routes to 7% of each state's roads, while 3 in every 7 roads had to be "interstate in character". Identification of these main roads was completed in 1923.[1]"
Also according to your source it looks like the U.S. numbered highways developed in spite of the numerous private organizations existing at the time:
"The new system was both praised and criticized by local newspapers, often depending on whether that city ended up on a major route. While the Lincoln Highway Association understood and supported the plan, partly because they were assured of getting the US 30 designation as much as possible, most other trail associations lamented their obsolescence. At their January 14–15, 1926 meeting, AASHO was flooded with complaints."
This is silly. "Government wasn't important to the construction of our transportation infrastructure" is an argument you're not going to win, and this conversation increasingly feels like you're grasping at straws.
I feel like the reasonable middle ground here is simply what Fred Turner is insisting: the two components are intertwined and symbiotic. Why is that so hard to accept?
Of course, even if the interstate highway had been completed, it's a rather odd to feel that the meaning of the work is derived from the literal experience of a particular road.
It's like saying that so much is made of Leonardo's artistry, but no one talks about how that Mona Lisa only exists because of the great genes of the Gherardini family.
Even worse, whether government activity is labelled 'intervention' does not follow any sound logical pattern in practice.
To make it painfully obvious: When was the last time you heard somebody characterize the existence of limited liability companies as 'intervention'? Who out there consistently calls copyright law an 'intervention'?
It would be possible to use the term 'intervention' consistently. In actual practice, it is (typically) only used as a rhetorical device to support the speaker's preconceived political position. That causes the term to become loaded.
Because government activity is generally mandated (both in the sense that they can compel people to change their behavior or that people can't refuse to contribute money towards government endeavours), while private sector activity is generally optional.
That's not the meaning of intervening. It means something like meddling. The point is that when businesses do something to the economy it is not called an intervention.
"A legacy from the communalist movement that I think is pernicious is a turning away from politics, a turning toward the self as the basis of political change, of social action. I think that’s something you see all through the Valley. The information technology industry feeds off it because information technologies can so easily be aimed at satisfying individual needs. You see that rhetoric leveraged when Google and other firms say, 'Don’t regulate us. We need to be creative. We need to be free to pursue our satisfaction because that’s ultimately what will provide a satisfying society.'
That’s all a way of ignoring the systems that make the world possible. One example from the ‘60s that I think is pretty telling is all the road trips. The road trips are always about the heroic actions of people like Ken Kesey and Neal Cassady and their amazing automobiles, right? Never, never did it get told that those road trips were only made possible by Eisenhower’s completion of the highway system. The highway system is never in the story. It’s boring. What’s in the story is the heroic actions of bootstrapped individuals pursuing conscious change. What we see out here now is, again, those heroic stories. And there are real heroes. But the real heroes are operating with automobiles and roads and whole systems of support without which they couldn’t be heroic."
I find the individualist rhetoric in Silicon Valley to be puzzling. There is a huge emphasis on the wonderkid with the genius idea, not the team of dozens or hundreds that took a half-assed idea and turned it into a product. To steal some terminology from 'pg (without imputing to him any political leaning): Silicon Valley culture right now glorifies the hacker/painter designing organisms in Lisp over the pyramid builder building pyramids in Pascal. This is an elevation of the individual, the creative genius, over the institution, the organized team. But the internet is the product of an era when America was all about institutions, not individuals. The military-industrial complex built the internet. The federal government built the highways. NASA put a man on the moon. That era was all about the power of pyramid builders working in structured, hierarchical organizations.
So I find the "road trip" analogy particularly apropos. You have these guys going on heroic, individualist road trips, but they're riding on this infrastructure created by big institutions, infrastructure that only big institutions have the scale to create.
EDIT: My comment was really more about individualism versus institutions than libertarians, and has been edited accordingly.
There's a lot of libertarian rhetoric, but are actual libertarians really widespread in the Valley? To me it comes across as a loud but very small minority— albeit perhaps also one that's disproportionately represented among those at the very top (perhaps part of why it's so loud). Someone like Peter Thiel might be a libertarian-conservative politically, but the average middle-class techie seems more like a middle-of-the-road to center-left liberal. Silicon Valley politically votes almost exclusively for center-left Democrats, and if it were only up to the region's votes, more funding for the UC system and science/technology research in general (NSF, NASA, etc.) would be easy to pass. Even ideas like a basic income are considerably more popular in the Valley than among the general American public (though a basic income does admittedly fit pretty well into an individual-empowerment worldview).
I can't help but think all the libertarian hating is an attempt to find a new scapegoat in those places where Republicans have been all but eliminated. Because let me tell you, "volume" from Silicon Valley or not, libertarians have almost no power. Conservatives pass laws, Republicans pass laws, Democrats pass laws, Liberals pass laws, Libertarians mostly post on the Internet.
Whatever's going wrong in SV isn't the libertarian's fault. Or, if it is, then the Democrats in power ought to take a serious look at how their wondrous plans manage to be scotched by such a small, low-power minority.
It's possible that part of the confusion around some this is both what's meant by Libertarian in this context and whether we're talking about actual political affiliation or /cultural attitude./ First, I think if the article was more specific in naming the kind of Libertarianism involved (by this reading, Libertarian Socialism aka Voluntary Regional Collectivism, particularly of the 1960s America New Left inspired Libertarian Socialism) it would be helpful. Second, it seems like what's being referred to here is more about outlook and ethos vs actual voting patterns, especially if you don't dig very deep in terms of positions. You can "think commune and hate hierarchy" and still "vote Democrat" because of social issues; perhaps thought of as a kind of counterpart to the Republican "what's the matter with Kansas?" phenomenon (vote against your personal economic interest on the basis of cultural issues.)
That's my reading. Overall, I think the article was quite good (terminology and title aside.)
There's a lot of liberal-tarian people, like myself, they are skeptical of many East Coast Liberal ideas, while still wanting the government (perhaps city, not fed/state gov't) help the poor, provide free education / healthcare, etc.
That's sort of (if I understand correctly) the direction parts of Scandinavia have been moving. Denmark's '90s Social Democratic PM coined the term "flexicurity" to refer to a free-market economy that is as flexible as possible (no onerous regulations on hiring/firing and doing business), but combined with a strong state-provided social-welfare system (the "security" part). Basically the idea is that it should be easy to fire someone, but they shouldn't end up homeless and poor if you do, plus they should have plenty of retraining/education resources available.
That's an odd argument to make against libertarians when libertarians support defense spending as a key role of government.
The Highway Interstate system was driven mainly by defense needs. It's also known as the "Dwight D. Eisenhower National System of Interstate and Defense Highways"[1]
> The Highway Interstate system was driven mainly by defense needs.
Driven, maybe, but that's not how it's used.
The Internet itself was developed mainly for defense needs too, but now people see it as a rallying point for world citizenry, human rights, etc.
Is that what we'd have to hope for with libertarianism, that enough "defense needs" pop up to allow for adequate public goods to still be created and later be mis-used for a purpose, for which it'd never have been initially funded at all?
That's an odd argument to make against libertarians when libertarians support defense spending as a key role of government.
It is not necessary to understand libertarianism to bash libertarianism. All you need to know: they're against government doing certain things, therefore they're against government doing any and all things.
Where does a libertarian draw a clear line between defense and non-defense spending? Couldn't food stamps be considered a defense policy if it ensures an able bodied population of potential conscripts? Where is the philosophical line?
Why do you believe there must be a line? Eve right-wing libertarians have widely different opinions about the proper role of the State, or even its existence. In any case, I'd say most are not in favor of conscription itself.
But there has to be a philosophical distinction right? Some way of clearly marking where the state's power ends and individual rights begin. Otherwise libertarianism is just a matter of "I know it when I see it", which means people will twist a philosophy of small government to fit their particular political needs.
when libertarians support defense spending as a key role of government.
Not sure where you're getting this from... even though I'm not a libertarian myself, it seems like most libertarians believe in drastically reduced defense spending. [1]
I'm not seeing the connection between regulation today and the IHS or (D)ARPA decades ago. Both the IHS and the Internet were created in an era with dramatically fewer pages in the Federal Register.
And that was a mistake? I don't see the principle that can stand against any regulation no matter how ill-advised when the counter argument is "you must hate highways and the internet".
It's a great argument against someone who demands no regulations or laws, sure.
It's a great argument against someone who demands no regulations or laws, sure
No, not really. Playing Devil's advocate, if a thief robs a lot of money along the years, and the donates part to charity, must you hate charity to oppose the thief?
That argument is only valid if we assume that ends justify the means.
The traditional libertarian viewpoint isn't that the government shouldn't use the money it has to foster innovation, or that the government shouldn't have any money to use for anything, or even that the government should be tiny. It's that the government should be more decentralized.
And while the libertarians in the US today have a large number of differences with the more historic libertarians, some of the historic viewpoints can be seen in the contemporary US.
One of the main defining points for libertarianism, historically and currently, is individualism. Individualism isn't strictly anti-government, but anti-authoritarian. The government using its means to foster innovation is completely separate from most other points. Even small or distributed government should foster innovation if possible.
When a few individuals own all the land other individuals have to choose between selling themselves short for others' gain, or starving. The whole anti-authoritarian thing goes out the window when property laws need enforcement.
It has been discussed extensively by left libertarians since the 1800s (most famously by Proudhon's What Is Property?).
But most right-wingers consider property something like a god-given right (usually called "natural rights"), which makes discussion as impossible as trying to convince an young-earth creationist of evolution.
(Though to be fair, not everyone in that side of the field believes the same. Mises is particular wrote that property is just an human device, "it is not sacred". Which makes for a good laughs when you point it out, along with the fact that Ron Paul is a supporter of the Von Mises Institute, in one of those right-wing discussion forums).
"Even small or distributed government should foster innovation if possible."
Yes, but it turns out that big governments are much more effective at some kinds of innovation and expertise than small governments. There is no Missouri Institutes of Health, or if there is, you have not heard of them, but you sure know of and expect the best from the NIH.
So in effect, decentralization implies the a retrenchment of the scope of government.
If you found this article interesting I highly recommend the documentaries "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" and "The Century of the Self" both by Adam Curtis.
A number of points in the article were covered in the documentaries such as 40's & 50's era mass media concerns and early valley cultural experiment failures.
I think my big take away from this article is that nearly everyone in the Bay Area, techies included, are liberal or votes Democrat. So the irony is that some of these liberals are doing better (financially) than others, which is causing unforeseen problems. Startups are born out of the same counterculture principles, but focused on economically tangible solutions. You say revolution, we say disruption. You can probably say the same thing about Whole Foods or REI.
I think the underlying problem here is that some in the left can't cope when a part of their culture becomes big, popular and corporate. The ideas are nice when they're outside the box, but oppressive when it's the establishment and highly profitable.
That's interesting. Because Cassady and Kerouac's road trips in "On the Road" happened in 1947, 1949, and 1950 [0]. Construction of the Interstate Highway System didn't begin until 1956, and didn't finish until 1992 [1].
However, if we conspicuously omit the name "Kerouac" and that most famous of American counterculture roadtrips, then like Fred Turner, we too can conclude that no fun ("heroic!") roadtrips happened prior to intervention by the Federal Government.
[0] http://www.dennismansker.com/ontheroad.htm
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System#Const...