Non-sequitur. There never has been real laissez-faire. That doesn’t mean all industry is an indirect (or direct) creation of the state.

“According to a heavily documented history by David Noble (Forces of Production), the overwhelming majority of R&D in microelectronics, cybernetics, etc. was funded by the Air Force and carried out in USAAC/USAAF/USAF contractors.”

Well, I suggest you bother to learn the history of IC producers like Intel, AMD and the like. Or just look around you. PCs, cell phones and other gadgets exist because they are used by the civilian *mass market*, not the military.

“You really don’t think the government’s funding priorities have an effect on the direction of technological development?”

To a point yes. If it wasn’t for the destruction gov’t causes we would have even more amazing technology.

Charles Nathanson claims that the overwhelming majority of electronics industry R&D was funded by the military from WWII through the 1960s.

I suggest you read those sources and get back to me with a point by point explanation of why you reject their historical claims, rather than making a simple statement of religious faith as you have here.

You really don’t think the government’s funding priorities have an effect on the direction of technological development?

Your casual tossing around of the term “Marxist,” btw, indicates that YOU hardly know what you’re talking about. A conventional Marxist would argue that any government intervention that promoted economic centralization and capital-intensiveness was objectively “progressive,” and that the only thing left was to expropriate the shareholders and have the CEOs appointed by the state when the firm got big and Galbraithian enough. I would think that anyone of at least normal intelligence would be able to discern that this is not my argument, but I’m not holding out much hope for you.

“The latter industries, created almost entirely through
government-funded R&D during and after WWII, and/or whose existence was possible
only through the action of government in guaranteeing a market for their product,
included civilian jumbo jets, microelectronics, cybernetics, and the use of automated
control systems for machine tools.3″

Carson sounds like a marxist *and* luddite who hardly knows what he’s talking about. The idea that an industry as sophisticated as microelectronics has been created by government intervention is a joke and betrays a serious lack of knowledge about technology. The only sort of engineering that the state can manage is ’social’ engineering.

Agreed. My point is just that McKibben is wrong to say that substituting local production for importing creates NEW economic output, when really it just shifts production from outside to inside the community.

But like you said, local production has other benefits, like better jobs, stronger communities, etc.

If you’ve read the entire essay, you should be aware of what I consider the specific advantages of a diversified local economy: in particular, its gearing of supply to demand and comparative security against shocks and dislocations. All “jobs” are not created equal. My ability to convert my labor directly to use value in the household economy, or to trade my labor for that of my neighbors within the community, is far less vulnerable to the business cycle or to the decision of a single large employer to close up shop and move. If that’s a bug rather than a feature in your value system, fine, but I don’t think it’s something you can “prove” from Hazlitt.

In fact, one of the central points I tried to make involved the growing irrelevance of “jobs” as something that one is given by an employer.

And to anticipate, yes, I’m familiar with the concepts of comparative advantage and division of labor. Division of labor is a good like any other, with a point of diminishing returns; and state-subsidized economic centralization promotes it beyond that point.

In this case, looking at the local effects while ignoring the “foreign” effects.