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120 sats \ 3 replies \ @Undisciplined 15 Apr \ on: Free markets, governments, and space econ
I love these kinds of thought experiments.
You're talking about internal structure. From the outside, there would be nothing unlibertarian or anti-market about people signing contracts to live and work in a privately owned space colony.
I think the key point is that somebody (or group of somebodies) owns the physical building that makes up the initial colony. Like all property owners, they get to set the terms for acceptable uses of their property. Allowing or prohibiting market mechanisms is one of the choices the owner gets to make. It would be very similar to how firms have some internal market mechanisms, but largely don't because the transactions costs are too high.
If someone else wants to connect another colony, or building, then it would be up to those owners to work out the terms. Presumably, that would involve mutually reassuring each other that the connection won't catastrophically fail and kill everyone. It may also involve restrictions on allowing new parties to connect to the structure.
I suspect you're right in speculating that a few critical things would never be subjected to market or democratic feedback, while most aspects of day-to-day life would be fairly liberalized.
there would be nothing unlibertarian or anti-market about people signing contracts to live and work in a privately owned space colony.
That is a good point.
I suspect you're right in speculating that a few critical things would never be subjected to market or democratic feedback
I think my view is a little different than this. I think it is more so that nothing will be subject to market or democratic feedback until there is some threshold of level of production.
Just to make it easier to discuss, assume there are 10 goods that are required for survival. If we can only produce 9/10, the population will die off.
If there are two colonies, both colonies should produce their own supply of each in case the other has a catastrophic failure. Likewise for 3 and etc.
However, at some point, maybe when there are 100 colonies, each one produces some subset of the goods such that if any 50 colonies are destroyed the other 50 still have enough of each good. Maybe 10 of them will always produce all 10 goods as well.
I acknowledge this seems like an arbitrary thought experiment, but but consider how governments were formed throughout history.
People weren't worried about dying in space; rather they wanted protection from chaotic crime. Over a decade, a government might tax your supply of wheat more than criminals would steal from you, but criminals might steal too much in a single year and cause your family to starve.
Now, I ask myself, does this somehow apply to what happened in Israel over the weekend? Does this have any implications for political philosophy?
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What this has me thinking about is all the supply chain disruptions of the past few years. We're sort of living out a much lower stakes version of your thought experiment. I haven't seen a compelling treatment of how a market could maintain optimal redundancy in the overall system of trade.
Still, the gains from specialization are so great that I don't think colonies would generally operate in autarky. What makes more sense is that critical resources would be stored in enough quantity that if something disrupted the supply there would be plenty of time to ramp up domestic production.
That would probably have to be a non-market policy, though, since markets don't seem to operate that way on Earth. Although, perhaps it would be an insurance requirement.
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What makes more sense is that critical resources would be stored in enough quantity that if something disrupted the supply there would be plenty of time to ramp up domestic production.
Yes! Excellent observation. Sadly, I had not thought of this. Specialization -> efficiency gains -> surplus.
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