Inside The Republican Utopia: No Masks, Lots Of Felonies

Republicans seem religiously opposed to wearing facemasks to prevent the coronavirus. They say there is no scientific evidence masks work. But logically masks work. Kind of like the new fines, felonies, and reporting requirements recently announced by Speaker Sprowls and Governor DeSantis for international exchange and technology in Florida. There is no scientific evidence these laws will benefit Floridians, no control group and experiment. But logically, to a prosecutor like Sprowls and an authoritarian like DeSantis, these laws must be effective at preventing Chinese infection of business and academia in Florida.

The first question is are Florida cops even qualified to enforce laws on intellectual property? Given that I am currently out on a $25,000 bond for sending an email to someone I did not send an email to, it is a fair question to ask. More laws mean more cops, more court dates, more people charged with crimes and in prison, more lives ruined by legal costs, more errors and false accusations, more abuses of power, and more work for lawyers. Speaker Sprowls’ cop friends currently have had my laptop for five months, and boast that they “went through it” high and low, not specific to any crime and without even having charged me with a crime.

The second question is, does a lawyer and military groupie like Sprowls even know jack about technology? Can he hope to? You would think if it is so easy to steal technology, states like Florida and Alabama would be the first to steal technology from places like Massachusetts and California, and start our own Facebook or Microsoft. Not even most technology companies seem to understand the technology business very well, whether it comes to hiring programmers, or innovating viable new products. Most new technology ventures fail. And most US states cannot imitate California. Other countries have not much hope to do it. And if they are successful, it won’t be because they stole the code.

Back when I worked in technology, I used to meet a lot of people with wide eyes. They had some great idea, and thought I would steal it. They wanted me to sign a non-disclosure and non-compete agreement before they would tell me about it. They thought all it would take is me knowing the idea, and I would instantly make the riches they were about to make. They imagined everyone would try to copy them, and steal their idea. This reflects a lack of experience actually working in technology, and a misunderstanding of how business and human knowledge actually work.

Suppose you had a billion-dollar product. You made snow shovels, and made a billion dollars profit a year doing it. It is the easiest thing to discover exactly how the snow shovels work, and copy it. Suppose someone decided to copy you, and make a billion dollars. The first thing they would do is sit around a table with investors. They would say “we are going to make snow shovels.” And within 3 minutes, everyone would have his own idea of how to make a snow shovel. They would say ours should be longer, we can make them from fiberglass. Their product and business would end up looking nothing like the product and business they were trying to copy. A different group of people in a different room will produce a different result. It is impossible to copy a business, it is not human nature.

A newspaper story about the new legislation promoted by Sprowls and DeSantis mentioned “theft of cloud technology.” I once worked as the senior software engineer at a premium high-security cloud-hosting company. The entire company was built using open-source tools, by a non-programmer. There was no cloud technology to steal. The company’s trade secrets were in their pricing and branding strategy, their sales approach, their customer service and support, their employee culture. When I quit, I considered using the same tools they used, to just sell my own cloud hosting. I could have copied the technology exactly. It would have only taken me a few weeks to build the same technology product. But it was not my nature to do what the company owners did.

One of my worst days working at that company, was when Microsoft came to collect their licensing fees. When our customers used Linux servers it was free. But when they used Windows, we had to pay a fee to Microsoft. A previous employee miscalculated how many Windows licenses we needed to pay for. Microsoft audited us, and found we owed them a huge chunk of money. It reduced the funds we were using to innovate new products, and to pay my salary. We would have innovated more quickly if all our customers used open-source Linux. Licenses may make Bill Gates rich, but they don’t necessarily speed up prosperity or spread it around.

But there is such a thing as intellectual property right? The greatest economist in history, Friedrich Hayek, disagreed. He thought unfettered imitation was the key to human prosperity. He thought there didn’t need to be a patent to give incentives to innovation, it would happen anyway. And the more and faster innovations could be copied, and the more freely people could disseminate new ideas and copy each other, the faster the evolution of human knowledge, and the more prosperity. So Chinese people sharing knowledge is no different from people in different US states sharing knowledge. The more freedom, the bigger the pie for everyone, and the faster it grows.

Do we want to protect secret designs for military equipment, like atomic bombs and stealth aircraft? Sure. These are things that a group of government scientists sitting in a different country literally would make an identical copy of. But where do you stop, what is the right extent of regulation and life sentences? Will threatening academics and programmers in general, with felonies for crimes that police are not even well equipped to understand, create more freedom and innovation? History has proven, that the most innovation and prosperity has taken place, in times and places where government enforced the simplest set of laws and property rights. When government became too ambitions – too utopian – when government stuck their clumsy hands in too many things, innovation stuttered.

The newspaper article about Sprowls and DeSantis mentioned a fear that Cuba and Venezuela might somehow steal or benefit from our technology. What a joke. Cuba and Venezuela can’t even make use of the resources and technology they already have. This again reveals a misunderstanding of technology and business and human nature. Surely Venezuelans also know how to grow food and drill for oil, but they can’t seem to do those things either. Maybe these countries were just thrown onto the list to make a nice political story, or maybe there is something I am missing. DeSantis is using a South Florida strategy, because Trump won Florida when Biden became associated with socialism. So DeSantis has to say a copyright law is fighting communists in Venezuela, LOL.

The relative size of China alone, makes it likely US culture and business will be influenced by their activities. In some ways similar to how Hong Kong, and Kowloon, had to live in China’s shadow. And there is never any guarantee, that the entire world won’t become a miserable place. I believe Hayek would say the solution is more freedom, faster exchange and evolution of ideas. Let our superior ways and ideas take over China. Whatever the solution is, it will more likely be discovered through freedom. And it is less likely to be advanced under oppression by a self-important lawyer like Sprowls, with a utopian optimism for the role of police, and who sees fines and felonies as the hammer, and every other problem in life as the nail.

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Sprowls and DeSantis have recently passed new legislation for more authoritarian control of what universities teach in Florida. There are some values to this, in protecting the very existence of a nation. An authoritarian nation needs indoctrination of culture and nationalism, to survive. And students, and particularly young students, need hard education in math and reading, as a prerequisite to participating in more advanced knowledge production. Every young girl in the USSR knew what Pi and e and cosine waves were. And for this reason, Russia was able to overachieve in technology projects, relative to their wealth.

But knowledge at the university and post-graduate level is organic imitation and evolution. People at universities are talented communicators and imitators. This enables innovation by evolutionary accident, which is even more important than the individual problem solving which it complements. No country outside the US has been able to come close to the US in advanced technology innovation and production. The countries that have come closest in the cultural prerequisites to technology innovation, have been in the British Commonwealth. The US has had some ingredient of intellectual freedom which has produced the most innovation.

These same highly college-educated people are also likely to freely transmit all kinds of dumb ideas about socialism and such, where they pay no individual price for being wrong. A college person can make a ton of money as a medical researcher, and produce new effective treatments, while promoting socialism that destroys the country, affecting the less gifted while he eats cake. Free and organic imitation and knowledge transmission, is only effective when it is directly tied to the survival of the person or institution which imitates the knowledge or practice. If a ship with 51% percent idiots sinks, everyone goes down. Except the rich idiots with lifeboats.

But making sure the location of the belief and the decision, is the same as the location of the people who survive or die because of the belief or decision, is a different problem. DeSantis and Sprowls wish to control what the belief and decision is, justified because it affects distant strangers. And so DeSantis and Sprowls wish to put a chill on the free and organic production and imitation of ideas at universities, which may make our innovation more like a small Russia or China. University people need total freedom. Promoting and protecting private property, so that other people don’t pay the price for the dumb social idea of Hollywood actors and professors, is a different problem.

DeSantis says he wants an open debate, where the kiddies in school get persuaded with different viewpoints. But DeSantis has given up trying to persuade the college crowd with debate, and instead resorts to the power of the executive branch. The reason why, is the college professors actually want to destroy DeSantis and his faction, and can’t be talked out of it. Thomas Sowell says it is because smart college professors are jealous of coarse businessman having more power and prestige. But there are definitely factions which are legitimately under attack by the supporters of Sprowls and DeSantis, and wish to undermine them through the universities.

So what is really playing out is not a competition of ideas for the good, but the attempt by different factions to destroy each other, in a death struggle in the courts and legislatures and universities. The solution is not increasing the strength of the hand of government in the free flow of ideas, and all other human affairs. It is persuading all factions, that they should leave each other alone and be more tolerant and less utopian. The solution is devolving the power of institutions, which are always sold as doing good, and then corrupted and used in a cold war of vicious men against their neighbors.