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RepRap–the Replication Rapid Prototyper–may be on the way. It’s a “3D printer” which can be used to fabricate useful plastic items which would otherwise have to be mass produced–and even replicate itself. So if you make one using the open-source plans, you can print another for a friend. And so on. As Google’s Chris DiBona says, “Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop.” It’s been talked about for a long time but looks like it’s nearing reality.

Update: Reader Tommy Montgomery writes: “Computer technologies have created virtual miracles in our time! The RepRap is amazing but rather primitive compared to commercial versions that are on the market for a reasonable price that a real shop can afford. Jay Leno demonstrates a 3d scanner and a working part made from the scan with a 3d printer in his own shop on his Youtube channel.”

(Thanks to David Blackstone; LRC Cross-post)

Apropos Revising the American Revolution and ‘Untold Truths About the American Revolution’: from The Spoof, a funny piece with some inadvertent (?) insight (check out the bolded parts in the excerpt below):

As fireworks were lighting the sky, President Obama apologized for the war crimes and other offenses against Loyalists

Obama Apologizes to Loyalists

Washington, DC – President Barack Obama on Independence Day said he would on behalf of the United States apologize for the treatment the Loyalists got during and after the American War for Independence.

The President will host a dinner at the White House for selected descendants of those loyal to George III and the British Empire. It is expected that a lot of Loyalist descendants, mostly from Eastern Canada, will want to come to this dinner.

At the dinner, the President will give an official apology speech.

After issuing the statement, the President was asked whether the Loyalists were right in their fears of republicanism and too much democracy resulting in mob rule. Well, yes, they were right, he admitted. This is one of the main reasons we are apologizing, the President added. “Anyone can see that the American experiment has resulted in big government.”

… Will this have any consequences for the policies in American government? Of course not, the chief executive says. “The illusions and lack of distinction between the ruled and the rulers are what give us power. Now, we wouldn’t want to take that away, would we?” …

(Thanks to J.K. Baltzersen; LRC Cross-post)

He writes here of Cowen’s recent mutterings:

Cowen apparently desired to carry water in the culture war between George Mason economists and the scholars and enthusiasts associated with the Mises Institute. His characterization of a “Mises Institute Nationalism” borders on bizarre, though I see why he would make the attempt. The fact that so many of these folks are themselves anarchists means that whatever “nationalism” they promote must be a different sort. I took from this short description that Cowen doesn’t like Hans-Herman Hoppe. Yeah, thanks for sharing. This description of a strand of libertarianism is less coherent than the previous.

The temptation to despair is high for realistic libertarians. It seems ever more difficult to achieve the society we strive for. But here are some inspiring words from Blaga Dimitrova, a Bulgarian poet:

I’m not afraid
they’ll stamp me flat.
Grass stamped flat
soon becomes a path.

—Blaga Dimitrova, “Grass,” quoted in Harold B. Segel, The Columbia Guide to the Literatures of Eastern Europe Since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003 [1974]), p. 146.

I was made aware of these beautiful lines in “Why We Have Rights,” by Christian Michel, a chapter in the book I co-edited with Guido Hülsmann in 2009, Property, Freedom, and Society: Essays in Honor of Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

From Re: Is the Vatican a State?:

There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.
–Hans-Hermann Hoppe, A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, pp. 148-49; emphasis added

From an exchange on LRC blog a few years ago:

First, Chris Manion had a post, Pope Benedict on Charity and Truth, about Pope Benedict XVI’s new encyclical letter, “Caritas in Veritate,” which is about the importance of (necessarily voluntary) eleemosynary activities. As Manion writes:

Re: Pope Benedict on Charity and Truth

Is the Vatican a State?

Lew, excellent point. This highlights the need to distinguish the political conception of the state from more positivist definitions such as the one I was employing.

This is actually a quite fascinating area. International law generally sets forth four criteria for statehood: “The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with the other states.” (Art. I, Montevideo Convention on Rights and Duties of States) Given such criteria, there are various “micro” and borderline “states,” such as San Marino, Monaco, and Lichtenstein. And “states” are not the only “legal persons” under international law–there are also international organizations such as the UN (see Brownlie, ch. 3) and other sui generis entities such as the Holy See (Vatican City is not a state under international law; it has a murky relationship with the Holy See). But even by positive international law standards the Holy See’s status as a state is borderline (see Brownlie, p. 64), although it is recognized as a (non-member) state by the UN.

Is being a “state” in this sense necessarily unlibertarian? I think not, since none of these criteria, even “government,” necessarily implies aggression. Libertarians are against aggression, and thus also against institutionalized aggression; the “state” opposed by libertarians is the agency of organized or institutionalized aggression. In Power and Market, Rothbard quotes Oppenheimer from his The State:

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one’s own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. … I propose … to call one’s own labor and the equivalent exchange of one’s own labor for the labor of others “the economic means” for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the “political means.” … The state is an organization of the political means [emphasis added].

Or, as Oppenheimer defined it in his introduction to The State: “I mean by [the ‘State’] that summation of privileges and dominating positions which are brought into being by extra economic power. And in contrast to this, I mean by Society, the totality of concepts of all purely natural relations and institutions between man and man …. ” (See also Rothbard’s classic The Anatomy of the State; update: see also my post The Nature of the State and Why Libertarians Hate It.)

Here, by the way, we see the genius of Hoppe’s essentialist definition of socialism not merely as centralized control of the means of production, but as “an institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims” (A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, p. 2; also see pp. 12). To those who would object that this means all states are socialist, and all socialism is statist–yes. Exactly; and this is why libertarians are anti-state. It is because we are anti-aggression; and all states (in our sense) employ aggression; and this is what is also wrong with socialism: it is merely institutionalized aggression (update: see also my article What It Means To Be an Anarcho-Capitalist).  Thus Hoppe explicitly writes:

There can be no socialism without a state, and as long as there is a state there is socialism. The state, then, is the very institution that puts socialism into action; and as socialism rests on aggressive violence directed against innocent victims, aggressive violence is the nature of any state.

(A Theory of Socialism and Capitalism, pp. 148-49; emphasis added)

In short: Lew, I stand corrected. The Holy See does not tax; it does not compel; it does not commit aggression. It is not a state in our sense, no matter what the UN calls it. And maybe this is why it is hated by leftists and liberals.

Great quote:

“… the state has been living on a revenue which was being produced in the private sphere for private purposes and had to be deflected from these purposes by political force. The theory which construes taxes on the analogy of club dues or of the purchase of the services of, say, a doctor only proves how far removed this part of the social sciences is from scientific habits of mind.”
–Joseph A Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy

Chris–quite right about charity being voluntary. And not only that, as far as I know, the Holy See is the only state in the world that does not tax–it’s supported by voluntary donations of a billion Catholics around the globe. It’s the most libertarian state in the world.

As mentioned by Jeff Tucker, in the Pope’s new encyclical, Caritas in veritate, he writes:

On the part of rich countries there is excessive zeal for protecting knowledge through an unduly rigid assertion of the right to intellectual property, especially in the field of health care.

As Jeff writes, “I wish it had gone further to reject the whole idea of a IP but this is an excellent statement as far as it goes.”

[Against Monopoly cross-post]

Lew, great post. Anti-state, and anti-war. The Zinn piece has some other great lines that should be of interest to libertarians, especially constitutional sentimentalists and those who desperately cling to the notion that the American Revolution was some thoroughly libertarian event:

Nobody ever knows exactly how many people die in wars, but it’s likely that 25,000 to 50,000 people died in this one. … That would be equivalent today to two and a half million people dying to get England off our backs ….

Do you think the Indians cared about independence from England? No, in fact, the Indians were unhappy that we won independence from England, because England had set a line-in the Proclamation of 1763-that said you couldn’t go westward into Indian territory. They didn’t do it because they loved the Indians. They didn’t want trouble. When Britain was defeated in the Revolutionary War, that line was eliminated, and now the way was open for the colonists to move westward across the continent, which they did for the next 100 years, committing massacres and making sure that they destroyed Indian civilization.

Did blacks benefit from the American Revolution? … Slavery was there before. Slavery was there after. Not only that, we wrote slavery into the Constitution. We legitimized it

… Do you know that there were mutinies in the American Revolutionary Army by the privates against the officers? The officers were getting fine clothes and good food and high pay and the privates had no shoes and bad clothes and they weren’t getting paid. They mutinied. Thousands of them. So many in the Pennsylvania line that George Washington got worried, so he made compromises with them. But later when there was a smaller mutiny in the New Jersey line, not with thousands but with hundreds, Washington said execute the leaders, and they were executed by fellow mutineers on the order of their officers.

[LRC Cross-post]

ABSOLUTELY HEROIC post by Lew Rockwell! Yes, it’s time to take the gloves off, my fellow libertarians. No more excuses for the state! No more state worship! Down with constitutional sentimentalism!

‘Untold Truths About the American Revolution’

Posted by Lew Rockwell on July 7, 2009 08:49 AM