Jonah Goldberg: Don't Dismiss the Market Economy
[Jonah Goldberg is editor-at-large at the National Review and writes a column for the LA Times.]
...In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, "I, Pencil." It begins, "I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write." It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet "not a single person on the face of this Earth knows how to make me."...
These days there's a lot of buzz about something called cloud computing. In brief, this is a new way of organizing computer technology so that most of the data storage and number crunching don't actually take place in your own computer. Rather, everyone plugs into the computational equivalent of the electrical grid.
Do a Nexis search and you'll find hundreds of articles insisting that this is a revolutionary advance in information organization. And in one sense, that's obviously true. But in another, this is simply an acceleration of how civilization has always worked. The information stored in an encyclopedia or textbook is a form of cloud computing. So is the expertise stored in your weatherman's head. So are the intangible, but no less real, lessons accumulated over generations of trial and error and stored in everything from the alphabet to the U.S. Constitution to my daughter's second-grade curriculum....
Read entire article at LA Times
...In 1958, Leonard Read wrote one of the most famous essays in the history of libertarianism, "I, Pencil." It begins, "I am a lead pencil — the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write." It is one of the most simple objects in human civilization. And yet "not a single person on the face of this Earth knows how to make me."...
These days there's a lot of buzz about something called cloud computing. In brief, this is a new way of organizing computer technology so that most of the data storage and number crunching don't actually take place in your own computer. Rather, everyone plugs into the computational equivalent of the electrical grid.
Do a Nexis search and you'll find hundreds of articles insisting that this is a revolutionary advance in information organization. And in one sense, that's obviously true. But in another, this is simply an acceleration of how civilization has always worked. The information stored in an encyclopedia or textbook is a form of cloud computing. So is the expertise stored in your weatherman's head. So are the intangible, but no less real, lessons accumulated over generations of trial and error and stored in everything from the alphabet to the U.S. Constitution to my daughter's second-grade curriculum....