As I’ve said several times, the story of history is the story of innovation, not governments. From Paul Rosenberg at freemansperspective.com:
The Blessings of Technology
A fundamental part of “how people lived” is the technology they created and used. We’ve been covering this in our previous lessons, but this lesson will go into it further.
One of the most important things to remember about technology is that it improves human life far more than rulership ever has or ever could. We see this very clearly in the fact that technology is almost never forced upon us: It’s appeal is so clear that we willingly spend our time and money to get it.
Rulership, on the other hand, is forced upon us: Like it on not, we have to do what the ruler says. The central statement of rulership, after all, is, “These are the rules, and whoever doesn’t keep them will be punished.” Every form of rulership has a reason why their rules are of ultimate importance and must be kept, but none of them allow disagreement.
There was an old joke that highlighted the difference between technology and rulership:
“Who do you miss more when he goes on vacation, the secretary of state or your garbage man?”
The answer, obviously, is the garbage man; his work affects you immediately and directly. The secretary of state (a political official) does nothing that directly improves your life.
Technologies, then… tools, machines and so on… are things that we freely choose, because they make a direct and positive difference in our daily lives. For example, rather than washing our clothes by hand, down at the stream (as people had to do for most of human history), we now have machines that do it for us, with almost no physical labor, and at any hour of the day or night.
