Re: Government/society in post-scarcity interstellar environments

Quadibloc schrieb:
Eivind Kjorstad wrote:
We wheren't. "How to refine germanium" is a different problem from "how
to make a working transistor". I'm not sure what your point is.

Oh, I think I recognize the point. Just sharpen a pencil...

Do you know how to harvest rubber, mine brass, or mine graphite, or
take care of the forest from which the wood comes for a pencil? And
the yellow paint, and the gilded lettering identifying the hardness of
the graphite, do you know how to make them?

The humble pencil involves so many arts to be made from nature that no
one man has mastered them all!

Essays may be written by fools like me, but only the power of the
*Free Enterprise System* can make a pencil!

It's a famous essay in support of Libertarian-style principles.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but even in countries without free enterprise, pencils were made. In fact I seem to own a mineholder made somewhere in ex-Czechoslovakia, of a model that has been manufactured there since at least 1960.

mawa
.

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