I have a hard time understanding that as anything other than a religious view. And a relatively new one, despite your claim that people are shifting away.
Read, for example, The Economist, which for 150 years has been advocating for free markets and against excess regulation. They've been doing it so long they prefer the phrase "classical liberal"; to them, "libertarian" is a johnny-come-lately term. Every time they advocate this stuff they do it not based on a tautological "markets are good because markets" argument. For them, markets are the best way to accomplish human ends: people that are better off, freer, more independent. But when markets work against that, they say so. For example, they're strong supporters of a carbon tax, because they see that as the least intrusive way to prevent further degradation on the atmosphere.
Markets are tools, just like computers are. They can be used well or used poorly, for good or for bad. In my view you have mistaken a mechanism for the purpose. When we decide how to structure society, it cannot be to serve the individual aesthetic or ideological views of a narrow group. It has to be to best serve its members. Nothing else is sustainable.
I see free markets as providing the least resistance to unfettered technological progress (which is ultimately what I'm after).
I don't think it's worthwhile to "decide how to structure society". Society should be emergent from individual freedom. Central planning can only cover the needs/ideologies of those doing the planning (and probably not even that).
Admittedly my views are radically post-modern and include a healthy dose of moral relativism i.e. there is no "best" way to serve society's members, just progress and the by-product of that progress.
Ok. You are after something that you define as "progress". Why do you think everybody else should act in ways that maximize what you want?
Also, you have already decided how you want society to be structured, which is devotion to a very particular definition of "individual freedom". (Other people have broader definitions of freedom that they are equally devoted to.)
I agree that there's no intrinsically "best" way to do things, but that doesn't mean we can't jointly converge on a shared understanding of "best". Indeed, I think it means we must work very hard to do so. Since God is dead, we must take up the work we previously assigned to him.
I'd also suggest you haven't really paid much attention to where your kind of progress comes from. Free markets (which require a fair bit of regulation to maintain) are a decent way to optimize certain things. But they aren't really good at anything that has relatively long payoff times. Anything with a payoff time of more than 25 years or so should be ignored because its net present value is zero. Anything where the value is hard to capture is effectively worthless, and that includes things like society-wide vaccinations, moon landings, GPS, the Hubble telescope, and our many interplanetary probes.
Or take the Internet. It came purely out of tax funding. The commercial equivalents were evolutionary dead ends like Compuserve and AOL, centralized fiefdoms with low interoperability. The network technology that drives it wasn't invented by AT&T, who had no interest in things that reduced their central control. (For more see the excellent history When Wizards Stay Up Late.) If not for net neutrality regulation, many Internet companies wouldn't exist; monopoly or oligopoly network providers would have made it too hard or extracted too much monopoly rent.
Or consider basic science research. Einstein never had a market-driven job in his life, and it's a good thing, as his freedom from practical concerns let him do amazing work. Very few Nobel laureates had anything approaching commercial goals or commercial support. I'd call the detection of gravity waves major progress, but that work received massive tax funding. Etc, etc, etc.
I'm not sure we've ever seen a 100% free market so while regulation appears on the surface to have been helpful, it could be viewed as solving problems caused by other regulations.
It's also important to note that the vast majority of major progress (including your examples) have been tied to war, conflict and war-like situations (Cold War).
Human conflict will continue to be a driver of progress but we've reached a state where the agents engaged in that conflict need not be centralized in the form of a government.
Some of us would like to race toward that situation while others believe there's redeemable qualities in the status quo. Interesting times as that dichotomy will likely grow as individuals continue to be networked together without the limitations of geography or citizenship.
> I'm not sure we've ever seen a 100% free market so while regulation appears on the surface to have been helpful, it could be viewed as solving problems caused by other regulations.
The prosperity gospel types, for example use it to say that if something bad ever happens to anybody, it just means their faith wasn't sufficient. [1] Communists use it too; when I've asked why we would want to try communism when it has failed every time, they explain that it just wasn't "true" communism, that it would work if we'd use a more pure version of it.
This strikes me as ridiculous in two ways. One, it isn't falsifiable; nothing can ever prove it wrong. And two, advocating to run a country on a system that can't work except under the most perfect conditions is advocating for something that will never work in practice.
I also reject your thesis that war is necessary for progress. Einstein wasn't out there building bombs. Most Nobel winners are not engaged in war research. The Hubble does not have military applications, and neither do gravity waves. The CDC is not paid for out of the defense budget.
Your notion that the most effective way to get more progress is to have more war between non-state actors is, aside from being wrong, ridiculous as something to advocate for; exactly nobody will go along with it. I agree it's a reasonable consequence of unfettered pseudo-libertarianism, though. It's at least refreshing that you admit that; so many anti-government types have trouble admitting that by their lights Somalia is the freest place on earth.
I was thinking about this recently, and most of the major inventions of the last 50 years seems to have been state funded - the internet, GPS, the space program.
Free markets bring the products based on these to the masses, and incremental improvements but the technologies behind them are often funded by military needs. Most research seems to be done in publicly funded research labs, while the development side of R&D is done in private companies.
Other great examples include things like the US Census and the National Weather Service. It's just enormously more efficient to pay for certain things centrally and make them available to everybody because that enables all sorts of useful business activity. Same for roads, policing, and courts.
As an entrepreneur, I like markets a lot. But as an engineer, I think of them as I would something like state machines or map-reduce or machine learning: amazingly useful in the right circumstances, but not always the right tool for the job.
Read, for example, The Economist, which for 150 years has been advocating for free markets and against excess regulation. They've been doing it so long they prefer the phrase "classical liberal"; to them, "libertarian" is a johnny-come-lately term. Every time they advocate this stuff they do it not based on a tautological "markets are good because markets" argument. For them, markets are the best way to accomplish human ends: people that are better off, freer, more independent. But when markets work against that, they say so. For example, they're strong supporters of a carbon tax, because they see that as the least intrusive way to prevent further degradation on the atmosphere.
Markets are tools, just like computers are. They can be used well or used poorly, for good or for bad. In my view you have mistaken a mechanism for the purpose. When we decide how to structure society, it cannot be to serve the individual aesthetic or ideological views of a narrow group. It has to be to best serve its members. Nothing else is sustainable.