This is an old, unoriginal argument that is also completely baseless. According to this, people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution, right? And then capitalism just naturally emerged, of course. Not a single drop of blood was spilled.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with standards or the article, if that is what you are implying. The Internet, for example, along with the many standards that followed, is the result of government funneling money into the Pentagon, universities, and other research institutions. It did not emerge spontaneously. And then private enterprise has flourished on top of that baseline infrastructure, much of which is used unaltered to this day. If anything, we need more and up-to-date standards, not siloed proprietary technology that disappears on the whims of an acquisition or a bankruptcy.
> According to this, people must have been living in tribes until the industrial revolution, right? And then capitalism just naturally emerged, of course. Not a single drop of blood was spilled.
I didn't really want to wade into a pointless argument, but this is a very ungenerous reading. They didn't say any of the things you're implying they did. A system can be natural, inevitable, emergent and still require that blood be spilled to make it happen. Karl Marx certainly believed so.
Fair enough, if you admit that violence is part of that "natural" emergence of things.
I don't think my reading was ungenerous, though. OP wasn't even stating anything related to the article, mostly just spammed free market fundamentalism. That bottom-up argument etc. is entirely baseless and does not check with even recent history.
Besides, there is nothing wrong with standards or the article, if that is what you are implying. The Internet, for example, along with the many standards that followed, is the result of government funneling money into the Pentagon, universities, and other research institutions. It did not emerge spontaneously. And then private enterprise has flourished on top of that baseline infrastructure, much of which is used unaltered to this day. If anything, we need more and up-to-date standards, not siloed proprietary technology that disappears on the whims of an acquisition or a bankruptcy.