Why?

There were a range of reasons, for example that Massachusetts investment banks were reluctant to invest in high tech. Another was that California courts largely viewed non-competition clauses in employment contracts as being legally unenforceable, relative to their interpretation in Massachusetts, and potential employees in CA tended to view non-competition clauses as being personally unacceptable.

A major reason, though was that Massachusetts high tech was very heavy on protecting its company secrets, while California was heavy on fern bars where secrets interchanged and fertilized each other. Curiously, MA high tech people tended to be Republicans, while California has a certain number of sensible liberals.

ITAR is the losing Masachusetts high-tech approach.

For multiple articles on this question, go to old issues of Technology Review.

ITAR does not matter if we get into a war with a minor power, because minor powers can not take advantage of our high technology. Instead, they have to use clever low-tech approaches, as the Serbians demonstrated when they substantially defeated our air war in Kosovo.

Any country capable of taking advantage of our technology is a great power. Great powers all have significant stocks of thermonuclear weapons. In fact, thermonuclear weapons are adequately cheap that several second-tier powers (Britain, France, Israel, India) have them in considerable numbers. As has been known even to fairly crazy world leaders for nearly 60 years, warfare between nuclear powers has only one outcome, namely the survivors are peasants living on the outskirts of the husks of burnt-out cities.

Unfortunately, the consequence of Republican paranoid—but I repeat myself—fantasies about fighting wars between great powers is that our people in Europe cannot talk with Europeans in Europe about high-tech. When you cannot talk, you cannot learn what the other guy is doing, meaning we are in the process of being left behind technologically. A good example of this is supplied by the ITAR discussion at the following NASA link. Warning. The link is a 400 MB video
http://discovery.nasa.gov/Discovery15/session4.html

I will take an example from my own scientific field, which is fortunately not covered by ITAR. Een 15 years

He has supported “state boy” Sam Brownback.I doubt it that they would dupport the LP, and if they still have a neocons view, Root would be their man if they had to support someone, while Barr only if they have really changed their view on the war.

Does the Kochtopus and/or Reason have a candidate in the LP Presidential Race?

Bob Barr

I suggest you go talk to Boeing, Northrop, and Lockheed’s Import/Export Security Offices before talking about ITAR. There are some damned good reasons those rules exist, reasons that you are probably not aware of. Espionage problems (a.k.a. treason) are one them. It is far more than a market thing.

Unless you prefer to see our warfighters be shot down and shot up and killed when in war? And that has NOTHING to do with why they would be in war or who sends them!

BTW, the B-2 research you refer to was proprietary to Northrop. Boeing had to do their own carbon-fiber research (as did Lockheed for the F-117 and F-22) because they had no access (short of commercial espionage) to Northrop’s proprietary and highly classified work. To claim that Boeing’s efforts were a waste means you don’t seem to understand how the aerospace and defense industry operates. Sure, there is waste, and a lot of excess bureaucracy, but in every non-open-source industry there is.

I believe you can do better than this.

Reason Magazine has yesterday published http://reason.com/blog/show/126441.html the false claim “- Most of the Libertarian presidential candidates (except for Barr and Root) demand a new 9/11 inquiry.” The original line has a link to ‘Libertarians for Justice’.

Reason’s claim that I signed the ‘demand’ in question is false and baseless.