One of the best things about having something you wrote go flying around the Internet for a few days is that you get lots of feedback and ideas from interesting people with whom you’d normally never interact. This is the promise of what Brad DeLong called the “invisible college,” and I must say I’m really enjoying it. It’s kind of like getting peer reviewed for a journal article, except that the volume and quality of reaction I’ve gotten to “Anti–Star Trek” has been superior to the actual peer reviews I’ve received.

Most people who took the time to write about my post were inclined to view it favorably, but of course the real fun is being told that you’re wrong on the Internet. Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias actually tried to defend Anti–Star Trek as a superior arrangement to actual Star Trek. I think Hanson is some kind of libertarian, and the tone of the post is pretty snide and condescending, but whatever; I’ve said nastier things about libertarians. It’s still worth addressing what he says. His argument has three separable components: the first misses the point, the second is irrelevant, and the third reveals an important moral disagreement about what makes for a good society.

First, Hanson wants to say that really, my portrayal of Star Trek as a communist society is wrong. There are still some resource constraints, we see market exchange (although I’d argue it’s mostly what Erik Olin Wright likes to call “capitalism between consenting adults”), and so on: