Last week, I went to Boulder, CO, with my wife. Boulder has an airport. I have an airplane. I drove.

The flight time from Colorado Springs is about 30 minutes in my plane. The drive time is about 2 hours–more than that in heavy traffic: the quickest route takes you through downtown Denver. The chances of getting in an accident on the road are higher than we’d like to admit; the chances of getting in an accident in the plane are lower than most of us actually believe.

On the drive home, as traffic on the 10-lane highway ground to a halt (there was a Broncos game about to start), the following thought crept through my mind: I could have been home a half hour ago. And I’ve still got another hour and a half of driving ahead of me. Ugh.

So, why oh why did I take my car? The answer was simple: I needed a car when I got there. Sure, the plane would have gotten me to the airport with enviable speed. However, I wasn’t going there to visit the airport, and the airport wouldn’t have a car for me when I got there. Flying is great, but you have to leave your car at home.

Of course, the obvious solution is a flying car of one sort or another. This isn’t a new concept–the first flying car was built by the Wright Brothers’ contemporary Glenn Curtiss. His aircraft-automobile hybrid flew, but never really got off the ground. Other models that came later were a bit more successful: Molt Taylor’s Aerocar even got FAA type certification; it was, and remains, the only flying automobile to achieve such recognition. Dozens of other “successful” flying car designs have been built, though few have achieved much recognition.

Of course, one of the major problems with these aerial automobile designs is performance and efficiency. My plane, a Mooney M20E, comes with a price tag in the mid $50k range, cruises at around 180mph, and get about 22 MPG. That’s actually a very reasonable vehicle. It cuts a 2-day road trip down to about 4 hours (which, incidentally, is faster than even flying commercial when you factor in the airport time). The Aerocar does just over 100 mph–hardly a cross-country travel machine.

New Designs

The quest continues, and new personal flying vehicles are being designed every day. Just for the fun of it, I’ll go over a few of them for you:

Moller Skycar

This name always seems to come up first. Moller has been relentless in his PR campaign, and managed to continually convince investors that his design is only about 5 years away from public consumption. He’s been saying that for much longer than 5 years now. He’s built a prototype. It’s shiny. It even hovers 50 feet of the ground, though never without being attached to a crane, just in case. As frequently cited an example as it is, it’s highly, highly unlikely that he’ll ever have a certified aircraft, and this design will simply never become mainstream.

CarterCopter

Of all the flying car concepts, the CarterCopter is the most reasonable, viable, and well-developed of the lot. It also bears the least resemblance to a car. For reasons I’ll explain in my next post, this is where I’d put my money.

Jay Carter’s Carter Aviation Technologies is everything that Moller International isn’t. Their prototype aircraft, the CarterCopter Technology Demonstrator has been flying bona fide test flights for 7 years while they tweak and improve the technology. It’s not shiny, it’s not red, and it’s never been photographed in front of a giant American flag. Their design is, essentially, a helicopter with wings. Well, not a real helicopter, they went with a gyroplane because it’s simpler, but the design will work just as well with a hover-capable helicopter.

Anyway, the idea is that a rotor is highly efficient during slow flight, while wings are great for fast flight. So they get their lift from the rotor when going slow, and from the wings at high speed. It’s not a new concept, but these guys are using this prototype to create solutions for long-standing problems this design has faced. And they’re doing a great job. It can take off and land vertically, but cruise at over 170 mph. The overall design allows for speeds well beyond the capability even the most powerful helicopters. It’s also highly efficient and reasonably safe.

Jay Carter has no intention of selling or certifying an aircraft. Rather, he intends to develop, perfect, patent, then license the technology to interested parties. In the end, I’d expect the “flying car” of the future to be a vehicle like this–it flies from building top to building top like a helicopter, but costs a lot less and flies a lot faster.

Sokol A400 et. al.

There’s a large number of individual designer-inventors who have come up with designs for either “flying cars” or “roadable aircraft,” depending on your perspective. Few of these vehicles have been actually built, and some of them wouldn’t even work. Others still sport truly innovative feasible concepts, like collapsible, telescoping wings, on the A400, or the compact, sleek simplicity of the PALV.

Dictatorships are bad. Capitalism is good. We learned all that back in 4th grade after reciting the pledge of allegiance to the flag in the back of the schoolroom. God bless America, and pass me a sparkler.

The world is not so simple anymore.

Guiding Principles

The truth is, a dictatorship, if run correctly, has the power to beat the pants off a capitalist democracy in every arena. However, in past history, dictators always (overgeneralization, I know) acted in their own immediate self-interest at the expense, and eventual destruction, of the country they run.

Capitalism and democracy solve that problem–a capitalist society acts in its own financial self-interest, while a democratic society acts in its own social self interest, which luckily both actually serve the greater good. However, there’s one serious caveat — a rare condition that can destabilize these systems and make them behave like a poorly run dictatorship. The problem, as you know if you’ve studied economics, is any artificial centralization of power. For example, The Monopoly.

Economic Destabilization

In a capitalist society, each individual entity acts in its own self-interest, attempting to strike some optimum balance where its own return on its investments is at a peak. As luck would have it, when each individual component is working at its peak performance, the economy as a whole is also at a peak. The market automagically adjusts to meet supply and demand changes, and competition drives the innovation required to find new ways of meeting demand while spending less. It’s as though, as Adam Smith put it, an “Invisible Hand” is guiding the market to its optimal performance.

This all assumes, however, that the individual entities always act in their own self-interest, and without interfering with the actions of others. Adding a monopoly to the mix changes all that. If one single player can directly manipulate supply or demand (like a monopoly can), he can force other entities to act in his self-interest, rather than their own. This creates a sub-optimal situation that may not always be obvious.

For example, our most recent American monopoly, Microsoft, has been using is position to control the market to a degree not generally within the bounds of a capitalist environment. For example, nearly all computers sold in this country come with Microsoft’s software pre-installed. You pay for it, of course. Usually, Windows accounts for $60 to $200 of your computer’s purchase price. And at current prices, that could account for a third of the computer’s cost. There are alternatives, of course. Linux, for example, can be had for as low a price as free, and its main hindrance to widespread adoption is its lack of popularity. In fact, nearly every piece of software you’ve ever used has a free alternative that closely rivals (or even exceeds) its commercial counterparts in quality.

Microsoft, however, using its monopolistic influence often takes the choice out of your hands. That copy of Windows running on your computer–how much did you pay for it? You don’t know? Free? No, it wasn’t free. But you didn’t see the price tag, either. Microsoft struck a deal with the maker of your computer (Dell, IBM, Sony, etc.) allowing them to sell your copy of Windows closer to the $60 range instead of the standard $200 price in exchange for an agreement which forces that manufacturer to sell a copy of Windows with every computer they sell–effectively taking that purchasing decision out of your hands. A single company has been allowed to directly manipulate both supply and demand on a few different fronts, resulting in a broken market. Adam Smith sighs resignedly in his grave.

Well, fool me once… and I’m not going to get fooled again: Such acts by monopolies are now illegal in this country. Microsoft went to trial for this very thing, and interestingly enough, the very companies they were influencing, the hardware manufacturers, actually came out in the company’s defense. As history later showed, this hold–the preinstalled software pricing deal–which allowed Microsoft to dictate what the manufacturer would sell, was also used to force these manufacturers to testify in court in Microsoft’s defense–falsely if necessary.

Social Destabilization

These events lead us to the other half of our discussion, the social effects. In a democracy, each citizen is a well-informed active participant in all matters of governance. He votes in his own self-interest, and the society as a whole progresses in what could be considered an ideal situation.

We don’t live in a democracy.

No one does. To use a computing term, democracy doesn’t “scale”. The more members you add, the less effective the system becomes. A system where half a billion citizens spend a good part of their day discussing legal issues and voting on bills would collapse under its own weight. The real truth behind issues presented would rarely be understood, the only decisions that actually get made would have to be pushed through by a “man on a white horse” who mobilizes the masses based on his own propaganda. Democracies of any real size don’t work–it’s just not an option.

We, along with our “democratic” neighbors, live in a Representative Republic. We elect representatives whom vote on our behalf. Your opinion on real-life issues only matters to the extent that it affects whom you vote for. Beyond that, your own views are quite irrelevant to the direction our society takes.

Real governing power is concentrated in the few elected officials who actually direct public policy. If an organization can convince enough elected officials that it’s in their best interest to act in the interest of the organization, then they’ve effectively wrested control of the government out of the people’s hands. If the issues in question are minor (or difficult-to-understand) enough as to not attract too much public attention, any policy decision can be effectively influenced by those with enough political clout. This is, of course, the “Iron Triangle” you heard about when studying government. Bureaucrats, politicians, and special interests run the country. You just think you do.

Companies like Microsoft can then effectively use the legal and legislative system to avoid any social repercussions to their tampering with the economic side of things. You’re the one who gets hurt, but you didn’t get to vote on that decision.

Enter China, Stage Left

This is where the dictatorship comes into play. China still wants to take over the world. Recent history has shown, however, that the most effective way to do so is through economic strategies, not through military conquest.

The societies in Eastern Civilization tend treat authority with a higher degree of importance than their Western counterparts, which leads to a more stable social situation. The success of an Eastern empire is measured in millennia–years are just milestones. It’s not uncommon for an Eastern company to have a 10-year, 50-year, or even 100-year plan on the books.

The current Chinese government is no different. World domination is what they’re after, and they’re willing to wait if that’s what it takes. The government is free to make whatever decisions are required to make that happen without having deal with the requests of special interests.

For example, China is one of the world’s leading consumers of Nuclear Energy research, promising the largest deployment of pebble bed reactors in the world in a time when building nuclear reactors is taboo among countries with an active environmentalist contingent. The fact is, China needs electricity. These reactors are cheap, absolutely safe, low-maintenance, and more environmentally friendly than their conventional counterparts.

The Global Market

One point that makes the current situation different than that of centuries past is an awareness of the global scale of our opportunities. China had found, for example, that it could artificially tie their own currency to the American dollar, thereby assuring that labor and materials in China were always the cheapest no matter what happened to exchange rates–thus guaranteeing the availability of an export market. Export markets are, in fact, the mainstay of Chinese technology production, where supply far outstrips internal demand. And Chinese companies are always looking for ways to better compete on cost; an area where China excels in comparison to other countries where workers’ unions are all too willing to trade a job’s viability for short-term benefits.

The Future of Technology

And that brings us back to our discussion on software pricing. China has the resources and the motivation to produce computers and computer parts at costs below the global average, and its capability is increasing as time goes by. The Chinese government has already publicly eschewed Microsoft and everything they stand for. China has even gone as far as to create its own Linux distribution: Red Flag Linux. This platform has already been adopted by all levels of Chinese operations, from government offices to insurance companies to news media. In China, Microsoft has much less clout.

It’s only a matter of time before Eastern companies start selling large quantities of very-low-cost computer systems to Western consumers. It’s all part of the game plan. The software is free; the hardware is cheap. Here in the West, a small handful of very powerful companies is manipulating the market to their own advantage. The expense we pay is overpriced goods, stifled innovation, and the loss of market dominance.

The situation won’t last forever, of course. The market will recover. The monopolies will be rendered ineffective, and supply will once again balance out with demand. The bad news is that the American economy will no longer have a commanding role in global commerce.

Sooner or later, we’ll all have to learn to speak Chinese.