On Tue, Jun 27, 2006 at 12:03:15PM +0100, Ashish Gulhati wrote: > Not at all. This assumes that one person (or a small group of people) > can
Centralism has advantages when unpopular but necessary decisions have to be rammed through. However, I already cited the unfortunate side effects, I believe. > possibly know the "one true way" to prosperity and happiness for all. There are things which work best bottom-up, and things which work top-down. Regulations work well where invisible hand is flipping us the bird. (I'm not accepting panglossian interpretations of free markets here, as you may have noticed). > The > most well-intentioned dictator can nevertheless end up killing millions > through lack of detailed knowledge of the millions of cause and effect > relationships that make up the market, and human society. The point is that the well-intentioned and competent dictator is not something sustainable, and quite impossible to back out cleanly. > Such knowledge is however perfectly harnessed and utilized in a > free market, with millions of well-informed micro-decisions auto- > correcting > at every step, through the price mechanism, and the co-operative and > emergent intelligence of free agents engaging voluntarily in mutually > beneficial relationships. I'm intimately familiar with libertarianism. I will not argue with you, but simply stating that you're wearing rose-colored glasses. People can do get hurt by big faceless governments, and big corporations alike. As an anarchist, I trust neither. As a very pragmatic anarchist, I think both are very useful, until we can make the average bear smarter. Much smarter. So far, we're lacking the technology to reengineer the human condition, but we're working on it. > >That kinda sucks, and this is why we're stuck with this > >particular suboptimal configuration. > > I assume by this you mean democracy. However democracy not limited > by absolute respect for individual rights is nothing more than disguised > dictatorship (and not of any enlightened person, but simply of a mob, > whose decisions asymptotically approach total mindlessness as the > numbers of its members increase). You should tell that to the Swiss, they won't be too amused. > Which is inherently contradictory, non-adaptive and will inevitably > collapse, as No, with enough surveillance and enforcement by automation you can reach long-term stability, until... > human beings are NOT ants, no matter how desperately tyrants would want ...they can be reengineered into human equivalents of mole-rats, a burrow of castes where each human animal has its specialist niches. > them to be. The hive society will be wiped out or rendered unworkable > by the > first crop failure, new virus, or other unexpected, un-planned-for > occurrence to > come along, precisely as they have been in the 20th century. We're no longer in the 21st century. You should check out Vernor Vinge's (a libertarian) vision of the Emergents culture. This is one of alternative branches of our future. A future that will never happen, I hope, despite the trends. Because, unlike the book, we wouldn't be saved by an advanced-technology hero. > Any coercive top-down decision structure will end up killing people, Civilized socities don't kill people. In fact, they limit the old "power comes out of the barrel of the gun" bit to the absolute minimum. > because the > top doesn't know or care about the "ants" that must be sacrificed to > build the "perfect > hive". Nor is the top in possession of magically perfect information > on how to care > for the people whose welfare it is responsible for (even if it had > the best of intentions). > Micro-decisions made by those with most to lose (or gain), on the > other hand, work > very well, as can be seen from the success of the bazaar model vs. > the cathedral in > software development. Too much Ayn Rand, perhaps? > There's this major domain difference though: In software when you > develop in cathedral > mode, you simply risk having more buggy code. In society, when you do > the same, you > risk killing millions of innocent people. But our history is one big evolutionary tapestry, where alternative systems are pitched against each other. The winner, so far, seems to be the representational democracy. Hopefully, a more direct democracy will become possible with online blinded voting. The protocols are all there, maybe in another two decades. > >As to robbing, you need to expand a bit. > > What is coercive taxation? I agree it sucks. But it works better than a hypothetical private-ownership of infrastructure would work. You know, libertarianism is a really good idea, especially if automating the market part, if the libertarians themselves wouldn't give it such a bad name. > I really do not. Nor do I understand your assertion that it's a > "silly question". You're trapped in a very boolean view of the world, with caricatures of how things should work. The reality is both more nuanced, and full of compromises. If your average libertarian wasn't so unreasonable, New Hampshire would have been an interesting experiment (albeit one I wouln't like to be trapped in in the middle of). -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE
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