Hi, On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 08:41:36AM +0100, Russell Coker wrote: > On Wed, 30 Oct 2002 07:22, Jonathan Walther wrote: > > > That all humans have an equal and legitimate right to defend their lives > > and their share of the human inheritance. No person or body of persons > > shall maintain a monopoly on such right to legitimate use of force. > > Bodies maintaining such monopolies today are called "governments". > > The problem is that an individual or a small group of people can't oppose the > use of force that a government can provide. If a group of people have a > country then they need to defend it from other countries who would desire > mineral resources, agricultural land, etc. Disorganized people can't stand > against a modern army. Therefore every country needs an army. This is getting rapidly off-topic, but that is also a good counter- argument against the anarchistic notion that 'the people interested enough in wellfare will pay for it'. You see, some people will only play along if they know everybody else has to as well. So a majority to spend money on something might only form if people know in advance that they can force everyone else to spend that money too. Of course, that's how democracy works, and in theory it can work quite well, if the freedom of the individual is protected from that all mighty government of that 51 % majority, from his fellow individuals and, not unimportantly, protected from the private organizations run by them. It's too bad that the framers of the US constitution thought the government more dangerous to the liberty of its citizens than anything else and therefore hardly protects against the enormous private concentrations of power you see today. Given the foresight, the framers would have no doubt forbidden all use of private resources for political campaigns, whether they come from the rich candidate himself or campaign 'donations'. [SNIP] > > from fear of theft, murder, oppression, starvation, and homelessness. > > And by abolishing government and private property, we can all enjoy the > > unlimited wealth that this physical universe and our fertile human > > imaginations provide as an inheritance. > > That might work for a non-technological society. It doesn't scale to chip > fabs capable of producing 50 million transistor CPUs that run at 3GHz, and > other similar technological production. > > Being into technology we all depend on things that are not possible without > corporations. Therefore we can't oppose private property and companies. I doubt that. If a public society can build highways that costs millions of euros per kilometer, then why can it not build chip fabs? Or do you think the AMD vs. Intel competition is really needed to spark the creativity of their engineers? I think human competition is needed, but it need not necessarily be among corporations that are in it for the money. You can see the same beneficial effect in two publicly funded rivalling R&D groups I guess. Lots of people will do that extra bit for fame and and public recognition as well as for money. Cheers, Emile. -- E-Advies / Emile van Bergen | emile@e-advies.info tel. +31 (0)70 3906153 | http://www.e-advies.info
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