On Wed, Oct 30, 2002 at 08:41:36AM +0100, Russell Coker wrote:
That the right to liberty presupposes that coercion of one man by another is an indescribable evil. But liberty does not include one man taking what rightly belongs to all of humanity for his exclusive use, misuse, and non-use.I think that those beliefs are common in Debian, but socialism can meet them too...
Alas, these days when people say "socialism" they are generally talking about state-socialism and Fabian socialism. Anarchism too is socialist. Unfortunately for socialism it's never had the smarts to get out of the religion business and stick to politics and economics.
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.
Or maybe, every individual needs to BE an army? One could have a kalashnikov in the kitchen, an RPG in the attic, and sniper rifles here and there... And if your neighbors noticed you building something anti-social like a MiG or a tank, I'm fairly certain they'd take action, if only for their own self-preservation. Even the wickedest psychopath needs to sleep sometime. As long as power is decentralized, it's not a big burden for citizens to KEEP it decentralized.
There are many parts of Africa without effective governments, they have much more disorder, crime, and poverty than the first-world countries with heavy governments that most of us are used to.
I would tend to disagree. A bee-hive looks disorderly to the untrained eye, but beautifully ordered to the one that knows it. And, while much of the third world may be "poor" by our standards, when it comes right down to it, a place to sleep at night and ready access to food seem a lot more important than how much shine and gleam your plumbing has. And in the third world, people typically have these. The farmers tend to work 2-4 hours a day in their fields, and spend the rest of the day drinking, talking, joking, socializing with their neighbors... I gleaned this knowledge from observing my in-laws and their neighbors. :)
Private property helps stabilise society. Ideally everyone would have some property that they want to keep. This gives them an incentive not to do anything stupid that could result in them losing their property.
Society could give someone exclusive rights to some land in exchange for a consideration, sure. But it shouldn't be inheritable or saleable. Property is a mechanism for accumulating capital, nothing more.
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.
If society thought such chips were important, it would not only build
the necessary fabs, they'd be vastly superior than the stuff we have now
that has to put profits ahead of actual innovation, value, and quality.
Heck, the Internet is an example of stuff developed by society without
the aid of corporations. The corps jumped on the bandwagon only after
people started using it like there was no tomorow.
Jonathan
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