Re: is Debian an anarchist organization/project?
On Wed, 30 Oct 2002 09:45, Emile van Bergen wrote:
> 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.
Actually if all you had to worry about was the situation where >50% of the
country was against you then things would be a lot better! Look at most
oppressive regeimes and the amount of real popular support that they have,
probably no more than 10% of people would vote for many governments if they
felt that they had a real choice.
> It's too bad that the framers of the US constitution thought the
> government more dangerous to the liberty of its citizens than anything
Consider the history of the FBI, the war on drugs, and some of the things we
know of the CIA doing. I think you can make a case for the US government
being worse than private organizations (when you talk to .gov people they say
"but that's because of private organizations manipulating the government").
> 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'.
No. It would be better if they clearly stated that a company is not a person
and does not deserve the rights of a person.
Currently a company is given all the rights of a person under contract and
civil law. But when a company does something wrong it can't be punished.
In the US someone who kills a few dozen people will at best be jailed for
life, and probably get the death penalty. A company who kills as many people
will at worst get fined.
> > 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?
It can't build such expensive highways. My observation is that it's often
quite difficult to get fence repairs done between two properties because the
people involved have a dispute about cost sharing. How do you get agreement
on cost sharing of a million euros for 1Km of road among the 100,000 people
who drive on it?
The only solution is to have the people taxed by a government and then the
government decides which roads the taxes are to be spent on.
As for chip fabs. How will you get several thousand people in one place, all
highly trained (in some cases having years of specialist training) and ready
to work at the same time other than having someone pay them?
I'm happy to attend install-fests and spend a half day configuring other
people's PCs without pay. But I'm not going to spend several years of
non-stop work without getting something for it!
> 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.
If "publically funded" means "government funded" then yes I agree that can
work (but that goes against the anarchist philosophy).
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