From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Aug 07 2002 - 14:05:32 MDT
Charlie Stross wrote:
>...
>
>What is government for?
>
>That's the rub.
>
>(I hate to say it here because it's bound to generate a knee-jerk response
>from the minarchist contingent hereabouts, but I am in favour of big
>government for certain purposes. *Not* for letting some inbred loon in
>a crown indulge their droit de seigneur, or for allowing a posturing
>idiot in a suit to declare war on people who didn't vote for him, but
>for organising those common functions that don't self-organise and don't
>work well in the market but that we the people can benefit from. We live
>in a complex, and ever more complex world, and it increasingly requires
>regulatory mechanisms. This is axiomatic -- to me, if not to you -- and
>if you don't agree, then we'll just have to agree to differ.)
>
>
>-- Charlie
>
>Out now: "Toast, and other rusted futures" -- available via my blog
> http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blosxom.cgi
>
>
>
The problem with government, and other monopolies, is that when you get
a concentration of power in one spot, it becomes a magnet for those who
are more interested in the power than in doing the job that the power
was designed to accomplish. Because of this, centralizations of power
need to be managed very carefully. One need only look around to see
many examples of the wrong way to do this, and one need only practice
honest self examination to see how suceptable each of us is to the
temptation. Failing self examination, one could look at history.
Organizations to achieve a worthy purpose seem to inevitably be swayed
to devices for personal aggrandizement, if not under the first steward,
then under the second or third, and eventual recovery is not probable.
OTOH, there exist jobs that require large scale planning and
implementation. The streets of a city occur as a reasonable example.
Thus a conflict. All of the traditional mechanisms for promoting large
scale planning and implementation require the centralization of power.
What are the alternatives? It seems like there should be *some*
reasonable approach that works without being corrupted. But it isn't
clear what it would be. The US Constitution was perverted almost
immediately (see the Alien and Sedition acts, possibly also the Whiskey
rebellion.), so a clear statement of the limitations is no guarantee.
It appears that the only mechanisms that have a hope would require that
the power remain dispersed, but the directional authority be delegated
in a revokable fashion, rather like an e-mail auto-forwarding selection.
If I choose to auto-forward my e-mail, of some selection of it, to
someone else, then they have the capability of dealing with it, but I
can revoke this choice, and then future e-mails remain in my in-box.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
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