From: Greg Burch (gregburch@gregburch.net)
Date: Sat Nov 09 2002 - 08:41:09 MST
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Alexander Sheppard
> Sent: Friday, November 08, 2002 2:06 PM
> To: extropians@tick.javien.com
> Subject: Re: extropians-digest V7 #306
>
> Greg Burch wrote,
>
> "Basic values of liberty and exchange among free individuals
> lie at the
> heart of the extropian principles."
>
> Well, first of all, I don't view exchange as a principle
> which generally is
> compatible with liberty--because exchange between someone who
> is dying from
> hunger and someone who has vast resources in his control
> thanks to armed
> individuals who fight for his control is a joke (in fact,
> this is basically
> the definition of a dictatorship). Vast inequality of
> resources controlled
> leads to tyranny. A rough level of equality, in contrast,
> leads to liberty,
> because nobody has a dominant role. Therefore I am not really
> an extropian,
> although I am a transhumanist. I am an anarchist, but not an
> anarcho-capitalist, which I do not view as a legitimate form
> of anarchism at
> all (in fact it is a system which I think generally would be
> extremely
> tyrannical and anti-humanistic).
Let me offer to you an aphorism well known to lawyers in the
Anglo-American common law system: "bad facts make bad law." What this
means is that modifications to basic principles made to accommodate
extreme cases almost always do violence to the value of those basic
principles and serve only those who are involved in the specific facts
of the extreme cases, while harming the larger number of people who are
served well by the unmodified principle. This little gem -- "bad facts
make bad law" -- represents one of the most brilliant distillations of
wisdom from 20+ generations of people who have had to deal with the
crafting and application of rules for social intercourse in the real
world of people living their lives, rather than the rarified and
abstracted world of social and political theory, or the moral outrage of
observers who aren't charged with the awful responsibility of
administering the law on an on-going basis.
Good judges know the terrible import of this aphorism: They know that a
basic rule modified to do justice in an extreme case can then cause much
more suffering to the large number of people who are well served by the
unmodified principle down the road, when the newly redefined principle
then gets applied as a general rule. Instead of making bad law to
address bad facts, they know that the course of wisdom is to realize
that extreme cases call for a shift in perspective in which more than
one basic principle is applied to synthesize a new rule that applies
*only* in special, extreme cases like the one that causes the "cognitive
dissonance" of injustice in the extreme case in the first place.
Extreme cases are then triggers for "limit applications," "escape
clauses," etc.
Applying this wisdom to the subject at hand, consider that the instance
with which you seem to be so concerned, a person being starved by
imposition of force, actually calls for crafting an exception to the
rule that individual autonomy and free exchange best serve the value of
liberty, rather than a rejection of the rule itself. And the exception
need not do violence to the integrity of the basic principles at all;
all one need do is broaden one's frame of reference from the immediate
"transaction" involved to the broader context of *how* the great
inequity of power involved in your extreme case arose in the first
place.
To use another old saying, Alexander, you are "throwing the baby out
with the bathwater" when you reject the basic principles of free
exchange in order to address the case of someone who is suffering from
an inequity of power caused by the deprivation of the right to free
exchange in the first place!
I can cite from my own personal experience a perfect and living example
of this matter. When I first went to China 24 years ago, I saw a
country brought to its knees by the imposition of a social and economic
system premised on the goal of imposing "equality" as a value to be
regarded above all else, especially over "liberty" and "free exchange."
Having been a student of Marxism in general and China's experience with
it in particular for over thirty years, I cannot stomach any assertion
that China before 1978 was *not" a socialist country, but some kind of
bad special example of a perversion of socialism. If you yourself have
any doubt that what China experienced from 1949 to 1978 was anything but
an attempt to instantiate socialism in a heartfelt, broad and deep way I
*strongly* urge you to read a wonderful book I've recently finished
called "Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China" by Jung Chang. The book
is now available in paperback:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0385425473/qid=1036855639/
sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-3711225-1534215?v=glance&s=books
and is one of the best personal accounts of the communist revolution,
its antecedents and aftermath that I have read (and I have read many).
Although there are some people who in some specific ways are not "better
off" now than they were in 1978, the overwhelming majority of the
one-and-a-half billion Chinese people are *vastly* better off in every
measurable -- and immeasurable -- way now than they were before those
who would "do good" by "imposing equality" lifted their boots a little
from the necks of people there. China is by no means a paradise of
liberty now, but as one who saw and knew both socialist China and now
sees and knows even the "semi-capitalist" China of today, I have to urge
you to consider that the principles of individual liberty and free
exchange may not be "perfect" -- no social system possibly can be, but
they happen as a matter of the natural order of life in society to be
the best possible means of ordering human affairs.
Greg Burch
Vice-President, Extropy Institute
http://www.gregburch.net
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