From: Dick.Gray@bull.com To: extropians@maxwell.kumo.com Date sent: Mon, 14 Dec 1998 09:02:44 -0700 Subject: Re: The Education Function Send reply to: extropians@extropy.com
>
>
> "Joe E. Dees" <jdees0@students.uwf.edu> writes:
>
> > [Manu wrote:]
> >> So, I go for a government that would primarily have two
> >> responsibilities: defense and diplomacy. Or do you think enterprises
> >> could manage that too???
>
> >What about as an instrument for preserving our environment (which
> >the private sector has shamelessly trashed), a global problem not
> >amenable to individual or corporate solutions, and guaranteeing
> >basic human righrs for its citizens (which other citizens, and
> >corporations, are, sadly, only too willing to abrogate, violate and/or
> >ignore)?
>
> You couldn't possibly be more wrong if you tried, Joe. If you'll bother to
> check some facts, you'll find that the biggest polluters are invariably
> *governments*. Visit Eastern Europe or Moscow or any tyrannical third-world
> country and you'll find the worst environmental disasters, including
> barely-breathable air and fetid watercourses. Here in the USA - just for
> one example - the federal gov't is responsible for wholesale denudation of
> forest land which it claims, while the loggers plant more trees on their
> own lands than they harvest. The myth that government protects our
> environment against the "greedy businessmen" is one of the worst outright,
> baldfaced lies I've seen, another of the many attempts by the politicos to
> shift the blame for their own depredations. Here, as usual, government is
> the *problem*, not the solution.
>
And who did the government sell these trees to? The corporations
whose big bucks campaign contributions and professional lobbyists
persuaded same. This graft should be outlawed, and its subsequent
perpetrators prosecuted. When trees are replanted, they are usually
of the one harvestable type, in straight rows. To call this the
maintainence of an ecosystem would be laughable, if it weren't so
disastrous. And as I have said before, communist countries were
totalitarian corporations masquerading as universal labor unions.
Joe
> As for government protecting our rights, har har har har har. Businesses
> can't "abrogate" anyone's rights because, unlike the territorial gangsters
> we call "government", they don't operate by armed force against the
> populace.
>
> Dick
>
>