From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Sun Aug 20 2000 - 14:24:03 MDT
On Friday, August 18, 2000 10:36 PM Spudboy100@aol.com wrote:
> << My point with my comment was not everyone on this list should become a
> libertarian. It was just a lament on the fact that almost everyone who
has
> responded to me on the Kosovo War has been for it. Not one other here
has
> spoken against it -- at least, not to my recollection. And at least two
> people have given it their thumbs up. I find that rather strange because
I
> bet on any other list, on this topic, I'd find people who vary on that.
>>
>
> Because if you like freedom and order, sometimes you have to get the bad
> guys. And, yes, sometimes there are really predatory criminal states.
The creation of bad states -- "really predatory criminal states" -- does not
happen in a vacuum. Freedom does not, per se, encourage it. For example,
the US government, during the 1920s, helped to back German inflationary
policies leading to the rise of the Nazis. During the 1930s, the US
government sent grain shipments to the USSR, helping to keep Stalin in
power. During the Cold War, the US helped to back many dictatorships, even
by overthrowing many democratic governments and replacing them with military
dictatorships. (Democracies are not always nice, but in almost all of these
instances, from Guetamala to South Vietnam, the government which took over,
while loyal to the US, was much worse than what came before.) Notice a
pattern?
If not, recently, the US government has supported both Indonesia and Turkey,
despite the fact that both nations have severely repressed ethnic minorities
and continue to do so. (Happily, Indonesia is starting to come apart, but
the US government kept supporting its government with money and arms sales
during the bloodily repressed secession of East Timor.) The pattern
continues.
I'm not even going to go over all the little interventions throughout the
early twentieth century in Latin America that helped to set the chessboard
of current instability. (Helped but did not create, since a lot of Latin
America's problems are due to the disintegration of the Spanish Empire and
internal repressions. The US government helped a lot of these repressions
out, in the name of American businesses or fighting Communism.)
My point here is that if the US had practices a foreign policy less
interventionist, less statist, a lot of these problems would have not
happened. Or if they had happened, they would have been less severe. Also,
US involvement did not make things better. To boot, Americans have died in
the process.
You speak as if the US had been some sort of libertarian society all along
and all these bad states arose, then far sighted politicians in Washington,
D.C. saw that they must reject libertarian noninterventionism in favor of
getting involved.
> >>Trying selling your wares in Saudi Arabia without a license. Try also
doing
> things like having sex with who you want to and let the law there know
about
> it.<<
>
> But Saudi tends to be an intensive capitalist state-just not the
capitalism
> of the Scottish Enlightenment and as you have pointed out-little freedom.
> Singapore has more freedoms, yet it too is tightly controlled and
capitalist.
> Pinochet's Chile' was capitalist, yet also repressive. My point is that
the
> pillar of Libertarianism-economic libertarianism, if you will, is
capitalism.
> And it appears as if its not axiomatically producing freedom.
In the case of Saudi Arabia, oil wealth alone has given that nation a
"vacation from politics." The government there is able to take people's
minds off everything else by giving out cash. (Most of this is expropriated
since the oil industry there was nationalized. In other words, the Saud
government stole what someone else built.) Falling oil prices and the
winding down of the Cold War actually led in the 1990s to the rise of many
internal militant groups aimed at overthrowing the Saudi government. (The
Riyadh terrorist attack in 1995 is one example. See
http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9511/saudi_blast/11am/index.html)
In the case of Chile, Pinochet eventually did fall from power and the
country is much better off now. The reason he adapted many pro-market
policies which have laid the foundation for current political stability is
that he alienated both the USSR and the US, so he had to go it alone. This
pragmatic decision did help to create a stronger populace that was later
able to call for Pinochet's giving up power in the 1990s. He did this
reluctantly, but he did it. (Not to defend him, but his government was much
less repressive than Argentina's Junta run one of the 1980s and Fujimura's
Peru then and now. Perhaps this is because there was less economic
repression. If you can't start a business or invest money unless you have
friends in power, then consider yourself economically repressed.)
Also, your statements overlook two other things. One, I do not base my
defense of libertarianism on capitalism. You can reread my posts. We were
talking about US and NATO interventions, not economics. Aside from that my
claim was that societies that have freedom tend to be the more prosperous
ones -- not vice versa.
Two, the weight of examples are on the side of those who argue the economic
freedom and political freedom intersect. The Soviet Union and its puppets
fell because of its people saw they could be better off without communism.
Not one has gone back, despite years of pundits telling us everyone over
there wants to. The Peoples' Republic of China, similarly, is going through
this process right now, albeit more slowly. The other "fossil regimes" --
Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba -- have yet to embrace free market policies,
though Vietnam is trying to do this, but fears this might threaten its rule.
(Why would the rulers there be afraid if there wasn't some link between
political and economic freedom?)
> >> My examples would be Minsky, Moravec, Tipler, et al.
>
> Then follow them. No need to think or discuss. After all, they have it
all
> worked out. Just read and agree, right?:) <<
>
> Hey! I could do a lot worse then those three. ;-)
Funny, though you are admitting to be intellectually dependent here. I tend
to think these guys have great ideas in limited areas. I would not think
that because someone is intelligent or creative in one area that that makes
her or him intelligent or creative in all areas. This is the mistake many
people make vis-a-vis other people. Einstein was a very intelligent and
creative physicist (he had his limits that too, but you have to give him
credit for his outstanding successes too), but a sloppy and highly
derivative political thinker.
> First I feel that nanotech as envisioned by Drexler will happen decades
later
> then we desire and will not be gradualistic, but will become as pervasive
as
> the telephone became in the early 20th century-an explosion. I am more in
> line with Moravec's thinking that work might disappear, not only because
of
> nanotech, but large-scale robotics, as homo sapien becomes stock holders
> living off dividends, as the robots labor
I hope you and he are right.:) Until then, I'm not going to base my support
or lack thereof for certain policies on a conceiveable, especially when
people are being killed by such policies right now. In other words, it's
nice to dream about the future, but we have to deal with the present.
Cheers!
Daniel Ust
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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