From: Adrian Tymes (wingcat@pacbell.net)
Date: Fri Sep 21 2001 - 21:01:17 MDT
Louis Newstrom wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "J. Hughes" <jhughes@changesurfer.com>
> > TEN PROPOSED NEW LAWS FOR THIS CRISIS:
>
> My wife and I loved this. Yes, there are many people who claim to be
> "patriotic" who never bothered to vote or attend any meetings to try to make
> a good government. We have always said "If you didn't vote in the election,
> you can't complain about a candidate or a law put in place by the election".
> If you choose to vote "I don't care", then how can you say it went against
> your wishes?
<shrugs> I voted in every single election in my county since I was of
legal age to do so. In the '00 elections, my choice for President did
not make the top three (counting by popular votes). And yet, my
protests when the government proposes and passes laws that, in my
opinion, are at best an insult to the Constitution and the spirit in
which it was written, are utterly ignored by those with any power to
significantly affect the laws. Instead, these people choose to listen
to those who vote with their money (for example: see the recent
Slashdot article on the money trail leading to the SSSCA that's as good
an example of "bought legislation" as has been exposed recently),
ensuring that said donors will have more money to buy more legislation.
Given that, does it really matter whether one votes or not? I plan to
keep doing so, since it costs me nothing (yet) and might possibly
affect some very local issues. But what of those where even the local
politicians are openly for sale?
This type of situation is what bred the worst failures of communistic
and socialistic impluses. I wonder, though, if there is any system of
government of human beings (not "perfect" but currently hypothetical
AIs) that can resist such corruption while staying away from
(inevitably broken/corrupt in practice) strong central governments.
Perhaps one that naturally gravitates towards a distributed government,
not a central government, over time, while still keeping enough
effective central government or government/government interaction to
have any meaning (which disqualifies systems like privately produced
law, since the practitioners there are, in practice, free to ignore one
another's laws).
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