John Williams wrote: > Lance A. Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > >> John Williams wrote: >>> there will be decisions made by people, and people do make mistakes. > >> You are assuming everyone is a rational actor. > > By no means is everyone a rational actor. People make mistakes, act > emotionally instead of rationally, and generally tend to screw things up. > Politicians especially. > >> You argue that diverse decentralized systems work better because >> mistakes are uncorrelated and failures are localized. > > This is too strong, sorry if I overstated. Mistakes are less correlated > and failures are more localized, relative to government control which > tends to create strong, long-range correlations.
I'm not sure I agree that mistakes are smaller (less correlated/more localized). What's different between the ability of government actors to make "large" mistakes vs. the ability of private actors to make "large" mistakes? Scale-wise, it seems to me that there are several sets of private actors that can generate errors as large or larger than the government can or has. > >> Instead, we are faced with actors who will collude with each other to >> manipulate markets, subvert systems, and for the short term gain without >> regard to long-term consequences. > > Definitely. Such actors exist in government, as well. In fact, they dominate > government. You're saying there are bad actors all around, then. So what is the answer? Can there be a balance point between two sets of bad actors (government vs. private)? John, you consistently argue for less government regulation, but I don't recall reading your ideas of what should replace government regulation. What are your positive arguments? --[Lance] -- GPG Fingerprint: 409B A409 A38D 92BF 15D9 6EEE 9A82 F2AC 69AC 07B9 CACert.org Assurer _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
