(WARNING: Do not read this if you are easily offended. Just hit ``delete'' now.)
On Sat, Sep 03, 2005 at 10:03:26PM -0600, Andy Bradford wrote: > Thus said Ross Werner on Sat, 03 Sep 2005 10:05:14 MDT: > > I personally don't think "true" anarchy is really possible on a large > > scale. The moment you have anarchy, people will instantly begin to > > form deals, alliances, police forces, and pretty soon you have at > > least minimal government in everything but name. > > There would be a difference. First, the associations would be > mutually beneficial and based on profit/loss. It wouldn't even have > the same structure as government because we wouldn't be governed at > all, instead we would contract for things which we need, Therefore you need a government structure to enforce contracts. Unless you are comfortable making contracts with friends of Don Corleone, who will be happy to take care of the pesky ``enforcing'' details. > and if we find that one service doesn't suit our needs we would > could easily vote with our wallets as consumers often do. This is an ideal free market fantasy. Now try to apply it in some real-world contexts. As Dave pointed out, the whole military defense issue gets to be pretty hairy. If we do not keep a strong and unified standing army sustained by national taxes, then we simply cannot exist as a nation. Any third world despot would have the ability to wreck havoc on our country with his own national army. So we need a unified national government sustained by federal taxes for at least two functions -- contract enforcement and national defense. These things are absolutely crucial to sustaining our free market economy. Aside from those functions, I hesitate to let the government control much else. I would like to see schools have the freedom to fail. I see all kinds of inefficiencies and absurdities in the public school system in which my wife currently works here in Texas. These issues would be resolved by immediately converting all the schools to the private sector and issuing vouchers to parents, so that they can send their children to whatever school best fits the needs of their own family. For every problem I witness, I can see a viable solution with privatization of the educational system. I myself was educated in a private school (Baptist) -- the only major failure of that experience was the school's inability to teach me the difference between religious beliefs and true scientific knowledge, and that played a part in setting me up for assimilation into Mormonism for eight years, which later wound up wasting two years of my education and career in the totally futile endeavor of trying to convert Italian Catholics into Mormons -- but I digress. If it weren't for Mormonism, I might still be a theist today, so all's well that ends well, so to speak. The point is, I would approve of the system of accreditation applied all the way through the educational system, not just four-year universities. A high school losing its accredited status would disqualify the school's students from admission into an accredited four-year university. Different accreditations carry different reputations, and so parents will naturally want their children to go to a school with a high-reputation accreditation -- and that will do nicely to deal with nonsense like Intelligent Design. Parents will realize that their children will have a harder time getting into a reputable institution of higher learning if the school teaches ID in its science classes, and that will put pressure on the parents to send their kids to a high school that is not being run by idiots. I could envision the free market doing wonderful things for our educational system, and I would like to see it happen as quickly as possible to save our country from perishing in ignorance. Politics corrupts, but it is a necessary evil. One of the best defenses against the corrupting influence of politics is education. If the people (a) desire a democratic system and (b) have the intelligence to use it right, then we stand a pretty good chance of ``making it.'' Nowadays, I worry about both (a) and (b). And I see it as a self-perpetuating spiral -- politics is now corrupting education, which results in more corrupt politics. I think one of our great challenges today is breaking that cycle. Privatization of our school system may be the only feasible solution at this point. The people must get fed up enough with the system as it not stands and they must demand their freedom to have school vouchers. A near-100% free market economy is one of the best ways we know of to generate aggregate wealth. So we need to ask ourselves, what do we strive for as a society? Is generating wealth and preserving individual freedoms (i.e., right to obtain and hold property) to the maximum extent possible what we value above all else? Is this really the best that we can aspire to as a civilization? Is it the best way to alleviate human suffering while promoting scientific and technological advancement? As it turns out, there are no easy answers. > Even our own form of government was meant to be extremely > limited. The Constitution was written to bind government officials, > not the people of the United States. The Bill of Rights is our > shield against bad governmental policies (or at least it should be). And what if many of those in power could give a rat's ass about that these documents say? The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are pieces of paper with some writing on them; these pieces of paper do not vote in Congress. By themselves, they protect us from nothing. Our liberties are under constant assault by lawmakers, who will interpret these documents in whatever way furthers their own agenda-du-jour. It is incumbent upon us, the citizens, to be educated, mindful, and involved in what democratic processes we do have today in order to sustain our civilization and our tradition of individual liberty. The Constitution must be written on the American heart before it can have any effect. Freedom comes from our active defense of it day in and day out. The Constitution cannot defend itself; it must be defended by those who revere it. Mike .___________________________________________________________________. "Belief far outstrips truth as it soars on the wings of imagination." - Paul Kurtz
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