At 1:35 PM -0700 4/30/01, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >The idealism that I refer to is the concept that human beings can create >something substantially better than what exists. We should all have a >touch of this idealism but reality doesn't fit the model so well. Many of us certainly believe that "human beings can create something substantially better than what exists." Examples abound, so I don't have to start making a laundry list. However, what many of us also believe is that top-down or central planning or scientific economic planning rarely works, and the few times it works are swamped by the problems it creates (ethical problems, efficiency problems, and misallocation of resources problems). I'd say most of us on this list _are_ in fact "idealists" in the normal sense of the word: we hope to see changes made to society. If we were not idealists, we'd probably be Democrat Party activists and hacks, perhaps working on ways to redistribute income to our voting base. Or Republican Party organizers, arranging fund-raisers for our candidates and finding ways to have Seawolf submarine factories built in our local political districts. > > > You have fallen for the Inchoate fallacy. Profit seeking is not the sine >> qua non of literal anarchistic systems--non-coercion is. >> >Now that's idealism - a human-powered machine that doesn't work by >coercion. Yep, that's where I'd place my bet. Assuming you are being facetious, you are missing the anarchies that are all around us. Bookstores, restaurants, and a hundred other similar examples operate with essentially no coercion over customers, no coercion over who enters their stores or restaurants, and with very little "regulation" by men with guns. Noncoercion _is_ the sine qua non in that when agents are not coerced, their natural profit-making motivations can then operate. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
