[11845] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Information and Liberty Part 2
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Frezza (via RadioMail))
Thu Apr 21 22:41:58 1994
Date: Thu, 21 Apr 1994 13:58:11 PDT
From: Bill Frezza (via RadioMail) <frezza@radiomail.net>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com, stahlman@radiomail.net, brodsky@radiomail.net,
opfer@radiomail.net, Sam_Boyle@mcimail.com, media15@radiomail.net,
dbuck@world.std.com, aa@wired.com, jswatz@well.sf.ca.us,
4091174@mcimail.com, kevin@wired.com, louis@wired.com,
mfeshbach@radiomail.net
To: gbolles@nwc.com
PART 2 of 2
You state: <>
<But separating government and the economy sounds to me like verbal shorthand
for a free-market free-for-all. The wholesale removal of the admittedly creaky
checks and balances currently cattle-prodding the economy will simply create an
alternate matrix of de facto governments, an environment in which the
megamultinationals will simply become laws unto themselves.>
This will not happen for many reasons, some of which I stated above. But
more importantly, no corporation has ever dared claim sovereignty. They
do not have the power to compel. The have no police, no courts, and no
army. They cannot tax. They exist only as long as they can please their
customers and their stockholders and if they cease to do that they can
disappear very, very suddenly. And some of the biggest ones will.
< Think corporations
will on their own show any altruism>
A brief aside - The failure of the altruist moral code lies at the very
root of our problems. I can and will persuasively argue the case for
the bankruptcy of altruism, as others have done before me, but not here
and not yet. It is too soon.
< or care if little things like personal
rights get stomped? Riiiight. Go live on a Superfund site for a while. I want
my profits, get the hell out of my way. Scratch it on the walls of the world:
unlimited liberty=greed.>
Of course corporations care little for personal rights. Frankly, many
individuals share this same moral shortcoming. Envy, greed, and sloth
abound in human nature. There is a widespread craving for the unearned
and a long history of reaching for the club to get it. This is why we
institute a government, to protect the properly constituted rights of both
the large and the small, the majority and the minority. This is why anarchy
is evil and might is NOT right. But when we pervert the definition of
a "right", when government coercive power is used not to defend property
but to take property and then dispose of it by no known rational rule, when
we by degrees slide into a state of unconstrained majoritarianism with
competing power factions fighting to control an engine of patronage and
largesse that grows without bound, we have reached the end of the road.
We are ready for a change.
It has started already. The economy will slip out of their hands.
Not overnight, not in one dramatic move, but by the same imperceptible
degrees by which it came under the government's control. By the time we
reach the point that we achieve constitutional separation of economy
and state we will be but acknowledging
reality. Come to think of it, much the same thing happened here 200 years
ago in the minds of our founders when they examined their relationship
with established religion.
<It's relatively easy to toss the anarchists word-bomb into the dance and blow
all the structure away. Humans are doomed to follow the Sisyphusian "I don't
like it like this, so let's make it like that, how bad can it be?" mentality,
creating and destroying their own constructs. It ain't painless, but it's
human.>
Accelerating the pace of the Information Revolution, steering
clear of anarchy, and putting our efforts in the vanguard of fundamental
social change will require above all else a strongly positive "sense
of life". An optimism about one's efficacy and a belief that we can
use reason to solve our problems. that we can use persuasion and not coercion
to convince our neighbors. This sense of life and these more noble
characteristics also exists within human nature. It is our good fortune that they are found in abundance within the emerging techno-elite that will
lead this revolution. While many of them have had their moral sensibilites
dulled or perverted by a government dominated educational system steeped
in this modern day fusion of "church and state", to close the metaphor, many are awakening. Their time will come.
<I think, though, there's a balance to be had here, an admittedly-complex
solution that neither so shackles commerce that it is unable to move and so
moves on, or that so unfetters commerce that, left to its own devices, tromps
on any semblance of structure in its own blind search for maximized profit on
goods and data. Given economic incentives, corporations can do much to ensure
market balance, to neither so fragment or so bloat that commerce isn't
strangled. And government can keep its collective hands to itself whenever
corporations freely agree to bind themselves to principles of balance,
redefining themselves as parts of the communities - physical or virtual - they
hopefully feel the obligation to live in.>
You preach a failed formula of compromise. A middle-of-the-road, let's
not-fix-it-if-it-ain't-really-broke, we can muddle through another day
solution. Face it, it's broke. There can be no compromise. The day will
come when everyone will have to chose sides and it will be important to
be fully prepared to make that very personal choice. THIS is why ideas
matter. And ideas are the coin of the realm here in cyberspace.
Regards (from AA flight 1010 touching down in Philly),
Bill Frezza
frezza@radiomail.net
