[liberationtech] Privacy, Moglen, @ioerror, #rp12

Sat May 12 08:00:34 PDT 2012

On Thu, May 10, 2012 at 06:03:51PM +0200, Andre Rebentisch wrote:
> Am 10.05.2012 17:07, schrieb Pavol Luptak:
> >This may be work in Norway where are highly ethical/moral
> >politicians, but it does not work at all in my country (Slovakia)
> >or other Central/Eastern European countries where are massively
> >corrupted governments.
> 
> 
> Who "corrupts" government? Commercial interests. What do dominant

Of course. But this is not a problem of commercial companies, but 
the government which is a "single-point-of-failure" because its monopoly for
regulations/laws.

The government is corrupted because from the economical point of view it is
just cheap and effective for corporations to lobby the laws that protect their
businesses. In a pure freemarket it would be much more expensive and difficult
to corrupt all your competitors (or someone) because of its decentralized 
character. Without the government (or very limited government) the corruption
would become much more expensive because there would be no single centralized 
institution to corrupt.

> commercial interests want? Government to not get in their way, lower
> taxes and/or state aid/contracts. In other words you advocate for
> suicide in fear of death.

Lowering/increasing taxes is just a game for sheep-citizens, because FED can 
print arbitrary lot of money without your consent and using the inflation 
regulates your real tax burden (and of course all without "touching" your 
"official taxes").

And the same applies to ECB that can easily steal money from all EU citizens
by printing new euros. That's a reason why it is a good idea not to have state 
monopolies to currencies and stop using these fiat moneys.

> >In Slovakia open standards are mainly violated by our government
> >:-) (and it is because strong lobby of Microsoft and other
> >corporations).
> 
> Indeed, because there is no sufficient expectation of your
> government officials to act on principled grounds and set
> regulation. But even when they your government officals sell out
> they get paid. Corruption usually trickles down.

Probably two reasons why the situation is so bad in Slovakia:

1. No politician in Slovakia has been ever criminalized or sentenced because 
of his corruption scandals. 

2. Systematic fail of democracy system that motivates politicians to maximizes
their profit during 4-year election term (because after this period, there will
be new politicians and their interests, so why not to steal just now? )

> Generally speaking you believe that without market intervention
> cartels get winded up by market forces. That is often true. The
> ordoliberal view is that we know that in a perfect market no cartels
> exist, so we intervene and then let the silent hand do the rest to
> approximate that market allocation.

I just do not believe in the central authority that is moral and fair. 
I have many logical reasons why fair and honest people do not tend to work 
for these autorities and why these authorities attract greedy and dominant 
people (at least in our government, maybe you have the honest government).

I just think that we cannot afford to have centralized governments just because
people are too bad and too greedy (and all these people are attracted by 
the governments because of their nature).

Authoritatian systems (I include also democracy system here - because if you
choose democratically your slaver, it will be still just your slaver) 
maximize the power of these bad/greedy people because of guaranted money 
of tax payers (without feedback) and exploitation of many advantages of state 
monopolies.

And you are IT geeks and know that p2p decentralized systems are usually more
stable and offer more freedom than centralized systems, so why do you think
that we need strictly centralized governments instead of decentralized society?

> Government procurement is a powerful leverage on the demand side. I
> would also like to suggest that certain companies are more powerful
> than your small state, and your state is defined by what it could do
> for citizens. If it doesn't do that, then that is an indication of
> the powers of the high seas.

That's true. But these big companies still do not have the privileges and
monopolies that my small state has. And still there is a voluntarily 
relationship betweeen customers and these big companies and anybody can decide
to accept or reject the company rules (and find another company).

I admit that in the past central/authoritatian governments made sense and
provided a lot of advantages for our society, but in these days our society 
is so complex, so interconnected between individuals, that is extremely 
difficult to control it by single central governments. Hayek's explanation is
here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNbYdbf3EEc

Of course this won't change for another many years, because all governments
do everything to show their citizens that they are extremely important and that
they really need them.

Pavol
-- 
_______________________________________________________________
[wilder at trip.sk] [http://trip.sk/wilder/] [talker: ttt.sk 5678]
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 230 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
URL: <http://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/attachments/20120512/4df182d7/attachment.asc>