From: KH.Ranitzsch@t... (K.H.Ranitzsch)
Date: 16 Mar 2001 10:14 GMT
Subject: Re:[OT]Governments was: [FT] UNSC (emotional rant), etc etc etc...
> Absender: siefertma@wi.rr.com By what procedure do you suggest to do that if not by some kind of election process? > And dispite my participation in the electorial process, I don't You will be hard put to 'statistically have much of a say' in a nation of close to 200 million people. Perhaps you should emigrate to Andorra? Or get your county to declare independence? > > One could say that by choosing to live in a state that has society, no matter how wrong they are, or find somewhere else to > live? The proper response should be to work to get the rules changed if you don't like them. Of course if most other people are happy with the way things are, you may not get far. > > One could say that the benefits of government are clearly Adrian didn't say anything for or against capitalism or profit. You are responding to what you imagine his ideas to be. A free-market/capitalist economy needs a stable political environment and the rule of law to work. Look at anarchic places like the Somalia quoted above, or Albania, or Russia or... Foreign investors shun states with poor governance with good reason. You have to bribe a lot of people, you need 'security services', and if you cross the wrong people you still may lose everything (even your life). > As for anarchism... I'd like to think that most rational people Now, there are many kinds of 'Rule', from the guaranteed-rights, rule-of-law, elected-governments of stable democracies, over the less-stable emerging democracies in, say, Eastern Europe, over relatively mild dictatorships such as used to be common in Latin America, to totalitarian dictatorships such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union or North Korea, and such blood-thirsty caricatures as Idi Amin's Uganda or Khmer Rouge Cambodia. All normal people prefer a stable and free state to one of the nastier ones. And it is our duty to take care that our country stays in the healthy range. But I think most thinking people prefer a reasonable government to no government, precisely for the reasons discussed by Adrian. > However, a sizable number of people on this planet are not so That's precisely the reason democratic governments with balance-of-power institutions are designed the way they are. They channel that ambition, giving power-hungry people something to strive for, but hedge them in by giving all people a say in the matter and by distributing the power among many wolves. Such rows as the recent troubled US presidential election are a case in point. You may or may not like the result, but having Gore and Bush fight it out in the courtrooms is certainly preferable to having Democrats and Republicans fight it out in the streets with automatic rifles. Greetings