poli-sci@ucbvax.ARPA (11/06/84)
From: JoSH <JoSH@RUTGERS.ARPA>
Poli-Sci Digest Tue 6 Nov 84 Volume 4 Number 101
[This is "ordinary" poli-sci material.]
Contents: Bond Issues and Answers
Withering States
Speaking Truthfully of the Dead
Voting/Elections/Running
Speaking Truthfully of the Russians
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Date: 31 Oct 84 12:42:24 EST
From: ARAMINI@RUTGERS.ARPA
Subject: New Jersey: Jobs, Science, and Technology Bond Issue
For those of us that are registered voters in New Jersey:
Note Public Question No. 1, the Jobs, Science, and Technology Bond Issue.
The purpose of the Bond Issue is claimed to be to:
- Create new jobs by attracting high tech industries and encourage
existing industries to stay here and expand.
- Improve the ability of New Jersey's colleges and universities to educate
students and to retain workers for these jobs.
- Stimulate research to find better ways to serve you in vital areas such
as health care, food supply and the disposal of toxic waste.
The issue would provide $90 million to establish high technology centers
in various colleges, public and private. Several other states have already
begun such programs.
[This letter was edited to avoid its being an ad... --JoSH]
------------------------------
Date: 2 Nov 84 00:07 EST (Fri)
From: _Bob <Carter@RUTGERS.ARPA>
Subject: Running for office
The intellectual
foundations of freedom must be laid before the government can be
removed; and when they are, it will melt away as if by magic.
--JoSH]
As in the "withering away of the state"?
_B
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Date: Fri 2 Nov 84 08:04:53-PST
From: Terry C. Savage <TCS@USC-ECL.ARPA>
Subject: Re: Running for office
Yup!
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Date: Fri, 2 Nov 1984 16:40 EST
From: ASP%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Waiting for the State to wither ...
The intellectual foundations of freedom must be laid before
the government can be removed; and when they are, it will
melt away as if by magic.
--JoSH
Sounds like faith healing to me. Strange that a libertarian, given
to attacks on the concepts of socialism, would repeat the basically
Marxist argument that the (ideal worker's, in Marx's case) State
would vanish when it had ceased to perform its function. Perhaps
we can attribute it to the need for intellectuals to justify their
ideas on the importance of their own intellectuals.
--Jim
[If what you mean is that my holding "the pen is mightier than the sword"
is merely self-aggrandizement because I'm an intellectual, I thank you
for the compliment but observe that it is logically an "ad hominem"
fallacy anyway--it doesn't matter why I think it, it matters whether
it's right. I ask: if *all* the citizens of a country believed that
the government were illegitimate (ie, including the policemen and
members of the army, etc), how would the government enforce its edicts?
--JoSH]
------------------------------
Date: Thu, 1 Nov 84 16:27 EST
From: Steven Gutfreund <gutfreund%umass-cs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa>
Subject: Ghandi
Can anyone give me a cogent theory on why the press seems to feel obligated
to laud and praise any well known figure that dies regardless of his/her
actions. Take the case of Indira Ghandi. Here was a women who ran roughshod
over all her father's democratic ideals. When the supreme court in India
banned her from office she instituted marshal law. There was a joke in
India at that time that if Nehru was still alive, he would be found in
a prison writing his famous prison letters to his daughter (instead of
to the Brittish). The lengths she went to set up a dynasty mirror the
actions of Marcos in the Philipines.
So why does the press find it necessary to bring up all these facts about
what a caring mother she was, how she favored humanitarian efforts, etc.
etc. If one considers the actions of someone who takes a country from
one of the most open and democtratic in the world (more than it was here)
to that which more resembles a puppet democracy like the Philipines, that
that person is a tyrant and the Press should finish the story at that.
The truth is, that I am not sure that Mrs. Ghandi was that bad. I cannot
really judge that culture nor the actions that needed to be taken. But
I see similarities with people who clearly were evil.
When Breshnev died, the press was full of the "strong and clear stable
guidance that he gave his country". Yes, tyrants are real good at that
and they also responsible for the emprisoning intellectuals, bloody
suppression by the KGB of dissidents, declaring disagreement with the
government a mental disease and institutializing them, and they
consider gas warfare in Afghanistan as just part of the status quo.
Call the man what he was: a bloody tyrant dictator.
Even Shirer in his book on the Third Reich has to point out how
the political acumen of Hitler in the early years made all the other
supposed wartime heros (Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt) look like complete
boobs. Maybe he was politically sharp. But why eulogize him in such
tones?
Just because a person is prominent, or gets killed in a dramatic or
cruel manner (such as assasination) does not cleanse the person of the
actions of their life. We should hold prominent people up to higher
standards than we would the general public.
- Steven Gutfreund
------------------------------
Date: Fri 2 Nov 84 08:24:34-PST
From: Terry C. Savage <TCS@USC-ECL.ARPA>
Subject: Elections/various
Josh:
I agree that it is a good idea to encourage people to understand
that government intrusion is bad. In the long run, it may work (It is
possible to construct scenarios, however, a la Atlas Shrugged, where it
will *never* work given some distributions of competence in
society). It is possible, simultaneously, to work to *reduce*
the level of intrusion through the policitcal process. It is my view
that both routes should be pusued.
Annette:
It may just be possible to win election to a local office (ie city
council, state legislature) without any kind of dishonesty.
*Marketing*, of course, will be needed, but it can take the form of
emphasizing areas of agreement and being entertaining, rather
than scheming and deceiving. I feel that kind of marketing is
honorable, if not very informative. I am seriously considering such
a campaign in Redondo Beach, Ca in 1986. I think it would be a
hell of a lot of fun, regardless of the outcome, and it might just
work!
Allen:
It is misleading to focus on the academic view that by accepting a
legislative salary you are participating in thievery. I take a much
more "black box" view of the situation--A certain level of thievery
exists-if, through their actions, an individual produces a net reduction
in thievery, they have done us all a service.-the fact that they may
participate in the thievery in the process is inconsequential (except
perhaps to purists)
Numerically:
State Amount of theft Theft by X Theft by others
------ --------------- ---------- ---------------
A $100 0 $100
B $80 $20 $60
If X, through his/her direct action, transforms the situation from state
A to state B, then X should be commended as having done a noble thing
(unless they did it by accident, in which case it was just a fortunate
stroke of luck)
As to building a free society, I of course completely agree! I
just think it has to be done off-planet.
Galt's gultch is in the asteroids!!
TCS
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 84 9:17:54 PST
From: hibbert.pa@XEROX.ARPA
Subject: Voting for a winner
[I am a registered Republican although more a LIberatarian at heart.
While I think the Libertarian cause is a good one, I feel that they
will never really have a good chance at electing someone to the
highest office, and so I will vote for Reagan in this coming election.
Stuart]
Why does it only make sense to vote for someone who might win? Under
the current election system, you only get one chance to express your
opinion, and reducing the number of choices to those that have a chance
of being the majority (or plurality) view emasculates the process. It
only takes one look at the last race, (in which the polls said that half
the people who voted at all were voting against someone rather than for
someone) and Reagan's subsequent claim of a "mandate" to see that any
vote is construed as implying total agreement with the vote-getter. Why
not say what you want with your one chance to express your opinion?
You'd rather tell them what you think you can get?
Chris
------------------------------
Date: Fri 2 Nov 84 13:56:05-PST
From: LUBAR%hplabs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
Subject: changing gov't
[Yikes! Your recipe for good government is "Find a strong-willed,
fundamentally dishonest person, and put him (or her) in charge
of everything." ?!?!?! --JoSH]
My last posting was rather tongue-in-cheek when it came to that last
paragraph, so I really do agree with you that the results of my
proposal are not likely to produce good government. I was saying that
no one who presents himself as a candidate for significant change is
likely to win an election, so that the only way I see for change
within the system is for a candidate to put on one face to get elected
and then another when he wins. But I do agree (and should have stated
in my previous posting) that such a person is not likely to be the
sort I'd really want in control. I just wish I believed in some
desirable means of change within the system.
Annette
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 84 09:53 MST
From: "Paul W. Benjamin" <Benjamin@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS.ARPA>
Subject: Re: Running for Office
The biggest problem that I have with running for office is that the
system does not encourage responsible involvement. The state
legislature here (Arizona) would seem a reasonable place for me to
turn. In fact, in my district, 2 of our 3 legislators are running
unopposed in the general election. It would seem like an easy enough
process to get involved in. However, upon examination, it turns out
that most state legislators in this country are paid either a paltry
per-diem or a salary that borders on minimum wage. The real problem
there is that few can afford to serve. It's a full time job, at least
when done properly. If one is self-employed or has an extremely
flexible job situation, perhaps it is possible to do it right, but, for
the most part, the system encourages representatives who are wealthy
(the remuneration is irrelevant), who are poor (the remuneration is
adequate) or who can't devote enough time to the job. The middle class,
is just not represented, at least not by the middle class.
I have been reading this digest long enough to determine that the
notion that anyone involved in government should be paid more is not
going to be particularly popular, but I contend that that is the only
way in which we will obtain competent representative goverment.
------------------------------
Date: Mon 5 Nov 84 09:10:56-PST
From: DANTE@EDWARDS-2060.ARPA
Subject: Giving up on the System
"To run for office is to lie, cheat, and steal"
"all the political doings are bad"
I am a complete newcomer to this discussion so I hope my thoughts are
not just a rehash of what others have said. However I have heard this
argument many times before. Classically it goes like this:
All the politicians are corrupt. They are lying, cheating, stealing
from the people. Hence we must get rid of the politicians. Throw the
rascals out. The people must govern themselves. ... Of course, the people
have been oppressed so long that it will require those of us who understand
the situation to provide leadership in the beginning. All power to the
people! All power to the people's soviets!
Every attempt I know that has tried to put direct power in the hands
of the people has ended with power more firmly than ever in the hands of an
elite. The only revolutions I know that have worked have been those
carried out within the system in which those who held power, though they
may have trimmed their numbers, simply reorganized the way they held power
(e.g. the American Revolution).
But this time it's going to be different! We will have direct part-
icipation of all the people. (Electronic democracy?) In principle,
fantastic! But lets look at the grubby details. Do you really mean that
you want all the people to consider which road is going to be paved next
and which construction company is going to get the contract? All the
people are going to read all the bids? If you actually believe that you
have never read a bid yourself. The alternative is to let someone else do
it for you. But if you select someone else to do it for you, then no
matter what you call it, you have reinvented government offices. I could
go on and on. The fact is that a government organization is a necessary
evil once you have reached a certain level of complexity. And a big city
is already that complex.
Still not convinced? Want to see real democracy in action? Do you
have a small college nearby? See if you can sneak into a faculty meeting.
I don't mean meetings run by the Administration, but the faculty on their
own. (Large schools usually have elected bodies, if this is all you can
find just assume, as is probably true, that these elected representatives
are representing only themselves.) Now don't leave early, sit through the
whole meeting. Then ask yourself "Is thisthe way I want our nation to be
run?"
The government we have in the U.S. is the result of thousands of years
of thought and experimentation. Bad as it is, look at the alternatives. I
believe that every American ought to be required to live in a foreign
country for at least two years. (An American enclave does not count.) We
would really be a nation of chauvinists. So what is it that we have that
is better than what we find elsewhere? I think the key is that our system
is slowly changeable. The government Thomas Jefferson presided over was
quite different from that of Herbert Hoover. Harry Truman's government
differed from that of Hoover. Reagan's is a change from Truman's. (I am
talking about the total government, not the Administration.) Yet, however
different, the bases of our system have remained the same. They have
allowed quite radical changes to slowly take place. The pendulum has swung
back and forth but it has swung. The government can be improved and
changed from within. By participation, voting, supporting candidates, even
running for office, we can make a positive difference. But we might also
make a negative difference. The system has enough inertia so that negative
differences can be noticed early enough to be headed off before they become
disasters. So far, I haven't heard of anybody, including myself, that I
trust to know enough to replace our system with something better.
Sorry to have been so long winded,
Mike
[Hoo boy. This sounds like an open invitation to expound the theory of
anarcho-capitalism... Hold your breath, cross your fingers, and hope
I don't take you up on it. --JoSH]
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 5 Nov 1984 16:10 EST
From: ASP%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
Subject: Letting the people have what they want
I'm not sure we really want to put power of any kind in the hands of the
general public, especially not power that is capable of acting quickly.
Consider the accomplishments of the American public when given free reign
to determine some aspect of our society:
1) Nielsen ratings. A favorite issue of the wine-cheese-and-public-TV
elitists, but an example nonetheless of the kind of glop the people will
select for themselves given the opportunity. I wouldn't like to see a
government run on jiggle, laugh-tracks, and soap opera.
2) Presidents. The American public has elected a President for a second
term only once since Eisenhower, and that Presidency ended in disaster.
There's an unpleasant look to this: most of the time, our electoral system
devolves from democracy to rule by a rotating Presidency; when the electorate
breaks out of the pattern, they do so for reasons that are both wrong and
self-destructive.
3) Self-interest in politics. This is the big one. Where I live, rent
control has completely destroyed any semblance of sanity in the housing
market. "Community organizations" hold public meetings on the problem
of squeezing (legitimate) maintenance out of landlords who can no longer
afford to operate a well-run apartment building. In the face of local
governmental pressure, MIT is being forced to build low-income, non-student
housing on land originally purchased for the construction of dormitories.
The reason for all of this? There are many more tenants in Cambridge than
landlords, and they vote. The pattern is repeated elsewhere. Most of the
major accomplishments of I & R have been laws like Proposition 13, which
provided a grab bag of tax breaks to current residents by penalizing new-
comers. You might be able to run an economic system on greed, but you
can run a government by it.
Alas, I'm afraid that I don't have the vaguest idea of how to build a
representative government that won't suffer from the narrow-minded
ignorance of the bulk of the electorate. But removing the encumbrances
to democracy in our present system is only going to put government in
the hands of clods that much more quickly.
--Jim
[OK, I'll ask you the question I once asked Sen. Joe Biden: "Should the
government give the people what they want or what they need?" I sure
hope you can give a better answer than he did... --JoSH]
------------------------------
Date: Mon 5 Nov 84 14:54:19-PST
From: LUBAR%hplabs.csnet@csnet-relay.arpa
Subject: voting
I finally realized the question that's really bugging me about how people
vote. I don't really want to fool the voters and elect someone dishonestly,
I want to educate the voters to vote more intelligently. But as I see it,
most voters don't *care* about the issues; they don't even care that they
don't care. So before we can educate people about issues, we need to
educate them that issues are more important than personalities. And this
is where I get stumped. Does anyone have any ideas (short of brainwashing
and other forcefully coercive means) on how to make the average man or
woman on the street care about the issues?
Annette
------------------------------
Date: Tuesday, 6 November 1984 00:15:43 EST
From: Hank.Walker@cmu-cs-unh.arpa
Subject: nastiness tolerance
I gather from a few recent messages, that we now regard the usual "rip the
hell out of the US" items in Pravda as normal Soviet dialog, while "evil
empire" statements by the President are so nasty that they will cause the
Russians to run off and sulk.
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End of POLI-SCI Digest
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