flink@umcp-cs.UUCP (12/12/83)
Here is an interesting sequence of cases. Imagine that it is about you. 1. There is a slave completely at the mercy of his brutal master's whims. He is often cruelly beaten, called out in the middle of the night, and so on. 2. The master is kindlier and beats the slave only for stated infractions of his rules (not fulfilling the work quota, etc.). He gives the slave some free time. 3. The master has a group of slaves, and he decides how things are to be allocated among them on "nice" grounds, taking into account their needs, merit, and so on. 4. The master allows his slaves four days on their own and requires them to work only three days a week on his land. The rest of the time is their own. 5. The master allows his slave to go off and work in the city (or anywhere they wish) for wages. He requires only that they send back to him three-sevenths of their wages. He also retains the power to call them to the plantation if some emergency threatens his land; and to raise or lower the three-sevenths amount required to be turned over to him. He further retains the right to restrict the slaves from participating in certain activities that threaten his financial return, for example, mountain climbing, cigarette smoking. [Sound familiar? Do you see where this Tale is headed? You will...] 6. The master allows all 10,000 of his slaves, except you, to vote, and the joint decision is made by all of them. There is open discussion, and so forth, among them, and they have the power to determine what uses to put whatever percentage of your (and their) earnings they decide to take; what activities may be forbidden to you, and so on. [If the master contracts this transfer of power so that he cannot withdraw it, you have a change of master. You now have a 10,000-headed master, instead of one.] 7. Though still not having the vote, you are at liberty (and are given the right) to enter into the discussions of the 10,000 to try to persuade them to adopt various policies. They then go off to vote and decide upon policies covering the *vast* range of their powers. 8. In appreciation of your useful contributions to discussion, the 10,000 allow you to vote if they are deadlocked; they commit themselves to this procedure. After the discussion you mark your vote on a slip of paper, and they go off and vote. In the event that they divide evenly on some issue (5000 for and 5000 against), they will look at your ballot and count it in. This has *never* yet happened. (A single master might also commit himself to letting his slave decide any issue on which he, the master, was absolutely indifferent.) 9. They throw your vote in with theirs. If they are exactly tied your vote carries the issue. Otherwise it makes no difference to the electoral outcome. -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reprinted w/o permission from Robert Nozick, *Anarchy State & Utopia*, New York: Basic Books, 1974, pp. 290-2, by --Paul Torek, umcp-cs!flink
norm@ariel.UUCP (N.ANDREWS) (12/20/83)
Paul Torek recently submitted to this newsgroup an excerpt from Nozick's Anarchy, State & Utopia. In this excerpt, a slave who is subject to brutal abuse from his master undergoes a change in status (gradually) until he now is (only?) subject to brutal abuse from a majority of a voting population of 10,000 people. (The slave can vote with the same weight as the others). It would be interesting to see what conclusion or principle Nozick derives from all this. I regard democracy as the moral equivalent of slavery. The framers of the U.S. Constitution tried to prevent the slavery of a democracy by making this government a constitutional republic in which the power of government is constitutionally limited. Unfortunately, the Constitution's protection wasn't sufficiently iron-clad to prevent democratic injustices from being enacted into federal law. No political system will be immune to corruption or perversion if it isn't built on the solid foundation of a culture whose dominant outlook is reason, self-interest, and recognition that self-interest is opposed to seeking the unearned. Of course this statement can be interpreted to mean a lot of things, so rather than try to pin it down in this article, let me just indicate that I mean a culture based substantially on Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism. In such a culture, slavery wouldn't stand a ghost of a chance... --Norm Andrews, AT&T Information Systems, Holmdel, N.J. (ariel!norm)