faustus (02/25/83)
Rabbit!jj has made a point that we seem to miss much too often in our political discussions. It is easy enough to invent models to describe sociology and to predict the effects of any political system, but the real world it not by any means constrained to follow our models. The most significant test of any theory is, for sociology and political science, just as it is for 'real' sciences, the degree to which it works in the real world, and in the case of socialism and also unre- strained capitalism, the model tends to work quite badly. Men are not going to work for the good of the state with no concern for themselves, but rather are to an extent greedy and want to enjoy the fruits of their own labor. There is no way that we can avoid this fact. And likewise, an economy based solely on lassez-faire cannot suceed because there is no way to ensure perfect competition. Nature took millions of years to work out what system it has, and we expect to develop a system based on 'natural selection' that will work for the economy in the few hundred years that people have been thinking about this? No, the economy will not take care of itself, and we need a certain amount of government control, and perhaps ownership of resources to make it run smoothly. But the one thing that we must remember is that nothing EVER works the way the theorists say it will, at least not in sociology. We must examine our theories under the light of empirical evidence and modify them so that they do work. This is the major distinction between the scientific method and mysticism, and I think that we all would prefer to think of sociology as a science rather than a subset of mysticism... Wayne Christopher