At 11:13 PM 5/20/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
On Tue, May 20, 1997 at 04:23:10PM +0000, Attila T. Hun wrote: [rant deleted - bill] Speaking of power corrupting, notice how the power to speak anonymously has destroyed this poor souls brain.
Attila's not anonymous - he's a regular poster, and has been for long enough to build up some reputation around his penname.
"Power corrupts..." isn't a property of governments, it is a property of individual human beings.
Mostly. But you're presumably advocating government by humans. And while government is an abstraction of the activities of a lot of individual humans, governments do tend to accumulate and abuse power, and tend to reach a point where they're more interested in maintaining and increasing that power than in any legitimate activities like protecting life, liberty, and property. Consider the drug war, the military-industrial complex, the fraction of your income that's paying for government, and compare that with 200 years ago... Also power _attracts_ the corrupt, and the corruptible. As Henry the K said, it's the ultimate aphrodisiac. # Thanks; Bill # Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com # You can get PGP outside the US at ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/crypto/pgp # (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies. Thanks.)