Re: Decline and Fall
In article <2tnlbgINNjss@life.ai.mit.edu> you write:
Decline and Fall of the Nation State:
Tuesday's WSJ had an article on how private money market funds are starting to jawbone foreign governments just like the World Bank used to.
Case cited was Fidelity Investments calling Mexican bank officials during the Peso crisis after the recent assasination. They said "we'll invest another $18 billion (of ours and other fund's money) if you do what we say and if not..."
DCF
"If they hadn't killed quite so many people, you'd almost have to feel sorry for them."
--- WinQwk 2.0b#1165
Noam Chomsky spoke here in January and made the point that the increasing mobility of capital increasingly holds governments hostage. He felt that it was the current greatest danger to democracy, because it bypasses any leverage voters might have on politicians at the ballot box. It's not clear how well his argument really holds together, though, since the leverage that the mobile capital has is via the satisfaction of the voters. If capital flees a country, the population will be less productive, dissatisfied and vote the politicians out of office. So policies that favor capital in some sense also favor labor. Anyone else care to take shots at his argument or support it? Mobile capital does mean that population and government lose their ability to decree the relative rewards made to capital and labor. If labor requires too high a return, capital will go somewhere else. The ownership and control of capital IS highly skewed, but since it's still distributed among many parties, it is forced to compete and remain engaged, lest it depreciate in value. Go cyphercredits.
On Wed, 15 Jun 1994, Rich Lethin wrote:
Noam Chomsky spoke here in January and made the point that the increasing mobility of capital increasingly holds governments hostage. He felt that it was the current greatest danger to democracy, because it bypasses any leverage voters might have on politicians at the ballot box.
If I withhold my capital from some country or enterprise I am not threatening to kill anyone. When a "Democratic State" decides to do something, it does so with armed men. If you don't obey, they tend to shoot. I know this may violate the cypherpunks politics alert threshold, but people out there have to realize that if technological change enhances the powers of individuals, their power is enhanced no matter what the government does. If the collective is weakened and the individual strengthened by the fact that I have the power of cheap guns, cars, computers, telecoms, and crypto then the collective has been weakened and we should ease the transition to a society based on voluntary rather than coerced interaction. Unless you can figure out a new, improved way of controlling others; you have no choice. DCF "1000 idiots are not an improvement over 1 idiot."
C'punks, On Wed, 15 Jun 1994, Rich Lethin wrote:
. . . Noam Chomsky spoke here in January and made the point that the increasing mobility of capital increasingly holds governments hostage. He felt that it was the current greatest danger to democracy, because it bypasses any leverage voters might have on politicians at the ballot box. . . .
Chomsky's error is that he equates governments with democracy. There are plenty of governments (most, ALL?) that incorporate no meaningful elements of democracy. More often than not, it is the politicians who use governments to hold the citizens hostage. Then, of course, there is the issue of whether democracy, itself, is a good thing or not. (Personally, I'll take freedom over democracy any day.) The important issue for Cypherpunks is how we should respond to this seemingly inevitable increased mobility of capital. Does it pose a threat to privacy? If so, let's write code to thwart the threat. Does it offer us any tools we can use to fight the efforts of nation-states to take away our privacy? If so, let's write code to take advantage of those tools. Let's not forget why we are here. S a n d y
Date: Sun, 19 Jun 1994 08:55:39 -0700 (PDT) From: Sandy Sandfort <sandfort@crl.com> [Chomsky] equates governments with democracy. This is most certainly *not* true. If anything, I think that Noam Chomsky would be far more likely to claim that there has never been a democratic state, although its also reasonably likely that he'd first ask about the meaning of the term `democratic state'. I suspect that the root of Chomsky's concern is that the power of big money interests should be concerned to be at least as large a source of concern to individuals as the power of big government. While many lump him in with `consiracy theorists', his arguments are almost universally based on a combination of (a) widely available evidence (b) the idea that entities tend to act in their own self interest and (c) something akin to Occam's Razor, i. e. simpler explanations are more likely to be correct. Rick
participants (4)
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Duncan Frissell -
lethin＠ai.mit.edu -
Rick Busdiecker -
Sandy Sandfort