This is why a free society is evil. [Re: This is why HTML email is evil.]

[Tim May]

At 11:54 AM -0800 12/15/00, Ray Dillinger wrote:
>On Fri, 15 Dec 2000, Tim May wrote:
>
>>The reason the company now prohibits all sorts of activities, and the
>>reason the Personnel Commissar is inspecting offices, is because of
>>_externalities_ like lawsuits, harassment charges, etc. In a free
>>society, these externalities would vanish.
>
>>Nope, the fear is of lawsuits.
>
>Do you posit that people should not be free to file lawsuits?

Yes, in these cases, they should _NOT_ be able to file lawsuits.

-- If an employee doesn't like the calendar that another employee has 
on his desk, she can talk to others in the company. Maybe they'll 
have it removed. But she CANNOT use the courts to intervene in a 
matter of how the company's owners deal with their property.

-- and so on, for other examples I could construct.

Lawsuits should only be "allowed" when some matter of law is involved.

>
>
>Why do you regard harassment charges as external?  Basically
>the goal of a business owner is to have people capable of both
>producing and working together.  If you have two workers who
>are both productive but who can't work together (for example,
>one guy who makes dirty jokes and sends porn movies around, and
>one woman who takes mighty offense and brings charges against
>anyone who acts like that) you have to decide which one to get
>rid of.

Sure, one of them may have to go. Such was it 20 years ago, such was 
it 100 years ago. But the court system and EEOC sorts of offices were 
not involved until in recent decades.

Whether I as a business owner allow "girlie calendars" on the walls 
of my shop is no business of the State.

>
>As more and more women are in the workforce, the possible cost
>in productivity from such obnoxious behavior rises; If the
>company is allowing the guy to be offensive on company time
>or using company email accounts, they wind up offending a large
>part of their workforce.  They stand to lose a lot of other
>productive employees by keeping one productive jerk on board.

Such "possible cost in productivity" issues are matters for the 
business owners to decide upon, not the courts, and not regulatory 
agencies.

>
>And this is a completely separate issue from the legal liability.
>The legal liability, again, is not an externality: The company
>has to allow its resources to be used in this way in order to
>become liable.  The company could, to be fair, refuse to allow
>its resources to be used to file the suits -- but that could not
>stop the suits from being filed on personal time, any more than
>refusing to allow company resources to be used to spread porn
>can stop a jerk from spreading porn on personal time.

I give up. Reading your stuff here makes me realize why it is 
hopeless to argue with those infected with legalitus.

You will make a fine lawyer.


Meanwhile, I have decided life is too short to waste it by reading 
your legalisms, so I am must put you in my filter file.


--Tim May


-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: 1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns