“government”

The present’s already hard to believe. It’s the most hopeful of times, the most dreadful of times.

On one hand, the Pirate Party —a left/right-bloc-independent party pursuing “the reform of laws regarding copyright and patents, the right to privacy, both on the Internet and in everyday life, and the transparency of state administration.”^WP— wins an astonishing 7.1% of Swedish votes and gets a seat in the European Parliament.
On the other hand, in less than a month, China will start forcing PC manufacturers to include censoring software —ridiculously named Green Dam Youth Escort— on every computer’s hard drive.

Travelling all across the developed world this question’s naturally recurring. Here some likely fragments of the answer:

It’s a stab. Please help with more ideas that come to mind.

A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.

As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.

In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.

Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?

Ugh. I actually hope to use any wealth I happen to make to help the causes I believe in and we even coincide in some of those causes, but I recoil from the reasoning that led Andrew Carnegie^WP to philanthropy. A reasoning he most famously presented in his Gospel of Wealth, quoted above.

In what could charitably be attributed to a deep generational chasm (he did wrote more than 100 years ago), he’s insufferably unctuous, enlisting at every opportunity the “wise men,” “the thoughtful man,” “most of those who think,” “the best and most enlightened public sentiment,” and a further, seemingly endless cohort to his aid, substituting them for argument.

He frequently employs a fatalism I’ve always found devious, the fatalism that makes some limp effort to justify the status quo only to conclude with the friendly provision that it is all inevitable anyway.

But most depressingly, he makes scant sense and obscures rather than illuminate. Speaking in pompous, hyperbolic generalities, he never goes around to explaining just why wealth accumulation is increasing—he only talks vaguely about assembling “thousands of operatives in the factory, in the mine, and in the counting-house,” as if wealth creation were a matter of mere herding. He uses dubious anecdotal evidence —a “most worthy” man’s impromptu giving of a quarter is interpreted as “probably one of the most selfish and very worst actions of his life”— and rather idiotic “insights” into the mind of men —at one point he actually claims the rich would take in stride being confiscated, happy to brag about how much they’d been deprived of.

He seems to believe that rich men acquire their wealth by doing something extraordinarily good, necessary, and rare. Yet, he entitles them to no right to what they’ve earned. They should “provide moderately for the legitimate wants of those dependent upon him” and consider the leftovers society’s trust fund, theirs only lent to administer for the good of all.

It’s not all bad, I actually sympathize, from a distance, with his Randian views on charity and property, and I also agree with his Hayekian wish for evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes. Still, the essay is unusually abysmal. If this is the best tract we have arguing for private philanthropy no wonder there’s so little.

What would you give up first, capitalism or democracy?

Never had the bug bit me before—always thinking crypto-anarchism^WP a hangover from the cyberpunky 80s. It isn’t. It’s pure magic. And it may be anarchy’s best hope—ever.

Timothy C. May’s^WP long, superb essay, True Nyms and Crypto Anarchy (which appears in an essay collection^AM around Vernor Vinge’s True Names novel) has made a wild-eyed believer out of me. Fascinating stuff, this. (May, btw, is a former chief scientist at Intel, confirming my hypothesis that the people at the trenches of the Moore revolution had to be among humanity’s very best.)

Never had I been more than casually interested in cryptography. Now my copy of Schneier’s Applied Cryptograpy is on its way. Can’t wait.

Ayn Rand’s^{WP, ELZR} Atlas Shrugged^AM is on the wishlist. I’ve read a sketch of the plot and as soon as I get my hands on it, it’ll be the first book I read. It was a tortuous decision though. I tend to anguish over negative criticism and she’s a woman with her fair share of it. People talk jadedly about “growing out of Rand’s idealism.” They compare her with Herman Hesse, good for rebel-without-a-cause teenagers but pity the adult that still believes them. And so on.

The thing is her radical capitalism and love for America are exactly where I am at.

Ah, the ever-recurring techno-myth: a dirt-cheap educational contraption to revolutionize third world children’s education. I can’t even remember when I heard about it first. I was thrilled though, enthused. But then with the undelivering years went my excitement. For one thing, the deployment plan is based almost entirely on governments, which is a nonstarter. More importantly, there might be better options. Cellphones are already a phenomenal worldwide success, even in the poorest countries, and that’s because they’re tangibly, immediately useful. A recent Economist article, Splitting the Digital Divide, mentions other less obvious but intriguing options.

And yet, reading yesterday’s New York Times article, For $150, Third-World Laptop Stirs Big Debate (yup, there’s been some price adjustment), made me think again of the amazing possibilities that can unfold from a personal mobile computer in the hands of a child. Blame it on Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age^AM with its amazing book-machine, the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer —every self-learner’s wet dream.

At any rate, it seems to me that (save actual existence and deployment) the crucial factor for success will be software and so, for what it’s worth, here’s a promise: If and when Negroponte’s brainchild ever sees daylight, I shall stop whatever I’m doing, for three months, to develop mindblowing educational software for it. There, I said it.