Re: [Gnu-arch-users] Re: in-tree pristines fatally wounded (merge-fest etc)

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

>>>>> "Roman" == Roman Zippel <address@hidden> writes:

    Roman> I really tried to stay out of this, but first seriously
    Roman> mentioning Ayn Rand

You Have Been Trolled.  Have A Nice Day.

    >> The fact is that in modern democratic societies the crisis of
    >> social responsibility is not among the powerful.[1] It's among
    >> the _weak_, and especially the middle classes, who use their
    >> weakness as an excuse for turning a blind eye to the excesses
    >> of the powerful, which they could easily curb, simply by
    >> refusing the bribes offered by the rich.  And among the "moral
    >> left", who prefer to meaninglessly denounce the abuses of the
    >> powerful and demand "social responsibility", while themselves
    >> turning a blind eye to the hypocrisy of the majority.

    Roman> This is the same ignorance of social realities as one can
    Roman> find with Ayn Rand. It completely ignores the social effect
    Roman> of economic forces.

No, it does not.  I do not reach the same conclusions that Ayn Rand
does, but I am not _ignoring_ the social effect of economic forces,
either.  What I am doing is equating the moral irresponsibility of the
poor who consistently vote for those who bribe them with the moral
irresponsibility of those who shelter under the umbrella of the
"invisible hand."  That's a somewhat spurious procedure, but I think
it's (literally) good enough for government work.

    Roman> Not playing by the rules of the powerfuls can have drastic
    Roman> consequences, what are the alternatives?

Ask Thoreau, Gandhi, Mandela, Stallman, and Lord.  Ask the 85% of my
graduate student classmates who voted against candidates who promised
to extend the middle-class bribe called "guaranteed student loans."
Ask my undergraduate teachers who testified before the Ohio
legislature (their employer, please note) that, according to their
research, university professors in Ohio were overpaid.  (Gandhi and
Mandela got Nobel Prizes, Stallman a Guggenheim.  Students got lower
interest rates on the next tranch of GSLs.  My professors got a raise,
along with all their colleagues.  Social responsibility pays off. ;-)

    Roman> We have reached a higly specialized society,
    Roman> which requires years of education and socialization. One
    Roman> cannot simply abandon this. What you call "bribes", is the
    Roman> choice between a comfortable life and a failed
    Roman> existence.

rms and Tom are neither comfortable nor failed.  Nor does one have to
fight the good fight 24 hours a day, as they do.  The choice you
present is a straw man.

    Roman> Social responsibility also implies the means to do so,
    Roman> without the resources to act responsible, it cannot be much
    Roman> more than helpless gesture.

In the U.S. the median family by income has plenty of resources to
take more responsibility than it does.  Wide screen television sets,
Game Cubes, children who dispose of $1000 a year on recorded music and
candy.  Whether it is "just" to demand that or not is a different
question; however, the resources are there---and the next round of
Bush tax increases will prove it by taking some of them away.

We _can_ (economically) ask for more social responsibility from the
non-rich, at the same time that we ask for it from the rich.  Whether
that's what we should do is an open question, but I think it's the
right way forward.

    Roman> The individual has to learn again to act socially
    Roman> responsible, what also includes a socially responsible use
    Roman> of available resources and not that the majority of
    Roman> resources are used for a relative minority. This will not
    Roman> be an easy process, as the "bribes" are so much more
    Roman> tempting.

Isn't that exactly what _I_ said?

And the real problem is that the truly rich in the U.S. (those with a
family income of > $250,000/year IIRC) dispose of "only" about 10% of
U.S. personal income.  What that means is that in order to improve the
lot of the _real_ majority, we're going to have to redistribute income
away from the _20th-percentile_ of Americans.

If we can't get the bottom half of Americans to behave responsibly,
expropriating the top 5% of families in the US is not going to make
much difference.  Not even to the bottom half of Americans, and
imperceptible to the bottom half worldwide.

    Roman> It would be a big mistake to think that with the burst of
    Roman> the "new economy" bubble the worst is already over.

True, but your reasons are entirely wrong.  The reason that things are
going to get worse (for Americans) is that there are 1 billion Chinese
and 1 billion Indians, each as smart as any other human being, in
societies with traditions of good education that are rapidly gathering
the resources to implement good education on that scale, but they
consider an income 1/20 of the advanced economy median princely.

In other words, what should scare you is not market failure, but the
"normal" functioning of a well-ordered labor market.

    Roman> The irony is that the free market philosophies wouldn't
    Roman> work in that village at all, unless you assume a selected
    Roman> society of people with equal abilities or you quickly had
    Roman> to make exceptions for the weak. That these philosophies
    Roman> work in the global village still has to be proven, the next
    Roman> few years will be quite interesting in this regard.

Of course the extreme free market philosophies would "work" in that
village in the same sense that natural selection works in the Amazon
rain forest.  But what you undoubtedly mean is that that will destroy
the social structures that make it a "village."  You're right, only
Ayn Rand would consider that desirable.  But again that's not what I'm
proposing.

The problem that we face is that we have no known mechanism other than
the market for managing the purely economic side of the global
village, and the societies (Western Europe and Japan) that we look to
for examples of something better than "pure" free market-ism (whatever
that would look like) for setting and implementing social goals have
failed dismally at implementing "social responsibility"---their
unemployment rates among 18-27 year-olds run at 2-4 times the social
average, they subsidize their farmers to the point where they have a
decade's worth of many crops in storage and (in the case of the
Japanese staple of rice) their consumers pay 5-8 times the world
price, their politicians are regularly caught taking bribes from
protected industries, and they refuse to extend these benefits to the
much poorer new members of their international "club" because that
would force them to reduce the bribes they pay to their constituents.

Aside from Marxism, we're in uncharted territory here.  And Marxism
has a pretty dismal track record.

-- 
Institute of Policy and Planning Sciences     http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN