X-Message-Number: 28090
Date: Thu, 22 Jun 2006 15:32:04 -0600
From: "Anthony ." <>
Subject: Re: CryoNet #28070 - #28078
References: <>

On 6/22/06, egg plant <> wrote:
> >No regulation means no democracy
>
> Yea, but that's OK, I'm not a big fan of democracy anyway because elections
> are dumb.

Do you think elections could improve?
Do you think that different ways of voting, campaigning, and
representation can be experimented with & improved? You must realise
that the democratic process is different across democractic nations.

> Elections are an idiotic way of communicating your wishes, there
> are much better ways. Every day I send hundreds of exquisitely precise
> messages to the Free Market

You show me the nearest Free Market and I'll show you the closest
Griffon we can ride to it upon.

> telling it what I want it to do.

While it tells you what it wants you to buy.

> I also get to
> compare brands, I can't do that in a democracy because I'm not voting for
> goods or services or even policies, I just get to choose between two grab
> bags of promises every 4 years.

Shopping is more fun than voting, that's for sure.

> When I "vote" in the economy by making a purchase I am sure to get it, I
> always win.

Should everyone be able to "vote" or is the Free Market only Free for
some and Slavery for others?

> When I vote for the grab bag I may or may not get it.

Is voting the only way you can participate in democracy?

> People
> have figured out that the chance that their vote will influence things is so
> absurdly small that it's just not worth their time to study the issues very
> deeply, the result is that the politician with the best hairdo gets to make
> the decisions.

There are many explanations for voter apathy - this is just one.

> >People do not spend their money very well.
>
> And government does? Maybe people spend their money foolishly, maybe they
> don't, the point is it's THEIR money NOT yours.

But it is OUR environment, OUR society, OUR economy, OUR present and
future. How does YOUR loot and how you spend it going to influence ME?

> I can only think of 3 ways to get anybody to do anything, force, love, or
> trade; government uses the first, people like me tend to like the last two
> better, if you can think of a fourth I'd love to hear it.

You obviously need to hear it - the fourth way is dialogue. There
could be coercive elements (force), compassionate elements (love), and
an element of exchange (trade). A democratic ideal is dialogue. But
the "Free Market" only wants to hear from you in a market survey.

Indeed, there is a fifth way of "getting anybody to do anything" and
it is called transference, a psychological phenomenon which is found
in the market, the government, and anywhere else you care to look. It
is part of the problem of (& explanation for) over-consumption. Today
this can be summed up with the phrase "buy or die".

> >You think that people should spend and consume wantonly
>
> And you think you have the right to make me spend money that I earned in a
> way that pleases you not me. And I think that is evil.

I think it is evil for you to think you can buy whatever you please,
regardless of consequence.

> >trust me I'm from an honest-to-god corporation
>
> Oh I don't trust corporations either, but the difference is I can tell a
> corporation to go to hell, if I tell government to go to hell I'll end up in
> jail, or worse.

You must realise that the government and corporations are not
seperate. The jail the government would put you in would have been
built by a business. The war you are in/directly involved in is
sustained by business contracts with arms-dealers (& all the other
businesses rebuilding the shattered infrastructure of "the enemy"
country). I could go on, but surely I don't need to? To sum: you can't
tell the corporations to go to hell.

> For some reason people love to dwell on the bad things business has done,
> but if you put all the evil business has committed over the last century
> together in one big lump I can't find a word stronger than "naughty" to
> describe it compared to the horrors committed by government.

This is as naive as the Free Market.

> Perhaps
> Wal-Mart hasn't treated its employees with enough consideration from time to
> time, but at least Wal-Mart doesn't push them into ovens.

Who do you think built the ovens for Nazi germany? Was it government
officials, or a business? Who built the arms? Who funded this or that
in return for a favour? Having read a biography of Hitler, you should
know this (unless the biography was really crap).

> Big government has created a sea of blood and butchered hundreds of millions
> of people, often their own citizens.

Do governments do this with no help or prompting from business interests?
Do businesses not "butcher" their citizens with back-breaking work & pollution?

Anthony

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