31 Years of the Digest ... founded August 21, 1981
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The Telecom Digest for March 11, 2013
Volume 32 : Issue 62 : "text" Format
====== 31 years of TELECOM Digest -- Founded August 21, 1981 ======
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Date: Sun, 10 Mar 2013 14:02:59 -0400
From: Fred Goldstein <invalid@see.sig>
To: telecomdigestmoderator.remove-this@and-this-too.telecom-digest.org.
Subject: Re: Smart Phones (Atlas Shrugged)
Message-ID: <513CCAD3.2000908@interisle.net>
**********************************************************************
* Moderator's Note: This is the last post in this thread. Usenet *
* followups have been set to humanities.philosophy.objectivism. *
**********************************************************************
On Fri, 8 Mar 2013 23:16:12, wollman@bimajority.org (Garrett Wollman) wrote,
...
>> > Really? I guess socialist is a word that means different things to
>> >different people.
That much is true. I think Fred Atkinson said that.
>> >
>> > To me, it means that the government provides for you and runs your
>> >life, just the opposite of freedom.
No, that's literally false. "Socialism" means that the government
invests in the means of production. It has no conflict with democracy,
since the government in such cases should be elected by the people.
Many European Union countries practice such democratic socialism, though
the ratio of socialist to capitalist investment varies with the
political winds. The government doesn't run your life; it does however
provide venture capital and takes care of life's necessities like fire
protection, police, water, sewer, education, roads, trains, and medical
care, since those are more efficient when not left to profit seekers.
Private investment is however still welcome.
"Communism" is a more extreme system, where the government monopolizes
the economy. If socialism means you go to church on Sunday, hard-core
Marxist-Leninist or Maoist Communism means you are a monk.
> To Marx, it meant that the state owned the means of production, and
> determined what goods and services would be provided and at what price
> (relative to workers' wages). (It turns out that this is a
> computationally intractable problem, but Marx had no way of knowing
> that, since the notion of computational complexity wasn't even
> formalized until nearly a hundred years later.)
True. Lenin and Stalin tried full-bore communism, where Gosplan ran the
economy without the communication signals of a marketplace. It turns
out not to work. Markets are useful tools in all sorts of economies.
However, working markets require regulation.
> In today's modern economy, socialism is nearly nonexistent (Cuba and
> North Korea are the main exceptions, and Cuba is inching away from
> that model);
Then why does Fox News yap "socialist" at Obama, whose economic policies
are what used to be called "moderate Republican" and are a bit to the
right of say Eisenhower? It's a semantic trick: Cuba and North Korea
are totalitarian Communist, though of course they like the more
inclusive, vaguer term "socialist" which also applies to those hard-core
totalitarian tyrannical poverty pockets like France, where the ministry
of cheese dictates exactly how much brie and how much boucheron everyone
gets while waiting for the Death Panels to call their time.
Which is why this discussion is so silly. It is using words with
multiple meanings to apply the implications of one meaning against the
actualities of another. Rand, like "Austrian" economist Hayek, was
correctly noting problems with the Bolsheviks. Hayek's rants against
"socialism", however, were against "soviet socialism", which is to say
Bolshevism; modern teabaggers use his words against anything at all that
interferes with the ability of the wealthy to screw the rest of us.
Hayek did not mean that.
Leading back to Ayn Rand, the patron saint of selfishness, Rand did.
Her work is popular among geeks who have little understanding of the
real world but who are doing okay and are sure that the only reason
they're not rich and powerful is because of a gummint conspiracy against
them. It is really not on topic for Telecom Digest so I think we should
close out the thread, but I want to put in a last quote, from Raj Pate,
made famous by Paul Krugman:
"There are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-kld's life:
The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish daydream
that can lead to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood in
which large chunks of the day are spent inventing ways to make real life
more like a fantasy novel. The other is a book about orcs."
--
Fred R. Goldstein fred "at" interisle.net
Interisle Consulting Group
+1 617 795 2701
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