Limits of State Power
POSTED BY: SergeantX
UPDATED: Sunday, December 14, 2025 21:53
VIEWED: 37205
PAGE 15 of 36
While I think 'The Dispossessed' was a helpful book -
Many sticky questions remained unanswered. Who mined (or recycled) the iron and coal to make the parts to fix the railroad engines to run the railroad ? Who mined and refined the minerals to manufacture the chips to run the computer that listed areas where work needed to be done ? Who gathered the resources to create the nutrition/ food lab to research new and better food supplies ?
Basically, it comes down to a lack of large-scale organization that you need to get complicated things done. I didn't see it in the book, and I don't think the society could survive without it.
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Quote:Basically, you want the taxpayers to fund a huge take over of the private sector. And I guess, I’m not sure how that prevents the concentration of power. Where does it end? It seems to me the basic flaw your position is that it is not self consistent. You claim that ideally, you want an “end to concentrations of power,” but your methods of doing this is to put that power in the hands of the government, which leaves me with the same unanswered question I have always asked socialists, how does concentrating power in the government bring an end to concentrations of power.
Originally posted by SignyM:Quote:Er... no. How did you figure THAT? I don't want companies to be under the direct control of government. What I want are feedback loops, checks and balances, which keep power dispersed as much as possible.
And your idea is that each company will have a committee who will decide that this company needs to be under the thumb of the government?
I think I may have confused people with what I want because there are two tracks: what I think is do-able in the immediate future, and what I want in the ideal world. Immediately, I think we should have single-payer health care. Immediately, we should divorce money from political campaigns by making media time freely available to all candidates. Immediately, we should shower money on NPR. Immediately, we need to government to invest in infrastructure - especially emerging green technologies. WHY? Because the so-called free-market system has fucked everything up immensely.
This is essentially the Marxist model. Make a totalitarian dictatorship, then magic happens, and everyone is suddenly living in completely egalitarian world. I don’t buy it. And where it has been tried it has led to disaster.
Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum.
Nothing is more unpredictable than the mob, nothing more obscure than public opinion, nothing more deceptive than the whole political system.
-- Cicero
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"... but your methods of doing this is to put that power in the hands of the government ..."
Since I seem to be the only one on-line at the moment - I think the answer is posted above. Whereas both systems have concentrated power - when it is concentrated with business, there is no limiting (negative) feedback mechanism. When it is concentrated in government, you have (in this country) the limiting feedback of the vote.
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Hehe...my post got long, and I may have gotten lost along the way. Not just going to dump it now though...a couple of things in here are on topic.
Just to respond to SergeantX's notion that the people should have the right to think stupidly....or whatever...
sure, at face value, that sounds democratic. I agree that thoughts should not be mandated----
but in a republic such as ours, where our future depends on the sanity(and by this I don't mean "common wisdom"), of the populace at large,
we can't really afford for those stupid voices to get a whole lot of traction, without regressing as a society every time the American people as a whole, get complacent, and content to not know shit about whats going on.
So I do believe in public schools, and I do believe in curriculum,
and at the very same time, I am aware of the threats that such a system could pose----
indoctrination versus honest providence of facts and ideas, is a real concern----and just looking at examples of states demanding the inclusion of Intelligent Design as a legitimate theory, in science class, emphasizes to me just what a slippery slope this is, and I have to appreciate the possibility that there are ideas on the left that can be propagated in the same way, even now, that I'm just not quite as sensitive to.
There is certainly evidence of indoctrination on a large scale. Socialism has been a boogie man word for ever in this country...people are content to equate any socialistic forms of government, with our enemies in the cold war. It has been so effectively propagated on a gut level that without even truly engaging the thoughts of people like Marx, Americans have been derisive and dismissive of anything that fairly or unfairly, gets the label of Marxist, or socialist, or communist.
Now, I'm no fond of Communism, and am certainly not appreciative of any tracking that country's might have done in their efforts to follow the Marxism "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,"
But I have in the past, found it disturbing that some ideas can't see the light of day very easily in this country. It is illumination that is the most important thing, both to discover merits of different thinking, and to debunk the unsound ideas in the public sphere, that might otherwise be cultivated.
Another such area of effective indoctrination is in our drug laws, and the lack of any serious debate about them in the mainstream for as long as such laws have been used to target and sometimes demonize certain ethnic groups, inflate the for-profit prison industry, etc. etc.
The "Just say NO" campaign, while being wholly ineffective at curbing drug use, has been exactly the way we have been willing to approach any discussion on the drug war in this country, until just recently.
Sure, there have always been rebels, and thankfully, free speech and the value placed on that right by most Americans, has prevented most from being literally silenced.
renegade messages, for so long relegated to the fringe, have over time found themselves to deliver a less pavlovian response to those popular outlets of information, so good on us I guess.
But look at all the wasted time, and all the disrupted lives.
.............
So, yeah, we have the right to be stupid and ignorant, but while we've seen where that road goes, we will likely forget about it in the next 10 years if things get better instead of getting worse in this country.
There is no national emphasis on staying informed...there is no, strong, national call to for Americans to exercise our duty, and make sure we spend some time governing.
Voting campaigns are simply not enough.
That is indoctrination we could use more of, in my opinion, because taking individual isolationism to the extreme as we so often do here, is probably not tennable for the long haul.
Now, i personally, have always had a romantic place in my heart for the individualism that is so idealized in American living, but it might serve to undercut our very real responsibilit
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On Marx/Lenin State Communism: Unprecedented amount of control on a national level, rampant cronyism and corruption among lobbyists, a bloated economic system based largely on fraud and cooked up numbers, and a single party system masquerading as two parties with the sole purpose of maintaining the status quo?
Gee, I can't wait for us to collapse into a kleptocracy!
... 
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"... There is no national emphasis on staying informed ..."
My answer to that has always been a parliamentary system. When you can vote them out at any time, it behooves you to keep track of what they are doing (and in general it works better than the US system), and it behooves them to keep themselves in line with the electorate.
But direct democracy, which we can now do facilitated by computers, is another option.
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"Gee, I can't wait for us to collapse into a kleptocracy!"
Elections are coming up in two years. Time to get that vote ready !
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Quote:
You know, speaking of the Amber Alert, Utah's trying to come up with their own version now. I suspect it'll be pretty ineffectual.
Well, it depends.
(Advisement: This'll be long winded, as it's a pet peeve and a complex issue)
There's certain other factors in getting an AA issued, like if you're an upper class white suburbanite, versus poor white trailer trash or the wrong minority (in which case the trying is likely to get YOU arrested as a suspect, and a "confession" pounded out of you) - as well as the potential for abuse of the system, which has happened three times to our count but no one is gonna admit that, and certain glaring weaknesses in both the Amber Alert and Emergency Broadcast Systems which one would think might draw hackers and pranksters...
But doesn't, because despite it's glaring weaknesses, even amongst the very bottom feeders of the hacker community, an action like that is below the moral event horizon of even the lamest script kiddy, which in a sideways kind of way, illustrates that even those with no respect for the law have certain moral limits.
I did however see one remarkably decent use of the EBS on a local scale when I was living up near Flint - some store accidently refilled and exchanged a propane tank that was defective and likely to cause an explosion if used, and they put out an alert via the EBS which resulted in the recovery of the defective tank within a couple hours and possibly averted a disaster.
As far as Amber Alert, generally law enforcement personnel are fairly useless for that sort of thing, because actual investigation is no longer considered a priority by something that's devolved from public safety to protection racket, and the NCMEC is a shell game of feelgood which traded actual ability for perceived legitimacy - I could give you a list of ten questions which would have you thrown out of their office and hit with a restraining order within the hour, I do NOT jest.
However, they're not the only forces out there, and even in cases where Amber Alert is NOT engaged, there are folks who can and will set whole networks into action looking, none of us has forgotten Madeleine McCann, and her unique identifying characteristic means that if any photographic evidence whatsoever becomes available, the result is gonna be like kicking a hornets nest.
PeeJ is another such group, who deserves a bit of a shoutout today, because someone from a nearby township started stalking a female member of the socrates club (Talkin about YOU, Eric!) and PeeJ rolled him up as a habitual sex offender with previous convictions, resulting in Wayne County throwing him back in slam for a parole vio - believe me, if you handed them a "Missing-Critical (timeframe)" case they'd be all over it immediately.
Fair Warning though, they're hardcases and some of em are former DeeVees, so if you're concerned about fairness and justice, well....
On the other hand if ALL you want is your kid back in one piece to hell with the niceties or "building a proper case" or suchlike, they're a go-to group for that kinda thing.
Childseek is another, and I mention these two cause they're legal, aboveboard programs, even as harsh as PeeJ is, and thus willing to be excoriated in every possible detail down to what size shoes they wear in order to get "cooperation" from law enforcement.
If you can get the word to less aboveboard individuals and those who hang out in the "grey area" between aboveboard orgs and downright criminals, that interface can be amazingly useful because of their contacts on the dark side - there's been many a time where a name and description has been passed, and facing the possibility of high profile police/press involvement, which is a severe annoyance more often than outright threat to them, mind you - the kid is quickly deposited at a nearby fast food or convenience store from outside security camera range in accordance with a mutual SOP for this sort of thing, the kid gets returned and whatever investigation there is becomes a formality without an all hands turnout
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Rue: If only that would actually make a difference. But no one's going to do a thing about all the corporations pulling the strings and exporting our future to China. Not when the politicians on the side of the platform who might say they'd do something about it are all firmly in the pockets of those same corporations, and the ones who aren't won't do anything either because of free enterprise.
I sound bitter. *muses on that*
Anyway, I sincerely hope there isn't a collapse. The amount of suffering people would experience... But sometimes I wonder if that's the only way to establish a system that works. Reform within the system seems almost impossible.
I'll keep voting and talking to people around me, I think that's all I can do right now. My efforts at civil disobedience have been... lackluster, at best. But I really don't expect to make any difference.
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Quote:
Your communal business/government model has the same problem libertarian or anarchist systems have, you need to have a large percentage of the people with the proper mindset.
A very salient point, and one I have addressed repeatedly, both in discussion here, and in reality by waging what amounts to a covert war with the elements and structures in our society set up to "re-educate" or eliminate people that DO have such a mindset, as well as prevent folk from developing it in the first place.
Been damned successful at it, too - given the pitiful resources and constraints involved.
-F
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