Re: Bad govt represents bad people?

>sw@tiac.net (Steve Witham) writes
>
>> Saying that a bad government is just representing bad people gives it more
>> credit than is due.

John Kreznar responds-

>You leave me wondering what you mean by ``bad people''.  As someone near
>here (Eric?) is fond of reiterating, never attribute to malice that
>which can adequately be explained by ignorance or stupidity.  Bad
>people?  Well, maybe, but it's mostly ignorant-bad, not malicious-bad.

Yah.  I just meant "bad" to stand for something we were discussing: people who
want to benefit from your being taxed, or restrict your freedoms gratuitously.

>Majority or not, the constituents strongly influence the bureaucrats.

Right, the problem is more than just people in government.
I was just contradicting the idea that (as Tim May says) people get the
government they deserve.  Certainly not all people, maybe not most "deserve"
this deal.

> A
>good recent example familiar to readers of this list is the EFF with its
>shrill and incessant campaign

Yeah, I said that cleverness, etc. helped to influence but left out
persistence, volume, high profile.  But not representativeness.

> to all of us to pressure politicians to do
>this or that.  Thanks to the EFF's efforts, proponents of government
>surveillance can now claim the cooperation of a leading representative
>of data communications users.

Yup.  Whoops.  There's a footnote in one of Bruno Bettleheim's books--
he says professional organizations resemble the guards recruited from among
the prisoners in concentration camps.  They both start out wanting to defend
their fellows from the tyrants, but through compromise they end up being
the ones who deliver the tyranny.

>> It's the structure of government that needs changing.
>
>The social cancer would need to be cured.  It's hard to believe that
>what would result would embed anything like ``government''.

You're right, the problem is bigger than government.  Also, I was using
"government" in the sense of "whatever way protection services are
arranged for" rather than "government as we know it".  (But I've blabbed
enough about that usage.)

 --Steve

 - - - - - - - - - -
It is said a Shao Lin priest can walk through walls.
Looked for, he cannot be seen.
Listened for, he cannot be heard.
Touched, he cannot be felt.

Steve Witham writes:

> Right, the problem is more than just people in government.
> I was just contradicting the idea that (as Tim May says) people get the
> government they deserve.  Certainly not all people, maybe not most "deserve"
> this deal.

To clarify my meaning, "people deserve the government they get" is
short for saying that the evil, repressive, godforsaken government
than everyone complains about is mostly their own doing. Majority
rule, the will of the herd, etc.

I certainly wasn't saying that *all* people asked for it. 

This seems quite obvious to me, that the problems of America and other
such countries is not that some evil government was, say, imposed by
conquest from the outside, but that the voters got what "they" asked
for.

("They" being most of them, more or less, but not "all" of them.)

I find it useful to remind people of this point, that they get the
government they deserve, as a reminder that asking for the government
to "do something!" or saying "there ought to be a law!" is exactly how
we got into our current mess.

--Tim May



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