Mozilla tells DHS: we won't help you censor the Internet
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Stop confusing your 'country' with your 'nation state' the two are not synonymous. Your country is important because it contains people with whom you share culture, your nation state is a bunch of pieces of paper and lines drawn on a map, if no one believed in these pieces of paper and lines on maps it would cease to exist.
The nation state is next on the list of business models that the internet is going to kill. They aren't going to take it lightly.
I guess you value information freedom over basic living conditions huh.
I also like this thing called democracy and freedom of speech, which a bunch of people, normal everyday people like me, round the world really don't like. There's a hell of a lot of them.
And even if they do like democracy, they also rather like this totally bizarre idea to me called religion. In my sovereign state is pretty insignificant. I can poke fun at it. They makes a lot, billions of people, not very happy. Just not in my little sovereign state.
It's great being in my country. There's a social state, which a bunch of American's think is a really bad idea but which I, and a lot of my sovereign state, happen to think is pretty nifty.
So before you start saying that the sovereignty of your nation is really only important to your sovereign, take a look at all the people in England who love being English, France, who love being French, Iranians, who love being Iranian, Indians, who love being Indian, Chinese, who love being Chinese, Russians, who love being Russians. You get the idea.
I personally think you and reality are very far divorced in your views of sovereignty. A lot of people like it.
Go ask your average cop how many people they arrested for armed robbery and murder, then ask them how many seat belt tickets they handed out.
And this time things are going to be different because ....?
A huge fraction, if not most, revolutions end badly.
It's almost like revolutions are intended to demonstrate that "it can't get worse" is horribly wrong.
Gov't is a tool that can be used for good or for evil. I'm also with Lord Acton in my belief that power corrupts. Therefore I tend to think that the responsible role of government is very limited in scope. I'm of the opinion that the budgets of gov't in G8 states could be slashed by 75% to 90% whilst providing a major boost to the economy.
To cut beyond that would involve cutting services that are subject to market failure in which we'd end up destroying a lot of the value in our governing institutions.
One of the most effective things we could do to bring about these changes in a realistic manner is to setup Special Economic Zones or something like that where the normal rules of society do not apply and instead we'd use a more liberal set of rules. Perhaps we could find a smaller city with overwhelming popular support for these rules. Or an uninhabited area that capital could flow into to build the infrastructure from the ground up. Basically use a scientific approach to government where we run experiments to see what the effect of various rules are.
Ultimately I could be wrong and a gov't that allocates 50% of the resources in an economy provides better allocation than the market could achieve but I tend to doubt it.
When were market solutions ever tried for these problems? Not being an ass, im just looking for info.
a) do markets always provide better allocation? b) are there cases where economic efficiency is not the primary determinant of how resources are allocated?
So, 75% of the U.S. budget is made up of mandatory payments (debt interest), medicare (for the elderly), medicaid (for the poor), social security (for the elderly), and defence.
1. Health care services are notoriously subject to market failure due to a variety of problems: moral hazard, unpredictable and highly skewed demand (a small number of people take up the bulk of national costs), adverse selection, insurance free riding, plus geometrically rising costs due to increased innovation, a culture of litiguousness, and the demographics of an aging populace.
Besides all of this, all developed nations share a sense that humans deserve a minimum standard of care, that collectively we are rich enough, and the demand small enough, that we can cover everybody (subject to the caveats above).
EVEN if you decided there is no fundamental human right to health care, then the most efficient allocation (a) is subject to predominantly non-market controls & regulations due to moral hazard & free riding; (b) someone other than the customer makes the buying decisions due to adverse selection.
2. Defence is often subjected to market forces in the specifics of contracts, but the overall spending levels and results of defence clearly can't be measured by a market, since the mission and goal is about survival, not wealth.
Could the U.S. cut it? Sure. Which elected official would take the risk they'll be blamed for the next [insert tragic event here], though?
3. Social security, again, has to do with a shared sense that the elderly deserve a safety net when they are too infirm to continue working. It's a flawed, imperfect approach, but seems better than just letting people live off the streets in their twilight years, as was done for over a hundred years prior to Otto von Bismark's creation of the welfare state.
I have no doubt the market makes (some) activities more efficient. The challenge is that reality is more complicated than that.
A quick search shows that about 100,000 seat belt tickets were issued for the state of Wisconson, and assuming that every instance of driving without a seatbelt was ticketed, then there are about 6 million ticketable instances per year.
Thus, "your average cop" tickets about 10 people for each reported robbery or murder.
What do you think the answer should be, were the people put in charge?
I don't mean this to be insulting, it's just that nationalism is pretty fundamentally different to monarchy or feudalism which you seem to be confusing the present state of the world with.
You had it in Rome for a bit mixed with Imperialism but then it died out. Imperialism rose again, but then Nationalism rose pretty violently in opposition to it. Although it brought about Fascism it also brought about an end to Imperialism.
It's at the heart of the Napoleonic wars to WW2. There are still echoes of the struggle in the Israel/Palestine mess.
There's a lot, and I mean a hell of a lot, that's gone on in the last two centuries from the common man's point of view that has fundamentally shifted the power balance of rulers and subjects.
It's very, very different to the 'reasoning Kings and Queens used for thousands of years'.
In my country (the U.S.) neither the federal nor state governments have any obligation to protect me from criminals (1). In fact, if the statistics are accurate, my country has a higher murder rate (5 per 100K) than the "libertarian paradise" of Somalia (3.2 per 100K) (2) who have no central government (3).
1) See DeShaney v. Winnebago County Department of Social Services
2) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
There have been over 4,200 civilians killed in the fighting in Mogadishu in just the last 2 years (1). Even if that were the extent of violent crime in Somalia it would amount to an annual rate of ~23 per 100k. By all accounts, however, violent crime remains extraordinarily high throughout the entire country, we just can't put numbers to it because there are no authorities to report to. Here's some more context: over 1.5 million Somalis have been internally displaced by the violence, and over 600,000 have fled to other countries (2).
That number on Wikipedia is so low because it came from a 2004 WHO report which was compiled using data from national authorities - the vast majority of violent crime in Somalia never gets reported to any authority.
1) http://www.timeslive.co.za/africa/article782458.ece/4200-Som... 2) http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e483ad6.html
[edit] not that I completely agree, just that I think it's an idea worth more exploration.
How would that work?
It's sortof inevitable. Governments are subject to economic forces. They can't make the Internet go away by decree. They can make their country's access go away by decree, but that's economic suicide. For example, does China want to risk giving their citizens access to all the goodies on the other side of the great firewall? But they have to do it to keep up. They will decide that ruling over a prosperous country is worth more to them than being a tyrant.
(Not saying they're right, just explaining why they're involved.)