UK government about to start monitoring personal data on social network sites

[Skybird]

@ Lance, 2 of 2

The nice thing about private firms is that you don't have to wait that long, and all the people concerned actually vote (with their purchases and investments)

Tell that the big corporations, or any business that is not on very small family-level, or medium level (let's say less than 100 employees). I see them dancing around the laws, and eroding the laws by content. You can'T vote them out, and you can't tell them what to do. They tell you what you should buy and how you should live. Again I see you describing the idyll of small village communities - on that level, you would be right, like Newton is great for playing pool. On astrophysical and quantumphysical levels, you need other rules than that of Newtonian physics.

As I said in part 1 of this post, I think competition should help fix that. Nothing you can do about it without damaging incentive anyways. Why start a company here to make half a million a year when you could go somewhere else?

And I replied that capitalism has no interest in competition, but in establishing monopoles that make the business actor invulnerable, and denying others the option to compete. You have far too much trust in the self-regulation of the market, although it just has failed on monumental scale, and has worked for many years towards that logical outcome. This outcome - is no surprise at all. It was the only outcome possible.

This answer leaves me with the same question; What system do you use to do all this? How are these companies regulated? Who drafts the regulations? Who regulates the regulators? How is fiscal responsibility ensured? How do you stop the regulation from becoming invasive to the point of damaging competitive ability? What kind of taxes would be needed to pay for such a tremendous undertaking.
Imo, it has perpetually expanding state written all over it, leading to the harms you describe above.

I have answered that repeatedly now, as far as it could be answered. I said that although I am aware of the deformation of the democratic idea, I see no alternative to the state forming the legislative and being in control of the executive, and that under no circumstances I would leave any of these two to private enterprise with private selfish profit interests - you cannot have to create massive conflicts of interest by doing your way. On the individual form and shape of new laws and rules, i cannot answer in detail, that is a job for really indepth-experts and owners of insider-knowledge, so I leave it to pointing the general direction of where the trek must heading. But considering that the original spirit that our constitutions once were breathing, and considering that they were written down by people living in times of a challenging living environment, who went through harsh times we cannot imagine today, and considering that in past years and decades massive attempts have been undertaken to erode these rules and making them permeable, and considering that the ammount of laws we already have, with their plethora of appendices and appendices to the appendices and special rules and rules on exceptions from the rules, and the many self-maintaining lobby interests that live by keeping this labyrinth alive - I assume that a massive cleaning up and deletion of already existing laws would be a necessary part of it. for example, the german tax system is so complicated that experts say more than half of the world's literature about national tax laws is just about the German system. that you can hide perfectly in such a monster, that you can form your foxholes and hideouts, your evasion exits and cheating ways to fromally legally evade taxation, is clear, I think. And we know for sure that this is what is happening, on great scale.

So: we not only need new laws. We also need fewer laws, and a massive cleanup regarding already existing laws. Our states may be too compromised already to be seen as the most perfect authority to do so, but leaving it to private business is an even worse choice, since communal interests and private interests of the economy are natural antagonists. So the state is the lesser evil, still.

I do not believe in a sustainable system of economic prosperity for the entire globe in the forseeable future.

Neither do I. I believe that eventually a sustainable, enduring, balanced system of economy is possible - but not at that totally excessive level of living standards that we got used to take as granted, and only by leadership of a kind that we currently cannot even imagine to have, that acts not on the basis of craving for power and profit and ever-growing economy, but on the basis of reason and logic.

We live beyond our means, and very, very massively so. We must learn to live by less. Survival demands us to not take more from the pkanet than the plkanet can compensdate natureally, and ethics demand any part of mankind to not take more than any other part of mankind must live by. No matter whether you think we are toom many people on the globe, or material wealth is distributed too unfair - we in the West consume seveeral times too much. If all mankind would live by our living styles, then plnaet would die. and actually, it seem to head into a desaster big enough that it puts mankind'S survival into question. The planet will live on, in this form or any other. But man cannot say the same about himself. And this Science Fiction vision of getting ores and minerals from foriegn worlds - that is science fiction. One would be a fool to consider this vision a reasonable alternative to our current problems, evehn more so since even in this SF vision format, companies already try to monopolise theirt share in it - just in case "pessimists" like me are wrong and it all turns into reality nevertheless. But I personally give it a probablity of almost 0%. but I see a high probability that in a centuryor so, maybe even earlier - maybe we will not even be able to maintain a "space" program anymore. We fool ourselves if thinking we could ensure mankinds' survival in space in the forseeable future. But the forseeable future and it's vital threats are what we must deal with - and deal with NOW.
A good ammount of vulcan virtues, paired with some Roman and Prussian virtues, would come handy. Such a balanced economy I mentioned above can be reached then, but not by the forces of the market, nor by democratic populistic elections. Both procedures are flawed and prone to deformation. All ideas we have tried in our history, seem to be inadequate to adress the situation we are in today. We need something new.

Naive? Only if I would seriously believe that would come true. I just outline what in theory should happen. If I really think it will happen, is something different.
I think the chances for us falling, and disappearing, are much, much greater. the evolutionary concept of individualism seems to get it'S own problems if the technical intelligence of the individual grows beyond a certain quality level. seen that way we maybe are a blueprint that evolution already has thrown into the waste bin, like so many before. the sad thing is that in individual people you sometime see the qualities I called for. But they must become a racial characteristic of most of our species, not just a potential mark in some few individuals.

relax restrictive economic policy and lure companies(not factories or whatever) back to our nations with business-friendly policy. Who cares where the factories are if we own everything? An auto worker can just as easily become a retail manager or work in some other non-exportable industry.
Then we transition from a service economy to a corporate economy, the next step up the ladder. Some say it wouldn't happen that way, but they forget the lessons of the industrial revolution and the computer age. For all the industry we have exported, America's GDP per capita has been on a steady rise since those times. Excepting the probable results of the current crisis, people live better now, and there are more of us, and we live longer.

For my tatse you ignore too willingly the many shadow sides of what you described, but that is a discussion in itself, and this one already has become long. I leave it to saying that it is not as simple as you describe it in that paragraph.

Of course, all of this requires that the state keep its' over-taxing, over-regulating, over-spending nose out of business and not go wild with its' fiat money. That means limiting the state, whether in business or security or whatever.

We can have freedom, and security, and prosperity, but the state has proven time and time again that it cannot be the agent.

So has private economy. With it'S ever existing trend for monopolism, and it's profit interests often colliding head on with communal interests, you can't trust the market as well.

And to mention that at least once: Africa for example is full of examples - murderous, mass-killing examples - where it leads to when Western market elements are left to themselves to regulate the market. It's hell. We all live because we suck blood of people far away, and will war and mass dying on epic scales. Each of us in the West - is a killer, from the cradle on.