Pflaump@wiredbrain.com
RE:
The Internet as a public good:
Fundamentals of Political Economy: A branch of Natural
Philosophy
When, as it did yesterday, Friday January 10, 1997, the Internet starts to break down ( most likely storm related ) I think about the problem of "the commons".
The ecology of common spaces ( Barry Commonner ) is one form of the "free rider" issues discussed by Mancur Olson. When there is a "public good" like a common land, it is in everyone's private interest to graze as many sheep as possible until the plot is over used and the ecology destroyed.
There has to be a careful and intelligent management of "collective" goods by political authorities. Politics is a process of "who get's what, when and how" the authoritative allocation of value, or how to manage the public welfare. How many sheep can you graze and is there a fee ? Free goods get over used. We need a better process for allocation of resources.
Life, politics, religion, love, business and money is a process, a path, a way of being - becoming something better, wiser, smarter, faster, NOT a specific plan or rule.
The America "process" is in deep do-do, because of a imbalance of the individual and collective markets and a political process that "sucks" but it is "for sale", prostituted by raw power.
The symbols, signs and images that create the collective conscience are crusted with intellectual trash created to confuse and distort in the service of private interests. Private interests are great, necessary and the engine of liberity and prosperty BUT as everyone from Adam Smith's moral philosophy to :
Francis Fukuyama's book "TRUST,
The social Virtues & the Creation of Prosperity" suggests the cause of these all too common
problems.
Wiredbrain home site/ideaweb.htm
The lack of "trust" has forced replacement of natural work groups with formal administrative rules and procedures.
The management of technology, organizational operations are not culturally or morally free. His concept of "social capital" is the ability of people to spontaneously work together and trust each other. "Social Capital" is the critical idea of the current technological, economic, political, educational, managerial effectiveness. It is absolutely necessary to understand the concept of "social engineering" as prejudiced as we are about the concept.
Human collective behavior involves private and shared goods. Some
goods and services are shared by necessity others by choice.
Public goods such as the air, common spaces, law and order,
courts, legitimate political process of taxing and spending,
defense, aggression, land use, social security and public
services, all involve synergy. Everyone benefits from a
collective political economy. Collective and Individual Private
efforts require physical and social "infrastructure", a network
of support "underneath". Compare US and the developed world, the
USS-was, and "third" world economies, and the major difference is
the level of social support for private collective enterprise.
Commercial law, contracts, courts, property rights are
"collective" supports for collective public and private
economies. This should be understood by everyone involved but is
often forgotten in the heat of partisan debate. Japan and Germany
are more productive because of their social support for
education, law and order, correct social behavior includes the
work ethic and mutual obligations. America carries a social
burden and high cost of fragile social capital, fraud, ligation,
corruption, confusion, disorder, and a dysfunctional 18th century
constitutional system.
The national system for the selection and management of social
goods and services was structured to increase conflict and
prevent good management. ( A strong anti-government bias, and
local preference is a constant in American political rhetoric )
In a way it works wonderfully; we have a lot of unnecessary
conflict, manufactured by the constitutionally mandated fractured
system; and gross mismanagement of national assess, services and
capital. BUT in a competitive global economy the social
political system will drag us down. NO question about it.
The answer is a national constitutional convention called by the
states, something they have not done since 1782 called to fix the
articles of confederation. Rex Trugwell's suggestion of
"regional" governments is most likely to succeed.
The 10 Federal
Regional Councils ( Boston, New York, Atlanta, Denver, Dallas,
San Francisco, Chicago, are natural centers of their regions;
Miami, Charlotte, Seattle, Omaha, are others ) creating
administrative regions of about 20 million that could control and
operate almost all federal domestic policy.
The federal agencies
would disperse to the field, and Congressional Subject
jurisdictional Committees ( the real heart of the iron triangle
problem ) would become regional legislative bodies.
The federal
government would be left with Defense, Treasury, and State
Department, more or less in its original form in 1787.
Copies of the SYNERGY JOURNAL sent by request: synergy8@JUNO.COM
Peter E. Pflaum Ph.D. , Headmaster GLOBAL_VILLAGE_SCHOOLHOUSE
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