![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
autonomy, democracy, and freedom
Dec. 25th, 2011 05:33 pmthe 10 december issue of the economist has a pair of back-to-back articles on honduras's experiment with semi-autonomous cities to try to improve the country's economy. the first is just an overview of what honduras is proposing. the second is much more interesting.
a couple of libertarian groups want to run two of the semi-autonomous cities honduras is setting up. their leaders have some... interesting ideas about the nature of government:
however, these guys appear to believe in what might be termed a "market approach" to rule. i was rather skeptical of that when i originally read the articles a week ago, and my recent virtual flight from livejournal has done nothing to convince me that such an approach is at all useful.
the right to leave is better than no such right, but it's a poor guarantee of good government. in order to exercise it, a person must be willing and able to simultaneously change jobs and move house, and as a result probably lose most of their in-person social network. people who are wealthy can pull off a trick like that, as can those whose skills are presently in demand. and the truly desperate can flee as well; if the only other options are starvation or slavery, why not take a chance in the despotate next door?
but does that yield well-governed cities? if the logic were to apply, social networking sites would be "well governed". they'd do what their users wanted them to, to the extent that their conflicting demands could be made to work together. their interfaces would be as slick as wet glass, and their dev teams would be responsive to their needs, and certainly not make abrupt -- often technically broken -- changes to the service without consulting their users. but we don't see that, despite the switching costs for online social networks being much lower than physical moves and job changes.
the reason is obvious: social networking sites' "communities" are not their customers. their customers are their advertisers and whoever the sites sell their "communities'" information to. so long as those customers are relatively happy, the social networking sites are free to do whatever they want to their users.
i have deep suspicions that's what these libertarians really want. their customers will be the corporations who bribe them to permit shoddy goods, pollution, and poor working conditions in their cities. the residents will be just another commodity to profit from.
but perhaps one of these guys does really does believe that something like a market solution will provide utopia. maybe he'll even try to set up a showpiece city like singapore (conveniently forgetting that singapore is a republic, if a dubiously honest one). but if the absolute power doesn't corrupt him, the huge piles of money his customers can offer will. i have great faith in human nature. one of the tenets of my faith is that people who want power without responsibility shouldn't be given any.
advocacy: if you want to comment to the FTC about the facebook settlement and my modest proposal for it, you have until friday. vote early, vote often!
a couple of libertarian groups want to run two of the semi-autonomous cities honduras is setting up. their leaders have some... interesting ideas about the nature of government:
Mr [Patri] Friedman[, a grandson of Milton Friedman,] is an outspoken critic of democracy. It is “ill-suited for a libertarian state”, he wrote in an essay in 2009—because it is “rigged against libertarians” (they would always lose) and inefficient. Rather than giving its citizens a voice, he argues, they should be free to exit; cities should compete for them by offering the best services.one of his backers is peter thiel, "a Silicon Valley billionaire who founded the internet payment service PayPal and was an early investor in Facebook". mr. thiel has similar beliefs:
Mr Thiel’s ambitions go far beyond scouting out the next big thing in technology. “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wrote in an essay in 2009. This is why libertarians should find an escape from politics, he added. “Because there are no truly free places left in our world, I suspect that the mode of escape must involve some sort of new and hitherto untried process that leads us to some undiscovered country.”the notion that there's a fundamental tension between democracy and freedom isn't new. it's why we have a bill of rights; some of the founding fathers convinced the rest of them that mere majority rule was no protection for individual liberty.
however, these guys appear to believe in what might be termed a "market approach" to rule. i was rather skeptical of that when i originally read the articles a week ago, and my recent virtual flight from livejournal has done nothing to convince me that such an approach is at all useful.
the right to leave is better than no such right, but it's a poor guarantee of good government. in order to exercise it, a person must be willing and able to simultaneously change jobs and move house, and as a result probably lose most of their in-person social network. people who are wealthy can pull off a trick like that, as can those whose skills are presently in demand. and the truly desperate can flee as well; if the only other options are starvation or slavery, why not take a chance in the despotate next door?
but does that yield well-governed cities? if the logic were to apply, social networking sites would be "well governed". they'd do what their users wanted them to, to the extent that their conflicting demands could be made to work together. their interfaces would be as slick as wet glass, and their dev teams would be responsive to their needs, and certainly not make abrupt -- often technically broken -- changes to the service without consulting their users. but we don't see that, despite the switching costs for online social networks being much lower than physical moves and job changes.
the reason is obvious: social networking sites' "communities" are not their customers. their customers are their advertisers and whoever the sites sell their "communities'" information to. so long as those customers are relatively happy, the social networking sites are free to do whatever they want to their users.
i have deep suspicions that's what these libertarians really want. their customers will be the corporations who bribe them to permit shoddy goods, pollution, and poor working conditions in their cities. the residents will be just another commodity to profit from.
but perhaps one of these guys does really does believe that something like a market solution will provide utopia. maybe he'll even try to set up a showpiece city like singapore (conveniently forgetting that singapore is a republic, if a dubiously honest one). but if the absolute power doesn't corrupt him, the huge piles of money his customers can offer will. i have great faith in human nature. one of the tenets of my faith is that people who want power without responsibility shouldn't be given any.
advocacy: if you want to comment to the FTC about the facebook settlement and my modest proposal for it, you have until friday. vote early, vote often!