From: zstewart@nyx.cs.du.edu (Zhahai Stewart)
Subject: Re: If you haven't sent your checks to no-on-hate yet, do it!
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Date: Sun, 27 Sep 92 18:06:40 GMT

In article <1992Sep25.233805.4612@gordian.com> mike@gordian.com (Michael A. Thomas) writes:
>> >I know of no libertarians who make such a claim.  Libertarians will claim
>> >that a market imposes costs on discrimination... for example, a bus company
>> >that forces blacks to sit on the back of the bus will lose ridership
>> >unless the government requires all bus companies to do likewise.
>  Why, oh why, do people hold onto this starry eyed (tm) belief
>that if individuals can be reprehensible (which they can) that
>a goverment comprised of the same individuals will be any better
>when given a free hand?

But a marketplace composed of such individuals doesn't suffer from this?
This is getting silly.

What some folks have come to understand is that both democratic governments,
and marketplaces, when well structured, have useful niches in the conduct of
human affairs.  In particular, they have different strengths and weaknesses.
Someone who relies almost totally on government control would be an  
authoritarian socialist; someone who relies almost totally on private 
markets could be a Libertarian (or some other faction).  Either end of this
spectrum tends to attract absolutists who avoid the hard decisions by
believing in "their end" and pretending that everyone who disagrees is at
the "other end".

Some of us are "politically bisexual", with all the things I've said about
it being a loose category, with multiple scales each of which is mutable.
(For the confused: I don't mean sexually bi because of politics; I mean to
make an analogy between hard socialists/Libertarians as phobic monosexuals,
and those with more subtle politics as bi; like all analogies it is inexact,
so take what makes sense and don't bother pointing out the mismatches).

I would say that the synthesis (partially regulated capitalist state) has
clearly won the ideological battle; hard core free-marketeers were defeated
over fifty years ago (Libertarians are a fossil species, one of several), 
and hard core state-socialists have been defeated in the past few years (there
will be fossil Communists 50 years from now, remarkably similar to Libertarians
in form tho not in content).  Note that (1) the free market ideology bit the
dust first, and (2) it was the synthesis or hybrid which then defeated the
state-socialists, not the free markets.  That is, pure free market concepts 
did not win over state-socialism; instead the same hybrid which beat out
the pure free market idea also beat out the pure socialist idea.  Free market
advocates are sadly mistaken to take the defeat of Eastern Europe as a signal
that their own long-vanquished cause is going to prosper!  As a friend of mine
who travelled in a number of Eastern European countries just before the big
collapse said "they don't want to become like the US, they want to become like
Sweden" - a rich  and very democratic social welfare state.  
   ~z~

(Gosh, it's nice to think the bi-politico-economic system is winning out over
the mono-politico-econmic systems :-)

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