From: kurt@eskimo.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
Newsgroups: pnw.general
Subject: Re: government still at large (was Re: FDA still at large)
Date: 18 Aug 92 19:30:40 GMT
Article-I.D.: eskimo.1992Aug18.193040.10993
Organization: >>> Eskimo North (206)-FOR-EVER <<<

In article <1992Aug18.043751.14045@u.washington.edu> davidb@zeus.ce.washington.edu (David W. Barts) writes:
>In article <900@nazgul.UUCP>, bright@nazgul.UUCP (Walter Bright) writes:
[...]
>> 	The "rule" of a corporation is by consent. None of the workers
>> 	in a corporation are there by force. *ALL* of them agreed to
>> 	work there, and typically signed an employment contract. Do
>> 	you think it is unreasonable for someone to be expected to
>> 	abide by the terms of their agreements signed of their own
>> 	free will?
>
>Oh come on, certainly you aren't suggesting that a contract between
>two entities where:
>
>a) One entity that has millions of dollars to devote to a legal department
>in drawing up and maintaining contracts and which will survive perfectly
>well if the second entity does not work for them
>
>and
>
>b) One entity that does _not_ have millions of dollars to spend
>drawing up and maintaining contracts, and that likely _will_ be
>adversly affected if s/he doesn't get the job
>
>... can possibly, even remotely, be considered to be a fair contract
>drawn up under non-coercive circumstances, are you?  One might as
>well call a wrestling match between an elephant and a shrew "evenly
>matched."

Walter, I have objected to such "agreements" that are really just
choices made among a finite set, where the set gets defined by
the corporation, or entity with the greater raw power, and I haven't
seen you or anybody else address this in a satisfactory manner.
Now the kind of agreements made between free entities I have in mind
is an agreement synthesized by inputs from all the parties concerned.
This process is essentially negotiation, and is totally absent in the
"free choices" you claim that employees make, when they deal with
corporations.  Instead what the employee (or prospective emp.) gets is
the "standard default agreement", defined by the corporation (actually by
self-serving "current personnel practice"), and told, take it or leave it.
That's a *parody* of free choice and really, ought not to be worthy of
comment.

[...]
>> 	I agree with you totally about property rights. I also suggest
>> 	that property rights includes the right to own shares, something
>> 	with which you appear to strongly disagree.
>
>I do disagree.  The "right to own shares" is a "right" to manipulate,
>coerce, and dominate other human beings.  Such "rights" are a peversion
>of the concept of rights.  The sole legitimate concept of rights is to
>act as social benchmarks to _minimize_ such coercion.

A "Share" is, like money, essentially an n-th-order abstraction of the
universal human commodity, toil, or if you will, the sweat of the worker's
brow.  As such it has a shimmering, evanescent quality, essentially devoid
of humanity in its abstraction, when compared to the actuality, and the
memories of the real thing, that seemingly, less and less of us have
experienced, or are able to.  Hence, it's lack of appeal to the more
ordinary person, who would prefer a cold brew, or a joint, or other more
concrete things.  It's an article of faith for the capitalist that his
stock in trade, n-th-order abstractions of toil, will continue to be freely
convertible to the first-order *products* of toil (themselves *abstractions*
of toil).  This depends partly on cultivation of awe, envy, mystery, taboos,
ignorance about "financial concepts" among those who must content themselves
with more concrete, less refined abstractions of toil.

When *really* hard times hit, which seems to correlate with collapse of
faith in high-order abstractions of toil as a *guarantor* of continuing toil,
try eating debentures, bonds, futures, or shares.  Even something like gold,
heavy, soft, yellow gold, a pretty concrete manifestation of desire and/or
avarice, if not toil (at least that of the miners), won't buy food.
People persist in confusing aesthetic or otherwise desirable properties like
luster or durability with the distillation or essence of valuta.

If you *really* want to see something abstract, try wrapping your brain
around the concept of a "financial object"!  We are talking strange things
like debentures, puts and calls, and other time-dynamic entities...  I saw
an article on the subject in a recent issue of one of the object-oriented
SE (software engineering) mags.
-- 
kurt@grogatch.celestial.com (Kurt Cockrum)
e-mail me at kurt@eskimo.celestial.com for a copy of Bob Black's essay,
"The Abolition of Work"