Re: WARNING: Political Argument in Progress

Posted by Russ Abbott on May 17, 2010; 10:09pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/WARNING-Political-Argument-in-Progress-tp5060628p5067354.html

From a complexity perspective libertarianism is aligned with favoring a diversity of autonomous agents -- as in a complex system.

It seems to me that a complex system can reasonably be characterized as one in which there are many autonomous agents, and there is a reasonable diversity among them with respect to how they act.

Libertarianism in effect argues that political and economic systems that have such a structure are both most open and most robust.

On the other hand, we know that complex systems are not invulnerable to catastrophic failure. It may be that the global ecosystem is approaching one because one species has become too powerful. The desire for regulation is an attempt to mitigate this problem by modifying how the system as a whole works, e.g., not let any one agent get too powerful.

Theoretically, it's probably impossible to erect a system that is completely invulnerable to failure--unless it is so rigid as to be essentially dead anyway. But the regulatory impulse is to do what one can do stretch out the periods between failures, to make the inevitable failures as tolerable as possible, and to ensure to the extent possible that the system will regenerate some reasonable facsimile of itself after such failures.


-- Russ A

On Mon, May 17, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Steve Smith <[hidden email]> wrote:

Chris -

This is why libertarians believe in divided government. The donkeys and
elephants both steal and abuse power, but they have somewhat different
constituencies. Keeping the government at least partly divided between them
guarantees the honesty of thieves.
 That's why I'm hoping our president will
soon be blessed with a worthy opponent, the way Clinton had Gingrich and
Reagan had Tip O'Neil.  And I think Bush -- and all of us -- would have been
much better off if Pelosi had taken the Speaker's gavel in 02.  

And I would like more division, not simple (bi)polarity.   I want Libertarian and Green and ??? candidates on the ballot and in the offices.  I want the Dems to spin off a Progressive branch and the Pubs to spin off a Hard-Core Conservative branch.  And I want our election rules to support this, not suppress it.   I want run-off elections so we can vote for OUR favorite candidate first, then vote for OUR lesser evil candidate second, making it obvious when there is no "mandate", when there is strong opposition to the lesser of evils when finally installed, etc.

I'm not that up on other forms of election rules in the world and how well they work, but I have to believe there is a better mode than ours which seems to guarantee wild oscillations between polar opposites (or worse yet, the illusion of this while the opposites are merely brightly-differently colored variants of the same damn thing).

- Steve

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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org