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Memes in the Watson category “/law, govt and politics/government”

181–197 of 197

What If People Stopped Valuing Money?

Mexico and Chile and Brazil and Argentina were likewise bankrupt--and Indonesia and the Philippines and Pakistan and India and Thailand and Italy and Ireland and Belgium and Turkey. Whole nations were suddenly in the same situation as the San Mateo, unable to buy with their paper money and coins, or their written…

The Light of Science Defines the Rights of Human Beings

All eyes are opened, or opening to the rights of man. The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born ,with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of god…

Two Economic Models for States

Walker also has an economic vision for his state—one which is common currency in the Republican Party today, but hitherto alien in a historically progressive, unionist Midwestern state like Wisconsin. It is based on a theory of economic growth that is not only anti-statist but aggressively pro-corporate: relentlessly…

Socialism and Individualism are Absurdities

To the onlooker, both Individualism and Socialism are, in the absolute, absurdities; the one would make men the slaves of the violent or rich, the other the slaves of the State official, and the way of sanity runs, perhaps even sinuously, down the intervening valley.

Leave Room for Uncertainty

What then is the meaning of the whole world? We do not know what the meaning of existence is. We say, as the result of studying all of the views that we have had before, we find that we do not know the meaning of existence; but in saying that we do knot know the meaning of existence, we have probably found the open…

Communism and the scientific viewpoint

I would like to remark, in passing, since the word "atheism" is so closely connected with "communism," that the communist views are the antithesis of the scientific, in the sense that in communism the answers are given to all the questions - political questions as well as moral ones - without discussion and without…

The Importance of Antitrust

...governments and communities have to establish and enforce strong antitrust laws--which is basically fighting any group that gets too large and usurps power. Antitrust fosters decentralization of power, whether from government or business hands. Right now, antitrust authorities are already cooperating across borders…

ISPs Can Be Regulated Like Banks

The closest analogy to how ISPs operate on the Net is how banks operate on the terrestrial plane today. In most countries, banks are highly regulated, and they have a duty (in most countries) to know their customers. Although their primary mission is to serve their customers, to some extent they operate as (sometimes…

The DIfference Between Physical and Cyber Communities

While terrestrial governments are natural monopolies in their own territories, cyberspace governments compete. Terrestrial governments get overthrown when things get too bad; cyberspace governments simply lose citizens, much as a business loses customers. Former members may even go into competition with their old…

The Federal Origin of the Internet

Ironically, for all its free-market libertarianism, the Internet was a creation of the U.S. Government. The government still owned most of it in the early '90s, although and increasing proportion of hte equipment over which it ran sat in computer centers in universities, research organizations, and private companies…

The Market is Not Darwinian

What is a market? And what does it have to do with the Internet? The fashion right now, one I follow, is to think of the Internet as a living environment, a place for societies, communities, and institutions to grow--rather than as something constructed, a superhighway, for example. That leads to appropriate…

Examples of Digital Freedom Rhetoric

Digital freedom, of the monetary and First Amendment varieties, may in retrospect have become our era’s version of Manifest Destiny, our Turner thesis. Embracing digital freedom was an exaltation, a kind of noble calling. In a smart essay in the journal Fast Capitalism in 2005, Jack Shuler shows how similar the…

Corporations are Antithetical to the Free Market

Corporations, whose leaders portray themselves as champions of the free market, were in fact created to circumvent that market. They were an answer to the challenge of organizing thousands of people in different places and with different skills to perform large and complex tasks, like building automobiles or providing…

How Do Artists Make Money in a World of "Free"

Obviously we must balance our desire for free stuff with a concern for work. but the open-source software tradition, our final authority on all social questions these days, has little to say about labor, oppression, compensation or collective bargaining. The supposed liberation heralded by those who promote free…