🚀 go-pugleaf

This is a repost; sorry if anybody gets it twice.

>DATE:   Wed, 27 Jan 1993 00:08:27 GMT
>FROM:   Alan McGowen <alanm@hpindda.cup.hp.com>
[....]
>Talk of "rights" always sets off fundamentalists 
>like [name deleted] who will
>immediately (and with almost no individual variation) tell you exactly
>which rights "really" exist and which don't.
[....]

Reading the various "environment" groups, I've been quite puzzled by the 
amount of attention that people are willing to lavish on these market 
cultists, Randites, Libertarians, and the like. 

Presumably most of the people who participate in these groups do so 
because they're interested in the topic. But there is no public forum 
without its resident crank -- some poor guy with a fetus in a bottle, or a 
densely printed tract about UFOs. They're not always as truculent and 
ill-bred as the individual Alan was responding to, but there's no use
trying to talk even to the polite ones. 

Net-users may be more susceptible than other people to  
these cloud-cuckoo-land discussions of property rights in the air, etc., 
by virtue of our educational and vocational background. Lots of us are 
in the computer business and have some training in math or science. So 
the intellectual gamesmanship of devising policy mechanisms  
given certain arbitrary assumptions (like reliance on 
market forces) has the same kind of appeal some people find in chess 
problems. Is mate in three moves possible? Is it possible if the bishop 
must be moved first? And so on.

But I would urge that we resist the temptation. We have real problems to 
talk about, and real social forces to deal with. In spite of all the 
rhetoric about decentralization and freedom, people who are deeply 
committed to property rights and suburban-cowboy "individualism" 
ultimately have little if anything in common with anybody who's really 
interested in constructive social change. They will always end up 
preferring the status quo over any *actual* challenge to it ("Yeah, I'm 
an environmentalist, but not if it involves taxes.").

Let the hecklers rage, and the cultists walk their dogma unchallenged; 
that's what kill files are for.

--Michael Smith