From: Paul Hughes <paul@planetp.cc>
Subject: Money 1, Justice 0: was: Bugs in free markets.
Date: Mon, 04 Sep 2000 14:33:29 -0700
hal@finney.org wrote:
>Yes, that makes sense; organizing in a group amplifies your power, for good
>or evil. However corporations and other groups are not inherently evil or
>wrong, any more than are other power amplification systems like science and
>technology.
>
> > A lot of evil contributed to big corporations seem to consist of >
>situations where two parties voluntarily cooporate on some effort, but >
>because one of the parties is in a significantly weaker bargaining >
>position (because of market conditions, lack of information, or >
>whatever), most of the benefit deriving from the effort goes to the
other
> > party (i.e. shareholders of the corporation). Is it evil to take >
>advantage of other people, even though they would prefer that you did?
>
>IMO it is not evil to engage in interactions which are voluntary for all
>parties. As I understand these situations, the "victim" actually has his
>situation improved, but just not as much as the victimizer. However I know
>that many people have a different intuition.
Absolutely! The bottom line is that a corporation, because it is bigger
has
the power of both money and armies of lawyers to screw everyone else. Sure
many companies are not malign. But what about all the ones that are? The
problem that you continue to overlook is that the malign companies are
often
able to get away with their 'evil' acts because they have power to pay or
legalize the problem away, as is now with the DMCA.
Here is my point - in an idealistic legal system you have an arbitrary case
of
Person X vs. Corp X where justice prevails every time. But instead the
legal
system almost always favors the corporation, because they have more people,
more money, and more lawyers. That means that in any legal case, the
probability of victory always sides with the one with the most money.
To reiterate what I said earlier - the biggest bug in our so-called
free-market
is that everything is up for grabs (freedom, justice), where he with the
most
money wins.
Paul Hughes
http://planetp.cc/
The whole point of having a legal system - whether via state fiat or some
other means, such as a social contract - is to reduce as far as possible the
ability of those with power or money to capitalize on it to steal from those
less wealthy or powerful. That's why we support legal systems. That's
their purpose. "A government of laws, not men."
The genius of the West, as one of the many offshoots of the concept of
objectivity which European culture originated and refined, was to remove the
influence of power from the adjudication of property disputes, via
mechanisms such as the jury trial, the common law, the Unified Commercial
Code, and the concept of a contract itself, as something that could be
enforced.
Other cultures, such as the Chinese, have not come up through that long
philosophical evolution, do not accept as part of their root Weltanshauung
the concept of objectivity itself, certainly do not accept it in the Western
sense of applying to social/ethical relationships, and thus have little
inherent respect, in the Western sense, for such things as contracts.
Unfortunately, one of the essential flaws of the monopoly state is that it
can and is always bought. It is always at the service of the more
concentrated, powerful interests, against the interests of truly objective
justice. The faster we can move the actual practice of justice away from
state control, the better. Peace follows from justice. Where there is no
justice, there can be no peace, but only war. Witness Chinese history.
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