Justice as fairness: we can do better than we are

[dreadgeek]

Originally Posted by loremar

Get rid of capitalism and Democracy. I guess Anarchism would be better?

I know a person who made a good thought about anarchism and he thinks that it would work if everyone can just participate on direct democracy. No one is brought into office just representatives who will execute what everyone has decided upon.

Does anyone think it would work?

No. In fact, I'm almost *certain* it wouldn't work. Anarchism is another one of those ideas that I would put in the category of 'great idea, wrong species'. Firstly, I do not trust direct democracy. There are 187 million whites in America. There's 300 million people in America. In a direct democracy the majority could impose an *absolute* tyranny on the minority with no restraints. Secondly, you have to have laws. Have to. Unless you are going to get rid of property (good luck) and get people to not prefer their kin and friends over random strangers (not happening) you will have conflicts of interests. Without laws there's no way to adjudicate those conflicts and they *will* happen.

Get rid of capitalism and replace it with what? There's a fantastic scene toward the end of the Terry Pratchett novel "Night Watch" which I'm going to share with you to illustrate the point about why getting rid of capitalism is a really bad idea. A revolution is starting, the hero--Sam Vimes--is a sergeant in the City Watch who is protecting the people against the army and the secret police. One person of true revolutionary fervor is having a conversation about how things will be once the revolution is complete with a shoe maker:

"Anyway, it says here in article seven on this here list--" Mr. Supple ploughed no. "--People's Declaration of the Glorious 24th of May," said Reg.

"Yeah, yeah, right...well, it says we'll seize hold of the means of production, sort of thing, so what I want to know is, how does that work out regarding my shoe shop? I mean, I'm in it anyway, right? It's not like there's room for more'n me and my lad Garbut and maybe one customer."

In the dark, Vimes smiled. But Reg could never see stuff coming.

"Ah, but after the revolution all property will be held in common by The People...err...that is, it'll belong to you but also to everyone else, you see?"

Comrade Supple looked puzzled.

"But I'll be the one making the shoes?"

"Of course. But everything will belong to The People."
"So...who's going to pay for the shoes?" said Mr. Supple.
"Everyone will pay a reasonable price for their shoes, and you won't be guilty of living off the sweat of teh common worker," said Reg shortly. "Now, if we--"
"You mean the cows?" said Supple.
"What?"
"Well, there's only the cows, and the lads at the tannery, and, frankly, all they do is stand in a field all day, well, not the tannery boys, obviously, but--"
"Look," said Reg. "Everything will belong to The People and everyone will be better off. Do you understand?"
The shoemaker's frown grew deeper. He wasn't certain if he was part of The People.

Elsewhere in the book, Vimes reflects on 'The People'

"People on the side of The People always ended up disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of cleverness. And so, the children of the revolution were faced with the age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong kind of people."

Both passages illustrate what I think is wrong with the idea of throwing out capitalism and democracy. Let's say we did. What would you replace it with? Would you get rid of money as well? At which point how would we do trade? Barter? I can't build a laptop computer--well, I probably could but I can't build the *components*. Where are the components going to come from? If I'm not getting paid, why on Earth would I get up at 4:45 in the morning to be to work at 7:30? Love of my employer? Not hardly. I do it because I get paid to do so, as it turns out I happen to rather enjoy my work but I wouldn't do it for free. So what would you replace capitalism with?

Now, back to democracy. Constitutional democracies are not perfect systems but they are the least bad system devised so far. But let's say we did everything through direct democracy. How would you go about protecting minority rights? How would you go about *preventing* people from, say, selling goods or services on the black market?

What would happen in an anarchy is that it would last about two weeks. Then the person who could convince the most people with guns to side with him would become Supreme Leader for Life. If you want to know what a nation without either capitalism or democracy looks like, you can do no better than either North Korea or Somalia. At least North Korea has a government. Somalia doesn't even really have that. There's no capitalism or democracy in Somalia, instead he who has the guns is he who makes the rules.

Governments are what Thomas Hobbes called a Leviathan. One purpose of having governments is to have an entity that has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. In an anarchy, no single entity has a monopoly on the use of force and so people will be *hyper-sensitive* to Hobbesian traps. Hobbes said that in the absence of a state (he didn't say what kind of state) things would degenerate into a war of all against all. A Hobbesian trap, then, is when you think I'm going to come over the wall and take your tomatoes and so you put up defenses to prevent me from doing so. Seeing that you are arming up, I start to arm up. A *perfect* example of a Hobbesian trap, and one civilization escaped by the skin of our teeth, was the nuclear build-up of the Cold War. Once the United States detonated a nuke, the other great powers *had* to get one however they could. The Soviets developed their own and missiles to deliver them. So we developed our own missiles. We put missiles in Turkey, they put missiles in Cuba and so on.

Cheers
Aj