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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TigerPaw who wrote (227465)	4/3/2005 1:56:12 PM
From: Dan B.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571982

That sounds fine and well so far as it goes, remembering that the way I put it isn't wrong, it may just not be applicable in some cases, perhaps (though the way I put it continues to have powerful powerful consequences, and is worthy of further consideration before being rejected in any case. I say this not so much out of the personal "like" or "want" not to have others run one's life (albeit natural), but rather out of the demonstrable negative consequences of such happening to large numbers of individuals in, I think, most cases). Dan B.

To: TigerPaw who wrote (227465)	4/4/2005 9:41:19 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1571982

Group decision making, esp. decisions made by groups that are mostly remote from the specific situation, is often worse than the decisions people make for themselves. Of course when action is going to be taken as a group, or you are setting the basic rules for how the group members will interact than it is usually better that the group as a whole decide rather than one member. But for the actions of each individual it is normally better that the individual gets to decide. This was echoed in one of those links (very short article) which studied herd animals and their group decisions on predators. When few of the animals has good information, for example cannot see the predators, then the decision is no better than that of a lone animal The herd might have better collective information than the individual, but the US government, or the government of VA, or of Fairfax County, doesn't have better information about my life and wants and needs than I do. Also what if the herd is a group of lemmings? In any case powerful government is not necessarily decisions being made by the herd. It can be decisions being made by one powerful politician, a special interest group, or a non-elected head of some government agency. In an older post you said of Neocons that "They want to make government less powerful than corporations." That's just silly, even many libertarians wouldn't want that and neocons are not a group of libertarians. Neocons don't always even want the government to be weaker. Libertarians do, but it could become a lot weaker without becoming weaker than corporations. Also a lot of acts of government directly strengthen the power and profitability of corporations. Not all "government downsizing" makes corporations more powerful. Tim