NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #26/NN_1992_26.iso/spool/bit/listserv/csgl/1418

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Date:         Mon, 9 Nov 1992 15:42:49 -0700
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From:         "William T. Powers" <[e-mail]>
Subject:      means, ends, politics
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 [From Bill Powers (921109.1430)]

 Rick Marken (921109.0900) --

 Good thoughts on means and ends.

 We need to be explicit about one problem with means and ends --  "using
the end to justify the means." This becomes a bad thing  sometimes --
for example, in adopting the philosophy that it's better to let 20
innocent people go to jail than to let one guilty person go free. The
desire for law and order is often used to justify means that involve
violation of rights and other cruelties.

 The problem here is not so much in trying to reach the goal -- which
we can agree is good -- but in forgetting that we have more than one
goal at a time. Not only do we want to protect people from criminals,
but we want to defend Constitutional guarantees for everyone. The  real
objection isn't to using the end to justify the means, but in
forgetting that the means must support more than one end at a time.
This often involves a conflict, and some people don't like the
complications involved in finding resolutions in tough situations. So
they go with the solution that agrees with their highest-priority  goal
and rationalize or ignore the other side of the conflict.

 This tells you something about a person's priorities. Catching
criminals rather than protecting the innocent from harrassment would  be
the first choice of someone who has power, wealth, and social  standing
and doesn't anticipate being falsely accused of tawdry  crimes.
Protecting the innocent from false accusation would be a  higher concern
for someone who is a member of part of society in  which tawdry crimes
often occur; someone who has no power or  recognized social standing,
who can't afford paying court costs and  lawyers to fight a false
charge, and who looks, dresses, and speaks  no differently from the
criminals and thus can present no superficial  evidence of being an
unlikely suspect. There would also be much more  concern with
apprehending thieves and robbers among those who judge  their own worth
in terms of their material possessions than there  would among those
whose main possessions are their friends and their  freedom, which are
harder to steal.

 With regard to your comments on "trickle down" economics:

 It has struck me that one of the main discriminators between the
clusters of ideologies must be, simply, wealth. The philosophy of
trickle-down economics says, basically, let us rich people make all  the
money we want by any means we can achieve, and some of that will
trickle down to the rest of you when we spend it. In the implied
economic model, poor people are necessary. It takes fifty or a  hundred
people at the lower end of the economic scale to make  possible the life
styles of every one or two who receive most of the  income. Given any
current level of technology and productivity, there  is simply no way
that all people can live like rich people. For some  people to be rich,
many more people must remain poor. The greater the  disparity between
the bottom and the top, the more people must work  for small incomes to
allow for a few people to have huge incomes; the more people must becontent with
 fewer and lower-quality possessions  and less fun to allow
a few people to acquire many high-quality  possessions and play rather
than work.

 Those with very large incomes naturally want to preserve that
situation. They also want to maintain the power needed to protect
themselves from the natural efforts of others to get more of the
available income for doing less of the necessary work. They promote a
work ethic in which self-esteem is coupled to being a good employee  who
observes the rules and works for the offered wages with  gratitude. Rich
people can fund lobbies for influencing legislation  that would affect
their own freedom, their own wealth, and their own  power. They are
against regulation because meeting regulations would  reduce their
incomes. They use economic principles instead of morals  because the
economic principles show how to maximize return on  investment, whereas
morals might limit doing some of the things that  maximize return. The
return on investment that they are thinking of  is, of course, the
return they receive, not that the nation as a  whole receives.

 So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, simply because there
is no negative feedback to speak of in this social situation. The  more
wealth a person accumulates, the more power that person obtains  to
resist restrictions on increasing personal wealth and thus gaining  even
more power. And the poorer a person gets, the less ability that  person
has to resist having even more taken away.

 The only protections the poor person has to oppose being forced down
to the level of subsistence or worse are government and crime. This,  I
think, is why people at the lower end of the economic scale want  more
government, and why those at the upper end want less. It is why  crime
is the most rampant in the poorest neighborhoods. People do  what is
available for them to do as a way of improving their lives,  in their
own judgment of what will work.

 I am unsympathetic toward those who rail against taxes and government
regulation, simply because their own self-interest is so clearly the
motive. There can be bad taxes and bad regulations, but that is a
matter of quality and appropriateness, not quantity. Those who simply
want less taxes and less regulation in general do not have the good  of
the nation at heart; they are simply trying to preserve what they  have
regardless of what is good for others. This attitude comes from  a
narrow system concept in which only some people deserve the best,  in
which only a few are qualified to tell the rest how to live. It's
inevitable that this sort of system concept would create its own  mirror
image that guarantees endless social conflict. Marx may have  had an
inkling of this, although he and his successors used a  mystical semi-
religious theory of history to back up their common-  sense predictions.
I think that control theory gives us a much  simpler way of predicting
the outcome of such a "class struggle."  When any small group makes life
hard for the majority, the majority  will eventually get fed up and take
whatever steps are necessary to  reach their own goals. One doesn't need
to be a political pundit or  even a control theorist to understand that.
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Best,

Bill P.