From: utzoo!decvax!yale-com!brunix!gh Newsgroups: net.politics Title: Re: hey - (nf) Article-I.D.: brunix.1610 Posted: Sat Feb 19 16:33:08 1983 Received: Sun Feb 20 07:05:33 1983 References: ima.292 (1) John Levine, in comparing public and private bureaucracies (and preferring the latter) mentions the post office and the phone company, and says "At least with private bureaucrats, you can usually take your business elsewhere." But of course, with the phone company one can't. I would dearly love to dump New England Telephone!! NET is just as bad as the U.S. Postal Service, except that it somehow manages to get its prices continually raised despite public protests, and is therefore more profitable than the USPS. The government-owned phone system in Australia has considerable problems, many due directly to that fact that it is government-owned, but its service is on the whole as good as the privately-owned American system. (It had direct overseas dialling, for example, years before we got it here in Providence.) (2) Socialism is not about bureaucracies, but rather about owning the means of production. In a socialist country, you tend to get large bureaucracies controlling the means of production. In the U.S. you also get a large bureaucracy, who instead have to control those who control production, because they can't be trusted to monitor themselves. (Even *with* government regulation, we get too much fraud, environmental mess, etc.) The *quality* of a country's bureaucracy has more to do with its standards of education and the attitudes of the people than with its economic structure. "Bureaucracy" is not inherently a dirty word. (3) What arguments on socialism *should* be about is questions of morality: Should wealth be concentrated among a few "successful" people? Do people have a right to share in the natural wealth of their country? How can an economy based on "the profit motive" possibly be considered ethical? And so forth. Graeme Hirst, Brown University CS ...!decvax!brunix!gh gh.brown@udel-relay