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