http://news.yahoo.com/s/space/20100412/sc_space/airforcesmysteryx37bspaceplanefuelsspeculation

The Carsonite analysis is the only rational one given that a primary drive of human beings is to secure natural resources for their use. Unfortunately, the deviants believe they can secure those resources for their narrow exclusive use regardless of the needs of the rank-and-file. The rank-and-file then fight back and you have today’s proxy war between the Neoliberals and Libertarians and their Republican and Tea Party proxies and the oppositional social-democrats.

Personally I’d remove all corporate welfare as well as corporate personhood and privileges.

When it comes to the internet I think it has its pluses and its negatives to be honest and it must be seen within its place in the current socio-technical matrix.

http://www.businessweek.com/chapter/degeus.htm

Arie De Geus in the Amazon.com book reviews is described as the person who inspired Peter Senge to do his work on “the learning organization”.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History

If the Internet has been a pointless exercise then I guess we can say we wouldn’t be bothering to argue our viewpoints out with each other on it! Also if government is that ineffective why does the right wing continue to field so many political candidates for it and why are such vast amounts of money spent corrupting the politicians and lobbying them? I have worked for both public and private sectors and quite frankly it has been the quality of management leadership that has often turned out to be the determining factor for success not the nature of the institution. The average life expectancy of private corporations is only forty years and this rather startling figure is entirely due to the final poor quality of leadership that doesn’t know how to lead and adapt to changes in the market (Read “The Origin of Wealth” and “The Fifth Discipline”). At least it can be argued up to a point that regular election for public sector bodies provides some measure of accountability. The recent disasters on Wall Street suggest that accountability to shareholders is a problem. On the issue of accountability though I’m personally actually not a huge fan of government delivering services through the current bureaucracies we experience because of the difficulty in maintaining consistently high quality management. I apply the same argument to the current elite form of private sector formation and governance. I prefer the use of mutals in line with the implications of the arguments Eric D. Beinhocker and Peter Senge make in their books I named and also the ownership and hence governance arguments made for Distributism.

The government restrains people from self-interest? That’s not what those taxpayer-paid census ads on the TV were telling us. They were encouraging us to greed up and get “our share of federal spending.”

The truth of the matter is that we have an individual fear of being dominated and try to elicit collective dominant action to resist it. We are therefore psychologically ambivalent creatures with regard to dominance. In Rousseau’s treatise “The Social Contract.” the famous opening sentence is “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” Rousseau, of course, believed that man could break those chains by submission to the “general will.” What he failed to understand was the impossibility of ever breaking any chains or restraints by the very contradictory aspect of our human nature with regard to dominance. Thus on FPR we have the chains of capitalism, government red-tape and even where Phillip Blond tells us we need to produce an Account of the Common Good as well as an Account of our Rights it produces what even Phillip would probably humorously acknowledge as Blond’s Bonds, the bonds of mutual obligation.

Instead of all the squabbling that FPR engages in the task it ought to really set itself is to produce an Intentional Ethos with regard to the type of dominance it would permit and from whom and how it ought to be restrained should it get out of hand. The ethos would be like a kind of prescription and proscription of the way we’d like our society to go about doing things. We can look back at the history of the human race’s development with regard to this and see what went wrong. For example, we can see that with hunter gatherer societies whilst there might have been a high level of egalitarianism there was also a price to be paid with restricting conformity and with our own current society how Neoliberal deregulation and a tax payer bail-out back stop plus Greenspan’s put encouraged Wall Street irresponsibility. Accordingly at the forefront of this task of creating an Intentional Ethos should be that of combining Fairness with Incentive and both with Sustainability.

I think both sides in this central versus bottom up debate as well as the anti-state versus more pro-state debate tend to the simplistic side. Isn’t it quite clear there is a role for the central and higher(ie than the very local level) levels of gov’t but that this has its definite limits as well as that is must be cautious and measured?

TS Eliot puts it well in his Idea of a Christian society, where he describes what can be done to remove obstacles to this society but then states this is just the bare minimum. Surely this is how we should treat the state’s relationship with traditionalism and decentralism, it can clear obstacles, it can do its limited role but it must be kept in its place and it’s role is just a minimum groundwork, the rest is up to small-scale social associations and other non-state institutions.

Well the issues with England and devolution are complex. There is a “Tory unionist” element that wants to preserve UK unity(not just the UK but a centralist version of it.) but these exist in the Celtic nations as well, the SNP is the only major party in the Scottish party to be definitely for “independence”, and are not primarily what I’m talking about.

A lot of the problems stem from two main factors:

The first is an general perception that the current system of devolution is unfair; its gives the Scots more autonomy but doesn’t exclude them from intervening in areas which only impact England(New Labour has used Scottish labour MPs to carry bills which only effect English and Welsh Universities and healthcare for example.), there is also the perception that the funding is disproportionate and Scotland and Wales get subsidised by England(the tartan tax as it has been called.).

There is both truth and some inaccuracies in these perceptions particularly in the latter one however they are mixed with the second main reason for English annoyance which is a perception of Celtic whining, unreasonableness, anti-Englishness and championing of dubious “Braveheart” versions of British history where the English are the bad guys and everyone else the tragic oppressed. Again this perception is not completely true or false, there is certainly this element among the Celtic nations and their nationalists, I have met Cornish who like to talk about the “Cornish genocide”, but they are far from universal of these categories.

At to this common perception of the links between the main Celtic nationalist movements and Brussels and you can see why the overwhelmingly Eurosceptic English(the rest of the British nations are more Eurosceptic than most EU nations but except for Cornwall they are not quite as much so as England.) are not devolution’s greatest fans.

All in all, as someone supportive devolution(though not independence.) in general, I think us English have a right to be a miffed at the current system and the attitudes of some of the Celtic nationalists but not to the extent some English nationalists like to paint it.

“I say, if Scotland wants to be Greece and whore itself to the EU, than that’s their choice. They’ve surrendered to larger powers before, and if they want to do it again, it is not my place to say them nay. Scot wha hae wi Wallace bled, can find themselves in Brussels’ bed.”

Like so many Englishmen and Brits I’m both British and a man of my nation(not to mention my region, County and locale.). Though no old-fashioned Tory Unionist I still have feelings for the entity known as the UK and personally would not like to see it broken up if it doesn’t have to be, particularly just so Scotland, Wales and Cornwall can throw themselves into the hands of the despotism in Brussels. Plus England is trapped within that despotism itself right now,despite the clear wishes of its people to the contrary, so I’d be a little annoyed if the Scots et al want to break with us and we still have to pay to up-keep them.

If you’re talking about Henry II setting up courts, my understanding is that he wasn’t creating new communities ex nihilo. He was trying to bring existing institutions, including local communities and the church, under the control of the crown. (I’m going here by memory of stuff I’ve read several years ago — mostly a long essay in American Historical Review, I’m not sure which issue.) My understanding is that a parallel movement was taking place on the European continent at the same time. But England ended up with a less centralized judicial system than France, not because Henry was trying to create vibrant local institutions, but because he just didn’t have the resources to bring the legal system under more direct control than he did. So he had to make use of what was already there.

The fact that most local institutions exist in a wider context and are sometimes subject to control from above does not in any way seem to justify the idea that one can revitalize local institutions from the center. I haven’t exactly been racking my brain trying to come up with an example of something like you describe having taken place, but I am not at the moment aware of any historical evidence to support the idea.

Well, I suppose someone might make an argument that the revitalization of Native American communities has come about because of support from the center. And there has been some support in the form of dollars. But there has also been a lessening of control from the center, allowing Native communities to exercise a kind of sovereignty over their remaining lands and communities, and keeping the state governments from interfering with it too much. I guess if I was trying to defend your concept, I would look there. But I would question where the initiative for that revitalization came from.

Sometime I should finish reading David Priestland’s book, “Stalin and the Politics of Mobilization : Ideas, Power, and Terror in Inter-war Russia” (2007). It seems Joe Stalin was trying to revitalize local communities by taking action from the center. But people didn’t respond as he had expected them to. I wouldn’t call it a success story.

Well, that book is mostly about communities of workers in industry –questions of the degree to which communities of workers could direct their own work and the degree to which they had to be controlled from elites above. But there are also kommunalki. I don’t know how intentional it was, but by forcing people into shared communal apartments, the Soviet Union ended up creating communities of a sort. Many thought such arrangements were a hell to be escaped as soon as possible, and not only because of informers. But some still exist, and some people are still nostalgic for them, not without reason. (There is a web site devoted to them at http://kommunalka.colgate.edu/. One of the persons interviewed is a single mother who appreciated the way the other residents of her kommunalka would help watch out for her daughter when she was at work, making sure the girl did her homework, etc. I would recommend that anyone who is interested in the concept of community should become familiar with them. There are a lot of Russian movies that feature both the good and bad sides of living in kommunalki, and there is much to learn from them that applies to more than Russian kommunalki. There are samples of a few of the movies on that web site.)

John G. I didn’t realize I was under any obligation to research for you, but since you insist, I think we can cite the medieval crown setting up local and circuit courts, which are certainly important local institutions. Indeed, most local institutions exist in a wider context and are part of a chain of hierarchical institutions. That seems to me to be the normal order of gov’t in history, once you get outside the purely tribal institutions. Am I wrong?