[e2e] FYA

[David P. Reed]

At 12:55 AM 5/2/2003 +0100, Lloyd Wood wrote:
>On Thu, 1 May 2003, David P. Reed wrote:
>
>   The network shouldn't be the locus of societal policy
> > enforcement - that set of functions should be end-to-end, if it is at all
> > possible, since freedom is something that people will pay money for).
>
>and you don't think money is a particularly pervasive form of societal
>policy enforcement? Or that paying for freedom negates, in fact, the
>very nature of freedom?
>your rhetoric is very... American.
>
><http://www.ee.surrey.ac.uk/Personal/L.Wood/><L.Wood at ee.surrey.ac.uk>

I wasn't suggesting that one should pay money for freedom.   I was merely 
suggesting that freedom was indeed valued, using the only language that 
seems to make sense in the US these days.   My American co-citizens seem to 
be going through a phase where anything must be valued only in terms of 
monetary value - what someone will pay for.   They believe that government 
should never give anyone anything, because people will scrape up the cash 
to pay for anything important enough to matter (i.e. the poor mustn't value 
education, proven beyond a doubt because they don't send their kids to 
private schools - what you guys call "public schools" such as Eton).

So you are right, I'm playing to the "Americans" who have dominate our 
government and media these days...   because asking them to understand that 
freedom might be more fundamental than money, that the poor kids deserve 
preferences to get into Yale just as much as the son of a rich oilman 
former president who gets C's, is asking too much.   That's a left-wing 
idea of equality that can get you held as a material witness without habeas 
corpus, apparently.   The US believes that everything can be reduced to 
property, and we invent and export novel synthetic property rights (IPR) to 
make sure that no one who doesn't get born with property will ever have any.