wouter van ooijen <wouter <at> voti.nl> writes:
> case. Nowadays universities are encouraged to turn their inventions into
> money - so the state has less to pay. So in the end we must blame
> ourselves - we voted for the politicians that cut down the taxes (or
> raised them less) by cutting down the universities budgets. 

I think that every university should try to turn things into money - within the
framework of allowed things. Locking up information as private intellectual
property and patenting it as such does not contribute to knowledge in general
and is probably against the academic spirit in more than one way, plus it breaks
the law where public money cannot be used to subsidize private firms as it would
constitute unfair competition to everyone else in the industry. After all, why
not subsidize a firm directly, then it could hire the university people to do
the research, and the university would get paid that way.
 
> IMO this is one of the fundamental flaws of democracy: the feedback
> cycle is so short that behaviour that is only long-term profitable is
> not rewarded. Politicians are only human, so they do what they are
> rewarded for: things that are short-term good (or at least look so up
> front).

I don't think so. Democracy works almost perfectly when 'feedback' information
is available to the electorate in a timely manner. Especially about the 
leader's current and past blunders and about new methods and in general data
from statistics and scientists - see above about scientists not making data
available. The same applies for a free market. But there is a turning point when
the amount of lies told is so large that revealing them might lead to chaos. For
example how can one tell a population that one third of its expenditure leaves
the country as import purchases. Then another third is direct taxes, and two
thirds of what is left are indirect taxes. That leaves 10% of brute income as
money to spend. 

This is a typical case for most developed states excepting the US which seems 
to allow the citizens to keep more of what they earn. At the same time its GINI
index is closer to that of Nigeria than to that of Canada and most EC states
(where 'life quality' is judged to be best), but it has the best (?) business
opportunities. I don't think that there is an easy way out, to go back to 'real'
democracy (if there ever was such a thing - certainly not to Athenian democracy
- slavery is illegal - maybe indentured immigrant high tech workers tied in
clever ways to their employers by elaborate work visa arrangements could replace
them). 

And I don't think that a dictatorship solves anything. I have lived under a
dictatorship and I also saw it fall (to be replaced by a milder one).
Dictatorships have all the problems of a corrupt democracy, raised to the tenth
power, plus their own additions, such as megalomaniac palace builders,
goose-stepping tontons macoute and mass glorification sessions alternating with
brainwashing 'music' saturated with political messages as well as paranoid
secret service bosses who execute people selected by 'decadent' haircuts.

I believe that there is no single solution to this, and any solution must be
found through wide access to education and accurate, timely information. I.e.
not syndicated news about the same 3 issues everyone else is reporting. Also
'editing' history is just lying to more people. It is said that he who does not
learn from past mistakes is damned to repeat them. Speaking of democracies and
dictatorships in the context of history that has not been rewritten (yet), one
should not forget that the Roman Empire's Dictatorship followed the Republic,
and preceded its decadence.

Peter P.


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