I really wanted to stay out the this one.  In fact, I will not even get into
a spat about the stereotypes that all republicans are X and all Democrats
are Y.  I know too many Democrats who have paid their workers under the
table to avoid taxes (employer portion) and too many Republicans who are
more than willing to accept government money to know that one can dismiss
such simplistic statements.

But I am intrigued by Mr. Byrne's heartfelt statements and thought it worth
comment.

> One of the most distressing things about political discussions is that
> complex issues are frequently asserted by partisans to have only
> one, obviously deficient, premise or viewpoint worthy of discussion.
> Governments are not mandated from heaven but are complex
> social organizations that gradually come into being to service the
> majority of the governed;

In my few years on the planet, I have reached a much different conclusion:
Governments tend to service few people by masquerading behind the needs of a
majority.  The more a government centralizes power, the easier it is for the
few to control others.  Bank robbers rob banks for one reason:  that's where
most of the money is.

> who realize from bitter experience that co-
> operation provides a better payoff than competition, on average.

Again, in my experience, I cannot think of a more cooperative setting than a
market with free choice.  It is there you have two parties fulfilling each
other's needs.  Competition is just another word for choice and choice is a
natural result of freedom.  OTOH, there is a group of people who like to
sell the notion that if you let them take away some of your freedom for the
benefit of the collective, those people are, well, you describe them next:

> However, there exists within all biological collectives a residual
> group who see exploitation of their own as being beneficial to
> themselves, and be damned to the rest. In humans we call these
> creatures psychopaths.

I like to call them politicians, and they exist in all of the major parties.

> There is an evolutionary explanation for this, any perverse survival
> strategy has worth if it is sufficiently rare. The concentration of
> power, material resources, and opportunity that government
> represents apparently proves to be an irresistible attractor for those
> whose personal survival strategy is narrow self-interest and
> exploitation.

You could not be more correct.  Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts
absolutely.  In light of this fact, we still try to fight corruption with
more power.  The disconnect is fascinating.

> The tendency to avoid looking directly at these unpleasant
> observations and attempting to systematically deal with them
> makes up a great deal of the art and artifice that we call politics,
> in no small measure due to the actions of the psychopaths themselves
> who employ mimicry and diversion as tactical measures to further
> their own agenda.  This in not to claim that all, or even the
> majority, of those that seek public office are psychopaths, but it is
> delusional to believe that our present political systems select
> against such creatures.

Dispersing power would seem to "deselect" these personalities and yet we
resist.  Why is that?  What makes us think that this time we centralize
power that things will be different?

> Real politics  is the art of identifying and collectively mitigating
> the effects of these inherent and irreducible flaws in human nature so
> that, on average, the benefits of co-operation can be realized by the
> majority; and those who would have it otherwise are prevented from
> exerting their baleful and malign effects over the rest of us.

I strongly disagree that some "majority" is any way to run a government and
I mean that in this sense:  at the core of any good social structure,
government if you will, there has to be some well-defined understandings.
IMHO, the most important of these understandings is that every person is
born free.  By this I mean that freedom is not bestowed by a majority or by
some supreme human commander, but a natural state of the human condition.
The human spirit craves freedom and resists control.  The stories of people
whose spirit conquers the heavy hand would fill volumes.  Unfortunately,
real politics is the art of gaining control, and we only have ourselves to
blame because we are all too willing to give up a little freedom here or
there for some apparent short term gain.

> This
> struggle is eternal while improvements are small, infrequent, and
> often transient.  Yet humans persist since the potential benefits
> from even small successes are enormous.

Yes, improvements are small, infrequent and transient.  If we ever let loose
the full power of human potential and resist regulating it, the successes
would be enormous indeed.

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