Letters to the Editor
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utterly inane
Boy Andrew, I'm generally a big fan of yours, but that libertarian / geek ethos mashup you came up with is pure drivel.
If you really must make a libertarian / geek analogy, then you should be talking about emergent systems. The libertarian philosophy is about making decisions at the lowest level possible. It's bottom up, rather than top down. And it just so happens to reflect the objectives of the country's founding fathers - you know, the ones who wrote the Constitution Ron Paul keeps talking about. Limited government. Of the people, by the people, for the people.
A vote for Ron Paul is a vote for the Constitution. A vote for anyone else is a vote for cynicism. Are we going to continue our cynical disregard for the rule of law, in the pursuit of "what's best for us" as proscribed by a ruling elite? How long will we abrogate our rights as individuals to benefit a small cabal of industrial capitalists and their financiers?
Ron Paul is the real deal. Everyone else is just whoring for votes.
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A few thoughts
While I completely respect Paul for being a self made man, anyone that thinks they could pay to go through medical school today by doing menial side jobs is insane. BTW, what schools did he attend? Were they all private or were some state (government subsidized) colleges? Once he was successful $$$, it's a hell of alot easier for his kids to not need government assistance to go to school. Warren Buffett is not a libertarian and yet his kids did not need government assistance either.
Another thing, regarding engineers (and programmers, similar personalities) and their viewpoints. I'm an engineer and things have been pretty damn good for the last 18 years. Before that was a lull that was very humbling. Many of the people in the workforce today (similar to the financial industry) have never experienced a serious downturn that discounts their competence and just plain doesn't need them. I ended up waiting tables on the side to make ends meet, the thought of that to many today is mind boggling. One of my firms in the 90's paid a nuclear engineer (Master's degree) $8 an hour ot draft for us, he felt lucky to get a job in the engineering field. He has a successful business of his own today.
On a side note, I know a few anarchists (kind of cracks me up, I guess some of my hobbies introduce me to a wide field) and their views do not seem that different from the hard core libertarians I know, the exception being that anarchists hate corporations, libertarians don't see them as bad.
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A different perspective
I think most of us work desk jobs, at the very least we interact with software on a daily basis. Maybe we even work at companies where software is written in-house, and we get to experience the joys of going back and forth with the geek/nerd that wrote the software on why there's a problem and what is going to be done about it. Maybe at one point we thought something looked erroneous in said piece of software, but we decided to ignore it and continue going about our business, because we just couldn't be bothered with the hassle of notifying the geek/nerd and working with them to fix the problem, only to find a week later that the problem has spiraled out of control and massive amounts of data corruption had occurred. If we had only notified the geek/nerd when we first noticed the issue maybe it wouldn't be such a big problem, but you know what, we're very thankful that we have that geek/nerd in the same building with us so we can get the problem fixed quickly and move on with our lives. I mean, imagine if the software had come from some giant software company and you had to wait months for it to be fixed! Maybe I'm using too many 'maybes' and 'what ifs', but I think this is a good analogy, so bear with me.
The libertarians are very much like the geeks and nerds of the political world, but there are no worse enemies of corruption than your local libertarians/geeks/nerds. The computer-types are very good at spotting and correcting corruption of data, and the libertarians are very good at spotting and correcting the corruption in politics and law. They both thrive on reducing the possibility of corruption and creating a system that works, not for themselves, but for the people that will be using it, and at minimizing the possibility for corruption so that the system holds up over time. After all, what good is a piece of software if nobody can use it?
On in-house software vs. big vendor software: You can work with the local geek/nerd, you can talk to him and he will listen to your input. He wants to know how to make the system better for you, and you're much more of a 'real person' to him than the person you'd be talking on the phone with who works in a call center and reads his script to people all day long. This is what states rights affords the individual--the ability to actually be heard, and to actually make a difference in local government. You just have to be willing to sacrifice some of your time to do it. It can be a lot more difficult to make a difference in federal government. If this scares you, then you're lazy.
Oh, and in response to "But there is a point at which this analogy does not hold. Because computers don't always do exactly as they are told, especially when they are networked together," this is absolute nonsense. Computers do exactly what they are told. Sometimes people don't tell them exactly what they want them to do, because they are inexperienced, lazy, or just plain corrupt. The same goes for law-making. Just as I'd prefer a geeks to write my software, I'd prefer a libertarians to run my country.
What's my point? Analogies are meaningless, as is this article. They're a bunch of slanted gibberish. And yes, I am a software developer (a geek, if you will).