Competition/Cooperation
Dan Robinson
(UUA President) John Bueherns' article, "Two cheers for
competition, three for cooperation" should be required reading
for economics students. Competition is motivated by greed;
cooperation compromises greed with compassion.
We've moved somewhat away from "the law of the jungle" to
government-controlled "free-enterprise", where killing and
stealing are usually not considered good form. But then, with
old-fashioned controls, we've moved beyond that to capitalism,
where "the rich get richer...", far out of proportion to their
social contributions.
I was recently trying to read a conservative booklet, ("Freedom
Daily" from "The Future of Freedom Foundation"), whose first
article says, "...the freedom to acquire unlimited amounts of
wealth is the greatest thing that could happen to [the poor]". It
may be the "greatest", but not the best. In fact it's what "made
them poor". Monetary wealth is not just about having more money
than I had before, but about having more than others have. When
people get rich, they're able to buy more expensive things, so
more things become more expensive, so in effect, "..the poor get
poorer".
I had a dream this morning about creating some kind of new
technical device, investing the proceeds and getting rich. I woke
up with the thought that "little money" is made by doing something
useful, and big money is made just by taking little money to the
bank, or stock market. I continually wonder how the rich justify
this.
There is another direction to take. Though I'm more of an idea
person than a programmer, I'm getting involved with a group
devoted to creating free, "open-source" computer software, such
as Linux operating system, as an alternative to commercial,
proprietary, monopoly software. "Open-source" means that the
human-readable version of programs are available for other
programmers to alter for their own purposes, or for distribution.
By distributing it freely, they get around principles of
copyrights and patents, which tend to inhibit cooperation,
communication and creativity for the sake of business. They're
saying that as cyberspace becomes more a part of our lives,
software is at least becoming very closely related to law, since
neither are copyrighted, and I agree. My part of it, which I call
"eConsensus", is about ways to combine Internet discussion forums
with at least informal voting, making it possible for decisions
to evolve rather than be voted in all at once.
Dan Robinson dan...@efn.org
Eugene OR 97401 www.efn.org/~danrob/
Money was invented as a lubricant for the barter system,
but we're way overdue for an oil change.