Comment by wildmusings
10 years ago
I'm not against altruism. That's not the point I was trying to make at all.
But whereas altruistic solutions to problems require continual interest from the donor class (which is subject the same fads as the rest of our culture), or government coercion (which eventually gets co-opted by political considerations), market solutions are robust because people are profiting from them. We'd all love to feed the starving people of the world, but sending ships full of free food isn't the solution (and can actually be harmful). It's much much more effective to set in motion the market forces that will create a stable food supply year after year.
Agree, donor based systems are non-sustainable. But tax based systems for public goods are. The Facebook initiative looks innocuous enough but Facebook is creating a dependency that could be very dangerous for the public good as the perceived marginal cost of other services is seen to be too high.
The Internet is a basic utility and public good. Monopoly usually doesn't seem to be a good model for these kinds of systems.
FWIW, Snowdrift.coop is trying to create a donor-based system for public goods that is as close as one could get to being sustainable in the way tax-based systems are. A voluntary tax can never match an imposed tax, but a social pledge and organized system can make voluntary much more feasible than it is otherwise in the status quo…