From: John Conover <john@email.johncon.com>
Subject: Re: 10/22/96 S.F. chronicle re INS vs.courts
Date: Tue, 22 Oct 1996 17:32:01 -0700
Carl Sloan writes:
> An interesting dilemma has now been publicized regarding enforcemnet of
> immigration laws,either in existence or proposed,as applicable to aliens
> or non-U.S citizens residing in this country.
>
.
.
.
Funny how accurately game-theoretic iterated defection strategies work
out. As predictable as clockwork ...
John
BTW, as a note in passing, the Supreme Court will have to rank
priorities. An agenda that, from a game-theoretic POV, should not be
attempted. Re: "Archimedes' Revenge," chapters 6 and 7. No matter what
the Court decides, it will constitute a defection strategy for one
side or the other, who in turn will intensify the defection strategy,
which will end up back in court, and so on, forever. The inevitable
outcome is an increasingly complex regulation system, that grows
without bounds. Last year, 95% of the rules and regulations of social
administration in the world happened in the US, ie., 95% of the
world's rules concern only 17% of the world's people. (In 1930, or so,
it was on a par that is commensurate with the number of people in the
US.)
Do we really need that escalation in the number of rules? (Bear in
mind that the US is one of the most homogeneous societies on the
planet-62% of the populace is of Germanic extraction, or about
2/3's. The diversity is actually quite small in relation to the other
industrialized countries, excepting, only Japan.) Interestingly, over
the same period of time, (1930's to present,) the US contribution to
world GDP has dropped from over 1/3'd to less than 1/5'th, at a cost
of the federal debt being about the same as the GDP, (GDP = 7
trillion, or so, debt = 5 trillion, or so.) Another interesting stat
is that the standard of living in the US, over the same time interval,
has dropped from 2'nd to 18'th, in the world. Maybe they are all
related. Maybe we should look at the viability of a bottom up
construct for social administration, (the original Constitution, and
the 10 Ammendments were top down constructs,) rather than deliberate
the esoteric issues like whether several hundred thousand immigrants
should be grated "rights." (Bottom up rule based constructs in a
sufficiently complex system will always grow without bounds, Re:
Godel's formal complex-theoretic proof in 1928, which would seem to
state that such issues are a "system problem.") Trouble is that top
down approaches are damn'ed hard to do-but not
impossible. (T. Jefferson, B. Franklin, et al, did it. Franklin's
modification to Jefferson's original draft changing the wording to
read "We hold these truths to be self-evident," was a masterful
insight, ranking with the other great axioms of history like Euclid's,
Newton's, etc. Note that all of these were top down
constructs. Particularly, our man Ben was aware of such things, and is
highly regarded as being responsible for putting the US Constitution
on a formal, axiomatic basis-ie., not subject to contradictions and
incompleteness. Most normative documents, like the French, British,
etc., are riddles of detail and confusion.)
--
John Conover, john@email.johncon.com, http://www.johncon.com/