Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The Problem with SOPA is Common to All Legislative Power Grabs

Eric S. Raymond (aka: esr) is one of the founders and pioneers of the Open Source software development paradigm. He helped define and develop the early Internet. And I believe he's a libertarian. Here are some of his thoughts about the SOPA legislation:

It’s a bad bill, all right. It’s a terrible bill – awful from start to finish, idiotic to the core, corruptly pandering to a powerful special-interest group at the cost of everyone else’s liberty.
But I can’t help noticing that a lot of the righteous panic about it is being ginned up by people who were cheerfully on board for the last seventeen or so government power grabs – cap and trade, campaign finance “reform”, the incandescent lightbulb ban, Obamacare, you name it – and I have to wonder…
Don’t these people ever learn? Anything? Do they even listen to themselves?
It’s bizarre and entertaining to hear people who yesterday were all about allegedly benign and intelligent government interventions suddenly discovering that in practice, what they get is stupid and vicious legislation that has been captured by a venal and evil interest group.

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