Kernel-space Politics

I thought of an interesting analogy the other day during an IRC conversation that I thought I'd share with you. :) It was probably almost a week ago (Blogger was down for maintenance at the time) and I forget exactly what the discussion was about, but more or less just how the members of government exploit the people for their own personal gain. In defense of privatizing as much as possible, I argued that the government is a little bit like the kernel of an operating system. If you want the system to be secure and reliable then you need to move as much as possible into userland (i.e., outside of the kernel). This way the individual processes (services, businesses, etc.) can attempt to do wrong, but ultimately the authority (kernel AKA government) has the power to stop them. On the other hand, if these processes are occurring directly within the kernel then they have unrestricted access to the entire system and can do whatever they want, even if they happen to corrupt or crash the system in doing so.

Then again, with the world's major currencies under private banking monopoly control you have to ask yourself whether the government is actually the kernel or only the system drivers. :-X The government can only hope to keep the system secure and reliable if it is actually ring 0 and free of corruption itself.