From: Billy Brown (ewbrownv@mindspring.com)
Date: Tue Aug 24 1999 - 20:24:53 MDT
Clint O'Dell wrote:
> It is my opinion that government should protect its citizens, nothing
more.
> It should be possible for a government to work without taxing its people.
>
> Can we formulate some ideas on how this can be accomplished. Would it be
> desirable? Remember that nanotechnology can create some very scary
weapons
> that can make an undesirable government incredibly strong!
Has it been 3 months already? Oh, I guess it has. OK, sure, we can argue
this one again.
FWIW, here is my current best idea for implementing a truly free society
without getting everyone killed. It all hinges on an idea for making
governments more fully subject to market forces:
1) Find someplace ininhabited to set up shop, so you don't have to deal with
any messy problems on the issue of consent. Anyone who doesn't like the
following proposal can simply go elsewhere and do something different.
2) Start by claiming an expanse of physical space (preferably a solar
system, but something as small as a large asteroid might work.
3) Set up a national government charged with defending said space. Give it
the power to raise a standing military force, collect taxes (but not control
emmigration - so it is a lot more voluntary than current systems), and
conduct dimplomacy. It also gets to have a few negative powers - it may use
force to prevent local governments (see below) from making war on one
another, creating internal trade barriers, or preventing the free flow of
money and people from one locality to another.
4) Set up a process by which citizens may create a local 'government'
spanning any unclaimed region of physical space the national government is
willing to try to defend, or any virtual space that they themselves have
created. A local government could be anything from an authoritarian
mini-state to a completely ungoverned anarchy. Its scope is limited only in
that it is forbidden to infringe on the perrogatives of the national
government (i.e. defense and foreign policy).
5) Since a locality can not force people (or their money) to stay put, the
various local governments will find themselves competing for citizens.
Thus, we would expect that localities will evolve to actually give people
what they want. Any vision of society that can actually work, and that has
a significant number of adherents, should end up being implemented by at
least one locality. Conversely, schemes that can not work well will tend to
be weeded out by economic forces as businesses migrate to more hospitable
localities.
A few obvious questions that I don't currently have good answers for:
1) Should there be a national Bill of Rights, with some sort of national
police/court system empowered to enforce it? Personally I think this is
giving the central government too much power for too little reason - if some
people voluntarily choose to live in an oppresive locality, who are we to
stop them? OTOH, there are some sticky issues involved if a locality
suddenly takes a turn off the deep end. I think the key issue here is how
to make sure that no one ever has to live under a system that they haven't
explicitly agreed to.
2) Is there some minimal criminal code that all localities should be
required to recognize? This is a significant issue, since otherwise there
will be a market niche for localities that are hospitable to fugitive
criminals. OTOH, it is difficult to devise an effective soluition to the
problem that does not compromise the whole nature of the system. Perhaps we
are better off leaving the market alone?
3) What kind of system should be created to make sure that localities can
not use false advertising to lure people into their sphere of influence, and
then prevent them from leaving via devious, indirect methods? Bear in mind
here that we have to take into accound the potential for advanced
technologies like personality editing, mind copying, sentient AI,
borganisms, and 100% virtual worlds. Giving the central government
sufficient police powers to investigate possible cases in detail would make
it entirely too strong for comfort, but I don't like the idea of just saying
'caveat emptor' - these are people we are talking about, not dollars. Maybe
we need an additional power group of some sort?
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
ewbrownv@mindspring.com
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