From: Richard Brodie (RBrodie@brodietech.com)
Date: Wed Jan 08 1997 - 14:39:15 MST
John K. Clark wrote:
>It's not like we don't have an example of Anarchy working beautifully,
>just
>look at the Internet.
I'm not sure what you think the Internet has to do with anarchy. It was
developed in the United States with government funding and functions at
the pleasure of a multitude of governments. Please clarify why you think
>the Internet is an anarchy, I'm curious.
>
>Even if we make the ridiculous assumption that all politicians are
>honest and
>have boiling water IQ's they could never do as good a job as the free
>market,
>because they are lacking a vital ingredient, price information. The
>true
>price of an object is determined by an enormous number of variables and
>is
>much too complicated to be calculated from first principles, but the
>market
>will tell you what the price should be, no trouble at all.
You are committing the naturalistic fallacy here. Just because a price
would naturally be X in a free market doesn't mean the price SHOULD be
X. Likewise, government frequently attempts to do good things (space
travel, quick economic recovery, for example) that would not happen in a
free market. That doesn't mean they OUGHT NOT to happen.
>
>Modern communication, cryptography and untraceable
>digital cash will make it increasingly difficult to collect taxes.
Not likely. We may see a shift in the kinds of taxes paid, though. But
even sales taxes and income taxes are difficult to hide if one of the
parties is a licensed business that must keep records and books.
>
>There is just
>no getting around it, recent developments in mathematics and
>communication
>have tipped the balance away from the tax collector and in favor of the
>
>tax evader.
I must not get your point. How does cryptography keep me from paying
property tax on my home, license tax on my car, income tax on my salary,
or sales tax collected by CompUSA?
>
>The tribute that could still be extracted, like
>property taxes and building permits, would have to be increased to
>astronomic levels and collected with a heavy hand, a tax revolt will
>follow. Without money government will grind to a
>halt.
I'm not clear on which taxes you think would be unenforceable. The U.S.
government doesn't have a sales tax. Why would income tax become less
collectable? I don't see much effect at all on business taxes, which I
believe are the bulk of income for the U.S. government.
>
> >Who would enforce it? The government?
>
>It's not clear to me what "it" refers to, I think you mean law and
>order and
>justice.
Sorry for the lack of clarity. I meant the state of anarchy. That is,
what is to prevent someone from setting up a government once your
anarchy is established?
>Consider what would happen if law and law enforcement were driven by
>market
>forces. In general, the desire not to be killed is much stronger than
>the
>desire to kill a stranger, even a Jewish stranger. Jews would be
>willing to
>pay as much as necessary, up to and including their entire net worth
>not to
>be killed. I doubt if even the most rabid anti Semite would go much
>beyond
>2%. As a result the PPA (private protection agency) protecting Jews
>would be
>much stronger than the one that wants to kill them. In Anarchy, for
>things
>that are REALLY important to you ( like not getting killed) you have
>much
>more influence than just one man one vote.
I have trouble even getting into your head on this one, John. What the
Nazis did WAS essentially anarchic. They illegally whipped up a bunch of
support for executing the Holocaust. How would it be any different under
an anarchy? And before modern enlightened government, slavery was common
and "natural."
You keep assuming that in your ideal anarchic state, you could simply
allocate funds to your priorities and have them magically materialize.
Baloney! Wealthy people, large groups, people with connections have
exponentially more power than ordinary folks. With no laws regulating
behavior, there is nothing to mitigate this power. You will have a
country such as Thailand where laws are essentially unenforced and you
need connections to get anything done.
>
>And it doesn't mean justice only for the rich. If a rich man's PPA
>makes
>unreasonable demands (beatings, sidewalk justice, I insist on my
>mother
>being the judge if I get into trouble) it's going to need one hell of
>a lot
>of firepower to back it up. That kind of an army is expensive because
>of the
>hardware needed and because of the very high wages it will need to pay
>its
>employees for an extremely dangerous job. To pay for all this they
>will need
>to charge their clients enormous fees severely limiting their customer
>base
>and that means even higher charges. They could never get the upper
>hand
>because the common man's PPA would be able to outspend a PPA that had
>
>outrageous demands and was just for the super rich. A yacht cost a lot
>more
>than a car yet the Ford motor Company is far richer than all the yacht
>builders on the planet combined.
People's wills and motivations are not driven by the amount of money you
pay them. Napoleon remarked how amazing it was that a man would risk his
life for a shred of ribbon and a scrap of metal. Look at you: no one is
paying you to write these words. Likewise, you don't have to pay
soldiers much to beat people up.
And once you give the soldiers weapons, to whom are they accountable?
>
>It won't be perfect, there will still be brutality, but you have to ask
>
>yourself, brutal compared to what? States? Governments, those paragons
>of
>charity and morality, those defenders of the weak and powerless, the
>source
>of all virtue, have butchered hundreds of millions of people this
>century
>alone, often their own citizens. We'd have to work very hard to break
>that
>record.
I don't recall the United States butchering hundreds of millions of its
own citizens this century. It seems to me that the butchering is on the
decline as governments become more enlightened, no?
>
Richard Brodie RBrodie@brodietech.com +1.206.688.8600
CEO, Brodie Technology Group, Inc., Bellevue, WA, USA
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie
Do you know what a "meme" is?
http://www.brodietech.com/rbrodie/meme.htm
>
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