free market services vs monopoly government

I wrote at the bottom of another post:
> General rhetorical question: indeed why have governments at all?

and Kent Crispin parried:
: General rhetorical answer:  Because people are the way they are.

Kent you seem to harbor the belief that government monopoly is a good
thing, or at least that government is somehow an unavoidable necessary
evil.  I doubt I'll convince you otherwise, but in case there are
other people reading who still think governments the best way of doing
anything, I'll try to explain why I think government monopoly is a bad
thing.

Are you opposed to free markets?

Government holds a number of monopolies.  These monopolies are not
efficient.  They result in resource wastage on a mind boggling scale.
The USG has pretty much bankrupt your country, the US national debt
being I understand at a level where US citizens collectively do not
have the resources to pay it off.  If a privately or publicly held
company got to that stage the receivers would be sent in. 

The success that a country does enjoy is pretty much proportional to
the degree of market freedom.  Luckily for us our governments have
left a bit of freedom in markets, or we would have food shortages, and
rationing.

In economies with extremely low amounts of market freedom, the readily
observable inefficiency demonstrates my point.  (eg Former Soviet
Union communist economy).

Governments tend to grow, and soak up larger tax percentages, and
encroach into more aspects of life which were previously a question of
free choice, or were previously purely market driven.  The reason for
this growth is due to the government as an entity unconciously
promoting itself as an organism.  A great huge cancerous growth which
has us by the jugular.

The reason governments as businesses can get away with their abysmal
performance is because they have a near complete monopoly.

A good start would be a choice in government, to generate some
competition.  So you can buy membership in a protection racket, hire
the services of a private security firm, or buy insurance from an
insurance group because of its benefits package, or go elsewhere if
the offering sucks.  You choose on an individual basis what package
best suits you, and you choose the service providers who you consider
as the best value for money.

eg. I can go buy into Uncle Enzo's pizza delivery and protection
racket because the protection is 5000% better value for money than the
Feds deal.

I can pick and choose the services I want to produce a mix which
satisfies me.  Double efficiency, people don't have services provided
for them which they actively don't want, and I can buy services which
the government attempts to prevent the market from providing, so my
requirements are better met.

As well as the increased efficiency obtained in provision of services
which governments are currently holding monopolies on, the reduced
taxation and regularatory burdens put on the economy would cause a
boom.

And your argument is?

That people want government?  Fine, let those sheeple that do want
something even more oppresive and intrusive than the current
government buy into whatever form of oppresive cult they want.
Perhaps a sheltered perimeter gaurded enclave where all media is
censored, there is capital punishment for spitting on the side walk,
evil thoughts results in public flogging, etc, and where the taxation
rate is 90% would suit them to a T.

Great!  We need some evolutionary pressures anyway.

So which mix would you choose Kent?

Or are you arguing that there are lots of stupid people, and that you
are happy to let their ill-informed choices, and their willingness to
go with the bankrupt corrupt status quo fuck your life up?  Why should
there be blanket decisions made and forced upon you as an individual.
Free choice makes for much more efficiency in terms of economics, and
in terms of individuals happiness.


Here's a reading list for those interested in disbanding government
and replacing it with services purchased on the free market:

"Snow Crash", Neal Stephenson
	Snow Crash is a sci-fi novel giving a depiction depictions of
	life with choice in services, private law enforcement services
	competing with Uncle Enzo's pizza mafia.

"The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", Heinlein
	The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is a sci-fi novel giving a
	depiction of a wild-west like legal system.  There are no
	laws, excepting individual responsibility.

"Machinery of Freedom" 2nd Ed, David Friedman
	Machinery of Freedom talks about free market methods to provide
	services that have traditionally been provided by government.

"The Wealth of Nations", Adam Smith

	The Wealth of Nations is an interesting book despite being
	published in 1776.  Didn't have his judgement clouded by this
	namby-pamby socialist/communist junk.  Pure capitalism,
	examining why the free market is efficient.

"The Road to Serfdom", Hayek

	Road to Serfdom explains in Hayeks view that socialism is a
	slippery slope leading to economic decline and communism.  In
	context of Nazism after second world war.  He makes the case
	that Socialism the root of much evil.


Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

On Thu, Jul 31, 1997 at 09:59:37PM +0100, Adam Back wrote:
> 
> I wrote at the bottom of another post:
> > General rhetorical question: indeed why have governments at all?
> 
> and Kent Crispin parried:
> : General rhetorical answer:  Because people are the way they are.
> 
> Kent you seem to harbor the belief that government monopoly is a good
> thing, or at least that government is somehow an unavoidable necessary
> evil.

Adam, in all honesty I don't think of it like that at all. 
"Government" to me is a completely neutral abstract term, like
"organization", or "society".  Consequently, a statement like
"Government is always bad" is ipso facto a shallow generalization, and
my natural reaction is to point out that sometimes government is good. 
Since the poor brainwashed souls on cypherpunks uniformly spout the
"Government is bad" party line, the result is that comes out looking
like I think government is good.  But that is an incorrect impression. 
Government, as a general abstract term, is neither bad or good. 

[Note: While "government" in general is a completely neutral term,
particular governments may be better or worse in various dimensions,
of course.  But it is never a black or white thing.  The government of
Singapore accomplishes a great deal for its citizens, but I would not
want to live there because of the constraints on freedoms I value. 
But the government of Singapore is vastly preferable to the government
of North Korea.]

I don't think of government as a "necessary evil", either.  Rather,
I think that a government of some kind is an inevitable outgrowth of
human nature.  I think this for three compelling reasons: first, it is
obversationally true -- there are essentially no human beings who live
without a government of some kind; second, because it is in agreement
with all my observations and knowledge of human nature; and third,
because it makes sense to me as the rational consequence of the
existence of force as an interpersonal interaction. 

[...]

> Are you opposed to free markets?

Nope.

> Government holds a number of monopolies.  These monopolies are not
> efficient.  They result in resource wastage on a mind boggling scale.
> The USG has pretty much bankrupt your country, the US national debt
> being I understand at a level where US citizens collectively do not
> have the resources to pay it off.  If a privately or publicly held
> company got to that stage the receivers would be sent in.

In fact, of course, the US generates a great deal of wealth for its
citizens, who are among the best off and most productive of any nation
on earth.  Of course it could be better, but it could be a whole lot
worse.  To say that the form of government had nothing to do with that
*success* is intellectually dishonest -- one can just as easily argue
that things are good in the US largely *because* we have a relatively
good government. 

> The success that a country does enjoy is pretty much proportional to
> the degree of market freedom.  Luckily for us our governments have
> left a bit of freedom in markets, or we would have food shortages, and
> rationing.

Oh, "luckily".  No possibility that there was intelligence involved,
eh?

[...]
> Governments tend to grow, and soak up larger tax percentages, and
> encroach into more aspects of life which were previously a question of
> free choice, or were previously purely market driven.  The reason for
> this growth is due to the government as an entity unconciously
> promoting itself as an organism.  A great huge cancerous growth which
> has us by the jugular.

"Governments" is the wrong term here.  A more correct term would be 
"bureaucracies."   The growth you describe is endemic to any large 
human organization.  Large corporations go through very similar 
cycles.  Charities, churches, clubs -- it happens everywhere.  
Sometimes the organization becomes too fat and dies.  Sometimes it 
manages to metamorphose into something else.  But none of the 
characteristics you describe are unique to governments.

> The reason governments as businesses can get away with their abysmal
> performance is because they have a near complete monopoly.
> 
> A good start would be a choice in government, to generate some
> competition.  So you can buy membership in a protection racket, hire
> the services of a private security firm, or buy insurance from an
> insurance group because of its benefits package, or go elsewhere if
> the offering sucks.  You choose on an individual basis what package
> best suits you, and you choose the service providers who you consider
> as the best value for money.

This is a pure pipe dream, a utopian fantasy for libertarians.  I 
could say "a good start would be for everyone to love one another" -- 
it would be just as real.

> eg. I can go buy into Uncle Enzo's pizza delivery and protection
> racket because the protection is 5000% better value for money than the
> Feds deal.

How do you get out from Uncle Enzo's protection racket when things go 
sour, if Uncle Enzo doesn't allow his customers to leave, or even to 
say anything bad about him?

> I can pick and choose the services I want to produce a mix which
> satisfies me.  Double efficiency, people don't have services provided
> for them which they actively don't want, and I can buy services which
> the government attempts to prevent the market from providing, so my
> requirements are better met.
> 
> As well as the increased efficiency obtained in provision of services
> which governments are currently holding monopolies on, the reduced
> taxation and regularatory burdens put on the economy would cause a
> boom.
> 
> And your argument is?

You are describing pure speculative fantasy, and it is pointless to
argue the details of your speculation.  All I can do is point out that
it *is* a speculative fantasy, and challenge you to produce something
meaningfully concrete.  Show me a real living example of such a
society in operation.  If such an excellent society existed then
surely people would flock to it in droves.  Or is it like communism --
we have to have the whole world under control before the dictatorship
of the proletariat withers away, and the glorious new world order
flowers?

[...]

> So which mix would you choose Kent?
> 
> Or are you arguing that there are lots of stupid people, and that you
> are happy to let their ill-informed choices, and their willingness to
> go with the bankrupt corrupt status quo fuck your life up? 

No, I think that average people have much more sense than you give
them credit for, and that the egotism of people who are bright
technically frequently blinds them to their shallow understanding of
other areas.  I have seen very bright people caught up in all sorts of
insane ideas.  The best example I know is the weapons physicist, a
brilliant and clever thinker, who is a member of a fundamentalist
Christian group.  He predicted the second coming on a particular day,
and announced it to the press, with a statement to the effect that he
had set off bombs at the Nevada test site with less intellectual
certainty than his prediction.  I'm sure he is now back reading the
the Bible and other texts, and trying to figure out what went wrong. 

I admire his conviction, his tenacity, but not his grip on reality. 

[...]

> Free choice makes for much more efficiency in terms of economics, and
> in terms of individuals happiness.

Sure.  So what.  The issue is what *real* can be done.  Utopian 
fantasies don't do it.

> Here's a reading list for those interested in disbanding government
> and replacing it with services purchased on the free market:
[...]

Hmm.  You base your philosophy on a couple of science fiction novels,
"The Machinery of Freedom", Adam Smith, and Hayek? Some years ago I
read Nozick and Rand, because I thought there might be something to
libertarian philosophy.  I also read parts of "Machinery of Freedom"
-- a better title, I think, would be "Intellectual Tinkertoys of
Freedom" -- and something by Boas, and a couple other things that fade
from my memory.  I conclude that these books are libertarian
scripture, and function like that physicists bible.  People who
believe, and willingly host the parasitic memes, find such texts very
meaningful.  More cynical types such as myself don't relate well to
them. 

Adam, I admire your conviction, I respect your technical expertise a
lot, but we have a different view of reality.  We will just have to
differ on that. 

[...]

>print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
>)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

BTW, how do you use this code?  I'm not a big "dc" user, I must admit.

I dug out a midi interpreter I wrote a number of years ago, 
and it is indeed trivial to modify it to read any text as input.  
Unfortunately, I wrote that long before the midi file spec was 
finalized, and the hardware I wrote it for is also long gone.  But 
it's probably not much work to get file output working again...and 
the thought of a general text-to-midi translator is rather 
entertaining -- I could play this entire mail message through it, for 
example... It would definitely make better music if some rhythmic 
variation was part of the coding, but that would make it a little 
harder to make an automatic decoder...

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com> writes:
> On Thu, Jul 31, 1997 at 09:59:37PM +0100, Adam Back wrote:
> > Kent you seem to harbor the belief that government monopoly is a good
> > thing, or at least that government is somehow an unavoidable necessary
> > evil.
> 
> Adam, in all honesty I don't think of it like that at all. 
> "Government" to me is a completely neutral abstract term, like
> "organization", or "society".  

Isn't that a bit humpty dumpty words mean what I say they mean-ish?
Clearly my use of the word government above is intended to mean your
or my government.  If I was in the US I might have used the term USG,
but as I'm not I generalised to governments, meaning existing
governments of countries.  Government has other dictionary meanings.

> Consequently, a statement like "Government is always bad" is ipso
> facto a shallow generalization, and my natural reaction is to point
> out that sometimes government is good.

I'll admit there are situations where a government may make a good
decision, or handle a situation not too badly, or not that
restrictively.  Such situations are quite rare though, aren't they :-)

> Since the poor brainwashed souls on cypherpunks uniformly spout the
> "Government is bad" party line, the result is that comes out looking
> like I think government is good.  But that is an incorrect
> impression.  Government, as a general abstract term, is neither bad
> or good.

All words are neutral as abstract terms, it's only when you consider
the semantics of your intended meaning in using them in given contexts
that they become other than abstract.

Nuclear bomb is an neutral term.

> [Note: While "government" in general is a completely neutral term,
> particular governments may be better or worse in various dimensions,
> of course.  But it is never a black or white thing.  

Didn't say otherwise.  I gave the example of the ex Soviet Union as a
worse, more restrictive government than either US or UK government in
the post you are replying to.

> I don't think of government as a "necessary evil", either.  Rather,
> I think that a government of some kind is an inevitable outgrowth of
> human nature.  I think this for three compelling reasons: first, it is
> obversationally true -- there are essentially no human beings who live
> without a government of some kind; second, because it is in agreement
> with all my observations and knowledge of human nature; and third,
> because it makes sense to me as the rational consequence of the
> existence of force as an interpersonal interaction. 

As a general rule: less government intervention is more efficient than
more.  This is because the free market is better at meeting people's
demands in a tailored fashion than any socialist/communist planned
economy handed down by a few big-wigs.

Are you against privatisation?  Are you against deregulation?

I suppose you'd like to unreform the US telco's and put it back into
one huge monopoly charging monopoly rates?  Clearly US telco's have a
long way to go in terms of having a free competitive arena with FCC
intervention, but surely you aren't denying the improved efficiency
the deregulation you have had has produced.

It's not black or white.  (Where did I read that sentence, hmmm).

In the UK we have a socialist state.  Government provides a huge
social security system.  They have cut back on it a bit in the last 20
years, but it's still a disgrace the way money is wasted.
Nationalised medical care, all out of your tax bill.  No wonder the
tax rate is > 50% effective.  Some scandinavian countries are up in
the 60 and 70% effective tax range.

Would you like some of that in the US?  At least you currently have
mostly privatised medical care.

My point is really that the more market freedom, more deregulation,
less government intervention, less attempts to influence the market
the better off we'll all be.

Do you think it would be a good thing if the government started taxing
Internet usage?

> In fact, of course, the US generates a great deal of wealth for its
> citizens, who are among the best off and most productive of any nation
> on earth.  Of course it could be better, but it could be a whole lot
> worse.  To say that the form of government had nothing to do with that
> *success* is intellectually dishonest -- one can just as easily argue
> that things are good in the US largely *because* we have a relatively
> good government. 

Jeez, just imagine how much better off you could be without all the
government crapola.

> > The success that a country does enjoy is pretty much proportional to
> > the degree of market freedom.  Luckily for us our governments have
> > left a bit of freedom in markets, or we would have food shortages, and
> > rationing.
> 
> Oh, "luckily".  No possibility that there was intelligence involved,
> eh?

Maybe a bit of self-interest :-) Eg if the cancerous growth stifles
too much trade, it might get less tax revenues.  I view Clinton's
recent "hands off" approach to the internet in this light, if he
actually means anything concrete by it.

> [...]
> > Governments tend to grow, and soak up larger tax percentages, and
> > encroach into more aspects of life which were previously a question of
> > free choice, or were previously purely market driven.  The reason for
> > this growth is due to the government as an entity unconciously
> > promoting itself as an organism.  A great huge cancerous growth which
> > has us by the jugular.
> 
> "Governments" is the wrong term here.  A more correct term would be 
> "bureaucracies."   The growth you describe is endemic to any large 
> human organization.  Large corporations go through very similar 
> cycles.  Charities, churches, clubs -- it happens everywhere.  

Governments too.  ie what I said was true for governments so why
contest the fact?  So there are other systems it is true for, so what?
I didn't say there weren't.

> > A good start would be a choice in government, to generate some
> > competition.  So you can buy membership in a protection racket, hire
> > the services of a private security firm, or buy insurance from an
> > insurance group because of its benefits package, or go elsewhere if
> > the offering sucks.  You choose on an individual basis what package
> > best suits you, and you choose the service providers who you consider
> > as the best value for money.
> 
> This is a pure pipe dream, a utopian fantasy for libertarians.  I 
> could say "a good start would be for everyone to love one another" -- 
> it would be just as real.

OK, lets start with deregulation, and privatisation of everything that
it is immediately possible to arrange.  Not so radical is it?

You aren't going to get a purely market based economy with no
government intervention over night, clearly.

> > eg. I can go buy into Uncle Enzo's pizza delivery and protection
> > racket because the protection is 5000% better value for money than the
> > Feds deal.
> 
> How do you get out from Uncle Enzo's protection racket when things go 
> sour, if Uncle Enzo doesn't allow his customers to leave, or even to 
> say anything bad about him?

Sounds remarkably similar to the current situation doesn't it?

Anyway you just buy into Mr Lee's New Hong Kong protection racket, and
Uncle Enzo will respect Mr Lee's fire-power enough to consider it not
worth the effort of picking on small fry like you.

> You are describing pure speculative fantasy, and it is pointless to
> argue the details of your speculation.  All I can do is point out that
> it *is* a speculative fantasy, and challenge you to produce something
> meaningfully concrete.  Show me a real living example of such a
> society in operation.  

It's not black and white.  It's not all or nothing.  We can start with
less government, before it shrivels up to close to zero.

> If such an excellent society existed then surely people would flock
> to it in droves.  Or is it like communism -- we have to have the
> whole world under control before the dictatorship of the proletariat
> withers away, and the glorious new world order flowers?

Cultural and societal change have happened in the past.  I guess
you've read of the feudal systems.  Well society's structure has
changed.  If you lived in feudal systems, you'd be one of the serfs
happy with his lot tithing to the lord of the manor, and to the fat
church, and being left with barely enough to eat.

Clearly presures exist today where people would like to move to
different regimes.  People are real keen to get out of less free
governments into freer ones.  I won't bother with examples, anyone can
come up with those.

See anything wrong with making a currently relatively free government
into an even less restrictive government?

> No, I think that average people have much more sense than you give
> them credit for, and that the egotism of people who are bright
> technically frequently blinds them to their shallow understanding of
> other areas.  I have seen very bright people caught up in all sorts of
> insane ideas.  

Tell me, are the following insane ideas:

	- privatisation
	- deregulation
	- devolution of government power to smaller power bases
	- lower taxes
	- fewer politicians
	- reduced social security system 
	- cancel the war on drugs

> The best example I know is the weapons physicist, a brilliant and
> clever thinker, who is a member of a fundamentalist Christian group.
> He predicted the second coming on a particular day, and announced it
> to the press, with a statement to the effect that he had set off
> bombs at the Nevada test site with less intellectual certainty than
> his prediction.  I'm sure he is now back reading the the Bible and
> other texts, and trying to figure out what went wrong.

That suggests to me that he is slightly cracked, as well as being a
inventive physicist.

> I admire his conviction, his tenacity, but not his grip on reality. 

Yup, cracked.

> > Free choice makes for much more efficiency in terms of economics, and
> > in terms of individuals happiness.
> 
> Sure.  So what.  The issue is what *real* can be done.  Utopian 
> fantasies don't do it.

Work towards the principle that free markets are more efficient than
state monopolies.

> > Here's a reading list for those interested in disbanding government
> > and replacing it with services purchased on the free market:
> [...]
> 
> Hmm.  You base your philosophy on a couple of science fiction novels,
> "The Machinery of Freedom", Adam Smith, and Hayek? Some years ago I
> read Nozick and Rand, because I thought there might be something to
> libertarian philosophy.  I also read parts of "Machinery of Freedom"
> -- a better title, I think, would be "Intellectual Tinkertoys of
> Freedom" -- and something by Boas, and a couple other things that fade
> from my memory.  I conclude that these books are libertarian
> scripture, and function like that physicists bible.  

Adam Smith is a pretty sound pure market economics text.  If you can
refute any of it's claims, which are in the main logical, or
mathematical readily observable truisms, I'd be interested to hear
your arguments.

Hayek just points out the clearly observable trends with Socialism.
If you can't see much of what he was saying back in 1944 replayed
before your eyes in the US, you've got your eyes closed.

Rand is a somewhere between the two, lots of negative things to say
about socialism, and also lots to say about free market.

> Adam, I admire your conviction, I respect your technical expertise a
> lot, but we have a different view of reality.  We will just have to
> differ on that. 

Heh, I said I wouldn't convince you.

[I took the perl rsa usage to a new post]

Adam
-- 
Have *you* exported RSA today? --> http://www.dcs.ex.ac.uk/~aba/rsa/

print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

On Fri, Aug 01, 1997 at 11:32:04AM +0100, Adam Back wrote:

After reading your long response I have one general comment:

"No Fair!"

Remember your rhetorical question that started this: "indeed why have
any governments at all?" That reflects a *vastly* different position
than favoring less government.  Analogy: it would be better for my
health if I ate less.  It would not be good at all for my health to
eat zero.  Your rhetorical question posed the "zero" position for
government, and that was the position I was arguing against.  

But your reasoning is this, apparently: "Kent says he doesn't believe
it is possible for a human society to not have a government, therefore
Kent favors big intrusive government." This kind of "reasoning" is
rife on cypherpunks; may I suggest it is beneath you?

With that little thing out of the way:

[...]
> > Consequently, a statement like "Government is always bad" is ipso
> > facto a shallow generalization, and my natural reaction is to point
> > out that sometimes government is good.
> 
> I'll admit there are situations where a government may make a good
> decision, or handle a situation not too badly, or not that
> restrictively.  Such situations are quite rare though, aren't they :-)

Compared to what? Compared to an imagined libertarian utopia, or
compared to really bad situations (say, North Korea), or Cambodia
under Pol Pot? In fact, you and I live lives of unbridled luxury,
compared to a majority of the human race.  Our government has 
something to do with that.  Put another way: your debit governments 
for the bad things they do, but you don't credit them for the bad 
things they prevent.  A fair analysis would include both.

[...]

> > I don't think of government as a "necessary evil", either.  Rather,
> > I think that a government of some kind is an inevitable outgrowth of
> > human nature.  I think this for three compelling reasons: first, it is
> > obversationally true -- there are essentially no human beings who live
> > without a government of some kind; second, because it is in agreement
> > with all my observations and knowledge of human nature; and third,
> > because it makes sense to me as the rational consequence of the
> > existence of force as an interpersonal interaction. 
> 
> As a general rule: less government intervention is more efficient than
> more.

Re: my eating habits, above.

> This is because the free market is better at meeting people's
> demands in a tailored fashion than any socialist/communist planned
> economy handed down by a few big-wigs.

That's hardly a recommendation, now is it?

> Are you against privatisation?  Are you against deregulation?

In general, no.

[...]
> > In fact, of course, the US generates a great deal of wealth for its
> > citizens, who are among the best off and most productive of any nation
> > on earth.  Of course it could be better, but it could be a whole lot
> > worse.  To say that the form of government had nothing to do with that
> > *success* is intellectually dishonest -- one can just as easily argue
> > that things are good in the US largely *because* we have a relatively
> > good government. 
> 
> Jeez, just imagine how much better off you could be without all the
> government crapola.

How so? I could have more money? That's a rathole without a bottom --
I have an adequate supply.  More personal freedom? The main constraint
on me is lack of time to enjoy the freedoms I already have.  If I 
make a realistic assessment of my life, less government isn't going 
to make any significant difference, and I wager that it wouldn't make 
any significant difference to you, either.  We are both members of 
the technological elite, doing pretty damn much what we please, and 
having a good time doing it.

So I am not a good example of someone who might be better off.  Well,
how about someone not in our fortunate position? That's not clear
either, but for entirely different reasons.  In the US the economy has
done very well the last few years, but there is this troubling
undercurrent about the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer
-- the economy isn't like the tide -- it doesn't seem to float all 
boats.  And I have no confidence that the unfettered free-market 
utopia you dream about is going to be equitable in its distribution 
of wealth.

[...]

> > > eg. I can go buy into Uncle Enzo's pizza delivery and protection
> > > racket because the protection is 5000% better value for money than the
> > > Feds deal.
> > 
> > How do you get out from Uncle Enzo's protection racket when things go 
> > sour, if Uncle Enzo doesn't allow his customers to leave, or even to 
> > say anything bad about him?
> 
> Anyway you just buy into Mr Lee's New Hong Kong protection racket, and
> Uncle Enzo will respect Mr Lee's fire-power enough to consider it not
> worth the effort of picking on small fry like you.

Mr Lee isn't interested in dealing with you -- he will deal with 
Uncle Enzo.  You are an insignificant pawn to both of them, and they 
will divide up their turf according to their own concerns.  Force 
monopolies don't overlap, generally.  But anyway, this is another one 
of those intellectual tinkertoys of freedom...

[...]

> Cultural and societal change have happened in the past.  I guess
> you've read of the feudal systems.  Well society's structure has
> changed.  If you lived in feudal systems, you'd be one of the serfs
> happy with his lot tithing to the lord of the manor, and to the fat
> church, and being left with barely enough to eat.

Yep. Probably.  Everybody was.  That didn't change through serf 
revolts, to my knowledge -- it changed through growth of a merchant 
class. 

[...]
> See anything wrong with making a currently relatively free government
> into an even less restrictive government?

Nope.  It's something I work on, believe it or not.

> Tell me, are the following insane ideas:
> 
> 	- privatisation
> 	- deregulation
> 	- devolution of government power to smaller power bases
> 	- lower taxes
> 	- fewer politicians
> 	- reduced social security system 
> 	- cancel the war on drugs

No.  Obviously not, as I favor all of them :-)  You said, however, 
"any government at all."

[...]

> [I took the perl rsa usage to a new post]

OK.  I now have "RSA, the song" as a midi file, which I will post in 
the next day or two...

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html

> But your reasoning is this, apparently: "Kent says he doesn't believe
> it is possible for a human society to not have a government, therefore
> Kent favors big intrusive government." This kind of "reasoning" is
> rife on cypherpunks; may I suggest it is beneath you?

I don`t think this is a necessarily entirely spurious line of reasoning, 
all government leads to large and intrusive government, it is the nature 
of power that it corrupts and is addictive. So the statement above could 
be corrected to "Kent says he doesn`t believe it is possible for a human 
society to not have a government, therefore Kent favours a system which 
would eventually "evolve" into big intrusive government".
Anyway, the argument over anarchism vs. minarchism comes down very much 
to how you define government, if you define government as a body of 
people given the power to pass laws over the citizens of that 
jurisdiction, then government is indeed a bad thing per se, however, if 
you define government as a loose informal set of social norms and codes 
of behaviour (for a libertarian example see the NAP) then government is 
indeed present in all civilised and succesful human societies, real or 
conjectured.

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"