Imagine if the government stopped trying to force people to join it. Or imagine if they tied decision making power to how much you pay in taxes. The more you pay, the more say you get. After accepting the idea that government is a
Without the legal monopoly on coercion, this so-called "government" would be just another service provider, like Safeway or Goodyear or K-Mart.
Well isn't that how its supposed to be? The entire justification for having a monopoly in the "government market" (:-) in the physical realm is that it would be impractical to have multiple governments in one physical location. Nobody would know who is following which laws and confusion would reign. In cyberspace, the default condition is that there is no interaction. Communication requires agreement by both parties. During this agreement, the laws (contracts, whatever) that the two parties follow can be communicated by each party to the other, and if party A does not feel that party B's laws provide him with enough protection from B, he can refuse contact until B agrees (at least for the duration of the communication) to more constraining laws. The cost of such a transaction will likely be negligible in cyberspace. There is thus no longer a problem with different following different laws coexisting in the same place at the same time, and it no longer makes sense to allow one entity to have a monopoly on government.
Economies of scale work against a large, slow-moving bureaucracy, so the so-called goverment would devolve quickly into multiple small pieces.
Kewl.
The specific point about "imagine if they tied decision making power to how much you pay in taxes" was tried a while back: only tax-payers could vote. I'm all in favor of this, but I doubt many of my fellow citizens are.
I remember reading a short story a long time ago which was about an individual filing his taxes and about how proud and excited he was to do so. The government in the future had changed things to allow citizens to specify where they wanted their tax dollars to go to and the result was that they came to view filing taxes as a positive event. Now clearly this one change would not suddenly convince everbody that taxes were a positive event, but it would go a long way towards that and it would be an excellent marketing ploy for a non-monopoly government (or civic enterprise if your prefer). [Side note, I am in the process of convincing the MIT UA to adopt a similar measure where students would control where up to 70% of the per student money goes. It turns out that such a change would have a minimal impact in terms of where the money actually goes, but it would have an enourmous impact upon the feelings of the student body towards the UA (or the civic enterprise as the case may be). So when I say marketing ploy, I really mean it.]
I have a problem with the whole notion of calling a voluntary, self-selected, market-driven system a "government" of any kind. Yes, it is something people may voluntarily join, but so are country clubs, book reading groups, and mailing lists. And the decision to shop at Safeway one day is a temporary joining of such an instantiated group. But these things ain't governments!
This is not just semantic quibbling. If we say that such groups are voluntary, but can vote on "rules" or "laws" which all must follow, then the voluntary nature means people can freely leave, can choose not to abide by the rules, etc. Hence the rules are toothless.
First of all, I think that government is in a very specific business, the business of providing security (note, infact, how many of the government's programs are labled "insurance" of some kind). FDA restrictions, welfare, medicaid, anti-gun laws, the military... they are all intended to make sure that the citizenry need not worry about these things, to make sure the the people feel secure. For now, however, I'd like to define governments as entities that try to use some form of coercion to get others to follow its rules. My definition of government is as follows: governments are civic service providers which by their design attempt to impose a consistent set of rules on a diverse group of entities. In the physical world, the word impose usually translates into puting a gun by your head. In cyberspace, the word impose translates into placing stipulations on contact between people who follow the rules of the government and people who do not. Charging "aliens" penalty taxes during economic transactions, and refusing contact altogether are examples of cyberspatial government imposition. I do not find it difficult to imagine extremely large cyberpatial governments that depend entirely on these voluntary economic forms of coercion. In fact, unless some sort of enourmous cultural change were to occur, I find it extremelly likely that except for some fringe groups (like ourselves :) most citizens of Western nations would wind up belonging to large cyberspatial "nations", each with international treaties that govern the interaction between "citizens" of different "nations". So my claim is this: Without extreme cultural upheaval, it is highly probable that voluntary economic coercion alone will be sufficient to allow big government to move from the physical realm into cyberspace. Certainly the relationship between the citizenry and the government will change when government becomes voluntary. But when Joe Average gets wired, he will happily join whatever government that the authorities that be tell him is the right one for him to join without giving a second thought about the philosophy behind the existence of government. Nor will Joe think about how difficult it would be to create an annonymous pseudonym that was not a "citizen" of a "cybernation" and could not be linked back to his own identity or damage his primary identity's reputation. Joe probably won't even know what the word escrow means when the personal government agent he choses (because it was convieniently labled USA) secret splits his private key and sends the halves to the NSA and the FBI. JWS