At 9:09 AM -0400 on 10/22/00, Harmon Seaver wrote:
I'm having a hard time imagining how this would work with real property. I'm living in my house, all paid for, you can't kick me out and move in since the law says it's my house. Take away the state, and I (and perhaps my family and friends, neighbors, tribe, whatever) simply kill you when you try to move in, which is clearly not workable in many situations, i.e., you have more men with guns.
Again, go ahead and read somebody like David Friedman, or Vinge's Ungoverned, for more on this idea from a pre- financial crypto / ubiquitous internet point of view. As for the internet/crypto version, and strictly in, um, Hettingspeak, :-), I would say that we are currently transfer-pricing the market for force, and that the internet, bearer financial cryptography, etc., might allow us to have more efficient markets for same. Transfer-pricing is a result of transaction cost, and all that, and monopoly is the ultimate in transfer pricing.
I can easily understand how crypto can protect intellectual property, ecash, etc. but not real estate, cars, whatever, without ultimately a state or some sort of arbitrating body (men with guns) to enforce title. Crypto -- digisigs -- to prove title, of course, but title has never meant much to men with guns who wanted it.
Amen. The trick is to hire men with guns directly without going through the middleman -- without having to confiscate taxes and "switch" those assets up and down a large centralized hierarchy -- which is, of course, a Hard Problem. I think private electronic supervision of property (as opposed to government surveillance of citizens) is one step toward solving this problem, as is "Mesh and Net" -style automated rent-a-weaponry. It might be a bit of mystification of Moore's Law to say it'll happen before diminishing returns on same, but I think we may get there yet. On a moderately tangential note, remember that financial assets are the largest and most valuable asset category, and that financial assets are, as the Brits say, "dematerialised" already. More over, Paul Harrison talks about dematerialized bearer title to assets in transit and in storage, bills of lading, warehouse receipts (E-gold is, for the most part, a warehouse receipt, after all), things like that, though we talk about it in terms of a synthetic numeraire for the most part. So, if all these goodies work, we're looking at a world where title to assets are in bearer form and instantly tradeable, for cash. We should also have efficient markets for force to watch and protect those assets, if the above "private panopticon with teeth" actually happens. More important, we're looking at a world where we can do transactions small enough for even the most transfer-priced of "public" goods (selling passage on a road, or through a gas pipeline or water or electricity system, much less through a data network, where it will probably happen first), we don't need the confiscation of people's assets in order to pay for those goods. People (as in individuals, not "The People" in some Feudal/Russeau/Marx sense) will *own* the "commons", and *other* people will pay others to them to use whatever piece of that "commons" they need, as they're using it. Just like with bearer transactions, where you don't *need* the nation-state to enforce the non-repudiation of their transactions, you won't *need* the nation-state to provide much else except force, and, in the process, you get smaller force monopolies. Another angle on Negroponte's "10,000 nation-states in 100 years" idea, certainly.
And don't take this to mean I'm arguing against abolition of the state, I'm just looking for an explanation on how this would work.
Hope that helps. It doesn't mean that any of the above *will* happen, more
that it's a way it *could* happen, certainly, and, frankly, if it *does*
happen, it will only happen if, if course, it's significantly *cheaper*
than the way we do things now.
Progress, as always, is more stuff for less money, right?
Cheers,
RAH
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R. A. Hettinga