Date: Thu, 21 Sep 1995 06:13:40 -0400 (EDT) From: Duncan Frissell <frissell@panix.com> On Thu, 7 Sep 1995 hallam@w3.org wrote: > The UK laabour party is opposed to key escrow "we do not accept > the "clipper chip" argument". The Tories have less than half the > level of popular support an are barely recognisable as a > government. > > Phill Wait till Labour finds out that crypto makes "The Caring Society" impossible. Perhaps they'll change their view then. Ok, I'll bite. What do you mean? I'm guessing that you're talking about the fact that fully applied crypto (e. g. fully anonymous digital cash) makes it essentially impossible to base a tax system on income. With full application in place, a government would be forced to shift the basis of the tax system toward `real assets' and the receiving of goods and services within its borders. However, outside of transactions involving pure information exchange, this simply shifts things from one side to the other in a relationship where the basic ideas behind capitalism suggest that both sides should be more or less equal. That is, you're not taxed based on money changing hands, but rather on the more tangible things that are the reason for the money changing hands. To use the over-used grocery store example, you're taxed on what you carry out in your basket, without regard to any money that may or may not have changed hands before during or after you went to the store. Earnings tend to correlate reasonable well with receiving goods and services, at least over long periods of times. Also most people are more or less tied to a certain area of the world. Certainly there are exceptions, but the average case is more relevent when considering what sorts of governmental policies are possible. Given this, I think that crypto is more likely to result in a readjustment of the details than a fundamental change in the relationships between various elements of society. I don't mean to suggest that these relationships can't or won't change, just that strong crypto is not a magic pill that can transform everything by itself. Fundamental changes are the results of the interplay of a wide array of forces. -- Rick Busdiecker Please do not send electronic junk mail! net: rfb@lehman.com or rfb@cmu.edu PGP Public Key: 0xDBD9994D www: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/user/rfb/http/home.html send mail, subject "send index" for mailbot info, "send pgp key" gets my key