At 4:02 AM +0200 on 7/2/02, AAA, the Annoying Anonymous Austrian wrote:
But you claimed that signed pieces of digital information were private goods. Please explain.
If it's encrypted, and it's on my hard drive, than it's my property. I own it, not someone else. That's a private good. I can turn around, and sell it to you. You can encrypt it, and put it on your hard drive, and you can sell it. It's *your* property. The same can be said for time-on-channel bandwidth, or rented computational cycles, or anything else, up to, and including custom-ordered "output" like professional opinion. For the most part, except for custom professional opinions that are to specific to be worth much to anyone else, we're talking about public property exchanged over a public internetwork. Private goods. Go read some more econ and finance, starting with, say, Coase, and ending with a decent corporate finance textbook, and come back when you have something useful to say instead of spouting collectivist pseudo-economics, please. In the meantime, read my .sig, below, and take it to heart. Cheers, RAH -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "Externalities are the last refuge of the derigistes." -- Friedrich Hayek