-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 6:25 PM +0000 11/6/04, Justin wrote:
65m/141m = 46% of registered voters voted for Bush
Of course, you can invert the math and say the same about Kerry, plus Bush's 3-something million margin, I'm afraid. Hell, Rush said exactly the same thing on Friday. :-). Numerology doesn't win elections, I'm afraid. Remember, boys and girls, government itself is the not-so-polite fiction that the highwayman is acting in our best interest at all times if we pay him enough to leave us, individually, alone. So, as Brooks indirectly proves, rather than blathering here, or elsewhere, about "values", or "equality", or "fairness", or "justice", or other lofty nonsense, electoral or otherwise, look at how well a given *culture* and its implicit force-control mechanism, does *economically* for its citizenry (a parasite doesn't kill its own host, and all that...), besides just being able to kill more and better soldiers on the other side of the battlefield is actually putting the cart before the horse. The fact that increasing personal liberty results in such higher per-capita income, and thus the ability to project force than reducing liberty does isn't necessarily the same level of metaphysical mystery as the fact that some kinds of mathematics predict reality, but it's close enough for, heh, government work. Someday, hopefully, financial cryptography will reduce transaction costs by actually *increasing* privacy (see math and reality, liberty and income, above), the *economic* rationale for force-monopoly will go away, and *then* we can all exhume Lysander Spooner, prop him up, and talk about constitutions of no authority, or whatever. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0.3 iQA/AwUBQY1vN8PxH8jf3ohaEQKyGACbB6XlMBht53x48ugBvJQqOUJ/4P8AnRlX 4M/JvqrHdU9LvnTlrEilGzoK =D4M9 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'