B >From: bill@twwells.com (T. William Wells) B >I mostly agree B >with your statements and wish you wouldn't weaken them with B >worthless supporting claims. I'm glad. B >The permanent tourists, of course. The state is, when all is B >boiled down, an instrument of force and it functions most B >"effectively" when it limits itself to that. I guarantee you that B >if the US wanted to crack down on this stuff that it would be B >gone. This year, a third of the prison population is from B >drug-related "crimes"; if they got a bee in their bonnets, you B >and I and a whole lot of other people could take their places. B >(Not, mind you, that I think this'll happen. But it *could*.) Permanent Tourists are outside US jurisdiction. You could grab a very few but only a few. You couldn't affect the non-US persons earning their dough on the nets at all. That's the point of the nets that "foreigners" can be Americans and Americans can be "foreigners" without any loss of income. Once developed, the ability to work from anywhere to anywhere is powerful. It makes one much harder to control. Consider, small cash-intensive businesses located *in* the US report less than half of their income to the government (according to IRS studies). That is among people completely subject to US jurisdiction. B >Yes, that could be prevented, but it won't be prevented by what B >the cypherpunks are doing. Sooner or later, the bodies would have B >to meet the bullets. That's the way of the world, alas. Actually, such problems are rare in the OECD countries. Most enforcement here is indirect. People obey because of fear not direct application of force. Reduce the fear and you reduce the obedience. The threat we represent is a bit to abstract to sell the government on an all-out campaign against us that would be difficult and expensive. I don't think the Feds would "go to the mattresses" to fight us. Duncan Frissell If the KGB and the Stasi couldn't prevail against the winds of institutional "rightsizing", what chance does one aging dyke have? --- WinQwk 2.0b#1165