Tim May wrote (and fairly cogently, I might add)... "If a person thought he was not being paid enough, it was his option to go elsewhere, to start his own business, etc. If a business wanted to raise or lower prices, their option. Customers were free to purchase or not." This is an idealization, of course, and to the extent that it was true I agree with some of the main conclusions here. Another idealization is that, once in a while, someone will get caught in a downsizing or without a job for a while. Knowing that some small cushion existed allowed those with fairly minimal capital to take the kinds of risks implicit in what you're talking about. "The meme which Tyler Durden and John Young--not surprising to me that both are Manhattanites, representing the East Coast view of capitalism--are popularizing is the one that says that what made companies successful was *government spending*, not this compact which needed little or no government role, and that this makes government intervention in business justifiable. Even more mendacious is the claim that those who worked hard and risked their capital by investing in companies are profiting at the expense of the "less privileged." " Well. I wasn't exactly trying to say that. At least, "Intel was successful because the government gave it tax breaks..."...that's what I'm NOT saying. However, add my point above to the notion that the whole American social fabric probably can not be separated into small discete chunks, and you get my point. Or at least, the logic that compels one to conclude that the murder of 40 million African Americans is justifiable should somehow make one take those notions with a grain of salt. Intel or National Semiconductor doesn't and never did exist in a vacuum. They were started by great engineers and physicsts that were educated in places like Stanford, or that worked in Bell Labs. And this isn't an argument for tax-and-spend 'statism' per se, but simply that there's a social/political/economic environment that can't be diced and sliced. You'd dice and slice an African American population, but then again it's from these inner cities that much of popular American culture has arisen (ie, between pro sports, various forms of music and so on...). Who knows the impact these people have had in terms of providing 'content' for the chips and TV screens and so on. Am I therefore arguing that this justifies US tax policies? Hell no. I might bother trying if I thought $$$-towards-blacks amounted to anything more than mere mollification and storage. (Hell, my household probably pays more than the whole rest of the Cypherpunks list in annual taxes...including May, I'd bet.) No, blacks aren't the enemy. I'm not even convinced that the basic notion of the "state" is the enemy. But those who currently adminster the state and utilize it for various ends have morphed themselves, and (most likely) the American State into the defacto enemy that billions of people throughout the world are starting to resent. For that reason I'd like to cut out the cancer that eats my hard-earned resources and utlizes them to benefit a preselected few. -TD PS: Is there any comment that Mr May would like to profer on the issue of having been rejected by some hot black tail back in the day? (ie, aside from "I'd like to see you are your infant children stripped of epidermis and dipped in seasalt")

From: Tim May <timcmay@got.net> To: cypherpunks@lne.com Subject: Re: Vengeance Libertarianism and Hot Black Chicks Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2003 12:06:29 -0800

On Dec 31, 2003, at 10:51 AM, Tim May wrote:

...

...

Add to that the fact that Mr May seems to lead a fairly bucolic life (from his accounts)...working in his gardens, installing tripwires and landmines and so forth, apparently without worrying about cash or physical needs. So this system has served him pretty well, insofar as there was a place for him to apply his skills in order to make his $$$. That system was payed for by somebody else's taxes, and now it's asking (well, demanding from) him for some $$$ that he apparently can easily afford.

Nonsense. The chip companies were NOT "payed for by somebody else's taxes." (Nor was the invention of the IC or the microprocessor paid for by DARPA or anyone else in government, despite factually incorrect lore to the contrary. I was there, at least for the onset of the micro, and I can say precisely what role government contracts played: none.)

Engineers and scientists who work an estimated 8 months out of each year to pay their taxes (Federal plus state plus local plus payroll plus property plus sales plus.....) see the minority layabouts working not one _day_ for their "entitlements" and "benefits" and "social services."

I'm going to elaborate on this point, as there seems to be a growing meme in the tech culture (especially amongst the anti-free trade, twentysomething, self-described "geeks") that somehow government built or paid for technology, business, high tech, etc.

What built our "system" was essentially a _compact_, an agreement codified in the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and even centuries of common law that a bunch of things would happen:

-- that interference in the business choices of a business would be minimal

-- that failing businesses would not be bailed out (and, indeed, none of the leading companies in 1850 last much beyond 1900, few in business in 1900 are still dominant, etc.)

-- that owners, employers, etc. and their employees, customers, etc. would themselves negotiate wages, prices, benefits, etc., without a top-down order about who might be employed, at what rates, etc.

(This of course began to change when the socialists assumed power in the 1930s, and then dramatically changed when the Great Society socialists assumed power in 1961. It then came to be seen as the role of government to set wages, to force businesses to deal with those they wished not to, to let debtors off without repaying debts or even having their kneecaps smashed, etc. This was the start of the Era of Entitlements, when some ethnic groups decided that reading be for whitey and that they would coast on freebies paid for by the "suckas" still working.)

This compact, based essentially on voluntary interaction in trade, employment, and investment, worked quite well for many decades. This compact, this way of doing things which is usually called "liberty" or "laissez faire," was not "built" by government...until relatively recent times the size of government was small and tax rates for most workers and investors were low. What made the system work was that the system largely worked on the "non-initiation of force" principle, which is what begets voluntary transactions. If a person thought he was not being paid enough, it was his option to go elsewhere, to start his own business, etc. If a business wanted to raise or lower prices, their option. Customers were free to purchase or not.

The meme which Tyler Durden and John Young--not surprising to me that both are Manhattanites, representing the East Coast view of capitalism--are popularizing is the one that says that what made companies successful was *government spending*, not this compact which needed little or no government role, and that this makes government intervention in business justifiable. Even more mendacious is the claim that those who worked hard and risked their capital by investing in companies are profiting at the expense of the "less privileged."

"You are successful because of the taxes paid by the less-privileged, so now it is right that you be taxed at high rates so that welfare benefits can be maintained." is the essential message here.

This is hokum. Very few U.S. or even European and Asian businesses were built with public funds. Neither Sony nor Honda, two examples of post-war successes, were built by MITI (MITI, in fact, frequently criticized Sony and Honda for the courses they pursued...meanwhile MITI was funding the now-defunct TRON microprocessor and the Fifth Generation Computer, utterly missing out on workstations, PCs, modern microprocessors, CAD, routers, and the Internet).

None of Intel's achievements, whether the first dynamic RAM (the 1101), the first EPROM, the first microprocessor, the first single board computer, the first...., etc., was paid for by any kind of DARPA or DOD or government grant. In fact, the military was pissed off at us for not developing their kind of "mil-spec" components, for not bidding on military contracts. We made our products by selling to those who wanted to buy them. Period. And we risked our savings by buying stock in the company and others of its kind.

Make a list of companies of the past 50 years, in the U.S., Japan, and Europe, and virtually none of them had significant U.S. funding. Sure, some of them had a lot of government purchases...aircraft companies, for example, will almost always end up selling heavily to national governments. But Boeing beat out Convair (on the 707 vs. 880 race) for very basic reasons. Likewise, Boeing again "bet the company" on the 747, between 1965 and 1970. It succeeded, and only partly because of government purchases. Mostly it was just competency.

And so on. The best examples are in Silicon Valley, now being taxed at cumulative rates exceeding 75%. For what? To pay mostly for things they will not, and cannot, ever benefit from.

This is one of the reasons Intel and other companies are expanding so rapidly in other countries, places where the work force is not made up of increasingly illiterate high school kids, mall rats, and whiggers. In China and India and Malaysia they have no translation of "reading be for whitey."

In 30 years America and Europe are going to be in a precarious position.

--Tim May

"The whole of the Bill [of Rights] is a declaration of the right of the people at large or considered as individuals... It establishes some rights of the individual as unalienable and which consequently, no majority has a right to deprive them of." -- Albert Gallatin of the New York Historical Society, October 7, 1789

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