Robert Hettinga wrote:

A government is just another economic actor. A very large economic actor with lots of guns and a monopoly on force, but an economic actor nonetheless.

No they are not, nor will they necessarily recognize the economic consequences of their actions before they entirely self-destruct or mutate only to do it again. History shows this. I generally use the economic/political distinction as made by Franz Oppenheimer, and furthered by Rothbard, Rand, etc. In that context they are a political actor, not an economic one. I purposefully ignored the prospect of corporations using coercive force to prevent privacy, it is rather improbable and still preferable to government coercion -- but note they do use coercive force today preventing privacy, but government is their instrument of force. Jim Choate wrote:

You need to look around, the government has NO monopoly on force.

They have a *legal* monopoly on force (within a state). You do not generally consider the black market in determining monopolistic conditions, and in fact the existence of a black market in a segment generally points to a coercive monopoly in the public one. Matt