Voluntary Governments?
[If you don't want to read about this stuff, don't. Just don't claim it's not a valid list topic, as some are wont to do...often after first making their own comments :-}. The issues of taxation, government, anarchy, and cyberspatial institutions are important topics for a list like "Cypherpunks." If the *beliefs* are not to be talked about, but only code is to be written, then _what_ code? Code that helps ensure tax compliance? Code that helps government control "cyberspace criminals"? We've seen recent discussions about religion, the need for values, etc. Many of us are opposed to the specific views raised, but since there is no "official party line," the way we work on these issues is through discussion. Besides, any arguments people actually type in themselves are worth at least deciding whether to read them or not....I'll change my opinion if completely off-topic posts on topics like abortion, the purported need for national health care, and the war in Bosnia begin to dominate the discussion. Until then...] Where to begin? Jason Solinsky and Mike Duvos argue for a kind of voluntary, donation-supported, non-coercive, service-providing government, funded voluntarily by citizens who presumably think they are getting their money's worth. Well, this is first of all a *very nonstandard* interpretation of "government"...more on this later (and how the idea of "privately-produced law" figures in). I'm skeptical that governments would give up their current use of coercion, or threat of coercion (the fallback position that gives their various edicts more teeth than, for example, my edicts or your edicts). I'm even more skeptical that the current bloated state could be funded by the small fraction of the population that--in my opinion--would make donations. (Mike has argued elsewhere that his concept is of a utopian state much smaller than we have today....an even less likely possibility unless that bloated state is starved to death by the methods many of us advocate...but this is another discussion.)
solman@MIT.EDU writes:
[other excellent stuff elided]
Imagine if the government stopped trying to force people to join it. Or imagine if they tied decision making power to how much you pay in taxes. The more you pay, the more say you get. After accepting the idea that government is a
Without the legal monopoly on coercion, this so-called "government" would be just another service provider, like Safeway or Goodyear or K-Mart. Economies of scale work against a large, slow-moving bureaucracy, so the so-called goverment would devolve quickly into multiple small pieces. This is the "anarcho-capitalism" many of us argue for, so I won't argue against it here. I just wouldn't call it "the government" anymore. As soon as "the government" gives up its use of force, allows competitors in all areas, and is run by donations or fees, it is no longer "the government." [I promised to mention "private produced law," or PPL. This is the notion of multiple, competing legal systems. A fictional treatment of this can be found in Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash," and a more scholarly treatment can be found in David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" and in Bruce Benson's "The Enterprise of Law." I don't have time now to go into this in more detail.] The specific point about "imagine if they tied decision making power to how much you pay in taxes" was tried a while back: only tax-payers could vote. I'm all in favor of this, but I doubt many of my fellow citizens are. (And to some extent we have this, through bribes and influence-buying. Campaign contributions, etc.) Would anyone choose to pay more in taxes for an increased voting share? Hardly. Do the math on how influential any one vote is in an election. For specific cases, maybe. Again, that's how influence-peddling arises. Not a very healthy development, even for a cynic like me. (I view governments as protection rackets. The last thing we need is a bidding war between various sides in a dispute.)
product by which you get the warm fuzzies of giving to society, government could make itself into a more desireable product by undertaking changes like these. The possibilities are endless in this reguard. Its very easy for me to imagine a government in cyberspace which is substantially more successful at collecting taxes than the IRS.
For a very few services, this could be so, with the caveat mentioned above, that "the government" would cease to exist as a monolithic organization. If for some reason it was required to remain a large, monolithic organization, then I'm quite sure it would collect much less revenue than it now does. The people paying the taxes would seek alternative providers for almost everything, leaving only a few areas "better" served by "the government." (And maybe not even these, as things like roads, defense, etc. couldn't be held as a monopoly by the Feds unless coercion was used...in Jason's purely voluntary system, the government would lose even these valuable properties. But I digress.) Mike D. enthusiastically endorses Jason's ideas:
The notion of government as a product which must compete on an equal footing with others in society definitely wins "Nifty Idea of the Week" in my book.
Reminds me of something TS Eliott once said. "If only we had a system so perfect it did not require that people be good." Perhaps "government in cyberspace" will be the first working example of this paradigm.
I have a problem with the whole notion of calling a voluntary, self-selected, market-driven system a "government" of any kind. Yes, it is something people may voluntarily join, but so are country clubs, book reading groups, and mailing lists. And the decision to shop at Safeway one day is a temporary joining of such an instantiated group. But these things ain't governments! This is not just semantic quibbling. If we say that such groups are voluntary, but can vote on "rules" or "laws" which all must follow, then the voluntary nature means people can freely leave, can choose not to abide by the rules, etc. Hence the rules are toothless. There *are* forms of organization in which bad behavior has implications, such as banishment, shunning, etc. But this is true of the country club, or this mailing list...acting like a bozo has implications. Some might call these governments of a sort, but I don't. (Iceland in the Midle Ages is often cited as such a thing, Cf. Friedman.) But it is simply poor strategy as well as being poor semantics to label the voluntary social and economic interactions as being some kind of "government." Call them what they are: market interactions, agoric systems, or voluntary associations. Normal life is like this...families, girlfriends and boyfriends, freedom to associate as one pleases, free markets, anarchy in book and music selection, etc. And these systems work pretty well--or at least a lot better than the corruptions and absurdities of government-run programs. They don't require that people be "good," only that people understand the consequences of their actions, the value of a good reputation, and the punishment that will be meted out to the few who nevertheless transgress against a few basic rules. (I mention the need for violence because without some punishment, or removal by some affordable means, the "wolves" proliferate. To make this less abstract: no laws except for a very few laws about murder, theft, rape, etc. Enforce those laws ruthlessly, and the wolf population is kept in check. a fedback mechanism suppresses wolf formation. Ignore these laws, delay justice, and proliferate thousands of economic and social laws--such as the "dietary laws" also known as drug laws--and the wolf population will proliferate. A feedback mechanism that encourages more wolves to form Look at inner cities. Look at South-Central L.A.) (No offense meant to wolves or other predators here.) And these systems don't have to wait for implementation at some future time in cyberspace....they already exist all around us. Just don't call them governments, because they ain't. "Why doth governments never prosper? For if governments doth prosper,none dare call it government." --Tim May .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."
Imagine if the government stopped trying to force people to join it. Or imagine if they tied decision making power to how much you pay in taxes. The more you pay, the more say you get. After accepting the idea that government is a
Without the legal monopoly on coercion, this so-called "government" would be just another service provider, like Safeway or Goodyear or K-Mart.
Well isn't that how its supposed to be? The entire justification for having a monopoly in the "government market" (:-) in the physical realm is that it would be impractical to have multiple governments in one physical location. Nobody would know who is following which laws and confusion would reign. In cyberspace, the default condition is that there is no interaction. Communication requires agreement by both parties. During this agreement, the laws (contracts, whatever) that the two parties follow can be communicated by each party to the other, and if party A does not feel that party B's laws provide him with enough protection from B, he can refuse contact until B agrees (at least for the duration of the communication) to more constraining laws. The cost of such a transaction will likely be negligible in cyberspace. There is thus no longer a problem with different following different laws coexisting in the same place at the same time, and it no longer makes sense to allow one entity to have a monopoly on government.
Economies of scale work against a large, slow-moving bureaucracy, so the so-called goverment would devolve quickly into multiple small pieces.
Kewl.
The specific point about "imagine if they tied decision making power to how much you pay in taxes" was tried a while back: only tax-payers could vote. I'm all in favor of this, but I doubt many of my fellow citizens are.
I remember reading a short story a long time ago which was about an individual filing his taxes and about how proud and excited he was to do so. The government in the future had changed things to allow citizens to specify where they wanted their tax dollars to go to and the result was that they came to view filing taxes as a positive event. Now clearly this one change would not suddenly convince everbody that taxes were a positive event, but it would go a long way towards that and it would be an excellent marketing ploy for a non-monopoly government (or civic enterprise if your prefer). [Side note, I am in the process of convincing the MIT UA to adopt a similar measure where students would control where up to 70% of the per student money goes. It turns out that such a change would have a minimal impact in terms of where the money actually goes, but it would have an enourmous impact upon the feelings of the student body towards the UA (or the civic enterprise as the case may be). So when I say marketing ploy, I really mean it.]
I have a problem with the whole notion of calling a voluntary, self-selected, market-driven system a "government" of any kind. Yes, it is something people may voluntarily join, but so are country clubs, book reading groups, and mailing lists. And the decision to shop at Safeway one day is a temporary joining of such an instantiated group. But these things ain't governments!
This is not just semantic quibbling. If we say that such groups are voluntary, but can vote on "rules" or "laws" which all must follow, then the voluntary nature means people can freely leave, can choose not to abide by the rules, etc. Hence the rules are toothless.
First of all, I think that government is in a very specific business, the business of providing security (note, infact, how many of the government's programs are labled "insurance" of some kind). FDA restrictions, welfare, medicaid, anti-gun laws, the military... they are all intended to make sure that the citizenry need not worry about these things, to make sure the the people feel secure. For now, however, I'd like to define governments as entities that try to use some form of coercion to get others to follow its rules. My definition of government is as follows: governments are civic service providers which by their design attempt to impose a consistent set of rules on a diverse group of entities. In the physical world, the word impose usually translates into puting a gun by your head. In cyberspace, the word impose translates into placing stipulations on contact between people who follow the rules of the government and people who do not. Charging "aliens" penalty taxes during economic transactions, and refusing contact altogether are examples of cyberspatial government imposition. I do not find it difficult to imagine extremely large cyberpatial governments that depend entirely on these voluntary economic forms of coercion. In fact, unless some sort of enourmous cultural change were to occur, I find it extremelly likely that except for some fringe groups (like ourselves :) most citizens of Western nations would wind up belonging to large cyberspatial "nations", each with international treaties that govern the interaction between "citizens" of different "nations". So my claim is this: Without extreme cultural upheaval, it is highly probable that voluntary economic coercion alone will be sufficient to allow big government to move from the physical realm into cyberspace. Certainly the relationship between the citizenry and the government will change when government becomes voluntary. But when Joe Average gets wired, he will happily join whatever government that the authorities that be tell him is the right one for him to join without giving a second thought about the philosophy behind the existence of government. Nor will Joe think about how difficult it would be to create an annonymous pseudonym that was not a "citizen" of a "cybernation" and could not be linked back to his own identity or damage his primary identity's reputation. Joe probably won't even know what the word escrow means when the personal government agent he choses (because it was convieniently labled USA) secret splits his private key and sends the halves to the NSA and the FBI. JWS
solman@MIT.EDU writes:
In cyberspace, the default condition is that there is no interaction. Communication requires agreement by both parties. During this agreement, the laws (contracts, whatever) that the two parties follow can be communicated by each party to the other, and if party A does not feel that party B's laws provide him with enough protection from B, he can refuse contact until B agrees (at least for the duration of the communication) to more constraining laws. The cost of such a transaction will likely be negligible in cyberspace.
The problem I have with this is that there is no such place as cyberspace. I am not in cyberspace now; I am in California. I am governed by the laws of California and the United States even though I am communicating with another person, whether by postal mail or electronic mail, by telephone or TCP/IP connection. What does it mean to speak of a govern- ment in cyberspace? It is the government in physical space I fear. Its agents carry physical guns which shoot real bullets. Until I am able to live in my computer and eat electrons, I don't see the relevance of cyberspace. Hal
solman@MIT.EDU writes: [ > T.C.May writes: ]
Without the legal monopoly on coercion, this so-called "government" would be just another service provider, like Safeway or Goodyear or K-Mart.
In cyberspace, the default condition is that there is no interaction. Communication requires agreement by both parties. During this agreement, the laws (contracts, whatever) that the two parties follow can be communicated by each party to the other, and if party A does not feel that party B's laws provide him with enough protection from B, he can refuse contact until B agrees (at least for the duration of the communication) to more constraining laws. The cost of such a transaction will likely be negligible in cyberspace.
Huh? This is gobbledygook. Get specific. What is it that party A is providing that would motivate party B to "agree to more constraining laws?" Or do I have it backwards; I can't even tell which of these parties is supposed to be a "government".
My definition of government is as follows: governments are civic service providers which by their design attempt to impose a consistent set of rules on a diverse group of entities. In the physical world, the word impose usually translates into puting a gun by your head. In cyberspace, the word impose translates into placing stipulations on contact between people who follow the rules of the government and people who do not. Charging "aliens" penalty taxes during economic transactions, and refusing contact altogether are examples of cyberspatial government imposition.
This is just gobbledygook again. Please describe how a "voluntary" government would prevent "aliens" from conducting their own economic transactions completely outside this system. And what is meant by the phrase "refusing contact?" Does this mean that the government to which I don't "belong" will refuse to receive communications from me? How is this a penalty?
So my claim is this:
Without extreme cultural upheaval, it is highly probable that voluntary economic coercion alone will be sufficient to allow big government to move from the physical realm into cyberspace.
Perhaps. You certainly haven't explained how. ("voluntary" and "coercion" in the same sentence?) -- Jeff
participants (4)
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