-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- - From the out-of-the-mouths-of-nascent-soft-tyrannies department... I like to joke that Anguilla was so free back in the old days mostly because it couldn't afford the Red Tape Raj it *really* wanted. After The First Annual International Conference on Financial Cryptography (FC97 to its friends), or, now that I think about it, after Wired and Forbes made FC famous, a whole bunch of financial cryptography hackers stuck around after FC98, followed Vince Cate's successful example, wrote code, and started businesses. Then they got the first one of these "surveys" in the mail a few months later. Almost all of them left as soon as they could pack. The rest, bigger companies who were by then making actual money, like, say, Hush Communications, weren't too far behind. Hush is now in Ireland. Even Vince's most successful business, Public Data, is domiciled in the US of all places, and speaking of soft tyrannies, chugging right along. Milton Friedman noted that regulation benefits large market participants at the expense of small ones, especially consumers. Somewhere, he's laughing. The Government here are to call an election pretty soon. Maybe the Government of Anguilla (GOA, below), in the spirit of Olsen's "a prince is a bandit who doesn't move", or Mencken's "an election is an advance auction of stolen goods", is just taking a pre-auction inventory. Speaking of "Domesday", the economy here, after the de rigueur real- estate collapse, is going 'round the bowl and down the hole, same as everywhere else. Looking on the bright side, Brian, they're talking, horrors, about cuts in government salaries. One presumes they're modeling their "cuts" on the recent homeopathic ones announced by the new administration in Washington. In the specious logic of statists everywhere, maybe both GOA and POTUS think that taxpayer memory operates the same way that "water-memory" does. They both seem to be written in water, there's that. BTW, there are only 13,000 full time residents of Anguilla, "belongers" and "non-" . The list below, when it doesn't include the usual recently defunct businesses, and "non-profits" (in an ostensible tax-haven :-)) represents a significant chunk of the island's gross domestic product. Cheers, RAH - ------ Begin forwarded message: