Ah Variola...do I detect a wee bit of Knee-jerk in your otherwise consistently iconoclastic views? Let's take a looksee...

Get this through your head: a corporation can't initiate force against you. You may not like their product, practices, or price, but no one is coercing you at gunpoint.

Think I'm gonna have to disagree with ya' hear partner. For one, in the old days Corporations regularly hired goons to mow down striking coalminers and whatnot. OK, those days are all gone, right? Wrong. Halliburton and Bechtel have both hired mercs for their Iraq operations. (In fact, I was on a call a couple of weeks ago where a Halliburton official was describing the casualties they take on a regular basis. These don't get reported much in the news, though, for obvious reason...) However, a corporation doesn't actually have to hire the goons these days in order to get the job done, not when it's much cheaper to call upon the publically-available pool of goons that function as a government in some places. The fact that some corporations may leverage existing thuggery to get their job done doesn't make them any less complicit. But this is all besides my main point...

PS: you are a corporation, I am a corporation, together we could be a corporation, with 100K others we could be too. Doesn't matter; all have the same rights to act, and be left alone.

Well, this is where I suspect a little knee-jerk. I'm no socialist: in no way am I saying that "Corporations are inherently evil". (In fact, I'm hoping to continue profiting admirably as the result of my participation in the capitalist system.) What I think bares investigation is whether or not, here in the US, a subset of the big corporations are so tied in with the political engine as to be complicit in the violations we both agree are occurring. As Max said so eloquently, this is not to imply that "we should make some laws and eliminate these big evil corporations". Or maybe it is (I dunno...I'm a stoopid Cypherpunk...). But I don't think it's inherently inconsistent to point out that there may be a direct correlation between the activities of our particular State and the interests of a subset of Large, Old-money-dominated US Coporations. -TD

...

In fact, it's easy to argue that the current Oil Crusade in Iraq is precisely for the purpose of protecting a set of dinosaur industries in the US. That's not the kind of capitalism I think most Cypherpunks espouse.

The state can legitimately only use taxpayers' armies to defend citizens in the country, not other countries, not its perceived-by-some self-interest, not corporations. All the oil colonialism is illegitimate for that reason, as well as illegal as Congress has not declared war.

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