At 10:09 AM -0400 10/25/00, Declan McCullagh wrote:

It's a not entirely uninteresting approach, but one doesn't have to resort to libertarian rights-theory to refute it (not that arguing about rights is going to resolve anything anyway).

Simple pragmatism can do the same. I mean, Nathan, have you ever considered what happens when taxes are raised to 95 percent?

I know you were just speaking hypothetically, but to be realistic, a hypo will have to includse the negative effects as well as the positive. For instance, what are the economic effects? What are the black markets that arise? What punitive measures must nations adopt to enforce tax collection? What about revolt and the ensuing bloodshed? What about public choice theory?

Think these things through, if you really want to be "pragmatic."

I've seen nothing from Nathan Saper that warrants the level of response we've been giving him. I regret having wasted my time writing replies to his puerile points. It's not so much that he's "wrong" as that he's "naive." He arrives on the CP list and begins regurgitating socialist blather he heard in his poli-sci and sociology classes. Junk about mandatory health care, feeding the poor, raising taxes to make the world a better place, government doing what it "needs to do" without regard for constitutional restraints, all said with utter disregard for basic economics. As I have said, and as Lucky just said this morning, the list has for some reason attracted a whole set of such naive and puerile people. One theory is that it's the "fall crop" of students. Another is that the noise coming out of "privacy rights organizations" is increasingly leftist and interventionist. (We have a Canadian branch of the Cypherpunks which is apparently led by a neo-fascist civil rights crusader who wants guns banned and is distrustful of free market solutions.) The Saper-Warped Hypothesis. --Tim May -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.