I wrote:

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I really do not want to digress onto the issue of nominalism and legal positivism, which is seriously off topic, but a similar approach on other matters has led to the catastrophic collapse of societies in the past, and I would claim that it is having something of that effect in the present.

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If such a system was to serve the function that reputations now serve in the real world, it would lead to consequences very different from those intended or desired by Hal.

John Young writes

Your elaboration of this claim, to echo Tim's later post, would be welcomed.

Hal seems to be asking questions which implicitly define a reputation to be some kind of credential. This is like *defining* money as fiat money, as governments are prone to do, or *defining* the value of a good to be its labor content, as Marx did. If you assume that the two are the same, then the two will cease to be the same, the system will screw up, and you will need coercion (legal tender laws) to make fiat money work as if it was actual money, and to make credentials act as if they were actual reputations. -- --------------------------------------------------------------------- We have the right to defend ourselves and our property, because of the kind of animals that we James A. Donald are. True law derives from this right, not from the arbitrary power of the omnipotent state. jamesd@netcom.com