From: Steve Kinney <admin@pilobilus.net>

On 08/04/2016 03:00 AM, Cecilia Tanaka wrote:
>> I asked Steve some suggestions in private, but it's better to ask
>> publicly, so more people can profit the clues. Oh, you know, he
>> loves books, uses cute emoticons and makes oink oink. He's a good
>> reference for me, hahaha!! ;)

>When dredging the Internet for information, I am sure you won't have
>much trouble picking out the State sponsored anarchist literature and
>pseudo-radical propaganda fronts:

I hope people will forgive me for tooting my own horn. I was a minarchist Libertarian in 1994,

not an anarchist Libertarian. But it wasn't because I somehow wanted to keep around some

minimal government. Rather, it was because I couldn't figure out a logically-consistent method'

to entirely get rid of those last vestiges of government. Lacking such an plausible method,

I chose the intellectually-honest route of accepting (at the time) that some residual government

would be necessary.

While not specifically aware of David Friedman's (son of famous economist Milton Friedman)

"Hard Problem" http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/04/will_david_frie.html , from his

book, "The Machinery of Freedom" (1973; revised in 1989; again 2014), I was effectively

aware of the same barrier, and like Friedman, I could not see any solution. Anarchy, I

concluded, was impractical, and unachievable.

It's a good thing that I wasn't aware of Friedman's "Hard Problem", or the idea it was "hard".

In January 1995 I because to contemplate the idea that turned into my "Assassination

Politics" essay. https://cryptome.org/ap.htm

I wasn't intending to solve that problem: Rather, I was trying to figure out how

an otherwise-powerless public could defend itself from bad acts, mostly from government

employees. I realized that to combine the contributions of anonymous individuals, allows

that public can deter and prevent those bad acts. I further realized that this system would

be extremely economical, allowing (for instance) the region known as "America" to defend

itself, not merely from external threats, but also internal crime, probably for a total cost of

under $1 billion per year, far less than the $600 billion in defense spending currently done.

A simplistic, initial analysis (which I initially assumed, even before I wrote the first part of the

AP essay) was that AP would simply fix government. But the ultimate "fix" was actually far

more powerful than I'd initially realized, not merely fixing governments, but destroying all

governments, and thus protecting an anarchist or minarchist region from threatening

neighbors.

Put simply, I solved David Friedman's "Hard Problem". I haven't yet seen the 2014 revision

of his book, Machinery of Freedom, to see if he has acknowledged this yet. I think it would

be extraordinarily strange if he doesn't do so: After all, ostensibly we are on the same side

of this matter. He advocates a zero-government solution: Why wouldn't he cite a proof

that a zero-government solution is actually possible, contrary to his apparent previous

opinion?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machinery_of_Freedom

But in effect, I think I was quite correct, pre-1995, for me to believe that anarchy was

impractical. I don't know how people who labelled themselves as 'anarchists' resolved

the apparent contradiction. Were they aware that anarchy wasn't stable? (At least not

absent my 1995 invention, AP). Most likely I think they were simply unaware that anarchy

wasn't going to be stable. Or, perhaps they assumed that then-future events would somehow

solve the problem. As, ultimately, they did, but it didn't have to be that way. I, virtually by

accident, solved that problem. But things could have been very different.

Jim Bell