free market services vs monopoly government
Paul Bradley
paul at fatmans.demon.co.uk
Sat Aug 2 11:44:23 PDT 1997
> But your reasoning is this, apparently: "Kent says he doesn't believe
> it is possible for a human society to not have a government, therefore
> Kent favors big intrusive government." This kind of "reasoning" is
> rife on cypherpunks; may I suggest it is beneath you?
I don`t think this is a necessarily entirely spurious line of reasoning,
all government leads to large and intrusive government, it is the nature
of power that it corrupts and is addictive. So the statement above could
be corrected to "Kent says he doesn`t believe it is possible for a human
society to not have a government, therefore Kent favours a system which
would eventually "evolve" into big intrusive government".
Anyway, the argument over anarchism vs. minarchism comes down very much
to how you define government, if you define government as a body of
people given the power to pass laws over the citizens of that
jurisdiction, then government is indeed a bad thing per se, however, if
you define government as a loose informal set of social norms and codes
of behaviour (for a libertarian example see the NAP) then government is
indeed present in all civilised and succesful human societies, real or
conjectured.
Datacomms Technologies data security
Paul Bradley, Paul at fatmans.demon.co.uk
Paul at crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul at cryptography.uk.eu.org
Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
"Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"
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