Three Cheers for the State - RAH RAH RAH

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 7:55 PM -0400 4/21/03, Patrick Chkoreff attempted to calibrate his apostasy reflex, across three email lists:

>You're on a roll, Mr. Bob Hettinga:

And you're on a troll, Mr. Patrick Chkoreff? :-).

At the very least he either doth protest too much, or at least mistook my meaning. Let's be charitable, and assume the latter, shall we?

>> ... is a distinction without a difference. Identical to the 
>> distinction between "pacifism", or "opposition to war", and treason, 
>> in an actual time of war.
>
>> Of course, the very concept of tax-free *anything* is anathema to me, 
>> these days. At the very least, it's just as much a state subsidy as a 
>> cash grant.
>
>To summarize:
>
>- Opposing any war is treason.

Well, if you're the de facto property of one nation-state or another, that's exactly true. Find me someone who isn't, these days. Hint: <http://www.google.com/search?q=failed+states&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8> The very definition of evil these days is the so called "failed" state.

>- Every human activity should be taxed.

Isn't it already? Certainly I think that *nothing* should be done without profit, that nothing really *is* done without profit to somebody, no matter what its governmental designation, and that *all* economic activity should be taxed if any of it is, and it *will* be, directly in cash, or indirectly in regulation, since we're all the "property" of one nation state or another, whether we say we "own ourselves" or not.  So, maybe you're right. 

When you think about it too hard, Non-Governmental Organizations aren't Non-Governmental, and that Non-Profit isn't. Churches, included, if you remember one of the three(?) original posts you're clipping from.

>- Failure to tax is equivalent to subsidy.

Given the above, indeed. Think about the implicit government subsidy for  medicine (I hate to commit the commie-code neologism "healthcare" in polite company...) by making it tax-deductible on a corporate tax return. Certainly the home interest rate deduction is a subsidy for single housing.

Taxes, since nation-states have their guns at our heads and take them whether we want them or not, shouldn't have deductions, if the word "should" has anything to do with it. It "should" not distort the economy anymore than it has to to pay the guys with guns.

>> Nation-states are a bitch, y'all...
>
>And from the above I conclude that you like it that way.

I think you mistake a statement of naked fact for approbium.

Since the nation-state is caused by physics, I expect that changing physical phenomena is the only way to solve the problem.


>Three cheers for the state, rah rah rah!

Fancy that. My initials make a cheer. Never heard that one before. <Hyuk!>


>Digital bearer settlement is treason.

Possibly. Certainly lots of people, you and others, hope so, apparently. 

But, hope, as exemplified by one's politics, or ethics, for that matter, doesn't have much to do with it. Like I said, nation-states are caused by physics, not politics. Politics is a result. It is not a cause of anything. These days, I tend to prefer economics, myself, as a reason for doing things. YMMV. Religion, applied fiction, if you will, doesn't make physical reality change anymore except through non-coercive economic means, and I live for the day when politics, whose very modern definition is the control of force monopoly, doesn't either. I figure that suckers are born every minute, if they want to pay money to people who tell them what to think, ethically, or politically, that's fine by me.

I'm not resigned to, much less in favor of -- not that what you or I *want* actually matters -- the ubiquity of the nation state or any other monopoly, force or otherwise. Nonetheless, we do live in a world of geographic force monopoly, funded by expropriation and extortion. Like Philip Dick said, reality doesn't change when you change your mind. 

Part of that expropriation is that nation-states can expropriate your physical person, put you in jail or kill you, for not agreeing with them, much less actively thwarting their behavior, particularly in time of war between nation-states. Part of that extortion is that they can threaten you with every thing from mobs and vigilantism to, again, murder and kidnap you if you don't pay them what they tell you you owe them. Their attempts to do this as efficiently as possible with the least amount of violence, usually through bribery of their supporters and fraud about that bribery as a "public good", do nothing more than sugar-coat the fact of their basic extortion and theft.

Life is hard. As I said before, "Nation states are a bitch".


Certain financial cryptography protocols hold out the, promise, the *hope*, that functionally anonymous, and completely secure, non-repudiable transactions can be done on ubiquitous geodesic internetworks without the requirement of the monopolistic force of nation-states in order to execute, clear, and settle.

Economics, and not politics, will determine the answer to that question.

Furthermore, as has been said by Tim May and others, those transactions must, sooner or later, execute, clear, and settle in the face of vigorous *repression* of those transactions, by most, if not all nation-states. 

Though certainly said as expressions of political opinion by Tim May and others, the efficacy of their survival in the face of such opposition will be the ultimate determinant of their *economic*, their physical -- and not political or ethical -- usefulness. That's not surprising, or, for that matter, hostile to nation-states, per se. Any more than railroads or television are hostile to nation states, even marginal or "failed" ones, like Bhutan, or Somalia, or Afghanistan.

Ultimately, however, *if* those transaction technologies work as advertised, orthogonal to the nation-state, if you will, they will have consequences to the nation-state, and, as others have said, might be considered threats. Clearly lots of people *want* them to threaten nation-states, but what people want in the absence of *profit* is, also orthogonal.

However, and this is most important, at *every* step of the way these protocols must make money. You can't be like Trotsky and say that the revolution hasn't come *yet*, with "yet" being permanently defined as "not now". That means that, plugged into and collateralized by existing *book-entry* assets, bearer certificates on the net are cheaper than book-entry transactions on public internetworks, much less the considerably more expensive book-entry transactions over the proprietary networks of meatspace.


My other claim, contingent on the above admittedly long stretch of conditionals, that bearer transactions on the net, because they execute not only anonymously, but more important, *without* the force monopoly of the nation state, make the transaction costs of nation states, and, ultimately non-monopolistic force contracting itself, fall, and, accordingly, dramatically increase the number of "firms", and competition in markets for force. Anarchocapitalism, right here in River City, folks. 

Crypto-Anarchy, in other words, but not because nation-states can't *catch* previously illegal transactions, causing their fall and, ultimately, violent chaos, but because their *competition* in newly emerging non-monopolistic force markets reduces their market share -- as the net does to centralized information, the surfacting of markets for force into recursively smaller and smaller market actors, at lower and lower cost, with no loss of, if not actual gains in, total individual security -- and liberty.


Finally an even bigger stretch, contingent on all of the above, is the idea that if the above really does happen, it, among other things, would prove something that I've always thought was true, something someone else has probably said before somewhere, though I haven't come across them yet, that our social structures map to our communication networks, and that Moore's "Law", in making our network architectures geodesic makes, in turn, our social structures less hierarchical and more geodesic themselves.

That, boys and girls, would be very cool indeed, but we ain't there by a long shot.

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
-----------------
R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah at ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'