Three Cheers for the State - RAH RAH RAH

Tyler Durden camera_lumina at hotmail.com
Tue Apr 22 12:26:37 PDT 2003


RAH wrote...

"as the net does to centralized
information, the surfacting of markets for force into recursively smaller 
and smaller market actors,..."

Ah. I was wondering when a reference to "fractals" would be made.

-TD


>From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
>To: Patrick Chkoreff <patrick at fexl.com>,   dgcchat  
><dgcchat at lists.goldmoney.com>
>CC: cypherpunks at lne.com, Clippable <rah at shipwright.com>
>Subject: Re: Three Cheers for the State - RAH RAH RAH
>Date: Tue, 22 Apr 2003 14:46:31 -0400
>
>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'


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