Pentagon discovers Assasination Politics, deadpools

[Bill Stewart]

At 11:23 AM 07/29/2003 -0700, Bill Frantz wrote:
>Note that properly run, this "Ideas Futures" market would be a money maker,
>not a cost center.  For only a modest percentage of the winnings, it could
>be self sustaining.  Perhaps someone with a profit motive will pick up the 
>idea.

Assuming it can be legally structured as a "Futures Market",
rather than as "Illegal Gambling", it could make money.
(There are obviously some bets it's unlikely to handle,
such as the bet that Idea Futures markets would be successfully prosecuted
as illegal gambling :-)

>If they don't want the label of "Assasination Politics", they can forbid
>bets on individual deaths, and still have nearly the full field, including
>wars, revolutions, "nonstandard" attacks, and elections available for play.
>(c.f. the way eBay and Yahoo limit themselves.)

This provides a number of Doubleplus-Good Things.

- Government agencies can be funded by private ideas futures speculation
rather than by taxes, freeing them from the tiresome needs of
Congressional budget requests and oversight.  No more Ollie North trials!

- Private organizations can fund government agencies to do specific things
and launder the money through the market, rather than needing to lobby
Congresscritters to fund them.  There's a bit less leverage this way,
but surely there are some Congresscritters who'd appreciate that
private organizations were betting they'd live to 100 like Strom Thurmond.

- All those boring old Neutrality Act laws that keep companies like
ITT and Halliburton from overthrowing foreign governments
and forbid patriotic Americans to be foreign mercenaries
can be avoided, because they won't need to do that any more -
they can just bet sufficient sums that governments will be overthrown
and they'll go overthrow themselves, and those patriotic Americans
can be working as, ummm, investment logistics expediters instead of mercs.

- The system will be completely Anonymous, and
         Anonymity is Strength!

- Of course Oceania has always had an Idea Futures position about
the downfall of WestAsia.  Why do you ask?