Max's Lesson (was Re: [osint] Martha's lesson - don't talk to the FBI)

[Tyler Durden]

"In fact, a *moral* argument can be made that restraint of that
information is more fraud than trading on that information to begin
with. Morally -- if morality caused markets and not the other way
around :-) --  "insiders" should be *obligated* to trade on "inside"
information as soon as they believe that information to be true."

To some extent this is already touted as a long-term issue here on Wall 
Street.

The biggest example is when one company is doing "due diligence" when 
contemplating a purchase of another. During that process that have a (legal) 
level of access to information that does not exist elsewhere. During that 
time, then, they have the info-advantage that can be directly exploited 
during the deal and that causes bizarre pricing.

As I've said before, if we had a true blacknet, where even options could be 
traded, then no deal would ever suffer from the advantage of hidden 
info...they'd all be priced far more fairly, and the little 401K retirees 
would actually benefit greatly.



As for the notion of a state being INHERENTLY "evil", I'm still not 
convinced. At least, if I WANT to be butt-humped by the state, then it's OK, 
right?

-TD


>From: "R. A. Hettinga" <rah at shipwright.com>
>To: cypherpunks at al-qaeda.net
>Subject: Max's Lesson (was Re: [osint] Martha's lesson - don't talk to the 
>FBI)
>Date: Wed, 24 Mar 2004 17:49:48 -0500
>
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>At 2:30 PM -0500 3/24/04, baudmax23 at earthlink.net wrote:
>
> >movement
>
>bZZZT. -10 pts., Hackneyed Socialist Cliche.
>
> >unjust state
>
>Bzzt. -10 pts., Bad grammar. Redundant phrase.
>
> > <eat the rich...>
>
>Bzzt. -20 pts., Innumeracy, Economic ignorance.
>
> > <marketing is evil and must be controlled>
>
>Bzzt. -20 pts., Totalitarian will to power.
>
>
>...I think we'll stop there, in the interests of, um, intellectual
>charity...
>
>Score: 40/100. F.
>
>Game over. Thank you for playing, Max.
>
>
>
>And now for a little post-mortem, shall we?
>
>It's all about property, Max. You know, the stuff you *earned* by
>personally altering reality to such a favorable degree that other
>people to *pay* you to keep you doing it? It's also about freedom.
>You don't get freedom, from "god", or from laws, or from "movements",
>or a "just" state, or any*body* else. You get freedom by defending
>*yourself*. Your *self*, Max.
>
>
>*All* states, Max, are about taking your money at the point of a
>weapon of some sort. They're *all* unjust, just like the theocracy of
>the dark ages was irrational and innumerate. Of course, life isn't
>fair, much less "just". But, in the particular case of states, we pay
>force-monopolists because they will, ultimately, kill us if we don't.
>
>OTOH, if states kill us all, they won't have anyone to steal from,
>preventing their market from achieving equilibrium.
>
>:-).
>
>
>Martha, of course, is, politically, culturally, the epitome of
>hypocritical, liberal-socialist scum.
>
>However, the "laws" (virtually unpromulgated, and certainly
>unlegislated "regulations", not actual laws; doesn't keep them from
>sending you to jail, of course, but they weren't legislated: there
>are too many of them to vote on, for starters...) they were *trying*
>to convict her on were completely ridiculous in their intent and evil
>in their consequence.
>
>First off, information, like money, is fungible. It is *impossible*
>to keep information, "insider", or any other kind, out of the price
>of an asset. The minute that information is credible and known to
>*anyone* "insider" or not, the price of the asset will begin to
>reflect that information, if only by insiders not *buying* that
>asset.
>
>In fact, a *moral* argument can be made that restraint of that
>information is more fraud than trading on that information to begin
>with. Morally -- if morality caused markets and not the other way
>around :-) --  "insiders" should be *obligated* to trade on "inside"
>information as soon as they believe that information to be true. Call
>it financial Calvinism, kinda like Tim's saying he's morally
>prohibited from helping liberals, and the otherwise-damned :-),
>achieve their own salvation.
>
>Think about it this way: the "crime" of "insider" trading didn't
>exist until 1962. We've *always* had capital markets, of one form or
>another, and insider trading, in *every* civilization, since the
>first agricultural surplus was put into a grain bank and exchanged
>for goods and services. It is impossible, I would claim, to have
>civilization without capital markets. Even Stalin -- especially
>Stalin -- had to have recourse to capital markets to stay in
>business. Go read up on a guy named Ludwig von Mises, and pay
>particular attention to the words "calculate" and prices, and the
>impossibility of using both in a meaningful, logical, sentence, and
>you'll figure out what happened to Stalin's successors. Mancur
>Olsen's "Power and Prosperity" wouldn't hurt either.
>
>
>The fact that the most plutographic, nepotist, crypto-aristocratic
>"liberal" political dynasty in this country's history made its
>seed-money first on bootlegging, but, most importantly, on
>pre-market-crash 1920's "insider" trading, and that the progenitor of
>that dynasty was, later, the first Chairman of the Securities and
>Exchange Commission, speaks more to the folly, if not actual evil, of
>capital market regulation, much less "insider" trading, than anything
>I could say here.
>
>
>
>Finally, if you're stupid enough to believe "marketing", you deserve
>to buy what they sell you. Hell, if you're happy doing so, it's
>nobody's business but yours. Your property is your property. Trade it
>for what makes you happy.
>
>Just don't pass another goddamn law. Please. Physics causes Politics,
>not the other way around. Change reality, write code, discover a new
>market, whatever, and the law will change accordingly. Change reality
>enough, and maybe we won't need law to enforce, say, the
>non-repudiation characteristics of our transactions, and people like
>Martha, god forbid, won't go to jail because nobody will *know*
>whether someone used "inside" information or not.
>
>
>
>So, Max, I hate to break it to you, but you seem to be a socialist,
>to use the more pleasant of several pejoratives. Not the end of the
>world, you probably don't call yourself one, and you may not even
>know you are, because socialism is about as ubiquitous today as
>theocracy was a thousand years ago. As Perry Metzger noted somewhere
>else a little while ago, back then one was either in favor of God, or
>the Devil, and anyone who said that both were just fictional
>characters in a book rather quickly became toast on a stick.
>
>Just like back then, these days there are people who believe one is
>either in favor of "democracy", or socialism.  Anyone who believes
>that both are just a fig-leaf for expropriation and refuses to
>cooperate with that expropriation quickly becomes a guest in
>state-run accommodations.
>
>
>The average person in the dark and middle ages believed that physics,
>and all information and learning, came from an information monopoly,
>represented by a book in a language they couldn't read in a stone
>building built with their "tithed" slave-labor.
>
>The average person in these innumerate economic dark-ages believes
>that economics -- or "justice", or a "fair" allocation of material
>resources, whatever those mean -- comes from whole libraries full of
>paper printed by what I would call an artifact of now-devolving
>human-switched hierarchical information networks.
>
>A thing that, even more than the theocratic feudal lords of old were
>able to do, forcibly confiscates half the average person's income and
>spends it mostly on the maintenance of its cronies and foot-soldiers,
>but also on lowering the costs of its physical control by eloquent
>fraudulent justifications for its theft. Telling them lies about how
>powerful it is, like their dark-age theological progenitors did about
>their fictional character controlling the physical universe. The
>chief lie of all is that it has the absolute ability to control asset
>prices, by, of all things, taxing their sale, or, just as ludicrous,
>capriciously "regulating" their production, invariably to the
>advantage of its cronies and not the consumers of that asset.
>
>That "thing" is, of course, the "public thing", res publica, if you
>will, the latest wrinkle on good fashioned modern force-monopoly, a
>thing that spontaneously -- like all real markets do, like, say,
>those for capital :-) -- arose when ur-agricultural-age bandits
>figured out they could steal *more* money if they simply didn't move
>anymore.
>
>
>So, Max, as a socialist, an unwitting user of such lies as
>"movement", or "(un)just state", as someone who believes that the
>*earned* property of "the rich" should be confiscated, or that
>"marketing" should be controlled by force, welcome to the other side
>of the looking glass. The *real* side of the looking glass, I might
>add, where the "justice" of the state is simply another not-so-polite
>fiction to keep power.
>
>Hanging out on this list is a sure cure for such mental delusions. It
>worked for me, anyway. :-).
>
>You might, in the meantime, try Googling "crypto-anarchy" or
>"anarcho-capitalism" and/or "cypherpunks", or "Tim May" and
>"cryptonomicon" (no not *that* cryptonomicon, the *original* one...),
>which will probably, in the process, find you a currently working
>version of several archives of this list that have arisen over the
>last decade. I'd start at the beginning, around September 1992.
>
>It's not that hard. You only need to read the first two months of the
>archives before things start to repeat themselves. ;-).
>
>
>
>Cheers,
>RAH
>
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>--
>-----------------
>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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