corporate vs. state, TD's education

[Tyler Durden]

Ah Variola...do I detect a wee bit of Knee-jerk in your otherwise 
consistently iconoclastic views? Let's take a looksee...

>Get this through your head: a corporation can't initiate force against
>you.
>You may not like their product, practices, or price, but no one is
>coercing you at gunpoint.

Think I'm gonna have to disagree with ya' hear partner.
For one, in the old days Corporations regularly hired goons to mow down 
striking coalminers and whatnot.

OK, those days are all gone, right? Wrong. Halliburton and Bechtel have both 
hired mercs for their Iraq operations. (In fact, I was on a call a couple of 
weeks ago where a Halliburton official was describing the casualties they 
take on a regular basis. These don't get reported much in the news, though, 
for obvious reason...)

However, a corporation doesn't actually have to hire the goons these days in 
order to get the job done, not when it's much cheaper to call upon the 
publically-available pool of goons that function as a government in some 
places. The fact that some corporations may leverage existing thuggery to 
get their job done doesn't make them any less complicit. But this is all 
besides my main point...


>PS: you are a corporation, I am a corporation, together we could
>be a corporation, with 100K others we could be too.  Doesn't
>matter; all have the same rights to act, and be left alone.

Well, this is where I suspect a little knee-jerk. I'm no socialist: in no 
way am I saying that "Corporations are inherently evil". (In fact, I'm 
hoping to continue profiting admirably as the result of my participation in 
the capitalist system.) What I think bares investigation is whether or not, 
here in the US, a subset of the big corporations are so tied in with the 
political engine as to be complicit in the violations we both agree are 
occurring.

As Max said so eloquently, this is not to imply that "we should make some 
laws and eliminate these big evil corporations". Or maybe it is (I 
dunno...I'm a stoopid Cypherpunk...). But I don't think it's inherently 
inconsistent to point out that there may be a direct correlation between the 
activities of our particular State and the interests of a subset of Large, 
Old-money-dominated US Coporations.

-TD





>
>
> >In fact, it's easy to argue that the
> >current Oil Crusade in Iraq is precisely for the purpose of protecting
>a set
> >of dinosaur industries in the US. That's not the kind of capitalism I
>think
> >most Cypherpunks espouse.
>
>The state can legitimately only use taxpayers' armies to defend citizens
>in the
>country, not other countries, not its perceived-by-some self-interest,
>not
>corporations.  All the oil colonialism is illegitimate for that reason,
>as well
>as illegal as Congress has not declared war.
>
>
>

_________________________________________________________________
Get reliable access on MSN 9 Dial-up. 3 months for the price of 1! 
(Limited-time offer) 
http://join.msn.com/?page=dept/dialup&pgmarket=en-us&ST=1/go/onm00200361ave/direct/01/