What is a cypherpunk?

[Justin]

On 2005-02-15T21:40:34+0000, Justin wrote:
> On 2005-02-15T13:23:37-0500, Steve Thompson wrote:
> >  --- "James A. Donald" <jamesd at echeque.com> wrote: 
> > [snip]
> > > As governments were created to smash property rights, they are 
> > > always everywhere necessarily the enemy of those with property, 
> > > and the greatest enemy of those with the most property.
> > 
> > Uh-huh.  Perhaps you are using the term 'government' in a way that is not
> > common to most writers of modern American English?
> 
> I think it's fair to say that governments initially formed to protect
> property rights (although we have no historical record of such a
> government because it must have been before recorded history began).
> They then developed into monarchies which were only really set up to
> protect property rights of the ruler(s).

It seems I've been brainwashed by classical political science.  What I
wrote above doesn't make any sense.  Judging from social dynamics and
civil advancement in the animal kingdom, monarchies developed first and
property rights were an afterthought.

-- 
Certainly there is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who
have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never really care for
anything else thereafter.           --Hemingway, Esquire, April 1936