The ghost of Cypherpunks

[R.A. Hettinga]

At 9:43 AM +0100 9/15/05, ken wrote:
>Do you really think that politics only exists where there is a
>state?

Agreed, on this one.

In 10th century Iceland, an ostensible anarcho-capitalist society with
exactly *one* "public" employee(1) *everybody* was a lawyer -- and murder
was a tort. See David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom", and any good
Icelandic saga, my favorite being "Njall's Saga", for details

Cheers,
RAH
Who especially liked Friedman's "penny game", for a good example of how
government works.
--------

(1) A guy whose job it was to recite one quarter of the agreed-upon laws
once a year at a summer solstice fair called the Allthing, and if a law
wasn't recited after four years, it was considered rescinded.
-- 
-----------------
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'