GOA kicks ass, calls names, threatens prison. List headed by AFSA and AHTA

[R.A. Hettinga]

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- From the out-of-the-mouths-of-nascent-soft-tyrannies department...

I like to joke that Anguilla was so free back in the old days mostly
because it couldn't afford the Red Tape Raj it *really* wanted.


After The First Annual International Conference on Financial
Cryptography
(FC97 to its friends), or, now that I think about it, after Wired and
Forbes made FC famous, a whole bunch of financial cryptography hackers
stuck around after FC98, followed Vince Cate's successful example, wrote
code, and started businesses.

Then they got the first one of these "surveys" in the mail a few months
later. Almost all of them left as soon as they could pack.

The rest, bigger companies who were by then making actual money, like,
say,
Hush Communications, weren't too far behind. Hush is now in Ireland.
Even
Vince's most successful business, Public Data, is domiciled in the US of
all places, and speaking of soft tyrannies, chugging right along.

Milton Friedman noted that regulation benefits large market
participants at
the expense of small ones, especially consumers. Somewhere, he's
laughing.


The Government here are to call an election pretty soon.

Maybe the Government of Anguilla (GOA, below), in the spirit of
Olsen's "a
prince is a bandit who doesn't move", or Mencken's "an election is an
advance auction of stolen goods", is just taking a pre-auction
inventory.

Speaking of "Domesday", the economy here, after the de rigueur real-
estate
collapse, is going 'round the bowl and down the hole, same as everywhere
else.

Looking on the bright side, Brian, they're talking, horrors, about
cuts in
government salaries. One presumes they're modeling their "cuts" on the
recent homeopathic ones announced by the new administration in
Washington.

In the specious logic of statists everywhere, maybe both GOA and POTUS
think that taxpayer memory operates the same way that "water-memory"
does.

They both seem to be written in water, there's that.

BTW, there are only 13,000 full time residents of Anguilla,
"belongers" and
"non-" . The list below, when it doesn't include the usual recently
defunct
businesses, and "non-profits" (in an ostensible tax-haven :-))
represents a
significant chunk of the island's gross domestic product.


Cheers,
RAH
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