[105048] in Cypherpunks
RE: dbts: Privacy Fetishes, Perfect Competition, and the Foregone
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Matthew James Gering)
Thu Nov 5 00:58:35 1998
From: Matthew James Gering <mgering@ecosystems.net>
To: "'Robert Hettinga'" <rah@shipwright.com>,
"Cypherpunks (E-mail)"
<cypherpunks@cyberpass.net>
Date: Wed, 4 Nov 1998 21:43:31 -0800
Reply-To: Matthew James Gering <mgering@ecosystems.net>
Robert Hettinga wrote:
> A government is just another economic actor. A very large
> economic actor with lots of guns and a monopoly on force,
> but an economic actor nonetheless.
No they are not, nor will they necessarily recognize the economic
consequences of their actions before they entirely self-destruct or mutate
only to do it again. History shows this.
I generally use the economic/political distinction as made by Franz
Oppenheimer, and furthered by Rothbard, Rand, etc. In that context they are
a political actor, not an economic one. I purposefully ignored the prospect
of corporations using coercive force to prevent privacy, it is rather
improbable and still preferable to government coercion -- but note they do
use coercive force today preventing privacy, but government is their
instrument of force.
Jim Choate wrote:
> You need to look around, the government has NO monopoly on force.
They have a *legal* monopoly on force (within a state). You do not generally
consider the black market in determining monopolistic conditions, and in
fact the existence of a black market in a segment generally points to a
coercive monopoly in the public one.
Matt
