From: jim bell <jimbell@pacifier.com>
Date: Mon, 29 Apr 1996 07:24:21 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: Re: CryptoAnarchy: What's wrong with this picture?
Message-ID: <m0uDagf-00093GC@pacifier.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


At 08:21 AM 4/28/96 -0400, mkj@october.segno.com wrote:
>Sandy Sandfort wrote:
>> Income tax is the Godzilla of taxes.  It is THE TAX when it comes
>> to the US.  (Perhaps VAT has a similar status elsewhere, but both,
>> as pointed out, are subject to crypto-anarchistic subversion.)
>> 
>> > ...taxes existed, and governments sustained themselves perfectly
>> > well, long before these systems arose.
>> 
>> But at nowhere near the voracious levels of modern states.
>
>This is a point I hadn't considered.  If the govt doesn't know where
>most of the money is, they can't "harvest" it nearly as efficiently.
>Although they will almost certainly try to extract as much as possible
>from the poor, you can't get blood from a stone.  Hence the size of
>current governments will undoubtedly have to shrink.
>Most other arguments put forth so far in this thread, about how people
>"won't stand for" certain government behaviors and so forth, I don't
>find convincing.  Modern military technologies, especially in the
>U.S., make the prospects of a sucessful popular uprising dubious.

Then you obviously haven't read the essay (AP) I sent you yesterday.  
"Military technologies" only work effectively against a military target.  
Kill civilians and you just make other civilians angry.  At that point 
they'll be look for a weapon that "military technologies" cannot effectively 
oppose.  That weapon is already known to be possible.  

Quite the contrary, I think that a "successful popular uprising" will 
require only a very small investment in time and money, in which some of 
they key players in government are targeted and the prospect exists for 
easily and cheaply getting the rest.  At that point they will resign in droves.

>
>When you cut off someone's air supply, even the nicest, gentlest
>person will go into an unrestrained, murderous frenzy.  I expect
>something similar will happen to even the most "civilized" governments
>within the next few years, as popular crypto begins to cut off their
>money supply.  As I see it, only those relatively few citizens who can
>afford to flee will dare to resist.

Please read the essay.  I think it may enlighten you.  

Even with "conventional" analysis, there is no reason to believe that 
governement will be able to avoid shrinking.  Aside from making it easier to 
avoid taxation, the vast increase in information communicated by the 
Internet is taking a huge amount of power away from the traditional media, 
and the media is (despite the illusion they want you to believe!) the main 
backer of the government in most cases.  In addition, this information flow 
is making it ever more difficult to pass abusive laws; if the government 
does something stupid in the morning, by noon they are being flooded with 
faxes and emails.  And the whole concept of having a "governement" tends to 
be based on the assumption that people are incapable of making decisions for 
themselves.  That's an increasingly unrealistic position.

Government feeds on its own size; once government is dramatically reduced 
below its current size, it will become even less able to resist further 
contraction.  Probably few government employees realize this.

Jim Bell
jimbell@pacifier.com