From: solman@MIT.EDU
Date: Thu, 4 Aug 94 06:30:37 PDT
To: tcmay@localhost.netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Subject: Re: Voluntary Governments?
In-Reply-To: <199408040909.CAA25693@netcom5.netcom.com>
Message-ID: <9408041330.AA03044@ua.MIT.EDU>
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> > > Imagine if the government stopped trying to force people to
> > > join it. Or imagine if they tied decision making power to
> > > how much you pay in taxes. The more you pay, the more say
> > > you get. After accepting the idea that government is a
> 
> Without the legal monopoly on coercion, this so-called "government" would
> be just another service provider, like Safeway or Goodyear or K-Mart.

Well isn't that how its supposed to be? The entire justification
for having a monopoly in the "government market" (:-) in the
physical realm is that it would be impractical to have multiple
governments in one physical location. Nobody would know who
is following which laws and confusion would reign.

In cyberspace, the default condition is that there is no interaction.
Communication requires agreement by both parties. During this
agreement, the laws (contracts, whatever) that the two parties
follow can be communicated by each party to the other, and if
party A does not feel that party B's laws provide him with
enough protection from B, he can refuse contact until B agrees
(at least for the duration of the communication) to more
constraining laws. The cost of such a transaction will likely
be negligible in cyberspace.

There is thus no longer a problem with different following different
laws coexisting in the same place at the same time, and it no
longer makes sense to allow one entity to have a monopoly on government.

> Economies of scale work against a large, slow-moving bureaucracy, so the
> so-called goverment would devolve quickly into multiple small pieces.

Kewl.
 
> The specific point about "imagine if they tied decision making power to
> how much you pay in taxes" was tried a while back: only tax-payers could
> vote. I'm all in favor of this, but I doubt many of my fellow citizens are.

I remember reading a short story a long time ago which was about an
individual filing his taxes and about how proud and excited he was to
do so. The government in the future had changed things to allow
citizens to specify where they wanted their tax dollars to go to
and the result was that they came to view filing taxes as a positive
event. Now clearly this one change would not suddenly convince
everbody that taxes were a positive event, but it would go a long
way towards that and it would be an excellent marketing ploy for
a non-monopoly government (or civic enterprise if your prefer).

[Side note, I am in the process of convincing the MIT UA to adopt
a similar measure where students would control where up to 70%
of the per student money goes. It turns out that such a change
would have a minimal impact in terms of where the money actually
goes, but it would have an enourmous impact upon the feelings
of the student body towards the UA (or the civic enterprise as
the case may be). So when I say marketing ploy, I really mean
it.]

> I have a problem with the whole notion of calling a voluntary,
> self-selected, market-driven system a "government" of any kind. Yes, it is
> something people may voluntarily join, but so are country clubs, book
> reading groups, and mailing lists. And the decision to shop at Safeway one
> day is a temporary joining of such an instantiated group. But these things
> ain't governments!
> 
> This is not just semantic quibbling. If we say that such groups are
> voluntary, but can vote on "rules" or "laws" which all must follow, then
> the voluntary nature means people can freely leave, can choose not to abide
> by the rules, etc. Hence the rules are toothless.

First of all, I think that government is in a very specific business,
the business of providing security (note, infact, how many of the
government's programs are labled "insurance" of some kind). FDA
restrictions, welfare, medicaid, anti-gun laws, the military...
they are all intended to make sure that the citizenry need not
worry about these things, to make sure the the people feel secure.
For now, however, I'd like to define governments as entities
that try to use some form of coercion to get others to follow
its rules.

My definition of government is as follows: governments are civic service
providers which by their design attempt to impose a consistent set of
rules on a diverse group of entities. In the physical world, the word
impose usually translates into puting a gun by your head. In cyberspace,
the word impose translates into placing stipulations on contact between
people who follow the rules of the government and people who do not.
Charging "aliens" penalty taxes during economic transactions,
and refusing contact altogether are examples of cyberspatial government
imposition. I do not find it difficult to imagine extremely large
cyberpatial governments that depend entirely on these voluntary economic
forms of coercion. In fact, unless some sort of enourmous cultural change
were to occur, I find it extremelly likely that except for some fringe
groups (like ourselves :) most citizens of Western nations would wind up
belonging to large cyberspatial "nations", each with international treaties
that govern the interaction between "citizens" of different "nations".

So my claim is this:

Without extreme cultural upheaval, it is highly probable that voluntary
economic coercion alone will be sufficient to allow big government
to move from the physical realm into cyberspace.

Certainly the relationship between the citizenry and the government
will change when government becomes voluntary. But when Joe Average
gets wired, he will happily join whatever government that the
authorities that be tell him is the right one for him to join
without giving a second thought about the philosophy behind
the existence of government. Nor will Joe think about how difficult
it would be to create an annonymous pseudonym that was not a
"citizen" of a "cybernation" and could not be linked back to his
own identity or damage his primary identity's reputation. Joe
probably won't even know what the word escrow means when the personal
government agent he choses (because it was convieniently labled USA)
secret splits his private key and sends the halves to the NSA and
the FBI.

JWS