From: lunaslide@loop.com
Date: Tue, 13 Feb 1996 08:27:22 +0800
To: jamesd@echeque.com
Subject: Re: A Cyberspace Independence Refutation
Message-ID: <v01530500ad4522b6d733@[206.138.118.125]>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


<rm>

}Your other arguments casually dismiss the very real power that large numbers
}of able people with good communications can exercise, have just exercised
}very recently.
}
}Nation states are a new creation.  In the past many different
}kings ruled many different bits of one nation, and one king often
}ruled parts of more than one nation.
}
}Today nation states are almost universal, and people can no longer
}imagine what a nation is, other than a nation state.  But the net
}is a nation, and is not a state, and nationalism is a force that
}governments usually cannot withstand.
<rm>

I'll just come out admit right now that I read Wired.  Yeah, sue me.  But
my point is that there was an article in 4.01 (January) on page 86 titled
"Is Government Obsolete?  Is the free market all we need to build a robust
and democratic political economy for the 21st century?"

I think the govt sees the beginning of the end.  They will not be
completely done away with, but they will lose the vast amount of power that
they now have and be reduced in size till they are functioning as a
mediator of disputes between this country and others, a regulator of some
laws involving ecology, labor laws, and so on.  But they will have lost
control over the direction of the nation.  Will the nation be able to be
cohesive without them?  I don't even think our concept of what a nation is
will be the same when that time eventually does come.

One think does stand to reason though, when govt gets in the way of
business, govt eventually gets run over.  Regulating the net in content
brings them one step closer to obsolescence.  The govt is not yet in it's
death throwes, but it has seen it's own fate.  The net regulation is one
more feeble attempt at avoiding destiny.  King Laius will not avoid his
fate by sending his son away this time, just like he didn't the first time.

"...We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created
equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of
Happiness.---That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among
Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, ---That
whenever any Form of government becomes destructive to those ends, it os
the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new
Government, laying it's foundation on such priciples and organizing it's
powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their
Safety and Happiness.  Prudence, indeed,  will dictate that Governments
long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and
accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to
suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing
the forms to which they are accostomed.  But when a long train of abuses
and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to
reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty,
to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future
security."

>From the Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776.

lunaslide

"Prohibition... goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to
control a man's appetite by legislation and makes a crime out of things
that are not crimes... A prohibition law strikes a blow at the very
principles upon which our government was founded."
- -- Abraham Lincoln

On the meridian of time there is no injustice, only the poetry of motion
creating the illusion of truth and drama.
                                                Henry Miller
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