From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
Date: Fri, 30 May 1997 03:17:40 +0800
To: cypherpunks@toad.com
Subject: e$: Altered States. Transfer payment addiction, Le Infame, andPhil Dick's definition of reality.
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Date:  Thu, 29 May 1997 11:57:32 -0400
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
To: Multiple recipients of <e$@thumper.vmeng.com>
Subject:  e$: Altered States. Transfer payment addiction, Le Infame, and
Phil Dick's definition of reality.

At 1:23 pm -0400 on 5/28/97, Bill Frantz wrote in cypherpunks:

> I object to the state, providing addictive substances/experiences when
> private enterprise could do the job.  If they are against addiction, then
> they should set a good example.

For myself, I deplore the state's all-too-successful efforts to "provide"
that ultimate addictive substance, the transfer payment.

>From the oxymoron of "Social" "Security", to direct subsidies on everything
from electricity to sugar to helium, from deliberately mispriced federal
assets like lumber, water and mining rights, to indirect subsidies like the
tax-deductibility of mortgage interest and health "insurance", we use our
government to bleed money, initiative, and, ultimately, freedom from the
people who produce wealth and material well-being and give almost all of it
to people who do nothing but consume and obstruct. We've all become a
nation of innumerate dole-junkies, unaware of the economic consequences of
our actions because the state has hidden them behind a veil of
pseudoeconomics and political cynicism.

The heyday of Roman dole was nothing compared to the "compassion" we
increasingly have for ourselves.

So, like a lot of people, I hope and work for the day when that giant
mosquito on the Petomaine :-) river -- and its larvae in places like
Jefferson City -- starts sucking air instead of the economic and moral
lifeblood of people who actually work for a living. Then, maybe, this
nation of lotus eaters will wake up to the fact that we've no one to rely
upon but ourselves.

Science fiction author Phillip K. Dick said, "Reality is that which doesn't
go away when you change your mind." I would ammend it to say that reality
is that which is still there when transfer payments stop.


Voltaire used to end all his correspondence with "Death to Le Infame". "Le
Infame" translates as "the infamous thing". He was talking about the church
then, but nowadays it seems that *all* of us take communion at Our Lady of
the Federal Transfer Payment.

The end of opressive religeous control of society was the advent of
science, the enlightment, and the triumph of reason that resulted from
them. The founding of this country was part of that revolution.
Unfortunately, unreason shed its priestly vestments and immediately
counterattacked in the form of Rousseau, Robespierre and the French
revolution. Since then, through the mechanations of Rousseau's intellectual
decendants like Karl Marx, and lately, the people that Harold Bloom calls
the "School of Resentment", nation states have justified more and more
oppression in the interest of unobtainable mirages like "equality" and
"security", and in perverting words like "fairness" and "justice" to mean
envy and arbitrary confiscation.

The very touchstone of reason in political thought, this country's
constitution, is now standing on the bottom of a vast lake of irrational
statist excrement, with its nose barely above the waterline.

Sometimes, I think that, when we can breathe no longer, and we try to
return to the shore of reason, we'll forget the swimming lessons the
founding fathers and the philosophes of the enlightenment taught us. That
we'll drown in our own sloth, envy, resentment, and, more important, lack
of faith in ourselves.

However, most of the time, I'm much more optimistic. I believe that the
increasing ubiquity of all information, and, more important, the means for
each person to competitively process that information himself to get
independently replicable results, will create a world where people and
their computing technology become the equivalent of scientists, testing and
verifying facts about the world themselves, rather than having reality
served to them on a lotus leaf.


The operative word in that Proustian sentence was "competitively". That
means markets for everything which can be put into ones and zeroes and sent
on a network, which in turn means instant settlement and clearing of those
transactions, and, most important, a myriad of autonomous economic entities
operating in efficient, competitive, auction markets for that information.

Fortunately, we have the technology, in the form of things like the blind
signature algorithm, public key cryptography, Moore's law and geodesic
networks, to make this happen. I believe that we actually have no economic
choice, and so it will happen. It's as if we have found the dole-receptors
in our economic neurochemistry, and soon our transfer payment addiction
will be a thing of the past.

"Reality is that which doesn't go away when you change your mind."

Kicking an addiction is by definition a mind-altering experience. :-).


Polemically,
Bob Hettinga

-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/


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-----------------
Robert Hettinga (rah@shipwright.com), Philodox
e$, 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
The e$ Home Page: http://www.shipwright.com/