From: Bill Stewart <stewarts@ix.netcom.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 07:48:47 +0800
To: cypherpunks@Algebra.COM
Subject: Re: Capitalist Assassination Politics
In-Reply-To: <199706151420.PAA19195@cscmgb.cc.ic.ac.uk>
Message-ID: <3.0.2.32.19970616154947.00762f8c@popd.ix.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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Bell's AP isn't a Democratic Assassins Program - it's a free-market system.
In a free market, when enough people want something enough to pay for it, 
like buying dope or killing someone, someone may decide it's worth their while
and just do it.  The catch is that he confuses mechanism with policy;
the market doesn't really care _why_ someone has a price on their head.

In a Democratic Assassins Program, everybody gets together and
haggles about who ought to be killed and why, and if a majority
wants someone killed, they go do it, or hire someone to do it for them,
and tell the minority what a wonderful thing Democracy is.

The US theoretically has a Republican Form Of Assassination -
everybody votes on some representatives, and the representatives
do whatever they can get away with, given future elections as a moderating
threat,
such as assassinating hundreds of thousands of Iraqis instead of the
one Iraqi they told us we should all Hate for Two Minutes,
or sending poisoned cigars to annoying bearded guys.

In practice, we have a Capitalist Mixed-Economy Assassination Process -
the Representatives decide to assassinate some people because it
seems to be popular in the polls, and other people because the 
Big Business interests want them assassinated, or because the 
Pentagon wants to advertise their availability for future jobs, and
some free-market "work" gets done, since you don't _have_ to 
annoy the national-scale interests to get assassinated,
some things get done by Good Old Fashioned Volunteerism*,
government-hired assassins decide ignore some collateral damage
or work overtime in the war on Republicanly-Selected Substances
and some people are society offenders who might best be underground
or just tempt Darwin too many times.


[* President's Commission on Volunteerism
http://www.whitehouse.gov/volunteer.htm  ]


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Attachment Converted: http://www.cia.odci.gov/assassination/nominations.doc
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#			Thanks;  Bill
# Bill Stewart, +1-415-442-2215 stewarts@ix.netcom.com
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#   (If this is a mailing list or news, please Cc: me on replies.  Thanks.)