From: Paul Bradley <paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
Date: Sun, 3 Aug 1997 02:44:23 +0800
To: Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>
Subject: Re: free market services vs monopoly government
In-Reply-To: <19970802015614.65348@bywater.songbird.com>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.3.91.970802152737.845A-100000@fatmans.demon.co.uk>
MIME-Version: 1.0
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> But your reasoning is this, apparently: "Kent says he doesn't believe
> it is possible for a human society to not have a government, therefore
> Kent favors big intrusive government." This kind of "reasoning" is
> rife on cypherpunks; may I suggest it is beneath you?

I don`t think this is a necessarily entirely spurious line of reasoning, 
all government leads to large and intrusive government, it is the nature 
of power that it corrupts and is addictive. So the statement above could 
be corrected to "Kent says he doesn`t believe it is possible for a human 
society to not have a government, therefore Kent favours a system which 
would eventually "evolve" into big intrusive government".
Anyway, the argument over anarchism vs. minarchism comes down very much 
to how you define government, if you define government as a body of 
people given the power to pass laws over the citizens of that 
jurisdiction, then government is indeed a bad thing per se, however, if 
you define government as a loose informal set of social norms and codes 
of behaviour (for a libertarian example see the NAP) then government is 
indeed present in all civilised and succesful human societies, real or 
conjectured.

        Datacomms Technologies data security
       Paul Bradley, Paul@fatmans.demon.co.uk
  Paul@crypto.uk.eu.org, Paul@cryptography.uk.eu.org    
       Http://www.cryptography.home.ml.org/
      Email for PGP public key, ID: FC76DA85
     "Don`t forget to mount a scratch monkey"