From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Tue, 17 Nov 1998 13:56:25 +0800
To: Jim Choate <cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com (Cypherpunks Distributed Remailer)
Subject: RE: dbts: Privacy Fetishes, Perfect Competition, and the (fwd)
In-Reply-To: <199811101638.KAA18839@einstein.ssz.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19981116173649.008a3d20@idiom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 10:38 AM 11/10/98 -0600, Jim Choate wrote:
>Your right, let me spell it out. Free-markets as depicted by
>anarcho-whatever theories legitimize theft, physical violence, extortion, etc.

Nonsense.  Governments are the ones who claim legitimacy for
their theft, violence, and extortion.  Free markets consider those things
to be bad, though in some free markets they're for sale anyway.

>They further a priori abandon any precept of social institution and
>leave it all on the shoulder of the individuals. 

Nonsense again.  Social institutions aren't a market issue,
though some services provided by them can also be provided by markets,
i.e. hiring people to do things.  They're a social issue, and 
people will form social institutions to do things if they want.
Absence of coercion doesn't mean absence of cooperation.
Anarchists are perfectly good at having schools, churches,
volunteer fire companies, theater groups, and soup kitchens,
and they still raise their kids, live inside if they want,
do fun things together, and do necessary things together.
Just because you don't have a social institution that announces
that it has the job of killing anybody who competes with it or
fails to obey its proclamations of the will of the majority
doesn't mean you don't have social institutions.

>Additionaly they abandon such concepts of justice, equity, etc. 
>because they describe no mechanism to handle these issues.

You've sure got the cart before the horse here.
Most anarchists I know, whether leftists or libertarians,
care more about justice and equity than any government
I've encountered (maybe not more than the citizens
ruled by the government, but more than the government itself.)
We just don't think a State is a good or likely way to get them,
given too much experience to the contrary, even if some occasional
groups of people have some limited success running a limited government
for short periods of time.

> And finaly, they don't even attempt to recognize
>the international interactions and cultural differences that drive them.

You're building assumptions into your terminology here....
it's only international if you've got nations.
But assuming you mean interactions between groups of people
living in different places who act different, sure,
we recognize them, whether they're across an ocean,
or a Big River, or just across town.  Doesn't mean we can't
peacefully trade with each other, and doesn't mean that some of them
won't occasionally try to rip us off.  

>They make the same mistake as every other form of non-democratic system,
>they assume because it works for one it works for all.

Huh?  I've been told time and time again "This is a democracy,
majority rules, it's America and you'll do it our way,
love it or leave it, conform or we'll beat you up."
Democracy means that other people can tell you what to do,
and if it works for them you'd better hope it works for you
because you're stuck with it.   There are other systems where
smaller groups of people can tell everybody else what to do,
which can be worse than democracy, like monarchies or slave states,
but somehow the purported "limited government" have been
much less limited in theory than in practice, and 
justice and equity are for those people who are more equal than others.

>Not even hardly. At least citizens can change the laws under a democracy.
>Under an anarcho-whatever it is strictly lump it or like it unless you're
>willing to fund a bigger gun.

A bigger gun than Congress can fund with your money and mine?  Wow!

>I'm going to stop now, this particular vein of discussion is bereft of any
>and all positive attributes when one tries to justify slavery and theft.

Wait, did the attributions get switched around here, and this line
wasn't by Jim Choate?  If not, what was your draft card number, Jim?
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639