Re: Brit Fascists To Track Motorists - DigiCash Obsolescent

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Thu, Jul 24, 1997 at 06:54:29PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> At 02:34 AM 7/24/97 -0700, Kent Crispin wrote:
> >On Wed, Jul 23, 1997 at 01:59:00PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
> >[...]
> >> And, yes, all of this privacy loss happens because somebody decided
> >> it was convenient to put a car-ownership-tax receipt on the outside
> >> of a car so police can quickly decide if you've paid your taxes...
> >> The rest of it's just implementation details.
> >
> >Of course, you could just confine your driving to private roads, and
> >leave the license plate off. 
> 
> If the government wants to take over all the public commons right-of-way
> and pave it for roads, I'm not saying I'm not willing to pay them
> for the use of all their nice concrete and asphalt*, though 
> government-built roads have led to a whole lot of ecological and social
> problems

Can't deny that.

> that are far more severe than those a free-market road system
> would have given us;

I see no evidence for this.  Do you know of any national level 
free-market road system that would demonstrate this?  I don't think 
there are any.

> free-marketers without eminent domain would have
> built fewer roads in generally more efficient places because they'd need 
> to make money on each one, though eminent domain may be enough of a 
> cost-saver to make up for lower efficiency, and housing and business 
> development would have organized more compactly around the roads and
> railroads that did get built, allowing less car use.

I don't know.  Maybe, maybe not.  This is all hypothetical.

However, I think that strong identification systems for people and
cars would develop on private road systems, as well.  The reason is
that traffic rules would have to be enforced on private roads just as
much as they do on public roads.  Roadway operators would still want
drivers licenses to identify drivers who were competent, and would
still want to be able to identify cars as an aid to identifying
people.

More generally, while much of the argument on cpunks has been about
the government invading privacy, in fact, of course, "private
enterprise" has no motivation to respect privacy rights -- knowledge
about people is just another commodity.

In fact, there was a recent thread about how there was no such thing 
as "privacy rights"...

[...]
								
> And somehow before the automobile we got by without license plates on
> horses and buggies and cows, though some people branded their horses or 
> cows or painted their names on buggies without the law requiring it
> so they could demonstrate ownership if there was a dispute.

My dad had his own brand, many years ago ("WC on a Bench" -- I used 
to have a wooden plaque with it burned in...).  There was and still is 
a great deal more government involvement in brands than you may 
realize.  Brands are registered, there are "brand inspectors", etc.  

But in any case, *many* things were different 150 years ago. 
Arguably, you didn't need things like license plates, because
*everything* was much less anonymous -- the web of personal knowledge
of other people's doings was much more complete.  You didn't need to
put your name on your buggy, because everybody locally knew it was
yours.

[...]

> Changing the
> transaction costs changes the possible relationships between
> supplier and customer, and if the government wants to use them
> for social control, some of those relationships make it easier.

That's the leitmotif of this discussion, isn't it -- government use of
technology for social control.  In my view, however, it is a mistake
to focus on the government.  Society exerts social control, not just
the government.  We have jobs, families, friends, habits, training,
education -- a whole web of relationships that channel our activities 
and our thinking.

If you consider what "freedom" means in the context of this larger 
definition of "social control" things become rather subtle.

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
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http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html