Re: free market services vs monopoly government

[Kent Crispin <kent@songbird.com>]

On Thu, Jul 31, 1997 at 09:59:37PM +0100, Adam Back wrote:
> 
> I wrote at the bottom of another post:
> > General rhetorical question: indeed why have governments at all?
> 
> and Kent Crispin parried:
> : General rhetorical answer:  Because people are the way they are.
> 
> Kent you seem to harbor the belief that government monopoly is a good
> thing, or at least that government is somehow an unavoidable necessary
> evil.

Adam, in all honesty I don't think of it like that at all. 
"Government" to me is a completely neutral abstract term, like
"organization", or "society".  Consequently, a statement like
"Government is always bad" is ipso facto a shallow generalization, and
my natural reaction is to point out that sometimes government is good. 
Since the poor brainwashed souls on cypherpunks uniformly spout the
"Government is bad" party line, the result is that comes out looking
like I think government is good.  But that is an incorrect impression. 
Government, as a general abstract term, is neither bad or good. 

[Note: While "government" in general is a completely neutral term,
particular governments may be better or worse in various dimensions,
of course.  But it is never a black or white thing.  The government of
Singapore accomplishes a great deal for its citizens, but I would not
want to live there because of the constraints on freedoms I value. 
But the government of Singapore is vastly preferable to the government
of North Korea.]

I don't think of government as a "necessary evil", either.  Rather,
I think that a government of some kind is an inevitable outgrowth of
human nature.  I think this for three compelling reasons: first, it is
obversationally true -- there are essentially no human beings who live
without a government of some kind; second, because it is in agreement
with all my observations and knowledge of human nature; and third,
because it makes sense to me as the rational consequence of the
existence of force as an interpersonal interaction. 

[...]

> Are you opposed to free markets?

Nope.

> Government holds a number of monopolies.  These monopolies are not
> efficient.  They result in resource wastage on a mind boggling scale.
> The USG has pretty much bankrupt your country, the US national debt
> being I understand at a level where US citizens collectively do not
> have the resources to pay it off.  If a privately or publicly held
> company got to that stage the receivers would be sent in.

In fact, of course, the US generates a great deal of wealth for its
citizens, who are among the best off and most productive of any nation
on earth.  Of course it could be better, but it could be a whole lot
worse.  To say that the form of government had nothing to do with that
*success* is intellectually dishonest -- one can just as easily argue
that things are good in the US largely *because* we have a relatively
good government. 

> The success that a country does enjoy is pretty much proportional to
> the degree of market freedom.  Luckily for us our governments have
> left a bit of freedom in markets, or we would have food shortages, and
> rationing.

Oh, "luckily".  No possibility that there was intelligence involved,
eh?

[...]
> Governments tend to grow, and soak up larger tax percentages, and
> encroach into more aspects of life which were previously a question of
> free choice, or were previously purely market driven.  The reason for
> this growth is due to the government as an entity unconciously
> promoting itself as an organism.  A great huge cancerous growth which
> has us by the jugular.

"Governments" is the wrong term here.  A more correct term would be 
"bureaucracies."   The growth you describe is endemic to any large 
human organization.  Large corporations go through very similar 
cycles.  Charities, churches, clubs -- it happens everywhere.  
Sometimes the organization becomes too fat and dies.  Sometimes it 
manages to metamorphose into something else.  But none of the 
characteristics you describe are unique to governments.

> The reason governments as businesses can get away with their abysmal
> performance is because they have a near complete monopoly.
> 
> A good start would be a choice in government, to generate some
> competition.  So you can buy membership in a protection racket, hire
> the services of a private security firm, or buy insurance from an
> insurance group because of its benefits package, or go elsewhere if
> the offering sucks.  You choose on an individual basis what package
> best suits you, and you choose the service providers who you consider
> as the best value for money.

This is a pure pipe dream, a utopian fantasy for libertarians.  I 
could say "a good start would be for everyone to love one another" -- 
it would be just as real.

> eg. I can go buy into Uncle Enzo's pizza delivery and protection
> racket because the protection is 5000% better value for money than the
> Feds deal.

How do you get out from Uncle Enzo's protection racket when things go 
sour, if Uncle Enzo doesn't allow his customers to leave, or even to 
say anything bad about him?

> I can pick and choose the services I want to produce a mix which
> satisfies me.  Double efficiency, people don't have services provided
> for them which they actively don't want, and I can buy services which
> the government attempts to prevent the market from providing, so my
> requirements are better met.
> 
> As well as the increased efficiency obtained in provision of services
> which governments are currently holding monopolies on, the reduced
> taxation and regularatory burdens put on the economy would cause a
> boom.
> 
> And your argument is?

You are describing pure speculative fantasy, and it is pointless to
argue the details of your speculation.  All I can do is point out that
it *is* a speculative fantasy, and challenge you to produce something
meaningfully concrete.  Show me a real living example of such a
society in operation.  If such an excellent society existed then
surely people would flock to it in droves.  Or is it like communism --
we have to have the whole world under control before the dictatorship
of the proletariat withers away, and the glorious new world order
flowers?

[...]

> So which mix would you choose Kent?
> 
> Or are you arguing that there are lots of stupid people, and that you
> are happy to let their ill-informed choices, and their willingness to
> go with the bankrupt corrupt status quo fuck your life up? 

No, I think that average people have much more sense than you give
them credit for, and that the egotism of people who are bright
technically frequently blinds them to their shallow understanding of
other areas.  I have seen very bright people caught up in all sorts of
insane ideas.  The best example I know is the weapons physicist, a
brilliant and clever thinker, who is a member of a fundamentalist
Christian group.  He predicted the second coming on a particular day,
and announced it to the press, with a statement to the effect that he
had set off bombs at the Nevada test site with less intellectual
certainty than his prediction.  I'm sure he is now back reading the
the Bible and other texts, and trying to figure out what went wrong. 

I admire his conviction, his tenacity, but not his grip on reality. 

[...]

> Free choice makes for much more efficiency in terms of economics, and
> in terms of individuals happiness.

Sure.  So what.  The issue is what *real* can be done.  Utopian 
fantasies don't do it.

> Here's a reading list for those interested in disbanding government
> and replacing it with services purchased on the free market:
[...]

Hmm.  You base your philosophy on a couple of science fiction novels,
"The Machinery of Freedom", Adam Smith, and Hayek? Some years ago I
read Nozick and Rand, because I thought there might be something to
libertarian philosophy.  I also read parts of "Machinery of Freedom"
-- a better title, I think, would be "Intellectual Tinkertoys of
Freedom" -- and something by Boas, and a couple other things that fade
from my memory.  I conclude that these books are libertarian
scripture, and function like that physicists bible.  People who
believe, and willingly host the parasitic memes, find such texts very
meaningful.  More cynical types such as myself don't relate well to
them. 

Adam, I admire your conviction, I respect your technical expertise a
lot, but we have a different view of reality.  We will just have to
differ on that. 

[...]

>print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<>
>)]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`

BTW, how do you use this code?  I'm not a big "dc" user, I must admit.

I dug out a midi interpreter I wrote a number of years ago, 
and it is indeed trivial to modify it to read any text as input.  
Unfortunately, I wrote that long before the midi file spec was 
finalized, and the hardware I wrote it for is also long gone.  But 
it's probably not much work to get file output working again...and 
the thought of a general text-to-midi translator is rather 
entertaining -- I could play this entire mail message through it, for 
example... It would definitely make better music if some rhythmic 
variation was part of the coding, but that would make it a little 
harder to make an automatic decoder...

-- 
Kent Crispin				"No reason to get excited",
kent@songbird.com			the thief he kindly spoke...
PGP fingerprint:   B1 8B 72 ED 55 21 5E 44  61 F4 58 0F 72 10 65 55
http://songbird.com/kent/pgp_key.html