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James A. Donald:
> > Seems to me that most of our economy is arguably illegal.
R. A. Hettinga
> Fine. Document that, pease. Show me statistics.
Obviously that is a claim that cannot be directly documented,
since most people decline to register their business with the
department of census and statistics as "engaged primarily in
illegal activity"
However every business that I have been involved in, where I have
been in a position to know, has been extensively violating some
laws in some fashion -- personal anecdotes, where I cannot give
details.
There are also many sweeping decrees where it is not clear what is
intended, or what will be enforced, and one can make a plausible
argument that current practice is arguably legal -- but not a very
good argument. For example AOL, Verant, Yahoo, and perhaps
Microsoft are arguably in violation of COPA. Almost everyone
necessarily operates in gray areas, often fairly openly, and
wherever I have been in a position to know, most people were in
some respects operating in black areas, not at all openly.
There are so many laws, that it is impossible to operate a
business entirely legally.
> Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, right?
What is extraordinary about this claim: If most individuals can
rack up multiple felony offenses while scarcely realizing it,
think what a pickle the average business must be in.
When the federal register is requires a fleet of trucks, when I
have committed several hundred years worth of felonies without
doing anything that the ordinary middle respectable middle class
male would regard as very disreputable, I do not see what is so
extraordinary about that claim.
> Illegal drugs are probably a few tens of billions of dollars a
> year. Timmy Leary quoted $50 billion in the early 80's at the
> height of the Columbian cocaine boom. I'll take triple that
Add AOL, Yahoo, Verant, and Microsoft to the crips and the bloods.
My usenet server has a sign up web page that emphasizes privacy,
anonymity, lack of logs, absence of censorship, and completeness
of newsgroups -- I get the impression that a large part of their
customer base is people downloading child pornography.
> Frankly, the amount of formerly illegal business now declared
> legal, in a gross sense, has gone up dramatically in the last
> 10-15 years
In Russia what we saw is not so much legalization, as collapse of
enforcement -- the long existing illegal market that kept Stalin's
economy going has now wholly displaced the socialist economy, a
process that in restrospect was visible under Khruschev, and was
visible to me at the time under Brezhnev. A similar collapse
seems to be under way in America. Here in America we are in a
situation equivalent to the early Brezhnev years.
> We're legislating "crime" out of statistical significance, just
> by making most of it legal,
Most legislation makes more things illegal, not more things legal.
--digsig
James A. Donald
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