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The Geodesic Society Robert Hettinga Commerce, Colonialism, and Empire Boston, March 21, 2003 - ------ "Camels, fleas, and princes exist everywhere." -- Persian proverb "Some people say that money can't buy happiness. I've found that it usually does, and, when it doesn't, it buys the most interesting substitutes." -- Rhett Butler, in Margaret Mitchell's 'Gone with the Wind' "...our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us." -- Winston Churchill, January 1914 "Every election is a sort of advance auction of stolen goods." -- H.L. Mencken "War is God's way of teaching Americans about geography" -- Ambrose Bierce "The direct use of physical force is so poor a solution to the problem of limited resources that it is commonly employed only by small children and great nations." -- David Friedman, 'The Machinery of Freedom' - ------ At 8:31 PM -0800 on 3/21/03, Hokkun Pang wrote on FoRK: > I think British rule was basically bad because Britain didn't go to > India with the *intent* to bring democracy there. No, they actually had much more noble intent. To trade. Something humans have done since before we were even officially human. One could say, the thing that, along with war, and art, actually *makes* us human. And those British traders in India did trade, just fine, for quite a while. It wasn't until they started to be murdered in copious numbers by various political opportunists that they were forced to hire their own army take the place by force. Then, of course, because they had earned more than enough money to do so, they won handily. All that duplicitous mumbo jumbo about "white man's burden", much less "democracy", came after various -- politically "liberal", I might add -- apologists got into the act. The East India Company didn't even hand over their colony to the Crown until sometime in Victoria's reign, after the traders had been on the ground for more than a century, and they probably, um, forked it over, :-) to Vicky because all the political nonsense that comes with "marketing" of a force monopoly on its subject population drove them to it. The same thing happened in China a little later. Like it or not, there was a *market* for opium, remember, and it was the Chinese *government* that restricted free trade in every thing else to such an extent that opium was the only thing western merchants could sell in China. When the Chinese *government* and their various political proxies started attacking western traders, they "hired" various troops from their own nation-states and fought back. We won't even go into the pure stupidity of the Ming blue-button mandarins who, one fine day in the early 1400's, recalled *all* their merchants and burned their own *navy* to the waterline in the first place. Of course, they didn't have the Athenian experience in the Peloponnesian war to guide them, right? (Or, speak of the devil, the French at the outset of World War II. :-).) "Democracy", as the old libertarian saw goes, "is three wolves and a sheep voting on what's for lunch." To expand on Mencken a bit, any election is a mostly non-violent war fought over future stolen property. Personally, I can't wait until technology and markets liberate us from "democracy", and other government tyranny, once and for all. I personally hold out hope that the transaction costs of various financial cryptography protocols will be so cheap that we'll be able to do business for digitable goods (information, opinion, or financial -- increasingly the only three goods that matter in a geodesic society) without the implied force, much less the imprimatur, of any nation-state whatsoever. Until then, though, I "vote" for the government that maximizes *my* private property and trade opportunities, and, oddly enough, so too does every single person who has a chance to "vote" with their feet - - -- or with their own personal force of arms. So, since we can't -- yet -- hire private armies when someone threatens us with such gross acts of violence, modern Americans use the one that was "bought" for us, using our own confiscated property. Fine. As Wyatt Earp said, we "skin that smokewagon", and hope it works. It seems to be working just fine at the moment. Anyone who bullshits me about how we "deserved" what we got since September 11th 2001 -- or since people started doing trade, and other things, with and to the middle east since the advent of Islam there, I don't care which -- deserves, himself, to go stick his finger down his throat and puke in the San Francisco streets with all his other coupon-clipping hash-brownie-muching trust-funder buddies. And, I mean that to the libertarians as well out there as well, who, while probably having the the right end of the moral stick with discussions of owning oneself and the initiation of force, must have inhaled the same kind of anti-war sanctimony, along with modern refried-marxists, as some kind of contact high during their "coevolution" in the 1960's Bay Area. In the meantime, we're proceeding to take out all the government buildings in Baghdad while leaving the lights on and the toilets flushing for every one else. Kewl. Seems like the right people to kill and property to damage, and the right people and property to leave alone, as far as I can tell. Here's hoping western "liberals", embedded -- with every bit of irony on both sides of this mixed metaphor :-) -- like some fifth column in our state-department, "non"-government organizations, and the press, have enough sense to leave Baghdad's survivors alone, so that Iraqis' private property is unencumbered by further governmental imposition when the dust settles. Fat chance, of course. In spite of Robert Barkley's heralding of a new "establishment" of conservative ideologues, I personally wouldn't be surprised at all if, in spite of Bush's best intentions, and contrary to "liberal" fears, 10 years from now Iraq's oil will still be nationalized, the Iraqis will still be poor as a result, and their brand new American-model compulsory government schools will have their children burbling inane nonsense about "carbon sequestration", humanity-caused "global warming", about how "capitalism" (a Marxist code word for "economics", of course) causes war and "homelessness", along with other such pseudoscientific nonsense. One can still hope, I suppose. Though, at this point, frankly, I don't care, as long as their government is not paying their own equivalent of our liberal trust-funders to blow up and kill people over here anymore. The more-or-less efficient application of force is the *only* reason we have politics, boys and girls. We transfer-price force like we do *only* because we haven't yet figured out how to auction it for cash. And force, not "diplomacy", is the *only* legitimate reason for government in the first place. Period. The only true liberty is anarchy, and that, by definition, is something that government can never provide. Liberty, like property, comes from ourselves, but it must be defended, occasionally, by force, personal or "public", whatever's at hand, or it won't exist at all. And, because of that very conjunction of physics and economics, the highest and best use, the only *real* use, of government money is self defense, and, in particular, the defense of trade and private property, without which we don't have life, much less wealth. Statists, well, actually, their dupes -- so-called "princes", as bandits who don't move, understand their business completely -- have always had the whole thing backwards, mixing cause and effect. Various statist-dupes think that because physics currently gives us monopolistic confiscatory markets for force, markets which are so successful at extracting economic rent that they enable actual palaces to be built for sellers in those markets, that the various bits of redistributionist fraud, the hocus-pocus, the mummenchance and literary virus-coats that force monopolists have always used to lower their costs of operation -- "welfare", "diplomacy", voting, whatever -- are the *reasons* that force monopoly exists in the first place. Of course not. Physics causes culture (markets, finance, economics, common law, legislation and philosophy, in that order), and not the other way around. If you want to actually learn about the how that all came about, you might want to read some political economics. Both Mancur Olson's "Power and Prosperity" <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0465051960/qid=10483726 75/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-8169892-4192866?v=glance&s=books> and David Friedman's "The Machinery of Freedom" <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0812690699/qid=10483727 25/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-8169892-4192866?v=glance&s=books> will both open your eyes. In the meantime, think about *why* Western European markets and thought came to dominate the planet. It certainly wasn't some "gift" of natural resources, all of which were completely undeveloped, actual man-killing wildernesses, and on both sides of the North Atlantic. Furthermore, everything thing we have now belonged to someone else once, no matter how savage they were, and, contrary to the fantasies of Marxists, Islamists, and other neofeudalists, we *bought* virtually *all* of that stuff, literally *earned* it through trade. Meaning, that, for centuries, now, Northern European culture has *produced* more stuff that people want, day in and day out. For some insight into to *that*, look at Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0393317552/qid=10483725 65/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-8169892-4192866?v=glance&s=books >, and Joel Mokyr's "The Lever of Riches" <http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0195074777/qid=10483726 25/sr=1-2/ref=sr_1_2/002-8169892-4192866?v=glance&s=books>. In short, progress is literally more stuff cheaper over time. Anything else is just smoke and mirrors. Progress also means that, when attacked, the west has *earned* more stuff to win wars with. Fine. We win wars. Life's a bitch. The solution to the problem, for tyrants everywhere, secular and theocratic, is not to blow up our stuff, and we won't blow up yours. Even better, learn how to earn more money than we do, and *you* can buy it out from under *us*. If that happens, we deserve to lose. Heck, they learn to do that do that, they probably won't be tyrants anymore, either. Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPnz6fsPxH8jf3ohaEQIvbgCgpv94fT7mweR/CBbsCVhky3aMlacAnArH dlpgfZbI1Iu6aNh+SHDHYRxl =PEKn -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ----------------- R. A. Hettinga <mailto: [EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/> 44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA "... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity, [predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
