-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 At 1:47 AM -0800 1/14/03, Bill Stewart wrote: > At 10:40 PM 01/13/2003 -0800, Tim May wrote: >> Everything the Supreme Court did in the 2000 election was fully >> justified. The Dems lost, then tried to change the rules. Were it >> up to me, I would have shot Al Gore and Joe Lieberman on the spot. >> You and Bill need your brains washed out with soap. I'm not happy >> with Bush, to repeat this mantra that Gore/Lieberman actually won >> is knavish at best. <snip> > Gore and Lieberman would have been no prize in office either, but > they wouldn't have done much more damage to the economy or to civil > liberties, probably much less, and would have been less gung-ho > about getting us into a war and would have found some kind of pork > that's more productive than military hardware to spend our tax > money on.
At the time, it absolutely amazed me how, when push came to political shove, all the libertarians and ostensible anarchocapitalists -- myself included -- went back to behaving like, if not becoming actual, Democrats and Republicans in November 2000. Or for that matter, how September 2001 changed that initial polarization, one way or another. The joys of the American binary, winner-take-all pseudomarket for force, I suppose. [Yes, I know, the French have the same type of system and they have multiple parties, and, yes, I know, proportional representation probably yields *more* law and regulation than the system Americans have, and, no, I don't think we can do much better than what we have, qua politics itself, except to make smaller nation states, which will probably happen in this country more from market forces than political violence, probably under the guise of some kind of Federal "devolution", and yes, we need actual markets for force instead of transfer-priced monopolies for same... Right. In the meantime, you're preaching to the choir. :-)] It is -- almost -- amusing, nonetheless, to see really how fragile it is, how hard it is to coalesce around, this idea of stateless freedom that lots of us have discovered, in *concrete* form, for first time, on this list. An actual method, a technology, to get to that freedom without having to resort to politics itself like the libertarians do, or to violence like some anarchists do, or outright non-participation like anarchocapitalists do. Given that it took a couple of hundred years between the Thirty Years War, when an actual economic *requirement* for an orthogonality of politics and religion was first discovered and the removal of monopolistic force from the latter was first implemented, and the American Revolution, when the first ostensibly religion-orthogonal nation-state was founded, I expect that we really shouldn't be too surprised that we still have such a long row to hoe before we can finally kick the state out of the economy once and for all, to be just as free of politics as a means of controlling force as our forefathers made themselves free of religious control of the same. Until we do so, however, we're going to have to deal with the fact that we're still Republicans and Democrats, Liberals and Conservatives, no matter what even our registered voting affiliation says we are. For instance, Bill and Tim are, I believe, both registered Libertarians. (And, of course, I'm still a registered Republican. In Massachusetts, no less, so I'm literally hopeless. :-)) Nonetheless, when I see the above kinds of discussion from people who do agree on method, if not cause, I can't help thinking about something Heinlein said about religion, and I have to smile a bit: "Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help. But like dandruff, most people do have a religion and spend time and money on it and seem to derive considerable pleasure from fiddling with it." - --R.A. Heinlein, "Time Enough for Love" Cheers, RAH -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: PGP 8.0 - not licensed for commercial use: www.pgp.com iQA/AwUBPiQwtMPxH8jf3ohaEQIxewCdFzzKjwzRdoRw9V6cOVHgUKnfN5cAn3V1 Daeb5ErSfZqv/Mv7e60Ny9p7 =Xg90 -----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 "All government is, in its essence, organized exploitation, and in virtually all of its existing forms it is the implacable enemy of every industrious and well-disposed man." -- H.L. Mencken
