🚀 go-pugleaf

starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Tim Starr) writes:
>...  I
>maintain that maximal individual liberty is the common good.  Nor am I as


Few others do, from crime to traffic, to Internet traffic regulations.


>The main factor making our firearms violence rates to high in some places
>are people turning to crack dealing out of desperation with ghetto poverty.

Your firearm death reate was high long before crack.



>Stable?  Like the Baltic Republics?  Where Gorbachev had the police killing
>innocents after confiscating their registered guns?  Like Yugoslavia?  Poland,
>where people who challenge heads of state in elections get imprisoned for it?
>Sweden?  Where a sea change away from welfare-statism is underway in reaction
>against having about half the workforce be paid with the taxes paid by the
>other half?  Like Germany, which recently suffered 4% inflation, and neo-Nazis
>riot against the welfare programs for immigrants, and which deports foreigners
>to keep its unemployment rate down?  Like Canada, where separatism rides high?

Sorry should have said like western Europe. And all of your western
European examples are simply the normal political process. (even the
German is hocking in contrast to the normal state in Western Germany,
, and the social upheaval of the integration is far far greater than
anything almost any country in the world has gone through, and the
violence level is amazingly low considering that. Stable does not mean
dead, it means that there are established operating ways of
accomplishing political change. 


>Switzerland has citizen's vetoes.  They have the highest degree of consent
>by the governed in the world.

Which includes high levels of what many ( including you I suspect) would
call Government coercion. However, your position seems to be not that a majority
has the right to impose its will on the minority, but that the minority
has the right to use arms to protect its position if threatened by the
the government ( no matter how large the majority support of the govt
position). 



>You're apparently ignorant of any distinction between command-and-control
>regulation from the "public sector" and contractual terms in the "private
>sector".  You don't have to deal with RSA if you don't consent to it.  If
>you refuse to deal with the government, it deals with you.

Yes I do. If I try to use public key cryptography to protect my privacy,
the whole force of the legal system will back RSA's patents. No matter
how much I try to avoid them RSA will coerce me to deal with them.
Of course you may argue that patent laws should not exist, they are
simply another coercive regulation of the Govt. In that case however,
the evidence seems to be that the economic arguements are on the side of
the Govt regulations.

>It's not only tyrrannical, it's uneconomical as well, a fact which has been
>established by economics much more than is necessary to overcome such shallow
>denials as yours.

Aomw govt regulations are uneconomic, some aid the economy. Trying to
figure out which do which is part of the political process. Sometimes
stupid mistakes get made. Especially when the arguements get reduced to
shroll namecalling and the proponents of either side try to base their
positions on "fundamental truths" rather than careful study and
analysis. Which is exactly my objection to the current level of debate
on the encryption registration. The conflicting needs and desires need
to be aired and debated rationally, and not enveloped in a fog of "moral
principles", or the regulations that will come are sure to be silly.

>Society isn't a primary which has needs.  Society consists of the interactions
>of individuals, and as such has no needs which aren't individual needs.  Needs
>aren't additive.
 
 Yes, and those individual needs include stability and security of their
 physical and economic environment, needs which can be met best, it
 seems by concerted collective and group action as embodied by governments.



>Furthermore, there is not one "benefit" to be had from regulation of crypto-
>graphy.

The claimed benefit is to be able to prevent and discover criminal
activity. Whether this benefit outweighs the benefit derived from the
security of being reasonably certain that one can have normal private
communications is precisely the argument going on in this group . This
argument is not advanced by pretending that one side of the
argument does not exist. That is especially true if your position is in
the minority. ( I suspect that most of the population either could not
care about encryption, or believe that it is something only spies or
crooks use and should therefor be stringently regulated). In a minority
position, telling the majority that their concerns are stupid, ignorant
and invalid is one certain way of ensuring that you do not win. Only by
recognising that they have valid concerns which you try to meet  or at
least take seriously can you even hope to win.