Organization: Queen's University at Kingston
Date: Sun, 10 Jan 1993 21:35:50 EST
From: John G. Spragge <SPRAGGEJ@QUCDN.QueensU.CA>
Newsgroups: soc.culture.canada,can.politics
Subject: Re: Taxation as Theft (was Re: Negative Income Tax)
 <1993Jan9.014016.25439@csi.uottawa.ca>

In article <1993Jan9.014016.25439@csi.uottawa.ca>, cbbrowne@csi.uottawa.ca
(Christopher Browne) says:

>Going further, it was NOT "the government" that discovered the idea of
>"intellectual property rights."  It was individuals that discovered
>it.  And they happened to be individuals that were involved with
>government.

Can we discover rights in that manner?I accept the use of the term
"discover" for archetypes; I do not accept it for paradigms such as
intellectual property.

In any event, you simply return to the idea of a sort of Platonic
definition of "ideal property". Even if I accept that such an ideal
existed, what basis have you for an assertion that the notions of
property (notions which a government defined and enforces) we have
today correspond to that ideal?

>I'd suggest a thought:  The various issues here have dealt with
>determining just who ought to have authority over various "things."

Right. I'll suggest another thought: perhaps more than one workable
system for human to relate to the physical world exists.

>Centuries ago, "slavery" allowed people called "masters" to have
>particular types of authority over their "serfs."  Some forms still
>exist.
>
>It was somewhat easier to deal with the issue of "personal property."
>It has always been pretty clear that each person has authority over
>some of the things that they appear to be able to possess.

Sorry, on the matter of ease, no sale. A Roman slave owner would not
have found it difficult to "deal with the issue" of slavery. Romans
owned their slaves, and as far as I can determine, many if not most
of them had no problem with it. We view their conduct as unnatural.
Perhaps a society of the future would find our forms of property
unnatural. But they didn't think of themselves as unnatural, any more
than we think of ourselves as unnatural.

>Money represents perhaps the strangest form of "authority," and there
>have been a plethoria of developments in this area over the last
>century.  Money represents a really quite abstract sort of "authority
>over value."  If you have a certain amount of money, then you have
>that QUANTITY of authority over economic goods.

Money, more than any other economic instrument, provides state control
over our interactions with "economic goods". Consider the "money supply",
and who controls it. Consider (at a basic level) whose picture appears
on your money. Who gets to print it. And (most tellingly) how citizens
who use homemade "tender" get treated. The state uses money as a basic
instrument of its power. Counterfeiting attacks that power.

Of course, you can use money as a medium of exchange as well. That does
not make it any less an instrument of state; indeed, the state, as an
institution, has lasted so well precisely because many of its
instruments do have that flexibility.

>Most of these developments have moved some of the authority, that was
>usually previously vested in the state, to individuals.  It kind of
>suggests that perhaps states are becoming conceptually less important.
>As the king becomes less and less responsible for things, the question
>comes: Is the king really necessary?

Describe these developments, and how they lessen the authority of
governments. Do you not remember the frantic currency manipulation
that went on after the stock market tumbled in 1987? Do you know
what the famous G7 exists to do? How about the Eurodollar?

Individual "kings" may have lost their authority, but it seems we
have begun to replace them with a sort of "super king"; a set of
international coordinating institutions to control exchange and money.
I don't think that moves power to the individual; I think it transfers
it to more powerful (and secretive) international institutions.

Your culture will adapt to service ours - Columbus to Natives, 1492
Your culture will adapt to service ours - Borg to Captain Picard, 24th C.

standard disclaimers apply ----------------------- John G. Spragge