[P2P-F] feasible - legally - to set up an alternative government body in Wisconsin ?

Fri Mar 18 00:54:06 CET 2011

On Wed, Mar 16, 2011 at 3:47 AM, Mark Janssen <dreamingforward at gmail.com> wrote:

> The only reason to try to set up another government is if your current
> government's basic principles or constitution are against your own
> basic principles.   Unless you want to be a dictator, this is likely
> not the case (at least in the U.S.).   Consider this carefully.  A lot
> of people have invested a lot of science of political thought over the
> past 3000+ years.

Well, yeah.  The propertied classes, the ruling classes, over the past
3000 years have invested a lot of thought in how to use states to
extract a surplus from the producing classes through artificial
property rights, artificial scarcities, and assorted subsidies and
privileges.

If you want to distribute information without paying tribute to the
"owner" of a copyright, or manufacture a physical good without paying
tribute to someone who "owns" the rights to configure material
elements in a particular pattern, you're at odds with the basic
principles of the U.S.  If you want to produce freely produce a drug
which was developed entirely at taxpayer expense, and sell it for your
actual production cost, without the permission of a company that owns
patent rights and sells it for a 2000% markup, you're at odds with the
government.  If you want to run a low-overhead microenterprise out of
your home, without renting standalone commercial property and buying
unnecessary industrial-grade capital equipment, in defiance of local
zoning and licensing laws passed at the behest of the big incumbents,
you're at odds with the government.

Government exists mainly for enforcing the political means to wealth,
through rents on government-enforced artificial property rights.
That's been the main purpose of the state these past 3000 years:  to
make sure the people who do the world's work give over their surplus
to the people who own the world.

> "By the people, of the people, for the people".  This is what the U.S.
> prides itself upon.  If it isn't happening and you feel the existing
> (standard) procedures are too slow or corrupt to make a change,
> *force* the issue and *take it to court*.  Argue your f*cking case.

By way of analogy, it costs a hundred or a thousand times as much to
destroy the entire infrastructure of a pipeline system or
communications network, on the pattern of  strategic bombing in WWII,
as it does to destroy a handful of key nodes and render the entire
thing inoperable without actually destroying the entire physical
infrastructure.  The key nodes, in the words of John Robb, are the
Systempunkt.  Attacking the Systempunkt rather than destroying the
whole physical infastructure results in ROIs of a million percent.

The effort of actually working within the system to change the laws,
in this analogy, equates to the enormous number of sorties required to
bomb an entire physical infrastructure to rubble.  The state's
enforcement capability, OTOH, is its Systempunkt.  A law which is not
enforceable is as good as a law which is repealed, and evading
enforcement is far more cost-effective. Why waste the next fifty years
showing up at hearings and committee meetings stacked with RIAA and
MPAA representatives, in a process where you're outspent 100-to-1 by
industry lobbying efforts and the decision-making bodies are barely
concealing their giggling behind their hands while pretending to
listen to you, when you can spend a hundredth as much on developing
the means of filesharing without the state, proprietary content
companies or ISPs tracking you?

The whole system is set up to be dominated by the people with the big
money.  So long as you play by their procedural rules, you're almost
guaranteed to lose.  Why not play by the rules of asymmetric warfare
and nullify their advantages in money and resources?

> Here's one:  make a freedombox that would create an awesome mesh
> network operating in ranges currently disallowed by the F.C.C.  But
> don't be another failure like Napster:  be prepared, do your research,
> have the economic and social-policitical cases ready when you get a 1
> million nodes and start popping up on their radar....

Napster was a failure mainly because Fanning failed to plan for
circumventing government attempts to shut it down, and because its
architecture wasn't robust enough to thwart such attempts.  The
failure of Napster led to Kazaa, a system which was more distributed
and harder to shut down.  And from there to Kazaa Lite, to eDonkey,
and so on.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html