HEADLINES: 2026
- Thread starter sear
- Start date
Not all governance is a dictatorship.
A representative democracy is generally not.
Many dictators wear trousers.
That does not mean all that wear trousers are dictators.
Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive
Postal Service won’t deliver mail ballots for states that don’t hand over voter lists, under plan for Trump directive
State election officials could soon face a stark choice: hand over voter lists to the Trump administration or risk losing Postal Service delivery for mail-in ballots.www.yahoo.com
That does not seem legal to me.
Voter lists are private information.
Anyone can hire, create, or authorize someone else to do that which they could have done themselves.
But how can you hire, create, or authorize someone else to do something which you could not legally do yourself?
I do not think you legally can, so I think whenever government does something you could not do yourself, it is an illegal dictatorship.
It's a new millennium.
The United States of America can no longer be protected, our sovereignty preserved, with club-wielding guards disbursed along our borders,
or even infantrymen holding fortified positions ...
That wouldn't protect from international trade scams, cyber-probes, electronic eavesdropping, forgery, many, many etc.
Bruce can't keep a MIRV ICBM in his back yard. How would his targeting protocol account for continental drift, etc.?
There are things as basic as printing $cash private citizens cannot / should not / must not do.
Thus we pay government to do such things for us.
Dictatorship is not all governance, only the category that is absolutely authoritarian, dictated by a single individual.
I disagree about "printing cash" because we essentially do the same whenever we write a check.
But I see your point when it comes to nukes.
It's similar, but it's not the same.
I got useful insight about this reading accounts about cash transactions around the time of the U.S. Civil War.
Such questions as:
- is it counterfeit?
BUT !
- Some historic accounts describe how that wasn't simply a go / no go determinant. For example,
even if counterfeit, was the workmanship high quality, etc.
The denomination was an issue, but also whether it was from the U.S., or the Confederate States of America.
One major difference, one can accept $cash from a stranger fairly safely. But a personal check is risky, without ID verification, etc.
I'm not wild about government.
But I'm no anarchist.
Many things like that,
- airline safety
- food safety
- road building.
Surely there is government over-reach.
But I wouldn't extrapolate the excesses as justification to abandon government entirely.
I have bitter experience with lawless frontiers. Not a panacea !
The principle I go by is to ask, "how can individuals create something with more authority than they themselves have?"
I do not think they can?
With currency, I think BitCoin shows how anyone can do it acually.
With nukes, I think if a private individual wanted to make nukes for something that could not harm people on earth, such as asteroid mining, I think they legally could?
With airline and food safety, I think it is still the commercial companies that implement it.
All the government does is set standards, which I think is something everyone can do, and you only need government for the greater enforcement capability.
Road building I think is just like any improvement made to communal property, which is like people voting for parks, churches being built, food co-ops, or rural shared grain elevators.
But it does get hard to be sure about.
Its not like the original militia weapons anymore.
You cited writing a check in R5 #306. That's similar. BUT !!
The monetary unit a personal check conveys is not "Rigby's". They're $U.S. $Dollars.
The currency is exceedingly deeply woven into the culture.
The reason we have such stupendous products at such unimaginably low prices is division of labor. BUT !!
The only way I know of to have division of labor at this level is to have a universal currency.
BitCoin may be a medium for wealth exchange, but I gather the unit value fluctuates wildly.
Part of what makes the U.S. dollar so powerful is its universality.
Bruce could, Steve could, Dinah might,
but their individual currencies would require exchange rate calculators, and chances are currencies that small would fluctuate, & thus "float".
They could combine forces, stabilize their currency by applying a common standard.
That's basically what the U.S. $Dollar is.
For national security reasons, a good guy could assemble such mining equipment with the best of intent, but would likely need to meet government requirements.
- Insure that he's not only claiming to be a space-miner, but is secretly planning to blow up Washington DC.
- Security measures are in place so that his legitimate enterprise isn't hijacked by bad guys for evil purpose.
In the 18th Century there may not have been so much government regulation. BUT !
In the 18th Century there was far less need of it. They didn't have weapons grade Plutonium back then.