You're ignoring the BIOS, which could be used to compromise either the "secure" operating system or the real one without touching the hard drive.
Rather than a Flash drive, I'd recommend an independent hardware device, incorporating all the necessary encryption protocols. The private key(s) never leave the device -- they could even be generated internally -- and with the proper interfaces you could use the same device for both online and offline secure transactions.
Add a small screen and you could even include a representation of what you were agreeing to (store logo, total price) with the signature; this won't stop fraud, but it should make it a lot easier to expose after the fact when the $50.00 digital money transfer they had you sign is tied to a visual receipt for $5.00.
While I will freely admit that the US gov. has a positively sparkling human rights record compared to some, I note that the country is still not party to, for example, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights among others.
That's a good thing, since none of the items listed in that covenant are actual human rights. There's a simple litmus test for whether a proposed "right" is reasonable: can you exercise the "right" in the absence of other human beings to exploit? In this case the answer is clearly "no"; their so-called "rights" cannot be exercised except by making one or more other people worse off than they would be otherwise.
Maybe i'm wrong, but i'm positive a campfire DOES NOT convert mass to energy - you're just releasing chemical energy from the atomic bonds as heat.
Actually, the energy stored in the chemical bonds is also measurable as mass, according to the formula E=m*c^2. The change in mass when you break the atomic bonds and allow the resulting heat to conduct/radiate away is minuscule, but present.
You've made it abundantly clear that you don't know what a theory is...
You've done that yourself. It is not possible to prove a theory "true and correct". Theories are falsifiable; they make predictions which can be objectively demonstrated to conflict with observations. However, one cannot prove correctness for the simple reason that there are always new observations being made, and it is impossible to know whether some future observation will disprove the theory, e.g. the way that Newton's theory of gravity, at one point consistent with all known evidence, was disproved by observations of relativistic effects.
By definition, it's not blind faith if there's evidence and a consistent model to support your predictions. Lots of observations indicating that things tend to stay on the ground, plus a model consistent with these observations that predicts things will continue to tend towards staying on the ground, leads to rational faith that one isn't going to just float away without a tether.
Blind faith is when your model goes beyond the minimum necessary to explain the observations, such that you are selecting an unnecessarily complex (i.e. over-constrained) model out of a range of possibilities.
I'm sure that pain is a very effective teaching mechanism. And I'm also sure most parents feel it hurts them more than the victim. It's still assault, though: "Modern American statutes define assault as: 1. an attempt to cause or purposely, knowingly, or recklessly causing bodily injury to another; or, 2. negligently causing bodily injury to another with a deadly weapon" (Wiki). The victim's age and/or relation to the perpetrator are irrelevant.
Bottom line: if a child believes there are no consequences for mis-behaving, and that the State will shelter them from everything (right up until the moment they're legally an adult - at which point it will turn on them) then it's a rare child that won't run amok.
When did I ever say anything about the State stepping in? If they choose to leave they either find someone willing to take them in voluntarily, or they're on their own. The former protects those who were exiled or hurt through no fault of their own; the latter is natural consequence of incorrigible misbehavior.
Parents already have all the power in the world; from a child's point-of-view there is no higher authority. They don't need the extra power trip of legally inflicting pain.
Forget the "child abuse" label. Hitting someone is assault, whether the person you're hitting is an adult or a child, and regardless of whether the child is yours or someone else's. It should be treated as such.
On the other hand, the parents should have some leverage as well. I propose that they not be legally obligated to provide shelter or care; any child that habitually breaks the rules can find its own food and shelter. To protect against overuse, relax the rules giving preferential treatment to biological parents in regards to custody and let others take in the child voluntarily with a minimum of trouble. Then the problem cases can discover first-hand the consequences of alienating their caretakers, and uncaring parents can learn to treat their children as human beings instead of personal property. This should cultivate a much larger degree of respect on both sides.
I'm pretty sure that the scale and (lack of) money involved doesn't make a difference - copyright infringement is a criminal offense.
Check your facts. The primary differences between civil and criminal infringement in the U.S. are commercial intent and scale:
Section 506 (a) Criminal Infringement. --
(1) In general. -- Any person who willfully infringes a copyright shall be punished as provided under section 2319 of title 18, if the infringement was committed --
(A) for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain;
(B) by the reproduction or distribution, including by electronic means, during any 180-day period, of 1 or more copies or phonorecords of 1 or more copyrighted works, which have a total retail value of more than $1,000; or
...
Not that I support the law -- I'm fully anti-copyright -- but your assertion was nonetheless in error.
P.S. I also found it interesting that there's also a statute of limitations on copyright infringement, three years for civil proceeding and five for criminal: Section 507.
Look. The only investment with 0 risk offers a negative rate of return. You suffer little to no risk by putting your money in your mattress. It just will lose value due to inflation.
That's not really zero-risk either, since the rate of inflation is subject to change. Zero risk would imply that one knows exactly what one's situation will be at all points in the future. So long as one is alive the future will always include a nonzero level of uncertainty; the only way to truly eliminate risk is to die.
Every law, by its very nature, takes away the rights of the people. The only way for a government not to take away rights is to abolish all laws.
True, but only for one of the many definitions of "right" which is clearly not the one the GP was using.
If you start from a position of negative rights -- each person has the right to do anything which does not cause harm to others, "harm" being defined as interference with homesteaded and/or contractually transfered property rights -- then it is possible to have laws which do not interfere with rights, but rather complement them perfectly. This is the underlying principle of Common Law, which is completely independent of any sort of government. This is an "anarchic" position in a purely denotative sense (without rulers), but with none of the connotative aspects (chaotic/lawless). It is summed up by the phrase "equality under the law".
I know that the term "right" doesn't quite apply, which is why I quoted it. I wasn't sure what term to use for something that isn't a universal right but is nonetheless offered to everyone in the country; it's not much of a privilege either if anyone can claim it, since "privilege" tends to implies a certain measure of exclusivity.
Thank you for the information about registration; I wasn't aware that it was optional. This makes it more like a voluntary contract, in which case -- provided the terms were clearly understood up front -- payment for nonperformance makes sense. Everything I'd seen up till now implied that participation was mandatory for all citizens. Of course, you're still affected in involuntary ways by other people voting, even if you yourself choose not to participate, but at least the "obligation to vote" isn't itself coerced.
No. Your argument is a veritable army of strawmen. But I give up, count yourself the winner if you like.
My, that sounded a bit bitter. I'm not interesting in "winning"; I simply don't see how something one don't want to do and yet is required to do anyway can be reasonably described as a privilege from one's own point of view.
If you can point out even one actual strawman argument I'll be happy to address it, but having read back over my comments I don't think you'll find any.
At the very least the list of possible suspects is much narrower for theft from a plane than for almost any other kind of theft -- you know it had to be one of the other passengers, all of whom are precisely identified in the airline's records. That's true regardless of the size of the item or how many people may be watching. Also, I believe that regulations require that at least one crew member remain on watch at any given time during the flight; they may not be able to identify the thief, but they can probably narrow down the list quite a bit.
If you're particularly paranoid, just ask the passenger next to you to watch your equipment while you're gone. Then if it goes missing you have either an eyewitness or a very likely suspect.
It also says "Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom of speech". Congress is explicitly, unconditionally and absolutely forbidden to interfere with the freedom of speech. Any law which abridges the freedom of speech is unconstitutional. Period.
If you plan to argue that copyright isn't unconstitutional -- i.e. merely unethical/immoral/unjust -- you first have to establish that it isn't a violation of freedom of speech.
It doesn't seem very likely that anyone could reasonably get away with stealing a laptop during a flight. The owner would immediately report the incident to the flight crew; there would be numerous of witnesses in close proximity to the theft, and a relatively limited number of potential suspects. There is also no discreet way off a plane other than the main exit, where airport personnel and/or the crew will certainly be searching for the stolen equipment -- which, even in the case of a small laptop, is not particularly concealable.
I don't see that the GP really has much to worry about.
You're half right. Firefox is released under a triple license; the MPL is one choice and the GPL is another. I forget what the third choice is. I'm not sure if they require copyright assignment, but even if they do it wouldn't help much to make a binary-only release; most of their users wouldn't get the update before they got around to releasing the source code anyway. Some Windows users, perhaps, but a large share are on Linux where updates are managed through a central repository, and without source code those repositories won't carry the fix.
As I said, the so-called "right" to vote is a privilege; the obligation to vote per se is not. If the "privilege" is something you didn't want to do in the first place then the only part that matters to you is the obligation. If I told you that you had to kill someone, but would be immune from the normal consequences, I'm fairly sure you would call that an obligation and not a privilege, even though it could technically be described either way. Presuming, of course, that you aren't a sociopath.
"Forced"? No one holds a gun to your head.... you will pay a fine of about $20.
Any action whose presence or absence carries an artificial, involuntary consequence can be properly described as "forced." A gun is not specifically required. However, consider the progression if you do not pay this fine: they will attempt to garnish your wages, or raid your bank account; if they cannot do this (e.g. you are self-employed and have no accounts) they will visit personally and try to take your property directly; if you resist this unjust taking they will arrest you; if you resist this unjust arrest they will employ violence. Ergo, guns are ultimately the means by which they influence people to pay the fine. Whatever intermediate steps they might take, without the guns they could not effectively impose the fine.
Of course, it doesn't necessarily account for environmental contaminants, which is basicaly how we got into this mess in the first place.
It would account for environmental contaminants, but a while back the courts decided to abdicate their responsibilities in the interest of merchantilism, siding with the polluters against the affected property owners on "utilitarian" grounds. If they'd done their jobs and held people liable when their pollutants end up in other people's property this mess wouldn't exist.
I am not aware of any definition of "privilege", even in specialized fields, which would include actions which you are forced to take against your will. Such is neither an advantage, a right, an immunity, nor a benefit from the perspective of the person upon which it is bestowed. To be permitted to vote could be considered a privilege -- the definition which includes "exercised to the... detriment of others" is apropos here -- but to be forced to vote is, indeed, quite the opposite.
If Google had not been able to patent its major innovation, then Microsoft could easily have co-opted the idea, and it would have dominated search as well as operating systems and office suites.
The existence of a patent doesn't prevent that. If Microsoft found the patent inconvenient all it would have to do is convince Google's shareholders that it could better serve their interests than Google's present management, or else make an offer high enough to overrule any qualms about the future of their investments. Then Microsoft would be the patent holder and everyone else would be locked out.
The simple fact is that Google's investors believe that Google can implement the patent better than Microsoft can, and thus Google gets their support. Without the patent Google would still be better able to implement the patent; the only difference is that in that case Microsoft could try to imitate them and the investors could then make a more informed choice based on actual results.
I believe that what Slashdot readers truly dislike are bad patents, not software patents per se.
I sure hope that was intended as a broad generalization. This particular reader is fully opposed to all patents, including all software patents. Being the beneficiary doesn't make them any more right, just a bit more palatable to those apathetic about individual freedom.
You sound confused. A market is made up of people (producers and consumers) potentially organized into groups for mutual benefit. It has nothing to do with the concept of "countries", and in many ways the idea of political boundaries to trade is incompatible with any concept of a free (unfettered) market. A country can have a market, or at least contain a portion of one, but markets can just as easily exist without any political boundaries at all.
On the other hand, if you assume the existence of a government then of course you have a country as well: the domain within which said government enforces its decrees and permits no competition for defense services. The concept of a country is implicit in government, not the market. As you yourself pointed out: without the government there is no country, at least in a political sense, as opposed to a geographical, social, or ethnic grouping.
and it would reach for sure such a monopoly
Who's making assumptions now? Anyway, by definition, a defense organization is limited to enforcing property rights; it cannot forcibly prevent competition and remain a defense organization. This is what separates a defense organization -- even one with a de facto monopoly -- from a government, which tolerates no competition within its domain.
If you have government interfering in consensual acts between two responsible individual that don't affect unrelated 3rd parties, you have a market that isn't free.... Of course, the government interfering in acts that do affect unrelated 3rd parties, or preventing a party from cheating the other, isn't an interference in, but rather a defense of, the free market.
But what if the "consensual acts between two responsible individual[s]" consist of one hiring another to provide defense against such acts? According to your own definitions this isn't something that the government can rightfully interfere in, but as soon as this is admitted the "government" has lost its monopoly on defense services and has thus ceased to be a "government" at all, by any meaningful definition. Thus, a market with a minimal government, limited to enforcing contract and property law, is indistinguishable from a market with one or more private defense organizations and no government.
Either you have an aggression-free (read: government-free) society, with no "special" organization possessing a monopoly on defense services, or you have a government which clearly exceeds the limitations you describe as "sufficient".
When an industry is taxed, well, guess what, prices go up for consumers like you and me.
If the company could get away with the higher price, they'd have been charging it from the start.
You're both right. When taxes go up the marginal suppliers -- those that were just barely making enough accounting profit to justify staying in business -- are forced out of business. As a result, the supply of the good shrinks. The same demand competing for a smaller supply means that the price per unit must increase.
The increase in price is not necessarily equal to the increase in taxes; the remaining loss is imposed on those who must now make do with less, or go without entirely.
The money will stay on earth, in the pockets of eg rocket engineers who will spend it on food 'n housing. So it's nowhere near as bad as it sounds.
The cost of such a feat isn't actually in money, on a macroeconomic level; it never is, since moving money from one person to another results in no net change in the overall supply of money. As you say, money isn't actually consumed through spending. The real cost is the productive capacity -- labor, material, capital -- required to design, produce and launch the rocket. These are the scarce resources which will have to be diverted from other areas toward rocket-production. The supply of goods which compete with the rocket project for factors of production must decrease; prices of such goods will increase, and people will be unable to afford as much as they used to.
If this were the result of voluntary action the result would still be an overall increase in wealth, with the value of the rocket making up for the reduction in other areas; if the project can only be funded involuntarily, however -- e.g. through taxes -- then the consequence must be a net loss, since there are other, higher-valued uses to which those resources would have been put were the funds not forcibly redirected.
It's just as much my country as yours. I own a tiny piece of it -- my property -- and you own your tiny piece of it. Neither of us has any right to tell the other what to do with their piece. If the entire country (geographically) were your property you might have a point, but it isn't. A just claim of ownership is grounded in the process of homesteading, which requires a personal connection to the property. You have none. An unsubstantiated claim, one with no connection to the property, is just empty words.
All property in the US is encumbered by other agreements.
You have to own property to restrict its use. You need a valid, voluntary contract with someone before you have any right to demand payment; apart, of course, from compensation for damages resulting directly from the other's actions. No part of these "encumbrances" you are claiming has any basis in reality. The idea of the "social contract" -- that a person can be bound by a contract simply by being born in the wrong place -- was always a myth.
The selfish person refuses to share what belongs to him or her; the concept presumes absolute individual ownership. Eliminate private property and you remove the choice, eliminating the opportunity for altruism as well as selfishness. Libertarian political philosophy is about giving individuals the choice, not encouraging selfish behavior. Most libertarians, in my personal experience, are quite generous with their own savings.
Theft is childish. Fraud is childish. Throwing tantrums about not being able to tell others what to do is childish. Defense of basic human rights, including the rights to retain the product of owe's own endeavors, and to choose for oneself between selfishness and altruism, is far from childish.
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You're ignoring the BIOS, which could be used to compromise either the "secure" operating system or the real one without touching the hard drive.
Rather than a Flash drive, I'd recommend an independent hardware device, incorporating all the necessary encryption protocols. The private key(s) never leave the device -- they could even be generated internally -- and with the proper interfaces you could use the same device for both online and offline secure transactions.
Add a small screen and you could even include a representation of what you were agreeing to (store logo, total price) with the signature; this won't stop fraud, but it should make it a lot easier to expose after the fact when the $50.00 digital money transfer they had you sign is tied to a visual receipt for $5.00.
That's a good thing, since none of the items listed in that covenant are actual human rights. There's a simple litmus test for whether a proposed "right" is reasonable: can you exercise the "right" in the absence of other human beings to exploit? In this case the answer is clearly "no"; their so-called "rights" cannot be exercised except by making one or more other people worse off than they would be otherwise.
Actually, the energy stored in the chemical bonds is also measurable as mass, according to the formula E=m*c^2. The change in mass when you break the atomic bonds and allow the resulting heat to conduct/radiate away is minuscule, but present.
You've done that yourself. It is not possible to prove a theory "true and correct". Theories are falsifiable; they make predictions which can be objectively demonstrated to conflict with observations. However, one cannot prove correctness for the simple reason that there are always new observations being made, and it is impossible to know whether some future observation will disprove the theory, e.g. the way that Newton's theory of gravity, at one point consistent with all known evidence, was disproved by observations of relativistic effects.
By definition, it's not blind faith if there's evidence and a consistent model to support your predictions. Lots of observations indicating that things tend to stay on the ground, plus a model consistent with these observations that predicts things will continue to tend towards staying on the ground, leads to rational faith that one isn't going to just float away without a tether.
Blind faith is when your model goes beyond the minimum necessary to explain the observations, such that you are selecting an unnecessarily complex (i.e. over-constrained) model out of a range of possibilities.
I'm sure that pain is a very effective teaching mechanism. And I'm also sure most parents feel it hurts them more than the victim. It's still assault, though: "Modern American statutes define assault as: 1. an attempt to cause or purposely, knowingly, or recklessly causing bodily injury to another; or, 2. negligently causing bodily injury to another with a deadly weapon" (Wiki). The victim's age and/or relation to the perpetrator are irrelevant.
When did I ever say anything about the State stepping in? If they choose to leave they either find someone willing to take them in voluntarily, or they're on their own. The former protects those who were exiled or hurt through no fault of their own; the latter is natural consequence of incorrigible misbehavior.
Parents already have all the power in the world; from a child's point-of-view there is no higher authority. They don't need the extra power trip of legally inflicting pain.
Forget the "child abuse" label. Hitting someone is assault, whether the person you're hitting is an adult or a child, and regardless of whether the child is yours or someone else's. It should be treated as such.
On the other hand, the parents should have some leverage as well. I propose that they not be legally obligated to provide shelter or care; any child that habitually breaks the rules can find its own food and shelter. To protect against overuse, relax the rules giving preferential treatment to biological parents in regards to custody and let others take in the child voluntarily with a minimum of trouble. Then the problem cases can discover first-hand the consequences of alienating their caretakers, and uncaring parents can learn to treat their children as human beings instead of personal property. This should cultivate a much larger degree of respect on both sides.
Check your facts. The primary differences between civil and criminal infringement in the U.S. are commercial intent and scale:
Not that I support the law -- I'm fully anti-copyright -- but your assertion was nonetheless in error.
P.S. I also found it interesting that there's also a statute of limitations on copyright infringement, three years for civil proceeding and five for criminal: Section 507.
That's not really zero-risk either, since the rate of inflation is subject to change. Zero risk would imply that one knows exactly what one's situation will be at all points in the future. So long as one is alive the future will always include a nonzero level of uncertainty; the only way to truly eliminate risk is to die.
True, but only for one of the many definitions of "right" which is clearly not the one the GP was using.
If you start from a position of negative rights -- each person has the right to do anything which does not cause harm to others, "harm" being defined as interference with homesteaded and/or contractually transfered property rights -- then it is possible to have laws which do not interfere with rights, but rather complement them perfectly. This is the underlying principle of Common Law, which is completely independent of any sort of government. This is an "anarchic" position in a purely denotative sense (without rulers), but with none of the connotative aspects (chaotic/lawless). It is summed up by the phrase "equality under the law".
I know that the term "right" doesn't quite apply, which is why I quoted it. I wasn't sure what term to use for something that isn't a universal right but is nonetheless offered to everyone in the country; it's not much of a privilege either if anyone can claim it, since "privilege" tends to implies a certain measure of exclusivity.
Thank you for the information about registration; I wasn't aware that it was optional. This makes it more like a voluntary contract, in which case -- provided the terms were clearly understood up front -- payment for nonperformance makes sense. Everything I'd seen up till now implied that participation was mandatory for all citizens. Of course, you're still affected in involuntary ways by other people voting, even if you yourself choose not to participate, but at least the "obligation to vote" isn't itself coerced.
My, that sounded a bit bitter. I'm not interesting in "winning"; I simply don't see how something one don't want to do and yet is required to do anyway can be reasonably described as a privilege from one's own point of view.
If you can point out even one actual strawman argument I'll be happy to address it, but having read back over my comments I don't think you'll find any.
At the very least the list of possible suspects is much narrower for theft from a plane than for almost any other kind of theft -- you know it had to be one of the other passengers, all of whom are precisely identified in the airline's records. That's true regardless of the size of the item or how many people may be watching. Also, I believe that regulations require that at least one crew member remain on watch at any given time during the flight; they may not be able to identify the thief, but they can probably narrow down the list quite a bit.
If you're particularly paranoid, just ask the passenger next to you to watch your equipment while you're gone. Then if it goes missing you have either an eyewitness or a very likely suspect.
It also says "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech". Congress is explicitly, unconditionally and absolutely forbidden to interfere with the freedom of speech. Any law which abridges the freedom of speech is unconstitutional. Period.
If you plan to argue that copyright isn't unconstitutional -- i.e. merely unethical/immoral/unjust -- you first have to establish that it isn't a violation of freedom of speech.
It doesn't seem very likely that anyone could reasonably get away with stealing a laptop during a flight. The owner would immediately report the incident to the flight crew; there would be numerous of witnesses in close proximity to the theft, and a relatively limited number of potential suspects. There is also no discreet way off a plane other than the main exit, where airport personnel and/or the crew will certainly be searching for the stolen equipment -- which, even in the case of a small laptop, is not particularly concealable.
I don't see that the GP really has much to worry about.
You're half right. Firefox is released under a triple license; the MPL is one choice and the GPL is another. I forget what the third choice is. I'm not sure if they require copyright assignment, but even if they do it wouldn't help much to make a binary-only release; most of their users wouldn't get the update before they got around to releasing the source code anyway. Some Windows users, perhaps, but a large share are on Linux where updates are managed through a central repository, and without source code those repositories won't carry the fix.
As I said, the so-called "right" to vote is a privilege; the obligation to vote per se is not. If the "privilege" is something you didn't want to do in the first place then the only part that matters to you is the obligation. If I told you that you had to kill someone, but would be immune from the normal consequences, I'm fairly sure you would call that an obligation and not a privilege, even though it could technically be described either way. Presuming, of course, that you aren't a sociopath.
Any action whose presence or absence carries an artificial, involuntary consequence can be properly described as "forced." A gun is not specifically required. However, consider the progression if you do not pay this fine: they will attempt to garnish your wages, or raid your bank account; if they cannot do this (e.g. you are self-employed and have no accounts) they will visit personally and try to take your property directly; if you resist this unjust taking they will arrest you; if you resist this unjust arrest they will employ violence. Ergo, guns are ultimately the means by which they influence people to pay the fine. Whatever intermediate steps they might take, without the guns they could not effectively impose the fine.
It would account for environmental contaminants, but a while back the courts decided to abdicate their responsibilities in the interest of merchantilism, siding with the polluters against the affected property owners on "utilitarian" grounds. If they'd done their jobs and held people liable when their pollutants end up in other people's property this mess wouldn't exist.
I am not aware of any definition of "privilege", even in specialized fields, which would include actions which you are forced to take against your will. Such is neither an advantage, a right, an immunity, nor a benefit from the perspective of the person upon which it is bestowed. To be permitted to vote could be considered a privilege -- the definition which includes "exercised to the ... detriment of others" is apropos here -- but to be forced to vote is, indeed, quite the opposite.
The existence of a patent doesn't prevent that. If Microsoft found the patent inconvenient all it would have to do is convince Google's shareholders that it could better serve their interests than Google's present management, or else make an offer high enough to overrule any qualms about the future of their investments. Then Microsoft would be the patent holder and everyone else would be locked out.
The simple fact is that Google's investors believe that Google can implement the patent better than Microsoft can, and thus Google gets their support. Without the patent Google would still be better able to implement the patent; the only difference is that in that case Microsoft could try to imitate them and the investors could then make a more informed choice based on actual results.
I sure hope that was intended as a broad generalization. This particular reader is fully opposed to all patents, including all software patents. Being the beneficiary doesn't make them any more right, just a bit more palatable to those apathetic about individual freedom.
You sound confused. A market is made up of people (producers and consumers) potentially organized into groups for mutual benefit. It has nothing to do with the concept of "countries", and in many ways the idea of political boundaries to trade is incompatible with any concept of a free (unfettered) market. A country can have a market, or at least contain a portion of one, but markets can just as easily exist without any political boundaries at all.
On the other hand, if you assume the existence of a government then of course you have a country as well: the domain within which said government enforces its decrees and permits no competition for defense services. The concept of a country is implicit in government, not the market. As you yourself pointed out: without the government there is no country, at least in a political sense, as opposed to a geographical, social, or ethnic grouping.
Who's making assumptions now? Anyway, by definition, a defense organization is limited to enforcing property rights; it cannot forcibly prevent competition and remain a defense organization. This is what separates a defense organization -- even one with a de facto monopoly -- from a government, which tolerates no competition within its domain.
But what if the "consensual acts between two responsible individual[s]" consist of one hiring another to provide defense against such acts? According to your own definitions this isn't something that the government can rightfully interfere in, but as soon as this is admitted the "government" has lost its monopoly on defense services and has thus ceased to be a "government" at all, by any meaningful definition. Thus, a market with a minimal government, limited to enforcing contract and property law, is indistinguishable from a market with one or more private defense organizations and no government.
Either you have an aggression-free (read: government-free) society, with no "special" organization possessing a monopoly on defense services, or you have a government which clearly exceeds the limitations you describe as "sufficient".
You're both right. When taxes go up the marginal suppliers -- those that were just barely making enough accounting profit to justify staying in business -- are forced out of business. As a result, the supply of the good shrinks. The same demand competing for a smaller supply means that the price per unit must increase.
The increase in price is not necessarily equal to the increase in taxes; the remaining loss is imposed on those who must now make do with less, or go without entirely.
The cost of such a feat isn't actually in money, on a macroeconomic level; it never is, since moving money from one person to another results in no net change in the overall supply of money. As you say, money isn't actually consumed through spending. The real cost is the productive capacity -- labor, material, capital -- required to design, produce and launch the rocket. These are the scarce resources which will have to be diverted from other areas toward rocket-production. The supply of goods which compete with the rocket project for factors of production must decrease; prices of such goods will increase, and people will be unable to afford as much as they used to.
If this were the result of voluntary action the result would still be an overall increase in wealth, with the value of the rocket making up for the reduction in other areas; if the project can only be funded involuntarily, however -- e.g. through taxes -- then the consequence must be a net loss, since there are other, higher-valued uses to which those resources would have been put were the funds not forcibly redirected.
It's just as much my country as yours. I own a tiny piece of it -- my property -- and you own your tiny piece of it. Neither of us has any right to tell the other what to do with their piece. If the entire country (geographically) were your property you might have a point, but it isn't. A just claim of ownership is grounded in the process of homesteading, which requires a personal connection to the property. You have none. An unsubstantiated claim, one with no connection to the property, is just empty words.
You have to own property to restrict its use. You need a valid, voluntary contract with someone before you have any right to demand payment; apart, of course, from compensation for damages resulting directly from the other's actions. No part of these "encumbrances" you are claiming has any basis in reality. The idea of the "social contract" -- that a person can be bound by a contract simply by being born in the wrong place -- was always a myth.
The selfish person refuses to share what belongs to him or her; the concept presumes absolute individual ownership. Eliminate private property and you remove the choice, eliminating the opportunity for altruism as well as selfishness. Libertarian political philosophy is about giving individuals the choice, not encouraging selfish behavior. Most libertarians, in my personal experience, are quite generous with their own savings.
Theft is childish. Fraud is childish. Throwing tantrums about not being able to tell others what to do is childish. Defense of basic human rights, including the rights to retain the product of owe's own endeavors, and to choose for oneself between selfishness and altruism, is far from childish.