By that measure, all legal systems are bad. It is doubtful that you could come up with a set of laws fully correlated with even two people's personal ethics, much less those of an entire society.
If you just take the majority view then your legal system is still subjective, and enforcing it is just another form of "might makes right". The law must be valid from all points-of-view, even the criminals', to be above reproach.
A king or monarch felt perfectly justified in stealing from his subjects with absolutely no such reasoning, and it never would occur to many of their subjects that this was any great injustice. “I’m/he’s the king” was, to them, a perfectly rational objection. It was simply the way society worked.
So? Logic doesn't care how the rulers or their subjects felt, or whether it occurred to the subjects to question their rulers' so-called reasoning. If the subjects had responded to the theft in kind, the rulers would have been left without any rational objection.
You based it off the moral premise that everyone else has a right to the same actions and freedoms that you do. Not every society accepted this premise.
Where did I ever say that anyone has or does not have a right to specific actions or freedoms? I am not concerned with rights or freedoms. I am simply resolving a question: "If some else harms me (from my P.O.V.), and I respond in kind, can they rationally object?" If they throw out the concept of universality then the answer must be no; on what rational basis could they possibly appeal against any punishment they might receive?
For the law to be relevant the accused must already be within one's power—it makes no sense to worry about legality if one is incapable of implementing the sentence. As such, the law exists to protect the accused, not the victim. It would be self-defeating for the accused to undermine the law's protection by questioning its universality.
Your basic premise is already an invention of morality. Morality leads you to conclude that this principle is important and should be the basis of law.
Please, show where I tried to any particular framework of right or wrong on others. I never said "stealing is wrong"; I said "if you steal then your victims can steal from you and you won't be able to rationally object." That's simple cause-and-effect reasoning, not a moral prescription. I don't care whether you or anyone else believes stealing to be right or wrong, and neither should the law. If the law depended on morality then it would be completely useless whenever two disputing parties failed to share a common moral code—which is pretty much the only time the law is needed.
The notion that all men are created equal and that we should adhere to the rules you described is a decidedly western philosophy. Many cultures have had (and still have) no such concept.
I didn't elaborate on the principle of universality above, but with a bit of thought you can see that it's built-in. If one party in a dispute argues that their actions were right for them but wrong for others, they have no basis on which to object should the other party make exactly the same argument in reverse. Only if universality is taken as given can it be argued that punishment must be proportional to the crime, so it is not in the offender's best interest to argue against it.
There is simply no way to create a legal system without creating a system of ethics and morality.
Strange; that's what I just did: the law, as I just described it, is independent of morality.
Breaking the law is wrong, and obeying it is right.
Now that's a moral code, albeit a rather crude one. Intended as it is to govern interpersonal behavior, the law is by nature limited in scope to those things on which there can be little disagreement. (If there was much scope for disagreement then the law would be ignored.) Most people develop their personal morality quite a bit further, classifying as wrong many actions which are not, strictly speaking, illegal, or taking a stand for rights not currently recognized by the law.
You're looking for a system of morality, and so cast everything in terms of how various cultures have defined right and wrong. However, I'm just asking the question: "If some else harms me (from my P.O.V.), and I respond in kind, can they rationally object?" The answer depends only on logic, not cultural baggage or subjective morals.
You're right that "protecting the rights of citizens" and "providing for their common interest" are matters of personal morality. They have no place in the law. Morality is subjective, and thus no basis for a law which purports to govern all interactions within society.
Instead, the law should be reciprocation and the principle of estoppal. If you perform an action yourself you cannot simultaneously argue (without contradiction) that the action is right and that others cannot do the same, OR that the action is wrong, that others should be punished for performing it, and that you should not be punished yourself. Since either path justifies a proportional response it does not matter which argument you make; ergo, the outcome is independent of the moral nature of the original action. If you steal then you can be fined, if you murder then you can be killed, if you kidnap then you can be imprisoned, etc., all without reference to anyone's personal moral code.
If you're going to use a passphrase then you'll need much more than 20 characters to get 128 bits of entropy:
Considering that the entropy of written English is less than 1.1 bits per character, pass phrases can be relatively weak. NIST has estimated that the 23 character pass phrase "IamtheCapitanofthePina4" contains a 45 bit-strength.... Using this guideline, to achieve the 80 bit-strength recommended for high security (non-military) by NIST, a passphrase would need to be 58 characters long, assuming a composition that includes uppercase and alphanumeric. (Wikipedia)
To get 128 bits of entropy would require about 20 words. I don't know about you, but to me it seems that 20 non-obvious words would be about as hard to remember as 20 random characters, while being much less convenient to type.
Free markets require regulation. Why? Because, as the saying goes, your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose. "Free" should not be equated with anarchy. If your freedoms abridge my freedoms, there is a problem.
Whatever the colloquial meaning may be, the term "regulation" in an economic context does not include basic enforcement of property rights. The one thing common to all free markets is that property rights are always strictly enforced (a.k.a. the Non-Aggression Principle or NAP). How they are enforced varies; it is possible—some would even say necessary—to ensure their enforcement non-aggressively, i.e. without a government, by relying on the purely defensive use of force in immediate self-defense or as a proportional response to prior aggression. In any event, the absence of aggression is inherent in the free-market concept, and needs no extra label; the term "regulations" refers only to additional prohibitions on non-aggressive use of one's property.
Resisting the violation of one's property rights (e.g. slavery, murder, theft) is an act of defense against prior aggression, but any enforcement of regulations would require one to become the aggressor, violating the property rights of non-aggressors to prevent them from (or punish them for) using their property in the prohibited fashion. This is clearly in violation of the NAP.
The NAP is thus a complete description of the set of prohibited actions in a free market; the introduction of any additional "regulations" can only lead to contradiction.
As for the "socially conscientious opponents", I do not care whether you call them "socialists", "communists", "fascists", or any other label. What they are is individuals who would seek to violate others' property rights, a.k.a. criminals. (Remember, in a free market there is no double-standard separating the normals from the government; the same rules apply to all. All aggression is criminal, regardless of the instigator.)
I can say, categorically, that OS X is better than Windows and Linux at automatically finding nearby machines and devices that do not have a static IP/DNS A record assigned to them.
That would be strange, since Linux uses exactly the same system as OS X (mDNS) for advertising local machines and services. You didn't disable the Avahi daemon, did you? It's generally enabled by default in new installations. You should be able to refer to any Linux machine on your local network as hostname.local, just as with OS X.
Windows is a bit behind on native support, of course, but you can install Apple's Bonjour for Windows software to get the same effect.
Zero government is necessary, but not sufficient. What you really need is zero aggression.
Governments are an obvious target because they are founded on the concept of "legitimate" aggression, but private aggression—any non-defensive violation of property rights, including self-ownership—is just as much of a obstacle to true freedom.
Of course, we can't just wave our hands and do away with aggression overnight, but every little bit helps. It is possible, given sufficient motivation, to promote local zones of non-aggression within one's own community. Over time these zones can grow and merge until true freedom becomes the rule rather than the exception.
Perhaps not, but you do have to upload 3,000 copies of a file for 3,000 people to be able to download the file from you. No defendant should be punished for what others uploaded.
If you have a share-ratio of 1.0 then you have uploaded approximately one copy of the file(s). It would be unreasonable to calculate so-called damages as if a single defendant was solely responsible for all 3,000 people received a complete copy of the file, when in fact any given defendant could at most be responsible for uploading 0.1% of each copy (on average).
... you will suddenly realise that the great majority is a whole heap of actually necessary small things that add up.
It may look that way at first, but most of those "necessary" things weren't even invented until the last century or so, and society managed to work just fine without them. Perhaps they aren't really so necessary after all?
Even if the government was completely honest, competent, and efficient—an economic impossibility, but we'll let that slide for the purposes of this discussion—it's still doing the wrong things. Put another way, the real measure of government is in how well it achieves its mandate, not how well the various departments achieve the goals the set for themselves. By that measure, everything it does which does not contribute toward its mandate (a.k.a. scope creep) is a guaranteed source of inefficiency. Finally, it's important that the mandate itself be minimal—including only those things both necessary to civilization and impossible to achieve without the use of force—because non-aggression is the key to human civilization. The only justification for employing force must be that failing to do so would be deadlier still. (I am not persuaded that any such situation exists, ergo I see no difference between minarchy and anarchy. Others obviously disagree.)
In any standards-compliant environment, actually. Part of standards-compliance is not defining identifiers when the corresponding headers haven't been included, to prevent namespace collisions.
The ideal level of theft, taxes included, is zero percent of GDP.
Short of that ideal would be the minimum level required to fulfill the federal government's Constitutional mandated functions, which history shows is far less than 20% of GDP.
P.S. Note that GDP includes government spending, so (assuming an approximately balanced budget) a taxation rate of 50% of GDP is actually a 100% tax on all private spending. A rate of 20% of GDP thus effectively skims off 40% of all private consumption and investment. For an unbalanced budget, as we currently have, the effect is much worse, as government spending makes up a larger portion of the GDP.
P.P.S. Wikipedia claims the United States has a tax rate of about 28.2% of GDP, not 20% (Source), for an effective taxation rate of over half of all private spending and investment.
It would be far better to create and use a new and actually gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun.
We already have an "actually gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun": "it". Why should we make up a new word when there is a perfectly servicable one just waiting to be used?
This exploit lets any unprivileged local user inject arbitrary code into the kernel, and you think it only deserves a rating of moderate? Apparently you've never heard of local privilege escalation. This reduces the actual security of every NT-based Windows system to the single-user "security" last seen in Windows ME.
Sure, it's not a remote exploit (yet). That doesn't mean it's not a major issue, particularly for those administering multi-user systems and/or network domains.
Sure, but your suit will be heard by a federal judge (paid by the government) in a federal court (a branch of the government) and measured against a body of federal laws (written by the government), so even if they give you permission to sue the deck is still stacked against you before you even register your complaint.
Occasionally the courts are willing to throw some minor functionary or politician to the wolves for the sake of public consumption, or even reprimand some executive department for getting ahead of the legislature, but when it comes to the major issues, like the limits of government power, institutional solidarity trumps liberty and justice almost every time.
No one rips out a chapter of a book and lends it to someone.
Are you sure? Nothing legally prevents anyone from doing so. I've heard stories—I don't know whether they are true or not—of whole communities breaking books up into separate pages and passing the pages around so that everyone had a chance to read them, when books were rather more scarce than they are today. So long as you don't actually make a copy of anything it would seem that copyright law should not apply. Why should digital books be any different? You haven't really made a copy unless the same portion of the same book is displayed in more than one place at a time.
Even going by your (somewhat twisted) definition, gold at least has "intrinsic" value to someone; there would still be demand for it even if you took away the additional value it warrants as a medium of exchange. Paper currency, on the other hand, has no significant "intrinsic" value to anyone; no one buys paper currency for direct use. Among other things, this means that while gold can become a currency naturally as barter gives way to indirect exchange, paper currency only becomes prominent as a result of fraud (or force).
Of course, "dollar" could also refer to the Bahamian dollar, the Barbados dollar, the Belize dollar, the Bermuda dollar, the Brunei dollar, the Canadian dollar, the East Caribbean dollar, the Guyanese dollar, the Hong Kong dollar, the New Taiwan dollar, the Singapore dollar, or the Trinidad and Tobago dollar. All of these (plus the US dollar, of course) started out as local equivalents of the Spanish dollar, though only two (Singapore and Brunei) have thus far avoided debasement. (Source)
If it doesn't say "US dollar", "$US", "US$", or "USD" then there is little justification for the assumption that "dollar" must refer to the United States variant. When the term is used in a phrase like "Liberty Dollar" and abbreviated ALD (American Liberty Dollar) rather than USD the chances of actual confusion should be minimal.
I think the problem here, if there is one, is simply that Americans are unused to handling any form of non-US currency. Combined with the recent tendency to vary the appearance of the coins (e.g. the introduction of 50 different types of quarter, one for each state), this leads to an unfortunate but inevitable pattern where anything round and shiny placed in one's hands is assumed to be some sort of US currency, regardless of whether it matches any known type of coin.
Naturally this impairs the market for real money, like the Liberty dollar, by confusing it with the far less valuable "legal tender". As such, the U.S. Mint should take more care to avoid trademark pollution by making their coins more distinctive and educating the public as to their proper identification. In this area they could take a few lessons from NORFED, creators of the Liberty Dollar.
when you torrent, there is a limited bandwidth that you can share at any given point in time. If you "share" a 10 SizeUnit file to 10 people, all at once on a connection with bandwidth of 1 SizeUnit/Hour, it takes those 10 people 100 hours for each of them to get the file.
That's not how torrents work. In an ideal world, a torrent can take advantage of the swarm's total upload bandwidth, not just that of the original seed. If each peer has a connection rated for uploading 1 unit/hour then it should take just a bit over 10 hours for every participant (other than the original seed) to receive a full copy of a 10-unit file.
In practice, of course, there is a non-trivial amount of overhead involved, such that it actually takes more than 10 hours to complete all the transfers. However, it still takes a lot less than 100 hours—probably less than 20, even—as all the peers are receiving bits of the file from each other in parallel rather than waiting for the original seed to send the file out ten times sequentially.
It would be easier to place faith in the impartiality of their ruling if the court weren't part of the same organization as the plaintiff, namely the federal government.
...you sound like a Libertarian partisan.
You are entirely correct; I am a partisan of Liberty. Thanks for noticing.
The Liberty dollar strikes a certain cord of civil disobedience...
In order for an act to be civil disobedience it must first be (wrongfully) illegal. The Liberty Dollar is certainly intended to be as much a political statement—a protest against the current fiat system—as a practical alternative currency, but I have seen no evidence to suggest that the creators or (generally speaking) the users of the Liberty Dollar believe it to be illegal.
As a currency, however, food is somewhat lacking. It's bulky, you can't store it for very long, and it's value is noticeably non-uniform (and difficult to judge without actually eating it). Gold is compact, relatively incorruptible, arbitrarily divisible, easy to purify, and of uniform value once purified; as such it makes a much better currency.
It's "real money" if it's used as the marketable commodity in an indirect exchange. In your example the monopoly money and the gum are both intended for direct use, so you have a case of direct exchange (barter) and no money is involved. If the other party intended to trade the monopoly money for something else they wanted, rather than use it directly, then you could say that it was "real money" for the purpose of that three-party transaction.
"an inscription purporting to denote the year of production"
"images that are similar to United States coins" (torch, Statue of Liberty, Bill of Rights, Liberty Head)
A very amusing list, indeed. I particularly like their complaint about "an inscription purporting to denote the year of production" and a phrase which they explicitly do not use on any of their coins. The claim to a monopoly on patriotic imagery is nice as well.
The fact is, however, that the Mint does not have a monopoly on any of these items taken individually, and as a whole their arrangement on the Liberty Dollar is not particularly like any current US currency. The only plausible way someone could confuse the Liberty Dollar for a US coin would be something along the lines of "It's round and metallic and I've never seen anything like it before; ergo it must be US currency", which is clearly fallacious reasoning.
The problem with attempting to implement electronic cash is that physical cash only exists because it was grandfathered in. Under current regulations, anyone introducing cash today would be charged with money laundering due to the lack of records. Electronic cash has been attempted several times, and the result is always the same.
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By that measure, all legal systems are bad. It is doubtful that you could come up with a set of laws fully correlated with even two people's personal ethics, much less those of an entire society.
If you just take the majority view then your legal system is still subjective, and enforcing it is just another form of "might makes right". The law must be valid from all points-of-view, even the criminals', to be above reproach.
A king or monarch felt perfectly justified in stealing from his subjects with absolutely no such reasoning, and it never would occur to many of their subjects that this was any great injustice. “I’m/he’s the king” was, to them, a perfectly rational objection. It was simply the way society worked.
So? Logic doesn't care how the rulers or their subjects felt, or whether it occurred to the subjects to question their rulers' so-called reasoning. If the subjects had responded to the theft in kind, the rulers would have been left without any rational objection.
You based it off the moral premise that everyone else has a right to the same actions and freedoms that you do. Not every society accepted this premise.
Where did I ever say that anyone has or does not have a right to specific actions or freedoms? I am not concerned with rights or freedoms. I am simply resolving a question: "If some else harms me (from my P.O.V.), and I respond in kind, can they rationally object?" If they throw out the concept of universality then the answer must be no; on what rational basis could they possibly appeal against any punishment they might receive?
For the law to be relevant the accused must already be within one's power—it makes no sense to worry about legality if one is incapable of implementing the sentence. As such, the law exists to protect the accused, not the victim. It would be self-defeating for the accused to undermine the law's protection by questioning its universality.
Your basic premise is already an invention of morality. Morality leads you to conclude that this principle is important and should be the basis of law.
Please, show where I tried to any particular framework of right or wrong on others. I never said "stealing is wrong"; I said "if you steal then your victims can steal from you and you won't be able to rationally object." That's simple cause-and-effect reasoning, not a moral prescription. I don't care whether you or anyone else believes stealing to be right or wrong, and neither should the law. If the law depended on morality then it would be completely useless whenever two disputing parties failed to share a common moral code—which is pretty much the only time the law is needed.
The notion that all men are created equal and that we should adhere to the rules you described is a decidedly western philosophy. Many cultures have had (and still have) no such concept.
I didn't elaborate on the principle of universality above, but with a bit of thought you can see that it's built-in. If one party in a dispute argues that their actions were right for them but wrong for others, they have no basis on which to object should the other party make exactly the same argument in reverse. Only if universality is taken as given can it be argued that punishment must be proportional to the crime, so it is not in the offender's best interest to argue against it.
There is simply no way to create a legal system without creating a system of ethics and morality.
Strange; that's what I just did: the law, as I just described it, is independent of morality.
Breaking the law is wrong, and obeying it is right.
Now that's a moral code, albeit a rather crude one. Intended as it is to govern interpersonal behavior, the law is by nature limited in scope to those things on which there can be little disagreement. (If there was much scope for disagreement then the law would be ignored.) Most people develop their personal morality quite a bit further, classifying as wrong many actions which are not, strictly speaking, illegal, or taking a stand for rights not currently recognized by the law.
You're looking for a system of morality, and so cast everything in terms of how various cultures have defined right and wrong. However, I'm just asking the question: "If some else harms me (from my P.O.V.), and I respond in kind, can they rationally object?" The answer depends only on logic, not cultural baggage or subjective morals.
You're right that "protecting the rights of citizens" and "providing for their common interest" are matters of personal morality. They have no place in the law. Morality is subjective, and thus no basis for a law which purports to govern all interactions within society.
Instead, the law should be reciprocation and the principle of estoppal. If you perform an action yourself you cannot simultaneously argue (without contradiction) that the action is right and that others cannot do the same, OR that the action is wrong, that others should be punished for performing it, and that you should not be punished yourself. Since either path justifies a proportional response it does not matter which argument you make; ergo, the outcome is independent of the moral nature of the original action. If you steal then you can be fined, if you murder then you can be killed, if you kidnap then you can be imprisoned, etc., all without reference to anyone's personal moral code.
If you're going to use a passphrase then you'll need much more than 20 characters to get 128 bits of entropy:
Considering that the entropy of written English is less than 1.1 bits per character, pass phrases can be relatively weak. NIST has estimated that the 23 character pass phrase "IamtheCapitanofthePina4" contains a 45 bit-strength.... Using this guideline, to achieve the 80 bit-strength recommended for high security (non-military) by NIST, a passphrase would need to be 58 characters long, assuming a composition that includes uppercase and alphanumeric. (Wikipedia)
To get 128 bits of entropy would require about 20 words. I don't know about you, but to me it seems that 20 non-obvious words would be about as hard to remember as 20 random characters, while being much less convenient to type.
Free markets require regulation. Why? Because, as the saying goes, your right to swing your fist stops at the end of my nose. "Free" should not be equated with anarchy. If your freedoms abridge my freedoms, there is a problem.
Whatever the colloquial meaning may be, the term "regulation" in an economic context does not include basic enforcement of property rights. The one thing common to all free markets is that property rights are always strictly enforced (a.k.a. the Non-Aggression Principle or NAP). How they are enforced varies; it is possible—some would even say necessary—to ensure their enforcement non-aggressively, i.e. without a government, by relying on the purely defensive use of force in immediate self-defense or as a proportional response to prior aggression. In any event, the absence of aggression is inherent in the free-market concept, and needs no extra label; the term "regulations" refers only to additional prohibitions on non-aggressive use of one's property.
Resisting the violation of one's property rights (e.g. slavery, murder, theft) is an act of defense against prior aggression, but any enforcement of regulations would require one to become the aggressor, violating the property rights of non-aggressors to prevent them from (or punish them for) using their property in the prohibited fashion. This is clearly in violation of the NAP.
The NAP is thus a complete description of the set of prohibited actions in a free market; the introduction of any additional "regulations" can only lead to contradiction.
As for the "socially conscientious opponents", I do not care whether you call them "socialists", "communists", "fascists", or any other label. What they are is individuals who would seek to violate others' property rights, a.k.a. criminals. (Remember, in a free market there is no double-standard separating the normals from the government; the same rules apply to all. All aggression is criminal, regardless of the instigator.)
I can say, categorically, that OS X is better than Windows and Linux at automatically finding nearby machines and devices that do not have a static IP/DNS A record assigned to them.
That would be strange, since Linux uses exactly the same system as OS X (mDNS) for advertising local machines and services. You didn't disable the Avahi daemon, did you? It's generally enabled by default in new installations. You should be able to refer to any Linux machine on your local network as hostname.local, just as with OS X.
Windows is a bit behind on native support, of course, but you can install Apple's Bonjour for Windows software to get the same effect.
Zero government is necessary, but not sufficient. What you really need is zero aggression.
Governments are an obvious target because they are founded on the concept of "legitimate" aggression, but private aggression—any non-defensive violation of property rights, including self-ownership—is just as much of a obstacle to true freedom.
Of course, we can't just wave our hands and do away with aggression overnight, but every little bit helps. It is possible, given sufficient motivation, to promote local zones of non-aggression within one's own community. Over time these zones can grow and merge until true freedom becomes the rule rather than the exception.
Perhaps not, but you do have to upload 3,000 copies of a file for 3,000 people to be able to download the file from you. No defendant should be punished for what others uploaded.
If you have a share-ratio of 1.0 then you have uploaded approximately one copy of the file(s). It would be unreasonable to calculate so-called damages as if a single defendant was solely responsible for all 3,000 people received a complete copy of the file, when in fact any given defendant could at most be responsible for uploading 0.1% of each copy (on average).
... you will suddenly realise that the great majority is a whole heap of actually necessary small things that add up.
It may look that way at first, but most of those "necessary" things weren't even invented until the last century or so, and society managed to work just fine without them. Perhaps they aren't really so necessary after all?
Even if the government was completely honest, competent, and efficient—an economic impossibility, but we'll let that slide for the purposes of this discussion—it's still doing the wrong things. Put another way, the real measure of government is in how well it achieves its mandate, not how well the various departments achieve the goals the set for themselves. By that measure, everything it does which does not contribute toward its mandate (a.k.a. scope creep) is a guaranteed source of inefficiency. Finally, it's important that the mandate itself be minimal—including only those things both necessary to civilization and impossible to achieve without the use of force—because non-aggression is the key to human civilization. The only justification for employing force must be that failing to do so would be deadlier still. (I am not persuaded that any such situation exists, ergo I see no difference between minarchy and anarchy. Others obviously disagree.)
In any standards-compliant environment, actually. Part of standards-compliance is not defining identifiers when the corresponding headers haven't been included, to prevent namespace collisions.
The ideal level of theft, taxes included, is zero percent of GDP.
Short of that ideal would be the minimum level required to fulfill the federal government's Constitutional mandated functions, which history shows is far less than 20% of GDP.
P.S. Note that GDP includes government spending, so (assuming an approximately balanced budget) a taxation rate of 50% of GDP is actually a 100% tax on all private spending. A rate of 20% of GDP thus effectively skims off 40% of all private consumption and investment. For an unbalanced budget, as we currently have, the effect is much worse, as government spending makes up a larger portion of the GDP.
P.P.S. Wikipedia claims the United States has a tax rate of about 28.2% of GDP, not 20% (Source), for an effective taxation rate of over half of all private spending and investment.
It would be far better to create and use a new and actually gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun.
We already have an "actually gender-neutral third-person singular pronoun": "it". Why should we make up a new word when there is a perfectly servicable one just waiting to be used?
This exploit lets any unprivileged local user inject arbitrary code into the kernel, and you think it only deserves a rating of moderate? Apparently you've never heard of local privilege escalation. This reduces the actual security of every NT-based Windows system to the single-user "security" last seen in Windows ME.
Sure, it's not a remote exploit (yet). That doesn't mean it's not a major issue, particularly for those administering multi-user systems and/or network domains.
Sure, but your suit will be heard by a federal judge (paid by the government) in a federal court (a branch of the government) and measured against a body of federal laws (written by the government), so even if they give you permission to sue the deck is still stacked against you before you even register your complaint.
Occasionally the courts are willing to throw some minor functionary or politician to the wolves for the sake of public consumption, or even reprimand some executive department for getting ahead of the legislature, but when it comes to the major issues, like the limits of government power, institutional solidarity trumps liberty and justice almost every time.
No one rips out a chapter of a book and lends it to someone.
Are you sure? Nothing legally prevents anyone from doing so. I've heard stories—I don't know whether they are true or not—of whole communities breaking books up into separate pages and passing the pages around so that everyone had a chance to read them, when books were rather more scarce than they are today. So long as you don't actually make a copy of anything it would seem that copyright law should not apply. Why should digital books be any different? You haven't really made a copy unless the same portion of the same book is displayed in more than one place at a time.
Even going by your (somewhat twisted) definition, gold at least has "intrinsic" value to someone; there would still be demand for it even if you took away the additional value it warrants as a medium of exchange. Paper currency, on the other hand, has no significant "intrinsic" value to anyone; no one buys paper currency for direct use. Among other things, this means that while gold can become a currency naturally as barter gives way to indirect exchange, paper currency only becomes prominent as a result of fraud (or force).
It's still absurd even if other places are worse.
Of course, "dollar" could also refer to the Bahamian dollar, the Barbados dollar, the Belize dollar, the Bermuda dollar, the Brunei dollar, the Canadian dollar, the East Caribbean dollar, the Guyanese dollar, the Hong Kong dollar, the New Taiwan dollar, the Singapore dollar, or the Trinidad and Tobago dollar. All of these (plus the US dollar, of course) started out as local equivalents of the Spanish dollar, though only two (Singapore and Brunei) have thus far avoided debasement. (Source)
If it doesn't say "US dollar", "$US", "US$", or "USD" then there is little justification for the assumption that "dollar" must refer to the United States variant. When the term is used in a phrase like "Liberty Dollar" and abbreviated ALD (American Liberty Dollar) rather than USD the chances of actual confusion should be minimal.
I think the problem here, if there is one, is simply that Americans are unused to handling any form of non-US currency. Combined with the recent tendency to vary the appearance of the coins (e.g. the introduction of 50 different types of quarter, one for each state), this leads to an unfortunate but inevitable pattern where anything round and shiny placed in one's hands is assumed to be some sort of US currency, regardless of whether it matches any known type of coin.
Naturally this impairs the market for real money, like the Liberty dollar, by confusing it with the far less valuable "legal tender". As such, the U.S. Mint should take more care to avoid trademark pollution by making their coins more distinctive and educating the public as to their proper identification. In this area they could take a few lessons from NORFED, creators of the Liberty Dollar.
when you torrent, there is a limited bandwidth that you can share at any given point in time. If you "share" a 10 SizeUnit file to 10 people, all at once on a connection with bandwidth of 1 SizeUnit/Hour, it takes those 10 people 100 hours for each of them to get the file.
That's not how torrents work. In an ideal world, a torrent can take advantage of the swarm's total upload bandwidth, not just that of the original seed. If each peer has a connection rated for uploading 1 unit/hour then it should take just a bit over 10 hours for every participant (other than the original seed) to receive a full copy of a 10-unit file.
In practice, of course, there is a non-trivial amount of overhead involved, such that it actually takes more than 10 hours to complete all the transfers. However, it still takes a lot less than 100 hours—probably less than 20, even—as all the peers are receiving bits of the file from each other in parallel rather than waiting for the original seed to send the file out ten times sequentially.
The court will decide.
It would be easier to place faith in the impartiality of their ruling if the court weren't part of the same organization as the plaintiff, namely the federal government.
...you sound like a Libertarian partisan.
You are entirely correct; I am a partisan of Liberty. Thanks for noticing.
The Liberty dollar strikes a certain cord of civil disobedience...
In order for an act to be civil disobedience it must first be (wrongfully) illegal. The Liberty Dollar is certainly intended to be as much a political statement—a protest against the current fiat system—as a practical alternative currency, but I have seen no evidence to suggest that the creators or (generally speaking) the users of the Liberty Dollar believe it to be illegal.
As a currency, however, food is somewhat lacking. It's bulky, you can't store it for very long, and it's value is noticeably non-uniform (and difficult to judge without actually eating it). Gold is compact, relatively incorruptible, arbitrarily divisible, easy to purify, and of uniform value once purified; as such it makes a much better currency.
It's "real money" if it's used as the marketable commodity in an indirect exchange. In your example the monopoly money and the gum are both intended for direct use, so you have a case of direct exchange (barter) and no money is involved. If the other party intended to trade the monopoly money for something else they wanted, rather than use it directly, then you could say that it was "real money" for the purpose of that three-party transaction.
the "trademarks" of legal US currency
I suppose you're referring to this list?
A very amusing list, indeed. I particularly like their complaint about "an inscription purporting to denote the year of production" and a phrase which they explicitly do not use on any of their coins. The claim to a monopoly on patriotic imagery is nice as well.
The fact is, however, that the Mint does not have a monopoly on any of these items taken individually, and as a whole their arrangement on the Liberty Dollar is not particularly like any current US currency. The only plausible way someone could confuse the Liberty Dollar for a US coin would be something along the lines of "It's round and metallic and I've never seen anything like it before; ergo it must be US currency", which is clearly fallacious reasoning.
The problem with attempting to implement electronic cash is that physical cash only exists because it was grandfathered in. Under current regulations, anyone introducing cash today would be charged with money laundering due to the lack of records. Electronic cash has been attempted several times, and the result is always the same.