At 1:17 PM -0400 8/10/00, Steven Furlong wrote:
>
>My first impulse is to agree. However, the late Roman republic was
>crushed under a morass of laws, and so it finally became the rule that
>any Senator who proposed a law must appear with a noose around his
>neck. If the law did not pass, he would be strangled on the spot. No
>laws were proposed for, IIRC, decades. I don't recall the dire
>consequences of this rule, but the decay of the Republic's real
>holdings and problems with the legions would be an obvious guess.
It may be an "obvious guess," but the reasons for the decline and
fall of the empire and republic have been debated for millennia. I
could give dozens of likely contributing factors, ranging from
overextension of the empire, the selection of xtianity as the
official state religion by Constantine, the pressure from northern
tribes, decadence, etc.
That there weren't enough laws is not high on _my_ list of what
caused their empire to eventually implode.
>
>And to drift a bit farther off topic, I'd like to see *harsh*
>consequences for anyone who participated in the execution of an
>innocent man. This applies from evidence-planting pigs through DAs
>who don't disclose crucial evidence all the way up to "actual
>innocence" justices. Maybe not death for these offenders, but life
>without parole should suffice.
>
I used to think this, then I got more and more pissed off at the
cavalier way government expands into our lives, plants evidence,
sells drugs and weapons but then says its exempt from laws, etc. etc.
And I was talking about methods for untraceable contract killings
many years before Jim Bell even thought up his complicated scheme for
buying lottery tickets. (Unlike Bell, I have been careful to not be
implicated in actual crimes.)
Fact is, hundreds of thousands of government types have already
earned sanctioning.
--Tim May
--
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Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
