Why Do They Hate Us?

[R. A. Hettinga]

At 1:39 PM -0500 on 10/31/01, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote about
multinational corporations:


> the USA has little
> or no control or jurisdiction over them.

You can't have corporations, legal "persons", quite literally creatures of
the state, without the state to create them.

By the way, "non-governmental" organizations, and "non-profit"
organizations, are, of course, also creatures of nation states.

Someday, we'll be able to do the same thing without legislation, of course,
through some combination of network and cryptographic protocols.

Not at the moment, though. The present war is just as much a war of states
as the Thirty Years war was one of religions. Let's hope there's a
cryptographic/protocol Treaty of Westphalia at the end of it all, though
that's probably wishful thinking, if not actual heresy -- er, treason...

Cheers,
RAH

-- 
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R. A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'