Bitcoin could bring about smaller governments - and that is a good thing

[crumbs]

But governments are unique in the use and concentration of power. There's no doubt corporations take on a government-like power structure but a person can quit a corporation, a person cannot quit their government.

A person can, and often does, quit his government.  It's called emmigration.  
You have to be attractive enough to the government u liek better, but that's open market, just make yourself presentable.  I did.
 

Do you think government IS society? I don't.

What made you assume that i do?  That's crazy talk.
Government is government, society is society, two distinctly different words with distinctly different meanings.
You're right to not confuse the two.  We're good  here.

Yeah, no. Developing economic models is tough. Getting a lot of data from different countries and finding the casual relationships (through government reports that are probably lies) could take a long time. It might be fun though.

In other words, u see no extant alternative?

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[Mike Christ]

The status of a poor nation with government: poor.

The status of a poor nation without government: still poor.

The lack of government will not automatically turn dirt into gold.  All it does is come without the guarantee that government can fuck up a situation more than the situation was naturally fucked up before government involvement.  If the Somalians want a better life, they'll seek it, and I believe everyone always actively seeks this; they do not need to vote in a democratic election to have a representative hold office in a palace constructed by another man's labor so he can sit and make the decision as to whether or not the Somalians want a better life, or if he wants a much better life paid for with the former promise on a string.

[xxjs]

The queston of large and small government is, at least for the non-zero government folks, a foggy concept. It is not good enough to speciffy a small government, for if a small government is better than a large government, an even smaller governement is better, and therefore no government at all is by extension the best. You have to be more specific.

There are three things government does: What nobody should do, what only governments can do and what either governments or private entities can do. The government obviously should stop doing what nobody should do, and government should leave that what private entities can do to those private entities. The reason is that the private entities are guided by rational self interest, and the government can not do better than that.

[marcus_of_augustus]

It's a very simple metric .... (total tax take)/ GDP.

I can't see how people are getting hung up about how to measure the size of govt ... unless they want to of course.