Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msandford | Hacker News Reader

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Also an excellent point. I'm a libertarian and I'm thoroughly fed up with both parties; neither hold true to their supposed core ideology when faced with the choice to do the right thing or to accrete more power. As such I'm really interested in ways to scare the shit out of politicians in the hope that they'll think LONG and HARD about whether what's being proposed is RIGHT or EXPEDIENT. As such the whole notion has a certain appeal, it's a way to try and curb particularly egregious abuses of power.

For example you might see $50mm worth of bounties on a lot of higher-ups at the NSA for letting this spying-on-innocent-as-well-as-guilty Americans business go on for so long. Those programs might then get shut down, or at the very least those people might retire to very private places immediately.

Possibilities for abuse? Absolutely. Are those abuses worse than what the folks in power are currently doing to us? That all depends on your viewpoint. I'm honestly not sure where I stand on that one because it's really tough to figure out the exact magnitude of the unintended consequences of any change in policy.

>For example you might see $50mm worth of bounties on a lot of higher-ups at the NSA for letting this spying-on-innocent-as-well-as-guilty Americans business go on for so long. Those programs might then get shut down, or at the very least those people might retire to very private places immediately.

Or you'll get bounties put out on postal workers because the Post Office is secretly reading everyone's mail.

I would submit that out of the pool of people willing to participate in an assassination-for-hire marketplace, few are likely to be reasonable in what they would consider a killing offense.

The Post Office example isn't very good because most mail carriers don't serve more than a few thousand people (maybe a lot less in the 'burbs) so it would be very hard to get enough money together to make it worthwhile to kill any one individual. But the greater point, that people could act irrationally and cause entirely innocent people to be killed is still a possibility and tough to refute.

I really do find it difficult to believe that an assassination-for-hire marketplace would be mostly utilized by reasonable people anyway.

The point is deeper than this -- with such a system in place, one must never even attach their real name or address to controversial ideas.

This would allow thought to proceed on pure merit, rather than social proof.

But such a system only has the purpose of having people killed for money. There wouldn't be any other ideas discussed, except maybe haggling over whether to use a gun or a knife or maybe anthrax if the price is right.

An assassination program like this more or less defies the concept of 'ideas based on merit.'

Oh, but the effects would be wide-ranging: if an idea has enough of a likelihood of angering people past some threshold (either lots of people, or a few rich ones), then it will only be reasonable to air that idea under strong pseudonymity.

Participating in this marketplace would be somewhat like voting, except it would have a tangible effect.

If you're talking about a marketplace of ideas and collective action, fine. I'm all for communication without oppression.

But a marketplace for violence is just as bad or even worse than the implicit violence of the state in my opinion. While I believe that sometimes violence might be necessary to oppose tyranny, I don't know that I trust the 'justness' of a system which presumes anyone employed by the state should find themselves subject to that kind of threat. Eventually (inevitably) it would wind up being used as a tool for political and ethnic genocide. Or petty crime.

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