For centuries, during the so-called "Dark Ages", the Roman church ruled the known world of Westerners. The technology of the day, the printing press created by Gutenberg around 1450, started stealing some of the power that was Rome. The freedom to read and pray to thine own god had arrived. This was an unusual freedom. because basically it was a first. It grew over the centuries to the freedom to be free of any religion if so desired.
Time marched on. Eventually, in 1776, the American Revolution woke the world to the further potential and possibilities of the human spirit -- political freedom. The United States made the entwining of church and state illegal. No longer could the church impose rules beyond theological matters. This was The Second Freedom.
Is The Third Freedom peeping over the human horizon? The freedom and separation of economy from the state? If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, then the formerly free power of the state has run out of control. The power to organize and administer the lives of many now restricts the livelihood of those who create wealth and jobs that lead the economy onward and upward.
An apparent law of Nature seems to be setting its own regulations: "a country that is not fair to its rich, will soon be too broke to be fair to its poor." Draconian taxes on the rich (in Canada that's anyone earning US$40,000 a year!) move, taking wealth, expertise and jobs-creating ability with them.
Successful Canadians are taxed more than the Egyptian pharaohs taxed their slaves.
The United Nations started off with 48 countries in 1948. Current membership totals 187 (roughly three more a year over the past 50 years), with another 38, mostly tiny principalities still agitating to join. Places and people like Quebec, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Tibet, Tamil Tigers, Natives in the U.S. and Canada, half of Africa, several provinces in Indonesia, Iraq, Mexico and elsewhere.
Have you felt the breeze? Something is happening.
Three decades ago a few daring entrepreneurs or adventurers tried to set up a "Free country" on a reef called Minerva, in the South Pacific. The King of Tonga squelched them although the force used was little more than a yell. Recently, New-Utopia (a reef off the coast of Central America) vanished from my screen. Another one recently appeared on the Internet. It's located on a World War II anti-aircraft concrete platform 10 km (six miles) off the British coast. It's called: www.havenco.com They claim to be the world's smallest principality -- The Principality of Sealand -- and "will soon be offering the world's most secure managed co-location facility" for Internet traffic. "We will be providing the business structure in the world's first free-market location".
According to the latest edition of INTERNETWEEK, "HavenCo will be the closest place on earth to be in a completely free, unregulated and untaxed data market."
What's happening? Even the pharaohs knew that when oppressive taxes caused slaves to slow down and crop productivity to fall no matter what happened on the Nile. Have modern governments fallen into the same trap?
America was established as a free economy and that made it great. Now a young guy does everything an entrepreneurial successful American is supposed to do and the government says he is too successful. What if Bill Gates picks up his marbles and moves along with most of the 5,000 millionaires on staff On a trip to the new Valhalla? What if he decides not to sell his new software to the U.S. until after the rest of the world has it? What if this becomes a new virus (or religion) and the one percent of American taxpayers who pay one-third of all tax monies follow the new Pied Piper? What if the five percent who pay 50 percent of all taxes joins the march? See where this could lead? The same bureaucrats are also picking on World Com and Sprint. Has democracy run its 225-year course?
Perhaps someone somewhere will attempt the ultimate and try to make CyberSpace the only truly free soverign state? Stranger things have happened.
Remember the 9th Law:
In times of panic, chaos and rapid change, the bizarre rapidly becomes acceptable.
Things like the separation of economy and state.
Now you know how the Pope felt in The Dark Ages.
What do you think triggered the Renaissance?
