Quote from: Impaler on November 14, 2013, 03:52:08 AM

You libertarians are just crazy, your whole focus on wrapping your self in secrecy and eliminating any accountability in society you create the very Dystopia you fear. To stretch a metaphor from TLOTR (a better work of fiction then anything Ann Rand ever wrote btw), your think passing out copies of the one ring will make the world a better place because the common man will somehow be 'equal' to elites. Equally unaccountable and equally likely to abuse that power I think (you know even Frodo succumbs to the temptation, because you know know power corrupts etc etc). If you want a world free of abuse of power then you can't fight fire with fire, you need universal accountability and transparency so abuse of power can be seen by everyone rather then fester in the shadows.

And seriously of all the realms of our lives were privacy might be justified, out financial and business transactions are the last ones that are deserving of privacy. I would really expect more libertarians to understand how markets work, they require information and the more the better. Information asymmetry between two parties makes a fair meeting of the minds impossible and thus leads to market inefficiency.

See David Brin (my favorite author btw) on the subject of privacy, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society And
http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/02.06.97/cover/brin1-9706.html

Privacy should exist everywhere but there should be a balance. A way to follow the money trail must exist to prevent institutional corruption. For this reason we cannot have secrecy in financial transactions. We can have privacy though. I don't think everyone needs to know what books everyone else is buying.

But I want to know if a politician or police officer is being bribed because democracy depends on it. A free society depends on transparency.