Turing Complete Government

So one of the common objections to the privatization of roads is that it means there will be a crapload of new toll roads. Like – all of them. And we all hate those. The problem is that toll roads make sense: the people who use the property are the ones who pay for it, in direct proportion. Gas taxes unfairly penalize drivers of uneconomical vehicles by charging them more per vehicle_lb-road-mile than drivers of (for example) electric motorcycles who use the same roads, but do not pay a dime for their upkeep. Toll roads permit users to be charged on a per axle basis which is substantially fairer from a use / maintenance perspective. The challenge in doing toll roads correctly is reducing the burden on the driver. But that’s a customer service problem, and those generally get solved in a free market, while governments (and other unnatural monopolies) provide notoriously bad customer service.
This leads into a series of thoughts I had regarding turing completeness and government.
There is the general idea of turing completeness between programming languages, which basically says that once a language has a certain level of complexity, it can be turned into any other language. Effectively, once a language is turing complete, phrases in other languages can be written in that first language. The languages become, at a basic level, equivalent. At a higher level, of course, it may be substantially harder to produce certain types of code in one language rather than another, due to idiosyncracies of design that the language builders created. (for example, the programming language brainfuck [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck] is equivalently powerful to C, but virtually impossible for a normal human to program in.
Here’s where the connection to government comes in:
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/24/2408.asp
The fact that certain things are more efficiently handled by a free market type solution means that as the available resources decrease, a free market solution WILL inevitably arise. The question is whether that solution will arise only over the complete destruction through economic force (black market economics) of the previous system or whether the existing system can adopt some idioms from the anarchistic language to solve the problem using free market techniques.
Lisp is a powerful language. It’s not easy to learn, but once one has a handle on it, it can do amazing things with an ease that blows most other languages out of the water. I’m not personally at that level yet, but I’m hoping to get there. Most people use C++ or PHP or whatever because it’s easy and accessible, even though it’s not the most powerful language available. Note that both languages are turing complete. One could write a lisp interpreter in C, or a C compiler in Lisp. They are theoretically capable of achieving the same ends, it’s just so much easier to do so in Lisp once one understands the intricacies.
Anarchism is a powerful organizational paradigm. It basically says that stable emergent behavior is optimal. Authoritarianism means inefficiency. The arguments for free market economies have essentially been won academically. There are no economists who would argue for a command economy over a free market from a theoretical perspective. And even from a practical perspective, we WON the cold war, in large part, due to the greater efficiency of our free-er market economy. The problem is that everyone out there is already using C++ and PHP. oops. I mean socialism. The tools of government are so readily available that few people stop to wonder if there is a better way that things could be handled until the existing system proves completely inadequate, and sometimes even that is not enough.
The government can provide services. A free market anarchist environment can provide services. They are both complete solutions. One of them just has much more powerful (though perhaps less obvious, from this side) idioms for resolving the complexities of the real world. A C programmer looking at Lisp will only see the ugliness inherent in the thousands of parenthesis, while a Lisp programmer looking at C sees the ugliness inherent in the code duplication and awkward whatever blah blah blah who cares what those crazy Lisp programmers say, they never write any good programs anyway.
I don’t think that Lisp will ever become the one true programming language any more that I believe that all governments will completely fade away into the franchulets and corporate protectorates that may arise under a free market, but I think we can all do well to attempt to adopt some of the tools of the more powerful systems and integrate them into our existing system.
From a programming perspective, I think that just means be smarter and try to learn as much as possible about how the really smart people do things in smart languages like Lisp.
From a sociological perspective, I think the folks in Dallas county, Texas have the right idea. Use the free market ideas and do your best to implement them well under a not-quite-free market system. It’ll be better than what you had before, and it probably will transition more nicely when the inevitable uprising and collapse comes with the food and water shortages and the zombie attacks.