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[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

>His view of a complete government breakdown seems a bit off the mark, 
governments will do anything to maintain power.



The operant phrase here, says I, would be "anything they CAN do".   I heard 
in '99 that the govenment would not allow the dot com stocks to tank because 
of 
what it would do to the economy.  They tanked anyway. More recently we heard 
that the could not be a housing crash, the government would never allow it.  
It crashed (is crashing).  

I've thought a bit about this.  I read Victor Hansen's  "The Other Greeks" 
and I wondered at those far flung isolated farmsteads and how an ancient 
central 
(city state) government ever hoped to maintain any control over them.  
Likewise the far flung yeoman of any culture or centruy, to what extent can 
the 
government profitably strong arm the finges into submission?

In the proper circumstances making an example of one resistent farmsteader 
might gain some influence over the others, but in Kunstler's world, they had 
no 
idea what was going on in the next county over.  Muscling a family or farm 
there would gain you nothing five miles away and might cost you plenty.

Without gasoline and a maintained communications network, how much could the 
modern government do?  In the dim and distant, a local leader (or thug) 
allied 
himself with the general leader and delivered the goods and obedience to the 
central authority.  We've lost the knack for that, and so I wonder if 
government, regardless of what it wanted to do, would not almost crumble 
entirely in 
absence of motor fuel and electronics.   </HTML>