We really do see the world in fundamentally different ways. You define freedom in a narrowly material and functional way and think the concept's destroyed by perceiving it as having an additional "metaphysical" dimension. I see the material dimension of freedom as the most trivial and obvious view and consider the "metaphysical"--spiritual, psychological, and moral--aspects of freedom to be the most important.

'People are "forced" to work in order to live'...such melodrama. You must've missed it when America stopped being a hunter-gather society. We're no longer at the knife's edge of starvation, and for a century a lot of people have noticed and questioned whether "forced to work in order to live" might have become artifice instead of a law of nature. People like Robert Heinlein, for instance, who saw in the Social Credits system an evolutionary improvement to free-market capitalism.

Attempting to improve the system isn't tantamount to destroying it, Tom, that's just reactionary thinking. Everyone who contemplates improving free-market capitalism is intent on keeping its benefits while rounding off some of the rough edges, and on seeing some of the benefits of the staggering gains in productivity it's brought about. That's the irony that you miss: The productivity promoted by free-market capitalism undermines its assumption of a scarcity economy. To avoid making it a victim of its own success, it needs refinement to again closely match its environment.

Ehhh...you'll just scream "Commie bastard!". Let's move on...

Of course I know whose adminstration proposed the Clipper Chip. I was there and was one of the people outraged enough to actively fight it.

History is the whole point. Domestic surveillance has been used by authoritarians and despots since the dawn of time. It was tried in America in the 20th Century, by Nixon against his political enemies and by J Edgar Hoover in a long bipartisan career as domestic spymaster.

Historically, the discovery of such treachery by the government against its citizens has provoked universal outrage. When it was discovered that the FBI and CIA had engaged in illegal domestic surveillance, there was outrage and action--most notably the Church hearings and the FISA court. When the Clinton Administration tried it with the Clipper Chip, the outrage alone was sufficient to kill it.

But times have definitely changed for the worse. As a result of the Bush Regime's relentless campaign of fearmongering designed to scare people into giving up their civil liberties in exchange for an illusory promise of security, when they are caught in the act, it's merely controversial. That's a measure of just how far we've fallen from our principles, and a measure of how deeply authoritarians have undermined America.

There are no operational quantum computers

Really? Maybe it depends on the definition of "operational", but IBM announced a 5 q-bit QC back in 2000. Last year D-Wave Systems announced a commercial QC. As for the NSA, let me repeat why that's a safe bet: "A quantum computer can slice through encryption like a hot knife through butter." Isn't it more rational to assume that the NSA is doing its job than to blithely dismiss the very existence of quantum computers?

This is, of course, granting your premise that the people taking this kind of work will be poor and desperate--and somehow still happen to own computers.

I can tell that you thought that a clever remark. But between efforts to develop extremely low cost (<$100) computers for the developing world, and the general decline in low-end computer prices to near that level, there's nothing at all hard to believe about somebody outside the US possessing a computer. Owning a computer hasn't been a symbol of status or wealth in, what?, 20 years? Your view on this is, perhaps, a tad provincial.