Bored Zhwazi

Selective Implication

2008-06-09T17:42:00.000-07:00

I noticed something new today, arguing as I often do with people that I generally agree with about most things because we disagree on some small thing. And I'm struck with the realization that it seems to be remarkably easy for people who don't want to think about something to not think about it.

A useful term to describe the specific phenomenon I'm encountering is "selective implication". This is a phenomenon where a word has certain implications and connotations that are selectively applied. This can be a good thing if used correctly; sometimes for lack of a better word, we use one that implies something slightly different than what we actually mean, and it gets the point across. We leave it up to the plausibility and context to determine what was actually meant by that word in that case, and which connotations or implications might not be intended. For example, the phrase "Capitalism has brought great wealth to the world" is not using the word "capitalism"'s capacity to imply exploitation. The phrase "Gravediggers of Capitalism" is not using the word "capitalism"'s capacity to imply prosperity.

In my previous post on my other blog I described a mental filter I use to compare ideas to each other, and throw away useless ones. A variant of this filter is pretty common to libertarians (I think mine developed from the common libertarian version). The difference appears to be that libertarians very often use this filter on words, not on the ideas that the words stand for. Libertarians very often insist on a very strict definition of capitalism to mean "free market" (although I don't know why they use the word "capitalism" when "free market" does a better job with less fuss). In doing this, they strip "capitalism" down to what they believe to be it's core meaning, and throw away all it's other implications and connotations. As I've said, this can be a useful thing. Libertarians tend to be very precise thinkers. Not always necessarily accurate, but precise. In a "2.24885837+2.11358=3.92485263" sense. But this habit often leads to libertarians stripping away some very important implications and connotations that these ideas and words carry that screw with their ability to understand new ideas that they are not familiar with. It also gives a lot of room for people to assert things that aren't true as if they were obvious. Somebody who doesn't care a bit for the word "Capitalism" will rarely be seen defending inanely huge fortunes on the grounds that the free market naturally produces them. Somebody who cares for nothing but the word "Capitalism" will rarely fail to do so. And very often those who believe that inanely huge fortunes are not legitimate creations of the free market will be denounced as "socialists".

"Whatever you do, do not think of an elephant."

The above instruction is impossible to comply with once having heard it. As soon as you read or hear the word elephant, you're thinking of a big gray animal with a long trunk. If I call a rock "the elephant", I'm not trying to say it's a biological, living, breathing thing. It's obviously not. What I'm trying to do is put the implications of the word "elephant" in your head; I trust you to make the necessary connections between the rock I'm talking about and an elephant, or to discover what rock I'm talking about by associating the idea of a "rock" with the implications of the word "elephant". Maybe it's got a trunk-like feature, on the end of an elephant-head shaped bulge on one end, maybe it's just a big rock the size of an elephant, maybe it's a statue of an elephant. Whatever it is, you know damn well I'm not telling you that the rock has a large brain and grows ivory tusks, even though these are quite essential characteristics of elephants.

"I hate going to work."

I don't know about you, but what passes through my mind when I read the word "work" in this sentence is doing things you've done a hundred times before, leaving home every day, being on a schedule, earning a wage or salary, coming home late in the day, the color of dirt and wood, fighting rush hour traffic, dealing with annoying coworkers and customers, going to sleep tired and waking up tired the next morning because that's the schedule, and the fear of not being in control of things and the dependence upon your boss's happiness. These are the images that come to mind.

When I say "work should be abolished" I'm obviously not talking about the definition from physics. I'm not talking about all productive endeavor. I'm not talking about doing something you don't like. I'm using the word "work" because there's no other word that brings up enough and the same implications and connotations (and as few unwanted or extraneous implications and connotations) as I want you to think of when I choose a word to describe it.

When I say I am opposed to capitalism, I am not saying I oppose free markets. I'm saying I'm opposed to at least most of the things that the word "capitalism" implies, centralized wealth and wealth disparity, bosses and workers, consumerism, consumption, the GDP, corporations, pointless extravagance...that's what I'm opposed to. It is unfortunate that "capitalism" has come to imply "free markets" in addition to these things, as there's no reason for it to be so.

When I say I am opposed to government, I am not saying I'm opposed to order, agreement, or control. I'm saying I'm opposed to politics, opposed to making other people's decisions for them, opposed to lies and bullshit, opposed to monopoly, opposed to all the witless slogans and arrogance and raw, unsubstantial imagery that is brought to mind when I hear, see, or speak the word "government".

A lot of the time all it takes to understand somebody is to try to understand them. Not to hear them, not to listen to them, but to actually recognize that there is an idea, probably at least somewhat sensible, that they are trying to communicate to you, and to try, make a conscious effort, to understand what they are talking about. Robots would object to my calling a rock an elephant on the grounds that rocks and elephants are defined in a mutually exclusive manner. People respond by thinking about what rock or what elephant I might be talking about and how the one relates to the other. Don't be a damn robot. Be a person.

Labor Theory of Value

2008-01-27T15:56:00.000-08:00

I got some relatively quick responses to that last post, both of which ignored what I originally was trying to write about to talk about the LTV, which is a mere afterthought I added to the post on an immediate insight. So here's a bit about the LTV.

First of all, I think the LTV is valid. This does not mean that I think everyone's labor is worth exactly $10 per hour, or that mudpies sell for $10 if they take 1 hour to make, or any of that stuff. I associate the LTV with Adam Smith and David Ricardo, not Karl Marx. And I'm not going to defend Marx's version and I'll dismiss any objections based on Marx's version as a strawman.

Adam Smith:

"The real price of every thing, what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people."

Notice he says "what every thing really costs", not "the price that everything sells for". All costs can be expressed as labor costs.

Ricardo:

"The value of a commodity, or the quantity of any other commodity for which it will exchange, depends on the relative quantity of labour which is necessary for its production, and not as the greater or less compensation which is paid for that labour."

What's being said here is basically "cost and price are different; costs are always ultimately labor costs". That ought to put Ricardo's statement that value (stated in terms of costs or disutilities) derives only from labor into the correct perspective. Prices tend toward reflecting costs because where price exceeds cost, production ceases until that condition changes. Thus, the LTV does not say that the price that something sells for is always directly and solely coming from the labor put into it, only that it's costs are.

What is not being said here is that "people only want something as badly as the labor that went into it", or that "value is tied directly to the object and has nothing to do with evaluation by individuals" or that "two people can't value the same thing differently". It is not irreconcilable with STV. As I said in my last post, they are complementary if you understand them (or at least, if you don't start off with the belief that they are incompatible and then look for validation of that hypothesis). The LTV doesn't have to "provide a means for discovering when labor should not be done at all", or "comparing the value of alternative uses for labor." As I said, it is complementary, not exclusive, to a subjective understanding of value. I don't know how I can say "they're compatible" and get an objection like "LTV can't account for X that the STV can". Apply the immortal ethic of ARFCOM: "Get Both."

And I'm going to recommend this to anyone wanting better understanding. Studies in Mutualist Political Economy by Kevin Carson.

False Dichotomies Make Bitterest Enemies

2008-01-26T18:14:00.001-08:00

In the late 1800s there was one outstanding disagreement among individualist anarchists. They divided essentially into two camps; the Natural Law anarchists, including Lysander Spooner, and the Egoists, including Benjamin Tucker.

Tucker was the first to translate Max Stirner's "The Ego and His Own" into english. This is where Tucker got his rationale for individualist anarchism from. Stirner's Egoism was something that would offend a lot of libertarians these days. His position can be summed up accurately as "might makes right". In Stiner's words, "I do not step shyly back from your property, but look upon it always as my property, in which I respect nothing. Pray do the like with what you call my property!"

Lysander Spooner took a very different view. Spooner believed in a natural law, discoverable by inquiry. This was his rationale for individualist anarchism. Spooner rejected "might makes right" outright, as most libertarians would today.

Eventually the disagreement caused a split movement.

These two ideas were, supposedly, two alternatives to the same thing; two rationales for the same idea. If you weren't one of them, you were the other (or you were not an individualist anarchist). You couldn't be both. Yet I find that, right now, I'm both.

When Max Stirner proposed his "might makes right" ethic, he was stating simple facts about the way ownership practically works. The state does not control all of the property it does because they are better traders than anyone else. Might makes right. The state has "right" to it's property insofar as it is willing to kill people that disagree about what it's property is.

As I see it, egoism describes property, while the natural law is both predictive and prescriptive, but not descriptive. Essentially, in a Tucker/Stirnerite egoist world, Spoonerian natural law is what can be expected as the shape of an emergent, self-organizing law as it appears in anarchy. Natural law and egoism are doing different, but extremely closely related things. The forces which shape this law are universal everywhere.

It's analogous to Stirner saying "Rocks fall if you drop them" and Spooner observes "the rock fell at an accelerating rate of about 10 meters per second per second" and then wrote an equation that should describe the movement of the rock, and all rocks everywhere, and called it a law of physics. They are perfectly complementary ideas! How did this get such results out of people?

These days, we've got this new point of separation. It's an extremely fundamental thing being argued about. It's an extremely hotly argued about thing. Both sides are incessantly condescending to the other, just like in the days of Tucker and Spooner. But at least Tucker and Spooner agreed on this point.

The new one is the Labor Theory of Value vs Subjective Theory of Value.

See, the Subjective Theory states a truth on par with Stirner's egoism. The fundamental nature of value is such that individuals independently value things, and these values are not tied directly to the object. STV describes the nature of value. The Labor Theory provides principles for prediction and prescription of the values things would or should have in a more universal sense. In prediction, LTV states that prices will tend toward the costs of labor. In prescription, it advocates that the worker get the full value in exchange for their labor. Again, perfectly complementary ideas. Yet there's almost a war going on between labor value theorists and subjective value theorists.

I don't get it myself. Why can't people just take the good, useful parts of two ideas and see if they can't be reconciled?

Political Classes

2008-01-25T18:36:00.000-08:00

I separate society into two classes: The political upper class, and the political lower class. These are, respectively, those who benefit from the state, and those who are harmed by it. This is a nice, simple dichotomy to work with. But it's sorta like the distinctions of the red, pink, white, gray, and black markets. There's different grades that should be distinguished for clarity, rather than simply lumped into "economy" and "counter-economy". So here's a more precise version of my political class theory, divided into three classes:

1. The fuelers
2. The foolers
3. The rulers

The Fuelers are the people that keep the state going, i.e. the host organism. Taxpayers (as opposed to tax-consumers), soldiers, good obedient nationalistic citizens, et cetera.

The Foolers are the apparent political class. That is, the people that get elected, appointed, et cetera. They are the formal state. The congress, the president, the judges, the directors, everything right down to the cops. They have transient power. They are mere interchangable elements of a grander parasite.

The Rulers are the true political upper class. They are the people who have, not transient, but perpetual power. Not through getting elected, but through being able to control those who are, no matter who they are.

Libertarians recognize the dichotomy I gave at the beginning of this post, they see and understand a political upper and lower class, and, seeing themselves in the lower, try to move into and displace the upper. But most libertarians have a shallow view of the situation. Their attention is directed away from the Rulers, toward the Foolers (which is the whole point in having Foolers, to fool people, like most libertarians, and everyone else).

And this is one more area where I find agorism takes a generally-good anarchocapitalist idea and hones it. Agorism advocates displacing the true political upper class. The agorist technique is to profit from statism without partaking in it's violence, by entering the black market (which exists specifically to correct the economic stupidity caused by the state, not to maintain it as does the pink market). The agorist technique is to bribe the police to be just, not to change the law they are sworn to uphold to be just. Rothschild may "care not who makes [the nation's] laws", but his antithesis, the agorist, cares not who enforces them, because in either case, one may change the individuals in apparent power, but cannot change the individuals in true power.

I seriously can't even count how many new insights agorism has brought with it into my head. It's certainly not a logical proof of it's validity, but it's a MUCH more useful idea for me than anarchocapitalism was.

On Persuasion

2008-01-22T17:06:00.000-08:00

This blog post comes from a forum post I made. The OP asks for help with his liberal (read: state socialist) friends. I responded in vast overkill because somebody got me going on something I had lots to say about. The core advice is not specific to liberals at all. It is advice for persuasion, period.

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Don't be on the defense. Don't put them on the defense. You are not enemies, you are friends. Assuming you are both on a quest for truth, you are partners in the search for that truth. You help each other figure out what is true and what isn't.

Some people are not looking for truth. Some people are looking to preserve their identity as a liberal. If they value being a liberal and the relationships they would lose if they stopped being a liberal more than they value truth, then they're hopeless in that condition. You have to figure out a way to make truth their first priority. Do not let them lie about how truth is their first priority (the contradiction is obvious, and most strongly indicated in whether their decisions and actions contradict their words). Trap them with it if you have to. Don't be hostile or threatening to their worldview, but point out their hypocrisy as humor that they can laugh at (so they won't be angry at you). If you can align them with truth, and align yourself with truth, then you don't have an enemy, just a friend that doesn't know it yet. Persuasion isn't just about giving people truth, it's about getting them to accept the truth, which requires getting them to want the truth. Do not just appeal to facts, appeal to values.

From this sentence: "its okay to use the government gun when its for the good of the people", it is apparent that they value "the good of the people". If they are being honest in this (i.e. no ulterior motive), then showing them that universal healthcare is detrimental to "the good of the people" will be an effective tactic. But they probably aren't, they probably heard that rationalization for it and regurgitate it like a good liberal, where their true values lie: being a good liberal = being a good person, by the reasoning of many liberals.

It's actually a pretty common mistake for newer libertarians to make to discover how universally true the moral argument is, and then use the moral argument against people who don't share your moral premises. They value morality, in all likelihood. They do not value your moral laws, they value theirs. Arguing from it's immorality by the laws you propose will just make them disagree with your moral laws insofar as they do not already share them. The true basis for the morality of decisions is the results of the decisions. "Good" is what is good for people. This should be obvious because of all the pseudo cost-benefit analysis involved. If you asked them whether or not the costs of universal healthcare, without the benefits, were good or bad, they'd be an idiot to say that nonzero costs with zero benefits is good. The problem is that they believe that the good outweighs the bad. Fundamentally this idea is refuted by the fact that you will never get any more benefit from the government than it costs in the first place. At best it's hypothetically equal, but there's always overhead and bureaucracy and bullshit like spending social security dry, so outputs never exceed inputs, preventing it from being good, the costs always exceed the benefits. Bureaucrats and statists ALWAYS emphasize and overstate the benefits and ALWAYS downplay or underestimate the costs, using highly advanced deception tools developed by intellectuals recieving state subsidies or grants.

In cases where there's a negative externality, like aggression, the good of the aggressing individual is threatened by the retaliation of the victim who suffered loss. That's a good rule of thumb to use a lot of the time, if somebody wants to retaliate against you because of what you did to them, you probably costed them something. In the case of the state, there is no retaliation of the victim against the state, almost ever, so it can appear intuitively moral if it is believed that the act of aggression served the good of someone else. The moral costs appear to be virtually zero, and the benefits appear to be nonzero, so obviously universal healthcare should be good! The hard part is getting them to realize the unseen costs.

The issue with identity-value like wanting to be a good liberal is that if you bring up the costs, they subconsiously see a threat to their identity, and they'll say something according to their identity that makes them feel like a good liberal and that superficially appears to refute what you said, like "yeah, you should go to jail for not paying taxes". But that obviously just moves the problem back a little bit, because then you've got to repeat the process for the costs of paying taxes without the benefits, to get them to admit that there certainly ARE costs, because once they've acknowledged the costs they are forced to re-evaluate the costs and benefits. If they decide the costs of taxation outweigh the benefits, good going! If they don't, they're stupid, and they'll probably bring up more "i'm a good liberal" rhetoric or "you're a bad libertarian" rhetoric (they think they are good not only because they are what they are, but because they are not what they are not, and because their enemies are who their enemies are), and usually I'd get something absolutely irrelevant like "but who will build the roads?" or "best country in the world you should be grateful" or similar stupid shit, and if you can't get them back on topic after they try to do that, they're suffering from severe cognitive dissonance and you need to let them ferment and cool off because they'll probably be angry because you made them scared because you threatened their identity as a good liberal but they won't admit that to themselves.

This is why I prefer to either argue from the first principles and original facts, or to convince them that their first priority should be truth, depending on the the circumstances. If you don't have them wanting truth they won't care about facts and principles so you should really go for that first. I can't overstress it enough. People really do let their desired truth overrule the real truth. This is the number one enemy of reason and it's pretty much my definition of faith.

It Doesn't Just Happen

2008-01-19T18:22:00.000-08:00

Agorism predicts that, as the agora grows, DROs and PAs will come about and eventually suppress the state. Counter-economics, until these form, is a means of inordinately profiting and a result of smashing the state in your head, but it itself doesn't further the revolution except to grow the counter-economy a tiny bit so that DROs and PAs will form. I think agorists are working it a bit backwards here. DROs and PAs haven't formed and overthrown the state in Burma (although it might be because the black market isn't an "agora", isn't conscious of agorism). A 100% counter-economic market is agorism, but a 50% counter-economic market is still statism, and a 0% is still statism. What would 99% be? 90%? 80%?

Instead of trying to grow the agora over generations or so, why not work on adapting a DRO and PA to operate in much lower-density agoras? If a way of providing the service in a 100% counter-economic market is inevitable, and 99% would be extremely easy, at some point it becomes moderately hard, unless you adapt your model specifically to work in an extremely-low density agora. There's no law of physics that says that at some certain point it becomes impossible to do. It'd be a hell of a task, but the payoff!

FSK discusses tax resister insurance. This is the sort of thing agorists should be really focused on in terms of counter-economic behavior. Growing the counter-economy is certainly conductive to the agorist goals and greatly preferred over the white market, but a "deep black market" business, not just acting in violation of the state's decrees, but in direct contravention to it, and making a profit doing it, that's the kind of thing that has massive potential to liberate society very quickly. Let's not wait around saying "Well we can't really do anything but stay off the books and out of jail until the agora develops and grows to [undefined point of precipitation of the agora]", let's get our asses to work figuring out how we can form DROs and PAs now, not worry about whether we can or not. Worst case scenario, if we can't make it work here and now, the techniques developed will still help it come into being sooner than it would otherwise. The failures would be learned from, the successes would be remembered.

What do we need, exactly, to get from here to there? Let's build it. We already know it'll happen, in the fullness of time. But it doesn't just happen. People make it happen. People like us.

"Man will not fly for fifty years." -Wilbur Wright, 1901

Geoism, Land, and Space

2007-12-05T16:39:00.000-08:00

Something I do when arguing with people that have new ideas is consider under what conditions what they're saying might be true. I'll readily admit that open source software is about as communistic as you can get. But it works flawlessly in the case of open source software, because there isn't any scarcity with information. In a world without scarcity, communism would work perfectly. It works under those conditions. I'm still not a communist.

I'm not a geoist either. However, their reasoning is strong enough to warrant the kind of thinking I mentioned, "Under what conditions would they be right?" Obviously, from my ancapish leaning perspective, they'd be right if land ownership was illegitimate. But under what conditions would land ownership be illegitimate, aside from theft? Then I looked at what we have today.

Land as property is unique. Not because "they're not making it anymore", they are, they're just not making much. It's unique because, in the case of all other property, our title to that property moves with that property. If we treated land the same way we treat any other type of property, property titles to land could be carted around by dumptruck. That's just not how land ownership (presently) works.

What we actually do isn't "owning land". It's "owning space". You don't own the dirt on "your land" except by the fact that it's on your plot, in your space. Likewise, "trespassing" is a charge for being in somebody else's space, even if that trespass does no damage whatsoever to the person trespassed against.

But how can space become property? With all physical property of matter and energy, it becomes property through labor. Space cannot be labored on. Without this, space cannot be owned. If space can't be owned, what is title to space?

It is analogous to intellectual property. It is a claim to own that which is inherently unownable. It's a way to rationalize the use of force against others who've done no damage to you or your legitimate property.

This only takes me as far as to grant geoists that there's something illegitimate about land monopoly. It takes something else to get me to accept the geoist economic rent collection thing, something which so far, I haven't found. But, at least, I'll accept that there is some kind of injustice there, though perhaps not through the specific way they think of it.

I recognize the problems that I've seen geoists bring up that "If all the land on the planet is owned, where am I supposed to live?" But I don't see how the collection of economic rent solves this problem. It preserves the land titles, it just compensates everyone else for the inconvenience of that title, without giving actual land to the non-landowners. At best that'll make it easier to pay rent to to renters, but it won't solve the original problem.

Enter restitutive justice (more and more appearing to me as the means to solve most intra-left-libertarian conflict). If it were recognized by a justice system (I'll assume it's anarchic, as that pushes the limits of unideal circumstances) that ownership of space was not legitimate, but that it was nonetheless claimed and enforced, a debt would be owed to vagrants who were aggressed against under this guise. The debt would cancel between the landowner and vagrant if the vagrant did actual damage to the landowner's property, but if not, the landowner would lose money every time he had to enforce his illegitimate claim. A persistent vagrant would be given, after some time, enough money to likely buy off a part of the landowner's property, and thus come to own it legitimately.

But why go through that hassle? A more streamlined way of doing it would be to cut the justice system out of the way as much as possible, leaving, at most, the possible threat of it's use, and to allow the vagrant to claim some already owned land. A landowner would tend to allow that if they know the courts will rule that way. Naturally this would be technical theft, especially if the land had been improved by labor, and so would create a debt from the vagrant owing to the improver (or whoever had justly aquired the title from that improver), for the amount of the improvements that had been taken over. For instance, if a 10 acre lot had been uniformly invested with $10,000 in improvements (fertilizers, plowing, planting, paving, etc), and a vagrant were to move onto 1 acre and make it his own through his own labor, he would, owe the prior owner $1000 for the pre-existing improvements to the land. Once that debt was paid, it would become the former vagrant's land free and clear.

This is a more self-regulating system. Vagrants won't want to incur more debts than they need, so they won't take more land than they could use, nor would they rationally choose land which had already been improved unless they intended to make use of those improvements, and would probably choose unimproved land to improve on their own to keep in good standing with their neighbors. Nobody would be denied access to land on which to live an independent life to the extent possible. Nobody would be forced into renting. Everybody would have a place where they can do whatever they want to their property without worrying about the conditions imposed by renters.

The only scenario which has come to my mind for which a solution isn't readily apparent to me would be dumping on unowned land. For example, what'd be there to stop people from dumping toxic waste on unclaimed land? Perhaps those who chose to claim an abandoned dump site may be able to find who did it and demand a cleanup?

On a side note, this is analogous to my beliefs on children's rights as well. It may be argued that young kids might not have rights because they have no responsibility, but it would certainly still be a crime for a parent to, for example, have the child's arm amputated for no reason, and the child would have cause of action against the parent authorizing that when the child became mature enough to bring suit. (This is the same line of reasoning that refutes the "social contract" line of the anti-libertarian FAQ.)

I still haven't heard much good critique of this idea, nor seen this idea anywhere else, so I'd love to hear anything you have to say about it. I encourage comments, or contacting me in the other ways listed on the right side of the screen if the discussion should become prolonged.

Anarchist Without Objectives

2007-11-30T00:00:00.000-08:00

This blog was made specifically for my philosophizing, but I have more to say than philosophizing. So I made another blog where I'll post the more useless stuff, personal updates, rants, jokes, really awesome youtube videos (been on 56k for a month, so I'm behind on that), et cetera. A blog for what most blogs are used for.

The new blog is Anarchist Without Objectives. Yeah, I like using puns in my names.

I'm by no means abandoning this blog, this other one is a complement, not a replacement. At least that's the plan right now.

Positive Feedback, Rivalrous Rates

2007-11-22T20:55:00.000-08:00

I tried to make this as short as possible. I'm sure I've gone through a more thorough explanation somewhere else, but this is a short entry because it's really a pretty simple concept that doesn't need elaborate hypothetical situations and such.

Nathyn (a state socialist who trolls the Free Talk Live forums) asks:

"Authoritarianism can cause poverty and inequality (I.E., North Korea and Dalits in India). But what proof do you have that inequality is caused primarily by governments?" [Emphasis mine]

It's just my personal belief that government is the primary cause of inequality. I haven't gone through an exhaustive list of potential causes of inequality trying to estimate the contributions of each factor toward existing inequality, but as I'll show, it seems to be a rational conclusion based on how the state works.

Power has the property of being usable to get more power. And in politics, all power comes at somebody else's expense, for all power one gains in politics, somebody else must lose some power. Anybody who gets some perpetual political power (not the temporary power of elected officials or those who appear to be in charge, but those who can influence said elected officials essentially irrelevant of who the actual individuals are, including after a political revolution, i.e. the rich), will be able to use that power to increase their own political power. For example, a $50,000 bribe that leads to a new regulation that puts enough of the competition out of business that the centralizing effects bring in another $100,000 in capital.

The longer this system is allowed to run, the more centralized the wealth becomes. The richest don't get much power from the poorer anymore, so they go after the next-richest. Whoever wins, they've got more power (i.e. money) for later use against whoever is next-richest. It's easy to "win" power at the expense of those less powerful, but difficult to win at the expense of those more powerful. Those in the middle will find that those below them have little power left to take, and those above them are taking what they themselves have, and so find themselves gradually weakened. At the top, power can be had at almost anybody's expense. So as the time this system has been in place increases, the centralization becomes extremely pronounced.

The system of statism has been running from the beginning of recorded history. My reason for believing that most of the present inequality is a result of politics is that one can predict from this that the inequality caused by politics will be enormous. One also sees that the present inequality is enormous. Lacking knowledge of any other potential causes of such enormous inequality, I'm personally left with the conclusion that most of it is caused by politics.

Politics a positive feedback system with rivalrous feedback rate and inputs. The rivalrous feedback rate alone is sufficient to cause inequality, and rivalrous input is the reason why the poor are so poor. Those in power take both the best feedback rates and the best inputs. Metaphorically, they command the highest interest rates and give out the biggest loans, thus they get the most income and will eventually get the most money.

Strong Libertarianism

2007-11-19T10:37:00.000-08:00

Most people are familiar with strong atheism (there's no such thing as god) and weak atheism (I don't believe in any god). The analogous positions are deep anarchism (there is no state) and an anarchistic or radical minarchism (I don't believe that any state is legitimate). As there are already good labels for these positions, it's not my intent to duplicate them with this new word. So when I say "strong libertarian" I don't mean "the state does not exist".

I see two kinds of libertarians on the radical end where I reside. The first kind of libertarian is the more common on the Free Talk Live forums I post at, and Ian Bernard (anarchist cohost of Free Talk Live) is a good example. They follow libertarianism to the letter in politics, then pretty much let it go. They'd defend Microsoft from any claims of "monopoly" or "predatory business practices" without much independent consideration. They'll advocate ostracism as a good way to punish people. They'll ban people who use the term "wage slavery" because they find it offensive. In short, "weak" libertarianism is strictly political libertarianism, not a social libertarianism.

The second is the kind I am. Libertarianism is more than just politics to us "strong libertarians". The principles of libertarianism have applications outside the sphere of "how much government should we have?" It's about more than just leaving other people alone. It's about empowering people with freedom. It's about empowering yourself with freedom. And not just freedom from government either. Freedom from superstition, freedom from ostracism, freedom from tradition, freedom from being guilted into things, freedom from the "tyranny of genes", freedom from bad ideas in general, freedom from whatever holds you back. Freedom from gender, racial, regional, and age-related stereotyping, among other types. Freedom from restricted information. Freedom from deliberate incompatibility. Freedom from DROs that tell you "You can't buy and sell from this person, they're bad!" Freedom from the urge to control others. Freedom from things that interfere with your power to achieve values and virtues.

"Strong libertarianism" pursues empowerment through freedom in every sense possible. Not just the ones that are politically or socially acceptable. Not even just the ones that you think you want to accept. Every sense that you can recognize it, it's about empowerment through freedom in that way.

Strong libertarianism is about making yourself, and making yourself better. It's about empowering thought and action. It's about brutal honesty and openness. It's about eating with your elbows on the table because it is convenient to do so. It's about seeing yourself as the inherently free and powerful being you are.

It's not about whether you're an anarchist or a moderate (not directly, but I imagine it correlates positively with radical libertarianism). Hans-Hermann Hoppe would qualify as an anarchist (barely) but he's nowhere near being a strong libertarian. Many of Hoppe's ideas are exactly the opposite of strong libertarianism, his ideas about immigration being a prime example. Hoppe is a "weak libertarian".

I think the libertarian movement needs more awareness of this distinction.

Restitution and Antipropertarians

2007-10-22T16:55:00.000-07:00

Some ideals of justice call for the punishment of the offender. I call this "retributive justice". Some call for the repayment of the victim. I call this "restitutive justice". Note the two different, but similar words. I support restitutive justice, just repaying the victim.

Anarchists usually fall into one of two categories, pro-property, or anti-property. Pro-property usually means "coming from a Libertarian angle", anti-property usually means "coming from a socialist angle". I'm gonna call them "propertarian" (from the word "property") and "antipropertarian".

Antipropertarians usually substitute possession-and-use for what the propertarian calls "property". They're similar concepts, but not the same. But I think I've found that, in the context of restitutive justice, they're actually compatible.

To illustrate this, let's suppose we have a propertarian farmer and an antipropertarian farmer. The propertarian farmer sees the others' land and thinks "that's his property", whereas the antipropertarian farmer looks at the other's land and thinks "he is using it and it is in his possession". The antipropertarian notices that the propertarian has left a field fallow for 10 years. They're not using it, and probably won't be using it anytime soon. In the eyes of the antipropertarian, the other farmer is no longer using it, making it free for him to put to use himself. Assuming they can't or don't agree on how to use the land, the antipropertarian may do what he sees as his right - he starts cultivating the empty field and grows and harvests a crop. The propertarian farmer may be none to happy about this. What does he do?

According to Rothbardian and Lockean property theory, the antipropertarian did the work, which created the property right in the crop. And, according to the principles of restitutive justice, there has been no damage done to the land itself that would allow for cause of action against the tresspasser. The propertarian should have the right to force the antipropertarian to repair all damage done, but what damage is there for the antipropertarian to fix? There was no cost to the propertarian at all. If the propertarian claimed the crop which the other farmer harvested, he would be stealing.

Ultimately, there is no action that can be rightly taken against the antipropertarian.

This doesn't just apply in this one case. A propertarian not living in a house they own may find it has been moved into by an antipropertarian. Hold the antipropertarian responsible for any damage done to the property, but cause of action does not extend beyond that, no cause of action exists for the "crime" of living in a house so long as it has been maintained. An irresponsible squatter would certainly be held liable for any damage done to the property, a responsible squatter would not have done any damage to be held liable for.

In every case I've been able to think of where a propertarian and an antipropertarian disagree about whether a crime has been committed, the crime is of such a nature that no restitution can rightly be demanded, rendering it effectively no crime at all for all practical purposes.

This does of course depend on restitutive justice. A system of retributive justice can't guarantee the same level of interoperability between the two that restitutive justice does. I see this as just more reinforcement for my position of strictly restitutive justice, but take whatever conclusions you want from it.

Not-So-Infinite Regress

2007-10-04T23:52:00.000-07:00

To the best of my knowledge, this type of argument has been used successfully to fight off the IRS, and by a friend of mine who is still in highschool that successfully used it against his teacher. Sorry I haven't tested it that much, but making practical use of it will depend on your creativity, understanding, and intelligence.

The time you use it is when a bureaucrat of some kind begins demanding that you do something. I would hesitate to use this on cops because they'll think you're talking back and being confrontational and they'll threaten you with charges of some sort, but any other kind of bureaucrat should be fine.

After they make their demand, ask them if they think they have the right to make such a demand. They'll probably respond that, yes, they do have that right. So then ask them where they got this right, is it a right that they inherently have? For instance, if you met the bureaucrat off the job, would they still have the authority to make that kind of demand? They'll probably answer to the effect that they don't. So then, if it's not a natural right of theirs, it must be a right somebody else originally had, and simply delegated to the bureaucrat you are speaking with. They'll probably answer affirmatively. So ask them who it was, and make a suggestion. Their boss? Of course it is, who else would it be? And does their boss have the right to make that demand off-duty, is it the boss's natural right? Well, no...

At this point they'll begin to see where you're going with this, and they'll probably not want to keep going down that road unless they're an especially arrogant bureaucrat. If they don't try to cut their losses and get out of a humiliating demolition (assuming you have a thorough understanding of how to apply the principle), then proceed to apply the same reasoning of "is it their natural right? No? How about their boss? Is it their natural right? No? How about their boss..." until they give up or you arrive at Congress, the Constitution, or the Voters.

If at any time they call the argument inane or frivolous, remind them that if it turns out that nobody who authorized this ever had the natural right to make this demand, then it's impossible for the bureaucrat to have the right to make the demand.

If they ever get the idea in their head that they don't need to have been delegated the right, accuse them of pulling rights out of thin air, and after all, if the bureaucrat has the right to invent rights out of thin air, so do you! Including a right to not comply with their demands. If they try to say that you actually don't have that right, ask them where they got the right from. If people don't have the right to invent rights from birth, then somebody else had to give it to them...you know where that's going. You could also demand that they prove it (don't worry, they can't), but if they're not likely to go very far down this new tangent that looks suspiciously like the main avenue.

If dealing with the IRS, you'll probably end up with the Secretary of the Treasury, and from there, go to Congress. From Congress there's only a couple places to go.

First, they can go to the Constitution. Dissuade this if possible, because it's difficult for people to accept that the Constitution isn't valid. Try to lead them toward thinking the rights had to come from the voters if possible. In case they do try this, (and if they're persistent enough to get here and the "voters" route fails, there's a good chance they will,) familiarize yourself with Spooner's arguments in "No Treason: The Constitution of No Authority". If you don't think they'll get it, just point out that a piece of paper doesn't have the right to make demands either, and the absurdity of even supposing it possible. The people that wrote the Constitution didn't have the right to make this demand of you either.

Second, they might say "well the Congressmen got that right from the voters." To this, respond that they are now supposing that, firstly, one's neighbors had the right to make this demand, and secondly, that the act of voting gives the Congressman thus voted for any or all of the rights of the voter. The first is self-evidently absurd. Even the state will help you chase down and imprison a neighbor that robs you. The second is also wrong, because the nature of voting is not a contract to confer rights to the congressman, and because even if it was, it would be impossible to tell whether or not the person even voted for that congressman, or for that matter, even voted!

There is only one person who naturally has the right to make demands of you, and that's you. Unless you knowingly and voluntarily (no force or fraud used) signed a contract giving them the right (this is THEIR burden of proof, not yours), they never had it, and can't get it. And if the person is indeed acting under your what is ultimately your authority, then simply tell them that you revoke your delegation of authority to them, and terminate any contract you had with them, on the basis of fraud.

If the discussion even gets this far, and the bureaucrat has not yet given up, they will be faced with the realization that they don't actually have the right to make the demand that they have made.

The exact words used will probably need to be changed according to context and any stupid answers they may give. Expect this argument to work on the more petty bureaucrats, those with other things they need to do. As presented here it probably won't fly in court, although Marc Stevens applies this basic principle more specifically to court appearances, so check out his Adventures In Legal Land site and book. He's got an audio version of "No Treason" on his site too.

This may come in useful as well...

"Whatever the form in which the Government functions, anyone entering into an arrangement with the Government takes the risk of having accurately ascertained that he who purports to act for the Government stays within the bounds of his authority... and this is so even though as here, the agent himself may have been unaware of the limitations upon his authority." Federal Crop Ins. Corp. v. Merrill, 332 U.S. 380 at 384 (1947).

Always question authority.

On Voting

2007-10-04T16:32:00.000-07:00

The morality of voting is a significant point of disagreement among anarchists, so it deserves some attention.

I don't vote, and don't plan on voting. I don't see it as a remotely effective means of getting anything. You can't vote the state out of existence. No election will change the state's innate tendency to grow. The most you'll get out of voting is temporary relief, with an overall extension in the life cycle of the state. That's why I don't vote. It's got nothing to do with whether voting is ethical, and everything to do with whether voting is effectual. It's not, it's a waste of time and energy.

But I think I have a relatively unique understanding of natural law and justice. At least, I haven't heard my views from very many other people, including anarchists, irrelevant of adjectives. Whenever I have discussed systems of market justice and natural law with other anarchists, they have said something extremely different. So I'm gonna try to analyze voting from my perspective on justice, because I don't know of it being analyzed in my framework anywhere else, and people are still going nuts over Ron Paul.

A lot of the arguments I've seen have to do with whether or not one is "free" to choose whether or not to vote in a condition of state coercion, but with voting being voluntary. In other words, who has ultimate responsibility for your having voted, you, or whoever created the conditions that drove you to vote? Because if it is the voter who is the responsible party, then a case can be made that doing so is wrong. If the state is the responsible party, then your actions taken under it's duress are not something you may rightfully be held accountable for.

My approach to the problem is a little different.

In my view, all illegitimate interaction between people creates a cause of action. A cause of action begins when damage is done by a responsible party. If I tresspass and run across your property to get to the other side, you really won't have any cause of action against me because I did no damage (unless I've done it many times and worn down your grass, but that's different). If you went to demand restitution, you'd be able to demand almost nothing of me (and keep in mind that if you demand restitution for damage I never did, I will have cause of action against you for enslavement). I would be the responsible party, but you've got no substantial cause of action because I've done no substantial damage to you or your property, nor threatened you in any way.

If we assume that the voter is not the responsible party, then obviously voting cannot be wrong. If we assume that the voter is the responsible party, then we have merely opened up the possibility that voting is wrong. You'd still need to prove an actual wrong that the voter could be held responsible for.

The damages caused by voting have other responsible parties than the actual voters. The damage occurs when bureaucrats enforce policy. The bureaucrats do not take action in the name of the voters and under their directive, with the voters to be held responsible for all actions of the government. "The state" is the responsible party. The state practically acts as an insulator of responsibility, not a conductor, not a conduit, not something through which responsibility flows on to some other entity. The state is the endpoint of responsibility. The responsibility for the actions of the government are not passed on to the voters. In the "United States", as Lysander Spooner pointed out, there's no way the voters can be held responsible for the acts of the government because a secret ballot is used.

The voters have the power to choose the politician, but responsibility can't flow back onto the voters because of the secret ballot. The politician has the power to choose policy, but then there's another one-way gate, because the politician chooses policy, but it is not the politician in whose name the policy is enforced. Policy is enforced in the name of the state. Neither the politicians nor voters may be held responsible for any damage done by the enforcement action, and the bureaucrats themselves merely act as agents, all responsibility for the actions of bureaucrats falls onto the state unless the bureaucrat acts out of it's capacity as a bureaucrat.

Cause of action may be against the bureaucrats, or against the state, but not the politician, and not the voters. The disconnections involved prevent the voter from being responsible for the damages at two points.

And then, even if you managed to somehow break through that and determine that the voter is the ultimately responsible party, you'd still have to prove how much damage his having voted caused. What would the difference have been had this one voter not voted? In almost every case, it would have made no difference. It is illegitimate to try them as a class of voters to try to avoid this, because then people would be held responsible for the actions of others.

So, there's some good arguments against voting. It's counterproductive. It discourages independent action. It encourages thinking in terms of statist nonsense. But the immorality of voting is, in my view, not a good argument against voting.

Think Inside The Other Guy's Box

2007-10-04T01:55:00.000-07:00

In circles of armed conflict, there's talk of what's called the OODA loop. It stands for "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act". It's called a loop because it repeats itself. OODAOODAOODAOODA et cetera. The key to victory often lies in breaking your opponent's OODA loop by blinding, disorienting, confusing, or restraining your opponent. Another tactic is to "get inside" your opponent's OODA loop. Don't just run your own little OODA process, try to imagine, in your own head, what your opponent observes, how they will orient, what they'll decide, and how they'll act. This is less important in short skirmishes such as a sudden mugging or an ambush, where breaking the opponent's loop is easier. However, in conflicts of any length, where tactics of any sort are required, it becomes an invaluable and often deciding factor.

How people act depends on what they want. But something to keep in mind is that at the same time, how people think also depends on what they want. From a debate, it's easy to get the impression that somebody engaging in a debate has the intent of trying to learn. But sticking to this assumption can lead to a lot of wasted effort. So when somebody says something, always keep in mind that what they want isn't always what you think they want, and isn't always what they say that they want, and in fact, isn't always even what they truly believe they want. Always ask yourself what the other person wants. Don't go just by their word, don't go by your first impression. Go by what they do. They can deceive you with words, but their actions betray things about their values that they aren't even consciously aware of. Get inside their OODA loop. Observe their actions, then you can work backwards to see what their decision was, from which you can often work backwards to discover what this decision was based on, the person's motivations and premises.

A while ago, a number of my market anarchist friends on youtube began arguing with communist Buddhagem. The exchanges went back and forth a few times before either side gave up. Something I noticed my market anarchist friends doing is assuming that Buddhagem really cared to understand what market anarchist beliefs actually were. In my analysis, what Buddhagem wanted was to piss off people who he saw as his enemies. Much fun can often be had by doing this, because most people are stupid enough to fall for it. When somebody's means do not seem to fit the ends you believe they seek to fulfill, it's easy to think that they're just wrong, and their means are improper, and to attempt to correct their means so that their ends may be satisfied. When people resist any change to their means, it's not necessarily because they're just stupid or persistent or obstinate, it may indicate that their means do indeed satisfy their ends, and it is their ends that you have misunderstood. In these cases, I have found, a good way to test for a suspected alternate motive is to stop giving them what you suspect they want, or give them exactly the opposite, and see how they react after doing this for a short time.

Loss is not just something that happens. People don't feel loss until they have recognized it. In some cases, this feeling of loss is prevented by preventing the actual loss. In other cases, people prevent themselves from feeling loss by denying it, by refusing to recognize it. Psychologists call it "denial" and classify it as a "defense mechanism" with good reason.

When somebody's values contradict, for instance, having no problem deriving joy from the torment of others (pissing off ancaps) and at the same time wanting to think oneself to be of good moral nature, the easy way to not have to deal with the contradiction is to deny it. The person will not want it to be recognized, certainly not to others, but absolutely not to himself, that this is what he wants. He will tell himself a lie that he wants to believe, for instance, that he argues with them to discover the truth of the matter, as it is apparent to anybody, discussing with market anarchists will assist in this end. When the intensity of his drive for truth is superseded by his drive for self-esteem, this kind of contradiction becomes inevitable.

The best way I know of to deal with such people is to stop wasting your time with them. I've been experimenting with trying to show people what's going on in their head when they do this, but response has overwhelmingly been to deny being in denial. It's a vicious trap to fall into, and the only way I can think of to stay out is to value truth so highly that nothing else can cloud your vision. You have to check yourself for it, because if other people check you for it you'll probably deny it, and if nobody checks for it, you'll never find out. So make sure to avoid these traps.

Radical Politics Chart

2007-09-30T16:04:00.000-07:00

I made this chart. This chart represents my "political map".

The first thing to notice is that it's divided according to equality and inequality. It's my firm belief that liberty and equality are NOT dichotomous. Liberty is a natural product of equality, and equality is a natural product of liberty. What I mean by "equality" here is "classlessness", the absence of distinct classes.

The axis labeled "means of destruction" can be thought of as "who gets the guns?" or "who controls the state?" If people are to have different levels of decisionmaking power over the use of the guns, then someone subscribing to that belief is a political elitist, a statist of some variety. If you believe that there should be no distinct, perpetual classes of those with power to use violence and those without, then you support political equality.

The axis labeled "means of production" can be thought of us "who decides how to use the tools?" If you believe a few people should control all the tools, and the rest work for those people, then you are in favor of economic inequality. If you believe everybody should (or, if left alone, would) have the power to make decisions about the use of these tools, then you support economic equality, and fall under that category. I want to make it perfectly clear that I don't mean equal distribution of the actual consumer goods, not some worldwide sharing web of altruism, and I don't mean severing the link between work and reward at all or destroying profit motive at all. I also don't mean perfect economic equality, but simply the abolition of distinct economic classes of wealth in society.

Many who call themselves anarcho-capitalists are actually relatively indifferent about economic equality or inequality and take a "whatever the market gives us is good, let's just get there" stance. It isn't my intent to strawman that position, so it should be borne in mind that I would simply call those people "market anarchists", with "anarcho-capitalist" being a more specific type of market anarchist. On this chart, market anarchists belong obviously to the political equality side, but if they make no predictions, they don't belong to either the economic equality or inequality side. They're just agnostic or apathetic, but they happened upon the word "anarcho-capitalism" to describe their beliefs and think it's so perfect that they ruthlessly declare themselves anarcho-capitalists. If you are this kind of market anarchist, I'd recommend considering what you think would happen under anarchism so you can gain a deeper understanding of your own beliefs.

Anarcho-capitalism and agorism are not the same in my view. My use of "anarcho-capitalism" on this chart is to mean a variant of market anarchism that predicts essentially what we have now, minus the government. People looking for these imaginary "job" things, using other people's tools to build other people's property and getting paid according to the best guess of the owner, the market dominated by a few really large firms, a boss-worker relationship being the preferred type of economic organization. Often the Randist theme that big business is America's persecuted minority is present, and an anarcho-capitalist will think of the benevolent good-guy big businessmen being oppressed by the evil altruistic socialist government. Sometimes there's also the implicit idea that some people are just plain fifty times better than most other people, and so they'll naturally get fifty times richer, and there's really no explanation provided for it. Belief in the existence of a class of natural-born elite does conflict with anarchism. That's the kind of thing that I call "anarcho-capitalism". If you want or predict a society as I have just described, then you are an anarcho-capitalist as I have placed it on the chart above.

A quick word about the Austrian School. While I admire the Austrian methodology and most of it's conclusions and reasoning, and I link to it from this blog as an intellectual resource, I don't unquestioningly accept all their conclusions and definitions. Like any group of imperfect people, they make mistakes too. The tendency of Austrians to call whatever they advocate "Capitalism" and to call anything else "Socialism" is one of the places I differ with them. I do my best to avoid creating confusion through the misapplication of labels (as you might notice by my insistence on explaining things every time I label something).

So when I put agorism on the same side as socialism, I do not mean this to be interpreted as agorism being statist, or being anti-market, or being a warm-and-fuzzy altruistic belief in sharing and goodwill, or being anti-property, I mean it to be in favor of economic equality. To borrow an example from Brad Spangler, a radical socialist would call NAFTA "capitalism", whereas a radical capitalist would call NAFTA "socialism", and both would condemn it. On the other hand, I have spoken to self-avowed socialists and self-avowed capitalists who both see an agorist world as I described it to them (worker-entrepreneurs own their own means of production, worker-cooperatives for factories and such, little if any big business, no state, no taxation, and an explanation of the justice system) as something that they would support and like to see happen; my "socialist" friends consider it socialism, my "capitalist" friends consider it capitalism. Please don't get hung up on these words. The capitalist's idea of the capitalism/socialism dichotomy and the socialist's idea of the capitalism/socialism dichotomy probably will differ significantly.

Agorism and libertarian socialism are in the same square. There's some libertarian socialists out there with what I'd consider some really dumb beliefs about money and ownership and power and such, but what qualifies them as libertarian socialist is that they believe in political equality and oppose political elitism, and they believe in economic equality and oppose economic elitism.

Also note that fascism and "state capitalism" (what we have today) are in the same square. Before any radical capitalists chime in to tell me that fascism is actually socialism, and the Nazis were "national socialists", I'm going to remind them that politics is an art of lies, and that calling people whatever descriptor they want to be called irrelevant of the actual meanings of the words (thinking of democrats as democratic, thinking of republicans as supporters of constitutional republic in more than just rhetoric, thinking of national-socialists as actual socialists, etc) is a good way to shoot yourself in the cortex and limit your ability to think straight in relation to these ideas. Fascism isn't socialism. Yes it's collectivist, yes it's anti-free-market, no it's not socialism.

If you've got an opinion or question about my chart or my explanation of it, please leave a comment.

Interest

2007-09-29T22:48:00.000-07:00

Historically anarchists have been opposed to interest, as well as rent and other things. One particularly interesting anarchist to me is Benjamin Tucker. It was his contention that in a world without a banking monopoly (read as "free market"), interest rates would practically fall to the cost of administration, tracking, and collecting on the loans. I'd like to believe he was right, but don't see how it's possible.

There is only so much capital in the world, only so much that can be loaned out, and only so much willingness to loan it out to the future at the expense of the present. The demand for this capital, by contrast, is practically infinite. There is an opportunity cost for lending money out of a finite supply of savings. Some of the things credit would be spent on will be more productive of wealth than others. I hate to use a hypothetical situation with absurd circumstances to demonstrate a principle, but it's easy to do, so I will.

Let us suppose that most people are using most of their wealth to satisfy their present needs, and they either can't or refuse to save any more and a bank has only $10,000 to loan.

Enterprise A has done calculations and predicts that total profits from the increase in production would exceed $10,000 in six months if it gets that $10,000 now. Enterprise B has similarly reached the conclusion that the money can be used to increase profits to a total of $10,000 one year from now. Enterprise C has found an exceptional opportunity that it believes will allow it to meet it's expenses and have $20,000 in profit in 3 months. One enterprise will create a $10,000 surplus in 6 months, another create a $10,000 surplus in 1 year, the third will create a $20,000 surplus in 3 months. It should be obvious enough which enterprise should receive the money if they can't all get it.

Without interest, whoever got to the lender first would get the capital, irrespective of the actual results. The lender has no incentive to hold out on Enterprise B to see if Enterprise A or Enterprise C might come along and promise better results. But Enterprise C has much more to gain than either of the other enterprises, and will be willing to pay more than the administration costs to ensure that he secures that $10,000 this moment. And so an excess is created that would be considered interest.

Now, in reality, it's unlikely that such high rates of return will be so frequent that loans must be considered at that interest rate. In the above hypothetical situation, an interest rate of 101% per year will cause Enterprise B to not want the loan, and an interest rate of 101% per six months will cause Enterprise A to turn it down. In the real world we've got much more credit to put toward much less lucrative opportunities, but we have, nonetheless, a limited amount of capital today, and infinite opportunities to use it, ranging from creating a surplus of value (investing in a business) to creating a negative return (getting into debt over a fifth vacation home on the Hawaiian shoreline for instance), that nonetheless, people will want.

Consider the impossibility of building a computer in agrarian times. They could not take out enough capital to build a computer, for enough didn't even exist in the world at the time. If everyone were to put all their effort toward building a computer back then, they still would not have a computer, and would run out of food before they were done figuring out magnets, and would have been generally unhappy while doing so, being hungry, thirsty, tired, and so forth. It is not possible to invest more toward the future than exists in the present. And most of what exists in the present is used to satisfy present needs. To a degree, people will give up their present needs in favor of future goods, depending on how much better the future good will be and how far in the future it can be had.

Decisions as to how limited savings will be used have to be made, and while I certainly admit that other ways of doing it can exist, interest seems the most sensible way to coordinate the two in a continuous way.

So while I'm against rent (as in, you're better off owning than renting), and against wage slavery (as in, you're better off as an entrepreneur), I really don't see it as reasonable to be opposed to interest.

A potential problem that interest might present is that it is a positive feedback system that has the potential to eventually dominate, like the bacterium which, under ideal conditions and having infinite resources, would expand to flood the earth in bacteria in a year, and destroy everything else.

But I think in a freed market the banks would be paying almost as much in interest to those who put their savings in that bank as it would be taking in from those who are indebted to the bank, ultimately spreading the profits to anybody who is willing to save. And for anybody who didn't save and fell behind economically as the rest of the economy advanced, an opportunity would exist to take advantage of the surrounding infrastructure built by others, the rewards for advancing would far exceed the cost of the loan, and once the debt was cleared and their hands more productive, they could easily be right back on par with the rest of society. I might have to elaborate on this later though, because it's still kinda fuzzy to me.

At least that's my take on it.

Wage Slavery

2007-09-29T16:36:00.000-07:00

I hoped I'd been adequately clear in my previous post on the subject, where I tried to avoid using this language because it pisses some people off and makes them stop listening, but apparently while using that language I wasn't clear enough. So I'll drop the euphemism and stop phrasing around the bush.

In the experience of most libertarians, the people who have used the term "wage slavery" have inevitably used them to rationalize a belief in state necessity or the abolition of money or something dumb like that, and thus unfairly dismissed the whole idea. I think there's a valuable lesson to be learned in the socialist viewpoint.

The common libertarian rebuttal is that working for a wage is a choice, making it voluntary, and precluding it from being slavery, and this is a mostly valid rebuttal, if a bit shallow, applying the "I don't see a gun, I don't see a bureaucrat, that means it's voluntary" way of thinking. The common socialist line that "you don't have a choice whether or not to work" also has some validity, although it is phrased amazingly poorly for digestion by a libertarian mind, especially in this context where the libertarian is looking for anything to pick apart.

The fact of the matter is that the market at present, is not free, and the market conditions are unfairly favorable to employers of wage labor, creating a condition of the employers having more control over the workers than they would fairly have, a condition which might be aptly called "wage slavery", and this is a condition libertarians ought to be opposed to.

The price of refined sugar in the United States is four times the world sugar price. Do you have to buy sugar? Are you forced to buy sugar at gunpoint? Technically no, but it's such a widely-used substance that this price increase is going to work it's way into your budget, directly or not. Do libertarians say that it's wrong to prevent the government from regulating sugar in this way, or do they proclaim that "buying sugar is voluntary, so there's nothing wrong with the sugar market"? No, they don't. However, apply the same conditions to the labor market and the crime seems to vanish in an opaque cloud of invisible hands.

It may be a fairer comparison to refer to income taxes. In this case, the libertarian is forced to observe that valid portion of the socialist line "you don't have a choice whether or not to work", in order to declare the taxation to not be truly voluntary despite choosing to pay taxes in favor of making the guns show themselves. This limited choice, however, as libertarians will note, does nothing to change the involuntary nature of the government's receipt of their money. "Wage slavery" is extremely similar to income taxation, although much less direct, and rather than the government getting the excess money, it is the employer that gets it. To the degree that one's hypothetical free-market wages have been reduced to one's real wages, it may aptly be said that the employee or taxpayer is being robbed.

When I say I am opposed to "wage slavery", I am not saying that I am opposed to work, or that I am opposed to money, or that working for a living is slavery, or that earning or paying a wage is a criminal act, I don't believe any of those things. I'm saying that I'm opposed to theft, no matter how direct or indirect this theft may be, no matter how "politically correct" to libertarians my observations may be.

"Wage slavery" is slavery. When blacks were owned as slaves, they were often paid a wage in the form of food and housing, and sometimes given money to spend in the market. This did not make them any less slaves. Their hands worked the fields, and their masters took the product of this labor, according to Lockean and Rothbardian property theory, the property of the slave. Slavery is persistent, continuous, ongoing theft. And that's something that can be observed in the present-day market, if you know to look for it.

Generally Stupid Objections

2007-09-28T23:13:00.000-07:00

My criteria for putting them in this list is that it's such a popular objection, that it's really pretty stupid to think that the recipient anarchist hasn't heard it before or that it didn't change their mind last time but this time it'll work. Hopefully now I can just point people to this instead of answering their dumb statements.

"Anarchy is chaos."
Only in metaphor according to popular culture which doesn't know what anarchism is in the first place, and thus can't make adequate metaphor of it. The word "anarchism" has a much more pertinent meaning, go look that up.

"The government does good things."
The bad things government does far outweigh the good things, especially when considering that most of the good things government does would get done anyways without the government.

"Read/watch [fictional work], that's why anarchy doesn't work."
Honestly this is too stupid to even merit rebuttal. I'm mentioning it only because it's such a self-evidently impotent argument that it shows how dumb some of these objections can be.

"Blah blah necessary evil blah blah."
Well-known figures of speech are not axiomatically true.

"You're just a hateful little bitch."
Ad hominem.

"You're too young blah blah blah..."
Tell Rothbard. Also, ad hom.

"Rights are things the government gives the people."
Well then where did the group of people in "the government" get their rights from to give to everyone else? If they can create them ad nihilo, so can I. Governments aren't magic.

"In a democracy, we are the government."
We are supposedly given some control over the government. This does not make us the government.

"Well since anything that makes a decision is a government blah blah blah..."
This argument defines it's way out of the applicability of the arguments against government. Unfortunately, for this very same reason, it doesn't do anything to refute anarchist claims where they are intended to apply, which is to say, the state, and thus doesn't refute anything.

"If you go against the government they'll throw you in jail."
Argument from intimidation is fallacious.

"Mises wasn't an anarchist."
He wasn't infallible either.

"We The People..."
...are not one single consciousness with one single will able to make something voluntary to all by pretending we did.

"...the Constitution of the United States..."
...is invalid, as Lysander Spooner so thoroughly proved in the 1860s.

"If you live here, you're consenting."
If I live in the ghetto, am I consenting to have my bicycle stolen?

"Love it or leave it."
You don't own the country, you have no right to tell me to.

"Look at the aftermath of Katrina."
What a great example of government failure. With all the weapons confiscation, roadblocks, FEMA crawling all over the region inside the government-built failed levees, you can say that it was chaos, but you can't say it was anarchy. Government set the dominoes up, and went out of it's way to knock them all down. The example has nothing to do with anarchy or anarchism.

"Look at Somalia."
Supposedly there isn't a government except the one that supposedly is, and the UN and US and Ethiopia were meddling in the region, and Somalia was essentially the poorest country on earth even when it had a state, thus Somalia being a wartorn shithole is no effective argument against anarchism at all.

"We should work within the system."
The state is inherently evil, and it isn't going to abolish itself by vote. Anything less than complete abolition is temporary relief and delays the government's ultimately destroying itself as all governments do. Like inflation, it feels good in the short term but is ultimately counterproductive in the long term.

"If men were angels, we wouldn't need a government."
If men were angels, the government wouldn't have the problems that support arguments in favor of anarchism.

"Anarchy assumes all people are good."
If all people are good, government is unnecessary. If all people are bad, government is intolerable. If some are good and some are bad, the bad will seek to dominate the good through government. In no case is government desirable.

"But it's too extreme!"
Too extreme for what? Not too extreme to be realized, communism, despite it's flaws, went from manifesto to revolution in 70 years. Not too extreme to be true, extreme consistency does not make something invalid, just the opposite.

"Gangs of criminals will just take over and oppress us like dictators!"
Well, it's certainly possible (that's how we got governments in the first place), but using this as an argument to support government is hypocritical because it supports gangs of criminals taking over and oppressing us, which it's intended to stop. The same forces that smashed the old state would prevent the formation of a new one.

"Governments are necessary for cooperation."
Cooperation is necessary for government. Which came first, a cooperative group of people, or a government? Either cooperation does not require government, or government never would have formed.

"Anarchy is against human nature because people are meant to obey others."
Even if true (and it's not), this wouldn't disprove statelessness. You can still obey others and not have a state. You're just choosing a leader rather than having one forced on you. The state doesn't pass the objection, however. At the top of government are the final rulers, these people do not obey any others. This would be against human nature.

If you believe I have missed one, please leave a comment, and I will add it to this list.

Intellectual Property

2007-09-26T21:43:00.000-07:00

In the material world, we've got this inconvenient little thing called scarcity. Objects are discrete, and there is only one of each object, but there are many people all with their own plans for the use of such objects, and these objects cannot be used in two mutually exclusive ways at the same time, even though people's plans for such objects may be mutually exclusive. An object can only be and do one thing at a time. A car cannot be in the driveway of my residence ready for me to use, in the Walmart parking lot ready for you to use when you finish shopping, and on the highway being used to take some kids to a soccer game, all at the same time. Yet me, my friend, and my neighbor, and for that matter the rest of mankind, can all think of uses for that car that better suit their own needs than the use I choose for it. But only one of us can get our way.

In the interests of preventing unnecessary destruction of such valuable objects, we have what we call "property". Property is the freedom to enforce one's decisions as to how an object will be used against others who attempt also to act upon decisions made about the same object. Along with this freedom comes responsibility. Actions have consequences. You alone are permitted the freedom to use force to impose your decision as to the use of your property, but you alone bear the consequences for those actions. Should your actions have consequences which others bear, you have violated their exclusive right to decide how their property should be used. For while they may have decided their property should not be used as a dump, you may be dumping your trash onto their property, a decision which you are excluded from making. And in most cases, they will shift the burden of the consequences, the costed opportunities, back onto you. You'll owe them restitution for the opportunities you have cost them.

Property rights only apply to objects, though. They must apply to objects, but they can only apply to objects. Ideas and information are not subject to scarcity. The opportunity cost of using an idea is nonexistent. Everybody can have the same idea and use it their own way at the same time. There is no basis for any exclusivity in decisionmaking power over ideas. And, more damningly, property in ideas is incompatible with property in objects.

Unauthorized reproductions of intellectual "property" does not prevent the original creator from making any decisions which they have the right to make. The only way it could is if every creator of ideas instantly became partial owner of every information storage medium in the universe. Only then would they have any right to tell anyone else that they have no right to reproduce an idea.This is incompatible with any absolute right of property to the owner of the storage medium. Intellectual property not only lacks the foundations needed to justify any exclusivity, but enforcing it means denying the basis for property in the first place. Affirming intellectual property is saying the owner of the printing press can do whatever they want with the press and that the creator of an idea can tell the owner of the printing press what they can print. They're not compatible.

It's not as if people will simply stop creating in a world without copyrights and patents and intellectual property. The open source movement is sufficient proof of this. It is an actively creative group of people, making software that they know in advance they'll have no exclusive right over, that they know in advance, derivative works will be made out of with no permission asked nor expected, that they know in advance their name will not necessarily be seen on it. And yet, there is a market. The common objection that artists and creators and inventors would stop creating if they thought they would not have exclusive right to it. And yet, in the open source movement, people are making money doing what is equivalent to writing books that anyone may obtain for free and reproduce as they want. Clearly, that objection, while it sounds good in theory, doesn't have as much application to the real world as it's proponents might tend to hope.

Ideas are not scarce, and proponents of intellectual property are trying to create an artificial scarcity through force where no scarcity needs to exist in the first place.

Statist Apocalypse

2007-08-14T22:59:00.000-07:00

Who here hasn't gotten one like this?

Quote:

I, or my tribe, is better equipped and we come knocking at your door. The private police franchise finds it more profitable to look the other way. Then what?

I call it "The Argument from Apocalypse", it follows the general structure of "Everything goes wrong, and there's nothing you can do about it. What do you do about it?"

I'm sick and tired of it so after answering his question I wrote up a response I deem rather adequate. Take notes, because much of this scenario is derived from my observations of the way things are. The parts from reality will be italicized.

Quote:

If you continue making arguments of the general nature "Everything goes wrong and there's nothing you can do about it", then please do allow me to do the same for you, lest it become obvious that you are a hypocrite.

Suppose your state seizes absolute control of everything despite any restrictions that should have been in it's founding documents, but nobody in power seems to notice or give a fuck, or they're behind it. The people are so thoroughly indoctorinated, stupid, and lazy as they've been made by public schools that they are in support of it, or they don't know, or don't care, or are too passive to do anything about it, because to take the time to think they'd have to miss the big football game, the only free time they have left anymore.

You can't own guns to defend yourself against the corrupt police force, and they're indistinguishable from the military anyways, especially after the recent deal leasing surplus or retired harriers (or at least the ones that don't get dumped into the ocean) to the local police force.

Your savings account has been made worthless by inflation and you're taxed out of 80% of your income after income, sales, transfer, estate, property, licence, inflation, and other taxes, to speak nothing of the price increases from all the hidden taxes that get built into the sale price.

You're in a mountain of debt from the home loan you took out while housing prices were kept up by import tarrifs on the building materials and an artificially low interest rate and an artificially restricted supply that is by law unnecessarily expensive.

You can't get out because of your low wages, which you can't get raised because your union, if you have one, has been made irrelevant unless they can work through the state which is owned by the biggest businesses anyways, who you have to work for, ultimately leaving you just barely in the black at the end of the month.

Your every move is tracked, scrutinized, and regulated. Random attacks are made by the government against the people to keep the rams in patriotic, angry, unthinking fervor, while the ewes are kept in terrified submission.

Your door is busted down at 2 AM and police rush in with machineguns, yank you out of bed, and demand to know what the white powder in the bag is that you've never seen but they claim they found in your house, and drag you away to be held in a cell without bail while they try you in a secret trial without you being allowed to make a case, without a jury, where they imprison you for possession of cocaine, with intent to sell, they presume the money you earn is going to support terrorists and convict you of treason, and you're to be killed in the morning at sunrise by firing squad. Your family, if you aren't divorced, will have to take on all your debts in addition to their own.

Isn't this argument annoying? But so effective! It lets me completely evade whatever is likely or unlikely and pull the conditions out of my ass without regard to other effects of the same causes that brought this system to be in the first place. Using this wonderful tool I can base my conclusions on contradictory premises but they're too deeply hidden to be obvious and if you bother to find them I can just deny it anyways and accuse you of avoiding the question. You can't just ask for other conditions or take some way out that I failed to block in my scenario because I can just change the scenario to prevent that route from being available.

But yet, if you have any right to demand a response from me to your stupid situation, you must come up with an adequate response of what you would do in the situation which is not terribly absurd or unthinkable since we're already about 80% there anyways.

And now for the final question you expected me to answer which I highly doubt you adequately are able to without severely compromising your position: Then what?

I'm thinking I should make a revised copy where I gather up articles and link to examples of reports of these things happening.

Note: They never did answer the question.

Gain and Loss 5: Agorism vs Anarchocapitalism

2007-05-24T22:33:00.000-07:00

Anarchocapitalists often look at agorism and say "But that is anarchocapitalism. Why do they call themselves something different?" Why indeed? It's difficult to explain to an anarchocapitalist why agorism is different and better in the sense that an agorist can percieve the difference. I've had a hard time putting my finger on it until now: Agorism is a more gain-oriented perspective.

For an example of this, it helps to understand the agorist's view of the post-revolution economy.

The ancap's typical view of a post-state economy is that not a great amount of change will take place. Some price changes will obviousy occur where the state had been favoritist and discriminatory, of course, but otherwise, people will carry on as they do now.

The agorist's typical view of a post-state economy is different. Agorists see a post-state economy of entrepreneurs replacing what Marx called the proletariat - an entrepreneurait, in agorist terms - comprising most of the economy, just as was the class of counter-economists which brought about the revolution in the first place. Contrast the entrepreneur with the employee. The idea of a job as we know it is a loss-oriented concept, it trades away both higher wages and more freedom for a kind of "safety", hiding behind the veil of the entrepreneur, not holding the employee responsible in case of loss. Society would largely do away with jobs as we know them.

Consider insights gained from Gain and Loss 4, a post about thought and action.

C-ancaps are loss-oriented thinkers. They're probably just interested in the theory of it. They love the intellectual discourse and comfort of sitting at home talking and reading about market anarchism. Or they may be so afraid of the state that they fear doing something about it may get their name on a secret government list. In any case, they are doing little more than thinking and talking.

B-ancaps are loss-oriented actors, often activists. In this category you'll find most Free State Project members. Obviously anyone willing to move, to act, for liberty is not going to be in the C-class. They enjoy talking about it every bit as much as the C-ancaps, but they go out and protest the actions of the state, they protest laws, they spead libertarian literature, they are out there acting to prevent the state from taking away more of their freedom.

A-ancaps are gain-oriented thinkers and actors. This is where you find the agorists. They are not just saying it, they are LIVING it. They're not just talking about how the War on Drugs is keeping drug prices high, they're out there getting in on the profits. They're not just talking about how taxation is theft, they're researching or practicing the ways to stop paying taxes. They're not just protesting a new law, they're professionally subverting the state, and making money doing it. They're not just thinking about how alternative institutions would work, they are pouring the foundations. They're the ones out smashing the state for fun and profit.

Many anarchocapitalists are political, in that they advocate "working within the system", generally pay their taxes, apply for the necessary permits and licensing, vote, and so forth. This is a loss-oriented position of course, giving in to your fears of potential loss.

Agorists don't participate in the existing political system. To the maximum extent possible, no voting, no taxpaying, no obedience. Contrary to the ancap view of disobedience as a loss, agorists see it as a gain, as profit. It's more gain-oriented.

For another good example of agorism's gain-orientation, consider the treatment of socialists by ancaps as contrasted with agorists.

The ancap says to a socialist, "You are my enemy. You stand for theft and oppression. You stand for illegitemate authority, and support the good of one class at the expense of another. You are the antithesis of everything I believe." (On a related note, most socialists react the same way to capitalists.)

The agorist says to a socialist, "You are my friend, to the degree you agree with the non-initiation of force. You stand with me, in opposition to systematic theft and oppression. You stand with me, on the side of liberty and equality. You are my ally."

The ancap position is negative; the agorist position is positive. The ancap is often quite happy, and even ready to deliberately cause the misconstrual of words in an attack upon the socialist in order to feel victorious. The agorist, who is seen as almost socialist by anarchocapitalists, attempts to understand and think about what the socialist is actually trying to say. And the agorist, using this understanding thereby gained, seeks the help of the socialist in fulfilling the shared goals. The ancap seeks to deepen the ravine between the left and the libertarian political movements. The agorist seeks to bridge it. The ancap is a loss-oriented thinker. The agorist is a gain-oriented thinker.

Frederick Mann, whose works I see on BuildFreedom and BigBooster when I visit those sites, is very much a gain oriented individual. He speaks of the economic means to freedom, not the political means to less slavery. He talks about "the strange 'job' concept" dismissively, as he rightfully ought to dismiss such an idea as a job, which is rooted in the pursual of security, stability, the prevention of loss, not the achievement of gain, which he discusses in the same articles under the name "real free-enterprise" business, which you do not need a "job" for. I don't think a word I've read that was written by him has been loss-oriented. The lack of loss-orientation probably alienates a lot of readers from him, but draws in the right ones anyways.

Frederick Mann also advocates, interestingly enough, agorism in practice. While I have never seen him use the word, or agorist vocabulary like "counter-economy" or "entrepreneuriat", he advocates the same thing for the same purpose. I'm adding a link to BuildFreedom to my blog.

This is essentially why I think agorism is superior to anarchocapitalism. Those attracted to the agorist ideas tend to naturally be more gain-oriented, thus the agorists will be the more effective group, even if they are fewer in number.

Gain and Loss 4: Thought and Action

2007-05-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

Many kinds of gains require very little change in the world around and outside us. When I write things for this blog, I just get a kick out of doing it, out of learning from it, and out of people harassing me for not telling them I wrote something new (a good sign!).

But often times we need something to change outside us. Monetary gain is a perfect example. Thinking will not earn you an income, acting can.

Loss-oriented thinking impedes action. If you are worried about what you might lose by taking a certain action, you are guaranteed at least, that you will lose time, effort, and often comfort, to do so. So you are ensured that you will lose something at least. If you are unsure of whether or not you will gain, as you always are, the potential exists of losing and not gaining. When infected with chronic loss-phobia, this leaves people dead in the water. Inertia ovecomes them, and they do not act. And so, they do not gain.

Loss-oriented action is often overcautiously executed. All erring is done on the side of safety. This is generally for when inaction is not an option, or is so deplorable an option as to be considered to be a loss itself.

Gain-oriented thinking doesn't promote inactivity. All gain takes place after action is taken. If you are looking for gain, you must act. A gain-oriented thinker is a gain-oriented actor. The potential to gain is unlimited. Opportunities need not present themselves, a gain-oriented thinker will pursue them if none are readily visible. A gain-oriented thinker may even create opportunities for others in the process.

An interesting parallel exists with something I recall hearing from the author of Rich Dad Poor Dad. Robert Kiyosaki says there are three kinds of people who invest or plan for their future.

C-type Investors: Thinks about it, does nothing.
B-type Investors: Looking for safe investments.
A-type Investors: Looking for problems to solve.

In relevant sense:

C-type: Loss-oriented thinker
B-type: Loss-oriented actor
A-type: Gain-oriented thinker (and thus actor)

Although it is possible for people to fall into more than one of these categories by appproaching different subjects than investing in different ways, for instance being a C-type thinker, a B-type worker, and an A-type woman chaser (no doubt a common comination).

What substantially differentiates a C-type from a B-type is that the B-type has a lower time prefrence. They can look into the future and percieve loss, and so they act now to prevent it. The C-type looks only at the loss of the present inconvenience. Thus, C-types are called procrastinators and lazy and so forth.

So, which type are you? Can you think of any parts of your life where you might be a C-type, even though you're a B-type or A-type in others? If so, it just can't hurt to try to fix it. Libertarians need to be A-types. Statists do not.

Agorist Revolution

2007-05-23T19:43:00.000-07:00

One of the things that makes agorism a superation upon Rothbard's anarcho-capitalism is the theory of revolution that was added. It is outlined in New Libertarian Manifesto by Samuel Edward Konkin III (SEK3).

As I see it the agorist revolution is not just one revolution. There are multiple revolutions involved. Let me try to explain it.

The agorist revolution in the first sense is an event which will happen a billion times. Libertarianism being individualistic, and agorism being libertarian, the agorist revolution is necessarily an individualistic revolution. In accordance with the proverb that before changing the world, you must change yourself, the first agorist revolution is when you change yourself, when you become a libertarian, when you choose to live free from state control, to disobey, to accept responsibility for your own acts and disreguard authority from above, that is the first agorist revolution. It's a thought.

The revolution in the second sense is not an event as the first was, but a process. It's just the conversion of that thought into action. Not just saying "Live free or die" but actually living free. On an individual basis, it's a matter of practicing what you preach, because what you preach is practical, and what you preach is true. It's an action. It's non-aggressive human action which is forbidden by the State.

There exist four sectors of the market: Red, white, gray, and black. The red and white markets constitute the economy. The red market is the market of overt violence, the white market is the market of implicit violence. The gray and black markets constitute the counter-economy. The gray market is the voluntary market of legal goods and services provided illegally (in violation of regulations or taxation), the black market is the voluntary market of illegal goods and services. The counter economy is "the sum of all non-aggressive Human Action which is forbidden by the State", to use a definition from agorist literature. It's all the people practicing what you preach, living free.

The state refuses to provide justice or protection, which it has a virtual monopoly of, in the gray and black markets. However the counter-economy will not be without conflict, so justice and protection will be needed by the counter-economy. The counter-economy is not yet big or obvious enough for non-state justice or protection to be a very profitable enterprise, because of the economy-of-scale effect. The non-state justice system will not form until the counter-economy it gets it's income almost exclusively from grows large enough that it can be provided on a mass-scale broad enough to support it.

It is interesting to note that a number of other proposed roads from here to there, from statism to anarchy, can all fall under counter-economics. Mass civil disobedience, education, protection agencies, et cetera, are all just parts of the more complete concept of the counter-economy.

Once non-state protection appears, non-state protection will drive out state protection. It will protect the counter-economy from the state in what will likely be a relatively small geographical region. Konkin called it "small condensation" With this protection, the growth of the counter-economy will accelerate, into larger condensation and higher densities.

The immediate goal of the agorist is to grow the counter-economy, so that the protection agencies, who will be opposing the state (and profitably doing so at that) will grow to the point that they can protect people best by destroying the state.

The second agorist revolution, the process outlined above, eventually leads to the third sense of the agorist revolution: The end of the State.

This is the plan for revolution outlined in New Libertarian Manifesto by SEK3. But I'm seeing that it might not happen like that. The above plan assumes an extremely stable society; so stable that it would likely only be that stable for long enough for the counter-economy to grow that it's only in theory that it happens as written.

There are two events that I see coming in the next 30-50 years that might offer the possibility of a slightly different agorist revolution.

The first is a political revolution.

During a political revolution the State has essentially lost it's ability to enforce the law well. This should be obvious; if it could, then how is an illegal resistance force present? It's resources are diverted away from law enforcement and into rebellion subversion. As this would likely be sustained, agorist entrepreneurs have much to gain from providing the market protection that will no doubt be in great demand. This will allow the Agora to establish itself. The agorists would be able to take advantage of the situation created by the angry revolutionaries; the revolutionaries need not be working with the agorists for the agorists to benefit. It will make the protection agencies cheaper to form. There will likely be two classes of revolutionaries; attackers and defenders. Attackers would take the fight to the state, defenders would be those willing to defend their homes, families, and communities. An oversupply of defenders will make finding people willing to do the job for the agorists much cheaper, and thus tend to increase profitability during the political revolution.

After the political revolution, but before the final agorist revolution, if the politicals attempt to set up a new state, this new state will be the weakest the state will ever be, as from this point it will only grow, as states do. If the agora's protection agencies are powerful enough to defend the agora against the new state, then the state will eventually lose due to it's inability to compete. The agora will grow in population as outsiders desert the state in favor of the superior economic and legal conditions made possible by the agora. It will grow in territory, as residents on the border of the agora and the state will tend to prefer the agora as better for their bank account, and will defect. The new state will slowly lose it's host population if it does not do something about it, and if it does something about it, it will lose it even faster.

And so the third agorist revolution takes place. The state either is crushed by the agora, or crushes itself.

The second possibility an economic revolution; I'm talking about the technological singularity.

I believe it to be most likely that the state attempts to prevent the singularity. I believe this more likely because the singularity would be a disaster for the state. Empowering all the rest of humanity as such an event as that would doubtless do, it weakens the state relative to it's host population and thus makes the host population simultaneously less dependant and more able to resist. The state does not want this to happen. Politicans who understand this will find any excuse to hold it back. They already restrict industry in general in the name of Global Warming. They are looking for any excuse to ban stem cell research. They would shut down cryogenics labs by crying fraud. They would suppress the knowledge that this event is even taking place to the best of their ability. Failing that, state puppets in university posts and PBS documentaries would talk about how this must be regulated so that all of society can benefit equally from it, rather than the few greedy capitalists getting all the benefit from it. So I believe it likely that the state will attempt to prevent it.

And you libertarians know what that means! Black-market singularity! The singularity will be confined to the counter-economy. It's benefits will be largely confined to it, the limitless growth afforded by it will be confined to it, the counter-economy will expand rapidly, bringing forth the counter-economic protection and abitration that will eventually suppress the state. And with the rapid advances in defense technology that the counter-economy will get, the protection agencies will tend to be better armed in case of direct confrontation. The agorists would have every advantage.

And then there's the possibility of the two happening at the same time. A weakened, post-revolution state attempting to impose it's will upon a technologically superior agora?

Or perhaps the reverse. If the state could divert most of the singularity toward itself, the mass of the people would have even more reason to attempt a revolution, as the state would use that technology as states do, that is, to oppress the people. More people would be more vehemently on board with the revolution effort. As the state would have revolutionaries within it's ranks as well as in the general population, the state will not stand much of a chance. The revolution will release the rest of the singularity into the market, as the agorists attempted condensation. With the new state, it would then be a more balanced fight between the two, to the maximum degree that a profit competition between Fedex and the Post Office can be considered balanced.

I hope I am right, and that I may actually see absolute liberty in my lifetime.

Gain and Loss 3: Education

2007-05-21T18:21:00.001-07:00

I believe myself fortunate to have had an independant mind through most of my life. Taking nothing I was told as fact, but merely stashing it in my mind under "what I have been told", and trusting my own ability to percieve and reason to provide me with the actual facts, I was able to form my own opinions of things. Such ideas as "homosexuality is evil", from the time I became aware of it, were given to me as facts, but never recieved as such. I had a somewhat detatched view of the world. This independant, detatched view served me well in isolating me from the ideas given to me through the public school system.

The grading system itself is wholly loss oriented. You start with 100%, and whenever you are wrong, you lose. Furthermore you do not lose because you put something at risk and made a wrong decision. You lose something you never owned nor wanted to risk, and your loss is not metaphysical justice but human-imposed retribution. When this item, your grade, is risked, there is no opportunity to gain, as there is in reality, you cannot get a 105% on most assignments, and certainly not a 125% that a dedicated gain-oriented thinker can pull, you are capped at 100%, amounting often to just defending the status quo.

It is irrelevant to the grading system how much you improve. Attempts at improving your ability are not rewarded except as you improve your ability to not lose, thus encouraging loss-oriented thinking. If every question is gotten wrong on a test, and you can then look at the test and realize the mistake you made and correct and learn from your mistakes, they don't care. You screwed up. Your attempt at gain afterwards goes wholly unrewarded. A student soon learns that gain is not to be sought. The goal is not to win, but to not lose.

In some cases, arriving at the correct answer in the "wrong" way, is punished. Thus, attempts at innovation are not only left unrewarded, but quite effectively dissuaded. Finding new ways to solve an equation that work and require less effort were not allowed in most of my math classes. It is analagous to setting me at the start of an obstacle course and telling me all I had to do was get to the finish line, and then punishing me for walking around the outside edge of the obstacle course and crossing the finish line from the other side. Someone with no patience for trudgery will take the path of least resistance, even when that path is the least obvious one. This is just a variant of innovation. In a real-world situation, if the goal really was "get to the finish line", my actions would have been rewarded to the degree that I cut down on the time and effort needed to do what I did. In this artificial fantasy world of public schools, where action has no consequences except as those actions are judged by others, where self-defense is prohibited, property rights do not exist, you are a slave to the state, to be told when and when not to visit the bathroom, when they say jump, you ask how high, when they say "don't run", you walk, when you're late for class because you couldn't run, they punish you, if you break their mold, they break you.

People make mistakes, and people learn from these mistakes. Under a system where mistakes are punished, mistakes are not made, and thus no learning takes place. Worse yet, under a system where mistakes are punished, it causes whoever made the mistake to not think, but to feel. To feel bad, for having lost. This suppresses their ability to think, their ability to understand their mistake, and to learn from it. It has the effect of closing their mind to the potential of learning. It has the effect of making them prefer submission and obedience, because if they do as they are told, any mistakes that are made are not their mistakes, but the mistakes of those who ordered them around.

Loss-oriented thinking is force-fed to kids for over a decade in their most formative years, drilled so deeply into their view of the world as to often paralyze their ability to think in a gain-oriented fashion.

It is high idiocy to give a student information in such a way that destroys their ability to process it correctly, to make them unable to think and to act.

To me, one thing is certain: A new way of teaching is needed. An objectivist method of teaching, in the sense that it is reality-based and not opinion-based.

It would be consistent between it's means and ends. It would not claim the banner of reason and then use force, the negation of reason, in order to compel it's teaching.

In reality-based education, perfect action is rewarded, imperfection is rewarded less, and big mistakes are not rewarded at all.

In current education, perfect action is given zero punishment, imperfection is punished slightly, and big mistakes are punished harshly.

Is it any wonder kids hate school? Is it any wonder mistake-phobia is so common? Is it any wonder kids come out of school with a loss-oriented mindset, trying not to lose, as they have been taught to do?

The destruction of minds that comes from the public school system must NEVER be underestimated. I would venture so far as to say that next to the military, the institution of public schooling is the most destructive government program ever. And I'm not even sure that the military has been more destructive. I think it's actually that bad. The military's destruction manifests more obviously to all as a major loss (just look at any warzone). The schools' destruction manifests in reduced creativity, reduced productivity.

How much better off would America be if the 200 million or so people that went to school had not been force-fed loss-oriented thought? Where would we be if they were seeking liberty and not security? If they were seeking entrepreneurship and not employment? If they were thinking and not fearing? If they were seeking problems to answer rather than answers to problems?

It's really amazing me how many recurrent themes I'm noticing when I write these...

Gain and Loss 2

2007-05-21T16:43:00.001-07:00

In "Gain and Loss", I said that a relationship existed between gain-oriented thinking and libertarianism and atheism and individualism. I'd like to expand upon that. Libertarians not only are gain-oriented, they must be. This is to me, a logically unproven but empirically true rule. One of the things libertarians should be doing consistently is gain-oriented thinking rather than loss-oriented thinking. Loss-oriented thinking is lazy thinking. Gain-oriented thinking is better. But this isn't very specific or easily understood, so allow me to use an example:

I've been thinking about this Dispute Resolution Organization (DRO) idea put forward by Molyneux and fans. It looks to me like a good example of loss-oriented thinking. What the DRO system amounts to is statism without the state. It operates in very much the same way. The idea is that people should have some organization with purpetual jurisdiction over them for purposes of contract and tort enforcement, by signing what amounts to a social contract. It is the state in practice, without the geographic monopoly or forced payment. The idea that it is necessary to have such an organization is saying "The government is necessary" while changing what is needed to make it such that the government is no longer the proverbial "necessary evil". Ironically, they're implying that government is necessary and not evil in contradiction to the libertarian manta of evil but not necessary. And the lie of the social contract, an idea created in defense of the state, is accepted as true with the libertarian condition that it must actually be signed. That is lazy thinking. The bare minimum of thinking that needs to be done to arrive at libertarianism is done, and not a bit more. The problem is solved, an objection is no longer valid, what more needs to be done?

To put it another way:

Objections (potential losses) arise about how the world will work without the state.

A gain-oriented person has the goal of seeking insights as to how the world could work without a state. "What are all the potential solutions?" he asks. "Have they all been thought up? Let's look for more. The more we have the better the chances of finding the best system possible."

A loss-oriented person has the goal of invalidating the objection, cutting off the threat to the worldview, with as little effort as possible. They will fall back on existing structures, modifying them as little as need be, to give a merely adequate response to the objection. Additional thinking is not necessary, so why do it? The goal, the narrow, loss-preventive goal, has been met. And in the process, almost no useful insight has been gained.

This suggests that loss-orientation isn't mutually exclusive with gain-orientation. You can be extremely gain-oriented, but if you become loss-oriented in the final stages, you still will not win, at least not as much as you should have. It's possible to be extremely loss oriented and become a fascist, highly loss-oriented and become a conservative or socialist, somewhat loss-oriented and become a centrist, somewhat gain-oriented and become a libertarian, highly gain-oriented and become a minarchist, or extremely gain oriented and become an anarchist. And then go further.

Gain-oriented thought correllates extremely strongly with human success. All of the greatest things done in history were done by gain-oriented people acting in a gain-oriented manner. The Agrarian Revolution. The Industrial Revolution. The Enlightenment. The Rennisance.

Loss-oriented thought correllates extremely strongly with human failure. All of the worst things done in history, and the greatest failures in history, have come from loss-oriented thought. Slavery, religion, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, every single war in the history of the world, terrorism, all based primarily on the prevention of loss or the results of that kind of thinking.

I've held as a person principle what I now realize to be a gain-oriented way of debating. My mindset is "I would rather be proven wrong now than continue to spread ideas which are false." This mindset resulted in my quick adoption of anarchism. Because I had to give up any time I found that I was wrong or inconsistent, I had to adopt the alternative presented to me which corrected the problems. But I notice a lot of people approach discussion and debate with a different mindset. It's as if they are thinking, "I am right and you are wrong. I will concede nothing. Every idea of mine is valid irrelevant of my ability to defend it. I will end this discussion in a draw before I will lose to you. I will not lose."

Which of the two perspectives is more gain-oriented? Which is more likely to result in success? Which is more futureminded? Which is more thought-related as opposed to feeling-related? Which sounds like an atheist and which sounds like a theist?

Are you, the reader, gain-oriented or loss-oriented?

Actually Existing Capitalism

2007-05-21T16:34:00.000-07:00

I'm going to address some socialist ideas about the market and hopefully this can be illuminating for both socialists and libertarians.

Here, I am not using "Capitalism" to mean a free market of private property. I am using it in the sense of "Actually Existing Capitalism" or the market as we see it today. Because that is usually what socialists are talking about when they say capitalism, and this is about socialist ideas. Any mention of the free market from them is rarely if ever an attack on a truly free market, but an attack upon the "free market" that libertarians help them to conflate with "capitalism" which to them means what they see around them. So let's use their definition of "capitalism" and use the free market to mean something different.

It can properly be said that the capitalism is exploitative. Let's take the socialists' definition of exploitation, so that everyone can understand each other.

Exploitation - n.
1. The expropriation of value by a person in a position of power from a person in a position of subjection

The common socialist cry of "exploiting the workers" is often met by libertarians with the response along the lines of "they are like peers meeting and trading money for labor, it is not involuntary as it would have to be to be exploitation." Now, who is right here?

The socialist is talking about actually existing capitalism, that to which they are opposed. The libertarian is talking about the free market, that which they are actually supportive of. And so in the confusion of the vocabulary, communication breaks down.

It's important that neither the libertarian nor the socialist conflate the free market and actually existing capitalism. Kevin Carson, a mutualist, has noted the issue in his formation of the term "vulgar libertarianism", pointing out that libertarians often forget from one moment to the next whether they are defending the state capitalist system or the free market, two very different things, and that they often end up defending state capitalism unwittingly.

It must be conceded to the socialist that under actually existing capitalism, exploitation is taking place. For under this statist system, where licensing and regulation make it unduly difficult to actually be entrepreneurial, a disproportionate number of those who would otherwise be entrepreneurs become wage labor. This creates an oversupply of wage labor as opposed to entrepreneurial activity.

This gives the capitalist class an unfair advantage in two ways. First, it reduces the amount of competition on the market, increasing the capitalist's market share and prices with little effort on the part of the capitalist. Second, it reduces the amount of bargaining power the wage labor has. Because there is an oversupply of wage labor, wage labor is more easily replaced than it would be on a real free market, and wages are depressed. This amounts to an effective expropriation of value by the capitalists (who are in a state-created position of power) from the consumers on the one hand (through reduced competition and higher prices) and from the workers on the other (who are underpaid and have less than their fair amount of inflence) and even doubly due to the fact that the workers ARE consumers when they are not on the job.

In a free market, where more gain-oriented thought was present, where more entrepreneurs were around seeking to take from the reduced supply of voluntary wage labor workers, the capitalists would no longer have this unfair advantage. The workers, being scarcer, will thus command higher wages and more influence upon the employer, making it a much more fair system, the libertarian's view of it as an interaction between peers would be true.

Libertarians should recognize immediately the common theme that libertarians always love to discover as it proves correct their eternal theme: The state is at the heart of this particular form of oppression which manifests in the market. But they should and often do not recognize that it's manifestation in the market does not make the statism causing it something to defend, even implicitly. Socialists should recognize that any libertarians who defend the current setup should not be considered representative of the consistent libertarian position, but what Carson calls "vulgar libertarians", who are confused by the socialist vocabulary into attempting to defend actually existing capitalism.

Personally, I favor that the word capitalism just be gotten rid of. That would be wonderful. Every usage of the word "Capitalism" can be replaced by "Free market", "Mixed economy", "Fascism", or something else.

Identity Theft

2007-05-17T18:59:00.000-07:00

Alright, I've told some people what I think about names and it seems like it takes more explaining than I hoped it would.

As I see it, we identify people by their minds. For example, if we put Adam's brain in Ben's body, we would still call him Adam. If Adam's brain could control both his original and another body, we would address both of them as Adam, because that is the mind we are talking to.

Every mind has it's own separate identity. We use names to differentiate between them. I use the word "names", but really any method of differentiating between two minds is what I'm talking about. It could be a number, a name, anything that will work like that.

The body is just a piece of property. The property is owned by the mind.

Alright, now let's suppose Ben goes around claiming to be Adam. What he is saying in effect is "The body before you which is speaking to you is property of the mind known as Adam." This implies "Adam is to be held responsible for the actions of this piece of property (the body)." To then proceed to act in a way that would have people hold Adam responsible or to damage or impede Adam's ability to reach his goals by falsely pretending to be him, would be fraud, and a crime.

If a dog attacks someone else, the owner is held responsible.
If my dog attacks someone else, and I say "it is Adam's dog", I might be able to trick people into holding him accountable. But I cannot then retract that statement and say "No, this is my dog" once the debt has been paid.

The same should apply to human bodies.

If you claim that your body is property of someone else (in everyday thought where we conflate mind and body into identity, we would normally see this as claiming to be someone else, using their name, pretending to be them), you should then give your body to that someone else as property. That means, you become their slave. For however long you pretended to be them, you deserve to become their property. Because it was supposedly someone else's property when you had control of it without their permission, you stole from them, and owe restitution.

Now, I know that a lot of people have the same name. I'm not talking about that kind of thing. Names are not unique in all cases. If two people share the name "John Smith" then anyone else purporting to be "John Smith" and holding someone known only as "John Smith" accountable could not prove which of the two "John Smith"s was to be held responsible, who had ownership of that body. If it cannot be said that either one of them had ownership of the body, neither of them can be held responsible.

But in the case of unique names, like my old handle "Keti 'Kotaree", which was stolen on more than one occasion, and I do mean stolen, we're not talking about some coincidence of naming, then you are claiming to be property of a specific person, and you deserve to become that person's property for the duration of time you spent pretending to be them.

Of course, you can buy yourself back from them, if they'll sell you back your time, and just give them money. But they have the right to refuse to sell it back to you at any price, until your time as their slave is up.

If the possibility of becoming a slave doesn't deter identity theft, I don't know what will.

Fatal Instability

2007-05-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry for being gone for so long. I haven't had a terrible lot to write about. Fortunately I've got a pretty good one here, addressing an objection almost 10 years old at least, but still nagging some people.

A commenter here sent me to paulbirch.net where he (Paul Birch, not the commenter) has page about anarchocapitalism being unstable because of restitution ratios in market justice. Well, I'm going to try to refute this as best I can. If you want to see the original, it's located here:

http://www.paulbirch.net/AnarchoCapitalism1.html

First, it should be noted that Birch loves the common law. He loves talking about it and referring to it. But the common law isn't exactly the perfect libertarian law code. My understanding is that it allows for theft and enslavement without the owner's consent, merely on the basis of the owner's inaction. Now, something similar to common law but without the provisions for theft and enslavement would probably be a good thing for libertarianism. But alas, we don't have that, and discussions of common law today are not discussions of a libertarian ideal of law. This is relevant because a purely stateless justice system would probably not work exactly the same way common law courts do. In this case, I think the false assumption is that the finding of any court is automatically made binding upon the offender, who may not even be aware that a case has been tried. We anarchists like to call two people agreeing to deprive a third of life, liberty and property, "conspiracy", even if one claims to be a victim and one claims to be a court.

The second point I take issue with is how he says that the offender must pay for all the enforcement, restitution, and court costs. I do believe the offender should ultimately be paying for their offenses, but I do not believe it must necessarily be done directly as the statement implies. If done indirectly, the restitution war can be easily averted. Another issue on this same point is his insistence that the court must provide immediate restitution to the victim, to pursue repayment from the accused afterward. First problem with this is that I can find no basis for immediate restitution as opposed to restitution later, with interest. The second, and slightly more pressing problem, is that of economic calculation. Justice is a good or service which is subject to scarcity. The same problem of a government "Cost-plus" contract appears here, the court has no reason to keep it's costs low because someone that is neither the producer nor consumer is going to be paying the bill. Also, there would be little way of telling when more people are in the judicial industry than is efficient. If there are too few, or too many, the prices paid by the consumer (the victim) cannot go up and down to reflect the shortage or surplus and motivate more or less people to go into law. On the same token, the customer has no reason not to go with the most expensive courts (in terms of resources used, not in terms of money, for the latter won't be realized by the customer), or to use the time and money tied up in the courts to enforce relatively petty contracts, for example using $60 worth of resources to enforce a $10 debt, when it would make more sense to either get it done out of court, or lump it with a number of similar unpaid debts and do them all at once. Indeed, with the full cost paid by the accused, the customer has motivation to waste the resources, and pass the costs on to the accused, as revenge.

My third issue starts when he discusses "Justice in an Ultraminimal State", where the State consists of a court which has a monopoly, a court of final appeal, but with most courts being private. Then in the section "Justice in an Anarcho-Capitalist Society" he says "There is no final court of appeal...no uniform code of justice can be enforced." Implying of course, that things like restitution ratios (how much the offender pays the victim as restitution, for example with a restitution ratio of 2, an offender which steals $100 will be expected to repay $200 to the victim) can be altered at will. He is right in that there is no court of final appeal, but he takes this as if to mean there is no appeal but perhaps to another part of the same court as handled the case for the victim.

Predicting an anarcho-capitalist society is difficult because, as Birch rightly notes nearer the end, there's way too many factors to consider to be able to see them all at once. But what I believe would happen was outlined in my earlier post "Supplanting the State: Courts and Law". In the system I predict will appear, there would up to three courts, one court chosen by the victim (and in most cases, the accused would probably submit to it), one by the accused (for when the accused suspects a corrupt court), and possibly a third court to settle any dispute between the first two. The court chosen by the accused would be the defacto court of appeal, able to find the first court to either have authorized illegitemate siezure of property, or to have found incorrectly if action has not yet been taken. Potential items of dispute between the courts would include guilt and restitution owed.

My fourth problem is a point of negligence on his part. Under the section "Justice an an Anarcho-Capitalist Society" he says, "...there is no guarantee that an anarcho-capitalist society will be just." And he is right. However, he failed to point out the same in the immediately prior "Justice in an Ultraminimal State". There is no guarantee that an ultraminimal state will be just anymore than the same can be said of anarchocapitalism. I say it's a point of negligence because I'm going to be nice and not assume he's taking the justice of an ultraminimal state as a truth which needs no proving, because that wouldn't be negligent, that would be stupid. So I'm calling him negligent. But you know, this really isn't basis to refute his idea. It just shows that the alternative won't be better. I thought the point needed to be made.

Now onto the restitution war. Birch predicts that courts will offer, for example, 150% restitution, at the offender's expense. Victims will flock to the 150% court and not use the 100% (restitutional "unity") courts. In his words: "And why not? After all, it's the criminals who pay. Who cares about them?"

This is where the non-commonlaw, indirect, market-version appeal process comes in. A man expected to pay 150% restitution could take suit against the court that demanded such payment for unjustified theft (assuming the property siezure has taken place, if not, then this would be an appeal) by going to a different court. The victim's court would then likely be found (especially if they have been advertising it to attract customers) to have been unjust in demanding payment, and the offender's court will demand the excess 50% be returned (or, pending the siezure, dropped). It may have to go to a third court, and the third court will in all likelihood not be attracting customers (the other two courts) with 150% restitution ratio, as both courts would need to agree on it.

I think this sufficiently demonstrates why a restitution war will not happen. To make it short, courts that do that, will get sued. Ironic, sorta. I'm inclined to believe that this didn't occur to Mr. Birch because he was still operating within the statist court-of-final-appeal mentality. As he says in the Ultraminimal State section, "The state court will enforce its judgements against all other courts; but no other court can enforce its judgements against the state court." This may have accidentally carried over to his analysis of anarcho-capitalist justice. This statist idea that the courts are not people themselves, able to bring suit and to be sued, but some entity above the people at large, metaphorically similar to a god passing judgement, is easy for even anarchists, and especially statists, to fall into when discussing anarcho-capitalism. It's so easy to do because we never see courts suing each other under statism. Private courts are contractually obligating upon both parties from the outset, and hierarchal state courts merely overturn decisions without punishing bad judgement, and certainly nothing like suing the court, so it's easily missed that it is possible.

However, I'm going to keep going through this, because even if we assume that he has been correct up to this point, which I do not believe he has, he makes more mistakes.

The most notable one for me is what he says and what he does not say right before predictions of the collapse of civilized society into chaotic violence and gang rule. What he says is, that the courts which do not raise the restitution ratio go out of business and whoever has the highest restitution ratio will become the monopoly court or virtually so. I really have no idea what reason led him to that conclusion, since it seems to me that raising the restitution ratio would be a simple matter of policy adjustment. But the point is moot because courts can be sued. Anyways, the notable mistake is where he says that the last court will go "belly up", and then there's no courts. I personally don't get it. If there's a surge in demand for courts, then the price will go up and new courts will pop up like weeds. High demand + Low Supply = High Price = High Incentive for new courts to appear. The predicted crime wave never happens because there will never be no courts on the free market.

Billy-mae and Billy-bob waking up Grandpa Boo for his wisdom in a dispute over who gets to sit in front of the 1937 Ford Pickup on cinderblocks in the backyard right next to the outhouse is as much a court hearing as the professional organizations with suits, lots of wood furniture, and juryboxen. There won't be licensing of courts. There won't be the same situation as if every licensed doctor died tomorrow. Because there would always be the black market, and under anarchy, the black market is just "the market".

My favorite part of the page is the sixth section, "Conclusions", in which he basically gave an ornate version of "I don't really know what's going on here (paragraph 1), but I know I'm right (paragraph 2), but I hope I'm wrong (paragraph 3)." His conclusions speak for themselves, folks.

The Poor

2007-03-20T14:52:00.000-07:00

Common objection to anarchism is "What about the poor? They can't afford X!"

Actually, they could afford it better without the government, because a massive tax burden has now been lifted off of them.

Consider first the income tax. On paper, without knowing better, one would look at Title 26 subsection 1 and think "The income tax is progressive, the rich pay more than the poor."

This is true to a point. This point is the corporation. The example I normally use to illustrate the problem is this:

Average Joe:
Income - $10,000
Expenses - $8000
Taxable income - $10,000

Richard the Rich:
Forms Corporation
Corporate income - $1,000,000
Corporate expenses - $900,000
Taxable income - $100,000

Notice that despite having 100 times the income, Richard the Rich has only 10 times the taxable income as Average Joe. And this is a simpified version not counting all the other tax benefits corporations get.

Average Joe must pay out of his post-tax reserves of money for his insurance, gasoline, rent, and other things.

Richard the Rich pays out of his pre-tax reserves of money for these things, lists them as corporate expenses, and is taxed on whatever is left.

This is why the income tax, contrary to popular belief, is actually NOT progressive. It is progressive only to a point.

The figure I've read is that 95% of taxes are paid by the richest 50%. On paper, this is true. But taxation increases the effective costs of production which increases the cost to the final consumer, in most cases meaning, the poor. So the poor pay for it one way or another.

If Walmart is taxed on 5% of it's income, these costs are not simply absorbed by Walmart. Walmart has to increase prices (or lower prices not as quickly as they'd like to) in order to make up for it.

This isn't half of it, and this is just the income tax.

Now let's look at "subsidies" and "regulations" and "tariffs".

The price of sugar in the United States is 4 times the price the rest of the world pays for sugar. We're talking one of the basic cooking supplies, which the poor pay a greater portion of their income on than anyone else. Why is this? Because of regulations, taxes, and tariffs.

The United States imposed a tariff on softwood imports. Why? Because Canada refused to impose a tax on it. The tariffs raise the cost of building the kinds of homes that the poor would be moving into as soon as they could to escape the slums and ghettos. But now, they are stuck in high-crime neighborhoods for longer because housing is more expensive.

Food is supposedly "subsidized" in the US, to make it more available to the poor. Who eventually pays those income taxes again in the form of higher prices on everything? Oh right, the poor.

Who spends the greatest portion of their income on rent? The poor. What do property taxes do? They raise the costs of operating apartments and the like, causing the prices to rise, causing the poor to pay more.

If you still believe such a thing as "Progressive taxation" exists, you are tricking yourself.

And what about licensing? It limits not only the number of sellers, allowing prices to rise, but it also limits the ability of the poor to become a seller, build a business, and get out of the hole.

Even the police have this problem. Without prices and choice, allowing the poor to decide for themselves how best to allocate resources to secure the rest of theirs, there is too much spent in the way of police-department-bureaucracy and tools used by police, and too little spent in the way of actually protecting people from harm. The poor are overcharged and underserved. The government has no rational means to calculate how much the poor desire the services over the money they pay in taxes.

On the topic of police, who in his right mind would pay money to have a man come and throw him in a cage for selling weed? Nobody! What makes anyone think this kind of "service" is doing any good for the poor?

No matter what the government does, it has perverse consequences. And the poor always bear the brunt of this, because they have the least influence on politicians, they don't vote, they rarely understand what is going on, and when they do, they don't have the resources to do anything about it.

The best way to help the poor is to get the hell out of their way and let them do something about their own lives.

Chaos and Order

2007-03-12T15:16:00.000-07:00

One of the things I did to help me think about the topics I write about here was to make a two-column list. Everything consistent with my philosophy is on one side, everything opposite of it is on the other. This helped me relate certain ideas. As I made this list, I had to figure out which side these two words go on: Chaos, and Order.

They're just not on the list. But some of the things I realized as I thought about it did make the list.

Reality is guided by certain laws. We call these "the laws of physics" among others. These laws create a kind of order to things which does not have to be imposed. It just happens on it's own. It is not because people said "We need to force matter to congregate in an orderly fashion to create distinct objects" that we have distinct objects. The universe, clouds and clusters of galaxies, galaxies, galactic structure, solar systems, planets, moons, asteroids, this order did not come about because it was imposed upon reality. It simply became. Intelligent Designer not required, batteries not included.

Perhaps I'm using this word out of context, but I want to use the word "Emergent" to describe it. The universe as it exists today is the result of the natural order of things. It is the result of individual particles behaving according to their nature.

To some, the universe may seem chaotic. They may think it requires some rearranging to be more orderly. Assuming they had the means to do this, they might for example, place all particles 1 mm apart from every other particle in a tesselating tetrahedral formation, grouped three-dimensionally according to the particle's mass, charge, and spin. The universe would then be more "orderly". But the very moment the laws of physics had to once again be applied, the particles would be organized in a way incompatible with their nature. Particles would attract and form new particles, force other particles away, et cetera. This perfectly orderly universe quickly would become a violent soup of subatomic annihilations and decays. The Intelligent Designer here may have been able to somehow force the universe to be orderly. But one thing no Intelligent Designer can do is change the laws of physics which guide the behavior of these particles.

The same principle applies to people. To some, the free market may appear a turbulent and choatic way of doing things. They can attempt economic control, but they cannot for example, repeal the law of supply and demand. While it might be possible for them to force reality to be a certain way, they cannot rewrite the inherent laws of nature which caused it to behave differently in the first place.

When you force order, you create chaos.

When you permit chaos, reality will give you a sorted order.

Design - Order degrades into chaos.

Emergence - Chaos sorts itself into order.

Ethics and Politics, Truth and Lies

2007-03-12T14:31:00.000-07:00

"The bigger the lie, the more people will believe it." -Josef Goebbels, Nazi

The best political quiz ever given was that which I found on Marc Stevens' website which as of the redesign, I haven't been able to locate. It claimed to be "The World's Smallest Political Quiz." Except it wasn't the one you find on the website of the Advocates for Self-Government. It had one question and two possible results. (WSPQ is not the smallest after all.)

The question: "Should a good or service be provided at the barrel of a gun?"
If you said "yes", you were directed to the definition of "tryant", "despot", et cetera.
If you said "no", the test returned "Congradulations, you are not political."

I am not political.

Ethics and Politics are usually seen with a relationship whereby one's ethics decide one's politics. What you think is moral and immoral determines what you think should be legal and illegal. I don't exactly think of it like that. The relationship between ethics and politics is the same as the relationship between truth and deception. Politicians find ethics inconvenient just as liars find truth inconvenient. Politics and lies deliberately conceal and negate ethics and truth.

Political language is a language of lies. All political words reflect this. When you see a political lie, translate it to an ethical vocabulary. By doing this, you can make anyone who habitually uses political lies look like an idiot by using an equivalent ethical truth.

"Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

Remove the political lies of "Your" (as if you actually had possession or property right in the government) and the implication that "country" means "government" and what we're left with is:

"Ask not what I can do for you, ask what you can do for me."

The stupidest idiot who ever lived could recognize this if not for the success of political language.

When political lies distort reality, the easiest way to set things straight is to restrict yourself to the ethical vocabulary, except to translate political to ethical terms or clarify how these political terms are related to the ethical terms.

When people talk about "war", talk about murder.
When people talk about "law", talk about involuntary servitude.
When people talk about "taxes", talk about theft.
When people talk about "nations", talk about individuals.
When people talk about "legality," talk about morality.

A libertarian reading the words "WAR IS PEACE, FREEDOM IS SLAVERY, IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH" will see a beautiful irony here. That first, there are three perfect absurdities of logic, and three perfectly valid political statements. War abroad distracts the public, creating peace for the ruling class, while peace abroad creates political conflict at home. Freedom of government is slavery, and freedom from government enslaves the government. Ignorance is patriotism, patriotism is the basis of government's consentual element, and strength, force, is used to compel the rest to act as the ignorant masses do. They are three lies, but in the political realm, they are three truths. The political realm is a lie.

One of the most absurd of the political lies is the collective lie.

"National" = "Ours"
"Ours" = "Yours" as in "We tax ourselves."
"Ours" = "Mine" as in "We get federal aid."

"For every dollar we send to the state level, we get five dollars back." -local government

Translation:
"For every dollar you give the mafia I like, I get five dollars."

So whenever you see "Our" or "Us" or "We" or "Nation" or "Country" or "State" in a political context, keep in mind that someone is lying to you.

Deception is an inherent, inseperable part of politics. Politics itself is a big lie.

Gain and Loss

2007-02-26T12:56:00.000-08:00

As I've said in a recent post, people have two economic instincts. Gain, and prevent loss.

One of the insights I gained from LeFevre is that when there is gain to be had, people want to be individualistic. When there is loss, they want to be collectivistic. They want the full benefit of their rewards but they want everyone else to bear the burden of their loss. This led me to realize something. People who are focused on gain tend to be individualistic. People who are focused on not losing tend to be collectivistic.

Individualists, libertarians and atheists, are gain-oriented, they seek to make the most of life, to achieve what can be achieved, to create, seek happiness and reward and glory and riches, to win big and lose big, but learn how to win more often than lose.

Collectivists, socialists and theists, are stop-loss oriented, they seek to not lose in life, and so invent such ideas as a social "safety net" so that nobody can really lose, or an afterlife so that when they lose their life, they believe they are actually going to gain.

From the Rich Dad Poor Dad series, you read Kiyosaki incessantly describing how the middle-class trap and unsuccessful investment and noninvestment is driven by emotion, fear of loss and subsequently pursual of security (and as he points out, there are no safe investments).

As Kiyosaki says, the problem with the stop-lossers is that they never win. "Losing is part of the process of winning," he says. If you want to win, you have to get used to the fact that you're going to lose a few times. He likens it to saying "Here, learn how to ride this bike but don't fall off."

People who are gain oriented respond to loss with thought. When they fail, they learn from it, think about why it happened, what caused it, and what they can do about it in order to gain.

People who are stop-loss oriented respond to loss with emotion. When they fail, they're angry, scared, sad, and negative emotive feedback leads them to have negative responses. And with reason not being applied in this case, it tends to bring out the animal in people.

We should also look at the relationship between freedom and security. They exist on different axes, but any libertarian can tell that there's a correllation between them. Freedom is objective, it's based on the world around you and outside you. Security is subjective, it's nothing but a feeling. It's possible to be free and feel secure, and to be free and feel unsecure. It's possible to be a slave and feel secure, and to be a slave and feel unsecure.

Stop-loss oriented people recognize insecurity as a potential loss. Thus, they seek to enter collectives which spead this loss out, and give them a feeling of safety. They may still feel unsecure, but they believe they will lose less than they would if they were responsible individual. Of course this collective requires collective decisionmaking which requires tyranny, which means slavery. That's why people who seek security end up with slavery.

In short, if you like to win, individualism makes sense. If you don't like to lose, collectivism feels good.

Self-Sufficiency

2007-02-26T12:52:00.000-08:00

In the first post on this blog, which as things are set, you can access by scrolling all the way down, I said that I was a survivalist. I've completely neglected survivalism since that post.

As I've stated before, I recognize three rights, life, liberty, and property. There are three corresponding crimes, being murder, slavery, and theft, and three corresponding dependancies, being defenselessness, obedience, and dependance.

Survivalism has many definitions, and anyone who wants to call themself one can find an excuse to do so. There are those who call themselves survivalists who are back-to-nature types, those who stockpile ammunition and tactical supplies anticipating to kill anyone who has what they want, and any number of other ideas. So I'm going to specify here. Survivalism to me is self-sufficiency in the event of any kind of drastic change. A kind of basic economic independance.

Individualists can't afford to be dependants. Individualists must be independant. Dependancy leads to a kind of half-voluntary subservience, where you put yourself at the mercy of whoever controls what you want.

In this world, everything is interconnected, and in many cases, interdependant. Consider that a very tiny portion of the population supplies a very large portion of the poplutaion with food. Consumers depend on stores depend on distributors depend on manufacturers depend on suppliers depend on producers depend on tractors depend on fuel depends on how angry the middle east is at us. With US foriegn policy what it is, I think you can see the problem here. The producers will look for other sources of fuel if the middle-eastern supply is cut off from us, but a sudden drop in supply without a corresponding drop in demand yields a sudden sharp increase in price. As the price of production increases, the price the product increases. Those poorest neighborhoods where planning for the future is something that is to be done at some point in the future will be hardest hit and least prepared, with the most mouths to feed and the least ability to feed them. As people become desperate, they become either aggressive or they turn to the agency of aggression, the government, who incidentally, they are dependant upon.

I believe that the society most conductive to liberty would have an emphasis on being able to provide for yourself under any forseeable circumstances, although not necessarily to actually provide for yourself, the cost benefits of division of labor would make that uneconomical, just be able to if you have to. The more people are able to defend themselves, think for themselves, and not dependant upon others, the more free I think people will be.

So I believe people should be able to provide themselves with food, water, and shelter, at the very least. I believe people should be able to defend against threats to their rightfully owned means of survival, be able to choose how best to use those means of survival, and not depend on others, especially to the degree we do at present, for these things.

To me at least, it makes sense that the greater the degree of self-sufficiency a community has, the lower the degree of dependancy it has, the greater it's freedom will be, and disproportionately greater in an emergency. And I recognize that the best place to start changing the world is to change myself. So I'm a survivalist in that sense.

Land Ownership

2007-02-22T21:34:00.000-08:00

I use these two words to distinguish here.

Person - someone who respects people's ownership of property.
Animal - nonperson.

All rights are property rights. So by extension:

A person has rights.
An animal doesn't.

Rights aren't inherent, there are no "natural rights", they're conditional. If you want your rights to be respected, you must respect others' rights.

If you have a human that doesn't respect people's ownership of property, then they are not a person, they're an animal. Person does not always mean human, nor does human always mean person, as I use the words.

In case it's not obvious yet, I deny the idea of proportional force. If someone threatens you with a pocketknife, you have every right to blow their head off their shoulders by any means necessary, or make a slave of them just as you would if they were an ox plowing your field, for instance. When they do that, they make themself no longer a person, they make themself an animal.

I got an objection recently that this would mean that if you even set foot on my property without my permisson, I could kill you or enslave you.

No. There's a difference here.

You can violate someone's rights without rejecting their rights.
You can reject their rights without violating them.

Suppose I own a patch of land and I don't want people walking across it. But I fail to put out any signage saying "No Tresspassing" or a fence or something to that effect. You have no way of knowing that I don't want you walking on my property. You could think yourself in the right to be on my property unless told otherwise, similar to your assumption that you are in the right as you walk around Walmart.

Now, this is a violation of my property rights, whether you know it or not. What determines whether I can rightfully kill you or not is how you respond to being told to leave.

If you leave, then you have violated my property rights, but you are respecting my right of ownership of that land, and if I attempted to sue you for restitution, I couldn't prove any damage to be repaid for. Unless you did some damage while you were there, this would be the end of it.

But, if you do not leave, I can assume you do not respect the idea of rightful ownership. By logical extension, you deny any exclusive right to your own body, and if you do that, you surrender your "person" status and reduce youreslf to an animal. Then I can do whatever I want rightfully, pertaining to you.

If you want to become a person again, you'll have to start respecting my ownership of the land again. You'll have to leave (or at least say you will and act toward leaving) if you want me to assume you have any right to your life, liberty and property. You may also owe me restitution if you caused any damage.

In other words, just because you violate someone's rights doesn't mean you don't have rights anymore. But if you want to keep your rights, you will have to pay them back any restitution, and respect the rules they set with their own property.

One of the reasons this was brought up was because the idea was brought up of people mining their yards with explosives.

I do have a right to plant mines all over my property. It is after all, my property.

If one of those mines happens to injure you before you deliberately ignore my ownership of the property, then I'm wrong.

You still own yourself as you walk onto someone else's property. They can tell you what to do so as not to violate their rights, but you still have rightful ownership of your own body. You do not make yourself my property as you walk into my yard.

Before I can be made irresponsible for anything that happens to you, you have to disrespect my rightful ownership of the property, you have to deny my rights and act to violate them.

If you have rights as I violate them, then I owe restitution. If you were obeying all the rules of the property, you still own yourself, and it's still wrong for me to blow you up with a landmine.

That's why I can't kill you just for walking on my lawn.

Who I am

2007-02-22T00:02:00.000-08:00

I thought I had like five readers of this blog. Appearantly this isn't so. I seem to have readers I've never heard of. This is a pleasant surprise.

So, I figured none of these new people would know much about me. Many of the readers I thought I had have known me for years. So here's a quick explanaton of who I am.

I'm 19, white, male, agnostic-atheist, living in Florida, moving to New Hampshire with the Free State Project, with no more credentials than a high school diploma. I had no formal education in philosophy or logic whatsoever, and my formal economic education was nine weeks in a typical economics class where Keynesianism was taught (Keynesianism is a load of bull). Like most of what I know, I taught myself. I work in the back of a KFC washing dishes and live in a trailer park where I'm leeching wifi on my father's laptop for my internet access. Not proud of it but this is who I am.

I've been kinda libertarian all my life, mostly wanting to be left alone, thinking my conservative parents' ideas about gays and such was completely stupid, and I pretended to be Christian, although I was a deist for most of my life. I call myself an agnostic-atheist because while I reject all religion as a load of BS, I think a deist type of god is possible, even though there's no reason to believe or assume it exists.

I discovered libertarianism as such on December 28th, 2005. About a year ago. I figured "I'm 18 now, maybe I should look into politics to see who to vote for." I came across the World's Smallest Political Quiz. I ended up voting libertarian on everything except drugs, which I was unsure of. When I found the result of being extremely libertarian, I knew where to look for the rest of my politics. The last record I have of me identifying my political beliefs before using "anarchist" was March 6.

Before then, I already understood the stupidity of both political parties, but I called myself a "Republican" because Republicans were a little more individualistic than Democrats. Keep in mind, I knew and cared not what "individualism" and "collectivism" even meant, but I understood the concepts in a kinda fuzzy sense and would have considered myself individualistic.

I've always known that people were stupid. I've spent a lot of time arguing with people over silly things, and once I discovered what I call debating sports, I was addicted. In the year before I found libertarianism, I spent half of my time debating console fanboys. So I'd gotten a taste for arguing with people and was well aware of many of the fallacies I deal with on a regular basis.

Reading through the LP platform (Pre-LRC-bastardization), I saw the policy on secession. It read like "We support the right of individuals and states and communities to secede". I thought about this, and I realized that consistent libertarianism was anarchism. At that point, the other legos fell into place and I became an anarcho-capitalist. I don't know exactly when this was, but it was obviously after March 6, 2006 and before April 27, 2006, which is the first record I have of being called an anarchist.

Many of the things I write here are not so much me explaining what I know, it's a part of my journey through discovering libertarianism, which as I said, has taken place over the past year. It's me putting in words things that I've always known, but never been able to explain. I recall describing what I do on my blog to one friend as "Taking what you already know as a fuzzy concept and putting it in words that make it clear to you." As I come to any realization or clarification, I'll normally post something about it here. In this sense, maybe it's good that I've never taken a formal lesson in any of these things, it lets me start from the perspective of a reader that hasn't either, and I think they're the largest pool of potential libertarians that would be receptive to my message. And that may be why I've gotten any readership other than my known friends.

Because this is the documentation of the process of me discovering libertarianism, some of my more recent work may be in contradiction to some of my earlier posts. Not glaringly so, but partially. I'm not contradicing myself, so much as changing my mind as I realize I was either wrong or was using a word incorrectly, which is something to be expected during the process of discovery, right? I'm hoping that the things I write will help to reinforce anarchocapitalists, draw libertarians to anarchocapitalism, and make libertarians of nonlibertarians.

A few of my major influences are Rothbard and the Austrian School of Economics, Robert LeFevre, Marc Stevens (Author of Adventures in Legal Land), who led me to Lysander Spooner, George Orwell, a little Stefan Molyneux, a little of Ayn Rand, and much of my libertarian entertainment is a product of Free Talk Live. If you read or listen to some of these people, you'll see exactly what parts of each of these I combined to form my perspective.

So this is who I am.

Don't Underestimate Defense

2007-02-19T23:15:00.000-08:00

People value things. This is so self-evident a fact it needs no proving.

People have two fundamental economic instincts:

1. Gain things of value
2. Prevent loss of things of value

One of the objections I've gotten pertains to confusion on this issue.

The contention is, people will try to gain things of value by force just because it will work.

I believe, to the contrary, people will avoid using force because they do not want to lose their life for some limited gain. In fact, people tend to have a desire to prevent loss far greater than their desire to gain. This is why many investors are failures, they aren't playing to win, they're playing to not lose. The feeling of security is inextricably intertwined with prevention of loss. And we all know that people seek security. This is actually one of the larger problems libertarians have to deal with.

If I am capable of defending myself with deadly force, this is an extremely convincing arguement against initiating force against me. You may see a great potential gain in doing so, but the potential loss involved, even if you and your friends outnumber me 10:1, will dissuade you from doing so, because there's always a chance I'll kill you. How many times would you play a game of double or nothing?

In the case of government this doesn't apply. The risk of retaliatory force is so low because the government is so widely accepted as legitemate and so powerful that it's literally not resistable. You may take out one or two of them, but they will crush you. Archoexceptionalism creates an exception, enough people believe it to be so that it becomes so.

In all other cases, where someone who is not seen as rightfully able to do as they please, which is anyone that you'd encounter absent a government, can expect to encounter violent resistance to any aggressive action taken.

People will usually ignore the gains when the potential loss is great, even if the probability of loss is small.

You won't have bands of murderers running around under anarchy killing people. The risk is too great. They will either get themselves killed, or as their friends are killed in repeated aggressions, they will realize they will inevitably die if they continue.

This is why I think it's so important that people be at all times able to defend themselves with deadly force, with no reguard to proportionality of force.

Arguement Against Anarchy 4

2007-02-09T22:33:00.000-08:00

A common charge against anarchocapitalism is that it's "too extreme". Ignoring the fact that this completely fails to refute anything whatsoever, let's look at the charge anyways.

On any particular issue there are five possible things government can do.

1. Prohibit
2. Regulate
3. Ignore
4. Subsidize
5. Mandate

This is how it works on every issue. They can do more than one of them, but they must be doing at least one.

Some people want the government to prohibit drugs. This is obviously an extreme policy.
Some people want the government to regulate drugs. While not an extreme policy, it is not moderate either.
Some people want the government to ignore drugs. This is the middle-of-the-road policy.
Some people want the government to subsidize drugs. Not extreme, but not moderate.
Some people want the government to mandate drugs. This is obviously an extreme policy.

What's the most moderate policy? Obviously, it's to ignore drugs. This is a moderate's policy.

Some people want the government to prohibit people from protecting themselves.
Some people want the government to regulate self-defense.
Some people want the government to ignore it.
Some people want the government to subsidize it.
Some people want the government to mandate it through police.

What's the most moderate policy here?

If you're going to be a consistent moderate, you have to take the position that the government should ignore every issue. In other words, become an anarchocapitalist. Ironic? Yes. If you are going to be completely consistent and never violate the principle of being moderate, anyways. Then you'd have to become an extremist in the pursuit of moderation.

This is when many people come to the realization that it is necessary to harness the power of doublethink to make the point that you need to be moderate in the pursuit of moderation. Of course, the only way to do that is to become more extreme.

Either moderation contradicts itself, or does not contradict anarcho-capitalism.

Have fun trying to work your way out of the trap you set for yourself.

"National" "Security"

2007-02-06T23:39:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Jason Orr on the Free Talk Live forums for this idea.

One of the biggest objections to an anarcho-capitalist society is "What if you get invaded by another country?"

Usually the assumption that the region in question is the United States and the point being made that it's thousands of miles of ocean both ways with friendly neighbors, the issue can be avoided. I prefer to do this because it takes a lot less effort.

One brilliant possibility I heard of seems like it would apply very easily.

If we assume first that a libertarian society exists and has for a number of years, every major company would want to move there to avoid taxes. Let's assume, for example, New Hampshire becomes an anarcho-capitalist society. And suppose the US wants to invade.

What would the companies do to defend themselves? I can see the broadcast right now.

"Hello, my name is Z. Hwasi, the CEO of Hwasi-Miess Defense and Courts, and I understand your country may be planning an invasion of the New Hampshire region. This causes us great concern. Should your country go through with this, you should know that a bounty will be out for you. Every Congressman and Senator who votes to support such a measure, every General who leads your army, your President, and anyone else responsible for the decision to invade, will have a bounty out on their head to be paid five hundred thousand ounces of silver at the lowest, and such person who can prove that they killed you will be given safe haven in New Hampshire, free platinum-level protection for ten years, and the bounty money. We expect most of the rewards will be paid to your closest advisors, assistants, and other employees. We trust you will put great consideration into your decision."

Who would dare invade? By doing so they invite their employees, and even each other, to betray them.

Why Libertarian Debate is Hard

2007-02-06T12:20:00.000-08:00

The typical political debate for me goes like this.

I say we don't need the government. That it's immoral. That it's impractical. That it's ineffective. That it's wasteful. That it's destructive. That it requires a thousand logical contradictions to make sense.

From that point on, it is my job to defend anarchy from every concievable hypothetical failure imaginable, including some which don't apply, some which couldn't apply, some which only apply to statism, some which are absolutely stupid, some which contradict themselves, and then the same ones over again just for good measure.

It's always the same thing. I'm thinking I need to reconsider my methods.

When I am on the defensive, I cannot gain ground. When I go to the offensive, people ignore me until I am back on the defensive. This is not going to work.

On one forum I've been visiting I am defending anarchy in 8 different threads. I am on the offensive in one thread, which I created, had to bump 4 times to even get a single response, and then the only response was "This thread should be locked."

I brought up every arguement in support of anarcho-capitalism I could think of, and rebutted all the objections I could think of. And what's the response? I'm ignored, save someone wanting to permanantly ensure that I could only be ignored.

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

It seems the statists automatically assume that they have a moral and pragmatic high ground. They can't afford to fight on a level playing field. I might be just playing their stupid little game by acting as if I'm on the low ground. Next new place I'm going, I'm going to try ignoring their claims that it will eventually fall back into government, in favor of attacking the very concept of a government in the first place as being wrong.

When people are open-minded to liberty, explaining to to them is easy. They eat it up and ask for more.

When people are not, they won't tolerate you explaining it to them. Your job as the anarchist is not to attack government, but to give them a strawman to beat up so they can feel good about themselves. Fighting back is not playing by their stupid rules.

All I ask for in debate is an open mind and a level playing field. Why is it so hard to find them?

The government and the popular media has people equating anarchism with chaos. The government has turned 99.9% of the population into dependants who could not imagine themselves surviving without government. Anyone who attacks the government provision of anything is fighting an uphill battle.

But I like challenges. I like being forced to think. So I'm going to keep fighting uphill battles until I'm dead or I'm at the top of the hill.

Tax Strategy: Tar 'n' Feathers

2007-02-05T02:06:00.000-08:00

I got a W-2 today. My Income Tax Strategy in 4 words or less: KILL IT WITH FIRE.

Something I would love to see happen -- to the point that I would do it myself just to ensure that it gets done -- would be the classic "Revolutionary" tax collector treatment.

That means tar, feathers, and a nice big "Tax Collector" sign, paraded through downtown Concord in the back of a pickup.

Everybody hates the IRS. If McVeigh had bombed an IRS office, he'd be a nationwide folk hero. I'm not planning on bombs, however. That would get me labelled as a terrorist. Not pretty. I just want to show the government, "It's been 230 years, and we still hate taxes." It's not like I want to hurt anyone (save some massive embarassment for the IRS agent). I just want the world to know how I feel. And I know a lot of other people feel the same way. They just don't act on it.

A thought not put into action is a thought never thought at all. A thought shared by millions is never thought if not acted upon. It only takes one person to act. The rest will then respond, and their response will show their thoughts. And the response to the responses of others will reinforce those thoughts.

The ground is exceptionally fertile for the seed to be planted right after a tax increase.

What would the response be? Among politicians, with no doubt, the response would be outrage. Among voters, the response would be laughter. From a jury? They might just aquit. With enough Freestaters spending the weeks prior to and during the trial giving all potential jurors a FIJA flyer, the chances really aren't too bad at all.

What a better place to tar and feather an IRS agent than the lowest taxed State in the Union.

Random Libertarian Debate Points

2007-02-05T01:24:00.000-08:00

These are a few things I've found in my adventures debating with nonlibertarians. Some are taken out of context, but putting them back in context should be simple enough to make it easy for new libertarian debaters to learn to apply. I'll update it as I hear other clever ways of phrasing things.

"A patrol or two a day in a neighborhood and a response time of 15 minutes or more is somehow sufficient to stop mass killings. Let's entertain this stupid idea for a moment..."

"At the very least, petty warlords do not have the time or patience to enforce stupid laws and economic regulations."

"Okay, the government protects you from criminals. This just delays the problem. Who protects you from the government? Under anarchocapitalism, you'd just call in another [Private Defense Agency] if yours is being abusive. Under government, you don't get that redundancy."

"It's a lot harder to get people to pay taxes when they think you're just a petty theif."

"The government does not invent, create, or produce, the market does. The government spends all it's time trying to regulate, impede, or otherwise loot the market."

"Some people would rather have higher pay than a safer workplace; you are not involved in that decision so you are not to make that decision for anyone else."

"The market is shortsighted? Who is more shortsighted? Bill Gates or Bill Clinton?"

"Government is a hopelessly utopian idea. To work, it requires intelligent voters, selfless politicians, and omniscient bureaucrats. None of these three have yet manifested in reality. But that's okay. Maybe it'll work someday when we finally get that perfect world where we don't need it anymore."

"What do you mean Libertarianism requires faith in humaity? Bullshit. I have no faith in humanity. That's why I have no faith in cops, bureaucrats, and politicians. Government requires faith in humanity."

"People who say government is a 'necessary evil' tend to emphasize the 'necessary' and ignore the 'evil', leading me to believe they're just regurgitating rhetoric."

"How oh how did humanity ever evolve without economic regulations?"

"If people need leaders because they are idiots, then democracy is a stupid idea, because idiots will just elect other idiots."

"I've yet to understand how calling oneself a 'government' gives you such amazing powers."

"You think under libertarianism the government would be owned by corporate interests? I thought that's what we had right now anyways."

"Wages are prices. If you want high wages, you want high prices. Next time you raise wages don't bitch that prices are going up."

"...which begs the question, why does it still happen today if the government has solved these problems for us?"

"If you can't afford a $300 AK-47, you have better things to be doing than organizing labor unions."

"I said people should be held responsible for their own actions, not that they would take responsibility for them."

"A pissed off hunter with a .308 isn't going to play nice or fair when his life, liberty, and property are in jeopardy."

"It's not necessarily true that all people will do anything to achieve their goals. As for those that do, why don't they just take political power- oh wait."

"I want to hit people when they start telling me how great democracy is as if it is the very emobidment of freedom itself."

"If the government were consistent it would break itself apart for violating monopoly laws."

"And this system of mutual tolerance is what we call 'Libertarianism'."

"If the goal [of checks and balances] is to stop asshole A from overriding asshole B, the obvious solution is to get rid of both of them and scrap the whole government so neither asshole has anything to take control of in the first place."

"This 'voting with dollars' thing they give you in economics is an attempt to make you equate democracy with freedom. You don't actually vote with dollars."

"Government is people, it's wrong for people to hurt each other, therefore it's wrong for government to hurt people. How people don't get it is beyond me."

"Under government violence is far more widespread. It's just disguised as 'Law enforcement'."

"'We' are not the government."

"The Labor Theory of Value is a questionable economic theory which is for some reason often interpreted as a law of morality."

"The unethical nature of the method of funding [taxes] necessarily precludes the question of the unethical nature of not paying."

"If the government wanted me to pay, they wouldn't give things away for free. On the market, people put a price on things before allowing them to be used. The government can do this too. Oh wait, no it can't. If it could, people would be able to choose not to interact with the government."

The Natural Selection

2007-01-26T22:46:00.000-08:00

Reality naturally seeks an equilibrium.

When something changes, nature will change to balance it out. It will adapt to new conditions, not necessarily consiously.

Adaptation is integrally woven into life on earth. Including adaptation to adaptation. Some species are more adaptive than others, but all adapt.

The market operates the same way. Some businesses are more adaptable than others.

Sometimes things change. A species will die out. The climate will change. Demand for products skyrockets. Businesses fail. Everything around it will respond, and soon they'll be humming along like business as usual. This is the natural order of things, the result of natural selection.

In contrast to natural selection is artificial selection.

Dog breeding is artificial selection.
Ethnic cleansing is artificial selection.
Economic regulations are artificial selection.
Democracy is artificial selection.

When you breed dogs for purity, you end up with some of the wierdest things. Narcalepsy, weak immune systems, psychological disorders. Things break down.

When you cleanse races, you narrow the genepool, and allow what might have actually been a superior race to die out.

When you regulate the market, you limit the conditions of production, and thus limit production, reducing the capacity for people to solve problems. You get problems.

When you use democracy, you limit the potential for more natural selections to appear and be tested in the playpen of real experimentation, possibly eliminating something superior from coming about.

Allowing everything to happen and letting nature sort things out is the most effective way of determining what works and ensuring that it keeps working in changing conditions.

Human knowledge is imperfect, so artificial selections are not always correct. Natural selection will sort this out. Incorrect artificial selections are incompatible with natural selection and will naturally fail.

Incorrect artificial selections which cannot coexist with correct selections not only fail, but make the process of natural selection impossible, and will force something larger to change when nature adapts.

For example, natural selection dictates that the equilibrium price of bread (intersection of supply and demand) is $1 per loaf.

An artificial selection might set the price of bread at $0.90 per loaf. Another might set the price at $1 per loaf. Another might set the price at $1.10 per loaf. These are compatible. One artificial selection does not prevent other artificial selections from being tested. Whichever artificial selection is correct will be rewarded. The 90 cent loaf will lose revenue and sell out before demand is met, the $1.10 loaf will undersell, while the $1 loaf will sell well and offer profits. The profits are maximized at $1.

Another artificial selection might be that bread producers are more important than everyone else, therefore nobody shall sell bread at less than $2 per loaf. This is incompatible with other options. The correct artificial selection is impossible to test in the real world. So something bigger will change. People will buy less bread. People will make less bread.

Reality WILL assert itself, whether you like it or not. And if you don't let it change when it "wants" to, it's going to change some other way, and probably going to do so in a way that brings worse consequences than you sought to prevent.

It makes sense to allow all potential selections to be tested as natural selections. To do this requires tolerance of other potential selections. No potential selection is inherently superior to any other potential selection until it has been tested against natural selection and chosen. Whites are not inherently the superior race. Equality is not inherently superior to class division. If you believe they are, then the only way to know for sure is to let natural selection pass judgement, not to attempt to prevent all others from being tested, as should you be wrong, you will force something bigger to change, and the bigger the change, the smaller the pool of natural selections which will survive that change.

Some things must be allowed to succeed.
Some things must be allowed to fail.

To disallow these things will simply make matters worse later on.

Collectivism

2007-01-26T11:35:00.000-08:00

There are two mutually opposed ideas in the world.

Individualism deals with the sovereign unit of the individual.
Collectivism deals with the sovereign unit of the collective.

The root words, obviously:

Individual - a single person, one mind + one body
Collective - a group, more than one.

Individualists deal with every individual as someone who thinks, acts, makes decisions, and oberves the world independantly.

Collectivists deal with the sovereign unit of the collective, and all thoughts, actions, decisions, and observations apply uniformly to all members of a collective.

Individuals pre-exist collectives.

If you have some individuals in a collective, take away the collective and you're left with individuals.

If you have some individuals in a collective, take away the individuals and you've got no more collective.

Individuals are discrete. It's easy to tell when one person and another person are differet.

Collectives are arbitrary. A single person can be a member of multiple collectives simultaneously.

Individuals are real.
Collectives are figments of the imagination.

Individuals have minds.
Collectives are creations of the mind.

Individuals can think and act, individuals are sovereign.
Collectives cannot, only individuals in the collectives can.

Now that I think I've pretty well shown that individualism makes sense and collectivism is stupid, let's look at some examples of collectivism so you can recognize it in the wild.

Towns/Cities/Counties/States/Nations/Countries: Collectives by geography.
Races: Collectives by ethnicity.
Democrats/Republicans/Libertarians/Communists: Collectives by politics.
Christians/Jews/Muslims/Buddhists/Atheists: Collectives by religion.

All of these are arbitrary.

"White" is not a set I belong to, it is a trait which is part of me.
"Atheist" is not a set I belong to, it is a trait which is part of me.
"American" is not a set I belong to, it is a trait which is part of me.

If I say "All these objects on my desk constitute a collective", I'm simply grouping them by my perceptions of a common trait among them: They are all on my desk. I'm not creating any real or object that can be dealt with singularly as if I was referring to an engine or a firearm.

Right-wingers usually bitch about how left-wingers are collectivistic. Right wingers then appeal to nationalism. Nationalism is collectivism. Right-wingers are hypocrites.

Did you catch the collectivism right there? I said "Right wingers are hypocrites". Don't fall into this trap of collectivizing people like that. Learn how to catch when people say things like this. Next time I say something like that, a red flag should go up in your head. Not all right-wingers are hypocrites, but the ones that bitch about collectivism and support nationalism are (not all bitch about collectivism).

Individuals are the only sovereign units which really exist. Jews do not make decisions, nations do not make decisions, blacks do not make decisions, it is individuals who are jewish, reside in an area, or have black skin, who individually make decisions.

Arbitrary collectives are deceptive. Some would have you believe all leftists support affirmative-action, for instance. But this is not how things work. I know some who think it's racist (and they're right). Coincidentally, racism is collectivistic.

It is possible to have an individualistic collective. If the collective is voluntary, then all members of the collective are acting as sovereigns to participate in the collective. If not, if it is involuntary, then it is a collectivistic collective.

When you group people into arbitrary collectives and make generalizations, your generalizations tend to fall apart.

When you drag people into an arbitrary collective with you, such as "society", then you run into the problem of people who don't want to be a part of your society, and your collective fragments into the individuals which really exist and constitute the arbitrary collective.

Collectivism is bogus, and useless.

How is this relevant to anything?

"Society needs to take care of it's less fortunate."

How is society defined? Everyone else living in the area? That's an arbitrary grouping to include me. I don't force you into my imaginary collective, so don't force me into your imaginary collective.

And what's democracy? It's based on the arbitrary geographical collectivization under governments, deferring the sovereign unit from the individual to the collective, directly contrary to reality. Same thing as above.

If you can find some other people that want to go play collectivism with you, have fun. But don't make people play who don't want to. The game is going to fall apart.

Identify all instances of collectivism in your thoughts, and stomp them out. They stand in opposition to reality, reason, and liberty.

Archoexceptionalism

2007-01-25T22:24:00.000-08:00

This is the new word I coined for people who believe the government is morally justifiable.

Archo - from greek "archon", meaning ruler, often meaning government.
exceptional - excluding, excepting, not counting
ism - idea or belief.

In plain english, it's the belief that government is magical. It's the belief that while it's wrong for people to murder, enslave, and steal, it's alright and even beneficial if done by government.

Which as I've said before, what's government but a group of people?

If it is wrong for a person to do X, then it is wrong for all people to do X.
If it is wrong for all people to do X, it is wrong for groups of people to do X.
Government is a group of people. It is wrong for government to do X.

This means, no war, no law, no taxes. This is not compatible with government. So statists must be archoexceptionalists in order to rationalize it.

"No you cannot rob Peter, that's wrong. But Peter isn't paying his taxes, now Paul won't be getting a Social Security check."

"No you cannot force Peter to let you look around his house. But the police can get a search warrant and that's okay."

"No you cannot kill Peter, that's murder. But if he resists the IRS agents we're sending to his house we'll kill him."

"No you cannot print money, that would be bad. The Federal Reserve has to print all the money."

"Nobody but the government can build roads."

"Nobody but the government can school the children."

"Nobody but the government can stop the terrorists."

"Nobody but the government can offer police protection."

You can see the clear archoexceptionalism present in these statements.

Another great example is the definition of violence in the public mind.

When a man shoots a cop, even in self-defense, that's considered crime.
When a cop shoots a man, defensively or not, that's considered justice.

How does he do it? Archoexceptionalism. He's not just a man with a badge and a uniform, he's the government. He's excepted from the normal rules.

I'll reiterate, the government is a group of people. Anything one group of people can do, any group of people can do. There is nothing inherent in any one group of people that makes them superior to all others by the very title which they give themselves.

Statism requires archoexceptionalism.

Archoexceptionalism is irrational.

Statism is irrational.

Daily Bread

2007-01-16T22:49:00.000-08:00

There are three subsets of rights. Life, Liberty, and Property.

There are three subsets of crime. Murder, Slavery, and Theft.

Between these we have, Defenselessness, Obedience, and Dependance.

When you are defenseless, obedient, and dependant, you are giving up responsibility, which means you are giving up control over yourself.

Defenselessness is giving someone else control over your life.
Obedience is giving someone else control over your liberty.
Dependance is giving someone else control over your property.

This is what we in the biz call a "slippery slope". When you give someone else control over you, they are not going to give you that control back. Taking it back is difficult because they have an advantage over you that prevents you from getting it back. From that point on, it's the ratchet effect.

Gun ownership is the solution to defenselessness.
Disobedience is the solution to regulation.
Independance is the solution to the welfare trap.

Keep control of your own Life, Liberty, and Property, because it's exactly what collectivists, fascists, and socialists want you not to have. If you do not give up any control, it will be harder for someone to come along later and take control.

"...they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'"

Arguement Against Anarchy 3

2006-12-07T01:27:00.000-08:00

People love to resort to this one if they find no other way to attack the idea that government is unnecessary.

"Without government, you'd just have big corporations hiring private armies and taking over."

I'll give you the long refutation first, and the short version second. Because I feel like torturing you with common sense.

First thing that you have to consider here is the motivation. In order for such a venture as the violent conquering of a territory to be done, there would have to be a percieved reward. Let's call it taxes. The violent megacorp, let's call it "Vichi Incorporated", would have to have a means of compelling the payment of taxes.

Door to door assessment and payment is out of the question. It's too impractical, opens the tax collectors up to too many ambushes, and if the private army is collecting the taxes, they're going to demand a big pay raise to do recurring systematic and predictable entry into everyone's business or home and steal the tribute. Vichi would not have the systematic, institutionalized, ritualized, or legitemized method which governments employ. Victims would not see these payments as "their fair share", but as theft, and respond appropriately (i.e. shoot the bastards). Vichi would have a very hard time collecting any taxes, and the taxes collected would likely not be enough to cover their costs.

The second thing to consider is the costs. War is not cheap. How much would a private army cost? Most people would not accept money to go get shot at, except "patriotic nationalists", and those wouldn't really exist in anarchy, since anarchy isn't national. A gang of mercenaries would be expensive. Aside from that, any mercenaries that wanted more than offered might, "just to teach Vichi a lesson", tell everyone else of Vichi's plan, so they can be ready for it. This will only amplify the costs in both lives and dollars for Vichi.

The third thing is resistance. There would certainly be resistance to this. Protection agencies, militias, your average everyday gun owner...in anarchy, where an SMG could be had for $80 and bombs made for whatever the explosive costs (it's extremely cheap), it's fully possible that the anarchist resistance would be as well armed as the private army, and have the defender's advantage. Vichi would obviously not have priorly claimed the territory involved and therefore gun control would be absolutely impossible.

Governments have an exceptional advantage in each of these. They do not have to conquer a territory, they already have some. They can collect taxes easily because dissent is scarce enough that the violaters can be systematically determined and imprisoned. They can get fighters for very cheap also, because part of the population would patriotically fight for their government without pay, and the rest of the population could be drafted. Resistance under government is difficult because of the general consensus that the government is good. Vichi would have to work from scratch.

Even considering the advantages which the government has, governments still default on their debts. I can assure you that a private army would stop fighting if they weren't getting paid anymore because the war expenses were greater than the tax income for Vichi. Vichi would run up a debt from the costs, what little tax income could be gathered would not go nearly as far as the total costs.

Vichi would have to play a very precarious balancing game as the fulcrum was shifted around underneath them. Suppose one soldier can keep 20 men under control (I'd guess higher, but consider the ease of resistance with explosives and guns being so easily attainable). Vichi would have to figure out how many people can be controlled per soldier, and extract at minimum, that soldier's annual pay from the 20 people. If we count men, women, and children in those 20, the median income in the US is $40k per year. Let's assume families of five, that means one soldier can control people who produce a total of $160k per year. Let's bump that up to $240k to consider the kids and the wives, who are less likely to be working or for as much income. At 10% tax, Vichi could pay each soldier $24k and break even if it had zero management overhead. Will mercenaries work for $24k per year? Some will. Others will want more. At 20%, Vichi increases the motivation for guerilla resistance. This will correspondingly increase the pay demands for the private army. If the mercs started demanding $36k per year, Vichi would be extracting $48k, and make a $12k profit per merc, with which to pay for any overhead. At 50% tax, resistance would be far more than proportional to the increase in taxes. Mercs would not survive very long and so only for massive pay would they continue fighting. Not only would Vichi have to balance the taxes with the mercenary's pay, but they'd also have to balance the population density. If 20 people moved from outside the area being controlled to one place where 20 other people were, but Vichi only put 1 mercenary there, the probability that the combative among those 40 will kill the mercenary is much higher. This is assuming a point of general obedience could even be reached.

Vichi had to get it's money from providing some kind of good or service on the market, after it attempted to rule everyone else, this good or service had to have a lot of infrastructure and capital invested which would have the floorplate fall out from under it. Vichi's invested time and energy in it's previous (and obviously successful) venture would all go to waste as people witnessed Vichi's actions and boycotted it.

The short version is, the government will protect you from the violent megacorp's private army...but who protects you against the government?

Arguement Against Anarchy 2

2006-12-07T00:10:00.000-08:00

Authority, as I use the word, means violently imposed decisionmaking. Self-defense is not authority because it is not decisionmaking, it is just violence. The decisions of someone you choose to follow are not authority because they are not violently imposed. I understand that other definitions of the word exist, but this is how I will be using the word. I believe it is not terribly different from how most people use the word when debating against the assertions I'm going to try to make here.

A common objection to anyone proposing the abolition of government is the cry that "Authority is necessary!"

No it's not. Let's take a look at why it's not.

If authority is necessary, then authority is necessary for everyone. If not, it's unnecessary.

Who is the authority of the authorities? Nobody. They either do not need authority, in which case authroity is unnecessary, or they need an authority and don't have one, in which case the present system is a failure.

Or perhaps authority over the ruled rests in the ruled themselves. But that is not only impossible, but absurd. It is impossible because the nature of authority is violence, and if authority rests in the ruled, then subjection to the authority must be absolutely voluntary. It's absurd because, if authority over me is granted to George W. Bush, and authority over George W. Bush is granted to me, we own each other, but not ourselves. Why is this necessary? Why can GWB not lead himself and why can I not lead myself? It is necessary that we must be slaves to one another?

But that's avoiding the issue most people mean when they say authority is necessary. They usually are thinking in terms of "We must protect the weak against the strong." What this really means is "Protection must be provided by force." Why? It makes no sense. Maybe sometime soon I'll make a post about private police protection.

Let me second point out what a contradiction this is. Protection against what? Violence? And you violently impose this protection upon them? Doesn't that make the whole thing self-defeating?

They also frequently believe that authority is necessary to keep people in check. This is also untrue. People who want to hurt others will not be stopped by authority. People who do not want to hurt others are not being stopped by authority. Removing authority will not turn a peaceful, married father of three into a theif. And any authority short of omniscient cannot stop a dediated killer from killing.

I've also heard an arguement about liability. Supposedly, without a central authority, nobody would be held liable. This is untrue and backwards. With a central authority, nobody in the central authority is held liable. With no authority, everyone can hold anyone else liable for a tort or breech of contract or use of violence or whatever. Only under central authority do we get such bullshit as "Sovereign Immunity".

So no. Authority is not "necessary". The moment you try to apply it, it starts contradicting itself. It's not only unnecessary, it's absurd. Stop believing this stupid rhetoric.

Democracy vs Market

2006-12-03T23:13:00.000-08:00

"We hold these truths to be self-evident...that all men are created equal..." -Declaration of Independance

Democracy is an idea that rests on the equality of all people. Rich or poor, black or white, right or left, all people are equal. If one man were created superior to all others, monarchy would be justified. If one group of men were created superior to all others, and all in that group equal to one another, oligarchy would be justified. Democracy is contrary to these, it requires that all men are created equal.

Are all men created equal?

Certainly it is absurd to treat one group of men as if they are superior to another group of men by their very nature, and thus should rule over the others. Democracy deserves credit for avoiding that idiocy. There is absolutely no reason to believe that one person's interests supercedes another person's interests. But that doesn't necessarily mean people are equal.

One person is one mind controlling a body. Minds are subjective. And subjective spheres cannot directly access other subjective spheres to identify anything about them, including their actual existence.

But this means that two minds cannot be compared at all. And if they cannot be compared, they cannot be said to be superior or inferior, but nor can they be said to be equal. Superiority, inferiority, or equality is irrelevant for the simple reason that it is impossible to ascertain in the first place.

Aggression is irrational because one who aggresses believes that they or their interests are superior to the victim's interests. Having no way of determining that, they are necessarily acting in absence of reason.

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on dinner. It treats the sheep as if it's desire to continue living were equal to the desires of two wolves to eat. We have no way of determining whether that is true, however. For all we know, the sheep may desire to live with 10 times the intensity of the wolves' desire for dinner.

What we can do instead is the method of the market. For example, if the Sheep values it's life at many millions of dollars, the sheep will not sell itself for less (assume the sheep would like it's family to have a lot of money). The wolves may value the meat of the sheep at $40 for all the meat, wool, et cetera. These prices are how we can determine how intense people's individual wants and needs are.

Which system is more rational? Which system is more fair?

Democracy asserts knowledge where none can exist. It is two wolves and a sheep voting for dinner.

The Market is where we can have knowledge which Democracy believes to have. It is two wolves trying to buy a sheep for dinner, but not having enough money.

I'll vote for the market.

Plant Seeds in Fertile Soil

2006-11-19T18:34:00.000-08:00

On my blog and in my discussions I'm extremely blunt. Anarcho-Capitalist. No government, free market. I'm sure this drives a lot of people crazy and turns them off immediately, so I'm considering rethinking that tactic. After all, if nobody is listening to you except people that already agree with you, you end up trapped in a world where you vehemently think everyone else is wrong and nobody cares.

We use two different kinds of words these days. We use descriptors and names. "Automobile" is a descriptor. "Car" is a name. We want a descriptor which has positive, or at the very least, non-negative implications. In absence of such a descriptor, it's better to use a name.

Libertarian was a pretty good descriptor, but has recently become a name. And that name has become associated with the Libertarian Party and the huge number of people who call themselves libertarians have no principle or consistency. They advocate one tax because it eliminates another, and advocate gay marriage frequently without considering the possibility of abolishing state marriage. So it has implications that we want to avoid; it is no longer consistent in the public mind with our goals.

Panarchy is one possible descriptor. It does have the drawbacks of being a word nobody has heard of before, and being impossible to explain without leading them to think you actually mean "anarchy".

Acracy is also unintuitive and impossible to explain without saying "no government".

But I think I've found a good descriptor.

"Market government" is a contradiction in terms, the two are completely at odds, which invalidates the "government" part while not retaining that appearance. But consider the implications of saying "Market Government" to someone you're trying to convert. They'll think you're a little fringe, which you are, anarchism isn't mainstream no matter what you call it, but their minds are not reflexively closed to the idea. It takes the immediate burden off of proving that we are better off without government (as well as setting aside such considerations as "what about the roads/what about the poor/what about my favorite program) and shifts it to allowing you to explain that you believe government services should be provided by the market, offering you a choice of governments and allowing you to choose the best government for yourself.

This allows you to lead people into the idea rather than the usual response to anarchism, which is to distance oneself as much as possible and criticize it from afar, not bothering to check the validity of any points but rejecting them outright and then seeking a way to dismiss them as patently absurd without needing to actually refute them.

You do not need to tell them that roads, police, and courts may be provided by three seperate companies. If they ask about that, you could say "If the market supports that kind of service division, it does so because that is how the customers want it." This way you can advocate a totally free market without government controls. If they ask "Who governs the government services?" ask a similar question which applies to the present day such as "Who governs the United States?" The obvious answer to either is "the people", although people's power over governments would be much greater with a free-market government than with a central monopoly government.

I'd like to see anarcho-capitalism marketed as "market government" to see if people are truly more responsive and acceptant of the ideas. Showing someone the ideas from the inside before telling them what they're looking at will make it so that even if they quickly figure out that you are advocating anarchism, they will have seen the reasons behind the idea from the inside. This is a good way to deal with the problem of people judging ideas by their labels.

Anarcho-capitalists and libertarians, once realizing the basic truths of anarchism, rarely change and become republicans or democrats. They may abandon the term anarchy, but they do not abandon the ideas. You can show someone the ideas, and if their mind is open, they may never fully abandon those ideas, even if the reject the name given to them.

If you can show them why the market works and why the monopolies do not, it is easy to advocate anarchism under the title "Market Government" and get a number of curious interested people introduced to the basic premises of anarchism before they reject it. It performs the critical function of planting the seeds of truth, which, if nurtured, grow and become stronger until a metaphorical tree of knowledge is planted in them, which they will have a hard time denying if you continue to ask them about it from time to time.

Plow the dirt, get their mind ready for the ideas. If you don't have an open mind, you can only plant in barren land.
Then sow the seeds. Introduce them to the fundamental principles like market vs government, and explain the advantages of the market.
Then water the seeds by citing how the ideas work in various specific instances. Why they are protected from their neighbor advocating shariah law, for instance.
The seed will grow roots into their mind, and become almost impossible to uproot to replace with another tree. Hack as they may at the branches, they might never pull up the roots.
And eventually, if the tree grows large enough, the ideas may spread when the tree bears fruit and plants it's own seeds later on.

Deep Anarchy

2006-11-16T22:20:00.000-08:00

I'm a Deep Anarchist. This is more of a perspective of anarchism than a kind of anarchism.

Deep Anarchy is looking at the State as a shared delusion, like a religion, rather than as a concrete entity. Rather than assume government, as most people do, it assumes no government, and treats the actions of certain people acting in their capacity as a government as merely individuals acting under the delusion of working for a ruling body.

We already live in anarchy. Let us assume that States exist. The State can only use authority where it's agents (police) are there to enforce it. Because police are limited, the reach of the State is inherently limited. At any particular time, the police can only control a certain limited area. They can't be everywhere or see everything. In fact, they can't be most places at most times. Unless there is a police officer close enough to you to protect you, you are essentially in a state of anarchy. At that moment, you can act without fear of police action. The fact that these anarchies exist should be obvious. Without them, crime would be impossible. People today can smoke a joint, mug a passerby, fuck a whore, and any number of other illegal activities because they do so in a state of anarchy. The potential for the anarchy to be broken by the presence of a police officer drives them to avoid the police.

But States are arbitrary mental groupings of only cognitively related objects (in this case people and buildings). "States" are imaginary. The people forming the State are certainly real.

If we just assume that States do not exist, and look at bureaucrats and cops for what they really are, bureaucrats and cops, individual people, who exercise violent and coercive authority over others, then the situation looks different. Enforcement action taken by the DEA, rather than appear to be anarchy being broken by the presence of police, becomes overt and unremorseful theft between individuals acting under anarchistic circumstances. This is the worldview that results from the perspective of Deep Anarchy.

I should take the time to note that anarchy does not mean chaos. It means statelessness. A lack of some kind of monopoly ruling body. People will still be people without the government. Their values will not suddenly change. Peaceful people will continue to be peaceful and violent people will continue to be violent. The violent would not see a lack of police as a green light for rampant killing of innocents. Especially under anarchy, where peaceful people would not face police harassment and imprisonment for carrying their most effective means of self defense with them. Police, as noted above, cannot be everywhere, and cannot enforce justice everywhere. The people at large can defend themselves better than the police can defend them, and they can defend each other even better still. The violent, while they might no longer fear enforcement action by the police, will suddenly have much more to fear from enforcement action by victims and other peaceful people. The green light for killing sprees will become a red light when the potential victims are finally freed to defend themselves without restriction imposed by government. The cocky hardass gangstaz will rethink their criminal intentions if faced with aptly free and well-armed potential victims. They might be cocky hardasses, but they're not suicidal sadomasochists.

Question as much as you can. Assume as little as possible. Question government, and do not assume government, and you may reach similar conclusions as mine.

Searching for Ownership

2006-11-08T18:06:00.000-08:00

One of the central ideas of Libertarianism and rational morality is Ownership. It's also the one that has given me the most trouble to test the soundness of. To my advantage it is an almost universally accepted concept which rarely comes into question except in the case of Tradtional Anarchists who deny Ownership, so I never have to actually explain it to people.

But that's not good enough for me. This is after all an idea on which the concept of rights are built. Should the concept of Ownership have no valid justification at all, then the only valid philosophy would be Traditional Anarchism, and if I cannot prove that Ownership exists, how can I say that rights exist?

It is insufficient for me to ask "What is the alternative to Ownership?" first because I can only speak from the perspective of someone who has lived his entire life in a world of Ownership, and second because it does not prove a reasonable basis for Ownership except a utilitarian one, and as utility is subjective. I could certainly discuss the ramifications of abolition of ownership, and it would not be pretty at all in my opinion.

I could talk about scarcity and value, and how life must consume resources, and how in a world where resources are not infinite nor omnipresent it becomes necessary to allocate resources, but this could at best be an arguement for possession, not ownership.

I could talk about how peace is desirable, and that ownership is repsected because failure to respect it results in violence...but this would be accepting Non-ownership as a basis to disprove Non-ownership while simealtaneously assuming Ownership to prove Ownership. I suppose ownership is subjective, but I do want some firmer, objective foundation for it.

Perhaps a combination of these are why the very idea of owning something is never questioned. People just don't want to question it because the results of questioning it might result in long-held beliefs simply falling apart.

Hence is the quest for truth. If I cannot refute Non-ownership nor prove Ownership, I might have little choice but to accept Non-ownership. Unless perhaps Ownership builds upon Non-ownership, but I haven't figured out how that might work yet. I certainly like Ownership, and don't want to give up the idea as unfounded. But in intellectual honesty if I can't give it a foundation it won't hold up to any criticism. It is unlikely that Ownership will be criticized by anyone I encounter, but I still like the security of having a sound basis for it.

Free Your Mind To Free Your Body

2006-11-07T00:00:00.000-08:00

On top of the irrational beliefs in gods and governments, there is an equally pervasive belief in compulsory wearing of clothing. Stand back and look at this objectively for a moment.

You come out of your mom's womb. You were not born with clothing. Hence is man's natural state. It is not by nature than humans must wear clothing almost purpetually.

Some might claim that nudity promotes lust. I contend that there's actually nothing inherently wrong with that, but that it's untrue anyways. Nudity is not inherently sexual. Yes, you are generally naked when you have sex. But I can point out plenty of other times that you're naked that you're not having sex.

Ask yourself the following question: "What is the function of the bathing suit?"

It doesn't make you more wet. If it does, it makes you more wet when you want to be dry. It impedes your swimming, so it's certainly not designed to make you a better swimmer except in recordsetting and flotation swimsuits. Does it dissuade sexual fantasy?

The very act of hiding genitalia creates sexual mystery. Wearing a bright red bikini attracts attention directly to the genitalia and then says "No! You can't look here!"

Imagine I shout at you to come look at something and then as you get closer I put it in a box and tell you "You can't see it." Is that going to make you want to see it more or is that going to make you want to ignore it? Now, if I called you over to look at something and showed you a glass of water, with nothing unusual about it, it's not exactly like all other glasses of water but it's not terribly different, what would you think then? You'd ask me what's so special about it as if you were obviously missing something because if you weren't you certainly didn't want to spend your time looking at a glass of water.

Yet the people who believe in compulsory wearing of clothing would see the bright red bikini as less sexually interesting as no bikini at all. Or at the very least, more decent.

As a matter of fact, the concept of a bathing suit is only about 100 years old. Before then people just stripped down naked and hopped in the pond/river/ocean/bay/gulf/lake/etc. Skinnydipping wasn't even a word because an alternative way of doing things wasn't even bothered to be thought of.

People do not need clothes to survive. I don't know why people think you do. Clothes are no more necessary to survival than calculators. People say "Food, Clothing, Shelter" as if they were three different things. Clothing is portable shelter. You don't always need shelter, just when things start getting pretty bad. And in this day and age of air conditioning, central heating, good insulation, telecommuting, et cetera, it's less necessary than it ever has been.

I'll grant that sometimes clothing is useful. If you're cooking, welding, playing with liquid nitrogen, smoking, or doing anything else where there's a high likelyhood of something hot, poisonous, cold, sharp, or extremely fast moving hitting you, you probably shouldn't be doing it naked. And if it's really cold outside, or you live in the desert, then you have some reasons for wearing clothes.

But when it's betwenn 65 and 95 degrees outside, there's no practical reason to wear clothes. If it's raining, your skin dries off a lot faster than your shirt does.

If you're working out, your sweat will evaporate faster if you're not wearing anything, and you'll cool off better. You also won't have to peel your clothes off to get in the shower. If you're sitting at home doing something else, you'll be amazed how quickly you forget that you're naked. And if you're being harassed by those damned Jehova's Witnesses again, answer the door naked. They won't be coming back anytime soon. And if you have never been skinnydipping you are seriously missing out on a wonderful experience.

So why do we wear clothes? Especially unnecessary and redundant clothing. On males, all it takes to be "decent" is a pair of underpants or boxers. Yet we wear so much more. We wear a shirt or two, pants, and sometimes a hat, at least in fair weather. That's 5 times as much clothing as we need to be "decent". Certainly we'll attract attention doing that but we won't get arrested for indecent exposure. Most women would venture out in public wearing the skimpiest bathing suit in existence before going out in their regular underwear. Why? The bathing suit is more revealing, so it's not how much skin is showing.

It's not like the Bible bans nudity. Nowhere does it say "If a man goeth out into market and is not wearing his garment, he shall be taken to the edge of town and stoned." Not at all. Jesus actually said "He who has no sword, let him sell his garment and buy one." (Luke 22:36) Jesus would rather have you naked than defenseless. And the prophets tore off their clothes in the street and prophesied nude. It was pretty normal. Fishermen at the time almost always worked without their clothes on. But one of the things you learn about fundamentalism is that when it makes policy decisions, half of them glaringly contradict the Bible. Prohibition on alcohol for example.

So, why do we wear clothes 24/7? It's not to keep people from lusting after us. It's not because we don't have fur. It's not because we melt when it rains. If it's because it makes us "decent" then that definition is arbitrary and hence invalid. Because we "just don't wanna see that"? That's caused by the arbitrary decency and social conditioning. My personal belief?

Herd mentality. If you subscribe to the clothes-compulsive mentality, beat yourself in the head until you realize that most people are stupid, so if most people believe it, it's probably stupid. So don't follow a bunch of stupid nitwits. You have your own brain. Use it.

Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth

2006-11-05T18:19:00.000-08:00

As Ludwig von Mises, the Austrian Economist, proved in his book "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth", economic calculation under socialism is simply impossible. My reasons for saying this are quite different from Mises', but much easier for the layman to understand. I'll put it in very simple mathematical terms.

2+2=0: Value is Objective

Under socialist thinking, value is more than just something we perceive. Something has a certain value, and it doesn't change from person to person. To someone who believes it, mutually beneficial exchange is simply not possible. One man cannot make one dollar except at the expense of another. So if I have something I think is worthless and another person has something I value at $2, and what I have, he values at $2 and what he has he thinks is worthless, if we trade, and each come off perceiving the trade to enrich us both by $2 each, the total wealth increase is actually zero under socialist thinking.

2+2=2: Reality is Subjective

Socialists must always deny reality in order to practice socialism. They do this by picking and choosing the reality they want to live in, and dismissing the rest as absurd. An increase in the minimum wage, under socialist thinking, will cause low-wage employees to all get pay increases. This action has no consequences except when it's convenient for the Socialist thinker. Socialist thinkers ignore undesirable consequences. In this way, four real consequences can actually be two. While in the Socialist's subjective reality, the wages increase, and employees get more money, in the real world the effects are the employer's costs increasing and the subsequent firing of employees. Those effects, if even acknowledged, had other, unrelated causes.

2+2=3: Redistribution Maximizes Welfare

To a Socialist, 1 million dollars in the hand of one man is worth less than 1 dollar in the hands of 1 million men. This actually contradicts their belief that value doesn't change from person to person. The belief is that redistributing wealth evenly will maximize overall utility and "collective good." And this will not affect the production of wealth, as we already know how to do that and that will not change. So it is true under socialist thought that 2 men with $2 each has the same collective good as 1 man with $3 and 1 man with $0.

2+2≠4: Exploitation is Evil

Socialists think paying low wages for unskilled labor is inherently wrong. Paying a worker for what their labor is worth, that being whatever wage they agree to sell their time and energy for, is exploitive. So for two hours of work worth two dollars per hour, paying $4 is wrong because it's exploitive.

2+2=5: The Collective Supersedes Individuals

This is the basis of all collectivist philosophies. To Socialists, a thing can be completely separate from the sum of it's parts. The collective supersedes the individual. So for example, if you have 4 individuals forming a collective, a Socialist might judge the collective good to be worth 5 individuals, because the collective always outweighs the sum of it's parts. Under this logic it's perfectly fine to kill a dissident individual and that this can be done in such a way as to make all of them all better off than they were before, including the dead one, because it was done for the "collective good."

22=4: I Know Everything

It is possible under Socialist thinking for someone to know what is best for the collective. Someone can know how to create and distribute goods and services in such a way as to maximize overall welfare. In reality, the amount of information necessary for this to work in a complex economy is greater than what a single human mind can comprehend, much less evaluate without leaving out any relevant information. If 22 units of information are needed to plan the economy, then only 4 are actually used to plan the economy, because that's all that was "really needed" to plan the economy.

2+2=22: The Living Wage

A wage is really just a price paid for labor. Under Socialist thinking a wage is an amount of money given to someone by an employer for them to live off of. And if the wages given are lower than what is supposedly needed to live off of, then exploitation is taking place. Under socialist thinking, if I make $2 worth of butter per hour, let's say that's 10 sticks per hour for two hours a day, and thats my employment, my labor is enough to earn me a "living wage" of $22 per day. To a Socialist thinker I should be able to buy 110 sticks of butter a day, even though I only made 20.

For Socialist economic calculation to work, not only do all of these have to be true, but they must all be true simultaneously. That's why Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth simply does not work.

(revised 11/08/06)

The Rich

2006-11-03T23:38:00.000-08:00

A lot of people seem to think the rich got rich by either being lucky, or by stealing it. If the rich became so by stealing it, they could only have done so through government, or the definition of theft being used is different from mine. So in this post, I'll address the "You get rich by being lucky" idea.

Becoming rich is a course of action guided by a way of thinking.

Money is made through production. Production is the allocation of resources to meet demand. Whose demand is irrelevant. You can produce for yourself (i.e. grow a tree that bears fruit for you to eat) or for others (transfer the fruit to others), it really is not important. What is important is the allocation of resources.

The poor and middle class are trapped in a little thinkbox. That thinkbox is "The way to make money is to work for it." In effect, they think that the only resources they can allocate to production are their time, effort, and talent. They allocate these resources to meet demand by finding an employer that demands it and selling it. They create a surplus of value, earn a wage, and spend that wage. How they spend it depends on their class. The poor spend it on their day-to-day needs and the occasional toy and their bills. The middle class spend it on a new car, a new house, et cetera, which they always buy with debt and create recurring expenses.

The rich don't think that way. They see that everything they own is a resource to be allocated. They do own their time, effort, and talents, so those are certainly resources which may be allocated. But what the rich do is think of everything they own as something that can be allocated to meet demand. Their money, real estate, all their property can be allocated and create a surplus of value. The rich might start by working just as a poor or middle class person does, but what they do with the money is very different. Rather than buy things to satisfy their own demands, they allocate the money they earn to meet someone else's demand. This is one of the essential principles of becoming wealthy. You must produce more than you consume. The rich do not consume their money, they use it to produce. They might loan it out, for example, to someone who needs the money now, and get a return on the investment, the interest. They might buy a house, for example, and then rent the house out to tenants, creating a recurring income. Pay attention, because this is how the rich become rich. I've heard it called the "Infinite Bootstrap Principle". What does the rich man do with this surplus of value he created? This income from rent? He buys, for example, another house. Now he has two sources of income, two tenants renting to him, and now the money is coming in twice as fast. This takes absolutely no effort on his part, he can keep his day job while he is earning these passive incomes. Soon he buys a third house to rent out. Then a fourth. And a fifth. He can buy each one in less time than the last one because the money is rolling in faster than when he had fewer houses and fewer rent paying tenants. At this point, he can quit his day job, as he has enough income coming from the renters that he no longer has any need to work. He can devote an extra 40 hours of his week to allocating his resources, figuring out what he has, looking for people that might need what he has, creating a surplus of value, and spending that surplus on additional resources that other people might need.

That is how the rich get rich. It's not by magic, it's not by sheer luck. It's not because they were born rich, and it's definitley not because they steal it.

When someone attacks the rich for being so rich, keep in mind that they are rich because they are allocating resources to those who want them more. They might own property worth billions of dollars, yes. But that money is all tied up in business ventures seeking to meet demand. Also keep in mind I'm not just talking about consumer demands. Employees make demands as well, they demand a paycheck, and supply something valuable in return. The rich's money is all tied up in investments and real estate. It's all tied up. They don't have a 500 million dollar house with 400 rooms filled with millions of dollars worth of fine art, furniture, servants and maids, or anything of the like. They more likely live in 10 million dollar homes with good furniture and a great view, but that's just not where their money is. They are not surrounded by their wealth, their wealth is out at work looking for workers to hire and customers to satisfy.

And the only reason the gap between the rich and poor is so wide is because the poor don't know this. If they did, the poor would be doing exactly what the rich did. And there are two possibilities for what this might do, both are a good thing in the eyes of those seeking 'economic justice'.

1. It would bring the poor up to the standard of living enjoyed by the rich.
2. It would reduce the opportunities of the rich such that they will eventually be pulled closer to the poor.

I do care about inequality. I just don't care about it the same way those that won't shut up about it care about it. I don't think the gap between the rich and poor is a good thing. I want that gap closed, but I want it closed by the poor bringing themselves up to the rich. I am not happy to hear that 90% of the wealth is in the hands of 10% of the population. The amount of wealth in the world is not static, it's not a big pie where one can gain only at the expense of another, the poor can bring themselves up without bringing down the rich. That is what I want to see.

If you care about the gap between the rich and the poor, do not focus on penalizing the rich. No good will come of that. Focus your efforts on helping the poor bring themselves up. That way, everybody wins.

My Philosophy

2006-10-31T21:03:00.000-08:00

My philosophy is based upon looking for nonsequiturs and arbitrary statements, and eliminating those from my philosophy. Nothing is immune from being questioned. I have called into question such basic ideas as ownership and rights. I have called into question such enshrined institutions as the Church and State. I have called into question such widely accepted ideas as democracy and human rights. I have questioned the basic foundations of each of these to see if they rest on arbitrary assumptions, total nonsequiturs, or if they are actually sound. Even after I satisfy myself on such a topic, I question it again and again. I have previously believed in philosophies such as subjectivism, nihilism, Randian objectivism, and others. I have previously believed in majority rule, government legitemacy, collectivism, and Christianity.

But I question and question and question everything, taking nothing for granted, challenging all assumptions. In this way I encounter a philosophy or idea and then to the best of my ability, I attempt to refute it's basic assumptions.

To say the Bible is infalliable is an arbitrary statement. If the Bible is not absolutely infalliable, then nothing in it can be said to be absolutely correct. If the basis of Christianity is in question, anything built upon that basis is in question as well.

To say that the collective supercedes the individual is an arbitrary statement. If the individual can ever supercede the collective, then the doctorine cannot be said to be absolutely correct. If the basis of collectivism is in question, anything built upon that basis is in question as well.

To say that government is needed to protect rights is an arbitrary statement. If rights can exist without government, or government can exist without protecting rights, then the doctorine cannot be said to be absolutely correct. If the basis of Randian Objectivism's politics are in question, anything built upon that basis is in question as well.

In short, when I encounter a new idea, I strip it down to it's basis and test to see if the basis is sound. If it is, then you may proceed from there.

One of the problems with communication of philosophy is the arbitrary nature of communication itself. If you have ever watched an individulist and a socialist argue about Capitalism, it is not hard to figure out that the two are not using the word to mean the same thing. Hence, it is critically important that when you approach a word that is being used in a context not consistent with your definition of the word, you must ask them to clarify exactly what they mean when they use the word.

One such word is "Human". How does one define human? Is it determined by genetic makeup? If a complete human genome were inserted into a bacterium, would that bacterium become human? Would it have human rights? Of course not, that would be asburd. If a human is defined as a primate with little hair, then you exclude the Ramos tribe of humans who have hair all over their body. If a human is defined as such a being not necessarily applying the "little hair" rule, then you introduce all primates into the human category. We all know what a human is, really, but if we cannot define it rigidly and absolutely, how can we determine if something qualifies for human rights? If we cannot do so, how can we say that rights are derived from being human?

Any time you encounter a determining factor that is open to interpretation, question it. If someone says "You have rights because you are rational", ask them how they determine how rational is rational enough. If they give some arbitrary point, ask them what it is about one above that point but not the slightest increment below it that makes the infinitecimally less rational being irrational. They can give no answer to this without using circular logic, the "it is because it is" reasoning, which only reinforces that the statement was arbitrary.

"So," you might ask, "If you question the basis of everything, what is the basis for your philosophy?"

The basis of my philosophy is that there is absolutely nothing which is beyond questioning. There is absolutely nothing that by it's nature is not to be questioned. "Cause and effect" is not immune from being questioned, although it has passed questioning. "Existence exists" is not immune from being questioned, although it has passed questioning. "God exists" is to be questioned. "The Bible is Infalliable" is to be questioned. "Humans have souls" is to be questioned. Everything, absolutely everything, without exception, is to be questioned.

It does not matter if questioning it makes people angry. It does not matter if questioning it gets you rejected from society. Do not accept beliefs simply because there are negative consequences to not doing so. Pretend to believe them if you are threatened with violence for not professing belief, but do not simply accept an idea without first questioning it's premises.

Question premises. Question authority. Question everything.

Supplanting the State: Courts and Law

2006-10-31T20:56:00.000-08:00

One of the biggest objections to Anarcho-Capitalism is the belief that without Government, there can be no way to get recourse for a crime committed against you. This is untrue.

There's a lot of diversity within the Libertarian movement as to what kinds of law, law enforcement, courts, et cetera are best. My position is not necessarily the one held by most, or even any significant number of Anarcho-Capitalists or Libertarians.

So what would we do about the courts?

Let's start with the basis of justice, injustice.

1. The Crime

Adam lets Ben borrow his car. Adam asks for it back, but Ben does not return it. (I chose names beginning with A and B to help you remember who is who.)

2. The Judgement

Adam goes to a respected arbitrator and put his case before the court.

a) Contracts

In a totally voluntary society it would be likely that written contracts would be used extensively when something as valuable as a car is at stake. So, for example, if Adam let Ben borrow his car, Adam might write a contract saying that "Adam is allowing Ben to use his car until Adam asks for it back". It would include Ben submitting in advance to any punishment the court (which may be named in the contract) decides on for breech of contract. Ben could make the case in court that Adam permanantly transferred ownership to Ben, that Adam gave him the car, not let him borrow it. If Ben had a contract with Adam's and his own signature which transferred permanant ownership of the car to Ben, and Adam did not have a later dated contract transferring ownership of the car back to him, Ben would not be held liable for returning the car to Adam, because as far as the contracts say, the car belonged to Ben.

b) Hard Evidence

Suppose Adam did not have a contract, however. By making some indelible, obvious, distinct mark upon the car, perhaps an unremovable license plate style identifier, perhaps with Adam's name and signature on it, welded onto the rear bumper, perhaps, and by claiming that a car with such identifier was now in the possession of Ben, Adam would be able to make a case. The court may ask Ben to bring the car in question to the court, to be allowed to make the case that it is not actually Adam's car that Ben has possession of, but a similar car belonging to someone other than Adam. Of course this would be totally voluntary on Ben's part, although refusal will only bring up suspicion and not help Ben's case.

It should be noted however that courts will be hesitant to judge such torts without contracts.

c) Witnesses

Adam would be allowed to bring in witnesses to testify that they saw Ben with Adam's car. Witnesses would have to sign a contract with the court saying that should their testimony be found to be intentionally deceptive, they would sumbit in advance to any force used by the courts to enforce retribution or reparation or whatever the court uses to convince witnesses to not give false testimony.

3. The Reparation

a) Under Contract

If the court (which was agreed upon in the original contract would therefore be entirely voluntary) decides that Ben has a car belonging to Adam, and that Ben needs to return Adam's car, Ben would then be obligated to return Adam's car. If Ben should then refuse to return Adam's car, Adam may go back to the court, and demand enforcement action, which would have been voluntarily submitted to in advance by the original contract. The court could then send it's enforcement agents to forcibly return the car to Adam. Ben would not be allowed to charge the court's enforcement agents with assault because Ben had already given them permission to assault him if necessary, the moment Ben signed the contract and accepted the terms of it. However, if Ben should resist and attack the enforcement agents, the agents would be able to bring charges against Ben in the same way Alex did.

b) Absence of Contract

If the court decides that Ben has a car belonging to Adam, it would then order Ben to return Adam's car. At this point, Ben could either get in touch with Adam and ask for a retrial in a different court that the two could agree upon (contractually such that it's decision would become obligatory and enforcement would become voluntarily submitted to in advance), or Ben could give Adam the car in question, or Ben could refuse to return the car and not demand a retrial.

If Ben decides to give Adam the car, that is the end of the dispute.

If Adam and Ben can agree upon a second court, the retrial will take place with a different and agreed-to arbitrator, whose decision becomes voluntarily obligatory and binding, the process repeating itself though under contract.

If Ben does not return the car, and Adam and Ben cannot agree on a new court for retrial, Adam returns to the court. Adam asks the court to declare Ben to not respect ownership, and thus not have rights (understanding and respect of ownership is prerequisite to having rights, and if any being can be shown not to respect ownership, it cannot be said to have rights).

Ben would then have his rights nullified until such time as Adam gets his car back. Any attempt by Ben to press charges against anyone else in court would be denied, as Ben would not be said to have any rights. Ben would become an "Outlaw," essentially an animal, until Adam was restituted and hence anybody would be free to kill, enslave, or take property from Ben without Ben having any legal recourse. Anyone Ben attempted to bring suit against could merely point out that Ben has been declared an outlaw.

4. Reinstitution of Rights

After Ben is declared an outlaw, he would obviously be in great danger. Adam could freely come and take all of Ben's property. So what could Ben do about it?

Well, Ben could go to the court which declared him an outlaw and attempt to get the ruling overturned. Obviously this would be the ideal. However that court has already decided that Ben has wronged Adam and not restituted him. If Ben believes the court to be crooked, he may go to a different court and sign a contract (which would make the second court's decision binding) asking for a restitution of his rights. The other court could then ask for the evidence from the first court. If the first court provides none, the second court could restitute Ben's rights. The two courts in disagreement would then contractually find a third court to find one or the other court to be biased and the decision thus invalid. If the two disagreeing courts did not do so, anyone not respecting Ben's rights would be charged in Ben's court, including enforcement agents from Adam's court. Depending which court the third court found to be errant, the decision would be binding upon both courts and Ben would be declared with finality to have rights or not have rights.

However, let us assume the second court recieves the evidence from the first court, to review the case. Ben would of course be allowed to review the evidence to ensure that nothing on his side has been left out. Then the second court, one of Ben's choosing, and not Adam's, would review the case. If the second court agreed with the first court, Ben would be declared an outlaw. If they disagreed, the third court would be sought as described above.

In the event Ben cannot recieve rights, Ben will have the option of entering protective custody. He could voluntarily enter a jail which, rather than keep outlaws in, would keep potential attackers out. He would be free to leave, though if he does so he risks being attacked without possible recourse. He could also transfer his property to the jail for protection, property to be returned once Adam has been repaid and Ben is thus no longer an outlaw. Should Ben do this, however, the jail which would then own all of Ben's property would be likely to restitute Adam. The Jail's revenue could come from Ben's work, or out of the property held in safekeeping for him, depending on the policy of the jail. When Ben's work surplus is sufficient that the jail can restitute Adam in money, if not in returning the car. At that point Ben would have his rights restituted by the first court, and when Ben left the jail, he would have his property returned to him, minus perhaps any payment that the jail took.

And so we have a free-market judicial process which is voluntary, simple, and contains within it checks to prevent corruption. It does not require a State to function, it focuses on restituting the victim rather than punishing the offender, satisfies everybody and oppresses nobody.

Rights: What? When? Where? Who? Why?

2006-10-30T19:44:00.000-08:00

What are rights?

According to dictionary.refrence.com definition 18, "a just claim or title, whether legal, prescriptive, or moral"

When do we have rights?

Always. Because rights are something one a just claim to, rights must be absolute and therefore must be constant irrelevant of time. If not, one's sense of justice is arbitrary. Rights such as the "right to healthcare" are not rights because if medical science does not exist, the right does not exist either. In all the time before healthcare and medicine existed, a "right to healthcare didn't either.

Where do rights come from?

Fundamental to rational morality is the concept of Self-Ownership, the idea that you own yourself. If you own yourself, that means you have exclusive control over your body. This was covered in the previous post entitled "Morality".

If you own your body, which you do, then you have a just claim to it. Anyone attempting to take control of your body is taking your exclusive control over it is violating your right, your "just claim" to your own body.

Who has rights?

Aknowledging that rights come from self-ownership, self-ownership is clearly how we determine whether someone has rights.

Self-ownership is a two-pronged concept.

1. Self, a recognition of one
2. Ownership, a recognition of others

A being which has no concept of self, nor any concept of ownership extending beyond momentary possession, does not have rights.

How do we test for these things? First, we offer the being a representation of itself. In optically capable creatures, this would most easily be done by providing a mirror. If the creature treats it's representation as a totally seperate animal, then it is not self-aware, thus having no concept of self, and not qualifying for self-ownership. All creatures require sustaining energy, so a good way to test for concept of ownership is via offering a number of such creatures (which are allowed to move and communicate between themselves freely) individual sources of such energy. For example, food. Each creature would have one source of food. Only enough food for one creature would be provided in each, and would be provided in fluctuating intervals. Then, by cutting off the supply of food to a number of such creatures, if the creatures who have been cutoff do not immediately resort to taking from the food sources of others, they can be said to understand the concept of ownership.

So who specifically does and does not have rights?

A normal adult human has rights because it has both self-awareness and understanding and respect of ownership.

A dolphin could have rights if it demonstrated self-awareness and understanding and respect of ownership. (To my knowledge dolphins have demonstrated these traits, and thus, they have rights.)

A fetus does not have rights because it has no self-awareness nor understanding of ownership.

A criminal does not have rights because it has concept of self, and understands ownership, but does not respect ownership.

A cockroach does not have rights because while it is unclear whether or not it has concept of self, it does not have concept of ownership.

A bacterium does not have rights because it has neither self-awareness nor ownership.

A class of people does not have rights because it has no physical manifestation, thus cannot possibly think. Individuals of a certain class do have rights provided they are self-aware and understand and respect ownership.

Why do we have rights?

Rights are the founding basis of peaceful, cooperative interaction. Rights are the foundation of civilization and society. Cooperation is mutual benefit and mutual benefit is good for everyone. Rights are a way to maximize welfare and overall happiness. And we rational beings with rights would never want it any other way.

Arguement Against Anarchy 1

2006-10-19T11:50:00.000-07:00

In discussing anarchocapitalism with a certain state-glorifying friend-of-a-friend, I learned a bit about the anti-anarchist mentality.

He believed that people are inherently bloodthirsty ravenously murderous animals that would attack everyone else with anything they had available, and that the law gives people morality and allows them to cooperate with each other peacefully.

Oh, and for some strange reason, this applied to everybody except him. He was perfectly sane and rational and trustworthy, but everyone else was an animal that had to be kept in check. Elected officials are also exempt.

Let's look at the evident absurdities here, and why they might actually be believed.

1. People are inherently bloodthirsty, ravenously murderous animals that would attack everyone else with anything they had available.

Why its wrong: If people's natural tendency was to randomly kill each other, as he made certain I understood his position to be, we would be forever engaged in combat. Police are not numerous enough to prevent such nature from showing itself.

If it was correct: If it were people's nature to kill each other without reason or motive, the sane and rational people who enter government to control others for their own good would be killed before being able to do so, and there would be no controlling body to keep people's animal nature in check, and there would be no government.

2. The law gives people morality.

Why it's wrong: It's generally believed that what is moral is right, and what is immoral is wrong, and that what is legal is right, and what is illegal is wrong. This is a problematic belief because of the nature of morality and law. While law does occasionally emulate morality, and morality frequently emulates law, the two are not identical. They exist independantly of one another. "Do unto others as you would have them to unto you" is not a law, it is a moral. You can repeal laws against public nudity, for instance, by getting a certain group of people known as a legislature to repeal the law.

If it was correct: People's moral codes would never object to laws passed. If one has ever watched the news, one can see that this is not the case.

3. "I am excluded from this rule."

Why it's wrong: Fear arises from uncertainty, and uncertainty is a given when dealing with other people. One tends to fear that other people are directly opposed to them, not because it is the most likely possibility, but because it is the most dangerous possibility, and therefore the one that should be prepared for. The belief that one is excluded from the rule that all people are animal except oneself stems from the priority given to the emotion of fear of the most dangerous possibility.

This fear drives people to believe that for their own safety, everyone else must surely be restricted.

If it was correct: If all people were rational and sane and believed all other people to be irrational and insane animals, all people would unanimously agree that there needed to be some method for them to control others. What would that result in? Pretty much what we have today. It's ironic because the vast majority of people are not animal, yet the belief is held that they are.

4. Elected officials are exempt from this rule.

Why it's wrong: When you have democratic government, the governed are given some control over their government.

If it was correct: If that were the case, animals would vote for animals, the rational would vote for the rational, and if all others truly were animal, the animals would undoubtedly control the government.

Then there are Christians that think man is inherently evil because God/Jesus/whoever said so. People subscribing to this belief should also consider that God and Jesus have no problem with slavery, killing people that work on Saturdays (or Sundays, depending), owning women as property, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, so don't believe the "inherently evil" part if you're not going to spend your weekends killing everyone you see working.

Introduction

2006-09-26T20:42:00.000-07:00

The name is a pun. I call myself Zhwazi, and I usually type these things when I'm bored. Or sometimes in a discussion with someone else, then I reformat them to a monolouge. Anything omitted is usually a personal discussion rather than the philosophical type I typically go on about. The reason it's a pun is because if pronounced quickly, one says "Bourgeoisie", the word Karl Marx used for the capitalist class.

My beliefs can be summed up rather nicely using the words anarchism, atheism, individualism, and survivalism. Quite a departure from the mainstream, but if you read on you may find that my reasons for believing what I do are not as stupid as you might believe them to be given an outline of my beliefs before allowing me to explain them.

My goal is either pursuasion or reinforcement, depending upon your current beliefs. I do not purport to be able to change your mind, all I can do it convince you to change your own mind.

If you approach this blog with the idea that I am wrong and you are right, then please counter any arguements I make. I do not purport to be a "true believer" in the "one and only truth" which I describe for you. I would very much like to be proven wrong, because I think it worse to continue spreading incorrect or unsound ideas than to endure the embarassment of being proven wrong. However, if you do wish to debate me, do so with the assumption that you are right but acknowledge the possibility that you might not be. My ideas will likely challenge doctorines that you hold dear, and it may be painful to give some of those up, or in fact you might absolutely refuse to give them up. So long as you continue discussion with me, I will try to show you the truth, but I cannot show you the truth if you will not see it.

I do not play some of the games that many people play. Conservatives will believe I am a "left wing" blogger. Liberals will believe I am a "right wing" blogger. Please note that I am neither. I do not play "left and right". I play "free and slave". "Left and right" is a game where one argues between two kinds of slavery which each side believes is freedom. "Free and slave" is a game where one argues between consistent poles which have forever been at odds.

You might find the different perspective refreshing or maddening, insightful or frustrating. Your perception is up to you, only you can control that. I say what I do not to make you mad, but to help you understand.

I hope you enjoy reading what I type and that you challenge your existing views, I'm going to give you a thinking experience on my blog.