A video I just found very nicely and clearly explains the philosophy of Liberty that I now fully believe in.
A number of formats available, from flash to mp4
Philosophy, worldchanging April 6th, 2008
Philosophy of Liberty video - get it here
A number of formats available, from flash to mp4 Pay attention and enjoy.
A number of formats available, from flash to mp4
April 7th, 2008 at 12:50 pm
I own my life? No I don’t. If I were to borrow money from someone, spend it all, then kill myself (yes, this does happen in reality), I would be stealing from the person I borrowed from. Theft is initiation of fraud/force, so logically the lender has a right to prevent me from killing myself, which means I do not own my life.
A bit less extreme, a lender has a right to make sure I repay him before I die of a natural cause.
So if I borrow, I exchange my rights to life and liberty for money. Which I suppose is only fair - but doesn’t match the nice sloganisms of the video very well.
April 7th, 2008 at 3:48 pm
First of all I find it very disturbing that you say with such conviction that you don’t own your life. I feel you aren’t fully aware of implications of such a statement.
I believe I own my life. However, if I at some point decide to exchange a particular part of my life for a sum of money then that decision stemmed from the fact that I was the owner of that part of my life to begin with.
And submitting yourself to debt is essentially a restriction on your living, and hence a submission of a part of your life to that debt.
But, if you don’t own your life, who are you to even begin thinking about making any sort of agreement regarding your life, including the agreement to borrow???
In the case you described, whatever the consequence to his rights over his life, they are the conseuquences he himself chose to accept, by choosing the debt. And again, if it wasn’t his life to begin with this choice wouldn’t have been his right.
You seem to be considering these ideas. I personally think that’s good. You’re questioning them. Good as well. However, from my perspective arguments you came up with against it so far are quite weak in their foundations.
April 7th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
> So if I borrow, I exchange my rights to life and liberty for money. Which I suppose is only fair - but doesn’t match the nice sloganisms of the video very well.
Let me put my point right down to a sentence:
To exchange your rights to life and liberty for money, you must own your life to begin with.
And so your logic falters.
April 8th, 2008 at 10:36 am
And as usual, you’re not getting the point
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Yes, I do own my life and liberty, but as soon as I do anything that gives me a responsibility - borrow money, have kids, sign some contract or another, whatever - I don’t fully own them anymore. So shouting “you own your life” is just empty sloganism: as soon as you do anything with your life and liberty, you get responsibilities, and as soon as you have responsibilities, you don’t own them anymore.
Yes, I have a cake. But as soon as I eat it, I don’t have a cake anymore, and it happens to be so that there is no other use for cake than eating it.
April 8th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
You imply that *anything* you do with your life results in parts of your life being sold out. Of course you are always responsible for your actions, but those actions don’t always involve selling your life.
Also, the basic premise of the video is that you own your life. Of course that means that you can also sell it for something, but that only further supports rather than detracts from the original premise!
> and it happens to be so that there is no other use for cake than eating it.
And there lies the flaw in your thinking. That is simply not true. You can use your life in ways in which your ownership of it is still in tact. It is your decision what are you gonna do with it at one point or another and whether that will or wont involve selling out. It doesn’t automatically happen with every action as you seem to imply.
Btw, it’s interesting to see how you’re self-censoring your last blog entry, including my comment on it.
April 9th, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Yes, it is possible to live in a way that avoids all responsibility. I don’t really consider that “living”, though. In normal life there tend to be other people that depend on you. But whatever, I don’t really care much about this point.
As for me removing blog entries, yes I do remove a certain type of entries (with negative tone) whenever I expect many more visitors because of a link from another site. I do that because I don’t want to have to deal with a load of flames from random people who don’t know the context of what I’m saying. I still have the same point of view, so this isn’t self-censoring in the “oops, changed my mind” sense.
There even was a newer post which you probably missed, outlining my view of humanity.
I think the difference between us is the following: You think “the system” is the cause of problems, while I think (human) nature is the real cause. It’s humans that create systems after all… But on the other hand I’ll agree with you that the system can corrupt humans even further.
So you want a minimalistic system, while I want a system that works such that it prevents humans from harming each other (and then I hope it will work, but I won’t bet on it). I think a minimalistic system will be extremely corrupting, while you seem to have faith that if you give humans ultimate freedom, they will act reasonable.
The other day I read an article that said the cause of war and terrorism isn’t religion or ideology or politics, it’s simply demographics. When there are many unemployed young men, there will be war and terrorism. People want to feel useful, and they want to eat. No job? Then join the army or a terrorist organization. Ideology is just an excuse.
Compare this to what happens when you put too many animals in a small space, with nothing to keep them busy: they fight each other to death.
And that’s exactly how I see humans and the problems of the species. Without overpopulation, which we’ve had for many centuries already, we wouldn’t be bothering with politics. There would be enough space for everyone who didn’t like what others were doing to move somewhere else. There would be the ultimate free society you dream of, or perhaps a tribal one (which doesn’t have to be a big difference). But now there simply are too many people to let them live without babysitting… and unfortunately the babysitters are humans too, with the same natural behavior.
If overpopulation is the real cause of war, I guess there is a problem with the saying “make love, not war”
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April 9th, 2008 at 6:13 pm
> Yes, it is possible to live in a way that avoids all responsibility.
That’s not at all what I said. I said it is possible and even sometimes more responsible to live without committing parts of your life to other people in ways that would make it effectively rented or sold.
Other people may depend on me in some sense, but they might not depend on me for life. And even if they do, then this is only because of my own choices. No matter how you put it, it comes down to me *owning* my own life to begin with, which is the whole point. I don’t wonder you don’t care for that point much anymore.
> I do that because I don’t want to have to deal with a load of flames from random people who don’t know the context of what I’m saying.
Understandable I suppose, but I very much doubt you’ll be getting *loads* of flames. Expressing disagreement with anarcho-capitalism is unlikely to be contended by most people. If anyone can expect to be flamed it is me. But I don’t care much for filtering my blog because of that.
> You think “the system” is the cause of problems, while I think (human) nature is the real cause.
Then follows that the real disagreement is merely on what we believe human nature actually is. I don’t think modern humans are given enough chance to show what their real nature is. So, at best, both of our points on that are moot. The difference is, government has been tested and tested yet again with various kinds of systems and it failed. Coupled with that and, at least to me sufficiently convincing logic behind the philosophy of liberty as presented, I find pursuing an alternative - hence no-government - way, as well worth it.
> I think a minimalistic system will be extremely corrupting, while you seem to have faith that if you give humans ultimate freedom, they will act reasonable.
Where does minimalistic come from now? I don’t want minimal government. I want NO government at all. All government is a source of corruption, be it small or big. It’s just that the bigger it is, the greater its corruption potential.
My belief, in a nutshell, is that if you give a man freedom (not half freedom or 80% of freedom), it will bring the best of him. Nobody gave him a fair chance to prove this, however! This is not absolute freedom (= absolute power in essence) because it is naturally limited by the non-initiation of force/fraud. Naturally because such initiation has a natural consequence on both the victim and the perpetrator, and both wish to avoid such consequences.
Because if someone did you wrong the natural way to respond is to retaliate until you feel justice has been done. If you were the one who done wrong, for lack of other “laws” to confuse you about what is or isn’t moral, you would quite clearly know that you did wrong and that someone is out to seek reparations.
Today, the system however punishes you for doing even good. Talk about a total disruption of morals - you no longer are certain whether you’re really doing harm or not, and therefore whether you deserve to be punished or not. “Legal” is, when government dictates the truth, the new “moral”. This relativizes things to such an extent that people simply throw the whole concept of morality out the window.
And that’s a symptom of a sick society, a society with a cancer. The cancer is government - the concentrate of power - the black hole that sucks up honesty and sense of ethics and replaces it with blind loyalty, conformism and hunger for power.
> People want to feel useful, and they want to eat. No job? Then join the army or a terrorist organization. Ideology is just an excuse.
In other words people want to feel valuable. How else can they achieve that then in a market which directly and with no external constraints allow them to pursue directly the creation of value and reward of wealth that comes with it?
Government is the ultimate army maintainer - indeed, when government sickened market fails to provide these people with value, they will seek it in the blindedness of government loyalty.. or indeed, in a terrorist organization seeking to “destroy the sick world”.
Well, let’s make it healthy again. Let’s remove the cancer then. Let’s remove the motive behind terrorism, blindedness, ignorance and conformism and destruction of value.
> Compare this to what happens when you put too many animals in a small space, with nothing to keep them busy: they fight each other to death.
You make less and less sense man.
Did you just compare humans in a free market with animals in a “small space” (cage I reckon?) with *nothing to keep them busy*. lol
What else are we gonna be doing than *business* in a Free Market??
> Without overpopulation, which we’ve had for many centuries already, we wouldn’t be bothering with politics.
Must be why politics is called one of the oldest professions. We must be overpopulated since before the new era, according to this logic (overpopulation = need for politics). Huh?
> There would be enough space for everyone who didn’t like what others were doing to move somewhere else.
Ah the fallacy of scarcity, another concept that was shattered to pieces by some of my latest realizations. First of all, there *still* is enough space for people to move to. Pity that such places are all jurisdictions of some government, guarded again by the threat of force. Try and establish a society you would like in any of the empty spaces of USA.. No way, it is “public property”, which is codename for “government possesion” - you can’t just start building a town there ran by your own set of rules.
Check out the population density of Canada, Russia and even USA: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4d/World_population_density_map.PNG
Again, government standing in guard of the problem, rather than the solution.
Next you might speak of “wealth is scarce because resources are scarce”. False again. You don’t exactly turn resources into nothingness. You convert it from one thing into another. It is only the current limits of science which stand in way of being able to convert it back once we don’t need it, or convert the surpluss OR the byproduct back into a useful resource OR just find a way to use a given resource more efficiently OR discover a completely new resource.
Just look at all the trash we’re throwing around. How much resources may be lieing in this byproduct of ours? There already are scientific solutions for this, but our crippled “free” markets haven’t yet recognized its value. An example are plasma converters which are already, albeit at a slow rate, being adopted by some cities. They turn ALL trash into clean energy and a material which can be turned into glass.
Inventiveness is a trait of a free human achieving his or her full potential. It most thrives in a market which rewards your valuable contributions without taxing your for it. A free market can and will make more of less or just expand to new frontiers. Space does not seem so far away anymore, and it holds unlimited amount of resources.
To claim scarcity in order to force people into sacrificing their freedom is like claiming Earth is the center of the universe, so there’s no point in finding anything beyond ourselves. Shortsighted.
I say. Make wealth, not war, and then make love.
War is an antithesis to anarcho-capitalism, and war is one of the biggest resource hogs a world has ever seen.
April 10th, 2008 at 11:36 am
Not caring about the point anymore: both of us are right, just using different perspectives.
Flames: smokers tend to be an angry bunch.
Government as a cancer: man you’re really being ridiculous. It may not be perfect, but where I live it’s working well enough. It’s not perfect in the same way Linux is not perfect: if I really would be too annoyed by the problems, I could fix them.
Minimalistic system: by “system” I mean more than just “government”. “no system” would mean no market either, everyone just takes what they need.
Overpopulation: Yes, we’ve had it for many centuries. And yes I do think human aggressive behavior is the same thing as the behavior of animals in a crowded cage. Our intelligence keeps it under control, most of the time, but as population increases this will get more problematic.
Scarcity of space: A lot of the empty space just isn’t suitable for living on, otherwise we would already have built in many of those places before people and governments started thinking about preserving nature. By the way, how could you call yourself “green” and at the same time suggest humans should be allowed to build everywhere?
And wouldn’t it be nice if every beautiful piece of nature became a private property with a villa and a fence around it? Not!
A lot of “empty” space is privately owned, by the way. It actually is in use: farmland, forests for paper production, etc. Just because (almost) nobody lives somewhere doesn’t mean it’s not in use.
Scarcity of resources: I didn’t think of that one, but hey, thanks for suggesting useful arguments
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Extracting useful material from old garbage is practically impossible, and extracting it from fresh garbage is sometimes possible but usually expensive. Don’t overestimate how much we can reclaim.
Plasma converters: so we’ll have an abundance of “clean” (carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, dioxin, chlorine… yuck!) energy and low quality glass. That doesn’t make all other resources less scarce.
Scarcity in general, and space: I think you’re well aware that if we continue the way we live now, we will need several planets. And terraforming reachable planets is not feasible within a period of time that is useful to think about.
Rewarding inventiveness: I’m all for it. Unfortunately a free market also rewards encouragement of irrational and wasteful behavior (drugs, the medicine industry, teleshopping junk, plastic toys in food, excessive pretty packaging, giving away the printer and selling the ink, etc etc etc).
War as the antithesis of anarcho-capitalism: I can easily imagine an anarcho-capitalist society producing weapons to sell to countries with different systems, and even companies encouraging those conflicts. It’s profitable, so it will happen.
Make wealth, not war: No, don’t make wealth. Remove our sick need for wealth instead.
April 10th, 2008 at 4:17 pm
> Government as a cancer: man you’re really being ridiculous.
Call it what you will, but that’s what I think it is. It has a tendency of growth and continued concentration of its power at the expense of individual freedom. Also its coercive nature indeed attracts power hungry people and encourages corruption.
> It may not be perfect, but where I live it’s working well enough.
So you may think. I suppose there is no law being forced on you in Netherlands that you don’t agree with? Because that’s the whole problem, force. You being fine with your government may just mean that your way has been forced upon someone else, even if those are merely a minority. It’s this force I have a problem with, and that’s where all other issues with government come from.
A fine democracy like one in Netherlands is still a democracy, a faulty system. No matter how consensual you try to make it, you fail unless you give an individual the power of self-governance. It doesn’t change the fact that government concentrates power at the expense of your freedom and has a tendency to grow it. I wonder what is it that it should do for you to wake up and smell your freedom melting away? Especially considering how dependent on it you seem to be.
It’s so hard for people today to even imagine the possibility of there being no government, after practically a millenia if not more of government existing and leading. No wonder. People see government as a hammer and everything else as a nail (and you seem to be one of them). It can solve everything. And if that means giving up some of your freedom to it, so be it. Well, that’s what I find ridiculous.
> It’s not perfect in the same way Linux is not perfect: if I really would be too annoyed by the problems, I could fix them.
Only if you’re in a majority. You can fix yourself, but fix government? Can you fix it by making it non-coercive?
> Our intelligence keeps it under control, most of the time, but as population increases this will get more problematic.
There are kids screaming as they play just down here on the street and the yard surrounding this building. It doesn’t really get any more crowded than this. But I am busy and intelligent enough to get pass the annoyance, turn up the music, close the window, or just focus on what I’m doing. How hard is that? It’s not like we’ll be living 3 people per room everywhere. Then we’ll indeed have a problem, and I don’t think it’s a problem a government can solve any better than a market can, at the very least.
> A lot of the empty space just isn’t suitable for living on
Not all. You just aren’t allowed to build on suitable places. And I’m not talking about natural resorts or whatever. Also, some places that you may consider unsuitable might actually be suitable by someone more inventive and resourceful than you are. Individuals decide, not you instead of other individuals (which government allows you to do, unfortunately).
> By the way, how could you call yourself “green” and at the same time suggest humans should be allowed to build everywhere?
Not every individual will be allowed to build everywhere. Some of the spaces are private property. They’d only be free to claim a particular space that isn’t yet owned, whether to build on it or to just preserve it.
I think I’m even more green by opposing government mind you.
Government does not care about its posession because profit is not what keeps them in power, but power itself (brought by elections, connections or just plain corruption). So they don’t really see efficiency or preservation of value as so important as a private property owner would. A private owner of land that has special natural value may find it more valuable to preserve it, sell it to a green organization of some sort even, than to just bulldoze it.
See beyond the default conceptions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism
> Extracting useful material from old garbage is practically impossible
See plasma converters.
> Plasma converters: so we’ll have an abundance of “clean” (carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, dioxin, chlorine… yuck!) energy and low quality glass.
You must’ve missed the beat: http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2007-03/prophet-garbage , http://www.startech.net/faqs.html , http://science.howstuffworks.com/plasma-converter.htm
This technology is here, and it works, and is already being used, just not enough yet.
> That doesn’t make all other resources less scarce.
It makes all of our trash into a new resource, and all this trash once was a resource. Therefore, we’re getting closer to the resource > product > waste > resource formula, closing the circle. Consumption no longer means irreversible incineration of resources. It never really did, we just had to figure out a way to reverse. I believe plasma converters are just a start.
> And terraforming reachable planets is not feasible within a period of time that is useful to think about.
Terraforming is not the only way. Colonies can be built beneath domes on planets as they are, as long as they’re sufficiently stable (as in no major quakes, volcanos etc.). I think Mars and even Moon qualify, for starts. Then there are also space stations which could support long term life, and the better space stations get the more plain space becomes useful, and there’s plenty of that around.
Sure you’ll say, this is so far away. Well, indeed, and it’ll be even more “so far off” if we keep depending on governments for everything. Today, you must essentially have government approval or jump through numerous expensive hoops to start a new business, not to mention all the smuthering regulations once you do. Fuck that. We need to innovate and do it fast.
Free market can do it. It can make us into a space faring race sooner than any set of governments can. And you well know that as soon as a certain area was commercialized it usually flourished, as we’re seeing with space tourism today for instance. Meanwhile NASA is still flying that old bucket of a Space Shuttle and taking fscking decades to build that space station. You know, I’d be bold enough to say it’d be over by now if job was done by the unrestricted free market instead. We’d focus on private mansions in space instead (which are being planned too, by private industry).
> I’m all for it. Unfortunately a free market also rewards encouragement of irrational and wasteful behavior (drugs, the medicine industry, teleshopping junk, plastic toys in food, excessive pretty packaging, giving away the printer and selling the ink, etc etc etc).
And government is a solution right?
Yet another nail.
All government regulation did to “solve” these problems is create more problems and even more corruption in the market itself. One of the forms of what we consider unfair market behavior is proprietary software. Guess what, I still agree it’s unfair, but I no longer believe forcing Freedomware on people by government regulation is the way to solve that problem. By your adamant defending of government you actually end up siding with exactly that argument. You could say you don’t condone legislating Freedomware while at the same time condoning legislation of something else (and both are *forcing* your way upon others).
Instead, I will and am using market activism instead. I cancelled my membership to FSF because I see them willing to use legislation as a way to promote Freedomware. I am now sending my monthly donations to GLM instead.
> I can easily imagine an anarcho-capitalist society producing weapons to sell to countries with different systems, and even companies encouraging those conflicts. It’s profitable, so it will happen.
First of all don’t speak of “society”. It is just a metaphysical construct that doesn’t really exist. What exists are *individuals*. Therefore a society wont be doing anything, it will be individuals. If an individual is selling weapons to countries which still have their warmongering governments I will oppose it, and I am sure many others will. Market will see no end to various movements for good (as we see it), from Free Software movement to the anti-war movement, but we’ll have hell of a lot better chances without government standing in way!
That said, those who sell weapons to the government are not the ones doing war! Governments are!! I might not support their business, but I cannot blame THEM for the war just as I cannot blame you for giving a person a pen just because he mispelled a word or even giving a person a gun just because he went and used it to kill a person.
Also, a comment on “profitable”. It assumes it is only money which is valuable. Obviously it is not. By getting rid of government which disrupts the balances in a Free Market I believe Free Market participants will be induced to seek to accomplish more than just “make as much money as possible”. Everyone has dreams. Someone has a dream to open a great restaurant. Another one to build a network of sites for technology enthusiasts who want to find ways to do good! Our sole goal was not money. It is the achievement of that goal.
However, government requires us to have more money than we would otherwise need in order to start a business in the first place and then comply with their regulations!!!
You know what Taco? I am fucking sick of it! And I wont have it anymore! What right do they have to rob people of their dreams just to play by the rules established by the few?! Because the majority gave them that power, most of them not even being fucking aware of it! Indeed.
Pity that I am seeing you among those who give my oppressor that power. A real god damn pity.
You know, I am considering moving to New Hampshire, helping people there establish as Free State as possible, with limited or ultimately no government. It is one place in the world where people who are willing to disobey and live free in an unfree world, concentrate. And I’ll tell you, this new cause is making me more passionate than most other causes I pursued in the past, including free software.
It is so simple yet so profound. I am against coercion. Government IS coercion. If we’re gonna solve our problems we wont do it by forcing each other to act the way we want. We will do it by voluntarily doing what we believe is right instead. Nobody will tell us that what we are doing is “NOT ALLOWED”. Fuck that.
If you cannot see the logic here, then I am deeply saddened by your choice. But you cannot convince me otherwise, at this point, with what you’ve been saying so far.
What the hell is your alternative? You keep arguing against instead of proposing your own. If it’s your “nice” dutch government then we don’t have anything more to say to each other on the topic.
> No, don’t make wealth. Remove our sick need for wealth instead.
Oh what a monk you are. Wealth, for one, can be more than just money, as you well know (but apparently ignore here). Second, wealth is the product of what we do with our life and liberty. If you earned it then it is rightfully yours. What are you proposing? Government has to take some of our rightful earnings so that it can give, like a god blessed “saint”, to the needy? We are supposed to sacrifice ourselves for others, is that right? Is that the way to “remove need for wealth”? Everyone living in sacrifice to everyone else. Well, if you didn’t NOTICE by now by pursuing that philosophy we’ve allowed exactly opposite to happen - everyone sacrificing everyone else in the name of sacrificing themselves!
Interesting, isn’t it? It’s a perversion you get when you go against the natural law, and the need to extend your life by property (achieve wealth in essence) is part of that law. As said before it’s as real as gravity. Defy gravity and you’ll die. Defy this law and you’ll get the kinds of perversions I just described.
Heck, you speak of overpopulation. If people had no government’s “social services” to rely on people wouldn’t have kids unless they can earn and provide for them by themselves. Less freedom means less responsibility - which translates to less responsibility for the world around the. It shows, besides, doesn’t it? So many ignorant masses just being *led* to the slaughter that is the ultimate endgame of this perversion. Problems remain unsolved. The few keep shouting, like me and you, while the rest just don’t care. They don’t even feel the responsibility for themselves! What can you expect?
I see abolishment of government as the first fundamental step towards resolving worlds problems. No matter what we do, if we didn’t do this, these problems will be perpetuated.
There is an elephant in the room. I keep shouting about it, but you don’t see it.
April 10th, 2008 at 6:50 pm
A little bit about plasma converters: these things don’t use atomic fusion or fission, so if you put in garbage that contains something that is toxic in its elemental form (say, chlorine as part of some molecule), you get toxic elements out. Simple enough. It might be cleaner than normal incineration, but I wouldn’t call it clean. Also, if you burn syngas, you still get carbon dioxide, possibly nitrous oxides, and all the toxic stuff that was in the syngas to begin with.
I’ll write about free market again later.
April 10th, 2008 at 8:46 pm
Plasma converters are simply a fancy form of incineration, and incineration, even though it generates electricity (and I expect normal incineration/electricity combined plants are actually more efficient at generating electricity even if you add a gas washer to make them just as clean as a plasma converter with a smaller gas washer, and need less maintenance). And incineration really should be the last resort in dealing with waste, real recycling should be attempted first. L33t plasma technology, but pointless.
Now, the elephants in the room… there must be at least two of them! One is yours, the other is mine.
A question: what worth is a “free” society if people with different opinions, beliefs, skin color, sexual orientation, or some other difference, need to pay more for basic security than others? The free market doesn’t give a damn about morality. If there is a higher risk in protecting someone, then protecting that person will cost more.
I expect you will talk about charities now. But using a charity to solve this problem means that people who don’t care about tolerance effectively get a financial reward.
A reward to not caring about tolerance. That idea scares the [insert colorful language here] out of me.
Another thing: I’m quite happy the government is doing at least a little to keep children and drugs (including alcohol and nicotine) away from each other. Of course this task can be done by charities as well, but because of the non-initiation of force principle these cannot do much for the children whose parents didn’t donate to the charity… and those parents who did donate are likely to educate their kids about drugs anyway.
Or if you take the non-initiation of force principle to its extreme, parents have no authority over their children whatsoever. Going to school would be completely optional.
Leaving things to the market… wherever you try to leave something to a completely unregulated market, I only see disasters waiting to happen. The market principle has no morality in it, it just promotes whatever happens to be profitable. You might talk of people making moral decisions while shopping, and of money not being the goal of the market but just a tool… Do you know what I call that? I call it religious bullshit. You have this blind faith that in one system (representative democracy) people are helpless gears in the machine who are corrupted by the machine and couldn’t make themselves useful because there is a tax on being good, while if that system is replaced by another (free market), a system that actually contains a very strong corrupting force because less moral feelings equals more profit equals stronger ability to achieve goals equals more power, you believe they magically become reasonable intelligent and compassionate individuals. (man, that’s a long sentence
) If that’s not religious bullshit, I don’t know what is.
> A fine democracy like one in Netherlands is still a democracy, a faulty system. No matter how consensual you try to make it, you fail unless you give an individual the power of self-governance. It doesn’t change the fact that government concentrates power at the expense of your freedom and has a tendency to grow it. I wonder what is it that it should do for you to wake up and smell your freedom melting away? Especially considering how dependent on it you seem to be.
If you give individuals complete self-governance, they end up being governed by the market. Although a free market is nice, it’s no silver bullet. And even silver bullets need to be aimed in the right direction.
Yes, I love my freedom. That’s what I need a government for, to protect my freedom! I guess that statement sounds insane to you. Well, look at you, you want to fight corruption by introducing a system that is driven by money! Fighting corruption by making everything corrupt.
> People see government as a hammer and everything else as a nail (and you seem to be one of them). It can solve everything. And if that means giving up some of your freedom to it, so be it. Well, that’s what I find ridiculous.
s/government/free market/
Really.
> That said, those who sell weapons to the government are not the ones doing war! Governments are!! I might not support their business, but I cannot blame THEM for the war just as I cannot blame you for giving a person a pen just because he mispelled a word or even giving a person a gun just because he went and used it to kill a person.
A pen can be used for correct spelling, or making drawings, and who knows what else. The only purpose of weapons is to harm people. Without weapons less harm would happen, and just as many good things would happen. Therefore, someone who manufactures weapons can be blamed for their use.
> Also, a comment on “profitable”. It assumes it is only money which is valuable. Obviously it is not. By getting rid of government which disrupts the balances in a Free Market I believe Free Market participants will be induced to seek to accomplish more than just “make as much money as possible”. Everyone has dreams. Someone has a dream to open a great restaurant. Another one to build a network of sites for technology enthusiasts who want to find ways to do good! Our sole goal was not money. It is the achievement of that goal.
You believe… religious bullshit indeed. You will be pushed out of the market by those who are only interested in money.
> You know, I am considering moving to New Hampshire, helping people there establish as Free State as possible, with limited or ultimately no government. It is one place in the world where people who are willing to disobey and live free in an unfree world, concentrate. And I’ll tell you, this new cause is making me more passionate than most other causes I pursued in the past, including free software.
Yes, why don’t you try that. But don’t come asking me for help if it ends up as a big failure.
> It is so simple yet so profound. I am against coercion. Government IS coercion. If we’re gonna solve our problems we wont do it by forcing each other to act the way we want. We will do it by voluntarily doing what we believe is right instead. Nobody will tell us that what we are doing is “NOT ALLOWED”. Fuck that.
> If you cannot see the logic here, then I am deeply saddened by your choice. But you cannot convince me otherwise, at this point, with what you’ve been saying so far.
It’s sad you are so blind to the enormous threat to freedom that a “free” market is. I think my everyday freedoms are way more important than the slight difficulty in starting a company caused by the system that protects my freedom. And you know what? If I want to start a company that is truly beneficial for everyone, I can get funding from … guess who?
But of course accepting funding paid from taxes is wrong ;P .
> What the hell is your alternative? You keep arguing against instead of proposing your own. If it’s your “nice” dutch government then we don’t have anything more to say to each other on the topic.
And that’s what I call being an asshole. You complain about me not giving alternatives, while I’m actually giving you one. But no, that one is invalid because it doesn’t match your little free market religion, because of “coercion”. Well excuse me, but here and now I and everyone else here feel much less coercion than we would without a government. It’s much better to be ruled by people who got votes and who therefore are at least liked by someone, and who might actually be intelligent (but not necessarily), than it is to be ruled by a machine called “market” that is amoral at best, but encourages immoral behavior most of the time. You think you can set up ethical businesses without a government doing at least SOMETHING to protect you from competitors with less feelings? Dream on!
> Defy gravity and you’ll die. Defy this law and you’ll get the kinds of perversions I just described.
It’s the other way around. If you step off a skyscraper, you’d better have a means to defy gravity, or else - splat. Follow only the law of the market, and you get ultimate corruption. Just like we need the right amount of gravity (not to float away or get crushed), we need the right amount of market freedom and the right amount of government. Simple enough.
There is a rule to which the only exception is someone stating that rule: “extremists are always wrong”. And yes, that is my “religion”
.
> I see abolishment of government as the first fundamental step towards resolving worlds problems. No matter what we do, if we didn’t do this, these problems will be perpetuated.
Abolishment of government is the last step to hell.
April 10th, 2008 at 8:53 pm
> It doesn’t change the fact that government concentrates power at the expense of your freedom and has a tendency to grow it. I wonder what is it that it should do for you to wake up and smell your freedom melting away?
also s/government/free market/
April 10th, 2008 at 10:46 pm
If you have better things to do with your time, ignore what I wrote above
(unless you’re going to argue against the following, then do read it). It can be summarized and expanded as follows:
Coercion by the government is not a bug, it’s a critical feature. Without it I have little hope for freedom (see argument about tolerance above if you need an explanation).
Yes, there are laws and policies I don’t like. In return I get to have laws and policies that I like but others don’t like. It’s awkward, but fair enough for me.
April 11th, 2008 at 6:17 am
About plasma converters again: You apparently missed the last answer here: http://www.startech.net/faqs.html Toxic materials are completely broken apart.
That said, whatever disadvantages the plasma converter has it’s just one example of a technology that can help turn our trash into a resource again, with or without incineration. Technology will keep evolving.
> The free market doesn’t give a damn about morality.
Just shows how little effort you take in trying to understand my point of view before adamantly arguing against it any way you can think of.
Free market is not a person which can care or not care. People within the free market are. To claim “free market” will *feel* or not feel anything is absurd, for it is not a living being.
So what you’re probably saying is that most people in a free market would just throw all their moral values away in pursuit of money.
First, that’s just a barely educated guess. Your only frame of reference is a government tangled market, not a truly free market.
The difference is a whole lot bigger than you seem to realize. The existence of government as a repository of power offers a, to some irresistible shortcut to wealth, which disrupts the market by giving some players a head start over others (one which they didn’t earn). This is not just a case of government connections. Most market regulations end up giving ones advantage over others, to a point of completely axing the competition to certain players allowing those players to immediately grow even bigger.
This way government completely cuts away the self-regulatory force of the free market. And at that point you should have a hard time arguing what would happen if it was left as is. You can assume and postulate all you want, but your frame of reference is utterly incomplete and flawed. You have no solid evidence.
Second, by your narrow focus on “money” as the only motivating force in a free market you, my friend, are missing on A LOT! You’re basically saying that all we do is motivated by a desire for material profit when humans are so much more complex. I may *want* to do something for you that actually leaves me at a material loss, but with a good feeling, a good relation to you, even love towards you as a friend, a certain moral ideal maybe, or a whole host of other things. Not to sound too positive, I could even be motivated by wanting to spite someone I don’t like and think helping you would be a way to do it. Might sound evil, but it’s an example of an action done not in pursuit of material profit, but something much more fundamental, something that holds value to me personally.
Free market goes beyond material pursuits. It is a naturally functioning consistence of human interactions. Doesn’t sound quite like a mad gold rush that you narrowely purpoted it to be, doesn’t it?
All humans have moral values they care for and free market is one of humans. They just differ from person to person. Instead of forcing one set of morals upon all, a free market allows us to be and let be.
> If there is a higher risk in protecting someone, then protecting that person will cost more.
Considering that people in a free market wont suddenly see their morals washed I don’t see how the issue of non-tolerance becomes any bigger without government. Just as they do today, people advocating tolerance will pressure insurance companies to have an even policy, even if it means charging a slightly higher price to “low risk” protectees.
Government’s alternative? Charge everyone and charge those who actually produce more value even more and then send out the police to break in people’s houses for having a party (they might be smoking pot or overaged drinking alcohol!) while someone in the back alley is raping a “member of the minority”.
Because that’s exactly what happens under government. (Sure dutch have pot legalized, but I’d be willing to bet you have legislations against non-violent acts which police therefore has to waste time and money enforcing). It’s government’s job to legislate. Sooner or later it wont be enough to just legislate against aggression, or else they wont be doing their job - to impose ones morals over others (which usually go beyond merely preventing aggression).
> Or if you take the non-initiation of force principle to its extreme, parents have no authority over their children whatsoever.
It’s extreme alright. We’ve been discussing it and I certainly don’t believe parents wont have authority. Kids are the result of their act, therefore they are responsible for it to the extent to which that kid is not yet a fully grown individual.
> Leaving things to the market… wherever you try to leave something to a completely unregulated market, I only see disasters waiting to happen.
Well do I look surprised? It’s so typical by now to make that sentence redundant. Someone suggests no government and everyone goes into a “shock and horror mode”, as if they were preprogrammed.
> The market principle has no morality in it, it just promotes whatever happens to be profitable.
Now you’re taking your “no morality in a free market” dogma to an extreme. It promotes voluntary action. To say that our only pursuits in life are those of material profit is to call us less human than we actually are, and all that only to win an argument against free market?
> You might talk of people making moral decisions while shopping
Yes, actually, making decisions that fit the morals they *care* for. Just because they don’t care for the morals you care for doesn’t make all people immoral, as you suggest they’d be in a free market. Hey, some people will agree with your morals and some wont! Deal with it!
> Do you know what I call that? I call it religious bullshit.
You know, there is a nice joke that says that government is something atheists came up with when they stopped believing in god. But.. hell, I guess I ruin that one, cause I no longer believe in government either.
I believe in science instead, reciprocity, balance. Somehow coercion doesn’t fit in. Now you decide who is being more religious, not that I care so much for that desperate characterization.
> a system that actually contains a very strong corrupting force because less moral feelings equals more profit equals stronger ability to achieve goals equals more power,
As if power is the sole goal of all humans and those goals couldn’t be anything but material.
> you believe they magically become reasonable intelligent and compassionate individuals
Heh, no. I believe they wont be forced to be what you or I want them to be. I believe more freedom induces more responsibility (you’ll be required to look for ways to behave responsibly when you wont have government leeching off of people on your behalf). There will still be people who are left irrational, stupid or apathetic, but what you seem to miss is that there will be people who are just the opposite - and they too will have more freedom to move and act and to influence others, when freed from regulation.
Government, by trying to regulate the bad, ends up disempowering the good. Why not just step back and let the two forces collide as they naturally ought to? Oh wait, you think evil always wins, so we must *force* good on everyone. Pardon me.
> If you give individuals complete self-governance, they end up being governed by the market.
No, they end up being governed by self or else it’s not a free market. lol.. where are you pulling those funky rabbits from?
> Although a free market is nice, it’s no silver bullet.
It’s not a silver bullet. It’s a consistence of human interactions. Your morals define what you consider to be good. Based on how many of these interactions you see as good or bad you can judge the market as good or bad. However, the free market as a consistence of human interactions is inherently neither. It just is. Human individuals are the ones which can be perceived as evil or good.
Free market is a framework, not the solution. You must think of your own solutions, as long as it doesn’t involve forcing something on someone. But.. I guess that’s too much to ask.
> you want to fight corruption by introducing a system that is driven by money! Fighting corruption by making everything corrupt.
You sound like a child now. “Look, cloud has blotted out the sun, therefore cloud is evil because I really wanted to get a tan!”
A fair approximation I reckon. Truth is, sun was never blotted out and a cloud is incapable of being evil.
I want to introduce a system that is powered by voluntary rather than coerced action by people motivated by pursuit of what they consider to be valuable.
> s/government/free market/
Free market as a hammer is a logical fallacy. It is a consistence of human interactions which can result in many sorts of solutions, not just one. Free market’s solution is whatever an individual offers and others by voluntary action adopt. Government’s solution is always: coercive legislation.
You can’t beat voluntarysm, except by force of course. In which case, I’ll defend myself.
> The only purpose of weapons is to harm people.
I guess you never heard of shooting sports.
But guns can also be used for self defence. And if you can’t make sure nobody has them then better give them to everybody so everybody knows it’s not a good idea to initiate force (you might get shot down yourself). I don’t like guns personally, but I see a logic in this. A coercive monopoly on guns (that governments often have) just means that should government corrupt itself well enough to start shooting their own people, you wont have anything to defend yourself with.
> You will be pushed out of the market by those who are only interested in money.
I don’t believe in prophets, sorry. I will determine what I can or cannot do, thank you very much.
I am already pushed out by the government and government sponsored monopolies, yet even so I survive and Libervis has seen some success, not to mention the whole market around Free Software, Free Culture and many other positive things.
What do you think would happen if you remove government and their leech-benefits?
> But don’t come asking me for help if it ends up as a big failure.
Typical response. Well.. I wont.
> It’s sad you are so blind to the enormous threat to freedom that a “free” market is.
So that’s the end result of the conjecture you’ve been building up? You know, you might as well replace “freedom” there with “money I get from government” because nothing else fits. Sorry.
> You complain about me not giving alternatives, while I’m actually giving you one.
Government, yes. I know! The thing is, you keep attacking free market and arguing why free market can’t work yet in all those instances rarely say how would a government do it better? Perhaps because there isn’t much to say? Legislate, enforce and be at peace, right? Meh. Not impressed.
> Well excuse me, but here and now I and everyone else here feel much less coercion than we would without a government.
Nobody put a gun on your head and ordered you to leave your precious democracy. If you are conceding to it fine. How long will you be happy with it we’ll see. What comes around goes around.
> You think you can set up ethical businesses without a government doing at least SOMETHING to protect you from competitors with less feelings?
I think it is unethical to *force* the competition with different morals out. At any point, I might be the one being forced out.
> Abolishment of government is the last step to hell.
Religious bullshit …
> Coercion by the government is not a bug, it’s a critical feature. Without it I have little hope for freedom (see argument about tolerance above if you need an explanation).
Restrictions of free speech in China are not a bug. It’s a critical feature.
At this point there really might not be anything more we can say to each other. Non-coercion is an utterly fundamental point for me. I find it immoral for someone to believe forcing a certain way of acting is OK, I guess if done in the name of labels such as “freedom”, “democracy”, “fighting drugs and crime and terrorism” etc.
Your statement carries the weight you can’t even begin to imagine. Even I can’t.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
Man, you fail both in basic chemistry and basic economics.
Chemistry: A plasma converter is not nuclear. It breaks down molecules into atoms (or if it doesn’t work perfectly, into small molecules such as the toxic carbon monoxide). If those atoms happen to be toxic when not bound in a larger molecule, like chlorine and bromine are, the plasma converter will produce a toxic product. Both chlorine- and bromine-containing molecules are rather common in trash.
But of course you’d rather believe what someone wrote on the net than what every highschool chemistry teacher could tell you.
Of course, normal incineration has similar problems. Which is why both types of incineration will need a gaswasher (I’m not sure what to call this in English). My educated guess is that a normal incineration plant can be made just as clean and efficient as a plasma converter, but will need much less maintenance, will produce much, much less maintenance-waste.
Now, basic economy. In a free market, money equals power. If you have more money, you can do more. If you have a few orders of magnitude more money than your opponent in a conflict, you can even use it for coercion. This is a simple truth.
Now, consider two competitors in a market. A has ethical feelings, B doesn’t. A will not do things he considers unethical, whereas B will do anything to make money. Assuming equal intelligence, and also enough intelligence to avoid looking bad to customers, B will make more money. And money equals power…
So, the market puts the worst individuals in power. The logic is simple enough.
You can point out loads of books describing control mechanisms that could be implemented in a pure free market to avoid, and you can say people prefer to buy from ethical businesses, but all these things will only slow down the inevitable, not stop it.
Of course something similar is true about democracy, there always is a risk it will collapse into fascism. But this is only a risk, not an inevitable consequence of the system. And it’s a lot easier to overthrow a dictator than it is to rob a multibillionaire.
I’ll give you another alternative to free market, one that isn’t representative democracy. There is a long post about it on my blog, but I can give you a summary here.
If the world population is decreased a lot, and people would stop caring about owning more stuff than their neighbors (I know it’s quite a stretch), then with the current level of technology or that of the near future, I think we will have such an overabundance of resources that the market concept will be pointless. Work can be done in inefficient ways, so people would do it without getting paid just to amuse themselves (boring work would be done by machines). Everyone just takes the resources they need, and not much more because they don’t see a point in owning more than others.
I’m sure you can like that alternative, and I hope you will even see that removing competition as a fundamental value of our culture and changing it into something optional we can do for fun is a huge improvement.
The biggest problem I see now is that it will be difficult to convince people to quit the rat race while they constantly get brainwashed by advertisements telling them to buy more. It’s quite likely that the rat race is part of human nature. If that is so, I guess all hope for a better world is futile. For now I’ll choose not to believe that.
The second biggest problem is convincing people to have at most one child. I know the Chinese managed to do that, but I’m not so sure if I agree with the methods they used.
Speaking of China:
> Restrictions of free speech in China are not a bug. It’s a critical feature.
It sure is a critical feature, but maximizing the amount of freedom is not its purpose, whereas the coercion in a democracy is meant to (try to) make sure there is a fair distribution of freedom.
April 11th, 2008 at 12:10 pm
Oops!
After “You can point out loads of books describing control mechanisms that could be implemented in a pure free market to avoid”, insert “this from happening”.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:30 pm
> A plasma converter is not nuclear. It breaks down molecules into atoms (or if it doesn’t work perfectly, into small molecules such as the toxic carbon monoxide).
I don’t care what it is. Again, it is an example of a technology that could turn trash into a resource. It’s not perfect? Fine, it’s still being developed and other technologies can be developed for the same or similar purpose
> But of course you’d rather believe what someone wrote on the net than what every highschool chemistry teacher could tell you.
I’m assuming that what they wrote in that FAQ is true just as you are assuming they are using this or that type of incineration which can’t possibly burn the toxic material out. Besides, you’re catching on to a side point.
> Now, basic economy. In a free market, money equals power. If you have more money, you can do more. If you have a few orders of magnitude more money than your opponent in a conflict, you can even use it for coercion. This is a simple truth.
Basic economy as it is in *our age*, which saw no government-free market for practically forever. Again, your frame of reference is faulty and incomplete. But you keep using it to back up this narrow minded vision of what a free market as I advocate it would actually be: A consistence of human interactions devoid of coercion.
It requires a more expanded thinking than you’re apparently willing to invest into this to realize what this actually means. It means that if some group of people wants to establish a socialist-like order they could. If they wanted to set up a democracy, they could. If they wanted to set up an economy that isn’t based on common money, they could! The difference is they wouldn’t force anyone to be in or out of it and their government would have 100% support.
All they’d need to do is consent with each other to this sort of a society. Someone could write a contract and others can sign to it.
You can argue it wouldn’t be *real* socialism or real democracy if there is no government - so be it - what’s the difference if people concede, whether the organization they conceded a certain amount of power to actually is able to coerce or not? They are acting upon an agreement, not coercion.
Of course, I doubt many would really want to play with such contractual constructs, but I’m just trying to show to you how much more a free market I’m talking about is than a market for power and money that you try to make it seem, using, again, the limited and faulty frame of reference of today’s NON-FREE market.
You keep focusing on money = power, but the real formula is about values, all values, from moral to material and what kinds of values an individual is willing to pursue. You accuse me of being a naive believer yet in a sense you’re doing the same thing - seeing how today many corporations are corrupt, and conveniently ignoring the fact that many of them came to be what they are because of the government’s “bypass-the-competition” option, you just *believe* this is an inevitable result of a market free from such a bypass where it IS actual value that can empower, and there’s no place for shortcuts to wealth and power like those government causes to exist.
> You can point out loads of books describing control mechanisms that could be implemented in a pure free market to avoid, and you can say people prefer to buy from ethical businesses, but all these things will only slow down the inevitable, not stop it.
You’re playing a prophet again. That’s an incredibly arbitrary assumption. But.. you saying so does not make it so. Nor can you claim to have solid evidence, again. Your frame of reference is faulty.
> If the world population is decreased a lot, and people would stop caring about owning more stuff than their neighbors (I know it’s quite a stretch),
If you still think that this “owning more stuff” is the only thing to which free market appeals then you’re still hopelessly out of the loop on what I’m trying to say. Free market, AGAIN, is a consistence of human interactions devoid of coercion.
Hint - those interactions can be anything!! They may or may not be motivated by wealth expansion. They will NOT always constitute competition. Many times it will be cooperation. But you’re still forcing this narrow view of it as just “market for money”, “market for only competition” so “market that rewards corruption”. Seriously, you’re saying you have an open mind. Prove it god damn it, and stop redefining what I say to suit your arguments.
A strategy of decreasing population and achieving abundance the way you describe it _IS_ possible in a free market. It’s just that it wont have as its component a government forcing a particular set of legislations to make it happen, but rather a large enough number of people supporting such a strategy voluntary. If you don’t have sufficient support for it, then it’s a bad job even if you have government involved - but then again.. you already admitted that coercion is a good method - so I guess I’m wasting my effort here.
> I think we will have such an overabundance of resources that the market concept will be pointless.
Again, you’re showing how limited your view of the free market is. It can’t be pointless because it is NOT JUST about exchange of money, but about ALL HUMAN INTERACTIONS DEVOID OF COERCION. A free market will regardless of what it’s particular form may be at any given point, depending on what the majority of interactions will be about.
> I’m sure you can like that alternative, and I hope you will even see that removing competition as a fundamental value of our culture and changing it into something optional we can do for fun is a huge improvement.
Yes, I like it, and you know what? (You can guess anyway.) Pursuing Free Market is the best way to achieve it. In other words, let people participate in this strategy on a voluntary basis. When there wont be a need to work and be efficient and produce (if ever) they just wont do it. The market price of those would be too low indeed. A market will still exist, however, around whatever interactions are involved with such a society.
Just don’t coerce anyone to anything.
> The biggest problem I see now is that it will be difficult to convince people to quit the rat race while they constantly get brainwashed by advertisements telling them to buy more.
Such advertisements exist even today. A lot of them are same old repeated crap because there is usually a lack of diversity, because there is a lack of competition and government actually contributes to removing of competition. When almost everyone is a business person advertisements would be diverse and advertising strategies would be diversified as well. We saw a serious market push against blinking bad ads on the internet and indeed there are actually less of them and more of the less intrusive and more intelligible ads instead, or just mere references to a particular business just so people know it’s there.
The “rat race” makes sense only in a world full of rats. Government stifled the fairness of chances of all people putting ones in status of great power and others in status of great poverty. In both classes “rat race” is a norm because in poverty you race to survive and in great power you are too intoxicated not to try and beat everyone.
It’s an imbalanced, government-trampled market. That’s what it looks like. Free market, however, has a great potential of bridging this gap, creating a middle class again and perhaps even making *everyone* into a middle class. Rat race would be replaced with what a free market is supposed to be about anyway in business, an exchange of real values.
> It’s quite likely that the rat race is part of human nature.
Exchange of values is human nature. I’ll give you this in exchange for that because I value this slightly less than that. Or I’ll do this for you because I want to, I’ll feel better (one value for you for one value for me, even if you’re not the one providing it directly) or I’ll do this for you if you do this for me (service for service) or I’ll do this for you if you give me this (service for property/money) etc.
I don’t see government helping make these interactions any fairer than they already are, but it does interfere, making a particular product or service cost more or less than the actual free market would determine it to be and hence disrupting this whole process of fair exchange. This ruins the whole thing, no wonder people sometimes resort to violence - they feel this injustice every step of the way, because everything is regulated away from its natural form, and they’re the ones paying the price, getting poorer as the few bigwigs are getting bigger because of this.
> The second biggest problem is convincing people to have at most one child.
Here’s an idea, you’ll like it. Just make it illegal for them to have more than one child. How about that? *sigh*
> the coercion in a democracy is meant to (try to) make sure there is a fair distribution of freedom.
Man that sounds ridiculous. I own myself I am free, just like all other people on Earth, but wait! Government must resolve this “problem” so it takes away some of my freedom and freedom of everyone else so it can distributed it back to us? How ridiculous is that?
Of course, government turns much of that freedom into its own power, but hey, that too is in the name of protecting freedom - they’ll use this power for good, trust them!
I don’t buy it, not one freaking bit. Talk about stupid, shortsighted and irrational.
I am truly amazed about how adamantly you try to fight non-coercion. I wouldn’t have thought this possible.
April 11th, 2008 at 2:59 pm
Another thing, easy even for me to forget considering I’m still recovering from our system’s “newspeak”. One of the faulty assumptions your claim that free market is inevitably corrupt is based on the “scarcity of wealth” argument, which is why I suppose you’re still dragging on the point about plasma converters.
So I’ll re-iterate. Wealth scarcity is an illusion, and increasingly so. Even you are arguing, under the condition population is scaled down, that there will be an abundance for us, because of technology. Indeed, technology keeps advancing, making more out of less, converting waste to useful and discovering entirely new resources.
You however make overpopulation to be too big for even technological advancements to cope, which is again a very arbitrary assumption. You don’t have real evidence behind assuming that a free market wont develop technology in much more rapid and diverse fashion than it does today, actually making it able to cope. Where there is demand there is an opportunity. Where there is a problem, again a market opportunity. It WILL be pursued.
A solution can be anything from making more efficient use of resources (plus conversion, discovering of new ones etc.), new forms of housing, space stations, space colonization and much more (we can never tell what might the next genious come up with.
If wealth isn’t scarce, then this big problem you see in a lot of people pursuing to have as much wealth as possible is no longer such a problem. Only when wealth is really scarce can one have so much more than the other so as to be too powerful.
April 11th, 2008 at 9:56 pm
> I’m assuming that what they wrote in that FAQ is true just as you are assuming they are using this or that type of incineration which can’t possibly burn the toxic material out. Besides, you’re catching on to a side point.
Do I have to spell it out for you or are you stupid on purpose? A plasma converter is not nuclear. It cannot change one type of atom into another. All it does is break down molecules into atoms. There is no assumption being made by me here - I understand what the thing does.
It is indeed a side point, but I’m trying to help you be not stupid, sheesh.
> Basic economy as it is in *our age*, which saw no government-free market for practically forever. Again, your frame of reference is faulty and incomplete. But you keep using it to back up this narrow minded vision of what a free market as I advocate it would actually be: A consistence of human interactions devoid of coercion.
A market without coercion is a logical impossibility all by itself, I don’t need any assumptions beyond definitions to show why. Without assumptions, my reasoning clearly doesn’t depend on any frame of reference. In a competition where some hold back, and others go all the way, those who go all the way win. They may be slowed by some mechanism or another, but in the end they win. That is only logical. In a market, the competition is for resources/value/money/power (these things are equivalent, money represents value and is used to buy resources (where services are also considered resources), and by buying services you get to tell others what to do, which is power). Combine these two points, and the logical conclusion is that markets put people with less than average caring about ethics in power. Whether or not there exists a government is completely irrelevant to this logic, except for the fact that a government can change the rules of the competition to favor nicer people. Or it can make the rules worse, which is why you should vote for decent people.
Cooperation? Well guess what, the less ethical ones can cooperate with each other when it is in their interest as well. The influence of cooperation on the sick mechanism that exists in any market, free or not, is none at all.
> You keep focusing on money = power, but the real formula is about values, all values, from moral to material and what kinds of values an individual is willing to pursue. You accuse me of being a naive believer yet in a sense you’re doing the same thing - seeing how today many corporations are corrupt, and conveniently ignoring the fact that many of them came to be what they are because of the government’s “bypass-the-competition” option, you just *believe* this is an inevitable result of a market free from such a bypass where it IS actual value that can empower, and there’s no place for shortcuts to wealth and power like those government causes to exist.
Interesting, I think that in one of your earlier posts you said that market is just a mechanism, it doesn’t know moral. And now it suddenly is all about trading in moral value, whatever that may be.
Creating a play-government by contract is also possible when there is an actual government (if it’s a sane democracy anyway, maybe some dictators don’t allow it). And a group bound by such a contract isn’t up to competition with a group that works without an agreement to be nice to others. And what if the overwhelming majority decides to be bound by a contract which includes a clause forbidding doing business with those who are not bound by the contract? Certainly that means a coercion to sign the contract (otherwise you’ll starve), and once everyone has been coerced you have… a government. Yay.
This is so completely besides the point of what’s wrong with having a completely free market, which is that it puts the wrong kind of people in a position where they *are* able to coerce. Yes, governments can put people into that position even more quickly, of course. As I said, vote for decent people, and if there are no decent people to vote for, go into politics yourself.
I’m focusing on the power created by wealth because that’s where the problem is. So can we have a discussion about the problem, or is that too inconvenient and would you rather pretend I have something against things that aren’t problems? You fail basic debating too.
> A strategy of decreasing population and achieving abundance the way you describe it _IS_ possible in a free market. It’s just that it wont have as its component a government forcing a particular set of legislations to make it happen, but rather a large enough number of people supporting such a strategy voluntary. If you don’t have sufficient support for it, then it’s a bad job even if you have government involved - but then again.. you already admitted that coercion is a good method - so I guess I’m wasting my effort here.
With the sick mechanism that is inherent to markets being set completely loose, I don’t see it happening. But who knows. Anyway I’m not saying it should be governments that bring us to the frugal lifestyle. With the democracy/market combination we have now it’s very unlikely that a government wanting to do that will ever come to power. Also, you could have known that I wasn’t even considering government as the method to get there, because then I wouldn’t have wondered about how to do it. Just write some laws…
> It’s an imbalanced, government-trampled market. That’s what it looks like. Free market, however, has a great potential of bridging this gap, creating a middle class again and perhaps even making *everyone* into a middle class. Rat race would be replaced with what a free market is supposed to be about anyway in business, an exchange of real values.
Yeah, right. By removing the one thing that is more capable of coercion than the market, in other words by removing the one thing that can keep market sickness under control (or encourage it, so vote for decent people, but I already said that), you’re curing market sickness. Does not compute. And the middle class is gone? WTF? Then who the hell are all these people with average wealth I see everywhere?
>> It’s quite likely that the rat race is part of human nature.
I’m saying I’m afraid wanting to have more status than the neighbor at all cost, including the cost of being miserable, might be part of human nature. I suspect it is, but I’m taking a leap of faith and assume it isn’t.
> I don’t see government helping make these interactions any fairer than they already are, but it does interfere, making a particular product or service cost more or less than the actual free market would determine it to be and hence disrupting this whole process of fair exchange. This ruins the whole thing, no wonder people sometimes resort to violence - they feel this injustice every step of the way, because everything is regulated away from its natural form, and they’re the ones paying the price, getting poorer as the few bigwigs are getting bigger because of this.
I understand it looks that way from where you are, and I think it really sucks that you are in that position. But your experience is not the same thing as the general rule.
> Here’s an idea, you’ll like it. Just make it illegal for them to have more than one child. How about that? *sigh*
I said I didn’t like the Chinese solution. Making having more than one child illegal (the punishment is a fine) is the Chinese solution. Didn’t you know that? You never heard of the famous Chinese one-child policy? Aw geez, you fail history and general knowledge too.
>> the coercion in a democracy is meant to (try to) make sure there is a fair distribution of freedom.
> Man that sounds ridiculous. I own myself I am free, just like all other people on Earth, but wait! Government must resolve this “problem” so it takes away some of my freedom and freedom of everyone else so it can distributed it back to us? How ridiculous is that?
Your freedom ends where the freedom of another begins. Democratic government is a mechanism to make sure that this end/begin is in a fair place. Free market may also be used as such a mechanism, but that was never designed to be fair since it wasn’t designed at all. I guess you define “fair” as “whatever the result of a free market would be”? It’s not my definition.
> I am truly amazed about how adamantly you try to fight non-coercion. I wouldn’t have thought this possible.
I’m fighting the idea of free market because I consider it to BE coercion and corruption. That said, I don’t believe in non-coercion. By simply existing, one already slightly limits the freedoms of others. What I believe in is minimal coercion, where coercion is set up to fight itself, thus minimizing itself.
> Another thing, easy even for me to forget considering I’m still recovering from our system’s “newspeak”. One of the faulty assumptions your claim that free market is inevitably corrupt is based on the “scarcity of wealth” argument, which is why I suppose you’re still dragging on the point about plasma converters.
I’m dragging on the point of plasma converters because I can’t stand it when people misunderstand science and ascribe magical attributes to it.
> A solution can be anything from making more efficient use of resources (plus conversion, discovering of new ones etc.), new forms of housing, space stations, space colonization and much more (we can never tell what might the next genious come up with.
You could simply have said “more efficient use of resources”, cause all fits that label.
It’s really simple. Population grows exponentially. Non-renewable resources eventually will be used up (and we’re getting dangerously close to that now), while renewable resources have an upper limit (you can’t have more solar panels on a planet than the surface of that planet). Inventions may keep scarcity away for a while, but they are always just postponing the need for the real solution. Furthermore the number of new inventions doesn’t grow as fast as the population does (because inventing something new is getting more and more difficult with all the easier inventions already existing: inventing plasma converters just IS more difficult than inventing old-fashioned incinerators) and we certainly can’t assume that the average usefulness of new inventions is going up (why would it be?). All this is common knowledge and common sense. You do the math / draw the graphs / meditate on it / whatever. The obvious conclusion is that if we continue to have exponential population growth, we get in trouble.
Heck we already are in trouble. Scarcity is real (even you mention scarcity of oil when it matches your argument), inventions may remove our dependence on oil but then our dependence on a thousand other non-renewables remains, and so do the upper limits to renewables. Stop growth or go down, that’s the choice.
> Only when wealth is really scarce can one have so much more than the other so as to be too powerful.
Exactly. With a smaller population and the “wish to own everything” removed (if we don’t remove that, we might still end up with scarcity… and homes full of junk we don’t use. humans are funny like that), there will be abundance and therefore no power caused by the opportunity to abuse scarcity.
The funny thing is, if there is no scarcity, there is no point in having a market. Why bother with paying each other if giving things away for free doesn’t make one poor?
Market:
A: I’d like to have a bag of apples.
B: That will be 5 euros.
(Optional government or consumer organization: hey! those have too much pesticide on them! stop selling those! / don’t buy those!)
Abundance:
A: I’d like to have a bag of apples.
B: There are millions of apples on the trees over there, let’s get some.
(Government (if any): I don’t care about apples. Nobody uses pesticide anyway.)
April 12th, 2008 at 12:50 am
> It is indeed a side point, but I’m trying to help you be not stupid, sheesh.
How generous of you. Thanks. I don’t care for it anymore. As I said, it’s a mere example. Someone will build a nuclear based one, or discover an even better method and achieve total incineration. The point is, technology can do it. It proved capable of doing the “impossible” and it will continue to do so.
> A market without coercion is a logical impossibility all by itself
Maybe the market as you defined it in your mind, which is not the free market I keep talking about, because the *whole point* of it is avoidance of coersion. It is the only crime being punished or repaired.
If you’ll argue that a free market as I defined it would lead to someone seeking enough power and access to weaponry to establish a de-facto government then what you’re really saying is that majority of people would concede to being coerced. Because no matter what kinds of “immoralities” (as you or I might perceive them) they could condone, one thing nobody likes is being forced. This fact would be even more obvious in a market in which pursuing your own self interest is the norm rather than a criticized exception.
But if people really would let someone become coercive without organizing a proper counter-reaction, then so be it. It would prove that humanity sucks more than anyone ever imagined it. Nobody, again, gave them the chance to prove what they are, however. And you are denying it all even before such a chance has been given. It’s as if you claim to know the result of an experiment before it was even done.
> by buying services you get to tell others what to do, which is power)
The whole paragraph this is a part of is more of the same old narrow simplifications or attacking of your own definition of a market rather than tackling mine etc.
Two people agreed. Joe offered a sum of silver to Josh in exchange for Josh’s service of writing a particular program and Josh agreed because he found that amount of silver sufficiently more valuable than the time and effort he’ll spend writing a program. By your definition, Joe is imposing his power over Josh instead of being engaged in a cleary consentual contractual relationship where both are in fact equal.
It’s as if you just don’t seem to understand consentual relationships.
> Combine these two points, and the logical conclusion is that markets put people with less than average caring about ethics in power.
You don’t measure ethics as more or less. Everyone has them. It’s just one individual has different moral values than another. This is what I mean when I say you’re narrowing things down and oversimplifying. It really comes down to your fear that someone who believes differently might prevail in the market. You speak of good and evil as if you solely know what the two represent and government is supposed to enforce that view of yours upon everyone, including those who might think differently.
Let me ask you this. If you believe people are so evil (and therefore unacceptably different to you), then how can you claim that the democracy in your country brought the right people to power? If your democracy worked, then it follows that most people actually share similar values to you and would therefore exhibit those same values in the market. So either you’re afraid that democracy really didn’t work, that most people are secretly oppressed, but deserve to be because you consider them evil OR you don’t even trust people you do share similar values with to exercise those values without government telling them how to do it?
IMHO, you just can’t win that argument. You can’t argue that freedom is less important than how people choose to use it.
> And now it suddenly is all about trading in moral value, whatever that may be.
Man, discern. I still agree it is a mechanism. It is one that allows people to trade upon their moral values as well, not just the material ones. You see it as a mechanism that somehow picks and chooses which values can or can’t be traded and benefited from - as if law of supply and demand can choose which supply or which demand to apply to. As if the law of gravity can decide which place on Earth it will apply on and which not.
> And what if the overwhelming majority decides to be bound by a contract which includes a clause forbidding doing business with those who are not bound by the contract?
Why would anyone sign such a contract in the first place? Majority doesn’t come instantly so that wouldn’t qualify as their motivation, and otherwise not being able to trade with others is actually a limiting factor most people don’t want to enter. I’d argue that such a contract would fail well before it binds a majority.
As for the rest, even if such a contract would be succesful as you say, they still aren’t *bound* to it and therefore not coerced to follow it. They could group up, find their own resources and without anyone taxing them survive until they develop a better solution.
And if the utter extreme of that scenario happens establishing a defacto government, I already addressed that above.
> I’m focusing on the power created by wealth because that’s where the problem is.
If that wealth was not created by coercion I simply don’t see a real problem. I might not *like* how they did their business and how they achieved that wealth, but if they did it without coercing someone then that just means that enough people conceded to whatever interactions were necessary for them to get where they are.
Note that the more wealth you have the more focus market puts on you which makes the cost associated with perpetrating fraud that could lead them into a position of coercing proportionate to the amount of wealth they have. Is it really worth the risk?
And if people fail to react to any signs of such a fraud happening then it is not market that failed. It is the people that failed, or there simply were not enough people that have strong enough moral opposition to coercion (which is hard to believe because you’d have to have that before establishing a government-less free market in the first place.
> So can we have a discussion about the problem, or is that too inconvenient and would you rather pretend I have something against things that aren’t problems?
If you are missing my point, arguing against things I’m not even advocating, what am I supposed to do? My focus is on non-coersion and freedom, not on enforcing my view of morality. I agree that those for those who are too succesful there is a higher degree of risk of using coercion and getting away with it, but that is exactly why they will be at the more spotlight in the market, more interesting targets, more talked about etc. It’s a far cry from being a done deal, being an inevitable coercive monopoly and it sure is a far cry from government as we have it, which *already* uses coercion in so many ways.
> I understand it looks that way from where you are, and I think it really sucks that you are in that position. But your experience is not the same thing as the general rule.
Oh I wasn’t thinking about myself there man. If you think I’m some sort of an isolated case there then you’re simply blind or just unaware of reality around you. Must be the price you pay for being a self-admitted snob (no offense). Results of market disruptions are practically everywhere. IMHO, Microsoft’s monopoly, oil conglomerates, currently ongoing US recession and as an extreme example hyperinflation in Zimbabwe (to name a few of many), are all results of government cutting up the natural self regulatory mechanism of the free market into pieces.
> Aw geez, you fail history and general knowledge too.
Thanks for a yet another credibility shot, one even based on a pure assumption. But you’re already used to making unfounded assumptions. Yes I was aware of the one-child policy, but didn’t have it in mind when I wrote it, perhaps in the back of my mind.
But this attack of yours is totally pointless. Ad hominem I might add.
> Your freedom ends where the freedom of another begins.
That’s non-coercion.
> Free market may also be used as such a mechanism, but that was never designed to be fair since it wasn’t designed at all.
Gravity was never designed by humans either.
> I guess you define “fair” as “whatever the result of a free market would be”? It’s not my definition.
I see doing anything you want and can do as long as you don’t coerce someone, to be the ultimate fairness.
> I’m fighting the idea of free market because I consider it to BE coercion and corruption.
This is insane. Because you could conjecture a scenario that you think *could* happen in a *limited* amount of circumstances involving people *conceding* or *not opposing* a potential would be coercer you equate a system based fundamentally on coercion as coercion itself. Do you see how incredibly insane this is?
> By simply existing, one already slightly limits the freedoms of others.
By that logic someone being killed potentially amplifies your freedom. Sorry, not my vision of a good world.
> What I believe in is minimal coercion, where coercion is set up to fight itself, thus minimizing itself.
Let’s see.. coercion applied to coercion = less coercion? You must be stoned dude.
And don’t tell me now initiation of force against initiation of force equals less initiation of force because it doesn’t (surprise!). What makes it justified is defence from *coercion* (surprise!) because coercion and initiation of force aren’t the same. Initiation of force is the means, coercion is the result - someone doing something against his will, in fear of force.
> Furthermore the number of new inventions doesn’t grow as fast as the population does
I think it would grow faster if government didn’t interfere. Amount of inventiveness is usually proportional to the amount of freedom.
> The obvious conclusion is that if we continue to have exponential population growth, we get in trouble.
I already said market doesn’t exclude that strategy and I don’t think government can solve it, yet the non-existance of both is practically impossible if you consider the free market as non-coercive human interactions.
> Why bother with paying each other if giving things away for free doesn’t make one poor?
You’re still in that limited mentality. Giving something away for free IS a market transaction. Caught you again. Damn, how many times do I have to repeat myself?
April 12th, 2008 at 1:34 pm
I stick to my point that when everything is free, there is no market. Market is exchange of value: one thing for another, buying and selling. When everything is free, there is no such exchange.
> Someone will build a nuclear based one
Yeah, right. Any type of recycling that doesn’t involve nuclear physics is cheaper (requires less energy). It’s odd you are fascinated by technology, and yet you don’t even want to understand highschool level physics and chemistry. But hey, if you want to be stupid, I’ll let you, instead of getting into an explanation of why nuclear recycling requires so much energy.
Another thing you don’t seem to want to understand is that what I’m arguing against is not something different from what you want, and not all of what you want either (heck, many things you want, I want too). The “market” I talk about is a subset of what you want - unless I completely misunderstood you and you actually don’t want free exchange of material value without third parties involving.
The China thing… let’s have a look at what I said:
“The second biggest problem is convincing people to have at most one child. I know the Chinese managed to do that, but I’m not so sure if I agree with the methods they used.”
Then you CHANGED that and replied as follows:
“> The second biggest problem is convincing people to have at most one child.
Here’s an idea, you’ll like it. Just make it illegal for them to have more than one child. How about that? *sigh*”
There are two possible conclusions I can draw from that response: either you are a complete idiot who doesn’t know about the Chinese one child policy, and who couldn’t be bothered to look up what I meant by my reference to China, OR you intentionally modified what I said, to use it as a straw man. You say you did know about the one child policy there, so it must be the latter. And now YOU accuse ME of using unfair debating tricks by calling my assumption of you being fair but stupid rather than unfair an ad hominem attack????
I’m done talking to you. You’re both so stupid it hurts, and unable to have a fair debate.
April 12th, 2008 at 7:51 pm
> When everything is free, there is no such exchange.
Free of price doesn’t equal to free of value.
> It’s odd you are fascinated by technology, and yet you don’t even want to understand highschool level physics and chemistry.
I just don’t want to focus on a side point in this discussion. If this was a discussion about physics underlying particular technologies I’d refresh my mind.
True enough I don’t have these specific facts all lined up in my mind like you apparently do. For the last few years my focus was on the social impact of technology, not on how exactly technology works. So I forgot certain, according to you basic facts, on chemistry. Booohooo! So I’m stupid now. If that makes you happy, have at it, enjoy your self! I have different methods of pursuing happiness.
But if that’s why you keep harping on that side point, to discredit my intellect, then this just shows how strong I should expect your other arguments, the on-topic ones, are.
Damn, you really are a friggin snob aren’t you?!
> The “market” I talk about is a subset of what you want - unless I completely misunderstood you and you actually don’t want free exchange of material value without third parties involving.
I understand that, but what I am saying that the things outside of that subset actually influence the subset itself so by focusing merely on a subset you are missing my points by a long mark. So what else should I think then that you’re focusing on the subset where it is easier for you to argue instead of focusing on the whole that we are actually talking about?
I want free exchange of values, not just material values and I believe that people don’t exchange ONLY material values, but much much more (and we can’t even tell which because we can only talk about ourselves individually). Most importantly to the point you’re trying to make here: The fact that people don’t exchange ONLY material values has a GREAT effect on the way they exchange those too!
In other words, you can’t effectively argue against my WHOLE by focusing merely on the subset of that whole, because the two are too interdependent.
> The China thing… let’s have a look at what I said
Taco, I said that I didn’t have the Chinese one-child policy in mind at that point. I was only reminded of it once you specifically mentioned it.
If not having that particular policy in my mind at the time you mentioned China means I at that *moment* did not know about it then so be it. IMHO there is a difference between not knowing something and not recalling it in a particular moment. If there wasn’t we wouldn’t require *reminding*.
You apparently think that you mentioning China in the context of overpopulation regulation MUST immediately make one recall the one-child policy OR he simply does not know about it. And you make this a choice between being an “idiot” or being “stupid” because *everyone knows it*.
Obviously, the former is not true and to assume otherwise would IMHO be a limited way of thinking. But if you wish, you may disagree.
The latter characterization is based on conformism. “Everyone knows” it and so if someone does not he is immediately intellectualy inferior - stupid.
And that, my friend, is what makes an ad hominem attack. You’ve done a brilliant job. I admit that I didn’t make it hard for you. I was being sarcastic at your expense and that provoked you. If I have anything to apologize for that is it. Less provocation might have resulted in a less “heated” debate, but then again I might as well be apologizing for being *too* passionate.
So it was NOT a deliberate “trick” on my part. And if the above explanation does not convince you then ask yourself, based on the years of experience we have as friends (including many debates), do you really think I would want to use such tricks just to defend my position? Man, I keep talking on my blog about being open minded, about accepting new ideas and about a discourse being a way to learn, not a way to insult each other.
If you still think it was a deliberately designed trick then I am sorry.
> I’m done talking to you. You’re both so stupid it hurts, and unable to have a fair debate.
I think it is quite convenient for you to make that a conclusion of this debate. Discredit me as an idiot, or stupid or unable to have a fair debate.
Yet what you did in summary was leave out many of my points unaddressed, argue against a mere subset of what I was presenting and then using what opportunity you could find to discredit myself and my debating skills so as to completely undermine *everything* I was saying and make it justifiable for you to withdraw as “in the right”.
It would’ve been much better to merely say you are too tired to continue and agree to disagree. What’s bothering you so much to make you do what you did instead?
April 13th, 2008 at 10:19 am
> But if that’s why you keep harping on that side point, to discredit my intellect, then this just shows how strong I should expect your other arguments, the on-topic ones, are.
That’s not the reason. I’m correcting false information and being very surprised someone I expected to be more knowledgeable gets these basic things wrong, that’s all. By the way, since when is remembering the basics of the basics of what you learned in highschool snobbery?
> Taco, I said that I didn’t have the Chinese one-child policy in mind at that point. I was only reminded of it once you specifically mentioned it.
Don’t lie. I mentioned the Chinese solution in the very sentence after the one you chose to take out of context. You’re telling me you couldn’t be bothered to think about what solution I was mentioning disliking before accusing me of liking a certain solution? Because hey, something unknown and something you make up about me on the spot might just be the same, you know. I don’t believe you’re THAT stupid.
So either you were ignorant of what the Chinese solution was before I explained it to you, or you are a first class asshole who puts up straw men and lies about them when they are discovered.
Either way you are a liar now.
As for the subset/superset thing, I really don’t see why a combination of forces weaker than the market (where by market I mean trading material value), combined with that market itself, would be able to stop misbehavior in the market. When a six year old and a two year old are told to cooperate in babysitting the same six year old, there is no babysitter.
Anyway, I was done talking to you. I hope you at least understand my position properly now.
April 13th, 2008 at 7:40 pm
> By the way, since when is remembering the basics of the basics of what you learned in highschool snobbery?
Expecting everyone to recall the same things or think about the same things you do and otherwise calling them stupid is.
> So either you were ignorant of what the Chinese solution was before I explained it to you
If you will, that’s closest to the truth about it that you got. Call it ignorant if you wish, I just did not recall it until you reminded me off it. If that makes me stupid in your mind so be it. I already explained myself. You trying to perpetuate it wont help.
Right now you’re just in a name calling mode, trying to find whatever weak-or-not argument you can to come up with a yet another label. So far I’m either stupid or an idiot and a liar. Thank you very much.
> As for the subset/superset thing, I really don’t see why a combination of forces weaker than the market (where by market I mean trading material value), combined with that market itself, would be able to stop misbehavior in the market.
Those supposedly “weaker” forces (another made up assumption) ARE part of the market. That’s what I keep arguing. Just because you say material exchange (hence the subset of the market as I see it) is the whole of the market, does not make it so. At best it’s a difference of definitions, and in that case if I am defining it in one particular way yet you keep arguing against your own (which is a subset of mine), you’re not arguing against the whole thing. And naturally, you fail.
You can’t even bring yourself to argue against what I am actually presenting. You have to narrow it down to only one part of it to even be capable of arguing it seems.
> Anyway, I was done talking to you. I hope you at least understand my position properly now.
Yes, honestly, I understand. I understand that having failed to convince me to accept your point of view and being unwilling to agree to disagree you resorted to name calling and character assasination.
April 14th, 2008 at 6:32 pm
Sheesh, did you even read my analogy instead of dismissing it as “character assasination BEFORE reading it?
the six year old ~ my definition of market
the two year old ~ some other forces, eg people telling each other “I dislike what you’re doing there” and whatever else may be part of your wide definition of market that isn’t part
the six year old + the two year old ~ your definition of market
With either definition, in my opinion the market is not able to stop itself from having very undesirable results. Do you now see why I’m not addressing the immaterial side of the wide-definition market? Because I consider that part irrelevant to the problem.
And no, I don’t give a damn about convincing you to adopt my point of view. You are the one who brought the discussion about government/no government back from the dead, and in a rather offensive way by calling government a cancer. And now you’re all surprised I got angry at you for bringing back a discussion on which we had agreed to disagree in such an offensive way.
April 15th, 2008 at 1:23 am
> Do you now see why I’m not addressing the immaterial side of the wide-definition market? Because I consider that part irrelevant to the problem.
Yes I see that and already understood that. I just don’t agree it is so insignificant to the market (material exchanges) as you see it. I in fact think it’s a crucial part. But if we can’t agree there’s no point in going on.
Besides you already decided to finish it, albeit in an overly dramatic way. But I said enough in my email already.
> And no, I don’t give a damn about convincing you to adopt my point of view.
That doesn’t seem to be the case. You were quite persistent in trying to argue against my view and you even expressed being worried about these views because, as you said it: “mucking about with the way the government works DOES sink my boat” (http://www.libervis.com/topic/when_nationality_race_and_bloodline_cease_to_matter?page=1#comment-11727 - bottom of the post).
It does appear that you were motivated to dissuade me from these views.
> You are the one who brought the discussion about government/no government back from the dead,
You posted a first comment here. I find the no-government to be quite related to the self-ownership principle so it doesn’t surprise me that the topic would quickly expand to that. Besides, I first mentioned government only once you mentioned me wanting a “minimalistic” system which is often a way people describe “minimal government”. That’s when I expressed my anti-government beliefs.
The “cancer” characterization was clearly not intended as an insult. How does calling a government a cancer insult you personally? You’re really stretching it to extremes.
Anyway, my email response is in.. what you do next is up to you. If you want to boycott me because of a difference of opinion and one discussion that resulted in a flame war to which, at best, both of us contributed, then that just shows how strongly you actually DO feel against the fact I believe what I believe.
Libervis was built on tolerance for different opinions and freedom of expression of all opinions no matter how radical they may be. By leaving you are signaling that this tolerance is not really your thing.
Fair enough.