Highly recommended audio

Just thought I’d recommend some audio lectures/speeches for anyone interested in market anarchy. Anyone who is already anarcho-capitalist needn’t bother, and probably already knows about this site, but I’m just putting it here for anyone who is interested. This is an awesome source for economics and anarchist thought, I also highly recommend anything by Rothbard or Hoppe.

http://www.mises.org/media.aspx

Happy listening guys!

A question of size

From I’ve read and heard, people in the past (such as the US founding fathers) saw democracy as a horrible system of governance, correctly seeing it as purely “rule by the mob”. While I still do stress that democracy is indefensible, part of the reason democracy is so bad is because of the scale on which it is applied today.

For example, if democracy were applied only within a town with say, 100 people in it, people would be much less inclined to immorally use their ‘democratic right’ to steal from each other via taxation, regulation etc. This would be because as you get smaller and smaller, you have a more personal relationship with the other people who are affected by your decision at the polls. Most people would generally have a harder time advocating redistribution by force if they had to actually interact with the victims of their proposed violence on a daily basis.

On the flip side of the coin, how hard is it to steal economic ‘value’ from somebody you don’t even know? It’s obviously much easier for a person to do. This is the way governments today work, they have become so large that nobody even cares about the fact that they are supporting theft, partly because its unclear who is losing out on what.

Of course, even if it is less wrong to apply democracy on a smaller scale, it is still wrong. I believe that it is when we’re looking at a smaller society that democracy’s natural tendency towards redistribution by force is exposed to a greater degree. It’s harder for the individual people to ignore the fact that they’re stealing.

Rudd’s plan to tackle homelessness

“It’s something which you can either push to one side and sweep under the carpet or you can say, ‘Actually this is just dead wrong, we need to do something about it’,” Mr Rudd told reporters.”We don’t believe it is something which a country as wealthy as ours in the 21st century can just ignore.”Mr Rudd said the government would build on its $150 million election commitment to build new homes for people in crisis.

“Something needs to be done.”

Source

I’m getting sick and tired of the rhetoric used by politicians who think they own other people and their wallets. Yes, homelessness is bad, but stealing is not acceptable either.

‘Something needs to be done’ cannot legitimately involve stealing from some to give to others. Rudd seems to conflate the two. The solution to our problems is not government, government is the cause of many of these problems in the first place. If it weren’t for welfare dependence, house zoning, government control of currency, taxation burden and countless other regulations, these people would most likely not be homeless in the first place.

Government is like the guy who comes up to you and breaks your leg, and then offers you a crutch to use. Which it then promptly bills you for.

The public interest

The problem with concepts like “the public interest” is they aren’t measurable or testable in any real way. If I say “This man is 6 feet tall”, that’s a testable and verifiable statement. We could actually get out a tape measure and find otu how tall this guy is, because my statement here is falsifiable, I’m providing the criterion by which I’ll be shown wrong (if I am wrong). If on the other hand I say, “Stealing money from some to provide healthcare for others is in the public interest”, this is not a verifiable statement. There’s no way somebody could actually confirm or deny the truth value of this statement, since people could just always disagree on what the public interest is.

Such ’public interest’ statements are as good for one purpose as they are for another. Why don’t you tell me why this is wrong:

“Turning around 3 times while touching your nose is in the public interest”

Ok, so now you may just want to talk about majorities, but even here, it is an arbitrary distinction. Who’s to say 51% is the ‘magic number’?  Couldn’t I equally say 100% is the ‘magic number’? Or 3%?

Now while I’m prepared to accept that there can be such a thing as the public interest, it is not a concept that can be used to justify theft or murder. The anarchic society would only use voluntary means of funding for ‘public goods’ because this is the only moral way to take money from people.

So please, stop talking about the public interest like its your “get out of jail free card” to the crimes of stealing (taxation) and violent coercion. As far as excuses are concerned, it simply won’t do. So before you even think about pulling the “public interest” argument on me, tell me exactly how you identify what the public interest is, and tell me why I can’t also just claim that whatever I’m arguing for is in the public interest.

What’s in it for me?

To those people who say there isn’t “enough in it” for citizens to stop voting, I think it might be a good idea to examine where the benefit of not voting comes from.

It comes from your own personal integrity. So yes, you have to want to be moral for this to mean anything to you, I accept that. But I think the fact of the matter is that people do want to justify their actions. People don’t work for the army and then justify it by saying “Yeah I get ordered to go overseas and kill foreigners”, they’re much more likely to say something like “I help defend the nation”.

The desire to justify what people do is immense; it can be seen in so many facets of our lives. Wherever people go and whatever they do, you will be very hard pressed to find somebody who can openly admit that what they do is wrong, but they do it anyway. More likely, you’ll find somebody trying to use some twisted logic to justify what they’re doing.

Not everything is an economic transaction, people don’t need to be paid money to refrain from voting. Believe it or not, there actually are people who are able to resist voting without being paid not to vote. Yes it is true that you have to want to be good all by yourself. For the most part, this is not the problem, it’s just that what is considered good has to be changed. There needs to be more honesty and rationality when it comes to moral decisions like these. People should not consider it a good thing that they get to dictate how other people’s lives are led via the guns of the state. People should not consider it a good thing that they can pretend as though they own other people by voting.

“Why don’t you violently resist government?”

The reason I don’t withhold my taxes and compliance with regulation from the government is because bad things will happen to me if I don’t. So yes, even though I consider government taxes and regulation an immoral use of violent force, I am made to submit to the system for fear of having even more liberty taken from me. This is not itself an acceptance of taxation and regulation, in much the same way that if you are being mugged by 30 thugs, you handing your wallet over to them is not an acceptance of their thievery, it’s just a rational decision you make because you’d rather not get beaten/killed.

I also don’t think that a violent revolution would actually yield any kind of positive results, I think the change that needs to be made is a mental one. The government does not stay in existence purely because of laws, and the government police do not stay in existence purely because of government laws. These things stay in existence because people think they are good. So in order to move towards a free society, libertarians need to convince people that government is immoral, not violently bring about the downfall of the current government, because the bad people will just create a new government in its place.

When people reject the vote they are advancing the cause of liberty. This is one of the few freedoms left, given that voting has to be kept anonymous anyway so its practically impossible to prove that a given person spoiled their ballot. By doing this, the government in place could not be said to be truly “representative of what the people want”. Over time, as more and more people spoil their ballot or refuse to vote, the government would lose popular support, as people disassociate with it. Once enough people have disassociated with the government, it won’t have anybody working for it. The government would simply cease to exist, and this is a completely non-violent solution.

I am not for a violent revolutionary change, I am for a peaceful evolutionary change. I honestly believe that in the future, human society won’t need or use governments, and I think that we’re only just realising this now. To the people who disagree and think that I’m wrong/crazy, just think about what it was probably like for the first people who argued against slavery. I’m sure that to everybody else, they would have looked weird too.

“But the evil monopolist would buy land and encircle the city!”

Ok this is a funny objection that I’ve seen before, but rest assured it will not be a problem in the market anarchist society.

1. Unreasonable access charges are not going to be profitable, people would just move away, so rather than devaluing their own land by driving customers away, the road owners would most likely charge a rate that people are willing to pay.
2. People don’t make their decisions in a vacuum – if one guy is just monopolising, other people won’t want to do business with him, because a road network needs interconnectivity to be of value to people, which in turn is necessary for somebody to make a profit from it.
3. Aspiring land monopolists generally won’t be able to just quickly and secretly buy up all the land. As land is being bought to close off a circle, it will be more and more economically advantageous for somebody else to buy up some land to provide an accessway. Also, people could start forming contracts/agreements not to form roads that block access to areas in response to this aspiring monopolist dude or whatever.
4. Also, as land is being bought to close off a circle, each piece of land will continue to become more and more marginally expensive, with the last piece being the most expensive and most probably not even up for sale. If ‘encirclement’ started to become a problem, land values for those areas would just shoot up, making it even more difficult for this hypothetical land monopolist.
5. People would just refuse to buy property unless they made an agreement beforehand that they would be allowed to leave/enter the property.
6. Lastly, I just feel like throwing this in: If you think monopolies are bad, then the solution is not government, because government itself is a monopoly.

I’m guessing the error people make here with this objection to free markets is thinking that markets are static, when really they’re dynamic and always changing in response to other things. People don’t just sit idly as they see threats coming at them, they adjust.

What will save you

Just as a follow up to “Ron Paul will not save you“, I’d like to specifically outline things what will save you.

1. Actually living the idea of “no unchosen positive obligations” in practice in your own interactions with other people. You don’t ‘owe’ people anything just because you were born into a system of governance. This also applies on a personal level, to your own family and friends. Don’t be pressured into going to “family dinners” if you feel that you won’t enjoy the time you spend with your family. There is no virtue in genetics, no reason why you must necessarily be closer to those people who you just happened to be born into the same family with. If you love your family, do it for the right reasons, because you actually like their personalities and qualities as human beings.
2. If their personalities are not that appealing to you, don’t be afraid of disassociating with these people. If they openly admit that they support violence against you, keeping your association with that person is like a jew hanging around with a bunch of Nazis.
3. Don’t vote! You can’t claim that everyone has self-ownership of themselves, while at the same time claiming that you can own other people by voting in democratic elections.
4. Talk to other people about personal and political freedom – We’re not going to advance the cause of liberty by keeping the answers to ourselves.

If government is good…

Then you’d have no problem doing the following yourself:

• Taking people’s money against their will, by force (taxation) – Simply claim that its for the ‘greater good’ and you’re away!
• Dress up in green uniforms and then go to other countries, feel free to kill people, you’ll get off easy when you get back home anyway (if the public even find out about it)
• Dictate how other people should live their lives, use force if they don’t want to comply – drugs, seatbelt laws, and most probably thousands of other crappy regulations dictating other parts of our lives.

It seems that there are two different moral standards being applied today. Let’s stop pretending that calling yourself the government allows moral rules of the complete opposite nature to apply. The fact that you are part of some group claiming to be a force for good does not justify doing things that ordinary individuals are not allowed to do.

If a democratic majority is all the justification you need to do something, then does that mean any majority, anywhere, anytime, regarding any issue is all you need? So if atheists outnumbered christians, could they outlaw churches in that town? Can females make males their slaves? (females outnumber males)

It does not matter that all these things are not actually happening, the problem is that the rule of the majority is considered golden. It is so obviously not valid, and it goes against the very self-ownership you are using to argue for it in the first place. You are engaged in performative contradiction when you deny your own self-ownership rights.

Ron Paul will not save you

Ron Paul needs little introduction to most people who would be running across this post. Even though he is relatively radical compared to the average person as far as free markets go, the reason he is a bad thing for libertarianism is actually the fact that he isn’t enough of a free marketeer.

With the US Presidential election upon us, I feel that it’s time to look at why Ron Paul’s candidacy should not be supported:

1. Voting will not change anything of significance: The problem is with democracy as a system, not with who is in charge.
2. Ron Paul is not that much different from other politicians, he still has to pander to audiences and offer them something for nothing, just as any other politician does. Notice how he still has to compromise his positions because he doesn’t want to risk feeling the wrath of the public service unions.
3. He won’t even get the Republican nomination, let alone President, he just doesn’t have the numbers. Working towards freedom is not the sort of thing that you get people to vote for, it is something that comes about by our own actions and thoughts. So voting is looking in the complete wrong direction.
4. Even if he does become President, there is no telling that he will be able to do what he says he will do.
5. Notice how there isn’t much of a plan as to exactly what will be privatised and how it will be done, given we’re talking about dismantling government agencies – no easy task, when people are dependent on these agencies.
6. To think that Ron Paul can go into the government and make it smaller is forgetting the entire purpose of government – to steal and take control of things. Don’t believe me? Well then why don’t you get to opt-out of taxes or regulation? Why is it that some firms pay money to politicians in return for favourable legislation? Why is that when people can’t just rely on their own productivity or voluntary solutions, they opt for government solutions? The government doesn’t exist to help us, it exists for some people to try and push costs onto other people. In a sense, the system will be rigged against anybody trying to make government smaller, since each individual department will want to try and maintain its own budget/power.
7. Governments have never been kept small in the past – just look at the US constitution, it was designed to limit powers not explicitly granted. The US government is now one of the biggest, most powerful governments in the world!

I’m not saying that I dislike the ideas of personal liberty, freedom and free markets. I’m just saying that I disagree with political solutions like trying to get your “saviour” voted in, in favour of solutions that will actually work, like refusing to vote and actually living personal freedom.

What we need is people moving towards freedom on their own, not our own guy in the machine to control the guns of the state. The world is sick, and until it realises that democracy sucks, it will never get well.