Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State

New essay by Hoppe: Reflections on the Origin and the Stability of the State

I thought this was a great essay, I specifically liked this point:

Hence, people recognize that there is but one solution to the desideratum of peace: the establishment, per agreement, of a state, i.e., a third, independent party as ultimate judge and enforcer.

Yet if this thesis is correct and agreements require an outside enforcer to make them binding, then a state-by-agreement can never come into existence. For in order to enforce the very agreement which is to result in the formation of a state (to make this agreement binding), another outside enforcer, a prior state, would already have to exist. And in order for this state to have come into existence, yet another still earlier state must be postulated, and so on, in infinite regress.

Religion is bullshit

So George Carlin died recently and I thought I’d just post a video where he attacks the idea of religion. This guy is a comedy legend and I really like how he thinks religion and voting are bullshit.

Anti-competition laws are arbitrary

Yep, that’s right. They are, they make very little sense at all. In the article, ACCC rethinks eBay payments immunity – the ACCC (Australia’s consumer watchdog government agency – for non australian readers of this blog) is kicking up a fuss over the way that eBay wanted to make it compulsory to use their Paypal service for payments.

Now it doesn’t seem to matter that transactions settled via PayPal are “four times less likely to lead to a dispute” to the ACCC (and the people who wrote up the Trade practices act). All that matters is that they want to throw their weight around, maybe they want to just look like they’re being useful. And even if the fact that eBay is forcing customers to use PayPal is some kind of ’negative’ thing that customers don’t like, well then clearly they’ll just take their business elsewhere.

The thing that annoys me the most about the existence of these types of laws, is that they’re really just arbitrary. They’re just governments imposing their own views on what business practices should be. Like this whole idea that companies can’t use certain things in an “exclusive way” even if they own all those aspects of the process.

Section 47 of the Act prohibits exclusive dealing, which broadly involves one trader imposing restrictions on another’s freedom to choose with whom, in what or where it deals. In some cases, exclusive dealing is prohibited outright, and in other cases, only where it substantially reduces competition.

This is not right because there is no real restriction placed on people’s freedoms, because nobody forced them to buy via eBay in the first place! This is also an arbitrary way to define things, because it doesn’t seem all that different from choosing not to give the economic benefits of something you own to somebody else. (which you’re allowed to do if you own it) Eg. You may own a clothesline, but that doesn’t mean you have to let your neighbour use it. Similarly, a business may have some kind of asset that they only want to let people use in certain circumstances – eBay doesn’t want to let people use its service unless they are willing to pay via PayPal.

Governments and voters tend to think that once a business has become large enough, it has become this institution that can be stripped for its assets and made to do whatever they tell it to, cos might makes right, or whatever screwed up reasoning they have in their own mind. Whether or not using PayPal is the ‘efficient outcome’ doesn’t even matter in the slightest. What matters is: Do you have the right?

So unless you think slavery is morally acceptable, you can’t logically say that you think you can force other people to change the way they do business with their own assets and products/belongings. Because this is suggesting that you can own other people.

Jurors play Sudoku, and the government wonders why

I saw this article on smh.com.au today:The game’s up: jurors playing Sudoku abort trial

So apparently this bunch of jurors in a $1m drug case got bored and started playing Sudoku instead of watching the trial. Let’s see, so you can be ‘chosen’ at random out of a pool of eligible people to do jury duty, and be made to stop your regular job. Instead of getting paid what you normally do, you can get paid less than what you would otherwise be earning. All this when you never chose to do jury duty!

And then people wonder why jurors get bored and all this money has been wasted.

In a free society, jurors would need to be given an actual choice, and if they aren’t going to do it for a certain rate – then the court would not have the right to force them to do it. In the free society, the right to somebody’s time is not taken for granted.