Theme: Coercion

  • Why Would A Civilian Living Peacefully Need A Semi-automatic Gun?

    Because if he is living peacefully, he lives peacefully because he and those like him have guns.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-would-a-civilian-living-peacefully-need-a-semi-automatic-gun

  • Why Would A Civilian Living Peacefully Need A Semi-automatic Gun?

    Because if he is living peacefully, he lives peacefully because he and those like him have guns.

    https://www.quora.com/Why-would-a-civilian-living-peacefully-need-a-semi-automatic-gun

  • VAMPIRES IN WASHINGTON DC You know, this whole ‘farming’ the productive citizen

    VAMPIRES IN WASHINGTON DC

    You know, this whole ‘farming’ the productive citizen thing is really a wonderful analogy to what the federal government has become.

    In one of the Stargate science fiction worlds, there are these vampires that treat human populations as herds of cattle, and they ‘cull’ the herds to feed off of every so often.

    Now, the federal government doesn’t do that. THey just make sure that none of us will ever be self reliant enough to do without them, and so they harvest enough of our productivity through taxation that we continue to labor, but then, have to spend our old age in poverty.

    So, I tend to think of the federal government as an enormous vampire clan.

    Because it is.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-23 16:39:00 UTC

  • KEEP INCREDIBLY GOOD DATABASES ON OUR LIVESTOCK Now we can treat people even mor

    http://blog.independent.org/2013/07/22/obamacare-all-your-intimate-details-available-to-almost-anyone/WE KEEP INCREDIBLY GOOD DATABASES ON OUR LIVESTOCK

    Now we can treat people even more like livestock.

    I am a cow to be milked. I understand. I understand.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-23 14:21:00 UTC

  • ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION NIT If you and I are in the same community and we operate by

    ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION NIT

    If you and I are in the same community and we operate by the same code, we can use the law to resolve our conflict peacefully. If we are at war, then that isn’t possible. If our legal codes are incompatible, that isnt possible. So if my legal code says I an conquer primitive, illiterate, stone-age people in order to gain territory before one of the other competing nations conquers the illiterate stone age people in order to obtain their land, and my people will not prosecute me for it or they permit it, then it is by definition LEGAL.

    You might confuse illegal with immoral. But that would require that you define MORAL. Because MORAL rules among the tribal people were pretty freaking terrible.

    The ‘LAW’ at that time, was that you could conquer people who were ‘savages’. And they did. It was legal.

    Now, you could in fact, argue that lower classes have an unwritten law, or a moral obligation, that they can conquer others by waves of invasion, just as the whites conquered their ancestors by waves of invasion.

    And that’s true. But the question is not between members of the invaders and the population, it’s between members of the population who WANT the invaders and those that DON”T WANT the invaders.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-23 12:56:00 UTC

  • GOVERNMENT THINGS THAT I AM A FARM ANIMAL

    http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3v9pl6/MY GOVERNMENT THINGS THAT I AM A FARM ANIMAL.


    Source date (UTC): 2013-07-23 08:17:00 UTC

  • A Defense and Criticism of The Class Philosophy We Call ‘Libertarianism’

    [A]ll philosophy is class philosophy. All philosophies give precedence to one class or another. Libertarianism is a class philosophy as well. A CLASS PHILOSOPHY

      AN ECONOMIC PHILOSOPHY Libertarianism is an economic philosophy that states that:

        A POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY Libertarianism as a political philosophy that states that:

          BRANCHES OF LIBERTARIANISM

          • CLASSICAL LIBERALISM
          • MINIMAL STATE LIBERTARIANISM
          • ANARCHISM
          • ROTHBARDIAN

          LIBERTARIANISM IS AN ARGUMENT AGAINST MONOPOLY AND BUREAUCRACY – NOT SOCIAL GOODSLibertarianism is not an argument against ‘government’. It is an argument against monopoly and bureaucracy which hinder individual innovation and competition, and the creating of ‘differences’ (inequalities) which we then seek to eliminate. Libertarianism is not a prohibition on government. IT IS A PROHIBITION ON A MONOPOLY BUREAUCRACY that we call the STATE, that is able to issue COMMANDS under the guise of LAWS, because it maintains a monopoly on the use of violence to enforce those commands, because that state is isolated from competition, and as such, can pursue the interests of the bureaucracy, or become a tool of special interests that likewise desire monopoly privileges, at the expense of the citizenry. THE POWER OF LIKE-MINDED COMMUNITIES EVEN IF THEIR POWER IS BASED SOLEY ON THEIR VALUE AS CONSUMERS Libertarianism allows us to form our own communities with our own rules and norms, in a balance of power between communities with similar interests. These communities will then compete with one another for population, talent, and services. And people can choose which community to belong to. In this model there is no ‘state’. There are just collections of people who form contractual alliances. Just as we make voluntary commercial organizations, we can make voluntary civic organizations. Consumers are very important. Without consumers and credit it is impossible for commercial organizations to make money, and without the ability to make money there is no ability for people to organize into groups. The lower classes are consumers, and quite honestly, produce very little of value other than their consumption. Lower classes in the libertarian model will either exchange adoption to norms for redistributions in wealthy communities, or organize into their own organizations and charge fees for access to their consumers, which can then be redistributed, thereby minimizing profit. COOPERATING ON MEANS EVEN IF WE HAVE DIFFERENT ENDS: BY EXCHANGES IN THE MARKET AND IN GOVERNMENT The market for competition lets us compete toward different ends and preferences, even if we cooperate on means of achieving them. Monopoly government forces us to compete in government in a win-lose battle for control of the monopoly bureaucracy. Humans have been cooperating in the market on means, despite having disparate ends, for millennia There is no reason that we cannot take this insight as far as possible. MORALITY AND COMPETITION The market allows us to compete upon ends while cooperating upon means. However, competition is morally objectionable to human beings inside the family group, village or tribe. We license and encourage competition, because it produces positive results: a virtuous cycle. We tolerate only one form of immorality: competition. Every other form of involuntary transfer: violence, theft, fraud, omission, externalization, free riding, rent seeking and privatization, systemic corruption, systemic procedural involuntary transfer and warfare – we have constrained or outlawed. We can, in the market, use boycott to deprive organizations of wealth. But it is not always a strong lever. We can use the courts to protect us from violence, theft, fraud and omission if we do not surrender our right to sue. We can use government to protect us from unnecessary competition, free riding and privatization of the commons. when we invest in commons. We can use the state ‘bank’ as an insurer of last resort. We can use multiple houses of government, where we have them, to negotiate exchanges between the classes where market exchange is not possible or creation of commons is not possible, because of the asymmetry of reward of investment in various commons’. But we can only use market and government to cooperate on means of achieving disparate ends, if government is not open to corruttion. And government is open to corruption if it can make laws rather than conttracts. Only the courts can find or discover laws. The government if not corrupt, can only negotiate contracts impossible to negotiate in the market. This emphasis on contracts relies upon the morality of exchange, rather than the immorality of majority rule, or arbitrary command in pursuit of some artificial common ‘good’. ANY OTHER SOLUTION MEANS YOU’RE A THIEF That is, unless your desire is to STEAL rather than EXCHANGE. And you are most likely to want to STEAL rather than exchange if government provides a systematic means of stealing from others. And that’s what government does. It provides a systematic means of stealing. THe common law and property rights provide a systematic means of exchanging instead of stealing.

          ON THE NECESSARY, ADVANTAGEOUS, AND LUXURY FUNCTIONS OF GOVERNMENT

          A) NECESSARY PROPERTIES The NECESSARY properties of of a government are:

            These are the minimum properties of a government. B) ADVANTAGEOUS PROPERTIES In addition to these properties, it may also be possible for a group of people to afford to also have government engage in the following:

              These are advantageous properties of government. C) PROPERTIES THAT ARE LUXURIES In addition to these properties, it may be possible for a group of people to afford to also have the government engage in the following LUXURIES:

                These are LUXURIES that can be provided by some governments under rare circumstances in exceptional periods of time, where malthusian and group selection problems have been temporarily held at bay by technological innovation. The government is not the source of the ‘good things’. The courts, under the common law and property rights is the source of ‘good things’. The government has destroyed the common law, the rule of law, and crated both corporatism and socialism. And we now suffer between two factions that try to control the government for corporatist or socialist means.

                RESERVATIONS ABOUT LIBERTARIANISM

                THE ANCIENT SOURCE OF LIBERTY AND THE DESIRE FOR LIBERTARIANISM White males (the european, or perhaps germanic, race) seek status under the ancient indo-european proscription for heroism via competition. The west is unique for having produced this philosophy of aristocratic egalitarianism – inclusion in equalitarian leadership, and therefore obtaining the reward of property rights, by demonstrated heroism. And the high trust society of the west is the result of aristocratic egalitarianism (heroic achievement, demonstrated excellence, virtue). For most of history, and pre-history, males could achieve this only through combat. With the advent of manorialism, males could demonstrate their fitness through hard work. With the advent of chivalry males could demonstrate their heroic status by charitable service. With the advent of consumer capitalism, males could demonstrate their heroic fitness in commerce. Heroic achievemnet grants access to mates (we have a lof of data on this now that confirms this fact – to the point where we know how many dollars in income per inch of height under 5’10” you must earn to gain the same quality of attractive woman…. Really.) Women are as shallow about status as men are about physical attraction – and the data is the data. As such, white males are intuitively attracted to libertarianism if they see in libertarianism a means of pursuing traditional signals for mating, social status, and wealth. That libertarianism is a rigorous philospohy equalled in detail only by Marxism, and is articulated in economic language and analytical philosophy. It is accessible only to those people with both incentive to learn it, and the ability to understand it. This is why libertarianism is a minority white male philosophy. It is an aristocratic philosophy and difficult to access. Other cultures lack both the mythology and cultural values for heroism and egalitarianism Which is why other cultures also cannot produce the high trust society. And without the high trust society, the wealth necessary for redistribution (charity) is impossible to achieve at scale. RESERVATIONS ABOUT LIBERTARIANISM

                • 1) DISCOUNT-DRIVEN PACIFISM.
                • 2) LIBERTY IS A DESIRE OF THE MINORITY.
                • 3) LACK OF ORGANIZATION.
              • Why Is Communism Considered Evil By Some People?

                GREAT QUESTION. ILL TRY TO DO IT JUSTICE

                Because Karl Marx made a catastrophic error in basing his system of thought on the Labor Theory of Value, and amplified that with a complete failure to understand the necessity of prices and incentives as information systems – a combination that invalidated everything else he concluded from that point onward.

                This catastrophe would not have mattered, and would have made him little more than the subject of economic ridicule that he is today, except that he wrote ideological works including the Communist Manifesto, that were prescriptions for rebellion, and that formed both the basis of a new pseudo-religion masquerading as a political system. Second this pseudo-religion formed the a model with which the east could react to, and compete with, the disruptive social and political effects of anglo consumer Capitalism under Democracy.

                The east needed an ideological alternative to ‘jump ahead’ of the west. In their societies, democracy could not function because it requires that familial trust and freedom from coercion be extended to all members of society, which was impossible due to eastern cultural retention of family and tribal priorities where trust and freedom from coercion is extended only to family and tribe – and coercion and corruption were pervasive elsewhere.

                While Marx is sometimes given a pass, because his ideas were abused by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong (毛泽东), and the Khmer Rouge, which resulted in the murder 100M people, the fact remains that Communism isn’t possible because human cooperation is impossible in a division of knowledge and labor without the combination of money, prices, accounting, contracts, and the constant desire of people to identify new opportunities and niches to fill in response to changing demand and shocks.

                The reason that the west demonized Marxism was because it was a threat to consumer capitalist society: it was used to militarize countries, it was used as an ideological tool to foment rebellion around the world, and it resulted in more deaths than anything in Human History other than perhaps even the Black Death. So realistically, it deserves to be demonized.



                WHAT WORKS IF MARX DOESN’T?

                Social democracy, which is ordinary english classical liberalism with the addition of Keynesian Economic policy, does not include the abolishment of private property, prices, and incentives, instead keeps all of those institutions, while ‘siphoning off as much profit from individuals as it can without killing the cow that feeds it.’

                This seems to be working quite well, except that people do not work hard or long enough, and have now spent both the money that they would have saved during their lifetimes, and the money that the future generations would have consumed. This is a problem of building a Ponzi Scheme dependent on the same perpetual Economic Growth that we saw during Industrialization, but it is not one of the impossibility that Marx fantasized about.

                WHY IS CONSUMER CAPITALISM NECESSARY?

                It is very easy to be China or India and import existing western technology. But when easy opportunities (as we see is happening in China) are fully exploited, the country must turn to domestic consumption, and to domestic innovation. So Totalitarianism is effective in China at creating literacy, and effective in ‘investment’ in infrastructure. The question remains how effective or burdensome that bureaucracy will be when the limits of totalitarian direction are reached, and the society must run entirely on domestic consumption.

                THE VALUE OF TOTALITARIANISM AT EARLY STAGES

                Chinese totalitarianism is useful at this stage because the army can be counted on to enforce policy if the people rebel, but India can’t do the same. While both China and India are empires, India has more systematic corruption and insufficient centralization of power to forcibly implement policy as does China.

                It is possible that China can convert to an innovation country at some point. But it remains a desperately poor country. But the entire issue is that innovation and constant adaptation become the source of prosperity once easily obtained opportunities have been fully exploited.

                CHINA IS A CORPORATIST NOT A COMMUNIST STATE

                (Which would be painfully ironic if not for 100M dead people.)

                There is nothing communist about China at all. China is operated by Confucian rules: as a large, extended-family corporation. And the modern communist party is not communist, or a party, it is a corporation and runs china as a corporation. It satisfies consumers, and it must satisfy consumers because internal frictions would disrupt it if it didn’t.

                In this sense, there is nothing communist about china any longer other than the symbolism, and the disproportionate power of the People’s Liberation Army that still lives by doctrine.

                China is an example of Corporatism. Corporatism works. Because it’s meritocratic.

                Russia is trying to move to corporatism, but culturally is too much of a bridge civilization between east and west, and will have to retain some semblance of democratic rule even if the bureaucracy will remain corporatist.

                The west is having problems with its fantasy of universalism, and social democracy which were invented in a period of temporary economic superiority that no longer exists in a globalized labor force. It is not any more sustainable than is the US military control of trade and petrodollars.

                But that’s a different topic for another time.

                https://www.quora.com/Why-is-communism-considered-evil-by-some-people

              • Why Is Communism Considered Evil By Some People?

                GREAT QUESTION. ILL TRY TO DO IT JUSTICE

                Because Karl Marx made a catastrophic error in basing his system of thought on the Labor Theory of Value, and amplified that with a complete failure to understand the necessity of prices and incentives as information systems – a combination that invalidated everything else he concluded from that point onward.

                This catastrophe would not have mattered, and would have made him little more than the subject of economic ridicule that he is today, except that he wrote ideological works including the Communist Manifesto, that were prescriptions for rebellion, and that formed both the basis of a new pseudo-religion masquerading as a political system. Second this pseudo-religion formed the a model with which the east could react to, and compete with, the disruptive social and political effects of anglo consumer Capitalism under Democracy.

                The east needed an ideological alternative to ‘jump ahead’ of the west. In their societies, democracy could not function because it requires that familial trust and freedom from coercion be extended to all members of society, which was impossible due to eastern cultural retention of family and tribal priorities where trust and freedom from coercion is extended only to family and tribe – and coercion and corruption were pervasive elsewhere.

                While Marx is sometimes given a pass, because his ideas were abused by Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong (毛泽东), and the Khmer Rouge, which resulted in the murder 100M people, the fact remains that Communism isn’t possible because human cooperation is impossible in a division of knowledge and labor without the combination of money, prices, accounting, contracts, and the constant desire of people to identify new opportunities and niches to fill in response to changing demand and shocks.

                The reason that the west demonized Marxism was because it was a threat to consumer capitalist society: it was used to militarize countries, it was used as an ideological tool to foment rebellion around the world, and it resulted in more deaths than anything in Human History other than perhaps even the Black Death. So realistically, it deserves to be demonized.



                WHAT WORKS IF MARX DOESN’T?

                Social democracy, which is ordinary english classical liberalism with the addition of Keynesian Economic policy, does not include the abolishment of private property, prices, and incentives, instead keeps all of those institutions, while ‘siphoning off as much profit from individuals as it can without killing the cow that feeds it.’

                This seems to be working quite well, except that people do not work hard or long enough, and have now spent both the money that they would have saved during their lifetimes, and the money that the future generations would have consumed. This is a problem of building a Ponzi Scheme dependent on the same perpetual Economic Growth that we saw during Industrialization, but it is not one of the impossibility that Marx fantasized about.

                WHY IS CONSUMER CAPITALISM NECESSARY?

                It is very easy to be China or India and import existing western technology. But when easy opportunities (as we see is happening in China) are fully exploited, the country must turn to domestic consumption, and to domestic innovation. So Totalitarianism is effective in China at creating literacy, and effective in ‘investment’ in infrastructure. The question remains how effective or burdensome that bureaucracy will be when the limits of totalitarian direction are reached, and the society must run entirely on domestic consumption.

                THE VALUE OF TOTALITARIANISM AT EARLY STAGES

                Chinese totalitarianism is useful at this stage because the army can be counted on to enforce policy if the people rebel, but India can’t do the same. While both China and India are empires, India has more systematic corruption and insufficient centralization of power to forcibly implement policy as does China.

                It is possible that China can convert to an innovation country at some point. But it remains a desperately poor country. But the entire issue is that innovation and constant adaptation become the source of prosperity once easily obtained opportunities have been fully exploited.

                CHINA IS A CORPORATIST NOT A COMMUNIST STATE

                (Which would be painfully ironic if not for 100M dead people.)

                There is nothing communist about China at all. China is operated by Confucian rules: as a large, extended-family corporation. And the modern communist party is not communist, or a party, it is a corporation and runs china as a corporation. It satisfies consumers, and it must satisfy consumers because internal frictions would disrupt it if it didn’t.

                In this sense, there is nothing communist about china any longer other than the symbolism, and the disproportionate power of the People’s Liberation Army that still lives by doctrine.

                China is an example of Corporatism. Corporatism works. Because it’s meritocratic.

                Russia is trying to move to corporatism, but culturally is too much of a bridge civilization between east and west, and will have to retain some semblance of democratic rule even if the bureaucracy will remain corporatist.

                The west is having problems with its fantasy of universalism, and social democracy which were invented in a period of temporary economic superiority that no longer exists in a globalized labor force. It is not any more sustainable than is the US military control of trade and petrodollars.

                But that’s a different topic for another time.

                https://www.quora.com/Why-is-communism-considered-evil-by-some-people

              • ARE WRONG ON IMMIGRATION. AND IF THEY”RE RIGHT, PROGRESSIVES ARE RIGHT ON DEBT.

                http://cafehayek.com/2013/07/thomas-sowell-and-immigration.htmlLIBERTARIANS ARE WRONG ON IMMIGRATION. AND IF THEY”RE RIGHT, PROGRESSIVES ARE RIGHT ON DEBT.

                (How do you like that one?)

                Reposted from Comments on Cafe Hayek.

                —————

                ACK. POSITIVISM.

                How do we measure the cost to current political friction?

                How do we measure the cost of the decline in property rights?

                How do we measure the cost of the decline in the rule of law?

                How do we measure the cost of the decrease in the civic society?

                How do we measure the opportunity cost of what might have been?

                How do we measure the cost of the decline of the nuclear family?

                How do we measure the cost of declining trust due to diversity?

                I can generate constant economic growth by conducting two centuries of constant warfare, while increasing credit loads predicated on the ongoing success of that warfare. So what?

                How many unmeasured costs of normative, social, and institutional capital are absorbed by immigration?

                I can’t take the time address this problem other than to just make a very long list. To which the ONLY response by libertarians would be correlative empirical nonsense. There is no reason if these intangibles PRODUCE the high trust society and the rule of law, that their sacrifice isn’t a COST that undermines the high trust society and the rule of law.

                After all, the production cycle of high trust norms it looks like, is from 200-700 years, and the production cycle of an economy is months or years. I mean, just how IRRATIONAL is it to measure the NOISE generated by profit, loss and GROWTH, instead of the SIGNAL of social and human capital? I mean, how absolutely ridiculous… it’s essentially numerology – attributing magical properties to numbers, and falling into the vapid positive error of INDUCTION.

                IMMIGRATION IS NOT AN ABSOLUTE GOOD and ECONOMIC MEASURES are contrary indicators of the growth of normative, social and human capital.

                If positivism on this scale is right, then the progressives are also right. All you do is confirm the idiocy of the Krugman-Stigliz-Delong left. And their goal is not economic -it’s political. It’s to undermine the aristocratic high trust society and replace it with the totalitarian equalitarian state.

                Sigh. It’s no wonder that we lose the ideological battle with even the conservatives. At least they understand it even if they speak in allegorical terms.

                Exasperating.


                Source date (UTC): 2013-07-20 12:16:00 UTC