A Couple More Dictators Taken Down A Peg!

[SouthernYankee]

"If they are not against the law, then I don't feel I should have to pay for the problems which come up."

 

I have been reading my arguments for the last 20 minutes, and that was one I keep asking myself, "is that what I meant to write, because you could drive a Mack truck through that statement." Good to both of you for calling me on it.

[rkbabang]

"Taxation is theft."

-If that is your angle, run with it. That makes you the law unto yourself; you may run into someone who thinks his law is more important than your law, and take everything from you. Will you expect help from anyone, if that happens?

 

I don't want to steal your money from you so I am "a law unto myself", you want to steal money from me, so you are some kind of wonderful communitarian?  Let me get this straight. 

 

  We are afraid of private thieves so the solution is to create an organization that will take from us by force half of everything we produce for the entirety of our lives?  How exactly does this solve the problem of theft?

 

  We are afraid of private murderers so we create an organization that has murdered over 100 million people in the 20th century alone (this is murders by governments of their own citizens not even including wars which is human slaughter on a scale impossible without the state).  How does this solve the problem of murder?

 

  You are afraid of unscrupulous dishonest con-men who don't like to play by the rules of civilized society and enjoy using force and/or fraud to get what they want, so you create an organization with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?  Where do you think those people are going to go?  You haven't stopped the the criminals, you've made them your rulers!

 

I'll take my chances with the private criminals any day. At least I have a chance of defending myself against them.

 

[rranjan]

"Taxation is theft."

 

I'll take my chances with the private criminals any day. At least I have a chance of defending myself against them.

 

There should not be any problem to find places where you don't need to pay tax and don't have any law & order as well.

[rkbabang]

There should not be any problem to find places where you don't need to pay tax and don't have any law & order as well.

 

Funny how you associate the word “law” with the word “order”.  I’m sure you’ve also been taught to associate the word “anarchy” with the word “chaos”.  When in reality those definitions are backwards.  This is the very reason one of the most important things the state does (in its own opinion) is brainwash…I mean “educate” the youth.  That it can do this right out of the funds it steals from the parents and convince them that it is giving them a “free” service is all the better.  We all want order, none of us want chaos, and we’ve all been neural-linguistically programmed to think “law=order”, “anarchy=chaos”, but it is law I want to get rid of not order.  I do not want to live in Antarctica where there is no state and try to survive on penguin meat.  What I am trying to say is that institutionalized violence is not only not necessary, but is a significant impediment to a peaceful and orderly society.  But when you are dealing with generation after generation of people who are convinced that without violence roads could not be built and we’d all turn into savages slaughtering our neighbors for no reason, it is a very difficult point to get across.  Of course taxation is theft. It is theft by definition. Taking from someone something they own by force is theft.  But if you are thoroughly convinced that without such theft your neighbor would kill you and the roads couldn’t be built, it is easy to dismiss what is obvious and staring you right in the face.    Of course none of that is true.  You wouldn’t kill your neighbor, nor would I.  Roads would be built where they economically make sense and there was a demand for their use, but they wouldn’t be built otherwise (no “bridge to nowhere” in a free market).  When you read something that is obviously true and yet you want to dismiss it out of hand anyway, you should at the very least try to examine why that is and think about why you are reacting in that way.  It takes a lot research and a lot of self-examination to even begin the process of deprogramming your mind to use only logic, reason and evidence, and not rely completely on the neural programming you received as a child.

 

--Eric

 

(I see the fnords)

 

[cwericb]

rkbabang  “...as an anarchist...”

 

One thing I have never understood about anarchy and anarchists is what sort of society do they see themselves living in in their ideal world? I mean, taxes, law, government, etc all have their downside and we undoubtedly have too much of each, but what is the alternative? Somalia?

 

“Taxation is theft” For sure some of it is and nobody likes taxes, but again, what is the alternative? Privatization? Do you see Wall Street as a shining example of honesty? 

 

Do you really believe that if there was no law and law enforcement that you would be able to live in any semblance of safety?

[rranjan]

There should not be any problem to find places where you don't need to pay tax and don't have any law & order as well.

 

Funny how you associate the word “law” with the word “order”.  I’m sure you’ve also been taught to associate the word “anarchy” with the word “chaos”.  When in reality those definitions are backwards.  This is the very reason one of the most important things the state does (in its own opinion) is brainwash…I mean “educate” the youth.  That it can do this right out of the funds it steals from the parents and convince them that it is giving them a “free” service is all the better.  We all want order, none of us want chaos, and we’ve all been neural-linguistically programmed to think “law=order”, “anarchy=chaos”, but it is law I want to get rid of not order.  I do not want to live in Antarctica where there is no state and try to survive on penguin meat.  What I am trying to say is that institutionalized violence is not only not necessary, but is a significant impediment to a peaceful and orderly society.  But when you are dealing with generation after generation of people who are convinced that without violence roads could not be built and we’d all turn into savages slaughtering our neighbors for no reason, it is a very difficult point to get across.  Of course taxation is theft. It is theft by definition. Taking from someone something they own by force is theft.  But if you are thoroughly convinced that without such theft your neighbor would kill you and the roads couldn’t be built, it is easy to dismiss what is obvious and staring you right in the face.    Of course none of that is true.  You wouldn’t kill your neighbor, nor would I.  Roads would be built where they economically make sense and there was a demand for their use, but they wouldn’t be built otherwise (no “bridge to nowhere” in a free market).  When you read something that is obviously true and yet you want to dismiss it out of hand anyway, you should at the very least try to examine why that is and think about why you are reacting in that way.  It takes a lot research and a lot of self-examination to even begin the process of deprogramming your mind to use only logic, reason and evidence, and not rely completely on the neural programming you received as a child.

 

--Eric

 

(I see the fnords)

 

Law does have it's downside but due to human nature I doubt that you can get much of an order with 6-8 Billion people in the world. It's very easy to see the downside of current system but you are going in other extreme by ignoring all the upside as well.

 

Care to give an exmaple where your ideal world exist and you want to live there?

[SouthernYankee]

“Taxation is theft”

 

"But when you are dealing with generation after generation of people who are convinced that without violence roads could not be built and we’d all turn into savages slaughtering our neighbors for no reason, it is a very difficult point to get across."

 

-rkbabang,

A lot of what you have written on this thread, I enjoy reading. It is refreshing to see your perspective. I just think it is a pretty big leap to classify taxation as theft, and to say you need violence to build roads.

 

To get back to the reason for this thread, a man who spoke without thinking about a woman who wants other people to pay for her methods of contraception, and his subsequent business problems (overblown by the MSM of course, which considers him an enemy), seemed to give people their jollies for the week. While I admit some of my tax dollars will go to pay for things which I don't approve, mandating insurance coverage is not the same as taxation, and should be fought. The issue was not TAXATION, but Government telling private companies, religious institutions, and/or individuals what sort of contracts they have to provide for their employees.

And also, I believe you mentioned insurance being controlled by the individual. I would like to see us move in that direction. If my wife had more control of our healthcare dollars, my long-term care bills would have a nice nest egg in 20 years time! Like Buffett and Munger say, MARRY UP!!!

[rkbabang]

rkbabang  “...as an anarchist...”

 

One thing I have never understood about anarchy and anarchists is what sort of society do they see themselves living in in their ideal world? I mean, taxes, law, government, etc all have their downside and we undoubtedly have too much of each, but what is the alternative? Somalia?

 

“Taxation is theft” For sure some of it is and nobody likes taxes, but again, what is the alternative? Privatization? Do you see Wall Street as a shining example of honesty? 

 

Do you really believe that if there was no law and law enforcement that you would be able to live in any semblance of safety?

 

The short answer is “yes”.

 

I do realize that isn’t a very convincing answer.  I don’t have the time right now to respond in the way the question deserves, I’ll try to respond another time in more detail.

 

I also will say that I don’t think you can go from a massive state which has millions of people depending on it for their livelihood on a daily basis to an anarchistic society overnight.  It would have to be more evolutionary rather than revolutionary.  If the state disappeared tomorrow into thin air in the U.S. or Canada it WOULD be chaos.  Millions would be out of work, social security and other entitlements would just stop coming, many people would not know what to do with themselves.  Hell, even people in the private sector who have jobs would look at the very money they use and say “what is backing this now?”    If the state is to be dismantled it has to be because of a cultural change in the population that wants it to be dismantled.  Not because they are stereotypical "bomb throwing anarchists" who love chaos, but because they realize that the state does more harm than good in a civilized society and that violence begets more violence, so violence shouldn't be an accepted device used to solve societal problems. This is Somalia's problem, they have no state, but they do not have a culture of freedom either.  Yet, do some research on Somalia, they are clearly better off than they were in the 1980’s and they are better off than some of the societies that surround them.  All things being equal in their society as it stands culturally they are arguably better off without a state, than with one.  The culture needs some evolution to create a peaceful and prosperous society, but that would be true whether or not they have a government. If Somalia forms a government tomorrow, who will control it?  Most likly one of the warlord groups that are causing so much chaos in stateless Somalia today.  This will not bring peace and order, it will most likely bring corruption and widespread persecution of other competing groups. All of this is also true in many of the countries in that part of the world.  You could not go back in time to medieval Europe, for instance, kill the kings and all of the other royalty, tell the serfs that they are now free and expect life to immediately improve.  People get used to a certain way of life and do not handle quick structural changes well.  These things take time.  Over the course of human history our culture has been evolving towards more distributed  less concentrated power and towards more civilized, less barbarous and violent societies.  Of course sometimes we take 2 steps forward and 1 step back, but that has been the general direction.  Someday there will be no state, and historians will look back at our society and think of how primitive our culture was to still cling to our tribal leaders marked off by boundaries on a map even though we had relatively easy global trade, global transportation, and global communication (even if crude by the standards of the future of those things).  The same way we look back at god-kings and think “how primitive”.  There we're no biological differences between the humans under the god-kings and us.  The only things that have evolved since then, the only difference between them and us, is our technology and our culture.  Both will continue to evolve, each of us has the choice of either helping the process along or stand in its way.  How much more speedily and bloodlessly would slavery have been gotten rid of if there were more abolitionists and less people who thought "slavery has always been part of human society and we couldn't function as a society without it"?

 

As far as crime goes I think you give the state way too much credit in that area.  Many murders are never solved and the vast majority of property crimes go unsolved.  If your house gets broken into you will almost certainly never get your stuff back.  The police will make a report, place it in a file, and that will be the extent of it. Then your insurance company will pay your claim.  This is very similar to how it would work in a free market as well.  You will contract with a protection agency or maybe this will be run by your insurance company.  You will call them to file a claim, they will investigate and pay your claim.  If you call 911 because you have an intruder tonight, I hope you have some way to keep yourself alive in the 10-15minutes it may take for the police to get there.  Again, this will be the same in a free society with the exception that if you aren’t happy with your protection services company you can do business with someone else instead.  Walk around your average mid-to-large city and chances are you don’t see a cop anywhere or at least not very often.  The reason the people around you aren’t robbing you is because they are civilized, not because they are afraid of the government.  Will there always be crime?  Of course there will, it is how we deal with it that is under discussion.  Only statists think that there is some magic in words on paper called “law” that “solves” crime.  It just isn’t so. These laws, and the institutions that evolve to enforce them, are much more concerned with politically motivated “crimes” and fighting the "culture war" which the politicians use to get votes rather than really protecting people from violence.  Most people in jail are not murderers and rapists, they are minorities who are there for violating drug laws. Middle class whites are simply not arrested and thrown in jail for these “crimes” even though they do drugs at a rate similar to poorer minorities.  And since nothing will hold down your earnings potential like a criminal record, the “justice” system is used to keep the underclass in its place. It is a sick, disgusting and thoroughly broken system that needs to be done away with if our society is going to move forward and prosper.  There are many books written about how crime could be handled in a free society.  Milton Freidman’s son David Friedman who is a professor of economics and law at the Santa Clara University Law School wrote an excellent book called “The Machinery of Freedom: Guide to a Radical Capitalism” which I highly recommend.

 

Also some good and quick reads (and free) which deal with the subject, are Stefan Molyneux’s “Everyday Anarchy” and “Practical Anarchy”.  These books are excellent.  The free versions are in PDF, HTML, and the audiobook in MP3.  You have to buy and pay for the print versions if you prefer paper.

 

Other excellent books if you’ve read the above and would like to delve deeper into the subject is “The Conscience of an Anarchist: Why It's Time to Say Good-Bye to the State and Build a Free Society” by Gary Chartier

 

“Markets Not Capitalism: Individualist Anarchism Against Bosses, Inequality, Corporate Power, and Structural Poverty”, by Gary Chartier

 

And the classic: “For a New Liberty: The Libertarian Manifesto”, Murray N. Rothbard.  This book is a good introduction to a free society and how it might work.

 

So much for my idea of writing a short, quick post.

 

--Eric

 

[SouthernYankee]

Thanks for the book ideas, I guess it makes sense that I have heard of several of the people you list. I will wait for your book to come out, after this response with no detail.  ;)

 

 

[rkbabang]

Care to give an exmaple where your ideal world exist and you want to live there?

 

Some of the same things could be said about not having a king or dictator.  Show me an example in all the thousands of years in human history where a society has successfully gotten rid of its monarchs for any length of time?  Even our recent few hundred years of Republican government isn’t much proof, the Roman Republic lasted longer than ours yet still deteriorated to dictatorship in the end.  Looking only at history you could make a good case that human society needs to be organized as a dictatorship.

 

Remember that even a relatively short time ago in human history you could have said.  “Show me one modern agricultural society that has ever functioned without slavery.  None has ever existed. Please explain how we could feed our population in a world without slavery.  How could a labor intensive product like say, cotton, ever be grown, harvested, and brought to market profitably without the institution of slavery?  And what would these slaves all do if you set them free?  They have no education, no idea what it is like to live on their own and be responsible for themselves. They have no idea what it is like to be a productive and civilized member of society?  How to you integrate such people into a modern society without causing all kinds of problems?”    These questions (and many more like them) where asked many times. The answer of course is that it doesn’t matter.  Slavery is wrong and whatever the consequences, we will either find solutions to these problems or we won’t, but it simply isn’t morally acceptable to treat human beings like animals.  And of course in the end once it was clear that slavery would come to an end, labor saving devices were invented and cotton and other crops were successfully farmed (who would bother trying to invent such devices if slavery was not outlawed).  And it was sometimes a little rocky, but the former slaves were integrated into society.

 

I would say the same things about the state.  It simply isn’t acceptable to take by force from people to educate children, help the poor, build the roads, and protect us from crime.  Will people come up with innovative ways of solving these problems when the state is on its way out?  I think they will.  There is a huge market for all of these things, because almost everyone wants all of those things.  I can’t tell you how these problems will be solved any more than someone in the 18th century could have predicted tractors and the cotton gin.  If human beings are good at anything it is problem solving, especially when there is a profit motive behind it.  Some people have come up with ideas on how many of these problems would be solved (read some of the books I linked to in my last post), some of them sound plausible, but those are just that, plausible sounding ideas.  As Yogi Berra said “Prediction is very hard, especially about the future”.  No one will know for sure until it is hammered out on the forge of the marketplace.