Introduction
Democracy is universally held up as the sacred political ideal. In fact, it is no exaggeration to say that democracy is a secular religion. Observe: We fight wars for it (“Making the world safe for democracy”). We are implored to blindly participate in it (“It doesn’t matter who you vote for, just vote”). And most tellingly, it is taboo to question it. Anyone who claims that democracy is bad is likely to be labeled a Nazi. (Even though Hitler was democratically elected and much of Nazism was promoted with democratic rhetoric.)
Nevertheless, I will attempt to prove that democracy is one of the worst political ideologies, on par with dictatorship and communism. My argument is three pronged. First, democracy is founded on initiatory violence. It is thus no more acceptable than murder or rape. Second, it can be refuted by a reductio ad absurdum; namely, that while we accept democracy for government, we would never accept it applied consistently in our lives. Third, democracy is unnecessary. What is there to vote on? All essential functions of society can be provided voluntarily and competitively on the market. Programs like the minimum wage and rent control are actually counter-productive, and can be eliminated altogether. There are many other problems with democracy: its ineffectiveness, its corruption, its total war, and its decivilization effect; but I will not address these here (see Hoppe). Last, I will address two strategies to undermine and weaken democracy: not voting and secession.
Democracy is immoral
Let us start with a definition. The root word definition of democracy gives us “demos” = “people” and “cracy” = “rule”. Essentially, democracy means rule by the people, or more commonly, rule by majority.
With this definition we can come to my first point. Democracy is a rule by majority over a minority. This means that the majority must threaten or initiate violence against the minority in order to rule. Aggression, invasion, and hegemony are at the very root of democracy.
Assume the majority wishes to levy a tax while the minority dissents. The majority must initiate coercion or threaten punishment against the minority to enforce payment. They are literally robbing the minority of private property. If the minority were not compelled to pay, it would not be a democracy. In other words, democracy could only be voluntarily if all decisions were unanimous. But, then it would cease to be majority rule. So, the inescapable problem of democracy is that it replaces voluntary interaction with initiatory coercion.
Moreover, democracy relies on a prohibition of secession. A democracy must initiate violence against seceding minorities in order to maintain majority rule. “If every dissident minority secedes after every opposed decision, then there is no democratic regime.” Thus, “those who advocate democracy are also logically advocating, that at some point secession be suppressed. And almost inevitably, that implies the use of force – military force. You can not be a democrat unless you are prepared to kill.” (source) Democracy, as it must initiate violence against minorities and secessionists, is the moral equivalent of a fascist dictatorship. Democracy is a lynch mob writ large.
One may object that democracy is not pure majority rule, but involves some individual rights. However, this does not obtain. For if some individual rights are respected, the logical conclusion is that all rights are respected, in which case democracy would not exist. The majority could not initiate violence against the minority, or violently suppress secession movements. Such acts would be rights violations. The other logical conclusion is that all rights are actually just privileges granted by the majority, and are subject to the majority’s whim, in which case we have democracy. There can be no justification for holding an inconsistent middle ground.
Democracy is absurd
My second argument is a reductio ad absurdum. Democracy, as rule by majority, does not recognize individual rights. All property is subject to the will of the majority. But why settle for majority rule only in roads, police, courts, schools, libraries, regulations, etc.? If it is right and just for a majority to rule over a minority, why not apply this principle consistently and take it to its logical conclusion: if democracy applies to 1,000,000 people ruling over 10,000; then it must also apply to any scenario where two people rule over one.
Walter Block provides one such example: Two robbers break into your house and steal your TV. You catch them, but as philosophical robbers, they point out that they are two and you are only one. As a majority following democratic principles, the robbers can rightly take your TV. Or imagine a single mother living with her three children. When she refuses to feed them ice cream for breakfast, the children, as a majority, could legitimately vote her out of the house. Or imagine a democratic organ clinic. A group of renegade surgeons could grab any person walking alone down the street, and as a majority, harvest the pedestrian’s organs. The democratic principle means that any minority must always submit to the rule of any majority.
The ultimate result of democracy carried to its logical conclusion reads like a dystopian nightmare: people would roam the streets in packs, mugging and looting any minority they could find. People would never leave their house alone, for fear of encountering any group of more than two people. Humanity would regress to some bizarre tribal warfare, where mobs would squabble desperately over who is more numerous. The larger mob—the majority—would then pillage and rob the smaller—the minority. In fact, there could not even be laws, because law could be determined at random by any majority, such as Block’s TV robbers. Such a scenario is truly absurd.
Democracy is unnecessary
My last argument is that democracy is totally unnecessary. There is no conceivable reason to have a democratic government, because any government function can be provided voluntarily and competitively on the market. Because interactions on the market are always voluntary, we can avoid the moral problem inherent in democracy of using initiatory violence against innocent people. Through market competition, these services will be more efficient, because entrepreneurs must earn their income from customers and must compete with one another to provide the best service. Moreover, instead of investing power in a centralized government, the market decentralizes power into the hands of individuals. Rather than having some bureaucrat in Washington running everyone’s lives, the free market allows people to be responsible, self-reliant adults.
Abraham Lincoln wrote that
A majority, held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or despotism. Unanimity is impossible; the rule of a minority, as a permanent arrangement, is wholly inadmissible; so that, rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.” (emphasis added)
However, Lincoln was wrong. Unanimity is possible. A totally voluntary society is possible where all government functions are provided on the market. A society by consensus replaces the coercive relations of majority rule with mutual, voluntary, market relations. Lincoln’s division between democracy and anarchy/despotism is a false dichotomy. Unanimous rule is possible.
Thus, private roads would be run by profit seeking road companies, eager to satisfy customers. (Note that, historically, the first roads were privately owned.) They might collect payment from tolls, monthly subscriptions, or use road sensors that detect magnetically encoded stickers on your car. They might offer free service for commercial districts, or charge forbidding prices to through-traffic on residential streets. They could reduce road congestion through peak load pricing: charging high prices during rush hour and lower prices any other time, thus evening out the traffic flow. Importantly, road deaths would incur costs to road owners, both in repairs and reputation, in turn creating a financial incentive to provide safe, orderly roads. In comparison, democratic government roads are chaotic, ill maintained death traps: over 40,000 people die each year on roads in the U.S. alone.
So, there is no need to vote for politicians to provide roads, because the market can do a better job, and voluntarily to boot.
Private courts and police would likely be provided by insurance companies. As every exchange is a contract, people will buy contract insurance to resolve potential disputes. The insurance companies would have to indemnify victims, and would thus have a financial incentive to provide fair and efficient arbitration services. Insurance companies would stipulate in their contracts exactly how disputes would be resolved, leaving no problem of having to agree on an arbitrator after the fact. Competition would weed out corrupt companies and serve to keep premiums low.
In terms of police, note that protection from coercion is an economic good. Like contract insurance, people would buy protection insurance. Again, insurance companies must indemnify victims, and so have a financial incentive to eliminate crime. They would also stipulate in their contracts how justice would be meted out – mainly by restitution to the victim – and competition would keep them honest. Protection could also be provided by private property owners. For example, roads, malls, and office buildings can better serve customers by employing security guards, as is the case now.
Contrast government police and courts. Police are notorious for not preventing crime, and are increasingly becoming criminals themselves (e.g. taser murders). Government courts, as a monopoly industry, are bureaucratic, inefficient, and agonizingly slow. Government provision of justice is actually government perversion of justice.
There is no need to vote on police and courts, because they can be provided non-coercively on the market.
Lastly, there is no need to vote on such price control programs as the minimum wage or rent control, because they simply do not work. In fact, they are actually counter-productive: instead of helping, they hurt the poor.
For instance, the minimum wage coercively increases the price of labor, thus decreasing the income of employers. With increased labor costs, employers must demand less workers, and do so by laying off marginal workers and creating less new jobs. The minimum wage is an unemployment law. It hurts poor, marginal workers the most.
Likewise with rent control. By coercively lowering the price of housing, the incomes of landlords are reduced. With less income, landlords cannot afford to maintain their current supply of housing, and so will reduce the supply and/or reduce the quality. The effect is double: reducing the supply causes a shortage, and reducing the quality leads to widespread slum housing. Rent control is the primary cause of slums. Again, it is poor and marginal tenants who are hurt the most. Rent control is a homelessness law.
There is no need to vote on price controls, because they do not even work.
Strategy
But if democracy is morally revolting, illogical, and destructive, we are still presented with the fact that most countries are democratic, or at least subscribe to its rhetoric. Keeping in mind our goal of a totally voluntary, unanimous society, how can we delegitimize and expose democracy as the fraud it is?
The first step is to stop voting. The politicians’ credibility and legitimacy depend on the support of the masses. As de la Boétie and Hume have shown, the government rests, not on force, but on the public opinion of the citizenry. By abstaining from voting, we can lower voter turnout to the point where the winning government is supported by only a small minority, say 20% of the population. For example, if total voter turnout is 45%, and the election is very close, say 23% to 22%, that means that only 23% of the population is running the country. Suddenly people realize that democracy no longer means majority rule; it is now minority rule. Moreover, why do politicians beg us to vote, telling us “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, just vote”? The answer is that politicians feel very nervous without mass public support. Knowing that only a small minority supports them, they must be very moderate with their policies lest the people revolt. Thus, not voting is a strong way to destabilize and threaten democracy.
Next, it is essential to realize that any internal governmental reform is near impossible. The politicians and bureaucrats are enjoying their position as leaders of a protection racket, and are not going to give it up voluntarily. Governmental reform is akin to trying to infiltrate and bring down the Mafia from the inside—it’s not going to happen.
Thus, our second strategy is secession. “Democracy relies on a prohibition of secession. A democratic regime assumes a ‘demos’—a unit of political decision-making which is constant between decisions. If every dissident minority secedes after every opposed decision, then there is no democratic regime.” (source) In other words, “secession allows the democratic process to be circumvented or evaded, without a direct attack on the government. In a secession, the existing government is not overthrown, the nation is not colonized, the people are not murdered or enslaved.” (source) Peaceful secession is a nonviolent expression of the right to free association.
Secession is like punching democracy in the gut. Secession subverts and undermines the democratic process. The integrity of majority rule is violated when a minority threatens to secede rather than obey majority decisions. As Abraham Lincoln wrote: “The principle [of secession] itself is one of disintegration, and upon which no government can possibly endure”. Further, once the legitimacy of secession is granted, it opens up a Pandora’s Box of secessionist claims that cannot be rejected. Secession would have an exponential, snowball effect: Once Vermont secedes, Quebec’s secession will progress more smoothly, New York will become a free independent city, and on and on! This is why governments fear secession so much: once it starts, it can’t stop. Once one secession is granted, entire nation-states will crumble apart. Finally, the principle of secession must lead to secession of the individual, at which point the ideal of the totally voluntary society has been reached.
Conclusion
I have attempted to show that democracy is undeserving of its status as the ultimate political structure. Democracy is based on aggression, not voluntarism, and thus is morally repulsive. Taken to its logical conclusion, democracy leads to absurdity. No rational person would accept democracy if it was applied to every aspect of their lives. Finally, democracy is wholly unnecessary – there is nothing that needs to be voted on. Further, our strategy to smash the sacred cow of democracy must be rooted in nonaggression. If we aggress or initiate violence we are no better than the democrats. Not voting and secession allow us to maintain the moral high ground, while effectively challenging the moronic democratic philosophy. And so, democracy is immoral, irrational, and unnecessary. It should be torn down from its revered pedestal and tossed onto the intellectual junk pile of history.
Great article, well written imo
Interesting article! Very entertaining read! =)
Good to know there are thinking, principled people out there. I have questions about some of these proposals but overall I like the article.
I just skipped down to your strategy and conclusion. I agree that non-voting and secession are good strategies that would get us to where we want to be. Unfortunately, as you noted, democracy prohibits secession, so if we attempted that strategy, we'd be faced with the violence of the State. And non-voting is not really an "action" but an "inaction." Although non-voting is important, it is too slow (with all the get-out-the-vote propaganda that goes around) to rapidly effect change in society. Anarchists need to peacefully "do something" to bring people to the point where they are realize that anarchism could actually work. Violence isn't the answer as that would alienate the populace from the principle trying to be taught. A peaceful solution would be one that people would gravitate towards and also as they used it, would be self-educated in the anarchic principle of self-government. In my opinion, the present economic climate is the perfect window of opportunity for anarchists to get their message across, as people are beginning to get really upset by the corruption found in government. I have presented an anarchic economic solution to take advantage of this ideal time we are living in, but we need more anarchists or libertarians who also take action and present other peaceful solutions that will rapidly change society. Once society reaches the point where it will allow peaceful secession, I agree that the principle of secession would be all that would be necessary to do the rest. But until that happens, other peaceful means must be used to bring us to that point.
I agree that other strategies are necessary. Non-voting and secession are just two that specifically counteract democracy.
When I use the word "democracy", I am using it literally. You do not vote "for" someone under democracy. What the author is making points against is a "republic". Specifically the US version of republic (no one else has ever fought wars to "make the world safe for democracy") In fact, what is really meant when politicians when they say that is making the world safe for free markets – the very thing the author is supporting – because open foreign markets (ie not regulated by each foreign countries government) means cheap labor and goods fo the US.
Further, democracy is a political system, not an economic system. The author treats the two as if they were interchangeable. They are not. The economy can be one of the things which government regulates.
Majority rule does not imply violence anymore than any decision making process does.
If you are in class, and you have a group project, and each person has a different idea of what to do it on, no student fears his classmate will attack him for his opinion. They may argue about it, but ultimately which ever idea is most popular will win out. There is no coercion or threat involved.
That is democracy.
Not everyone gets their way, but it is understood that it is a group project, and things have to be decided or else everyone is going to fail.
The argument that anything which applies to one circumstance must apply to every possible circumstance is stupid and i am reluctant to even respond to it, but for the sake of argument, I will anyway.
In order to say that riding a bike to the store is good, you must say riding it everywhere is good. It is not good to ride a bike from your bed to the living room, nor is it good to ride it from Oakland to Japan. Since it isn't good in every imaginable scenario, it must not be good for anything at all.
Democracy isn't about the majority getting to "outvote" any minority about everything, its about an equitable way to make society wide decisions that need to be made for the benefit of everyone which the free market simply will not provide. Things like roads, disaster relief, environmental protection, and health care. Our country is a great example of what happens when you trust health care to the free market. If police and fire services were not public, only the middle class and above would have fires put out or protection from attackers.
A free market society is far from a consensus society.
A free market society means the richer you are the more "votes" you get.
He suggests roads could be maintained privately. There is no model to support that idea. Existing toll roads take decades to pay for themselves (and, incidentally, the toll roads I have been on in Ohio were much worse maintained than average). Bridges never pay for themselves. No company would go into a market with so low a return when there are other options available.
He suggests also that all market interactions be based on contract.
Who enforces those contracts?
How do they enforce them when there is no public court or police?
If courts are private, what stops them from siding with whoever is paying their fees (as we see happen consistently with arbitration companies and which is the reason almost all corporations prefer to use them)
A minimum wage does not force employers to lay off workers.
They could just as easily cut hours of everyone equally. Better yet, the company could be worker owned, in which case they can divide up the amount of thier own labor which was diverted to the managers and owners who do not do any of the actual work yet make far more of the income.
For all the bitching Ford does about employee costs, its CEO made $21 million – in a year they had huge losses and needed government help. Meanwhile Toyota, which is doing far better, paid their CEO less than 1 million.
That 20 million would have gone a long way to paying union wages, health care benefits, or retooling factories to make more efficient cars.
And that is not counting the CFO, the assistant CEO, the president and vice of the board of directors, product managers, or any of dozens of top level manager with million plus annual compensation.
If a company can not afford to provide a living wage to its lowest paid workers, than it is expanding faster than it sustainably can, and it needs to stop.
The authors comments on rent control are ridiculous. He doesn't bother to give any indication of where people who can't afford market rates should live. That's the basic problem with all libertarian theory. It gets around the immorality of it by claiming that anyone who can't afford, say, the market rate for food or water, must have made bad choices so it is their own fault they are poor so fuck them.
In the real world the rich are rich due to inheritance, the middle class send their kids to private school and college, and poverty is inherited the same way. Under the free market (or anarchy) their is no provision for the poor, the elderly, the disabled, or the abandoned young. Individual charity alone does not have the resources to help these groups.
The solution to rent control is to outlaw all ownership of rental housing.
You should not be able to charge someone just to live on a space on the Earth. You should not be able to make money when you are not actually doing any work. If every rental were put on the market at once, buying a house would become affordable.
I believe land ownership other than the land you yourself live on, for the purpose of profit, is inherently immoral, as is any other way of generating money without producing something of value to society.
If you personally built the house (not put up investment money, but got out there with a hammer and nails) then charge whatever the market will bear. But buying something because you have the capital just to charge someone rent? You are not providing anything of value because the house was already there, and if you didn't "own" it the same tenants could be living there for free.
If this guy wants to stop voting, great! That means my vote has just a little bit more weight.
Now that's a hefty load of ecognorance!
You can disagree with my opinions, even say I am wrong on facts, but it isn't a matter of ignorance.
In addition to years of independent reading, subscriptions to the Motley Fool and Economist, and unquantifiable internet research, I also happen to have a degree in economics.
That is a very convenient way for you to write off any one who disagrees with you without actually responding to the arguments.
The article you linked to make a statement of "fact" which are in fact not inherent fact, and which can easily be shown to be false via real world examples.
I won't get into all that here, but choosing to ignore any data which doesn't fit the conclusion you want to believe is actually the very definition of ignorance.
If you are your brother (I am assuming?) really believe in what you are saying, I'd welcome constructive criticism on some of what I've written on economics and politics, particularly: Anarchy Vs Capitalism,
Predictions,
Free Market VS. Democracy : (1-0),
Taxes, and the contribution to society of the wealthy,
and
In which I point out that Republicans are not conservative at all.
All of these can be found on my here:
http://apps.biodieselhauling.org/Blog/?c=Economic…
Clearly, from what you wrote, you do not understand economic theory. One could be very well read in a false theory, but that doesn't change the fact that they're ignorant. At first, I was going to point out and refute all the fallacies in your first comment but that would have taken a few hours. There's no point arguing with someone who's not familiar with the theories.
Those subscriptions will not teach you economic theory. I'm mildly surprised that you have an econ degree. Usually people drop a lot of these false ideas, even from the statist economic education in the universities.
Economics is a logical-deductive science and can't be falsified by empirical data. On this, see the work of Ludwig von Mises.
I took a look at a few of your articles, but they suffer from muddled thinking. For example, in Anarchy vs Capitalism, you make the fundamental error of equating anarchy with lawlessness. Anarchy means no rule, not no rules. There are many more errors (especially arguing that public goods cannot be provided on the market) but I'm not going to get into them. All I can suggest is to read up on economics and market anarchy.
Theory separated from the real world is meaningless and useless.
Anything which is unfalsifiable by empirical data has a special word: "faith".
Aristotle used logical-deductive reasoning, and made conclusions about gravity. Newton proved them false with empirical data. Aristotle was a brilliant person, and his theories may have been logical, but when reality differs from theory, real science discards the theory.
Something which is purely deductive is not science. A scientific theory has to be able to make real-world predictions given a set of circumstances, and when implementing those circumstances, the predictions observed.
While linguistically no rule may not inherently mean no rules, in the real world, with no one to make rules, no one to enforce them, and no consequences for breaking them, there can be no distinction. In the real world you will never have unanimous consensus on all rules. If you make rules by general (majority) consensus, then that is, by definition, democracy. If rules are followed voluntarily, then they are suggestions, not rules. Its funny that you should point to that article, since I made the same argument that the one here made: the free market and democracy are incompatible.
Many, perhaps even most, public goods can be provided by the market (although not equitably or universally). There are a few that could not. Public streets and sidewalks in a city in front of everyone's house and business. The modern economy couldn't function without them, and there is no practical way to toll every single block independently.
Another is the legal system. A arbitration company has no way to enforce the ruling. A private security force, without any police or law, would be indistinguishable from a mercenary force.
Really, I have a much simpler retort.
Four words:
Tragedy of the Commons
We live in a finite world. There is a finite rate of regeneration of renewable resources. A free market does not regulate its rate of consumption, nor does it take into account externalities.
A failure of intelligent long-term regulation will hasten humanities trail along the wake of the yeast in a beer barrel – drowning in the waste of our own gluttony.
I think if you read what Mises had to say, you will be convinced. Again, economics is a logical-deductive science grounded on the irrefutable action axiom.
Again, you are arguing against market anarchy but you evidently have no familiarity with the theory. There is an exceptional body of literature showing how law, arbitration, roads, police, etc. can be (and have historically been) provided on the market.
Case in point, you bring up the old "finite world" canard. But on that, see: Humans ARE Smarter than Yeast
There's no point in debating with you if you're unfamiliar with market anarchist theory and economics. It would only be an excessively strenuous and frustrating effort on my part.
There's no free market in the US today. What's different is the degree of government regulation or presence in the particular industry. For example, IT industry is relatively free of regulations while law enforcement, courts, roads, education, coinage is almost completely monopolized by the government. As for healthcare, it's far from private. Government pays for half of the expenses and enforces medical cartels that curb competition and raise prices. So don't blame today's issues on free market when it's clearly the government's fault.
Just because I disagree with it doesn't mean I am unfamiliar with it.
I actually agree with much of what Mise says, and believe he makes valid points which many on all sides often fail to acknowledge.
I agree entirely with his position on government induced inflation and on patents, for example.
However, he does make some fundamental errors which invalidate some of his conclusions based on them.
Ch1, Acting Man, of Mises book begins with "Human action is necessarily always rational."
This is demonstratively false.
The only irrefutable action axiom is that humans act. It can not be taken as axiom that humans act rationally in their own long term interests, particularly when the optimal outcome requires a level of individual sacrifice.
In game theory, many situations create an incentive for individuals acting in their own best interest to cause a worse outcome for the group as a whole (which of course includes the individual as well.)
For example: http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displa… http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2009/01/06/why-…
Even assuming individuals acted rationally in any individual moment, they neither take into account the effects of their individual choices aggregated over a large population nor the long-term effects. Because of this, even though as individuals we have the capacity for reason and the ability to make conscious choices, when allowed total freedom as a group we do in fact act the same as yeast.
The tragedy of the commons is a real phenomenon, which holds both in theory and in practice.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/162/38… http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/28…
Pricing alone does not solve the problem, because it does not take externalties (such as pollution or a finite rate of resource regeneration) into account.
Then again, it is very easy to show that individuals do not even act rationally in the simpler terms of their own personal best interests either. Look at the success of casinos.
It goes far beyond gambling however:
http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_gilbert_researches_h… http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_ariely_asks_are_we_i…
Again, something which is purely logical-deductive is not science. It is philosophy at best, and faith at worst (since any deductions must be founded on assumptions about reality – in this case, the ultimate rationality of individual humans).
If you can find an example of law, local roads, or police being provided both efficiently and equitably purely by a market historically, or even describe a scenario in which it could even hypothetically arise, I would be very interested to read about it.
Now, aside from the dependence on individual rationality for faith in the free market, there are additional questions:
Mise does address externalites, for example injuries to employees
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap23sec6.asp
blaming them on market interference by governments which "allow" them to be unaccountable. However, he fails to explain who, in the absence of any government at all, would enforce labor standards, and how. If the problem is caused by a lack of regulation (or "deficient laws"), how would removing all regulations solve the problem? (Later Mises does implicitly acknowledge that this is neccesarily the role of government: "governments are [in a hypothetical ideal world] devoted exclusively to the task of protecting the individual's life, health, and property against violent and fraudulent aggression."
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap24sec5.asp).
This then begs questions of the form and structure of said government.
In the same section he makes the exact sort of external valuation of commodities he objects to in the opening chapters (while also showing his own racism) in saying "Many of the richest deposits of various mineral substances are located in areas whose inhabitants are too ignorant, too inert, or too dull to take advantage of the riches nature has bestowed upon them." This in the context of objecting to government intervention conquest of land/peoples, and claiming war is the result of protectionism.
Even were a government to allow free trade, the dull ignorant natives might still choose not to extract and sell a resource at any price – yet the other nation would still have desire for it, no less than if it were a protectionist policy which kept them from it.
In other words, if a population chooses, for whatever reason, not to utilize a natural resource, it is acceptable, or even ideal, for them to be taken by force by those who would utilize them.
On a similar issue, his solution to the tragedy of the commons is to privatize everything
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap22sec5.asp
Aside from the practical impossibility of privatizing extremely large public resources (the ocean, the atmosphere, a large river (anyone dumping or fishing in their "own" section of river affects everyone downstream of them ) there remains the question of how initial prices of commons are to be set, who they are paid to, and if there is no such entity then how the distribution is to occur.
Mises claims that unemployment (of the employable) would be zero in a purely free-market system
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec2.asp
but offers no evidence, either theoretical or examples, to support it.
He suggests that the alternative to the gross inequalities inherent in capitalism is welfare.
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec1.asp
I won't argue the merits of welfare for the overall benefit of society here, but instead point out that regulations to ensure equality does not necessitate any form of welfare.
It is possible to eliminate (or at least reduce) inequalities simply by taking steps to level the playing field. A major omission is the issue of inheritance. People who inherent wealth do not earn said wealth by contributing something of value to humanity. They just get lucky in which parents they are born to. Similarly, education, living environment, etc are not in an infants control, and these factors incontrovertibly have a direct effect on the individuals access to the means of wealth generation later in life. This itself is an external privilege, no different from the caste system (which he says restricts the market)
"What those people who ask for equality have in mind is always an increase in their own power to consume. In endorsing the principle of equality as a political postulate nobody wants to share his own income with those who have less. When the American wage earner refers to equality, he means that the dividends of the stockholders should be given to him. He does not suggest a curtailment of his own for the benefit of those 95 per cent of the earth's population whose income is lower than his."
http://www.mises.org/humanaction/chap35sec3.asp
Actually, that IS what I suggest. The American middle class consumes far more than it's share of world resources, at the expense of the rest of the world, (upheld only by having a military budget equal to the rest of the world combined).
"Many who are aware of the undesirable consequences of capital consumption are prone to believe that popular government is incompatible with sound financial policies. They fail to realize that not democracy as such is to be indicted, but the doctrines which aim at substituting the Santa Claus conception of government for the night watchman conception."
Exactly.
"Even those who look upon the inequality of wealth and incomes as a deplorable thing, cannot deny that it makes for progressing capital accumulation. And it is additional capital accumulation alone that brings about technological improvement, rising wage rates, and a higher standard of living."
I do not deny those. I question whether they are ends to themselves past the point where a society has obtained security in the basic necessities of life, and if they are in fact so desirable to be worth the trade off of gross (unearned) inequalities.
Realize that I accept that inequalities will exist due to differences in how hard a person works or how innovative they are.
It comes down, ultimately, to a moral issue.
And it was morality which the original blog entry was commenting on, not the method by which a society can most raise its average standard of living.
All this time we have been discussing only economics, while you ignored my points on democracy – as much the original focus as economics.
In my first comment I made a simple example: 3 or more people need to work together to get something done. If they don't come to an agreement, there are negative consequences for everyone. It is not possible to have unanimity in every possible instance. If one or more people agree to go along with the majority consensus, that is democracy. It does not require coercion or threat of force.
This same situation, on the level of a society making large scale decisions, is all true democracy is.
It might be contrary to a maximization of wealth generation that a society collectively decides to enact an economically restrictive law. However, that is their choice.
In fact, in both the group and any true democracy, no one is forced to go along – however, if they do not, they can be ejected from the group because their association by other members is voluntary. As such, if someone objects to the laws of the US, they are free to move permanently to another country.
Jacob, that was a really long comment! But I must say, I disagree with nearly every statement you've made. To me, your post reads as a laundry list of statist fallacies and errors. I have neither the patience nor the time to dissect and refute all your points. We'll have to agree to disagree for now. I can recommend some literature if you're interested in learning more about market anarchism and praxeology:
-Economic Science and the Austrian Method – explains praxeology as an irrefutable logical-deductive science
-The Voluntary City – illustrates how so-called public goods have historically been provided on the market; including roads, law, courts, police, education, urban planning, and more. A very interesting read.
-Libertarian Anarchism: Responses to Ten Objections – a good, short defense of market anarchism
-Anarchy and the Law – the Motherlode
I can agree to disagree
I look forward to reading some of your suggestions when I get time.
I recommend also that you take a look at the links in my last comment sometime (they are all fairly short) – not so much so you can be "convinced", but because actually understanding and sympathizing with the objections some people have to your ideas will put you in a much better position to explain and defend them when you write.
Presumably your whole goal in maintaining a site like this is to reach the people who are undecided – otherwise you are just preaching to the choir, and there isn't a whole lot of point in that.
For every one person who strongly disagrees with you and can articulate exactly why, there are a hundred others who will share at least some of the same concerns – and those are the people you might convince.
p.s. Sorry about the multiple posts last time. For some reason I wasn't getting any confirmation that they were being submitted, at and I was having network problems at the same time, so I thought they weren't.
"Walter Block provides one such example: Two robbers break into your house and steal your TV. You catch them, but as philosophical robbers, they point out that they are two and you are only one. As a majority following democratic principles, the robbers can rightly take your TV. Or imagine a single mother living with her three children. When she refuses to feed them ice cream for breakfast, the children, as a majority, could legitimately vote her out of the house."
I wasn't originally going to leave a comment but the above passage just made me fume: what fucking stupid arguments! Unrealistic and derivatory, designed by a demagogue to fool idiots like this article's writer. Can I believe it? Yes; after all this is from the same "theorist" that said that the book on The Bell Curve Theory would "stop the government trying to educate such people[blacks and other minorites]."
I can't believe I put up with people like you to get the "whole picture" of opinions…
Fun to follow the above discussion. Even more fun to see "Toban Wiebe" declare he doesn't give a shit about the argument if he has to do any more work to continue.
Right on Toban! Propaganda first, rationality maybe later.
The second point is fabulous . The democracy must not ignore the minority.
Good stuff, but you should know that Hitler was not elected, he lost his election but was nevertheless appointed to his position. This makes him a bad example to showcase the evils of democracy.
I have some points for Jacob Ariza. I am going to assume that he puts himself at least slightly in the category of convertible since if not, I doubt that he would waste his time posting here…
I will start with this one simple statement which I believe is very informative about how framing statements can show a lot about what we likely believe about the way that things are:
"A free market society means the richer you are the more “votes” you get."
I might at one time have phrased things like that too, but I believe that this is a very limited point of view.
First, this sounds like a very static point of view. It seems to assume that wealth is static (and evil). Naturally, the state does a lot to attempt to make this true, so this is an understandable point of view. However, I would like to suggest that you step out of this frame of mind for a second and think of human action and human conditions as more dynamic.
In a free market, people who manage resources very well will end up controlling more resources… for everyone!! In other words, without coercion, the road to wealth is achieved by being extremely resourceful and productive. While this may involve significant trade, and thus affecting many other people, this is good. In fact, the more the productivity it based on voluntary trade, the more likely it is benefiting the most amount of people. So, for a brief moment, I would like you to replace the potential idea of "rich people" as a "bad static thing" with: "currently very productive and helpful people" as a "good dynamic thing."
Next, let's approach the second part of your statement, "the most votes". While this is meant to obviously be an analogy of sorts to democracy, and "vote" is meant to mean "decide about", it is an egalization that presupposes a consensus mindset on decision making. Again, I will point out that the statement portrays voting as a good way to approach decisions, that consensus is something to seek in the first place. This consensus seeking approach has the side affect of assuming that most things have a right way and a wrong way to do them. It does not allow for the idea that there might be thousands/millions/billions of equally valid and good approaches to something.
The last statement I made may very much seem like an exaggeration on the surface, but it pays to delve into this a bit deeper with a simple example. I will do this to attempt to portray why this is true, and to understand how profoundly this affects our view of decision making. Let us picture 10 people walking into a restaurant for dinner. 10 people is a small number, most small restaurants will likely accomodate at least 10 parties of people, but it should at least help to keep the example simpler. How would one go about deciding the meal choices for these 10 people using voting?
Well, the simplest voting mechanism would be to put all the potential choices which the restaurant chooses to make available on a ballot and to let each person vote for the meal they would prefer. In a free market, that would likely be the end of the deal. Each person has selected their meal and nothing more needs to be done. But with voting, some form of consensus is seeked instead, why? Why is this needed? What is the point? Democratic theory conditions us to think that a vote is good, that some form of concensus should be seeked, so we will rig the simple decision making of free trade and replace it with voting. What is the outcome?
The simplest outcome would be that majority rules and thus, the most votes tabulated for a particular meal type is now what is served to everyone! This is the second worst possible outcome (the worst outcome would select the thing that is the least voted for). It is a horrible outcome yet it is praised by democracy supporters. Some will no doubt come along and say that obviously a "limited party" system is inherently bad at providing good solutions. So, perhaps they will increase the complexity of the voting system and allow each person to proportionally vote for each meal type so that the one meal selected ends up being something that no one despises (and yet, likely no one will still get what they actually want). Or some will instead reform the voting system to allow for more than one possibility, the top 3 meals chosen will be served, (and this still leaves the vagueries of how many to make of each, so involves more ballot casting to pick amongst the 3 favored options now).
These solutions are all suboptimal and some will go to greater and greater depths to attempt to make the systems fair. The extreme version would be to
put every single combination of meal possible to every single person eating on a ballot and to vote on those possibilities. Given say 10 meal types and 10 people, that would be 10^10 possible distribution patterns that people would now have to vote on! That would be over 10 billion combinations. All for what? What are the chances that each person will get the meal they desire when everyone is potentially allowed to vote on those 10 billion combinations (hint ~10 billion to 1)?
This way lies madness. Voting thinking leads naturally to concensus thinking since without it, complexities abound. Without voting, simple decisions are simple. With consensus thinking, complex things are phrased in simple ways: "choose between A or B"! Voting inherently limits the way people think. In a world where creative thinking is the key to progress and productivity, why would anyone vote for voting instead of personal decisions (freedom)?
So, to go back to this one statement you made:
"A free market society means the richer you are the more “votes” you get."
I am attempting to illustrate that this statement is a view of free markets framed within the extremely limited view of democracy thinking. I would suggest perhaps one alternative wording to this simplistic statement without some of the democracy blinders applied:
"A free market society means those who provide for and please the most people gain more ability to make decisions about and to offer solutions on how to provide for and please more people."
That sounds fantastic when liberated from consensus thinking, doesn't it?!
I hope that you will give a chance for this statement to ring more true in your future world view.
Hello Martin, and thank you for taking the time to address my comments, and doing so in such a reasonable manner.
First off, I wouldn't exactly use the word "convertible", but I definitely do not consider myself dogmatic, I do consider other arguments, and I do try to incorporate truth into my viewpoint from all sources.
On this topic, I think that libertarian ideals have a lot to offer society, but the problem is dogma.
I do not consider wealth to be "static", nor do I consider it evil. One thing I perhaps never made clear: I am not opposed to the free market. I am not opposed to (earned) wealth. In fact, I myself am an independent businessman.
However, it is important to look beyond the basic textbook theory out into the real world. Is wealth necessarily static? No. But does it tend to be? Yes. There are the occasional success stories, but in the real world, no matter what type of economic or political system a society has, the most wealthy people rarely earned that money by providing superior goods and services.
Most wealth comes from some combination of inheritance, unethical behavior, and investments.
Inheritance, obviously, is not a way of earning income, and has no value for society at large.
An example of unethical behavior is Bill Gates taking open source software, making relatively minor changes to it, and then patenting it (many of his early "innovations" came this way).
Now investment is an interesting one, since almost everyone seems to agree that this is a legitimate form of increasing economic activity.
But this only appears to be true because of the abstraction which money brings to the marketplace.
Money, remember, is nothing more than a convenient stand in for actual goods and services, to allow more complex trade than could be done with barter alone. Currency has no inherent value (it would be impossible to have general inflation in a barter economy).
So, in order to simplify, lets take currency out of the equation and look at goods:
Lets say you have a small expanding town. One man in town has accumulated some wealth somehow, and uses it to barter his way to acquiring most of the hammers in town, which he then passes on to his son.
Jr. goes on to rent out hammers to people who are building houses. In return for letting people temporarily use a hammer, they give him something. But he doesn't do any actual construction. He didn't create the hammers himself. If he wasn't hoarding them, those same hammers would still exist. If they were distributed more equitably then the builders could get them more cheaply (or might already own their own) and the cost of construction would go down. Because of this, instead of getting credit for helping create houses by the investment, Jr. is actually depressing construction activity by expecting a return on his investment without directly contributing to the work.
Hard work and innovation can raise a person out of poverty, and from working class to middle class, but the correlation between contribution to society and personal income only goes so far. Many of the highest paid professions – corporate litigator, advertising executive, CEO of a bank that almost fails and needs to be bailed out by government, trust-fund baby, sports star, investor, drug king-pin, hitman; have questionable (if not clearly negative) effects on the economy and on society as a whole.
What I am suggesting is not that all economic activity be regulated, or that government micromanage everything. What I am suggesting is that it is valuable in some circumstances.
Your dinner example is an excellent one of when everyone can do their own thing. But while this obviously works for deciding what to eat in a restaurant, not every personal decision occurs in a vacuum. Lets say this same party of 10 is choosing where to eat, instead of what to order. If everyone goes to a different restaurant, its no longer a party, and everybody loses. By agreeing to the minor sacrifice of not necessarily having exactly what they want, everyone still benefits overall. Since only 1 decision can be made, we are left with figuring out how to make that decision. If its one person's birthday, maybe they make the call (dictatorship). In some circumstances this can be a good thing. Otherwise it most likely goes to a vote, and dissenters can make their case – and even opt out if they can tolerate the consensus decision (just as a citizen of a democracy can always expatriate), but ultimately the closest thing to reasonable is to go with what makes the most people the closest to happy. This can be a hybrid of the top choices (just like proportionate representation), instead of just "majority rule", but it will be impossible to make everyone 100% happy.
Many of our real world decisions affect other people in potentially negative ways – whether to run that red light or drive home drunk, whether to dump my garbage in the towns river; and many projects are too large or expensive for individuals to do them and have too low a return for business to do them, but do have value for society, such as roads and bridges. There are natural monopolies, such as public utilities.
I think your entire response represents a limited and overly simplistic view of markets and democracy in order to force a pre-decided conclusion to seem more reasonable. Yes, it does sound fantastic! Problem is, that word has the same root as "fantasy".
My main point stands, your responses are clear, they are framed from within the limited idea of a static state. Most of your complaints about wealth accumulation are based on state given monopolies. The other, the hammer example is based on an economic falacy. One cannot drive the price of something up long term by hoarding it, in fact, the exact opposite will happen. Need/value drives prices up. The proof of this is every single economic "bubble". Those hoarding real estate in the early to middle of this decade despite the lack of a shortage payed dearly for believing this falacy. Yet, real estate is the one thing which is pretty hard to make more of and is therefore a favored example of people fearing wealth accumulation. Despite all the fear and government intervention, the majority of the world's land is still unwanted real estate, no one has been able to hoard it.
You have to think further to realise why this is, why hoarding does not work. Because as you attempt to hoard something, the price of everything you are trying to hoard, but to do not yet own goes up!! That last hammer that you are trying to buy, will likely cost you more than all the other hammers put together (if that hammer has any value to others)! And once you have bought it, you could not turn around and sell it for as much as you bought it for or else it would never have been able to buy it in the first place at that price (because the person selling it to you valued it less than you payed for it!) This ignores the simple fact that anyone could build new hammers at any time! Hoarding for the sake of hoarding is a net loss. Investing in something be because you see the value of something appreciating in the future with respect to other things is very different. It can sometimes be worth it.
If you disagree with this argument, please, feel free to hoard all you want.
As for natural monopolies, as others suggested, you should read more about history. It is hard for people to imagine the world differently than what they see. Once the state provides a service, few people can envision even 10 years later what life was before they did. But, the reality is that even law enforcement was not provided by the state until fairly recently in history, and crime had never been as bad as it has since. The same with schools and literacy, money and inflation/fraud, roads and rails. In my state, Colorado, there were private rails covering it at the turn of the 1900s, (despite heavy state intervention) including access to most mountain towns. It is hard to get anywhere now with railroads in this country. Utilities? Come on, this is a joke, water: ever heard of wells, bottled water and septic tanks. Fuel: ever heard of home oil/wood delivery. Electricity, ever hear of generators, PV… Internet, that's the biggest, easiest one of all, just string a line to each of your neighbors, connect them all together with a router, and there you go (that is how the internet works, the phone companies did not create it). And those are just the obvious current already existing alternatives! Without state monopolies we would have true competitive grids to service us as well. Where are these natural monopolies you speak of?
If you want to see the world one way, you will see it that way. It is hard to shed the indoctrination likely given to you by 12 years of state schooling. 20 years from now we will not think it to have been possible to have private airline companies (they will all be worse state monopolies than today). This does not mean however, that it was not possible at some point in history.
As for your responses to my dinner example, you proved my point. You deliberately attempted to frame it as something that requires "voter" mentality. Despite this, you failed since even you admitted that, well without consensus, people simply can go their own ways. You attempted to claim that this is the case with state also, but you should think about that one harder. It really is impossible. No matter what you do, you are subject to taxation and slavery. Perhaps you do not realise that the draft covers any person living in the US, citizen or not? Try leaving the US with your money and land (Hmm, and why can't I ask them to leave me instead?)! Not so easy. How can one opt out? Do you remember that war in 1860 when people tried to opt out democratically, but were forced back in? If there is one thing we are sure of, it is that secession is not possible.
These may sound like minor nits, but they make a world of difference. They are the difference between aggression and freedom. Ever notice how the bully is always the one saying that you NEED their help, trust me? Ask yourself what the difference is between your claim, and that of the mafia asking for protection money? The difference to me is that I have a better chance of fighting off the mafia, because it doesn't have legitimacy status in most people's minds. You seem to claim that the same behaviour done by two different people or two different groups has a different ethical outcomes? Any claim that it does supposes one person is superior (i.e. unequal) to another. I don't think that you support this view, so I hope that you will search for the logical falacy in your thinking that inevitably leads to this conclusion.
You are now making categorical claims without backing them up, much as the OP began doing when responding to me. I am not framing my ideas from an idea of a static state. Just because you claim that does not make it true. I have at no point invoked the state as an answer to these questions. "Democracy" does not mean "The State". In my examples of students with a group project due or a party choosing a restaurant in no way require a state.
My complaints against wealth accumulations are entirely irrelevant to state given monopolies. Had I been talking about patents or corporations you would have a valid argument that these supposedly capitalist institutions are in reality state sponsored – but I never mentioned them at all. My complaints are based on reality, and really, on basic common sense.
Instead of making vague theoretical criticisms of the argument, why not attempt to address inheritance, or the income of a hitman?
My hammer example was not about raising the price of something by hoarding it. It was about investments impact on the economy. The person who control the hammers (wealth) does not want to sell them, and therefor does not care if the price goes up or down. They want to rent them.
They don't have to control ALL hammers – just enough that some people want to rent them. It is inaccurate to say anyone can just build a new one – that takes resources and time, and if you are busy building tools, you can not be simultaneously constructing something with those as yet uncreated tools. The whole reason we have an economy is specialization – not everyone can build everything. Besides, this is an analogy – hammer is a stand in for currency. Your suggestion would be like saying that instead of getting a bank loan for a house, people could just make more money in order to buy it. That is not an easy thing to do, and not always possible.
It is true that the total value of all things in the world increases every year with increases in technology, and there is no theoretical limit to overall wealth in the world. However, at ANY GIVEN MOMENT there is a finite amount of wealth in the world. Therefor it remains accurate to say that the more wealth that is hoarded by one person, the less there is to go around.
You are 100% wrong that crime has never been worse. That is a very common fallacy. Steven Pinker demonstrates in a TED talk how violence has changed over time: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myt…
By any measure, the more egalitarian and democratic a society, the less crime and violence it experiences. I could get into the many theoretical reasons why this is true, but more relevant is the simple fact that you can see this trend in the real world.
The railroads in this country were MASSIVELY subsidized by the US government. The initial rail barons to cross the country were given a full acre of land for every section of track they laid down. How does that support your argument?
And the idea that every person in the country might personally string lines between their home and every other home around them, creating an unbroken worldwide net able to preform the way the internet does… well, ok, you did start that section saying it was a joke.
Are you really not aware that wells run dry or get contaminated, often by the actions of neighbors or others with access to the same water table?
Its like you are saying "this can work under limited, ideal circumstances"
I don't deny that! There are many circumstances where the free market provides the best possible outcome.
"If you want to see the world one way, you will see it that way."
I guess that's what I'm facing here. Every time someone tries to discuss economics with anarchists, libertarians, communists, almost anyone who proposes a single simplistic solution to all of the worlds questions, we eventually come to a point where they other side stops making arguments and resorts to attacking the person rather than the statement, claiming the arguments are from "ignorance", or making unjustified categorical statements.
As for your responses to my dinner example, you proved my point. You deliberately attempted to frame it as something that requires "voter" mentality.
I did not "frame" it! I used a similar analogy to yours to demonstrate a real life situation which occurs in nearly everyone's life on a regular basis. It isn't a made up scenario. If you think my argument is one sided, what is your alternative for making the decision of where to eat as a group?
Yes, people CAN go their seperate ways. And in a great many areas of life, the majority of reasonable people DON'T WANT TO. There are many goals in life the require cooperation. As a simple example, if everyone made up their own individual traffic rules, a lot of innocent people would die needlessly.
If you have spent much time actually working in a large complex collective, you would know that if you insist on 100% consensus 100% of the time very little gets done.
However, of course anyone can opt out. You are actually making the claim that the US will not let citizens move out of the country? Your initial post was clear and sensible, but now…
OK…
People are allowed to expatriate. You can sell your land, and take your wealth with you. It is not difficult. There are no restrictions, beyond not going to certain countries which are hostile to the US without a reason. Many people have left the country, for reasons ranging from lower taxes to better weather to disliking the political system.
You ask why you can't ask the country to leave? Because this is a society, not just a location. You are in the home of American citizens. If you lived in a commune with other people, those people could expect you to do chores (jury duty, voting) obey house rules (laws) and contribute to rent and bills (taxes). If you don't, they are justified in kicking you out. You can also leave voluntarily at any time for any reason. However, you can not decide to continue living in the house on the grounds that the room you live in is "yours" while not paying rent and breaking the house rules. This is what the confederacy tried to do. You are using an example of a competing state trying to secede, while denying the legitimacy of any state. Individuals can opt out.
While you are in this country, you are receiving enormous benefits from the existence of the state (whether or not you want or appreciate them). If you doubt it, live in the 3rd world for a while. Note that every country in the world with a higher standard of living than ours is MORE democratic and MORE socialist than our own.
Again, I am not arguing in favor of the state. I am arguing in favor of democracy. Small scale local democracy is still democracy. I am not advocating violence or coercion. In the real world some things must be decided collectively, and in those circumstances 100% consensus is not always possible. In those circumstances democracy is the best option available.
I am not sure who you are since the guy I was responding to had a different name than you, it makes it confusing since you responded as if you wrote the things that Jacob Aziza said. I will assume that you are him.
Hmm,
"“Democracy” does not mean “The State”."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy
First sentence:
"Democracy is a political form of government where governing power is derived from the people, either by direct referendum (direct democracy) or by means of elected representatives of the people (representative democracy)."
Despite your poor terminology, yes, there can be voting without a state, i.e. without force. But, as my example pointed out, it is unlikely to be useful. And to compare forced consensus to non-forced consensus is night and day. Please stop trying to blurr the distinction.
"My complaints against wealth accumulations are entirely irrelevant to state given monopolies. Had I been talking about patents or corporations you would have a valid argument that these supposedly capitalist institutions are in reality state sponsored – but I never mentioned them at all."
Again since it is hard to know who you are, and what you previously said… but if you are Jocob, I will quote you, it sounds like you are talking about patents (for sure) here and likely also copyrights (state given monopolies):
"An example of unethical behavior is Bill Gates taking open source software, making relatively minor changes to it, and then patenting it (many of his early “innovations” came this way)."
You make strange contrived examples with stragne contrived restrictions on human action.
"They want to rent them. They don’t have to control ALL hammers – just enough that some people want to rent them."
What does the amount of hammers that you own have to do with others wanting to rent them? Renting is a cost basis decision, "is it cheaper to buy or to rent?". How many you own is irrelevant. If you charge a high price for me to rent them (I assume that is why you are attempting to hoard them), it will be cost effective for me to build or buy one. In what non-contrived world is this not true? Impractical wealth accumulation is … not practical. Why invent strange scenarios to not make a point.
"It is inaccurate to say anyone can just build a new one – that takes resources and time, and if you are busy building tools, you can not be simultaneously constructing something with those as yet uncreated tools.
The whole reason we have an economy is specialization"
No, we have an economy because people are poductive. We have trade because people find value in specialization. This, of course only holds true if people benefit from this specialization, not because it is some dogma. If no one will sell me hammers and they cost too much to rent, I will forgo specialization and I will build one! How do you benefit from being selfish in this scenario???? Remember, free trade (rent is trade), requires both parties to benefit.
"You are 100% wrong that crime has never been worse. That is a very common fallacy. Steven Pinker demonstrates in a TED talk how violence has changed over time"
I never equated violence with crime. Your link does not make me 100% wrong about my crime statement, how could any link or other persons opinion do that? It is my opinion based on my understanding of history, I will not make the assertion that I am 100% correct (anyone who thinks they could be 100% correct about any opinion about something that happened back when no one currently alive is around is surely "optimistic") But, instead of simply trusting someone else's opinion, please, do investigate the matter yourself instead of taking someone else's conclusion for granted.
"The railroads in this country were MASSIVELY subsidized by the US government. The initial rail barons to cross the country were given a full acre of land for every section of track they laid down. How does that support your argument?"
Agreed, these are not the private railroads that were prevalent in Colorado, those rails do not even cross this state. Just beacause the state can do things worse than free enterprise does not alter my claim one bit that the state is NOT required to build railroads. i.e. no Natural monopoly.
"Are you really not aware that wells run dry or get contaminated, often by the actions of neighbors or others with access to the same water table?"
Of course, are you not aware that public water systems get contaminated as well? What is your point? If we all trust the state supplied water so much, why has bottled water become a major product in the last 2 decades in the US? Where is the natural monopoly? You are simply arguing over preferences. When preferences are forced on others, we call that coercion.
"Its like you are saying “this can work under limited, ideal circumstances”"
It is so easy to simply dismiss the other guy's preferences as idealistic hogwash. Be idealistic, please explain to me how forced democracy can ever work? How can it not aggress on people, even when everyone is nice and friendly and honest?
"By any measure, the more egalitarian and democratic a society, the less crime and violence it experiences. I could get into the many theoretical reasons why this is true, but more relevant is the simple fact that you can see this trend in the real world."
Hmm, so I guess my "measure" does not count? Only the "measures" which agree with you count. I do not see the trend. Again, I hope you start looking around and stop reading opinion. I see crime in almost everything I do, most of it is state crime. Just because you refuse to see it as crime, does not make it not crime. Do you have a basis for judging criminal acts? I hope it is not the law?
"And the idea that every person in the country might personally string lines between their home and every other home around them, creating an unbroken worldwide net able to preform the way the internet does…"
You do realise how the internet works, right?
"You are in the home of American citizens"
Says who, I payed for my land. Are you claiming that I don't own it? Are you claiming that the sate, which drove the Indians off of it owns it, even after it was homesteaded by others? If you want to claim that my ownership may be questionable, you at least have a place to start, but surely, my ownership claim has more credibility than the states?
"You can also leave voluntarily at any time for any reason."
Have you tried lately? Do you realize how hard it actually is to leave the US (if you for some strange reason wanted to give up what is yours)? Again, why do I have to leave? I payed for my land. Why does the state somehow have a claim to rule over it? Should I leave because the bullies down the street ask me to? Why would you stick up for them instead of me living a peaceful life?
"While you are in this country, you are receiving enormous benefits from the existence of the state "
The mafia offers me protection too, should I be grateful? Would I suddenly become OK with their rule if I can elect their leader? Should I then ask you to submit to them also?
"Note that every country in the world with a higher standard of living than ours is MORE democratic and MORE socialist than our own."
Name one? Not that I would make the lame claim that you should go live there if you think so, but why do you not live there if you think so? Perhaps the standard of living is not as good as you think? I grew up in Europe if you are thinking of that continent. Not one of my Europen friends visting the US thinks that they have a better standard of living than here. I am not going to tell you which place is better, but I will suggest that perhpas many of us see the grass greener on the other side of the fence.
"Again, I am not arguing in favor of the state. I am arguing in favor of democracy."
Please explain this contradiction?
"Small scale local democracy is still democracy."
Small scale state is still state.
"I am not advocating violence or coercion."
Great, but that does not come across in your responses.
Ah, yes, error in the name field, but the last comment was the same person.
If you want to use wikipedia as a reference, you could go on to look up government, which does not automatically imply a state power.
The benefit of hoarding in my example is restricting the supply of already available hammers. No matter how low the rental price is, the owner is benefiting while not providing society at large any benefit. Because the person who engages in trade benefits does not mean society at large benefits. Selling stolen goods, for example, benefits the buyer, but is not good overall. But again, my point was that investing hoarded wealth (in the form of money) does not actually improve the economy.
If you decide that requiring citizens to pay taxes is a "crime", obviously you will see more of it with a state than without it. By that token you can make up whatever you want to be a "crime". What standards are you using? I used violence because it is representative of individuals using force upon others without consent, to their detriment. I would think given your focus on force and consent it would be a significant part of what you consider a crime. You could also use property crime and take the same measures.
Rather than argue with you about crime rates and living standards, I would recommend looking up data, perhaps using the CIA World Book, Nation Master, or Wikipedia, or other free online tools. (Hint, "Europe" is a very big place with many countries which have their own economies and governments. They are not all interchangeable) No, your personal "measures" don't count – any more than mine do.
Public water supplies are protected by law. That does not make them uncontaminatable, but it does make them far more protected than the alternative of not protected in any way.
The average person has neither the hardware, the software, the knowledge, nor the time, to personally build a mini neighborhood network – never mind making one which was compatible with the rest of the world's.
I actually know many people who have ex-expatriated, including recently. What obstacles do you think are in the way? The biggest obstacle is that the receiving country may not want you.
"What standards are you using?"
The Non Aggression Principal, as most anarchists do consciously. I even believe most people do deep down, even if they never externalise and express it that way.
"I used violence because it is representative of individuals using force upon others without consent, to their detriment. I would think given your focus on force and consent it would be a significant part of what you consider a crime."
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes!!!!!!!!!! (others or their property) So, how can you say that a democracy backed by force is not criminal????? Nearly every product of such a beast commits acts that initiate force (or the threat there off) against people and their property.
Remember just because the state's threat of violence is so powerful that we are not all acting in ways which will get us beaten daily does mean that they are not initiating force against us every second of the day. They are!!! This is criminal.
well now we are getting somewhere!
see, I don't acknowledge that we have a democracy backed by threat of violence.
First of all, like I have said, every adult citizen has the option to opt out, and can take all of their wealth (not land, but they can sell at fair market value).
Second of all, even if you choose to stay, the penalty for (for example) not paying taxes is not violence or force, it is a fine. If you don't pay the fine, they can garnish your wages. Even if you are arrested (which normally only happens if you commit a crime against another person) violence is only used against you if you fight the cop.
The majority of citizens consent to living in a democracy, and, while they grumble about them and wish they were lower, the majority acknowledge that some degree of taxation is reasonable.
So how are these people having force initiated against them?
Ah, you are correct, we are getting somewhere.
If you simply believe that we are arguing over consent, I am ecstatic!
It sounds like you are open to the idea that some democracies could be backed by force onto people who have never consented to it? But it sounds like you believe that by living in the US, that I have consented to the democracy's force?
Well, let me be clear, I HAVE NOT! A woman saying no to sex is clearly not consent. Would you not give me the same respect? Perhaps you think that I signed a document somewhere in time giving my future consent, something akin to a contract? It seems that you believe that simply living in the US is consent (since as I pointed out citizenship has nothing to do to whether you are submitted to the democracies rules) to be ruled?
So, let met try to check out of your system for simplicities sake, since you seem to think that I can. Suppose that I check out, I expatriate and I leave the country. Where would I go? I suppose that is my problem? I suspect that you will find that there is no land where that I can go and not be submitted to someone's rule. But, I will give you the benefit of the doubt that you believe that: I at least have the right to find land that no one currently rules if such land exists?
What then, may I homestead the land? I certainly believe that I may. Most anarchists believe that I can. Common law (as developed naturally in almost all cultures, even without governments) says that I may. So, I will imagine a small island in the pacific which is not currently under the rule of any state, perhaps the island was just formed by a volcano, or an earthquake. May I move to this island and homestead it? Would you agree that at this point, that I would not have consented to any democratic rule by anyone?
When would this non-consent end? By my future actions to consent? Or someone else's future actions against me or my (is)land? In other words: if I simply chose to live on my island forever and other people attempt to take my island from me, would you agree that they are criminals? If a nation decides that I suddenly need to follow their drug rules even though no one else lives on the island with me, would they be criminals? What if that nations happens to be democratic?
I agree that a democracy can be backed by force.
In fact, I even agree that you could make a strong case that the US government is backed by a type of force (I think it's debatable, but I am as of yet undecided on that question).
I have not been using the US as my basis of democracy, for the simple reason that it is not really a democracy in the strictest sense. Given that the president is elected by appointed electors, and not popular vote, (not to mention the two party winner-take-all system of all elections) it is debatable that it is even a representative democracy.
Now, the point you bring up that there is very little unclaimed land does make the issue more complicated. And it doesn't seem fair, but I would say that this is "your" problem (or the problem of whoever wishes to opt out). What you can do is survey the rules of every state available, and choose which you live in (assuming they will have you).
Another choice you have is to be politically active, so that you make the rules yourself. In a direct democracy you are not subject to "someone's" rule. You and your neighbor's make the rules you will live by, SummerHill school style. The larger the social unit, the more dilute that power is – I see this as an argument for smaller social units.
The reason people everywhere have organized into formal units is because humans are naturally social, and dependent on each other for survival (not to mention the living standard advances allowed by specialization). Having rules helps a society function and reduces conflict and violence.
I get the feeling in this last comment that you are no longer talking about political or economic systems, but are advocating total anarchy, in the most basic and literal sense. In that case all talk of markets, and fairness, owning land, and property all goes out the window – life becomes survival of the fittest, nothing more, nothing less.
If you have property I want, I can kill you in your sleep, and there will be no repercussions. (If you have a tribe that will retaliate, then you have some form of government operating).
It is unfortunate that human nature is this way, but it is true.
The very concept of property is in itself a rule. In order to ensure anyone other than the property owner respects it, there must be some way of enforcing it, and once you have that, you have (limited) government of some sort.
Suppose everyone in the world agreed to the non-aggression principal as the sole basis for law. Then its a situation of consent. Say one person doesn't agree to the principal, and violates it? If there are no consequences, why bother to even have it in the first place? If there are, then what you have is a democracy.
So, if you are declaring all government inherently criminal, yet you believe in property rights, you have a problem. If you are going to drop the absolutes, and say that government reach should be limited, and that personal freedoms should be extended as much as possible so long as they don't infringe on others, than we are in agreement.
Incidentally, about land rights and ownership – you pointed out before that the US stole land from Native American Indians. By both your definition of crime, and in many cases even by US law (where treaties were broken) this was illegal.
Buying stolen property is basically an accessory to the crime (it enables the thief). It is not considered a legitimate transaction, and the property does not legally (or morally) belong to the person who buys it.
If you are a land owner in the US, who did you buy that land from? Who did they buy it from? What gave the initial person in the chain the right to the land? If you call the legitimacy of the US into question, it also calls into question your claim on "your" land.
If you homestead unoccupied land, what makes it "yours"? Should that ownership extend after your death? We live in a finite world, with a potentially infinite population. The issue you raise about the scarcity of unpopulated land is a reality that was inevitable.
What I don't understand is how removing all accountability from individual action could possibly end up as a good thing overall.
Anarchy does not mean zero repercussions, nor zero property. Again, our friend wikipedia may be of help:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy
"No rulership or enforced authority."
"A social state in which there is no governing person or group of people, but each individual has absolute liberty (without the implication of disorder.) But is bound by a social code ."
"Absence of government; a state of lawlessness due to the absence or inefficiency of the supreme power; political disorder."
"Absence or non-recognition of authority and order in any given sphere."
"Acting without waiting for instructions or official permission… The root of anarchism is the single impulse to do it yourself: everything else follows from this."
But to avoid that confusion since many people pass judgment on what anarchy would devolve into, let's stick to simpler principals: the non aggression principal.
Let me clarify this principal in case you have a different perception of it. If I homestead land and property (tools, food…) and you attack me or attempt to steal my life/land/property, then I can defend myself without breaking the non aggression principal because I did not initiate force, you did. As long as I don't escalate the aggression, I am still not initiating it. None of this requires (although you may believe it would be better) a government to enforce (remember, I may ask for help, just as you can by attacking me). The concept of property is natural, animals will fight to protect their land and food. Almost all societies have acknowledged the homesteading principal of some property, and aggressors against it are almost unilaterally considered criminals. You seem to agree with this, even if you think that it is not possible to establish a society without government?
In other words, do you still agree that the non aggression principal is a valid way to judge a crime, despite the consequences? If not, what do you propose as a way to define crime? The non aggression principal is powerful and can be universally applied, in the sense that it gives no one privilege, or rule over another. What I am asking you to do, is to forget for a moment any ideas about practicality (if not, we will argue forever, likely uselessly), and do define a method to judge criminal behavior if you do not agree with the aggression principal. You seem to claim earlier that you agreed, yet you are defending methods which are clearly in opposition to it. So, help me get a better understanding of your ideas, since many of them seem in opposition to each other (I am sure that to you, many of mine seem contradictory). Much of this is perhaps because of our unstated assumptions.
So to recapitulate some of my assumptions/principles:
1) The non aggression principal is the only way to judge criminal behavior.
2) Scarce property, in the form of land, food, objects, self… is natural, and legitimately defendable.
3) All interactions between people/property which are voluntary and do not violate the NAP (#1), are legitimate.
If you find these contradictory, please explain why? If you prove (logically) these to be contradictory, I will likely have to adapt my thinking.
You claim:
"In a direct democracy you are not subject to "someone's" rule."
This is a vague statement, it does not address consent. If it means:
a) "In ALL direct democracies you are not subject to "someone's" rule."
it is easily provably false (see below). If however, you mean:
b) "In some direct democracies you are not subject to "someone's" rule."
Well, sure that is true, and in that case, I would claim it is non criminal.
So, for the simple disproof of (a), a simple example. Suppose that I live alone on the island of "Isolation" all by myself. There are only two other people in the world left living, they live on the island of "Democracy Rule" next door. All three of us agreed early on that I own my island, and that they own their island (just to simplify things). We also happen to agree with the 3 principals above. But, one day, the other two people decide that they want a direct democracy between the three of us. But, I like living alone, and I have no desire to participate in their democracy. They go ahead and form it anyway, and claim that I am a citizen of their democracy, and extend a vote to me. Of course, I am still no longer interested in participating: I have not given consent to be ruled by the democracy, despite it being direct!
Suppose that they decide to have a vote on a "law" that would claim that my island is now theirs, and it passes. If they act upon this vote, and invade my island, they will clearly be criminals (initiating aggressive force) with respect to the 3 principles above, despite their "direct democracy". This example at least should disprove claim (a) above since the direct democracy in my example submits me to someone's rule.
So, you see, legitimacy of "ruling" clearly depends first on consent, not the form of ruling. You seem to be supposing that the mere existence of other people means that I consent to be ruled by them, or some group of them?
Anarchy does not "mean" zero repercussions by definition, but it does it practice.
In your version of consequences, the conflict still comes down to who is more powerful, not who is right.
Certainly you are free to try to defend yourself. And your friends or family may decide to incur risk by helping you. But your attacker may have friends or family too. You can try to hire security or mercenaries, but if the criminal just stole your property, they can use your own wealth to hire the mercenary security guards against you instead.
In a power vacuum, mafia and war lords can take what they like. This isn't just theory – it actually happens.
1) There is another problem with using a single simplistic principal to judge all actions:
It is possibly for an action to be harmful without directly involving violence or property crime against an individual.
As a free adult, I can drink if I choose. I can also drive a car in public spaces. Driving a car drunk is not an act of aggression toward any particular individual, does not necessarily harm anyone, yet does significantly increase the risk of an innocent person being harmed due to my actions. Same goes for running red lights (assuming they even exist in your world) because I am running late and I feel "pretty sure" no one is coming. Or for maintaining car insurance, since I can not afford to pay your medical bills in an accident.
In any of this cases my actions can harm you without my having been aggressive – it can be a total accident. Often times car accidents happen in which there is no particular gross negligence involved.
Another action I can take which is harmful without being aggressive would be to pollute the air or water or soil on my own land, which in turn travels on its own to adjacent land. In the case of driving a car, no one car can be said to impact any specific victim, yet the sum total of many drivers traveling with cars that would not pass a smog check causes significant health effects for everyone who lives in the area, even those who don't drive. You have a victim without any one perpetrator.
In any of these cases, the best case scenario is compensation as recourse after the fact. Having laws against drunk driving and unsmogged cars is a deterrant which protects people from injury. In a lawless world, you could possibly hope to extract money or get revenge on the responsible party, but that won't heal your spine or cure your cancer.
And getting that compensation in the first place would be, to say the least, a logistical challenge. The other person may very well not acknowledge fault, and not be willing to give you anything. Then the issue returns to which of you has more strong friends or can hire the more powerful security force.
2) "Almost all societies have acknowledged the homesteading principal of some property, and aggressors against it are almost unilaterally considered criminals." I do not think that is an accurate statement. In fact, I would go so far as to say the majority of societies throughout history have not acknowledged the homesteading principal. This doesn't make it any more right or wrong, because "everyone else does it" isn't an argument to begin with (if it were, you would accept "almost every society has a government" as a validation of government).
Further more, being "natural" is not a valid argument either. Violence is natural. Yet we agree that in terms of human interactions in an ideal society it is not legitimate.
3) It is very easy for a voluntary interaction to be illegitimate. The majority of voluntary interactions do not occur with perfect information on both sides. If I sell you my car, we both agreed to the transaction. But if I opened the dash yesterday and used a drill to turn back the odometer 100k miles, added body filler and new paint to cover up crash damage, and poured syrup in the crankcase to get it to seem to run smooth for the test drive, would you not agree that this transaction was invalid and you deserve your money back? If I sell you medicine, knowing full well that it is snake oil, is that transaction legitimate, even though no force was used, and you consented to buy from me? Until the FDA was created, people sold every imaginable substance as a miracle cure, including a few poisons, so again, this is not just theory. Is a drug dealer selling to an addict legitimate? The addict can technically say no, but he feels that he can't; is it voluntary? What about marketing geared towards children? If you say some of these examples don't constituent voluntary interactions, how could anything be expected to be?
Your island of isolation example was very well done, and I must concede that it is possible to have a direct democracy which is non-consensual. This is of course why most advocates of democracy maintain the importance of their being non-negotiable protections for the minority and rights that extend to all people. In your example invading your island could be seen to be violating your rights. In America, for example, the people do not get to vote on whether or not to suspend the bill of rights.
But even in your example, you are not subject to any person or group's rule, as you have equally as much authority as either of your neighbors. They can choose to use their greater numbers to take advantage of you, yes – but they could do the exact same thing without the democracy! In your example, with a formal government in place, you could protest, and appeal the law, make your case. If this world is anarchy, they can still take over your island and subjugate you. The only difference is they wouldn't have to even try to justify it. A society based on the rule of non-aggression requires that all individuals consent to its universal validity.
That last post was the big picture. Now to some of the smaller points.
"Having rules helps a society function and reduces conflict and violence."
I agree. But only one rule is not criminal to back by force: the non aggression principal. (Granted this makes many assumptions, many that I will point out below)
"If you have property I want, I can kill you in your sleep, and there will be no repercussions. (If you have a tribe that will retaliate, then you have some form of government operating)."
No, I disagree. Simply because a tribe, or my family, or a corporation that I hire will deal with the repercussions does not imply a government. But since we disagree on the word government, let me be more specific: it does not imply rule, only defense (if before the death), or restitution if after. This distinction is what I am talking about. You may think it to be minor, but to many it is the difference between living free vs. living as a subject.
"The very concept of property is in itself a rule."
No, not really, property is not a rule, but a concept which is used in rules, or acted upon, say to attack/defend. But, a rule (the noun) and the verb "rule" or not synonymous, perhaps my use of the verb rule is sometimes confusing. (I usually mean rule by force)
"In order to ensure anyone other than the property owner respects it, there must be some way of enforcing it, and once you have that, you have (limited) government of some sort."
No, again, see above, it is possible to have cooperative enforcement without rule. I no longer wish to debate the effectiveness of such, but just to affirm the possibility.
"Suppose everyone in the world agreed to the non-aggression principal as the sole basis for law. Then its a situation of consent. Say one person doesn't agree to the principal, and violates it? If there are no consequences, why bother to even have it in the first place? If there are, then what you have is a democracy."
I think that you are saying that a unique circumstance (everyone agreeing to the NAP) would make a legitimate democracy? I agree! And ONLY this would constitute a legitimate democracy!
In other words, in all other cases of a democracy (backed by force), it would be illegitimate. However, in this single case, the form of rule, democracy, would be irrelevant. In fact, you could say the same about monarchies and dictatorships! If we all agree to the NAP, who cares that there is a king since he too will agree to it!
"So, if you are declaring all government inherently criminal, yet you believe in property rights, you have a problem."
I am declaring all non consenting government (rule backed by force) inherently criminal. Where is the problem with property rights again? Seriously, I missed it, could you be very specific? Is it that you believe that property rights cannot be understood without a government? Perhaps surprisingly to you, it is likely better understood by most anarchist. There is plenty of good anarchist literature out there if you don't want to take my word for it, I would suggest reading "the ethics of liberty" by Murray Rothbard: http://mises.org/rothbard/ethics/ethics.asp
"Incidentally, about land rights and ownership – you pointed out before that the US stole land from Native American Indians. By both your definition of crime, and in many cases even by US law (where treaties were broken) this was illegal."
Yes, yes, yes… but more below.
"…Buying stolen property is basically an accessory to the crime (it enables the thief)…"
No, it simply makes the property still stolen. Accessory involves more, for example: it is fine to buy stolen property to return it to its original owner. But, I agreed that if you own provably stolen land and that there is a provable legitimate owner still, it should be returned to them. I will claim that this is not possible with my current land, my title search attempted to identify this (note: I am not denying the unethical loss of these records, just that it is likely impossible to do.) However, it is fairly important to understand homesteading. If the legitimate owner of any property can no longer be found, this property may be homesteaded again.
"If you homestead unoccupied land, what makes it "yours"?"
Homesteading is the only legitimate way for property to become owned in the first place. How else do you propose something become owned in the first place? All unowned property is homesteadable. You will likely point out that this is a rule and that it requires a government to back it up. But, again, I do not believe so, and prefer to not debate it. I will simply refer to the fact that this is normal acceptable behavior, it is common/natural law, most of it is even visible in the animal kingdom. No rule, and anarchy does not mean no conventions or no understanding of homesteading and property definitions and nuances.
" Should that ownership extend after your death? We live in a finite world, with a potentially infinite population."
No, the population can never be infinite.
But, you certainly ask a good question. Again, convention will likely show that inheritance of legitimately (important keyword) owned property is legitimate. This is again a problem best addressed by convention, not government. I will acknowledge your concern, and simply state that I believe that if you eliminate the ability to make large illegal claims to land (I own this continent) in the first place, this is not likely to be an issue.
"The issue you raise about the scarcity of unpopulated land is a reality that was inevitable."
The scarcity is primarily one of "unruled land", not unpopulated. But most of this ruled land was never legitimately homesteaded. You cannot set foot of a continent and claim it to be yours, that is not homesteading (I doubt even by anyone's definition). So, the scarcity you see of unruled land, is actually a government product (I claim this for the king!). There is plenty of unpopulated land in this world.
"What I don't understand is how removing all accountability from individual action could possibly end up as a good thing overall."
I am not advocating removing accountability, sorry if it came off that way. In fact, I am advocating more accountability. I am advocating that people are responsible for their crimes even if any government makes these crimes "legal" (murder is murder, theft is theft, slavery is slavery…), even when replaced with some state's words for these (war is murder, taxation is theft, conscription is slavery…)! Along with this, I am pointing out a way to judge the difference between real crimes and "legal" crimes, the NAP.
Having read this a 2nd time (after my last reply) I realize I already addressed everything I wanted to in my reply to the comment before this one.
I just wanted to say I have enjoyed this conversation, and found it very interesting. I'm going to be in basic training (USCG) for the next two months, so I won't be able to participate any further.
I wish you the best of luck in dismantling the US government and rebuilding society as a utopia.
Yes, it is getting long, we are repeating ourselves too much.
While I don't expect us to see eye to eye on all these issues, I am happy to see that we have at least found some common ground. While I have heard all the arguments that you have made before (and likely made them myself at some point), perhaps some of mine are new to you? And, perhaps they might someday influence your future pontifications.
I hope that even if you never give up your safety net (the state), that you will continue to consider the ethical implications of actions and evaluate them based on something more than just majority rule. And, maybe, just maybe, you will question many of the assumptions that you have about what can, and what cannot exist without a government. And, of course, I am confident that we will both continue to read more and think more about liberty and how we can live more peacefully together. oooh, sorry I didn't mean to sound so touchy feely.
first drive away the people who lived on the land using arms, deceit and every evil card one has in hand. then wear your white collars, coats and bows and talk democracy. what a farce.
talk lots of theory while the world and the poor of the world are exploited and raped
vow democracy
what was written ididn`t mean but what was written was right
Antidemocracia.
El foro de filosofía política "Antidemocracia" es un foro para antidemócratas, para quienes rechazan el detestable régimen político que es la democracia y proponen alternativas.
Se llama "democracia" al régimen político en el que las decisiones políticas se toman por mayoría de votos. Aquí somos antidemócratas, sencillamente, porque estimamos absurdo y perjudicial ese procedimiento político, sin por eso convertirnos en unos terroristas o unos tiranos. Hay terroristas y tiranos demócratas, como también los hay antidemócratas.
Dirección de entrada: http://es.groups.yahoo.com/group/antidemocracia/