Quote from: anarcho47 on March 02, 2012, 05:43 amI've long said that I would be satisfied with minarchism, but I believe in the power of universal human self-interest and therefore in anarcho-capitalism.I would be fine with government courts and police and such, so long as they didn't actually have a coercive monopoly on their services and people could say "you suck" and move over to a private alternative.Ok, but in practice don't we already have this to some degree in the West?An American or European can pretty much go anywhere within the West, so long as certain criteria is filled, usually Time. And people do avail of these freedoms when it's in their interest to do so, but it's not the case that entire nations get up and go suddenly.Now, like yourself, I think there should be *no* barriers to the movement of labor. Governments should compete for people as clients to be taxed etc. But I think we are 50% of the way there, even though it was much freer at the beginning of the 20th century than it is today. The world wars devastated the ideals of capitalism.However, we do seem to have a paradox where distinctly centralized and powerful states in Hong Kong and Singapore are quite authoritarian, I mean socially authoritarian not economically, but nevertheless these are extremely free markets with governments that appreciate the fundamentals of capitalism. Recently the Hong Kong government gave everyone a rebate of six or nine thousand dollars, because they didn't need the money... These states, incidentally to anybody else reading this discussion, are among the lowest in terms of taxation in the world. They are also very resilient to economic crisis and have next to no poverty or other social ills. Basically, if you take care of the market, it takes care of most other things without requiring continual expensive interventions. All the empirical evidence you want is in those two cities. Tax is an afterthought in the minds of most Singaporeans and Hong Kong citizens. Yet their governments are extremely powerful and influential on the world scene.I think in the long term, this is the future. Very large city states controlling the world. That countries, nations will recede in importance and cities will become the dominant new 'State'. Just like in ancient Greece. Anyway, I seem to have wandered off topic... :DQuote from: anarcho47 on March 02, 2012, 05:43 amHaving a massive monopoly on violence means you have a structure just sitting their waiting to be co-opted by whichever ideology happens to have a majority at the time. If enough muslims kept immigrating into europe and having 9-children families and teaching Sharia law, in a generation or two you suddenly have a "moral majority" and under collectivist/statist doctrine they can just "swap" the whole system over to Sharia and nobody has any say in the matter.Yup, which is why democracy is not a pancrea. If markets are not a perfect pancrea, then with democracy this is 100 times more so the case.In practice, Muslims are being absorbed into the West. They have lost the ideological war a long time ago. This whole business with Sept 11th and the wars in the East are an actual sideshow in comparison to the great shift in thinking in the East. The West has won, it's just that this kind of thing takes centuries to fully play out such that everyone sees the big picture.Quote from: anarcho47 on March 02, 2012, 05:43 amPersonal crime might be down, but I would argue that crime has a lot more to do with poverty and a human's ability to defend him/herself. Again, I go back to guns. The market provided a man or woman with ability to stand up against multiple assailants with this tool, which is a natural deterrent to crime (see switzerland, with its 90-something-percent household gun ownership, and lowest violent/property crime rates in western civilization). But the bigger issue is poverty. If people have the opportunity to pursue self-interest in a profitable manner, they aren't going to pursue crime (because it's dangerous/high risk) over an honest profit. Well, I can certainly identify with that. Opportunities available to me, are scant. The fault ultimately lies in the high taxation of Europe. There is no opportunities for smart hungry people anymore. The government hasn't the first fucking clue, they keep blathering on about 'information technology', 'bio-tech', 'nano-tech' as if that will save them from the tremendous morass, the huge burden they've placed on us. When I was legit I remember spending weeks and weeks filling in and collecting different bits of paperwork to pay my myriad of taxes, then worrying at night whether I'd misplaced a zero or a comma somewhere until my accountant validated the paperwork. I worked hard, educated myself, and invested in our system. I made money, but it was a miserable, paltry sum of money. It would take me four decades to buy myself a modest home. That is why the majority of Italian youths live with their parents today, even though they are 30 - 40 years old themselves. People on the benefits system were getting by just fine without working a single day, in fact they were the ones most frequently paying *me* to work for them. See something wrong with this picture?The vast majority of Europeans, are frankly asleep at the wheel of this train wreck. At least some Americans are bitching about the problem, at least they are aware!I'm not the kind of person who blames things 'on the system'. I'm an individualist, I look to myself first if there's something wrong, since it usually is the case that you are the problem. However it just *cannot be the case* that I am to blame for the bullshit of the last ten/twenty years with our governments throwing money down the toilet with hundreds of half baked schemes, high taxation on workers and an enormous 'benefits class' that sit on their asses. People themselves have been completely corrupted by high taxes, you can see it as plain as daylight in the housing estates of our countries. People have no hope or aspirations anymore. Their biggest life event is getting a new smartphone or making babies, they are literally like cattle. They accept the world just as it is.Eventually I said to myself: How about No, and I became a criminal for exactly this reason. It's a more honest living. Listen to this government, there are consequences for your stupidity, not all of us will lie down and take it up the ass like you were doing us a favor. Yeah, I mad./rantQuote from: anarcho47 on March 02, 2012, 05:43 amFor a good primer on US history, I would recommend checking out Thomas Woods, a Harvard PhD historian and Austrian economics. His book "33 questions about American History" is excellent. All of his books are excellent, truth be told, and his sourcing of facts is pretty much unparalleled in his history and economic papers and books.I'll pickup a copy sometime, thanks.Quote from: anarcho47 on March 02, 2012, 05:43 amIf we look at crime now there are some distinct categories we can place things in to. General sadism is still pretty flat, and has increased in most western countries since major gun bans came into effect (things like rape, most of which aren't even reported). Drug crimes and all of the associated crime (I think something like 30-40% of violent crime is drug related in the US, and a similar amount for property theft) are up as enforcement becomes more and more draconian. It is the economics of prohibition that turn people into 100% habit-focused addicts. The production cost on cocaine is dirt cheap, and that's still with production being illegal. Mark up is tens of thousands of percent by the time it hits the ounce-buying dealer. The structure of the system molds the people within it. It's just reality. The DEA is like one of those hunting dogs, intelligent in the hunt, but fundamentally dumb as a bag of rocks when it comes to the big picture. They are not so much the Orwellian actors of 1984, as the characters of A Brave New World, they are desensitized by their beliefs to see the long term consequences of banning drugs such as marijuana and MDMA. They are a great burden on the State. They are not real patriots at all. Quote from: anarcho47 on March 02, 2012, 05:43 amNot to mention that while private-interaction violence drops off (I credit this to capitalism providing better outlets for self-interest, versus state coercion), the 20th century saw more mass murder and collectivist "cleansing", along with eugenics and a hundred million sacrifices to Molech, than any other century prior. These were state atrocities, not individual or group actions.That is all very true, but it doesn't mean that anarchism will reduce the overall rate of violence per capita within society. You could take away 'external violence', only to replace it with a greater amount of 'internal violence' if you take my meaning. I think the lesson the 20th century, is that if you're going to have a Revolution, you better be really really sure you're replacing it with something better.Quote from: anarcho47 on March 02, 2012, 05:43 amAn example of how the economics of statist policies/collectivist morality affect crime: A regular cocaine habit takes something like $50,000 - $70,000 to sustain in the US. The high end of that is almost double what the average US worker makes pre-tax. Celebrities, a great many of whom are cocaine addicts, can sustain this habit and one generally doesn't even know they are addicted. An average person must focus all of their time and energy on acquiring the resources to keep the addiction sated. And because an "honest job" hardly covers the costs or falls very short. violent crime or prostitution or becoming a seller, etc. are the only ways to sustain this for a large percentage of users. Imagine if free markets were allowed to provide something like cocaine, at $2.00 per gram and extremely high purity, coffee-shop style, completely unregulated. Any addict could be a 100% functional member of society that would only have to devote a small part of their life to feeding this habit, the same as someone addicted to caffeine might.QFT