Quote from: Shannon on July 31, 2012, 11:43 pmQuote from: Dread Pirate Roberts on July 31, 2012, 11:07 pmThank you for the acknowledgement Lim, but what is Silk Road without all of you? The way I see it, we are all players in something that has grown way beyond any one of us. Granted I play a unique role, but part of that role is continually earning the trust of the community to make the right choices going forward, and to serve each of you as best I can. Silk Road was built to serve you, your needs and desires are the wind that fills its sails. Without you, we are dead in the water. So sure, it's my job to steer and chart the course, and I am ultimately responsible for the outcome of this experiment, but never forget where the real power lies. It's where it always has been, in your hands.how are you an agorist and a collectivist at once? :PIndividualism ultimately serves the collective. It was Adam Smith's belief that when an individual pursues his self-interest, he indirectly promotes the good of society.With the criteria that you require open competition and no coercion between market participants.Many people who mock these ideas today, never really understood them in the first place. They prefer "sophisticated" arguments in preference to simple truths. Communism was not an advancement because its theory was more complex, it was really a throwback to older philosophies that go back to the Greeks and no doubt beyond.Only capitalism was an original conception. If people research Maddison's work on economic statistics over the centuries then they will come to similar conclusions: capitalism was the catalyst for where we are today vs the dark ages. Many of our critics forget that even Karl Marx agreed with us on this point. Marx says in the manifesto that we were responsible for the greatest change in history, he saw capitalism as a positive development in comparison to the past, even though he was hyper-critical of it in his day. People also forget that Marx wrote Das Kapital something close to a century before the Revolution began, so they conflate his ideas with a good deal of the rhetoric of the time.In fact, there is a great deal the communists and capitalists agree on, that the general public do not. Which is, I think, interesting.