Hubble has produced some wonderful marvelous pictures. But that doesn't justify the fact that it's a multi-billion dollar project funded by stealing from the tax-payer. If private individuals and organizations want to fund projects to peer deep into space -- using money voluntarily acquired -- fine. Otherwise, it's just theft with the excuse of stargazing.
um, yes, your job should be your life
on
Dream Jobs of 2004
·
· Score: 1
Well, not really. But your job is what you do 8 hours every day, so it should be something that you really enjoy and are enthusiastic about. It should be something where your excited to get up and go to "work" (I'm sick of these anarcho-socialist nut-cases babbling about how "unfair" work is -- grow the fuck up).
My personal dream jobs:
1. Anything at or affiliated with the Mises Institute. Supporting personal and economic freedom, along with economic sanity.
2. Mutual fund manager. I don't care what they say about mutual fund managers being over-paid. Who make that arbitrary decision? Anyways, finding really great companies is a fun challenge.
If I sell a service/software/product that can be used for many purposes, I should not be held accountable for how it's used. Even if I sell something that can only be used to violate human rights, I should not be held accountable (since it, after all, still can be kept as a exhibition). Here, we have the same crowd who rightfully says that the makers of P2P software, encryption software, file-sharing software, DeCSS, and other pieces of software, shouldn't be held liable for the illegal uses of those software; that same community, now, is idiotically and hypocritically saying that Microsoft should be held liable for the way it's software is used.
What we really have here is a case of attempted slavery. The government, and various special interest groups, are trying to enslave producers of goods. What? How? They are trying to enslave producers by trying to force them to expend resources monitoring and determining how their products are used.
I'm no fan of Microsoft. In fact, they have benefitted from various State-interventions in the free market -- like copyrights, trademarks, and patents -- which create artificial scarcity. However, that still does not mean that it is right to punish them for something of which they should have no liability.
In other words, there's a 0.9961 that if you flip a coint 8 times, you're not going to predict the superbowl right all 8 times. However, that means that you only have to repeat your 8-coin flip experiment 1000 times to make it 98% likely that in one of those 1000 8-coin-flips, you're going to predict the winner correctly each time.
is copyright. If it wasn't for copyright, an artifically created monopoly, there would be no way that publishers could keep the prices of books so high. If they insisted on asking for so much money, professors or students could scan the book into a computer and offer it online as a website.
There are no natural property rights in resources that aren't scarce, and this qualifies as one of those resources. Google's lawyers trying to get Booble to change and turn over their website constites a violation of *real* property rights that the people at Booble have (namely, the right to alter their physical property in any way they see fit). Sorry, but Google has no inherent right to have a certain domain point to their IP address, nor to have all domain-names that are similar to theirs. All that trademark is is an artificially created monopoly, a State intervention which hinders the free market.
What's obvious to me is that Google is, in fact, trying to capitalize on an innovation that they did not think up, to name a website "Booble" and make it a search engine. However, if they're really worried about the public's good will to them, they can put out a statement on their website saying that they have no affiliation with Booble. Oh, and sorry, but they have NO RIGHT to have the public at large have "good will" towards them either.
Note to Google: You have no property right in your reputation. In other words, you do not have the right to have others think well of you. Get over it.
I mean, don't most people who sit around and game all day basically have the motions dealing with lower arm strength all pat and down? After so many repetitive...strokes...they must have pretty strong brachioradials.
Consider frensel lenses. You can get a very large Frensel lense at a relatively cheap price. They cause eye-strain if you look through them for very long periods, but how long are you going to just sit there staring through the telescope?
Some very respectable people, and one friend of mine suggested I think about becoming an associate. But it's a lot of money to put in (you buy the associateship and then all the advertising materials) and the statistics presented are fluffed (e.g., they say that they have an 85% retention rate of customers, but that's only for one year...after one year, it drops to less than 30%). In short, the whole thing just seems like a headache and a mess.
these types of things reel in desperate individuals who don't want to work for their money, or do the research to learn how to invest it well. In general, if someone tells you that you can make lots of money by doing no work, they're trying to scam you.
It's not all black and white. There are even some companies in the US that have a sort of queezy feel to them in regards to their offers. Pre-Paid Legal has an iffy feel to it (see News on Pre-Paid Legal. It's a MLM company which sells That was a grey-area example, But offers which promise to make you rich while requiring no work from you are almost invariably scams. There's an easy way to detect a scam: listen to your gut. If something doesn't feel right, you shouldn't go with it.
Irrelevant of all the (valid) poitns you made about how patents are often harmful, they are simply inconsistent with property rights and should not be subject to ownership. Only scarce resources are subject to becoming property (privitization). Furthermore, creating legal rights (patents) in ideas violates real property rights, by telling the owner of one piece of property that he can't mold it in the way of his choosing. (see the excellent Kinsella paper I pointed out).
With basically everything you've said. However, I think we're being far too narrow in looking at the problem. The real problem is that ideas and expressions are aggregiously being treated as if they are scarce-resoucres, that is are subject to ownership. By creating an artificial scarcity -- which is what patents and copyrights do, and what alot of other government regulations in real property do -- you artificially raise prices and hinder production, which is harmful to increases in the standard of living.
though I still think there's no problem if there's sufficient competition (not possible with IP). The article I linked to is interesting, check it out.
because most user's don't actually look at the source. The reason people trust GNU/Linux more than Windows is because it has a record of better security than Windows. So-long as there is real competition between various companies and products -- and I argue GNU/Linux is a competing product put forth by capitalists for non-monetary profit -- individuals can make choices so as to protect their data. The problem is that The State has created an artificial scarcity of resources, by creating property rights in information. The solution is to eliminate this artificially created scarcity (which violates real property rights). You may be interested in Against Intellectual Property by Stephen Kinsella.
For what we presume to be their response to this survey, which will be ignoring responses, using them as examples of zealotry, using them to better tailor misinformation, or (gasp) using them to actually improve their product (that is still a fundamental business principle, better product = better business = more money = shareholders happy = CEO's obligations met)...while we're doing that, let's examine what the typical response would be to a Windows user who explains why he doesn't use Windows
You're 2u stUpId
You're not l33t
Winbloz suX0rZ
You just need to RTFM, bitch!
RT-motherfuckin-FM. Linux is easy if you just RTFM (of course, poorly formated man-files filled with useless information help matters a lot)
just learn how to "man command" (never-mind the fact that they might not even know what command they need to use and that many manuals from websites are poor...)
Etc
There are some exceptions. The entire Gentoo community seems to be friendly to newbies, with clear documentation and a well-organized website. When I first installed GNU/Linux, I found Gentoo to be easier to install than Debian, despite the fact that Gentoo's install process is more archaic. Good step-by-step manuals and helpful users who are willing to say something more helpful than "man 'command'" do make a difference.
The biggest problem is the common attitude that help in IRC rooms should only be sought after the manuals have been exhausted and exhaustive search efforts on Google have failed. People don't want to read hundreds of pages of documentation. Quite frankly, I don't give a shit about the details of emerge or dpkg commands. I just want to get a program installed and get to work. For example, a while ago, I wanted to install Free Mind. This program requires Java SDK 1.4. Unfortunately, my stable release of Debian (it's actually LibraNet, but who cares) doesn't allow me to apt-get that.
So, I had to get it from Sun's official site, go through the install process. I did matters backwards and downloaded the rpm. So, I had to use alien to convert it to a deb and then figure out how to install a deb locally. Up until then, I'd simply always installed thing from apt-get, which installs over the the net and had never used alien. So I went in a #Debian room to find out how, and I got "RTFM, 'man alien' 'man dpkg'". Now, anyone who said that would know that what I had to type 'alien -d -i j2re.rpm'...would it really have been that much extra work to type that? Instead, I had to waste time going through the alien man-pages to figure that out. As it happens, it was relatively quick, but it just adds to annoyance. This is the same type of response you get for everything, which results in individuals wasting lots of time sifting through information which they will never use. Of course, what I didn't tell these dimwits is that I was doing that to avoid having to regularly boot into Windows to use FreeMind to take notes on Think and Grow Rich.
"No accountability"? That's bull-crap. They're held accountable by free-market response, people moving to other OS'. Which is exactly what most GNU/Linux users have done. This means less profit for them. As for assurance of meeting claimed criteria, there's none of that in FOSS either...just because the code is Free doesn't mean anyone actually looks at it, nor that everyone is even capable of doing such. Attaining the truth? Well, we may not know how MS programs do what they do, but we do know whether or not they work (granted, there's no way of finding bugs before they're exploited, but most of us don't do that in FOSS anyways) and how good they work. Anyone using MS Word and Excel know, for example, that they have gotten progressively worse from 1998 or maybe even before.
If individuals don't trust Microsoft, MS can bang their heads against the wall making their OS less buggy and more stable, to no avail. If that's the case, the way for MS to make more money may be changing some of it's behaviour.
by that, I can only presume that you've been brainwashed into thinking that Lincoln was a great supporter of the abolitionist movement and a supporter of African-American rights. In reality, nothing could possibly be further from the truth. You would be hard-pressed to find a bigger bigot than Lincoln. Lincoln was such a racist that he didn't like slavery because it meant that we'd have to live with African Americans...he wanted to ship them all back to Africa.
The following links may prove informative on the real Abraham Lincoln:
Which would be almost all property owners, and all those who own apartment complexes. Since many of the lower and middle class live in apartments, they're covered by their landlord's private law-enforcement, even if they don't have their own private insurance. Furthermore, you continue to ignore the fact that law-enforcement is provided by the hard work and labor of law-enforcement agencies. No-one is entitled to their labor without compensating them for it, nor are those who can't afford to do so entitled to steal from other's to compensate law-enforcement. Rothbard addresses your questions:
But how could a poor person afford private protection he would have to pay for instead of getting free protection, as he does now?" There are several answers to this question, one of the most common criticisms of the idea of totally private police protection. One is: that this problem of course applies to any commodity or service in the libertarian society, not just the police. But isn't protection necessary? Perhaps, but then so is food of many different kinds, clothing, shelter, etc. Surely these are at least as vital if not more so than police protection, and yet almost nobody says that therefore the government must nationalize food, clothing, shelter, etc., and supply these free as a compulsory monopoly. Very poor people would be supplied, in general, by private charity, as we saw in our chapter on welfare. Furthermore, in the specific case of police there would undoubtedly be ways of voluntarily supplying free police protection to the indigent--either by the police companies themselves for goodwill (as hospitals and doctors do now) or by special "police aid" societies that would do work similar to "legal aid" societies today. (Legal aid societies voluntarily supply free legal counsel to the indigent in trouble with the authorities.)
There are important supplementary considerations. As we have seen, police service is not "free"; it is paid for by the taxpayer, and the taxpayer is very often the poor person himself. He may very well be paying more in taxes for police now than he would in fees to private, and far more efficient, police companies. Furthermore, the police companies would be tapping a mass market; with the economies of such a large-scale market, police protection would undoubtedly be much cheaper. No police company would wish to price itself out of a large chunk of its market, and the cost of protection would be no more prohibitively expensive than, say, the cost of insurance today. (In fact, it would tend to be much cheaper than current insurance, because the insurance industry today is heavily regulated by government to keep out low-cost competition.
there was a time that Libertarianism was about liberty (which was then defined as "freedom of action").
Property rights are required for liberty. Anyone who doubts that can only look at the "freedom of speech" we see on government-owned and regulated airwaves. See Rothbard's Personal Liberty. For a relevant quote:
THE LIBERTARIAN CREED rests upon one central axiom: that no man or group of men may aggress against the person or property of anyone else. This may be called the "nonaggression axiom." "Aggression" is defined as the initiation of the use or threat of physical violence against the person or property of anyone else. Aggression is therefore synonymous with invasion.
If no man may aggress against another; if, in short, everyone has the absolute right to be "free" from aggression, then this at once implies that the libertarian stands foursquare for what are generally known as "civil liberties": the freedom to speak, publish, assemble, and to engage in such "victimless crimes" as pornography, sexual deviation, and prostitution (which the libertarian does not regard as "crimes" at all, since he defines a "crime" as violent
it means that all systems of management of groups/resources (government, anarchy, decentralization, etc.) will tend towards badness, hence the cyclical tendencies of history. And it's no more one-dimensional than the idea that the State is the cause of all our troubles and that pure free market will solve things
Firstly, Libertarianism makes no assumption that people are inherently good. It would work better than any other system even if people were only inherently evil, crooked, selfish and corrupt. Obviously, any system will work better if most people are good. The point of libertarianism is that it doesn't require dubious assumptions about the "goodness" of people to work. Secondly, the unhampered free market isn't a magic bullet. It's not some garden of eden. It's simply the best system available for respecting individual's property rights. It also happens to be the best economic system, but that is aside from the point.
Witness bans on the homeless sleeping outside. Even with todays' frameworks, this happens. When law enforcement, courts, etc. are privatized, this type of problem will only be exacerbated.
The "problem" is with the homeless people who refuse to get a job. Sorry, but no-one has the right to tresspass on anyone else' property, homeless or not. Of course, absent a State, there wouldn't be assinite labor laws which illegalize jobs. In an unhampered free market, almost all unemployment would be voluntary.
In a free market, the poor would have to pay for the services they get, just like anyone else. Irrelevant of the perceived need, no-one has the right to obtain the service of someone else without compensating them what they'd accept of their own free will for that service. That is slavery. Simply because someone happens to provide the service of a room to sleep in, or a meal, or medical services, does not mean that we get to enslave them for "the greater good" (a bunch of subjective non-sense). If the poor want room and board, they'll have to pay for it. Of course, you make the dubious assumption that no-one would allow the poor to sleep on their property, or help them out. This is contradicted by the reality of what we see today, where people contribute to homeless shelters, even though the government steals up to 50% of their income.
Irrelevant of your subjective opinions on the overall good, no-one has the right to steal from anyone else.
In a libertarian scenario, Bill Gates, with his $30 million salary, could...[bribe everyone and get away with murder]
First of all, we'd have to question if Bill Gates could even exist in an unhampered free market. Remember, he's made his money via government-granted monopolies (patents and copyrights). These would not exist in the free market. Even so, let's assume someone making $40mil in the free market. That doesn't mean that such a scenario as you describe would be possible. First of all, that assumes that the only concern people have is a monetary concern, and completely dismisses any moral concerns individuals may have. Secondly, any private police officer who took a bribe would risk being charged with a crime in a private court by the protection agency he works for. He's also risk being labelled a co-conspirator by any private prosecution (or crime-insurance) agencies and trialed in a court. Thirdly, even if the absurd scenario you suggest could happen, it is nothing that is unique to an anarcho-capitalist sytem. It could just as easily happen right now.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Putting power that is limited only by wealth in the hands of the almost limitlessly wealthy guarantees that the wealthy can do whatever they want to do with impunity.
This simply is not true, namely because the "limitlessly wealthy" have to get their wealth from somewhere. They would be just as subject to the non-aggression axiom as anyone else. If they had someone tortured or murdered, then by the estoppel approach and proportionality, they would be subject t
a defensive war means a war fought against those invading your country. It does not mean taking the war to their country. During the Revolutionary War, we didn't go to Britain and murder British citizens. What you describe is a pre-emptive war, which is really no different than me saying "I think you're going to hit me, so I'll just kill you now". That's not acceptable. As for WWII, that was made a certainty by the way we handled the ending of WWI ("the war to end all wars"). WWI, btw, would have been resolved in stand-still, had not the US become involved. Finally, WWI -- and all wars, indeed -- are only possible due to the centralized power constituting a territorial monopoly on the initiation of violence known as The State.
Slashdot Mirror
Hubble has produced some wonderful marvelous pictures. But that doesn't justify the fact that it's a multi-billion dollar project funded by stealing from the tax-payer. If private individuals and organizations want to fund projects to peer deep into space -- using money voluntarily acquired -- fine. Otherwise, it's just theft with the excuse of stargazing.
My personal dream jobs:
1. Anything at or affiliated with the Mises Institute. Supporting personal and economic freedom, along with economic sanity.
2. Mutual fund manager. I don't care what they say about mutual fund managers being over-paid. Who make that arbitrary decision? Anyways, finding really great companies is a fun challenge.
If I sell a service/software/product that can be used for many purposes, I should not be held accountable for how it's used. Even if I sell something that can only be used to violate human rights, I should not be held accountable (since it, after all, still can be kept as a exhibition). Here, we have the same crowd who rightfully says that the makers of P2P software, encryption software, file-sharing software, DeCSS, and other pieces of software, shouldn't be held liable for the illegal uses of those software; that same community, now, is idiotically and hypocritically saying that Microsoft should be held liable for the way it's software is used.
What we really have here is a case of attempted slavery. The government, and various special interest groups, are trying to enslave producers of goods. What? How? They are trying to enslave producers by trying to force them to expend resources monitoring and determining how their products are used.
I'm no fan of Microsoft. In fact, they have benefitted from various State-interventions in the free market -- like copyrights, trademarks, and patents -- which create artificial scarcity. However, that still does not mean that it is right to punish them for something of which they should have no liability.
(0.5)^8 = 0.0039 = 0.39%.
In other words, there's a 0.9961 that if you flip a coint 8 times, you're not going to predict the superbowl right all 8 times. However, that means that you only have to repeat your 8-coin flip experiment 1000 times to make it 98% likely that in one of those 1000 8-coin-flips, you're going to predict the winner correctly each time.
is copyright. If it wasn't for copyright, an artifically created monopoly, there would be no way that publishers could keep the prices of books so high. If they insisted on asking for so much money, professors or students could scan the book into a computer and offer it online as a website.
Patent Wrongs, Illana Mercer
Rethinking Patent Law, Gene Callahan
Against Intellectual Property, Stephen Kinsella
What's obvious to me is that Google is, in fact, trying to capitalize on an innovation that they did not think up, to name a website "Booble" and make it a search engine. However, if they're really worried about the public's good will to them, they can put out a statement on their website saying that they have no affiliation with Booble. Oh, and sorry, but they have NO RIGHT to have the public at large have "good will" towards them either.
Note to Google: You have no property right in your reputation. In other words, you do not have the right to have others think well of you. Get over it.
I mean, don't most people who sit around and game all day basically have the motions dealing with lower arm strength all pat and down? After so many repetitive...strokes...they must have pretty strong brachioradials.
Consider frensel lenses. You can get a very large Frensel lense at a relatively cheap price. They cause eye-strain if you look through them for very long periods, but how long are you going to just sit there staring through the telescope?
(1) Most movie downloads are porn, porn, and more porn. This only affects the porn industry.
(2) Movies take a lot longer to download, and basically require a DSL, Cable, or LAN connection.
Some very respectable people, and one friend of mine suggested I think about becoming an associate. But it's a lot of money to put in (you buy the associateship and then all the advertising materials) and the statistics presented are fluffed (e.g., they say that they have an 85% retention rate of customers, but that's only for one year...after one year, it drops to less than 30%). In short, the whole thing just seems like a headache and a mess.
It's not all black and white. There are even some companies in the US that have a sort of queezy feel to them in regards to their offers. Pre-Paid Legal has an iffy feel to it (see News on Pre-Paid Legal. It's a MLM company which sells
That was a grey-area example, But offers which promise to make you rich while requiring no work from you are almost invariably scams. There's an easy way to detect a scam: listen to your gut. If something doesn't feel right, you shouldn't go with it.
Irrelevant of all the (valid) poitns you made about how patents are often harmful, they are simply inconsistent with property rights and should not be subject to ownership. Only scarce resources are subject to becoming property (privitization). Furthermore, creating legal rights (patents) in ideas violates real property rights, by telling the owner of one piece of property that he can't mold it in the way of his choosing. (see the excellent Kinsella paper I pointed out).
With basically everything you've said. However, I think we're being far too narrow in looking at the problem. The real problem is that ideas and expressions are aggregiously being treated as if they are scarce-resoucres, that is are subject to ownership. By creating an artificial scarcity -- which is what patents and copyrights do, and what alot of other government regulations in real property do -- you artificially raise prices and hinder production, which is harmful to increases in the standard of living.
though I still think there's no problem if there's sufficient competition (not possible with IP). The article I linked to is interesting, check it out.
because most user's don't actually look at the source. The reason people trust GNU/Linux more than Windows is because it has a record of better security than Windows. So-long as there is real competition between various companies and products -- and I argue GNU/Linux is a competing product put forth by capitalists for non-monetary profit -- individuals can make choices so as to protect their data. The problem is that The State has created an artificial scarcity of resources, by creating property rights in information. The solution is to eliminate this artificially created scarcity (which violates real property rights). You may be interested in Against Intellectual Property by Stephen Kinsella.
There are some exceptions. The entire Gentoo community seems to be friendly to newbies, with clear documentation and a well-organized website. When I first installed GNU/Linux, I found Gentoo to be easier to install than Debian, despite the fact that Gentoo's install process is more archaic. Good step-by-step manuals and helpful users who are willing to say something more helpful than "man 'command'" do make a difference.
The biggest problem is the common attitude that help in IRC rooms should only be sought after the manuals have been exhausted and exhaustive search efforts on Google have failed. People don't want to read hundreds of pages of documentation. Quite frankly, I don't give a shit about the details of emerge or dpkg commands. I just want to get a program installed and get to work. For example, a while ago, I wanted to install Free Mind. This program requires Java SDK 1.4. Unfortunately, my stable release of Debian (it's actually LibraNet, but who cares) doesn't allow me to apt-get that.
So, I had to get it from Sun's official site, go through the install process. I did matters backwards and downloaded the rpm. So, I had to use alien to convert it to a deb and then figure out how to install a deb locally. Up until then, I'd simply always installed thing from apt-get, which installs over the the net and had never used alien. So I went in a #Debian room to find out how, and I got "RTFM, 'man alien' 'man dpkg'". Now, anyone who said that would know that what I had to type 'alien -d -i j2re.rpm'...would it really have been that much extra work to type that? Instead, I had to waste time going through the alien man-pages to figure that out. As it happens, it was relatively quick, but it just adds to annoyance. This is the same type of response you get for everything, which results in individuals wasting lots of time sifting through information which they will never use. Of course, what I didn't tell these dimwits is that I was doing that to avoid having to regularly boot into Windows to use FreeMind to take notes on Think and Grow Rich.
"No accountability"? That's bull-crap. They're held accountable by free-market response, people moving to other OS'. Which is exactly what most GNU/Linux users have done. This means less profit for them. As for assurance of meeting claimed criteria, there's none of that in FOSS either...just because the code is Free doesn't mean anyone actually looks at it, nor that everyone is even capable of doing such. Attaining the truth? Well, we may not know how MS programs do what they do, but we do know whether or not they work (granted, there's no way of finding bugs before they're exploited, but most of us don't do that in FOSS anyways) and how good they work. Anyone using MS Word and Excel know, for example, that they have gotten progressively worse from 1998 or maybe even before.
And why exactly can't GNU/Linux distros run on a 2.6 GHz P4 with kick-ass sound and video, with lots of programs?
If individuals don't trust Microsoft, MS can bang their heads against the wall making their OS less buggy and more stable, to no avail. If that's the case, the way for MS to make more money may be changing some of it's behaviour.
The following links may prove informative on the real Abraham Lincoln:
Confronting the Lincoln Cult
The truth spitter
Rethinking Lincoln [mp3]
The Real Lincoln [mp3]
Which would be almost all property owners, and all those who own apartment complexes. Since many of the lower and middle class live in apartments, they're covered by their landlord's private law-enforcement, even if they don't have their own private insurance. Furthermore, you continue to ignore the fact that law-enforcement is provided by the hard work and labor of law-enforcement agencies. No-one is entitled to their labor without compensating them for it, nor are those who can't afford to do so entitled to steal from other's to compensate law-enforcement. Rothbard addresses your questions:
there was a time that Libertarianism was about liberty (which was then defined as "freedom of action").
Property rights are required for liberty. Anyone who doubts that can only look at the "freedom of speech" we see on government-owned and regulated airwaves. See Rothbard's Personal Liberty. For a relevant quote:
Er, I'll reply later on. I just finished typing a response when fucking Galeon crashed.
Firstly, Libertarianism makes no assumption that people are inherently good. It would work better than any other system even if people were only inherently evil, crooked, selfish and corrupt. Obviously, any system will work better if most people are good. The point of libertarianism is that it doesn't require dubious assumptions about the "goodness" of people to work. Secondly, the unhampered free market isn't a magic bullet. It's not some garden of eden. It's simply the best system available for respecting individual's property rights. It also happens to be the best economic system, but that is aside from the point.
Witness bans on the homeless sleeping outside. Even with todays' frameworks, this happens. When law enforcement, courts, etc. are privatized, this type of problem will only be exacerbated.
The "problem" is with the homeless people who refuse to get a job. Sorry, but no-one has the right to tresspass on anyone else' property, homeless or not. Of course, absent a State, there wouldn't be assinite labor laws which illegalize jobs. In an unhampered free market, almost all unemployment would be voluntary.
In a free market, the poor would have to pay for the services they get, just like anyone else. Irrelevant of the perceived need, no-one has the right to obtain the service of someone else without compensating them what they'd accept of their own free will for that service. That is slavery. Simply because someone happens to provide the service of a room to sleep in, or a meal, or medical services, does not mean that we get to enslave them for "the greater good" (a bunch of subjective non-sense). If the poor want room and board, they'll have to pay for it. Of course, you make the dubious assumption that no-one would allow the poor to sleep on their property, or help them out. This is contradicted by the reality of what we see today, where people contribute to homeless shelters, even though the government steals up to 50% of their income.
Irrelevant of your subjective opinions on the overall good, no-one has the right to steal from anyone else.
In a libertarian scenario, Bill Gates, with his $30 million salary, could...[bribe everyone and get away with murder]
First of all, we'd have to question if Bill Gates could even exist in an unhampered free market. Remember, he's made his money via government-granted monopolies (patents and copyrights). These would not exist in the free market. Even so, let's assume someone making $40mil in the free market. That doesn't mean that such a scenario as you describe would be possible. First of all, that assumes that the only concern people have is a monetary concern, and completely dismisses any moral concerns individuals may have. Secondly, any private police officer who took a bribe would risk being charged with a crime in a private court by the protection agency he works for. He's also risk being labelled a co-conspirator by any private prosecution (or crime-insurance) agencies and trialed in a court. Thirdly, even if the absurd scenario you suggest could happen, it is nothing that is unique to an anarcho-capitalist sytem. It could just as easily happen right now.
Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Putting power that is limited only by wealth in the hands of the almost limitlessly wealthy guarantees that the wealthy can do whatever they want to do with impunity.
This simply is not true, namely because the "limitlessly wealthy" have to get their wealth from somewhere. They would be just as subject to the non-aggression axiom as anyone else. If they had someone tortured or murdered, then by the estoppel approach and proportionality, they would be subject t
a defensive war means a war fought against those invading your country. It does not mean taking the war to their country. During the Revolutionary War, we didn't go to Britain and murder British citizens. What you describe is a pre-emptive war, which is really no different than me saying "I think you're going to hit me, so I'll just kill you now". That's not acceptable. As for WWII, that was made a certainty by the way we handled the ending of WWI ("the war to end all wars"). WWI, btw, would have been resolved in stand-still, had not the US become involved. Finally, WWI -- and all wars, indeed -- are only possible due to the centralized power constituting a territorial monopoly on the initiation of violence known as The State.