Exactly where did someone give "implicit" permission? By voting? Because they didn't leave where they were born and go somewhere else? (And try to find some place where there aren't thugs pointing guns at people claiming to control them. Every square millimetre of land on the Earth nowadays is claimed by some government.)
This "implicit" permission---the so-called "social contract"---is just something statism apologists made up to justify statism. You might as well resort to the "divine right of kings" to justify their coercive system.
Democracy is exactly what you stated: Two foxes and a hen voting on what's for dinner. The NHLA, one of the political activism groups I work with extensively, actually sells a T-shirt with that quote on it.:)
The property taxes are higher than many other states, but only the towns and the education system get money from property taxes, not the general state government. The state government is simply a lot smaller and less intrusive here than a lot of other places. Lower spending results in lower taxes.
See the "government" section of this list, especially items #9, #10, #13, and #21. Many of the items there include citations if you're skeptical.
Although sometimes they get elected US senator. With any luck, we'll pass an amendment to the state constitution to make those taxes even more unlikely.
Fortunately they can sometimes do less damage as a U.S. Senator. Two recent examples: I'd rather see former A.G. Kelly Ayotte as a Senator---one voice in 100--rather than leading the prosecution of innumerable victimless crimes. (Although I was part of that "Not Ayotte" campaign: Best of all would be for her to disappear into obscurity.) Similar with former Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta. He's one voice in 435 now rather than bloating the Manchester Police Department all the while claiming to be a small-government conservative.
Our state politicians are like car salesmen (yes, a car analogy!). "Well, by enacting a small sales tax, we won't have to raise property taxes nearly as much." In the end, we pay more anyway. All a granite stater has to do is look at our southern neighbor.
Yup. They might even be clever enough to lower property taxes for a couple years, but within a few years after the income tax were to pass, the tax rates would be just as high as they had been.
Someone I know in Grafton recently found one of their property's tax bills from 1912. The total tax? $16. Accounting for inflation, in 2010 dollars, that would be $356.80. Yet, what's his current property tax bill? $3,000---a 740% increase in real terms.
If you take something from someone without their permission, it's theft. This is a rather simple concept. Calling yourself "the State" doesn't change the simple meanings of simple words.
I do vote. I do a lot more than just vote, too. I have moved---to New Hampshire, not Somalia---because of my philosophical beliefs. Last week I was even part of a group that defeated $24M worth of new theft that our public school district was proposing.
"Necessary"? I guess New Hampshire never got that memo, because we have no sales (nor income) tax. Many times they've tried to pass one; each time it's failed. Often these politicians don't get re-elected, either.
"We steal from these guys over here. So we should steal from you, too."
Naturally the brick-and-mortar stores are going to favor fairness in the application of the tax laws. But why do we never see them saying, "You don't tax all these business, so stop taxing us?" Or, "Taxing these businesses is going to double your tax base, so how about cutting the tax rate in half?"
No, instead, the government wants more money and more control over a greater number of people and businesses. So they sell it to local businesses as "levelling the playing field" and these businesses eat it right up and support the ever-increasing growth of government.
Many places define value for purposes of theft as the highest amount possible determined by reasonable standards. In New Hampshire for example, the theft law defines "value" as:
"Value'' means the highest amount determined by any reasonable standard of property or services. (RSA 637:2, V)
Are you suggesting that because you don't like the manufacturer's pricing models, that we should just write a special exception into the laws for phones requiring some other standard be used?
This is not a situation like when the RIAA claims a mere copy of bits on a disk representing "music" and sold for $0.99 is actually worth $50,000. If someone steals someone's smart phone, the victim actually paid the $800 for that physical, tangible property, and will have to pay $400 again to replace it.
There are certainly problems with the felony laws: In many places, the threshold between misdemeanor and felony was defined decades ago and hasn't been updated for inflation. For example, it was set to $500 in New Hampshire sometime in the 1970s, and was only increased to $1,000 in 2010 (SB205, 2010), whereas $500 in 1971 is actually worth $2661.24 today (Inflation Calculator). But this doesn't mean we should be adding special exceptions into the laws for products people don't think are worth the purchase cost.
In New Hampshire, we've been working on spreading knowledge about this fact for some time now. See http://nevertakeaplea.org/. There are flyers we hand out at court, too. Glad to see more and more people are waking up to this.
This activism is a nice complement to it: Not only demand a jury trial but convince the jury to acquit because the law is unjust, too.
Not that I've heard of, either. (I came in here to post essentially what you said in the OP.) But perhaps the people who enjoy remaining blissfully ignorant as to what their government is up to want to get a head-start on dismissing theories that make them uncomfortable.
I read about this theory years ago, which I've always found to be particularly interesting.
tl;dr: Human beings are naturally nonviolent. 6-7,000 years ago, desertification in northern Africa caused the humans there to become desperate for food and resources, and thus violent in order to survive. These cultures in turn spread out over the entire world (obviously able to out-compete peaceful peoples). And now various cultural practices have continued teaching violent behavior to people generation after generation when there's no longer any such natural "need" for such violence.
Uhura was the mailserver. When it was upgraded, the new server was Kira. Transporter was the FTP server. Tholian was the web server. Kirk and Spock were two login boxes for admins. At some point, Kirk was replaced with Picard.
"The asteroid 2011 AG5 is 140 meters across: Nearly three hundred breadboxes long and able to contain an entire Library of Congress within. Its orbit isn't nailed down well enough to say anything useful yet, but using our completely incomplete data set, we conclude there's a close-to-zero chance it will impact the Earth in 2040. It's behind the Sun until September 2013, and more observations taken then will probably reduce the odds of impact to something closer to 0. (Or perhaps farther away from 0. The chance of the odds of impact being recalculated to something else are close to one-in-one.) But does it make sense to wait until then to start figuring out ways to use this non-event to beg for government funding for our solution-in-search-of-a-problem project? Astronomers are debating how to write alarmist grant proposals for this non-crisis right now, and what they conclude may pave the way for yet another increase in NASA funding that will be quickly cut by the next administration and thereby completely wasted."
Slashdot stips the unicode trademark symbol. Shame on them!
Well of course they don't support the technology: It's only fourteen years old, after all. What did you think this was, some sort of cutting-edge technology news site?
This would be an excellent opportunity for Iceland, which has been working on become a haven for free speech, to drum up a few million dollars worth of business for their ccTLD.
More often than not, the people who take these kinds of jobs want to see these kinds of images. Of course they're going to talk about how "awful" they are, in public, in their job interview, whatever. How else would they get the job?
And anyone who believes in science and wants to protect its reputation as actually being a method for researching and revealing the truth about reality should oppose technocrats, too. As I've said in other posts, if science is used to justify controversial policies, people try to discredit the science when what they really intend to do is discredit the policy. The end result is science becomes politicized and people end up supporting only whatever research or study serves their interests.
There are many fine examples of this in history: Biology poisoned by "Lysenkoism" in the Soviet Union. Anthropology poisoned by "scientific racism" in the west. Mental health research poisoned by numerous factions insisting their pet social problem is in fact a mental illness. And so on.
The solution is to keep science out of politics and people will keep politics out of science. This is similar to the "separation of Church and State" doctrine. Jefferson's rationale for such separation was not just to keep religion out of government, but to keep the government out of religion. One merely need to look at the religious wars in England in the 1500s and 1600s to see not only how much damage State religion did to the people, but how much damage it did to the Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic Churches themselves, too.
The problem is that your premise is flawed. The role of government is not protecting people against every conceivable threat. That very premise is the root of the problem.
And what you described in your post is exactly what I mean by an un-democratic, un-free "technocracy." "If experts say X is bad, we automatically have to do something about it."
Does the government not grow in power as more laws and regulations are passed? Does the government not gain revenues as more taxes and fees are implemented? Does the government not grow in size as more regulators are hired, more bureaucracies are created, and so on?
I think the term "proprietary interest" is quite appropriate here. Politicians and bureaucrats pushing policies that will consolidate their power, grow their influence, and increase their job security might not be as tangible as corporate profits, but the idea is the same.
And stealing ever more of the people's money and gaining more and more control over their private business is certainly an immoral position.
Footnote: What an amusingly apropos Slashdot fortune appeared when I loaded the post form: Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Government: No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
It's hardly a technocracy. If it was, you would probably be facing the end of using petroleum products for producing energy tomorrow. As it is, governments do just enough to appear to be doing something.
That's exactly the direction we're moving. Just because it isn't an efficient technocracy doesn't make it not a technocracy.
Even though freedom is dead in this country, there's just enough of a democratic electoral process left to slow things down. Unfortunately the people in the system slowing things down are just corporate tools, and have equally as little understanding of human freedom as the progressives do.
The university is probably a "person" whenever it wants to be, but isn't whenever it wants to be.
We're fighting a similar case in New Hampshire. A couple decades ago, the University of N.H. employed their legal "political subdivision" label in order to protect themselves against another party in a lawsuit. And the court duly recognized their status as a political subdivision of the State of New Hampshire.
So recently a group of activists tried to challenge the UNH's firearms policy by pointing to N.H. RSA 159:26, which states that no political subdivision of New Hampshire can regulate firearms; only the Legislature may do so. The university of course tried to argue they're not a political subdivision.
If the legal system here was even remotely non-corrupt, this would be a slam dunk. The principle employed here is called "collateral estoppel" in legal parlance. "You can't have it both ways" might be another way to describe it. Or "blatant hypocrisy."
The problem with environmentalism isn't the actual facts.
The problem is that once people try to use these facts to justify policies that will harm other people, the victims of those new policies will try to dispute the facts in order to discredit the policies that are harming them.
We don't live in a free society anymore, but a technocracy. If the "experts" say X is good, government takes your money to promote it. If they say Y is bad, the government taxes, regulates, or bans it. The very premise here, "if X is good, they should promote it; if Y is bad, they should ban it," is never actually questioned.
It's one of those terms that has a very positive connotation, and so people have usurped the word hoping to have some of that positive connotation rub off on their ideology, sort of like how the corporatists stole the term "free market" or the progressives the term "liberal."
And the definition I use is the original definition---in philosophy at least. When people first started philosophizing about natural "rights," they were only referring to various freedoms that they believed deserved to be protected: Life, liberty, property. No positive entitlements were included.
In mediaeval times, however, it did have a different meaning: "Rights" were in fact just the things granted by feudal kings and overlords to their serfs. So maybe that's what the nanny-statists are really up to: Reverting us to a society where our government overlords grant us serfs whatever "rights" they want us to have, and revoke whatever rights they don't want us to have.:)
I did not assume you were part of the other major party, just wondered why you seemed to give them a free pass. The whole American political system is full of statists like this, not just the Democratic Party.
Slashdot Mirror
Why wouldn't I use the roads? They stole my money to build them.
Exactly where did someone give "implicit" permission? By voting? Because they didn't leave where they were born and go somewhere else? (And try to find some place where there aren't thugs pointing guns at people claiming to control them. Every square millimetre of land on the Earth nowadays is claimed by some government.)
This "implicit" permission---the so-called "social contract"---is just something statism apologists made up to justify statism. You might as well resort to the "divine right of kings" to justify their coercive system.
Democracy is exactly what you stated: Two foxes and a hen voting on what's for dinner. The NHLA, one of the political activism groups I work with extensively, actually sells a T-shirt with that quote on it. :)
The property taxes are higher than many other states, but only the towns and the education system get money from property taxes, not the general state government. The state government is simply a lot smaller and less intrusive here than a lot of other places. Lower spending results in lower taxes.
See the "government" section of this list, especially items #9, #10, #13, and #21. Many of the items there include citations if you're skeptical.
Fortunately they can sometimes do less damage as a U.S. Senator. Two recent examples: I'd rather see former A.G. Kelly Ayotte as a Senator---one voice in 100--rather than leading the prosecution of innumerable victimless crimes. (Although I was part of that "Not Ayotte" campaign: Best of all would be for her to disappear into obscurity.) Similar with former Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta. He's one voice in 435 now rather than bloating the Manchester Police Department all the while claiming to be a small-government conservative.
Yup. They might even be clever enough to lower property taxes for a couple years, but within a few years after the income tax were to pass, the tax rates would be just as high as they had been.
Someone I know in Grafton recently found one of their property's tax bills from 1912. The total tax? $16. Accounting for inflation, in 2010 dollars, that would be $356.80. Yet, what's his current property tax bill? $3,000---a 740% increase in real terms.
If you take something from someone without their permission, it's theft. This is a rather simple concept. Calling yourself "the State" doesn't change the simple meanings of simple words.
I do vote. I do a lot more than just vote, too. I have moved---to New Hampshire, not Somalia---because of my philosophical beliefs. Last week I was even part of a group that defeated $24M worth of new theft that our public school district was proposing.
"Necessary"? I guess New Hampshire never got that memo, because we have no sales (nor income) tax. Many times they've tried to pass one; each time it's failed. Often these politicians don't get re-elected, either.
"We steal from these guys over here. So we should steal from you, too."
Naturally the brick-and-mortar stores are going to favor fairness in the application of the tax laws. But why do we never see them saying, "You don't tax all these business, so stop taxing us?" Or, "Taxing these businesses is going to double your tax base, so how about cutting the tax rate in half?"
No, instead, the government wants more money and more control over a greater number of people and businesses. So they sell it to local businesses as "levelling the playing field" and these businesses eat it right up and support the ever-increasing growth of government.
Many places define value for purposes of theft as the highest amount possible determined by reasonable standards. In New Hampshire for example, the theft law defines "value" as:
Are you suggesting that because you don't like the manufacturer's pricing models, that we should just write a special exception into the laws for phones requiring some other standard be used?
This is not a situation like when the RIAA claims a mere copy of bits on a disk representing "music" and sold for $0.99 is actually worth $50,000. If someone steals someone's smart phone, the victim actually paid the $800 for that physical, tangible property, and will have to pay $400 again to replace it.
There are certainly problems with the felony laws: In many places, the threshold between misdemeanor and felony was defined decades ago and hasn't been updated for inflation. For example, it was set to $500 in New Hampshire sometime in the 1970s, and was only increased to $1,000 in 2010 (SB205, 2010), whereas $500 in 1971 is actually worth $2661.24 today (Inflation Calculator). But this doesn't mean we should be adding special exceptions into the laws for products people don't think are worth the purchase cost.
In New Hampshire, we've been working on spreading knowledge about this fact for some time now. See http://nevertakeaplea.org/. There are flyers we hand out at court, too. Glad to see more and more people are waking up to this.
This activism is a nice complement to it: Not only demand a jury trial but convince the jury to acquit because the law is unjust, too.
When theorizing about the treachery of the government, one is very rarely wrong.
Not that I've heard of, either. (I came in here to post essentially what you said in the OP.) But perhaps the people who enjoy remaining blissfully ignorant as to what their government is up to want to get a head-start on dismissing theories that make them uncomfortable.
I read about this theory years ago, which I've always found to be particularly interesting.
tl;dr: Human beings are naturally nonviolent. 6-7,000 years ago, desertification in northern Africa caused the humans there to become desperate for food and resources, and thus violent in order to survive. These cultures in turn spread out over the entire world (obviously able to out-compete peaceful peoples). And now various cultural practices have continued teaching violent behavior to people generation after generation when there's no longer any such natural "need" for such violence.
An ISP I used in the 1990s used the same scheme.
Uhura was the mailserver. When it was upgraded, the new server was Kira. Transporter was the FTP server. Tholian was the web server. Kirk and Spock were two login boxes for admins. At some point, Kirk was replaced with Picard.
The appropriately named submitted writes:
"The asteroid 2011 AG5 is 140 meters across: Nearly three hundred breadboxes long and able to contain an entire Library of Congress within. Its orbit isn't nailed down well enough to say anything useful yet, but using our completely incomplete data set, we conclude there's a close-to-zero chance it will impact the Earth in 2040. It's behind the Sun until September 2013, and more observations taken then will probably reduce the odds of impact to something closer to 0. (Or perhaps farther away from 0. The chance of the odds of impact being recalculated to something else are close to one-in-one.) But does it make sense to wait until then to start figuring out ways to use this non-event to beg for government funding for our solution-in-search-of-a-problem project? Astronomers are debating how to write alarmist grant proposals for this non-crisis right now, and what they conclude may pave the way for yet another increase in NASA funding that will be quickly cut by the next administration and thereby completely wasted."
Well of course they don't support the technology: It's only fourteen years old, after all. What did you think this was, some sort of cutting-edge technology news site?
This would be an excellent opportunity for Iceland, which has been working on become a haven for free speech, to drum up a few million dollars worth of business for their ccTLD.
More often than not, the people who take these kinds of jobs want to see these kinds of images. Of course they're going to talk about how "awful" they are, in public, in their job interview, whatever. How else would they get the job?
This is exactly what I mean.
And anyone who believes in science and wants to protect its reputation as actually being a method for researching and revealing the truth about reality should oppose technocrats, too. As I've said in other posts, if science is used to justify controversial policies, people try to discredit the science when what they really intend to do is discredit the policy. The end result is science becomes politicized and people end up supporting only whatever research or study serves their interests.
There are many fine examples of this in history: Biology poisoned by "Lysenkoism" in the Soviet Union. Anthropology poisoned by "scientific racism" in the west. Mental health research poisoned by numerous factions insisting their pet social problem is in fact a mental illness. And so on.
The solution is to keep science out of politics and people will keep politics out of science. This is similar to the "separation of Church and State" doctrine. Jefferson's rationale for such separation was not just to keep religion out of government, but to keep the government out of religion. One merely need to look at the religious wars in England in the 1500s and 1600s to see not only how much damage State religion did to the people, but how much damage it did to the Protestant, Anglican, and Catholic Churches themselves, too.
The problem is that your premise is flawed. The role of government is not protecting people against every conceivable threat. That very premise is the root of the problem.
And what you described in your post is exactly what I mean by an un-democratic, un-free "technocracy." "If experts say X is bad, we automatically have to do something about it."
As does the other side.
Does the government not grow in power as more laws and regulations are passed? Does the government not gain revenues as more taxes and fees are implemented? Does the government not grow in size as more regulators are hired, more bureaucracies are created, and so on?
I think the term "proprietary interest" is quite appropriate here. Politicians and bureaucrats pushing policies that will consolidate their power, grow their influence, and increase their job security might not be as tangible as corporate profits, but the idea is the same.
And stealing ever more of the people's money and gaining more and more control over their private business is certainly an immoral position.
Footnote: What an amusingly apropos Slashdot fortune appeared when I loaded the post form: Jacquin's Postulate on Democratic Government: No man's life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.
That's exactly the direction we're moving. Just because it isn't an efficient technocracy doesn't make it not a technocracy.
Even though freedom is dead in this country, there's just enough of a democratic electoral process left to slow things down. Unfortunately the people in the system slowing things down are just corporate tools, and have equally as little understanding of human freedom as the progressives do.
The university is probably a "person" whenever it wants to be, but isn't whenever it wants to be.
We're fighting a similar case in New Hampshire. A couple decades ago, the University of N.H. employed their legal "political subdivision" label in order to protect themselves against another party in a lawsuit. And the court duly recognized their status as a political subdivision of the State of New Hampshire.
So recently a group of activists tried to challenge the UNH's firearms policy by pointing to N.H. RSA 159:26, which states that no political subdivision of New Hampshire can regulate firearms; only the Legislature may do so. The university of course tried to argue they're not a political subdivision.
If the legal system here was even remotely non-corrupt, this would be a slam dunk. The principle employed here is called "collateral estoppel" in legal parlance. "You can't have it both ways" might be another way to describe it. Or "blatant hypocrisy."
Guess which way the Superior Court ruled.
The problem with environmentalism isn't the actual facts.
The problem is that once people try to use these facts to justify policies that will harm other people, the victims of those new policies will try to dispute the facts in order to discredit the policies that are harming them.
We don't live in a free society anymore, but a technocracy. If the "experts" say X is good, government takes your money to promote it. If they say Y is bad, the government taxes, regulates, or bans it. The very premise here, "if X is good, they should promote it; if Y is bad, they should ban it," is never actually questioned.
It's one of those terms that has a very positive connotation, and so people have usurped the word hoping to have some of that positive connotation rub off on their ideology, sort of like how the corporatists stole the term "free market" or the progressives the term "liberal."
And the definition I use is the original definition---in philosophy at least. When people first started philosophizing about natural "rights," they were only referring to various freedoms that they believed deserved to be protected: Life, liberty, property. No positive entitlements were included.
In mediaeval times, however, it did have a different meaning: "Rights" were in fact just the things granted by feudal kings and overlords to their serfs. So maybe that's what the nanny-statists are really up to: Reverting us to a society where our government overlords grant us serfs whatever "rights" they want us to have, and revoke whatever rights they don't want us to have. :)
I did not assume you were part of the other major party, just wondered why you seemed to give them a free pass. The whole American political system is full of statists like this, not just the Democratic Party.