Flying sucks because of all the security theater annoyance. I used not to check bags for more than half my trips, but now I have to check a bag every time because I don't feel like going through the annoyance of having my toiletries inspected at the security line. Fuck that shit. I now drive wherever possible.
When I got FIOS, I explicitly told the Verizon installer not to touch the copper. And they didn't. Too bad for those that didn't think of it ahead of time: I guess they'll have to pay for another installation if they decide to move back to copper.
Pi is not a rational number: this is a natural law.
Legislatures, no matter how hard they try, can't repeal the law of supply and demand: it is a natural law.
Similarly, a government bureaucracy can't simply decree that Open Source is less secure: the greater security of open source software may not be considered a natural law yet, but it's getting there.
For a time, I was conflicted about moving to FIOS because I was leaving a company with such great customer service and support for a hulking monolith simply to get more bandwidth. (Much, MUCH more bandwidth: 5/20 instead of.25/1.5!) But now that they've sold out to Best Buy, I have zero regrets. I wonder how long until the eliminate all the things that made Speakeasy so good? Static IP's, reverse DNS, responsive customer support, encouraged servers and reselling bandwidth, etc.
If discrimination isn't backed up by the threat of force---which of course Jim Crow laws were---then those discriminated against have no standing to complain. Just because I don't let you play in my private sandbox doesn't give you the right to force your way in. That's what private property is for, and what freedom of association means.
This is the way shared transit should be: discriminatory.
Part of the reason I hate public transit is the other people on the bus/train/plane with me: there are the ones who smell, the ones who talk to themselves, the ones who start ranting, the ones who panhandle, and the ones who won't fucking shut up and let me read.
If you discriminate on the basis of employment, you are likely to eliminate most of these bad behaviors, maybe with the exception of the ones who talk to themselves. Oh, and maybe smelling, depending on how many engineers there are on the bus.:)
In all seriousness, though, this makes the concept of shared transit palatable. I stopped taking the commuter rail after an incident in which a strung-out druggie was "escorted" off the train at the cost of over an hour. And you know what? Because it's public transit, that same person can get back on the train and cause problems the very next time she is freed from jail/rehab again.
Forget how you've been brainwashed. Discrimination on some criteria is good.
Finally, I should throw in a point about how this transit is entirely voluntary. There is no robbery (i.e., taxation) involved in paying for it. Google does it because they have determined that it is probably making them more profitable. If the experiment succeeds, other tech companies will probably start doing the same thing, perhaps even combining efforts. And it doesn't cost me a penny that I don't choose to spend. Contrast this with public transit in Boston, for instance, where the fare pays only 1/4 of the actual cost of the system, the rest being stolen from the taxpayers of Boston, Massachusetts, and the rest of the US (in decreasing degrees) at the point of a gun.
And if a person can pay, by whatever means, the damages the courts say he caused, then why shouldn't he be let off? Isn't that the point of damages? To compensate the plantiff for the damages he or she suffered?
I'm sure it will work in the short run, but I wonder who is really behind this. It could be Phillips, who is sure to gain a huge profit from the mandate.
Exactly the right kind of thinking: follow the money. The money will always lead you to the actual culprit.
For once, I'd like to see a problem for which someone says, "We could create a law to address this... but instead we'll just inform people that the problem exists and let law enforcement stick to real crimes."
This sort of thing is exactly why I rail against any form of compulsory government.
Democracy has the illusion of liberty without the substance of liberty because you don't have the freedom to make individual choices based on what is best for you. Instead you have only the freedom to lose election after election and forfeit right after right to those that need to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority by declaring that certain things are good for you whether you would choose them or not. Hence, "one size fits all" government.
To the math geeks on this site, I'd point out something that seems very obvious, but evidently isn't because few people have caught on. Let's say there are N issues of importance (Iraq, drug war, taxation, right to self-defense, etc.) and each has a minimum of two possible distinct stances. That puts the number of positions you can take on these issues at *at least* 2^N. Guess what? In a system like we have in the States, you have 2 choices. In a parliamentary system, you realistically have 4 or 5.
Good luck with that democracy thing. When you're interested in true liberty---that is, when you want to understand what "freedom" really means---read the book introduced by its author, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, here and begin to understand why democracy is doomed to fail under any metric measuring individual freedom.
Stop bitching that Microsoft won't give you exactly what you want, because guess what? It's their software and they can do what they want with it. Just as it's your hardware and you can put whatever OS you want on it.
I'm going to ignore the moralizing and ad hominem in the rest of your response because frankly it isn't interesting. That, and the vast majority of economists are Keynesians, so using them to support your arguments in favor of any form of anarchism is a bit foolish.;-) I'll just address feasibility and leave it at that. This will be my final response.
> The force that will keep you from monopolizing natural resources > is whatever force society pays to do so, just like in your scenario.
(1) What makes you think that everyone will agree on a single set of rules and a single force? This is the core of the problem with both democracy and various forms of socialism, and one which you have not only not solved, but have actually made worse by virtue of requiring everyone everywhere to obey the same artificial rules and use a single standard of value for property. How is this anarchy?
(2) What if a group of people want to break off from your utopia and form their own anarcho-capitalist society, *and* have the resources to defend their decision? It will happen. What will you do then? A society based on anarcho-syndicalism doesn't sound very peaceful to me.
The reason why anarcho-capitalism works is that it is truly what Hoppe called it: the Natural Order. It is a stable equilibreum primarily because it is *not* mutually exclusive with other reasonable philosophies and does not require everyone---even in a small geographical region!---to participate in order for it to work.
*This* is what I mean by it requiring only local force vs. non-local force. If you want to get together some land and build yourself a socialist paradise, your anarcho-capitalist neighbor says, "Go for it, as long as you don't impose your will on me!" If you manage to gather enough power to yourself to take over a plot of land, enslave some natives, and generally run rough-shod over the people stupid enough to remain there, your anarcho-capitalist neighbor says, "Whatever, as long as you don't impose your will on me!"
Anarcho-capitalism is feasible precisely because it doesn't require everyone to agree to the same terms for running a society. It even works in the degenerate case, in which one individual decides he wants to engage in human sacrifice. The anarcho-capitalist says, "Fine by me: just stay the hell off my land or I'll shoot you in the head."
Anarcho-capitalism is not utopia: it is what one would expect to naturally occur if people were not foolish enough to permanently surrender their rights to a custodian. Anarcho-syndicalism simply does not have this property. Whether you find capitalism distasteful or not is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether it is the natural order or not, the latter being a much more interesting question to someone who wants to realistically promote liberty in a world filled with statists.
>> Who is going to enforce this? > The same people that would enforce private property. That is, whoever the > people collectively decide will enforce it. The same people who enforce > the prohibition against murder, for instance.
This is a non-constructive answer ("non-constructive" as in "non-constructive proof"): you assert that someone exists to do this, but fail to delineate who that is or illustrate how this force would come into being/come to possess the power it wields. It sounds an awful lot like a "world government" if it possesses compulsory regulatory power regardless of physical domain.
> Conversely, what natural force would keep me and my posse from simply ignoring > your unilateral decision that you own a certain natural resource?
The natural human desire to own property would result in my hiring a defense contractor who would keep you out.
Functionally, I assign a subjective value to the property; I consider what percentage of that value I am willing to pay to protect it; and I hire a defense contractor for less than or equal to that amount of money to perform the protective service.
It seems like anarcho-syndicalism relies on the existence of a non-local force (as yet merely hypothetical) to keep people from performing the "bad" act of appropriating natural resources. Conversely, anarcho-capitalism relies only on privately-owned local force to prevent coercive transactions.
> how do you deal with the three major breakdowns of the free market: natural monopolies
Natural monopolies can only exist when the cost of the appearance of a competitor outweighs the cost of living with the natural monopoly. If, for example, a monopoly in electricity were to exist in some area, and they proceeded to jack up prices, people would live with it until the point at which it would be worthwhile for them to form an electricity co-op, or until some company decided there could be extracted enough profit to make the venture worthwhile. Once public opinion against an abusive company got enough momentum, that company would lose enough credibility that even underselling their competitors would not be enough to make all of their competitors disappear.
You can also imagine that in the absence of government-enforced environmental regulation, small co-ops generating electricity for neighborhoods would be sufficient counterbalance to abuse of otherwise monopoly power.
This is not a "breakdown" in the market: it is precisely how you would expect the market to work.
> imbalance of information
Otherwise known as "people are foolish." I fail to see how this applies to anarcho-capitalism and not to anarcho-syndicalism.
But to address it briefly: using the example form the Wikipedia page, smart people today insist on taking used cars to their own mechanics for once overs; and the "lemon" problem has inspired a "certified pre-owned" market in which the car makers themselves put their quality reputations on the line in exchange for being able to command a higher selling price.
Again, not a "breakdown" in the market.
> externalities?
This is no different from any other kind of property dispute. If someone pollutes your air, for instance, you attempt to arbitrate with them using a mutually agreed-upon arbitrator; and if at the end of this process the accused decides not to abide by the decision of the arbitrator, your insurance company either pays you the damages and attempts to collect ("repo-man") from the accused or his insurance company, or you yourself collect or hire a repo-man to do the dirty work. Because you have engaged in an equitable process to attempt collection, your insurance company will support you in your efforts and defend you from any attempts at retaliation.
> how do you keep wealth from concentrating into fewer and fewer hands, > leading to an eventual dictatorship of the owning class over everyone else
I'm honestly interested in how this philosophy is supposed to work, because evidently I am not smart enough to figure it out on my own. In contrast, anarcho-capitalism was perfectly logical to me within days of reading about it. Just as a bit of background: I used to be a small-government libertarian until I realized that permanently assigning powers to another authority (i.e., without the ability to get them back at will) will inevitably result in that authority growing unbounded over time.
Thus I question:
The means of produciotn must either be managed collectively
Who is going to enforce this?
limits must be placed on the amount that any one person can own
Who is going to enforce this?
The whole point of anarchy is that there can be no compulsory authority, i.e., one from which you cannot re-obtain any powers to which you assigned it. For example, if my posse and I decide to buy a massive amount of offensive chattel (i.e., guns), take over a plot of land in the southwest, and obtain monopoly ownership of the oil beneath that ground to sell to other like-minded people who aren't interested in the concept of public ownership of the means of production, what is the natural force that is going to stop us?
You want to own all the best ideas for yourselves.
No, I simply don't want to be associated with an ideology that is so illogical it makes my brain hurt.
Just like communism, anarcho-syndicalism denies a basic reality of human nature and economics that most people like to own things, and that since people are motivated to be happy, they try to acquire things non-stop.
If the means of production cannot be privately owned, then nothing can be privately owned, since everything is ultimately a means of production: even that sofa cushion under your fat ass is a means of production, because it provides you with the pleasure necessary in your off time to be able to slog back into work on Monday to earn money.
No private property => no motivation for personal gain => personal productivity in toilet => human race comes to a halt and nothing gets done.
Anarcho-syndicalism is pretty much what the Star Trek: TNG universe was based on, yet no one ever discussed how or why the motivation to get things from other people ("envy") was abolished. Perhaps it was done using psychotropic medication?
Slashdot Mirror
Flying sucks because of all the security theater annoyance. I used not to check bags for more than half my trips, but now I have to check a bag every time because I don't feel like going through the annoyance of having my toiletries inspected at the security line. Fuck that shit. I now drive wherever possible.
Fully open source 3D drivers blessed by the company producing the cards? Bye-bye, NVIDIA.
When I got FIOS, I explicitly told the Verizon installer not to touch the copper. And they didn't. Too bad for those that didn't think of it ahead of time: I guess they'll have to pay for another installation if they decide to move back to copper.
This is up there with the state of Indiana nearly passing a law stating that Pi would be equal to 3.14.
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a3_341.html
Pi is not a rational number: this is a natural law.
Legislatures, no matter how hard they try, can't repeal the law of supply and demand: it is a natural law.
Similarly, a government bureaucracy can't simply decree that Open Source is less secure: the greater security of open source software may not be considered a natural law yet, but it's getting there.
The tech sector added some 150,000 new jobs 2006, and there are no signs that interest will flag in the near future.
Emphasis mine. Now where have I heard this before? This should be your warning that the bottom is about to drop out of the economy again.
Once burned, twice shy: be careful; protect your wealth; keep the best interests of your family in mind; avoid irrational exuberance.
For a time, I was conflicted about moving to FIOS because I was leaving a company with such great customer service and support for a hulking monolith simply to get more bandwidth. (Much, MUCH more bandwidth: 5/20 instead of .25/1.5!) But now that they've sold out to Best Buy, I have zero regrets. I wonder how long until the eliminate all the things that made Speakeasy so good? Static IP's, reverse DNS, responsive customer support, encouraged servers and reselling bandwidth, etc.
False dichotomy.
Educate yourself before spouting.
If discrimination isn't backed up by the threat of force---which of course Jim Crow laws were---then those discriminated against have no standing to complain. Just because I don't let you play in my private sandbox doesn't give you the right to force your way in. That's what private property is for, and what freedom of association means.
This is the way shared transit should be: discriminatory.
:)
Part of the reason I hate public transit is the other people on the bus/train/plane with me: there are the ones who smell, the ones who talk to themselves, the ones who start ranting, the ones who panhandle, and the ones who won't fucking shut up and let me read.
If you discriminate on the basis of employment, you are likely to eliminate most of these bad behaviors, maybe with the exception of the ones who talk to themselves. Oh, and maybe smelling, depending on how many engineers there are on the bus.
In all seriousness, though, this makes the concept of shared transit palatable. I stopped taking the commuter rail after an incident in which a strung-out druggie was "escorted" off the train at the cost of over an hour. And you know what? Because it's public transit, that same person can get back on the train and cause problems the very next time she is freed from jail/rehab again.
Forget how you've been brainwashed. Discrimination on some criteria is good.
Finally, I should throw in a point about how this transit is entirely voluntary. There is no robbery (i.e., taxation) involved in paying for it. Google does it because they have determined that it is probably making them more profitable. If the experiment succeeds, other tech companies will probably start doing the same thing, perhaps even combining efforts. And it doesn't cost me a penny that I don't choose to spend. Contrast this with public transit in Boston, for instance, where the fare pays only 1/4 of the actual cost of the system, the rest being stolen from the taxpayers of Boston, Massachusetts, and the rest of the US (in decreasing degrees) at the point of a gun.
And if a person can pay, by whatever means, the damages the courts say he caused, then why shouldn't he be let off? Isn't that the point of damages? To compensate the plantiff for the damages he or she suffered?
Exactly the right kind of thinking: follow the money. The money will always lead you to the actual culprit.
Just what we need: more laws!
For once, I'd like to see a problem for which someone says, "We could create a law to address this... but instead we'll just inform people that the problem exists and let law enforcement stick to real crimes."
Microsoft's motto appears to be, "We're not happy till you're not happy."
At least the sea took Cthulhu with it!
I guess the cell phone companies didn't get their checks in to their congresscritters' campaigns in time.
The maxim "people get the government they deserve" comes to mind here.
This sort of thing is exactly why I rail against any form of compulsory government.
Democracy has the illusion of liberty without the substance of liberty because you don't have the freedom to make individual choices based on what is best for you. Instead you have only the freedom to lose election after election and forfeit right after right to those that need to satisfy their own sense of moral superiority by declaring that certain things are good for you whether you would choose them or not. Hence, "one size fits all" government.
To the math geeks on this site, I'd point out something that seems very obvious, but evidently isn't because few people have caught on. Let's say there are N issues of importance (Iraq, drug war, taxation, right to self-defense, etc.) and each has a minimum of two possible distinct stances. That puts the number of positions you can take on these issues at *at least* 2^N. Guess what? In a system like we have in the States, you have 2 choices. In a parliamentary system, you realistically have 4 or 5.
Good luck with that democracy thing. When you're interested in true liberty---that is, when you want to understand what "freedom" really means---read the book introduced by its author, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, here and begin to understand why democracy is doomed to fail under any metric measuring individual freedom.
Simple and beautiful summary of so-called "democratic" taxation: two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner.
Linux. Or Mac OS. Or *BSD.
Stop bitching that Microsoft won't give you exactly what you want, because guess what? It's their software and they can do what they want with it. Just as it's your hardware and you can put whatever OS you want on it.
When governments collude, you and I lose rights.
Well, I guess that isn't news: whenever governments to anything, you and I lose rights.
I didn't realize Slashdot was shilling for Lenovo these days. I thought that activity was limited to Apple.
I'm going to ignore the moralizing and ad hominem in the rest of your response because frankly it isn't interesting. That, and the vast majority of economists are Keynesians, so using them to support your arguments in favor of any form of anarchism is a bit foolish. ;-) I'll just address feasibility and leave it at that. This will be my final response.
> The force that will keep you from monopolizing natural resources
> is whatever force society pays to do so, just like in your scenario.
(1) What makes you think that everyone will agree on a single set of rules and a single force? This is the core of the problem with both democracy and various forms of socialism, and one which you have not only not solved, but have actually made worse by virtue of requiring everyone everywhere to obey the same artificial rules and use a single standard of value for property. How is this anarchy?
(2) What if a group of people want to break off from your utopia and form their own anarcho-capitalist society, *and* have the resources to defend their decision? It will happen. What will you do then? A society based on anarcho-syndicalism doesn't sound very peaceful to me.
The reason why anarcho-capitalism works is that it is truly what Hoppe called it: the Natural Order. It is a stable equilibreum primarily because it is *not* mutually exclusive with other reasonable philosophies and does not require everyone---even in a small geographical region!---to participate in order for it to work.
*This* is what I mean by it requiring only local force vs. non-local force. If you want to get together some land and build yourself a socialist paradise, your anarcho-capitalist neighbor says, "Go for it, as long as you don't impose your will on me!" If you manage to gather enough power to yourself to take over a plot of land, enslave some natives, and generally run rough-shod over the people stupid enough to remain there, your anarcho-capitalist neighbor says, "Whatever, as long as you don't impose your will on me!"
Anarcho-capitalism is feasible precisely because it doesn't require everyone to agree to the same terms for running a society. It even works in the degenerate case, in which one individual decides he wants to engage in human sacrifice. The anarcho-capitalist says, "Fine by me: just stay the hell off my land or I'll shoot you in the head."
Anarcho-capitalism is not utopia: it is what one would expect to naturally occur if people were not foolish enough to permanently surrender their rights to a custodian. Anarcho-syndicalism simply does not have this property. Whether you find capitalism distasteful or not is entirely irrelevant to the question of whether it is the natural order or not, the latter being a much more interesting question to someone who wants to realistically promote liberty in a world filled with statists.
Cheers,
Kyle
>> Who is going to enforce this?
> The same people that would enforce private property. That is, whoever the
> people collectively decide will enforce it. The same people who enforce
> the prohibition against murder, for instance.
This is a non-constructive answer ("non-constructive" as in "non-constructive proof"): you assert that someone exists to do this, but fail to delineate who that is or illustrate how this force would come into being/come to possess the power it wields. It sounds an awful lot like a "world government" if it possesses compulsory regulatory power regardless of physical domain.
> Conversely, what natural force would keep me and my posse from simply ignoring
> your unilateral decision that you own a certain natural resource?
The natural human desire to own property would result in my hiring a defense contractor who would keep you out.
Functionally, I assign a subjective value to the property; I consider what percentage of that value I am willing to pay to protect it; and I hire a defense contractor for less than or equal to that amount of money to perform the protective service.
It seems like anarcho-syndicalism relies on the existence of a non-local force (as yet merely hypothetical) to keep people from performing the "bad" act of appropriating natural resources. Conversely, anarcho-capitalism relies only on privately-owned local force to prevent coercive transactions.
> how do you deal with the three major breakdowns of the free market: natural monopolies
Natural monopolies can only exist when the cost of the appearance of a competitor outweighs the cost of living with the natural monopoly. If, for example, a monopoly in electricity were to exist in some area, and they proceeded to jack up prices, people would live with it until the point at which it would be worthwhile for them to form an electricity co-op, or until some company decided there could be extracted enough profit to make the venture worthwhile. Once public opinion against an abusive company got enough momentum, that company would lose enough credibility that even underselling their competitors would not be enough to make all of their competitors disappear.
You can also imagine that in the absence of government-enforced environmental regulation, small co-ops generating electricity for neighborhoods would be sufficient counterbalance to abuse of otherwise monopoly power.
This is not a "breakdown" in the market: it is precisely how you would expect the market to work.
> imbalance of information
Otherwise known as "people are foolish." I fail to see how this applies to anarcho-capitalism and not to anarcho-syndicalism.
But to address it briefly: using the example form the Wikipedia page, smart people today insist on taking used cars to their own mechanics for once overs; and the "lemon" problem has inspired a "certified pre-owned" market in which the car makers themselves put their quality reputations on the line in exchange for being able to command a higher selling price.
Again, not a "breakdown" in the market.
> externalities?
This is no different from any other kind of property dispute. If someone pollutes your air, for instance, you attempt to arbitrate with them using a mutually agreed-upon arbitrator; and if at the end of this process the accused decides not to abide by the decision of the arbitrator, your insurance company either pays you the damages and attempts to collect ("repo-man") from the accused or his insurance company, or you yourself collect or hire a repo-man to do the dirty work. Because you have engaged in an equitable process to attempt collection, your insurance company will support you in your efforts and defend you from any attempts at retaliation.
> how do you keep wealth from concentrating into fewer and fewer hands,
> leading to an eventual dictatorship of the owning class over everyone else
I reject the premise of this question. You ne
I'm honestly interested in how this philosophy is supposed to work, because evidently I am not smart enough to figure it out on my own. In contrast, anarcho-capitalism was perfectly logical to me within days of reading about it. Just as a bit of background: I used to be a small-government libertarian until I realized that permanently assigning powers to another authority (i.e., without the ability to get them back at will) will inevitably result in that authority growing unbounded over time.
Thus I question:
The means of produciotn must either be managed collectively
Who is going to enforce this?
limits must be placed on the amount that any one person can own
Who is going to enforce this?
The whole point of anarchy is that there can be no compulsory authority, i.e., one from which you cannot re-obtain any powers to which you assigned it. For example, if my posse and I decide to buy a massive amount of offensive chattel (i.e., guns), take over a plot of land in the southwest, and obtain monopoly ownership of the oil beneath that ground to sell to other like-minded people who aren't interested in the concept of public ownership of the means of production, what is the natural force that is going to stop us?
Cheers,
Kyle
You want to own all the best ideas for yourselves.
No, I simply don't want to be associated with an ideology that is so illogical it makes my brain hurt.
Just like communism, anarcho-syndicalism denies a basic reality of human nature and economics that most people like to own things, and that since people are motivated to be happy, they try to acquire things non-stop.
If the means of production cannot be privately owned, then nothing can be privately owned, since everything is ultimately a means of production: even that sofa cushion under your fat ass is a means of production, because it provides you with the pleasure necessary in your off time to be able to slog back into work on Monday to earn money.
No private property => no motivation for personal gain => personal productivity in toilet => human race comes to a halt and nothing gets done.
Anarcho-syndicalism is pretty much what the Star Trek: TNG universe was based on, yet no one ever discussed how or why the motivation to get things from other people ("envy") was abolished. Perhaps it was done using psychotropic medication?
Cheers,
Kyle