One thing I find curious about the the anarchist/libertarian position is the use of the term "monopoly" when describing the ability to use force. The use of force is framed in an economic context, while suggesting that its use will be less prevalent in an anarchist society and that the flaw of states is that they will, at some point, resort to the use of force with regard to issues like taxation. Further to the point about framing use of force in economic terms are references to force being cheap and easy.
However, in an economic sense, the opposite of a monopoly on a good is not its absence. The other basic economic frameworks are perfect competition, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly. Assuming that force is a good or service for which there is a demand (and given the level of violence that has historically been the case, this seems like a safe assumption), and that it is "cheap", then it would seem that, absent a state monopoly on the use of force, the default would be perfect competition. One might plausibly make the argument that monopolistic competition could apply if firms were successful in distinguishing their specific brand of force from other types of force, but I think we can assume that by and large, violence is an undifferentiated good, and so perfect competition applies.
Contrasting the competing models of a state monopoly on violence versus an environment of perfect competition, basic economic theory holds that the monopoly will exact a higher price for providing violence (in the case of state violence, this could be conceptualized by the numerous legal, regulatory, legislative, and investigative constraints imposed on the use of violence), produce violence less efficiently, and in general supply a quantity of violence at a lower level than would otherwise be the case in perfect competition.
No, CaptainNemo is. Some people have considered buying land from other countries (not Somalia, that's where people died), some are even considering buying a private island. Others are planning seasteading.
Yup. Here we finally are. FREEDOM SHIPS!
Well, you're in luck - a group of wealthy morons did, eventually, manage to put their money together and buy a ship, The World, which you can buy a shitty little cabin on for a mere half a million dollars. And, of course, in order to keep the Goddamn boat floating they have to maintain a political structure more or less identical to small American town.
But, hey, Freedom Ship! The future is now! Get your studio cabin while space is still available, RayofAsh - things must be moving like hotcakes!
Basically, society should reward altruism instead of punishing disobedience....but I am not sure if this should be an across the board sort of thing (I suspect not, as there are times when punishment is necessary), and likewise I am not sure how to implement it.
We already have! Thus individuals who participate in society and abide by it's laws are given a number of important benefits, chiefly: Free Public Education, Unemployment Benefits, Welfare, Medicare and Medicaid. Thus, even non-functioning members of the society who are not directly beneficial to it's continued sustainability are still able to acquire benefits merely for being a non-asshole to their fellow citizens.
Squaring the circle man. This is a spherical cube here.
That's 'libertarian' with a small 'L' - as in, holding personal freedom as a primary value. Not to be confused with American Libertarianism, which is a form of capitalist minarchism.
There's nothing intrinsically contradictory between libertarianism and socialism, provided you're not using the retarded American definition of libertarianism.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
No, CaptainNemo is. Some people have considered buying land from other countries (not Somalia, that's where people died), some are even considering buying a private island. Others are planning seasteading.
Yup. Here we finally are. FREEDOM SHIPS!
Well, you're in luck - a group of wealthy morons did, eventually, manage to put their money together and buy a ship, The World, which you can buy a shitty little cabin on for a mere half a million dollars. And, of course, in order to keep the Goddamn boat floating they have to maintain a political structure more or less identical to small American town.
But, hey, Freedom Ship! The future is now! Get your studio cabin while space is still available, RayofAsh - things must be moving like hotcakes!
Don't forget about the monthly maintenance fee. That starts at $20,000 for the smallest units.
Freedom ships would be awesome! This way they could get plundered by Somalian pirates, showing the world how different communities with no central governments can coexist, with a delicious dash of irony to top it off nicely.
I posted this back on Page 3, and I still don't see how the discussion has moved at all past this point:
"We don't need governments, here's why."
"Ok, but what about this scenario, or this one, or this one."
"Well, non-government entities behaving like Governments could solve those problems."
"Oh, so basically Governments?"
"No, not the same. Governments are involuntary and coercive."
"Ok, so how do your psuedo-government entities solve the above problems?"
"With societal banishment and regulations."
"So...basically coercion and force; the same things governments use?"
I mean, we haven't fucking moved past this. Like, I don't understand why its so hard to just say "yes, I agree that local communal governments are necessary to regulate human behavior, I just don't believe it works and is actually inherently morally wrong on a large scale."
At least the discussion would move somewhere, but we're still doing laps around what "Goverment" is, and what "force" and "coerce" mean.
No, CaptainNemo is. Some people have considered buying land from other countries (not Somalia, that's where people died), some are even considering buying a private island. Others are planning seasteading.
Yup. Here we finally are. FREEDOM SHIPS!
Well, you're in luck - a group of wealthy morons did, eventually, manage to put their money together and buy a ship, The World, which you can buy a shitty little cabin on for a mere half a million dollars. And, of course, in order to keep the Goddamn boat floating they have to maintain a political structure more or less identical to small American town.
But, hey, Freedom Ship! The future is now! Get your studio cabin while space is still available, RayofAsh - things must be moving like hotcakes!
Don't forget about the monthly maintenance fee. That starts at $20,000 for the smallest units.
But that maintenance fee is not the same as taxes. Because... because it's not!
But that maintenance fee is not the same as taxes. Because... because it's not!
I wonder if you could get libertarians perfectly happy by just renaming everything. The government could be the "central citizens council", the police could be the "local militia", taxes could be "land usage fees" and courts could be "arbitration centers". You've just eliminated taxes, the justice system, and the government in one fell swoop, with no more costs than reprinting a lot of headed notepaper! Freedom!
But that maintenance fee is not the same as taxes. Because... because it's not!
I wonder if you could get libertarians perfectly happy by just renaming everything. The government could be the "central citizens council", the police could be the "local militia", taxes could be "land usage fees" and courts could be "arbitration centers". You've just eliminated taxes, the justice system, and the government in one fell swoop, with no more costs than reprinting a lot of headed notepaper! Freedom!
Yes and no. The big open secret is that what the most vocal libertarians do not want liberty, they seek to "free themselves to enslave the people," they don't want government gone, they just want a bigger say in it than anyone else.
But that's the game, the spark behind most revolutions, the cause of dreamers who go beyond soft political games and compromises to have fire and energy and life. It's the cycle of history, the madness of being.
And what ill-informed college students do because being a hippy is now old-school.
Basically, society should reward altruism instead of punishing disobedience....but I am not sure if this should be an across the board sort of thing (I suspect not, as there are times when punishment is necessary), and likewise I am not sure how to implement it.
I think it could be as simple as offering a more robust gradient of options than (in essence) 'dirt poor' and 'extremely wealthy'.
We see this modelled a lot these days: a user is offered some basic package at no cost (or virtually no cost), with the option of getting more if they want to put the work in. It turns out that many people do want more, so they'll pony-up the money. But, a significant portion of people are also much happier to just get by on the free offerings.
In social terms, this might mean that basic groceries, small housing and utilities are provided by the state. If you want larger housing, a wider selection of groceries, a nice car, etc, you've got to work for that.
Everyone else thinks it's crazy and will never work even though we've got many examples of flourishing businesses using exactly this methodology.
*shrug*
Anyway, that's Communism & is not for the Libertarian thread.
Was an explanation ever offered by RayofAsh or the other guy who did a drive-by debate for how you can establish police forces without a monopoly on violence and not cause the outbreak of gangs / warlords?
The video in the OP claiming to offer this explanation does not actually offer it.
Everyone else thinks it's crazy and will never work even though we've got many examples of flourishing businesses using exactly this methodology.
*shrug*
Anyway, that's Communism & is not for the Libertarian thread.
Was an explanation ever offered by RayofAsh or the other guy who did a drive-by debate for how you can establish police forces without a monopoly on violence and not cause the outbreak of gangs / warlords?
The video in the OP claiming to offer this explanation does not actually offer it.
"The community will reject them" was the best we got. So, no, not really.
Im just confused on how a guy who, appearently, cant work due to disabilities is arguing for a system wherein the godmother of the theory despises altruism.
So very very confused by it.
'I wish people didnt help me and everyone hated me!' doesnt seem like a very strong point in favor of your argument.
Im just confused on how a guy who, appearently, cant work due to disabilities is arguing for a system wherein the godmother of the theory despises altruism.
So very very confused by it.
'I wish people didnt help me and everyone hated me!' doesnt seem like a very strong point in favor of your argument.
To some degree, it's kind of like how people do the "salad bar" thing with religion.
Otherwise it tends to be people who don't actually understand the implications of things because they're too busy feeling indignant about things.
Im just confused on how a guy who, appearently, cant work due to disabilities is arguing for a system wherein the godmother of the theory despises altruism.
So very very confused by it.
'I wish people didnt help me and everyone hated me!' doesnt seem like a very strong point in favor of your argument.
Look, in fairness, he's probably in a rough spot, and it always sucks when you're relying on a government assistance program to get by.
Im just confused on how a guy who, appearently, cant work due to disabilities is arguing for a system wherein the godmother of the theory despises altruism.
So very very confused by it.
'I wish people didnt help me and everyone hated me!' doesnt seem like a very strong point in favor of your argument.
Look, in fairness, he's probably in a rough spot, and it always sucks when you're relying on a government assistance program to get by.
Indeed it does suck. I was laid off in 2009 from the economic downturn.
I was on unemployment benefits for only 6 months out of the 12 months I was out of work, in fact!
Notice how instead of arguing that I should have died homeless and starving and freezing on the street, I am instead a bleeding heart lideral/progressive.
I used to think of myself as an anarchist. I don't use that word about myself any more, but that's not because my views have changed. I've just realised how the language is wrong.
I don't want government to go away. Neither does rayofash, although he seems a bit hard of understanding. Most anarchists want there to be rules. And they want there to be government. It's just that their conception of how government should be is so different that they don't even realise they are proposing a radically different kind of government rather than the removal of government.
So, of course, the language is a problem. Our idea of government has become horribly tainted by the bullshit that the ruling elites of our quasi-democracies promote. So other forms of government don't even sound like government.
Secondly, any conversation has the same problem that any radical philosophy has: it may work as a whole, but any given part of it will not work within the current system. So it may be possible to have an area with a widely-distributed system of governance and no strong central authority, but obviously not tomorrow, because it wouldn't work. And if it did work, current nation-states would bomb the fuck out of it, shitting themselves copiously all the while. Equally, the disappearance of a professional military is something I hope for, but obviously not tomorrow, or even generations from now, because a state with a professional military would immediately invade the hippy pacifists like me and put us in salt-mines or Nike factories.
And so lastly, we get to the reason why people don't debate the potential of radically different systems. Paucity of imagination. In the past and across the wide world, there have been radically different cultures, radically different systems of governance. But any discussion of these has to be imaginable to the majority of the audience. At PA, this is largely 20-something Americans, who are themselves, I speculate, often caught in an existential crisis caused by the shock of discovering the best nation in the world is not. So people get all Francis Fukuyama about radical political imaginings.
That's why I like political SF. You can get away with imagining and discussing possible state-forms without someone going, 'But in the real world...'
Just so you know, the reason this post isn't worth crap is not primarily because you're being smug and condescending. Its because your views are as shallow as a two dimensional plane and as thoroughly described as Godot. Saying "we should debate radically different systems" is dumb because there are literally an infinite amount of "radically different systems."
Hand waving to say there's some paradigm of this "radically different system" that would work but you won't debate it because only you have the imagination to talk about it is ass hattery of the highest caliber.
If you can't elucidate your political philosophy but believe it to be so far advanced that only you can understand it, I suggest you should consult with a medical professional. For millenia across different cultures political philosophy has been studied by some of the finest minds in history from Plato to Confucius to Marcus Aurelius to Kant to Locke to Hobbes to Marx to Mill to Rawls. You're not that smart and you just might have serious mental health problems.
I have no idea how a post that was trying to talk about the general problems of communicating radical political ideas got this level of frothing hate.
Complicated systems require simple rules. The US tax code is a good example of this.
You need a little more life experience.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
Maybe it comes from not actually making that much money, but I don't really understand whats so complicated about our tax code, at least how it applies to most Americans.
I feel like GE getting a tax return last year (anyone know if they got one this year, too?) means the tax code is probably more complex than most people know.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I don't mean to say it isn't complex, but there is a difference between complexity and exploitability.
Notice how instead of arguing that I should have died homeless and starving and freezing on the street, I am instead a bleeding heart lideral/progressive.
Strange, that.
It seems like RayofAsh feels the government is responsible for his current situation, though. And he's not necessarily wrong, either.
I don't mean to say it isn't complex, but there is a difference between complexity and exploitability.
Right, a country that has tens of thousands of industries, hundreds of millions of citizens, represents 45% of the world's military spending, and economic relationships with every country on earth can not have a simple tax code
It's not exploitable because its too complex, that's a myth, the exploitable parts were deliberately inserted via lobbying (and not every loophole is bad, GE has do to a lot of good stuff to get a tax refund, however not $X billion good). The complexity just makes the exploitable parts more easily hidden.
I feel our tax code is sufficiently simple for the average citizen though, probably a bit too complicated for small business.
Edit: you know it strikes me that the difference between a liberal and a libertarian is just pragmatism. I too believe great personal liberty should be a laudable goal, however the difference is I am not completely concerned with my own liberty, I am concerned that every citizen has as much liberty as possible, and that society is as fair to everyone as it is to me.
What was it FDR said? “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." I believe the best way to ensure an egalitarian society and avoid tyranny of the majority is a strong government.
I'd like to see them try that in an area with resources that the government might actually be interested in and see how well it goes.
Well, all the land with resources is already being used. Are you proposing stealing it?
Resources belong to everybody.
But they're using them. How is going in and taking the land any worse than just paying taxes? How is it any different?
Who said anything about taking? It should be shared. We'd do the work of extracting the resources ourselves and give what we don't need to those who need it.
You see the larger community has decided what they want to use that space for. You're free to, much like you suggested, seek arbitration on the matter though you'll probably lose. Your othe option, which you also suggested for your utopia, is banishment.
Congratulations and welcome to being on the weaker side of community decisions. This doesn't change just because you alter the name of the organization making the decisions.
Banishment is for extreme circumstances and that's up to the community to decide. As for land use, various ideas have been considered. Libertarian socialists don't think land can be owned, and the community can't own it either. Anarcho-capitalists believe land can be owned, but you have to mix your labor with it before you can call it yours.
I keep hearing this "the community will decide," "the community will decide..." What methodology would you suggest the community use to decide?
The community is a group of individuals and quite possibly an even larger group of those communities together. Should their be a dispute over it he believes people should find someone to arbitrate the dispute. This would then be enforced by community volunteers should the loser of said arbitration decide to resort to coercion which, as ray will tell you, is possibly the greatest moral sin to have ever existed. They will, of course, always have the option of leaving the community for a variety of others that aren't as restricting.
I used to think of myself as an anarchist. I don't use that word about myself any more, but that's not because my views have changed. I've just realised how the language is wrong.
I don't want government to go away. Neither does rayofash, although he seems a bit hard of understanding. Most anarchists want there to be rules. And they want there to be government. It's just that their conception of how government should be is so different that they don't even realise they are proposing a radically different kind of government rather than the removal of government.
So, of course, the language is a problem. Our idea of government has become horribly tainted by the bullshit that the ruling elites of our quasi-democracies promote. So other forms of government don't even sound like government.
Secondly, any conversation has the same problem that any radical philosophy has: it may work as a whole, but any given part of it will not work within the current system. So it may be possible to have an area with a widely-distributed system of governance and no strong central authority, but obviously not tomorrow, because it wouldn't work. And if it did work, current nation-states would bomb the fuck out of it, shitting themselves copiously all the while. Equally, the disappearance of a professional military is something I hope for, but obviously not tomorrow, or even generations from now, because a state with a professional military would immediately invade the hippy pacifists like me and put us in salt-mines or Nike factories.
And so lastly, we get to the reason why people don't debate the potential of radically different systems. Paucity of imagination. In the past and across the wide world, there have been radically different cultures, radically different systems of governance. But any discussion of these has to be imaginable to the majority of the audience. At PA, this is largely 20-something Americans, who are themselves, I speculate, often caught in an existential crisis caused by the shock of discovering the best nation in the world is not. So people get all Francis Fukuyama about radical political imaginings.
That's why I like political SF. You can get away with imagining and discussing possible state-forms without someone going, 'But in the real world...'
Just so you know, the reason this post isn't worth crap is not primarily because you're being smug and condescending. Its because your views are as shallow as a two dimensional plane and as thoroughly described as Godot. Saying "we should debate radically different systems" is dumb because there are literally an infinite amount of "radically different systems."
Hand waving to say there's some paradigm of this "radically different system" that would work but you won't debate it because only you have the imagination to talk about it is ass hattery of the highest caliber.
If you can't elucidate your political philosophy but believe it to be so far advanced that only you can understand it, I suggest you should consult with a medical professional. For millenia across different cultures political philosophy has been studied by some of the finest minds in history from Plato to Confucius to Marcus Aurelius to Kant to Locke to Hobbes to Marx to Mill to Rawls. You're not that smart and you just might have serious mental health problems.
I have no idea how a post that was trying to talk about the general problems of communicating radical political ideas got this level of frothing hate.
Neither do I.
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AManFromEarthLet's get to twerk!The King in the SwampRegistered Userregular
I'd like to see them try that in an area with resources that the government might actually be interested in and see how well it goes.
Well, all the land with resources is already being used. Are you proposing stealing it?
Resources belong to everybody.
But they're using them. How is going in and taking the land any worse than just paying taxes? How is it any different?
Who said anything about taking? It should be shared. We'd do the work of extracting the resources ourselves and give what we don't need to those who need it.
You see the larger community has decided what they want to use that space for. You're free to, much like you suggested, seek arbitration on the matter though you'll probably lose. Your othe option, which you also suggested for your utopia, is banishment.
Congratulations and welcome to being on the weaker side of community decisions. This doesn't change just because you alter the name of the organization making the decisions.
Banishment is for extreme circumstances and that's up to the community to decide. As for land use, various ideas have been considered. Libertarian socialists don't think land can be owned, and the community can't own it either. Anarcho-capitalists believe land can be owned, but you have to mix your labor with it before you can call it yours.
I keep hearing this "the community will decide," "the community will decide..." What methodology would you suggest the community use to decide?
The community is a group of individuals and quite possibly an even larger group of those communities together. Should their be a dispute over it he believes people should find someone to arbitrate the dispute. This would then be enforced by community volunteers should the loser of said arbitration decide to resort to coercion which, as ray will tell you, is possibly the greatest moral sin to have ever existed. They will, of course, always have the option of leaving the community for a variety of others that aren't as restricting.
But that maintenance fee is not the same as taxes. Because... because it's not!
I wonder if you could get libertarians perfectly happy by just renaming everything. The government could be the "central citizens council", the police could be the "local militia", taxes could be "land usage fees" and courts could be "arbitration centers". You've just eliminated taxes, the justice system, and the government in one fell swoop, with no more costs than reprinting a lot of headed notepaper! Freedom!
Someone should make a story about a parallel universe run by libertarians, which is the same as this one but with different names.
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Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
However, in an economic sense, the opposite of a monopoly on a good is not its absence. The other basic economic frameworks are perfect competition, monopolistic competition, and oligopoly. Assuming that force is a good or service for which there is a demand (and given the level of violence that has historically been the case, this seems like a safe assumption), and that it is "cheap", then it would seem that, absent a state monopoly on the use of force, the default would be perfect competition. One might plausibly make the argument that monopolistic competition could apply if firms were successful in distinguishing their specific brand of force from other types of force, but I think we can assume that by and large, violence is an undifferentiated good, and so perfect competition applies.
Contrasting the competing models of a state monopoly on violence versus an environment of perfect competition, basic economic theory holds that the monopoly will exact a higher price for providing violence (in the case of state violence, this could be conceptualized by the numerous legal, regulatory, legislative, and investigative constraints imposed on the use of violence), produce violence less efficiently, and in general supply a quantity of violence at a lower level than would otherwise be the case in perfect competition.
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
Yup. Here we finally are. FREEDOM SHIPS!
Well, you're in luck - a group of wealthy morons did, eventually, manage to put their money together and buy a ship, The World, which you can buy a shitty little cabin on for a mere half a million dollars. And, of course, in order to keep the Goddamn boat floating they have to maintain a political structure more or less identical to small American town.
But, hey, Freedom Ship! The future is now! Get your studio cabin while space is still available, RayofAsh - things must be moving like hotcakes!
We already have! Thus individuals who participate in society and abide by it's laws are given a number of important benefits, chiefly: Free Public Education, Unemployment Benefits, Welfare, Medicare and Medicaid. Thus, even non-functioning members of the society who are not directly beneficial to it's continued sustainability are still able to acquire benefits merely for being a non-asshole to their fellow citizens.
That's 'libertarian' with a small 'L' - as in, holding personal freedom as a primary value. Not to be confused with American Libertarianism, which is a form of capitalist minarchism.
There's nothing intrinsically contradictory between libertarianism and socialism, provided you're not using the retarded American definition of libertarianism.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
Freedom ships would be awesome! This way they could get plundered by Somalian pirates, showing the world how different communities with no central governments can coexist, with a delicious dash of irony to top it off nicely.
"We don't need governments, here's why."
"Ok, but what about this scenario, or this one, or this one."
"Well, non-government entities behaving like Governments could solve those problems."
"Oh, so basically Governments?"
"No, not the same. Governments are involuntary and coercive."
"Ok, so how do your psuedo-government entities solve the above problems?"
"With societal banishment and regulations."
"So...basically coercion and force; the same things governments use?"
I mean, we haven't fucking moved past this. Like, I don't understand why its so hard to just say "yes, I agree that local communal governments are necessary to regulate human behavior, I just don't believe it works and is actually inherently morally wrong on a large scale."
At least the discussion would move somewhere, but we're still doing laps around what "Goverment" is, and what "force" and "coerce" mean.
Thing is that you always eventually get dicks again.
But that maintenance fee is not the same as taxes. Because... because it's not!
I wonder if you could get libertarians perfectly happy by just renaming everything. The government could be the "central citizens council", the police could be the "local militia", taxes could be "land usage fees" and courts could be "arbitration centers". You've just eliminated taxes, the justice system, and the government in one fell swoop, with no more costs than reprinting a lot of headed notepaper! Freedom!
Something something occasional revolutionthomasjefferson.
But then we'd have to admit the ones yanking our chains are the ones with executive titles and that's SOCIALISMS! or some such.
Yes and no. The big open secret is that what the most vocal libertarians do not want liberty, they seek to "free themselves to enslave the people," they don't want government gone, they just want a bigger say in it than anyone else.
But that's the game, the spark behind most revolutions, the cause of dreamers who go beyond soft political games and compromises to have fire and energy and life. It's the cycle of history, the madness of being.
And what ill-informed college students do because being a hippy is now old-school.
I think it could be as simple as offering a more robust gradient of options than (in essence) 'dirt poor' and 'extremely wealthy'.
We see this modelled a lot these days: a user is offered some basic package at no cost (or virtually no cost), with the option of getting more if they want to put the work in. It turns out that many people do want more, so they'll pony-up the money. But, a significant portion of people are also much happier to just get by on the free offerings.
In social terms, this might mean that basic groceries, small housing and utilities are provided by the state. If you want larger housing, a wider selection of groceries, a nice car, etc, you've got to work for that.
Everyone else thinks it's crazy and will never work even though we've got many examples of flourishing businesses using exactly this methodology.
*shrug*
Anyway, that's Communism & is not for the Libertarian thread.
Was an explanation ever offered by RayofAsh or the other guy who did a drive-by debate for how you can establish police forces without a monopoly on violence and not cause the outbreak of gangs / warlords?
The video in the OP claiming to offer this explanation does not actually offer it.
"The community will reject them" was the best we got. So, no, not really.
So very very confused by it.
'I wish people didnt help me and everyone hated me!' doesnt seem like a very strong point in favor of your argument.
To some degree, it's kind of like how people do the "salad bar" thing with religion.
Otherwise it tends to be people who don't actually understand the implications of things because they're too busy feeling indignant about things.
Look, in fairness, he's probably in a rough spot, and it always sucks when you're relying on a government assistance program to get by.
Damn.
I'd need to buy stronger furniture for one of those.
Indeed it does suck. I was laid off in 2009 from the economic downturn.
I was on unemployment benefits for only 6 months out of the 12 months I was out of work, in fact!
Notice how instead of arguing that I should have died homeless and starving and freezing on the street, I am instead a bleeding heart lideral/progressive.
Strange, that.
I have no idea how a post that was trying to talk about the general problems of communicating radical political ideas got this level of frothing hate.
You need a little more life experience.
It seems like RayofAsh feels the government is responsible for his current situation, though. And he's not necessarily wrong, either.
It's just that he's drawn the wrong conclusion.
More like a pay-to-win society, amirite?
Also on Steam and PSN: twobadcats
Right, a country that has tens of thousands of industries, hundreds of millions of citizens, represents 45% of the world's military spending, and economic relationships with every country on earth can not have a simple tax code
It's not exploitable because its too complex, that's a myth, the exploitable parts were deliberately inserted via lobbying (and not every loophole is bad, GE has do to a lot of good stuff to get a tax refund, however not $X billion good). The complexity just makes the exploitable parts more easily hidden.
I feel our tax code is sufficiently simple for the average citizen though, probably a bit too complicated for small business.
Edit: you know it strikes me that the difference between a liberal and a libertarian is just pragmatism. I too believe great personal liberty should be a laudable goal, however the difference is I am not completely concerned with my own liberty, I am concerned that every citizen has as much liberty as possible, and that society is as fair to everyone as it is to me.
What was it FDR said? “Necessitous men are not free men. People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made." I believe the best way to ensure an egalitarian society and avoid tyranny of the majority is a strong government.
History seems to be in my corner on that one
The community is a group of individuals and quite possibly an even larger group of those communities together. Should their be a dispute over it he believes people should find someone to arbitrate the dispute. This would then be enforced by community volunteers should the loser of said arbitration decide to resort to coercion which, as ray will tell you, is possibly the greatest moral sin to have ever existed. They will, of course, always have the option of leaving the community for a variety of others that aren't as restricting.
These forums are a textbook example of a dictatorship
Neither do I.
This is fantastic, @Quid.
B-b-b-benevolent?
best not to provoke him
it
Someone should make a story about a parallel universe run by libertarians, which is the same as this one but with different names.
Also, screw poor people.