Guest Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 That is only taxation as viewed by the right. To the rest of us, it is the debt payed to the state to live in a society with a socialized form of the necessities of life. In an (read: my) ideal society, taxes will pay for more than that sheer minimum. Neither view defines taxation, which is simply the compulsory contribution of revenue to the state. Just because something is compulsory does not mean it is lacks consent. From some people, perhaps, but reread your own claim before you call dawh clueless. "Just because something is compulsory does not mean it lacks consent." That is true. For example, I could sign a contract with you where I agree to pay you 10% of the money I make each year for the rest of my life and I can agree to have you come after me with people who have guns to put me in a cage if I fail to pay you the money like I agreed to. In that case, I would, later in my life, say that I am "forced" to pay you my money and that it is "compulsory." However, due to the fact that I gave my consent with my signature back in the day when I said I agreed to giving you that money or else face the violent consequences of the people with guns who would put me in a cage, I wouldn't say that it would really be violent of you to lock me up should I not pay you and I wouldn't really say that you were actually forcing me to pay you, all because I gave my consent to have that forced used against me in the first place. So I completely agree that just because something is compulsory does not mean that it lacks consent. With regard to our government's taxation, however, I wouldn't say that I ever gave my consent to be taxed. You could speak of a so-called "social contract" of the country and that by being born here and now living here I have "given my consent" to be taxed, but I completely disagree with the validity of such a "social contract." I wouldn't say you have my consent to do something (and I wouldn't say I have your consent to do something) unless I personally communicate to you that I am okay with you doing that something. By claiming that I gave my consent to taxation simply by living in North America (i.e. by calling on the existence of a "social contract") I think you're tricking yourself into thinking that the government is taxing me and has my consent to do so. In reality I don't believe in this social contract and due to the fact that I never actually gave you my consent with my words, I wouldn't say you actually have my consent. And if you're going to take my money from me in the name of taxes, etc, I would regard that as an initiation of force against me without my consent, even if you don't. And dawh: I suppose I should have taken note of your smiley faces and not taken your statement seriously, but the fact that that interpretation of the word "taxation" was so blatantly contradicting what taxation is (and was actually an example of supporting voluntarism, the opposite of taxing people without their consent), I just had to make a deal of it. And a second note, I was in fact aware that the tone of my writing was rather angry, but I wasn't very into it in real life. I just thought that that sort of response was a decent way of getting through to the fact that I've said the same thing about the non-aggression principle and how our government's taxation is coercive and violates the non-aggression principle so many times, that you really ought to get it by now. But, I suppose I could be more patient so I apologize for the tone of my writing. And I probably should have known that it wouldn't have a good effect on making this discussion more productive anyways, so I do regret it. See above. I will, eventually, willingly pay taxes. In return, I feel entitled to what constitutes as an enjoyable, or at minimum, livable life. Healthcare, to me, is a minimum. This is what I was saying to gvg I believe. I think the reason why he doesn't view taxation as coercive is because he isn't opposed to being taxed. The same is probably true for all of you. That is why I think for you to see my perspective (you as in gvg and dawh... you Izzy seem to understand it basically) you should ask yourself "What if I wasn't okay with being taxed for X (e.g. some hypothetical war?)? What would happen?" Hopefully then you would see that you would pay your taxes anyways (because taxation is coercive!) because of the consequences of not paying the taxes (having your property stolen from the government or getting locked up in jail). This debate is pointless because we have fundamentally different ideals. You want what is optimal for you, while the rest of us will rather sacrifice arbitrary currency in return for essential services that we feel should be available to even those that can't afford them. If I may... I don't want what is optimal for me, as you say I want. I want what is optimal for every single person excluding possibilities of allowing those people to gain even more by taking away from others. As for, "while the rest of us will rather sacrifice arbitrary currency in return for essential services" I will add that I want that too--in other words, I regard myself as a charitable person. I would gladly donate to the poor and the needy who are unable to afford food, clothing, education, etc, themselves. And if you all do too then I don't see why you all are arguing to force every tax payer to pay for charity with taxes. If so many people are charitable why not allow people to voluntarily donate to charitable causes rather than forcing them to pay taxes for those causes whether they want to or not? Is it because there are a few non-charitable people who don't want to give money to poor people? Because if that is your reason, then I disagree with you again. I support letting those who wish to be charitable voluntarily give up their money to charitable causes. I do not support forcing ever person who makes a certain income (i.e. every taxpayer) to pay a certain amount of money to charity. Even if Bill Gates doesn't want to pay a cent to charity I support letting him make that choice. It's his money that he made and he owns and I support his right to spend it how he wishes. If you wish to claim ownership of a certain portion of his money to spend on societal problems then that is where our ideals differ, not in the area of wanting to be charitable. I am charitable as well, and perhaps I view people in general as even more charitable than you do which is why I don't think that violently forcing people like Bill Gates to pay for charity is necessary to keep the poor from falling through the cracks and yet you do. No one is "right" because it's not "wrong" to love yourself more than society or vice versa. The problem is that you need to realize that. If I may express my view of what our differences are: I don't love myself more than society... I love my consent with each person in society (including the wealthy selfish people who don't want to donate to charity voluntarily) more than my love of the poor/needy people who would be better off with some help from the selfish wealthy person. That (and the fact that I think people are charitable enough to keep the poor from falling through the cracks anyways) is why I don't support pointing guns at the wealthy person to force them to give up part of their wealth to help the poor. So it's not that I love myself more than society as you said earlier; it's that I value my consent with you more than I value the well-being of the poor people who I also care about who could benefit from you. So If I went up to you and said, "I think you should donate some more money to these poor people" and you said, "No I think I've donated as much as I wanted" I would say "Okay" and not force you to donate any more. If we reversed this situation, on the other hand, and you said that you thought I should donate more to the poor and I said that I didn't want to, you (at least the political statist you) would raise your gun at me and say "Well then... either give more money to the poor like I want you to or else I'm going to arrest you." Taxes are coercive. You said only the right views them as coercive while the left views them as payment of a debt for getting to live in a society with roads and health care for all, etc. What I think you really meant when you said that is that you almost always are okay with paying the taxes. When you're not okay with paying them, however, I think you would say they were coercive just like any person on the right or any anarchist. Am I right? So another summary: I value my consent with people more than I value the possible benefits that poor people could receive if I raised my political gun at Bill Gates and required him to give up some portion of his money by law to spend towards those poor people. So I think your "No one is "right" because it's not "wrong" to love yourself more than society or vice versa" is inaccurate with regard to the true differences between us. Do you see what I'm saying or do you still think that the differences between us is that I am selfish and you're charitable? Because not only would I say that I am not as selfish as you say I am, but I would say that the real difference between us is how much we value our consent with other people. I value it a very lot whereas you are willing to break it sometimes (such as violating Bill Gates' consent) so long as it benefits the poor or other societal problems that you care about. Dawh and gvg are not spewing nonsense because you don't agree with them. To be fair, aside from when your logic is completely inconsistent, neither are you. I understand, that to you, taxes feel like they are violating your human rights, and are a form of non-violent violence (haha, and oxymoron that makes perfect sense). To the rest of us, taxes are the binding agent of our civilization. I formally apologize and rescind my use of the phrase "spewing nonsense" here and now. While it may have seemed like nonsense to me because of their lack of agreement with my concept of voluntarism saying that dawh and gvg were spewing nonsense would just get them upset if anything and make them listen to me even less, thus making our discussion go nowhere. So yeah, I'm sorry about that. So on the subject of taxation again, while anarchists are almost always conservative, I think you could be a liberal anarchist. In other words, you could advocate a society built around a central government that redistributes wealth and maintains a single law across the society (thus being liberal) and still be an anarchist simply by upholding the non-aggression principle and by doing your best to help those living in your country who don't wish to pay your taxes, etc, to be able to secede. But, as you pointed out earlier Izzy, that would require liberal anarchists to rearrange themselves geographically so that they could have their public roads, etc, in places where only people who agreed to join the government (and thus pay for the roads) live. Now, there is a point for debate in here, and that is the practicality of your society. That's what I was originally addressing with my "What will you do?" and Dawh's series of "What If's". It's important that your society will even function before you wish to secede from ours. /post I agree. There is an important point here and that is the practicality of a society where people typically follow the non-aggression principle and there is no centralized "governing" organization to deal with the "societal" problems like dispute resolution and fires that we have mentioned so far. In other words, the conservative stateless society. This is distinguished from the idea of a liberal stateless society that you made me think of when you mentioned your liberalness and your desire to geographically redistribute people so that they can live in a society under a government of the right size/style or no government of their pleasing. I interpreted this as you caring about peoples' consent and you wanting to make governments less tyrannical to people by giving the people the choice to live in a part of the country with the right government that they want or no government at all. So you don't have to call yourself an anarchist, but I do think you could be a liberal anarchist. But, as for what you just mentioned here: the practicality of a society that follows the non-aggression principle, I think you really meant the conservative side of the stateless society, not the liberal side which is just finding a way to let people secede from your government who don't wish to be a part of it (people can move now (to Antarctica?), but you wish to give people even more choice (the choice that I actually deem a real choice, unlike the choice somewhere else on Earth (for the Earth is filled with states right now)) which is to let them live in the same "country" but stop paying for their government/receiving their government services if the person doesn't want to be a part of the government. Certainly providing a legal framework for states to secede would be a starting point in that process. But, that's not what you meant when you said "there is a point for debate in here, and that is the practicality of your society". I think you were referring to the practicality of a stateless society that doesn't resemble government-like organizations (a "conservative stateless society" I'll call it) which is the kind of anarchy I imagine I would be living in (and perhaps everyone else once states as we currently know them start to dissolve in a hundred years or so :-) ). And so, I think we already did some talking on the practicality of how people might function in a society while following the non-aggression principle right before you Izzy joined the discussion. We were talking about Dispute Resolution Organizations and fears of monopolies (like water company monopolies) forming in the absent of coercive state regulation and how to make sure that your water company doesn't get a monopoly on you if that is a real fear that you have. There are many many practical issues to discuss though, so before going on about any more I'll let you pick out the exact issues you want to discuss and I'll try offering some solutions that don't involve a state (or the state's coercive regulation and tax money that it currently uses to deal with many of these "societal" problems). So what "societal" problems do you want to discuss? Note: While I doubt you'll buy most of the ideas I present on the subject you ask for, the point (from my perspective in the discussion) is to get you and everyone else participating in the discussion to realize that if you follow the non-aggression principle (and thus stop taxing people / supporting government in its current form around the world) society won't spiral into chaos (which is what many people presume will happen when you mention anarchy). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gvg Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 (edited) I don't have time to reply to all of your comment, but I did notice this: That (and the fact that I think people are charitable enough to keep the poor from falling through the cracks anyways) is why I don't support pointing guns at the wealthy person to force them to give up part of their wealth to help the poor. And this is where I cal BS. EVer since the 70's wealth in America has moved upward due to the lack of gov. preventing it from doing so. We have the largest rich-poor gap in the industrialzed world, but we also have the most billionaires. 400 people own 155 million people's worth of wealth. I see no charity. People are greedy. Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are (off the top of my head) the only two rich (and i mean billionaire/multi-millionaire rich) guys who are full on kick a** philanthropists. And i respect them for that. But most are not. Oil merchants don't give. Wall Street doesn't give. The insurance companies, the pharmaceutical companies. None of them give a damn about us. Corporate America is all about profit; that's why it was them who came up with social darwinism. You are too trusting of the charitability of people. Hell, the only real reason most people are charitable (i am still referring to the well-well-off here) is BECAUSE it gives them tax cuts. Some are doing it because it's the right thing to do. most aren't. Also, many private charity funds are not properly managed, especially if they also deal with international stuff. So, my three biggest issues that i most want to discuss: 1. People are jerks 2. Unfettered free-market is unsustainable/monopolies 3. It will lead to a feudal system, which I will admit is a hell of a lot worse. Your system puts two much trust itnoo private industries. i mean seriously, competting weapons manufacturers? I see military coup in the making. Those are my three, and I'm sure more will come up. Oh, and apology accepted =) Edited June 2, 2011 by gvg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 Nope monopolies do not require govt intervention to be created and govts have always created laws to break them up, except those that were created by the govts. The bit about the incentives, all I can say is read a bit of history and find out that you are 100% wrong. Here is what will and has happened, company A has gotten to say 80% market share company B 20%(make is simple only 2 but add C,D,E,F if ya want). Now Company A can sell product at 9$/unit and make profit, say company B being leaner and meaner can sell it for 8$/unit. What has always happened without govt stopping it is Company A sells product at 7$/unit, being larger they can withstand the losses for longer than company B eventually company B goes bankrupt or sells out and company A raises the price to 11$/unit. Remember start up companies rarely make a profit in first year due to start up costs so even if company B starts up at 7$/unit they will still get bankrupted by company A. Okay. While I don't buy what you're saying here I'll cede it to you for argument's sake. Even if all of the financial incentives lead to the formation of a monopoly (the opposite of what I said), I still don't support a government that initiates force against businesses simply for buying other businesses and forming a monopoly. If people are really worried about companies forming monopolies or want to do something about monopolies that are already in existence there are other alternatives other than the options that violate the non-aggression principle (is that a better way to say it than to say that they're violent/coervice, etc?) that our government currently employs such as passing a law that requires that the monopoly breaks up or else pay large fines or else gets its CEOs and others arrested if they don't pay the fines, etc. I would regard those "solutions" to the problem of monopolies as initiations of force against the businessmen with the monopoly (can you confirm that you do to, quag?) which I consider immoral. Whether you agree with me or not on whether those initiations of force are immoral or not is not my current question for you quag. My current question is whether you, like me, regard the governments actions towards the monopoly business men as violations of the non-aggression principle or not. I believe this question is asking you if you agree with me on a fact rather than an opinion (although I suppose you could interpret the non-aggression principle differently than my view of the concept so maybe it's not completely a fact-based question) just so you know. Once we get this straight we can argue why we think it's okay or not to initiate the force against the monopoly to break it up and thus prevent it from exploiting the circumstances of its customers who really want water, etc, and cannot easily seek the services of another water company that is not charging monopoly prices. "Some nonviolent possibilities: -Pay yourself to put out the fire at your neighbors house should a fire occur -Move to another house where your house isn't in danger of catching on fire due to a neighbor's house catching on fire -Or it may be possible to just modify your current house so that it isn't in danger of catching fire from your neighbor's house(build closer to the center of your property, for example) Since I probably wouldn't be satisfied with the above three nonviolent solutions in many situations due to inconvenience or unfairly paying for your neighbor as well as yourself, I would probably look to the following possible nonviolent solution: -Move to another house where your house may be in danger of catching fire from a neighbor's house on fire, but work out an agreement on how you would both pay cooperatively for fire insurance together before settling on buying the house" -UtF And if you live in an apartment? Get real not everyone lives in Mayberry in fact the vast majority do not. Now back to main issue and Mogadishu I thought I was "real"... and what is Mayberry? I don't understand your rejection other than the fact that I didn't mention what I would do about fires if I was looking to rent an apartment in a dense city rather than buy a house. But simply because I didn't provide a solution doesn't mean there isn't one. I don't like how you just put out the cheap apartment rejection as if that meant your view that government coercion for taxes to pay for fire stations is necessary to deal with fires practically is correct and my view that there are ways to efficiently deal with the problems without breaking the non-aggression principle is wrong. Do you want me to write a paragraph to you on what I think of fires and apartments and the non-aggression principle? I'm asking rather than writing the paragraph as I usually would because I feel you might not. What do you do with actual criminals? People who rob/murder/rape? Who will identify them if there isn’t an actual witness? If there are no police then there is no police investigation. If you sneak into my house and kill me and no one sees it, they may suspect you but that can’t know for sure or should in this case my family (i.e. the victims family) pay for an investigation including the forensics to try and catch a killer who may just be a psychopath that has already left for another town and will never be seen again? Or will DRO’s head this up? If so who pays them? Individuals? So its pay as you go for justice? Collectively? I.e. a tax and were back to a govt system? Summary: Real fear. Good guesses at what I would say as a solution. One inaccuracy: Yes, I imagine people paying their DROs, but no it is not a tax. It is completely voluntary. You're not forced to pay your DRO anything and you can stop paying at any time(you just might lose your membership if you do stop paying or receive less thorough investigations maybe, but it's not compulsory that you buy membership from a DRO... and of course I imagine peoples' desire to provide the poor with DROs would mean that not everyone pays for their DRO.) And as for your comparison of DROs to governments I once again think it's a terrible comparison. There are many key differences that make your comparison seem crazy to me such as the fact that you're not required to give any money to any DRO under any conditions EXCEPT if you expressly give your consent in a contractual agreement with the DRO to give your money to the DRO under a certain circumstance. On the other hand, I am required to give money to my government just for choosing to make a certain amount of money and choosing to remain living in North America :-). Significant difference? Definitely. Another significant difference is that DROs might look more like a law firm in their composition than a government. They might be composed of lawyers and secretaries and other experts in the area, but unlike a government they do not have law enforcement officers (police) that carry around guns (guns in the US at least) and forcefully enforce the law. The only time that a DRO would use force against someone (e.g. to fine them or take their property) would be if that person gave their consent to have that force used against them or if the DRO was acting in self defense (remember, the non-aggression principle allows using violence in self defense). So because of this the DRO would never grow to resemble a state. Make sense? I will try and explain what will happen in your anarchistic society should it ever evolve. First off the DROs will become corrupt. Who is paying for them and how? What will stop DROs from taking bribes and who will check to see if they are? I know in your utopia that wouldn’t happen or if it did the people would move to another DRO but first you have to have the suspicion of bribery before you would even think of changing, plus if you are doing the bribery well duh! of course you stay with them. Eventually there will be private security firms to uphold the DRO justice. It is the only way it could work. These private firms will become corrupt. Why well why not? There is nothing to stop them there is no govt of any kind to oversee them. Let me ask you something for the issue of corruption: why would you voluntarily pay money to a dispute resolution organization if you thought it was corrupt and was beginning to use that money towards funding some sort of military force that might be used against you? And also, remember that the DROs are competing. One one hand you're asking how the DROs are going to get money and on the other hand you're thinking that they're going to get corrupt and are thus going to somehow pay for military people in order to become a government or something. Wouldn't it cost money to pay for that military? Don't you think a competing DRO that didn't spend money on a pointless military would be able to offer lower costs for dispute resolution and would thus receive far more customers whereas the corrupt DRO that tries to use your membership money to fund a "security" force that is actually going to turn against you are start taxing you would go out of business? And another point: Let's say a DRO does get "corrupt." What does that mean? Does it mean someone bribes the DRO to make a ruling in their favor? I imagine that's might be something you're thinking but if it is that doesn't make any sense at all because DRO rulings are NOT violently enforced in the way that government rulings are. If a DRO gets corrupt and makes an unfair ruling because it is bribed, the victim of the ruling can simply seek another DRO that isn't corrupt. This non-corrupt DRO would then be betting the victim-person's money (in the form of the membership fee) (or if the victim was too poor to pay a membership fee the DRO would be able to advertise them as yet another person who they take under their belt (charity?)). I don't know about you, but if this second DRO did that for someone I would be very likely to seek that DROs services and it would thus receive my money. So I'm sure the financial incentives are in the right places to keep them afloat and other than the fact that corrupt DROs would lose customers and thus income (as a reason to make them go out of business) don't forget yet another deterrent of getting corrupt which is that if anyone ever caught the DRO people responsible for being corrupt (which I'm sure they would if they made a blatantly unfair ruling that could only be the result of bribery) then I'm sure that people in society (at the very least you and I) would socially and economically ostracize those people like never before. All of the decent DROs would add those corrupt DRO leaders to their list of criminals and all the stores working with the DROs would then easily be able to stop selling to the corrupt DRO leaders unless they agreed to pay a hefty fine (which would allow them to regain membership at a DRO) which is what I'm sure the other DROs would say they had to do in their rulings against the corrupt DRO leaders. Now the Mogadishu link, these private security firms exist there, their CEO’s are called warlords, same name used in Afghanistan. In Italy and USA they call them the Mafia, Japan Yakuza etc. Somalia is a perfect example of an anarchistic society. All govt has broken down and now warlords run their little corner of Somalia. I know you will say I am talking nonsense because that is all you have ever said. But please look at human history there is not one example of anarchy leading to anything other than some form of dictatorship. It doesn’t even have to be violent to start. Often smooth talking political types get people to follow them without the use of violence. Cults are also an example; they will just form their own little hell on earth err... I mean paradise and eventually there will be no more Anarchistic system, just plain anarchy. Of course I don't want mafias bossing me, my family, my friends, my coworkers, etc, around (and I imagine most people agree with me here) so I'm sure that unless I'm very stupid I will put security near the top of my list of things to get. Security and dispute resolution are two completely different things though really. I wouldn't buy from a DRO that also was in charge of my security. That wouldn't make much sense. For security issues I would basically make an agreement with a company where I say "Make me this secure and I'll pay you this much, blah blah blah." Sure, my DRO would play a role in that contract enforcement with the company just like it would with any other company (from a furniture store to a health insurer), but the DRO company itself wouldn't have the guns. A security firm might have guns, but even then if someone were to rob my house or something I wouldn't go after them with guns. The security services I would seek would be almost entirely about prevention to make sure that people wouldn't rob my house in the first place. And people always bring up Somalia as an example of anarchy, but seriously... "Somalia is a perfect example of an anarchistic society." Oh yeah, if you stop initiating force against people then all of these mafias are going to spring up around town and we're all going to lose our standard of living ad there are going to be many murders every day left and right (that's sarcasm). But really, I think Somalia is a good example of if you have a society that has grown dependent on a state and then suddenly you have political unrest and the government stops functioning. So I think that's the void that the government left. Now, I know that it's been a long time of the government having basically no control over the country so you would probably dismiss my claims by asking, "So why hasn't the void been filled yet by the wonderful stateless society order that you are saying could happen without a state?" Well, it could be due to a lot of violent mafia organizations and a generally uneducated people. If the US were to become a stateless society, the transition would of course take time for it to be done well. For example, people would need time to set up their own security agencies before you take away the public police. Wasn't there some police strike back in the 70s or something in a major Canadian city where there were major problems with a lot of crime? (You probably know that history... I've only heard of it). I would say that is due to a sudden lack of government. If you suddenly take the government away (such as by having the police go on strike) then surely there is going to be a lot of crime. It might even take a long time (many years in the case of Somalia) for that chaos to stop. Once you have a mafia system in place it is indeed difficult to get rid of. I don't think this is a reason to think that the public police are necessary (or else there will be chaos!) though. I think it just means that during your transition from a statist society to a stateless society you have to give people time to transition. Give them warning that you are going to stop having police at a certain time so that they can have time to prepare by setting up their own security organizations and dispute resolution organizations. If you suddenly take away the police of course there will be crime because people can commit crimes and get away with them. But, if you give me time to set up an arrangement with a private security business and give that business the time to set up by providing people with a good bit of warning before you are going to get rid of the police, then I think the transition could be quite peaceful and you could have the stateless society without all the chaos and crime that you envision. "I know you will say I am talking nonsense because that is all you have ever said." I said that a lot about you not considering taxation as coercive (which I still think that's a nonsense view of yours), but not all you say is nonsense. For example, I appreciate your incite into how healthcare in Canada works that was part of this post that I am replying to now. I didn't quote it because I had nothing to say in reply to it, but I guess I'll say now that I'm glad you wrote it and that I got something out of it. It certainly wasn't nonsense. I know you said you don’t read much, a shame you should especially if you want to have more coherent arguments, but here is another book for you. Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond, I especially recommend the chapter on the Chatham Islands, very illuminating, kinds funny too in a very very Black humour sort of way. While I don't read a ton, I probably read more than most people. I haven't read a lot on the subject of politics though, which I suppose is the same meaning as not reading a lot in general from your perspective. And there are far more books that I would like to read than I will be able to read so I probably won't get to "Guns, Germs and Steel" but I'll keep it as an option for the next book I'm reading. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quag Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 Ok le’ts start with monopolies, you may not buy what I am saying but the fact is that is what DOES happen, It has happened over and over again. Your belief in what would happen in a monopoly situation has NEVER happened. So you may not agree but then you would simply be wrong. The point you are ignoring again is that govts set up laws that prevent the monopolies from happening in the first place. Sometimes they are too slow and the monopolies form, sometimes they make the laws wrong and the monopolies form. However if you look at what actually happens in a monopoly situation, not the fantasy version you have tried to put on us, It is the monopolies that do harm to everyone else. Example forcing other peaceful businessmen out of business, charging exorbitant fees, creating indentured servants (your actual slave rants actually come into effect here), etc. You seem to think that the state has a monopoly on violence and that all and every action of the state is violence. This is naive and wrong. My current question is whether you, like me, regard the governments actions towards the monopoly business men as violations of the non-aggression principle or not. You are making assumptions on what the govt does and what a monopoly does. By your definition of violence the monopoly as it actually works not as your misconstrued view of economics thinks it works, is the one initiating the violence. Your question is therefore backwards, it should be do I agree that monopolies should use force to force me to buy their products or services. The point on the fire dept. was that you were oversimplifying a situation, fires can jump huge distances in the right conditions. the moving of people far enough away from each other is unrealistic and unworkable except in a small town setting, even then with a strong wind you could still end up losing your home. I was not trying to make a defense of taxation on this point I was merely trying to point out that once again you were using a naive belief in how your system would work, ignoring reality. Seriously how would you deal with real criminals? I have no guess except that judging from your previous posts I can only assume you think the criminals would be obvious and easily identifiable, of course they are not and would not be. DRO’s: Ok I’ll try and explain why they WON’T work before I’ll deal with why they WILL becoem corrupt if they were instituted. Lets use your 10000$ example, you owe me 10k$ according to me, why have you not paid yet? 3 possibilities 1. You don’t have the money 2. You don’t want to 3. You don’t think you owe me the money. • note could be a combination of some or all of the above. Case 1 doesn’t matter what system you use I won’t get my money Case 2 Why on earth would you even agree to go to a DRO? You could only end up a loser and would still ignore the judgment, without enforcement of laws there are no laws. Case 3 Perhaps you would go to a DRO to explain your side but if the DRO sides with me you may still feel you are in the right and say screw you and not pay. The DRO example fails utterly in these scenarios. Now lets look at one where it might work: I want to build a fence between us. I go talk with you about it and discover we disagree on where the property line is. It is possible since we have a disagreement that we could go to a DRO to settle the matter. This is the only type of scenario where a DRO might work (notice the might as one may disagree with the judgment and ignore it). However ATM I could if we lived in a municipality just go down to the town hall and check the records, no fuss no muss, problem solved. Now why they will become corrupt if they do exist? Remember there is no law and no one can remove a DRO from existence only lack of clients (where any clients would come from I have no clue as I see no reason any sane person would pay for a DRO as it’s judgments would routinely be ignored.) So a DRO would require private security firms to enforce their judgments, or as I like to call them the mafia Do not think for one second that criminal organizations would not rapidly create so called private security firms, it would be the natural outlet for them in your Dystopia. The after all already “provide” protection to many individuals and businesses on a system very similar to what you have proposed. So basically what WILL happen is that criminal orginzations WILL take over the security and will force the DRO’s to do what they want. In your system the only organized group that wields any force would be these security companies. Now you can say but I’ll just go to another non criminal company for protection. Sorry dude once again reality will slap you ion the face. What WILL happen is that the security companies will form Cartels (notice I use words like cartel, warlord, mafia for things you call free enterprise and private security, it is not an accident) These cartels WILL divide up the landscape and only let you buy service from the one in control of whatever region you live in. Oh sure there will be occasional (perhaps continual) WARS between these Crime Families (read security companies) but in general each will control their own little region. This WILL be a form of Tyrannical govt. IMPOSED on you because you have no one to defend yourself from it. Why did I use caps for the WILL in the last paragraph? Was it to be loud and try to browbeat you? Nope It was because Human History is replete with examples of such systems happening over and over and over again. Not once has any system such as the one you are proposing ever not turned into what I have outlined for you. Why? Because of human nature that is why. If person A steals from person B and there are no consequences person C eventually decided it’s ok to steal as It seems patently unfair for Person A to get ahead of him so unfairly. Remember crime and corruption are not always visible and easily detected often the sneak up on you and before you know it they have taken over. And people always bring up Somalia as an example of anarchy, but seriously... "Somalia is a perfect example of an anarchistic society." Oh yeah, if you stop initiating force against people then all of these mafias are going to spring up around town and we're all going to lose our standard of living ad there are going to be many murders every day left and right (that's sarcasm). Actually the criminal organizations are already there, it is the forces of order that are keeping them in check. You may say it with sarcasm but it is still true. So why hasn't the void been filled yet by the wonderful stateless society order that you are saying could happen without a state?" Well, it could be due to a lot of violent mafia organizations and a generally uneducated people. Hmm just rebutted your earlier statement Ok schools I assume you want them to be pay as you go. Great so poor people can’t afford school they stay illiterate and poor. Tough bananas for them, But you ignore the fact that an educated work force allows you to be more competitive and make better products. In fact every govt has recognized the inherent benefit for all of its citizens by having them educated. Only those who do not have the means or fear that their populations will revolt if educated, do not educate their people. Yes there was a police strike here in Montreal but I was a baby and have no direct memory. Yes it showed people at their worst. What I want to know is why you are convinced that a slow transition would make any difference? What do you base this on? Do you have any historical reasoning? Or is it based on some psychological insight to human nature? All I see happening is what I have described but in a more orderly and slower fashion. I.e. warlords, mafia cartels loss of freedom etc… Ok another stab at taxation again you do not need to leave North America to stop paying for roads you merely need to live outside of municipal boundaries. This is not hard and is an option taken by many of your fellow citizens, In fact one of our richest (read uber rich) citizens has done just that and built up his own private estate outside of all municipal borders accessible only by helicopter and thus he avoids property taxes. Also a recent report stated that 45% of Americans pay no income tax. So please explain to me why you are forced to pay taxes? Simple fact is you are not you choose to. There are benefits to living in society one of them is better chance at gainful employment. This is a result of clean water/public roads/educated population/sanitation etc… all of which you benefit directly or indirectly and to say you shouldn’t have to pay for them is to claim the right to the benefits of society without any obligation to that society. Thinking that you have rights without obligations is morally and intellectually wrong. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
unreality Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 I have been reading this discussion from the sidelines without commenting and it has been very interesting, but I feel it is time to step in. UtF: I would like to live in a world where everything is by consent and where you choose to join a govt instead of being born into "taxation-based slavery" as you say; however, as others have pointed out, this can never be reality due to human nature. It simply comes down to this: you are far too optimistic about your fellow human beings. Maybe you have just not seen enough of the world or experienced the cruelty and selfishness of the average person. We'd all like to believe everyone is inherently good but ultimately we are just animals, and our foremost care is ourselves. Sure we may give to charity but usually it's to feel better about ourselves Don't get me wrong, there is a lot of charity, a lot of good people in the world, that sincerely want to help, but it's not enough to overcome the constant tide of self-interest that persists through every animal on the planet including us. It's how we became so prolific in the first place and it's not stopping now. Your society may work if each member was selected after a careful cross-examination and only "good people" were in it, but corruption happens fast. People WILL take advantage of the freedom and make life hell for everyone else. So really, it comes down to values. You value freedom/choice/(consent) as the utmost highest pinnacle of morality; others on the board value basic life necessities/conveniences/(ease/quality of life).... that's what it comes down to. I'm not trying to pick sides, I will let the debate continue as it has, but I just wanted to point out this fundamental difference that's making a large barrier between you all. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 Just two notes: The first is that I was reading some random stuff online and came across the terms I was looking for earlier. In an earlier post I came up with the terms "conservative anarchist" and "liberal anarchist" to try to describe two different groups of political views that people could hold that could both me anarchists. Really there are already terms for the "liberal anarchists" that I tried describing which include anarcho-socialists, "left libertarians," and libertarian socialists. The "conservative" anarchists like myself are really just free market capitalist anarchists. So you can disregard the two terms I came up with. There are better terms out there to use that I just wasn't aware of (e.g. left libertarian). The second note is that in some post I made here recently I think quag had used Somalia as a "perfect" example of a stateless society. I of course said that was nonsense (sorry Quag) and gave a reason that basically said it was really an example of what happens to a society when the state suddenly stops functioning. I said that there would of course be chaos if you suddenly had police go on strike (as happened in Canada in the 70s) or anything like that. I said that in order to achieve a successful stateless society (not a society like Somalia where you just get rid of the government) it would take a lot of time. People would need a good amount of warning time to set up their own private security companies and seek the services of these security companies so that when the police stop working they are caught off guard. Well, my note here is that in a Youtube discussion I watched today Stefan Molyneux, that guy who provided me with so many of the great ideas on "practical anarchy" (how to solve societal problems without a coercive state... e.g. DROs), and some college professor were discussing something and Molyneux said that he thought the transition to being a stateless society would surely be a multi-generational change just like with any other major social change issue (slavery, civil rights, etc as historical examples that were all multi-generational). I admit that I hadn't really thought about the time scale required to transition from a state to a stateless society and so in my post to Quag I made it seem like if the US government today suddenly announced that in 5 years they were going to shut down the government (get rid of all the government services including things like police, etc, for example) then we would all be able to deal with that just fine. Now that I think about it though, that is of course crazy. Without most people in our society ready to make the transition to a stateless society the task would almost surely end in failure. It would be like someone saying in 1800 that if the government told people that in 5 years (1805) slaves would be illegal to own then people would be able to deal with that just fine. In reality you can't bring about such social change (it's largely a mental adjustment) in just 5 years and so when 1805 came around and the government made slavery illegal, so many people in the south probably would still think that slavery was moral, etc, and would hold on to their slaves and probably a civil war would have started then. So really my note here is explaining that I don't think Somalia is a perfect example of a stateless society (I don't even think it's a decent example) and I don't even think that what the US would like like if we suddenly magically abolished the government 5 years from now would be a good example of a stateless society either. In reality, in order to go from what we currently have to a functioning stateless society with order and not chaos, I think the transition must happen over many years (certainly more than 5... multi-generational as Molyneux said) and peoples' views must adapt during that time to want a stateless society. And here I'll throw in another note that you might say that I'm saying that a functioning stateless society requires that peoples' human nature change so that they are more selfless or whatever else. I would reject such claims by saying that "human nature" as it currently is is perfectly capable of allowing people to function in a society with a state or a stateless society and that peoples' perception of the type of society that they live in is largely determined by their upbringing and their culture by growing up in that society. Actually, since this is sort of what the discussion I was watching on YouTube was about, I'll bring in Molyneux's point which was that most people in Stalinist Russia thought that that that system was fine, that communism was good, etc. Here in present day North America, however, the vast majority of us hold very different views from that and don't think that Stalin's communism is any good. I think this is because peoples' views are really a function of their cultural upbringing, etc, as much as their "human nature." So my point is that I think social change over a couple generations to get people to accept the non-aggression principle (and thus get our society on the way to being a stateless society) is entirely plausible and does not require that we change human nature in the same sense that human nature was not changed when the public opinion moved from "enslaving black people is okay" to "slavery is wrong no matter what color skin people have". That was not a change in human nature, but a social change, a change in culture. I think the same type of thing would happen for the social change needed to transition into a stateless society--a stateless society with order that functions well like the hypothetical society we talk about when we mention DROs and how they might work, not a stateless society like a society like Somalia that just lacks a functioning state. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 I just read the two previous posts (Quag and unreality) and saw that Quag said more on the Somalia issue and unreality mentioned human nature. These were both things I mentioned in my two "notes" above, but I didn't reply to what you two said because I hadn't yet read your posts. So I'll make another post on these two things later--why the transition from state to stateless society requires social change over multiple generations (just like transition from a society with slaves to a society that doesn't accept slaves (although I think this social change doesn't require a civil war) or the transition of getting African Americans and women the right to vote, etc) and why this social change transition doesn't require changing human nature, but only requires changing the culture (in other words, I think it is our current society's culture that makes people love states and think they are necessary and good, whereas if you raise people correctly they can learn to accept the non-agression principle even with their own current human nature and thus I think it is possible to transition to a stateless society from our current society even with all of our current human nature). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quag Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 [utF: I would like to live in a world where everything is by consent and where you choose to join a govt instead of being born into "taxation-based slavery" as you say; however, as others have pointed out, this can never be reality due to human nature. Unreality do not feed his delusions that taxation = theft = violence = slavery. I know absolutely nothing in his preset program will work and you want to get past the taxation thing to point out the folly of his ideas, but his ideas are based on the presumption that taxation is violence/theft/slavery. If we can make him see reason on this all the rest is moot as he will have to concede it is based on a lie. The second note is that in some post I made here recently I think quag had used Somalia as a "perfect" example of a stateless society. I of course said that was nonsense (sorry Quag) and gave a reason that basically said it was really an example of what happens to a society when the state suddenly stops functioning. I said that there would of course be chaos if you suddenly had police go on strike (as happened in Canada in the 70s) or anything like that. I said that in order to achieve a successful stateless society (not a society like Somalia where you just get rid of the government) it would take a lot of time. What difference will time make? All I see is that it will give the criminals more time to set up their Private security firms. Which by the way will only provide “justice” to those who can pay thus making all the poor people have no access to justice? Is this fair or right? How will letting people take advantage in any way of the poor create a less violent society? It would be like someone saying in 1800 that if the government told people that in 5 years (1805) slaves would be illegal to own then people would be able to deal with that just fine. In reality you can't bring about such social change (it's largely a mental adjustment) in just 5 years and so when 1805 came around and the government made slavery illegal, so many people in the south probably would still think that slavery was moral, etc, and would hold on to their slaves and probably a civil war would have started then. Now I’m not a huge US history guy but you do realize the civil war was not started over the slavery issue don’t you? Lincoln freed the slaves as a political/military tactic, and got much flack about it from those still in the Union. And here I'll throw in another note that you might say that I'm saying that a functioning stateless society requires that peoples' human nature change so that they are more selfless or whatever else. I would reject such claims by saying that "human nature" as it currently is is perfectly capable of allowing people to function in a society with a state or a stateless society and that peoples' perception of the type of society that they live in is largely determined by their upbringing and their culture by growing up in that society. Actually, since this is sort of what the discussion I was watching on YouTube was about, I'll bring in Molyneux's point which was that most people in Stalinist Russia thought that that that system was fine, that communism was good, etc. Here in present day North America, however, the vast majority of us hold very different views from that and don't think that Stalin's communism is any good. Wow nothing in there is even close to being correct. The Russians did not like Stalinism but they were given state controlled media that told them the Americans were bad and evil. As they had no way of learning anything about the outside world and most loved their country if not their govt they had little choice but to accept it. Why do you think there were so many people who tried to get over/under/through the Berlin wall? And so many people who try to escape Castro’s Cuba? And almost nobody tries/tried to go the other way. Many realize dthat despite what their govt said things were better in the “free western democracies”. Except for those few who profited from the communistic dictatorship nobody really liked the govt. That would explain why communism fell through popular uprisings throughout Eastern Europe, A fact that you and Molyneux fail to remember. You really need to stop quoting Molyneux who seems to have a complete lack of understanding of history, economics and human nature. change human nature in the same sense that human nature was not changed when the public opinion moved from "enslaving black people is okay" to "slavery is wrong no matter what color skin people have". That was not a change in human nature, but a social change, a change in culture. I think the same type of thing would happen for the social change needed to transition into a stateless society--a stateless society with order that functions well like the hypothetical society we talk about when we mention DROs and how they might work, not a stateless society like a society like Somalia that just lacks a functioning state. No it wasn’t a change in human nature it was a change in the societal morals. That is not the same thing. There is and continues to be slavery today even in the USA. Prostitutes who are slaves to their pimps or the gangs that owns them, Sweat shops using illegal immigrants who are not even allowed to leave the factory they work in. If we haven’t been able to get people to stop slavery even though it is deemed illegal and the state will use “FORCE” to stop it when they find it then why do you think a stateless society even if you take generations will somehow make things work better? How will a few generations remove sociopaths and psychopaths when since the start of human history we haven’t been able to do so? A couple of generations for people to accept the non agression principal? People have tried that for millennia it has never worked because there are always other people that figure out if they don’t follow these principles they can control those who do. Once again take 1 10-100-1000 years you will still end up with Somalia, nothing you have said proves otherwise everything history has shown us proves it will happen. Deny history, believe what you want but do so at your and everyone else’s peril. I’ll say it again read The Dispossessed by Ursula K Le Guin. It’s a fun easy read when she sets up a society similar to what you are talking about. She then points out the flaws. Perhaps you will find it illuminating. I am sure you will at least find it entertaining. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
curr3nt Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 Did anyone ask how these DRO's would wage war? Or does the DRO idea require worldwide acceptance and an end to war? ----- UtF, you seem willing to give money to a DRO as long as it was used the way you want. Would you have an issue with paying your taxes if they only used your money for programs/services that you supported? (Pardon this next train of thought...I work around accountants and it is month close.) You want an itemized statement of programs and services that you elect to pay for? With the idea of charities. Maybe you want to help the poor but another only wants to help poor single mothers. Say you do not want to help poor minor criminals but another does want to help. Do we group programs or list out individuals since it is wrong to require people to pay to help someone they do not want to help. Is the charge elective or based upon need? If elective then what happens to the sub-section no one elects to help due to indifference or lack of resources. (Each person can only help so much) If need based then how is the individual charge determined? What if the need exceeds what a person wishes to pay? For road maintenance do you choose to pay only for roads you use most of the time? Is the charge elective or does the DRO charge based upon need or your use? If elective then do you also pick what work you allow the money to be spent on? You ok with paying to fill in potholes but not additional warning signs? You willing to pay for speed and safety enforcement? If so how much? Healthcare, you willing to pay for just your needs or you willing to pay for insurance? If you are willing to pay for insurance then what procedures are you willing to allow your money to cover for others? Water, electricity, schooling, property development, DRO accountants ... What if you are against paying for accountants? How would you ever get billed or pay for anything? ----- So even with DRO you will either end up paying for something you do not agree with or you will be buried in paperwork. Or you could be like most of us and pretend the government uses the taxes we pay for what we want. The wars are being funded by the crazy taxpapers. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 Did anyone ask how these DRO's would wage war? Or does the DRO idea require worldwide acceptance and an end to war? Dispute resolution organizations don't use force and thus don't wage wars. They don't require universal acceptance although naturally the more people they can get to like their rulings the more customers they will get. And they can operate fine even with murders in the world still who want to fight wars. UtF, you seem willing to give money to a DRO as long as it was used the way you want. Would you have an issue with paying your taxes if they only used your money for programs/services that you supported? Of course I wouldn't have a problem with paying my taxes if my taxes only went to programs/services that I wanted my money to go to. How would that be taxation though? It seems if I get to pay taxes for the things I want only then suddenly the process is voluntary and so it's really not longer taxation. (Pardon this next train of thought...I work around accountants and it is month close.) You want an itemized statement of programs and services that you elect to pay for? I don't know what you're asking here. That I elect to pay for? As in I choose what things I want to pay for and what things I don't want to pay for? Isn't that what people do on the free market? Taxation is the opposite because they aren't voluntary... people who pay taxes can't choose to not pay them without getting arrested or having their property stolen. With the idea of charities. Maybe you want to help the poor but another only wants to help poor single mothers. Say you do not want to help poor minor criminals but another does want to help. Do we group programs or list out individuals since it is wrong to require people to pay to help someone they do not want to help. Is the charge elective or based upon need? If elective then what happens to the sub-section no one elects to help due to indifference or lack of resources. (Each person can only help so much) If need based then how is the individual charge determined? What if the need exceeds what a person wishes to pay? It sounds like you think I want to develop a system of taxes that is partially voluntary in that I get some choice in where my money goes to. That is not what I am advocating. I am advocating giving me complete ownership of my property. In other words, I am advocating letting me trade the money I earn in the way I want. If I want to spend it in one place let me and if I don't want to spend it on something let me not spend it. So I don't need a central organization drawing up lists of things I can pay for and asking me to check off the ones I want to pay for (or whatever you were envisioning in the quoted paragraph above). What happens to the things that nobody chooses to pay for due to indifference or lack of resources? Those things don't get paid for. For road maintenance do you choose to pay only for roads you use most of the time? Is the charge elective or does the DRO charge based upon need or your use? If elective then do you also pick what work you allow the money to be spent on? You ok with paying to fill in potholes but not additional warning signs? You willing to pay for speed and safety enforcement? If so how much? I'm for privatizing roads. I'm not sure what payment system I would prefer in a private company, but it would probably be a system that would allow me to pay less if I use the roads less so perhaps some sort of toll system or a gps in my car that tracks the miles I drive on the roads and I pay per mile. Also, dispute resolution organizations wouldn't have anything to do with how I pay for my road services from a company. If I come into a dispute with my company (perhaps my company thinks I didn't pay what I agreed I would or something like that) then I could bring my DRO and the company's DRO into the picture and they could hear our case and agree on a way to settle the dispute for us. Healthcare, you willing to pay for just your needs or you willing to pay for insurance? If you are willing to pay for insurance then what procedures are you willing to allow your money to cover for others? Because I know that I could be hit with a major health problem out of the nowhere (perhaps I'm hit by a car) that could be very expensive to care for, I'm sure that I am someone who wants health insurance of some kind. What procedures am I willing to allow my money to cover for others? Anything and everything, even crazy very expensive fingernail procedures. The point of the insurance is that I make an agreement with my insurance company where I pay a little bit every so often and then if X Y or Z happen to me the insurance company agrees to help me pay for those things by giving me a defined amount of money. So, for example, I could have insurance for getting hit by a car. I pay a little bit each month to my insurance company and if I get hit by a car my insurance company helps me pay for my hospital bills in the recovery (in the defined amount and way). What my insurance company decides to do with my money in the mean time isn't relevant to me (assuming the insurance company isn't using the money to commit crimes, etc). If the insurance company wants to use that money on a million dollar operation to install a fake fingernail in another person, that is fine by me. All that would matter to me is how much money I am paying for my insurance and how much money I am going to get should X Y or Z bad things happen to me and then the risk of X Y or Z happening to me. Water, electricity, schooling, property development, DRO accountants ... All significant problems, but problems that I think can be dealt with peacefully. I'm not sure what your specific questions are with regard to these things are so I'm not really sure what to write in response. I'll just say with regard to education that because I am against forcing people to pay for things (including schools) against their will then education for the poor and others who can't afford it either wouldn't happen or else would happen due to charitable people volunteering their money to the children of poor parents. What if you are against paying for accountants? How would you ever get billed or pay for anything? I'm not sure why I wouldn't want to pay for accountants... accountants are useful to me after all. If someone was against paying for accountants however then they could simply choose to not pay for accountants. In our current system, however, every tax payer is forced to pay taxes for accountants in our government. So even with DRO you will either end up paying for something you do not agree with or you will be buried in paperwork. I think the free market is better with paperwork than the government for sure. Paying bills is easier than paying taxes at least in my house. This is likely because customers don't want to have to go through a lot of paper work so the easier companies can make their paperwork the more customers they will get and thus the more money they will get. With governments, the government can tax us no matter what. It has little incentive to get rid of the complicated IRS system of taxation and replace it with a simpler tax system that doesn't give taxpayers all of that trouble filling out the form and doesn't allow the wealthy businesses to hire people to go through and find all the loop holes to pay little or not taxes. Anyways, the IRS gives me a lot of paperwork and even if I had the time to go through it all thoroughly I would still be forced to pay for things I didn't want to pay for no matter how well I filled out the paperwork. On the free market at least I am free to do my best to spend my money where I want to spend it, even if I still have to fill out some paperwork in that process. Or you could be like most of us and pretend the government uses the taxes we pay for what we want. The wars are being funded by the crazy taxpapers. What are you talking about? All US taxpayers pay for the Afghanistan War. They don't keep track of whose money is whose. They just take all the money in and add it up and then spend that much (plus more lol) on everything including the wars. When the government spends money on something it is spending the money (and thus the labor and effort) of every current taxpayer and future taxpayers who are going to wind up having to pay taxes for the debt that the US government is accumulating. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gvg Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 (edited) Just one thing.... Because I know that I could be hit with a major health problem out of the nowhere (perhaps I'm hit by a car) that could be very expensive to care for, I'm sure that I am someone who wants health insurance of some kind. What procedures am I willing to allow my money to cover for others? Anything and everything, even crazy very expensive fingernail procedures. The point of the insurance is that I make an agreement with my insurance company where I pay a little bit every so often and then if X Y or Z happen to me the insurance company agrees to help me pay for those things by giving me a defined amount of money. So, for example, I could have insurance for getting hit by a car. I pay a little bit each month to my insurance company and if I get hit by a car my insurance company helps me pay for my hospital bills in the recovery (in the defined amount and way). What my insurance company decides to do with my money in the mean time isn't relevant to me (assuming the insurance company isn't using the money to commit crimes, etc). If the insurance company wants to use that money on a million dollar operation to install a fake fingernail in another person, that is fine by me. All that would matter to me is how much money I am paying for my insurance and how much money I am going to get should X Y or Z bad things happen to me and then the risk of X Y or Z happening to me. Hmmm..... pay alittle every once in a while, like, I dunno, once a year.... don't care where else the money goes, as long as you get what you need when the time comes.... Public Health Care system. It's exactly as you described. And not for nothing, but it seems like yu don't care where else the money goes. So why do you care if you end up paying part of the Afghanistan War? Or for a school in Alaska? Or whatever? Taxes do what you said: You pay a little once a year, you get what you want, and you say you don't care if it goes for a fingernail operation, so why should it matter where your taxes go? And lookie here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/15/politics/otherpeoplesmoney/main4945874.shtml They aren't even completely mandatory (although in my view, the thing this shows has to be fixed, but that's beside the point)if over 40% of the people don't pay them. So... WTF? I know you'll say I'm not understanding you, but you seem to have contradicted yourself. Edited June 2, 2011 by gvg Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
curr3nt Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 I got a little confused thinking the DRO's would be running everything but I think some of the principals hold. For each of those, instead of DRO insert a different private company. So every month or whatever billing cycle is set you would have a seperate bill for everything that taxes cover now? That is even worse then the DRO handling your billing. Without a government to stop them, parent companies will start buying up everything they can that will make them money. Just imagine the "bundled" package savings you could get! Actually I think it would make more sense for the DRO to handle your billing so they can keep up with what is going on with their people. How else are they going to keep up with all the contracts they need to maintain? If you want a new service your DRO would have to get a contract with that business first anyways. ----- Paying a private company could become as bad as taxation too. What if you are against a certain medical procedure but all the private healthcare companies support that procedure. Your paying insurance could be funding that procedure since all the insurance money is lumped together. Or say there is a couple healthcare companies that you agree with but they are less popular so have less funds to cover the care you want. Would the military be privatized too? Would that be protection insurance? If you do not pay then other nations could invade your home without threat of retaliation? It seems a lot of things would move from taxation to insurance since not everything the government provides is needed all the time. You'd just be changing from paying one place to having to pay multiple places and keep up with what those places are doing. ----- Also individuals would have to pay for the DRO too. Pay for the mediators and all the administration for contracts. How many DRO are you imagining there will be to get one that every person will be happy with? Since you would not want anyone paying for a DRO that supported anything they were against. Or would you be happy with DROs that made you pay for less things you do not support than our current government? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 Quag: By your reasoning it's not theft if I take your money because you chose to make the money. You didn't have to make the money in the first place so you actually have a choice. Your choice to give me your money is completely voluntary due to the fact that you completely voluntarily choose to make your money. Thus, I don't use any force against you when I take your money because you choose to make money. So even if you try to stop me from taking your money, any violence that might arise as a result of your resistance and my action of seizing your money anyways doesn't mean that I'm violently taking your money from you. In fact it just means that you agreed to give me your money when you choose to make the money in the first place. This was basically your reasoning. I know it wasn't productive to say that your (lack of) understanding of the concept of when someone is being forced to do something or not was nonsense, but it really was and really is completey absurd. If you can't understand that the government breaks the non-aggression principle when it taxes me for living in North America and trading a certain amount of goods on that continent then I honestly think you are delusional. You should try coming to my house and taxing me yourself to see that it is coercive. We're not voluntarily making a trade; you're just forcefully seizing my property in exchange for the government services that I never asked for and never agreed on a price for. You don't have my consent and you require force / the threat of force to take my money from me and yet you would call it taxation but not violent, coercive, immoral, or theft. So I think your view is very insane, but you think the same of my view. There really isn't anything I can do to stop your delusions and I don't wish to spend any more effort trying. And I know you're just going to want to say the same stuff about me and how I am wrong about what reality and that I am saying taxation is something that it factually isn't, but I'm just going to let you know that I'm not going to read any of your posts that I see the word taxation in from now on so it could be a waste of your time to reply. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 Just one thing.... Hmmm..... pay alittle every once in a while, like, I dunno, once a year.... don't care where else the money goes, as long as you get what you need when the time comes.... Public Health Care system. It's exactly as you described. And not for nothing, but it seems like yu don't care where else the money goes. So why do you care if you end up paying part of the Afghanistan War? Or for a school in Alaska? Or whatever? Taxes do what you said: You pay a little once a year, you get what you want, and you say you don't care if it goes for a fingernail operation, so why should it matter where your taxes go? And lookie here: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/15/politics/otherpeoplesmoney/main4945874.shtml They aren't even completely mandatory (although in my view, the thing this shows has to be fixed, but that's beside the point)if over 40% of the people don't pay them. So... WTF? I know you'll say I'm not understanding you, but you seem to have contradicted yourself. I don't think that you're not understanding me; I think that you're not understanding what the product of insurance is. When I buy insurance I am buying X amount of money should Y thing happening in some specified time period. The company determines the risk of Y happening (say it guesses 50%) and then offers me a price for the insurance (say X/2+$100 so that it can profit some). I can then agree to buy the company's insurance. This means that I choose to pay X/2+$100 to the company and in the event that Y happens in the specifized Z period of time then the company will give me X dollars. That's insurance. It's basically you're buying a chance at a lot of money for less money. For example, I could be an insurance company and offer you insurance for the price of $1 per dice role. If the dice lands on 6 then I'll give you 5 dollars. If it doesn't then that's it--I make a dollar. So if it does land on 6 though then I would have lost 4 dollars (because I give you 5 dollars and you gave me 1 dollar in the first place). Now replace "if the die lands on 6" with "if I get hit by a car and require an expensive medical procedure (defined more clearly of course in reality)". Now you might be willing to buy this insurance from me that way if you do get hit by a car you will have the money to afford the operation that you will require. That's all that insurance is, but you can buy it for anything, not just cars, healthcare, or your other property. You can buy insurance on dice rolls if you. So perhaps you did misunderstand me slightly. I replied to curr3nt's statement: "Healthcare, you willing to pay for just your needs or you willing to pay for insurance? If you are willing to pay for insurance then what procedures are you willing to allow your money to cover for others?" Note the italics and underlining. Bringing this back to the dice example, "your money" refers to your $1 each time you roll the die. Do you care what I do with that money? Not really. I could spend it on a bottle of water. All you care is that as an insurance company I hold on to enough of the money that I take in from my customers like you so that if the die happens to land on 6 I still have $5 to give to you. Whether I want to loan my money out to people like a bank or whether I want to spend your money (the $1 you gave me) and then work to earn the money back in the mean time somewhere else really doesn't matter. All that matters to you is that I have $5 available to give you should the die happen to land on 6. So what procedures am I willing to allow my money to cover for others? Anything. In other words, if you're buying the $1 dice insurance from me, then if I were you I would be willing to allow your $1 to be spent on anything, even peoples' fingernails. The way I spend your $1 once you give it to me doesn't matter to you. All that matters to you is that I have $5 to give to you if the die lands on 6. Do I make sense now? I'm certain I'm not contradicting myself so if you think I am I wouldn't be surprised if it was due to a lack of clarity on my part that lead to a misinterpretation by you of what I meant. Hopefully I just cleared up the understanding. "Public Health Care system. It's exactly as you described. And not for nothing, but it seems like yu don't care where else the money goes." If I was voluntarily buying any insurance from someone (including health insurance), I wouldn't care if the person selling me insurance used the money I gave him for the insurance to buy a big hole in the ground. Since when is that relevant when you buy something? If I buy a bike from you I don't care if you use the money I give you to pay someone to dig a hole in the ground or not. All I care is that you give me the bike I want for the price I want or you give me the insurance I want for the price I want. Make sense? Okay, so obviously all insurances are similar so of course my description of insurance to curr3nt could potentially be government health insurance as you interpreted it. But, I didn't say any details on how much money I wanted to pay for what insurance. I'm not sure why you just stuck in government health insurance ("Public Health Care system. It's exactly as you described.") when I certainly didn't mention anything to do with the government. Perhaps another misunderstanding that you are having about insurance is that just because I want insurance for a certain something (like health care or dice landing on 6s) doesn't mean that I would want to pay any cost for that insurance. For example, it is incredibly obvious that I wouldn't want to pay $100 per dice roll for insurance that gives me $5 if land on a 6 and $0 if I land on anything else. I'm bound to lose at least $95 no matter what happens. So similarly, just because I am someone who wants health insurance (because I know I don't have the money to afford the many expensive operations that could possibly happen to me that I would want to pay for should they happen) doesn't mean I want to pay the government's price for it. Make sense now? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 I got a little confused thinking the DRO's would be running everything but I think some of the principals hold. For each of those, instead of DRO insert a different private company. So every month or whatever billing cycle is set you would have a seperate bill for everything that taxes cover now? That is even worse then the DRO handling your billing. Without a government to stop them, parent companies will start buying up everything they can that will make them money. Just imagine the "bundled" package savings you could get! No, no, no. You're totally misunderstanding what I'm saying. I'm an anarchist--I want to abolish taxes. I'm not proposing an alternative tax system. I thought I already said that, but your question ("So every month or whatever billing cycle is set you would have a seperate bill for everything that taxes cover now?") makes me think I didn't or you missed it so anyways I'll say it now. I don't want any taxes. There are some services, however, that our government currently provides (e.g. roads) that I would still want in a stateless society. Of course I wouldn't be "taxed" for those services in a stateless society, but I would voluntarily buy them, perhaps in a way where I have a monthly payment that I have to send in to the company when they send me my road bill. I have no idea what you think that has to do with taxes, though. Actually I think it would make more sense for the DRO to handle your billing so they can keep up with what is going on with their people. How else are they going to keep up with all the contracts they need to maintain? If you want a new service your DRO would have to get a contract with that business first anyways. DRO stands for dispute resolution organization, not WHYPB (we handle your paperwork and bills). They resolve disputes. So, for example, let us imagine that I set up a contractual agreement with a road company whose roads I want to use. I agree to pay a certain amount of money per mile or something at a certain point in time. In the contract I specify the dispute resolution organization that I recognize as an authority to resolve disputes between me and the road company. The road company specifies its dispute resolution organization that it agrees to abide by the rulings of as well. Then we agree on the contract and now I can drive on the company's roads as long as I pay what I agreed to pay, etc. If I were to decide to just stop paying for one reason or another, the road company would ask me why I wasn't paying. After trying to resolve the dispute with me ("you owe our company money!"-company "No I don't!"-Me), the company would contact my Dispute Resolution organization that I agreed to follow in our contract. They would hear the case and make a ruling saying that I indeed owed the company money as specified in the contract that I agreed to. So the DRO would rule that I had to give the company the money I owed it (as well as pay for the DRO case hearing costs most likely) or else I would face the property confiscation that I likely agreed to in the contract with the road company. So all the DRO does is resolve disputes between me and the road company. DROs have nothing to do with managing bills or anything like that. They're dispute resolution organizations composed of accountants, secretaries, contract lawyers, etc (just like so many other organizations/businesses/groups of people) not mafia men with guns that are going to try to set a government. Paying a private company could become as bad as taxation too. What if you are against a certain medical procedure but all the private healthcare companies support that procedure. Your paying insurance could be funding that procedure since all the insurance money is lumped together. Or say there is a couple healthcare companies that you agree with but they are less popular so have less funds to cover the care you want. I doubt that (that there wouldn't be a company that would provide me with the insurance that I wanted (and only the coverage I wanted)... entrepreneurs are usually very good at jumping at a chance to earn money), but if it did happen and all the major health insurance companies out there had bulk offers that made me pay for insurance that I didn't like, I could always choose to just not buy the insurance. "Paying a private company could become as bad as taxation too." No. There's absolutely no way that it could become as bad as government taxation due to the fact that my participation in buying insurance from the private companies is completely voluntary. Would the military be privatized too? Would that be protection insurance? If you do not pay then other nations could invade your home without threat of retaliation? I don't know if I would be a customer, but if you were worried about a nation invading your stateless society (which is really an empty fear) then you could always by insurance for a nuke or something with all of the like-minded people living in the stateless society who, like you, thought that a country might invade you. You would all pay a small insurance fee to fund a nuke which you could threaten any foreign nations with for your own self defense. Let them know that if any country launches a war on you to invade you (whatever that constitutes) then you would launch the nuke at them. Surely that's an easy, inexpensive way to protect yourself from invasion--certainly a lot less expensive than the $600+ BILLION dollar military budget that the U.S. currently has. So I don't know what you're worried about. If you are worried about your protection, you're allowed to pay for protection if you want, remember. It's not like you need a coercive government to tax you for protection in order to get protection. You can always voluntarily choose to pay the money yourself. It seems a lot of things would move from taxation to insurance since not everything the government provides is needed all the time. You'd just be changing from paying one place to having to pay multiple places and keep up with what those places are doing. I certainly don't have anything against insurance... not sure what your point is here. If you want to buy insurance you can. The whole point is that if you think you're getting a bad deal on protection (you're paying too much for too little protection) you get to choose what insurance you want to buy (if any) rather than being forced to pay your taxes to the government for their one option for protection whether you want the government's military or not. Also individuals would have to pay for the DRO too. Pay for the mediators and all the administration for contracts. How many DRO are you imagining there will be to get one that every person will be happy with? Since you would not want anyone paying for a DRO that supported anything they were against. Or would you be happy with DROs that made you pay for less things you do not support than our current government? I'm not sure what you're so confused about. It's really simple: government is coercive both in how it funds its dispute resolution and how it enforces its dispute resolution while private dispute resolution organizations are voluntary both in how they get their money and how people abide by their rulings. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
curr3nt Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 How many DRO are you envisioning? I wonder how much they would charge for their services. It would have to be enough for them to cover the admin costs and any dispute resolution required. Obviously the larger ones would be able to charge less. The more people involved the more likely they would already have contracts set up with other businesses new clients would want. The larger ones would work a bit like insurance too. The ratio of paying clients to mediation would drive cost and likely favor larger DRO. Would DRO have the option to reject clients? If so they could get rid of any that cause more mediation then they are worth. Would DRO be required to work with other DRO? If not a DRO that has a lot of large companies as clients could refuse to do business with smaller DRO that they do not like. What would happen if the DRO of the utility companies that handle your house or allow another to subcontract decide they do not like your DRO? What happens if the farmer's DRO decides it doesn't like your DRO due to a mediation decision in another case? Wouldn't it be in the interest of business to group up for more leverage? The bigger they are the more bargaining power they have. Wal-Mart comes to mind for some reason. You really think DRO wouldn't do the same? The larger DRO threatening to stop business with smaller DRO unless they get their way? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
curr3nt Posted June 2, 2011 Report Share Posted June 2, 2011 What about the people who do not like contracts? You want to make me set up a contract with every business I wish to use? Apartment, phone, cable, internet, gas stations, restaurants, groceries, book stores, movie theaters, gaming stores, clothing, shoes, electronics, pet stores, vehicle, any store in a mall, all the various insurance types along with all the utilities, road, medical, vision, dental, banking, retirement, police, fire, military, disaster (I live in Florida), parks, sidewalk, trash, jails/asylums, FDA type stuff, schools, scientific research, environment protection, CDC, disability, charities for poor and the DRO. (I'm sure I missed some things) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
curr3nt Posted June 3, 2011 Report Share Posted June 3, 2011 Wait...no government so no laws. How could a FDA or EPA function? You would have to have a contract with your restaurant or grocer that the food is real and relatively healthy. You would have to have a contract with someone and agree with the business for inspections. Nothing to stop oil drilling or at least pretend it is safe. Nothing to stop over logging or over hunting a species. No child labor or minimum wage laws unless you had a contract with businesses that included them. You would have to have a contract with a retail store to shop there and likely a contract to buy anything to agree upon coverage if there are any issues. And that is just from the point of view of the individual. Can you imagine how many contracts a business like Wal-Mart would have to maintain? --- I suppose DUI laws would exist in road use contracts which means road businesses would have to include enforcement. Anyone that wanted to drive would have to read, sign and keep up to date on current laws (since there would likely be a clause about new laws) for any road system they wanted to use. No illegal drugs unless Home Owner Associations or Apartments included those in their contracts. Each organization would have to maintain their own set of laws for everything. No prostitution laws. That could get messy without regulation. Are kids assigned a DRO since they are too young to understand a contract? Who picks and pays for the DRO and makes sure it is actually working for the kids interest? If parents pick and pay for the DRO what is to stop them from selling their kids into slavery? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 3, 2011 Report Share Posted June 3, 2011 Right, I agree with all the points that curr3nt brought up. These are so many of the reasons that I think this stateless DRO-based system is unwieldy at best. What if you can't find a DRO who will agree with your values (or at least, none at a price you can afford)? You have to "agree" with one of them or face "economic ostracization." As constructed, DROs are far too complex for you to simply create a new one and even if you could, why would anyone else agree to give it any legitimacy if you are the sole (or one of very few) patrons? UtF, I would like to think that you realize that MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) is the most insane political strategy of the 20th Century. We approached the brink with the Soviet Union so many times for no good reason. India is worried that fundamentalists in Pakistan will get in control of Pakistan's nuke supply and bomb India regardless of the consequences. MAD "worked" between the US and USSR more by luck than by sound policy. But let's go along with it anyway... Your geographical region pays collectively and buys a nuke. So any one aggressor country might be deterred from attacking you. What if they decide to team up against you with X other aggressor countries? They calculate the risk and figure that there's only 1/X chance that it's their country that gets killed. If they are controlled by a tyrannical government, they might not care if they do get hit, provided they can protect the people they care about. Since you aren't likely to have a standing army, once they invade, they don't have to worry about organized armed resistance. Even if their country does get devastated, they can use the resources from your "country" to rebuild. Also, I would like to note that any analogies that equate governments to people really don't work. John Stewart had a pretty good example of why the analogy doesn't work on his show the other night. Eric Cantor (House Majority Leader) said that the Federal Government should only pay for disaster recovery in Missouri in so far as they can offset the cost with cuts in other areas. He said that if you had a fund to save up for a car, and suddenly you lost your house in a disaster, you would have to use the money originally intended for the car to rebuild your house. John Stewart eviscerated that argument on his show (I can't link to it at the moment). A government is not a person and it does not have the same obligations as a person. A government can print money. A person cannot. That is the most important distinction between them, though there are many others. UtF, you are saying that if you happen to be born into a poor family who can't pay for an education (through no choice of your own, obviously), then you would be forced to remain uneducated (and thus likely poor), through no choice of your own. If your family can't pay for your education, your only option is to hope for the charity of strangers. I think that being forced to rely on the charity of strangers to improve your condition is a horrible position to be in (not to mention, I think that it's an immoral position for a wealthy country to hold). This draws me back to the movie October Sky. The main characters were all stuck in a mining town with little prospect of ever leaving it or getting a job outside of the mining business. The only people who did get out did so on sports scholarships. But the main characters got inspired by seeing Sputnik launch and they managed to build a model rocket to enter in the regional science fair, which in term got them scholarships to prestigious universities and some of them went on to be NASA scientists. It's based on a true story and none of it would have been possible if they hadn't been educated and most of their families wouldn't have been able to afford any kind of private education. Your system condemns people without money to a life without much chance of upward mobility. So much potential in people is squandered if you don't even offer people the chance to shine. They need a basic education to have any hope of standing out. An education is one of the most essential services that a community can provide its citizens. And it's one of the best investments you can put your money in, but it's a very long-term investment and the majority of people aren't looking at the long-term. They want to make sure they'll have enough money to survive and live. Companies are even worse. They want to make money. They want profits. Educating a workforce will pay dividends in 10-15 years, but if the company is worried about profits for the next quarter, why should they be investing in something as abstract as 10 years later? They might have gone out of business by that point, or moved to a different region, so that "investment" would be wasted if they put funds into the education of random strangers. Even if their reasoning is poor, there are so many ways to rationalize bad decisions. "I shouldn't eat that second candy bar...well, I'll go out running and I'll burn it off." Later: "Ooo, it's looking pretty stormy out there. I probably should go for that run after all...I'll do it tomorrow." Etc. People do it all the time. We are generally very poor judges at what is in our best interest in the short-term, so why should be we better at it in the long-term? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gvg Posted June 3, 2011 Report Share Posted June 3, 2011 UtF, you are saying that if you happen to be born into a poor family who can't pay for an education (through no choice of your own, obviously), then you would be forced to remain uneducated (and thus likely poor), through no choice of your own. Yes UtF, that is what you said. You're mad about being forced into a 'social contract' because you are born here through no fault of your own, yet you are OK with the statement above? THAT is hypocritical. At least your social contract can lead to your well being and not condemn you to being poor like what happened to the surfs in feudalism. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 3, 2011 Report Share Posted June 3, 2011 How many DRO are you envisioning? I wonder how much they would charge for their services. It would have to be enough for them to cover the admin costs and any dispute resolution required. Obviously the larger ones would be able to charge less. The more people involved the more likely they would already have contracts set up with other businesses new clients would want. The larger ones would work a bit like insurance too. The ratio of paying clients to mediation would drive cost and likely favor larger DRO. Would DRO have the option to reject clients? If so they could get rid of any that cause more mediation then they are worth. Would DRO be required to work with other DRO? If not a DRO that has a lot of large companies as clients could refuse to do business with smaller DRO that they do not like. What would happen if the DRO of the utility companies that handle your house or allow another to subcontract decide they do not like your DRO? What happens if the farmer's DRO decides it doesn't like your DRO due to a mediation decision in another case? Wouldn't it be in the interest of business to group up for more leverage? The bigger they are the more bargaining power they have. Wal-Mart comes to mind for some reason. You really think DRO wouldn't do the same? The larger DRO threatening to stop business with smaller DRO unless they get their way? Let's see. Well I suppose you could have a small DRO, but the larger you are the easier it is to get recognition and the easier it is to reduce administration costs, as you said. "The more people involved the more likely they would already have contracts set up with other businesses new clients would want." Yes, although remember that you don't have to write up contracts for every business dealing you do. Surely you would make a contract with your employer/employees and when you're buying a service from a company on a regular basis (like water or electricity to your house for example) and you want to make a long term deal on what you're buying for what price, but if you're just going shopping at the store it would work very much like today. You would just go in and get the stuff you want to buy and give them your money for it. So I would imagine some DROs only handling a couple thousand people (perhaps the DRO is localized to a region) while others may have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, or possibly even millions of customers. Maybe some DROs are localized to a specific region while others have customers across the country (perhaps internationally as well). Also, perhaps some DROs would specialize in business disputes while other DROs may specialize in handling peoples' personal disputes, such as if a crime is committed against a person. All these ideas seem plausible to me. "Would DRO be required to work with other DRO?" DROs certainly wouldn't be "required" to work with other DROs, but I would think that it would be in their best interests to do so. If you're a DRO while you may only have a few thousand customers, there are other non-criminals who aren't your customers. You'd get your information on them from the other DROs. And also don't forget the contract ratings. DROs wouldn't just deal with disputes that arise when people commit crimes, but since the DROs also manage disputes in business interactions, for example, the DROs would probably come up with a system of contract ratings so that if someone makes a contract and breaks it then the DRO can lower that person's contract rating so that other people in the future know that this guy doesn't always follow through with his agreements. "What would happen if the DRO of the utility companies that handle your house or allow another to subcontract decide they do not like your DRO? What happens if the farmer's DRO decides it doesn't like your DRO due to a mediation decision in another case?" I'm not sure what you're saying here. It sounds like you're saying two DROs may disagree on something (very plausible) and the larger DRO would have the "leverage" to get their way ("The larger DRO threatening to stop business with smaller DRO unless they get their way?"). I don't really see what specific examples you could be talking about here. If, for example, I have a dispute with Walmart and my DRO is much smaller than Walmart's DRO that doesn't mean that Walmart's DRO will make sure that the dispute resolution leans in Walmart's favor or anything. Remember that both Walmart's DRO and my DRO would have to agree on a resolution of our dispute. If they couldn't come to an agreement then they would agree on another DRO to hear the case and they would agree on that DRO's ruling. What about the people who do not like contracts? You want to make me set up a contract with every business I wish to use? Certainly not. Any decent business would make it as easy as possible for you to buy their product without having to go through the hassle of signing contracts if possible. As I said earlier, if you're just going shopping then there wouldn't be a need for any contracts. You would only want to set up a contract with a business if you're not paying immediately and getting your product immediately. So, for example, if I want a business to landscape my yard I might pay them up front but make them sign an agreement in which they agree to do the landscaping I define with defined consequences if it doesn't. That way, if they don't follow through and do the work they said they were going to do then I could go to my DRO and complain about the company ripping me off. You wouldn't have to go through much work writing up the contract though. I would think the landscaping company would do almost all of it and then you would just say what landscaping work you wanted done and how much you were going to pay for it. Apartment, phone, cable, internet, gas stations, restaurants, groceries, book stores, movie theaters, gaming stores, clothing, shoes, electronics, pet stores, vehicle, any store in a mall, all the various insurance types along with all the utilities, road, medical, vision, dental, banking, retirement, police, fire, military, disaster (I live in Florida), parks, sidewalk, trash, jails/asylums, FDA type stuff, schools, scientific research, environment protection, CDC, disability, charities for poor and the DRO. (I'm sure I missed some things) All of the small stores you just mentioned that you just "shop" at wouldn't require any contracts. As I said, if you're giving them the money and they're giving you the product then why would a contract be needed for anything? Even if the store offered a guarantee that if your product breaks within the first 6 months then you get your money back, all you would have to do is hold on to your receipt (no contracts) and if they didn't follow through on their guarantee then you could go to your DRO and they would see that the store indeed said that they would give you your money back if the thing broke and so that would count as an agreement even though you never signed or wrote up any contracts and so your DRO would rule against the store and say they had to pay you your money plus their DRO costs or else the DRO would make sure that everyone (including the other DROs) knew that the business was breaking its agreements doing unfair business. Sorry for the run-on sentences; I'm ranting. Apartment, phone, cable, internet, all the utilities, etc, would require contracts. I wouldn't think that you would have to write up any of these contracts yourself personally if you didn't want to (good companies would probably let you specify things in the contracts other than standard business deal contracts, but if you didn't want to write any contracts I doubt you would have to). When you buy these things today you have to sign contracts to. The only difference is that if the company breaks its contracts you go to the US courts and the court ruling is absolute (unless another US court appeals it of course) whereas in a stateless society you would go to your DRO instead. When the DRO makes their ruling, if you or the company disagrees with the ruling then they can go to a different DRO and appeal the case. Curiously: "charities for poor" what contracts are you imagining here? Contracts that if the charity decides to run off with your money instead of spending it on the poor like they said they would then you would go to your DRO and press charges against the scammers? That's perfectly reasonable actually. "scientific research, environment protection" ... "military, disaster (I live in Florida), parks, sidewalk, trash, jails/asylums" What is the point of your list, by the way? Are you saying there are a lot of things that you might want to have contracts with other people for? I agree that there are, but I don't see that as a problem. We have a lot of contracts with people/businesses today to even with a government. The added contracts for things like roads (/sidewalks) and trash collection from your house wouldn't be much more to handle--at least not too much more to handle. I certainly would rather have a choice in the matter than have my money taken away from me and spent on those things regardless of whether or not I approve. And were you saying trash collection or where to put your trash or what? Trash is a good issue we haven't mentioned yet and I actually think the privatization of the whole trash issue would do a great deal of help in protecting the environment. And may I ask: why would you want to pay for a military? I mean, if you want to fund that stuff go for it, but I think you'll find that it's all quite costly, damaging, and unnecessary should we get to the point where you have to pay for it yourself rather than vote for everyone to pay for it. Disasters are also a good issue. I imagine a lot of protecting yourself, your property, and other people from disasters would take the form of insurance. There are a lot of things that you could do to make sure that if your house gets destroyed by a tornado or an earthquake or gets covered completely in water from a tsunami then you can be okay (in that you can buy insurance so if your house gets destoyed by a natural disaster then you will have money to buy a new house, etc). Also you could have insurance to make sure that if a disaster strikes your city your insurance company will not only give you money as insurance but will hire people to come in and help clean up the mess (assuming there is a shortage of volunteers which I'm sure there would be). Insurance is good at guarding against disasters so that if everything you own gets destroyed you're not ruined. Wait...no government so no laws. How could a FDA or EPA function? You would have to have a contract with your restaurant or grocer that the food is real and relatively healthy. You would have to have a contract with someone and agree with the business for inspections. Nothing to stop oil drilling or at least pretend it is safe. Nothing to stop over logging or over hunting a species. Certainly you want to make sure that the food at a restaurant is healthy and if you get sick from it (E coli or something nasty) then you definitely want the company to be punished/pay for it. But, without an FDA mandating that all restaurants have certain quality food and have their food regularly inspected, how would you do it? Well, I'm sure because of the large desire for these services, companies would form that would do the inspections. I'm sure that at least all of the large restaurant chains would have to submit themselves to regular inspections to make sure their food is healthy or else they would lose customers. Customers would choose the restaurant that they know is regularly inspected by a third party company (or multiple companies even to prevent corruption and make sure that the inspections are good) over the restaurant that doesn't get their food inspected. But, anyways, the whole deal is that he FDA requires that companies meet certain standards or else the companies face criminal charges. You could do a similar thing by paying for a company to inspect the restaurants (and other businesses) you want. Or you could probably get around without paying anything by just demanding (as most people demand) that the food at the restaurants are healthy. Unless the restaurants funded the third party inspections themselves they might not get anyone to inspect them and thus their customers might not want to go their restaurant anymore. Also, imagine what would happen if the inspections failed and a restaurant started serving out something like E coli. Well first of all, I wouldn't eat at a restaurant unless it gave me a guarantee that either it isn't serving me E coli or it is, but it will give me a million dollars if it is (or some other consequence). Individual customers wouldn't sign any contracts with the company for this, but rather the company would just publicly release their guarantees. Then if the restaurant ends up serving someone some E coli then the customer who gets sick would go to their DRO and the DRO would track down the restaurant that served the customer the contaminated meat and press the charges against it. Even without the FDA it looks horrible for restaurants to face such a scandal like this and I imagine that without a government the pressure that individuals would put on their restaurants to make their food healthy would be even greater. Instead of responding (Oh, the FDA isn't doing a great job inspecting this company's food production) people would probably blame it entirely on the restaurant and whatever inspection company failed to inspect the food well. I think also that by privatizing the inspecting companies rather than having the FDA be the organization "responsible" for making sure E coli doesn't get in restaurant's food, then there would be competition among the inspection companies to make sure that they are doing good jobs inspecting. If one company gets slack to save money or something and ends up not actually inspecting the food or something and E coli (or any other unhealthy thing) gets in the food then no restaurant would want to hire that company again, unlike when the FDA fails to make sure that the restaurant's food is healthy, it remains the organization in charge of the inspections. So I think the profit incentive for inspection companies to do a good job inspecting would actually make the process better (the FDA doesn't lose funding when there's a major inspection scandal and a big E coli outbreak... perhaps the opposite (increased funding) if anything. So I think the government's money incentive is the opposite. When there's a problem and a government program fixes the problem then the program loses funding, whereas if they don't do a good job fixing the problem and the problem grows then they say "oh, we can't solve this problem without more funding" and they get more funding even though they really don't deserve the money since they did a bad job fixing the problem). As for the environmental problems, I actually think the free market can do a lot to solve those problems. For example, you mentioned oil, over-logging, and elimination of species. If a company has an oil spill and it affects your private property, you can file a complaint to your DRO for property damage. Also, insurance can be used to deal with oil spills (and other pollution) too. If you pay your insurance company some money for insurance (say $1000) that says, "If more than 1,000 barrels of oil get released into the Gulf of Mexico this year due to oil spills, leaks, etc by these defined oil companies, then you give me a million dollars (or some other fee)." This is just a super generic example, but basically if you want you can buy insurance to stop anything from happening. If an insurance company thinks that it can reduce the chance of oil spills enough to profit off your offer then it will get to work inspecting the oil companies and making sure in every way possible that they don't spill their oil. I have to go for now but I will talk about over-logging, elimination of species, later as well as the rest of your posts: No child labor or minimum wage laws unless you had a contract with businesses that included them. You would have to have a contract with a retail store to shop there and likely a contract to buy anything to agree upon coverage if there are any issues. And that is just from the point of view of the individual. Can you imagine how many contracts a business like Wal-Mart would have to maintain? --- I suppose DUI laws would exist in road use contracts which means road businesses would have to include enforcement. Anyone that wanted to drive would have to read, sign and keep up to date on current laws (since there would likely be a clause about new laws) for any road system they wanted to use. No illegal drugs unless Home Owner Associations or Apartments included those in their contracts. Each organization would have to maintain their own set of laws for everything. No prostitution laws. That could get messy without regulation. Are kids assigned a DRO since they are too young to understand a contract? Who picks and pays for the DRO and makes sure it is actually working for the kids interest? If parents pick and pay for the DRO what is to stop them from selling their kids into slavery? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 3, 2011 Report Share Posted June 3, 2011 Certainly not. Any decent business would make it as easy as possible for you to buy their product without having to go through the hassle of signing contracts if possible. As I said earlier, if you're just going shopping then there wouldn't be a need for any contracts. You would only want to set up a contract with a business if you're not paying immediately and getting your product immediately. So, for example, if I want a business to landscape my yard I might pay them up front but make them sign an agreement in which they agree to do the landscaping I define with defined consequences if it doesn't. That way, if they don't follow through and do the work they said they were going to do then I could go to my DRO and complain about the company ripping me off. You wouldn't have to go through much work writing up the contract though. I would think the landscaping company would do almost all of it and then you would just say what landscaping work you wanted done and how much you were going to pay for it. I'll finish reading the rest later. But I think there's an inherent contradiction with your system right here. In order to be a member of a DRO, that implies you have to have a contract with them. If you don't have a DRO, then you are supposed to be an economic pariah. So how could you do business without linking into the system somewhere? And if you came in with cash, would you still have to prove that you are an upstanding citizen before you could get the goods from the merchant? Without some sort of monitoring system, you can't check everyone's ID. As much as you say that this will give everyone choice, it's an all-or-nothing system. It can only work with total compliance. If I live on the border between a DRO-directed region and a non-DRO-directed region, even if I get ostracized by the DRO, I can simply cross the border and buy products from the people on the other side. Even if I don't live near the border, if I have enough money I can continue to be ostracized in my local community while paying people to deliver goods from across the border. Without total compliance, the wealthiest individuals get a method for circumventing the DRO system. If you offer enough money, you can get most people to do illegal things (and if not most people, then enough people that it won't matter to you if you do get ostracized locally). Your system is designed by the wealthy, for the wealthy. There's no room for the common weal in your world. (Which is by design since the wealthy usually hate the common weal for some reason, even though they depend on a vibrant community to become wealthy in the first place. ) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 3, 2011 Report Share Posted June 3, 2011 Disasters are also a good issue. I imagine a lot of protecting yourself, your property, and other people from disasters would take the form of insurance. There are a lot of things that you could do to make sure that if your house gets destroyed by a tornado or an earthquake or gets covered completely in water from a tsunami then you can be okay (in that you can buy insurance so if your house gets destoyed by a natural disaster then you will have money to buy a new house, etc). Also you could have insurance to make sure that if a disaster strikes your city your insurance company will not only give you money as insurance but will hire people to come in and help clean up the mess (assuming there is a shortage of volunteers which I'm sure there would be). Insurance is good at guarding against disasters so that if everything you own gets destroyed you're not ruined. Yes, disasters are a good subject. What company would be willing to insure people who live in hazardous areas? Insurance prices in such areas would be astronomically high, limiting the places that poor people could live. Republicans are already using this argument. They said that since the risk of flood damage in New Orleans is so high, it's the poor people's own fault that they can pay to rebuild their homes after Hurricane Katrina. There are so many dangerous places and there would almost always be the risk of some huge disaster that would preclude the poor from living there. Hurricanes along the south coast of the US (and a good distance into the interior). Tornadoes ravage the whole of the Great Plains in "Tornado Alley." Fault lines are rife with dangerous volcanoes and earthquakes. So no poor people can afford to live in Haiti or Japan or Indonesia (at least, not with insurance). What would happen to an individual who didn't pay for insurance? They would be liable for all costs incurred rebuilding their home (that they owned). If they owned the home, that's a significant amount of personal equity that has been erased by forces completely beyond their control. If I own a house worth $200,000 and it gets destroyed, then while the land may retain some value, it's not going to be worth nearly $200,000, even though that's at least how much I put into it. Disaster insurance would have to have a massive fund lying around to deal with monumental catastrophe. We've seen in the last couple years (as early as 2005), that entire cities can be destroyed in minutes by natural disasters. A small insurance firm could never collect enough money to cover all the claimants, should an entire city get destroyed. It would have to be regionally larger than the area of devastation, or have existed for a long period of time without experiencing any major disaster, or it would have to charge exorbitant premiums for service. Insurance only works with the expectation that the majority of the people buying the service will never need to collect. Most people are expected to pay more than they will ever receive from the insurance company. When you are talking about the possibility of losing entire cities (or even entire countries), no one is going to want to be liable for that risk. There would very little profit motive for insuring people in those areas. Modern governments are supposed to be obligated to serve their citizens when outside forces destroy their entire livelihood. And the reconstruction costs of such an ordeal are enormous. If houses have been completely destroyed, you need some place to give shelter to the survivors. There may not be infrastructure working for bringing supplies to the area, so they'll have to be transported expensively from a long way away. The destroyed land will have to be cleared and rebuilt from scratch in many instances. The utility companies will almost certainly have their own insurance costs for repairing sewers and roads. Someone is going to have to be liable for all of those costs. I can't conceive of a private entity willing to take on that much risk without a huge promise of cash. So either only the rich can live in more dangerous (though usually more desirable) locations, or everyone will have to live there without insurance because no one will cover them for a price they can afford. Then, if they do lose everything, they really lose everything, incurring so much debt that they'll likely never be able to pay it off. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Quag Posted June 4, 2011 Report Share Posted June 4, 2011 Quag: By your reasoning it's not theft if I take your money because you chose to make the money. You didn't have to make the money in the first place so you actually have a choice. Your choice to give me your money is completely voluntary due to the fact that you completely voluntarily choose to make your money. Thus, I don't use any force against you when I take your money because you choose to make money. So even if you try to stop me from taking your money, any violence that might arise as a result of your resistance and my action of seizing your money anyways doesn't mean that I'm violently taking your money from you. In fact it just means that you agreed to give me your money when you choose to make the money in the first place. This was basically your reasoning. I know it wasn't productive to say that your (lack of) understanding of the concept of when someone is being forced to do something or not was nonsense, but it really was and really is completey absurd. If you can't understand that the government breaks the non-aggression principle when it taxes me for living in North America and trading a certain amount of goods on that continent then I honestly think you are delusional. You should try coming to my house and taxing me yourself to see that it is coercive. We're not voluntarily making a trade; you're just forcefully seizing my property in exchange for the government services that I never asked for and never agreed on a price for. You don't have my consent and you require force / the threat of force to take my money from me and yet you would call it taxation but not violent, coercive, immoral, or theft. So I think your view is very insane, but you think the same of my view. There really isn't anything I can do to stop your delusions and I don't wish to spend any more effort trying. And I know you're just going to want to say the same stuff about me and how I am wrong about what reality and that I am saying taxation is something that it factually isn't, but I'm just going to let you know that I'm not going to read any of your posts that I see the word taxation in from now on so it could be a waste of your time to reply. Now you are just trying act like you don't understand, you know thats not what i was talking about ok lets try this, please answer these questions: 1. Are municipalities responsible for water/sanitation and the majority of roads as well as other services? 2. Do the citizens of these municipalities recieve the benefits of these services? 3. By their nature is it impossible to avoid these benefits if you live in the municipality? 4. Do Municipalities raise most of their income through property taxes? 5. Does much of the North America exist outside of municipal boundaries? 6. Are these areas thus exempt from property taxes? 7. Are you free to choose where in North America you live? Now for you to disagree with me you must say NO to one of these questions, please inform me which one it is and why, Then I can begin to try and understand where you are coming from. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted June 4, 2011 Report Share Posted June 4, 2011 (edited) ... Nothing to stop over logging or over hunting a species. No child labor or minimum wage laws unless you had a contract with businesses that included them. You would have to have a contract with a retail store to shop there and likely a contract to buy anything to agree upon coverage if there are any issues. And that is just from the point of view of the individual. Can you imagine how many contracts a business like Wal-Mart would have to maintain? --- I suppose DUI laws would exist in road use contracts which means road businesses would have to include enforcement. Anyone that wanted to drive would have to read, sign and keep up to date on current laws (since there would likely be a clause about new laws) for any road system they wanted to use. No illegal drugs unless Home Owner Associations or Apartments included those in their contracts. Each organization would have to maintain their own set of laws for everything. No prostitution laws. That could get messy without regulation. Are kids assigned a DRO since they are too young to understand a contract? Who picks and pays for the DRO and makes sure it is actually working for the kids interest? If parents pick and pay for the DRO what is to stop them from selling their kids into slavery? Okay, so I had this stuff still to reply to. Currently our government often leases land to logging companies and gives them the right to cut down the trees. This results in the logging companies cutting down almost everything very quickly, quickly wiping out any endangered species that might be living on the land before anyone finds out they're there and makes the logging company stop. A much better alternative would be to sell the land to the private companies rather than just leasing it to them and giving them the rights to cut down the trees. When you sell the land to the private companies they would want to find the best way to make the most profit off of it. Surely over logging the land by cutting everything down at once and not reseeding isn't the way to do it because once you finish the land will basically be ruined (which I think is the reason you're concerned about over-logging it in the first place). So by selling the company the land rather than leasing it from the government the company would then want to get as much money out of it as possible in a longer term profit then the short leases where they give the government back land with everything cut down. So basically I think moving towards all private property rather than the government owned property would help give incentives for people to take care of their land because of they over log it down like some logging companies do now when they lease the land from the government, then their land will be of very little value at the end and thus the company would avoid doing that and would instead log it more slowly while reseeding to make sure that they can always turn a profit with it. I'm certainly not worried about minimum wage laws (what's the problem there? If someone offers you a job for less pay than you want just don't accept it... pointing a gun at the person to say you'll criminalize them if they hire someone for less than a certain amount per hour is just insane. As for child labor, I certainly wouldn't let my kids work too much when they're too young and I hope other parents would be responsible and do the same. Also, if there's a family in poverty having their young kids work for too little when they are too young, I could always ostracize their employer or talk to the parents and try to help them out without having their kids have to work if wanted to, but I wouldn't point a gun at the poor child (or their parents if it is their parent's fault they're working so young) or the employer. I'll put a note here though that I do believe there is such a thing as child of abuse of course so depending on how young the kid is and what work they're doing (how hard it is, how often, etc), I may consider it as child abuse. And if a parent is abusing their child to a certain degree (beyond the degree of brainwashing their children to believe in a god for sure) I might interpret that as an initiation of force against the child and may respond with force of my own against the parents if they refuse to stop treating their kids so poorly. Of course, before resorting to that violence I would much rather give up my own money to the family making their kid work hard so that their kid doesn't have to work, so I doubt I would use violence in such a situation regarding child labour. It is a possibility though if a parent is abusing their child enough. "No illegal drugs unless Home Owner Associations or Apartments included those in their contracts." I'll note here that you are thinking contracts would be required for everything. Contracts are just written agreements between people to avoid future disputes. If you think you might have a dispute with your water company over the price of the water in the future then set up an agreement with them ahead of time so that the dispute doesn't happen (and if it does happen your DRO can look at your contract and resolve the dispute very easily). As for drugs, I certainly think they should all be legal. Does this mean that I'm okay with anyone having any drug whenever? Of course not. For example I can imagine many situations involve parents abusing their children by giving them various drugs. Depending on the severity of the abuse in my opinion I may or may not choose to use force against the parents and chances are if I was to use force it would only be after trying many non-violent ways of dealing with the problem first. I certainly wouldn't just declare a law that people under a certain age can't have alcohol or something and use force against them if they do (or use force against their parents if their parents are responsible). Just because you think someone shouldn't do something doesn't mean you should support pointing guns at anyone who does it. I would only point guns at people if I thought what they did was very horrible--a kid drinking alcohol, for example, (or marijuana) certainly doesn't merit that violence (unless the kid is 5 and the parent is overdosing them , then I might think about using force against the parents if they fail to stop when told to... because they are abusing their children). "I suppose DUI laws would exist in road use contracts which means road businesses would have to include enforcement. Anyone that wanted to drive would have to read, sign and keep up to date on current laws (since there would likely be a clause about new laws) for any road system they wanted to use." Yes, I think it's certainly reasonable to say that a road company would ban a certain level of intoxication while driving on their roads just like it is currently in our society. This would be written in to the agreement that customers must agree to when they choose to use the company's roads. And also, as you said, I would think that the road company would want to leave open the possibility of adding/adjusting the rules even after a customer is already a customer. If I was a customer I would certainly want a warning ahead of time that the rules were going to change in a week, a month, a year, etc, depending on the degree of the change. I think the good companies would do this sort of thing rather than throwing in a change in the rules on their customers immediately because customers may not like it if they are suddenly now allowed to drive and talk on the phone at the same time (for example). So, as a customer I would want my road company to agree to give me some warning time about any new rules that would go into effect. "No prostitution laws. That could get messy without regulation." I don't consider prostitution a crime (unless we bring up the child abuse thing again, then I can think of some example situations I would consider crimes). Is this just a generic thought you're having, by the way, or is it supposed to be some objection to following the non-aggression principle? "Are kids assigned a DRO since they are too young to understand a contract? Who picks and pays for the DRO and makes sure it is actually working for the kids interest? If parents pick and pay for the DRO what is to stop them from selling their kids into slavery?" Wow, that's funny: I just came across someone yesterday who was thinking people might sell their kids into slavery if we lived in a stateless society. Yesterday when I heard the person say something about someone selling their kids into slavery if we had a stateless society I thought, "What?? That's crazy... why would anyone think that people would suddenly sell their kids into slavery if you didn't have a coercive state making it illegal?" Where do you get such ideas from? Is that something you would do if it wasn't illegal? Do you know anyone would who would want to sell their kids into slavery if it was legal to? For the guy who mentioned selling kids into slavery if we had a stateless society that I saw yesterday and just mentioned because coincidentally curr3nt mentioned the same thing (selling kids into slavery), look at 2:40 to 8:40 (for some context) if you wish in the following video (note: this section of the video also contains Molyneux saying how he thinks that surely a multi-generational social change is necessary to make the switch from a society with a state to a stateless society. This transition isn't something I have really thought about (I usually just jump right in to the final product and think of how things might work, but quag mentioned Somalia and at the time I had just seen this video with Molyneux saying how he thought the transition was multi-generational, which now that I think about is completely true--no matter what system of society we live in people must believe in that system... we can't have a stateless society unless most people generally start following the non-aggression principle and that won't happen by snapping your fingers and abolishing the government, but will only happen by changing peoples' minds over generations (social change)). So here's the video (2:40 to 8:40): Edited June 4, 2011 by Use the Force Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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