Bitcoin Forum

Taxes i.e. letting a small group of people rob me? No thank you.

Kindly stop driving on our roads... Thanks

Kindly stop using the free market... Thanks

Wut?  My statement (Dont use things paid for by taxes if you dont pay taxes) makes sense.
Your statement (Dont use the free market if you pay taxes) doesn't make sense.

Taxes dont go to anything we use daily.
They are used to pay the interest rate on fed notes.
Sorry.

My statement (Dont use things that come from freedom if you do not support freedom) makes sense.
Your statement (Dont use things that come from socialism if you do not support socialism) doesn't make sense.

I see we have some non-Libertarians in the thread who think there should be publicly maintained roads, etc.  ;D

How 20th century of them...lol

Perhaps there shouldn't be, but there clearly are.

In what fantasy land did freedom create roads?  All the roads that I know of were created by the DOT.

Now you know of some created by private industry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_highways_in_the_United_States

I take it excluding the handful of roads listed there the rest were built with public funds? 

Strange that your clearly better idea of private roads only accounts for <1% of all roads, eh?

Public funds are an illusion.  They were private funds before they became public funds, and the conversion was not an act of charity.

The original roads were not government created.

We were stuck with government controlled phones between 1934 and 1984 too. 50 years of a single company controlling the phone systems.

If roads were privatized, we would go from the single choice long distance we had back in the 80s to the advances we have today.

Perpetuating the government road system is a detriment to transportation advancement and a shame that we are stuck with it.

Strawman fallacy.  Elwar was merely educating you about the particular thing you confessed to be unaware of.

Wow, I thought I was a strong libertarian... but this thread is showing me that Im weak... LOL

I would have thought taxing citizens to build roads was a no-brainer, guess I will have to reconsider that, or perhaps reconsider some of my libertarian views as well.

Speech I gave at a local tea party event:

--------------------------------------

I consider myself fairly libertarian in my thinking and don't see all that much that couldn't be privatized or left to the free market. From time to time I will bring this up to people and inevitably I get the response...

"what about the roads?"

What about the roads...

What about the roads is so great? Sure, they get you from point A to point B, but they get you there in the most inconvenient way possible. It's like dealing with the DMV on a daily basis.

What about the roads is so great...is it the long waits at red lights? Is it the amount of time wasted sitting in traffic? Is it the fact that roads are so dangerous? According to the CDC, accidents on our roads are the leading cause of death for US teens accounting for 1 in 3 deaths in this age group. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reports over six and a half million car accidents per year. A Federal Highway Administration study showed that 34% of serious accidents had contributing factors relating to the roadway. People are literally dying in the streets and yet we put up with it because the government owns the roads.

Let me ask a question...has anyone here ever been in a car accident? Been stuck in traffic? Waited too long at a red light?

Why do we put up with this?

The blame gets shifted to cell phone use or drunk driving. More laws to fix bad government. The real question should be, why do we put up with a road system that hasn't changed in the past 100 years?

For 50 years we lived under a government mandated phone monopoly where we were stuck with the home telephone where we pick up the handset, dial the number and talk to the person on the other end. And we were fine with this. We didn't want anyone to mess with it because it worked. But competition was allowed in and we had more choices. The telephone system got better. Now hardly anyone uses the old system, there are so many better choices out there. The same could happen for the roads.

The next time you are stuck in traffic, you are at a red light or have the unfortunate thing happen, where you are in a car accident I want you to just give this some thought. To just imagine...

Imagine...

Imagine being able to get to work with no hassle and no delays.

Imagine being able to get in your car in the morning and have your car drive you to work on the smart road while you catch up on that last bit of sleep or eat your breakfast or read a paper.

Imagine driving in an electric car that is charged by the road with wireless induction.

Imagine a world without the need for foreign oil.

All of this is possible, the technology is there.

But we are stuck in the belief that what our government has provided for us in the way of roads is the best solution.

It is time we accept alternatives, it's time that we stop accepting the same old roads as a given and allow the free market to offer us more.

What about the roads?

I agree, What about the roads!


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I really like the concept, I just don't see how it is possible to have competing "road companies".  My house is already so close to every other building that the one road we do have is the only thing separating most buildings.  Where would the competing roads exist? Underground?  In the air?

Edit: I can see how a competing phone company would be able to either run lines on existing poles or even put up their own poles, but I cant see how a competing road company could "put up their own poles".  Some things have very real physical limitations, no matter the technology.

Competing phone companies often share the same line. They 'lease' time for their customers.

Same could be done for roads.

Nope, you are a communist. True libertardians support privatization of everything, including the air you breathe. Everything else is socialism.

On topic though, I think that it is pretty much impossible to tax capital gains on bitcoins. However there are many other ways to tax bitcoins, and I think goverments will stay here and tax their citizens, even though it will become more difficult. If all else fails, they can just go from house to house with guns and collect the taxes that way :D

libertarianism != neoliberalism  >:(

air cannot be quantified without heavy lobbying  :-X

Meh.  I'm a pretty strong libertarian, but I don't think that everything should be privatized.  Certainly we are WAY too far in the other direction right now, so I love listening to hard-libertarians come up with ways to change things around, even when I think that some of those ideas are pretty well unworkable.

Some things are natural monopolies.  I think that most roads fit into this category, as do several other utilities, mostly the things that are physically attached to the land.  Some type of public governance seems to be required for those.

MUST.NOT.MAKE.JOKE.ABOUT.PEOPLE.WITH.BIG.NOSES.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH.

Where I live, no utility I use is publicly run. All private. Water, sewer, TV/Internet, electric. My garbage service is also private. I used to live somewhere that had a private fire department that was better than any other fire department in the state. My local fire company used to be private until the county passed a law to take all of the private companies over.

The reason it is so hard for people to imagine roads as private entities is because they have not experienced them themselves.

Who cares about roads?  The immorality of coercive taxation is reason enough get rid of it.  Would you have defended slavery because you thought it would be impossible for farm land to be harvested in its absence?  Society will not collapse in the absence of coercive taxation.  But, if you really must imagine how roads might get built (along with a whole bunch of other stuff), I'd suggest that crowd funding and assurance contracts are the most likely answer.  Until we can get past our collective hangup on coerced taxation, I don't really think we can consider ourselves to be a civilized society.  People a few hundred years from now will look back on this era as barbaric.  They'll think of the federal reserve system (and central banking in general) to have been pure folly (kind of like we view the pegging of the gold/silver ratio).

(and, for the record, I do pay all my taxes...my opinion voiced here should not be mis-construed to suggest that I don't)

Indeed. Central banks will be deemed the cause of "the second Dark Age" in our descendant's history e-books.

Perhaps you should read Walter Block's The Privatization of Roads and Highways (http://mises.org/books/roads_web.pdf). If those who screwed up were held accountable instead of protected by sovereign immunity then only about 10,000 people would die on the roads and highways instead of the 50,000/year currently. Imagine the outrage if 50,000 died every year on airplanes.

Once a person accepts libertarian ideas and philosophy there is a logical progression towards a more anarchistic or anarcho-capitalist perspective.

Some of us view bitcoin as demonstrative proof that a decentralized, voluntary and stateless currency is possible.

And if you don't like those services, you can pick different ones?

Your political ideology did not invent Bitcoin, bitcoin is based on computer science and cryptography :D

There is a commonly accepted theorem in cryptography: Anything that can be done with a trusted authority can be done without.

I can choose another garbage company, and another TV/Internet company. When I lived in Texas I could choose between electric companies. Unfortunately here there is only one. My water and sewage companies are local co-ops. Run by committee chairmen voted by members(anyone who uses their service). I do not see why another water company could not come in and compete. This one has just been around for so long that there is not much demand for another one. I ran for water chair last year but lost by 4 votes. It is a very small company.

Sure, as soon as "the people" buy my ownership stake in them. I'd settle for 95% of what I've paid for them in state income and gas taxes, inflation-adjusted. Before you scoff, this would be several hundred dollars for this year alone. I don't mind paying for roads, but more on a local level. I'd even accept state if they only used eminent domain to LAY the roads and then sold them to private companies to maintain.


Many didn't understand how there can be competing cell phone companies or ISPs, either. It's in their best interests to work together, and when one thinks there is an advantage to not doing so, they suffer lost customers because of it. It's the same reason why Network Neutrality has been violated, but not egregiously. We already packetshape bandwidth at every level from your home to the Internet, but we do so with the customer's best interests in mind already. I've never seen a Net Neutrality law that didn't also end up being bandwidth caps or a benefit for the RIAA and MPAA.

Your statement suggests that I have a 'political ideology' and that I am claiming it created bitcoin. wtf?

It would be interesting to see how the two sets of water mains and sewer systems would intertwine, and in which land.  At least with electric and communication, you have the option of one above ground, and one buried.

But what you are describing really sounds like a local government, in fact even if not in name.  I can't think of any obvious difference.

What do you think about radio?

Government monopoly on airwaves.

Elwar, I think your public roads speech was really overcomplicating things. Next time, just say that roads are government subsidizing of a specific type of transportation, which makes it impossible for other transportation types to compete. Government subsidy of highways is why trains and other type of public transportation that people in other countries get for cheap, can't compete, and why our public transportation is so expensive and sucks so much. Ask them if they prefer two hours in traffic that costs them gas, maintenance fees, and nerves, or an hour in a very comfy and fast train that costs them something like $15 round trip (as you can do in most of Europe). If you want to blame something for the destruction of our great rail and trolley system, highway subsidies is it.

Kjj, stop thinking of competition as competing equal alternatives, and start thinking about substitutes. This is an error that a lot of people make when they first think about this.
My teacher asked in our business class, "You run the Coca Cola company, and are worried about competition. What are some of the competing products you have to watch out for?" The students named Pepsi, Royal cola, generic, and every other brand of cola out there, but the teacher kept pressing for more. It wasn't until he suggested, "What about milk? Or orange juice?" that we understood what he was getting at.

One alternative to water piped to your house is your own personal water well system. The alternative to electric wires from the power company is your generators. Right now we are limited in what we can get (gas, solar, wind), in large part because alternatives can't compete well yet, but if the price of electric, water, or gas rises even a bit, competing ideas will take off. After that, there could be even more different services we haven't even imagined yet (your own personal water tank with water delivered by truck? Japan is developing personal, fully contained, nuclear reactors the size of a shipping container that can be buried, and provide power for a small neighborhood for 20+ years)

So what happens to roads in ghettos who pays for them?  Or do you just put them all in jail and send the rest back to Mexico.  The US has the highest prison population per-capita of any nation by a long shot.  WTF is going on with your justice/education system?

I'm not against rules, but I am vehemently against ruleRs, unlike you I prefer my autonomy and freedom and do not agree with being governed by anyone without my contractually arranged explicit consent. But to each his own, if you want to be a slave to a small gang of people, be my guest.  ::)

Excellent post.

You reminded me of a Reagan quote:




(Not a Reaganite BTW)

I think everyone should get a healthy understanding of the history of America's phone system. I recommend the book The Idea Factory. It's mainly about Bell Labs, but it also discusses the monopoly.
Bell was a government-sanctioned monopoly, free from antitrust laws, because the government loved the sound of "one unified system" of telephone operations.

As long as AT&T kept innovating, there wasn't much of a demand for another company. In fact, the transistor, perhaps the most important invention in the past 100 years, was invented at Bell Labs. But the antitrust regulators were always on the prowl, and when competition came in, the phone system improved further. If the "natural monopoly" of a phone system could be privatized, why not roads?

LOL.  How did you get from anything that I said to slavery?

By the way, this is why libertarians are still a joke.  Are you really sure it was a good idea to pick a fight with your best friend?  Are you too young to remember the 70s and 80s?  :)

It is far from being a no-brainer (except maybe in the other direction). Subsidizing something that kills people (even people who don't drive, but pay so others can) pollutes, and cuts every city into blocks is awful.

It's like the most massive gift ever to an industry. If I invent something that will help everyone get around but just needs hundreds of billions of dollars of outside help it's a terrible idea. Really it needs more than that, they also have to force people to give up land for a lower price than they value it out. Easily trillions all totaled. Not to mention the lives, it's a 9/11 every month.

since we're WAY off the original topic anyway i'm gonna ask something I've been wondering about libertarian views. i get the road privatization thing, actually. ghetto's? well, they would have shit for roads just like they have shit for houses. *shrug*

but what about medical? the current system in the US (where i'm from) is jacked, i think we can all agree. medical insurance and all. one alternative, obviously, is the socialist route like they have in some countries like the UK and other places. what's the libertarian angle?

COMPETITION IN A MARKET REGULATED STRICTLY BY IT'S CONSUMERS (i.e. a free market), you know, kind of like what we have with Bitcoin exchanges today where if you haven't noticed rates are getting lower and lower all the time and more and more exchanges are coming in with better and better services.

Yeah, the libertarian viewpoint is always very simple: just leave it to free markets.

The problem I see constantly is that libertarians compare something that free market is very good producing at (like bitcoin exchanges, or consumer goods in general) to something that free market hasn't succeeded producing in very efficient/consumer-friendly way, like health care. "Just let free market handle it", without going to any practicalities, because "invisible hand is always the best solution". This is very simplistic and annoying.

There's a free market in health care?  ??? Where? How?

In Somalia, for example.

Why do you need roads when you can have flying cars ?

In Somalia??
http://www.path.org/files/FGM-The-Facts.htm
"Female Genital Mutilation..., the prevalence varies from 98 percent in Somalia to 5 percent in Zaire."

http://www.desertflowerfoundation.org/en/

The only difference is that the trade is voluntary. It's a big difference.

Sure, give me back my taxes.

The tendency of people to conflate issues and over think simple things is annoying.  Simple is simple.

A friend just got back from 6 months in Europe & was very clear that flying is a lot cheaper than trains.  It also wouldn't surprise me if trains in Europe are heavily subsidized.  So using trains as a competing example probably isn't the best idea.  And finding a good example period is extremely difficult because almost all forms of transportation everywhere in the world are subsidized by the government.

Not again with Somalia ::)
Somalia was a shithole. Now it's an anarchist shithole. It might be a better shithole than before, though.
If "go move to Somalia" is your argument against anarchy, "go move to 1800's Somalia" is my argument against statism.

Look at the fringes of our current system that are outside of our socialized medicine.

Look at the price and prevalence of Lasik eye surgery. It is a surgery not covered by insurance and yet the price gets cheaper, the technology improves significantly and it is offered all over the place.

Imagine the same for every other medical treatment.

Trains are indeed heavily subsidized (at least in France). And yet more expensive than flying.

You may be right; I think the actual rails are subsidized and only the trains that run on them are privately owned, so maybe not a good example. As for being more expensive than flying, for long distance (5+ hour drive), maybe, but I remember a trip from Rome to Netuno Italy (about an hour) was ~$16 round trip, and from London to Cambridge (about two hours) was ~$30 round trip. Both trains were local, traveling at about 80 to 100mph, while here in east USA, our Acella Express (US version of high speed train) only has a top speed of about 120mph, and costs about three times as much, despite also being subsidized.
I don't know what the situation is like in Japan, so even though they are also well known for their trains, I didn't bother bringing them up.