Bitcoin Forum

One of my great fears, and I'm sure some of you share it, is that an oppressive and dictatorial style of government will become the norm and that these local governments will have supranational structures imposing on them the equivalent of one world government.

One of the ways that the people can remain free is by privately controlling the means of communication. The internet is for instance 99% privately owned. The entire government portion can be shut down to tomorrow and the world might not even notice. Unfortunately the political class specialize in showing up to a private party late and then shouting "lets get this party started!" as they impose rations and regulations on previously content happy party goers. I suspect this is why they call their groupings "parties"

The internet has not escaped their attention and obviously we see their fingers in everything. They shout terrorism and child pornography to high heaven but forget that the people themselves are vested in eradicating child pornography and that terrorism is mostly aimed at governments (directly or indirectly).

Cryptography of course makes the common man stronger than the NSA. Thanks to communications protocols based on redundancy and privacy ensuring software it has become possible to read your e-mail from almost anywhere with more secrecy than the US military can apply to its top secret documents. Thanks to cryptography applied to VPNs I can bypass "US only" restrictions and access sites like Hulu.com. The cypher-sphere creates a place of freedom and anonymity that is guaranteed by mathematics and not the whim of an elected official.

My question:
Do you think we will prevail or will government grow until it crushes its host?

It will be an epic battle, but we will prevail.  Our social structure is evolving to a decentralized nature.

I like your line "The cypher-sphere creates a place of freedom and anonymity that is guaranteed by mathematics and not the whim of an elected official."  I may steal it.  ;)

^^^ WIN.

Yes, the cat has been released out of the box.  PGP has been released to the public.  All networking standards by the IEEE are open.  It is too late for the government to turn back.  It will be an epic battle, but we will prevail.

True.   Governments are powerless in cypherspace.  There are no guns nor jails there.   Force in cypherspace is mathematics, and thanks to free software, it belongs to whoever wants to use it.

Where's the "Like", "Thumbs Up", or "+" button on this simple machines forum?  So many great quotes here...

Yeah, but, you know, the cypherspace needs a physical space to exist... The Chinese government is already successfully blocking Tor, for example. Yes, Chinese geeks manage to escape, but once a technology becomes popular enough to be more accessible to not-so-geek folks, then the government can always block if they are really determined. They could go as far as creating a "whitelist" sort of blocking instead of the blacklist model they use right now. (by whitelist I mean you block everything with the exception of a specific list, instead of allowing everything with the exception of a specific list)

It's complicated... but anyway, I also think that cryptography+p2p networks will help society a lot, for sure.

Controlling the infrastructure is more important than anything else. This is analogous to workers controlling the means of production.

http://www.libertyandsolidarity.org/node/104

This interesting read explores some of the dynamics involved with the many facets of crypto-anarchism. It looks at the issue as a class struggle. Bitcoin is specifically mentioned. I should also note that none of the ideas here are new. These issues have been discussed since the early 90s.

I didn't belive you, but apparently it's true that China is getting better at blocking Tor (https://blog.torproject.org/blog/china-blocking-tor-round-two). "Here's a graph of returning users to the Tor Network from China":

http://blog.torproject.org/files/china-direct-180d.png

So looks like they blocked the regular channels a little over a year ago, but according to blog.torproject.org, "most Tor users in China switched to non-public relays, called bridges, over the past few months. Interestingly, the GFW has also started blocking some of the more popular bridges":

http://blog.torproject.org/files/china-bridges-180d.png

So what that means, is we should help out our chinese bretheren and setup a Tor bridge (https://www.torproject.org/bridges).


This is when Steganogrphy (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Steganography) - the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message - comes into play.  Basically you have to embed your cryptographic messages inside 'whitelisted' communication channels disguised as legitimate media.

Crypto is a tool. What is most important is the infrastructure -- the physical network, which is owned by companies and governments. The networks we build upon them (tor, bitcoin, torrent, etc) are still ultimately vulnerable. If your ISP decides to make your upstream 1kbps, then you are effectively a "content consumer" and no longer a peer in a network. Carrier grade NAT (more and more common) can also essentially cut you off from participating in p2p. These trends have been apparent for many years now.

UK can now demand data decryption on penalty of jail time - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2007/10/uk-can-now-demand-data-decryption-on-penalty-of-jail-time.ars

That kills bitcoin, freenet, and Tor in the U.K.  If it is on your computer and you are believed to hold the key, you could go to jail for 5 years.  If this law was further modified to require you to have all keys to encrypted data on your computer, then it further hampers freedom.

You are making an excellent point.  I was also listening to the latest "Thinking Liberty" podcast, and they mentioned this same thing.  The fact that us internet users do not actually own the wires and switches that make up the internet is a serious issue.  Of course having a democratic government take over the internet from the corporations would probably make things worse.  The crux of the problem is that the current structure of the internet is not a p2p, but rather extremely hierarchical with the major corporations and the governments controlling the backbones.  I think the solution is that 'we' actually need to start wiring up our neighborhoods ourselves.

It won't help that much, it's quite easy to block all Tor bridges.


I have a hard time imagining services being provided to a not-so-geek audience by such means...

Here is the bigger question.

We already have FreeNets.
We already have Bittorrent for filesharing.
We have BitCoin for money.
DNS in progress
Any more already implemented or being implemented?

Can we decentralize governments, crowd-funding/crowd-sourcing, etc? What can't we decentralize at this moment?

Would it really be so bad for a town or city to lay down its own fiber or set up its own wireless? What about an ISP run on a cooperative model, whereby the customers owned it?

True. That's also why I created this topic (https://www.bitcoin.org/smf/index.php?topic=2586.0), to try to see if people already know of "alternative infrastructures".

The main problem with internet access - in what concerns avoiding censorship - is that it depends on physical infrastructure to provide the link between ISPs and clients. Even wireless networks like 3G need antennas who can't be too far from the end points. By too far I mean a continent away.

The only type of link that can avoid this is satellite. For example, somebody could launch satellites that would take connections from anywhere in the world and, by having a physical infrastructure in a place controlled by a still-not-so-authoritarian government, link censorship victims to the open internet, anonymously and cersorshipfree. Of course, authoritarian governments would forbid their citizens from accessing such network, but as long as the equipment needed to connect to it is cheap enough and small enough to be hidden, I suppose it would be difficult to trace down everyone. And with bitcoins, clients could pay for their access anonymously too - the problem here would be how to obtain bitcoins in such a hostile place... I imagine it would be almost like drug dealing...

Now, all that said... launching satellites is expensive! I suppose the costs of launching a satellite largely outcomes the revenues one would expect to have from it. That's why I asked on that topic if it would be possible to hijack those US military satellites for such purpose. :D

They want to: http://seasteading.org/
I hope they manage. :)

I'm in favor of democracy. A truly democratic government by definition would tend to decentralize control and would look very little like what we currently regard as governments. Don't mistake what we have in western countries with democracy. That is all just garbage they teach kids in school - what we have are republics and parliaments. As FatherMcGruder mentioned, a democratically controlled infrastructure may look like a co-op. There are small manufacturing shops in the US that take this form. The workers and engineers own the factory and manage it democratically, not like most companies. Caveden, it is certainly possible for networks to be organized at the local level and extended, using a co-op or even volunteer model. Some networks like this already exist. Bitcoin can be a complementary tool to raise capital and establish more and more reliable networks. I'm not smart enough to foresee how this would happen, but history shows that these sorts of societal structures are at least possible. Pre-Columbian Native American cultures in North America give a good example.

This is all true, but real democracy doesn't scale well, and is far from conflict free.  Most people think of federated representative parlimentary governance whenever someone says "democracy", so there will continue to be much confusion without a common definition.  The US isn't a democracy now, and never has been, because the framers knew that democracy was flawed, and didn't trust that it was sustainable in any context.  Our history has proven them correct.  Keep in mind that prior to 1913, we didn't have central banking, franctional reserve banking, Senators were not elected, and there was no federal income tax.  We still don't directly elect the US president.  The US is a federated republic quite intentionally, and most of Europe are parlimentary republics for similar reasons.  Anyone who advocates for increased democracy at the state or national level is advocating for majority rule, and the rights of a minority have no meaning in that context.  Such a person is either a fool or a Sith Lord.

I can say this much.  If it is a satillite that you are aware of, it's not really a military satillite.  It's probably a honeypot, and any attempt to do anything with it will draw the very kind of attention that you do not want.  If you are a particularly talented ham radio operator, with much experience with satillite tracking (or a foreign government geek who's job this would be) you can find real military satillites.   You might even be able to track them adaquately, but most military satillites spend most of their time 'dark', just listening.

I would not consider it realistic to hijack either a honeypot or a real military satillite for any purpose.

It depends which point of view you take. If you take the point of view of a rich landowner, then democracy sure doesn't scale well. If you are a regular person, it scales a bit better.

That is the purpose of propaganda.

Quite true. They knew that they needed to establish a government that would protect the interests of rich landowners from regular people. They were very explicit about how they regarded non-property holders - as dangerous and stupid masses from which the rich needed to be protected. Madison and Hamilton both were shockingly open about it.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_United_States_Senate
I leave it to the readers here to decide what they think is right or wrong about what they thought.

The same ideas are now working for the interests of large corporations, which essentially own governments. Incidentally, none of what I am writing here is particularly controversial, but I encourage anyone who is interested to investigate these matters on their own (i.e. don't take my word for anything).

Yes. If there is great inequality, then a democracy will tend to eliminate the inequality. To maintain inequality, democracies must be avoided at all costs. This is not just US history. This is the history of western civilization.

And you are saying these are good things? I think you must be on the wrong forum.

Your last sentence articulates well the contempt for democracy inculcated by western "liberal" education. This thinking leads to centralization of power and capital, which are exactly what frameworks like bitcoin are designed to dismantle.

Bitcoin is an idea that originated from cypherpunk context, and by extension, libertarianism. Bitcoin does not dismantle the accumulation of wealth, nor does it democratize money. Inequality is inherent in bitcoin.

Yet, everybody have the freedom to accept or deny bitcoin.

Those are old satellites that they don't really use for military purposes anymore, and they don't have any sort of encryption or whatever. People are already hijacking them to made radio communication, even for chatting.
I've posted a link on the other topic I linked above. There are some videos on youtube too.
Hijacking them seems simple. The question is whether it's feasible to pass data channels through them...

I hesitate entering into discussions where terms like "libertarianism" start getting thrown around. At least in the US, the term has been reclaimed by far right-wing elements and is associated with the myth of the rugged individual that lives on the frontier and can survive all alone. If you look at what the cypherpunks actually wrote, they were anarchists with strong socialist undercurrents. Their ideas of online p2p communities and strong collaborations rooted in solidarity have basically nothing to do with what people think of libertarians today. Also, "free markets" now essentially mean socialism for large corporations, paid for by normal people and assisted by favorable policies as enforced by central banks. Capitalism, as envisioned by Adam Smith, does not exist today. I encourage anyone here who disagrees with me to go and read the writings of the cypherpunks in the 90s and Adam Smith. Digital cash may facilitate a true free market by disallowing a corrupt central banking authority that favors the interests of large corporations. This is indeed a strong democratizing force - one which forces all to play by the same rules. I also suspect (and this is conjecture) that simply by forcing all to play by the rules, wealth will be less likely to accumulate into the hands of very few, as it has so many time before. The extent to which wealth is accumulated by the very few is largely the result of what I regard as unjust "socialism for the rich and tough love for everyone else." Social libertarianism and social anarchism are not contradictions in terms.

Well geez, you must have your head into the ground with regard to the current community. This is mostly a libertarian forum with a significant number of us are anarchists. I would think that the support of democracy or equality is taboo around here.

I cannot tell if the last sentence is meant seriously or in jest.

These ideas are discussed with disdain.

It is pointless to use terms like liberal, conservative, libertarian, anarchist, left, right, blue, red, progressive, democracy, republic, etc., as all of them have been rendered meaningless by overuse and misuse in the media.  Either you are in favor of centralized control of the economy by government, banks and large corporations or you are opposed to it.  That will determine whether or not you belong here.

No.  I wasn't being coy or relative.  Democracy doesn't scale beyond 1000 voting members.  I've seen in on many occasions.  Attend a full church business meeting sometime, there is a reason that they don't do such things except under dire need.


That was only two out of hundreds, and Madison was conflicted in this regard.  Try actually reading the Federalist Papers and the full text of the US Constitution, it was certainly not intended to protect landowners.  Hamilton was functionally a loyalist and an elitist, but his particular viewpoint was not widely held by '76ers or framers.


Understandable considering their background.  The US would still be a British territory if King George could have managed to compromise.

I don't contest this assesment of the current situation, but it was not because of the framers or the government that they designed that this is so, but despite it.  If we can blame the constitution for any of this, it would be because the public has put too much faith in a document that following generations of Americans have too long ignored.
I say democracy is a tyranny of a majority, and any inequality in life will be maintained or increased by one, not limited by one.  I have the history of civilizations to support my position, you have the limited retoric of the past 200 years or less.

I'm saying these are better than democracy.  I'm certainly not on the wrong forum.  Perhaps you don't fully understand what democracy leads too?

Democracy is great in theory, but I care only about the practice.  A democracy requires much work on the part of the electorate to maintain itself.  Inevitablly the electorate becomes distracted by their own lives, and leaves such things to people who are more interested in the political process than themselves, which leads to the consolidation of power by fiat, corruption or simple neglect.  It happens every time.  A republic isn't better in this regard, but they are more sustainable because the process of representative governance slows down the processes that lead to rot.  Thomas Jefferson, himself, expressed doubt that a generation could impose a social contract on those that followed, but also doubted that there was a better solution.  The root problem with democracy is the human component.

The theory is wrong if the practice is wrong. The map is not the territory. The map must be fixed. Therefore the theory must be rejected as it is not in agreement with reality.

I would also conclude that a republic also have the same failing of a democracy. I defer to creighto's analysis of electorate incentive and behavior to make my argument.

I don't think that we are in disagreement.  Just different ways of saying it.

True, but in a representative republic, the edicts take longer to march through the process towards enforcement.  In a true democracy, if one could even exist on a level larger than the small town, the decisions of the electorate are effective immediately.

My apologies everyone for using that horribly misunderstood term "democracy".  I should have instead used the term "democratic State" instead of "democratic government", since a democratic government formed entirely by consenting adults is perfectly permissible (and may even be a more efficient form of government for a business enterprise or management of shared resources than the typical hierarchical dictatorship with CEOs and board members running everything top down), while a democratic state is by its very nature must initiate violence against unconsenting inhabitants inside its territory.  Indeed, I am very much open to the concept of democratically controlled infrastructure at the local level.  For instance, each of us could go around our local neighbored, solicit money to fund a local high speed internet loop on our local road, form a democratically-governed contract detailing how decisions about purchasing and maintaining of the network routers, switches, and fiber cables on our little neighborhood should be determined, and what routing protocols should be used to ensure fairness (and how fairness of bandwidth usage should be defined).  For every neighborhood road, there is likely to be at least one geek/nerd like us who would be competent in setting up such a network.  And then connect each local highspeed networks to neighboring networks to build up a new internet in an decentralized mesh-like fashion, rather than have big ISP control the passage of your bits between your home and the centralized Internet Exchange Point which connects to the rest of the network.

Hi again guys,

Very happy at how this post is turning out ;D

I started skimming over the last few posts since they seem to debate specifics regarding what would constitute freedom.

A lot of people I talk to are very "libertarian" although don't go into full blown anarcho-whateverism. Most of these people actually have no conscious political interest but get quite excited when they begin to see that our present form of government would do better by getting out of the way and allowing people to solve their own problems.

If I can throw in a uniting cry "the freedom to solve out own problems" I think we can go a long way to identifying people and organizations that are useful and not so useful to reaching the desired ends. But also it is necessary for people to debate until they can settle on a well formed view that has withstood debate.

What I find a little disturbing about many of the "freedom minded" is how much they focus on the decay of freedom. They go on and on about how everything will lead us into the dark ages and ignore incremental progress like the collapse of communism, the liberalization of China, the end of Apartheid, the changes in Swedish socialism since the 1990s. I personally believe and hope that most people, even those in government, are open to "the freedom to solve our own problems". People also become very open when it becomes abundantly obvious that the gov. is in the way.

A great mercy from the Most High is that the market eventually wins. Even if the government wins for a period of time, eventually the market will overwhelm their policies through economic forces. Unfortunately that might be proceeded by a few decades, or even centuries of regression.

Another encouraging idea is that there are always pockets of freedom. During the Soviet Union there were black markets, I'm sure that even if we "lose" there will be a remnant where ideas can be debated freely even if it is only the super geeky.

I suppose the next questions are:
*How do we get members for the cryptography revolution?
*How do we complete the cryptography revolution?

What I see here are several people who imagine themselves as lords over their own private domains who can exist completely independently of others. What utter nonsense. The limiting case of these kinds of hallucinations is a situation where everyone is in a race to the bottom to abandon the very qualities that make them human. It doesn't take much thinking to anticipate what a world based on values of absolute greed and selfishness would be. As a matter of fact, we can see what such a world would look like. Check out Somalia. Tell us how nice it would be to raise a family there.

Thankfully, normal humans understand that we require cooperative efforts to survive and improve our condition. Sure, democracy isn't perfect. It just happens to be far better than anything else we know of. Compromises are obviously required. The question we should be asking is: do we wish to make our lives better individually at the expense of others, or do we try to take the concepts of solidarity and basic human decency seriously? What kind of world do we wish to live in? To see our children live in?

You may all go back to your regularly scheduled Ayn Rand readings. Good day.

What I see are people showing that you dont need a coercive state to trade peacefully with anyone or produce an egalitarian currency.

^^^ Alert: This post is full of many logical fallacies and false claims about anarchists.

At the end of the day, incentive matters. Greed, selfishness, and altruism and all that are second fiddle to economics.


Any educated libertarian understood that cooperation is the pillar of economic progress because they understood the principle of comparative advantage and division of labor.



Democracy make life worse for the minority, and better for the majority. There's no cooperation, but the iron fist of the majority. In any case, democracy have no built in protection against the election of tyrants, idiots and so on. If they can elect Napoleon and Hitler, what's there to prevent the election of a tyrant even worse than the two of them?


Had anybody ever tried to act against basic human decency, defraud anybody, and so on? I assure you that's only the minority of posters here. If they are identified, they are either banned or ostracized.

I would also dare to argue that this community is in solidarity with one another.  We also have no qualm about donating to others, helping others, and making act of altruism. Libertarians are individualists, not anti-altruists.

Ayn Rand was an objectivist and she did believe in limited government but not in Anarchy. She said Anarchy would destroy civilization and freedom, much like you are stating now. On the other side many Anarchists are not Anarcho-Capitalists and Anarcho-Capitalists are not necessarily Objectivists. Most Libertarians are not devout Anarcho-Capitalists and would not favour a Somalia like situation.

So exactly who of us are you attacking ???
If all these groups of us can find an amicable way to debate why not rather join the amicable debate?


The entire point of Austro-Libertarianism (The view espousing limited government as a logical outflow from economic understanding) can almost be summed up by this sentence of yours. The more freely and the more easily that can happen the more civilized civilization becomes.

Within democracy you actually get so varied a set of views of what is a government and such a large variety of outcomes that there is actually choice as to which type of democracy is the best type of democracy. So to correct Churchill; a constitutional democracy based on limited style of government is not perfect but it's the best type of democracy we know about. Besides if you are an American and are referring to how well it seems to have worked there, remember that you are in a constitutional republic (or at least you used to be) and not in a pure democracy that is part of why it worked out so well.

Gene, after reading some of your previous posts I can see where you are coming from. If I understand your view correctly you are concerned that government and libertarian arguments are used in favour of rich entrenched interests and do not end up improving the lives of everyone. I can totally respect that view.

However if we ever did have your kind of world, and there were plans to improve life in some way and I chose not to participate. Would someone need to force me to or could I go my merry way in peace?

Cooperation and improvment of each other condition is just what free volontary trade is about.


Why do want it to be "at the expense of others" ?   Free trade is volontary : it's a win-win game.

That is a fair assessment. I think a good case can be made that historically what are now called "libertarian" views have been co-opted by powerful interests. Is it really that surprising that fundamentally selfish motives can be leveraged to construct large scale injustice?


I don't think anyone should (or even can) be forced to partake in any society against his or her will. Hermits have always existed. However, if a person wishes to enter society (a relationship of some sort with at least another person) then compromises must necessarily be made. A democratic community should decide (yes - likely though difficult deliberation) what that standards and social contracts are based on their values and goals. Again, a person may be cast out of society for failing to meet some social obligation, or leave voluntarily. This seems elementary to me.


You assume it is voluntary. Consider a farmer forced off his land and into a city by a powerful landowner. He can choose to work in a factory in basic slavery. Or he can choose to starve. Some would consider that "voluntary" free trade. This is not a hypothetical example, by the way.

Selfish motives -> injustice is unjustified. You need to reason why selfish motives equal injustice.


Where is this social contract and how do I sign it?

If the rich landowner purchase land from him, than it's fine. If the landowner took it by force, that's a violation of property right.

Working for food does not equal automatic slavery.

Any such relation is difficult, perhaps impossible, to show. It is my conjecture, based on experience and intuition. Human nature/interactions are far too complex to try to nail down the validity of any such statements. I will say that I am not alone in suspecting that the relation holds in most meaningful cases.


I think you know you are being obtuse, but I'll play along. The contract depends on who lives in the society. You "sign" it by living in the society.


Property rights are defined by those who own lots of property. Eminent domain is sometimes used by private interests to re-appropriate land.

However, we can go on to consider specific cases where the idea of ownership of resources falls down. If I say that I own something that you need to survive (water, air, etc.) then you may agree that there is a severe limitations regarding the concept of arbitrary private property.


I see no distinction between being forced to live in a sweat shop to feed your family and slavery. I do see a difference between that situation and a factory that is run cooperatively by employees.

You need to drop all such arguments.


The contract is invalid. You must sign it to implies that you understand "society's rule".

The real situation is clear. Do as we say, or we use violence or throw you in jail. That is reality.


This is not property right people understood in Libertarian parlance. It is understood that people, no matter how rich they are, cannot take your property away, unless you specifically sold it to said person.


It is my opinion that slavery required coercion. A threat of violence. If there is no such threat but nature, than it is not slavery.

I am not going to discard my intuition and experience. It has helped me avoid mistakes and solve problems. Just because I cannot show definitely why intuition and experience (induction) works does not disqualify it as a useful method. I prefer deductive methods, but induction and deduction may complement each other. You may disagree on my conclusions or reject my experience as invalid, and that is fine.


It may be. However, authority must always justify itself to the satisfaction of those it claims to represent. In a true democracy, this condition is satisfied, by definition.


It is an academic exercise then. In reality, property owners routinely conspire to allocate resources and capital to their own ends at the expense of others. This has been repeatedly demonstrated.


By that logic, I can commit all sorts of atrocities and blame them on "nature" or "acts of God." The problem with this logic is that one can predict a likely outcome of such situations; this is sufficient to show intent in a court of law.

Shooting someone in the face and denying them a means to earn food lead to the same predicable outcome: death. If they only way to earn food is by working in a sweatshop, I think one could demonstrate that the situation is coercive. In my estimation (and I would wager - the estimation of most), this is criminal.

Also, I noticed you skipped over my example about property rights over air and water. What is you stance on that?

My experience tells me that human beings are all evil. It doesn't matter if they have good intentions.


We have relative strong property right in the western world. Without the ability of accumulation, there is no capital. Without capital, there is no wealth. It is not an academic exercise, but an actual economic consequence.


Cannot follow the logic.


I agree that the outcome is the same. However, for coercion to qualify, a human being must actively threaten another to do something. Denial of resource a human being own is merely "not helping".

Working in a sweatshop is a lifesaver compared to the economic condition I would have to endure outside the sweatshop.


It is up to those who possess the mean to determine what they shall do something with it. It is an extreme situation with impossible ethical choices. Save others, or yourself, or die altogether. I do not wish ill well on those who are forced to make such decisions like this.

Gene, you make strong logical arguments and obviously have thought and read about these subjects in depth.  If I understand correctly your main concern is the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the few while the many live in poverty.  This concern is justified as history is rife with many examples of this sort of social injustice.  However, upon examination, you'll find this is always caused by government.  Even today, Big Business tends to grow so large because it's in bed with government.  Without government regulations and taxes to drive out marginal consumers Big Business would have a lot more competition and would not be able to grow so large and abusive.

From what I can tell you are in favor of decentralization and I agree with that.  What I don't agree with is that democracy is the best institution for governance, even local governments.  Democracy is fundamentally flawed: just because a majority of people hold an opinion, does not mean that opinion is right. Morality and reality aren't subject to the majority concentration of opinion.  I'm sure you're aware of this, so I guess what I'd like to hear from you is how you think individual rights and private property rights would be protected under any sort of democratic system.

I noticed your Ayn Rand comment in an earlier post.  I'd like to point out that associating all Libertarians with Randian objectivism is hardly fair.  I know it is the stereotype and is very easy to paste onto anyone vaguely libertarian to discredit them, but for heaven's sake that's what the mainstream media does.  Don't be like them.  :) 

I consider myself libertarian but have never read Miss Rand's "epic" works of literature and don't subscribe to her philosophy of objectivism, where what ever she believes is what is objective and whatever someone else believes is subjective.  That being said, I'm not completely discrediting her because she doubtless had many good ideas which helped fuel the libertarian movement.

Her novels are awesome. I've just finished re-reading "We the Living". Story synopsis: The heroine, a very cool 18-year-old chick, is having sex with two guys. One is a communist with integrity, who kills himself when it dawns on him that all of his comrades have become corrupt. The other is an anti-communist who loses his integrity and descends into debauchery. This leaves the chick feeling that she has no alternative to escape the country (it's set in Russia in the 1920s), and ... I won't reveal the ending.

Both "We the Living" and "The Fountainhead" are great stories even for those with no libertarian leanings. On the other hand, her masterpiece "Atlas Shrugged" can be hard going for non-libertarians, and the 50-page speech of John Galt is hard going even for libertarians.

I've heard good things of her writings in general and do plan to read some of her books at some point.  I just don't think she is the end-all of libertarian thought.

For sure you're right. But when Ayn Rand developed Objectivism, she pulled together many ideas in a very coherent way. Some of those ideas were unthinkable to many people at the time she published them, but have now become more generally understood. And as thinkers have moved forwards to accept those broad ideas, they can now see further and can fill in the finer details. Today, the person who might have been an Objectivist Libertarian in Rand's time, may be a market anarchist or other flavor of voluntarist.

Here's a specific example. Ayn Rand patiently wrote up explanations of how certain aspects of society could work in a Libertarian world. For example, she explained how the radio spectrum could be allocated based on market principles rather than by the favors of officials and committees. As a teenager in the 1970s I presented that argument to those with whom I was debating, and I was heavily ridiculed. People came up with reason after reason why radio frequencies couldn't possibly be allocated to the highest bidder. And yet here we are today, with mobile phone frequencies routinely allocated by auction in most countries.

Oh, that's just rediculous hyperbole!  I believe that John Galt's speech is only 32 pages.

Thumbs up.  I agree with you.  Also, I really like your example of radio spectrum allocation.  That one is near and dear to my heart...

I read Atlas Shrugged long after I became a libertarian, and after I had many liberals accuse me of being a Rand worshipper.  I wouldn't consider the book to be a truly great piece of fiction.  It was a good read, but it's real value is as a philosophy tome disguised as a work of fiction.  The characters are stereotypes, on purpose, because they represent entire mindsets and worldviews.  On a related note, John Stossel recently did a show about the 50th anniversary of the release of Atlas Shrugged including helping the Rand Foundation announce their video contest winner.  I've yet to see the video, but if some of the losing submissions are any indication, it's got to be outstanding.

Although I can admit that I was moved by the book, I was already a libertarian.  For anyone who doesn't know about that concept who reads that book will either love it or hate it, but no one walks away from it unchanged.

Still, I would say that The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Alongside Night were two very libertarian novels that were far better works of storytelling.

Then that is your root problem.  If this is how you believe people are, then you will gravitate towards authoritarianism throughout your life.  For if no individual can be trusted to have a code of honor, then only the threat of collective force could ever keep them in check.

Sociopaths only make up about 2% of the general population, but make up at least 10% of all corporate CEO's, 60% of the penal population and 20% of the career military with more than one tour of duty.

What does that tell you?

For the record, I am an anarchist, and an anti-authoritarian.

Yes I do assume it is voluntary.  That's the definition of free trade.

If a farmer is forced off his land, then this land is not "his".   He was working on a land he doesn't own.  Working in a city doesn't improve his situation, but it doesn't make it fundamently worse either.

You've mentioned that before, but your statements don't mesh.  Not all anarchists are the same, as some intend for anarchy to be a stepping stone to another political end; and many who say they are anti-authoritarian are really anti-current-establishment.  If you can imagine a type of authority that you could find acceptable, then you are not truly anti-authoritarian.  Honestly, I don't think that libertarians are absolutes in this regard.  I'm certainly not, as I have real problems with the concept of absence of government.  Duely limited, sure, but anarchy isn't a sustainable condition, even when it's desirable.  There are always that thin minority of the population that is truly evil, for whom the collective force of society is the only plausible limitation.  Nature doesn't like a vaccuum, and neither does politics.  It is a part of human nature for most people to look for guidance during a crisis, and a crisis is easy to manufacture within an anarchist society.

I was going to stay out of this thread, but statements like this really have to be answered.  Let's conduct a thought experiment.  There exists an impoverished, third-world village where most of the inhabitants don't get enough to eat.  If nobody from the outside does anything, conditions in the village will likely remain the same for generations.  A businessman comes along and builds a factory on previously-unused land and offers jobs to those who wish to work there.  Everything about the working conditions and wages is disclosed beforehand.  Each villager has the option of continuing to scrounge/trade for food in the same way they have for generations or work at the factory.  Some choose to work at the factory and decide that it is better than the old way of surviving, even though the hours are long and the conditions less favorable than in the industrialized countries.  How is this coercive or criminal?

Psycopaths make a large percentage of politicians.

Intuitively true, but if there is any group that is inclined to avoid proper phycological profiling, it's politicians.

I think that we're not too late.
All the technologies needed are already there (P2P, Bitcoin, TOR, I2P, Proxy, OpenVPN etc).

It is already possible.  The internet could already become one giant gray box, to which you send data and from which you receive data, not knownig where that data come from, and where are the data coming to. But that of course depends on the people and their will to do it.

The question is - will the people follow this path ? I certainly hope so, because IMHO the only other way out of the current situation is either a Global Totalitarian Government or war. I sure would pick anonymity & freedom.

Anyway I doubt something like bitcoin could have come sooner.

It needed the financial crisis to happen.  I'm personnaly convinced that Satoshi wrote his code after the "Too big to fail" thing.

And if not, at least IMO many of bitcoin early adopters came into being interested in it after having been disgusted by financial bail-outs.

You could always ask him.


Do you realize that these are exactly the same arguments of any CEO of any multi-national? I am sure that they believe the arguments, but the thought experiment collapses immediately upon inspection of its presuppositions.

It may prove instructive to ask why the village is destitute. Or why cities are crowded with miserably poor and desperate people - people who, conveniently for the businessman, make really good employees because they don't have any choices (what was that about free trade?). Typically, the whys aren't accidents. They are deliberately planned and executed acts of centralized power and capital - acts with easily predictable (indeed, predicted) outcomes.

The idea that your hypothetical company just happens to come in and help the poor masses by offering them sweat shops and fascist dictatorships (you neglected to mention that corresponding aspect) is morally offensive to many, especially when considering all the requisite conditions which are systematically designed and implemented.

Indeed, that is why anarchy would work so well for poorer people. Most of the destitute people in the village are creative, resourceful, hard-working people. But in a statist society they compete against corporations who can retain profits while externalising many risks (that's what a state-protected corporation is, in essence).

In the absence of state coercion, the people in the village would have much more opportunity to benefit from self-organization and bottom-up growth, and the village would flourish. You don't need a large organization to perform agriculture, services, or most kinds of manufacturing. Sure, a factory is capital-intensive, but that doesn't mean it needs a corporation. Instead, it can be the coming-together of a number of individuals or smaller autonomous organizations, one of whom does one subtask: owns and leases the building, owns and leases various pieces of machinery, supplies and drives a truck, etc.

Only the very largest of projects (designing and building a new kind of airliner, for example), need more than this, and those industries will of course only exist in heavily-populated areas with high levels of education etc.

Large companies can become (have become) virtually indistinguishable from states. They represent centers of capital and, by extension, power.


Perhaps. Or perhaps a large corporation would impose its own forms for coercion. State vs private: they look the same from the end of a barrel.


I agree. Cooperatives run via democratic principles can and have achieved success. However, don't expect concentrated power to let this go unchecked. Democracy is the most powerful threat to centralized power that we know of.


And what happens when, say, the truck owners decide they want something and decide to stop running their trucks? Or any other economically important property?


... they will only exist in the presence of concentrated capital. In early US history, this need was recognized. This was the role of the corporation. One difference between those corporations and modern corporations is that as soon as its charter was satisfied (bridge built or river dammed) the corporation would be dissolved. Now, corporations have all the rights of people (and more, actually) and can live forever.

The state can take those rights away. In the absence of a democratically appointed authority, a corporation will never impose checks on itself. It becomes a total tyranny, absolutely devoid of any accountability besides the threat of popular revolt, to be kept in check by force.

Colors are not indistinguishable because you are colorblind. I can tell the difference easily.

If some corporation has a problem with me, they don't give me things anymore, and I don't give them money anymore. If some government has a problem with me they put me in a cage and try to kill me if I resist.

You are absolutely right to look at why people's best option is to accept a shit job from a corporation. And the answer is always a government. People leave bad conditions if there aren't laws and borders preventing them. People want to make their lives better and will if they aren't threatened with prison and death.

I'm not saying that corporations are blameless, but when they do evil the tool they use is government.

Actually, that is no longer true. Large corporations have become so powerful, they can kill you if they don't like you, and they get away with it:
http://killercoke.org/

For now this usually happens in small third world countries, where law is weak and governments are corrupt. But it won't be like this forever. Also, you should probably watch/play some Resident Evil (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resident_Evil).

Sure, I shouldn't speak in absolutes like I did.

I completely know that individuals and corporations (well, individuals using the cover of corporations) hurt people all the time. But for anything truly systemic, enormous and awful government (well, individuals using the cover of governments) have to be involved.

I have little doubt coke has killed many people. Maybe 10 or 100 or 1000. But I know for sure that my government has killed 1000s of 1000s and imprisons right now a similarly huge number. They do it in the open, they tell everyone, they are proud of their wars on people.

Government is not the only problem, but it is so much bigger than every other problem combined that I just don't care about the other ones right now.

You can hide a few dozen murders, but since you can't hid a few million you have to train people to ignore that reality. It's massive, it's right in front of us.

Democracy is centralized power, so it can't possibly be a threat to centralized power. That's like saying that democratic control of the Fed would be a threat to centralized banking.

Oh, come on. If the co-operative needs the truck owners more than they need the co-op, the co-operative will give in to some of the truck drivers' demands. If the truck drivers need the co-op more than the co-op needs them, either the co-op will find someone else to drive the trucks, or the truck drivers will come crawling back asking for work again. In this way, a stable equilibrium will soon be reached. In a non-coercive society, everyone benefits from co-operation and negotiation and a show of strength is rarely needed.

Just who do you think benefits from wars?




"The biggest trick the devil played was convincing the world that he didn't exist."


The thin, peeling veneer of government over private power serves a few purposes. It convinces people that government (in which they may at least have some nominal participation and ability to change) is far worse than a system of private control over which they have no control whatsoever. It also convinces people that democracy is evil or a path toward centralized power, which is exactly where private control over all capital consistently leads.


An example, as if I had planned it:


War is peace, black is white and up is down. It is impossible to discuss these issues when the terms of the discussion have no meaning. Let's establish a point of reference:

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy


Sure, but this example generalizes. Consider the limiting case of private control over unique (no substitutes exist) and critical resources. The demands can literally be anything. This is the definition of coercion. "You want access to clean water? How much are you willing to pay?"

All these scarce resources have to be rationed, anyhow.


All governments are centralized power. Democracy is a kind of evil you prefer.

I never said anything about a fascist dictatorship.  That's something you added.  Corporations are fictitious entities, creations of the state.  So yeah, I'm in agreement with you that there shouldn't be a government behind which businesses can hide.

Interestingly, Smedley Butler is widely quoted by us anti-statists as an argument for precisely why we shouldn't have a state.  The State is used by private interests to advance their private goals at the expense of the rest of society.

I'm curious, gene.  If you are so much opposed to private control over money, then why are you supporting bitcoin?

Bitcoin also make it easy for people to accumulate wealth!

I think Satoshi is like, the richest bitcoiner on earth.

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on whats for dinner .

I doubt that, really.  There are a number of early forum members who seem to have had substantial resources before jumping into this, who likely had a better ability to generate than a single, presumedly middle class, programmer.  ArtForz likely had greater wealth overall, both outside and inside of Bitcoin.  I can't imagine that it's terribly likely that Satoshi has personally dedicated more than a few cpu's to generation.  Assuming that ArtForz's claims with regard to his own generating capacity are remotely accurate, which has more or less been verified by at least one other forum member; it is very unlikely that Satoshi is even in the top five.

Gene, you're absolutely correct, defenseless stateless populations would pretty obviously be subject to aggression by private powers.  It should be noted, however, that if a private power relies on maintaining a good reputation in order to preserve its customer base, then this imposes an added cost of messing with the defenseless stateless populations.

Unfortunately this disincentive is not sufficient to deter attacks in all cases, since the customer base may be either
1) too uninformed or apathetic
2) other private powers whose customer bases are too uninformed or apathetic
3) governments whose citizens are either uninformed, apathetic, or just not powerful enough to keep their governments accountable

For all of these things, solidarity is indeed very important (most important in the long run, IMO); stateless people needs to organize effective PR campaigns.  They should take lessons from the Israelis here.  ;)

More important in today's world with today's human population, however, is actual muscle; stateless defense needs to be organized in such a way that overcomes the free rider problem enough to deter attacks.  Here's one possible solution: http://www.youtube.com/user/fringeelements#p/u/2/ylXAhyDZhZ4 (http://www.youtube.com/user/fringeelements#p/u/2/ylXAhyDZhZ4).  Long video, but most honest presentation on the subject I've heard so far.

I'll criticize ancaps for sometimes not recognizing the fact that all systems of property rights are involuntary to those that don't agree with them.  Also, sure they're useful from an economic efficiency standpoint, but the reason they emerge when they do is to prevent or mitigate disputes.  So it's a total violation of the natural order to try to impose systems of property rights from the top down.  (I'm looking at Natural Rights adherents and Objectivists here - refuting their moral theories is the topic for another tl;dr.)

That being said, I would prefer to live in a society that respects the private ownership of capital based on its apparent economic efficiency.  I would say that private powers in this society only become really problematic when they are unchecked, and the biggest factors in their ability to become unchecked are the existence of monopolistic law making institutions that have vast ideological support, called states, from which they can buy blindly-enforced laws cheaply, and also the degree to which people are "disarmed" - in various senses - by these states, and left unwilling or unable to create actual effective checks on private powers in an emergent, bottom-up, resilient fashion.  I think it is possible for a stateless society to defend itself from aggressive private powers, and I think solidarity based on a common set of values is extremely beneficial for the provision of this defense, as well as any otherwise unsupplied public goods.

I hope this helps to produce some understanding or agreement.  Or maybe I've just made enemies on both sides.  :P

Individuals in corporations. They see that people acquiesce to government violence so they pay individuals in government to do it. No corporation could sell anything after they killed a million people. The cost of hiding murders is so great that it has to be outsourced to a government (who is doing it in the open!) to happen on any but the smallest scale.  

I want to clarify, I have no love for any corporation that makes deals with government, which happens to be all of them afaik.

You can think of my position as wishing to disarm corporations of their weapon, the government. So they can focus on the good they do, which is bringing me and my family things. And without government any that don't satisfy needs will simply fade away.

But without government how do corporations play nice with scarce resources like electromagnetic spectrum, the environment, fisheries, etc.?

This is as general a question as "How will people resolve conflicts and make the world better?". It's a really really hard question to answer and anyone trying is doing it wrong. Every specific little issue is hard, it will best be answered by the people who know about it and care about making it work or making it better. All I'm saying is that force is not the answer to any of these problems. I don't have one millionth the hubris required to give a blanket solution to all the problems humans face now and in the future. The people with the armies police and nukes unfortunately seem to have unlimited hubris.

And don't forget that the current situation is that we do have governments and the corporations are not playing nice. The solution of "Corporations get to use the airwaves and if I try I get hurt" is not playing nice. Neither is "This guy can have a farm that leaks waste because he paid us and if you have a farm that doesn't pollute I'm going to put you in jail".

So it isn't like these problems have been solved and I'm talking about unsolving them. I'm suggesting that we start looking for real solutions instead of the psudo-solution of "Put 2 million people in prison and threaten everyone else over and over with 100000 laws"

What says that we want them to play nice?  all of these are examples of forms of commons, but we also have real examples of real successes when innovators don't play nice.  For example, Wifi, Bluetooth, PSK31, Spread spectrum and many other wireless technologies function so well in a crowded EM environment as a direct result of not playing nice, and development that proceeded under the premise that otherswould not play nice.  Wifi & bluetooth in particular use the same unlicensed band, and must function with interference in order to function at all.  And yet, you can buy smartphones today that allow you to use your wifi connection to use Skype while talking on your bluetooth headset inside of a coffeehouse that several other people are trying to do similar things.

Proposed solutions to these problems abound, but it's impossible to say what kind of laws would actually emerge to regulate these in a stateless society.  Different solutions would be tried in different areas, they'd be iteratively improved upon, and the best ones would become the most widely adopted.  On the question of how to get corporations to play nice, I addressed the issue of enforcement of the rule of law in a stateless society in my previous post in this thread.

Cognitive wireless mesh networks seem like a promising way of reducing the scarcity of electromagnetic spectrum.

Here's another video by that guy on these issues: https://www.youtube.com/user/fringeelements#p/u/3/qwCXOhDqRYc (https://www.youtube.com/user/fringeelements#p/u/3/qwCXOhDqRYc)

I would describe spread-spectrum as "playing nice", because it's not depending on the force of the state to exclude competitors.

For those who don't know "spread spectrum" technology, it's radio communication that doesn't use any specific frequency or "channel". Rather, it spreads the signal over a wide range of frequencies, but uses a coded pattern that allows a receiver to reconstruct the desired signal.

There's no fixed limit to the capacity of spread spectrum transmissions. As more people transmit at the same time, the effective data rate per user slows down (or, a voice communication gets more background noise), but no-one gets blocked out. A higher-power transmitter gets better results, of course, as does a more directional antenna, but it's a near-optimum way to share out the limited resource of the radio spectrum without any central authority.

What about examples where corporations didn't play nice resulting in a bad outcome, like the depletion of fisheries in the northern Atlantic? Without the state, who forces a corporation, or an individual for that matter, to clean up its or his messes?

The engineers of these technologies don't do things the way they do because 'playing nice in a small pen' is their primary concern, although it likely is of some concern.  If they just chose to do what is in their own interests only, without considering their impact on others, then eventually others would make undermining their success a priority.  However, if the engineers consider the impact on others, and try to minimize that impact, they stand a higher probability of success without interference themselves.

This is exactly why WiFi, Bluetooth and Zigbee can all share the same band in the same area and generally succeed at their primary missions.

You'd need a sufficiently incorruptible system for law-making, along with a sufficiently powerful and incorruptible system for enforcing the law.

I don't need any of that imaginary stuff.

Do you need any recourse against some jerk or group of jerks making harmful messes in your vicinity?

The northern Atlantic is largely a commons under the control of the EU as it is, so this is a case of government failures.  The assumption that a government is neccessary to make companies play by rules starts with the premise that government will make companies play by rules.  We have all grown up in societies with rather large governments, under the impression that government oversight is better than the alternatives, but history tells us something different.  I am not an anarchist, but I agree with the anarchists on this forum when they say that increased regulation/government is not a solution.  Government is force at it's core, there is no way around this.  Government regulations are more likely to harm the small fisherman than protect him or the natural world.  I don't have a solution to the problem of the depletion of natural fish stocks, but I know with high certainty that government isn't a solution either.

Seriously?!  Well, if states should fall in my lifetime, and there are enough people like you around, then I know what I'll be doing for a living!  Somebody's gonna be robbing your asses, so it might as well be me!   ;)

Maybe there was some confusion here; I'm not suggesting any kind of centralized monopoly make and enforce laws.

Experience tells me that the kind of person who is willing to live in a state of anarchy is the kind of person that makes for a hard target.


Actually, that's exactly what you seem to be suggesting.

All law enforcement, including property rights enforcement, is force at its core.  Is law bad because of this, too?

The problem is how law is made today, not that it is made in the first place.  We need systems that actually respond to market demand, and have a at least a modicum of efficiency and accessibility.

I would say no, but some would disagree.  That said, the "law" as we know it is not written to restrain the just, but the unjust.  The just understand the "law" intuitively, and don't need it written down.  Any law or regulation that restricts the just from their proper actions, is a false law that deserves to be ignored.

Just don't be confused about the morality of what you advocate. 


Yes we do.  The most effective way of doing what you say above is to remove the regulations currently in play altogether.

Willing?  As if everyone would have a choice?  Do you expect all the grannies that don't to be packing heat?

I apologize if I was unclear, then.  I'm suggesting a polycentric legal order.

I agree, mostly.  There are many areas of law, however, that do seem to require a degree of complexity.

I smell bullshit.  Just a way of using guilt to control people.  The same way religion uses fear.  OTOH, a nice way of getting people to adopt a common set of values...

Anyway, you need to distinguish between legitimate force and illegitimate force.  And how do you do this in an unambiguous way?  The best we can do, I think, is allow the law to develop in a way that is responsive to market demand.

I'm well aware of the problem of regulatory capture and the overproduction of law, so I agree to a large extent.  On the other hand, ceasing the production of law altogether is not the solution to the problem.

That is a need I have now. There is none to buy when the gang is millions strong and supported unthinkingly by most others. I simply can't be scared by a gang that doesn't even exist yet that will be orders of magnitude smaller than the one I dodge every day.

No.  I expect that the anarchist poster that you were responding to in that post, and whom you implied that you would rob under such a state of anarchy, to be packing heat.  For that matter, I would expect him to be packing heat now.  Granny would be the soft target in this context.


Would a return something like the British Common Law of generations past qualify?  Wherein the law is 'discovered' by judges over long periods of time?  Or are you thinking more of a 'phyle' system as described in The Diamond Age?

If you want to convince people that a well-functioning stateless society is possible, you'll have to address how the services monopolized by "the state" today could be sufficiently provided - including courts and law enforcement.  Although today these institutions have been monopolized and now basically serve to protect the interests on an elite, they are still necessary - albeit in a much different form - for solving a host of problems faced by a society, and discerning people will not take your ideas seriously if you can't address this fact.

No, I don't.  In this conversation, you're the advocate; so you need to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate use of force.  That was part of my point about the 'just versus the unjust' post.  What most people think of when we use the term "law" are things that are prohibited because they are bad, but those statutes make up only a very small percentage of those produced by government.  In nearly every case of statutes that exist to punish infractions of common sense and basic civility; those actions (or something very much like them) have been prohibited in civil societies since the dawn of civilizations.  The statutes that refer to them in modern texts of law only clarify ambiguity and define consequences.  Beyond that, everything that comes from government is unjustifiable use of force.  I contend that is a given under the premise that governments are the organized use of force.


That would, indeed, be a wonderful trick.  The fly in the ointment is that is exactly what everyone else believes that whatever they advocate would accomplish.  Be they socialist or anarchists, authoritarians or libertarians, republicans or monarchists.


Why isn't it?  When the US was founded, Congress was in session for only three weeks a year, and were not paid.  If we went back to that age, when serving was an obligation instead of a career, I would wager than things might improve significantly.

I hope I don't have to because I can't. I don't believe law enforcement and courts and roads and welfare are problems that have ever been solved. I'm suggesting that we start trying to solve them instead of forcing people to accept non-solutions at the point of a gun.

It is no more my responsibility to solve these problems than for me to tell you what to eat. If I was a nutritionist or a cookbook author I would offer you some solutions, but I don't claim to be or want to be. Some people will do this and if others like their ideas enough they will try what they suggest.

+1

That was a response to your suggestion that my advocacy of the use of force is immoral.  I was assuming that you didn't mean to imply that this applied to all uses of force.

AFAIK, the only people advocating emergent law here are certain types of anarchists and libertarians.  Republicans think they do out of ignorance to public choice theory, and (statist) socialists think they do out of ignorance to the fact that people are quite different from insects.  I'm only saying here that there is no correct way to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate uses of force.

American common law was working away the whole time.

Like I said, "if you want to convince people that a well-functioning stateless society is possible, ..."  Of course you don't have to, otherwise.

Law enforcement and courts have been provided in many past stateless societies: see medieval Iceland, medieval Ireland, the stateless American west (had a lower homicide rate than the incorporated states!), stateless Pennsylvania (short period of time), Common Law, Law Merchant (there are others that I can't remember).

Welfare and healthcare used to be provided by fraternal societies and churches.

Private roads exist today.  Highways are easy for private providers.  Intracity roads are harder, and probably require some sort of collective arrangement, but there are proposals out there:
https://www.youtube.com/user/fringeelements#p/u/0/A1gp9_oCafM (https://www.youtube.com/user/fringeelements#p/u/0/A1gp9_oCafM)
http://mises.org/books/roads_web.pdf (http://mises.org/books/roads_web.pdf)

Current statist solutions to societal problems certainly suck, but they are in some cases better than no solution at all.  So it is indeed up to the advocate of a stateless society to argue that it could not just provide solutions, but provide them better than today's states if he wants people to accept his ideas.

I don't mean "convincing people isn't my job" I mean "if I could answer all these questions then we shouldn't have anarchy we should have a dictatorship, run by me".

No one knows the best solutions to all problems. Likely no one knows the best solution to any one complex problem. In fact any problem as complicated as "How should people keep their houses lit at night?" has hundreds of solutions none of which are best for everyone.

I'm talking about a new (not new really, we do solve lots of things peacefully) way to find solutions, not about the solutions themselves. The solutions are work for everyone and anyone to do, I have no particular expertise.

Showing solutions from the past is good for illustrating that there are other solutions, but I don't think it is likely that many of the old ways will end up being chosen by people when they are free to try anything.

Then, speaking more broadly, how do we resolve conflicts, those which we typically resolve peacefully with the help of the state, not according to the size of one's mob?

The state doesn't solve anything "peacefully", since it's a violent institution by definition.
But I know what you mean.
I once wrote something about it, but it's in Portuguese, you may check if an auto translation is understandable: http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=fr&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=pt&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mises.org.br%2FArticle.aspx%3Fid%3D605

If you are really curious on how conflicts can be solved without a monopoly of violence search about medieval Ireland or Iceland, Merchant Law and so on... at the end of the text I liked above there are some references, in English. This short book is good too: http://mises.org/books/chaostheory.pdf

Shouting until red in the face goes nowhere. Demonstrate by example- live outside the state. Work towards creating a better future. It's bound to happen eventually, what with the advent of the internet and the free software movement.

Most people resolve conflicts peacefully without the aid of the state.  In the relatively rare cases that the state police & court apparatus is required to resolve a conflict, it's never peaceful.  The fact that both sides may, in public, comply to the decisions of a judge are more often due to the implict threat of force that a judge's decision is supported by.

And my point was that regardless of how any particular advocate of any particular ideology may think about public choice theory, they all basicly believe that what they advocate will result in a better society.  The key difference is that authoritarians of every flavor fundamentally believe that some form of proper government is the key to that better society, while libertarians (the 'big tent' version of that word) of every flavor fundamentally believe that that a proper government is impossible.

Would you call a mugging with a compliant victim peaceful? I don't, but maybe I need a different word to get across what I mean.

Mob size is the virtue of a democracy, I suggest we try something else.

You need to look carefully at what sort of conflicts are actually resolved by the State.  Social pressure and negotiations between individuals tends to resolve a lot of our conflicts without involving the State.  However, when you have a disagreement with a neighbor about property lines or when someone cheats you in a business transaction you do indeed take it to the State's courts.  But it's very costly, time-consuming and there's no guarantee that your case will be decided justly.  This is because the State decides the law and even how to interpret the law and so you have an arbitrary decision.  Why couldn't we have a free-market system of courts, judges and arbiters?  Economics tells us that with competing courts, the judges would have to settle cases fairly and do so in a way that the "customers" see as just.  If the judge doesn't he will lose customers and go out of business.

The case of how courts would work in an anarchist system is a very good question, and much brighter minds then mine have taken a hard look at it. I would refer you to "The Market for Liberty" by the Tannehills for some specific examples of how courts, national defense, insurance, etc. might work in a laissez faire society.  We can't know for sure exactly how things would turn up, because left to a free-market individuals would try different ideas and the ones that worked well would stay around, and the ones that did not would not be able to make a profit and stay in business.

FreeMoney, I agree, solutions that actually emerge in statelessness probably won't look anything like past stateless solutions, or the new proposals thrown around today.  But the point of designing new solutions today is not to figure out exactly how it'll play out, but to undermine the perceived necessity of statist solutions to societal problems.

creighto, we can argue objectively about the merits of a non-monopolistic approach to law and law enforcement over a centrally planned approach.  If opponents are impervious to reason, then the only hope is to at least get them to respect the idea of secession to some degree.  That or wait for them to die out while focusing on raising the new generations right.

Yeah, what creighto said.  Which is why a rosy picture of a stateless society not needing any law and law enforcement is silly.

The only way I can think of to lessen the whole "might makes right" thing is to advance a reasoned respect for the law so that folks are more accepting when it doesn't rule in their favor.  Presumably this would be much easier if it weren't so corrupt.

But really there's no way to avoid it completely.  "Might makes right" is certainly true today.  The only alternatives to anarchy in the pejorative are a single dominant power, or lots of them in some state of peaceful coexistence, where if one becomes abusive, enough of the rest will jump on its ass and set it in line.

It's tough to sell the latter, since people tend to underestimate the corruptibility of a single dominant power, while being scared that having lots of powers in coexistence will just devolve into anarchy in the pejorative.

Ok, I'll buy that a stable, healthy society can have a state or not. However, I remain unconvinced that statelessness offers the best framework, or lack thereof, for a society. It seems that a stateless society requires an especially disciplined populace.

For example, a pollutive factory might produce a desirable product. Perhaps only the people living downstream suffer from the pollution. They complain to a court that rules in their favor, but the factory does not comply. The downstream people, as their only non-violent recourse, boycott the factory and ostracize its workers. However, these actions affect no change because the upstream people would rather have the factory's desirable products than support their downstream brethren. The downstream people can now either put up with the pollution, flee, or attempt to shut down the factory with violence, potential instigating a war with the upstream people. Unless the upstream people choose to aid their neighbors over materialism, the issue escalates to violence.

If this society had a state however, the court could coerce the factory into compliance from the outset, preluding a violent confrontation from the start.

Just trying to understand anarchy better.

Google Translate did a surprisingly good job.

Yeah, when people don't agree about something, at some point ther can be blood.

But at least no one pretends to be more legitimate than the other.  Nor will they use ressources from unconcerned people to fight.  Nor will they force people to fight for them.  And so on...

Anarchy doesn't prevent war.  But democracy doesn't either.   Democracy actually instutitionnalize war : you have to pay taxes to send soldiers to some wars you are absolutely not concerned about, or wars that you even disapprove.   How is that better ?

At least those guys from downstream and upstream decided to fight from their own free will.

Courts, like factories, are corruptible institutions.

FatherMcGruder, I don't think statelessness requires an especially disciplined populace, just one with enough common values.  Presuming the legal agencies would accurately reflect the values of their members, then it is these common values that allow for common legal standards to form, and so reduce the possibility of violent clashes between different legal agencies.

Also, wars are ugly and expensive, and patrons of legal agencies that attempt to engage in them would probably just stop patronizing them in order to save money sleep better.  That's not to say that wars are impossible; they're just strongly disincentivized if those funding them actually have a choice.

The alternative, people of dissimilar values all tolerating one monopoly legal agency, has the unfortunate side effects of law being produced and enforced that has no market demand, and can be easily purchased, and the characteristic that it is authoritarian at least to the degree that the values of its citizens differ.

Think here about the necessity of somebody like Saddam to keep the Sunnis and Shiites from killing the shit out of each other.  Presumably such an unstable situation wouldn't have emerged in the first place in a stateless society.

Yeah, but the idea is that competition, voluntary patronage, and open management will provide adequate accountability.

FatherMcGruder, It should also be noted that the hypothetical scenario you described is perfectly applicable to the situation today with multiple nation states living side by side, yet they still manage to resolve disputes without violence.

I'd call today's situation the worst case scenario for a functioning stateless society, since states can more easily keep their members separated - integration builds economic dependencies, and thus increases the cost of wars borne by those that end up paying for them - and can more easily go to war than voluntarily patronized legal agencies.

I'm unconvinced as well, but I'm willing to keep an open mind.  What I am concerned about are those who are not willing.

The 'old West' territories before statehood were functionally stateless and seemed to do fine.  Either discipline isn't a requirement, or self-governance leads to self-discipline, or both.  I'm leaning towards both.


The largest polluters in the United States, by any metric, are government agencies.  And they are largely insulated from civil actions.  How do you deal with that?

What do you guys think about a P2P voting system? We could have "open source law" that anybody can edit, with a "blockchain" determining the majority vote in real time. If real time is too cumbersome to keep track of (for the user I mean), we could have periodic "update elections", where changes are bundled together and you vote by downloading and using the version you prefer.

This could be implemented in a context of "Panarchy" (proposed by Paul Emile de Puydt in 1860) where everybody is free to join any organization (or none) that each keeps track of their own "law" using such a system. In other words, only the law of that organization applies to you that you have joined voluntarily. If you don't like their law you could propose changes or join a different one that is closer to your ideal. This could accommodate pretty much anybody: Anarcho-capitalists would not join any organization (or one that only affirms property rights and the non-initiation of violence) and base the rest on contracts, while "communists" (or collectivists) could set up their communities and handle the distribution of property through voting.

I don't believe that democracy (i.e. voting) is a "tyranny by the majority" if you set up standards (like human rights) that apply always and are not decided on a case by case basis (which is what people mean when they talk about a republic). I don't think you would need a "constitution" in a P2P open source system though; you could simply keep organizing laws by priority. It seems unlikely that the majority will suddenly decide that traffic laws are more important that human rights. (And even if, which minority should have the right to force their ideas of human rights on the majority?)

Another advantage of such a system is that it could provide a very smooth transition from where we are now to a state of affairs where the state no longer has the monopoly. Its monopoly would be undermined gradually and peacefully through the emergence of a variety of better alternatives. In fact, we wouldn't even need to found new organizations; existing ones could simply start using appropriate technology once it emerges.

Nonsense, the republic is just slower at killing itself than a pure democracy. Standard by itself does nothing without proper incentives to enforce the rule of law.

So, voting = tyranny with no alternative? Then, what isn't tyranny in your book? Contracts? What if you set up contractual systems that include voting, is that tyranny?

I like the idea of people forming open organizations that create and recommend laws, but if it has to resort to voting all the time about everything, and dragging around those that lose the votes, then I think it's doing it wrong.  The focus should be on consensus building.  Here's some inspiration from the IETF on this: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-setting-standards-without-kings-or-votes.ars (http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/01/25-years-of-ietf-setting-standards-without-kings-or-votes.ars).

I think kiba's objection is when the "recommendations" are mandatory.

No, I said a democracy like you recommend have very poor incentive structures. Voting is fine when it is aligned with proper incentives.

Of course, for a libertarian, it have to be voluntary as well.

The question of enforceability is crucial. You can have recommendations (backed by consensus), contracts (backed by reputation) or laws (backed by force).

Of course, consensus building should be a top priority. But the question is: What do you do precisely when people cannot (or don't want to) agree?

I think we should move away from laws backed by force towards contracts backed by reputation. So, I am really advocating anarcho-capitalism. However, most people (including myself) have difficulties imagining it in practice, so I suggested a system of creating "laws". How and if these are actually enforced (beyond loss/gain in reputation) would be up to each organization. The market would decide which system works best overall, including which uses the best system of enforcement.

But who sets up those "standards" in a democracy? The majority. So, in a democracy of 51 men and 49 women, if the 51 men vote that it's OK for men to rape women, then there's no "tyranny by the majority"? I don't think so.


Precisely. Democracy is only "tyranny by the majority" when it's backed by the initiation of violence by a democratic state. But anarchism accommodates voluntary democratic processes whenever they meet the needs of those who are voluntarily participating.

Don't get so caught up with that one sentence I wrote. I wasn't defending democracy or a republic as we see them today, I was defending voting in general and was trying to point out that it's good to set standards (or at least a certain "time-delay") so that the law doesn't keep flip-flopping with the majority on every issue. (That's what I meant by arranging laws by priority.)


That's not how it has played out, historically. The authors of the constitution come up with the standards, saying "you can't ever change this". So if a group of white anglo-saxon males declares that all white anglo-saxon males are born equal, that's not a tyranny of the majority.

Good question. Although, for the sake of argument, I take pollution to mean oil spills, chemical runoff, and dangerous fumes. I wasn't considering carbon dioxide, not because I don't consider it a pollutant, but because I don't believe we have any good solutions for curbing its production.

Regarding the discipline of a population, what would stop a stateless society from developing one? Suppose the largest, most powerful militia teams up with the largest, most powerful court, and the largest, most powerful food producers. Such a conglomerate could easily coerce the population into cooperation, because they wouldn't have the discipline to choose liberty over security and food. Does this example explain why states rarely go away?

Also it's interesting to note that, historically, the more repressive regimes have ruled over more polluted countries. After the Soviet Union fell, it became clear that its industries were more polluting than those in the West. During the partition of Germany, East German pollution was much higher than West German pollution. State power certainly doesn't solve pollution.

Yes it does, but the interesting question is whether the Internet (peer-to-peer communication and transactions) will make a different outcome possible "the next time around".

The state can probably not be defeated, but it can perhaps be made irrelevant.

I doubt such an arrangement could persist based on coercion alone.  States seem to be unstable without pretty broad ideological support.  I suppose a disciplined population is useful for preventing the balance of power from moving too far in any direction, though.

I don't do anything.  But maybe they'll agree to respect the outcome of a vote, or maybe they'll just go their separate ways.  Perhaps it'll be pistols at dawn.  :)

What kind of disagreement are you talking about?  One within the hypothetical law-recommending organization?

Violence is ugly, especially to pampered westerners, so I think the bar would be set pretty high in western societies for the violent enforcement of laws by voluntarily patronized legal agencies.  Much higher than it is today for states.  This would put pressure on them to develop alternative nonviolent means of gaining compliance.

I was referring to studies done before co2 was considered a pollutant, so I'm pretty sure that refers to spills, dumping, runoff, fumes etc.  I might have to review those studies.

That would be because the US Constitution didn't create a democracy.  Not even a democratic republic.  The US was intended to be  federated republic.  The parlimentary republics of Europe are far more democratic in nature.  Senators were not elected by the people until 1913, and our head of state (president) is neither directly elected by the people, nor indirectly through parlimentary procedure.  It's done through an entirely independent body called the 'electoral college'.  I'm pretty sure that no other nation functions in like manner.  As a side note, Abe Lincoln was fourth in the popular vote, and wasn't even considered a contender before the electoral college met.

In the United Kingdom, members of the Upper House (the "Lords") are still not elected by the people.