Bitcoin Forum

After having a few tweets with Erik Voorhees today, rather than going through yet another libertarian debate, I figured- let's get tactical.

The bitcoin political ideology has been identified before.  It's called Neoliberalism (http://blog.bluemeanie.net/2014/10/what-is-neoliberalism-few-notes-on.html).

do bitcoiners call themselves Neoliberals?



sounds familiar don't it?

-bm



edit: mispelled Erik's name.  Dutch names arghhh

not neoliberals,because if  let BTC success, it avoid  need current economic and financial system  support.

I'd say that's putting it in the most negative way possible. How about we try rephrasing some of that:

THE RULES OF THE MARKET: All goods and services, including labor, are traded using the rules of supply and demand. Employees are expected to stick up for themselves when they are being mistreated by employers but should respect the fact that they're often being paid what their job is worth.

CUTTING PUBLIC EXPENDITURE FOR SOCIAL SERVICES: Instead of paying taxes, families can choose to use their money for the goods and services they use every day, including choosing which from a list of schools you send your children to. You get sick of that pothole in the road, you can make voluntary contributions to a fund that will fill it. You use the city bus, you're the one who pays the fare. There are charities that feed and house the poor that you can donate to. As for corporations, it's the rules of the marketplace again. If you don't want the goods and services they provide, if you prefer to have a solar panel and a well instead of paying for public utilities for instance, that's your business.

DEREGULATION: Buy the more efficient light bulb for the savings on your electric bill. Buy the fuel-efficient car or get around on a bicycle. Go freelance if you feel unsafe at your job. I've heard of joes with a welding license opening up shop in their garage. It's the free market again.

PRIVATIZATION: Tough one, but I like the idea of having several private schools competing for tuition dollars. Check out the MOOCs sometime and you'll see how easy it is to get a cheap education outside of public school. Electricity? Install solar panels. Fresh water? The ones who don't live in the desert can collect rain water, and the ones who live near a coastline can check out this Youtube video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FjvTYy8Wtmc) to see how to get fresh water from the ocean. Really! I think people are more clever about getting life's essentials than you give them credit for. It'll be a shakeup if governments privatize their assets all at once, but survivors know how to adapt.

I am not seeing how "individual responsibility" is a bad thing. Really a lot of the problems I see in America have to do with the fact that not enough people do the "individual responsibility" thing. Tell me you've never seen pictures of welfare queens with two brats and a third on the way. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac should be on the dust heap of failed businesses. Honestly, it's not the 19th century anymore. Most poor folks have a laptop or a friend with a laptop and one condition for being on welfare should be that they should demonstrate a new employable skill that they learned from Youtube lesson videos within three months, and have a new job within six.

this sounds like Arizona to me.

Arizonans invented something called 'school vouchers' which let people economize their own public schooling while meeting the federal education requirement in the US.  The program generally worked, although states like California run a non-stop promotion campaign to make it look like it's perpetually broken.

there is a happy medium for sure.

I don't believe in selling state "owned" enterprises, goods, and services, because it would not be right for the state to profit from theft.  A better strategy would be abandonment, in which case the services and property could usually be claimed by those who are actually working with it.  Sounds a little bit Marxian, but it was actually proposed by Murray Rothbard, among others.  I saw a variant of this in the fascinating novel Time Will Run Back (http://mises.org/document/3060/) by Henry Hazlitt, and I believe about 4-5 years ago there were several hypothetical "end of the state" articles on strike-the-root.com which featured accounts of former state employees homesteading abandoned sate resources and putting them to productive use.

Before discovering the idea of the state simply abandoning its ill gotten gains, my personal preference was that the state should auction off all of its goods for fiat money and then destroy the fiat money.  That idea might hold some interest for Bitcoiners. :)

I don't think this thread really belongs under "Bitcoin discussion" when there is a politics forum.

How do you define "freedom"?
There is nothing complex about it....
Debates about abortion (for example) can make a "proponent of freedom" quickly run into some complexity.

I find this to be a pretty clear, compelling, and consistent definition:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muHg86Mys7I

To make it even shorter, I believe in having the freedom to do what you want, but not the freedom to do what you want at the expense of somebody else's freedom.  I think that's the only way to be consistent about it.


They certainly do but most such debates honestly do not affect most of us on a daily basis.

Plus, freedom still offers some compelling answers.  Suppose you believe abortion is murder and should be prosecuted.  If we are all free and I do not believe in prosecuting abortion, then you don't have the freedom to prosecute abortion at my expense.  That would greatly curtail your ability to cause trouble on the subject.  Meanwhile, those who do not believe abortion is murder might very well believe in providing free aid to those who are prosecuted for it, so you might want to count your costs before you get into a war on the subject.

There comes a point where you have to start questioning whether or not you should be trying to right every wrong, with the use of force, using everyone else's resources as your bank account.

Ummm.... Yeah. I especially like how your 'definition' freely intermixes testable assertions of fact with opinion, and even a healthy dose of scorn. ::)

Bitcoiners are not a monolith.

You'll see people from all over the political spectrum, this is a technology.

The bitcoin community makes up people from all walks and talks of life. I've met a broad spectrum of people in my travels.

Bitcoin itself is a protocol and software program that is not political.  It may be used in a variety of different ways for a variety of purposes who have a political agenda but that is different then claimin that is what Bitcoin is.

People like Erik Vorhees who claim to know what Bitcoin is have latched onto the technology as a way of promoting his personal agenda and promoting himself.  He tries to misrepresent what Bitcoin is because he uses it as a bully pulpit because very few listen to his over-the-top nonsense.  His arguments consist of sound bytes and meme's.  Not that I totally disagree with the basic ideas of limited government but the way it is presented ranges from incredibly poor to ridiculous.  The same thing happened when the Internet was starting, all these people claimed the Internet was for freedom and it will end government corruption and give power to the people, yada yada yada.  Well guess what, it is now a tool for governments to spy on their citizens as well as a tool for freedom fighters.  The term most often used who go around claiming Bitcoin will replace the dollar, collapse governments, and end wars is "Pseudo-Libertarian" but I prefer "Bitcoin Wing Nut."

There is a middle-ground where Bitcoin doesn't "get the credit" for replacing the dollar & collapsing governments, but simply gives people a way to (partially) escape the paper-money system. Eventually, the old, corrupt system will be completely broken and the Libertarian Coin Nuts can take over.  :D

Replacing the USD is a bit much.  It will put pressure on current systems and it might collapse Western Union but collapsing national currencies is not going to happen anytime soon.  The Internet put pressure on politicians in ways that have never been done before but it still isn't stopping their shenanigans the way people thought it would.  I remember the protest where the web site owners turned the screens black and the people thought everyone would jump.  The reality was it took 20 or 30 minutes to explain the whole thing to a Washington Bureaucrat and they would just shrug their shoulders.

The real wacky stuff comes from the people who say it will end wars.  The theory being the whole world will switch to Bitcoin and it will somehow prevent governments from spending money on war (I guess they can't use the Dark Wallet?).  The first time I heard the whole thing was that Free State Radio who broadcast parts of the first big Foundation conference.  They played commercials claiming that all government employees were murderers.  That means janitors, social security workers, astronauts, etc. are all murders.  They also talk about 'government" as if is one thing all coordinated.  They played an excerpt from the Onion on the show and I could not tell the difference between the Onion stuff and the stuff they claimed to be serious.  One person who comes from this group often claims on podcasts that Bitcoin is increasing "exponentially" and that there is this "huge" Bitcoin economy.  The real reason is that almost nobody listens to their stuff so they have to latch onto a technology and claim that people who use it agree with them.

If you want to hear the difference between a reasonable person and a "Bitcoin Wing Nut" listen to Preston Byrne and Stephanie on Let's Talk Bitcoin

http://letstalkbitcoin.com/blog/post/lets-talk-bitcoin-137-eye-of-the-beholder

He makes perfect sense and then look at all the comments of the story.  They claim he is a State lover, not  libertarian, and on and on.  All he did was describe reality (and I usually can't stand lawyers).  I could not find one valid objection to what he said or any explanation as to why he would be wrong for the position he is in. 

All the regulations have to do with interfacing Bitcoin with the legacy system that these people say they want eliminated so why should they care?  The proposed regs are for people that still want to use banks.  Not that I agree with the proposed regs but that is what they are. 
 

Out of curiosity, what makes them "pseudo" libertarians?  Is that different from regular libertarians?

Who uses the term?

[[citation needed]]

The theory is that ending the power to tax and the power to inflate the money supply will greatly curtail the government's ability to wage war.

I'd like to end the power to tax - people who believe in a particular battle should fund it with their own resources, rather than picking their neighbor's pockets.  It would have been great if, in 2002, an invasion of Iraq had to be paid for by the people who were convinced of the need, rather than by them plus everybody who disagreed.

Because people should have the freedom to make whatever private arrangements they want.

I think a lot of bitcoiners have at least some liberalism in their blood, for sure the very early adopters. The ones that are adopting now may just be adopting because they like the technology, etc. But, Neoliberals? good question.

These are kind of stupid replies you get from the pseudo-libertarians.  You get some sound byte or meme and they act like they just trumped the whole discussion.  a "pseudo-libertarian" is someone who makes some kind of simplistic statement without much research or thought.  They only interact with other people like themselves so they sit around reinforcing each other with flawed and unrealistic ideas.  when they write about Bitcoin they start using political terms like "Libertarian," "state", and "leviathan."  No normal person describes Bitcoin that way unless they are using it to pursue some agenda. 

The people who unconditionally support Ross Ulbricht is an example.  If he really did what he is accused of then most people want him in jail.  I certainly don't want some nut job going around ordering murders.  If was a false prosecution then I want the prosecutors in jail.  What is really sad is that his Mother is upset and you have Roger Ver coming in and "donating" money for the legal defense fund.  Then he uses her in videos and blogs to try to promote his agenda.  You also have these "Bitcoins Not Bombs" people who used homeless people as billboards for their cause.  Nobody listens to them so they use homeless people.

Take another guy, Charlie Shrem.  he thinks all copyrights should be eliminated because it is a "Tool of the State."  Mr. anarchy lived with his parents and then got lucky with Bitcoin.  Maybe if he would try to earn a living as a musician for 10 years maybe he would understand what it is about.  But he doesn't take the time to understand the real world, he cries that nobody understands him except his Bitcoin friends.   

I certainly don't hate Libertarians.  I used to go to meetings at CATO institute when I lived in Washington, DC.  I also work with the NJ Libertarian's party on their Open Government Project.  So I like many normal Libertarians and people who fight for open government.  The guy who runs that project files lawsuits to gain access to government records.  He doesn't go around making a bunch of hyperbolic comments and meme's or attaching himself to a technology in order to promote himself.

Bitcoin is the technology and users have many different political views. Do only marxist have cars? no.
The users of bitcoin have neoliberals, socialist, marxist, anarchist and even statist views.
See: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=723537.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=723537.0)

Yes, anyone with any agenda can use Bitcoin.  what I am talking about are the people like Erik Vorhees, Roger Ver, Charlie Shrem, Stephanie Murphy, etc. who latched onto Bitcoin as way of promoting their agenda.  They often misrepresent Bitcoin when it fits their agenda because they are not rally promoting Bitcoin.  They think that their agenda is going to be "proven" if Bitcoin is successful. 

Take a look at that Bitcoin Bounty Hunter site.  The funniest part is posting "court documents" of the Bitcoinia lawsuit which consists of just a complaint.  It says Roger Ver, Jesse Powell, Jed McCaleb etc. are suing Amir Taaki, etc. for "breach of contract."  But if you read the complaint you can see NONE of the people suing have a copy of the contract but they claim if you get ahold of Amir he has a copy and that will prove their case.  So now he puts out a "bounty" because law enforcement is not doing their job.  How ridiculous can this get?  Who in their right mind would use financial services run by any of these people?

where have I seen that before? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=709528.msg9256817#msg9256817)

Boy, if only that were true.  Unfortunately we are forced to live like everybody else, subject to the winner take all system that you prop up.

The simple fact is that this group(perhaps several groups) operate under some vague ethos referred to by different names(libertarianism, cryptoanarchy).  It quickly devolves into extortion, harassment, death threats, etc.  You can't do business without a justice system.  What these people are is a mafia.  They will quickly find themselves surrounded by hardened criminals and doing things that are strictly immoral, where they may have started far more innocently.  I think Ross Ulbricht set the mold here.

This very same group you delineate is calling Ross a hero.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkRhBOZSw38

To me Panama doesn't really sound so glorious.  Maybe you get a bigger house and lots of money- but I'll take my little house and a simpler life in America any day.

I don't think anyone's proposing that, but I do think they are proposing that a justice system established only based on force from the majority will not be moral.


How many years do I have to go before I start seeing that?  I don't think I know any hardened criminals, and I don't think I'm doing anything immoral.  I don't even use the drugs I advocate legalizing, unless you count sudafed.

and what country do you live in?

I often thought the same, when I am listening to LTB. Sometimes I am not paying much attention, when Stephanie is talking.

Btw. I'd describe my self as a socialist.

I'm curious if there is evidence of supposed "neoliberals" calling themselves "neoliberals" or if this is a term primarily used by the opponents of alleged "neoliberals."

In Germany, I've only heard the term applied (always negatively) to the FDP, the sort of mainstream "liberal"/"libertarian" party. The FDP is quite hated right now, but I attribute this to some oddities in German thinking. Germans seem to think the opposite of socialism is...national socialism. Since "neoliberals" aren't socialists, they are, by some skewed thinking, somewhere down the road to national socialism. It's quite odd. My solution is to not take people who think this way very seriously.

I generally get the feeling when people apply a "neo" prefix to something they don't like (e.g., "neoconservative" or "neoliberal"), it's meant to suggest "neonazi" without saying it. It's a kind of neogodwinism.

In response to the question "Are Bitcoiners Neoliberals?" I decided to do some quick reading.

A quick scan of the Wikipedia page on neoliberalism says the term was coined by a German, Alexander Rüstow, in 1938. It was to distinguish them from "classical liberalism" (as advocated by von Mises and Hayek) because neoliberals advocated state intervention. In fact, Rüstow is considered one of the fathers of the "Social Market Economy" (again, according to Wikipedia, so research primary sources if you want more reliable information). The "Social Market Economy" doesn't sound anything like what the allegedly "neoliberal" bitcoiners advocate.

The Wikipedia page for "neoliberalism" also says this: "According to Boas and Gans-Morse the term neoliberalism is nowadays mainly used by critics as a pejorative term."

Without looking into it further, I would conclude two things:

1. Using the term in its original historical sense, the bitcoiners to which some of you are referring are not "neoliberals" because they don't advocate state intervention in economic affairs. They could possibly be called "classical liberals."

2. Using the term in its modern, pejorative sense, the bitcoiners to which some of you are referring are "neoliberals" because you want to insult them.

Pierre Rochard of the Satoshi Nakamoto institute suggested they are a Bitcoin 2.0 pumper (http://blog.bluemeanie.net/2014/10/pierre-rochard-on-lets-talk-bitcoin-and.html).

Guten Tag,



a good observation.  I pointed out elsewhere that the site the quote came from might be described as Chomskian marxist.




a good book: "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change" by Jonah Goldberg (http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0767917189)





a lot of free market ideas in America can be traced to the region of Germany(which had different political boundaries at the time).  Here we have the 'Austrian Economics' school, Murray Rothbard being one of it's proponents.  The history here gets fairly complex but to summarize, Roosevelt who brought The New Deal(early American Socialism) was also the president who fought Hitler.




The current term noeliberalism refers to political movements that want to break down national sovereignty, freely trade and commodify natural resources, labor, and such.  In that sense they are closely quartered with anarchists(that much is obvious to anyone who reads this board).  Marxism does admittedly serve a scholar well in these cases because he describes this sort of activity perfectly, whereas the 'libertarian' types view all the negatives as temporary collateral costs on the journey to Ayn Randian Utopia(which never arrives, sounds like Marxism).  "Neoliberalism" is often used in a perjorative sense, but also it is a good description of this political outlook and is a good signifier for further research.  These aren't new ideas and 'thought leaders' like Voorhees try to present them as though they are new and novel.  The cryptokiddies gush with excitement at the thought that they won't have to answer to 'the man' anymore.  They may have to answer to Erik Voorhees though.

Grüß, -bm

I read the Goldberg book years ago, and I agree it's good. More people should read it.


A word can be used however people want to use it. I agree opponents of those ideas tend to use "neoliberalism" to refer to them. I just don't think advocates of the ideas use the term "neoliberalism" that way.

Suppose I started using the term "neostatist" to refer to people who hold lots of very mainstream beliefs about government. Are most people suddenly "neostatists"? A lot of disagreements could be avoided by giving neutral names to things. I suppose someone could give the definition they intend and then hash it and we could use the base58 representation of the hash.

Take your description "political movements that want to break down national sovereignty, freely trade and commodify natural resources, labor, and such."

Taking the sha256 and putting it in base58 we get: BDaofyahyEpS7E9fCaoFkbMitFFv8WGToys1gBRrt9Ts

We could now ask: Do Bitcoiners believe in BDaofyahyEpS7E9fCaoFkbMitFFv8WGToys1gBRrt9Ts?

It sounds bizarre and neutral. The term "neoliberal" doesn't sound neutral. It sounds negative (by design).

Tschüs!

This is undoubtedly true - as this forum itself is a testament to.

However, Amir Taaki talks a lot about how the technology is effectively embued/laiden with the values held by those that have coded it. I certainly think he has a point re. the subtle shifts in direction that BTC may or may not take. The current thread about the hard fork kind of illustrates this (if i understand it correctly)

But I'm at a loss really to understand the core values that lay behind bit coin/the block chain.

 I guess you could say that its "values" will be revealed in its practical usage - and that the nature of its usage depends largely upon how the code is subsequently developed.


If I were pushed I would have to say that, if anything, BTC has more in common with communitarianism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communitarianism) than, say, neo liberalism - wether that be in its open source development, communities here like Bitcointalk, or in the (decentralised) nature of the protocol itself.

But its an academic point really - the bitcoin world itself is a broad church and so it should be.

Moin moin,

Well if you want to learn about something or someone, you can

 1) listen to that person's opponents,

 2) listen to those that praise that person

 3) listen to what that person says him/herself.

So the same goes for Neoliberalism.  You're not going to get the complete picture of a philosophy by reading Murry Rothbard or Ayn Rand.

btw- Germans do have some of the best economic thinking in the world at the present.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism

re. Erik, some accuse me here of attacking him.  That's not true, although he has made unwarranted accusations towards BM in the past.  Erik is an outspoken 'leader' and naturally you can expect to be criticized.  You can't start complaining everyone is attacking you if you volunteer to take a public role.

some factions might be described this way.  This isn't the Voorhees/Ver coalition though, they are hard-core libertarian/anarchist.

I have read a bit of Amitai Etzioni.

Wait. I think ordoliberalism refers exactly to what neoliberalism originally meant! Maybe they should be called neo-ordos. Ordiots would be to negative. :)

Regarding Voorhees. I'm curious. Is there evidence that Voorhees presents what I would call liberatarianism and you would call neoliberalism as "new ideas"?

Bitcoin can be very fairly called a "new idea", but the ideas of individual liberty have a long history and my impression of libertarians is that most of them learn something of this long history. I mean, at least people tend to know who von Mises, Hayek, Friedman and Rothbard were. They also know Ayn Rand, but that leads to lots more infighting. Even earlier there were influences from Lysander Spooner to Rose Wilder Lane that get talked about. Go to a libertarian meeting. They'd rather bore you with history than pretend all their ideas are new. But get ready for arguments. Libertarians always discuss until they find an area where they disagree. And there's always an area where they disagree with each other. :)

Germans just love Ordnung dont they? ;)

"Ordnung ist das halbe Leben"




Read his tweets.  It's over-the-top anarcho-capitalism.




Yes it's like 'herding cats'.  The are by nature disagreeable people.

also see "The Wörgl Experiment", Community Currency theorists worship this incident in history and insinuate that had we accepted what was learned at Wörgl, we never would have had WWII.  They are god-tier Godwinists.  I think they get a bit excessive about this particular moment and use this to parade around other ideas such as Demurrage.  We had, and still have, quite a few community currencies here in the US.

And given that I think a lot of the free market ideas and people ended up in America because they were pushed out by the Nationalist Socialists(Nazi).

and btw- not sure why were knocking Preston Byrne.  He wrote some great articles about BitShares. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=830487.0)

I think we're miscommunicating somehow. Anarcho-capitalism also isn't a new idea. If he has a tweet where he says "Hey everyone, look at my great new idea of anarcho-capitalism/pure libertarianism/...!" then that would be evidence that he's presenting it as a new idea.

Anyway, gotta go; nice talking to you. I hope I didn't come off like I was claiming new ideas as my own...except words as base58 of sha256 of definition thing. I totally invented that. :)

isn't neo-liberals just classical liberals like our founding fathers?

fairly distant concepts.  I believe they refer to that as 'Paleoliberal'.

Yes. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines)

This debate always derails into left vs right, 80 who own 20% vs 20 who own 80%. Such is the nature of human condition until post-scarcity becomes a thing. More interesting is debate how can we fix it (no Bitcoin itself can not, if the GINI of bitcoin is any indication, on the contrary).

As for the "death to the gubbermint" argument, ask people in sub-saharan africa how well it works for them.

Anarcho-syndicalism itself is a deceptive construct. While agent-based game theory is arguably rather vague approximation of sociology, its the closest thing to scientific method to guess behaviour of crowds (I'd recommend you sugarscape (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarscape) if you're interested in agent models of government-free capitalism).

There is a strong indication that the group benefits only if all, the 100% play by the rules. Libertarian tit-for-tat yields even worse outcome than agents randomly assigned to bins of kinship (which self-selects into 20/80 as per pareto much later in the sim compared to tit-for-tat).

It's mostly impossible to measure.  You can't just use accounts because one person may be holding many accounts.  To measure GINI you need a reliable way to measure WHO owns which accounts.


commonly, the "libertarians" are highly privileged white American males who really have no clue how good they have it.  They take America and civilization for granted.  As you say, it's not hard to live the libertarian dream in Mogadishu.


I've seen things like this before but I'll have a look.  I'm familiar with basic Game Theory.


curious points,

thx.  -bm

I used the stats zhoutong published (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=51011.0). I wonder if some wallet/exchange published more recent numbers since then.


To be fair, kleptocracy (Eastern europe here :) is just failure of (cultural) morals. To me, when someone says "neocon/neoliberal", I imagine ruthless robber baron capitalist who truly believes that market is end-all solution to everything, ethics be damned. Surprisingly, significant amount of those "white straight male reddit fedora libertarians who love to shoot guns" appear to not discard basic human decency in their dogma. However truly free markets are in contradiction with that - having no "silly morals" is very effective competetive edge after all.

This cognitive dissonance is my main problem with the ideology, I'd love to hear how one is supposed to address it, short of brainwashing people who are supposed to think for themselves with christian values.

mostly, it's a philosophy that lives entirely on the Internet.  You'll find it's greatest outspoken proponents are anons on twitter or random forums like this.  Few people would confess such beliefs to their mother, that's for sure.  It's a sort of attitude that builds up over time.   I think a lot of these people, especially on here dont really transition their psychological state from playing violent video games to interacting on these forums.  They say and do things they would never dream of in 'real life'.  Sometimes I even think Ulbricht lost touch with reality at some point.  People have said he spent all day on his laptop and never spoke with anyone.

If you get to know any of these cryptokids on here, it's a pretty typical profile.  Young, no social life, loves video games, marginally employed, etc.  They encounter another player-character in the forum video game that angers them, the solution is throw a grenade or fire rocket launchers.  They just don't understand that theyre in public and they're accountable for their actions.

You've also got a class of people, typically from Eastern Europe/Soviet rim regions who are paid trolls.  There is practically no laws against internet abuses so they know they can do what they please- you'll find a lot of the really odious trolls seems to emanate from the Transnistria (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transnistria) region.

Maybe real people aren't like caricatures.


I don't think I have any cognitive dissonance.  If I were to get what I want and what I think should be in the world by forcing other people to cooperate with my plans, that would cause cognitive dissonance for me.

So, I believe in helping the poor, so I do it.  I don't employ schemes to make other people do it.  I don't believe in any current wars, so I expect people who do believe in them to pay for them themselves.

You talk pretty authoritatively about people who are complete strangers on the internet, people you don't know.  I'm a libertarian anarchist, and you don't know anything about me.  I don't play violent video games, you don't know which of my parents I've discussed my political views with or if my parents are even alive, I suspect that I am older than you (you certainly trash talk people like a young disrespectful person), and you have no idea what I do for entertainment in my life.

And I'm just one of many.

Who are you to say that libertarians are internet dwellers who have no life?  How would you know?

You aren't claiming to have psychic powers, are you?

That is exactly the impression I got after spending 5 minutes on here.  One of the first posts I saw was this big long explanation about Bitcoin and how I needed to be a member of World of Warcraft and how I needed to read Vorhees' blog to understand what Bitcoin is.  I was thinking, "what the hell is this?"  Most people would end their interest in Bitcoin right there.  I was able to poke through all that and look at the technology but that is a difficult bridge to cross.  

Theymos had a tremendous opportunity with this forum and look what he has done.  People selling accounts, endless scams, etc.  If you read his stuff about things like GLBSE he talks about virtual companies and I have often said he sounds like he lives his life in a video game.  Almost nothing that goes on in this forum happens in the real world.  One of these clowns advocated breaking into the FBI computers because he said they were too stupid to keep the Silk Road bitcoins secure.  Guess where the guy works?  For the State of Maryland.  This stuff is beyond ridiculous.  These people think that because they promoted Bitcoin early on that they know more than the rest of the world or that somehow everybody owes them something.

I also noticed that many here are not up on things outside of video games and reddit.  It was comical to watch Ver and Vorhees say how great their honey badger billboard was.  When people pointed out almost nobody in the general public will understand it they argued the opposite.  

I also did a Bitcoin public event once at the Philly Punk Rock Flea market.  Most of the Bitcoin Philly group would not come because I refused to allow them to hand out "Bitcoin Not Bombs" stuff at my table.  I talked to a large number of people who mostly never heard of Bitcoin.  Not a single person asked about collapsing banks, ending wars, replacing the dollar, or any of the other nonsense you see here on a daily basis.  Just try it yourself.

I retired from my job as a federal employee of 27 years for the FAA..  I worked on research of explosives and weapons detection systems and then on information security requirements for large FAA systems.  While I was a researcher rather than regulator I worked in the system for a long time, including 9 years in Washington, DC.  I also participated in many of these public comment things involving privacy and I testified at a few FTC workshops such as the first couple "spam summits" back in the late 90's.  I can say with absolute certainty that comments like Erik Vorhees makes about the Bitlicense and the motives of regulators is completely wrong and his meme-based arguments are going to be disregarded.  He has a few correct points here and there but his arguments don't fit together.  Patrick Murck is pretty good be he still works for the Foundation and Vessenes.  Jerry Brito and Coincenter.org is the place to watch because he is good and I think he is independent or at least more independent than Murck.  




 

Indeed, the neo* prefix is a generalization too broad.


Let's keep it to economics. The dissonance I perceive is essentialy austrian vs keynesian money. Good example is usury - the more is wealth distribution skewed, the more society starts to resemble slavery, as the poor are left with no choice other than to borrow. Later on, it gets to the point that the wealthy spend less than the interest they're owed. Sugarscape mentioned earlier allows sugar lending, rent-seeking is the end game. Poor masses are caught in the hamster wheel.

Now, libertarians just shrug their shoulders "should not have borrowed if they can't utilize the capital" and that's true to an extent, but they completely dismiss the perspective of the poor - the game was rigged from the start (rich were rich from the beggining, and the poor just got poorer). Poor one getting lucky and escaping the trap, as well a wealthy one becoming poor because of bad investments is more of an exception, rather than rule. tl;dr: The term old money exists for a reason.

Leftism/marxism in the form of keynesian money and taxation of the rich is intended to level the playing field. Libertarians call bloody murder over this. I call it return to common ownership. The fact that governments are notoriously bad at it (http://www.garvensmortgagegroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Helicopter-ben-bernanke-1-Copy.jpg) and can't counter the pressure of the bag holders in current fiat monetary system is just how it is now, but in some places (sweden, canada) it used to work fairly well until recently.
 
Finally, it should be noted that most governments actually don't indulge in wars. I tend to generalize, hence no tunnel vision on the US.

we are all aobut dropping taxes

"Neoliberal" is a phony made-up word by people who want to limit others' choices.  It's not a valid descriptor of anything other than, "I wish people had less say in what they do with their stuff".

Bitcoiners are not political, no matter how much they dream of it.

They are just delusional.

Labeling is dangerous and very often leads to strawman arguements.

It's not like every one is equipped with a PGP key to understand exactly what you mean. There is a world of subversion out there that challenges even the core treatments of 'main' stream - ie the essentially 10 degree to the left or 10 degree right 'modern liberalism' that dominates (and some would say nose dived the West's) position.

For me to adopt a label is, in my opinion, only going to open me to a series of critics. Everyones a critic.

I like BTC - I seen it way back in 2008 at $11 - shuda, wouda, couda - but whats been fascinating to me is that the way the market has payed out.

***deep apologies for any derailment of thread*** but does the fact that 70% of of BTC has never been traded concern those from all ideologies?

Personally I'm a humanist, a trans-humanist - although I think it may not be the optimum state for our species. Evolution is an incredibly, effective, but generationally, default. It was never designed for Moore's Law or the singularity.

I work 2.5 jobs, I'm a loving father, I believe in considerably more than the 'eye' can see, i take Modafinial. I have a good life. How could a label benefit me?

It's no wonder that you're incredibly brainwashed. It's amazing how the closer you get to the government coffers the more defensive people become of government's existence.

Except it's not amazing at all.

I am an anarchist, strictly speaking, though because of the incredible decay of the word I need to say "Anarcho-Capitalist".

The common thread throughout these posts is that everybody that "opposes" the Anarcho-Capitalist position (As the OP is a giant straw man, supported by almost nobody.) will just say that we have no arguments and just leave it at that.

Oh you don't see the connection between currency and war? We must just be stupid. Don't bother reading any of the books or papers written and freely available at the Mises institute. After all, we don't have arguments, so why bother reading anything we have to say? Inflation during wartime; Totally unheard of!

Charity can't be accomplished through charity, and we're just suppose to take your word on that. Listening to you people you would think there are no such things as private charities; That pretty much everyone in the world will only give of their income with a gun at their head. We don't have any arguments against that of course, because you say so.

Oh and the roads and public utilities! Lord knows we haven't even considered this issue before! Boy, you have us dead to rights. Once we don't have a State, everyone will just flop around on the floor like fish out of water until they die, since they don't have any supreme overlords to tell them how to get these things done. We don't have any arguments after all, you've told us so.

If the extraordinarily thick sarcasm somehow missed your attention; Every single topic you've mentioned, in which you're frustrated with the Anarcho-Capitalists lack of defense, has been thoroughly defended time and time again and I've yet to see any serious effort on your part, or anyone else on this thread, of dealing with our actual arguments.

To answer the OP... pretty much no one is a "Neo-Liberal" by that description.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Robber-Barons-Business/dp/0963020315

This is the kind of total nonsense you get from the pseudo-liberals.  Anyone who points out flaws in their argument is working for "the man."  I could not wait to get out of that job and if I had to sit through one more useless staff meeting I would have gone nuts.  I called in sick my very last day and I mailed my stuff in because I didn't want to sit there one more day.  I think 30% of the FAA can be eliminated and nobody would notice.  However, there are some very smart people there and most people want them to provide the services they perform.  I did research for explosives/weapons detection systems and we sometimes did airport tests.  I ran into all kinds of brilliant researchers with the FAA, Sandia Nation Labs, etc. 

I can assure you the vast majority of people want more security and more intrusive searches and people don't wantgovernments eliminated as you claim with your hyperbole.  You are one who is brainwashed because you get your info from internet discussion boards and meme's and you don't interact with the public at large.  I live in New Jersey and many people here want the government to do everything for them.  People in my town see a candy wrapper on the beach and they want the government to send out a helicopter to pick it up.  In any case I made enough on my side Internet businesses so I don't have to work anymore and I can just do Bitcoin all day.  I don't miss Washington, DC ... except for the 930 Club.

It is funny that you claim the arguments have been "thoroughly defended."  How is that?  Posting stuff to reddit? That is comical.  The arguments are not totally wrong, they are just so over-the-top that the exaggerations make the whole thing sound ridiculous.  Government is too big and too intrusive in people's lives but it does not follow that everybody wants government eliminated, that everyone is going to switch to Bitcoin because of it, that people want the Silk Road guy released if he is guilty, and that this whole process of using Bitcoin will end wars.

What flaws?
You clearly were working for "the man", that isn't in dispute. I was pointing out that people that work for "the man" are unsurprisingly also defensive of "the man". Part of it is selection bias, but I'm sure a large part of it is also social conditioning. Not to mention, you know, getting paid to keep your criticisms of the ethics of the system you work for to yourself, and to vote for the continuation of that teat...

Do you really want to know? I don't think you do. Evidence suggests you just want to spend your time telling us who we are and what our positions are.

Oh do I? Tell me more about myself.

Who says that? Anarcho-Capitalists are not in the business of telling everybody else what they want.

People tend to use money that best meets their needs.

Guilty of what?

Bitcoin makes funding war difficult because it is immune to inflation. It does not "end all wars".

Nope, it's not. Read more books.

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_Po2s-06w4x0/TRsVRPSpxII/AAAAAAAABxY/qNu0r_z8i-Q/s1600/A%2Bbrief%2Bhistory%2Bof%2Bneoliberalism.jpg

Books are not averse to made up words...

That's like saying, "English as She is Spoke" is an improvement on the English language because it is in fact a book. A popular book, even.

No, they are just Neo(s) that have taken the red pill.  :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_pill_and_blue_pill

Are the people on that book cover neoliberals?  If so, I am definitely not a neoliberal.

Ha! You win.

Of course "neoliberal" is a made up word. All words are made up. Neoliberal was (apparently) made up in 1938 by Alexander Rüstow. These original neoliberals advocated state intervention in the economy and wanted a word to distinguish them from "classical liberals" who advocated no/little state intervention in the economy. (I wrote all this yesterday, but as this thread seems to be going in circles anyway, why not type it again?) Later it became used as a pejorative term for anyone who advocates less government interference in markets.

I had the impression yesterday that "neoliberal" was being used to refer to pure libertarians/anarcho-capitalists. Now it seems to be being applied to Reagan and Thatcher. I doubt anyone is silly enough to believe Reagan or Thatcher were pure libertarians or anarcho-capitalists. Reaganites, Thatcherites, pure libertarians and anarcho-capitalists basically have one common property: there is a large group of people who hate all of them and need an insulting word to use against them. This is the way "neoliberal" is being used here. It's basically an N-word to throw at anyone they don't like.

Well, I guess a lot of people in fact are. Also a lot of hardcore liberals (some may call them nutjobs) are attracted to Bitcoin because of its features and characteristics. The problem with neoliberalism is: It all looks nice and fair, but that's not how the world works. We need to help people who are in need, using taxes to build infrastructure for everyone for example leads us to a much better society. But this would go too far, this is a Bitcoin forum!

Who's a NeoLiberal exactly? You know I'd find this whole discussion less whimsical if someone could point to a person that self-identifies as a neoliberal and then criticised their stated positions.

Then help people! You don't have to steal from people in order to make the world a better place, that's what voluntary transactions are all about.

Rockefeller literally saved the whales through "heartless competition", earned huge sums of money by providing to everyone what they needed at a price that was better than anyone else could do while running Standard Oil. In case you're not paying attention, that means his business made oil less expensive than nearly any company in the United States, improving the lives of anyone that used gasoline/kerosene; Rich or poor alike. The monster then turned around with his profits and gave no less than a half a billion dollars away to charities.

Adjusted for inflation that's $9,119,254,050.44 if you use the latest year that he made donations. (1934 adjusted to 2013)

That was just Rockefeller, in the "real world". What's with this "we" crap? What are you doing to help the poor?

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/05/17/specials/rockefeller-gifts.html
http://www.westegg.com/inflation/

It makes me sick to my stomach when I see you self-righteous thieves conspiring against so-called "evil robber barons". I'd prefer our country were run by the Mob. At least when they take your money for "protection", they don't expect you to be grateful for it.

https://mises.org/books/roads_web.pdf

Edit: Gasoline/Kerosene

Wow - didn't realize you could get that book in PDF form.  I need to read that one!

(It's by a much smarter Walter than me.)

Walter Block is fantastic. He's one of the best debaters I've ever seen. If you haven't watched him debate I would definitely suggest looking those up on YouTube. He really bombed out badly when debating Sam Seder, I'm really not sure why... But all the other ones I've seen are great.

Though I don't like Molyneux because of his DeFOO and UPB nonsense, he's also one of the best libertarian debaters alive today. He's great when he's explaining and criticizing other people's works, but for some reason when he comes up with something himself, he falls totally off his rocker...
In fact, Molyneux did a really good debate against Sam Seder, also available on YouTube.

What ? You mean, it isn't  :o ?

Haha. It's run by a "mob"(Ochlocracy) not the "Mob". :P

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ochlocracy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mafia

ok, few tins the night, but I am keen on all this neo-liberal/ anarcho capitalism debate.

I want to ask a question only those that have been in the situation can answer - Have you ever suffered ABH or GBH with intent - and wished for a smaller state?

Corse some thug life character will say hell yea - get revenge after 4 months recovery.

But as a 19yr 150pound 5'9 guy in a new city, so close to lights out save for the fantastic work of the paramedics - you shrink that? Cost me those vital 15 min?

If you listen to people like Free State Radio or Roger Ver they would explain that the people that helped you were really the murderers and the violent ones.  http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/2k22av/silk_road_prevented_violence/clhcglw

Oh good. This thread is not yet dead.

There's still an open question from people on this thread:

Does anyone self-identify as a neoliberal?

I decided to generalize a bit and consider the following statement:

According to X, Y is/was a neoliberal.

Someone would self-identify as a neoliberal if the statement is true for some X and Y where X=Y. I still have no examples of this.

However, I now have several examples with X different from Y. I read the introduction and first chapter of David Harvey's book. (David Harvey is an expert in "Marxist Geography" -- you might think I'm making that up to be funny, but I'm not.)

This gives me enough data to support statements of the form:

According to Harvey, Y is a neoliberal.

So far, I can say the following.

According to Harvey, the following are examples of neoliberals:

Deng Xiaoping, Paul Volcker, Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, Paul Bremer, Henry Kissinger, Augusto Pinochet, Milton Friedman, Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Keith Joseph, the Shah of Iran, Richard Branson, Lord Hanson, George Soros, Rupert Murdoch

Of course, according to many people on this board, many bitcoiners including Erik Voorhees and Roger Ver are neoliberals.

So if you want to better understand what "neoliberal" means, just think about what all these people have in common.

PS: It seems, given the work I'm putting into this, I might be interested in this topic. If anyone wants to help me gather information about what "neoliberalism" is supposed to mean, bitmessage me.

Erik Vorhees and Roger Ver have no relation to those people.

I once tried to explain to Vorhees that "fiat" has more than one definition.  Government fiat current is based ona government decree/law.  Another definition of "fiat" is more general and means it just has the faith of its users.  Some say Bitcoin is the ultimate fiat currency since it is just based on the faith of its users.  Vorhees jumped in and said we had to coordinate one definition and he pulled out a link to an online dictionary to "prove" his case.  I had to explain to him that there is no definitive dictionary and that there were more complete dictionaries than the web site he linked to.  From that point on I knew that Vorhees had no idea what he was talking about and he just repeats meme's and cute slogans.

As for Roger Ver, just look at his videos about Mt. Gox and Bitcoin Bounty hunter.  No wonder he ended up in jail over fireworks.

Wow, that's a challenge. I suppose they're all human and none of them are African or black.


Some people have the intellectual capacity of a goldfish.

I'm actually kind of at a loss for words, because it represents such a fundamental ignorance of history, economics, and language that I'm not sure these people actually live in the real world. Perhaps they're kind of pan-dimensional beings that just kind of accidentally step into our universe from time to time and are totally bewildered by everything they see.

I guess the best I could do is point these sorts of people toward the information they'd need;
http://www.englishclass101.com/how-to-speak-english/
http://mises.org/daily/1333
https://mises.org/books/origins_of_money.pdf
https://mises.org/books/tmc.pdf
http://mises.org/money/3s11.asp

Certainly you're not one of these people right?

I am one of those people who knows that there are unabridged dictionaries that show many different definitions of the work "fiat."  I am also aware that people who study economics have written articles where they use the general definition and discuss Bitcoin as "fiat" currency as opposed to the more specific "government fiat" where there is no ambiguity.

I am only mediocre in English though.  I got a master's degree in Physics and bachelor degree in Physics and computer science from Rutgers so I spent most of my educational time doing math formulas and writing code.

Do you have a degree in meme-based debates on reddit?

In other words, you're totally unqualified to talk with any kind of authority about economics or language. Plus a nice little ad-hominem tacked on at the end. Classy.

If you're going to do the "argument from authority" fallacy you should at least do it right...

Well, on a positive note, at least there seems to be some agreement that Erik Voorhees and Roger Ver are not neoliberals in whatever sense Harvey means it.

A lot of disagreements come down to definitions. This could be avoided if people would simply agree during the discussion to be clear about their definitions and assign different words to different definitions. It's easy enough to discuss fiat1 vs. fiat2 as being different concepts and during the discussion to explicitly say fiat1 or fiat2 to indicate which one is meant. I wonder why people are reluctant to do that.

Correct. It's a good thing to debate using the same kind of vocabulary as the person you're speaking with, whenever possible. If someone is arguing about fiat currency and you respond that, "That isn't a fiat currency", and then the other guy says, "Well no, this is the definition I'm working with." The correct response from that position is to just use that definition whether you like it or not, not go into a hissy fit because he refuses to use your definition unless his definition is so esoteric that no one could be reasonably expected to have a rational discussion using it.

Thats stretching credulity a little too far IMHO.

No, it means I did research and I listened to people who knew what they were talking about and not a bunch of people on discussion boards who repeat meme's.  I generally don't talk about economics.  Most of the economics discussion on here is based on the claim that the entire word will switch over to Bitcoin so they are just thought experiments and not realistic discussions. 

The issue is you don't know how to argue about with a Bitcoin supporter who doesn't agree with your ideology.  The arguments usually are that someone is a Bitcoin hater so, therefore, they are stupid and any objections to our arguments are because they are stupid.  Well I am a huge Bitcoin supporter and I say the Bitcoin protocol is great ... but I am also saying that the so-called "heroes" of Bitcoin are not just wrong, they are delusional and the loudest voices don't even do basic research beyond their self-serving discussion boards about what they are trying to talk about. 

I never realized that Free State project was so bad until I got involved in Bitcoin.  In fact, I used to think it was a good thing.  Apparently they have isolated themselves from the real world and they sit around reinforcing each other with nonsense and then they act like the rest of world is stupid.  Right, we are all stupid and we can't read dictionaries and we can't read experts in economics. 

You keep making these wild assertions about how certain Bitcoiners/libertarians/"pseudo-liberals" are wrong and delusional about their "arguments". Then you don't even bother to mention what those arguments are, and then when you can be bothered to actually state the argument and what you think is wrong with it, you ignore any counterargument.

Case in point was you saying "pseudo-liberals" are crazy because they think that Bitcoin will stop all wars. I then pointed out that war is actually very tightly linked to inflation, and that bitcoin is immune to inflation, and therefore there is a case to be made that Bitcoin could make war difficult.
You, of course, don't respond to that at all.

You do understand that when people are at speaking engagements they tend to use demagoguery, hyperbole, undefended assertions, and take incredibly optimistic long positions? That doesn't say anything about the foundation of their thinking, or how they got to that position, it just stirs debate, gets people interested, and makes the speaker more fun to listen to. It's just rhetoric, not some thorough peer reviewed paper that they've taken months to consider. You seem to be perfectly happy to take a few soundbites and go off on a tirade about how crazy certain people are.

Or, perhaps you're only listening to fringe wackos that don't even represent the majority position of the people you're referring to. I can't really know, since you are anything but specific about the problems you have.

I have already explained that I agree with limited government and reducing their power.  I have also explained that any discussion about Bitcoin reducing or ending wars and many of the economic arguments are based on an assumption that the entire economy will switch over to Bitcoin.  Those discussion are, for the most part, are interesting as thought experiments but otherwise worthless.  I am not going to waste my time arguing minute details about that stuff.  The real discussion is when Bitcoin gets some significant percentage of the economy how that will effect the economy and policies of things like central bankers.  That is the rational discussion.  it is discussed now and then but most of the discussion if that we have almost 100% government fiat or 100% Bitcoin.

I would agree that the fringe wackos like Vorhees, Shrem, Mayer, etc. don't represent the majority but they are the loudest and they get the most coverage.  My issue is that people like that are making it difficult to present Bitcoin to the general public.  While they were champions early on they are now detrimental to the adoption of Bitcoin and are making it weaker.  Many Bitcoiners don't realize that because they don't interact with the public at large and they just call the public all stupid because they don't understand Bitcoin and generally like State-run institutions.  It is like an election where one candidate gets wiped out at the polls and their supporters stand around all confused because "everybody" they knew supported the losing candidate.

If Bitcoin can't stand by it's own technical merits then no amount of excellent cheerleading is going to make any difference.

I don't really follow the people you're talking about, so I can't really defend them, but if you don't like what they're saying about bitcoin, then all you can do is make a better case yourself.

The way I think about cryptocurrency is that it is the basis of defacto libertarian society if it can live up to its goals. It is a borderless country without recognizing any authoritative leaders (anarchy).

Another way to look at it is a dramatic expansion of the black market (System D), and the increase in economic freedom that comes along with it.

That's if the problems with anonymity and the blocksize limit can be resolved.

Where do you come up with the claim that the black market is expanding dramatically?  That sounds like the people who keep claiming Bitcoin is expanding "exponentially."

Bitcoin is only a tiny fraction of the black market. The black market is considered a subset of the informal economy, of which 1.8 billion people worldwide are employed. Market revenue is estimated to be 1829 billion $.  The bitcoin market cap has not reached such sizes.

That's true. However, if Bitcoin can be an anonymous, decentralized, cheap to use medium of exchange then black markets will naturally gravitate towards it.

Right now it's an unfinished unproven technology, so it's anyone's guess what it's growth rate will be.

The "informal economy" and black market are pretty thoroughly interwoven to the point that I think it's pretty hard to find an economic activity that is untaxed and unregulated that is also not technically illegal. After all, in the United States you're supposed to write down all of your economic activity even if it isn't taxed.

The claim was that is increasing dramatically.  That means it was a certain value before and now it has "increased dramatically."  Where does that come from?

the claim was that the black market is "increasing dramatically."  Another hyperbolic claim.

The claim is by the Bitcoins Not Bombs people in a panel hosted by Stephanie Murphy that Bitcoin is currently increasing exponentially.  If you look at things like number of transactions. merchant adoption, etc. you can see mostly linear growth.  They are promoting their agenda and they think the success of Bitcoin is going to prove their ideas to the rest of the world.

I was thinking of the potential of Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, not it's current state. Sorry for the poor choice of words.

A few references:

https://blog.caseykuhlman.com/entries/2014/bitcoin-somaliland.html

http://prestonbyrne.com/2014/08/19/interview-on-lets-talk-bitcoin-no-137-the-eye-of-the-beholder/

I think one of the strenghts of Bitcoin is that users are  ideologically various.

I've never meet a Bitcoiner in real life that was perfectly okay with paying taxes.

This is spot on.

Technical and economical.

Allow me to explain in generalizations:

Would you rather get a 5Ƀ discount, or avoid a 5Ƀ surcharge?

Using bitcoin (as an actual currency, not as an anonymous proxy token for USD) means merchants will keep asking this question. And it will be equally uncomfortable for consumers.

Secondly, most people are not actually speculators. While holding bitcoin is indeed zero-sum gamble in the long term, most will incline to avoid the potential 5Ƀ loss than hope for the potential 5Ƀ profit. Irrational loss aversion cognitive bias. Opposite of gamblers fallacy.

This results in catch-22 situation: for price to stabilize, the adoption must be massive, so no bagholders can actually move the market anymore. but for that to happen, the price would have to be stable for a long time...

The only way to escape the death spiral I see is bag holders ganging up and coordinate to "act as a central bank" to ensure long-term sustainability. Unfortunately rational players (and unregulated markets in general) tend to not follow the game-theoretic golden rules where cooperation (even coerced!) brings much better results than individual competition.

Remember Nash saying: If we all go for the blonde...

Coercive action with better result for everyone might be cock-blocking the uncooperative agent. I'm sure many can relate to the real life....

Absolute Madness. I was losing buckets of blood from an unprovoked stabbing in a serious dodgy part of an English town.

The people who saved me SAVED me - saved my life. What they ask for - nothing. Free health care.

Neo-liberalists live in a bubble of their own design. 

We should meet up then, because I am absolutely "perfectly okay with paying taxes".
An ineffective or a broken system is not an excuse to exist without one.
I know it's cool to scream blue murder at taxes, but in the real world, charity, noble intents and self-preservation will not hold a society together.

To those who insists that society can still function without taxes, I urge you to just consider why there are over 400,000 orphans in the United States and over 150,000,000 around the world that still depend on their respective government's foster systems to survive. Where are these altruistic individuals that we so often hear about in narratives of no-tax utopias?

No, paleoliberal is just another in a long line of vague and convenient labels.
The Founding Fathers were certainly not "paleoliberals".


Self-professed libertarians of CATO (associated/influenced/converted), for the most part, are thoughtful individuals who recognize the subtleties of theories and philosophies and the exigencies of real world - at least until the Koch brothers' hostile takeover a few years ago. Self-proclaimed born again and paleo libertarians, on the other hand, live in a world that is increasingly detached from reality.


And lastly,


No, 'Bitcoiners' is not a superorganism that can be definitively defined and classified by a single label.
The Bitcoin demographic consists of (my speculation) intelligent, opinionated and independent-minded individuals.
'Bitcoiners', believe it or not, is not similar to fungal colonies or coral reefs.

https://i.imgur.com/ky1mD4X.jpg?1 https://i.imgur.com/XAHR9gl.jpg?1

I notice there are still people on the thread using "neoliberal" as a synonym for "anarcho-capitalist."

This makes the thread terrible for discussion but very useful for something else:

This thread provides a good list of dishonest forum members.

So, there are still people out there, who don't understand, that their peer-group is not a reflection of the whole world?
If you have never met a person, that disagrees with you, than you should maybe try meeting new people.

So to be clear; 51% of people are altruistic enough to provide badly for 400,000 orphans, but those same 51% that voted for the bad support those children are getting today, would not exist absent the government?

I would suggest that maybe most people don't go out of their way to help people because they expect the government to take care of it. That's pretty reasonable considering the United States Government spent $3,450,000,000,000 in 2013, since that's about twice as much money as you would need to give each of those orphans $50,000 every year for 90 years (in a one year budget, I remind you.).

http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2015/assets/tables.pdf

We can agree on this. I'm absolutely perfectly okay with you paying taxes. Pay all the taxes you want.

For most people it is not about paying taxes or not paying taxes, it is a matter of paying too much because much of the money is wasted.

As for taxes being too high the main problem with government is the incentives.  There is no incentive to end things that are no longer needed.  A government program can be started at the drop of a hat but it can be next to impossible to end a program when it is no longer beneficial.  That asymmetry is the problem.

Explain what Neoliberals are.

As far as straw man arguments go, yours must be the weirdest I've encountered in a long while. Give it another try.

Also, your suggestion implies that altruism and altruistic people are holding back because someone else, i.e., the government, is doing it. That's not altruism. Altruism exists regardless of any circumstances. Suggesting that altruism will suddenly emerge in the absence of a government is, forgive my language, breathtakingly delusional.

For the record, the welfare spending for the U.S. in 2014 will amount to $264.4 billion (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_budget_detail_fy12bs12015n_4041_605#usgs302). That includes unemployment assistance, food programs, foster systems and many others. Walmart and Exxonmobil generate almost twice as much in revenue annually, and these two companies actually enjoy preferential tax rebates. As a percentage of GDP, the figure has been on a downward spiral for the past three decades.



Let's also agree that I am not interested to pander to your snide, childish remarks.

Exactly. The key is in finding an equilibrium and enhancing efficiency.

Good luck. I read the wikipedia page and then part of a book by David Harvey. You can find info in my responses on the thread, but I warn you: no one cares. They just pretend "neoliberal" means something and use it to refer to people and ideas they-don't-like without saying who those people are or what the ideas are.

There's been an outstanding question from two of us on the thread from the beginning:

Name one person who self-identifies as a neoliberal.

No one can. No one will. No one cares.

Altruism exists whether or not the unfortunate party is being helped? Whether or not the unfortunate party is actually unfortunate? Whether or not the person knows about any kind of unfortunate circumstance that happened?

What do you mean that "Altruism exists regardless of circumstances"?

Did you miss my post about Rockefeller? That man gave, of his own free will, more than you or any of your ancestors made in their entire lifetimes put together (Adjusted for inflation). That's not even including the incalculable benefit to mankind that his company was; Standard Oil.

Also, the basis of Democracy is that 51% of voters ultimately know what's best for the rest of us. For anything altruistic to come out of it, you have to presuppose that at least 51% of voters are altruistic. So you've already said that altruistic people already exist in vast quantities! I am not quite as optimistic as you are, but clearly you're a bit confused about which side of the fence you're on.


If only we could get that spending to fall to 0% of GDP.

The point wasn't about spending in particular. The point is that our government overlords spend a tremendous amount of money and they have almost nothing to show for it. That maybe it's rational to think that the government could take care of what they claim under their sphere of influence given their colossal budget.


It's kind of surreal to read this. It's like looking at a man beat his slave and then saying, "You know, the problem here is asymmetry". I'd say, "I agree I suppose, but shouldn't we end slavery?"

Isn't that kind of the moral crux of the issue? Molyneux calls it the "gun in the room", akin to the elephant in the room. Sure we can have debates about whether or not we should send people out to murder dark skinned people in the far east, and sure it's totally fine to discuss whether or not we should put people away for life for having certain herbs in their pockets, but can we have the discussion about whether or not this entire political system is justified? Not among "polite" company.

What's worse is if you want to just be left alone on your own property. Men in silly blue costumes will come and take you away for not paying for permission to live on your own land, or maybe you weren't paying them "their cut" of your salary. Either way, that's enough to put you into a rape cage. Bizarre, immoral.

I'm definitely not a neo-liberal. I'm a total Anarchist with the most extreme views. I feel that every government should be disbanded and replaced with companies that are staffed with volunteers who work to serve the citizens of their country

Education in it's current form should be outlawed because all that we are seeing today is the dumbing down of the worlds populace. Creativity should be at the forefront, not the ability to regurgitate information. Police power should be severely reduced and restricted

The requester of any form of a TAX should be charged with treason and left to hang. If the state needs to be funded they can add VAT to every retail product which is more morally correct

and finance should be totally deregulated so that we can finally usher in the age of the bitcoin for the masses

Correct me if I'm wrong, but you are suggesting that in the absence of taxes - which means that the government will not be able to provide financial aid to orphans - altruistic people will suddenly emerge to adopt and take care of these orphans?
What is stopping these altrustic people from adopting these orphans right now?
Altruism does not depend on any set circumstances before it can appear.

As per the Oxford Dictionary, altruism is defined as "Disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others".
Not "Disinterested and selfless concern for the well-being of others after certain conditions are met."
Altruism should mean that all of the 400,000 orphans that society as a whole do not want would be adopted by families annually - now.

Since the dawn of time, has this ever happened before? Has societies, collectively, voluntarily decide to adopt every orphan, provide assistance to single mothers, and care for their old, sick and handicapped? No, it hasn't - other than a few truly altruistic individuals, society has largely turned a blind eye to the plight of others.

I may have missed your post about Rockeller, but that merely weakens your argument. Rockefeller chose to be altruistic. He didn't set specific conditions.
He didn't say "I will start to be altruistic if the government stop taxing my income".

If your wish comes true, if  welfare spending goes down to zero, then you will see society as a whole crumble. Children will be begging and scavenging for food everywhere. Many would be used and abused by some of the more psychopathic elements of society. Single mothers, the old, the handicapped, the sick and the underfed would all suffer the same fate. People will give wide berths walking past dead bodies lying in the streets.

Too extreme you say? Guess what? It has happened before, repeatedly, throughout human history. No heroic altrustic brigade has ever emerged to take care of the weaker members of society. Sure, there have been a few exceptions to that, individuals and small charities, but those has always been the exceptions rather than the rule.

The United States was never meant to mimic a dystopian Elizabethan society of feudal lords, land barons, merchant princes and a permanent serf class devoid of any chance of upward economic and social mobility.  The establishment of the United States was a direct result of the Age of Enlightenment. It aspired to be something greater, something more noble (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=723537.msg9218935#msg9218935).

Is the government we have now perfect? Hell no. But that doesn't mean that we should throw out the baby with the bath water.
Instead, we should work on fixing it. We fight to find the equilibrium between wealth, virtue and compassion.
Shouldn't we all aspire to be the best that we can possibly be, morally, ethically and financially, instead of devolving into small clusters defined narrowly and exclusively by self-preservation?

Doing the right thing is never easy.

Do me a favor. This weekend, make a trip to a local orphanage or centers for single mothers or the handicapped. Spend a few hours there. I swear, your whole perspective will change.

This reminds me the Dead Milkmen song, Punk Rock Girl


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyaK3jo4Sl4

He's saying that the same people who are doing it now will continue to do it but instead of putting tenders to government for funding, they will be directly funded by people. The argument could be made that in the absence of a violent (and inefficient) monopoly claiming responsibility for remediation of a VERY important issue, the quality of care that underprivileged get will be significantly better without them.


Depends on what society you're talking about. What i've noticed whilst travelling is that in countries where governments are too corrupt to provide welfare, the communities look after the underprivileged themselves... In fact, i would say that the safety net is far better in some cases. The deciding factor is resources really.


I Wholeheartedly agree with your aspirations! I think that it is essential to strive for the best possible morals and ethics. I that unless we can all agree on an objective (not a subjective culturally biased) and universal standard for ethics based off something that we all know gets results and works ie:the scientific method, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of history.

There are such frameworks out there already if you choose to take that long arduous path to self knowledge, but doing the right thing is never easy.

Do me a favour, spend some time in central Borneo or rural China. You'll realise that people can and do solve these problems without government interference.

No, that's what you're saying, based on a notion that has never had a precedent in the entire recorded human history.



Could you name some of those communities?

[/quote]

I actually have spent time in Sabah and Sarawak in Borneo, and Guangdong in China.
I have come to no such realizations, though.

As a matter of fact, the people of Sabah and Sarawak (excluding the small number of indigenous tribes in the rainforest) depend on the government for their free inoculation, almost free healthcare (equivalent to $0.30 per visit to a GP + free medication) and free education.

I'm saying thats what i've seen, specifically in Central Kalimantan. If you don't think i'm capable of determining this that's fine with me, in which case i highly recommend you go and see for yourself. Just because it doesn't appear in western historic literature doesn't mean that it doesn't happen.

Malaysian government is significantly less corrupt (and more functional) than Indonesian government which is why i referenced central Borneo(Kalimantan) instead of Malaysian Borneo. Where abouts in Guangdong did you stay?

I can't remember names of specific communities and google maps doesn't have anything aside from the major cities listed. I flew into Palangka Raya and spent a few months riding motorbikes around and staying with locals, visiting schools/orphanages and teaching children amongst other things.

The government does nothing except extract taxes in alot of those places (it really is nothing more than a mafia, watch "the art of killing" for a better idea of what goes on) sometimes not even that and the people have very little in the way of financial wealth yet they still do better at looking after underprivileged than we do.

You cannot really generalize every bitcoiners. There might be bitcoin users who are neo nazi, racist etc. You cannot generalize them

It is okay to have opinions. However, the absence of empirical data or references in your arguments makes it difficult for me to address them.

Anyway, the average per capita income for Indonesia is $3,475 (about Rp42 million) (http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD). The figure is highly skewed however, as the majority of high income citizens reside in Sumatra and Java. The taxation rate for those earning between Rp24 and Rp50 million is 0-5%  (http://www.pwc.com/id/en/indonesian-pocket-tax-book/assets/indonesian-pocket-tax-book-2014.pdf) (page 16). There are not many among Kalimantan's 15 million who actually qualify to pay taxes, as it is one of the poorest provinces in Indonesia - hence why the East Kalimantan and North Kalimantan provincial governments depend heavily on the the central government for funding. Check =179]this (http://bappedakaltim.com/dokumen-
data.html?task=download&cid[0) out. Almost the entire infrastructural and development spending for the two provinces in 2013 is funded by a central government agency. Fyi, the local hoodlums there, as well as corrupt officials, are mainly 'financed' by timber and palm oil companies - not tax dollars. So you see, I honestly don't see how implementing a tax-free regime in Borneo, whether in Kalimantan or Sabah or Sarawak or Brunei or Labuan, will make things better for the people there.

Re Guangdong, in Guangzhou, a short distance from the Twin Towers.
But China isn't really a great example for anything, either way.
Apart from North Korea, I can't think of many other places where foreigners are more boxed in. Further, observations about China often miss (or entirely discount) the powerful patriachal effect enjoyed by government and military officials over the general population. It is nigh impossible to understand China without first understanding the deeply embedded quasi-religious form of patriarchy and social hierarchy there.

Yes.

The point isn't that it's going to appear, it's that it already exists, but many people don't do anything because their wealth is being pillaged, and they expect the government to take care of it.

Another important point about Rockefeller and others like him is not only was he generous in the absence of government intervention, but that he was tremendously concerned about actually fixing the problems that led to the poverty to begin with. He favored education over handouts, for example.

When your own personal money is being spent, you are much more concerned about how that money is being spent. When the government does it, people are by-and-large disinterested in actual results. It doesn't matter, for instance, that drug rehabilitation is almost totally ineffective. We just keep dumping money into schemes that try to fix these people.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/06/AR2010080602660.html

Of course there are private business' that do the same stupid practices, but the difference is they are paid by people with their own money, not by stealing from everyone at large to pay for it. Medicaid will sometimes pay for it, Medicare will cover it if it's accepted, and just go to your local Community Mental Health organization to find out all the different schemes they have to try to "help" drug abusers and alcoholics that are total wastes of time, effort, and money in the long run.


This is a "Straw Man argument" because you're arguing a position that I didn't take. I never said that if we got rid of government all the sudden every single orphan would get adopted.

I'm not under the illusion that when people exist in anarchy that all problems disappear; The lame walk, the blind see, and healthy food is piled like mountains on every street corner.

When people are free to do as they like and to be commensurately rewarded for their efforts, then people will work for the benefit of their neighbor even if they think they are acting in their own self interest. Wonderful prosperity occurs, but it's not magic.


It's pretty difficult to engage in counter-factuals. I don't know what Rockefeller would have said under government tyranny, but what I can guarantee is that he would not have been able to succeed to the extent that he did under the government intervention that we see today.
Because of anti-trust laws Standard Oil would have never come to be, he would never have gotten the wealth that he did, and so he couldn't possibly decide how to contribute his own money (Again, because he wouldn't have it).

Wow, I'm so glad you wrote this. When I say that "People think armeggedon will take place if government steps aside" sometimes I think maybe I'm not giving people enough credit, but clearly that stereotype is true for at least one person.

The world is not going to end if government stops interfering in people's lives. The sun will still rise, crops will still grow, and people can still deal with eachother. There was absolutely astonishing improvement in the lives of the poor long before the "great society" projects of the 1900's.

"The thesis of his first Essay on Population, publish in 1789, was that dreams of universal affluence were vain, because there was an inevitable tendency for population to exceed the food supply. 'Population, when unchecked, in creases in geo-metrical ratio. Subsistence increases only in arithmetical ratio.' There is a fixed limit to the supply of land and the size of the crop that can be grown per acre. Malthus spells out what he sees as the fateful consequences of this disproportion:
 'In the United States of America, where the means of subsistence have been more ample ... than in any of the modern states of Europe, the population has been found to double itself in twenty-five years...'" -Henry Hazlitt, The Conquest of poverty.

Of all the things you can say about the 1700's under free market capitalism, the one thing you cannot deny is that food production skyrocketed. (Despite Malthus' incorrect fearmongering nonsense.)
Malthus is literally freaking out because of how much free market capitalism helped feed everyone, including the poor.

https://mises.org/books/conquest.pdf
http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=74

The beauty of capitalism is that it doesn't require people to be altruistic in order to do tremendous good for the poor. Rockefeller was a tremendous benefactor, but his company did far more for the poor then even he gave in charity.

In the free market there may be less dollars dumped into programs to help the poor, but what is put into charities would be far more effective per dollar, and would certainly out-do our current ineffectual schemes by a wide margin.

It was founded in defiance of tyranny. Read the declaration of Independence.


I have spent decades with people whose profession it is to work with these people and I can tell you my perspective has only strengthened over time.
I have tremendous sympathy. There are so many people in this world that have gotten beaten into the dirt by circumstances completely out of their control, and often have nowhere to turn.
The question isn't about whether or not these people exist, or whether or not these people need assistance, the question is about "How do we best help these people so that our time, money, and effort isn't wasted?"
The government has proven time and time again that there are only two things that it is good at;
1.) Wasting your time, money, and effort.
2.) Sending young men off to kill or put in cages other men, women, and children; Innocent and guilty alike.

Edit: Woops, had the quotes all mixed up.

(1) I'm confused.  We seem to be running in circles.
When exactly will these mythical altruistic people emerge? By your own words, they won't suddenly emerge if we abolish taxation. I've also clearly addressed that altruism and altruistic people do not set conditions before helping people. Yet you're going back to the same argument - altruism is absent because " they expect the government to take care of it."

Why? That's not altruism, which is the central core of your argument. Nevertheless, I'll bite, once again.

When former President Bush enacted his massive tax cuts in 2001 (effectively the largest since the Hoover days), the federal government lost about $6.6 trillion in revenue over an 11-year period. By your logic, shouldn't these extra income also resulted in an explosion of charitable contributions during the time? It didn't though. Despite being flushed with cash, there were no significant increase in charitable contributions from individuals and corporations over the last decade.

You know where the money went? Stock market and monetary instruments speculations, including subprime mortgage bundles which ultimately led to the worst American economic crisis in 80 years. And yet, self-professed paleolibertarians keep on insisting that if we abolish taxes and cripple the government, people will magically start being altruistic. I've asked this question before, even to Justin Amash. No one has been able to give a proper answer beyond rhetorics and quoting Hayek, Rothbard, Rockwell, Mises or Bastiat.

2. I'm confused again. Are you for or against anti-trust laws? And how does it relate to Rockefeller's altruism? Let's make it more current though. Look at Bill Gates. As of now, he is the biggest philanthropist in the history world. In a few decades, his Foundation's continued activity will also elevate him above Rockefeller, after inflation adjustment. I doubt there have been many Americans, if at all, who have paid more taxes than Gates. But like Rockefeller, he plans to give out all of his wealth to charity. That's altruism. And fyi, he works alongside governments of various nations - now.

3. Are you now? You say this as if a significant form of anarchist government has ever existed; as if there have been occasions in history where fully functional anarchist geo states or communities exist; as if humans are not communal, social creatures that will naturally create a form of government. From the dawn of time, some form of government have always existed. This is an undeniable fact. From patriarchy and other forms of social hierarchy-based leadership, to tribalism, feudalism, warlords, aristocracy, monarcy (hereditary and later, divinely inspired), theocracy, democracy, republicanism, oligarchy, sultanate, caliphate, parliamentary monarchy, communism, socialism, Maoism - I could go on.

After trials and errors stretching several millennia, democracy, regardless of its form, has proven to be the most stable, productive and compassionate form of government. And we're supposed to throw all this away based on some theory and philosophy that has never been able to withstand scrutiny, never mind produce empirical evidence to substantiate its assertions?

4. You're bringing capitalism into this now. Huh. Regardless, whatever do you mean by "The beauty of capitalism is that it doesn't require people to be altruistic in order to do tremendous good for the poor."? Don't you still require your "altruistic people" to help the weaker members of society?

5. And how do you know this? This is just speculation. Who will fund and managed these charities? More of your phantom altruistic people?
We exist in a free market economy right now. What's stopping the emergence of such charities right now?

6. You pick a single word and a single line from one of the most powerful documents ever written and you have the temerity to ask me to read it? Did you read the link/s I gave you earlier?

7. If you have heard a grown man crying because he can't feed his hungry child, then you wouldn't be so cavalier about cutting off aid to them.
If you have spent time with orphans, you would be filled with fear at the thought of them left unprotected, uneducated and unfed, and you wouldn't be so eager to stop money going to orphanages.
If you have spent time with an old woman left on the streets by her children, then you wouldn't begrudge the money spent giving them shelter and feeding, and you wouldn't be callously insisting we should stop paying taxes.
There is absolutely no justification at all to stop aiding people in need. None.

8. The government is you, me and other people like us. They are not some alien beings or members Alex Jones' ruling 20 families. Fix the government, from outside or inside. Don't let organizations like {url=http://www.alec.org/]ALEC [/url] write bills for your Congressmen. Pressure your Congressmen to repeal acts like Citizens United which allows companies to secretly fund political campaigns. Despise the war? Make it known, like the Flower Generation. They achieved results, despite the almost universal ridicule they received.

9. Don't mind me asking - what is your age?

Bitcoiners are Liberal Neos.

 We can agree on that.
You don’t understand what I’m talking about when I say that altruistic people have conditions concerning altruism, and it’s mind blowing to me that this isn’t self-evident
If someone is going to be altruistic there are MANY conditions;
1.)   The altruistic person actually has to have the means to be helpful to other people.
2.)   Other people need to exist that need help, AND aren’t currently getting help.
3.)   Other people that need help should be cooperative with getting help.
4.)   Those people that need help, and are cooperative, actually need to be able to be helped.
Altruism exists in *reality* it’s not some kind of metaphysical state of mind that pre-exists any kind of rationality.
Taxation conflicts with 1. The welfare state conflicts with 2.
Because the federal welfare state didn’t go anywhere in the meantime and because people can’t adjust their spending habits based on the perturbations of our aristocratic overlords.
And who was pushing Americans to put money into housing? What agencies made it affordable? Do you think that maybe there was a tie to government somewhere in there?
YOU believe people are already altruistic. If democracy does ANYTHING it’s with a 51% majority. You already believe that most people in the United States are very altruistic people. They’re willing to be raped up the ass by Uncle Sam just so the poor and helpless can be saved.
I don’t have to make that point, you’ve already accepted that it’s true. Again, you seem very confused about which side of the fence you’re on with this issue.
This reminds me very much of the concept of the seen and the unseen that Bastiat wrote about. We can all see that Bill Gates exists today. We can’t see how many Rockefellers don’t exist today. I can’t rewind history and play it back like I’d like, I can just appeal to logic by stating that people like Bill Gates could always exist, but other people that would only have succeeded absent government intervention would not exist by definition.
Rockefeller’s rule was he would tithe 10% of his earnings, so the benefit that he had for the poor depended heavily on him succeeding in business, and not having his income taxed into oblivion. You might try to argue that he’d have “given” more to the poor if it was taxed out of him, but that’s a hard case to make considering, again, he gave more to the poor than you or any of your ancestors combined even if you and all of your ancestors ate nothing but dirt and gave everything else to the poor. His contributions were also designed to be more effective than government schemes, which was only possible by virtue of the fact that it was his own money.
Every time you do something without permission from any authority but your own, you are acting under Anarchy. System D would be second the largest economy in the world if it were measured as one.
Also, complete anarchy, when tried, tends to do better than the governments prior.
A good rule of thumb is the closer you get to 0% as GDP of taxation, the closer you get to anarchy and the more prosperous the underlying society given its previous condition.

http://mises.org/daily/5418/anarchy-in-somalia

Hitler was elected.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wIq2xeyal8
I’ve been talking about anarcho-capitalism since the beginning. Try to keep up.
Charity is necessary even in an anarchist society, but the greatest contribution to the poor has always been businesses acting in their own self-interest.

If you haven’t noticed, private charities do exist.
Again, I don’t have to prove that enormous amounts of altruistic people exist. That’s your position.

Yes, I have the temerity to ask you to read relevant subject matter. I know, I’m a bad person, but maybe one day I can get past these weaknesses of mine.

"--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --..." Emphasis, Thomas Jefferson's

None? How about stopping theft? How about if the agencies responsible aren’t actually doing their job? What if there is a better way of providing for them? What if the same entity that is suppose to be helping these people is simultaneously starving woman and children to death due to trade sanctions? What if that same entity is outright killing innocent people by the tens of thousands, calling it “collateral damage”?
I guess that’s just altruism existing outside of reality again.
Haha! That’s rich.

Let’s go with 225 years old.

Maybe. But the charity of an individual, such as your hero Rockerfeller, is capricious, uncertain and self agrandising.

It is certainly no foundation on which to build a welfare system for those most vulnerable in society.



 
What ? You mean like this :-

       http://dfwilson.co.uk/wp/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/child-labour-in-coal-mine.gif

Despite the total ridiculousness of that image, who benefited from the coal they produced? Did the rich people throw it all in a big pile in their backyard burn it and laugh while holding their fat bellies, and holding a cigar in their teeth, and a monocle in their eyes?
Did rich people perhaps figure out a way to eat it all with their caviar?

Also, if this is capitalism, then the children are better off working in the mines than otherwise. Why do you suppose children and adults choose to work in such conditions?

No? This is a more solid foundation?
http://www.usdebtclock.org/

You, sir, are a real asshole.
They would be better off in a school learning something for their future, than dying from a polluted lung before they even reach adulthood.
But sure, in your "ideal" world, education is just for the ones who can afford it and some children a rich person took pity on.

Why do you suppose they choose to work in mines rather than go to school?

It's really difficult to hold a discussion with you with your selective snips of my quote. Quote me in full, and respond to me in full instead of picking randoms bits of my post while ignoring portions you are unable to reconcile with your theory. For the record, I'm confused because you are going around in circles.

Let's do a quick recap.

On October 27, you responded to my post with the following

I corrected you.


You responded with


You continue to harp on the election results for some reason, twisting my word ("So you've already said that altruistic people already exist in vast quantities!") and went on to introduce Rockefellar into the discussion. You went on to state that:

I then address all of your points: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9362210#msg9362210

You returned with bits and pieces of my quote, and repeated the same, previously addressed position

You then even conceded that:

And went on to paint an utopian world that can be achieved via an anarchist regime.

You ignored by point about Rockefeller, and introduced Standard Oil's anti trust suits into the equation for some strange reason.

Then, you made fun of my statement about how society will crumble if we ignore our weakest, stating

You introduced quotes from Henry Hazlitt, a journalist and a disciple of von Mises to reinforce your point. Then you start talking about capitalism (which you've now changed to anarcho-capitalism) and Malthus in what can only be described as an attempt to divert the argument. You proceeded to make the following shocking statement, clearly failing to notice the gap in logic there.

The icing on the cake though, is when you made this huge leap of assumption that completely ignores the reality of corporations and private enterprises.

You close that up with a rant about theft, government killing children, etc - the standard paleolibertarian talking points.

Today you returned, snipping my posts again, and merely repeating the same opinions and even resorted to Godwin's law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law).

Rather than repeat my self, I'll just repost a few of my earlier posts which you chose to ignore. Respond to this with empirical data instead of rhetorics. I know all of your talking points; I've heard it all before. I even have a copy of the talking points prepared by Americans for Prosperity three years ago for Tea Party and paleolibertarian operatives, where words like theft and murder were highlight in bold. What I haven't seen/heard/read is, evidence that support these talking points. I sometimes laugh when people tell me they want a smaller government, but don't even know the size of the government. The first thing they always zoom in is on welfare for the needy, despite the fact that it constitutes less than 0.1% of the budget. They are just so eager to start slashing off the evil gubmen, as if there is some magic pill, a single, cure-all panacea for a series of complex issues (fyi, bashing the inefficiencies of the federal government is not evidence that income taxes should be abolished.) Anyway, here they are.








And, in response to your aim of cutting welfare spending to zero and possessing "tremendous sympathy",


Please, don't repeat your opinions or talking points again. Let's move this discussion forward instead of going round in circles.

ps: Read the Declaration of Independence again. This time, instead of focusing of specific words that you think supports your theories, focus on the message behind the entire declaration. Once you've done so, then you may once again condescendingly ask me to read the same document.

pps: Then fix it, as I've said twice before, instead of trying to replace everything with a logic-defying theory that cannot even stand scrutiny. And I literally spill cigarette ash on my keyboard reading your Somalia example.

Are you for real?
They didn't choose, because they didn't have a choice.

@DumbFruit
Are you also one of this pedophiles, who think sex with minors is ok, when they "choose" to do it?
So, are also minor sexworkers, ok?
If not, what is the difference to "choosing" to work in a mine?

You understand for democracy to do what you want it to do 51% of people have be altruistic? Just because you can't see the link doesn't mean I'm arguing in a circle or diverting attention.

You think you corrected me.

I did not. There are real world examples of the effects anarcho-capitalism have on economies which are fantastic, but it is not a "utopia".

Do you understand that saying anarcho-capitalism helps the poor is not the same as saying that poor disappear under anarcho-capitalism?
Why do you keep saying I have some kind of logic gap by saying that the poor are helped, but not all poor are always helped?
Do you see that there is a spectrum of "helping the poor" where at one at there are no poor because it has been completely taken care of and on the other end of the spectrum everyone is poor?
You understand that I'm arguing that anarcho-capitalism places us in the spectrum closer to no poor than democracy?
This isn't a "logic gap". You are trying to paint me into some absolute position of "no poor utopia" that I didn't take.

I'm not ignoring anything that I think is relevant, if you think I missed something point it out specifically and I'll address it.


What point? The point about Bill Gates? I did address it.

Irrelevant. Stop trying to paint me into a utopian position. My position is not that *EVERY* orphan will be adopted. My position is that anarcho-capitalism can better handle charity than the government can.

"The Baining also derogate sexual intercourse, because it is natural, although they apparently engage in enough of it to keep their population going. They consider adoption to be the ideal form of parenting, because to raise someone else’s child is less natural than to raise one's own. At the time that Fajans studied them, 36% of the children were adopted. In Baining tradition, if someone asks to adopt your child it is not polite to refuse their request. In many ways, the Baining are the ideal Puritans, even though they have no particular religious traditions and do not give religious reasons for their beliefs or behavior."
The Baining are totally free of orphans and even adopt more from neighboring villages, and have no government. Though again, this is actually not relevant to my position.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201207/all-work-and-no-play-make-the-baining-the-dullest-culture-earth
You mean "Fix it my way or move to a different country".

Why didn't they have a choice?

Stop sniping my post and cherry picking sentences to respond to. One more time.
Edit: Again, substantiate your position. Repeating the same thing over and over again doesn't make your outrageous claims any more credible.

The right way to defend your position is to respond to what I say and point out specifically how my arguments don't address your points. Not repeat yourself over and over again and pretend I haven't addressed anything. It's reminiscent of a child throwing a temper tantrum and just repeating what he wants over and over.

Why are you afraid to quote me in full?
I have responded to everything you've written, and have not once cowardly edited out your quote.
It's simple really.

Here's a good example. I edited out the ad-hominems and left the relevant portion of your post.

You haven't provided evidence that my responses failed to address your points.

Edit: Better example.

My full quote, which I have no problem reposting.
And please, don't start hiding behind ad hominem accusations. You've been patronizing from the start.

Re editing: Just look at the way how you started by suggesting society and charities will emerge to take care of the weaker members of society, and then turn around denying saying so, just because you didn't use the word altruistic. You did that by carefully editing my posts after backing yourself into a corner.
I've specifically quoted what I wanted you to respond to, which you have avoided doing so - and I'm quoting it again below.

I'm not hiding or accusing. I just edited it out of your post to demonstrate a good reason why I don't quote you in full.

If I came off as saying that absent government all poor people will be taken care of by private charities that emerge, then I apologize. That was not my intention, but I think my position is now clearer. Throwing a tantrum about my position not being immediately clear and accusing me of doing it intentionally is a bit silly.

How many times have I made "ad hominem" on your person, by your reckoning? Once? Twice?
How many times have you edited my quotes, lifting sentences from middle of paragraphs or avoided responding to questions? Twenty, thirty times?

Your apology is noted, and I also apologize if I have in any way insulted your person. However, your position is still vague.
Further, I have thrown two tantrums among my three hundred odd posts on Bitcointalk - my first one, to Cex.io, and the other, to C-Cex.
If you feel this is a tantrum, then I will try to be more gentle with you.

With that cleared, will you now respond the above so your position will be less vague - without editing my posts?

It's not about "being gentle", the only thing I'm objecting to right now is going on a repeated rant about how I'm just ignoring everything instead of doing any counterarguments to the things I did address.

However, I will go back and specifically address the following stuff. In full context for some reason. Some if it I know I addressed already, some of it I ignored for good reason, but by golly if it's what you really want, I'll do it. I'm nothing if not an unrelentingly caring, helpful, generous, friendly, humble, gregarious, and all together decent, intelligent, and good looking individual.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9384022#msg9384022

I feel I've addressed all of your arguments at least once already. Even if I hadn't, you can't demand that I did without addressing my earlier points.
How is that a rant? That is, as far as I know, reasonable decorum for discourse.

You can address those points tomorrow. I've spent too much time here as it is today.

So, address this

I was hoping that I could lead you to water, but apparently you won't have any of that. I asked you, "Why do you suppose they don't have a choice?"

The answer is because they don't have schools. Why don't they have schools? Because they haven't accumulated enough capital to afford the free time in order to pay people in a service industry. Why don't they have capital? Because they haven't worked enough to accumulate it.

So there you go. They're choosing to work so that one day they, or their children, might be able to afford to go to school, by interfering with people in third world countries working, you are literally interfering with their ability to accumulate capital, and therefore to ever be able to afford to go to school.

I know that's very abstract, that's how I tend to start out for some reason. Lets break this whole problem down to a relate-able issue.

Suppose that Armageddon happened tomorrow and nearly everyone on the planet vaporized because of aliens or whatever (I told you this was going to be relate-able). So you get up in the morning and presumably you're very good at whatever it is you do, but the bottom line is unless you're a farmer, those skills are useless.

You would want a tractor, you would want a mechanical auger, you would want an elaborate water transportation and irrigation system, but even if these things were given to you you're only well off until they broke down. How would you get the parts to keep it repaired? How would you get the gasoline? How would you get the tools to make the parts, or the tools to get the gasoline?

The bottom line is you're pretty much hosed because the problem of getting a tractor is only scratching the surface of your problems. The real problem is the entire infrastructure of the world you knew has been obliterated and you alone could not hope to build it from scratch in your lifetime.

So what do you do? You work your ass off. You plow by hand, you plant by hand, your life sucks. Maybe eventually your children or your neighbors start mining coal, the conditions are terrible, the work is hard, and their life sucks (But it's better than working on the farm!). Eventually down the line maybe, just maybe, if enough knowledge is accumulated and enough people can get together, the world as we know it could be built back up. You and everyone you know will likely work in terrible conditions day in and day out, and you will be afflicted by diseases and famine and have nowhere to turn to. No amount of petitioning, or bellyaching, or unionizing, or protesting will help because the resources simply aren't there.

That's pretty much what the third world is. In the third world the resources simply aren't there. There is an entire infrastructure of skills and capital that simply doesn't exist. You cannot just wish it away, you can't just send them tools, and you can't even just give people knowledge. That will help if it's done right, but the bottom line is working your way out of third world status is in the hands of the third world. If they're going to do it, it's going to be through long, tedious, and dangerous hard work though it won't be nearly as bad as it was for my ancestors, because we've already shown them how it's done.

We can help the third world in two ways that come to mind;
1.) Careful, moderate, individual charity that succeeds in its goals but avoids dependence.
2.) Free trade. Free trade of knowledge and free trade of capital.

Charity must be done by individuals because government charity is enormously wasteful, badly targeted, fails at its objectives, and creates dependence.

Free trade should be free trade absolutely. No currency games, no sanctions, and no strings. As long as everyone follows the Non-Aggression Principle everyone should be free to make arrangements with each-other that are mutually beneficial even if other people might find them offensive.

How fast can a third world country make it to first-world status if we even approach these conditions? Possibly 35 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Singapore

I know you will probably cry foul because Singapore is not an anarchist state, but crucially to succeed from an anarcho-capitalists perspective is to have economic freedom that approaches anarchy. You can tell that a society approaches anarchy when the regulations are almost nonexistent, and taxes are almost nonexistent.

The United States had these conditions until about the 1900's. Singapore, Hong Kong, the Dutch East India Company, Britain, and Rome all succeeded by adhering to these ideas. They all did or will fail as they succumb to socialism/statism.

Anarcho-Capitalism is not a all-or-nothing philosophy like Communism. The closer you get to achieving it, the more prosperous you become.

There is so much wrong with what you have just posted that I wouldn't know, supposing I had the time,energy and inclination to try, where to start.

But do me a favour hey - drop the pretence of being an "anarchist".

You are, by its proper name, a neo conservative free market proponent/capitalism apologist, busy kissing arse of those you aspire to cosy up to, as they, meanwhile, deem it fitting to make tax deductible charitable donations that they might better be able to exercise control over that which isn't rightfully theirs anyway - and thereby manage, in the process of so doing, to frame themselves as some kind of inverse Robin Hood, to those of an impressionable age and suggestible temperamant like yourself :-

http://www.hellomagazine.com/imagenes//royalty/2013040811966/margaret-thatcher-dies/0-60-936/margaret-thatcher--z.jpg



I know it might be cool to call yourself an anarchist and everything - your parents probably frown, in a loving and forgiving kind of way. And indeed, your heady idealism might well, I'm sure, remind them of themselves when they were once heady and, well, idealistic - but TBH, it doesn't quite cut the mustard on here.

You wouldn't know an anarchist if you tripped over one walking down the street FFS  

So, the best a kid can do, is over sex to tourists to make the most capital.
Ok, got it.

Fair enough, nothing to see here...

http://biblehub.com/matthew/7-6.htm

I'm an agnostic, I just admire that the bible describes people like you thousands of years before you were born.

Anarcho-Capitalist or Anarcho-Libertarian, please.

Edit: Also! Even though the two posters above this obviously don't want to learn anything, to any other interested reader this is a great debate with Walter Block against a "real anarchist".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZS255rKC3M

No, there is balance between that is optimal.  If the State gets too large it damages the free market.  If the State gets too small markets can't operate and things degrade.  Many of the youngsters who call themselves "anarchists" and claim the blockchain will solve all the world's problems don't get this. 

This is an example of argumentum ad temperantiam.
http://wiki.ironchariots.org/index.php?title=Argumentum_ad_temperantiam

You have asserted that when the state gets too small "things degrade". Defend your assertion.

I answered this twice.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9370403#msg9370403
This is a "Straw Man argument" because you're arguing a position that I didn't take. I never said that if we got rid of government all the sudden every single orphan would get adopted.

I'm not under the illusion that when people exist in anarchy that all problems disappear; The lame walk, the blind see, and healthy food is piled like mountains on every street corner.

When people are free to do as they like and to be commensurately rewarded for their efforts, then people will work for the benefit of their neighbor even if they think they are acting in their own self interest. Wonderful prosperity occurs, but it's not magic.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9382245#msg9382245
Irrelevant. Stop trying to paint me into a utopian position. My position is not that *EVERY* orphan will be adopted. My position is that anarcho-capitalism can better handle charity than the government can.

"The Baining also derogate sexual intercourse, because it is natural, although they apparently engage in enough of it to keep their population going. They consider adoption to be the ideal form of parenting, because to raise someone else’s child is less natural than to raise one's own. At the time that Fajans studied them, 36% of the children were adopted. In Baining tradition, if someone asks to adopt your child it is not polite to refuse their request. In many ways, the Baining are the ideal Puritans, even though they have no particular religious traditions and do not give religious reasons for their beliefs or behavior."

The Baining are totally free of orphans and even adopt more from neighboring villages, and have no government. Though again, this is actually not relevant to my position.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201207/all-work-and-no-play-make-the-baining-the-dullest-culture-earth

Answered this here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9382245#msg9382245
Because the federal welfare state didn’t go anywhere in the meantime and because people can’t adjust their spending habits based on the perturbations of our aristocratic overlords.
Expanded point:
If I wasn’t being clear, I’m saying that people can’t make decisions about charitable donations based on the whims of politicians that change from year to year, and they especially don’t go out of their way to help people that should be being helped by the federal programs that they are funding with their taxes.
People in general don’t have the idea that they are going to spend their money on either taxes or charity. There is what is called in economics a “diminishing marginal utility”, which when applied in this instance means that people certainly might not immediately put their money into charity as soon as discretionary spending comes up, because people value charity at different levels subjectively.
For some people, they might put all the money they save in taxes directly into charity. For other people, they might value their own children’s education, or paying down their debts before they start putting money into charity.
The point is we can hardly make any kind of prediction about precisely what’s going to happen during a temporary tax credit in such a government dominated industry (Welfare).
http://mises.org/austecon/chap4.asp
I answered that here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9382245#msg9382245
This reminds me very much of the concept of the seen and the unseen that Bastiat wrote about. We can all see that Bill Gates exists today. We can’t see how many Rockefellers don’t exist today. I can’t rewind history and play it back like I’d like, I can just appeal to logic by stating that people like Bill Gates could always exist, but other people that would only have succeeded absent government intervention would not exist by definition.
Rockefeller’s rule was he would tithe 10% of his earnings, so the benefit that he had for the poor depended heavily on him succeeding in business, and not having his income taxed into oblivion. You might try to argue that he’d have “given” more to the poor if it was taxed out of him, but that’s a hard case to make considering, again, he gave more to the poor than you or any of your ancestors combined even if you and all of your ancestors ate nothing but dirt and gave everything else to the poor. His contributions were also designed to be more effective than government schemes, which was only possible by virtue of the fact that it was his own money.

Expanded: I’m not interested in measuring how altruistic people are. It doesn’t concern me whether or not Bill Gates is a better guy any more than I care which of them had the bigger penis.
I’m concerned about which philosophy guides people closer to actually alleviating the suffering of the poor. Under anarcho-capitalism Bill Gates could still exist, in society today there could not exist people like Rockefeller, because they simply could not compete like they did in the 1800’s under low taxation and low regulation.
I am of course against anti-trust. I don’t see it as a benefit that it destroyed Standard Oil.
I answered that here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9382245#msg9382245
Every time you do something without permission from any authority but your own, you are acting under Anarchy. System D would be the second largest economy in the world if it were measured as one.
Also, complete anarchy, when tried, tends to do better than the governments prior.
A good rule of thumb is the closer you get to 0% as GDP of taxation, the closer you get to anarchy and the more prosperous the underlying society given its previous condition.

http://mises.org/daily/5418/anarchy-in-somalia
Expanded:
You hemmed and hawed about Somalia, but the bottom line is that Somalia has done much better without a government than with one. It’s not a paradise by any stretch of the imagination, but again, that’s not my position.
Unfortunately I don’t think it’s still without a State.
http://mises.org/daily/2066
http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf
Answered here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9382245#msg9382245
Charity is necessary even in an anarchist society, but the greatest contribution to the poor has always been businesses acting in their own self-interest.
Private charities do exist right now. We do not exist in a free market economy right now. Our economy is heavily controlled by both houses of congress, ill-concieved “free trade agreements”, as well as a central bank that manipulates interest rates (which are arguably the bedrock of business decisions).
Anarcho-Libertarians like myself don’t believe old white men should have the authority to vote on whether or not we can keep our individual freedom, no matter how many votes they have, or how many mistresses.
On top of that, no one in Congress represents me, nor does any majority in in any state in the United States. I represent me, and in a just society, that would be enough.
Anyway; Hitler was elected, elections can be easily gamed, and the mob can’t be trusted. So your point is moot.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wIq2xeyal8
Ugh. No. I’m not going to respond to this appeal to emotion again.
https://yourlogicalfallacyis.com/appeal-to-emotion

Answer to "There is absolute no justification at all to stop aiding people in need." here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9382245#msg9382245
None? How about stopping theft? How about if the agencies responsible aren’t actually doing their job? What if there is a better way of providing for them? What if the same entity that is suppose to be helping these people is simultaneously starving woman and children to death due to trade sanctions? What if that same entity is outright killing innocent people by the tens of thousands, calling it “collateral damage”?
I guess that’s just altruism existing outside of reality again.

You did.

I would suggest that maybe most people don't go out of their way to help people because they expect the government to take care of it. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9348038#msg9348038)


Quote from: Cameltoemcgee on October 28, 2014, 11:44:39 PM
He's saying that the same people who are doing it now will continue to do it but instead of putting tenders to government for funding, they will be directly funded by people. The argument could be made that in the absence of a violent (and inefficient) monopoly claiming responsibility for remediation of a VERY important issue, the quality of care that underprivileged get will be significantly better without them.

Yes. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9370403#msg9370403)

You also argued that: My position is that anarcho-capitalism can better handle charity than the government can. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9388453#msg9388453)

This of course brings up the question - based on what actually, other than blind supposition? Has corporations made measurable charitable initiatives today that exceeds the government in terms of reach and effectiveness? Are we supposed to believe that corporations that routinely exploit communities will metamorphosize into entities with social conscience once we stop taxing them?

Further, your examples of the Banning is misleading because they certainly exist within a governmental framework. Where did you get the idea that they have "no government". The are semi-nomadic, but they are not cut off from society. Some of them even go to churches and mosques! Further, their adoption habit is based on a unique sexual taboo. It has nothing to do with anarcho capitalism.



No, you did not answer it earlier. You answered it now though, in your last sentence.
"The point is we can hardly make any kind of prediction about precisely what’s going to happen during a temporary tax credit in such a government dominated industry (Welfare)."

But you can somehow predict their behavior post tax-abolishment? $6.6 trillion in liquidity and no discernible difference in charitable contributions, but we're supposed to accept there will be a difference if we stop taxing them entirely? Speaking of marginal utility, shouldn't private charitable contributions increase in light of the ever decreasing federal welfare funding relative to GDP? Or does that only work in favor of aggrieved taxpayers?

And just so we're clear, I don't have any "aristocratic overlords". You may imagine you do, but I don't. I don't consider government officials or politicians "aristocratic overlords. I've even yelled at a couple of your "aristocratic overlords".


Once again, you didn't answer that. Using your argument, altruistic people like Bill Gates shouldn't exists at all now. Remember your argument of “diminishing marginal utility” one paragraph above? Further, you seem unaware that Rockefeller and Standard Oil actually paid enormous amount of taxes in the form of import tariffs for their equipment and concession fees - not to mention systematic kickbacks to local, state and federal officials.



Your definition of anarchy is, I'm sorry, just plain silly. Exercising my free will within the constraints of the law is not anarchy.
Your rule of thumb is also, I'm sorry again, just plain silly. You're just restating your opinion that abolishment of taxes will magically lead to prosperity for all, ignoring historical, social and economic precedents. Your rule of thumb is just another rephrasing of the Reagan's trickle down economic (Laffer Curve, anyone?), which has been proven to be false.

I wasn't hemming or hawing about Somalia. I told you I was laughing - I even spilled cigarette ash on my keyboard.
Most paleolibertarians steer clear of Somalia - not you though. Sorry, I'm laughing again.  ;D

Somalia pre-anarchy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drW5cmd-GQk
Somalia post-anarchy: http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=ac7_1321327107

Sigh. Sometimes I wonder...



Not answered, again. You didn't mention the agents or intermediary in your initial answer. But I knew you were going to say businesses/corporations. Sadly, corporatocracy has always acted in its own self interest, not society's. Do I really need to expand on this?

Private charities exists, yes, I have mentioned that myself. But the total number is practically insignificant.

Also, you are laboring under the impression that free market equals complete deregulation - something that the United States nor any other nation have ever tried nor experienced.



You are not an anarcho-libertarian. Anarcho libertarians does not exist. Its philosphy is a half baked mutation of paleolibertarianism, which is a half-baked neo-confederate racist ideology, designed to justify social and economic extremism. It is just a label.

The beauty of democracy is, if there are enough people who share your beliefs, you can change the sociopolitical and socioeconomic system of this country.

You are resorting to Godwin's law once again. Yes, Hitler was elected. But you are intentionally ignoring the years of unchecked abuse he inflicted on the government culminating with him holding the entire Reichstag hostage while forcing the passing of Ermächtigungsgesetz, which elevated his powers to near monarchy.

Elections cannot be easily gamed - gaming it requires resource, patience and most importantly, depends on the apathy of the citizens. Case in point, you - you refuse to do anything about Citizens United, but have no problem complaining endlessly about the government. You just want the whole thing abolished in favor of some half baked theories.



Why not? Didn't you say you were sympathetic? How do you reconcile your sympathy with your insistence on bringing welfare spending to zero?
Do you think people won't die when you do that? Do you think people won't suffer when you remove social safety nets?
Do you realize how many people who are just one paycheck away from poverty?
Is this truth too inconvenient for you?


You've asked me this earlier, and I've answered you.


ps: You do realize that most of the links you posted, especially the Mises ones, are merely opinions, not substantive facts?

Yeah, that is great, just don't answer my question, because it shows a big flaw in your argument of "free choice".
Going on an abstract level, when there is a concrete question is just weak.

No. I answered why third world countries tend to have working conditions, hours, and pay that don't come anywhere near to matching the first world, then you one-line bald-faced swapped the topic out to sex trafficking which is a different issue. To me, that signaled that you either have zero integrity, or you have zero capacity of following a conversation. In either case, why should I waste my time on you?

Why do you waste time on any of this delusional stuff?  The only thing you are doing is making Bitcoin look ridiculous.

Yep, HELP.org, you are always raising the quality of discussion. How's your "Everyone that disagrees with me is just repeating memes." meme coming along?








This is my favorite;


Followed by;


It sure does suck when people just jump in with a sound byte and act like they just trumped the whole discussion, huh?

Minor sex workers and children working in mines is both about children labor and their "free choice" to do it.
You gave a ridiculous example about "what if aliens invade us"?
How is that answering my question?

I was answering the portion concerning capital accumulation, would you like me to answer what I think about the age of consent? What age am I supposed to assume people in some some random drawing are suppose to be?

There is not a definitive Anarcho-Libertarian position on this issue, but it's certainly not the "children are cattle" sort of nonsense you're trying say.

I never asked about capital accumulation, I asked about "free choice" of children.
Saying  there is no "Anarcho-Libertarian position" just shows, that you are cherry picking. Minor sex workers is something in the real world. A theory about society, that doesn't have a position on it, is just a real bad one. Avoiding delicate questions is weak.

The word liberal in Neoliberalism refers to the liberalization or easing of labour and trade laws meant to protect the population from the tyranny of unrestrained capitalism.

I love how you highlighted this in red like you caught me out. Great job detective. How does what cameltoemcgee said contradict anything I said previously?
You just posted a bunch of things I said, but you haven’t described how I contradicted myself, and I don’t see it.
I’m saying that the condition of the poor improves under Anarcho-Capitalism better than under state overlords. I’m not saying that all the poor will disappear immediately, no matter how many times you try to paste some quotes together to try to make it look like I’ve taken some extreme position.

The extreme position that you are trying to put me in is here plain as day for anyone to see and was never a position that I took.
First you say that altruism should mean that all the poor and all the orphans should be taken care of immediately, and since I said altruism already exists in society, I need to show you a society in which all the orphans and all poor people are constantly and completely taken care of. That’s an outrageous definition of altruism, and that’s not my position.


I am not concerned with the effectiveness of charities in terms of “reach”, because government welfare crowds out private charity. You cannot lose money in taxes and then send that same money to private charities. You can give up even more of your income, but people have what is called “diminishing marginal utility” for their discretionary income. The more money that is taken in taxes, the less people will give in charity, depending on their prefences.
It's also more important for charity to be effective, than have massive quantity. "Charity" that makes the problem worse, is better off if it is smaller.
So the “reach” part aside, I think there can certainly be made the case that private charities in the United States are far more efficient than Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.
However, I’m not going to do that. Society is so complex we could spend the next century trying to figure out why event X happened despite Y.
Austrian economists do not believe that economics is based on empirical research. Economic understanding comes from the outworking of logical principals.
For instance, we understand that raising the minimum wage, ceteris paribus, will mean that less people will be employed. Raising the minimum wage makes it illegal for the least productive members of society to work.
There is no need to go out and do research, or figure out if this is always the case, because you’re always going to find strange outliers where you haven’t been able to track down all the variables.
This is just the same as if your teacher told you the Pythagorean Theorem, and then you went out a measured a bunch of triangles but you found one where the Pythagorean Theorem didn’t seem to hold true. It was a right triangle, but your measurements didn’t correspond to what the Pythagorean Theorem gives you. Your teacher would rightly scold you, because whether or not the Pythagorean Theorem is correct is not based on empirical research; where mathematicians measured triangle after triangle and it just happened to be true most of the time. It’s based off of the fundamental principles of mathematics.
In this same way, no matter how much empirical research you do, you can’t disprove the logical effects of the minimum wage.
Now then, the welfare state is necessarily an entity that takes money from you by force, also known as “theft”, funnels it through its bureaucracy, and then deposits it back into the accounts of certain members of society. Who those members are is based on the whims of congress or appointed agencies. Because welfare is achieved through taxation, it can remain perpetually indebted, show poor results, and have high overhead. For the population to do anything about it, they need to have a majority vote hampered by the votes of the welfare employee’s themselves and the recipients.
Now consider private charity. In this scenario, the agency gets money by the consent of their customers, the benefactors. For them to stay in business they have to succeeded in several ways; Most of the money they receive needs to make it to the people they’re trying to help, they have to show positive results, and they must stay solvent. If at any time the benefactor’s don’t like what’s going on with this business they can withdraw their funding immediately, no questions asked, and no theft permitted.
There is no fundamental advantage to a welfare state. There is no positive improvement in any way over private charity. If a welfare state “succeeds” in any way, it is only due to the infusion of insane amounts of money; impoverishing society as a whole in order to benefit the chosen few.
So instead of asking for empirical evidence, I would ask you instead: In what fundamental way is the welfare system structurally superior to a private charity? What do we gain that we can’t gain from private charity in a better way?

All I predict is that the same demand for charity that exists with a government will still exist without a government, and that demand will be met more efficiently by private charity.
If society neglects the poor, that is a reflection of their values, and a government could do no better. (But often does far worse.)

Diminishing marginal utility doesn’t predict that Bill Gates wouldn’t be charitable.
I was using Diminishing Marginal Utility as a way to show that just because some people have more money does not necessarily mean that those people will be more charitable because it depends on their preferences.
The fact that Rockefeller paid taxes has nothing to do with anything I’ve said about him. The amount of taxes he paid was the important part.

An Anarcho-Libertarian society is exercising free will under the judiciary of private law agencies, and the executive action of private defense agencies and individuals. In this way having “no rulers”, which is what I call “anarchy”.

“GDP per capita (PPP constant $) 836b 600c,e ?
Life expectancy (years) 46.0b 48.47c,g Improved
One year olds fully immunized against measles (%) 30 40h Improved
One year olds fully immunized against TB (%) 31 50h Improved
Physicians (per 100,000) 3.4 4h Improved
Infants with low birth weight (%) 16 0.3l Improved
Infant mortality rate (per 1000) 152 114.89c,g Improved
Maternal mortality rate (per 100,000) 1600 1100i Improved
Pop. with access to water (%) 29 29h Same
Pop. with access to sanitation (%) 18 26h Improved
Pop. with access to at least one health facility (%) 28 54.8k Improved
Extreme poverty (% < $1 per day) 60 43.2k Improved
Radios (per 1000) 4.0 98.5k Improved
Telephones (per 1000) 1.92d 14.9k Improved
TVs (per 1000) 1.2 3.7k Improved
Fatality due to measles 8000 5598j,m Improved
Adult literacy rate (%) 24b 19.2j Worse
Combined school enrollment (%) 12.9b 7.5a,f Worse

…Only two of the 18 development indicators in Table 1 show a clear welfare decline under stateless: adult literacy and combined gross school enrollment. Given that foreign aid was completely financing education in Somalia pre-1991, it is not surprising that there has been some fall in school enrollment and literacy…

…A substantial observed rise in consumption without an attendant rise in per capita GDP suggests an unmeasured increase in per capita income between the pre- and post-anarchy periods not reflected in the data.”

The lives of people in Somalia improved under anarchy almost across the board compared to under government, your prevaricating and sense of humor notwithstanding.
http://www.peterleeson.com/Better_Off_Stateless.pdf
Business’s acting in their own self-interest is the same as acting in the interest of society. The only time this is not the case is when the business quickly fails, or when the business is getting favors from government.
I would suggest getting the book “The Myth of the Robber Barons” and learning the difference been entrepreneurship and political entrepreneurship.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Robber-Barons-Business/dp/0963020315
Deregulation insofar as practices don’t conflict with the Non-Aggression principle, but otherwise yes.
A good example of free trade was inter-state free trade in the United States. One of the biggest reasons the Federal Government was instituted was to “regulate interstate commerce” which actually meant to remove any kind of barriers to commerce that states might try to erect amongst each-other.  This is why when the Constitution we know today went into effect in 1789, all interstate tariffs, trade restrictions, and export taxes were banned. -Dewey, Financial History of the United States (5th ed. 1915) ch 1-3
Voting can be gamed;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wIq2xeyal8
Voting didn’t stop Hitler. He was elected before the Ermächtigungsgesetz, so I’m not sure why you brought that up.
Voting didn’t stop this;
http://www.usdebtclock.org/
Voting didn’t stop the fall of Rome.
Voting can’t stop the tyranny of the majority.

Voting fails time and time again because it’s subject to social pressures, conflict of interest, Condorcet’s paradox, and the ignorance of voters.

Elected officials aren’t “me”, they don’t even necessarily represent the views of the majority.

What ideology do you hold, and what is the age of consent?

My question wasn't about age of consent. There is a huge difference between having sex for fun and having sex as a job.

Should a 12-year old work in a mine?
I say no, they shouldn't. You say, yes they should.

Should a 12-year old fuck a 40-year old for money?
I say no, they shouldn't. What is your answer to that question?

First off, for the umpteenth time, please stop cherry picking my posts. I am not sure what you are trying to accomplish when you do that. If I wrote two things, and you were either wrong on or could not respond to one of them, then concede the point instead of lifting specific sentences to fashion a new argument against me. Don't hide behind excuses that you don't think it’s relevant or I'm throwing a tantrum. What do you think people will do if you conduct yourself this way in a real life discussion?



Of course you won’t admit it - even after presented with your own words. I expected no less. You don;t even realize how extreme your position is. Instead, you are arguing semantics, and are absolutely reveling in my use of the word ‘altruism’ and ‘altruistic’, completely oblivious to the fact that I am using the catchword of self-professed paleolibertarians.

You argue against government welfare, and stated that in a tax-free form of government, people and corporations will voluntarily give charitable donations to support the poor.

I’ve asked you why you think corporations that consistently exploit communities will suddenly develop a social conscience? You ignored that (but went on the make a remarkable revelation below).
I’ve asked you why there was no explosion in charitable contributions when the Bush tax cuts freed up $6.6 trillion. You said it’s difficult to make a prediction because it’s “a temporary tax credit” and “people can’t make decisions about charitable donations based on the whims of politicians that change from year to year”. Really? Thirteen years on?

And again, I have no ‘overlords’. You seem very convinced that you do – I am beginning to sense that is the root of your problem.




Why aren’t you concerned about its effectiveness and reach?
Doesn’t the entire point of your argument rest on the fact that voluntary contributions in a tax free society trumps government welfare?
Yet you go on to state that “I think there can certainly be made the case that private charities in the United States are far more efficient than Social Security, Medicare, or Medicaid.”
So can you or can you not demonstrate this empirically?

Which are?

How convenient. Is it because there is no empirical evidence to support your argument? Naturally, I expect you’ll want me to just ignore your statement (two quotes above) that private charities are more efficient that SS and Medicare.

So since you can’t substantiate your arguments, you’re asking me to disprove it. :)
Here’s the problem with that. Voluntary private charities have never existed in significant enough size to make that comparison – throughout human history. Why do you think that is so? And why do you think that will change in a tax free society?

As I’ve noted before, U.S. welfare spending for families and children in 2014 ($264 billion) amounts to to 0.066% (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_budget_detail_fy12bs12015n_4041_605#usgs302) of the federal budget. And it’s decreasing annually relative to GDP.

Did you know that we spend $863.5 billion, three times as much, on defense?
Did you know that oil companies receive an average of $5.2 billion in subsidies annually, almost the same as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program ($5.6 billion) designed to assist 14.5% Americans facing food insecurity?
Did you know that the tax rate of the 3 biggest US based oil and gas companies averages at 20%, which is lower than my rate, despite making $80 billion in profit?

http://assets.motherjones.com/politics/2014/04/tax-breaks-630.png

Did you know that farm subsidies cost the taxpayers $14.1 billion (http://ttps://web.archive.org/web/20130426030340/http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/R40532.pdf) (2012), almost twice as high as the budget for the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children ($7.1 billion)?

Did you know that the $88 million (http://subsidytracker.goodjobsfirst.org/prog.php?parent=koch-industries&company_op=starts&company=&free_text=&subsidy_op=%3E&subsidy=&subsidy_type=&sub_year=&state=&program=&agency=&city=&county=) worth of subsidies enjoyed by Koch Industries is almost as much as the $100 million allocated for the federal Emergency Food and Shelter budget?

Did you know that 965 of the largest corporations in the United States receive $110 billion (http://pando.com/2014/02/26/fortune-500-companies-receive-63-billion-in-subsidies/) in subsidies, larger than the entire federal Food and Nutrition Assistance Program ($107.2 billion) - which includes the above cited subprograms?
   
And yet you here you are, a self-professed sympathetic guy, frothing on bringing down the welfare budget to zero. And you say you are not extreme.



Aaah. So you actually don’t know if people will make charitable contributions in a tax free environment – despite repeatedly proclaiming that people don’t contribute to charity now because they expect the government to do it. Thank you for finally admitting that, even if it was done in accident.

If I use your flawed argument about diminishing marginal utility, it actually does predict that “Bill Gates wouldn’t be charitable”. Remember what you said?


To be honest, I don’t think you really understand what diminishing marginal utility even means.

Re Rockefeller. You don’t even know how much he paid in taxes. You didn’t even compare how much he and Standard Oil spent in tariffs and what a similar company would pay today, but you are perfectly okay making a blanket statements like




No, you said.


That's silly, and you know it. Which is why you edited out my quote, and then wrote a different explanation.


Predictably, you copied those stats verbatim from self-professed libertarian Peter Leeson’s book. You didn’t even delete the question mark he placed on the huge drop in GDP – it makes me wonder if you even read it.  Anyway, did you happen to notice that he was using UNDP data from the mid-80s and comparing it against UNDP data between 15 and 20 years later? In your eyes, is that a fair comparison? Do you expect society to stand still for up to two decades? Do you expect the presence of aid workers and funding from international organizations to have zero effect in the interim period?

Shall we take a look at the numbers of post-anarchy Somalia using the latest data from UNDP's Somalia Annual Report (2013), UNDP's Somalia Human Development (2012) and CIA World Factbook (2014) and watch them blow yours away?

http://www.so.undp.org/content/dam/somalia/docs/Project_Documents/Human_Development/UNDP%20Somalia%20Annual%20Report%202013.pdf
http://www.so.undp.org/content/dam/somalia/docs/MDGs/Somalia%20Human%20Development%20Report%202012.pdf#page=1&zoom=auto,-100,794
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/so.html


GDP per capita : $600 (Improved)
Life expectancy (years) :  55 (Improved)
One year olds fully immunized against measles (%): 85% (Improved)
One year olds fully immunized against TB (%): NA
Physicians: 0.04 physicians/1,000 population (Improved)
Infants with low birth weight (%): NA
Infant mortality rate (per 1000): 100.14 deaths/1,000 live births (Improved)
Maternal mortality rate (per 100,000): 1,000 deaths/100,000 live births (Improved)
Pop. with access to water (%):31.7% of population (urban, urban: 69.6%) (Improved)
Pop. with access to sanitation (%): 52% of population (Improved)
Pop. with access to at least one health facility (%): NA
Extreme poverty (% < $1 per day): 43% (Improved)
Radios (per 1000): NA, but there’s now one government-operated radio station and ten private FM radio stations
Telephones (per 1000): Total lines, 100,000 – works out to about 10 per 1000 (Improved) (There’s even stats for mobile [658,000] and internet usage now[106,000])
TVs (per 1000): NA, but there’s now one government-operated TV station and one private TV station stations 
Fatality due to measles: NA
Adult literacy rate (%): 37.8% (Improved)
Combined school enrollment (%): 78.4 (Improved)


Do you understand now why self-professed libertarians and paleolibertarians stopped using Somalia as an example after a government was put in place in 2011? Do you understand now why I was laughing when you brought Somalia up?


Since when? Left unchecked, land, natural resources and communities will always be exploited by corporations. The United States and especially third world nations are now being raped and exploited by American enterprises even as you read this. The myth of trickle-down economics is not “the same as acting in the interest of society”.

Thanks for the book recommendation, but to be honest, I don’t take anything published by Young America's Foundation seriously. You can only read so much revisionist accounts and half-truths before you get sick of them.



If you’re going to quote Section 9 as an example of free trade, you should also quote Section 8 and the import tariffs designed to protect American businesses. I repeat, “you are laboring under the impression that free market equals complete deregulation - something that the United States nor any other nation have ever tried nor experienced.”



Yes, I did say that. I also explained how it can be gamed. I also explained your weak argument regarding Hitler. Not surprisingly, you once again edited out the relevant part of my quote and pretended as if I hadn’t already answered you. Why? Did you think I wouldn’t notice? Or are you just grandstanding for a silent audience?

Here, let me requote myself.


Your excuse on why “Voting fails time and time again” can also be applied to individuals and personal psychology in personal capacity.

I know. To you they are “overlords”,  “aristocratic lords” and some other description I forget.
In your mind, are they humans or reptilians from another galaxy?
Or are they scions of Alex Jones' twenty families that secretly control the world?
Or are they shape shifters?

Im a bitcoiner, but its not neccessarily mean that Im a Neoliberal. Neoliberalism is under the guidance of a strong state. Bitcoins is local to the whole world, no centralized governing body.

I'm a mummy - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fjT89UfU16o

Oh if only the world boiled down so nicely. Again, what is the age of consent?

Are you having trouble answering the question? Is perhaps the world not quite as crystal as you're trying to pretend it is?

I am also interested to hear you answer to @turvarya's question, DumbFruit.

Or what?
What have you added in the remaining paragraph of this quote? I’ve read it, and a quick click to the link above will take anyone including yourself to read it to get the context. There’s nothing substantive here, so I cut it out.
I don’t like wading through massive walls of quotes just so that I can read something, and I expect others might feel the same.

Do I have a crystal ball? You will find examples that match and mismatch throughout all of history given any kind of ideology. What does that prove exactly? Nothing much. Just that societies are very complicated.
I know you don’t like this answer, but again, that’s just reality.

This is how you defined altruism, not me;
I certainly don’t “revel” in that usage of the word.
I didn’t respond to this because I didn’t think you meant it, honestly.
Businesses that aren’t running as political entrepreneurs benefit the poor through their own operation.
Strip away all the money, strip away all the classes, strip away all of the relationships and pretend for a second that the world is running as it is without money.
Take a look around, and then tell me what’s doing the greatest good for humanity?
You would see McDonalds, with a massive industry working day in and day out to feed people. You would see Wal-Mart stocking its shelves and making everything clean and presentable. You would see a massive network of fuel stations, trucks, and operators insuring that people that can get to where they need to go. So on and so on and so on.
What do you see with the government? An entire group of people doing almost nothing for anyone. The roads they manage are in disrepair, their mailing system is no better than any other business, they have tanks, bombs, and airplanes that are awe-inspiring wastes of time and effort. When they are used, you would see the deaths of villains, as well as helpless innocents.
Businesses are the lifeblood of society, and government is the leech.
To say that “corporations aren’t charitable” is just totally missing what corporations do every single day. They help everyone; Regardless of race, class, gender, or age. All they ask in return is about the same effort in return in the form of currency.
In what way are they not overlords? They are class of people that follow different rules than we do, they decide how we should run our lives however they see fit, they’re paid more than most, they don’t do any kind of industrial work, they don’t provide any service themselves that benefits anyone, they have titles and demand respect in their presence, um.. Ya, they’re our supreme overlords alright.

Would you prefer if I called them semi-temporary overlords that get into power based on how well they promised what they couldn't deliver to as many people as possible?

I’m sure you’ve heard of “Stockholm syndrome”.
I did not say that I am not concerned about it’s effectiveness and reach, I said “I am not concerned with the effectiveness of charities in terms of ‘reach’”.
Voluntary contributions are better than State welfare, but I was appealing to the logic of it rather than go through empirical data all day and still never come to any better understanding about the world.
Economists use a term called “Ceteris Paribus” because economists understand that societies are complex structures that are immune to traditional experimentation. There is no way to control the variables and rerun an experiment.
For example; I can say, “Look at the United States in the 1800’s, it had tremendous growth and innovation under little taxation and essentially no public welfare system.”
You could say, “Well that was another generation at another time, that won’t work with the culture of today.” (I know this isn’t an argument of yours.)
Strictly speaking, this isn’t “wrong”. I couldn’t disprove that by taking our culture back in time and giving it to the people of the 1800’s and see what happens.
So we’re always struggling with hypothesis without experimentation or accurate conclusions.
Austrian economics gets around this problem by looking at society from a logical perspective starting with the concept of “Human Action”. This is called Praxeology.
https://mises.org/rothbard/praxeology.pdf
No one can demonstrate it empirically in either direction with any certainty.
Suppose that all of this is true, what have we proven? What if we just got lucky, and the spending is going down relative to GDP by pure coincidence?
I asked you to show me how welfare is superior. How can you guarantee that this isn’t just a fluke? I pointed out to you that Public Welfare is essentially designed to fail. If it succeeds it’s by blind coincidence, or enormous spending that is simultaneously destructive elsewhere.
Is this not in principal true;
If it is true, is this not superior;
Look, if I say if you jump out of a boat in the Atlantic, you’re going to get wet, will that always be true? No, you could land on a raft, or by some shocking coincidence hit a whale.
I can’t guarantee anything at all about the past or the future, I’ve just written a lot about this.
However, if 51% of people are willing to vote to tax the “charity” out of them, why would that same 51% not act of their own accord to provide charity?
Markets will always seek to fill the demand of the society, if even a small minority of people want to provide charity, markets can provide for that. Only in the instance that 51% of people want public welfare, can this happen.
If it wouldn’t happen in a free market then it certainly wouldn’t happen in a democracy. Well, as certainly as you would get wet if you jump out of a boat in the Atlantic, if you want to get that pedantic.
Do you know what “might” means? As in the difference between “might not” and “always will not”?
You think it would have been more honest to edit out the question mark? Are you serious? I assure you, I intentionally left it in.

And is the empiricist suddenly against empirical data whenever it contradicts your narrative?

No, could you please explain to me what looking at the country long after anarchy has ended has anything to do with the effect that anarchy had on the society?
How do you know the success in later years wasn't due to the bootstrapping of the anarchistic society before?

Your loss.
Again, Ermächtigungsgesetz happened after he was elected, so what’s your point?

It’s a good thing that no one has the resources, patience, or the citizens to do this sort of thing. Oh wait, according to you there are the citizens, most importantly, so we can scratch that one off.
It’s a good thing there’s no one with resources or patience to game the system.

Why bother? What if I said the following;

Should a 12-year old work in a mine?
I say that depends. You say, no, they should be taken out of the mine and left to starve to death in the street.

Should a 12-year old fuck a 40-year for money?
I say that depends. You say, no, they should be taken out of the brothel and left to starve to death in the street.

Of course, that kind of misrepresents your positions, but you both seem totally satisfied in misrepresenting mine.

So, it is good when a 40-year old first world country tourist goes to a third world country fucking a 12-year old because it is good for their economy?

Or what? Ooh, internet tough guy here, folks.

Or it might enhance your reputation as a sneaky poster who picks and choose sentences, segments and questions to respond to while grandstanding to an invisible audience?  In case you forget, you are having a discussion with me. You have to present your arguments to me, while defending yours. How can you achieve either when you censor or misrepresent my posts? How will you learn, evolve and grow if you choose this path?

Honestly, what do you hope to achieve with this childish attitude? Do you think this evasiveness will make anyone take you or your ideas seriously?  You know I can see this, you know others can see it as well, so why do you do it? Is your pride so enormous that you must be right even when you’re wrong?

Far from it. I love this answer. Because it proves all your theories are hogwash. On one hand, you have a crystal ball on how society in a tax free environment will react to those in need, but on the other hand, you don’t have a crystal ball (never mind that we’re talking about the past and present) to explain why charitable donations did not rise when the economy is flooded with $6.6 trillion. The air is thick with hypocrisy.

Err, have you forgotten Oxford’s definition I posted three days ago?

Why wouldn’t I mean it? Your simple-minded rationalizations and irrational hatred of the government aside, I am curious by your intimate knowledge on what they want.

Just for the record, when you say corporations help everyone, does that include them opening sweat ship factories overseas to avoid paying real, livable wages to workers here?
When you say they help everyone, regardless of race, class, gender or age, does that include business owners that
(i) Do not hire people based on their race, class, gender or age?
(ii) Pay lower wages to people based on their race, class, gender or age?
(iii) Exploit entire communities for their natural resources such as timber, oil or and diamond?


You can call them whatever you want. It only reflects on you and your mentality.


Do you realize how ridiculous it sounds when you make statements like “Voluntary contributions are better than State welfare”, when you yourself have conceded that you can’t empirically prove it?

Aren’t you forgetting something? The slave labor advantage that early America had? You know, the subhumans without wages who we used to exploit the enormous natural resources of the land and as farm workers and later on, railroad and factory workers? Yeah, we had no public welfare system. Why would we? They’re not humans, right?

You bandy around terms like praxeology and ceteris paribus as if these somehow lend any weight to your arguments. Like “diminishing marginal utility” you used earlier, I don’t even think you understand what “ceteris paribus” means, judging by how you are using it.

What are talking about? Federal welfare exists now. It helps the citizens. Some may argue it is not enough or not efficient, but it is there. That’s empirical evidence.
Voluntary charitable contributions as a form of a credible social safety net does not exist – it has never existed. You are arguing that in a tax free society, it will exist. The onus is on you to prove that. Fourth day on, you still can’t prove it (not that you can, of course).

Superior to what?

And you edited out the rest of my post on the subject.


Can you see how ridiculous your fixation with welfare is, considering the existence of other more wasteful expenditures, specifically involving the corporations you idolize.

No, it’s not true. Because
(i), blaming the government’s level of indebtedness to welfare spending (0.066%) is silly,
(ii) ‘poor results’ can be improved upon
(iii) The population includes the welfare recipients. Being poor does not mean you should not be involved in decision making process.

And if no benefactors exist in your tax free market utopia?
Edit: And if no credible number of benefactors exist in your tax free utopia? ( have to be careful, otherwise, you will leap on that sentence) Just leave the weak and sick to fend for themselves?

Yup, you can’t guarantee anything. You can’t guarantee that people will voluntarily contribute time, money and resources to take care of the sick, aged, handicapped. You can’t guarantee that in your tax free utopia, people will take care of orphans. Thank you so much for admitting that. It took four days, but you finally caved. If you recall, this was your initial point of contention with me four days ago. Now that you have conceded that point, are you going to find something else to argue with me?

Oh give it, up. You have no clue what you’re talking about.

Really? You left in a question mark, but did not bother explaining what that question mark is for? Go on, explain it to me.

Anarchy only ended three years ago. Your data, using 15-20 year gap, showed fractional improvements in several areas (while ignoring the effect that foreign aid has on those numbers, and the presence of regional warlords). The data I presented showed vast improvements in just two years, which completely negates any arguments about how anarchy is better for Somalia.

Your loss. /quote]
Nah. I prefer dealing with facts.

Exactly what I wrote. He was no longer operating under a democratic government. Do you disagree?

Your simple-minded arguments are quite breathtaking to read sometimes. You know what? Let’s go with your idea. Go and game the election presidential election in 2016, and the 2018 midterms since you make it sound so easy. Once your candidates win the Presidency and two thirds of the seats in the House and Senate, then go on to appoint supportive Justices into the Supreme Court. Then, dissolve the union, disband the government and you can have your tax free utopia.

Now excuse me while I go an address your position on sex with minors.

I don't know if you really believe this, or are just merely trying to stay true to your broken philosophy, but just so you know, DumbFruit, you are coming across like a really sick and twisted person.

First of all, only pedophiles and psychopaths think it’s okay to sleep with 12-year old girls.
Secondly, only a truly evil and degenerate modern society will intentionally allow sexual commerce involving 12-year-old girls and adult males.
Thirdly, this is why social safety nets which you detest so much are important.

You're misrepresenting me again, and you don't understand the Anarcho-Libertarian position. We have to look at the problem logically, not resort to arguments from emotion, or ad-hominem.

1.) What is the age of consent?
If 12 years old is the age of consent, then it's their choice whether they want to work in a mine, or work in prostitution.

2.) Did the parents decide to put them there?
If 12 years old is not the age of consent, then it was the parents decision to put them there.

3.) Was it the best option for the child?
If 12 years old is not the age of consent and the parent is not doing their best effort make decisions for their child that best promotes their safety and health, then it would be appropriate for anyone to take that child from them and to do a better job.
All options for the child are first crossed off if they violate the non-aggression principle. Since sleeping with someone below the age of consent is rape and violates the NAP, these options are crossed off first.

4.) Is there any chance of charity?
If on the off chance there was literally no better option than sex trafficking, then you've painted a picture that it's either prostitution or death and the last thing they might be able to turn to is charity.
If there is no chance for charity, then what do you want me to say? There's nothing that can be done for these people, and they're certainly not better off by being strong-armed out of jobs that are terrible and immoral, but are at least keeping them alive.

For such a scenario to come about you would have to believe that there is an entire society of people that have no conscience, but are somehow so poor that there are no jobs aside from sex-trafficking, but at the same time are people that can afford and want to hire 12 year old girls for sex, and for some reason are completely resistant to any kind of charity. What exactly would you say to such a scenario? There's no reason to suggest that's what would happen in an Anarcho-Libertarian society.

You need to show how the quotes that I choose are somehow being displayed out of context, which alters the meaning of the quote. You don’t do this, you just go into arguments from emotion and ad-hominem whenever absolutely everything wasn’t quoted from start to finish.
Which is just silly, most of the world does not do this. Scientific journals will simply put an annotation to the relevant material and not even quote a single line. Are scientific journals all trying to play games with the source material? Certainly not, you’re just being a baby, because there’s a certain way you like to respond to posts that don’t match everyone elses.
No, not really. All you’ve proven is I’m not omniscient and Austrian Economics cannot predict with utmost certainty outcomes in a marketplace because marketplaces are inherently chaotic and unpredictable.
There are certainly activities that you can do that are ultimately harmful to society, but tracking down all the variables and seeing where the harm took place is an extremely difficult thing to do. This doesn’t undermine Austrian Economics or Anarcho-Capitalism one bit.

The Oxford Dictionary said that if there are any altruistic people in society then altruism means “that all of the 400,000 orphans that society as a whole do not want would be adopted by families annually - now”?

I must of missed that.
You would prefer they opened factories here to avoid overseas workers having the opportunity to work themselves out of third world status?
“Hiring” itself is not a benefit to mankind, first of all.
The goal of businesses is to provide goods and services, and they will provide goods and services to any race, class, gender or age, pretty much all the time. I know there are outliers, but competition will drive out businesses that are incorrectly discriminating against their employees or their customers.
Note that there are perfectly acceptable reasons to discriminate. If you have severe Parkinsons, you shouldn't be doing triple bypass surgery, for instance.

Competition will drive this out. Consider if we lived in a society that didn’t want to hire any woman. This would be a huge business opportunity for you, because there are all these highly intelligent and hard-working woman that are not being hired over men that are less intelligent and less hard working. You could outcompete by hiring the best woman and the best men.
You might say that the culture wouldn’t allow that, but that’s a cultural problem, not a free-market one.
I love how “exploit” has turned into some kind of a bad word, and that’s somehow enough to replace an argument. Businesses get diamonds and wood from certain places in the world, ok. Did you have a point you wanted to make with that?
And the ad-hominems just keep flowing, should I keep a tally and we can see which one of us has used less? You seem very concerned about reputation after all.
I said that neither one of us can empirically prove it to either of our benefit. This isn’t “ridiculous” this as an old and well established fact of Economics.
http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/03/071103.asp
Ok, you didn’t address what I was talking about, which is the well-established fact that economics is not testable. My point was about why the term “ceteris paribus” is used. Why do you suppose that "ceteris paribus" is not used in mathematics?
When I was using “diminishing marginal utility” I was pointing out a reason why it’s so hard to predict what will happen under certain scenarios. People have different chains of wants that they satisfy depending on the amount of any particular good they have, including discretionary money.

There is empirical evidence of private charities as well, though maybe there’s not enough of it (Private charity). That doesn’t help us understand which is a fundamentally more moral and efficient system.
The onus is not on me to prove that a “charitable contributions as a form of a credible social safety net” will absolutely exist under any particular circumstance.

I didn’t do that, try again.
That’s not the point, the point is that it can show poor results with very little recourse by those who pay into it.
I didn’t say that just because you’re poor you should not be involved in decision making processes. I was pointing out a distinct conflict of interest.
It is not a utopia. If there would be no benefactors in the free market then there would be no votes in a democracy. Or I suppose there would be votes from those that want the benefit, but if all the votes were coming in this manner, then that would mean 51% are literally voting for something from the other 49%, which is unethical and unsustainable.
If there are votes coming from the people that are giving, then we already know there would be benefactors in an anarcho-capitalist society consisting of the same people.
Haha. I’m not omniscient, you caught me. That has absolutely nothing to do with why private charity is better than public welfare.
For example; Can you prove to me absolutely that welfare voting won’t be used to ultimately hurt society? You can’t prove it? Then welfare is bad, QED.
Private charity is better because it’s structurally superior and because it’s morally superior, not because I'm omniscient.
You said that “diminishing marginal utility” somehow means Bill Gates wouldn’t exist. Please make that argument or concede. How you can come to that conclusion, make no argument for it, and then accuse me of not knowing what “diminishing marginal utility” means, is beyond me.

It means that the reported GDP went down, but the author went on to explain why he suspects that the records weren’t correct. So the author was saying that it is unclear whether or not this record accurately shows an increase or decrease in the welfare of the population.

It doesn’t, you said that removing the welfare state would decrease the welfare of the people in the given region. I showed that there was actually an improvement in Somalia during anarchy, which shows that your contention is not always the case.
So no, your argument didn’t negate any arguments about how anarchy is better for Somalia than the preceding state of affairs, which was my argument.

He arose through a democracy, what he did from there was only possible because he was elected.
I never said that it was easy, nor that it is gamed in favor of smaller government. In fact, it is gamed in favor of larger government largely because it is not easy.
That was rich, since I didn’t actually tell you my position on sex with minors.

whatever form, whether a fiat currency and money cryptocurrency. has the same value as a political commodity, as long as they have a exchange rate, they certainly can be used for political purposes the politicians. fiat currency and money cryptocurrency equally valuable in the eyes of others, so there is a possibility bitcoiner neoliberal ...  8)

This is exactly what I’m talking about.

I explained why you shouldn’t be editing and cherry-picking my posts – again. Yet, you came back by editing and cherry picking it anyway, and then innocently ask why you shouldn’t. Isn’t that hypocritical? You even ridiculously compared a forum discussion to a ‘Scientific journal’. How can we hold a conversation when you won’t respond to my entire posts? When you only respond to parts that are convenient to your narratives?

Look at the silly Hitler subject you brought up. I answered your question, you edited it out two posts ago, and asked me the same question again, and then agreed with my original contention. Isn’t that childish? Or when I demonstrated the fallacy of your Banning example - you just cut that portion out so you don’t have to concede on being wrong – as you have been so many times over the past four days. Or when you avoided responding to my question about your apparent lack of interest in corporate subsidies that amounts to more than the welfare you're trying to abolish.


I am re-posting your Mr. tough guy routine here so you can be reminded again of your childish attitude. Grow a pair, man.

---

We are not talking about Austrian Economics or Anarcho-Capitalism one bit. We couldn’t , even if I want to. You lack sufficient understanding of either subject as you have amply demonstrated over the past couple of days.

What we are talking about is, indeed, you are not omniscient. You can’t predict the real life consequences of your abstract ideas. You can’t predict how society will react towards the poor in a tax free environment. This is blindingly obvious to anyone, but it took you three days to concede that point. And still you want to revoke welfare spending because of something you believe might happen - something you, nor anyone else for that matter, have been unable to empirically demonstrate.

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My quote above, which you have deviously snipped off context again, was in response to your over the top claims. Yet you are falsely positioning that as my definition of altruism. Why? Is your position reduced to misrepresenting me?

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See, another example of your hiding from your original assertion. This is your original claim.

You deviously snipped of the portion, and try to reframe the discussion into “hiring”.

Besides, what competition? If there are no laws or taboo against discrimination, what incentive would there be for businesses and business owners to intentionally create barriers against themselves?

And please, we’re not talking about doctors suffering from Parkinsons.

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And yet historically, businesses have always paid women lower, to this today. Why would competition emerge involving stable, socially acceptable factor? Did businesses pave the way for civil rights or women’s suffrage, or were they compelled by law to do so?

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You really shouldn’t start on the topic if you need an explanation on something so elementary.

I’m re-quoting you one more time, to keep the discussion in perspective.

Here’s a one example. When Western diamond retailers and their agents force people (including children) in parts of Africa to work in mines for low wages (at times, without wages, at gunpoint) from dusk to dawn under harsh and dangerous conditions, which part of the community there are they helping? Or do you include company owners and shareholders in the U.S. or Europe as part of the communities in Sierra Leone, Angola, etc?

http://www.republicofmining.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ww-world-vision.jpg

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See, another cowardly attempt at misrepresentation. Shall I repost the conversation to make your lunacy more understandable? And for the record, you are the one who is grandstanding to a silent audience. I am debating you. To reemphasize my point, I have no overlords. The fact that you think you have overlords “only reflects on you and your mentality”.

---

I don’t have to prove the existence of federal welfare. It exists. You, on the other hand, cannot prove your abstract assertions that voluntary private charitable contributions will take over in a tax free society. It’s a notion based on zero empirical data.

Besides, you’re being dishonest again. Let me post the entire conversation.


Do you realize how ridiculous it sounds when you make statements like “Voluntary contributions are better than State welfare”, when you yourself have conceded that you can’t empirically prove it?

Aren’t you forgetting something? The slave labor advantage that early America had? You know, the subhumans without wages who we used to exploit the enormous natural resources of the land and as farm workers and later on, railroad and factory workers? Yeah, we had no public welfare system. Why would we? They’re not humans, right?

You bandy around terms like praxeology and ceteris paribus as if these somehow lend any weight to your arguments. Like “diminishing marginal utility” you used earlier, I don’t even think you understand what “ceteris paribus” means, judging by how you are using it.

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We are not talking about economics now. Your position is that the sociocultural habits of society with regards to charitable contributions will suddenly change in a tax free environment.

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Our discussion is not centered on understanding “which is a fundamentally more moral and efficient system.” It is centered on your radical assertion that federal welfare should go down to zero and in a tax free society, people will voluntarily make charitable contributions for the weaker members of society, including the old, sick, handicapped and children.

---

Why not? You are proposing to end federal welfare, and (I’m repeating myself here) “in a tax free society, people will voluntarily make charitable contributions for the weaker members of society, including the old, sick, handicapped and children.”

I know you’re trying to slowly back down from you original assertions, but your pride keeps getting in the way.

---

I highlighted your own words for your own convenience

---

Changing the goalposts, are we? Fine. Then fight to fix the system to enhance its efficiency instead of advocating its complete abolishment, at the cost of death and suffering of the needy. Instead of advocating some abstract solution absent of any hard data, rectify the situation. If you say it can’t be done, then how has the conservatives successfully placed the federal budget for family and children on a steady downward spiral?

Family and children (http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/federal_budget_detail_fy12bs12015n_4041_605#usgs302)

                        FY 2011      FY 2012      FY 2013      FY 2014      FY 2015      FY 2016
Billion      283.8      266.9      270.7      264.4      259.8      264.4
% of GDP    0.074%      0.007%      0.068%      0.066%      0.062      0.059%

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By your reasoning, the figures I gave above shouldn’t be happening.

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I can afford to donate only very little time or money to the needy. But I am happy that my tax dollars are used to protect, feed, clothed and educate children.
In a tax free society, why would I, or anyone, be compelled to make monetary sacrifice if my neighbors, people like you for instance, won’t do so?
Doesn’t that make your abstract an utopia?
So once again, if no benefactors exist in your tax free market utopia? What happens to the needy?

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Huh. Your pride just had to force you to make a 180, huh?
See, this is a textbook example a circular argument.
You have stated several times that you cannot prove your assertions, yet still maintain it's superior.
That’s farcical.
And when you say morally, by whose moral standards? Yours?

---

I already did. Bush tax cuts, $6.6 trillion, etc - remember the part of my post which you’ve edited out? That still is a different matter though. Because when I say you really don’t understand what “diminishing marginal utility” means, it is based your own words – not mine. I highlighted it again for your convenience.

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Actually, no. Leeson states that “Per capita GDP (PPP) is lower than its 1989–1990 level, but the data overstate the size of average income in the pre-1991 period, which was likely lower than it is under anarchy.” His reasons for saying so, other than trying to prove his point, are overreporting, pre-anarchy economy produced “a great deal of” military hardware that “citizens didn't consume” , and a large amount of foreign aid. Of course, all three factors are also present during the period of anarchy, but that is too inconvenient to consider I suppose.

---

So two years of explosive growth under a government compared with 15-20 years of fractional growth using uncorroborated data doesn’t negate your arguments? You never cease to surprise me.

Would it interest you to know that even Leeson didn’t make the claim you did?


Leeson also qualifies his findings several times, but this attracted my attention.


Anything else?

---

Do you deny that he was no longer operating under a democratic government?
Do you deny that he seized power by threatening members of the Reichstag?

---

Really? You make it sound so.
“It’s a good thing there’s no one with resources or patience to game the system.”
Anyway, so you are actually agreeing with my original contention which you have craftily edited out again.

---

Really?
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9403771#msg9403771

DumbFruit, how am I misrepresenting you? I am saying your previous post makes you come across like a really sick and twisted person.
Also, you are once again being dishonest.
You created that scenario, then you mischievously assign it to me.

The original question @turvarya asked you was "Should a 12-year old fuck a 40-year for money?"
It's a simple yes or no question.

Yes means you are either a pedophile or a psychopath.
No means you are a normal human being. There is no gray area here.

Your prevarication and pussyfooting around the question gives me great cause for alarm.
If you are someone I know, I would have made a call to the police right now. That is how alarming your evasiveness is.

Your reading comprehension… I'll just point out two problems so I can save myself considerable time walking you through what you should have learned in maybe high school grammar classes, because at this point we’re not even talking about the issues, we’re just struggling with your illiteracy. I’m not your grammar teacher, go back to school.


Really, I mischievously assigned it to you? Did I mischievously sneak in that “then” and those 3 other points that led up to that?

What do you think I meant with the word “then”? Well let’s look at the whole context shall we?


I was walking through scenarios that would give us a different understanding of the situation, depending on what the situation is, because “Should a 12-year old fuck a 40-year for money?” depends on a lot of factors, so I said “If on the off chance there was literally no better option than sex trafficking, then you’ve painted a picture that it’s either prostitution or death and the last thing they might be able to turn to is charity.”

So you taking that position depends on whether this 12 year old was in the off chance situation of having literally no other options other than sex trafficking or death (through starvation).
I didn’t paint you in it, force you in it, or do anything “mischievous” by any normal standards.

The other problem you have is with both mainstream economics and Austrian Economics. You keep trying to say that because I can’t prove something empirically, I have lost all credibility.


You would get laughed out of any serious economics class if you said something like this, because you could say this to any mainstream or Austrian economics professor and it would be true. That doesn’t discredit our entire understanding of economics, any more than it discredits my position on the welfare system.

Now, it would be a fair criticism that I hadn’t made a connection all the way from praxeology to the welfare system, but I certainly can’t do that in a forum post, and the way Austrian Economists understand economics gives them a different way of addressing economic problems that avoids the empirical issue, but again, the fact that economics is empirically untestable or predictable is pretty much a universally accepted fact of economists.

The fact that you don’t see this connection either again reflects your reading comprehension issues, or a deeply flawed understanding of economics (Probably a combination of both). Don’t debate this with me, go debate this with the entire Economics profession.


No, it really isn’t. I walked through 4 different steps that would lead to different answers depending on what the situation is.
It is probably immoral because I don’t think 12 years old is old enough to consent, but the whole “consent” issue for what age group is a gray area that I haven’t seen a really good answer to from anyone. It is certainly immoral in my society.
So doing this whole “yes or no” thing for this very complex issue just reflects a very puerile and not well considered moral philosophy.


So. I wish you the best in luck in all your endeavors, but I can’t continue with this because you’ve demonstrated a lack of reading comprehension, a lack of basic knowledge of economics, and very poorly considered moral philosophy. You don’t need to be doing debates, you need to be taking some basic level English, Economics, and Philosophy courses. Cheers.

Edit: Oops, Rugrats correctly pointed out I had the wrong name in my quote. (He incorrectly thought that this absolves him of his inability to understand the word "then".)

So in other words, since I have debunked all of your ridiculous, and at times, extreme and illogical notions, the issue is suddenly my “reading comprehension”. Is that also the reason why you dishonestly cherry pick my posts and deceptively quote me out of context? If I go “back to school” and improve my 'literacy', would that make you a more honest and thoughtful poster?

You wrote the bolded bit and the three other points, genius. Not me. The only thing I am not sure of is whether you are lying, or just simply forgot (unlikely, since it's been just a day).

Moron, you are quoting yourself. I didn’t write that – hence why I said “You created that scenario, then you mischievously assign it to me.”

One more time – moron, you are quoting yourself (again). I didn’t write that – hence why I said “You created that scenario, then you mischievously assign it to me.”

Moron, you wrote the posts; the words are yours. I didn’t write them. After writing the post, you then claimed I wrote them one day later, and went on to argue against yourself.

Here they are:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9403771#msg9403771
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=827010.msg9406005#msg9406005

Not ‘something’ – specifically, voluntary charitable contributions in a tax free society and how the current almost non-existent private welfare is superior.

No, I wouldn’t. No “mainstream or Austrian economics professor” would dare make such a ludicrous claim. Besides, didn’t you yourself say

First, duh. Second, aren’t you contradicting your owns words one paragraph above?
Third, we are not talking about economics. We are talking about your a radical societal sociopolitical and psychological change involving the welfare system in a tax free environment.

Big talk from someone who doesn’t even understand the term ‘diminishing marginal utility”. Once again, we are not having an economic discussion here.

This is not a matter of consent. This is not a complex issue. A 12-year-old girl is not mentally, emotionally and physically prepared to fuck a 40-year old. Even a 12-year-old is starving, you should feed her instead of asking her to choose between fucking a 40-year-old man or starving to death. I am not a violent man by any stretch of the imagination, but I would literally risk my life to prevent a psychopath or a pedophile from taking sexual advantage of a 12-year-old girl. I am sure most rational, sane people would react the same way.

Dumbfruit, the reason why I easily poked holes in your juvenile grasps of economics is because one of my degrees is in Economics. I originally held myself back on several occasions so I don’t embarrass you. But when you started to cherry pick my posts and misquote me after failing to offer any substantiation for your radical, extreme and cruel notions, I had no choice but to call you out.

Moreover, if I am so dumb, what does it say of your own mental capacity, considering you failed to substantiate any of your arguments against me?

And for heaven’s sake, if you’re going to quote from a book, make sure you at least read it first instead of just copy pasting. See how foolish you ended up looking with Leeson’s book?

Finally, one word of advice for you. Don’t let anyone on this forum know your real identity. Because if your earlier posts about sex with minors ever gets out, you can pretty much kiss goodbye to any chance of a respectable professional career. Not only that, your extended family, neighbors and community members might also take preventive actions against you.

@DumbFruit
I really put you in the place to endorse minor sexworkers, where I just wanted you to see the flaws of your thinking.
One thing is even more disturbing.

So, parents have full control of their children? It is ok for them to put them into sex slavery for the money.
Would it also be ok for them to sell them to a scientist to experiment on them or to a warlord to kill other people?

btw. as far as I saw, you didn't answer that question:

Hi Turvaya, the answer to your question is literally in the next points from that quote. Hope that helps. I did not write, "It is ok for them to put them into sex slavery for the money." in fact, I wrote pretty much the exact opposite in the next point.

How embarrassing for you.

You mean:

The first paragraph sounds like:
If nobody cares, than it is ok, to sell your child.
Nobody means, nobody in the near neighborhood. So, if my neighborhood doesn't like, when I sell my child, I just can move to a neighborhood, where nobody cares.
Also, what does "then it would be appropriate for anyone to take that child from them and to do a better job" mean?
You mean taking by force? Wouldn't that violate NAP? Can I just take a child from people, when I think, they are shitty parents?

The second paragraph seems to tell a whole different story:
Why is it rape?
If it is about fucking up their psyche and health, than I am wondering what is the difference to letting them work in a mine?

I can't help what you think it sounds like, that's not what I wrote.

That's not what nobody means, but in the situation that everyone that finds out doesn't care, then no one will do anything about it, regardless of the morality of it. That's the same for any ideology in any society everywhere.

Yes, individuals have the same freedoms as groups, so if it's ok for societal mechanisms to take away children, then it's ok for individuals to take children. However, in an Anarcho-Capitalist society, they would need to deal with any defense agencies that would prevent this sort of thing unless certain criteria were met, like the child was being abused. If the defense agency disagrees, then it would need to be arbitrated by a third party, or there could be violent conflict.
So you can't just take someone's child for any reason you like, it needs to be supported by evidence of violating the Non-Aggression Principal. (Or violating terms of both parties defense agency, but I won't get into that scenario at the moment.)

"Force" does not violate the Non-Aggression Principle. The NAP deals specifically with the initiation of force, not force in general.

http://mises.org/journals/scholar/Hoppe.pdf

Any non-consensual sexual intercourse is rape. There are all sorts of other kinds of sexual activities that wouldn't be rape, but things like oral sex, sexual harassment, and so on would still be violations of the Non-Aggression principal for the same reason; The child cannot provide consent.

Working in a mine does not require consent of the child, it is true that this should be avoided if at all possible, but the reason is not because the child didn't consent. The parent can tell the child to do all sorts of things without the child's consent. For example; "Don't shit in the living room.", "Eat your vegetables or go to bed.", "Go to school." and so on. I'm sure there are gray areas here, but overall the parent has a responsibility to make decisions for the child that are best for the child, and when the parent doesn't do this, they are abusing the child and therefore violating the Non-Aggression Principal.

In some cases, I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, putting children to work is the best option for the child. Putting children under the age of consent to work as sex slaves is never a moral thing to do, though if you're extremely creative you could come up with nearly-impossible scenarios in which it just can't be stopped.