I'm glad to see you took the time to read even my text and watch the long video. That shows you're not just some troll, rather someone really interested.
No, claiming that I support violence and dictatorship when I in fact do not is an ad hominem attack. What I'm saying is that if you want to live under the rules of the current contract that the US has with it's citizens (or any other state) you have to adhere to the rules setup by that entity.
That's the thing. There's no such contract. I
never signed any contract giving total control of all my properties (including my body) to any armed group. And yet I've been forced to do so since birth. That's totally authoritarian and violent. (
This piece of the video you didn't like satirizes very well this wrong idea
)
And no, you can't say that by using the services this violent group monopolizes I'm agreeing with anything, because, for a start, the way such services are provided is already criminal (from an ethical definition of crime, obviously not from a state definition). They use stolen resources to provide such services, and they coercively forbid competitors to provide them. There can be no valid contract there.
The only way a state could claim to have the right of doing all they do is if they were the legit owners of all the land they control. And that's obviously not the case. To be legit owner of anything, you either need to acquire it legitimately (voluntarily), or you build it out of your own labor, using only resources you legitimately own or that nobody does (original appropriation, the principle behind homesteading).
Every state territory in this world is the outcome of plain brute violence. Maybe tiny territories like Monaco would be an exception, but I doubt it.
And rulers doesn't seem to be such a big problem either, since you applause the Cheiftains in Iceland and whatever the other were called in Ireland. Seems to me that they are just what you protest so much against. Elected leaders. Your text was interesting though, and I enjoyed reading it. The auto-translate wasn't too bad.
No, it's definitely not the same. Elected leaders in modern democracies use violence to impose their rulings. Chieftans did not force you to agree to theirs, although in Iceland there was this problem of a maximum number of chieftans, the freedom of choice among the existent chieftans was already enough to make that system way different from current monopolized states.
The video however was quite bad. It was very naive, full of misrepresentation and distortions and hopes that things would just "work out".
It's not "hopes that it will work out", it's more a "certainty that it will work
better", even though you don't exactly how it will work. That's the result of solid economic knowledge that shows that freedom brings a much better structure of incentives than monopolies, in any sector, from telephony to laws.
Maybe the most important part of that video is the one where he tries to describe why the government is incapable of making economic calculations. He should have spent a bit more time on that explanation I suppose.
The flash-animation was a nice introduction, but nothing new. And it does describe an ideal world, a theory. While I also agree with the fundamentals, I'm not an idealist.
That was my first reaction to that animation too.
The premise of the contracts everyone is supposed to agree to is that all parties are equal.
No, people are not equal. The main ethical premise is that people should have the
same set of fundamental rights. Denying that is supporting a sort of cast society, pretty much like aristocracy did. That's the only way I can see one could argue for a state, actually.
And if you enter into a contract as a weaker part and being exploited, how is that not comparable to the force that the state imposes on you.
It's very different.
If you life is miserable because you're directly or indirectly forced to remain miserable, that's not only a criminal action perpetrated by this conscious agent who attacks you, but that's also something you'll never be able to get rid off without getting rid off the aggressor, or at least decreasing his level of aggression and increasing your level of freedom. It's both ethically and economically "bad".
If your life is miserable "just because it is" (bad luck, poor/bad parents, natural catastrophe, inability in being productive, whatever), then, first of all, that's not the result of an aggression perpetrated by an individual. There's no crime there. Then, for example, if an individual proposes you something that, for outsiders' standards, is something humiliating or degrading, but
for you it represents an improvement, even if minimal, you'll certainly accept it. You would not accept something that would make your life even more miserable than what "nature" already does. So, naturally, you see a possibility of improvement there coming from this "exploitations", as people who haven't being under your skin call them.
And if you observe the economic incentives of such framework, you'll see that the possibility of profiting from these miserable people cheap labor will drag lots of investors, allowing such miserable people to improve their life faster and faster. It's a virtuous circle, not a "trap" from which you can't get out, like the scenario of coercion.
It's the typical
sweat shop scenario, so criticized by leftists who don't really see the entire picture.
As you can see, there are major differences, both from an ethical and an economical point of view.
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