Environmental Protection: The New Socialism?In 1990, the economist Robert Heilbroner expressed genuine surprise at the collapse of socialism. Writing in The New Yorker, he recalled that in the debates over central planning in the 1930s and 1940s, socialism seemed to have won. A half century later he realized that he had been wrong and that “Mises was right.”[1]
Since Heilbroner has leaned toward socialism for most of his career, he deserves credit for admitting that he was so mistaken. Yet by the end of his revealing essay, Heilbroner was suggesting that perhaps socialism wasn’t dead, after all. He proposed “another way of looking at, or for, socialism.” He suggested that we think of socialism “not in terms of the specific improvements we would like it to embody but as the society that must emerge if humanity is to cope with the one transcendent challenge that faces it within a thinkable timespan.” That challenge, says Heilbroner, is “the ecological burden that economic growth is placing on the environment.”
Heilbroner’s characterization of environmental problems is as misinformed as his half century of wishful thinking about socialism. But this should not be surprising. Environmental issues frequently overwhelm intelligent thought and factual analysis.
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People will never be civil enough to sustain ancap. Certainly as long as the world if full of dysfunctional, exploitive families it will be difficult for people to stop conflating their childhood experiences with human nature. |
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My take on AnCap: "governments are bad because they gain and maintain their power by force. Therefore (and this is where it gets murky), they ought to be somehow(strategy?) removed from power/starved of taxes/etc(common goals?). Afterwards, things will eventually settle down and market forces will enable everything that had been hitherto provided by the State (a few big question marks remain for things like a justice system). As long as everyone somehow(how?) abides by the non-coercion principle, there won't be any cancerous government-like entity trying to fill the "top dog" niche." There is no plan, nor any need for one. When people stop believing that threatening other humans with violence is a valid way of solving social problems the State will end, just like how slavery ended when people stopped believing it was right to own other humans. When the State ends, people will find alternate ways to solve their problems, just like they found alternatives to slave labor. It's impossible to predict the precise form those alternative solutions will take, because making that prediction is equivalent to solving the economic calculation problem. |
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Government will (in the end) tax your house, your land, your car etc. and will demand BTC. You cannot hide physical property too much and they will tax it. For bitcoins!  It won't work. There's a form of EROEI that applies to taxation. Governments have a exponentially-increasing need for taxation to bribe the dependent classes, pay public sector pensions, and to make legislators rich by diverting money to their cronies in the "private" sector. Eventually the need for taxation will exceed the available productivity and the state will collapse just like it did in Rome, Weimar Germany, the USSR, and many others. That point comes much faster when the enforcement cost rises. If the government has to spend $0.01 per dollar of revenue in enforcement costs the game can go on a lot longer than if it has to pay $0.10 per dollar of revenue. If taxes must be attached to tangible property and collected directly from individual taxpayers the "return on investment" from the perspective of the government drops catastrophically. |
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My own opinion is that the Bitcoin crowd has a long way to go, and that Dmytri is "right". To be on the fence about it, I want Bitcoin to succeed in order to improve the effectiveness of both individuals *and* common action. Both can do better, and indeed *have* to if we're going to face up to an ever-changing, fucked up world. The world is fucked up because of coercion, not because the coercion isn't efficient enough. There is no such thing as a better tax model that will result in improved common action, because pointing guns at people and ordering them around is the exact opposite of common action. When taxation becomes impossible, and the institutions which subsist on it collapse, then the opportunity for common action will start. |
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The Dallas/Fort Worth area is deficient in terms of organized Bitcoin meetups, even though there are enough people involved in the area to have one. I know of two or three people not on this board who would be interested in a biweekly or monthly meetup so with a few more people we could get a regular event started. As far as a venue there's a resturant in Dallas owned by a Libertarian (actually this district's LP candidate for Senate in the last election) who I think might be persuaded to accept Bitcoins if enough people ask for it. http://freemandallas.com/ |
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This leads me to think that it's extremely naive to believe "controlling/steering/regulating" something as complex as the economy of a country or even the world could be successfully accomplished by a group of people, however smart, educated and well-meaning they might be. If only everybody could be convinced of this conclusion we would have finally caught up to what von Mises figured out in 1920. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_calculation_problem |
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would make it impossible for bitcoin to be made illegal in the US. Statements like this betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the law and its relationship to the individuals which make up government. |
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Im just sayin he's not Mother Theresa as some see him. Mother Theresa was an evil, sadistic opportunist. If Dotcom is merely a greedy meglomaniac he's already better than her. |
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"I find it interesting that in all of our technological ingenuity we have not established an online voting system through the internet where you can vote from home through your internet connection. The reason I think this is the case is if there was any cheating/tampering with votes or the algorithm of the system it would be clear as day it was happening." If the purpose of political systems was expressly opposed to the goal of implementing the will of the people it claims jurisdiction over then one would expect it to behave exactly as it is behaving now. |
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It's all a mix of achievements, genuine efforts, unforeseen show-stoppers, competence, incompetence, wishful thinking, vaporware, and pump'n'dump campaigns. Even the same person or company may be involved in several, or all, of the above. QFT |
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+1 +1 to "argument by image macro" with a side of strawman? I had you down as being more intellectually honest than that. My mistake apparently. |
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It's true that I was talking about the "bootstrapping phase". However: that phase might last quite a few generations or longer. How would that happen? |
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I will be interested to know more about it, please explain Newly-mined currency doesn't represent "value that you have given to society, that you have not yet redeemed". Currency that is accumulated via trade does represent unredeemed value. Minting currency is necessary just because it has to come into existence somehow, and since Bitcoin is fully transparent about how this process people are willing to use it. But in the long term it doesn't matter because the volume of trade taking place is already much larger than the amount of new coins being introduced and the creation of new bitcoins will become exponentially less significant over time. |
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I don't see how bitcoin fulfills this. Not that the early adopters and inventors of bitcoin don't "deserve" the many coins they have, but they have not received that as compensation for having given anything to society. The means by which the initial supply of bitcoins is generated is an implementation detail that is only temporarily signifigant. The post you replied to is descring steady-state behavior and you're talking about the one-time startup behavior. Right now it's possible to get bitcoins without adding trade value, but only because it's necessary to create the initial supply somehow. Even now, though, the amount of coins being traded on a regular basis is many times the supply of new coins being minted, and mining is only going to get less signifigant over time. |
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Could declaring Bitcoin a religion protect it from Finacial Regulation? Well not now. If you wouldn't have publically announced this as a motive, maybe. |
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Is it too much to ask for people who think they've discovered a major, obvious flaw in Bitcoin to maybe search the forum and see if there aren't already a billion threads discussing this very thing?
Maybe, just maybe, you aren't the only person bright enough to come up with the same question.
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I'd use it if it included Armory, Casacius' Bitcoin Address Utility, and printer drivers.
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obviously but no real business will touch it ever if its illegal. You must live a pretty sheltered life. |
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