I appreciate your post. This plot basically makes my point for me. Check out Houston. Guess which city doesn't have zoning laws ("keeping gubmint regulation out of our lives"). Also, it and those cities in that cluster were built about the idea of the car as personal transport as opposed to decent mass transit. Guess who lobbied the hell out of this idea. (Hint: it ain't named "Texas tea" (think Houston) for nothing).

You see those red European cities? I believe that is what libertarians call "socialist, fascist, communist, statist..." They could have expanded outwards into suburbs in the 60s and 70s. But they didn't. Wonder why.

The point is that we need transport. And it ain't gonna happen "voluntarily." It requires taxation, mostly by those who have lots of money (like the Koch bros and their companies which have profited from society and from their lobbying). Most people understand this, even though they may not realize how little these people (very few who own/run these companies) give back to the country.

I should add that all media, being corporate controlled, is party to corporate propaganda. I don't know why anyone thinks I like the NYTimes -- my ideas are in discord with the establishment doctrine put forth my what are called "liberal" newspapers. These news companies cover news in predictable ways, corresponding to their respective audiences and advertisers. It seems it is an easy label (reader of X) to apply to people who disagree with you. I've been called a reader/watcher of everything from Fox to WSJ to NYTimes to you name it. This is basic tribalism: same teenager thought process in play. I don't take offense to it -- same way I don't get upset when babies cry. This is to be expected.

And I noticed that nobody has even attempted to address the points regarding the Koch bros. I'll repeat that they aren't the only ones doing this kind of thing. I am sorry to say that the whole libertarian movement is a farce being perpetrated by those with huge amounts of money and influence. The good news is that it's never too late to realize that you are being duped.

This is a caricature. The teenage in this thread is strong.

It is easy to say that taxes are theft while enjoying the society that is in some large part built upon them. Actually, it is just funny/sad (depending on how much I've had to drink).

Beautiful. Your response makes it difficult for me to take you seriously. How are people supposed to get around? What would you prefer? Rail? Good luck with that... unless you're talking about paying for it with taxes.

Go to any major American city except those without good public transit (like NYC or San Fran). Ever been to Houston? Atlanta? Good luck trying to get anything done without a car. Although I agree that rail would be far better than just roads.

As for the cartoon. I don't think that society is composed chiefly of "sinners, whores, freaks and unnameable things that rape pit bulls for fun." Maybe you do, but that's not my problem.

Yes. Every rich person's greatest problem is what to do to keep from giving anything back to the society that made their success possible in the first place. The end result of a society in which this is permitted to go unabated is pretty horrible.

For everyone else, like you, taxes help pay for things like clean water and many other things that libertarian types consistently forget all about.

Well, I don't know... Do you like roads? How about knowing that there are regulations that keep you from getting poisoned by tainted foods? Or the building codes/inspectors that keep the country from looking like Somalia? Or the internet? It was built using tax money. What's that? You thought the free market made all this happen? Nope. Taxes levied by representative (flawed, but existent democracy) government.

Th problem is clear: the rich will continue to abuse you until you realize that you can put an end to it. They use many tools. A favorite tool is propaganda - to fool you into supporting policy that sets favorable conditions (for them) that ensure that you will never be able to compete.


This must really make people like the Koch brothers smile. Yeah - good for them. For you, not so much.

I think it goes a very long way.


I'm thinking more like 2% -- the percentage of people that really own my country, for instance. Of course, it we're talking about human rights and basic standards of human decency, then even 2% is too much. The good news is that most Americans don't like messing with other people for no reason. This suggests that democracy is not the poison that some insist.


Here are some facts:

http://robertdfeinman.com/society/gmu.html

http://exiledonline.com/a-people-history-of-koch-industries-part-ii-libertarian-billionaires-charles-and-david-koch-are-closetcase-subsidy-kings-who-milk-big-government-tyranny-but-want-to-slash-spending-on-anyone-else/

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/30/100830fa_fact_mayer

The hits just keep on coming in that piece.

And there are others. The Koch bros. are just a very obvious example. Of course, they didn't just fund the tea partiers. Pretty much every "libertarian" outfit that you've heard of (and some that you likely haven't) have been bankrolled by others like them.


The golden rule and democracy are not mutually exclusive. In fact, I think they are truly compatible. So no, I won't "disperses" with the idea of democracy.

I see that the teenaged suburbia-dwellers are out in full force.

These sad people are deluded into thinking that disarming themselves against large companies (concentrated power and wealth) will make them free. It should come as no surprise that such propaganda comes primarily from corporations themselves. Luckily, most people understand that democracy is probably the only way that we (humans) can coexist in relative freedom and decency.

I'll point out that the method I outlined above does not rely on any unsupported methods of extracting and storing wallet data. My method preserves the wallet and does not require you to manipulate bitcoin data (potentially risky if you don't know exactly what you are doing) to get the wallet into print-ready form. In addition, my method compresses and protects the wallet with strong encryption.

This is possible, but I would go one step further and encrypt the wallet first. Here is how:


This will compress and then encrypt your wallet using your private GPG key. The -a flag tells gpg to give you ascii-armored (printable) output. The -o flag tells gpg to name the output file "text_crypt_wallet.txt". You can then print this out. The file will look something like this:


I recommend first moving bitcoins to a fresh wallet with a single address via a single transaction, so as to have as small a file as possible. Otherwise, you may end up with many pages of output.

Make sure the font is OCR-readable (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition) and large enough to avoid scanning and transcription errors. Also, make sure to keep track of page numbers.

If you don't have a GPG key, you can encrypt it via just a symmetric cipher and password:


Just don't forget your password.

By default, GPG uses CAST5 as the symmetric cipher. Note that you can always specify which symmetric cipher you want to use (all of gpg's ciphers are considered strong) with one of these flags:


To recover the wallet, you can scan the document and OCR it to a file. Then decrypt it:


If you are running linux, you probably already have gnupg. If you have windows, you can get gnupg here: http://www.gpg4win.org/

This concisely encapsulates the essence what I see as the fundamental contradiction in "libertarianism," which I have never seen addressed by the Auburn crowd.

I agree, and this is more along the Unix "philosophy" that I mentioned earlier. The less code within bitcoin itself, the better. You can't exploit code that doesn't exist.

If you mean that my response was terse, I can grant you that. However, the forum can facilitate as productive and detailed a discussion as we can manage. It is up to us to set the standard.


Even in a purely capitalistic society, you must agree that resource (re)allocation will not happen unless there is some sort of mechanism for enforcement. Not all transactions will occur with all parties (especially those that pay "external" costs) happy with the outcome.

The situation that I was thinking of is, for instance, an economy suffering due to the effects of widespread real-estate speculation as a result of economic "financialization." Consider the production of raw material, such as concrete or steel. If they were still being produced in the country suffering economic problems, the limitations of private ownership (fiduciary responsibility to meet quarterly targets) will force the companies to lay off large portions of their labor forces. This will further depress the economy, as the laid-off workers no longer have the ability to consume goods and services. The process degenerates via a positive-feedback mechanism.

Now, let's consider those industries being run outside of the constraints of quarterly profits. The industries can continue to produce raw materials, which are required for things like infrastructure development and maintenance, as well as other goods. The work force can continue to consume goods and services. Yes, the government incurs a debt, but this is a situation in which debt is tolerable. In good times, countries should be accumulating surpluses to help deal with the bad times. Anyways, the positive feedback situation present in the previous example, with which we are very familiar - we are experiencing it now - would be mitigated and the economic situation would improve far more rapidly. After recovery, the industries would return to profitability and the debt repaid.

Of course, this requires a large industrial capability to produce raw basic goods - currently lacking in the US.


The New Deal helped control some costs, but we can debate that. I'll put that aside for now. With respect to the war, I think your case it far weaker. The enormous production of war materials (think of all the steel, aluminum, textiles, etc. required) certainly helped pull the country up. Notice that the country incurred debt in the process (bonds), similar to the process I outlined in the second case, above. The clincher was that the US emerged as the dominant economic and military power after WW2. This afforded unparalleled opportunities to exploit resources and labor on a global scale. The party has been ending in the last few decades, which is partly why the US economy has been developing so many bubbles and why it is now based on pure, unsustainable debt. There are things that can be done to arrest and reverse this process (such as (re)establishing domestic modern productive industry), but the people that own the country don't like those options.

Another (rarely mentioned) factor that helped bring down the rate of unemployment is the gruesome fact that over 400,000 working-age American men perished in the war.


I'm having a difficult time parsing these paragraphs.


Perhaps. But that isn't the situation I had described. What I described are two centralized systems operating in series.

1) the government funding basic research to develop technologies that are to be commercialized by private companies

2) the private companies that take those technologies and repackage/market them (for a hefty price) to the people that already paid to have them developed in the first place.

As long as businesses need to run VPNs and SSL websites, I think crypto will remain legal. Mimicking traffic patters in another matter, though.

No, I asserted it. Big difference.


In this industrial world, it can also emerge via centralized control over productive capital.


Bitcoin is a neutral tool - just like money; it is not an end to itself. If you "don't know why [I  persist] on this forum," then all I can do is comfort you by saying "don't worry about it."

EDIT: just noticed you changed your entire post. I was replying to a thoughtful and well-formulated question by BitterTea. Sorry if you can't appreciate my posts.


You consider economics to be real science? If only...

I think I am still being consistent. I see the state as a necessary tool in the transition away from state capitalism. Others here have more faith in the tools of private capital. I maintain that if we disarm ourselves by getting rid of the tool of the democratic state, then we are at the mercy of private tyranny. Ideally, we can approach a point in which the state is unnecessary, but that point is very far away - perhaps not entirely attainable; I definitely can't envision it. But I strongly suspect that the only way we can improve our human condition is to progressively dismantle the worst parts of the systems in place and to build the kinds of systems that we think will lead to a better condition within the remaining scaffolds - the shells of the existing unjust systems. All the while, building more just societies which are based on enlightenment and democratic principles.

Because of where we place our faith for the best tool for the transformation (private capitalist power vs. democratic state power), and I won't presume to speak for Babylon, there are sharp differences between what anarcho-capitalists believe and what I believe, as is evident in this thread. You call it "the only difference," but this is fundamental. To be honest, I don't consider "libertarianism" or what is called anarcho-capitalism to be anarchist philosophies. My experiences and intuition lead me to suspect that the endpoints of these approaches are vastly different: that the endpoint of anarcho-capitalism is a nightmarish condition of industrial feudalism.

I'll end the post with a quote by Immanuel Kant:

"one cannot arrive at the maturity for freedom without having already acquired it"

I think the same applies to democracy. Perhaps the people of Tunisia and Egypt will show us how it is done.

It seems fair to discuss the merits of UPnP inclusion here. I tend to agree with you, just because of potential security issues.

No comment.

Relax. I meant that you brought back memories of the pre-internet days, and that your post made me want to go back and look for some old stuff.

Yes. And because of you, I will waste my weekend looking at ancient fidonet echolists.

Fair enough. I haven't heard of fidonet for a long, long time.