OK, so eventually voting gets cancelled altogether and Joe becomes the Supreme Leader. How does that help you?

"I don't vote" -- could somebody please explain this attitude which seems very pervasive among An-Caps and Libertarians & Co.?

Seriously, is it a:
"I don't negotiate with terrorists" hunger-strike kind of thing, where you drink poison and hope the other person will die?

Not that I'm trying to get anyone to participate in the democratic process (please, just NO! ), I'm just trying to fully understand how this non-participation mindset is supposed to personally benefit the non-voter.

I suppose we should clarify whether we're talking about a theory of capitalism, or some practical activities which we label capitalism. In programming terms, the former would be a class, and the latter an object of that class. Edit*: And for that matter, maybe those ought to be classes and objects of trade, whereas capitalism would be a container class or object that houses all of the individual trades? [/edit] To me it seems that whenever someone performs a trade, a calculation -- or simulation -- is done to try and predict the possible outcomes and to choose the best one. Doing these simulations in our heads was obviously beneficial to us humans, and that was probably a factor in why we evolved to have such big brains.

And I wonder if our individual neurons sometimes think the 'brain' they're stuck with is a coercive idiot. If only those individuals could be left alone to mind their own business, homesteading the lipid-lands, and collecting the glucose and oxygen provided by nature.

Well then, part of the discussion earlier was about whether or not 'pure' capitalism can be separated from the state. Your version obviously can't. There would need to be some kind of official body that maintains a list of what all the 'crimes' are. Otherwise the so-called stealing is just bad yet legitimate trade.

Asian sweatshops.
Granted that most of the exploitation is likely transitional -- various foreign businesses "shop around" for third-world countries whose authorities won't "get in the way" of progress. But you're doing the classic sales pitch: "ignore the bad stuff, just look at the GIANT MONUMENTS the labourers built!"

I'm not.

You fail to take into account do-gooders: those people with lots of heart but not enough brain.

-_-
Simple example: "free range" eggs that cost twice as much as the cage ones. Caring about the poor little chickens costs you financially. If you stop caring, you get financially rewarded. Admittedly it's a dead-end example because I can't really think of any long-term negative side-effects of eating cage eggs instead of free range ones, but if you actually wanted to understand, I think you would by now.

It's an ism.

Lol. Yet another 'preacher'.
Merely saying something is rational, does not make it so.

Claiming to know what happens when you die seems arrogant of you. You're obviously assuming and calculating that you're never coming back. What if you're wrong?

Fuck 'glamour', faker.

I think you exaggerate with the 'bloodlines' thing. Unlike some other species, humans don't have a very strong sense of smell, so it's not like we can literally sniff each other and determine group membership based on DNA. Besides, how would you explain fraternal bonding within, e.g.: nationalist, church, or academic groups?

To me it seems that many people tend to gravitate towards various groups, and some of those groups happen to be a major source of that "organised violence" in the world today.

Yeah yeah, attack the messenger, ignore the message. You seem to be putting words in my mouth, hypocrite.

Because:
-stealing to survive
-stealing, ripping people off and so on, due to greed
-exploiting easy targets (e.g.: immigrants who are desperate for a little bit of money).
-Capitalism seems to reward society with short-to-medium term gains (e.g.: technology, gadgets) while potential problems (e.g.: depleted resources, pollution) are easy to ignore because they tend to creep up very slowly.
-Ignoring morals seems to be more "efficient" than being righteous, at least in the short term.

I'm sure there are more reasons, but that's plenty for starters.

Zero imagination you lot. Do I have to explain all the intermediate steps between a 49 million person minority and a 1 person minority? Dictators and kings are a minority -- they are considered special and wholly different from their peasant subjects. So stop being so closed-minded and stupid. right back at you.

So you're a beneficiary of the King's nepotism?

It seems you would prefer tyranny of the minority instead. The end-game of such a system would be 0.000001% being the smallest minority, and therefore the dictator, or should I say Dear Leader.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that democracies are better than dictatorships. So yeah, god help you if you want to be a dictator because I sure won't.

Says he who assumes that anyone who doesn't fit the An-Cap / Libertarian / Laissez Faire world view must be a government agent...



Anyway, to try and summarise this "my Capitalism versus your Capitalism" debate:
-An-Caps + Libertarians seem to be using the word 'Capitalism' to describe a set of Western values: free/voluntary trade, using money and/or barter. And it's seen as purely an economic system.
-ktttn seems to be saying "no, it's also a political system. Those 'Western values' re: money, contracts, property rights, freedom, etc, are not natural, they are enforced, even if that enforcement can be a bit sloppy and incomplete."


Though I don't agree with everything kttn says, it's a refreshing change from the:
-"property rights are totally natural"
-"I don't know how my mind got to inhabit this body, but I hereby claim ownership upon it (the body)"
-"<circular_reasoning>property rights are derived from the axiom of 'self-ownership', which is derived from property rights </circular_reasoning>"
-"freedom is a wondrous thing, let's relabel it 'security' and have friendly freedom companies 'security companies' sell/restrict it on the 'free' market"
-"competition is great, cooperation is great, but monopolies are evil...
-unless they're natural monopolies because sometimes economies of scale make cooperation more efficient than competition...
-unless they're governments because self-enforcement doesn't count as 'natural'"
-"and a majority exerting its will over a minority is coercive and evil...
-but a minority exerting its will over a majority is less evil because it's obviously more righteous...
-however, the coercive minority shouldn't be too small because then they become leaders in an authoritarian system of government like an oligarchy or dictatorship...
-therefore all governments are evil in principle,
-but without them there would be total anarchy and chaos, which is where the (haaallelujah!) Non-Aggression Principle comes in...
-Surely everyone agrees with The Golden Rule? Right? We'll just quietly slip in some Western values here like property rights, which implies concepts of theft, justice and all that other stuff we can't imagine living without (no thanks to our evil government that keeps oppressing us) NOTHING TO SEE HERE!! Hopefully no-one will notice"
-"Of course we wouldn't be so silly to presume we'd ever actually get this utopia, which kind of works in our favour. Conveniently, our idealism cannot be disputed with the help of real-world examples, and whenever someone engages us in debate it's always a great opportunity to for us to educate them about the error of their ways..."

...mind-numbing circle-jerk that regularly besieges the politics forum.

Hmm. Without access to other people's economic calculations re: internships, you have no basis for accusing them of having screwed priorities. As someone who has actually been an intern, in my case the incentives were right for both sides of the trade. I got to work at a 'cool' place, had tutoring, room to experiment and make mistakes, and that made up for the low wage. In return, the employer got their easier/menial tasks done for a lower price, giving their full-time employees time to do more advanced stuff. Win win.

That desert island game seems like childish propaganda -- the only incentive that exists is a contrived need to eat an equal yet maximal amount of fish and coconuts. What about personal growth? Boredom? Self-sufficiency/safety/redundancy? Maslow's hierarchy of needs?? In trying to make a point about trading, the game dehumanises the characters -- they're just drones, and you're the controller trying to maximise factory output.



Great point. There seemed to be some uncomfortable squirming in the follow-up posts. I wonder why? Life largely consists of a fight for survival -- do whatever it takes to "not die" and then progressively fulfil all those other Maslowian needs. Being stuck, life-long in just one body (and you don't even get to choose which one) is not exactly a great start for voluntarism. It seems that most of life is involuntary -- people live out their genetic programming, and maybe, occasionally make conscious decisions. Even so, people seem divided on whether free will exists at all -- maybe our conscious 'I' is just a helpless observer and even the feeling of making a voluntary decision is just an illusion, another quale to add to the collection?

There's the issue of death. It's an "unknown unknown". We usually don't know when it'll happen, but we also don't know what happens. Do we get re-incarnated? Do we die forever? We don't even have first-hand proof if it happens! We only have the evidence of the 'Matrix' senses telling us that lots of other people die every day. Thus, we can't make accurate economic calculations on how to spend our time. This is where capitalism breaks down -- the economic calculations just don't work when we have no freaking idea what proportion of our life we are exchanging for the temporary enjoyment of some material item.

Similar points can be made about healthcare but I've had that discussion before.

Spoken on a Bitcoin forum. How ironic.

How about I make a quick list of Bitcoin's socialist tendencies (not that I'm a socialist or anything, just pointing things out.)

• Relies on infrastructure that's sponsored by someone else. E.g.: distributed memory pool for unconfirmed transactions = unfunded; network resources = unfunded
• Relies on charity to pay for development. So far this kind-of works, but anecdotal evidence suggests it's mostly a loss-making hobby and contributors usually have other day jobs to subsidize it.
• Most direct funding is through a combination of "inflation tax" and exchange rate appreciation.
  
• As long as participation remains voluntary and transparent, the inflation seems acceptable. If it's ever forced on me, I might start demanding that the miners provide various governmental services in return.
• As people put more of their faith into Bitcoin, the exchange rate goes up and it parasitically steals value from other things. One way to think of Bitcoin is: it's just one bubble in a global washing basin full of other bubbles. If one bubble grows, the other bubbles have less room.

Seems to me that it's responsible governance that gets rid of slavery. Otherwise one starts getting things like:

• Profit-driven prison systems and a breakdown of whatever justice system is supposedly in play. The lower classes get sent to prison for relatively minor infractions (the judicial process still has to look legitimate when people aren't used to slavery), where they manufacture various goods.
• Vulnerable immigrants get conned into perpetually working off a debt that they accrued in exchange for "protection" or "insurance" while crossing the border.

Evolution brought in governments, followed by better governments, and they weeded out slavery. The gradual collapse of your US empire and its governmental structures is coinciding with a return of the things you listed.

Except that evolution has also brought about all the 'bad' stuff. Unless you want to blame god and creationism for all those pesky governments?

Well, if 'revolutions' only changed things by 180 degrees, they would call them u-turns.

No, you fool. You're confusing a hypothetical 'exchange' that has zero nett profit with a "profitable exchange" where your greed pays off and you happen to get more real-world value than what your monetary debt represented.
E.g.:
You have a $100 bill.
Therefore, society 'owes' you exactly $100 worth of 'stuff. Not $105 worth of stuff.

That's why programming books have boring titles like "ISO C++ Programming" instead of "Complete A to Z Instructions on how to Hack Government Networks Undetected".

Maybe you should ask: what's the end-game regarding Bitcoin and taxes?

Some possibilities:

a) Bitcoin remains a niche curiosity. It's the 21st century "tax haven" and supplants the various Cyprus' and Isle of Mans out there, but fails to starve other regimes. After some more banking collapses, various reforms occur around the world as mainstream finance finally realises it has to step up and perform better. New financial tools emerge: banking transactions become faster and safer, some offer features that were previously exclusive to Bitcoin such as irreversibility and maybe even some degree of anonymity. Governments start supporting various mini cash systems (as long as they get the tax of course), a bit like IPOs or redeemable coupons are fully accepted by society. Ironically, most people end up enjoying Bitcoin's benefits but without ever using Bitcoin.

b) Bitcoin keeps growing. Governments are unable to keep up, and eventually they start toppling due to lack of funds. People embrace this new low/zero tax Anarcho-Capitalist / Laissez-faire regime. Various social turnarounds occur: profit-driven education, health, justice, defence, infrastructure, central-planning, and superannuation (among others) ushers in a new era of prosperity. Even governments in various backward parts of the world end up collapsing as well due to Capitalism's unbeatable competitiveness. People have an epiphany and think "how did we end up tolerating all that authoritarianism for so long?! It's so nice that things are voluntary now."

c) Governments fight back. Being seemingly unstoppable, evil beasts that just won't die, they re-spawn as smart money-makers. How long Bitcoin "0.8" lasts seems irrelevant in the scheme of things. It's just a matter of time before the unfunded infrastructure collapses under its own weight. However, these money-makers will gladly produce newer, better coins that offer better performance and various other perks in exchange for tax superior fee structures. It's interesting how some people are so strongly opposed to overt taxes yet they gladly pay "inflation tax" and transaction fees under the Bitcoin model (in exchange for so little extra services, I might add!). Perhaps it really is just a matter of choice -- the ability to select between a wide variety of voluntary governance providers such as: BTC Guild, Bitminter, or 50BTC. Anyway, it later turns out that people want a bunch of government-ish services after all, and they would rather pay BTC Guild (or whoever) to provide an all-inclusive "social package" rather than wasting time with 1001 individual invoices each week. Unlike option (b) where there are no governments, the people grow to love their voluntarily chosen overlords.