It's clear enough to me, and since I'm that libertarian mod you speak of, that works out fine.  It's not a requirement that you understand.


It's at least as likely that exposure to libertarian thought causes significant cognative dissonance in those who don't understand the philosophy, including yourself.  Sometimes I actually try to soften the blow for some of you guys, because I feel sorry for you; it must hurt sometimes.  Other times I don't feel any such pity, because stupidity should hurt somewhat.

Yes, I do pay taxes.  Against my own will, so that I don't get my own head kicked in also.  I also have the joy of paying the NSA to watch me, as well.

Here's an irony; up until very recently, I received EBT benefits as well.  I was required to accept them due to terms of a contract, with the state.  I know, a further irony.  The reason was because I was fostering two brothers, and the birth parents already received EBT, and I was obligated to maintain all benefits until such time as parental rights were terminated. 

They were terminated shortly after my wife & I adopted them, because there is no way that we qualify and no way that we were going to pursue them anyway.

I've never lived in Texas or Tennessee, nor do I smoke, nor do I frequent furry bars; so I seriously doubt I've ever given you a cigarette.

I saw your husband's hairdo.  At least I hope that was your husband.


As previously noted, several.  Posted them already, you didn't bother to read any of them.  Many of them predate your forum membership, just as that entire thread did before you got there.

Don't you have some evidence of my bad behavior to gather up?  The clock is ticking.

It may not be nice to point it out, but it is what she is.  She is an able bodied, young adult who lives off of the kindness of others and the forced taxation of others; by her own admission above.  No matter how I may feel about food stamps, the food assistance program was established to help out families who could not afford to buy enough healthy foodstuffs to feed their families.  Not only does she not have kids, (god help them if I'm wrong) she isn't incapable of supporting herself, she just chooses not to participate in her own support.  Other people give her things either because they feel sorry for her, like her enough to overlook her parasitical lifestyle, or are forced to by government taxation and redistribution schemes.  That is unethical, and the very definition of a parasite.

You're a parasite.  I wouldn't call that ethical.

That just means that someone else is paying those taxes on her behalf, not that taxes don't get paid.

This makes me even more curious.  How do you access this forum, if you neither own anything, nor buy time at a cybercafe?

Maybe.  I don't remember that one.  I'm pretty sure there are still taxes in NH, though.

And no one buys anything on your behalf either, I suppose.

I thought you lived in the US, do you not pay sales taxes?  Do you never buy anything at all?

Seriously?  You don't think that there is a rational reason that murder and rape are crimes regardless of government?

We're not even speaking the same language.

Just a little bit of research into the topic for which you attempt to speak would have saved you from shame, assuming you actually feel shame.

"In 1992 [5] Dunbar used the correlation observed for non-human primates to predict a social group size for humans. Using a regression equation on data for 38 primate genera, Dunbar predicted a human "mean group size" of 148 (casually rounded to 150), a result he considered exploratory due to the large error measure (a 95% confidence interval of 100 to 230).[6]

Dunbar then compared this prediction with observable group sizes for humans. Beginning with the assumption that the current mean size of the human neocortex had developed about 250,000 years ago, during the Pleistocene, Dunbar searched the anthropological and ethnographical literature for census-like group size information for various hunter–gatherer societies, the closest existing approximations to how anthropology reconstructs the Pleistocene societies. Dunbar noted that the groups fell into three categories — small, medium and large, equivalent to bands, cultural lineage groups and tribes — with respective size ranges of 30–50, 100–200 and 500–2500 members each."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number#Research_background

Trolling again.


I absolutely agree.  That's why armed mugging is so popular  I point a gun at your face & offer you a profitable trade:  Your life for your wallet.  After a quick negotiation, you conclude that it's in your enlightened self interest to part with your wallet & not your brains.  Another deal done
[/quote]

Mugging is popular where you live?  Perhaps you should move, or choose another profession.  That one will get you killed where I live, and I do mean that literally.


That wouldn't have been my choice.  My choice would as likely to have been to shoot you in the face, since I'm more than confident that I'm both fast and accurate enough to defeat you, since I actually can afford to practice.  Again, I live in a city where at least ten percent of the adult population possesses a permit to carry a weapon concealled.  I was 32 before I even met anyone who was mugged in my city.  To this day, in a city of roughly one million people, the reported muggings are less than 100 in a year; half of which occur within a three block radius of a particular housing project in the west end of town, and almost all of them after dark.  I've never been in that neighborhood after dark, and don't know anyone who would.

I cut out the remainder of your trolling, BTW.

It's a perspective developed from observations.  So yes, that's my opinion.

I can't see it, something on that site keeps crashing my browser.

Nope, got a plan.  The hardwoods I'll require that they are cut in winter, so they'll "coppicce" and grow back.  The regrowth rate is so much faster because the root system is already in place.  As for the stumps that can't regrow, or just fail, I'll cover over with a layer of good soil and use as a huglekultur bed (http://www.richsoil.com/hugelkultur/) for the replacement fruit tree guild.  Basicly the stump and roots rot in the ground, providing long term fertilizer and water retention for the seedling fruit tree.

I'm in the process of buying  a few hectares of land just outside of my home city.  It's kind of strange, because I've always been a 'city boy'.  I know almost nothing about farming, but then nor do I need to know that stuff.  What I plan on doing isn't farming, per se.  It's permaculture.  See, the land I bought is almost completely wooded.  Old growth timber 70 feet high, 30 to 50 inches across, and a complete canopy.  It's downright dark in the deep woods at midday.  I plan on a 'selective cut' of timber right from the start, to balance out some of the purchase price & to open up the canopy; letting me transition the property into a 'food forest'.  There is one house on the property already, that has been heated with wood grown from the same lot for as long as the house has been there.  When I walked the lot, there were at least four deadfall trees that hadn't yet been cut up.  In other words, the growth of the trees, even matured, outpace the heat needs of the single family home in this climate.  Some pawpaws, apples, pears, etc; mixed into the forest, and in a decade or so the 'food forest' will produce a great deal of food.  Problem is, permaculure doesn't produce on a modern industrial timescale.

Murder is not a crime, in your opinion?  Rape?  You require a state to define your mores for you?

You most certainly are.  The earliest mention of the term 'capitalism' was in the Communist Mannesfesto by Karl Marx.  How do you think he defined it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism#Marxist_political_economy

Do you need me to translate that?  Private entities aquire commodities to be used as resource inputs for the production of other commodities.  In it's simpliest form, that would be "private ownership and control of the means of production".  Marx's complaint with this system was that it generally treated human labor as a commodity itself, which he regarded as inhumane.  Many avowed capitalists did then, and do now, hold a similar view as to the special nature of the "human capital".  Ultimately that's a moral, and not a feature of capitalism per se, and capitalism can and often does work within the constraints of such a social moral.  That seems to be your complaint as well, but like Marx, you confuse a common stage of a industrial economy with a fundamental feature of capitalism.  For example, Britain & the US both had child labor and "sweatshops" a century ago, but as our societies grew more affluent across all classes both societies grew to regard children as precious, and also to regard minimum working conditions as a moral case, ultimately reflected in child labor laws and such.  Every single industrial society on Earth that has followed us on that path has also progressed through those stages.  Does anyone here not remember the cases of 12 to 14 year old girls working in unheated or un-air-conditioned shoe factories in China during the 90's, electronics factories Taiwan during the 80's, or fields in Mexico pretty much anytime in the last century?  The reasons you don't hear about such things anymore is because those societies grew too affluent to put up with such conditions anymore.  Not because of a few high profile activists & actors whining about it in front of American Wal-Marts.


Naturally no.  In practice, it depends.  Using your example, prove that any such land was stolen.  Bear in mind, I've personally got as much claim to be a 'native' American, or at least the heirs of same, that anyone does.  While the tribal traditions of the Eastern 'longhouse' tribes most certainly did recognize real estate and personal property, it was very much a 'homesteading' type of culture.  If it was wild and uncultivated, no one owned it, until they killed it or cut it down.  So the idea that white men were willing to come into their region and then offer them low value gifts in exchange for the tribes to 'sell' the white men their untamed stretches of land was laughable.  For the most part, the stories of selling off land for nearly worthless beads was a myth, as the recipients largely knew the gifts were of little value.  They didn't complain because their cultural traditions didn't grant them any kind of exclusive claim on the untamed wilds, only on the areas that they had already invested their labors into cultivating.  The wild animals belonged to no one until the hunter killed it, and the fruits of the pawpaw tree belonged to no one, until someone picked it.  It was rudimentary, but it was certainly an example of a belief in the right of private property.  The cases that probably did exist of land disputes between natives and white settlers must have been relatively rare, and likely less common than land disputes between white settlers claiming the same stretches of untamed forest as their own.  The real problem for the natives was that the whites vastly outnumbered them, and were just as free to homestead around them as anyone; and ultimately that many of those same homesteaders were also racists, sometimes violently so.  If you dispute this perspective, then prove it.  If you can prove that any such land was actually stolen, it's not theirs, and the heirs of the wronged are entitled to compensation from the estates of the wrongdoers, but not from their heirs if those heirs didn't profit from those estates.  If those estates no longer exist, sadly, there is no one to sue; for those who are at fault are long dead, and the grandchild cannot be rightly held to the debts of his forefathers.
And what do you claim is it's natural state?

Says the one without capital, or knowledge of what it is.  By what logic do make this claim?  Are you going to come and take it?  With what, exactly?


No, they don't.  Limitless accumulation of resources is a self defeating enterprise.  It you even knew what capital was, you'd already know that, but you're not willing to learn something new.

Yes, you could.  Start by not wording your opinons as facts. Don't make statements in a vacuum.


Sadly, I'm not surprised.


Yes, you could say that.  Families are communal by definition, and by nature.  The problems only arise when the well intended try to apply the communal elements of a family beyond Dunbar's Number.  It can't work only because it's simply not scalable.  Capitalism may appear harsh from a certain perspecitive, but it's both sustainable and scalable.  The assertion that it requires some degree of slavery or government force to function is false, and provablely so.  The sad fact is that, yes, slavery has historicly been found coincincidntal to capitalsim. It's also been found coincidental to just about every other known form of governance, including those matriachies that certain posters seem so fond of.  Corrolation is not causation.


It's a balance of motivations, however.  You can look at trade as an advesarial relationship (a conflict) if you like.  That's not a completely unsupportable position.   However, trade is almost always more profitable for both parties when both parties benefit, because voluntary exchange is less costly than war.  In the cases that voluntary exchange is not mutually beneficial, such exchanges cannot (by reason) be voluntary.  That's conflict, war, theft, and force.  Those are the halmarks of governments.  Corporations cannot fight wars because they don't hold monopolies on force, their governments do.  Would corporations wage wars if governments did not exist or were too weak to prevent it?  I don't know, maybe they would.  The East India Company was known to function in such a manner in far flung corners of the British Empire.  Still, corporations are not naturallly occuring "corporate' structures; as they all require the support of some government to even exist.  I question whether or not corporations, as we know them, could even exist in the absence of supporting governments.

Perhaps you could avoid that by not stating your personal opinions (the world is a 2 year old, all borked) as an objective observation or fact.  It's not, there are many people that are quite capable of managing themselves (i.e. 'adults' in your worldview) that do not feel the need to intervene with the (follwoing through with your analogy) childish tantrums of governments or societies at large.  I don't consider those 'tantrums' to be so much a flaw of societies, but the failed experiments not yet permitted to follow through with a natural ending.  If the whole of Europe devolves (again) into a roiling toddler fight, the adults will be those who choose to stay out of the way as best as possible.  The Roma have a culture that is at least as old as the rest of Europe and isolated from the rest of Europe, and doesn't suffer from the cultural connections to particular parcels of land.  The Roma don't have national loyalties, don't fight for nations, and don't care what happens to most of Europe.  Whatever happens to Europe (Germany, France, Italy, whatever), they'll still be Roma.  Whatever happens to the United States, there will still be Anabaptists; and again, they don't much care what happens to the rest of us either.  They may or may not be the 'adults' in the room, that remains to be seen; but nor are they among the 2 year olds.

A further irony, is that both of those cultures deal with the greater world on capitalistic terms, and among themselves on  particularly communistic terms.  But of course, I don't trade with my own children either; I trade with those beyond my family unit.  Capitalism is how soverigns deal with each other in peace; they make agreements about borders and property, etc.  If you don't agree that you own yourself, and that I own myself; then we cannot trade on peaceful terms.  If you do agree that I own myself, you must also agree that I own the fruits of my labors; and therefore have the right to tarde those fruits under my own terms, or otherwise rent out my labors, as I alone see fit.  If we can agree on this simple principle, then capitalism is the only economic system that can arise from that on any significant scale.  No other form of economy can naturally or voluntarily grow beyond Dunbar's Number.  Therefore the only form of peaceful anarcy that could ever exist is an Ancap society.