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[JayJuanGee]

Frankly I would not want those people working for me.  I think everyone is better off if they are bribed into staying out of the workforce.  The reason is the same as the reason why the argument that market-based minimum wage is better than mandated is so bogus:  Lots of people have negative productivity.  No matter how hard they try, they will do more damage than good.  GHWBush, and BObama for example.  Would you want either of them making you a coffee?  Blech.

Problem is, if you pay them not to work, all there is to do is stay home and breed. And now you have five people to take care of instead of two.

People that say stuff like this sound like they subscribe to the Just World fallacy, for this case specifically that every problem someone has stems from themselves, and that you can't possibly be struggling if you're working hard. It's a lie some people tell themselves to make them feel better, usually out of either a fear of it happening to them, believing that it cannot happen to them, or believing that since it has never happened to them, the poor must be doing something wrong. Every ex-CEO probably subscribed to that theory until they had to start delivering pizzas.

Either that, or you have a heavy and unwarranted disdain for poor people, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

I don't have to have a disdain for the poor to understand that vilifying capitalists is not the way to gain/retain the capital needed for economic growth. The labor theory of value has been discredited. The subjective theory of value and marginal utility have much more explanatory and predictive power. Update your economic model.

Yeah.  Give them all nice sounding names, and that will help....


NOT....     



You need more substance, facts, rather than merely having a nice sounding name and a vision that is NOT based in reality.

[Richy_T]

I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution....

You kind missed the point again. He doesn't want to design a society. That's what statists want to do.

[Richy_T]

Aminorex mentioned the encirclement and rapprochement with Switzerland by the Nazis. Godwin's Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_law remains intact!

Sieg-sieg mutter-fokker



(No endorsement of Naziism implied)

[billyjoeallen]

A voluntary society cannot be designed at all. It will be emergent. When a critical mass of people realize that the rules we tell children to live by (namely don't hurt people, don't mess with their stuff, and keep your promises) should be applied across the board, and that no other general rules are necessary, then such a society will form.

There can be no formula for dealing with people in need. As soon as such a formula is known, most of the marginally needy and some of the non-needy attempt to game the system. Subsidizing poverty creates more poverty. The best way to deal with those in need is on an individual case-by-case basis. It's too important of a problem to be left to monopolists. Concrete answers are wrong answers.

Killing and stealing only works until the productive people stop producing, and then everybody starves. The productive people started leaving South Africa in droves when the anti-capitalist Nelson Mendela took over. There's no place on earth with more natural resources per acre than South Africa. If people are starving there, then it's because the government killers and thieves created an environment hostile to peaceful trade.

Actual good rebuttal, but this assumes all will be rational and well-adjusted. The killers and stealers won't think like this (or won't care/won't have the skills needed to make it in the world), and people who refuse to live by the sword will not be able to allow themselves to starve if they can help it. If we both turn out to be right, you about killing and stealing losing efficacy over time, and me about killers and stealers doing killing and stealing anyway, that's a potential huge blow for your ideal. Having your reasonable people inevitably starved to death at the hand of greedy murderers and thieves is a likely death knell.

Personally, I'd rather people game the system by collecting more food stamps than they are legally allowed, rather then having them just straight up try to blow my brains out and take all my stuff. While I wish we could deal with them on a case by case basis, under the current system I think that would cost more than the money saved by catching fraud. If you think the ability and cost-effectiveness of doing this would be improved in your ideal world, or even if you think there is a way to improve it under the current system, I'd be very interested in hearing about that.

Unfortunately I don't think meaningful improvement is possible under the current system. This is one reason why I am a revolutionary. I see a fundamental weakness in monopoly government that cannot be corrected without allowing distributed competitive governance.

There is no easy solution to the problems in South Africa. I see the best case scenario a hopefully temporary reversion to tribalism. If I lived there, I would leave if I could and retreat to an area controlled by my tribe if I couldn't, hunker down and ride out the storm. It is likely to get much much worse before it gets better.

I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution....

From my reading your various posts on the topic of your vision of what society should be, your society would likely be a very dog eat dog world with a lot of holes and loop holes that do NOT provide for the public to benefit from the public goods.. and probably would NOT adequately protect public goods.... unless of course, after the revolution, your side is able to slim the population down by 80% or more.  

I simply want to live in a society where all interactions are voluntary and property rights are respected. If that sounds too distopian to you, find comfort in the fact that I am philosophically am opposed to forcing anyone to create such a society, to live there or to stay there. Can you the the same of your society?

[Adrian-x]

I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution....

You kind missed the point again. He doesn't want to design a society. That's what statists want to do.

This time it can happen, history has favored the plunder, now for the first time there is a plunder proof store of wealth if you store it properly, if it is stolen it rewords all others not the plunderers.

[JayJuanGee]

To me, it appears as if you were misreading my earlier post and my use of the word capitalist.   I used the word capitalist to refer to persons holding capital.

Yes. But a person holding capital might also be a machinist putting money into a pension for his later years.

So I was NOT specifically criticizing capitalism with my employment of the term capitalist and my description of what seems to have been a major problem in the united states's allowances regarding the capitalists.   Also, NOT all capitalists have been able to suck all the surplus value - such as the smaller businesses are stuck attempting to compete and putting up their capital and their risk and then getting screwed by the overall poor business and poor humanity infrastructure in the USA. 

IN the USA, you tend to make more money by being a dickhead, rather than by being responsible - even though there are some examples of responsible companies, such as Costco, who treat their workers relatively well, and Costco still is rewarded in the market place.  Wallmart is rewarded in the market place, but treat their workers like shit, and deserve to be regulated into a better state of business, humanity and state of responsibility.

So again, it's not really capitalism per se. Just clarifying because I feel it's important.

Richy_T...

I get the sense that we would agree about a lot of the criticisms of the current system, and surely I am NOT opposed to responsible capitalism nor responsible capitalists.  Some of our bones of contention seem to come when we get into describing solutions or if we attempt to paint too broadly with solutions.    We also may agree about some of the solutions, if we were to take them one by one.  It is much too difficult to get into painting broad solutions in a forum like this and through a variety of short written posts.


Though I do tend to agree with one of the points above made by Octaft that removing some of the distractive and corruptive nature of money in politics would likely go a long ways towards moving us in the right direction.  I think that movements can be made in that direction, so I would NOT throw my hands up in the air regarding those kinds of potential measures to remove or to lessen the impact of the money in politics matters.

[ErisDiscordia]

I think we've determined already that you have far more faith in humanity than I do, and it shows. Yes, private individuals would have more wealth to share, but would they? I am of the opinion that it's human nature to horde and be greedy, and from the tone of your post and others, I'm sure you disagree. You sound like a really nice guy, but take care not to too readily project that onto others.

I agree that there is this basic difference between our outlooks on life. On my part it is quite a conscious decision. I choose to view people as generally decent and likeable, because I find life to be more fun that way. Maintaining my general agnosticism I realize that I probably can't know for sure either way. Traveling a lot and Couchsurfing in particular have reinforced my view.

Besides that I am skeptical of any notions about a "fixed" human nature. My own experience and certain experiments which have been conducted with some funny chemicals before they became illegal make me think that human behavior, our individual software which makes us behave certain ways, is mostly influenced by the environment we find ourselves in and is much more flexible than most would imagine. This means that there can be no permanent selfish, greedy, or altruistic human nature for me. It is not only subject to the point in space-time where the bearer of said human nature finds himself, but can be re-programmed with the skillful use of appropriate methods later in life.

If I were to take a dim view of human nature in general, my reaction would be to limit the amount of power humans could attain in order to minimize the damage they can do. It seems that while having this assumption, giving people huge amounts of power in order to watch out for/over the rest of the equally crooked people, is really counter productive.

Anyway, I'm sure if we met over a beer, we would get along just fine  

[JayJuanGee]

I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution....

You kind missed the point again. He doesn't want to design a society. That's what statists want to do.

You still design by NOT designing... So there is NOT some lofty point that you are getting that I am NOT getting.  Billyjoeallen has painted several aspects of his vision of society.. which seems scary if it were to be applied... unless, of course, the world population was 10% or less of its current quantity.

[hdbuck]

woowowowo  

-> http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-proves-just-the-tonic-london-gin-distillery/


BULLISSHHHHHH

[billyjoeallen]

I don't have to have a disdain for the poor to understand that vilifying capitalists is not the way to gain/retain the capital needed for economic growth. The labor theory of value has been discredited. The subjective theory of value and marginal utility have much more explanatory and predictive power. Update your economic model.

Yeah.  Give them all nice sounding names, and that will help....

NOT....      

You need more substance, facts, rather than merely having a nice sounding name and a vision that is NOT based in reality.

I didn't give them nice sounding names,  William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger did over a hundred years ago. It's weird how several different people can independently and nearly simultaneously discover something so supposedly unbased in reality. The same thing happened with calculus. Maybe that's not based in reality either.

[JayJuanGee]

A voluntary society cannot be designed at all. It will be emergent. When a critical mass of people realize that the rules we tell children to live by (namely don't hurt people, don't mess with their stuff, and keep your promises) should be applied across the board, and that no other general rules are necessary, then such a society will form.

There can be no formula for dealing with people in need. As soon as such a formula is known, most of the marginally needy and some of the non-needy attempt to game the system. Subsidizing poverty creates more poverty. The best way to deal with those in need is on an individual case-by-case basis. It's too important of a problem to be left to monopolists. Concrete answers are wrong answers.

Killing and stealing only works until the productive people stop producing, and then everybody starves. The productive people started leaving South Africa in droves when the anti-capitalist Nelson Mendela took over. There's no place on earth with more natural resources per acre than South Africa. If people are starving there, then it's because the government killers and thieves created an environment hostile to peaceful trade.

Actual good rebuttal, but this assumes all will be rational and well-adjusted. The killers and stealers won't think like this (or won't care/won't have the skills needed to make it in the world), and people who refuse to live by the sword will not be able to allow themselves to starve if they can help it. If we both turn out to be right, you about killing and stealing losing efficacy over time, and me about killers and stealers doing killing and stealing anyway, that's a potential huge blow for your ideal. Having your reasonable people inevitably starved to death at the hand of greedy murderers and thieves is a likely death knell.

Personally, I'd rather people game the system by collecting more food stamps than they are legally allowed, rather then having them just straight up try to blow my brains out and take all my stuff. While I wish we could deal with them on a case by case basis, under the current system I think that would cost more than the money saved by catching fraud. If you think the ability and cost-effectiveness of doing this would be improved in your ideal world, or even if you think there is a way to improve it under the current system, I'd be very interested in hearing about that.

Unfortunately I don't think meaningful improvement is possible under the current system. This is one reason why I am a revolutionary. I see a fundamental weakness in monopoly government that cannot be corrected without allowing distributed competitive governance.

There is no easy solution to the problems in South Africa. I see the best case scenario a hopefully temporary reversion to tribalism. If I lived there, I would leave if I could and retreat to an area controlled by my tribe if I couldn't, hunker down and ride out the storm. It is likely to get much much worse before it gets better.

I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution....

From my reading your various posts on the topic of your vision of what society should be, your society would likely be a very dog eat dog world with a lot of holes and loop holes that do NOT provide for the public to benefit from the public goods.. and probably would NOT adequately protect public goods.... unless of course, after the revolution, your side is able to slim the population down by 80% or more.  

I simply want to live in a society where all interactions are voluntary and property rights are respected. If that sounds too distopian to you, find comfort in the fact that I am philosophically am opposed to forcing anyone to create such a society, to live there or to stay there. Can you the the same of your society?

Those are very nice and lofty principles in theory, and they are NOT even bad things to which to aspire.  NONETHELESS, we are likely NOT going to be able to achieve complete voluntaryism, especially your concept of the term, and there are social and public benefit and social and public property that are from time to time going to impinge upon the boundaries and property rights of others that are NOT likely resolvable voluntarily.   But, in theory I would like a world that also aspires to those kinds of broad principles, to the extent feasible.. so maybe we kind of agree to the broad principles, but NOT to the absolutism of such broad principles to the detriment of society as a whole.

[JayJuanGee]

I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution....

You kind missed the point again. He doesn't want to design a society. That's what statists want to do.

This time it can happen, history has favored the plunder, now for the first time there is a plunder proof store of wealth if you store it properly, if it is stolen it rewords all others not the plunderers.

Bitcoin is NOT going to resolve all of these societal and community questions b/c they are still going to exist; however, bitcoin will likely bring some revolutionary possibilities in the way that we think about our social institutions and how we think about and carry out social interactions.

[freebit13]

“I’ve been amazed by the number of people who actually tried to do transactions through the website. It’s been pretty incredible actually. I don’t think I realised how many people have bitcoin and are looking for services outside of trading.”

Pirates love gin, don't they? Better than dumping on the market 

woowowowo  

-> http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-proves-just-the-tonic-london-gin-distillery/


BULLISSHHHHHH

[ChartBuddy]

Explanation

[Adrian-x]

I didn't give them nice sounding names,  William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger did over a hundred years ago. It's weird how several different people can independently and nearly simultaneously discover something so supposedly unbased in reality. The same thing happened with calculus. Maybe that's not based in reality either.

Now reconcile those thinkers with the likes of Joseph Proudhon and you have the bases for the capitalists new enlightenment.

[ErisDiscordia]

You still design by NOT designing...

And you still don't seem to be understanding that this is a valid way to do things.

I suggest you read a bit about Zen Buddhism or Taoism.

Alternatively, Alan Watts can explain how this applies to our current debate.

[JayJuanGee]

I don't have to have a disdain for the poor to understand that vilifying capitalists is not the way to gain/retain the capital needed for economic growth. The labor theory of value has been discredited. The subjective theory of value and marginal utility have much more explanatory and predictive power. Update your economic model.

Yeah.  Give them all nice sounding names, and that will help....

NOT....      

You need more substance, facts, rather than merely having a nice sounding name and a vision that is NOT based in reality.

I didn't give them nice sounding names,  William Stanley Jevons, Léon Walras, and Carl Menger did over a hundred years ago. It's weird how several different people can independently and nearly simultaneously discover something so supposedly unbased in reality. The same thing happened with calculus. Maybe that's not based in reality either.

If these guys are smart people and they have the mathematical solutions and visions, you surely have NOT done them justice in your summarizing them.  or your assertions about the solutions in society.

I am NOT going to waste my time and read up on them, unless some of their ideas, if they have any, are presented to me in a more meaningful and practical way.

In this regard, I get the sense that you get a lot of modern day facts wrong including the role of unions, the detroit problems and us auto industry and the comparison of german companies and society, so why would I have faith in these other sources that you have supposedly digested into your philosophical outlook.

[Adrian-x]

I would hate to live in the experimental society that you would design after the supposed revolution....

You kind missed the point again. He doesn't want to design a society. That's what statists want to do.

This time it can happen, history has favored the plunder, now for the first time there is a plunder proof store of wealth if you store it properly, if it is stolen it rewords all others not the plunderers.

Bitcoin is NOT going to resolve all of these societal and community questions b/c they are still going to exist; however, bitcoin will likely bring some revolutionary possibilities in the way that we think about our social institutions and how we think about and carry out social interactions.

I agree Bitcoin wont solve a thing, its people who will solve the problems, Bitcoin is just a useful tool, a unique and powerful tool people have never had before.

[KeyserSoze]

3-day uptrend... 30-day even. All good news, no more Gox to stop us. Jet packs are full. Prepare to strap in, bears.

Edit: Possibly the best news of all: Stolfi is running low on energy. To our Latin American friends I say, "Make hay while the sun shines." Sell everything you own, steal what isn't yours and sell that as well, then sell your own mothers (yes, plural); put it all into Bitcoin. Mere months later, make your friends jealous as you ride smoothly around town in a Jaguar. Invite them over to your new mansion for a champagne jacuzzi party where all guests are beautiful and nude. Smile widely to show off your new gold grill. Jangle fingers draped in an endless supply of bling. Untold riches await just inside the tent.

[JayJuanGee]

You still design by NOT designing...

And you still don't seem to be understanding that this is a valid way to do things.

I suggest you read a bit about Zen Buddhism or Taoism.

Alternatively, Alan Watts can explain how this applies to our current debate.

Yes I have heard quite a bit of Alan Watts presentations...     Some of you guys may need to read economist richard wolff to get some perspectives on labor history and to get a sense of our modern state of affairs and the exploitation of the people by capitalists (my employment of the word capitalist does NOT mean I am against capitalism).