Magnus

This statement is so impacted with error, it's hard to know where to start. First, I would say that the question posed by market anarchists is whether the "government" (by which we mean the "State" organized in a corporate form, with an executive we call "president" and a board of directors we call "Congress" and shareholders we call "voters") can ethically exist in the first place. I realize that your friend's position is that, yes, it does, and that the writings of men who are dead these 200 or so years is somehow the definitive answer to that question, but this is not really an argument at all. Even before we get to the question of why he is wrong, he has not yet advanced an argument as to why he is right. "Because they said so" is not really an ethical argument. Spooner outlined a very rebuttal a while ago, which said that the "founders" had no authority to bind anyone but themselves (and maybe also the people who agreed at the time to empower these "founders" to act on their behalf). But that certainly did not include me, and now everyone involved in that pseudo-contract is long dead. Second, the "power to coin money and regulate the value thereof" is found in a part of the Constitution concerning the authority to set the standards for weights and measures. In other words, it is located alongside the power to define what an "ounce" means, what a "pound" is, and inch, a yard, a gallon, etc. Why is money found in the same sentence as weights and measures? I wondered why that part was written that way, so I looked into it. Money, of course, used to be real. It was made of things, not just ideas and words. One of the most important objects used for money was gold, but there were all sorts of other fungible objects that have been used as money in America, like silver, copper, whiskey, cotton, corn, wheat, horses, cattle, tobacco leaves, beaver pelts, etc. They could all be traded for each other. The key to understanding what "the power to coin money" means in practice (as an expression of "weights and measures") is in the meaning of the word "value." Nowadays, we use the word "value" to refer to a very broad, abstract, subjective concept. It refers to the desire a person has for something. Everyone has different values -- the relative importance of things, people or ideas, compared to every other "competing value." This is ordinary parlance today. However, in the Constitution, the word "value" refers to something very simple and concrete, but its meaning has been obscured through the passage of time and changing language. The "value" of a gold coin is the quantity of gold in it. It is, literally, the number of gold molecules present. But counting molecules is difficult, so we use other means instead. To count the molecules of gold in a gold coin, we need to objectively determine two things -- its weight, and its purity. In other words, measuring the quantity of gold in a bar or coin is a binary measurement. It might weight 1 ounce, and be 99.9% pure. Or, it could be only 90% pure, and weigh 1.3 ounces (or whatever). When these two objective factors are combined, it is possible to determine how much gold is there. This determination of how much gold is present in a coin or bar is called "assaying." It is a chemical, metallurgical analysis. It's objective and scientific. Incidentally, the word "dollar" refers to a similarly objective quantity of silver. It comes from German word "thaler," which was the word given to silver coins that were minted there (lit. "from the valley"). They became popular in the 16th and 17th centuries for their consistency and reliability. A dollar of silver literally means a coin made of 1 ounce of silver of 0.937 fineness (although both the weight and purity standards fluctuated over time, by government dictates). What we call a "dollar" today is just an abstraction, denoted by either a ledger entry in a government-approved bank, or a piece of government-approved paper. Now, this process of assaying the value (i.e., the actual, physical metallic content) of a coin has NOTHING to do with the exchange rate of that coin in the market place. The value of a coin is its metal content, nothing more. The power to "coin money and regulate the value thereof" is, literally, the power of the government to operate a mint -- a melting and stamping operation where they make ore into coins. The government may (according to its charter) declare what the terms of weight and measure to be stamped on coins mean -- they can declare that a Filbert of gold shall mean 21.144987 grams of gold at 0.903 fineness, or whatever. It is not the power to shut down all private mints. Anyone can run one, and many did in the 18th century. The point of this Constitutional clause was to authorize the government to operate a reliable (government run) minting operation -- a place where anyone could take his foreign or privately minted coins, bars, ore or any relevant metallic substance, where they would "assay its value" (tell you how much of it was there), and either melt and stamp that substance into officially-designated coins (filberts, quatloons, guilders, kroner, or whatever), and give it all back to you, for a nominal fee, or they could give you the equivalent official coinage in exchange. The idea was that having a governmental mint available would help keep the private mints honest -- there was always a non-profit place to go where anyone could verify (by exchange) any form of coinage. The government mint would thereby set the standard for weight and measurement of coins. The scope and purpose of this Constitutional power was NOT the power to declare what the exchange rate of all coins shall be in the market place. It was not the power to declare the "value" of a gold coin IN THE MARKET for houses, horses, tobacco leaves, bread, etc. It is not the power to declare what money will buy. What happened throughout history, of course, is that States can't resist tinkering with the official value of money. They always want to dilute it. It's like selling watered-down whiskey, and pass it off as though it's full-strength. They have, historically, taken full-value coins, and in return issued debased (watered-down) coins in exchange, but they want to continue to declare that the watered-down coins they issue have the same "value" as the old ones. It's like the government demanding that it be paid (in taxes) in gallons of whole milk, but when it comes time for the government to pay people, it declares that henceforth a gallon shall mean 3 quarts instead of 4. Governments always want to declare that their diluted dollars, filberts, quatloons, guilders or kroners of silver (or gold, or copper, etc.) are, officially, now to be called full-strength coins. That way, when the governments repay their debts (which are denominated in those currencies), they only have to repay a portion of it. They can wave their magic wands over their shrinking treasury, and declare that the 1000 dollars (or filberts, quatloons, etc.) in their possession are now to be demarcated as 1400 dollars (or filberts, quatloons, etc.). Ta-da! The State's treasury is instantly 40% richer! The "power to coin money and regulate the value thereof" does NOT mean the power to monopolize the entire process of money-creation, to eliminate private coinage from circulation, to eliminate coinage altogether, to hand all banking operations over to a sponsored cartel, to designate this cartel's paper as the only valid form of money, and to fix the prices of money in the marketplace for every good and service of every kind whatsoever. No, that's just not historically accurate. If you are going to rely on the writings and declarations of men who have been dead for over 200 years as though they are all-powerful and authoritative, and imbue those writings with the power to bind us all, then you at least ought to understand what they wrote. Otherwise, I could just as easily take a piece of paper, claim that it was written 300 years ago, but (unfortunately for you) it was written in an alien language that no one but me can now interpret, but trust me when I tell you that it says that "Magnus of FDR shall be considered the infallible god-king of the universe." I think your reaction to this claim would be that (a) you didn't agree to that arrangement, and (b) my interpretation of this document is awfully self-serving. Government money is backed by the power of the government to extract a portion of the wealth created by people's productivity via taxation. Statists always want to skip over that part. The government's actions caused the "problems" in the first place. Every time. Pollution? It was once solved by respect for clear property rights. It was the government that re-wrote the ancient rules against pollution, which went back to pre-Roman times, by declaring in the mid-19th century that a polluter's actions would be allowed to persist if shutting the polluter down was "unreasonable." Before that, anyone could shut any land use down, merely by showing that the polluter was trespassing. It was simple and automatic. A single homeowner's land use right were just as inviolate as any industrial manufacturer's. The government courts unilaterally changed the law to add a meaningless standard of "reasonableness." In practice, what this meant was that if a local industrial operation was politically powerful, and economically well-connected, it would be allowed to continue polluting, because shutting it down was considered so "unreasonable." The entire field of "law and economics" (i.e., legal voodoo) was created as an effort to pretend to define which property rights would be enforced and which would not. Money? The problems with inflation and price volatility was caused by governments giving banks a free pass. Everyone in the sane world is required to deal honestly with customers. But banks were allowed to issue promises to repay multiple customers with the same money, over and over again. Clearly, it's impossible for a fractional reserve bank to legitimately make these promises, since such a bank is insolvent, by definition (its liabilities exceed its assets). But governments allowed banks to operate, although they were bankrupt, and even allowed them to stay in business and legally default on their contractual obligations. They called this process "suspending specie," which is euphemism for governments granting banks the special privilege of not repaying their debts, and yet still staying open for business. Government lies and aggression are the root cause of every problem that it has ever purported to solve. I have yet to see an example to the contrary.

This is the Statist mindest in a nutshell. I would ask you to consider that your assertion is an article of faith rather than observance of economic reality. That it is based on pure metaphor. That it is a matter of interpretation rather than concrete reality. That it is not substantially different than concluding that everything that occurs is according to the will of God. Since there is no God, and thus no one who wills the universe into motion, the assertion that everything occurs according to the will of God is, in practice, nothing more than a psychological defense mechanism, whose design and function is to inhibit a person from understanding the real reasons why things occur. Of course, Statist behavior does exist, and the vast majority of people believe in the fiction of Statist "authority." But the actual, economic role of these other people's Statist behavior, in my life, is really very small. All of the exchanges I transact every day occur without their involvement. I could go for years without any meaningful interaction with a person claiming he's an "agent of the State." I do not need them to live my life any more than I need a priest to absolve me of my sins. It's all imaginary crap.

Anarchism is the essential nature of all human societies. You say there's no historical precedent? All human societies everywhere are the precedent. It is statism that is the mere idea. The proposition that Statists have ever had "control" over any society is an illusion. They are far better at taking credit for organizing society (and providing its benefits) than they are at actually doing it. Statism is, first and foremost, a con game. It works almost entirely by deception and illusion. It's sort of like telling people that they should see the "Hand of God" operating in their lives. It's completely imaginary, and never actually happens, but you can convince billions of people to interpret natural phenomena and events in their lives as though they are the workings of a deity. The illusion prevents them from ever discerning the actual cause and effect mechanisms. The State's greatest talent has been to convince people that its role in their lives is meaningful and beneficial. They provide the "umbrella" under which we all live. They make the money. They'd take credit for the heat of the sun if they could.

I have never failed so spectacularly as when I've tried to talk to a lefty about political ideas. I don't know why that is. I have a blind spot to whatever motivates them. Which is surprising (and frustrating) to me because in my regular life, I get along great with them -- I'm into weird music and abstract painting and microbrew beer and French movies and all that artsy crap, which are populated by leftists to the tune of about 1,000-to-1. So I look like I'd be a fellow traveler, but then I say something about how owning a gun is a basic human right, or how freedom of association is at the center of a civilized society. And they soon realize how I feel about taxes, and it all goes downhill extremely quickly. It's funny that you mentioned the "voting is bullshit" thing. I hate talking about what I'm writing before I'm done, but the FDR community is a safe place, but I'm about 90% finished working on a book that's all about voter fraud. (I'm probably jinxing it by talking about it.) It's a kind of farce, about a young PR flack who is forced to go on the run with an eccentric crack-pot whose entire job is to rig elections. The crack-pot is trying to blow the whistle on the grand conspiracy, but no one will listen, so their plans keeps backfiring. Anyway, I've had a blast writing it. I've always assumed that lefties would hate it, but maybe there's hope for it after all!

For $2,000, I'd expect more than a personality assessment. You can get that for free online. For that money, I'd expect some real psychological assistance, insight, therapy, coaching, etc. There are a ton of personality assessments that are wholly unscientific, of course. But the good ones have a limited value, I think, sometimes. All they can really do is ask good questions -- questions that identify some of the criteria that differentiate people's mindsets. These assessments go back to Carl Jung, who identified 3 or 4 criteria, each of which could be scaled on a linear spectrum. This yielded a 4-dimensional sorting of personality types (for a total of 16 types), which he claimed corresponded to various modes (or styles) of cognition, or styles of information processing. That's part of your personality! Using your abstract conceptions (as opposed to concrete senses) as your primary source of information-processing is what Jung called Intuition, in particular Introverted Intuition. The opposite cognitive style would be Extroverted Sensing -- people who are impatient with abstractions and theories, and who tend to be spontaneous, and interested mainly in the concrete, tactile, observable world. I don't believe, however, that the entirety of human personality can be summed up into 16 types. There are obviously a lot more factors to consider than 4 linear criteria. But these criteria are, to some extent, useful, and they do describe something about the human mind that is observable and objective (even though it's largely self-reported). I would urge you to consider, also, that these cognitive modes or styles are not set in stone. People go through personality changes all the time. People can become more rational (or less) rational, or more (or less) extroverted. The factors that are measured by personality assessments are malleable, over time. But most importantly, I would not consider personality assessment to be a form of therapy. Personality sorting is only a way of describing a person's mental habits and preferences, which might help explain why a person tends to thrive in (or gravitate toward) particular types of social situations, hobbies, or jobs. It's not much use when it comes to gaining insight into a person's motivations, psychological impediments, etc. For that, I have never seen anything more helpful than the Internal Family System approach, which I would highly recommend.

Then why are you bothering to engage in the pretense of rational argumentation? I don't consider thinking, in and of itself, to be either evil or good. I reserve the idea of good and bad for things that occur in the real, material world -- i.e., economic goods (and evils), things that are desired or un-desired. Democracy is more than arbitrary -- it is patently unethical. It is the infliction of aggressive force according to the ratio of some groups' members' temporarily-aligned preferences. Acts that are taken in the name of democracy are considered "ethical" one minute, but the same act is considered unethical when it is performed 5 minutes later, if the winds of preference of the "swing voters" happen blow in the other direction. That's not an ethic. That's just a gang. That sounds interesting, what is the distinction? I sometimes use ethics to mean a theory of morality, and morals to mean the judgments that result from an ethical theory's application. Most ethical theorists I meet use them interchangeably though, and I've picked up the habit myself. An ethic is a principle. It is an abstract assertion that, out of the universe of all possible human actions, they can be divided into two categories -- unethical, and not-unethical. (As a matter of convenience, we can also label these two categories "ethical" and "unethical," but then that runs in the problem of some acts being ethically neutral, or "non-ethical." To avoid that problem, it is a simple matter to lump non-ethical acts into the category of acts that are "not-unethical." The point is to identify acts that are unethical (i.e., "wrong").) An ethic is the method used to draw the line between these two categories -- a metric, a rubric, a heuristic, a rule, a criterion. An ethic is a hierarchical set of rules used to categorize the set of all possible human acts into those that are unethical and those that are not. The first, obvious feature of ethics that we can deduce from this premise is that an act cannot be both unethical and not-unethical at the same time. It is either one or the other. That's implicit in the premise that acts can be sorted according to their ethical character. If we fail to do that, we've done nothing. The second feature of ethics is that acts are categorized according to type -- the whole idea of sorting all possible human acts into one of these two categories is to avoid arbitrariness. We could, I suppose, arbitrarily call some acts unethical and some acts not-unethical, and just go about our day randomly deciding that we're going to consider whatever we see happening on Wednesdays to be unethical, but everything happening on Thursdays is not-unethical. Or we could just assign rightness or wrongness in a way that's totally random, minute by minute. But if we do that, we haven't articulated a principle at all. Two acts that are virtually identical could end up being characterized the opposite way from one another, for no reason. The whole point of ethics is to articulate the reason for making ethical distinctions. To do that, acts are lumped together into groups. For example, we could conclude that certain homicides are considered murder (i.e., unethical homicide). But murders that are committed by guns are no different from murders committed by knives (or any other instrument). In other words, the particular weapon used has no ethical relevance in defining murder. The ethic that defines murder includes all types of behavior that cause death. If a type of action in question changes its ethical character from other acts otherwise of the same type, then we need to state the distinction in the ethical principle. In contrast, a "moral" is just a social custom. I can see why you have trouble distinguishing between ethics and morals. For you, they are the same thing -- ethics are just social conventions, habits and customs disguised as ethical principles. One example is that many cultures have declared that it's moral for one group to enslave another, but not moral for the slaves to revolt and enslave their former masters. ("It's right for me but not for thee.") However, the whole point of ethical philosophy is to identify the principles of ethics that are derived from reason (i.e., truth). An ethicist would not consider mere habit and custom (or history or culture), whether by one person or a million, to define an ethical principle. Ethical reasoning is akin to any other form of reasoning, such as mathematical or logical reasoning. Mathematics is the study of what must be true. If we say that 2+2=4, and we also say that 2+2=5, and we also say that 4 is not equal to 5, then we are talking nonsense. It's just gibberish. There's no reason we can't use the symbol that looks like a "5" to represent what we know to be the number "4," but if 4 and 5 are different, then 2+2 cannot equal 4 and 5 at the same time. Ethics works in a similar way, but it concerns human social behavior rather than quantities.

Aggressors HATE recordings. I remember in the early days of the Internet coming across a series of videos (taken by an ex-cop) of people getting arrested. The cops would actually stop arresting the suspect just to confront the videographer. You could see the cops' instant hostility. Their attitude toward the suspect they were arresting was a kind of mild interest, but the videographer? They were enraged at him! There are "laws" in a lot of states against surreptitious audio recordings, even sometimes prohibiting recording a conversation that you are participating in.

When the community's decided use for the property is more likely to lead to a morally superior outcome to the Prior User's decision. This is the root of your confusion -- what you said here is circular reasoning. You haven't answered the question at all. As Alan said, you have not identified the criteria by which you identify the "morally superior outcome." What is the ethical principle that enables you to distinguish ethical and unethical behavior? (I prefer to use the term "ethics" instead of "morals," but here I mean essentially the same thing.)

What is the rational metric for determining morally valid standards of ownership of material property? What makes homesteading for example a more valid moral basis for determining ownership than need (as posited by the communists), use (as posited by classical anarchists of the Proudhon type), or popular vote (as posited by democrats and anarcho-communists of the Bakunin type)? You have to begin with what a property right really is. A person is said to own a thing, but what that really means is the right to exclude other people from using a thing. Or, more accurately, it is a right to exclude others by force from interfering with your use of a thing. In other words, a property right does not exist between a person and a thing; it exists between a person and another person with respect to their competing uses of some physical matter. In property rights theory, we call this competition a "rivalry," and one person's use of the object in question is said to be "rivalrous" with the other person's. The key feature of this issue is that the assertion of a property right is relative -- it posits that one person's claim of right to exclusive use is superior (or inferior) to some other person's claim. Therefore, the ethical challenge is articulating a principle, which is equally applicalble to everyone, that will distinguish between competing claims of exclusive use, to determine why one type of claim is superior than the other. In your question, you asked how a claim based on prior use or homesteading is superior to a claim based on popular vote. Consider the essence of your question in terms of rivalry: a homesteader is really just the first user of previously unused goods. So, a prior user and a homesteader are really describing the same claim, the only difference being that the homesteader is the first user, and a prior user is merely claiming that he is ahead of you in line (whether he was first, or something later than first). So, let's say we have a person who has established a prior user of some object, and let's say it's a patch if dirt where he's trying to grow some plants. Clearly, he is deriving some economic benefit from his use of this dirt, and the anticipated use of the plants growing there, or else he would not be using these things. His claim of Prior Use must be compared to all other competing claims -- let's start with the competing "popular vote" claim. These Popular Voters also want to put these objects (dirt and plants) to some economic use, and they claim that their economic uses of them is somehow more important than the economic use of the Prior User. On what basis could the Popular Voters' claim poossibly be ethically superior to the Prior User's claim? Could the Popular Voters take a vote to put the Prior User in chains and force him, under threat of pain, to continue to farm the land and then eventually turn over all of the crops to the Voters? The only difference between him and them is that they outnumber him. But that action is a rather clear definition of slavery -- if the Prior User declines, and they do this anyway, they are enslaving him. I think we all would object to the ethical claim of slavery, since we already acknowledge the validity of claims of Self-Ownership, and clearly the Prior User has self-ownership. In property terms, we say that the Popular Voters cannot have a superior claim to the exclusive use of the Prior User's body than the Prior User has in his own body. So, what happens instead when the Popular Voters leave his body alone, but instead come along at harvest time and tell the Prior User that he has to hand over all his crops? And if he doesn't relent, then they will assert their claim of exclusive use of the crops, so if he resists their taking it all, they'll physically hold him down until they've departed with the crops. The Popular Voters have graciously allowed the Prior User to be the nominal "owner" of the land, but have instead asserted that he's just not allowed to make his intended economic use of it by keeping the crops he has grown. I think we would both agree that this scenario is really no different than overt slavery, since the Popular Voters are doing the same thing as if they had openly enslaved him -- taking all of his productivity by force. At what point in this rilvalrous contest over control of these objects does a popular vote become ethically superior to the Prior User's right to control these objects? We know that slavery is not superior to his self-ownership, and that de facto slavery is equally inferior to the Prior User's property rights in the fruits of his productivity. Is 90% slavery ethically superior to 100% slavery? 80%? 50%? 10%? Any number you pick is arbitrary. The problem with arbitrary assertions is that they articulate no ethical principle. What ethical principle makes a popular vote superior to a rivalrous claim based on prior use? "We want X" is not a valid ethical principle. It's not an ethical principle at all, actually.

The whole debate is pointless. The entire point of government is to find new ways to control people. "Limited government" is a pipe dream. A fantasy. An oxymoron. Appealing to government to limit itself is nonsense. As a result, there is no room in politics for a libertarian position. Promoting a libertarian government is like supporting a pacifist boxer -- political freedom is the opposite of what government exists to do. She is right about one thing, though -- economic issues are far more important than the Window Dressing issues. Politicians merely use the social issues to wind people up, get attention and extract support. That's just for show. The real business of government is about money.

These debates are so interesting to me. I once found myself in an unexpected Wikipedia editing war, about an unlikely topic --- the difference between classical (non-electric) fencing and modern Olympic fencing (which is scored electronically). There's a surprising amount of animosity between the two camps of proponents. The Classical fencing method uses training weapons that have no electricity. Hits are judged visually, sometimes with the aid of chalk applied to the tip of the blade, or with a special tip that has a small barb on it (which catches the fabric of your opponent's uniform). But the rules of fencing call for scoring a touch without yourself being touched. The problem is that touches (and nearly-simultaneous double touches) can be extremely fast, and the competitor being touched (or missed) sometimes has a different opinion than the referee standing on the sidelines. Disputes ensue. In the mid-20th century, someone invented a foil with a plunger tip, which is connected by wire to an electric box that lights up and beeps when you land a touch. The box can also be designed to lock out the opponent's signal, so that the box will register touches as occurring simultaneously (and thus not counting) if they occur within a certain interval of each other (an interval that can be electronically measured in milliseconds, which is much faster than the unaided eye can discern). Classical fencers argue that this tiny change in the scoring system fundamentally changed fencing. They say that electronic scoring technology favors attacking, since one does not need to fear being hit nearly as much. In comparison, in a Classical bout, one needed to score a touch so decisively, without being touched at all, that the referee could clearly see it. The emphasis was on NOT being touched -- a more defensive strategy. This issue has provoked an intense, venomous debate. The proponents of modern electric fencing resent being characterized as inauthentic. Their electrified system is far more popular today. They say it is more fair. They say the modern style is more athletic and more interesting. They also dispute the validity of the Classicist version of fencing history regarding the emphasis on defense. In any event, there are a couple of things that interest me about my Wikipedia editing conflict. First, I think it clearly illuminates how even a tiny change in the design of a system can have HUGE consequences. Changes in the rules, or in technology, will fundamentally alter the system. If a small change can do that in the context of something as esoteric as fencing, just imagine the effect that a change in, say, the rules of divorce can have on family life. Or how a small change in the State's banking laws will affect the entire economy. I am also struck by how vehemently people will battle for control of a narrative. It's just words on a page, but people will absolutely fight to the death over them. It's beyond ideology. It's a matter of theology. If people will do this for a Wikipedia entry about something as minor as fencing, then I imagine that the contest for control of the page on Anarchism was extremely heated.

Ask him to supply the factual support used to reach these conclusions, and then ask yourself if the response sounds like a regurgitation of fairy tales -- narratives that have been spoon-fed to them since childhood. Food safety? OK, what's your evidence? Don't cite Upton Sinclair's The Jungle. That's a novel. Show me the rates of exposure. Show me the cost/benefit calculations. Show me where voluntary mechanisms (property rights, reputation, etc.) are objectively inferior. If the person has such certainty about his political conclusions, then he should have an equally solid grasp of the predicates for those conclusions. Ask him to explain the causal mechanism behind any cited "improvement." Remind him that he has to explain not only the "seen" but the "unseen" -- the good things that never occurred because of some action. It's never taken me more than a couple of exchanges to determine whether a person who espouses pro-State talking points has any interest in rationality and reality, or is merely a captive of the State's narratives. However, in my experience, these "discussions" don't lead anywhere useful.

I think English is a wonderfully irregular language. It's a thorough mongrelization of old German and Frenchified Latin. It's like two languages masquerading as one. It's the jazz fusion of world languages. The history of Western Europe is baked right in. I have never understood the Whole Word vs phonics dispute. I don't pretend to know much about it, but if the impetus behind the Whole Word approach is linguistic irregularity, I'm don't think I would consider that to be a problem that needs fixing.

One important note -- the Depression did not end until a year or two after the war ended. Government economists and other miscreants claim that the Depression ended with the beginning of the war, but that is a lie. The only thing that the start of the war itself accomplished was the employment of men and women as soldiers and war manufacturers. Government economists inappropriately count this war employment as though it's equivalent to productive employment, and count war production as though it's equivalent to productivity of goods that consumers actually want to buy. This is a serious conceptual error, because it ignores the fact that war production and employment are paid for entirely by debt and taxes, and produces no goods that are valuable to consumers, only bombs, bullets and tanks, instead of real wealth. The reality is that war production is, economically, always a net loss, even when (like the USA) one's own country is not bombed and occupied. (Germany had it far worse, having its economy wrecked both by the forcible diversion of its productivity into war materiel, and having its cities bombed out, too.) For the American consumer, the war made the economy worse. Prices immediately rose, so the government responded with price controls. As always, the price controls and diversion of productivity to war "goods" caused massive shortages of just about everything. Quality of life went down during the war, for most people. The government calls those years a "recovery," by their twisted rationale. The best thing that happened during that period was that Roosevelt and Hitler finally died, thus reducing their respective governments' levels of economic devastation.

A 60% drop in government spending, and the reduction of America's manufacturing competition in Europe (due to bombing and such).

The terminology derived from Roman law was "use," which I suppose would encompass consumption. One refinement of that concept among today's libertarian and anarchist legal writers is "rivalrous" uses -- any manipulation or displacement of objects that rivals, or conflicts, with other people's uses of their objects. That may be similar, but broader, than uses that constitute consumption.

Amazing! It's incredible to me that such a thing is even knowable. It does leave me with a question -- who designed the designers?

The Mises Institute has a lot of resources about the economic and political history of Standard Oil, and monoplies generally. Here, here and here.

Welcome! I agree -- I still remember a comment that Stef made in a short podcast a year or two ago -- that the globe is anarchic. Countries relate to one another, and there is no ultimate arbiter or authority. If it can work on that scale, it can work on our individual scale.

It's an important topic, since the State's "protection of children" is one of the main justifications for Statism in the popular mind. Many people reflexively assume that without the "public service" provided by stalwart, brave, selfless defenders of honor and justice known as "the government," constantly keeping vigil over us as we sleep, the world would instantly descend into a frenzy of more or less constant child-rape. What these people never seem to grasp is that the children who are taken from parents by the State and placed into the various places are far more likely to be the victims of abuse after they've entered the "child welfare" system. The rate of child abuse in group homes, foster homes and (worst of all) the juvenile justice system is insanely high.

I imagine that urban space would, in the absence of statism, would be constructed to serve a far higher level of population density than it is now. If you look at medieval towns all across Europe, they follow a similar semi-chaotic pattern (with the exception of the towns that were built in unusual places, like on top of mountains, or the swamp than is now Venice). The streets are irregular, and the blocks are small enough to access on foot. There are alleyways and side streets that are too small for anything other than pedestrians. The main problem with living in a high-density area has essentially been solved, and is something that hasn't been a problem in the West for over 100 years -- sanitation. The development of the germ theory of disease is one of the most important intellectual achievements in world history (it's right up there with the theory of evolution, private property, logic, arable farming, weaving, nitrogen-fixing fertilizer, written language, etc.). With the advent of modern sewerage, a high urban density is simply not the threat to health and safety that it was for the prior 2-3,000 years. And it's relatively new -- the germ theory of disease (although postulated by scientists much earlier) did not gain wide, popular acceptance until the late 1800s, which was not all that long before the development of the other major technology affecting urban design -- the internal combustion engine. Cars (and roads for cars) were heavily subsdized by the State from their inception (and still are). They were the impetus for the modern idea of the "comprehensive development plan" (which is the current euphemism for statism in the field of construction). And, of course, with cars, the State's cronies, insiders and other beneficiaries made sure that outlying, ex-urban land was easily accessed by subsidized roads, which conveniently happened to rapidly increase the land values of that property, which also conveniently happened to be owned by those very same cornies and insiders. This simple, corrupt mechanism (get the peons to pay to inflate the State's frriends' land prices) is one of the main reason for urban sprawl. It's the reason that the words "developer" and "scumbag" are almost synonymous. So, because of the timing of these two inventions, there has not really been much of a period in Western history where (a) modern santitation greatly increased the health and safety of dense urban life, while (b) cities were also designed primarily for pedestrians and bicycles. The few cities that were developed in the late 1800s, prior to the automobile but after the acceptance of modern sanitation practices, are (not surprisingly) very livable. The ones that survived the process of levelling and re-building urban space according to the needs of cars are some of the most popular tourist spots in the Western world. People love to walk around and just passively experience what it's like to be in a pedestrian-friendly, low-automobile urban space. They are tucked away in small areas, like parts of central London, Amsterdam, Venice, New Orleans, the university towns in the UK, old San Francisco, downtown New York (before the advent of the uptown grid), and a few small isolated neighborhoods here and there that survived the wrath of the urban planners. People travel all over the world just to see these places, and daydream about living there. So, I suspect that, without the engine of the State driving the layout of cities and towns, they would look a lot like these vestigial, archaic places that people flock to.

Can you believe that I was almost an urban planner? True story. I can't even imagine what my inner anarchist would have done if I had woken up in the middle of an urban planning career.

There is a woman who produces YouTube videos under the name "girlwriteswhat" whose positions are anti-feminist (although I believe she uses a different term). I can't speak to her politics generally, since I have seen very little of her video content, but I believe she opposes the socialistic legislation that's been enacted supposedly to benefit women.

I remember seeing a nature show on TV many years ago about elephants, which are remarkably intelligent, social and sophisticated herd animals. It showed how the older males were removed from a group, and how the younger males essentially went insane -- ripping up trees for no reason, attacking other members of their families, and eventually being so aggressive and violent and destructive that they had to be put down, or made to live apart from the (now female-dominant) herd. It was amazing to see, because when we're talking about elephants, and you strip away all the expectations and bullshit that clouds the issue when dealing with human society, it was obvious to expert elephant-caretakers that the older males were controlling the younger males. The adults would suppress the adolescents when they got too violent. It was how the herd was regulated -- adolescents that constantly pushed the limits of aggression, and the older males that were there to inhibit that behavior and keep a lid on it.

Would you say that what truly benefits one truly benefits all? Your question is a bit vague, but if I understand what you mean, I would say -- definitely not. Value is subjective. Benefit is defined personally, and it varies widely not only from person-to-person, but from moment-to-moment. Giving a child a gold star as a form of reward is no better than a punishment. Reward and punishment are the two possible outcomes of a power-dominant relationship. Giving people "rewards" implicitly reinforces the ability to dole out punishments.