Magnus

There is no legitimate right in so-called "intellectual property," for either humans or monkeys. Copying isn't theft. IP is just pattern-protectionism.

Then why do they keep stealing my stuff and breaking everything?Plus, their taste in music is just awful.

No. Property rights are not about the relationship between a person and a thing. It is an ethical principle governing the relationship between two people, with regard to their rivalrous uses of a thing. I have no ethical relationship with a monkey because the monkey can't reciprocate -- the monkey can't choose whether to aggress against me, or to keep his hands to himself.

The defining feature of the state is the claim of being the final arbiter on the use of legitimate force. This is sometimes called a monopoly, but it's really just a claim of finality. It is that finality/monopoly of force that begets the expansion of state power above and beyond the mere protection of life and property. The statist's irrational rules (allowing its own aggression, such as taxes) are merely an effect of its claimed finality on the use of force. So, that claim is the root cause of the problem. This is the reason that it's impossible to have a minarchist state -- by being the final arbiter, its power inevitably grows beyond protection of life and property. Creating a state of any kind is like giving world-wide fame and unlimited wealth to a 12 year-old who has no parents, and expecting him to grow up into a normal, balanced, well-adjusted adult. It just can't happen. It would be nice if it did. But it doesn't.

Where does "the obligation to give come" from? What are its parameters? How is it universally applicable? Why is it not equally applicable in the other direction? How is it to be enforced if not through force?

A search for "market anarchist" comes up with a few interesting hits. Mostly dudes, though. If I were single, I'd be giving "funnelcakes" a call. But seriously -- almost no one has any principles at all. Going to a dating site looking for depth and philosophical virtue is like going to a honky-tonk looking for a math tutor. Maybe it will happen, but that's not where such people often hang out. The act of going onto OK Cupid and creating a profile is itself a form of social communication. Just being there is a way of advertising what they are looking for.

I've read Griffin's Jekyll Island book. It's a bit disjointed. I understand that the problems you describe are philosophical in origin, not technological. The disasters of the civilized world are organizational, not technological. My point is not to discount the importance of social-organization ideas in the development of Western civilization. But modes of social organization have changed radically over time. It so happens that knowledge of microbiology was developed during the Progressive era. (So was household electricity, actually.) That's why the two main functions of local government are "public" water and power -- they were collectivized, because "public works" theory was the predominant governmental idea at the time. The governmental take-over of these functions radically altered the daily way of life for all of America, after Anglo-American property law had already been eroded by Progressivism. One of the impediments I encounter out in the world is that when I mention that there are some vastly superior ideas about society and freedom and property to be found in the past -- going back to Justinian and the Romans, through what we now call "feudal" times, up to and including the Enlightenment. The major stumbling block is that, when we look back on those times, as they actually happened, we also see rampant starvation and disease. Progressives use that correlation to argue, "See, look how awful things were in the Bad Old Days! Infant mortality! 40 year-life spans! Starving children in the streets! It was the FDA that saved us!" Those problems could have been solved without unionism, socialism, fascism, Communism, etc. The last 3 generations of humans have solved the technological problems that plagued humanity for 3,000 years.

I think about this sort of thing all the time. I've been planning to do more in-depth reading on the banking system, from the perspective of a libertarian/anarchist/voluntaryist, but the impediments to getting reliable information on the subject are incredibly high. The history of copyrights, property law, trade and merchants generally ... these things are more or less out in the open, but banking? It's buried in more layers of secrecy and bullshit than just about anything I've encountered. I sometimes daydream of a Western world where just a handful of the most important inventions were developed centuries earlier than they were. The most pressing concern of the early modern West was starvation -- a problem that was mostly solved by the invention of the Haber-Bosch process, which gives us modern fertilizers, and a vast increase in agricultural output. The other main development was knowledge of microorgansms -- something we all take for granted now, but is really very recent. It was not known until the late 1800s. Basic sanitation prevents most diseases, which once caused an infant mortality rate of 25-30%. Together -- food and sanitation -- they changed the world. What if they'd been developed in 1500? Or 1300? Or 1100? Or in Roman times? Before the central banks, when money was a commodity, not just ledger entries in the records of the cartel?

This Ph.D. manages to recycle every strawman, cliche and falsehood about voluntarism. You can find this Stanford-level academic's quality of thought on Yahoo Answers, the Huffington Post, or YouTube comments. You see, Doctor, we libertarians (though I prefer the term "voluntarist" to describe the political dimension of social organization) believe wholeheartedly in interdependence and common purpose and common interest. They're downright awesome! The only feature we insist on is that everyone refrain from attacking everyone else when the decline an offer to cooperate in some manner. See, that's what "voluntary" means -- you don't attack me if I refuse to do what you ask of me. It's not looking good for Doctor Smarty Pants. I prefer to think of society as a "cooperative survival enterprise." Our first cooperative obligation is not to harm others. That's what enables, you know, the cooperation to occur.

“We’re on high alert,” said one counterterrorism cop. I've always thought that, if someone were interested in that sort of thing (which I am not), and I wanted to engage in some sort of public, symbolic act of defiance (which I don't), a key part of an effective plan would be to toss a few packs of firecrackers into the lobby of the local police station and/or City Hall. The government's entire responding manpower would be so insanely preoccupied with the fireworks, as a clear chemical/potential nuclear attack on civilization itself, that you could pretty much do whatever you wanted for hours without fear of police intervention.

Equal means equal, huh? So, what you're saying is that equal equals equal.

I've lived in a few places in America, and haven't found any place that fits the description. I wish I had, because it sounds nice, the way you describe it. My explanation for their absence is that most of the close-knit communities you describe were wiped out by the forced redesign of urban space to accommodate cars, beginning in the 1920s and 30s, but taking effect in earnest after WWII. It ended the small, walkable neighborhoods that existed pretty much everywhere, except for a few niches in old, hard-to-destroy places like New York, San Francisco, New Orleans and a few pockets here and there, such as student areas around college towns. The ordinary small-house kinds of neighborhoods were mostly banned, with the advent of larger and larger lot-size mandates, setback requirements, maximum density regulations, zoning restrictions, and an effective ban on build-your-own mail order houses that were popular from 1890 to 1940. The smaller houses (i.e., more walkable neighborhoods) that survived are mostly either in very pricey historic (pre-car) neighborhoods that were specially preserved (e.g., Haight-Ashbury, the Garden District, Beacon Hill), or they were just left to decay, being left for poor people, which means that they are either slums or have been bulldozed. The government more or less forced the middle class to buy 2,000+ square feet of single-story air-conditioned space, on a quarter-acre lot. Multiply that by thousands of houses, with no stores in walking distance, and they call it a "neighborhood." That was also the time that television came on the scene. Combined with the loss of walkable urban space, it pretty much ended the kind of easy, casual, public interaction you're describing.

My general approach to social life, and the inevitable confrontation of ubiquitous irrationality, is not to evangelize for anarchism. I consider my "outreach" strategy to be more a matter of sending up a signal flare, and seeing if any intelligent life spots it.

No, Leftism and rational liberty can't be combined. But changing people's minds is, in large part, a matter of avoiding a reaction where you trigger their lizard-brain sense of revulsion. Millennials have been steeped in an ethic of sharing and cooperation and anti-competition and forced equality. They literally do not recognize government action as a form of force. They see government as a reflection of their social values -- a government that forces certain wages for fast food workers is, to them, merely a reflection of the idea that no one should be poor. To these people, "The Rich" is an all-purpose bogeyman enemy who can afford all of their utopian agenda items, if only their corrupt stinginess can be defeated at the polls. I think it's interesting to consider how to appeal to people who begin with this particular collection of bad ideas.

That's a great article. That kind of generational analysis is often dismissed out of hand, and treated like a pseudoscience, like handwriting analysis or dream interpretation (both of which I also find some value in). The Millennials are definitely the children of the Boomers. They grew up in households that tolerated 60s ideas like free love and recreational drug use, and treated them in a way that reversed the previous social norm, which was to shame them. The Millenials have definitely shifted the focus of their conformism from that of earlier generations. There's a lot of food for thought here.

First-world problem.

Other than the fact that they rocked? That Brian May could make his guitar talk? That he built it with his own hands? That he took time off from graduate school to be a rock star, then returned to school a few decades later to finish his dissertation in astrophysics? That Freddie Mercury had a set of pipes that could make angels weep? That the Flash Gordon soundtrack kicks major ass?

The key word here is "expense." That's an economic term, so its use in biology is metaphorical. A pregnant female is designed to produce offspring, the way that a male is designed to fertilize females. Animals evolved that way. To say that gestating a fetus occurs at the mother's "expense" is like saying that male ejaculation occurs at his "expense." It's what the body is made to do. It's like saying that exhalation occurs at the breather's "expense." It's nonsense.

40-50 years ago?

It's horrible, isn't it? To think that anyone could believe that applying to the government for contracts, as it spends other people's money, constitutes a "private" transaction ... So dumb. But it's worse than that -- Government can't make butter or clothes. It must buy these things from manufacturers. That's a straightforward contract. Not private, but something of a quasi-private bargain, since people in the real world do buy butter and clothes, too. To make this writer's confusion even more profound is that there are tasks that do not exist at all in the real world -- prisons, for example. Governments can "contract" that service out, I suppose, but the contractor has no market for such activities, apart from government buying them. Only governments buy prisons. To call that "privatization" is beyond silly.

I'm a criminal defense and appellate attorney. I've been practicing for about 17 years. I've worked in commercial litigation, too, but I transitioned out of it because I couldn't stomach the absurdity, hypocrisy and general waste. I used to help prepare bar exams and study materials, but I quit doing that too, on account of the same general disillusionment with the statist legal system. The last place in the legal field that I can tolerate is criminal defense, since it consists of resisting the state on a daily basis. But I'm working toward leaving that, as well. My wife is a novelist, so once I finish the book I'm working on, I have a shot at using her contacts in publishing to sell it. If I can't make that work, I'll take a crack at self-publishing. If I can't make it work as a fiction writer, I'll publish a book on editing (since that's where I have a lot of experience). On the weekends, occasionally, I play bass in a local band, for beer money.

Where have I seen this argument before? Oh, right --

The songs from the top performers are created by teams of producers. They are created by focus groups and market testing surveys. The themes of these songs are expertly designed to appeal to the target market for pop songs, which is female teens. Beyonce's songs are therefore not really an art form, but an expression of the strong currents in female teen culture. That subculture revolves around having a large number of high-value males desire them sexually, which gives them social power on account of having an abundance of choices. The male counterpart is the juvenile power fantasy you see played out in every superhero and sci-fi action movie.

The fact that the State spends millions of dollars on something is not proof that millions of dollars are required to accomplish the same (stated) goal. Maybe the speaker has not realized that governmental inefficiency is well-documented phenomenon. Also, I agree that sexual slavery is a grotesque and outrageously hideous phenomenon. But since it is such a persistent and horrible problem, why, then, is the US government spending money on things like space exploration and corn subsidies, before fixing the sexual slavery problem? Even if we agreed that rooting out the scourge of sexual slavery is the greatest evil (and I can't think of anything worse at the moment), AND believed that only a State can fix it (although this is where I disagree), then why has he not made a video decrying the State's decision to spend money on ANYTHING else?

Start your own business. Get out of the school-to-job mindset. Read James Altucher and Tim Ferriss and Chris Guillebeau. The world has changed. The Internet has made micro-entrepreneurship truly possible, for the first time ever.