Magnus

The government's legal system is corrupt. Before the mid-19th century or so, any property owner could sue any other owner for a nuisance, which covered any sort of trespass of A's property onto B. But by the later decades, industrial pollution was happening on a new scale. The US courts deliberately changed the law by refusing to prevent nuisances (including industrial pollution) whenever the courts thought that shutting down the polluters was "unreasonable." In other words, they gave the large and powerful a free pass to harm others. For the greater good, they said. There are 100 other examples.

I question if the Holocaust really happened. Or, to be more accurate, I question if mass murder occurred in the same manner, as to many of the key details, as is commonly promoted. The political incentives for distortion and exaggeration are enormous, and statist media was no more powerful (and monopolistic) as it was in the period immediately following WWII. The camp locations were all in occupied Poland, and all fell into Soviet control after the war. The Soviet government devoted massive resources to a bureaucracy that had cutting edge, highly-developed expertise in propaganda. It's also openly admitted that the Soviets "rebuilt" the captured Nazi facilities in the late 1940s and 1950s. In short, I don't trust Soviet war data any more than I trust today's DEA police reports or the Labor Department's unemployment and economic data. There are many aspects of the horrors and democide that occurred right out in the open throughout the mid 20th century, without having to resort to politically-compromised, unreliable reports about mass murder occurring at hidden sites.

I'm not misrepresenting anything. I've never seen that video. I've been speaking of my own views on the subject, and responding to your characterizations of Stefan's statements. I have no desire to defend other people's views.

Your link at Bleeding Heart went to a 404 page, so I can't read it and comment on it.

This is incorrect. Self-ownership doesn't "mean" direct psychological control. They are not equal in all respects. Self-ownership is predicated on direct psychological control. Self-ownership arises from self-control. And all the other forms of property rights we have arise, in turn, from self-ownership, as long as certain other conditions are met (e.g., being the first user of an object, or legitimately obtaining property rights in the object from the prior owner, etc.). Putting you in prison (for no good reason, like a drug charge or not paying taxes) is still a violation of your OTHER rights, which are broader than just the right to wiggle one's own fingers. All of our rights BEGIN with self-ownership, but they extend outward from there, such as the right to do anything or go anywhere, when doing so does not infringe on other people's rights. The jailers can still violate those rights (freedom of movement), and can confiscate your things, even though the jailers can never deprive you of direct psychological control of your body (short of forcibly inserting high-tech implants into your central nervous system). You seem to be assuming that self-ownership is the one and only right a person has, and as long as you have that, your property rights can't be violated. That's clearly false.

If (in the absence of electrodes and servos) it's impossible to confer true, direct control of your body to another person, then how could you transfer the right of exclusive control to him?

The first user of any object is the owner. So, we're the owner of our bodies. Also, a person's brain has (literally) exclusive control over his hands. There's no way around that, short of implanting electrodes and chips and servos. Anyone's control over your body requires your assent and compliance. The right of exclusive control can't be transferred, because the fact of exclusive control can't. Once you start dealing with external objects, then control-in-fact becomes at least disputable. So, that's why the issue of who has the right of control arises -- to differentiate between rightful control and wrongful control. But as to the body, full, exclusive control literally cannot be assumed by someone else. You can agree to let someone else guide you temporarily (e.g., employment), but that's really just agreeing to follow orders, not to surrender true, exclusive, complete control over your hands.

It's the difference between positive assertions and normative assertions (questions of fact vs. questions of law). Control is a positive assertion -- it describes a feature of objective reality, an empirical fact. You either control something, or you don't. Or you might have partial control over it, or you might have competing efforts between two or more people to control something. In any event, to say that someone controls something says nothing about whether he should control it. Ownership is a normative concept. It's an abstraction, in particular an ethical proposition. Ownership is the right of exclusive control (of something). As such, it's a key concept in property rights, or property law. Ownership in general is not a fact. But self-ownership certainly arises from biological fact.

What happens when the AI exceeds the capacity for human comprehension? Who is going to expend the massive amount of time and effort it will require to create, improve, guide, monitor and maintain the Great Computer? I'd rather spend my time flying to Barbados for breakfast and having dinner in Paris. On a related note, the real estate I plan to use for my jet setting lifestyle be available, or will my use of the resources to live this way be rivalrous with other people trying to do the same? Will the magic printers be able to synthesize elements, or will the world be made of plastic? Because I'd prefer the fabrication-bots make things like wood musical instruments and authentic replica medieval armor, and the ones made out of plastic suck.

To paraphrase Spooner, either the Constitution authorized the government we have now, or it's failed to prevent it. Either way, it's unfit to exist. (And that was written 100 years ago!)

It's only through capitalism that production and efficiency will increase to the point of superabundance. It's impossible to coordinate the production and consumption decisions of a few billion people without prices.

I couldn't extract that much coherent content. 90% of it was meta-discussions about meta-discussions, and sundry technical difficulties. What bothered me was the "thirsty man in the desert" argument, or its cousin "trespassing in an emergency," which is Kindergarten-grade stuff. It's perfectly sensible for the law to make narrow allowances for theft in the face of life-and-death, exigent situations. Life is more important than temporary restraints on liberty, and they are both more important than trespass on property. There is a hierarchy of rights. But how that hierarchy of rights explains the State and taxation, I just can't remotely comprehend. The levying and collection of taxes is just about as far away from extremis and split-second crisis management as one can possibly get. It's the opposite of crisis and duress. The State is plodding, bureaucratic, planned, regular and predictable. It's systems and impositions are completely unlike the Drowning Man scenario. The duress or crisis excuse doesn't make the trespass or the theft any less wrong, by the way; it only mitigates the penalty for the violation. It renders theft excusable, not justified. But even where there is genuine duress, the Duress excuse is only valid to the extent there are no other good options. But the State has all the time in the world on its hands. It has infinite alternative options! The life-or-death duress, crisis and extremis excuse makes no sense, as a justification for Statism and taxation. It should have taken 20 seconds to dismantle that whole line of Duress "argument." Instead, they got into an argument about ad hom-be-dom attacks, Molynooks and debate-formatting.

I somehow misses the Helfeld-Molynooks debate. This one was horrid. It covered (a) lifeboat scenarios that I haven't even seen online since 2004, and (b) the Warlords Take Over scenario, which fell out of fashion in 2005. I almost wet myself when I saw Helfeld embarrass Pelosi, and I like Kinsella, but this video was a hot mess. What does the FDR board think about the current state of the popularity of anarchism vs. minarchism? Kinsella said anarchism is now the dominant mode, and minarchism is the fading legacy. Does that jibe with people's experience? I confess I'm a bit out of touch.

The American revolution was a step down in terms of economic freedom. Monarchy was marginally better, as Hoppe laid out in Democracy: The God That Failed. There was more economic freedom under the British monarchy than Cromwell's disastrous republic. Without the US revolution, slavery (which England abolished) would have ended sooner than it did. The Articles of Confederation were scrapped and a stronger central state was organized largely in response to the prior government's inability to effectively quell tax protesters. Ironic, I guess. The Civil War was fought because Lincoln was a professional railroad lobbyist, and his agenda was to expand massive railroad-building subsidies, which were to be paid for with taxes collected from Southern taxpayers (almost all taxes were import duties, and the South bought most of the imported goods). The war was fought to prevent the railroad-building tax source from escaping federal taxes. Also, as a response to criticism, Lincoln used the military to shut down newspapers. Secession was patently Constitutional. The government you think was more free than today's killed 700,000 people in an illegal war, just to ensure a steady stream of funds for its railroad subsidies. Do you really think that same organization is going to allow any meaningful changes in the benefits it currently confers on banks? Military contractors? The oil business? Try something relatively simple -- start a telecommunication company that competes against Comcast, which enjoys federally-sponsored legal monopolies all over the place. Try organizing a repeal of the federal telecom market restrictions. Step on a few crony capitalists' toes. Threaten the protectionism they currently enjoy by trying to offer consumers a better, cheaper telecom service. You would give people a great market alternative if you succeeded, but the reality is that you'd be shut down within a month or less before you strung the first length of coaxial. You'd quickly see who the politicians really work for. (And telecom is about 11th on the list of the corporate owners of USA, Inc. They'd still crush you, just for daring to upset the status quo.)

There is an enormous surveillance apparatus in place, tracking everyone's electronic communications. All emails, all phone calls, all texts, all Internet traffic, everything. It's all going into data centers like the one in Utah. When the Boston Marathon bomber was first identified, but still on the loose, they tracked down his ex-wife. There was an article in the Guardian about the CNN interviews that revealed how extensive the surveillance network is: Since Tsarnaev wasn't under specific surveillance prior to the bombing, the only way it would be possible to listen to pre-bombing phone calls is: This is the State that is going to respect the Constitution when a few trillion dollars in government money are at stake?

I don't disagree with it, so much as it sounds like a proposal to grow wings out of your back and fly to the moon. It's ridiculous, in the extreme. Votes don't matter. I can only say what I've said before so many times before I assume you aren't going to listen.The point of communicating the anarchist view is long term benefit. As in 5+ generations from now, maybe anarchism will be somewhat mainstream. Always? No. But it took 3,000 years for Western society to accept atheism to the point of not murdering atheists on sight. The point is to build a successful, thriving, but tiny group of people who will survive the collapse of the US government, and perpetuate ideas of non-aggression, building generation after generation, until we can count our numbers in the tens of thousands. Five or six generations from now. Not in our lifetimes. Or, maybe sooner if we experience a near-total collapse of civilization, involving a loss of electricity production. No, none. The US Constitution ceased to be meaningful after the so-called Civil War. It means nothing. Read Bastiat, who saw 150 years ago that the Left and the Right wings were two factions fighting over who could rob the populace faster. Read Lysander Spooner, who explained the insignificance of the Constitution 130 years ago, and that was well before the rise of the welfare state and the habit of launching foreign wars. Read Smedley Butler, one of the most decorated Marines in US history. He saw in the 1920s that the US Marine Corps was worse than the Mafia. Read Confessions of an Economic Hitman.One of the most important parts of the US Constitution was the prohibition on all exercises of power except those specifically enumerated. That limitation formally ceased to exist in 1937, well before you and I were born. There is zero Constitutional authority for the Federal Reserve, Social Security, Medicare, Obamacare, Medicaid, welfare, SSI, drug laws, bank fraud and robbery prosecutions, telecommunications regulation, the federal highway system ... pretty much 90% of what the US government pays for and does these days. Try convincing the banks, financial industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the media or the oil industry of these arguments. Pick any one, and give it a try.

I don't think the answers you've gotten are vague. I think you are resistant to a new way of thinking, which is entirely normal, since broad new ideas take time to digest. One of the main problems of modern life under the corporate State is that we have been conditioned from birth, for many generations, to believe in the power of politics. We are told, explicitly and implicitly, that the composition of government, and actions taken by it, are all-important and a reflection of society as a whole. This is an inherent attitude of progressivism, conservatism, from Communists through Christian Social Democrats and everything in between. The State is a master at two things -- violence and lies. It is an expert at taking credit for other people's successes, and avoiding blame for the destruction it causes. It's easy to mistakenly believe the government could be a potential instrument for good, but it can't be. It's corrupt at its core. Trying to vote to get the State to stop subjugating people is like trying to organize a vote whereby the inmates in a prison camp can vote on whether they'll be released. They wouldn't be in a prison camp in the first place if that were one of the realistic outcomes of an election. Obviously, the prisoners can only be permitted to vote on a very small range of topics. The fundamental restructuring of the power relationship between inmates and prison guards is not one of them. We are trained (by the Statist school system, mostly) to look to the State as the fountain of importance. For the infrastructure and coherence of the society. For the definition of the composition of society. For our identity. Most histories that have been written are essentially political histories. Even the calendar used to be expressed in terms of the number of years the current king has ruled (i.e., regnal years). The West didn't change over to numbering years consecutively until the 8th century, when the idea was promoted by the Venerable Bede, as a way of adapting the custom of using regnal years to instead base them on "the King of Kings." In other words, even the marking of time is, in its origin, a political reference. How is it possible to use the political system to end the political system? That's not what it was made to do. It gets stronger by your participation in it. The only two options are to either accelerate its inevitable self-destruction, or avoid it altogether. Otherwise, it's like using slaves to end slavery. Or forming a church to end theism. You're working against your stated goals. The important parts of life are out here, away from government. In family, friends, community, art, science, entrepreneurship, etc.

Don't forget the 60% of eligible voters who don't vote. That's a great libertarian electoral victory!

How could it not be true? Every country has central banking and income taxation. The State will serve the interests of its central and member banks, every time, all the time, no matter what you say or do. Government schools are also essentially universal, and they, naturally, serve the goals of Statism by making freedom not just obscure but unthinkable. How can these massive, structural, systemic control mechanism be ignored? Your plan is to fight the State where it is strongest -- the realm of electoral politics, which it created, controlled, and uses as its primary method of deluding the populace into believing we have a meaningful influence over them. The Statist system overall is actually very fragile. But not as to voting. They own the voting realm. The system is vulnerable in other areas. It can't function without the active cooperation of other slaves. Also, the State overreacts wildly to symbolic displays of defiance. Remember the LiteBrite display in Bostom that shut down the entire freeway system a couple of years ago? Cliven Bundy? The Branch Davidian standoff and mass murders? The 9/11 hijackers killed roughly as many people as are killed in 30 days on the government's highway system. The government pays zero attention to the 35,000 traffic deaths caused every year by the way the government designs and polices its roads. But that one symbolic act of Fuck You on 9/11 caused a shift in government policy for a generation or two. Remember the Unabomber? How many people did he kill? Do you remember without looking it up? The search for him was the biggest in FBI history. His death toll was 3. But he's housed in the deepest hole in the US prison system for life. Why? He embarrassed the State. He made them look weak. Gandhi. MLK. The list goes on. Anything that symbolically demonstrates the State's impotence causes them to freak out. Any time there is a violent rebellion, the State destroys the rebel symbols. In the US, it was Hamilton marching on Shay's Rebellion that set the tone for the next 250 years. The State deals in symbols. If you want a solution to fighting the State in the short term, the most powerful would by non-violent ways to publicly undermine the power in the State's symbols of authority. But I would never promote or recommend those actions. They typically end with the rebel's destruction. Our goals are to thrive, and to demonstrate the State's irrelevance. That's why I focus on living my principles, talking about them, and raising non-aggressive children.

Why do you define "success" as electing your desired politicians? Why do you think the political arena is the place where important social change occurs? You seem to be accepting a few underlying, unquestioned assumptions about the nature of the State. The first would be that that democracy (i.e., voting) creates a responsive government. Or that the USA is a government “of the people.” Or that the State is somehow subordinate to the voters. Or that the government somehow “represents” us. These ideas are a perfect inversion of reality. Elections and voting mean nothing. Zero. The hard reality of our lives is that voting has about as much influence on the actions of the government as does voting for the winner of American Idol. Imagine that everyone's votes go into a random number generator. Imagine that the voting machines didn’t even bother to record votes at all. That’s how trivial voting is. The State is the enforcement department of the true OWNERS of this country. The Owners are a handful of huge corporations who make decisions that you will never be privy to. They attend conferences that you will never be invited to. They are (mainly) finance, pharmaceuticals, oil, media and military contractors. Do you think you have more influence than them over US government policy? That's who politicians work for. Not you or me. If you think that any politician, much less one like Gary Johnson or Ron Paul, has any chance to effect the SLIGHTEST change on the agenda of the U.S. government, then you are delusional. You are buying into the false reality they have synthesized in order to enslave you. We are serfs on their plantation. But they discovered that it’s far too expensive to keep us all in actual, physical shackles, so instead they have trained people, from birth, to enslave themselves. How do they do this? By convincing people of the importance of the democratic system. Voting is not designed to change the government. Voting is designed to prevent people from fully accepting the reality of their subjugation. Once you fully accept the proposition that THE STATE DOESN'T CARE WHAT YOU THINK, then you’ll see what voting amounts to — self-abuse. If you really want to end or even limit Statism, take all the time that you would spend thinking about voting, or participating in politics in any way, and spend that time running a website. Or becoming a famous novelist. Or a popular songwriter. Or a movie director. Or an entrepreneur. Weave your ethical principles into these worthy endeavors, and your influence will be tremendous. Or start a school based on freedom, not only political freedom, but mental and emotional freedom. Create an environment that churns out young geniuses -- scientists, inventors, artists, entrepreneurs, philosophers. After you've produced a disproportionate number of luminaries, the world will beat a path to your door and beg you to reveal your guiding principles, and then you can tell them that it all began with the non-aggression principle. But please don't waste your time on politics. It's worse than doing nothing.

Jon Stewart is the front man for one of the largest media conglomerate of multinational corporations in the world.You will not get anti-statist viewpoints conveyed through such a medium. Never.Yes, my suggestions 1 and 5 are not entirely serious. I do believe in the power of media, but believe employing it to political ends is a colossal waste of time.I also would never spend my time on local politics. But I suggest it only as a way of enlightening people to the nature of political reality. It's like dreaming of being an actor -- try your local volunteer community theater and see if you like it, before you plan to star in the next superhero movie.I suspect that if you were to see what local politics is really like, up close, how sleazy and corrupt it is, then you'd likely give up trying to elect a libertarian president.No one can get anything (un)done by political action because the system is rigged.There is a whole host of unstated assumptions and beliefs that underlie the modern democratic political system, and they are all allied against the libertarian anarchist position.Today's politics asks the unstated question "What do you want to extract from others by force?"They never come out and say this overtly. They hide behind about 8 layers of euphemism, jargon and outright lies. Part of the Big Lie of government is that it can do anything, accomplish anything, express any values, be a perfect reflection of the people it purports to represent.It's not true. It's a system for extracting economic value forcibly. If you're opposed to that on principle, then you're a misfit ab initio.Let me give you a very simple example. It would cost the government nothing to put a "None of the above" option on every ballot. And if None were to win, the rule could be that all candidates lose and a new slate be determined. So easy. They will never do this. Never.Attempting to use government to promote freedom and limit government is like trying to use a shotgun to cook bread. It was invented for a wholly different purpose. Swords and plowshares.Politics exists as pure theater. It's the fig leaf, concealing the reality of our subjugation. It is the social-pressure relief valve, providing us with the illusion of control, thereby preventing or delaying violent revolution.In wartime prison camps, the camp operators typically would give the prisoners a kind of internal self-government. The Nazis were especially good at this. The point of allowing them to organize that way was not to make the prison more free, but to deepen and solidify the level of control. It's to mollify the inmates by giving them a trivial degree of control over their daily lives.That's what politics is.

I have come to the conclusion that rational argumentation does not work when trying to remove governmental control. Rational argumentation was not used to get these things implemented in the first place. If it were, there would have been no need for voting, which is about as anti-rational a process as could possibly be invented. Democracy and voting was created to achieve the results it has achieved -- a brain-dead populace, increasingly dependent on the State, that's more or less impervious to radical change. I believe the greatest change you can effect are in the following areas: 1. Media. Now that we have the internet, our viewpoints have at least some potential to be disseminated. Learn how to be as skillful as possible in things like: marketing, advertising, media production, writing, websites, graphics, audio production, videos, etc. Increase the standard for libertarian-anarchist production values to be at least comparable to the mainstream Statist media. This is critically important, and requires a wide range of real skills. 2. Convince the people in your immediate circle. If you can't, because they're die-hard statists, then you might want to spend time with other people. But don't withdraw into an insular circle of fellow travelers. If every anarchist convinced just one person, there'd be twice as many of us around, right? 3. Focus on children. Save as many as possible from the State indoctrination camps. Set up non-State schools (a lifetime project in itself), or help develop freedom-oriented homeschooling materials. This is what Ron Paul is doing now, since his political career ended. As a politician, he got nowhere, and achieved nothing. But as a homeschool material producer, he might succeed. 4. Set an example. Focus on your own life. Live well. Be happy. Remove as much of Statism as possible from your life, and keep purging, as a complete lifestyle. 5. I think any politically-minded action should be last on one's list of priorities, and if done at all, it should be directed at either maximizing the rate of government growth (which will cause it to break), or at monkey-wrenching the system. Start local. There will be some town council or similar process where you live, and once you look into it, you'll quickly see how it is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the real estate developers and their buddies at the banks. Getting a traffic light removed might take you a year of your life. But there are comprehensive development plans that affect all of us, and they are required to be open to the public, although no one does. Try organizing opposition to Statism at that level. Gum up the works. See if you can keep your County from expanding its road system to yet another massive subdivision (which only discourages the redevelopment of existing land). Take a stand against local government-sponsored sprawl, before trying to enact a Constitutional amendment.

That's insane -- without long traffic lights, when are drivers supposed to have the time to check their smartphones for recent texts or emails?

Very well said.

Excelsior!