LFReasons

I blame bad epistemology. It's hard to blame those that knowingly use fallacies to garner support for what they want when it's so ridiculously easy to do so. Unfortunately, the vast majority of people don't know how to think. They think they do, but all they're really doing is snatching at whatever random associations arise from words that they have been programmed into reacting to without thought. I got taken in by it too, and I'd guess it was the same for many of you, but once I gained a basic competence in logic, most of the illusions that had been pounded into me sloughed away quite painlessly and rapidly.

It's not that society is not "built" to accept precious metals as money, or that there is even any particular practical impediment to doing so. In fact, it has to be prevented from happening via legal tender laws, because precious metals are a shield against the various games that governments play with currency to loot their livestock. If the dollar crashes, people aren't just going to stop trading and lay down and die. They will barter, whether it's strictly legal or not. And when it comes down to that type of situation, ANY commodity, any physical good, will be much more valuable than IOU tokens. It's just that most other commodities can rot or go bad, and require a lot of storage space for a comparable amount of value.

Consciousness has a cause, thoughts have a cause, choices have a cause. This does not somehow mean that people cannot be persuaded, change their minds, or think. In fact, arguing for that theist notion of free will would make reason, logic and evidence totally impotent. Logic and reason exist and are valid because the world is deterministic. If it were not, we would not be "free", as we would have no meaningful way to understand or affect the world.

Hi everyone, just wanted to introduce myself as a new member of this forum. I spent a few years as an avid Objectivist, but the many subtle (and some amazingly brazen) contradictions inherent to that chain of reasoning made me unable to justify it without prodigious amounts of mental hand-waving, which strikes me as the exact opposite of objectivity. I'm still very grateful to Ayn Rand for the tremendous intellectual growth that her work triggered within me, but I no longer go along with her advocacy of minarchy. In retrospect, I find it quite amusing that I once claimed to advocate reason and the non-aggression principle while simulataneously going along with Rand's often laughable and contrived arguments for the necessity of government (essentially, that there needs to be an objective (?!) set of rules for everyone to be bound by) The final nail in the coffin of my Objectivist phase was Roy Childs Jr.'s open letter to Ayn Rand, entitled "Objectivism and The State". I did and still do find it to be a brilliant and concise refutation of Objectivist politics. I highly recommend this to any minarchist, but particularly to minarchists of the Objectivist variety. So, if you have any Objectivist friends or associates that are still on the fence about the "necessity" of government, this may help them to see reason. Anyway, that's the barebones version of how I got to voluntarism. I look forward to having having many stimulating and enlightening discussions with all of you.