GailG

You own your body. You do not own nature. You can own the fruit of your labor, but nature is held in common.

There are at least two kinds of Libertarians. There are the neo-libertarians, like Rand Paul. Then there are the Libertarians. I'm a Libertarian and all my libertarian friends support Bernie. That sounds strange to many, but it doesn't if you think it through. Until we establish equality, we can't establish libertarianism, so he's at least a baby step in the right direction.

Locke said that the basis of his reasoning is that before wealth and money, all land is commonly held. So your scenerio doesn't work. Locke wrote his 2nd treatise on government after learning about the Iroquois and other indigenous nations that held all nature in common and had democracy by 100% concensus. That culture would never build a "circular road", as you call it because it would have required the concent of 100% of the people within its boundaries to allow that to happen. the one effectively held prisoner would have vetoed the proposal. The rest of the people either have to live with it or use peaceful means to change the resister's mind. We are taught that those of the enlightenment just happened to come upon new ideas and ideals, but that's a myth. Those of the enlightenment happened to learn about the Iroquois who have the longest lasting constitutional democratic republic in recorded history. It was founded in August 909 CE

People live in a delusion is the answer to your question. Just because your labor touches the land does not make the land yours. It makes what you gather from the land - with none going to waste - that makes it private property. The entire concept of labor causing you to own what your labor produces arives from the idea that nature is commonly held. So a stream is commonly held, but the water you draw from the stream is your property. This has a built-in failsafe, where it would be ethically abhorrent to take more than you can use - not to mention stupid - because you have to carry your possesions with you as you travel about. You need to read John Locke's 2nd treatise on government. I think the part you want to read is chapter 5 - but I'm not sure. It's not that long of complicated in any case

When you take away consumers, you take away demand. The sole remaining company dies. That's what's happening now.

There is a difference between anarchy (chaotic anarchy) and rational anarchy. In rational anarchy, government does not own you, so you can't be forced to fight against an invader. Neither can government stop you from doing so. THat's why I think that capitalism must fail before we can implement rational anarchy, thus peace. The Iroquois accomplished it, and they began as cannibals. They were the longest lasting constitutional republic in history - established in 909 CE - with democracy by 100% concensus. They had no social ills - no prisons, no taxes, no domestic abuse, no poverty, etc. All contributed for the benefit of the whole. The invading capitalist cultures destroyed theirs.

Not to my way of thinking. If you are being forced to do something against your will, you are not free. I happen to believe that if you think of opportunity costs as financial ones, then again, you are not free. Capitalism is a softer version of slavery. Adam Smith called workers in a capitalistic system "free slaves". Somehow along the line, we dropped the word slaves.

A functioning democracy IS anarachy. Democracy by consensus is RATIONAL anarchy.

Here is how I escaped the cycles of anger. You have to walk THROUGH the anger. About 30 years ago, I was frustrated by my anger. Anger hurts. It doesn't feel good. I could never gain congtrol of it. One day I wonderd what anger really is. At that point I was a Xian, so I wondered if my emotions could be gifts from god that I was refusing examine. Perhaps they are a gift that I'm not using properly (among other wondering). So I decided to explore my anger to see what it is if I could. I chose a time when I was alone in the house. I fixed a cup of coffee, sat down, and proceeded to let my fury loose. Something had been upsetting me so it was very easy to get anger. Soon, I was as angry as I had ever been, but because this was an intellectual exercise, I didn't feel any of the pain that comes with anger. At that moment, I realized that what is so painful about anger is our fear of it. So I looked around in my mind (with the mind's eye) to see if there was any more anger in there. I found some hiding in a dark corner, and I invited myself to experience it. Immediately, I heard a popping sound in my ears, and felt like a whole giant bathtub of invisible water just washed over me. the anger was 100% gone. But then, I remembered that I hadn't learned anything about my anger, which made me angry enough to do the exercise over again. I repeated it. At the point of the ears clicking and the inivisble water washing over me, I was laughing hysterically. VIVID memories were wizzing through my mind. These memories were of me as a young child. The first was me at age 4.5. I had been wanting to read for at least a year but no one would teach me because I had to wait until I started school. I thought I would trick them into teaching me. I asked my father to write me name on a piece of paper, which he did. I then went to the coffee table and started practicing over and over and over and over again. After what seemed a long enough time back then (probably 5 minutes or less), I wrote my name on another piece of paper and showed it to him. He looked and pointed out that the "a" was backwards. I was devastated. I started crying. I felt so ashamed and embarrassed. I hadn't been careful enough. I was too stupid to teach myself to read. As I watched that memory (from the outside), I wanted to tell her that she hadn't done anything wrong and she certainly wasn't stupid. At that point I realized how perfect she was. As a Chritian, I found this shocking. I had never seen anyone's perfection before, and this perfection was mine. Then another memory. These were wizzing by so quicly I couldn't keep up as I tried to write notes about each memory. Every single memory was a memory where I unfairly and harshly critized myself. I didn't grow up in a physicallyt abusive home, so I didn't have to face memories that others might have to face as they realize that they are angry at themselves for judging themselves. By the time the exercise was over and the last of the memories passed, I realized that I could no longer be angry at the someone I had been angry at. I could see the perfection at the core of her being, because if it was in me, it was in her as well. Now I see only perfection when I see others, even if they are making mistakes because of errors in their belief system. whenever I start to get angry, before it can root itself in me, I go to my front porch, sit on the rocker, and remember what my perfection feels like. It feels wonderful. Those who live in anger are really beating themselves up with it. I can't share your emotions. You are alone with them. You can choose to abuse yourself with them (masochism) or you can get rid of them. The choice is yours. Good luck

I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's a symptom of a rational mind coping with the irrational world we live in. My husband has Aspergers. He is extremely bright, but he is not logical (though he is in his 80s and what we knew about the world back then was verey different than we now know. I love learning so I kept my knowledge up to date. I have to keep bringing him back and walking him through logic.

You are right. Thank you for bringing it up. I too found it fascinating as I had never been able to understand how those who called themselves Christians would do as they did.

LIsten to the interviewer be amazed by her atheism. That's the kind of indoctrination we were all subjected to. That video is from the time when we were required to say the Lord's prayer in school each day and pledge allegiance to the flag (rather than the Constitution), and a nation under god. thanks for the video

I don't have morals. I have ethics. These are two very different things. The pope has morals that allow him to say one thing and do another, That's why morals are so important in both religion and governmnent. Ethics make that impossible because ethics are grounded in honesty. As to your question, I am reminded of a speaker at the 2015 American Humanist Association. The woman is a pastor who through her studies realized that she was an atheist. Atheist had been a dirty word--so dirty that it was an almost unthinkable thought. She googled "atheist minister" and found out that there were many in her position. At that moment, she got it and started laughing. The first thing she realized after recognizing her spiritual atheism is that atheists have ethics! She went to her leadership meeting and told them what happened and how she would like to change the church. They said OK, so it's now a humanist church. She lost some parishoners, but she lives with a clean conscience, and services are now more meaningful.

In my opinion, the most complete explanation is in a book I am writing. I explain it rather like this: We are powerful creatures, and you can easily test that for yourself. Get two strile canning jars. Now cook some rice. Place the steaming (sterilized) rice in the jars. A couple of tablespoons each is enough. Label one love and the other hate. Place them about two feet apart where they will get equal environmental treatment. For the next month, whenever you see the rice, (at least once a day), hate the one labeled hate. Be as mean and insulting to it as you can. Project your dislike for it into the rice. Do the opposite with the one labeled love. Complement it. Tell it how beautiful and wonderful it is. Project your love into the rice at least once a day. It will take little time before the hated rice will turn moldy while the loved rice remains pristine looking. You can also do this with 3 jars of rice. Love one, hate one, and ignore the one in the middle. You will find that the one in the middle turns black and moldy. The other two jars look pretty OK, buty when the experiment is over, smell the two not-moldy jars of rice. The hated one will stink so bad you might gag while the loved one has a mild fermented smell that is not objectional. Our minds are powerful instruments. When we learn to discipline them, we can do amazing things. These aren't miracles. They are natural parts of our beings. We are gods.

Why are you afraid of Satanism? It is nothing more than atheism wearing a costume. It exists because of anger at Christians. It pokes fun of them, but in a more personal way than the flying spaghetti monster does. Satan isn't real.

Time is an illusion. It's conceptual at its core. It exists without existing. Take a single second and keep dividing it until it no longer exists as anything but an abstract concept. Now, remember entanglement. If you split a photon and send the now entangled parts in opposite directions down fiber optic cables, then change the spin on one, the other simultaneously changes its spin accordingly. This is endlessly repeatable. How can this be? Einstein predicted it but hated his own prediction because it would, to his way of thinking, mean that information travelled faster than the speed of light. He didn't understand. Information doesn't travel faster than the speed of light. Here's how I think of it: Imagine a sheet of paper. Now imagine a pencil. Stick the pencil point through the paper near the top of the sheet. Now poke it out near the other end of the sheet. Imagine the paper as the reality we see around us. The body of the pencil is invisible to us because it is in another dimension that we cannot perceive. Now twist one of the ends of the pencil. The other twisted simultaneoudly. It's not that God exists outside of time. And it's not that God (if you want to call it that) has any power. If one of the parts of the pencil moves, it moves. It is more like an UN god. If life as we know it began as a singularity that explosively expanded, then it is most likely that WE are entangled. All-that-is, is what so many call God. I choose to believe that singularity/energy is and was sentient and sentience. Thus, from mind comes matter. In this way, we are gods, but God is an UN god. It is powerless.

The video makes some provably false assumptions. Just start with money being necessary to human motivation. It’s not. The three tested and testable pillars of motivation are autonomy (the right to think for yourself and choose a life’s purpose), master (getting better at what you love to do), and using your abilities to be of service to something greater than yourself. The carrot and the stick method the video encourages is a known fail for anything but the most rudimentary of work, like digging holes or other menial labor. The evidence PROVES that the more money is paid, the poorer the job is done. The most successful cultures did not use money or barter. Their social glue was the healthiness of their relationships. The American Indians were such cultures that used no money and knew no crime, hunger, domestic violence, child abuse, child abandonment, mental illnesses, and a host of social ills that we have today. All these cultures were full equality, democracy by consensus, which is even better than the empire that became an extremely powerful central government. It was therefore still the domination politics that is harming us so much. The Iroquois gave up their warring ways that included cannibalism in order to start The Great Peace. Perhaps we should rethink our assumptions and realign them with facts. The carrot and stick approach is an epic fail and has been proven over and over and over again. You don't need free market trade to keep a culture growing. You need good relationships.

What you are failing to accept is that cash money is debt and nothing more. The dollar in your pocket is a debt certificate. It does not represent a fraction of value as most people think it does. It represents a fraction of the bank's debt. America went off the gold standard in 1971 because America was already bankrupt. That means that when a bank starts up, it places a bunch of debt certificats to hold in reserve. It must retain at least 10% in reserves, though other situations only require that 3% be held in reserve. It then lends out the other POTENTIAL 90% which is how it invents money into existence. Our money is backed only by the false belief that the dollars have REAL value. They don't. They have negative value. I call them anti-dollars. Our monetary system is mathematically guaranteed to collapse. Here is why: Let’s say that you wanted to get a mortgage for a house from the bank where 1 million anti-dollars were desposted. And let's say that you were one of those 90 who wanted $100,000 to buy a house. The amount of interest you need to pay on the mortgage will come to $93,255.78. (5% over 30 years). You received $100,000.00 in debt certificates. $100,000 has been invented into existence. The other $93,255.78 that was never invented into existence but must also be paid has to come from other anti-money, which is why the game is like musical chairs. Your goal is to get your hands on anti-money before the other guy gets it. Greed, aggressiveness, dishonesty, and competitiveness are natural consequences of our destructive money system, thus central elements of our culture that is held together by it. If the bank used all of its money-inventing abilities funding mortgages, it would see an average yearly return of nearly half a million dollars (50% return on its investment of that which has negative value). If that's not enough, the bank could involve itself with credit cards. At an average rate of 13%, the bank will realize more than 100% return on its original depost - every single year. It would be just as easy for the government to print a dollar bill as it is to print a bond that has interest attached. Government won't do that because your elected representatives want to get re-elected, and they can't do that if they raise taxes to pay for all that they want to spend money on. So they borrow instead, making those tax increases much much smaller. But as government borrows the anti-money that it needs, the debt grows. Because the interest has never been invented into existence, if government wanted to pay off the debts today, it can't. There isn't enough money to do it. Today, governmnent incurs almost half a billion dollars a day in interest that is also due and has never been printed into existence. Government could create some trillion dollar coins and pay off the debt, but the inflation and resulting crash of the banking system will cause violence and revolt in the streets of America as people struggle to find ways to eat. The easiest way to invent reasons to invent debt into existence is WAR. Not only do wars require the building of armaments, but after the war, countries need to be rebuilt. It's win-win for the bankers who own government. It is a rare person who understands that WWI and WWII were actually economic wars sold to us as stoping the spread of fascism. So as we went about telling ourselves that we were the greatest nation in the world because we defended freedom, we were actually defending fascism from the spread of freedom. We've been lied to so much in public schooling. The day WILL come when - with absolute certainty unless we willingly discard capitalsim and bring it down in a CONTROLLED crash - we won't have enough money to pay a single interest payment on the debt. Unless we take control in advance of that, chaos is certain to follow. We can take control. We just don't know how because we have been so "DISeducated" in public schools. The longest lasting and strongest constitutional republic was a democracy by consensus with full equality. They didn't use money. They overcame their violent ways and established "The Great Peace", that was its constitution. I just finished writing a book about this. It's not published yet as it still needs some editing. You can read it for free at my website www.gnewman.org. If you want to understand how money works, open the middle part and query the PDF file for the words Musical Money. The second video you posted is just another of those venture capitalists who WANT you to be afraid of giving up capitalism. There are many commercials like that on the web. He's just tyring to get you to buy gold from him. Don't bother. There is a better way.

If you live in the UK or USA, you have never tasted freedom a single day in your life. You may think you have, but you have not. There was a time when we were called free-slaves. We were free to sell our labor in exchange for survival in a capitalist system. That is the opposite of freedom. At some point after Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations), the word slave was dropped from the word free-slave. I am a Libertarian (rational anarchist) and I know that capitalism is, at its core, destructive. (I don't believe in evil) I've studied it in depth. Capitalism is a wealth-transfer scheme. Captialism rquires poverty to survive. It also requires near-constant wars. It is the most horrid system ever devised in all of recorded human history. Compare that to the native Americans who actually were free, but in a brutal greed-based act of genocide, we destroyed most of that elegant culture in order to steal their resources in order to turn them into profits. What do we have now? We are in the midst of the 6th mass extinction of all life on earth. Capitalism did that. The Iroquois had a constitutional republic. They used democracy by consensus rather than domination (majority rules) politics. They had no money, therefore they had no hunger, homelessness, crime, prisons, police, child abuse, domestic abuse, mental illness, poverty, or political parties that divide us as a people. They were by all recorded accounts, much happier than the European counterparts who destroyed them. They were far better educated and civil than we are. Their culture centered itself in relationships--something that we have given up in exchange for money. They saw us as slaves. We are. We are free-slaves.

What is immoral is the capitalist system that literally and provably causes mental illnesses. The USA has, BY FAR, the highest income inequality and the highest mental illness rate in the world. Mental illness is now the number one reason for social security disability, and that doesn't even count the retirees who have switched from SSD and/or SSI to Social Security retirement. The numbers of serious mental illnesses (SMIs) are rising so dramatically that Congress has been asked to fund SMIs The longest lasting constitutional republic that lasted more than 700 years before being destroyed by invading Europeans was the Iroquois confederation. They had no money but the lived amidst abundance that we today cannot comprehend. They nurtured nature, beliving themselves part of it. They thought that our money system turned us into slaves, which it does. It makes us immature, like children, which it does. Not only did they have no money, but they turned from a violent and cannabilistic cultuire to a wholly peaceful culture. Ther constitution was called "The Great Peace". They had no poverty, no child abuse, no domestic violence, no crime, no prisons, no police, no NSA, AND theirs was a democracy by concensus, not the domination politics that we have today. Jefferson and Franklin thought we should emulate them, but the aristocrats (the Federalists) reviled the mere mention of the word equality. Inequality CAUSES brain damage. You can't have capitalism without inequality.

I wholly disagree with you. I just finished writing a book detailing how capitalism affects people--giving studies as proof. Capitalism and the wealth inequality that it creates does great damage to humans and the rest of life. The earth is already in the midst of the 6th mass extinction of life on earth as a direct result of it. Capitalism is a remnant of feudalism. It is slavery, not freedom.