Random Acts of Anarchy in Russia
(Source: youtube.com)
[W]hen we launch in a territory the Bittorrent traffic drops as the Netflix traffic grows. So I think people do want a great experience and they want access – people are mostly honest. The best way to combat piracy isn’t legislatively or criminally but by giving good options. One of the side effects of growth of content is an expectation to have access to it. You can’t use the internet as a marketing vehicle and then not as a delivery vehicle.
I simply advocate peaceful, consensual interactions in all things.
This is based on the premise of self-ownership: We own our lives, we own the product of our lives (that which we traded our time and talents for, or property), and we own the ability to decide what we do with our lives (that which we voluntarily choose to do without aggressing others, or liberty).
As such, we must disregard unjust laws, as consent is paramount: people should be able to peacefully associate with others in any way all parties voluntarily agree to.
An emergent, natural order of non-aggression thus nurtures rational decision-making and fosters efficiency and prosperity for all. Resources are scarce, mankind is imperfect, and the future is uncertain - but free exchange best adapts to these shortcomings in order to cater to our myriad, subjective demands.
(Post in question: The Illegitimacy of Democracy.)
Re: [Statelessness] is chaos
People do not agree on what laws are desirable and what laws are undesirable. An anarchic society would either result in new states taking power or endless combat (most probably both). Furthermore, decentralization is weakness. Good luck defending your small town against a much larger political entity. No, anarchism is simply not realistic.
It’s true that there is a difference of opinion on which laws governments pass are legitimate or warranted or desirable - but there is a minimum that essentially all people agree to be just. As I explained in my post on unjust laws, “the only just law is that which initiates aggression against none. In other words, one that echoes natural law; that is, one that protects and respects the life, liberty, and property of all equally. Any violation of a person’s self-ownership is illegitimate. So laws against theft, assault, battery, murder, slavery, rape, fraud, trespass, destruction of property, and the threats thereof are all legitimate because they would exist irrespective of a state. They are axiomatic consequences of human self-ownership.”
Furthermore, only states fight wars. It’s not the anarchy that would cause combat it would be the states, or rather foolish people believing it is legitimate to force other people to live and behave a certain way, defer authority to the majority’s (or the mighty’s) chosen rulers, and submit to their un-peaceful decrees all in the name of preventing some foreign entity from doing the exact same thing.
In truth, it is your position that is unrealistic: believing humanity is incapable of living peacefully and voluntarily yet granting some of those same ignoble members of humanity great power over others.
Perhaps a power vacuum would quickly be filled, and the toppling of one tyrannical state could leave an opening for another. The weak who believe in the supremacy of a state will blindly fight to maintain the status quo. And again, the problem here is states. But that is why the fight for voluntarism is first and foremost an intellectual one. The desire to be free from force and conflict and servitude (the hallmarks of all states) must first foment in the minds of individuals, before it can manifest itself into anything that lasts.
As the great Étienne de La Boétie beautifully noted nearly 500 years ago:
“Poor, wretched, and stupid peoples, nations determined on your own misfortune and blind to your own good! You let yourselves be deprived before your own eyes of the best part of your revenues; your fields are plundered, your homes robbed, your family heirlooms taken away. You live in such a way that you cannot claim a single thing as your own; and it would seem that you consider yourselves lucky to be loaned your property, your families, and your very lives. All this havoc, this misfortune, this ruin, descends upon you not from alien foes, but from the one enemy whom you yourselves render as powerful as he is, for whom you go bravely to war, for whose greatness you do not refuse to offer your own bodies unto death. He who thus domineers over you has only two eyes, only two hands, only one body, no more than is possessed by the least man among the infinite numbers dwelling in your cities; he has indeed nothing more than the power that you confer upon him to destroy you. Where has he acquired enough eyes to spy upon you, if you do not provide them yourselves? How can he have so many arms to beat you with, if he does not borrow them from you? The feet that trample down your cities, where does he get them if they are not your own? How does he have any power over you except through you? How would he dare assail you if he had no cooperation from you? What could he do to you if you yourselves did not connive with the thief who plunders you, if you were not accomplices of the murderer who kills you, if you were not traitors to yourselves? You sow your crops in order that he may ravage them, you install and furnish your homes to give him goods to pillage; you rear your daughters that he may gratify his lust; you bring up your children in order that he may confer upon them the greatest privilege he knows — to be led into his battles, to be delivered to butchery, to be made the servants of his greed and the instruments of his vengeance; you yield your bodies unto hard labor in order that he may indulge in his delights and wallow in his filthy pleasures; you weaken yourselves in order to make him the stronger and the mightier to hold you in check. From all these indignities, such as the very beasts of the field would not endure, you can deliver yourselves if you try, not by taking action, but merely by willing to be free. Resolve to serve no more, and you are at once freed. I do not ask that you place hands upon the tyrant to topple him over, but simply that you support him no longer; then you will behold him, like a great Colossus whose pedestal has been pulled away, fall of his own weight and break in pieces.”
[F]rom the point of view of justice and morality, the State can own no property, require no obedience, enforce no contracts made with it, and indeed, cannot exist at all. A common defense of the State holds that man is a “social animal,” that he must live in society, and that individualists and libertarians believe in the existence of “atomistic individuals” uninfluenced by and unrelated to their fellow men. But no libertarians have ever held individuals to be isolated atoms; on the contrary, all libertarians have recognized the necessity and the enormous advantages of living in society, and of participating in the social division of labor. The great non sequitur committed by defenders of the State, including classical Aristotelian and Thomist philosophers, is to leap from the necessity of society to the necessity of the State. On the contrary, as we have indicated, the State is an antisocial instrument, crippling voluntary interchange, individual creativity, and the division of labor. “Society” is a convenient label for the voluntary interrelations of individuals, in peaceful exchange and on the market. Here we may point to Albert Jay Nock’s penetrating distinction between “social power” — the fruits of voluntary interchange in the economy and in civilization — and “State power,” the coercive interference and exploitation of those fruits. In that light, Nock showed that human history is basically a race between State power and social power, between the beneficent fruits of peaceful and voluntary production and creativity on the one hand, and the crippling and parasitic blight of State power upon the voluntary and productive social process. All of the services commonly thought to require the State — from the coining of money to police protection to the development of law in defense of the rights of person and property — can be and have been supplied far more efficiently and certainly more morally by private persons. The State is in no sense required by the nature of man; quite the contrary.
— Murray Rothbard
We were on the verge of obtaining a reasonable degree of liberty. We were going to get our taxes slashed and simplified but not abolished, the military budget reduced and the troops brought home, drugs decriminalized and managed via harm reduction, a significant liberalization of immigration controls without totally open borders, new restrictions on the Fed’s central planning powers adopted in 2008 and 2009, some more flexibility on pharmaceutical testing and health insurance, moderate patent reform, a diminution of pages in the Federal Register, prison reform, genuine oversight and remedies for police misconduct, strengthened due process and warrant requirements in national security cases, a plan to phase out massive entitlements, some fair-minded school reform, and a scaling back of federal gun laws. We were on the cusp of this moderate but significant step toward liberty, where we would not get all we wanted, but we would get much of what we wanted. But I ruined it all. I cited Murray Rothbard and Lysander Spooner. I made the perfect the enemy of the good, and now the liberty that was in our grasp is lost forever. Sorry, everyone. My selfish desire to adhere to ideological purity has spoiled our chances at increased freedom once again.
The state is the most destructive institution human beings have ever devised — a fire that, at best, can be controlled for only a short time before it o’erleaps its improvised confinements and spreads its flames far and wide.
About Authority: The Evolution of the State
(Source: youtube.com)
Assume a group of people, aware of the possibility of conflicts; and then someone proposes, as a solution to this eternal human problem, that he (someone) be made the ultimate arbiter in any such case of conflict, including those conflicts in which he is involved. I am confident that he will be considered either a joker or mentally unstable and yet this is precisely what all statists propose.
— Hans-Hermann Hoppe
(Source: laliberty)
From its very beginnings [the State] has been — and still remains — the divine sanction of brutal force and triumphant iniquity. Even in the most democratic countries, like the United States and Switzerland, it is simply the consecration of the privileges of some minority and the actual enslavement of the vast majority…. This explains to us why ever since history began, that is, ever since States came into existence, the political world has always been and continues to be the stage for high knavery and brigandage — brigandage and knavery which are held in high honor, since they are ordained by patriotism, transcendent morality, and by the supreme interest of the State. This explains to us why all the history of ancient and modern States is nothing more than a series of revolting crimes; why present and past kings and ministers of all times and all countries — statesmen, diplomats, bureaucrats, and warriors — if judged from the point of view of simple morality and human justice, deserve a thousand times the gallows of penal servitude … For there is no terror, cruelty, sacrilege, perjury, imposture, infamous transaction, cynical theft, brazen robbery, or foul treason which has not been committed and all are still being committed daily by representatives of the State, with no other excuse than this elastic, at times so convenient and terrible phrase Reason of State.
— Mikhail Bakunin, The Immorality of the State (1870)
[I]f you think in terms of marginal utility, you realize that the whole world is built in tiny steps as an extension of a complex decision-making process that is ultimately subjective, and that bringing people together can never come through force, but only through small acts of persuasion, one person at a time. Through the lens of marginal utility, we see the beautiful orderliness of anarchy.
Mafia, Government, and Legitimacy →
What is the difference between a government and a criminal gang or protection racket such as the mafia? In a word, it is legitimacy. In practice, this vague notion suggests that people view the government—its institutional composition, its personnel, and its conduct—as morally acceptable or proper, whereas they view the mafia—at least in its conduct—as morally unacceptable or improper.
Many governments claim that their legitimacy rests on the Lockean grounds of consent of the governed, but in practice this consent proves to be highly problematic because the governed population is rarely, if ever, presented with the choice of being ruled or not being ruled under the established governmental institutions. Regimes use public education, propaganda, judicial decisions (rendered by the government’s own judges), political elections, public hearings, and other artifices to imbue the people with the idea that their rulers are legitimate authorities taking legitimate actions. Many if not all of these justificatory efforts are highly questionable, if not entirely bogus, and none of them represents decisive evidence of the people’s consent to be ruled as they are by the rulers who dominate them.
In reality, the so-called consent of the governed consists for the most part of mere acquiescence—a widespread resignation that signifies only that most people would rather endure the government’s robbery and bullying than openly resist it at the risk of injury, imprisonment, and death. The people’s acquiescence, in many cases a sort of sullen, resentful, implicit surrender, hardly endows the rulers with any moral approbation. Indeed, even in the countries with the greatest degree of popular political participation, the bulk of the people may look upon the governing politicians and bureaucrats with ill-concealed contempt and sometimes with openly expressed hatred. …
[T]he ostensible bright-line demarcation of legitimacy that separates the government from ordinary criminal gangs fades and blurs under close inspection. It does not disappear completely, however, because for some portion of the ruled population, the government’s efforts to sell its legitimacy do succeed. These beguiled individuals are the ones who volunteer for service in the government’s palace guards—its armed forces, police, and other agencies of physical violence and intimidation—and who willingly send their children to be sacrificed in the government’s foreign wars and other adventures. They provide, as it were, legions of “essential idiots,” parallel to the “useful idiots” among the intelligentsia, who fight on the government’s behalf in the war of ideas and ideologies.
From one country to another, the division of society between the hopelessly beguiled and the merely intimidated varies greatly. All governments seek to move the demarcation line so that a greater proportion of those it rules falls in the former class. Thus, all governments carry on ceaseless efforts to convince the people of their competence, good intentions, close representation of the people’s desires, and morally impeccable standards of conduct. Although these efforts provide little more than fodder for bitter laughter among individuals with open eyes and unsullied hearts, they succeed often enough to keep the rulers afloat as they continue their plunder and repression. Their prevailing legitimacy, however, is rarely anything more than ersatz or counterfeit as a sound foundation for a government whose composition, personnel, and conduct are generally desired and approved.
People too often suppose that large social problems can be solved only by deciding ahead of time which particular group of people and procedures hold the key to the solution. While declaring “Let the government handle it” comes across as a solution, it’s no such thing. Instead, it is merely a sign of a simple and baseless faith — a simple and baseless faith that people invested with power will not abuse that power; that political appointees possess or will find better answers than will millions of people pursuing solutions in their own ways, and staking their own resources and reputations on their efforts; that only those ‘solutions’ that are spelled out in statutes and regulations and that have officials paid to implement them are true solutions. So yes, show me a problem and I’ll likely respond “Let the market handle it.” I’ll respond this way because I know that not only is my own meager knowledge and effort never up to the task of solving big problems but that not even the Einsteins or Krugmans or Bushes amongst us can know the best solution to any social problem. Solutions to complex social problems require as many creative minds as possible — and this is precisely what the market delivers.
The crucial monopoly is the State’s control of the use of violence: of the police and armed services, and of the courts – the locus of ultimate decision-making power in disputes over crimes and contracts.
— Murray Rothbard, The Ethics of Liberty
(Source: dionysus-xxx, via antigovernmentextremist)
