Hacker News Reader

Comment by princeverma | Hacker News Reader

Please don't make this a case for bitcoin. This is much more serious and complicated issue and will not get solved just by using bitcoin. I think you are over-romanticising the use of bitcoin, nothing else...

Just saying,..

View on HN

All I said that NSA, Drones and imprisonment of the population for victimless crimes requires money. I would also claim that if taxes were not collected (or would be impossible to collect) with a threat of force, very little number of people would pay them voluntarily. Also, if people were not forced by law to use national currencies for exchanging goods and services, they wouldn't be subject to hidden taxes, such as inflation. Bitcoin makes taxes prohibitively expensive to collect and inflation impossible. How is it an oversimplification then?

> hidden taxes, such as inflation.

Maybe it was a typo, but I think you should double check what inflation means.

The effect of the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply, and making it available to favored banks and the US Treasury at low rates helps cause inflation and has about the same effect as a tax: your holdings are worth less, and somebody else, albeit indirectly, is able to tap into the value that those dollars held.

Sounds like a pretty big stretch to call it a tax in my opinion.

The government has more money and I have less. I'd be interested to hear your suggestions for a better descriptor?

I'm not convinced that the government gets more money when inflation goes up. I've only taken an introductory level economics course, but I'm pretty sure the value of a currency goes down for everyone - government included - when inflation rises.

If it was not forced by law there would be no private property at all.

empirically not true:

http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragme...

Please make a proper argument, nobody is going to read through all of that.

TLDR; Anarchist systems have existed throughout history both alongside and within, and most certainly in awareness of hierarchical systems which they often explicitly reject.

Most assertions about the nature of those societies are based on ignorance. Most relevant to your comment, they tend(ed) to maintain rules, conventions, personal property, arbitrate disputes, take care of the weak, and do any number of other things considered impossible without government. Various types of egalitarian social order have existed, it isn't one monolithic concept, and it certainly doesn't necessarily result in chaos or might-makes-right.

If you want specific examples and actual information, take the time to read the pdf. It is written by an anthropologist, so it is his gig to footnote all this stuff.

How have these anarchist societies fared after hierarchically-driven societies came through? I don't seem to recall it working out well in Africa, Asia, North America, or South America.

That wasn't the discussion I was responding to. If anything, it bolsters my intuition which is: the fact that anarchist societies historically haven't stood up well to the depredations of authoritarian and warlike organizations is probably the reason we think they can't work.

But to do the other things discussed, other than organized warfare, they seem to work just as well as anything else.

I think this point is important when evaluating the need for government in a variety of other contexts, other than war.

> If anything, it bolsters my intuition which is: the fact that anarchist societies historically haven't stood up well to the depredations of authoritarian and warlike organizations is probably the reason we think they can't work.

Sure, but my intuition is that you cannot simultaneously stamp out all authoritarian/warlike organizations. And even if you could, you'd eventually get one more, which would screw the whole world up again.

The idea is one of those "would be nice in theory/won't work in the real world" types of things. I wish it weren't, I really do. But life is about dealing with the hand you're given, not the hand you'd wished you'd have been dealt.

By that logic we would all still be sitting in mud huts. Progress is about imagining a better future and then working to achieve it.

Well, you get people to not ever rape or murder one another and I'll get political schemes to all settle on anarchist societies where major industrial projects still manage to get funded and no one ever tried to take more by force.

David Graeber is a left-anarchist whose work backs me up: those anarchist societies don't have private property, they have personal possessions. You don't get capitalist enterprises without a state.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com