Comment by snitko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snitko | Hacker News Reader

>We have to learn how to play politics. There will be voices who call for revolution, or who publicly declare that playing this game is tantamount to aligning ourselves with government. I don't believe that these are productive discussions.

It's not aligning yourself with government, it's begging your masters to throw you a bone. What kind of incentive do you think a protest creates? Would politicians suddenly shut down all surveillance programs simply because people on the streets are protesting? If you were a politician, would you? Not likely. You're already elected, you're paid and you have private interests at your back who DO pay you money that directly depend on your ability to pass laws in favor of those interests. The best a protest can do is to incentivize government to create an appearance of change.

Look at history. Protest rarely solved anything. They either transformed into bloody revolutions (which didn't do any good either) or were largely ignored. No, you don't need to protest. You need to ignore the government as much as you can and tell others to. Use Bitcoin instead of govt currency and don't pay them a cut in the form of taxes, use Bitmessage instead of email, use VPN and TOR, don't send your children to school where they are indoctrinated. And never ever vote. Voting is begging your masters. Have some pride.

don't pay them a cut in the form of taxes

Illegal. You will be jailed for a very long time. Not something the I, or the average Joe Schmoe, will be willing to risk.

I certainly wouldn't advocate tax evasion, it would be immoral to ask people to risk the leftovers of their freedom and confront IRS. What I meant was, don't give them a cut unless your transactins can be effectively tracked. When you tip someone in cash, most likely they're not paying any taxes from that. And there's currently no law requiring you to pay taxes in Bitcoin unless you previously converted it to fiat. Also keeping your savings in gold, silver or Bitcoin saves them from another tax - inflation.

The government presumes that tipped workers get a certain amount in tips, and taxes as if they got it.

So without "your masters", who's going to actually enforce the worth of money? Who's going to enforce property titles?

Why do you believe the entire society you know and like will run with government cut out?

And who enforces the value of Gold, or Silver, or Bitcoin? And why is it impossible to enforce property rights without a monopolistic protection service, which is government police force?

>Why do you believe the entire society you know and like will run with government cut out?

Why do you believe the demand for safety, property rights and anything else government currently provides, would vanish in the absence of government? And why do you believe the market cannot satisfy this demand?

Property rights are enforced through violence, ultimately. Whatever group provides the property rights is a government. To govern is to create rights, to create rights is to govern. Even if it's you with a shotgun next to your nation state of a cabin in the woods.

The point is, that when it's me with a shotgun or a hired private protection agency, we enforce property rights at the expense of property owners. When it's government, it takes someone else's money by force to provide this service. Thus, with government, you have double violence and a lot less accountability, because you simply can't stop paying if you dislike the service.

> The point is, that when it's me with a shotgun or a hired private protection agency, we enforce property rights at the expense of property owners.

Same thing with the government.

> you simply can't stop paying if you dislike the service.

You can do that to governments, too. Of course, many governmens don't like it if you do that, and retaliate. Of course, individual actors who assume defense of their own property rights and become governments (whether they acknowledge the name or not) by getting others to sign on with them also do that, and, unlike modern representative governments, tend not to have even theoretically available constraints to limit the extent of their retaliation.

Of course you can stop paying the IRS if you dislike the service. You just end up in jail or with your wages garnished. Similarly, if you dislike the service of your private protection agency (which is still a government, just not monopolistic), then if you stop paying you'll just end up dead, unless you can pay for equivalent protection from someone else. This is how mafia protection works, for example. Currently, we don't kill people for running out of money, and debtor's prisons are illegal.

Furthermore, in such a system if you have more money than the guy next to you, you can pay to have more rights than the guy next to you. A philosophy of a la carte rights to the highest bidder is absolutely materialistic and denies the fundamental equality of all humans. Why revert to being animals? Why do you believe that some humans are more valuable than other humans?

Yes, abuse of government authority is unpleasant, but if like me you find it distasteful that the US can abuse its economic power to trample people in other nations around the world, how do you tolerate the idea of billionaires doing whatever the hell they please, including bribing all the "private protection agencies" of the people that get in their way? All that happens in the canonical libertarian ideal is that there are even less restrictions on the behavior of the very rich than we have today.

Thanks, I think your questions are important, because those are the exact questions people often ask when presented the idea of private protection agencies and other libertarian ideas. So I'd like to address them and maybe try to demonstrate that those ideas would indeed work (so please let me know if I managed to convince you at least a little bit).

>Similarly, if you dislike the service of your private protection agency (which is still a government, just not monopolistic), then if you stop paying you'll just end up dead, unless you can pay for equivalent protection from someone else.

So, at the very least I already have a choice between one protection agency and another. If one promises to kill me if I cancel my subscription, I simply go to another agency that will be happy to have my money and ask them to protect me against the one I dislike. Because both agencies are in the business to make money, they realize that violence is more expensive and nothing happens.

Then people would usually say "But what if two agencies form a cartel"? Well, in that case, nothing really prevents a third agency to spring up as a competition and take customers away. Historically, cartels break down very fast without any intervention because one of the cartel members usually breaks the rules or an outside competitor emerges. Also, intimidating even one customer because he decides to unsubscribe is very likely to cause a chain reaction where a company simply loses its business.

A cartel, though, is still a better situation than a government. If a cartel decides to kill or detain anyone who's not paying, it cannot actually claim, like government does, that it's a legitimate action, because people would take it for what it is - a violent action by a criminal gang. A great majority of people would be very likely to at least stop paying the cartel as soon as they realize it doesn't do them any good and some violent resistance is also very likely. A cartel is in the business of making money, thus it is in its interest to make more money and attract more customers. They can't print money, nor can they steal without losing a lot of customers.

>if like me you find it distasteful that the US can abuse its economic power to trample people in other nations around the world, how do you tolerate the idea of billionaires doing whatever the hell they please

Billionaires can't really do what they please to the extent a government can. First of all, any violence that is likely to happen would be paid for out of this billionaires pockets. Governments, on the other hand, don't pay for violence. They steal money from taxpayers, then use these money to finance wars, steal more money and indoctrinate people, convincing them that what they do is not actually theft.

I don't really see rich people starting wars or intimidating other people. Why? Because it's a costly activity. Creating actual value is profitable. Inducing violence to steal money is only profitable when you can steal more than you spend in the long run.

Look, I believe that the proposed system could work for people on average. The mafia works well for the people it protects, on average. Ask your average Sicilian shop owner if they are happy to pay the mafia for protection and they will tell you that yes they are, otherwise their store would surely get broken into.

My problem is with the edge cases. What happens if I don't have any money, insurance, friends, family, or employment prospects? For example, if I'm schizophrenic, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and on the street? Outside of charitable giving, there's no guarantee that other customers will care about me, no company cares about me, so who goes to jail when I get murdered because I defecated on your lawn last night?

As far as rich people go, basically they tend to run corporations and history shows that they abuse their power as much as possible to drive prices down. We see this with oil, diamonds, running shoes, electronics, etc. etc. etc. Corporations would be even more able to buy laws than they already are. Want to dump some nuclear waste in the river in China? Well, if it's going to make your profits go up enough in the US, you can probably afford to buy the regulations you need. To some extent this already happens. I want less of this, not more.

It's strange, I'm having the same argument in a related thread concurrently, but basically my ideal is the opposite of yours: one government, one currency, one set of laws, no borders, no passports. I think they're about as likely as each other though, that is to say not at all anytime soon.

>My problem is with the edge cases.

What happens if a government starts abusing its power, spying on its own citizens, starting wars at their expense and detaining and killing innocent people all over the world? Or what if a person receiving a welfare check drinks and gambles on it? Because if we are to play the "what if" game, we should play it both ways.

You can't completely avoid edge cases in any system. But you can minimize them and you can also be moral. Edge cases are no justification for the existence of government and legalized theft. If you really care about those unfortunate people, convince me to donate to a charity! Don't come to me with some IRS officers and steal my money because you think it's the right thing to do.

Also a note about mafia. > Ask your average Sicilian shop owner if they are happy to pay the mafia for protection and they will tell you that yes they are, otherwise their store would surely get broken into.

In this case, the situation is also distorted by the existence of a government. Government collects taxes and it doesn't care that much about the actual protection of people from mafia. It also controls tightly any possible market-solutions, making it prohibitively expensive for private companies to enter the protection market. Mafia knows it and exploits the situation, basically establishing a monopoly in one particular region.

> What happens if a government starts abusing its power, spying on its own citizens, starting wars at their expense and detaining and killing innocent people all over the world?

You mean like the US? This is why I like the idea of one world government.

Let's treat each country in the world like a single individual, such that we have about 200 people on the planet. To me, this approximates how an anarcho-capitalist society would function, since there is (basically) no governing body. Yet the rich individuals in this system quite clearly abuse the poor individuals. Life is very nice though if you're a rich individual. I cannot see any guarantee that this won't happen with true anarchy.

If we had one world government, everybody would be subject to the same laws, there would be no outsourcing of torture and environmental destruction, there would be no military, and there would be no war. Importantly, your lot in life would not depend on where you were born, since there would be no immigration barriers. And there would be the full spectrum of political choices available.

Why is it such a problem that the US government collects taxes from a population earning fiat currency in an economy that the government provides? I like paying taxes, it keeps the country running. It also means that those people less fortunate than me are guaranteed some level of basic protection.

The market doesn't exist without property titles.

Your misconception is that it's government who creates property titles. That's not true at all. Even in the animal world, territorial rights are enforced by animals themselves or groups of animals. They don't have any kind of government.

Now what government does is it provides a service of protecting that property. Indeed, it's much better than having to protect your own property yourself all the time, but it's much worse than hiring private protection agencies. Two reasons: 1) you can't stop paying for the government service if you dislike it 2) customers who may need various levels of protection cannot subscribe to various service plans, thus some customers get inadequate levels or protection, while some subsidize protection of others.

Again, enforcing property rights != government. Government is just one way of doing it.

> Your misconception is that it's government who creates property titles.

Because it is.

> Even in the animal world, territorial rights are enforced by animals themselves or groups of animals.

The power of the each individual, or collaborating group, to claim as much territory as they can effectively defend, independent of who held it before, is pretty much the opposite of what "property" and "property titles" are.

> Now what government does is it provides a service of protecting that property. Indeed, it's much better than having to protect your own property yourself all the time, but it's much worse than hiring private protection agencies. Two reasons: 1) you can't stop paying for the government service if you dislike it

Yes, you can.

Now, there may be negative consequences to this, but, in the absence of a government to constrain the action of "private protection agencies" (which are, de facto, governments) exercising force to defend property, the same can be expected. In fact, where such private protection agencies have played a major role in protecting property (with or without the consent of whatever de jure government nominally operated in the area), retaliation against those who attempt to opt-out of their "protection" has been a frequent feature of their operation.

> 2) customers who may need various levels of protection cannot subscribe to various service plans, thus some customers get inadequate levels or protection, while some subsidize protection of others.

I find it interesting that you posit "the rich can't buy better protection of their property rights than the poor" as a problem with government, but I think you'll find considerable disagreement on two grounds with that claim:

* First, disagreement that the absence of equal protection is a problem, and * Second, disagreement that the absence of an ability for the rich to buy better protection is, in fact, a feature of government in the real world (however much it might be in some theoretical models.)

Then you would have to give me your definition of what property is, because I think we might have a crucial disagreement on that and should start from there.

Well, property means that one holds resources regardless of one's strength with which to defend them.

I see. So by that definition guardian journalists should have their hard-drives in tact now.

The problem with this assumption is that, while a nice idea, it is completely detached from reality and it obscures the truth. If I tell you that yes, I support equality for all, while at the same time I covertly abuse my power, it doesn't make everyone equal. It actually makes people more unequal, because it distorts their understanding of reality, which is that a more powerful player wins. If they falsely believe the promises of government that it wants more equality for all, they set themselves up. If, however, they understand that under any circumstances, the more powerful is gonna win, they will strive to compete, not to rely and beg.

Well yeah, but if you're talking about property as "might makes right", then there's no reason for the working class not to just rise up and take what's ours, ie: everything.

It's been tried before. What happens when the working class rises and takes what's theirs is that after some time, a new elite emerges thanks to this working class, pretending to have the same values, while actually screwing this very same class even more.

The crucial distinction to make here is what's yours and what's not. If people agree that one billionaire made his money honestly, by creating companies where people work voluntarily and that provide products and services people really need, thus actually creating value - then there can be no justification for anyone to go and take part or all of this billionaire's money. If they agree he stole his money or extracted them by force, then he's a criminal and all of the money he made in this way should be confiscated. But there's no middle ground here. You can't make a person kinda-guilty because he's rich.

But back to "might makes right". The collective might of the people is always greater than the might of any organization, be it government or a corporation. If people understood the distinction of two ways to get rich I described above, they could easily support protection agencies that would prosecute criminals, but leave alone and protect rich people who made their money honestly. This kind of arrangement would promote a greater degree of equality. And we've seen this historically too: the great rises in standards of living for the poor happened where markets flourished and regulations were minimal (scandinavian countries including, read their policies throughout the 20th century). Yes, rich people became richer. But so did the poor.

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