Brainpolice:Again, state privileges are not up for grabs equally by everyone (the highest privilege being decision-making power internal to the institution itself, and the 2nd highest being direct patronage with those who do have such decision-making power; none of this is possessed by the average person). There is no basis for you to claim that it is, that is simply absurd. The average person does not have a direct relationship with the state in which they can easily access legal privileges. The state more fundamentally engaged in patronage with various oligarchies or narrow interest groups. Nothing about La Boetie's writting suggests otherwise, so you bringing his writting up seems to be irrelevant.
Anybody can benefit from the state and anybody can become a part of it, the fact that the rich living of the state intervention in the market is easier to see than the poor receiving welfare is not relevant. Both receive welfare, both are bought off by the state
Brainpolice:In the case of your example, the point is that the "right" to rob people to pay for welfare, the bureaucracy and connected moneyed interests in patronage with it, is a legal privilege exclusively held by a few.
And? If nobody accepted welfare and refused the welfare state. They wouldn't occupy those positions.
Brainpolice:Where did that comment even come from? It doesn't follow from anything stated. Noone is forgetting the evil of the state entirely: to the contrary, the evil of the state is being pointed out! You're being unecessarily hostile and bigoted.
Unecessarily hostile? Coming from a LL I found that amusing
Brainpolice:Big buisiness's relation to the state is not the same as an average individual citezen's relation to the state.
Of course it is, the state rules by consent. It does whatever it can to gain this. That's the state only relation to the people, placating them so at to sustain itself.
Brainpolice:Again, and that point is irrelevant and does nothing to counter my fundamental point. The fact that the state is in some sense dependant on widespread approval does not negate the fact that it is an oligarchy in patronage with oligarchies and its privileges are selectively and unequally distributed.
And? I'm guessing the fact that they're unequally distributed is what really annoys you. This still ignores the simple fact, the state buys off big buisness to sustain itself, just as it does with the poor.
"You don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows"
Bob Dylan
GilesStratton: Brainpolice:In the case of your example, the point is that the "right" to rob people to pay for welfare, the bureaucracy and connected moneyed interests in patronage with it, is a legal privilege exclusively held by a few. And? If nobody accepted welfare and refused the welfare state. They wouldn't occupy those positions.
When you're in a dire situation and a context in which your incentives for helping yourself are highly diminished, I'd like to see you refuse welfare. The welfare state as such is what breeds such dependancy to begin with and amounts to little more than bribery of the poor to keep them just barely at sustainance levels while keeping them in a state of dependancy, and the corporate or plutocratic state is what largely creates the conditions that cause a demand for welfare to begin with. You misplace blame.
Once again, you keep returning to the way in which people passively resign themselves to power as if it refutes the point that legal privilege selectively benefits a few at the expense of the many. It's irrelevant to the point. I think you're using La Boetie out of context to bolster a conservative viewpoint of general distain for the underclasses.
Brainpolice: There is no LL movement. There is LL pandering to people who do not believe in freedom, who believe in using coercion, and who will not respect the right to own property. You have it backwards. The entire point is to get people to believe in and respect those things and not see them as antogonstic with their overall viewpoint. There is no pandering, the whole point is to bring them over. I've watched it occur first hand myself, to see rabid collectivists transformed into individualist anarchists.
There is no LL movement. There is LL pandering to people who do not believe in freedom, who believe in using coercion, and who will not respect the right to own property.
You have it backwards. The entire point is to get people to believe in and respect those things and not see them as antogonstic with their overall viewpoint. There is no pandering, the whole point is to bring them over. I've watched it occur first hand myself, to see rabid collectivists transformed into individualist anarchists.
Indeed.
The videos of Brainpolice, XOmniverse, and Libertyisnotgiven along with discussing philosophical issues with Moragauth on youtube is what started my journey towards shifting my position from being a statist market socialist to a left libertarian anarchist a little over a year ago.
http://aestheticbend.blogspot.com/
Juan: GS:Better yet go do some leftist graffiti. Yeah, whatever. Here's the quote and in no way supports anarchism. However, the right of self-determination of which we speak is not the right of self-determination of nations, but rather the right of self-determination of the inhabitants of every territory large enough to form an independent administrative unit. If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done. This is impracticable only because of compelling technical considerations, which make it necessary that a region be governed as a single administrative unit and that the right of self-determination be restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country. Sounds like a clear endorsement of statism and democracy to me....
GS:Better yet go do some leftist graffiti.
Ok, I was wrong, congratulations.
aestheticbend: Brainpolice: There is no LL movement. There is LL pandering to people who do not believe in freedom, who believe in using coercion, and who will not respect the right to own property. You have it backwards. The entire point is to get people to believe in and respect those things and not see them as antogonstic with their overall viewpoint. There is no pandering, the whole point is to bring them over. I've watched it occur first hand myself, to see rabid collectivists transformed into individualist anarchists. Indeed. The videos of Brainpolice, XOmniverse, and Libertyisnotgiven along with discussing philosophical issues with Moragauth on youtube is what started my journey towards shifting my position from being a statist market socialist to a left libertarian anarchist a little over a year ago.
On a related note, partially due to the youtube market anarchist's consistant debating with people like mr1001nights, some of the collectivists have come over to the market-oriented or individualist-oriented side. I can think of quite a few people who, 6 months ago I was debating with, and who now are taking individualist anarchist positions. While some might want to make me feel bad for being involved with youtube, it has been a good forum for developing one's own ideas and exchanging with others. The market anarchist "community" on there is something that is expanding, and as such isn't something to ignore outright.
Brainpolice:When you're in a dire situation and a context in which your incentives for helping yourself are highly diminished, I'd like to see you refuse welfare.
Appeals to the emotion now?
Brainpolice:On a related note, partially due to the youtube market anarchist's consistant debating with people like mr1001nights, some of the collectivists have come over to the market-oriented or individualist-oriented side. I can think of quite a few people who, 6 months ago I was debating with, and who now are taking individualist anarchist positions. While some might want to make me feel bad for being involved with youtube, it has been a good forum for developing one's own ideas and exchanging with others. The market anarchist "community" on there is something that is expanding, and as such isn't something to ignore outright.
Your videos are actually pretty good, although you sound really depressing. XOmniverse needs a girlfriend. And a shave. I think you know how hard it was for me to post that, but it is true.
But I'll say it again, if these so-called converts won't respect property rights, and embrace the NAP, then you're kidding yourself that you're winning friends and spreading influence. Anarcho-communists are not going to tolerate your claims to property when the state is abolished.
And the risk of pandering to these folks, is that you begin to promote a form of compromised libertarianism. Like allowing Joe the Plumber to frame the discourse within his minuscule wheelhouse of knowledge.
If you find something evil that wobbles, push it. - Gary North
GilesStratton: Brainpolice:When you're in a dire situation and a context in which your incentives for helping yourself are highly diminished, I'd like to see you refuse welfare. Appeals to the emotion now?
No appeal to emotion intended. The point is that the political system creates the bad incentives that perpetuates dependency and contributes to the negative conditions which creates the demand for welfare states to begin with. Welfare provides a disincentive to employment, while wage laws tend to diminish the labor pool or be made up for in a higher cost of living. Meanwhile, inflation eats at people's savings and in conjunction with the other interventions it continues to cause a situation in which wages dont catch up with the cost of living. This is a significant part of the context in which one must understand people's decisions to go on welfare. While there are such thing as welfare queens, it's hardly the case that everyone whos on welfare just woke up one day and said "oh boy how I envy the rich, I think I deserve to live off of them".
liberty student: Brainpolice:On a related note, partially due to the youtube market anarchist's consistant debating with people like mr1001nights, some of the collectivists have come over to the market-oriented or individualist-oriented side. I can think of quite a few people who, 6 months ago I was debating with, and who now are taking individualist anarchist positions. While some might want to make me feel bad for being involved with youtube, it has been a good forum for developing one's own ideas and exchanging with others. The market anarchist "community" on there is something that is expanding, and as such isn't something to ignore outright. Your videos are actually pretty good, although you sound really depressing. XOmniverse needs a girlfriend. And a shave. I think you know how hard it was for me to post that, but it is true. But I'll say it again, if these so-called converts won't respect property rights, and embrace the NAP, then you're kidding yourself that you're winning friends and spreading influence. Anarcho-communists are not going to tolerate your claims to property when the state is abolished. And the risk of pandering to these folks, is that you begin to promote a form of compromised libertarianism. Like allowing Joe the Plumber to frame the discourse within his minuscule wheelhouse of knowledge.
I don't "pander" to anyone, I say exactly what I think. And if one keeps insisting on the concept of voluntary pluralism, over time who one's allies and enemies are becomes clear as reflected in the degree to which they opt for "live and let live" or the degree to which they consistantly remain hostile and continue to push for their socio-economic model as a universal imperative.
I've long since concluded that those who consistantly reject polycentrism are statists in disguise or statists in practise. People like mr1001nights get on my nerves precisely because they are marxists in anarchist disguise, which is why I've tried to make a point of differentiating marxism (the root of authoritarian socialism) from genuine social anarchism (the disagreements between Marx and Proudhon or between Marx and Bakunin are handy in this regaurd), and some of the lefty-anarchists swayed my way on this.
Anarchism without adjectives (in short, voluntary pluralism) is not a compromised form of libertarianism, it is the inevitable consequence of a thoroughly applied thick libertarianism in which matters of personal preferance become inconsequential.
However, the right of self-determination of which we speak is not the right of self-determination of nations, but rather the right of self-determination of the inhabitants of every territory large enough to form an independent administrative unit. If it were in any way possible to grant this right of self-determination to every individual person, it would have to be done. This is impracticable only because of compelling technical considerations, which make it necessary that a region be governed as a single administrative unit and that the right of self-determination be restricted to the will of the majority of the inhabitants of areas large enough to count as territorial units in the administration of the country.
The right of self-determination down to the individual level is, in a word, anarchism. No, it does sound like Mises was an anarchist at heart.
To darkness I condemn you...
February 17 - 1600 - Giordano Bruno is burnt alive by the catholic church. Aquinas : "much more reason is there for heretics, as soon as they are convicted of heresy, to be not only excommunicated but even put to death."
Sigh this is so easily gainsaid. Yes, I took it in context. He qualifies his statement by saying he finds the notion impractical. So what? As for the rest, that is to be expected given the topic of the book... Mises did not have his head stuck in the clouds and thus did deal with issues concerning real, existing institutions, like the state.
liberty student:Comments please.
A number of thoughts came up reading the exchange.
1. Corporations (joint-stock companies) are free market institutions. "Corporations vs. the Market" is a contradictory title.
2. If some forms of business benefit as a result of being able to avoid a general burden that government is imposing on the rest of the industry, these benefits
are passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. (Agorists should probably favour this)
3. Roderick Long doesn't have a clear thesis. Are corporations in general bad or just some? Are they bad because they benefit from state interventions or
because they lobby for the interventions? He doesn't say clearly whether they benefit on net or lose on net from state interventions. He makes many strong
suggestions, but never offers and decisive proof.
4. He makes no distinction between aggressive and defensive bribery. If a larger business can more easily bribe politicians, this may be a blessing as well as a
curse.
5. He dosen't have any clear definitions for many of the words that he uses, such as: capitalism, free market, corporatism, power. Nor are the definitions apparent
from the context in which he uses the words.
6. He has no theory of the corporation. He clearly hasn't read Robert Hessen's "In Defense of the Corporation", or MES Chapters 6.8 and 6.9.
I'm not really sure how much Block and Huebert differ from Long in theory. The difference might be one of semantics, or of emphasis. Long doesn't really have a clear position.
Liberals don't mean to destroy people. They just do.
Why are you presenting this as something new? I've read it. It would tie into his "impracticabiity" qualifier.
Why are you presenting this as something new?
I've read it.
It would tie into his "impracticabiity" qualifier.
Because you say so ?
Yawn. No, because the concerns he raises regarding anarchism are all concerns regarding its practicability.
Brainpolice:I don't "pander" to anyone, I say exactly what I think.
Yeah, sorry. I meant the sort of pandering the libertarian left does, not you specifically.
You didn't even read the whole chapter, let alone the whole book.
Prove it.
Mises is talking about so called national self-determination and the 'right' of individuals to choose what national government will rule them.
Yes, which might involve self-determination down to the individual level, were it practicable.
Construing that as support for anarchy is nonsese. But I understand you're parroting some party line or other here.
You're confusing me for yourself. You didn't do anything to show my interpretation of Mises is incorrect. I'd love to know which "party line" you're referring to.
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