r0ast_p0tat0es
Thinker
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2010
- Messages
- 188
Ok. I'm really sick of the day-to-day, horse-blinkered drudgery of popular politics. I thought it would be fun if we got back to basics for a while, although I do hope that we can do it in good humour. Remember, this is just teh_internets, and someone is always going to be wrong.
Now, for me, coming to accept the universal criminality of the government felt very similar to becoming an atheist. I have come to view the voluntarist position as a skeptical one, and the statist position as a faith-based, irrational belief. Since most of us are atheists, I trust that you will not regard this as insulting, as we regard religious people in a similar fashion without the intention to insult.
In order to understand how one can come to voluntarism from a skeptical perspective, just fill in the blank in the following analogy: "The church is to God what the government is to ___________?"
The country? The people? The state.
Now... These things only exist as concepts, in precisely the same way that God only exists as a concept. Their only reflection in physical reality are the effigies, texts and symbols that we arrange in their honour. The real organisations behind the things they allegedly do are the church and government, and those contracted or coerced by them.
Up until the Enlightenment, religion and government were virtually the same thing. At a basic level, kings or emperors justified their rule by divine mandate, while clergy relied on the patronage of the government to prosper and survive. Religion evolved from disorganised superstition and the government evolved from disorganised banditry, but they were both born together about six thousand years ago in Ur, present-day Iraq, together with the first writing, and "civilisation" in general. It was writing that made organised religion, government and empire possible, among other things. If one looks at the 1st and 2nd-generation empires that emerged in the Middle East in ancient times, it is obvious that the imperial state was derived from a religious belief. Ancient Egypt is another obvious example of the head-of-state literally being god on Earth.
I'm sure we're all aware that the classical democracies in Greece and Rome were heavily informed by superstitious belief. It was only in the 18th Century, really, that some governments became secular with the advent of modern democracy - the United States of America being the obvious example.
In terms of its effects on statism, the political Enlightenment of Europe and its former colonial empire has been akin to that of the Protestant Reformation on religion. In fact, it is no coincidence at all that the Enlightenment hit hardest in Protestant countries - that the USA, Netherlands and Britain are all Protestant, for instance, and that absolutist elements within Germany tended to either be Catholic or Prussian. (Prussia was really in a class of its own in terms of state fanaticism in the 18th and early 19th Centuries.)
From an honest, skeptical perspective, the Protestant Reformation is not sufficient an alleviation of dogma, is it? Sure, the corrupt and evil Catholic clergy aren't in control any more, but where are we two hundred years later? Look at the state of Protestantism in America, and tell me it isn't corrupt, absolutist and intolerant. Look at the government and tell me the same thing, for that matter.
The difficulty with religion - no matter how much you tone it down and try to make it friendly - is that it rests upon a false premise: that god exists. The government suffers from a very similar difficulty, but it sounds glib and inane if you phrase it in the same way. The state doesn't exist, but what this means in the context of politics is that there's really no justification for state coercion... War, taxation, conscription, imprisonment, prohibition etc.
Now this is where the monkey poo usually starts flying. You see... The reward for following a religion comes in the next life, but a secular state has to provide perceived rewards to its constituents. Look at any pro-state ideology from libertarianism to communism, and they all want the state to provide them with something. The libertarian thinks that only the government can provide roads and national defence, or whatever, while the communist has been completely enraptured and thinks the government is the source of all productivity, but either way... They have this belief that there are certain fundamental things, essential to their way of life, that only the government can conceivably provide, and that's why it's a necessary evil at the very least and an omnipotent provider at best.
Now, because they oppose the state, anarchists are always assumed to be these Scrooge McDuck/Monty Burns types with no compassion for their fellow being and a severe, sociopathic drive for personal wealth above all else. It ain't true. Let me illustrate the problem of this presumption for you, in a logical fashion...
Why would you rather vote for a tax increase than donate to a charity?
Because you think more money can be raised by taxation, I suppose, which is a fallacy. Maybe it's malicious for some people... They think that rich people aren't going to donate, because they're inherently selfish, despite the fact that we can see they donate as often as anyone else in proportion to their income, if not more so. Does anyone really believe that rich people are inherently more selfish on average than anyone else, or can we burn that strawman right now?
The thing is, if everyone were an ******* who never donates anything to anyone, then the damned bill you're voting for wouldn't pass. I want to stay away from calling taxation theft, although it obviously is, because I know people get teary-eyed and imagine orphans starving while fat businessmen gloat and eat caviar, but those same people would not appreciate it if a bum stole their wallet, no matter how hungry he was.
From an economic perspective, there is nothing the government "provides" that could not be provided by the market to most and charity to those in genuine need. I'm not saying it would be a hundred percent perfect, but it WOULD be a damned-side better than the current situation. All you have to do is recognise the simple fact that the government has no more wealth than the individual members of society - it has a monopoly on the money-printing machine, sure, and it has the power to condemn your children and great-grandchildren to perpetual debt, sure, but that does not generate wealth!
The private market could provide roads. The typical argument against the notion is the "externalities" one - roads provide more benefits to more people than could ever translate into returns for the original investor, hence no one would ever build a road in the private market because they'd be so pissed off by all the people they make happier for free... Yeah, it really makes no sense at all. I don't know about you, but if I as an investor get a fair and decent return on my investment, then I'm happy. I don't care if other people are made happy for free, provided they aren't actually stealing and causing me a loss... in fact that makes me even happier, because it automatically gives me a small level of power and influence in society.
Then again, who knows what would happen if the RIAA ran America's roads, holy Christ... (Of course their evil would not be possible without the state.)
Let's talk about evil corporations, now that we've mentioned the RIAA. There's a lot of entirely righteous anger directed at corporate evil and abuse in America. The anger is righteous because the harm is real, but it's directed entirely at the wrong people...
The fact is, banks would not have bought up everyone's bad debt (they knew it was bad!) if the government wasn't going to "bail them out". If they didn't know that they were 'too big to fail'. Yes, the individual businessmen, bankers and day-traders who knowingly conspire to defraud the public out of their life savings are evil, but their evil is enabled entirely by the state. They are not evil because they are businessmen... They are evil because they use state coercion against the public to further their own interests. Every economic collapse in the modern world, back to the goddam tulip crisis, was heralded by currency debasement by the government. As far as I am aware, this is not controversial history. When you start manipulating the currency to suit unsustainable spending habits, you inevitably create a situation in which short-term gambling on the stock market becomes more viable than sensible, long-term investment. When you keep interest rates artificially low, to keep borrowing easy for the biggest debtor around - the government - then you encourage inflation, debase the currency and encourage mass-borrowing, which is a recipe for collapse.
Let's consider the BP screw-up in the Gulf, because that's a fairly obvious example of a corporation doing something really harmful.
British Petroleum, formerly the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, is about as private as the Dutch East India Company. They are essentially a state enterprise. They've moved onto the public stock-market (casino of death that it is), so they aren't seen as one any more, but they really are. Look what informs British and American foreign policy... If you think the big petro companies don't depend on the state for their survival as they know it, then you're blind.
In any case, it's fairly obvious that regulations were not followed at BP... In fact it seems that the company has a pretty dubious safety record in general.
So the automatic cry is one for more regulation by the state, because God knows that will sort them out! Yes, the state which simply hadn't considered oil industry safety until now... No, there were only 400 federal and state agencies/commitees/etcs with concurrent jurisdiction over such matters before the incident, I'm sure the 401st will be the charm! It would not have been possible for the government not to know about the safety issues at BP. Either they didn't care, or they were criminally inept. Either way, trying again makes no rational sense. This is like banging your head against a wall. It's like asking the mafia to improve safety at their bootleg hooch still. They obviously do not care, and voting for the next smiling candidate who invariably say that they do is just painfully gullible.
No one would approve of a charity which stole money from people, no matter who they were giving it to. No one would re-hire a nightwatchman who had failed consistently with no good excuse on dozens of occasions... And yet this is what people do when they vote for any party in government.
Economic arguments aside, a very old function of the state has been the provision of 'law and order', and this is something most statists approve of, even if they recognise all the economic problems with state intervention. Without the state there'd be no laws, and you'd have the Montreal Police riots all over again every day forever more and we'd all kill ourselves in an orgy of animalistic violence...
Isn't that Christians' major gripe with atheism? Don't they think that if people lose their belief in God, they will inevitably become amoral nihilists with no sense of right or wrong? Don't we poke holes through that argument quite easily? It's usually along the lines of, "If the only reason you do not sin is fear of being caught, then you are morally bankrupt." So we need the state because most people are morally bankrupt? And yet you believe in democracy, which is "rule by most people"? Yeah.
And I'm pretty sure I've never heard an atheist come back with "There is no god regardless, but if you do evil the state will punish you!" Because the Christian would immediately reply, "Oh yes? And what informs the state with regards to morals?"
And that would be a bloody good comeback. Indeed, fellow atheists, what does inform the state with regards to morals? The democratic process, I suppose. But the whole reason we need a state is because most people are ********, and would go on the rampage without one... It's self-contradictory, folks! It's actually quite insane, and I mean that entirely literally. If most people weren't ********, then we wouldn't need a state! If most people are ********, then we're screwed no matter what we do, but having a state just empowers them further!
The reason you had the Montreal riots was because everyone knew the police were going to go on strike beforehand, and a crowd of scumbags prepared for the occasion because they knew that people weren't prepared to defend themselves when the police were gone... That they'd been disarmed literally and figuratively by the irrational belief that the state would keep them safe.
You are always going to have scumbags in society, I think... But they are outnumbered by decent people. As long as there is no monopoly on force, decent people will always be more powerful than the scumbags. A state is a monopoly on force. A state empowers evil, and does nothing good that decent people could not have done of their own individual volition.
Now, for me, coming to accept the universal criminality of the government felt very similar to becoming an atheist. I have come to view the voluntarist position as a skeptical one, and the statist position as a faith-based, irrational belief. Since most of us are atheists, I trust that you will not regard this as insulting, as we regard religious people in a similar fashion without the intention to insult.
In order to understand how one can come to voluntarism from a skeptical perspective, just fill in the blank in the following analogy: "The church is to God what the government is to ___________?"
The country? The people? The state.
Now... These things only exist as concepts, in precisely the same way that God only exists as a concept. Their only reflection in physical reality are the effigies, texts and symbols that we arrange in their honour. The real organisations behind the things they allegedly do are the church and government, and those contracted or coerced by them.
Up until the Enlightenment, religion and government were virtually the same thing. At a basic level, kings or emperors justified their rule by divine mandate, while clergy relied on the patronage of the government to prosper and survive. Religion evolved from disorganised superstition and the government evolved from disorganised banditry, but they were both born together about six thousand years ago in Ur, present-day Iraq, together with the first writing, and "civilisation" in general. It was writing that made organised religion, government and empire possible, among other things. If one looks at the 1st and 2nd-generation empires that emerged in the Middle East in ancient times, it is obvious that the imperial state was derived from a religious belief. Ancient Egypt is another obvious example of the head-of-state literally being god on Earth.
I'm sure we're all aware that the classical democracies in Greece and Rome were heavily informed by superstitious belief. It was only in the 18th Century, really, that some governments became secular with the advent of modern democracy - the United States of America being the obvious example.
In terms of its effects on statism, the political Enlightenment of Europe and its former colonial empire has been akin to that of the Protestant Reformation on religion. In fact, it is no coincidence at all that the Enlightenment hit hardest in Protestant countries - that the USA, Netherlands and Britain are all Protestant, for instance, and that absolutist elements within Germany tended to either be Catholic or Prussian. (Prussia was really in a class of its own in terms of state fanaticism in the 18th and early 19th Centuries.)
From an honest, skeptical perspective, the Protestant Reformation is not sufficient an alleviation of dogma, is it? Sure, the corrupt and evil Catholic clergy aren't in control any more, but where are we two hundred years later? Look at the state of Protestantism in America, and tell me it isn't corrupt, absolutist and intolerant. Look at the government and tell me the same thing, for that matter.
The difficulty with religion - no matter how much you tone it down and try to make it friendly - is that it rests upon a false premise: that god exists. The government suffers from a very similar difficulty, but it sounds glib and inane if you phrase it in the same way. The state doesn't exist, but what this means in the context of politics is that there's really no justification for state coercion... War, taxation, conscription, imprisonment, prohibition etc.
Now this is where the monkey poo usually starts flying. You see... The reward for following a religion comes in the next life, but a secular state has to provide perceived rewards to its constituents. Look at any pro-state ideology from libertarianism to communism, and they all want the state to provide them with something. The libertarian thinks that only the government can provide roads and national defence, or whatever, while the communist has been completely enraptured and thinks the government is the source of all productivity, but either way... They have this belief that there are certain fundamental things, essential to their way of life, that only the government can conceivably provide, and that's why it's a necessary evil at the very least and an omnipotent provider at best.
Now, because they oppose the state, anarchists are always assumed to be these Scrooge McDuck/Monty Burns types with no compassion for their fellow being and a severe, sociopathic drive for personal wealth above all else. It ain't true. Let me illustrate the problem of this presumption for you, in a logical fashion...
Why would you rather vote for a tax increase than donate to a charity?
Because you think more money can be raised by taxation, I suppose, which is a fallacy. Maybe it's malicious for some people... They think that rich people aren't going to donate, because they're inherently selfish, despite the fact that we can see they donate as often as anyone else in proportion to their income, if not more so. Does anyone really believe that rich people are inherently more selfish on average than anyone else, or can we burn that strawman right now?
The thing is, if everyone were an ******* who never donates anything to anyone, then the damned bill you're voting for wouldn't pass. I want to stay away from calling taxation theft, although it obviously is, because I know people get teary-eyed and imagine orphans starving while fat businessmen gloat and eat caviar, but those same people would not appreciate it if a bum stole their wallet, no matter how hungry he was.
From an economic perspective, there is nothing the government "provides" that could not be provided by the market to most and charity to those in genuine need. I'm not saying it would be a hundred percent perfect, but it WOULD be a damned-side better than the current situation. All you have to do is recognise the simple fact that the government has no more wealth than the individual members of society - it has a monopoly on the money-printing machine, sure, and it has the power to condemn your children and great-grandchildren to perpetual debt, sure, but that does not generate wealth!
The private market could provide roads. The typical argument against the notion is the "externalities" one - roads provide more benefits to more people than could ever translate into returns for the original investor, hence no one would ever build a road in the private market because they'd be so pissed off by all the people they make happier for free... Yeah, it really makes no sense at all. I don't know about you, but if I as an investor get a fair and decent return on my investment, then I'm happy. I don't care if other people are made happy for free, provided they aren't actually stealing and causing me a loss... in fact that makes me even happier, because it automatically gives me a small level of power and influence in society.
Then again, who knows what would happen if the RIAA ran America's roads, holy Christ... (Of course their evil would not be possible without the state.)
Let's talk about evil corporations, now that we've mentioned the RIAA. There's a lot of entirely righteous anger directed at corporate evil and abuse in America. The anger is righteous because the harm is real, but it's directed entirely at the wrong people...
The fact is, banks would not have bought up everyone's bad debt (they knew it was bad!) if the government wasn't going to "bail them out". If they didn't know that they were 'too big to fail'. Yes, the individual businessmen, bankers and day-traders who knowingly conspire to defraud the public out of their life savings are evil, but their evil is enabled entirely by the state. They are not evil because they are businessmen... They are evil because they use state coercion against the public to further their own interests. Every economic collapse in the modern world, back to the goddam tulip crisis, was heralded by currency debasement by the government. As far as I am aware, this is not controversial history. When you start manipulating the currency to suit unsustainable spending habits, you inevitably create a situation in which short-term gambling on the stock market becomes more viable than sensible, long-term investment. When you keep interest rates artificially low, to keep borrowing easy for the biggest debtor around - the government - then you encourage inflation, debase the currency and encourage mass-borrowing, which is a recipe for collapse.
Let's consider the BP screw-up in the Gulf, because that's a fairly obvious example of a corporation doing something really harmful.
British Petroleum, formerly the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, is about as private as the Dutch East India Company. They are essentially a state enterprise. They've moved onto the public stock-market (casino of death that it is), so they aren't seen as one any more, but they really are. Look what informs British and American foreign policy... If you think the big petro companies don't depend on the state for their survival as they know it, then you're blind.
In any case, it's fairly obvious that regulations were not followed at BP... In fact it seems that the company has a pretty dubious safety record in general.
So the automatic cry is one for more regulation by the state, because God knows that will sort them out! Yes, the state which simply hadn't considered oil industry safety until now... No, there were only 400 federal and state agencies/commitees/etcs with concurrent jurisdiction over such matters before the incident, I'm sure the 401st will be the charm! It would not have been possible for the government not to know about the safety issues at BP. Either they didn't care, or they were criminally inept. Either way, trying again makes no rational sense. This is like banging your head against a wall. It's like asking the mafia to improve safety at their bootleg hooch still. They obviously do not care, and voting for the next smiling candidate who invariably say that they do is just painfully gullible.
No one would approve of a charity which stole money from people, no matter who they were giving it to. No one would re-hire a nightwatchman who had failed consistently with no good excuse on dozens of occasions... And yet this is what people do when they vote for any party in government.
Economic arguments aside, a very old function of the state has been the provision of 'law and order', and this is something most statists approve of, even if they recognise all the economic problems with state intervention. Without the state there'd be no laws, and you'd have the Montreal Police riots all over again every day forever more and we'd all kill ourselves in an orgy of animalistic violence...
Isn't that Christians' major gripe with atheism? Don't they think that if people lose their belief in God, they will inevitably become amoral nihilists with no sense of right or wrong? Don't we poke holes through that argument quite easily? It's usually along the lines of, "If the only reason you do not sin is fear of being caught, then you are morally bankrupt." So we need the state because most people are morally bankrupt? And yet you believe in democracy, which is "rule by most people"? Yeah.
And I'm pretty sure I've never heard an atheist come back with "There is no god regardless, but if you do evil the state will punish you!" Because the Christian would immediately reply, "Oh yes? And what informs the state with regards to morals?"
And that would be a bloody good comeback. Indeed, fellow atheists, what does inform the state with regards to morals? The democratic process, I suppose. But the whole reason we need a state is because most people are ********, and would go on the rampage without one... It's self-contradictory, folks! It's actually quite insane, and I mean that entirely literally. If most people weren't ********, then we wouldn't need a state! If most people are ********, then we're screwed no matter what we do, but having a state just empowers them further!
The reason you had the Montreal riots was because everyone knew the police were going to go on strike beforehand, and a crowd of scumbags prepared for the occasion because they knew that people weren't prepared to defend themselves when the police were gone... That they'd been disarmed literally and figuratively by the irrational belief that the state would keep them safe.
You are always going to have scumbags in society, I think... But they are outnumbered by decent people. As long as there is no monopoly on force, decent people will always be more powerful than the scumbags. A state is a monopoly on force. A state empowers evil, and does nothing good that decent people could not have done of their own individual volition.
