I wouldn’t have any issue with Clovers (see here for samples) if they were wiling to live their Cloverish lives as they see fit – and willing to leave the rest of us free to live ours as we see fit. But of course, Clovers – by definition – cannot abide that. The quality – the personality defect – that makes a Clover a Clover is his relentless unwillingness to live – and let live. He – or she – is the sort of person you can’t just walk away from. Because they will follow you.
Everywhere. Relentlessly.
Though you may want nothing more than to go about your business, Clover considers everything you do – anything you might do – his business.
If, say, you have a club and don’t want him as a member, he will try to force his way in (using “the law,” of course). It would never occur to him to start his own club, amenable to himself and those like-minded.
Clover can’t just build his house the way he wants his house to be built. He insists you build yours the way he wants it to be built.
If Clover decides he needs an air bag, then you must have one also. If Clover “buckles up,” then you’d better buckle-up, too.
If Clover wants a 35.5 MPG car – then you will have a 35.5 MPG car.
If Clover doesn’t trust himself to own a gun responsibly, then clearly no one else can be allowed to own a gun – since Clover assumes everyone else is as irresponsible as he is.
The same goes for “speeding” (as he arbitrarily defines it) as well as swimming – without a lifeguard on duty.
If Clover only feels “safe” when random and arbitrary searches are the order of the day, then random and arbitrary searches will become the order of the day.
When Clover decides some “public good” or other deserves to be funded, he will lobby and legislate and vote to make sure others are forced to fund it.
And so it goes. You know the drill.
For Clover, it is never sufficient to do what he wants, purchase what he wishes – and leave it at that. Much less leave others free to do as they wish (and purchase what they wish). Every Clover is a little Stalin at heart. Collectivizing his life brings no joy. He must collectivize the lives of others. Only then is he truly happy. This is the essence of Clover.
How to deal with such a creature?
Within the matrix – that is, society as currently constituted – it is virtually impossible. Because most people have been so effectively conditioned (by having had their cognitive faculties crippled or merely never awakened – mostly via government schools) to accept or at least, never to question Cloverite bromides such as “the public good.” This Clover deftly manipulates to achieve and then enforce his good. Get most people to acquiesce to the idea that there is such a thing as “the public good” – in other than purely metaphorical terms – and you can get them to accept being lorded over in the name of a Clover’s very specific ideas about what constitutes that “good.”
His good.
Make sure that most people never question the idea of “democracy” (and its political synonyms, “society” and “we”) and you have the green light not merely to tyrannize millions of individuals – but to get them to accept being tyrannized, by using morality against them.
People – most people – naturally want to be good and do good. Let Clover define “good” in his terms – in terms of the collective – and he is unbeatable. If it is accepted that good is necessarily a collective thing – and the collective is defined by Clovers – then no individual stands a chance. He is “selfish.” He is unconcerned about “the children” – or “the future.” You name it. Clover has an endless supply of proxy euphemisms for himself. 
Clover also has back-up.
The state.
It can be and historically has been overtly authoritarian (less successful, as history has shown us) or subtly and much more cleverly authoritarian, such as the modern “democratic” state – and so far, much more successful. Quite possibly, longer lived, too. Chiefly because the average person labors under the delusion that his freedom remains intact, that he is governed by representatives freely chosen and so with his consent. All of which makes him quiescent – even if he grumbles every now and then about the ever-tightening invisible straight jacket he wears. Even if he is opposed to this or that new law. The person who would never tolerate a king or Duce or Fuhrer will almost always tolerate – even respect – a president. So long as he is permitted every so often to choose a new one, he does not notice that he is never offered the choice to be free of them all. (See here for more on the “democratic” con.)
Clover understands all this, if not intellectually (the rank and file type of Clover) then instinctively – at the emotional level that is a Clover’s normal level of functioning. Clover feels. He believes. He “just knows.” His irrationality is his most formidable weapon – because it end-runs reason, logic, principle – and thereby, morality based on natural law. It is much easier to say, for instance, that “the children are the future” than it is to question the propriety of using organized violence (the state) to eviscerate the very concept of property by imposing an endless, potentially limitless, tax on property to “finance” said children’s future. Just mewl about “the children” – and anything is possible.
Including mass murder, given time. And we are nearly out of time.
When the individual’s rights are no longer inviolate, any violation is not only theoretically possible but inevitable. Once you understand this, you will understand why we are on the path we’re on right now. Why the onslaught of collectivism and authoritarianism seems so irresistible. It is because we – “we” being most people – have accepted collectivism and authoritarianism.
We only quibble about particulars. 
How much to tax (that is, steal) from our fellow man. Not whether to tax at all. About “reasonable” restrictions of formerly unalienable rights. We argue among ourselves about the nature of the “public good” – and how best to achieve it. That is (shorn of euphemisms) how best to impose it at gunpoint.
But there is no “public” – except in the abstract. There are, however, millions of very real individual human beings, each possessed of exactly the same right to be left in peace to pursue happiness as they see it.
And that is the only good which matters in this life.
The galling effrontery represented by Clover’s lust to impose his notion of good – to control other human beings’ lives – to micromanage their precious, transitory existence on this earth – must be shorn of euphemism, laid bare for what it is – and anathematized by all decent people. Because there is nothing in this life more indecent than the urge to dominate and control other people. It is the primal sin, if you like, from which all others follow. Every theft, every assault, every murder – including mass murder – derives from the urge to control. Every Fuhrer – and every elected Fuhrer, from Lincoln to the current strivers – depends on general acceptance of the idea that it is acceptable for one person to control another. Because it gives one person the power to control millions. Which means, to tyrannize and even enslave millions.
It will not end until there is a re-awakening. A rebirth of natural morality. I am not a believer, but I find admirable the Christian teaching that each individual must “come to Jesus” of his own volition – which implies that he must have free choice.
Which implies he must be free to choose.
Taking away freedom of choice has given us an onslaught of horror on an institutionalized, mechanized scale. Whatever pains may result from the errant (or even evil) actions of millions of free-choosing individuals, they can never rise to the level of the wholesale slaughter of entire populations, the imprisonment of nations and populations, made possible by the acceptance of Cloverism. By acceptance of 
the idea that some may permissibly lord it over others by presuming to act in their name – “for the public good” – and with the backing of organized force (government).
It must be disassembled and deconstructed – then, rejected.
It may take generations to recover our senses – or rather, to discover them. But there are green shoots here and there, if you know where to look.
Nothing will change overnight. But it may just change for the better, given time.
And given thought.
Throw it in the Woods?
The Animals – Cutting Edge Musical Giants
It’s My Life
http://www.youtu.be/mJUI-NRDflU
Tobacco Road
http://www.youtu.be/mfqq2Jkv64c
We’ve Gotta Get Out of the Place
http://www.youtu.be/LUpBSvN1a50
When I Was Young
http://www.youtu.be/iPKTQkkK3YM
Interesting thread – the arrogance of the statist apologists in claiming that we are “stealing from the community” when we “don’t pay our fair share of taxes (tribute)” makes me just want to see all of us starve this beast. Just find ways to minimize income, put ourselves on the dole as much as possible, and help bring it down.
Here’s a guy’s site that has put this into an excellent formulation; his book is great “Starving the Monkeys.” Highly recommended!
http://www.starvingthemonkeys.com
@downrange
Arrogance. Yes, that pretty much sums it up.
Limiting income: I am with you and Walter Block on this one. It is not morally wrong to reclaim loot from criminals. Especially when they give us a legal means to do so. I cannot determine who rightfully owns what exactly and so cannot return it (which would be ideal) and most often it does not come as that kind of ‘benefit’ anyway.
I advise that all look into starting an LLC or something like it. Many expenses can then be written off completely. I don’t know how difficult a license to deal in firearms is to obtain, but that would seem to be (I own a contracting company, but after having this thought I just may to look into something like that) the kind of thing where you could write-off your expenses on ‘inventory’ while purchasing items of real and increasing value with paper. High-quality tools also fit this category IMHO and also have the added bonus of letting me do more accurate work in a more efficient manner. This is a WIN-WIN-WIN for me. Your investments actually limit your taxable income. This may even reduce your income enough that you can get ‘free stuff!’ I would rather my neighbor had medical care than that they used the money for drone missiles. Of course, that doesn’t stop them from doing both and just ‘charging it’ (and much more; obviously that’s a simplification for illustrative purposes). If it doesn’t destroy itself in its quest for hegemony first, Leviathan must be starved and although it uses many means other than taxation to enrich itself at our expense, anything that can be done to hasten its demise is a welcome form of civil disobedience. They write the rules, but that doesn’t mean you can’t play by them and try to use them to your advantage.
Now that you have a business what about an extra room or two? If you alter how you ‘use’ that space it can be deducted as a percentage (by size) of your home and all related expenses. Now some of your living expenses are not taxable. All this can be done without violating your morals of non-aggression of course. It is not wrong to keep what is your – what you have worked for – the fruits of your labor. Just remember your business can lose money for 3 years before you have to declare it a ‘hobby.’ There are always other businesses to be started though.
Although I feel like I don’t really need it here among friends:
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer or an accountant. Inform yourself and talk to the appropriate people if necessary, but don’t take my word as gospel for your situation. 🙂
Ray, Tom Baugh has a great series on incorporating – you’re right with him!
http://www.starvingthemonkeys.com/taxated/IncorporationTips.html
Hey cool. I had opened your link, but hadn’t had a chance to check it out yet. Sometimes things just work out like that. 😉
Hey downrange,
Had a chance to browse your second link. I’m not “right” with him exactly, as I said LLC meaning s-corp, and he said use a c-corp NOT an s-corp.
I am interested in learning more. Had me wondering if I would be better off reorganizing.
Ray
Yes, it’s worth reading all three parts. According to Baugh, you only get the full benefits from a C corp, FWIW.
I’ve been reading it too, and I’ll be scrambling to reorg next week!
Can’t wait. The less I pay into Leviathan, the fewer bullets it can afford to send my way…or anywhere else.
Thank you Downrange for the link.
@methylamine
But…how to connect “afford”(ability) & digital fiat “money”…? Not to mention all those rounds of .40 hp already “purchased”.
Wondering how you make text bold (& is italicizing an option, too?)?
@ozymandias–
Indeed. They’ve already bought enough to last them the entire war. But at least we can deprive the bastards of their pensions!
Bold, italic, block-quotes (those indented sections useful for highlighting a quote):
Use HTML markup. So:
Italic–surround in <i>italic text</i>
Bold–surround in <b>bold text</b>
Block quote–surround in <blockquote>indented text</blockquote>
Hypertext links are a bit more fancy but same theme:
<a href=”the URL here like ‘http://www.foo.com'”>the text that’s linked</a>
oz, in the email I was sent because i am subscribed to the thread it looked as though HTML would work. Less than symbol b greater than symbol and to close it out use a / before the b. italics is i.
I will try it here
you beat me to it, meth
Thanks for the how-to’s, meth…as for the other, I hope to be completely out of range.
Thank you, as well, Ray.
@ray–I need to be quick on the draw, I now program for a living!
@ozymandias–my pleasure.
And I’ll see you both in the foxholes; keep your scopes clean and your powder dry.
Our Great Ape Forefathers
The Invention of Weapons
The Invention of Music
@ray
“What is your job?” “Oh, I slit dolphins throats.” Damn, that’s funny!
At least dolphins remain in their normal state until they “meet their maker.” But wait, human fishermen aren’t their maker?
The Jews recorded that their ancient Babylonian hosts in “The Bible”[sic] often lamented that men were dying much too young, that the patriarchs in olden times lived far beyond 100 years of age and remained robust. Who was it then, that now harvested the people or corrupted their minds, such that everyone died enfeebled and at a young untimely age? Who is it that continues to do so even now?
People do have to eat, and much of it does currently involve horrific acts. Letting others do this is infantilizing, our blank-outs or self-absolvings do nothing to alter this fact.
Isaiah 65:20
The longevity of men in the first age of the world shall be enjoyed again.
ישעה 65:20 Hebrew Bible
לא יהיה משם עוד עול ימים וזקן אשר לא ימלא את ימיו כי הנער בן מאה שנה ימות והחוטא בן מאה שנה יקלל׃
Latin: Biblia Sacra Vulgata
non erit ibi amplius infans dierum et senex qui non impleat dies suos quoniam puer centum annorum morietur et peccator centum annorum maledictus erit
http://bible.cc/isaiah/65-20.htm
I am glad you found my comment amusing. That was my intention. I needed to introduce some levity after watching that video. It’s like ‘that’s a job?’ Better than being the potus, I guess.
That part of Isaiah is specifically referring to the creation of a ‘new heavens and a new earth.’ Not to our time left on this earth. Read the rest of Isaiah 65 and see how aptly it applies to today. http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Isaiah+65&version=NIV
If you will bear with me for a minute as I try to briefly explain my perspective on the world I’d appreciate it.
Think of creation as God making something which He would sustain through His power. There’s no such thing as a free lunch or perpetual motion, but God’s power is infinite and able to support all. Sin separates us from this source of power – not because God is vindictive or anything, simply because it introduces violence into a once perfect system. I am trying to think of an example and this is the best that sprung to mind just now: Your significant other certainly doesn’t ‘want’ to feel separated from you because you slept with her best friend, but it hacks at the bond that you have worked to create, leaving jealousy, covetousness, etc in its wake. Just like the physical laws which make perpetual motion impossible there are moral laws of His creation. These are in my understanding related to what we call anarchy and non-aggression. We were made to be free no matter what the consequence may be. The nanny state would advocate the removal of the tree of knowledge of good and evil from the garden. But there are consequences to all actions (something Clover never seems to understand). Without God’s sustained influence, the system entropies. Life spans while having been raised in recent centuries will never approach those of original man (though you may object that there were people who were larger, smarter, and lived much longer). That’s all for now although this is something I often think about and want to explore/express further.
There are 241 million Christians in the USSA. 79 million of them are Catholic, which I used to be. 5 million of them are ELCA, which I am now.(with qualifications)
There is a term, deFOO which means breaking free of your “Family Of Origin.” I have done that, but still have a relationship with my folks, but remain vigilant, because they are not bound by the NAP.
In addition to that process I have deROO’d, or have broken free of my “Religion Of Origin.” My wife and I were married in the ELCA(Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, the largest Lutheran denomination in the USSA.) Many of our friends are from here. The ELCA has less baggage than other religions, and if Porky puts a gun to my head, then yes, I’ll say to his fat fascist face, I am an “ELCA.”
But I also write and say auslandish things both on the internet, and in real life during time away from my family. This is outside talk, not a way I am at my dinner table. Perhaps you speak for everyone here, that I should behave better, stay more on topic, and remain closer to the shared Judeo-Christian values I too hold dear, despite my rogue blasphemous screed du jour. This is Eric’s property, not my “diary of a madman.”
Perhaps I appear unsympathetic and even pathological. I sometimes take a consequentialist tack because many here are much more pathological than me. Maybe of you “Lovers of Liberty” are really some of those smiling tyrants who use the levers of state to ram their belief system down everyone’s throat.
Perhaps even you are another brick in the lockstep wall of Christians working to make marijuana illegal once more in Washington & Colorado, to give but one example, there are thousands more. In some ways I may need some Thought Control, but in other respects, Hey Teacher[sic] Leave Those Kids Alone!
From early colonial days, when some English and German settlers came in search of religious freedom, America has been profoundly shaped by religion. That influence persists in American culture, social life, and politics.
Several of the original Thirteen Colonies were established by settlers who wished to practice their own religion within a community of like-minded people:
the Massachusetts Bay Colony was established by English Puritans (Congregationalists),
Pennsylvania by British Quakers,
Maryland by English Catholics, and
Virginia by English Anglicans.
The USSA has assuredly become a Frankenstein monster. If the bible really is the way to make IT bound by the NAP, then show me how it would come about, I am willing to Learn.
ELCA Detroit 2015 – Lose Yourself
ELCA Christmas Message 2012
“Perhaps you speak for everyone here, that I should behave better, stay more on topic, and remain closer to the shared Judeo-Christian values I too hold dear … This is Eric’s property, not my “diary of a madman.”
Diary of a madman. I like that. I don’t recall ever saying anything like that, but if that’s what you came away with, then I want to express that was not my intention. I never said anything about your behavior and have found your comments interesting. Far be it from me to try to censor you, overtly or otherwise. I actually like the unique view you have on subjects.
There may be 241 million people who when asked to describe themselves in that way say that they are ‘Christians,’ but there most definitely are not 241 million followers of Christ in America today. The country would look much different if there were.
“Perhaps even you are another brick in the lockstep wall of Christians working to make marijuana illegal once more in Washington & Colorado”
This is most definitely not the case.
“The USSA has assuredly become a Frankenstein monster. If the bible really is the way to make IT bound by the NAP, then show me how it would come about, I am willing to Learn.”
I did not say this either, but I wish that I could and had an answer for your request.
“I spent hours of every day talking to the imaginary Teddy Bear until I reached 22 years of age … Major religions … they’re just opiates of the masses, you musn’t take them literally or at face value.”
I am not sure what you mean by this exactly, but you might understand where from other comments in the same vein I would’ve thought that you are an atheist. I am not talking about religiosity, about scribes and pharisees, or trying to proselytize. I am not even talking about Judeo-Christian values although those are certainly the basis of our system. I am talking about my own personal experience. The Savior as I have come to know Him. I have “kicked the tires” and tasted and seen (http://bible.cc/psalms/34-8.htm).
A man and his God(thunder buddy)
I spent hours of every day talking to the imaginary Teddy Bear until I reached 22 years of age. Then I enjoyed 8 years of “Rumshpringa”. Then I married and settled down.
[my assertion]
Major religions, sports, soap operas, national histories, social schemes, they’re just opiates of the masses, you musn’t take them literally or at face value.
Be sure to kick the tires and look beneath the hood and walk away if something doesn’t seem right. Take a ride in them if it suits you, but always retain the option to get out and walk on your own two feet.
Let the fools persist in religiosity & folly. Unless you’re a truth seeker, which is what I believe visitors to this site mostly are. My aim is only for you to take off kid gloves and blinders, and to see the matrix as it really is.
Fast Car (What Big Churches claim to be)
1906 Jewish Encyclopedia
Re: Prophet Isaiah. (1906 Jewish Encyclopedia)
The career of the great prophet, Isaiah, is connected with the kingdom of Judah. Here the historical conditions are more complex, and the prophetic message is therefore more profound and many-sided. Isaiah deals much with the same themes as did Amos and Hosea: the sins of luxury, fashion, and frivolity in men and women; land-grabbing; defiance of Yhwh (ch. ii., iii., v.). To his revelation he adds the great announcement and argument that Yhwh is supreme, as well as universal, in His control and providence.
Ahaz makes a dexterous alliance with Assyria, against the prophetic counsel, for the sake of check-mating Samaria and Damascus. Let him beware; Yhwh is supreme; He will dissolve the hostile combination; but Judah itself will ultimately fall before those very Assyrians (ch. vii.). The Ethiopian overlord of Egypt sends an embassy to the Asiatic states to incite them against Assyria.
Isaiah gives the answer: God from His throne watches all nations alike, and in His good time Assyria shall meet its fate (ch. xviii.). The great revolt against Assyria has begun. The Assyrians have come upon the land. Again the question is taken out of the province of politics into that of providence. Assyria is God’s instrument in the punishment of His people, and when it has done its work it shall meet its predestined doom (ch. x.). So the trumpet-tone of providence and judgment is heard all through the prophetic message till Jerusalem is saved by the heaven-sent plague among the host of Sennacherib.
— it seems this message vanished in the ether, I will re-post my response to Eric.
@Eric I am not being intellectually dishonest at all.
When you do not pay your debts that is the equivalent of theft and when that theft is against the whole of society that makes it all the more egregious. The initial aggression, in tax evasion, IS NOT, the the many reminders, notices, warnings and fines NOR is it the eventual necessity of police coming to arrest you. It is your choice to steal from the rest of society.
I don’t believe in violence ever being a first resort, but I accept that on occasions it can be unavoidable. And when crimes are being committed policing certainly qualifies as “defensive force”.
I have never said the ends justify the means – at every step along the way the law should be adhered to. However, Libertarian thought seems to ignore consequentialism altogether and doing that is as foolhardy as what you accuse me of. Consideration of the means and the ends must be a part of any rational plan for managing societies of many millions of people. You would have an extremely disparate landscape, in which average humans in developed nations would endure far worse living conditions than today – all to adhere to your zealous dogma that no law or government can ever be just. You give no thought to the ends so long as you can content your self-righteous conscience that “your hands are clean”.
Those socialist/communist tyrants who went too far in the other direction were wrong as well, sacrificing too much individual freedom for a particular goal, no matter how much you believe in it, can never be right.
I see no gulags in our future, we’ve built a very stable & progressive, developed nation. By adopting social democracy/ social capitalist systems that balance the needs of individuals along with the needs of the whole – most developed nations have found a way to walk a fine line between individual/virtue and social/ consequentialist ethics.
So you consider it a legitimate debt because government decides you have to pay something to it? Have to give up something to them? That’s how thugs and pimps talk. “Bitch better have my money”. That’s how lord talks about serfs. It’s his money and the serfs owe it to him. The owner of the company town sees everything as his to run as he sees fit as well. You’re using the rational of someone who exploits other people. Who thinks those other people are his property.
The initial aggression is when the thug comes in and says: ‘Nice place you have here, shame if anything should happen to it, maybe you want to buy some protection?’. The initial aggression is when a pimp demands the money a woman earned because he can beat her up and take it. Because he can manipulate her psychologically and emotionally. That’s the initial aggression. Having an election doesn’t change things in any fundamental way. It’s still an aggression. Surrounding it with ceremony and costumes and rituals just disguises it a little, works as a confidence game, but it’s still the gangster or pimp in the end.
You use words like progressive and others… but why can’t you use the real words like slavery and serfdom? Because those are the real words for this system where we live under the management of a slave master or lord who then in turn manages everything and cares for us, all for the low low cost of owning our productivity. Robber baron or company town also works. That too is just a disguise of the same fundamental system of exploitation. That’s the real system underlying all of this high sounding language of yours. Your wording is nothing more than attempt to disguise the servitude to a small elite that manage the collective. Who are by the way, have already started cutting some people off and will eventually cut everyone off they currently throw a few pennies of the plunder at for supporting this system, cutting them off in the name of ‘austerity’.
This idea that we incur a debt to a bunch of popularity contest winners and their minions and those who have their hand out for merely living is absurd. If we stop working what are you and your government going to do then? Pull out your guns and make us work? Because that’s where this goes. Eventually you run out of productive people for your system to feed off of. Many people just decide to get on the cart and others just decide to stop working to some degree or entirely.
Those socialist/communist tyrants who went too far in the other direction were wrong as well, sacrificing too much individual freedom for a particular goal, no matter how much you believe in it, can never be right.
This sounds exactly like human farming to me. An attempt to find that level where the most can be extracted from people. Well, the system crossed that point awhile ago. It will always go ‘too far’ because these sociopaths can never be satisfied. They have to push things until it’s wrecked. It’s their nature and it’s the nature of such a system that they eventually run it if they didn’t start it in the first place. The worst rise to the top.
Bravo, Brent. Outstanding analysis, as always.
@Brent – I consider it a legitimate debt because the work has been done and will continue to be done. Whether you choose to use any of the myriad services and infrastructure within the nation you are a citizen of, is irrelevant – they are provided so that any citizen may use them. You may choose to use them or not at your discretion BUT the responsibility to pay your fair share remains unless you decide to relinquish that citizenship.
I’ve never viewed politics as purely a popularity contest. To me the choices between principles and direction are very important. I can understand how, in the USA it may seem like fewer choices due to your 2-party system [we have many political parties and independents]. There is no thuggery involved, merely democratic principles. I am certain the kool-aid you’ve all drunk is far too potent for me to dissuade any of you… though I would ask that you attempt to realize I believe in the ethics of my perspective as strongly as you claim to believe in yours.
When I view the potential consequences of your ideology I see my entire way of life being destroyed and replaced with a deadly fight for survival. From my perspective, libertarians seem to fluctuate between extreme naiveté and being simply dishonest. Either you think a society without government, enforceable law or social systems will be one of Hari Krisnas holding hands OR you know it will actually be chaos and don’t care because at least YOU won’t have to pay taxes.
I want my children and their children to [hopefully] enjoy more success than I have – destroying society would not suit those goals at all. And on the subject of society – I don’t view it as an abstract at all – I believe the hard work of generations has gone into creating the society we are a part of and I do not believe that quality of life is without merit.
Clover writes:
“I consider it a legitimate debt because the work has been done and will continue to be done. Whether you choose to use any of the myriad services and infrastructure within the nation you are a citizen of, is irrelevant – they are provided so that any citizen may use them. You may choose to use them or not at your discretion BUT the responsibility to pay your fair share remains unless you decide to relinquish that citizenship.”
What you “consider” legitimate goes to the heart of the matter, Clover.
Your ethically sickening position is that if I (or random others) decide to do some “work,” without having obtained your consent – and perhaps against your specific wishes – the “workers” nonetheless have a morally valid claim to threaten you with cages, then guns, if you decline to pay up.
Your are the squeegee man at the red light. I don’t want you to touch my fucking car, but I know that if I don’t play along and pay you something to swipe your filthy rag across my windshield, you will attack my car – or me. You’ve done “work.” So – in your evil little mind – I “owe” you something.
Oh, I know. You will mewl that it is different (somehow) because it has been done via the ballot box and democracy (mob rule, codified into law).
Please – explain the difference to me. No euphemisms and evasions, Clover. Explain how it is that you or any other person is morally entitled to force me to pay for “work” or anything else I did not contract for and more, do not wish to avail myself of?
I’ve asked the same question over and over. You never answer. Because you can’t.
Because you don’t want to face up to being the thug that you are. And – the pussy.
I’d like to see you try to come to my home on your own and make me hand over whatever you deem to be “my fair share.” You’d never do it. But you are happy to hide behind your ballot box – and send your band of armed enforcers to do so on your behalf.
What wretch – what a worm – you are.
And, never forget: Der tag kommt.
Dear Eric,
rj argues:
“There is no thuggery involved, merely democratic principles.”
Wow. jr truly doesn’t get it, does he?
No matter how many times you and others explain it to him.
rj didn’t just drink the “freedom and democracy” kool-aid. He went back for refills.
So-called “democratic principles” are thuggery.
@rj:
Thuggery is thuggery. It does not magically cease being thuggery merely because you got together with other thugs, “took a vote,” dressed a few of your thugs in costumes, then “authorized” them to rob others at gunpoint.
Work done? Work I didn’t ask for. Work I don’t want done. The government goes off and invades a country or five, bombs some other people without an invasion, gives money to insiders, funds the research it wants to advance it’s agenda, sets up welfare programs to vote away my tiny amount of wealth, wages war against people who use certain drugs, and much much more and sends me and other people the bill and you call that a legitimate debt for work done?
There used to be an old scam where the con-artists would send out a box of crappy products and a bill. A bill for way more than the box of crap was worth. People would pay it. Like you they thought even though they didn’t order it, didn’t want it, had no say in getting it, that somehow they still owed for it. It’s a con game.
You might be able to peddle this legitimate debt con-game to others, but it isn’t going to work on me. It’s just criminal behavior. Plain and simple. You and those who want this welfare-warfare way of life should play amongst yourselves.
Principles in an election? Since when? The choices all believe as you do, that the people are their property. That they own our productivity. That they own us. Principles… not at all. It’s a straight up popularity contest. Who looks better, who sounds better, who had the funnier one liners. But most of all who promises the most free shit to the right people.
Ethics? your position has no ethics except the ethics of bully, of thug, of a criminal enterprise. Al Capone ran soup kitchens. That didn’t make him not a gangster. Drug cartel leaders often provide for poor people too. They want not only the feeling of power it gives but popular support of their enterprises. Your government system of choice is no different.
“potential consequences of” my ideology? What about yours? How many millions of people have died from government? Your way of life is the gun. It’s violence. It’s threatening your neighbors to provide you and those you think deserve their wealth. Oh yes, under my ideology of the non-aggression principle you wouldn’t be able to live off your neighbors unless your neighbors volunteered their wealth for that task.
Either you think a society without government, enforceable law or social systems will be one of Hari Krisnas holding hands OR you know it will actually be chaos and don’t care because at least YOU won’t have to pay taxes.
Come back when you have a clue. I really no longer have time to bring people like you up from zero on what libertarian principle really is. Here’s a hint though, you don’t get point a gun at your neighbors’ heads and take their wealth. And that’s why it would end your way of life.
Oh and I hope your children are productive members of society and perhaps they won’t have to suffer under your ideology and get to keep some it. But it appears you want them to be parasites that live off of others the way you do but receive greater amounts of plunder. Well, sorry RJ, the line has already been crossed, the productivity to steal is dropping and will continue to drop because you and your kind demand its theft their benefit. By the time your children grow up we should be fully impoverished given the current track. Your track heads towards a wealthy sociopathic minority with all the power and all the wealth. Look at North Korea. Look at many a third world country. It will be kind of like that except with drones and other things keeping us serfs and slaves ‘obeying the law’.
@rj pare:
And THAT is the crux of your fear! I’m ecstatic you brought it out…because anyone, faced with the prospect of loss, fights like a cornered animal.
But why do you think, left to their own devices, people would devolve to chaos and bloodshed?
Do you have that little faith in human nature?
You live peacefully with your neighbors; there may be the occasional disagreement, but you solve them amicably to maintain the peace. I know I do; even when they’re quite obnoxious. I go to work–as a contractor–and work conscientiously, and hard, striving to maintain friendly relations with my coworkers. I–and most others–will even correct the Starbuck’s employee who’s given back excess change. We let people merge into traffic.
And we do these things not because there’s a cop around every corner watching us; we do them because it’s in (most*) of our natures to do them–humans are a naturally social species. Our “tribe” of the roughly 150 people we interact with closely is our lifeblood, and we cherish our relationships with them.
The “*” is for the 2-4% who are NOT like us; the sociopaths. The connivers, deceivers, thieves, killers; bereft of conscience, empathy, and compassion, they gravitate to positions of power.
Not surprisingly, they gravitate to government most of all. Look it up; the percentage of people in government with narcissistic personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, schizoaffective disorder…all psychiatric euphemisms for “psychopath”.
SO: you see in your daily life your (and others’) voluntary, consensual interactions that lead to peaceful gain for all parties.
And yet you fear, that without a bunch of psychopaths “regulating” you and stealing from you, you’d lose that and plunge into Mad Max world?
See the disconnect?
“SO: you see in your daily life your (and others’) voluntary, consensual interactions that lead to peaceful gain for all parties.
And yet you fear, that without a bunch of psychopaths “regulating” you and stealing from you, you’d lose that and plunge into Mad Max world?”
But that’s not what we were taught in skool! I cannot comprehend! I thought regulations were for the good of all. Regulators and government officials are in ‘public service.’ They are selfless – higher pay and incidences of narcissism, nepotism, sociopathic tendencies notwithstanding (nothing is perfect right?)
War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
PS. what kind of contracting do you do? I am a master carpenter and (licensed – gotta drive costs up and maintain that monopoly!) general contractor in WI.
You are right though, early last year I was in Home Depot stocking up on some tools, fasteners and supplies and the guy forgot to ring about 3-4 items (one cart basically, maybe a 1/3 of the purchase) worth over $500. I could’ve walked out of there, but instead said, uh, I think your total is off! Of course, as a Christian I do try to hold myself to a higher standard.
QED my earlier point on how the internal contradictions in your argument must itch, and burn, and claw inside. It’s difficult to hold two contradictory thoughts. Here’s your therapy:
It is your choice to steal from the rest of society.
Stealing implies ownership. Who owns my labor but me? Who owns me, but me? Anything else is a degree of slavery. You use the word “debts”; but debt implies contract. I sincerely hope you won’t trot out “social contract”, because sadly, no government has ever produced the document I signed binding me to this “social contract”.
“Society” is an abstraction–and a very important one in your argument, because using “society” you appeal to the collectivist instinct. You see it’s not just YOU who demand I pay for the schools; it’s “society”. But “society” as an actor doesn’t exist; society is but a group of individuals. You may as well say “Fred, Bob and I demand you pay the school tax”; it would be more honest…but less comfortable psychologically if you reduce the number of people demanding I pay up.
Now, finally, you admit there’s violence in the system–“…I accept that on occasions it can be unavoidable.”
Followed immediately with policing as a defensive force–implying my refusal to pay for “services” I do not desire is an act of aggression.
To summarize again:
And now you have come to the conclusion that I’m stealing from the collective, and some small amount of violence is OK because stealing from the fictional construct called “society” is aggression.
I see.
It’s a fairly good dodge, with much hand-waving and what we programmers call “fuzzy logic”.
But society is you, Fred, Bob, and a few million of your closest friends–individuals. And debt is a contractual obligation–entered willingly and consensually.
Here’s the point once again:
If you feel you’re morally in the right, you feel convicted that your conscience is clear in the matter; and that I owe money for the schools regardless of my home-schooling…
…thus feeling morally certain, why don’t YOU hold the gun to my head and yell “pay up or else”?
Because if you can’t, somewhere your premises are faulty.
I would never do that given those circumstances. However I’d feel very little compunction in doing just that to a robber in my house or a rapist attacking my wife.
And in a separate note:
“…zealous dogma that no law or government can ever be just.”
Again, conflating two concepts; natural law exists outside and above government, government is another fictional construct. It is not an actor; only individuals who call themselves “government” are actors.
We love law; natural law, expressed as common law, distilled into
“do unto others”,
“love on another”,
“to each his own”,
in Texas “he ain’t hurtin’ no-one”,
“live and let live”,
“no harm, no foul”
All of which ride on the NAP; or, I prefer the “ZAP”–the Zero Aggression Principle.
You may wish to familiarize yourself with two terms:
malum in se–that which is bad in itself, murder, theft, assault, fraud
malum prohibitum–bad because we said so, also known as administrative law or:
“if it saves just one life”,
“for the greater good”,
“for the children”,
“for your safety”
“We’ve built a very stable & progressive, developed nation.”
R. J. are you really so self-unaware you don’t know you’re the creepy kid in the “It’s a Good Life” Twilight Zone episode?
“I made a gopher with three heads. See him? I’ll make him dead now, I’m tired of playing with him. Be dead! Gopher, you be dead!”
Canadian Mounted Fags Play Dress-up
Taxation is theft under color of law; & that kind of “law” – legislation – is mere pen-strokes, whimsy, this today, the opposite tomorrow. Rules, decided & imposed, by rulers, in other words. Theft is not a debt collected, anymore than debt is wealth created (or the source of wealth).
Consequentialism? Libertarians ignore, are unconcerned with, consequences? What of the consequences of criminal conspiracies you apologize for (progressive / social / democratic / capitalist) – are libertarians (not to mention anarcho-capitalists & Austrian-school economists) ignoring those, too, or is that offense for you & yours to ignore in your attempts to disparage, under color of intellect, those who would defend themselves against your assaults & trespasses? The western gangs are all in trouble, not “stable”. The world has decompartmentalized, division of labor, comparative advantage, which means all the rest of the gangs are dependent, subject to systemic risk, & therefore, in trouble, too. You only feel cozy, or pretend to, up there in Canada…but I’ve met at least some Canadians, here & abroad, who know better.
“Society” is an emergent property – not an engineering feat. A prison is not a society – & emergence is frowned upon, to put it mildly, in prisons. Cartels, open-air prisons, something you applaud, are to people what CAFO’s are to cattle.
“Managers” are those tested in competition on a free market; parasitic, predatory, authoritarians are not managers.
I’ve read your selective two-stepping: you are intellectually dishonest. You’re also ignorant. The first defect makes solution by way of addressing the second defect, impossible. You’ve got an intellect, but it’s wasted for a lack of integrity.
Humans confined within NATO/CAFO whatever your barn is called, have the capacity to understand the de-beaking and the spirit-breaking practices. It is not natural or good news when one is rounded up or encircled with soldiers and checkpoints into the various “Plantations of Law.”
The women within such zones should increase their stresses while pregnant, not lower them, and make every effort to give birth to someone potentially useful and eminently capable of providing for and liberating them from their lowly status of domestication.
Don’t surrender your precious little chicks to the mandroids wearing the masks of state, the many who stand ready to mutilate your sacred babies with unfeeling calculated efficiency.
Circumcision. Vaccinations. Putting a baby on its back like a turtle. Soft swaddling fabrics. Chemical laden plastic bags to crap in. Shovel fed sugary garbage paste. Pharmaceutical Russian Roulette. Fawning gibberish and contrived goo goo idiocy.
An hour before birth the baby was an independent creature tethered to its mother needing none of her conscious attention. Why not bear babies into a similar environment where it can continue to feed itself, excrete its waste, explore and learn on its own. Why turn a perfectly good creature into a “baby.” A baby who is a insipid and cynical instrument of imprisonment for its “mother” for no good reason?
Baby’s born into lower gravity environments are already pre-programmed to walk and explore from the moment they are born. All that’s needed is a room full of DIY “Newborn Mobility Gel”, some lactating women available, some other types of babyfood & formula dispensers he can operate on his own. From day one, a free being that can feed himself, clean himself, excrete his waste, and explore his world independently.
Really every social convention and construct should be thrown in the woods. Day & night are myths. Sleep when you are tired. Work when it feels like time. Forget clocks, calendars, and schedules. Today is no day of no week. This applies to thousands more lunacies and mass delusions. Throw all the societal bullshit in the woods and leave it there, you won’t miss it.
Be like Bartleby the Scrivener. Anything They suggest ignore them. If pressed, say “I Prefer Not To” and stick to it. Even if, like Bartleby, you risk death in one of their matrices of prisons.
Never read a sign. If a warning box comes up on your computer, click it closed. Never acknowledge official paint on roads, official ink on paper, lines on maps, official data in official databases.
This is my body. There are many like it. But this one is mine. My body, without my mind and free will, is useless. Without my mind and freewill, I am useless.
I must outsmart my enemies before they outsmart me. I will. My mind, freewill, and body know that what counts is the actions we envision and undertake. The property we homestead and control.
My mind, freewill, and body are the defenders of my life. We are the masters of our enemy. We are our own saviors, so be it, until victory is ours and there is no enemy within our horizon, but only peace and prosperity.
I agree with most of what you said here and appreciate you posts and unique perspective, but I’m not so sure about this one:
“From day one, a free being that can feed himself, clean himself, excrete his waste, and explore his world independently.”
Do you have any children? I am no expert (it’s kind of learn as you go thing, you know) but as the parent of a ten-month old this seems, well, ridiculous. Although, she has been quite good at excreting waste from the beginning. The tether you mention keeps them alive sharing oxygen, nutrients and ridding waste. And while she may not ‘need’ mother’s ‘conscious’ attention (how can we measure such a thing?) she certainly has it.
I wish I lived in a low-gravity environment, gravity being the drag that it is. I imagine that would also have some less than desirous effects on the development of, as one example, muscles in preparations for the real world.
If you aren’t holding it, you might put a small baby on its back because you can’t really put it down any other way. Would you rather they be set down on their face? I also think that this plays a role in core muscle development which is key for the balance necessary to stand upright in a world with gravity. You try holding a crunch as long as a baby once they begin to actually be able to move around and even be on their back for any period of time. At first they can’t do much of anything. They can’t manipulate objects. They wouldn’t be able to find a breast or know what it was until they did. They certainly wouldn’t know anything about bottles and formula. Cleaning itself? How exactly?
“some lactating women available, some other types of babyfood & formula dispensers he can operate on his own.” Surely you jest? A small but fully conscious person who should not be surrendered to the ‘masks of state?’ – who should be taught much but more importantly taught to teach itself, yes. A being capable of caring for itself as long as a couple bottles and literal nursemaids are floating around with it in low gravity? I think not.
I do find it interesting that the Bible identified the pig as a disease-causing animal thousands of years ago. From prior posts I believe you are an atheist, however?
Watching that video is a sad thing for me. “What is your job?” “Oh, I slit dolphins throats.” “Sorry, what?” I guess people have to eat, although it would seem there have to be less horrific ways to do it. The end is the same, and while I believe that people are more important than animals, causing suffering is wrong. Sad that the people ‘caring’ for the animals are so desensitized to violence on them. It makes me think about returning to a vegetarian diet or at least getting locally raised meats. The video does quote Emerson at one point saying that if we knew where the food came from we’d be more likely to be vegetarians and then later try’s to play off of school children apparently not minding walking by the suffering dolphin’s. I thought: which is it? it can’t be both.
Anyway, this became a lot more than I intended. I need to get some sleep. I agree with basically everything you said here except your theory on raising a child.
Take care,
Ray
Thanks for a well thought out response. I’m glad you could parse what I was saying. Babies are pre-programmed to suck and to walk. To orient themselves in their environs. Why shock them and start them at square -10 right out of the gate? Why put them in a carpeted fake-ass zoo habitat with shoes and clothes that frustrate their spatial calculations?
The truth is babies are born loud and active, and full of great programming. Right out of the box, they are immediately made to shut up, to lay still and motionless, and are filled to the top with adware, trojans, viruses, and malware of Lilliputian minds and authoritarian madmen.
Keeping environmental continuity for a newborn wouldn’t be anywhere near the challenge you pretend it is. My writing is too poor? Or are you afraid to even think about it? Our kind are rapidly dying out, don’t you want to explore alternative ideas and solutions?
All the loud cries may be due to aggressions and harm by their supposed protectors. You’re all Munsters really. Cribs are prisons. Strollers are wheelchairs. Rocking is done to disorient and confuse.
Imagine “parents” were told by the bible or government to destroy their infants ability to blink automatically and put special devices over newborn eyes to compensate and ameliorate.
Then around 8 months to a year the kid learns to blink “voluntarily.” and the parents record their baby’s “first blink.”
Yay!
Imagine how much stupider individuals would be, if every waking hour they had to consciously make themselves blink every 6 seconds.
To raise stronger kids, breastfeeding from more than one mother is the best, is all I meant to say.
Why let a baby’s inborn mobility die on the vine? It’s a type of induced crippling, really. If you would only learn infantese, you might learn the youngster agrees with me.
My bible says put your woman in the desert during menstruation. My shampoo bottle says lather rinse repeat. Both seem like valuable property I control. I try not to be ruled by objects like bibles or shampoo bottles, but just maybe both are brain-washing me, and I am a fool.
I write from a growth-minded perspective. Putting words on the paper even adjacent to the ballpark might eventually lead to some player(other than myself) making the winning play.
I have 3 offspring.
Birds belong in nests. Yet being Grinning Babbits who can’t be bothered to simulate nests, we put them in cages with a swinging wooden dowel and a water trough. WTF? Cruel and inhuman beasts we are, even to “pets” we profess to love. Worse still do we treat the food that is going to become a part of us, as that movie shows.
Walking/stepping reflex
The walking or stepping reflex is present at birth; though infants this young cannot support their own weight(they could if we engineered a proper environment for them). When the soles of their feet touch a flat surface they will attempt to ‘walk’ by placing one foot in front of the other. This automatic reflex dies at six weeks due to an increased ratio of leg weight to strength. It reappears as a voluntary behavior around eight months to one year old.
Primitive reflexes are reflex actions originating in the central nervous system that are exhibited by normal infants, but not neurologically intact adults, in response to particular stimuli. These reflexes disappear or are inhibited by the frontal lobes as a child moves through the matrix of “normal” child development. These primitive reflexes are also called infantile, infant or newborn reflexes.
The first two years of an American’s life neurologically consist mainly of BREAKING multiple connections between nerve and brain cells. To consciously move your legs to walk, you actually break connections between brain cells, so that your prefrontal cortex can “voluntarily” do what used to be automatic and “come naturally”.
I submit, that the regimen our kids undergo, rather than being in their best interest, makes them weaker, stupider, and easier to control.
They are “de-beaked” so to speak so that TPTB’s flawed social structures don’t completely break down, just like is done to young chickens in the movie.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitive_reflexes
Mouse Breathing Highly Oxygenated Water
We’ve all been designed to be another brick in the wall of Authority. Think of me as an amusing hob-goblin Learner, still wiping away the mortar, vainly casting shadows on the “noble” free mason wall of the human billipede for you to applaud, jeer, or ignore.
Blank out and retreat to Teacher’s dark sarcasms in the classrooms or try leaving it yourself, what is it that you wish?
I don’t need no arms around me
And I dont need no drugs to calm me.
I have seen the writing on the wall.
Don’t think I need anything at all.
No! Don’t think I’ll need anything at all.
All in all it was all
just bricks in the wall.
All in all you were all
just bricks in the wall.
Adaptive value of reflexes. Moro reflex. Walking/stepping reflex. Rooting reflex
Sucking reflex. Tonic neck reflex.
Palmar grasp reflex. Plantar reflex.
Galant reflex. Swimming reflex. Babkin reflex. Other primitive reflexes. Primitive reflexes in high-risk newborns.
BBC(British Pravda) on Sweden’s Gender-Neutral Preschool
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-14038419
I understand what you’re saying and agree for the most part. I am not sure whether some more gradual introduction to the world may be preferable to the way things are done now. Not putting it down to your writing, but will admit that the way you phrased it kinda left me with this image of a newborn being pushed into a zero-gravity (I know you did not say that) environ with some lactating ladies and miscellany floating around as well. “Oh yeah, they’ll be just fine!” 😉
I am not against any change that may benefit a child (in falsetto; ‘somebody please think of the children!’ *faints*) but think that it is up to the parents to do so. It certainly shouldn’t be given to the ‘authoratays’ as one more reason to take the child from its parents at an even more tender and thus impressionable age (though I know you weren’t calling for that). Of course, the government cares more about my child than I do (I try not to swear, but all I can say there is wtf?).
That kicking and screaming little creature is building muscle – lungs need use and exercise too! That was one of the first things I thought and said after my daughter came screaming into our world. ‘That’s right, exercise those lungs!’
Regarding shoes, they must be put in the closet or she crawls straight for them and wants to put them in her mouth. Not too sure about ‘frustrating spacial calculations.’ 🙂
“To raise stronger kids, breastfeeding from more than one mother is the best, is all I meant to say.”
This seems counterintuitive, but I am open to learn.
The reflexes that you mention are interesting to read about. Do you think that maybe they exhibit themselves early and then disappear for reasons other than improper care? That they serve some purpose (I am not claiming to know what it is). I know that my daughter will pick up on things and then once she’s done it to her satisfaction (like when she first said “mamma”) she may not really do so again for some time. I think we all do that; once we learn/master (and children ARE the BEST learners and are getting much thrown at them in short time) something we often move to the next and even forget about the other for awhile.
“My bible says put your woman in the desert during menstruation. My shampoo bottle says lather rinse repeat. Both seem like valuable property I control. I try not to be ruled by objects like bibles or shampoo bottles, but just maybe both are brain-washing me, and I am a fool.”
I am not sure where the Bible says that specifically (it does say “she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days”); however, the ‘unclean’ WERE often separated from others. My Bible also shows God as a man being touched by an unclean (for 12 years!) woman in the press of the crowd (Luke 8:43-48 http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke+8&version=CEV) and therefore He should be made unclean as well. Instead she is praised for her faith and made well and clean by her association with Him. I am not ruled by shampoo bottles or even directly by the Bible, but believe a personal relationship with Jesus is possible and certainly won’t hold it against you because you haven’t had that experience. It is He who I want to rule my life – as foreign and brain-washed as that idea may seem to you. As far as shampoo relates to brain-washing; well if you could only get it through that thick skull of yours. Har har. Sorry. 😉
Good ol’ Pink Floyd. Good music, interesting messages. I haven’t listened to that kind of music for awhile, but Animals was always my favorite album.
@ tor…
Got into a conversation with a bank teller yesterday. A “bit about me” placard at the counter indicated he was working on his first novel. I asked about it & he said it was science fiction, sort of along the lines of Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle”. I asked if he knew the short story “Harrison Bergeron”. He didn’t, but intended to look it up. Your
“Imagine “parents” were told by the bible or government to destroy their infants ability to blink automatically and put special devices over newborn eyes to compensate and ameliorate.”
has me flashing on it, too.
http://www.tnellen.com/cybereng/harrison.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tvqsv1pPSbg
The movie version papa is played by an actor who uttered, in another role, “We don’t have to beat them – we just have to fight them!”
Interesting coincidence you take this track. I was going to addendum my last night’s response, to rj pare, with the below, but bed had become preferable to typing.
This is from Yalom’s “Existential Psychotherapy”, which I’ve referenced before, & which I think is a book that contains the details of the universals of what all world-improvers are up against – including the only faction whose findings are not fiction, the anarcho-capitalists:
~~The word “exist” implies differentiation (“ex-ist” = “to stand out”). The process of growth, as [Otto] Rank knew, is a process of separation, of becoming a separate being. The words of growth imply separateness: autonomy (self-governing), self-reliance, standing on one’s own feet, individuation, being one’s own person, independence. Human life begins with a fusion of ova & sperm, passes through an embryonic stage of complete physical dependence on the mother, into a phase of physical & emotional dependency on surrounding adults. Gradually the individual establishes boundaries demarking where he or she ends & others begin, & becomes self-reliant, independent & separate. Not to separate means not to grow up, but the toll of separating & growing up is isolation.
The tension in this dilemma is, in [Hellmuth] Kaiser’s term, the human being’s “universal conflict”. “Becoming an individual entails a complete, a fundamental, an eternal & insurmountable isolation.” Fromm makes the same point in “Escape From Freedom”: “To the extent to which the child emerges from that world it becomes aware of being alone, of being an entity separate from all others. This separation from a world, which in comparison with one’s own individual existence is overwhelmingly strong & powerful, & often threatening & dangerous, creates a feeling of powerlessness & anxiety. As long as one was an integral part of that world, unaware of the possibilities & responsibilities of individual action, one did not need to be afraid of it. When one has become an individual, one stands alone & faces the world in all its perilous & overpowering aspects.
To relinquish a state of interpersonal fusion means to encounter existential isolation with all its dread & powerlessness. The dilemma of fusion-isolation – or, as it is commonly referred to, attachment-separation – is the major existential developmental task. This is what Otto Rank meant when he emphasized the importance of birth trauma. To Rank, birth was symbolic of all emergence from embeddedness. What the child fears is life itself.
It becomes clear now that existential isolation & interpersonal isolation are intricately interwoven. Emergence from interpersonal fusion thrusts the individual into existential isolation. A dissatisfying state of fusion-existence or too early or too tentative emergence leaves the individual unprepared to face the isolation inherent in autonomous existence. The fear of existential isolation is the driving force behind many interpersonal relationships and is, as we shall see, a major dynamic behind the phenomenon of transference.
The problem of relationship is a problem of fusion-isolation. On the one hand, one must learn to relate to another without giving way to the desire to slip out of isolation by becoming part of that other. But one must also learn to relate to another without reducing the other to a tool, a defense against isolation. Bugental (in his discussion of the problems of relatedness) plays on the word “apart.” The human being’s basic interpersonal task is to be at once “a-part-OF” and “a-part-FROM”. Interpersonal & existential isolation are way stations for each other. One must first separate oneself from the other in order to encounter isolation; one must be alone to experience aloneness. But, as I shall now discuss, it is the facing of aloneness that ultimately allows one to engage another deeply & meaningfully. ~~
I was in a sales gig once. An image from one of the managers / trainers has always stayed with me. He said most people are walking around with their umbilical cords in hand, looking for a womb to plug back into. Just so.
See also Ernest Becker. Thomas Szasz was his mentor & EB shook the tree just as much as TS.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernest_Becker
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62RwQKszNA0
the movie looks like 9 parts on utube…but looks like uninterrupted, here:
http://www.hulu.com/watch/173530
@ozymandias–
Thank you. This is profound stuff; and stuff they’re just not teaching in most psychiatric programs anymore. No, now it’s all multiple-choice, fill-in-the-bubbles next to DSM-IV-R/DSM-V “diagnostic criteria”…and push the pill that pops out the black box.
Szasz has appeared before on these pages, and he is due a great deal of respect and re-reading. The man was a titan for liberty and swam against a swift current his whole career.
Yes. Turns out, after all said/done, most manifestations are symptoms…thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, as Thoreau put it…which translates into a whole lotta’ makework, & luddites, too, if you think about it.
Szasz was something, alright. Saddened me to hear he’d left…”complications from a fall” – sucks (does in so many older people).
Others have already made some great comments here, but I have to put in my two cents.
“The initial aggression, in tax evasion, IS NOT, the the many reminders, notices, warnings and fines NOR is it the eventual necessity of police coming to arrest you. It is your choice to steal from the rest of society.”
The initial aggression in tax evasion is the government’s expectation that you bare all financial information to them and then pay them a percentage that they determine. Be it high or low it is inherently unjust and evil. Letters and fines and even jail are simply lower cost alternatives to just killing those who “evade taxes,” and most “cooperate” under duress. “Tax evasion,” – note the attempt to paint the victim as the aggressor – I consider to be akin to when the thief puts a weapon in your face and asks for your wallet: Do you believe it is wrong not to tell him about the $20 in your sock? I’m sure he just needed the money to pay for his kid’s indoctrination, sorry, education. That’s a worthy goal, right? What if he is doing it for a neighbors kid? You OWE that money – pay up. Do you try to avoid paying as much taxes as you might through write-offs, not reporting cash, and other tax avoidance? This is clearly unfair to society.
“Consideration of the means and the ends must be a part of any rational plan for managing societies of many millions of people.”
The idea that a group of ‘many millions’ of imperfect people who can’t even be trusted with dangerous items can be ‘managed’ by having what amounts to a popularity contest from that same pool every few years is the height of Utopian thinking. And anarchists are accused of this?!
“You would have an extremely disparate landscape, in which average humans in developed nations would endure far worse living conditions than today – all to adhere to your zealous dogma that no law or government can ever be just.”
No, only that any unjust law or government is intolerable and must be eradicated. Also, I disagree completely with your first premise. The type of people who steal (only for other people’s good, certainly!) are not worried about violating other property rights. There is always more incentive for owners to take care of their property. If you deny this you are completely blinded. I own a construction business. Over many years I have worked with hundreds of thousands of dollars in tools and thinking back I remember cutting the cord of a circular saw ONE TIME. Employees wreck things all the time out of carelessness. A man elected to office for 2 years up to life, depending, only has incentive to ‘redistribute’ as much as he can in the time he has. I believe that history has shown that the more people are able to keep the fruits of their labor, the more prosperous society is. (Ironically, even at lower tax rates the total take by government remains about the same.)
“You give no thought to the ends so long as you can content your self-righteous conscience that “your hands are clean”.”
You are right. My conscience comes first. I will not do wrong to make right. I do not believe such a thing really possible, so while at times it can be tempting and there are even some (not many!) goals pursued by the government that are good in a moral sense, I cannot condone them. You, apparently, would rather say “my hands are covered in blood?”
“I see no gulags in our future, we’ve built a very stable & progressive, developed nation. By adopting social democracy/ social capitalist systems that balance the needs of individuals along with the needs of the whole”
If you mean “we” as in the individual people of the country, you are partially correct. If you are saying that the government can take credit for America’s past prosperity then this is completely false. It was precisely the opposite idea that made America great. That that government which governs least governs best. I believe in the continuing that reasoning to its logical outcome. There is no balance in theft. The social welfare/warfare state that you refer to uses the same twisted logic regarding its debt (perhaps that is where you got it?) – “it would be irresponsible not to keep borrowing more money to pay for all the things we promised but have no way to currently pay for.” Huh? I wish I could say the same about gulags with the confidence that you have. I sincerely hope you are right, but I do not see prosperity in paper lasting much longer. It may hang on for awhile, but I think they’re running out of ideas. QE3, anyone? Bad times will follow such an upheaval, gulag or no.
Well done, I agree with everything you wrote. 1861 in the USSA can be looked back at now as a tipping point. Cynical European slave paradigms were adopted as the law of the land at the same time the slaves were freed.
The old way of getting slaves was to buy them from their family in Africa. Or get them even cheaper by paying the Dutch to steal them for you without payment by force.
Now there was a new way of getting slaves in America. The more powerful states would collude to steal from the less powerful states using the federal government.
When the “evil” private plantation owners of the southern states don’t want to pay public tariffs to support the poorer northern states? The north conscripts men and manufacturers(makes them temporary slaves) into a war effort to steal from the south and force them to comply.
Before 1861, 2% of Americans were 100% slaves. After 1865, 98% of Americans are 20% slaves. 2% of Americans are war criminals, or criminals of law and thus 100% slaves. Public owned convict labor takes the place of privately owned slave labor, the number of enslaved stays the same. Slaves aren’t made by race, but rather by a type of contrived demerit system.
Wars can be announced for all kinds of pretexts now, and the whole of the people forced to be 100% slaves of the government whenever the controllers of the federal state deem it profitable.
I read a comment once that went something like this (in the context of the recent assault on the 2A): “Lincoln didn’t bring the slaves up to our level. He brought us down to theirs. Slaves aren’t allowed to own weapons.” (Or much property for that matter. And if so the master always has the final say.)
End-running clover is probably the easier part. The harder part is end-running myself. I can recognize Clover’s malignancies because I harbor a milder version of them myself. I have grown immune to many of them, yet each time I write, I unwittingly spread cloveristic ideas to others, who may not have built a tolerance to them. When writing, it is rare that there are only authentic principles of libertarianism which I am elucidating, often impurities manage to appear also.
I hope you become better than me. To do this, you need only learn to look at yourself and others objectively. I hope this story illustrates the importance of listening others, and yourself. That you learn at a younger age, to recognize truths when they are being told, no matter how implausible they appear to be.
Introduction to Ignaz Semmelweis – a Medical Pioneer:
In the 1840s, hospitals were dangerous places. Mothers who went in to give birth often didn’t make it out. For example, at Vienna General Hospital’s First Obstetrical Clinic, as many as 10% of mothers died of puerperal fever after giving birth. But there was some good news: at the Second Clinic, the number was just 4%. Expectant mothers noticed this — some would get down on their knees and beg to be admitted to the Second Clinic. Others, hearing new patients were being admitted to the First Clinic that day, decided they’d rather give birth in the streets.
Ignaz Semmelweis, an assistant at the First Clinic, couldn’t bear it. He began desperately searching for some kind of explanation for the difference. He tested many things without success. Then, in 1847, Semmelweis’s friend Jakob Kolletschka was performing an autopsy when a student accidentally poked him with a scalpel. It was a minor injury, but Kolletschka got terribly sick and ultimately passed away, with symptoms rather like the what the mothers had. Which got Semmelweis wondering: was some “deathly material” on the corpses responsible for the deaths?
To test this, he insisted the doctors begin washing their hands with chlorinated lime (which he found best removed the stink of death) before handling the pregnant women. The results were shocking. In April 1847, the mortality rate was 18.3%. Semmelweis instituted hand-washing in mid-May and by June the mortality rate had crashed to 2.2%. The next month it was even less and later that year it reached zero — for the first time ever.
You’d think doctors would be thrilled by this incredible discovery. Instead, Semmelweis was ridiculed and attacked. He was fired from the hospital and forced out of Vienna. “In published medical works my teachings are either ignored or attacked,” he complained. “The medical faculty at Würzburg awarded a prize to a monograph written in 1859 in which my teachings were rejected.” Even in his native Vienna, hundreds of mothers continued to die every year.
Semmelweis turned to alcohol and his behavior became increasingly erratic. In 1865, he was committed to a mental institution. There he was beaten by the guards, placed in a straitjacket, and locked in a dark cell. He died shortly thereafter, at the age of 47, from an infected wound.
Ignaz Semmelweis – Antiseptic Pioneer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis
Principles of Asepsis
OMFG Tor that is so true!
Orthodoxy is attacked in every field as if by marauding white blood cells engulfing a bacterium.
But it’s particularly brutal in medicine; we joke about it in software, the “Not Invented Here” syndrome but in medicine it is endemic.
Dr Barry Marshall in Australia twenty years ago discovered that there was a bacterium that could live in the highly acidic stomach–and it caused inflammation of the lining leading to ulcers…Helicobacter pylori.
And the cure was simple; a six week course of two cheap antibiotics, problem solved.
Was he heralded as a hero and feted on the highest? Hardly. He was ridiculed, persecuted, and run out of meetings. Until, that is, it became the new orthodoxy. And Yet it is STILL not practiced; many doctors still prescribe the same old stupid and tired ineffective regimens.
Same thing with Alzheimer’s; if you weren’t talking about beta-amyloid protein, you couldn’t get funding for research. Still mostly true; but it turns out, eliminating the stuff doesn’t cure Alzheimer’s–twenty years and billions of dollars lost. In fact, it’s probably a result of not eating enough saturated fat and cholesterol, and taking poisonous statin drugs–another orthodoxy.
All the advice we’ve been given over the last forty years on cholesterol and fat is WRONG–and it’s why Alzheimer’s, heart disease, and obesity have increased dramatically despite our doing the “right” thing.
Orthodoxy.
If medicine weren’t a State-sponsored monopoly, we’d save literally hundreds of thousands of lives a year.
God I’m glad I left that bunch of hide-bound statists behind!
Is this also the case with obesity? It seems reverse-orthodoxy is at play, such that the worst treatments are chosen first and most often. #1 seems to be worst; #6 is the best.
1. Gastric bypass, gastroplasty. 2. Lipo. 3. Low calorie/exercise. 4. Phentermine. 5. Primal diet/lower enterobacter’s presence in gut. 6. Medically supervised removal of enterobacter to near zero presence.
http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1212/obesity_bacteria.php3
http://www.nature.com/ismej/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ismej2012153a.html
Going for the Galileo’s Fallacy – lame.
No, you idiot, he is illustrating the power of orthodoxy.
He points to a completely obvious (now) and well-proven fact–that surgical cross-contamination leads to sepsis and death–and decries medicine’s resistance to a new concept.
Were he defending Semmelweis’ hypothesis it would constitute argument-from-persecution.
God you’re unbearable.
Actually, modern understanding of Galileo’s heliocentrism is incomplete and only partially correct.
The milky way is supermassive-blackhole-centric, all matter revolves around it’s center.
The earth rotates around the moon in an orbit about 2/3 its diameter. The sun is pulled at and distorted by all the planets revolving around it. The sun itself rotates and is akin to a planet rotating around the milky way center, a planet that is undergoing fusion in a visible, rather than subterranean fashion.
There are all kinds of smaller solar system bodies with all kinds of complex orbits. Orbits that can’t be said to be merely, revolving around the sun.
A stone dropped from a tower also attracts the mass of the earth up towards it by some infinitessimal amount. Jupiter has a measurable small effect on its drop as well.
All revolves around all, and surprising changes are commonplace. Nothing is a simple clockwork, measurable in advance and or predictable perpetuity. The matrix of natural truth values cannot be forecast, but only viewed in hindsight.
@pare:
There’s another confusion here: you’re conflating libertarianism and the NAP with Rand’s Objectivism. I love much of Rand, but I reject Objectivism–chiefly, because I believe in community and charity, and vigorously engage in both.
I am not Howard Roark; I clearly see one of our chief strengths as humans is our social nature. “Co-opetition” is real and powerful. Strong communities, starting with strong families, are the ideal state of human society.
But only when those things are based on mutual consent and voluntary cooperation.
Enforcing them at gunpoint–forcing people to be “neighborly” and “help out”–coarsens the fabric of society and rends apart the very comradeship it pretends to encourage. It makes everyone unwilling partners in a chain gang, lashed to the next man by heavy chains and resenting every minute of it.
Charity is ennobling. Redistribution is theft.
@ r. j. paré on January 14, 2013 at 6:54 pm
It’s called “Godwin’s Law”–any sufficiently long internet discussion will inevitably draw analogies to Hitler or the Nazis. Also commonly known as reductio ad absurdum
But in your case it’s highly instructive. You worried about the psychological damage to the cop–the aggressor who was “forced” to shoot the victim.
It’s Stockholm Syndrome. No, it’s worse; it’s battered-wife syndrome. You’re so used to being a slave, of getting a shiner from dear old dad…
Oh whoops. My psychiatrist’s spidey-sense–rusty as it is–just tingled. You DID have an abusive alcoholic father, didn’t you?
Dig inside yourself. There’s a psychological abscess there; if you lance it and let the pus come out, you’ll see your attachment to the State is largely a function of gratitude it doesn’t beat you if you just do what you’re told. Not like irrational dad at all.
As far as “delusional narcissist”–No, people faced with arguments they willfully fail to comprehend posed by a superior intellect rationalize those failures.
Q.E.D.
Dear meth,
rj lost this “debate” days ago.
He has no response to the NAP, and he knows it.
That is why he keeps tap dancing around it in every exchange he has with you and Eric. He knows it would stop him dead in his tracks. So he refuses to look at it.
That’s the thing about clovers. It’s not so much their ignorance. It’s their flat out refusal to look at the facts.
I keep hoping, Bevin; it’s the Don Quixote in me. 🙂
Thing is, he keeps coming back. So at some level, he must KNOW it’s wrong, but he just can’t quite face it, but he can’t leave it alone either.
It must be maddening. I thought maybe, just maybe he’d ‘fess up and see it.
But it’s frightening to see it–because then you have to take responsibility.
It really is a parent-child relationship for the Statists; and in his case it’s pathological because, I think, of his early experiences.
I took umbrage to “delusional narcissist”; I have objectively valid reasons for being a narcissist.
Dear meth,
Don’t get me wrong. I wouldn’t think of telling you to “not bother.”
Clover is hardly the only one reading the excellent points you and Eric were making. Lots of other undecideds on the fence are probably reading them too.
Who knows who they might reach?
As long as the arguments aren’t held in a sealed room, they have an impact. These days, with the Internet, the impact should never be underestimated.
I Googled some my old online articles a few years back, and was surprised to find mirrored all over the place.
“The ravings from regressives who know, deep down, that history has passed them by.”
You just won’t deal with it, will you?
The violence behind everything you favor.
I and other Libertarians oppose shoving guns under people’s chins to take their property or for any other reason except in self-defense. This is the non-aggression principle (NAP). You live your life as you see fit; I do the same. We interact with one another peacefully and cooperate (or not) voluntarily. Your poor decisions or plain old bad luck don’t impose an enforceable obligation on me, just as mine impose none on you. Neither of us has the right to force the other to do (or hand over) anything. I may freely choose to assist you – and vice versa. But only if I harm you in some way – that is, if I violate your rights – do you have the right to use force against me.
That’s my “regressive” view of things.
I’ve challenged you to explain how it is that a morally objectionable action such as theft – when committed by an individual (or unsanctioned gang, such as a mafia) – is made ethically acceptable when it is done via the ballot box, by a “sanctioned” (by some) gang?
If it is wrong for me to threaten to beat you up in the street in order to compel you to “help” me, by what magical process does it become acceptable when I do the same thing via the ballot box? When I vote for a politician who promises to “help” – by threatening to assault (or kill) you in order to provide me with a material benefit?
You have not – and likely will not – address this. Because you know you can’t. Not without openly admitting what you are.
Just read Eric’s post–and yes, like him, if someone attempted to steal from me I’d smash his face in.
Defensively.
Can you not draw the distinction?
And stop trying to claim the moral high ground.
You can’t claim that until you come clean with your (passive) violence.
This is so typical–so-called liberals prance around calling others “violent” and “warmongering” while their existence is supported by those very qualities.
Meanwhile I’m the bad guy if I attempt to defend myself.
You’re only non-violent–if people do as you tell them.
You’re putting words in my mouth. Remember, I (and Eric et al.) abhor violence; we propose a system of voluntary cooperation without coercion and violence. I’ve said nothing of the sort:
You’re projecting. I see this so often among supposed “liberals”; deep down, there’s a nasty authoritarian streak.
Let’s examine what “progressivism” has wrought; but first let’s clarify what “progressivism” really means. It’s thinly-veiled socialism; socialism is collectivism; other collectivist ideologies include communism and fascism. It is incorrect to think of socialism and fascism as polar opposites; they are fraternal twins.
If you’ve read much, you’d know a famous title–The Road to Serfdom by Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek. He ably describes how all collectivist ideologies descend to authoritarianism. Hell, you don’t even have to read it; just look at history.
Ultimately, collectivism reduces us to serfdom.
SO: who’s on the “regressive” path? We believe in the ideals of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the American Revolution. We believe in individual rights and dignity. You adhere to an ancient, authoritarian philosophy girded up like makeup on a corpse with euphemistic terms like “progressive”–without understanding the core precepts–and worse yet, refusing to logically examine the basis of your philosophy.
Seems my first attempt at this comment went into the void.. try try again… and again. Please delete multiple copies 😉
I don’t think we can expect r. j. paré to be aware of how good Germans were turned into killers for the state. I could dig up appropriate cites but I don’t think it would do any good. But for RJ’s benefit what the Nazi regime did to get people to carry out the violence of the state was to turn things around such that it was about what the victim made the perpetrator do. That the victim gave the camp guard no choice. It was the victim’s fault. That was the psychological conditioning the Nazi government used to get people to carry out the various horrors.
Such things are needed because good people won’t do these things normally. They have to be tricked, warped into doing them.
Because of “Godwin’s Law” I avoid making the references. It also seems to cloud people’s minds rather than being instructive. Methyl and others here know these things as well or better than I do and those who don’t will shut down as RJ did when Nazis are mentioned. That’s why I specifically avoided it in my reply which of course RJ was silent to. It is no surprise to me that he grabbed on to the comparison to nazis to avoid the issue.
A well-taken point, Brent. It does not serve to invite discussion unfortunately, even if the analogy is accurate.
I did maintain an even tone for a very long time though; I’m getting better.
What’s interesting is going back to one of Pare’s first posts–“I am a pro-peace, anti-death penalty, anti-war of aggression liberal.”
Which he then goes on to disprove by threatening me with lethal violence if I don’t pay the fuck up and give him welfare–NOW, Bitte
And we STILL haven’t heard if it’s OK to mug your neighbors for bennies.
Seems my first attempt at this comment went into the void.. try try again… One more try to avoid the spam filter..
I don’t think we can expect RJ to be aware of how good Germans were turned into killers for the state. I could dig up appropriate cites but I don’t think it would do any good. But for RJ’s benefit what the Nazi regime did to get people to carry out the violence of the state was to turn things around such that it was about what the victim made the perpetrator do. That the victim gave the camp guard no choice. It was the victim’s fault. That was the psychological conditioning the Nazi government used to get people to carry out the various horrors.
Such things are needed because good people won’t do these things normally. They have to be tricked, warped into doing them.
Because of “Godwin’s Law” I avoid making the references. It also seems to cloud people’s minds rather than being instructive. Methyl and others here know these things as well or better than I do and those who don’t will shut down as RJ did when Nazis are mentioned. That’s why I specifically avoided it in my reply which of course RJ was silent to. It is no surprise to me that he grabbed on to the comparison to nazis to avoid the issue.
Hi Brent,
Apologies – for some odd reason your comments got flagged as spam. I’ve just approved them. (Dealing with spammers and the havoc they create is a huge chore – wish I could throw them all into a giant blender and grind them into a slurry to feed to RJ Pare, et al. )
Regressive?
There’s nothing more regressive than what you and other statists advocate. A serfdom, a slavery, where the lord or master cares for the population taking what the population produces in the process. The statist system is ancient. It turns the clock back thousands of years.
Sure you and others use different words, but it is effectively the same thing. The same ancient scams and social manipulations. Us libertarian minded folks want to recapture and perfect the enlightenment that improved everyone’s lives. Freedom in all forms and the ability to retain what one produces. Meanwhile the statists want to return to the collectivism of the dark ages and the poverty that comes with it.
It is your kind that “target” groups. Pit groups against each other. Make everything political. Libertarians are interested in productivity, not political social manipulations. It is your kind that wants “gay marriage” as another state granted privilege, the libertarians want the state out of marriage. Your sort of “freedom” amounts to massa granting you something under his specific terms. About groups competing with each other politically and socially for privileges. Libertarians want to rid us of massa.
.the inherent nobility of the white man. What the fuck are you talkin’ about Willis? Seriously, this sort of nonsense doesn’t even deserve a response.
Ron Paul would treat someone at HIS expense and did so many times. The end. Also it’s irrelevant what Ron Paul would do as he is just an individual. I could just as well point to individual statists that executed or imprisoned those who didn’t agree with them from Lincoln to Hitler to Stalin to Mao and so on. To get back to point, what you want is charity given at gun point. That somehow in some Wilsonian way you can right the wrongs of the world at the barrel of a gun. That through violence you can achieve some sort of utopia of equity. Not that you ever will come to grips with the fact that you need to use violence. No, here you blame the person who didn’t hand over his wealth. If he just obeyed your kind wouldn’t have to use violence. Look at what he made you do… Just like good Germans learned to carry out the desires of sociopaths. Ever think there might be a sociopath manipulating you too?
They also avoid direct explanations of how a society of millions and millions would remotely function without comprehensive fire services, emergency services, police services.
It’s been explained many many many times over. The failure of statists to read the work done on these and more topics is your failure not that of libertarians. Why is it that every statist I encounter does this? Puts forth his own ignorance as that no such work was ever done? There are private solutions to many things, but the statists want monopolies. For instance, fire protection. State run fire protection has often used force to stop private fire fighting. It has had people arrested and jailed for fighting fires the state has decided to allow to burn. Those using government fire services get angry when their neighbor’s insurance company sends in a private fire company to protect their neighbor’s property. The state destroys other mechanisms and then claims it is needed. It’s not.
There are countless examples of government stomping out private efforts. There was some guy who started his own private curb pickup garbage collection. He charged less than government. Government shut him down. Over and over the same thing. Did you know many if not most food businesses now start illegally and when they get enough revenue, grow to a certain size, they go legit? And by illegally I mean they bake cookies in the home kitchen because they cannot afford a six figure commercial set up. That’s how government works for the bigs in areas government hasn’t taken monopoly for themselves. But eventually they use that leverage to do so, see health care. It may be ten, might be 20, could be 15 or 30 years but the US federal government will have a monopoly on health care. All it has to do now is bankrupt the private insurers and it now has the legal ability to do so.
“It does not take a genius to realize that the .free market. means that the very wealthy will have all the services they require; that the working classes will have to forego education and regular health care in order to survive; that the poor who are unable to find a wealthy benefactor or are unwilling to live as beggars will suffer greatly, as a permanently disenfranchised segment of humanity.”
I am not wealthy. I would pay less than I do now. The wealthy don’t pay the taxes that keep you government services. The peasantry does. Do you really think the wealthy that have control of government pay for your fire protection or anything else? No. You do and you pay a lot more for it because there are layers upon layers of parasites involved. Furthermore government controls education because it is a tool of maintaining control. It conditions children. Most kids just get conditioned…. Others just suffer. I don’t think kids should be subjected to these horrid institutions. If I had kids I think I would do everything to prevent my children from suffering the social and mental tortures the way I did.
Onward…
The middle class shrinks under statism. We have more and more statism but what happens? Shrinking middle class and the rich get richer. Your political systems are what the wealthy want. They can dominate a political system easily because they are established. They use regulation and law to make sure the little guy can’t get a foothold. They pit groups of people against each other to make things easier for them to control. It’s the free market the wealthy hate which is why they condition people to hate it. They don’t want competition.
Ever notice how statism’s attacks on the ‘rich’ end up enriching the wealthy even more? You statists hate productivity. Hate it. Punish it. So when a family has a business and the owner dies, you death tax it. The family can’t pay the taxes and has to sell out to the corporations the wealthy control. Less competition for them.
It’s all about top down management with you statists. Utopia through control. The more you can control people the closer you get to your conformist utopias. That’s why when statists know nobody can fight back they start purging the population. It’s all the people for the corporation, for the state. Just as it was in the dark ages but on larger scale.
Onward….
With you all rights come from the barrel of a gun. Who has the biggest and most weapons, the most thugs becomes the granter of rights. The manager. Thus your system is a system of no rights. We are all slaves to the politically powerful. Just like in the dark ages.
Now, I have addressed everyone of your paragraphs. You have yet to address anything I wrote. You ignored it and went off on these tangents above. Don’t worry, That’s what statists do. They turn every ‘debate’ into ‘ask the libertarian anything’. And that is all I will indulge you in that game.
Instead of addressing what I stated about the social manipulations of getting people to blame the victim, the battered wife attitude, you go off on nonsense about libertarians not having worked out how fires would be put out and the like, when anyone with half a clue knows countless papers on such subjects at their fingertips. And this doesn’t get into my other replies to you which you have avoided.
@Brent – thank you for not diving into a further digression involving Nazis. I am well aware of the so-called “Godwin’s Law” on the internet and have seen it in action in more discussions than I care to recall. Beyond the absurdity of it – the intellectual dishonesty is staggering. I’ve not dodged any questions – but not all my posts have made it through… so addressing each comment, directed towards me, is problematic.
I will say this for Libertarians, theirs is by far the “most clever” repackaging of regressive social policy I have come across to date. They [for the most part] try to avoid openly targeting one particular ethnic/gender/sexual orientation/racial group and rather couch their arguments as being non-aggressive. They package their ideology as “non-aggression” yet the anger and threats of violence that erupt from them, when challenged, reveals that to be an illusion though.
It is also very revealing to observe those who claim to support “libertarian-ism” and notice the cross-over/overlap with things like the Tea Party movement and Birther-ism.
There does seem to be this self-delusion at work, believing in: “the inherent nobility of the white man” — in that they perceive themselves as somehow more capable individuals than the “others” they decry. They willfully ignore all the benefits of living in a modern, progressive, developed nation, that they use on a daily basis, and instead yearn for the “pioneer days”.
They refuse to answer direct questions on social welfare issues – although even Ron Paul finally admitted he would let a young man, lacking funds or a wealthy benefactor, die rather than have his medical issues treated and paid for at tax expense.
They also avoid direct explanations of how a society of millions and millions would remotely function without comprehensive fire services, emergency services, police services… they instead speak in small scale examples: “well, see bob and ted live on a remote island and…” blah, blah, blah… OR they dismiss the entire problem with a wave of their magic “the free market will provide” wand.
It does not take a genius to realize that the “free market” means that the very wealthy will have all the services they require; that the working classes will have to forego education and regular health care in order to survive; that the poor who are unable to find a wealthy benefactor or are unwilling to live as beggars will suffer greatly, as a permanently disenfranchised segment of humanity.
I will take a moment to address the issue of taxation and prosperity. A society can be measured by the quality of life enjoyed by its citizenry. When the vast working class [the larger demographic when compared with the wealthy elite and the most impoverished] is diminished, the economy struggles, as the middle classes are the ones who do the majority of spending in any community. When the middle classes prosper – the economy grows and ALL income classes benefit – because: a) the products created by the corporations the wealthy own have more consumers and b) the impoverished see the middle class as a realistic goal. This also creates a more stable society [less need for social unrest and the bloodshed of inevitable revolutions whenever gross disparity thrives]. Thus a system of law and taxation, which ensures that the rights of everyone are protected [be they labourer, merchant, aristocrat or hobo] and divides the costs amongst its citizenry is the most equitable, just society humanity has discovered, to date.
A quick note on rights and freedoms. We can trade barbs and quote competing scholars and philosophers ad nauseum… instead I will just say that I disagree with your perspective that rights are merely “freedoms from” certain things and do not include any inherent “rights to” anything. As for the notion that rights exist by magic [inalienable – outside of legislation] that is an exercise in classroom pedagoguery, for without some mechanism to uphold or confirm the existence of those rights – they do not in any meaningful way exist.
I am not of the opinion that we will never find a better way, mind you – I just have yet to find any ideology/philosophy that can lead to a better the quality of life than this current system.
You must be joking! You’ve done nothing but avoid answering the single most important question posed.
One more time:
I choose not to send my children to government school.
I home-school them, at no cost to anyone else.
I therefore choose NOT to pay for government school and withhold those taxes.
Is it morally acceptable to threaten me with lethal violence if I do not pay that tax?
In all your increasingly vociferous arguments, you’ve dodged THAT one more skillfully than Bolshoi Ballet.
Other points:
“threats of violence that erupt from them, when challenged”–who has threatened you here? You on the other hand threaten me–but are too dishonest to do it directly, you delicately vote to hire goons for the job.
“overlap with things like the Tea Party”–a fallacy, guilt by association.
“the inherent nobility of the white man”–my god now you’re just making things up, there’s not a word of race/gender in the entire discussion! Are you so bound by collectivism you must inject it to stir trouble?
” refuse to answer direct questions on social welfare issues”–I’ve addressed that directly, pointing out that social welfare was better before collectivist programs like the New Deal and the Great Society. We have MORE homeless, MORE disenfranchised now than we had eighty years ago.
On the middle class: An excellent point and wholeheartedly agree; the bigger the middle class, the better. And yet what do we see in “progressive” societies? The ongoing destruction of the middle class. Here in America–the middle class is being decimated. Greece, Spain, Portugal, Italy; a beleaguered and shrinking middle class.
Why is that? Because collectivist ideologies are DESIGNED to consolidate wealth in an oligarchy. It’s the deepest, darkest secret of these monstrous systems. Marxism wasn’t to liberate the underclasses; it was to crush them forever.
Look at its results! And please, I beg, don’t trot out “…but it hasn’t been really tried properly, if only they’d done it better.”
> ‘Is it morally acceptable to threaten me with lethal violence if I do not pay that tax?’ — the easy answer is NO and certainly no IRS agent or police officer is ever going to threaten you with lethal violence for not paying taxes. But I suspect you are not referring to the non-payment of taxes but are exaggerating the situation to a worse-case scenario ending [ie: They send you a bill for your taxes, you refuse, they send you notices and notices and you refuse. They apply penalties and take you to court, you refuse… At some point they are given no choice but to take you into custody and sell of and valuables you may have in order to pay your outstanding debt. From what I gather you are suggestiing you would resist arrest with force and would fight them to the death. I sincerely doubt that [hell I sincerely doubt the entire scenario] but I do trust that the police would try to take you in, at that point, with as little force as possible. the degree of force would be entirely dependent on how violent you were with them].
> ‘who has threatened you here?’ — I was pointing out the hostility I’ve encountered on this site and others like it – because I had a different political/philosophical perspective. Such is the vitriol one will encounter justified via the juvenile excuse: “those policies you support are an attack on my freedoms – so you started it!” — However, it ain’t gonna kill me, so moving on…
> The Tea party – guilt by association fallacy – absolutely you are correct, it was unfair of me to judge your side by them, regardless if some followers flow between the two – they are still separate, distinct movements.
> your claim: ‘MORE homeless, MORE disenfranchised now than we had eighty years ago’ — I would strongly disagree with that. An estimated 60% of the US population lived below the poverty line during the 1920s, [approx 70 million] while the US population is two and a half times larger today the numbers of people living below the poverty line has decreased to 15% of the population [approx 46 million] and this despite 30+ years of conservative attacks on social programs and decreases to tax rate causing debt. Up to the mid 1970s the number was even lower fluctuating between 11 & 12%. Clearly investment in those with lower income and investment in early childhood care results in more successful and more productive members of society.
> The middle class has taken a bit of a hit in recent years, as I pointed out above, but that is more a result of the following:
1. tax cuts leading to debt and program cuts
2. wages for workers being completely divorced from productivity
3. management/owner side receiving massive salary increases while labour side has not recieved commensurate % increases [ie: if management recieves a 5% bump because company is successful, in any given year, then so should labour].
Despite all of the above, which I view as very real problems, we are still doing far better [as I pointed out above] than we were back then. And hopefully, in near future, these inequities will be adressed in law.
> ‘collectivist ideologies are DESIGNED to consolidate wealth in an oligarchy’ — For starters I don’t personally believe in pure free market capitalism nor pure socialist/communist structure. Neither do most developed nations with high quality of life ratings. Most adhere to a form of social democracy/social capitalism that bridges the gap between the two. They have a regulated capitalist economy that applies some free market measures in certain areas of business while socializing certain sectors deemed essential services. Thus balancing the freedom to pursue wealth with recognized rights of individuals and the needs of society as a whole. as for the accusation that wealth is consolidated in an elite oligarchy I would argue that disparity was greater before progressive tax rates and rule of law than after. The constraint of law and progressive tax rates chafes the very rich and powerful and they work hard lobbying to see them weakened and one day removed… but those constraints are responsible for the dramatic increase in overall prosperity in these last several decades, [consisting of consumer strength and leading to technological boom].
I would never advocate Marxism… nor do I ever wish to live under Social Darwinism.
Clover, you once again reveal your intellectual dishonesty – and vapidity:
“‘Is it morally acceptable to threaten me with lethal violence if I do not pay that tax?’ — the easy answer is NO and certainly no IRS agent or police officer is ever going to threaten you with lethal violence for not paying taxes.”
Is it even necessary to point out the manifest untruths and contradictions?
You state that it is not morally acceptable to threaten me with lethal violence if I do not pay that tax – but that is exactly, precisely what will happen if I do not pay the tax!
Consider:
I retreat to my home/land – I aggress against none. I withdraw, and ask only that you leave me in peace. I commit no crime against persons or property. I do not take your money – or anyone else’s money. I merely ignore your letters demanding my money.
What comes next, Clover? Does the fact that letters precede the men with guns kicking in my door and dragging me off my property – and into a cage – and killing me if I dare to defend myself – obviate somehow the inevitable kicking in of my door, the dragging me off my property and very possibly my murder at their hands if I try to defend myself? Is Don Corleone not a murderous thug because he gives you the opportunity to comply … before he splatters your brains?
So, which is it? Man up! Face what you advocate – and defend it openly – or repudiate it, having come to your senses.
But no more of your mealy mouthed quibbling.
You are not a Marxist – or a fascist. But you are a collectivist and an authoritarian. You believe in collective violence against the individual, sanctioned via the ballot box – enforced by anointed thugs.
You justify it, because you believe the ends you favor are more important than the means. But here’s what you miss, Clover: If you accept as legitimate the use of force against peaceful human beings for any reason other than self-defense, then you have accepted the use of force against yourself for any reason. There is nothing not in principle up for a vote – including your very life.
And this is what inevitably leads to the gulags and the killing fields.
It may happen sooner – or later. But it absolutely will happen.
It already is happening.You have to be willfully blind – obtuse – not to see it.
RJ, do you know where the social and political systems you advocate come from?
I’ll give you a hint, they come from the foundations controlled by social darwinists.
Feel free to look up who brought about the government schools in the USA on the Prussian model. Look up who established the foundations aka NGOs that come up with the foreign and domestic policies. See who created the so-called ‘health care system’ in the USA through licensing and thus eliminating competition. Take a look. It’s social Darwinists.
The people who feel that because they are ruthless and thus successful and social manipulation, at politics, and used it to make a lot of money off of other people’s labor that they get to decide how everything is run. It is their utopia you
hit the wrong key and it posted…
It is their utopia you advocate for, and like most statists have no clue where it all it comes from.
BTW, here this video is for you:
There would be no violence if everyone just obeyed is simply absurd. It’s the way you hide the violence in your mind. You blame the victim. Would you do the same in a domestic violence case? Agree with the wife beater that if she had just had dinner on the table when he got home, given up her labor to him, then everything would be just fine?
My only question is are you a habitualized victim or are you the person who is aggressive and then says ‘look at what he/she made me do’ when someone doesn’t give in to your demands?
People used to be poor because they weren’t all that productive. Freedom brought about productivity. Now you want to tax productivity so we are all poor again.
The reason why ‘management’ gets such a big share and workers can’t get fair wages is because your government blocks people from going out on their own and competing. There’s only so many places for people to work.
Your system like those systems of bondage that predate it is to make sure the worker never has the capital to go out on his own. To break the bonds. Your system is to keep him working for the corporations. Sure your system at times can make the bondage a little better at times but it never lasts. The worker ultimately gets the scraps in a political system. In a productive system he can take his skills elsewhere and does.
It is productivity the caused Henry Ford to raise wages above and beyond what others paid. He wanted the most productive people available and paid for it.
@ pare
Your perspective, beliefs, are not the issue. Your willingness to coercively, violently, impose your perspective & beliefs on others is what earns you enmity.
Worship at whatever altars you & similar like. Proselytize, even, if you want. But realize this inescapable fact: the minute you attempt to forcibly conscript or impress anyone else into your religion, you forfeit all moral agency & become a thing – a person no more – and you should not be surprised when the person or people you sought to accost, treat you accordingly.
Dear oz,
“Your perspective, beliefs, are not the issue. Your willingness to coercively, violently, impose your perspective & beliefs on others is what earns you enmity.”
Well said.
It’s really not that complicated, is it?
One can believe whatever one wants. Libertarians will be the first to defend the right to be wrong.
But the moment one resorts to physical coercion, either in person or by proxy (i.e., tax collectors and policemen with guns) to have one’s way, one forfeits all claim to the moral high ground, and even to civilization.
The moment one resorts to brute force, one descends to the level of an anthropoid ape with a club.
It’s funny. Clovers such as rj look and sound like homo sapiens on the outside. They exhibit a superficial “intelligence.” They may even give the impression of being “articulate.”
But something inside their heads remains primitive, atavistic, incapable of grasping the simple moral truth that physical coercion to exact unwilling compliance is an abomination.
Chalk it up to evolution as a “work in progress.” Many specimens are simply not there yet.
It’s funny. Clovers such as rj look and sound like homo sapiens on the outside. They exhibit a superficial “intelligence.” They may even give the impression of being “articulate.”
Sounds like the definition of a psychopath.
“Sounds like the definition of a psychopath.”
Amen, that.
There is something not right in their heads – or rather, with their capacity to comprehend an ethical principle.
It puzzles me to no end that someone like RJ will acknowledge that theft – the taking of property – is always wrong when it is done by an individual or a Mafia. Yet he approves of theft when it is done by an anointed Mafia – government – or individuals acting on behalf of the anointed Mafia.
How can one hold such mutually contradictory ideas in one’s head?
Dear lberns1,
“Sounds like the definition of a psychopath.”
There you go!
Now, now, RJ – don’t let facts ruin their little story they got going.
“As for the notion that rights exist by magic [inalienable – outside of legislation] that is an exercise in classroom pedagoguery, for without some mechanism to uphold or confirm the existence of those rights – they do not in any meaningful way exist.”
People have been defending themselves since long before classrooms or pedagoguery. Every living creature defends itself, & without benefit of “legislation”. Self-defense is a natural, inalienable, right. As said, delegation is not abrogation. No one is obligated to call/wait for the cops or to get parliamentary permission. No one can be stripped via pen-stroke of the right to defend themselves. Believing otherwise, as you do, is what’s “magical”, albeit an impoverished magic..its as if you revel at being the product of some other solipsist, or group of solipsists (oligarchy); I’m not sure that even qualifies as vicariousness.
“I am not of the opinion that we will never find a better way, mind you – I just have yet to find any ideology/philosophy that can lead to a better the quality of life than this current system”
How do you define “better quality of life”. I’d define is as a more efficient (wasting resources benefits no one) and a more just ( being compestated for injustices ).
Simplify the argument.
Two rational people no govt. They have two choices war with one another to take what the other has, wasting valuable resources in the war, or work together to find mutually beneficial trading opportunities. Any rational person would see the benefits of mutual trade. Conclusion: no need for govt.
Two people ( one or more are not rational ), no govt. They have two choices war with one another to take what the other has, wasting valuable resources in the war, or work together to find mutually beneficial trading opportunities. The irrational one(s) will want to war and both will be ruined. Conclusion: a govt of irrational people that will want to war and take what others have.
What kind of society do you think we live in? The former or the latter? So what’s the root problem? The ratonality and morality of the people. Any govt will simply reflect that (lack of) morality and rational.
There is no “perfect” solution, no utopia but the “best” (just and efficient) one is anarchy. I know that goes against everything you’ve ever been taught, and it should because you’ve been taught crap your whole life.
Every time you think to yourself “this goes against everyhting I’ve ever believed” then you’ve just identified another piece of crap. Throw it away, wash your hands, smile and have a cold one. You earned it.
Welcome to real world.
“this goes against everyhting I’ve ever believed” then you’ve just identified another piece of crap. Throw it away, wash your hands, smile and have a cold one.
I like that. I’ll do that.
I doubt I’ll do the smile part though.
Thanks for writing it.
When I see these animals, I get really upset.
How can you rich libertarians live with yourself? How dare you spend money on expensive cars, boats, vacations.
Why don’t you heartless bastards take care of all these unfortunate animals? If I ever got rich like you did, I’d be a lot more charitable than you are. I hope they take everything you have and put you in jail.
I hope we pass a 75% tax like they have in France, so all these animals can have peace, dignity, and happiness.
Voluntary charity isn’t getting it done. It’s time to invoke martial law and make charity mandatory. It’s time to make sure all God’s creatures are taken care of.
Some animals still live without air conditioning and chew toys.
This must stop!
Please give to ASPCA. There are still millions of animals we haven’t captured and put to sleep to end their suffering.
Ja Rule
Money owed: $1 million plus penalties
Prison sentence: 2-3 years
The rapper and actor pled guilty to tax evasion last April in a Newark, N.J., federal court. Admitting that he hadn’t paid tax from earnings in 2004 and 2006, Ja Rule will pay more than $1 million in back taxes and penalties and serve two years in prison. Though the MTV Video Award winner did catch a break: He will be able to serve his federal sentence concurrently with the two years he’ll already be serving in New York for attempted possession of a weapon stemming from a 2007 incident — the same incident that put rapper Lil Wayne in behind bars for nine months.
Martin Scorsese
Money owed: $2.85 million
Prison sentence: None
The Academy-Award winning director made headlines last March when it was revealed that the IRS had a levied a $2.85 million lien against him. And in a plot twist worthy of Casino, the bill was delivered on Valentine’s Day. A spokesman for the director has since said that any monies owed had been paid in full and the matter was now closed. But it isn’t Scorsese’s first run in with the IRS — he’s had a series of big liens since 2002, according to the New York Post. It’s been reported that Scorsese’s tax troubles stem from his relationship with Kenneth Starr, his financial advisor from the nineties until last year, just months before Starr pleaded guilty to a $33 million Ponzi scheme and was sentenced to more than seven years in prison.
Willie Nelson
Money owed: $16.7 million
Prison sentence: None
Let’s not forget that the country singer, enthusiastic defender of marijuana and friend of President Jimmy Carter, is still the only person to admit to smoking pot in the White House. So his 1990 tax troubles had a distinct counter-cultural rebel vibe. The IRS seized his property claiming he owed $16,700,000 in back taxes. Nelson had settled with Uncle Sam for $6 million but when he couldn’t come up with the money, the Feds sent his possessions (including six houses) to auction. In classic outlaw style, the only asset Nelson sent into hiding was his guitar, Trigger. Nelson also received an undisclosed settlement from the Price Waterhouse accounting firm to settle claims that they’d involved the Farm Aid founder in bad tax shelters.
Wesley Snipes- Money he paid $42 million,
Money he still “owed”: $17 million, Prison sentence: 3 years
Richard Hatch- Money he paid $6 million,
Money he still “owed”: $2 million, Prison sentence: 4 years
Ja Rule, Money paid $3 million, Money still “owed”: $1 million, Prison sentence: 2-3 years
We lock these high earning people up at your expense, America. Can’t let them earn money to pay us back, we need to show the world our power to make anyone we choose an example.
Is $50 million enough you ask? Only we know what your “fair” share is.
Ultimately – I cannot see how the weak, the elderly and the poor would be cared for in a land of no recorded laws or guaranteed rights and no government to uphold them. It seems they would be left to their own limited resources.
As for those in the working classes, it seems to me they would have to choose to ignore crimes against their person as they would lack the finds to hire private security and seek private justice.
There also seems no mechanism to protect one’s civil rights… so that are not subject to discriminatory practices.
I don’t believe our current society is perfect – not one bit. But it is better than what our ancestors had and I have to believe our descendants will enjoy something even better still – that is the very nature of progress.
Well, gtg, will check back another day… despite our differences thx for the lively debate – no matter what I am glad we live in societies where such debate is possible.
Clover, ever hear of families? Of charity? Of people giving freely of their time and resources to help others in need?
Perfect? Of course not. Will there be those who suffer in a free society? Certainly. But what you advocate is to institutionalize suffering; to make it legal to cause others to suffer – by depriving them of their liberty and possessions. This acts like an acid on the normal human inclination to help those in need – because it causes people to resent, even hate, those who claim their need imposes an obligation enforceable at gunpoint on others. For example, I resent people who shit out kids they can’t afford to care for – more often than not, multiple kids – and who then expect me to “help” provide for their education, health care and so on. I resent like hell that I can never truly own my home/land – even decades after I paid the bank note off – because of an unlimited, never-ending “obligation” to “help” provide for the education, etc. of other people’s children.
You still refuse to directly respond to the fundamental question:
Would you personally put a gun to my head to compel me to pay for “services” I demonstrably do not use and have not used and do not wish to use – and so, pay for?
If your answer is yes, then you are a violent person; an authoritarian who believes it is acceptable to control – to use – other people for whatever ends you deem acceptable.
Bear in mind, though: You’ve also accepted the “right” of others to do just the same to you in return.
Wouldn’t it be preferable to agree that violence should only be countenanced in response to violence – that is, in self-defense?
Wasn’t planning on checking back in tonight [long debate] but I noticed plenty more commentary, so what they heck…
Charity is a wonderful individual act. It usually demonstrates a degree human kindness and that’s always a good thing. However, it simply has never been adequate in a large nation. For those in desperate need, who do not encounter a charitable person – should they starve if hungry or freeze if cold or die if in need of medical care? Of course not.
Most people do not resent or hate the less fortunate amongst us. They know these folks are not “moochers” despite what Ayn Rand claimed. They are human beings temporarily in need of assistance – once back on their feet they become productive members of society.
I am not ashamed to say my own family was one of those assisted in such a way. My father was mean country-boy drunk. He would hospitalize us and our Mom. When she was finally able to leave him, for good, we lived for a few years on welfare. It kept a roof over our head, food in our stomachs and it let me stay in school. Because of the system we were able to weather that storm and come out the other side better for it. Raising my own children now I interact with the many systems and programs that assist parents [my oldest has special needs, as she was born severely premature [only 1 lbs] and has cerebral palsy. Quite frankly, despite having good jobs, my wife and I would not have been able to manage without the many programs that helped us save our daughter’s life, deal with her limitations and provide her with opportunities to succeed in life despite her health issues. She is now in high school and other than being the smallest kid in her grade and needing to wear a leg brace under her pants – you wouldn’t know the uphill battle she has fought.
It seems the far right labours under many delusional fantasies: “the rugged individualist” – “the self-made man” – LOL, and so on… none of us exist within a bubble.
You claim that in every encounter with the law a true individual must be willing to fight to the death resisting. What an insane way to view life… who on earth is willing to fight to the death resisting a traffic citation? SMH
I would never place a gun to your head to make you pay taxes – I do not advocate anyone ever needing to place
a gun to your head in order to make you pay taxes. Please don’t initiate force against the police and escalate an altercation to that extreme extent. Those officers don’t need the psychological trauma of killing anyone – even some crazy anti-gov type brandishing a weapon because they refuse to comply with any laws.
We, the vast majority of citizens, choose this society – if it truly offends you, I guess you could try building you libertarian dream elsewhere and see how it goes.
“I would never place a gun to your head to make you pay taxes – I do not advocate anyone ever needing to place
a gun to your head in order to make you pay taxes. Please don’t initiate force against the police and escalate an altercation to that extreme extent. Those officers don’t need the psychological trauma of killing anyone – even some crazy anti-gov type brandishing a weapon because they refuse to comply with any laws. “
See, we are just supposed to obey and then there is no violence from the state. The state is good all we have to do is obey. Just obey massa and we won’t get whipped. See it’s our fault the state uses violence, because we didn’t obey. Just like domestic violence, if she only had dinner on the table and hot when she should have she wouldn’t get hit. But not only wasn’t dinner ready she mouthed off to him and was defiant. He didn’t want to hit her, it hurt him more than it hurt her but he had to do it. That’s just the way it is in statist ‘logic’. There’s no violence until we don’t obey. When we don’t surrender ourselves into captivity for our disobedience.
All we have to do is be submissive and if we aren’t then we deserve whatever violence the state’s employees dish out on to us. Did I get that correctly?
Not exactly, if you believe there is an unjust law there are mechanisms in a progressive developed nation, such as yours or mine, whereby one can advocate change. Use them.
Violence though, should not be the go-to answer as it usually just makes a situation worse.
“Violence though, should not be the go-to answer as it usually just makes a situation worse.”
And yet, RJ, everything you advocate involves violence. When will you face up to that?
“Most people do not resent or hate the less fortunate amongst us.”
We are all “less fortunate” than somebody. So, not very exclusive a category. That’s not what’s under discussion, as much as you’d like to reframe/rationalize (lie) otherwise. No, its the “less fortunate” pretext as justification for robbery, theft, extortion, etc that is under discussion.
Needs such as you described in your personal anecdotes do not create valid claims on others. It is because the claims are invalid that 3rd party muscle is brought to bear, to force the “transfer”.
Human rights are not conferred by other humans, or human institutional processes, political or otherwise. Human rights are inherent within each individual, so geography – your stock rx that people who would resist encroachment & enslavement by people like you should go “elsewhere” – is irrelevant…the absurdity of a bought & paid for Canadian wagging a finger at some Americans is an extra layer of nonsense.
Interesting–an extremely significant historically.
Do you know who suffered a bit of squeamishness over killing people–perhaps a hint of guilt at their anguished pleadings, or cries of pain?
Yes–a high-ranking Nazi officer (his name escapes me sorry) taught himself and his underlings a useful trick.
Whenever he had to torture or kill someone, he would think to himself how angry he was at them for making him suffer their cries–for what they had done.
None of us advocate martyrdom for a traffic ticket. I DO stand firm on my rights; never consent to search, I don’t answer questions, and I am never obsequious. While not rude, I’m certainly curt and I’ve often mentioned they’re acting as revenue agents.
But come for my children? Or my weapons? Game ON.
How do you think America worked before the “Great Society”? Before the “New Deal”?
Before the banksters intentionally bankrupted us in 1929, America was AWASH in charity. Dozens of large charitable organizations, and tens of thousands of churches, provided charity.
I’m sorry your early life was difficult. I’m especially sorry that the State, having bankrupted and driven out private charity, had to help you; had it not, you would have gotten the help you need.
Despite our economic straits, America is still the largest charitable population in the world. We gave $300 billion in private charity last year alone.
I can only imagine how much more I could have given–and I did–if my paycheck were twice as large, and my expenses half their size. Which, without the State, would be true.
And isn’t ironic that the biggest “givers”, the most “charitable” by percentage of their income happen to be the poor. Those who’re crushed by those who steal wealth as casually as breaking wind.
Ah, yes the intellectual dishonesty of comparing anyone you disagree with to Hitler.. Bravo [you delusional narcissist].
Prior to the modern welfare state [in which the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens]. People did suffer – far more than some libertarian [who cannot grasp that the system has actually done more for them than they could ever pay into it] would ever acknowledge.
Quality of life has improved dramatically since we recognized certain basic principles – like the right of everyone to education and health care. These are not “wasted expensive entitlements” as libertarians would have us believe but rather investments in our future that pay dividends of healthier, better educated and more productive members of society.
“…like the right of everyone to education and health care. ”
Education and health care don’t just exist – or rain like Manna from the sky. Someone must work/create wealth in order to provide them. You believe you have the right to force those someones to provide them. That is, you believe you have the right to threaten to kill others to force them to provide what you want/need. Because you believe your needs and wants entitle you to take things from other people simply by dint of the fact that they have the things you want – and you don’t. So, give it up – or else! Your money – or your life!
You’re a thug, RJ.
The fact that you continue to evade facing/discussing the violence you advocate indicates you’re a coward on top of that.
People like you are no different than ordinary street thugs, with one exception: You haven’t got the guts to do the stealing and the beating and the killing yourselves. To man up and face what you are. And who your victims are.
You like to pretend you’re very civilized – peaceful, even.
You’re nothing of the sort.
I’ll try one last time:
If you would not come to my home, kick in my door and threaten to kill me in order to compel me to hand over my property for your benefit (or the benefit of those you deem to be in “need”) how can you countenance the act being done by others on your behalf and with your approval?
Theft is theft, RJ.
You can equivocate, rationalize, justify until the end of time. It does not change the nature of the thing.
Do you really want to be on the side of violence and thuggery against your fellow man?
@ pare, parried
V. Positive rights
Libertarians favor negative rights: the right not to be murdered, raped, stolen from. In our view, positive rights (the right to food, clothing, shelter) are a philosophical confusion. Access to food, clothing, shelter, etc, are not rights at all; they are, instead, aspects of wealth. This matter can also be put in terms of freedom. Libertarians favor freedom from being molested, having one’s property stolen, trespassed upon. In sharp contrast is FDR’s “freedom” from want (the third of his famous four freedoms), see here: freedom from hunger, homelessness, things like this.
Prof. Foss, unhappily, buys into this hook, line and sinker. He said that the industrial revolution gave us freedom from having to work all day long (my paraphrase). Not so, not so. The industrial revolution directly vastly increased wealth, not freedom.
Consider this example. Farmers A and B both own 100 cows. Rustlers come and steal all of farmer A’s cattle; at the same time, lightening destroys all of B’s herd. Both have lost wealth of 100 cows. Farmer A suffered a rights violation, or a reduction in freedom. No such thing occurred to Farmer B. B’s rights, or freedom, were not reduced in the slightest. Freedom and wealth are both good things, but to confuse them is a basic error.
For a very clear exposition of this fallacy, see chapter 27 of Rothbard, Murray N. 1998 [1982] The Ethics of Liberty, New York: New York University Press. It is available for free (no money cost, that is) right here. Isaiah Berlin makes the same error as Jeff Foss, and Rothbard exposes this fallacy.
If there is one thing that everyone (well, almost everyone) agrees to regarding freedom and rights, it is that all people, rich and poor, black and white, male and female, should have equal rights and freedoms. This presents no problem whatever for the libertarian concept of negative rights, liberties, freedoms. We all have an equal right not to be murdered, raped, etc. But, if positive rights or freedoms are legitimate, then we all have an equal right to food, clothing, shelter, all of life’s goodies. Notice the garden path down which Foss, Berlin and FDR are attempting to lead us: to egalitarianism not merely of rights to be left alone in peace, but something far more insidious: equal shares of wealth. Well, how are we to equalize positive freedoms, or wealth? Surely, it must be by taking from the rich, and giving their property to the poor. And, this simply cannot be done without initiating violence against the wealthy, a violation of the libertarian non-aggression axiom if ever there was one. (I assume arguendo that those at the top of the income distribution earned their possessions honestly, that is, in keeping with the tenets of the libertarian philosophy If not, rectification would be in order.)
~ “Libertarian Basics”, Walter Block
“Prior to the modern welfare state [in which the state plays a key role in the protection and promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens]. People did suffer . far more than some libertarian [who cannot grasp that the system has actually done more for them than they could ever pay into it] would ever acknowledge. “
Why is it that statists always use the failings of the state to promote the state? Back in these times the state was as much as it is today, the tool of the wealthy so-called elite. Such that the state did not do its most basic job of protecting individual rights.
When enough people complained the state, still working for this so-called elite, created welfare to prevent a revolt. Now of course welfare didn’t come out of the pockets of the wealthy, no, it came out of the pockets of the people. Thus the revolt was stopped at no cost to the ruling classes. Even better is that it gets the lower classes to buy into the system. Now they support the wealthy elites so long as they get this meager share of the plunder. The lower classes become a weapon to steal from the productive classes.
Statists never seem to grasp that their need for a welfare state arose from the fact that the state allowed those closest to it to violate people’s rights in the first place.
@Ozy…
It is a fallacy to view rights in “positive vs negative” distinctions. All rights, including the negative one’s you listed still require positive actions/duties/responsibilities by others in order to ensure that right is upheld.
It is not a question of human beings being granted either “rights to” certain things or “freedom from” certain things. All rights and freedoms, when explored in depth and require elements of both if they are to have any meaning.
Evasions – and gibberish.
The bottom line is: You’re a thug. A person who believes he has the moral right to take other people’s property as his own, and to threaten them with lethal violence if they attempt to resist such predations.
Listen up: No one owes you a blessed thing unless they’ve done you some injury or freely accepted some obligation. Otherwise, you have no moral right to a penny of anyone else’s property – irrespective of your “need” – and irrespective of the other person’s wealth or status. You may be deserving of help – in which case, help will very likely be given freely by those who can and wish to. But your “need” does not impose obligations enforceable by violence on others. I don’t hate the poor. I hate scumbags who believe that because they don’t have something, it gives them the right to take it from someone else by violence. You are a god-damned hyena.
I’d smash you in the face if you stuck your god-damned paw in my pocket – and I’d shoot you dead if you threatened me with violence. But being the sordid little pussy you are, you’d never make the attempt yourself. No, you vote to have others do it on your behalf and call it “democratic” and “progressive.”
I hasten to add that I would never accost you in any way, or attempt to meddle in your affairs (even if I personally disapproved) so long as you do not initiate force against me.
Again: This is the fundamental difference between us. You’re a violent cretin who feels entitled to take other people’s things and control their lives. I, on the other hand, am a peaceful man who would never raise a hand against you or any other person – unless you first raised your hand against me.
“…like the right of everyone to education and health care. ”
Another elephant in the room that may not have been pointed out, yet, is that “positive rights” means indoctrination (not education), & sickness management (not healthcare).
Positive rights means cartelization means inferior products/services at rent-seeking pricing / offers you can’t refuse. It means conscription, which is enslavement.
Happy, “well-adjusted”, good slaves have always existed. Good slaves say “traitor” to bad slaves; bad slaves see traitors. Its Stockholm syndrome cognitive dissonance vs plain sight.
@ pare
“It is a fallacy to view rights in “positive vs negative” distinctions.”
Specific or precise distinction may inconvenience you, but its not fallacious.
“All rights, including the negative one’s you listed still require positive actions/duties/responsibilities by others in order to ensure that right is upheld.”
Rights are inherent, unalienable. “By others” – delegation, or just assistance, even (as is apparently “illegal” in Britain), does not modify, let alone abrogate the right to self-defense, including defense of one’s property.
“It is not a question of human beings being granted either “rights to” certain things or “freedom from” certain things.” All rights and freedoms, when explored in depth and require elements of both if they are to have any meaning.”
Human rights are not granted, & are not synonymous with privileges, as you want to believe.
Since the “meaning” of rights, whether negative or positive, is clear, I wonder if you mean to say “value”?
Value is subjective. Not objective, as you would have it. Rights are inherent, inalienable, & objective. Not subjective, as you would have it.
You should do what is within your rightful domain to do about your fear. Externalizing the costs of your fear, projecting your fears, & trespassing the inalienable rights of others, is not within your domain – it violates the non-aggression principle.
“Holy Smoke! You’re a Toon!!!”[after discovering the flattened Doom getting up and wobbling to his feet]
Judge Doom: Surprised?
Eddie Valiant: Not really. That lame-brained freeway idea could only be cooked up by a Toon.
Judge Doom: Not just ANY Toon…
[Doom wobbles over to an oxygen tank, puts the valve in his mouth and turns it on. He inflates back to his old self. His hat flies off and his prosthetic eyeballs pop out. Then he turns menacingly to Valiant, his eyes glowing a grim Toon red. Valiant gasps in terror]
Judge Doom: [voice getting higher, until it reaches a high-pitched squeak] Remember me, Eddie? When I killed your brother, I talked… just… like… THIS!
[eyes pop out in the shape of daggers
Judge Doom: You see, Mr. Valiant, the successful conclusion of this case draws the curtain on my career as a jurist in Toontown. I’m retiring, taking a new role in the private sector.
Eddie Valiant: That wouldn’t be Cloverleaf Industries, by any chance?
Judge Doom: You’re looking at the sole stockholder.
That’s all you are, r.j. paré. A goddamned toon, nattering about cockamamie Canadian schemes which you have fuck-all to do with.
Stop inflating your ego with political puffery. It’s not to late.
Take a hard look at your Castrating Mother and the Heartless System that ran over your own Father with a steamroller.
r.j. paré’s father’s story…
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x7fav7_kanye-west-heartless-new-video-subt_music
In the night I hear ’em talk, the coldest story ever told (what you said about your dad).
Somewhere far along this road you lost your soul. To a woman so heartless (your mom & the state)
How could you be so heartless?
“I would never place a gun to your head to make you pay taxes… ”
Ah, but why not?
And if you would not, do you condone others doing so on your behalf?
If not, why not?
The ugly, awful reality, RJ, is that all your evasions and justifications do not obviate the murderous violence that is behind everything you support and defend. Look it in the face. Be a man, at least.
No one’s “need” confers a right to use violence against others. Period. This is a core Libertarian ethical doctrine.
It does not mean we are “selfish” – that we oppose helping people. It means we oppose using force to compel people to do so. It means we reject violence as the basis for human interaction. That we favor freely-given help and voluntary cooperation. Goodwill among men – not force and fraud. Moral persuasion. Not the sword.
While poverty and misfortune are terrible things, institutionalized state violence – man preying on man made legal – is far worse, for all the reasons already discussed at length.
If you are not comfortable threatening to kill me – or some other person – in order to compel us to “help,” then you still have a conscience. You know what you advocate is wrong – evil. You have already effectively conceded the point. Otherwise, you’d happily come to my house with a gun and kill me yourself for refusing to hand over my property for redistribution.
Dear Eric,
It does not mean we are “selfish” – that we oppose helping people. It means we oppose using force to compel people to do so. It means we reject violence as the basis for human interaction.
The clovers’ pretense about this particular point has always infuriated me.
The totalitarian clovers know that libertarians are not really “selfish.” But they pretend not to. They pretend not to, so they can use our alleged “selfishness” as a pretext to use brute force against us.
At some level, they know that we know it’s a bullshit allegation. But they also know that enough sheeple will roll over that those of us who refuse to knuckle under will be outnumbered and overpowered.
It’s why I agree with your earlier comment about how the gunvermin are even worse than the Mafia.
At least the Mafia doesn’t expect us to buy any bullshit about how they are “protecting us.”
Morning, Bevin –
Ol’ RJ is an archetype, isn’t he?
The inability to understand concepts (and the consequences of that) just amazes me. They’re literally a different species, I often think: Homo Simplissimuss or some such.
His limited animal mind would object if I accosted him in the street and demanded he empty his pockets because I “need help.” He’d surely demand I be arrested and punished.
Yet this same animal mind advocates and defends precisely the same thing when a collective or its claimed representatives does it – and sees no contradiction.
We are dealing with ethical imbeciles.
Dear Eric,
Good morning Eric!
“They’re literally a different species, I often think: Homo Simplissimuss or some such.”
LOL!
I’m thinking of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the anthropoid apes, prior to enlightenment by the mysterious Black Monolith.
Cue Richard Strauss’ majestic tone poem “Also Sprach Zarathustra.”
Now that you mention it, I think I know why you and meth ran into so many obstacles in your attempt to communicate with clover.
You thought you were communicating with a fellow Homo Sapiens.
Little did you know you were attempting interspecies communication, a la Jane Goodall.
“Homo Insapiens” maybe, or “Homo Tardus.”
On a more serious note, I joke about this only reluctantly, out of sheer frustration.
I’m sure you and all the regulars here feel the same way. I’m sure none of us have any desire to feel superior to anyone else.
If anything, we desperately wish clovers weren’t clovers. If they weren’t, we would be able to live in a truly civilized society. The NAP would be universally honored, and people would be genuinely free.
@Bevin–
ROFLMAO at cue “Also Sprach Zarathustra”
See Clovers awakening here.
Dear meth,
You know what?
I think I recognized clover among the anthropoid apes gathered around the black monolith!
Bevin–
I see dumb people!
Dear meth,
You should have no trouble spotting him.
He’s the one running around threatening to hit the other apes with a tapir jawbone if they didn’t share their bananas with “underprivileged” anthropoid apes.
How is being ‘cared for’ a right?
Such wording about being ‘cared for’ tends to sound like slavery to me. That is back when slavery was obvious, the slave master had to take care of the old slaves. In serfdom the lord had to care for the serfs on his land. In the modern world where slavery and serfdom are less obvious the more productive slaves and serfs are forced by the slave masters and lords to care for the less productive slaves and serfs.
The wealthy classes have effectively reduced their costs.
Now the olden days of unprotected workers were the result of government not doing what it was supposed to from a property rights and contract stand point. And like for every government failure it was rewarded with more power. In the end we are ‘cared for’. However in that process we are cut off from upward mobility by the state. Thus we little people can never challenge the big established players with being accepted into the club. There are a few exceptions of course and those often found themselves prosecuted and/or dealt with harshly in the media.
Some of us would prefer not to be ‘cared for’. To run our lives as we see fit. We don’t like the life of a slave. We are not comfortable with it as you are.
If you take issue with the wording, rather than semantic digressions equating that word with slavery, allow me to re-phrase. What happens, in a libertarian regime, when someone is in desperate need and they do not have the funds to hire the goods or services needed nor have they attracted the generosity of some charitable wealthy person?
Do the working classes forego education or health care?
Do the malnourished starve to death?
Do the homeless freeze?
RJ,
Your questions are classic examples of the collectivist “trap.”
You tug on emotional strings – “Do the homeless freeze?” – and imply there are but two alternatives: Collectivist redistribution or “starving homeless.” Ergo: If you don’t support collectivist appropriation (that is, taking other people’s rightful property) so that it may be used to “help” the starving homeless (and so on) you are a cruel and heartless person.
As I’ve already mentioned, there is a third alternative: Freely given charity – and the help of the people in needs’ families. Not perfect – but neither is coercive collectivism.
And unlike coercive collectivism, freely given charity does not turn man against man – by chaining man to man.
Much of it is people who want to feel good by providing charity, they just want to do it with other people’s money.
Dear Eric,
Our man Ron Paul, an experienced doctor, knows a thing or two about this issue.
… when [Ron Paul] entered medical practice in the early 1960s, before the Medicare and Medicaid programs were established, the poor and the elderly were hospitalized at about the same rates as they have been under Medicare and Medicaid in the 2000s, and that they received good care…
… in those days, doctors and hospitals provided cut-rate or free care to people who did not have health insurance – “every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility toward the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm” – and that this was possible because healthcare costs were much lower.
At a church charity hospital where he worked in his early years of practice, “nobody was turned away” for lack of ability to pay.
… government meddling in health care delivery is to blame for healthcare costs having skyrocketed over the past few decades.
From Wiki.
Freedom works. Not only is it moral, it’s also practical.
@Bevin–
That’s absolutely right. We still have those charity hospitals; of course, they’re suffering because the State is a jealous god and guards its monopoly on its “charity” violently.
It won’t do to have viable private charity making the mighty State look bad.
By the same argument, the State doesn’t want serfs armed–not just because of the direct threat, but because if serfs can defend themselves, what the hell do they need the State’s goons for?
So disarmament increases the perceived need for the State–while eliminating a direct threat to the State as well.
And here we are.
@Bevin–
Damn forgot my main point there. My dad was a doctor, and in his day–he’s eight years younger than Dr. Paul–it was expected you’d give away 20 to 30 percent of your practice. Doctors who didn’t were shunned and reviled; not forced, mind you, but it Just Wasn’t Cricket.
Again, a voluntary community standard provided charity a thousand times more effective than government.
Do Clovers think history started thirty years ago? Do they not think back just eighty years, and wonder “Hey, I don’t remember seeing pictures of poor, crippled, starving people roaming American streets back then…I wonder how they did that?”
Because under government “charity”, you sure as hell see poor, crippled, starving people wandering the streets!
Dear meth,
I’m often loath to cite the practical arguments for zero tolerance re: the initiation of force.
I always feel that the moral argument ought to be enough, by itself.
But it realy doesn’t hurt that, as Rand noted, there is no “moral/practical dichotomy.” The moral is the practical, and the practical is the moral.
Sometimes it helps to point out the link between the two.
Why can’t you malignant murderous control freaks stop once you have the loot like other criminals, that’s my main issue.
Your system takes 39% of what I earn, which if it was used to feed the hungry, care for the sick, give homes for those too pathetic or even just criminally lazy wouldn’t be that big of problem to me.
The sicillians, triads, ukranians, just want their cut and not to be given any shit for their taking it. I get that. If bureaucrats and soldiers want to live high on the hog, I won’t lose any sleep over it, just leave me be with the 61% I have left.
I never see the Crips or Hell’s Angels telling someone they’ll throw them in a cage if they see someone eating transfats or a soda larger than 16 oz.
A 3 year old talking about improving Santa’s mechanisms for bringing toys each Christmas has better ideas than you and your Fabian socialistic nudgers.
You really are a right bloody cynical bastard, and I have no wish to get even or to settle up with you, I just want you to go far away. I’ll keep sending them the money, just stop trying to be a part of my life, you creepy, cretinous, cuckolder.
An excellent point, Tor –
Bad enough that they take a third to half our assets. Much worse that they insist on controlling our personal lives on top of all that.
Besides which, they create more poverty rather than less.
Literally almost half the country is now on the dole. If we measure the success of government this way, it has clearly failed.
“Why can’t you malignant murderous control freaks stop once you have the loot like other criminals, that’s my main issue.
Your system takes 39% of what I earn, which if it was used to feed the hungry, care for the sick, give homes for those too pathetic or even just criminally lazy wouldn’t be that big of problem to me.”
Indeed, but that cuts to the root. The loot comes from the power. The more control over every aspect of life (and I believe that this ties into our other discussion) from birth the less costly it is to loot. In fact, you have people like this Clover who will actively support his owners. If they only spent what they took in that would be another thing also. Instead they have created a system which penalizes the poor and those on fixed incomes (elderly) especially because their lust for power (and money) is insatiable. So much for supporting them as RJ claims. They have promised far more than they can deliver, and have done so by clicking the chains shut on our children before they have even been born (massive borrowing). If you, RJ, are really a liberal as you claim, can we at least agree that blowing up men women and children with darker skin in faraway places will definitely ‘pay dividends’ but that they won’t be good ones. That these things in no way constitute ‘essential services that the market can’t provide.’ Beating of the hornet’s nest is not a service I would pay for. Those who would pay to murder others should be jailed for violating the natural law. Clearly the mail one of those essential services (losing 16bn a year, while UPS and others once let into the game provide a useful service and create wealth for others). Food production itself isn’t an essential service? Your arguments abound with non sequiturs. You place the cart before the horse and confuse causality when you try to claim that any increase in living standards of late is directly attributable to the rise of the welfare/warfare state. Simply because the host is still alive (and trying to thrive) does not mean that it is because of the parasite that it does so. Only the parasite would make such a claim.
@Ray–well said.
Why is it so hard to see that parasitism harms the host–which otherwise would be free to thrive?
Thanks Meth,
I was brought here when Lew Rockwell first started linking to Eric’s articles and look forward to them ever since. The articles are well-written and thought-provoking. The discussion is always lively and informative. Enough similarities of thought that most of us are on the same page, I think, but enough differences that it doesn’t come off as a big circle-jerk. I am not sure how much of that has to do with Eric’s policing of the board, but it is nice. Some of the comments could be articles in themselves. I have appreciated reading your comments as well as MoT, Tor, Don Cooper, TGS, BrentP and others (sorry if I left you out! 🙂 ). Thank you all, you have influenced my views in many ways. And while I have been mostly lurking, I do hope that I have something worth saying at times!
As to why they can’t see their parasitism for what it is? Answering this would solve many of our problems interacting with Clovers I think. Mostly it seems to be one of perspective – they are, or hope to be, one of the parasites; one who may be forced to pony up for the system, but is a net gainer from it – as well as indoctrination. They forget of the ‘things not seen,” or rather, never see them. Imagine that?
God bless,
Ray
@r. j. paré on January 13, 2013 at 9:56 pm:
You’re joking, right? Or is it truly your assertion that government is more efficient at providing goods and services than private industry?
Please explain to me how that has worked, is working, all over the world.
Show me some state-owned airlines and contrast with their private counterparts.
Now do the same for: electrical generation, telecommunications, the petroleum industry, the lumber industry, mining…
All of those have been or are state-owned in various places. They are almost universally abysmal.
Again–government breaks your legs, gives you crutches, “See? Without me you couldn’t walk!”
It has, through destruction of private property ownership, made providing private roads almost impossible. Walter Block has written a brilliant book on road privatization, for example.
The same arguments apply to every other example–sewers, water, etc.
In fact your argument–that the infrastructure was too expensive, the free-rider problem to steep, the organizational challenges too daunting–was applied in the past to telecommunications.
Where are the state-owned telephone companies today?
Instead we have an embarrassment of riches in choice and technology from phone companies–at stupidly low prices. Were it not for the monopoly-encouraging (oh you thought governments fought monopolies?) State policies, those phone services would be even cheaper.
You example of the poorly-privatized electrical generation/transmission is actually NOT true free enterprise; it’s fascism, privatizing the profits and socializing the losses. The regulations are still such that those companies must cozy up to the state, and the regulatory hurdles (written by the companies BTW) just onerous enough to limit entry.
Through this cunning legerdemain, they’re claiming privatization while still garnering near-monopoly profits.
The same thing has happened here in Texas with “privatized” water companies and “public-private partnership” toll roads–where roads “we” paid for already are sold off to the Spanish company Cintra, and we’re charged exorbitant tolls.
That’s not free enterprise–it’s fascism again.
Above you answered “you actively USE THEM and refuse to pay.”
My examples were specifically chosen to avoid this charge, without confounding our discussion with roads/pipes/electrical lines–those too are easily privatized but it’s a sophisticated discussion.
I ask again: will you force me with violence to violate my conscience and use hospitals and schools I do not wish to use, and whose services I will provide for myself?
Quite simply there is no way to guarantee you won’t use those services. The first time you are hurt, sick, diseased and unconscious – paramedics will work to save your life and they will bring your unconscious body to the hospital. In fact, you would not have it otherwise [if you are honest] you certainly would not want to be left there, dying and no compassionate human being would wish to leave you there. Thus the system operates and thus we use taxation to pay for it.
As for schools, I suspect you did receive an education, heck even the home-schooled have benefited from the government [which assists with creating curriculums for parents, assistive literature and materials and periodic assessments to ensure the needs of the child are being met].
Bullshit, again.
I am a grown man with no children. I will never use the government schools. Why must I be forced to “help” finance them? At the very least, unless and until I actually do use them?
Why can’t a school or library be open only to those who pay to use the facilities – like a health club? Or do you also believe that moochers have a right to threaten me with violence in order to provide them with “free” gym access?
Education is not a right, Clover. Neither is health care. Neither is a nice car or a steak dinner. People have a right to work to earn these things – and also the right to resist cretins such as yourself, who believe they have a right to take them away.
PS: Andrew Carnegie, that great malefactor of “wealth,” financed the truly free NYC library. Because no one was forced to “help” finance it.
Your entire being is suffused in violence. It’s disgusting.
If government didn’t exterminate the services outside its control there wouldn’t be any need to use those the government controls.
Let us assume there are some providers left the government does not control. If someone refuses to participate in and pay for the government system and sufficiently resists paying for them, what does your government do?
Furthermore, what tool will the government use to disarm those who refuse to be disarmed?
The government is violence. That’s all it is. It’s a gun to the head of people who refuse to conform. It does not matter what the topic is. It’s just perception that makes a ‘government’ different from a ‘street gang’. Even Al Capone provided for the less fortunate.
Dear tj,
Quite simply there is no way to guarantee you won’t use those services.
Really?
Eric and methylamine just spent hours telling you exactly how.
Eliminate compulsory “public services” altogether!
Then you can be sure they won’t use them.
I guarantee you we won’t complain. That’s what we libertarians were arguing for in the first place.
Get it?
Christ, this guy is literally reading from the statist logical fallacy songbook.
Yup –
That’s what we’re up against. Notice the common things? The refusal to acknowledge a principle – and distinctions such as legal/illegal vs. right and wrong?
And of course, Frenchie Clover touts himself as a “peaceful” liberal!
Dear lberns1,
LOL!
I was thinking the same thing!
He’s reciting the Clover Catechism, chapter and verse.
Dear tj,
Tell me, do you really think your “arguments” are new to libertarians?
Memo: We’ve been there, done that. Again, and again, and again.
Every one of your “arguments” is a tired, dog-eared fallacy that has been thoroughly discredited so many times, some of us are too weary to refute them, yet again..
You should be enormously grateful that Eric and methylamine were willing to invest so much time and energy cluing you in to reality.
In the process of course, they have basically done to you, what Alex Jones did to Piers Morgan. They have chewed you up and spit you out. They have left your “arguments” in tatters.
But the real question is this:
Now that Eric and methylamine have painstakingly discredited every one of your “arguments” one after another, will you change your position?
I wish I don’t already know the answer. I wish you actually had an open mind. But your repeated intellectual evasions tell us that you don’t, and are impervious to reason.
Thank goodness the vast majority of us do not take Libertarians seriously {whew}. A world that ran on your principles would never have progressed past hunter/gatherer and the only law would be the strength one had to defend their own square foot of soil.
Randy,
What you “don’t take seriously” is morality-ethics. You think it’s ok to use violence against people who have caused no harm – for all sorts of nifty reasons. Everything from forcing them to “help” others to punishing them a priori – because “someone” might do something.
We Libertarians abhor aggressive violence.
Thank goodness more people than ever are beginning to take Libertarian ideas seriously!
Actually… when people break laws they are causing harm – even if they are unaware of it. It is the criminal that initiates violence, the authorities are charged to use enough force [often none] in order to uphold public safety.
I am a pro-peace, anti-death penalty, anti-war of aggression liberal. But the world Libertarians propose would consist of nothing but gangs and warlords — until enough people banded together and re-instituted democratic principles, constitutional rights, essential services and infrastructure. Since we already have that… seems an awful waste of time and lives to bother with the “libertarian experiment”.
So, the law is necessarily right? If that’s your position, then slavery was right – because it was legal – and only ceased to be right when it was no longer legal.
A speed limit is just a number on a sign, RJ – nothing more.
How do you get to “gangs and warlords” from the Libertarian Non Aggression Principle (NAP)?
1. Slavery did not begin because of the law or government. It began as a civilian practice, one for which there was no law, and so common-place that eventually some governments protected it in law. However, it was always wrong and eventually enough voters got together to push for the immoral law to be changed. Slavery has existed for as long as anyone with the strength to enslave another has lived. It took modern ideas about human rights and the legislators willing to uphold those rights – in order to abolish the practice.
2. A speed limit is in place in order to create safer driving conditions.
3. If there is no law [or at the least no mechanism to enforce it] then what happens is the most wealthy and powerful individuals will ensure their enclaves are protected – while the masses will suffer without.
More evasion!
You’ve stated that “the law” is tantamount to “right.” That to disobey “the law” is necessarily morally wrong. Your words, not mine.
The fact is that slavery was legal. It was illegal to aid a fugitive slave. Fact.
As a very simple exercise in logic, this proves my point that “the law” is by no means necessarily morally right. The principle can thus be applied to other circumstances. Use your brain, RJ. There is “the law.” And there is right – and wrong. They are not always the same thing. Indeed, very often they are not.
“A speed limit is in place in order to create safer driving conditions”
Bullshit.
I’ve given you the incontrovertible case in point (the 55 MPH highway limit). You refuse to acknowledge the point, because it devastates your position.
The standard you are applying: that government is only necessary if it is perfectly right all of the time is absurd – as with any group of people it is made up of human beings. The difference between them and anarchists, is at least the human beings are TRYING. They will make mistakes, but they will continue to improve. Life is better now than it was a century ago and I can only imagine how much better it will be a century from now.
No, Clover, that is not what I said.
What I said was that the use of force is only morally legitimate when it is used in self-defense. Can you comprehend the concept?
The issue here is natural law vs. statutory law.
Example: It is always wrong to murder. “The law” merely codifies this. But if “the law” says it’s legal to murder, then it does not become right to do so merely because it has been codified. Do you see?
Similarly: It is by no means necessarily wrong (in a moral sense) to drive faster than a number on a sign says you may. Or to disobey a wrongheaded – and yes, even evil – law.
1) Slavery never ended. It has been renamed–you’re now called a “citizen”–the cages are much nicer, the chains nearly invisible. But you own nothing except the clothes on your back and a few trinkets; your house, your car, belong to the State (your master). Your “taxes” are forcibly expropriated labor; the very definition of slavery. It’s a brilliant system; it’s working on you, you can’t even see it!
2) If speed limits make us safer, why not 5mph everywhere? Or why not variable, based on driver’s skill and car capability–or do you think a rusty pick-up truck with drum brakes is just as safe as a Volvo with disk brakes?
3) Google Iceland, middle ages. A truly libertarian society with private courts and private justice. We have analogous systems today that work so well they are eroding the state systems–private arbitration and private security agencies. Both work voluntarily and very well; they are the model for a future libertarian system.
Go read Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash”.
Use your imagination and just try to look past your programming to see how things could be different.
Listen–modern governments are only about 200 years old. They are a blink in history’s eye–there ARE other ways!
Clover, government – organized violence – has destroyed exponentially more human life than any other thing, including nature itself.
You – like so many authoritarian peace poseurs – equate private wealth with violence. Who caused more misery, Clover? Uncle Joe – or Henry Ford?
JP Morgan – or Dishonest Abe?
Clover, I insist you answer Meth’s (and my) query:
Would you put a gun to our heads to compel us to pay for government schools/government health care we do not use – for services we wish to decline/or provide for ourselves with our resources?
No equivocation. Answer the question. If you refuse, you’ll be thrown in the woods. Because you’ll have demonstrated to my satisfaction that you are unwilling to engage in direct, honest debate.
Gangs and warlords are just governments of limited size and scope.
Government comes about in one of two ways.
1) A gang or warlord obtains enough power and control over a sufficiently large enough territory that the gang or warlord becomes a government.
2) People establish an institution which is to manage their common interests.
The problem is that 2) just becomes an effective avenue for those who want power over others and to live off the wealth of others. Thus it becomes infested with criminals until it resembles the government that was created by the first process.
The idea you propose is that a larger criminal gang suppresses the smaller ones. This is true. However that does not mean we need the larger gang.
“The initiator of the conflict is the jerk refusing to comply with the officer’s requests.”
No, sorry, the initiator was the cop who started the whole thing by trying to enforce some inane law. I suppose that if the cop requests that you give him a public blowjob, you would comply.
Interestingly, I can think immediately of a fine example of a libertarian society that worked fantastically well–until people like YOU took over that is.
America–1776 to 1860, and in a more limited sense until 1913.
It produced the richest, healthiest, most innovative people the world has ever seen. It produced wealth that put the common man over kings a generation before.
And it was, in everything but formal name, libertarian.
Thank goodness the vast majority of us don’t take statists seriously–a world that ran on your principles would have degenerated to a Stalinist Russia, a Maoist China, a Castroan Cuba, a Chavez Venezuela, a Kirchner Argentina, a Mugabe Rhodesia, a Kim Il Korea.
Oh… so Americans paid zero taxes back then, eh? smh
Developed nations TODAY enjoy a higher quality of life than at ANY time in history. We have better sanitation, education, health care, infrastructure, equality and longer life spans.
In a land without government and rule of law.. the weak and the poor would have zero rights.
We enjoy these things in spite of the outrageous fact of taxation.
These things only exist because we created a system of government, laws, rights, essential services and a mechanism to pay for them. Without that mechanism, there would simply be no society…merely enclaves of the wealthy separated by vast undeveloped areas with disenfranchised poor.
The American colonies were virtually tax-free (relative to today and in absolute terms). No income taxes, no forced “contributions” to wealth transfer schemes. People came here from all over the world to escape what you revere – a system of collectivism and authoritarianism.
But, you claim to be a peace-loving liberal. Let’s put it to the test.
Are you willing to personally put a gun to my head in order to force me to “help” those you believe are entitled to a portion of my property? If so, you are far from peace-loving. You are in fact a thug. If not – but you still advocate others doing so on your behalf – then you’re just a coward.
PS:
I follow real estate as a side interest.
In your socialist paradise, half a million (US) will buy a shitty little brownstone with a postage-stamp sized “lot.”
I’ve got about 16 acres, a 3,400 sq. ft. home, with a small guesthouse on the property. What would something like this cost in your socialist paradise?
I expect three times what I paid. Plus the taxes.
But oh. I forgot. I don’t “need” all that. I should “pay my fair share” – and be happy to live in a much smaller place that cost me much more… in order to “help” other people.
The systems you describe–merely enclaves of the wealthy separated by vast undeveloped areas with disenfranchised poor–exist everywhere in the world:
Most of Central and South America
Africa
The Middle East
India
China
Unsurprisingly all have governments in common.
You confuse “society” with “government”. Government is the predatory parasite that feeds of society, society is a construct made of the voluntary interactions of freely interacting individuals.
Government is a coarsening, violent influence. Its only purpose, use properly as it was in early America, is to protect rights. Nothing else.
Everything else it does, it does poorly, expensively, begrudgingly, and as a PR exercise to justify its parasitism.
The Post Office: perpetually broke and totally inferior to private FedEx/UPS.
The Military: a fantastic boondoggle and promiscuous waster of money
The Roads: crumbling to pieces, 70% of the bridges dangerously decayed.
The developed West’s apparent prosperity is, at this point, an illusion built on a mountain of debt–an illusion that’s coming crashing down…see Europe esp. the PIIGS
Again–don’t confuse civilization with government. Civilization comes first and is voluntary; government is parasitic, offers a few enticing protection rackets (police and courts), then subsumes other previously private enterprises like communications and transport…then eventually all others.
The latter state is called “fascism”–when the government merges with corporations…and generates enclaves of enormous wealth, separated by vast swaths of poverty.
In response to: eric on January 13, 2013 at 9:05 pm
No one is putting a gun to anyone’s head in order to take a portion of their property in order to help someone else. This is the inherent flaw in the thinking of all fiscal conservatives. Damn near every citizen gets more out of the system than they contribute individually. Our high quality of life is only possible because of taxation revenue utilized to create the systems, infrastructure and services necessary for everyone.
Really?
What will happen, pray, if I decline to hand over the annual rent payment the county demands of me each year? If I fail to send in my annual tributum to the federal government?
You know as well as I do: Men with guns will come. And they will kill me if I attempt to defend myself against them.
@r. j. paré on January 13, 2013 at 9:40 pm:
How can everyone get more out of the system than they put in?
That is the best question/statement you’ve made yet! Perhaps inadvertently, you have just highlighted the central illusion of all statist/socialist systems: They are inherently self-bankrupting.
Here’s how they do it: They borrow money from central banks, who in turn print the money.
There are two consequences:
1) ever-increasing debt to the point of total failure
2) ever-increasing inflation, which is a clever form of theft (each dollar printed reduces the value of the dollars you saved)
We’re in the end-game of that system now. Most governments around the world are borrowing money simply to pay the interest on what they’ve already borrowed…
…akin to opening new credit cards to make payments on the ones you’ve maxed out already.
Those bills WILL come due. Look at Greece, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal–the PIIGS.
The vast majority of people get far more out of the system than they put in because the government does not create systems or deliver services aimed at the individual. Rather tax revenue is spent on creating systems that are designed for all citizens. Thus they spend far less on those services than what an individual would spend on them privately.
I don’t give a tinker’s damn about your collectivist generalities. I don’t want your “services.” I therefore do not wish to pay for them. I want simply to be left the hell alone. You and your ilk refuse to do so. That makes you a thug, RJ.
Plain and simple.
I didn’t say it was perfect–but it was a damn sight better than today.
Those qualities are the result of continuing improvements…built on the base of free enterprise. Even the remnant of the free market ideal that survives is so powerful it is able to overcome statism and bring forth its fruits.
Imagine how much faster we would have improved absent the predation of the State–and especially, its lord and master the central bank.
Why do you equate libertarianism with the absence of “rule of law”? We are obsessed with law–Natural Law, that is, not administrative law.
Look up malum in se versus malum prohibitum.
Nobody has zero rights; we are all born with absolute human rights, among them those enumerated in the Bill of Rights but much more besides. One’s rights can be violated–but never taken, they are inherent and unalienable*.
Pare–we’re probably closer than you think. I just want freedom, and I abhor tyranny. The path we’re on is statist; and its inevitable conclusion, historically proven dozens of times, is authoritarianism.
Is that what you want?
Because what we have today appears stable–but its destruction has already begun.
* different than inalienable.
I live in a country most US Liberatrians probably abhor. Canada! Along with many other developed nations we eschewed the extremes of either crony capitalism or oppressive communism and instead borrowed quite liberally from both in creating an alternative: Social Democracy/Social Capitalism: Nations with capitalist economies that have socialized certain essential services in order to ensure even the weak and poor have quality education and health care.
Here’s the problem with that, RJ:
Where do you draw the line? Where does it stop? Once you accept the principle that’s its acceptable to put guns to people’s heads for any reason other than self-defense, you have opened a door that inevitably, necessarily leads to limitless oppression of the individual by the collective – or rather, those (like Stalin and Hitler) who presume to speak for the collective.
What I abhor, RJ, is violence except in self-defense.
Everything you tout has behind it – a gun pointed at some peaceful person’s head.
I don’t want anything from you – or anyone else – except respect for my rights, as I respect yours. Live – and let live. People interacting freely, without coercion.
If you really do believe in peace, then you need to check your premises.
Wow the Canucks are coming out of the woodwork today?
I just had the pleasure of decimating one of your hoplophobic countrymen on another thread at EPAutos, search for “methylamine on January 13, 2013 at 8:20 pm”.
You still haven’t answered the central question: is it OK to use violence to enforce the terms of your utopia?
That is: I do not wish to participate in socialized medicine, or government schools; therefore, I decline to pay for them.
Eventually, men with guns–agents YOU hired indirectly–come and put me in a cage. If I resist, they shoot and kill me.
Is that moral? I merely wished to abstain from systems you think are a good idea.
Must I be shot?
So – if you decided to break the law and further decided to assault police officers – well there certainly wouldn’t be any choice but for them to use as much force as necessary in order to subdue you, as you were certainly a public menace. They would try their best not to use lethal force mind you.. but if you were using a gun? Well, sadly yes – they’d most likely kill you.
“There is no logical reason for you to refuse to pay your taxes..”
You can’t be serious. Are you?
It is illogical for me to object to other people – random strangers, people whom I owe nothing (other than goodwill and respect for their rights) asserting a claim by violence against my person?
To object to being made a slave?
What is the essential attribute of a slave, Clover? It is that he labors under duress for the benefit of others. He is forced to do hand over the fruits of his labor, the sweat-work of his brain and body, to others who did not produce it but have the ability to threaten him with violence if he declines to hand it over.
Your logic is 100 proof Clover: You’ll have no worries… if you just submit and obey!
@r. j. paré on January 13, 2013 at 9:48 pm
“no logical reason for you to refuse to pay your taxes”
Why yes, there is–I gave it to you. I do not wish to participate in the medical system, nor do I wish to send my children to government schools. I have my reasons as a rational and free man, and I will provide those services for myself, at my own expense, without asking anything of you or anyone else.
Therefore, my logical reason for refusing to pay those taxes is that I do not wish those services; much like cancelling my cable TV, I no longer wish to watch it.
But you do not respect my wishes; in fact, you wish to hire armed men to accost me, cage me, and possibly kill me—
because you disagree with me.
I’m sorry, but in my book that makes you a fascist.
Can you clarify how you are not?
Random people are not asserting any claim. We [the people] have charged the government with doing a job – it is a big job – and they pay for that by splitting the bill amongst us all. You do owe your fellow citizens, absolutely, for the roads, sewers, sanitation, police, libraries, fire departments, schools etc etc etc Every single day we use facilities and services the vast majority of us would never be able to afford otherwise.
Who is “we,” Clover?
It isn’t me – and millions of others who object to a society built on legalized theft and violence. Let’s cut to the bottom line; the basic difference between you and I:
I would never threaten you with violence (and would act to aid you, in the event someone else threatened you with violence).
You, on the other hand, eagerly threaten me (and many others) with murderous violence – and castigate us for objecting.
You’re a thug. You can dress it up, you can equivocate and rationalize all you like. The bottom line is you are a thug.
I expect you’re also a coward. Because I doubt very much you’d put a gun to anyone’s head in order to force them to “help” and “contribute.”
Don’t have the stomach for that? Maybe you should ask yourself why that is….
Yet you USE those services.. it isn’t that you don’t wish to contribute to them – you actively USE THEM and refuse to pay. That, is actual theft, btw.
Bullshit again!
I don’t use the government schools; why must I “help” pay for them? Why are other people’s children my obligation? I impose no such obligations on others.
If I wish to pay for fire protection, etc., that ought to be my choice to make, either way.
You have no right to make me pay for any of these things. Yes, you can compel me to – exactly like the Mafia or a common street thug.
That’s the company you’re in.
PS: Roads are financed by pay as you go motor fuels taxes – which are not extracted by force.
@pare:
You do owe your fellow citizens, absolutely…
Ah–the tired old trope, “Social Contract”, philosophically disproven but resurrected from time to time like Lenin’s frozen corpse.
Where’s this contract I signed, pare? Show it to me.
Because what I see is you hiding your philosophically inconsistent and immoral argument–that you may pay the state to enslave me–behind a collectivist front: “We the people”
There are only individuals, and individuals interacting. The “collective” is an abstraction, an illusion.
Again you dodged the question:
I do not wish certain services.
I will provide them for myself and ask nothing of you.
You do not respect my wishes; you pay for armed men to do violence to me.
You coerce me with violence against my will.
Ergo, you are a violent man and a tyrant
You can claim you do not use the services… you can claim you’ve never used the services – except for the fact that you have and do.
Every road you drive on, every time you turn on the water tap, every time you visit a library, every time you receive medical care, any schooling you’ve received and so on….
More evasions, Clover.
Meth was very precise in his query to you. As I was.
Again: I do not use government schools. I impose no costs on “the system.” I do not use the library. I buy my own books.
Do you believe it is morally right to threaten me with violence to compel me to provide monies for other people’s schooling, books and so forth?
@pare:
Why are you so intent on implicating me in your crimes; ensnaring me in your system? It is NOT my system. I reject it. I abhor it; and I especially abhor the violence that sustains it, the theft that never satiates its gaping maw.
It–the theft and violence–cheapens society. By making every man every other man’s simultaneous servant and master, it engenders an ugly nosiness, envy, hatred, busybody-ness.
I asked you about two very specific things–the socialist hospitals (I pay my own way) and the schools–I pay for my children to go to private schools that take NO state funds whatsoever…to make plain the central argument:
You use violence by proxy against me because you will not respect my decisions.
The other examples you bring up–roads, water, libraries–are things that have been and in many places still are, and will be provided privately. However, because the State is a jealous god, it actively destroys private enterprise and private charity.
The State comes to your house and breaks your legs. The next day it comes back with a pair of crutches, and says “See? Without me, you couldn’t walk!”
Because the State has made private property ownership impossible, it’s make private roads mostly impossible…and so I’m forced to use its roads. And it galls me.
However my other examples still stand–
you don’t have the courage, or intellectual integrity, to answer them, pare–and I understand, and actually like you for it–because I know that deep down inside you KNOW it’s wrong but it’s very hard to admit it.
If you were a sociopath like our “leaders”, you wouldn’t be arguing.
It’s a like an itchy abscess; you can’t stop scratching at it because you know you have to get the poison out.
Of all the ‘services’ arguments the most used is the roads, but the roads are really one of the few if not the only government service that is funded in a sensible manner.
Most roads are funded by tolls and fuel taxes. The few that aren’t come from small portions of the property tax on those with property along said roads. It is pretty easy to avoid paying for roads by minimizing one’s use of them.
If all government ‘services’ were funded like the roads then that would be a far better condition than we have now. Those of us without children wouldn’t pay for schools for instance. Those with children would have to pay.
So, statists feel free to model funding of all government services after the way roads are done.
I’ve no idea what you are referring to. A half million (US) would, pretty much anywhere in Canada, buy a similarly huge plot of land and home.
Exactly my point, Clover!
I paid far less than half a million for our land/home.
@ methylamine:
“Wow the Canucks are coming out of the woodwork today?”
Nah. “They” aren’t Canadians, and there’s only one of them. Note the writing style. This is one single paid troll, most likely an American working for a paycheck.
He’ll hit several threads and move on. That’s what these assholes do.
Have only skimmed thread. The free rider “problem”. a snip from “Does Law Require Legislation” (Rothbard):
Furthermore, Leoni apparently does not see that taxation is a prime example of coercion, and is hardly compatible with his own picture of the free society. For if coercion is to be confined to the coercers, then surely taxation is the unjust coercive extraction of property from a vast body of noncoercing citizens. How, then, is it to be justified? Leoni, again in chapter 8, also concedes the existence of some legislation in his ideal society, including, mirabile dictu, some nationalized industries![6] One specific nationalization favored by Leoni is the lighthouse industry. His argument is that a lighthouse could not charge individual consumers for its service, and that therefore it should be supplied by government.
The basic answers to this argument are threefold:
the taxation for lighthouses imposes coercion and is therefore an invasion of freedom;
even if the lighthouse could not charge individuals, what prevents shipping lines from constructing or subsidizing their own lighthouses? The usual reply is that then various “free riders” would benefit from the service without paying. But this is universally true in any society. If I make myself a better person, or if I tend my garden better, I am adding to the benefits enjoyed by other people. Am I then entitled to levy tribute upon them because of this happy fact?
In fact, lighthouses could easily charge ships for their services, if they were permitted to own those surfaces of the sea which they transform by their illumination. A man who takes unowned land and transforms it for productive use is readily granted ownership of that land, which can henceforth be used economically; why should not the same rule apply to that other natural resource, the sea? If the lighthouse owner were granted ownership of the sea surface that he illuminates, he could then charge each ship as it passes through. The deficiency here is a failure not of the free market but of the government and the society in not granting a property right to the rightful owner of a resource.
On the necessity of taxing for government lighthouses and other services, Leoni adds the astonishing comment that “in these cases the principle of free choice in economic activities is not abandoned or even put in doubt.” (p. 171) Why? Because “it is admitted” that people would be willing to pay for these services anyway, if available on the market. But who admits it, and to what extent? And which people would pay?
Perhaps fruitful rooting here:
http://www.simpleliberty.org/taota/the_free_rider_fallacy.htm
On surface, could say its the donneists vs the wolfeists (John Donne, Thomas Wolfe). No man is an island vs every man is an island.
Deeper, root, this divide is psych/emotional. The Donnes – imposers & imposees – are pathological, integrity is missing (in their arguments & actions).
Contributions from UK (peirs, is it?), Canada, points the pathology: no islands, no countries even – the world, all of it, is required. You can bet that will be “insufficient”, too, & so, “space programs”.
Fortunately, reach exceeds grasp. Unfortunately, at some frustration threshold, some Donne somewhere will push a button…destroy it, to save it….
It is our principles that advanced the world.
The statists retard it.
North and South Korea, East and West Germany. Same peoples. Different political systems. The (more) statist system is always the (more) retarded one.
How about the kill-on-command clover? Gets to wear special suit with pins attached just so with boots that are tied perfectly and a weapons, too! ‘Gets a thrill out of getting to kill. What power the clover has now. How good the clover feels!
Clover is like a serial killer in that he is able to disassociate his actions from his victims. He has a defective empathy mechanism. Most of us here, for example, would find it impossible to be a cop given what cops do as a matter of routine – because we find the idea of doing such things abhorrent. And we find them abhorrent because we see the victims of “law enforcement” as precisely that – victims. Fellow human beings who have not done anything to warrant being threatened with violence by us (or anyone else).
We have a “sick” society because it is peopled by low-grade sociopaths.
Very true. Just check out the comments in this Youtube vid:
Traffic Cop Opens My Car Door
The most recent cop humper comment:
“i’d like too see these scumbags live 1 day as a police officer, they wouldn’t be half as polite, or co-operative as this man was to them. look i sing ‘fuck the police’ as loud as the next man.. but you’ve got to understand that in the end of the day (especially stuff to do with driving) we need authority to keep us safe to some degree. not from drugs, not from sex and not from art… but from idiots that could harm others, and fellas, you are those idiots.”
The noble martyr argument is favorite amongst cop groupies. Really, it’s not like they are volunteering their services, or that they didn’t choose their profession, or aren’t free to quit if it becomes more than they can handle.
Yeah, I read some of those comments and it’s truly amazing. They are all clovers! I know we’re the minority, but I’m really starting to get a sense of just how outnumbered we are.
“we need authority to keep us safe to some degree”
Another favorite where they accuse those who challenge authority as being the immature ones.
Well, made some comments, and received the usual “Your (sic) a whiner” “Love it or leave it” “If you have nothing to hide…” robo-replies.
Man, their religion runs deeeeeep.
Interesting. The spike in this vid was discussed last night on Free Talk Live:
CopBlock Video Goes Hater-Viral
http://soundcloud.com/freetalklive/ftl2012-10-19
“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” Denis Dederot
Cover quote from an article ‘Some Implications of Anarchy’ by Edward Abbey
You all have a good weekend…Tre
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Abbey
The cop should have given taken the douche away in hand-cuffs the minute he refused to cooperate. We need our police officers busy doing their jobs not wasting time with jerks who want to hassle them as some sort of youtube prank – see how much they enjoy cooling their heels in a cell.
@pare–
Brave words. It seems you like violence–as long as it’s perpetrated by your hired goons, not by you.
Would you be so bold?
Statist swine.
The initiator of the conflict is the jerk refusing to comply with the officer’s requests. He was very lucky that officer had so much patience. Police do a very difficult and essential job – yanking their chains for entertainment is worthy of contempt.
That’s right, RJ – just Submit and Obey. “The law” is always right; never resist or even object to authority.
Sheesh.
If you lived in some dictatorship where they were violating your human rights in order to steal from you and rape your sister etc etc etc – then by all means I’ll stand with you and resist. YES
When a police officer here is doing his friggin’ job and this driver decided he is going to take a routine stop and escalate matters for his own bloody amusement? No.
Clover (because you’ve proved yourself to be one), consider this:
I am not “buckled up for safety.” Harming no one. Possibly, I may harm myself – but that is surely my business, unless you assert parental/spousal authority over my person.
An armed man in a funny costume forces me to stop my vehicle and demands I “buckle up” – with the “or else” very clearly manifest. What will happen if I decline to obey his command?
Mind: I am causing no one any harm or in any way threatening harm. I merely wish to be left alone, to take a decision about my personal life and go about my business in peace.
The armed man in the funny costume will escalate to the point of lethal violence if I continue to disregard his orders.
That’s the society you favor, Clover.
A society in which it is not enough to respect other people’s rights (to not aggress against their persons or their property), to be a peaceful, productive person. No, one must submit – and obey. Whatever the collective decrees – as expressed by “the law” and its enforces – is sufficient warrant to threaten (and use) murderous violence against peaceful people.
That’s your world, Clover.
I’m hopeful we can make a better one.
1. Minors – the government has a duty to curb child endangerment/abuse.
2. Adults – it isn’t just that you are endangering yourself – it is also the cost to the public that this decision incurs [first responders, emergency room expenses etc]
In your world – without the law to protect the vulnerable – the wealthy and powerful would have zero impediment to their exploitation and abuse of those less powerful.
Clover,
Your premise assumes collectivism – that “society” will bear “costs” (which may be entirely hypothetical). I reject your premise. There are only individuals. And individuals should be held responsible for their actions – not the actions (or potential actions) of nameless “others.”
If the government – the collective – has the moral right to threaten to kill me over a seat belt, there is no small corner of personal choice that is not open to murderous threats and violence. You have accepted a horrible thing: That others have a right to micromanage your life – or else.
How does it feel to be a thug?
Dear Eric,
Clover writes
“… it isn’t just that you are endangering yourself – it is also the cost to the public that this decision incurs [first responders, emergency room expenses etc]”
Wow. He really is reciting the Clover Catechism chapter and verse, isn’t he?
What is this, but the same old trick? Use previous unwanted “public services” to justify still more unwanted authoritarian impositions. Ram one thing down our throats. Then use that as an excuse to ram another.
Clover knows we never wanted any of it. We don’t want it. We don’t want to pay for it. We want to purchase what we need on our own. But clover doesn’t give a rat’s ass.
As clover put it, “The cop should have given taken the douche away in hand-cuffs the minute he refused to cooperate.”
There it is, the brute force physical coercion, plain for all to see. The moment clover lets his mask slip, his sociopathic compulsion to control others bursts forth.
After all the yada yada about “compassion.” what do we get when we cut through all the crap?
Answer: “Do as I say, or else!”
This is one of the best articles I’ve read on this topic… ever.
Regarding genetics vs. environment, there can be no end of speculation. I think genetics create an initial disposition. That disposition is not immutable and CAN be changed via personal experiences. To that degree, public education, intentionally and otherwise, seeks to push people into a submissive collective mindset rather than to create free thinking individuals. Of course, the outcome of going through public schools is not a forgone conclusion for ALL kids. People are different and they will react differently. Some will totally absorb and relish the school experience. Some may be indifferent. Others may rebel openly. It’s a number game for those in power though. They don’t need EVERYONE thinking the same, but just enough…
One of the things I enjoy seeing on Lew Rockwell’s site is when he posts the emails he gets from people that used to be hard core statists but finally had something happen in their lives which opened their eyes and made them see things differently. Eric referenced the Christian experience of having to make a free choice. That comes after the awakening. What happens first is that the person sees things in a new way. The choice comes in how they react to that new vision. Do they embrace it and run with it, or do they flee from it and try to deny it. After all, having long held beliefs destroyed is NOT a fun experience. We ALL spend our lives laboring under false conceptions of the world. Growing up and maturing involves letting go of these misconceptions when we are faced with evidence that they are false. It may happen slowly at some times and/or REALLY fast at other times. It is a process that lasts a life time. Some people are VERY deliberate and disciplined in pursuing the process. Others are more passively, reacting only when they have no choice. Finally, there are those that simply DO NOT want to change their views on things (BUT they CAN if they make the choice to).
When you think about all the myth surrounding our government/society, we are not asking someone to give up on some trivial belief about something of slight consequence. Imagine what it does to a person to go from having believed all their life that government is actually a force for good, staffed by honorable people genuinely seeking to improve our lives, to grasping that government is just the Mob with a veneer of legitimacy. That makes the world a scary place. That is a BIG emotional leap for some people. Some might be able to handle it, but many others may have to be led using baby steps. So pause and think about your own life and experiences when dealing with needed changes to your thinking before getting self righteous and judgmental about the thinking of others.
I guess my issue with the clover label is that it creates an artificial division. There is no bright line between clovers and non clovers. I think to some degree almost everyone has a bit of clover in them at times. There are degrees of cloverness. However, if you think you have reached enlightenment such that you no longer consider yourself a clover, does demeaning the PERSON rather than the beliefs really help in assisting others to escape their cloverness?
As I Christian, this issue is very dear to me. I cannot tell you how many unbelievers I encounter that view Christians as self righteous militant thugs bent on forcing everyone to bow to their beliefs. Sadly, this is frequently a justified description because so many Christians don’t want to take the time to engage unbelievers, respect them as individuals created in the image of God and worthy of respect for that reason alone if for no other, and they don’t want to interact on the basis of personal relationships. It is FAR easier to just label the “others”, assign negative characteristics to them, and treat them as a lump. Our military does this to make it easier for soldiers to kill enemies. Our media does this to make it easier for people to hate our enemies. How often do you hear something like, “They can’t be reasoned with,” “They are not rational,” “They are just different”, etc,…? These are all views that automatically put the “others” outside the realm of people that we need to respect or to make any effort to relate to on a personal level. THAT is collectivist thinking and I see many of the so called non clovers posting here engaging in that very behavior…
People CAN change. Beating them over the head or insulting them is not usually real effective. Arguing them into a corner with your superior logic is not usually real effective. Would any of you listen to what someone has to say if you knew they had ZERO respect for you as a person or they were insulting you? Would you REALLY be open to listening to their arguments? If you want to change someone, for the better, you have to relate to them. This takes time. It can get messy. It is slow going. you have to be willing to let people think, say, and do things you might not like. Sometimes that might even be REAL inconvenient or hurt. The willingness to absorb some of that can often be what finally gets the person’s attention and gets them to lower their shields so they can finally start hearing what you are saying. That is what Christianity is supposed to be about, loving other people enough to put up with their crap without retaliating or fighting them so that your sacrifice on their behalf might one day break down the barriers. I thank God regularly for putting a woman in my life that understood this and put up with my crap for years. The end result was me finally “getting it” and life changed radically for me. Had she nagged me and treated me with contempt, it never would have happened. I only wish I had not labored so long under my false conceptions before getting it…
Wow Scott! Very well thought out and sincerely from the heart. I commend you and concur with most of what you state. You have done an excellent job of expressing the concepts of do unto others as you would have them do unto you, that one reaps what one sows, and that we are to be as wise as the serpent and as gentle as a dove. I have a coworker (as well as a good friend now) who was immediately put off by the Bible on my work bench when he hired in. As we got to know each other and he discovered that I don’t try to put my foot on anyone’s throat and attempt to evangelize them, he informed me of this. It seems he had a coworker at another job that did so and it completely (and understandably) put him off.
If we are to be true Christians, then we are to let our light shine and lead by example. I confess that I’m not always good at it. I am rebellious and often would much rather fight than turn the other cheek. And there are certainly times for a Christian to fight, but only in defense. In fact, if our ancestors here in the U.S.A. had not taken up arms we would not have enjoyed the short period of Liberty that we as a nation did. And I fear that we may be faced with a similar situation again all too soon.
I believe it is better to identify the enemy publicly, label them, expose their deeds and ridicule them, than to have to use force against them. I agree that we may turn some individual hearts away from the collective through persuasion. But unfortunately “Cloverism” (a.k.a. compliance with and active support of government authoritarianism no matter how morally wrong) is as much a religious conviction as Christianity. And apparently a very popular and timeless one at that. Christianity is the archetype of individual Liberty, teaching that we all have a free will and it’s up to us as individuals to live and let live, not act aggressively and to make the choice to do that which is right; the antithesis to Cloverism. It is our responsibility to expose the deeds of evil men to the light of truth if we dare call ourselves “Christian.” That is often best accomplished through ridicule.
I too have been blessed with a wonderful wife that has put up with my crap over the years as well. Through her I have gained a much more understanding, generous and compassionate heart. Through me, she has learned that it’s one thing to turn the other cheek to a fellow believer and quite another to let the world (i.e. Clovers and their spiritual ilk) use you for a doormat. We must exercise discernment Scott; because unfortunately, most people, if you will let them, will take advantage of you. And that includes forcing you to do what they think is right under pain of death if necessary. The members of the crowd crying “Crucify him!” were uber Clovers to say the least.
The problem of “clovers” is never going to go away. If you believe the Biblical narrative, it is just the fruit of man’s fallen nature. No amount of armed resistance will ever change that. No form of government will ever keep them in check. Resisting them will never be a finished task from which we can rest and enjoy the fruits of our labor. Understanding this should affect how we seek to interact/react with them.
Does the effectiveness of ridicule as a means of highlighting evil deeds and corrupt thinking make it justified? Is there a difference between ridiculing a person versus ridiculing a belief or action? Does ridicule ignore the impact on the target of ridicule? How do you react/feel when others ridicule you? Does it make you more or less open to what they have to say? Jesus had some harsh words for the leaders of His day, and even for the people in general, but how did He treat individuals?
I think about the issue of resistance or self defense a LOT. I am pretty settled on the moral right of using self defense. In all but the most exceptional cases, I would not hesitate to use deadly force against common criminals in cases where my life (or family/friends) is threatened. But what about a criminal government…?
Sure, clovers crucified Jesus, but what was He praying as He was nailed to the cross? Jesus surely had the moral right and the power to defend Himself from the people responsible for His death, yet He didn’t exercise either. He willingly let go of that right for the greater good of accomplishing the plan of salvation and building His Kingdom.
So we have a tension between the right of self defense and the example of not always exercising one’s rights when forgoing them might serve a higher purpose. Jesus permitted a criminal government to have its way. Does this mean we ALWAYS give up our right of self defense when government is involved? Do we ALWAYS obey government?
A LOT of Christians like to point to Romans 13 to support the idea that we should all be good citizens, support our government, and obey it even when we might not like it. But, this cannot be an absolute principle. After all, many believers went to their death because they refused to obey the command to acknowledge Caesar as Lord. So again… we have one of these annoying tensions between two principles. We should seek to obey government where possible yet there are times where we should resist even to the point of OUR death. Many early Christians went to their death at the hands of their government, without resisting. Like Christ, they had a right of self defense, but they chose not to exercise it.
I believe the Bible makes clear that there are appropriate times to resist government. For me, the BIG issue is what form that resistance can take? Should it only be passive? Can it be subversive? Can it be physical, as in armed resistance? Do we engage in politics just like any other interest group, seeking to have our vision imposed on others? Here is where I struggle to find clear guidance.
I am fully aware that throughout history, a great many Christians have used violence, aggressively and defensively, against governments and individuals. Their examples alone do not settle the question in my mind. Far too many things have been done that perhaps should not have been done for me to let historical examples be conclusive. Sure, our ancestors fought an armed revolution against England that resulted in a new country. But was that the ONLY or BEST path things could have taken? Look where that has taken us, from one set of oppressors to another that is worse than the former. Perhaps non violent resistance might have accomplished something better? Hard to say… Obtaining the ring of power didn’t work out real well for our ancestors.
I try to deal with people on an individual basis where possible. I engage folks in places like these comments or on forums where I participate. I encourage people to think about the consequences of their beliefs and the things they support. I try to strip away euphemisms and lay things bare for what they are, hoping that once people see things as they truly are it might lead them to change their views/actions. I try to encourage others to respect even those they see as their enemies. ALL of these things are a form of resistance. I have no delusions regarding whether or not this will stem the tide of those seeking to control the lives of others, but I stay at it regardless, because I believe it is the right thing to do.
Scott, I find Christians are their own worst enemy. Speaking as a former missionary I saw and experienced it first hand. Self-righteous, fire-from-heaven, hypocrisy is the beam in mainstream Christianity’s eye that they all too often refuse to acknowledge. Oh, they “love” you to agree with them but how often do you find someone who will actually “listen” when you rub them wrong? It does come down to simple respect for the individual. When you can see that person as more than a meat-sack of lying contradictions, and believe me that’s “work”, then you have a foundation to build off of.
“When you can see that person as more than a meat-sack of lying contradictions, and believe me that’s “work”, then you have a foundation to build off of.”
EXACTLY!
And you are quite right, it is difficult. Many times my own attitudes and actions are the single biggest obstacle, not the other person’s…
Thanks Scott for your thoughts.
You seem to be able to “see the forest for the trees”.
I have been exposed to the “militant thug” type christian and the ones who respectfully and truly love all.
It’s a tough and emotional world out there.
The best one can do is take good care of themselves through healthy living and healthy thinking.
I appreciate your’s and Boothe’s thoughts about the women in your lives. They used honey. Honey is made from clover.
And if that fails, there’s always fast living and heavy drinking.
— The Other Scott 🙂
I just noticed there is another “Scott” posting in the comments. I guess I should have put “Scott F” in my post above to distinguish between us. The replies below to Boothe and MoT are mine.
In Michigan it is legal to pass on the right on a highway with more than two lanes in each direction . . .
Being a lifelong observer of driver’s foibles, I would like to make several observations. I think people who tailgate, even when there is an open passing lane, are simply too insecure to face an open highway: they MUST have a car in front of them. (My remedy: a reverse pass. Shift to the left lane, slow down, and pass the tailgater by going slower than he is.) In a multi-lane situation, those who pass on the right, despite an open left lane, are too insecure to be in the left lane. Drivers who are constantly flashing their brake lights are simply riding the brake pedal with their left foot. The automatic transmission has almost completely destroyed safe driving practices. Slow-driving line leaders see themselves as self-appointed guardians of the highway. Drivers who drive only in the left lane are totally oblivious to other people. And finally, few drivers give a thought to what they are doing, nor think ahead to where they are going nor how to get there effeciently without hazardous last second maneuvers. Drive defensively!
You should have made an analogy to Honeysuckle instead of clover. clover is a very important plant for the production of honey, for improving the health of the soil, for animals to eat….
Honeysuckle just grows over the top of everything, shutting out all the light to those indigenous plants below creating a virtual desert underneath, dark and hopeless.
Government is like kudzu, you bring it in thinking it will solve and problem and it ends up taking over and is impossible to get rid of.
Good stuff!
Bees utilize clover to make honey.
Can we do the same?
Unfortunately, no…But can I interest you in a tapeworm salad?
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own goodwill torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. ~ CS Lewis
I see some people talk about no place left to run or escape the collectivist nonsense. I believe a reason for high rates of mental “illness” is because people have lost power over their lives and there is no place to escape the Statist structure. I would say these people do not understand this consciously.
Hmmm, excellent point. I wonder if any studies have been done on this?
Collectivists have a hive mentality and when you poke the hive, they try to kill you. Their brains are synced and function instinctually more than objectively and rationally.
Where they came from I will never know. Maybe they are not fully evolved.
Placing individuals with collectivist all on the same spinning ball, maybe God does have a since of humor after all.
Good article Eric!
Collectivists are more tribal ape – that demand others live for them – than evolved individual human. They are humanoid still stuck between auto-reacting ape and full integrating consciousness.
One question that I pose to clovers when the opportunity arises is a paraphrase of Bastiat. If people are so stupid and evil as to not be allowed the Liberty to live their lives as they see fit; why is it the proposals of politicians, bureaucrats and social reformers are always considered good? Are they not also members of the human race?
I usually get a blank stare in reply.
Excellent, Mark!
And, right on target….
I call it the deer in the headlights moment…..
The world if full of evil psychopaths so therefore we need to setup a government and give it absolute power on the initial use of force and give it armies…and nuclear bombs…You Know…To keep the evil psychopaths away from…Ummm…No….Wait.
Clovers are just mentally retarded children.
But when you don’t, I expect the argument is that politicians, bureaucrats and social reformers *try* to better the human condition, while the general populace (i.e. the lay about slugs on drugs) don’t. This would be the same argument used to advance the authority and righteousness of the Church during the pre-Enlightenment, yes?
Those in power seeking to retain it will always place themselves and their intentions above the proletariat.
Scott having just read “World Lit Only by Fire”, and learning about the church circa 1100-1600, I’m amazed at the parallels between government today and the catholic church then.
Statism IS a religion. And we need only apply the same levers applied against the Catholic Church during the Reformation to destroy it as effectively as the church was, then.
I make it a point of discussion that corporations and governments have no life of their own, but are made up of individual people. It is these individuals and their actions under the aegis of those (and other) organizations that are the problem. Because they can wield authority and act badly with impunity, psycopaths gravitate toward government agencies and corporate management jobs. Worse yet, when they get in they tend to promote their own kind. So it stands to reason that there is a much higher percentage of thugs, sociopaths, opportunists, sluggards and thieves in the bureaucracy, because that is the one place they can ply their trade and not end up in Hotel Graybar or just get shot outright.
“Half of the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm – but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.”
T.S. Eliot
Indeed.
This is why it’s so important to confront them with the ugly – but always unmentioned – “other half” of do-gooderism: The use of force against other people.
When a liberal says, “I want to help the poor,” ask him whether he means he’ll personally be helping the poor with his own time and resources… ? Or is he advocating that armed men be sent to take away the resources of others?
Make him confront, openly, that he advocates putting other people in cages, threatening to assault and kill them – etc.
Then the person has to choose to either change his views – based on the realization that his views entail thuggish actions – or admit to being a thug. And reveling in it.
They “mean well” with the operative word being “Mean”
My experience with this tactic is that they lack introspection to such a degree that it simply does not compute. Their desire for control is so great that their own personal capacity is meaningless to themselves.
“What??? You mean do something MYSELF? That won’t accomplish my goal! Stop being silly – doing something myself is just a waste of time.”
Nothing short of totalitarian measures can appease them.
Make [the do-gooder/Clover/control freak] confront, openly, that he advocates putting other people in cages, threatening to assault and kill them – etc.
Then the person has to choose to either change his views – based on the realization that his views entail thuggish actions – or admit to being a thug. And reveling in it.
(Oops! Fingers hit the SUBMIT button too soon.)
I’ve found that most people, no matter what their ideological or political persuasion, react to your attempts force them to confront the truths about their beliefs in one of two ways – sometimes even both. They will either:
1. Evade your question to the point of lashing out violently when you tree them on it, refusing to admit to the painful truth about themselves, or
2. Admit to the truth about themselves, but staunchly defend it, refusing to see the contradiction between their rhetoric and their words. This can lead to some truly bizarre conversations.
My own personal experience has shown that reaction number 1 is the more common of the two.
Change “words” in point 2 to read “actions.” (Damn, fingers racing ahead of brain tonight!)
Most of the time, this is just what happens. But every once in awhile, you’ll reach someone. And that’s what makes the exercise worthwhile!
My experience has been that they will literally “blank out” the way Ayn Rand talked about.
Their minds will go blank. Sort of like in SF films, where their short term memory is wiped clean.
You will then be forced to begin the conversation all over again, from scratch.
A lot of times, I just give up.
@liberranter
3. defensively claim ‘but you do that too!’
Usually without basis and completely oblivious to the fact that even if it were true, it does not exonerate their behavior or belief.
r. j. paré appears to be a combination of the two.
There is no one above you. No man is greater than you. You see the homeless and cry for them but it is them who should cry for you. You the ignorant spend your time telling the stupid they can’t take care of themselves. What they need is education, like the Indians.
All the Indians and Aboriginals need is MORE Education.
Homeless=chainless slave=cageless prisoner?
It’s all one big Milgram experiment. Do you set the alarm clock again tonight so it shocks you awake tomorrow morning? We want the stuff, so we flip the switch when the authority figures tell us to.
The clovers are the ones who enjoy it. The screams of pain from the other room make them feel alive. That is their purpose in life, they are the teacher, while the other guy behind the wall is the learner.
Lethal electric shocks, drone strikes, starving women and children with sanctions, caging soccer moms and dads, its all in a days work for them. They’re happy well adjusted psycopaths, we’ll have to be the psychopaths that stop the experiment, no one else will.
I always wanted to know WHO, if anyone, refused to go ahead with the experiment and walked out. Did anyone ever follow up with them?
When the learner starts screaming about their heart, 40% of the teacher/pain givers will protest or try to stop or argue with the authority figure. That guy sternly says “you must continue” or the experiment must go on, eventually they reluctantly go back to doing it.
23% stop at some point, no real pattern in those who stop. ‘Ncredibly, no one demands to verify the learner is ok or demand the experiment stop. They apologize and beg to be let go.
Imagine what people would do if they thought the person was a criminal or military enemy. Probably you and those you love would murder the person based on the claims of the authorities.
Most of our social structure is an artificial forced situation like this experiment. It should seem obvious that administering pain and death to strangers is every bit as pointless as Milgram’s world. Most of news and current events comes from an authority, teacher, learner vicious circle that in reality is meaningless and needlessly cruel.
All I have to do is slipstream over to another web site, like CNN or Yahoo Newz, and the murderous comments from people who seem hell bent to kill someone, anyone, who is even suspected of doing ill will to Leviathan, are all I need to know. Yes, they’d do it in a heart beat.
Funny how all the bellowing manatees on wheels get so agitated about being 2nd hand smokers but have no qualms about being 2nd hand murderers.
Aarp aarp feed a clover a free fish and he’ll wallow about on free shit island for a lifetime. Try to teach him how to get his own fish and he’ll bark and honk for the return of the days of free fish forever. They are the walrus.
Hey Tor–that’s damn catchy, and I’d never thought of it that way:
Authority, Teacher, Learner–the predictive-programming triad to model one’s behavior. It’s what the Clovers have been taught–one stupid step at a time. “Am I the Teacher? I’ll do as I’m told!” “Am I the Authority? I’ll tell as I should!” “Am I the Learner? I’ll lie down and die!”
It’s exactly like Problem-Reaction-Solution; Authority-Teacher-Learner, it’s even a bit symmetric.
On “Learner”:
I often marvel at those scenes–be it Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, or Maoist China–of people lined up against pits about to be shot. Why the HELL don’t they DO something? You could not get me near that pit. I don’t care you’re going to kill me anyway; if I can scratch your eyes out on the way I’ll do it. “I’ll bite your kneecaps off you lilly-livered bastard!”
I think you’ve just defined opposing motivations of the war of Us vs. Them, methylamine.
They want to be the Authority. They are always flashing a badge, or claiming to be a part of the group that is in charge. They see Fixed classes of Masters, Workers, and Peoples.
When they visit this blog, they respond to Eric, because Eric is the authority of this blog. They are determined to be the Teacher who shows Eric he is not the Authority. It is the President, or the elected officials that are the Authority. They are the Teacher with many things Eric needs to Learn about the ones they call the Authority.
When they can’t play Authority, they always to play Teacher. When teaching, they always bring up past times when they were the Authority. Their Teachings consist of determining who the Authority is, and then elucidating the Teachings of the Authority.
If they are forced to be a Learner, they rebel at any chance, and revert to being a Teacher. They don’t really want to Learn. They just want the title of Teacher given to them for the time they hung around pretending to be Learners. Things are Fixed with them because they refuse to Learn new things and re-evaluate their previous assumptions.
We want to be the Learners. When in Authority, we try do demonstrate our Learning. We make value judgments of the Learnedness of potential Teachers and Learners to integrate them into our Team.
Unlike Them, We don’t accept everyone on our team, only those We feel will be a benefit. We want to maximize our capabilities, not our power.
When We are experienced, We assert ourselves as Teachers. We look for those able to discern our superior Learning and acknowledge us as Teachers, so we can increase our efficiency and accomplishment.
We are most at home being Learners. In our leisure time, we enjoy Learning new things. We often move on to new projects before getting an official title recognizing our accomplishments, we hate to waste time we could better be spending Learning something new and interesting to us.
We come on this blog to be criticized and corrected. We enjoy discovering we were wrong or uninformed about a matter, so that we can spend additional time and effort Learning about the topic under discussion.
@MoT:
Fascinating question, with a great answer.
In the un-modified experiment–everyone walked in without having seen another participant–10% walked out or just refused to go past the pain point.
In another follow-on experiment, participants were allowed to see others performing it before they themselves did.
When they observed the 10% refusing of their own accord to continue, 63% refused to continue!
This goes back to Tipping Point theory; it just takes 10% of us to reverse course.
Joseph Dimow was a 1961 refusnik who wouldnt issue the fatal shocks.
http://www.jewishcurrents.org/2004-jan-dimow.htm
Blass did a meta-analysis of 30 years worth of performances. 61-66% will give the fatal voltage regardless of time and place.
How can libertarians be the tipping point for others? How do we assure we don’t fall for a similar immoral authority? How do we stop the central banks from making the whole world a Milgram Holocaust?
What’s great about Eric’s articles and commentors is they help me to hold strong when threatened and try to be a tipping point force when it is prudent to be one. Going all Don Quixote is admirable,but it also needs a long term strategy.
For example, I mistakenly admitted I work for a company which does both union and non-union jobs in a venue filled with union guys. The principle of voluntary unionization versus forced unionization is something worthwhile to argue and made for an interesting exchange.
The tired cliches of Obama cleaning up Bush’s mess are easily conceded to them, but then they’re surprised when they realize there’s not much more to their beliefs than blind hatred, brute force, and trite tautologies.
A group of independent thinkers could be the unstoppable force tha finally begins to coax the immovable objects to move of there own free will.
Thanks for the update. I’ll take time to read up on him and I’m glad that someone didn’t “roll over” and do as they were told.
“How can libertarians be the tipping point for others?”
For individual others, now & then? Just be your piece/peace-wielding selves. Stay humble, tho, because a la “you cannot teach a man anything, you can only help him find it within himself” (Galileo) – “it” was already there, not a creation or conversion.
But “tipping point” as in magnetic pole reversal scale? You can’t, & you won’t.
“independent thinkers”…when you’re outnumbered, don’t count heads – weigh them (petr beckmann)…but, perspective, even atlas had to shrug….
Again, that’s good news but it obviously paints a large number of people as being “herd animals”. Followers and not leaders.
Dear meth,
Very interesting!
Didn’t know about that part of the experiment.
Very hopeful indeed.
Facepalm….and “libertarians” towards the end. Good Lord.
Eric, I think you’re right about the Clovers having the ascendancy at present. Alas, I don’t think we’re ever going to see a sudden and sweeping Libertarian revolution – it’s just not in our nature, most of us will simply ignore, or seek to minimize the influence the State has in our individual lives (totally valid choice). Meanwhile the State grows, and grows, and grows…
Despite the revulsion most Libertarians would feel, I think we could do tremendous good by actually entering (hijacking) the public service and shrinking it from within. Making them efficient, competitive, and smaller, much smaller, maybe even self-supporting. I managed to make two other positions redundant just by improving process – imagine if half the people in the public sector did that! We could forget about the political arm and directly (albeit incrementally) reform and reduce the actual State apparatus. A kind of anti-Fabianism:)
Again, it’s dirty work, and I know it’s a pretty distasteful idea for most Libertarians, but damn, I could actually see it making a real difference in the real world for real people.
Hey Mike,
I choose not to violate what I consider the Prime Directive of Libertarian thought – do not aggress against others – which makes it impossible for me to consider choosing to work in the “public” (that is, government) sector. Leaving aside ethics, there is also the practical problem of becoming financially dependent on stolen goods. For instance, consider government school teachers. They are among the most demonstrative and pushy of tax-feeders, right behind cops. (These two categories of tax feeders are principally responsible for the elimination of the concept of property ownership in this country – in the name of “the children” and “safety.”)
No, I think it’ll be more fruitful to get people to think more about what these people actually do – and demand – always at the point of a gun. To anathematize what they do – and demand. To make Clover as unsavory a personage as a Sandusky type.
Can’t thank you enough for the emergency repairs to my post there Eric!
Is it something you think about? Pragmatic, effective ways to diminish the State? How would you deliver America into liberty again?
Probably too big a question for the comments section, bet you’ve already written something on the subject, got a link?
np!
I think the only way societies change is when enough people change their minds. You’ll never get everyone on the side of non-aggression. But if you can get a critical mass of about 20 percent of the public, that’s enough to change everything.
Don’t forget that the American revolutionaries were in the minority (as were the communists in Tsarist Russia).
So, I keep chipping away – and encourage other like-minded people to do the same. Challenge Cloverite premises when you encounter them; get other people thinking.
That’s the way to proceed.
We may not see any positive changes in our lifetimes. But that doesn’t make it any less worth striving toward.
Hmmm 20%, now that actually seems rather achievable. You know, I don’t usually permit myself the possibility of thinking I might one day live in a libertarian(ish) society, but I might treat myself today.
It’s good to maintain perspective – and remember how much has changed in the relatively short time span of just the past 20 or 30 years. No reason it can’t change in the other direction – and perhaps in less time, too.
I have to think this way. Otherwise, I couldn’t do this anymore. I’d give up and focus on my bikes and old cars until the SHTF!
“20 percent of the public”
That’s the aim of the Free State Project. I’ll be relocating there sometime in the future.
http://freestateproject.org
Dear Eric,
Mao Zedong and the Chinese Communist Party were able to ram Marxism-Leninism down the Chinese peoples’ throat with a political party comprising only 5% of China’s population.
Libertarians ought to be able to liberate Amerika from TPTB with the determined support of 20% of the US population.
Wilko Eric’s on the right tack, and I have even more encouraging news.
If you’ve read about “Tipping Point” theory, it posits that if even 10% of a populace holds fast to an idea, I mean, really really believes it stolidly…
…the rest of the herd follows in a very short time.
10%.
Not too hard, right?
Talk about being the “salt of the earth”, eh?
Don’t forget Lawyers, the ultimate paracites. When you go to fight the rest of the parasites, the lawyers show up to pick over the bones.
Eric I really liked this essay and I think it’s one of the best you’ve written.
I can’t escape feeling that using the word “clover” to describe the individual member of the collective is diminutive and that might be dangerous. I understand your desire to heap scorn on these people, but I’d encourage you not to take them lightly or turn your back.
I think it’s also a good idea to understand the historical context; this is not a new problem. The founders of this country ran across a 2000 mile ocean to escape the tyrannies you describe. Our problem now is that there’s nowhere to run anymore.If you were like me as a kid, maybe you read all those great Robert Heinlein story’s like “Tunnel in the Sky” that described the vast new wilderness we’d all explore and the freedom we’d have when we got there. Of course, that was science fiction and it never happened.
Instead, we’re living through the “bacteria in a petri dish” scenario; we have no physical place to escape to. I’d venture the challenge now is to learn how to live with one another in close quarters. I think your discussion is a good overview of the problem and it begs a solution.
“No matter where you go, there you are.”
— Buckaroo Banzai, Adventures in the 9th Dimension.
Scott…I think you just added another definition of Pet Clover Names to my post above…
THE CLOVER COLLECTIVE!
I am still working on the “Petri Dish Clover” comment as well…
The Clover Collective would be the Clover Patch.
Clover won’t ever leave you alone for the exact same reason a Tapeworm or Mosquito won’t. Clover is a Retarded FuckUp (Or what used to be called “Liberal”…Liberal violence to steal from and control others) and is far too stupid to be free. It is dependant on a productive host to live off of…and will become violent if the host refuses. These petty terrorists ALWAYS seek positions in the terror group called Government…Wouldn’t you?
I love the parasite analogy.
Funniest thing I’ve read in a while. 🙂
Thanks.
Cloverism is better defined as Childishness…Infantilism…Acting on nothing as if it were something…Public Schooled…TV-watching…Carbohydrate-eating runts. Clover is a mental child…Mentally retarded…Psychotic brat…And they tend to possess murderous resentment for rational adults who refuse to live for them. They are basically stupid/bumbling terrorists and they vote for political terrorists to ruin others and to steal for them.
Clovers – “Public Schooled”?
Not sure I totally agree with that one.
From my experience (of course that was back in a day long gone)the LCIT (Little Clovers in Training)
went to the private schools and those of us in public schools were mostly RI (i.e. Troublemakers).
The Times – they are a changing…
‘public’ schools, aka government schools are about conditioning the children into being clovers. In the USA, there aren’t really private schools accept for the wealthy and politically high up. The ordinary private school is fundamentally the same as government school in how it follows the Prussian system, what it teaches, how it conditions the children. The wealthy don’t send their kids to schools like that, but clovers often do.
John Taylor Gatto applied the methods of the elite private schools to poor kids from Harlem with great success. The real private schools are fundamentally different than government schools. They do more than keep ‘disruptive’ kids out.
Correct. Think about it – Would you ever expose your child to something called “Kindergarten”?
Have you ever had significant dealings with 20-somethings? Most are so incredibly weak and stupid that you realize Amerika has just become another socialist shithole. These are Klinton’s kids…How could they be anything other that retarded and violent psychopaths? Klinton/PTB did this deliberately because they are mass-murdering terrorists that literally get-off on controlling and owning tax livestock massman…imagine deliberately diminishing the lives of MILLIONS of people for their entire life! Gatto understands what’s going on.
Nice rant. You’re not exactly “wrong….” but you are missing the point.
Clovers are not the source of America’s problems. They are simply tools of TPTB. Pawns, or more accurately “useful idiots.”
Stop burning so much emotion on the PUPPETS. Start thinking about the Puppet Masters.
There are the puppet masters, then the puppets (elected office holders, executives, middle management, well compensated people who may or may not believe but push the system forward), then the servant/thugs who do as they are told carrying out the tasks if they believe or don’t, and then the manipulated masses who largely believe.
What the puppet masters fear the most are those who they manipulate waking up. If manipulated masses wake up just a little bit the whole system can fail. Even if it just becomes un-cool to believe in such things from social pressure with no real understanding the same result can happen.
I don’t see how to go after the puppet masters directly. They’ll just send their minions in to take care of the problem.
Quite right BrentP; without the puppets, the puppet masters can’t put on the show. It’s a matter of individual choice that the PTB really can’t control when the rank and file members are shamed into quitting. When the secret police and foot soldiers refuse to go out at night, it’s game over for the PTB. So ridiculing, mocking and chastising clovers out here where the rubber meets the road is a good step toward thwarting the whole matrix.
One thing I can do (besides blowing past the clover so fast on my bike that they can’t do a thing to interfere) when they are doing the “sucker fish” thing(Thanks Scott, I love it!) in my blind spot is the same way a friend of mine taught me to open a left lane hole in heavy Kansas City traffic. When the target gets up close to my rear quarter panel, I whip left without signaling but don’t leave my lane. I do it rapidly and aggressively enough to make them shit their pants and back off. Trust me it works. As soon as they react by hitting the brakes (and unless they’re texting and completely oblivious they will) I just change lanes and cut them off. It usually really pisses the clover off though, so if you decide to try this it’s at your own risk…
“The Kansas” – I love it!
One of my most effective mood-enhancers is to be stuck at an endless red light, with Clover behind me. I check to make sure the coast is clear – of cops as well as traffic – then run the light. I look back in my rearview at Clover’s expression. Sometimes he’ll actually be thrashing with fury. Even though he can see as well as I that no traffic was present – and thus, my only crime was ignoring the red light.
I do this, too, with a minor twist. I “walk” the light. I just take my foot off the brake (or let the clutch out in a manual tranny) and let the car idle through the intersection against the light at about 5 MPH, emphasizing just how clear the coast is. It drives Clovers crazy!
It works best at night because you can see for miles that no one is coming and the Clover behind you can’t see your license plate well enough to jot it down and narc you out…
This only works if you’re at “blind” intersection (i.e., one not under the remote watchful eye of Big Brother the Revenue Thief via a RLC).
I can only do it on wide open roads but when I get a someone glued to me along side I just nail the brakes. Hard. It breaks the bond and they don’t know what to do. Most will slow like some instinctive need to re-establish the herd connection.
I used to accelerate hard to break free from a herd or herder then one of the herders was an unmarked ISP cruiser…
You just might have a point there, Mike. One could make a strong argument that Cloverism is a symptom, the inevitable result of today’s dumbed-down, tightly controlled society rather than the cause of it.
I think it’s both.
There have always been Clovers – both the uber Clover types and the rank and file. But once ascendant, these Clovers create an environment that tends to favor more of their kind.
Cloverism is just another word for Feminism. Wherever security is trumpeted over freedom I find socialist soccer-moms and their nut-less drones buzzing all over the place.
Eric – take it a step further and define the levels of the Clover Society – or maybe the Order of the Clover?
They would have
Clovers and Cloverettes – everyday sheeple clovers.
4 Leaf Clovers
Sargent Clover
Major Clover
Exalted Clover
Most Special Clover
and of course – The Grand Poobah Clover
Please feel free to add more PET CLOVER NAMES here….
Good stuff, Glenn – love it!
Let the word go forth: Clovers are to be mocked and reviled whenever encountered.
Don’t forget about the Asshole Clover!
Isn’t that redundant, dom? lol
Ha. Yes it is, but I just had a conversation on another page here discussing it. I wanted to add it!
It’s a clover that when trying to pass he’ll speed up just to prevent you from doing so, then he’ll tailgate the shit out of you.
How about the ones who will come up fast in the left lane, then slow down and stay next to your rear quarter panel until you have to slow down for a car in front of you? I seem to get that on I-66 more than anywhere else.
ok, you talked me into it: asshole clover is more emphasis than redundancy.
I can’t figure those guys out either Mike, but I know exactly what you’re talking about. I get them on I-80 all the time and it’s real obvious since there isn’t that much traffic on 80 once you clear Reno eastbound or SLC westbound. I call them leeches, sometimes sucker fish.
I usually notice them before they can inflict their stupid game on me. When I see a car in front of me while I have a sucker attached I just accelerate with authority, pull into the left lane in front of them and pass. If they do it more than once I pass in front of them and keep accelerating until I have a mile or so lead, then I pull back right and resume normal travel.
I’ve found if you don’t do this they move to stage two of their sadistic play; they pull up alongside of the slow traffic on the right and match speeds so you can’t pass. I think they play with themselves while they’re doing it. It’s pretty disgusting.
I figure folks who do that sort of thing are just damaged goods. Makes me sad to think about what must have happened to them to make ’em do it, but in the long run I recon it’s just not my problem.
How about this one?
You are driving on a road with two lanes of traffic in each direction. Up ahead are two cars, both in the right lane. As you approach a traffic light, one of the two cars ahead decides he just has to pull into the left lane, blocking you. When the light goes green, he “paces” the car next to him – preventing you from getting by either of them.
Eric, that’s like every-other day here and they’ll actually cut me off to do it now and then.
It’s an important distinction because every Clover is an asshole, but not every asshole is a Clover.
This is what the horn is for…
Left hand lane equals left ticker for 5 count.
If that fails then high beam flash (works great at night).
If that fails then horn.
If that fails then just lean on the horn until they get the fuck out of the way or you can pass them on the right with your finger out the window,
Then pull in to the right lane while driving faster and demonstrate proper driving ediquite,
just had a guy in a porsche play this bs the other day. Suckered him into following and getting nailed for speeding because his ego wouldn’t let my truck drive faster than him and he obviously had more money than brains because he could afford a 911 but not a radar detector and jammer.
Slammed on the breaks and he flew right off my quarter panel into a $400 ticket 🙂
It was fun 🙂
I also try to teach Clovers by (for example) immediately moving back over into the right lane after passing them – hoping they’ll get the hint.
Unfortunately, incivility waxes.
Related: At my gym I have noticed that more and more people just leave weights lying around (or plates on bars/machines) after they’re done. Assholes. I say so, too. Gonna get in trouble I suppose one of these days.
Common courtesy is on the wane. People just drop their shit wherever they want, it is for someone else to deal with. traffic lights, ineviatably someone just has to text waiting onthe light to change, then you sit these for a 5 count before hitting the horn, then of course im the asshole. that they get thru the left turn and everyone else is stuck at another cycle is just icing on the cake. Everyone is in their own little bubble. I swear that smartphone = dumb people. Very common unfortunately. These are the same folks that will of course expect consideration from others when they need it however.
Hi Tomas,
Indeed. My perception is it’s becoming worse, too. Which is to be expected given a society/culture that fosters narcissism and entitlement-mindedness.
We got away from it, to a great extent, by moving away from the DC area. But even here in our new hometown (Roanoke) the trend waxes. Because population has increased. Which means, more Clovers. All it takes is a spoonful of shit to ruin 100 gallons of ice cream.
Pretty much says it all, Eric. The only view I’d add is that the clover, the collectivist-lover, actually WORSHIPS the State, although they’d never admit it. They actually bow down and genuflect for the State exactly because the state EMPOWERS them, the little impotent, terrified of its own shadow and anything that goes bang, MOUSE to rule over all the individuals that might threaten their illusions of safety. They will NOT take any personal responsibility for their own safety, say by responsible ownership and use of firearms – no, they dial 911. And chapter and verse of THEIR religion is that there is someone at the other end of that phone to pick up and PROTECT them. Of course, those who’ve researched the matter realize there is no STATUTORY requirement for those “guard dogs” to protect ANY of the herd – just to ensure, as much as possible, LAWS are enforce, and, more important, that the guard dogs all get to go home at the end of their shifts.
But all this is lost on Clover. Clover doesn’t want individual liberty, nor the personal responsibility that is concomitant with that. I hope you’re right about green shoots, but history shows that every state that has descended to such totalitarian “democratic” ideals has collapsed into savagery.
Another great article! Thanks for keeping it up.
I can’t remember if I read it here (at EPA) or some other unusually-sharp web site, but I agree with the theory that clovers are GENETICALLY disposed to their views.
It may be that they NEED the impression or FEELING of security over everything else and this need is based on a genetic insecurity. They are born to seek security through control of their environment and this makes the state (and the evil narcissists who are drawn to politics to control others) a natural ally for them.
I’ve come to see people as basically falling into two very general camps: Rugged Individualists (such as those at this site) and Clovers. RIs are also probably GENETICALLY wired to seek freedom and to violently reject attempts to control them, just as Capt Kirk always talked about on Star Trek. Those days seem long gone…
Clovers have infected all aspects of America and have a clear advantage. There is almost no place in America one can go to be free from them. I grew up in Oregon where, in the 1960’s, it was dominated by RIs. Today, it’s a liberal stronghold as the Clovers (mostly from California) gradually moved up and away from the Hell Hole they created down there to contaminate, ruin and ‘Californicate’ this relatively-free oasis.
Now, Oregon is a nightmare for RIs. Last week, my wife and I took a long, driving trip through Idaho, trying to see if we might want to retire there and at least TRY to escape the liberal nightmare we find ourselves trapped in here in Oregon.
We found it to be a much better place, in general, than Oregon for the RI. Gas is cheaper, taxes are less, speed limits are higher, FAR LESS police presence on the roads, no helmet law, pump your own gas, far fewer people, Red State, etc. In general, it appears that California hasn’t totally f-ed it up… yet.
We’re still thinking about it, but we both noticed the difference and are seriously thinking about retiring in Idaho, even though it’s far from perfect.
As just one example: We never saw a worthless cop sitting, running radar on a freeway or highway in our 1 week drive from Boise all the way up North of SandPoint. But, as soon as we got into Washington (at Spokane) to head back to Oregon, we ran into THREE radar traps on our way to Moses Lake.
Anyway, if any RIs here have an opinion about Idaho compared to other Western states, I’d love to get the input.
Thanks again for this web site. It’s an outstanding breath of fresh air!! Live long and prosper!
Idaho Hi-Po love to sit on the Utah border nabbing all those folks coming into the state. Keep it below the speed limit. I lucked out once when, due to road construction, the unfriendly fuzz nabbed the cat behind me who was traveling at the same speed. We’re talking a few miles over “da limit”. We were entering those ubiquitous construction zones where it narrowed from two to one lane and I managed to zip ahead of this dude while keeping my eye out on the pig in the rear view mirror who had been lurking off the shoulder. As soon as I saw him enter traffic, and I merged quickly forward, the gumballs kicked in and the guy behind me was nabbed but not after having to navigate through the zone. So be careful! I actually think Montana has far fewer cops than any place I’ve been to short of Wyoming. For obvious reasons: FEWER PEOPLE. Nevada has been cited as the worst offender at ticketing. That I believe from seeing them swarm travelers like flies to shit down there.
MoT
Thanks for the input! I might have just been lucky…
Oregon is a Hell Hole for fat, Type II diabetic pigs sitting on their sugar-laden asses “risking their lives” running radar on I-5 so they can retire at 53 years old.
It’s just a field day for those lazy bastards but I have found they do let you by if you are only about 5-7 MPH over the posted limit, which limits are generally slower here than in Idaho, at least in the places I saw last week in Western Idaho (Boise up to Canada).
I hear ya! Going to Ontario I noticed them lurking about. I always, ALWAYS, keep below the limit in Oregon and especially near any borders or town. If you’re talking about the road that goes up through Cambridge, Moscow, etc. then you may have been fortunate enough to have caught them napping at the Dunkin Donuts. Even the Libertarian wordsmith Will Grigg was pulled over with a friend years ago going up that stretch. Be vigilant my friend! I’m originally from Texas and coming up here I was amazed at all the cops in this corner of the state. Like anything they congregate where the pickings are easier.
2 words: radar detector
And if theyre using laser, then get a jammer. Problem solved. Pigs in the US are genrally too lazy/stupid to do a speed match and most of the time youll see them if they do.
Tip: instant on is not instant. Fight the ticket. Its easy to win, cause the operating manual says as much and as long as you hit the breaks as soon as youre high quality detector goes off youre fine. Ad of course laser jammers make you comepletely safe if installed correctly with the right model.
Going on 6 years without a ticket with the combination 🙂
Amen, James.
I got my V1 in 2006 and have been ticket-free since then with one exception, which I probably should have fought. I was coming into “town” when a Clover in an SmooooVeee pulled out right in front of me. I broke left and passed it just as that stretch of road goes from 45 to 35 (notorious speed trap). A pig was coming out of a sidetreet at just that exact moment, saw me, painted me (the V1 went ballistic) and pulled me. 53 in a 35. I decided to lose the ticket by burning a Saturday at “traffic school.” Should have just fought the damn thing….
@James–
Amen brother, especially to the jammer!
I love my Laser Interceptor. In Houston, predominantly laser, I’m invisible. It’s like wearing the Iron Man suit; I have to be careful not to get TOO brazen, because their guns just don’t work.
In Texas it’s now a Class C misdemeanor with a $100 fine.
I’ll take that…IF they can prove I used it. To the world, it’s just a “parking distance aid”.
It’s not just the security thing. It’s deeper I think. I am risk adverse. I like security and control over my environment. I should capitalize the ‘my’ but Eric doesn’t like that ;). I create my own security through my own decisions for me. Clovers want me to pay for the downside risk of other people’s decisions. Because I am ‘lucky’ I can lose my job and be ok. Clovers don’t see that I don’t have fancy vacations, a mcmansion, and a big ass TV.
To the clover it’s just random events that put people in dire straits. (There’s probably a “Money for Nothing” angle here too 😉 ) How could it be they didn’t have a cushion for job loss because they bought a house at their borrowing limit? No, it’s just an unforeseen random event that could happen to ‘anybody’. Thus the prudent are merely lucky. My old standard of ‘help for the hapless’. Thus there are many risk takers who are clovers. They want to have all of the fun and then have someone else pay for the downside. I suppose that’s security in a sense, but these clovers get upset if others were to try to put an end to their risk taking enjoyment by yanking the downside coverage or being told they can’t take that risk any longer.
Perhaps this is the endless feedback loop. Clover A and clover B both want security. A hates risk and wants to control others. B loves risk and wants his downside covered by others. Together its a feedback loop. Clover B creates a program of government rescue of idiots who snowboard in dangerous wilderness areas. Clover A doesn’t want to pay for it and/or thinks nobody should take such risks and outlaws snowboarding in wilderness areas. Now what happens to the individualist? His money is taken for a government rescue squad and he is put in a cage if he should decide to snowboard in a wilderness area.
Arg… thinking that thing through is just plain depressing.
BrentP
Can’t argue with ya! How depressing when you add the Clover A / Clover B self-reinforcing loop! Gawd, that’s scary and sickening to RIs who hate the cages and the gun-wielding tax thieves.