us government shutdown - it's happening

[Gez]

gggmork said:

Every voluntary trade, such as cash for a product or service is cooperation where both parties benefit.

And there have never been any crook ever in the history of the world. Nobody ever sold defective goods, nobody ever defaulted on payment.

Scam everywhere, unless honesty is enforced.

gggmork said:

And there's a saying (I learned it from alex jones, heh heh) "a rising tide raises all ships", as a metaphor for the economy.

Which is not what people want. People want to raise their own ship, and see all the other ships sunk.

"It is not enough to be happy, it is also necessary that others be unhappy." This is how (a sizable portion of) humanity works.

gggmork said:

Like imagine if anyone could compete to create places to live

I don't need to imagine. This actually already exists. They are called slums, shanty towns, townships. There is no license needed to become a slumlord.

gggmork said:

If nobody respects plumbing and shitting outdoors becomes a hygiene problem, well now many potential buyers would

YOU KEEP USING THAT ARGUMENT. "People would pay more for quality, so shoddyness wouldn't exist". This is false. People wouldn't pay more for quality because they couldn't afford more. You keep thinking that everybody would be upper-middle class, but this would never be the case. The middle-class cannot exist without the state protecting it.

Money attracts money. You have more money than your neighbors? Then you will become richer and they will become poorer. You have less money than somebody else in the vicinity? Then you will become poorer, and he will become richer. This is how it works.

The only method to keep people more-or-less on an equal footing is through forced seizing and redistribution of wealth. This is done by the state through taxing and spending. By taking money from the wealthy (taxes), giving money to the poor (welfare), and injecting the remainder in various investments (infrastructure construction and maintenance, public function services, etc.), the state takes money that would effectively be removed from the economy, and grows a middle-class.

Policy changes since the Reagan/Thatcher era has been to reduce the influence and power of the state on the economy. As a direct result, the middle-class is shrinking, the upper class is becoming richer, and the lower class is becoming much larger. This is because when you stop the redistribution of wealth, it is swallowed by financial black holes: persons and legal entities which earn more than they will ever spend.

In fairy tales, there's an evil dragon (capitalist) who sleeps on a hoard of gold (money removed from the economy or used only for speculative means rather than invested in constructive uses) and then the heroic prince (the state) kills the dragon with his sword (laws and taxes), rescue the princess (the nation) and returns the treasure to the kingdom (the economy) so that everyone lives happily ever after. In reality, the dragon eats the prince, because the prince has been convinced by the evil vizier (the wealthy 1%) to use a butter knife instead of a sword (deregulation & tax cuts). The dragon can then gleefully rape the princess ever after.

gggmork said:

I think potential for winning/losing/draw has to add up to 0, whatever) by just observing that EVERYONE in modern times 'wins' relative to everyone in hunter/gatherer times such as being able to make phone calls, the internet, cars, etc which weren't available then.

And why do these things exist? That's right, nation-states. Cars are useless without roads, who build roads even in places where there will not be enough traffic to make a toll profitable? That's right. Nation states. Who extend the power/phone/etc. grid to even remote village with but a handful of habitants? That's right, nation states. Who created the Internet and got it off the ground? A government agency (ARPA), a research center (CERN), and several universities -- all things that exist thanks to nation states.

gggmork said:

But you could be right.. I don't know, what would you prefer, minarchism? resource based zeitgeist type economy?

I'd like a system where the economy is not reduced to a simple, abstract number corresponding merely to the amount of money. I'd like to see factored in a number of extremely important factors that are omitted because they aren't money and are not considered to belong to anyone in particular. Notably:
- Quality of local infrastructures (road/rail/canal networks, power grids, etc.).
- Relative sizes of the upper, middle, and lower classes. The larger the middle-class, the smaller the other two, the healthier the country is.
- Quality of life. Are people either overworked or unemployed? Is there a large number of suicides caused by job-related stress? Are people in need of medical aid going without it because they cannot afford it? Is criminality high, with a lot of robberies, aggressions, and petty vandalism?
- Quality of environment. Is the air and water clean? Is there enough biodiversity and variety so that, for example, not all crops/cattle use the same handful of "hyper-efficient" stock that will all share the same weaknesses to diseases/parasites/unusual climate, meaning that one accident might entirely destroy the entire continent's production?

That's looking at the big picture and thinking on the long-term, basically. But capitalism doesn't like it. Capitalism wants a simpler reality, one which is easier to understand: short-term profit is the only god. People only think in terms of dollars and GDP. Everything else can be sacrificed as long as the GDP is increasing and moneylenders are repaid.

gggmork said:

In the statist paradigm all these fat cats can use the monopoly of violence, government, which forces everyone to pay it so has unlimited disposable income (especially by legalizing counterfitting for itself in the federal reserve), to attack competing start ups. In a free market, starbucks probably wouldn't have tanks because that'd be a business cost, and if people become aware they can voluntarily stop doing business with a war mongering coffee business.

They don't need tanks. They just need a few, ah, handymen. You know. Put some rat poison in a competitor's supplies. Sabotage their equipment. Sling mud and monger rumors. If all else fails, plant a bomb. Improvised explosive devices are ridiculously easy to create, as I think we are all aware if we have read a newspaper or listened to a news broadcast within the last ten years.

The idea that people could become aware is ridiculous. People are generally characterized by their desire to be unaware. Ignorance is bliss. Also, voluntarily stop doing business with you? That's even more ridiculous. How many people actually do that? Boycotts don't work. On the one hand, people are too sheepish and too ingrained in their habits for them to work; on the other hand, the idea is that if they don't do business with you then they don't do business with anyone because you have eliminated all your competitors. Besides, if you still have competitors around, you can be guaranteed that they will be just as unethical as yourself, otherwise they'd have succumbed by now.



Basically, you are hostile to the idea of nation-states. You see it as illegitimate form of authority. That is the crux of the issue.

The theory behind the modern democratic nation-state is that the state is the only legitimate form of authority, because it is the expression of the people. The state is the people. The laws are passed and enforced in the interest of the people. The nation is governed according to the will of the people. United, the people is strong enough to protect itself from threats, be they internal or external.

Of course, a nation-state is vulnerable to corruption. Power is said to corrupt, and that is partly true; but mostly, power attracts corrupt people. Honest and responsible people are generally happy with their lot in life (if they live in a functioning society with a decent amount of prosperity and liberty), so they will generally not aim to go much higher than where they are. Greedy sociopaths, on the other hand, are never satisfied and always want more, so they'll do everything they can to climb ever higher. In time, this leads to having the society's "elite" (people in government or with a reasonable chance of getting there) entirely infiltrated by greedy sociopaths. You'll know when that happens because the mainstream political discourse will be about how greed is good, about how if you let the wealthy keep all their wealth it will somehow "trickle down" more efficiently than through state-based redistribution, and so on.

What to do in such a situation? That's the problem. Nothing. Ideally, voters wouldn't put greedy sociopaths in positions of powers, but it's not like any candidate is a decent and honest man, so whoever is elected will be a greedy sociopath as that is all there is to choose from. Furthermore, people don't like to be aware and responsible with their choice (same deal as to why boycotts don't work) so they'll vote for corrupt criminals all the same. There is but one issue here: continued destruction of society through egotistical reforms made to benefit the greedy sociopaths to the detriment of everybody else, causing an endlessly aggravating crisis, until everything explodes and there is either a war or a revolution. Then most of the corrupt elite can be guillotined with abandon by angry mobs (or at least removed from office) and a new society can be rebuilt based on the ideals of universal brotherhood of mankind, the need for people to be equal in rights and in the eye of the law, the need to favor cooperation over competition, and having a state that does represent the people's will and have for its mission to protect the common interest.

This new society will work well for a while. The same old greedy sociopaths will keep pushing for their agenda, but as long as the cause of the old society's collapse will remain fresh in the collective memory, they will not be paid heed. After a while, though, people will start to forgot and will buy again into discourses like "greed is good" and "trickle down actually works!" and the cycle will repeat.

Which is why mandatory state education is good too, though it should mostly insist on history, and especially recent history, notably the causes of World War 1, those of the 1929 crisis, and those of World War 2.

[Phobus]

I have never been more happy to read a post on this forum than I was to go through Gez's post right now. That is exactly how I see things!

[Captain Red]

Thank you Gez for putting the smack down on this randian/libertarian horseshit that people genuinely think is going to save the US (and disturbingly, Australia as well, God help us).

[dew]

Now that's a well written post. Thank you for taking your time with it, Gez.

[Aliotroph?]

Yeah! Thanks, Gez! My brain is too muddled to make a post that long comprehensible these days.

[geo]

Costs $2 million per year per troop to have a US troop in Afghanistan >> http://news.yahoo.com/it-costs--2-1-million-per-year-for-each-soldier-deployed-in-afghanistan--report-133150602.html

[gggmork]

Its interesting to see you supporting a paradigm that goes against the grain of the youtube (propaganda?) I've been bubbled into and causing me some cognitive dissonance. I guess you think our current system is corrupt and toward the end where it needs to be reset again (into a state run by the people that redistributes wealth which is good in your opinion).

"Scam everywhere, unless honesty is enforced."
A forceless solution seems to be reputation, like how ebay's feedback system used to work (a decade ago, before they were hijacked by communist politicians to demonize the free market with a false flag attack on it with seller limits and kafkaesque "predatory capitalism" behavior, doublespeak, etc. Now ebay authoritatively decides who you will buy from rather than individual market players deciding). With feedback, as a buyer you know its riskier to do business with someone w/ low or no reputation, as a seller its better to accumulate positive rep so people trust you for future business than to dishonestly gain short term.

What about that wealth is constantly created instead of a fixed value (like if I make a videogame, that's something that didn't exist previously so adds wealth to society), therefore the system that creates the most wealth might be best (capitalism/free market). I guess you think it'd constantly be funneled to predatory monopolistic black holes like foxconn workers vs apple. Maybe I don't know. One thing is like "apple is being mean", I see that point but who else is even meaner? Everyone else who DIDN'T offer to hire them even for that price.. (but this player exists in the state so isn't a good free market example maybe) Its almost like it could be legitimized that wealth could be stolen from me and redistributed to foxconn workers cuz I didn't offer to hire them. Then like apple has tons of wealth/money. If they have most of it in the bank rather than in goods, competing currencies could prevent them from cornering all the money (meh, then they'd probably switch over to that currency). Or if apple wants to convert money to goods like they want to buy a plane, then the plane company makes money because apple is rich. Anything apple buys goes to another player in the economy (trickle down lol). I don't know this is all complex and confusing. I don't know enough about foxconn workers to know how much regulation/artificial barriers to entry is preventing them from getting better jobs. Who says a very rich person didn't deserve what they got? People voluntarily gave it to them.

What about the means of production moving to more hands with something like 3d printing? Maybe that is the solution to wealth inequality.

"What's to stop an evil defense business from operating a Mafia-style protection racket?"
Molyneux said this lol ""What's the difference between the mafia and government? The mafia doesn't have a 15,000 hour indoctrination system to convince you its not the mafia.". Plus mafia usually makes money from artificial black market monopolies afaik since government makes drugs/alcohol illegal.

What about approaching the problem from an ethical/philosophical standpoint that says initiation of force is immoral for anyone, regardless of the costume they're wearing etc? Molyneux says putting this basic "golden rule" at the heart of society simplifies our jumble of complex laws like copernicus putting the sun at the center of the solar system. Government kidnapping people for doing peaceful activities/victimless crimes like using drugs is initiation of force. In a voluntaryist society, a group of people could voluntarily agree to come together in a sort of voluntary "government" club, but if those club members decide to forcefully redistribute wealth, that's going against the golden rule.

A government is a monopoly, the most powerful thing around. So if you're a pessimist and think businesses are going to screw everyone, it might not be good to create a powerful monopoly for them; government to control evil gets controlled by evil instead.

Here was an interesting post I read somewhere:
"People do want anarchism. This is tautological. All the state does is force people to do things they don't want to do, or forcibly restrain them from doing things they do want to do. Everyone wants anarchism. What they fear is anarchism for other people. You fear anarchism for other people because you know you are evil and think everyone is. I do not fear anarchism because I know I am not evil and think we good people outnumber you evil people. As such I don't see the benefit of conceding to evil to begin with."
and here's a quote I read somewhere:
""The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries."" another: "democracy is a suggestion box for slaves"

"redistribution of wealth" implies that it was distributed to begin with. Whoever creates the wealth should get it? In a free society wealthy people would become wealthy by people voluntarily trading with them so maybe there'd be more philanthropic steve wozniak type rich people. I know you said there'd be evil survial of the fittest types at the top who destroy their competition, maybe, I dunno.

I think the only real core guides to human behavior is dawkins "selfish gene" type stuff, being more altruistic to those sharing more of your genes (and we used to live in small tribes where many were closely related, so our modern relatively good altruism in some big city might just be misfiring behavior). Political systems are completely artificial on top of that. The non aggression principle wouldn't make sense to hyenas. One risk is putting all eggs in one basket, like ok everyone let's try this zeitgeist resource based economy. Ready, GO! Maybe some geographic region should be set aside as a political "sandbox" where whatever social idea/paradigm can be tested first then studied and selected or contained if it gets out of hand. The voluntary nonaggression core idea would allow a lot of ideas to be tested in a sort of cultural evolution.

And that's my pile of bullshit.

[fraggle]

WASHINGTON—Though his incoherent, deeply uninformed, and often incomprehensible internet comments seem to suggest he suffers from severe mental illness, web user gggmork is in all likelihood a normal individual capable of functioning in the outside world, sources reported Wednesday.

Noting that he must at least own a computer, know how to use it, and possess the basic skills required to publish his thoughts on numerous websites and forums, internet users said gggmork—the username of a person who posts dozens of inane and delusional comments online every day—is presumably a stable member of society.

“Clearly this guy has a working internet connection, so he must have some way of paying the bills, which I guess means he’s holding down a job,” said John Winegar, 34, reading comments from gggmork that reportedly contained conspiracy theories, rambling offtopic comments and extremely forced sexual innuendos that make no sense to anyone. “If he lived with his parents or in some kind of mental health facility, surely someone would stop him from going online and making so many inexplicable and racially charged statements.”

“I can only assume this is an ordinary, sane individual who has a home, goes shopping, cooks dinner, and pays taxes like anyone else,” he added.

Suggestions that gggmork could simply be a crazed vagrant using the internet at a public library have largely been dismissed, with Doomworld users noting that his needlessly vulgar and bizarre posts personally attacking politicians and other people he has never met often occur as late as 2 a.m.

Sources have also confirmed that gggmork, whose comments on a recent Doomworld thread headlined “ E3 2013 Presentation: Microsoft and Sony” included “I get it now: xbox one = xbone = x bone = cross bones; This is in reference to the secret "skull and bones" society composed of elite members like George Bush”, must at least possess the mental faculties necessary to have registered with the gaming website and have kept track of his username and password for each subsequent login.

Further evidence indicates the seemingly psychotic man probably lives in a house with four walls, a roof, and working utilities, drives a car on the same streets everyone else drives on, and is capable of routinely engaging in measured, straightforward face-to-face conversations with coworkers.

“The scariest thing is knowing that gggmork isn’t the only one out there,” an anonymous internet user told reporters in an email statement. “There r so many crazy fucking nutsoz in this world that it makes me want to shoot everyone. Those faggots can go die.”

“Fucking faggits,” he added.

[gggmork]

fraggle said:

filled with the cum of Doom

Someone once told me it was disconcerting how I referred to humans as "them". Its all a big joke. I wire doomworld forum input to a hivemind of 8 octopus brains in a vat then output that through encyclopedia dramatica and back to doomworld as my comment.

[GreyGhost]

gggmork said:

What about the means of production moving to more hands with something like 3d printing? Maybe that is the solution to wealth inequality.

De-centralizing production to a "cottage industry" level? Why not! That approach seems to work quite well in impoverished third world countries, though the larger and more complex an item is, the less likely it is to be successfully produced that way. If the 3D printers are produced in a similarly ad hoc manner it's going to be fun trying to purchase consumables for them.

[Cupboard]

good one fraggle