Why I stopped loving and learned to worry about democracy (reply to Oberon)

[Skybird]

I felt it was adequate to put this in a separate thread. The original one that led to this long reply to Oberon, can be found here:

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=204938

For convenience and greater eye friendliness :) I have set it up as a pdf here, can be read online or printed:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/yzs2hhb6wd1u44x/Oberon.pdf



This went a bit out of hand, and I got carried away and got surprised myself by how long it became, and in the end I further found that it was not what I really wanted to achieve. Well, reality can be a bitch. It still is not what I wanted it to be, and I feel it is terribly incomplete. But I had to stop at some time. Typos should be at an acceptable level, but for the lack of structure I think I still must apologize.

I certainly cannot and do not demand anyone to read all this, so everybody being potentially interested, see this as an invitation only. That includes you, Oberon. ;) I would not be angry or offended if you decide that this would consume too much of your time.

[Skybird]

@Oberon,

I try this reply to you in two “phases”, first I will address your paragraphs to provide a first general, more specific answer to most of them, although it will be incomplete hints only. After that, I will add – still meant as a reply – a longer text of mine, where hopefully I succeeded in bringing more background thought into a structure that makes it a readable and understandable model or line of thoughts.

Nothing of all that is originally my brainwork's fruits, while I have come to many arguments and criticism like classical libertarians and Austrian school economics all by myself, neither was I the first man on Earth to learn thinking like that, nor did I succeed in putting all those many lose strings together and form one consistent “model” of them, which left me in a state of delusion and irritation, without advice, for as long as I did not stumble over according literature that helped me indeed to put it all together. The value of said literature for me was not to provide me with criticisms and arguments on single details – that far I came all by myself. We all can see how things turn into mess around us, if only we are willing to let loose of our precious self-deceptions and are to open the eyes to the inconvenient truths. But to put it all together to form not many different but just one huge image: that is where I profiteered from these books and where I am thankful to the authors for the help they provided to me by writing these books. Without them, I would have stayed stuck in a dead end: angry, but helpless. Today, I am still angry (even more so than ever), but the feeling of helplessness got replaced by understanding the unforgiving mechanisms behind the events that lead us to where we are heading. That might not be pleasant, but I am a very rational, head-heavy person, my head clearly dominates over my heart. That's me, whatever that tells about me, and wallowing in shallow sentiments or hysteric pathos never was my thing. Understanding even unpleasant things still helps me to bear them more calmly and becoming less concerned. It is the uncertainty, the lacking understanding, that sets me on alarm. If we go down the drain, then at least I want to know WHY we go down the drain.

The problem I think that is happening here is that you are not introducing a first step into the subject.

What is freedom? From libertarian POV, it is neither an idea nor an ideal. It can only be defined usefully by understanding that it needs to be understood as a material condition. It bases on property – the ability to gain it (the individual's skill in harvesting wheat from the field it owns, and baking bread), and the right to use it (to consume it, to bake bread – or do something different with the wheat).

It's a bit like saying to someone who wants to know why the earth moves that they should read a thesis by Stephen Hawking. Furthermore the method in which you put forward this thesis is borderline fanatical, comparable to fundamentalist preachers and extremist Imams in its ferocity and vehemence.
Sure, it's good to be passionate about a subject, but brow-beating people from a pulpit of righteousness that your cause is just and the only true way...well, makes you sound a lot like some of the people that you have argued against in the past in different threads.

It's just that we have been there already. There is a full thread about Hoppe for example
( http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=202945&page=3 ),
and all links I gave in this actual thread, above, have been given before as well. I do not unleash my anger at modern states for the first time either, I have not hidden my uncompromised hostility to our modern ways and goings on several opportunities. I do not will to re-invent the wheel every time. I take it as a basis once it is there.

Putting this to one side, and coming back to the point at hand. What you describe, in essence, is the state of mankind in the days around the Neolithic era, when it boiled down to small local settlements which spawned new settlements off each other like buds from a plant.

??? No. I do not even know the models anthropologists have formed of how it might have been in that era.

When I attack Western states, and states in general, I do it due to two different perspectives on things.

The first is that I see the democratic model being different (already since the ancient Greek) than what it is claimed to be today, and that it does not work, just does not work as advertised – quite the opposite is the case, and many of those malfunctions that in summary are self-destructive to the community, are inbuilt features that do not indicate an aberration of the idea, but are features of it, implications that cannot be avoided.

The second perspective is that I find the alternative ideas that I introduce quite convincing from a rational and reasonable perspective. I know that I argue from a theoretic standpoint on the latter, which is true both for libertarian economics and the libertarian understanding of liberty and ethics. And that theoretic basis by nature is, as Rothbard and Hoppe both explain, a so-called a-priori-theory, which means that its conclusions and theorems base on assumptions and statements that cannot be rationally, logically or reasonably be rejected without creating contradictions or logical fallacies. Is it a proven theory? No, obviously not. But reason speaks strongly in its favour, and refusing the fundament it stands on – natural law – brings you into hell's kitchen.

My criticism of the present Western states bases on observation of the reality I presently live in, and what I see is going wrong although by democratic theory it should not only not go wrong, but the scenario where it goes wrong should not even be imaginable . When that theory says it should function beautifully, with things breaking apart around me, then that theory cannot be what it claims to be. In other words, it must be faulty, if not all-out wrong..

********




Eventually this collective group of settlements pooled their resources to form a nation, it may not have been done peacefully, it most likely was done through force, but there was strength in numbers against both disease, other settlements and predators.

This may or may not have been the case in that long ago era. However, in the era we associate with the term “high cultures”, trade was the deciding factor that led to the lasting economic foundation of huge empires, or not. The complex production cycle allowed complex interaction and cooperation only when monolithic values, like land property or a huge rock of precious ore, could be broken up into smaller quantities of value in order to trade these for small gains one desired (a craftsman's daily service for example) and the gain being so small that it was not justified to give the harvest of one field away for it, or the field itself. You do not trade your barn for getting a liter of salad oil. The solution was an intermediate variable: the introduction of money. And this money was a common trading good like any other, and its value was decided by market interactions amongst trading parties like the value of any other good. Instead of trading A for getting C, which would be a oss to you maybe, you traded A for several quantities of B, and then one quantity of B for C, keeping the rest of Bs for other purposes. This was a revolution in how trade, bartering was done, and only this allowed cooperation of bigger communities to achieve things that one man alone never would be able to achieve.

This gets very comfortably explained in a surprisingly small amount of pages in Rothbard's “What has government done to our money?”, part II, chapter 1-13, 45 pages only. LINK- http://library.mises.org/books/Murray%20N%20Rothbard/What%20Has%20Government%20Done%20to%20Our%20Money. pdf


It enabled them to do greater things,

I just hinted at it: civilisation is trade, trade before anything else, trade generates the revenue to pay for the civilisation growing, blossoming, developing. It is an evolutionary process, and beyond the easiest level of trade – 1 fur for 10 fishes -, when complex production cycles set in, you depend on this intermediate variable: money. No money - no complex trade, no complex production cycles, no communal cooperation efforts producing results surpassing what the single individual could achieve, no specialisation of the individual (which also is an essential quality: specialisation) – in brief: no complex civilisation.

Needless to say: we do not have that kind of money anymore, it got intentionally destroyed by states to expose citizens in greater helplessness and vulnerability to the state. More on that later.

to pool their knowledge and basically lead to where we are today, through a few thousand years.
There is a reason, a real reason, that we don't live that way any more, and it's got little to do with government greed, although certainly there is a factor in that, because after all government is made up of perfectly ordinary people just like you and me, but a need for collective strength.

As I hinted above, the reason for the rise of civilizations is: trade. Help it and foster. Hinder it, see it declining, and see civilization decline and empires fall. And then again the complex productivity cycle, specialisation, all what I said above. If I understand you correctly in what you say, then I think you are misled there in so far as that you seem to misidentify or misinterpret the solid material factors that enable empires and civilizations to blossom. Where there is plenty of ground and population to be supplied with food and stuff, there is needed an infrastructure, a transport of food and water and items and goods and services, there needs to be information traffic for coordination. All this needs specialisation by the individuals, and specialised individuals forming huge communities depend on means and a system of making all these quantities and items “inter-changeable”, so that you could compare their valuer: economic management, fiscal cost-effect calculations. Just having a government, no matter which kind, saying it should be like this or that, does not work. And this is one of the most devastating creiticism you can aim at today'S tyranny of government printed FIAT paper-”money” and fiscal regulation by the state: that both prevent everybody joining the market as producer or customer to form such value comparisons and fiscal cost-effect calculations by eroding the basis on which such comaprsions could be run. For that, a free value-determination of money by the market is inevitably a precondition. But that is what politicians desperately try to prevent.

I would put money on, if it still existed, the likelihood that any attempt to split a state into seperate individual states would eventually result in the reunification of those states into one larger entity.

Yes - by force and imperial demand of the centralist power. From libertarian POV, enforcing the union that way of course is illegal and immoral. Well. Libertarianism encourages local separation of regional communities from the – national – higher entity. It also is a moral right of the local population to do so, since other people outside that region have no legal or moral claim to make that they must obey these foreigner's commands. We are nobody else's possession, we are nobody else's slaves, we owe nobody our loyalty just because he demands it or due to the fast that we got born. That is the sovereignty of the individual, and it cannot be taken away from nobody and by nobody in a moral way. The political entity on the next higher level of hierarchy of course does not like subordinate regions breaking away, since this means a weakening of its influence and claim for more power. However, to have many city states and small regional communities, where people self-govern their affairs and decide themselves how to interact and trade and have treaties with neighbouring communities and cities – or to compete with them! Very important, this is what has brought Europe to the top of the list of influential civilisations known in human history! - to me seems to be the most promising way to go – although I know it is unlikely that all Europe will go that way. Nevertheless, I mind you that since Brussel claims more and more powers, independence movements that previously existed, got more support, and new movements get founded every year. The crisis in Europe causes many conflicts between people and regions, and the EU is directly responsible for having caused a massive rise in alienation and hostility – it achieves exactly the opposite of what it claims the Euro should bring and what the EU claims to want. Heck even here in Germany some would like to see Bavaria breaking away from Germany. :) If they would, I would move there, probably, if then they still let outsiders in.

I read that some historians point out that this kind of conflict – separation, or enforced unifying - also probably played the dominant role motivating the American civil war. Where the war for independence was a revolt against the British who after some time of relative laissez faire wanted to impose a stricter tax system again and tighten British control over and possession of “their colonies”, and the revolt thus was a self-defence on behalf of own sovereignty and own freedom, some historians, but also Hoppe, refer to historical quotes by Lincoln that reveal that Lincoln's decision for war against the South seems to have had not much to do with freeing the poor slaves, but with enforcing a claim for centralist power by Washington not only over the North, but the South as well. I got the impression that he just instrumentalised them for his - very different - intentions, but that ending slavery was not an item he had on his radar for the worth of the very issue itself. Also, apparently the centralised power by the whole union's government should had been supported by destroying the independent currencies circulating in the South (there were several, which from libertarianism's POV, seeing money as just a trading good like any other, was perfectly okay and imo makes more economic sense than any other monetarian model I have read about or heard of, and certainly much more than the bad joke of a paper money we have today). The result was a war that ended the southern money market, destroyed the South's economy and thus it's basis for independent survival, and paved the way for the North's centralised political regime taking control not only of the northern but the southern “provinces” as well.

Somebody would write later that any democratic state cannot afford to leave its citizen the simpliest form of defence against and escape from state control, that the state must secure total and undisputed control over the citizen's private wealth and property, and that a democratic regime can only live if it installs unhindered access by the state to private property and wealth to be able to expropriate it at will. And that is what Lincoln seems to have been about when destroying the sovereignty of the south, the southern economy, and especially the Southern money system. The same is being done in European states since WWI and the defeat of monarchies by the republican paradigm. The development of money and the rise of the central banks also must be seen in this light. The book on money by Rothbard explains that nicely in the parts III and IV. It is already such a compact book and so easy to read that I will not summarize its content any further. It already is a summary.


You can deregulate, transfer powers, like devolution in the United Kingdom, but somewhere along the line the buck has to stop, there has to be one entity which decides the collective direction of a nation,

Ever saw a deregulating, declining bureaucracy? A shrinking government? Spendings declining for longer time? Politicians deleting laws? Taxes taken back even if at entry it was said they only are temporary? Sorry, Oberon, if you believe what you say there, then that is very naive, and you prefer to believe what you want to believe only. A bit down this text, I hopefully succeed in explaining that the very nature of a state and especially the democratic state is totally against it. It does not shrink, it mutates, like cancer, it squeezes itself in more and more aspects of people's lives. You cannot deregulate a bureaucracy, for bureaucracy blossoms from expanding regulation. European states and the US are financially suffocating by their ever growing law canons and bureaucracies and ever expanding regulation canons. I read that in the US the number of administrative regulations additional to the laws, that touch upon just every single detail you can imagine, in the past twenty years alone have grown in number and volume by a factor of 120. In Germany, so I read, it is even worse. And more than the half of all global literature about tax systems and laws, written in just any language, more than half of that is about the German tax system alone! The EU promised the believing public that it wanted to battle bureaucracy and over-regulation, and had a commission for deregulation set up, which released regulations to regulate down regulations , resulting now in the labyrinth of regulations having grown even faster.

You are totally on the wrong path there. You believe what officials tell you, probably. That is a very very big mistake. It is officials who live by the system. Limiting the system, limiting its reach and powers, would limit their own material profiteering from it. What do you expect...? I will later argue that politician's best interest is to act immoral and to abuse the public as much as they can. In a causal understanding it is reasonable to do so, in a democracy. Even worse: it is inevitable.

But I would like to already question the very premise of your above quote already: why having a king government, nation in the first? ;) The state does nothing better than private initiative and the basis of honest, grounded private business and craftsmen. In fact, states manage everything they take away from private responsibility of people much worse, having smaller net effect while wasting far more resources of that, and causing a plethora of follow-up costs. Spending money that is not yours, is more fun than to spend your own, you know. Pah! That also is an inbuilt feature of democracy, and states in general, that you cannot avoid. And the financial budgets of your nation as well as mine prove it, year for year.

be it a King, President, Fuhrer, General Secretary, Ayatollah, anyone, that central figure has to exist to interact with the figures from other nations, even if it's only a figurehead and the real business is done by the worker-ants underneath them.

Imagine there are no other states. And in the past, long before kings established relations to far away empires, relations already were run- by traders going there, not even speaking the language at first. But trading instead.

I mind you of one thing: I do not say my suggested “methods” would work in the context of the today existing environmental context. I talk about the environmental context being changed. The question is how to get from “here” to “there”, and honestly said I have little optimism there, and so said Hoppe and many other late libertarians as well. Nevertheless, it is the right thing to suggest the goal to reach out for. It is right to criticise sticking to the self-destructive old ways. If we dare the new ways, maybe we succeed, maybe we lose. If we stick to the old ways now, we are guaranteed to lose, with no chance to even just keep what we gained. We will lose it all.

Yes, the current democracy is bloated, and yes it is probably quite corrupt, but you show me one governmental system in this planets history that has NOT suffered from corruption of some sort in its existence, and lasted longer than a year.

That is neither any comfort, nor does it explain why it is wise to stick to democracy. Even more so when the deficits of it necessarily must always pervert it into what it claims to be its opposite: socialism, centralism, totalitarianism, collectivism. Already the ancient Greeks warned of that, they only argued about the order in which these things would follow each other. And they did not appreciate democracy, originally. Not one bit. ;)

It also implies that there is no reason to not trust a monarchy, then. When democracies prove time and again that by their design after short time already just lousy opportunists and liars, blenders and propagandists, criminals and dilettantes can claim the top offices in elections after they babbled the public dizzy, and when they have an interest of not keeping the nation's resources together since their claim for them is limited in time only, so that everybody in office instead wants to abuse them to the maximum he can achieve - why not trusting in a feudal family instead that then has an interest to manage wisely, to keep it all together over long times, so that not some bullsh!t talking spineless a*****e or ideologically ambitioned messiah may end in office because he “got elected”, doing an enormous amount of damage in an amazing short period of time, but some son or daughter who got prepared all youth long in education and training for the post he/she later would claim – the crown – wouldn't one see at least a chance that the likelihood of unsuited persons coming to power in a monarchy at least is not higher than in a democracy? By the record our states have to show, I would even say that monarchies tend to show much better records here. If this is the case, and democratic regimes tend to enslave their citizens anyway and nowadays politicians behave like new feudal lords to whom the population must account (instead of the other way around!) - why then favouring democracy over monarchy?

And check on genocides and wars' death tolls. You will see that democratic regimes kill differently than totalitarian regimes – but that the death toll they have to accept resp0nsibility for is even slightly higher than with totalitarian regimes. Dictators kill themselves – democrats leave the killing done to somebody else. - Maybe you recall, several years ago we had that in a forum discussion.

My point is that a democratic state necessarily must go corrupt. That's one of the main reasons why the democratic state itself is the problem. It is not sustainable/enduring/long-time surviving. And it always leads to a planned, bureaucracy-run socialist economy. Which in itself also is a verdict against the economy surviving.

Furthermore, and here's the real kicker, any one nation that is dissolved into a collection of smaller states, will almost immediately be overrun by its neighbours, because it will be unable to form proper resistance without a central organisation, each individual militia will be fighting a separate battle against a unified army, so unless those militia have someone rich and power backing them, they will be kicked around by the unified force and destroyed.

Tell that the Swiss. I would direct you to the more detailed explanation on how security, military, police and justice would run in a private law society. Again, it comes down to voluntary cooperation and signing for mutually agreed business contracts. There is no argument why robust defence should be something only a government could provide. A STATE, A GOVERNMENT ITSELF MORALLY OWNS NOTHING! It abuses its status of acceptance to legalize robbing that it conducts. It talks populations into believing that they owe part of their private property to the “government”, and the government not only claims the right to steal that, but also claims the right to make laws legalizing this, and deciding on how much it may steal. And maybe steal more later. No matter what the citizen thinks or would agree to. Specialisation! There will be private business that provides policing n and legislative service. Insurance companies. Hoppe explains in many of his essay in quite some more detail how such companies would interact, form cooperations in policing and legal services, and that it could function as long as there is competition, no monopolising, so that people can chose between competitors if they are not satisfied with the service provided by one. They play foul – people will leave them and sign deal with another one. Or move to the neighbouring small community where in their view living is better. Why should this not be able to be organised by the population in a region by its own free will and decision, why is it that some far away centralist clique of parasites makes laws and decisions that are valid for millions and that all too often are so very disconnected form the realities on location? This is especially a problem with the EU, of course. Why must there be a transnational government telling me which light bulb to use, which browser head to use, how to live healthy, what diet to eat, at what increase I have to give away my private property and wealth, what policies of theirs I need to accept, what migration I have to tolerate, what cultures I have to respect, why must we save water in Germany, very rich in water, because the same amount of water they demand to be saved in Spain – isn't that like me needing to use sun-oil in rainy Germany because on the Spanish Riviera there is sunshine? And so on and on. Who is the government – national or transnational - to tell us that we must do it this or that way, and must do it not for ourselves, but for others?

I am not naive, I know there is invitation for abuse of business, in capitalism, there has always been the effort to deliver the smallest amount for the highest price, and this trend can lead to monopolies, and that is a big problem, yes. I have no complete solution than in theory calling for securing competition. But I mind you – THE BIGGEST MONOPOLIST OF ALL IS THE STATE! And it provides the worst service of lowest quality for the highest money, and all what it wastes it steals from the citizens!

Things throughout history happen for a reason, civilization evolves for a reason, right now democracy seems to be the government of choice, five hundred years ago it was monarchy,

One hundred years ago. ;)

Then came America's Wilson, realising that America could increase its influence only in the world if monarchies in Europe are being destroyed. And so they did – seen from an American POV, WWI just came at the right time. Very opportunistic timing indeed. There also was a very strong personal antipathy in the clique around Wilson against monarchy. Hoppe explains that with the German emperor they could ,live, after all the Germans appeared to be quite sober and rational to them - but whom they really hated were the Habsburger, representing anything in shine and history that they wanted to leave behind in America when kicking the British out. That's why they made sure after the war that almost nothing of the Donau monarchy survived. Germany was economically exploited, since the opportunity was financially so inviting, but the Habsburg empire was destroyed for the sake of just destroying it. Not the fist time I heard that Wilson and his cabinet had very strong personal animosities against the Habsburger.

ninety years ago everyone was convinced that communism and socialism was the answer. Perhaps through some sort of giant war or ecological disaster Hoppes work will come to fruition,

Hoppe is realist, and not optimistic at all, as I said before. Also, for him and in a way already for the ancient Greek it is clear that democracy is just an early phase of communism, with socialism forming the transition in-between, the ochlocracy – the tyranny of the canaille. Democracy and socialism/communism are no opposites or different things. The opposite to them all is individuality and statelessness. I hope to illustrate that a bit more later, after answering your text.

I don't deny that should the planets population be reduced by three quarters of its current size then governmental types would have to rapidly evolve to suit the situation, and unless communications were swiftly restored between nations then there would be a break-up of states across the globe, because civilizations adapt, they have to, or they die.

First, politicians LOVE crises : it is the opportunity for them to manage, to do, to smile into cameras and to shine with actions (no matter how shallow and dumb they may be) – and to release new rules and legislations that widen their power and widen the state's reach and boost the law code and the bureaucracy for even more suppressions emitted by these against the people. Crises allow to install more control, to claim more power for the state, to have more rules telling the people what to do. Crises are jackpot wins for politicians.

Second, if a disaster takes place on a global level that would reduce the population levels by that scale you mention, then global civilisation would collapse, and it's hierarchical levels would desintegrate in reverse order in which they got established and created. Pretty much like any life forms seems to die, too – higher functions fail first, basic functions fail last.

Sure, it makes for some good fiction to have a civil war in America, Texas is independent, California tries to become the new Athens and instead becomes Rome post-visigoths, the Monroe Republic rules with an iron fist (yeah, I've seen some episodes of it, and no, I'm not impressed by it) or Cheyenne rules through subterfuge (much better imho), but each of those works of fiction require a major catastrophe to take place to break the current situation. No amount of links, posts, tirades, sermons or judgement on an internet forum is going to create the sort of catastrophe required to break up a nation.

Who mentioned civil wars? I did not, nor do libertarians, nor did Hoppe. You have to realise that it is any regional populations' moral right to decide to stay in a union with somebody else, or to split up. The greater entity of course wants to prevent that, but fact remains that from a libertarian point of view people the the moral right to decide freely on their company, to stay with somebody, or to split up, or to leave and move somewhere else. A state denying that, again already suppresses people and acts criminally. It is simply panic-calling to say that Europe will fall into war when the Euro gets destroyed – or when nations split up. Have you realised how much conflict was created last century, in the past 20 years alone, by pressing together people who do not want to live together (Balkans)? By creating arbitrary new states, at the cost of the one and the profit for the other? And again, Europe saw its greatest cultural blossoming in times and circumstances when still not all big European states had formed up (pre-Germany, pre-Italy namely). Think away these two alone – and see how much would be missing what later condensed to the strengths and advantages founding the – now over – era of Europe's global dominance and cultural greatness! Never has a culture had such an amount of global influence before and after. Only Islam comes to mind – and that is no creator of culture, but a destroyer with the only power to destroy humane culture. Neither Rome nor the ancient Chinese ever had such an amount of global influence in the past.

BTW, in Switzerland, they practice voluntary merging and splitting of Kantons, until today.

And over all of Europe you see a growing intensity and number in regional independence movements as a reaction to Brussel's brutal grab for totalitarian control, and enforced collectivising.

I, too, am disillusioned with the current political system in the United Kingdom, and a tad fearful of the one in America, here in the UK everyone has taken the middle ground and there is little difference between the parties, in America the middle ground has been napalmed and both sides are flying off the opposite ends of the spectrum, neither system particularly works, however I would much rather live under a democracy than under a system that, by typing these words, I am automatically picked up in the early hours of the morning by a policeman and spend the rest of my short life in a prison cell.

I do not care for political parties, for now hopefully obvious reasons. They must go, they are vicarious agents in the destruction of cultural life and liberty, they pout their own power interests before that of state reason and the people of which they live like blood-sucking parasites that crawl into people's brains and tell them to do what parties tell them to do; and while they are that totally and completely a part of the state-system that they are form up together with the bureaucracy, they necessarily help the state to grow and enforce its regime on the people. They also play the bribe game that I referred to as the “democratic disease”. Political parties are the visible symptoms of the cancer that destroys liberty from within. They are to libertarian politics what religious dogma and institutions are to true spirituality.

Political parties must go. Career politicians just go. Voluntarily, or by ropes around their necks – their choice. The means I do not care for, the goal is the priority – and the goal is they must go.

Sure, there are some circumstances in a democracy at the moment that can cause this to occur, and at the moment, they usually involve Islam, and now surely, Skybird, you cannot call for greater security against Islamic extremists on one hand, and decry increased government surveillance on another. It just doesn't work that way.

Do you really believe in this either-this-or-that black and white scheme? Do you seriously believe something just because father government says so, and prints it on an official document with an emblem on top? You are not that over-credulous, are you?

Has it ever come to your mind, that that Islamic migration is wanted by politicians because they vote for them and thus form an increasing voter basis supporting them in their idea of redesigning the ideological basis of the nation? The German Greens, their leaders, for example said it like this very clearly some years ago. 90% of Muslim migrants at that time voted left-leaning. What takes place is nothing else but a redesigning of the electorate's composition to influence the outcome of future elections and by that securing the left party's power basis. It is the same concept that all parties support when lowering the voting age. First it was 21. Then 18, now they make it 16. Their minds are unformed, the knowledge untested, life experienced almost non-existent, their character never challenged, and their thinking is easy to be manipulated, paroles can easily be implemented, and when you are young, left slogans for “justice” easily catch prey, unreflected and untested by minds that are easy to be ignited in enthusiasm for “a better world”.

Also, Islam is a authoritarian ideology in style, it teaches the individual submission, obedience, uncritical attitude, non-thinking. Western states do not wish for educated and informed citizens, that is a lie. The sovereign citizens is not wanted. The obedient, servile drone functioning and doing and ticking like demanded by politics is what states want. You shall not live by your morals, you shall live by the politically correct morals. That is two morals that are lightyears apart.

I said it earlier: politicians LOVE crises, and social conflicts are their most favourite ones. They can push wealth redistribution, they can fire the arsenal or fighting terms like “social justice” and “solidarity”, they can call for more state in order to regulate unjust conditions here, wealth inequality there, and what do you say: schwuppdiwupp you have more laws, and more indoctrination, and most important: MORE INFLUENCE AND LEGAL COMPETENCES FOR THE STATE.

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If I still have not exhausted your patience and you still are reading this, I would like to add some notes and thoughts now and in loose sequence; as they lie scattered around in my mind, that are not directly linked to your original posts.

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On justice and criminal laws, Rothbard's book on the Ethics of Freedom describes in chapter 13 “Punishment and Proportionality” that an implication of the libertarian basing of freedom on property rights leads to a punishment system in law where the victim of a crime must have the right to demand that the perpetrator at court is facing punishment to the ethically possible maximum of punishment – or that he shall be forgiven by the victim and thus leave freely. The ethically possible maximum (the proportionality) must be fixed by the principle of “an eye for an eye”, and may not exceed this. Now this has some reasonable implications that our law system constantly violate. Assume Smith steals 1000 dollars from Brown. Libertarian justice says that Brown thus has the right to do in effect to Smith what he previously has suffered from him. That means it is not enough if Smith is just giving back the 1000 dollars. Becasue by dpoing so he just reapirs the dmage he did, but hgas not suffered the damage he did to the other before. Additionally Smith thus must pay another 1000 dollars maximum to Brown – not before then he has been object to the damage he did to Smith before. - But in our states today, in germany namely, capital crimes do not get broght to court by the victims, at least the victims are not leading the procedures – but the state does, in form of thre state'S attorney. You rob a bank? Not the bajk leads the procedures but only plays a second, minor role, the state prosecute the robber instead. The vicitm of a rape may inform the police, but it is the state attorney lading the procedure, “in the name of the people”, as they say, but in reality it is in the name of the state who constitutes and arranges the courts and lawcodes. While ove rhere the ofender maybe must pay some – often symbolic only – compensation tpot he victim of his deed, he also must pay a penalty – not to the victim, but to the state. But why? The state has not been victim of any crime. It has suffered no damage to demand compoensation for . Morally it does not even own anything by itself. And it tailors laws and and admionstrative rules so that they best meet the state'S demands against the people (what can wionderfully be seen when constitutional courts or transnatrional courts currently are called for checking issues regarding the Euro and the EU – EU-politicians have the judges in their piockets, and so you do not see any seriosu questioning of the Eu and the Euro at these courts, nothing that could ever seriously become a threat for the EU's cause.

My family has been victim several times of such twisted “justice”, my family as well as me personally. I do not trust – or respect – our justice system even that far like I could spit. But the real issue I have with our justice system is not due to biographic reasons, but because of the fact that it is in bed with the state and corrupting the moral understanding of offender and victim, with one great profiteer of this distortion: the state.

Chapter 15 in the same book deals with HumanRights that must be understand – and can only be reaoisnbably defined on the ground of property rights. Anything else, what they usually do today, is just sentimental wallowing in imprecise, vague and nebulous assumptions, hear-says, and impossible-to-define-by-real-nature nebulous claims

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On war and guns, both the most favourite American hobby. Hoppe strongly suggests the right to carry arms, both claiming that this would help the sovereign citizen to defend himself and fight crime as it springs him in the face when walking in the streets, and reminding politicians that citizens not only can withdraw support to them, but also can fight against them if politicians push it too far against people's private wills. However, Hoppe just voiced nothing but criticism for the Iraq war, and called it another big crime by the government that created just chaos in an effort to bring morally unjustifiable and realistically non-functional governmental tyranny to other parts of the world. Needless to say that I see it the same way, on Iraq and Afghanistan even after more than a decade I have no reason at all to change my opinions I already held ten years ago.

Rothbard also defends the right to carry arms, and points out that there must be enough arms indeed that in fact the citizens' threat to resist to government by force, if necessary, indeed is a credible threat, else it does not fulfill its deterring function. Rothbard strongly spoke out against any wars of aggression and conquest, but claimed the right to militarily resist and defend oneself if being victim of somebody else's military aggression. According to the libertarian ethical principle of proportionality the war needs to be waged so that it does not exceed what the other side has done in violence and damage. This is a detail I have reservations about, not in general and covering all eventualities, but still: some things there I see different.

I have u-turned myself on the rights for private arms in recent years already, even before having read these two. Now I consider to even give up my rejection of right to carry military-style firearms.

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Some weeks ago, I have already summarised the perception of democracy in ancient Freece, that it was pretty much despised and warned of, that this reputation prevailed even beyond the time of the American founding fathers (who were no democrats), I also described that the Greeks had set up demands for the population that wanted to qualify for being allowed in majority-votes affecting communal issues, and that most people therefore were not allowed to vote ( see my post #48 here:
http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe-arch.html )
A concept that I strongly support, I oppose the general right to vote for just every Peter and Paul. When the majority finds out that it can vote for the many living at the cost of the few and that the many can legalise that the few get robbed, guess where this ends. It ends at where we are today in Western, eroding, fiscally completely exhausted nations where people still demand for ever more and politicians try to win votes by claiming that one could spend one's ways out of debts. Total insanity, total childishness, total socialism. Ochlocracy at its best! Christian Ortner, an Austrian publicist, calls it “prolocracy”, which also is the title of his book from last year (C. Ortner: Prolokratie. Demokratisch in die Pleite).

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Trade, capitalism, market – and the danger of monopolism. That danger always is present in capitalism, since capitalism seeks to establish monopoles. A monopolist can maximise his profit by delivering less (quantity and quality) for more (higher price), since those depending on him have no choice (that is the nature of monopolies). An unsolved problem I see in the ideas of letting the market dealing with it. Hoppe indicates that people should live in communities that small and independent that they can vote on services and products with their feet – just moving to a neighbouring community where life is better to them. He refers to the Italian city states, the German condition before the national state was called out, and what enormous wealth and culturally highly influential blossoming this had for Europe, and the whole world. This would enforce competition amongst providers of goods and service.

But if the producers to not play honest and secretly organise themselves and their market shares and price policies over several communities in order to bypass market mechanisms, then you again deal with monopolies, this time in form of cartels. I am a bit clueless on what to do about that. Maybe it cannot be prevented, like you also cannot prevent bank robbery, you can only deal with the consequences and try to bring the offenders to justice. Who said that perfection is possible in this world? Wouldn't that mark the end of history and evolution? I believe there can only be constant improvement and change for the better, hopefully – but not perfection. Maybe the solution is to keep communities indeed so small that every member can be fully aware of what is going on and how somebody's action affect him, and his own actions affect the whole rest of the community (see Jared Diamond's examinations of several past, failed cultures in “Collapse”). In other words: finding a way to guarantee transparency seems to be inevitable. Democracy fails in establishing that in today's state, since it fosters the massive increase of ever growing bureaucracy. Democracy also I consider to be an option for very very small-sized communities only.

I consider this whole problem of monopolies and cartels unsolved. They are the natural antagonist to the theory of free markets, and thus monopolists must be seen as some of our worst enemies. Freedom coexisting beside monopolism: impossible. That is true for economic monopolists. That is true for the biggest monopolist there is: the state.

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Free speech, tolerance. Well, according to this paradox that tolerance will get destroyed by the intolerant if the tolerant even tolerate the intolerant, parallels can be drawn to that with regard to free speech and freedom, too. And Rothbard and Hoppe both explicitly do so. That means there can be no right for total freedom of speech. I want to leave it at this general hint, the reference goes to quotes scattered across the whole work of both authors, it seems. Explicitly it gets formulated in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, too. What it all aims at, in popular phrasing would be “my house, my rules” and “as long as I pay the bills and you accept to benefit from that I define what goes and what not”. You don't like it – you don't take my money. You don't like my home and how I run it – you pack your things and leave.

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I would strongly encourage to check this list of headlines for items related to this conversation, they all are brief articles, interviews and short pieces by Hoppe with the nice detail of that the headlines nicely describe what the focus is on in that goven piece of text. Save me a lot of more – repetitive -typing and adds depth and detail to all that what I just touch upon on th surface and cannot examine deeper here without killing my time table completely.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe-arch.html

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I mentioned Jared Diamond, and four years ago I even ran a whole thread on one of his books, Collapse. Diamond formulates some conclusions that may be of interest for our perception of politicians' performance today, so I link to that thread again. I wanted to mention him again in more detail (like previously announced somewhere above), but this text already is hilariously long, and so I cut some corners short.

How to fail in survival for very rational reasons (Nov. 2009): http://www.subsim.com/radioroom//showthread.php?t=159065

I think that especially in the later part of Diamond's book, Collapse, there are some rules formulated that are about the need for transparency and community sizes being limited and small, both to be seen as indispensable preconditions for any system of majority-oriented self-governing decision-making (and a decision making exclusively based on the majority argument is highly vulnerable to moral counter-arguments putting its legitimacy in doubt, btw, but that is another discussion and thread...) . He points out that many past cultures and civilisations failed because this rule was violated, and that such cultures also fell due to over-stretching their borders, growing beyond sustainable economic sizes instead of saving reserves for bad times, and allowing decision makers to claim immunity from their own decisions, having only all others affected by them. I think the latter is one of the most obvious signs of corruption and failures with our so-called elites today.

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The “democratic disease”, to use this old term, should be enough explanation by now to see why states never will limit themselves, but always will claim more power and control, and that this growth necessarily must lead to a situation of where competition between governments reduces the number of governments existing, making the surviving ones even bigger and more powerful. Ultimately this must lead to continental one-governments and finally one world government. This will be one with a claim for totalitarian, autocratic, absolute ruling and total control, however. I already mentioned the example of the American civil war which led to one centralised government dominating the union's states. Other examples are of course the path followed by the EU, which first wants the banking union, then the transfer union, next the planned European economy, and finally just one federal European state – under central command by Brussel, which means: France, the leaders both in socialistic aim and centralized government in Europe, are in control, and the Germans must pay for it and occasionally bend over to get spanked. In three months there are German general elections, you will be amazed at the u-turning taking place after that over here! Take me by my words. That aim by France to ultimately dominate Europe is the primary reason why they insisted on Germany destroying the D-Mark and the Bundesbank as precondition for accepting reunification (the French press in 1992 called the triumph of France to bully the Germans into the Maastricht treaty “like Versailles without war”). France is too impotent top be economically strong enough by itself, so it must seek dominance by weakening others. There is no more thing like French-German axis and cooperation, one finally has to realise and admit that. It's a thing of the past – if it ever was real anyway.

When the people endlessly demand more and more social and material and fiscal responsibilities of theirs being fulfilled by the state, and the state demands the people to be obedient vasalls in return for that, while the state also lets them pay the bill of their ever growing demands (devaluing money by printing more, raising taxes, increasing debts and by that increasing the overall burden), then this must lead to a situation where people become more and more weakening in character and sense of responsibility, and for material demands they are willing to compromise morals, their own creativity, and instead develop what Kenneth Minogue calls the “servile mind”. The dog does not bite the hand that feeds it, but wags the tail instead. This also leads to a situation where the politicians must represent the people whom elected them, but is powerful enough to instead demand that the people shall do what the politicians say them. As Minogue so laconically says, today were account to politicians instead of the other way around. And it seems, so he continues, that in all their lecturing on how we should live, what we should like, what we should do and what we should think, they are finally loosing patience with us. Politicians today have a totally feudal, aristocratic self-understanding,. They think they have a right not only to candidate, but to demand to play a role in politics no matter what, and that their performance is unimportant there and that it is enoiugh to claim that they mean things this way and not the other way, while their actual actin g then is that of a third way, and that behave – and are proven right – as if they cannot really get voted off the scene. They may need to change chairs, but you only see them popping up again in some other office, in another committee, in some other gremium, often more influential than before. They get payed Royal fees and added boni and social compensations and live by priviliges that they do not deserve, while demanding all others to obey the law that they avoid, and to save and accept cuts where they waste what is not theirs anyway, and they take ever bigger heaps of the pie for themselves the shadow lobbies and networks behind them, and they form new seats for their buddies at the table to have more parasites living by our life blood. You cannot vote politicians to stay out of politics, you cannot get rid of them as the populistic interpretation of “democracy” often implies.

What this taking-the-free-party-for-granted means for the degeneration of public morals and the individual's morals, gets dealt with in Minogues book, or also in that by Ortner (Prolokratie), and this great, insightful history of dilettantism by Thoams Rietzschel, a very well-educated publicist and expert for historic arts: Die Stunde der Dilettanten. One bon mot from it: “The dilettante reduces everything he has to deal with to the standards of his own imagination. (…) He lives by the conviction that just being what he imagines to be, already is enough to be admired and applauded by the others.”

How very different today's business of democracy, and the way we glorify it, is from what the Greeks had to say about it! We could as well glorify the hygienic standards in Medieval and ancient cities and claim we should run modern public health the same way. Half of us would commit suicide the same day we install that, just due to not being able to stand the smell in the streets.

That is while the very system of the political circus as well as the mutual dependency between gift-giving politicians and gift-taking citizens paying with obedience makes sure that only networker successfully adopting to the rules of climbing the ladders can make it to the top. The system generates the same kind of career politicians time and again. You thus do not get really a choice at elections, they are all like clones with some singing the song in minor and the others singing the same song, just in major. But it is always the same tune: social justice they say, and they mean: socialist redistribution, taking from those who seem to work more successfully and thus getting more reward, and giving it to those that are not that competitive but by getting fed for free tend to learnt hat they can demand it for free. This has as a consequence, that the number of people living by the state's robbed treasury grows, and the number of people producing private wealth that then gets expropriated from them, is shrinking. Even with weak notes in math at school one can easily imagine where this must lead. The precariat is growing, and it is consuming us to death, and even beyond that, demands and claims for money by “the state” are still growing high into the sky.

I therefore see no oral wrong in avpoidni89g taxes, if one can get away with it, even more so since I refuse the right of the state to steal from me anyway. Immoral. anti-social and criminal it only becomes if you do not pay taxes and refuse to cooperate with the state's robbery – but hold your hand open and demand it to freely give to you and pay for you and have you fed and supplied with free services. I have no problem with tax evaders anymore these days, that far I have moved in reaction to the madness and lunacy all around. I despise those parasites who avoid paying taxes - but still encourage the robbing of others and then demand their share form that loot. That actually is two crimes in one act! That the state claims it to be criminal and also immoral (anti-social, as the German president said recently) to avoid paying taxes, just illustrates how very naturally they take it for granted and how righteous and self-convinced these robbers, gangster and mafiosi indeed are. The more they fail, the more corrupt they become, the more the disaster they caused unfolds, the more costly it becomes for everybody – the more convinced they are of themselves, and claiming that to be their moral integrity and their “unperturbed morals”. Anti-social psychopaths from head to toe! Manipulative, cheating, unscrupulous, without any sense for moral right and wrong: that are some of the psychiatric key characteristics of psychopaths and antisocial personality disorder indeed, check just any psychiatric book.

And I am expected to vote for these people - of whom, from a certain level in the political hierarchy on criminal lunatics, losers, robbers, manipulative propagandists, lobby-owned strawmen and parasites fill most of the ranks, and I should give the moral legitimation and forgiving of sins and install them a shine of respectability when they push forward my enslavement and follow their never enough appetite for my freedom and my property? That is like a rapist demanding his victim to give consent to get raped, and calling it a moral crime if the victim refuses to comply.

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Rothbard's book on money, which I linked and which is short and totally free and legal, explains so simple why the states not just manipulated but destroyed real money when democratic regimes rose, because democratic regimes never are sustainable regimes, but always consume more than they produce, always. This is due to the vicious circle between politicians' promises and voters' demands. To endure that for some time longer, before the system breaks down, the state needs to take full control of money-creating, it needs card blanche for printing as much paper tickets as is needed to keep illusions alive and not needing to depend on market assessments of what that money'S real value is, and so he has to destroy the market mechanisms that privately produced money before in a private business enterprise and traded it according to market mechanism. So we got paper-money, made by the state. The damage done by Keynes' seriously flawed' thinking (I would call it even self-decepting) cannot be overestimated, the collapse of especially the European all-inclusive wellfare states is closely linked to it manna-from nothing philosophy. With the old, value-based money, both Keynes utopia of fiscal perpetuum mobiles and spending frenzies by states and the wellfare paradise states in Europe would not have been possible, would never have materialised. Thus the replacing of the gold standard with gold derivates, replacing gold derivates with FIAT money, prohibiting private coin making, and banning the use of precious ores for coin making. (I know I know, there have been some more reasons for the abandoning of the origal gold standard, namely the socalled bimetal problem – changing gold in silver and reverse -, but in principle the main reasons still are what I briefly lay out in sketches here). The inflationary self-boosting state depends desperately on being allowed to bring as many chips into the game as it needs to keep the illusion alive. The market, however, knows it better. The more an item (FIAT money) is available the lesser is its value. Rarity is what makes a good or item precious. In the end, the voicing of doubts about the 500 Euro notes as being channeled by EU sources, and plans to stop producing 1 and 2 cent coins, are only a psychological preparation of the public for the digital currency, to increase the public'S willingness to give up material expression of currency – coins, notes – alltogether, so that the state's money-from-nothing monopoly must not care for a material understanding of money at all, and the citizens being fully exposed to any political intention to expropriate even more of their private savings and wealth, when all financial transactions are digital and electronic only. Why is it that the vast majority of peope slipping into porivate debts do so by using credit cards, not by handing over too many coins and banknotes...?

The infrastructure to just push a button in the finance ministry to have so and so much of private savings being collected by the state, already exists. Schäuble and other europhile super-gangsters do not hide at all that they want to get rid of real money (as far as “real” has any meaning with FIAT money) better yesterday than tomorrow. Be assured the state will steal all and everything from the European private households as long as there is something to steal, since this is the only way to keep the worsening snowball system alive and running for some time longer – hopefully long enough so that collapse takes place after the actual politicians have had their power-party. When at the end the lights go out, you can be certain that they went off because nothing, really nothing was left in private savings that could be stolen anymore. Politically wanted low interest rates, wanted inflation are forms of self-legalised expropriation as well, and thus represent theft and robbery.

Citizens must be pushed and kept in total helplessness towards the state, this is one unpleasant, brutal truth about our Western states – just the means of controlling the people are more subtle and clever, than in an uncovered police dictatorship. But the chains are as merciless and solid, if not more. Brutal violence can be identified, it can be pointed out, it can be morally condemned – the creeping re-education of people minds in the west, the omni-present medial background training and social engineering and cognitive rearranging we are being subjected to, is far more difficult to resist to, not to mention to openly fight against – in form of public opinion, political correctness, combative terminology like “solidarity!” and “social justice” and the many term”xyz”-phobias (homophobia, Europhobia, Islamophobia, religiophobia, xenophobia) , all energy you invest into resisting and fighting is turned against you,m gets deflected against you, and you end up being the one called mentally ill, subversive, immoral, phobic, extremist, irrational – a mentally deranged person who needs the state's and community's help to assist him thinking in the right way again: effectively what the Borg may call “Rebooting the system”. What a horror, what a cold-blooded and calculated mercilessness! All in the name of humanism and a better world, of course.

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People vote for those people that tell them the best lies, that deceive them the most gloriously, and are the most unscrupulous in telling fairy tales and are wise enough to not dusrtub the running party, even when it is the party before next morning's execution. This tells you something not only about the share of guilt the electorate – this hopelessly overestimated sovereign instance from which all power in a democracy should emit and lighten the world from here to the horizon – has to face, but also about the character quality in our political personnel, don't you think? And when you think of it, you must recognise that it is against politicians' very interest to be any different, and to act more responsible – usually they get the boot for being that. It thus is naive to think that things would ever turn better if only the right candidate wins, the right guy comes along, the right Über-Führer steps onto the scene, the right party takes control, a noble, good man takes over. It will not happen like that, in the end they always are just about one thing: about themselves. Did not happen with the EU's operetta kings (in some years I will be threatened with punishment for using such derogatory terminology about our brave and glorious EU). Not with Obama. Not with Reagan or Kennedy. Not with Merkel, Hollande or anyone. Not only can the system not form up other characters at the top, it is against these people's very self-interest to be any different than how they are. Things become better if voting for the right guy? My doubt crystalizes in one single question: how could that be? That would be better than from rags to riches. That would be like from nothing comes everything, free express delivery included , delivered already yesterday, on a platin plate.

And consider this. The more people vote, the less worth has the single ballot. Something that people oversee time and again. Your vote means the less and has the less influenhce the more people vote. Also, When politician A promises to rob person B and share the loot with C, then he will be elected by C. Do we really want every Peter and every Paul having a say on what at the same time is pathetically advertised as influencing the fate and future of the nation? :lol: Even worse. Do we want to have people having said influence on the whole who contribute nothing, share no responsibility, have nothing at stake that is truly theirs, and live by state wellfare and at other people's expenses? Or who lack school education to calculate by the simple rule of three – but should form an opinion on highly complex matter like economic cycles, fiscal policies, international interdependency and the consequences of demographic changes?

Needless to say: I am totally and strictly against a general, unqualified right to vote. I I would support democracy and would see any reason in having votes in today's nation's context. Which is not the case. So go voting, everybody, if it flatters your ego, I do not really care. I just say you would stay morally less guilty if you do note participate in this collective crime of legitimizing what you better should not wish to legitimate.

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The qualities that make you a governing politicians, are the qualities of a gangster and mafiosi, a liar and fraudster, a cheater and tyrant. Another reason that speaks against democracy. This failure and the moral degeneration are inbuilt features of the democratic system, the democratic disease. In what way could one say this is better than monarchy...??? It is not even as bad as monarchy, imo it even is WORSE. Hoppe would still say that he does not favour monarchy over democracy, since historicall the abuse and damage in monarchies has been smaller, but still existent, because a monarchy also is a central state, like democracy today. Thus his conclusion: statelessness it must be.

Today people have to hand over more than 50% of an ordinary employee's or worker's income to the state, in forma of various taxes and mandatory payments to state-de,manded or state-driven fonds and -insurances. In the late monarchic system before WWI, it were a maximum of just 8% . and wise monarchs even tried to not squeeze out more than 5%, knowing that this would help to let “their property” foster, grow and develope. In capitalism, I often heard in the forum, having managers being payedfwith insane wages is okay as long the whole company benefit from their decisions and general wealth has advantage from them, too. I never agreed with that logic, but however: I still demand that the same right and logic is being apllied then when comparing a monarchic and a democratic ruler. Why should a monarch not “own” the country as long as that results in policies and a managing of its resources that sees trade and culture blossom due to wise management? A monarch has a natural self-interest to keep his property together and in good shape. The democratic leader only is short time in office, and so tends to abuse to the maximum the resources available to him (and these today are existing only in form of – debts) . His successor does the same, and the same it is with the guy coming after him. Total, maxium exploitation of the nation's resources (especially the middle class) is the consequence. A moral degeneration is also a consequence, expressed in the unscrupulousness in which politicians do not fix the damage, do not tell the uncomfortable truth, increase the damage to bribe their voters, and telling lies. Democracy implies ochlocracy, I think, always: the tyranny of the mob, the cheap prolete, the dog of the street, the precariat. And we see it everywhere. Our democratic regimes know no real victims, the people are not victims, not really: they are accomplices in crime. Only when you refuse to formally and morally legitimate the state, democracy, parties, politicians, the majority dictatorship of the plebs and canaille – only then you can hope to put as little guilt on yourself as possible under these insane circumstances. I am of the opinion that it is a moral imperative to speak out against democracy, and against this danse macabre of today's Western states. It is a bitter historic irony that the West is turning in exactly that kind of regime that it claimed to have defeated after the cold war. We are becoming communist, totalitarian, unfree and suppressive, we become brainwashed and opinion-pressed and anonymously blackmailed - we call it political correctness. Oh brave new world!

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It goes without further need for explanation, I think: it just be demanded that states and governments shall be stripped of their monopoly to print money, this and central banks as the state's fiscal executor must be destroyed. I am willing to unleash civil wars over enforcing this, it is of utmost importance and must be seen as a non-negotiable condition. The state's monopoly to print money, and to manage money (as if there would be any need to manage value.-basing money! ) must be destroyed, no matter how, no matter the price, at all cost.

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It is the state of societies as formed by the Northern European Hanse alliance (12th-17th century), or the Italian city states. States that were formed more by the trading class and the businessmen, where the basis of our modern laws were laid although these laws based on traders' codifications and courts where entities called and maintained by the trading class of businessman – not by a superior instance called “state”. We have remains of that still in some craftsman guilds. Even military and policing functions were run not by a higher authority of kings or democratic government (a state in today's understanding), but where organised and maintained by the traders and businessmen.

Hoppe's reiteration of what he calls „private law society“ bases on this, and so it is not just theory, but a historically proven example. Mind you, although there were the Medicis' corruption, the Italian city states represent a blossoming of Italian and European culture of absolutely highest worth and importance.

Same in the Hanse, an alliance of “private people” (traders) so powerful that it ruled, even dominated the Baltic and Northern Europe, had I think over 300 member cities right down to central Europe (!), with my beloved Lübeck as its centre of wealth, control and power. They were a political, economic, fiscal and military superpower – not bad for just a private alliance formed by businessmen and traders only, eh? That was no state, but a free and voluntary alliance by free people, basing on free trade, and supporting the diea that trade brings development and that it is in everybody's interest to guarantee the safety of trading transactions: thus the military component build by the Hanse, strong enough to keep not only pirates but the Scandinavian Royal navies behaving. The Hanse was an equal, sometime superior diplomatic partner for Scandinavian kingdoms. It's sad that the glorious history of the Hanse is so much forgotten these days, especially in Germany. The success and the former wealth of it you can still see in many of the old Hanse cities.

I mentioned in the other thread the era when Germany still did not exist as a united nation under one central command, but was formed by dozens, hundreds, thousands of free cities and dukedoms – all of them competing for the best talents, the most gifted artists and craftsmen, the best living conditions, in order to shine brighter than the others. This represented a climax in German cultural creation: music, literature, painting, architecture, trade blossoming, and so forth. Sometimes their rulers declared war, but these wars were not that absolute and not about word views like today (which makes the wars since the 20th century so tremendously total, bloody and unforgiving), but they were more military comparisons that were stopped early usually before any real costly damage to property and trade and wealth took place. There also was a strict separation between combatants and non-combatants, and property damage of non combatants often was to be compensated for by the feudal lord of the city or dukedom. Also, these lords has far more limitations and responsibilities and were not that absolutely free at all to abuse laws as today normally gets understood.

Nevertheless, a monarchy still is a morally non-justifiable ruling of the one over the other. That's why - different to some accusations - neither me nor Hoppe prefer monarchy over democracy. I learned to reject both. But when democracies produce incompetent selfish criminals gaining power time and again, and when they increase their elections chances the more the worse their character is in cheating, defaming, making false promises and abusing access to the state treasury, and this get rewarded by the crowds, I'd say the chance that in a monarchy the heritage of the throne, who undergoes his youth years and early adult years in education and preparation for his later job, probably more often is a better candidate, and while there is no guarantee, there is not smaller a chance (I think even better a chance) that morally and by sense of responsibility he is superior to elected politicans in general, for it is against reason and the very own interest of politicians to be moral and acting by a sense of responsibility. Monarchs owning the land as a property, have a best interest in keeping it intact and have it blossoming – democratic politicians have an interest in abusing the country and stealing from it as long as they have their limited timespan of access to its financial resources. Make hay while the day lasts, and let the world end once you get kicked out of office – to find another office thanks to your party's networking with your old job being taken by somebody being the same miserable character like you are yourself – that is the logic of crewing political offices today. Why should I defend to get ever more of this, of this and nothing else? We see the results today, we see the enormous damage, the stellar bills. It all is at our costs. Democratic politicians abuse the system much more and more hurting than most feudal rulers in the past ever did.

Natural law means the right to own something that you discover before anyone else, so that you are the first to make a claim for it. For further intricacies (owner is missing or died, ownership is challenged and so forth, see the according chapters in Rothbard'S book, I do not plan two rewrite it chapter for chapter here). Any understanding of a morally legal state must base on that, I think, the term liberty or freedom else makes no sense. I would argue that leaves states no legal status at all, for the following reasons.

Usually they say a state shall have two responsibilities, and these two exclusively, banning it from anything else: it shall make laws guaranteeing the right for private property, and it shall maintain these measurements needed to enforce that protection: police, a military. Implied is that everything else: social relations between people, trade, business contracts, community projects, street building etc etc, should be left to the local population living in the places and areas effected by these things. Let them organise their firebrigade. Let them sign insurance contracts as the see fit. Let them vote with their feet or their wallets on services, products, living conditions. And let everybody be the master and unlimited owner of property that according to natural law is legally his own. What need is there for a centralised state regulating all this?

However, that is an ideal only and there was never a state that had accepted to stay in that limited role. And that is why I have a big time problem with democracy as well as states in general. The businessman does not care for how the conditions were formed up by which he decides whether or not he invests in a place. If the conditions are positive, he invests, no matter whether the conditions were created by a military dictatorship or a democratically elected government. For him only the quality of these conditions is important, and whehe he trusts the government having created them, or not.

In other words, it does not matter for business what kind of state it deals with. The quality of the situation and the trust put or not put into the government are the deciding factors. A democratic government not being trusted, sees a decline in investments. A military dictatorship reliably fulfilling its agreed contract duties, is being favoured. During the cold war, even at the highest tensions during Cuba, the Russians were reliable trading partners in oil and gas for european (potentially hostile) customers. Ethics and morals have little to do with it. Trust is what it is about. Trust that what one has assessed in contract conditions will not get arbitrarily changed by the other side over night.

And while it is sometimes claimed that without democracy there would not have formed up law and order in the West, no humanistic tradition, no liberty, and no wealth, I must point out that several writers demonstrate that historically this has been exactly the other way around: that the seeds were sown and beginnings of modern legal systems base on fundaments rooting in ancient law of the land and juristic codifications founded by private business guilts like for example the Hanse; that many of our today's liberal values and rights and morals emerged in conditions where there was no democracy in sight, but enforced, sometimes in bitter conflicts, a free space for themselves and by doing so allowed later that democracy started to pout itself onto their achievements (and starting to consume them), and that the basis of wealth never has been a democratic base order, but a context in which natural law was allowed to regulate free market interactions by freely deciding individuals. The stronger the democratic state has become, the more the meaning of justice in the law system, the more moral values, the more our wealth, our sovereignty, our self-determined way of life has been eroded and weakened and declared a bagatelle in the name of politically corrected ideological redesigns and social engineering experiments.

High time to get beyond this madness. Before madness gets us all killed.

[August]

High time to get beyond this madness. Before madness gets us all killed.

Your preferred replacement for this madness is madness itself.

[Dowly]

This why we have private messages.

[troopie]

You'se are merely attacking the symtoms; you can go to half a dozen doctors complainling of an illness (trust me I know) and get many varied responses. What you'se need to address is the cause.

The problem is the human condition and how people accept it's various guises. No social group can be free of it, save for the individual; He who must then shun the benifits of a social system, i.e, weigh up survival prospects.

Were people better off in the medieval period? Being controlled by a church under heavy government influence?

And so survaillence today is what grinds our goat; what was the major complaint of peoples of old? I'd reackon It'd be as close to their hearts as our issues today.

For questions regarding the aptness of modern social structure, or even any historical period, I would strongly recomend reading Jacques Rousseau's work 'the Social Contract':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract

Rather than squabling over your idealisms, I'd suggest educating yourselves on the fundamental problem.

I too get irate over our 'leaders' shenanigans, but, in oder to address and deal with them we must understand the root causes of their actions.

People from the dawn of time have had to deal with social tensions, yet merely their manifestation changes.

Indeed, even a wild dog in a pack must succumb to his own leaders wants.

Is this dubiuos order what we are comfirtable with as a species? History would suggest yes. Personally I seek greater values, but in reallity' how many anarchistict civillisations remain today, or indeed, ever thrived?

I suspect, none.

[Armistead]

Possibly the longest post in SUbsim history?

[Stealhead]

This why we have private messages.

Truer words have not been spoken or typed.

@Armistead according to Word 2013 the second post is 13,310 words 25 pages long its like a rough draft of a thesis.Which guess is sort of what it is.

[Bilge_Rat]

Skybird,

are you actually Hans-Herman Hoppe?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans-Hermann_Hoppe

just wondering. :hmmm:

[AVGWarhawk]

I think I earned 3 college credits after reading that. :hmmm:

[Takeda Shingen]

I think I earned 3 college credits after reading that. :hmmm:

Funny, because I think that I actually lost 3 credits after reading it.

[Sailor Steve]

This why we have private messages.
I don't know; I think it's good to have it out where everyone can read it. Not so much today, but in the past people would write private letters "for publication", meaning that while they were written to private individuals they were written so that everyone would get the message. I can cite several examples, but I don't think this is the appropriate place to do so.

If this had been sent by PM it would be lost to everyone but Oberon. Here it can be read or ignored by everyone. I'm not saying I agree or disagree, and I'm not qualified to single out and address specific points as I usually do. I'm not even going to say what I think of it in general, just that I think it's a good thing it's here.

[Skybird]

You'se are merely attacking the symtoms; you can go to half a dozen doctors complainling of an illness (trust me I know) and get many varied responses. What you'se need to address is the cause.

The problem is the human condition and how people accept it's various guises. No social group can be free of it, save for the individual; He who must then shun the benifits of a social system, i.e, weigh up survival prospects.

Were people better off in the medieval period? Being controlled by a church under heavy government influence?

And so survaillence today is what grinds our goat; what was the major complaint of peoples of old? I'd reackon It'd be as close to their hearts as our issues today.

For questions regarding the aptness of modern social structure, or even any historical period, I would strongly recomend reading Jacques Rousseau's work 'the Social Contract':

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Contract

Rather than squabling over your idealisms, I'd suggest educating yourselves on the fundamental problem.

I too get irate over our 'leaders' shenanigans, but, in oder to address and deal with them we must understand the root causes of their actions.

People from the dawn of time have had to deal with social tensions, yet merely their manifestation changes.

Indeed, even a wild dog in a pack must succumb to his own leaders wants.

Is this dubiuos order what we are comfirtable with as a species? History would suggest yes. Personally I seek greater values, but in reallity' how many anarchistict civillisations remain today, or indeed, ever thrived?

I suspect, none.

Most people - not all, but most people - prefer to chose the easier way, pick the comfortable option, prefer the bigger net gain over the smaller. Can't get any closer to human nature than this. Most people even do so when the longterm cost for the short term advantage is bigger. This is what economists call and refer to as the "time preference": if you can gain something in profit, gain, something positive now, or could wait a little bit longer to then gain something more profitable, a bigger gain, something even more positive: how long are you willing to harvest before you reap? How long and how much do you invest the possible immediate win, to win something bigger later on?

The modern present, short-lived media society claims reward for immediate satisfaction of your desires. Human cognitions and memory functioning are such that that over 2-3 generation we tend to delete memories ("learned lessons") from history becasue they are not transported and handed over to later generation in a manner functional enough to keep these lessons present on mind. During our own lifetime, we tend to overlook changes that unfold slowly only (the so-called landscape memory, meaning that we do not become aware how the glacier for example withdraws more and more from the mountain when we look out of the window - and when we then get shown a photo from 40 years ago, how it was back then, we cannot believe it and are completely surprised, although the change took places right before our eyes, every year).

when considering this and also considering that I studied psychology and have had a bit of experience in counseling people and also for years teaching meditation and having to deal with the usual problems that haunt people starting with that, I must say that the time preference for most people is such that most people really want a gain, a reward now or after very short time, with only very few being able and willing to wait longer and invest more time for the chance to harvesting even more profit some longer time later. Pay tomorrow, get it yesterday, enjoy stuff NOW - isn't that the motto of our modern consumer society?

And that is as close to human nature as I must be in order to understand why people support todays politics of bribing others and getting bribed, of believing in promises and miracles, and not caring for long-termed outlooks and costly consequences in the future.

Irnically, this may be due to the decline of religion. Not that I would admit religion's claims are right, but they focus the perspective on longer time tables, and hint at a final bill - finals bills that today most people tend to ignore, thinking it is not their responsibility and they will not be affected by them. Couple that with the short timespan we learn to have by media hysteria entertainment and a fast living hectic way of life, and there you are.

= = =

Everybody:

as I said, nobody expects you or forces you to read all the above. But if I would have left the reply to Oberon a PM, then the adress by him to me would have stood unanswered in the other thread - and then again you would complain for me having "ignored" him or having no answers to him, and I would need to explain tiem and again why I have not made my reply public. Sorry, my way is the easier solution.

Yoiu can read through all the above, and if you don't want that, then just let it be. Freedom of choice is a great thing, isn't it!? :yeah:

[Tribesman]

Freedom of choice is a great thing, isn't it!? :yeah:
Not according to Hoppe.
Freedom of choice is a great thing only if you accept his choice of what your freedom is, if you don't then you are not a person but an animal which must be punished until tame or simply eradicated for the sake of the real humans.:doh:
As nutty as squirrel excrement:yeah:

[MH]

I dont see anything good coming out of it at the end.
It looks sort of like tribalism future mixed with industrial revolution and corporation rule?:doh:

[AVGWarhawk]

Funny, because I think that I actually lost 3 credits after reading it.

:haha:

[Oberon]

Egads...right, I shall break my reply down and type it out as I go along, bite-sized so to speak. I think this is the best way to reply to this, although it might get a little hard to follow later on in the conversation, but at least the reply quote function doesn't stack like it used to otherwise it would get messy.

@Oberon,

I try this reply to you in two “phases”, first I will address your paragraphs to provide a first general, more specific answer to most of them, although it will be incomplete hints only. After that, I will add – still meant as a reply – a longer text of mine, where hopefully I succeeded in bringing more background thought into a structure that makes it a readable and understandable model or line of thoughts.

Nothing of all that is originally my brainwork's fruits, while I have come to many arguments and criticism like classical libertarians and Austrian school economics all by myself, neither was I the first man on Earth to learn thinking like that, nor did I succeed in putting all those many lose strings together and form one consistent “model” of them, which left me in a state of delusion and irritation, without advice, for as long as I did not stumble over according literature that helped me indeed to put it all together. The value of said literature for me was not to provide me with criticisms and arguments on single details – that far I came all by myself. We all can see how things turn into mess around us, if only we are willing to let loose of our precious self-deceptions and are to open the eyes to the inconvenient truths. But to put it all together to form not many different but just one huge image: that is where I profiteered from these books and where I am thankful to the authors for the help they provided to me by writing these books. Without them, I would have stayed stuck in a dead end: angry, but helpless. Today, I am still angry (even more so than ever), but the feeling of helplessness got replaced by understanding the unforgiving mechanisms behind the events that lead us to where we are heading. That might not be pleasant, but I am a very rational, head-heavy person, my head clearly dominates over my heart. That's me, whatever that tells about me, and wallowing in shallow sentiments or hysteric pathos never was my thing. Understanding even unpleasant things still helps me to bear them more calmly and becoming less concerned. It is the uncertainty, the lacking understanding, that sets me on alarm. If we go down the drain, then at least I want to know WHY we go down the drain.

That's fair enough, although one has to keep an open mind in the matter that there is still the matter of 'if' we do go down the drain, and should we do so it might not be in the manner in which we expect. After all, things in this world rarely occur in the manner in which we expect them to.
You are certainly a 'head-heavy' person, and this I hold you in respect for, no matter what others may say about you, but certainly you write with a passion inspired by the heart and indeed other matters which have occurred within your life which have influenced you, matters which have likely not occurred within mine and thus my viewpoint differs from yours, however this is why we have these conversations so that we may get a better understanding of each others viewpoints. So, let us begin, I have some baroque music playing to help my brain open up a bit, although whether I'll be able to reply to all of this in one evening without sacrificing quality over velocity is another matter, but bear with me, I shall do what I can.


What is freedom? From libertarian POV, it is neither an idea nor an ideal. It can only be defined usefully by understanding that it needs to be understood as a material condition. It bases on property – the ability to gain it (the individual's skill in harvesting wheat from the field it owns, and baking bread), and the right to use it (to consume it, to bake bread – or do something different with the wheat).


When you say property, do you define it as physical property or also include non-physical property. When I think of freedom, I think of the freedom of expression as opposed to a physical object, therefore whilst I am concerned about the erosion of the freedom of speech in some western countries, it is still a much better situation than in the Peoples Republic of China where speaking out against the government might net you a visit from the MSS, likewise in Nazi Germany or the Warsaw Pact, although admittedly you could express discontent with the government in both those nations at a low level without being arrested, but even so, certainly if America was a dictatorship as some people fear it to be, quite a few members of this forum would suddenly disappear. That is not to say that it cannot ever become so, and I can understand peoples concerns about it, but in many cases these concerns turn into paranoia, in a manner of the 'Red Scare' of the 1950s and that can equally be detrimental to the freedom of speech via witch hunts and the like. However, that's enough waffling about what I perceive to be freedom.


It's just that we have been there already. There is a full thread about Hoppe for example
( http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=202945&page=3 ),
and all links I gave in this actual thread, above, have been given before as well. I do not unleash my anger at modern states for the first time either, I have not hidden my uncompromised hostility to our modern ways and goings on several opportunities. I do not will to re-invent the wheel every time. I take it as a basis once it is there.

Even so, within that thread you highlight, you end the introduction with, and I quote:

"If you prefer to still dream on of democracy being the best of all bad options, and consider it to be just and lawful - don't touch it then. Your idols are unlikely to survive this lecture."

Which, whilst placed at the end of a decent appraisal of your feelings towards Hoppe, sour the whole tone of the piece by essentially telling readers that 'if they don't conform to my way of thinking then you have my contempt' which is generally acknowledged to be an inefficient manner of persuading people of your viewpoint. 'My way or the highway' I believe is a saying used to describe such sentiments. Generally this method of presentation leads to driving more people away than it does encouraging people to read your thesis.



??? No. I do not even know the models anthropologists have formed of how it might have been in that era.

When I attack Western states, and states in general, I do it due to two different perspectives on things.

The first is that I see the democratic model being different (already since the ancient Greek) than what it is claimed to be today, and that it does not work, just does not work as advertised – quite the opposite is the case, and many of those malfunctions that in summary are self-destructive to the community, are inbuilt features that do not indicate an aberration of the idea, but are features of it, implications that cannot be avoided.

It's generally understood that mankind began as nomadic tribes moving out from the birth of mankind in Africa, from there some tribes stopped being nomadic and discovered that they could settle down and farm the land. Now, obviously if you take this and run with it, you can see that the more nomadic tribes that settled down, the more settlements there would be, and likewise that those settlements would get larger and maybe even split as the population increased. Then at a certain tipping point two settlements would have a dispute over a stretch of land and conflict would begin. Now it makes sense that there is a safety in numbers, and such separate settlements would band together to protect themselves and their land from external forces, and as such nation-states would begin. This eventually leads, usually through conquest, to the states becoming larger and larger until one large state rules over all the settlements. That has lead us to the current age where the whole world is filled with nations and there is no new land to expand into that is not already occupied by another nation (on this planet anyway).

I agree that the democratic model of today is much far removed from the model envisioned by the Ancient Greeks, as indeed are most ideas that were founded in that era, the world is, after all, a different place and as such ideas have been changed in the face of new challenges. Although I do believe that the Ancient Greeks would have positively loved the way that the internet has brought the world together in a manner to discuss philosophical matters on a scale which dwarf even the largest fora of old. They probably would have enjoyed the porn as well.
Certainly one could argue that democracy as it was originally envisioned in the days of more recent times, has also changed and failed, in that the power is once again placed in the hands of the rich and privileged whilst the poor are expected to toil to feed the aristocracy. However, when you compare the living conditions of the modern age with that of two hundred years ago, you realise that there have been definite improvements, and even so there have been improvements in the equality of democracy. Three hundred years ago the thought of a female Prime Minister would have been unthinkable, in fact just the other day in the United Kingdom we celebrated a woman called Emily Davison, who died in 1913 after throwing herself in front of the Kings racehorse at the Epsom Derby in support of Womans sufferage. In less than a hundred years from Emily Davisons death, women have prominent places in office and there has even been a woman Prime Minister. Of course, it is still a male dominated world, and it is harder for women to advance in British politics than it is for men, but the point is that it is happening.
Democracy is flawed, yes, but so is every single other form of government, there is no magic bullet as every government is made up of people of different ideologies and beliefs, so no matter who is in power and no matter what they do, they will upset someone. It is the curse of the office, and I would not swap places with the President of the United States for all the tea in China, despite the great promises of wealth and power, since no matter what policies I introduced, I would be lampooned and hated by some manner of people.

The second perspective is that I find the alternative ideas that I introduce quite convincing from a rational and reasonable perspective. I know that I argue from a theoretic standpoint on the latter, which is true both for libertarian economics and the libertarian understanding of liberty and ethics. And that theoretic basis by nature is, as Rothbard and Hoppe both explain, a so-called a-priori-theory, which means that its conclusions and theorems base on assumptions and statements that cannot be rationally, logically or reasonably be rejected without creating contradictions or logical fallacies. Is it a proven theory? No, obviously not. But reason speaks strongly in its favour, and refusing the fundament it stands on – natural law – brings you into hell's kitchen.


I can see where you are coming from, and for each of us out there, there is often a well published individual who has expressed ideas who we agree with. The problem comes when these theories are attempted to be placed into reality. Karl Marx made some engaging arguments in his original work, however when it was filtered through humanity we wound up with the Soviet Union which was in many instances a direct contradiction to the ideas of socialism. For each political system that has emerged on this world, it has rapidly differed from the thoughts which gave birth to it.
'No plan survives first contact with the enemy' is a classic saying, oft quoted by those of us who enjoy strategy and tactics alike, however outside of strategy it is still valid in that no political theorem can survive the ravages of human behaviour that is placed upon it, even through the best of intentions, but more often through a sense of greed and lust for power.


My criticism of the present Western states bases on observation of the reality I presently live in, and what I see is going wrong although by democratic theory it should not only not go wrong, but the scenario where it goes wrong should not even be imaginable . When that theory says it should function beautifully, with things breaking apart around me, then that theory cannot be what it claims to be. In other words, it must be faulty, if not all-out wrong..


The gulf of the difference between the theory and the fact can be quite large, and there is no theory out there that would remain unblemished by an attempt to reproduce it in the real world. Even more so, the longer a theory is put into practice, the more it changes, the less it resembles the original theory. For at each turn it is changed, moulded and altered by those within it, either to suit the circumstances of the era or to suit an individuals desire. Does this mean that the theory is wrong? Perhaps, perhaps not, or perhaps it is another example of the gap between our brains and our hearts in that our brains can often come up with fantastic ideas, but our hearts can smash those ideas within minutes. Rational thinking is not the strongest point of humanity, after all, if it were then the world would be a much different place. :haha:




This may or may not have been the case in that long ago era. However, in the era we associate with the term “high cultures”, trade was the deciding factor that led to the lasting economic foundation of huge empires, or not. The complex production cycle allowed complex interaction and cooperation only when monolithic values, like land property or a huge rock of precious ore, could be broken up into smaller quantities of value in order to trade these for small gains one desired (a craftsman's daily service for example) and the gain being so small that it was not justified to give the harvest of one field away for it, or the field itself. You do not trade your barn for getting a liter of salad oil. The solution was an intermediate variable: the introduction of money. And this money was a common trading good like any other, and its value was decided by market interactions amongst trading parties like the value of any other good. Instead of trading A for getting C, which would be a oss to you maybe, you traded A for several quantities of B, and then one quantity of B for C, keeping the rest of Bs for other purposes. This was a revolution in how trade, bartering was done, and only this allowed cooperation of bigger communities to achieve things that one man alone never would be able to achieve.

This gets very comfortably explained in a surprisingly small amount of pages in Rothbard's “What has government done to our money?”, part II, chapter 1-13, 45 pages only. LINK- http://library.mises.org/books/Murray%20N%20Rothbard/What%20Has%20Government%20Done%20to%20Our%20Money. pdf

This is true, and certainly I cannot argue that the system of economics now is so bloody convoluted that it is baffling to the simple man on the street, which has probably helped create the divide between the city and the nation which exists in many western European nations, particularly in the UK.


I just hinted at it: civilisation is trade, trade before anything else, trade generates the revenue to pay for the civilisation growing, blossoming, developing. It is an evolutionary process, and beyond the easiest level of trade – 1 fur for 10 fishes -, when complex production cycles set in, you depend on this intermediate variable: money. No money - no complex trade, no complex production cycles, no communal cooperation efforts producing results surpassing what the single individual could achieve, no specialisation of the individual (which also is an essential quality: specialisation) – in brief: no complex civilisation.

Trade is a founding block of civilisation, I fully agree, and the foundation of money has definitely enabled more complex trading and complex civilisation, and money and trade has also fed that part of human nature that desires improvement by setting forward an easier manner in which a person can achieve his desires. What is being sold has varied over the years, from materials in the early eras, to manpower and ideas in the later years. This has enabled both physical and intellectual labour to flourish through a reward system. As much as I would love to see a world that did not require money to exist, I do not think that such a thing could occur.

Needless to say: we do not have that kind of money anymore, it got intentionally destroyed by states to expose citizens in greater helplessness and vulnerability to the state. More on that later.

I would say that this varies, there is still a market for barter through private means, ebay for example, and although it is a very competative market, there is a market for intellectual labour too. If there was not then people like Mark Zuckerberg would not have amassed a great fortune.
The opportunities are still there, but the competition is so great that many people are unable to get into the market. Is this the fault of the states or the inevitable result of a free market? But yes, we will cover this later.


As I hinted above, the reason for the rise of civilizations is: trade. Help it and foster. Hinder it, see it declining, and see civilization decline and empires fall. And then again the complex productivity cycle, specialisation, all what I said above. If I understand you correctly in what you say, then I think you are misled there in so far as that you seem to misidentify or misinterpret the solid material factors that enable empires and civilizations to blossom. Where there is plenty of ground and population to be supplied with food and stuff, there is needed an infrastructure, a transport of food and water and items and goods and services, there needs to be information traffic for coordination. All this needs specialisation by the individuals, and specialised individuals forming huge communities depend on means and a system of making all these quantities and items “inter-changeable”, so that you could compare their valuer: economic management, fiscal cost-effect calculations. Just having a government, no matter which kind, saying it should be like this or that, does not work. And this is one of the most devastating creiticism you can aim at today'S tyranny of government printed FIAT paper-”money” and fiscal regulation by the state: that both prevent everybody joining the market as producer or customer to form such value comparisons and fiscal cost-effect calculations by eroding the basis on which such comaprsions could be run. For that, a free value-determination of money by the market is inevitably a precondition. But that is what politicians desperately try to prevent.

I am not entirely sure where you are coming from in this respect. I agree that the growth of a civilisation requires the networking of food, water and services...but where it falls apart is when you start mentioning about the prevention of everybody joining the market as producer of customer. Surely we are all in a market of some nature as a producer or consumer. For example, I produce security and cleanliness during my night-shift, for this I am paid and this money then goes into the purchase and consumption of both leisure and necessary items. Therefore at the most basic level I am a producer and consumer. Of course, there are people who are unable to produce, and some who are simply unwilling, and the latter spoil the life of the former by prejudicing the general public and government against them, but that is a rant for another topic completely.
In an indeal world for a government, every member of society would produce work-hours and consume the result of the work-hours of other people. For example, my security and cleanliness enables people who stay at the hotel I work at to sleep in the knowledge that the place is unlikely to burn down around them and when they eat their breakfast in the morning it is unlikely to be shared by a cockroach or a rat. Equally, when I go to a shop, I am paying for the products of someone elses work, be it a person working on an assembly line, or a farmer growing the crops that I eat.
Obviously in todays market the person who grow the crops is likely to live on the other side of the planet, but aside from the fact that the entire world (well, most of it) is a market now, what is the difference between this and the world of six hundred years ago when democracies were rare and few and far between?

Yes - by force and imperial demand of the centralist power. From libertarian POV, enforcing the union that way of course is illegal and immoral. Well. Libertarianism encourages local separation of regional communities from the – national – higher entity. It also is a moral right of the local population to do so, since other people outside that region have no legal or moral claim to make that they must obey these foreigner's commands. We are nobody else's possession, we are nobody else's slaves, we owe nobody our loyalty just because he demands it or due to the fast that we got born. That is the sovereignty of the individual, and it cannot be taken away from nobody and by nobody in a moral way. The political entity on the next higher level of hierarchy of course does not like subordinate regions breaking away, since this means a weakening of its influence and claim for more power. However, to have many city states and small regional communities, where people self-govern their affairs and decide themselves how to interact and trade and have treaties with neighbouring communities and cities – or to compete with them! Very important, this is what has brought Europe to the top of the list of influential civilisations known in human history! - to me seems to be the most promising way to go – although I know it is unlikely that all Europe will go that way. Nevertheless, I mind you that since Brussel claims more and more powers, independence movements that previously existed, got more support, and new movements get founded every year. The crisis in Europe causes many conflicts between people and regions, and the EU is directly responsible for having caused a massive rise in alienation and hostility – it achieves exactly the opposite of what it claims the Euro should bring and what the EU claims to want. Heck even here in Germany some would like to see Bavaria breaking away from Germany. :) If they would, I would move there, probably, if then they still let outsiders in.

Yes, I understand what you mean here. There is only so far that unity of nations can go before it reaches a tipping point. Some people outside of Europe question the likelihood of a giant European superstate emerging, and I laugh at them, since it is incredibly unlikely that European nations could agree on something long enough to do so.
There is definitely a move towards devolution in modern society, in the United Kingdom we have the Welsh assembly and the Scottish parliament, both of whom have to pay lip service to Westminster of course, but it is something that did not exist a hundred years ago.
Of course, the problem lies that, if Bavaria, for example, did seperate from Germany, what would stop Poland from invading and occupying it? Other than the knowledge that to do so would lead to retaliation from the entire German nation, so...even though Bavaria would be seperate from Germany it would still be tied to it in a manner in which the Falkland Islands are tied to the United Kingdom despite being on the other side of the planet, the need for support from an entity larger than itself.

I read that some historians point out that this kind of conflict – separation, or enforced unifying - also probably played the dominant role motivating the American civil war. Where the war for independence was a revolt against the British who after some time of relative laissez faire wanted to impose a stricter tax system again and tighten British control over and possession of “their colonies”, and the revolt thus was a self-defence on behalf of own sovereignty and own freedom, some historians, but also Hoppe, refer to historical quotes by Lincoln that reveal that Lincoln's decision for war against the South seems to have had not much to do with freeing the poor slaves, but with enforcing a claim for centralist power by Washington not only over the North, but the South as well. I got the impression that he just instrumentalised them for his - very different - intentions, but that ending slavery was not an item he had on his radar for the worth of the very issue itself. Also, apparently the centralised power by the whole union's government should had been supported by destroying the independent currencies circulating in the South (there were several, which from libertarianism's POV, seeing money as just a trading good like any other, was perfectly okay and imo makes more economic sense than any other monetarian model I have read about or heard of, and certainly much more than the bad joke of a paper money we have today). The result was a war that ended the southern money market, destroyed the South's economy and thus it's basis for independent survival, and paved the way for the North's centralised political regime taking control not only of the northern but the southern “provinces” as well.

It is certainly an arguement that can be put forward, and from a rational viewpoint it makes perfect sense, after all 'A house divided against itself cannot stand'. If America had remained split into two entities when the First World War broke out, would either entity have intervened in Europe? Or would the war in Europe spread to America in a resumption of hostilities between the North and the South? Either way America as we know it today would be radically different, and I believe not for the better.
So, yes, a rational and calculating mind would certainly see that an empire that is united is stronger both financially and militarily than one that is divided in on itself. A civil war makes for a weakness, and a weak empire is one that is oft preyed upon by other empires. Were it not for the powderkeg like situation in Europe and the dash in Africa, would Britain have decided to invade the US again whilst they were struggling against the CSA? All situations that have been explored in fiction but certainly one cannot deny that Lincoln and those around him would be acutely aware that a divided house is politically, financially and militarily weaker than a unified one. Having the moral crusade to free the slaves makes it easier to sell to the public, and is certainly a just a noble endeavour, be it the primary or secondary objective of the American civil war or not.

Somebody would write later that any democratic state cannot afford to leave its citizen the simpliest form of defence against and escape from state control, that the state must secure total and undisputed control over the citizen's private wealth and property, and that a democratic regime can only live if it installs unhindered access by the state to private property and wealth to be able to expropriate it at will. And that is what Lincoln seems to have been about when destroying the sovereignty of the south, the southern economy, and especially the Southern money system. The same is being done in European states since WWI and the defeat of monarchies by the republican paradigm. The development of money and the rise of the central banks also must be seen in this light. The book on money by Rothbard explains that nicely in the parts III and IV. It is already such a compact book and so easy to read that I will not summarize its content any further. It already is a summary.

I would struggle to suggest that this is a democratic speciality. The control of a citizens private wealth and property is something that has been sought after by the state since the idea of the state was created. This has been going on for longer than the United States of America has existed and certainly before the First World War.
Absolute monarchies, despotism, fascism, socialism, democracies, republics, all of them are governed by people who want control over the people below them. If anything, in todays democracy we are actually able to keep more than those of us who lived three to four hundred years ago, for if one were to scale the sort of tithe taken by feudal lords back in the medieval era to the taxes we pay today, it would be something like 80% of our earnings, with just enough allowed to eat. Nothing for electricity, nothing for internet or luxuries or leisure, and forget education because that would be a challenge to the dominance of the lord over you. Is this merely bread and circuses? Maybe, but it's clearly not wasted on everyone otherwise we would not be having this conversation.


Ever saw a deregulating, declining bureaucracy? A shrinking government? Spendings declining for longer time? Politicians deleting laws? Taxes taken back even if at entry it was said they only are temporary? Sorry, Oberon, if you believe what you say there, then that is very naive, and you prefer to believe what you want to believe only. A bit down this text, I hopefully succeed in explaining that the very nature of a state and especially the democratic state is totally against it. It does not shrink, it mutates, like cancer, it squeezes itself in more and more aspects of people's lives. You cannot deregulate a bureaucracy, for bureaucracy blossoms from expanding regulation. European states and the US are financially suffocating by their ever growing law canons and bureaucracies and ever expanding regulation canons. I read that in the US the number of administrative regulations additional to the laws, that touch upon just every single detail you can imagine, in the past twenty years alone have grown in number and volume by a factor of 120. In Germany, so I read, it is even worse. And more than the half of all global literature about tax systems and laws, written in just any language, more than half of that is about the German tax system alone! The EU promised the believing public that it wanted to battle bureaucracy and over-regulation, and had a commission for deregulation set up, which released regulations to regulate down regulations , resulting now in the labyrinth of regulations having grown even faster.

Oh good lord, I would be naive if I did believe in the ability of the state to self-govern. No, goodness no. I agree that the state does bloat itself out somewhat, sure it tries to cut bits here and there, but civil servants are like cockroaches, you can't get rid of them. There was an old joke that referred to the early L85A1 rifle as the 'civil servant' as it "didn't work and couldn't be fired". Of course, some of these civil servants actually do keep things ticking along in government, more so than any of the politicians whose faces we see on television or in the newspapers. Earlier I stated that I wouldn't be the President of the United States for all the tea in China, because it's a job in which you are doomed to fail to please everyone. Well, when you factor in the grey men which stand behind the President you see that he is merely a sail in the wind, he may push the boat in a certain direction, but it's the civil servants who are the wind that push the sail.
Again, however, this is hardly a byproduct of a democratic system, although it is perhaps more noticable in one because of how much of the system we can see versus how much of it we cannot. Even in an absolute monarchy there were advisers, councillors, the little men who influence the ultimate decision of the monarch.

You are totally on the wrong path there. You believe what officials tell you, probably. That is a very very big mistake. It is officials who live by the system. Limiting the system, limiting its reach and powers, would limit their own material profiteering from it. What do you expect...? I will later argue that politician's best interest is to act immoral and to abuse the public as much as they can. In a causal understanding it is reasonable to do so, in a democracy. Even worse: it is inevitable.

I believe what history and my understanding of the human race as an ultimately flawed species has told me.

But I would like to already question the very premise of your above quote already: why having a king government, nation in the first? ;) The state does nothing better than private initiative and the basis of honest, grounded private business and craftsmen. In fact, states manage everything they take away from private responsibility of people much worse, having smaller net effect while wasting far more resources of that, and causing a plethora of follow-up costs. Spending money that is not yours, is more fun than to spend your own, you know. Pah! That also is an inbuilt feature of democracy, and states in general, that you cannot avoid. And the financial budgets of your nation as well as mine prove it, year for year.

You simply cannot put the genie back into the bottle, my friend. Nations came about through interconnectivity and a need to be strong to prevent other nations from conquering them. Once one group of people banded together they were stronger than those around them, they could take and do anything they wanted, and the individuals around them could do little to stop them, after all, which is stronger in a fight, one person with one gun, or eight people with the same type of gun? As the old saying goes, 'Quantity has a quality of its own', and so to combat this new threat, other individuals had to band together to form their groups.
Now, if a group of people were to split back up again, with no outside aid, it would be quite simple for their neighbours to walk in and help themselves to whatever they wanted through force.
As August put it, those who live by such principles are doomed to be overrun and enslaved by those who do not.

Imagine there are no other states. And in the past, long before kings established relations to far away empires, relations already were run- by traders going there, not even speaking the language at first. But trading instead.

This was in the days when communication took months, nowadays it takes seconds, the world is too small for there to be far away empires any more, and even in those eras, the traders were quite often soon followed by diplomats, or sometimes co-erced into becoming diplomats themselves.

I mind you of one thing: I do not say my suggested “methods” would work in the context of the today existing environmental context. I talk about the environmental context being changed. The question is how to get from “here” to “there”, and honestly said I have little optimism there, and so said Hoppe and many other late libertarians as well. Nevertheless, it is the right thing to suggest the goal to reach out for. It is right to criticise sticking to the self-destructive old ways. If we dare the new ways, maybe we succeed, maybe we lose. If we stick to the old ways now, we are guaranteed to lose, with no chance to even just keep what we gained. We will lose it all.

A good point, and one that should be put in bold really because it is a statement of humility which is something that not enough people connect with your statements on this forum. Of course, the primary problem lies in the old frying pan and fireplace situation, would the new way become even more self-destructive than the old? Would the new way lead to a massive war which would result in the loss of it all? Perhaps, and indeed, you state that if nothing is ventured then nothing is gained, but I think that right now there is far too much inertia in the system for such change to occur.
However, in the near future when resources start becoming more expensive to acquire, and the situation is more dire...well...nothing motivates a person like an empty stomach as they say. Who knows what will come about in the next fifty years in Europe alone, let alone the entire world. I certainly do not expect the sort of fluffy utopia that some do, but a world in which technology may have advanced but human nature remains the same.
Time will tell more than any single word of this conversation can.

That is neither any comfort, nor does it explain why it is wise to stick to democracy. Even more so when the deficits of it necessarily must always pervert it into what it claims to be its opposite: socialism, centralism, totalitarianism, collectivism. Already the ancient Greeks warned of that, they only argued about the order in which these things would follow each other. And they did not appreciate democracy, originally. Not one bit. ;)

Indeed it is no comfort, but it is reality and there is little comfort in it as you and I both well know. :03: In the vast long term perhaps this democracy will not last, Rome did not, and that was hardly a democracy by the end of it. There are hard times ahead, I think we both recognise that, that this Pax Europa will not last. Next year we will mark a hundred years since the Great War, and every time I go to the war memorial in our town and I see the children from the local primary school lined up and reading 'In Flanders fields' I wonder to myself what wars they will see in their lifetimes. Will there be another great European war? Will it involve nuclear weapons? I do not know, although I think the fear of the destruction of what has been built currently weighs greatly on the minds of the people who make the decisions to go to war. It is far easy now to destroy in greater magnitude than it has ever been before, and it is perhaps this fear that has prevented major wars in Europe? It certainly helped to prevent the Cold War from going hot. Again, this is something that only time will tell.


TO BE CONTINUED.

I have run out of time this afternoon to continue writing, so I will continue more tomorrow if and when I have time to get into the right frame of mind.

I can see where you're coming from Skybird, I really can, although at this point in time in this discussion I think that you are prescribing far too much blame towards a system rather than the reasons why that system is corrupted. That being said, I do see through a brief read of the next paragraph that you are moving on to compare the systems, so I shall address that later.

[the_tyrant]

Hey Skybird, I sure hope you aren't married, your wife must feel neglected due to all your writing :O:(and to think you aren't publishing it, just posting it on subsim)

[Skybird]

TO BE CONTINUED.

Oh, I just got threatened! :D
although at this point in time in this discussion I think that you are prescribing far too much blame towards a system rather than the reasons why that system is corrupted.
That is maybe the biggest difference between you (and most people here), and me: I so far ended up thinking that democracy was not so much corrupted (being moved away from an ideal state), but is a corrupt system by nature, from beginning on. At least if it is used as the modus vivendi in communities that exceed a certain size limit. In ancient Greece, the bad reputation of it did not unfold or develop over time. It was present from beginning of the use of its concept on, I understand

The corruption thing is a conclusion I came to over the past two years or so. The size limit for communities is something that is, in different forms and contexts, on my mind since much longer already. Ten years, if not more.

Anyhow, this just as a first quick reply to yours - I have not read your text so far, and just copied it into a text processor to make it easier to read. Will read it later this night, or tomorrow. Thanks for taking the time to type it in - and to read mine. I did not take it as a natural thing that you would. :salute:

[Skybird]

Hey Skybird, I sure hope you aren't married, your wife must feel neglected due to all your writing :O:(and to think you aren't publishing it, just posting it on subsim)No, not married, when it comes to the point of the church ceremony where the priest says "And will you type for your man till death will part you", they all use to turn and run away, screaming.

Women. :dead:

[Tribesman]

That is maybe the biggest difference between you (and most people here), and me: I so far ended up thinking that democracy was not so much corrupted (being moved away from an ideal state), but is a corrupt system by nature, from beginning on.
Yet you miss the key.
It isn't the system or any other of the systems which have been tried which are the problem, the problem is humans.

The corruption thing is a conclusion I came to over the past two years or so. The size limit for communities is something that is, in different forms and contexts, on my mind since much longer already. Ten years, if not more.

So you are back to genocide again. It is the only way to get a population small enough for the little isolated serfdoms you want.
Though of course those the populations of those serfdoms will still have to be regularly culled because people are still the problem even in your utopian dream/nightmare, though even that won't solve the problem as it can only increase the very obvious corruption which is built into the core of your dream system.

[Cybermat47]

Here's my face as I read the text:
:)
:hmm2:
:hmmm:
:06:
:o
:doh:





:subsim:

EDIT: I'm not talking about the content of the text, just the sheer amount of it.

[Skybird]

Oberon,

I would like to start replying to your comments, though maybe not doing it all in one rush, which makes it more comfortable for me to write, and for readers to consume it. Also, for the first paragraphs you can see that I already added quite some extensive quotes, making it a longer reading already again.

Not rushing it and doing stuff in smaller portions maybe also allows us to run this enjoyable discussion for some time to come - who knows? I am with Steve on what he said about the use of published letters in the old days... Reminds me of the long gone years when I played correspondence chess tournaments. :)

When you say property, do you define it as physical property or also include non-physical property. When I think of freedom, I think of the freedom of expression as opposed to a physical object, therefore whilst I am concerned about the erosion of the freedom of speech in some western countries, it is still a much better situation than in the Peoples Republic of China where speaking out against the government might net you a visit from the MSS, likewise in Nazi Germany or the Warsaw Pact, although admittedly you could express discontent with the government in both those nations at a low level without being arrested, but even so, certainly if America was a dictatorship as some people fear it to be, quite a few members of this forum would suddenly disappear. That is not to say that it cannot ever become so, and I can understand peoples concerns about it, but in many cases these concerns turn into paranoia, in a manner of the 'Red Scare' of the 1950s and that can equally be detrimental to the freedom of speech via witch hunts and the like. However, that's enough waffling about what I perceive to be freedom.

Property, and freedom. Well. Two things need to be mentioned here, and they are not just any part of the libertarian ethics: they form the very basis of it. First: the importance of “natural law”, namely the right of original appropriation and owning private property that was legally gained in trade, as a voluntary gift or by original appropriation , and second: the right for self-ownership (which includes the rejection of slavery both in explicit and implicit formats). Both points have have much to do with each other.

The following is by Rothbard, written in 1973, from the “Libertarian Manifesto”. I could as well have taken it from “The Ethics of Liberty” since all that stuff is in that as well (and in so many other of his texts - he was so incredibly productive and educated, additionally to his profession as an economic and political scientist he also was a passionate historian), but in trying to find the English texts (I have for the most in German, of course), I stumbled over this text first and found it matching the need. It focuses on right your opening question: what is property, is it meant physically or non-physically.

http://f4fs.org/murray-rothbard-on-the-fundamentals-of-property/

The most viable method of elaborating the natural-rights statement of the libertarian position is to divide it into parts, and to begin with the basic axiom of the “right to self-ownership.” The right to self-ownership asserts the absolute right of each man, by virtue of his (or her) being a human being, to “own” his or her own body; that is, to control that body free of coercive interference. Since each individual must think, learn, value, and choose his or her ends and means in order to survive and flourish, the right to self-ownership gives man the right to perform [p. 29] these vital activities without being hampered and restricted by coercive molestation.

Consider, too, the consequences of denying each man the right to own his own person. There are then only two alternatives: either (i) a certain class of people, A, have the right to own another class, B; or (2) everyone has the right to own his own equal quotal share of everyone else. The first alternative implies that while Class A deserves the rights of being human, Class B is in reality subhuman and therefore deserves no such rights. But since they are indeed human beings, the first alternative contradicts itself in denying natural human rights to one set of humans. Moreover, as we shall see, allowing Class A to own Class B means that the former is allowed to exploit, and therefore to live parasitically, at the expense of the latter. But this parasitism itself violates the basic economic requirement for life: production and exchange.

The second alternative, what we might call “participatory communal-ism” or “communism,” holds that every man should have the right to own his equal quotal share of everyone else. If there are two billion people in the world, then everyone has the right to own one two-billionth of every other person. In the first place, we can state that this ideal rests on an absurdity: proclaiming that every man is entitled to own a part of everyone else, yet is not entitled to own himself. Secondly, we can picture the viability of such a world: a world in which no man is free to take any action whatever without prior approval or indeed command by everyone else in society. It should be clear that in that sort of “communist” world, no one would be able to do anything, and the human race would quickly perish. But if a world of zero self-ownership and one hundred percent other ownership spells death for the human race, then any steps in that direction also contravene the natural law of what is best for man and his life on earth.

Finally, however, the participatory communist world cannot be put into practice. For it is physically impossible for everyone to keep continual tabs on everyone else, and thereby to exercise his equal quotal share of partial ownership over every other man. In practice, then, the concept of universal and equal other-ownership is Utopian and impossible, and supervision and therefore control and ownership of others necessarily devolves upon a specialized group of people, who thereby become a ruling class. Hence, in practice, any attempt at communist rule will automatically become class rule, and we would be back at our first alternative.

The libertarian therefore rejects these alternatives and concludes by adopting as his primary axiom the universal right of self-ownership, a [p. 30] right held by everyone by virtue of being a human being. A more difficult task is to settle on a theory of property in nonhuman objects, in the things of this earth. It is comparatively easy to recognize the practice when someone is aggressing against the property right of another’s person: If A assaults B, he is violating the property right of B in his own body. But with nonhuman objects the problem is more complex. If, for example, we see X seizing a watch in the possession of Y, we cannot automatically assume that X is aggressing against Y‘s right of property in the watch; for may not X have been the original, “true” owner of the watch who can therefore be said to be repossessing his own legitimate property? In order to decide, we need a theory of justice in property, a theory that will tell us whether X or Y or indeed someone else is the legitimate owner.

Some libertarians attempt to resolve the problem by asserting that whoever the existing government decrees has the property title should be considered the just owner of the property. At this point, we have not yet delved deeply into the nature of government, but the anomaly here should be glaring enough: it is surely odd to find a group eternally suspicious of virtually any and all functions of government suddenly leaving it to government to define and apply the precious concept of property, the base and groundwork of the entire social order. It is particularly the utilitarian laissez-fairists who believe it most feasible to begin the new libertarian world by confirming all existing property titles; that is, property titles and rights as decreed by the very government that is condemned as a chronic aggressor.

Let us illustrate with a hypothetical example. Suppose that libertarian agitation and pressure has escalated to such a point that the government and its various branches are ready to abdicate. But they engineer a cunning ruse. Just before the government of New York state abdicates it passes a law turning over the entire territorial area of New York to become the private property of the Rockefeller family. The Massachusetts legislature does the same for the Kennedy family. And so on for each state. The government could then abdicate and decree the abolition of taxes and coercive legislation, but the victorious libertarians would now be confronted with a dilemma. Do they recognize the new property titles as legitimately private property? The utilitarians, who have no theory of justice in property rights, would, if they were consistent with their acceptance of given property titles as decreed by government, have to accept a new social order in which fifty new satraps would be collecting taxes in the form of unilaterally imposed “rent.” The point is that only natural-rights libertarians, only those libertarians who have a theory [p. 31] of justice in property titles that does not depend on government decree, could be in a position to scoff at the new rulers’ claims to have private property in the territory of the country, and to rebuff these claims as invalid. As the great nineteenth-century liberal Lord Acton saw clearly, the natural law provides the only sure ground for a continuing critique of governmental laws and decrees.1 What, specifically, the natural-rights position on property titles may be is the question to which we now turn.

We have established each individual’s right to self-ownership, to a property right in his own body and person. But people are not floating wraiths; they are not self-subsistent entities; they can only survive and flourish by grappling with the earth around them. They must, for example, stand on land areas; they must also, in order to survive and maintain themselves, transform the resources given by nature into “consumer goods,” into objects more suitable for their use and consumption. Food must be grown and eaten; minerals must be mined and then transformed into capital and then useful consumer goods, etc. Man, in other words, must own not only his own person, but also material objects for his control and use. How, then, should the property titles in these objects be allocated?

Let us take, as our first example, a sculptor fashioning a work of art out of clay and other materials; and let us waive, for the moment, the question of original property rights in the clay and the sculptor’s tools. The question then becomes: Who owns the work of art as it emerges from the sculptor’s fashioning? It is, in fact, the sculptor’s “creation,” not in the sense that he has created matter, but in the sense that he has transformed nature-given matter — the clay — into another form dictated by his own ideas and fashioned by his own hands and energy. Surely, it is a rare person who, with the case put thus, would say that the sculptor does not have the property right in his own product. Surely, if every man has the right to own his own body, and if he must grapple with the material objects of the world in order to survive, then the sculptor has the right to own the product he has made, by his energy and effort, a veritable extension of his own personality. He has placed the stamp of his person upon the raw material, by “mixing his labor” with the clay, in the phrase of the great property theorist John Locke. And the product transformed by his own energy has become the material [p. 32] embodiment of the sculptor’s ideas and vision. John Locke put the case this way:

. . . every man has a property in his own person. This nobody has any right to but himself. The labour of his body and the work of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined it to something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property. It being by him removed from the common state nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed to it that excludes the common right of other men. For this labour being the unquestionable property of the labourer, no man but he can have a right to what that is once joined to . . . 2

As in the case of the ownership of people’s bodies, we again have three logical alternatives: (i) either the transformer, or “creator,” has the property right in his creation; or (2) another man or set of men have the right in that creation, i.e., have the right to appropriate it by force without the sculptor’s consent; or (3) every individual in the world has an equal, quotal share in the ownership of the sculpture — the “communal” solution. Again, put baldly, there are very few who would not concede the monstrous injustice of confiscating the sculptor’s property, either by one or more others, or on behalf of the world as a whole. By what right do they do so? By what right do they appropriate to themselves the product of the creator’s mind and energy? In this clear-cut case, the right of the creator to own what he has mixed his person and labor with would be generally conceded. (Once again, as in the case of communal ownership of persons, the world communal solution would, in practice, be reduced to an oligarchy of a few others expropriating the creator’s work in the name of “world public” ownership.)

The main point, however, is that the case of the sculptor is not qualitatively different from all cases of “production.” The man or men who had extracted the clay from the ground and had sold it to the sculptor may not be as “creative” as the sculptor, but they too are “producers,” they too have mixed their ideas and their technological know-how with the nature-given soil to emerge with a useful product. They, too, are “producers,” and they too have mixed their labor with natural materials to transform those materials into more useful goods and services. These persons, too, are entitled to the ownership of their products. Where then does the process begin? Again, let us turn to Locke: [p. 33]

He that is nourished by the acorns he picked up under an oak, or the apples he gathered from the trees in the wood, has certainly appropriated them to himself Nobody can deny but the nourishment is his I ask then, when did they begin to be his? When he digested? or when he ate? or when he boiled? or when he brought them home? or when he picked them up? And ’tis plain, if the first gathering made them not his, nothing else could That labour put a distinction between them and common That added something to them more than Nature, the common mother of all, had done, and so they became his private right And will any one say he had no right to those acorns or apples he thus appropriated because he had not the consent of all mankind to make them his? Was it a robbery thus to assume to himself what belonged to all in common? If such a consent as that was necessary, man had starved, notwithstand ing the plenty God had given him Thus, the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut, and the ore I have digged in my place, where I have a right to them in common with others, become my property without the as signation or consent of any body The labour that was mine, removing them out of that common state they were in, hath fixed my property in them.

By making an explicit consent of every commoner necessary to any one’s appropriating to himself any part of what is given in common, children or servants could not cut the meat which their father or master had provided for them in common without assigning to every one his peculiar part Though the water running in the fountain be every one’s, yet who can doubt but that in the pitcher is his only who drew it out? His labour hath taken it out of the hands of Nature where it was common . . . and hath thereby appropriated it to himself.

Thus the law of reason makes the deer that Indian’s who killed it, ’tis allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though, before, it was the common right of every one And amongst those who are counted the civilized part of mankind . . . this original law of nature for the beginning of property, in what was before common, still takes place, and by virtue thereof, what fish any one catches in the ocean, that great and still remaining common of mankind, or what ambergris any one takes up here is by the labour that removes it out of that common state nature left it in, made his property who takes that pains about it.3

If every man owns his own person and therefore his own labor, and if by extension he owns whatever property he has “created” or gathered out of the previously unused, unowned, “state of nature,” then what of the last great question the right to own or control the earth itself? In short, if the gatherer has the right to own the acorns or berries he picks, or the farmer the right to own his crop of wheat or peaches, [p. 34] who has the right to own the land on which these things have grown? It is at this point that Henry George and his followers, who have gone all the way so far with the libertarians, leave the track and deny the individual’s right to own the piece of land itself, the ground on which these activities have taken place. The Georgists argue that, while every man should own the goods which he produces or creates, since Nature or God created the land itself, no individual has the right to assume ownership of that land. Yet, if the land is to be used at all as a resource in any sort of efficient manner, it must be owned or controlled by someone or some group, and we are again faced with our three alternatives: either the land belongs to the first user, the man who first brings it into production; or it belongs to a group of others; or it belongs to the world as a whole, with every individual owning a quotal part of every acre of land. George’s option for the last solution hardly solves his moral problem: If the land itself should belong to God or Nature, then why is it more moral for every acre in the world to be owned by the world as a whole, than to concede individual ownership? In practice, again, it is obviously impossible for every person in the world to exercise effective ownership of his four-billionth portion (if the world population is, say, four billion) of every piece of the world’s land surface. In practice, of course, a small oligarchy would do the controlling and owning, and not the world as a whole.

But apart from these difficulties in the Georgist position, the natural-rights justification for the ownership of ground land is the same as the justification for the original ownership of all other property. For, as we have seen, no producer really “creates” matter; he takes nature-given matter and transforms it by his labor energy in accordance with his ideas and vision. But this is precisely what the pioneer — the “homesteader” — does when he brings previously unused land into his own private ownership. Just as the man who makes steel out of iron ore transforms that ore out of his know-how and with his energy, and just as the man who takes the iron out of the ground does the same, so does the homesteader who clears, fences, cultivates, or builds upon the land. The homesteader, too, has transformed the character of the nature-given soil by his labor and his personality. The homesteader is just as legitimately the owner of the property as the sculptor or the manufacturer; he is just as much a “producer” as the others.

Furthermore, if the original land is nature- or God-given then so are the people’s talents, health, and beauty. And just as all these attributes are given to specific individuals and not to “society,” so then are land and natural resources. All of these resources are given to individuals [p. 35] and not to “society,” which is an abstraction that does not actually exist. There is no existing entity called “society”; there are only interacting individuals. To say that “society” should own land or any other property in common, then, must mean that a group of oligarchs — in practice, government bureaucrats — should own the property, and at the expense of expropriating the creator or the homesteader who had originally brought this product into existence.

Moreover, no one can produce anything without the cooperation of original land, if only as standing room. No man can produce or create anything by his labor alone; he must have the cooperation of land and other natural raw materials.

Man comes into the world with just himself and the world around him — the land and natural resources given him by nature. He takes these resources and transforms them by his labor and mind and energy into goods more useful to man. Therefore, if an individual cannot own original land, neither can he in the full sense own any of the fruits of his labor. The farmer cannot own his wheat crop if he cannot own the land on which the wheat grows. Now that his labor has been inextricably mixed with the land, he cannot be deprived of one without being deprived of the other.

Moreover, if a producer is not entitled to the fruits of his labor, who is? It is difficult to see why a newborn Pakistani baby should have a moral claim to a quotal share of ownership of a piece of Iowa land that someone has just transformed into a wheatfield — and vice versa of course for an lowan baby and a Pakistani farm. Land in its original state is unused and unowned. Georgists and other land communalists may claim that the whole world population really “owns” it, but if no one has yet used it, it is in the real sense owned and controlled by no one. The pioneer, the homesteader, the first user and transformer of this land, is the man who first brings this simple valueless thing into production and social use. It is difficult to see the morality of depriving him of ownership in favor of people who have never gotten within a thousand miles of the land, and who may not even know of the existence of the property over which they are supposed to have a claim.


And this is an essay by Hoppe on the question of Ethics and Economics of Property, putting it into a more complete, compact, though summarised form:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/hoppe/hoppe11.html

What's more, you mentioned that you think of - or in context at that point in your text: mean – freedom as the freedom of speech. I quote from The Ethics of Liberty, where Rothbard discusses in chapter 15 how and why “human rights” make only sense if understood as in principle material rights for owning property.

He mentions freedom of speech and explains:

Liberals generally wish to preserve the concept of "rights" for such "human" rights as freedom of speech, while denying the concept to private property.' And yet, on the contrary the concept of "rights" only makes sense as property rights. For not only are there no human rights which are not also property rights, but the former rights lose their absoluteness and clarity and become fuzzy and vulnerable when property rights are not used as the standard.

In the first place, there are two senses in which property rights are identical with human rights: one, that property can only accrue to humans, so that their rights to property are rights that belong to human beings; and two, that the person's right to his own body, his personal liberty,, is a property right in his own person as well as a "human right." But more importantly for our discussion, human rights, when not put in terms of property rights, turn out to be vague and contradictory, causing liberals to weaken those rights on behalf of "public policy" or the "public good."

As I wrote in another work:
Take, fdr example, the "human right" of free speech. Freedom of speech is supposed to mean the right of everyone to say whatever he likes. But the neglected question is: Where? Where does a man have this right? He certainly does not have it on property on which he is trespassing. In short, he has this right only either on his own property or on the property of someone who has agreed, as a gift or in a rental contract, to allow him on the premises. In fact, then, there is no such thing as a separate "right to free speech"; there is only a man's property right: the right to do as he wills with his own or to make voluntary agreements with other property owners In short, a person does not have a "right to freedom of speech"; what he does have is the right to hire a hall and address the people who enter the premises. He does not have a "right to freedom of the press"; what he does have is the right to write or publish a pamphlet, and to sell that pamphlet to those who are willing to buy it (or to give it away to those who are willing to accept it). Thus, what he has in each of these cases is property rights, including the right of free contract and transfer which form a part of such rights of ownership. There is no extra "right of free speech" or free press beyond the property rights that a person may have in any given case.


Even so, within that thread you highlight, you end the introduction with, and I quote:

"If you prefer to still dream on of democracy being the best of all bad options, and consider it to be just and lawful - don't touch it then. Your idols are unlikely to survive this lecture."

Which, whilst placed at the end of a decent appraisal of your feelings towards Hoppe, sour the whole tone of the piece by essentially telling readers that 'if they don't conform to my way of thinking then you have my contempt' which is generally acknowledged to be an inefficient manner of persuading people of your viewpoint. 'My way or the highway' I believe is a saying used to describe such sentiments. Generally this method of presentation leads to driving more people away than it does encouraging people to read your thesis.

I take note of that you see it as being that personal in tone. But I would lie when claiming that I can understand it. Translating the English sentence you quoted into German and using it in that thread at that point, does not raise any emotions in me of the kind you described. I do not see it as such a personal statement about people agreeing or disagreeing with me, but I see it as a reference to the critical attacks of Hoppe against the democratic system of which I think that they have such a logical and rational “penetration” power that it is hard to deflect them by counter-arguments that would convince. I repeatedly said that Hoppe's suggestion for an alternative world design may be more open to debate and difference in opinions - but that he is “unstoppable” when being on the attack against the existing system. To me, this still holds truth. Hoppe is best when he charges against the status quo, there he is most convincing. And to that part I have gotten reactions in the forum only that not only did not convince me rationally, intellectually, but gave me the impression of being strongly motivated by emotional antipathy to him - because he slaughters the beloved golden calf. Well, I would happily hand him the axe. If that destruction of idols is seen as a loss stirring emotions by some, then so be it. I refuse to be considerate of that, since I think it is more important to get this deconstruction done.

It's generally understood that mankind began as nomadic tribes moving out from the birth of mankind in Africa, from there some tribes stopped being nomadic and discovered that they could settle down and farm the land. Now, obviously if you take this and run with it, you can see that the more nomadic tribes that settled down, the more settlements there would be, and likewise that those settlements would get larger and maybe even split as the population increased. Then at a certain tipping point two settlements would have a dispute over a stretch of land and conflict would begin. Now it makes sense that there is a safety in numbers, and such separate settlements would band together to protect themselves and their land from external forces, and as such nation-states would begin. This eventually leads, usually through conquest, to the states becoming larger and larger until one large state rules over all the settlements. That has lead us to the current age where the whole world is filled with nations and there is no new land to expand into that is not already occupied by another nation (on this planet anyway).

That is I think a bit too much of simplifying there, or better: ignoring too many aspects that also weigh in. There are many other factors who most likely also seriously affected the stories unfolding: ethnic and tribal/family identities of factions one confronted of allied with, natural disasters and environmental changes, climatic changes, famines, and the ever-happening trading, bartering. All the time, while the history of coin-money began with the first minting of coins in the 6th or 7th century BC, barter and trade basing on natural law conceptions obviously is much older; using any commodity as an intermediate “currency” for allowing complex trade is much older than minting: before that coin making era, it were rare stones, seashells, beans and the like. “Natural law” may not have been a formulated academic model back then, but it's underlying and obvious reasonability is what makes us think of it and referring to it as “natural”, and thus it probably was the pragmatic basis of many things that happened and many relations, friendly and hostile, that were maintained.

Since I think the history of the past let's say 3000 years (and I really have no intention to link the history of modern states to the conditions of the stone-age cave-owners) is decisvely influenced by the spreading use of money-tokens and later: minted coins, I'd like to refer to an earlier posting by myself on the history of money and previous money-tokens (the latter being used since around 3500 years):

http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=203589&page=6&highlight=history+money+currency+mint

From the far east and Polynesia, over the deserts in Africa, to the Western/European sphere, you could see that tokens that turned into a standardization method for abstract trading processes (establishing trading and complex production lines that in direct 1:1 trade without such tokens was not possible) emerged from more primitive trade-exchange. As I said: money is just ordinary trading goods which are seen by people as valuable, desirable, and are available in sufficient quantity to really penetrate and become omnipresent in the market.
(...)
This German Wikipedia entry is better than the English pendant, it lists several of the early primitive currencies that were used to standardize the value of items in an indirect way so that things could be calculated and compared in their value to each other and trading became able even if you needed to accept to trade for something that was not immediately offering you the thing that you originally wanted. Your cow does not help you if the other needs no cow or you only need three planks of wood, since your cow is too valuable to trade it for just three planks of wood. But by trading it for coins, you get the market-agreed value (that means the value you and the other negotiated and finally agreed to) of the cow, and can use that to pay a craftsman and to buy a piece of wood so that he makes three planks from it for you. That is the difference between primitive bartering to complex trading, and without this expanding of trading complexity you cannot hope to form a huge and influential civilization, culture, empire.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitivgeld

They used: salt, cacao and plant seeds, tea-leafs, seashells, peas, teeth, hair, bones, textiles, "Spangengeld" (bronze era 1200 B.C.), "Axtgeld" (middle America until 1500), Messergeld (knife coins, China 12th-3rd century B.C.), Larin (16th-18th century from the Persian gulf to the Bengalian sea, kind of a metallic wire), "Hackgeld" (bars of precious material where slides got cut off when needed to pay something), and then the wide variety of natural produce. Trading with these intermediate tokens allowed complex trade. When rare metals like silver and gold entered the trading scheme, these primitive forms of a currency transformed into the money currency that we knew until last century. But in principle a currency until today, no matter what currency it is, always means: a certain quantity/weight of a material that is agree by the market to serve as a carrier material for standardizing these quantities: by forming them into coins with a certain specified amount of that material, or bars.

For more detail I refer again to Rothbard's “What the state has done to our money?”, part II, and additionally: Carl Menger, “On the Origins of Money”.

TBC

[Tribesman]

I take note of that you see it as being that personal in tone. But I would lie when claiming that I can understand it. Translating the English sentence you quoted into German and using it in that thread at that point, does not raise any emotions in me of the kind you described. I do not see it as such a personal statement about people agreeing or disagreeing with me, but I see it as a reference to the critical attacks of Hoppe against the democratic system of which I think that they have such a logical and rational “penetration” power that it is hard to deflect them by counter-arguments that would convince. I repeatedly said that Hoppe's suggestion for an alternative world design may be more open to debate and difference in opinions - but that he is “unstoppable” when being on the attack against the existing system. To me, this still holds truth. Hoppe is best when he charges against the status quo, there he is most convincing. And to that part I have gotten reactions in the forum only that not only did not convince me rationally, intellectually, but gave me the impression of being strongly motivated by emotional antipathy to him - because he slaughters the beloved golden calf. Well, I would happily hand him the axe. If that destruction of idols is seen as a loss stirring emotions by some, then so be it. I refuse to be considerate of that, since I think it is more important to get this deconstruction done.


And that is where you are completely wrong.
Hoppe like you say identifies problems and argues against their existance.
It is where he excels because it is very very easy.
The hostility towards Hoppes dreamworld isn't his attacks on the problems, it is the plain lunacy of his solutions.
It is well illustrated by his use of historical ideals he wants to follow which clearly create the very problems which he is saying they can get rid of.
The only emotion is from people who have swallowed Hoppe whole like a grade school student who read Marx and passionately thinks they have discovered some wonderful panacea that the ignorant masses just can't see.
It is those wonderful fans of the fanciful ideal which are emotional about their new idol, which is very easily slaughtered.

[HundertzehnGustav]

I like this passage by oberon a lot:

The gulf of the difference between the theory and the fact can be quite large, and there is no theory out there that would remain unblemished by an attempt to reproduce it in the real world. Even more so, the longer a theory is put into practice, the more it changes, the less it resembles the original theory. For at each turn it is changed, moulded and altered by those within it, either to suit the circumstances of the era or to suit an individuals desire. Does this mean that the theory is wrong? Perhaps, perhaps not, or perhaps it is another example of the gap between our brains and our hearts in that our brains can often come up with fantastic ideas, but our hearts can smash those ideas within minutes. Rational thinking is not the strongest point of humanity, after all, if it were then the world would be a much different place.

I could boil it down to:
Between our Dreams for our future Society (Concepts, Theories) and the application of these, there is a Problem, it is Ourselves.

In a very rough manner, Humans are too flawed to achieve what we could achieve.
Our bad ways hinder us from moving forwards.
Too dum for our own good.


Enjoying the reading so far. It is a bit "deeper" than what i expect from a gaming forum, but that just adds to the value. It is educating to see two guys send their ideas back and forth.
thank you Neal, Thank you Subsim, thank you Authors.

[Oberon]

Right, I shall finish with the original post before I tackle your reply to my replies otherwise we'll be tail-chasing forever more. :haha: I've started so I'll finish as the great Magnus Magnusson used to say.


It also implies that there is no reason to not trust a monarchy, then. When democracies prove time and again that by their design after short time already just lousy opportunists and liars, blenders and propagandists, criminals and dilettantes can claim the top offices in elections after they babbled the public dizzy, and when they have an interest of not keeping the nation's resources together since their claim for them is limited in time only, so that everybody in office instead wants to abuse them to the maximum he can achieve - why not trusting in a feudal family instead that then has an interest to manage wisely, to keep it all together over long times, so that not some bullsh!t talking spineless a*****e or ideologically ambitioned messiah may end in office because he “got elected”, doing an enormous amount of damage in an amazing short period of time, but some son or daughter who got prepared all youth long in education and training for the post he/she later would claim – the crown – wouldn't one see at least a chance that the likelihood of unsuited persons coming to power in a monarchy at least is not higher than in a democracy? By the record our states have to show, I would even say that monarchies tend to show much better records here. If this is the case, and democratic regimes tend to enslave their citizens anyway and nowadays politicians behave like new feudal lords to whom the population must account (instead of the other way around!) - why then favouring democracy over monarchy?

Well, this is true in some respects, however history is littered with as many defective monarchs as there has been defective Prime Ministers or Presidents, and the detachment between the monarchical system and the people it governs has been just as big if not bigger than a present democratic system. If this was not the case then there would not have been a revolution in France or Russia, or a civil war in England, although admittedly there were plenty of other factors in the origins of these events but traditionally it has been accepted that within the nobility there is a certain disconnection with the plight of the common people.
What differs this from democracy? Perhaps the illusion of choice, after all you're stuck with one Monarch, in a two party system then you can at least change the face of the idiot trying to sell you a dream.
Why would I favour a democracy over a monarchy? Having never lived under a monarchy I couldn't tell you for certain, however when I examine the abuses of feudal lords of their subjects in the Dark Ages and Medieval eras, taxation far and beyond the sort that we experience today, then I am grateful to be in this era than then, not that I would know the difference.

And check on genocides and wars' death tolls. You will see that democratic regimes kill differently than totalitarian regimes – but that the death toll they have to accept resp0nsibility for is even slightly higher than with totalitarian regimes. Dictators kill themselves – democrats leave the killing done to somebody else. - Maybe you recall, several years ago we had that in a forum discussion.

I don't recall the discussion off hand, but I honestly can't really see where you're coming from here. Hitler is widely regarded as a dictator, but outside of the First World War he didn't actually kill anyone directly, likewise Hirohito and yet both were responsible for the deaths of thousands, and thousands of people. It's been a very long time since the leader of a nation has been on the battlefield and directly killed people, well, in Western Europe anyway.

My point is that a democratic state necessarily must go corrupt. That's one of the main reasons why the democratic state itself is the problem. It is not sustainable/enduring/long-time surviving. And it always leads to a planned, bureaucracy-run socialist economy. Which in itself also is a verdict against the economy surviving.

What makes this different from any other political system? Yes, democracy is flawed, but that is because it is a system created by a flawed species, just like the socialist system.

Tell that the Swiss. I would direct you to the more detailed explanation on how security, military, police and justice would run in a private law society. Again, it comes down to voluntary cooperation and signing for mutually agreed business contracts. There is no argument why robust defence should be something only a government could provide. A STATE, A GOVERNMENT ITSELF MORALLY OWNS NOTHING! It abuses its status of acceptance to legalize robbing that it conducts. It talks populations into believing that they owe part of their private property to the “government”, and the government not only claims the right to steal that, but also claims the right to make laws legalizing this, and deciding on how much it may steal. And maybe steal more later. No matter what the citizen thinks or would agree to. Specialisation! There will be private business that provides policing n and legislative service. Insurance companies. Hoppe explains in many of his essay in quite some more detail how such companies would interact, form cooperations in policing and legal services, and that it could function as long as there is competition, no monopolising, so that people can chose between competitors if they are not satisfied with the service provided by one. They play foul – people will leave them and sign deal with another one. Or move to the neighbouring small community where in their view living is better. Why should this not be able to be organised by the population in a region by its own free will and decision, why is it that some far away centralist clique of parasites makes laws and decisions that are valid for millions and that all too often are so very disconnected form the realities on location? This is especially a problem with the EU, of course. Why must there be a transnational government telling me which light bulb to use, which browser head to use, how to live healthy, what diet to eat, at what increase I have to give away my private property and wealth, what policies of theirs I need to accept, what migration I have to tolerate, what cultures I have to respect, why must we save water in Germany, very rich in water, because the same amount of water they demand to be saved in Spain – isn't that like me needing to use sun-oil in rainy Germany because on the Spanish Riviera there is sunshine? And so on and on. Who is the government – national or transnational - to tell us that we must do it this or that way, and must do it not for ourselves, but for others?

The Swiss Confederacy had Imperial immediacy under the Holy Roman Empire, if someone had tried to invade the Swiss Confederacy I would wager that the HRE would have not stood for it. Look what happened when the HRE was on the verge of defeat by the French, the Helvetic Republic occurred. Then, following the defeat of the French in the Napoleonic wars, the Swiss federalised after a civil war and became the Switzerland of today. Had the Swiss remained a faction of several independent states without a central military command then they might not have faired quite so well in the First and Second World Wars. Certainly they would not have had the luxury of remaining neutral in European affairs without a strong military defensive presence.

I am not naive, I know there is invitation for abuse of business, in capitalism, there has always been the effort to deliver the smallest amount for the highest price, and this trend can lead to monopolies, and that is a big problem, yes. I have no complete solution than in theory calling for securing competition. But I mind you – THE BIGGEST MONOPOLIST OF ALL IS THE STATE! And it provides the worst service of lowest quality for the highest money, and all what it wastes it steals from the citizens!

I'd say that the state is certainly a big monopolist, but I would doubt that it is the biggest, certainly when you examine multi-national companies, some of whom have a greater GNP than some democratic nations. Would I trust the government to run a critical service? Once upon a time perhaps I would have, but since the trend in government now, greater than before, is to provide a profit over a service then I would question the ability of the state to provide a service.
Of course, privatization doesn't always equal success. In the United Kingdom, British Rail was privatized in the 1990s, it has split into several smaller companies, some of whom provided such appalling service that the railway was taken away from them, and since then the amount of companies has shrunk and now we're in a situation a bit akin to the 1920s when the dozens of smaller railway companies had amalgamated into the 'Big Four' which eventually were nationalised after the war.
Has the system improved? Not particularly, the trains still run late, some worse than in BR days, and ticket prices have gone through the roof.
So, I'd say that the state is equal to some businesses in terms of abuse of monopolies, but certainly no greater than some.


One hundred years ago. ;)

Then came America's Wilson, realising that America could increase its influence only in the world if monarchies in Europe are being destroyed. And so they did – seen from an American POV, WWI just came at the right time. Very opportunistic timing indeed. There also was a very strong personal antipathy in the clique around Wilson against monarchy. Hoppe explains that with the German emperor they could ,live, after all the Germans appeared to be quite sober and rational to them - but whom they really hated were the Habsburger, representing anything in shine and history that they wanted to leave behind in America when kicking the British out. That's why they made sure after the war that almost nothing of the Donau monarchy survived. Germany was economically exploited, since the opportunity was financially so inviting, but the Habsburg empire was destroyed for the sake of just destroying it. Not the fist time I heard that Wilson and his cabinet had very strong personal animosities against the Habsburger.

Not particularly. The United Kingdom has moved towards a democratic system since the Civil war, the monarch has increasingly become little more than a figurehead since that era. In fact if you look at the Bill of Rights of 1689, there are some similarities to the US Bill of Rights which was (IIRC) based upon it.
In regards to European monarchies, well, post-French revolution there were not a great deal of them left that were not primarily figureheads, even the German Empire was going that way until Wilhelm II reasserted his right to rule which lead to Bismarcks resignation. Would the First World War have taken place if Bismarck had still had control over Germany's foreign affairs? Would millions of people still have died in the battlefields of Flanders? Who can say?
I think that saying that Woodrow Wilson had a vendetta against the Habsburg-Lorraines is a bit of a stretch, certainly the US government would have had no love of a monarchical family but I think to place upon it all the ills of post-WWI Germany and Austria is a bit simplistic.
The downfall of the German Empire was, ultimately, the ineptitude of Kaiser Wilhelm II in his foreign affairs, had he taken Germany down a slightly different route, well, the Empire might still exist in some form today, but as it was he only served to add to tensions that already existed amongst the powerhouses of Europe and increase the chances of a conflagration. I don't blame Wilhelm II solely for the First World War, that would be stupid of me, and to be honest I suspect that even if Bismarck had stayed in power the Great War would have happened in some way, some how, because the road to war was paved in the late 1800s.

Hoppe is realist, and not optimistic at all, as I said before. Also, for him and in a way already for the ancient Greek it is clear that democracy is just an early phase of communism, with socialism forming the transition in-between, the ochlocracy – the tyranny of the canaille. Democracy and socialism/communism are no opposites or different things. The opposite to them all is individuality and statelessness. I hope to illustrate that a bit more later, after answering your text.

An Ochlocracy is probably a good description of the current situation of democracy, and one could argue that the ultimate destination of a Ochlocracy is an Oligarchy. I would also add Kleptocracy to the list, Plutocracy too, and perhaps a descent into a Illiberal democracy.
Is this a transition to communism? Not in its strictest form, because the ideals of communism is to create a state-less society, rather than a society in which the state controls everything. True Communism has never been achieved, only bastardisations of the original idea. So, what has been called a Communist state (such as the Soviet Union or the PRC) is really and truly a dictatorship (or to give it its proper name, a dictatorship of the proliteriat) which in turn becomes a Oligarchy or Ochlocracy.

First, politicians LOVE crises : it is the opportunity for them to manage, to do, to smile into cameras and to shine with actions (no matter how shallow and dumb they may be) – and to release new rules and legislations that widen their power and widen the state's reach and boost the law code and the bureaucracy for even more suppressions emitted by these against the people. Crises allow to install more control, to claim more power for the state, to have more rules telling the people what to do. Crises are jackpot wins for politicians.

Definitely, not going to disagree with you there. One only has to look at what 9/11 did for the career of President Bush and the Falklands War that for Margaret Thatcher, to be seen as a strong leader in a time of crisis endears a leader to the people, and enables the leader to get away with whatever reforms he wants to make in the name of response.
As Goering put it "Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Second, if a disaster takes place on a global level that would reduce the population levels by that scale you mention, then global civilisation would collapse, and it's hierarchical levels would desintegrate in reverse order in which they got established and created. Pretty much like any life forms seems to die, too – higher functions fail first, basic functions fail last.

Not disagreeing. Although the human race would likely endure depending upon the nature of the disaster.

Who mentioned civil wars? I did not, nor do libertarians, nor did Hoppe. You have to realise that it is any regional populations' moral right to decide to stay in a union with somebody else, or to split up. The greater entity of course wants to prevent that, but fact remains that from a libertarian point of view people the the moral right to decide freely on their company, to stay with somebody, or to split up, or to leave and move somewhere else. A state denying that, again already suppresses people and acts criminally. It is simply panic-calling to say that Europe will fall into war when the Euro gets destroyed – or when nations split up. Have you realised how much conflict was created last century, in the past 20 years alone, by pressing together people who do not want to live together (Balkans)? By creating arbitrary new states, at the cost of the one and the profit for the other? And again, Europe saw its greatest cultural blossoming in times and circumstances when still not all big European states had formed up (pre-Germany, pre-Italy namely). Think away these two alone – and see how much would be missing what later condensed to the strengths and advantages founding the – now over – era of Europe's global dominance and cultural greatness! Never has a culture had such an amount of global influence before and after. Only Islam comes to mind – and that is no creator of culture, but a destroyer with the only power to destroy humane culture. Neither Rome nor the ancient Chinese ever had such an amount of global influence in the past.

You make a good point, however I hope you realise that with the reference to civil war in America I was joking. :03: (in particular the reference to the Monroe Republic and Cheyenne was to two television series, 'Revolution' and 'Jericho' respectively). However in order to break a nation down, you need to have something that is so strong that it overcomes the bonds which hold it together. Obviously the strength of these bonds varies from nation to nation, depending upon its individual circumstances, it took the collapse of a superpower to break apart Yugoslavia after all. Although the Balkans have historically been a very fractuous area hostile to any form of unification, heck, they even invented a term for the break-up of a unified nation after it 'Balkanization'. Although one could argue that the creation of Kosovo was more 'Pakistanization' than it was 'Balkanization'.
The weakening of the bonds that hold nations together though can come through a vast number of scenarios and I don't deny that such a scenario can take place within Europe or any other nation on this planet given the passage of time.
Perhaps our differing viewpoints on this come from the historical backgrounds of our nations? It's harder for me to understand the fractioning of nations because England has been unified for well over a thousand years, obviously when you zoom out a bit and bring in Scotland, Ireland and Wales into the picture then it gets a bit more difficult, but when you compare it to Germany which is a relatively modern construct and has shifted borders a lot over the past millennia in comparison to the island bound relatively static Great Britain (excluding our colonial exploits of course). Of course, we've been overrun by foreign nations from time to time, but our borders have remained relatively the same. Therefore to someone from England it seems completely unthinkable that, for example, Northumberland would form a separate nation-state from its neighbours. Whereas in Germany or America, the idea is seen as a positive thing.

BTW, in Switzerland, they practice voluntary merging and splitting of Kantons, until today.

I did not know that. How is it organised? Must be an administrative nightmare. :haha:

And over all of Europe you see a growing intensity and number in regional independence movements as a reaction to Brussel's brutal grab for totalitarian control, and enforced collectivising.

Of course, because for each action there is a clear and opposite reaction. Brussels grabs for more power, people shy away. I don't think that Brussels will ever achieve its goals, simply because, as I have repeatedly stated on the subject, you simply cannot mesh together a collection of nations that have spent the last millenia brutally murdering each other. The idea of a global super-state is a pipe-dream, not because of any libertarian belief but simply because human beings struggle to co-operate with each other for long periods of time, after all the longer the amount of time that people are together, the more they find to disagree about.

I do not care for political parties, for now hopefully obvious reasons. They must go, they are vicarious agents in the destruction of cultural life and liberty, they pout their own power interests before that of state reason and the people of which they live like blood-sucking parasites that crawl into people's brains and tell them to do what parties tell them to do; and while they are that totally and completely a part of the state-system that they are form up together with the bureaucracy, they necessarily help the state to grow and enforce its regime on the people. They also play the bribe game that I referred to as the “democratic disease”. Political parties are the visible symptoms of the cancer that destroys liberty from within. They are to libertarian politics what religious dogma and institutions are to true spirituality.

Political parties must go. Career politicians just go. Voluntarily, or by ropes around their necks – their choice. The means I do not care for, the goal is the priority – and the goal is they must go.

The only thing that prevents me from agreeing with you is concern over what they would be replaced with. Time and again history has shown us nations that have thrown off the yoke of one oppressor only to put another one into office. Sometimes the best choice really can be the devil that you know.


Do you really believe in this either-this-or-that black and white scheme? Do you seriously believe something just because father government says so, and prints it on an official document with an emblem on top? You are not that over-credulous, are you?

Has it ever come to your mind, that that Islamic migration is wanted by politicians because they vote for them and thus form an increasing voter basis supporting them in their idea of redesigning the ideological basis of the nation? The German Greens, their leaders, for example said it like this very clearly some years ago. 90% of Muslim migrants at that time voted left-leaning. What takes place is nothing else but a redesigning of the electorate's composition to influence the outcome of future elections and by that securing the left party's power basis. It is the same concept that all parties support when lowering the voting age. First it was 21. Then 18, now they make it 16. Their minds are unformed, the knowledge untested, life experienced almost non-existent, their character never challenged, and their thinking is easy to be manipulated, paroles can easily be implemented, and when you are young, left slogans for “justice” easily catch prey, unreflected and untested by minds that are easy to be ignited in enthusiasm for “a better world”.

Also, Islam is a authoritarian ideology in style, it teaches the individual submission, obedience, uncritical attitude, non-thinking. Western states do not wish for educated and informed citizens, that is a lie. The sovereign citizens is not wanted. The obedient, servile drone functioning and doing and ticking like demanded by politics is what states want. You shall not live by your morals, you shall live by the politically correct morals. That is two morals that are lightyears apart.

I said it earlier: politicians LOVE crises, and social conflicts are their most favourite ones. They can push wealth redistribution, they can fire the arsenal or fighting terms like “social justice” and “solidarity”, they can call for more state in order to regulate unjust conditions here, wealth inequality there, and what do you say: schwuppdiwupp you have more laws, and more indoctrination, and most important: MORE INFLUENCE AND LEGAL COMPETENCES FOR THE STATE.

So what is the answer? The destruction of migration? Because then aren't you restricting the libertarian right of people to choose their company? Or is it the destruction of a group of people based upon religious beliefs, in which case you would be creating genocide greater than any democracy has created. How do you combat religious extremism without restricting libertarian rights or creating mass genocide?

---------------------------------------------

In regard to your further thoughts, I may come back to them at a later time or in reference to future discussions, for I think that for me to address each one in turn would bloat this conversation a bit too much, however it is a good reference to your beliefs and perhaps at some point one day I will get around to putting down a similar series of thoughts of my own.
I recently stumbled upon the concept of Nihilism (well, I say stumbled upon, I had been aware of the term for a long time but not researched it or read up on it much) and I am intrigued by it, and the existential thinking of the likes of Nietzsche, this understanding of the fundamental flaws of humanity, to me, leads to a greater understanding of political systems and their failings than that understood by the seemingly optimistic Ancient Greeks.
To understand that humanity is an imperfect species gives you the ability to acknowledge that any product of humanity is also an imperfect thing, and to replace one flawed system with another flawed system by externally seem a fantastic idea, it generally boils back down to the same system, power in the hands of the few over the many.

[Skybird]

It helps to have it all in a separate word document, adding the latest replies at the bottom of the existing list,there I also colour code your and my entries, earlier quotes, and quotes from literature.

As I said, I see no need to rush this, so I will do it in sequence of your returns, but in smaller heaps. When you do not hear from me one or two days, that does not mean you have been forgotten.

It takes two to tango. Thanks for falling in to the tune! ;)

[TarJak]

This why we have private messages.

No this is why we have books.

[Skybird]

I agree that the democratic model of today is much far removed from the model envisioned by the Ancient Greeks, as indeed are most ideas that were founded in that era, the world is, after all, a different place and as such ideas have been changed in the face of new challenges. Although I do believe that the Ancient Greeks would have positively loved the way that the internet has brought the world together in a manner to discuss philosophical matters on a scale which dwarf even the largest fora of old. They probably would have enjoyed the porn as well.

Could it be that you have misunderstood me there, 180° reversed? My point is that the ancient Greeks despoised democracy, and explicitly warned of it. Two or three months ago I used a brief summary by Rahim Taghizadegan, an Iranian living in Austria and founder of the “Institut für Wertewirtschaft” (institute for value-based economics), he is about economics, history, politcal science, cultural anthropology and theology. About the institute (the opening page in English):

http://wertewirtschaft.org/en/index.php

He has released one essay which so very unfortunately is only available in German, for whatever it is worth I nevertheless link it, it explains in compact format how it was with democracy in an ancient Greece. It's not my only basis for assessing Greek history, but I like it for its very handy and compact format. The key issues imo it gets right.

http://wertewirtschaft.org/analysen/Demokratie.pdf

In an older thread ( http://www.subsim.com/radioroom/showthread.php?t=203589&page=4 ), I summarized part of that like this:

The Greek had no illusions about democracy. They favored a small social elite that was about 5% - maximum 15% of the total population to be allowed in assemblies to vote on issues that affected the community. These 10% had to be males, they had to be rich and materially contributing to the community, they had to believe in the gods and they must honored their parents and forefathers and pay respect to the rites by which the dead forefathers got remembered and honored. Especially the latter was very important and was called for examination not rarely when a new young man demanded access to the assembly. These people were what constitutes the “citizens” of the community. The others - were of lesser social value than citizens. In other words, citizens were an elite, a minority, and a privileged group that also had to live up to the responsibility they had to accept.

In ancient Greece, the "demos" originally meant a small village, and later the "deme" was the smallest local administration cell (surprise, surprise: again the reference to having communities as small as possible!). The "demos" was not the totality of the whole population. At that time, the governing inside the demos meant the self-governing of the "citizen". But the citizens were an elite that was different to the ordinary population. The term "citizen" originally referred to an organized band of armed men - a small military unit, in other words. Men who served under arms were seen as free people and were full citizens, whereas unfree people - most of the population - were forbidden to carry arms or to gain access to the governing assembly.

So, where "democracy" was meant at those times in a positive context, it meant something like the self-governing of small administrative entities like a small city, and one criterion was that from the top of the hill where the assembly met outside the city walls, all of the country and community being governed must have been in view, and places that laid beyond that viewing range could not be claimed to be part of this community. In these assemblies, orthodoxy and conservatism were demanded and defended to protect culture, identity and rites, and the way this elite was identified could only be described as being aristocratic.

Rahim Taghizadegan mentions also this nice little detail: the realm of public affairs, in whose governing the citizens (the free, arms-carrying men) were not only allowed but were expected to participate and take up responsibility, was called "demosios". On the other side, there was the "idios", the sphere of privacy, private household, the non-public life behind the walls and doors of your home. This was seen in a negative, disadvantaged connotation, because the “idiot” was a poor dog or a fool or an unfree man who had to do the work in the household or his job and had no time and no inspiration to make a personal engagement for public issues, he lacked the education for that as well, and finally was not allowed to do that. Thus our modern negative understanding of the term "idiot". Taghizadegan points out that this discriminatory weighing was necessary and understandable, because the private household - the "oikos" - was holy and untouchable (protected private property as well, not that caricature of property protection we have today), whereas to safeguard the common good and a solid living basis for all the community - the "polis" -, public engagement was necessary as well. To engage yourself in the public part of the demosios was needed and encouraged and thus was seen positive, compared to somebody just withdrawing into the privacy of his own life in his home where he could not be of any use for the common good.

So, with this idea of aristocracy, there also came an understanding of that the aristocracy had to accept the responsibility coming with the privileged status. There also was the understanding that not everybody had what it takes to be part of that elite, both in character features and education and wisdowm, and in material wealth and fiscal/economic autonomy. Those without having own investments at risk (the ordinary man, the unfree, the slaves, the poor, all of whom did not own much or nothing) were excluded from decision making so that they could not make decisions that would redistribute other people's private property that was not theirs and direct it into their pockets (I cut it very short, you get the point, I hope). Also there was understanding that not just every stranger, just because he was wealthy, could be allowed into the aristocracy if he did not accept and integrate into the cultural context of rules, rites and traditions, because that would destroy the cultural identity of the whole polis. And finally there was understanding of the need that those wanting to decide needed to be of the education standards to be able to decide, intellectually and morally and with reagrd to knowledge and experience, while it would be a great danger if just any imbecile dumbhead, who had his intellectuality from counting flies in the streets, were allowed to effect the future of the polis.
(...)
The Romans followed that separation between aristocratic public life and idiotic private life, calling them "res publica" and "res privata". "SPQR" in the legions' emblems indicated the one-identity of the army and the senate - the citizens (free, carrying arms, male) and the political privilege to participate in governing. [Where one legion stood in the field, there was - at least symbolically - present the senate of Rome also] While senators and legionaires were not one and the same in person, that the soldiers still were speaking for the senate as if they were them, was implied.

In modern times, some fascists argued and still argue that only those who have served in the army, are real citizens and should have full rights to civil rights and offices of political power.

You see, democracy is a highly discriminatory (and to some degree even intolerant) affair. It refers to self-governing local communities of very small size, that function feudalistically-aristocratically, are hierarchically structured, that clearly differed between “us” and “them”, and where the majority principle - that today we mistake to be the most important feature of democracy - only was used in the governing assembly of the “full citizen's” elite, which only 5-15% of the population were part of.

In other words, today's modern understanding of "democracy" is a distortion that has little to do with the original meaning of it, and which was far more negatively seen by many Greek philosophers. When the Greek city states grew in size and corruption blossomed as a side effect from that, democracy was made available to the wide public, the citizenship was opened for access for more non-elitarist people, and there it all started to go down the drain: Athens leading the way. From that time on, "democracy" became synonymous with the "tyranny of the majority" , the "dictatorship of the canaille". It then was seen as something that was to be avoided, at all cost.

Max Weber's phrase "Dilettantenverwaltung durch Beutepolitiker" (=dilletantic administration by predatory politicians) describes it quite well.

I remind of that even the American founding fathers were decisevely anti-democratic, a fact that really took me many years and more than just one hard swallowing to see and to understand. That the people shall have a govenrment, although with the idelaistic right to rerplace it if they desire that, is not part of the declaration of independence, but just came later, with the constitution. Still, until the time of around WWI, the reputation of “democracy” in the feuilletons, the political and artistic elites, the general “intelligentsia”, was predominantly negative.

That's what I mean when pointing out that the good reputation of democracy today is a relatively young and new phenomenon in human history, with the justification of that fame still not confirmed so far. Considering that it necessarily leads to the robbing of the few on behalf of the many, it is no surprise that the majority mob seems to like it - not understanding how in the end it is at their own cost, too. Most people's time preference, as I explained earlier, is such that they prefer the immediate or imminent smaller reward at cost of higher future costs over greater rewords in a distant future, with risks involved. That is where I would start mentioning this thing of “human nature”.


Certainly one could argue that democracy as it was originally envisioned in the days of more recent times, has also changed and failed,

I again must oppose what I believe to identify as your intention to imply that democracy in principle is something positive, but just gets distorted or abused or perverted and so becomes something that then represents the original idea turned into its fallen, degenerated state. As I see it, democracy for the ancient Greeks meant a state of generation in general – there is no positive format of democracy, neither the way it got used back then, nor as it is understood today. As I said earlier, the concept has implications that imo makes it a very questionable concept from all beginning on – by its most inner essence and nature. And that the Greeks held it in so low esteem and warned of it, imo reflects that. Its not as if they were first celebrating it, and then learned to warn of it. The warning of it is part of its very beginning already, and they tried to keep it on very short line. Like a disease is nothing that was once good and then turned into something bad, but was nothing but really only a disease haunting the people from the time on when it first showed up. The ideal condition would be not the disease in its imagined, idealized form when it was if not good so then at least nevertheless harmless - but to not have the disease at all.

in that the power is once again placed in the hands of the rich and privileged whilst the poor are expected to toil to feed the aristocracy. However, when you compare the living conditions of the modern age with that of two hundred years ago, you realise that there have been definite improvements, and even so there have been improvements in the equality of democracy. Three hundred years ago the thought of a female Prime Minister would have been unthinkable, in fact just the other day in the United Kingdom we celebrated a woman called Emily Davison, who died in 1913 after throwing herself in front of the Kings racehorse at the Epsom Derby in support of Womans sufferage. In less than a hundred years from Emily Davisons death, women have prominent places in office and there has even been a woman Prime Minister. Of course, it is still a male dominated world, and it is harder for women to advance in British politics than it is for men, but the point is that it is happening.

I would like to scratch the paint on that idealised line of thoughts, too, at least a bit, but I would automatically link all what you say here necessarily with the history of feminism (okay) and ultrafundamentalist, radical feminism and today's modern renaissance of it under the proxy-term genderism, and for the sake of not drowning in this already complicated and content-heavy exchange I would at least for this thread prefer to not go into this thematic complex, at least not for the time being. So, for a parting over this theme, I only say I do not agree with what you said at least due to the way you put it, I see problems there.

Maybe we will have another thread like this one, just over feminism and genderism, collectivism, sexism and sexual supremacism – and yes, these terms imo cannot be separated, thematically. It's not for no reason that I ring red alert over the EU's and Germany's genderism agenda.

Democracy is flawed, yes, but so is every single other form of government, there is no magic bullet as every government is made up of people of different ideologies and beliefs, so no matter who is in power and no matter what they do, they will upset someone. It is the curse of the office, and I would not swap places with the President of the United States for all the tea in China, despite the great promises of wealth and power, since no matter what policies I introduced, I would be lampooned and hated by some manner of people.

I do not wish to be personally offensive when I say that I fail to see a rational or logical relevance in this lament. In principle it says nothing meaningful. The claim that democracy is flawed, but so are other thing as well, is a commonplace - imagine what Tuvok or Spock would say to that. :)

TBC

[Skybird]

I can see where you are coming from, and for each of us out there, there is often a well published individual who has expressed ideas who we agree with. The problem comes when these theories are attempted to be placed into reality. Karl Marx made some engaging arguments in his original work, however when it was filtered through humanity we wound up with the Soviet Union which was in many instances a direct contradiction to the ideas of socialism. For each political system that has emerged on this world, it has rapidly differed from the thoughts which gave birth to it.
'No plan survives first contact with the enemy' is a classic saying, oft quoted by those of us who enjoy strategy and tactics alike, however outside of strategy it is still valid in that no political theorem can survive the ravages of human behaviour that is placed upon it, even through the best of intentions, but more often through a sense of greed and lust for power.
(...)
The gulf of the difference between the theory and the fact can be quite large, and there is no theory out there that would remain unblemished by an attempt to reproduce it in the real world. Even more so, the longer a theory is put into practice, the more it changes, the less it resembles the original theory. For at each turn it is changed, moulded and altered by those within it, either to suit the circumstances of the era or to suit an individuals desire. Does this mean that the theory is wrong? Perhaps, perhaps not, or perhaps it is another example of the gap between our brains and our hearts in that our brains can often come up with fantastic ideas, but our hearts can smash those ideas within minutes. Rational thinking is not the strongest point of humanity, after all, if it were then the world would be a much different place.

I can only repeat again that, as I see it, the conception of democracy is such, from beginning on, that it can only work in very small community sizes, smaller than most people maybe imagine, but that it's dysfunctional by inherent, inbuilt design beyond that scaling, like a plane from all beginning on is made for flying, not for diving into a deep sea abyss – it has not “lost” the ability to dive, but it just has never had it. If you think of it, today's “distortions” and “abuse” of democracy, all are nd have been forseeable AND INDEED HAVE BEEN PREDICTED OVER CENTURIES AND MILLENIA, if it were a random degeneration only, that prediction would have been a case of hitting a target by pure chance only – and for that I think the criticism of democracy and warning of where it necessarily leads, has been a little bit too uni-sono and has been agreed on by too many great names in history. That the idea nevertheless is welcomed by those majorities of people who would and do profit from “taking from the one and giving it to the others – which are said profiteers that today come in such majorities that they bring down the economic basis of modern Western states, cannot really be surprising. Socialism always is welcomed by the big crowds, although – to quote Konrad Adenauer – the only thing socialism knows about economics is how to spend the money of others.

So I do not follow you where you seem to think that today's dysfunctional appearance of democracy is due to imperfection of man, or is a process of qualitative erosion in democracy. Democracy today just is what it has always been, and it is man who today holds extremely transfigured ideas about it, lifting it to a status of shine and greatness that already in ancient Greece – which we love to refer to to defend our idealised image of it – was not shared. The problems with it are in its genes, and it appears to me that the ancient Greeks already knew that, and that many thinkers and noble spirits of the past until just one century ago also still kept that understanding alive.

One can also question the moral legitimacy of having the majority deciding an issue due to being the majority vote, with the minority more or less being plowed under. This indeed gets debated in political science, and apparently with hot emotions and since long time. I just want to make that note on it, and leave it to that remark, it would lead too far to follow that trail here, maybe. Some of the points Steve once made in a locked engagement with me, I would have understood better if he would have already back then erected the theoretical background that back then I did not had in reading and knowledge on these things, but gained just in the past two years or so. Steve, you had a correct point there, I nowadays understand you better.

I could only share grounds with you - Oberon now :) - on this detail currently talked on, if you mean that the idea of democracy failed in “getting designed” by man >>with a sufficiently realistic assessment of human nature.<< The reason that democracy may work in very small human communities, but does not in big ones, of course is due to social dynamics and cognitive and behavioral changes in humans due to growing communities as their social environment with which they interact, are exposed to, and adapt to. But even then the concept still would have stood as what it is from beginning on, even if not having taken that change in man sufficiently into account where man interacts with an altering social and cultural environment. Also, there still remain to be factors that apply to even state-altering communities that still are objective factors and have little to do with human nature. For example the need of nutrition and water in a growing population does not grow linear with the growth in population size, but non-linear, due to the growing complexity of the needed infrastructure that needs to transport these goods over greater and greater distances. Humans fail in overseeing these factors – that I would agree on. Humans fail on this, so that often they cast doom and fall over the empires and cultures they have formed up, due to this. The book by Jarred Diamond, Collapse, explains that in many examples and references.


Trade is a founding block of civilisation, I fully agree, and the foundation of money has definitely enabled more complex trading and complex civilisation, and money and trade has also fed that part of human nature that desires improvement by setting forward an easier manner in which a person can achieve his desires. What is being sold has varied over the years, from materials in the early eras, to manpower and ideas in the later years. This has enabled both physical and intellectual labour to flourish through a reward system. As much as I would love to see a world that did not require money to exist, I do not think that such a thing could occur.

I see it as an inconsistency in thought if really wishing for an end of money, since it is a tool that simply is required to allow complex production cycles and complex civilization forming. I also refer to Rothbard's remarks about the sculptor somewhere above, in a longer quote I gave, and libertarian understanding of property, both intellectually and materialistically. When we say “For him, the purpose justifies the means” – that is a commonplace usually being used to morally discredit somebody doing something we do not like, and so we paint his act as something immoral by implying that he just does anything as long as it fits his intentions. But the phrase is very stupid, if you think of it, because without a purpose we never implement or use any means at all. When I am hungry, I eat – the bread is the means that serves my purpose. If the purpose of ending my feeling of hunger do9es not exist, I would not use the means: the bread, that is. Money also is such a means that serves the purpose, to achieve our goal, to form complex production and civilization. Even more, it is an indispensable tool for serving these our purposes.

So why wishing for a world without money? That would be a very primitive and jungle-law-like world, believe me.

TBC

[Méo]

This why we have private messages.

:rotfl2::rotfl2::rotfl2:

When I see all this it makes me think a lot when some people say we don't have to take life so seriously...

[Herr-Berbunch]

This why we have private messages.

:har: POTY

TLDR doesn't seem adequate enough for the first couple of posts in this thread.

[Skybird]

Quote Skybird: Needless to say: we do not have that kind of money anymore, it got intentionally destroyed by states to expose citizens in greater helplessness and vulnerability to the state. More on that later.

Quote Oberon:I would say that this varies, there is still a market for barter through private means, ebay for example, and although it is a very competative market, there is a market for intellectual labour too. If there was not then people like Mark Zuckerberg would not have amassed a great fortune.
The opportunities are still there, but the competition is so great that many people are unable to get into the market. Is this the fault of the states or the inevitable result of a free market? But yes, we will cover this later.


I am clueless where you come from here, it seems to me you were replying to something that I did not say or mean, or that you misunderstood. I meant the way in which money basing on the gold standard was replaced with the gold derivates, and the gold derivates then was replaced with paper money. Could you elaborate on why you gave that answer of yours? I am in loss over it'S context.

Also do not know where to sort your mentioning of Ebay and Facebook.



Quote Skybird: As I hinted above, the reason for the rise of civilizations is: trade. Help it and foster. Hinder it, see it declining, and see civilization decline and empires fall. And then again the complex productivity cycle, specialisation, all what I said above. If I understand you correctly in what you say, then I think you are misled there in so far as that you seem to misidentify or misinterpret the solid material factors that enable empires and civilizations to blossom. Where there is plenty of ground and population to be supplied with food and stuff, there is needed an infrastructure, a transport of food and water and items and goods and services, there needs to be information traffic for coordination. All this needs specialisation by the individuals, and specialised individuals forming huge communities depend on means and a system of making all these quantities and items “inter-changeable”, so that you could compare their valuer: economic management, fiscal cost-effect calculations. Just having a government, no matter which kind, saying it should be like this or that, does not work. And this is one of the most devastating criticism you can aim at today's tyranny of government-printed FIAT paper-”money” and fiscal regulation by the state: that both prevent everybody joining the market as producer or customer to form such value comparisons and fiscal cost-effect calculations by eroding the basis on which such comaprsions could be run. For that, a free value-determination of money by the market is inevitably a precondition. But that is what politicians desperately try to prevent.

Quote Oberon: I am not entirely sure where you are coming from in this respect. I agree that the growth of a civilisation requires the networking of food, water and services...but where it falls apart is when you start mentioning about the prevention of everybody joining the market as producer of customer. Surely we are all in a market of some nature as a producer or consumer. For example, I produce security and cleanliness during my night-shift, for this I am paid and this money then goes into the purchase and consumption of both leisure and necessary items. Therefore at the most basic level I am a producer and consumer. Of course, there are people who are unable to produce, and some who are simply unwilling, and the latter spoil the life of the former by prejudicing the general public and government against them, but that is a rant for another topic completely.


No, what I mean is that you depend on money – true money – as a currency that does not get manipulated by the state in its “prescribed” value, but whose value gets negotiated by the market, because money is nothing special but is just like any other object category that gets freely traded. That seems to be something that many people do not see, and government reject it anyway, since it would threaten the very basis of their power and spending. Obviously, which is my argument, FIAT money does not represent market's assessment of the value of a given currency, it is not money like a gold-standard-money. You can see it today how distorted the relative values of the international currencies to each other are, and in the eurozone you cannot even speak of any market-based measurement of the value of the Euro it all, it is a completely political item now, it gets massively manipulated by governments, by low interest policy decisions, and by changing the ammount of printing money. Also, there is the problem of competitive and uncompetitive economies, with the latter no longer being able to compensate by devaluing their currency, which enforces a currency that is disconnected from their economic potency and competitiveness.

So what I mean is if you want to participate in the market, you depend on making calculations that compare costs versus effects, investments versus profits, items versus services, and so on. You need a commonly agreed standardised value for that, like you need an agreement on which numerical system to use in order to talk with somebody else about math. If the one bases on the decimal system and the other on the hexadecimal system and they are not aware of it, they run into problems. FIAT money is not value scaling that the market agrees on and that the market negotiates. It is government-made and -wanted, the value gets planned by planners, and if reality does not meet that in the real economy, than hectic efforts break out in order to manage the currency, to regulate the currency even more, to implement monetarian management, and so on and on and on – everything that politicians are so great in.

Money, correctly understood and left in its original format, does not need any monetarian policy or fiscal management, not at all! That is only needed if politicians want to manipulate money on behalf of their interest. It always is a distortion of money.

Also, FIAT money is different than a gold coin. A gold coin you ´can take to a trader, and you will always get the market price for gold for it. The currency not only represents a value, it IS a value. Cannot be said of a banknote. Imagine a currency collapses. If it was gold-based, then no mater the number on the coin you still can sell it as an item of gold. A banknote is just a worthless piece of paper if the printed number on it is no longer agreed to represent any mandatory service by the other whom you wan to pay with it for something, service or material item.

There is plenty of problems with FIAT money, and I would not even call it money, because it is not in the real meaning of the function that money had when it started to get used in the far away past. Value money is a value in itself, and real economy is linked to it and gets represented by it. FIAT money has no such value, but is an – legally not binding promise only, it is a debt bond. It is no value that goes beyond just a hoped-for value, and imagined value that is hoped to materialise in the future (FIAT: Latin: “it may become”, “it shall be” – the value shall still materialise in the future, but is not rere in the present). It is just a playing coin in a snowballing system where oyu place yoiur bet on debts. With real money that has nothing to do, nothing.

I recommend Detlev Schlichter: Paper Money Collapse. The Folly of Elastic Money, published 2011, and awarded with the Get Abstract International Book Award 2012: it's on the implications of FIAT money in today's present situation and why the collapse is not a question of If, but When; and again Rothbard's “What the state has done to our money”, which so nicely demonstrates why the states after WWI had such a huge self-interest to destroy value-money and replace it with paper-tokens and debt bonds instead. And that is exlcusively about accumulating power for the state, and making the citizens more dependent on the state, and exposing them to the state's claims in maximum weakness possible. Paying war bills after 1918, 1945 and 1971 has less to do with it than usually gets mentioned. I fell for that explanation myself in the past, but I had to realise that I was wrong there and that the explanation is too superficial



In an indeal world for a government, every member of society would produce work-hours and consume the result of the work-hours of other people. For example, my security and cleanliness enables people who stay at the hotel I work at to sleep in the knowledge that the place is unlikely to burn down around them and when they eat their breakfast in the morning it is unlikely to be shared by a cockroach or a rat. Equally, when I go to a shop, I am paying for the products of someone elses work, be it a person working on an assembly line, or a farmer growing the crops that I eat.
Obviously in todays market the person who grow the crops is likely to live on the other side of the planet, but aside from the fact that the entire world (well, most of it) is a market now, what is the difference between this and the world of six hundred years ago when democracies were rare and few and far between?


The two different moneys back then and today make the difference. The first cannot destroy the economic cycle. The latter can, and due to the inner dynamics of both FIAT money and a democratic system, it inevitably will.

A printed banknote saying “one dollar”, leaves oyu dpeending on the good willingness of the other whith whom you trade. One silver dollar however will always get you as far as one dollar reaches, you do not need the good willingness of the other.

In principle, every time you accept to get payed with FIAT money, you gamble on that the snowballing system will carry on.

But one day, it will no longer. And then only the one at the top wins. All others loose.

I forgot to mention another detail, although I explained it briefly in some other, older thread, I recall. That democracy see politicians making ever growing promises and voters demanding ever more, and that this in an unholy alliance between the two that leads always to the state spending more than it can afford, should have become clear by now. There is also another reason why states' elites love to print money. In a healthy economy, it does not matter whether there is more or less of items circulating that are being used as money, coins for example. If there is a shortage in gold coins, now rare gold becomes precious and prices for other items thus go down: you get more for your gold coin than before. If there get gold coins pumped into the market, gold becomes less valuable, and you have to give more coins for the same item like before, since prices go up. The market manages the money all by itself, no government intervention needed. Of course, the state must have the economic power to produce more gold coins, to buy the gold for minting, and so on. The state cannot just flood the market with goldcoins as he pleases, it is not possible (and that is why value-currencies basing on some form of gold (or other) standard are an insurance against criminal politicians as long as they cannot secure a minting monopoly for themselves and then replace part of the gold in a coin with bronze, silver with tin). It does not matter how much currency pieces are circulating. But today? Paper money allows the state to print money as he pleases, without any control and without any limitation, it does not represent actual real value anyway. The central bank decides to print money, the market gets flooded – and then it takes a while until the inflationary effect drips down from the top to the bottom level of the economic system. That means that for a short while those getting that fresh new money first in their hands, for a short time can buy items at the old, still not adapted price, and with money of which they have for some time more (in buying power), than before. Without doing anything for it, they have a temporary boost in buying power of theirs! Which makes a nice net profit – for nothing! Later, when time has passed and the fresh market got soaked up by all levels of the economy, prices have adapted and went up and you have to pay more of your paper tickets for one item now. That explains to you also what so often is wondered about, if you listen to the economic news: it explains why the injection of new money into the market almost always has no lasting effect and especially has no effect on most parts of an economy. The middle class business only rarely, if ever,. Benefits from such programs. It is always the big sharks, the top players who really are at the very top, who get the cream. The rest – is left with the consequences of growing inflation. Those who benefit from all this, are at the very top of the food chain, because they get their hands on the new money first, and then profit from the still non-adapted prices. Now you know why so many of the elites secretly or often even openly claim that it is in the state's interest to have a certain amount of inflation(which is nothing else but printing money and pumping it into the market), and why a certain amount of inflation is claimed top be desirable. Well, logic and reason has nothing to do with why it is desirable, so much is for certain. A wanted inflation the state cannot enforce with a gold standard currency. Before getting the card blanche for inflation policies, the state must destroy value currencies and must replace them with debt-based paper-tokens that are not linked to and do not represent real value or real economy treasury in a realistic proportion .

It's not a market but a planned economy from A to Z, in this regard. Damn planners. Has the WP economy not shown where that leads...

[Tribesman]

Also, FIAT money is different than a gold coin. A gold coin you ´can take to a trader, and you will always get the market price for gold for it. The currency not only represents a value, it IS a value. Cannot be said of a banknote. Imagine a currency collapses. If it was gold-based, then no mater the number on the coin you still can sell it as an item of gold. A banknote is just a worthless piece of paper if the printed number on it is no longer agreed to represent any mandatory service by the other whom you wan to pay with it for something, service or material item.
But the market value fluctuates wildly and can be manipulated by numerous means.
The value is only what someone else says it is, just like paper money.
Imagine the market value collapses, like silver did when it was the standard

[Skybird]

Yes, I understand what you mean here. There is only so far that unity of nations can go before it reaches a tipping point. Some people outside of Europe question the likelihood of a giant European superstate emerging, and I laugh at them, since it is incredibly unlikely that European nations could agree on something long enough to do so.

I would not laugh so early, since we see since years how the EU is widening its power and rights against what I still claim to be the majority of European people's desire. In 3 months, there will be election in Germany, and after that much of what has been objected too by Merkel, by wonder and miracle will no longer be objected too . Take me by my words. Germany will agree to legal or illegal means to finance the totally illegal (by EU treaties and EU laws) direct financing of bankrupt states via the ECB. A banking union will follow, the first steps already have been undertaken. Germany will agree to a de facto transfer union. Germany will agree to give more competences form the parliament to the EU, even if pro forma in other countries such giving up of sovereignty will be less smooth. We are being submitted to EU legislation and bureaucracy since over 20 years now, increasingly, and still there is no real resistance to it, especially in Germany.

In the end there will be the European superstate, copying the power structures and administrative structures of the Soviet Union style. Whether it then goes along peacefully or the people violently revolt, is something different. It should be clear to you that I argue that politicians do not care for what people want, and that they demand or imply that people should be accountable to politicians, not the other way around (as the election thing in the democratic circus implies). Our leaders do not owe us, but we owe to them. It is a form of neo-feudalism already.

Also, many people, honestly said, do not care about freedom, as long as they have comfort and their little share of happiness, to put it that way. That's why the sedating of the electorate by bribing it with financial gifts the states in reality cannot afford, works so well! If people would care for the future and their children's perspective, we already would have had that uprise against the EU at it'S püolciies that it enforces against the people, from Islam and migration over 50+% tax burdens to ruining the economy and the fiscal status of the state and raping even the vital essentials of state reason time and time again.

The bills will be presented one day. Then nobody will accept his share of guilt, all will claim to be helpless victims, and everybody will agree that something needs to be done, but not at his cost. Wash my fur but don't make me wet! (German phrase)


There is definitely a move towards devolution in modern society, in the United Kingdom we have the Welsh assembly and the Scottish parliament, both of whom have to pay lip service to Westminster of course, but it is something that did not exist a hundred years ago.
Of course, the problem lies that, if Bavaria, for example, did seperate from Germany, what would stop Poland from invading and occupying it?

Again, that note is about a situation where only one place int her world is chnaged to the “new order”, and all toher places are staying like thexy are today. I already said that the “new ways” implemente dinto the functinality and ways of going of today'S system probbaly will not work too well. The whole issue is aboiut what the world would be like if ALL the world would have changed to the “ner ways”. BTW, what stops Luxembourg or Finland's or Switzerland's neighbours to invade them today?

In a world of private law society, people would have contracts with private enterprise to provide legislative, insurance, policing and military protection services. It wold be no central state holding a monopoly for these, but it would be a business service provided for a fee, and since companies would have an interest to limit or prevent suffering costly damages, they would run legal, police and military action on behalf of their customers – private, free citizens and local/regional communities of these - in ways that emphasize prevention over allowing situation to unfold where sanction is needed. Of course, the barbarians, for example Islamic jihadists and ideologically blinded terrorists, will still be there, and the deterrence of any enterprise in these fields must be robust enough to be credible. Its just that there will be no class of politicians, and no overboarding bureaucracy holding a monopoly for this. Mind you, peoples rarely ever started wars against each others, they instead feared wears. Wars most of the time are decided and declared by governments, not the ordinary people.

Hoppe and Rothbard have written separate books just about security, war and military issues. I refer you to the lists I already provided, since many essays there address the issue as well. It is not being ignored, and got dealt well with already. Again we have the state regulating a people and the society into a state where crime is favoured due to unfavourable social factors the government creates, and wars that the government declares. Police, jurisdiction, military – you do not need a centralised, disconnected govenrment for that. Leave that to where it belongs – to the people of the land.


I read that some historians point out that this kind of conflict – separation, or enforced unifying - also probably played the dominant role motivating the American civil war. Where the war for independence was a revolt against the British who after some time of relative laissez faire wanted to impose a stricter tax system again and tighten British control over and possession of “their colonies”, and the revolt thus was a self-defence on behalf of own sovereignty and own freedom, some historians, but also Hoppe, refer to historical quotes by Lincoln that reveal that Lincoln's decision for war against the South seems to have had not much to do with freeing the poor slaves, but with enforcing a claim for centralist power by Washington not only over the North, but the South as well. I got the impression that he just instrumentalised them for his - very different - intentions, but that ending slavery was not an item he had on his radar for the worth of the very issue itself. Also, apparently the centralised power by the whole union's government should had been supported by destroying the independent currencies circulating in the South (there were several, which from libertarianism's POV, seeing money as just a trading good like any other, was perfectly okay and imo makes more economic sense than any other monetarian model I have read about or heard of, and certainly much more than the bad joke of a paper money we have today). The result was a war that ended the southern money market, destroyed the South's economy and thus it's basis for independent survival, and paved the way for the North's centralised political regime taking control not only of the northern but the southern “provinces” as well.


It is certainly an arguement that can be put forward, and from a rational viewpoint it makes perfect sense, after all 'A house divided against itself cannot stand'. If America had remained split into two entities when the First World War broke out, would either entity have intervened in Europe? Or would the war in Europe spread to America in a resumption of hostilities between the North and the South? Either way America as we know it today would be radically different, and I believe not for the better.

I am not so sure on that. At least it could not have been worse than it is today. The issue of slavery I expect to come to a resolve by itself over time, like the acceptance for it faded in Europe as well. Licoln certainly did not decide for a centralised power governing all the state because he has forseen WWI. And how the US would have reacted to WWI if North and South would not have been united, we simply do not know and can only speculate.

So, yes, a rational and calculating mind would certainly see that an empire that is united is stronger both financially and militarily than one that is divided in on itself. A civil war makes for a weakness, and a weak empire is one that is oft preyed upon by other empires. Were it not for the powderkeg like situation in Europe and the dash in Africa, would Britain have decided to invade the US again whilst they were struggling against the CSA? All situations that have been explored in fiction but certainly one cannot deny that Lincoln and those around him would be acutely aware that a divided house is politically, financially and militarily weaker than a unified one. Having the moral crusade to free the slaves makes it easier to sell to the public, and is certainly a just a noble endeavour, be it the primary or secondary objective of the American civil war or not.


Well, I cannot help but to think why you do not argue for a union between Canada and the US as well, then. And why you do not applaude the EU melting all European states together - at least by intention.

The empire-forming you mentioned by installing unity even against what the people want (and the Southerners absolutely did not seem to like it to get subjugated to Washington's claims for power ) necessarily sees a growing totalitarian control by the state over the people, this should be clear by now. The stronger an empire, the stronger its government, the less free are its people. Sooner or later you come to a point where you have to make a moral decision which side you want to join: the side claiming that freedom goes over strong imperial status, or the side claiming that the empire's needs overrule the private interest for freedom. I mentioned earlier that competing governments in the world reduce themselves in numbers, with the surviving ones becoming stronger and stringer, claiming more and more power, until their power has become so absolute one day that there will be just one world government only – and I stick to that, I tell you that will not be a liberal, free world state, but a totalitarian tyranny.

[Tribesman]

The whole issue is aboiut what the world would be like if ALL the world would have changed to the “ner ways”.

That would take a bloody big one world government to force the change, it would also require the bloody huge dictatorship to remain in perpetual existance to maintain all the little fiefdoms in the desired order.
Kinda shows why hoppes utopia is a self defeating fantasy which doesn't stand even the briefest scrutiny.

I refer you to the lists I already provided, since many essays there address the issue as well. It is not being ignored, and got dealt well with already.
The lists use examples in history as support where your desired method has proven to be a complete failure. That is what is being ignored and not being dealt with.

[Sailor Steve]

If America had remained split into two entities when the First World War broke out, would either entity have intervened in Europe?
A side-note. Your bringing this up reminded me of a fun little book I read many years ago but had forgotten. I checked, and sure enough you can get it cheap in the UK as well as the US. Just thought I'd let you know.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wild-Blue-Gray-William-Sanders/dp/0446361429/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371400073&sr=1-1&keywords=the+wild+blue+and+the+gray

[August]

Originally Posted by Oberon
If America had remained split into two entities when the First World War broke out, would either entity have intervened in Europe?

Of course that depends on how the south was able to defeat the north and what happens in the intervening time.

If the British had helped the Confederates I seriously doubt that the Union would help them defeat Germany. It's hard to imagine it now but in 1914 there was a considerable amount of anti-English sentiment still left over from the Revolution and war of 1812. Interfering in our Civil War would have stoked that dislike to white hot intensity. The British would have been lucky the Union states didn't join on the Kaisers side.

Another possibility to consider had the Confederates won the Civil war was that they would likely soon have fragmented into individual nation states. Given their fierce sense of independence and separate national identity it's not an unreasonable assumption to make. In that event you'd be getting the help of probably less than all of them with no guarantee those that did send troops would be willing to work together.

Finally there is the potential for more wars between the American states after 1865. A Confederate win would not have settled anything. In the following 50 years there would have been plenty to fight over without the unresolved issue of slavery. The Confederacy might not have been able to help fight the Germans because they were fighting wars of their own.