Oh sweet Odin. I’m kind of busy here. Sorry if I can’t remember all of your comments. I’m pretty sure I replied that “I” could use force.
That’s a result of ownership. I’ve already said there are many possible definitions. Some I agree with. If you don’t agree with property ownership let’s discuss that, this is circular.
I don’t, hence my advocacy of a distribution of power. Market based preferably.
What? I general we don’t make the distinction, admitting that there are in fact difference doesn’t disprove this. What are you about?
“Free market” has to be one of the most semantically meaningless terms in contemporary political debate, and in my experience libertarians are the worst offenders with respect to it. As @wysinwyg has masterfully and continually pointed out, your conceptualization of a “free market” isn’t even internally consistent. Besides it runs into the No True Scotsman territory that libertarianism seems to live with regards to capitalism - that any concrete criticism of the status quo is dismissed that we don’t have a “true free market”, which completely elides the critique. There never has been a “true free market” and there certainly never will be, which is why criticisms of markets and capitalism are directed at how they actually work.
So if I could find a cheap source of electricity - say locate a server farm near a hydro electric site could I farm at a profit? Wait that is not the take away message?
That’s not the claim at all. The claim is that markets are the most efficient mechanism known to allocate resources. There’s no such thing as equity in results.
Yet, despite this “progress”, we still deal with deep poverty and violence. Any social gains were hard fought, not givens. Plus, you are glossing over evils such as slavery, mass murder, segregation, the displacement of millions of people to benefit a few.
Pretty sure I said property is that which was acquired using resources gained via my own labor.
Optimally.
Who is this society? Isn’t a society made up of individuals each with their own needs and preferences? How would society determine what is best for all of the individual units?
Governments are also created by people, they aren’t outside of society. Any human institution is inherently political, and markets are no different in this regard. In fact markets are the primary political institution because they are how material wealth is distributed, and politics is ultimately about who gets what.
As for “no state required”, I’d love to see historical examples of such markets.
Inhaling vaporized tautologies is precisely why I’m here, dude. The concentration of TauHC on the BoingBoingBBS is way higher than any of that YouTube or CNN comment schwag. Here, you can have your head up your ass, have it handed it to you AND be taking a monster hit of redundancy off the ÜberCleverness KleinBong all at the same time. You just can’t get that kind of recreational recursion anywhere else.
I’m not glossing over anything. The progress was in spite of these things. And they become less and less severe as humanity becomes more wealthy as a whole.
“Progress” caused those things–the British, French, Spanish, and then the US were all bringing “progress and civilization” to the “darker nations”. In the case of the US, we brought “free markets” to the 3rd world, and killed an awful lot of people when they said “no thanks, America”. These processes continue in the war on terror. Our own well-being is predicated on the impoverishment of other people. Even here, not everyone has access to the same quality of life and the well being of some is on the backs of their fellow citizens.
So you’re just going to restate the point that I dismantled? That you’re using a one-sided definition of what constitutes state interference, and that “interference” isn’t even really a coherent concept to begin with since markets are not hermetically sealed from other human institutions. Plus your definition of free market seems straight forward because it is both facile and circular.
Okay I did, but I don’t see how it shows I’m wrong. My point is you’re defending an abstraction which has never existed, so claiming how great that abstraction is doesn’t mean you’ve refuted the criticisms.
In other words, “you didn’t build that”. And you assume that’s good enough to exclude the bread I picked up from the ground, though I might have invested a lot of time and energy in finding and taking it, yet not taxes owed to society by people who have taken great advantage of its services. Lots of unrecognized assumptions, again and again.
Why, it’s the market I belong to. We hold elections to decide what the general public opinion is, mint currency, provide public services like roads, and so long as you live in our region we expect you to recognize some portion of what you are paid actually belongs to us. If you don’t like it, fine, but there is no reason we should reciprocate in recognizing any of the property you claim is yours.
Your principles suggest we shouldn’t hurt or jail you over such a dispute, on which I must apologize for my peers - they would arrest me for taking the bread, too. Other than that, though, it’s all just a question of what we have agreed to define as private and public property, part of the market rules, and of course if you disagree you have had plenty of notice to try and find another market to participate in.
Of course you might have trouble finding a nice one. Because somehow everwhere with a high standard of living has similar rules - bread you put down is still yours to keep, and taxes are not, and commerce has all kinds of regulations to keep people safe. Strange, huh?
“Libertarians love it because it pushes the same buttons as their gold fetish…”
“BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind”
" but I tend to take the stance that Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids…"
He specifically called about libertarian ideas so I responded. Was that wrong, should I not have done that?
So long as you think you’re doing well, then that’s fine. See, on antipope, there’s an actual, interesting discussion about bitcoin. Here, there’s just you showing off. Again. Which is dull. Like it was before.
That’s essentially the definition you’ll find if you look it up. What’s one sided? It’s the definition.
Definitions are mostly abstractions. Not sure why you have an issue with this. Yes, markets have existed and do exist without government interference, just look at all of the black markets.
