No policy can be so stringent as to encourage people to break it in order to get their jobs done. With the exception of highly regimented and closely inspected environments, such non-conformance will be totally invisible even if universally rampant. Rule-breaking will probably be vastly less secure than simply liberalizing the rules.
Signed, somebody who sometimes has to send large executables to customers, but cannot Google Drive share a file offsite.
Correction: The Zeroth Rule of Anything With Any Rules At All
If someone was running a private security company in Ancapistan I wonder if they would be tempted to offer a deluxe package which costs ten times as much and offers immunity to minor crimes, or a platinum package which costs even more and shields you from murder investigations.
Would you want to buy security from a company that would let some members of Argumate’s Hypothetical Security Firm not be prosecuted for murdering you?
Probably not, in which case you would have to buy from me! :)
It’s kind of surreal to watch libertarians argue, and forget that some people don’t have money. Or do you just think that victims of crime don’t matter unless they are rich?
Presumably, people with fewer possessions are less likely to have lots of thieves target them, so they should be able to get lower rates. In terms of “random assaults”, normal police already don’t constantly go around breaking those up?
IDK. I mean, it’s not clear that current police serve poor communities particularly well.
The police don’t exactly help poor people a lot in the status quo… like, Friedman addresses this argument in Machinery of Freedom, and he’s like “in a statist society, poor people pay taxes to get victimized by police, and in an ancap society poor people will pay fees to get protection that actually has an incentive to, you know, protect them.”
Yeah. Black Panthers are what I’d expect marginalized people to have if the state wasn’t intent on smashing every such attempt (guess what the fuck happened to the Black Panthers in reality). If the poor have their own protection agency that negotiates with the protection agency of the rich, even from a drastically lopsided negotiating situation, it’s still strictly better than the status quo where the protection agency of the rich is allowed to kidnap anyone who tries to organize the poor people’s protection agency.
"okay so if I hack my (non-expropriated) toothbrush into a rocket, go to space, bring back an asteroid and use my toothbrush to turn it into a 3d-printer which prints more 3d-printers, at which point do things get socialized and how?"
Because my laptop has so many hours of labor put into it, nobody should expropriate it or I will cry (Arch linux, disproving absolute abolition of property since 2002); and if we allow me to keep my laptop I can’t see any feasible way to absolutely prevent someone from hypothetically owning a factory.
Empirically, I think you just pass a law saying that you can’t own factories but laptops are okay, and leave judges to make Good Enough judgement calls to make the thing go- it’s less ambiguous than, e.g. anti-harassment laws. Communist countries have existed and have done this sort of thing.
Eventually a rich set of case law emerges defining what has/has not been considered to be a factory in the past, which provides guidance for judges making decisions and a level of dependability in judgements.
It’s only a problem if you insist on whatever the legal system does being rigorously defined- but I don’t think any real world legal system *is*, and I’m dubious one even could be, let alone must be. It’d probably also have to lack functional harassment restrictions, and I think you’d need to at least tolerate totally arbitrary cut offs to be even able to enforce assault and anti-noise disturbance law,
If you mean you think it has enforceability problems because a laptop will be too helpful for building a 3D printer, then that’s reasonable but akin to the enforceability problems of taxes; it is true, but the bigger you get the harder it is to not notice, so in practice the breaches are not a huge problem. Presuming the plan isn’t for the 3D printers to foom and destroy the state.
(I’m not familiar with a lot of the details of communist thought, someone who actually is a communist could provide a more detailed idea of where they’d like the limits of private property to be.)
The problem is that people are smart and will find ways around it. Enforceability problems with taxes are right now big enough to make pretty much every single welfare state be in deep trouble they wouldn’t be in if they could enforce the taxes they’ve set.
Like, legos are toys, right? We aren’t going to expropriate children’s toys because we aren’t terrible strawmen.
Consider a nerd: (laptop + legos) = 3d-printer.
Is it a “factory”? Reason (not the magazine) says it isn’t. Reason says using it to print another 3d-printer doesn’t turn it into a “factory”. Reason says 100 3d-printers is a “factory”. Induction breaks down somewhere.
We could argue that one may only own what they are possessing, so that the factory owner must personally operate all the machinery instead of having wage laborers, because any machinery they can’t operate personally 24/7 will be expropriated for everyone else’s use when they aren’t using it. This is the basis of many theories that try not to expropriate toothbrushes while still expropriating factories.
Consider a nerd: automation.
Even if people are only allowed to have “possessions”, not “property”, a nerd can “possess” an entire factory by running it off their laptop. And if land is the issue, the nerd will just make the factory mobile.
So even with the rule that property isn’t allowed, only possession, we still can have factory owners.
Or we could have a rule that whatever people build will revert to the public after 10 years or something. How unfortunate that my 3d-printer only lasts 9 years before breaking down. Or maybe I rebuild it in year 8 and argue that it’s new now and get to keep it for another 10 years.
The only way I can think is to have ultimately arbitrary expropriation based on the democratic decision-making process, and I don’t trust democracy not to find some way to expropriate even my laptop. So far democracy has managed to build two kinds of things: horrible bullshit that originated from evil intentions, and horrible bullshit that originated from good intentions. At best, we get a horrible bloated regulatory hell determining how many 3d-printers turn expropriable and what kind of automation is considered “possession” and what is “absentee ownership”.
(And this is with a few minutes of deliberately trying to break it; the people who run Mossack Fonseca have been thinking about such things a lot longer and more thoroughly.)
The alternative is really elegant: you can call it your own, but you must pay a tax for others to respect your property. Property can be bought and sold because that way there are markets that can be used to determine the value of any piece of property, and then people pay x% (always the same value of x, never changing for any reason because otherwise we get bullshit) of their “voluntary selling price” every year to be allowed to keep the property, otherwise it reverts to the public. If someone offers to buy it for the VSP they must sell, or raise the tax value of the property and pay more. No arbitrariness, no democracy, no loopholes, and my ingenuity in hacking things into 3d-printers printing more 3d-printers gets harnessed for the common good and I know that I can keep my laptop and thanks to the taxes everyone gets 3d-printers and a UBI to buy food and shelter etc.
Having a well-defined and principled legal system for things that involve the means of production is important in a way having a well-defined boundary for assault and noise isn’t, because people aren’t incentivized to bootstrap noise into a lot more noise and create auditory growth and musical prosperity.
And seriously, 3d-printers fooming and destroying the state is exactly what you can expect in this community. In rationalist tumblr, anything, absolutely anything, even legos and a laptop, ends in a foom and world domination.
Omfg! holy shit I just learned today that Hideaki Anno is MAKING A GODZILLA MOVIE
It’s nice how some of the scenes here are completely lifted from Eva
In fact, my brain pattern-matched so hard that I “recognized” Gendo, Misato, Fuyutsuki and Ritsuko despite them (presumably) not being in the movie at all.
The Raspberry Reich - Bruce La Bruce - 2004 - Germany/Canada
Comparing political enemies to vermin that parasitize the volk: the least fascist thing you could do
Or is the irony intentional?
[academicianzex voice]: “comparing a political enemy to vermin makes you the real fascist. that’s why no non-fascist politician has ever called a rival candidate a “rat” in human history. only fascists say harsh words.”
I mean, it’s one thing to use harsh words, it’s another thing to
1.) call for death to 2.) political enemies who 3.) are metaphorically compared vermin that 4.) parasitize the body politic
it’s not wrong if they’re really vermin. #polpot2k16
at first i thought this was going to turn into mosquito comments in the reblog chain and it has not done that yet
anyway i’m pretty sure mosquitos have killed more people than fascists, although that’s over a longer period of time
Assuming mosquitoes kill 1M a year nowadays, I think they took back the #1 spot from fascists around 1945 (they lost it temporarily in the 30′s)
Am I the only one super amused by how “One of the richest people ever did a cool thing” managed to become “FUCK CAPITALISM”? It’s like they don’t even try anymore.
(And those links aren’t even all the responses like that.)
I don’t care about debating the details of whether or not this is capitalism because definitional battles are uninteresting, but this is definitely liberty and the æsthetic. Now there are commons, publicly available for anyone, where there previously weren’t, and it didn’t take people with guns to make them.
inb4 special interests whining about how these free textbooks are evil and low-quality and how any college which doesn’t use their proprietary super expensive books is doing a serious disservice to their students and the state should probably step in to ban these things to protect jobs in the textbook industry…
“So many cases had been overturned where young men had been sitting in
jail for years and years before someone got around to vetting the
prosecution,” he recalls. “It occurred to me - why are we doing that at
the end? Why don’t we have a procedure in place on the front end to vet
prosecutions before they can become a conviction?”
Yes, why not try not imprisoning people who are “actually innocent”, what an absolutely novel concept.
Jesus
Things like this are why privatizing the courts is starting to sound like a far better idea than one would naively expect. I don’t think the Black Panthers could do much worse than the existing system.
"okay so if I hack my (non-expropriated) toothbrush into a rocket, go to space, bring back an asteroid and use my toothbrush to turn it into a 3d-printer which prints more 3d-printers, at which point do things get socialized and how?"
me, trying to understand the practicalities of communism
…I think I found the leftist economics equivalent of the trolley problem
That’s why we need to abolish capitalism, tho – you CAN’T hack your toothbrush into a rocket now – because DMCA prevents breaking DRM so you can’t touch anything. The only way we can get rid of the DMCA is by abolishing capitalism.
This is why I think the reply system is bullshit because I can’t like or reblog replies directly, because this is like-and-reblog-worthy. Limiting reply interaction is theft. Or something.
But my brain is still confused by communism though, because it automatically assumes that it would be Equality Fnargl who uses markets to maximize currency (because when externalities are internalized and people are actually free, maximizing currency doesn’t have the terrible side effects it currently has) and takes some of that currency in taxes and uses it to buy 3d-printers for everyone, but actual communists say that this is a fundamental misunderstanding of communism.
Property is theft, and responding to it with another form of theft, taxation, makes perfect sense (because the existence of property needs some enforcement mechanism or otherwise even the biggest capitalist is simply an Emperor Norton staking fictitious claims to everything; and if there is to be enforcement it’s fair and just to set some conditions for the enforcement to make sure that the social construct of property actually works for the common good instead of against it, because we want entrepreneurs not robber barons); but when someone is like “okay no you seriously won’t be allowed to own anything” my brain outputs an extremely contrived scenario that is still far simpler than the actual tax evasion schemes some people use and breaks the proposed idea for not having any property at all.
Because my laptop has so many hours of labor put into it, nobody should expropriate it or I will cry (Arch linux, disproving absolute abolition of property since 2002); and if we allow me to keep my laptop I can’t see any feasible way to absolutely prevent someone from hypothetically owning a factory. If we just say that “okay you are allowed to own $thing, but you need to pay the rest of us compensation for not touching your $thing because property is theft”, it is sensible and doesn’t break but is allegedly not communism, even if we assume that enough things are shared so that nobody needs to choose between wage labor and starving on the streets, and if enough things are shared I don’t see how the existence of some private property somewhere would inevitably degenerate the system to serfdom and wage slavery if a culture of liberty exists and everyone has agreed to kick the ass of anyone who tries to fence in the commons or force people off their land into the dark satanic mills or otherwise oppress others.
(Or, in practice, if the existence of some private property somewhere were to totally outweigh all the shared 3d-printers, I’d take it as pretty strong evidence that sharing things doesn’t work; but empirically it doesn’t seem to be the case and historically people have been violently stopped from sharing things or the systems have otherwise been artificially rigged in favor of the non-sharers and this suggests that in the absence of such intervention people would indeed be able to share things successfully. The tragedy of the commons was a fiction constructed to justify state action to deprive people of their rightful property because people with guns didn’t like people who shared things, and this is why the state is bad and should as a prior probably not do the things it wants to do even if many people who are not the users of the commons think the state totally should seize the commons.)
And in practice I’d expect that with Equality Fnargl providing 3d-printers to people and crony capitalists (some say that the “crony” is redundant and I won’t exactly object if I’m allowed to make a distinction between markets and capitalism) not being artificially propped up by a state which loots value creators to enrichen rentseekers with bullshit like copyrights or patents, the outcomes would be far more equal than in any currently existing society (at least in the sense of not having people suffer from material deprivation and the indignity of servitude to others because they don’t have alternatives) and the question would be whether in the left-libertarian actually free market paradise everyone would have one 3d-printer or two 3d-printers, and whether people would have much reason to care that someone is using their 3d-printer to print more 3d-printers while someone else is 3d-printing complicated fractal artwork.
This is why I don’t do theory and just stick to intensely gesturing towards things, and building things because intensely gesturing doesn’t actually have much of an effect. Theory is confusing and democracy is bullshit, but building 3d-printers and sharing them and trying to prevent the state from taking them away is an actionable strategy.
"okay so if I hack my (non-expropriated) toothbrush into a rocket, go to space, bring back an asteroid and use my toothbrush to turn it into a 3d-printer which prints more 3d-printers, at which point do things get socialized and how?"
me, trying to understand the practicalities of communism
…I think I found the leftist economics equivalent of the trolley problem
