promethea.incorporated

brave and steely-eyed and morally pure and a bit terrifying… /testimonials /evil /leet .ask? .ask_long?

unknought asked: I suspect that your anon is taking Promethea's views (which they've described as trying to bridge the gap between ancoms and ancaps, among other things) as more representative of rationalism as a whole than they actually are. Anon, I think most of us are boring liberal statists, when it comes down to it.

sigmaleph:

What she said, anon.

actually, you probably shouldn’t assume any object-level belief strongly advocated by a rationalist is representative of the community without asking around.

Oh no you made me geek out on the history of libertarianism

Because anon was actually more correct than the explanation that it would be just about me

“Libertarian” in the 19th century meant just as laissez-faire as it means now, but the political alliances were reversed; they used to call us “voluntary socialists” because we considered ourselves allies of the labor movement and free enterprise against the state-supported capitalists and thought that a free society would be less inequal and oppressive.

(And that’s totally 100% true; without the Inclosure Acts and other such shit the dark satanic mills couldn’t have happened and the 18-19th century industrial capitalists were amazingly honest about how the entire point was to use the state to create a proletariat stripped of property so they could be forced into the mines and factories for a miserable living enriching others. (Every sin begins from treating people as product and so on…) Sometimes child labor was effectively legally mandated as parents weren’t allowed to work in the neighboring parish (or whatever they were called) so they had to send children instead even though there were unemployed adults who would’ve been willing to accept the jobs. And even during the Napoleonic wars the British army had more men keeping order in the industrial communities than fighting the French (anyone who’s played Civilization knows that thing where you put soldiers in a city so it stops rioting and that’s exactly what Britain did).)

Then Lenin happened, and everyone who was not a statist soon concluded that it was a terrible thing and the libertarian movement kind of split into two.

One part allied with right-wing statist capitalism against statist communism and the New Deal as it saw it as the lesser of two evils and over time mostly forgot that it was evil at all. That’s where the “points out every single law that favors the poor, and ignores every single law that props up the rich” type of “libertarian” comes from, or the type that triumphantly touts the $50B workers steal from bosses and disregards the $50B bosses steal from workers. Laissez-faire is not “pro-business”, laissez-faire is not “anti-business”, laissez-faire is “none of our business”.

(And real freedom in employment contracts inevitably implies at least a bare minimum of pro-union stance, and the absence of state intrusion in bargaining the details would make labor struggles meaningful as employers would need to give workers a deal worth taking but it would also simultaneously prevent redwashed rentiers from looting others. All in all I’d expect a freer market with fewer distortions to deliver everyone a money which is closer to the value they create than currently, and if workers are getting less than their true worth then they obviously would get more. Even if capital isn’t redistributed, one would expect its accumulation to lower its value over time as labor would become more of the limiting factor (there are some issues around automation and the control of human-displacing capital but “everyone who is not a robot loses their job and gets fired (upon)” is a very massive market failure). This line of thinking seems to be utterly alien to many non-libertarians, although I must say that those right-libertarians who are very R first with a really small l aren’t helping at all.)

Another part decided to go against both of them and usually got stomped every time (Ukraine, Kronstadt, Catalonia, etc.) and also lost its free-market laissez-faire ideals because those were now right-wing in the Big Ideology Fuckup of the 20th Century.

There were a few attempts at reconciliation eg. in the 60s when Vietnam made right-libertarians notice that the capitalist state was an oppressive piece of shit as well (eg. Barry Goldwater’s speechwriter Karl Hess switched sides to Emma Goldman because her writings were like Ayn Rand’s but with the boring parts stripped out; something that might appear completely incomprehensible to someone who doesn’t understand libertarianism), but Murray Rothbard decided that he wanted to appeal to “tight-assed conformists, who want to stamp out drugs in their vicinity, kick out people with strange dress habits, etc.” instead of the weirdos and founded “paleolibertarianism”. (As a weirdo, I decided that Rothbard was a total asshole.) And during the previous half-century the left got way too enarmored with social democracy and statism and when dissolving that system in the late 70s began opposing anything smelling of laissez-faire turned into a tribal symbol and an Important Hill To Die On. (You wouldn’t believe how frustrating it is to be surrounded by 5 million socdems who make Bernie Sanders look like Ron Paul in comparison. (By that I mean that he isn’t that socially liberal but he does propose low taxes. Yes, that’s Finland for you; where Bernie would be the low-tax candidate.))

And speaking of tribal symbols, the question of private property had alwas been divisive but I see that as kind of a ??? thing because there’s no way to enforce private property on a voluntary collectivist community without violence, nor is there a way to non-violently expropriate a community which maintains consensual private property, and neither side could destroy the other so making some kind of peace in the form of “agree to disagree, each side goes its own way and doesn’t fuck with the other’s stuff” is the only stable outcome anyway unless the entire world was instantaneously brainwashed into one or the other.

(And the division of that stuff would end up being such that ancoms would actually have some to begin with. For pragmatic reasons. By pragmatic reasons I mean that letting ancoms expropriate enough to have their ancommunities be actually economically viable is more economically efficient than dealing with a lot of disgruntled ancoms. Disgruntled ancoms with guns and a special interest in expropriating things, specifically. Even Murray Rothbard thought that capital owned by the state or businesses that receive enough tax money is a legitimate target for homesteading and thus there is a clear win-win solution in expropriating the state and its monopolist cronies for the ancommunities so ancoms can get a real job building their vision of a good society without bothering others or being bothered, while ancaps can run their own society instead of whining on reddit. And mutalists and other inbetweeners can inbetween freely.)

Ancaps usually recognize that there is nothing stopping ancoms from having ancommunities in ancapistan while ancoms tend to be vaguely uncomfortable around the opposite equivalent, usually evading the question with something like “but nobody would want it”; my opinion is that if a bunch of people want to live on a ship among themselves, bothering nobody, stopping them with violence makes one the bad guy. At that point I don’t care about lofty proclamations about how “that ship is made from materials that belong to everyone” or the other usual justifications some (but fortunately not all) ancoms give for why they would do violence to stop those people and take their ship; I’d be there, protecting their right to do whatever the fuck they want amongst themselves without bothering anyone else, with whatever amount of violence I need, and I’d probably go on the ship with them because if land is filled with people who won’t let people do some consensual thing among themselves because it would be immoral, I don’t want to live there. (this is totally going to end up misquoted in a call-out post some day as “promethea is an ancap” but do I look like I give a shit)

More abstractly, I can sidestep the issue of the morality of private property by looking at it with cynical pragmatism: in most of the possible outcomes, ancaps won’t, or more importantly can’t, prevent ancommunities; and ancoms can’t prevent ancapistan existing somewhere, so both could and should be happy with the deal of “let’s build a new society where we both can do our thing without bothering the other side”. What I think about the morality of property doesn’t matter for my anarchism because I wouldn’t impose my views on non-consenting people anyway, and I’m willing to ally with anyone who agrees with that.

(Intellectual property is an exception; when it comes to things like copyright and patents I’m 100% pirate and in favor of expropriating everything; people could obviously keep trade secrets and use DRM and make license contracts and that’s fair game, but breaking DRM and using cracked licensed software is totally fair game too.)

And about the word “libertarian”? I’ll let Murray Rothbard explain: “One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy… 'Libertarians’… had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over…”

And my response is that Rothbard is once again being a massive dickbag of an asshole and I’m not letting assholes monopolize that word.

But yeah, even right-libertarianism actually has its roots in the same soil as communism and the history is fascinating and people should learn it. (And Lenin and Stalin are assholes.)

1 week ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #this is a social democracy hateblog #this is an emma goldman fanblog #still bitter for '36 #i _may_ have a special interest in this topic #at least based on the word count #bitching about the country of birth #laissez-faire used to mean _stop trying to help us_ · 14 notes · source: sigmaleph · .permalink

metagorgon:

socialjusticemunchkin:

metagorgon:

socialjusticemunchkin:

metagorgon:

argumate:

xhxhxhx:

#xhxhxhx #fighting the good fight

@argumate​ is tired of my neoliberal bullshit

The threat of new entrants keeps monopolists on their toes. Deep, liquid, and liberal capital markets ensure that the entrants always have access to deep pools of money. 

Deregulation is good, privatization is good. Private firms do what public firms don’t. There were too many mines and rail lines, too many plants, too many lines, too many products, and too many employees. There are still too many post offices and airlines. 

Norton Villiers Triumph was a mistake. British Leyland was a mistake. British Aerospace was a mistake. British Airways was a mistake. British Steel was a mistake. British Rail was a mistake. British Coal was a mistake. There was much to be liquidated, and much that was not.

Deregulating the railroads was a good thing. Rate setting, employment, and capital investment did not need to follow the priorities of the regulators. It could follow demand instead, and liquidate everything that was not worth the cost. And the Bell System breakup was a wash. 

I don’t know whether the app market works the same way, but you’ll forgive me if I’m skeptical of state monopolies and state regulation of private carriers. It doesn’t usually work well.

I’m always eager for your bullshit! :)

It’s certainly easy to point to examples of successful deregulation and privatisation, and China could benefit from a whole heap of that right now.

It’s also possible to point to awful failures of privatisation where the state ends up subsidising private companies to do the same job more expensively, typically due to other natural monopoly constraints that make it impossible to have a truly competitive market.

But back to Apple, that may actually be an example of an overly-regulated market, just the regulation is being done by a (huge) company, not the state.

While the app market seems free and competitive as absolutely anyone can make an app and try to sell it, Apple has absolute discretion on which apps they approve for sale and can deny you at any time based on criteria they don’t even have to reveal. They use this power to protect their monopoly, but this can make it very risky to innovate as you have to develop the entire app and submit it for approval and only then once the entire development costs have been paid will you find out if Apple will let you sell it or not.

Then of course if you make something amazingly brilliant and lots of people buy it, Apple take 30% of your revenues in exchange for doing absolutely nothing :|

The app store itself is a terrible piece of software, but you can’t make a better app store and charge more competitive rates as Apple won’t let you.

Basically if the tech giants were states they would not be very good ones.

monopolists are not kept on their toes because they use their glut of market power and collude with related monopolies in order to destroy or consume all newcomers. tech startup culture is about getting your company valuable enough for one of the agglomerates to notice you and perform extend-embrace-extinguish on your products in return for paying back your investors and yourself. the only exchange of value is in currency between the capitalists; the social value of the product is lost and even corrupted against the consumers.

the lifecycles of these giants are on a continental scale, they do everything they can to ensure that they themselves survive. all selective pressure has been lost, and these are in fact worse than the government because they have political power and simultaneously answer to none but their owners.

companies aren’t selected for market freedom or perfection, they’re selected for survival. the free market is an unstable equilibrium. at the very best you have different monopolists and monopolies at the helm, and that is not better.

IP, IP, IP

Those companies would be in a lot more precarious position if the state didn’t send PoliceMob after anyone who “violates” “ownership” of numbers.

And excuse me, but I’ve got to be the one to say this: not all startups

Some of us are actually trying to bring down some giants for being so shitty. The freedom of dying starving wolves is just a nice bonus compared to the livestock complacency of being a corp drone.

that is a good point, though i would not call it a necessary and sufficient condition for anticompetitive practices. you would agree with regulation of force, correct? i can’t picture ancapistan without companies having their own PoliceMobs, which may keep them from committing violence on each other (sans literal corporate warfare), but definitely does not keep them from protecting their own position against newcomers. the actual mob is a thing.

This margin is too narrow to contain a treatise on Non-Police Mob, other than that state enforcement of bans on drugs, gambling etc. make those industries both profitable and violent, thus in a certain way serving to protect the Mob.

A libertarian economy would need to be fragmented enough that no single actor could re-establish “effectively a regulatory state, no matter what one calls it de jure” and there are reasons to believe that private-as-in-privacy police and courts and polycentric law could be less vulnerable to monopolistic capture than state monopoly law.

Also, I consider Pure Ancapistan relatively unlikely as a lot of people seem to want different things and thus an actual libertarian society would probably be a patchwork of all kinds of systems, from Ancapistan somewhere to Ancomalia elsewhere and Consensual Social Democracy in its own place, the market for governance systems supplying the various demands competitively, and thus the existence of different systems throws a wrench into the plans of trying to model just a single one (I suspect it might possibly have a stabilizing effect, as the failures of one system could just destroy it without having massive effects on everyone else; think startups going bankrupt whereas the USSR was the equivalent of a “too big to fail” megacorp; and thus the overall system could figure out what actually works well; and less-than-destructive failures could be moderated by the alternatives, as the standard of living in $alternative_system effectively sets the floor for how terrible things could get in $another_system (and ancaps and ancoms seem to basically simply disagree on which system is the one where all the refugees from the other system’s Inevitable Failure would end up at)).

In fact, there’s an argument to be made that Scott’s Archipelago is basically very close to what an Actual Anarchist World (as opposed to various unrealistic utopias that are basically “what if everyone automagically suddenly agreed with us and coordinated perfectly in implementing it?”) might be expected to look like.

I agree with regulation of force, but I really want to see alternative ways of regulating it because I’m highly suspicious of the claim that “The State is best supplier of that service and the fact that it has been violently suppressing competition is totally not in any way related to its degree of confidence in how well it effectively believes it could compete against consensual alternatives”. And when one looks at the period of history closest to “companies having their own PoliceMobs” which is still in any way relevant to modern society, the state was there watching the back of those companies, thus effectively subsidizing their ability to do violence and passing the costs of that enforcement to taxpayers and other innocent victims.

i agree that prohibitions protect and nurture organized crime, but that wasn’t how organized crime got started. the irish mafia came before prohibition. i don’t know enough about the time period to say more, but i would think the only prohibition in effect at the time was on good jobs for irish workers. that might be isomorphic to substance prohibitions, i don’t know.

scott’s archipelago rests on a meta-state, unigov, which is a minarchist complete monopoly on inter-state force with universal community taxes for coordination, externalities, and an enforcing military. i would hesitate to call it anarchist.

though i haven’t seen a working state yet, i believe technology can enable one just as you believe technology can enable a working anarchy. friendly ai is the problem of good governance.

my main concerns with states and their alternatives are:

  • protection against harm and interventions to reduce expressed harm
  • increasing freedom of behavior and movement
  • counteracting externalities
  • counteracting poverty and inequity, necessary for the above
  • increasing perfection of markets
  • reducing anticompetitive practices, necessary for the above
  • reducing cognitive complexity, i.e. different standards of information and behavior, complex standards (this is not done well by central authorities or otherwise, possibly the only solution is intelligence enhancement)
  • reducing coordination costs of all of the above

a lot of it has to do with providing public goods, which benefit everyone and can be paid for by no one in particular.

there are probably more. with foot-voting, tax evasion is a concern. basic income is a strong intuition for me. i don’t see how basic income can be reliably funded without a simple universal progressive tax, and i don’t see how a universal tax can be levied without a universal centralized monopoly on force.

aside: advertising and applied memetics in general are massive issues for me. which side wins is a priori neutral save for those with more resources being more likely to succeed. all that is produced then is a massive negative externality in coercion, cognitive load, misinformation, tribal polarization, anti-competition, resource costs, security vulnerabilities, i hate it i hate it i hate it. ad blockers are certainly a blessing, but they’re only individual-level solutions, while the problems are with the society that enables and lives by them. off-topic, though…

a micro/transaction-based system might have some improvements, it certainly would for removing the parasite of advertising from the otherwise-starving face of media (at least, small media, big media can go choke). i am hesitant to go down that route, though. it has dystopic feels if there is any coercive pressure (though to some extent this would be replacing taxation?), poverty in general has to be addressed, and administrative/coordination costs have not been addressed yet.

now i’m basically spewing disconnected thoughts. i will leave this here.

The ILA had bought off the politicians. That’s exactly what I’m talking about; good government is a public good, bad government is a private good, thus the former will always be undersupplied and the later oversupplied. The politicians helped pass the costs of organized crime onto citizens, whereas in hypothetical Anarchistan the honest businesses and citizens would be able to wage war on the ILA without politicians and their police being there to stop them.

Scott’s version of the Archipelago features Unigov, and even I suspect that Firewall might be necessary, but the basic anarchist idea is that the absence of states would render it unprofitable to try to re-establish states. David Friedman’s claim seems to basically be that genuine polycentrism would turn good law into a private good and bad law into a public good, and while I lack the qualifications to evaluate it properly, it at least sounds very interesting.

(Firewall, being an organization with a strictly restricted purpose which would have to be internally tailored to resist attempts at co-option to serve private interests, would be an interesting problem to solve but a very vital problem nonetheless. I’m not saying it would necessarily be solvable, but if it isn’t, we’re fucked anyway so one might as well operate off the assumption that the world can be saved and the only question is “how”.) (And even semi-georgist Unigov taxing land and common pool resources to do its very limited functions with otherwise a total hands-off approach would probably be Least Bad State, especially compared to what we have now. My anarchism will be pragmatic or it will not get anything done.)

Most of the things you listed are things existing states tend to suck at. Open source etc. seems to show that under conditions of sufficient material abundance, prosocial motivations combined with reputation economies can help incentivize the creation of public goods. Then there’s also the fact that any inefficiency in the market is theoretically an opportunity to make a profit if the inefficiency can be solved at less cost than it itself causes. Crowdfunding, for example, is one neat solution facilitated by modern technology reducing transaction costs and basically making copyright totally unnecessary for the “find out how art-makers get paid” purpose and exposing its true “find out how cronyists can extract maximum rents” purpose.

Basic income is obviously a problem because you can’t give people free money without taking it from others in some form (otherwise the money would just be worthless), but a possible alternative would be making some things so cheap that people can easily access their necessities. States tend to be terrible in this regard; due to regulatory capture etc. they don’t really have the incentives to safeguard commons but instead have historically systematically worked to fence them in and hand them to cronies (inclosure acts, intellectual property, etc.). And due to the monopoly on violence they can get away with it, but people who are dedicated to defending their commons from external seizure would be less likely to be worth messing with if there weren’t such big monopolistic organizations to render their resistance ineffectual. I’d expect an Actual Anarchist society to feature a lot of sharing as supporters of welfare could construct communities to do it voluntarily, and when someone wants to call themselves a king the anarcho-syndicalist communes could just disregard their claims and keep doing what they were doing, knowing that there isn’t enough violence inherent in the system to disrupt their utopias.

(A darker, more cynical possibility might be that nobody actually wants to help others, and superficially well-intentioned welfare states are a simple accidental side-effect of status signaling, and the inability to maintain the structures that keep them up would reveal the true preferences for dog-eat-dog brutality that people have underneath. That being said, even I, who have been described as “the most Slytherin/Slytherin person I’ve seen”, don’t believe freed humans would actually be like that.)

The argument that foot-voting and thus tax evasion would be a significant problem is true if one accepts some basic premises of the present system, but I doubt the strength of those basic premises under possible alternatives. Unregulated free-as-in-speech currency could reduce the power of financial rentseekers when people could just switch to some other means of exchange for their own needs. And without the state to enforce the property of absentee owners and pass the costs of citizens, capital-holders would need to be worth keeping around and non-value-creating rentseeking where some asshole simply calls themselves the Owner and wants to extract money from people without doing anything useful would be a lot more vulnerable to people just deciding that such shit wouldn’t fly. Thus, actually value-creating businesses could continue to operate within win-win frameworks, while artificially uppropped rentiers would be more precarious, and the system would have an incentive to create such win-win frameworks for people to operate in.

The problems of advertising and such things also apply to states as well; a lot of money and effort is wasted on democratic politics because whoever wins the election gets to pick their neighbors’ pockets, and thus it reallocates resources from productive activities to what’s basically thievery on an organized scale.

Then there’s the question of people optimizing for monetary gain over eudaimonia (”I am a contract-drafting EM…”), and I have a vague intuition that the decoupling of money from eudaimonia is an important factor, and if people were free to choose between systems they would probably prefer the ones that supply more eudaimonia and the exchange rate of money and eudaimonia would fluctuate freely, thus eradicating this particular failure mode. The failure mode of some people disregarding eudaimonia and optimizing for taking over the world would still persist, but that’s what Firewall/FAI is for. We can’t have everything, and even states-as-they-exist are vulnerable to the exact same processes (as anyone who has played 4X games knows, governments which sacrifice power for eudaimonia inevitably get outcompeted by those who don’t).

Poverty in general isn’t actually that much of an issue assuming near-future technology and absence of distorting factors. Most people can do something productive (as creation of material value grows ever more automated, they can switch to creating immaterial value instead, and prices should simply go down and down), and most people prefer to take care of people in their communities, and thus we should technically be in a better position than ever to eradicate poverty-as-in-deprivation. The problem is the allocation, and it seems that states mostly serve the interests of those who wish to see everything allocated to themselves (be they crony capitalists or redwashed rentiers). Any kind of centralization in power is probably dangerous (even if it may be sometimes necessary), and thus states are kind of not helping with this issue.

Of course, this is all just the type of vulgar theory which is mostly only good for eulering people.

(Also, as an interesting aside, the way people found startups to get bought out by the big tech monopolies seems entertainingly similar to how people built fake refineries just so they could sell them to Standard Oil and trick away a share of its monopoly profits. In a certain way the market is already making the corps bleed money everywhere even though in practice that “everywhere” tends to mean only “skilled programmers” (although programmers in turn create more jobs in the service sector than other fields, because we’re lazy af and like to pay people to do things we don’t feel like doing) while the government’s biggest contribution is upholding the patents and other bullshit that only help anti-competitive practices.)

(via metagorgon)

2 weeks ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist · 100 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

shlevy:

gentlemantiger:

shlevy:

gentlemantiger:

shlevy:

argumate:

so taxes are government coercion and doubleplusungood right?

what about the fact the way Apple takes a 30% cut of any transaction you make on the App Store and their newly announced subscription system takes 15% for subscriptions older than 12 months?

sales tax in Australia is only 10% and credit card processors take less than 5% so Apple is absolutely gouging repeatedly for something that takes them no ongoing investment, nor are they using the revenue to fund development of the platform because the hardware is already sold at a profit, and in the past they even charged developers for access to the tools! (and of course they still prohibit any development activity on non-Apple hardware, so in a sense you still have to pay to play anyway).

App Store policy prevents you from using a competing payment processor or makes it extremely awkward to do so, so competition is squashed.

sure you could design your own competing ecosystem from scratch, but that would take billions in capital, and is completely out of reach of even the largest app developers (besides those that are trying to establish similar monopolies).

a principled boycott of Apple appears unlikely to get off the ground.

now Apple won’t send the canonical men with guns to your house if you refuse to pay: they don’t have to! they deduct their cut before they pay you! so no force is involved and it’s entirely okay, right? bleurgh.

I mean, I can understand the voluntary/nonvoluntary distinction not mattering to you, but surely you can see that there is a distinction there? I don’t have to participate in Apple’s market or buy their phones.

Considering the sheer number of companies that you need to interact with that are switching to this model, not really.

All phone companies do this and you can’t honestly opt out of cell phones these days.

I mean on a factual level I think you’re wrong here, I have a flip phone and many Android phones allow you to install whatever apps you want from whatever source.

But setting that aside, and reiterating that I can understand why this distinction isn’t important to you especially given the huge startup costs, do you really not see a distinction between the case where you won’t go to jail if you use an alternative and one where you will?

To some minor extent? But like that’s just one example. Not even the best one.

But to give a better example of why I don’t sees meaningful distinction between taxes and private companies providing services that are necessary: You would die if you could not eat food, and that is pretty much impossible for the average person to acquire without paying for it in any practical way. Dying is very equivalent to legal ramifications from not paying taxes.

Maybe you can live without a phone (although you cannot get a job without phone service or a address in most cases, and those do need money, so I think that’s super debatable) but there’s plenty of other things you need to survive that you do have to pay more for, and why aren’t those just as coercive?

The distinction here is not whether you can forgo the service altogether, but whether you can use or create an alternative without risking imprisonment. I can go to Walmart, or Target, or plant in my yard to get food. I can’t set up my own home market and not pay income tax on what I make.

Again, it’s a reasonable stance to say that this difference doesn’t actually matter that much. Especially in cases where creating an alternative is impossible due to lack of resources and no meaningful alternatives already exist. But I still think there is a difference between “you can’t choose differently because you don’t have the resources to set up a different choice” and “you can’t choose differently because if you do you will go to jail”, even if that difference is often irrelevant to any given political analysis.

Also, intellectual property monopolies etc. are helping a lot of those rentseekers. The costs of creating alternatives are artificially high because the companies can send PoliceMob to hunt down those who don’t respect patents and other such silly things.

And telecoms in most western countries are incredibly regulated with excessive barriers to entry; Romania has some of the best internet in the world thanks to its anarchistic origins and Somalia seems to have way more competition (and probably better customer experience too) in telecoms than the US. If it was easy enough, you would most likely have a free-as-in-speech alternative for your phone service. It might not have the same UX as corp alternatives that can extract maximum money to maintain their services (eg. a macbook is a lot easier to deal with than a custom linux laptop), but I’d be highly surprised if it didn’t exist.

Then there’s the difference between “not forbidden” and “actually a commendable thing to do”. In pure perfect info-anarchy, Apple could manufacture phones with self-destruct switches if one tries to jailbreak them, and publish software with DRM that prevents people from using it without paying whatever rents Apple asks, and they would be perfectly free to do so. I wouldn’t like it, and would strongly prefer that things be done differently, and I would be there to break the DRM, pirate the phones etc., but even then I wouldn’t want to establish a precedent of authorizing men with guns who can mess with your business in if their boss thinks you charge too much.

I don’t think Apple could get away with such things in a free society, but if they did, I would limit my objections to non-violent forms.

3 weeks ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist · 100 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

jbeshir:

socialjusticemunchkin:

jbeshir:

socialjusticemunchkin:

neoliberalism-nightly:

argumate:

voximperatoris:

argumate:

It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.

If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.

To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.

This is a bizarre criticism to me.

If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.

There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position of an interventionist state. But again, I don’t see any reason why such a thing would happen without “non-libertarian actions being taken along the way”. And how to design institutions to minimize those is the chief project of libertarian jurisprudential theory.

In any case, I don’t see how this reduces the main points put forward by libertarianism, such as that nearly all of the arguments used to justify the existence of an expansive state are invalid, that nearly all government interventions in the economy or in people’s private lives are net harmful, etc. And if you agree with those, it’s hard to see how you could support an expansive state.

But if those arguments are wrong, that would be an entirely separate line of criticism from “a libertarian society would devolve back into a non-libertarian society”. Because in that case, the goal would be to prevent this from happening and/or minimize the role of the state as much as possible. Which is hardly the “middle of the road” position.

I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world across many industries today.

(In the case of monopoly on violence this is even more critical, and it is typical to see turf wars between nations or gangs flare up from time to time then settle into a steady state once they have negotiated who has control of which territory).

But the fact that this can easily happen means continual interventions and tweaking to keep the system from collapsing, maintaining it in a kind of dynamic instability much like a modern fighter plane, or going back further to Romance of the Three Kingdoms where any two of them can always gang up to prevent a takeover by the third. That’s not necessarily an efficient or fun process, though.

To take this line of thought further requires clarifying whether we are talking about a hypothetical state that still holds an absolute monopoly on violence or not, because that makes a huge difference.

Even a strong centralised state can be more discriminating in the interventions in which it undertakes, eg. a more sensible drug policy, fewer foreign wars, etc.

Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states even now holds absolute monopoly on violence.

I mean you are seeing the consolidation in industries, but not really comprehensively across industries. And it could be argued that tax systems and regulations actually disfavor non-big-businesses.

Few big corporations would be competitive against smaller challengers without state intervention to establish barriers to entry. Even the businesses themselves know this; advice to invest in those that have strong “moats” around them is cartoonish villainy and totally true.

Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually know their own situations better than outsiders do, and a lot of the problems in eg. universities emphasizing “””productivity””” in terms of publications, or employers of programmers counting lines of code, are instances of precisely this: people can’t do the actually useful things because someone is trying to measure something that doesn’t lend itself to effective measurement, and the bad measurers should get outcompeted away in a functioning market by those who aren’t impacted by mismeasurement. This probably explains a lot of why academicians perform best in traditional public/monopoly-corporate settings where the rules are basically “you’re smart, here’s a bunch of money, figure out something cool, we won’t bother you in the meantime” and programmers are more productive in startups instead of corps burdened by mismanagement.

And state intervention also creates artificial and inefficient property rights. Copyrights, patents, etc. would be basically unenforceable without the state or an organization equivalent to it, and they have a massive centralizing effect on the economy. I don’t believe organic-pragmatic property rights would ever be able to extend to information in such a way as nobody could afford to hunt down pirates on their own unless the starting position is absolutely centralized to begin with (and that’s like “what if we turned the Soviet Union into a megacorporation but didn’t change anything else”; not libertarian at all in practice).

Bans on stripping DRM and stuff get legitimacy from the state; we’re seeing the backlash to “corps are trying to steal the stuff we own” even now and absent a state-equivalent enforcer all it would take is one defector who sells free-as-in-speech 3d-printers etc. to render such positions unfeasible in practice. And the world has way more idealists than a single one.

State and gang violence is seldom economically efficient either; a lot of it relies on the existence of a population those benefiting from violence can pass the costs of that violence on. Drafting soldiers, harming civilians, destroying value, etc.

So all of this turns into an engineering problem: how to craft a system that has, when accounting for known human biases, stable incentives against harmful centralization. My anarchist side suspects that the monopoly on violence is the key, specifically in the sense that its existence enables all the other centralization by passing the costs of enforcing that centralization onto others. When someone has that degree of power, it can be abused to create other forms of power as well, but if violent enforcement of monopolies of any kind is ~disrupted~ the prohibitive expense of trying to recreate them could protect a system made of smaller, competitive actors, from re-establishing them.

Of course, this necessitates solving the three key issues that the popular legitimacy of states presently rests on. One is safety, one is equality, and one is moloch. If people believe that only a state can protect them from crime, they will want a state; and if people believe that only a state can prevent a slide into feudalistic rentseeking by capital-holders and destitute indebted poverty for the rest, they will want a state; and if people believe only a state can disarm the shitty multipolar traps that will destroy everything of value, they will want a state.

The first one has seen a decent amount of work done on it, and I guess empirical experimentation would be enough to sort it out.

The second is what a lot of people object to, but I think simply stopping the state/crony-capital symbiosis of using artificial property rights and assignments to monopolize zero-sum things and propertyize non-scarce things would render it relatively inconsequential (of course, easier said than done); a lot of deliberate violent, coercive, and value-destroying action has gone to creating and maintaining economic hierarchies between people favored by states and people preyed upon by states, and modern technology makes maintaining a basic standard of living trivially cheap if one isn’t bound by rentiers holding artificial property rights. Thus basic solidarity, mutual aid, distributed productive capital etc. could ensure that even non-productive people would be able to have their needs met better than in current illfare states.

The third one is hard, but even states themselves are subject to the same pressures, and if we got from “states everywhere” to “Firewall has the monopoly on x-risk prevention and will nuke you if you act irresponsibly and refuse to stop doing it but otherwise you may do whatever you wish” it would still be a drastic improvement. And the less significant multipolar traps aren’t that terrible; I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.

For example, the most simple solution would be that the Filter Pact threatens to kick Mike’s ass unless Mike uses the filter. Or Mike’s Dia Paying Group, having negotiated the same deal with everyone else’s protection agencies, would tell him that disconnecting the filter is agreed to be illegal and obligates him to pay $999 in damages to everyone else (+10% for DPG) or they won’t protect him from attempts to kick his ass. The state bans this because kicking Mike’s ass is a crime but polluting everyone else’s fish farms isn’t, but an anarchistic system of organic property rights wouldn’t draw such a distinction as Mike isn’t able to lobby himself a special protected position from which to harm others.

Alternatively, everyone could agree to start paying $.29945 a month to everyone else who uses a filter once everyone has agreed to this deal and joined the Filter Fund. Thus, everyone will join it to earn $700, and Mike won’t disconnect his filter because he would lose the $299.15 he gets from others plus $1 from pollution while only gaining $300 from not operating the filter, making a net loss of $.15. And Mike won’t stop paying the Filter Fund because if he does it, everyone else will disconnect their filters because now they would make a profit of ~$.15 from doing so, and everything will go to shit. This should be a game-theoretically stable equilibrium afaik.

But the basic thing is: if there’s a problem that causes net harms, someone could make a profit by solving it. In the fish farming example, the solution will exist if implementing it costs significantly less than the $700 000 a month it would create in value.

For food regulation I could join with a bunch of people to pay our own food certification agency, which in turn is held responsible for the costs of illnesses caused by tainted food, and is thus incentivized to minimize its occurrence. And it itself would pay restaurants, manufacturers etc. to inspect their facilities so that it could get accurate information on risks. If the seller pays the regulator they will have an interest to collude, but if the buyer pays the regulator (whose entire point, after all, is to be serving the buyer’s interests) it’s possible to construct a system where nobody has an incentive to sell unsafe food. And this can naturally be bundled with a whole lot of other services in insurance, healthcare, etc. to create a de facto regulatory regime that is nonetheless voluntary and actually incentivized to serve the people, instead of special interest groups and the careers of lobbyists and cya-obsessed bureaucrats.

So in ~theory~, (and this is very much the sort of theory which is just entertaining instead of serious) if the emergence of states is a harmful thing, people would find a clever way to prevent it as long as they are permitted to do so.

And then there’s the cultural thing. Nowadays when there is a problem, people automatically think the state should do something about it, and try to pass a law. Fixing that would go a long way; instead of what-is-basically-violence-at-the-bottom people could try a different way of solving it.

Unregulated trade unions were nice until the state stepped in and ruined the labor market (the socialdemocratic corporatist labor laws in Finland were literally implemented as an anti-communist conspiracy, but just as usual the left has forgotten this and nowadays everyone in the unions defends the thing that was intended to destroy their influence, because redwashed rentiers got comfy jobs from it and it got tribally associated as “left” so of course they must support it; and nowadays everything related to work and welfare is an unholy hell of bullshit which hurts workers and honest entrepreneurs alike).

Mutual aid societies were nice until the state stepped in to implement price floors for doctors and artificially restrict the supply because doctors didn’t want to be in an equal bargaining position with working-class customers; they wanted to be authorities and the state obligingly served those interests because screw the poor that’s why.

Rojava is nice, but Turkey is a state which is doing its damnednest to step in and prevent it from being successful.

But basically, getting people from the mindset “the state should solve this” to “okay how do we solve this” would help a lot. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to operate in, and I’d love for the state to get out of my way when I make the world better.

okay this got excessively long and rambly and I lost track of what I was originally saying and whatever, enjoy

I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.

But, as the FAQ comments, those clever ideas did not, in fact, happen and are continuing to not happen when it comes to fisheries in international waters nowadays.

Any fool can imagine a utopia; the problem is that the incentive structures of economics will produce exactly one thing out of the space of things you could imagine might happen, and the one thing they pick is not, usually, your favourite. From the perspective of a human, there’s billions of free variables we can tweak in our imagination to get the result we want to fall out; in reality, those free variables already have specific values, and they’re not conveniently setup for anything in particular. Insofar as stable equilibria do appear, there’s lots of them and there’s no principled reason to expect the one you like to emerge- as demonstrated by the lack of clever coordination schemes in the real world.

I’d like it if “how do we solve this” could be consistently and universally answered without involving coercion, but I’m very dubious. You need a very specific pattern of people being able to coordinate effectively whenever it’s good and unable to coordinate effectively when coordination is bad that’s unlikely to emerge by chance; you’ll get cases where people can’t/don’t coordinate effectively where it’d be desirable, and where they coordinate effectively where it isn’t, e.g. to set up cartels, or to torture and kill people for being “deviants” because the owners of the the three nearby violence-handling firms don’t care enough about deviants, are better paid by the people doing it, and trying to start your own is just helpfully highlighting yourself as the next target.

The only way I could see it sort of working is if you could coordinate everyone to *create* that pattern, because it’s vanishingly unlikely to occur by chance. If you could get everyone to agree to a norm of cooperating and coordinating if and only if coordinating is a good idea for everyone and had near-perfect (possibly perfect; a lot of stuff doesn’t handle even a single defector well) value alignment and agreement on game theory between people maybe it’d work.

But I think this boils down to a complicated description of requiring perfect humans to make your society go, rather than fitting a society to your humans- every instance of individual corruption is people failing to do that in reality, and it isn’t clear how you’d get people to all agree to not try to create regional monopoly violence handlers in any world you couldn’t get them to all agree to just not commit crimes- or not run a centralised government shittily.

And one reason you can’t do that is that human actions are noisy; in your lake scenario, some human is going to pay the 15c to defect because they get in their head the idea that they’re not going to let the other people tell them what to do, or because of some stupid argument over how the filter should be implemented, or something else (15c is a cheap way to make a point). Any system needs to be able to tolerate individuals being wildly and ridiculously bad at optimising for their own interests, which means it needs to have stability after defections even if defection is stupid. Even perfectly mentally healthy humans behave stupidly often, nearly always if the argument for “correct” behaviour is not intuitive. It needs to be able to tolerate channers deciding in numbers of about a thousand to try to fuck things up for the lulz of seeing the world burn.

And I’m really doubtful you can get that kind of quasi-stability without coercion, especially since you need it to persist over technological development and other things which will wildly change all the factors involved in decision-making.

EDIT: To put this last bit in engineering terms, your system would need Byzantine fault tolerance for up to some reasonable number of byzantine (arbitrarily, possibly maliciously designed with intent to break the system) failures. (There are impossibility proofs for byzantine fault tolerance with more than a third failing, but a third is much more than a reasonable number, so the problem remains not *proven* unsolvable)

Obviously. Incentive structures are everything; but there’s a certain laziness in “let’s have the state solve it” which regularly backfires. And state action has an entire class of shitty incentive structures that inevitably cause those backfires and massive large-scale harms. Just as there are inherent issues in voluntary coordination/consensual subjection to coercively binding agreements, there are inherent issues in having a centralized implementer of arbitrary violence. My claim is that people should be allowed to test the hypothesis “voluntary systems are less shitty than coercive systems” without getting shot at, because voluntary systems eradicate one class of failures (voting on promethea’s body) and there are incentives to migitate other classes of failures.

I might not be able to save the fisheries, but I could save many people from the violence inherent in the system. In a world with NSA, gender identity clinics, FDA, the war on drugs, privatized prisons, regulations banning non-rich people from making profitable investments, criminalization of poverty, cronyist businesses and lobbyist rentseekers, the entire mil-ind complex, FBI destroying the Black Panthers because fuck you that’s why, etc. the decimation of the world’s fisheries doesn’t sound like such a big deal in comparison.

I’m all for letting people try stuff (so long as they’re not coercing people internally or abusing children or anything), and I definitely agree that there’s incentive structure problems with how the people-that-comprise-the-state (meaning civil servants/agents + ‘representatives’, not citizens) are selected and behave and use their power, too.

I’m just very dubious that what will fall out of the new incentive structures would be any better- cronyism between companies as well as with the state becomes legal and not restrained by any need for appearance of legitimacy, and those companies also now run everything the state used to, and this seems unlikely to be any better than the old cronyism and probably a lot worse, and to promptly lead to a lot of the rest of the complaints as well as fascinating new ones that are not readily predictable from here.

I do agree you’d lose the NSA, probably, and military entirely. If you could avert the “monopoly on violence re-emerges” problem and not wind up with a single Police Inc you’d avoid the war on drugs and Black Panthers getting destroyed because fuck you thing, but as I’ve said I find this extremely unlikely and can’t think of anywhere with multiple violence regulators which didn’t have them immediately hash out territories to individually be monopolies within and tolerate other armed groups only insofar as they were clearly not threats to their supremacy.

And if you did end up with a single Police Inc, well, you now live in a dictatorship where social norms are that if you want defence by the police at all you better be able to pay for it, the police can arbitrarily charge whoever they want however much they want (including deliberately pricing you out, if someone else wants you priced out), cronyism is set up to go because we explicitly threw out the regulators, and the head of the doctors’ union has a meeting scheduled with the CEO about all this dangerous drug taking going on scheduled for 2PM and the rest of the CEO’s day is packed too. I think this would be a lot worse, wouldn’t want to live under it, and think the best hope would either be to be popular, or that the market goes so wildly dysfunctional it collapses and lets you try some other kind of government.

I guess what I’m really picking up on here, though, is that the current democratic system is ultimately checked by the empathy of the electorate. This is a shitty check, and a lot of people get overlooked, including you, and it’s bad at complicated problems. But it constrains how *far* a bad consequence of the incentive structures can go. The current system doesn’t have all its problems stop just before the point the majority would get outraged by chance- it has an incentive setup which ensures that.

This new system would have no empathy checks, not even the shitty one. Its bad consequences of its incentive structures go *all the way*. To the extent it shares any problems, those problems are now unrestrained, to the extent it has new ones, they start out that way. And for all the current non-human incentive structure does awful things, I think a non-human incentive structure unconstrained by even the minimal constraints on the current one would be worse. I can understand how that is not such a concern for you given how shittily the current system treated you, but it’s a fairly major one for me.

And while I mostly expect this means it would be immediately overthrown by an angry and appalled population as soon as it spits out 18 hour workdays for children or a Child Abusers’ Mutual Defence Force, or something else obviously cartoonishly evil, there’s a good chance the fix for that will come in the form of a dictatorial Police Inc or something else awful, and it’d probably take centuries to get back to a State even as bad as the current ones again.

But yeah, I’m for people being able to try it, so long as they’re trying it mostly with other people who want to try it. But I wouldn’t want it anywhere near me or the people I care about, and would fear for the people trying it even as I thought they should have a right to.

Cronyism between companies is enabled by centralized control of the economy; a sufficiently competitive market without big dominant players would help in reducing those possibilities. And even then there’s a limit to how much damage cronyists can cause when their ability to coordinate it (and to violently extract corporate welfare etc.) is reduced.

And if the psychological-cultural issue of “there’s a problem, let’s have a state solve it” is reduced (which I consider necessary; freedom is facto, not jure, and the culture most people form is very unfree and inherently coercive and disrespectful of people), people can just band together to destroy the Child Abusers’ Mutual Defence Force.

Anarchism is under no obligation to be nice to coercive people; if some people decide that slave trade is legal and okay and try to take slaves, I’d fully support violence against them until they stop trying to take slaves. And I’d expect other people to feel the same; but I don’t think they would be willing to do violence to stop people from smoking weed if they couldn’t hide it behind the facade of artificial civility of “laws”. Maybe they would scorn weed-smokers in their communities, but weed-smokers could move to other communities. And since there is no crystallized essence of coercion somewhere in the laws of nature that things could be compared with, the exact boundaries would always be a question of negotiation, fluidity and constant adjustment, and ultimately determined by the combination of what people accept and what they are willing to fight for.

If power to do violence is sufficiently decentralized, the point where the majority gets outraged is just as dangerous for those who are causing it, as it is now, if not more. And with proper coordination systems in place, it might be possible to create a sufficiently stable equilibrium where principles of symmetry, “I don’t mess with you if you don’t mess with me”, etc. complement the woefully deficient empathy of the majority enough to eliminate most of the democratic failures of coercion, while still serving as a check on flagrantly intolerable practices.

Cultural liberals and cultural conservatives could agree that they won’t shoot each other for saying disagreeable things, and won’t try to vote each others’ cultures into oblivion. Trans people could sign up with the Tranarchist Mutual Defense Force which would, with help of allied security providers, keep them safe, or evacuate them from the worst communities where keeping them safe is too difficult. Judge Rotenberg Centre could be at risk of getting raided by Dawn Defense which lets children sign up at age ten, and has made a niche in challenging abusive parents both pro- and retroactively. Dia Paying Group could have its Large Employees harass ArguProtect Platinum members to convince them to stop harassing DPG customers and respect restraining orders. Everyone could band together against the CAMDF and the slavers because fuck them.

The late 19th century-early 20th century saw violence in labor battles because people considered some practices sufficiently intolerable. The difference is that back then the state intervened to artificially favor the cronyist robber barons (eg. in the Battle of Blair Mountain the government even bombed its own citizens from the air); without state support for some groups over others, the knowledge that workers and people sympathizing with them would be willing to draw a line and the mutual desire to avoid violent confrontation could incentivize everyone to prevent 18-hour workdays for children.

Or another example; banks evicting people after a financial crisis has fucked up everything and there are lots of homeless people and empty houses. Without the state to back up the banks with police violence, I’d expect greatly increased amounts of squatting and renegotiating terms.

And this is what I mean by organic property rights; if I made up a paper claiming that I “own” a specific number or the entirety of Kibera, everyone would laugh and tell me to heck off. If I claimed that I made my child with my own labor and thus I “own” my child and can abuse my child however I wish, people would unkindly ask me to go to hell with my claims. But the state enforces patents, clears slums without compensating residents, and kidnaps runaway children and returns them to abusive parents. Democracy can’t ad hoc monkey-patch its rulesets pragmatically, so the rulesets will result in ridiculous edge cases and ever increasing sprawl of conditionals of conditionals to try to deal with them; but if the legitimacy of such an attempt at an exhaustive monopoly ruleset is thrown out, there’s less incentive to abuse those edge cases when there’s the risk of people just going “fuck it, that shit won’t fly”. And knowledge of this incentivizes people to craft agreeable rulesets that can avoid instances of “that shit won’t fly” while still enabling all the good things that rulesets make possible.

I won’t claim that it wouldn’t result in absurdly horrible things happening because everything results in absurdly horrible things, but I’m saying that monopoly violence enables certain hard edges in the culture that I’d expect to be less pronounced without it; and thus an anarchistic system shouldn’t be assumed to be “hard edges taken all the way, plus the novel failure modes” but more like “mostly novel failure modes” instead.

And as far as stability is concerned, theoretically all it takes is that users of violence coordinate effectively against anyone trying to establish monopolies. There are some claims that administrative burdens of inefficiency in policing set a natural limit on the size of security providers somewhere significantly below “big metropolitan police force” which is notably far below “state” or that monstrous “Police Inc”. And (attempts at) monopolies in violence happen in an environment where the idea of a monopoly of violence is relatively taken for granted, and organized crime etc. operate in the same constraints of police existing.

Furthermore, there’s an argument to be made that without a coercive government, trying to establish a coercive government would run against incentive gradients when people would rather be consensually governed. And in ~hypothetical perfect coasean utopia land~, coordinating efforts to stop the Absurdly Horrible Thing would be easier than coordinating efforts to create a state, as almost everyone can agree that AHT shouldn’t exist but rightists won’t want taxes and leftists won’t want morality legislation and thus neither would be willing to cooperate beyond stopping AHT; and stopping AHT could be done even by paying people to not do it and not tolerate it, if paying money would be easier than using violence.

And pragmatic-empirically, Rojava is planning to abolish police by training everyone in policing and having well-armed citizens united by a common ideological cause, and I’m extremely interested in how it goes, and extremely angry at Turkey for trying to fuck with the experiment. So far it seems to be only getting fucked up by authoritarians who don’t want freedom on their backyard, instead of rojavans shooting up sea slugs and shooting at each other.

(via jbeshir)

4 weeks ago · tagged #violence cw #this is a rojava fanblog #promethea's empiricism fetish #drugs cw #i am worst capitalist · 40 notes · source: argumate · .permalink

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

collapsedsquid:

socialjusticemunchkin:

socialjusticemunchkin:

  • Things I learned this week:
    • Things that go viral with relatively low effort:
      • Hilarious trolling of people everyone hates
      • Surveys
    • (if I’m going to continue tumblring in Lisp, I should do it this way
      • (at least I think this is easier to follow))

metagorgon said: didn’t you already learn surveys go viral when you grouped everything into left/right, female/male, etc and it was used as a personality test?

Yes, and I replicated the study and tested the method myself. Thus, if I ever need to draw attention to things, I should try to formulate them into a survey somehow so people will spread it. This is vital for memetic engineering purposes.

You gotta work on making an equivalent of the nolan chart that tags everyone as mutualist.

Okay.

Q1: Immigration

  • open borders, but no benefits for immigrants ()
  • make immigration dramatically easier, provide them the very basic necessities (S)
  • make immigration dramatically easier, all comers get generous benefits (SS)
  • regulate immigration, but cut their social benefits (H)
  • regulate immigration, give some benefits to those who get through the process (HS)
  • regulate immigration, but give generous benefits (HSS)
  • only import vulnerable foreign labor with few legal rights to keep the underclasses in control and wages low (HH)
  • close the borders, deport foreigners (HHS)
  • stop the movement of both people and capital (HHSS)

Q2: Taxes

  • should be low, simple and easy to comply with ()
  • should be progressive, without loopholes (S)
  • the rich should pay proportionately less tax than others (H)
  • we should have a system of progressive taxation with many different deductions and exceptions to ensure that the outcome is fair and just to everyone (HS)

Q3: Welfare

  • keep it strictly voluntary, or just a barebones basic income, but eliminate criminalization of poverty as well ()
  • provide people an unconditional income that covers their basic needs (S)
  • provide all people enough money for a comfortable life (SS)
  • reduce welfare, but retain the criminalization of begging, dumpster-diving, sex work, and other means of survival (H)
  • have multiple different programs for addressing social issues, and keep them means-tested (HS)
  • add more social programs and benefits (HSS)
  • the state should provide everyone a job with a living wage (HHSS)
  • work should be a condition for receiving any money; replace the system with workfare where companies get free labor, people get “unemployment benefits”, and taxpayers foot the bill (HHS)
  • just put the poor to forced labor, no need to pay them (HH)

Q4: Trade

  • trade should be free ()
  • the only legitimate use of tariffs is to reduce the unfair market position of countries which use forced labor or have insufficient environmental protections; or to protect the developing industries of poorer countries (S)
  • trade policy should furthen the economic interests of domestic businesses (H)
  • trade policy should protect domestic jobs from foreign competition (HS)

Q5: Discrimination

  • don’t legislate morality ()
  • some anti-discrimination laws are okay as long as compliance is easy and cheap and they target genuinely marginalized groups (S)
  • businesses should be incentivized to treat everyone equally, but the mechanism should be one which doesn’t distort competition in favor of the strong (SS)
  • make laws explicitly protecting certain types of private discrimination (H)
  • protect some groups, and establish stringent and specific standards and bureaus to enforce them and monitor compliance and punish those who get caught discriminating (HS)
  • like above, but expand the coverage and try to reduce the perverse incentives (HSS)

Q6: Housing

  • reduce zoning rules, let the market decide ()
  • use regulations only as a temporary measure while waiting for zoning reforms to render housing more affordable (S)
  • legalize squatters seizing unoccupied houses as long as involuntary homelessness exists (SS)
  • use zoning laws to protect neighborhoods from undesirable kinds of people (H)
  • combine zoning laws with rent control, subsidies etc. to manage the housing supply (HS)
  • have the state produce housing for people (HSS)

Q7: Immaterial property

  • should be abolished ()
  • is useful and should be protected (H)
  • should be protected better and enforced more strongly (HH)

Q8: Private property (capital, not toothbrushes)

  • is private, no concern of the state ()
  • is sometimes legitimate but other things should belong to everyone, and depriving others of such things (eg. land) should at the very least warrant compensation (S)
  • should not be respected; only possession is legitimate ownership (SS)
  • should be protected by the state, while owners are free to do whatever they want (H)
  • should be protected, taxed and regulated reasonably to serve the common good (HS)
  • the state should limit how much capital the rich can accumulate (HSS)
  • the state should use eminent domain to seize private property for important business interests (HH)
  • the state should seize property for important public interests (HHS)
  • the state should own all capital and allocate its use optimally (HHSS)

Choose your answer, sum the letters after each to see your position on the two-axis chart of economic freedom. “S” means intervention to reduce inequality, while “H” means intervention to preserve/create hierarchy. The maximum score on each axis should be 12. This is not a purity test, so reaching out for the corners isn’t what one is “supposed” to do although I guess ardent ancaps would get a solid 0/0.

You see, part of the point of the test (as I see it) would be to push back against ancaps/libertarians.  You’d want a test that points out the key issues there.

I would push the line that property is a creation of the state more.  To say that private property “is private, no concern of the state“ is not true, you are asking for the state to enforce private property.  You would want a test that points that out.

If you accept property rights as some inherent fact of nature the preservation of which is just the default state, you’ve already lost the major battle.  You’ve gotta make the libertarians fight for it.   Although you give hierarchy points for immaterial property, you describe the base state as “should be abolished.“  You want to make it clear that enforcement of property is, if not state action, at least violence.

Similarly, you want to explicitly point out the similarities between rent and taxes.  That’s to me one of the key points of mutualism, they’ve realized the similarity between taxes and rents, and you want to make that similarity clear, that both are the threat of force by the state to make you pay money.

The key insight on polling and surveys is, as always, here.

1 month ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #tumbling in lisp · 33 notes · source: socialjusticemunchkin · .permalink

multiheaded1793:

thirqual:

neoliberalism-nightly:

thirqual:

multiheaded1793:

“It’s not only undesirable but *literally impossible* to afford basic social infrastructure or redistribute basically anything, so suck it up” is perhaps the most amazing article of faith I’ve seen among US-style libertarians.

Yup, it’s like Western Europe does not exist.

What if EU implodes and Western EU except Germany just go into full crisis?

You have to admit that the fiscal situation in most of Western Europe is not pretty and Brexit, Greece and peripherals really could be ticking time bombs. You can say money are just numbers on paper, but they really do reflect something fundamental even if non-obvious and distorted.

Like I don’t think I need to say that it’s entirely plausible that by making today nice it could make the future a lot worse, since that’s what more or less Greece did. In this case whoever they imported stuff that they can’t make easily stopped giving them imports because they can’t come up with those numbers in their bank account.

It’s easy to say pretty words, and I’m sure rich people as a whole are incredibly good at that. But if they are really less charitable than the average person, from that article I saw floating around, then probably you (idk what’s your objective, but just a reasonable guess xD) need to be careful there. Since we also can agree they are probably very good at dodging bills too. And just let you know I want those skills too for obvious reasons because I believe with good faith and careful consideration that it’s in my best interest to do so.

“We” might not be able to resist completely, but we are really good at it!!! And our resistance makes us less productive and also incidentally salt the earth for the rest of you as well. And who knows, I feel maybe, just maybe you people here actually will be pursuing your objective better if you kept us around and just tried to focus on structuring things better than to trying to take more and more blindly without focusing on the logistics. But then again this is like the whole strategy from a subgroup of us who’s politically connected. Because I’m pretty sure bureaucratic power must stroke someone’s fetish out there as well.

And honestly my charitable mood from my childhood over the years gradually turned sour from seeing how entitled people can be, so who knows. I don’t think I’m the only one here who might put up extra effort into resisting just because ~feelings~ ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Greece? You want to invoke Greece in the last 6 years to caution against the successes of Western Europe since 1950 (arguably, since Bismark in the German Empire) ?

A crisis which was in part due to corruption, widespread tax evasion and financial advisors from Goldman Sachs advising the Greek government to misreport their level of debt ?

Where did the economic crisis began by the way¹ ? Oh yeah, a boom-and-bust cycle in the USA.

And then you want to argue why it is desirable for you to acquire those ‘skills’ ?

“Take more and more blindly” does not represent the reality. Increasing volumes of tax evasion, weaker enforcement of tax laws, greater sophistication of tax avoidance, on the other hand…

Nice veiled threats too and spite against the “entitled”. Thanks for reminding me why I am for very large punitive damages for tax evasion.

(note: even the IMF says that only in extreme cases redistribution lead to bad growth outcomes)

¹not that the Greek situation was stable, mind you.

Yep, the veiled threats and the laughable… petulant tone really got me as well. Also, nice passive-aggressive essay in the tags there…. Pretty words this ain’t.

Tagged with: politicsreference for discussioni honestly think with existing revenue you people already can do a lotyou also can reform god dam corporate tax and stuffand that will raise revenue and growthand you can reform welfareand bite the fking bullet and end protectionismmaybe if you people even did a bit rather than exacerbating it more I wouldn’t have gone to the other campbut I’m deep in there now and you won’t ever get me back except make me disinterested in topics like thiswhich is what I’m trying to do because I want $$$$$$$$$$

Okay seriously, I do agree with NN on a lot of this. The socialdemocracies of Western Europe are not in trouble because of the inaffordability of redistribution, they are in trouble because of the inaffordability of all the bullshit they’ve tacked onto the redistribution.

Finland could pay every single person a basic income of 15 000€ a year without increasing taxes a single cent. That’s almost double the minimum pension, nearly three times the spending money people on welfare get (along with rent, and significantly more than the highest amount welfare pays out even with rent included), and more than what tens of thousands of working poor earn. And as a result poor people’s effective marginal tax rate would go way down from the 50-100% it’s now.

And this includes children. Right now the state pays, at most, 4000€ per child; free education, healthcare and childcare would end but the extra 11 000€ a year would go a long way in letting poor families access the services they need. Or if we want to account for the fact that not all families would know to purchase the right insurance etc. and spend 5000€ per child per year in providing vital services to them we would “only” up the money children directly get to 10 000€ a year.

And obviously this massive basic income would render pretty much any tax scheme progressive, so we could drastically simplify the tax code. I don’t even know what the true transparent flat tax level would be because the system is so complicated with all kinds of hidden fees and multi-level taxes, but it would make things simpler. If one assumes that, after privatizing all other forms of social security (15k€ is already more than a lot of people make even from the income-dependent benefits) the income tax level would end up a transparent 40%, someone earning another nominal 15k€ on top of the basic income would get to keep 24k€ to themselves. Easy, simple, not hard to calculate. (And if it sounds ridiculously high, one should note that currently around 25% of people’s wages goes straight to pensions but it’s hidden so they only see 7% as “”“the employer pays”“” the rest (they buy it because most people cannot into math))

But the tax system itself could use some (and by “some” I mean “an awful lot of”) change; property taxes should be replaced with land value taxes, income taxes could be shifted onto consumption, a revenue-neutral carbon tax should be instituted, corporate taxes taken only from dividends to owners, etc.

And we could end so many laws. Who needs regulations on working hours, minimum wages and benefits when one has the 15k€ option to simply tell the boss to screw themselves if a job offer is unacceptable? (only statists) Ending corporatism and freeing both employers and unions to negotiate without external coercive intervention would make the economy a lot more responsive to changes, and everyone has that 15k a year to fall back on even if they end up without work (and a lot of bureaucrats rightfully would), along with any savings they have. That’s a lot more than what most working-class people currently would get from unemployment insurance.

Privatizing public services and state-owned corporations would be most naturally done by handing ownership to their users and workers; so schools would be owned by parents and teachers, universities by students and professors, buses by drivers, etc.; this would prevent a massive transfer of wealth and capital from the state to cronyist oligarchs while allowing all service providers to participate equally on the markets. Finland is one of the per capita richest countries in the world because of its absolutely bloated pension funds (in fact, to such an extent that the national debt is effectively -80% of its nominal value) and this money could be either used as the basis of a post-labor universal capital fund, or immediately redistributed to everyone as an investment account of 15 000€ while keeping enough in reserve to cover the national debt (of course, paying out the debt would be folly when the interest rates are around zero but the return on investments is several percent; any sane corporation would borrow and invest on such terms).

Furthermore, this would completely decimate the non-productive parts of the economy, freeing both labor (which is not desperate and exploitable because remember that 15k€ a year?) and money to productive things (of course, ex-bureaucrats would be so pissed at having to learn how to do good things to people, but you know what scorn dem).

The private sector would be almost as dramatically rearranged as the previously public sector, as artificial industries such as agriculture (where something like 50% [fucken sic] of revenue comes from subsidies instead of selling things people want to buy) and exploitation of forced labor (the current welfare system is inhumane and there are basically sweatshops where disabled people work for 1,5€/h [fucken sic] making scarves rich ~designer~ assholes sell for 300€ a piece, pocketing the difference) would be flattened into the economic equivalent of a glowing glass parking lot. The ensuing stimulus of domestic demand and the abolition of many cumbersome regulations would open up massive opportunity for people to make a value-creating living while reducing the economy’s dependence on big businesses. The abolition of regional subsidies and artificial limits on the housing supply of Helsinki would trigger a significant movement into the big cities where jobs are available, workers productive, and services cost-efficient.

And if one wants to get really hardcore, abolishing patents and copyrights would be a pretty huge move. Suddenly obscene barriers on innovation would be wiped away and people wouldn’t need to waste time figuring out whether they need to push lots of paper just because someone else “owns” a number, and drugs and many other things would get dramatically cheaper.

And they should totally build the hyperloop between Turku and Stockholm.

Without an increase of a single cent in taxes.

Yeah, it would be quite a drastic shock doctrine. A glorious, magnificent shock doctrine leaving behind only the ashes of the old system. Ashes which the seeds of freedom and poor people finally not being treated shittily could blossom from. A beautiful, terrifying cataclysm of creative destruction. The value-destroyers and parasites would feel the pain of righteous vengeance, a pain which would be far less than what they had previously imposed on others because 15k€ a year.

But instead, we have some “”“engineer”“” who got lucky and became a millionaire prime minister despite having no economic or political savvy whatsoever, and whose dream seems to be to become the Thatcher of Finland; a dream he pursues mainly by trying to become as widely hated as Thatcher was/is, and assuming the rest follows on its own.

1 month ago · tagged #bitching about the country of birth #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time #i am worst capitalist #win-win is my superpower #this is a social democracy hateblog · 37 notes · source: multiheaded1793 · .permalink

princess-stargirl:

worldoptimization:

prophecyformula:

shkreli-for-president:

jenlog:

voximperatoris:

fatpinocchio:

voximperatoris:

@eccentric-opinion / @amakthel / others:

Anyone know any good, fun personality, political, ethical, and/or other self-reporting tests?

I’ve done the ones at OKCupid years ago (an example of pretty low-quality tests).

Of course I’ve done the Myers-Briggs test and the Big 5 test.

The ones at YourMorals are really interesting. But I finished all the best ones a while ago.

The coolest ones I’ve run across recently are the ones at Philosophy Experiments. They’re fun because they try to test you on the internal consistency of your positions, e.g. on religion and philosophy of mind. I highly recommend them.

Any other recommendations?

iSideWith, World’s Smallest Political Quiz, 5-Dimensional Compass, Ideology Selector

iSideWith is pretty good, the second and last one are kind of…bad.

The 5-Dimensional Compass was a little bit interesting. My score:

You are a: Conservative Anarchist Interventionist Cosmopolitan Libertine

Collectivism score: -67%
Authoritarianism score: -100%
Internationalism score: 33%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 100% 

Kind of bizarre they they apparently use “conservative” to mean “individualist”. And I’m not actually that much of a “libertine”.

Objectivist Anarchist Total-Isolationist Cosmopolitan Progressive

Collectivism score: -83%
Authoritarianism score: -100%
Internationalism score: -100%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 67%

There were some weird ones like “Our nation should eliminate all foreign aid and spend that money on other things.” Ideally they wouldn’t pay the foreign aid and also not spend it on something else.

You are a: Left-Leaning Anti-Government Non-Interventionist Nativist Fundamentalist

Collectivism score: 33%
Authoritarianism score: -33%
Internationalism score: -17%
Tribalism score: 67%
Liberalism score: -83%

ＣＯＭＢＡＴ　ＬＩＢＥＲＡＬＩＳＭ

You are a: Right-Leaning Non-Interventionist Traditionalist

Collectivism score: -33%
Authoritarianism score: 0%
Internationalism score: -17%
Tribalism score: 0%
Liberalism score: -33%

pat buchanan 4 god-emperor

You are a: Socialist Pro-Government Cosmopolitan Liberal

Collectivism score: 50%
Authoritarianism score: 17%
Internationalism score: 0%
Tribalism score: -33%
Liberalism score: 17%

You are a: Centrist Anarchist Non-Interventionist Nationalist Liberal 

Collectivism score: 0%
Authoritarianism score: -83%
Internationalism score: -33%
Tribalism score: 17%
Liberalism score: 33%

iSideWith:

candidates: Bernie Sanders and a bunch of libertarians around 90%

parties: green, libertarian, socialist and democrat all basically tied within the margin of error

parties by issues: basically all either libertarian or socialist

ideology: left-wing libertarian

themes: Privacy, Populism, Tender, Decentralization, Globalization, Multiculturalism, Small Government, Isolationism, Progressive, Pacifism, Laissez-Faire, Collectivism, Deregulation (from strongest to weakest)

feelings: I think I broke the test and made it give a spiteful “lol screw you weirdo, good luck trying to differentiate the results” (seriously, they are all utterly bunched up around the same scores)

5-Dimensional Compass:

You are a: Left-Leaning Anarchist Interventionist Bleeding-Heart Libertine

Collectivism score: 17%

Authoritarianism score: -83%

Internationalism score: 17%

Tribalism score: -83%

Liberalism score: 100%

feelings: utterly unsurprised

1 month ago · tagged #politics cw #i am worst capitalist #the best heuristic for oppressed people since sharp stick time · 49 notes · source: voximperatoris · .permalink

collapsedsquid:

sinesalvatorem:

ilzolende:

“Noooooooooo…” Carmen whines helplessly. “Look, this is only indirectly my forte. My father is the one with a special interest in economics, and he raised me to respect the power of the field. He made me watch every episode of My Little Factory: Markets Are Magic when I was a kid. He made my brother and I bid on where we’d go on the weekends to clearly signal how much we wanted it, because money is the unit of caring. He devised a game in which I traded a stipend of imaginary currency for goods and services at home, and gradually increased the complexity until there were financial derivatives. So, even if this isn’t my special interest, I still feel comfortable saying this: If someone gave me a loan and a decade, I could own your island. Please: markets. That is all.”

[OOC: Both my parents are econ/finance people and ex-central bankers. The game about trading currency for household goods was an actual thing they did with me from seven to nine years old. I had a unique childhood.]

(from this glowfic)

i love my Economics Girlfriend (alison @sinesalvatorem)

original post

This was my character’s reaction to being told by a noble woman that her country had a command economy, because using money for important services was undignified.

My character then turned that woman into a venture capitalist. #NoRegrets

It’s all fun and games until someone organizes the peasants into an anarcho-syndicalist commune.

Actually…

If the peasants’ lands don’t get forcibly seized by ex-aristocrats, anarcho-syndicalist communes are a very good thing for free markets.

First of all, they reduce the vertical nature of a feudal society by undermining the aristocrats’ power and distributing power horizontally, which in turn is useful for making markets adequately reflect people’s preferences and not just the aristocrats’.

Second, they allow the peasants to pool their capital for more intensive technologies of production and economies of scale, while having an incentive structure that supports value creation as people work for their own benefit instead of some asshole over there. Voluntary collectivization has often been favored over involuntary collectivization or tenant farming for a reason.

Third, the existence of a sufficient amount of anarcho-syndicalist communes effectively sets a reasonable floor for how horrible industrialization can be. Historically the inclosure acts and the poor laws and all that bullshit made the opportunities for the proletariat way lower than they would’ve otherwise been, thus rendering it artificially exploitable in the dark satanic mills. If peasants can anarcho-syndicalist-communize instead of working in horrible factories and mines, the factories and mines will be substantially less horrible or they will simply not exist on a free market.

Forth, land is fundamentally much more zero-sum than other forms of productive capital, and thus a lot of what aristocrats do is inevitably just unproductive rentseeking which anarcho-syndicalist communes would redistribute to the creators of value, disincentivizing unproductive activities such as aristocratizing and other forms of mooching off others’ labor. On the other hand, anarcho-syndicalist peasant communes can’t (unless they totally dominate society and ostracize everyone who wants to use currency and markets so thoroughly that social pressures prevent economic efficiency) destroy the markets’ ability to create value as they would still be incentivized to trade with outsiders where trade is beneficial.

1 month ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist · 27 notes · source: ilzolende · .permalink

Anonymous asked: holy shit i raN INTO COMMUNISMKILLS ON OMEGLE LMAO HOLY SHIT I SAW HER AN RECOGNIZED HER IMMEDIATELY AND TOLD HER I LOVED HER AND SHE SAID "THERE NEEDS 2 BE MORE OF US" AND DISCONNECTED BEFORE I COULD SHOW HER MY DDR FLAG :(

ilzolende:

leviathan-supersystem:

i know you probably mean the German Democratic Republic, but it would also be pretty sweet if you meant “dance dance revolution”

dance dance permanent revolution? :P

“If I can’t dance, I don’t want to be part of your revolution.”

1 month ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #this is an emma goldman fanblog #my brain wants to ship goldman/friedman way too hard #i mean i don't even know if it would make any sense at all #but it's probably still not the worst ship ever #like i want to lock goldman and friedman in a room until they can come up with something they can agree on #and then we do that thing to society #or something #this is why promethea's brain should not do political theory · 41 notes · source: leviathan-supersystem · .permalink

I did not set out to deliberately do it, but if one wants a libertarian case for a socialist-flavored free market (in the sense of it featuring a significant amount of shared capital), I kind of perhaps from a certain perspective might have basilisked propertarianism into suggesting that one could make a moral argument for needing to replace the welfare state with handing over some means of production to the people, because anything else would be theft:

If one looks at the state, taxes, benefits, regulations, etc. as strange property it provides a very interesting perspective to everything. (The perspective which, for example, informs my bostadsrett proposal for the abolition of rent control; people already have a certain kind of kind-of-property, and it would be naive to expect them to give it up right away without compensation. From an amoral so-propertarian-it-wraps-beyond-propertarianism perspective certain things make perfect sense and it can be argued that rolling back benefits would be, pragmatically speaking, as similar to theft as taxation is. We might have broken the system by creating all these property derivatives nobody fully understood, but simply expropriating one class of strange property that is mostly held by those in a bad position otherwise provokes the same kind of totally comprehensible resistance as expropriating less strange property.

And you know, if any state was to implement this kind of pareto-optimize-and-recognize-even-strange-property bargaining I’d be on board with the experiment.

And the reason for why we should do this instead of just abolishing the strange property? By the argument that we would be allowed to simply take away the property that has formed, we could just as well argue to abolish private property and institute communism, or give all land back to the descendants of the people who held it back in, say, 1200 CE. Or if we argue that property may not be strange, then we might have to say goodbye to the finance sector.

I’m not sure if I endorse this fully (because I try to avoid endorsing pretty much anything fully), but I do think it’s an interesting perspective to consider. And obviously this relies on moral libertarianism/propertarianism to begin with, so it isn’t convincing if one rejects the basic idea of that one (which I do, but playing around with constructs of logic and systems is just so fun)

1 month ago · tagged #i am worst capitalist #win-win is my superpower · 4 notes · .permalink

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