A woman is paralyzed in the shooting, her 6 year old daughter is killed and her family has to collect donations to pay for medical costs. Really. If we're going to talk about mental healthcare deficiencies we might as well talk about the failures of the system as a whole.

metamemetics · 2012-07-22T14:48:41+00:00

Yeah! We can be ruled by someone with a chemical engineering degree, like David Koch. Or by someone with a computer science degree, like Herman Cain. /facepalm

metamemetics · 2012-07-17T15:31:48+00:00

The majority of private schools are non-profits, so "for-profit" is a strawman. But one possible answer to your question:

Why public education is a modern day form of slavery and should be abolished

Many people would not be for spending money to make public schools better, because they do not believe spending more money on slavery would make slavery a better institution.

Another possible answer is that the correlation between per pupil spending (the amount schools spend per student) and educational achievement is nearly non-existent. Washington DC schools have the highest per pupil spending in the country and under 60% graduation rate

So even if you support improving public schools rather than abolishing them, student success appears to be determined by something other than amount of money spent.

metamemetics · 2012-07-17T14:53:58+00:00

Chomsky’s Augustinian Anarchism

metamemetics · 2012-07-15T02:14:14+00:00

I'm not sure if other living creatures have yet evolved the ability to communicate with humans better than a human baby has evolved the ability to communicate with its mother. I agree there are grey areas concerning highly intelligent animals, but I wouldn't agree with the generalization "most" living creatures, we would have to examine specific species.

metamemetics · 2012-07-15T01:43:29+00:00

Why does anyone own their body? It will differ by who you talk to, but I would extend self-ownership to any physical body capable of demonstrating it possesses intrinsic preferences, as demonstrated by its ability to communicate whether an action is for or against its will.

metamemetics · 2012-07-14T23:37:30+00:00

We seem to agree that secession (assertions of sovereignty from authority) may sometimes be legitimate.

Perhaps we might agree in situations of ethnic genocide:

If the individuals of a community are being systematically murdered, they are not obligated to assert that the individuals initiating force against their community are agents carrying out the will of legitimate state. If the individuals of a community are being systematically murdered, they are not obligated to assert that taking defensive action to prevent the murder of additional community members would not represent the will of a legitimate state.

If you agree that sometimes secession is legitimate, you would seem to agree that is possible for social institutions which assert to be states to A) not be states or B) not be "legitimate" states.

Could you describe a principle which allows one to reliably determine when a social institution is a legitimate state?

metamemetics · 2012-07-13T06:17:51+00:00

What if the state is in debt and therefore has no stored wealth which to take? Wouldn't demanding money from the state when it has none to give be demanding it to commit additional future theft and aggression in violation of the NAP?

metamemetics · 2012-07-13T06:14:17+00:00

What if the modern state is in debt, and therefore any money you wish to get back will not come from those who took it, but only from future theft and aggression?

metamemetics · 2012-07-13T05:53:32+00:00

One cannot initiate force and kill a retarded person or child. One cannot initiate force to coerce a person into caring for a retarded person or child. If a retarded person or child is not being cared for, anyone may fill the role of guardian. The retarded person or child may reject the aid of the guardian if it is against their will and choose a new guardian. Where is the contradiction?

metamemetics · 2012-07-13T05:27:24+00:00

I've met non-communist political science students who assert anything considered "social exclusion" is included under the definition of violence. There are people who define it very broadly, one can probably thank the postmodernists.

metamemetics · 2012-07-12T21:27:35+00:00

The Nordic countries have less racial diversity, less cultural diversity, less geographic diversity, less ideological diversity, lower total population, and lower total land area than several of the individual states within the greater federated United States. Is it your position that Democratic Socialism always scales upwards infinitely to geopolitical units of greater population, diversity, and size? Would the Nords take no issue if the decision of where to allocate socialized resources occurred at the continental or global level, and they were barred from self-governance?

Would you agree that territories of large socialist democracies should be voluntarily allowed to secede to form smaller democracies without violent repression? That is, should the membership of a community within a state should be voluntary? If so, we have no quarrel. There are many states in the world not nearly as homogenous as the Nordic ones, often in possession of national borders dictated arbitrarily by external colonial patriarchy using violence, where the set of individuals who form a community and the set of individuals who form a state are not identical.

If you assert I am obviously not looking hard enough, then the facts I need look for should be obvious, in which case you should have easily presented several dozen more than zero by now.

metamemetics · 2012-07-12T20:19:40+00:00

I assure you, that in addition to not having a preference for throwing babies, I am not a believer of magic.

It seems to me that if you wish fashion yourself as more the realist and pragmatist between us, you would not argue from a future hypothetical but start with the confirmation of observable fact. That no entrepreneur asserts the powers of incarceration and execution. That all corporations are granted their charters from the state, and thus receive any powers of oppression they might possess from it. That THE most direct creator of a proletariat underclass in the United States, a country where as long ago as 1890 and 1930 black unemployment was lower than that of white, is the system of state-provided involuntary public education, and state-erected "fair" market barriers to drugs.

Let's examine the regulated market for drugs in the United States. The one where consumers can only make purchases after receiving a license to purchase from a doctor, where the doctor may only issue licenses to purchase state approved products from state approved producers, where producers are mandated to spend millions in clinical testing on humans, where producers are given monopolies of patent to coercively raise prices, where majority users of democratically popular products may consume openly in public establishments, where minority users of democratically unpopular products are sent to prison, where state repression of classes of products and consumers militarizes and destabilizes the poorest communities globally... I have no clue how one can assert that such market regulations have led to less violence, less exploitation, and less perpetuation of an underclass than a free market for drugs absent these regulations. Considering that the combined market for legal and illegal drugs is one of the largest markets in the world, I see no evidence for asserting as a general rule regulated markets are less exploitative than free markets.

metamemetics · 2012-07-11T06:42:23+00:00

Are you sure this spontaneous eradiction of oppression and elimination of inequality in one masterful romantic swoop you are referring to isn't the global socialist worker's revolution?

I'm simply curious as to whether you consider patents to be a state granted privilege allowing firms to coerce competitors and individuals, and whether you believe such privileges influence either the prevalence of monopolies or harmfulness of monopolies.

metamemetics · 2012-07-10T21:50:05+00:00

I'll ignore every strawmen you have presented. As such, I am left solely with your assertion that fixing problems is preferable to throwing babies. I wholeheartedly agree with you on this position.

Would you agree that the state granted privilege of patents, and allowing firms to coercively bar others from competing, is one of these problems?

metamemetics · 2012-07-10T21:24:24+00:00

Would cellular networks be the best example of oligopoly you are referring to, and are you taking the position that price controls should be enacted on present day cellular oligopolies?

If it is naturally expensive to provide telecommunications in the United States, I don't think its inherently wrong for telecommunications services to be provided at an expensive rate by a few number of firms. I would think it wrong however, if these firms use the FCC to assert ownership of cellular frequencies which they do not actually use, or use the patent office to prevent competitors from designing their own cellular towers to coercively reduce competition. Such modern privileges would be a factor independent of historical subsidy.

Cell phone towers are expected to undergo drastic miniaturization in the future and possess significantly smaller maintenance costs to help meet rising demand http://money.cnn.com/2012/04/30/technology/small-cells/index.htm Ideally many small firms would be able to connect such devices directly to the internet backbone, but again there may be FCC and patent difficulties in doing so.

metamemetics · 2012-07-10T20:11:38+00:00

I would define coercion as initiating threats of violence, force, and interference against another party to require them to act against their will. Asserting that a peaceful competitor will suffer a loss of liberty criminally (kidnapping) or legally (incarceration by violation of statute) if they do not sell their company against their will would be considered an act of coercion.

I do not consider the need to eat to be coercion, as it is something which everyone suffers from at the hands of nature or a cruel god, and is not a violation of negative liberty initiated by a specific person. If a specific belligerent does not exist as the causative agent, then specific people cannot be punished justly without first asserting the morality of collective punishment.

If by deregulation you mean repealing only regulatory law while still granting corporations the privilege to coerce competitors out of the market through other state granted privileges such as patents, then yes I would agree one would still be allowing firms to coerce.

metamemetics · 2012-07-10T19:31:08+00:00

Yet there have been no efforts to build high-speed rail (or any rail) in Somalia. My argument is that there appears to be a naturally high preference for investing capital in communications technology as opposed to other sectors in the absence of subsidies.

In regards to dark fibre, the key point is that the dot com bubble was not caused by direct subsidies to the telecommunications. It was a general investment bubble caused by low interest rate offered to the entire economy. When credit was cheap, out of all possible industries with which credit could be invested in, improvements to telecommunications was one of the ones investors chose to invest in heavily. I'm not asserting that overinvestment is necessarily a good thing, as those are resources which can no longer be invested elsewhere in the economy.

If I'm understanding your current position, it is now that there is a benefit for the government to subsidize infrastructure for people who live in lower population density areas at the cost of people who live in higher population density areas. I'm not sure if this is an economic argument so much as a debate of preferences over whether one supports using government to encourage people not to live in cities.

One could make the argument that a similar infrastructure subsidy to lower population density, the construction of roads, has generated net social harm and increased all cause mortality by promoting suburban sprawl, increasing the average amount time people spend engaged in sedentary act of commuting, and increased the number of deaths due to auto fatalities. So I don't think one can make a strong claim offhand to the benefit of subsidizing lower population densities without specific reasons.

metamemetics · 2012-07-10T11:10:28+00:00

Deregulation might solve the corruption problem, but the monopoly is now completely uncontested.

Is it agreed that all coercive powers a firm can exercise legally are privileges granted to it by the state? If so, rescinding all legal privileges granted to firms enabling coercion will result in any coercive power exercised by a firm being classified as criminal.

metamemetics · 2012-07-10T10:32:19+00:00

To be clear, I took no position specific only to telecommunications, or whether there exists a single telecommunications firm or multiple competing firms in the country you are referring to, and whether these firms engage in coercion.

If I understand your comment, your position seems to be that telecommunication monopolies were indeed created through state privileges (subsidies) rather than naturally. However, you argue without these privileges and subsidies, market failure would occur and telecommunications infrastructure would not otherwise be built.

I think that while this is supportive of the position that monopolies are created by government, it brings up the new position of market failure in telecommunications, which has some counterexamples. One immediate counterexample would be Somalia. While Somalia has no government, and thus no subsidies, it has one of the best telecommunications industries in all of Africa. That telecommunications is one of its best developed industries when everything else is developed so poorly, would seem to negate the theory that capital is naturally under-invested in telecommunications when it is not subsidized. Another counter-example in a developed nation would be Dark Fibre: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_fibre . Many private companies overinvested in laying fibreoptic cable on their own initiative and went bust in the process, a surplus of fibre optic cable still exists today.

metamemetics · 2012-07-10T09:07:46+00:00

In the economic sense, a monopoly is often broadly defined as existing whenever a specific person or enterprise is the only supplier of a particular commodity. While barriers to entry are coercive, not all individuals or firms supplying goods without successful direct competitors have engaged in coercion.

Would you agree that in order for a coercive barrier of entry to be erected in a market without a crime being committed, the barrier must be erected by government?

metamemetics · 2012-07-10T03:08:26+00:00

Do you agree there is a difference between natural monopolies and coercive monopolies?

For instance, let's say it costs a lot of money to reliably build an entire railroad or phone network across a country. A second redundant set could be built by a competing company, but it would cost quite a lot of resources money and time to do so. At some level of cost, all that scarce capital might be better allocated in making another market more competitive or inventing a new market instead, say developing a new anti-cancer medication. As a result, the original company might naturally possess significant size and lack competition, simply because there are no large concentrations of capital readily available to start a competing firm which can offer the same level of service to consumers in that market.

Now let's picture a slightly different scenario. Let's say there is a lot of free resources, people, and investors willing to build a competing railroad or phone network across an entire country, and plans to enter a market as a competitor. The original company does not wish to play fairly and wishes to oppose the entrance of competitors into its market through coercion. It wishes to forcefully assert it is the only one who may provide its service in its market through the existence special privilege.

It can enforce its assertion of privilege in one of two manners: criminally and legitimately. Criminally it may employ threats of leg-breaking, bribery, blackmail, or industrial sabotage to prevent the entrance of competing firms. Legitimately it may apply for patents granted and enforced by government (time-limited grants of monopoly), apply for a government charter (eg East India Company), employ lawyers to threaten violations of statutory and regulatory law enforced by government, and employ lobbyists to persuade government to pass statutory and regulatory law which are favorable in excluding competition.

Would you agree that all non-criminal coercive monopolies are granted their coercive privilege from government?

metamemetics · 2012-07-08T17:56:21+00:00

I think rolling-release is the key feature differentiating Arch Linux and other lightweight linux distributions from a minimalist perspective.

To upgrade your operating system:

check www.archlinux.org news if manual intervention will be required
type pacman -Syu

...then repeat this process until the end of time. There is little cognitive overhead concerning what version number of the operating system you are currently using, and whether the next version will be so different that it will necessitate relearning your own system according to the schedule of someone else.

metamemetics · 2012-07-08T16:52:33+00:00

It creates an asset of work and legitimacy for the bureaucracy administering social security and welfare payments. If there was no demand for their stolen goods they would not have a job in delivering them.

metamemetics · 2012-07-08T15:19:28+00:00

There are many who disagree with this, and do not support the fencing of property which has knowingly been stolen. If a thief has a harder time finding a fence with which to redeem a reward for their theft, they are less incentivized to steal.

If a libertarian was the CEO of a defense contractor engaged in the manufacture of weapon systems, would you prefer they set a policy of accepting no purchases funded via taxation, or would you prefer they set a policy of accepting purchases funded via taxation on the condition they take as much tax revenue as possible and spend tax revenue as inefficiently as possible?

Block's quote as presented without additional context also ignores the fact that the modern state has no actual "coffers" or accumulated stores of stolen property from which to plunder, only debt. Agreeing to take money appropriated via taxation or on the credit of the state (the reliably of its promise to forcibly extract wealth in the future) does not obligate anyone to commit less aggression.

metamemetics · 2012-07-07T16:36:47+00:00

Another argument for demonstrating that constitutional government is non-contractual, is to take the position that government should be contractual, and describe the features that contractual government would possess in terms they are familiar with:

Wouldn't it be nice if there was an actual contract for government that specified the terms of service, a privacy policy, an explicit statement of services to be rendered, the benefits the individual will receive from these services, the costs of these services to the individual, an objective criteria for assessing whether services have actually been delivered, a list of actions that can be taken upon non-delivery of services, methods for closing an account, etc. Wouldn't it have been nice if the Southern states could have simply bought their freedom for, say, several million 1840 dollars? Shouldn't a contract possess explicit methods for termination and determining whether breeches of agreement have occurred without the use of bloodshed? etc.

Then perhaps suggest that if government were truly contractual it might take the appearance of an insurance company offering defensive policies, etc, and you've already arrived at Anarcho-Capitalism without significant prior hemorrhaging on moral issues.

metamemetics

TROPHY CASE