Re: . 2.7 Million Morons

Steve Harris [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> For reasons that Mati has explained and I've also argued before
> here, anarcholibertarians really don't get it.  A rose by any other
> name would smell as sweet, and a skunk would smell as bad.  In any
> society you'll have bastards who need to be dealt with by arrest
> and imprisonment, and without some agreement on who gets to do that
> without retribution, you just get family feuds, ala Capulets vs
> Montigues.

The criminal justice system is completely broken.  I think we'd be
better off without it.

My being "out" about my false conviction causes people to confide
in me.  I usually suggest to them that they also come out.  They're
concerned that employers, girl friends, etc., will reject them.
Perhaps in some cases they're right.  But if *everyone* came out,
a felony conviction would completely lose its negative meaning, as
everyone could then see that it could happen to anyone at any time.

For years after my false conviction I continued to engage in the same
magical thinking that most people are still doing.  I imagined various
systems of checks and balances, constitutional amendments, or systems
of incentives, rewards and punishments which would cause the criminal
justice system, and the rest of the government, to work as we were
falsely taught in civics class that they already do.

Eventually I realized that this was foolishness.

People fear the power of rogue individuals and corporations, and
put their faith in a much more powerful government.  Why?  Because
government is *defined* as the good guys.  Whatever they do is right,
just because.

It would make as much sense to define the DC snipers as being right.
That would have saved everyone the anxiety of fearing being shot, and
the effort of catching them (assuming that they *have* been caught,
i.e. that Muhammad and Malvo aren't innocent).  Anyone who they shot
must have deserved it, and since each of us know that *we* don't
deserve it, we'd go to gas stations and shopping centers without fear.
If overwhelming evidence was presented (how, and by whom?) that one of
their victims *was* undeserving of being shot, we could come up with
fanciful methods of ensuring that there would be no repetitions of the
unfortunate mistake.  Or rather, of reassuring ourselves that this had
been ensured.  Perhaps we could ask Muhammad and Malvo to keep an eye
on each other (checks and balances).  Or perhaps we could write out
a new set of rules for who's allowed to be shot (a constitutional
amendment) and solemnly promise ourselves that these rules will
somehow be binding on the snipers, and on their successors for
centuries to come.

Or maybe government is supposed to be good because it "represents us".
But who says it represents us?  The government itself?

We have elections, you say?  Sure, ones in which millions of adult
US citizens are permanently forbidden from voting.  Ones that
use closed-source voting machines, where we have to trust the
government that what comes out has any resemblance to what goes in.
Closed-source voting machines running Microsoft software.  I thought
we weren't supposed to trust Microsoft?  Ones in which the elected
politicians are not bound by the pre-election promises which motivated
people to vote for them.

Or maybe people believe in government simply because they can't
see any alternative.  Schools have taught us that the absence of
government constitutes a horrible war-like condition of utter chaos.
Who runs these schools?  You think there might be a conflict of
interest here?

My idea is that everyone has their own opinion of each other person's
character, and nobody's opinion is privileged above anyone else's
(except by being more in tune with reality).

I'm not proposing a system, but rather the lack of one.  You might as
well suggest that if we abolish the Spanish Inquisition, how do we
know that whatever replaces it will be any better at deciding who is
a Heretic?

> If you let the family feud thing go to the literal end you get a
> bunch of competing warlord-controlled territories like the worst
> places in Africa, and if one of the warlords wins out totally, in
> these days of modern technology of repression, you get Saddam's
> Iraq.  Not a good thing.

I don't propose to suddenly overthrow the government.  Aside from
being logistically impossible, it would certainly lead to chaos and
rival governments, as you suggest.  And the one thing that's worse
than a single national government is multiple competing national
governments.  Such a condition constitutes a war.

What I propose is that more and more people change their attitude
toward government.  Treat it as a criminal gang, or as an irrelevancy.
Don't work for them, don't ask them for favors, don't vote in their
elections, don't say or do anything that would lead others to think
you regard them as legitimate.  Pay your taxes with the attitude you'd
have toward any other armed robber.

I hope and expect that in fifty years most people will regard the
government as they regard the SCA.  A colorful anachronism of great
importance to those who choose to participate, but of no importance to
the rest of us.  A group whose opinions of various individuals are no
more or less valuable than anyone else's opinions.

(The SCA is a medieval recreation group.  It has divided the US into
rival kindgoms, and fights comic-opera wars.  All in good fun.  I
don't know which kingdom I'm in, or who rules it.  I don't need to
know.  It has no effect on my life unless I choose to involve myself
with the SCA.)

> Which is why my favorite way of twitting anarcho-libertarians is to
> just tell them to realize that the Federal government doesn't have
> any proper "authority" over them, and that thus they live in an
> anarchy *already.*

Funny, I do the same, but I'm not twitting anyone.  Once everyone has
this mindset, the job is mostly done.  You obviously don't have this
mindest since you say "we agreed on a Federal income tax".  Did you
really have anything to do with that 1913 decision?  It is magical
thinking to believe you have any influence on events that happened
before you were born.  Not that most Americans who were living in
1913 agreed on a Federal income tax either.

> Most of these people are narcissists anyway, as you will discover if
> you go to a few libertarian conventions.  The fantasy of controlling
> their own armies goes perfectly with such psychologies.

Your logic is flawed.  You can't conclude from the fact that most
people who call themselves Libertarians and attend libertarian
conventions are anarcho-capitalists, that most people who are
anarcho-capitalists call themselves Libertarians and attend
libertarian conventions.  I haven't attended any libertarian
conventions in the past decade, I am not a narcissist (at least not
by the DSM-IV definition), and I have no desire to command an army.

> Now, if we agree that minarchy is good, and that Big Government
> leads to problems with information processing, we get to the hard
> problem that Ken has been addressing, which is by what mechanism(s)
> do we do the best diffusion of power and local governance.  So as to
> meet our goal of distributed parallel political/social information
> processing, which would let politics work as well as our economy
> does.  This is a very, very hard problem.

Which may be a hint that there is no solution.  It's like trying to
build a perpetual motion machine.  Or to decide the most moral way for
bank robbers to divide the loot.

> It's been hard to stop since we agreed on a Federal income tax ...

I never agreed on any Federal income tax.
-- 
Keith F. Lynch - [EMAIL PROTECTED] - http://keithlynch.net/
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