C4SS

Except that is not true at all by any objective measure. [1] The Ultra Rich do not use Personal freedom to disable efforts, it uses Government Regulation to disable efforts, the Rich LOVE big government why do you think many billionaires vote Democrat, it enables them to control the economy to ensure the poor are kept poor and dependent on government. In the end we should look to Smash the State, Eat the Rich, and expand personal freedom [2] [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J5s6aZCPSg [2]https://c4ss.org/content/30085

Check out what they say on https://c4ss.org. Maybe opinions have changed over the years though.

Well that is a complex issue with wide ranging solutions. My overall point though, even if you believe society is best serviced with High Taxation and large government social systems at least be honest and identify that taxation is infact theft, I am willing to debate the multiude of solution for social problem and wealth inequality but I am not willing to debate if taxation is theft. It is, there is no debate. To address the social systems and welfare, I personally believe these systems are largely need because of government. Government creates the problem it then uses taxes to "solve" A stateless or libertarian society does not benefit the rich, in fact strong central planning and control (aka government) ensure the rich stay rich. Smash the State, Eat the Rich: https://c4ss.org/content/30085

Or, alternatively, why not actually foster dialogue between left-wing and right-wing anarchists and help the two groups realize that they're often not as far apart as they think? Seems to be working quite well over at http://c4ss.org/ .

First of all, Somalia is not a great example of anarchy. All anarchists recognize that there needs to be significant social change before anarchism could happen; just toppling a government without changing the people leads to very, very bad things.[1] Secondly, Somalia has done really well without government, depending on who you ask. There are studies that show [2] that it's only after the UN started screwing around and trying to impose a state that it stabilized into smaller, community-level governments. I'm no expert on Somalia, but you also have to recognize that when the institution of a state is recognized as the default condition, even a successful transition to anarchism would be talked about as 'failed.' 1: http://c4ss.org/content/2859 2: http://www.independent.org/publications/working_papers/article.asp?id=…

> Yeas, that is exactly what I am saying. People with these qualities still receive certain advantages, but selection selection by these qualities does not happening as in other social systems. Oh, well, I disagree, and the evidence supports my position. The people who capitalism has most rewarded are billionaires. Billionaires became as rich as they are through cynicism, cruelty, unscrupulousness, and deceitfulness. I challenge you to find me a billionaire without these qualities in spades. I'm happy to hear arguments that other modes of economic organization may also reward these values if it makes you feel better, but I maintain my point that capitalism rewards them also. In comparison, gift economies reward the opposite values. > Not universlly, and that's the problem. I do agree that it's worth a hedge, however, it appears these values are as near-universal as is possible for humans. Every religion I've ever learned about teaches these lessons, Confucianism for the most part as well, we can read about these values in Plato, Aristotle, ancient Greek myths, ancient native american myths... certainly there are outlier cultures, but for these values to be an underlying current in so many cultures... what else could we call universal? > . And you can ignore this fact and fall into slavery to the most cruel, deceitful and selfish people, or you can effectively protect yourself from such people with the help of capitalism. But, under capitalism, the majority of people…

>>I’d love to see less government interference in people’s reproductive rights, in education like the massive censorship around US history of slavery and genocide and the slightest mention of lgbtq people. I bet I can test your resolve to both of them and show you really do not want more freedom, you just want different government controls than "the other team" For example Education. Do you support backpack funded school choice, putting the power of what schools people go to in the hands of the parents? Reproductive Rights.. How about "Financial Abortion" or Default Joint Custody with no support to either parent? Or mandatory DNA validation before entering names on birth certificates. >Government protecting corporations from their responsibilities to the safety of the public and toward our ecosystems is extremely oppressive Corporations are a creation of government, the entire purpose of a corporation is to protect them from liberality. That is really the sole reason for their existence. I always love when strong government supports rail on and on about corporations when strong government is the source of power for corporations. The stronger the government the stronger the corporations. The more centralized the government, the larger the corporations. Since We have been putting more and more regulation an power under the pervue of the federal government the largest corporations have gone from about 20% market share on average to 80% market share on…

Hi everyone, We are the original authors of the post and thought we'd offer some very brief clarifications since there seems to be some good discussion about both the intent of the piece and our approach to the technology. Our hope is to let you know where we wanted to see the conversation go in. Where it actually goes is, of course, something of a collective choice. We'll keep this short since some people have already provided good responses in some threads that we don't have much to add to. First, on useful but ultimately tangential technologies: fsflover writes: > I2P does not require a special infrastructure and provides strong anonymity on top of existing networks. mackrevinack writes: > the safe network is going to be autonomous so it won't even need anyone to act as an admin. all you will need to do is log in to access your files Munksgaard writes: > I think gemini is an interesting alternative to the regular internet. It's deliberately designed to avoid many of the things making the web terrible Others have suggested similar overlay networks, including GNUnet, Tor, and so on. As we state in the article, overlay networks are useful, but they are by their very definition reliant upon existing hardware devices to provide the underlying network over which these networks lay. One of the goals of our article is to point out that a hyper-focusing on such overlay networks misses the point of "owning your own infrastructure" at a deeper (hardware) level. What good…

> In exchange the United States act like the world's rent-a-cop, keeping shipping lanes open and getting rid of those who stand in the way of global commerce (sometimes violently) "sometimes violently" is a bit of an understatement. With the use of our current system we are literally making the world uninhabitable for human existence. We are systemically destroying mother earth's carrying capacity through ecological destruction, not to mention the misery caused by Magical Voluntarism and labour rights abuses the world over. I'm still finding ways to describe the issues with our economic system and it's apparatus, and the meaningful changes proposed by one of the projects I follow, in a way that acknowledges that in a way we are all victims to this current system (including neo-Imperialist USA), as today's money does not respect the law of requisite variety [1]. My above critique might sound anti-American, but America (together with other formal colonial powers in the Global North) is just the most powerful player in a game with outdated, harmful and inadequate economic models and governance systems. It's a painful era where we are using inadequate wealth acknowledgement systems, where the old Platform Capitalism paradigm is breaking down and showing it's flaws, and where the potentiality for Protocol Cooperativism is starting to emerge. Money is an information technology created by humans, operating a set of protocols. Tomorrow's world is governed by the practice of…

- The hospital industry is a monopolized cartel - you usually need the approval of existing hospitals in an area before you can open your own. - The insurance industry is a cartel - there are extreme compliance costs that only a few big players can take care of. - Employer provided insurance is subsidized. - Most 'reform' of health care in the US has punished individual insurance holders while strengthening the employment-based insurance system further strengthening third-party payment systems including increasing lists of 'must-cover' mandates for health insurance. - McCarran-Ferguson act exempted health insurance from a competitive national market. - The culture and institutional incentives in US healthcare push towards extreme capital-intensive expenditures and cut down on labor-intensive expenditures even when its not cost effective for the procedures that the patients require. Hospital beds get more expensive per day while extremely unlikely to succeed procedures like proton therapy expand further. This paper is very illuminating and comprehensive: http://c4ss.org/content/2088. Please have a look even if you disagree with the solutions and the ideology of the author. I assure you it will be worth your time.

I mean even these avowed anarcho-capitalists have pretty much the same criticism of the World Bank as John Pilger: https://c4ss.org/content/80 How do you feel about The State as an institution?

> it seems so antithetical to capitalism to conjure up some laws to create scarcity. That is precisely what Enclosure(pretty much the birth of capitalism) was. Land was made artificially scarce by concentrating it into the hands of the few, creating a landless working class that had to move to the cities and work in the factories to earn their living. At the time Britain also had something akin to an internal passport system, so that movement of labor between parishes was also restricted. For a bigger, well researched exposition of this, see Kevin Carson's essay "The Iron Fist behind the Invisible Hand". https://c4ss.org/content/24158

Making a population "legible" is one of the functions of a state, for good or ill. https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/James-Scott.pdf

You should read more intelligent libertarians, because Somalia has been thoroughly analysed in libertarian thought. Start with Kevin Carson, "Somalia — Is That Really All You Got?" for a good primer on libertarian/anarchist thought on the subject: https://c4ss.org/content/2859

Sure, Anarcho-Sydnicalism is a book by Rudolph Rocker the founder of anarcho syndicalism. For other approaches there's mutualism a market based approach, for that I'd see the works of Proudhon, Participatory Economics. There's also anarcho-communism. Here's some books that flesh out the ideas: Participatory Economics: https://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/Alternatives%20to… What is Mutualism? : https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/what-is-mutualism.pdf Anarcho-Syndicalism https://libcom.org/files/Rocker%20-%20Anarcho-Syndicalism%20Theory%20a… The Conquest of Bread (Anarcho-Communism): https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/petr-kropotkin-the-conquest-of…

Most "private" corporations are only so large because their inefficiencies are subsidized by the state. [1] [1] https://c4ss.org/content/18100

NAFTA isn't free trade. That's the lies the capitalists play with. NAFTA is a mechanism for heavily regulating trade, setting quotas, etc - in essence, state-granted monopolization. https://c4ss.org/content/5231

While states dominate history, private law has proven successful. You could see the Law Merchant throughout Europe as one example or medieval Iceland, where civil order was maintained for longer than the US has existed so far, as another. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_mercatoria https://mises.org/library/medieval-iceland-and-absence-government Regarding your other concerns see points 8 & 6 here: http://c4ss.org/content/13612 While I have some differences with this author, you could consider this video as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o

>If you're going to refer me to the existing literature, please at least make a specific reference. This should be a good starting point. http://anarchism.pageabode.com/afaq/index.html >Somalia's been trying it out for years. The results don't look promising http://c4ss.org/content/1201 >If you invaded the US, I think Syrians would be quite passive about it indeed. The point is that, yes people tend to only care about their group but there are different levels of group. For example, when the Russians had their "communist" revolution practically the whole world cared because they were terrified it would happen in their country as well (and in some cases like Spain, it did). >People have always formed groups and not cared about people outside of their group. As just shown, while this may be technically true group size changes depending on the level of threat up to and including "group human". >That's how humans work. Now you're moving toward a more interesting argument. We see how humans behave but how much of that is because of our nature and how much is because of the environment we grow up in? There's tons of interesting research about this question (one starting point: http://www.charleswarner.us/articles/competit.htm). >You're assuming I'm dismissing anarchism without considering the arguments for it or anything. Actually, I'm dismissing it after a lot of consideration, partially about anarchism and partially about idealistic, theoretical political…

http://c4ss.org/content/1201* My argument is that in the absence of a strong government, various warlords and the like will attempt to seize power for themselves. So thank you for supporting it. Again, if you want to get into an intellectual wanking session about how nice it would be if we lived in a world where absolutely no one attempted to use violence or seize power over other people, I'll kindly provide Somalia as empirical evidence that we live in a very different world and turn my attentions to the question of how a society of actual human beings* can function, and hopefully can function better than it currently does. Now you're moving toward a more interesting argument. We see how humans behave but how much of that is because of our nature and how much is because of the environment we grow up in? Yes, and? How exactly do we get those environments? Co-recursively, of course--the environment influences human behavior and human behavior influences the environment. In general that's the kind of system that, hopefully, reaches a steady state at some point. Empirically we've observed two--primitivism and governed civilization. Anarchic civilization doesn't seem to be an option. (I'm actually fairly open to considerations of primitivism, which is likely as anarchic as humans can get.) I'm assuming you dismiss it after working it out in your own head without consulting the existing body of knowledge on the subject, and it sounds like you just confirmed that my…