Again… what does any of this have to do with peer to peer electronic cash? You’re projecting your values onto the things you like. That’s fine but just acknowledge that that’s what this is about.
Discussion
Permissionless p2p money undermines the centralized authority needed to do all the things people on the left want to do. It's not projection, it's just a recognition of the fundament nature of bitcoin vs trying to impose a bunch of programs on people from the top down.
While I’m not a leftist, trying to play advocate here. Could certain lefty social programs not be feasible under a Bitcoin standard? If the collective group decides to vote with their money to do it, it happens.
Voluntarily funded programs that help people are perfectly compatible with libertarianism & small or no govt. All any "small govt" person wants is the ability to fund the ideas they believe will actually help people & not the ones they believe are destructive. People on the right do tend to donate more than people on the left.
I think society has been moving left for a long time, but it seems to me that part of what distinguishes left from right is generally a respect for freedom of choice. People on the right want the freedom to choose no matter the issue so long as the choice doesn't hurt anyone, people on the left generally want the freedom to escape the consequences of their choices no matter who it hurts.
Any program that isn't funded by force or imposed in some authoritarian way is a program that lives or dies by its own merits. If I oppose such a program I am free to withhold financial support & encourage others to do the same. When such programs fail, many on the left tend to conclude that it's because people are evil & must be forced to do good things rather than reflecting & examining their own ideas & potential failings.
What distinguishes govt from a charity or business is forced vs voluntary funding. Captive citizens threatened with cages for failure to pay, or competition for patrons via useful products & services. There are businesses & charities that become quangos, seeking funding from govt, or protection from changing market desires, but that's only possible when there is already a large political apparatus & lots of forced funding already happening.
Overly idealistic. Large scale, society-changing public works would never happen under this model. High speed rail. City sewers. Nuclear power. You name it. What you advocate for is basically a return to agrarianism in the digital age.
None of those things were created by govts. Govts simply monopolize & control them, & then they run them so poorly that they don't create nearly the value they otherwise might.
I just want people to have the freedom to fund better ideas & to refuse to fund political tyrants who do things poorly.
I mean sure, when you put it that way, so do I. Who wouldn’t? I just don’t think the solution to that problem is an abolition of the state and taxation. My inner nihilist is coming out now but I think the solution to the problem of tyranny and inefficiency in the public sector is so difficult that it’s practically impossible.
A proper understanding of Bitcoin makes a decent antidote to nihilism.
Would the world be a better place if criminals could or couldn't force you to fund things that serve them?
If you think it's better when they can't, then the solution is to give people the tools to stop funding criminals in all forms. Bitcoin & 3d printed guns are among those tools.
Sir, I think we question each others’ understanding of bitcoin here. If you think that bitcoin and guns solve the issues in our society then I can’t get on board with what you’re preaching.
So you don't believe in freedom or basic human rights?
I believe people should have the freedom to devote their lives & the fruit of their efforts only to that which they believe in, or that serves them in some way, & they should be able to own the tools needed to protect that freedom no matter what anyone else says.
Being forced to financially support people who are working to reduce your choices & control your life is just slavery with extra steps.
Ok yes you’re right, I hate freedom and human rights. Long live slavery!! Silly argument.
Look, I fundamentally disagree with “taxation is theft.” In fact I think high earners should be taxed even more than they are. I make a half a million a year in the fiat mines so I’m including myself in that set. Tax me!
But I also think that our political system is failing us. If the choice is between trump and biden then fuck me.
What’s your definition of theft?
You say “Tax me!” Why not just reallocate the resources you have to spare yourself? Why does it have to be a tax instead of a donation or investment?
So you believe that freedom can be separated from your earnings & your right to self protection?
What amount of what I earn belongs to someone else?
Why do you think theft is wrong?
I think theft is a form of retroactive enslavement. The time it took me to earn a thing (once that thing is stolen) is now going to serve someone else.
Similarly, if I am working half the year to fund an organization that does things I hate & that threatens me with a cage if I don't pay them, then I am 50% a slave. Govts of course want people to believe that slavery is some sort of race based caricature with whips & chains so that their own human tax livestock can't identify what is being done to them.
Why don't you just give away more of your money? Why do you feel the need to encourage authoritarians to take more from others? You don't want the responsibility of deciding what your work helps to contribute to?
I think there are a lot of people who don't like how they make money & as a result they feel guilty for having it.
Ok two things here. First, theft is theft. Someone steals my shit and I get nothing for it. Taxation funds a lot of stuff, but also the provision of public services—to you and also to other people. We can argue until the cows come home about whether that’s right or wrong, or whether you get enough in return for your tax dollars, but show me a person who is aggro about their taxes and I’ll show you someone else who benefits from a government program. The fact is it’s a value exchange. This is a core belief of mine, however lop sided the value exchange might be today.
Second: sure, if there was some massive public version of kickstarter that could direct my funds to the things that matter most to me, hot damn, sign me up. But—keeping the examples to public works, since that’s my jam—to my knowledge there is no way for me to contribute to redevelopment of the northeast corridor, or expansion of New York City sewer capacity, or public schools or the construction of a nuclear plant. So for now my best bet is to pay my taxes and vote for the people that care about the things that I do while I stack sats.
Theft & extortion are distinct from trade in the same way that rape is distinct from consentual sex. It's consent that makes the difference. It has nothing to do with what comes after. If i steal your car & then mow your yard, that doesn't make up for the fact that I stole your car. And I don't get to then tell you that you were going to owe me something for the mowing that I didn't want from you in the first place.
When a violent organization monopolizes industries that are critical to survival it's pretty easy to claim people couldn't survive without them, that doesn't make it any more true. The things they monopolize were often privately developed before being taken over.
A slave doesn't owe thanks to a slave master for shelter & food. The slave would have more (in one form or another) on his own. The richest societies in the world were the ones that had the smallest & most restrained govts & also those that ended slavery first. Free markets are the only way to make people better off. Societies that collapse always do so under the burdens of too big a govt. Govt is the only thing left of N Korea or Venezuela or Cuba, it's just a govt & slaves. And with our govt printing trillions that's exactly where we are headed unless Nostr & Bitcoin & individuals with low cost productive tools can turn things around.
So I have nothing else to add here because this gets at a fundamental disagreement between us that we simply can’t get past. I think guns in too many hands is bad, government is not inherently extortive, taxes are not inherently coercive, and I don’t think violent revolution is the answer to anything because when does that ever work out well for the people?
But I will say that were this exchange to have happened on Twitter, one or the other of us would have resorted to name calling or Hitler references before the third volley.
I admit I’m a fish out of water on Nostr in terms of my political views but this is a good place 🫂 💜
"An armed society is a polite society."
You cannot disarm people who do not obey laws, you can only disarm good people & make them easier victims for criminals. People who support gun control are quite literally working to make it easier & safer for criminals to terrorize innocent people. Thankfully, there are enough good people in the US who believe in natural rights, & who know the intended law of the land, so they will also disobey bad laws in order to protect themselves & others.
Stop paying the govt & see what happens. The extortion is not really debatable. Even when they create a virus (with your money) & then lock you in your home & threaten your livelihood & print trillions driving costs way up (making life dramatically worse for everyone) they still demand payment at the threat of force. They don't work for you, they quite literally force people to work for them. We are tax livestock that govt officials seek to control, manipulate, & cull.
I do agree that violent revolution is almost never a good thing. Guns are primarily a deterrent. I would very much prefer the revolution be a peaceful & productive & so completely decentralized & localized that govts basically have no way to effectively fight it. That said, the American revolution worked out fairly well, even if the American experiment in limited govt was ultimately a failure. The problem was the legitimization of theft via taxation that allowed the govt to grow without consent. Once that seed of evil is planted it cannot be restrained. So my hope is for a breakup of the US (& most other countries) into many pieces & that some areas will ultimately renounce taxation entirely.
Florida vs California or Texas vs New York already make for decent demonstrations of more freedom vs more govt, but I think a real national collapse & breakup would be much more revealing. One would think N Korea vs S Korea or East vs West Berlin would have been enough that we wouldn't need to keep repeating these mistakes, but apparently people are retarded.
Enjoyed the convo 🤙
By your logic the mafia does not steal, because they exchange it for protection. Just sayin. 😉
While that’s a reductive analogy, I’ll give it to you on the premise that you reject the authority of an elected government the same way that you reject the authority of a hostile crime syndicate. It’s a bit different to me but sure, not far off of you really boil it down.
To be pedantic, roads are comparatively easy. High speed rail, not easy at all. Like literally impossible without government intervention even in the best cases. But it’s hard to argue that *in certain cases* (such as Japanese Shinkansen for example) society was worse off for it. Government funded public works can be the engines of society.
Ask the engineers and the planners of high speed rail systems and nuclear power plants how difficult their jobs would be without government intervention and let me know what they say.
Government has and always will be a wrench in the engine of society.
Fair, but then ask the finance people on those projects whether they would ever be financially viable without subsidy, eminent domain, etc and lmk what you learn too.
If you think there will be LESS entrepreneurship/risk-taking and LESS investment in massive profitable long-term society-improving projects in a hard-money-enabled world where we don’t have a big group of child raping retards stealing and debasing everyone’s savings and thereby jacking up their time preference then idk what to tell you.
Ooh I love this graphic.
That’s an absolutist view. If bitcoin truly replaces central banking then yes, what you describe is a likely side effect. I personally don’t see that as likely whatsoever. I think bitcoin will replace our payment rails, will provide a parallel avenue for storage of wealth, will serve as a check on inflationary tendencies in our economy, but it won’t fundamentally replace the state.
But again, my view doesn’t matter. Tick tock, next block.
I just think that means you need to spend more time studying the history & economics of money.
Lol you’re talking to an economics major.
As a former econ major (with a focus on money & banking) myself, I can tell you that you almost certainly can't learn what you need to know from a university (with maybe a couple of rare exceptions). The contradictory Keynesian nonsense taught at universities is sometimes almost worse than total ignorance.
You have to unlearn a lot of what you were taught, which is harder than learning things correctly the first time around.
My brother has been doing a great job of attacking the foundations of Keynesianism with the Bitcoin Audible podcast. See the episodes about hoarding & saving. The key is to understand that savings is the foundation of society - more things must be produced than consumed. And that Say's law is an absolute. Production enables consumption & investment. You can't build a house with trees you intend to cut down in the future. Everything else basically follows from those things.
The Use of Knowledge in Society by Hayek is a good read or a good listen (via Mises.org or bitcoin audible).
To be clear here I majored in economics 15 years ago, with a focus on public property rights and international trade. And the only universal truth in economics is that there is no universal truth in economics. Sure, it’s easy to say that production cures all ails but the secret sauce is in how to incentivize production of the right stuff in the right places. A major role of government in an ideal sense is to cut through local comparative advantages and the misalignment of incentives that inevitably arises in a diffuse structure of governance. I fundamentally believe that there is a role for government, maybe even “big government,” however different it may look from what we see today.
Thanks for the recommendations, will listen. Should have known you were OP’s sibling 😂. So who’s the smartest one?
I think the laws of economics are a certain as just about anything can be.
You don't have to incentivize people to trade & solve problems & to do what serves them, you just have to get out of the way.
Agree. That’s the only thing that has to be done. And maybe removing other (old) obstacles.
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Everything else is a choice and optional to commit to.
Disagree. That doesn’t work because people are inherently selfish. Put too many of them in a room with competing interests and nothing will get done. A decade in corporate leadership roles has taught me this. That’s the entire premise behind representative government.
Building things in a way that best serves the people around me is doing what best serves me. They pay me & are happy returning customers when I serve them appropriately. What is in my self interest doesn't come at the expense of anyone else. Anyone who thinks harming others is in their own self interest is not someone who is being honest about how that impacts their own self image.
If you get things by cheating others then everything you have becomes a reminder of your depravity, rather than your accomplishments. It destroys the ability to feel good about much of anything or to feel able to connect with others.
Freedom of association means we don't all have to be in the same room, people can go wherever they want & they generally have no obligation to deal with anyone they don't want to deal with. Which means that the liars & the cheats tend to get ostracized.
People doing horrible things to others generally don't get very far without a mafia like organization &/or religious structure of some sort to protect them & to force others to support them.
Govt is just that, a religion with songs, symbols, statues, monuments, ritual ceremonies, costumed authorities, sacred halls, sacred texts, robed interpreters of said texts, & violent foreign crusades. And it operates on a mafia business model of charging people for protection from what the govt agents will do to you if you don't pay for protection. Govts even purposely create a dependent class that they can manipulate into violence & riots in order to threaten the middle class who are the real target.
In the same way that burning down churches doesn't destroy false beliefs, it's not possible to destroy govt by attacking it directly. Govts are primarily built on propaganda. So decentralizing communication & ending censorship is also critically important, along with the undermining of economic authority & monetary control, as well as spreading tools that make it cheap & easy for people to physically defend themselves if necessary.
#Nostr, #bitcoin, & #3dprinting are all pieces of a proper productive & freedom oriented revolution whether you like it or not.
Me… obviously