Fuck democracy & fuck republics too. Agorism via uncensored money & uncensored networks for an ancap future. Any form of compromising with thieves & authoritarians is a good way to eventually end up with thieves & authoritarians in charge.
Discussion
I agree with the democracy point , the Greeks laid it out long ago, the republic was compromised well before my time and that’s what my ancestors came here and fought to have instead of tyranny ,, it is what allowed free enterprise to exist, which is also nothing I have experienced since I have been born (sure I started a company and I still have an insanely small business at this point, but the principles we run on are not from a business book, it’s about service and doing good work),, I mean they tried to teach us in school that what we had was free enterprise but those were all lies .
Unfortunately, the Constitution is actually what interferes with free enterprise. The framers put a small part that allows the federal government to control commerce "among the states". In Wickard v. Filburn this was interpreted to mean the federal government has authority over everything from how much wheat you can grow on your property to whether you can have a bag of plant matter in your pocket. When you give a centralized organization absolute power, they can interpret any document to mean whatever they want.
The American experiment was a failure. The goal of creating the smallest & most restrained govt in the world produced the largest & most corrupt govt to ever exist.
Minarchy doesn't work. Doing the same thing & expecting a different result is retarded.
The mistake made in the creation of the US was the legitimization of theft. If taxation had not been allowed then the govt might have remained a polycentric service organization. But when some people can legally steal from everyone, they have zero incentive to give a shit what anyone wants.
And really there is no such thing as a voluntarily funded govt. The thing that distinguishes govt from any other business or charity is forced funding. A voluntarily funded organization must compete for supporters & can go out of business. If it can't go out of business then support is not voluntary.
So anyone who is consistently opposed to theft, extortion, monetary debasement, etc must be an anarchist.
Failure? Because absolute power corrupted absolutely , because the use of technology was high jacked and used to get people to believe in it and then to protect it and vote for it?
Is it America running America ? It seems more like the enemy has us destroying ourselves while they sit back and eat popcorn?
I’m totally against insanity
The creation of the Us was the legitimization of theft ? How so? Did America also start the slave trade?
Some folks get shot point blank when they are stealing , how come we don’t see bankers and cops 👮‍♂️ n the take laying in the street with politicians aside them?
I’m not an anarchist , but I believe in the best of people whether they do or not that’s for sure .
The US ended the slave trade, that was a major source of its success & prosperity. But creating an organization with the power to tax is legitimization of theft. It doesn't matter how you dress it up, "pay me or have your stuff violently taken & be put in a cage" is just plain theft. And the expansion of that theft has brought slavery back in a different form & destroyed the country. There are only 2 ways to deal with people, you can trade & otherwise interact in a voluntary manner (offering value for value), or you can deal in threats & force. If it's voluntary it's not taxation.
Govt is a religion that also benefits from Stockholm syndrome. It has songs, symbols, statues, monuments, ritual ceremonies, sacred halls, sacred texts, black robed interpreters of said texts, violent foriegn crusades, etc. And most people think of govt as the biggest scariest thing around (which isn't an accident). If the biggest scariest thing is on your side then life is generally okay, even if they mess up once in a while. But if the biggest scariest thing is actually working exclusively for your enslavement then the world is a terrifying place, so people refuse to see out of a largely subconscious sense of self preservation. And the govt takes it a step further by manufacturing large external enemies that supposedly only they can handle. Foreign govts with no history of military aggression outside their own borders become major threats & "terrorist breeding grounds." While the US is often literally arming the terrorists & invading their lands in an effort to radicalize them. The randomness of weather gets transformed into pending climate doom. An engineered cold virus becomes an excuse for global tyranny. The threat of aliens...
A system that only works with the right people in charge & that has no way to prevent the wrong people from gaining power is a BAD system.
If Wholefoods got thousands of dollars from you every month whether they stocked anything you wanted or not, how much incentive would they have to carry anything you wanted? Would voting for a different guy every 4 years be a decent way to get more of what you wanted in the store? Now add the fear & the religious devotion to the store, does it get better at serving people or worse?
You can often feel the difference when dealing with any "service" that is funded by force or govt protected. The DMV, TSA, Post Office, your local cable or power company, the VA or Social Security office, hospitals, banks... How do you feel when a cop is behind you in traffic? Do you feel protected or afraid? With all these "services" generally the lines are longer, the interaction is more about telling you want to do than finding out what you want, they often literally give you busy work, and the service is usually just bad. "We can't help you without multiple forms of ID." "Fill out these forms for the 100th time." "We need to fingerprint you before we can cash that check." "You have to submit to body scans & searches & hand over that tiny knife on your keychain if you want to fly."
And there are still more structural problems... Generally speaking I have little reason to care what my neighbor drives, but what happens if everyone has to vote on what people are allowed to drive? If I want to drive a Honda & my neighbor prefers GM vehicles, now his preferences are a threat to me. Deciding anything politically is extremely divisive. The more important the issue (education, security, healthcare, freedom of trade, freedom of movement, etc) the more destructive to peaceful relations & overall function that voting & central management becomes. The only way to solve this is to let people trade & decide things for themselves. And if you don't want anything centrally managed or funded by theft, then why do you need a govt?
I agree with many of your points (and could probably add examples to prove some of them),what ever system we end up with, I’m feeling better about it having #nostr and learning about view points like yours and others , I certainly don’t see how what we have now could ever be reformed , whatever it is we will have is going to have to be some built from the ground up.
I might add ,, I think Aaron Burr ran against George Washington. I believe Burr ran on immediately immancipating slaves, and I think that would have been a much better beginning instead of like you explained we have become , it is theft and slavery , the taxation system we are under.
There was a time when I looked at the founders with great admiration, and believed the Constitution to be some sort of holy document with magical powers to give us freedom.
If you’re interested, there’s a great book written by Lysander Spooner in the 1800s called No Treason. He was an important historical figure that government schools don’t want us to know about.
I have a box of copies of the book “none dare call it treason” it’s old but highly relevant and a good way to catch up on factual history , much of which has been scrubbed from access. I should give them away somehow I think .
Where is the line then? An association which is free to enter and leave at any time through which political will could be expressed but otherwise has no powers, is that still a government?
There’s got to be some form of rule without rulers that blends out the State?
Bitcoin is rules without rulers. Nostr is rules without rulers. Private security & private arbitration are also forms of rules without rulers. Bitcoin (and liquid) make insurance contracts possible that ensure rules can be established for important business relationships with skin in the game.
There is no definitive piece on the subject as far as I am aware, but I can certainly recommend some books that point to or discuss the sort of mechanisms that might "govern" an ancap society.
The Machinery of Freedom is a good read (unfortunately the audiobook is pure trash). Freedman said The Moon is a Harsh Mistress inspired him to write the Machinery of Freedom. David Freedman (son of Milton) & his son Patri both have a number of decent talks on the subject. I think Michael Huemer & maybe Kinsella have some talks on polycentric legal theory. I am certain I can come up with a bunch more if I start looking through my books & media files.
I think this is an inevitable historical process - a territory is more free, and therefore becomes richer, more technologically advanced, more industrially capable - which if converted to military might allows it to impose its policies and norms on other countries
In the long run this leads to a spread of organizational structures that are more liberal & capitalistic (eg British empire spreading common law) but obviously doesn't directly spread anarcho-capitalism which would be the maximum of individual freedom within a market structure
I think that as the globe industrializes and adopts homogenous and freely-exchanged technology (and especially as this technology makes defensive military operations more cost effective than offensive), we will see stagnation of empire, decentralization, and a global push to liberalize
The Global American Empire (GAE) dominated not because it was still free and organizationally superior, but because it had used freedom to acquire a technological and industrial lead over much of the world. When that technology is distributed across the world, what remains is organizational efficiency. I have extreme confidence that freedom in a private property framework is more efficient than central planning.
I don’t know why anyone would support a Republic, that is rule by the elite. But I have to disagree about democracy because I think they like to slap the word onto monstrous systems. Like decentralization onto a shitcoin.
Democracy as individual participation in power is powerful and why they cheapen the name with straw man tactics that we fall for. Anarchism and democracy are much closer than they want us to realize.
I think all these labels are just ideas , the idea of a true republic came from the Greeks anyways , that’s the idea I support , not the sham republic label on the current America (though it’s been this way since before I was born). Democracy has literally become what the Greeks called it, rule by the masses , and the masses are easily controlled by fear and fear has been a tactical weapon used to direct the so called “will” of the people , though I have seen more folks becoming less afraid lately , while at the same time seeing some folks that keep falling for the same games .
I think we will always have people who end up having more money than others , what causes this can be a multitude of things, I don’t think somethings wrong with someone who has a great idea and ends up producing an exceedingly amount of wealth ? I think lifting people out of poverty takes education and it’s not like we have been doing that to our nation the last decade or so.. if we were then I wouldn’t think we would have all our kids on prescription drugs, or the parents either. I agree with the idea of Agorism as well , though there will always be groups of individuals who will conspire together to keep others down in order to be and stay on top, which kind of seems like where we are at, at this point .
They aren’t just ideas. That drifts into understanding them as pure, which leads to ideology, which was invented by Plato.
I have nothing against ideas creating value and wealth as long as the wealth isn’t captured by bureaucrats pretending to be capitalists. A system of individuals participating in power, necessitates power structures and systems that will have a hard time being captured and concentrated.
Yes, the Greek elites were famously against democracy. Especially Plato:
“By simply reading The Republic (from Book II on, that is), we find the original model of the corporatist utopia that is being pressed upon us today. In the Middle Ages we find Plato’s philosopher-king being mixed into Christianity to produce the absolute monarch. We find that same philosopher-king elitism in the thinkers of the current neo-conservative movement. As Vlastos points out, the Socratic “say what you believe” turns into the Platonic “purely instrumentalist conception of justice.” We can understand through the Platonic past the uncomfortable silence of our elites today and their Hobbesian taste for law, not as justice, but as contract and fear. We can see and know that the Platonists are in power.”
-Sheldon Wolin
Agorism is a pleasant fiction but will never be a reality in any world.
Better to learn to live in the real world and use it to the best advantage of you and yours. Do your little agora thing when you trade a jar of honey for some sweet corn or tomatoes and relish that you have stuck it to the man.