How do we get to voluntaryism without exercising power? I'm a minarchist, I don't think ancap is coherent.
Here's a more thorough explanation of my thought:
Discussion
I think Bitcoin & the other tech it will fuel will lead to availability of the tools people need to assert independence & hide business dealings & resist funding evil in low cost ways. People don't like to see aspects of reality that make them feel powerless, & most have poor imaginations when it comes to anything beyond what a certain tool can help them do right now. So when the proper tools are mature & available which allow for privacy & soverignty, more people will have space to question political structures without things seeming hopeless.
It will take time bc a full stack of all the tools needed don't exist yet, & normie life isn't hard enough to be particularly motivating yet. And I don't expect much change from older generations anyway. As things are, the US govt is the most powerful org that most people know of, if that power is somewhat incompetent but mentally it's still in your corner, that gives people a much different feeling about life than if that power is actively out to get you. As things get worse hopefully the perception of the actual power the govt has will also deminish & it will get harder to deny the total corruption.
As a minarchist, how do you propose to limit the govt's growth? Taiwan is still poor. Minarchy produces wealth, wealth gives people the ability to tolerate more parasites which allows the govt to grow. If we reset things back to 1776 the same sort of "minarchy to parasitic empire" pattern would just play out all over again. I think the only way things can change for the better is if people have the tools to stop funding criminals entirely so that a culture which sees forced funding as the criminal behavior that it is can afford to exist & perpetuate itself. Criminal behavior that is viewed as an exception or that is otherwise allowed to continue will always metastasize into something that destroys everything else. Either criminality is being fought & actively prevented or it grows.
I'm also optimistic about the tools, just not so optimistic that I think power can be perfectly distributed or discarded through their use. Which is why I'm a minarchist — there needs to be a legitimate locus of power, or else there will be an illegitimate locus of power.
Freedom technology, constitutions, liberal arts education, cultural cohesion, and moral norms are all a part of restraining growing governments. In the end though, I'm pessimistic that we can entirely solve that problem. To think that after 6,000 years of human history we can figure out how to keep power from consolidating purely through technique seems naive to me. Governments grow because power and authority are essential realities of human society, and governments collapse because human competency and benevolence doesn't scale.
The fact that you think forced funding can ever be legitimate is part of the problem IMO. I won't fund your govt in the same way that I'm not funding the one we currently have, what do you think should be done about people like me? If you don't think I should he attacked then why advocate a system that would do such things?
Living this way today comes with a lot of tradeoffs, but I think they will continue to shrink & the benefits will continue to grow. Saving in a currency that couldn't be devalued to fund wars that I oppose has made me very well off. We are literally monetizing peace & private property rights.
"Forced funding" is not legitimate — I oppose property, sales, capital gains, and income taxes. The US was originally funded through tariffs on international trade and sovereign bonds. I don't know if this is exactly right, and I'm no fan of Hamilton, but it's categorically different from what we think of as taxes today. In the future, you could have a sovereign endowment of some kind, maybe bitcoin based, on which the government would subsist.
Why are tariffs any more legitimate than taxes on trades with my neighbor? If the people selling the bonds aren't on the hook for paying those back themselves, but instead are able to sell the public into debt then how is that not just seeds of the same sort of evil?
Why can't people just choose to support organizations that serve them? Forced funding is the primary thing that distinguishes a govt from any other organization. A voluntarily funded govt can go out of business & must compete for supporters or customers like any other org. If you support voluntary funding then you are an ancap. Congrats 😜
I honestly can't answer that question, tariffs seem problematic for sure, and bonds are if not evil at least central to the banking system we're dealing with today.
It's a funny dilemma as a Christian, because the real ideal is absolute benevolent authority. But that's not attainable by humanity, so the next best thing is distribution of power through incentives. It's not that I don't wish ancap were possible, I just don't think it is because authority and power are baked in to the pie, and the only one who can fill that vacuum is Jesus.
As for why people can't just choose to support organizations that serve them, that can work for some things (courts and roads, maybe), but for others in which the good is necessarily collective (e.g. national defense), you can't avoid a tragedy of the commons. The atomic individualistic framework ancap assumes just doesn't fit how the world works.
If there is no national tax base to take over then there is no nation to defend. If people can defend themselves from domestic taxation then they can defend themselves from foreigners who want to tax them too.
The govt as an organization is nothing but a manifestation of the tragedy of the commons. Everyone just tries to get what they can, while they can, without putting in any work. It's people seeking to become a parasitic authority as a source of wealth rather than working to create value for others.
The divide between good & evil is the prioritization of the pursuit of truth vs the prioritization of the pursuit of status & power. It's not a coincidence that God in human form was a man who spoke truth to men of arbitrary political authority & was killed for it. I'm quite certain that a large part of the point (no matter how few people choose to see it today) is that men in govt, clinging to status & power, will destroy the truth & kill God to maintain it. God or reality or the universe (or whatever label people prefer) wants people to see that force funded institutions are evil, & the cycle will repeat until we learn.
I think the world has shown us quite clearly that minarchy doesn't work. The American experiment was started with the goal of establishing the smallest govt ever & we now have the largest. The aim was good, but the experiment was a total failure. Repeating the same mistakes (especially given the amount of death & destruction & brainwashing that has been the result) would be completely retarded.
That's a very interesting position. It is striking how anti-establishment the Bible is, even taking into account passages like Romans 13. Personally, while I do believe in some form of authority, the discussion is pretty academic, because in practical terms I spend as much time as I possibly can rowing with libertarians and ancaps.
The first paragraph is very interesting. It makes me wonder how a bitcoin system compares with a gold system for freedom from oppression. Reading through the thread, maybe a good case in point could be comparing Jerusalem under Roman rule at the time of Christ and now. Do bitcoin and encryption make us more able to resist an occupier now? How so? Did the centralizing tendencies of gold play a roll in Rome’s ability to conquer? My intuition is no, but I wanna think this through…
There were four primary kinds of taxation in ancient Rome: a cattle tax, a land tax, customs, and a tax on the profits of any profession. These taxes were typically collected by local aristocrats. The Roman state would set a fixed amount of money each region needed to provide in taxes, and the local officials would decide who paid the taxes and how much they paid. Once collected the taxes would be used to fund the military, create public works, establish trade networks, stimulate the economy, and to fund the cursus publicum.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_ancient_Rome
Comparing some other empires, they mixed centralized collection and decentralized. Sounds like the Chinese system where taxes were due based on land ownership worked well for the empire since land ownership was easy to verify. So today, where our work is to a large degree difficult to verify, we may have a special advantage. Especially if the laborer and the contractor can not know each other. Though AI will affect that…