Printing Money for War and Profit
# I posted another comment in Sierra's Today post at Fish or Man:
WE don't make this work. The free market makes it work. In the world that many of us envision, nobody would be responsible for general peace-keeping, and there would be no crimes against the state, since there would be no state. If you were in the security business, and you witnessed somebody attempting to harm one of your clients or to steal his property, you would stop that person. There would be no other valid reason to use force.and:
After the fact, you would look for the perpetrator and force him to provide resitution, to restore what was stolen. In the case of murder or irreversable bodily harm, no restitution is possible, so the perpetrator loses his liberty forever and becomes the property of his victim or his victim's survivors. They can do with him what they please.
It takes quite a bit of unlearning for most people to grasp this, which is precisely how we get there from here. Simply eliminating the actors in the current government will not do it, since that leaves the meme that government is necessary, that it has a valid purpose for existence. Once we rid enough people of this broken concept, however, the government will collapse under its own weight. Actually, it will probably collapse under its own weight no matter what we do. Proper teaching is necessary in order to make it more likely that liberty will be established afterwards.
"But that's anarchy," say you. Precisely.
Sergeant Mac, you have encountered a den of anarcho-capitalists. Kudos to you, sir, for sticking it out so long. And thank you, Jason, for hosting this little discussion, though I suppose it's really Haloscan doing the hosting...
I appear to have invented a new "justice" idea in making slavery the restitution for irreversable physical harm. I'll reinvent the prison concept if I'm not careful. Shame on me. I completely ignored the entire free-market court system that would be necessary once the monopoly state system disappears. I'm not an expert on those theories, remembering only Bob Murphy's Chaos Theory and Wolf de Voon's The Freeman's Constitution. One thing I haven't read is that free-market courts would likely vary radically from place to place.
"Barely more sentient than a parrot," is certainly funny, but I haven't met any cops like that. A minority take advantage of their power and behave tyranically, and the majority certainly need to be selectively blind to what they're really doing in order to do their "job", but most seem pretty normal to me outside of that.
I'm surprised that Sergeant Mac calls himself a "libertarian", and wonder what he means by that. I use L. Neil Smith's definition, the Zero Aggression Principle ("Zap"):
"A libertarian is a person who believes that no one has the right, under any circumstances, to initiate force against another human being, or to advocate or delegate its initiation. Those who act consistently with this principle are libertarians, whether they realize it or not. Those who fail to act consistently with it are not libertarians, regardless of what they may claim."
Of course the important word is "initiate". Defensive force is allowed, encouraged even.
All this anarcho-capitalist theory will need to be tested and tuned in the real world. Maybe it won't work at all, but my experience tells me that the America has been so successful due primarily to the anarchy in its culture. Successful despite an increasingly tyrannical government. I have decided that the entire government -- legislatures, executives, bureaucrats, cops, and courts -- have passed the point of no return, and that our system guarantees that should we manage to clean it up, it will happen again. Anarcho-capitalism appears to me to be the best choice for the next experiment in civilized living.
# Fred on Everything - Down With Education: Sort of - on the importance of separating school and state. "Nothing else can prevent resentful minorities from imposing invertebrate standards on all." [lrtdiscuss]
The public schools, say some, have failed to such a degree as to make their continuance rationally unjustifiable. Yes, they fail, but why? To some extent it is because they are expected to do what cannot be done--to educate the uneducable. For reasons of dizzy idealism, we pretend that all students have the wit to learn. Thus we suffer high-sounding programs like No Child Left Behind. You cannot ensure that no child will be left behind. You can try to ensure that no child will get ahead. To this we incline.
As in the universities, the difficulty is that we refuse to separate the able from the rest, yet insist on attempting to teach to the uninterested things that they do not want to know. If this effort bore fruit, it might be justified: A disputable case can be made that the historically literate are better equipped to vote, etc. But it is easily demonstrated that the majority do not learn much. Why bother?
# Jeff Cooper's Commentaries - December 2004: Happy New Year! - the long dry spell since Mr. Cooper's November missive is finally over! Looking back with mixed emotions on 2004, subtitle: "Troubled Times"; an interesting taste test; "dangerous game truly is dangerous"; a couple of new 45 caliber pistols on the drawing board at Ruger; news from the troops in the field; the Ruger "Frontiersman"; slow innovation in firearms manufacture; Gunsite: the world's best shooting gallery; kudos for the NRA; "frangible" bullets considered unnecessary; "spontoon" defined; good results in Mesopotamia with the .50 BMG; on the rarity of "sacrifice" in war; forthcoming review of a Broomhandle Mauser, on loan from John Gannaway; 63-inch kudu taken with a Steyr Scout in Namibia; miscarriages of justice; collectors are a special breed; "the 223 cartridge (5.56) is a pretty good man-stopper, if you hit your man three or four times in the center of the chest"; naming heroes; "there is no such thing as a really bad hunt, just as there is no such thing as a really good election"; serious history mistake from San Francisco; no need whatsoever for new H&H belted rimless cartridges in 400 and 416; glorifying the 1911 (and with good cause). "The word comes back to us that there are two kinds of troops in the battle zone now - those who have a 1911 45 auto and those who wish they had"; ramblings on liberty and freedom.
# George F. Smith at Strike the Root - Season's Greetings from the Fed - how fractional reserve banking causes runaway inflation. It can happen here. [root]
In 1903, a lawyer in Germany took out an insurance policy and made payments on it faithfully. When the policy came due in 20 years, he cashed it in and bought a single loaf of bread with the proceeds. [1] He was fortunate. If he had waited a few days longer, the money he received would have bought no more than a few crumbs.
...
The ability to create money out of thin air is very heady -- and enticing, if you're the government in need of revenue. With banks periodically facing insolvency from their inflationary practices, they were in need of government-backed assistance. It is not surprising, then, that banks and government worked out a deal. Government gave banks the laws they needed in exchange for which banks would buy government debt -- with money created from nothing.
The institution that made everything tidy and discreet for both parties was the central bank, which in the U.S. is called the Federal Reserve System.
A major function of the Fed is to monetize government deficits, thus avoiding the risky business of raising taxes or reducing spending. The Federal Reserve Act, passed by a short-handed Congress on December 23, 1913, endowed the Fed with a deeply inflationary structure so it could expand the money supply at a controlled, even pace at whatever level it wished.
Because of the Fed, the U.S. had the funds to send our boys into the slaughterhouse known as World War I. A little later it sponsored the boom that led to the Crash. Since it began operations in 1914, it has ripped away 95 percent of the value of the dollar.
