The Grift

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 03 Oct 2011 11:35:28 GMT  <== Politics ==> 

L. Neil Smith at The Libertarian Enterprise - the state is a con, perpetrated by the best con men in the world.

The grift. It's as old as humanity—possibly even older. Perhaps there were Neanderthal con men, Homo habilis hucksters, long before Homo sap (no abbreviation) first raised his credulous eyes to the stars.

The word is slang, a noun, according to Dictionary.com, meaning "1 ... a group of methods for obtaining money falsely through the use of swindles, frauds, dishonest gambling, etc. 2. money obtained from such practices." But there's more than merely money involved (although that's a big part of it) there's the matter of power. The United States of America—just like every other nation-state that ever existed, every empire, kingdom, and satrapy—is first and foremost a griftocracy.

Perhaps a better definition may be "the act of accumulating power and wealth by pretending to struggle with easily-solved or nonexistent problems." Almost invariably, it turns out that the problem isn't the problems themselves, but the individuals who stand to gain most from them.

...

I'm not going to explain that, either, not here, not now. I want to be paid to solve these problems, at least a fraction as well as the grifters being paid handsomely to create and sustain and exacerbate them. The solutions each involve writing a book (what did you expect—I'm a writer, after all) of a kind that some people, afterward, will deeply regret can't be unwritten, a book that will fundamentally alter absolutely everything that most folks think with regard to these "problems".

It isn't rocket surgery.

It isn't brain science.

And it isn't free.

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Civilization = "The State"

Submitted by White Indian on Thu, 06 Oct 2011 07:37:21 GMT

Like most Libertarians, Smith rages against the State, yet supports the agricultural city-State (civilization.)

The agricultural city-State (civilization) constitutes a single sociopolitical package.

• Settlement of cities of 5,000 or more people.
• Full-time labor specialization.
• Concentration of surplus.
• Class structure.
• State-level political organization.

A host of empirical evidence from archeology, anthropology, and ethnography give lie to the "voluntary city" as an oxymoron.

Fantastical ideologies like Marxism and Libertarianism cannot divorce the State from civilization. Never has happened. Never will. The Stateless mass-society is an impossibility.

The science-fiction daydreams of Smith are as ridiculous as the fantasies of Marx himself.

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