re: Stop pretending to be anti-violence

I agree with so many things, except one -- markets.

Yes, government equals violence, in every 'solution' it offers. Yes, enforcement, especially selective enforcement of contracts is violence. And capitalism, especially in advances stages, is total violence -- like most --isms (government preferences) it is and -ism that gives preference to the rich.

Free Market is not Capitalism

It is the opposite of capitalism. Let me elaborate, because so many otherwise intelligent people start blithering when it comes to free markets.

First of all, there is no 'free market Capitalism'. That is just an insane thing to say - Capitalism explicitly eliminates free markets and replaces them with a company store enforced by men with guns.

A market has nothing inherently violent about it. It is a place where people voluntarily agree to exchange things to their mutual benefit. They exchange things they have for things they want, and the market matches participants. It is the only rational, non-coercive way to do that.

A transparent free market is also an amazing discovery mechanism for any observer -- what do people need? Is there enough of it? What are they willing to exchange for the things they want?

Without a free market, one cannot supply the demand (how would you even know what it is), or demand a supply. All the things you think are terrible have to do with the lack of free markets, aka Capitalism (or sometimes, Socialism or Communism -- where economies fail for the simple reason just listed).

Our economy is collapsing for the very same reason. The more free markets are suppressed to route money to the wealthy, the less we know about the system. We then have to trust the lies pushed by 'government statistics offices'. We then get stuck with shortages and bubbles, and endless inflation.

Without the predictive power of the market, we are screwed. Without a functioning market, Soviet Union collapsed, as factories were filling trains with circuit breakers that no one needed, and those trains wound up clogging up the railways for other useless crap transported to nowhere -- all while cattle was starving with no feed. People were feeding bread to the livestock -- until there was not enough bread for themselves. A five year plan is just not the same as a market showing you exactly what hole needs to be plugged.

Without a free market, you have idiocies like the Fed which meets at a certain hour on a certain day and makes a pronouncement about interest rates. The crowd listens to complete gibberish about inlation expectations and financial papers fill the front page with nonsense. That is completely idiotic.

Enforcement of agreements

How do you 'enforce' your agreements? Threats of litigation and men with guns are one way to do it. Escrow, trust, and decency is another.

People can just agree on things and shake hands. Without lawyers involved, that is actually possible. Add lawyers and roomfulls of legal precedents with loopholes and unintuitive laws just lead to potential disagreements and confrontations. Replacing decency and common sense with a long list of procedures to follow is a recipe for disaster.

In my experience, the legal system only benefits corporations with lawyers on retainer. In practice, corporations do not have to pay individuals (who are not employees) or smaller businesses, and sure, sue them if you want to but chances are you will just waste your money fighting against a thing created by the state with infinite resources relative to yours.

But many times they will pay you. As a freelancer I found that: THE ONLY TIME I got paid is when I had a relationship, with future projects in the pipeline. I don't think I ever got paid for the final project.

So I don't think without government violence markets would cease to function due to unenforceable agreements. In fact, not much would change for people.

As for corporations -- clearly they should not exist, and without government protection, they could not.

Government as 'The Friend of The Victim'

That lie needs to stop. I've gotten much flak from a lot of people, especially liberals, who go on about 'victim shaming' and pointing accusing fingers at me. Because I object when someone does something stupid and the crowd starts chanting 'The Government should do something about that'.

The important thing is to not do stupid things -- and to know when you did something stupid, so you don't do it again. It should hurt at least a little. And now the world is full of people who think they are owed something for being unhappy.

Pushing the 'government' to protect the stupid, the underclass, the basket of deplorables, 'people of color', whatever 'disadvantaged group' you particularly prefer to excercise your 'white man's burden' on, is a horrible thing to do. Who made you the arbiter of truth anyway? If you are 'an activist' trying to 'get the government to do the right thing', stop and think. There is no right thing the government could possibly do to justify its evil existence. You may be the bad guy here.

Now there are some terrible things that I don't wish upon anyone. But none are as bad as the government confiscating from the weakest to commit genocide.

Sep 18 · 3 months ago · 👍 bsj38381, glowdigger

11 Comments ↓

I think the reason for the need for enforceable agreements is that not everyone is capable of getting along. We see it happen all the time. Shoddy workmanship or nightmare clients. Fly by night companies. Grifters and scammers. How does one solve a dispute? Government is the default arbitrator though private ones are possible. But without arbitration it can turn to violence since you get to the last resort more quickly without layers of alternatives. The handshake fails, appeal to reasonableness and common sense fails, what is next?

Then once violence is on the table it becomes who has the most people with the most guns. Pointing a gun at someone is "one weird trick" to make them very agreeable.

@darkghost, you are correct. My ideal violence-free world obviously is just an ideal, and some kind of governance is necessary. Much more limited than what we have.

As an aside: I sign almost everything 'Under Duress', which looks a lot like my signature and no one looks anyway.

OK I actually laughed out loud at the signature.

there are single memory space operating systems, like oberon family of systems.

all programs run in the same address space and don't damage memory of each other.

normally our windows/macos/linux/bsd/android/ios systems have virtual address spaces, where programs live like animals in the zoo, in neparate cages, so that they don't eat each other.

that requires a lot of overhead, many wasted context switches between user/kernel space and time to calculate memory maps and accesses.

in single memory systems like oberon kernel/low level modules live in the same address space as programs. no context switches, and language doesn't allow address arithmethics so modules can't damage each other's memory.

i have read about german villages / towns in caucasus, in early 20th century.

they had good urbanism, beautiful buildings, paved roads, and importantly no borders in between those houses or lands that belong to different owners.

when asked how is that possible that neighbours don't steal from each other, town inhabitants were getting confused. why would anyone do that?

while these examples are beautiful, i am not sure they scale.

in oberon systems software was written by a small group of researchers or students under their supervision.

german towns were small, and everybody knew everybody in person.

but when we scale, we need to run a program on our computer that is written by someone we don't know and have no reason to trust.

therefore: virtual address spaces. kernel / user space separation. and even antiviruses!

i explain students that kernel is like municipality. you can't just take any land and build on it. it needs to look up and allocate for you.

real municipality has phone numbers and kernel has system call numbers.

in order to make a request in municipality you have to go there, look at the list of internal phone numbers on the wall and call to some department.

then you ask, and the person on the other side searches information in their books.

while they are searching you can't do anything, you are in an uninterruptible i/o wait.

in oberon systems system call is just a function call to a low level module. no need for heavy context switches.

but i digress.

the problem is how to scale?

If you are 'an activist' trying to 'get the government to do the right thing', stop and think. There is no right thing the government could possibly do to justify its evil existence. You may be the bad guy here.

The fact that this opinion is, in your mind, not only a valid one to have but one worthy of sharing in public is crystal-clear proof that you have never talked to an activist. Nobody knows the force of the state more than those who are currently beneath its boot. If you want to understand why many (though not all!) of these oppressed minorities are petitioning the government to do something, I really think you owe it to yourself to talk to them.

@manucum, if that sentence was somehow proof that I never talked to an activist, your idea of 'logic' makes further discussion impossible.

@stack: I'm open to being proven wrong. Who have you talked to? Have you talked to people who are actually doing activism, such as going to protests, talking to local politicians, or even doing direct action? Have you read the works of activists of the past? Or have you only talked to keyboard warriors on the site formerly known as Twitter?

My main issue with your comment is this assumption you seem to be taking that activists aren't aware of the government's evilness. When one listens to activists talk about their struggles, their awareness of the government's actions is obvious: it's all they can talk about. But if these people know damn well that the government is evil, how can you explain them trying to get that same government to do something? Have you also considered that there are some problems that ONLY the government COULD solve? Not out of some moral imperitive, but because they're the only ones with the capital to do so?

I'm going to refrain from writing an essay in the comments, but I want to leave you with an article talking about, among other topics pertaining reparations, the work the Contract Buyers League in Chicago did to fix the morally and practically abysmal contract housing situation common to many Black Chicagoans at the time (and to an extent the Black American population at large, then and now). In particular, after getting home contracts from Black and White homes, they sued the landlords that issued these devilish contracts: note the activists using government powers despite being aware of at minimum the government's complicity in this situation.

@manucom: thank you for the link I will take a look.

I think you are arguing this incorrectly. I am sorry if I stepped on a sore toe.

• I do not need to talk to an insurance salesman to have an opinion about insurance companies.

• Where does it say I am making assumptions of anyone's ignorance? I am meerly stating my opinion.

• Knowing you are feeding an evil machine in order to maybe improve someone else's life (or your own) at the expense of others -- is perhaps worse than doing so as an ignoramus.

I know many people who do good without involving authorities.

And I know many others who think they are doing good with serious blinders on.

I am often accused of not seeing the big picture, but I think it's the opposite.