Hugo

What are you smoking, and where can I get some? Bush may be misguided, but you are being ridiculous comparing him to Hitler. You seem to be implying that Bush wants to exterminate American aboriginals, or American Jews, for one thing. I've never seen a shred of evidence for this, and this is just base slander of the worst kind. I don't think he is on any "mad quest for power." Those who are - Hitler, Mao or Stalin - consolidate their domestic position and eliminate political opponents before they start on any foreign expeditions. Bush has done nothing of the sort, in fact, he almost lost the election to Kerry. The statist acts he has put in place would be equally useable by his successor, and he has not done anything to consolidate his personal power. He has expanded the power of the state, but unlike other dictators, he has not identified himself with the state, consolidated his own position or drastically expanded the power of his own office. Your argument stumbles all over itself. How does "selling out to corporate power" coincide with "working on being a true dictator", exactly? Unless Bush has nationalised these corporate entities or created a Nazi-style economic directorate, that point doesn't even make sense. You say he's consolidating his power and diluting his power at the same time. If you want to criticise the president, please, confine yourself to logic and reality.

Perhaps I'm not being clear. You seem to be assuming that I'm disputing the terms of the contract. I'm not. I'm arguing that one of the parties in the contract has no legitimate right to be a party in it. You are saying that I agree to the contract by a certain action. I'm saying that's as it may be, but the contract itself is illegitimate and thus null and void, therefore, whether I consent to it or not is wholly irrelevant.

You're all a bunch of communists! Economic Left/Right: 10.00 Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -7.28 Anyway, this test is pretty useless. The guy hasn't done his research. According to his "international chart" he can't think of anybody who's a libertarian capitalist, which should be easy: David Friedman, Alan Greenspan, Lew Rockwell, Michael Badnarik, Penn Jillette, Howard Stern, Kurt Russell, Tom Selleck, Ted Nugent, John Popper. He also doesn't realise that economic and political control or liberty are linked. For instance, you might have ostensible political freedom, but if the state owns all printing presses, radio stations and TV networks, you won't have freedom of speech. Thus, the top-right and bottom-left quadrants of his graph should be cut down to half their size. I would propose that he go even further and acknowledge that any extreme-left regime has to be considerably above the political baseline, and any extreme-right society considerably below it. Good effort, though.

Well, perhaps you can tell me by what right the government, or the majority that elected them, insists that I must choose between consent or departure. Don't say "social contract". A concept cannot derive from itself. Did you look up "circular argument" yet? I gave you guys a link.

It doesn't really hold water, does it? Birth seems to be the act of acceptance of the social contract, and yet birth is a non-consensual act. How can an involuntary act be taken as consent for anything? That's completely illogical. Lysander Spooner pointed out that constitutions have no inherent authority in No Treason, p.71. He states that social contracts (constitutions) are crafted by men, and no man can bind another man to a contract of his making against the other mans will, and certainly that no man can bind another to his own will if that other is not "consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted either to express their consent or dissent in any formal manner." The social contract is a misnomer. "Social extortion" is an accurate term.

What is the social contract?

For a while. Eventually, they're going to have to deflate and pay it all back, or they're going to have to continue inflating and literally destroy the currency. If it's predictable, when's the crash coming, August? Inflation is a random "tax", because the government doing the inflating does not know who is going to pay, how much they will pay and when they will pay. This is why I say it is like a tax. It's not actually a tax in the true sense of the word. A tax is a levy, inflation is a very risky and uncertain debt. That's right. As I have said, once you inflate, you have to have an economic bust. It's inevitable. If you return to the gold standard, obviously there is going to be a recession because all the economic expansion fueled by monetary expansion will have to be reversed. What goes up must come down, in this case. In the 1920s they did return to gold, at inconsistent and irrational parities. The pound was overvalued, the dollar and franc undervalued, and combined with French and American attempts to block imported gold you have a recipe for disaster. Then the Feds started to expand the money supply in 1927, the Brits started to contract it in 1928, then Austrian and German banks failed causing further contraction and voila, the Great Depression is born. The British were able to postpone their depression from 1925 until 1929, and make it far worse, of course. Basically, in the 1920s we had an attempt to return to the pre-war monetary game, with different rules. What evidence? Actually, Hohenzollern Germany was practicing Keynesian economics long before WWI. Study their history. They believed in a statist/socialist economy and inflation to finance government. Hence their economic collapse during WWI, which ended up losing them the war. Keynes, like Marx, didn't have a single original thought. He just made the ideas of others popular. I think you don't know a lot about economics, which is lamentable in a capitalist. Ironically, when it comes to government and to monetary policy, you're a socialist. You seem to be arguing for inflationary monetary policy.

The key difference, of course, is that government gives a facade of legitimacy to what it does. Those who disagree with or resist government crimes are traitors, turncoats, rebels, insurgents, terrorists, tax evaders, draft-dodgers, criminals and so forth. The government is able to label itself as righteous. Because he owns them. Government doesn't own anything.

Well, it would. Currently, free-riders have the option of using the tool of state power, or violence, to get their free ride. Under anarchy, that's no longer possible (at least, it's far harder, since no violent institution has an illusion of legitimacy). Exactly. You are justifying monopoly within a geographic area. That's a state - a monopoly on violence within a geographic area. If that is what you think, then effectively we already have anarchy (multiple states, different areas) and what you want is a single world government. This is also like state-granted geographic monopolies for utility and cable companies, for instance. You propose a state to take care of a public goods problem and you just create an even bigger one: the state itself.

Assuming all government debt comes from bonds. It doesn't, of course, and if it did this very discussion would be moot since government can't really demand to pay a bond back before its maturity date without an interest penalty, in which case there's no difference when it's paid. The trouble with government debt is principally that the temptation to inflate in order to pay it off is omnipresent. Inflation is actually more likely in a democratic government. If government owes $20m in bonds, it's very easy just to print $20m rather than raise it. No extra taxes, the government stays popular and someone else will become unpopular when the recession starts. In a way. It's a very random way to tax, because the effects aren't predictable. The question economists are always asked is, "when's the crash coming?" and they can't predict it with any certainty. The only certainty is that it is coming. It's also a tax that hits working people hardest. The rich can cushion themselves somewhat from the effects of inflation, but working people have to watch their pensions and their retirement funds evaporate before their very eyes. They contracted because they had recklessly expanded. Because of the reckless expansion, a depression was absolutely inevitable. The only question was when and how it would start, and they settled that when they contracted the money supply. Inflation has been government policy since the Civil War, when the Union started inflating the greenback to pay for the astronomical cost of the war. The American Civil War debt remains unpaid to this day. Von Mises records that 1914 was the time at which most countries that had not already abandoned the gold standard did so. After the war, the rise of Keynesianism quickly claimed the rest.

That's not what's being discussed. Transferrable restitution means that you can sell a debt. Say I owe you $1000 and I default on the loan. You don't have any way to make me pay. You sell the debt to a professional collector, who pays you $1000 for it. Then that collector makes it his business to hound me for the $1000, plus a fee for his services (which, being a smart guy, you would have insisted that I agree to as part of the terms for the loan). This is how things worked in anarchist Iceland, for instance. It meant that even the poorest peasant had a way to get what was owed to him by the rich and powerful. Anarchy isn't going to solve the problem of crime. What it would solve is, basically, the public goods problem of government. In Iceland, people were free to pick their chieftain or "clan" and so clans competed, like businesses, to offer the best services to people for the least cost. A person could always opt out. In Somalia, as the essays have said, they're still not quite at a truly anarchist society, as the Icelanders or the Pennsylvanians were. They're missing a few institutions. But they're closer than they were thirteen years ago, and there has been progress. Maybe. I don't know. I imagine Davidson must have some grounds for his speculation (and it is speculation, by his own admission).

Assuming, for instance, you could get more than 10% APR on that $100. Oh, I do see it. I also know something about economics and I know that taxation is a lesser evil than inflation. I never said it did. But the US government has been inflating the currency to finance itself ever since 1860. It got particularly loose with the money supply in the 1920s, with obvious (and terrible) results. All of them. Any country with a central bank that sets an interest rate is in the business of currency inflation. How do you think a central bank can set an interest rate? The prime rate is altered by expanding or contracting the money supply. Only because government fiat says it can (much as various crimes are not seen as crimes when committed by government). Banks can inflate currency because the government has given them permission. Without government intervention, any fractional reserve bank would be fraudulent.

What's silly about that is that no Western democratic government has actually done that since 1914. The US government has been inflating their currency as a method of financing themselves since 1860. Your hypothesis deals with a fictional world, not the real world. You might as well argue about economics based on a world with flying cars. In any case, if government debt entirely took the form of bonds or loans issued out of capital funds rather than out of fractional reserves, that would not pose a major economic problem. But that has not happened in the lifetime of any poster on this forum. Yes, it does. I can either pay the government $100 today, or $110 a year from now because they borrowed the $100 today. If you don't want $10, then send it to me. I'll give you my Paypal details.

That's like saying "consider astronomy (I will ignore the issue of heliocentrism)." Silly. Assuming no interest was charged, no. But nobody loans without interest (except friends and family, of which government has none). But the difference is taxing $100 now, or $110 later. Hopefully that cleared things up for you.

Better yet, Cartman, let's listen to and put all our faith in governments. They're always perfectly altruistic. It's silly to imagine that a politician might be something less than saint-like in his selflessness and devotion to the welfare of others.

Those who have advocated paying down the debt first are correct. This is what the government should do. Government usually doesn't borrow real money, it borrows fake money. When the state borrows from a lending institution, it borrows from the excess reserve rather than from actual capital reserves, which is merely the legal limit the government has placed on credit expansion. Therefore, government debt is currency inflation. Taxation leads to economic slowdown, however, inflation leads to economic recession or crash. It's important to pick the lesser of two evils and I would prefer slower economic growth to economic shrinkage (recession). Taxation is ugly, but it's the only method of funding government that doesn't give the nation a ticking economic timebomb.

The problem, most likely, is human nature. Scientists are about as likely to be perfectly rational and scientific as Christians are to be fully conformant with the teachings of Jesus, i.e. not very. Basically, scientists aren't generally scientific and Christians aren't generally Christian. It isn't the case that either religion or science (as they are practiced) are purely intellectual pursuits. Theologians and scientists have much more riding on their theories, paychecks and reputation to name a couple. If a Catholic says, "I was wrong" he risks excommunication (and unemployment, if he was a priest). If a scientist says, "I was wrong" he risks his standing amongst his peers and his job at whatever research facility he works for (people don't like to employ researchers who aren't even confident of their own theories and findings). Science as an intellectual discipline can be applied to religion and metaphysical ideas as well. The thing to remember is that religion, as a theory, is inherently unproveable either way. But this is no reason why a scientific approach cannot be taken to it, as it often has been. This is a problem. Churches aren't supposed to have leaders. Why would you need an intermediary between you and an omniscient, omnipotent and omnipresent being?

This isn't true. History is full of nonsense put forward in the name of science, all of it absolute bunk and yet much of it accepted with blind, quasi-religious faith. For instance, Galileo himself was unable to come up with a theory that explained the behaviour of comets in Copernican astronomy, so he claimed that they were tricks of the eye (Galileo had seen one comet in his entire life, as a young boy). The scientific method of the Jesuit astronomers who disagreed with him was far better, and yet Galileo is remembered as the great scientist and the Jesuits as fraudulent fools despite the fact that Galileo was, demonstrably, a crank. Consider medicine and all the quackery we have endured over the centuries: bleeding, leeches, humours, miasmas, and so forth. In all these cases, "science" was wrong, and yet the scientists completely failed to follow scientific method and used wholly unscientific methods to try and discredit those who thought differently. They acted more like religious fanatics than scientists as you think of them. This kind of stuff does continue in the present day. Scientists are quite attached to their pet theories, and often don't follow scientific method in trying to dismiss competitive theories. They are as proud and as fallible as the rest of us. This is probably also due not just to pride but to the psychological phenomenon of authority figures. Countless studies have shown that people are far more likely to do something or accept a theory if it comes from an authority figure: a priest, a teacher, a scientist, a judge. In this respect, science is really no different from religion. So, let's not fraudulently ascribe virtue to science and vice to religion. There's really not a lot between them in that regard. Science and religion both have had their fair share of great minds and genuine thinkers and their fair share of cranks and frauds. It seems strange to me too, and when the actual teachings of Jesus are taken into account it also seems profoundly anti-Christian.

Your source, Thelonius, has spent a week or so in one city and presumes himself an expert on the entire country. Tell me, would you spend a week in Toronto, and count yourself an expert on Quebec, the Maritimes, Alberta and BC? Jim Davidson of the Awdal Roads Company has spent a lot of time travelling in the entire country and wrote this essay about Somalian anarchy. Bryce Bigwood, who hasn't travelled to Somalia but who has researched it carefully, has a very similar view to Davidson's. His essay is interesting because he actually thinks about solutions to the ongoing problems in Somalia, for instance, the addition of transferable restitution (think of our collection agency system) to the Xeer legal code, and more efficient arbitration methods. Shafer Parker, an Albertan, has offered this embellishment on an article in a 2002 National Geographic magazine, in which the author, Andrew Cockburn, basically asserts that anarchy is responsible for Somalia's rise from the ashes of her 1993 war. As August said, it is important to consider anarchist Somalia not as compared to Canada, but as compared to Somalia under a government. The comparison is clear: anarchist Somalia is a vast improvement. If Canada were to become anarchist, we would get similar improvements, and we would also not have nearly the same amount of problems since we are starting from peace rather than the destruction of war and since we already have a lof of the institutions that Somalia ought to develop.

No, there certainly isn't. Since every aspect of the economy is interconnected, once non-market measures are introduced into one industry or to one aspect of the economy they are introduced into all industries and all economic factors. The problem is that industrial or post-industrial economies are about as fathomable as the workings of the human brain, so when government interferes in the economy it's effectively pushing buttons at random, saying "I wonder what happens if I do this?" Unsurprisingly, unforeseen consequences in the forms of unemployment, price increases, slowing of development, scarcity, recession and even economic crash are invariably the result. Of course, and if they receive corporate welfare it will be bad for everyone in the long run (except these companies, but only as long as the subsidy continues). Corporate welfare damages or destroys proper market incentives, which therefore tends to slow, halt or even reverse the free market tendency towards more and better for a lower price. I agree. The sad fact is that on both the political and the corporate sides there is too much to gain from the existing arrangement. Politicians get campaign funding, kickbacks, stock options and all sorts of goodies. Companies get to be "lazy" and bypass economic procedures by applying noneconomic force to their problems, which is more cost-effective for them and makes their bottom line better (at the expense of the bottom lines of the citizenry).

Interestingly enough, if you see a lag in free market response somewhere you can bet government regulation is at the bottom of it. For instance, state contraction and expansion of the money supply disrupts the time relationship between saving and spending, which is the actual cause of recessions (it's a myth that cyclical recession is inherent to the free market). The time lag in this case will, in a free market, be perfectly adjusted to the problem. A sudden dearth of oil will result in a huge upward swing in oil prices, which will just as suddenly stimulate a lot of investment in alternative energy. This investment will bring alternative energy to the market far faster. Consider IT for an example of how investment and market interest can create a vast industry that was worth $2.1 trillion worldwide in 1999 (source: WITSA) from nothing in only a relative few years. However, none of that is actually relevant because such a scenario is not going to happen. Your time-lag problem is only feasible were every well in the world to run dry at the same time, which is patently absurd. As reserves dwindle, investment in the oil industry will slow (it becomes an increasingly risky investment with increasingly smaller rewards), which will mean prices will rise even though actual production has not yet fallen. By the time the supply actually starts to drop measurably, the critical crossover price of fossil/renewable energy will already have been reached and fossil fuels will be on the way out. Thus, your time-lag objection is not credible.

As you have correctly identified, there is the problem of non-economic or political influences in markets. When business interests and politics mix, as when oil lobbyists have the ear of the White House, you have the problem of industry using noneconomical methods to skew the economy. Basically, businesses can harness political tactics like subsidies, tarriffs, taxes, federal (dis)approval and so forth to skew, distort and even reverse the outcomes that a free market would produce. Lobbyists generally sell this to politicians in terms of "saving jobs" and so forth, which make these tactics sound more palatable than their actual, true economic terms, such as "causing unemployment" and "delaying technological progress." It is true that companies will try and maximise gains for shareholders, not just in the short-term but also in the long-term (look at amazon.com, which, I believe, has never made a profit and yet has no shortage of investment). However, the crucial thing is to restrict these gains to that which can be obtained by free market methods, rather than those which can be obtained by political, coercive means. This, more than anything else, would probably make the effect I described above fail.

It means, "Here I am, and here I stay." Now, Thelonius, what August is getting at is that one day the pumps are not going to just run dry and leave us all up the proverbial creek. What will happen is that existing oilfields will dry up and less profitable ones will be opened, which will make prices rise. As prices rise, new oil will be drilled as oil sources that were not viable before (shale oil, for instance) will now become profitable. Furthermore, as oil prices rise alternative energy sources will become progressively more appealing and thus profitable. The rise in oil prices will also signal to energy producers that more profit can be had in alternative sources, which will have the effect of stimulating growth of market R&D into these sources. Basically, as oil supplies tail off and prices rise, alternative energy production will gradually ramp up. By the time the oil actually runs out, we won't need it anymore. The free market will naturally create this effect, it's simple economics. The best thing we can do is get out of the way and let it happen, meddling is likely to have very bad effects.

I don't think the US is after Iraqi oil. After the cost of the war is counted for the US government, it would have made more sense to strike some kind of deal with Russian oil suppliers, perhaps even using the money that waged the war to subsidise their prices instead (I believe Russian oil is still a smidgen more expensive than Middle Eastern). The only way that this could be about oil, in my opinion, is if the US government is looking at the very long-term picture, and planning for cheaper oil in 50 years or longer. This is unlikely, firstly because the complexity and unpredictability of the world make such long-term forecasts impossible and the plans based upon them worthless, and secondly, because a democratic administration rarely, if ever, plans anything that would only come to fruition after the end of its political life, especially if that plan will only have negative consequences before that end. I think the true reason for Gulf II is democracy-seeding, to start cleaning out the hornet's nest of Islamic extremism that breeds cultures hostile to Western democratic values (and terror is a strategy, not an institution). George W. is probably trying to fulfill a desire voiced by Woodrow Wilson after WWI, to "make the world safe for democracy." Note that "democracy" and "freedom" are not the same thing, no matter how often they are confused. What we are talking about, then, is not freeing the world and bringing liberty to people, but bringing them under the American umbrella of values, which are increasingly opposed to liberty and freedom.

I don't particularly care if it's tempered with a dozen roses and a box of chocolates. Personal insults have absolutely no place on this forum. It doesn't seem to propose that insults might be OK if they are tempered somehow. August has repeatedly shown that he is too immature either to understand or to follow these rules and constantly resorts to personal insults, which is just one reason why he should not be taken seriously as a poster here. Please clarify this. Are you arguing that property is based upon and depends upon force/coercion, or that property is force/coercion? This has actually been proposed by some anarchists, basically, that the anarchists of the world all descend upon a small country and vote its government out of existence. Why not? The universe is demonstrably ruled by absolutes. Are not the laws of thermodynamics or gravity absolute? Intellectually, one should search for absolutes, or truths, and then base theories and propositions around them. Who gives government this power? If they were able to give it, they must have had it (you cannot give what you do not have), which means that some people in our society have the right to use (initiate) force against others, while the rest of us do not. What is the moral basis behind this, please? Who sets those expectations and who decides when a breach has occurred?