Hugo

You're pushing your credibility a little too far, I think. If such is the case, you're indebted to pretty much everyone - how do you expect to pay them all? Don't say 'government' - it is not coincidental with 'people'. My position stands on the idea that the initiation of violence is wrong. The state, or government, initiates violence as policy. Therefore, it is wrong. Now, if you're quite done with the insults and obfuscations, perhaps we can move on. You said: Would you say that a monopoly created and sustained by violence i.e. government was not a "dominant position" and as such conferred no "unfair advantage in the market" and was not "abusive to overall welfare?" It seems to me that to say such a thing would be in direct contradiction of what you had said earlier. I am not ignoring it at all. I addressed it at length in my last post. Perhaps you would care to reply rather than pretend I did not? There are many people in society who are not in the employ of the government, nor do they have a voice in the role and policies of the government, so your inferred statement is necessarily and absolutely false. As long as there are people in society who disagree with the government (77% of the electorate alone, in our case), government cannot pretend to speak for society but only a fraction of it, and that is necessarily a best-case scenario since at least part of the 23% that elected the Liberals last election were compromising on one or more issues. I don't! Whatever made you think I did? So, you take a purely nihilistic view of property rights. In that case, one could not expect you to object if "society" or, as you think of society, the smallest portion of the country that can be mustered without making one single other faction more numerous, decided to steal everything you owned. Or, for that matter, even to march you into a gas chamber. Correct? Like Socrates, you would willingly drink the poison that the government gave you, even though you had no wish to die.

Well, I haven't used the healthcare system at all, for a start. Can I get that portion of my taxes back? If you argue that I paid like an insurance policy (pay whether you actually use or you don't), you're justifying monopoly (which you railed against in another thread). I am forced to "buy" the government's services whether I want them or not, I cannot avoid buying them, I cannot get a refund if I don't use them. Can you explain this self-contradiction in your political philosophy? Somebody can apply rules to their own property, correct? You can't apply rules to somebody else's property. I can't tell you that you must use your computer to visit my website twice a week, it's none of my business. So, the government of Canada has the (dubious) right to tell me to desist using public property if I don't want to pay taxes, but as the vast majority of Canada is privately owned, by what right does the government insist I leave the entire country if I don't want to pay taxes, exactly? This contradicts any notion of property rights. I gave you examples. You aren't refuting them, just telling me I am wrong without evidence or argument. If you say so. You are the one flailing around, contradicting himself on policy towards monopoly and on property rights. Your argument is not consistent, and if I want to refute you all I need to do is play the mutually exclusive parts of your argument off against each other.

Then make that argument, if you can. A wise man once said that you should not attack or destroy something unless you have at least a vision of what you want to replace it, and how to do that. It seems to me that you are attacking human society, but you have no idea what to replace it with or even what to do if you destroyed it. In fact, the only possible solution I see you having is exactly the same as the problem - force to combat force. Worse, physical violence to combat metaphysical pressures. The thing is, as I alluded to, that there are some things that you cannot change. You cannot fly, nor can you escape social pressures, since these are inbuilt parts of human nature. Humans are perambulatory creatures, and they are social creatures. However, you can refrain from violence. If you want to destroy what you see as oppressive social norms, then you are asking to destroy humanity. Moreover, the metaphysical does not force us to act against our will, it changes our will. For example, yesterday I washed the car. I didn't want to, in fact, there were a hundred other things I would rather have done. But I did it. You could say that "social pressure" drove me to clean my car, however, the fact was that I chose to obey those social pressures and go clean my car. It was a reluctant choice, but in the end I chose (and was not forced by anyone except myself) to clean the car. Social pressures etc. are not forces, they are influences. Plenty of people buck social trends all the time, like goths, atheists, nudists, fetishists, yes, even anarchists. What does this tell you?

If I left Canada, would I get my taxed income back? What about my EI payments towards a pension I'll never claim? Did you make the law? I don't recall making the law. Even accepting the fact that Parliament makes law, you then have to reconcile that with the fact that a government (lawmakers) is usually elected by less than half of the electorate. Technically, they get to make the law, or at least, select the people who are going to make the law. Then you have the problem of the judiciary. The government can exercise its will over me without my consent. That is arbitrary. A non-arbitrary transaction is one in which both parties have input. The sad fact is that government today is far more involved in the lives of citizens and has monopolised far more institutions than any government before the Magna Carta. Examples: healthcare, taxation, policing, etc. It wouldn't, if every expanse of government power were not a monopoly backed by violence. The contract, then, is illegal and void. I have made two types of transactions since I came to Canada and, indeed, in coming to Canada. The first is private transactions, with individuals, businesses etc. No matter how much the "people of Canada" other than the parties to the contract would like to interfere in these dealings, the fact is that they have no right to as defined in property law. One of them cannot interfere, and if one cannot, many cannot, and if many cannot, they cannot defer interference to another body e.g. government. The second type is public transactions, or my use of "public property." However, there is truly no such thing as public property. For things that are owned by everybody, there is no consensus as to how these things shall be used. Therefore, some people will be prevented from using public property as they see fit, therefore, they can have no property rights over it. Because of that, there is no such thing as public property, only widely-held (at best) private property, and that takes us back to my point above. You are violent towards McDonald's employees? Shocking! Explain how it is violent, please. All that I see is people exercising their right to deal with persons of their choosing. If that is violent, then I hate to point it out to you, but you are doing massive violence to thousands of people in the Third World while you refuse to send them all of the money and goods you have, over and above a subsistence level of existence for yourself. Against whom am I being violent? Nevermind "the people", because my wife, my children, my wife's relatives, my friends, my employer etc. are Canadian people and they positively want me to be here, i.e. they have waived any claim that I did violence to them. Therefore, please tell me which individuals, by name, I committed violence against. I'm sorry, where did I say that? No, I would describe the default as an initiation of force against property. By withholding money that is rightfully bequeathed to another, one is stealing from them. Therefore, to use force to reclaim that payment (if it was even necessary to) would not be an initiation of force. Except, of course, that you called anarchism "silly".

Then your next-door neighbour can steal your property, because if you don't like it, you can move. Who makes the law? Attempts to regulate government always boil down to an attempt to make something regulate itself. That is why attempts to regulate government always fail. Look at the modern USA compared to the USA of 1780 for an example. Or modern Canadian government compared to the government of even 50 years ago. Bigger, more intrusive, with far more accumulated power than it ever had before. There's no reason to believe that this trend will spontaneously reverse itself, it never has in the past, at least, not in any sustained fashion.

How many of those were obtained after war or years of oppression? History shows that, on the whole, government typically reacts violently to attempts at secession, and especially violently towards the notion that competition for its services might arise within its own borders. A better question for you to ask would not be, "how would the government react to Quebec secession?", but, "how would the government react to an attempt at an independent justice system within Canada, with its own police, courts of law, prisons and gallows?" So, according to you, the government does not own me or my wife, since we are free to leave, and one can fully control ones possessions. Nor does the government own any of our property, since its rights to it are limited. Therefore, what you are saying that the government has done is to attach clauses to a contract made between two people, wholly independent of the government. How do you justify that? Next time you make a contract with anyone, I want to add a clause that you'll pay $1000 per month to me forever. A birth is, for the infant, a non-consensual act. How can a non-consensual act be taken as some kind of consent for further acts, exactly? If your heart beats again, I'll take that heartbeat as your consent to your giving me $1000 per month forever. So, because I can choose my poison, I have no right to complain about being poisoned? Strawman argument. I referred to a battered wife, and I never insinuated that all such marriages involved violence. But further to your point, there are many nice marriages out there where all acts are consensual and no violence is initiated. That would be analogous to the anarchist state. I believe that the means affect the end. The means of government is the initiation of violence, which is wrong, therefore, it can have no good ends. What are the wages of sin, August? An act executed under duress or using violence cannot be more than amoral. How can a monopoly be a market or be like a market? A monopoly is the absence of a market. A thing cannot be its negative. Because I signed a contract of my own free will with the leasing company stating that, if I did not keep up the payments, they could repossess the car. Show me the equivalent contract I made with the government, please. Another strawman. You are supposed to be justifying the initiation of force. I have never advocated nor defended the initiation of coercion and violence for any reason, and your post (where you quoted me as specifically saying "initiation") refutes your own point. I didn't really need to say anything, did I? But it is not. The very fact that government depends upon the initiation of violence nullifies that statement. People who "work together" under the threat of violence, against their will, are slaves. Why? Milton Friedman has stated that, although not an anarcho-capitalist, he is sympathetic to them. His son David (also a renowned and published economist) is an anarcho-capitalist. So are many other great minds. Anarchists include people like Leo Tolstoy, David Friedman, Noam Chomsky, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, Henry Thoreau, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, George Woodcock, Murray Bookchin, Max Stirner, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Murray Rothbard, Gustav de Molinari and more. My point is that with all these people behind the theory, for you (who are, as far as I am aware, of no particular expertise in political or economic theory nor a published writer or renowned lecturer) to dismiss their ideas as "silly" is, in and of itself, silly.

It's very difficult to make the case that coercion is not purely physical. In the case of emotional or intellectual "coercion", as you are describing, you are not trying to force somebody to act against their will but instead, to change their will so that a person acts in accordance both with their will and your desire. In any case, the first problem is that there is no clear boundary between informing somebody and persuading somebody. I might give you a list of facts and, upon reading them, you might change your mind. Did I "coerce" you? The second is that any attempt to rid society of these non-physical coercions would be to apply more coercion, to make them shut up. Thus, your cure is as bad as the disease. And thirdly, you must be aware that your attempt to convince others of the wrongness of their non-physical coercions is, in and of itself, yet another non-physical coercion.

Your argument is only examining a symptom, not the problem. The actual problem is the tragedy of the commons. In an anarchist society, without public property, no police force would be allowed to set up speed traps and so forth without the permission of the owners of the road. The owners of the road are dictated to by the consumers, the drivers, because if the drivers are dissatisfied they will pick an alternate route and the road owners will lose money. Therefore, in the anarchist society the level of policing for speed limits will exactly reflect the compromise in the public mind between safety, and speed or convenience. There will be multiple compromises, and so there will be multiple solutions. One size does not fit all and never will. This has been very well dealt with in the works of David Friedman. I'm going to attempt a brief and wholly inferior summary here which I hope will suffice. Basically, the anarchist has no need to violate the rights of the trespasser. He can request that the trespasser appear at a mutually agreeable tribunal and be bound by its decision. If the trespasser refuses, he will have the huge black mark against him that he was accused of a crime and refused to submit to justice. It is a tacit admission of guilt and a declaration of irresponsibility and lack of remorse. In an exclusively private society, he will find it almost impossible to get employment, goods and services or even to move around freely. Therefore, the strong incentive is to submit to a court and have this black mark erased, to pay one's debt as it were. As to your question of recovering costs of catching the thief, it's really simple and already done in courts today. The court simply awards damages plus costs. The thief is made to pay the full cost of his crime to his victim. Of course, under our current system victims get nothing. The state holds their property and their very lives as being truly worthless. Certainly, and if only the state could ever provide that! But it cannot. Until Jesus gets involved in the policing business this is not going to happen. Any political body is by very definition aligned, to the majority in a democracy, or to the king in a monarchy, for instance. As to the standardized penalties, a brief review of sentencing should show you that penalties are by no means standardized and are a matter of the whimsy of the court. As to shared cost, no taxation system truly shares the cost. Somebody always has to pay more than their fair share, and some people will always be freeloading. The only way to ensure a pricing system that is truly fair is with a market.

No, my defence of anarchy is based on freedom from violence. Any individual or institution who attempts to influence people in any fashion using violence, fraud or the threat thereof is that which anarchy is opposed to. Usually, and especially in the last two centuries or so, this means the state or government, although organised religion has been a culprit in the past (given state complicity in their acts, of course). However, I am unopposed to religious principles (ideas), childhood education, social pressure and so forth that are not backed by violence or the threat of it. Ideas and schools of thought should be free to compete, however, when one idea gains the backing of coercion that competition is destroyed. Well, I would say that the most powerful form of control that we experience is physical laws. I can't fly, I can't run at 100kph, I can't turn mud into gold, I can't eat twenty pounds of chocolate per day without getting fat, etc. What is your solution to this powerful and insidious control? Would you not say that this is a severe limitation on freedom and liberty?

See what you want to, Eureka, I can't stop you. But it seems to me that, in all the court rulings against the government over the years, it is hardly the case that the Canadian government does not break the law. Even right now, we are in the middle of an investigation into whether or not the Chretien administration broke the law (Adscam).

Then take your pick of other breaches of law by Canadian government. For example, the BC government's violation in the Nisga'a agreement of the 1950 Supreme Court ruling that provincial and federal governments may not delegate their taxatory powers to one another, or Dalton McGuinty's breach of the Taxpayer Protection Act and his written contract with the Canadian Taxpayers Association (for which they have filed suit). My wife is Canadian. If the condo owners used violence to intimidate other entrepreneurs from opening other condos, your analogy would be somewhat more valid (although still invalid on net balance as the government of Canada did not build Canada). If government ceased to fund itself from forcibly expropriated taxes and permitted competition in provision of its services, it would not be coercive, and it would not be government anymore, but just a business. To state that the Canadian government is not coercive because I can leave is fallacious. To leave Canada means that I must have somewhere else to go, which means I have to merely pick a different master, another government. To construct an analogy, you would say that a battered wife could not leave her husband until she had found another man to take her in! Or, to put it another way, that blacks during the segregation period had no right to complain about Jim Crow laws because they could always move to New England. Or, that your next-door neighbour can break into your house and steal your television, because if you don't like it you can just move to another neighbourhood. But, we move off-topic. You are supposed to be justifying the initiation of coercion and violence to me. Yes, until everyone else caught on, and then the rush on the market would ensure everybody was ripped off. Furthermore, how will I get a fair price for my emotional investments - my friends, my wifes family, my childrens playmates? Why? If you move next door to me, do I have the right to demand that you wear a bearskin hat on Tuesdays, claiming that you consented to it by moving next-door, and if you don't like it you can always move away? You are assuming that government is ordained by some kind of divine law that must be obeyed. It is not. It is a law of men, so defending it is defending the notion that it is just for some men to impose their will upon others using violence, or that some men are inherently superior to others and have the right to coerce them and even to bind their descendants into coercion. Yes, it is. I can identify which individuals in our society are in government and which are not, just as I can identify which individuals in our society are female and which are not. Nor will you. Anarchy is self-government, that is all. Six billion states of one. Why do you continually try to pass off insults and condescencion as debate? Your behaviour is sometimes shameful, and the frequency of your descents into pettiness seems to be growing. I think it rather silly that you would even refer to anarchy as "silly" given the number of great minds who have lent their support to it, including the Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman. Are they "silly", August? You seem to admire their ideas in other discussions.

Why do they need to leave? What special claim does the government, or even the majority of Canadians, have over Canada? I have a stake in this country too, I own property here, I work here, my kids are raised here so why can others tell me to get out? Why can't I tell them to get out? Well, here's the definition of "arbitrary": Like the laws that permit tobacco smoking but forbid baby walkers or owning pit-bulls? That certainly isn't reasonable or based upon any principle. For example, when Chretien told his caucus that it didn't matter how they voted on the gay marriage bill, since he was going to make sure it became law anyway. Because we've never seen a court strike down a law or a statute in Canada, have we? Such as when the Federal government signed the Kyoto Accord without consulting the provinces, despite the fact that it was well outside the boundaries of their jurisdiction to do so and was supposed to be "limited by law". Or such as when the government violated legal public spending guidelines, resulting in Adscam or a part thereof.

But government is not family. I don't owe my existence to government, for a start. Then, my family gave freely of their own resources to support me as a child. Government does not have anything to give, what they do is to steal from some people in order to support others. Lastly, consider that in the parent-child relationship, one party is clearly superior in every respect and may justly enforce its will upon the other. Applied to government, that gives you Stalinism. But one cannot say that all politicians are inherently superior beings to their citizens, especially when you espouse a government of the people! This gives the lie to democracy. Anarchy has the logical beauty of having a single principle that is applied to all. It is internally consistent. Statism is self-contradictory, for it says "here, but not there", "me, but not them", in ways that are completely arbitrary and subjective and not logically demonstrable. Minarchists and Keynesians are just picking a different, arbitrary and equally unjustifiable point to compromise at. You can seek redress from my future assets. An arbitrator would probably rule that I should labour and pay you the proceeds until my debt is paid off. No coercion is involved, however, if I refuse there's every likelihood that I wouldn't be able to get employment or to purchase many goods and services with such a massive black mark against my character. If you needed repayment urgently, you could sell your claim to a collections agency, who will pay you in full and then make it their business to collect that sum from me. But I am surprised that you asked this question, since these mechanisms already exist. I can see the benefit from purging the human population of all handicapped people, too. That doesn't mean I'm about to open a gas chamber. How about you? My point in this somewhat cruel jab is that it's easy to see the benefit in almost anything. When it gets interesting and productive is when you compare the benefits to the costs. That is what I am asking you to do. Good for you. I don't want to be coerced in the future, and you have absolutely no right to empower somebody else to coerce me no matter how badly you want to be coerced. If you don't have a right, you can't confer that right on somebody else. Strawman argument. Who said it'd be a single owner? A large good can be divided, or a large number of owners can be incorporated. I'm sure you're familiar with the mechanisms already. No, and that is why we have other methods of providing "public goods." Do a Google search for libertarian public goods theory. What do you base that upon? No, August, it becomes government when one condo 'owner' is there against his will. Your condo argument fell apart, and you gave up even trying to defend it about half-way down page 7 of the "defence of anarchy" thread. What you have said is true but it in no way either refutes or adds to what I have said. Yes, we have! Have you not been paying attention? In asking somebody whether they are worse off, the only person whose judgement counts is their own. If they feel worse off then they are worse off. Anything else is an argument for despotism. That doesn't tie in well with the fact that 77% of the Canadian electorate is governed by those they didn't choose but who still exercise arbitrary power over them.

Emails nothing. Until they actually make a move, it doesn't count for anything. Ask a car salesman how many people he talks to in the course of the day who don't end up buying a car, and yet they still came down to the showroom. Then ask yourself how much greater an investment of time, money, emotions and material resources it is to emigrate to a foreign land rather than to buy a new car.

No problem. I appreciate your efforts thus far! Hopefully when your schedule allows we shall deal with the issues of polycentric law and the justice & policing market.

Could parents justly bind their children into servitude before they were born? That is what the social contract amounts to: not merely a family qua family, but a family - not even your family - that presumes to sign your life away on your behalf before your very birth. If you say so. It's pretty easy to call somebody "clueless" without refuting their argument in any way, and I've noticed that you tend to fall back on petty insults when you can't make an argument. You cannot call Spooner clueless, you have to prove him clueless with an argument. Better for whom? If people chose not to cover themselves within the market, that meant that the cost of covering themselves was not worth the benefit to them (value is subjective, remember?). Therefore, they were better off without coverage. So, if you force them to buy the coverage at gunpoint (and that is what governments do, they cannot provide anything for free but merely force you to buy) you have made them worse off than they were before, by their own judgement. And if you say that your judgement is better than theirs and should be overriding, then the type of government you truly desire is for you to be Pharaoh and for all other men to be your slaves. If you were truly a god amongst men who knew better than all of them, you wouldn't have any reason to look after their welfare anyway, and should just do what Pharaoh did and enslave the entire nation to building giant geometrical whimsies for you. The argument is self-defeating. That's not what government is. Government says, "Pay me and I'll become a monopolist." The cartel might be an improvement over nothing, but does that mean you should stop there, or pursue something even better? Once man had discovered fire from rubbing sticks or whatever, was it redundant and useless to pursue better methods of heat and light generation? You can read about this example here. But it seems that you agree with me anyway. To make the environment public is to invite its destruction, therefore, the logical solution to environmental damage is to ensure that every single part of the environment is privately owned, and that is how we should direct our thinking. Perhaps you've heard of privately developed communities, like townhouse complexes with internal road and parking lot infrastructures. The maintenance is paid by the residents. Consider the road and parking lot networks in shopping plazas. The leases of the stores pay for it. To answer your question in one word: "bundling." Of course, it's not the only solution, and I'm not so arrogant as to assume that some worthy entrepreneur would not come up with an even better one given time. Why? Let companies build power distribution networks and lease them to customers and/or power generation companies. The best one will win out (and 'best' is in the eyes of the consumer, so there will be many 'best' companies). Vast riches await the company that can work out a way to keep the power on during a storm! That's something the state power industry has never solved and will never try to. Heck, they can't even keep the power on during summer. All trade has a price. Don't be so short-sighted as to assume a price must mean money, or material goods, or tangible services. Actually, no, it is in a permanent state of imbalance. This is why the economy changes over time. Very few companies in existence will be around in 100 years, those that do, will probably exist as a result of state subsidy of some kind. None will be around in 500 years. There are no constants in the market.

Perhaps, but the general public is also incredibly cunning, more so than most realise. They may not figure out the intricacies of every system, but the citizenry will always figure out how to work within and how to cheat that system. For an example, consider the American democratic system. It was designed with checks and balances, but the founding fathers grossly underestimated the cunning of people within that system, who learnt that they could skew the political machine all over the place with lobbying and special interest groups as early as George Washington's heyday, who learnt that they could work around the limits on government power within the Constitution and wrangle all sorts of statist machinations unthought of by the founding fathers, and so forth. For another, think about inflation. Central banks this century have consistently created inflation by increasing the credit supply, knowing that this alleviates unemployment only by lowering real wages and hoping that the masses would never notice that their real wages had been lowered. And, of course, they did, with the result that everything under the sun is index-linked. I had heard that Immigration Canada advised that American immigrants will be treated like any others. As an immigrant, let me tell you that the immigration process is very long, very expensive and frequently infuriating. I can't see a great exodus of Americans any time soon. Alec Baldwin vowed to leave and didn't, and he has wealth, which makes everything easier. Imagine being a working-class guy with a job, a wife with a job, a mortgage, three kids in school, friends, a church, a big-screen TV on finance, two cars on lease... is he really going to give all that up and move to the Great White North just because Bush won the election, especially considering that an America under Kerry would be practically indistinguishable from one under Bush? The only people likely to flee are people who would be better off in Canada, those without medical coverage, on low incomes or unemployed, low-skilled and so forth, and I'm not sure how the Canadian economy will cope with a sudden influx of needy and largely unproductive people. And as I said, America under Kerry wouldn't look any different, so I can't see the numbers of those kinds of immigrants increasing at any huge rate. The only other group I can see coming in large numbers will be draft-dodgers after Selective Service starts coming into its own (and the Democrats favour it too, so that can hardly be laid at Bush's door exclusively), and if an American draft-dodger turned up at my door I'd take him in. I'll try my best to help anyone who asks me to help them flee slavery. As to the rest, I'm in favour of open borders and no immigration controls, so let them all come. But before we open the borders, we have to abolish welfare and all the other stuff I usually complain about. You fellows all know my score by now.

Proudhon, eh? Proudhon the anarchist? Do you have a source for your quote? Proudhon, from P.J. Proudhon, George Woodcock, p.249

An enlightened response, I must say. Who indoctrinated us, exactly? They did a pretty terrible job considering that Black Dog, Argus and myself hold three substantially different views. As to being "irrelevant Canadians", if you are indeed American, then I would remind you that your vote makes absolutely no difference and you are just as irrelevant as we are in the American political process. Hey, I'm smarter than both of them. Give me the job. I think this is quite a common reaction. Conservatism used to be about small government, fewer taxes and more freedom, but Bush has hijacked it and turned it into a statist vehicle. Unfortunately, the fact that Kerry really has nothing better to offer doesn't leave them with anywhere to go, and probably leaves them where many Canadian Conservative voters were left after Harper destroyed the Alliance/Reform roots of the party and turned it into Liberal Lite.

Ah, the social contract. The problem is that you can't sign a contract before you are born, before you exist, before you have faculties. Did you read that Lysander Spooner essay? Unfortunately, many people won't or can't vote with their feet because they have already invested vast amounts of time and resources in building a life in their home country, and I don't think it just or fair that you should expect them to abandon all of it and get lost just because the government feels they have the right to help themselves to the property of the populace. Then you define a failed market as a market where some people choose not to participate? Then by your definition, every market is a failure, and we should abandon the whole thing and move to a completely planned economy. There are a large number of possible transactions that would be beneficial to people and yet they fail to participate in them. You propose to force their participation at gunpoint, unfortunately, you don't realise that that act of coercion will destroy the market, and render any results obtained substantially less than Pareto optimal. Then, it becomes self-contradictory, because by forcing people to participate for their own good you have ended up making them worse off than they were before. Incorrect, August, there will be welfare losses. If you grant a market with "universal, obligatory participation" you have created a cartel, which will then proceed to gouge on prices and generally extort from the customers who no longer have market options to help themselves. You will have artificially created a market failure by introducing politics into the market, and you have terribly skewed economic function by creating a market that lacks correct market functions. Go ahead and make one, then. In the meantime I'll refer you to the 407 ETR and to Britain's private power companies, and to the consistent failure of the state to provide reliable and cheap power, well-maintained roads, and an efficient, bacteriologically safe water supply. Take a look at the example of southern US forestry, which has been saved (a rapid decline in tree population was arrested and then reversed) by the free market. You yourself have said that what is owned by all shall be cared for by none, and to trust care of the environment to government, to the public, is to introduce the environment to the tragedy of the commons and nothing more. You need to understand a few concepts, August. Firstly, any voluntary human transaction or interaction constitutes a market. Secondly, wealth is definitely not the same as money, and wealth is not even necessarily material goods or tangible services. Wealth is that which has value. And thirdly, nothing has value until it is assigned value by a human being, and the value he assigns will depend upon circumstances and upon his preferences. This is how trade happens and how trade can be beneficial to both parties even though there is only one price. Yes. However, it's not applicable to an economy because it only works in static equilibrium models, and an economy is neither static nor in equilibrium. An economy is not a snapshot taken in time but an ongoing process. The Walrasian equilibrium assumes that the quantities (or values) of goods, their prices, and the values and utility of their owners remain static but this is not the case in an economy.

What arrogance? You declared that your interpretation, and your interpretation alone, was "the fact of the matter", and that any disagreement with you was "splitting hairs." Given that I think my summation was entirely justified.

Only John mentions the whip, not the other gospels. Matthew tells a different story, as do Mark and Luke. As a witness, John is disputed and outnumbered. Furthermore, even when John mentions the whip, Christ is never described as having used it on a human, or even to actually strike an animal, merely that he used it to drive them out of the temple. Animals broken to the whip aren't so stupid that when you wave one around in front of them they hang around. Nor could the merchants have been particularly intimidated by his actions, because many of them hung around and talked to him later on. Passive resistance is not restricted to polite requests. Christ, like Gandhi and others, taught passive resistance, which can include civil disobedience, creating a disturbance and generally making a nuisance of oneself, and Jesus certainly caused plenty of disruption and disturbances in his lifetime, habitually and intensely annoying the establishment. Pacifism means that, in the event of institutionalised wrongdoing, one shall fight the institution and not the people in it, and so Christ attacked the property of the merchants, not the merchants themselves. One could also say that, since the merchants had put that property in Christ's house and then proceeded to break the rules that had been set out for that house, they had de facto relinquished their right to that property and therefore, Christ was not attacking their property at all since it had ceased to be rightfully theirs when they brought it into the temple and started hawking it. As to "splitting hairs", it's plain to see that you see in the Bible what you want to, so any attempt at debate and clarification is likely to be ill-received. So be it.

So you assume, but you have no proof that this would be so. In any case, the height of hypocrisy would be to call oneself Christian while violating the teachings of Christ. Christ said, "My house will be called a house of prayer for all the nations." The money-changers were trespassing in His temple and desecrating it. They were aggressing against Him, so He threw them all out. Absolutely. Chapter 6 of Matthew says as much.

That's not what he said. He said the "regressive and fundamentalist brand" of Christianity is a problem. I fully agree, and I would call myself a fundamentalist Christian. "Fundamentalist" is a very mis-used term. The most fundamental point of Christianity - the point that Christ said was the most important - is not to aggress, to love your neighbour, to do no harm. Therefore, anyone who claims to be Christian and proposes using violence and coercion to punish people for their lifestyles, sexual preferences or habits, or to expropriate their belongings, or waging "just war", is being fundamentally anti-Christian. These are the people to whom Christ promised that, on judgement day, he would say, "Get away from me! I never knew you."

We can play this game all day. OBL's primary beef with America is that America has always backed Israel. Al-Queda and, at one time or another, every Arab state has been or is at war with Israel. OBL's attack on America was, as he perceives it, an attack on the ally of his enemy. Yes, he killed 3,000 civilians. The Allies killed many times more fire-bombing Dresden and Hamburg. The moral of that story is that there is no moral and just way to conduct a war. People are going to suffer and die, and at least some of them won't deserve to. OBL intented to kill civilians, and that's wrong. But any war is waged with the understanding that innocents will die no matter how hard you try to avoid it - how does that stack up as a moral issue?