Hugo

Blackdog, I'd just like to talk on this point briefly. This would seem to support the idea of smaller or minimal government. The problem is that government never stays that way. A State, by definition, holds a monopoly over law and justice, and these things are what curbs State power. Basically, the checks and balances on State power are all in the hands of the State (barring violent revolution). As we've seen in the USA, minarchist States don't stay that way. Jefferson warned that it was the nature of things for government to grow and liberty to shrink, and in the USA we had a government conceived with the idea of a very limited role (initially consuming only about 2% of GDP and responsible for minimal services such as courts and defence). Over time, despite the very favourable conditions in the USA such as a natural isolation from other belligerent states, a wealth of natural resources and a population at least initially committed to liberty and sick of the oppressive regimes that they fled, this minimal government ballooned to a bloated great monster which currently regulates and polices every aspect of American life, consumes over a third of the economy and has become the most warlike, imperialist and militarist State currently in existence. The justice system, which supposedly checks and balances State power, has allowed continual massive and flagrant violations of the original Constitution and the ideals of the Founding Fathers. This might be seen as something like Galbraith's "blocs of power" theory, in which various powerful institutions are balanced by each other, e.g. big labour counterbalances big business. Galbraith's failing here is that he does not anticipate that big labour and big business could just collaborate to rip off the consumer, just as the Founding Fathers did not anticipate that the executive, legislative and judiciary would stop balancing each other and just gang up on the citizen. If the experiment in minimal government could fail so dramatically in such favourable circumstances, I believe there isn't a chance it could ever succeed anywhere. To create a minimal State is to accept that within a few generations, you will return to Leviathan. The checks placed on State power are placed there by the State, and will last exactly until the State decides it needs more power for whatever reason, at which point they will be quickly demolished (see Lincoln, T. Roosevelt, Wilson, F. Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon... heck, virtually every president since 1890 and a few before). It's significant that all gains in State power are made "temporarily" but somehow manage to never go away.

But authority comes in many forms. Priests are authority, as are teachers, private arbitrators, credit agencies, professional associations, labour unions, etc. You assume that we need government to have authority. You need to prove that first. This is a marvellous self-contradiction. You imply that humans are too greedy, selfish and evil to be trusted to run a society without government. However, you then contend that it is right that we create a government with coercive powers which will be picked by and consist of humans, who are greedy, selfish and evil. You fear that in anarchy, some people will exert coercive power over others, so you propose to create an institution to exert coercive power over others in order to prevent this from happening. If what you say about human nature is true, then a society with government would be far, far worse than one without. Of course any social system works better if people are more virtuous. The difference between you and me is that for your system to work, people must be saintly. I make no such assumption. Nothing. Why do you have a right to a nationality? It's an abstract thing that depends upon both other people and pre-existing social and technological conditions. It makes as much sense to say you have a right to a nationality as to say you have a right to a plasma TV, a right to e-voting or a right to a flying car. I'd like you to explain this one, please. Being Canadian is to be born within Canada. But you define "Canada" as part of being Canadian. This is a circular argument. I could say that your willingness to accuse another person of lying and poor character before having the facts straight casts aspersions on your character.

I would say that rights are an innate part of being human. I think that Blackdog was trying to explain that thinking discovers rights but does not create them, the difference between discovered law and imposed law, and that which can conceive of having rights has rights. This is why he said "evidence of the existence of rights": thinking about rights reveals that they exist, rather than bringing them into existence. However, thinking that something exists does not make it exist. You can believe a large pink elephant exists five miles above Toronto. That doesn't place one there. Ah, so you are saying that the UN created all rights, and nobody had any rights before the UN? So the Holocaust was not a crime at all, because it was pre-UN, but the atrocities in the Sudan are crimes, because they are post-UN? My grandfather, not my father. British conscription began in 1938 under the National Service (Armed Forces) Act. My grandfather was drafted under this legislation and sent to France as part of the BEF, and was evacuated in Operation Dynamo in the first days of June 1940. Any other WWII history you're confused about? What definition of anarchy? The "anarchy = chaos" definition, which was deliberately created by French, German, Russian and British government propagandists in the 19th Century to try and discredit the increasingly influential anarchist movement? Do you know this was why Tolstoy never identified himself as an anarchist, because the Tsarist establishment had successfully associated anarchism with terrorism and random violence, although Tolstoy himself was both an anarchist and a pacifist? Anarchy is not lawlessness. Law comes from liberty, not vice versa, and anarchy is liberty. Right now we have governments that break all of their own laws. They steal and call it taxation. They enslave and call it jury duty. They counterfeit and call it inflation. They defraud and call it politics. They kidnap and call it arrest. They spy and call it wiretapping. They break and enter and call it a search warrant. They murder and call it war. They presume you innocent until accused, make themselves judges in their own cases, and disregard their own laws so long as it is them that break them. What's lawless, exactly?

But every other Canadian citizen also can make the same claim. If Canada is all their country, how is it owned? Does each person own a one-thirty-millionth part of everything in the country? Does that mean I own a one-thirty-millionth part of you? It's a good thing that pieces of paper can give things to people, because I have a sheet of paper here that just gave me all your property. Come on, hand it over. Do you have a right to ask me to leave? Does anyone else, for that matter? A country, a land and a state are not the same thing. A state is an institution that exerts a monopoly of law and enforcement over a certain geographical area. Land is a geographically defined amount of soil, rock, mountains etc. A country is an abstract concept that does not exist in the physical world, attempts to define which insist on the aggregation of nonaggregate things. I don't know what crimes you've committed. And as I've said above, "Canada" hasn't committed any deeds of any kind because it isn't an acting agent. I'm ignoring the rest of your post because it is repetition of your earlier points, and if you want a response you can use the scrollbar in your browser to see what I said when you first posited them.

I wouldn't use deadly force to protect my family, friends and property because I'm a pacifist, however, I recognise the right of others to use deadly force to defend themselves if it were necessary. Where have you explained them clearly? All you have done is to repeat them mindlessly. You have provided absolutely no definition of "honour", "country", or "duty" anywhere in this thread despite being repeatedly asked to do so. How do you define "war", first of all? You cannot prove that it's a lie. I can't prove it's true, either. The difficulty of this message board is that personal information and personal anecdotal evidence is unverifiable. This is why I hesitate to give you any further information about me. All you have here is your logic and what objective evidence you can muster. My grandfather was an example I used of a well-known and well-documented - by your own admission, no less - phenomenon. Your whining about my grandfather seemingly serves to disguise the fact that you have no answer to the actual question: how does destroying men's souls with PTSD and shell-shock make them better people? Never. It is forbidden for anyone of my particular religious faith to knowingly lie and I take my faith seriously. I don't recall you claiming you didn't have a right to kill people either. So what would you do if your superior officer told you to kill someone? You're just making stuff up now. Here's your original quote on June 17th at 2:15 pm: You said that you contended that soldiers were better than 'most ordinary people', but what you actually said was that soldiers were better, period, which means the group they are better than must be non-soldiers, i.e. civilians. Because there's a song about it, it must be real? I'm sure you'd tell me that John Lennon's "Imagine" is an impossible dream, but when it comes to the Canadian national anthem, it's somehow compelling evidence?

This is indeed personal wealth. These assets are held in his name. When he dies, whoever succeeds him will probably be able to seize his assets, just as when any dictatorship changes hands. But this is just the way things are done in Cuba. The ruler can seize whatever he wants, no matter who it belongs to. Why, because he machineguns them? Because he puts them in jail for decades and tortures them for criticizing him? I think Castro cares about Castro and does whatever he thinks will best persuade the Cuban people not to rise up and shrug him off.

The problem is that you may have to put your life on the line to defend the interests of someone else. States create wars, and the big lie they tell is that they are defending their citizens, when in fact it is the other way around: they are asking or compelling their citizens to defend the State. If we say that Germany has declared war on France, this doesn't mean that all Germans have decided that they hate all Frenchmen and must attack them immediately. This means that the German government has decided that it will attack the French government and will muster armies to do so. Since each government regards citizens and property within their borders as chattel, it also follows that each government will attack citizens and property who are identified with the opposing government. Without governments, there are no armies and no wars. The only rights violations committed are by private citizens, and as I have demonstrated, a private citizen has a far, far lesser capacity to inflict harm than a State Not me. If the Hunnic government attacks my government, I rightly recognise that it is none of my business. Indeed, this used to be the pattern of warfare until a few centuries ago. It used to be considered a spectator sport: the citizenry would gather on the town walls to watch the armies of noblemen duke it out in the fields. Of course, if an individual Hun attacks me, personally, then I will defend myself, personally.

I'm not going to cross these threads over. The old one is still open and if you want to put the gloves on again, I'll be happy to continue the discussion. I simply gave a summary for those who wouldn't have time to read the thread in full, and according to the one independent observer here who took the time to read the thread (i.e. Blackdog), my summary is accurate. This is completely backwards and wrongheaded. Capitalism proper (as opposed to the various forms of socialism and neomercantilism that, these days, have assumed that name) depends upon the complete fulfillment of personal and property rights, or at least complete fulfillment as a goal, rejects all coercion, fraud and the initiation of violence, and holds that the only human interaction that is moral or just is that which occurs with the consent of all parties. If you believe that this is subjugation and rights-violation, I'd like to hear exactly what rights are being violated. Now, this is just a lie, because I distinctly remember saying that slavery is inherently wrong, and moreover, the wrongness of slavery therefore means that taxation is also wrong, because taxation amounts to the expropriation of labour or fruits thereof. Simply put, we no longer have Southern planters as slaveowners, but men in Ottawa, Washington DC, London etc.

By far the most hilarious thing was to watch Thelonius first tell me that he feared anarchy because it would lead to the Hobbesian war of all against all, and then tell me that the only correct social system for humanity was the war of all against all, and any other system would be founded on erroneous and delusional ideas of morality. In other words, he told me that his own ideas were based on nonsense. This is getting back to the human/animal rights argument. Thelonius contends, or seems to contend (despite his argument that rights are an illusion), that animals and plants should enjoy equal rights with humans. My contention is that the existence of humans depends upon the subjugation of animals and plants. Therefore, if humans are to have rights, then animals and plants must therefore not have rights. If they are to have rights, then that means that humans are not able to exploit them and so will die, therefore, humans have no rights. Faced with the inescapable choice of awarding rights to either humans or animals and plants, I must always pick the philosophizing, developing, moralizing, technological humans. The desire to award equal rights to both is, sadly, just wishful thinking.

Even a cursory glance through history will show you that governments are by far the greatest violators of rights and freedoms. For an example, the peak murder rate in the USA was 10/100,000. This was considered very, very high. If we assume that the average murder rate in the world in the 20th Century was about 1/100,000, that means that, given an average world population of 3 billion in the 20th Century, about 3 million people were murdered. R. J. Rummel estimates that, besides war, governments were responsible for about 150 million murders (executions, man-made famines etc). Therefore, in the last century, governments have been about 50 times as murderous as private citizens. The argument that governments protect rights and freedoms is pure and undiluted horsecrap. Actually, the beginnings of all states and nations began with conquest. Read up on Rothbard, Oppenheimer, and others who have studied this question for many years and found that the nation-state is invariably created when one group of people conquers and enslaves another. The myth that governments are created by social contract is not borne out by a single State currently existing or in the entirety of human history. No, they are not. They are there because they are an innate part of being human, violable but inalienable. "Improvement" and "better quality" are completely subjective terms that can only be fulfilled by individuals according to their own perceptions. Your argument makes it seem that rights and freedoms are a means to an end. They are not. They are the end. What collective? What are their names? Where do they live? Who is "society"? Who comprises "the nation"? All these things are abstract concepts that don't actually exist. "Society" is not monolithic, has no purpose, no goals, no desires, takes no actions, etc. It does not exist. Yes, and the Canadian government is acting on what is best (supposedly) for the few people who comprise a technical majority (right now, 23% of the electorate). The difference between the Nazis and us is that the group of people that the Canadian government serves is somewhat larger than the group that the Nazis served.

Who said it was your country? Do you own it? What right do you have to kill for it? What is a country anyway? It's not a homogenous entity. It has no unity of purpose. It isn't physically identifiable. It's just an illusion that people such as yourself use as an excuse for all sorts of nefarious deeds. So what the government says is just, is just? Then the Holocaust was just dandy with you, I expect, since the "legitimate" German government said that it was moral and just to murder the Jews, the Roma, blacks, homosexuals, the physically and mentally handicapped, etc. And before you start prevaricating on the legitimacy of the Nazi government, let's just say that the (fully constitutional) Nazi rise to power and subsequent rigging of elections was really no different in principle to all the Liberal shenanigans in Canada, or Bill Clinton's illegal campaign contributions, etc. Basically, if the Nazi government was illegitimate, then so is the Canadian government, and the American government, and indeed every government in the world. I never asked you what you did. All the personal information here was volunteered by you, and frankly, I don't care. I've had the same arguments with both military personnel and with armchair warhawks in the past. Your arguments will stand or fall on their own merit and your personal background makes absolutely no difference to me. Unlike you, I don't generally make the mistake of judging people as members of a group rather than as the individuals that they are. Nor would I stoop to an ad hominem fallacy. Yes that is what i'm saying... Then I have difficulty understanding your objection to Nazism. It seems to me that your assessment of a tyrannical nature is entirely dependent upon your personal prejudices. E.g. it's evil for the Nazis to impose a unified agenda of building a great Reich, but it's good for the Canadian government to impose a unified agenda of socialized medicine. It is right and just to fight for the latter, but evil to fight for the former. Basically, you want government to do what you want and you don't reject force if it is necessary. In principle, you're no different from Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Kim Jong Il, Mao Zedong, etc. These words are empty. You can't even explain the meaning of them to me. You just keep repeating them. If you want to live by an empty slogan, fine, but when you start claiming the right to kill people based on it then I must object in the strongest possible terms. I don't believe I did so. I pointed out the greater tendency for soldiers to do these things and asked how it affected your contention that soldiers are better people than civilians. So far, I've received no answer. You don't have to believe my story about my grandfather. If you want I can find you a ton of objective and independent evidence on the existence of PTSD and shell-shock. That's the point I'm making. You're trying to make this argument about my grandfather when it isn't. I'm just using his example. Why, thank you. High praise indeed.

I am getting really tired of this. I'm not going to answer any further questions on this topic as long as you refuse to extend the same courtesy to me. In debate, both parties ask questions and are equally entitled to have them answered. If you are just going to question me, this stops being a debate and turns into a mentor-student session. Answer this question: What is the difference between Country A and Country B? No more excuses, insults, and distractions. I don't know. Could I convince an "intellectual giant" that sentences generally only end with one period? Apart from that, this is an ad populum fallacy. Because a theory is not fashionable or widely accepted does not mean it is wrong. All political tools involve violence, but violence is the cessation of the observation of rules. What you know as "war" is when the rulers of a State feel their interests are threatened by another State, inbetweentimes, they simply wage war against their own citizens. Violence knows no rules. It is the imposition of the will of the strong on the weak. The only rules that apply are the ones that the strong choose to apply to themselves, which are no rules at all since their conduct is governed by the principle of "I do what I feel like." Hence Dresden, Hamburg, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, My Lai, Fallujah etc. Even those countries who ostensibly fight by the Geneva Convention continually prove my point that "rules of war" are followed strictly optionally. No. Review the thread I linked to. It's all been explained before. The latter.

Getting back to the original question, which you still haven't answered: What is the difference between Country A and Country B under the conditions I stated? Your only answer has been to suggest that I need more education. Well, let's assume I'm very ignorant of the whole thing. Why don't you explain it to me? Or alternately, let's not keep making the same mistakes over and over again. I already told you why. They want US troops to leave their homeland and stop exerting an influence on their government and way of life. I'm asking you. Why did you make a point you can't defend? If you seriously can't think of a satisfactory answer does that not suggest something about the viability of the original point? What business is it of yours? My answers will neither negate nor augment my arguments. Are you saying that these 30 million need to have a unified agenda forced on them by an all-powerful government? That's really the alternative, isn't it? But your words remain just a mindless repetition of your original contention. Why don't you answer Blackdog's point? Government does not grant freedoms, it can only take them away! I'll tell you what I haven't done: killed any of them. I'll read it if you post it. Again, I'm waiting. But this just sounds like an excuse for you not to produce any evidence. And evidence versus no evidence is no contest.

It does not suit you to be so condescending when you can't defend your own ideas. An intellectual giant, you are not. You don't understand it. There's a long thread on the subject here, please do me the service of actually hearing my arguments before presuming that you know them. Oh? Then which of you and Chimera is going to bow out of this debate, then? War is the cessation of rules. It's the exertion of force. Rules are concocted to provide solutions to the problems of social interaction without the resort to force. The resort to force is the default and is lawless. I believe, firstly, that it's a silly idea to try and force those committed to violence to abstain from certain types of violence. You're proving that point in this very thread, and all I'm doing is trying to persuade you. I also believe that it's a silly idea to try and apply laws to that which is lawless whilst still under the illusion that you are preserving the essential nature of the lawless thing. Unless you believe it is the right of another individual to aggress against my person or property, it would not be a violation of his rights for me to use force to prevent that aggression. This just highlights the problem of government. It is really just an imposition and a coercive monopoly on violence held over the population in general. There's no good solution for how to apply government because opting out is not possible.

You stated that I knew nothing about death camps. I told you that I did. You basically said, "Whatever, it means nothing anyway." If it meant nothing why did you bring it up? If it was so important to you, I think you owe me an apology for your false accusation. What about no government? Because every nation is governed by a ruling elite that needs to defend its own interests. Yes, but none of those things involve killing people! This does not answer my point at all. It's just noise. More noise. I am willing to defend what's mine. I'd defend my property, and my family and my friends if they asked me to. I don't believe I have a rightful claim to anything else, so I don't see how I would even be able to defend it unless I wanted to and the owner consented. If I'm to defend Blackdog, for instance, since I don't own him I submit that we must both consent to the defence. Otherwise, either I'm rendering a 'service' he doesn't want, or he's forcing me to render a service I don't want to perform. Right?

If the USA had not backed Saddam he wouldn't be a problem. If the British hadn't carved the Middle East up into a Royal mess (pun intended) there wouldn't even be an Iraq. If the USA didn't insist on putting troops all over the place Al-Queda wouldn't be bombing anyone. The "they hate our way of life" argument is just crap. If they hate secular capitalism so much, why don't they bomb Hong Kong, Singapore, or Taiwan? If they hate democracy, why don't they bomb Sweden or Switzerland? If they hate Christians, why aren't they bombing the Vatican? No, I'm really not. You just keep refusing to answer the question. If you say that soldiers are better people than civilians because they give out candy as well as kill people, I say, non sequitur! Like firemen, mountain rescue teams, or just ordinary people who do extraordinary things? What is special about a soldier? What is "our country"? I'll tell you: a big lie concocted by a ruling elite to try and convince 30 million very diverse individuals that they could ever possibly form a homogenous group. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but you are still not answering the question. You just keep repeating the same pap over and over again. Then I expect you have hard evidence that things are very different now. I'll wait.

Alright, so if you aren't willing to show respect for your enemies, what right do you have to insist that Blackdog and I show respect for ours? No. It's called the ad hominem fallacy. It's fraudulent because it ascribes things to me that I never said. In short, it's a personal attack (fallacy) made on a fraudulent basis. Just like if I had said, "You're just stupid because you're a Communist." Firstly, "you're stupid" isn't a valid rhetorical gambit. Secondly, it's not even been proven that you're a Communist. They are not needed. They perpetuate the system you allege they would like to see abolished. There can't be a "war to end war". I'll quote Judge Judy: if it doesn't make sense, it probably isn't true. Violence to end violence does not make sense. Whatever, but hey, it's easier than actually putting up a rebuttal, right?

On your points on the political parties, I will read more in-depth later but for now I will say this: In a State, good law is a public goods problem. David Friedman identified that where a coercice State exists, it is in people's best interests to vote for laws that reward them at the expense of other people. It is not in their interests to vote for equitable laws that treat all people equally. Without a coercive State, however, the situation is reversed. Anybody wanting to create a coervice State has to accept that his creation will be turned on him, therefore, it's not in his interests to help create one. However, keeping the State abolished is in his interests. What you describe is basically the public goods problem of democracy and the illustration of Friedman's point above.

Austrian economists generally describe Milton Friedman as leftist. The Cato Institute hasn't been the same since Murray Rothbard died. Try the Mises Institute, another libertarian organization that is staunchly opposed to this social security reform (of course, they aren't in favour of the existing system either). The Mises Institute is headed by Lew Rockwell, a radical libertarian in the Rothbardian mould and thus not plagued by the inconsistencies and self-contradictions of halfway-house classical liberals such as Ayn Rand or the Cato people (and, ironically, Ludwig von Mises himself). Yes, there is. Government obtains money through coercion and awards it to various businesses. It identifies strongly with the mercantilist ideas of economic operation in the national interest and strongly against the idea of the free market, in which trades should never be coerced. Every contract the government makes is coerced. That's me. Yes, and quite low by the standards of the USSR, too. Well done! Of course, it's a very ugly picture when put next to the USA of 1790, when federal expenditures were more like 2%. Of course, if you compare Bush to Stalin, he doesn't look that socialist. Compare him to Andrew Jackson, however, and he's left of Jack Layton. Well, as described by Marx, socialism is the state between capitalism and communism. The USA began with a classical liberal government spending about 2% of GDP and, since then, has ramped up spending and interventionism to about 35% at a steady rate, and still climbing. In the Marxist definition, the USA is now definitely in the intermediate socialist stage, and heading for communism. Ownership is the right to control. The US government has pretensions to the right to control a large part, if not most or even all, of the means of production on US soil by setting controls, laws, rules, tarriffs, etc. They can dissolve businesses and industries, reward others, persecute certain businesspeople, and more. Therefore, the US government de facto owns the means of production at least in large part. At best, one could say that the US government is part-owner of the means of production along with the ostensible business owners. The owners get to decide what to do with the permission of Uncle Sam, which makes the government a non-shareholding but decidedly non-silent partner of every business in America. This is especially true when the Constitution and law evidently do not set any kind of limit on the economic intervention that the State may take. Legally, they are entitled to seize the means of production, so what we have now can also be seen as a system whereby the American government merely leases out the means of production to private individuals for as long as it suits them to do so. No. The difference is that consumers must place a stake in the process to affect the outcome. Voters don't have to. Democracy can be viewed as a vast market failure because the price of entry to the market has been lowered to 0 and, effectively, the cost of individual failure reduced to 0. Voting is the biggest public goods problem of all.

The Barbary corsair campaign is not analogous. Firstly, the Barbary "pirates" weren't pirates at all but privateers operating under the mantle of the ruling states of the area. Jefferson's military solution became necessary because, unlike other governments like Britain, he failed to negotiate a treaty with the Barbary rulers. Basically, Jefferson mustered a navy and attacked the Barbary corsairs because he was not willing to recognise the right of the Barbary states to charge tribute for passage through their territorial waters. Put in this way, it looks more like imperialism than anything else, and perhaps Jefferson should have taken his own advice. Right. The trouble is that China is increasingly liberalising its economy, whereas the USA is steadily deliberalising. Soon enough, China going up will pass the USA going down, unless these trends reverse. However, as I pointed out, the Chinese leadership seems to be committed to a liberalising course, but both major American political parties have rejected liberalism. Any tarriff is, by definition, mercantilist. It is indicative of a mindset that free trade can be a bad thing and that there is a need for the State to manipulate foreign commerce for the good of the nation. If this mindset was not firmly entrenched in American government, there would be no tarriff, period. If you look at Great Britain during the 19th Century you will see a nation that had embraced free trade in a far more fundamental and effective way than the USA does today. It doesn't work. The embargo is probably the only thing keeping Castro in power right now, since it is his main excuse for the failure of socialism. Compare it to the example of China and Taiwan. The trade and openness of Taiwan to China has undoubtedly been a major influence in the liberalisation of China. Not really. There has been a veritable flurry of Bushite protectionist programs. There's the Vietnam catfish fiasco, the textile industry, the South Korean computer chips affair, drug reimportation, and so forth. Note that the protectionist measures in all these cases were all undertaken by the Bush administration. It was not that they were in place and he hasn't gotten around to dismantling them yet, no, it's that he actually created them. This is all wrong. Basically, the plan just moves a budget deficit around. State borrowing remains unaffected. Effectively, the government puts more money back into the free market with the left hand and borrows it all again with the right. The increased supply of loanable funds is exactly offset by the increased demands of the government for loans and government intervention in the economy is exactly unchanged. No, actually, a lot of people dispute this. Go to the Mises Institute and do a search on social security to find an awful lot of economists spending a lot of time exploding Bush's plan. But the plan doesn't work. Currently, social security funds subsidize other areas of government. Remove that subsidy and the government has to borrow more money from elsewhere, i.e. it exactly offsets the new loanable funds available. The only way to reduce government intervention is the old-fashioned way: cut government spending. But that isn't even on the table. No, what you've described is a private investment account like a mutual fund or savings account. That's not what this is.

Again, this doesn't address my point that any heroic and humane acts done by soldiers are, in my opinion, offset by the killing that they do. Civilian heroes don't kill people. In fact, I consider it better that one donates $10 to feeding Ethiopian children than if one donates $1,000 and then shoots a bunch of Arabs. I imagine you don't believe in the Nazi cause, but do you still feel obliged to show respect and deference for Nazis? If Heinrich Himmler or Josef Mengele walked in the room right now, would you be polite and respectful towards them? Would you defend them against anyone who called them 'monsters' or 'butchers?' Nice, fraudulent ad hominem fallacy there. Anyway, I don't love money. I do like the things that money buys, but what I love is liberty, because that makes the pursuit of anything a person loves possible, whether it's money, friendship, excitement, enlightenment, or whatever. As Blackdog has noted, however, soldiers are the agents of those who destroy liberty and thus destroy the chance for so many people to do and pursue what they love.

From the way you were shamelessly singing his praises and blathering on about him to the exception of anyone else (save Fidel Castro, who describes himself as a Marxist), yes, I assumed that.

Are you telling me that Canadian and US soldiers haven't killed a single person in the Middle East? All these Iraqi soldiers, insurgents, Taliban fighters etc. shot themselves? Is that the story here? The point is this: you say soldiers give out candy and that makes them better people than the average civilian. I say that the average civilian performs many acts of charity, most of them greater than giving out candy. However, the average civilian doesn't kill people. On balance, therefore, I judge soldiers to be worse human beings than civilians. Here's a link. Doesn't take long on Google to find a lot more. No, actually he was ordered to show up and put on a uniform, or go to prison as a traitor to his country. He hoped that he'd be sent to a non-combat unit. Of course, once he was in uniform, he was told he'd go to an infantry unit, and if you desert the penalty is death. So he felt that probably being killed by Germans was better than certainly being killed by his own government. You are still not answering the question. How is he a better person for being irreparably mentally scarred? I think that heroic people are heroic whether they're in the military or not. Think of firefighters, mountain rescue teams, etc. I don't see how taking heroic people and destroying their souls makes them "better people". It proves that, contrary to your previous accusations, I do actually know something about death camps. Are you going to apologise now, or just try and pretend it never happened? And yet you defend this system. It makes me think you have no problem with politicians picking fights and drafting young men to fight their battles for them. Again you fail to answer my point. What freedoms and rights do corpses have? How does killing people defend rights and freedoms? How does it not completely violate the right and freedom to live free from aggression? The "rules of war". How quaint. It takes a special kind of mind to take ritualized mass murder and apply rules to it, to decide what is honourable and what is not - as if there could be anything honourable about mass murder and human butchery. Not to mention that soldiers of all sides have a long and sordid history of not taking the Geneva Convention particularly seriously. Not just Abu Ghraib, not just Guantanamo Bay, the killings of unarmed men in mosques, but also the execution and torture of Viet-Cong prisoners, the destruction of civilian villages, the mass bombing of German, Korean, Vietnamese, Italian, and Japanese cities, and so forth. There's no honour amongst murderers. The Rape of Nanking wasn't particularly different from the a-bombing of Hiroshima. Auschwitz and Dresden are quite parallel. The difference is that at Auschwitz, the murderers were Nazi monsters, and at Dresden, the murderers were our Brave Boys in the Forces. Not to mention that the Geneva Convention effectively legitimizes murders and thus fails to protect the rights and freedoms of a very large number of "the enemy". Very silly, come to think of it, to decide an entire people is your enemy. The greatest evils in history came about because people judged others as members of a group, not as individuals. I have the right to judge anyone I feel like. You don't have to respect it, and I imagine you won't. However, I advise you that one morning in old age you're going to wake up and realise there's blood on your hands you can never wash off.

Ah, so you don't know what you're talking about. Otherwise you'd know the difference between anarcho-syndicalism and anarcho-capitalism. This is very amusing, since you accuse me of ignorance and stupidity, yet I have read all of your influences and you aren't even aware that mine exist. In fact, you haven't even read your own influences. This is impossible. Creating an ever-bigger state does not lead to the abolition of the state. It creates a ruling elite whose power becomes ever greater and whose interests become inescapably intertwined with the health and vitality of the big, oppressive state. As it grows, those who have the power to abolish it will become fundamentally opposed to its abolition. I've given the argument. Respond to it if you will, but don't pretend you're so smart when you can't even come up with a semblance of a rebuttal. That doesn't answer the question. I asked you what your interpretation was of Marx's views on Jews, not what your understanding of his family background was. OK, so you don't know anything about Marx's views on women either. So far you're 0 for 2, and the "ignorant" anarchist knows a lot more about Marx than the so-called Marxist. Socialism is the transitionary period between capitalism and communism. The US government controls a third of the US economy. This percentage has steadily grown since 1865. Therefore, the US is socialist, by Marxist logic, since Marx calls for the State to take control of more and more of the economy, both by taking control of business and by directing the economy with controls on prices, wages, labour and so forth. Again, you don't know what you're talking about. As I've demonstrated, Marxism makes anarchy impossible. I doubt it. You haven't even read Marx, and he's your hero. Read Murray Rothbard's Libertarian Manifesto before you start slinging insults against things you have absolutely no knowledge of. You really are a joke. This is a serious forum. Come back in a few years when you're out of the sandbox and have actually read a few books. Marxism might sound like a great idea in your high-school, but please, learn at least a little about it before you start shouting that you're a Communist. You just embarrass yourself.

Of course, any social system will be better if people are more moral and selfless. It goes without saying. However, libertarianism does not rely on any change in human nature to work. It works with humans just the way they are. The greed of humans can be relied upon to limit the greed of other humans - so long as some of them aren't given a monopoly on coercive force and violence (in other words, government). Your self-contradictions are showing. If it is human nature to be greedy, selfish and evil, why do you think it is a grand idea to award some humans massive and arbitrary power over others? Does the history of state-sanctioned murder and violence not show that government is perhaps more vulnerable to the entry of evil and violent people than any other institution? It worked in Iceland. It worked in Pennsylvania. It worked in Ireland and in England for many, many centuries and produced very vibrant and healthy societies. Communism and American minarchism both collapsed of their own contradictions after about 75 years. Libertarian Ireland survived for almost a millenium and was ended by British invasion. Anglo-Saxon libertarianism survived for several centuries and was ended by Norman invasion. Anarchist Iceland survived for several centuries and was ended by Norwegian invasion. Holy Experiment Pennsylvania survived only for a few years and was ended by British invasion. See a pattern emerging here? No, it isn't. Your problem is that the inconsistency and self-contradictions in your own arguments are being thrown in your face, and you are embarrassed and humiliated by it. The libertarian theory cleaves militantly to pure principle. Yours depends upon arbitrary compromises. Logically, your position is indefensible - as you have found. It's also laughable that you call Communists foolish when large tracts of your argument are pure Karl Marx. No, yours takes two fundamentally different and opposed views of human nature according to what you are trying to argue. When discussing capitalism, humans are greedy, selfish, violent and evil. When discussing statism, lo and behold! humans are suddenly altruistic, selfless, pacifist and saintly. The reason you're discontinuing this argument is because you can't reconcile your beliefs with each other, and the reason why systems built on your beliefs don't work is because the beliefs themselves don't work.