"You can’t use logic on these people,” Geoff Keith told me over dinner at the Hilton, “or then they think you’re a dick.”Polylogism has fully taken over the campus.
Politics is a game, a joke, a hustle, a con, a distraction, a spectacle, a sport, and for many devout Americans, a religion.Rutherford for president! Shut down the e pluribus fool'em
In other words, it’s a sophisticated ruse aimed at keeping us divided and fighting over two parties whose priorities are exactly the same. It’s no secret that both parties support endless war, engage in out-of-control spending, ignore the citizenry’s basic rights, have no respect for the rule of law, are bought and paid for by Big Business, care most about their own power, and have a long record of expanding government and shrinking liberty.
In effect, when solar energy made no economic sense, companies received subsidies, now that solar makes sense, many governments want nothing to do with it.
So it looks like we are going to get net neutrality.
This should be opposed for the same reason all other price controls are, namely because they are not capable of accomplishing their stated objectives (stimulating supply or demand for products of a given quality).
The notion that all packets should not be interfered with by those who own the private property that said packets travel about on is a price control; namely it is a price floor. Not filtering anything (and ergo maximizing the traffic on your infrastructure) implies a higher cost of doing business with said infrastructure than can be achieved with filtering, tiered pricing, etc. This in turn creates a minimum price for all firms on the market, namely how cheaply can I lay cable or make a wireless network.
Guess who has the easiest time doing that? Large firms that get volume discounts, and can cajole local authorities into coercing easements on people’s property, be it through brand clout or straight up bribes. So it’s fundamentally going to do what price floors always do — enlarge monopolies, impede small business and create a shortage of consumers (the people who would have bought the lower priced service which they are now prohibited from doing).
Price floors always create shortages of consumers, while price ceilings create shortages of producers. This is a law of economics that has been known for hundreds of years.
In summary, if you prefer to lock the poor out of a market completely rather than allowing them to get some utility out of an inferior good, impose a price floor. The effects of the minimum wage upon structural unemployment (it increases it) is the classical example of this phenomenon.
If you want a good to never be produced above the quality threshold implied by the price ceiling (and ergo deny those who can afford it a higher standard of living), then impose a price ceiling. In extreme cases, when the ceiling is lower than the cost of the factors of production for even the shoddiest quality of some good, shortages occur and famines result.
All law is fundamentally price controls. Consider that every time you are advocating one policy or another — It is socially desirable to have a shortage of murders, so I advocate making it’s cost prohibitively high (a price floor). This is imposed implicitly by our courts system's overhead and so forth. Similarly, society wants a shortage of hit-men, so a price ceiling of $0 is imposed (outlawed).
Do I want a shortage of internet service providers, or conversely to limit access to the internet for our poor brothers? no. So, I don’t advocate regulation on the internet. Stimulation of supply via force always encourages lower demand, which defeats the purpose of higher output. Stimulation of demand via force always encourages lower supply, which defeats the purpose of higher demand. As such, these controls make sense only in cases where both demanding and supplying a good or service is considered universally undesirable.
That’s the classically liberal perspective — lassiez faire, lassiez passer.
For the moral perspective, it’s a clear violation of “Love thy neighbor as you love thyself”. It is not loving behavior to interfere in the behavior of two individuals/organizations that are interacting at arms-length (a contract), and harming no third party with their actions. Interference is only moral if coercion is involved — one of the parties does not consent to the deal, or a third party is harmed.
Nobody is explicitly harmed by traffic prioritization supposing this is laid out in the contract as the nature of the agreement, which is is in most ISP service contracts. Regrettably, few actually read said contracts, much less anything at all. So they naturally become upset when they realize the marketing material they read that convinced them to purchase was not a full disclosure, like the contract is. While that is indeed a shortcoming of the firm in serving their customers adequately, it is not a legal harm, as the customer had every opportunity to understand the nature of the relationship, had they read the contract.
So these customers get upset and rail against these companies, and advocate government force to change the relationship into what they believe the relationship should be. Basically, shoving guns into business owners' faces to cover for their customers inadequacies (insufficient care/reading comprehension). Much of government action is this at work — violence to cover up more mundane sins. This underlines the old adage that "The government breaks your legs and then hands you crutches".
It is a pity they are not more bold as sinners. Simply mugging people would more quickly remove from society those who wish to maintain or improve their standard of living through violence.
So who's next on the chopping block? My guess is the shared hosting industry. The same logic used to justify "net neutrality" can be used to mandate equal shares of resources on shared hosts, which would annihilate the profit margins of many of our largest customers. Shared hosting relies on under-delivering and over-delivering to customers based on traffic; if a specific amount of traffic is mandated, you may as well head over to any dedicated server firm with your website.
This does result in the occasional case of overloaded servers and site downtimes; but let's face it -- these bargain basement programs offered by various shared hosting firms aren't exactly advertising themselves as top-quality products either.
As a marginal firm, I would prefer to have a low quality vendor that works 80% of the time rather than one I can't afford which results in no online presence whatsoever.
This is why $1/month hosting exists. Cutting corners and making a shoddy product is often the only way to serve marginal consumers. As such, don't advocate for levelling -- pay more for quality products and live in peace with your less fortunate neighbors.
I guess the final injustice coming soon to my professional field is going to be licensure of techs and programmers, as the old guard will quickly be upset by downward wage pressure. This will be due to people flocking to the tech field in droves, as it's one of the few "freedom zones" left in professional America. Maybe the political class will throw in some hyperventilation about cyberattacks too.
Zerocoin is the best hope I've seen so far for getting true anonymity in a bitcoin-like digital cash. It accomplishes this with Zero Knowledge Proofs.
Zero Knowledge Proofs for the Layman is here.
Regrettably, it appears development on this project has more-or-less stalled. ShadowCoin claims to have cribbed a bit of the work, but I see no evidence of it being used to obscure transaction amounts, etc.
Zerocoin has one weakness, though. The issuer must be trusted. This works out if you are the one creating your private coins from previously public ones; however that is probably enough to get you put on the 'naughty list' in certain regulatory climes.
That said, I believe a Homomorphic Encryption Scheme could be used to overcome this difficulty. This sort of scheme allows for modifications to some block of ciphertext (say, a blockchain?) without actually having to know the contents. As such, you could have a blockchain that is fully obscured to it's users.
The only weakness there would be the original setup of the blockchain itself. This could be overcome by witnessed/notarized creation of the private key, and it's subsequent destruction (as it would not be needed to read/write new transactions).
Effectively the blockchain becomes a large binary blob that is written to via a homomorphic encryption scheme, and that can only be read by inference through a zero-knowledge proof scheme. And then only enough to know the amount of coins in your account has changed (did I come out from the $50 or $100 branch, as in the Ali-Baba example).
So the mathematics are finally ready to be put together to create Eris' golden apple. I pray somebody gets the time to put it together soon.
Tom Woods recently had a guest on his podcast who destroyed the last objection to Anarchy I had with this brilliant article from 1995. (Obviously I read this several years ago). It is ironic to think how old such an argument is now, considering his proposed solution to the problem of the arbitrariness of the law is much like a phrase I frequently used at the time; namely that "There is adequate remedy under the law". The common law definition of Crimes and Torts already covers 100% of all the stuff that "there oughtta be a law" for.
As such, everything else is just "I rule you" BS by some dedicated satanists, but mostly misguided do-gooders. It's trivially obvious to me as a mathematician; No proposition (law) can ever mean the same thing when it's axiomatic underpinning (assumptions) change. In the context of the Law, no two people have the same assumptions. With Friendly "Public Service" like this, you don't need enemies.
Which brings me to another influence that brought me to anarchy; it is this same differences in assumptions that lead to the infinite variance in ordinal preferences of market actors. When reading the first few chapters of Mises' Human Action (which I was amazed to find most people actually skip reading), the reason centralized planning (and ergo all the "I rule you" BS) fails became crystal clear. Much like Prof. Hasnas' notes in the podcast, a system of rigid rules -- cardinalizations of ordinal preferences (justice in his case, production in Mises') can only produce tyranny and privation. Nobody is comfortable laying in Procrustes' Iron Bed. Yet all too many are eager to stuff others into it.
The reason for all this, of course, is a legitimization myth (as the professor notes), which is currently the "Rule of Law", and it's resultant lemma of the "Nuremburg Defense" and other similar "Horizontal Enforecment" schemes. Speaking of such legitimization myths, leads me back to both the most profound book I recently read and the book that turned me on to liberty in the first place. Larken Rose's The Most Dangerous Superstition takes a core myth of the statists, and stakes it as effectively as the Professor kills the "Rule of Law". The collectivist argument of the 'greatest good for the greatest number' rests on the idea that some groups and individuals empowered thereby somehow transubstantiate and are allowed authority that is not granted to any single individual in said group. This argument basically falls on it's face without taking the axiom of synergy in groups (sum(parts) > sum(parts)) on faith.
Yet I realized that despite the stark clarity of Larken's message it was really the same thing that Bastiat tried to say in The Law. When one really asks "What is Justice" like Bastiat did, you realize that the collective notion of providing social justice can not be legitimate, nor can it produce society or justice. All it can do is exalt some at the expense of others, leading to shouts of "...but what about MY pillage???" until the situation degenerates into "everybody robs everyone", when true justice means "Nobody robs." Meanwhile, society collapses due to no rational expectation that deferred gratification will pay off. Every city is renamed Barter Town, because everyone was too busy playing Master Blaster to realize that they should have been trying to escape from thunderdome.
I think I'll leave with a passage from Professor Hasnas' The obviousness of Anarchy:
...if people were ever to seriously question whether government is really productive of order, popular support for government would almost instantly collapse.It certainly did for me, and it will for you too, if you seek the truth earnestly. One need but look around like the professor suggests. I will add one thing to his essay on "National Defense" -- Look Around. Washington's centralized army lost almost every battle whilst the militia pushed the British off of the colonies.
A great deal of hay will be made in certain American political circles due to this: Government workers during the shutdown will receive back pay when reinstated. Many will decry this as making the shutdown more of a farce than it already is, despite this being expected (this has happened before).
As an anarcho-capitalist, one would think I am repelled by this paid vacation the federal goonforce is getting, and can see no silver lining to such a cloud. While I am morally disgusted by the notion of paying a dime to these gangsters, I also know from my experience as a businessman that paying off incompetent or crooked employees is sometimes the best you can do. This has been referred to as the Peter Pinnacle.
So, in that spirit, I realize that paying these federal parasites to stay at home is actually an improvement on the situation; at least they aren't at large executing the various derangements of the market which they have been commissioned to perpetrate. Indeed, this can actually be seen as stimulative of consumption, as these furloughed workers now have less of an expectation that they will require extra savings; similarly, those industries oppressed by these rascals will now (temporarily) not have that 500lb gorilla squatting on them.
So in such a spirit, I have devised a mutually beneficial solution to this government shut-down. Pay each furloughed federal worker one million dollars upon the condition that they never work for the government again, and shutdown the "nonessential" departments they once staffed. This sort of bribe would be irresistible, and would be a bargain next to the economic damage they cause, the banker bailouts or one of Uncle Sam's ill-advised overseas adventures. It would also be a sort of scattering of the seeds of entrepreneurship on newly fertile ground.
Given such a large lump sum, the urge to invest it would be impossible to resist for most. Most would simply start private firms using the knowledge of the industries they once interfered in; after all, the demand for goods and services provided by many of the state's socialized industries would not simply vaporize. Those committed to being locusts would blow through their wad like lottery winners and come to understand the long term effects of profligacy on a deeply personal level. Both these things would be very beneficial activities for society.
However, even with such a measure, the overall course of the nation would not change. There is no bribe too great for those engaged in direct coercion, such as the military, police and other einsatzgruppen. Like any good blackmailer or extortionist, they realize that no amount of payment makes their leverage dissipate. For them, this train only lets off two places: the Janissary Barracks or Auschwitz. In the end, I think this is the most valuable part of Alex Jones' message: These police-staters should consider the fact that the means they use result in their deaths in the end. Such a system, instead of protecting them, kills them. We should expect nothing less of choosing violent ends incapable of producing their desired ends (the pursuit of happiness).
Yet another anarchist "controversy" came over the wire yesterday about limited liability and the corporation. Since I was doing some database maintenance at the time, I had time to scribble my 2 cents on the matter.
On limited liability: there's nothing morally wrong about doing business with a firm that explicitly limits the liability it can incur when doing business with you. Doesn't make it a good idea in all cases, but for the vast majority of goods and services it's not that big of a roll of the dice, and limitation of liability could allow for lower prices. Of course, the current system does not explicitly explain this to the customer, which is one of the big educational problems about economics that should be addressed.
This ignores the fact that when combined with an authoritarian hierarchy (yes, most companies are such) limited liability morphs into something resembling the Nuremberg defense.
Since Limited liability encourages the owners to be less careful with their agents, you start to get into trouble the larger you make the organization; as small errors then cascade into lethal ones. Couple that with the face-saving culture of hierarchies, and it becomes quite clear why so many preventable tragedies come out of such places.
This is just like how the western nations can always gather intel on impending attacks, but universally fails to act on the information; It is not a failure to acquire knowledge (like in socialism/communism), but an incapability of taking action due to natural bureaucratic paralysis.
The lefty-anarchists wanna work in their communes and watch their centrally planned rationing mechanisms fail, and the righty-anarchists want to slave away in a kafkaesque authoritarian hierarchy. I agree that you can knock yourself out if we truly become free of coercion, but that doesn't make either way a good idea.
In my opinion, the most effective limitation of liability is reality. Nobody really believes roofers when they offer lifetime warranties, after all. Similarly, don't expect contracts to stop lynch mobs after your limited liability product or service kills somebody. There is no free lunch, no easy way out. Making simplifying assumptions like limiting liability fail for the same reason that econometric models fail -- their foundational assumption is flawed.
So, what should the Austrian economist do? Follow the action axiom -- People act on the information at hand to achieve their desired objectives. This suggests that liability is limited only so long as it suits either party, which is really no limitation at all. As such, the wisest structure for a company wishing to minimize liability by my estimation is to forgo any pretense at limitations (it's just overhead, eh?) and operate like a loosely-affiliated terrorist cell. Being difficult to disrupt is the most effective way to limit liability. I believe the open source movement and the companies in it's orbit is a modern expression of this tendency.
Of course, that's not really what's at issue here, as nobody really reveals what they want out of a situation in such discussions. I suspect Wenzel is interested in what would be best at maximizing return on capital investment (implicitly betting that his field of endeavour will not incur liabilities greater than profits). Similarly, I suspect the C4SS guys just want to work in a structure that doesn't give them crippling anxiety like hierarchies do.
Like most anarchist controversies this one turns out to be as vacuous as most others -- it's really a matter of personal preference. This one basically comes down to how much risk you are willing to tolerate. In that way, I'd say Wenzel wins on an emotional level; "so what" is the correct response.
It has occurred to me that every democracy or republic is bound to eventually become dominated by their own intelligence apparatus or "Secret Police". This is usually after some sort of catalyzing event that introduces some kind of executive or bureaucratic apparatus (which in the USA happened with the constitution).
