Christian anarcho-capitalism

I need price protection

2008-11-24T16:56:00.001Z

I know that Barack Obama has promised to protect people from all of the price gouging that has gone on in recent years. People have been taking advantage of other people's serious needs and gouging them for lots of money by charging more. This is going on in my own office. The price of chips in the vending machines has risen from 40 cents to 50, the price of candy has gone up from 50 to 60 or 75, the price of sodas has gone up from 50 cents to 60 (honestly, who can manage all the dimes and nickels this entails; it is extraordinarily inconvenient to have prices that are not one-half of a dollar), and worst of all the price of energy drinks has gone up from $1.25 to $1.50. This was formerly the best place in the world to buy a refrigerated Mountain Dew Amp. It was a real steal.

This is completely unfair, and I hope our new President, who has promised to represent the interests of all Americans, will pass laws to protect me from this unconscionable price gouging.

Don't vote

2008-11-04T16:46:00.002Z

Democracy is not freedom. It is the exact opposite. It is the power to rule your neighbor. If your neighbor is subject to your vote (or to the people you vote in), then he is not free.

Isn't this obvious?

I call for an immediate abolition of the government, to be accomplished by giving every person the right to secede and form their own institutions for the protection of their liberties, as called for in the Declaration of Independence.

And what I am doing is immeasurably better for you than voting. When you vote, you are attacking the welfare of me and my family. Meanwhile, I am lovingly calling for you to be granted freedom and prosperity.

This system is wrong. I will not legitimize it in any way.

Love does no harm to a neighbor

2008-06-03T14:21:00.001Z

A small bit of truth from the media confusion regarding the FLDS:
Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville[, TX], ... began looking for ways to rein in his FLDS neighbors.

Representative Hilderbran from Kerrville is a tyrant, a busybody, a crook, and the moral equivalent of a Mafia thug.

The FLDS are NOT Hilderbran's neighbors. According to Google maps, Kerrville is nearly two hours from Eldorado. Why should a man in Kerrville have the authority to tell people in Eldorado how to live? This is a moral question we really should answer, with monstrous implications for the whole foundation of most people's thinking.

There's a line drawn across the middle of the Rio Grande river. We call it the border between Texas and Mexico. People living north of the line don't have the authority to tell people living south of the line how to live, and people living south of the line don't have the authority to tell people living north of the line how to live. If people cross the line with guns and try to force their will on others, we recognize they are criminals. The only way for people on opposite sides of the line to influence each other is by voluntary agreement. This can happen on a massive scale, in the form of treaties, and it can happen on an individual scale, in the form of small purchases, and it can happen on every scale in between.

Representative Hilderbran has no more authority to force his approval or disapproval of marriages on the FLDS than I do to go next door and tell my neighbor who his daughter can or can't marry. Marriages at age 14 and up with parental consent were deemed perfectly moral and acceptable by the gang of thugs in Austin calling itself the State of Texas prior to October 2005. They did not suddenly become immoral. Apparently the Austin Gang thinks these marriages were just fine as long as nice Baptist and Methodist people were letting their children get married at 15; it's only a problem when scroungy FLDS people move in and do it. Baptists and Methodists don't constitute near as much of a threat to the established order as do the radical FLDS.

There is no moral reason why there should be a line across the Rio Grande between Texas and Mexico, but no line drawn between Eldorado and Kerrville. People have the right to self-determination. If Texas and Mexico each have the right to self-determination and it must be mutually respected, then so does each component territory within the U.S. and within Mexico, so does each county within each U.S. State, so does each city, in fact, so does each household. Why should there be a line between Texas and Mexico? Surely it's not because the people to the south have dark skin and speak a different language, is it? Is that why it's okay to draw a line to keep those people out, but not okay for FLDS near Eldorado to draw a line to keep whites out? I don't think that's the motivation ... but what other consistent response can be offered?

We've invented the fiction that voting equals self-determination. Here the truth is exposed: voting in this case eliminates self-determination by giving a fake legitimacy to the crime of a man from Kerrville oppressing the FLDS. Self-determination is robbed from the FLDS. Their fate will now be determined by "neighborly" thugs like Hilderbran, offering us all "protection" if we will pay and acknowledge his authority, as he makes us an offer we literally can't refuse.

The cult here is not the FLDS. It's the religious belief that the gang in Austin is legitimate in exercising its authority and is beneficial as it does so. And that belief permeates almost all of society, within and without Texas. This is why Austin is so scared of groups like the FLDS: they offer something else to believe in and venerate, an alternative culture to the one mandated by our gang. They are competition, and the gang is trying to wipe them out.

Xenophobia in South Africa

2008-05-21T12:42:00.005Z

Wikipedia is a marvel. At any given moment, a Wikipedia article might contain good information, vandalism, lies, or mistakes. But by watching the process through which a Wikipedia article is built, you can usually obtain a spectacular overview of the different points of view on a subject. The neutral point of view policy is not always followed, but when it is it results in a marvelous source of unbiased information.

Today is not one of those days.

Bias is sitting on the front page of Wikipedia, in the form of a headline which reads "At least 22 people are killed as a wave of anti-foreign violence spreads across South Africa." The bias is subtle. You might miss it. Statistically speaking, you're likely to possess some of this same bias yourself, without even realizing it.

The bias is most evident in a link from within the headline. The word "anti-foreign" is linked to the article on "Xenophobia." Xenophobia, of course, is a fear of things foreign. And here's the bias: Anglo-saxonism!

What prompted the violence in South Africa? Why would anyone rise up and begin taking lives? Wikipedia's answer is deceptively simple, and biased: the South Africans are rioting because they have xenophobia. They just don't like foreigners. Those backward Africans!

It really isn't too hard to obtain a historical perspective which will shed a lot more light on this headline than simply "xenophobia." It doesn't take much reading to discover that White Europeans have been overrunning every piece of the globe, killing and subjugating other people, since at least the days of the Roman Empire. Britain in particular is one of the most bloodily guilty nations in history, if a nation can be held "guilty" rather than the murdering individuals themselves. At one time, the British Empire covered 22% of the globe. Long before a murderous anti-Semitic lunatic in Germany dreamed of dominating the globe, murderous lunatics in Britain had basically done it. For millenia Europeans have worshiped the lie of the "Pax Romana" and dreamed of being the special, anointed people who will bring it to pass again. Many of them have been only too happy to use the same methods as Rome: bloodthirsty conquest.

(Please don't think when I say "Europeans" I'm tarring all Europeans with the same brush. I simply mean that, historically speaking, many Europeans have been ruled by murderers bent on conquest. During that time, the vast majority of people have simply been trying to live their own lives and not get killed. The common man does not profit from conquest; it is only the politically powerful who reap the benefits of war. When I say "Europeans," I mean "some Europeans," not "all Europeans." Furthermore, I'm not suggesting that only Europeans are guilty; the Pax Romana delusion and disease have certainly spread to many other nationalities. It's just that in this context, the fact that Europeans have done it is significant.)

Those foolish Africans, rising up against foreigners. Don't they understand that the foreigners are there to benefit them? Don't they understand the civilization, culture, and prosperity the foreigners bring? These questions might sound silly today, but one hundred years ago, to an Anglo-Saxon ear, they most certainly did not. The "white man's burden" meant that white Anglo-Saxons, including Europeans and Americans just happened to be the best and the brightest. After all, Anglo-Saxons ruled over 22% of the globe. And the Anglo-Saxons brought the blessings of civilization to all the backwaters of the world, where filthy, stupid dark people lived. In other words, Anglo-Saxons suffered from a Messiah complex. Unfortunately, unlike my Messiah, the Anglo-Saxons were willing to inaugurate their reign with bloodshed.

Why should South Africans have anti-foreign sentiment? Are they just irrational xenophobes? Really, that's a despicable thing to say. Like hundreds of other localities, South Africa was dominated by British rule. Those of us who live in America (whence the majority of English-speaking Wikipedians hail) don't often understand it, but people in other countries often have long, long memories. The past is not always just forgiven and forgotten. There are regions where 100% of the residents have been touched by the death and violence of conquest in the last few generations. What does it feel like to know that your father, grandfather, and three of their brothers were all killed when the Europeans were dominating? What does it feel like to have helped raise your own orphaned siblings after lethal injustice? I don't know how these things feel, but many people in formerly dominated countries do.

Thankfully today the British and most Europeans are enlightened. In the 20th century, imperialism mysteriously slowed down, although it did not entirely come to an end. Many dominated countries obtained their independence, sometimes through resistance, sometimes just through the apparent benevolence of their subjugators. The imperialistic Europeans have backed off. But mysteriously, sometimes the maimed and wounded survivors are still not happy. Sometimes we see anti-foreign sentiment. It's completely unjustified and irrational, of course; everyone knows we're more enlightened today than we were back when we were imperialistic. You know, half a century ago, when your father was a child?

I think it's somewhat telling that Wikipedia doesn't even include an article on Anglo-Saxonism. Bias, indeed. Not an overt bias, not a bias most of the readers are aware. But a bias of omission.

Does Anglo-Saxonism still exist today? Surely we see how racist the "White Man's Burden" idea was, don't we? Hmm ... "If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see farther into the future." -- U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, defending the use of cruise missiles against Iraq, February 1998. Hmm.

For more about imperialism and its legacy, I heartily recommend the following books. They are all part of a series called the Uncle Eric Books. You can Google for these books and find them easily. I've also seen them for sale at every single homeschool book fair I have ever been to. The author's name is Richard Maybury. The books I suggest on this subject are:

Whatever Happened to Justice? [Doesn't concern imperialism directly, but this establishes the base perspective for the other books.]
Ancient Rome: How it Affects You Today
The Thousand Year War in the Mideast: How it Affects You Today
World War I: The Rest of the Story, and How it Affects You Today
World War II: The Rest of the Story, and How it Affects You Today

I contacted the Fuhrer of Texas

2008-05-15T19:20:00.001Z

I just sent the following to the Governor of Texas:

Governor Perry, it is reprehensible that you have publicly commended
the actions of the CPS in terrorizing the people of the FLDS RANCH
(not "compound" -- they are not a paramilitary organization). These
actions are unconstitutional, immoral, and sinful. These people have
been denied due process of law. I am very sorry to have voted for you
because I now see that you obviously do not believe in anything that I
stand for. I am praying for power to be removed from all those who
have been responsible for this abusive government action. The right
thing for you to do is to immediately repudiate your commendation,
return these children to their parents pending the outcome of any
legal case against them, and discipline and fire the people involved
in this kidnapping.

You are out of touch with the people of your state.

Crying out against the State of Texas

2008-04-24T12:58:00.004Z

As John the Baptist cried out against the sin of King Herod, saying "It is not lawful for you to have your brother's wife," so today the Voice of John blog cries out against the Government of Texas, saying, "It is not lawful for you to have the children of the FLDS sect."

I have zero religious support for the FLDS religion, or the mainstream LDS religion, for that matter. I have no doubt that things are going on at the FLDS YFZ ranch which I could never condone. However, it appears that the vast majority of these things are legal, and it appears that the State of Texas has produced no concrete evidence in court of abuse and/or imminent danger to the 437 it has unlawfully kidnapped. And even if the state does manage to produce such evidence, it looks like it would only be able to prove this happened in some families, giving them no warrant whatsoever for kidnapping the other children. Constitutional protections in such cases are in place to protect real rights. They do an imperfect job of this, but to sweep them away is to oppress and persecute people. For Christians to support this is to participate in state sin. God held David responsible for authorizing the murder of Uriah on his behalf; I expect He would hold me responsible for authorizing the state to kidnap children on my behalf.

Before siding with the state in this matter, please educate yourself by reading at the Common Room. Please do not shield yourself from opposing points of view. You may find that your initial impressions based on what you hear in the news are false and not based on fact. You may "think" or "feel" now that these children should be taken away, but people should not go to jail based on a feeling, and children should not be taken away from their parents based on a feeling, either. One of our God-given protections in this land is the presumption of innocence until we are proven guilty. Suspicion of guilt is not enough to authorize the state to take action. And unless you have truly investigated things, your feeling is mere suspicion. "Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgment." (John 7:24) You shall not follow a multitude to do evil. (Exodus 23:2)

I have been asked for some suggestions about what people can do to help in this matter. I have brainstormed some suggestions. I am only confident of the effectiveness of the first two.

Things which I know will help:

Fast and pray, for the children, and for the parents

Purpose in your heart before God that you will never support similar injustice. Agencies like this could not function if the whole public did not support them and accord them a level of trust which is completely undeserved. Go look at the number of people who say "I think such and such about FLDS. I haven't read any opposing views and what I know about FLDS I heard in the mainstream media. I support the government in this." That is the true source of this tragedy.

Other things which might help:

Find out how to foster FLDS children. Make your home a loving temporary refuge for them. Don't try to change them. Allow their parents to come live with them if possible, or at least to see them if possible.

Tell people the truth. If they are supporting this action and are unaware of the things you know of, ask them to read the things you have read. If they will not do that, ask them why not. Ask them their sources for what they believe, and lead them to investigate those sources. Remind them that for the Christian, the end can never justify the means. "Shall we do evil that good may come?" Absolutely not! (Romans 3:8)

Attempt to find a way to privately help finance someone's custody battle. They will do much better with a privately-funded attorney than a state attorney.

Help set up a legal defense fund, in fact. I don't know how to do this. I wish there were such a fund to help, run by non-Mormons, but assisting these FLDS, and committed to Constitutional law. Such a fund would abandon anyone who truly committed abuse to whatever horrors the government wants to inflict on them, but would seek to protect the rights of everyone who did not.

If you live in Texas, attempt to contact your representatives as well as the people involved here. Tell them that the legal protections that they are skipping are a right you are unwilling to give up and are unwilling to see removed from other people in your name by your agents and representatives.

It's my personal belief that people outside of Texas should not tell people inside what to do, and vice versa. Nevertheless, if you do not live in Texas and do not share this conviction, you might want to mount some federal campaign. Alternatively, I see nothing wrong in saying, "I don't live there, but what you people are doing is WRONG. We see it and are taking notice."

Preach to state officials like John the Baptist. Remind them that God is watching them and that "It is appointed unto man once to die, and after that, to face the judgment," and that they must give an account for the deeds which they have done in the flesh. Majority vote or government appointment will not shield them from responsibility in That Day.

Make sure your own state isn't legally authorized to do things like this.

Protest. In public, in groups.

Contact conservative talk radio hosts and persuade them of the importance of advocating for Constitutional rights in this matter

Speak to your church leaders about the subject. They have a flock they should be leading in this matter

Oppose welfare and government subsidized loans. The FLDS sect likely benefited from both of these, and both are sinful programs which Christians should not support, anyway. The state likely could have forced the end of the FLDS group by ceasing to distort the free market like this. No violence or sin would have been needed. This is one of many cases where the state has caused a problem it is now using as an excuse to claim more power.

Enlist the support of your congregation for any of these suggestions

For the really serious: pack up your car and drive to Eldorado. Cook, do chores, and otherwise take care of FLDS women (and possibly men, too), so that they can devote themselves full time to seeking the welfare of their children. In this way you can be a personal testimony to them as well as to the world. I have no doubt that there are plenty of wrong things about the FLDS; the Scripture says, if your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. Of course, right now the FLDS parents may welcome mundane chores to take their minds off of the tragedy they are going through; don't insist on offering unwanted help. Take your children along with you; keep them with you at all times; bring your spouse and/or your children's grandparents, if possible, or a group of several adults. In this way you will be offering quite a testimony to the world, about many things.

If you can get in touch with the FLDS, watch for news items that quote them and put them in a bad light. They are quite naive about many things, and this is probably hurting their case in the court of public opinion (which is very much where this thing is being judged). Offer them advice on how they can bolster their case; things not to say, things which should be said differently. Stress the importance of competent legal counsel.

Convince the FLDS to sell or mortgage the YFZ compound and use the proceeds to purchase the best legal help money can buy for any parents who are innocent of sexual activity with children under 16 since 2005, or under 14 before 2005. Explain to them that while the state provides free counsel, the state is still footing the bill, and therefore there is every reason to expect the suggestions offered to them will not be quite as good as they could get by paying for advice themselves.

Protection from fraud

2007-11-30T14:19:00.001Z

One common baseline cited for libertarians to agree on is that government power should be limited to only the power to defend against force and fraud.

Anarchist libertarians, or anarcho-capitalists, believe in shrinking government as we know it to zero. There would no longer be a single institution claiming jurisdiction over all people within a certain geographic region as its citizens. People would still be permitted to form their own institutions for protection (and these institutions might be called governments), so long as these institutions did nothing immoral, that is, anything that would infringe the right to life, liberty, or property of anyone, such as theft (including taxation as we know it), enslavement (including conscription, compulsory schooling, compulsory citizenship, regulation, licensing), etc. Anarcho-capitalists are generally agreed that there IS a law, and that under a system of true freedom anyone whose rights were violated would be morally authorized to punish the violator, or delegate the right to do so.

In an anarcho-capitalist world, what could be done about fraud? Who is watching businesses to make sure they don't take advantage of people? Who will punish them if they do something wrong?

The answer is that these protections under anarcho-capitalism are stronger than they are under our system of monopoly government. Even if you don't assume that people actually go out and threaten justified force against perpetrators of fraud to reclaim their losses.

Under today's system, the government promises to eliminate fraud through regulation and legal action. Of course, then can never be accomplished perfectly. There will always be fraudsters who get away. The resources the government has to go after them will always be limited, so they will always have to pick and choose who to prosecute. Richer people will be more able to afford to navigate the expensive and unwieldy government system to get their rights protected.

If things don't go perfectly, the government won't admit failure. Instead they will promise that with a few changes (a new election with new officials, getting the "right" people in office who can "make a difference" (by ignoring something else that should be a priority), adding a few regulations, giving government a few more powers), eventually the problem can get better and better and axiomatically approach being fixed. The cry will not be "look at the bad job government does because of centralization"; instead it will be "look how bad things are with all this help we're providing; think how bad it would be without us! The market would never make it without this kind of protection."

All the while, government is promising that most fraud problems will be eliminated, and therefore people conclude that they can trust businesses that the government has allowed to exist, either through licensing, regulation, certification, or simply by virtue of not being shut down. How many times have you heard someone say, "If this business were doing something wrong, the government would shut them down?" When people say this, they are according a business a higher level of trust than they would in a completely free market with no big government promising to protect them.

An environment with these unnaturally elevated levels of trust makes fraud worse.

Without government promising to make all businesses trustworthy, people would realize that they shouldn't trust someone without a good reason. That good reason might be a proven track record. For example, people will trust someone they've had a longstanding positive business relationship with. Or they will check with their contacts, friends, and acquaintances when seeking out a new service provider to find someone trustworthy. Or they will look for an accreditation agency or professional organization with a good reputation (checking out its trustworthiness, first), then find a business certified by that agency.

In our system, we try to make trust start at 100% and fix the problem later if something goes wrong. In the real world, the world that would exist without government pretending it can offer us perfect protection, trust would start at zero and build from there.

A new business trying to get established will have little trust. It will need to compete in some way: by offering services that cannot be provided elsewhere, by offering a lower price, etc., until it is established with a reputation for trustworthiness. If they want to last, they will not be able to afford to commit fraud.

Everyone will think of new businesses with no history and no reputation as having trustworthiness zero. Everyone will know not to contract with such businesses unless they are getting a deal so good it makes it worth the risk of finding out that the new business is untrustworthy. It will simply be common knowledge.

If you think this sounds very similar to ebay's feedback system, then you are right. On ebay, your feedback starts at zero. Check out auctions for a commonly available item on ebay sometime. Watch the prices these auctions close at. Observe that sellers with five-digit feedback scores sell their wares at higher prices than sellers with one-digit feedback scores. Sellers with a proven track record are considered more trustworthy. Sellers without this proven track record need to compete to build one, and one way they compete is by selling at lower prices, at prices so low that some buyers (not all) believe that transacting with them is worth the low amount of money risked. You'll also observe that new sellers have trouble selling, or have to sell at lower prices, if they don't accept credit cards (through paypal, or otherwise).

Ebay's feedback system is just one of many possible free market mechanisms that can arise to allow buyers on the market to swap information about sellers and make the trustworthiness of a seller visible. Entrepreneurs will be able to design thousands more, and can make a lot of money serving people in this fashion. But since the government claims to be the answer to all fraud, this market is stifled. These better mechanisms have no reason to come into being when we all think we don't need them.

In a free market, retailers will be an important line of defense against fraud. If you purchase Dr Pepper at Target, and Target provides an inferior product, you'll quit buying at Target. And some entrepreneur somewhere will be able to make a profit by serving you in your desire for quality Dr Pepper. In a free market, to make money long term you have to consistently serve people well. Untrustworthy or low quality sellers can start over and over again at feedback/trustworthiness zero, but they'll never be able to cater to those who want to spend more money with retailers who have a proven track record for quality and honesty.

Boycotts have been organized over and over again to try to influence the marketplace. Many of these have had wonderful effects, including winning liberty in some cases. But far, far more of these boycotts fizzle and die out, forgotten. It's hard to motivate people to quit purchasing a product or service that serves their needs or desires. BUT, if a seller is providing an inferior product, defrauding its customers, the response will be more powerful than any boycott. That fraudster will see demand for its service or product plummet as people go to someone else who can do the job honestly. He'll either go out of business entirely, or cater only to people who are willing to deal with cheap quality knockoffs or shoddy work in order to save a few bucks.

I mentioned credit cards in conjunction with ebay, above. Credit cards have given another great example of market-based protection against fraud. Most credit cards have an agreement with their cardholders whereby they guarantee purchases. Get ripped off online by someone who accepted your card, and your card company will often give you your money back and get it back from the fraudster themselves. They have an incentive to be honest in these matters: if they allow cardholders to get away with fake claims, there will be a market among merchants for a more honest service. On the other hand, if they allow merchants to get away with fraud, there will be a market for a more honest service to cardholders. This is a spectacular example of how justice (the service our courts claim to provide and our government monopolizes) can be provided on the free market!

It's nice to think that government can provide us a world where we can trust everybody, but it's a pipe dream. In case you haven't noticed, we can't even trust our government. When we swallow the lie involved here, we trust people more than we should. Maybe this means we buy Dr Pepper that isn't as good. Or maybe it means something more serious: maybe we trust that since the childcare provider we are contracting with is licensed by the state, they are trustworthy. If we're trusting them at unnaturally high levels, we're going to find more childcare providers that molest children than we would in the real world, where we know that government can't solve all our problems.

Should we agree when people say that because people are untrustworthy we must have government to protect us? No! The very opposite is true: because people are untrustworthy, we need to eliminate monopoly government and allow the free market to build better mechanisms of establishing trust and fighting fraud.

If everyone did this

2007-11-29T15:13:00.000Z

If every single person laid down their arms and followed the law of Jesus Christ, He would be king, and we would obviously have no need of governments. There would be no evil to punish. There would be no evildoers to defend against. Every single person could submit to the rule of Christ, placing themselves in His kingdom, the Church, under the guiding authority of Godly shepherds (also called bishops, overseers, pastors, or elders) to watch for their souls and warn them if they began to go wrong.

It's obvious that what I say in this blog could work, if only everyone would follow it.

But it's also obvious that not everyone will. This world will always contain evil people, probably always predominantly evil people.

So in the meantime, should Christians lay down their arms and stop using government force? Or do they have an obligation to use government as a tool to try to make this fallen world as livable as possible?

Remember that God is in control. If God has commanded that we not govern non-Christians, then we must submit even if it looks like this does not work, just as Abraham submitted to God when required to kill his son, the only possible ancestor of the great multitudes of descendants God had promised him. Faith means trusting God even when it seems obvious that God's wisdom is flawed, because we know the truth, that God's wisdom may appear foolishness (I Corinthians 2), but God is trustworthy.

As long as sin exists in this world, God can and does use governments as His agent to punish evil (Romans 13). "The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He wishes." (Proverbs 21:1) God will still use evil rulers to bring about His perfect will, just as He used evil Nebuchadnezzar of wicked Babylon to punish His rebellious people in the Old Testament. (And tried desperately to save Nebuchadnezzar in the book of Daniel, I might add, before finally executing vengeance on Babylon for their sins.) He certainly does not need our participation in the evil deeds that governments inherently commit!

In fact, the Bible explicitly teaches us to leave all of these things in the hand of the Lord: "Never take your own revenge, beloved, but leave room for the wrath of God, for it is written, 'Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,' says the Lord." (Romans 12:19) Strangely enough, God goes on to talk about government in the next chapter. So God has specifically told us to trust Him to protect us from evil, and not to attempt to punish evil ourselves. What could be more clear? Stop governing. Leave room for the wrath of God.

Injustice

2007-11-27T14:30:00.000Z

My morning Psalms reading encompassed Psalm 53. I'm accustomed to the King James Version translation of this, which in verse one reads, "The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: there is none that doeth good." But I read the New American Standard Bible translation, which reads, "The fool has said in his heart, 'There is no God,' They are corrupt, and have committed abominable injustice; There is no one who does good."

That word "injustice" surprised me this morning. I knew that Psalm talked about people committing iniquity: lawlessness, breaking the laws of God. But today I'm reading a translation that says this Psalm talks about people committing a particular type of iniquity: injustice.

Injustice is denying people the justice that is due to them.

And let me tell you that there is no bigger source of injustice in this world today than governments.

Governments take what does not belong to them. This is the sin of stealing, but they call it taxation. The Bible commands us to pay taxes when required of us. Romans 13:6 says that our taxes are rightfully collected from us when government defends us from those who do evil, whom verse 10 refers to as those who "do harm to a neighbor." But this verse does not authorize us to force others to pay for our defense! It does not authorize us personally to take the action of taxing others! In the complete absence of government force, human institutions would still exist that punish evildoers. They would just be funded without the sin of stealing. These funds could probably also be called "taxes," but they would not involve the injustice that exists today, where people authorize agents to commit the sin of stealing in their behalf. God has placed a sword into the hands of government, not into the hands of His Son's Church, which is explicitly commanded not to judge anyone outside of its number (I Corinthians 5).

Governments punish people for doing things that are not wrong. Isaiah pronounced "Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!" (Isaiah 5:20) Governments authorize themselves to perform evil actions, such as counterfeiting, restricting the liberty of free speech (this may not seem like a big deal, but did you know that our government revokes a church's tax exempt status if they start preaching specific actions which people must take about politics?), manstealing, and raising other people's children. In so doing, they are calling evil things good. (Only when they do it, though.)

Meanwhile, governments punish people for doing things that are not wrong. You need look only to the early modern homeschoolers who went to jail for trying to take control of the education of their children. Or the civil rights activists of the 1960's. Or anyone who ever practiced civil disobedience. Or anyone who gets fined in my town for holding a sale on his own property without paying the government for authorization, or for holding a fifth sale (I think we're allowed only four). Or the myriads of sinful and unjust licensing and regulatory requirements, such as the electrical code which I was told currently requires an electrical outlet in a strange, unsafe, and nearly unreachable place behind sinks when they are installed a certain way, and authorizes the local government to fine violaters (at its option, which means this can be enforced completely capriciously and arbitrarily, or even used as a tool against people who aren't favored by the local authorities for some reason). Thus, government calls good evil.

Nowhere in Scripture is government authorized to make law. And certainly nowhere are Christians authorized to participate, even though we are commanded to submit. As A.B. Dada says, "Personally, I think the 'live by their rules' [teaching of Romans 13] is far different from 'make the rules, and cheer when they're enforced.'"

God appointed kings and judges in His Old Testament nation, but it was clear that they were not permitted to take any action they wanted with impunity. They were required to render just verdicts in disputes. They were told they would be punished by God Himself if they accepted bribes, let the guilty go free, or sided against the innocent. God knew full well that a multitude might get together and choose to do evil and pervert justice (Exodus 23:2), might give unfair favoritism to poor people over rich people (Exodus 23:3), might sin against property owners because of covetousness, or might favor those who could afford to buy exemptions from the law (Exodus 23:8). Then as now, rulers could bow to the will of the people, or choose to abuse power for their own desires.

People think the "rule of law" was a great modern invention, where nobody is above the law and even governing officials are accountable to it, rather than simply changing the law as they please. But God invented this. It was revealed in Scripture, in both the Old Testament and the New. In fact, God's Law predated everything; I believe it is written into the very fabric of the universe in such a way that if we do not obey it, we will face inescapable natural consequences. We have no need of human institutions that can define law. We have no need of legislatures. What is wrong is wrong, and always has been; what is right is right, and always has been; and these are immutable truths which can be revealed by God and discovered by man, but never altered by human agency! And where is our rule of law now? Are our rulers also accountable to the law? Or are they permitted to make it up and modify it as they choose?

I'm not being outlandish in saying that government is the biggest perpetrator of injustice in this world. That does not mean it is the only source of injustice. But it does mean that it should be treated like any other.

What is my responsibility when I see other people sinning in this manner? Firstly, to warn them (Ezekiel 33). I am to be preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, including the moral standards He laid down for all people to follow. But second, my responsibility includes recognizing that any mandate to judge them ends outside of the church: I Corinthians 5 specifically says that God will judge those outside. So I warn those involved in the evil that God is going to judge them, and if they do not listen and seek forgiveness in Jesus Christ, I eventually have a responsibility not to waste any more time with them and to protect myself from retaliation (Matthew 7:6, Matthew 10:14-15). Finally, I have the responsibility to make sure that I myself do not participate in their evil deeds! (Galatians 6:1) It should be obvious from the get-go that even if God allows people to persist in these sins of injustice, even if He works it to His own positive ends, I am not permitted to be a part of it. There is only one person I can control, and that is me. When I stand before the Lord at the end of my life, I will give an account for the actions I took. If I cooperated in perpetrating injustice, I will discover that I was a fool, a man who may not have been an atheist, but who effectively said in my heart "there is no God" by breaking God's law and believing that God would not hold me accountable.

How to fix American healthcare

2007-11-21T16:53:00.000Z

The following is shamelessly copied from The Ultimate Pro-WalMart Article, by Paul Kirklin, at The Ludwig von Mises Institute. Google says I've accessed this article from search results five times since August 14th. :) Today makes the sixth.

We're dealing with insurance problems right now. Our employer-provided insurance doesn't want to pay claims they are obligated by agreement to pay. I'm spending way too much unproductive time researching what they've done and calling them back.

I know that the reason insurance companies can be like this is because of government intervention. YES, insurance companies seek profit, as do all people, including people who complain about "evil, greedy" insurance companies. The difference is that with government help, you can often make profit by exploiting people, but without the mighty sword of government, in a free market, the only way to make sustainable profits is to serve people. If all civil laws related to medical care were repealed, including all laws related to medical insurance, the behavior of insurance companies would improve more than one thousand fold. Of course, a completely different class of more honorable people might be attracted to the industry as the change occurred. :)

Here's the excerpt. Below this paragraph, nothing is my own words:
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Healthcare Benefits

Wal-Mart improves access to healthcare by raising the real incomes of all the millions of people who are its customers or the customers of its competitors, whose prices are lower because of its powerful competition. This allows people to be able to afford healthcare more easily than they otherwise could.

In spite of this fact, another one of the Wal-Mart critics' favorite complaints is that Wal-Mart "reduces access to healthcare." The Wal-Mart critics believe this because Wal-Mart does not offer substantial healthcare benefits to all its employees. Employees who don't have substantial healthcare benefits are often unable to afford healthcare on their own, and thus they are left with little or no access to healthcare. Wal-Mart is blamed for their plight since the company is allegedly capable of offering more healthcare benefits but chooses not to. In part the critics are right; access to healthcare is becoming more problematic, but this is not caused by Wal-Mart or by "corporate greed." It is the result of an irrational healthcare system that causes us all to suffer, including Wal-Mart.
"Wal-Mart has made the system ingenious so its employees don't have to be."

This is not an article on the problems in our healthcare system. So I can only deal with that subject very briefly here. Many people are under the false impression that employers are responsible for the healthcare costs of their employees. The reason that so many people have this misconception is due to government intervention. For several decades, the government has put pressures — mainly powerful tax incentives — on companies to offer healthcare as a fringe-benefit. It has artificially created a system in which it is cheaper for an employer to purchase healthcare for an employee than for that employee to buy healthcare for himself with take-home wages. This has caused healthcare fringe-benefits to become so widespread for so long that most people have forgotten that they are fringe-benefits (i.e., an alternate way to pay wages.) Instead, many people incorrectly believe that healthcare benefits for employees are a moral duty of employers in addition to wages. But healthcare costs are not the responsibility of employers any more than the costs of food or clothing or anything else are.

The disastrous byproduct of healthcare fringe-benefits being offered on such a widespread basis is that healthcare costs have become collectivized. Employers cannot directly pay unlimited amounts for all the healthcare any employee would ever desire, so instead they routinely contribute amounts into employee health "insurance" policies. Employees spend money for healthcare out of giant pools of these contributions. If employees bought healthcare with take-home wages, they would have no reason to collectivize all their healthcare costs in health insurance policies. Many employees would get health insurance for catastrophic events, but not for routine health expenses.

Unfortunately, collectivization turns economic progress on its head. Healthcare is a product of human labor. Just as we can improve our ability to produce all other products through increases in productivity, we can improve our ability to produce healthcare. The same market mechanisms that caused television sets to become increasingly better and more affordable can cause all healthcare to become increasingly better and more affordable. But instead of becoming more and more inexpensive as time goes by, healthcare in our country is becoming more and more expensive, a typical result of collectivization. Since money for healthcare is spent out of giant pools of contributions, for the most part, people don't feel any direct financial effects from their healthcare expenditures. Therefore, an individual has little reason to show any restraint in his healthcare spending, and few people do when they know "insurance is paying for it." Furthermore, there is no limiting force on prices of healthcare. Healthcare providers want prices going up higher and higher without limit, and healthcare buyers who don't feel the direct financial effects of buying healthcare have no reason to exert pressure on providers to keep prices down. Mainly for these reasons, healthcare costs are sharply rising.
"Many people are under the false impression that employers are responsible for the healthcare costs of their employees."

The fundamental problem with access to healthcare in this country has nothing to do with employers who may or may not choose to offer healthcare fringe-benefits in the face of sharply rising healthcare costs. The fundamental problem is: healthcare costs are sharply rising.

As healthcare costs rise, it will become increasingly difficult for companies and individuals to afford, and paying for it will become more of a drag on the rest of the economic system. The sensible solution is not to pressure companies like Wal-Mart to attempt to clean up the government's mess by dumping more and more money into the bottomless pit of healthcare collectivization as it gets more expensive. The sensible solution is to eliminate healthcare collectivization altogether, the cause of sharply rising healthcare costs. We must get the government out of healthcare, and we must expose as false the idea that employers have a moral duty to provide for their employees' healthcare costs. In the absence of government pressure, healthcare collectivization would end. Healthcare fringe-benefits would be dramatically reduced, take-home wages would increase, health insurance would be used primarily for catastrophic events, and most people would buy healthcare with take-home wages just as they buy almost everything else with take-home wages. Most importantly, the healthcare industry would get back on a path of economic progress, and healthcare would become increasingly better and more affordable for everyone as time went by.

Libertarian newsfeeds

2007-09-27T15:46:00.000Z

I just updated my blog template, moving around the headline sections on the right. I've carried Lew Rockwell headlines since I started this blog. Recently I learned that LewRockwell.com carries weekly, monthly, and annual top ten article pages. Since I don't have time to read every single LRC daily article (alas), these are pretty useful to me. And since I am a programmer, I knew how to create my own headline newsfeeds off of these pages.

So now my sidebar carries the Lew Rockwell weekly top ten most popular headlines. The daily headlines are down lower.

And I should mention that over time I've created a lot of such newsfeeds that might be of interest to libertarian-minded, liberty-minded, or anarcho-capitalist-minded people. You can read these feeds with feed reading software such as Google Reader, which I highly recommend. Here's a list:

This blog

This blog's comments

My shared items feed from Google Reader, bringing you frequent updates of items I found interesting and relevant to the liberty-minded. And here it is as a webpage.

A.B. Dada's comments on Slashdot

John Stossel's syndicated columns

Lew Rockwell monthly ten most popular articles

Lew Rockwell weekly ten most popular articles

Lew Rockwell yearly ten most popular articles (yes, you'll have to wait a long time for this one to update to something new :) )

Lysander's Ghost, a friend of mine who helped me see that God required me to have a righteous attitude toward "public policy"

Strike the Root

The Chalcedon Foundation, a religious institution calling for self-government and voluntary submission to God

Walter Williams columns: Walter Williams is a brilliant minarchist economist. You may have often heard him substitute for Rush Limbaugh on his radio program. Williams is responsible for teaching me that governments do not get a pass to break God's laws such as Thou Shalt Not Steal.

Thomas Sowell columns: Sowell is another bright minarchist economist. He's a little more "conservative" and a little less "libertarian" than Williams

Read "The Right to Ignore the State"

2007-09-25T15:34:00.000Z

The Right to Ignore the State, by Herbert Spencer, is tough reading (Spencer died in 1903). It takes work to get through what it says, assembling the meaning of complex sentences from difficult words, and then following the train of logic from sentence to sentence.

But I found that Spencer said, eloquently and intelligently, exactly what I believe to be true.

Totalitarians looking for another name

2007-08-08T13:09:00.000Z

Leftist politicians are abandoning the word "liberal" in favor of the word "progressive." Of course, they pretend they are fighting to restore the original definition of "liberal," which meant being in favor of freedom, which they definitely are not. But as we know, it's politically expedient to claim that things which are not freedom and liberty actually are freedom and liberty. Like democracy, for example.

I know a bunch of libertarians who would love to have the word back. That's what it used to mean. Of course, it's truly bizarre to see advocates of religious faith in government like Hillary Clinton pretend to care that liberal doesn't mean liberty anymore.

I'm fine with them labelling themselves progressives. I just hope there will always be an extremely large number of people like me around to point out that the "progress" that they want is totalitarian. What this world does NOT need is just the "right" leaders in charge so that we can finally make "progress." True progress would be liberty.

A couple of years ago my local city politics had a group calling itself "Moving [our city] Forward." I opposed it, of course. What utter dreck! You'll never hear a politician who doesn't say things along the lines of "a vote for me is a vote for moving forward; I just think we need to move forward," etc.

Free human beings don't define "moving forward" like a collective, like a communist nation, like the Borg. The only meaningful definition of "progress" at the government level is the progressive elimination of government itself. Want to make progress today? Call one of your agents in government and tell them to stop doing anything, and especially to stop taking money from your neighbors and telling them what they can and cannot do. And convince your neighbors to do the same. Help build a world where we don't gladly hand out the reigns of tyranny to people who promise to make the most "progress." That would be a world where anyone who stands up and says "put me in charge, I'll help us make progress" doesn't get a single vote.

Practical anarcho-capitalism

2007-07-25T16:33:00.000Z

What would anarcho-capitalism look like, if we had it? How would it work? How would we solve all the problems that government now solves for us? It is easy to see how the need met by such things as government postal delivery might be met. It is not so easy to see how defense would be handled, or how we would be protected against tyranny.

Many people love the original Constitutional United States government system because they believe it to be the best system mankind has discovered for protecting liberty. Often you'll see such good patriots attempting to educate today's public about the fact that the U.S. system is not a democracy; it is instead the superior system of a Republic. Of course, in practice our system has been attempting to devolve from republic to democracy, and from there to socialism (did you ever know a Communist nation that didn't like to refer to itself as "The People's Democratic Socialist Republic of [Region]?"). And personally I think the similarities between republic and democracy are greater than their differences. But I do agree that Republican government was a great protection for liberty, and a great check against tyranny.

History has produced a long list of such checks against tyranny:

the rule of law

Constitutional government

law applying to the ruler as well as the ruled

democracy

republicanism (not the political party, the form of government)

separation of powers

bills of rights

checks and balances

In the end, though, none of these is sufficient to guarantee liberty is never violated. And in fact some of them don't work nearly as well as advertised. And unfortunately many of them get equated with "liberty." Right now we say we want to spread "democracy," and we act as if that means spreading "liberty." The very definition of democracy is actually incompatible with liberty.

Anarcho-capitalism surpasses them all. And what's more, anarcho-capitalism actually is liberty.

I think a Republic was a great advance and a great protection for liberty, but in the end I think it always devolves again into tyranny. I do not believe one government can check itself, even if you have separation of powers. I believe governments can only be checked by the people, or by other governments.

Being checked by the people has always been a part of government's existence, even under tyranny, even since the first raiders rode into a peaceful town and proclaimed themselves kings. The government takes a lot from its people, in the form of liberty and resources. It loudly gives a large portion back in the form of services. They give enough back to keep the people from revolting, and this keeps their power and income sources secure. It's a little more civilized under a Republic, thankfully.

This necessity that government be checked by the people is always the reason for the need for the rights granted by the US second amendment to be secure and absolute. I know a lot of people think the 2nd amendment is about hunting (I used to), or personal defense against local criminals (I used to think that, too), but the reason the founders talked about was the need to protect from the main criminals of history: government.

The second way of checking government is why a Republic is not the greatest hope for human government, and anarcho-capitalism is. Under such a system, every person would have the right to secede from their government, as well as the right to form new governments within the same territory. Noone would have the right to compel anyone to be a citizen of their government; government would be by true contract. If a government became tyrannical to its citizens, they could form a new one (or several) to protect themselves from its depradations. If a government acted tyrannical to those who were not its citizens, they could protect themselves by forming their own government. And this is pretty much exactly what the Declaration of Independence says, that government is an institution with the special purpose of securing rights, and that all people have the right to form such an institution as seems best to them (though I doubt Jefferson envisioned multiple such institutions in the same geographic region).

Noone has the right to do that which is wrong, not even governing officials, and in all history the biggest threat to man's rights has been the government; therefore the most pressing reason to form a government is to protect its citizens from another government. Under our present system government does much which is wrong. As it exists, taxation is simply legalized theft (indeed, the government is simply a group that has a monopoly on breaking laws such as this with impunity), and much of the rest of what governments do is simply legalized slavery. Under a system of anarcho-capitalism this could not be the case. A government's only citizens would be people who had explicitly agreed to its terms, which would include whatever fees the previous citizens or founders had deemed necessary. Governments could actually compete for citizens by trying to offer the best protection for the best price.

People who wanted to keep the existing institution, the United States federal government, could do so. They could support it with their taxes, pledge their allegiance to it and salute its flag, think of it as the greatest country on earth, and everything they want to do now. They just couldn't compel other people to do so, and they'd have to allow their children to make the decision for themselves when they grew up, and they certainly couldn't force everyone who lived in their land after they died to be bound to the same institution for hundreds of years or forever. They'd have to grant everyone else the right to be free.

I'm going to say something you might not have realized anarcho-capitalists believed: we do need government. At least, we need to have our rights protected, and we need to create institutions to do that for the common good. What we don't need is to take away the rights of other people in order to protect that for ourselves. Government as it exists today rests on the premise that you and I cannot protect ourselves unless we force other people to furnish the means and manpower to do it, and to surrender complete allegiance to our system and any decisions it makes as well. This is not true! It might provide some form of protection, but it is inferior to what could be developed in a world of true freedom, it weakens the foundations of society by making us interact together in forced ways rather than those we would naturally choose, and it damages our economy because of the damage to our freedom, resulting in decreased wealth and therefore decreased capacity for the very defense we were trying to achieve, as well as decreased capacity to enjoy the fruit of our labors.

One world government?

2007-07-24T13:14:00.000Z

If the state is such a good thing, why don't we just have one of them? For the entire world.

When I was younger, I accepted all the good things people told me states were responsible for. Civilization would be impossible without them. States were the only way people could be protected. States provided needed services that couldn't be obtained in any other way, such as roads, schools, and certification of income tax preparation experts. Through democracy, states permitted completely diverse groups of people to peacefully coexist and cooperate and form civilization, in a way that would be impossible without a government. And through federalism local groups of people could have their own local government but still share the benefits of a common state.

So why in the world did the earth have many nations? Obviously the best thing in the world would be for every existing nation in the world to become a state in the United States. And then we'd all live happily ever after, or so I naively thought.

The reality is that the state is pretty much only a good thing when it is protecting us from the next level up, and/or the rest of the world. Increasing centralization wrecks the structures that man creates through the voluntary association of the free market. And unfortunately our trend is toward increasing centralization of everything. Apparently a lot of people still believe what I believed as a boy. I wonder why those same people still want nations to retain their sovereignty? If their logic is true, they should accept that one government would be good for everybody.

In the early united states, education was the private decision of each household. Near universal literacy prevailed. Then education was assumed by the community, then the state, and now finally the federal government (a federal government legally prohibited from doing so by the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution). It's only gotten worse, but at each stage flaws in the system have been used as justification for fixing things at the next higher level. Somehow making only one decision instead of fifty is supposed to magically work better. Somehow federal government is a magic realm where people can solve problems they can't solve in states. Somehow state government is a magic realm where people can solve problems they can't solve in cities or counties. Somehow government in general is a magic realm where people can solve problems they can't solve on the free market. Remember the big lie: the risk of leaving this up to people we don't control is too great.

Health care tells the same story as education, and so do a thousand other issues.

Morally, why should people in New York have the right to tell people in Kansas what to do? Why should people in Houston have the right to tell people in Dallas what to do? Why should people on the north side of Boston have the right to tell people on the south side of Boston what to do? Why should a household in Denver, Colorado have the right to tell the household living next door to them what to do? The answer is that they don't, and in fact when they do the economy produces less than it would have if left alone.

Somehow people can see that it wouldn't do to have people in China telling America what to do. Somehow they can even see that it wouldn't do to have people in England telling America what to do. Why then don't they follow that logic through to its obvious conclusion: any such institution which compels people to obey it, rather than protecting those who voluntarily join it, is immoral and damaging? If it's a bad idea for America to give up its sovereignty to a one world government, it's a bad idea Wyoming to give up its sovereignty to Washington, D.C., and it's a bad idea for Muncie, Indiana to give up its sovereignty to Indianapolis, Indiana, and it's a bad idea for the household on the north side of town to give up its sovereignty to city hall.

An institution that protects us from possible violation of our rights by other people, including by other people in institutions called states, is a good thing. In fact, it is so much of a good thing that I think we should have several of them, competing with each other, and you should choose which one you want to belong to (hire), or several if you choose and they are still willing to serve you under such an arrangment.

But compelling other people to be a member of your institution is wrong. Compelling your children to be a member of your institution after they are grown and emancipated (and even after you are dead) is wrong. The Americans of 1789 created an institution to protect their rights. (They had earlier declared their right to do this in 1776. Interestingly enough, at the same time they declared the rights of man to abolish such institutions and replace them with new ones that they thought would better secure their rights.) But creating this government in 1789 didn't obligate people who were born after 1889 to keep the agreement. (Especially since it's now conveniently reinterpreted and ignored.)

Right now the basic message defining our system of government is: "I can't protect myself from violation of my rights unless I violate your rights and compel you to help me." The reality is that individuals can protect their rights, and when they can't they can band together voluntarily in many ways to do so. The household that perceives some benefit to a local rights protecting organization can join it voluntarily, just as the household that perceives some benefit to shopping at the grocery store can shop there voluntarily.

Government-certified money

2007-07-23T12:33:00.000Z

Once upon a time, people had to barter in order to trade. If you raised chickens and needed butter, you had to take a chicken to a dairy farmer and hope he needed chickens, and hope he'd give you enough butter that you wouldn't be shortchanged for your chicken, and hope you could find a use for all the extra butter, because it's hard to make change for a live chicken.

Then the free market discovered money, and if you haven't read the book I just linked to on the words "discovered money," I encourage you to leave my site immediately and go read it before finishing here, because the information there is more important than just about anything I have to say. The free market selected gold and silver as its two forms of money for several natural reasons, and soon anybody could make a better living by exchanging what they produced for money and then exchanging money for what they wanted or needed.

Of course, when you accepted a gold or silver coin as payment for something valuable you produced, you wanted to make sure you didn't get shortchanged, and you therefore wanted to make sure that you really got the amount of gold or silver you were promised. If you'll go bankrupt producing chickens for a half an ounce of gold each, then you want to make sure the one ounce gold coin you've been given really does contain an ounce of gold.

So the minting business arose and created spectacular innovations to protect its customers: gold and silver ("money") was turned into coins for portable convenience. A coin would be a uniform shape and size and contain a uniform amount of precious metal. The precious metal would be alloyed with a uniform amount of base metal in order to make the coin more durable so that the precious metal wouldn't wear away. (I have made the incredibly expensive and stupid mistake of dropping a United States gold bullion coin on my ceramic tile floor. Gold bullion coins are way too pure to be used in general circulation; there is very little base metal in them. The coin in question suffered ugly dents and little flecks of gold were seen flaking off from those dents.) The edges of the coin would be reeded so that if anyone tried to clip precious metal off the edges (do this often enough and you can make a new coin!) it would be obvious that the coin no longer contained its stated quantity of gold or silver ("money"). And the mints stamped the coins with their own seals or other indicator, giving them the chance to build a reputation for reliable coins. In Joachimsthal, now in the Czech Republic, one particular mint did such a good job that the name of its world-renowned silver coin, the Joachimsthaler, became the standard for other coins and eventually became the generic name for coins of the same weight and composition. The Joachimsthaler became the Thaler, which became the Dollar. (And then the United States government appeared and assassinated the dollar, but I'm getting ahead of myself.)

The free market therefore managed to provide the best possible protection against being cheated in money. If you didn't provide just weights and a just balance, people would actually find out, word would get around, and people would be visiting your competitors.

But liberty dies on a lie, and this is the lie: government persuaded everyone that the risk of adulterated or counterfeit money (gold and silver, remember) on the free market was too great. Despite the fact that the very best in money protection had been innovated by the free market, the government told people that this was not enough, that their money was at risk, and that they could magically help. You see after liberty is mortally wounded by the first lie, and that is that government is somehow a magic organization of people that can do what people organized in other ways cannot: protect you from the unacceptable risk of adulterated money.

And so the government had "proved" that it naturally must have a monopoly on the money supply. The government became the sole supplier of coins. Now money was government certified, and finally everybody could trust it. They could trust it so well the government hoped they didn't even find it necessary to check it. And it wasn't long until every time the government got its hands on a coin that the coin was clipped, or melted down and mixed with more base metal than it was supposed to have, in order to give the government more coins and trick people, for a while at least, into accepting less payment for the product of their hard work which government desired. So the government lied about protecting people and then perpetrated the same harm on those people. Sadly, one definition of government is a group of people with a monopoly on breaking the law. Note that in this case, the law already existed before the government even regulated the issue: private sellers have an incentive to keep just weights and a just balance; the government does not, especially when it comes to the money supply.

The big lie isn't just about money. Everywhere government tells the same story in order to kill liberty and expand its own power: there is a danger, and the risk of this danger is unacceptably great, and even though the government is just a bunch of people with fancy hats and titles they are somehow magically able to protect against this danger in a way that people organized in other fashions cannot.

Parents can't select who will teach their children; only somebody certified by the government should be allowed to do that! (And if parents want to teach their children by themselves, heaven forbid, we simply must regulate the situation and insist that the parents are certified.) It's too dangerous for people to simply select their own health care providers; the state must certify certain people as "doctors" and only they should be allowed to practice medicine. Food could contain dangerous additives and the government must look it over. Noone would preserve great natural wonders or historic monuments if the government didn't take care of them, with your money. The roads would be a warzone if we didn't license drivers. If government doesn't step in to regulate cheese, somebody might sell a lesser-quality cheese under the same name, or an identical-quality cheese from a different location which people would buy instead of the real thing, or people might even begin to think that quality is subjective. Chances are, you felt a gut feeling of agreement with some of these sentences.

Of course one of the biggest dangers to the state is the idea that anybody should be allowed to read the law and have their own opinion on it, and so practicing law without a license is of course completely forbidden.

Are there real dangers if the state isn't allowed to regulate and certify things? Yes, there are. As I showed above, in the realm of money the the free market protected against these dangers better than the government, though. Lord willing, I will later blog on two ways in which the free market protects against such dangers in general.

Three reasons not to be a part of democracy

2007-07-20T12:04:00.001Z

I was going to title this post "Three reasons not to vote." But actually, I do vote, just in a very unorthodox way that I have found to register my disapproval of the system. So here are three reasons not to vote. Much. Or at least, not in a normal way.

It's ineffective: Change is never going to come by this route. I voted Republican in 2000 and 2004 because I believed in smaller government. It didn't work. Even when your candidate wins you don't get what you want. (Even if you wanted bigger government you wouldn't get what you want, because the costs of reality and the impossibility of centralized economic calculation always prevent big government planners from fulfilling all of their promises.) And the candidates always believe in expanding some portions of the government's power. (George W. Bush, for example, believed in socializing healthcare, which distressed me greatly because "we" Republicans had stood against this staunchly when Hilary Clinton wanted to try it. I compromised. May God forgive me for supporting a man who would steal from other people.) And of course all politicians believe in taxation. The history of elections in the United States has been the history of the expanse of federal power and the decline of liberty and the intent of the founders of the country. Even politicians who believe in a limit to government power seem to weaken their principles with only a short time in office; some believe this is because power is simply so intoxicating.

Meanwhile I have two avenues to effective change. As a Christian, I may have confidence that if I practice the things God requires of me, which include prayer and the preaching of the Gospel, change will occur in my life and in the lives of those who come in contact with me. If Christians really believed this we would see a dramatic decrease in the amount of time they spend discussing politics and a dramatic increase in the amount of time they spend discussing the word of God. Secondly, I may spend my time peacefully persuading people that anarcho-capitalism is best for them and best for everybody; throughout history governments of all types, tyrannical and democratic, have survived by throwing out enough "benefits" that the populace never gets mad enough about the violation of their rights and continues to support the government. Eventually as enough people cease to support the government, there is a tipping point where its power will begin to rapidly decay. Some optimists think this tipping point is very small, at somewhere near 10% or 25% of the population. All I know is I'd rather reach that than obtain a temporary majority for some flawed candidate in an election.

It legitimizes the system: When I vote for a politician, I'm saying that I pick him to represent me, to act on my behalf. As the declaration of independence says, the government derives its just powers from the consent of the governed. I can delegate my right to self-defense to an agency to defend my rights. I can delegate my right to decide what to do with a portion of my land to a group that is going to pool land and use it for a particular purpose. But since I don't have a right to dictate to other people (other than requiring them to respect my rights), I therefore can't delegate to the government all of the powers it is exercising. Selecting a representative means picking a person to act as my agent. If I get together with someone and ask him to steal for me, he is acting as my agent and we are both guilty. This is government as currently practiced. This is "we the people."

Furthermore, when I've picked someone to hold the king powers for a term, I'm stuck with him, and if he doesn't do what I need or want, or what is right, it's my fault for picking him. As I said above, no person can or will use the king powers in the "right" way (there is no right way, other than using those powers to destroy themselves). But under our system, you have three options, and no matter what it's your fault:
- You can vote for your man and win. If things don't go well, it's your fault for picking the wrong man. And all the men are wrong, and things will never go well for everybody for any length of time.
- You can refrain from voting. In this case when they come to take your money your haughty voting neighbors justify their theft by saying you didn't vote and therefore you granted your consent to everything they wanted to do. I wish it were more obvious that this couldn't be more wrong, but we were all taught this in government school and almost everybody believes it. Funny, that.
- You can vote for your man and lose. In this case you have to suffer all kinds of things being done to you that you did not consent to, but you agreed to participate in this democracy and you are told you have no room to complain and should work for change within the system. What a joke.
Funny how the government keeps taking money that doesn't belong to it, keeps keeping people from using what belongs to them, keeps abusing people ... and then tells people that it is their fault, not its. When this happens between a man and a woman we call it domestic abuse. Interestingly enough in many domestic abuses the abuser tells his wife that all the bad things he does are her fault, and she often believes him. (This without loss of generality; I don't mean to imply that all abusers are men.)

Democracy is a domestic abuse situation. The people are battered. It's time to realize that we need to abandon this partner once and for all. We're not really married to him, anyway. Worst shack-up we ever made. Let's get on with our real lives.

It sacrifices real change: There were a variety of views on slavery in the 1800s. Some believed in immediate, total abolition: free all the slaves immediately, no compromises. Some believed in gradual abolition or various compromises: slowly free the slaves, slowly truncate slavery's territory, have the government buy some of them, send them back to Africa, etc. The fiery insightful abolitionists recognized the truth: if you argue for gradual change, real change may never happen. The change to anarcho-capitalism should happen now because it is right, because the current system is wrong, because it is better, because the current system is far, far worse, and because any gradual transition period would really just be another formation of the current system, which is tyrannical and wrong as well as damaging; an instant transition to doing what is right might be destabilizing, but it would actually be healthier than a tyrannically managed transition, as well as being the moral thing to do. The truth is that if you argue for complete change, what you will really get is gradual change as more and more people accept the truth. If you argue for gradual change, nothing meaningful will ever happen, and thousands of years from now we will still have all-powerful government.

Voting for "the guy who is going to shrink the government the most" or "the guy who is going to grow the government the least" may seem like the libertarian or even Christian thing to do. But the reality is that you give your approval to someone who is not going to shrink the government, someone who is going to do wrong things in your name, and you perpetuate the situation rather than sounding the message that reform must come swiftly.

Privatization

2007-07-13T14:29:00.001Z

As a laissez-faire capitalist, I support the privatization of everything the government does. Everything.

Unfortunately, many governments at various levels (state, local, federal) have made trials of something that they have called "privatization" without trying real privatization. Since this pseudo-privatization is really not based on letting the market work, it doesn't work to efficiently meet needs, and often people are dissatisfied and become fearful of privatization. They become more convinced than ever that government is necessary to meet our needs and is somehow magically able to do so in ways that cannot be done by voluntary self-organization. Government becomes like a powerful drug addiction that people will not turn loose of. And unfortunately those of us who aren't addicted and would like to refuse to be a part of it have no choice but to deal with the consequences anyway.

For example: suppose a city decides to "privatize" its garbage pickup. True privatization would be this: the city stops collecting the taxes and fees used to support the garbage pickup service. It sells (possibly by auction) all of the buildings, equipments, dumps, etc. that have been used in providing its service. It discontinues the service entirely. After that, the city does nothing.

Now the people have an unmet need to have their garbage hauled away. Entrepreneurs realize that the people of this town have this need and get to action because there is money to be made. Some of them obtain land and turn it into private dumps. They may contract with citizens to give them a place to take their garbage to. But of course most people don't want to haul their own garbage. So more entrepreneurs, or possibly the same ones who start the dumps, obtain vehicles and start businesses hauling garbage away to the dumps. If they don't run the dumps themselves, they contract with the people who do. Anticipating these needs, some of these entrepreneurs probably arranged to buy some of the city resources at auction. Some of them might even be people who were formerly employed by the city for garbage pickup.

Some garbage services might offer daily pickup. Others offer twice weekly pickup for a lower cost. If the garbage pickup is late (as it often is in my neighborhood under the socialized garbage pickup system we have today), people switch to a competing service. If there is no competing service, then there is money to be made starting one, and some entrepreneur may do this, starting a more reliable service that will be able to charge higher rates, assuming that people care enough to pay for a more reliable service. Some entrepreneur realizes he can save money if he creates automated garbage pickup trucks, and this service is offered. Some entrepreneur realizes his pickup service can be available on call, any day of the week, so this service is offered. Some entrepreneur realizes he can make money offering an additional service where your garbage pickup men also clean up your yard. A dynamic market forms where people are constantly seeking to do a better job of picking up the garbage because doing so makes them money.

Unfortunately, cities don't do true privatization. Instead, here's what happens: the city scraps its own garbage pickup service and puts out a request for bids from private services. The city makes ONE choice of a private service for everybody. The city might pick the cheapest service. Or it might not. You might think it's better to pick a more expensive service that's more reliable. Or you might prefer to do it as cheap as possible. Either way, your individual preferences, and those of your neighbors, are not likely to be respected. The city might not even use price and quality of service to make its decision: the contract might go to the mayor's brother-in-law. Cronyism. (You'll note that such a situation can't occur under the true privatization scenario, where if somebody picks his brother-in-law he has to live with the consequences himself and can't impose them on other people.)

And of course the city signs a two year contract with the service provider. Lock in.

The garbage pickup company now has a lucrative government-granted monopoly. They'll pick up the garbage. But if they are late once in a while, their customers can't fire them. If they were in a free market, their customers would vacate them one by one at their own pace. But a city government cannot possibly react that fast, and may be locked in by a contract any way. The garbage pickup company has no incentive to come up with new services, or make its existing service better to customers. They just have to make sure they do the worst and cheapest job possible without making enough people angry enough to call the city council that the city council actually reacts strongly enough to affect their bottom line.

As more and more cities "privatize," such companies grow fatter, bigger, and less responsive. There's no market for little, agile, companies to spring up and meet needs with a fresher more energetic approach, because nobody has the money to consider switching to an alternative to the city monopoly service.

This, my friends, is what your government calls "privatization." But the truth is that it is socialism. You are meeting your needs as a collective, not individually. The city gets to brand the failures of a system that is collectivism, socialism, communism as if it were the failures of privatization, the free market, capitalism.

Over and over governments use this technique to brainwash you into fearing the free market. They make you and your neighbors fearful of what would happen if you didn't have the government to take care of your needs. You might sometimes notice that the government doesn't do a very good job of meeting some needs, but you'll be too afraid that without the government doing the job (complete with compulsory funding and compulsory participation) things would be worse to consider that there might be an alternative. And they'll try to work hard to meet enough needs that nobody gets too unhappy, as governments have since the first conquerer rode into the first conquered peaceful community and proclaimed himself "king." Like those kings, the governments will use its successes and what few services it does provide as propaganda to show people how benevolent their government is and how it helps them in ways that could never be done by ordinary people working together on their own accord.

By the way, you'll see the same thing with "deregulation." Deregulation means getting rid of the regulations. Governments never do this. But they will eliminate a couple of rules, possibly making others, and they'll take the opportunity to make a lot of noise about how great they are for trying "deregulation," just before the new system fails. Perhaps dramatically, as in the case of the California energy crisis, spawned by "deregulation." Of course, when you look at such failures, you never actually see a market without regulations. You see a situation where companies where regulated to the hilt and then suddenly allowed to set their own prices, or you see a situation where a government granted monopoly was suddenly forced to produce and sell its services at a forced price, possibly below cost, to new competitors. Of course these systems fail, but they don't represent a failure of freedom.

Whole Foods bludgeoned by Mafia for serving the public

2007-07-12T18:58:00.000Z

Right now, the Whole Foods Market chain is trying to buy the Wild Oats chain. This is an honorable move: Whole Foods is exchanging money that it has earned through serving society for a business with the consent of the owners of that business. Other than that, it's nobody else's business.

But the federal government is attempting to stop the trade. The federal government does not own Wild Oats, and therefore if they attempt to force their way on the subject, they are effectively stealing Wild Oats and/or Whole Foods. They may permit the true owners of these companies to retain some ownership rights, but as long as these owners have to get permission from some other party to do as they wish with what is their own, they are no longer truly owners, but instead stewards appointed by the true owners: government.

And that government says that it is representing you and me. I don't own a single share of either company. Do you? Could you explain why your agents are harassing these free citizens? If it's not moral for you to tell Wild Oats who they can and cannot sell their company to, then how did you delegate that authority to the government that is acting on your behalf and claims to derive its authority from you?

You can find a lot of writing demonstrating what a bad idea it is to allow government to forbid mergers and acquisitions that arise naturally in a free market. It harms all of us. But assuming you're a Christian reader, shouldn't it be enough to just know that God does not give us dominion over the property of other people, instead commanding us "Thou shalt not steal?"

You can also find Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's blog and read the case he makes, that Whole Foods purchasing Wild Oats will help, not harm, consumers. Of course it will help them! Whole Foods cannot make money without helping consumers. That's how businesses get consumers to give them money. The alternative is to steal the money, which can be accomplished by direct force or by using one's government to enact laws and use force indirectly. Isn't it strange that the government says it's a bad thing when Whole Foods tries to serve people, but says it's a good thing when they (the government) restrict private property rights and the free market and damage the market's ability to help people?

"Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil." (Isaiah 5:20)

Misimpressions about pollution

2007-07-11T18:39:00.000Z

Problem: "people wrongly believe that the world is dirtier and less healthy today than in the past."
Problem: "they blame capitalism."

Reality: "the free market is the greatest cleanser and disinfectant of the environment — the most successful pollution fighter that the world has ever known."

Why America today can handle more immigrants than ever before

2007-07-09T20:39:00.000Z

How many people can America support?

Okay, now that you've answered, how do you know that your answer is correct? What reasoning lies behind it? Is there any other rational reasoning process that could lead to a different result?

America today is far wealthier, healthier, resource-rich, and spacious than it was a century ago. Our ability to absorb immigrants is greater than ever. There's one reasoning process, and it makes perfect sense to me.

Of course, the fact is that the correct answer will be decided by the free market, if it's not injured and deprived of its free and moral character by regulation and socialism. And for that matter, a free market will be able to absorb more people, anyway, because it creates wealth and prosperity. But the thing you should realize is that you really have no idea how to decide how many people can be absorbed into our economy, and therefore you shouldn't seek to impose policy based on your estimate on everyone else.

Optimus Prime and the rights of all sentient beings

2007-07-03T19:48:00.001Z

Admittedly I liked the Transformers as a boy (I think every boy who was my age did). And admittedly I'm excited about the upcoming movie, which will be released tomorrow. And I'm particularly excited that Peter Cullen, the voice of the original Optimus Prime, will be reprising his role.

Optimus Prime was presented as the ultimate hero. He was completely noble, with perfectly pure motives. In multiple versions of the Transformers story (the cartoon and the comic books carried completely different stories, and the movie is starting yet another new version) that purity and nobility led him to give his life to save others. Sometimes multiple times -- it's science fiction, and that kind of thing happens.

Now as an adult I can ask serious questions like "Is it really good for kids to invest so much hero-worship in a fictional character, and an animated one at that?" And "if I'm using the word hero-worship, should I be a little worried, theologically?" And I definitely don't hold up Optimus Prime as the supreme example of morality, as I might've been more inclined to do at age seven or so. Obviously some people took Optimus Prime very seriously as a role model. And I confess I just bought a Softimus Prime for my second boy's first birthday. Probably he'll mostly just chew on it, not view it as a role model. (But it really transforms!)

But Optimus Prime got a lot of great heroic lines, and some of them taught good morality. And one of them forms the basis of my slogan for the work I do through this weblog and my writings and conversations elsewhere: "Secession is the right of all sentient beings."

Prime's original slogan was "Freedom is the right of all sentient beings." What a great 80's American slogan, huh? :) No wonder Optimus Prime is conspicuously colored in red, white and blue. But the American ideology of freedom is a good one. At least when you mean true freedom, the ideology of the founders, not the ideology of today where we pretend that "democracy" means "freedom" instead of "everybody voting on taking turns violating freedom."

In our world we don't have freedom, because we're missing a particular right. Without that right, freedom is meaningless. Ironically, tomorrow, the day the Transformers movie comes out, is the day that we have set aside for the past 231 years to celebrate men exercising that right: the right to secede. But today we have eliminated that right, and we brainwash children to create a public that actually thinks that not having that right is a foundation of freedom. The mind boggles.

The founders recognized that government was not an institution that magically deserved blind obedience from its subjects. The Declaration of Independence specifically states that government is an institution created by men in order to protect rights. It states that people are free and have the right to abolish and reform that government and create their own whenever the government isn't securing their rights. And when people do establish their government, nothing permits them to commit their descendants to give that government perpetual fealty, generation after generation. Nothing permits them to take away their descendants' rights as expressed in the Declaration of July 4, 1776.

How many things can you name that your government does that do not secure rights? Will your government recognize your right to secede? And if you want to stay with your government, will you recognize the right of other people to make a different choice?

Optimus Prime teaches children that all sentient beings, anything that can think, anything which, as the Christian might say, "has a soul" deserves freedom. He teaches it on a child's level. But adults wrote the declaration of independence, and if the message of Independence Day really is true, then Secession really is the right of all sentient beings. I acknowledge your right to secede, and may I suggest that you celebrate Independence Day by acknowledging mine, and that of others?

Immigration policy for "our" country

2007-07-02T18:40:00.000Z

This morning somebody asked my opinion of an email about illegal immigration, which began as follows:

Our country is worth reading a 8 minute speech. It is our country and to those that disagree go home as our fences keep people out not in.

I disagree starting with this fundamental premise.

It is not "our" country. Any time you start arguing from a "we" I submit that it's a sign that your thinking is off. Perhaps only off a little, but sometimes off a lot.

This is not "our" country. Only limited parts of it are mine. A small chunk in Dallas/Fort Worth, to be exact. The rest of it belongs to someone else. Some of it belongs to you guys, most of it belongs to people who aren't involved here.

God only gave me dominion over my part.

When you quit saying that some of it is mine, some of it is yours, etc., and start saying that all of it is "ours," you're thinking collectively, socialistically, Communistically. We are not a commune.

And you've also usurped property rights. "Thou shalt not steal" says the Lord. But the 'patriot' blurs the lines of ownership, pretends we all own it collectively, and thus justifies himself in exercising ownership over the property of others. I don't think God is fooled by such justification.

Hopefully all of us here would scream bloody murder if a movement started in the country that said "The children belong to all of us. Therefore we will all vote on how they are to be raised. We will vote to outlaw spanking, we will vote to outlaw parents teaching religion to their children, we will vote to remove children from the homes and raise them in government centers where they can be taught to seek the greater good, to serve society as good people should. They are OUR children, and OUR children deserve the best." We would rightfully respond "They are most certainly NOT 'our' children. These two are MINE." And we would fight or flee in order to see that our children do not become the state's children.

Of course there's a gigantic power in this country that exercises dominion over the entire thing. And it even offers to let us have a say in how that dominion will be exercised, and to vote on who is going to take turns having the power. The gigantic power continually repeats the collectivist mantra: that we are all in this together, that it all belongs to all of us, that we all have the right (really those who happened to get the turn at power this term) to tell individuals what they may and may not do with what is theirs, or even to take away all or some of it, to make completely blameless actions into illegal acts.

But since I can't exercise dominion over what is not mine, I can't legitimately delegate such a right to that power. Of course, God commands me to submit to it, and so I do. Even when it is not just. Even when it exercises dominion over the little pieces of property God has given to me. But I won't exercise that dominion over others, and I won't authorize anyone as my agent to do so on my behalf.

So in the end, here's what I think about immigration: the entire thing can be easily resolved with property rights, and that's the only righteous way to resolve it.

Here's some links to articles where I've seen this view expressed, or similar views expressed, or have expressed the same myself.

mises.org

tx.lp.org

unanimocracy.com

unanimocracy.com forum discussion

unanimocracy.com

It's wrong for me to tell someone they can't hire someone based on where they were born or happen to live. It's wrong for me to tell a property owner he can't sell or rent his property to certain people. It's wrong for me to take money and resources that don't belong to me to provide services to other people, whether they are "citizens" of "my" country, or not. It's wrong for me to exercise force against other people when they want to compete with me in whatever market/industry I participate in, rather than being industrious and adapting and finding another way to survive. It's my responsibility to provide for my family, by doing work that other people find valuable and will pay for, not by using force to prevent other men from fulfilling the same responsibility. It also so happens that economics teaches us that it is best for the economy if we do it God's way, rather than exercising such force.

What does the Bible say about immigration? Plenty. Look for "alien" and "stranger" in your Old Testament. You won't find a single statement that is encouraging to the view that God looks favorably on those who want to restrict immigration. That's my position.

Judge asserts right to raise my children

2007-05-04T16:37:00.000Z

I resent this. Cocaine energy drink has been banned in Texas. (Not by passing a law, of course. By a judge.) Why do I resent this? I don't like the idea of drinking something named after a harmful drug. I don't take drugs. I do drink energy drinks, but I wouldn't drink this one. It honestly scares me. :) My kids wouldn't be allowed to drink any energy drinks at all.

So why do I resent it? Because I'm not raising my kids in a commune. Judges are supposed to make decisions about the law, not make decisions about how we should all raise our children. That judge asserted a right over my kids which he does not have, and that's wrong.

Once upon a time those who were in charge of this country made decisions based on liberty. Now the decisions are made based on what's best for "us".

Folks, "we" are not in this together, and I'm not going to allow you to raise my kids. And in turn, I'm not going to even attempt to raise yours.

The Cocaine energy drink people did not do anything wrong. They came up with a product which I find disgusting. They are not ambushing people in alleys and forcing them to buy this product. Instead they are just offering to sell it. If you don't like it, don't buy it. The Cocaine energy drink people are not your slaves. You don't have the right to tell them what to do. They exist for themselves and for God, not for you. They've chosen to serve a market. If you're not a part of that market, it's none of your business. They are not slaves to society. But this judge has enslaved them.

Manstealing is a sin.

Please don't forward or listen to "gas out" emails

2007-05-01T18:21:00.000Z

The "boycott gas and hurt the evil oil companies" emails are circulating again.

This idea won't work. It's rooted in economic fallacies.

We're being conditioned by a conspiracy to covet what the oil companies own. The conspiracy is not headed up by human beings. Guess who has a vested self-interest in teaching us to use covetousness as a basis for our personal decisions and public policy?

See things clearly: when you're thinking that somebody is unjust because they won't sell what they own to you at the price you want, are you thinking like Jesus? Not according to Matthew 20, where Jesus didn't even bother to prove the principle He asserted in verse 15 because it was supposed to be obvious: "Is it not lawful for me to do what I wish with what is my own?" What's the Bible word for wanting what you do not have? Covetousness. Envy. See James 4:2. Don't dress it up pretty and pretend it's noble. It's ugly.

Please see also my covetousness category.