However, it's still easy to see looking back through history that anarchy and pure capitalism do not create optimal circumstances for success. Originally, a system similar to that is already what existed; there was once no governments and no real society, just tribes or random groups, and even then you can see having an organized group is better. And it was a very violent history with little in terms of technological progress. Over time, continuing to this day, people continue to develop a higher functioning form of government because having a government or organized society helps stop people from killing each other and allows the specialization of workers to create industrial scale production of things ranging from food to technology for the average person. Do you think humanity would have the capability to go to the moon without working together in an organized way on a large scale?
I don't think it's accurate to describe the primitive state as anything at all like anarcho-capitalism. Baboon troops are strictly hierarchical. Chimpanzees maintain a reasonably strict hierarchy. They don't have anything recognizable as government, but the idea that our distant ancestors were free in anything like the anarcho-capitalist sense is very... unlikely.
I don't think it's accurate to describe the primitive state as anything at all like anarcho-capitalism. Baboon troops are strictly hierarchical. Chimpanzees maintain a reasonably strict hierarchy. They don't have anything recognizable as government, but the idea that our distant ancestors were free in anything like the anarcho-capitalist sense is very... unlikely.
People were free to trade objects with each other if they wanted, build houses, build roads, build farms, ect, just not on a global scale. Different people would find different ways to live with each other or establish deals with different groups, and others were not so inclined to make deals.
Ah yes, it's the gool ol' "But without government, who will build the roads?" argument.
Perhaps the intended question is, "Who will pay for the roads?" And the answer is, "Whoever uses them." It is likely that local roads will be jointly owned by people that live on a street, who will arrange maintenance; arterials, where there is more opportunity for competition, are more likely to be owned by businesses that will compete for drivers and will collect money via per-use fees (more likely transponders than toll booths -- think modern technology!) or subscriptions.
Last May in Portland, a bunch of people got fed up with the poor service the government provided with the roads. Potholes were littered everywhere. They took matters into their own hands and pooled their money to get a paving company to repair the potholes. Of course, the city of Portland decided that only the governments can build the roads and kept the citizens from trying to repair the roads due to lack of permits.
This is a good example of why "Who will build the roads" is a bad argument against a stateless society. The city clearly did not care about the roads, but the individuals that actually used those roads did. It wasn't until the people decided to get someone else other than the government to fix the roads that got the city to use its monopoly on force to shut down the paving.
Meanwhile, on a stretch of road near my family home in Omaha, Nebraska, the residents assumed similar responsibility for street maintenance a couple decades back. Then they all decided, in what appears to be a textbook tragedy of the commons, that they weren't actually going to pay for it. Today, it's a mess. An embarrassment for a well-off suburban neighborhood, and a stark contrast to the perfectly fine municipally-maintained streets all around it. Would you like me to enumerate the potholes in order of size and severity of risk to suspension, or geographically from west to east?
This is a good example of why anecdotes are not good examples. For every engaging little fable one side of an argument can tell, the other side can tell their own. What this approach lacks is the element of objective quantification. So rather than rest my argument on the Tale of My Neighborhood Street, I'll instead ask a few questions: How much has the American federal government spent on the Interstate Highway System? How much have private companies spent on equivalent systems? How many miles of interstate are there, and how large is the total area serviced? How many miles of private equivalents are there, and how large is the area they service? What is the volume of traffic and economic activity on the interstate? What is the volume of traffic and economic activity on the private equivalents?
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
When libertarians argues for a society without a government, I find it very similar to marxians arguing for a society without money/trade/property. This is similar and will try to explain.
The exercise of political theory is the exercise of imagining a different human society (slightly different, like capitalism with ultralow taxes, or completely different, such as AC) and analyzing it using a certain criteria, normally a moral axiom. Sometimes the different human society idea spawns from this axiom (such as in libertarian political theory) but how authors come into certain conclusions has nothing to do with the abstract theory.
There are two fronts to analyze a political theory. First, if the imagined human society is feasible. Second, if the moral axiom produces a desirable moral framework. I'm not a moral philosopher so I will not argue from the second point. I feel like I've a valid argument for the first point though from my formation (economics, some side studies on social sciences as whole).
Is AC's society feasible? The vast majority of political theorists I've read ignores this point completely and argues from moral axioms alone. This is a mistake often committed by marxians and libertarians - ironically. I don't know why libertarians ignores this point entirely (Marxians do it because they belief theres no human nature - everything about peoples are mutable so any new society could be created as long as people changed to fit it).
As far as I know a society without a form of government is not feasible. Government emerges from the necessity of rules to organize people, so human interactions are predictable to certain extend. The naive no rules AC system quickly degenerates into private wars (because fighting and stealing is sure as hell as more economically efficient then respecting laws). The only internally consistent libertarian system is the one that argue for a private owned government.
Now, arguing how a private owned government promotes a less crony capitalism is the tricky thing. Imo it would promote more but the topic is certainly underdeveloped to a point anyone could be wrong about this.
You start to notice certain trends with them. "Small" being almost a necessity. You should also note that most of them got rolled over by a larger non-anarchist society.
As for contemporary ones (as in, didn't get rolled over yet), Freetown Christiania is a good one to look at. It's interesting to look at how its laws became more codified. And, how it reacted to the "biker gang" issue.
Of course, it only hasn't gotten rolled over yet because no one was to do it. One bomb and the place would be a glass parking lot.
As far as I know a society without a form of government is not feasible. Government emerges from the necessity of rules to organize people, so human interactions are predictable to certain extend. The naive no rules AC system quickly degenerates into private wars (because fighting and stealing is sure as hell as more economically efficient then respecting laws). The only internally consistent libertarian system is the one that argue for a private owned government.
Now, arguing how a private owned government promotes a less crony capitalism is the tricky thing. Imo it would promote more but the topic is certainly underdeveloped to a point anyone could be wrong about this.
It's a question of system stability as the system grows and evolves. I am sure that a group of dedicated believers could set up an AC system that would work for the first generation or two. Then it has to start dealing with standard societal issues that were suppressed due to the original group being in consensus about them. The new generation will have disagreements with the way things were set up and this will put stresses on the system. The dispute management system might prove inadequate and then more drastic methods might have to be used to keep the peace.
Outside factors will be even bigger stressers. A flood, drought or other environmental disaster can put the society in a shortage situation which can throw the community into chaos. An AC society would require its citizens to be very active politically and socially and a shortage situation will tend to shift people's focus inward. You will get factionism and clanism forming and an incentive to revert to a simpler, more authoritarian system of government.
I can see an AC society working for a while but it will be a fine balancing act. There will always be a tendency to revert to a more stable system.
I am sure that a group of dedicated believers could set up an AC system that would work for the first generation or two.
Any social system, to be stable, have to deal with dissenters (people inside the system that don't follow the system rules). A dedicated AC group could certainly exist but what would stop a dissenter from breaking it?
A system that holds only if everyone respect and follow the dogma is essentially unstable as dissenters are bound to appear. Non-anarchical social systems solve the issue by persecuting dissenters. In capitalism someone who doesn't abide the rules of property are locked out (example). AC are not allowed to have a public agency, so this typical solution is not possible.
Not only that, but AC even rewards it's dissenters. In any economy there are huge premium for crimes and without public agency those crimes go without a risk.
Normally libertarians solve this issue with creative private solutions that are much more economically viable in the form of a government (and thus, in a free market system the solution that would naturally emerge).
Libertarianism makes no sense if it's argued from a anarchist point of view. The at least logical libertarian position is the one of private owned governments.
Outside factors will be even bigger stressers. A flood, drought or other environmental disaster can put the society in a shortage situation which can throw the community into chaos. An AC society would require its citizens to be very active politically and socially and a shortage situation will tend to shift people's focus inward. You will get factionism and clanism forming and an incentive to revert to a simpler, more authoritarian system of government.
I can see an AC society working for a while but it will be a fine balancing act. There will always be a tendency to revert to a more stable system.
I am sure that a group of dedicated believers could set up an AC system that would work for the first generation or two.
Any social system, to be stable, have to deal with dissenters (people inside the system that don't follow the system rules). A dedicated AC group could certainly exist but what would stop a dissenter from breaking it?
A system that holds only if everyone respect and follow the dogma is essentially unstable as dissenters are bound to appear. Non-anarchical social systems solve the issue by persecuting dissenters. In capitalism someone who doesn't abide the rules of property are locked out (example). AC are not allowed to have a public agency, so this typical solution is not possible.
I can imagine a well enough self-selected group managing a functioning AC system for a while if they are dedicated enough to the dogma and have enough resources for stressers to be minimized. However, the second generation will be 'voluntold' into the system and there dissenters will start appearing for sure. Something as basic as someone sleeping with someone else's spouse can easily create a rift in such a community.
I remembers reading a sci-fi story about a planet with a colony of pacifist anarchist that was able to subvert an expedition from a statist planetary nation by civil disobedience and and showing the rank-and-file of the expedition a better way to live than being cogs in a big government machine. The system analyst in me quickly started seeing problems with the setup since the colony only worked because it had a low population that was spread out over a large area. They had one significant dissenter in their history and that guy went mad before he could do significant damage. Once the colony starts growing, the competition for resources will increase and the dissenters will start banding together into gangs and then armies.
I remembers reading a sci-fi story about a planet with a colony of pacifist anarchist that was able to subvert an expedition from a statist planetary nation by civil disobedience and and showing the rank-and-file of the expedition a better way to live than being cogs in a big government machine. The system analyst in me quickly started seeing problems with the setup since the colony only worked because it had a low population that was spread out over a large area. They had one significant dissenter in their history and that guy went mad before he could do significant damage. Once the colony starts growing, the competition for resources will increase and the dissenters will start banding together into gangs and then armies.
That sounds like Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed. Awesome book, by the way, and one of the better things is that while the statist/authoritarian planet is the clearer "bad society," the anarchist/pacifist planet is only ambigiously "good." There are still signs of corruption (that one professor in the college who selfishly hoards a bunch of books but nobody can really stop him, for example)... the society works, we're told, only because the planet is so arid that it's not really worth it to not cooperate. There's also a big computer that coordinates what jobs need doing, which disappointingly never got a chance to be tested in the real world.
Is AC's society feasible? The vast majority of political theorists I've read ignores this point completely and argues from moral axioms alone. This is a mistake often committed by marxians and libertarians - ironically. I don't know why libertarians ignores this point entirely (Marxians do it because they belief theres no human nature - everything about peoples are mutable so any new society could be created as long as people changed to fit it).
Libertarians are "praxaelogists" so they, as an explicit philosophical axiom, believe themselves to be right regardless of evidence. It's a tradition of the Austrian school.
It is people's natural state to dominate and control each other. How , exactly , do you construct a way of life in which people refrain from doing so? Coercion?
Since there will be hierarchy and coercion in some flavour, you better well make it the right one.
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Epic banner by Erasmus of æтђєг.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].
The best thing about this topic is that I'm pretty sure it's mostly just this dude attempting to rationalize pirating movies and trying to look philosophical about it by distracting us with his other poorly thought out points.
Just accept a certain amount of immorality in your life. Personally I pirated a lot while I was poor but I buy stuff now that I'm richish...not exactly strictly moral but it's the best I've got.
Unless it's GoT, I feel nothing about pirating that show until they make it available to buy without a stupid cable subscription. If it's "not television" then why do I have to buy cable, ya dicks?
Suspension for promotion of illegal activity. - Blinking Spirit
Is AC's society feasible? The vast majority of political theorists I've read ignores this point completely and argues from moral axioms alone. This is a mistake often committed by marxians and libertarians - ironically. I don't know why libertarians ignores this point entirely (Marxians do it because they belief theres no human nature - everything about peoples are mutable so any new society could be created as long as people changed to fit it).
Libertarians are "praxaelogists" so they, as an explicit philosophical axiom, believe themselves to be right regardless of evidence. It's a tradition of the Austrian school.
I think it's a tradition of all idealist not just Libertarians.
Forget traffic laws, how the hell would roads work in an anarcho-capitalistic society?[/quotes]
One of the reasons society functions smoothly is specifically because the government owns things like roads and public utilities. Can you imagine having privatized roads? Or privatized electricity? Imagine having a different set of electrical lines for each provider of electricity.
Ah yes, it's the gool ol' "But without government, who will build the roads?" argument.
Perhaps the intended question is, "Who will pay for the roads?" And the answer is, "Whoever uses them." It is likely that local roads will be jointly owned by people that live on a street, who will arrange maintenance; arterials, where there is more opportunity for competition, are more likely to be owned by businesses that will compete for drivers and will collect money via per-use fees (more likely transponders than toll booths -- think modern technology!) or subscriptions.
Last May in Portland, a bunch of people got fed up with the poor service the government provided with the roads. Potholes were littered everywhere. They took matters into their own hands and pooled their money to get a paving company to repair the potholes. Of course, the city of Portland decided that only the governments can build the roads and kept the citizens from trying to repair the roads due to lack of permits.
This is a good example of why "Who will build the roads" is a bad argument against a stateless society. The city clearly did not care about the roads, but the individuals that actually used those roads did. It wasn't until the people decided to get someone else other than the government to fix the roads that got the city to use its monopoly on force to shut down the paving.
Road infrastructure is the most expensive of all infrastructures used in society due to the need for constant upkeep and widening.
They require intensive capital investment followed by upkeep. The cost of the Interstate Highway System all came out to $425 billion adjusting for 2006 inflation. Adjusting for 2012 inflation, it's $482 billion.
Is AC's society feasible? The vast majority of political theorists I've read ignores this point completely and argues from moral axioms alone. This is a mistake often committed by marxians and libertarians - ironically. I don't know why libertarians ignores this point entirely (Marxians do it because they belief theres no human nature - everything about peoples are mutable so any new society could be created as long as people changed to fit it).
Libertarians are "praxaelogists" so they, as an explicit philosophical axiom, believe themselves to be right regardless of evidence. It's a tradition of the Austrian school.
I think it's a tradition of all idealist not just Libertarians.
The difference is that Libertarians explicitly hold it as a core belief. Praxelogical truth superceeds reality.
If an Austrian economist determines that turning on the heat will warm up his house and it gets colder instead he will believe that his home has warmed up rather than that there's something wrong with the heater. Shockingly the school of thought is reserved for fringe nutcases.
What's more, Iain M. Banks was quite explicit that he was writing about an advanced society that he'd like to see, not necessarily one that he thought was actually possible. I find it amusing that, freed of that limitation and allowing his imagination to run wild, he created an anarchist-ish society that actually reads as much more plausible than all those writers who've taken their utopian fantasies seriously. An author is at his best when he's being an author, I guess.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
What's more, Iain M. Banks was quite explicit that he was writing about an advanced society that he'd like to see, not necessarily one that he thought was actually possible. I find it amusing that, freed of that limitation and allowing his imagination to run wild, he created an anarchist-ish society that actually reads as much more plausible than all those writers who've taken their utopian fantasies seriously. An author is at his best when he's being an author, I guess.
Except when they make their own religions based on their books *cough*
Is being an author and a con artist mutually exclusive?
It's ars gratia artis versus ars gratia fraudis.
That's ridiculous. It's like saying OJ Simpson was never a football player because he murdered someone.
People wear many hats. A man can be a devoted father, a husband, an office worker, and an embezzler. Just because he's an embezzler doesn't mean he's not an office worker. And being an office worker doesn't mean he's not a devoted father.
That's ridiculous. It's like saying OJ Simpson was never a football player because he murdered someone.
When O. J. Simpson committed his crime, was that act a football play?
I never made this ridiculous claim you're attributing to me, that L. Ron Hubbard was never an author. When you think somebody has said something so ridiculous that it can be refuted by pointing out a banal truth, this is a big neon warning sign that you may actually be attacking a strawman. Let me rephrase for you what I was saying:
Art suffers when it is made for ulterior motives rather than its own sake.
That's it.
So can we drop this pointless tangent now, or are you going to keep trying to find things to quibble over where there are none?
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
This is a good example of why "Who will build the roads" is a bad argument against a stateless society. The city clearly did not care about the roads, but the individuals that actually used those roads did. It wasn't until the people decided to get someone else other than the government to fix the roads that got the city to use its monopoly on force to shut down the paving.
So what if I'm too busy to show up to every little policy decision in a direct democracy to choose which service provider our people are going to do? In ancient Greece it was mostly the rich, retired, and the poor who ended up in government. Everyone else was working, making babies, raising babies, and on and on. It's the old 80/20 rule.
What the problem with ancient Greece was that the rich would pay for certain projects, then they would commit a crime and then say "Hey I paid for that bridge, not convicting me would be a good idea." That sort of morality plays directly into a problem with justice, when we're all forced to pay for something we cannot singularly justify that we are more deserving than the other person.
Which we must also consider against the NAP, the rich guy's saying "I'm special" and then buying people off. If Bribery works on Emrakul, the Aeons Torn it's certainly also going to work on Little Girl. With or without government.
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Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
I don't think it's accurate to describe the primitive state as anything at all like anarcho-capitalism. Baboon troops are strictly hierarchical. Chimpanzees maintain a reasonably strict hierarchy. They don't have anything recognizable as government, but the idea that our distant ancestors were free in anything like the anarcho-capitalist sense is very... unlikely.
People were free to trade objects with each other if they wanted, build houses, build roads, build farms, ect, just not on a global scale. Different people would find different ways to live with each other or establish deals with different groups, and others were not so inclined to make deals.
Meanwhile, on a stretch of road near my family home in Omaha, Nebraska, the residents assumed similar responsibility for street maintenance a couple decades back. Then they all decided, in what appears to be a textbook tragedy of the commons, that they weren't actually going to pay for it. Today, it's a mess. An embarrassment for a well-off suburban neighborhood, and a stark contrast to the perfectly fine municipally-maintained streets all around it. Would you like me to enumerate the potholes in order of size and severity of risk to suspension, or geographically from west to east?
This is a good example of why anecdotes are not good examples. For every engaging little fable one side of an argument can tell, the other side can tell their own. What this approach lacks is the element of objective quantification. So rather than rest my argument on the Tale of My Neighborhood Street, I'll instead ask a few questions: How much has the American federal government spent on the Interstate Highway System? How much have private companies spent on equivalent systems? How many miles of interstate are there, and how large is the total area serviced? How many miles of private equivalents are there, and how large is the area they service? What is the volume of traffic and economic activity on the interstate? What is the volume of traffic and economic activity on the private equivalents?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
The exercise of political theory is the exercise of imagining a different human society (slightly different, like capitalism with ultralow taxes, or completely different, such as AC) and analyzing it using a certain criteria, normally a moral axiom. Sometimes the different human society idea spawns from this axiom (such as in libertarian political theory) but how authors come into certain conclusions has nothing to do with the abstract theory.
There are two fronts to analyze a political theory. First, if the imagined human society is feasible. Second, if the moral axiom produces a desirable moral framework. I'm not a moral philosopher so I will not argue from the second point. I feel like I've a valid argument for the first point though from my formation (economics, some side studies on social sciences as whole).
Is AC's society feasible? The vast majority of political theorists I've read ignores this point completely and argues from moral axioms alone. This is a mistake often committed by marxians and libertarians - ironically. I don't know why libertarians ignores this point entirely (Marxians do it because they belief theres no human nature - everything about peoples are mutable so any new society could be created as long as people changed to fit it).
As far as I know a society without a form of government is not feasible. Government emerges from the necessity of rules to organize people, so human interactions are predictable to certain extend. The naive no rules AC system quickly degenerates into private wars (because fighting and stealing is sure as hell as more economically efficient then respecting laws). The only internally consistent libertarian system is the one that argue for a private owned government.
Now, arguing how a private owned government promotes a less crony capitalism is the tricky thing. Imo it would promote more but the topic is certainly underdeveloped to a point anyone could be wrong about this.
BGU Control
R Aggro
Standard - For Fun
BG Auras
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities
You start to notice certain trends with them. "Small" being almost a necessity. You should also note that most of them got rolled over by a larger non-anarchist society.
As for contemporary ones (as in, didn't get rolled over yet), Freetown Christiania is a good one to look at. It's interesting to look at how its laws became more codified. And, how it reacted to the "biker gang" issue.
Of course, it only hasn't gotten rolled over yet because no one was to do it. One bomb and the place would be a glass parking lot.
It's a question of system stability as the system grows and evolves. I am sure that a group of dedicated believers could set up an AC system that would work for the first generation or two. Then it has to start dealing with standard societal issues that were suppressed due to the original group being in consensus about them. The new generation will have disagreements with the way things were set up and this will put stresses on the system. The dispute management system might prove inadequate and then more drastic methods might have to be used to keep the peace.
Outside factors will be even bigger stressers. A flood, drought or other environmental disaster can put the society in a shortage situation which can throw the community into chaos. An AC society would require its citizens to be very active politically and socially and a shortage situation will tend to shift people's focus inward. You will get factionism and clanism forming and an incentive to revert to a simpler, more authoritarian system of government.
I can see an AC society working for a while but it will be a fine balancing act. There will always be a tendency to revert to a more stable system.
Any social system, to be stable, have to deal with dissenters (people inside the system that don't follow the system rules). A dedicated AC group could certainly exist but what would stop a dissenter from breaking it?
A system that holds only if everyone respect and follow the dogma is essentially unstable as dissenters are bound to appear. Non-anarchical social systems solve the issue by persecuting dissenters. In capitalism someone who doesn't abide the rules of property are locked out (example). AC are not allowed to have a public agency, so this typical solution is not possible.
Not only that, but AC even rewards it's dissenters. In any economy there are huge premium for crimes and without public agency those crimes go without a risk.
Normally libertarians solve this issue with creative private solutions that are much more economically viable in the form of a government (and thus, in a free market system the solution that would naturally emerge).
Libertarianism makes no sense if it's argued from a anarchist point of view. The at least logical libertarian position is the one of private owned governments.
Totally agree.
BGU Control
R Aggro
Standard - For Fun
BG Auras
I can imagine a well enough self-selected group managing a functioning AC system for a while if they are dedicated enough to the dogma and have enough resources for stressers to be minimized. However, the second generation will be 'voluntold' into the system and there dissenters will start appearing for sure. Something as basic as someone sleeping with someone else's spouse can easily create a rift in such a community.
I remembers reading a sci-fi story about a planet with a colony of pacifist anarchist that was able to subvert an expedition from a statist planetary nation by civil disobedience and and showing the rank-and-file of the expedition a better way to live than being cogs in a big government machine. The system analyst in me quickly started seeing problems with the setup since the colony only worked because it had a low population that was spread out over a large area. They had one significant dissenter in their history and that guy went mad before he could do significant damage. Once the colony starts growing, the competition for resources will increase and the dissenters will start banding together into gangs and then armies.
That sounds like Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed. Awesome book, by the way, and one of the better things is that while the statist/authoritarian planet is the clearer "bad society," the anarchist/pacifist planet is only ambigiously "good." There are still signs of corruption (that one professor in the college who selfishly hoards a bunch of books but nobody can really stop him, for example)... the society works, we're told, only because the planet is so arid that it's not really worth it to not cooperate. There's also a big computer that coordinates what jobs need doing, which disappointingly never got a chance to be tested in the real world.
See also Iain Banks' Culture setting, where the society is pretty darn kickass but also has its various problems. Similarly it helps that the Culture is almost entirely spacefaring (so it behooves one to be polite when there's hard vacuum on the other side of the wall, yet there's lots of room if you want to leave), and governed by godlike machine intelligences (not that they're perfect).
Very Well Then I Contradict Myself.
Libertarians are "praxaelogists" so they, as an explicit philosophical axiom, believe themselves to be right regardless of evidence. It's a tradition of the Austrian school.
Since there will be hierarchy and coercion in some flavour, you better well make it the right one.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].
Just accept a certain amount of immorality in your life. Personally I pirated a lot while I was poor but I buy stuff now that I'm richish...not exactly strictly moral but it's the best I've got.
Unless it's GoT, I feel nothing about pirating that show until they make it available to buy without a stupid cable subscription. If it's "not television" then why do I have to buy cable, ya dicks?
Suspension for promotion of illegal activity. - Blinking Spirit
EDH Primers
Phelddagrif - Zirilan
EDH
Thrasios+Bruse - Pang - Sasaya - Wydwen - Feather - Rona - Toshiro - Sylvia+Khorvath - Geth - QMarchesa - Firesong - Athreos - Arixmethes - Isperia - Etali - Silas+Sidar - Saskia - Virtus+Gorm - Kynaios - Naban - Aryel - Mizzix - Kazuul - Tymna+Kraum - Sidar+Tymna - Ayli - Gwendlyn - Phelddagrif 4 - Liliana - Kaervek - Phelddagrif 3 - Mairsil - Scarab - Child - Phenax - Shirei - Thada - Depala - Circu - Kytheon - GrenzoHR - Phelddagrif - Reyhan+Kraum - Toshiro - Varolz - Nin - Ojutai - Tasigur - Zedruu - Uril - Edric - Wort - Zurgo - Nahiri - Grenzo - Kozilek - Yisan - Ink-Treader - Yisan - Brago - Sidisi - Toshiro - Alexi - Sygg - Brimaz - Sek'Kuar - Marchesa - Vish Kal - Iroas - Phelddagrif - Ephara - Derevi - Glissa - Wanderer - Saffi - Melek - Xiahou Dun - Lazav - Lin Sivvi - Zirilan - Glissa
PDH - Drake - Graverobber - Izzet GM - Tallowisp - Symbiote Brawl - Feather - Ugin - Jace - Scarab - Angrath - Vraska - Kumena Oathbreaker - Wrenn&6
I think it's a tradition of all idealist not just Libertarians.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
Road infrastructure is the most expensive of all infrastructures used in society due to the need for constant upkeep and widening.
They require intensive capital investment followed by upkeep. The cost of the Interstate Highway System all came out to $425 billion adjusting for 2006 inflation. Adjusting for 2012 inflation, it's $482 billion.
TxDOT plans to spend $800 million for expansions and upkeep on major Texas roads.
Tell me which corporate entity can afford to maintain the level of upkeep needed for all road and bridge projects in the United States.
The difference is that Libertarians explicitly hold it as a core belief. Praxelogical truth superceeds reality.
If an Austrian economist determines that turning on the heat will warm up his house and it gets colder instead he will believe that his home has warmed up rather than that there's something wrong with the heater. Shockingly the school of thought is reserved for fringe nutcases.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Except when they make their own religions based on their books *cough*
No, you see, that's an author not being an author, because he's being a con artist instead.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Is being an author and a con artist mutually exclusive?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
That's ridiculous. It's like saying OJ Simpson was never a football player because he murdered someone.
People wear many hats. A man can be a devoted father, a husband, an office worker, and an embezzler. Just because he's an embezzler doesn't mean he's not an office worker. And being an office worker doesn't mean he's not a devoted father.
When O. J. Simpson committed his crime, was that act a football play?
I never made this ridiculous claim you're attributing to me, that L. Ron Hubbard was never an author. When you think somebody has said something so ridiculous that it can be refuted by pointing out a banal truth, this is a big neon warning sign that you may actually be attacking a strawman. Let me rephrase for you what I was saying:
Art suffers when it is made for ulterior motives rather than its own sake.
That's it.
So can we drop this pointless tangent now, or are you going to keep trying to find things to quibble over where there are none?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
So what if I'm too busy to show up to every little policy decision in a direct democracy to choose which service provider our people are going to do? In ancient Greece it was mostly the rich, retired, and the poor who ended up in government. Everyone else was working, making babies, raising babies, and on and on. It's the old 80/20 rule.
What the problem with ancient Greece was that the rich would pay for certain projects, then they would commit a crime and then say "Hey I paid for that bridge, not convicting me would be a good idea." That sort of morality plays directly into a problem with justice, when we're all forced to pay for something we cannot singularly justify that we are more deserving than the other person.
Which we must also consider against the NAP, the rich guy's saying "I'm special" and then buying people off. If Bribery works on Emrakul, the Aeons Torn it's certainly also going to work on Little Girl. With or without government.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
1) No crashes/drunkving.
2) They go faster.
3) They use less fuel (economy.)
4) They use less fuel (environment.)
Witness as the grand free market decides the best solution.
But I also propose even distribution of number of cards in each rarity: Large set: 60 c, 60 u, 60 r, 60 m.
Probabilities of particular cards: Common 7/60, Uncommon 1/12, Rare 1/20, Mythic 1/60.
I'm fairly certain that "anti-train" is not a phrase I'd use to describe the US government.