So, A Free, Open and Voluntary Society Can't Work

[moreluck]

Did you put that in the wrong thread?

Thanks trplnkl......I was so frustrated trying to make sure i wasn't being gullified again that I put it in the wrong thread.........

 

[wkmac]

Three Voluntary Economies

 

[wkmac]

AlterNet: Primer on Anarchism

Anarchism Is Not What You Think It Is -- And There's a Whole Lot We Can Learn from It

 

[wkmac]

Where is half of the global population now and where will 2/3rds be by 2020'?

Many of you on bothsides of the political landscape probably won't like this but it's becoming obvious, you can't fight the future. Think of all those billions and trillions of your labor hours ie property converted to tax dollars are being wasted across the planet as the Mafia thugs.....sorry establishment soldiers try all their might to maintain economic order for their masters and yet it's a bunch of 3rd world pleasants that in the end will undermine the great economic/industrial order created by the so-called "experts!" Could the global war on terror be something entirely different than is being sold?

And all these 3rd worlders needed was the ages old idea of Agorism!

Que up "Turn Out the Lights, The Party's Over" America! Let real Freedom Ring!

 

[wkmac]

Seems Greece is providing a teaching moment if the rest of the world, especially the US, will ever listen. And why is the OWS movement not all over this? Because it's true free market (self organizing and voluntary) and they just completely fail to see how it returns power back to the people while disconnecting the 1% from it's real means of power that is statist, hierarchical and exploitive which in the case of the last 2, OWS claims to be against.

In recent weeks, Theodoros Mavridis has bought fresh eggs, tsipourou (the local brandy: beware), fruit, olives, olive oil, jam, and soap. He has also had some legal advice, and enjoyed the services of an accountant to help fill in his tax return.
None of it has cost him a euro, because he had previously done a spot of electrical work – repairing a TV, sorting out a dodgy light – for some of the 800-odd members of a fast-growing exchange network in the port town of Volos, midway between Athens and Thessaloniki.
In return for his expert labour, Mavridis received a number of Local Alternative Units (known as tems in Greek) in his online network account. In return for the eggs, olive oil, tax advice and the rest, he transferred tems into other people’s accounts.
“It’s an easier, more direct way of exchanging goods and services,” said Bernhardt Koppold, a German-born homeopathist and acupuncturist in Volos who is an active member of the network. “It’s also a way of showing practical solidarity – of building relationships.”
He had just treated Maria McCarthy, an English teacher who has lived and worked in the town for 20 years. The consultation was her first tem transaction, and she used one of the vouchers available for people who haven’t yet, or can’t, set up an online account.
“I already exchange directly with a couple of families, mainly English teaching for babysitting, and this is a great way to extend that,” said McCarthy. “This is still young, but it’s growing very quickly. Plainly, the more you use it the more useful to you it gets.”

Greece communities walking away from the euro, fiat debt currency and even debt itself!

And if our dollar loses it's global reserve currency status and it all comes crashing down, we aren't destined to the world of Road Warrior chaos, fact is, just the opposite!

Fear is the mind killer, THINK!

 

[wkmac]

Cryptography shall always have a place in securing our digital future and most especially in securing our digital value. Advanced public-key encryption for the masses cannot be eliminated nor denied — the genie is out of the bottle and mankind is the better for it. The unintended consequence of regulating or restricting decentralized cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin is that their use as a currency will have been ‘recognized’ officially and that usage will be driven largely underground.


However, underground may not be so bad anymore as Robert Neuwirth points out in his brilliant Foreign Policy article, “The Shadow Superpower”. If aggregated, this $10 trillion global black market is the world’s second largest economy after the United States and it is also the world’s fastest growing economy. The OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) projects that, by the year 2020, fully two-thirds of the world’s workers will inhabit this shadow economy, or “System D.” As Neuwirth elaborates, it refers to the entire untaxed, unlicensed, and unregulated cash-based economy:

Could Bitcoin Become the Currency of System D?

 

[av8torntn]

Sort of related.

 

[wkmac]

Sort of related.

Good find. One of the best lessons of voluntary, self organization is to park your car and observe a major intersection with non-working traffic lights for about an hour. I was lucky to do this with my kids about 5 years ago and it was very instructive for them to see how people act once the burden of risk is place upon them. What was even more interesting was this happened during a period of rush hour and locals after it was over made note of how much better the overall traffic flowed without the lights. Sad most of them would never think it all the way out but then most of us never do.

 

[av8torntn]

People behave socially and 'well' even without rules: study

 

[wkmac]

Liquid Tide: A Black Market Currency

To me, this is an interesting observable event of human action. Beyond the obvious wrong of using theft to acquire the initial currency, once in the marketplace, it's a teaching moment IMO where markets and people who act within them will create working alternatives when monopolized systems no longer work such as in this case. And IMO our monopolized currency system have in truth begun to fail and collapse as some evidence to that fact is the growth of System D around the planet. Or the rise of BitCoin. I've even found local merchants who will take silver instead of Fed Notes and the exchange ratio is extremely attractive because the final price is driven down even further as the 3rd party rent seekers are removed.

This also piggybacks onto AV's post and link on people cooperating in a peaceful, compassionate manner when left to self organizing and voluntary means as well as my post in the "Science overturning the view of humans" thread or in observing people in the case of a traffic light failure. The illusion and necessity of topdown hierarchical control is collapsing among the masses and as a result we see the topdown state instituting more authoritarian control mechanisms should the time come to crush the rising tide (no pun) in order to protect it's own power base and control.

 

[804brown]

FOCUS: The Horrors of an Ayn Rand World

 

[av8torntn]

FOCUS: The Horrors of an Ayn Rand World

No government except the police, courts of law, and the armed services.No regulation of anything by any government.No Medicare or Medicaid.No Social Security.No public schools.No public hospitals.​

I see no down side.

 

[UnconTROLLed]

I see no down side.

Police, court of law, armed services, etc.

 

[wkmac]

Understanding the origins of state power



In the beginning ruling classes had a problem. It will be familiar to those acquainted with the Austrian critique of central economic planning: Rulers could not know what they needed to know to do the job they wanted to do. Societies, even seemingly primitive ones, are complex networks held together by unarticulated—and largely inarticulable—know-how (mētis). That presents a formidable obstacle to centralized rule, which requires minimum resistance from the ruled if it is to endure. Rulers, however, were not without recourse. If they couldn’t know the society they aspired to rule, they could (try to) shape it into something they could know. To use the term James C. Scott uses in his book Seeing Like a State, they could strive to make society “legible” in order to make it controllable.
Scott came to understand this point when studying “why the state has always seemed to be the enemy of ‘people who move around.’” He discovered that “[n]omads and pastoralists (such as Berbers and Bedouins), hunter-gatherers, Gypsies, vagrants, homeless people, itinerants, runaway slaves, and serfs have always been a thorn in the side of states. Efforts to permanently settle these mobile peoples (sedentarization) seemed to be a perennial state project—perennial, in part, because it so seldom succeeded.” He adds:

The more I examined these efforts at sedentarization, the more I came to see them as a state’s attempt to make a society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion. . . . I began to see legibility as a central problem in statecraft.

​

How to Think Like the Ruling Class

 

[wkmac]

If the Greeks can begin to move beyond the Euro...........

[video=youtube;9y9R0v96K48]http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=9y9R0v96K48#![/video]

can we begin to move beyond the Federal Reserve Note and it's unpayable debt?

 

[wkmac]

Forbes reporting that BitCoin, the virtual, digital monetary exchange system, is getting a $500k venture capital investment.