Voluntary Society and Spontaneous Order

[wkmac]

But What About the Roads

When making the case for a truly free and stateless society built on the principles of the voluntary market order, one of the most common objections is the production and maintenance of roads. Roads, say the statists, are a public good that are essential for transportation and commerce and must be socialized, regulated, and controlled.
It is true that roads and streets are incredibly important to the division of labor and the supply of goods. They are also one of the most intimate and obvious examples of human interaction. They are a complex network of competing and coordinating interests, like cells travelling through veins or solar systems in a galaxy.
Yet they are also one of the most heavily regulated and controlled aspects of our lives. In any drive through a major metropolitan city, one will undoubtedly come across a multitude of signs, colors, arrows, prohibitions, and most importantly, traffic jams.
Are clogs in traffic related to how our roads are bastions of miniature Soviet-style centrally-planned dictates? Fit Roads thinks so. It's an organization that "opposes regulation which contrives conflict, usurps our judgement, dictates our behaviour, and deprives us of choice. Based on a trust in human nature rather than an obsession with controlling it, FiT could launch an era of peaceful co-existence on our roads."
In a very interesting experiment, Fit Roads documents a town in England (near Bristol) that removed traffic lights from a heavily trafficked intersection that had been known for long delays and collisions.
The results of this trial should not surprise anyone familiar to libertarian theory and the free market. "I didn't think it would work without the lights. But everyone is taking their time and they were sensible...You usually wait 20 minutes to get through, but not tonight. 5 minutes to move through, I timed it," says one woman being interviewed. "This is an absolute surprise," says another interviewee, echoing the general sentiment. "Not to see traffic stalled and pumping out fumes all day long...this is an absolute pleasure."
Pedestrians, too, are far safer on this anarchic intersection. "It's less congested and easier to cross as well," recalls a young student.

 

[wkmac]

How free market voluntary currency helps stimulate local markets by going around the Federal Reserve. And it's those nasty, socialist, marxist lefties doing it too!

At the height of economic anxiety in November 1991, a community organizer named Paul Glover decided to start his own currency, called Hours, in Ithaca, NY. Today, it’s the nation’s oldest local currency still in use, a trendsetter that’s been joined by other substitutes for the greenback that have sprung up nationwide since the onset of the Great Recession. Contrary to what one might expect, the movement for local currencies is not dominated by conservative and libertarian followers of Ron Paul eager to “End the Fed.” In fact, the political left has been most receptive to the cause of region-specific money.
Glover—who has started about 18 different organizations in his lifetime, most of them advocating a fusionist mix of progressive and localist policy—explains the situation he faced in the early ’90s: “Ithacans had too few dollars, even though we were ready to produce and to purchase. We needed more money and more control of investment and interest rates.”
He decided to solve the problem himself by issuing a currency that could only be used in the Ithaca area. After designing the Hour and convincing 90 local citizens and small businesses to agree to use it, he published his first newspaper directory of participants and invited everybody else in the small college town to, in his words, “join the fun.”
The system is relatively simple. The currency is managed by a board of directors, who are elected by members of the Hours program. To become a member, one need only pay a yearly fee to be listed in the newspaper directory. The Hours themselves are pegged to the U.S. dollar at a fixed 10:1 ratio—$10 buys one Hour, a rate that hasn’t changed since the system started in 1991.
Hours are pumped into the local economy through grants given to community organizations and interest-free loans, with the board determining who receives these funds. The largest loan to date was worth 3,000 Hours. According to Glover, 11,000 Hours have been issued since the system started, but the amount in circulation is unknown.
Once bought, Hours can’t be converted back into dollars, ensuring that the money is kept in the region. Hours also can’t be deposited in checking or savings accounts because, as Glover says, “Hours are designed to be spent rather than saved.”
The system is legal: any citizen can print his own currency—so long as it doesn’t resemble U.S. dollars.
And from a historical perspective, local currencies are nothing new. Privately made coins circulated widely in England at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and local bank notes were commonplace in America until the Civil War. During the Great Depression, local paper currencies were popular on both sides of the Atlantic as deflation made national currencies scarcer.
Local currencies in the U.S. disappeared once the Depression was over. But in the 20 years since the Hour debuted, 80 more have sprung up in the U.S. and Canada, many using the program in Ithaca as a model. Others have adopted systems in which, for example, one unit of local currency can be purchased for $0.95 but will be accepted in stores at a full dollar’s worth. That type of system essentially turns the currency into a buy-local discount program.

Crunchy Currency

 

[wkmac]

The process of circumventing the State has begun.

“I know that you’re afraid … you’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. … I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. … I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you. A world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries. A world where anything is possible.”

The Stigmergic Revolution

 

[moreluck]

Stigmergy ??? Who talks like that??

All I know that is similiar in sound is Stigma or Stigmata and the last person I heard about that was real was Padre Pio.