From the Hit & Run Blog at Reason.com:
Positing a “market” in elections and campaigns, the Debate Commission and major parties are alleged to be illegally colluding and creating barriers to entry.
I blogged the other day about early reports on a lawsuit, that will likely be officially filed tomorrow, in which the Libertarian and Green parties (and their last presidential candidates) are suing the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD), along with the Republican and Democratic National Committees, and Barack Obama and Mitt Romney to boot (as well as some others associated with CPD).
Among other goals (mostly involving compensation for damages alleged), the suit seeks to eliminate the “getting 15 percent in a national poll” criteria for debate access, and to dissolve the CPD itself.
I noted that in the article about the suit in the Washington Post I quoted and commented on, lawyer Bruce Fein didn’t mention that previous suits had been filed to achieve the same thing by 2012 L.P. candidate Gary Johnson.
Here are those suits, one based on antitrust grounds, the other on “breach of contract” grounds.
Johnson’s vice presidential candidate Judge Jim Gray (a plaintiff in this suit) contacted me to let me know they don’t think those earlier suits are relevant to how this one will go because, rather than losing on the specific merits of the argument, the earlier suits had been thrown out on technical jurisdictional questions.
Read the rest at Reason.
[vroman part 5]
Bob concluded by essentially saying that the only way to anarchy is an enormous campaign of rational evangelism. He disapproves of the whirlwind anarchy in Somalia and similar power vacuums. I disagree. I see much more hope for building Ancapland out of the lawless ashes of a Somalia, than of gradually subliming the promised land out of the monolithic State in an America. If AP does prove the alarmists right, and crashes society into an apocalyptic period, (I do not think this is the case) still, such a turn of events will be in the long run an easier path to Ancapism than the intellectual erosion strategy. Murphy points out the example of the bloodless revolutions in Eastern Europe. To which I respond derisively, what revolution? They traded hard line Russki-communism for soft line Euro-socialism. That’s even more of a joke than American style Republicrat lesser-evilism. Stasi agents all retired on embezzled millions, and now the Great Terror War is inviting domestic espionage back in force all across the Continent. The only revolution that arguably has ever made recognizable progress is the American experiment, which is notable for killing employees of the previous regime by the thousand. If Thomas Jefferson could have emailed digicash to pub brawlers in London, or scheming heirs in Buckingham palace, mad King George’s confused reign would have come to a deserved end before he could futilely attempt to reclaim his rebellious colonies. The point being, in order to get anarchism, I don’t think it’s a question of getting the balls to start sledge hammering the Berlin Wall and hope the Kalishnikov toting border guard respects the numbers presented by all your fellow civil disobeyers. If the only fall out is a different set of thugs being in charge tomorrow, there will of course be less State resistance than if the entire thug industry is being called into question. If you want real change as in no more thugs, ever, then the top thugs aren’t going to budge until they have no other choice. The ultimate conclusion then is that if anarchism takes a revolution of the non-bloodless variety, there’s no reason why the fighters shouldn’t be backed up by a means to get at the higher ups. Or better yet, replace the fighters entirely with anonymous assassins and strike exclusively at the heights of power. I know I don’t want to spend much time huddling in trenches.
It undoubtedly sounds arrogant, but I would say that less than 1% of global population has any concept of how the world (i.e. economics) really works, and of those that do, most have got it horribly wrong. However, when they are forced to suddenly make do for themselves in the absence of authority, as is the case of Somalia, Ancapism spontaneously appears without the presence of wise graduate student mentors preaching Mises. It sure would be nice, naturally, if Bob could go over and warn them off from accepting UN overtures of providing “stable governance”, but the point is they were able to find profitable anarchism on their own, with little to no knowledge of economics and certainly no deep respect for pacifism. All it took was the total destruction of their state, the means notwithstanding. On the other hand if Murphy expects to get some percentage of the population to side with him before picking up a hammer, he will definitely be taking the long uphill route.
Murphy says that a generation growing up surrounded by headlines full of dead famous people will be disastrous. I fail to see how this could be more damaging than the scores of generations stretching back into history that grew up with headlines of how great the State is. The Somalians lived through generations of war, where life was made quite cheap, yet now they are Africa’s best chance.
If AP worked perfectly and stripped the state away by force in a relatively short time frame, people will be thrust into unfamiliar territory. No doubt in their confusion they will attempt to recreate State functions. These will be torn down again and again. Like a child getting its hand slapped every time it reaches for the hot stove, AP will discipline the world that concentrations of power are bad. In the mean time, if Murphy is able to patiently explain to the bewildered why this is the case, so much the better, but either way, there will be no more State, and they will not have a choice in the matter. Murphy is essentially advocating a Taking Children Seriously approach to enlightening the collectively childlike population. I would rather just smack them until they stop and maybe explain briefly afterwards why.
Lastly, it seems clear to me that AP is superior because it is a market process. People exchange value for perceived value. They invest their money for the benefit of removing aggressive people from society. On the other hand, Murphy is advocating a “educate the masses” routine that depends solely on he and his colleague’s dedication to the cause. Not to disparage his efforts, honestly, if anyone can do it, the current crop of anarchist intellectuals has got my fullest confidence. However, I really don’t think anyone is going to listen until they are already living in it. I see the economic wizards role as after the fact guides in the new wonderful world of anarchism wrought by AP and other market strategies. Once everyone is stuck in their regional equivalents of Somalia, and wondering what the hell just happened, Bob and co, will step in and say, “Hey, isn’t this great, look how much more we can get done now!”
And people, who have been forced to find alternatives to formerly government offered services, and no longer obey regulations or sacrifice taxable income, will sit up and finally notice Bob, and say, “What the fuck? Why haven’t we always done this? Thanks, Bob!”
Bob will then smile knowingly and go on a worldwide lecture tour.
Then from time to time, a few clueless bastards will try to “get all the guns and take over”. AP will mercilessly smite them. Life goes on. In the meantime, I await the next round of objections.
August 15, 2002
[end of vroman part 5]
[vroman part 4]
Murphy says that if AP works well enough to destroy the state, it won’t stop there and will completely shred civilization.
He claims for example that just as disgruntled citizens can axe politicians at will, laid off workers can axe their cost cutting former employers, and that any defenses the private individuals can use, will be even easier for the state to use.
This is wrong on both counts. Not only is it harder for capitalists to be killed, they can defend themselves from AP easier.
First of all, there are vastly more high ranking business owners than there are high ranking bureaucrats. If the AP betting population suddenly gained an all consuming irrational desire to destroy capitalism, it would take a far greater monetary investment against businessmen than politicians, to reach that tipping point where targets are scared away from their positions.
Furthermore, each individual businessman has a much smaller pool of people affected by his decisions. Whereas everyone in the country has to deal with the onerous decrees of the gang in Washington, there are many orders of magnitude fewer people dependent on any given board of directors. Presumably, people who don’t work for that company will not be very inclined to donate money, just as not many Americans would bet against Italian party chiefs. Therefore if the boss does manage to royally piss off the workers, he has much fewer potential bettors against him. These are people who have just lost their source of income (with no welfare to look forward to), and have fewer co-conspirators; they will not be able to produce nearly as enticing bounties as those that public officials will accrue. Keep in mind that people who bet against politicians will be expecting their incomes to rise in the absence of taxes, and thus be more likely to bet higher.
More importantly, the boss knows who they are. If murder is being considered its likely due to them being whipped into a fury by some mafia goon union boss. The CEO has much more money at his disposal than an unemployed working class gang. If the union leader agitates his followers to wreak AP based revenge against the CEO, he can’t expect to survive either. Anyone who attempts to rally workers to donate their already dwindling cash reserves into pointless vengeance will see his own name rising on the list faster than the CEO’s. The population of an entire state will be large enough that the number of independent people willing to put money against their powerful enemies will not require there be anyone egging them on. In order for smaller interest groups to get their petty revenge, a more coordinated effort is required. Harder still is that the potential victims have a much more conveniently sized body of suspects to watch, compared to politicians who are being targeted by anonymous bettors hiding among millions or billions.
And better still, if the CEO knows whom he fired and who is threatening him, then everyone else knows as well. Would you hire workers who had paid for the assassination of their last employer? If a group of people are fired and their ex-boss is subsequently the target of a fat AP prize, then the entire group will immediately be blacklisted by every other employer. This will provide a huge incentive for individual workers not to toe the union line. Their own reputation and future employability rests on breaking their professional relations civilly or at least without bloodshed.
This situation might instead just serve to impress upon corporations the need to be more careful in their hiring and firing. Only take on workers you really need, and only let them go after careful consideration, and in that event, possibly firing them in smaller batches, rather than mass lay offs. Nevertheless this may indeed grant more power to workers. We must remember that not all corporations are nobly building wealth in spite of government machinations. Occasionally there really are scumbags who abuse employees, is it such a disaster if such people fear lethal retaliation for their misdeeds?
Another dystopian fear is that AP will support murders between non-famous people over petty frustrations. A scumbag husband wants to get out of a divorce without losing half his wealth, so if he thinks an AP bet worth a quarter of his wealth will get the job done, and does so. An unrelated party kills the wife, scumbag cuts his losses nicely, and the wife is horrendously aggressed against with no chance of justice for her family.
Yes this is a problem that AP would exacerbate. Choosing your spouse carefully has always been good advice. However, if the wife’s lawyers checked the AP records and found there had been a substantial prize, despite her being a generally well liked individual, they would decide that the “unrelated” killer might not be such a random tragedy after all. And proceed to hire detectives to investigate the ex-husband’s financial records to find a similarly sized hole. Even if he expertly hid all his transactions with encryption and such, the sheer lack of other suspects may lead an arbitration committee to demand the husband prove his innocence. I assume hiring an assassin to initiate aggression will be a crime in Ancapland, but I will let others debate that.
Like the threatened businessman who knows who his potential threats are, in the case of an innocuous unknown being the victim of AP, it will be easy to discover the few or single person that has motivation to invest the significant money involved. AP in fact hurts the chances of the anonymous petty murderer, because the record of one’s prize is public. Anyone who cares to investigate the death of an AP victim can see exactly how much it cost. If the victim had few enemies, it is a simple matter to make the connection between the specific sum and the likely suspects.
Compare this to the case of a low level bureaucrat that Murphy complains is just as vulnerable as the rest of us. He is right in saying that it doesn’t require one big bet, only lots of little bets. However, unless the bureaucrat has managed to piss off all those people placing the little bets, they won’t happen, and he is safe. If the bureaucrat has managed to do so then there’s probably a reason he deserves it. People in the phone book though, probably do not have multitudes of enemies, and thus are safe from all but an exceptionally wealthy psychopath, which I imagine are few and far between.
As for the extortion scheme that Jim Bell rather awkwardly argued against and Bob accurately deflated. The problem there is that the extortionist needs to have enough money of his own to actually place the bet that will attract assassins to his victim.
Fortunately, extortionists usually ply their trade because they don’t have any money. The thug could bluff, but if called on it, he has no bargaining chips in this case, like an old fashioned significant other duct taped in the basement.
If he actually does have the money and the victim calls his bluff, if he goes through with his threat, he has just spent a shit load of money to kill someone for no reason, and with no return benefit to the extortionist. Not a very profitable scam.
If he does convinces the target to play along, he still has to communicate his threat. Such exchanges usually involve some amount of negotiation, or complicated instructions that require communication. The extortionist has to sacrifice a lot of anonyminity to pull his crime off. This weakness gives the presumably deep pocketed target plenty of opportunity to spend some of that ransom on private detectives to locate the extortionist. The criminal in this case has no human shields to prevent a raid.
The benefit of AP is to allow anonymous assassination contracts, in both the case of the vengeful labor leader, and the crafty extortionist, both lose that shield and leave themselves wide open to retaliation from the greater resources of their chosen enemies.
Another concern mentioned on the forum, is that the State, with its trillions of revenue will actually invest money into AP to off its political opponents. This is a pretty ridiculous proposal.
First of all, the enemies of your enemies are not necessarily your friends. If the State pays an AP assassin to shoot some, say, ultra-lefty criticizing them, are we really that much worse off? In fact, I’d be overjoyed to see politicians taking out AP bets against their opponents for the most part. Why should a democrat spend valuable campaign money on advertising when he could just pay to have his republican opponent drop out of the race permanently? Libertarians are rare enough that I doubt we present a serious enough threat to the State compared to their fellow parasites scrambling for the best suck spot, that they’d spend money to attack Harry Browne instead of their opponent in the primary who has a real chance of ousting them.
Another problem with this supposed counter strategy is that it’s entirely unnecessary. If the State really wants to kill someone, they already have all the tools; they don’t need to spend money on AP. They could just give Lon Horiuchi his normal paycheck and have him snipe whomever they don’t like. It’s not as if they ever get in trouble for it, even when they aren’t exactly subtle. It doesn’t make sense for them to pay for secrecy they don’t need.
Finally, this plan would backfire, because if the admins are anarchists, and they take a commission, then the State, by playing AP, is directly enriching someone who will re-invest his profit against State targets. Also, the assassins don’t care who they kill if the money’s right. The State is also enriching people who will be just as happy to come back and shoot Statists, now with more resources to plan hits too.
[end vroman part 4]
Okay, here I am presented a conflict between my policies of:
1) reading every comment on IPR that shows up in recent comments when I am free; and
2) not wasting my time reading the ravings of a batshit crazy lunatic
I think I’m going to have to stick with #2. It’s the end of an era for my IPR comment reading streak.
Matt Apple, brought up a similar potential scam on the forum:
“Another problem is the targets could fake their deaths. Suppose I’m a powerful person you’ve targeted. I just buy a day and then fake my death on that day. I put out a phony death certificate, maybe I even provide some gruesome staged photos of me lying dead. The media reports me dead and the operator releases the dough to the “guesser” ie me. As soon as the anonymous transaction is completed I appear on camera at a live press conference and announce that the plans of the evil electronic terrorists have been foiled and that in an ironic twist I’m donating the bounty they had on my head to the FBI. If this happened just once then all the people pumping up those bounties will lose their faith in the system.”
If the media is so blatantly lied to, then more so than the AP bettors, the media itself will not believe future death reports. They will want to take pictures at the autopsy or do whatever it takes to have ironclad proof that this guy really is dead. If the media becomes an overt tool of the state, there will still be people who demand an objective news source, whether they are AP sympathizers or not. This demand will support the Matt Drudges of the world who will find a way around mainstream hegemony, and AP can be programmed to ignore statist media.
Murphy doubts that my army of gutter trash will be able to make a dent in the ruling class. Perhaps he’s right that the average street hoodlum will only be successful in killing mid level bureaucrats that the State can’t afford to lavish security on. However if that were true, is it really such a crucial flaw? If AP bettors come to realize that the tiptop of the pyramid can find impenetrable missile silos to hide in, then it’s no longer cost effective to chase them with ever higher donations. Like any institution, the State clearly needs support personnel, and even if they do choose to hide in Mt. Cheyenne, they still need people on the ground at the very least to crack heads and collect taxes to keep the lights on down in their hole. If AP bettors become frustrated that the juicy targets are out of range, the next level down is going to take the brunt of it in the face. It might be fun to be a storm trooper, but if suddenly you, due to lack of options, become the priority target for the assassination market, maybe its time to turn in your badge and go back to vocational school. Additionally if you are an ordinary citizen who has up to this time not been involved with AP at all, but suddenly you notice that the tax collectors who stay above ground are getting executed with alarming frequency, you might be more inclined to gamble on fudging your returns or not paying at all, and hoping that the constant harassment provided by AP will prevent the revenue harvesters from noticing you.
If the State is denuded of its agents and means of interaction, then it is just as harmless as if it had been chopped up directly.
However, it would naturally be more efficient to strike the root. AP would reach its end goal quickest, with the least collateral damage, if assassins were able to hit the politicians even in their super-bunkers. There’s an argument that there is some upper bound beyond which additional funds will no longer influence the odds of an assassination taking place. Meaning that if $500M is not enough to convince anyone to take a chance on the target, $5B probably won’t either. That may be the case for individuals, but not for groups of AP players. If a mercenary or terrorist group became interested in mounting a multi-person operation like the WTC attack, then the higher the bounty gets, the more equipment they can buy and more personnel they can recruit for the plan. If say, there were multi-million dollar bounties on Saddam Hussein (a safe example) and all his top generals and lieutenants, making their bunker a concentrated mega bounty, it could become worthwhile for some para-military unit to risk a raid. The highest paid professional mercenaries in the world are employed by Sandline International and, according to the UN (who wants to ban their line of work), they make no more than $300,000/yr. That’s not chump change, but for someone who rides shotgun in a chopper chasing down African guerrillas for a living, the extra risk driving into Baghdad might be worth the hazard pay offered by AP.
Taken to its logical conclusion, if there were enough extremely high bounties on a country’s leaders, who were all clustered into one spot, no matter how well defended, it could be cost effective for army sized forces to be mobilized to seize the prize. So even if the top brass did hole up in the ultra bunkers, entire legions of militiamen or other adventurous chaps might come a knocking to snag all those billions.
Murphy goes on to say that the average Americans will be horrified by the idea of AP. True, the 50% of the population who don’t bother to vote probably will not feel their time is well spent influencing the political system by AP or any other method. Of the other half, probably the majority has no deep interest in the issues or understands anything beyond doing one’s civic duty. Of that slim percentage that actually have strong to passionate views, whatever they may be, therein lies AP’s demographic. What Bob fails to realize is that AP bettors will not know what they are doing, long term. Very few people are going to consciously decide they want to get rid of government and put money on it. Instead they will donate money against specific politicians in the hope it will help advance whatever pet cause they clutch so dearly. Think if AP were in place back in the 2000 election. Are you a greenie who can’t stand the thought of oilman GW raping poor Gaia? Give AP some of your weed money and see what happens. Are you a good ol’ boy who thinks eco-feminist Al Gore will send the beloved US of A the way of the Roman Empire? Put off buying that new truck and see what AP can do. Even the most authoritarian bastard who ever cast a ballot can list some Statists of a slightly different breed that rub him the wrong way. Do you doubt the gun culture would pass up on an opportunity to bury some liberals, or for the religious right hypocrites to take out some of the godless queers in Washington, or radical feminists putting their 79 cents on the dollar against Deep South carpetbaggers? And more importantly than private citizens, don’t forger corporate-statists, like Big Ass Subsidies Inc who’s pocket politician might lose to the candidate who’s platform calls to spend the loot on some other boondoggle. Surely they can afford a million dollar write off if their spot in line at the trough is at risk.
The point is that maybe Mrs. Soccer Mom has no strong opinions and would never think of placing a bet, but there are many, many people with strong political views, regardless of what they are. Surely the more diehard or less moral will see that they increase the chances of their guy winning, if the enemy is scared off by a rising AP tab.
And the boiling frog effect comes into play as AP makes its mark on the world. When the state predictably increases its enforcement measures, more people will see it in their best interest to bet against encroaching fascists.
If you doubt Americans will buy into this system in relevant numbers, I will repeat the point from my first article that Murphy did not address. I can concede that Americans will refuse to play, or that the Feds will manage to protect themselves (I don’t) but that does not mean AP cannot be effective. Ignore the NATO countries for a minute. Imagine AP taking root in some exotic locale like Nigeria for example. I bet a lot of those relatively well to do white farmers might take the opportunity to go online and put some money against Mugabe. I also think that one of his sadistic henchmen might be able to do the math to see that the AP prize is greater than his entire combined future earnings. The downside of the Third World is the lack of communications infrastructure, but in the coming years, ever cheaper electronics will make that less and less of an obstacle. The upside of course, is that the leaders are rather absurdly unashamed of their predations, and very frequently there are large contingents of people who adamantly hate them. Furthermore add that these States have less sophisticated means of combating online activity it disproves of, and the fact that the population is used to politicians forcefully attempting to grab the throne. Conclusion is that many of the potential objections that apply to America and the “civilized” world are not to be found at all south of the equator. This could be an interesting test bed for the protocol. If it works, we get another blossoming Somalia. If it fails, well, the country was a hellhole before anyway.
[end Bob Vroman part 3]
Bob Vroman part 2:
By this scheme, there could be multiple prize pools for the same target, each with different disclaimers. For example, in addition to the 90% victim payout pool for Mr. Z, there might be a no questions asked pool for the same guy. Presumably, the fewer rules there are attached to the prize, the more likely an assassin will be to take a chance at winning it. Thus bettors have to balance their moral qualms about collateral damage versus their desire to see results. If they care more about bystanders, they should bet into the rules heavy pool, if they care more about eliminating the target, bet into the open ended pool.
Unless there is overwhelmingly more money in the “kill by any means” pool, the mere existence of the “kill carefully” pool, should convince the assassin to be as discrete as possible so as to win both prizes. So even if AP bettors are on the whole more bloodthirsty than socially conscious, the few with some scruples will be able to have a large impact on how AP players go about their operations. In fact if AP players really did tend toward wanton destruction in order to hit their marks, it might be in the best interest of people, who either exist in close proximity to a top target, or have a general compassion for bystanders, to bet into the constrained pool, even if they have no desire to see the target dead, but for no other reason than to be sure that when he does die, the assassin will hopefully be motivated by the money in the conditional pool and avoid civilian casualties.
Young denounces AP on the grounds that it uses a tactic of the State, i.e. “terror”, against the State itself, and this is a reprehensible flaw. Saying that AP is terror because it kills tyrants, is like saying shooting a mugger is terror. Well, yes. If you were unfortunate enough to live in a neighborhood inhabited by gangs, and got a reputation for shooting harassers without hesitation, this would effectively “terrorize” the gangsters into leaving you in peace, or so goes the “armed society is a polite society” school of thought.
However, AP does not even qualify as terror in the political sense.
The precise political science definition of terrorism is “a group that uses force against an intermediate target in order to bring about a desired decision from an ultimate target”. In other words, a terrorist is ill equipped to directly attack the hated government, so instead he blows up a school bus, and issues a public ultimatum that unless the government meets some of his petty demands he will strike again. The logic being that the government is incapable of protecting every school bus all the time, and the terrorist has nothing else to do but plan his next bombing, so he can essentially strike at will. He hopes that eventually the State will tire of this harassment and acquiesce, usually because the population becomes exasperated at the government’s ineffectual attempts to stop the attacks, and it is in danger of losing its power, not due to any compassion for the school kids.
AP does not follow this model, primarily because, unlike the terrorist, it can indeed strike the ultimate targets directly and does not need to play deadly games with intermediate symbols. If anything, AP should be described as guerrilla warfare.
Even if the effects of AP end up being terrorist in the popular sense, this is wholly different from say Al Quaeda plotting together in some dusty bunker. AP is a decentralized system unlike anything ever before. Without a central decision making body like a terrorist cell, the targets selected by the AP patronizing public will reflect its user’s ideologies. AP will only use explicitly terrorist tactics, if its users overwhelmingly have terrorist inclinations themselves, which given the superior abilities provided by AP, is an unproductive course of action and a waste of money.
I hope that is a decent response to Young’s excellent article. On to Mr. Murphy’s piece.
First Murphy doubts the feasibility of AP with the very legitimate concern that if the system were truly an impenetrable secret to all investigators, there is nothing stopping the AP operators from pocketing all the donations, yet claiming winners had been paid, resting on the impossibility of discovery, and the robbed winner’s desire to remain anonymous (since he’s probably got blood on his hands). A better scam might involve creating artificially high bounties, and then only paying out what’s actually in the pot. Since if there are multiple bets on the same day, the prize is split evenly between them, the assassin will not know if he has been cheated or if there are actually were enough other random guessers to dilute his prize down to the share he actually gets. The administrators could also skim off a healthy chunk too, and no one would be the wiser. This would probably be the best way to for the admins to dishonestly game the system, so that they enrich themselves; the assassins are disappointed but not given proof of treachery; and the bounties are higher than normal, thus enticing more gullible thugs.
So is this really a problem? Seems to me the system still works exactly as planned whether the admins are honest or not. The only problem is getting people to trust the system in the first place, which I’ll cover in a minute.
If we assume that the admins’ purpose in creating AP is to make as fat a profit as possible, then they will not want to blatantly rip off hit men, for fear that word will inevitably get out among the criminal population that AP isn’t on the level. However, even in an extreme case where the admins do embezzle every penny, it doesn’t matter. Since very few people involved with AP will be actually killing anyone, only a tiny minority of users will feel they have been cheated, while the greater number will be convinced they got their money’s worth. Thus they will continue to use the system. Future assassins not in communication with their gypped colleagues will also be led to believe others have been paid. Thus everything still works, money goes in, prizes are accumulated, and targets are eliminated.
If the admins really are capable of hiding all evidence and expertly conning the system, then the system will indeed be conned, and so well conned, that it will continue to run despite being conned over and over. The only problem is if this possibility prevents people from ever starting to bet and becoming convinced they are being dealt with fairly.
There are two answers to this: the AP business can slowly build trust with less extreme versions of itself, and also the overlooked fact that people have surprisingly high tolerance for potentially fraudulent online services.
To establish itself as an authentic operation, AP might be introduced not as a full fledged death machine but instead as a low key betting pool system whereby users could put money on sporting events or guess the day certain celebrities will get divorced, and other trivial wagers. The selling point is the hardcore anonyminity feature for users in harsher nanny states. In this relatively low risk phase, winners could have the option of being publicly announced for ego’s sake, and this would prove the system operated as intended. Then gradually more and more sinister bets would be allowed until it becomes completely un-moderated and AP is born.
Such a system would not be nipped in the bud, as Murphy predicts, as there are countless underground betting organizations currently in operation, and proto-AP would arguably be even more secure from law enforcement, by benefit of its exclusive existence on the internet with solid encryption and no face to face contact among users. Even at the intermediate semi-morbid phases its possible proto-AP would not garner significant government attention. Look at this http://www.stiffs.com.
Clearly harmless, but the fact it has garnered no legal complaints is a good indicator that real-AP would be able to go on the offensive for some time before the Feds figured out where the threat is coming from.
I also still think the best idea is to design an autonomous system with no publicly identified administrators even in the proto phase, whether this will become feasible with future developments in cryptography remains to be seen.
Even if AP did not go to the trouble of gradually building a customer base, does not necessarily mean it will fail. Examine the case of online gambling. Here we have people putting there money on games where the “house” can completely manipulate the odds in its own favor simply by changing a few lines of code, and the user will never know unless he takes detailed notes on winning percentages. They do not even have a reputation at stake like a traditional Las Vegas casino, which could do the same with its electronic slot machines. If a Vegas outfit says its slots pay out 99% or something, people who have no good reason to trust that, still play by the thousands. Many people are unaware that the Nevada Gaming Commission even exists, and virtually none have any idea how good a job they do at enforcing gambling regulations. And inexplicably they play online versions of these same dubious games too, where they have far less control, and nowhere near the trust of a “reputable” brick and mortar casino. Online gambling rakes in millions, despite obvious security holes and opportunities for abuse. An indicator that even if AP is not fool proof as far as protecting bettor’s money from the admins, people will still donate and predict. Maybe they’re just stupid, and maybe the online casinos are actually honest.
Murphy also points out that if politicians resort to holding Congress inside a NORAD bunker, then any information about deaths inside the mountain can be easily manipulated by the government, thus disrupting the rewarding of correct guessers. I doubt this will be an effective countermeasure against AP. If the outside world never knows that the Feds are lying about death dates, then potential assassins would not be aware their successful hits might be in vain. They would then still have motivation to mount their attacks, and only afterwards realize the government’s press corps has cheated them out of their prize. However, the people donating money have still gotten what they want: a dead politician, and thus will continue donating. Since the assassin will presumably either be dead, captured or in hiding, he will not be able to warn anyone that the government is using information warfare against AP. Thus the system continues as planned.
On the other hand, if it becomes common knowledge that the government is not a reliable source of information, then it will be up to the assassin to make the real death date known. Perhaps acquiring a tissue sample from the victim and anonymously forwarding to independent media, or videotaping the kill shot with some kind of provable date stamp. This means the assassin has to take extra risk in getting close enough to the body to grab some proof, or accidentally providing incriminating evidence on tape, and also risk further exposure in contacting the media. If the AP server is run autonomously, it will have to be programmed to take into account the relative trustworthiness of misinforming government sources versus potentially nutcase indy media, and then make a decision as to the actual date of death. If the information is too ambiguous, then it might extend prize percentages to predictions on neighboring days, based on the probability of being correct. In light of this possibility the assassin would be smart to take out high interest loans and dump his entire net worth into bets on days all around the planned kill date.
In light of this development the assassin will have to take more risks and thus insist on a higher prize before taking his chances. Thus this government strategy will only serve to increase the equilibrium price of assassinations, just like their moving into the bunker itself.
The Jim Bell System Revisited
by Robert Vroman
Ed. note: This article reflects the views of the author ONLY, not the editors. We have no official opinion whatsoever on the Jim Bell System, aka Assassination Politics.
Please see Robert Vroman’s original AP article, as well as both Bob Murphy’s and Adam Young’s response.
Let me re-emphasize that I have neither the knowledge nor the will to implement this system. I certainly don’t like the State, but I would rather concentrate my energies on constructive rather than destructive solutions. That said, I still think governments everywhere are going to be staring down the barrel of an encrypted gun in the near future, and this article attempts to explain why, in response to numerous objections received since my last article.
I also want to point out some areas where I think Jim Bell is completely off base. First of all, his insistence that AP is somehow residing in a loophole of the American legal system that only he is aware of, is absurd, as rightly pointed out by many of his critics. I have no delusions that AP would somehow survive its “day in court” or that even if, due to some arcane technicality, AP is a legal enterprise that that would stop the State from pursuing it relentlessly. Furthermore, I am mystified by Bell’s fascination with confrontation and martyrdom (as exemplified by his personal life) and do not think AP will be started by the self sacrificing, or that it’s even necessarily a good idea to have that mindset when designing the system. Bell also overestimates the enthusiasm that ordinary people will have for AP by a long shot. I still have reasons to believe there will sufficient customers, but they are not going to be primarily heartland regular Joes, who Bell envisions watching AP’s deadly progress with amusement. Bell also gives some slightly cockeyed responses to a number of the objections to his invention. In fact really the main thing I take away from his writing is the system itself, not necessarily any of his justifications.
My friend and business partner, Bob Murphy presented some powerhouse arguments against my pet theory in our recent columnist debate over the infamous Assassination Politics concept. I contend that under closer examination, his insightful questions can be answered satisfactorily.
Additionally, Adam Young has presented a thoroughly researched historical analysis against AP, which I will address first.
Young has three main points. First, that assassination has been ineffectual in the past for destroying states. Second, assassinations will instead create a backlash against anarchism by government and citizens alike. Third he does not like the moral implications of the very likely possibility of collateral damage from sloppy AP prize-hunters, given the relatively poor caliber of historical attempts.
The first point, despite all its exhaustive research, is I’m afraid to say, totally erroneous, because the mechanism by which AP kills its victims is fundamentally different then assassination campaigns of the past. I am not at all surprised to read that a handful of suicidal ideologues gunning down a few unlucky aristocrats failed to exorcise the nation state. Assume for the moment that AP’s basic functions materialize (I will get to Murphy’s objections later). The pool of assassins has instantaneously expanded from only insane political extremists, to every single violent opportunist in the world who can access a computer. AP represents a veritable full scale war against the State, fought by the scum of society and funded by every partisan malcontent across the political spectrum. A dozen assassinations per century is certainly not going to give any politicians second thoughts about their career choice, any more than the dozen or so plane hijackings in the past 50 years makes me nervous seeing a turban in business class. However, logically speaking there must be some tipping point at which the body count is the most pressing statistic a politician has in mind. AP will surpass this tipping point, where history’s basket case revolutionaries were doomed to fail. The State will of course respond in nasty ways, but inevitably these will prove ineffective in the face of an impenetrable network supporting a sustained and wide spread offensive.
Secondly, Young fears that AP will re-enforce the stereotype of anarchists as the 19th century mad bomber and 20th century Starbucks arsonist. This will then erase any chance of our winning hearts and minds via soul stirring online essays, and worst of all, get the lot of us gulagged.
What he fails to realize is the absolute lack of a reason for there to be any connection between anarchists and AP. If AP were actually launched, I for one would certainly not be publicly cheering it on (I probably wouldn’t even risk staying in the country, having written this article). The people who will be donating will not be doing so for anarchist reasons, they will not assume they are furthering anarchism, they will not make the connection. The targets also, will not probably be prioritized as an anarchist would. Ancaps are too small a group for our bets (if any) to be a major impact, thus if occasional bettors are caught, they are statistically unlikely to be one of us. The assassins will also not be Ancaps, unless any of you have a mercenary streak you’re not revealing. If all goes well the admins will either not exist or remain anonymous, and thus their political angle is irrelevant.
With no anarchists predominantly involved in any of the core functions of AP, or visibly supporting it, I don’t see why Young thinks that the State will blame anarchists for the rise of AP. In fact, if my predictions are correct, the assassins will primarily be the existing criminal class. If the State picks any scapegoats, it will be black militancy, or drug users, or the militia movement, etc, i.e. the people who are actually attacking them. The Government did not condemn anarchists for WTC, they blamed Islamic fundamentalists. Ancaps aren’t being rounded up in detention camps, Arabs are. Despite the fact that anarchists have often said things in the aftermath that amount to “they had it coming to them.” Which is more or less what I’m saying here. Anarchists will have just as much to do with AP as they did with WTC. The people who are going to suffer the brunt of the State’s reaction are the actual instigators of violence, and if I read my audience correctly, that will not be any of you. Do you particularly care (aside from general aversion to Statist crusades) if the State launches a crusade against crack heads and professional killers?
If the non-betting population experiences revulsion from AP at work, its outrage will be directed at a disparate collection of political interests and unrelated thugs. The State will undoubtedly ramp up its enforcement regime in response to AP, however there is no reason that anarchists would be singled out, when there are more direct threats available.
If the State does pick Anarcho-Capitalists as the source of all evil, instead of some other arbitrary group like, say the Republic of Ganjastan, then I advise us all to leave or prepare to be martyrs. At some point things are going to get uncomfortable for non-statists whether its Ashcroft Inc’s regular scheduled programming, or an AP frenzy whipped totalitarian drive. I plan to be an ex-pat at that time in either case. We can always come back in the aftermath, and start the equivalent of Awdal Roads Company in the former US of A.
Third is the issue of collateral damage, which can be creatively ameliorated within the AP protocol. Its conceivable AP players might get in the habit of waiting for a number of high priced targets to get in the same building, and then truck bombing the whole structure to claim multiple big prizes, without concern for the dozens of non-targets cut down along the way. The moral failure here, I believe, lies solely with the assassin. However, my opinion is irrelevant, because if the bettors themselves feel they are responsible and they have a conscience, they will not bet for fear that the target they put money on will take a hundred un-targeted coworkers down with him. Thus AP needs to alleviate the moral obstacles bettors will face in order to have the maximum revenue flow possible. The answer is to allow for pools to be started with any number of stipulations. For example, the prize for politician Z might include the following rule:
“If any bystanders are killed in the death of the target, 90% of the prize money will be donated to a fund for their next of kin. The remaining 10% will be distributed evenly to correct guessers via the normal method.”
Or some such wording that would serve to greatly motivate the assassin to be careful in planning his attack.
[end of part 1]
Jim went and did it for you.
In other fun news, read this morning that Trump used to (and maybe still does) sleep with a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside. I wonder if he was trying to draw inspiration.
In theory, yes, tyrannicide could be justified, I’d say. Off the top of my head, I can’t codify where it would and would not rise to the level, though.
Chuck Moulton: I reply inline:
“Sane people can reasonably decide they are against assassination without being forced to read a manifesto from a crazy person first to “hear both sides”.”
“Assassination” is a broad category. It might be used to refer to unjustified targets, such as JFK, RFK, and MLK. or well-justified targets. Why imply that all “assassinations” are wrong, just because some of them clearly are?
“I’m also going to go out on a limb and put myself out there as being against the holocaust even though I didn’t grant Hitler the professional courtesy of reading Mein Kampf before forming an opinion. I know, I know… what an unfair jerk I am…”
What would have been wrong with an assassination of Hitler, possibly as early as 1933? Or of Stalin in the late 1920’s, after Lenin died?
“jim, so sorry. I got maybe 3/4s of the way through in my second attempt to read up on AP, but it was torture for me, in truth.”
Well, that means you DELIBERATELY made a mistake. I repeatedly told you that you should read Bob Vroman’s articles, especially the second one. It is short. Once you got the gist of AP, you should have read Vroman’s defense.
“I’m going to stand by my position that I under no circumstances support the death penalty, which AP falls sufficiently under that penumbra for me to state I don’t support it as a means of social change.”
Self-defense by, for example, using guns can result in deaths. But as I have pointed out before, mere “deaths” doesn’t make these thinks sufficiently similar to reject AP. “The death penalty” is biased by being done by government. “Self-defense” is relatively unbiased. If you can’t see this, or won’t admit it, that’s why you’re wrong.
“My sense is nothing I could say would convince you to reconsider, so I’ll just leave it at that….”
Since the LACK of disproof of the propriety and validity of AP, 20 years after I wrote it, remains true, why should I “reconsider”?
Sane people can reasonably decide they are against assassination without being forced to read a manifesto from a crazy person first to “hear both sides”.
I’m also going to go out on a limb and put myself out there as being against the holocaust even though I didn’t grant Hitler the professional courtesy of reading Mein Kampf before forming an opinion. I know, I know… what an unfair jerk I am…
jim, so sorry. I got maybe 3/4s of the way through in my second attempt to read up on AP, but it was torture for me, in truth.
I’m going to stand by my position that I under no circumstances support the death penalty, which AP falls sufficiently under that penumbra for me to state I don’t support it as a means of social change.
My sense is nothing I could say would convince you to reconsider, so I’ll just leave it at that….
Again, my apologies.
Someone posted this in another thread
http://www.fairdebates.com/funding.html
It may have more to do with the article that started this thread than what you all are talking about now.
Paulie: It also depends on the subject involved. A false position is very hard to defend.
Depends on the person.
I’m not ASSUMING bad faith. I’m responding to Capozzi’s DISPLAY of bad faith. At this point, he could do as little as to read Bob Vroman’s articles, and then try to figure out a valid criticism of the AP system. State that, or admit he cannot find a valid criticism. Is that so difficult?
No need to assume bad faith, but I still don’t think you two will get anywhere with the discussion.
Robert Capozzi: Your lack of willingness to actually address the issues involved is very revealing. You started out being critical, and then I think you pretended to misunderstand who wrote Bob Vroman’s articles. But I think you did indeed understand, but you by then already realized that you could not defend your side at all.
Jim, you are using the word “emotion” to mean something like “self-preserving reptilian brain” — the fight or flight response. My understanding is that heroic acts are themselves often involuntary, where the hero sees a dangerous situation and impulsively acts to save lives.
Isn’t that just two sides of the same coin? ““self-preserving reptilian brain” — the fight or flight response” AND “hero sees a dangerous situation and impulsively acts to save lives.”
So what’s your point?
“Emotion is omnipresent for human beings. We always have an emotional state, at all times. We can choose our emotional state, although my sense is few do.”
I say again: It’s NOT all about you. Stop it. And emotion is neither necessary, nor sufficient, to solve problems with society.
“You are quite right…I am a very poor debater.”
That’s obvious, in spades. You should either defend your position, or concede that the other person is correct, then move on. But you hide behind nonsense like that “sense of peace” bullshit, or not bother to read the whole argument.
Many years ago, I heard somebody comment about what he does when faced with a salesman who is trying to get him to buy something. He realized that whatever excuses he could come up with, had probably already been heard by the salesman dozens of times: So, the salesman always had a logical counter to them. So, he decided to claim, “I just feel I don’t want it. I don’t know why…”. And THAT was the claim that the salesman couldn’t respond to effectively: Because no REASON was given, no appropriate answer “worked”.
I think you’re doing the same thing with your bullshit “I don’t feel peace” answer. Now, there’s nothing wrong with rebuffing a salesman with a intentionally-vague, unchallengeable statement: You don’t owe the salesman anything. But your nonsense “I don’t feel peace” is just your rude, meaningless way to weasel your way out of an argument you are losing miserably.
“That’s because I don’t debate. I share ideas.”
You’re misrepresenting things. “Sharing” implies a two-way exchange. I don’t think you want to bother to pay attention to other people’s ideas. You simply want to GIVE ideas, and then ignore the other person’s ideas. You don’t really want to “share” at all. In this situation, you have actually failed to provide a workable contrary idea. Why should anybody pay attention to you, when you have admitted you have no alternative solution, yet you don’t want to bother to consider MINE?
“Sometimes I will continue to share if it feels appropriate to do so until I feel understood.”
So far, I don’t think you’ve said anything that needs to be “understood”.
I know that many/most will not agree with me, just as many/most won’t agree with any one of us. That’s the way of the human condition, near as I can tell.
People will agree with you if you make sense, and there is no better argument around. But you don’t, and there are better arguments. You have nothing to contribute.
“To clarify, I do advocate less government across the board. Unlike many/most self-identified Ls, I call for a more modest approach to rolling back the state, because I sense it stands the best chance of succeeding.”
You “sense”??? Ha ha! Did you consult your astrologer or palm-reader?
“more modest approach”? Have you ever had more success than somebody who exhorts the “less modest approach”?
” My L brothers and sisters seem more interested in Holding High the Banner. That approach has largely not worked, in my estimation.”
Which means that you should be more open to strategies that have a chance of succeeding. You aren’t.
“Your “But I do” statement confuses me. Have you, Jim,…”
Have I, personally, individually? No: I’ve done my part, by writing AP. I believe others are doing their parts.
“…rolled back the State in some way that I’m not aware of?”
Things take time. Read up about TOR, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Augur. The system could be working in 2 years. I haven’t been involved in any of those projects, but I can read the news on the Internet.
Unfortunately, I feel certain that you won’t have the patience to do that.
“Or do you mean to say that if your AP-approach garners significant support, it COULD be effective?”
That depends on what you mean by ‘significant support’. In today’s political world, we often think of “significant support” as meaning upwards of 51% of the population, or 51% of the legislators’ votes. In other words, a majority of some kind, because you are thinking such a majority is somehow going to be necessary so that society will “choose” a particular way. Far more likely to be effective is a system that doesn’t require any more than a tiny fraction of society to choose it.
Instead, I am quite confident that an AP-type system would “work” if less than 1% of the population agrees with, and uses it. If you actually read the essay, you would understand WHY this is true.
Robert Capozzi, you said:
“PF, largely true. I have started to read 2 or 3 of the links, just as I have attempted to read the Unabomber’s manifesto in the past. None of them seemed like the best use of my time, so I stopped.”
Read Robert Vroman’s second article. It’s short, and it addresses simplistic objections.
“Now, it could be that AP will re-instate the Garden of Eden…I am THAT open minded.”
But you aren’t “open-minded” enough to be bothered to read a few pages.
I am reminded of a joke which ends,
“God sent two boats and a helicopter! What more did you want?!?”
“But what I did read was profoundly unpersuasive to me, and I did not derive a sense of peace from the ideas being shared.”
Quit it with that “sense of peace BULLSHIT! You don’t WANT to solve the problem! The problem is far more than serious enough, so that if you really wanted to solve it, and somebody claimed he’s solved it, you would at least investigate his solution. The problem is not me, it’s not AP, it’s YOU!!!
So far, even you admit that you hadn’t been reading the material I URL’d. Unless you at least read the arguments, nobody should accept anything you say as being credible. You’re basically a non-anonymous troll.
“So far, I have never seen a house stand for long on a foundation of sand…that is, the ideas I read for AP seemed to me to be based on profoundly faulty premises.”
Name them.
“Jim has said nothing here to lead me to believe otherwise.”
The key words you said are “nothing HERE”. (emphasis on “HERE” by capitalization mine.)
That’s because I didn’t want to fill this blog up with material that can be just as easily left on a URL. I didn’t expect to find people who don’t even bother to click on a link!!!
GOD SENT TWO BOATS AND A HELICOPTER!!! WHAT MORE DO YOU WANT?!?
Jim, you are using the word “emotion” to mean something like “self-preserving reptilian brain” — the fight or flight response. My understanding is that heroic acts are themselves often involuntary, where the hero sees a dangerous situation and impulsively acts to save lives.
Emotion is omnipresent for human beings. We always have an emotional state, at all times. We can choose our emotional state, although my sense is few do.
You are quite right…I am a very poor debater. That’s because I don’t debate. I share ideas. Sometimes I will continue to share if it feels appropriate to do so until I feel understood. I know that many/most will not agree with me, just as many/most won’t agree with any one of us. That’s the way of the human condition, near as I can tell.
To clarify, I do advocate less government across the board. Unlike many/most self-identified Ls, I call for a more modest approach to rolling back the state, because I sense it stands the best chance of succeeding. My L brothers and sisters seem more interested in Holding High the Banner. That approach has largely not worked, in my estimation.
Your “But I do” statement confuses me. Have you, Jim, rolled back the State in some way that I’m not aware of? Or do you mean to say that if your AP-approach garners significant support, it COULD be effective?
Robert Capozzi, I reply inline:
“Jim, you are correct: Unlike the Unabomber, I do not have a manifesto of actions to repair dysfunction in the world.”
You don’t seem to have any valid suggestions, either. That’s the problem.
“I will share that the only thing I’ve been able to ascertain that I can control is my emotional state. If I do or advocate some action, I find it helpful to check in with my conscience first. If I’m at peace, then I proceed. If it doesn’t feel right to me, then I wait and center myself.”
Emotion is a very poor guide. Consider those three Americans who saved an entire train in France from death. If they had followed their innate reactions, built over 100,000 years of evolutionary experience, they would have followed the idea, ‘Danger! Save yourself! Run away!’, they would certainly have been killed, along with all the passengers of that train. Instead, they did PRECISELY the opposite of what that innate training told them: They attacked and won, saving everybody.
“I can understand that you might find that a bit too abstract, but for me and those paying attention, the world itself is an abstraction, filtered through one’s individual perceptual lens.”
Yes, and if YOU had been on that train, you and everyone else on that train would have been DEAD, QUITE DEAD. Those bullets weren’t “abstractions”, they were quite real. You can’t wish them away! If those Americans had ‘waited to check in with [their]y consciences first…finding [themselves] at peace…[they] would have proceeded’…20 seconds AFTER [they] had been fatally shot.
Therefore, it is clear you would have been hopelessly ineffective at actually accomplishing anything on that train.
“On a more practical level, no, I don’t think advocating killing pols is a good idea on many, many levels. It’s not gonna happen. ”
That’s your prediction and opinion. But you don’t back that up. And you don’t bother to describe those “many, many levels”. That’s because you are very bad at any sort of debate.
“It’s a sure-fire way to be branded a lunatic in the public square.”
Read some of the reaction to ‘Sanjuro’s’ claims in November 2013. There were very few articles that referred to him as being a “lunatic”.
“Even if somehow it were to happen, others will take their places and continue to do the same sorts of things their predecessors did, much like LBJ did following the footsteps of JFK.”
If you had actually read Bob Vroman’s second article on AP, you would have seen your simplistic comment destroyed. Vroman said: https://web.archive.org/web/20110808064650/http://www.anti-state.com/vroman/vroman9.html
“Young has three main points. First, that assassination has been ineffectual in the past for destroying states. Second, assassinations will instead create a backlash against anarchism by government and citizens alike. Third he does not like the moral implications of the very likely possibility of collateral damage from sloppy AP prize-hunters, given the relatively poor caliber of historical attempts. The first point, despite all its exhaustive research, is I’m afraid to say, totally erroneous, because the mechanism by which AP kills its victims is fundamentally different then assassination campaigns of the past. I am not at all surprised to read that a handful of suicidal ideologues gunning down a few unlucky aristocrats failed to exorcise the nation state. Assume for the moment that AP’s basic functions materialize (I will get to Murphy’s objections later). The pool of assassins has instantaneously expanded from only insane political extremists, to every single violent opportunist in the world who can access a computer. AP represents a veritable full scale war against the State, fought by the scum of society and funded by every partisan malcontent across the political spectrum. A dozen assassinations per century is certainly not going to give any politicians second thoughts about their career choice, any more than the dozen or so plane hijackings in the past 50 years makes me nervous seeing a turban in business class. However, logically speaking there must be some tipping point at which the body count is the most pressing statistic a politician has in mind. AP will surpass this tipping point, where history’s basket case revolutionaries were doomed to fail. The State will of course respond in nasty ways, but inevitably these will prove ineffective in the face of an impenetrable network supporting a sustained and wide spread offensive.”
[end of quote from Vroman
“Now, I do think the time is ripe for a relevant, moderated, L approach to politics,”
Well, I have been a libertarian all my life. Nothing wrong with that. But it hasn’t actually succeeded, yet.
” and that such an approach could be successful in bending the curve away from statism and toward liberty.”
Eventually, MAYBE. COULD BE. After how many decades? How many innocent deaths before that happens? And are you and others like you responsible for those deaths, because you rejected the solution that would have solved the problem?
” Unfortunately, most professional L pols and activists are still too imbued with extremist Randian/Rothbardian thinking, making the prospects for such a L shift still unlikely. ”
All the more reason to accomplish something else that doesn’t rely on something that doesn’t yet work. (and I notice you don’t justify calling that “extremist”, either.)
“I contend that the LM is its own worst enemy, by overstating the case for less government across the board.”
Unless you can state a valid case for MORE government, why not LESS government. Across the board, too. We’ve already tried “more government”, it hasn’t worked well.
“So, yes, you are correct: I don’t know how to accomplish anything.”
But I do.
“I do wonder what you think you are accomplishing by advocating systematic assassination, though….”
While I think you are mischaracterizing (undercharacterizing?) what I said, if you are in doubt, why not at least UNDERSTAND what AP hopes to do? So far it appears that merely because you are over-using your EMOTIONS, you are rejecting out of hand what I (and others) claim to be the solution. Unless you can prove it isn’t the solution, I think you have a responsibility to consider it further without bias.
more…
Perhaps I’m being rash. I did the same with Invictus’s writings.
Should I give his ideas another chance, dya think, PF?
PF, largely true. I have started to read 2 or 3 of the links, just as I have attempted to read the Unabomber’s manifesto in the past. None of them seemed like the best use of my time, so I stopped.
Now, it could be that AP will re-instate the Garden of Eden…I am THAT open minded.
But what I did read was profoundly unpersuasive to me, and I did not derive a sense of peace from the ideas being shared. So far, I have never seen a house stand for long on a foundation of sand…that is, the ideas I read for AP seemed to me to be based on profoundly faulty premises.
Jim has said nothing here to lead me to believe otherwise.
I don’t think you two are going to get anywhere like this. Jim is apparently going on the assumption that Robert has read his links and thought through the arguments they contain. Robert is more likely going only by what has been said on IPR itself.
Jim, you are correct: Unlike the Unabomber, I do not have a manifesto of actions to repair dysfunction in the world.
I will share that the only thing I’ve been able to ascertain that I can control is my emotional state. If I do or advocate some action, I find it helpful to check in with my conscience first. If I’m at peace, then I proceed. If it doesn’t feel right to me, then I wait and center myself.
I can understand that you might find that a bit too abstract, but for me and those paying attention, the world itself is an abstraction, filtered through one’s individual perceptual lens.
On a more practical level, no, I don’t think advocating killing pols is a good idea on many, many levels. It’s not gonna happen. It’s a sure-fire way to be branded a lunatic in the public square. Even if somehow it were to happen, others will take their places and continue to do the same sorts of things their predecessors did, much like LBJ did following the footsteps of JFK.
Now, I do think the time is ripe for a relevant, moderated, L approach to politics, and that such an approach could be successful in bending the curve away from statism and toward liberty. Unfortunately, most professional L pols and activists are still too imbued with extremist Randian/Rothbardian thinking, making the prospects for such a L shift still unlikely. I contend that the LM is its own worst enemy, by overstating the case for less government across the board.
So, yes, you are correct: I don’t know how to accomplish anything.
I do wonder what you think you are accomplishing by advocating systematic assassination, though….
You would not be the first IPR comment participant or reader to have reached that conclusion.
Amazingly, you said: “I’d say the fundamental problem is fear. I’d like to think that I share the solution, love and peace, as best I can.”
“love and peace” is NOT a well-defined solution. If I hand someone a broken appliance and say, “Fix it”, that tells the person what to ultimately accomplish, but says noting about HOW to do so. You can’t claim that “love” will, alone, will actually fix anything. And “peace” is a condition, not a strategy or a prescription or a set of instructions, or a roadmap.
And are you suggesting that AP won’t reduce “fear”? Right now, we fear a lot of things, many of them coming from government. Since about 1950, the world has “feared” nuclear annihilation. You can’t say how you would change that. I’ve already explained how to do that.
I’m sorry to have to say it, but I say again: You are wacky. You don’t actually know how to accomplish anything. Platitudes and truisms are all you spout.
Before we get too deep into this, would anyone like to get back to the original topic of the post?
I should probably not kid myself, that ship has long since sailed….
Jim, yes, I’ve heard the saying.
I’d say the fundamental problem is fear. I’d like to think that I share the solution, love and peace, as best I can.
Robert Capozzi: I noticed that you left out something. You said,
“Better ideas in what regard? Life is about choosing against the false and the fearful. Truth and love will set us free.”
You forgot to mention the immortal words, “Arbeit Macht Frei”. Those words were at least as effective as setting people free as “Truth and love” have been.
Ever heard the old saying, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem”.
Robert Capozzi: Foolishly, you said:
“Jim, no, AP doesn’t work for me.”
First off, whether you think AP ‘works for you’ (or not) is totally irrelevant, and indeed wrong. It’s not all about you, not at all. You should concede that if AP works, it will entirely change your world, WHETHER OR NOT YOU LIKE THAT. Stop being ego-centric. You CAN say, “I don’t like it!” and be truthful, but that still doesn’t prevent AP from “working” for everyone else.
“I don’t support the death penalty, either.”
Merely because both involve deaths, don’t try to equate AP and the death penalty. “The death penalty” as is commonly understood is punishment, but it is administered by the State, in a biased fashion, and it is not available for ordinary folks to employ. Powerful violators of rights (who happen to work for the government) will never be subject to the death penalty. Why SHOULD you “support the death penalty” as it is used _today_? But you won’t see that, will you?
“There’s been more than enough killing as far as I’m concerned.”
What you just said is illogical, but you won’t see why. Seemingly, you have adopted a position of “less killing is better”. Superficially, we can agree that this is ordinarily true. (You SHOULD have distinguished the killing of violent and threatening people differently than the killing of non-violent and innocent people. Why didn’t you do that?)
However, you have presumably also implicitly taken the position that in an AP-employing world, there will be MORE killing, rather than less.
How do you know this? How many people around the world died by government hands during the 20th century? Probably well over 200 million. I think you simply accept this as a given: It’s unavoidable, you would say. I say NO, IT IS AVOIDABLE. And you are implicitly ACCEPTING this as an outcome IF you reject a system that could stop it, as long as you have no better method.
“Better ideas in what regard?”
“Better ideas” to stop violence to innocent people. That should have been obvious. But you are clearly trying to confuse the issue.
“Life is about choosing against the false and the fearful. Truth and love will set us free.”
That’s about as vague and wacky as you can get. You don’t say anything about HOW to do any of that. Figures. “Truth and love” didn’t “set free” the 50 million people who died during WWII. Or the millions who died in the trenches in WW1. Or the ones who were gassed by Bashar Assad after dumbass Obama drew that rapidly-fading red-line in the sand in 2013.
You have no solutions, none at all. You apparently love the status quo.
Jim, no, AP doesn’t work for me. I don’t support the death penalty, either. There’s been more than enough killing as far as I’m concerned.
Better ideas in what regard? Life is about choosing against the false and the fearful. Truth and love will set us free.
Robert Capozzi: It’s been about 24 hours, and I am waiting for your reaction to AP now that the confusion has been cleared away. If you are like many others, you desperately want to avoid calling it a “good idea”, but at the same time you won’t be able to find a valid criticism. Since by now you should have been Bob Vroman’s two-part item on AP, you know that many, most, or perhaps all criticisms of AP are both simplistic and false.
If you still won’t concede AP is a good idea, do you have a better idea?
You can see it in very stark terms in divided nations, such as the Koreas, or the former East and West Germany. Government literally retarded human progress by a generation within a short span of time. Or to take a personal example, after we immigrated to the US my class was taken on a tour of a 1950s dental clinic to show us the antiquated equipment. It looked just like what was actually used on me in the USSR a year earlier.
That generation of difference is one thing when we are talking about the technology of the 1950s vs the technology of the 1980s, but when we are talking about the technology for the greatest evolutionary leap in the history of life on earth and the fact that it would have already happened by now if technological development would not have been massively retarded on multiple levels by many kinds of red tape, it’s a much, much bigger deal.
I’m not suggesting a conscious conspiracy to retard technological development. Rather, that’s the net effect that red tape, corporate welfare, standardized “education,” taxes, regulations and government bureaucracy add up to have.
I doubt that the corporate, academic, political, judicial, and financial oligarchs who are collectively running “The State” (sometimes cooperatively, sometimes at odds with each other) have anything against immortality. I’m sure they’d like to live forever. I don’t think they’d use their power to retard “immortality technology” is such a thing existed.
“jim
October 1, 2015 at 1:23 am
Does anyone want to make a bet on the question of whether or not ‘Wake Up’ is a troll?”
Probably on the payroll of some government agency as well.
Does anyone want to make a bet on the question of whether or not “Wake Up” is a troll?
Robert Capozzi: You said,
“5 Early in the first link provided by Jim that I was scanning, I see the author (whom I mistakenly thought was Jim, but was someone writing about Jim’s approach) alludes to his immortality, which to me did and does mean “living forever.””
Yes, and the reason I quoted Vroman’s article had nothing at all to do with his speculations about technological immortality. My interest was based entirely his addressing of my AP essay. I’m glad that’s settled.
So, have you read Vroman’s second article, vroman9[dothtml]
It was even better than the first.
Keep in mind that Vroman’s comments predate Bitcoin, most of the implementation of TOR, and now Ethereum and Augur. A lot of Bob Murphy’s objections (which reply to Bob Vroman’s first article, and to themselves are responded to by Vroman’s second article; they are hard to find but it is in the Wayback machine at: https://web.archive.org/web/20071118121247/http://anti-state.com/article.php?article_id=289 ) seem to be based on his doubt as to whether a system could be set up to implement the guarantees of performance that I felt could and must be included in the AP system.
To be sure, I cannot be too critical of Murphy, because at the time his comments were written, digital tools such as Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Augur didn’t exist, and TOR only began to exist in September 20, 2002. (see the Wikipedia article for TOR) Murphy’s article is dated August 22, 2002, almost one month earlier.
When I wrote AP, between January 1995 and a few months of 1996, I could not describe what was needed in great detail, because a lot more work needed to be done. I was confident, however, that given an large amount of effort, AP could come together as a functioning system.
Fortunately, because of Sanjuro’s episode in November 2013, we have a preview of how the news media will react to a functioning AP-type system. (I have definite doubts as to whether Sanjuro ever had intended a functioning AP-type system, and I don’t recall any claim that it ever actually functioned.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death_of_the_universe#Time_frame_for_heat_death
10 to the power 100 years is “immortal” by our scale albeit not in an absolute sense.
Jim, yes, that’s exactly right. Here’s a summary of my thought process:
1 This Jim, newish to IPR, makes a cryptic statement praising assassination.
2 He turns up the heat with his rhetoric.
3 He provides links to articles to support his claim
4 I begin to skim/read one, being open minded to a fault
5 Early in the first link provided by Jim that I was scanning, I see the author (whom I mistakenly thought was Jim, but was someone writing about Jim’s approach) alludes to his immortality, which to me did and does mean “living forever.”
6 I got the “ah oh, another L nut” vibe. I’ve encountered many over the years.
7 I was wrong, and apologize. It wasn’t Jim, only Jim referring to someone else writing about Jim. And some people apparently use a non-standard meaning for the word “immortal.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJMKupYF14I
😉
No way! That would be completely out of character and damn near inconceivable.
Robert Capozzi: In http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=009ape
You apparently only have the patience to read less than nine paragraphs, two of which are individual sentences. Vroman sets the stage for the argument. His own additions are his, not mine.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110808064650/http://www.anti-state.com/vroman/vroman9.html
This is the second Vroman article, from the Wayback Machine.
Maybe my cites got munged in translation. I will check them.
Paulie:
While I can certainly follow the technological longevity argument (I have seen speculations along these lines before, probably in Scientific American magazine) I don’t see why it is significant for my (or any other particular person, except for those who obsess on it.) claims or issues. Sure sounds like Capozzi was simply trying to change the subject drastically.
It’s far from an original or unique thought.
Capozzi may not be familiar with it since he calls it the “Frankel Singularity”
LOL
BTW I don’t know who Vroman is and did not read his comment before I typed mine, despite any similarities.
Vroman is correct, you just need context and “immortality” is not absolute, but relative to our current lifespans, yes.
Sorry, Jim. You pointed us to an article about your system, but it’s by someone else. Here:
The Jim Bell System by Robert Vroman….
My secondary long-term goal is to live free. By that I mean living in a stable, secure, anarcho-capitalist society. The obvious obstacle to this goal is the existence of the State. The problems I face generally in eradicating this persistent pest are that:
>>>>The State is actively retarding the progress of science, thus making my immortality timetable more and more dicey.<<<<
http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=009ape
My bad. OTOH, when you provide links to such stuff, and talk about assassination, expect an audience either wincing, or borderline.
Not a "lie," though. Just a mistake on my part.
OK, Jim doesn’t believe it… but I do … sort of.
The state is retarding technological development with red tape.
We are on the verge of technological developments, that, while they will not make us immortal, will end practical limits on the human lifespan or body.
It won’t make us immortal though, because there’s still the heat death or implosion/collapse of the universe that remains, as far as we know right now, an insurmountable problem. But maybe there are things we don’t know yet in that regard. In any case that won’t be a problem for a very long time… billions of years or longer, iirc.
And we would have already passed that technological singularity if not for the technology-retarding effects of red tape.
So yes, government is blocking us from being quasi-immortal, and some of us – I am a high risk candidate – will die before the technology gets developed and popularized.
Robert Capozzi and Paulie:
”
Capozzi said, “Jim, thanks, but when I read that you think the State is blocking you from being immortal, I decided that your thought system is on an entirely different plane than mine.”
You didn’t read that. You are lying, of course. The problem is you are stuck with either debating the issue, or leaving in the least ignominious way possible. By merely referring to something wacky, but not citing it specifically, you want to appear to “win”, or at least not admit you lost. (nobody can find the text you have just claimed existed.)
You are obviously not an honest debater. Go back and withdraw your negative claims about AP.
I hadn’t seen that part. Where did Jim say that?
Jim, thanks, but when I read that you think the State is blocking you from being immortal, I decided that your thought system is on an entirely different plane than mine.
I can and do post images in comments from any and all browsers as long as I am logged in. Either from dashboard or the regular post comment box that everyone else gets that’s not an IPR editor, I just have to type in the img src code manually then or cut and paste it from source code elsewhere.
I use Safari, so that might be part. Also I would say to them you have to hover over the bottom of the comments in the dashboard for the options to come up.
Cool. Now we just have to figure out why Andy C and Jill are still having trouble with it.
Paulie I edited after I got Warren’s email. He had to up my permissions. I wanted to test and not disrupt the thread with a new comment to test. The dashboard now works too.
Robert Capozzi:
Try: https://web.archive.org/web/20110808064650/http://www.anti-state.com/vroman/vroman9.html
This is an excellent riposte by Bob Vroman to his business partner, Bob Murphy, on the subject of the AP system.
Now, Mr. Capozzi, please do not slink away from this issue. Your immediate reactions to my idea have no doubt been thought, hundreds or thousands of times, by others. Simplistic and wrong. If you read nothing else, read THIS comment by Bob Vroman. This shows that intelligent, careful people can react well to the idea of AP, no matter how nervous it might make you.
Robert Capozzi:
https://c4ss.org/content/1157
series — anti-state.com
Robert Capozzi: Another one:
Further, consider
https://github.com/isislovecruft/patternsinthevoid/blob/master/content/anarchism/game-theory-anarchism-ii-how-information-can-smash-the-state.md
Robert Capozzi: Another one:
as well as by R. Sukumaran http://www.idsa.in/strategicanalysis/CryptologyDigitalAssassinationandtheTerrorismFuturesMarket_rsukumaran_0404.html.
Robert Capozzi: Another one:
and of Bob Murphy, http://www.anti-state.com/murphy/murphy17.html (although the Murphy essay might not be available, except as an archive.)
Robert Capozzi: Another one:
http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg02068.html
Robert Capozzi:
Here is a copy from something I posted elsewhere.
I suggest that you study the analyses of Bob Vroman http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=009ape ,
George Phillies, You quoted and said,
“Some Jim wrote “My reaction: Well, first, I cannot ignore the fact that Phillies seems to have extensively defended Richard Burke (Oregon), and since I knew and know from 20 years ago that Burke is a crooked crypto-Republican, that makes me doubt Phillies, too.”
“Who or what is the fruitcake who is claiming that I have extensively defended Burke?”
Maybe I misunderstood. I will look back in the threads to see what you really said.
“With respect to
““There is no longer any reason for anarchist libertarians to be suckers and agree that small-government is consistent with freedom.”
whoever wrote this is way, way too late. They have already done that.”
I was merely stating that as being a corrected alternate version of what you had said.
Some Jim wrote “My reaction: Well, first, I cannot ignore the fact that Phillies seems to have extensively defended Richard Burke (Oregon), and since I knew and know from 20 years ago that Burke is a crooked crypto-Republican, that makes me doubt Phillies, too.”
That’s amazing, we’re now getting posts from not-very-parallel universes.
Who or what is the fruitcake who is claiming that I have extensively defended Burke?
With respect to
“There is no longer any reason for anarchist libertarians to be suckers and agree that small-government is consistent with freedom.”
whoever wrote this is way, way too late. They have already done that.
Well, maybe stumbling, crawling and weaving drunkenly. Not sure about running.
Once you said, “running joke”, that was all I needed to know.
Jim, it’s a running joke based on different meanings of “image attachment.” Don’t struggle too hard to understand it.
Wang Tang Fu:
I still have to ask, “Huh?”
Other people, read what he wrote. What does this MEAN?
““Sometimes it’s good to let an image fool around and see other people. It came back to you, so it was attached to you after all. The best kind of attachment you can have with an image is one based on trust and, understanding and love, not the threat of leaving and fear.”
Jim see above
12:14 pm Caryn Ann Harlos
12:45 pm Wang Tang-Fu
2:12 pm Paulie 1
2:12 pm Paulie 2
Wang Tang-Fu, you said:
“Sometimes it’s good to let an image fool around and see other people. It came back to you, so it was attached to you after all. The best kind of attachment you can have with an image is one based on trust and, understanding and love, not the threat of leaving and fear.”
Huh? To what message were you replying?
Sometimes it’s good to let an image fool around and see other people. It came back to you, so it was attached to you after all. The best kind of attachment you can have with an image is one based on trust and, understanding and love, not the threat of leaving and fear.
When I was looking at it before the image was not there.
It looks like it worked.
Did you re-edit the comment?
For anyone following along or reading later the other IPR comment thread being referred to is https://independentpoliticalreport.com/2015/09/clayton-hunt-why-should-libertarians-care-about-terminology/
Robert Capozzi: You quoted and said:
“jim: Well, the problem is that it was YOU who raised the issue of NAP, in this discussion.”
“me: Dbl checked. No, it wasn’t me who raised it. I raised the *Pledge*, which may or may not have been intended to swear allegiance to the construct known as the NAP.”
That is a mighty fine distinction! You say tomayto, I say tomahto. I think I’m closer to being right in the “you who raised the issue of NAP” department.
“To be more direct, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about or contemplate assassinating anyone.”
Makes you nervous, huh? But I think you are implying that the subject is assassinating one specific person, or a few specific persons. But I don’t think so. The issue is the AP system itself, not any specific person who may some day be its target.
“That some Ls contort Randian/Rothbardian constructs to justify fringe communication is one of the reasons I’m no longer in the LP.”
“To justify fringe communication”? That sounds odd! With the 1st amendment protection on free speech, I wasn’t aware that anyone had to “justify communication” of any sort.
Look, I proposed and propose a system that I claim will eliminate statism, forever. The fact that it makes YOU nervous is utterly irrelevant. If you simply don’t want to address it as a possible solution to government,, that merely explains why “[you’re] no longer in the LP”. It’s plausible to argue that YOU don’t really want to see ANY solution, whatsoever.
Incorrect. Phillies takes the opposite side from Burke in Oregon matters, quite vociferously too.
It was one of many such comments by different people in a long thread.
You can just put them as separate comments, and write [email protected] about the multiple link per comment issue.
Wang Tang-Fu: You said,
“Why would NAP violators be the only ones to be on the assassination market? Business rivals, romantic rivals, annoying neighbors, random people just for kicks, objects of crazy people’s obsessions…possibilities are myriad.”
I hope you realize that my goal is not to convince everyone, one-at-a-time. that’s why I wrote my AP essay. I addressed precisely this issue, and others.
No, nothing would absolutely prevent such an improper use. Just as nothing would absolutely prevent a person from going to a gun-store, LEGALLY buying a gun and ammunition, and leaving and shooting the first person he sees on the street. But this happens extremely infrequently.
And, the misuse of AP that you described would also happen, extremely infrequently. For reasons I detail in my essay.
Also, a good and patient person, Robert Vroman, has debated AP with his business partner, Robert Murphy. here is Vroman’s comment:
http://www.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg.tcl?msg_id=009ape
Murphy wrote a response, which is available on the Wayback Machine, to which Vroman wrote a response, vroman9[dothtml], which I have to disguise because for some reason, IPR doesn’t “like” two URL’s in the same message. I will try to find it if you find the first vroman comment interesting.
jim: Well, the problem is that it was YOU who raised the issue of NAP, in this discussion.
me: Dbl checked. No, it wasn’t me who raised it. I raised the *Pledge*, which may or may not have been intended to swear allegiance to the construct known as the NAP.
To be more direct, I really don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about or contemplate assassinating anyone. That some Ls contort Randian/Rothbardian constructs to justify fringe communication is one of the reasons I’m no longer in the LP.
Wang Tang-Fu
“Jim, your reply assumes that Capozzi agrees that the pledge is about the NAP. If you read the Clayton Hunt thread, several people on there (I can’t remember if Capozzi is one of them or not) are arguing that the pledge just says we won’t attack the government or its employees, even in retaliation or self-defense or the defense of others, and has nothing to do with the NAP. They cite David Nolan, the pledge author, as agreeing with their view of what it actually means.”
Well, I found the thread, and a comment, that I believe you are alluding to. I will quote it.:
“George Phillies
September 26, 2015 at 8:30 am
Chuck,
Let us turn this around. There was once upon a time an agreement between restrained-government libertarians and no-government libertarians that we would not argue about where we were going, because it was so far away. That was sensible. We are so far away and moving farther away that we would not know the bad features of either position until we got closer.
There was, however, an agreement that we were getting there by political means, not by violent revolution. That was David Nolan’s affirmation on non-aggression.
The anarchists have now, manifestly, broken this agreement on a large scale.
There is no longer any reason for small-government libertarians to be suckers and agree that anarchism is consistent with freedom.
We should reject the anarchist big-lie technique about the non-aggression principle of David Nolan, whose meaning I determined from David Nolan himself.
George”
Is this it?
My reaction: Well, first, I cannot ignore the fact that Phillies seems to have extensively defended Richard Burke (Oregon), and since I knew and know from 20 years ago that Burke is a crooked crypto-Republican, that makes me doubt Phillies, too. That said…
Phillies goes on to say:
“There was, however, an agreement that we were getting there by political means, not by violent revolution. That was David Nolan’s affirmation on non-aggression.”
Some people tend to confuse “non initiation of force” with “non-violence”. I don’t. I suspect that Phillies is trying to do that, however, to misconstrue these concepts deliberately. David Nolan might very well have used the term “non-aggression”, but Phillies does not give a direct quote (yet). I can very well imagine that Nolan yet again reaffirmed NAP, but that doesn’t mean that he said we should totally forego self-defense.
Other people are probably confused by the relationship of “non-aggression” and “government”. My opinion is that while (to a newbie) government may not SEEM to be “aggressing”, at least on a daily basis, in fact everything it does amounts to the veiled threat of aggression. It’s just that everybody knows that if you don’t pay your taxes, the government will take the money anyway (from a bank), or seize your property (using the sheriff as an enforcer), and if you defend yourself (say with guns) you are YOURSELF declared to be “the aggressor”, and when you are shot and killed THEY will claim you “aggressed”. Not them.
Is Phillies making that common mistake? My position is that a government which has already aggressed in that way, and which threatens the same to all of its citizens, has ALREADY aggressed sufficiently to justify any one of its citizens to respond to that aggression, quite possibly with violence, since the threat of continuing aggression by the government is sufficient to amount to a continuation of the aggression itself. Naturally, a crypto-Republican certainly won’t think that way! HE would call the use of violence against the government “initiation of force”.
From my standpoint, the issue isn’t whether “the government” has initiated force against YOU, PERSONALLY, yet. The issue is whether “the government” has previously initiated force against anyone, wrongly, and explicitly or implicity threatens to do so, again.
Further, I should point out that until I wrote AP, in 1995, I too was a “minarchist libertarian”. That wasn’t, however, because I wanted there to be some minimal level of government left. Far from it. Rather, I was intellectually honest enough to admit to myself (and others) that I could not think of a consistent method of getting rid of that last little bit of government. It is related to a concept called by David Friedman (son of Milton Friedman) he called “The Hard Problem”: how do you finance defense in a anarchy?
Fortunately, I wasn’t aware even of the existence of Friedman’s “Hard Problem” in 1995, as I was writing AP. My AP idea SOLVED Friedman’s “Hard Problem”!!! Implement AP, and every group or region becomes automatically protected against the aggressions of others.
So I will turn around what Phillies said, above. he said:
“There is no longer any reason for small-government libertarians to be suckers and agree that anarchism is consistent with freedom.”
He’s wrong. I will say, instead, turning around Phillies’ comment:
“There is no longer any reason for anarchist libertarians to be suckers and agree that small-government is consistent with freedom.
Why would NAP violators be the only ones to be on the assassination market? Business rivals, romantic rivals, annoying neighbors, random people just for kicks, objects of crazy people’s obsessions…possibilities are myriad.
Root’s Teeth: You quoted and said:
“Jim, I checked your article, but (in typically libertarian fashion) it looks a lot longer and more complicated (and convoluted) than I care to read.’
Fortunately, it is not necessary to read the whole essay to get the gist. As you now realize. Keep in mind that I address a few simplistic criticisms in the later portions of the essay, so if you skip them, you will likely leave clinging to a false hope that it is unrealistic.
“I assume the gist of it is a plan for some sort of “market-based,” anonymous, assassination system. People will contribute money (bids?) for the assassination of “violators of the NAP.” Assassins can then see what the bidding is on which intended victim, assess the risks and rewards, then decide whom to kill.”
That’s it.
“I apologize if I assumed wrong, but if not — if this is your idea — it’s the sort of off-the-reservation, silliness that libertarians are known for. I can see some libertarian using it in a sci-fi novel. L. Neil Smith’s The Wardove, set around the year 3,000, was about a rock band that played benefit concerts to raise money for a “market-based” war effort.”
That’s not a particularly insightful (or effective) refutation of the idea, however. Consider that an idea in, say, 1925, that science could build a bomb which would destroy an entire city would certainly have been labelled as “off-the-reservation silliness”, too. Except that 20 years later, it actually happened.
One problem is you started out by referring to it as “off-the-reservation silliness that libertarians are known for”. Well, having known I am a libertarian for 40 years, and particularly in the early years, both liberals and conservatives wanted to address libertarianism in that similar dismissive way. NATURALLY a statist wants to (at first) dismiss a new way to run a society, one that does not require (or even allow!) for the statist government he so loves.
Ever hear of the “five stages of grief”: “the five stages are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.”. I should mention that a person’s reaction to AP might go through precisely such a set of stages. You’re in Stage 1: You deny, dismissively. “Off the reservation silliness”.
“But without the distancing effect of setting your fantasy in another place, another time, well, most people would regard it as crazy-scary.”
I have found that not to be true,, at least in regard to “most people”. Remember, the essay has been available on the web for 20 years, as well. And I have explained it to hundreds of people, in person.
I can also address your allegation of “most people” easily, today. In about November 2013, there was a very well-publicized instance of a person calling himself “Sanjuro” ostensibly actually implementing my idea, or at least his version of it. (I am not Sanjuro, and I don’t know who or where he is.)
Here is the seminal article that appeared in Forbes Magazine: http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2013/11/18/meet-the-assassination-market-creator-whos-crowdfunding-murder-with-bitcoins/
To find hundreds of other media references, google-search ‘sanjuro assassination market’.
What you will see is that you are simply wrong to say, “most people would regard it as crazy-scary”. Response to it has been far from what you suggest.
“People are already killing each other throughout the world. “Market assassins” would only be another group of unorganized thugs, adding to the chaos.”
“Unorganized”? Quite false. It would be just as “unorganized” as Uber and Lyft, the networked taxi services. And why would there be “chaos”? I address that issue in later parts of AP. Those new taxi services simply implement a new paradigm that, not too many years ago, would have been hard to imagine. Once people had smartphones and the ability to run apps, the possibility of replacing the legacy taxi system became apparent to a few.
AP amounts to the possibility of replacing militaries, wars, police and others with a system that could be as simple to use as Uber is.
I wrote this on IPR on September 23, 2015, little more than a week ago:
“20 years ago I wrote my ‘Assassination Politics’ essay, cryptome [dot-org]/ap [dot] htm , to address the problems I saw not merely with the American Federal government, but with governments of all nations of the world. All people will be able to anonymously donate money to a fund that also pays anonymously to somebody who “predicts” the date of death of a specific, named person. Dictators would be gone quickly, as well as all other oppressors. Soon enough, the need for militaries will be completely eliminated.
At that time (1995) I was doubtful that the public would “get” the idea, and why it was good. Many did, however, then. Since then, I have had the “opportunity” to explain AP to thousands of people, and virtually all of them “got it” immediately.
But my worries about how this idea would be seen were recently allayed: An anonymous person calling himself “Sanjuro” (No, I’m not Sanjuro and I don’t know who or where he is) purported to start such a system, he called it “Assassination Market”. While I have doubts about whether this was a genuine attempt to initiate such a system, what is to me the important part is how it was received by the many hundreds of reporters and commentators who mentioned it. Google ‘Assassination Market’, possibly with the addition of the search term Sanjuro, to see them. On the whole, I think the reception was far better than I could have ever hoped.
When, as this article indicates, 49% of the American public now sees the American Federal government as being a direct threat, that to me is a long way to acceptance of the entire AP system. Keep in mind that even if we take the position that American government is somehow better than other governments, clearly the world needs the AP system.
Fortunately, since I wrote that essay, the development of TOR, Bitcoin, and now Ethereum and Augur promise a quick transition to a new form of “government”, essentially none at all.
And for those libertarians new to the AP idea, I carefully explained in that essay how AP comports with the NAP (non agression principle).”
Caryn:
It’s just not that into you. Maybe you should start seeing other images.
Jim, your reply assumes that Capozzi agrees that the pledge is about the NAP. If you read the Clayton Hunt thread, several people on there (I can’t remember if Capozzi is one of them or not) are arguing that the pledge just says we won’t attack the government or its employees, even in retaliation or self-defense or the defense of others, and has nothing to do with the NAP. They cite David Nolan, the pledge author, as agreeing with their view of what it actually means.
Testing image attachment
Jim, I checked your article, but (in typically libertarian fashion) it looks a lot longer and more complicated (and convoluted) than I care to read.
I assume the gist of it is a plan for some sort of “market-based,” anonymous, assassination system. People will contribute money (bids?) for the assassination of “violators of the NAP.” Assassins can then see what the bidding is on which intended victim, assess the risks and rewards, then decide whom to kill.
I apologize if I assumed wrong, but if not — if this is your idea — it’s the sort of off-the-reservation, silliness that libertarians are known for. I can see some libertarian using it in a sci-fi novel. L. Neil Smith’s The Wardove, set around the year 3,000, was about a rock band that played benefit concerts to raise money for a “market-based” war effort.
But without the distancing effect of setting your fantasy in another place, another time, well, most people would regard it as crazy-scary.
People are already killing each other throughout the world. “Market assassins” would only be another group of unorganized thugs, adding to the chaos.
Robert Capozzi, you quoted and said:
“”jim:If you actually take the time to READ my AP essay, you will see plenty of explanation as to why my idea DOESN”T violate the NAP.””
“me: At this stage, I don’t do mechanistic NAP inquiries. I find them to be rabbit holes leading nowhere.”
Well, the problem is that it was YOU who raised the issue of NAP, in this discussion. I simply answered that my essay already contained, 20 years ago, a direct refutation of such arguments. In other words, if my refutation is correct, your challenge is pointless. I am not asking you to “do a mechanistic NAP inquiry”: I’m asking you to READ the essay. You will learn something.
“I encourage you to sit quietly and imagine yourself doing what you say. Do you find peace there? If not, then consider the possibility that something is wrong with the idea.”
Sorry, but I find your comment silly. Suppose we were having an argument, and you were a sworn-to-be-a-pacifist, and I advocated self defense. Suppose then I said that if a person was mugged on the street, but happened to have a gun with him, “he should take the gun and shoot his attacker”.
So, will you ask the same silly question?: “I encourage you to sit quietly and imagine yourself doing what you say. Do you find peace there? If not, then consider the possibility that something is wrong with the idea.”
I don’t think ANYONE would “find peace” in the outcome of an attack where he is forced to shoot and possibly kill an assailant on the street. But that DOESN’T mean that it isn’t a wise move.
Rather, an innocent person who is attacked in this way will FIND SURVIVAL, rather than be killed by his attacker. THAT amounts to as much “peace” as anyone expects, having been fated by this hypothetical to be unlucky enough to get attacked.
“Now, imagine yourself explaining your “idea” here to regular folks on the street. Try to imagine how they might react to your words.”
Until you bother to read the essay, you are merely playing games. I’ve explained the idea to probably many hundreds of people, although not “on the street”. Most truly ‘get’ the idea. Moreover, though my essay itself, available for the last 20 years on the web, I have already explained it to many thousands, and quite possibly tens of thousands of people
And, due to the nature of this idea, it isn’t necessary for me (or anyone) to reach that magic 51% popularity in order for it to work. It would easily work if only 10% of the population chooses to use it. No government approval would be necessary.
jim:If you actually take the time to READ my AP essay, you will see plenty of explanation as to why my idea DOESN”T violate the NAP.
me: At this stage, I don’t do mechanistic NAP inquiries. I find them to be rabbit holes leading nowhere.
I encourage you to sit quietly and imagine yourself doing what you say. Do you find peace there? If not, then consider the possibility that something is wrong with the idea.
Now, imagine yourself explaining your “idea” here to regular folks on the street. Try to imagine how they might react to your words.
They referred to a specific judge and were in reaction to the harsh, merciless and vindictive sentencing of Ross Ulbricht.
Here is a paragraph from the article https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/19/government-stifles-speech
“U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara subpoenaed all of the identifying information we had about the authors of such comments as, “Its (sic) judges like these that should be taken out back and shot.” And, “Why waste ammunition? Wood chippers get the message across clearly. Especially if you feed them in feet first.” This last comment is a well-known Internet reference to the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo. ”
All these so-called “threats” are very vague, Who is to be targeted? Very oblique statements. Worse (and this is something a non-lawyer would probably not see), we are supposed to have a legal system based on “equal protection”. (I’ll wait a moment until the laughter dies down!)
If these “threats” were made against an equally-poorly identified citizen (one who is NOT a judge, or at least not a cop!) it would be hard to imagine any such prosecution from being started, let alone completed. Not that this might never happen; it would just be quite rare.
This is clearly an example of “head-up-assitis” on the part of the prosecutors involved.
Caryn: While I haven’t seen the comments from Reason.com, I expect that in court, the arguments of the police-types will be demolished by Reason attorneys. Unless those comments are definitely already crimes, they have no basis for a subpoena. (Unless they have some more information that they are not sharing; but even that is unlikely.)
I thought they might help to spruce things up 🙂
Didn’t know who Jim was – thanks fir the links.
Gracias…. But the subpoena part is preliminary to the potential action against those commenters. As far as I know nothing has happened yet but this is recent.
I was referring more to the potential action part – not the force against Reason
Jim is not anonymous. He frequently makes references to an article he wrote under his real name. He makes no attempts to conceal his identity. He’s actually moderately famous:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_market
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Bell
Reason was subpoenaed to reveal identifying information about anonymous commenters making statements about a judge such as saying there was a special place in hell for her and wood chipper references. Jim was confident about his freedom of speech in his comment – just saying that it is far from certain that logic would hold – freedom of speech is under definite attack
Oh – in that case I am stumped. What’s the relevance of that one?
Jim, I am alluding to this recent event:
https://reason.com/blog/2015/06/19/government-stifles-speech
Jim, here’s a hint: scroll up all the way to the first line of the article you are commenting on here.
Caryn Ann Harlos: You said, “Tell that to the Reason.com commenters”
Were you directing that to me? Also, please be more specific. I assume that there have been Reason.com commenters for as long as Reason has had a website. I suppose, therefore, you are alluding to 15-20 years of postings. Care to narrow that down a little?
Tell that to the Reason.com commenters
Robert Capozzi: You quoted and then said:
“jim: 20 years ago, I said something like: “Given that the price of the typical rifle cartridge is $0.10, the U.S. Congress doesn’t represent a problem that $60 won’t solve”.
“me: Hoo boy. Maybe that Pledge wasn’t such a bad idea after all!”
If you actually take the time to READ my AP essay, you will see plenty of explanation as to why my idea DOESN”T violate the NAP. Hint: It says no INITIATION of force; it isn’t a pacifist, “don’t use force under ANY circumstances” pledge.
“Talk like this is the fringiest of the fringe! FBI attracting stuff if ever there was one.”
Secondly, you are about 20 years too late for that. But you also don’t know of a 1969 Supreme Court case, Brandenburg v. Ohio. See the Wikipedia article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandenburg_v._Ohio
“Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a landmark United States Supreme Court case based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The Court held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless that speech is directed to inciting, and is likely to incite, imminent lawless action.[1] Specifically, it struck down Ohio’s criminal syndicalism statute, because that statute broadly prohibited the mere advocacy of violence. In the process, Whitney v. California[2] was explicitly overruled, and doubt was cast on Schenck v. United States,[3] Abrams v. United States,[4] Gitlow v. New York (1925), and Dennis v. United States.[5]”
[end of quote of Wikipedia article.]
In other words, I _can_ advocate use of violence and crime, except in the case of “imminent lawless action”; in other words, a riot-type situation.
Now, it may STILL “attract the FBI”, but they would be doing so for nothing: My speech is clearly constitutionally-protected.
jim: 20 years ago, I said something like: “Given that the price of the typical rifle cartridge is $0.10, the U.S. Congress doesn’t represent a problem that $60 won’t solve”.
me: Hoo boy. Maybe that Pledge wasn’t such a bad idea after all!
Talk like this is the fringiest of the fringe! FBI attracting stuff if ever there was one.
He doesn’t try very hard.
I read that column twice looking for an actual argument.
Bloomberg View columnist Jonathan Bernstein tries to defend the status quo, saying it would be “terrible for democracy” if the lawsuit wins: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-28/leave-the-debates-alone
Root’s Teeth: You said, “Jim, just because many government workers are useless, doesn’t mean they can easily be gotten rid of.
“We live in a democracy, and government workers’ unions are extremely well-organized and powerful. They know how to work the system. How to buy politicians. See how their health & pension benefits are draining our state’s finances.”
I can tell you haven’t yet read my Assassination Politics essay. https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
20 years ago, I said something like: “Given that the price of the typical rifle cartridge is $0.10, the U.S. Congress doesn’t represent a problem that $60 won’t solve”.
Change always causes displacement. That doesn’t make change impossible.
Jim, just because many government workers are useless, doesn’t mean they can easily be gotten rid of.
We live in a democracy, and government workers’ unions are extremely well-organized and powerful. They know how to work the system. How to buy politicians. See how their health & pension benefits are draining our state’s finances.
Many citizens are forced to pay double. Pay taxes for govt teachers, then send your kids to private schools. Pay taxes for govt police, then hire private security patrols. Pay taxes for govt roads, then repair your neighborhood roads and sidewalks yourselves.
Just because we do without govt workers, doesn’t mean we’re not forced to pay for them. We also pay for others’ welfare benefits — rich and poor.
We live in a democracy, where the Takers are becoming the majority. And they’ll vote to take more, whether we need them or not.
Probably.
Luckily, their stranglehold of information channels is quickly being replaced and displaced by a huge explosion of alternatives, social media, etc.
Paulie: For many years, perhaps back well beyond when PBS’s “McNeil/Lehrer Report” was on and stretching back to the 1980’s, I think, one of them had a practice of dedicating ONE HOUR a YEAR to the Libertarian candidate, rather than the 364 days they were giving to the D’s/R’s. I suppose they thought they were doing us a favor, huh?
There is another lawsuit too, so we are attacking them from more than one angle.
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Comm.-Pres.-Debate-Complaint.FINALExhibit.FILED_.pdf
This lawsuit seems well-written. Perhaps it could have included references to assistance by ABC, NBC, CBS who have historically limited access to third-party candidates also.
That’s the actual complaint, which answers many questions and speculations people may have, if anyone is looking for it.
Roots Teeth: You said,
“Jim: until we are actually living in a libertarian-run society …””
“Until? You think that day will actually come?”
As of about January 1995, I became certain of it. That was (not coincidentally) the time I went from being a “minarchist libertarian” to being an “anarchist libertarian”.
“I’ve noticed that almost all Believers — anyone who Believes in a political, religious, or some life philosophy — is confident that someday their Belief will be widely accepted. That most people will someday finally awaken and See The Light. That victory for their cause is inevitable”
The fact that many people believe wrong things does not automatically mean that everything a person believes is wrong.
“Do people here believe that someday the United States, or any nation of significant power or size, will be run along libertarian lines? Do they think a libertarian future is inevitable?”
I don’t know what other people here think, but in January 1995 I began writing my essay, which I called “Assassination Politics”. https://cryptome.org/ap.htm
It explains why I believe that governments, at least all governments of current models, will fairly soon be destroyed. (5-10 years). The tactic I invented involves allowing everybody to get rid of all offending persons, which initially will (I think) primarily consist of government employees. (and former government employees.) No employees, no government.
If you doubt whether this would be practical, investigate TOR (The Onion Router), Bitcoin, Sanjuro (I am not Sanjuro, and I don’t know who or where he was or is), Ethereum (not the video game), and Augur. (the proposed prediction market that will run on the Ethereum network.)
“I don’t. I’m a pessimist. I believe that most people will never want a libertarian society. Not out of ignorance, but from a valid belief that it’s not in their self-interest. That controlling other people, and receiving subsidies from the state, are benefits well worth the tradeoff of losing some liberty.”
To be a pessimist is often (even usually) to be a realist. But sometimes, bad things fail to happen.
“Not everyone would be better off under libertarianism, and they know it.”
Look at the Nolan Chart and the World’s Smallest political quiz. I know from experience, and I’ve heard elsewhere, that results from this test tend to center around (70/70). (I gave this test, and posted the results immediately) at the local county fair in about 1992. (70/70) is very close to perfectly libertarian, 100/100.
That’s the actual lawsuit for those of you who like to read such things.
The attorney, Bruce Fein, may also be available for media interviews depending on his schedule.
https://independentpoliticalreport.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Comm.-Pres.-Debate-Complaint.FINALExhibit.FILED_.pdf
Jim,
You miss my point. Congress would define “manufacturers of 100,000 or more cars a year as 501c3 corporations, so your car purchase would be a tax deduction. It is all in how the law including its special exemptions is written.
With respect to restraint of trade, there has to be trade here, and that is less than obvious.
Jeffrey Tucker at liberty.me writes about all that stuff a lot, good source to keep up on the details on that.
I’m optimist, and nation states will soon be irrelevant and obsolete anyway. They already are, a lot of people just haven’t realized it yet. Quite a few have or are coming to the realization though. Lots of new technologies displacing government “services” or government controlled and regulated monopolies, etc.
Jim: until we are actually living in a libertarian-run society …
Until? You think that day will actually come?
I’ve noticed that almost all Believers — anyone who Believes in a political, religious, or some life philosophy — is confident that someday their Belief will be widely accepted. That most people will someday finally awaken and See The Light. That victory for their cause is inevitable.
Do people here believe that someday the United States, or any nation of significant power or size, will be run along libertarian lines? Do they think a libertarian future is inevitable?
I don’t. I’m a pessimist. I believe that most people will never want a libertarian society. Not out of ignorance, but from a valid belief that it’s not in their self-interest. That controlling other people, and receiving subsidies from the state, are benefits well worth the tradeoff of losing some liberty.
Not everyone would be better off under libertarianism, and they know it.
George Phillies: The essential elements of an anti-trust suit are an agreement to “restrain trade”. If two major manufacturers agreed to split up a market by geography, that would be “an agreement to restrain trade”.
Admittedly the use of anti-trust laws isn’t common, and perhaps it hasn’t happened yet in the political arena, but it is arguable, I think.
If two or more television networks had an agreement to only accept commercial placements for the top two detergent manufacturers, that would also be “an agreement to restrain trade”.
See the article Restraint of Trade in Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restraint_of_trade
Andy: Aha! Now I understand! Donations to 501(c)(3) are tax deductible! That explains a lot. And since CPD’s actions are clearly partisan (even if bi-partisan), they violate the requirements of that law. Got it!
Anti-trust suit? Seems a bit bit optimistic. 501c3 or whatever status is a letter of the law issue. Do they have a special status on this.
Jim said: ” And you mentioned yet another reason to sue: Their non-profit status.
However, I wonder if that losing that status is really so much of a threat?”
Having 501(c)(3) status means that individuals or groups who donate money to them can deduct the donations from their taxes. So loss of non-profit status could hurt them in this regard.
Don’t forget, I agree with you. And you mentioned yet another reason to sue: Their non-profit status.
However, I wonder if that losing that status is really so much of a threat? They might simply choose to never make a profit. THAT might mean they’d be ineligible for some kind of discount on debate airtime over TV, or something, but that might not be hard to overcome.
If they simply decided to make $1 in profit every year, what’s that in taxes?
“jim
September 29, 2015 at 12:11 am
It might be argued that as libertarians, we shouldn’t employ the State’s courts to solve this problem.”
I disagree. This is like saying, “As Libertarians, we should not use the State’s roads to travel.” or, “As Libertarians, we should not call the fire department when our house is one fire.”
1) We have to operate within the world in which we live, and using the State’s courts to resolve disputes is a part of the world in which we live.
2) The Presidential debates concern a public office that has a lot of power over all of our lives, and all of these debates utilize tax payer funds, and the Commission on Presidential Debates has 501(c)(3) non-profit status, which makes them tax exempt, and part of the criteria for being a non-profit is that they are supposed to be non-partisan, yet they are clearly being bi-partisan, which means that they are breaking the law.
It might be argued that as libertarians, we shouldn’t employ the State’s courts to solve this problem. Makes some sense, but I think until we are actually living in a libertarian-run society, there isn’t much wrong with using the only tools we are allowed to use to get into the duopolized debates.
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