and there are still people around that are astonished about this…
and there are still people around that are astonished about this…
At the Porcupine Freedom Festival which is held annually in NH by the Free State Project, a person, who I only know as Emily, delivered the rant I want to present here in a free transcription.
The usual argument against a society without the state (anarchy) is that we would first sink into total chaos (another meaning of anarchy, yet not the right one) and then organized crime would take over.
Let’s assume that this is true – which it probably is not – but let’s just look at it for the sake of argument, and we find out quickly that we would still be better off with the Mafia than the current ‘state’ of affairs.
10. The Mafia has a sense of honor – when they say they do something then they do it. That is not the case with people running the state. (Ed. comment: this is self-evident if you look from which ‘professional’ group the members are generally recruited.)
9. The Mafia’s code of conduct is simple and clear. There is no legal double-talk and not millions of rules and regulations.
8. When two families of the Mafia go to war they do not create millions of fatalities as collateral damages. For the Mafia that would be just bad for business.
7. Instead of conducting a war on drugs the Mafia is happy to provide quality products to those people who desire them.
6. When you buy protection from the government, you get protection. The Mafia limits violent crimes in the area they protect instead of just giving you a phone number to dial when you become a victim of violence.
5. The protection of the Mafia is much less expensive at 10 to 15% of your profits versus at least 40 to 50% for the current legal syndicate.
4. Unlike the government the Mafia actually wants your business to succeed. They know that ruining your business makes you unable to pay for their protection. They also don’t impose a huge overhead of paperwork and force you to fill out reams of self-incriminating confessions (tax forms.)
3. The Mafia will not keep you from having guns to protect yourself. The Mafia will gladly sell you the means to protect yourself.
2. Different than the state the Mafia will not regulate what you do in your bedroom. Instead they will offer for sale all the things you might need to increase your enjoyment.
1. Members of the Mafia have style, dress much better and are a lot easier on the eye than government bureaucrats.
The added advantage of having the Mafia being in charge is that the ‘protected’ do not believe that the organized crime lords have a god-given right to rule us (as most people believe the government has.) This will make it much easier for competition which will then drive down prices – something that will always happen in a free society.
If you are interested in seeing a bit more clearly what is going on here, a good introduction is delivered by this video by Stefan Molyneux…
A message from Stefan Molyneux
This article is more for my own benefit, so that I can find it again later should I need to refer to it.
But as I am writing this, mostly for the links to the videos below, I thought to expand a bit, just in case you reach this page by accident. The chances are slim because there are so many more established sources for this info that it is a minor miracle that google would send you here instead to those older links.
My added value to the information below is that you first have to get out of your mind that you did anything wrong by breaking the ‘law.’ There is chances that you did not break the law and it was just a crooked cop below his quota who gave you a ticket anyways but chances are good that you actually went too fast – pretty much all of us do – with the hope not to get caught.
Where the shift in your mind has to come is that deep inner feeling that you actually did something wrong. I am not talking about a situation where you went 90 through a school zone with a high probability of kids playing on the road. That, I would consider criminal because your chances are high that you truly harm another person. I am talking about random rules of men in black robes that say that you can only go 65 mph on that wide open, straight road where you car could safely make 95 without endangering anybody or anything.
If you are a responsible person who would stand up for his actions you do not need a nanny to tell you what you can and can not do and punish you when you break this recommendation. If you own yourself – and I hope you don’t believe otherwise – there is nobody who could possibly tell you what you can or can not do. If somebody tries then you have no more obligation to obey than you have to give your wallet to the mugger you encounter in the dark alley.
It might be prudent to do what the mugger asks you to do (better to lose your wallet than your life) but you would not feel any obligation to obey. To the same tune it is prudent to look out for a cop with a radar gun behind that bush on the side of the road and it might also be prudent to pay a fine if that saves you sanity and a drawn out court battle that cost more of your time than it’s worth – but don’t feel any obligation because you have broken a ‘law’ pushed upon you by some ‘authority.’ Simply, because there is no authority over you if you are not a slave but own yourself.
Armed with this changed state of mind you will be stronger to resist at any possible opportunity to resist legalized muggery and make the mugger follow at least his own rules.
Now, let’s see what a paralegal pastor – what an interesting combination – has to reach us in this classic video series. Some of the things might not be current any more, but take this as a start and don’t feel like an owned subject to ‘authority’ any more.
Here is the first video of a series of 12…
and here is the playlist of all 12.
I have to admit that I found the following video only because of my anarchistic tendency and state of mind.
I read something about that woman in the white house – and how she had over stepped her role once again. Found out it was not all that bad – and the most satirical was from Jon Steward…
Today is the day again where America celebrates it’s freedom.
I don’t have much to say, but I let Chris say something that might be appropriate. I met Chris at a recent home schooling event. He writes the wildest poetry you could imagine. When I tried to read the first poem he forwarded to me I told him that it reminded me of the famous Vogon poetry.
Today I want to present a piece from his moderate era.
Land of the Free…REE-LEE
Do taxpayers pun while paying frivolous fines?
Do marlins still tug against tightening lines?
When pinched by no squirm-room, left choice-less, bereft,
then clap-trap verboseness is all that we’re left. (Seemingly)
The noose of Big Brother hangs ever about
the necks of the masses – We, the People, who pout..
..As waiting in lines with our checkbooks in hand,
we ponder the path of this once wondrous land..
..of Washington, Lincoln and ‘W’ too,
while stonily missing the freedoms we knew,
when God was the giver of all of our rights..
..before lawyer-armies marched in in the night
and put up their fences now seen at the dawn..
We knew it would happen, we knew all along.
We’re cleared to chase evil the ends of the earth,
but we can’t stand against in the Land of Our Birth(?)
The lawyers’ america (sic):One City Hall..
Can’t fight’em, or join’em, go shop at the Mall.
It’s time to hold fast and rise up to the fight..
And pull off the darkness, the long winter’s night.
Recall when as children, they taught us to sing..
My Country ’tis of Thee, Let Freedom Ring?
Remember the soldiers, parades on Main Street?
And picnics and fireworks..Man, it was sweet!
America’s stirring, her proud heart can’t stand
the tyrannies festering all through the land..
We call on The Blood that was shed for all men..
In songs that commit all our voices as One!
Patriots, everyone, Sleepers awake!
Lift up your voices, for Heaven’s sake.
Remember your blessings and answer The Call!
In Christ, Hallelujah! Freedom for all!
Hand on your heart, now sing:
My country ’tis of Thee, sweet land of liberty, of Thee I sing.
Land where my fathers dies, land of the pilgrims’ pride,
form every mountainside, let Freedom ring.
So, I got myself a t-shirt from them, one of the ways to get money to them through the regular payment channels, without the need to resort to bitcoins, mailed payments or bank transfers.
I went to college in Germany (there called Universität) and the semester fees were about 23 Marks – maybe 10 Dollars. I lived with my parents but was registered at a friends house so that I could draw state funded study support, part of which was a loan. (I still owe some of that today, by the way.)
So, I have to say, my college education was pretty – – inexpensive. At least for me personally, maybe not so for the rest of the population. But my justification was always that later in my professional life I will earn well and pay lots of taxes.
OK, the latter did not really happen. First, I was self employed most of the time and I first saw my money in my account and then had to write a check (instead of it being collected before the wage earner even sees it), and that created a rather intense resistance, so I did everything possible to avoid writing big numbers on those checks.
And second, I left Germany after just about six or seven years.
At one point it becomes acute to think about those things for my son. He is still a few years away from any college thoughts, but eventually it will be something to consider.
Now I ran into this video that paints a bleak picture of the current college situation here in the old US of A…
There is not that much to add in terms of the facts, that it really does not seem to be worth to go to college any more, but what I do want to add is the following from my very own experiences.
I studied physics and got up to the equivalent of a masters degree – 6 years. It was fun to a bigger degree, especially my little stints down at CERN, to mingle with world class scientists – for example the internet was born down there (no, it was not Al Gore!)
But I did not go into a career in science, but moved into the computer field which was just then starting to be something to be reckoned with. What later became computer science was, in the beginning, manned by physicists and mathematicians.
So, after college I never did anything much of physics. I did practice forcing my will onto computers during my college days, but this was more or less a side effect because the experiments I conducted produced lots of data and we happened to have PDP 11 at the physics chair where I did my work. My first contacts with computers, a little bit before that, I had in my spare time when I taught myself to program a big IBM mainframe (I think it was an IBM 360) through the use of punch cards. I did this just because I was fascinated by these machines not because of any career goal.
All this happened during a time when in most cases you could still do the job you trained for, for the rest of your life. With the accelerated development in technology and science that is definitely not true any more. Sure, programming the PDP 11 in assembler gave me some basis but certainly did not prepare me for optimizing web sites and writing that occasional php application. All what I do now is self-taught and did not require me to sit in some auditorium and listen to a professor who has given the same lecture for the last 20 year, who can not be replaces by something younger and more up-to-date because he has tenure.
This is why I have to wholeheartedly agree with the implied conclusions in the above video that going to college at this time is a waste of time and money, and at these costs would just make you a slave for the rest of your life. It was scary for me to learn that not even a bankruptcy can get you out of these student loans – do I see debtor’s prisons on the horizon?
Maybe my son is really smart that at his young age he is really embracing the digital world, because that might be the area that we will be living in in 10 – 15 years. You better learn how to become an entrepreneur in Second Life.
This year all things seem to come together right on this one weekend
and particularly the first point makes me ponder the eternal question of ‘what is real’. It helped a bit that I also listen to a talk by Larken Rose, one of my favorite anarchists.
Let us look at my spiritual path for a moment and see if we can somehow apply this to my pondering.
On this path, I have now reached a point where I believe that I create my own world. This is often expressed as “The world IS as I see it” and not the other way around, something that I did subscribe to at some point on my path.
However, I have to admit that this is still, to some degree, a belief and not a certainty, as sometimes doubt creeps in. Occasionaly I wish for just one very good and solid experience to show me that something that I had just created in my inner world, was also visible to my physical eyes – that would be a nice thing to have and would remove all uncertainty, right? To give a rude example – I create a Ferrari in my inner world, go out the door – and there it is – in RED!
Unfortunately, these examples work both ways, so every time I create something in my own universe, and it does not show up in the one that I share with other, or believe to share with others, is like a punch in the teeth of my certainty.
If I could only find one (oh so) little example where it really worked – creating in my own world and finding it manifested in the ‘real’ world!
Today I understood that I’d better not look for little things only – I have a really big one right in front of me and after being able to see it – it’s undeniable.
“So, what is it?” you might now ask.
I was tempted to write some more sentences in order to build tension before I tell you, but I can’t stand this excitement myself any more – so here it is:
Memorial Day!
Huh – that makes no sense, this is something everybody knows and agrees upon – we honor our fallen heroes and celebrate that they are dead!
Maybe that did not come out right – ‘celebrate’ might not be the right word. Let me try it a bit differently and start at the beginning.
Now let’s see how this would have played out had we actually left that conviction back in the old world.
Today then, we would not have one hundred million people that give away up to half of their wealth obeying the command of a few hundred (congress, etc.) who back up their ‘power’ with about one hundred thousand enforcers. A nice graphic representation of these ratios can be seen in the ‘The Tiny Dot.’
This article you are reading here right now, also demonstrates the ratio of Us v. Them – taxpayers v. IRS employees: it has about one thousand words. If this article represents Us, then the total of the enforcers is ONE WORD – 100 million v. 100 thousand – and of those latter the bigger part are only pencil pushers and not real ‘enforcers.’
Imagine how strange it is that this whole article is terrified of one word.
The only explanation that would make sense is that this power is a creation of all those one hundred million tax payers. On a logical level the few could not terrorize those many. Only when those many would create the existence of this power, which, in a so-called ‘objective reality’ is just not there, can this government (and any other) exist. Neither does ‘the law’ exist in some kind of ‘objective’ fashion as it was created by the few that we put into existence and which we could just as easily un-create if we so decide.
We only have to answer this one question for ourselves:
Everything else falls into place automatically – there is no ‘government’ – no ‘authority’ that could possibly make rules which I have to live by.