When will We Have our Liberty?

Or you could just join the Heaven’s Gate crew following Hale-Bopp to a better universe. It is no more looney or self-delusional.

George wrote;
“I’m sensing bitterness. What exactly is looney and/or delusional?”

I’m sure you are an intelligent guy and are seeking a way to go. I’m not bitter, I’m just telling it like I see it. I think all self proclaimed “anarchists” are delusional and can’t be talked/debated out of their delusion. Based on my admittedly limited observation, I predict that you probably will become dissatisfied with anarchism in a few years.

I hope you will return to effective acctivism some time in the future.

so when I stop paying my taxes and the gang comes come to incarcerate me, what do I do then? Will the money I didn’t pay in taxes be enough to fund some sort of militia powerful enough to ward off the government?

I read the brochure a few days ago. I’ll try for the big one in between working. I’m not aware of any brute squads for hire in my area; which doesn’t necessarily mean there aren’t any. local gangs could be a good source of this, though I don’t really want to move to the ghetto…

@George Donnelly & Matt:

The simplest way to get the jackbooted thugs to back off now, is to participate in “Liberty Pools”. These are a re-named implementation of Jim Bell’s “Assassination Politics” from the mid 90s. (Bell has been hounded by government hugs ever since he started tracking IRS agents in the same way as the IRS tracks US livestock).

Like all perfect policy, it shocks the senses when first encountered. It is reminiscent of the ‘Parish Spike’ solution to the road toll: to get people to drive more safely, instead of an airbag, you install a steel spike that rams itself through the driver’s chest in the event of any frontal impact… drivers would CHANGE THEIR BEHAVIOUR.

The actual number of deaths from the spike would be low (much lower than the road toll currently) and the dead would almost always be the person at fault… the number of faultless dead would drop considerably.

Anyway – back to ‘Liberty Pools’ – a solution to tyranny which likewise limits the innocent dead.

Briefly: people who are interested in the demise of some or other enabler-or-tyranny (call him ‘A’), place double-encrypted pseudonymous bets on the date on which ‘A’ dies (or is seriously injured). He whose guess is the closest to the actual date, wins the pot. In the event of collateral damage, there is a penalty function.

Imagine you were one of the black-clad paramilitary thugs that have a penchant for using obscene levels of violence while trying to enforce stupid rules. If you knew that all it would take to get you offed is for 100 or so people to place $100 bets, maybe you would seek non-parasitic gainful employment that fit your skills (burger-flipper, perhaps).

(Actually, $10k is a high price for an assassination of an unguarded person – $3k is more like the right number).

If mid-level ‘Little Eichmanns’ woke up every morning knowing that their name could appear in a ‘Liberty Pool’… maybe they would be less inclined to grant that warrant/kick that door in/pull the trigger/hassle the black kid.

Imagine you’re Lon Horiuchi – the only one of the government’s paid assassins who fired shots at both Ruby Ridge and Waco. If that sick gutless murderer had known that his actions would wind up pissing enough people off that his pool hit $100k (not that it has yet – just sayin’)… well, maybe he would have fired a warning shot instead of killing an unarmed woman.

As always, the market will provide the mechanism: Liberty Pools are a mechanism that enables the focus of diffuse dissatisfaction with tyranny’s enablers, with execution (ahem) provided by people as their supply price is reached.

And you can’t doubt that it provides real incentives for tax-eaters to stop doing their jobs – or at least, to stop them doing that part of their jobs that pisses people off.

As an aside – the low cost of having someone offed (as I say, $3k for a schlub) is prima facie evidence that al Qaeda doesn’t exist.

If it DID exist, at least one of the leading neocon ‘intelligentsia’ would have been offed by now: most of them go around without SS details. Or are you trying to tell me that al Qaeda (as we understand it… comprised of some unspecified number of ‘sleeper cells’) is perfectly happy to have these folks traipsing around?

Mid-level HAMAS and Hizbullah guys – guys who are just functionaries – go through their days knowing that they could be toast at any time. Plenty of them have been offed, usually along with half a dozen children and other bystanders.

Are we to be led to believe that al Qaeda is less ‘hard core’ than Shin Bet?

OK – that bit was off topic.

I can’t point you to the pools, but both OrgA and OrgB pools exist.

They are largely concentrated in places where they will be most efficacious (witness the apparent rapid deterioriation of internal security in Moldova recently), but they will come to an intertubes near you, in time.

The aim, of course, is to get the entire machine of tyranny to operate at lower and lower levels of efficiency. GLOBALLY.

If every person in the supply chain of tyranny had their performance degraded as a result of harbouring doubts about their personal survival, then government’s ability to oppress would evaporate in weeks.

Cheerio,

GT

George said;
“Still wondering what exactly is delusional about a stateless society …?”
only
It is impossible just like a pure vacuum is impossible. Not from a debating point position but from the laws of the universe and from thousands of years of practical examples. “Anarchist” societies have been attempted and have happened briefly due to circumstance but they are always replaced by more ordered and structured societies. If logic is not enough, it is human nature to seek order and structure, especially among women. You are not going to find many mature women with children who will go along with anarchy. I don’t suppose you are contemplating an all male childless society. Anarchy is a young man’s dream when he can not cope with reality. dreaming is one thing, but believing in that impossible dream is the very definition of delusion.

Again, I don’t expect to change your mind through debate. An intelligent person suffering from delusion can invent many scenarios where anarchy works, has worked and is working. Just like Prot from Kpax.

“If logic is not enough, it is human nature to seek order and structure, especially among women.”

What makes you think women seek order and structure more than men?

“You are not going to find many mature women with children who will go along with anarchy.”

I am a 42-year old woman with kids and a good job, and I’d be happy to give a voluntary society a try.

@George Donnelly –

re: the ‘agent provocateur’ problem – it is a real problem, along with ‘honey pot’ operations. There is a requirement for mutual mistrust on open channels, in order to avoid entrapment (and the resultant no-knock armed raid by the aforementioned armed goons).

Still, there have to be people who are prepared to stick their heads above the parapet of encrypted pseudonymity, in order to attempt to propagate ideas to as wide an audience as possible: furthermore, ‘feelers’ such as the Declaration of Separation are put out in order to try and find other members of ‘The Remnant’ (to use Nock/Rothbard/North language for a second).

There will, without doubt, be O’Briens out there posing as Emmanuel Goldstein. In fact someone with an apparently ‘anti-State’ backstory (like me) is actually MORE suspect that a common-or-garden moonbat.

Me: military background, then degree in Economics (anarchism formed at this point, as I was taught by a former colleague of Hayek). Seven years at a very libertarian economic modelling think tank. Well, I say ‘libertarian’ but we did quite a bit of government work and taught people how to do what we did, including people from JWAC (Langley). I then went into the financial sector (before finishing my PhD), and headed a team of securities analysts. In 2002 I decided the entire edifice was screwed, and went native.

Since then I’ve been thrown out of France twice as a result of my vocal disagreement with stupid passport rules… the second time coincided with an accusation of anti-semitism and holocaust denial when I wrote a piece declaring that anti-denial laws were a despicable denial of liberty of expression.

I also got in trouble because I refer to ‘immigration detention centres’ – wherever they are located – as “concentration camps” (I spent two weeks in the camp at Lyon each time I was ‘repatriated’ from France, after the French authorities ‘lost’ my passport).

It all does sound a bit “O’Brien”-esque; too tidy. But that’s the story.

At the end of the day, people have to have the courage of their convictions. Jefferson, Paine and others remained ‘below the radar’ for a time, but eventually there was a requirement to ‘decloak’ and declare their purpose openly. I think that time is at hand, for the simple reason that the crony-capitalist state in the west is in the same position now, as East Germany, Romania and the Soviet Union were in the months leading up to their dissolution.

Economists – decently trained ones (like Mises and Hayek) rather than bastard-Keynesian statists – predicted that Socialism as practiced in the USSR and its satellites would eventually fail due to its internal inconsistency. The inefficiency of central planning, coupled with corruption in the Party and the resource drain of the military-industrial complex, would be its downfall.

Sound familiar?

Anyhow – Bell’s ideas were a genie that was never going back into its bottle. As more and more state organisms find it difficult to keep funding their internal oppressive machinery, expect Liberty Pools to make more and more of an appearance. They are a perfect 4GW mechanism – hell, if digital cash was a bit more secure the principals of Liberty Pools would be taking out AdSense ads.

One thing that people will dislike a lot, is that politicians will almost certainly curtail spending on ‘good’ protective services (fire and ambulance) before they will start cutting ‘offensive’ budgets (SWAT, domestic surveillance/intel gathering, and general thuggery).

Politicians will do that because the armed thugs of the state are the only thing that is between the disgruntled populace and the political parasites who STILL, after 150 years of corrupt mismanagement, retain a sense of entitlement to half your paypacket. They still think you are their livestock, and will keep their wranglers paid until the last opportunity.

The end-game is in progress, all over the planet. That’s why the State is getting increasingly violent and intrusive in its treatment of dissent.

And finally: if concerned about the inevitable attempts of government goons to infiltrate any process, simply prepare yourself against the O’Briens: it’s easy enough.

For example… I don’t do anything remotely ‘interesting’, except on a TrueCrypt VED running off a bootable USB key. I only ever connect that key to the internet using TOR (after hard-spoofing the machine’s MAC address, just in case), and it’s only from there that I send any mail (and always gnuPG rather than PGP).

The odds of a secure communication being traced back to a level enabling my ‘meat-space’ (which is writing this) to be matched to any pseudonymous encrypted communication: it’s not exactly zero, but it’s as near to zero as makes no odds. Think of the US national debt, square it, and invert it. (i.e., 10E-26).

Cheerio

GT

@GT, while your Liberty Pool solution is interesting I’m not sure how I feel about calling for the murder of another person, let alone saying I will pay for it. I think endorsing assassination is a bad idea and will only lead to escalating violence and further human misery.