thought provoking video
 

Humans as livestock, governments as livestock owners:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baAw6srihOE

(I didn't watch, just fixed.)

Indeed.

Interesting perspective. Though I don't think "shutting everything down" is a good solution.

OP, are you an archaist? Just curious. I could only get 1:20 in before I started smelling NWO theorists.

It had nothing to do with NWO. Farmers tend to crop thier own farms.

Interesting videos.

I've always looked at the majority of society as "cattle".

How old are you? Just curious.

You are the all singing all dancing....


Interesting video, but that fact of the matter is most humans need some sort of "hearding" to keep themselves on course.

The evil is those who use this relationship as a way to gain more wealth than the relationship would normally support in a sense.

Is this true of most humans because we are naturally that way, or because we've submitted to this situation for so long?

At least we live on the best farm. That's all I have to say.

That's a very hard question to answer, probably the only remaining case studys would be in untouched parts of africa. Even then most villages go from simple farm based societies to full on children with AK47's and slavery within a few years of the introduction of the idea of wealth and greed.


Then again the oposite can be said about this community, there are leaders to initiate new commers into the heard and dispense knowledge, yet we are not enslaved, some of us even donate to the cause.

dude.

Simple villages dont go from farmers to AK47 welding slave owners overnight from the introduction of wealth and greed...their peaceful villages get pillaged and they are forced INTO slavery, where the childern an indoctinated to hate and sent to kill their own families.

Yes most of them do, but where do the rebel forces that enslave them come from?

I'm obviously omitting the presence of outside armies who do the same and trying to focus on the idea that some of these farmers are born from the same village life they burn rape and pilage to gain wealth

where do they come from? that countries army/militia/dictator/overlord.

I don't think we should shut everything down either, but 95% would be about right. All his points are valid, not really free if you can't even own property with out your yearly rental fee "tax".

Nobody is advocating "shutting everything down". That's dumb.

Don't confuse society with government. That's the propaganda.

The Federal Gov't is on a train wreck to insolvency. The debt is unpayable. When the interest rates on treasury debt goes up, and the resulting cost of paying the interest alone on the debt rises and exceeds the military budget, is historically when empires end. The Fed Gov will be forced to cut its budget whether it likes it or not. And when budgets are cut, their power is cut. Then power will de-centralize.

I think the most logical thing that will happen next is that the States will invoke the 10th Amendment and take power back from Washington DC. De-centralization of power is a good thing.

So the Fed Gov will default. The question is, in what form? The most logical sequence is: mass inflation, then budget cuts. The Fed Gov will stiff various voting blocs. In what sequence? I think the military budget is the easiest to cut. Pull back troops from Germany, South Korea, etc, countries which can afford their own defense. After that, I think the oldsters and retirees will be stiffed, then the gov't unions. There will be a revolution at the ballot box. When the young voters are tired of taxes in the face of mass inflation, they will finally go out and vote and outnumber the oldsters and vote to take away their pensions. Granny will have to sell her house and come and live with you.

I doubt there will be hyperinflation - it's in nobody's interest - when the money dies, the power dies.

Who wins, who loses? Ruling class loses, cattle class wins. Short term, the destabilization of the economy will cause a short term recession - the destabilization is because the Fed Gov controls so much of the GDP. However as the free market is left alone, its tendency is towards productivity and the economy will recover. The losers will be those who are dependent on the government teat - employees, contractors, the welfare class, and those whose jobs are paid above-market via gov't protection. The winners will be the productive class.

Long term, de-centralization of power will lead to increased freedom. And the livestock will realize that the fundamental idea of "government as savior" was a big lie.

All of the welfare governments of the West (except maybe Canada and Norway), are on the path to insolvency. The accounting will catch up to all of them. The welfare state is fundamentally unsustainable. The 50-odd year experiment will end, just as the experiment with communism ended.

As you say this you are thinking of yourself as superior to others. You are thinking of yourself as part of the "herding class" and others as part of the "livestock class". You believe that your superiority justifies your promotion of "just" laws that do good and "properly" herd the others, because "you know better".

What you don't realize is that higher up the financial totem pole, are a smaller group of elite who are thinking exactly the same thing. Except that YOU are part of their cattle class.

Such thinking is a big part of the mess we're in. It is tyranny.

It is arrogance - that you believe you know how other people "should" run their lives.

Centralization of power leads to pathocracies - the positions at the top attract the very worst, most immoral megalomaniacs, yielding opposite results to what those well-meaning people like you that believe that the cattle need to be herded. Well-meaning people who vote Democrat thinking along the lines that "Bush and the Republicans are evil and Obama and the Democrats are angels". In reality both parties are evil, it's just that the Dems are less obvious. Creating a welfare class is a means of further increasing the power of gov't.

And if you say, "democracy is where the people exert their popular will". Well, would you like to have the inferior-to-you cattle class vote on what *you* can and cannot do?

A system based on freedom, leaving the cattle alone, will not be perfect. It will not yield perfect results for every cow. But the other option, top-down control, yields worse results.

The reason the USA became wealthy is not because of what the gov't has done, but because the relative amounts of freedom resulted in high productivity, which is incentivized, because individuals get to keep the fruits of said productivity. And such productivity benefits *everyone*.

“I am for doing good to the poor, but I differ in opinion of the means. I think the best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it. In my youth I traveled much, and I observed in different countries, that the more public provisions were made for the poor, the less they provided for themselves, and of course became poorer. And, on the contrary, the less was done for them, the more they did for themselves, and became richer.” – Ben Franklin


"Property is the fruit of labor...property is desirable...is a positive good in the world. That some should be rich shows that others may become rich, and hence is just encouragement to industry and enterprise. Let not him who is houseless pull down the house of another; but let him labor diligently and build one for himself, thus by example assuring that his own shall be safe from violence when built." - Abraham Lincoln


"Our tenet ever was that Congress had not unlimited powers to provide for the general welfare, but were restrained to those specifically enumerated, and that, as it was never meant that they should provide for that welfare but by the exercise of the enumerated powers, so it could not have been meant they should raise money for purposes which the enumeration did not place under their action; consequently, that the specification of powers is a limitation of the purposes for which they may raise money. "
-- Thomas Jefferson letter to Albert Gallatin, 1817


“…[T]he government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like the state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”
-James Madison


"A wise and frugal government ... shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."
-- Thomas Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1801


“To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his father’s has acquired too much, in order to spare to others, who, or whose fathers, have not exercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association—the guarantee to every one of a free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.” -- Thomas Jefferson


"As a matter of fact and law, the governing rights of the States are all of those which have not been surrendered to the National Government by the Constitution or its amendments. Wisely or unwisely, people know that under the Eighteenth Amendment Congress has been given the right to legislate on this particular subject [Prohibition], but this is not the case in the matter of a great number of other vital problems of government, such as the conduct of public utilities, of banks, of insurance, of business, of agriculture, of education, of social welfare and of a dozen other important features. In these, Washington must not be encouraged to interfere." - Franklin Delano Roosevelt, 1930 (Spoken when he was at the state level and it suited him. When president, he despotically grabbed for more and more power, the lousy fucking hypocrite)

“Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.” -- Thomas Jefferson


“Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence.” -- Thomas Jefferson


I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them." -- thomas Jefferson


"The policy of the American government is to leave their citizens free, neither restraining nor aiding them in their pursuits." -- Thomas Jefferson (Oh, that I wish this was still true)


"When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty." -- Thomas Jefferson


"What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?" -- Thomas Jefferson

I <3 Jefferson's and Madison's philosophies.
Hamilton was scum.

Just to show you how much power corrupts, one of the Founders, IIRC Adams, jailed a dissenter for calling him "his rotundity". Despite that fact that he helped write the Bill of Rights.

Hamilton should be happy...it only took 100 years for his shitty ideas to get out there.

21.

Really?

I'm pretty sure that is exactly what the author of that video is espousing:
Beyond that, the whole video can basically be summarized as "Having an economy and an organized society of any kind can only be the product of a humanity-as-livestock model, and therefore all economies and all societies are inherently evil."

So, essentially, the only way to be "free" is for us to all "shut everything down" and devolve to a state of complete lawlessness (laws create slavery) and bare subsistence farming (excess production also creates slavery.)



Jason, I honestly have to step back for a moment and ask: Do you genuinely believe in any of this stuff that you post up here?



I'm being totally serious. This video, in particular, is just so completely "out there" in terms of the ideas which are put forth being incompatible with reality that it genuinely makes me question whether you are trolling the forum.

His idea of "shutting the farms down", is not the same as "shutting society down".
Society is not the same thing as gov't.

I look at this video as having philosophical and metaphorical ideas. I agree with most of them. Gov't today evolved from the feudalistic system. Gov't is used by the ruling elite as a means of extracting wealth from the productive class.

Not directly, but the end result is the same.

His idea of "farms" and "farmers" encompasses most of the things that are necessary for a society to function.

Point 1: Without some kind of government, you cannot have laws and the means to enforce them. We don't even have to look back beyond the late 20th century to understand that in the absence of a stable government with a loyal police force, any sufficiently large group of people living under anarchic conditions will tend to naturally devolve into rule-by-bully. Doesn't matter whether it's a nation in central Africa or just a poorly-supervised schoolyard. In a consequence-free environment, the strong will always subjugate the weak.

Point 2: Without some kind of government, you can't have a standardized currency. Now, I'm well aware of your opinions vis-à-vis fiat money and the modern central bank, but even in a gold-based economy, you still need some kind of paper notes, and preferably a deposit-and-credit system to go along with them. If nothing else, do you not think that the rate of street crime (and orthopedic injury) would skyrocket if everybody were walking around with a large quantity of gold on their person, and that the rate of home burglary would increase by many orders of magnitude if there were no banks and I was forced to stuff my entire savings into a coffee can under my bed?

Point 3: Actually, a gold-based economy wouldn't be acceptable to Stefan even under the most ideal of circumstances. The video quite clearly states that having the technology to enable any excess production capacity will naturally lead to the rise of "slavery" (be it the literal Africans-and-chains variety, or merely an employer / employee relationship). Well, without excess production, there's no point in having an economy to begin with (even a barter economy), since nobody has anything to trade in the first place.


I understand some of the fundamental tenets of what the author here is trying to say, but he has a very narrow vision. What he is proposing just cannot work for any society which operates above the level of stone knives and bear-skins, and frankly, I enjoy having access to clean drinking water, medical care, protection from foreign armies, and a system of roads.



In an ideal world, this is true. In actual practice, they are separate but inseparable.


Well, yeah. You can't extract a lot of wealth from the unproductive class, as they don't have any.

Somebody has to pay for all of the road-building, healthcare-providing, military-and-police-organizing, etc.

The gov't could get a job. We could drill for oil and sell it like the rest of the world.

Acutally, the US could rent our army like mercenaries. We already do it for free.

Joe,

You are arguing for Minarchy, and I would love for us to live in one. In a Minarchy the purpose of gov't is to protect individual and property rights. And thus there would need to be a police force, a court system, and a military to protect against foreign invaders. What is NOT the purpose of gov't, is to re-distribute wealth, and to write economic interventionist laws. The latter always economic inefficiency; the former creates a welfare class (including corporate welfare). Empire building is also inimical to liberty and prosperity. The latter illegitimate functions of gov't are why your real tax rate is 30-50%.

As for currency, I like the idea of competing central banks. Where none of them have a gov't-granted monopoly, with the privilege of the legal ability to buy gov't debt and with a currency monopoly. The gov't can choose to collect taxes in gold or silver or even in a gov't currency. Having competing central banks will get rid of theft via inflation and get rid of the boom and bust cycle created by debt-expansion bubbles.

Lastly the guy in the video does not espouse Anarcho-Primitivism. He espouses a school of thought called Agorism. They have a lot of good ideas, and correctly point out the many ills of government, but I'm not 100% sold on the possibility of such a system.

In theory transitioning to Agorism is not possible in a society with little freedom such as in the likes of Somalia. It is only possible in a more advanced economy such as the USA. You missed the part (in maybe a later vid), that the center of a moral framework of an Agorist society is the non-aggression principle. IOW all agreements are voluntary. The fundamental precept of gov't, in contrast, is that gov't has a legal monopoly on violence. In an Agorist society, there can be no slavery because individuals cannot be coerced to do anything with the threat of violence.

For more ideas, this book is a bunch of essays on the problems of government, and AnarchoCapitalism.
http://voluntarykaraism.com/wp-conte...m%20(1973).pdf

When jason writes big posts like the above, i pretend its the cat in his sig that's speaking them out to me while I read.

I thought I was the only one.

I do have a problem with his last post.

Gov't should also be there to make sure baseball players don't take drugs, and if they do they can punish them.

I can only read things in the voice of the professor from Futurama.



Jason:

Really?

That's what your whole political will is founded upon, the hope that everyone will be nice to each other and we'll all just get along?


It's been tried, man. In "advanced" societies, too. Riding the wave of the whole "back to the land" movement, all sorts of communes sprung up in the 1960s, in the US and elsewhere. Those places were founded on precisely the sort of principles that you mention, and pretty much every single one of them failed.

And those were being run by hippies- folks who, generally speaking, had a few things to say about peace and love. How well do you think your voluntary coopoeration movement is going to fare in downtown Baltimore or East LA?


Face it, dude. People don't just want to get along. Even in the idyllic suburb of Carlsbad, CA, I'm glad we have police.

Joe:

Nobody said "no police needed". That would be idiotic. That's a very common misconception of Agorism. What they espouse is "police and the judicial system are too important to leave to the gov't, there should be free market competition in policing."

It has actually happened, in the Icelandic Commonwealth. It lasted for longer than the USA has been around. You got to choose among competing "chieftains". The gov't had no executive branch. Only a judicial and executive.

Besides, while I love reading the ideas of the Agorists and AnarchoCapitalists, (I learn a lot from them), I am still skeptical if it can ever happen. Barring that, I'll stick with Minarchy. This is where the gov't merely protects individual and property rights, by running the police, the military, and the judicial system.

You keep saying that, and yet the video which started the thread was pretty clear on the message that government of any kind is inherently corrupt. It's quite hard to know whether you actually have a firm stance on any issues at all, or merely enjoy posting diatribes by marginalized individuals with wildly contrarian points of view.

Government is a nessecary evil, imho.

after the war, we started with nothing....then we ratified the articles of confederation and when we realized they little a slightly more centralized government in order to make it work, we went with the constitution. this was the first of it's kind...the only consitution that granted citizens power and limited gov'ts.

Sadly, as time has gone by, curruption and political favors has allowed us to move closer and closer back to the system we fought against in the first place. Our gov't has great powers and we have less liberty.

Charlie Wilson might have stopped the Russians, but look at the cost...

What you're missing is that in Agorist theory, you will have a non-gov't aka non-monopolistic police. Police can exist without a monopoly gov't. It existed in the Icelandic Commonwealth for something like 400 years.

I will try to be clear. I find the arguments of Agorists and AnrachoCapitalists to be very interesting. Most of their arguments also apply to Minarchy. However, wrt the differences between them and Minarchists, I lean towards the latter.

Minarchy is similar to the original design of the Articles of Confederation (and to a lesser extent, the Constitution). To whit, off the top of my head:

- Small gov't with limited powers, which protects individual and property rights, and enforces private contracts
- that means a police and judicial system
- De-centralization of power aka the principle that all laws should be enacted at the most local, effective level (e.g. city zoning laws, vs. federal drug laws).
- no "moralistic" laws e.g. laws against porn or drugs- no empire building - i.e. national DEfense, not OFfense
- no wealth re-distribution, no corporate nor social welfare
- no economic interventionist laws are allowed, e.g. no central bank protection
- no meddling in currency either
- larger units of gov't take funding (taxes) from the smaller units of gov't, NOT from the people

The conundrum that Agorist/AnarchoCapitalist theory diverges from Minarchy, as Braineack puts it, due to gov't being a "necessary evil".
In a Minarchy, the gov't is granted the legal monopoly of the use of coercion and violence. They are the only entity that can legally use force to impose its will. It is hard to prevent a limited gov't, which has this power, from growing and arrogating power to itself. One measure of this is the number of laws. It grows relentlessly, and very very few laws are retired.

The Federal Gov't has grown into the monster that it is today (taxes 30% of GDP, sends young people to their death, murders foreigners, all in the name of "spreading democracy" what have you), OTOH, it took 300 years to do so, which in a small way is a testament to the Constitution.
The Agorists believe that a society with an advanced economy can transition to a system of no monopoly-gov't, and services such as police and justice, can be provided by competing companies. In a competitive environment, individuals and firms that provide any product or service, need to compete with each other - IOW the customer is king (witness the computer hardware costs and quality over time).

Such a system does not require that all individuals be angels - after all, about 0.8% of individuals are psychopaths - however, it addresses the problem wherein, with a concentration of power (monopoly gov't), those 0.8% are the exact types who rise to said positions of power. The power to ote with your wallet is far more democratic than voting at the ballot box. Psychopaths are expert manipulators and at projecting personae, so you don't know if the guy you're voting for is one.

Anyway, that's the Agorist theory, which I find very intriguing.

Back to the original video, there were a couple of interesting concepts - that gov't costing 30% of GDP means from January to March you are a slave to the gov't - and think about the inefficiency of gov't wrt spending that tax money. We are slaves to the corporate welfare and social welfare recipients. The fact that international borders are set up wherein you have to jump through hoops to move across them, diminishes the competition between gov'ts to "attract citizens" if you will, unlike say, TX vs CA. The fact that the Fed Gov laws are now more numerous than state laws, means that TX resembles CA more than otherwise, again diminishing the competition between them in attracting citizens. That a society based on the non-aggression principle (nobody can initiate violence - but of course you can use violence as defense) would be more prosperous. And so on.

K. So I've been trolling this forum for a bit because I have nothing to bring to the table as everyone has been balls deep in the furthest depths of their engine bay and back whereas the lowly grapist has 1) no money and 2) dropped his trans once and yelled at his timing belt a lot.

However there are two points I'd like to bring up for argument's sake:

1) Pretend this board is a society. Could it run without moderators or supporters? Discuss.

2) Everyone complains that we, as a society, are enslaved by debt.

Think about the last 60-80 years when luxury items such as cars and television sets were just that. Luxury items for people that were extremely wealthy. Now average joes like me and you can have a summer ride, a daily driver, a decent place to live, a degree in something useless, a retirement plan, accessibility to skanks much better looking than yourself (which may be directly correlated with how much shit and/or education you have, or it could be attributed to a complete breakdown of social hierarchy, or good ol' daddy issues), and a job that doesn't pay you in a sandwich bag full of change. Could the growth of money caused by switching from a semi-commodity currency to a fiat currency have caused all this? Now I'm an economist by trade and by education, and the only real answer we can tell you is, "We don't know. Wait a few years maybe and we'll come up with an educated suspicion or a model that may or may not be accurate."

Now a lot of us may be in debt for the rest of our lives from: mortgages, home equity loans (if you're a failure), business loans, car payments, etc. but the quality of living has increased and you can have more shit. There's no doubt about that. Personally, I'd rather have some debt than work my ass off to have one camry, a craptastic house in a rural area, no real retirement plan or safety net, to proudly say I am debt free and that my money will never grow but it's backed by the goodness of some commodity that can hyperinflate or hyperdeflate overnight.

The problem with commodity money (money backed by a commodity) is that it can never grow, unless you pillage and rape and get more of that commodity or have direct control of the value of it. Since fiat money (money backed by trust) is monopoly money it can grow independently of the value of whatever commodity it would've been secured by. So our buying power can increase and buy things we couldn't have possibly before. If this is considered "being trapped" or "held down by the man" or whatever the hell you want to call it, that's fine by me. Moreover, the Gini coefficient (measurement of the differences in national income) equality of the US isn't even all that awful.

I may have gone off on a very very different tangent since I read this last night and am responding straight from memory. So take this with a grain of salt and be easy on me since it seems you guys do your homework and I do this for a 9-5 that I couldn't give a rat's ass about.

1) Society has rules; in many cases the rules can be enforced without violence. This board is actually a great example. And, boards have competition. If a bunch of folks didn't like the sucky rules over at m.net, they moved here. The problem with gov't is that it has a monopoly on violence. Such power is dangerous. The worst individuals are attracted to gov't, megalomaniacs who wish to wield such power. Gov't has monopolies period. If you don't like the laws and can't change them, your best recourse is to move to another country, and there are some artificial, gov't-set barriers to that.

2) I agree, some debt, used wisely, like a tool, is a good thing.

And what's wrong with most prices denominated in said commodity, to drop slowly, numerically, over time? Look at LCD TV's and monitors. Their prices keep dropping. Imagine if most prices dropped over time - it means that money you set aside for retirement today, is worth more in the future. Make it a lot easier. No need to "play stockbroker" with your savings. Even if salaries dropped, as long as it dropped slower than the prices of goods, then that would be great - we'd end up in lower and lower tax brackets, instead of higher and higher ones!

Or better yet, why not have competing market currencies? Competing central banks?

funny you should mention this. We are about to force our senior members to pay $10 a month to use this site and require them to post helpful information or recieve a fine, while all the noobs get access the site for free and are privy to a wealth of information.

This will make our site full of great content and increase the userbase significantly. There couldn't be any bad reprocussions from it.