Some people might say "This whole agorism thing is too complicated. A lot of people aren't going to understand or appreciate it."
The answer is that those people are irrelevant. It is only necessary to get some smart people to start trading in an agorist economy. The advantage of tax avoidance and regulation avoidance will be so overwhelming that those agorists will have a tremendous advantage.
As the tools are perfected, more user-friendly versions will be developed that the average person can understand easily. The first version of the tools will probably only be usable by smart people who understand the philosophy.
The key is that some productive people are able to develop wealth without the red market confiscating it. Those people will have so much extra wealth that they will be able to convert others. It will be hardest at the beginning. At the very beginning, prices in the agorist economy will be only slightly lower than the white/pink market and wages will only be slightly higher. As time progresses, the disparity will increase.
Also, as an agorist economy gets going, even non-participants will benefit. As labor leaves the white market for the grey market, white market salaries will have to rise. The remaining white market workers will have greater bargaining power.
Once an agorist underground economy gets started, the collapse of the State should occur exponentially.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Agorist Toolkit - Dealing With Stupid People
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3 comments:
Dear FSK,
First, thanks for running a thought-provoking blog.
I see the main thrust here as absolutely correct. The trick we are faced with now, and which is only very slowly improving, is the tools you mention.
Some of those tools already exist. On the local lawn-mowing scale of things, cash in hand was, is and will remain king. For a national or global economy to "go grey", the internet would seem to be the cornerstone. Add on strong encryption technology (and there's plenty of it around these days), and a reliable free market digital money system (which services like e-gold have, unfortunately, thus far failed to produce) and you've got the foundation, at least for a large chunk of the pure service and financial economy.
The crypto is still less than user-friendly, but it's getting there step by step. Payment and banking are a much bigger problem, and the OECD FATF actions against banking secrecy and freedom-oriented financial practices worldwide in the last 15 years have been no help at all.
There was promising work being done some years ago by one Robert Hettinga, founder of the (apparently now defunct) Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation to create irrefutable, cryptographically secure virtual value tokens and a trust infrastructure to transact in them. The digital money story seems still unwritten, and there should be huge opportunities for those who can come together to make it work.
The idea keeps poking me, though, that a top-down solution to the payment problem may be the wrong approach. Perhaps what we really need is something like hawala, internationalized, updated for the modern age, internet-turbocharged and decentralized down to the local level. The trust infrastructure here would be viral, social-network style rather than authority-based.
Just a quick comment. Post tags could come in real handy here for people coming to your blog and wanting to just read all the posts in the Agorist Toolkit series. You could tag all of these related posts with the tag "Agorist toolkit" and then all the posts in this series will show up. Makes thing easier for your readers.
Not that you have to use it, of course ;-)
there is no reason to try to sort out stupid people we get a little dunber for trying
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