I liked this article, via Hacker News, on hyperinflation in Argentina. Inflation is so bad that metal coins are worth more than paper coins, with the same face amount. The metal contained in a 1 peso coin is worth more than 1 peso.
Argentina's government is decrying people for "immorally/illegally" hoarding coins. They are merely making the rational economic precaution against hyperinflation.
Most countries with a hyperinflation problem have no metal coins circulating at all. The metal value of the coin rapidly becomes greater than the face amount, and the State makes it illegal to trade such coins at their metal value instead of face amount.
I saw a bunch of articles on Hacker News on why top programmers don't get paid 10x as much as average programmers. There were a lot of "star programmers are losers" comments, but nobody said the real truth.
The problem is State restrictions of the market. A handful of top programmers can't easily get together and start their own business. For every Google you hear about, there are dozens of failures.
In order for a productive worker to get full value for their labor, agorism is their best option.
I liked this post on no third solution.
Rothbard was fond of describing taxes as “ransom for permission to live”
That post was specifically about property taxes, but that quote applies to all forms of taxation.
Property taxes are less evil than income taxes, but all forms of taxation are theft. Property taxes are partially avoidable, because you don't have to buy/rent the most expensive house you can afford.
BTW, in many cities, property taxes on apartments are higher than on residential buildings. If you own a house, you explicitly pay the property tax on the value of your house plus land. If you rent an apartment, then the property tax is bundled with your rent. The renter pays the tax as part of his rent, but the renter never explicitly sees the tax bill. Therefore, the incentive for the bad guys is to tax people who don't explicitly see the tax. This is one reason that "owning" a house is more desirable than renting an apartment, in the long-run. Further, many cities have a cap on how much % property taxes can be raised on a house per year.
I liked this article on the NY Times, via Hacker News. "Teasing" is a socially useful skill that has been nearly banished from the lives of most children (and adults). Of course, there's good teasing and bad teasing. For example, I was being friendly with a coworker at my former job, but I was accused of sexual harassment. All I did was stop by and say hello for a minute or two for a few times, so I don't see how that could be considered excessive.
In the comment thread on Hacker News, someone observed that if you're socially skilled, you can subtly tease someone without injuring them.
I liked this post on no third solution about the healthcare crisis, but it left out an important detail.
David Z missed the damaging effect of State licensing requirements for doctors. This restricts the supply of doctors, driving up prices.
I've never seen a mainstream media discussion of the healthcare crisis where licensing requirements for doctors is seriously mentioned as a cause of the problem.
Even though most hospitals are incorporated as a non-profit business, the doctors and bureaucrats who run the hospital pay themselves huge salaries. For this reason, a non-profit hospital should be treated as a for-profit business. The hospital gets some tax breaks, but everyone else pays higher taxes to compensate. If you say "Tax breaks for hospitals!", you're really saying "Higher taxes for everyone who doesn't run a hospital!"
In another post, David Z says his blog's traffic is growing pretty fast. He says he got 4,300 Absolute Unique Visitors in November, with a fast start in December. I had 6602 Absolute Unique Vistors in November, with a slow start for December. (I didn't make many good posts while I was sick.) I don't consider it to be a zero-sum comparison; it's actually positive-sum.
Overall, the amount and quality of free market writing on the Internet seems to be increasing.
David Z also made a post that referred to my post on The Free Market Labor Arbitrage Process. I consider this to be an obvious idea.
In a true free market, worker's salaries are directly proportional to the true economic value of their labor.
This completely fails to hold in the present. The problem is that the current market is not a true free market.
"The Labor Theory of Value" is one of those phrases that causes pro-State troll's brains to shut down. I decided that I'm going to use "The Free Market Labor Arbitrage Process" instead, even though I consider them equivalent.
The way I phrase it avoids the problem "What about the soldier who is paid a salary to dig a ditch, which has an economic value of zero?" In a true free market, there is no taxation system to force people to pay the soldier's salary against their will. In a true free market, you still will have some waste, but no egregious waste as occurs in the present. In a free market, the incentive is for workers and employers to be as efficient as possible, because that's their own wealth being squandered. In the present, the Agent-Principal problem encourages management to make inefficient decisions, and the State can always be lobbied for favors. Via the State, the cost of inefficiency can be passed on to society as a whole.
If only everyone could stop lobbying the State for favors at the same time, then everyone would be better off! In the present, a CEO is practically obligated to lobby the State for favors, because his competitors are doing the exact same thing.
The Free Market Labor Arbitrage Process will hold in the actual market, after the State collapses. In the present, this idea must be discredited by pro-State troll Keynesian economists, so they can proclaim that the current non-free market is free.
I liked this post on Freedomain. Arguing the morality of eating meat versus plants is silly, because they're both alive. Humans are at the top of the food chain, and it isn't immoral to eat meat.
Freedomain made an interesting point regarding meat. There are massive State subsidies for meat farmers. In a true free market, the cost of meat would be much higher relative to vegetables, providing a bigger market incentive for vegetarians.
In the present, many farm animals are abused. I'm much more concerned about the people who live their lives in cubicles than animals who live their lives in a tiny box. In a true free market, people would be able to choose meat that was grown under humane conditions.
It's possible to grow a steak directly in a laboratory, but State restriction of the market has prevented that technology from being developed. In a true free market, "steak grown in a laboratory" would probably be cheapest, high quality, and humane.
I liked this post on Check Your Premises. The Bible has actually changed over time, with some stories being added and others deleted or changed.
For example, in the Cain and Abel story, the "mark" that was given as punishment for murdering your brother is that your skin was turned dark. This is the justification for slavery in the early 19th century.
By gmail chat, someone asked:
I've been noticing a lot of references to the Matrix lately, do you think it is significant?
Yes.
Actually, I never really fully watched the whole movie, just bits and pieces.
The problem is that nearly everything you've learned in school and from the people around you is a lie. However, only when you start questioning the people around you, do you see the Matrix.
For example, ask your friends and relatives about "Taxation is theft!" Their reaction shows the Matrix in action. The government doesn't need to silence dissent. Your friends and relatives do a fine job.
As another example, try riding the subway during rush hour. I live in NYC, but this applies to any large city. If you're observant, you'll notice a certain amount of stress coming from every other person on the train.
I've noticed that, I've also noticed that people try to sit as far away from each other as possible.
Here's another thing you can do to make people panic. Get on a crowded elevator and face the opposite direction as everyone else. There's no reason that should frighten people, but it does.
How come?
It's just that you're violating the social convention. I don't think there's any other reason.
As another example, people talk about the government or a corporation as if they were a person with its own independent will. Government and corporations are abstract fictional characters. You can't have a dispute with the government any more than you can have a dispute with Santa Claus. Your dispute is with the bureaucrats and enforcers who use violence to impose their will on you.
Have you heard of L. Neil Smith?
No.
He is a libertarian science fiction author. A lot of his books are about agorist aliens.
Maybe he's writing documentaries. Aliens use advanced agorism as their economic and political system, and they're trying to implement that system on Earth.
I haven't read much science fiction (documentaries) lately.
It's possible.
The aliens don't need to always influence me directly. They could influence someone else to make a suitable comment on my blog or send me an E-Mail. If it's something that person could have plausibly done anyway, it doesn't seem weird to them. From my point of view, all these little coincidences are too convenient.
When I had my first manic/panic attack in 2005, I had a very bizarre thought at the time. My thought was, coming from apparently an external source, "Millions of people have experienced exactly what you are experiencing right now, but they were all murdered. (This was a reference to the psychiatry industry, which I didn't get at the time.) However, you will be different. You will remember and tell other people about what happened." In retrospect, that is true. There's no way I could have predicted at the time the horrible treatment I received by the psychiatry industry, and that I would successfully refuse to take anti-psychotic drugs. Almost nobody else would ignore the advice of their doctor, recognizing your psychiatrist is a fraud.
Even though there are many other anarchist writers and thinkers, you need to both realize the evil of government *AND* the evil of the way you have been conditioned to think, both logically and emotionally. Overcoming the latter is very hard.
I liked this post on Check Your Premises. Iceland's central bank has badly mismanaged Iceland's money.
Of course "Who needs a central bank anyway?" is never seriously discussed as a possible reform.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Fallacy of "Tax Protester Fallacies"":
It is just like baseball with its umpires. Years ago the umpire said: I call a strike a strike, and a ball a ball. Then later it became: I call 'em what they are!. Then some time passed and the umpire said: I calls 'em like I sees 'em. And now the umpire says: They aint a ball or a strike until I says what they are!
That's how a judge acts. "The law is what I say it is!" Whenever someone complains about the government, my retort now is "If you don't like it, start your own government!" Most people think that's an impossible task, but it actually is feasible. The trick is getting other people to go along with it, and making sure there are tangible benefits for the participants. If an "alternate government" enables people to avoid silly restrictions of the current State, then there are benefits for the participants.
barry b has left a new comment on your post "The Fallacy of "Tax Protester Fallacies"":
good points, you had me at 'it really boils down to I have more guns than you'... of course... doesn't everything really boil down to that? When will plunder stop? Only when plunder becomes more dangerous than actually working... sound familiar?
good post... enjoyed the read
The only convincing argument in favor of the income tax is "I have more guns than you." The other legal arguments are smoke and mirrors.
One goal of an agorist is to create wealth and raise collection costs for the plunderers.
fritz has left a new comment on your post "The Fallacy of "Tax Protester Fallacies"":
I like this post too. Most of all I truly believe it is immoral to let someone steal from you. And I believe that paying taxes allows a terrorist government to dominate and kill people.
If you voluntarily pay taxes, you are responsible for all the bad things that government does.
In the present, I pay taxes on the income from my corporate wage slave job. I'm working on building alternatives, but that will take a few more years.
Think of it this way.When I pay my taxes to the government, almost half of it goes to the military.And we know that the military buys bullets and bombs with the money they get.
That is correct. Half of the US government's budget is military. Corporate welfare is another type of government violence.
When you pay taxes, you aren't just murdering Iraqis. You're also making it harder for me to start a productive business, due to corporate welfare for my potential competitors.
They use these bullets and bombs to kill people I have never met. So actually by paying taxes I'm empowering someone else to commit murder.... To me this is immoral...
How many people have I helped my government kill,,( to many) Its wrong I say!!!!!
Here's one way to do the calculation. Figure out your tax bill for the past few years. Suppose the cost of the Iraq war were $1 trillion and 1 million Iraqis were killed. (I don't know the exact number.) Then, you can figure out how many Iraqis you personally murdered. "Taxes paid by you" divided by "$1M" equals "Iraqis you murdered."
Make sure you consider all indirect hidden taxes. Suppose my actual income over the past 5 years was $200,000, but I actually did $2M of labor. (The surplus was claimed by my employer and other workers as profit and salary. In turn, they paid taxes on this surplus wealth, so most of it winds up in the State's hands.) In that case, I paid $100,000 in direct taxes, but $1.8M in indirect taxes.
Fortunately, in most of my actual jobs, the tasks I was assigned were a complete waste of time. I did labor, but didn't generate much actual real wealth. As a corporate wage slave, I should look for the best job I can, and the highest-paying ones aren't necessarily the ones that generate tangible wealth.
I really should start my own business.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Fallacy of "Tax Protester Fallacies"":
Your continued speculation about the legality of the tax code indicates you passed on my suggestion you educate yourself at the feet of Pete Hendrickson with his book "Cracking the Code". His work will empower you to opt out of the system while obeying the law. Good advice for all wanabe anti-tax bloggers: study the book (it's not an easy read) or admit your ignorance about income tax and keep quiet.
You're entirely missing my point. According to the IRS, it is *IMPOSSIBLE* to boycott the income tax while obeying the law. I'd have to reduce my standard of living to poverty level to legally avoid income taxes.
According to the IRS, *ALL* work that anyone does is subject to the income tax. There are no exceptions.
Mike Gogulski has left a new comment on your post "The Fallacy of "Tax Protester Fallacies"":
Anonymous misses the point, yet again. The point is: fuck the law, and fuck the code. No mountain of words will make theft right, regardless.
Anybody who says "It is possible to legally avoid the income tax!" is pro-State trolling. According to the State, the income tax as currently implemented is 100% legal.
You should do what you think is morally correct. Just because a handful of people made up a law, doesn't make it valid.
Of course, there's also tactics of resistance. I believe in the non-Aggression Principle, which rules out aggressive preemptive action against the State. If I tried that, I would probably injure people who aren't consciously aware that they're part of a massive scam.
Also, I advise people to voluntarily pay property taxes, even though they're immoral. It is feasible to resist income taxes, if you work as an agorist. It isn't feasible to dodge property taxes yet, so I don't advise boycotting them. Further, if you "own" (rent) a car, I advise you to get a driver's license and registration and other slave papers. It isn't worth the hassle of going without them yet. At some point in the future, resisting property taxes and car registration requirements might be viable. Right now, such resistance is effort spent for negligible benefit.
Even though all aspects of the State are reasonable, you should be sensible on your resistance tactics. Focus on tactics that yield the best risk-adjusted return. Agorism seems most sensible of the tactics I've read about. Every other strategy for improving your lifestyle and freedom seems pointless compared to agorism.
By E-Mail, someone wrote:
Anyways, several months ago, I read your articles on the faulty black-scholes model of options pricing. What was written made a lot of sense to me, and so I decided write a quick and dirty program to fetch data from yahoo finance and determine the most underpriced LEAP call options. I suspect it's somewhat similar to the one you mentioned writing.
I'm wondering what you think about LEAP call options now. You've mentioned a few times that you no longer consider the stock market to be a positive return on average, after inflation, and knowing now how stock works, with upper management basically printing themselves stock just like the financial industry prints themselves dollars, that seems perfectly reasonable. But I'm not sure if LEAP call options are also negative on average, since it's a leveraged bet.
If you want to publish this in a reader mail post, be my guest.
Via LEAP call options, you're receiving a State subsidy via negative real interest rates.
With LEAP call options, you're betting *ON* inflation.
I didn't set up my LEAP investments for this year yet, because I've been unemployed most of the year.
Plus, I took nearly a 100% loss for the last two years, which makes it hard to continue my system. Being unemployed and nearly 100% invested in stocks, I don't have the cash to invest.
I still think LEAP out-of-the-money investments are suitable, provided you don't invest more than 10% of your savings per year. As an agorist, investing your profits in the stock market is infeasible, because you can't include the profit in the State economy. Agorist profits *MUST* be invested in gold or silver or perhaps real estate.
I'm particularly interested in the GLD LEAP 2011 options. Betting on a doubling of the gold price in 2 years seems favorable.
I haven't put any money into my options system again for next year, having suffered a nearly 100% loss over the past 2 years. Now is the best time to invest, but I'm unemployed and already 100% invested in stocks! I have no spare cash for investing.
That's another way the financial system discriminates against individuals. The bottom of a recession is the best time to buy, but that's when most individuals are unemployed or concerned about layoffs. Most individuals can't invest right now.
I'm thinking of gradually cashing in my State-sanctioned investments and buying physical gold and silver. I need to solve the "Safe place to store it" problem. I told my parents that I wanted to buy some physical gold and silver, and they said "NONONONO!!!! That's dangerous!! Someone will break into our house and steal it!! Only idiots buy gold and silver!" I have to wait until I get more interpersonal freedom to start buying gold and silver.
After 2 years of nearly a 100% loss, I'm losing confidence in my options system. Paradoxically, I'm doing so at probably the best time to buy, but I have no spare cash right now. Just this past summer, I was ahead at a healthy rate of return.
I read a lot of articles complaining "In the NFL, it's too easy to make a field goal." I never saw this solution seriously considered. They should make the goalposts narrower and higher.
My post on Bernard Madoff was another unexpected SEO hit. This one appears to have come from "Google Blogsearch" rather than straight search.
I still don't get SEO. However, I've learned some things.
- Keywords in post titles count more than keywords in post bodies.
- Writing about current events is a good idea, especially when it comes to financial scandals where my analysis ("The system is completely broken!") is better than that available elsewhere.
My post on False Opposites attracted quite a bit of traffic. It was mentioned on Reddit, which drove a lot of traffic to my blog. There also were a few comments.
Most mainstream discussion of politics is one big fnord. You'll never hear political analysts debating "Is the income tax a good idea? Is the Federal Reserve a good idea? Is limited liability incorporation a good idea? Is having a strong central government a good idea?" It you look back at history, each of these issues was debated heavily at one point, and the wrong decision was made. Now, they are treated as settled issues, as false axioms.
It's pointless to have any other discussion of politics without also discussing the above issues. Once you realize that, you see that mainstream political discourse is a fnord designed to disguise the true issues. People say "I care about politics! I care about abortion! I care about gay marriage!" Those issues are evil fnords designed to distract people.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "False Opposites":
Wow, so profound yet so simple and true. Very enlightened and inspiring.
I was sick when I published that article originally. I managed to avoid being hospitalized, and was merely posting queued-up drafts.
AzraelsJudgement has left a new comment on your post "False Opposites":
Short, but very important entry.
I've noticed that "post length" and "popularity" are uncorrelated. A post is as long as it is. When writing about the Compound Interest Paradox or the Black-Scholes formula, it's necessary to write a lot because they're complicated issues.
I don't follow "SEO practice" which says there's a certain ideal post length. I follow a better practice, which says "Write for a human audience, and you'll naturally attract search traffic." (I.e., write for human readers, and not for Google's search bot.)
fritz has left a new comment on your post "False Opposites":
Nice,,I love it.I even used it at work today.I live near Boston,and work at a bar,people were talking politics, I paused them and asked if anyone could tell me what is the opposite of a Red Sox fan. Of course they said a Yankees fan.
I than explained that the answer is of course someone not interested in the game at all. Than I began to put forth anti government agorist ideas. You know, Fsk ,you would have been proud.
Did you successfully convince anyone?
Please some one comment on my big big question with this form of society. I have thought about it so much, and I need some help.
Ok here goes. The need for a military in the early stages of agorism.????
In the early stages, no. In the early stages, you have isolated agorist trading groups of 10-50 people in the context of a State economy.
At this stage, if you start accumulating guns, you merely attract the attention of the State. At this stage, stealth is important. Agorism has not yet achieved this stage. I don't know of any functioning agorist trading groups anywhere, although some people claim success but refuse to disclose details for security reasons.
In that scenario, where the State has collapsed in the USA overall or even an area like New Hampshire, you no longer are at the beginning stages. Suppose, for example, that the US economy has converted to 100% agorism but the rest of the world has not. At this point, free market police protection agencies can profitably defend the USA from other areas. Since the USA is 100% agorist, police agencies in the USA can openly defend themselves from hostile foreign leaders. An invasion of an advanced agorist society would not be profitable.
imagine if the united states fully embraces the change to no government and complete free market.All north America,most of western Europe and some others form such a society. But China and others wont let go of their hold on people.
I predict that the collapse of the State will be global. For example, the current subprime housing crisis started in the USA, but the entire world economy was affected. Similarly, agorism will probably start in the USA, because people are most freedom-minded here. However, it will rapidly spread to all other countries.
When the State does collapse, it will occur in the entire world at nearly the exact same time. It's more accurate to think of one State covering the entire world, rather than several competing governments.
I believe that a communist governments military could dominate any form that a private military could ever muster.
No. The free market will have more resources than the communist society. Also remember that offense is more effort than defense. The invaders have to worry about supply lines and preventing their troops from being cut off. The local defenders can just go into a story and purchase supplies.
Initially, a free market economy will provide security against a hostile State that occupies the same territory! If you can defend yourself against invaders who occupy the same territory, then you certainly can defend yourself from external invaders.
One reason the USA has a better military than other countries is that US citizens have more economic freedom than in other countries. The economic freedom in the USA is decreasing, which will lead to a smaller military edge. The insiders who loot and pillage forget that the reason there's something to loot and pillage is because the cattle in the USA are allowed certain limited freedom. If you increase the pillaging rate, then the size of the pie becomes smaller.
Once we got going,became productive,our military became disbanded, What would stop the commies, Huns,Or any other large organized group from taking our land, wealth,and lives?????????
There will always be private police forces. In a true free market, anybody who wanted a gun could have one.
Suppose that, in the present, an invasion army of 10,000 landed in a big US city, even without a strong Federal government. Would they have any chance of success? The local police, plus support from other cities, would be enough.
The Europeans were able to steal the land from Native Americans because they were more technologically advanced. An established agorist free market economy would be more advanced than any State economy.
Just because free market police has never been tried in the past doesn't mean it won't succeed. Free market competition among police is the only way to solve the "Who watches the watchers?" problem, where corrupt police and politicians get away with it, due to sovereign immunity.
If someone has some insight into this,It just might help me make the next big leap in understanding the way this movement might realistically unfold.
Thank you for any response you might put forth!! Fritz
Freedomain writes about this. It hasn't been tried in practice, because there's no real historic examples of a true free market.
In a true free market, invasions aren't profitable. Also in a true free market, there's sufficient economic incentive to stop invasions.
In the present, what incentive is there for the State to stop a terrorist attack? If there's a successful terrorist attack, the State merely claims more power and more resources! There's no negative penalty for the State when it fails to perform one of its core functions.
You've been commenting here a lot. Maybe you should start your own blog?
Mike Gogulski has left a new comment on your post "False Opposites":
Submitted to the Anarchism subreddit.
I saw that, and mentioned it in Reader Mail #71. There were a few intelligent comments but lots of pro-State trolling.
I'm amused that I was accused of being both a left-wing fruitcake and a right-wing fruitcake in the same discussion. That shows the problem with the left-right divide. In a discussion about "False Opposites", people were making the same mistake I mentioned in the article!
That also illustrates the problem with forum engines like Digg or Reddit. If the majority of users are clueless, then controversial ideas cannot be intelligently discussed. That's why I want to write my own forum engine. If I wrote a good forum engine, and it's better than Reddit/Digg, then maybe my site could become as popular as them! If you have your own forum engine, you really only need 10-20 seed users to get an online community started.
Other bloggers aggressively submit their content to sites like Digg and Reddit. I've concluded "Why bother?", but I'll look if someone else submits them.
StrebeSi has left a new comment on your post "False Opposites":
fritz, as much as people hate nuclear weapons, I believe that they might preserve an otherwise impossible era of small, independent, self sufficient communities determined on self-sovereignty.
In fact, they may be the cause of such communities.
I doubt that building nuclear weapons would be viable in a true free market. There are other more effective means to discourage invasions in a true free market.
However, Freedomain mentions that free market police agencies might maintain a few nuclear weapons to discourage an invasion or nuclear first strike. A much more effective use of money would be buying rocket launchers and guns and arming everyone, if an invasion were imminent.
I consider "The State is needed for national defense!" to be false and a symptom of pro-State brainwashing.
gilliganscorner has left a new comment on your post "False Opposites":
Fritz, there are many examples where this has been attempted. You could cite the 10 years Russia tried to take Afghanistan - a decentralized group of armed people pose a MASSIVE threat against a large scale centralized army. They don't know where when, where or how they are going to be attacked.Once we got going,became productive,our military became disbanded, What would stop the commies, Huns,Or any other large organized group from taking our land, wealth,and lives?????????
If someone has some insight into this,It just might help me make the next big leap in understanding the way this movement might realistically unfold.
You could cite the US-Vietnam war. Same thing. The US was beaten by decentralized forces.
Decentralized armed citizens pose a HUGE risk to any standing army. Which is why the State is intent on disarming its citizens.
That's the point I was making. A decentralized guerrilla army, where nearly every citizen is armed, can take out an invading army.
If you give everyone rocket launchers and anti-aircraft missiles, then even a bombing campaign won't work.
fritz has left a new comment on your post "False Opposites":
Wow,,Thanks guys for your comments..Now I almost believe it is true that we could hold off a centralized army with an armed citizenship..as long as we have access to the latest advancements in weaponry and maybe foreign support..
But what about the nukes..with out N.O.R.A.D. and all the lose nukes around.With out ground to air defense. No air craft carriers. no surface to air response...What are we really looking at. No ability to strike first. How in the world can we keep the powers to be down????????
I really don't think myself a state troll..And I really don't think the state is protecting me. But I know at the same time how they work. They work with self interest. And if we are week, we will be taken advantage of . The governments of dictatorships will take advantage of the lesser,the more week, For their best interests.
You're illustrating one of the main tactics the State uses. Make sure everyone is afraid and believes they are incapable of protecting themselves. Therefore, the State is needed.
I'm convinced the free market can handle all functions currently provided by the State, including defending from an invading army.
I would like the transition to be clean,But I have this feeling that it might not be so nice. The people in charge might not let go of their dominance so easily..
I'm frightened of change but I feel it necessary....Fritz
If agorists do a good job, the transition my be relatively clean. However, the people currently in control won't give up their power without a fight. There is one factor working in favor of the agorists. Most people who work for the State aren't consciously aware that they're part of a massive scam. Fully aware of the nature of the scam, they wouldn't be able to do as effective a job.
I have no idea if the transition will be clean or a mess. The collapse of the Soviet Union was nonviolent, so perhaps the complete collapse of the State will be similar. All I can do is work the best I can towards building a true free market.
Mike Gogulski has left a new comment on your post "Which Color Pill do you Prefer?":
At work? Did you take a new job, or is this historical?
It was my new job, which I already lost.
That's another argument in favor of selling advertisements on my job. I want to have my own source of income, rather than being dependent on a corporate wage slave job.
cRav has left a new comment on your post "Which Color Pill do you Prefer?":
Looks like you have gotten it, FSK.
The Matrix wasn't about computers, at all. It was a fairly accurate description of our reality today.
Are humans just nodes in a giant computer that makes up the State? Has that computer itself attained self-awareness.
We all are just power-cells, milked every moment of our existence, having our dreams, aspirations, energy sucked out of us through a connection to the system, FRNs. It leaves us with just enough to exist. A connection that we vote to keep in place, since according to our "knowledge and experience", but in reality simply a propaganda matrix that we by law must expose ourselves through accredited teachers, tells us that we NEED.
Is there someone, somewhere, consciously and on purpose keeping the scam going? Or, is it merely self-perpetuating, with no single person controlling it.
I can't believe that someone would be so evil that they would be fully aware of what's going on, and consciously keep it going. On the other hand, I've met some really evil people, so who knows? Someone that evil probably wouldn't also be smart enough to keep the scam going. If you're evil, there's a limit to how intelligent you can get.
Congrats, my Friend. You're free now, at least in your mind. Be aware that you have paid a dire price for this, - you will never be able to forget what you know, and so, will never be happy until you manage to unplug.
I've attained theoretical freedom, but not practical freedom. There is a price that I pay. I no longer fit into a corporate wage slave job, now that I've attained higher awareness. I can pretend to be a cog in a machine, but not well enough. I have a hard time meeting new friends, because most people are afraid of anyone who contradicts their pro-State brainwashing.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Which Color Pill do you Prefer?":
i have tried explaining this stuff to someone that i had marked as someone who might be convinced. i went through it (voting is pointless, taxation is theft, government violence) and made it as easy as i could. by the end of the conversation, i had been informed that i was a socialist and that she knew i was going to vote for obama.
There's an advantage of repetition. The first person someone hears a new idea, they'll be violently opposed to it. If it's repeated enough, people might be convinced.
Most people get very offended and afraid of someone who contradicts their pro-State brainwashing. Paradoxically, attaining higher awareness makes it harder to make new friends.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Which Color Pill do you Prefer?":
Malcolm X spoke about the field negro and house negro, search for it on You Tube...same type of analogy.
House Negroes (those who work in the masters house not in the fields) identify their own interests with their masters, they forget that they are slaves owned and utilized by their master and they undermine those who seek freedom by deploying their masters thoughts and ideas.
I met a young guy at work aged 25, who just 'loves work', has aspirations to get married, settle down and to get a mortgage (get in debt slavery to bankers). He thinks I am crazy, or angry at the 'big bad world' and its not really that bad being a indebted consumer/producer.
In the present, anyone working in a "white collar" job is the equivalent of a House Negro.
For example, someone who works in the financial industry is very reluctant to become consciously aware that it's one big scam. Someone who works as a public school teacher is very reluctant to challenge the basic structure of the school system. The primary function of the school system is to eliminate independence and discourage learning.
If you work in any sort of high-paying State job, you're probably identifying with the pillaging of the masters instead of the problems of the slaves.
I received training to be in a high-ranking State job, especially with my Math and Computer Science training. Paradoxically, because I was *TOO* efficient, I didn't fit in. People are really threatened by a very productive worker.
fritz has left a new comment on your post "Which Color Pill do you Prefer?":
F*#@k that..I would ask for a double dose of both red and blue pills..And when I woke up, both sides of reality would be made to pay dearly for screwing me over..
They make blue pills. They are anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs. You should not take them.
or maybe I would take nothing and still make myself and everyone else pay dearly for putting me through this.
Or I would offer everyone I incountered a red or blue pill. Than when they took it.I would make them pay dearly for every perception they ever had..
nice game,,lets play!!
One advantage of true free market thinking is you can use it to screen potential new friends. Clueless people won't be receptive, and will in fact be hostile. However, you're really limiting your pool of potential friends if you can think clearly.
It's also very depressing to realize that all of your old friends and all your relatives are pro-State trolls, and it's pointless to try and enlighten them.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Which Color Pill do you Prefer?":
The latest communique from Al Qaeda makes reference to Malcolm X's dichotomy between the field slave and house slave. Al Qaeda's second-in-command compares Barack Obama to a house slave and notes that Obama is not going to really change anything.
FSK, you should write about the fnords present in Al Qaeda videos. There is much more truth in those videos than in 99% of U.S. government propaganda. Are the Al Qaeda videos that 1%?
I don't speak Arabic, so it'd be pointless for me to watch an Al Qeada video. Are the English translations reliable?
Some people say that Osama bin Laden actually really is dead, and the videos of him are fakes generated by the US government, which then certifies them as legitimate.
I already see enough fnords.
The fnord of Al Qaeda is the same as that of global warming. "There's a powerful, practically unbeatable enemy. Therefore, the power of the State should be increased!"
Maybe someone should tell the members Al Qaeda to work towards agorism, rather than towards defeating the State via acts of terrorism. In that sense, Al Qaeda are pro-State trolls, because their terrorist actions serve the agenda of the State.
The leaders of the Arab world are interested in enslaving their cattle just like those in the USA. They won't be convinced to advocate for agorism. The collapse of the US government will also coincide with the end of their ability to loot and pillage their cattle.
Free Stater has left a new comment on your post "The Free State Project Fallacy":
Look, there are 9,000 of us. We have differing ideas on how to make change. It's funny you should say that we're all politicos because the biggest complaint we get is that we're supposedly all anarchists who won't vote. In reality, we are both.
I'm convinced voting is pointless. However, if a promising libertarian/minarchist candidate were on the ballot, such as Ron Paul, I'd vote for him. In the primaries, I didn't bother changing my registration to Republican so I could vote for him, because I concluded it wasn't worth my time.
If you want more of the anarchists/outside the system type free staters, take a look at FreeKeene.com and NHFree.com
I've looked at both of those sites before, and wasn't particularly impressed.
In any case, the liberty movement is getting nothing done spread out all over the place complaining on the internet about the lack of problems. There are enough of us here that you will definitely find a community that you like.
For personal reasons, I'm staying in NYC for now and moving is not an option. I'm doing what I can to work towards liberty, but I'm staying where I am.
My criticism of the "Free State Project" is that "free" and "State" are opposite ideas. I'm much more interested in the "No State Project" than the "Free State Project". You can't have freedom and a government at the same time. Even if you went back to a strictly limited government, it wouldn't work. Once you accept that government has a monopoly of violence, then it would grow until it reaches the current monster again.
I'm not interested in "Return to the US Constitution". I'm interested in "Return to the Declaration of Independence", which says that if a form of government isn't working, people have a right and obligation to get rid of it and replace it with something better.
By E-Mail, Mike Gogulski says:
I formally renounced by US citizenship. I sent a press release to many mainstream media sources. This will generate lots of media coverage! Take that, Evil State! HAHAHAHA!!!
I'm sure it'll be the top story on CNN for the next week.
I prefer to merely act like a free person, while keeping my State slave papers while they're still useful. Actions are important, and not a piece of paper.
You still are paying taxes to the local State wherever you live, so renouncing your US citizenship is at most a symbolic measure. Someone working as a practical agorist has attained greater freedom.
Here's a rule of thumb. If you have to petition the State to acquire a form of freedom, then it's probably a meaningless symbolic gesture.
I noticed you got sick again.
The State isn't just government itself. It's also a way of thinking, where nearly everyone is brainwashed to act like a slave and suppress their own desires. If you discover too much too fast, you have a panic attack. It's really just a natural "flight or fight" reaction, when you realize that there's literally noplace to run to.
Hopefully, I'm reaching a mental state where I won't have any more panic attacks. A month later, I feel better than before I got sick.
I love what you're saying here. I agree with you. I have been through the same experience, though for me it manifested in different ways and happened over a much longer period of time than it seems to be happening in your case.
Imagine what happens the next day in "They Live", if it continued beyond "Hey, what's wrong, baby?" at the end... some people go nuts, others grab guns, and still others stumble on, recognizing that their world has always been different than they thought it was, but unable to change. What happens after that? Do the ones with guns get together? Do the sleepers eventually awaken due to overwhelming evidence? Do the ones who lost it for a while pick up and get back down to the business of living regardless of the circumstances? Dunno. I fell into a dark fucking hole for a while and never saw a way out... until I just one day found myself there, out. No real explanation for it, but a whole bunch of changed perceptions on the other side of the experience.
Hang in, the hole's not so deep.
Peace, Mike
PS: If there's any way for you to slow down, try it.
For me, it happened pretty fast. Also, I may have gone further in cracking my pro-State brainwashing than you have. It's hard to tell exactly.
At some point, you have to trust your own judgement over that of the Statists around you. For example, my psychiatrist and therapist are saying "FSK *MUST* take anti-psychotic drugs." I know based on my experience that they didn't help me.
I consider "They Live!" to be an excellent documentary.
I agree that the movie ended at what was a really interesting point in the plot. However, it's hard to publish a movie that has a massive successful revolt against the State. I heard there was enough resistance to publishing the actual movie.
Imagine that you suddenly developed that special power like in "They Live!". It wasn't special magic glasses. It just happened. It would freak you out. That's what happened to me. I can't tell anyone around me, because they won't believe me. In fact, one of the "symptoms" of schizophrenia is that you can see the secret hidden messages in TV and newspapers. It's almost as if the people who made up the mental illness specification were consciously or subconsciously aware of the scam.
I feel that after my most recent panic attack, I've again achieved a higher level of awareness. It's a traumatic experience, but it's worth it. As long as I don't take anti-psychotic drugs, I should recover eventually.
I'm not sure how to slow down. I'm still looking for another regular wage slave job. I'm not going to try practical agorism for another few years yet. Since I'm not a Statist, I don't fit into many corporate work environments. The abusive people can rapidly tell that I'm not abuseable, and target me for elimination.
I do have a limited life expectancy. I'm 34 years old. I really only have 20-30 years until I'm too old and senile to perform original work.
At some point, you have to trust your own judgement over that of the Statists around you. For example, my psychiatrist and therapist are saying "FSK *MUST* take anti-psychotic drugs." I know based on my experience that they didn't help me.
I consider "They Live!" to be an excellent documentary.
I agree that the movie ended at what was a really interesting point in the plot. However, it's hard to publish a movie that has a massive successful revolt against the State. I heard there was enough resistance to publishing the actual movie.
Imagine that you suddenly developed that special power like in "They Live!". It wasn't special magic glasses. It just happened. It would freak you out. That's what happened to me. I can't tell anyone around me, because they won't believe me. In fact, one of the "symptoms" of schizophrenia is that you can see the secret hidden messages in TV and newspapers. It's almost as if the people who made up the mental illness specification were consciously or subconsciously aware of the scam.
I feel that after my most recent panic attack, I've again achieved a higher level of awareness. It's a traumatic experience, but it's worth it. As long as I don't take anti-psychotic drugs, I should recover eventually.
I'm not sure how to slow down. I'm still looking for another regular wage slave job. I'm not going to try practical agorism for another few years yet. Since I'm not a Statist, I don't fit into many corporate work environments. The abusive people can rapidly tell that I'm not abuseable, and target me for elimination.
I do have a limited life expectancy. I'm 34 years old. I really only have 20-30 years until I'm too old and senile to perform original work.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Gold Standard Thoughts":
Just a thought on why foreign countries have been holding dollar reserves until now. I think it may have something to do with the fact that, until recently, oil and other natural resources were priced exclusively in dollars. This is changing now to a basket of currencies, but with the system of an important commodity like oil being priced in dollars, foreign countries needed a supply of dollars to pay for the oil (the black gold backing the dollar). This meant that they needed to sell their own resources and products in dollars as well. Also, I believe the IMF and World Bank deal in dollars exclusively, so loans from them have to be repaid in dollars. These factors seem to have increased the worldwide demand for dollars until recently and may be what motivated countries to use dollars primarily as a reserve currency.
The temporary increase in demand for dollars (increase in the value of the dollar) was entirely due to the Compound Interest Paradox. The long-term trend is always inflation. In the short-term, economic busts bankrupt non-insiders while insiders qualify for a bailout.
In 1933 nearly all the world's gold was stolen/owned by central banks, as private ownership of gold was declared illegal. In 1945, the Bretton Woods agreement led to the custom of holding gold as reserves. In the present, there is no longer any pretense of equivalence between fiat money and gold. The central banks are gradually selling off their gold reserves.
The custom of holding gold as reserves helps stabilize exchange rates. If a country's fiat paper is inflating, then that central bank can sell off gold and repurchase its paper. If a country's fiat paper is deflating, then that central bank can buy gold and issue more paper. The goal is to have every country's monetary unit inflate nearly equally, so that the average person does not suspect inflation.
For example, the USA is able to export its inflation to other countries. Other countries find trade with the USA desirable. If their currency appreciated relative to the dollar, then their exports in the USA would seem less attractive. Other countries, such as China, inflate their own currency to keep a stable exchange rate with the dollar. In turn, this means that the USA is exporting its inflation to China. Banks in other countries invest in assets other than Treasury debt, such as subprime mortgage bonds. This means that when the Compound Interest Paradox causes a recession/depression in the USA, this recession/depression is then exported from the USA to other countries.
The net effect of other countries' exchange rate policies is that they export tangible goods to the USA in exchange for a piece of paper. The USA has the world's strongest military (for now), which means that countries whose leaders "opt out" of this scam become targets for elimination. The leaders of foreign countries are more interested in lining their pockets than advocating for the rights of their citizens, so they go along with the corrupt system.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Fallacy of "Tax Protester Fallacies"":
Mike G.--
No, you miss my point thanks to your ignorance of Pete's scholarship. I can't simplify it enough for you, except to say that our forbears were not idiots to saddle us with the income tax. The law of which the code is but a reference taxes only income from government privilege. In 1943 tax withholding started as a patriotic duty, and a huge and persistent propaganda campaign has supported it ever since. I obey that original law and pay no tax, but since IRS agents are moles in the tax protest and avoidance movements, I prefer to stay Anonymous. Get the book and get educated at losthorizons.com and get free.
Sure the tax is immoral. But you will not starve the Beast with your complaints. Keeping your money is the sweetest revenge.
If your IQ is stuck in double digits keep on filing with your CPA, but if you really want to poke a pin in the Beast join the people who are beating the IRS with refunds every day thanks to Pete Hendrixson.
How do I know you aren't also a shill for the IRS or FBI?
Was the income tax and IRS a mistake? Definitely not. The entire purpose of the State is to loot and pillage. Having consolidated their power, the bad guys decided to increase the rate of looting and pillaging.
Once the US dollar become unbacked fiat money, the income tax is necessary to prevent people from boycotting the dollar and using other forms of money.
In an agricultural economy, nearly every worker has equal productivity. In an industrial economy, workers can have widely varying productivity. The income tax guarantees that the State leeches the maximum amount from each cattle/slave.
I don't believe there's some magic paperwork you can file with the IRS that gets all your withheld taxes back. That's like filing a return that says "**** you IRS!" I doubt that would be effective, except as a clerical error by the IRS.
People who say "You can petition the State and recover all income taxes!" sound like pro-State trolls to me. Freedom isn't that easy.
The correct way to avoid the IRS is to make sure all income/wealth you generate is not automatically reported to the State/IRS for taxation. This is the essence of agorism.
Is agorism legal? If you asked a lawyer or accountant for advice, he would almost definitely say "no". Is it worth pursuing? If you can double your wealth/productivity or more, definitely! Is the risk of a State crackdown worth the reward? Agorists should conduct an experiment. I believe that, if you're careful, you can minimize your personal risk.
I consider people who debate the legality of the income tax to be pro-State trolling. As mentioned before, the best argument in favor of the income tax and IRS is "I control more guns than you!"
The morality of the income tax is obvious. I consider "Taxation is theft!" to be obvious. The income tax means that the State has a greater claim on your labor than you do. If you add up all the direct and hidden taxes on your labor, your taxation rate is 50%, 75%, 95%, or more. For example, regulations that make it hard to start a business are effectively a hidden tax on labor.
I agree that the bad guys plant spies anywhere that freedom-oriented individuals meet. That's one nice thing about the Internet. It's easier for an online community to filter out pro-State trolls.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Compound Interest Paradox Revisited - Edward F...":
Good article. Others have refuted Flaherty(who seems to have a spam machine!) as well like Paul Grignon and Edward Griffin. Returning to the gold standard would not be a good idea though, see excellent doco: The Money Masters on googlevid. http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=the+money+ masters&emb=0&aq=f#
I didn't like Edward Griffin's refutation of Flaherty, because he says "There's no such thing as the Debt Virus!" (another name for the Compound Interest Paradox) Edward Griffin's other criticisms of the IRS and Federal Reserve are worth reading, but he's wrong about the Debt Virus.
I have the Money Masters on my HD somewhere. I never got around to watching it. I prefer written works, because I can read faster than most people would speak in a video.
So many people have recommended the Money Masters that I'd advice any newcomer to "The Federal Reserve Sucks!" to watch it. I'm looking for more advanced work, such as building an actual functioning agorist free market economy.
fritz has left a new comment on your post "The True Purpose of Sexual Harassment Laws":
Fsk I know that your intentions are good. But just remember that girls are fickle. The best way to stop this in the future would be the leave the door open policy. Tell them your interested,want to know more,and if they are interested this is how they can be in contact with you.
And leave it at that. For the longest time I used what is known as the machine gun approach. proposition any Hottie that comes along, leave it at that. and if they come back around you know that they are interested.see. if you put enough rounds down range, something is going to find a target.
Then after you hang out with them,,That's when you can better tell if that girl would be a long time match or not..
good luck to you!!
I was being friendly. All I was doing was I came over to say hello to her, but I got fired for "sexual harassment". If anything, I was the victim of harassment.
Anyway, I'll be more careful in my next wage slave job. Normally, I give up too easily in such situations. I decided to do the opposite of what I normally do and be slightly more persistent, like in the "Opposite George" episode of Seinfeld (fnord!).
The entire incident was traumatic for me. When I saw my therapist and told her about the incident, she said "FSK, you are a loser and will always be a failure." Instead of being sympathetic, she made me even worse. I should learn to not trust my therapist. Instead of calming me down, my therapist escalated my panic attack.
I had another therapist, who left for a better job, who actually did a good job of calming me down. This was when I was fired from the Rails Advocate's job. She said "The Rails Advocate and Idiot New Boss were being unreasonable. You did the best you could, but there's no way you could have made the situation work out." I was in a pre-manic state when I saw her, and she successfully calmed me down. Even though I didn't make her understand the evil of the State, in the context of my problem, she was sympathetic to my point of view.
I wound up firing my therapist, and I'm looking for a new one now. I probably shouldn't bother at all. I'm going to be picky this time, refusing to see anyone who isn't sympathetic to "FSK is doing the best he can, but the people around him are acting unreasonable."
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The True Purpose of Sexual Harassment Laws":
I don't understand the last few paragraphs of your post. Are you just trying to be optimistic?
Worst case scenario, there won't be anything stopping you from asking her on a date! (Although I wouldn't. It seems as a 'geek' you would have learned that girls make no sense that way.)
I got fired from that job for "sexual harassment", and am looking for a new job now.
It does suck for my now-former coworkers. I was doing a very hard project under a tight schedule. I doubt they were able to finish the project without me. However, they weren't able to protect me from a false sexual harassment charge, so they deserve to lose me as a coworker.
I feel that I did the best I could, given the circumstances. Our society has degenerated to the point where going over to someone and saying hello is a crime.
Zargon has left a new comment on your post "The True Purpose of Sexual Harassment Laws":
Also remember that some (most?) people aren't going to send consistent or correct body language. For example, she, like most people, could have been taught that you must be nice to everyone, all the time, even if you hate them. That training could be showing up in her body language.
Obviously, it's impossible for someone who wasn't there to tell what someone who sent contradictory signals actually wanted (sometimes it's even impossible for someone who was there), but it seems like a reasonable possibility that she really wanted nothing to do with you.
I don't understand how you came to the conclusion that they won't fire you. I think whether you get fired depends almost entirely on whether you're willing to act like you know you did something wrong, you're very sorry, and you'll never do it again. She's already decided you're guilty, as you've noted.
If you don't play the part, she'll either rely on her desire to show you who's boss or her HR training, both of which are going to tell her to fire you.
Weighing the benefits vs costs of that decision obviously can't be done by anyone else.
I felt that the girl's body language expressed genuine interest. Besides, all I did was go over and say hello a couple of times.
I wound up getting fired. I actually was surprised. I was doing an important project singlehandedly under a tight schedule.
Anyway, it's time to move on and find a better job. I was supporting several members of the parasite class with my work anyway.
There was no due process at all. I was pretty much automatically guilty. If you're a woman and you want to get rid of an annoying coworker, just file a false sexual harassment complaint!
I really should start my own business, so that the random decisions of other people can't cut off my income.
Your right that it's impossible to judge without being there. Most of the people have the default assumption "Something bad happened to FSK. Therefore, FSK is a loser and he deserved it." I feel that I was reasonable, given the circumstances, although I did wind up having a panic attack over the incident.
One lesson is "Only bother pursuing a woman if both her body language and verbal language indicate interest. A woman must be both consciously and subconsciously attracted to you."
Db0 has left a new comment on your post "False Opposites":
A guerilla force can only oppose an attacking force that wants to be seen as "defending" or "good" to its own people. If the attacking force does not care about such niceties, it can easily pacify a guerilla force by killing 100 of their patriots for every 1 that dies in the attacker's army. This has happened before quite a few times in history.
That analogy doesn't work in the USA. Suppose there are 10,000 agorists out of a population of 1M. Is the State going to kill 100 of its own citizens/slaves for each agorist that gets away?
In the case of agorism, both the State and the agorists are drawing from the same population. Agorists and cattle will be mixed together.
Also, I'd like to point out that the opposite of a State which coerces your out of wealth is not Anarcho-Capitalism, it's a non-state. And this non-state can lean to the left or to the right just as well. But remember that your version of anarcho-capitalism would still require a state and taxation in order to prevent violence between its citizens of different class.
Left and right are false opposites. That's the whole point.
I'm not an anarcho-capitalist. I'm an agorist. Where did I say that agorism requires a monopoly of violence and justice to be successful? I am unconvinced. Either you're a fool or you're pro-State trolling.
A true free market would be much less centralized that the present economy. There would be much more individual freedom.
The only way to find out what an agorist society would be look like is to conduct an experiment. Let's do it! When I attempt practical agorism, it'll be easy for me to weed out pro-State trolls like you, just by interviewing them for a few minutes. I wonder if an undercover cop could successfully convince me that they believe in true free market economics? Most spies are thoroughly brainwashed as pro-State trolls, so I doubt they could convince me. However, you never know.
Josh has left a new comment on your post "The Free State Project Fallacy":
I agree with you greatly. Not to say that people who relocated are not deserving of a pat on the back for trying.
It's a nice try, but ultimately an empty symbolic gesture.
Groups such as the Montana Freemen tried moving to the same area for mutual self-defense. They wound up failing due to a State raid. An isolated group of freedom-seekers don't have the resources to withstand a prolonged State siege.
The members of the Free State Project are not openly calling for a boycott of the Federal Reserve, income tax, and restrictive State regulations. From my point of view, they're accomplishing nothing.
When agorism gets more advanced, it may become practical for agorists to move to the same area for mutual self-defense. By the time that becomes practical, the State has probably already lost.
But you are absolutely right. These people are not willing to use force to protect their freedoms, they think they can just gather people and legally vote for what they want. As if the system doesn't have spies, liars and money to disrupt a group held together by peace and trust.
You cannot achieve reform by voting.
The bad guys can always send spies to disrupt a group advocating for change. There's always plausible deniability that the mole was just a troublemaker and not a deliberate plant.
One advantage of agorism is that the spies would have to do actual useful work and participate in the agorist economy. An agorist economy would be very trust-based. An agorist economy must always be open to new participants, but undercover cops/spies must be carefully screened out.
I wonder if I'm skilled enough to detect someone faking understanding of free market economics? I doubt that someone could convincingly recite the arguments in favor of free market economics without also understanding them and agreeing with them.
In an agorist economy, someone like me would be useful for weeding out undercover cops/spies!
But let's say, they can't get things done on a big scale, if they move somewhere to meet like minded people makes them happier, why not?!
The problem is that it's an illusion of freedom and not real freedom. Of course, they may do as they please. Living with like-minded people may be an advantage itself, for moving towards freedom.
I've decided that I'm not moving to achieve greater freedom. I'm standing my ground where I am.
In all fairness, both voting and relocating are participating in politics. People who just ignore and avoid the government don't need to "be in the right place".
That is the goal of the agorist, to avoid the government completely. If those are your tactics, it doesn't matter where you live. All you need is a network of trustworthy trading partners, and you only need 5-10 people to get started.
I would vote if there were a true Libertarian/minarchist/anarchist candidate on the ballot, and he had a plausible chance of winning. I would move, if there were a credible place I could move for greater true freedom. Those don't exist, so I'm going to stay where I am and work towards agorism. (There are some states that have slightly lower taxes than where I live in NYC, but that is also offset by lower salaries in a wage slave job. I'll stick where I am and work towards agorism.)
Josh has left a new comment on your post "The Fallacy of "Tax Protester Fallacies"":
I agree entirely.
Why play their game and tell them they have their own rules wrong?
They have guns, and unless you're willing to argue with guns, shut up. And don't play their game, it does take great courage to stand up to a gun, but those that do are BIG HEROES.
That is my point. Debating the legality of the income tax is fighting the bad guys on their turf.
Right now, I'm only practicing written and verbal resistance. I have not made the transition to practical agorism. When I do attempt practical agorism, I will be literally confronting the guns of the State. However, it will be confrontation-via-stealth rather than a direct confrontation. Actually, I may practice blatant-in-public agorism, as a means to raise awareness. I can practice low-risk activities in public, and use that to funnel customers to higher-risk, less-public businesses run by others.
A direct heads-on confrontation with greater firepower is pointless. The goal of an agorist is victory via stealth. If I'm clever, it'll cost the State a lot more to steal from me than the actual profits of the theft.
How many people need to participate in a tax resistance movement, before it's strong enough to become self-sustaining? 1%? 5%? 10%? I suspect the total is much lower than most people believe. Once you have a critical mass of agorists, it's possible to share best practices and sell insurance against State raids.
Josh has left a new comment on your post "The "Rule of Law" Scam":
When people say "it's the law" they really mean "it's otherwise a stupid idea" or "thank God I coincidentally agree with the law or else I can't convince you why you should do it"
I thought that when people say "It's the law", they mean "A handful of people made up the rule, and therefore it's a valid rule."
Josh has left a new comment on your post "The Ron Paul Discussion Forum Schism and The Straw...":
Sorry if it looks like I'm posting too many comments a night.
I noticed that, but that doesn't bother me if they're on-topic. Some frequent commenters (like fritz) probably should just form their own blog.
BTW, I noticed you sell hosting. I'm leaning towards lamphost. If I find myself the victim of censorship, I'll move, but I don't think that will be an issue. Technically, attempting practical agorism is illegal. Blogger hasn't shut me down (yet).
But I think the Ron Paul forum moderator just wants to steer clear of what he sees as trolls and wants people to focus on more important things, as any moderator would do, keep other topics in other places if somebody wants to moderate it.
The problem is that the motivation for the censorship seemed wrong. His line of reasoning was "If people on the Ron Paul forum discuss these non-mainstream conspiracy theories, that discredits Ron Paul, via the Strawman Fallacy. Therefore, I should ban these subjects to avoid tarnishing Ron Paul's name. If people see these fruitcakes on the Ron Paul forum, it decreases his reputation." I don't see how the philosophy of some of Ron Paul's supporters could be interpreted to reflect negatively on Ron Paul.
BTW, the 2nd Ron Paul forum didn't appear to survive long. The Ron Paul movement appears to have led to some converts to a real freedom movement, especially agorism. I noticed the quality of free market writing on the Internet increasing in the past year, so the trend is favorable.
Yes, this is a form of censorship, either from shame, or fear or pressure, but more importantly, its the submission to democracy. If you want to play the voting game, you just have to be careful about attracting more and scaring off less.
I'm not interested in playing the voting game. The voting game is fixed and pointless. Are you planning on attending President-elect Ron Paul's inauguration?
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Compound Interest Paradox - a Simpler Explanat...":
I suggest your read The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig Von Mises if you really want to understand Money, Credit, and Inflation.
I already understand Austrian Economics pretty well (perhaps better than most of the regulars on Mises). According to mises.org, Mises never wrote about the Compound Interest Paradox, and therefore it isn't a problem.
I'm more interested in reading advanced material on agorism, rather than rehashing what I already know. I'm already 100% convinced of the evils of the Federal Reserve and State regulation of the financial industry. In a true free market, warehouse receipt banking and time-deposit banking would be the dominant model, with gold or silver or other metals as the monetary unit. In a true free market, there is no regulation of banking and there is requirement to use a specific form of money.
Why do people keep writing "Tsk, tsk, FSK, read a basic introductory economics textbook!" I'm much more advanced than that. Besides, most mainstream economics books are pro-State trolling. Even Austrian Economics doesn't go all the way. Austrian Economists want to eliminate the State's monetary monopoly, but not its violence monopoly. In order to be free, you have to go all the way and say "Who needs a monopolistic State anyway?"
EnderF03 has left a new comment on your post "The Compound Interest Paradox":
You are simply describing fractional reserve banking. If you truly wish to understand the problem you need to read The Theory of Money and Credit by Ludwig Von Mises.
What is this, a repeat of the above comment? I already understand Austrian economics well enough.
Also inflation is not caused by interest. It can only be created by the monetary authority through the use of printing presses and the bookkeepers pin.
Interest is simply the time preference of money.
In a free market, interest is the time preference of money. In the present, the central bank credit monopoly completely destroys the price signal of interest rates. This makes it practically impossible for businesses to rationally plan for the future.
The Compound Interest Paradox means there must be continuous inflation to keep the dishes spinning in the air. The Compound Interest Paradox means that total debt is always increasing exponentially faster than the supply of money, and therefore exponential money supply inflation is needed to keep the scam going.
Given the context of a corrupt system, the Federal Reserve is doing the best it can to keep the whole scam from crashing.
The Fed Funds Rate is currently less than 0.25%. Why don't you lend me money at 1%? That's a great deal, because that's 0.75% more than the Fed Funds Rate. That would be a lousy deal for you, because you can't borrow at the Fed Funds Rate.
Why do people assume I know nothing about economics? I don't bother studying pro-State troll Keynesian economics, although I understand the basic principles and lies. Austrian economics is nice as a starting point, but the evil of the Federal Reserve is underestimated by the Misoids because they don't get the Compound Interest Paradox. Ultimately, the correct answer to any economics question is "Who needs a monopolistic government?"
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Problem With Ithaca Hours":
What is the point of having a central authority issuing "Ithaca dollars"? Why not just let everyone issue "gift certificates" backed by their own services? A doctor could issue a certificate worth 1 hour of his time, a lawyer could issue a certificate worth 1 hour of his. One side effect is, if their customers are happy, their currency goes up in value.
That is not how Ithaca Hours operates, and why I say it's a nice try but not a true solution.
That's how the Social Credit Monetary System worked, according to my description. That's also how the "Bills of Exchange" system (Real Bills Doctrine) worked until it was destroyed by the central bank credit monopoly.
To simplify exchange rates, it's better to issue silver-denominated or gold-denominated paper instead of hours-denominated paper, lest there be disputes over unequal value of various people's labor. Why would anyone accept paper at parity with physical metal, when there's no legal tender laws? People issuing paper would need to offer interest, because otherwise nobody would accept it. If you defaulted on paper backed by your personal reputation, then you would never be able to borrow again. You would only use paper instead of metal coins if you needed to raise money to start a business. For example, suppose I needed to spend 1000 ounces of gold to hire a doctor to teach me his craft, but then my expected income over my career would be 200 ounces per year. If the free market interest rate is 5%, then it pays for me to issue a personal loan for 1000 ounces at 5% and buy the training. I would be personally liable for that debt, whether I have a successful career as a doctor or not. The person lending me the money would evaluate my intelligence and potential success as a doctor. There would be no State licensing monopoly, so any doctor could train other doctors to join the workforce. There would be no State credit monopoly, so anybody could profitably lend me money.
Notice how this system puts the credit creation power in the hands of the general population, instead of centralized in the financial industry. The only "advantage" of the current system over a free market monetary system is that power is concentrated in the financial industry. I don't have the special perk of borrowing at the Fed Funds Rate, so it doesn't pay for me to lend my savings to other people and help them start businesses. Either I would be forced to charge an interest rate less than true inflation, or charge an extortionate implied interest rate in a gold-denominated or silver-denominated loan.
Banks don't mind inflation, because they're just collecting the spread. Banks borrow at the Fed Funds Rate (currently 0%-0.25%) and then sell mortgages or other loans (currently 5%-6%). Then, banks profit off the spread (5%-6%) times their leverage ratio (10x-30x), making a profit of 50%-180% without doing any real work. In this manner, the central bank credit monopoly subsidizes bank profits. The power to raise capital and form businesses is stolen from individuals and given to a handful of financial industry insiders.
The profit of large banks is essentially a guaranteed riskless profit, because there always is a bailout during a recession/depression. The bailout can take the form of a Fed Funds Rate cut or an explicit State subsidy. Due to the Compound Interest Paradox, the large banks *MUST* be bailed out during a recession, lest the entire monetary system collapse in hyperdeflation. If there were no bailout, then banks would be unable to issue new loans, and the entire money supply would shrink exponentially fast due to the Compound Interest Paradox.
The biggest negative consequence of the Compound Interest Paradox is that continuous money supply inflation is needed to keep the scam going. Then, pro-State troll economists say "The US economy needs continuous growth to survive!" The CPI is less than true inflation, and GDP growth is reported using CPI as the deflator. Money supply inflation is misreported as economic growth, and a thirst for economic growth is really just a thirst for inflation and financial industry profits. The parasite must be fed, lest the host die! If you use the price of gold as your GDP deflator instead of CPI, then the US economy has been shrinking at a rate of 8%-10% per year since 2001. Based on what I've seen so far, 2008 will continue that trend pretty closely.
The State cannot "manage the economy". Violence can only steal and waste.
Pro-State trolls say "Income taxes are the basis of our political system! You can't eliminate the income tax!" That's like saying "Theft if the basis of our political system! You can't have a stable society without stealing!"
The NYC MTA is raising its fares again next year, by another 20%-30%. This is merely an adjustment for inflation, but other factors are always blamed.
At a recent "public interest" hearing, someone tried throwing a shoe at the MTA officials running the meeting. The Iraqi journalist who threw his shoe at President Bush has started a favorable trend! The potential shoe-thrower was arrested for disorderly conduct, even though he didn't actually throw his shoe.
I wouldn't bother wasting my time attending public hearings. It's nice to see more anti-State sentiment!
Public transportation is another abusive State monopoly. For example, running a private bus service that competes with public transportation is so heavily regulated that it's illegal. Further, public transportation receives massive State subsidies, in addition to fares collected.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Interest Rates in a True Free Market":
I agree to some extent that the State should cease to exist, including its central banking etc. However you employ a completely 'quantitative rationalist model' (that the only thing worth calculating for man is monetary profit... if I do this based on the calculation that less plus a bit more I will make more, or not).
All economic decisions should be purely monetary based.
Other factors are also important, such as "Would I rather work an extra hour for an extra $30 or spend an extra hour with my child?" You can rationally make the decision, knowing you're giving up $30.
Morality and ethics can prevent someone from pursuing something 'because they will make more'. Its just that morality and values are completely distorted in a Statist society, so that even people like you think in those terms.
How do you know the State isn't distorting your morality to make such a pro-State troll accusation?
"Being rational is stupid!" only makes sense to a pro-State troll.
In a true free market, there's nothing wrong with being greedy. If my greed injures other people, then real free market police will stop me. In the present, most State employees are protected by sovereign immunity when they commit a crime.
If it makes rational economic sense to sell alcohol (and make lots of money personally) does it mean we all should do it and ignore the social costs of such a business venture?
If everyone was making alcohol and not doing anything else, then the price of alcohol would crash and making clothes would suddenly become very profitable. In a true free market, such an extreme scenario cannot occur. A true free market allows for easy entry/exit from the alcohol manufacturing business.
Only the State can cause such a massive misallocation of resources. In a true free market, such gross incompetence doesn't happen. Anybody seeing the foolhardy behavior can profit investing the other way. In the present, speculative bubbles are backed by the full evil power of the State.
Most people in a Statist society may agree that 'profit' is king, or we need 'The State' to regulate...but I think normal balanced human beings would not do it, because their values would be based on something other than 'rational economic man'.
The evil is profit combined with using violence to impose your will on others. Greed is not, by itself, evil. It's perfectly reasonable to look out for your own self-interests, provided you don't injure anybody else in the process.
You seem like you're pro-State trolling.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Interest Rates in a True Free Market":
Free Markets if the concept is taken seriously means that the 'forces' (taken from Physics) supply and demand will determine prices and the market, so long as no other 'force' or 'power' regulates or distorts this 'law'.
In the present, more than 50% of the productive value of society is drained by the State, making it strong enough to severely distort the market. The present market cannot be validly compared to a true free market.
As long as the State has a monopoly of providing justice and police protection, there is no free market. By this standard, there are no historical examples of a free market. You can't say "A free market is a proven failure!", because there's never been a true free market. You might say "Humans are inherently Statist by nature!" In that case, my retort is "I guess I'll have to start my own species and let the inferior life forms die off!" I believe Statism is an aspect of pro-State troll brainwashing, and not a natural human behavior.
Logically taken to its conclusion then it means if you are a food producer and there is a shortage of food, you are 'morally right' to raise your prices. People will starve and die....but so what its 'the law of economics'.
Yes, you are morally right to raise your prices if there's a shortage. In a true free market, there are many food providers. Some of them might forsee a potential shortage and stockpile food during times of plenty.
If you say that I'm not allowed to charge whatever I can get for my property, then you're asserting that I don't own my property. If you have the right to prevent me from charging more for food during times of famine, then what incentive do I have to stockpile food and plan for a famine. Paradoxically, your attitude causes famines!
Thomas Malthus said this then, and many 'economists' say this now. this is where 'modern atheist man' has reached with his banking and 'interest is good' doctrines and practices. I would not like to live in a society where people would raise their prices of food because there is scarcity, I would prefer to live where people have feelings for each other...this is not utopian, it is possible, its just that modern atheistic man projects his own values on all societies and says 'we are all just animals' and materialists (food, sex, power, wealth is all that matters to us glorified apes).
As the commenter below indicated, you are saying that you prefer to live in a society where there are shortages. Barred from charging the fair free market price, workers will merely stop producing.
You're pro-State trolling.
(I noticed that the stupidest comments tend to be the Anonymous ones. The non-Anonymous fools tend to get disgusted and leave after awhile.)
Sphairon has left a new comment on your post "Interest Rates in a True Free Market":
No, you would like to live in a world where there is scarcity, but no means of indicating it which will basically prolong the situation and not eliminate the bad side-effects of scarcity at all.
"I would not like to live in a society where people would raise their prices of food because there is scarcity"
Dude ...
Yes, the above Anonymous commenter was pro-State trolling.
It's like the employment listings on Craigslist where they demand 20 years of C# experience and then complain they can't find anyone qualified. There's only a "shortage" if you're clueless about the market.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Interest Rates in a True Free Market":
scarcity can be caused by many things, usually because man or men have acted in ways to benefit themselves to the detriment of others.
Hoarding, cartels, monopoly etc.
Scarcity only occurs in the context of State distortion of the market. (With the exception of huge disasters, such as an asteroid striking the earth and causing a global crop failure.) Historically, most famines were caused by State violence. For example, Ireland was a net exporter of potatoes during the potato famine. This stupid policy was a result of State violence.
Famines and natural disasters also can cause scarcity, but in an area where people are not like Hobbes described (life is short and brutish), people if they help each other they will survive and thrive.
The best way that people can indicate what help they need is via a market. In a true free market, prices are a signal that indicates what work needs to be done.
There is more to life than rationality or quantity can account for, more than the sum of its parts.
That is true, but when it comes to economic decisions, you should be rational. I don't understand why pro-State trolls are brainwashed to believe "Being irrational about economics is a desirable trait!"?
To materialists (only matter is real) and atheists if you have bread for one person to eat and get full on, there is no way that 2 people can share the bread and both become full, it is impossible, however from my perspective ('call it irrational, idealistic or stupid'), those 2 people can be full if they both agree to share (in the spirit of brotherhood) the food and they start the meal by praising God....this causes the food to be blessed and it provides nourishment for both.
To materialist and atheists this is just crazy... and their 'economics' reflects this attitude.
I'm not identifying myself as a materialist or atheist. I guess "The State is legitimate because the people who control the most guns say so!" is a form of materialism.
I don't understand what point you're making.
When it comes to economic decisions, you should be rational. You can then spend the profits of your business however you chose on whatever "make the world better" projects you want.
I don't understand how "People should not think rationally about economics!" is being seriously advocated by these pro-State troll commenters.
michael has left a new comment on your post "Interest Rates in a True Free Market":
Well, there's a big difference in the way you want things to be 'what feels good' and the way things actually are.
Price controls do not guarantee that the poor eat. In fact, history will show that price controls are much more damaging to 'the poor' and 'the brotherhood' than free market economics.
What the 'feel gooders' fail to recognize is that their policies of price controls and socialism cause the very negative circumstances they are, in fact, trying to prevent.
But hey, ignore history, ignore economics, and go with what feels good...
and you'll be hungry, you'll live with a lower standard of living, and destroy technological and market advancement.
but hey it 'feels good' right?
keep dreaming.... it's working for America right?
It's nice to see that I'm not the only one pointing out how foolish the pro-State trolls are.
A free market is the best way to raise the overall standard of living and help the poor.
The reason the USA is considered a more desirable place to live than other countries is that the USA has a less restrictive State than other countries, allowing more productive economic activity in the USA. That is changing, as the State in the USA grows more restrictive and the final total collapse draws near.
It's the usual "Problem! Reaction! Solution!" The State causes a problem. The mainstream media propaganda engine says "OMFG!!! OHNO!!!!" The solution is to give the State even more power, making the problem even worse. Then, the next major crisis is even more severe. This is the virtuous positive feedback cycle of total economic collapse.
The banking system is failing, so we give the bankers more resources. The auto industry is failing, so we give auto executives more money. The national defense failed to prevent a terrorist attack, so we spend more money on national defense. The public school system is failing, so we give public schools more resources.
The State is the only business where, if you're a complete and total failure, you get a big raise and promotion! The politicians you see in public change, but the insiders are still pulling the strings. I wonder if the insiders are consciously aware that they're pulling the strings too hard, and the whole Matrix is about to collapse?
jones9985 has left a new comment on your post "The Ultimate Seduction Technique!":
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http://www.TheSeductionKing.com/DVD
Is that about NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming)? That only works because most people are conditioned to behave as pro-State trolls. NLP won't work on someone who isn't totally brainwashed.
I have an amusing anecdote about NLP. I mentioned NLP to one of my psychiatrists. He said that he was mad that NLP techniques were openly publicly discussed. Previously, his psychiatry training gave in an edge in using mind control tactics, and now his dirty tricks were no longer as effective.
The psychiatrist wasn't glad that people were getting more awareness. He was mad that his "edge" was stolen by people exposing his scam!
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Reader Mail #70":
The idea to solve the problem by delaying extending the NFL regular season to 2013 or later would not work because (1) the NFL wants the additional revenue ASAP and (2) some players have contracts that extend beyond 2013.
I tend to agree with the NFL in this situation based on enforcing already existing contracts. If the players want an extra 12.5% salary to compensate for playing two extra regular season games, they can have their agents renegotiate their contracts.
It's already commonplace for NFL players who are underpaid to hold out for a raise, refusing to play. Most long-term contracts are already front-loaded. I.e., the player is given a $20M signing bonus as a cap loophole, with salaries of ($1M, $4M, $8M, $12M, $20M) over the life of the contract, with the expectation that the contract will be renegotiated before the $20M final year. The reason is that the $20M signing bonus only counts against the cap at a rate of $4M per year, yet the player is paid $20M upfront. This loophole, combined with inflation, effectively increases the size of the cap. The terms of the CBA (collective bargaining agreement) make such an arrangement practically mandatory for big contracts.
Remember that the NFL, as with all major sports leagues, gets all the state benefits that all big corporations get. The major difference is we are distracted from that because the product is "free" and usually excellent.
The cost of the NFL is hidden in the form of direct and indirect advertisements. Some advertisements are indirect. For example, I was watching a baseball game and the announcer said "Player X had a depression problem. He's taking anti-depressants and he's doing great now!" That is a hidden advertisement for the psychiatry/death industry. The announcer was himself probably not consciously aware that he was giving a hidden advertisement; it was merely written as a fact on the player's biography.
The NFL and all major sports leagues receive massive State subsidies.
I saw an article in the sports section of the newspaper. The family that owns the NY Mets lost a *TON* of money in the Madoff scandal. It was publicly disclosed along with the other list of victims. They said "Don't worry about us. We have a lot of sources of money that we haven't publicly disclosed and you don't know about. This big loss is annoying, but it won't affect our ability to own and manage the Mets." I found that annoying more than reassuring. Insiders have a practically limitless pool of wealth they can tap. When you leech via the State, it's like a practically unlimited fountain of wealth!
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Unemployed Again":
Learn Java + Flex/Blaze DS. Its popular to make enterprise systems using those.
There's a flaw in your reasoning. "Learn programming language X and you will always have a job!" is invalid reasoning. If language X is trendy now, then it won't be trendy 5 years from now.
Learning it on my own doesn't count, because from an HR keyword screening perspective, only actual work experience counts.
That's the continual grind of a slave software engineer. Every few years, all your experience is considered obsolete. I don't consider my experience to be worthless, but its market value is $0.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Unemployed Again":
I've been considering making a browser-based financial simulation game. I should purchase hosting first.Why not develop a board game based on what you have taught us all here? You could call it "Bailout". Put the those math skills to work!
I'll probably find another wage slave job sometime in the next few weeks, and I'll go back to focusing on that full-time. Right now, I have lots of surplus time.
fritz has left a new comment on your post "Unemployed Again":
Keep your head up fsk, its the challenges that make the man, and how he over comes them. I tell you this,I haven't been on for a while because of my own troubles....but you must know that I read your blog because I find you an inspiration.
Thank you for all you have taught me!!! Fritz
I feel that I did the best I could, but circumstances where not favorable for me. I feel that I'm really helping other people with blogging, and the feedback is useful. However, it isn't viable for me to do this as a business unless I get 100x-1000x more readers.
I'm hoping that I can keep up 10%-20% monthly growth for a few more years. Then, I could have a viable business.
John has left a new comment on your post "Unemployed Again":
I hope you find an even better job next time. I hope your computer and math skills and common sense are rewarded as much as they should be. Maybe in your next job, you will meet other libertarian(s) and agorist trading/business partners.
An agorist job won't be viable until the counter-economy gets more advanced. I'm looking for ways to start my own business. For now, a corporate wage slave job seems like the best option. I still need to work on my interpersonal freedom.
This is why I don't like my pro-State troll friends and relatives. They say "FSK has problems because FSK is a loser." instead of "FSK has problems because the economic and political system is unfair."
Paradoxically, greater awareness works against you in a wage slave economy.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Unemployed Again":
Get out of NYC. Unless you're writing software for the financial industry, you don't want to be there. (Too expensive, and not enough real programmer jobs.)
This goes back to the "Free State Project" fallacy. Why should I be forced to move for greater freedom? Besides, I'm starting to realize that being a wage slave software engineer is a dead end. I should try something else. For example, if I want to conduct a standup comedy experiment, NYC is a desirable location. I don't have to be the #1 top standup comic. I just have to be good enough to make as much as I do as a wage slave software engineer.
I'm going to stand my ground and work for freedom in NYC. Plus, for personal reasons, moving out of NYC isn't an option for me right now.
Seattle is good, Austin is good, the bay area might be good.
Might be a good idea to learn Cocoa / Objective-C. You could probably be self supporting if you wrote an iPhone application. The mac is ascendent, as is the iPhone, and so this would be a good direction to go.
The iPhone is trendy now. There's no guarantee it won't be popular 5 years from now.
Don't spend time on Java, or C++ or Windows. I mean if you get a great job or whatever ,fine, but these are not fun environments and they are not the ascendent technologies now.
LAMP is great if you're going to be building online systems. If that's the case, learning erlang would be a good idea. Simply knowing erlang without any job experience should get you big bonus points with anyone with a clue.
That's the problem. Interviewing with someone with a clue. For now, I'm just learning what I need at the time. LAMP seems like a good choice for making my own AgoristBay/Forum engine.
Also, NEVER, and I mean NEVER, deal with HR people where they are "screening" you. They are clueless and incompetent, and going thru them is a waste of time. I've got oodles of experience, know just about every language, am super qualified, etc, and I still get screened out by those idiots (well, I did when I still talked to them) for asinine things. (Like writing Java code that talked to an Oracle 8 database, an HR idiot actually said "this client is looking for Oracle 9 experience.")
The only way to find out if an ad was placed by an HR fool or someone with a clue is to respond to a bunch of them. I'm getting better at screening out fools.
If the vast majority of hiring/HR is done by clueless people, that is a symptom of a non-free market. Why don't some people with a clue start some businesses and clean out the competition? The answer is State restriction of the market.
Get on linked in. Get on whatever business networking site you want. Facebook? Whatever. Build up your links of friends and people you know. Everyone you have ever worked with that you respect, make them a friend... then network thru there to find hiring managers and CEOs to get jobs from. I'm constantly getting asked if I know someone for position X or who has skills Y. Build your network then work it, and also, go do networking.
If there are statup events in your area and you want to work for a startup, go to them, and then add the people you meet at them as friends in your network. Figure out what area you want to work in and then go to the meetings / SIGs, etc.
I bet there's an excellent Mac developers group in New York.
I've been considering going to some users group meetings. I went to the Ruby on Rails group a few times, and it was more of a luser's group than a user's group.
If you build something in a new technology and can demo it in an interview and show them the code, then it doesn't matter that you weren't paid to build it. (Such things only matter to HR idiots, and we're not talking to them, right?)
If I had something good, I'd just buy some hosting and start my own business.
The problem is that I need the income, so I can't afford to take too much time off building something on my own. My best idea right now is to buy some LAMP hosting and write my own forum engine.
Engineers respect people who learn new technologies, and your ability to problem solve is far more important than whether you know a particular language. Hell, from reading your blog postings, if I had an open position I'd be trying to talk you into coming-- simply due to your ability to think critically. Your programming style and languages can be fixed, critical thinking can't be taught, I don't think.
Once I get to the point where I'm talking to someone with a clue about software, then I'm mostly done. However, the good engineers aren't the ones making the decisions in most businesses. Most businesses have one or two really good engineers surrounded by several mediocre ones.
Ok, some HR people are cool, and you will end up dealing with them as they lead you to meetings or whatever. Sometimes you find an HR person who realizes they don't know technology and thus can't screen.... after awhile you can tell the difference right away, so networking wtih HR people isn't always a lost cause. Maybe asking them how the know whether a candidate is a good fit or not is a good way to tell-- if they say they look to see if they have the right technology experience, then they are idiots...
But figure out where you want to be, the kind of job you want, and then go find the people who are hiring for that, the people who would be your manager or co-worker, and get to know them.
The job I really want is something more free market oriented, rather than a corporate wage slave job.
It sounds harder than it is... its just a different way of going about it, its more active and not as passive as searching listings...That's an interesting point. It the hiring manager had a clue, then they wouldn't be advertising on Craigslist in the first place! However, I have found some decent opportunities via Craigslist.
But the extra secret advantage of this way is that you find the really good jobs. The good jobs get filled via networking. The jobs where tehy are looking for commodity "human resources" are the ones that end up in listings...
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Unemployed Again":
You have excellent writings. Keep going same bold way to explore our society. Try to sleep as you can.
I have also bipolar mental disorder for 15 years. It's not so bad illness. I have been working as a financial manager over 10 years after graduation. Lithium medicine may be good for you as you have bipolar disorder, but I am not a psychiatry.
Greetings from Scandinavia!
Lithium is poison. You should stop taking it, if you are.
How do you know that "bipolar disorder" isn't a made up false illness?
John has left a new comment on your post "My Personal Journey Towards the Truth":
"War is only profitable when there's a preexisting taxation and tribute collection system to usurp."
I've read Stefan Molyneux make this assertion. I'm not sure it's true all the time, though. What about land (lebensraum) or natural resources? Kill or subjugate all the people, take their land and what's on/under it. I don't think the United States gets any tax revenue from Iraq. The neocons invaded Iraq for geopolitical reasons, as an imperialistic attempt to expand its influence politically and militarily, to bring more of the world under its direct or indirect control and force its way of life on people. I don't think taking over a people's income-theft system is always or even usually the goal; taking their property and productivity (land, factories, farms, oil) directly seems more plausible.
In the case of Europeans invading North America and stealing land from the Native Americans, then that was "profitable", because the Europeans were more advanced technologically. The Native Americans offered essentially zero resistance. It was outright theft, but I don't consider claims that old to be enforceable anymore.
The purpose of the Iraq war wasn't territorial control of Iraq or its oil or resources. The purpose was to usurp the USA's taxation system! A lot of insiders made a ton of money off the Iraq war. The Iraq war was *INCREDIBLY* profitable, from the point of view of the CEO of Blackwater and other private military contractors. The Iraq war was profitable because the average American had no choice but to pay the cost via taxes and inflation.
Suppose there were an advanced agorist society. I assert that an invasion would not be profitable. If anything, the agorist society would be more technologically advanced than any Statist neighbors. In an agorist society, someone who started building an army and stockpiling weapons would be rapidly recognized as a threat. Further, it's hard to build a large army unless you can force people to pay via taxes.
I assert that in a true free market, war is not profitable. Police can always sell defense at a lower price than the invasion army expects to profit from war. The only way to find out is to conduct an experiment!
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The True Purpose of Sexual Harassment Laws":
Women who file sexual harrassment complaints want everyone to see how desireable-yet unapproachable they are. This escape hatch is the approach-avoidance conflict. They also do not realize that the attraction is what drives the species, but they labor tirelessly to prepare the bait for any naive suitor since they fully realize their competition is hard at work doing likewise. If a man says something while alone in a forest, is he still wrong? I prefer to be thrown in the briarpatch.
That's an aspect of pro-State brainwashing. However, the woman is still to blame if she cannot break her conditioning.
That's an interesting perspective. The woman gets validation that she is attractive, without having to actually date someone.
Further, that woman can now say "I was the victim of sexual harassment! Therefore, I deserve a greater raise and promotion!"
If my employer is going to mistreat me over such a frivolous accusation, I'm better off moving on. I will do what I think is right. Even though I got sick over the incident, I believe I behaved reasonably. Saying hello to someone is a crime now?
Josh has left a new comment on your post "Reader Mail #70":
Social networking sites more popular than porn?
Here's why!
1. It's free
2. Women use it too
3. People get laid
4. You can actually connect, for business or fun.
My blog is a type of social networking activity. At some point, if I get enough readers, I'm going to start trying to form actual agorist trading groups.
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LOL, the Think Geek link is very funny!
What kind of user name is "szH36fgas5f7_oG6zRQkxvvQGZHvtGA-"?
ripdna has left a new comment on your post "Water Powered Cars and Zero Point Energy":
LOL, the Think Geek link is funny!
Is this a duplicate comment?
HUNTER/GATHERER has left a new comment on your post "Water Powered Cars and Zero Point Energy":
That Zero Point Energy Generator is a hoax:
http://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2004/03/62794
How do you know that the debunking isn't a hoax?
I agree that specific Zero Point Energy Generator probably is a hoax. I'm nearly convinced that Zero Point Energy is a real technology. For now, it must be kept suppressed until the State is eliminated.
If someone tried openly selling an actual working Zero Point Energy Generator, you can be sure that "Men in Black" would come to shut you down. It would be neat if Zero Point Energy becomes a "killer app" for an agorist counter-economy.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Plaxico Burress Fnord":
I think you should take it easier, FSK, and don't worry so much about seeing fnords. I don't think it is related to your history of MI at all.
I never said that it bothers me that I can see fnords. It bothers me that I can't point them out to my pro-State troll friends and relatives. A therapist or psychiatrist will interpret "I can see fnords!" as a symptom of mental illness.
It's really disturbing to see both evil fnords and good fnords. Two groups are independently generating fnords with opposite meanings.
I see them all the time, and if you pay attention to the media of the past, say 1940-1950-ies, then you will see than almost 50% of all said and shown was fnords.
I read that the mainstream media propaganda engine was perfected in the early 20th century, especially after radio, TV, and movies were invented.
The disturbing part is that I've analyzed movies and videos over the past 10-20 years. Movies that are more recently generated have a greater percentage of good fnords. That's both disturbing and reassuring. In other words, if you plot "good fnords vs. time", it's increasing.
People communicate with fnords more commonly than not. While some people cannot see fnords, others cannot see or hear anything but fnords. Direct language has no meaning to those kind of people.
The problem is that once someone totally 100% believes the evil fnords, it is impossible to communicate with them at all.
In fact, I think I don't see them fnords good enough.
I'm getting very good at seeing fnords. It's amusing, because I can watch a TV show with lots of fnords, while other people are watching. I can see the fnords and they can't. I don't bother pointing them out.
As you know, direct recommendations that our society gives to young people are designed to ruin them.
That was the essence of my panic attack. I had nearly perfectly implemented the verbal advice I had been given. I thought I was being a good citizen, but I was merely being a good slave. The way I'd been conditioned to behave is exactly wrong. The only way to break that conditioning is via a panic attack. Hopefully, explaining it to others makes it easier for you than for me. I figured it out on my own the hard way.
Actually, that isn't absolutely true. If the top workers are 100x more efficient than everyone else, then you can have a society with 1% hosts and 99% parasites. I suspect the distribution of ability is closer to that estimate than "everyone has equal productivity", but it's hard to prove in the context of a slave economy.
This is understandable, since in parasitic society majority have to be hosts.
Even worse, many/most parasites delude themselves into thinking they are non-parasites. Many financial industry CEOs and hedge fund managers say "I'm a brilliant leader!", rather than realizing they're a parasite on the rest of society. When parasites think they're non-parasites, they hold back the activities of the productive workers.
But, I noticed, that there is an alternative set of directions, that shows the direct way for becoming a successive parasite. This set is communicated trough fnords and is placated everywhere.
It depends on who you're around. If your parents are parasites, you're more likely to become a parasite. If your parents are productive workers, then you're more likely to become a productive worker.
The parasites have their own unspoken union. Nothing unites the parasites in cooperation like someone honest who can see through the scam!
While all this certainly explains the origins of ( alien / reptilian ) society component theories, in my mind, it simply confirms that in any host/parasite society, there must be open and hidden language duality. Or, if you wish, then the existence of the duality of language presupposes the parasite nature of our society.
If I were to make that comparison, I'd say the successful parasite classes are the "reptilian humanoids" referred to in certain conspiracy sites. They are the families that have abused State power for generations, such as Bush, Kennedy, Rothschild, Rockefeller, and all the usual suspects. They are biologically human, but should for all practical purposes be treated as an inferior parasite species. Some insiders may be consciously aware of the scam and be actively working towards collapse, like the heroes in Atlas Shrugged (fnord!). It's hard to tell unless I've personally met them or analyzed their speaking or writing. Watching CNBC, it's very easy to tell who are the parasites. There's a certain pattern of speech a parasite uses that's very distinguishable. To a non-enlightened person, that pattern indicates "The speaker is very knowledgeable."
Good fnords, such as Visotsky / Aesop / Matrix, are created by hosts trying to raise the awareness of parasites among other hosts. The reason the have to wrap their message in fnords is because the parasite government makes it impossible or highly unlikely for any host to publish such warning in open language. Publishing it in fnordish, on the other hand reaches very few, as the majority does not speak fnordish.
How do you know that there are humans consciously aware of the scam, but only release the truth in bits and pieces? I'm consciously aware of the scam, and I'm trying to tell the truth as plainly and explicitly as possible. I don't see how anyone could be fully aware of the scam and not be actively trying to end it as much as possible. Most members of the parasite class aren't consciously aware that they're parasites, and merely think they're doing the right thing.
Maybe the good fnords are really generated by benevolent aliens. They're restricted by the Prime Directive like in Star Trek (fnord!), so they can't intervene directly. Suppose a writer is trying to write a good movie and be creative. Then, the alien overseers can guide the writer's mind so he writes a story that exposes part of the scam. That isn't violating the Prime Directive, because the alien overseers are merely helping the writer to do what he was trying to do anyway. The more intelligent and creative the writer, the better the process works. Perhaps the authors of the Matrix movie weren't trying to make a deep commentary on the corruption of our society. Maybe they were just trying to make a cool movie with neat special effects, and lucked onto the deeper plot and popularity by accident/ability, with help from aliens?
Now that a certain number of people have gained conscious active awareness of the scam, they can start going around explicitly telling the truth. Surprisingly, I haven't been the victim of State violence based on my blog. If telling the explicit truth were that dangerous, then wouldn't I have been assassinated by now?
This is why Soviet Union had a phenomenon of "SamIzdat" (Self-Publis[hing]). This is because SamIzdat allows the distribution of knowledge in open language, and therefore benefits hosts, and not mostly parasites, as does fnordish.
The Internet is a means of self-publishing. With my own blog, I can seriously respond to comments by productive workers or people genuinely seeking the truth, and I can prevent the pro-State trolls from disrupting the discussion.
In the Soviet Union and China, explicit State violence is needed to keep censorship active. In the USA, the mainstream media monopoly is a much more effective censorship arm. Despite no explicit threat of State violence, no mainstream media personality is critical of the Federal Reserve, income tax, or the State. All mainstream media sources uniformly spout the Statist party line without any explicit overt violence. If any writer, actor, comedian, journalist, or politician refuses to toe the Statist party line, then they are sacrificing their career. Knowing this, nobody rocks the boat.
I very much liked (loved?) your explanation of how brainwashing is important in keeping the status quo. True, proper education will easily disable the power of open/fnordish duality of language trough opennes to ideas and lack of unquestionable authorities / axioms.
That was one thing I read somewhere. If the truth is on your side, then you can overcome a situation where the anti-truth has superior resources. However, it's not absolute. Truth just means you get more bang for your buck. If the truth is on your side, every $1 you spend has equal power to $100-$1000 spent by the bad guys. That isn't enough, for example, for the anti-psychiatry movement to win out against the pharmaceutical/psychiatry/death industry, because the bad guys' resources are superior. For this reason, it's important for agorists to find a way to spread the truth and show a profit at the same time. That's why I don't consider it immoral for me to start advertising via AdSense on my blog. I want to promote agorism and show a profit at the same time, starting a virtuous feedback cycle building an agorist economy.
I think if you want to break this, the good place to start is to secretly educate your children in a proper way, while keeping the appearance of approved curriculum.
You'd probably have to homeschool or go to a non-standard State approved school. Someone mentioned Montessori schools. The problem with sending your children to school is that, by the time they're 10 years old, your State-schooled children will have spent more waking hours with State bureaucrats than with their parents. Homeschooling appears to be the only viable option for true freedom seekers. Starting a homeschooling association is one of my agorist business ideas.
If this can be dome on a somewhat wide basis, this would be the strongest weapon, as there is nothing you can do against millions of young people who where taught that you're the enemy.
The problem right now is that the average person has been brainwashed to believe that my ideas are those of the enemy. For now, I'm doing the best I can enlightening a handful of people at a time. I'm making progress, but I'm looking for ways to reach a wider audience. I'm thinking of expanding to vlogging or standup comedy.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Plaxico Burress Fnord":
This article by Gary North could have been called "Gary North on Fnords".
http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north667.html
That article was talking in the context of economics and academia, rather than fnords in general. Also, he's only talking about evil fnords and not good fnords. Remember that fnords come in two flavors! There's the evil fnords that are part of the human enslavement Matrix, designed to keep everyone enslaved. Then, there's the good fnords that are hints to help people figure out what's going on. If there's a massive conspiracy to generate powerful evil fnords, then who's generating the good fnords?
I liked the bit about "Academics don't generally write in plain English, lest the average person stand up and say 'You're full of ****!'" When I was at college and grad school, people who wrote for a non-academic audience were usually denounced heavily. I asked my advisor "There's lots of barely comprehensible Math papers. Why don't I go through all these old results and republish them in a more readable form? Isn't that worth doing, instead of some small marginal enhancement of other research nobody will ever read?" My advisor responded "That's a waste of time. You'd be throwing away your career if you did that."
I liked the bit about interest rates becoming zero-bound. That article was written before the Federal Reserve officially cut interest rates to zero. The only way out of zero-bound interest rates is deficit spending by the Federal government. Once the nominal interest rate reaches zero, the only way to cut real interest rates further is to increase inflation, via deficit spending by the Federal government. If interest rates remain zero, while inflation increases, then real interest rates decrease even further. The real interest rate is the nominal interest rate (currently 0%) minus the inflation rate (currently 15%-30%, depending on what measure you use). Negative real interest rates are a huge State subsidy of those who may borrow from the Federal Reserve at the Fed Funds Rate, and use the proceeds to buy tangible assets.
The problem with this tactic, mentioned in that article, is that it's a massive transfer of wealth from the productive sector of society to the State. That is what happened from 1933 until the end of the Great Depression. No longer obligated to redeem paper Federal Reserve Notes for gold, the Federal Reserve could inflate at will. The Federal Reserve inflated, bailing out bankers and insiders. The Federal government had deficit spending, using the profits to line the pockets of insiders. The parasite class made a fortune, while the rest of society was still in a Depression. Not commonly mentioned, the banks had ridiculously huge profits for the last few years of the Great Depression, as they got first dibs on the newly printed money.
The Great Depression was tremendously profitable for insiders, just as insiders are cleaning up during the current economic crisis.
Mainstream economic theory is merely a bunch of lies and propaganda that are used to justify inflation/taxes/theft and State intervention in the market. That's all that really needs to be said, but the details must be provided for people who haven't seen the lies exposed before.
"The reason the have to wrap their message in fnords is because the parasite government makes it impossible or highly unlikely for any host to publish such warning in open language."
Isn't this blog a counter-example to that idea?
That's an interesting question. Why haven't the bad guys used violence to shut down my blog?
Maybe the ban only applies to mainstream media sources. A mainstream media personality cannot explicitly state the truth like I can, although I'm starting to see some cracks and people more directly hinting at the truth.
Why hasn't anybody used violence to stop my blog? There are several possible explanations I can think of.
- I'm some irrelevant fruitcake blogger. This is what most pro-State trolls who read my blog see. For this reason, State enforcers won't read my blog for long without saying "This guy is nuts and harmless."
- The insiders who are secretly pulling the strings really do want complete economic and political collapse to occur. I'm actively working towards their agenda, so why should they eliminate me?
- I don't have enough readers to be considered a threat. I can fly under the radar. There's a lot of content on the Internet, and State enforcers don't have time to read all of it. An automated spying program that flagged my writing as dangerous would generate too many false positives to be useful. Besides, most police are looking for things like people blowing up buildings or assassinating people or other acts of terrorism. Of course, by the time my audience is big enough to be a real threat, it'll be too late to do anything to stop a free market agorist revolution from occurring.
- Maybe the "benevolent aliens" theory is correct and they really are secretly helping me. They're able to make any State enforcers who read my blog have a mental thought "This guy isn't dangerous." and they move on to other things.
- Anyone who understands my writing well enough to think my ideas are dangerous also agrees with my main points.
Dan has left a new comment on your post "The Plaxico Burress Fnord":
No, it isn't, I think. This blog serves what 0.01% of the population, maybe?
I have about 200-300 regular readers, according to Google Analytics. If you have 300M people in the USA, that gives me 0.0001% of the population, and some of my readers are outside the USA.
However, the growth trend for my readership is favorable.
Try to go on CNN and speak openly. Even Ron Paul did not speak openly about what really is going on.
I'm thinking of making a standup comedy act based on my blog, as a way to reach a wider audience. If I'm popular, I should eventually get invited on a guest on a mainstream media program. I can upload videos to YouTube as a way to attract a wider audience. There are other free market thinkers on the Internet, such as Freedomain. Freedomain correct "The State sucks!" and "It's possible to have a stable society without a monopolistic State." However, Freedomain fails to answer "How do you achieve a stateless society starting from the current mess." Agorism is the only plausible solution I've read.
I think if you even try to speak openly to an audience wide enough, they will simply get scared, and authorities will use that to remove you.
Of course, you can always try to be Kennedy, if you wish.
I'm starting to get bolder, now that I've been blogging for awhile without anything bad happening to me. I think the risk is less than is commonly believed.
If Obama discovered the truth somehow and tried doing something about it, he'd definitely be like Kennedy. However, people who aren't the President have fewer restrictions. I'm just some fruitcake blogger.
I'm looking for ways to get steady 10%-20% reader growth, combined with ways to reach a wider audience or make a profit while promoting agorism.
ng2000 has left a new comment on your post "The Plaxico Burress Fnord":
Valuable resource of Plaxico Burress news summaries...
This comment was spam, but I was charitable and posted it.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Plaxico Burress Fnord":
So Dan, if FSK's blog gets too popular, then what? He's going to jail, or worse? If that's true then why bother writing it?
If you believe that everything is hopeless, then why bother doing anything at all?
By the time my blog gets popular enough for me to be considered a threat, it's too late for the bad guys to do anything about it. So far, I haven't been the victim of State violence based on my blog.
You can't speak openly on CNN because they'd consider you a crackpot not worth listening to. FSK would certainly be considered a crackpot by CNN.
Where is the evidence that one can't publish openly? FSK is doing it right here!
I'm trying to figure out a way to attract a wider audience. That's why I like my "promote agorism via standup comedy" idea.
If a mainstream media outlet suddenly started broadcasting the truth, then there would be massive panic and rioting. It's better to let the smartest people to discover the truth slowly first.
Maybe I'm really directly serving the Supreme Leader of Humanity's agenda? He hasn't publicly explicitly stated his goal of achieving a global free market, but I've deduced his agenda and therefore am not harassed by the State.
Dan has left a new comment on your post "The Plaxico Burress Fnord":
You are either young or eager to prove something (or both). And that is fine. Of course you have a right to be.
But in that case, what are you doing here? I am not calling you a troll, but I am wondering.
It seems the issue being debated is "Is telling the truth publicly too risky? It can't be too risky, because FSK is doing it. It can't be too easy, because no mainstream media source is telling the truth."
It's like the Laughing Man in Ghost of the Shell (1st season) (fnord!). The Laughing Man kidnaps the CEO of the drug company that suppressed a promising treatment. He demands that the CEO publicly tell the truth. The CEO says "Why don't you tell them yourself?!" The Laughing Man says "They wouldn't believe me. You have to do it." However, the CEO was right. I should tell the truth myself, rather than waiting for other people to do it for me.
Still, this is a bad way to answer a question or a challenge. And yet there are questions and challenges that ought to be answered in this way. Think about it... How can I prove it to you? Get myself jailed?
I haven't been jailed (yet). I don't think a judge or policemen could send me to jail based on my blog's content with a straight face. Some of them would realize that what they're doing is wrong, especially when I explicitly pointed it out to them.
When I make the transition to practical agorism, I'm taking greater risk. In the USA, there's still a presumption of freedom of speech, even if you're saying "The State is evil and must be eliminated!"
The State seems stronger than it actually is, because if I mention free market economics to my in-person friends and relatives, they say "FSK, you're wrong and stupid!" I don't need police to violently censor my ideas. My friends and relatives and coworkers do a fine job of censorship.
Even then you probably would say that I just did something else wrong, since I will be accused of something else, we don't remove people for speaking openly, do we?
I don't understand this point. I try to publish all non-spam comments, although I'm starting to notice flamewars in my comments section.
So, I have considered everything and here is what: You're right, or probably right. There might be no problem shouting this aloud. Alex Jones is just an idiot for doing his best to keep the appearance of a cook, so that he can keep the forum.
I don't have a State-endorsed forum, so I risk losing less. Still, Google could cut off my blog at any time. I'd like to switch to self-hosting.
I was wrong, I am only a human. I still wouldn't talk about this on CNN, and think that if Ron Paul did, then he would be shot by CIA.
This is how crazy I am, I believe these things.
If I got invited as a guest on CNN, I'd tell the truth. I doubt that I'd be invited as a guest on CNN in the first place, so it's a moot point.
Does it really worth your time to talk to folks like me? Why don't you instead try to repair the intentionally good, but slightly misaligned system? Fight the national debt (is a worthy cause)? Just a suggestion...
OK, now you're pro-State trolling. I've concluded "Work withing the system to achieve reform!" is pointless. The system is completely corrupt and needs to be discarded.
Once I realized the immorality of the Federal Reserve and income tax, I cannot continue to support a corrupt system. Taxation is theft, and the profits of taxes are used to injure other people. If I voluntarily pay taxes, I'm partially responsible all the crimes of the State. In the present, I pay the taxes on income from my corporate wage slave job while looking to build free market alternatives.
The current economic and political system is broken and corrupt beyond the possibility of it being fixed. It needs to be completely discarded. When you says "Your only option for freedom is to work within a corrupt system.", then you are pro-State trolling.
It is impossible to obey the law and live a morally just life. When I pay taxes, the profits are used to hurt other people.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Plaxico Burress Fnord":
I am confused as to why it doesn't cross your mind that I'm honestly wondering what reason you have for believing in a conspiracy to silence dissent. Personally I find that people in general are confused enough to account for lack of it. I have no need for an additional hypothesis beyond that, although if someone alleges conspiracy, I am quite open to hearing their case.
"But in that case, what are you doing here? I am not calling you a troll, but I am wondering."
Is there a conspiracy to silence dissent in the mainstream media? There's certainly a lot of circumstantial evidence. There have been "purges" where people with non-approved viewpoints were banned from the media industry. For example, in the 50s and 60s, if you were accussed of being a Communist, then you would be unable to find a mainstream media job.
Either there are opening for non-mainstream media authors, or I'm really serving the agenda of whoever's secretly pulling the strings.
With so many fake-competing viewpoints, you would think that the actual truth would be one of the many viewpoints represented in the mainstream media? The fact that all opinions but the truth are publicly expressed, is evidence of a conspiracy.
But you evidently aren't interested in presenting it. I mean, if you can't present your facts, your reasons for believing in a conspiracy to silence dissent, to an honest person, what do you expect you look like to them? If all you can do is call them "troll" or "naive", well what does that mean? It can only mean to me that you believe what you do beyond any facts or reasons. If there really is a conspiracy like you allege, I want to know about it, I'm open to knowing about it, but you're pretending that it should be obvious, "To those who understand, no explanation is necessary; to those who don't, none is possible."--Is that your credo?
I believe there is a conspiracy to silence dissent, but for some reason I haven't been violently silenced (yet?). There appear to be some groups working to enslave everyone, while other groups are also working to set everyone free. In the end, the truth should win out over anti-truth.
As a practical matter, it's irrelevant whether there's a deliberate conspiracy or that the current corrupt system evolved via a series of bad decisions. In either case, I should do what I think is best.
So far, I haven't been the victim of State violence based on my blog. I'm looking to expand from blogging to other things.
Dan has left a new comment on your post "The Plaxico Burress Fnord":
"To those who understand, no explanation is necessary; to those who don't, none is possible."
Not in all matters. Even this one I have been attempting to explain before. I just don't think it is possible anymore, meanings, that when I was younger, I believed the explanation for this matter is possible. Turned out, I just misunderstood the matter at hand.
I am not trying to hide behind this. Everyone will see that as far as public discourse goes, - I have not been able to support my theory.
Instead, what I am trying to do is to pile up as much wording as possible to cover up my slip up.
As you read this last phrase, you have probably lost all doubts that I am insane. Which, incidentally, is the whole point.
This refusal to teach a particular point doesn't come from an intent to isolate you from knowledge.
It comes from a recognition of oneself, now presented by you, and knowing that no explanation would suffice. You may or may not come to a similar degree of paranoia, on your own, in the future. But I, can not bring it about.
There was a point in my life, when I suddenly realized that the one talking to me is telling me everything I need to know, while appearing that he is telling me nothing. It was up to me, how deeply I wanted to believe it. At first it looked like if I believe deeper, then it gets crazier. But then, it become clear, that the deeper I went in my belief, the crazier I had to behave myself, since now it made perfect sense.
It is no different than jumping off a tall building straight down, onto a pavement in Matrix. It just makes no sence, until it does.
I don't understand where this flamewar has gone. When Dan said "You should work within the system to achieve reform!", that was pretty bad, but I'm not going to use the Strawman Fallacy against the other points he was making.
Is it risky for a mainstream media personality to tell the truth? Yes. They probably would be forfeiting their career if they tried.
Is it risky for me to tell the truth? I haven't yet been the victim of State violence based on my blog. It's probably going to take a couple years, but I want to make the transition from theoretical agorism to practical agorism. The hardest part is finding trustworthy in-person trading partners.
If I do manage to build a successful mainstream media career, I would become popular for telling the truth while everyone else is a pro-State troll. Under the guise of comedy, I may be able to slip in my message.
I was watching the Communism Channel and the commentators made some interesting points. They said the Madoff scandal could have been shut down by regulators based on a simple statistical analysis of his monthly/quarterly returns. His volatility-adjusted profit was so high that there had to be some funny business going on. His fund's performance was a huge statistical outlier.
For example, suppose I had a time machine and had a copy of the next day's closing stock prices for an entire year. Even with that information, there's a limit to how much I could profit. Madoff's returns, for the markets he claimed to be trading, with the size of the portfolio he was managing, were greater than he could have achieved with the ability to predict the future.
I saw people on the Communism channel saying "Only an idiot would buy gold right now!" My conclusion is "This is a good time to buy gold!" Even though there was massive money supply inflation in 2008, the FRN-denominated price of gold started and ended 2008 at around $850/ounce.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Compound Interest Paradox":
The time preference of money is completely meaningless when there is no consideration. What most people fail to realize is that in our current system the depositor who deposits money in exchange for interest is not losing his time preference for money. When someone deposits money into a savings account the bank will never say to them sorry we cannot give you your money right now because it is lent out at the moment. The money being lent out has no relation to the deposits other than the illusory abstract obfuscation that most people are led to believe.
The compound interest paradox is real and easily shown mathematically given the fact that all money is lent with interest. Since the loan is the principle (P) and what is owed back is (PxI) P cannot equal (PxI) at any point in time without a further loan of (P) which will only serve to grow the interest owed minus defaults or other mitigating factors such as a trade surplus of a country. This is basically a ponzi scheme in slow motion and takes many years for the interest portion of the debt to become a substantial percentage of the principal eventually becoming a compound L-curve mitigated by defaults and trade surpluses.
A Ponzi scheme is different than the Compound Interest Paradox, although there is a Ponzi type effect in most asset bubbles. For example, people who bought real estate near the start of the housing boom and then cashed out made their profit at the expense of later investors.
In a free market, interest rates are the valid expression of time preference for work in the present compared to work in the future. The Federal Reserve monopoly distorts the credit market. The price signal of interest rates is disrupted. This frustrates people's ability to plan for the future, because you don't know whether there's going to be a boom or bust next, or for how long it will last.
The Compound Interest Paradox illustrates how fiat debt-based money is more evil than mere constant uniform inflation. With constant uniform inflation, then everyone would load up on leverage, causing a crash eventually anyway.
It really is amusing to notice reactions to "FSK is going to put an AdSense widget on his blog!" My regular intelligent non-Anonymous commenters are writing "Go for it FSK!" Some Anonymous commenters are saying "Bad idea, FSK!", but since they're Anonymous, I can't tell if it's a couple of people or the same person trolling.
Google has the capacity to track every single reader of my blog by their IP address. If I add an AdSense widget, that does not change.
For now, AdSense is the best option for "profit from my blog". I'd like to move to self-hosting and cover my expenses. Ideally, I would like to only sell advertisements to other agorists. There is no viable counter-economy right now, and my only option to support myself is to sell my labor to the State.
Selling AdSense only corrupts my blog if it affects the content presented. It probably won't. If there are some posts that turn out to be very profitable, I'll go back and edit them and make more posts on the same subject. However, "Most profitable via AdSense" and "Most popular" will probably be highly correlated. I don't think AdSense will affect the basic content of my blog.
Since working full-time as an agorist isn't viable yet, the next best option is "Promote agorism and show a profit at the same time!" For now, my goal is to raise $10/month to cover the expense of moving from Blogger to my own domain. Then, I can expand to offer other things besides blogging.
Besides, aren't there FireFox extensions that block AdSense?
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "My Personal Journey Towards the Truth":
Fan-bloody-tastic post.
Excellent summary.
That was repeated from an earlier Reader Mail post, but I figured it deserved to be on its own.
Figuring out the truth the hard way is harder than having someone else explain it to you. Hopefully, you can benefit from me learning things the hard way.
One of the big things that convinced me towards the evil of the State was "The 'chemical imbalance' theory of mental illness is nonsense." combined with "It is pointless to lobby the State to solve this State-caused problem." I was much more willing to question other things, after discovering that truth the hard way.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Is Broadcast Spectrum Property?":
The spectrum supposed to be all divided up into freely sold and privately held pieces. It is not a "common resource".
Already, you have a false assumption. Most methods used by cell phone companies and TV/radio for using spectrum require monopolistic use. Other protocols do not require monopolistic use of spectrum.
For example, the Internet and Ethernet networks follow a protocol where the broadcaster does not need monopolistic use.
I disagree with the assumption "Spectrum has the characteristics of property, because only one person/organization can use it at a time."
Most current "owners" of spectrum don't have a legitimate ownership claim, because their ownership was a gift from the State. Actually, the first TV stations did "homestead" their spectrum. They just started broadcasting, and their ownership was later formally recognized by the State. In the present, better techniques allow spectrum to be used non-monopolistically.
It is not, because it is "squattable". Because of this, there will be de-facto ownership of frequency ranges. Since there will be de-facto ownership, we now need to attempt to establish a system that would guarrantee such private ownership to be attainable fairly and efficiently. Such system is free market.
Is spectrum squattable? Suppose you decide to broadcast loud music from your property. Do I have the right to force you to stop? Similarly, if you broadcast loudly in the radio spectrum, interfering with my ability to use the spectrum, do I have the right to force you to stop?
If you go with a "full allodial title" theory of land ownership, then land and the spectrum in the space above it should be co-owned. Perhaps people in an area could voluntarily agree to sell their spectrum to someone, but then it would have to be a unanimous decision in order to be enforceable. Even then, would it be a lease, or would it be outright ownership?
That is what it supposed to be. Now, about what it is:In the present, the State granted spectrum monopolies to a small handful of people. Their ownership claim is not legitimate. Who actually owns this spectrum? I assert that it is unowned.
Since we do not have freedom, but instead we have a dictature of majority, such free market in radio spectrum is inapplicable. The government must see to it to prevent fair and efficient use of the spectrum. Therefore it dictatorially allocates frequency bands, and reserves the right to dictatorially change the format of transmission or even take back the resource. Do not let the fact that it "sells" (rents) the frequencies to fool you into thinking there is a free market at work. There is a market, but it is not free.
Back to what it supposed to be:
In the freedom, the spectrum would be first squatted, and then privately divided up and sold and resold between all willing to participate forever. Just as with the land. This system insures that a more efficient user or a resource attains more of it to use, meaning that the same resource will be used at it's maximum efficiency at any given time. It also insures that this resource is going to freely compete on it's luxurious qualities as well as on it's productive ones. Meaning that anybody efficient in some other area of the free market and not necessarily in radio, will be able to acquire a band at his/her leisure. This last feature insures that there will always be time for fun, just like there always be time for work.
It is possible to design cell phone and other protocols that don't require monopolistic use of spectrum. They are not developed, because currently most spectrum is monopolistically owned.
Back to the mob rule:
None of this is true in dictatorial regime. The government typically reserves the right to initially "designate" the ownership of spectrum bands, and then to "regulate" their use without removing the possibility of confiscation, as if the government "owned" it to begin with, or even "knew" how to judge efficiency.
In actuality, this is done to make sure there is no fairness nor efficiency in use of a given resource under dictatorial powers of majority. This latter is clearly the case, because in absence of free market (unregulated market), the profit can only be made by monopolizing a particular kind of economic action. I.e. I want a license from the thug government, to prevent my neighbor from competing with me. Once established, such order makes more profit by creating shortages, rather than by increasing the quantity and quality of the output. Meaning, that since nobody else has the license on my block, by using my secured resource inefficiently, I will create a shortage of product ad higher profits. This is why a system without freedom must necessarily INSURE that the resource under it's control is used INEFFICIENTLY and UNFAIRLY.
Because the dictature of majority (mob rule) likes to take away private property under the disguise of "voting it away" (as if together we can vote to ourselves something than none of use possesses separately), if schools do not explain this as outright theft, then former children won't be able to recognize the theft occurring when the government blatantly assumes the ownership of a particular resource.
I don't see how monopolistic ownership of spectrum could be enforced in a true free market. Therefore, I consider spectrum to be unowned. However, if all the residents in an area *UNANIMOUSLY* agree otherwise, then monopolistic spectrum rights could be acquired. I doubt that unanimity can be achieved, so nobody could claim ownership to spectrum.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Is Broadcast Spectrum Property?":
There are actually three separate issues:
1) Does anyone have a right to send electromagnetic radiation through me?
I say "Yes, if at levels proven to be not harmful."
2) Can this right be exclusive?
I can grant such an exclusive right, but I don't speak for my neighbors.
3) Do I have the right to intercept and use the radiation that is blasting through me?
Yes.
The first is a health issue. There is no good science left in this world and you cannot trust any studies as they are paid for by the broadcasters. The cancer rates are through the roof, and if it has anything to do with constant exposure to strong electromagnetic fields - your guess is literally as good as mine.
Like most mainstream science, I say "Cancer and electromagnetic exposure are correlated/uncorrelated" to be completely unproven either way. I assign a truth value of "unknown" to that statement. There are no studies conducted by scientists I trust. My guess is that low levels are safe, but high levels might be damaging.
You cannot isolate a single cause with rising cancer rates. For example, treatment of infections with antibiotics will lead to increased cancer rates. Now, fewer people die of infections, so more people die of cancer.
The second issue has to do with ownership. Is radiation property? Clearly no. But the spectrum is limited, and as any limited resourse, can be priced. Does the government own the spectrum, and can it auction off pieces of it? Ridiculous, isn't it.
How do you know that the only way to efficiently use spectrum is to grant someone exclusive right to use it? There are other protocols. If necessary, fault-tolerant protocols could be developed, to account for non-exclusive broadcast rights.
When you say "Spectrum must be monopolistically allocated!", are you pro-State trolling? I disagree with your assumption.
The third issue really upsets me. In my state, if I point a harmless laser pointer at you, I can be arrested for assault, a felony charge. But if my neighbor points a focused microwave beam at me from his WiFi router, there is no crime. Furthermore, if I connect to his network, I can go to jail.
As far as I am concerned, any radiation going through my property is mine. If you want to run a cable through my land, you have to ask my permission and pay for a right of way. IF you are broadcasting movies literally through me, the difference between me being a free man or in jail depends only on what kind of gadgets I own. That is clearly absurd.
Frankly, the whole thing is crazy, much like EVERYTHING that the government is involved in.
I agree that the current economic and political system is one big mess.
Keep up the good work, and please stay out of trouble!
Is that good advice? If my sole goal is to stay out of trouble, then I should stop blogging and forget about agorism! A better answer is "Stay out of properly risk-adjusted trouble!" I'll take a risk, if the odds of gain outweigh the odds of loss. Even if I miscalculate and am wrong, that doesn't mean I made the wrong decision!
At this point, "Attempt practical agorism" appears to be obviously worth doing. If I don't, I'm accepting that I'm a slave. Of course, attempting practical agorism is risky and could lead to trouble! I calculate that the odds favor the risk.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "The Black-Scholes Formula is Wrong! - Part 4/12 - ...":
I don't know that I completely understand why you think the put-call parity formula is bunk.
Is it only b/c there are short transaction fees?
No, short transaction fees are negligible compared to the true error of the put/call parity formula.
Suppose stock prices are a log-normal distribution, which assumes a random walk of normally distributed percentage change. In that case, there are two degrees of freedom. There is the volatility (standard deviation) and the mean.
The put/call parity formula implies that the mean equals the Treasury bond yield rate for the same duration. Suppose the 1 year bond yield rate is currently 1.5%. Then, a 1 year stock option should be priced as if the expected gain in the stock equals 1.5% over one year. If you priced options otherwise, another professional options trader would conduct arbitrage via a reversal or conversion.
However, if you observe stock prices over any nontrivial duration, the expected gain is far greater than the bond yield rate. Over any non-trivial time period (although the last 5 years were an exception), stocks have outperformed bonds. Therefore, stock options should be priced as if the expected gain is greater than the bond yield rate.
The discrepancy shows up as unearned profit for options traders and hedge fund managers. This is the perk they get for printing new money. The profits of options traders aren't free. They're paid by the rest of society as money supply inflation.
Why should I pay the financial industry's profits via money supply inflation? The only morally correct answer is agorism. I should boycott the dollar and income tax, lest other people steal from me and use the profits to line their pockets and do bad things.
The error is that the expected gain in stocks, over time, is greater than the bond yield rate. The Federal Reserve, via its "monetizing the debt" trick, keeps Treasury Bond yields artificially low. This also affects the prices for non-Treasury debt, because banks may borrow from the Federal Reserve at the Fed Funds Rate and issue loans.
The model assumes that when people borrow money to buy stock, they are borrowing from someone else. In practice, if I borrow money to buy stock, I am borrowing brand new money into existence. There is a false arbitrage argument that justifies "expected gain in stocks equals bond yield rate", because people will borrow to buy stock if that's profitable. However, people who borrow are borrowing brand new money into existence, preventing the arbitrage from occurring. The Federal Reserve has literally an unlimited budget, so it will inflate as much as desired to keep the Fed Funds Rate at its target.
BTW, after 2 years, my stock options trading system yielded a 100% loss. I'm abandoning it for now, even though now probably is the best time to buy. I just don't have the cash reserves to invest. I'm losing interest in Statist forms of investment. I'm going to gradually shift to physical gold and silver with my taxable investments, and GLD and SLV in my IRAs.
citizen stefish has left a new comment on your post "Mental Health Clinic Observations":
i have a degree in psychology and took the "pre-med" classes with the hopes of going to medical school and becoming a psychiatrist. i had the grades for it easily and also the fake/hated "extracurricular activities" that improved my application.
I never understood why "extracurricular activities" were important for college admissions. It only makes sense in the context of a corrupt system.
then my cousin (educational psychologist) was convinced i needed to be hospitalized because i was "depressed" and i don't socialize with every person i come in contact with. i was held against my will for a week while being convinced that i "wanted" to be there and that it was best for me.
I didn't like being hospitalized involuntarily either. A lot of the other patients were also unhappy with their involuntary hospitalization. A lot of them were also turned in by relatives.
In that post, I was referring to the mental health clinic, and not the hospital itself.
everyone there was just like you described. there were guys from the army, managers of grocery stores, middle-aged guys going through a mid-life crisis, etc. we were all given tons of medication. the psychiatrist that i spoke with talked to me for *10* minutes before giving me 4 different meds.
You spoke with a psychiatrist for 10 minutes? That's longer than in my case. I only recall speaking with the psychiatrist for 2-5 minutes before being involuntarily hospitalized.
Plus, the conditions of the mental ward admissions unit will make someone already in a manic state *TOTALLY* freak out.
I don't see how a psychiatrist can make the decision to involuntarily hospitalize someone and medicate someone for the rest of their life based on a 5 minute inspection. Once taking those drugs, they are very addictive and the withdrawal is nasty. All psychiatrists will advise you to continue taking your drugs. If all you have is a hammer, then everything looks like a nail!
Regular criminals get more due process than a "mentally ill" person. A regular criminal gets (some) due process, but someone a "mentally ill" person can be involuntarily hospitalized based on a 5 minute inspection by a psychiatrist. There is no appeal! Once hospitalized, you can be given forced injections if you refuse to take the drugs.
one of them literally made me psychotic. previously i was sluggish and unhappy ("depressed"), but she concluded in 10 minutes that i needed anti-psychotic meds because i said i have trust issues with others and because i don't like crowded areas. i became psychotic AFTER i started taking this one pill (which cost 150 bucks for about 20 of them).
The only time I ever felt really depressed or suicidal when I was taking anti-psychotic drugs against my will. I'm very glad that I figured out those drugs were bad for me and I stopped taking them.
i took it 3 times and was told by my parents that i was wandering around and babbling to myself and acting like a lunatic, and so i refused it from there on. strangely i went back to being normal.
I noticed that pretty quickly. If you stop taking the drugs, you revert back to your normal self. However, the withdrawal for those drugs is 3-12 months! The physical withdrawal only is a few days, but then it takes time for your body to re-adjust to normal neurotransmitter levels.
If you take a drug that blocks neurotransmitters, then your body compensates by producing extra neurotransmitters. When you stop taking the drug, now your body is producing too many neurotransmitters. It takes awhile for your body to re-adjust to the proper neurotransmitter levels again. I suspect this process takes as long as 3-12 months, possibly even longer! The good news is that the damage probably isn't permanent, at least in my case where I only took the drugs for 3 months total.
i kept taking the sleeping meds, anti-anxiety meds, and the depression meds. i still felt the same - sluggish and mentally tired. so once i was on my own a few months later, i quit taking all of it. and guess what? i became a completely normal person! i got over my period of mild depression by being more social and not staying locked up in my apartment. the medicine did nothing for me.
Yes. Once you stop taking the anti-psychotic, anti-depressants, and sleeping pills you recover and become your normal self again. Be careful, because the withdrawal is nasty!
I noticed that I was unable to sleep normally when taking anti-psychotic drugs. I felt sleepy and tired all the time, but I didn't feel refreshed after sleeping.
Three weeks ago, I had a regular flu. I felt a compulsion to sleep all day for one day, but it made me feel refreshed afterwards, unlike while I was taking anti-psychotic drugs.
i am simply someone who doesn't like new social situations (like my dad) and i have a low level of trust with people that i have just met. it is probably because i have been burned so many times by people that i have trusted quickly and because i tend to attract psychopaths. i think this is because the truly evil people know that i won't be evil to them in return and so they take advantage of me.
I'm getting better at filtering out evil people. It takes a lot of practice. I'm getting good at identifying evil people nearly instantly. In a corporate wage slave environment, that skill is dangerous. The evil people know I can see through them, but the people around them are unaware they are evil. Therefore, they can always manipulate the situation to eliminate me. Even in a small business of 10 people, there usually is at least one evil person.
If I start my own business (agorist or on-the-books) and successfully weed out evil people, I should be spectacularly successful.
for example, i have always attracted the weirdos at school and even befriended them because i felt bad for them and don't like to see people sitting alone by themselves. also, several women i have had extensive relationships with have turned out to be true psychos with actual mental problems. when i am around people like that, i feed off of it and turn into a weirdo myself until i successfully sever the relationship. i also figured out that most of life is a total lie (government, military, cops, court, priests, economics, etc). so this means i am "abnormal" and "paranoid" and need medication. what a load of nonsense.My attitude is clear. The "chemical imbalance" theory of mental illness is wrong. It's nearly impossible to say if it's the cumulative effect of bad decisions, or part of a deliberate conspiracy. There is some evidence that some high-ranking people in the mental health industry know that it's a sham. Otherwise, there wouldn't be such an organized and effective coverup, whenever a mainstream media source goes against the scam. Consider what happened to Michael Savage when he spoke out against treatment of autism. Autism is also usually treated with anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs.
For example, anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs were originally developed by the military. Based on my experience, a haldol injection functions like a truth serum. It would be very useful for interrogating people. That indicates that those drugs are known to have harmful effects, but they were released to the general public as a population control technique.
In the present, the people who work in the pharmaceutical industry and psychiatry/death industry have a very profitable scam. They can always lobby the State to prevent reform. If you want to correct abuses of the mental health industry, you must also eliminate the State.
Lobbying the State to solve a State-caused problem is pointless. The abuses of the mental health industry are 100% caused by the State. Psychiatrists are protected by sovereign immunity; you cannot sue a State-licensed psychiatrist if they mistreat you. State restriction of the market prevents other forms of treatment from being sold. I don't have a State psychiatry license, so if I tried to sell a drug-free mental health treatment, I would technically be committing the crime of "practicing medicine without a license". L. Ron Hubbard was harassed by the State when he was developing Scientology as an alternative to the traditional mental health industry.
Vinyasi has left a new comment on your post "The Compound Interest Paradox":
If you're going to make such a long comment, you should instead make a post on your own blog and just provide a link.
Besides repaying a loan with private money (which is always in limited supply and getting harder and harder to get adequate amounts of money to repay our debts in full), what about wiping out our debts via our social security account after first "accepting the purported debt for value" due to each debt's inherent remedy under Publc Policy of House Joint Resolution 192 of the fifth of June 1933, and then go find someone to execute your counter-claim via: a notary, an attorney, or some other public official with the clout to do this? Every debt created out of thin air (whenever money gets created in a similar manner) is a debt waiting to be "accepted for value". Every act of monetizing debt-creation is the inverse of Public Policy in that some debt (and its associated privilege of fiat money) gets attached to anyone claiming to be a United States citizen along with the privilege of operating as a U.S. citizen under our current corporate government (post Civil War). This attachment of the public debt (via the monetization of private debt) to our private self is reverseable via HJR 192. HJR 192 makes it a felony for any U.S. citizen to be coerced into "paying a debt". Only the "discharge of a debt" is allowed...discharge of a private debt off of one's private self and onto the public pool of collective-liability.
The "discharge a debt" vs. "paying a debt" distinction is an interesting one.
Under a gold standard, money has tangible value. If you lend me an ounce of gold for a year at 5% interest, and I pay you 1.05 ounces of gold a year later, that is a valid contract. You lent me an ounce of gold, risking the real loss of tangible goods. I expected to invest the profits for a gain of more than 5%.
In a true free market, there is no Compound Interest Paradox. The return of 5% represents the fair free market interest rate. The lender earns enough to cover his expenses, but there is no surplus unearned profit or economic rent. If someone tries to fraudulently expand the money supply via issuing too much paper, the people will demand physical gold instead of paper.
In the above example, if I don't expect to earn at least 5% on my investment, then I should not borrow. Capital will instead be available to someone else. In this manner, a true free market properly allocates capital and properly plans for the future. Everyone can follow their rational self-interest, and the result is the maximum efficiency for society as a whole.
State violence wrecks this equation. Suppose that, in 1932, I lent you $20 (an ounce of gold). In 1933, President Roosevelt defaulted on the gold standard. Suppose you try to pay me with $20 slave points. If I say "My contract specifies an ounce of gold. You are in default.", then a State court will not recognize my claim as valid. When President Roosevelt defaulted on the gold standard, he said that any contracts that demanded payment in gold were instead payable at the rate of 20 slave points per ounce. President Roosevelt and Congress broke any private debt contract that contained a gold clause.
A corrupt Congress and Supreme Court ruled this theft valid. As usual, this theft benefited financial industry insiders at the expense of everyone else. Freed from the restriction of gold-redeemable money, starting in 1933, the Federal Reserve inflated to bail out the banks, just like the Federal Reserve is inflating to bail out banks in the present. The result was a massive transfer of wealth from the productive sector of society to the parasite sector. This exacerbated and prolonged the Great Depression. In the present, the massive inflation by the Federal Reserve and Federal government will benefit the parasite sector of the economy at the expense of productive workers, who lose their salary and savings to inflation.
When you gave me 20 slave points to pay a debt that specified an ounce of gold, you have "discharged your debt" instead of "paid your debt". Instead of providing me with tangible goods, you gave me a piece of paper that said "This debt is legally satisfied." You were in technical default, but a corrupt State ruled that your debt is no longer legally enforceable.
One problem with "discharging a debt" with a piece of paper instead of "paying your debt" with tangible goods is the usual "Who prints the paper?" problem. The Federal government and financial industry can always discharge their debts by printing new paper. As an individual, I don't have this magic money printing power, and will always be the slave of the bankers. With sound money, you cannot use a printing press to avoid paying your debts. If people have the right to convert your paper to gold, your paper will start trading at a discount to gold when people start to suspect a default. Only State violence can force people to trade paper at parity to gold. Only State violence can force people to use paper as money instead of gold or silver.
Similarly, if you try to include a "gold clause" in a contract, a monopolistic State court will not recognize your debt as valid. I'm not sure if this has been tested since gold ownership was re-legalized in 1975. I know of nobody who asks for a "gold clause" in their contract, so the legal system must still not recognize such contracts as valid.
With sound money, you can "pay your debt" because the lender and borrower each are providing tangible goods. With continuously inflating paper money, you can discharge a debt but not actually pay it. State violence prevents people from making gold-denominated loans and using gold as money.
(This bit deserves its own separate post.)
The social security account contains unlimited reserves for commercial liability without any interest to worry about reducing its ability to neutralize our debts. And it is already securitized via our birth certificates which are registered with the Department of Commerce as international bills of exchange and regulated under the Securities Exchange Commission.
This is another common conspiracy theory. The State has literally placed every US citizen as collateral for the debt it owes to the bankers.
I prefer the more common explanation. People are literally the property of the State.
However, you don't have to act like cattle. If you practice agorism, you can recover your freedom, even though you still have slave papers.
So, its collateral is the Federal Reserve's ability to enforce our government to tax us to merely pay the interest on the Federal Reserve's money-creation...never any of its principal. Taxation could never equal the principal; the principal is too vast. And this interest-charge for the privilege of our government getting money from the Federal Reserve for nothing is a misnomer for calling it a tax. Since the money for the original loan never existed in the first place...it was merely created out of thin air under the authority of our's, or someone else's, signature...it stands to reason that a remedy exists which wipes away a debt in a similar fashion. To think that only slavery is available to us to neutralize our debts is to forget that "due process" is nothing other than the manifestation of commercial law (under the Fourteenth Amendment to our Constitution and instigated by our new, corporate-styled government)...ergo, the "processing" of our "dues" held to our feet under commerce. And taxation (and criminal sanctions) of any sort is merely an excuse to charge a fee for their use of our signature on whatever government form or application we signed onto as a U.S. citizen requesting some benefit/privilege. Our signature is the "source" talked about in the Sixteenth Amendment which is being taxed, for it is the signature which is being milked on international bills of exchange. To pay some finance charge in the form of a tax is to play the part of a slave through ignorance of Public Policy and not because there isn't any other way out of slavery. Slavery is prohibited via the Thirteenth Amendment. They require our permission to treat us as slaves. They cannot force us into slavery (at least not under commercial law, or "due process"; it could happen under mashal law, though, aka "Patriot Act").
Some people say that the USA has been under technical martial law since:
- 1933, when President Roosevelt defaulted on the gold standard
- 1913, when the Federal Reserve and income tax were fraudulently started
- 1861, when the southern states walked out of Congress
- 1787, when the Federal government was first formed.
Sending troops around the country to put down tax revolts is essentially a martial law declaration.
Our permission and consent for them to do business with us comes in the form of our belief that we violated some or another of their laws. These laws have no foundation under the Constitution's former operating mode of the Common Law which required either: someone to be hurt, or someone's property to be destroyed or stolen, or some contract was broken before it was voided. And many of these laws are not insured under a public hazard bond against anyone of us suing government for misconduct. So, our consent and belief in a fiction of crime is required along with a signature of ours signifying our willingness to step into the arena of proclaiming ourselves to be a U.S. citizen and a resident of one or another state. It takes but one nexus of residency or citizenship to preclude us from escaping this entrapment. Once inside this box, we can either pay as a misguided slave (they won't refuse us paying), or else accept the debt for value. Offering up to them the use of our setoff (social security) account is extra. And don't expect anyone in government to either admit to any of this or to fix it, 'cuz the fourth clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits them from "questioning the debt", i.e. this system of debt monetization, as it stands. And anyone who receives a benefit of any kind from any tier of government, whether that benefit be a reduction in property tax, or a social security income, comes under the "rebellion" specified under the fourth clause of the Fourteenth Amendment thus making that someone an "enemy of the state". Plain and simple. Be yourself, but be sovereign. Act like one. Make your own reality. Don't reuse someone else's unless it is on your terms. And be sure and find someone competent enough to execute your remedies, for lower level lackies, such as police (for instance) are merely enforcing Public Policy to their advantage while ignoring your's. Crime has become commercialized, and justice is the reverseability of crime. Justice is blind, because commerce can either sell your wife into slavery, but it can also buy you a ticket to meditate. Amorality is rampant, because of the commercialization of society in more ways than the limited ones that we've been taught through common ignorance. See: Winston Shrout, Solutions in Commerce, and the "TAKE NO PRISONERS" (internet) radio program of Dr. Sam Kennedy at Republic Broadcasting Network for more information.
I plan to stop participating in the slave economy (or decrease my participation) once I start working as an agorist. Agorism is the only solution to the current problem that has a nonzero chance of success. The tricky part about getting started is that I need trustworthy trading partners. For now, I will focus on "Promote awareness of agorism, while showing a profit at the same time!"
BTW, I visited your website and it needs work.
Most people are so brainwashed as pro-State trolls that it's hard to get your thoughts together as you discover the truth. Most newcomers to the freedom movement write long rambling comments, because the truth is such a shock to your brain.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "How to Start a Country":
You do realize that the current situation has become possible because majority is stupid and lazy?
Is "people are stupid and lazy" a natural human behavior, or is it the result of pro-State brainwashing? If many people are naturally stupid and lazy, then natural selection should be allowed to work its course. I believe that for the vast majority, it's a result of pro-State brainwashing. In that case, we should work towards enlightening them.
One of the main goals of mandatory public schooling is to train people to be obedient wage slaves.
We have been given a great system to live in by our benevolent founding fathers. We sold it for government substituting our lack of willpower and desire to work.
Actually, the original US Constitution was itself illegitimate. At the time the original US Constitution was signed, the two main factions were the Federalists and Anti-Federalists. The Anti-Federalists said "We don't need a central government." The compromise was the creation of a Federal government, but with carefully limited power and many restrictions.
Once you accept that the State has a monopoly of violence, it can only grow in power. Even if a Federal government were not formed in 1787, it would have been formed at some later date, because the individual state governments were presumed to have legitimacy.
The original US Constitution contained many provisions that protected individual freedom. Over time, all of those protections were eroded. Once you have a monopolistic State, it becomes very easy to gradually erode individual freedom via the "Problem! Reaction! Solution!" paradigm. The State causes a problem, and the solution is to give the State more power. Eventually, any State at all, even a minimal one, will degenerate into the current mess.
If you say "Return to the original US Constitution!", you are pro-State trolling. The US Constitution is a failed and discredited model of government. The correct answer is "Who needs a monopolistic State at all? All services currently provided by the State could be better handled in a true free market."
It is wrong to say "The original US Constitution was the best possible form of government." It is more accurate to say "It is the best form of government tried until this point in history." I claim that the "no monopolistic State at all" form of government will prove to be the best. Like all scientific theories, this one must prove its value in the real world. I predict that the philosophy of true free markets will be successful.
(This bit deserves its own separate post.)
Now, we are in the country you have just described (above).Agorism is a strategy for individual freedom. Even if you don't succeed in freeing the masses, you improve your own personal freedom by practicing agorism. Once a real free market gets established, it will spread exponentially fast.
I don't think it is possible to naturally return to freedom by agorism or any other process, because I have seen that in practice, the millions of dumb asses will stop the process and accept a malevolent dictator. So, the only way to the freedom is through a benevolent dictator. Dumb people support either, and that is a benefit, they are too dumb to know the difference. But because they are the majority, there always will be mass support for dictatorship.
Besides, how do you know that there isn't already a benevolent dictator? How do you know that there isn't already a Supreme Leader of Humanity, and he's working towards the complete collapse of the current corrupt economic and political system? I don't see how anyone could be fully aware of the nature of the scam, and not be actively working towards replacing the current corrupt system.
I do not think that #5 is true. The constitutions real purpose was to create a egalitarian society based on freedom but over the years it has been distorted to what we have now.
How do you know what the intentions of the authors of the US Constitution were? Did you personally ask them?
How do you know that the original US Constitution was merely a compromise between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists? The bad guys created a central government, knowing its evil power could only increase over time. They knew that all the provisions they included guaranteeing individual freedom would be gradually eroded over time. They had to include many provisions protecting individual freedom in the original US Constitution, because otherwise the majority of people would not have supported the Federal government. At that time, most people weren't totally brainwashed pro-State trolls like they are now.
I would also add a #12 Create the idea of a country entitled to patriotism from it's subjects based on certain events of the past that can never be overridden no matter how bad things get. Patriotism is a very powerful force that overlooks all deficits focusing solely on the positives at the expense of reality.
Patriotism is an interesting evil fnord. I should write more about that.
Zargon has left a new comment on your post "How to Start a Country":
How the current situation came about is irrelevant. If it came about because people are stupid, government is immoral. If it came about because of a conspiracy of the ruling class, government is immoral.
That is one of the points I make. It is irrelevant whether the current corrupt system is the result of a series of stupid decisions, or part of a deliberate conspiracy. Either way, the current system is completely corrupt and needs to be discarded.
The system the founding fathers created included methods of taxing people who did not consent to the creation of the system. Taxation is theft, theft is immoral, so the system is and always has been immoral, from the second they brought it into being.
I agree. All forms of taxation are theft. The original US Constitution says that the State has the authority to use violence to collect taxes. Therefore, the original US government was evil, because violence was used to collect taxes.
If you study Shay's Rebellion and the Whiskey Rebellion, you'll notice that George Washington used violence to collect taxes.
Whether it's possible or not for anybody on Earth to become free of governments doesn't change the fact that government, by definition (collects tax), is immoral. A true benevolent dictatorship would be one where the dictator enjoys no special privileges or rights that everybody else does not also enjoy, in which case he would be just another dude, and there would be no government.
Not only is taxation theft, but I claim that it is possible to achieve freedom. Once a true free market gets started, it will spread exponentially.
The constitution's real purpose is irrelevant. Whether it was drafted for the purpose of helping or harming people doesn't change the fact that it is now a very effective illusion.
That's an important point. You should notice that the system we currently have is completely corrupt and needs to be discarded. How we got to this point is mostly irrelevant, except as an interesting discussion.
I undecided regarding "The current corrupt system is the result of a deliberate conspiracy taking place over 100+ years." or "The current corrupt system is the result of a series of bad decisions." Either way, I should do what I think is best.
Seroquel Prescription Information has left a new comment on your post "Reader Mail #62":
My name is Richard Elmore and i would like to show you my personal experience with Seroquel.
If your name is Richard Elmore, then why is your Blogger ID "Seroquel Prescription Information", and why does your Blogger ID link to a pro-State article saying how wonderful Seroquel is?
I am 17 years old. Have been on Seroquel for 1.5 years now. I am currently trying to come off it, but my anexiety has been through the roof, and even 2mg of extended release xanax isnt working
I have experienced some of these side effects-
the biggest one is weight gain, i have to take at least 600mg at bed time for it to work.
I hope this information will be useful to others,
Richard Elmore
Are you saying "Seroquel is a good drug" or "You are right, FSK, that the 'chemical imbalance' theory of mental illness is nonsense."
This information is actually very useful. I suggest the possibility that you are not 17 years old, but rather a PR shill for a pharmaceutical corporation. I noticed such behavior on other websites, where someone claiming to have beneficial reactions to an anti-psychotic drug was really a drug company PR shill.
You've made the exact same comment on other blogs. Google Search is useful! (I found other matches also. Google them yourself.) I accuse you of being a drug company PR shill, doing a keyword search for posts with the keyword "Seroquel".
Notice that drug company PR agents don't explicitly say "I'm a psychiatrist, and FSK is wrong to say that the psychiatry industry is a fraud." Instead, they claim to be a patient who has had positive experiences with a drug.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "How to Start a Country":
FSK,
Could you please, when you have time, do an analysis of RipplePay, and how it might help agorism? Or not?
It appears to be an attempted implementation of a P2P decentralized alternate monetary system, almost like I describe in the Social Credit Monetary System.
One defect is that a credit rating system for the participants is needed. Suppose that A owes B an ounce of gold, and B owes C an ounce of gold. According to RipplePay, then B may pay C with his debt from A, leaving B with no balance and A owing C an ounce of gold. However, suppose that C deems A to not be creditworthy. In that case, C would be unwilling to accept a debt from A instead of B. How can C know the creditworthiness of A, if A is a complete stranger?
Another defect is that there should be more emphasis on sound money. The system seemed to support different monetary units, but a serious agorist would only use gold-denominated or silver-denominated transactions.
It included the ability to charge/credit interest on nonzero balances.
For initial agorists, they probably will find physical gold and silver more usable than any type of electronic money. However, a hawala-type system would be useful for people living in different cities. For example, if I write an AgoristBay engine, and someone in California uses it, they need a secure way to pay me without the transaction being reported to the State.
Also, RipplePay should be integrated with other services. A gold/silver/FRN barter network would be a nice addition. The ability to advertise other services is also needed for AgoristBay.
Also, RipplePay *MUST* be decentralized, lest the State crackdown on the site operator. The current RipplePay site is probably too small to attract the bad guys' attention, but it will be a problem if RipplePay is successful.
If RipplePay becomes popular, and I write AgoristBay, I'll make AgoristBay compliant with the RipplePay protocol.
The primary problem an agorist faces in the present is a network of trustworthy trading partners. Suppose I had 20 trustworthy agorist trading partners. I could keep track of everything on a piece of paper. On a small scale, agorists don't need software. If my trading network grew larger, then I would need software to help. At that time, it becomes very easy to write software based on your actual needs.
The value of any trading network, online or otherwise, is proportional to the square of the number of participants. The primary difficulty is attracting participants, and not what specific software you use.
One advantage of software is that it helps people make their initial contact. Suppose you're an starting agorist in Chicago looking to buy or sell something. You can't use Craigslist or EBay, because those services are easily monitored by the State. Craigslist and EBay don't have a rating system that measures the agorist trustworthiness of a partner, although EBay has its own trust system. A good P2P AgoristBay engine would make it easier for agorists to find each other so they can trade.
As another example, suppose I want to hire someone to mint small-denomination silver or copper coins for me. For such a service, the seller doesn't need to be living in the same city as me. (Most online dealers don't sell silver coins smaller than one ounce, and I haven't found copper bullion coins. If you want to use gold and silver as money, you also need to be able to make change, although you can just use slave points for transactions smaller than an ounce of silver.)
I was browsing the Internet and found this link on Louis McFadden, who was very critical of the Federal Reserve. For speaking the truth, there were assassination attempts made against him.
It's interesting to notice how, in the time period 1913-1933, there were several Congressmen who were aware that the Federal Reserve was one big scam. In the present, Ron Paul is the only Congressman who is critical of the Federal Reserve, and his criticism is rather weak. Ron Paul says "The Federal Reserve is unconstitutional!" instead of "The USA has a completely corrupt and immoral monetary system!"
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "My Personal Journey Towards the Truth":
FSK wrote: I'm on the fence for whether I should attempt stealth-agorism or blatant-in-public agorism.
The real question is whether your version of stealth/blatant in your face agorism is likely to be viewed as an attack on the fnords in power.
That is a very interesting question. The only way to find out is to conduct an experiment! I see no other volunteers, so I must do it myself.
For the next few years, it appears that I should focus on "promote agorism" instead of "practice actual agorism". For that, I am forced to utilize the State economy, such as my decision to include an AdWords widget on my blog.
You're misusing the word fnord. It's be more accurate to say "Blatant-in-public agorism may be perceived as a threat by the bad guys in power."
A fnord is merely an idea. "People who grow and sell marijuana are criminals!" is an evil fnord. "Large corporations are a natural free market occurrence!" is another evil fnord. "Taxation is theft!" is a good fnord. Movies like "The Matrix" and "They Live!" are good fnords.
A fnord has no power. It's the people who believe the evil fnords and carry guns that are my enemies. For now, either I'm flying under-the-radar or maybe someone is secretly helping me.
Peter Schiff at Euro Pacific Capital is a good example of in your face agorism that tells it like it is but does not directly confront or attack the government (as far as gmen are concerned).
As far as I can tell, he is critical of the State, but does not practice tax resistance or advocate for tax resistance. That makes him part of the problem and not part of the solution.
Irwin Schiff, Peter's father, a famous anti-tax protester and now tax felon, is a good example of in your face agorism that is perceived by the jboots as an attack on their business, and thus he has been taken out.
Irwin Schiff's mistake is that he focused on "The income tax and Federal Reserve are illegal!" instead of "The income tax and Federal Reserve are immoral!" The legal argument is incredibly complicated and mostly irrelevant. The moral argument is the important one.
Irwin Schiff was not an advocate for agorism. He was an advocate of people resisting income taxes on income the IRS already knew about. That type of resistance is pointless.
Most "critics of the Federal Reserve" wind up going to prison for tax evasion. Once you realize the corruption of the Federal Reserve and income tax, you realize it is immoral to pay income taxes and use slave points as money.
Once I realized the complete corruption of the current system , I cannot support it anymore. Agorism is the only way to live a morally just life. At some point, I must make the transition from theoretical agorism to practical agorism. Otherwise, "FSK is a hypocrite!" is a valid criticism. In the present, you cannot validly criticize me for not practicing agorism, because I'm still looking for trustworthy trading partners.
Agorism is a completely different strategy than that employed by Irwin Schiff. I will attempt practical agorism. If harassed by the State, I will pursue a sui juris jury nullification defense. I don't know if I will succeed or not, but I would feel like a failure if I didn't try. Initially, I will pursue agorism as a hobby while still working in my corporate wage slave job. I will promote agorism via the slave economy.
If you value your life, as opposed to valuing the story on page 17B when the jboots get you, use a nonconfrontational model for whatever you do.
I doubt I would even make page 17B in the news, if arrested.
Once you say "Taxation is theft!", that's already over-the-top confrontational, by the standards of a pro-State troll. I don't plan to be violently confrontational. I do plan to set up an alternate economic and political system that competes with the current one.
Someone has to pursue blatant-in-public agorism to help raise awareness. I might try a handful of each approach.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Mental Health Clinic Observations":
Perhaps we neurotic and mentally deficient cro-magnons will believe the Scientology fnord of Tom Cruise and escape our wallowing in the abyssmal pit of anxiety. We will do that as soon as we regain our balance on the tightrope of life, assuming that paranoia is universally unimagined.
When Tom Cruise and other Scientologists say that the "chemical imbalance" theory of mental illness is wrong, they are totally correct. It's a shame that Scientologists do so many other shady things. Scientology's anti-psychiatry attitude is 100% correct.
Many prominent members of the anti-psychiatry movement were initially affiliated with Scientology, such as Dr. Peter Breggin. He had to distance himself from the Scientologists to be taken more seriously.
fritz has left a new comment on your post "Mental Health Clinic Observations":
Fsk,,I think you are on to something..I work with herbs on the side,and if you were to do some research your self. I believe you could find some natural herbs you could use to good affect. they are inexpensive and have no side affects. I am also a homeopath,I suggest homeopath Gelsemium at 200c potency from what I have read about you. It would cost you about 8 bucks, there are no drugs involved. Its actually yellow jasmine. I have used it several times with great success. that's all,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,
keep up the good work
Fritz
According to Wikipedia, gelsemium is poisonous.
Ironically, homeopathic treatment is essentially illegal. That was the competing model for the medical industry that was outlawed by the AMA lobbyists.
So far, I'm finding SAM-e to be beneficial, along with generally higher awareness.
Firing my therapist and taking an "I don't need a therapist!" attitude has been helpful.
I feel that I've achieved another higher level of awareness after my most recent panic attack. Hopefully, I won't have any severe ones anymore. The problem is that it's very traumatic to crack your pro-State brainwashing.
It's one thing to consciously realize "Taxation is theft!" It's another thing to correct all the subconscious/emotional pro-State brainwashing.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Mental Health Clinic Observations":
Dude you need to forget about whether or not your parents are going to freak out and grow a pair and do what YOU want to do!
The problem is that all it takes is a 911 call from my parents to have me hospitalized/murdered. They explicitly threaten to call the police/murderers whenever I disagree with them. I'm trying to gradually regain my freedom. They're resisting at every step.
I did manage to successfully fire my abusive therapist.
eagledove9 has left a new comment on your post "The Value of Quitting":
I have wondered about the whole industry of computer programming and what will happen to it during this economic depression. I think that a lot of the businesses that hire programmers are going to be going bankrupt and laying people off. But I don't know what jobs they should take instead.
Programming itself does not generate any tangible goods. Programmers will suffer with the rest of the economic downturn. The value of good programming is that it makes the production of goods more efficient. For most large corporations, efficiency is irrelevant because they get huge State subsidies. It is irrelevant if a corporation with a State-licensed monopoly hires brilliant programmers or barely competent programmers.
The only alternative is agorism. That's the only way to avoid dependence on the wage slave economy.
I'm considering acquiring skills other than programming. Wage slave software engineer definitely is a dead end career. I'm thinking that repairing electronics or appliances would be a useful skill.
I thought I had trouble finding a job because I dropped out of college and never got a degree. But now, people who DID finish school and got degrees are still having problems finding and keeping jobs. It's not just you.
From my point of view, the social contract I was brainwashed to believe has been broken. I was always told "Study hard. Learn things. Work hard. Then, you will be rewarded with a good job and a good career." That has turned out to be a lie.
Whenever I failed, the pro-State trolls around me said "FSK, your problem is that you're not smart enough." However, I thought they were referring to genuine intelligence. They really meant "FSK, you should be a better pro-State troll." I worked on acquiring more intelligence and knowledge about how the world around me worked. Working as a financial systems programmer, I started studying the financial system. It was a shock to realize that it was a complete and total fraud.
There were little bits and pieces and clues I kept picking up. The Discounted Cashflow Paradox troubled me when I first started investing, because that implied that the correct price for any stock is infinite. It turns out that the long-run value of both a bond investment and stock investment is zero, because you get eroded by inflation. It's a simple "zero divided by zero" error. The flaw in the Black-Scholes formula really troubled me. I was studying the options theory, noticed an obvious flaw in the BS formula's axioms, but I could not make anyone around me understand. I also was incredibly confused as to why abusive people were always in positions of authority. In a free market, wouldn't the non-abusive managers be spectacularly successful? I finally put all the pieces together, but the shock gave me a panic/manic attack and I wound up involuntarily hospitalized.
I've wondered about careers in the jobs that vo-tech schools offer, in skilled trades, like auto mechanics. Sometimes those use skills that are similar enough to computer programming that people who are good at programming are able to do those things too.
I'm thinking of learning alternate skills. For now, programming is marketable enough from a wage slave software engineer point of view. If I make the transition to practical agorism, I'll probably need to learn other physical skills. I'll take the "learn things as I need them" approach.
Also, I'm sorry to hear that you had to go to outpatient therapy to placate your parents. I hope you are doing okay.
For now, I managed to fire my therapist and haven't picked a new one yet. The biggest problem was that my ex-therapist started insisting I needed anti-psychotic drugs, so I had to fire her.
I took the attitude "My therapist is actually my patient!", but they were too pro-State troll brainwashed for me to successfully explain anything to them. The therapists, by default, assume "FSK is defective" as their hypothesis. They aren't able to consider any larger problems than those specifically involving me.
I'm not able to discuss "Taxation is theft!" with my therapist, making a therapist almost worse than useless.
Sometimes, I have weird dreams where it seems like someone else is there. In the dream, someone said "FSK, write down one of your biggest problems." I was scared that I would be hurt for doing so, but the asker in the dream convinced me it was acceptable. My response was "If I told my therapist the truth about what I was actually thinking, she would have me murdered (involuntarily hospitalized)." This is a serious problem because therapists are one of the front-line enforcers for preserving the Matrix.
If you tell your therapist, "The economic system and political system is defective!", they aren't interested in discussing that. I can discuss problems I have with specific abusive people, but no larger issues. I can't tell my therapist "What if the voices are real?", because they would merely have me murdered.
After that, in the same night, I had a very realistic dream where my therapist left a voicemail saying "I'm seeking a court restraining order for you to be forced to take anti-psychotic drugs." Was that a warning/reassurance that I had made the right decision to fire my therapist? The details of the dream were very well-done. For example, if you try to write things on a piece of paper while dreaming, it obviously doesn't work, exposing the fact that it is just a dream. In that dream, the pen ran out of ink, preventing me from writing down the voicemail, so I didn't become consciously aware that it was just a dream. If the dream was generated by an external source, the details were very accurate to prevent me from realizing it was just a dream.
That is a serious problem. Except via blogging, I'm unable to seriously discuss "Taxation is theft!" or "The Federal Reserve is immoral!" with any of the people around me. I don't have any in-person friends with a real free market attitude.
fritz has left a new comment on your post "The Value of Quitting":
Its not bad to quit.It matters not with just a job. the real matter is fallowing your dreams. A dream can never be realized if you quit. There is no substitute for action, and hope will only get you so far. So of course you should know when to fold them, and when to hold them. Its the poker game of life. but never give up on your dream.
I meant the value of quitting from something hopeless, not from abandoning your dreams altogether.
I'm working on making the transition from "Dreaming about free markets" to "Working towards actual free markets".
I wonder what type of hand I have? Do I really have a Royal Flush, but none of the other players, including a crooked dealer, know how to properly evaluate hands? How can you evaluate your skill as a poker player when all the other players and the dealer are cheating?
Mike Gogulski has left a new comment on your post "The Value of Quitting":
If you're a crackshot coder like you've said you are, FSK, then all you need is a bit of inspiration to create a marketable product or a pay-for-deliverables rather than pay-for-chair-warming self-employed career.
The problem is that a pay-for-deliverables job in a corporate wage slave context requires connections. Unless I know someone at a large corporation willing to hire me directly, that is not an option. That is the ultimate problem of a nepotism/connections based economy.
Consider this argument. Suppose that creating a pay-for-deliverables business were easy. In that case, someone else would have already done it and hired me as employee. If I want a pay-for-actual-work-done job, I have to look outside of the wage slave economy. Creating an on-the-books job that values actual work must be practically impossible, because nobody else has already done it.
For the most part, coding ability and quality of software is irrelevant for a large corporation that has a State-licensed monopoly/oligopoly. Even at the startups I interview at, the interviewer usually cannot tell the difference between someone barely qualified and someone who really knows what he's doing.
If I target individual customers, then I need to have my own domain and start my own business.
That said, I'd love to see your stand-up routine :)
That's one advantage of blogging or pursuing a stand-up routine. For that, I'm working on building my own reputation and my own brand. As a corporate wage slave programmer, I'm a faceless drone working towards someone else's dream. In an interview situation, the interviewer has no idea if I'm a brilliant programmer or deadweight. They assume I'm deadweight, because otherwise why would I be looking for a new job?
I can experiment with stand-up while having a corporate wage slave job, if I try on Friday or Saturday night. One advantage of living in NYC is that there's lots of nightclubs, if I pursue that route. I make so little as a wage slave programmer that it might make sense to try stand-up. I wouldn't need to make much to replace my income as a corporate programmer. It would probably take a few years to build up a reputation and ability, if I tried that.
When I tried public speaking in college and graduate school, the audience said I'm a good public speaker. "Promote agorism via stand-up comedy" is an experiment I'm considering.
Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "Walter Block, a Pro-State Libertarian":
Your perverted idea of Libertarianism is that it's ok for Arkansas to infringe on my individual rights, and it's OK for Alabama to infringe on my individual rights, and it's ok for Alaska to infringe on my individual rights...........................it's ok for everyone to infringe on my rights except the Federal government. It's a version of libertarianism that is less than useless. OK, so everyone can trample on me except one entity. Great.
You're misquoting me. I say that *ALL* governments are immoral. Taxation is theft. Once you realize that, you cannot support anyone who claims the power to collect taxes from you.
However, a system of 50 competing state government was the vision of the original US Constitution, rather than a powerful Federal government. If people can freely move from one state to another, that places a limit on how abusive they can get. Before the Federal government got too powerful, individual states openly advertised their low taxation rates, in an attempt to attract businesses. With Federal taxation rates so high, individual states don't really compete anymore.
It is possible to have a stable society without a government that has a monopoly of violence and tax-collecting power.
Block's version is NO ONE, including the states, is allowed to trample on my rights and that will be ENFORCED. THAT is libertarianism.
It's about time people stopped confusing libertarianism, a theory where everyone's rights are protected, with federalism, a theory where we are attacked by 50 governments and protected from one
My criticism of Walter Block is different. He does not call out for people to start boycotting bad laws like the Federal Reserve and income tax. If you can find me a place where Walter Block advocates that people boycott the Federal Reserve, income tax, and other restrictive State regulations, then I'll move him into the non-troll classification. Otherwise, Walter Block is part of the problem and not part of the solution.
L(l)ibertarians like Walter Block actually serve the State. By providing a weak criticism of the State, they make all people who criticize the State seem like fools.
(Notice that DixieFlatline disagreed with my statement "Walter Block is a pro-State troll!", but DixieFlatline didn't say "**** you FSK! I'm leaving!" Some people disagree with me without getting disgusted and leaving.)
Also, I am not a libertarian. I am an anarchist/agorist. Libertarianism and the philosophy of real free markets are different. A libertarian says "The State has legitimacy, provided it stays small. This victory can somehow be achieved by voting, despite all historic evidence to the contrary." An agorist says "The State has no legitimacy at all, starting *NOW*. I will boycott all of the State's stupid laws and taxes, especially if I can show a profit while doing so. I want the State to get so large that it completely collapses under its own incompetence. There should be free market competition in *ALL* services currently provided by the State." People who say "You need a government, because only a monopolistic government can do X" are pro-State trolling.
fejta has left a new comment on your post "Is Broadcast Spectrum Property?":
I enjoy your blog. Thanks for the commentary.
The property you own is your property. A person who transmits his body cells onto your property is trespassing. A person who transmits a bomb onto your property is trespassing. A person who transmit radio waves into your property is trespassing.
Do you think two computers can access a wireless router without degrading the transmission speed?
Consider the example of two computers on an Ethernet network. They can share the network, but the quality does degrade with more users.
If someone started monopolizing spectrum at large volume, I would have a noise pollution complaint against them just like someone who started playing their radio loudly in the middle of the night.
It is possible to design network protocols that assume nobody has monopolistic use of a frequency. For example, you can keep trying different frequencies until you find one that is open. Such protocols have not been developed in the present, because of State restriction of the market. With State-licensed monopolistic use of frequencies, why should telecommunications corporations develop methods that allow multiple users?
For example, I can use my cell phone even if other customers in the same cell area are using their cell phone at the same time.
"Spectrum does not have the characteristics of property, where one person must be granted exclusive use of it in an area." I consider this statement to be "not proven". I'm leaning towards "Spectrum is not property", but I'm not completely convinced either way. It's acceptable to mention an idea without being absolutely certain if it's true or false.
In the present, the State has given the monopolistic right to use spectrum to various groups of insiders.
As another example, if I own land, I must pay property taxes. I believe that telecom corporations who own spectrum rights don't pay property taxes, but I haven't checked the details.
I'm still only on early/mid December answering my Reader comments. I'm still way behind, especially with the large volume of comments regarding "Should FSK put a Google AdSense widget on his blog?"
The number of comments I get per day is increasing. That's good, but it takes more time for me to answer them all.
2 comments:
FSK, I used to eagerly look forward to your Reader Mail posts when you provided a commentary on a bunch of interesting content from the web. Unfortunately, your latest Reader Mail posts have become nothing more than responses to reader's comments. While that is certainly interesting to those who left the comments (and possibly for a limited number of others), I think you should mix in a bit more content from the web in order to liven things up. Just a suggestion.
FSK wrote:
"I thought Austrian Economists say that the State should regulate banking towards what would exist in a free market, which would be practically equivalent to no State regulation of banking."
Austrian School Economists are very anti-government regulation. And, they are pro gold standard only insofar as the gold standard has historically been the one most often chosen by the market (independent of government). The more fundamental position of Austrians is that free markets (i.e. the people) choose whatever currency they want - i.e. no Legal Tender laws; if the people choose to use a currency different than the "official" government currency (for collecting taxes), so be it. That would be like a vote of no confidence on the "official" currency. They also teach that the government should NOT set exchange rates between any two forms of currency (e.g. gold to silver ratios). Anything towards that effect is coercion and distortion of the free market.
In a true free market some people may choose to use gold, some perhaps some "hours" based currency, some silver, some, "ebay credits", whatever. The free market would also produce the currency exchange businesses. Whichever people find to be the most useful to them will probably become the dominant currency.
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