You seem to equate "community" with nation-state. Individuals voluntarily co-operating with other individuals have presented mankind with mathematics, electric generators, radio, tv, airplanes, innovations in agriculture, the internet, and so on. Nation-states have provided such wonders as the Vietnam War, the Holocaust, Shock and Awe, Cash for Clunkers, Quantitative Easing, and so on.

I don't think that "the community" is obliged to accept my view on this matter, nor am I, on the other hand, obliged to accept the politcally correct view.

No, I don’t. The state – it doesn’t matter whether it’s a nation-state or not – is an institution or structure – just one of many, many institutions and structures that the community establishes to serve various social ends.


On the other hand, individuals voluntarily co-operating with other individuals have given us the Nazi party, reality television, the Ku Klux Klan, the mafia, heroin and slavery. While states have given us sewage disposal, the eradication of smallpox, registration of land tenure, legal tender currency and the rule of law. You can cut this one both ways.

(And, if you think the internet was not developed by states, you need to read a bit more. ARPANET, milnet, CERN, the National Science Foundation, the National Physical Laboratory . . . it’s hard to find anyone involved in development of the internet who wasn’t employed and paid by the state. You might also like to reflect a bit on the state that aviation technology would be in today if it hadn’t been for state patronage, support and money.)


So you’ve no objection to income tax, then? You’d rather you didn’t have to pay it but, ethically, the community is free to charge it regardless of your preferences?


You’re not obliged to accept any view, Tom. You are, however, obliged to pay income tax.

C'mon mate. There are some words that ought not be used on a forum such as this.

You said, Peregrinus: "You might also like to reflect a bit on the state that aviation technology would be in today if it hadn’t been for state patronage, support and money."

Probably being younger than I am, it wouldn't surprise me much if you were taught in a public school that the Wright Brothers would never have been able to invent the airplane without government grants, or was it Al Gore who invented the airplane?

Possibly being as old as you are, Tom, you have forgotten all you were taught about how to read. My comment was not about the Wright brothers' aircraft, but about the state of aviation technology today. The aviation industry was almost entirely funded by government for most of its first fifty years of existence; didn't you know that? Apart from the rapid development of aircraft design in response to military requirements and military expenditure, it is to government that we owe such things as the jet engine, radar, air traffic control and radio beacon navigation. Bit like the internet, really.

Gimme a break Peregrinus, that's like saying that the US Dept of Agriculture invented food, and we wouldn't have any food save for its subsidies, quotas, price supports, tariffs, grants, and its huge bureaucracy. If the US bureaucrats are performing such great wonders, why is the Chinese economy doing so much better at this time? Why, when we even have such terrific innovations invented by government like Cash for Clunkers and Quantitative Easing, things that even Einstein or Edison probably couldn't have thought up?

You're getting a bit parochial, Tom. I'm vaguely aware that there was a "cash for clunkers" programme in the US, but I've only a hazy idea as to what its objectives were, and no idea at all of whether it has been judged to have a achieved them. So, as an example of poor government, the cash for clunkers programme is not sufficiently notorious to be useful.

But lets assume it is a disastrous failure. What of it? Nobody suggests that government action can never be ill-judged, can never fail. Your thesis seems to be that government actions are much more prone to be ill-judged, to fail, etc than the the private sector actions of "individuals voluntarily co-operating with other individuals ". Merely pointing to government programmes that have failed does nothing to prove this, however. In fact, you haven't produced any argument or evidence at all in support of this thesis.

The cash for clunkers programme is unhelpful to your thesis for other reasons besides obscurity. While I'm not conscious of how well it is judged to have succeeded in its objectives, I am conscious of the principal reason for its introduction. It, like quantitative easing of the money supply, was introduced in an attempt to stimulate an economy in slump because of the global financial crisis. And the GFC seems to me a conspicuous example of just how badly the private sector actions of "individuals voluntarily co-operating with other individuals " can stuff things up. In so far as states have been criticised in connection with the GFC, thy have been criticised for failing to regulate; for dismantling the regulatory structures that might have prevented the repackaging and sale of dud mortgages; for not taking the economic measures needed to cool a property market hyped and overheated by a banking-driven bubble. They have been criticised for taking precisely the hands-off, noninterventionist approach that your philosophy would indicate. And the outcome of doing this was pretty disastrous. If I were in your position, Tom, I would not be citing any example that might call any attention to the GFC.

Nor would I be comparing the relative performance of the US and Chinese economies. The Chinese state is much, much, much more closely involved in economic management, direction and enterprise than the American state. The relatively strong performance of the Chinese economy therefore runs directly counter to your thesis that government action fails.

I think the point about government action is not so much that it tends to fail more than private sector action, but that its failures tend to be more spectacular. The state has such colossal resources at its disposal - including, but by no means limited to, the use of force - that it can undertake actions on a far wider scale, and in a far more concerted way, than private individuals or (most) groups of private individuals. Thus it can have much more profound consequences. It's hard to see that we can have a Hiroshima or a Nagasaki without state involvement, for instance.

But, equally, its hard to see that we can have the worldwide eradication of smallpox without state involvement either. I don't think you can have the possibility of one without the possibility of the other. What you seek to do, it seems to me, is to limit possibilities, both for beneficial actions and for detrimental action.

There may be an ethical case to be made for this, but we have to start by acknowledging that this in fact what is being suggested. It seems to me that your "state action tends to be bad" view is unsupported by argument or evidence, and is adopted to avoid exploring the adverse consequences of the philosophy you espouse. Take quantitative easing, for example. If you think about it, the power to determine the money supply is inevitably connected with the function of issuing money. The only way to prevent the state from implementing a policy determining the amount of money in circulation is to take away from the state the function of issuing money. That doesn't just mean no quantitative easing; it means no legal tender currency, and no regulation of the liquidity ratio for banks, or of the issue of credit by banks. That's not likely to make for the kind of economic environment in which private individuals acheive good outcomes. It certainly hasn't worked in Somalia, for instance

There may not be a need to take away the state's power to issue money. It seems that as states fail, they print more money and people avoid it, demanding "hard currency" instead, as was the case with Russia, where shopkeepers didn't want rubles, and would offer great discounts when making purchases with krona, dollars, etc.

I'm not a conspiracy buff, and prefer, instead what Murray Rothbard called The F---up Theory of government economics, so if you can explain the Goldman Sachs connection to the Fed as alleged in the video below, I would appreciate it.
http://illuminatus.squarespace.com/news ... asing.html

how about a govornment baised on merit

Everyone from the presedent/monarch to MPs/congressmen to all levels of the judiciary to all levels of the civil service should be chosen to the grounds of ability to do the job. Just like in a private organisation people already in the organisation would be responsable for selecting who gets the position from the pool of people who applied.

quite frankly democracy is a stupid way to select who gets a position because most people do not know most things about a the candidates and so the person who gets it is in effect the person who wins a popularity contest.

Someone is bound to reply to this by saying that by removing the general populations right to choose their leaders a dictatorship would be created and that would be unethical. To this i have two things to say

1)
We do not have a democracy, the only thing a person gets to vote on is which political party should win and in some cases which individual candidate should get the post. The vast majority of govornment and civil service positions are not choosen by a vote of the general population and most decisions regarding law are not made by holding an election on the matter.

2)
The individuals who gain positions and rule over the rest of us would be from the general population. Anybody who wishes to have a influence in a matter which they care about would be able to apply for a relevant position and the person who is best capable of carrying out that role would get the job.

My problem with a government based on merit is that it's still a government, and by it's very nature is unethical. As I've said all too often, and those who have heard it are free to ignore, IMHO ethical governments are impossible because the very nature of government is unethical. Governments all do unto (a least some) others that which they don't want done unto themselves, and are thus in violation of the world's most prominent ethical standard, The Golden Rule of reciprocity. Governments perpetrate not only gross ethical violations, such as The Holocaust, or the "Shock and Awe" and mass murder of totally blameless Iraqis, but routine violations such as mentioned by Proudhon, below:
"To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so." Pierre Joseph Proudhon

but without govornment anarchy would be the result
there would be no criminal justice system, only individuals doing anything they like to other people and mob justice
Without Employment law, minimum wages and welfare systems many many people would be stuck in poverty normally assosiated with the industrialisation period and would not be able to obtain means of getting out of it such as traning.
vital services such as health care systems, education and infrastructure networks would not be avaliable for all people only thoes who could afford them.

megaman4 wrote:
but without government anarchy would be the result
there would be no criminal justice system, only individuals doing anything they like to other people and mob justice
Without Employment law, minimum wages and welfare systems many many people would be stuck in poverty normally assosiated with the industrialisation period and would not be able to obtain means of getting out of it such as traning.
vital services such as health care systems, education and infrastructure networks would not be avaliable for all people only those who could afford them.[/quote]

It's unlikely the the world would collapse without the presence of kings and presidents and dictators. Professor David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom is a detailed and thoughtful book. Friedman forsees a society of sovereign individuals employing a network of security and judicial insurance systems that they can voluntarily subscribe to, much as one hires a pest control operator or buys car insurance. I think that both he and Professor Butler Shaffer (Boundaries of Order)make good cases for horizontally arranged societies instead of pyramidally-arranged societies with politicians on top and a king, Decider-in-Chief or a President-for-Life like Hosni Mubarek or Robert Mugabi at the pinnacle.

However, my own concern is not with the nuts and bolts of individual liberty, but with the ethics of individual liberty. Even if a Soviet-type system where every non-party member was assigned his job, living space, and so on without any choice, was very productive, or even if a Third Reich type system which employed a "final solution" of killing all minorities were found to be very efficient economically, I would be opposed to these systems because they are IMHO unethical, and do not conform to the age-old logic of the Golden Rule. On the flip side, even if a society of sovereign individuals did not produce spontaneous order and harmonious productive creativity, I would favor this system anyway, because at least it would be ethical, not doing unto any others that which they don't want done to themselves.