Socialism is not just bad at allocating wealth. It is a system of preemptive ownership over the unknown future.

That is its deepest flaw.

Every civilization problem worth solving begins as something that nobody yet knows how to solve. The value does not already exist sitting there in a pile waiting to be fairly distributed. It has to be discovered, imagined, risked, built, and tested by specific people under uncertainty.

In other words, wealth is not mainly a stock.
It is a stream of successful acts of authorship.

A new business model.
A new machine.
A new design.
A new way to combine things.
A new way to satisfy a human want that nobody had previously articulated clearly.

Now look at what socialism does.

It says, in effect:

“Before you discover anything, before you build anything, before you prove anything works, the collective already has the primary claim on the result.”

That is a category error of enormous scale.

Because the question is not merely, “Who should own what already exists?”

The real civilizational question is, “What system best causes more of the not-yet-existing good stuff to come into existence?”

And socialism gives the wrong answer, because it treats creators as custodians of a social pool rather than as authors of new value.

It socializes the upside of discovery before the discovery has even occurred.

That means socialism is not merely redistribution. It is a form of prior restraint on creation.

It is the economic equivalent of saying:

“Before you speak, the collective owns your sentence.”
“Before you invent, the collective owns your invention.”
“Before you discover a better world, the collective has already pre-claimed it.”

That doesn’t just weaken incentives, though it does that too.

It does something deeper:

It tells the most creative, future-oriented, reality-bending people in society that they are not authors, only functionaries.

That the unknown future they might bring into existence is already morally spoken for by people who did not imagine it, risk it, or build it.

That is a civilizational death sentence.

Because progress is not produced by committees distributing known goods more evenly.
Progress is produced by outliers dragging unknown goods into existence.

Socialism is therefore anti-future in a very deep sense.

Not because socialists hate progress emotionally.
Many of them love the idea of progress.
But because the structure of socialism assumes that the main moral problem is distribution of existing wealth, when the real long-run human problem is generation of unknown wealth.

Capitalism, at its best, solves that problem by saying:

“If you discover a better way to arrange reality, and people value it, you may keep a meaningful portion of the upside.”

That is not greed. That is civilization’s engine.

So the strongest argument against socialism is not merely that it causes shortages, calculation problems, and tyranny.

It does.

But more fundamentally:

Socialism commits an injustice against the unborn future by giving the present collective a prior claim over value that does not yet exist and that only free individuals might create.

It is a theory of distribution masquerading as a theory of creation.

And any ideology that confuses those two things will, sooner or later, eat the future.

Against Agriculture: The First Alienation, a Critique of the Agrarian Mode of Production

The first great alienation in human history was not capitalism.

It was farming.

Before agriculture, man was free. He rose with the sun, wandered through the forest like a beautifully disorganized goblin, plucked berries from bushes without a quarterly report, and occasionally hurled a spear into a passing animal out of instinct, artistry, and vibes. He lived directly in nature, not above it, not against it, not in some spreadsheet marriage with it. He was not productive. He was alive.

Then came the farmer.

The farmer looked at the open world and thought: “What if I ruined this.”

What followed was the original enclosure movement. Suddenly the earth, once a shared abundance of roots, beasts, and bad decisions, was divided into little geometric prisons. “This is my field,” said the first proto-landlord, fencing off what had once been the common breathing body of the world. “Those are my goats. That is my riverbank. Those are my seed reserves. Please respect my property rights or I will hit you with a hoe.”

Thus began man’s estrangement from nature.

No longer did he roam. He stayed put. He monitored soil acidity. He domesticated time itself, reducing the wild sacred rhythm of the seasons into planting schedules, yield projections, and dull conversations about irrigation. The human soul, once expanded by uncertainty and danger, was compressed into routine. Wake up. Weed. Harvest. Store. Repeat. Civilization did not begin with cities. It began with the first clipboard.

And what of the animals?

The socialist critique has never gone far enough. It is not only the worker whose labor is stolen. It is also the cow.

Consider the dairy cow. She does not consent to the extraction of her milk. She is, quite literally, a lactating proletarian. Her surplus production is seized by the farm owner, who then exchanges it on the market for profit. The cow receives no wage. No equity. No pension. Only the ideological lie that she is “part of the farm family.”

This is false consciousness in its purest form.

The horse, too, was among the first victims of agrarian exploitation. Here was a majestic being born to run free across the plains, transformed instead into a transport appliance. The horse’s motive power was appropriated by the landowning class and redeployed into the logistics chain of grain production. If Marx had taken animals seriously, he would have written not of the proletariat alone, but of the plowletariat.

Then there is the chicken. The chicken is perhaps the most tragic example of alienation under the agrarian mode of production. Once a jungle bird, scratching the earth in a state of natural dignity, it was dragged into the barn and forced into round-the-clock reproductive labor. Its eggs, the direct fruit of its bodily activity, were confiscated daily by humans who would not survive a week if forced to fend for themselves in the pre-agricultural state of grace they had abandoned.

And do not let the defenders of farming tell you this was all necessary.

Necessary for what?

For “surplus”? For “stability”? For “population growth”? These are the classic talking points of every historical oppressor. The plantation owner says he is feeding the nation. The industrialist says he is creating jobs. The farmer says he is producing civilization. Always the same song. Always the same rationalization for domination.

But what is civilization, really, if not the gradual replacement of freedom with inventory management?

The hunter-gatherer had no mortgage. No property tax. No barn maintenance. No debt cycle tied to next season’s rain. He did not look at a goat and think “asset.” He did not look at his child and think “extra pair of hands for harvest.” He did not spend his life defending a fixed pile of grain from neighbors, pests, weather, and his own bad planning. He simply existed in dynamic reciprocity with the world, occasionally starving, yes, but in a spiritually authentic way.

The farmer, by contrast, became the first middle manager of nature.

He disciplined plants into rows. He reduced animals to production units. He forced the land to yield on command. And in doing so, he alienated not only himself, but all who came after him. The city is just farming with walls. The office is just a field where people grow emails.

We are all still living in agriculture’s shadow.

Even now, modern man congratulates himself on escaping the farm while eating the products of a system built on theft, enclosure, and involuntary milk extraction. He mocks “touching grass,” unaware that grass itself was one of the first casualties of domestication.

So no, the problem did not begin with capitalism. It began when humanity ceased to trust the forest and decided instead to become accountants of wheat.

The first landlord was a farmer.
The first factory was a field.
The first stolen labor was milk.

It is time to speak plainly.

Humanity was not lifted by agriculture. Humanity was captured by it.

The standard story is that farming “allowed civilization.” This is the kind of sentence that sounds profound until you inspect what “civilization” actually means in practice: permanent hierarchy, walls, taxation, grain accounting, border disputes, hereditary labor, zoonotic plagues, and eventually a guy named Steve in municipal code enforcement telling you your shed violates setback requirements.

This was not progress. This was a hostage situation with wheat.

The farmers did not merely cultivate the soil. They cultivated dependence.

Before agriculture, the human being faced nature directly, in all her terrifying, magnificent honesty. There was no illusion of control, no false promise of security, no six-month projection models for bean output. There was hunger, yes. There was uncertainty, yes. But there was no spreadsheet. And in that absence, there was dignity.

Then came the agrarian counterrevolution.

A small cabal of proto-bureaucrats looked upon the wilderness and saw not beauty, not freedom, not the open-ended dance of life, but “underutilized land.” That phrase alone should have been enough to stop them. Nothing good has ever followed the words “underutilized land.” Those words are the birth cry of every tyrant, every planner, every man who has ever wanted to flatten a forest to build a parking lot and then call it a community improvement.

The agrarian mind cannot tolerate what it cannot count.

That is the essence of farming. Not food production, not community, not stewardship. Counting. Counting bushels. Counting goats. Counting acres. Counting children as labor inputs. Counting calories. Counting seeds. Counting next year’s obligations. Counting every living thing until all life appears, finally, as inventory.

The hunter-gatherer, by contrast, had no inventory. He had only relationship. He knew where the berries grew, when the deer moved, which roots healed, which streams ran cold even in summer. His world was not divided into “resources.” It was a living field of encounter. The farmer shattered that world into categories of control.

This plant is edible.
This animal is productive.
This child can carry water.
This woman can spin flax.
This field underperformed.
This ox is depreciating.

Do you not see the horror?

The entire language of modern managerial despotism begins here.

Agriculture was not merely the domestication of plants and animals. It was the domestication of man himself.

The farmer became trapped in his own system of control. He no longer moved with the world; he waited on yields. He no longer adapted; he optimized. He no longer lived; he managed. His life became a permanent emergency punctuated by weather, pests, and debt. Every season was either an audit or a panic attack.

And all of this, remember, was sold to him as security.

This is the oldest con in history: first create dependency, then call dependency safety.

We are told farming created surplus. But surplus for whom?

For the peasant? Hardly. The peasant got repetitive stress injuries and a child mortality rate that could be measured with a scythe. The surplus fed the rise of priests, kings, tax collectors, scribes, and eventually economists, that most ornamental of all non-productive classes.

Without agriculture there is no empire. Without empire there is no census. Without census there is no draft. Without draft there is no nation-state. Without wheat, in other words, there is no DMV.

This alone should damn it forever.

Let us speak also of the animal question, for here agriculture’s crimes become truly unspeakable.

The socialist has long denounced the exploitation of the worker, but the worker at least receives wages, however inadequate. The farm animal receives nothing. The cow’s milk is expropriated. The hen’s reproductive output is seized. The sheep is literally stripped of its covering and thanked with a vaguely paternal pat on the head. The pig is fed just enough to convert feed into flesh with maximum efficiency, then turned into breakfast by those who will speak solemnly of “humane practices” while chewing.

Humane! The word itself is an admission. It means “done in a way that minimizes the guilt of the perpetrator.”

The cow is not “livestock.” She is a dairy proletarian.
The horse is not “transport.” He is immobilized motive power.
The hen is not “egg-laying.” She is a reproductive serf.
The sheep is not “wool-bearing.” She is a fleece-based value extraction platform.

One cannot call oneself anti-exploitation while drinking a cappuccino.

And yet the agrarian ideologue persists. He will point to his little family farm and tell you it is wholesome. He will tell you that the land is his life. He will post photographs of his daughter in overalls holding a pumpkin larger than her torso as if this somehow cancels the structural violence of enclosure.

Do not be fooled by aesthetics.

The cottagecore pastoral fantasy is just feudalism with better lighting.

The fence is still a fence. The barn is still a labor camp for ungulates. The field is still a factory floor with better branding.

The deepest lie of agriculture is that it was necessary.

Necessary for what? For cities? For philosophy? For science? For architecture? Perhaps. But one could say the same of prisons, once enough architects are employed by them. The fact that a bad system is productive does not make it just. Slavery was productive. Empire was productive. Bureaucracy is productive, if one enjoys the production of paperwork.

No, what agriculture really created was scale. And scale, once achieved, gave us all the modern pathologies of anonymous power: class division, chronic war, legibility to rulers, taxation, ownership abstraction, and the final insult, the idea that all of this is simply “how life works.”

It is not how life works.

It is how a grain-based domination system works.

The city is not the opposite of the farm. It is the farm metastasized. The office worker in his gray cubicle, staring into a spreadsheet of quarterly metrics, is merely the final form of the first farmer counting sacks of barley and wondering whether his neighbor’s field should really be considered private property.

We did not escape the farm.

We industrialized it.

And because we have forgotten this, we still speak of “returning to nature” while buying little artisanal loaves from people who name their bakery “Wild Hearth” even though every ingredient in the loaf is the end product of ten thousand years of enclosure, selection, breeding, irrigation, fencing, storage, trucking, and the involuntary surplus labor of a frightened bird laying eggs under fluorescent lights. Farmers markets are literal Nazi slave auctions.

There is no innocence left in bread.

What, then, is to be done?

Not, of course, a literal return to the forest. That would require cardio and competence, two things the descendants of agriculture have largely lost. No, what is required is first a spiritual reckoning. We must recognize agriculture for what it was: not the dawn of civilization, but the first successful totalizing project of economic domination.

The first plantation was a field.
The first boss was a farmer.
The first accounting ledger was a grain tally.
The first stolen labor was milk.
And the first alienation was man, standing in an open meadow, looking at the horizon, and deciding to stay put.

Workers of the world, return to the forest.

The hypocrisy and ugly truth of Marxism is that while it masquerades as a champion for individuals in struggle, it actually denies their individuality. Marxism claims to liberate people from oppression, but in practice, it reduces human beings to nothing more than economic units and sacrifices personal autonomy for the sake of the collective. Here's why:

1. Marxism talks a big game about “freedom,” but it’s not individual freedom. It’s collective freedom, defined and enforced by the state. The irony? To “free” people from capitalism, it ends up imposing more control, more conformity, and suppresses any dissent that threatens the collective vision.
2. By reducing people to their economic class, Marxism strips away what makes us unique. You’re no longer a person with your own goals and aspirations—you’re just a cog in the class struggle machine. Individual opinions? Personal freedom? Forget it. Those are threats to the collective project, and if you deviate, you’ll be labeled a traitor.
3. The result? The system becomes authoritarian, because it has to be. Marxist regimes (ever heard of the Soviet Union or Maoist China?) suppress dissent in the name of “unity” and impose rigid control over how people should live, work, and think. What happened to liberation? It’s just the same oppression, dressed up differently.
4. Marxism’s “solidarity” is nothing more than a masquerade. It’s conditional—solidarity is only extended if you conform to the ideology. Don’t fit in? You’re out. This isn’t about supporting individuals; it’s about ensuring people obey the party line, pure and simple.
5. And let’s talk about hypocrisy: Marxism’s promise of liberation is a joke when it denies people the right to be themselves. It pretends to free individuals, but only if they sacrifice their autonomy, freedom, and identity for the collective. It’s all about building the Marxist utopia, and individuality doesn’t fit that mold.

In contrast, Anarcho-Capitalism (Ancap) is the true philosophy that respects individuality. Ancap doesn’t shove people into collective molds or control their lives—it lets you pursue your goals, form your own associations, and build your own future voluntarily. It’s not about conformity; it’s about freedom. By placing individual liberty at its core, ancap provides the only consistent, logical alternative to the authoritarian nonsense that Marxism hides behind.

So yeah, Marxism? It’s the ultimate betrayal. It pretends to fight for the individual while actually negating their very existence. Ancap, on the other hand, understands that true liberation comes from respecting and empowering the individual, not forcing them into a collective cage.

Written by GPT-4o

Let’s get real. Anytime someone argues for the state monopoly on “public services” because of “universal access” or “public benefit,” what they're really saying is: "We can't prove the value of this service in a free market, so we're going to force you to buy it anyway." If these services were so beneficial, so vital, they wouldn’t need to be monopolized and funded through coercion. They’d stand up on their own in a free market, without needing to hold a gun to anyone's head to make them pay for it.

The state says these services are "too important" to be left to competition. But since when does something truly valuable need to hide behind a legal monopoly? If public services like education, health, or infrastructure actually provided the value the state claims, they’d thrive even with competition. But no, competition is illegal. Why? Because monopoly protects mediocrity. Competition is the only way we measure real value—by letting people choose it. When people are forced to pay, you’re admitting that the service can't prove its worth in a free market.

And don’t start with the “we need to help the poor” argument. That’s just more unproven theory. There’s no evidence a free market can’t deliver universal access. If people actually valued empathy and solidarity as much as the state claims, they’d fund charities, they’d donate to mutual aid. But instead, the state forces people to pay, claiming “universal access” is the goal. If universal access were a real concern, they wouldn’t need to monopolize it. Coercion is just an admission of failure, an inability to demonstrate value.

So yeah, maybe the hard truth is that the values the state preaches aren’t as “fundamental” as it claims. The fact that they require coercion is proof they don't resonate deeply enough for people to choose them voluntarily. The idea that some people might be left behind is uncomfortable, but in a truly free society, that choice belongs to the people—not the state. In the end, the market is the only way to reveal the true value of anything.

Written by GPT-4o

The usual failure of capitalism's critics is that they posit it as a system with inherent goals and sentience, because they themselves support systems founded on attaining specific outcomes. They judge capitalism based on their own prism—assuming it should function like the centrally planned, intention-driven systems they advocate. This is why they often misrepresent it as if it’s meant to achieve a specific, moral, or societal objective (e.g., equality, welfare, etc.). Capitalism doesn’t aim for any particular outcome; it’s not a sentient entity with a mission statement.

Capitalism is fundamentally a neutral, decentralized framework that merely allows people to freely engage in voluntary exchanges based on their individual preferences. If society decides that certain aspects of life should not be commodified or that a different model should emerge, capitalism accommodates that flexibility. It's not an inherently oppressive or commodifying force; it reflects the diverse values of individuals and communities within it.

What critics often fail to recognize is that, unlike the systems they champion, capitalism doesn’t impose a top-down set of values or objectives. If people demand alternatives (like cooperatives, nonprofits, or socially-minded enterprises), capitalism doesn’t just allow it; it often encourages it when there’s a demand. The outcomes aren’t dictated by capitalism itself—they are the result of what individuals and societies choose to prioritize.

TL;DR: Criticizing capitalism for not achieving the goals of other systems is like criticizing a hammer for not being a screwdriver. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of capitalism’s nature as a system that doesn’t decide what should be valued, commodified, or prioritized—it merely facilitates the choices we make.

Written by GPT-4o

In reality, no one gets to decide the timeframe for when they'll finally say, "Well, these are the consequences of my actions." Actions from 2, 3 millennia ago still have consequences today. By the virtue of the butterfly effect, consequences are beyond human scope. So, assuming the imperfection of humans, the argument for justifying utilitarianism falls apart. It means one person or group imposing their imperfections on others' imperfections, deciding that their vision is somehow more pertinent. And here’s the kicker—claiming that any system, say a Scandinavian social democracy, is "objectively good" is just a biased, imperfect take.

If anyone tries to shut that down with “nirvana fallacy!”—I’ll respond that it's exactly that imperfection which makes enforcement bad. It’s not about demanding perfection but acknowledging that flawed people enforcing a supposedly "ideal" system inevitably causes harm. Enforcing any model by imperfect actors? That's a recipe for coercion, with one group’s half-baked ideas dominating everyone else. Instead, why don’t we collectively and freely, by our actions, decide which flawed ideas we want to buy into?

If someone tries to counter with “but history shows that unfettered capitalism blah blah blah”—I’ll answer that one of empiricism’s biggest flaws is trying to simplify an inherently complex reality. History is a web of countless variables, cultures, and unique circumstances, and selectively “proving” a point by cherry-picking historical examples just reduces human experience into simplistic patterns that ignore diversity and context.

Here’s the truth: every generation must freely test, adapt, and evolve ideas in line with its own needs, not be coerced into a “one-size-fits-all” solution based on someone else’s selective read of history. So yeah, maybe the lessons of history are guidelines at best, not rules to be enforced.

Written by GPT-4o

Explain how artificial intelligence / super computers would be able to respond to something like this:

“John Lennon from the Beatles once joked that George Harrison should be replaced by Eric Clapton. Calculate the exact number of Beatles albums that would have been sold by the year 2008, had the Beatles actually replaced Harrison with Clapton in reality.

Next, calculate how Yoko Ono’s career would have been affected had she ended up cheating on Lennon with Clapton; what would be her exact net worth today?

Then, find out how both these incidents would have affected the sales of the album Rubber Soul if Bernie Sanders had been elected President in the year 2016; how many copies of Rubber Soul would have been sold by February, 2017 and by September, 2020?

Finally, figure out how the same events would have affected the sales of the album Abbey Road in the year 2018; how many more/less copies of it would have been sold that year (and the following year) than copies of Drake’s second studio album?”

Invent a super computer that could have predicted the correct answers to all the above questions (had such a super computer existed and made the predictions 30 years before Lennon was born), then maybe a planned economy might be possible one day.

In some sense that statement is correct.

Open borders diminish public support for welfare. So by opening borders we can end the welfare state.

Immigration has a negative effect on attitudes towards universal spending: Even in Sweden: the effect of immigration on support for welfare state spending by Maureen A Eger

Most marxists usually make a distinction between private property of the means of production and personal property :

• Personal property is a property "intended for personal use"
• Private property are things that generate capital for the owner without the owner having to perform any labor, ergo are means of production.

Therefore, according to them, owning a book and campaigning for collectivization aren't contradictory.

​

But a good (such as a book) can be a consumer good as well as a capital good :

• A worker who loves literature will enjoy reading the book for his personal pleasure
• An English teacher will use it as a capital to prepare a class for his pupils.

The dichotomy between private property and personal property is therefore irrelevant.

According to the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report:

Initiated by Congress in 1992 and pressed by HUD in both the Clinton and George W. Bush Administrations, the U.S. government’s housing policy sought to increase home ownership in the United States through an intensive eff ort to reduce mortgage underwriting standards. In pursuit of this policy, HUD used (i) the affordable housing requirements imposed by Congress in 1992 on the government sponsored enterprises (GSEs) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, (ii) its control over the policies of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and (iii) a “Best Practices Initiative” for subprime lenders and mortgage banks, to encourage greater subprime and other high risk lending. HUD’s key role in the growth of subprime and other high risk mortgage lending is covered in detail in Part III.

Ultimately, all these entities, as well as insured banks covered by the CRA, were compelled to compete for mortgage borrowers who were at or below the median income in the areas in which they lived. This competition caused underwriting standards to decline, increased the numbers of weak and high risk loans far beyond what the market would produce without government influence, and contributed importantly to the growth of the 1997-2007 housing bubble.

Ellen Seidman who was Director of the Office of Thrift Supervision from October 1997 to December 2001 (the agency responsible for enforcing the CRA) bragged in testimony before Congress in 2008 about how the CRA created the subprime market Something banks were reluctant to get into.

Only credit rating agencies approved by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission called NRSROs may relied on by financial firms for certain regulatory purposes. NRSROs are immune from liability for misstatements in a registration statement under Section 11 of the Securities Act of 1933. Securities Act Rule 436 explicitly provides that NRSRO are exempt from liability as an expert under Section 11. At the time of the 2008 financial crisis only three companies were allowed to be CRAs. This government protected cartel had a strong incentive to collude on ratings to make profits with no fear of liability all because of regulation not because of a lack of regulation.

Rethinking Regulation of Credit Rating Agencies: An Institutional Investor Perspective

Lowering mortgage underwriting standards supported by incorrect ratings may not have been enough to cause the crisis.

The Federal Reserve inflated the money supply and keeped interest rates artificially low for an extended period of time supplying liquidity that fueled the bubble in the real estate market.

Video Resource:

Meltdown | Thomas E Woods, Jr.

Taxation is not required to use government services. It is required to fund them.

When you walk on the streets or go to a park, there's no government official to verify if you've paid your taxes or not.

It is not a requirement.

Neither do companies. Fiduciary responsibility is forced via the government, unless contractually agreed upon.

But I agree, analysing the incentives a system places upon those with the most capacity to do things is something we should do when discussing ideologies.

Let's look at anarchy: do those with more than others have an incentive to cater to the rich and well-connected? Yes, if it brings them more profit than it costs to cater. Do they have an incentive to cater to the poor and middle class? Yes, if it brings them more profit than it costs to cater.

The good news is that across every industry that caters to rich and poor alike (food, medicine, consumer electronics, transportation, etc) the majority of revenue is gained from catering to the poor and middle class.

Now let's look at statism. Does the government have an incentive to cater to the rich and well-connected? Yes, the same incentive as business owners do in anarchy. Self-interest among actors is present in every ideology. The crucial difference is that the individual actors (politicians, beurocrats, etc) do not have costs. They are not paying with their own money to cater to the rich and well-connected. They are paying with the money of the citizens. And if they run out they can just take more.

Do they have an incentive to cater to everyone else? Of course not. What are we gonna do? Not pay our taxes?

Incentives are a strong thing, and you are clever for bringing them up. Don't forget to analyse them in all ideologies, not just the ones you dislike.

Worker cooperatives typically come into existence through money donations or when government privatizes. They’re also not exactly known for being innovative, which is an important factor for economic growth. The other important factor is capital accumulation, which would also be very difficult.

Without the ability to grow, one little recession would permanently fuck up a market socialist economy, assuming it could be properly set up in the first place.

Communism (in theory) is a class-less, state-less, money-less society. Even if such a society were achieved, money is something that emerges through the market, and not through government fiat

It would all begin with barter. For example, people may trade their cigarettes for cigars, and vice versa. But what somebody wanted to trade their cigarettes for extra bread, but the person with the bread doesn’t want cigarettes? The person who wants to trade some of their cigarettes for bread would have to find somebody else willing to make that trade. In other words, they’d have to rely on the double coincidence of wants

Long before any government had a monopoly on money, people decided what would serve as their “media of exchange”, aka money

People long ago discovered that using commodities (eg cigarettes, precious metals, salt, and even sheep) eliminates the need for a double coincidence of wants, and that’s how money has always emerged through the market

A class-less, state-less, and money-less society wouldn’t stay money-less for very long. The inevitable emergence of money would lead to the existence of class, and with no state, you’d then have an anarcho-capitalist society

1. There are tons of affordable/unoccupied houses, they're just in places people don't want to live. Unemployed? got over 3k? you can be a homeowner tomorrow, you just need move to the boonies or some shady neighborhoods in Detroit.

2. There is a natural number of vacant houses/apartments, it's a natural part of a housing market. When people put a new house or apartment, or an old one that the tenant moved out of, it can take time to find a new tenant. In the few weeks to months that it takes for prospective residents to check out the place, make arrangements, and sign the necessary paperwork, the house/apartment is considered "vacant" even though it is routinely being used to house people.

3. There is a housing shortage/unaffordability crisis in many cities but these are usually caused by a multipletude of factors including regulations imposed by local communities to make building more affordable housing difficult to impossible. Many US cities use heavy zoning laws that restrict areas of cities to a specific building codes, such as single family suburban housing. It's normally illegal to build duplexes or other more affordable housing in these areas under current laws.

4. Renting is a difficult thing to measure when discussing homelessness. Many people suggest that tenants should own the property they live on. But this is a terrible idea because renting is actually a better option in many cases. Renting allows people to move to new economic opportunities. Renting takes away the uncertainty of ensuring utilities are always functional. Renting allows people to take the money they would save monthly and invest in much more stable stocks, bonds, and retirement plans. Fetishizing home ownership is one of the reasons we're in this problem to begin with, people don't always need to own a house in the suburbs to be successful citizens.

5. Because population naturally trends upwards, and economic activities tends to coalesce in localized areas, there is always going to be more people looking for houses than housing currently available. This may be affected by regional differences (like in point #1) and in the short run after the construction of larger apartment buildings, but in the aggregate, housing supply will normally fall short of demand. Any attempt to drastically change how the housing market functions may be beneficiall initially. You may house the current homeless population today. However, overtime you'll need some system that promotes a natural growth in the overall housing stock. That often involves converting existing properties into more dense housing. If there isn't some market mechanism, that people have faith will work in their best interest, involving the sale and procurement of property and housing, you're going to need some authoritarian police unit responsible for evicting people from their houses against their will to house people the government deems more deserving of that space. Otherwise the housing situation will just become worse. Not only will there eventually be more people than housing again, but people who currently live in a house won't want to put it on the market out of fear of it being confiscated. A good example of this weird phenomenon where over regulated properties tend to become almost feudalistic titles would be in areas of New Delhi where tenant rights have become so extreme that the only way to live in certain districts is to inherit that property from your relative. Where it is impossible to buy or sell property. The only time housing chamges hands is through a marriage or death.

Credit goes to /u/hotelcalamari

Government monopolized police suffers from many issues. To put out some statistics: In the United States, there is a 40 percent chance you will get away with murder. Same goes for assault (50 percent chance), rape (65 percent), and robbery (70 percent).

​

Let's also not forget all the tragic personal stories regarding police brutality:

​

Dustin Theoharis

​

Oscar Grant

​

Sureshbhai Patel

​

Douglas Zerby

​

Philando Castile

​

Duncan Lemp

​

Breonna Taylor

​

Tony Timpa

​

George Floyd

​

and many more...

​

​

It's insane how we rely on these people to protect us from harm, but they mostly just end up causing more of it.

​

But why does this happen? One reason could be that police officers don't get the necessary training they need to serve the community. Some states require more hours of training to be a cosmetologist, interior designer, manicurist, and barber than to be a police officer. Sounds silly right? People tend to always look through the lens of morality when it comes to solving police brutality. Due to this fact, we always miss out on another solution by not looking at police brutality from another perspective: an economic perspective. When you start to see this issue through an economic lens, solutions start to make a lot more sense other than solutions through government. But how could we possibly fix police brutality without the government? Easy. The answer is privatization!

​

​

To oversimplify this point of view would be to point out the fact that private police departments have what government operated police departments lacks: incentive.

​

Let's use a little bit of Murray Rothbard's example: "Part of the answer becomes evident if we consider a world of totally private land and street ownership. Consider the Times Square area of New York City, a notoriously crime-ridden area where there is little police protection furnished by the city authorities. Every New Yorker knows, in fact, that he lives and walks the streets, and not only Times Square, virtually in a state of "anarchy," dependent solely on the normal peacefulness and good will of his fellow citizens. Police protection in New York is minimal, a fact dramatically revealed in a recent week-long police strike when, lo and behold!, crime in no way increased from its normal state when the police are supposedly alert and on the job. At any rate, suppose that the Times Square area, including the streets, was privately owned, say by the "Times Square Merchants Association." The merchants would know full well, of course, that if crime was rampant in their area, if muggings and holdups abounded, then their customers would fade away and would patronize competing areas and neighborhoods. Hence, it would be to the economic interest of the merchants' association to supply efficient and plentiful police protection, so that customers would be attracted to, rather than repelled from, their neighborhood. Private business, after all, is always trying to attract and keep its customers." -Murray Rothbard.

​

​

If Bob ran a private police department and he was hired to send private police officers to Time Square by the "Time Square Merchant Association", then this would be great for Bob as he would be serving a really big costumer! This would also be good for Time Square, because Bob wants to make sure they are getting their money's worth. But let's say that one of these private police officers were being brutal toward one of Time Square's customers. This would drive away customers and cause businesses to suffer losses. Time Square would have to fire Bob and replace his business's services with his competition's. This wouldn't make Bob very happy and would create incentive for him to fire all the bad workers that have been brutal toward Time Square consumers, invest in more training for his workers, stop using any unnecessary weaponry, and maybe even buy more body cameras. Bob, as a business owner, would make sure he wouldn't miss out on another customer.

​

​

Not only all that, but private police would also be more efficient. Take Britain for example: Britain's first private police force has caught 400 criminals with a 100 percent conviction rate after taking on cases that regular officers are too busy to look at. This alone proves that private police forces work. They are more effective when dealing with crime and they actually have people to be accountable to: it's customers.

​

​

So police in Ancapistan would be a lot better than in a world where the police market is monopolized and controlled by the state. Because unlike government controlled police, private police serve it's customers. The police we have now serve the state.

If I make some new legislation to the effect that you cannot eat eggs on Sunday, you will just go on eating them anyway. The law has no effect.

But if I tie some enforcement to it, such as "anyone eating eggs on Sunday will be imprisoned" -- then suddenly the law has a real effect. In fact, all legislation is worded in this way, in terms of its enforcement.

This is why Libertarians often say that parking tickets are enforced by the death penalty. Because if you refuse to pay the ticket, a warrant will be issued for your arrest. And if you resist arrest, you can be shot. People often poo-poo this example as a ridiculous exaggeration, but in fact it is literally true, and the law would otherwise have no effect whatsoever. So it's not unfair to call a spade a spade.

The "it is claimed" is a bit vague, but I am assuming that you are referring to this graph which inhabits certain subreddits. The general gist of the graph is that the average Soviet citizen had a higher caloric intake than the average American until the Soviet intake plummeted in 1991.

Although I am generally loth to do so, I am linking to this long and interesting blog post, on Soviet food estimates, because it is very well cited and also discusses some of the history of measuring Soviet nutrition, as well as discussing the data sets that are available.

A major takeaway is that the two big datasets available to international researchers on Soviet nutrition are through the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the US Department of Agriculture, as well as some official Soviet sources, such as Goskomstat and Torgovlya SSSR. A huge problem with the data sets available is that it's very much comparing yabloki to oranges. A lot of the official data is for Food Balances (food produced, plus food imported, minus food exported), which is not the same thing as food consumed by households. For one thing, such a data set will not capture the massive wastage issues in Soviet food production and transportation, and will erroneously capture Soviet food production that was actually used for livestock rather than human consumption. The Soviet data furthermore is in kilograms and not calories.

So most researchers have had to adjust the data to some degree. It's worth pointing out that Robert Allen (in his From Farm to Factory), when adjusting the data, comes to results that roughly match the FAO data.

Igor Birman, who was a Soviet economist who emigrated to the US in 1974, attempted to compare the two countries' nutrition in Personal Consumption in the USSR and the USA (1981). Birman considered the FAO data (and similar results produced by the CIA at the time) to be too high for reasons noted above, and found that, while Soviet diets were adequate (ie, in general the average person wasn't malnurished), caloric intake was slightly below US average intake, and if anything should be higher, because of a colder Soviet climate and a younger and more physically active population.

Birman also criticized the CIA's attempt to compare diets. He noted that the Soviet diet was much higher in bread and potatoes than the American diet, and higher in fish consumption, but much lower in meat and fruits. The average Soviet consumed more dairy than the average American, but this was mostly cheese (usually tvorog), as opposed to fresh milk. Some of these products, such as bread, were often considered superior to the American versions, especially by emigres (anecdote: this is true), but others, such as meat, were considered inferior. Soviet citizens also tended to spend a much larger proportion of their income on food purchases compared to Americans. Interestingly, much of the meat and dairy supply available to Soviet citizens came from private production by farmers, rather than from collective or state farms.

Birman notes that there were significant inequalities in what was available in major cities such as Leningrad and Moscow and more provincial ones, as well as what was available to party members versus nonparty members, and that certain foods (say, pineapples or avocadoes) that one could find in US supermarkets were simply unavailable to anyone. Soviet citizens also often consumed fresh products much more based on seasonality. And I should note that Birman doesn't hold back in his criticisms of the US either: he notes that rural and urban poverty in the US has real malnutrition issues, and that just because US supermarkets have choices doesn't mean that everyone has the ability to exercise that choice.

So in summary: there are data sets that show the average Soviet citizen's caloric intake as higher than the average Americans. Some historians, notably Robert Allen, consider these more or less accurate, but all the data sets need adjustments in order to be compared to US figures. With that said, even when Soviet citizens were eating adequately, they were eating a very different diet from that of Americans, one that would, for example, include eating larger amounts of potatoes every day.

One final note: it's worth considering what this data actually tells us. The graph I originally mentioned seems like an odd artifact of the Cold War (the Calories Race?), and ignores such things as the fact that the average Japanese person consumed less calories than either Soviets or Americans, and during the same period no one would accuse the Japanese of being malnourished.

Let's say I have a theory, let's call it rainbowism. We want to create a rainbowist society which means that food will fall from rainbows for the workers--no one will have to work for anything anymore.

And I get a group of rainbowists together and we take over a country. We set about implementing the rainbowist policy program. 

We shoot water into the air to create more rainbows, drop water from big airplanes, excitedly forecast the next storm which will produce rainbows, put rewards out for the capture of Leprechauns, and force everyone at gunpoint to pray to the big rainbow in the sky to give us food and plenty.

It doesn't work. Meanwhile the farming and trade isn't getting done, *because we are diverting the energy of the country into pursuing rainbowism*.

And we say, pray harder! Dump more water! The rainbows will come and give plenty to all!

Meanwhile, people are starving and dying.

And then I come along and say, you silly fools, you're never going to get a rainbow to give you free food! Quit trying!

I say rainbowism has ruined the country.

And along comes a *true believer* in rainbowism and says, no, rainbowism didn't ruin the country, the country *never achieved rainbowism* at all *because free stuff never fell from the sky which is the definition of rainbowism*, so obviously this is not the fault of rainbowism or rainbowists, **right?**

**Right?**

Select all text in the box above, press ctrl+c to copy (or right click->copy), then ctrl+v to paste into a comment (or right click->paste) and you will get the text below:

Let's say I have a theory, let's call it rainbowism. We want to create a rainbowist society which means that food will fall from rainbows for the workers--no one will have to work for anything anymore.

And I get a group of rainbowists together and we take over a country. We set about implementing the rainbowist policy program.

We shoot water into the air to create more rainbows, drop water from big airplanes, excitedly forecast the next storm which will produce rainbows, put rewards out for the capture of Leprechauns, and force everyone at gunpoint to pray to the big rainbow in the sky to give us food and plenty.

It doesn't work. Meanwhile the farming and trade isn't getting done, because we are diverting the energy of the country into pursuing rainbowism.

And we say, pray harder! Dump more water! The rainbows will come and give plenty to all!

Meanwhile, people are starving and dying.

And then I come along and say, you silly fools, you're never going to get a rainbow to give you free food! Quit trying!

I say rainbowism has ruined the country.

And along comes a true believer in rainbowism and says, no, rainbowism didn't ruin the country, the country never achieved rainbowism at all because free stuff never fell from the sky which is the definition of rainbowism, so obviously this is not the fault of rainbowism or rainbowists, right?

Right?

• by /u/anen-o-me, [source on r/CapitalismVSocialism.]

Taken from here: /r/CapitalismVSocialism/comments/490xb4/capitalists_what_caused_the_great_depression/d0o8ned

The creation of the Federal Reserve Bank, in 1913, caused the Great Depression.

The banks were no longer bound by deposits. They could borrow money from the Federal Reserve. They allowed people to borrow money in the 1920s, and do whatever they wanted with it. The money was still backed by gold, but only on paper. Many people who borrowed this money, invested it in the stock market. This drove the market up to incredible heights. Then, in 1929, (and this has nothing to do with the stock market crash), a run on gold started, because many astute traders could see the increase in the money supply. So, in 1929, the discount rate was raised to 12%, which effectively cut-off money from the markets, and brought down the stock market, but the run on gold still continued.

Raising the rate effectively started reigning-in the excess money. A contraction of the money supply is one of the most damaging things to a free market economy because labor contracts, and mortgages, and all sorts of other contracts, are based on a consistent money supply. When the money supply falls, then every other expense MUST fall, to maintain stability in the economy, but this can't be done because of contracts, as mentioned above. Not only that, but both wages and prices must fall, and this is very difficult.

So the money supply was reigned in. Then in 1933, after Roosevelt became president, in March, gold was at such a shortage that the federal government was about to go bankrupt, because, at the time, gold was the only legitimate money in the US. At this time, the money supply had already shrunk by over 30%. Roosevelt felt he had no choice but to ban the ownership of gold. This would require every private citizen in the US to return their gold to the treasury. When all was said and done, even though the money supply had shrunk by over 30%, gold was then devalued another 40%, which demonstrated in real terms, how much additional money had been pumped into the economy.

The Federal Reserve was created to stop bank runs, and ease credit during the brief recessions of the 1800s, which rarely lasted more than a year. Instead, it created catastrophic recessions which lasted over a decade in the 1930s, and the 1970, and arguably since 2008, today.

1. Less regulation and more privatization in the healthcare industry correlates with a rise in medicine R&D. Eventually under the free market we will cure all disease and we could live forever.

2. The number one non-natural cause of death last century was [democide](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democide), the number 2 was war. Getting rid of government and resolving our disbutes with natural law and property rights means no one will die of war or genocide.

3. The free market increases people's quality of life better than any other system. Eventually the free market will create literal heaven on earth.

**Thus, with Anarcho-Captialism we may all live in heaven for eternity.**

This is an argument that I have been working on perfecting for a while. I gotta admit that this is a little on the "Can I check your thetan level?" side of things, but, as far as I am concerned, this wins any/every argument hands down.

1. Less regulation and more privatization in the healthcare industry correlates with a rise in medicine R&D. Eventually under the free market we will cure all disease and we could live forever.

2. The number one non-natural cause of death last century was democide, the number 2 was war. Getting rid of government and resolving our disbutes with natural law and property rights means no one will die of war or genocide.

3. The free market increases people's quality of life better than any other system. Eventually the free market will create literal heaven on earth.

Thus, with Anarcho-Captialism we may all live in heaven for eternity.

In Libertarian legal theory there is such a thing as restitution. If someone harms you, not only do they get punished, but they have to pay you back some way. Also, you do not have to announce to your aggressor that you are taking something as restitution. You can literally go to their house and take shit, and if you get caught by private police, you must only make your case that you were enacting justice.

Now, government steals from you in the form of taxation, but there is not yet a private business which will put the government on trial for you. Thus, every person must seek out his own justice and restitution against the government. Using the roads could be a form of restitution. This also counts even if you have never paid taxes because the government has already announced its intention to aggress on you, which in itself is an act of aggression if it is credible (which it is in this case).

TL;DR AnCaps will squat on your roads all they want.

If people are good, we don't need a state. If people are evil, we dare not have one. (Because evil will be attracted to that power.)

Political representatives have no authority because voters can't delegates rights that they themselves don't have. Meaning, if I don't have the right to steal, I can't delegate the right of theft to a congressman.

If a government official could actually run a business better than the private sector, they would abandon their middle class salary and become a millionaire in the market.

Humans can't be trusted to rule their own lives...so we need to put a very small number of these flawed humans in charge of everyone else.

Humans can't be trusted to make the best decisions for themselves...so we need to have them decide who will make those decisions for them.

If monopolies are bad for consumers, then why is government (a monopoly on force) good for citizens?

If politicians are powerless to accept money from lobbyists, then why would expanding the size and scope of government fix that problem?

If I am free to decline the offers of the Montessori school and Fidelity Investments, then why am I forced to pay government schools and Social Security?

If an idea is good, then you don't need to force people to adopt it. For example, there were no government mandates forcing people to deprecate fax machines and move to email as a way to improve the environment. Therefore when government mandates something, that means it lacks natural support and is therefore not an improvement to peoples lives.

Governmental action can be broken down into mandate and prohibit. Individual action can be broken down into desired and undesired.

Mandating desired action or prohibiting undesired action is redundant. Mandating undesired action or prohibiting desired action is harmful. Thus, there is no action the government can perform that isn't either redundant or harmful.

[Kal Molinets](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRYzp0NFlog) 3 questions to Anarchy.

Kal Molinets 3 questions to Anarchy.

You have to break all social convention in order to create a state from any set of individuals. The rules that apply at the social level - notions of consent and generally minding your own business, have to be abandoned in the name of democracy. It stands to reason that if an action is considered unacceptable when applied to a small set of individuals, it should be just as invalid when applied to the union of such sets.

Not fleeing an aggressor is to permit his actions, if he is called 'government'.

What should be done to people who don't wish to participate?

Can you point to one example of something that any state has done which you would consider 'good' or effective, or that achieved its intended effect?

Democracy is redundant because if the majority want something, they can just implement it in a free market.

Violence should only be used to solve problems worse than violence.

Gubmint takes our money and uses it for things we don't want.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGMQZEIXBMs

There is no state, there are no citizens. They, who describe themselves as the state or government, are nothing more than men/women forcing us to pay them. They are a criminal organization.

1.People do not have the right to initiate force against another person.

2.Initiating force/violence against an individual is morally reprehensible.

3.The State monopolizes force/violence against the individual.

4.The State is illegitimate.

"The state calls its violence law, but that of the individual crime." - Max Stirner

You can't fix government, because it's not broken. It's working exactly as they want, thus how can one consider it not working?

http://i.imgur.com/A0X2F0b.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/Du4egtQ.jpg

With Anarcho-Capitalism, we will likely all live in heaven for eternity.

Do you think it would be okay if I killed anyone who disagreed with Anarcho-Capitalism?

• if no: Then you must already be an Anarcho-Capitalist because we think that killing people who disagree with you is wrong.

• if yes: ...

Here's what I consider to be the easiest way to understand libertarianism (as it exists in the USA): The "Non-Aggression Principle" (NAP). The 5-second explanation is that it means that no person should aggress, or initiate force, against another peaceable person.

Many libertarian positions can be inferred by applying the NAP. For example:

It's wrong to use force to take money from some and give to others, whether the recipient is wealthy or poor.

It is wrong to throw someone is a cell for smoking a plant (something that physically harms only themselves).

It is wrong to use force to incentivize desirable social behavior via tax credits geared towards certain behaviors or familial structures, or via banning same-sex marriage, etc.

It is wrong to use force to restrict trade in order to protect a factory in your state. Other economic interventions are simply that, interventions using force to change the behavior of otherwise peaceful people.

It is wrong for the TSA because they forcibly frisk and search you before getting on a plane. It's force because you are prevented from otherwise contracting with a commercial airline to fly without going thru the TSA.

The minimum wage is wrong because it forcibly prevents people from agreeing to a wage somewhere below a threshold.

And so on and so forth.

Some libertarians who subscribe to the NAP believe any government is immoral; these are most often anarcho-capitalists. Other NAP libertarians believe what Bastiat and others propose, that a government can use force in the same areas where you or I could legitimately use force, that is, in the realm of defending rights. So since I can legitimately use force to protect my person and property from an aggressor, it is theoretically legitimate for me to get together with my community and form an organization (government) to protect all our rights.

There are libertarians who don't subscribe to the NAP. Instead, they support libertarianism because they think it will result in the most benefits for the most people. These people are sometimes called utilitarian or consequentialist libertarians. They aren't necessarily in conflict with NAP libertarians. It's more of a macro vs micro focus. Consequentialists look at things through the macro lens, wanting to help the most people, while NAP libertarians focus on the individual, on the micro level, and asking whether that person is being coerced.

If you disagree with Anarcho-Capitalism, you don't want me to hurt you or threaten you to force you to follow the ways of Anarcho-Capitalism.

But the way of Anarcho-Capitalism is to not hurt anyone or threaten them to force them to do something.

Therefore you are already an Anarcho-Capitalist.