Remember back when you were a kid? You would just do things. You never thought to yourself, “What are the relative merits of learning baseball versus football?” You just ran around the playground and played baseball and football. You built sand castles and played tag and asked silly questions and looked for bugs and dug up grass and pretended you were a sewer monster.
Tag: natural
Be More Antifragile
One of the major points of the book is that by designing all the danger out of things, trying to make the randomness and volatility go away and keep things smooth and “safe”, you make the danger worse. It’s inevitable and natural. Completely unavoidable. Just like how anti-gun “laws” actually increase the risks they claim to want to solve. The people who embrace these ideas may have good intentions, but they are idiots.
Con Trolling
Here’s how it works: a troll preys on your need to be affirmed. Nearly everything that a troll does is to signal a message to you that says “I don’t like you and I’m not going to grant you the gift of my approval.” Once you start using arguments as a means of begging the troll to become your ally, the troll wins. Now he/she can simply play the easy and endless game of using everything you say as a basis for offering responses that make you feel more desperate for their acceptance and more frustrated for not receiving it.
The Role of Capitalism in Anarchy
Anarcho-capitalists have a tendency to fancy themselves as too far outside the normal sphere of anarchy when we are actually just anarchists who understand both economics and human nature. In a free society devoid of the fiction that is authority, some people would indeed acquire, improve, and trade natural resources. Ergo, capitalism. This would happen not because a system of capitalism was established but simply because no one was stopping production and trade from occurring.
The Law According to the Somalis
Many voluntaryists have looked longingly toward Somalia for evidence of our ideas in practice. But it’s a little tough when that real-world example also happens to be the quintessential image of extreme poverty and feuding warlords for most people. Nonetheless, sometimes an article appears that rightly points out that comparing Somalia to developed nations is a little intellectually dishonest. In fact, Somalia has improved by virtually every measure of standard of living without a state, or when compared to its neighbors that still have a state.
Entrepreneurship is the Best Defense Against Hierarchy
Self-sufficiency often brings to mind recluses living in the woods, raising their own food, and building their own shelter. This doesn’t have to be the case though. Anybody who has the means of creating enough wealth to trade for their wants and needs is self-sufficient. You don’t need to raise your own food so long as you can trade with somebody who has a surplus of food and is willing to trade it with you. As an entrepreneur you cannot be fired by a boss and you’re not reliant on a state to protect you from an egregious employer.
What Anarchy Means to Me
Whilst most governments remain monopolistic “States”, I would prefer for them to be as small as possible in order to maximise my element of choice. In an anarcho-capitalist society, however, where communities would effectively have complete freedom to choose which regime to live under, and where every regime would have been perfected by fierce market competition to provide the best possible quality of life, the results might surprise even the most brilliant economists.
The Drug Named “Control”
Drugs laws in general are predicated on the assumption that though drug consumption is an individual behavior, the effects of that consumption, especially in the aggregate, are a net negative to society. Laws punishing the production, distribution, and use of drugs are therefore an attempt to prevent individuals from causing harm to society as a whole. In pursuing such policies, the government which seeks to discourage drug use in fact encourages the abuse of and addiction to the one drug it loves and will never outlaw: control.
“Spanking” Children Is Domestic Violence
While the average American would look at you like you were crazy if you said it was okay for a man to hit his wife if she didn’t obey him, that same person would likely argue that hitting – or “spanking” – children is not only acceptable, but advisable for producing “well-behaved, functioning” members of society.
This not only defies logic, it defies science.
The Civic Duty of an Anarchist
Ok, now I know what you’re thinking. “The civic duty? Do you even anarchy, bro?” No, I get it. We’re anarchists. We don’t vote. We don’t participate in elections. We think paying taxes is for schmucks, and actively look for ways to lessen how much we pay (if we pay at all *wink wink*), and generally, could not care less about the political process. It’s corrupt, fake, and full of deception, pay-offs, theft, armed robbery, and murder. A wise philosopher once said “Government is the price we pay for being uncivilized.” I get it. So how does an anarchist participate? Should an anarchist participate, even? Well, I think there are a number of ways that anarchists can engage the public, if we so choose (and we should).