"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." ~ H.L. Mencken
Crony Capitalism? Blame the Progressives
"The Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement has focused a lot of attention on private wealth creation through the exercise of government power — what we might more familiarly call 'crony capitalism.' These protesters and I may differ on a whole lot of things – perhaps even most things – but we share the same disdain for this sort of individual enrichment through one’s access to government."
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If I didn't know better I'd think from the first 3/4 of his video Napolitano was edging toward anarchy. But alas, at the end he confirms his belief that by engaging in politics and electing a Ron Paul "we" can, in fact, tame the beast.
Abstain From Beans.
Sam
G'day Sam,
Yes, I thought you might, WOW!, like I did, at the first nine tenths of that youtube video. Maybe he's not quite ready to do away with government altogether yet, but he's edging closer every day.
And, don't forget, he also said this; "What if the heart of the government policy remains the same no matter who's in the White House?" Would that not possibly negate the Ron Paul questions at the end? They were just questions, after all.
Not that Forbes should get a pass on Crony Capitalism but I quote the following from the op-ed:
"Where I think the OWS folks go off the rails is their assumption that this sort of cronyism represents the true beating heart of capitalism...."
I'm not willing to say the OWS are off the rails completely on that point but then unlike the author I'm not making the mistake of equating capitalism and free market as the same thing either. Capitalism's mother in mercantilism and it's grandmother in fuedalism was all about state power and there's no reason to see the child having abandoned the dogma and traditions of the family matriarchs!
Some of the OWS folk do IMO misconstrue real free markets with the fakery that calls itself such but I can understand why too.
The problem is not capital. Capital is simply the resource you will need to open a shop. If you plan to produce widgets you'll need some sort of resource useable to vendors and laborers to purchase the machinery, equipment, labor, sales and raw materials to get widgets on store shelves so people can buy them. Since those individuals who have formed monopolies on coercion ("The-Government") have declared, under threat of violence, that you must use their fiat "currency" (called "dollars" in this part of the planet), that is the resource you will need.
The problem is ISM. Once ISM enters the picture, the idea of free market becomes totally befuddled in the minds of those who do not understand the nature of getting a business financed and off the ground in order to provide employment for those who wish to do an honest day's work and receive an honest day's pay.
ISM implies interface with those people who make up the monopoly on force. Those are the sociopaths who proceed under the reification of "The-State". They would prefer you call them "our rulers" or "our policy makers" (what a criminal misnomer) to absolve them of responsibility for the ISM (this ISM we're discussing, in case you've forgotten, is "capitalism"). And be sure to get out the vote.
Through violent incursions into the free market by way of taxation, regulation, OSHA and other invasions far too numerous to list here, it is damned difficult to know whom to blame, because it's difficult for an honest businessman to seek out honest lenders to finance an honest enterprise because of the prerequisite for him to sleep with and pay prostitute fees to those holding the monopoly on violence. If anybody were to ask me for a one-word definition of government, I would answer, "obfuscation". That sez it all.
So they protest. And they occupy. Anything and everything. Which plays directly into the hands of those who maintain the legitimacy of state agents. The talking heads of state media love it. It calls for more government action -- more redistribution of "wealth".
Gimme, gimme, gimme!
There is a solution. Ask me some day -- although those of you reading this already know. Sam
At the very least one must be able see thru the political myths men have lived by since Neolithic times.
Today it is easier to attack a politically correct shadow with a pitch fork than the statue that darkens the landscape. And thereby avoid the controversial causes and any taint of stigma.
I recommend Tom Woods and Stefan Molyneux Take On Wall Street to begin to understand this issue!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXNOxnn7_uA&feature=youtube_gdata
Woods asks the Right Question: Would there likely be Less Wars and Bailouts--that enrich the military-industrial complex and politically connected fat cats--Or More if the Fed Gov had a magical money machine? This is not a hypothetical question. They--all the above--Do have such a machine and access to it: it is called The Federal Reserve System.
As Hayek points out money is half of every transaction economy wide. And Woods makes a cogent connection: Is there a chance that this magic printing machine has a tinsy chance of creating economy wide up and down boom, bust volatility and classes of people herded, corralled and enriched by Govt?
This is not the same as the pyramid of ability or comparative advantages of a division of labor society. What's changed? There is now more impoverishing Wars and the same for Bailouts than can be supported or hidden.
There is only one entity that can pit the poor against the rich, the young against the old, the white against the black, this country against another and thrive thru divide and conquer.
Woods and Molyneux further discuss: Seeing thru the duality of what is bad, evil and corrupt in the private sector magically rendered good in the public sector. It can only occur on the scale we have via a "coercive" monopoly that can be wielded by the politically connected to bypass the competition of free market.
Although I was taught to accept this inverted moral code (until I read Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", Royce's "Holgoram of Liberty", DiLorenzo's "The Real Lincoln", etc), rising prices are not normal . And saying the people running the system are bad and that we need to get Big Bird and Barney the Dinosaur to run the system is also not the answer. The System (Fascism) must be abandoned.
Indeed US Fascism is a most insidious mixture of the key ingredients while maintaining the necessary nuance to snooker the masses, the media, and the respectable folks across the spectrum. http://mises.org/daily/5634
Too many say, yes but surely too much freedom needs an authority system to step in is justified? After all Deregulation caused these chaotic issues? And look what happened?
Yet the same people who are so-called anti-establishment standing up to prevailing wisdom never ask themselves why do they accept the prevailing wisdom put forth by the same who did not see the crisis coming nor the causes?
As long as there are elected politicians, *politically connected* businessmen, banksters and members of the military-industrial complex will *Game the System*--and bypass competition and productive work.
Here I think the OWS has a legitimate gripe! But one size does not fit all. Do not throw the baby out with the bath water. *There are honest innovators and entreprenuers who are not politically connected...How does one separate out the two?*
The Occupy Wall Street know so much but only go so far. As Butler Shaffer points out: Running to one wing or the other of the same bird of prey is not the answer to undo the effects of that wing.
The Repeal of Glass Stegall Banking Act (1933) is a red herring as is the failure to pro-actively regulate. Red herrings put out there by those Gaming the System.
Obviously after the fact you can see that the housing bubble blew up. No kidding! The issue is where are the regulators and their chiefs when this is going on! They were the ones telling us everything was fine. And forcing rising interest rates down and thereby covering up the mkt feed back signals that would have stopped the housing bubble.
The Banks were ALWAYS allowed to securitize mtgs and hold those mortgages as investments. Nothing changed in that regard. The problem was banks did traditional banking things badly. Why? Because they knew they would be bailed out by the Fed Reserve! http://lewrockwell.com/woods/woods183.html
Finally there are bad leadership in the financial institutions but why is it so hard to get rid of them? The people who are protesting now are cut from the same cloth as the people who want and introduced more regulation. The Williams Act...and other legislation against so-called hostile take overs is basically the CEO Protection Act of 1986.
Individual share holders have since found it very difficult to discipline bank or corporate management. There are very strict limits on how much institutional investors can own of a bank or financial company. It is 1% at most.
The investor's natural oversight--of wanting a company to do well and not do crazy things--as a natural regulator is artificially debilitated and scattered by govt regulators and regulations!
Again and again it can be seen that it is Govt consistently protecting the bad and fat cats! Not helping to bring them down. No worries if there is problem the bankers will be made whole with a Greenspan or Bernake put (magic printing press)
The banks know they can act more recklessly than they otherwise would!! They have a sugar daddy waiting in the wings. Why don't you see this in the fishing companies nor book publishing? The FED reserve was manipulating interest rates making housing investing look sensible and better investment than it really was!
Every time the economy tried to tell people stop spending this is a bad investment the Fed Reserve intervenes and turns those red lights off and make them green!
Regulators are not far seeing. They are time serving drones. Stop praying to them and attributing to them super human powers...
Stop defending the semi socialist position of OWS nor making the Fed Reserve Bank more socialistic via the US Govt. The problem is The Fed--Central Planing--Reserve system embedded in the free market and drawn up not to increase wealth and prospects for you and me but designed to be The Great Bailout Banker System Extraordinaire that we have today. They are false alternatives...
*In some sense Occupy The Federal Reserve would make more sense*. Specifically: Occupy Liberty Street (OLS)! (The Federal Reserve Bank of New York)
http://lewrockwell.com/north/north1051.html
*Marginalization is the better and to me only solution. Government is marginalized when it is ignored, when individuals eschew the political process*.
http://mises.org/daily/5758/Depoliticize-Everything
Reference:
*The "central bank" is not a real bank. Everything about it is permeated with government power. At the heart of the financial and monetary system of a nation that is supposed to be an exemplar of free markets is a government money-bureau*.
http://lewrockwell.com/rozeff/rozeff364.html
Quote scholarly sources if you're going to use scholarly terms like "neolithic." OK? Quoting religio-economic ideological sources who eschew empirical data is less that honest.
I bet lewrockwell.com and mises.org hardly have a self-styled scholar who would admit that humans are primate mammals - animals. That's stupid multiplied by stupid.
...The mainstream political scientists and economists of this generation were completely useless for predicting the disaster we now confront, and continue to pour forth nothing but *the most worthless empirical studies of yesterday's least consequential issues*."
At some point in the future, however, after failure upon failure, social scientists will get around to looking at why they *keep failing to predict these important social events*. At that point, we can only hope that nothing will interest them more about this dark period of history than the failure of their predecessors, and that they may finally seek out an alternative to empiricism that can transform them from backward-looking failures into true social scientists...
Gathering Data while Washington Burns...
Mises Daily: Tuesday, July 06, 2010 by Mark R. Crovelli
http://direct.mises.org/daily/4529/Gathering-Data-while-Washington-Burns
Who listens to economists? LOL! Peak Oil scientists predicted this 30 years ago.
Come on, give me a Cornucopian* economist retort, a.k.a., that idiot Julian Simon, the losin'est bettor in the economic field.
__________
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornucopian
Apparently enough are seeing thru the difference between The Austrian School at Mises Vs Mainstream economists/political scientists and their abject failure-- perpetual wars and debt bailouts. See post above that starts "At the very least one must be able to see thru the political myths men have lived by since Neolithic times.
The Root of the Problem--If one digs--excavates--into the matter more deeply, future social scientists will ultimately arrive at the fundamental cause of the *appalling failure of today's social scientists' to predict or offer solutions to the disaster*: they decided *to adopt empiricism as their method for studying man* much like *main stream economists and political scientists* and a certain empiricist on this site.
Re: ..."Indeed US Fascism is a most insidious mixture of the key ingredients while maintaining the necessary nuance to snooker the masses, the media, and the respectable folks across the spectrum. http://mises.org/daily/5634"
Unbroken link:
https://wayback.archive.org/web/20160704091604/https://mises.org/library...
Ya think?
Genesis 34:10 "You can settle among us; the land is open to you. Live in it, trade in it, and acquire property in it.”
How many wars are mentioned after Genesis 34:10? (Hint, I'm quoting the Bible literarily, not literally.)
Now, purchase ye a good book on war. I've got it sitting in my lap right now:
The Origins Of War: From The Stone Age To Alexander The Great
by Arther Ferrill
http://www.getcited.org/pub/102389214
You'll find out Mises is as full of bunk as anybody mainstream; i.e., agricultural city-Statism (civilization) cheerleaders.
• Domestication (domination over other species) = violence to our own species.
• Agriculture (intensive domination over other species) = intensive violence to our own species.
It's just that simple; the Marx and Mises city-statist broz missed it. You have too.
...In order to move beyond making subjective statements of belief about how parts of the world work, the scientist would either need to become omniscient himself or consult someone who is omniscient, or else he would need to move beyond gathering and interpreting empirical evidence. Because the former options are, presumably, not open to him, the scientist's only viable option is to discover "facts" about the world, or parts of the world, that cannot possibly be thought to be false, and which are not open to misinterpretation. In other words, the scientist would have to transform himself from an empiricist into a "rationalist" who was concerned to discover fundamental truths about the world (i.e., a priori truths about the world) and elucidate them by means of a deductive and rationalistic method.[4] Only then would the scientist be in a position to say that he has found "facts" about parts of the world that are "indisputably true."
By dogmatically endorsing the "scientific method" as the only means to acquire knowledge about the world, the empirically minded scientist tacitly admits that it is possible to discover fundamental truths about the world without going out and "testing" them. For, the proposition "all hypotheses and theories must be 'tested' against empirical experience" purports to be objectively and universally true, yet the proposition itself has not and can never be "tested." Therefore the proposition is self-contradictory and thus false, a fact that establishes that it is indeed possible to discover irrefutable and demonstrable truths about the world without going out and testing them.
Thus, absolute certainty in science cannot be acquired by means of the "scientific method" and/or the collection and interpretation of empirical evidence. For beings that lack omniscience, collection and interpretation of empirical evidence can only yield imperfect and subjective beliefs about how the world "works." Instead, absolute certainty in science can only be acquired by discovering propositions about the world that can be known to be true a priori — propositions that cannot possibly be thought to be false.
*This observation, in a nutshell, forms the foundation and is the great strength of (Mises) Austrian School of economics, which stands virtually alone in the contemporary world as a bastion for thinkers who are unsatisfied with imperfect and subjective approaches to science...*
http://mises.org/daily/5860/What-Is-a-Scientific-Theory
Science (observation + inductive thinking) isn't perfect; but those with false premises (upon which rests their fragile deductive house-of-cards syllogisms) hate it.
Especially economists. Or charlatans. Either term is pretty descriptive of either Mises or Krugman, or the like. And their True® Believers.
The biggest laughs of them all come from Paul Krugman of the New York Times. Krugman, as anyone with a functioning cerebrum knows, is nothing but a court jester or sideshow act of the collapse.
Insane, Homeless Man Finds Suit in Trash. He looks like an insane, homeless man. And, I realize I just insulted insane, homeless men around the world.
Adding to the laugh factor, everything he says sounds like what an insane, homeless man would say! It’s hard to know where to even begin with him.
And yet Paul Krugman most resembles a certain resident data modeling empiricist/positivist on this site with his primitivist teachers. Gak! With all their attendant problems that they model so well. Hardly in the same camp with those Miseans who show how logic trumps both statistics and its spurious conclusions and patterns.
I think Tom Woods asks The Right Question--and certainly the most logical--and that he comes to the right conclusions and solutions (hint it's not more of the same insanity that got us into this mess nor does it require the culling of the masses before some backward-looking failures can practice their primitivists ways). But don't take my word for it. Check out the posts above, Dear Reader...
You're still bent out of shape because simple observation in the real world debunks your make-believe premises.
Which makes Paul Krugman pretty much like you: another agricultural city-Statism (civilization) swindler.
So, you continue to lie to cover up your evasion of empirical data. (Hardly surprising from your hustlin' type.) I've said several times that I do not advocate "going back to primitivism" because it is impossible to do. But the critique of civilization against 2 million years of our primitive ancestors' Original Affluent Society (Sahlins, 1974) still stands true as ever. If you dare to not evade reality.
And your dear leader, Ayn "Pol Pot" Rand was the one who dreamed of eliminating most people on earth. Oh wait, she dehumanized them like all genocidal tyrants do into mere "parasites." They're not people at all; just parasites, Objectivistly rationalized.
"Sweep aside those parasites..."
Yeah, Pol Pot sounded pretty much the same, and his goal was "restarting civilization" at "year Zero." Maybe Pol Pot read Ayn Rand?
She had the same murderous fantasy: blow the whole thing up and start over. That's what Atlas Shrugged is all about, a Mathusian novel to get the earth's population back to its Objectivist carrying capacity. So let's compare these two batshit crazy kooks:
Pol Pot wanted to:
(a) "restart civilization"
(b) by cleansing civilization of liberal influences
(c)and punishing and starving out people he regarded as subhumans
(d) at Year Zero.
Ayn Rand wanted also to:
(a) restart civilization
(b) by cleansing civilization of liberal influences
(c) and punishing and starving out people she regarded as subhumans
(d) with a wave of the dollar brand cigarette.
Not much difference. But what else would you expect from a philosophical movement inspired by a serial child killer?
Perhaps the most distinctive feature of the economics of Ludwig von Mises is his insistence on the a priori approach. For Mises, economic "laws" must be logically deduced from antecedent axioms, so that—assuming the initial assumptions are true—the conclusions reached are just as valid as any result in Euclidean geometry.
This stands in sharp contrast to the method of the positivists, a camp that includes most of today's practicing economists and a certain resident empiricist and primitivist. In their opinion, economics can only be "scientific" if it adopts the procedures used by the natural scientists. Roughly, the positivists--such as Krugman and Keynes--feel that economists should form hypotheses with testable implications, and then collect data to measure the accuracy of their predictions.
"The necessary result of the adoption of this *empiricist* epistemological and methodological model was that social scientists would always be behind the curve of any emerging social phenomenon."
http://direct.mises.org/daily/4529/Gathering-Data-while-Washington-Burns
Claims of "a priori" are a fraud when a premise can be checked against empirical data. That's what I keep telling you; your religio-economic priesthood keeps spouting premises that are easily debunked. You're just trying to weasel, equivalent to a fundamentalist claiming divine inspiration for his scriptures.
If Mises states that fresh water freezes at 28 degrees, and one empirically checks his statement and finds it doesn't, then only an intellectual fraud would try an end-run around reality and claim such a person is a positivist (he may or he may not be, it matters not) to deflect the the reality that the premise is checkable against empirical data.
An honest man would admit his mistake. Not an economist though!
Economists probably shouldn't be making "a priori" statements that are checkable against empirical data if they want to stay in the realm of "a priori" deductive thinking. But Mises and Rand and Rothbard made many such statements, easily checkable.
They were flat-out wrong.
You won't admit it, because truth doesn't matter to you; protecting your religio-economic dogma does.
You won't even follow your Dear Leader's advice to "check your premises."
Those who cleave to data charts--the thing between their shoulders--assume that I cleave similarly but I shrugged (long ago....) Some call it "shrieking" and just follow the "leader", but really that says more about them than I ever could...
It's not necessary for me to take my protractor and check the internal angles of a triangle. They are 180 degrees. Some say to hell with logic but again that says more about their premises than I ever could or would want to...
Logic vs Empiricism--opens up a world that separates Mises from Keynes (Krugman). And yet in many ways Rand, presaged Mises because she wrote about what she had yet to become and did not have to wait for her students to go full tilt into the realm of self-rule...
Got blame? Take it up with Lincoln and Sherman (DiLorenzo had not written "The Real Lincoln" in her time. Holding her responsible for something a certain poster here missed himself says volumes more than I ever could...
Me? I'm not a Misean nor Ran-dian nor Anarchist. I am "Indomitus" and I cannot even use the word "system" as it relates to freedom because there is no system for freedom...another posting already...
I cannot free the UNFree. They must find their own way. I have gleaned some fine ideas that I have made my own (some can misconstrue this, let them take my auto-didactism and chart its course and miss the point)!
The primitives posit that a culling of the "We" must take place before they can be free. They would love to be a war profiteer--so the data chartist premise--but logically and morally it is much more important to ensure you and I dear reader don’t become casualties of such...
If you want to study triangles, you should stay with in the realm of triangle axioms.
When you start positing claims that can be checked in the real world, only an intellectual fraud would claim something provably false was somehow "a priori" knowledge.
When Mises states: "The natural condition of man is extreme poverty and insecurity....Primitive man was always haunted by the specter of death from starvation," he's parroting the falsehoods of Hobbes.
By observation, anthropologists, archeologists, evolutionary biologists, medical historians, etc. have all debunked such Hobbesian lies created to apologize for the oppressive hierarchy of city-Statism (civilization.)
Then you further your intellectual fraud by trying to abandon those you were defending just, what, yesterday? Do you think I'm as stupid as you? Not hardly, pilgrim.
You're the only one who keeps talking about culling -- because you're hiding the fact that you want to cull the "parasite" sub-humans who aren't followers of your Totalitarian Capitalist ideology that you falsely posit as "free." And then you'll commit the intellectual fraud of calling genocide "self-defense." You'll cook up some fraudulent excuse how they "deserved it."
In fact, you buddy here already said that in his Totalitarian Capitalism, those without enough money deservedly "starve to death." Yep, that's what he said. "Starve to death," with nary a shred of human empathy.
Oh right, to you, evolutionary biologists are as evil as they are to Fundamentalist Biblical Literalists. Humans are created in your a priori image! There can be no observable data, across many species, about behavior that demonstrates morals and empathy and altruism, because you don't want it to be!
And those intellectual smarty-pants who are smart enough to observe such, well, they're just parasites to you, right? Send them to hell to burn forever and ever, amen! Maybe that's too silly these days, let's try a different rationalized tack:
"“Sweep aside those parasites of subsidized classrooms, who live on the profits of the mind of others and proclaim that man needs no morality, no values, no code of behavior!" ~Ayn Rand
There's your Fundamentalist Preacher who , and you sound just like it: an intellectual fraud. A fraud who wants people to ignore their senses, their powers of observation, in favor of believing your ideology about the real world is as axiomatic your simple-minded triangles.
~According to our resident Altruist: What "We" need is to be freed of the inhabitants of the World in accordance with the premises of Dunbar, Malthus and the Science of Empiricism. Ask yourself dear reader, is that really what you need?
~What is self-evident (at least to me on immediate inspection)--Gak--is that the primitivist's data driven ideas are the megalomania ravings of a Sociopath righteously demanding indulgence, acceptance and the sanction of death on a Global Scale for the good of his "We" who--then and only then--will be free to gambol in the forest undisturbed...
~The non-sacrificial ideas of Rand, Mises AND Thoreau--are hardly abandoned in "Atlas Shrugged". They are hardly abandoned here (nor LewRockwell.com or Mises.org). Indeed as their students Linda and Morris Tannehill point out in "The Market For Liberty": "If revolution comes by violence, and in advance of the light, the old struggle will have to be begun again".
I challenge you to cite anything I said close to your lies. Put up or shut up, Atlas.
Funny how you blank-out Ayn "Pol Pot" Rand's talk about deliberately killing-off de-humanized "parasites" and "lice." (Some of Rand's favorite words.) Tyrants do that sort of stuff. Dehumanize, and then sanitize.
Her written fantasies of philosophically undesirables dying horrible deaths is a logical exhibition of the inspiration of her novels — William Hickman, a cold-blooded serial child killer and dismemberer.
Even the usual dense-headed conservatives used to have her figured out, before they too began embracing her misanthropy.
"From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too..."
~Whittaker Chambers
Big Sister Is Watching You
From the Dec. 28, 1957, issue of NR.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/222482/big-sister-watching-you/fl...
The reality is, altruism is observed across the animal kingdom, including humans. Weird how it hasn't wiped out whole species after millions of years, eh? Maybe Ayn should have checked her premises? I guess not if you have a novel to sell.
The following essay has an array of articles and texts referenced—based on observed (empirical) reality, not fevered ideology—which Atlas must desperately evade to cling to his religio-economic faith.
Biological Altruism
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/altruism-biological/
Altruism, and nearly everything else good in humans, does become a toxic mimicry of 2 million years human evolution as egalitarian Non-State social band animals who lived as "autonomous and sovereign" individuals "who bowed to no external political leaders." (Service, 1975)
Agricultural city-Statism forces people into Mass Society, yet Atlas and Ayn were all for city-Statism (civilization.)
Care to address this contradiction of supposedly being against the state but all for City-Statism, Atlas?
I got this from your own posts. If you don't recognize your own drivel you need to go back and read your own posts.
You cite nothing; you fail the challenge.
Being that "War is a staple of civilization" (Zerzan, 1005) I have stated that I think nuclear war over dwindling resources is nearly inevitable, and so do many others, (Moore, 2007; and would put us back in the Stone Age, and that having some "re-wild skills in your back pocket" is a wise preparation.
You then lied and said I advocated nuclear war to wipe out the population of the earth. You must think your lies now have automatically become as axiomatic as triangle angles.
You, Atlas, are an intellectual fraud.
• You evade that I have written at great length about how to AVOID people dying as agricultural civilization comes to another collapse. One fellow I mentioned, John Jeavons, has proven and demonstrated for years a human diet can be gown in 1000 sq. ft.
• You evade the simple fact that all agricultural civilizations collapse; ours is in the process now. People can AVOID tragedy by learning horticultural-permaculture-biointensive gardening methods.
• You evade the fact that altruism, egalitarianism, and empathy are aspects of biological evolution—millions of years before the State came along; they in no way equal the forced "we-ism" of agricultural city-Statism, as you keep falsely purporting.
• You evade that the State is an integral and inseparable aspect of agricultural city-Statism (civilization) and have failed to provide a single example otherwise.
• You make pronouncements about the real world, then hide behind your "a priori" triangles dogma like a fundamentalist clinging to his Inspired Scriptures, evading real life observation of the real world.
It's time you checked your premises.
__________________
Zerzan, John (2005) On the Origins of War. http://www.scribd.com/doc/20298938/Zerzan-The-Origins-of-War
Moore, Carol (2007) IS WORLD NUCLEAR WAR INEVITABLE? http://carolmoore.net/nuclearwar/
Hellman, Martin (1985) On the Probability of Nuclear War http://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/opinion/inevitability.html
Jeavons, John (2006) How to Grow More Vegetables, (and fruit, nuts, berries, grains and other crops) Than You Ever Thought Possible On Less Land Than You Can Imagine http://www.bountifulgardens.org/
Dunbar, Malthus and the Empiricist posits are false alternatives. There is NO empirical evidence to support Dunbar.
The Covenant of Unanimous Consent, which is for interpersonal relationships (without the need to control others; without the need for space travel (which would require an industrial civilization, which is being destroyed by Govt)) and without the need for a grand kill off. But only self-control. Those that do not take care of themselves--you--will suffer the consequences.
There is plenty of wilderness. There are others out there now! If you are unable to go that is your own fault. Laissez faire. Go to it! The 99% won't go quietly into the night. Apparently you are hoping to be part of the 1% taking a BIG Gamble on the hope that they will not defend themselves and that they won't come looking for you....
Neocortex size isn't empirical evidence to you...
• Dunbar, R.I.M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution 22 (6): 469–493.
• Dunbar, R.I.M. (1993). Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4): 681–735.
• Sawaguchi, T., & Kudo, H. (1990). Neocortical development and social structure in primates. Primates 31: 283–290.
• Kudoa, H., Dunbar, R.I.M. (2001). Neocortex size and social network size in primates. Animal Behaviour 62 (4) 711–722.
• Barton, R. A. (1996). Neocortex Size and Behavioural Ecology. Primates Proceedings: Biological Sciences 263 (1367): 173-177.
...but it is to anybody with a couple firing neurons.
I did wonder when a neo-con psychopath like Atlas would start-up with the tired ol' "love it or leave it" bromide.
In reality, the US Gov't completely obliterated the last vestiges of Non-State sociopolitical typology over 100 years ago. Even the "wilderness" has hoards of big-government Game Wardens and Forest Strangers, as Charlie Brown calls them. (A few folks desperate to live a non-state life have even tried -- and had their kids taken away from their teepee.) And the landbase, flora and fauna are often nearly or completely destroyed. For example, buffalo aren't roaming the plains anymore, since the Capitalists decimated the herd. Maybe you didn't hear.
Oh, that's right, hearing and other sensuous observation is evilly "Epiricist" to you. Only pure deductively derived triangle angle dangles for you.
P.S. I hope you never read Buckminster Fuller's Synergetics, who eschewed Euclid's lines because they don't describe the way nature actually behaves. But if you find any real-life entity that extends forever like a "line," let me know, OK?
The problem is primitivism. It is pure evil....It is not solving the problem. Someone who is so fixated on their problem of state and cities apparently cannot think outside their Dunbar, Malthus, Empiricism out of touch with reality map..
A Primitivist is not here to teach nor understand. Don't care what the reason is Mommy--Dunbar, Malthus, Empiricism--said so...(Replacing the State with Mommy-ism is not the answer). sTROLLING in the wilderness does not require primitivism.
Primitivism is what we came from. Primitivism is old age and dead at 25. I can go modern with a 4 wheel into the wilderness. He can go build his stone ax--that's primitive. Go primitive? Who cares if a primitive wants to go. *Taking us with him is the problem*.
Primitivism awaits. Go for it. The greatest fool can ask more than the wisest man can answer.
~For those blaming Ayn Rand for genocide instead of embracing her break thru contributions to freedom.
Lincoln, Sherman and Sheridan (Govt) do not come up in the Slavery and Native Indian genocide map for our resident We-ist. This is hardly Rand's fault for missing what he failed to mention HIMSELF and what is by all accounts considered TODAY as Revisionist History! http://www.strike-the-root.com/vision-of-free-society-1
~For those smearing Rand as a lover of psycho-killers, by ignoring her qualifying comments is, I submit, intellectually dishonest.
But what did the author-philosopher actually say about Hickman? In The Journals of Ayn Rand, she is clearly quoted: “[My hero is] very far from him, of course. The outside of Hickman, but not the inside. Much deeper and much more. A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.”
There was clearly a context when Rand made her journal entry. Anyone who read her books would understand that the philosopher/writer is against initiation of force. She was morally against the crime Hickman committed and throughout her life, she advocated individual freedom and not collectivism.
~In general, slave-mentality can consist of any of these elements:
* A compulsion or obsession to blame others and things or factors outside yourself.
* A belief that the world in general is unfair.
* The belief that because of "government," "its laws," etc. you can't be free.
* An emphasis on changing or "fighting" factors outside yourself ("the system," "the ruling class," "big-daddy-government," etc.).
* Submission to real or imagined "external authorities."
* A strong orientation of "I'm right; you (and practically everything and everybody else) are wrong.
* A rejection of the notion that you can improve yourself, rise above your circumstances, and become the master of your destiny.
* A compulsion to attack anyone who suggests you can improve yourself.