Hans-Herman Hoppe is fucking cool. I don’t give a shit. Everyone makes occasional errors.

Why don’t statists let libertarians carve out a little minarchist corner of the country? It could be a section of New Hampshire or somewhere else. Whatever. Let those pesky libertarians nut up. Obviously, it wouldn’t be Ancapistan or a purist Libertopia - we have to compromise. People would never accept that. But what about a minimal state?

In this area, people only pay enough federal taxes to cover their share of national defense and courts. Social security and most federal regulations go by the wayside for this area, and people who retire there have reduced social security benefits up to a cut-off age where people at that point receive no social security benefits, assuming the half-assed Libertopia lasts that long. For fifteen years, the feds agree absolutely not to touch it and to force the state government to step off as well. The only state laws which apply are obvious ones - prohibitions on aggression, theft, fraud - but the courts handle matters differently, operating largely under tort law except for the more heinous crimes. Pollution is dealt with as a violation of property. The state courts are the highest appellate except for cases involving the state, in which case they must defer to private arbiters. For non-criminal matters, or criminal matters under the more heinous categories, private arbiters compete with state courts. The drug war is void in this area, as are state prohibitions of prostitution and gambling. Property is acquired in a neo-Lockean manner, meaning someone who leaves land untouched for years loses the claim if anyone settles the land and improves it. No zoning laws or any of that garbage. No burdensome regulation. Most or all economic regulations arise from the market. Permits and licenses for pretty much everything end. Monetary competition to the Federal Reserve notes would be permitted here.

As a raving an-cap emergentist lunatic or whatever I wish to label myself, this falls far short of optimality. Still, it’s a fuck load closer than the current state of affairs and I would settle for this as a short-term victory if it was achievable. I don’t think it is. I wish it would happen, because otherwise I see any victories liberty seizes in my lifetime being largely marginal, certainly for the duration of my youth. What if we could get a popular petition and people just decided to shut the whiny libertarians up once and for all? Petitions mean dick, but it’s a futile hope.

patchesthegreat:

Paulinite: Ron Paul liberty freedom derp
Me: But what about gay marriage?
Paulinite: Ron Paul supports the freedom for people to marry whoever they want!
Me: But what about the Marriage Protection Act, which would have prevented federal challenges to DOMA? Or the We the…

Marriage is a rite not a right. The only reason people wish it to be a right is because of benefits the government bestows upon married couples. Do away with that shit and it lacks teeth. Suddenly, no one cares. You don’t need a marriage license to get goodies anymore because they don’t exist. Suddenly, it is once more a ceremony of an explicit contract between two individuals. Maybe if it works like heterosexual marriages, gay marriage contracts will favor the effeminate, generally less productive partner such that they can reap alimony and take all the children.

The invisible hand is a really bad metaphor. People should use “spontaneous order” or “catallaxy”. Invisible hand implies something intangible, something which guides with specific intent. People imagine divine intervention, and the association isn’t much of a leap.

People like to raise all sorts of objections to private means of providing many services, defense or policing being just one of a great many. If ye peons hath heeded my past advice, you’ve gone out in the world and shot out assertions like an M134. You’re a veritable fallacy machine gun now. So if you have followed my sage advice, you’re well equipped to see through the garbage we’ve gathered to address. You’ll probably realize how I will counter these claims before even I. Keep in mind that we’re not planning how things will work - we are providing plausible solutions, for that alone is enough to dispel the “state must do it” mantra. Not necessary solutions, merely plausible ones.

“Private police will result in a massive disparity in security between people of means and the poor!”

Derpity derp you fucking herp. I mean, come on. Think about what you people say before you start drooling everywhere. Because then you expect me to clean up the mess. How inconsiderate!

There’s already a massive disparity between security for the rich and poor or middle class. Consider a few facts: poorer neighborhoods are disproportionately targeted for police raids, meaning the number of police shootings are almost certainly higher there; police typically run regular patrols along poorer neighborhoods less; police precincts are generally placed furthest from said poor neighborhoods as well.

Think about who needs security most: businesses, especially those with a lot of regular cash flow, and wealthy individuals with expensive estates. For the middle class and lower class and establishments that don’t hold such a pressing need for security, regular patrols and a minor police presence usually maintains a low rate of overt crime. Imagine a security detail that doesn’t bother with money-grabbing maneuvers like speed traps or otherwise trying to insure pedantic submission to road rules, and a security force not bogged down by a drug war like current police. Security presence will be more equitable and more effective whenever it is employed. But there is no need for equal security everywhere. Considering differing needs, the market can cater to these niches and wide range of needs far better than the state monopolies can. When people have more need for defense, they spend more money on defense.

“But how will the impoverished afford private security?”

In most cases, they probably won’t. If the abject poor are that low, they’ll most likely resort to community security committees. People in these areas will probably just agree to help each other if break-ins and vehicle thefts occur. This means additional work for these people, sure, but few people will be so poor that their communities cannot afford any formal security. For those with formal security, sometimes it will simply be the investigators and responders on call at a location a few minutes away; other times, on-site patrols and security buildings are desired and afforded.

“Well when there’s conflict between two security firms, it’ll be all-out war in the streets. The M1A2 Abrams roll out, and they start slinging nukes back and forth. Like some sort of Mad Max. OHHH GAWWD”

Warfare is expensive. When two firms engage in war, even if it’s only four dudes shooting at another four guys, they have to cover insurance for anyone who dies, property damage, replacements for any assets and personnel they lose, and that means that if any employees die in a firm, they need to hire and train a whole new person for that new vacancy and probably needlessly. It’s worth it to take down a rampaging criminal, or to threaten combat if necessary, but to actually engage in such warfare with a foe that remotely matches the firm is very, very bad business if it is at all avoidable. Unless we’re talking about defense firms attacking an internal would-be tyrant, the negative incentives stack up quite severely to punish those who would wage wanton warfare.

Before potential conflicts arise, most legal and security firms will reach agreements to avoid exactly the sort of needless expense listed above. Disputes would be taken to arbiters of at all possible. This means the firms would probably restrain their clients from rash action to the best of their ability as well. The best part, is that the appeals process could span potentially a dozen or more arbitrators, all of whom are incentivized to proceed through the cases expediently and as fairly as possible (if these firms have interest in long-term profit and sustainability).  

“It’ll be expensive and the rich will get off always, while the poor will suffer harsh punishments - maybe even public executions.”

Ancapistan suffers no drug war, though - and that means no poor people in prisons for only drug-related offenses. This sort of disparity on conviction rates and even sentencing severity already exists; most likely, such would be mitigated somewhat because people would be overall wealthier, and it wouldn’t be so easy to buy off judges or cripple prosecutors. Judges would have more incentive to keep relatively fair; any bias would necessarily be minimized to the point of being marginalized else people would soon learn not to trust that arbiter or their rulings, and thus take their custom elsewhere. Overtly corrupt judges would find very short careers indeed. Whereas today, unless the corruption is manifest and attested by extensive documentation or photographic evidence of a lobbyist or some such blowing a judge, they are fucking untouchable thanks to the unions and rules these self-interested slimy cunts establish to shield them from the consequences of their taint.

Public executions and so forth would just be bad PR. Even if executions are sanctioned by the emergent law, they would be conducted behind veils of discretion well outside the public eye. Though gunning down a rampaging scunt is clearly a separate matter from shooting a kneeling prisoner in the head PRC style. Even if the poorer folks would be convicted and punished more frequently, most of the time the punishments would be pecuniary and there wouldn’t be the same sort of institutional inertia for retribution and punishment in the current climes, where overturning most convictions is a bitch and a half where judges and prosecutors alike fight zealously against admitting their follies. A firm stands to do better if it admits its mistakes and offers compensation, rather than acting like the agents of the state who obstinately stand in conflict with the truth and suffer no consequences for their mistakes, and so can afford to continue to obfuscate the truth and deny wrongdoing for the sake of their egos.

“Security is a public good. So is defense. No way either can be provided enough. XSEPT 4 DA RICH lolololol”

Both security and defense can easily be internalized. My guess is that with the former, a security bill will usually be tagged onto the bill for being the resident of an apartment, condominium, or suburban neighborhood.  Combined with a dominant assurance pact, where 80% of the populace agree to individually pay for collective defense so long as the minimum threshold of payers is met. Defense firms will be a mandatory part of receiving legal protection and insurance, meaning some customers must defer to some approved firm for defense; defense firms provide security in peace time, while holding the capacity for high-intensity combat, including armor, anti-armor, artillery, et cetera. Defense and security, most often, will be synonymous. The reasoning is obvious; security forces require the same sort of risk-taking personnel that make good soldiers, as well as some of the armament even in peacetime.

Let’s discuss stateless defense specifically a little further. Be warned: this is just arm chair-command shit and it’s guesswork. I can’t say for sure what will happen, but I think that what I am laying out here is a potential solution for the defense problem. As above, the point is not to try to come up with solutions that everyone will necessarily employ, but rather to hypothesize that we might prove that solutions are conceivable and, perhaps more importantly, probable.

First things first: if the entire UN security council and their allies band together and send millions of troops into Ancapistan, there isn’t shit we could do - and there isn’t shit even a state could do. The fighting would be hellish, and the best we could hope for is a Pyrrhic victory on the part of the enemy, perhaps enough to force them away. But I don’t think that any invasion of that size would fail. I know that isn’t likely - the UN isn’t worth a dog turd - but since it’s even remotely possible that needs to be stated. No society could brave some massive inundation as this scenario would entail, stateless or not. If this is inevitable (again, it’s unlikely), then stateless societies will fail until a sufficiently massive global scale can be guaranteed.

Defense among stateless societies must be dealt with in a conglomerated effort. Why? The economies of scale are obvious - if all of the individual societies coalesce with a mutual defense agreement, the number of forces would increase dramatically, especially if it covers the whole of the stateless geographical area. As long as forces from Florida, for instance, agree to defend Maryland and Massachusetts and vice versa, such a reciprocal agreement will ward off state predation and allow for sufficient defense in any realistic scenario thus increasing the likelihood of successful defense astronomically. Optimal spending for defense is probably going to be less than two percent of the stateless conglomerate’s GDP. State defense in the US right now is about four percent of GDP for comparison, and composes the largest military budget in the world by far in absolute terms (if not as a percentage of GDP). 

But let’s assume a state or a few states invade. The invading force would quite likely be larger than the defense, but this won’t necessarily be cause for serious distress unless the ratio is incredibly high, probably over 2:1 or 3:1. Tactical nukes could be deployed against naval forces. Large conventional explosives could be placed on beachheads. Artillery positions and pill boxes could be placed further inland in advance of a war. Standard fortifications and so forth. Every attempt would be made to push the fighting out of cities and toward as desolate ground as possible. This means heavily fortified cities and solid intelligence so that threats can be spotted before materializing. Arterial roadways outside urban centers would probably host the majority of the defenses. Those roadways would be the means by which enemies would move throughout Ancapistan, despite any early penetration by airborne units, and hence logical chokepoints.

How do we guarantee the defense force will initiate in event of war? Just like a state military, there’s no absolute guarantee. If they all desert at the same time, then we’re shit out of luck. But if history with state militaries show anything, then as long as 60-70% of the forces stay in line, the brunt of the rest follow. Part of the common law may entail that defense firms must contribute in emergencies under severe penalties, this obligation extending to their employees as well. Financial incentives could bolster the incentive of negative consequences. Aside from that, there’s no way that the enemy could conceivably buy out enough defense firms or individuals committed to defense to cripple Ancapistan’s force sthat way. Further, firms would probably prove to be rather independent operators, cooperating with other firms in war time with strict operating procedure to reduce the effect of enemy intelligence officers, with a heavy emphasis on counter-intel. Not to mention that most of the firms would have significant self-interest in Ancapistan - they own properties and businesses that the enemy may suddenly throw into jeopardy with changing property schemes during occupation. Investments might be seized and nationalized or even handed through the nepotistic ranks of the occupying state.

The nuclear option, as in going as far as employing strategic warheads on enemy populaces could work, but only if the missiles are effective enough (i.e. break the ICBM shields frequently enough), and if there are a sufficient number trained on a sufficiently large area of the enemy nation. The way this would work is by pressuring the populace into reining in the politicians; because even if most of the government survived the nuclear blasts, millions of average citizens would not. Thus the military’s morale would break and the civilians would pressure the state into ceasing or at least reducing aggression, specifically toward Ancapistan. Thing is, Ancapistanis would probably only resort to such measures against particularly bad invaders - those who would reduce the standard of living, industrial capital, and so forth significantly, and who would turn Ancapistan into a brutal police regime. The prospect of occupation would have to be bleak enough to justify the possibility of all-out nuclear war, especially since that might result in the aggressor and Ancapistan suffering, even if the rest of the world is ‘left alone’, aside from any atmospheric effects. Anyone who promised better and whom Ancapistanis had good reason to believe would make good on their promise, despite their overwhelming force (though I think that should give many people pause - if they’re threatening such military force to conquest, could they really be that benevolent?), would probably not fall on the receiving end of earnest nuclear threat.

A huge navy would not be necessary. In all likelihood, a fleet of submarines and some warships would suffice, including maybe a handful of carriers. The airforce would not be so heavily reliant upon strategic bombers like the modern USAF, since those provide the most utility in assaults; while some would linger to soften up invading targets, the majority would be intended to intercept bombers and provide close air support for infantry and armor. Armor, of course, would be great and there would be a hell of a lot of armor both in the form of main battle tanks and APCs and light armor like M2 Bradleys and M116 STRYKERs.

If you managed to sit through all of that, all one of my phantom readers, congrats.

statehate:

Or, conversely, the belief in an infinity of past events in a universe that exists for no reason whatsoever which, a couple billion years ago, produced a magical explosion, and then a couple billion years after that, inexplicably produced life out of inorganic matter.

This isn’t something I opine on much, but this is utterly fucking retarded. Invoking a god doesn’t solve the problem - either the simplest possible form of matter or a deity (or deities) are acausal, and from them everything follows; or, there is otherwise an infinite regress. Rejecting the shaky and untenable god hypothesis does not leave a universe without a foundation. Conversely, I would argue that it is infinitely more probable that the simplest possible form of matter or potential matter (energy) formed first, acausally, than an infinitely complex god. Even if the god is not wholly omnipotent, omniscient, or omnibenevolent (the former-most and latter-most of which pose contradictions), plainly a god capable of forming matter is far more complex than the matter it created.

Gods are not defensible solely on the ground of reason for the following reason: a total lack of any evidence whatsoever; the ability to reproduce religious experiences, and the correlation of particularly vivid experiences to schizophrenia or stress-induced hallucination; the problem of evil; false elements of history and other knowledge in the Bible and other “inspired works” in other religions; the problem of evil; the vanishing god of the gaps. The latter is where god is a null hypothesis - null both that it provides no explanatory power, and that it is the default for some barring significant evidence - for contemporary mysteries. As such mysteries are solved by science and the rigors of naturalism, the domain of the god of the gaps shrinks. Obviously, we can only disprove gods if they are sufficiently defined. And the better-defined popular gods are all but vanished, proved incoherent or inconsistent with reality in some other fashion. There isn’t much I can do to counter faith, while I do consider groundless belief to be irrational, it isn’t offensive. Groundless belief doesn’t necessarily entail comical distortions of secular reasoning. People who engage in groundless belief are also more frequently humble and admit as much.

What do you view as the probability of the existence of your idiosyncratic god exists, or some other concept similar enough to warrant referring to it as a deity? If it is one-hundred percent, and you believe in an afterlife of infinite pleasure and splendor for righteous believers, why not sacrifice yourself at the earliest convenience? If it is less, and there is even the smallest seedling of disbelief or doubt, then I can understand why one would not so eagerly throw their lives away. I would rate the likelihood of the existence of anything remotely close to a god concept being infinitesimal, probably at around .000001 or something like that. And some gods we know do not exist.

newpopularfront:

“What libertarians and conservatives fail to understand about the left is that we are not in favor of “wealth distribution.” Indeed, I would argue the term itself is misleading. The point about wealth is that it never really belonged to the wealthy to begin with. The fortunes of the Rockefellers, the Carnegies, the Buffets and the Kochs, weren’t “made” by the barons themselves. They were made by their workers. They gave them a tiny reimbursement (“wage”) while the fruits of their labor went straight to the top. No, I would not call progressive taxation “wealth redistribution.” It’s more like giving back the sweat and blood that was ours in the first place.”

I’m not sure which falsehood is better: the claim that entrepreneurs and ‘capitalists’ are inherently thieving sloths or that the past thirty years have been a great time for libertarian ideals in practice. Your observations of the world around you are so astoundingly poor that I’m wondering if CNN and socialist pamphlets are you only sources of information. Additionally, I must question your sensory faculties.

For the first fallacy:

Let’s say you and three or four other people get together. You’ve saved up some money from working different jobs, the four of you, most of the time only earning about the median income; over time, it’s enough to buy some capital. While most other people were “living paycheck-to-paycheck”, spending almost the entirety of their earnings, you lot decided to defer consumption until you had amassed enough that the savings could form a significant investment; an investment which, itself, won’t provide much return for the first few years, and only really become profitable after seven to ten years, and that’s provided the venture succeeds. All this preparation requires a special sort of frugality, certainly above the mean worker.

For the sake of this hypothetical, all of the founders are investors and hold some functional station within the firm. One is a creative guy, another (or several others) is a technical wizard whose task it is to adapt the creative guy’s ideas to reality, one is a marketing guru, and the last one(s) is a great manager whose labor coalesces everyone else’s efforts. With the seed investment, the four (or five or whatever) of you buy some capital to begin production. Being that the labor of the founders is better applied to larger problems than operating the assembly lines, maintaining the capital, or filtering phone calls and writing every memorandum, you hire others to do those things, since those others are probably not equipped for the tasks the founders/investors execute. We call that comparative advantage. It doesn’t make sense to bog someone whose skills lie in high-order problems - bigger pieces of the ‘big picture’ than most people are capable of handling competently - with menial labor for which more people are capable than the high-order problems. For the sake of argument, this is one of the five to ten percent of firms that survives the five year mark, and stretches on to some indeterminate point. By the five year mark, each of the founders/investors are millionaires, making six figures per annum while the average employee of the company only earns, say, $50,000 annually.

You’re going to tell me that because they rely on the labor of others to execute simpler tasks, tasks which more people are capable of doing than solving the more specialized problems the founders/investors deal with, they are unduly paid? Their wages are exorbitant? Especially when the net profit margin is probably <10% and most of that is reinvested in the company? When if you redistributed the remainder of each chair member’s wages such that they earned only $75,000 annually, the average employee would most likely only earn an extra $2000 per year? The extra pay incentivises people who are capable of solving high-order problems to solve such problems more frequently and problems which naturally entail more risk than if they were paid only marginally above the median employee. These people possess skill sets that require more time to hone and as a matter of fact express in a smaller number of people than the skills required to work the average position in the company. Additionally, if the company folds, it is upon the chairs to liquidate their assets to pay off outstanding debts; the employees’ wages are unaffected, but for the fact that they terminate with the company. The founders/investors risk far more than the average employee; the latter only places themselves in the dubious and minor risk of finding another employer in the event that the company fails.

High profit margins signal other companies to enter the industry and directly compete with the firm raking in the high profits. To be competitive, the newcomers drive down costs primarily by reducing the profit margin such that in established industries, the profit margin tends toward zero without reaching zero. As a function of saturation over time, the limit of profits is zero (with a horizontal asymptote at zero). With those newcomers saturating the less saturated fields, wages are also driven up since more employers are competing for a relatively fixed labor pool, or at least a labor pool which grows slower than the demand for labor does. Thus automation is also incentivised over time such that scarce labor is applied more fruitfully, that more is produced in less time per unit of labor. In the same fashion, the division of labor specializes increasingly since people are better at tasks generally when they perform smaller components. For that reason and for diseconomies of scale that override previous economies of scale at certain size thresholds, firms also tend to specialize in a manner similar to their employees. That’s because larger companies require more bureaucracy, which is overhead disconnected from direct production, devoted to maintaining productivity and insuring minimal theft and other risk of loss. Bureaucracy is good to a point in large companies, and at that point where the expense of overhead overwhelms economies of scale, the firm must either dissociate into fragments, where overall profit diminishes somewhat but the decreased total overhead more than compensates, or the firm itself collapses if internal inertia is such that dissolution is unfeasible.

Overall in the economy, catering to demand and efficiency are promoted by inherent laws of supply, demand, and the facts of individual action and social organization, while excess, inflexibility, and incompetence are generally punished.

Thing is, the model explained above is true ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent of the time provided a caveat is met.

And the following addresses the second nugget in this wonderful crock of shit:

That all relies upon the existence of a total market. A free market. The freer the market, the more truth value the model holds as a means of explaining the workings of the economy, of the myriad individual interactions that coalesce into the market. Being that we exist in a world where there is greater regulation than ever before, where the number of laws is objectivelyhigher than at any time past, and where net tax burden and tax revenue are similarly at a historical high over the long-term in peacetime, we do not exist in a free market or anything like it. State subsidies and market controls interfere in the market and prevent the relatively smooth function of the model above. While there is a great deal of failure inherent to new ventures, the current social-democrat interventionist system means business more often fail, especially when they attempt to break legally-sanctioned cartels and industries with higher than average privilege granted by agents of the state (at the point of a gun). Inefficient firms with allies in legislatures earn shielding by buying off some votes for legislation that forces out competition by driving up expenses or outright establishing legal cartelization through licensing or other means. To a great degree, it is more efficient for firms that can afford the expense of paying off politicians to do so, since such investments yield far greater returns than any participation in the market. The current ratio is something like $1:$200; for every dollar spent in lobbying, large firms can expect a $200 return in the short-term with very little risk of politicians changing heart. After all, a good politician who wants their coffers lined must prove to interests that they pursue the interests after they are bought and paid for else no one would attempt to buy someone off who takes the money and does shit for it. Thus a company which spends $10,000,000 lobbying receives an average of $2,000,000,000 in subsidies and protections, and the damage to economy may even exceed the sum total of the benefits the firm reaps from the legislation.

You would most likely call the repeal of a clause in the Glass-Steagall act out as deregulation gone awry. But what of the hundred other laws created in its stead? What of the regulations established by the Federal Reserve? The Federal Reserve fucks around in the economy constantly, and has since at least the mid-1920’s. And yet I’m to believe that the problem with each business cycle that has ensued, the problem is that the Fed hasn’t done enough? Are you shitting me? The solution to every SNAFU is to expand their power? And their power has expanded over the past eighty years quite significantly. And the solution is to expand it still more? Or maybe, you might say that the Fed is a capitalist institution, a bitch for the big banking cartels and similar financial special interests. I would actually agree. Instead, you would probably claim that something more statist, something perhaps influenced more by participatory democracy, should take its place. I would be horrified of that for the exact reason that the median voter knows fuck all about economics, and the current system is at least half their fault. After all, the special interests, whether labor unions or corporations, wouldn’t get anywhere if they were pitching their bullshit to an educated mass of citizens unburdened by dangerous biases. The regulators fail, and the solution isn’t to say to hell with them and to allow actors within the market to determine efficacious regulators (actually, that is the best solution); nay, the solution is actually to bolster the power of regulators and wonder why problems continue to recur.

Every improvement that occurs within the modern economy occurs despite the systematic problems and in spite of the best efforts of busybodies to crash the whole thing around our heads. Thankfully, the ingenuity of some individuals is enough to keep the system floating to some extent for some time.

Guilt for the acts of the ancestors of some - violence committed in commission of colonial expansion and oppression, in occupation of lands formerly held by others, in theft of natural resources and property - is the secular form of original sin. Descendents are supposed to feel guilt and seek penitence for the faults of their forebears. The tarnish is permanent, an eternal stain. But didn’t Jesus die to erase original sin? And has not the subsequent industrialization made possible solely by European powers, chiefly Britain and Germany, bettered the world indelibly? More people exist now than ever could in the past. At least the sin of Adam and Eve, though fiction, was unique, for they were the first humans.

But the crimes of Europe? Nearly every prominent society contained some institution of slavery at some point. And for the modern period, the Muslim slave trade in North Africa and the Middle East among the Berbers and Arabs was abolished almost a century later than the last western or European nation to abolish slavery in their borders. Most Muslims forbade the reproduction of slaves, hence the relative dearth of Sub-Saharan Africans in much of North Africa and basically all of the Middle East. As far as megadeaths go, Chinese history is one of slaughters en masse repeatedly. So blood-soaked is their particular history that the violence of the twentieth century among Europeans is basically a paltry emulation of the whole of Chinese history. Not to denigrate them - I think their history is fascinating, if distant from that of my ancestors - but thems the facts. Racism? Greeks, Romans, Arabs, North Asians, and Egyptians have all viewed Sub-Saharan Africans as stupid, brutish, simple-minded, and so forth. They all shared these stereotypes generally, regardless of the scant, idiosyncratic members of these societies attempting to counter those stereotypes. Exploitation of natural resources? Christ, everyone did that. Amerindians are hardly super awesome environmentalists. For, as it turns out, they caused ecological disasters by themselves without the aid of European industry or market economies. Tragedy of the commons and all that. What about usurping the lands of other nations and peoples? Need I really state how ubiquitous territorial wars and empires were for the whole of human history? To refresh the memory, let me rattle off some empires in no particular order: the Mongols, Inca, Persians, Assyrians, Hittites, Egyptians, Mali, Ghanians, Indians (including the Mughals). Those empires occurred all over the world, some even in the Americas, several in sub-Saharan Africa as well.

Only spineless saps fall for the line that they should feel guilt for the crimes of their forefathers, whether these crimes are actual or not. No other people on the planet are implored by so much popular sentiment to attempt to meddle in the affairs of everyone else and sustain others by aid.

Why is counterfeiting money illegal? Well, if anyone could print a dollar, labor and goods would not be attached to the dollar. Trading dollars would mean only as much as the material cost sunk into the ink and paper (cotton blend or plastic or whatever). Eventually, so many counterfeit notes are printed that the money is literally paper-backed in that each unit is only worth its material cost. If the value of the money did not fluctuate to reflect an abundance of dollars, the only jobs people would care for would be those that produce the ink and paper that goes into the dollars and maybe the printers as well, but production of everything else - food, infrastructure, construction materials, fuel - would tend toward fuck all. The elasticity of value, that prices reflect underlying conditions, chiefly the interlocking webs of supply and demand, saves the economy from ruinous sloth.

The question then is: how is increasing money and credit supply legally in an economy by a central bank any different? It’s not.

Few fun facts about inflation: it is not instantaneous. In time, people recognize the surplus of money and credit and prices adjust at that point, when some goods are in higher demand due to the abundant money and/or credit, at which point prices rise and increase ever more dramatically if increasing production is difficult. This brings another point: the increase in monetary costs of goods and services as a result of inflation is non-uniform. Consumption tends toward certain goods, services and industries more than others, and the new inflationary reserves are not distributed randomly. Inevitably, they funnel right into the allies and friends of those who produce the surplus money and credit. Expressed like the limit of a function, as time and the amount of surplus monetary and credit expansion approach infinity, the correlation of non-uniform, temporally separated price increases to surplus money approaches one.

The irony is that lowly counterfeiters damage a currency, and thereby the economy wherein the currency transacts, far less than central bankers who create excess credit and money. Ten dollars or ten million dollars can be absorbed by the economy and the amount of time required to adjust prices to that excess is large while the total increase of prices, whether we consider them economy-wide or in terms of specific industries or goods and services, is low. The effect of three hundred billion, or two trillion, on the other hand, is quite fucking apparent.

Now, I don’t know for certain that non-Austrian-minded people disagree with all this, but based on some of the shit I’ve read it sure seems like it.