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Salon has a rousing piece of claptrap provokingly titled The question libertarians just can’t answer. Fortunately, without building up any suspense (which would in this case be correlated with reader annoyance), the author, Michael Lind, comes right out with it:
Why are there no libertarian countries?
Associated with this question, which must be profoundly perplexing to those robbed, through compulsory government schooling, of their imagination to consider alternatives, Lind also delivers a secondary question, aiming to emphasize the first.
If libertarians are correct in claiming that they understand how best to organize a modern society, how is it that not a single country in the world in the early twenty-first century is organized along libertarian lines?
Of course, not even two hours passed before the erudite Tom Woods delivered a series of ripostes, each one highlighting a specific failure of the state following the same formula: If your approach of statism is so great, then why really horrible thing X? While not directly addressing the original question, I think Tom has successfully lampooned the faulty logic in Lind’s reasoning. Which leaves me with only one further task; to elaborate the answers that I’ve used in response to this rather frequent question.
Firstly, we have a large number of historical societies that have worked quite well under various different forms of organization. I find that most libertarians are actually minarchists, and would keep the state around for certain items like roads, courts, and national defense. But, if I’m going to make the case for out-and-out unfettered freedom having been tried to various degrees in different arrangements, then my position won’t work without a list of Historical examples of Anarchy without Chaos.
Iceland stands out as a particularly strong example, having had a quasi-anarchistic legal institution which lasted from 930 to 1262 as recounted by Robert Long in The Decline an Fall of Private Law in Iceland. Interestingly, the institution of geographic tithing to a parish, forcibly exported from England, finally unraveled the ordered anarchy by allowing corrupt administrators to first value land as a rent-seeker and then to use the rent to fund armies in fights over it.
However, Lind clearly wants a more modern example. I am not a mind reader, but I speculate this might be because he thinks that modern technology and economic complexity makes some kind of fundamental difference. Without jumping the gun immediately, let me just point out that in our own United States that was America, the area now called Pennsylvania, maintained beautifully ordered anarchy for nearly a decade! As described by Rothbard in Pennsylvania’s Anarchist Experiment: 1681–1690, we see that existing regimes, focused on collecting taxes for government operation, saw the peaceful anarchy as a case of “colonists suffering from excessive liberty”. Eventually, due to long-standing coercion, the government council, which previously refused to meet, resumed session because some members were tempted by the power of government and gave in to that corruption.
I don’t wish to be accused of cherry picking from history, even though the list there is tragically short (anarchic regions tend not to keep records of their operations), so let’s also turn to one of the more difficult recent cases: Somalia. Remember, it would not be fair to compare today’s Somalia to how nice things are in the developed world, because of its disadvantage from having been under dictatorship for so long. Rather, we can only see if unfettered freedom works by tracking how rapidly Somalia can improve once the oppression of government has been lifted. Five years after the fall of government the UN finally gave up trying to impose a new one. Once this interference stopped and the people were finally able to self-organize, conditions improved immensely. In Better off Stateless, P.T. Leeson reports positive growth on 14 different metrics tracked by UNDP. The only aspects in decline are GDP (likely due to lack of government spending), access to water (which remained unchanged), adult literacy rate, and combined school enrollment. Before jumping on these few declines as indicative of anarchy’s failure, let’s give the Somalians the benefit of doubt and assume that they prioritized their investment in electricity, telephones, televisions, physicians and sanitation. After all, nobody forced their resource allocation. Somalia’s not a paradise, but anarchy did give it opportunities for rapid improvement unachievable under government. So much so, that they can now claim the cheapest international phone rates of any African country.
With these examples, I hope that you can see Lind’s restriction on the time period “early twenty-first century” artificially limits the scope of the discussion in his favor. Is it really the fault of libertarianism that every land mass during that time was under government control? Why won’t any existing governments allow the libertarian experiment? Should we read into this circumstance a revealing pattern: that government is so insecure it can’t permit competition?
To show my case, let’s now recall a few times where some entrepreneurial individualists have tried to build a libertarian society. In the 1970′s the micronation Republic Of Minerva was chased of a shoal they had dredged into an island by the King of neighboring Tonga, who claimed homesteading privileges on the fishing grounds and surrounding reef. More recently, the Seasteading Institute, recognizing a lack of land in which to run the libertarian social experiment, has proposed platforms and modular islands, but has had difficulty funding the projects, due to the logistical expenses. Because land is still the best resource on which to construct communications and building infrastructure, the most recent and most promising attempt is to create “free cities” in Honduras. Unfortunately these have been shrugged off by a government justice system (which would more accurately be spelled as “just-us”).
The bill to allow the creation of such cities passed the Honduran Legislature nearly unanimously, by a vote of 126 to 1. But not everyone is on board with the project. Left-wing Hondurans have filed a complaint before the Honduran Supreme Court, arguing that the free cities project violates their constitution and treats “national territory as a commodity.”
Private city in Honduras will have minimal taxes, government by Maxim Lott
In truth, as libertarians seek their utopia, they have made one tragic mistake of strategy: a consistent moral framework. All the libertarians I know live by the non-agression principal. Which means that none of the libertarians I know are willing to use the conventional tactics for acquiring that plot of land needed to carry out the experiment. We won’t conscript an army to take the land by force, as government has done before and to us. The Government mob wantonly takes advantage of this bedrock of consistency, further preventing libertarians from embarking on the experiment by existing government policies. We begrudgingly pay taxes to stay out of jail even though this forces us to retain less capital with which to invest in purchasing galt’s gulch. Let’s not forget to mention also, that government uses law to grant itself monopoly over the land, preventing any declaration of independence.
In summary, there are no libertarian countries because
- those that did exist historically eventually met their end through statist corruption.
- all the land is currently claimed by existing monopolistic states that won’t let go.
- widespread statist mentality won’t allow the experiment to take place.
These answers are long-winded and do not serve well during a heated debate. If you find a statist trying to corner you with “Oh yeah? Then why aren’t there any countries like that today!?”, rather than launching into a history lesson making the above points, try turning the question around with one of Tom Wood’s replies or simply channel Michael Bolton from Office Space and retort “No way! Why should I leave? Government’s the one that sucks!”.
Autistics may be a rare breed, but it it pays off handsomely to try and understand the workings of their minds. In the same way that building and bridge design improves from failures more than successes, neurologists learn more about the brain from examination of breakage whether due to accidental imperfections and handicaps from genetic lotter an unfortunate accidents than they can from observing ordinary working brains. My interest here differs slightly from that of the neurologists, for I care more about how I can boost my own processing power. In that regard, the high-functioning autistics, the ones that can explain somewhat how they think and especially what coping mechanisms they develop in order to function in the freakishly weird society the rest of us dare to consider ordinary.
Again this post is triggered from the processing and expansion of some older notes. Temple Grandin has written a wonderful book of her battle with autism, “Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism”. She has a remarkable ability to simulate 3D models in her head, which enabled a career translating them into working facilities. Even as a lover of cattle, she has designed the most productive livestock handling facilities in the nation, specifically focusing on corrals that avoid spooking the cattle on the way to slaughter. During college she also designed a ‘hug box’ that would comfort her during panic attacks. Her ability to overcome such crippling and non-visible handicap implies that she contains good advice on career building.
Expose Children to Interesting Things. “At MIT, John Blecher developed a computer program that turns mathematical equations into beautiful abstract degins”. As educators, we should be using these and similar techniques to get students hooked into our respective fields. Not only does it make for great demos and publicity, but visualization of the scientific models and data is also a key to the advancement of understanding itself.
To sell yourself you must have on hand a Portfolio of Work. I credit the motivation for all my past writing on this topic as springing from Grandin’s advice. Colleges (and students, though they little realize it) need metrics for discovering whether the learning techniques being used currently work. Right now, we have an overt focus on exams, which often tests material knowledge rather than synthesis and creativity. We need a switch from knowledge-based exams to constructive portfolio building. Career advancement happens when you can prove your fit for the job at hand, and nothing speaks louder than a list of past accomplishments. Collect into a personal website the drawings and photos of your completed work.
Recently there has been much brouhaha about 3D printed weapons. Mostly these reactions have been media-generated. Cody Wilson, an enterprising young lad has, for the past year, been perfecting the technical artistry behind the manufacture of a working gun printed out of ABS plastic. Before take-down by the bureaucratic late-comer U.S. Department of State, Cody operated a website, Defense Distributed devoted to hosting files that 3d printers could use to produce a wide variety of gun-related parts, including magazines, casings, flash hiders, handles, and the notorious AR-15 lower receiver. Wilson shares the view point of past violent radicals such as Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Patrick Henry, and Samuel Adams. He knows, without a shadow of doubt that defense is best provided in a distributed manner, as evidenced by the mission statement of his 501(c)(3) non-profit:
To defend the civil liberty of popular access to arms as guaranteed by the United States Constitution and affirmed by the United States Supreme Court, through facilitating global access to, and the collaborative production of, information and knowledge related to the 3D printing of arms; and to publish and distribute, at no cost to the public, such information and knowledge in promotion of the public interest.
Controlling the media, education, and minds of the subjugated populace in the United States that was America seems not to satisfy the powers that be. The media has convinced the people that they should not provide for their own defense, despite the obvious facts that (1) gun violence has been trending down and any perception otherwise should be blamed on media focus on incendiary news, (2) gun control laws have the opposite effect as that intended, and (3) need guns to be enforced, all documented by Marc Victor’s compelling summary of this viewpoint I am a Peaceful AR-15 Assault Rifle Owner. The Powers That Be must feel so uncertain of their control over the minds of the plebeians that they find it necessary to ensure their continued rule by depriving people of the means to revolt. The Department of Defense Trade Controls has shut down Cody’s site under pretense that it violates the International Traffic in Arms Regulation. To little avail! The plans have been downloaded 100k times, and now appear quite popular on The Pirate Bay bittorrent site.
However, in a lapse of Orwellian control, Forbe’s Ady Greenburg committed some competent journalism in his piece Meet The ‘Liberator’: Test-Firing The World’s First Fully 3D-Printed Gun, revealing what I find is the most amusing part of the media-driven outrage:
He’s spent more than a year dreaming of its creation, and dubbed it “the Liberator” in an homage to the cheap, one-shot pistols designed to be air-dropped by the Allies over France during its Nazi occupation in World War II.
Wilson’s knowledge of historical arcana impresses me. In my mind he has successfully made a very strong statement, proving the hypocrisy of any official indignation!
Yet Cody’s actions, and the statist reactions, indicate a dark undercurrent. Jim Karger, in an article describing What Anarchists Should Learn From Chairman Mao, notes that Cody’s battle with statism coincides with Kansas’s nullification of federal enforcement of laws violating 2nd amendment rights and Adam Kokesh’s armed protest march in D.C. As government debts climb higher, as crony capitalism siphons off the wealth of others, as the promises of employment go unfulfilled, as the media inundates those still watching with messages of fear, the fabric of our society stretches and thins. Perhaps I’m just becoming radicalized myself, but I have difficulty talking to and relating with most people. I don’t fear the proliferation of 3D-printed weapons, for I see the gun living up to it’s namesake: The Liberator.
In a recent, in-depth, late night/early morning conversation with my friends, I received a maddening and tragic realization about the horror of the state education system. Now, I’m already fully aware of alternative methods of teaching, and the systemic critiques of John Taylor Gatto in his books “Weapons of Mass Instruction” and the “Underground History of American Education”, as well as the promise of private education as demonstrated in studies by James Tooley and alternative curriculums such as Montessori and Waldorf. I’ve also personally felt that the current schooling system has slighted me in a large, unforgivable, and unredressable way.
Before beginning my lambasting of the system, let me first state, for the record that many people consider me, and I consider myself to be of above average intelligence. I don’t have a reliable measure on how far my abilities deviate from the norm, but online IQ tests have pegged me at 2 sigma, while knowledgeable and trustworthy friends have subjectively assessed me at 4 sigma. Given this situation, I focus my grievances on the ways in which a system of schooling slights the promising half the population, the insidious mechanisms through which humanity has conspired to rob itself of productivity.
My Story
I recall as a child, and I see in my nephew and all children, a natural inquisitiveness about the world. A curiosity for exploration, and inclination to playfulness. I’m fortunate that both my parents value education and they continuously challenged my abilities as I grew up, by playing mindful games: linguistic puns, humorous associations, tricks of numerical calculation, and pattern matching. Though not as focused as a homeschoolers curriculum, these daily games played whenever and wherever the opportunity arose serve as their own immediate reward. Eventually, and I think by design, the public system of schooling destroys this playfulness and nullifies curiosity.
I hold my friends in very high esteem for their abilities to recollect moments of childhood, and early realizations of the criminality of adult conformist behavior. My overactive garbage collector has left few memories, but I do recollect one year in elementary school they built a computer lab of nice shiny new macintoshes. Being in the lower middle class, my family could not afford a computer at home, despite my immediate enamoration with these wonderful machines. The internet had not yet escaped its confines from government labs and universities, so most people did not have a need for a computer at home, though many had one at work for typing documents.
I strongly suspect that the school installed a computer lab through some government initiative. I don’t recall making many class trips to the lab, but those we did make occurred under the guise of “learning how to use” a computer. One day, we received instruction in how to program something analogous logo the turtle. Even given my youthful state, I could recognize that the teacher possessed far less comfort with these machines than myself. I will not claim that I immediately understood the machine’s operational design, nor will I claim that I naturally knew how to program the poor turtle. But I distinctly felt compelled to explore what it could do, to play with it endlessly. However, my queries landed on unprepared ears, for my instructor, a friendly, endearing, and supportive elementary teacher, did not possess an algorithmic mind.
I think the system has tragically placed my elementary teacher in a very awkward role, and will retrospeculate why. Her inability to answer my exuberant yet detailed questions, undermines, in her eyes, a relationship of authority. I saw this uncertainty as she read through the programming script at the beginning of the lesson. I picked up on her fear that one of us untrained kids would, through ignorance and accident, cripple one of the expensive machines. My eagerness demanded that I try to learn more, yet, she remained only one teacher to many rambunctious elementary pupils. Logistically, my cries for attention could not be met. Even if the time had been available though, her own ignorance about programming, would not permit my satisfaction. She could not provide knowledge she herself did not possess.
The class wasted much of the learning hour on administrivia: travel to and from the computer lab and a slow, synchronized progression through a script. I estimate that I may have had about 15 minutes of free exploration, in which I realized that logo could draw really awesome spirographs, but did not have time learn any of the patterns behind the pictures. If given an instruction manual, I could have stayed for hours exploring the programming medium. Instead I don’t remember ever returning to the lab to play with logo, though I have a few memories of drawing and painting programs and of word processing.
The Lessons
Curiously, all of the good parts of this story, the eager and inquisitive student, basically friendly teacher, the school’s purchase of a new resource, serve to illuminate through stark contrast the insidious failures of schooling as a state system.
I consider the computer lab initiative to be a colossal failure and waste of resources. I still love all my early memories of computer interaction, and am grateful to have been given the opportunity, but we should realize that the scripted lessons I received did not build that attraction. In fact, were I not naturally curious about computers, the initiative would likely have resulted in a strong disinterest. Were I now to design an instructional method guaranteed to generate loathing of a particular subject, I would surely compose it as a scripted, involuntary, and regimented exercise, timed too short for any deep explortion and involving no connections to other topics. My experience in school contains all of these elements. Each one of my criticisms could easily fill an entire book chapter, and worse: they mutually support each other in a tangled system of mind killing.
Lesson 1: The Subjective Isolation
Recall that I had my experience of programming in a room specifically designed for this purpose. In contrast, today we all use computers as part of our daily lives. I do not recall that the instruction I received had anything to do with our other assignments or busy work. Quite frankly, even with my excitement to use the computers, I do not remember any attempt at connection to other topics, or non-committal verbiage regarding the reason why we should feel utility from the instruction. “It’s not that I feel that school is a good idea gone wrong, but a wrong idea from the word go. It’s a nutty notion that we can have a place where nothing but learning happens, cut off from the rest of life.”(John Holt)
Lesson 2: The Hourly Decimation of Attention
Observe the natural growth of any child to see that learning does not occur in hourly intervals. The school system decimates the day into instructional hours and stuffs each with filler content. Elementary mathematics seems especially amenable to this method of mental destruction, so I don’t wonder that most people claim to “hate math”. We teach computational algorithms (i.e. the process of 3-digit multiplication and long division) using blatantly artificial drills. Those who don’t understand the process become flummoxed and frustrated by the demand to perform, while those who do quickly take to the subject, despise the pointless repetition.
Lesson 3: The Unminding Grades
I have a developed science background and certainly do value measurements of progress, but I think an emphasis on learning metrics can do far more damage than most people realize. Psychologists have shown that the promise of reward (usually a small nominal figure in studies) can actually handicap creative problem solving ability. The disadvantage only increases under time pressure. My 3yr old nephew will do mental work for compliments, and I see no reason for an explicit system of grading when teaching him a new skill. The system of rewards distracts from the topics being learned. Far from serving as an encouragement, grades rapidly morph into a mechanism for discrimination and uncooperative competition. As an instructor at university, I can factually say that most students focus on these silly metrics at the expense of course content, undermining the entire purpose of their attendance. Fortunately, in my story above, my teacher only privately recorded subjective grades based on participation, not accomplishment or skill. “When Students cheat on exams it’s because our School System values grades more than Students value learning.”(Neil deGrasse Tyson)
Lesson 4: The Caste Classes
I endured not only a division of my day, but also age-based segregation. The school herded me into a class shared only by those my same age, regardless of our skills, abilities, interests, and inclinations. This arrangement prevents the older from teaching younger, interfering with supportive community development. In a feat of Orwellian doublethink, the system stratifies children on the presumption that doing so avoids incidences of bullying, tragically failing to see that the opposite occurs. Throughout my earliest years this regimentation subtly breeds class-based rivalry and discrimination. Relentlessly, the age-group marches through the same instructional material at the same time.
Lesson 5: Respect my Authoritah!
Finally, I end with the most grovelling lesson learned from this system: Thou shalt respect authority. The authority will reward you with grades, punish you with detention, reprimand you for thinking out of place, etc. Even with quite friendly teachers, I understood that I needed to seek permission for biologic functions. Today, I’m handicapped with fears of being incorrect, fears that impeded my desire to practice entrepreneurial activities, fears that make my desire for independence an internal struggle. As a university instructor, I saw the same learned fears in my students: they feel afraid to contact me for assistance, afraid to speak up in class, afraid to explore the material lest they make a mistake. They regarded me as a fount of knowledge and felt slighted if I told them to figure things out for themselves. It propagates a rigid credentialism, that reinforces conformity in stark contrast to growth and development.
Summary
As fortunate as I was to have a great many wonderful and dedicated teachers, I still feel held back, that the system has destroyed my full potential. Worse than the tens of millions killed under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, we have the systematic crippling of billions of young minds. Tragically, the masses graduating this institution emerge with such mental handicap, they cannot imagine any other world. For the unfortunate few that escape with some creative neurons intact enough imagine better, most of them lack the motivation to pursue promising alternatives. Insidiously, the schooling system mechanically presses diverse minds into those few and crude molds that describe the unthinking cogs which it requires for its own preservation. It generates caretakers, like Nurse Mildred Ratched, unable to see the damage they propogate. The more that I reflect back on it and my experience of mental starvation, the more the ramifications fill my mind with feelings horror. Being myself educated in a government school, I lack the language skills with which to fully express the depth of internal rage that this tragedy continues over so many generations.
Update: I checked the dictionary, English simply doesn’t have the words for this horror, this horror.
These are my notes from reading Rousseau’s The Social Contract for a libertarian book club meeting.
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Book 1.
——————————
Preamble.
:quote: Born as I was, the citizen of a free state and member of its sovereign body, the very right to vote imposes on me the duty to instruct myself in public affairs, however little influence my voice may have in them.
Ch 1. The Subject of Book 1
Ch 2. The First Societies
Ch 3. The Right of the Strongest
Ch 4. Slavery
Ch 5. That We Must Always Go Back To an Original Covenant
Ch 6. The Social Pact
:quote: Secondly, since the alienation is unconditional, the union is as perfect as it could be, and no individual associate has any longer any rights to claim; for if rights were left to individuals, in the absence of any higher authority to judge between them and the public, each individual, being his own judge in some causes, would soon demand to be his own judge in all; and in this way the state of nature would be kept in being, and the association inevitably become either tyrannical or void.
Why is there no middle ground here?
:quote: Finally, since each man gives himself to all, he gives himself to no one; and since there is no associate over whom he does not gain the same rights as others gain over him, each man recovers the equivalent of everything he loses, and in the bargain he acquires more power to preserve what he has.
How is that? From where does it come?
Ch 7. The Sovereign
:quote: Hence, in order that the social pact shall not be an empty formula, it is tacitly implied in that commitment — which alone can give force to all others – that whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be constrained to do so by the whole body, which means nothing other than that he hall be forced to be free; for this is the condition which, by giving each citizen to the nation, secures him against all personal dependence, it is the condition which shapes both the design and the working of the political machine, and which alone bestows justice on civil contracts — without it, such contracts would be a absurd, tyrannical and liable to the grossest abuse.
Ch 8. Civil Society
natural (limited by physical power of individual) and civil liberties (limited by the general will) are different
morality derives from civil reciprocity
covers property (legal title) v. possession (force of first occupancy)
Ch 9. Of Estate
Doesn’t seem to much like homesteading, unless the land is worked.
Property is a legal device, requiring recognition of the sovereign body — a half-truth
Prefers legal right over natural right of strength, thinks it’s a good bargain
==============================
Book 2.
——————————
Ch 1. That Sovereignty is Inalienable
Ch 2. That Sovereignty is Indivisible
Observes that much attention is paid to king, because they hand out favors
Ch 3. Whether the General Will Can Err
Have to avoid special interest groups, because they undermine the general will
Ch 4. The Limits of Sovereign Power
“general” will cannot arbitrate individual contracts?
Ch 5. The Right of Life and Death
No right to suicide?
:quote: Whoever wishes to preserve his own life at the expense of others must give his life for them when it is necessary.
Prince may order the man to die, because it is :quote:”only on such terms that he has lived in security for as long as he has also because his life is no longer the bounty of nature but a gift he has received conditionally from the state.
Ch 6. On Law
:quote: All justice comes from God, who alone is its source…
:quote: So there must be covenants and positive laws to unite rights with duties and to direct justice to its object.
… because they restrain the might of the unjust?
Did this guy never see an unjust law?
Thinks a republic law is fine because its the body politic making the rules about itself, but has no say at the individual level.
Ch 7. The Lawgiver
Best law is that which forces all acts to be cooperative
Elevates lawmakers higher than King (who does mere mechanical application)
Clearly separates legislation vs. executive powers
Actually believes the hoi polloi is too stupid to understand reasons behind the law, therefore invoke divinity as the wellspring, esp. in rhetoric during birth of a nation.
Ch 8. The People
Ascribes to genius “creative and makes everything from nothing”
Speaks of a nation’s people as if they are different fundamentally rather than culturally.
Ch 9. The People: Continued
Recognizes costs of bureaucracy and inconsistencies between layers and problems of remote and removed administration.
:quote: A strong and healthy constitution is the first thing to look for because the strength which comes from good government is more reliable than the resources which large territories yield.
Haiti vs. Dominican republic?
State which finds conquest a necessity for survival precipitates its fall.
Ch 10. The People: Continued
Nation should not have to choose between commerce and war; dependence on neighbors is a weakness.
Is violence the only recourse? Individuals face the same constraints and yet the (advocated and actual) behavior is different.
Outlines a stable anarchy as “the most fit to receive law” (as if it didn’t already have some)
:quote: Which people, then, is fit to receive laws? I answer: a people which finding itself already bound together by some original association, interest or agreement, has not yet borne the yoke of law; a people without deep-rooted customs or superstitions; one which does not fear sudden invasion, and which without intervening in the quarrels of its neighbors, can stand up to any of them, or secure the help of one to resist another; a people in which every member may be known to all; where there is no need to burden any man with more than he can bear; a people which can do without other peoples and which other peoples can do without*; one which is neither rich nor poor, but has enough to keep itself; and lastly one which combines the cohesion of an ancient people with the malleability of a new one. *economic dependence is a trap
Thinks the people require a ruler to preserve freedom.
Ch 11. Various Systems of Law
Wants equality of outcome, at least so that “no citizen shall be rich enough to buy another and none so poor as to be forced to sell himself”.
Wishes to bring the extremes as close together as possible
:quote: Any branch of foreign trade, .., brings only an illusory advantage to the kingdom in general; it may enrich a few individuals, even a few big towns, but the nation as a whole gains nothing and the people is none the better for it.
At least he recognizes that the law should not entangle the individuals but should reflect social custom
Ch 12. Classification of Laws
Has not accounted for the cost of changing laws, claims that it is easy to do so.
I object! :quote:The second relation [of laws] is that of the members of the body politic among themselves, or of each with the entire body: their relations among themselves should be as limited, and relations with the entire body as extensive, as possible, in order that each citizen shall be at the same time perfectly independent of all his fellow citizens and excessively dependent on the republic.
==============================
Book 3.
——————————
Ch 1. Of Government in General
Be careful, he makes some interesting distinguishments.
Sovereign v. State
Magistrate v. Government
Executive v. Legislative
He speaks of a breakdown of the contract in a way that doesn’t “dissolve the body politic”; subset captures government for itself and becomes tyrannical.
Ch 2. The Constitutive Principle of the Different Forms of Government
:quote: Hence the more numerous the magistrates, the weaker the government.
Magistrate has 3 wills: personal, corporate, sovereign will of the people
:quote: Hence, the general will always the weakest, the corporate will takes second place, and the particular will comes first of all; so much so, that within the government, each member is primarily a private self, secondly a magistrate, an thirdly a citizen. This sequence is exactly the revers of what the social order demands.
:quote: the ratio of magistrates to government should be the inverse of the ratio of subjects to sovereign; that is to say, the more the state is enlarged, the more the government must reduce its ranks, so that the number of magistrates diminishes in proportion to the increase of the people.
:quote: the more numerous the magistrates, the closer their corporate will approaches the general will.
So everyone should be in government? and then it will fully reflect the public will!
Ch 3. Classification of Governments.
- monarchy: best for large state
- aristocracy: best for intermediate state
- democracy: best for small state
Ch 4. Democracy
Notes that democracy prone to war, cue Hans Hermann Hoppe
Ch 5. Aristocracy
Thinks popularly elected aristocracy is the best form of government, because :quote:”the wisest should govern the multitude, if we are sure they will govern it for its advantage and not for their own.”
Ch 6. Monarchy
:quote: An essential and inevitable defect, which will always make monarchical government inferior to republican government, is that whereas in republics the popular choice almost always elevates to the highest places only intelligent and capable men, who fill their office with honour, those who rise under monarchies are nearly always muddled little minds, petty knaves and intriguers with small talents which enable them to rise to high places in courts, but which betray their ineptitude to the public as soon as they are appointed.
Ch 7. Mixed Forms of Government
Ch 8. That All Forms of Government Do Not Suit All Countries
:quote: Freedom is not a fruit of every climate, and it is not therefore within the capacity of every people.
:quote: IN every government in the world, the public person consumes but does not produce anything. … It is the surplus of private production which furnishes public subsistence.
The source is labor + land
:quote: Monarchy is thus suited only to opulent nations.
:quote: Places where an abundant and fertile soil gives a lavish return for little labour will want a monarchical government, so that the luxury of the prince may consume the surplus of the product of the subjects — for it is better that this surplus should be absorbed by the government than dissipated by private persons. [exceptions prove the rule, for they will produce revolutions]
Ch 9. The Signs of Good Government
The increase in native population (because government provides protection and prosperity)
In footnote, he recognizes :quote:”A little disturbance gives vigour to the soul, and what really makes the species prosper is not peace but freedom”.
Ch 10. The Abuse of Government and its Tendency to Degenerate
:quote: Just as the particular will acts unceasingly against the general will, so does the government continually exert itself against the sovereign.
But the beauty of the free market is to align them!
Observes that power concentrates even while government employment expands
:quote: First it [dissolution of the state] takes place when the prince ceases to administer the sate according to the law and usurps the sovereign power.
When state dissolves -> anarchy
democracy -> ochlocracy (mob rule)
aristocracy -> oligarchy
royal -> tyranny
Ch 11. The Death of the Body Politic
laws lasting longer are more respectful, once the trend stops the state dies
Ch 12. How the Sovereign Authority Maintains Itself
Ch 13. The Same — Continued
Thinks that the right to assemble comes from the magistrate!!
Advocates time-sharing round-robin assembly of government among several cities
Ch 14. The Same — Continued
Ch 15. Deputies or Representatives
:quote: compulsory service is less contrary to liberty than taxation. [because the people should be willing to donate their time to public service]
How do we know ‘the will’ is represented? It cannot happen by proxy
:quote: the moment a people adopts representatives it is no longer free; it no longer exists.
Ch 16. That the Institution of the Government is not a Contract
:quote: It is absurd and self-contradictory that the sovereign should give itself a superior; to undertake to obey a master would be to return to absolute freedom.
:quote: We see further that the contracting parties would, between themselves, be subject only to natural law, and so without any guarantee of their reciprocal commitments — and this is wholly repugnant to the civil state.
Ch 17. The Institution of the Government
plays funny games with hats
Ch 18. Means of Preventing the Usurpation of Government
government prevents assembly so as to maintain usurped powers
==============================
Book 4.
——————————
Ch 1. That the General Will is Indestructible
:quote: A state thus governed needs very few laws, and whenever there is a need to promulgate new ones, that need is universally seen.
implies universal agreement in all things?
Ch 2. The Suffrage
:quote: There is only one law which by its nature requires unanimous assent. This is the social pact: for the civil association is the most voluntary act in the world; every man having been born free and master of himself, no one else may under any pretext whatever subject him without his consent.
Does mere residency imply consent?
Ch 3. Elections
prefers to choose political official by lottery, for it requires no special skills
Ch 4. The Roman Comitia
Ch 5. The Tribunate
Ch 6. Dictatorship
Ch 7. The Censorial Tribunal
Ch 8. The Civil Religion
:quote: From this single fact, that a God was placed at the head of every political society, it follows that there were as many Gods as peoples.
But if communion ties Christians together, why are they not a phyle?
Frank Shostak wrote an article about The Bitcoin Money Myth. For an Austrian economist with “over 35 years of experience as a market economist, central bank analyst, and builder of large scale macro-econometric models”[AAS profile], I’m not wholly surprised that he frames his arguments using the commodity theory of money.
Although Shostak does not do so in his article about bitcoin, many economists of the Austrian persuasion often hail back to Aristotle’s attributes of a useful money:
- Durability.
- Money must stand the test of time and the elements. It must not fade, corrode, or change through time.
- Portable.
- Money holds a high amount of ‘worth’ relative to its weight and size.
- Divisible.
- Money should be relatively easy to separate and re-combine without affecting its fundamental characteristics. An extension of this idea is that the item should be ‘fungible’. Dictionary.com describes fungible as: “(esp. of goods) being of such nature or kind as to be freely exchangeable or replaceable, in whole or in part, for another of like nature or kind.”
- Intrinsic Value.
- This value of money should be independent of any other object and contained in the money itself.
[Taken from The Market Oracle]
Bitcoin handily satisfies everything in that list, even better than gold, except for the Intrinsic Value attribute. Some have argued that the conversion of electricity to proof-of-work that commoditizes the bits through a process known as mining, giving them an intrinsic value. I’m not convinced, for I think that bitcoins have no “intrinsic value”, they possess only network value as an exchange medium.
To prove my case that bitcoin has no intrinsic value, consider a hypothetical scenario. Suppose that I invest heavily in mining, but that, for whatever reason, bitcoin does not become widely used, and eventually becomes abandoned. The value of bitcoin relative to other goods/services/currencies drops to zero and my investment looks foolish in retrospect. In this case, bitcoin is worse than holding a hyper-inflated cash, because at least that I could use for stacking, wallpapering, or heating.
Yet, historically we have seen items such as paper certificates with negligible intrinsic value appear as money. Usually this proceeds in two steps, and Shostak acknowledges so in his article. First, an institution such as a government or bank issues certificates redeemable to the previously chosen commodity money. These are adopted because they rank higher on Aristotle’s portability attribute. Second, the institution severs the redeemability link. The money continues in circulation, partially because market participants may be reluctant to switch away from the customarily used unit of account and also often because of a legal tender law or keep-out-of-jail token during tax collection. Austrians like to refer to the resulting situation as “pure fiat” or “paper currency” to distinguish it from commodity money. But, as the issued certificates continue to circulate they satisfy the “medium of exchange” definition of money.
Because the intrinsic value of bitcoin is actually less than that of a piece of paper, I think bitcoin makes for a better money! I mean better in the sense that, when bitcoin can be traded for other goods/services, it does so purely because of its value as an exchange medium. That is, the price of a bitcoin is more purely function of its exchange prospects, than for any other currency in history. For econometricians, bitcoin operates as a better measuring tool:
- The total supply is public knowledge.
- The rate of mining (expansion of money supply) is public knowledge.
- The entire transaction history is public knowledge and provides a wealth of computable information about velocity, network connectivity, etc.
If Shostak seriously believes that “money emerges out of barter conditions that permit more complex forms of trade and economic calculation” then he should be in love with fully digital currencies.
Although bitcoin fails on the Intrinsic Value aspect of Aristotle’s attributes, it does possess what I’ll refer to as Extrinsic Value, giving it a mechanism for adoption. That is, in the same way that taxation and legal tender laws coerce the use of fiat currency, the desire to escape that same coercion motivates the use of crypto-currency. Bitcoin has secured a niche market in delivery of goods that government’s dislike, but which a laissez-faire market happily trades. By enabling this market, bitcoin simultaneously gains foothold for expansion and a lesser likelihood of abandonment. Indeed, many vocal proponents tout bitcoin as a possible escape from government managed money. Except for the blockchain growth issues, it may end up bitcoin succeeds in displacing government paper, analogous to why VHS succeeded over Betamax.
Today in my research, I came across an interesting challenge. I’m editing an older version of JavaScriptCore (JSC), redefining the most basic typedef in the sytem, EncodedJSValue. Previously it was a simple void*, but I need to gift it with some special secret sauce, so I changed it to a struct.
typedef struct EncodedJSValue {
void *value;
// additional functionality elided
}Most of the additional functionality could be filled in by following compiler errors. But one error deep in the system took some special cleverness. My initial (and failing) attempts at fixing the issue led me into a strange corner of the C++: overloading of the cast operators.
g++’s error messages are confusing, so I originally (wrongly) thought that the EncodedJSValue‘s were sometimes used to hold function pointers. Specifically typedef int(*jitStub)(void**); So, how to convert an EncodedJSValue to a function pointer?
Well, I know from online reading, that it’s possible to implement an operator that can convert from EncodedJSValue to int.
typedef struct EncodedJSValue {
void *value;
operator int() {
return static_cast<int>(value);
}
}So what would be the syntax for writing a typecast operator from EncodedJSValue to a function pointer? Although I know the syntax for function pointers (see the jitStub typedef previously), I was pretty sure that I could not just paste that into the operator definition. Besides that, function pointers don’t read very nicely, and keeping a typedef around helps the code to be more self-explanatory. So, I tried making an operator jitStub, and it worked. No complaints from the compiler!
typedef int(*jitStub)(void**);
typedef struct EncodedJSValue {
void *value;
operator jitStub() {
return static_cast<jitStub>(value);
}
}Also, I found out by writing a separate test, the conversion can be called implicitly.
EncodedJSValue jsv;
void **arg;
int x = jsv(jitStub); Although this didn’t solve my compilation problem, I did learn another dark corner of the labyrinthine C++. Using the much better error reporting in clang helped me to interpret my actual problem.
Last weekend (Mar 30th) I took a trip down to a fabulous domicile in Fallbrook, CA to hear Ron Yoder talk about his expatriation to Uruguay. Having already authored an article published through The International Man in 2011, Ron agreed to present information about his transition to a foreign land to the San Diego Casey Phyle. This post records some brief notes that I took during the presentation.
Before making such a life-altering transition it’s good to expose your mind to some of the economic background that led Ron to his decision to expatriate:
Before moving it’s a good idea to visit, get a tour of the area, a handle on the people and culture, investigate living conditions, medical resources, etc. For example, Having gathered enough information to commit to a local a second trip might involve setting up a foreign bank account. UY has pretty strict financial secrecy, and is well off the radar of the US government. But take things in small steps: “It’s a cinch by the inch, but hard by the yard.” Eventually you may consider parking some IRA funds offshore or acquiring a 2nd passport (through ancestry, outright purchase, or by residency).
Step 1. Narrow down the list expatriation targets. Start with something like a Quality of Life Index (such as that put out by International Living). Ron himself looked at a list of the freest countries minus any in the OECD. UY was near the top of his list for 3 years in a row. Do some research on any countries that look interesting. For example, Ron was unable to find books and maps about UY, making it all the more attractive for his interest in remote and low-profile countries.
Step 2. Take a vactation to the countries of choice. Get a feel for the weather and living conditions. See if you like the food, customs, and culture.
Step 3. Follow the breadcrumbs. Make contacts with bloggers about the country, find out if they are credible. Build a bridge of contacts in the area, people that can help set you up with meetings: lawyer, bankers, investment brokers, real estate agent, etc. Whatever you’ll need during the transition. Get a SkypeIn account with a number local to the area, so that other residents won’t be put off. This especially goes for any business start-ups, as they need to present themselves with a local number.
Step 4. Find your Facilitator. It’s worth the expense, as they can help to smooth things out, and book effective meetings on the first trip, giving you more for your time there. Many facilitators are actually retired expats, and are quite willing to help out. You definitely want a bunch of meet+greets in every visit.
Step 5. Complete the move. Within the US, consider getting a ghost address in NV to avoid state income taxes. Lean on your facilitator and previous contacts to setup any needed accounts abroad and move in.
After the presentation, Ron addressed questions from the audience. I took notes about this part as they took my interest:
- UY vs Chile: He can’t directly compare, as he doesn’t actually know about Chile. However, it seems they are more business friendly, and even have an international startup program.
- New Residency + Passport after citizenship: Must live there over 186 days for each year. 5yrs for a single citizenship, 3yrs if married. The clock for citizenship starts at the time residency paperwork is filed. The waiting time has been made longer recently.
- Quality of Life: They have better health care and much higher QoL. Far less hectic, and no Big Brother forcing scary stories through the media. Also, much closer to the food chain. Cost of living is about the same as the U.S. but you get a much better return on the money.
- Bank Account: Can get a bank account as a non-resident. Book a round-trip flight for $1200, meet with a lawyer for $200, minimum deposit $500, and 2 night hotel $150. Ron recommends using the national UY Bank.
- International Trust: maintenance fee $1k — $1.5k
- Income: Not such a great idea to earn a living in UY. Much better to have income stream from a higher paying OECD country (France, Germany, Switzerland, US). Also Chile is better for technical jobs.
- Diversification: Want to have 5 baskets, so that if 3 disappear you should still be fine with the remaining 2.
Ron also mentioned, that living trapped in the US, we are cultivated like cattle. Becoming an expat is one of the best things that you can do as a deprogramming exercise. You’ll learn more self-reliance and become personally empowered against the government’s controlling agenda.
In summary, Ron’s biggest message is: Don’t do it all at once. Don’t think about uprooting your life in a single step. Scout things out before committing, and do everything in small steps to make your transition as smooth as possible. Take the first step by outlining what you are looking for, write down you list of criteria!
I’ve recently come across another missive from Thom Hartmann, that reveals a lack of firm economic grounding. The very title of the article, “Ayn Rand’s Gospel of Selfishness and Billionaire Empowerment is Plaguing America” and it’s subtitle “The United States and other independent governments around the world are crumbling while Ayn Rand’s billionaires are taking over” clearly indicates an emotional appeal. While my own position sides with that of Herman Hoppe, author of “Democracy: The God that Failed”, Hartmann thinks that we all need a governmental parent that is justified in collecting taxes to provide for regulation and social services to the poor and sick.
Oddly, Hartmann begins his missive by portraying some great horror that I actually find both acceptable and potentially desirable.
Ayn Rand’s reviled “state” (or what we would call our democracy, the United States of America) is losing its power to billionaires and transnational corporations.
As far as I’m concerned, those billionaires are mostly rewarded for their role in creating and expanding the transnational corporations that produce the goods and service I rely on. I do business with these corporations on a voluntary basis. They employ people, like Thom Hartmann, that I’d probably hate and dislike if I met them personally. Meanwhile, that sacred government of Hartmann’s steals my wealth with the treat of imprisonment for my non-cooperation, in order to fund endless war and destruction. Not to mention the domestic devastation caused by regulation drafted by politicians without knowledge of industry practice demanded by a similarly ignorant populace and the regulatory capture which stifles competition.
Hartmann’s confused about where goods and services arise.
To our Founding Fathers, looking out for the general welfare of the population was an explici role of the government, one of its most important and the reason this nation was created when we separated from Britain. But to Ayn Rand, a government that taxed billionaires to help pay for healthcare and education for impoverished children was not just unwise economically, it was also immoral.
First, the meaning of the term welfare has radically changed since its inclusion in the Constitution. Not only does that phrase appear only in the preamble, but it was never meant to support the legal monopolization of theft and servitude that the government practices today.
Dickensian street urchins and indentured servitude merely reflect on the historical fact that, historically, the world economy has always been impoverished. The plentiful cornucopia of goods that we have today arises from the careful savings and calculated investment of millions of individuals throughout history. The collective action of each individual trying to make his own life better by serving others with what they desire, leads to prosperity and wealth. The confiscation of this wealth for political causes (oh, think of the children!) represents a gross misallocation of scarce resources. The forcible reallocation of wealth from private hands, through government, and into healthcare and (state-sanctioned forms of) education is immoral. This policy treats the wealth creators as serfs, and the labor of doctors and teachers as that of slaves.
Thom also inserts a logical inconsistency into Rand’s ideas.
According to Ayn Rand, the rich can never be asked to sacrifice. So instead, it’s working people across the Eurozone who have to pay for the bad investments that the banksters made in the run-up to the global financial collapse.
In truth, Rand was a staunch opponent of government subsidy. Not just because social safety nets degrade their recipients selfworth, but because capitalism doesn’t function without allowance of failure. Rand’s policy doesn’t save the corporations by bailing them out, Hartmann’s does. As much as I might disagree with Hartmann’s underlying motivations, the same logic that compels him to support the creation of governmental safety nets also compels him to accept the socialization of losses that arise from political policies containing moral hazard. Unlike Hartmann, Rand recognizes the underlying logic of Hartmann’s position. Her work, even in fiction, precisely outline the results of governmentally sponsored looting in the name of social welfare.
In a stunning display of partially applied logic, Hartmann supports the idea of national sovereignty, but not individual sovereignty. Especially not the independence of those with wealth.
We’ve seen the rapid privatization of our commons, the further erosion of social safety nets, and more losses of national sovereignty with more so-called free trade agreements.
…
She [Rand] may have realized that American Presidents like Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower were right when they made sure that wealth was more evenly distributed and the Billionaire Class was held in check.
If a country should be sovereign, and unregulated in it dealings with other countries, why cannot individuals behave similarly?
And finally, near the end of the confused, historical mythology, Hartmann reveals his government provided education for its true worth.
Or she may have come to understand that corporations and billionaires owe their wealth to the state and not the other way around. Without favorable patent and copyright laws, a court system, an educated workforce, and an infrastructure to move goods about the country, then no one would be able to get rich in America. We’d be like the Libertarian paradise of Somalia.
Patents and copyright are government sponsored monopolies which should be eradicated. Courts can be replaced with private arbitration, which already handle 90% of legal disputes. The need for educated workers does not imply the creation of a state-run system of indoctrination. Infrastructure is actually built by private construction companies with money stolen from private individuals and companies. The government has merely imposed itself as an inefficient middle-man in that process.
Only a government-provided system of indoctrination could ever lead people like Hartmann to so vociferously maintain that government is an absolute necessary for achieving those goals which we all value. It’s enough that I, and everyone really, value education and the roads that we use. None of the items that Hartmann points at require governmental force for their creation.
We each recognize the benefits of cooperation enough that we will (and do) voluntarily build and maintain that which we value.
So deep is Hartmann’s statist belife, that he even points out the immorality of the state, in its usurpation as a benefactor necessary for our life and liberty, without realizing he does so.
As Harry Moser, the founder of the Reshoring Initiative, argued in The Economist, “Corporations are not created by the shareholders or the management. Rather they are created by the state. They are granted important privileges by the state (limited liability, eternal life, etc). They are granted these privileges because the state expects them to do something beneficial for the society that makes the grant. They may well provide benefits to other societies, but their main purpose is to provide benefits to the societies (not to the shareholders, not to management, but to the societies) that create them.”
Sadly, this understanding of how democratic republics work – and why – has been lost this generation.
And Ayn Rand’s disciples are making sure the next generation never finds it again.
Let’s hope that the free market, guided by billionaires who have proven themselves successful as wealth managers on a voluntary basis where the government has failed and resorted to theft and coercion, can subvert the state and bring us together. I fully support their devious weapon of creating many transnational organizations that produce goods and services in response to the many diverse consumer and investment demands of individuals throughout the world. I will gladly and voluntarily exchange the wealth I keep from not paying taxes to a warmongering state on the products resulting from this transnational, market-based, cooperation.
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The finance industry is very secretive. Not only about what they do (so to avoid strategy/capability leak to competitors) but also in who they are.
Consequently it is difficult to get hired.
The best strategy is to become well known first and they will recruit you.
The industry’s biggest problem is finding and hiring talent.
It usually takes 1 or 2 years to train a new hire.
Quantopian solves this problem by providing a platform to develop trading strategies, proving your abilities in the field.
-
Because of existing tools, many quant traders cannot leave their job.
Even the super intelligent and successful ones simply cannot reconstruct a firms tooling.
- Tools break down into three components:
- Data
- Quantopian holds clean (normalized for splits/dividends) data.
They have minute trading data for almost all companies over the past 10 years (free).
Including companies which went bankrupt, or stopped trading, so as not to introduce survivorship bias.
- Backtesting
- Comparing an algorithmic performance using a different backtester’s is not apples-to-apples, because each backtester has differences in the way it handles splits, dividends, commissions, slippage, borrowing costs if shorting, in-sample v. out-sample, etc.
Quantopian allows comparison across algorithms, because the backtester is the same for everyone on the site.
- Implementation Plumbing
- Once an algorithm has been developed and rigorously tested, programmer may still introduce bugs when implementing it for live trading.
Every trading platform API is different (IB is horrible, but the standard).
- Quantopian provides in-browser editing and development, removing the largest hassle: setup.
- Proud to list some of the tools used: Rightscale, Flask, Gevent, Zero MQ, Pandas, SciPy, NumPy, Heroku, MongoHQ, Highcharts, Zipline, and others.
- Competitor (QuantBot?) allows people to create algo’s by connecting different boxes.
Much more flexible to let people write python.
Quantopian targets ease of uses and is trying to grow the community.
They do not focus on HFT development.
- Future monetization could come from charging for specialized data as a premium feature (futures, derivatives, commodities, etc); charging for cpu-hr during backtesting.
They want to avoid commission if/when the support live trading, because that would seriously complicate people’s backtesting.
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