April 2012
33 posts
Democracy: Not The Best System There Is
- Daily Bell: Let's jump right in. Why is democracy "The God that failed?"
- Dr. Hans-Hermann Hoppe: The traditional, pre-modern state-form is that of a (absolute) monarchy. The democratic movement was directed against kings and the classes of hereditary nobles. Monarchy was criticized as being incompatible with the basic principle of the "equality before the law." It rested on privilege and was unfair and exploitative. Democracy was supposed to be the way out. In opening participation and entry into state-government to everyone on equal terms, so the advocates of democracy claimed, equality before the law would become reality and true freedom would reign. But this is all a big error.
- True, under democracy everyone can become king, so to speak, not only a privileged circle of people. Thus, in a democracy no personal privileges exist. However, functional privileges and privileged functions exist. Public officials, if they act in an official capacity, are governed and protected by "public law" and thereby occupy a privileged position vis-à-vis persons acting under the mere authority of "private law." In particular, public officials are permitted to finance or subsidize their own activities through taxes. That is, they are permitted to engage in, and live off, what in private dealings between private law subjects is prohibited and considered "theft" and "stolen loot." Thus, privilege and legal discrimination — and the distinction between rulers and subjects — will not disappear under democracy.
- Even worse: Under monarchy, the distinction between rulers and ruled is clear. I know, for instance, that I will never become king, and because of that I will tend to resist the king's attempts to raise taxes. Under democracy, the distinction between rulers and ruled becomes blurred. The illusion can arise "that we all rule ourselves," and the resistance against increased taxation is accordingly diminished. I might end up on the receiving end: as a tax-recipient rather than a tax-payer, and thus view taxation more favorably.
- And moreover: As a hereditary monopolist, a king regards the territory and the people under his rule as his personal property and engages in the monopolistic exploitation of this "property." Under democracy, monopoly and monopolistic exploitation do not disappear. Rather, what happens is this: instead of a king and a nobility who regard the country as their private property, a temporary and interchangeable caretaker is put in monopolistic charge of the country. The caretaker does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his protégés' advantage. He owns its current use — usufruct — but not its capital stock. This does not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it makes exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock. Exploitation becomes shortsighted and capital consumption will be systematically promoted.
“In retrospect, it is clear that libertarians and Old Rightists, including myself, had made a great mistake in endorsing domestic red-baiting, a red-baiting that proved to be the major entering wedge for the complete transformation of the original right wing. We should have listened more carefully to Frank Chodorov, and to his splendidly libertarian stand on domestic redbaiting: “How to get rid of the communists in the government? Easy. Just abolish the jobs.” It was the jobs and their functioning that was the important thing, not the quality of the people who happened to fill them.”
—Murray N. Rothbard, Betrayal of the American Right, p.162
Send Them Your Money.com →
sendthemyourmoney.com
The Problem
The MPAA & RIAA claim that the internet is stealing billions of dollars worth of their property by sharing copies of files. They’re willing to destroy the internet with things like SOPA & PIPA in an attempt to collect that money.
The InspirationHundreds of years ago a Japanese judge (Ōoka Tadasuke) handled a lawsuit by a paranoid innkeeper who accused a poor student of literally stealing the fumes of his cooking by eating when the innkeeper was cooking to flavour his dull food. Although his colleagues advised Ōoka to throw the case out as ridiculous, he decided to hear the case. The judge resolved the matter by ordering the student to pass the money he had in one hand to his other and ruling that the price of the smell of food is the sound of money. — Wikipedia
The SolutionLet’s just pay them the money! They’ve made it very clear that they consider digital copies to be just as valuable as the original. That makes it a lot easier to pay them back in two ways:
- We can email them scanned images of dollar bills instead of bulky paper
- We don’t have to worry about the hassle of shipping huge quantities of cash
Take a picture or scan an image of your money. Send digital copies to the MPAA & RIAA in whatever quantity you feel you can afford. Don’t go overboard. If you can only afford 20 copies then that’s good enough. If enough people contribute we should be able to fully satisify even their most outrageous demands.
- MPAA Contact page
- RIAA About page (they don’t make it easy to send them email it seems)
Wikipedia gave me a copy, and I made a copy of it here. Please make your own copies if you can afford to do so.
If images are out of your budget here is some ASCII money (link courtesy of Danieru on HN). Say no to intellectual monopoly!
“
The unprecedented success of Keynesianism is due to the fact that it provides an apparent justification for the “deficit spending” policies of contemporary governments. It is the pseudo-philosophy of those who can think of nothing else than to dissipate the capital accumulated by previous generations.
Yet no effusions of authors however brilliant and sophisticated can alter the perennial economic laws. They.. work and take care of themselves. Not-withstanding all the passionate fulminations of the spokesmen of governments, the inevitable consequences of inflationism and expansionism as depicted by the “orthodox” economists are coming to pass. And then, very late indeed, even simple people will discover that Keynes did not teach us how to perform the “miracle… of turning a stone into bread,” but the not at all miraculous procedure of eating the seed corn.
” —Ludwig von Mises, Planning for Freedom, p.71You know you're an Austrian when...
- Your professors generally don’t know what you’re talking about
- You realize that bathroom lines in stadiums are a result of prices being too low
- Being in line for anything makes you think of the Soviet Union
- You extend that analysis to include traffic jams
- You know the other person’s argument better than the other person
- You incorporate malinvestment into conversations
- You get paid, and feel it is utterly worthless because the currency didn’t originate in the market
- You can pick Stephan Kinsella, Jeffrey Tucker, Peter Klein and Joe Salerno out of a lineup
- You know Margit von Mises’ pet name for her husband
- You’re on mises.org at 2:30am
- You realise markets don’t fail, only governments do
- You start using terms like “time-preference” in everyday conversations
- You get annoyed when someone implies that the value of something is not subjective, as in “this house is selling below its true value.”
- You know what the words a priori, methodenstreit, and verstehen mean
- You tend to disagree with everyone in a conversation about politics or economics
- Ron Paul talks about something besides war and still makes sense to you
“Upon entering the university, I too was an etatist, through and through. I differed from my fellow students, however, in that I was consciously anti-Marxist. At the time I knew little of Marx’s writings, but was acquainted with most important works of Kautsky. I was an avid reader of the Neue Zeit, and had followed the revisionist debate with great attention. The platitudes of Marxist literature repelled me. I found Kautsky almost ridiculous. As I entered into a more detailed study of the most important works of Marx, Engels, and Lassalle, I was incited to contradiction on all sides. It seemed incomprehensible to me that this garbled Hegelianism could have such enormous influence. I realized only later that party Marxists fell into two categories: those who had never studied Marx at all and were acquainted with only a few of the better known passages from his books, and those who knew of Marx only from textbooks, or, as autodidacts, had read none of the world’s literature beyond that of Marx. Max Adler, for example, belonged to the former group. His knowledge of Marx was limited to the few pages in which the “super structure theory” had been developed. Prominent among the latter group were the Eastern Europeans, who led Marxism’s ideological charge.”
—Ludwig von Mises, Education of an Austro-Marxist
“Urge immediate abolition as earnestly as we may, it will, alas! be gradual abolition in the end. We have never said that slavery would be overthrown by a single blow; that it ought to be, we shall always contend.”
—William Lloyd Garrison, The Liberator, August 13, 1831
“Political ideas that have dominated the public mind for decades cannot be refuted through rational arguments. They must run their course in life and cannot collapse otherwise than in great catastrophes… One has to accept the catastrophic devaluation of our currency as foregone. Imperialist and militarist policy necessarily goes in hand with inflationism. A consequent policy of socializations necessarily leads to a complete collapse of the monetary order. The proof is delivered not only through the history of the French revolution, but also through the present events in Bolshevist Russia and a couple of other states that more or less imitate the Russian example, even though they do not display the atrocious brutality of the Jacobins and Bolshevists, but prefer less bloody methods instead. As unbecoming as the collapse of the currency is in its consequences, it has the liberating effect of destroying the system that brings it about. The collapse of the assignats was the kiss of death for the Jacobin policy and marked the beginning of a new policy. In our country too a decisive change of economic policy will take its impetus from the collapse of the currency.”
—Ludwig von Mises, 1919 “Uber die im Hinblick auf das Fortschreiten der Geldentwertung zu ergreifenden Massnahmen” [On the measures to be taken on behalf of the decreasing value of money]. Memorandum. Mises Archive 109. pp. 2-3
“
What would a free market in legal services be like?
I am always tempted to give the honest and accurate response to this challenge, which is that to ask the question is to miss the point… It is possible to describe what a free market in shoes would be like because we have one. But such a description is merely an observation of the current state of a functioning market, not a projection of how human beings would organize themselves to supply a currently non-marketed good. To demand that an advocate of free market law (or Socrates of Monosizea, for that matter) describe in advance how markets would supply legal services (or shoes) is to issue an impossible challenge.
” —John Hasnas, The Myth of the Rule of Law
“
The history of thought and ideas is a discourse carried on from generation to generation. The thinking of later ages grows out of the thinking of earlier ages. Without the aid of this stimulation intellectual progress would have been impossible. The continuity of human evolution, sowing for the offspring and harvesting on land cleared and tilled by the ancestors, manifests itself also in the history of science and ideas.
We have inherited from our forefathers not only a stock of products of various orders of goods which is the source of our material wealth; we have no less inherited ideas and thoughts, theories and technologies to which our thinking owes its productivity. But thinking is always a manifestation of individuals.
” —Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p.178