News Donald Trump's Popularity To Date

[scout86]

I guess, yeah, taking Hitler as "right wing". Everyone on that list is actually the same and one of the things they were is liars. The major difference is which lies they choose to tell. Dictators generally say they are doing things for the people's own good. I suppose no one wants to hear "Your Grandmother is in jail because I'm an evil dictator." Where does someone like Abraham Lincoln fall on the spectrum? Or Nelson Mandela? Or George Washington, who was offered another term and turned it down because he thought it would set a bad precedent?

I think the human species has an inborn tendency to organize in clan type structures. And, maybe, with less lethal weapons, that would be ok. My idea of near perfect would be some of the indigenous people in this country, who picked a leader and followed them until they decided not to. I'm sure there was coercion, because that's something else that's common in our species. But things were on a small enough scale it was easy to see and know who you were dealing with and it was possible to pack up and leave if that seemed best. Hard to do that with globalization.

isn't that what we have now?

I don't think that's QUITE what we have now, at least not here. Here, I still have the right to speech in defiance of the government. I still have the right to dress as I choose, and to an education. But I'm pretty acutely aware that it's just an accident of birth that I was born in such a place. And, especially being female, my lot could be a whole lot worse than it is. And I'm protected by law and the government, here. I had a professor in college tell me that, had I been born a few hundred years earlier, I'd have been burned at the stake. (And I think he was one of the ones that LIKED me. LOL) But, he well may have been right. So, I count myself lucky to be born in a country that I'll admit is far from perfect but has laws that at least protect most of us from the rest of us most of the time.

I can imagine a world without government and imagine it as being wonderful. And then I remember there'd be people like my brother the narc in it. And I'd be forced to actually kill him. Which would be ok, because I guess it wouldn't be illegal, but I'm not sure I want to spend that much of my time trying to rid the world of evil doers. Because that's likely to be what I'd feel compelled to do.

 

[Anarchy]

My idea of near perfect would be some of the indigenous people in this country, who picked a leader and followed them until they decided not to.

That system is actually very common
it's also incredibly robust, for example (channelling "the spider and the starfish" here), the contrast between the complete collapse of the centralised Aztecs by a few hundred Spaniards and the two hundred years or more that it took to finally defeat the Apache by corrupting their ever emerging consensual leaders, after all attempts at violent conquest had failed.

No human system is ever perfect, most have warts and blemishes. Interestingly, the medieval Irish system of customary law developed very strong systems of women's rights, that would have seemed radical in the English speaking world of 1900

Narcs tend to have a hard time of it in such systems. People get wise to them, and stop seeking their services, and refuse to do business with them. Insurance groups* get sick of the claims that narcs and psychopaths generate, and seek to either keep them on a tight leash, or else eject them, leaving them un protected and unable to function.

In such societies the difference between justifiable homicide and murder is also much more subtly understood, for example Michael van Notten's wonderful book on "The Law of the Somalis" includes several examples of Somali jurisprudence regarding killings, where the killing of a guy who'd murdered his wife - by the wife's brother, after the murderer had returned from exile was accepted as justified.

You certainly wouldn't get that sort of sublety when slick willy and others were running for the post of resident, and an plea for clemency from someone on death row landed on their desk

and I doubt that youd get it with a Hitlery or a trump running for re-election and wanting to appear tough.


____________________________________
* in customary law systems - everyone is insured whether medievel Iceland, Ireland, Anglo Saxon England, or modern day Somalia, everyone is insured - incidentally, the troubled part of Somalia is around Mogadishu, where the remnants of the soviet client regime of Said Barre are still living parasitically as war lords, places like Somaliland and Puntland are about as peaceful as sub saharan Africa gets.

To head off the usual (and fallacious) argument that Somalia is hardly a desirable place - hence it's a really good job that we have a state: Without a state, Somalia went from around the bottom of most indicators of development for the (iirc 24) sub saharan african countries, at the end of the Barre regime to about mid way up the list by 2000, and despite the billions spent by foreign governments on favouring one faction or another as a future client government, and various incursions by the American and the American sponsored Ethiopian militaries, that development has continued at a faster rate than the comparable sub saharan african statist neighbours.

ref for Irish customary law (Conor Peden) https://mises.org/system/tdf/1_2_1_0.pdf?file=1&type=document

guessing you'll love this, the not so wild wild west, https://mises.org/system/tdf/3_1_2_0.pdf?file=1&type=document

and some examples drawn from "primitive" societies by Bruce Benson https://mises.org/system/tdf/9_1_1_0.pdf?file=1&type=document
also check out the much shorter abridgement from Benson's 400 page book "the enterprise of law", which is titled "the enterprise of customary law", which is available as a free .pdf

van Noten (very highly recommended) Dead Link Removed

 

[scout86]

I[m going to read all of those, I promise! And, I don't TOTALLY disagree with you. I think, without "government" as it exists now, we probably wouldn't have a lot of the troublesome things we have now, like nuclear weapons. I just can't imagine private industry coming up with a reason to make them.

Insurance groups* get sick of the claims that narcs and psychopaths generate, and seek to either keep them on a tight leash, or else eject them, leaving them un protected and unable to function.

OR, the narc takes over the company........ I'd LIKE to think in a more free wheeling system the narcs would be perceived as such and avoided. I guess I think it's more likely that a percentage of the tribe would decide "I'm not dealing with this!" and leave, Leaving our mini-Hitler to run what ever was left. From what little I know, a LOT of earlier systems were variations on the same system. But I'm not sure it works when you get into #'s above a hundred or so. We need countries the size of townships. But then, there's be a place for Kurds and Turks alike and that would be great.

 

[Anarchy]

There are a whole load of ways that insurance can be organised, and has been.

I'm guessing that the most common way for us would be specialised "for profit" companies, but that is far from being the historical norm

In Anglo-Saxon England, it was organised by neighbourhood, In Medieval Ireland by people who cooked and ate together, in present day Somalia, it is by the decendants of a common great grandfather

although each of those allowed for people to seek to join a different insurance group, or to establish a new one

other possibilities are an emergence of the fraternities as major providers of legal and defence insurance - which the buff's, freemasons, shriners (entry to the shriners requires candidates to already be freemasons, and 32 degree in the york or scottish rite) etc still do to some extent with social insurance

employers providing it

also churches, charities and the like.
In medieval Bologna, people from other kingdoms or city states, were held liable for the debts incurred by other people from the same place.

We need countries the size of townships. But then, there's be a place for Kurds and Turks alike and that would be great.

Yes, a million little places like Singapore, Hong Kong, Maccau, lichtenstein, San Marino, Monaco, Gibralta, the Isle of Man, The channel islands, Bermuda, the Swiss cantons, Faroe islands...

Prior to 1860 Germany consisted of over 100 independent kingdoms, principalities, city states, cantons (counties) and independant manors. and Italy also consisted of numerous kingdoms, republics etc.

such places could be a stepping stone to devolution down to the individual. http://dailyanarchist.com/2015/07/08/free-cities-and-commonwealths-a-bridging-strategy-to-freedom/

There's a great Lysander Spooner quote that pissed off both sides in the war between the union and the confederacy; "the right to secession derives from a slave's right to be free"

Like Tolkein's fictional shire with its hobbits (enjoying 6 cooked meals a day), anarchic places don't tend to end up with much written history. They have no need for a court chronicler who's job it is to record everything good that happens as being due to the king, and everything bad as due to those who doubted the king. they tend to be small quiet, peaceful and prosperous.
http://dailyanarchist.com/2015/03/11/the-anarchist-republic-of-cospaia/

Link Removed

 

[scout86]

I'm guessing that the most common way for us would be specialised "for profit" companies

You don't want to get me started on THEM! They are the true evil that lurks behind most of the apparent evils. But, what we have now is too big, local would work better. You could deal with it when they started sucking the blood out of society.

 

[Anarchy]

There are economies of scale and dis economies of scale
access to a machinery of legalised coercion allows the costs of the dyseconomies to be socialised (passed on to the tax victims) and the proceeds of the economies to be privatised

for example would Sam Walton's chain of store's have grown so large without the tax victim funded interstates to allow distribution? we have no way of knowing how roads would have developed if the private turnpikes had remained privately owned, and privately funded

Would the Pinkertons have grown so large without state sector contracts?

one of the unspoken corollaries of "too big to be allowed to fail" is "too small to be allowed to succeed"

without tax victim bail outs, Ford and GM would have been re-structured or perhaps even liquidated in 2008 - because not enough people thought their cars were worth buying, for them to be able to support their current size of operations. Political interests thought otherwise. Just imagine if the makers of buggy whips had had access to bailouts.

There a raft of ways that vested interests seek to use the state to keep competitors from entering the market and offering consumers an alternative;

Patents
licences
minimum standards (there are places where more training is required by law to work in a nail bar, than to bully people as a cop)
quotas (eg the NYC taxi cab discs that were changing hands at over $1M each until Uber rendered them unsaleable)
eminent domain (have your competitor deprived of their property)
monopolies (eg Pennsylvania's state monopoly on unwelcoming liquor stores)
anti trust (used by the Morgan family to take the Rockefeller's Standard Oil down)
approval (eg FDA keeping Indian made meds out)
tariffs and duties (eg on imports of sugar)
Defense contracts ( as a hidden development subsidy eg boeing)

Without access to legalised threats of violence, vested interests can't keep competitors from entering the market and trying to offer customers a better deal or better product.

attempts to establish monopolies without recourse to political means, such as those by Mc Cormick's International Harvester and Rockerfeller's Standard Oil, found competitors springing up faster than they could buy them out.

Ford's "you can have any colour car you like, just so long as it's black" only lasted as long as it took GM to show that people would pay for other colours too.

Without politicians, every penny you choose to spend, or to hang onto becomes a vote for who runs businesses, how, and what they make. even though I don't think that's how the reverand Jesse uses the term "economic democracy".

With Trump, it looks like some very well politically connected special interests are feeling very exposed

no doubt he'd reward other special interests to the detriment of everyone, but to relative advantage of some

for example by his proposed import duties raising the price that everyone has to pay for goods that are available cheaper from elsewhere, and that without the import duty, people would have chosen to buy.

 

[EveHarrington]

Me, I don't care about her gender. She is a career politician, which means she is completely and utterly ful...

Why thank you kind sir! Although I am finding the humor in the fact that no American could give me a straight answer on this one, LOL. Eh, we just like to complain without knowing what we're really complaining about.

I'm not really a Hillary fan. I have my own reasons for disliking her, although most don't understand why I've seemingly chosen to pick on such an inconsequential detail (in their eyes) as a reason to not like her.

I think I'll stop now while I'm ahead!

 

[Anarchy]

Trump [and other tyrants] antidote here:

Etienne de la Boetie's discourse on volountary servitude, written c1553
despite being around 450 years old, it is still highly relevant - for example it served as a basis for Gandhi's campaign against British imperialism in India (communicated to Gandhi by count Leo Tolstoy, in his "Letter to a Hindu")

Niccolo Machiavelli, wrote a manual for his prince on how to get hold of, and how to keep hold of political power,
de la Boetie, wrote on how to topple political power - without using violence,
The introduction by Murray N Rothbard is excellent. Rothbard points out the David Hume, probably the leading thinker of the 18th century Scottish Enlightenment, came to several of the same conclusions that de la Boetie had, but Hume reached them two hundred years later.

site with zip file containing MP3 of audio book Link Removed
.pdf, e book and html formats etc https://mises.org/library/politics-obedience-discourse-voluntary-servitude
and a Youtube playlist of the MP3 audiobook https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9EF8A72A139F5322

 

[scout86]

Kind of an interesting article. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/...ump-eminent-domain-lawyer-20160325-story.html

 

[Anarchy]

Kind of an interesting articleLink Removed

What a disgusting crony crapitalist

Trump is factually wrong about eminent domain being necessary
The El Paso Natural Gas Company, was able to build it's network of gas distribution pipelines without using eminent domain (it gets called "compulsory purchase" in Britain). They simply came up with three possible routes and negotiated with the property owners of the first of those routes to say that they were willing to host the pipeline.

Trump and all of the other eminent domain proponents are also wrong on simple (Austrian School) Economics 101 pricing theory.
If a project is more valuable to society than the current land use
then the expected earnings from that project would be sufficeint to pay the current owners of that ground enough to make it very much worth their while to sell.

That article really does [to me anyway] point to Trump being more than ready to use and abuse the implicit threat of state sector violence that makes things like eminent domain, possible.
It also shows him willing to deny customers choice, by trying to scotch a competitor's plans.

Trump might be treading on some establisment toes, but he is far from being something new and better.

 

[scout86]

The most interesting thing about that piece, to me, was that he was willing to used eminent domain to try to take the old lady's house when he wanted HER land, but then he also tried to hire her lawyer to fight in opposition to eminent domain when one of his competitors was using it to try to take property in another spot. Had her lawyer not been the ethical person he appears to be, and had he taken the job, he'd have had a conflict of interest that would have messed things up for his first client. AND, Trump obviously only cares about Trump. He'll use what ever's available to serve his purposes and has no ethical compass beyond that. All he cares about is what HE wants. I'm hoping more of his supporters will come to see this as time goes on. :nailbiting:

 

[Anarchy]

I'm hoping more of his supporters will come to see this as time goes on. :nailbiting:

Don't hold your breath
Statists of whatever stripe, are amazingly utopian
There seems to be a hugely naive faith in the run up to each election that each person's chosen candidate will bring world peace, close Gitmo, stop the seas from rising and heal the planet...

perhaps even get the trains running on time

Plenty of those things might not even be possible, and even if they are possible, electing a narcissist to preen his or her self in front of the TV cameras for five years is unlikely to be an effective means of achieving them.

There also seems to be the thing about each side having it's group of people that they wouldn't approve of seeing hurt, and it's group of people that they either wouldn't particularly care about if they did get hurt, or maybe they would really quite like to see them getting hurt.

The idea that it's actually not ok to hurt any individual, unless that individual is engaged in aggression (in Jefferson's words "Breaking legs or picking pockets"), and then only as a means to stop that aggression, never seems to occur to either side.

they don't disagree about using the machinery of state to hurt people - they only disagree about which people to hurt.

Trump and his supporters are no different to the rest of the statists in that respect.