Agorism as an option?

Freedom: The absence of the condition of coercion or slavery within a given group of people who choose to interact with each other.

Hello Folks,

Thanks to Sam for creating this thread!  I really did not mean to hijack the official Rowe thread with a talk about agorism but I believe it is the only option I have (so far) run into that stands a non-zero chance of success w.r.t us being prepared for what I see as the inevitable collapse of the State - somewhere between now and 20 years from now, a timeframe that overlays Chris's oft repeated statement: "The next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the last 20 years."

Since posts tend to fade over time, I am going to do a copy and paste of my post from that thread (with some improvements) here:

The Problem: The State.  Always.

I think you all know what the problems are.  If you didn't, you wouldn't be on this site. 

What is the State?  Here's a definition that you will NOT find in Webster's:

The State is nothing more than a group of people who enforce a monopoly of violence over a geographic area, declaring themselves "government". Be it a democracy, a republic, a dictatorship, a plutocracy, communist, fascist, or whatever.  How that government is selected is simply an academic process, but the exercising of violence or the threat of violence (coercion) control of one group of people over another is basic.

In some areas around the world, the media (falsely) portrays warring factions as "anarchists" in a given area (Somalia springs to mind) running around with guns, blowing up things, and killing people.  What it really is are groups of people competing to be the NEW government.  Anarchy gets a bad rap here, as all an anarchist is really somebody who believes in less government than you do.

Why do these groups of men want to take control?  The spoils are huge for them and their connected insiders!  They can loot and plunder the citizenry directly via taxation or enforce paper tickets (dollars, francs, pesos, marks etc) on the market within their area of control and devalue that money for their benefit via indirect taxation we call inflation.  More on that later.

I know that this comes as a great surprise for some, for others that definition is met with outright hostility, however from the cradle to the grave we are indoctrinated overtly and covertly into subjugating our lives, freedom, the fruits of our labour, and all forms property either partly or wholly to the State.

We cannot vote our way out of this mess - any politician who gets into true circles of power who wants to affect change for the benefit of his/her constituents would be long vetted out of the political system by the incumbents or by the dumbed-down voter. 

Tax resistance is futile for the State has amassed superior firepower to protect itself from its citizens in the name of "national defense".  Any partial, let alone full, tax resistance will result in the State deploying the bad guys in clown suits brandishing guns and badges to your home to terrorize you and your family.  Your employer acts as an uncompensated tax collection agent by collecting your tribute to the State on its behalf.  There are 50+ taxes on a loaf of bread from the field to the table. Your taxes are used to kill people.  We are all directly contributing to this and from what I have read on this site, we want out.  I could create the world's longest post listing all of the State's endless scandals, boondoggles, expansion of power, wars, mass murder, and citizen brutality, but that is beyond the scope of this post, and a reader on this site already has their own personal list.

One of the major fallacy traps that "awakened" people fall into is that they seek to limit the State's power enabled by the taxation/inflation system we are enslaved to, leeching off our productivity to support nefarious and incompetent agendas.  This is goodness.  However, in a democracy, we keep frantically scratching a pencil mark on a ballot to plead with our masters to beat us less or try to coerce each other into accepting the shade of lipstick we paint on the pig of the State.  This is silly. The fallacy is that we are pleading with the State to help with the implementation of limiting or removing the State!

After the election, the lipstick fades and it goes right on fleecing us. I refuse to participate in a process where I coerce you into agreeing with my choice of changing the hood ornament of the dump truck of the State bearing down on us.  I refuse to participate in a process where we make a personnel change in the Mafia. I don't think I have the right to coerce you into anything. I don't want my conscience to be stained of making a choice where all of us have to deal with the consequences of my choice, based on my knowledge (or lack of it). 

I wish others would extend the same courtesy to others and respect the other's freedom.  However, the State has intercepted the intellectual proliferation and expansion of liberty, property, monetary theory, and free markets and thwarted the development of the young mind for 12-13 years via indoctrination camps we know as "public education", right when the young minds are argueably at their peak reception of ideas.

There is a way out.

The only non-violent mechanism that I can think of that stands a non-zero chance of success is to bring together like minded people and create a counter-economy where trustworthy trading partners would buy and sell their products and services using whatever sound money trading parties agree on (most likely gold and silver coin/rounds).  The counter-economy enables people to fully enjoy the fruits of their labours without having it directly stolen via taxation.  Using gold and silver coin prevents theft via inflation.  This is called "agorism"  - a term coined by Samuel Konkin III (SEK3 in webspeak).

For those of you who are familiar with Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged", you will be well versed in "Galt's Gulch".  For those of you who aren't,  essentially the producers of the world rejected the notion they should labour for the benefit of the looters (the State and connected insiders) who held the gun at their heads.  The would leave the world and go to a secret location where they could voluntarily associate and trade with each other.  They would come back when the State collapsed and people were ready to deal with each other as humans.  

Sometimes, I wonder if "Atlas Shrugged" was fiction. However, the beauty of agorism is that you do not have to physically relocate.  You can hide in plain sight!

Initially, we could only work part-time in this counter-economy as not all of the products/services we require would be readily available in the network in addition to whatever extortion money (i.e. property taxes etc) the State demands from us.  However, as the counter-economy grows with more and more people participating in it, the number of goods/services increases.  Perhaps your local beer/wine brick and mortar store would be willing to participate part time in the network.  Then a independently owned gas-station.  People who bake, and make clothes and so forth. A shoemaker might spring up.  Is it becoming clearer?

The collapse of the State is When, not If.

Or we wouldn't be interested in Crash Course, would we?  Should we sit idly by and get dragged down with it? OK, even if I am wrong in that prediction, how much value to your productivity would be retained by creating your agorist network?  If the State does collapse, you will be better prepared for it as you will have your established network of trading partners.  How much value is there in that?

The will and the way

This post is getting a bit long, but I could certainly contribute more information if posters are interested and willing to do more.  Let's see what reception it gets.

It's time to posit a workable solution.  Agorism is the only one I have run into that has not been torn to shreds by my own critical thinking.  I am not being an egoist, snooty, or preachy.  Like all of you, I am deeply concerned, we all know what is wrong.  It is a matter of what to DO about it.

In agorism, if some people demand security and fairness from the market, but some people demand unfairness in their advantage, if the second group has more money, everything will be slanted toward that group.  A specific example: property rights.  I believe that property should be ownable, and that the person who owns something should have their rights protected.  As it currently stands, since the gov't fills this roll, if I own some land, and it turns out there is a lot of oil under my land, oil companies must either buy it from me or force me off it via the court system.  If security is something provided by the market, the oil company would hire security forces to show up at my door saying "this is our land now. Leave right now."  The only thing I can think of that could prevent that in an agoristic system is the general population choosing to not purchase gas from a company that doesn't respect property rights.  What is the chance that Joe Six-pack will buy more expensive gas just because of some rumor about some guy in a different state that may or may not have had his property taken away?

What (if anything) am i missing?

good post remnant

we are living hamilton's curse ah the title of a new book btw by thomas j di lorenzo it is endorsed by ron paul.

i highly recommend it.

the state imho will collapse. the choir will now shout amen

unfortunately the money masters who have been playing this game for centuries are much better prepared than we are.

there will be no vacuum something else will take its place. we will be allowed t play any game we wish as long as it does not interfere with the plans of the folks behind the curtain ie. we work and they profit.

just another conspiracy theorist

joe

Bear with me.

In an agorist market, there is no central monopoly on money issuance.  The market selected gold and silver over time for various reasons I will outline later.  There is no central mint.  Seigniorage - the act of minting coin - used to be a free market activity where several businesses were minting gold into convenient tokens for trade.  Payment was made to the minter in the form of the coin he rendered.  If a minter was dishonest, he was eventually lynched.   Sometimes minters were dishonest as they debased (the act of passing off a coin that was less than what it was supposed to weigh or alloying with another cheaper metal) but they were caught (i.e. as scales improved, assay tests etc).  Some minters "reeded" the coins in order to detect "clipping" - a process where people shaved off the sides of the coins ever so slightly and passed that off to others or shaking the coins in a bag and collecting the dust.  They declared that only the State should mint coin as we can protect the Serfs from nefarious counterfeiting.  Due to State violence, the people ceded private money production to the State.  Once that happened, it was GUARANTEED the State would debase the coins to suit their own purposes.

The State usurped and monopolized free market money by violence. Since gold and silver were difficult to acquire as they had to (a) expend labour on it to mine it, (b) State workers would often steal it, and (c) big egos to conquer other lands and small treasuries to pay for the empire continuously emptied the Treasury.

What gives the Federal Reserve Point value?  The State demanding it in the form of taxes.  Do you think a true free market would give value to paper money?  If I opened "The Remnants Money Printing Shop" and printed off pretty pieces of paper, do you think actors would accept that money?  I'd be laughed out of town.  But the State can do it, because they have a gun to your head.

So the State replaced free market money with paper tickets that were easy for the State to produce but woe to anyone else who tried to counterfeit money.  Only a monopoly on violence may counterfeit money.

I'm getting there.

In an agorist market, it is unlikely that a monopoly or oligopoly will form.  Currently, the State shields the incumbents within the market where regulations - enforced by State violence - written by industry insiders are designed to hurt competitors who want to enter the business.  Thus the enormous profits enjoyed by large corporations is protected by the State, resulting in higher prices.  Higher prices leads to greater profits for the parasite class to leech off the corporation in the form of taxation and other favours such as a high level "advisory" position on the Board.  It is a very cozy relationship.

In an agorist market, there wouldn't be much point in accumulating massive amounts of money as it would expensive to obtain - there is no printing press to go to and borrow at artificially low rates.  Commodity based money has no intrinsic value except for its weight and purity.  It is used to facilitate a voluntary claim on human labour - past, present, and future.  In otherwords, in order to be wealthy, you need to spend the money on things that will make you appear wealthy.

In an agorist market, there isn't much point in owning large amounts of land.  It isn't profitable.

You'll find the State facilitating your eviction, if that were to happen. What you really are asking is, "How am I protected if there isn't monopoly on violence established?".  That's a pretty provocative question.  So is this one: "How am I protected if there is a monopoly on violence established?"

You need to understand how competing Dispute Resolution Organization's (DROs) work.  That is a large topic worthy of attention in another post.

Well for one thing, thanks to the abolition of public school, Joe Six pack might be better educated and would likely hold property ownership sacred.  If he doesn', thousands of other Customers will.  I know that answer isn't good enough, but again DRO's would come into play.

The ability to visualize how a true free market (agorist) market works, as (a) there aren't any as they have been usurped by the State years ago and (b) a lifetime of brainwashing by the State that productive workers need the parasitic class to rule them.  I do not mean that as insulting.  It was very traumatic for me to unlearn and rebuild my value system.  It is a constant process where I fall into pro-State traps.

You asked good questions. I'll be back.

I followed Ron Paul's campaign quite intensely last year.  The single greatest benefit of his campaign that it allowed "awakened" people - members of The Remnant - to find each other on the web.    Other intellects converged on forums, meetups, rallies etc etc - it was quite exciting for me to meet some great minds online.   It is how I discovered Agorism.

And that is the whole point of Crash Course, isn't it?  To better prepare?  Agorism is an extension of CC.

Thanks to successful State brainwashing, you need to kill the State in your head.

Geez remnant....  has the FBI knocked on your door yet!?

Top post though.  Damn the Matrix!

Mike 

Only if they decide an idea is dangerous...which might be in the near future.

Hi Remnant,

This is an excellent post!!

I placed a thread together quite recently that began incredibly slowly (!), moved onward toward ridicule by an incumbant Kiwi (!) and came out the other side with some very enlightening posts from GregSchleich complete with a personal reference to Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged. Bringing the word 'Agorism' into the mix has filled in a gap to my thinking that has been searching the puzzle for literally years. I think I'm on the right track with connecting the two threads, but shoot me down in flames if I'm steering you away from your valid point of view :-

http://www.chrismartenson.com/forum/statism-dead/12560

Kind Regards,

Paul

Thanks Paul,

I have moved past "The State is Immoral!" and "Taxation is Theft!" statements.  I personally consider them true. Am I 100% correct in those statements?  I use Bayesian reasoning where I assign a value between 0 and 1 and multiply it against the preceding statements to get "truthiness".  For example, I assign the value of 0.999999 to the statement "2+2=4".  Does it hold absolutely true?  Well, maybe not in some space-time continuum warping in a remote area of the universe, but it holds true here.  I assign the same value of 0.999999 of truthiness to "Taxation is theft!" and since a State is a coercive force and molests others, it is immoral.

What kind of society do we want to live in?  There are three choices:

1. Everybody plunders everybody. <-- Not good, who would produce?
2. The few plunder the many. <-- What we have today - the State.
3. Nobody plunders anybody. <-- Not discussed in the mainstream sphere at all.

In order to maximize human well-being (I dislike using the word "welfare" as it conjures up other meanings), which one of the above philosophical POV's would you adopt?

Definition of Anarchy: Someone who believes in less government than you do.

Consider this.  If 0.01% - I picked that number out of a hat - of people in society want to control others (there are various degrees of control they want to exercise over others and some even have psychological labels applied to them), where would they gravitate towards to excerise that control?  Institutions that provide them the means.  Who are they?  In the private sector, they might reach the upper echelons of management if they were not clearly insane, but in the public sector, they gravitate towards the beacon of coercion.  Now, if you were to walk into a room filled with high level politicians, what percentage of those people want to control others?  50%? 75%? 100%?  You can easily see that it is a massive distortion of  the personality make-up in a given society.

If men are inherently good, we don't need government.  If men are inherently bad or apathetic, we dare not form one.

The State is very, very good at distorting clarity of thinking.  It gets a hold of your mind through your parents, as they have been conditioned, through public education, via media, via your colleagues and friends as they have been all conditioned.  There are very, very few who have broken through to the other side.  The process of doing so, as I indicated previously, is very traumatic.

One of the standard fallacies brought up is, "If we don't have government, how will people be protected?" or "If we don't have government, who wil build our roads, schools, healthcare, public works systems etc etc?"  I'll come to these when I have more time.

Hi Remnant,

in consideration of the other thread and the cause and effect the influence of our conversation would have there, I chose to continue here. 

Life is going on all around us with the input of ideals based on the imaginings and formulations of B F Skinner, all be it as a metaphor - incidentally, why does Bertrand Russell always appear in many an equation? 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner

Skinner argued that denial of the fact that we are controlled by our environment leaves us vulnerable to control by subtle and malignant circumstances and by malicious people. Governments and political leaders, he contended, may seek to control us for their own benefit rather than serve our best interest. Recognizing that behavior is shaped by its consequences is the first step in taking control of the environment and ensuring that it delivers consequences promoting desirable behavior. When we demand freedom, argued Skinner, what we really mean is freedom from aversive consequences and not freedom to make choices. In the final analysis, we can have "freedom" but only by arranging our own consequences and not by leaving it to "fate" or the "government. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber

The structure forming the shell of a chamber is a box large enough to easily accommodate the organism being used as a subject. (Common model organisms used include rodents—usually lab rats—pigeons, and primates). It is often sound-proof and light-proof to avoid distracting stimuli.

Operant chambers have at least one operandum (or "manipulandum"), and often two or more, that can automatically detect the occurrence of a behavioral response or action. Typical operanda for primates and rats are response levers; if the subject presses the lever, the opposite end moves and closes a switch that is monitored by a computer or other programmed device. Typical operanda for pigeons and other birds are response keys with a switch that closes if the bird pecks at the key with sufficient force. The other minimal requirement of a conditioning chamber is that it has a means of delivering a primary reinforcer or unconditioned stimulus like food (usually pellets) or water. It can also register the delivery of a conditioned reinforcer, such as an LED (see Jackson & Hackenberg 1996 in the Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior for example) as a "token".

..............................

I've been studying and reading about the habits of our species running about in just such a box, much of the time in anticipation of finding the edges of my own much more elevated and undocumented existence that I've built over time with writers and philosophers abound, even in mainstream media if you dig :-

Derek Jensen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSa9tyuIdkI

Don't Work For The NSA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxm7-yM7l1s&feature=channel_page

...yet the tentacles of government are crucially invasive and it is almost as though I'm being toyed with. Left to argue with yourself on such matters is purely paranoia, while listeners to your reasoning on such things as freedom assume they are already free.

A lot of people are wandering the threads of this site looking for the brightness of enlightenment, ideas, encouragement, confirmation, clarity; I wonder if many need to live in a fully broken societal model before a new one can take its place? How, therefore, can this idea be spliced into place with bearly a daylight gap? Also a great deal would have to be achieved to get beyond the grubbyness of the 'dirt under the fingernails' just to make it sustainable.

There is also the void I have concern about that will be filled into the empty space of the old system, and the idea of Agorism competing with fascism or comunism is going to need a championed voice to be heard over the heads of many that are going to be turned in the wrong direction by greed, corruption and ulteria motive - not that I wish to remain in this present one; I've seen too much of the space inside that I'm not supposed to know of already!!

I can clutch at straws with the idea of a new societal model, or stay put where I am and bring my children up in the fresh air, completely oblivious (for the foreseeable future) that what they do is different from todays 'norm'.

Questions - Questions,

Over to you...

Paul