Libertarianism

I’d rather be a maker than an employee.
I’d rather craft products than nurse a job.
And I’d rather be a customer than a boss.

 

At first I dismissed the idea of seasteading, of colonizing the seas to establish new nations in them. But a quick skim today through the Seasteading Institute proved a several hours affair, and I’m thoroughly intrigued. As Patri remarks at several places, they turned to the oceans because it was the least claimed space but they found that its intrinsic dynamics were uniquely suited to freedom. When it becomes inherently possible to move not only yourself but all your belongings, your house, your building, or even your neighborhood, a whole new freedom of association can become the effective base of societies.

The sea is bigger than capitalism, communism, or anarchism. It’s a whole new meta-system, with different dynamics that give hope of different results.

Perhaps the Pacific ocean, the world’s biggest expanse, will one day become the new West, the new frontier, will one day hold the most diverse, innovative, prosperous civilization on Earth. History hasn’t stopped, changes of this scale and strangeness will happen.

The present’s already hard to believe. It’s the most hopeful of times, the most dreadful of times.

On one hand, the Pirate Party —a left/right-bloc-independent party pursuing “the reform of laws regarding copyright and patents, the right to privacy, both on the Internet and in everyday life, and the transparency of state administration.”^WP— wins an astonishing 7.1% of Swedish votes and gets a seat in the European Parliament.
On the other hand, in less than a month, China will start forcing PC manufacturers to include censoring software —ridiculously named Green Dam Youth Escort— on every computer’s hard drive.

In record turnouts, 40% of eligible voters don’t vote. In other words, 60% of Americans don’t vote (because they can’t or won’t). Was thinking of something cool and snarky to answer that excellent celebrity video that’s making the ‘Tube rounds, but really, what need is there?

A lot of people, most on at least one count, aren’t wasting their time already. Some of the best propaganda in the world (the envy of any dictator), none for the cases against voting (1, 2, 3... just imagine if a true don’t vote ad went national—child porn would cause less mayhem), and yet so many still do what makes sense. Can’t really do anything for the rest. What I’ll do is humor the naive we all carry inside, do the simplest thing that could have some impact, this post, and move over to more productive stuff.

And please, please, were you a democra-zealot (good-natured pun, crazy, get it? :), take this not as a challenge to double your efforts, I’m truly saddened by all the misspent electoral effort as it is. Instead, why not make something you want happen that doesn’t need to (attempt to) change everyone else? As I’ll try doing now, over and out.

Both for what has happened to me and for what lies ahead this year, I knew I had to read Harry Browne’s How I found freedom in an unfree world (download PDF) sooner rather than later.

I just finished it yesterday and can’t believe how different I am already. How freer (me, always so proud of my freedom!). It really is a handbook for personal liberty. It’s so selfish that at times it even angered me (me, selfish as they come!). But then, well looked, the book’s an extended version of that famous parable, existing in some version in most cultures:
Or as Harry put it
I’m gonna be Switzerland. Mind my business. Be my own man. Neutral. Flexible. Pragmatic. Quiet. Living my own, happy, private life. Free in an unfree world.

Published the day after the towers fell, this the finest thing I’ve read on 9/11: Harry Browne’s When will we learn?

A fairly unique thing about democracy and capitalism is that —as opposed to, say, monarchy or theocracy— both are formal systems for collective decision making, both specify clear rules for obtaining and aggregating the ends of differing individuals.

As such systems, they both necessarily hinge in what we shall refer to as ballots. Usually the paper in which votes are cast, we will here use the word ‘ballot’ to mean ”an external expression of preference.” The key part is ‘external’. Externality has problems all its own but is also our only hope of finding out what others think—telepathy, guessing, and revelation are our other options.

In democracy, votes are the ballots. In capitalism, it’s money. In democracy, a clinic will be built if the majority of voters vote in its favor. It will keep in operation as long as people don’t vote it out of existence. In capitalism, a clinic will be built if enough people pool the money for its construction and it will keep in operation as long as it makes a profit—that is, as long as it ends up receiving more money than it gives away.

Seeing votes and money as instances of the same concept begs an intriguing question: How then do they differ? How is a vote different than a buck? What specific changes do you need to make to a vote ballot to turn it into a money ballot?

Hace ya casi un anho de la FIL y yo apenas subo este cuentito que tan simpatico se me hizo. Libertarianismo para ninhos.

The deep ethical crisis I’ve been immersed for some weeks now started when I realized that, ultimately, ethics is not a necessity, it’s a stand. You can’t judge without PREjudices. You are never guaranteed to be on the absolute right path, there is no such abstract thing. Your prejudices—your self—determine a range of trajectories, a train of self. And that’s that.

Our values are in practice a deeply enmeshed, deeply correlated network with no one most important end. Every value has its price, is outweighed eventually by some combination of other values. Far from urging us into hasty, thoughtless expediency, this should sober us: we concede when we have more to lose if we not—are we giving our values away at a discount?

That question is what the quote above is about. Liberty is both what civilization is and wants to be, for some of us. Terrorism has recently highlighted for us how dear its cost can be. It is not our nature to bear burdens and so we shall never stop looking for ways around them. But if it comes down to it, we wil bear freedom’s burden.

134 sayings by John McCarthy^WP (selected, presumably, by the man himself). I personally added 34 quotes to my personal quiver—a telling ratio for any quote collection, even without considering that the rest of the quotes were still excellent. It’s not only that our prejudice, tastes, and interests turned out to be surprisingly aligned (eco-bashing, optimism, Marxism-bashing…; libertarianism, existentialism…; AI, computers, technology…), the man can really turn a phrase. Check him out.

Here 8 of the very best: