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I read the book "Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393069001?pc_redir=1405274696&robot_redir=1), and it kind of explains the fear surrounding the USSR and the spread of communism in Latin America and Asia, and why conservative figures like Reagan and Thatcher were seemingly needed. The public of the US and UK desired someone to take on the threat of communism that was sweeping the world, and the best persons to do that had to be staunch conservatives who unilaterally stood for free markets, free speech, freeing people from the strains of communism, etc.

One of the other things, like you mention, is that Reagan (and Thatcher too) was good at orating ideas to the public. He was also quite charming. I'm sure when you watched the debates you noted that joke he made about not "exploiting his opponents youth and inexperience". That alone probably won him the election. A lot of Americans I feel want to elect someone they can partially relate to, especially conservative figures, not only like Reagan, but like GWB or Nixon (his "checkers speech" forever made him seem human to voters). Reagan, I feel, was good at relating himself to the common person, whether just by being charming, or talking about his faith that many Americans shared.
And his life story of simply growing up pretty normal was probably relatable too (one of the reasons Thatcher was liked a lot was because she really came from humble origins, which I guess a lot of British folk like).

I hope that helps a little bit. Personally, I find him such an interesting character. He's probably my favorite president not because he did a lot of good, but just because he's so fascinating.

>nobody has to give rich people power

Yes

>wealth is power

Yes

>in the absence of checks on power

Absence of a state isn't an absence of checks on power, they're simply privatized and organized so that a profit will come to thkse who check power most effectively (private arbitrators and REAs)

>the only check on power is government

No, government is the consolidation of power for the purpose of the most effective exploitation of people.

Wealth may only be gained in two ways, the economically or politically. Economically is to buy, sell, trade, or create wealth in some way. Politically is to use force to take what you want.

The government is nothing more than a parasite on those who produce wealth economically by those with power who wish to extract said wealth politically.

Nobody will work for free, but if you tell them it goes towards roads, or healthcare, etc, they will pay to have peace of mind, even while their wealth is being pocketed. Government is organized parasitism on the grandest scale with the goal of extracting maximum wealth for as long as possible.

>wealth has to ask permission

Wealth buys permission. Look at the industries government has molested and it's effects. Throughout history it coughs up monopolies and protectionism to who ever will pay them to do it. Look at railroads, airlines, healthcare, first class mail, oil, pharmaceuticals, steel/aluminum, etc. They all were once competitive markets that were choked after some rich fuck slipped blank checks under politicians' doors.

>standing armies with the worst things imaginable

The united states military drone strikes third mud huts and brushes off the civilian and child collateral like it's nothing, we turned two cities to dust, and forced hundreds of thousands of men into a service over a lie. This assertion seems to have already taken shape.

>Anarcho-whateverism

My favourite brand!

If you enjoy political literature you might enjoy this

Maybe you could quote what you think is relevant there?


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/BB%26T

>BB&T (Branch Banking and Trust) is one of the largest financial services holding companies in the U.S. with $222.6 billion in assets and market capitalization of $30.6 billion (as of September 30, 2016).


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Allison_IV
>In 2008, Allison was nominated by Morningstar as one of the best CEOs of 2008.

So Allison has an explicitly Objectivist world view, was the CEO of BB&T, and BB&T was extremely successful.


Allison is still extremely admired in the business world.

https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Crisis-Free-Market-Cure/dp/0071831118#productDescription_secondary_view_div_1483292088690

>John A. Allison is President and CEO of the Cato Institute. Previously he served for twenty years as Chairman and CEO of BB&T, one of the largest financial institutions in America. Allison is a former Distinguished Professor of Practice at Wake Forest University. He received a Lifetime Achievement Award from American Banker, was named one of the decade’s top 100 most successful CEOs in the world by Harvard Business Review, and is the recipient of six honorary doctorate degrees.

>Hailed by Forbes magazine as “one of the most important books of the year,” John Allison’s breakout bestseller The Financial Crisis and the Free Market Cure

How am I wrong?

I wrote a paper analyzing Chilean politics last year. The thesis was that libertarianism, Friendmanite neoliberalism, etc., in pure form, can only exist under authoritarian or totalitarian (in the case of Ayn Rand's objectivist capitalism) regimes and are logically incompatible with democracy.

The conclusion was that if people are ever given a vote, they will by and large vote against purist constructs of these political theories, and I used Chilean politics to demonstrate the point. I presented the argument in class and the logic of it was accepted, even by the two libertarian leaning classmates, but sadly it didn't move them at all. They concluded essentially that political freedom is unnecessary for real freedom™.

EDIT: If anyone is interested in learning more about the very fascinating "libertarian" dictatorship in Chile, and how it was implemented with the help of Milton Friedman, I suggest checking out Naomi Kline's The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. She's definitely a leftist, and so it should be read with her bias in mind, but she's a fantastic writer and journalist and there's enough factual information to form your own perspectives on the matter without relying completely on her analysis.

My library (that is, the one I work for) maintains a shelf of materials (everything from instruction manuals to the occasional video game) that are unfit to be properly catalogued and put on the shelves. They are entirely unregistered. You can just take them. Occasionally I strike gold and get a free copy of a decent book, or, more commonly, books written by raving loonies that are fun for a cheap laugh. We'll go give the thing a once-over to make sure nobody's slipping cult or pyramid scheme brochures between the books. Otherwise, we don't care.

On top of that, we maintain a set of "honor system" shelves filled with mass-market paperbacks. These are technically registered in that we have a list of everything we may or may not still have, but it's not properly catalogued. It's not properly sorted, either; we literally just slap a sticker on the spine identifying the first letter of the author's last name, and none of the other letters in the author's name matter for the purpose of sorting. Patrons don't even have to check them out, and they're returned within the month. Or not. People could just steal a couple dozen of them and nobody would really notice for months, nor would we really care. They're mass-market paperbacks, and putting them in the stacks would be a waste because they'd disintegrate within the year anyway.

Occasionally you'll see a circulation volunteer try and sort the honor system books properly, which is a bit like trying to put out a wildfire by blowing on it.

Would be curious to see which parts of your state or local law code regulate the establishment of private libraries and/or book lending/donation services. As far as I know, most states really do not regulate such establishments outside the usual building codes and such. It's mostly public libraries that get most of the regulatory burden. I'm sure a subscription library (such libraries are quite rare nowadays) would also need to follow certain business laws to ensure you're not scamming members. But all of the laws I'm aware of that would pertain to what you describe in your post are related to the actual business and building, and not to the act of borrowing/lending/holding books.

I could spend a lot time responding to these counter points, but, first, I want to know - are you proposing a democratic system for controlling a monopoly on the initiation of force (domestic and foreign)? How would the system you are proposing solve fundamental economic problem for dealing with scarcity in a more efficient way than free market capitalism?

> What does brain surgery have to do with anything? Like, at all? No one is suggesting that we have Twitch Performs Brainsurgery or Rocket Design by Popular Vote.

This part of your response, though, really surprises me. Most people I communicate with easily grasp this point. Voters (direct or representative democracy) would have to thoroughly understand very complex economic issues to vote 'correctly' or 'optimally'. That's the point about brain surgery. You can't hand a small group of people a monopoly on the initiation of force and then have the majority of voters be extremely ignorant on the issues. If this is still unclear, the following from Bryan Caplan is highly recommended:

Myth of the Rational Voter

http://www.amazon.com/The-Myth-Rational-Voter-Democracies/dp/0691138737

This has been a popular talking among the right wingers over the couple of years. I believe it was popularized by Jonah Goldberg and his book, Liberal Fascism.

From the excerpt.

>Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism.

>Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term “National socialism”). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities—where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Some of these people literally believe that Social Security, public education, a women's right to choose, separation of church and state, background checks for gun owners, and eating hippy food is fascism.

>Even if this were the case, which we all fucking know it isn't, there's a reason people have emotions.

I'm currently reading The Meaning of Human Existence by E.O. Wilson. He makes an interesting argument that the ability to be selfish was important to our evolution, but, just as important, was the ability to work collectively to form tribes that worked toward the good of all. In fact, he argues that coming together as a community potentially was the source of our ability to reason: one must be able to make reasonable assumptions about the actions and feelings of others to keep the peace.

Quite an interesting book so far. (He also argues that if aliens visited they would be much more interested in our art and culture than our science because science is science, art varies.)

GR has a lot of amazing history you can find. Anything that has happened nationally, happened nationally because it was in a lot of local areas, so even Grand Rapids has its own piece that plays a role, but with its own twist. The book I mentioned before shows why GR has historically had low union membership rates. You may be interested in a couple other books I'm getting to this year:

• City Within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids
  
• African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids
  
• Early Days of Aviation in Grand Rapids
  
  It would be cool if teachers presented local history when reviewing national history. There's a lot to be learned from the struggles within our own localities.

That entire fiishing analogy and the whole Irwin 'The Tax Dodger' Schiff and Peter 'The Gold Shill' Schiff book: How and economy grows and why it crashes is aimed squarely at shallow thinkers. It appeals very well to those who would like to believe everything is just so simple.

That said I do actually like the book from a stylistic point of view, it really does present Austrian Economics spam in a interesting and easy to understand format, the style is brilliant I think.

But unfortunately dunning krugerand libertarians read it and subsequently think they are experts at socio-economic policies because herp derp everything in society is just like two men on an island fishing.

Private ownership of natural resources, discrimination, historical oppression all doesn't real and doesn't matter even if they were.

Our complex society can just easily be hyper reduced to two men fishing in the sea. (Two men who started off on equal footing btw)

As you said once you change the scenario to where one man owns the entire island and everything on it and the second man only has the option to either pay rent by working as a chattel slave or rely on mother nature and hope he can evolve into an aquatic mammal before he runs out of energy and drowns in the ocean., the fairy tale doesn't sound as great any more does it.

Never heard of him or his book (and I am familiar with quite a few authors and textbooks). Looking at his biography, he is definitely a free market libertarian. He has ties to libertarian organizations and works at the Heartland, the libertarian think tank that believes smoking is not harmful and that global warming is a hoax.

The one review off of Amazon about his book describes it as a great introduction to libertarian philosophy and its origins.

You might have just got unlucky. Instead of getting an education, you might be fed propaganda.

It will be interesting to see how your professor teaches monetary and fiscal policy.

> So, in other words, public portions of land so no one gets trapped. Sorry, this sounds like a post-hoc bandaid to try to defend private property without realizing you are describing non-private property -- in other words, taking your opponent's stance against yours and pretending it was yours all along.

Well, it's not public property. You still have to be present and doing something in order to homestead. So, an airport would homestead an easement to produce noise in the area surrounding the airport. That doesn't mean the surrounding areas are public when it comes to noise. Some third party couldn't just drive around in a truck with a megaphone.

> You are describing homesteading+property rights, then modifying it with a system that contradicts it (travel rights), then acting like the original system was right all along.

I want to reiterate that while I am a fan of property rights, I am not a fan of the homestead principle as some objective moral principle. But I still think you are still misrepresenting the homestead principle. The idea is that by "mixing your labor" with land, you homestead that land for that purpose. That includes obvious things like building a house or planting a crop, but it also includes travel, noise pollution, light pollution, above ground rights (like airplanes), below ground rights (like mining), etc. I don't see the contradiction you are seeing.

> This is going to become a semantic debate, but I have to share my thoughts.

Yes, you quickly run into semantic arguments about what constitutes a "government." A lot of time is spent on this in the books and articles I have read arguing for and against so-called anarchist views. Unfortunately, most people don't make an effort to understand the definitions used by their opponents. For anarcho-capitalists, there is a big range, especially between the moralist faction (NAP, homesteading, etc.) and the economic faction, which I am more actively interested in and currently researching. But as far as I know, all anarcho-capitalists use "government" to refer to what we normally think of as national political governments. They don't consider all rule-making and -enforcing entities to be governments, like parents having rules for children or a cinema owner having rules about making noise during a movie. But of course there's a continuum of rule-making and -enforcing entities, and no clear way to draw the line, especially in such a way that everyone will agree. That said, it is absolutely a misrepresentation to say that anarcho-capitalists oppose all rule-making and -enforcing entities.

> When you tack onto that the arrogance and belittling they do of "statists" or progressives or anyone that does not fit into their idea for a new world order (if by no more than semantic differences), I hope it is clear why I see this movement as a foe more than a friend, and thus clear why I fight against its rhetoric even if presented by a devil's advocate.

The tribalism, arrogance, and belittling sucks, but there is literally not a single sizable group I'm aware of that doesn't exhibit this. This subreddit is obviously guilty of it (heck, it's practically designed specifically for it), although it's still possible to have a civil conversation like this one. Personally, I look more toward individuals than groups when learning about and debating ideas. When you start looking at large groups, it becomes too tempting to only focus on the most ignorant and least reasonable specimens in the group, and then think you're refuting all ideas in the group mocking the worst ideas in the group.

Anyway, I'm currently reading a pop economics book called Anarchy Unbound: Why Self-Governance Works Better Than You Think. It would probably be immediately labelled "anarcho-capitalist" and thus immediately be dismissed, mocked, and downvoted by most people on this subreddit, but I don't think the label is appropriate. It has absolutely nothing to do with the NAP, homesteading, natural rights, or morality. It's not a proposal for some big revolution to overthrow all governments (in fact, it recognizes that in many but not all cases, governments are a better option than anarchy). It's just an economic analysis of several historical and modern examples of how societies dealt with issues when they lacked a central governing body with the power to enforce rules. It's a rebuttal to the conventional wisdom that self-governance automatically results in a Hobbesian state of nature with each person at nature with every other person. The beginning of the book has a long section about the semantics of things like "law," "anarchy," "government," etc. which I could expound on if you're interested.

From Scott's book (this is in the first few pages, check the Look-Inside thingy):

• Won an art contest
  
• Found the golden egg at an Easter egg hunt
  
• High school valedictorian
  
• Corrected his 8th grade science teacher on something
  
• Won a tennis game against a guy that was apparently pretty good
  
• Solved a really hard problem once at a problem-solving class
  
• Speeches
  
• Bookwriting
  
• Restaurant-owning
  
• Slogan-making

>I read the book "Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0393069001?pc_redir=1405274696&robot_redir=1), and it kind of explains the fear surrounding the USSR and the spread of communism in Latin America and Asia, and why conservative figures like Reagan and Thatcher were seemingly needed. The public of the US and UK desired someone to take on the threat of communism that was sweeping the world, and the best persons to do that had to be staunch conservatives who unilaterally stood for free markets, free speech, freeing people from the strains of communism, etc.

Yeah but we didn't. All the leaders from 1945 to 1979 were way more liberal in a lot of ways and they also opposed communism. No need to go almost to McCarthyism to promote "capitalism"...heck...turning it into such an ideologically charged thing has been destructive to this country. Having friendly capitalism gave us the moral high ground. We no longer hold that high ground IMO because at this point we're proving Karl Marx right in a lot of ways.

> I'm sure when you watched the debates you noted that joke he made about not "exploiting his opponents youth and inexperience".

There we go again!

But yeah I agree. I really hate that idea tho...that we go for people who sound good rather than do good. Then we complain about why nothing gets done!

> I do agree that DIY needs to improve and be as foolproof as possible, but right now the efforts are pretty good, for example with epipen alternatives.

To me the "future" lies in comparing which simple plant-based herbs and medicines (which can be cross-referenced against the pubmed tests) have already been mastered by Native populations (such as aspirin, alcohol, other teas and herbal crap.

This, to me, would reduce the commercial aspect of treating health as a "Value".

Thus the DIY would supplement but not fully replace Big Pharma. But in my view, with equipment for testing, there's not much holding back tomorrow's adolescents from building a circuit to test impurities or other measurements.

Nice straw man. No, it's theft because it's taking property of somebody else, without their consent, which is a definition of theft! You can argue that it's necessary theft, but not that stealing isn't theft, because you like the robber. Imagine if mafia took quarter of your paycheck and gave you their protection. Wouldn't you call that a theft?

Immigrants have a freedom of association by nature. Innocence until proven guilty. These are derivate ethical principles and not my opinions.

As for philosophy, just because you're ignorant of it,it doesn't mean it doesn't exist...
https://www.amazon.com/Second-Treatise-Government-John-Locke/dp/1420955292/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?keywords=second+treatise+of+government+by+john+locke&qid=1565135287&s=gateway&sprefix=second+tre&sr=8-2

Who'd have guessed Kokesh would be replaced by someone just as nutty?

BTW-is just just me or does he look pretty toasted? Like any Libertarian martyr in the making worth his salt he's also got a book for sale.

Hopefully some mid-management person doesn't decide to raise the rates to show a better quarterly profit.

#RememberAndersonStation