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Techno-agorism

Started by memenode, September 16, 2008, 06:09 PM NHFT

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memenode

In a recent IRC discussion about a transition from government to a voluntary society I came to what appears to be a rather interesting idea, even though I suggested it tongue in cheek. You'd be the judge. :)

My belief is that it will be nearly impossible, so long as our numbers are so relatively low, for voluntaryists and agorists to bring about an effective transition from government to voluntary society without us getting seriously wealthy. We need to command huge amount of resources in order to built a whole alter market that can effectively compete with government.

So I'll say it again: All voluntaryists must become millionaires and multimillionaires!

I mean it. :) I am also pursuing an ambitious financial goal to start with.

Now, once we've got a few voluntaryist multimillionaires on our side, willing to act as agorists, before we can start any serious competition to government we have to have a defense agency, but the problem is again that our numbers are fairly low so how would we ever be able to compete with great armies of modern governments? That's where the idea comes in. Launch a private satellite via a private space firm into space, equipped with a remote controlled laser or some other weapon and point it to a strategic location, such as the White House or Pentagon. Then, we proceed to build our agora and every time they threaten to use violence against our agorist market actors we threaten back to turn our laser on.

Yes it's like waging a little cold war with the government and yes it's nasty, but what do you think an alternate defense agency would be? It is ALL about balancing their force with our own. It can't not be nasty! And this way we at least don't need big armies or whatever. It's efficient.

That's just one example, however, of using high tech to our advantage. Instead of having police of real people we could have defensive drones around our properties. And I don't even need to mention the internet and security technology that can be used there.

This is what we dubbed as "techno-agorism" - agorism enhanced by the high use of technology to achieve our objectives so much more efficiently.

Thoughts?

EDIT: I realized that if some government employee reads this one of the first things in his or her mind might be "this is terrorism!". But no, it's not. You're pointing your guns at us, why shouldn't we point our guns at you in defense? Terrorism is invading other countries to bring them "democracy" or stealing people guns away in the name of their safety or removing them from their houses for safety inspections or beating them to the ground for protesting - that my government "friends" is terrorism, and we are sick of it. Agorism is not about attacking government. We just want to build our own thing and be left alone. But due to constant threats we face from government, threats to destroy what we want to build for ourselves, we are compelled to devise a method of defense.

John Edward Mercier

A physical defense against government?
Not sure its necessary. It might be easier to balance oppositional forces than secure a static one.

Russell Kanning

sounds good
I will be trying to do it with less personal money. :)

memenode

Quote from: John Edward Mercier on September 18, 2008, 08:14 AM NHFT
A physical defense against government?
Not sure its necessary. It might be easier to balance oppositional forces than secure a static one.


I'm not sure what you mean by "balance oppositional forces"? They've got a whole military.. isn't the only way to balance them out to create our own military (which isn't in the least "easier" IMO)?

John Edward Mercier

Not really. Game theory states that confronted with two foes an opponent will focus on that deemed the greatest threat. So its like a child playing mom and dad against each other to get their way.

Ron Helwig

Quote from: John Edward Mercier on September 18, 2008, 11:07 AM NHFT
Not really. Game theory states that confronted with two foes an opponent will focus on that deemed the greatest threat. So its like a child playing mom and dad against each other to get their way.

Tom Palmer of Cato gave a great speech where he outlined how Britain had greater freedom because the church and state were competitors for power.

To fight a military (especially one as powerful as the American one is) with military tactics is foolish. Figure out how to defeat them without using military force and maybe you've got something. One thought (not preferred by this board's crowd) is to use politicians to keep the military at bay. I'd bet some of our more creative types can think of non-political/non-violent ways to prevent the use of military forces against us.

Caleb

#6
Quote"I again saw under the sun that the race is not to the swift and the battle is not to the warriors, and neither is bread to the wise nor wealth to the discerning nor favor to men of ability; for time and chance overtake them all."

"But those who want to get rich fall into temptation and a snare and many foolish and harmful desires which plunge men into ruin and destruction."

"Then He said to them, `Beware, and be on your guard against every form of greed; for not even when one has an abundance does his life consist of his possessions.'"

A man's life doesn't come from the things he owns.  The pursuit of wealth is a tragic deception. You can never have enough, and in order to acquire wealth one tends to have to play along with the rules that have been set in place by those who hold the reins of power.

No offense intended, but an idea like this seems to me to be the classic temptation to use the ring of power for "good" ... it is the same old trap that stumbles so many people and keeps people from realizing the true potential that lies within.

As for the rest of your idea, attempting to use violence to intimidate others, I fail to see how that would change the societal structure and bring in a culture of peace?  Do violent means lead to nonviolent ends? Is there no correlation between the ultimate ends and the means used to achieve those ends?

dalebert

Quote from: Caleb on September 18, 2008, 08:42 PM NHFT...in order to acquire wealth one tends to have to play along with the rules that have been set in place by those who hold the reins of power.

I was going to say something like this. In a truly free market, I really doubt we'd have very many super wealthy types as we do now. People get ultra wealthy with violent assistance from the state. On the other hand, there'd be a lot more wealth in general and a lot more extremely comfortable and financially secure people and certainly a lot fewer poor. The only way to get super wealthy in the world we live in is to play along with the power games. Also, there's no way to keep them from getting the major portion of all of your work. You can't help yourself to large amounts of wealth without handing over a large amount to them just through taxes, both the obvious ones and the subtle embedded ones. Make what you need to fulfill your personal goals in the ways that benefit the machine the least. For some, that may mean hiding it from them or it may just mean using what legal loopholes are available and staying in lower tax brackets. Either way, it's important to withdraw from the machine as much as possible. Ultimately, the machine is regular people working as cogs. Simply withdrawing that support as much as possible, convincing others to do the same, and avoiding violence is the steady course that wins the game. You can't win in a head-to-head collision course with the state.

memenode

I didn't and don't advocate violence any more than a person which owns a gun is a violent person. My idea is mostly about making the means of defense more efficient, if possible. That said I see the value in the proposition by John Edward Mercier.. let them bicker or fight with each other keeping themselves too busy to care to attack us.

But some means of at least personal defense still seem necessary and I think technology can only help us with that. Proper use of tech can make the fact they outnumber us less relevant.

About pursuing wealth I was usually the last one to believe that pursuit of wealth brings happiness and my online ventures were primarily driven by some sort of a "cause" than business sense. If not I probably would've had even more than I have today. There was this silent belief that starting to pay too much attention to money would make me a "greedy capitalist" or something of the sort.. Voluntaryism turned that around in that I no longer feel guilty if I set myself a purely financial goal and strive to do something that will maximize my wealth. I no longer see the market as something that goes wildly unfair if not regulated by government and which only serves to make rich richer and poor poorer and that you can only get ahead by exploiting others.

So voluntaryism puts me in a mind set from which I can finally without some (now perceived as artificial) moral breaks pursue wealth.

That said, wealth is rarely pursued for the sake of being wealthy. There are usually goals and desires behind it which require larger amount of value in our posession to accomplish. I'm not looking to become a slave to my wealth. I'm looking to increase my personal capacity to achieve whatever I want, and that is practically impossible without wealth. You can't receive if you don't have anything to give. So I don't think it's about the "ring of power". It's about personal power. The true potential that lies within is the fuel for that power. Wealth is one of its potentially most beneficial manifestations.

It's easy for anyone to say how pursuit of wealth is not the way or whatever, yet all this activism and advocacy, let alone building of agorist businesses we're supposed to be doing requires wealth to fund. Somebody has to pay for FreeTalkLive (subscribers, Sakal CAI etc.), freeminds.tv, web hosting for these forums, defense agencies to be built, the ShireID system and so on. And these are merely the beginning. The really ambitious projects are yet to come. Who is going to fund them? Last night in a discussion with a friend we talked about Sakal CAI and concluded it's actually just one person funding a majority of NH activism projects. I guess everyone else is too broke.

Lastly, million dollars is not much and it's a vague statement considering the "value" of the dollar. Better say 1200 ounces of gold. Regardless, as dalebert seems to agree, the "wealthy" in a free market would probably have a different meaning as everyone would be much better off. What if that is the equivalent of value to millions? Seriously?

Let's not boycott ourselves for these vague and unprecise ideas about "dangers of wealth" if there's any chance that we can increase our personal achievement capacity and therefore make our contributions to the (r)evolution more impacting.

dalebert

There is nothing wrong with trying to become as wealthy as possible by legitimately earning it. What I'm saying is that the world we live in is set up to keep people busting their asses for that goal when most of their efforts are going to the state and its wealth. So if your goal is to become wealthy for the sake of over-powering the state, you've got quite a challenge ahead of you. It's not a bad idea in essence, but you have to pay attention to how your efforts are actually fitting right into their plan of keeping you striving for this goal of wealth when you're working primarily for them. That's why I don't think any traditional methods are going to work for that. You've got to find ways to not work for the state. It sucks, but that's the world they've shaped with their violence. Have you read Atlas Shrugged? As much as I hate the book, it illustrates pretty well what I'm talking about.

memenode

#10
I suppose you're refering to taxes. If you pay them then that means greater wealth leads to more taxes in which case you are essentially working for them, as you say. But that is IF you pay taxes.

Ideally a voluntaryist would build wealth with neither the registration nor taxes, albeit it's up to every individual one to decide to which extent to comply or not, and the less they comply I think the more they undermine the state rather than "working for them".

My goal is not solely to get wealthy to over-power the state. There are multiple reasons. I build my own destiny. The idea of status quo doesn't appeal to me - working all my life for a pay that either never increases or increases only lineary, a pay which subsequently cannot fund any of the more ambitious things I want to achieve. In short, I do not want to be a survivalist in life, like most people, but an achiever - government or no government.

The fact that government exists and I no longer believe in its necessity nor morality only adds up to form a particular cause to put in front of my life, a direction towards which I'd invest a portion of my wealth - but it's just one of the things I want to achieve. I want to create something of great value, go to space, form an electronic music party franchise with parties that celebrate personal power and liberty (infecting the culture with the memes of liberty) etc.

Wealth generation should be the default way of living, not because of wealth itself, but because of the sideffects of both the process of its generation and its existence once attained. Those sideffects are positive impact on the world (value you provided for other people), personal happiness (sense of achievement and success) and freedom (mental and material).

There is no other way. You either produce wealth or you consume it. It's a spectrum, sure, but I'd rather be at the end of the spectrum where I produce far more than I consume, thus attaining financial freedom and awesome capacity to move the world.

Caleb

What I'm trying to tell you is that wealth creation is a privilege that the government might grant you if you play by their rules.

I doubt being a dissident will ever be financially rewarding. You will be punished with the theft of your wealth if you don't play their game.

A friend suggested recently to me that he could play their game (nod, nod, wink, wink) until he had accumulated enough. Then he would use his wealth to turn on them. I told him, "That's what they all say, I'm sure."  Like I said, you can never have enough. 1 Million isn't enough, I need 10 Million. 10 Million's not enough, I need to get 20.... You can always make another buck; you can never have enough money.

John Edward Mercier

Wealth, income, and money are not inherently the same things.

Even within the system, reinvesting income results in lower taxes.

And sweat equity increases wealth, but does not involve income nor money...

J’raxis 270145

Quote from: Caleb on September 20, 2008, 01:10 AM NHFT
A friend suggested recently to me that he could play their game (nod, nod, wink, wink) until he had accumulated enough. Then he would use his wealth to turn on them. I told him, "That's what they all say, I'm sure."  Like I said, you can never have enough. 1 Million isn't enough, I need 10 Million. 10 Million's not enough, I need to get 20.... You can always make another buck; you can never have enough money.

Well, this is essentially what I did...

memenode

#14
Quote from: Caleb on September 20, 2008, 01:10 AM NHFT
What I'm trying to tell you is that wealth creation is a privilege that the government might grant you if you play by their rules.

That can be said for anything which involves government regulation or oversight. Do I really need to hear that from someone who is supporting the cause of liberty? Their permission shouldn't concern me.

Quote from: Caleb on September 20, 2008, 01:10 AM NHFT
I doubt being a dissident will ever be financially rewarding. You will be punished with the theft of your wealth if you don't play their game.

Wow man, where were you with those soothing words in this thread.. Man, I've been through the whole "worrying about government going to get me" thing and it sucks, and isn't quite productive either.

Seriously, do you have concrete examples of that which don't include well publicised scare monger cases like Wesley Snipes? And what are you suggesting as an alternative anyway? If I am to live I have to work and if I am to work I am producing value. Good portion of this value is what the government wants to steal. Your suggestion so far seems to be that I should just let them... or what?

Again, how can someone NOT generate value, and how can someone NOT strive to produce more value if motivated and given the opportunity? Perhaps you aren't motivated or you don't see an opportunity yourself or just see a different kind of value to pursue than I do, but fundamentally it's all the same. We are both threatened by government in our pursuits and we both face the same choice: either let it regulate our lives or do what we want to do in spite of them. I want to generate higher income to increase my wealth in order to be more capable to achieve greater things. Why is doing this in congruency with principles of liberty rather than obedience to the state even being questioned on this forum??

Quote from: Caleb on September 20, 2008, 01:10 AM NHFT
A friend suggested recently to me that he could play their game (nod, nod, wink, wink) until he had accumulated enough. Then he would use his wealth to turn on them.

That's not quite an agorist strategy.  :)

Quote from: Caleb on September 20, 2008, 01:10 AM NHFT
You can always make another buck; you can never have enough money.

"Can" doesn't mean "must". I'm not some sort of a money generating drone whose actions are on autopilot to be incapable of rationally judging when I have enough. Besides, why does that even matter here, really? As a free individual I have the right to pursue as much wealth as I want so long as I don't ever coerce another person in the process. And as you might well know, this process also naturally contributes to the health of the market as a whole, the less compliant to the government's regulation the more.

Quote from: John Edward Mercier
Wealth, income, and money are not inherently the same things.

Even within the system, reinvesting income results in lower taxes.

And sweat equity increases wealth, but does not involve income nor money...

Makes sense, thanks for clarifying. I'm looking to increase my income so I can have more on a monthly basis to invest into wealth in order to provide for first financial stability and then a pool from which to fund more ambitious projects, some of which highly related to the spread of voluntaryist idea and building of the long term agora.

Thanks