If Ignition is anything like its Bovada roots, quality of play is ****. I played a lot on Full Tilt and Stars prior to Black Friday then transitioned to Bovada after maybe an 18 month hiatus, and DAMN...at least small to medium stakes tournament play was so, so juicy.

Only downside is they limited your ability to multitable. Think only 2 or 4 tables at any given time, and tournament traffic / selection was a fraction of what could be found on Stars.

Those two things are related.

Still a **** then

It would probably be easier if you didn't assume everyone who disagreed with you were villains best described by the terminology such as thieves, kidnappers and now liking them to religious extremists. Then again, you guys were certainly at forefront of this type of political rhetoric's surge in popularity; find a negative connotation and argue against it.

Apart from that I'm sorry to hear about your health issues and I wish you a good recovery.

AC-adherents aren't saying government should have less power, they're saying government should not exist. There is a big difference there.

In the US I think "small goverment" is often conflated with "less power". Smaller government doesn't necessarily translate to that. The US uses less of its GDP on government spending than my country and it also has less GDP per citizen. The size of its public sector of the total workforce is about half of my country. But it does seem fare more invasive in the areas it does cover and more accepting towards force.

More correct is to say that without government ACists believe that voluntary institutions would emerge AND would be more efficient and moral, much like other libertarians. The only real difference is that ACists are considered more radical. ACists are definately not left anarchists in many respects and is opposed to most forms of democracy and usually destruction of property. So an Ron Paul was almost entirely consistent with ACism and spoke to the problems of the time. Many will bring out their Ron Paul was right T-Shirts as military spending goes crazy and a possible new monitary system.

The reason why I made this thread, is because like many posters here, I was influenced by Borodog, PVN and VHawk into libertarian leanings. All this time later I wonder why so many other people don't really understand what anarcho-capitalism/libertarianism/voluntaryism is all about. But then I think that maybe I just believe in something different than others.

Ultimately it boils down to the fact that government action is coercion. The world is not black and white and it is not correct to describe all taxes as theft; but they are coercion. Anarcho-capitalism is all about trying to minimize coercion in our life, while ensuring peace and stability in our society. Because without the latter, there will always be coercion. Whether centralized in a form of a government, or decentralized in whatever other ways.

I do think that my views have mellowed out over time and think that a lot of anarcho-capitalists are misguided about how they prioritize their goals and arguments. First and for all, they only should focus on big things that the government does that actively harm our society. Like: prison industrial complex, military industrial complex, fossil fuel lobby, pharmaceutical industrial complex, allowing pollution, lobbying, corruption, war on drugs, racial discrimination, ****ing over the poor and the middle class etc. They will find many allies on these issues.

And afterward they can try to work to find solutions to our other problems in a way that make decentralization and competition with government possible.

Yeah, I basically agree. I also think ancaps and others who oppose the gov't have already made progress with BitCoin, TOR, and CopBlock, which shows that voluntary institutions do fill niches that gov't can't fill. Also the satanists are interesting too.

Whenever there is conflict there is going to be coercion, instead of minimizing coercion your system of government should seek to maximize justice to ensure the coercion is not being abused. Every example of AC proposed in PU failed to show any way to stop someone with more resources from abusing the system to their benefit.

The C part of ACism might as well be coercion. Wealth is power and the concentration of it is as much a guarantee of coercion as is war.

Either you must not allow large concentration of wealth or you must have powerful organized forces to control it. Of course that's very difficult and requires eternal vigilance as wealth can easily capture the oppositIon.

You only have to twist yourself into knots to refute the idea that taxes are theft if you erroneously think that theft is wrong (except in the most extreme life and death situations). I once posted a hypothetical scenario where some smart African kid figured out a way to grab a thousand a month from some American billionaire, via computer, and claimed he was doing nothing wrong if it was getting his family out of poverty.

Borodog didn't like that post of course but strangely didn't argue with my point. Rather he merely said that I shouldn't publicly be writing such things.

Taking this back to the real world, my stance is that past some insanely large bankroll, you should not find it immoral if someone tries to steal from you.

Property is theft.

No one owns a theft

Ok, let's say concentration of wealth is bad. You now have to demonstrate that monopolization of force/government is the best way to go about combating/controlling it.

No he doesn't. He isn't trying to prove statism is good, he's showing how AC is bankrupt by definition.

No. His definition is incorrect then.

lol

You can define anything as anything. That's not how arguments work. He is saying that absence of the type of states/government we have now, will result in wealth/power being concentrated even more than it is now. I am asking him to show his work.

And he's saying it's in the name. What is the point of Capitalism other than the concentration of wealth?

Go learn Economics. The Solow Growth Model will teach you this stuff.

Where do 08 bailouts and the whole aftermath fit into these economic theories?

One option is not allowing the concentration of wealth which, I submit, is impossible without a strong state protecting property rights. Another option is some force which holds the abuse of the money interests in check.

I'm not sure how any entity powerful enough to either guarantee property rights sufficiently to allow for this kind of concentration of wealth or to restrain the power of the money interests doesn't automatically count as a state.

Generally politics and government are symptoms of societal problems. I know having to get a permit to add a bathroom infuriates some people, but revolutions are about wealth, not forms of government. At a certain level of iniquity people just say "**** it, I'm not playing this game." The Anarcho part of Anarcho-Capitalism isn't just going to leave the masses saying, "Well, all's fair in Monopoly and life. If I'm broke and don't have toll for the road or the sidewalk, rent for the shanty or the park bench, or a token for the suicide machine I guess legally having no right to be anywhere I'll just will myself out of existence."

That's a dumb question. Contrast most of Europe's recovery to our recovery.

Here's the problem with ACism. It's a cool internet meme for kids who are too lazy to learn.

ACism has a horribly undeveloped basically non existent theory of power, so it can only really point the finger at the superficially apparent, look state has power, errr, state is power, get rid state, get rid power. FReeeeedooooomzzzzzzz.

You can swap power for coercion and the same holds true.

I'm pretty sure it's not the government doing those things.

Wait. "The Government".