I'm curious about "no alternatives" - I can see difficult alternatives (having to move if there is a company town or something). Or people held with force. But sure, show me what you have here, that is interesting.



But objective measures will still be done based on subjective values. And everyone will have different subjective values. Is someone who donates money to an animal shelter objectively wrong over donating that money to rehabilitate drug addicts?


Interesting assertion. I disagree with this assessment. Voluntary trade, by its nature, does not harm.


And it seems like there is a huge incentive for society to throw out parts of contracts that contain bollocks. And incentives for society to award damages when they screw people around intentionally.


What is wrong with "creating demand"? Creating demand is simply showing people they desire something that they did not conceive of on their own.


Not really, there can be advocates. Hopefully there are incentives for people to be able to advocate for others (maybe if they get a ruling in someones favor, they can get a percentage of the benefit, and those who wronged the weak pay extra).


Name a place where it is working "pretty well". And by what measures do you determine this?


I think it's fine and dandy to be morally against something. The question is how do you enforce it and police it. And enforcement and policing it must be less evil than the evil that is committed. Fair assessment? So I think well-intentioned policies can be negative in many areas and make things worse. For example, a nearly unenforceable law that requires a great cost to implement.

Teaching people not to be dicks is a good start. Cooperation is good.



I have the freedom to try to fly off the Empire States Building, but I don't have the means to do it. There is a difference between the two concepts. There is no artificial restriction banning you from traveling to the US (well, maybe airline taxes are too high). There is no force being used against you to prevent you from coming here (unless immigration laws prevent it). I have the freedom to buy a skyscraper as a house, but I don't have the means to do it. It's simply a difference in language- the concepts are all that matters. Like I said, if you want to have values based on "amount of choices", that's all fine and dandy.

Are you young? Your idealism is very strong and unfortunately terribly misguided. It's great to see, but reality does not work that way.


What does pocketing wealth into the wealthy mean? Wealthy people can't save their money? Why do you assume that is ideal? Is it possible that some societies might be better with this rule, but also possible that some might not be? Seems like a good experiment to try by having both societies and seeing what does better. I want more experiments and choices.

Gimme time!

Donating money is up to you, I'd prefer you to give to someone else.
But relying on charity to satisfy the needs of the needy is impossible.
And objective measures being done on subjective values is something, for the know, we have to accept as better than subjective preference, as the basis is that they are truly needy; not that they are subjectively preffered.
E.g. A government who must provide everyone with education, health, shelter, and food is a better way to provide the needy with E,H,S,F than subjective people's charity will.


Voluntary trade affects everyone (most of the time,) not just those trading.


Society to aware damages when they screw people around? Who is organising this in the society?
Throwing out parts of the contracts is fine, but contracts are complex and people don't search for what is best for them, but what is cheapest and brand named. The richer and more powerful you are the better the insurance coverage/$ due to economies of scale and greater impact there is. The poorer you are the worse it is. So there's one problem of the poor being unfairly branded, and the second of the fact that contracts contain many different caveats. These caveats can seem fair, and in fact are often. But they can be contradicted by other parts of the contract. It comes down to those engaged within the case that can correctly determine how it is done. If you are rich, they are more likely to have incentives to pay you off well. If you are poor, they have less. That is how it works.

There is nothing wrong with it.
What is wrong is the idea that satisfying demand is not always done in the right way. You have a demand for insurance, and buy it, but you don't know the quality of it till later. You have a demand for say, a soft drink, that is well advertised, and seemingly healthy and awesome in every way; 50 years later people start getting ill and its because of the drink- the factory was somehow putting some cancerous material in, and without regulations there was no way to stop it. There is no incentive to make sure that the drink is safe; there is an incentive for profit which may demonstrate itself in creating an unsafe drink but may also demonstrate itself in seemingly healthy drinks.


I'm not convinced by this, and you saying "hopefully" demonstrates your not entirely convinced either.

UK seems to do it well (for large parts of society at least), and i'm measuring this using direct personal experience, and a network of friends/associates etc., as well as the media.


fair.



In what way are you free to do it? People will stop you at every step of the way. You may have the legal freedom to acquire the licence required, you may not. If you lack the resources to aquire said licence you lack the fiscal freedom to purchase it. If you lack the physical abilities to do said action you lack the physical freedom to fly off it.

A part of me does find that most people who stand on your side of this debate do lean towards the libertarian, people who stand on my side think leftist.
There is force being used to prevent me from coming to the US as I have to fulfil certain conditions to acheive said freedom, as with buying a skyscraper. Means imprison you. I am free to kill you in the physical sense, but i'm not legally free to kill you. I am free to kill an intergalactic alien in the legal sense, but i'm not free to kill it as they don't exist.
If I can never do it, how can i ever be free to do it? The concepts are one and the same.


Boooooooo. I am young. I could say that you are as idealistic about ACism. I never said I new how to achieve such a govenrment, but that said government would fit said characteristics.
Thats how you get the right government. No one knows how to do it, but that is what is required.

In your decentralized society, the wealthy would (presumably) move to area's where they are not taxed on their wealth, whilst doing business in area's where they would be taxed on their wealth; as currently exists. It sucks.


Re. back to the monopoly point; I have a problem with monopolies in that in ACist society they can still harm people, and when they acheive said harm there is little ways to break them up in certain situations. Despite their being less occasion for said monopolies, it does not help the fact that for large periods of time whilst we wait for alternatives (if they occur) society is held hostage by the monopolies.

Anybody else ever read The Ungoverned by Vernor Vinge? It's free online, and a quick read. Wiki has a plot summary.

But who decides which subjective measures are given priority over another? That's more of the problem then setting arbitrary objective limits.


But it's none of their business.


Yes, assuming information is available. In the internet age, this is not a complicated problem.

It comes down to contract law. If someone is not capable of understanding a contract, it's possible it won't have any power to be enforced. Insurance is something where it takes a while for the reputation to come out. If you are poor, there is less incentive to screw around too much because it's cheaper to just pay off. I think there would be a greater incentive to get out of paying the rich peoples claims since the overhead would be roughly the same, but the reward greater. I agree that this kind of cheating and fraud would be a bad thing.

Did they know it was cancerous when they put it in? What makes you think there are no inspections or anything of the sort? Do you just randomly drink stuff without knowing what it is?

If they had no idea it was cancerous and there was no way to reasonably test for it, there's nothing to stop that from happening.

There's no incentive to make the drink safe? Maybe the incentive is that people don't want to drink poison!? Do you think people would do this?

Sure, there is no guarantee exactly how things will work out. Maybe the costs will be paid by the losers in court cases and this will be enough to compensate advocates. Or maybe it's charity. I can't tell you exactly how it might work, but it's not a terribly complicated problem to solve.

What in particular makes you think this?


There is no artificial restriction against it. Yes, if there are artificial restrictions like licenses, yes, that is restricting freedom.

You are free in the sense that no artificial entity is restricting you.

I don't think that's true, I grew to ACism out of skepticism not idealism. It's built out of mistrust and viewing corruption.

No one knows how to do it because it is impossible.

This assumes that they wouldn't have an exit penalty for leaving or that they aren't taxed on their wealth as they earn it. You account for this behavior.

Too bad we can't break up the biggest and most harmful monopoly of them all. That one's OK though, well, as long as we put magical people in charge who are both noble AND all-knowing.

Except that people actually advocate stateless societies. The people who advocate no property societies are just twisting the meaning of the word. AS has property. The land is owned by the commune that's using it.

Its a problem to be governed by the governing class. Admittedly quite subjective. But alot better than merely relying on subjective measures.
Never letting anyone starve is objective. Christian only food charities are worse.


It really is. Anything your affected by is your business.


For you to be right society will have to advance alot. But given that, i'll accept your premise.


They picked the cheapest "ingredient" without investigating the effects

Why would there be? If there were why would they be so comprehensive?

People do now.

I think people won't drink poison, but will drink things based on social norms, which is managed by decent capatalists.


Happiness/lack of violence/opportunity to excel/trends of improvement in said categories


Freedom isn't just about artificial restrictions.

So?

Other monopolies would be the same, and we can't govern them in anyway as they are governed by profit; as opposed to the founding principles and governing principles of government which would be to govern society well.

Although not addressed to me, 1. Why do you care what the wealthy have? Wealth can be defined by the commodities and junk a person owns. They own a bar of gold or an old car who cares. Why should someone tax someone a dime of their wealth?

So you say they don't pay their fair share for the roads. If they want the roads fixed they will volunteer money.

2. Monopolies who cares, you have the choice to buy the product you like. If there is only one car company, buy from them or not at all. If they are making money a new car company will form. It is impossible to have monopolies without government or violence.

If they built it themselves, in isolation, and away from society it is theirs yes by all means don't tax it.
But, if they achieved it through society they have a debt to pay for the wrongs and needs of said society.

There are ways to have monopolies without government/violence but they are admittedly rare, and rarer even without a government to promote them (TC showed this to my great chagrin)

But still... a monopoly can hold hostage to society and individuals in so many ways, and society and those individuals have a right to remove them as i'm sure you'd agree

*if they are harmful. nothing wrong with a good monopoly.

So anything that affects you is your business? Be careful what you say on this, it may lead to some wacky conclusions.

Did anyone know this ingredient causes cancer? Would it have been possible to know with research?

Because people wouldn't want random chemicals in their food?


Not really, they know there are some basic regulations. And it doesn't need every person to know, it just needs some.


Another conspiracy theory where the evil capitalists can brainwash the unsuspected people of the world. This explains a lot of your world view, and it is incredibly naive and incredibly wrong about what people are capable of. This viewpoint comes from extreme arrogance, where the pleebs cannot possibly live their lives without your generous input. And giving a central power all the power to control their lives is even worse in this case!


We are just using the same word in different ways. Like I said, it doesn't matter what the words mean, just as long as we are consistent.


So much better to just give all the power to the most politically powerful in a single monopoly! Nothing bad could happen!

Yes its your business. What you can do with it depends on the case in question though.

Its new, but research would tell you its new

People do now.

I get the impression people don't care because they follow not regulations/govt. but social norms, and an implicit trust in brands and shops that have been set up in their native countries.


Ooo do i sound like LirvA?
Anyway I don't think capitalists are evil. Capitalism works. But capitalists are managed by profit not good. people are afflicted with cognitive dissonance/love of loud noises/ridiculous sales techniques. I find your viewpoint that people go into every decisions looking to be fully informed alot more naive. Think of the hundred's of times massive corporates are found to be doing evil/wrong and get chastised and boned for it.
People of capable of alot when they know there being used, but not when their not.
Nudge
This book has a lot of examples of how this happens now; and with the advent and increase of behavioural physchology how we're not getting any better.
I think people are generally good, and more than that, generally happy. I think most people will never be screwed up much. But i'm glad and hope to propogate a system where the small times it does/times it happens on unreal scales circa. cococola, the banks, etc.., people get together to force change. Of which a government is a large force


So for you freedom only matters if the constraints are created by?

I know feel how you do when people yell roads at you

So if two people decide to have a BBQ in their back yard, and don't invite me. Oh noes, I be affected, I didn't get invited?!

As for research - how much? At what cost? Would it be reasonable to expect someone to know this? If someone does this, and they should have known better, they would be liable.

I never said people go into every decision fully informed. That is not needed. When I buy a car, I don't need to do a full inspection on every component. I can take a review site of my choosing, and see what they think is good. If I want to see how safe it is, I see their safety tests. On things I don't care about, I don't spend that much effort on. It's quite simple.

Nudge is a solid book- sure, you can influence people. People don't need to make perfect decisions. They just need to be better at making them than the alternatives. No body can know what a person wants and desires and how he subjectively rates everything better than him. Maybe a supercomputer can do this someday.

I never said anything about freedom being the primary goal. Just defining terms.

As for the last comment - it's very frustrating that your solution to the unstoppable monopoly problem is..... an even bigger unstopperable monopoly. It's just so obvious to me how flawed that thinking is. But I'll grant you this, if there is a huge monopoly that holds society hostage, then probably ACism would fail and people would just take care of things themselves and strip it down. It's not a moral argument, but merely one that people will do that, even if it violates the NAP.

Just read it, enjoyed it, thanks! Why did you ask?

Medical testing/prosthetic testing/etc.= Once a product has been created it will create a profit, and there will be little incentive to boycott said group especially if they are seeling some incredibly +EV product. What is to stop them using objectionable practices?

Roads.

It would be reasonable for someone who had access to the chemical and the production plan to know this. Lets say that the point at which it becomes "poisonous" is a mix between the mixing vat and the chemical interaction. Liable to who? The evidence for any individual having caught the disease from the coke is circumstantial= the drink can cause illness but so can other things.
This is a problem in current law AFAIK


And you are a reasonable and smart individual who i presume has a proper respect for how reviewing websites work. Lots of people trust more corporate entities or celebrities etc.. These people are not the same as you.


And no one deserves protection from this?


Freedom is only being impacted on by artificial restraints then?
If not freedom, what is your primary motivation for ACism?

I think thats because you think that all infrastructures have to work based on the profit infrastructure of capitalism; but a decent government would have incentive structures based on more than profit.
Look at football within the English leagues; the aim for so many of the clubs isn't profit but success. Its causing a huge amount of insolvency issues, and soon I predict the model will change- profit will overtake success. But as it is the infrastructure of British football has success as the incentive structure.
You could argue that its still profit through success; but thats the same as saying the purpose of capitalism is utility through profit

Created products won't always create a profit. Why is there little incentive to boycott? People want to buy unsafe products?

What's to stop them? Their reputation for that product AND any other product is harmed by making crappy stuff.