Well, this thread could go on and on but downrepping simply isn't going to work. All you end up with is fragmented rep networks. If 30% of Extropia decides to give up on the anarchist rep network and only operate through c-rep, who's to stop them (or create their own rep network)? And it doesn't solve the issue of how they resolve differences of opinion on how much should be spent on defense, and those that contribute "in kind" (here's my militia ship contribution! - which is kind of useless because Extropia wanted to spend a billion credits on a new state of the art frigate etc.). Anyway I'll bow out of this thread, and leave it that I'll just dump any ancap based societies from my EP universe and instead just use some ancap ideas to fill in some limited areas of Extropia where they make self-consistent sense to me.

Realistically, on a day to day basis most laws don't affect me. I interact with state-based coercion in the form of speed limits, but for the most part I determine my own behavior without regard to the state. I don't kill people because I think killing is wrong, but if something happened (not that I believe it could) to make me really [i]want[/i] to kill someone, the fact that it was against the law wouldn't deter me (though it would affect how I went about it). The same is true for stealing. Taxes are a once a year thing that's most handled by employers and my wife. City codes come up occasionally and when they do I strongly consider moving to the country (but ultimately they don't come up often enough for me to care). I still pirate software and movies, and if someone like me wanted some weed on occasion, the backward and (hopefully) soon to change US laws wouldn't stop them either. Government coercion is so far removed from my everyday life that I rarely think about it. If the state somehow magically disappeared (or say, I moved to an anarchist hab) my motivations wouldn't change. I still wouldn't kill or steal or engage in violence. Some of my other habits might move from the closet to the porch, but ultimately that's not that big of a change. If I were subject to a crime, things largely wouldn't change since I believe that the majority of my local police department is either corrupt or incompetent. At least in an anarchist hab I'd be more likely to be able to protect myself, either through weapon ownership or by hiring people who are [i]actually invested in getting the job done [/i]. I guess the one thing that [i]would[/i] change is that I would actually give a damn about the commons. I'd be more likely to volunteer at libraries or get involved in civically minded behaviors. Mostly because where I live now, the commons is the property of the state - which makes it their problem. In an anarchy, the commons is everyone's, which means it's mine (but I'm required to share it). I'd have a sense of ownership of the commons that I simply don't have living in a nation-state. PS Yes I said that I don't steal and that I do pirate software/movies.

Erenthia wrote:

I don't kill people because I think killing is wrong, but if something happened (not that I believe it could) to make me really [i]want[/i] to kill someone, the fact that it was against the law wouldn't deter me ([b]though it would affect how I went about it[/b]). The same is true for stealing.

I should point out this is the entire idea. The percentage of people able to evade actual law enforcement is much lower than the percentage of people who can evade some guy who thinks keeping a gun in his house will protect him.

Erenthia wrote:

if someone like me wanted some weed on occasion, the backward and (hopefully) soon to change US laws wouldn't stop them either.

If constant, omnipresent surveillance apparently lets anarchists catch people in crimes then it would sure as hell let the state stop you from putting anything into your body it didn't feel belonged there.

Erenthia wrote:

Government coercion is so far removed from my everyday life that I rarely think about it.

That's good. [i]That's the idea[/i]. The state doesn't exist to constantly interfere with people's lives on daily basis. It exists as background machinery, ensuring that everything continues running and things that are better done by collectives than by individuals keep getting done.

Erenthia wrote:

I guess the one thing that [i]would[/i] change is that I would actually give a damn about the commons. I'd be more likely to volunteer at libraries or get involved in civically minded behaviors. Mostly because where I live now, the commons is the property of the state - which makes it their problem. In an anarchy, the commons is everyone's, which means it's mine (but I'm required to share it). I'd have a sense of ownership of the commons that I simply don't have living in a nation-state.

This may well be true for you. I think most people who advocate the existence of the state assert that this wouldn't be true for enough people and that you have things backwards: the state exists [i]because[/i] some entity needed to take care of the commons, be they the city park and library or the entire continent.

Smokeskin wrote:

Consensus will solve it.

See, this is the problem [i]I[/i] have with anarchism. Consensus solves nothing and [i]cannot exist[/i] in sufficiently large groups. At that point you're just hitting democracy and it's either direct democracy, which is a terrible idea since most people literally don't have the time to sit down and learn the intricacies of what they're governing or even enough about it to make a truly informed decision, or it's representative democracy, in which case it's getting harder to justify the 'horizontal power structure' the anarchists seem to love so much.

Smokeskin wrote:

Anarchists have security. We've been over this several times yet you keep on coming up with this straw man argument.

I wouldn't go so far as to call it a straw man. So far our anarchist enforcers are having trouble with the lack of search warrants.

Smokeskin wrote:

Haha that's really funny. Enforcing monopolies? Banning all sorts of voluntary activities? Subsidizing industries and giving them legal advantages at the expense of citizens in return for lobby activities? Inefficient institutions? You call that doing a better job?

Umm..maybe I'm missing something but there are no examples of actual successful anarchists societies, are there? So of course an imaginary society will do better than a real one (and a pink unicorn yet to be seen in the wild can outrun a komodo dragon etc.)

Smokeskin wrote:

You may not think it is proper anarchy, but that's not really for you to define, and that's how anarchists wants it.

Anarchy - "proper" or otherwise - is nebulous partly because it hasn't yet been realized.

Smokeskin wrote:

Things that can be decided by the individual gets decided by the individual. They don't to the democratic "I'm offended by this so I'll ban it for everyone". Only decisions that require consensus get solved by consensus, and at the lowest level possible, and it doesn't become some hard to change law with intricate bureaucracy and self serving institutions built around it like democracies do things.

I'll believe that when I see it, but take my opinion with a grain of salt - I'm a born skeptic. I think paperwork could easily be [i]worse[/i] in an anarchistic society. Can muses and AI tech solve that issue? Maybe.

Smokeskin wrote:

Will it sometimes be problematic? Of course. But look at say US politics the last years - are you saying that representative democracy functions smoothly? It looks to me like a lot of politicians are actually rewarded for obstruction of society.

The US is a republic, not a representative democracy. Arguably a plutocracy as well. Obstruction is really easy when a state with 600,000 people gets two senators, and another with 34 million people gets the same two. I don't feel the USA is a good example to use. Also, on the point of defense spending brought up earlier - Denmark has 1% GDP for military - the USA has averaged about 7.5% since WWII. [img]http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/include/usgs_chart2p22.png[/img] You Danish got nothin' on our American crazy.

Smokeskin wrote:

Haha that's really funny. Enforcing monopolies? Banning all sorts of voluntary activities? Subsidizing industries and giving them legal advantages at the expense of citizens in return for lobby activities? Inefficient institutions? You call that doing a better job?

This is really the only thing I want to address as the rest of the argument is getting too close to being an actual political debate. I'll acknowledge that democracies and republics have problems (even if you and I are likely to disagree as to what the specific problems are and the extent of the problems in general). All I'm saying is that I feel anarchists should have some problems of their own. And they should be problems inherent to anarchism, not problems caused by people not being anarchist enough or by outside interference. I also feel that the difference in tone and word choice used to describe each faction betrays the authors' own political preferences too clearly for my comfort. In any case, my personal approach towards adding problems to the 'share everything' anarchists is to have their horizontal power structures and direct democracy fail them some of the time and to have their structures for deterring crime and/or disasters work worse than those of the other factions. My approach to giving the Extropians problems is to have their legal mishmash create so many bureaucratic problems that even muses aren't quite enough to sort them out and to have it give rise to progressively more mercenary courts and defense contractors as they snap up the coveted 'people who want to be jerks' market. My approach to Scum is to remove the 'tribe' dynamic entirely and to have their designation of 'Scum' come as much from communal-minded societies as from the Consortium. I also like to introduce alternatives to the 'new' economy. Because nothing about the existence of cornucopia machines invalidates other economic systems. In particular I tend to distrust the idea that the introduction of rep would somehow make barter the only alternative.

Smokeskin wrote:

These things are directly mentioned as problems in the books, aren't they?

They really aren't, to the best of my knowledge. I really feel like they should be. Aside from that, it looks like we don't actually disagree on much.

re: counterintelligence -- the 'Extropian corporations' subsection of the Extropian entry in Rimward lists a corp named Scrye and says it specializes in signals intelligence, traffic analysis, and data mining... and that one of the things its most commonly hired to do is 'keep an eye on the activities of Extropia's inner-system rivals'. Between that and the fact you can't throw a rock on Extropia without hitting six private security contractors, I think their counterintelligence and internal security capabilities are nowhere near as close to 'ain't got none' as some people are speculating. Because if Scrye's making money at it, on Extropia, then its got at least three competitors. :)

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

Right now my understanding of anarchism falls somewhere around the American colonies, circa 1780. Maybe some de facto taxes via skimming habitat resources in order to maintain the few projects that no individual could cover (things like naval defenses and habitat equipment).

Why does an individual have to cover the cost? Lots of companies manage to ssell products even though no indvidual could pay for the cost of the entire production.

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But there's no single currency. There's no central bank. There's a militia of guys and gals who like guns and have an idea how things work, but when it comes to who to arrest, that decision will fall somewhere between moral compass and old boys' club.

Ancap wants courts to handle it. Of course with lack of any law conflicts that aren't covered by contract will be solved with moral compasses - which I don't see as a step down from the often grossly unfair legal system we have today.

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You want to do something? You stake out a corner of the habitat or buy it off the previous owner and you do it.

That's better than "want to do something? Oh sorry that's illegal because it offended some ignorant voters", isn't it?

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You're doing something stupid? Expect a lynch mob.

Expect the lynch mob to face an armed response from a security provider under contract to protect their client from vigilantes.

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Most habs have a few people who everyone knows and everyone likes, who work as de facto leaders. But those people can't hold their positions if they start pissing everyone off, so they're limited to the soft touch (possibly excepting raiding outsiders).

And isn't that great?

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However, I would see anarchist situations like this as fairly unstable. It only takes one demagogue to create a central party,

That happens in democracies too. In fact it happens more easily in democracies since you can lie your way to power and from there there's a long way until next election where you're free to fuck things up legally.

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or the realization that several independent currencies would bring in more wealth and be more efficient if managed under a central bank,

It's a free market. Go ahead.

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or the joy of looting ones' neighbor (or threat of being looted) which requires an organized military,

Highly unlikely that ancap won't have something equal to an organized military. Why would anyone want to live without military protection? In general anarcho-capitalists will want most of the services that governments provide. They just buy them on the free market, cheaper and better.

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

Smokeskin wrote:

nezumi.hebereke wrote:

Right now my understanding of anarchism falls somewhere around the American colonies, circa 1780. Maybe some de facto taxes via skimming habitat resources in order to maintain the few projects that no individual could cover (things like naval defenses and habitat equipment).

Why does an individual have to cover the cost? Lots of companies manage to ssell products even though no indvidual could pay for the cost of the entire production.

I'm not following you. I just said that an individual could NOT support those costs. There are some expenses which are just too astronomical for even the richest people to support, which is why the new US said "no government ... except for these four or five things we can't do otherwise". Maintaining a Navy was one of those things. (Another was courts and, given the confusion we're seeing about privately contracting courts, I can totally see why. But even well into the 19th century, there were private, contracted judges. But the feds still collected money to maintain a Navy.) If you're asking about why don't individuals just voluntarily chip in to the Navy fund, there are several answers. 1) Navy is rarely a high priority. If I chipped 20% of my income to the sad orphans fund, you're not going to downrep me for not chipping in to the Navy as well. This is a regular issue among charities. Literacy for kids is always a winner. Building an effective sanitation system is not. But one of those leaves those kids alive. 2) Pulling in resources for public defense (as well as public infrastructure) is necessary, but unpopular. I don't think just down-repping people will work unless you're instituting it as a mandatory program. If it's a mandatory program of penalizing people for not chipping in, that's called taxes. It's easier to just have everyone agree "we take 10% of the habitat's hydrogen production and 10% of the publicly-owned nanofab production time and dedicate it towards paying for the Navy".

I think it is much easier to not find defense spending worthwhile when you have enough than when you don't. If your military is so weak that you're actually at risk people who don't contribute will be downrepped. If some people give money to sad orphans and others give to defense, that could also easily work out. I don't see why everyone should pay the same for everything, and in certain circles defense contributions would be much more popular than sad orphans. There's also the whole insurance angle.

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Ancap wants courts to handle it. Of course with lack of any law conflicts that aren't covered by contract will be solved with moral compasses - which I don't see as a step down from the often grossly unfair legal system we have today.

You may rethink that when you're in the court of someone you don't agree with morally (or who stands to benefit personally from your losing).

If I'm in the court of someone I don't agree with, it's because I signed a contract that stipulated that court. Either I had my reasons to do so, or I was being stupid. In both cases, there can be a price to pay. If I didn't sign a contract there's a non-contractual dispute. That's handled by consensus, precedence, appointing neutral courts, etc. I won't find myself at the mercy of some strange court in that case. Both situations are drastically better than the current legal system you find in most developed nations. It is convoluted, unfair, expensive and so incredibly slow.

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That's better than "want to do something? Oh sorry that's illegal because it offended some ignorant voters", isn't it?

You seem to think I'm arguing it's a bad system. I'm not making a moral judgment. I'm simply stating how I see things working out, for people to tweak or comment. (My exception would be the court system, which I still don't grok, and see serious space for abuse. Like I said, I see a LOT of justification for "the government" being tasked with guaranteeing basic rights and overseeing legal proceedings.)

This idea you have that the government secures you "basic rights" falls apart very quickly once you actually start interacting with the legal system. In practice it is essentially arbitrary. You or your opponent will get screwed over by conflicting or unfair legislation, long court times, unfeasible cost levels, etc. and one of your will get a much better deal than is reasonable and the other a crap one. What most people seem to have problems with is how ancap handles non-contractual disputes. They rely on consensus and precedence, reputation of the courts, appointing neutral courts to handle disputes, etc. "Crazy courts" that make crazy rulings will have a very hard time. If you use a crazy court, you can't get insurance - why would an insurance company accept such a liability?). You can't get a security provider - they won't accept a contract that will mean having to protect you from reasonable claims from other courts and having to collect claims that other courts won't recognize, since in both cases that means armed conflict. In reality you might as well just skip the crazy court and just hire mercenaries to take what you want, and I think we can see how that's not going to work.

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You're doing something stupid? Expect a lynch mob.

Expect the lynch mob to face an armed response from a security provider under contract to protect their client from vigilantes.

Vigilante is someone who works outside of the law. There's no law, ergo, no vigilantes. Or more to the point, if you're an ego trader, you will be dumped out of the habitat, as is established in canon. Whether they walk you nicely to the egocaster or not depends on how much they like you. But you are correct that the mob would likely meet armed response (I don't know how your contract protection would react to "you were creating WMDs and are being forcibly evicted from the habitat" scenarios). [/quote] Anarcho-capitalism is not as lawless as you seem to think. You can't just hurt people or trash or take their property or interfere with their business. People are expected to adhere to contracts and follow reputable court rulings. If you don't you'll end up owing people money, and they or their security provider will come and collect it. That's not being a vigilante. As to what your security provider will do if people come to stop you building a WMD - well probably their contract doesn't stipulate that they'll protect you if you do that. It applies to other scenarios as well - one of the most difficult parts of ancap is handling risk. Are you allowed to sue people for doing something that puts you at risk? If you drive down a street at reckless speed, can you be met with a class action law suit for the risk (and emotional distress) you placed on the other drivers and pedestrians? If your production releases carcinogenics into the environment, can everyone exposed sue you or is it only those who get cancer 20 years from now? What if several companies released carcinogenics, or the cause and effect can only be demonstrated statistically? I personally think that suffering risk should be considered a tort you can sue for, but it is a point of contention.

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That happens in democracies too. In fact it happens more easily in democracies since you can lie your way to power and from there there's a long way until next election where you're free to fuck things up legally.

This is true. As a quick note, all of the issues I'm bringing up are ones that the US faced or fell to in transitioning from the relative anarchy of 1780 to its modern setting. I'm not making a moral judgment on this transition. I think I'm just coming back to Jefferson; the tree of liberty and the blood of patriots. (Fortunately, blood in this scenario is much cheaper.) I see the most frequent response to this slide being people packing up their tents and moving elsewhere to start again; an option we saw in the US with the westward expansion.

I think proper anarcho-capitalism requires a high degree of complexity and accountability to work at anything but the smallest scale. Handling multiple competing legal codes, rep systems, individual contracts for even the simplest transactions, etc. I think certain elements of ancap could be implemented today, but not all of it.

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or the joy of looting ones' neighbor (or threat of being looted) which requires an organized military,

Highly unlikely that ancap won't have something equal to an organized military. Why would anyone want to live without military protection?

Firstly, I'm not specifying anarcho-capitalists, although it does apply. Unfortunately, "anarchism" is such a broad term to be nearly useless. That I'm not pinning myself down to a single category may be the cause of some earlier confusion.

Most other forms of anarchy are much simpler to work with. They don't mind direct democracy, sharing resources, etc. A soldier in an anarcho-communist hab won't have to worry about who will pay his salary.

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Secondly, I should have been more clear. I will illustrate with an example. The U.S. Constitution was set up and authorized a Navy, but not an army. The idea was that a Navy can serve a defensive role, but can't hold territory. It wasn't long before the U.S. created a standing army anyway, which we then used to take land from other people. The bigger an army we had, the more aggressively we attacked our neighbors. I expect every habitat to have some organized military units in order to defend themselves. The tipping point is when the have an organized military that can effectively attack others. Militaries are expensive to maintain. The cheapest way to pay a military (until around 1950, although that may change in the EP setting) is to loot your neighbors, or at least use gunboat tactics to help with your "diplomacy". Once you do that, you need a bigger organization to maintain that military and guide it. Whether it's a corp or a coop, it's effectively a government. You need rules on how the military operates, and on citizens to get them to keep paying for it. You need rules for security, and to prevent outsiders from coming in and freeloading off of your hard-won wealth. It's a slippery slope the U.S. is currently falling down hard. There's no reason an anarchist habitat couldn't fall in the same trap.

Well, anarchists don't have a government protected by a monopoly on violence and able to collect taxes, all decided by very weakly accountable politicians. It can't really take on a life of its own in anarchy (except for an actual military coup, but again that's a threat in any modern democracy too). Especially in anarcho-capitalism it will require continued support from the population - otherwise funding dries out.

I think one thing we keep getting snagged on is the legal code. Since you seem to have a pretty good grasp on it, maybe you'd be willing to walk me through it? Let me hand you a pretty straight-forward example; Bob claims Jane assaulted him. Jane claims Bob is levying a false claim in order to extort her for money. The alleged event occured in a privacy room, so it's not a clear-cut answer. How do the courts deal with this?

Wow, that's a very good example, with all of the twists and turns I would want more details on. Thank you! I'll need to think on that one for a bit and figure out how it applies when the money differential is huge.

nizkateth wrote:

I did have a question when it comes to anarcho-capitalism theory: Where does money come from? Who prints it and determines its value? Do privately owned companies get to print their own money? I ask because one of the issues we're having right now is letting private banks (like the Federal Reserve) print our money and determine exchange rates and such.

Anyone who wants to can make their own currency. Maybe you'll want to use something like bitcoins, maybe a fiat currency from a Lunar bank, maybe a currency backed by a qubit standard offered by a non-profit organization.

I would argue that backing isn't truly relevant to money, as all money is fiat-based. Even gold only has 'value' because we say it does. If humans considered gold to just be another malleable metal of no great use or aesthetic quality then it would have no value. It's only because we think it's pretty that we value gold. We could just as easily use pens as currency, if we valued pens. That we value paper money or, even more abstractly, numbers in a computer database is just as arbitrary as any other form of value. The key is convincing people it has value regardless of any other qualities. Suggestibility and cultural acceptance are the only things that matter.

nizkateth wrote:

I would argue that backing isn't truly relevant to money, as all money is fiat-based.

In that case, I have $100 from the Bank of Nezumi I'd like to sell you. (And no, you're not totally correct; currency must meet certain other requirements, such as being easily counted, increased, decreased, authenticated as genuine, with limited supply, etc. However, all of those requirements can be met by a bank. The ones which are difficult are things such as consumer confidence, insurance against aggressive currency manipulation, and things like that, which are based on the distributing organization being responsible even when it means lost profit.)

Well there is a difference between fiat-based and standard-based currencies. For standard-based currencies, the money issuer guarantees you that upon request it will give you something at a set exchange rate for your money. Of course that commodity could change in value, but at least it is something.

nizkateth wrote:

Money remains completely arbitrary, with a culture built around trying to reinforce or manipulate its accepted 'value'.

Arguably, all mercantile value is arbitrary, no matter the resource, as it is completely based on the demand that can be generated and the control one has over the supply. To whit, even a backed currency is arbitrarily valued in sync with something else that is arbitrarily valued.

nizkateth wrote:

Essentially my point. One of my core issues with capitalism, and any other system that [i]requires[/i] money to live in ("cost of living") is that we are saying that some people will have less and suffer more because they have less of an object of purely arbitrary value (currency). Now, I would be okay with finding a middle ground where human needs for general comfort (food, shelter, clothing, medical aid, at least some basic entertainment) were covered for free by society. Then have money be for things above and beyond the basics.

I believe that's the core objective of socialism... to prevent the private control of societal essentials, so that fundamental needs are met; while still keeping the luxury-earning aspects of capitalism that communism lacks.

nizkateth wrote:

Decivre wrote:

I believe that's the core objective of socialism... to prevent the private control of societal essentials, so that fundamental needs are met; while still keeping the luxury-earning aspects of capitalism that communism lacks.

^_^ And in practice, I am a socialist. It's just not my ideal.

It also turns out that the mechanisms that socialists use for achieving their objective simply don't work. It's a flawed idea with popular appeal.

And I would argue that the USSR and PRC and DPRK aren't actually socialist states... they are (or were) dictatorships under the guise of socialism/communism. Socialism is really more of an economic aspect of society than a political one (in its pure form), and is currently in use to large degrees in many countries: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Canada...

nizkateth wrote:

And I would argue that the USSR and PRC and DPRK aren't actually socialist states... they are (or were) dictatorships under the guise of socialism/communism.

PRC has kept the dictatorship part and become capitalistic. As a consequence over 300 million people have been lifted out of deep poverty and now enjoy significantly higher quality of life with health care and longer life expectancy and are able to provide their children with education and the promise of a better life. Everything points toward economic growth in China to continue to the great benefit of the people there. So let us not pretend that it was the dictatorship part that hurt the Chinese people, when the obvious fact is that it was mainly socialism.

nizkateth wrote:

And I would argue that the USSR and PRC and DPRK aren't actually socialist states... they are (or were) dictatorships under the guise of socialism/communism. Socialism is really more of an economic aspect of society than a political one (in its pure form), and is currently in use to large degrees in many countries: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Canada...

That is a common critique of large-scale socialism - "It failed because it was not truly a socialist state." The X found is not the true X. If one examines anthropological case studies, socialism does seem to work effectively for relatively small groups of people (n ~= 30 people).

nizkateth wrote:

And I would argue that the USSR and PRC and DPRK aren't actually socialist states... they are (or were) dictatorships under the guise of socialism/communism. Socialism is really more of an economic aspect of society than a political one (in its pure form), and is currently in use to large degrees in many countries: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Canada...

Agreed, but those nations you list only use socialist programs. All three of the nations I listed did, in fact, have a completely socialist economic model. Which is why I said that the largest socialist successes today are companies and businesses, not nations. National-scale socialism has so far been a failure. An unfortunate disadvantage of what is largely a fledgling economic model. But the successful implementation of it on the corporate level may pave the way for successful implementation of it on a larger scale. Now while Smokeskin argues that it is a flawed idea, I would argue that it no one has found a functional way to implement it. In all the national-scale transitions to a socialist state, it has come about after a war, and installed by a military force acting in governance. Inevitably, that military force never really leaves power, and it merely shifts into a totalitarian state. On the other hand, all of the successful installations of a socialist system have been voluntary and bloodless. And this is likely how a successful socialist nation is going to have to form... through small-scale implementation on a local level, in a manner that allows for scalability.

The Doctor wrote:

That is a common critique of large-scale socialism - "It failed because it was not truly a socialist state." The X found is not the true X. If one examines anthropological case studies, socialism does seem to work effectively for relatively small groups of people (n ~= 30 people).

Actually, the most successful socialist structure today functions perfectly with over 92,000 members, only 9,000 of which aren't employed (they are students).

nizkateth wrote:

Once those things are covered, people can play their games of money and pretend like wealth matters all they like.

But the solution you're suggesting, socialism, didn't cover basic needs for anyone but the elite. Without competing markets you can't afford quality of life for anyone. These "games" are not just for fun and profit, they're what generates the wealth, growth, creativity and efficiency that lets us afford to do things like tqx the rich and have enough money to help the poor. We can have a reasonable discussion about tax and welfare levels. That's a matter largely of opinion. But not wanting capitalism and markets is frankly either stupid or cruel. It is condemning everyone to poverty.

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Edit: As an aside, and pardon my abrupt sexism (I know people actually vary greatly)... but why does everything need to be a competition with guys? :P

If that's true, that competition is a guys only thing, then it was a mistake to let women get voting rights and enter the work market. But let me ask you this. Do you think athletes would be at the level they were if there wasn't competion? If it wasn't only those who trained BOTH the hardest and smartest who rose to the top? If we didn't even know what the smartest training methods were because we didn't have mechanisms to weed out those with less-than-optimal training methods and team tactics that some coach thought was great? Do you think the athletes would struggle like they do, devote their lives to it, train so hard, eat so right, if it wasn't necessary because he had to compete with someone else doing the same? Capitalism is the same, except that the people there aren't trying to make their bodies fit and skills sharp, they're trying to make the best and cheapest products and services - and only those that consumers want. Socialists on the other hand don't try hard because they're not required to, and they produce what they want to produce, not what people want. Socialism is by definition lazy and arrogant in thinking that it always knows best. The worst state of any capitalist market - the monopoly or cartel where competion is gone - is the ideal in socialism.

nizkateth wrote:

Sure, if they worked collaboratively toward finding the best methods to train. If a group of people decided "we want to be really fast runners" and so put their efforts together to train in various ways and figure out which method was working best. Compare notes, assist each other when certain techniques proved to be greater. In fact, I'd suspect eventually it'd work just as well if not better than competition, since there wouldn't be jealous hording of secrets and undercutting of rivals. Instead of thinking "wow, that guy did really well... let's see if we can take some time to study him in action and try to extrapolate his technique from that" thus spending a lot of time trying to imitate or outdo them, they could just go "Hey, how'd you do that so well?" "oh, like this, let me show you!" Knowledge gets passed on, smoothly. If that knowledge continues to spread and someone comes up with an even better variation, then they can spread that newer version and make everyone better for it. Same basic premise for economics. Instead of competing over dollars, which are arbitrary anyway, which leads to haves and have-nots... just work together collaboratively to make things as good as they can be for everyone. That way everyone is in the 'haves' category and there aren't any 'have-nots'. Anything else just seems like capitulating to envy and greed. I don't understand what it is about humans that makes them think there needs to be a hierarchy of success. Why can't we all succeed together as a species?

This all reminds me a lot of the open software movement, and Linux as a whole. Kernel development is backed by a multitude of corporations around the world, most of which technically compete in the market. Yet any improvements done to the Linux kernel benefit every Linux distribution, not just ones utilized by the company that add them to the code repository. The same is true for many products under similar licensing. On the RPG front we had the OGL, which allowed any company to utilize an OGL-based ruleset to create more supplements and materials, so that both the ruleset and supplement can incentivize fans to cross-purchase. While the rulesets compete for attention, the ruleset encourages a market of supplements that the ruleset-producing company doesn't take tyrannical control over. This is even already true in sports to a large degree. Teams coordinate exercise, and even Olympic athletes group together in teams by country. And there are already thriving non-competitive sports in charity-running events. So we've already seen proof that collaboration has a market benefit without the need for competitive withholding.