100 sats \ 2 replies \ @elvismercury 12 Mar \ on: My questions for libertarians libertarian
I think your questions 5a-5c are the heart of the matter; they also seem to be the least discussed or even acknowledged.
My hot take: I generally find the taxation is theft and related conversations tiresome because, however you feel about the issue, the kind of aggregate entities that impose taxes have wiped the floor with other forms of organizations at scale. Hand-to-hand combat could be considered, by some standards, to be more moral. And yet warfare is not a morality contest. The race is not always to the swift, etc.
A more interesting question is: are there alternatives possible that can, practically and empircally, pose an alternative, given that there is a very concrete survivability question in play? So far the answer seems no.
Some think btc will usher in this glorious age, as per the asymmetries between attack / defense described in The Sovereign Individual, but I am not among that number.
I agree with pretty much everything you said.
The initial questions are more about image and social reputation. I think you do give up some social capital identifying as a libertarian these days. I don't think that was the case when I was an undergrad.
are there alternatives possible that can, practically and empircally, pose an alternative, given that there is a very concrete survivability question in play?
This is how I should have worded question 1. To me, "worth the risk" means survivability. This implications being the expected value of eliminating the government is exceptionally low, even if the worst case scenario has low probability.
If bitcoin is the digital gold - why would expectations under bitcoin be meaningfully different than life/society under the gold standard? That's a head scratcher.
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That's a head scratcher.
It was one of the biggest head-scratchers for me for a long time. You can find some modest and realistic explanation in Lyn Alden's book about how btc corrects the gap that had grown up between the speed of transaction and the speed of settlement (we talk about it in the book club someplace) and that will, I believe, be a real change, though what it will mean in practice is hard to say. Certainly we did not live in a utopia when money was sound and settlement and transaction were equally slow.
Mostly, though, I think it's utopian thinking, which is pretty easy to spot and useful to examine critically.
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