They'll come for you, too

Posted by $ blarman 1 year, 9 months ago to Economics
297 comments | Share | Flag

Interesting to note that the bank in question didn't loan out its money but instead made its profits on transaction fees. Also to note, the bank's primarily conservative investors are out their $65 million. Can we say legalized THEFT?


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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    At this point, my ideas are not complete. I have only a vague idea of how things should be. I'm sorry for not being able to provide anything more clear. The one thing I am sure of is that the current status quo results in a lot of wrong being done to people, especially by the government. Those capable minds failed.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "This coming from the person"

    Let's say I am an idiot and I don't know what I'm talking about. How does that invalidate my accusation of statism being predatory? I think I did provide some evidence, such as states organizing wars to increase their territory or steal resources, etc. I think even the US did these things, is that not so?
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "perfect is the only thing we should accept"

    Well, if perfection is truly too far out, I am willing to be patient.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "purposefully ignorant"

    Sorry, I didn't mean it as an insult. My point was that people don't want to know because of what it would mean for them if they find out.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "join another that matches your ideology"

    The problem is that no society exists that would match my ideology. I am left picking the least wrong one. I think the US is probably at the top of the list, however, things are changing fast these days.

    Additionally, I believe the world has been overtaken by predatory states. It would not be possible for me to escape them. I feel like I am living under a planetary occupation.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Actually, I wouldn't want voting. I would like something similar to scientific debate and consensus. So, laws would be derived and checked similar to how mathematical proofs are done. Anyone may strike down a law or introduce one, provided that they prove it and the proof is confirmed by the academic/law enforcement community. The level of confidence required would be very high. Maybe as much as 90% of the community would need to agree with the proof as being correct before the resulting law starts getting enforced.

    So, people would be "voting" on the correctness of the proof, not on whether they agree with the resulting law. Now, maybe some would be clever and would not agree with the proof because they didn't agree with the resulting law. However, that wouldn't count because they would have to provide a counter proof showing how the original proof is wrong. Otherwise, they agree by default.

    So, once most laws are discovered, new ones would not appear very often. It would be a very big event when it happens.

    I don't think this has ever existed, however, I am not very good at history, so, maybe it did.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "punitive action"

    Let me clarify the point I was trying to make:
    Either we agree not to screw each other over and cooperate, or all bets are off. Any action is allowed then.

    This notion is at the root of my understanding of society. You can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't expect your neighbor to not screw you over but you make him allow you to screw him over.

    Yet, this is what you statists are basically doing. You are tricking everyone into allowing you to screw everyone over but not the reverse.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "poke logical holes"

    I guess I failed in showing you that these are not holes. I'm going to have to think about this some more.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "Then take yourself out of society and find a place to live by yourself!"

    I can't. Predatory statism is predatory. It will find a way to prey on me no matter where I would be.

    For example, they will come to me and ask why I'm not paying taxes, then put me in jail and take my stuff and if I defend myself they will just kill me.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Ya, well, I already have a very dim view of them, so, they would finally be up to speed.

    This is all assuming I didn't agree with the law because it was arbitrary and not part of the universal law. Of course, if the law as in line with the universal law, I would be in the wrong.

    You/they don't have the right to be surprised. Either we all get along or there is a state of war that exists between us. Nobody has the right to decree laws. If they start making moves against me, all bets are off. I am not their slave. Freedom might require some watering of trees with blood of tyrants.

    Now, I might have to surrender and submit to statists, but I'm making moves once numbers are on my side. It is only logical. You guys better start thinking about what you are doing.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Yes, the hypothesis needs to be tested. However, prior to testing, it already looks better. I predict the second renaissance. Let's hope testing is allowed to be performed.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I don't know much about water use rules. I'll have to get up to speed on that to be able to comment.

    The universal law can be derived in a decentralized way. That's the whole point of having it, so that everyone ends up with the same rule set. Just like everybody ends up with the same mathematics. I don't understand why you would think math is centralized.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    I think the overhead is not such a big issue. The problem is with wrongfully outlawing competition. If somebody WANTS to spend their money on extra overhead, you should fuck off and not prevent them from doing it. It is their money and not yours.

    It might turn out that they are able to provide the same service at half the price. That will be positive for society in the long run.
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  • Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    If nobody wants national defense then why force people to have it? You statists are a bunch of life losers, looking for make work jobs.

    Of course, in reality people want defense services. They might not be 'national', but they will be 'defense'. I think the issue is that the state (as it is) creates unfair competition or outright outlaws them, so, those services don't really have a market in the current environment. But I assure you, the market will exist for it once the state fucks off.

    Competition will make things cheaper due to the need to remove unnecessary waste, and there is a huge amount of waste in government, trust me. I suspect 50% of everybody's life is wasted on working to pay the state (in the US).
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  • -1
    Posted by nonconformist 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    As long as you perform law enforcement according to the universal law, I don't see a problem with this.

    Of course, nobody is going to be doing it just for fun. There are a lot of risks. You are going to need insurance. The activity itself will be very expensive. You will need to spend a lot of time in court. Somebody will need to be paying for the service. Some of the money will likely come from whoever hires you to patrol their neighborhood, etc. You can get some of the funds possibly from perpetrators repaying you for you stopping their illegal activities, however, there are still going to be huge standby costs and cost associated with mistakes (probably covered by expensive insurance). If you kill someone on accident, there will be hell to pay. If you are bad at it, the free market will chew you out.

    I seriously don't see the lunacy you are referring to. Everything appears logical.
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  • Posted by VetteGuy 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "If you start dictating made up laws to me (that I don't even agree with) and you start punishing me for not following them, don't be surprised when I fuck you over one of these days."

    I think the police, and eventually the jury, would take a very dim view of that attitude.
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  • Posted by $ 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "you can't punish other people for not follow your made up law."

    So there are several systems of government. There are options from a dictatorship to a full democracy. What you seem to want is nothing more and nothing less than unanimity in every single point of public policy. That was tried in Athens with a full democracy - literally every person voting on every point of public policy. It fell apart in a matter of decades and turned into mob rule complete with lynchings/executions.

    The long and the short of it is that if you don't want to be a member of a society, remove yourself from that society and join another that matches your ideology. If you can find such.
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  • Posted by $ 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    Your world view is yours and yours alone. I simply pointed out that one can not derive a position of inherent equality without starting from a position of recognizing inherent connections between people.

    "If you start dictating made up laws to me..."

    Then take yourself out of society and find a place to live by yourself! That is your only option because Life is an Opt-Out not an Opt-In. As for your empty threats, I thought you didn't believe that punishment was moral, yet somehow you believe that you can take punitive action against me for some perceived slight?

    "I apologize for the colorful language"

    -1. No, you don't. You just want things to be a certain way and when I present counterpoints that poke logical holes in your arguments you get upset. As I stated before, you need to either revise your arguments or come up with a counterargument. Name calling and expletives only underscore the fact that you're arguments don't hold up to intellectual scrutiny near as well as you think.
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  • Posted by $ 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "By the looks of things, you guys are purposefully ignorant."

    And you're a jackass.

    We can throw around ad hominem all day. All it does is mean that there is no serious/logical discourse taking place.

    "I don't agree with you that something much closer to perfection (than what exists now) cannot be achieved when it comes to laws."

    No one said that was the case. Certainly not me. But you tend to want to float things as if the perfect is the only thing we should accept and that's just not realistic.

    "Predation is the problem. ... You guys are unwilling to admit that you are guilty of it."

    This coming from the person who admits A) that he hasn't ever really studied any of the concepts mentioned in his diatribes and B) has no evidence to show that his ideas actually work. Come back to me when you've worked on both and we might be able to have a profitable conversation.
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  • Posted by $ 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    That's complete nonsense. Until one has actually tested the hypothesis it remains completely unproven and hypothetical. One can reach no reasonable or objective conclusion until the data regarding the testing outcome has been collected. There is a very simple word to describe such: prejudice.
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  • Posted by $ 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    "I would not allow anybody to get special privileges authorizing stuff. Either everybody can do it or nobody can."

    By that mentality, I can declare myself Sherriff - and so can everyone else! What you're proposing here is lunacy.
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  • Posted by $ 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    One of the difficulties in government is that it doesn't benefit from the same performance feedback loops that business does. In the free market, there is a direct (monetary) incentive to producing good products and services. Government frequently provides necessary but difficult to incentivize services such as national defense. (Despite it being an explicit provision in the Constitution, I would vote in a heartbeat to privatize the USPS...) For some things, competition is just competition and doesn't make things cheaper.
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  • Posted by $ 1 year, 8 months ago in reply to this comment.
    So please realize you're speaking to someone with an MBA.

    Overhead is a necessary evil, but overhead comes at the expense of profit margins. Efficiency is as much about the process one uses as the management overhead. But multiplying that overhead across a number of "competitors" doesn't make capitalism...
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