Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Brilliant move from Occupy Denver

Just hunt. Never learned to fish: not enough water. But I'm much better at shooting than I am at hunting.

whatever thou would doest is the whole of the Law. does that about sum it up?

time for rubber boolits.

Barak has many of the fundamentals correct, so he understands quite a lot. His problem is that he misses the larger picture, i.e., that liberty, absent its network of traditional supporting structures, is unsustainable.

Apparently Denver politicians and their enforcers are finding it impossible to deal with the Occupy folks because there is no Occupy leader that the officials can coerce into bringing the Occupy people to heel. Rather than having to coerce each individual protester, then, the officials are insisting that the protesters choose a leader for them to coerce.

So a group of the protesters (not all of them: they have no leader to compel them to do so) elected a dog to be their leader. The dog, through her agents, is now looking to meet with Governor Hickenlooper on behalf of Occupy Denver.

The Occupy folks are drastically wrong about a number of things, and economically clueless; but they do show how much trouble an unarmed voluntaryist community can give a coercive State.

In other words, Conservatives want the government to do what it is constitutionally mandated to do (protect the nation and insure domestic tranquility)

I find it ironic that the real enemies of personal freedoms in this country today, come from the Left Wing, not the Conservatives.

What you say would be true if you substituted neoconservative for conservative. Just because most neocons insist on identifying themselves as conservatives doesn't make them that. Conservative has a meaning.

He's an anarcho-capitalist. A minarchist is just how anarcho-capitalists refer to old school libertarians. Minarchists are not anarchists of any sort. What is called minarchism is close to old school conservatism, Barry Goldwater style.

If liberty required a structure of long-standing traditions to exist, then it could never have come into being in the first place.

I think a killdozer would work better than water cannons.

they've been doing a pretty fair job trying to murder each other so far......

That's double speak. All I have to do is shoot you and take what you have. Those that work for you would then work for me unless they interfered in my shooting you then they wouldn't work for anybody.

You need to explain what you mean by that.

The government doesn't mow my lawn now. I do. The government doesn't protect me in the purest sense at present. Break into my home and I'll do the protecting.

The vehicle we have in place for accomplishing this is the electoral process. It works poorly but that's because we have so many people who are easily beguiled by politicians.

In Barakistan you would have the same electorate as we have now except for those that are killed off when they tried to break into my home.

It gradually came into being as those structures did, and as those structures approximated the forms which supported liberty. Liberty didn't just pop into existence in full form one day.

Technically you could, but in real life you wouldn't, because there would be a couple of really unpleasant consequences to that choice, even if you happened to catch me completely unawares.

First, unless you and I are the only ones on a deserted island, there will be others around. When they hear that you shot me and took my stuff, the first thing they'll think is, "Maybe he'll shoot me and take all my stuff next." Unless you can present a really good justification for shooting me and taking all my stuff, you're going to find yourself under pretty heavy surveillance from the neighbors, in the very best case. In a somewhat-less-than-best-case situation, you might well have a little accident that leaves you in a state that makes it difficult or impossible to be shooting anybody and taking their stuff.

Second, the folks who work for me don't just work for me, they work for a lot of other people as well. Most of their income comes from those other people. If their other clients hear that they let a client get robbed and murdered and didn't do anything about it, they'll lose all those clients to more responsible competitors and go out of business. So first they're going to do their level best to keep you from robbing and murdering me, to preserve their own business reputations; but if you succeed anyway they're going to track you down and bring you to justice, so that they can advertise that they've done so to their other clients.

In a free society, you'd already know about those two consequences, and it would be very unlikely that you'd be willing to risk them just to get my stuff. If you did, then your story and the photos of your broken body would serve to make it even less likely that the next guy would make the same choice you did.


Okay, authority.

Suppose I respect you as a gunsmith, and I have a barrel to set back, and so I call you up and ask you for advice about how to go about setting back a barrel. You give me some specific directions. I think they sound like good ideas, so I do exactly what you say, exactly the way you say to do it.

That's authority. You have authority over me because I have decided for my own reasons to extend that authority to you.

Now suppose you're not a gunsmith, but a bureaucrat. You hear that I'm setting back barrels in my garage, and you send me a letter threatening arrest and imprisonment unless I follow a list of specific directions. So I follow the directions.

In this case you have no authority over me, because I have not decided to extend any authority to you, and I'm the only place you can possibly get authority over me (unless I'm your child, which is dealt with under other cover). What you have is power over me: societally-legitimized power to initiate force against me.

Initiation of force (or, colloquially, coercion).

Initiation of force is when Jones commits an act of force or fraud against Smith without Smith having first committed an act of force or fraud himself.

For example, if Smith is peacefully conducting consensual, voluntary business transactions on a street corner, and Jones arrests him and locks him in a cage, Jones is initiating force against Smith. In a free society, this is unacceptable.

One more. If Smith is setting back barrels in his workshop (get it? Smith? Ha ha, I crack me up) and Jones breaks in to steal his HDTV, and Smith shoots him dead on the entry runner, then Jones initiated force against Smith (unacceptable in a free society), and then Smith employed retaliatory force against Jones (perfectly fine, even laudable in a free society).


Good point, but you're nevertheless required under threat of imprisonment to pay for that protection you're not using. In a free society, you'd be able to spend that money on something you actually did use.


Politicians are people who pursue coercive power. To get it, they must be good at beguiling people; therefore, they develop the skill. You can claim it's the people's fault for being beguilable, of course, the way it's a rape victim's fault for being female, but politicians have been beguiling their subjects ever since the first roving bandit convinced the first farmer that the money the bandit was extorting was for the farmer's own protection. Regardless of whose fault it is, it's the presence of the politicians that leads to the beguiling. No politicians, no beguiling.


I disagree.

The electorate we have now is in its vast majority a herd of thoroughly domesticated livestock where political matters are concerned. Livestock need to be owned, need to be farmed. Turn a dairy cow out of the pasture, ignore her when she comes to the gate bawling to be milked, and she won't last very long. She doesn't understand freedom, she doesn't like it, and she'll do whatever she can to become owned again; if she can't manage it, she'll probably die.

You can't have a free society with domesticated livestock; you need wild, independent, free creatures for that. A herd of African cape buffalo, magically transported into an American dairy farm, would in short order make a kindling-pile of the farm and be out in the wild places, where they would do just fine thank you very much.

There will probably always be people with a burning need to be ruled; such people will always be able to find plenty of folks with a burning need to rule. But neither will be the sort of people you'll find in a free society.

Sure it did--on the sixth day of Creation. Liberty was the natural state of humanity until the first State came along to destroy it.

Barak seems to envision a world without a government, which has never existed in the history of man, and never will. When the government breaks down you end up with Somalia, war lords and feudal kings. There is always a power structure.


Hey, he wants no rule of law, Maybe he should move to Somalia