He may be a raving misogynist asshole who seems to spend most of his free time scanning through PlentyOfFish profiles for women he can insult. But I’ll give Zero Tolerance Man props for one thing: his blog, NO MARRIAGES.COM, is very easy to read.
Not because he’s a brilliant writer with the clarity and grace of a latter-day Orwell. Because he uses such huge fonts, offering those with tired eyes a haven of sorts from the tiny text you find on most websites. The only real trouble is that, reading his posts, I can’t help but imagine him shouting them out at the top of his lungs.
I thought I’d give you some of the highlights — that is, lowlights — from recent posts, in a normal sized font.
I would compare most American women to septic tanks or dumpsters. The ego of the typical American woman is out of control, especially with the on-line dating sites. they get a few emails from pathetic desperate guys and right away, they are a princess waiting for their dream man.
The bathroom isn’t good enough to pump out that titter milk for these American bitches? After all, if I’m at work and I feel like busting a nut, I have to go into the shitter, close the stall door and pump away. But now, that isn’t good enough for a woman and her little womb turd!!! …
American women are essentially worthless except as a fuck and dump, so why are we bothering with this shit? Leave the little bastard at home or if the bitch just has to drain her tit, let her squeeze it out into the shitter.
Besides, it’s just another body fluid like the piss, blood, and yeast infections that drain from her overused overpriced PUSSgina right into the shit pot. I’m sick of giving these “ladies” deferential treatment.
MISERABLE AMERICAN BITCHES!!!!!
I am sorry, but unless a woman is here to service my needs, she has no more value than shit in the sewer. … We should treat American women like the crap they are and work on lowering their self-esteem.
You wouldn’t buy a dented can at the supermarket! Why would you choose a single mother? Single mothers are for losers. …
Think about it! …
Her pussy is stretched out from shitting out the kids or she has a big UGLY scar across her belly. Also included at no additional charge are stretch marks and varicose veins for your entertainment pleasure. …
Some of these bitches have 120,000 miles on their odometer by the time their husband (s) or the guys they fucked have put them in the recycle bin where they belong!
You can see these bitches walking down the street with their noses stuck up in the air with their snooty, snotty grins as if to say “look at me, I am wonderful and if you are a man, you are a pig”. I wasted years of my life and lots of money trying to please these monsters.
Only a MADMAN would marry one of these creatures.
Oh there’s more, much more. Including a poem. But I’m saving that for a future post.
The point of “anarchocapitalism” is NOT the “replacements of governments” by business corporations, it is the replacement of BOTH governments and their heavily politicised and interlocking corporation “business” structures (which derive most of their income either directly from the governments, or from the public advantaged in some way through government regulations, bailouts, and subsidies) with truly market oriented, private property based entities (tentatively called poliis, from the Greek ‘polis’ or ‘city-state’, which even here is wrong because geographically and legally, it functioned as a government) but I as yet have no term for this type of thus far untried voluntary and contractual association. “Corporation” and “Co-operative” are both even more unsuitable, and “interest group” is so vague and already overused as to be meaningless.
Rand, von Mises and Hayek were utterly ill equipped to understand anarchism, especially its Anglo American ‘individualist” variety.Being European, they grew up and reached adulthod associating anarchism with a politics and economics utterly different from what is under discussion here, and by the time Murray Rothbard,and perhaps Robert LeFevre, developed theories of anarcho-capitalism, 1962, when Man, Economy and State was published, 1966 when LeFevre’s Freedom School was founded in Colorado, and 1967, when Rothbard completed Power and Market, the explicitly focused praxeological treatment of outside intervention into the market order (by government or favored groups like trade unions or banks) von Mises, Ayn Rand, and Hayek, brilliant as they were, were simply too old and set in their ideas to accomodate an entirely new way of looking at liberty, property and the State. They all, in their different ways, made the mistake you just made above, treating it–and criticising it–as a “replacement” of government by business corporations. It isn’t, and in fact, is almost the exact opposite in many ways!
In the description of Hans-Hermann Hoppe, one of the contemporary scholars of this new form of society, “private law society” is his choice of nomenclature. It too, has its shortcomings, but it is probably better than anarchocapitalism!
To sum up, it is the replacement, or better still, the transcendence, of BOTH governments AND corporations with something better.
Right: Meller thinks that doing away with governments will lead to a blossoming of fair-minded businesses which would never stoop to dishonest practices; never hire private thugs to keep workers from negotiating for fair wages, never set up company towns; with company stores, be completely open about what they put in products (refraining from anything which would lead to profit, at the cost of safety), wouldn’t dream of using rivers to dump waste (they would care about the people downstream, of course).
And the Tinkerbell is going to sprinkle me with fairy dust so I can think good thoughts and fly from place to place.
Brandon: We keep hearing this (that a living wage will never work), and the history of wage increases doesn’t support it. Santa Monica Calif. passed a living wage law; over the howls of the Chamber of Commerce. Shock of shocks, the community businesses didn’t have to raise prices, didn’t go out of business and saw an uptick in income.
What that argument boils down to (you can’t raise wages because the costs will just go up) is that businesses profits matter more than people having a decent life.
@Pecunium: Then what is your rationale for having to increase the minimum wage laws every few years? My guesses are inflation, price increases, and people with more disposable income are willing to spend more. If I was making 10 bucks an hour and the government demanded everyone must be paid $15 an hour. For one, I might lose my job and second, if I was earning 50% more, I would end up spending more on the things I buy.
So while, I think it is a nice idea in theory (so isn’t socialism), I just don’t see it working on a large scale.
That’s it, Brandon doesn’t see how it can work, case closed.
Meller seems to have passed through the flopbot stage and is now accelerating rapidly towards crackerdog. But I doubt he’ll understand what I mean.
No, but James Herriot would. *awards gold star*
Start your own police force? Made up of cute baby hippos?
Or perhaps rhinocerous mercenaries? (I don’t even need to link to that.)
Brandon: You oversimplify.
Trivia question: What is the real dollar difference between the average salary now, and the average salary in 1970?
Answer… almost nothing.
Want to know what would change a lot of that… taxes. If there was (as there was under Eisenhower, that uber-liberal) a 90 percent bracket for earnings in excess of say… 10 million per annum, and if perks (like that Company Jet, and the Golf Club membership) were treated a “payment in kind” and so taxable income, the amount of money being paid to the CEOs,and other executives wouldn’t be such a huge drain (as much as 14 percent of earnings… not profits, earnings), on the budgets of companies.
That was part of the reason they invested in company infrastructure… if they paid it to executives, then the majority of it went to the gov’t. 10 million a year (well, ok, 6.5, after taxes) seems more than enough to live on, in my opinion. I’m managing to do all right on a fuck of a lot less than that.
So, move… call it 5 percent, of a company’s present earnings out of paying the guys at the very top… that frees a lot of money for paying the guys at the bottom… and it doesn’t have to add a penny to the price.
But we don’t do that. That, you see, is “communism”, and screwing the guy at the bottom is the American Way.
Only it’s not working, is it? We are fast becoming second world economy. Part of what made Bush, and PNAC so upset about Iraq was Hussein talking about selling his oil in Euros, not dollars. And the Oil Standard is what we’ve actually been banking on for the past 30 years.
So no, the “if we pay people the costs will just be passed on and hyperinflation will commence” is nonsense. Look at Iceland, or Argentina, or Malawi. There is more than enough money floating in the business world to absorb the increase. What there isn’t is any sense that we should. That’s a moral failing on the part of our leaders. The Friedmanesque/Randian (by way of Greenspan) Idea that the engine of commerce is the guy at the top, is rubbish.
The engine of commerce is people buying things. They can’t buy if they don’t earn.
PKFAE: I do not. I would like to see reforms in overcharging defendants but I do not want to see the end of the use of plea agreements.
There is a case to be made for it. They aren’t allowed in England. One of the things which is nasty about the way they are used is that the threat of prosecution for the greatest possible interpretation of the crime is used to force someone to plead out.
When one isn’t guilty that’s a really difficult thing. It also makes it easier for cops to “frame guilty people”. Part of the reason we have gotten away with so much petty criminalization seems to be that the state doesn’t have to prove it’s case, just scare the defendant enough to get them to plead out to something.
If, and it’s a big if, the ways in which overcharging (or flat out blackmail charges) are done had a lot of reform, then it might still be acceptable, but there is something to be said for making the state prove it’s case, and funding the system to make that possible.
Because right now, to be poor is to plead out.
@HellKell: It’s not that I don’t understand how it would work. It’s that I think it that large amounts of socialist ideology goes against human nature itself. And creating a system that basically denies reality, is the first way to have an unsustainable economic system.
@Pecunium: So if a we take 5% of the salary of one of the top CEO’s salary (say Phillipe Dauman of Viacom). He has a base salary of 2,6 million in 2010. That roughly equals 130,000 dollars. Now we divide that by the number of employees (10,900) and that comes out to $11.92 extra per employee per year.
Even if we take into account his stock and options (which is not tangible cash). That comes to 84 million. 5% of that is 4.2 million. That means each employee would get an extra $385 per year. Divide that by a 52 to get the total weekly increase and it comes in at a meager $7.40 dollars extra a week.
So maybe instead of railing against the rich. You can stop buying Starbucks coffee every day before work and you would get more than $7.40 per week.
The engine of commerce is everyone. Everyone serves a role. From the uber rich to the lower middle class family.
Ah, the nature argument. So easy to use, yet so wrong so often.
@hellkell: not to mention the fact that what Brandon calls “commerce” which he sees as so natural and important (i.e. capitalism) is a relatively recent human invention — johnny newcomer — to the way human beings survived for gazillions of centuries.
So, totes natural, but only a half dozen centuries old (or less, depending on your definitions).
Sadly, all too common.
http://www.detnews.com/article/20111024/MIVIEW/110240414/1467/opinion01/Johnson–Detroit-Train-to-Nowhere
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=483820
http://www.seattleweekly.com/1999-03-17/news/train-to-nowhere/
24 October 2011, 6:37pm-
Pecunium:
Even if your criticisms of “anarchocapitalism” are correct in your post above, we would all be no worse off than we are now, with “businessmen” (most of whom are more like privileged bureaucrats gaming the system on a large scale for private profit) allied with governments (supposedly protecting us), than we are right now.
Have you even glimpsed the news for the last four years or so? How is what you are describing any different from a status quo that we all recognise is defective? Add to this, my alternative, unlike yours, does NOT depend upon any change in human nature, of businessmen, or of carpenters, cabdrivers, jewelers, deli-counter clerks, librarians or anyone else for that matter! Those charged with keepiing the law in the community, whatever it is, would enjoy no sovereign immunity that plagues government-subject(including business) relations today, and would be just as liable for damages as any other miscreant–as part and parcel of their “membership” in the ‘polis’.
There are additional safeguards built into a non governmental private-law society and economy; (who will risk his property, and maybe his life, and those of his customers, trading with the bloody mess that results from “businessmen” misbehavinng in the chaotic and destructive manner that you described, for example?
Once again, treat yourself to the writings of the theorists of the new type of society. The failures of every possible type of government over the past 6000 years or so around the world is attracting the attention of some very bright people exploring possible alternatives.
Enjoy!!
In addition to robo-women DKM wants ROBOCOPS!!!!
It sounds like a very large amount of police misconduct comes about because of
1) enforcement of ‘victimless crime” statutes that the subjects don’t respect, don’t agree to live under, and often privately–and bitterly–resent.
2) the exemption of law enforcement, ‘public’ prosecutors, and courts (especially judges and bailiffs) from law and even substantive safeguards that State subjects (persons like you and me) are subject to as a matter of course.
For example, I would be anwerable to the law, as understood and enforced, if, claiming that there was some “pot” growing in the basement, I then gathered a mob of fellow State subjects, armed ourselves, smashed down the door of a neighbor’s house, riddled the wall with bullets, terrorized the family living within.and perhaps smashed some closets and furniture in my “search” for pot. Police “authorities” do this all the time, under cover of “search warrants” or not, and as long as one can’t legally prove personal malice–(exceedingly difficult to do under the best of circumstances) on the part of law enforcement t, they have a free hand to do anything that they want to!
No police (or arbitration services, investigation agencies, or bailiffs could get away with this when people could agree which laws they would be governed by, and where enforcement was as completely governed by law applicable to both “subjects and masters” equally.
We mayindeed need something like”wifebots” and “cybercuties”, if women continue to turn rotten and become more feminist during the next century or two, and men can’t get what we want, except from something better!
All that is needed, on the other hand, in a laissez-faire ‘private law’ society, is to subject law enforcement and its associated services to the same constraints and limitations as everyone else, and obtain unanimity–or near unanimity–on the laws we all agree to be governed by.
I actually agree with DKM.
His language is bizarre and his proposed solution asinine, but the part about victimless/consensual crimes being difficult to enforce fairly, appealing to people who don’t intend to attempt fairness, and injurious to citizens’ faith in, trust of, and willingness to cooperate with the police is … well, self-evident, but for him, that’s an improvement.
Has Meller admitted that Benjamin Tucker was a dreaded Socialist yet, or is he still peddling revisionist anarchocap history?
Meller: Even if your criticisms of “anarchocapitalism” are correct in your post above, we would all be no worse off than we are now, with “businessmen” (most of whom are more like privileged bureaucrats gaming the system on a large scale for private profit) allied with governments (supposedly protecting us), than we are right now.
Um… yes we would.
Ever heard of Radithor?
How about Tetraethel lead?
Is there anyone in your city using hydrogen cyanide as a fumigant?
Is there thallium in your rat poison?
Because those are all things that had to be banned by government; because they were killing people and they were “safe” according to the people making/using them. They were also legal.
There are additional safeguards built into a non governmental private-law society and economy; (who will risk his property, and maybe his life, and those of his customers, trading with the bloody mess that results from “businessmen” misbehavinng in the chaotic and destructive manner that you described, for example?
Citations needed, though I wonder who is it that creates/enforces these, “additional safeguards”, since there is no gov’t.
Once again, I have read the writings of your theorists. I’ve even spent time talking to them directly, and listening to them argue.
I must confess, you do make them look something closer to rational.
Let’s take a look at your ideas:
2) the exemption of law enforcement, ‘public’ prosecutors, and courts (especially judges and bailiffs) from law and even substantive safeguards that State subjects (persons like you and me) are subject to as a matter of course.
Who is going to do this? Who can hold a private police force to account?
That would require a law which was above them. That would require a gov’t with some form of final authority over everyone.
Ergo you can’t be an anarchist, and have this.
No police (or arbitration services, investigation agencies, or bailiffs could get away with this when people could agree which laws they would be governed by, and where enforcement was as completely governed by law applicable to both “subjects and masters” equally.
Who shall enforce this evenhanded enforcement of laws? Who shall write these laws that everyone subscribes to? What if I have not agreed to the law in question? Who can make me obey?
That would require a law which was above them. That would require a gov’t with some form of final authority over everyone.
Ergo you can’t be an anarchist, and have this.
All that is needed, on the other hand, in a laissez-faire ‘private law’ society, is to subject law enforcement and its associated services to the same constraints and limitations as everyone else, and obtain unanimity–or near unanimity–on the laws we all agree to be governed by.
Who does that? What gives them the authority? What if you can’t get that level of unanimity?
Anarchy, and the force of fist, and the Hobbesian state of “all against all, where the life of man is nasty brutish and short”.
Ergo, you can’t have what you say you want, and still be any sort of anarchist.
Same problems occur all the time with government on all levels. It is nice when government holds business profiteers accountable for the pollution that they cause, but what if it doesnt?
Your objections become far more relevant when government works WITH malefactors, or even worse, becomes a source of aggression, pollution, or other value destruction ITSELF!
Check your premises. Government doesn’t–and can’t–serve the ‘public interest’ as selflessly as you would like, and business, as long as it IS engaged in the pursuit of profit, has a built in incentive (not always sufficient) to work for the well being of customers, suppliers, and creditors!
It is the badly flawed status quo, NOT private law “anarchism”, which, as I said previously, is characterised by Hobbesian brutality, where might (government)makes right, where people, especially businesss, close to the government do all of the malfeasance you state, and where people at llarge are, well, screwed! You are confusing the cure with the disease!
Meller: This is is why I say you aren’t aware: business, as long as it IS engaged in the pursuit of profit, has a built in incentive (not always sufficient) to work for the well being of customers, suppliers, and creditors!
Go back and look at the issues I cited.
Look at the business reactions to the problems those materials caused.
Hell, look at Prohibition, and the ways in which the bootleggers sold hooch they knew was straight up toxic.
You are arguing for the fox to guard the henhouse, and saying those who oppose it fail to se that the fox has an interest in not killing all the chickens.
Amber Pawlik here. I may have said a lot of stupid things in my life, but this was not one of them.
A correction. Amber Pawlik Domoradzki IS a mother and she denies describing breast-feeding as quoted above.