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Board Speculation
Re: Wall Observer BTC/USD - Bitcoin price movement tracking & discussion
by
billyjoeallen
on 13/03/2014, 20:17:05 UTC


I simply want to live in a society where all interactions are voluntary and property rights are respected. If that sounds too distopian to you, find comfort in the fact that I am philosophically am opposed to forcing anyone to create such a society, to live there or to stay there. Can you the the same of your society?


Those are very nice and lofty principles in theory, and they are NOT even bad things to which to aspire.  NONETHELESS, we are likely NOT going to be able to achieve complete voluntaryism, especially your concept of the term, and there are social and public benefit and social and public property that are from time to time going to impinge upon the boundaries and property rights of others that are NOT likely resolvable voluntarily.   But, in theory I would like a world that also aspires to those kinds of broad principles, to the extent feasible.. so maybe we kind of agree to the broad principles, but NOT to the absolutism of such broad principles to the detriment of society as a whole.


The debate might end here, then. There are several strong utilitarian arguments to be made in favor of distributed governance, but I'm probably not the right person to make them. I'm a Natural Rights kind of guy and I don't think coercion is justified even if it produced a net benefit for society, which I strongly believe it doesn't.

Our community just donated over $25,000 worth of bitcoin to a victim of irresponsible media. Is that not evidence of our charitable disposition?


You cannot run a society like that.... this situation got a lot of attention, but there are so many situations of public need that do NOT get attention, and the problem of free riding or free loading is a well known principle in economics and human psychology that people are NOT going to just freely invest in certain public goods, and they are just going to wait for the other guy... b/c they know that they can get it for free.. there are so many examples of this and even examples of natural monopolies that it is very inefficient to build redundant systems.. and those kinds of systems are public goods.     I think a lot of you anti-government folks do NOT account for these various factors, and somehow expect that everything important is going to be covered by some kind of hands-off voluntary/free/individualistic system.

I don't want to run a society. I want it to run without anyone running it. Kind of like Bitcoin. Free riders are not the primary issue to the truly altruistic. The main issue is "are the needs of the helpless being met?"