/liberty/ - Liberty

>>64285

That's a lot of questions to answer at once, but the topic is interesting. Here are some thoughts of mine on it:

The economic system is largely a function of ideology. Property rights and their inviolability, methods of conflict resolution, the acceptability of interest and usury and so on are ideologically determined and in turn determine the kind of economic system a society ends up with.

Economics isn't everything when it comes to degeneracy. An anarchocapitalist society that's degenerate as hell is absolutely conceivable. Unlikely, but conceivable and even possible. A degenerate society, however, is unlikely to become anarchocapitalist in the first place. If that weren't so, the very first invention of mankind would've been anarchocapitalism, but the rawness of our grand ancestors prevented this.

What you say on the conservativism of the Russians is true. The Russians, ironically, are not a good example of the communist mindset, however. They're individualists and predisposed towards anarchy, unlike the Chinese, who have been obedient for hundreds of years at the very least. That just goes to show that the history of mankind is complex, with seeming paradoxes more predominant than ideal types.

The USSR hated gay people because they're different and tend to build enclaves, which is the last thing you'll want in a totalitarian dictatorship. Such a state will annihilate what it cannot assimilate. In the US, the leftist movements simply chose the latter option instead. In this context, it's important to remember that real diversity is a conservative concept while leftists are staunch identitarians. Leftist-diversity is diversity without substance. It's diverse in the same sense as a canvas wall is colorful if the hundreds of colors on it mix into brown. The left espouses sexual diversity, but sex is not the consumption of marriage but rather a senseless pleasure like watching a movie. It espouses religious diversity, but degeades religion to a matter of opinion and subordinates religious commandments to an everchanging statutory law. It espouses multiculturalism, but forbids pride in your culture or even talking about culture. It gives the individual labels, but no true identity.

Degeneracy is just another label for those someone doesn't like.

>>64285

>doesn't capitalism inherently strive for laissez faire which ultimately leads to globalization

Laisezz faire doesn't make you want to associate culturally with groups you don't like. You are also free not to trade with them.

>why do you blame "Cultural Marxism"

The "Cultural Marxism" of today is a developed version of its classic methods of subversion. Nobody thinks of Marx when they use that term. Some of his key subversive elements are still there: divide people in groups even if they don't exist naturally, escalate tension, push the notion that individuality does not exist and the world is a only a battle of major collective wills, claim moral high ground by preaching about the "greater" good. Legally limiting speech to prevent ideas from spreading is a new addition. The USSR wouldn't be as conservative if they also chose to adapt "free love". No matter how much other leftists try to distance themselves from modern Progressives, they will always share the same roots. Nobody else buys it that "class struggle" and identity politics are somehow fundamentally different.

>>64293

>but you'd actually have to be somewhat ignorant to ignore Marcuse's writings on sexuality

You caught me, tbh. I don't actually know anything about that, but whenever they're mentioned there is never a concrete reference to what they said.

>Not necessarily, or rather not in the manner that's normative in today's climate. Put simply, you can easily trade with other nations and in the same light keep your tradition and your culture.

Not really what I meant, more in regards to the "undesirables" of society such as homosexuals or 3rd world immigrants becoming present. There are these two conflicting arguments for libertarianism/anarcho-capitalism: A) If you want to regulate your society you can vote with your wallet and make the undesirables/law breakers move. B) Since money is the deciding force in society, discrimination won't be profitable.

Globalization is maybe too long of a reach for this example, although depending on the center of trade if could be fitting, but if we consider a medium sized town that would supposedly have a predominantly conservative culture, are we to expect them to "vote with their wallet" to get rid of undesirables or to the contrary? For simplicity's sake, let's consider group X is particularly savvy in profession Y, but group X is undesirable by the particular society where the business owners employ them for whatever benefit they bring them. We can safely assume that they will live and intermingle in that society with no doubt since they bring a profit for the employer, which is has been the case historically. This in turn will cause societal friction. One such example being the Germans in Czechoslovakia.

>>64295

>You are also free not to trade with them.

They are hired by the local business owners, they live within proximity in society, you interact with them. Also refer to the above in regards to "voting with you wallet"

>>64293

>I don't, I just don't end up doing business with the Saudi and that's that. I can choose to not associate with muslims, and so can the rest of my community.

Even if say you aren't doing business even indirectly, like buying from a retailer of oil that the Saudi has shares in, the community still ends up interacting with the religion in one way or another if there is an effort to proselytize. It would be enough for him to buy a billboard to display it or leave leaflets or even go door to door. But forget all these particular examples, point is that it's not a static situation as if some invisible wall stands between two neighboring cultures which will eventually interact by the sheer fact that they are in proximity and more so if one has interest to influence the other.

>That's a strawman if I ever heard one. No one said the USSR had Cultural Marxism

I didn't say anyone ever claimed the USSR had "Cultural Marxism". Reread what I wrote.

>or more specifically the KGB which often promoted these lines of thought

So was it the Frankfurt School or was it the KGB or did they cooperate, despite the Frankfurt thinkers were repulsed by the USSR? This is really what I'm asking, why do you insist these developments in culture are necessarily subversion?

>most likely people would just keep the cultures that they had previously

I didn't mean culture as in funny regional hats or national holidays nor I implied it would turn around overnight. Rather the everyday life concerning matters like media consumption, activities, norms etc and how it would be after the eventual status quo is established.

>>64292

>So why wouldn't commodification of culture, low bar (uncreative, opportunistic, etc) appeals e.g. the recent emoji movie, and immediate satisfaction services such as pornography wouldn't be necessarily the eventual result of anarchocapitalism?

>Lust isn't something invented by Jews. The mere supply of it automatically creates a market. Especially when it is done privately. So even if the supposedly a "conservative" ancap society would ban it by simply not consuming it overtly or doing communal efforts to educate against it, there is always the prospect of online services. Same story with the case of widespread child abuse and pedophilia in the Catholic Church or Orthodox Jew circles or the amusement park yearly masturbation. If it's a society driven by profit and potential markets, I would rather ask how an ancap society cannot fall to these things?

The better question should be how a society that's not capitalist would prevent this kind of hedonism.

>Why weren't Russians a good example of the "communist mindset" if they fulfilled all there was to communism according to you?

>I don't see why you would think that, Russians were devout serfs to their emperor for centuries save for the schism, and even after that many serfs remained so.

Well, I've talked to Russians. None of them really cared about laws or was receptive to appeals to "the community" or "the state", completely unlike, say, Germans. Russians also have a peculiar pragmatism, like other Slavs: They don't care what their solutions look like as long as they have a solution. Plus they're almost never signalling and are highly skeptical of signalling from others. If you tell a Russian that politicians genuinely care about his wellbeing, he will at best politely smile and think that you're an idiot.

Serfdom was abolished under the Tzars, but that aside, serfdom was also never a collectivist practice. A serf still had individual rights. He wasn't a slave, he couldn't be evicted from his land and the tribute he owed his liege amounted to about two days of work in the field. The modern democratic state is hardly less demanding. Half of what you earn goes right back into its pockets and then you're still called a parasite on society.

>And I wouldn't hurry to say there weren't rebellions in China during the millenniums.

Sure there were, but what form did they take? One of the most infamous uprisings, the Taiping Rebellion, was started by the supposed "Son of God" who tried to install a protosocialist regime. Hardly an expression of staunch individualism. There's also the fact that not a single one of these revolts really changed the form of Chinese society. It was always ordered into castes or was egalitarian, it never had a strong tradition of individual rights, and servitude was always held as one of the highest virtues. That could've been different in much older times, but I'm sure not within the last thousand.

There were also some Mongols and other "barbarians" that were wilder and more unrestrained in China, but like I said, even they didn't change the collectivist nature of Chinese civilization.

>pic semi related

First time I hear of him, I must admit.

>Wasn't it because it represented bourgeoisie culture and subversion, the elimination of the effeminate aristocracy culture? Can you source what you said? I can't source mine, it's just general knowledge

I could source it, but that would just shift it from "I say" to "someone else says". The author I got this particular claim from, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, operates a lot on "general knowledge" and his interpretation of the world from the ten billion books he has read and the people he has met.

What you say also makes sense, but I don't think it conflicts with my interpretation. Both can be true, and I think both are true. Homosexuality didn't exactly have a strong tradition in Russian society, so of course it would be interpreted as bourgeois subversion at a time when the Russian government was going fully totalitarian. All true diversity is a spanner in the works when you try to reengineer society, and it's more convenient to take these spanners out when you can claim that they're saboteurs or conspirators.

>So the USSR wasn't leftist?

Sure it was. Identitarianism can take different forms. Whether you ban all religions, push them into insignificance or unite them into one single collectivist religion, in every case you substitute identity for diversity. Same with sexuality. You can kill all homosexuals or turn everyone bisexual. Likewise, you can kill all transsexuals or reduce gender to a label, or a "social construct". What all these actions have in common is precisely that they're identitarian.

>>64303

>with greater market freedom and less regulations*

and to expand a bit on that question, wouldn't this create a sort of slavery/human-trafficking culture?

Seriously, how would you go about to prevent this kind activity?

>>64303

>Maybe it's shown out of context, but what about the Rothbard quote concerning a kids market? Wouldn't that incentivize the poor to breed like crazy to sell their children to wealthy personnel and enable widespread child abuse? Since this sort of thing is already happening covertly I see no reason for it not to intensify with greater. I honestly see no benefit in this proposal of his.

Yeah, on this topic, Rothbard is weird. However, his intention is good: If you allow parents to sell their children, parents that don't care about their children will give them away to parents that do.

I find it more problematic that he didn't acknowledge a duty of parents to care for their children. If he did, then that would mitigate the problem of parents having children just to sell them. That problem is already mitigated by the law of supply and demand, but it would be better if parents that don't want children still have to care if they can't find an adoptive parent. He easily could've deduced a parental duty, too. He either could've gone with the principle that if you create a danger to someone, you're responsible for keeping that danger in check, and expand that duty somewhat. Or, he could've argued by the nature of things, which was an approach that he had already tried out in The Ethics of Liberty. If we deviate from Rothbard at this one point, most of the dangers of his proposal end.

>I don't know, but that's not really relevant. If you had some implication in this answer to my question then please clarify, otherwise answer how a society driven by profit and potential markets isn't going to spiral to the aforementioned things?

It can take this turn, but that's not unique to it. The market won't create demand out of thin air. Pornography is a commodity that's trivially easy to produce nowadays. With regards to it, the market can be seen as "free" pretty much everywhere. And yet, cultural views still have an influence. Some people simply don't want to watch porn every day and the availability of the stuff doesn't change it. People that are prudent won't become porn maniacs just because they could fulfill the desire for it if they had it, and people that are promiscuous will sleep around whether the economy is planned, interventionist, capitalist, mercantilist or whatever else you have.

>Serfdom was abolished after about 700 years, you can hardly say it was "the Tzars" who abolished it, it was very much so the decree out of pressure by one of the last monarchs.

Well, 1861, that's still over fifty years before the Tzars went down. And yes, that was late. No question about that. The Bourbons abolished it much earlier.

>I have never heard of this flowery description of Russian serfdom, you might be mixing it with Western peasants.

Well, Russia was kind of shitty. The Tzars are not exactly my favorite monarchs. Ivan the Terrible was a maniac, Peter the Great was an even bigger maniac, everyone was Dimitri and that led to a gruesome war of succession… Russia also had several terrible famines even before the USSR entered the picture. Like I said, not my favorite country. Still, Russia eventually got its shit together later under the Tzars. From another post I made:

>Except there was. From page 486 of Leftism, by Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn:

>Cf. N. S. Timasheff, "On the Russian Revolution," The Review of Politics, Vol. 4, No.3, July 1942, also citing Sir Bernard Pares, The Fall of the Russian Monarchy, London, 1939. Writes Timasheff, "The Russian peasants had received at the time of the liberation of the serfs more than half of the arable soil of Russia, namely 148 million hectares (versus 89 million which remained the property of the landlords and 8 million which were the property of the State). Half a century later, on the eve of World War I, the situation was quite different. Only 44 million hectares were still the property of the landlords, the rest, as well as about 6 million hectares of State land had been bought by the peasants." (p. 295) It should be mentioned here that one hectare equals about 2.5 acres. The agrarian situation of Russia before the Revolution can also be gleaned from the article on "Russia, the Agrarian Question," in Encyclopaedia Britannica, 13th edition, vol. 31, pp. 402403. If we compare the agrarian situation of Russia with that of Britain we see that in the 1870s 5207 proprietors of more than 1000 acres owned over 18 million acres or 55 percent of the surface of Britain. Cf. Brockhaus Lexikon, 14th edition, 1898, Vol. 8, p. 49

>>64303

Also, I downloaded your pdf. Thanks for posting it!

>>64299

>Not really what I meant, more in regards to the "undesirables" of society such as homosexuals or 3rd world immigrants becoming present.

>A) If you want to regulate your society you can vote with your wallet and make the undesirables/law breakers move.

Correct.

> B) Since money is the deciding force in society, discrimination won't be profitable.

Discrimination in terms of selling a product isn't necessarily profitable, however in terms of employment it does tend to have it's benefits. If one can't find work in an area due to a hatred of his creed or his religion then he will simply move away.

Discrimination isn't necessarily profitable in the most basic financial sense, but it is profitable in terms of keeping unwanted people out of your community, which a good portion of people value far more than money. For example: If I'm a firearms dealer and I really just don't like communists or anyone who supports ISIS, and someone who fits either of those descriptions walks in then I will choose not to sell something to him because I value the idea of not giving commies or terrorists guns and as such, I just won't sell them to him.

> For simplicity's sake, let's consider group X is particularly savvy in profession Y, but group X is undesirable by the particular society where the business owners employ them for whatever benefit they bring them.

Understandable comparison but businesses would still face the consequences of their actions. My business can poke fun at the fact that yours employs undesirables, whereas my business is made 100% by members of our society (or else people that our society would approve of), and as such competition marches on.

Mind you the society could also find others who are more culturally compatible in profession Y other than group X if worst comes to worst and the society cannot provide the same service at the same level of quality. You do have a point with this argument, but if most individuals in a society don't want a group to come into that society then more often than not they will do as much as they can to keep them out of that society, of course sometimes unfortunately resorting to violence if all else fails, but generally the weapon against this is simply disassociation.

>point is that it's not a static situation as if some invisible wall stands between two neighboring cultures which will eventually interact by the sheer fact that they are in proximity and more so if one has interest to influence the other.

That's somewhat correct but you have to keep in mind, most people do not have an interest in moving to nations with completely different cultures, practices and with completely different languages. It was only recently that such immigrants were enticed by the state through institutions such as the welfare state. The Saudi fellow can go right on ahead and try to promote his religion, but he would probably not find much success, much like the Christians who tried to promote their religion in Japan once it was discovered by the Europeans.

>I didn't say anyone ever claimed the USSR had "Cultural Marxism". Reread what I wrote.

My apologies.

Also FUCK 8ch with it's god damned word limits. Continued in next post.

>>64303

> Wouldn't that incentivize the poor to breed like crazy to sell their children

I doubt that child sales would be more lucrative than other endeavors. Considering the amount of time and pain that comes with childbirth, the fact that you can only produce about 1.3 children per year, competition in the market driving the prices down (since just about anybody could do it), and the medical expenses involved in carrying and birthing a child, it strikes me as unlikely that such a scheme would prove more profitable than much easier endeavors. Not that the children will be a dime a dozen, but probably not worth having kids for the express purpose of selling them. More of a cost-recuperating maneuver than anything else.

>and enable widespread child abuse?

Where does this come from? Why would somebody abuse a child they're trying to sell for good money, or that they paid good money for? Surely physically or psychologically damaged children would fetch less on the market than comparatively healthy ones.

>I don't know, but that's not really relevant.

It's absolutely relevant. You're pointing to problems in the world around you today, and speculating (with very little good reason) that these are a potential problem for a different form of social organization. If you cannot establish some rational reason for believing that this problem is uniquely bad in a market anarchist society (which would require establishing how alternative societies have measures to prevent these problems that a market anarchist society lacks) then there is no good reason to entertain the concern.

>>64317

>Where does this come from?

the buyer not the seller

>If you cannot establish some rational reason for believing that this problem is uniquely bad in a market anarchist society

But I don't think it is uniquely bad in a (completely free) market society, it clearly exists in nowadays. I suppose you could point to some totalitarian regimes where things like that were prohibited and curtailed to a minimum. I've already established a rational reason which is the appeal to our lowest drives, at least when concerning pornography or sex appeal in marketing for example. And if indeed there wouldn't be any regulation why should we expect that sort of market not to flourish. It's one of those cases where supply creates demand a la fidget spinners.

>>64285

I think this thought process might help you, OP: Think of degeneracy as an equation. Degeneracy is fueled by economic prosperity (can't slut it up when you're struggling to eat and can't buy condoms/afford an abortion) and socialized costs with concentrated benefits (welfare, everyone else being in a stable relationship, etc.). It is curbed by cultural norms and societal pushback. Cultural norms are a separate entity from economics, but are heavily tied to technology which is fueled by economics. The end result when simplified is something like: Degeneracy=(E*S*T)/(C*F) Where…

<E=Economic prosperity

<S=Safety Nets

<T=Technology

<C=Culture

<F=Functional (Usually Cultural) Necessities

Typically F is cancelled out by T, though examples exist such as single parenthood where T can't eliminate the negative effects enforced by F. E and C tend to equal out towards a 1:1 ratio, though it's not perfect. S tends towards (but not actually) 0, and is the main culprit behind degenerates. The less state intervention to help subsidize their harmful lifestyle choices, the less degenerates in society (you can never 100% remove degeneracy as it's human nature to some extent, but you can minimize it via incentives, especially socioeconomic ones like marriage, and you can track it via social norms such as views about virginity for women since pre-marriage virginity is both a cultural and economic incentive towards a better life.

You can fuck with the model to see the effects on various societies so long as you keep in mind T and F. For instance Africa has a low F value and a low C value in many places, so even though E is low, the effects of S and T ramp up the degeneracy.

>>64338

That doesn't make any sense, how do you quantify any of those things and what are the functions supposed to be, E times S times T? Did you come up with that "equation" yourself?

>You can fuck with the model to see the effects on various societies so long as you keep in mind T and F. For instance Africa has a low F value and a low C value in many places, so even though E is low, the effects of S and T ramp up the degeneracy.

That doesn't make any sense either, since when is Africa known for having a safety net if they don't have the economic means to begin with? What exactly is "low Culture value"? And how would you explain the USSR that didn't have "degeneracy" despite having probably the biggest safety net in history.

>>64292

>So why wouldn't commodification of culture, low bar (uncreative, opportunistic, etc) appeals e.g. the recent emoji movie, and immediate satisfaction services such as pornography wouldn't be necessarily the eventual result of anarchocapitalism?

You understand that the aforementioned are the result of corporatism and overregulation that drive people towards hedonism, right? The Emoji movie was created because Hollywood is a centralized oligopoly as a result of lobbying for laws like copyright. Of course it's going to produce low bar cash cow franchise zombies. Now compare Hollywood movies to short films made on the internet, and you will find that even though short films don't have high budgets, they still manage to be high bar, creative, patrician, and intelligent.

If you tried to sell low bar crap in a free market, no one would buy from you, because you'd be competing against firms selling high bar works, since there's a high demand for quality content.

As for porn and acts of hedonism, the people who engage in those kinds of activities do so because they're not well off financially or socially because overregulation greatly lessens their chances as well as their friends' and family's of getting hired or finding a fulfilling job, they use hedonism as a means of catharsis, to compensate for a lack of happiness, and fill an empty void within them.

Once again, if people were better off financially and socially, barely anyone would turn to hedonism.

>>64337

>I've already established a rational reason which is the appeal to our lowest drives

You've offered a conjecture, which is different.

>>64340

Your autism is showing.

You don't need to quantify those things objectively because I didn't give you an objective equation. I gave you a subjective equation to see the thought processes behind how a libertarian might view this cultural degeneracy instead of just saying "people aren't degenerates when they're responsible for themselves and the alternatives create unstable variables like high suicide/mental illness rates." Economics are objective, but prices are subjective institutions. Ethical systems are objective, but morals are subjective. Psychology is objective, but culture is a subjective phenomena formed by underlying truths ("dancing in spring is bad" because our ancestors danced so much that it caused a landslide due to the vibrations) after the winter frost melted). You can't objectively quantify a value like degeneracy when its definition changes based on events and end results that can change over time based on emerging technologies or changes in brain chemistry over generations. That's what I'm getting across.

That being said, we can quantify subjective values to an extent. That's what the equation does. Communism might have had a high S value, but it had a high C value and low E value to counteract it. Africa is a socialist shit hole where some constitutions claim "water is a right."

Cultural and moral degeneracy is a function of the state, not the market. Were it the function of the market, our society would have been absurdly degenerate in the past, when the market was less controlled by the state.

Anarchy will lead to cultural normalisation. To quote Hoppe,

>A society in which the right to exclusion is fully restored to owners of private property would be profoundly unegalitarian, intolerant and discriminatory. There would be little or no ‘tolerance’ and ‘openmindedness’ so dear to left-libertarians. Instead, one would be on the right path toward restoring the freedom of association and exclusion implied in the institution of private property, if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. There would be signs regarding entrance requirements to the town … (for example, no beggars, bums, or homeless, but also no homosexuals,33 drug users, Jews, Moslems, Germans or Zulus).34 and those who did not meet those entrance requirements would be kicked out as tresspassers. Almost instantly, cultural and moral normalcy would reassert itself.

>>64486

>if only towns and villages could and would do what they did as a matter of course until well into the nineteenth century in Europe and the United States. There would be signs regarding entrance requirements to the town … (for example, no beggars, bums, or homeless, but also no homosexuals,33 drug users, Jews, Moslems, Germans or Zulus).34 and those who did not meet those entrance requirements would be kicked out as tresspassers. Almost instantly, cultural and moral normalcy would reassert itself.

But that's not compatible with the current global economy. Seriously, why do libertarians try to play two tunes on the same cord at once? So this economic arrangement will both solve discrimination by putting profit before groups as some claim, but now you also claim that it allow groups to remain away from undesirables. Since when are these lofty ideas given precedence over economic reality, give me one such example from history. And wasn't it the state that prevented blacks from being employed in the South of the USA or in South Africa while property and business owners were more than ready to hire them?

>>64285

<posting this goddamned wall of text

<expecting anyone to bother to waste time reading this drivel

tl;dr

>>64308

<this fat bitch needs to lose some fucking el bees, son

>How do you prevent a Saudi oil magnate from buying a piece of land in the center of town plus its streets to build a mosque and spread his religion?

I don't.

>>64491

You don't have to go live in China or Brazil to do business with the people there. You don't even have to visit those places these days.