I HATE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY I HATE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The dilemma is how you define harming others and what implies being intolerant to an idea rather than a person holding that idea.

The temptation and crucial flaw of a totalitarian mind are that everyone must play a part in a superstructural battle between good and evil. Standing on the sidelines or taking a neutral position on present topics is not allowed; one may not merely observe or ignore the madness played out among the power hungry.

Everyone needs a take; everyone needs to “be informed” on the grand, irrelevant events of our broken times. Everyone needs a flag in their profile picture—a not-so-grand gesture indicating that they support the “latest thing.”

We need thousands of companies to be forced to do zero waste perfectly.

Forced by who? By an oligarchy of politicians that are being influenced by those companies, and viceversa?

The problem is that they fall in a false dilemma.

Evaluating the world and the people around you with labels so generic as "left wing" or "right wing" is not useful at all. Another problem is being too politicized, as I think it can damage your relationships with others.

Can we afford for everybody to try to live at the expense of everybody?

Economists of the classical school were right to define a monopoly as a government-grant privilege, for gaining legal rights to be a preferred producer is the only way to maintain a monopoly in a market setting. Predatory pricing cannot be sustained over the long haul, and not even the attempt should be regretted since it is a great benefit to consumers. Attempted cartel-type behavior typically collapses, and where it does not, it serves a market function. The term "monopoly price" has no effective meaning in real market settings, which are not snapshots in time but processes of change. A market society needs no antitrust policy at all; indeed, the state is the very source of the remaining monopolies we see in education, law, courts, and other areas.

Amazon is just another big company that benefits from corporatocracy.

Under TRUE capitalism the market is free but regulated as needed.

The market can't be free if it's regulated. Any intromission of the State in any voluntary exchange is stepping in the natural rights of its citizens.

We don’t live in real capitalism, there is no regulation, the oligarchy has captured the agencies that were supposed to regulate the market.

The agencies are the oligarchy. The politicians and lobbyists benefit each other by the existence of regulations, taxation, subsidies, FIAT money, intellectual property, public licenses, monopolical privileges, etc.

Yes, we don't live in "real capitalism" (that is, in a free-market setting), we live in a corporatocracy.

Moral outrage against corrupt leaders is not an isolated historical phenomenon but a common precursor of change. It happens again and again whenever one era gives way to another. . . . This widespread revulsion comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. As we write, there is as yet little evidence of an articulate rejection of politics. That will come later. It has not yet occurred to most of your contemporaries that a life without politics is possible.

Believing that banning a piece of fabric will stop police oppression is, ironically, encouraging such oppression by coercively violating the right to private property and freedom of expression.

Democracies get sick and then die from within.

Representative democracy has allowed for peaceful transitions from one ruling elite to another, but the use of institutional coercion is still there. The government is not the problem, it is the mere existance of the Monopoly of Violence, that is, the State.

"Probably no other belief is now so much a threat to liberty in the United States and in much of the rest of the world as the one that democracy, by itself alone, guarantees liberty."

Obviously, this mechanism of peaceful change is an important distinction, but does not absolve democracy of its shortfalls.

Instead of focusing in on how the various Republican candidates for speaker, both individually and collectively, embody how today’s Republican Party is an existential threat to the country’s multiracial pluralistic democracy

As mentioned before, the State itself is a threat. The model of the parliamentary dictatorship, that is, an oligarchy of politicians and public employees, does not serve our interests: it serves elites and violates rights to self-ownership, and efforts to limit governmental powers tend to fail.

The idea of a "social contract" is flawed in the sense that it is not a contract at all, as it is unilateral in nature.

Voting and taxation do not necessarily imply explicit consent with how government (the monopoly on violence) works.

The free market is not, as the social Darwinists imagine, a struggle between rich and poor, strong and weak. It is the principal means by which human beings cooperate in order to live. If each of us had to produce all his food and shelter by himself, almost no one could survive. The existence of large-scale society depends absolutely on social cooperation through the division of labor.

It would appear that democracy benefits the rulers, as democracy alone has provided the most consistent means for those formerly in power to sleep and die in peace. And the same holds for the courtiers, nomenklatura, and apparatchiks. These sycophants need no longer dread midnight's knife and muffled cries, and the subsequent crowning of a new king. The elite and bureaucracy can retire to their farms and while away their passing years without fear — their riches and posterity intact. As I see it now, democracy is not to the advantage of the demos, it is to the advantage of the power elite. Something to think about.

Part of a larger quote, but I agree with it.

I don't like representative democracy.

Better it goes into government so at least people can vote to change it.

We can't change it. Politicians would still have their monopolical powers because they help each other. Don't trust the government. Billionaires not only influence it, they also receive help from them.

If the person renting a home stops paying, the landlord will use force to evict the person.

In this case, the force applied by the landlord is legimitate because the tenant is not performing their contractual obligations over the property of the landlord.

You didn’t pay taxes? Here, lemme force you to stay in prison for a while, also here’s a fine on top of that.

There is no contract between the government and citizen that legitimize the violence of the state. Any theory of a "social contract" will be unilateral by nature. Actually, the state itself is a threat to the Non-Agression Principle.

Not all contracts are voluntary and, more importantly, the workers are almost always the weaker party when it comes to negotiation.

The asymmetries of power between both parties does not mean the contract is not voluntary. In fact, any government intervention in the labor market will make this situation worse, as these encourage poverty and harm those workers who are the less productive in the market.

If you leave it to the market to “self-regulate”, you’ll just get feudalism 2.0, where companies become the new noble houses

As long as private property is not violated by institutional coercion; as long as the system of prices is not manipulated by any government policy; as long as human action and his natural rights are respected: social cooperation through the division of labor will flourish, as voluntary exchange is the source of economic progress.

Indeed, civilization itself is inconceivable in the absence of private property. Any encroachment on property results in loss of freedom and prosperity, as property is the only way to resolve conflicts by the existence of scarce resources.

The market is a process, not an "equilibrium model". It is not designed, but emerged from human action.

Really, any sufficiently big company will act just like a govt, full of unnecessary bureaucracy

The difference is that having market concentration does not mean being a monopoly. In fact, a monopoly is a government-grant privilege, for gaining legal rights to be a preferred producer is the only way to maintain a monopoly in a market setting.

The state can not have direct consumer feedback; it can not act economically. Instead, it collects taxes and spends them arbitrarily following interest groups.

"In a market economy, the range of quality, quantity, and type of goods and services correspond to social needs. These goods are services that are valued by consumers, and hence, they will be provided if it is economically feasible to do so relative to other social priorities."

No amount of prolix explanation excuses even the act of stereotyping.

It depends on why and how you use stereotypes.

Prejudice only properly refers to judgments formed without consideration of the available information.

Prejudging is legitimate when we do not have all the relevant facts of an object or subject, having to resort to inductive reasoning in order to try to induce and predict its individual characteristics.

It's all about trying to make new information about someone or something, so we can economize information.

Consequently, the greater the sphere of public as opposed to private education, the greater the scope and intensity of conflict in social life. For if one agency is going to make the decision: sex education or no, traditional or progressive, integrated or segregated, etc., then it becomes particularly important to gain control of the government and to prevent one’s adversaries from taking power themselves. Hence, in education as well as in all other activities, the more that government decisions replace private decision-making, the more various groups will be at each others’ throats in a desperate race to see to it that the one and only decision in each vital area goes its own way.