Gyroscopic Investing

You never know when we'll end up like Britain, when they come for you in the middle of the night for posting offensive things online.  Not threatening..."offensive."  If we arrested everyone who posted an offensive or racist comment online we'd starve from a lack of space to plant crops due to all the jails in this nation.

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/britain-p ... 58582.html

Forget the Muslims, round up the thought police.

This is one of many aspects of British society that mystifies me. Could any of the UK citizens who post here educate us?

The same thing is actually happening closer to home in Canada. See the case of the columnist Mark Steyn who had to appear before official government thought police due to a column about Islam, or the pastor who sent a letter to a newspaper criticizing homosexuality, or the comedian who had to pay a fine for insulting lesbians.

Coming to a country nearby?

The USA is one of the few nations where there is almost unfettered free speech.  Short of making credible threats, anyone can say practically anything here without worrying about being arrested.  (You might be fired, ostracized, laughed at, sued, or suffer some other retribution, or even celebrated, but not arrested.)

Most countries crack down on what they perceive to be negative speech they believe will sow discord or disharmony, and the trigger for the crackdown can seem quite trivial to Americans.  Even idle gossip about government officials in some places can lead to a stay in jail.  On the one hand, we are mystified that someone can be arrested for disparaging a religious group.  On the other hand, people all over the world are amazed at the kind of speech Americans can get away with at home (and some of them them have used it as an excuse for inciting terrorism), and are horrified at the kind of speech some Americans will engage in when visiting abroad.

I enjoy and appreciate being able to speak honestly and openly about our leaders and the state of our society.

The idea of not being able to do this in a free society sounds absurd to me.

MediumTex wrote: I enjoy and appreciate being able to speak honestly and openly about our leaders and the state of our society.

The idea of not being able to do this in a free society sounds absurd to me.

Who said anything about a free society? 

Libertarian666 wrote:

MediumTex wrote: I enjoy and appreciate being able to speak honestly and openly about our leaders and the state of our society.

The idea of not being able to do this in a free society sounds absurd to me.

Who said anything about a free society? 

Well, what I'm saying is that the expectation of having the right to free speech tends to arise in situations where people perceive themselves to be living in a free society.

Are you suggesting that the U.S. is not a free society?  If so, when was the last time an armed government agent detained you, questioned you or otherwise harassed you in any way?  I don't fly very often and tend to drive pretty carefully, so I almost never cross paths with armed governments agents of any kind (other than sometimes eating in the same restaurants with them or seeing them give presentations in my community).

As I have said before, for someone in the U.S. who pays his taxes and drives the speed limit, he could literally go his whole life with only a vague awareness that there was any government at all.  You would, of course, never suspect this from watching cable news, but it's true.

MediumTex wrote:

Libertarian666 wrote:

MediumTex wrote: I enjoy and appreciate being able to speak honestly and openly about our leaders and the state of our society.

The idea of not being able to do this in a free society sounds absurd to me.

Who said anything about a free society? 

Well, what I'm saying is that the expectation of having the right to free speech tends to arise in situations where people perceive themselves to be living in a free society.

Are you suggesting that the U.S. is not a free society?  If so, when was the last time an armed government agent detained you, questioned you or otherwise harassed you in any way?  I don't fly very often and tend to drive pretty carefully, so I almost never cross paths with armed governments agents of any kind (other than sometimes eating in the same restaurants with them or seeing them give presentations in my community).

As I have said before, for someone in the U.S. who pays his taxes and drives the speed limit, he could literally go his whole life with only a vague awareness that there was any government at all.  You would, of course, never suspect this from watching cable news, but it's true.

The US is not a free society. In a free society, no one would ever have involuntary contact with the government unless there was a warrant issued by an independent judiciary based on credible evidence that they were responsible to a specific harm caused to another person. That is far from the case in the US, and if you don't realize that, then you haven't been paying attention.

Libertarian666 wrote:

MediumTex wrote:

Libertarian666 wrote: Who said anything about a free society? 

Well, what I'm saying is that the expectation of having the right to free speech tends to arise in situations where people perceive themselves to be living in a free society.

Are you suggesting that the U.S. is not a free society?  If so, when was the last time an armed government agent detained you, questioned you or otherwise harassed you in any way?  I don't fly very often and tend to drive pretty carefully, so I almost never cross paths with armed governments agents of any kind (other than sometimes eating in the same restaurants with them or seeing them give presentations in my community).

As I have said before, for someone in the U.S. who pays his taxes and drives the speed limit, he could literally go his whole life with only a vague awareness that there was any government at all.  You would, of course, never suspect this from watching cable news, but it's true.

The US is not a free society. In a free society, no one would ever have involuntary contact with the government unless there was a warrant issued by an independent judiciary based on credible evidence that they were responsible to a specific harm caused to another person. That is far from the case in the US, and if you don't realize that, then you haven't been paying attention.

Do you think that there has ever been a free society according to your definition of the term?

Do you think that it is possible to fashion for oneself in the U.S. today a reasonably free life experience?  This was what Harry Browne wrote about at length--i.e., not changing the world to make it freer, but arranging your affairs within the world as it is so that you as an individual can experience as much freedom as possible within the existing social and political structures.

MediumTex wrote:

Libertarian666 wrote:

MediumTex wrote: Well, what I'm saying is that the expectation of having the right to free speech tends to arise in situations where people perceive themselves to be living in a free society.

Are you suggesting that the U.S. is not a free society?  If so, when was the last time an armed government agent detained you, questioned you or otherwise harassed you in any way?  I don't fly very often and tend to drive pretty carefully, so I almost never cross paths with armed governments agents of any kind (other than sometimes eating in the same restaurants with them or seeing them give presentations in my community).

As I have said before, for someone in the U.S. who pays his taxes and drives the speed limit, he could literally go his whole life with only a vague awareness that there was any government at all.  You would, of course, never suspect this from watching cable news, but it's true.

The US is not a free society. In a free society, no one would ever have involuntary contact with the government unless there was a warrant issued by an independent judiciary based on credible evidence that they were responsible to a specific harm caused to another person. That is far from the case in the US, and if you don't realize that, then you haven't been paying attention.

Do you think that there has ever been a free society according to your definition of the term?

Do you think that it is possible to fashion for oneself in the U.S. today a reasonably free life experience?  This was what Harry Browne wrote about at length--i.e., not changing the world to make it freer, but arranging your affairs within the world as it is so that you as an individual can experience as much freedom as possible within the existing social and political structures.

Saga Iceland was a free society by my definition, although it had other problems.
More recently, there have been very good approximations of free societies. The American colonies before 1792 were a pretty good approximation, as was to a lesser extent the US before 1913 except during wars. Even today, there are countries where the average citizen does not have to worry about the government's behavior most of the time.

However, the US today does not qualify by any reasonable definition, even one much more lenient toward government than mine. Even ignoring the tentacles of the state that coil about us ever more tightly in the form of taxes and regulations, it is obviously impossible for a society to be free where one person can have anyone killed on his say-so without trial or review.

Libertarian666 wrote:

MediumTex wrote:

Libertarian666 wrote: Who said anything about a free society? 

Well, what I'm saying is that the expectation of having the right to free speech tends to arise in situations where people perceive themselves to be living in a free society.

Are you suggesting that the U.S. is not a free society?  If so, when was the last time an armed government agent detained you, questioned you or otherwise harassed you in any way?  I don't fly very often and tend to drive pretty carefully, so I almost never cross paths with armed governments agents of any kind (other than sometimes eating in the same restaurants with them or seeing them give presentations in my community).

As I have said before, for someone in the U.S. who pays his taxes and drives the speed limit, he could literally go his whole life with only a vague awareness that there was any government at all.  You would, of course, never suspect this from watching cable news, but it's true.

The US is not a free society. In a free society, no one would ever have involuntary contact with the government unless there was a warrant issued by an independent judiciary based on credible evidence that they were responsible to a specific harm caused to another person. That is far from the case in the US, and if you don't realize that, then you haven't been paying attention.

An independent judiciary?  Credible evidence?

These sound a lot like malleable terms to me.  Malleable enough to where maybe plenty of people might interpret any action taken upon them by this "independent judiciary" to be illegitimate and coercive.

And who decides whether this judiciary is truly independent?  And what constitutes credible evidence?  Another independent judiciary?

Government is coercion.  Full stop.  The question to be asked is, does the coercion we're being exposed to fall under an avoidable category (industry regulations, onerous taxes, city atmosphere), or the unavoidable category (being forced to fight a war, being forced into concentration camps and/or exterminated, being held against your will).

I'd agree that having an independent judiciary involved with government, especially the "unavoidable coercions," is ideal, but it's certainly not somehow automatically not coercive.  It's just more robust in helping us avoid gross, unavoidable coercion.

Would you care to name a "free society" we've had the privilege of being exposed to on Earth anywhere in history?

See my previous post about arbitrary killings of anyone at the behest of a single person.

Also, for extra credit, in which "free society" has the average person recently lost the ability to own a type of account that HB thought was essential to financial security, due to coercion by the government of that "free society"?

Libertarian666,

I'll have to look into that Iceland society.

However, to claim that the American colonies, or pre-1913 America, were anything close to free society's is a stretch.  Ask all the slaves that were traded as property, or the men that were forced to fight in war at gunpoint, or the people that had to pay taxes to the Brits 3,000 miles away.  Or the people forcibly relocated off of land they had been using for centuries.

Libertarian666 wrote: See my previous post about arbitrary killings of anyone at the behest of a single person.

Also, for extra credit, in which "free society" has the average person recently lost the ability to own a type of account that HB thought was essential to financial security, due to coercion by the government of that "free society"?

Since we all have to live, and a life made up of bitterness or even distaste at not living in a libertarian utopia doesn't sound like a good way to move through life, what is your suggested response to the current state of things in the U.S.?

What would you suggest someone do who preferred to live only in a free society as you define it?

I understand your critique.  I just don't know what to do with that knowledge.

Libertarian666 said:

The American colonies before 1792 were a pretty good approximation, as was to a lesser extent the US before 1913 except during wars. Even today, there are countries where the average citizen does not have to worry about the government's behavior most of the time.

In many of the "American colonies"--I'm assuming you mean British colonies in the Americas, or post-colonial nations, like the USA-- slavery was legal and ruthless, so they were not free.  In the USA, after the Civil War and before 1913, there was large-scale ethnic cleansing of Native Americans and freed slaves, among other atrocities, so there was no freedom.  And with Jim Crow laws, there was no freedom for many people in the southern USA (and not just African-Americans).  These were not completely repealed until the late 1960s.  And since the 1960s, there have been many successful lawsuits against police and other government entities over their mistreatment of a variety of people.  It's a current and ongoing problem.

Even today, while many people can go to work,  pay their taxes, stay sober, keep their emotions in check (AKA, stay out of trouble), and otherwise do all the right things, other people who do the right thing still suffer police profiling, harassment and attack.  In NYC, as a current example, there is a "stop and frisk" program by the NYPD, where people who are not believed to be committing or planning crimes, are stopped on the street and searched, usually in full view of people walking by.  It targets African-American and Hispanic men, supposedly to find illegal handguns and drugs.  In NYC, those men are not free.

MediumTex wrote:

Libertarian666 wrote: See my previous post about arbitrary killings of anyone at the behest of a single person.

Also, for extra credit, in which "free society" has the average person recently lost the ability to own a type of account that HB thought was essential to financial security, due to coercion by the government of that "free society"?

Since we all have to live, and a life made up of bitterness or even distaste at not living in a libertarian utopia doesn't sound like a good way to move through life, what is your suggested response to the current state of things in the U.S.?

What would you suggest someone do who preferred to live only in a free society as you define it?

I understand your critique.  I just don't know what to do with that knowledge.

If I had the money to buy citizenship in an EU country and live in Switzerland, I would do that, but I can't afford that. Unfortunately, not having a solution doesn't make the problem go away.

The U.S. is huge. The solution to living in a free society in modern America is to stay out of trouble and just be lucky. Avoiding government interference seems to be, at least in part, some kind of infernal lottery.

MediumTex wrote: Are you suggesting that the U.S. is not a free society?  If so, when was the last time an armed government agent detained you, questioned you or otherwise harassed you in any way?  I don't fly very often and tend to drive pretty carefully, so I almost never cross paths with armed governments agents of any kind (other than sometimes eating in the same restaurants with them or seeing them give presentations in my community).

As I have said before, for someone in the U.S. who pays his taxes and drives the speed limit, he could literally go his whole life with only a vague awareness that there was any government at all.  You would, of course, never suspect this from watching cable news, but it's true.

There's a lot of truth to this, but also the buried assumption that you will never do anything that challenges the powers that be. Unfortunately there are many ways to do so that don't involve hurting anyone or engaging in activities that anyone would consider dangerous or immoral.

... Like selling raw milk.
Or planting a garden in your front yard.
Or building your own house out of something other than dimensional lumber and OSB. Another one!

Sure, as long as you don't drink to excess, buy a house in a middle-class neighborhood, hire professionals to fix all the mechanical problems in your life, watch the standard TV shows, quietly work a 9-5 job for 40 years, save 5% and spend the rest on bills and socially-acceptable hobbies like bowling and eating at restaurants, then yeah, I bet you'll live a life remarkably free of government harassment or oppression.

Things get dicier if you want to step outside of the status quo, but remain firmly in the realm of "behaving peacefully and hurting nobody".

But yeah, I don't know what do do about it either.

PS,

I would remind you that those linked cases are probably intrusions of state and local governments, not federal .

Moda, as I'm pretty sure you're aware, the reason why we have the states is so they can be so-called "laboratories of democracy", competing with one another for citizens who are free to move among them. If we didn't have state and local governments, I think the restrictions I outlined would simply be put in place by the federal government, and then there would be nowhere to run save for leaving the entire country. At least with the states, some laws may be more permissive than average. When it's a federal issue, the stakes are higher when a single uniform law will apply to the entire country or not at all.

PS,

I agree with some of that, but then again, if government is in-and-of-itself an illegitimate entity, laboratories of it everywhere sound like testing grounds for "palatable coercion." 

You have to believe in democracy first to desire to see various laboratories testing ideas all over the place. At least I'd think one would.

And I just like to point this out because we often make accusations of the federal government trying to take away our rights and then use a handful of state/local law examples to state our case, even though under a originalist Constitution model we should accept the legitimacy of these smaller entities enacting their "lab test" (gun control, regulations, police brutality, etc). 

Plus you know I love any chance to point out how state and local governments are hardly the firewalls of tyranny most states-rightists hold them up to be.  Often, they're "laboratories of tyranny" that don't do much to prevent federal government tyranny against individuals.

Libertarian666 wrote:

MediumTex wrote:

Libertarian666 wrote: See my previous post about arbitrary killings of anyone at the behest of a single person.

Also, for extra credit, in which "free society" has the average person recently lost the ability to own a type of account that HB thought was essential to financial security, due to coercion by the government of that "free society"?

Since we all have to live, and a life made up of bitterness or even distaste at not living in a libertarian utopia doesn't sound like a good way to move through life, what is your suggested response to the current state of things in the U.S.?

What would you suggest someone do who preferred to live only in a free society as you define it?

I understand your critique.  I just don't know what to do with that knowledge.

If I had the money to buy citizenship in an EU country and live in Switzerland, I would do that, but I can't afford that. Unfortunately, not having a solution doesn't make the problem go away.

For some reason, people always seem to think that "somewhere else" is better than where they are now.

Switzerland is far more socialist than the U.S.  I don't know why someone today looking for more freedom would move from the U.S. to Switzerland.

The situation you live in will never be perfect.  There are, however, many opportunities in the U.S. to live a relatively free life.  There are also many places in the U.S. where you can live very cheaply, which is IMHO a large component of freedom.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Pointedstick wrote: Sure, as long as you don't drink to excess, buy a house in a middle-class neighborhood, hire professionals to fix all the mechanical problems in your life, watch the standard TV shows, quietly work a 9-5 job for 40 years, save 5% and spend the rest on bills and socially-acceptable hobbies like bowling and eating at restaurants, then yeah, I bet you'll live a life remarkably free of government harassment or oppression.

Things get dicier if you want to step outside of the status quo, but remain firmly in the realm of "behaving peacefully and hurting nobody".

But yeah, I don't know what do do about it either.

When it comes to political activism, I have met too many people who only seem to want to take their turn at the wheel of driving the governmental apparatus and imposing their own ideas on the rest of society.  IMHO, the worst future tyrants are often the revolutionaries who are certain that all of society's ills can be remedied by placing them in power.

What's wrong with the idea of simply turning away from government as the source of solutions to society's problems and focusing your energies elsewhere?  One person who did this to great effect was Steve Jobs.  He seemed to have found meaning in his life and enjoyed great accomplishments without feeling the need to make pronouncements about what the government should or shouldn't be doing or talking about his own plans for a political career.

I don't equate structuring your life to make the government as irrelevant as possible to having a dreadfully boring life.  That would be like saying that anyone who doesn't follow the latest Hollywood gossip isn't capable of living a happy life with a healthy appreciation for the arts.

For many people, the media has conditioned them to feel the need to follow the latest political intrigues, dramas and jackassery.  The "news" media has cleverly separated itself from other forms of entertainment through the idea that what they do is noble and important.  The truth, of course, is that what passes for news is just the original stupid reality TV programming.  Choosing to turn it off and determine which ides you will fill your head with is IMHO a very good step in the direction of personal freedom.

Apparently, many people mistake tuning out stupid political storylines for apathy.  To me, it's just the opposite.  When you watch and read too much media coverage of what the government is doing, the overall effect is often one of complete and total powerlessness in the face of a lumbering and moronic monolith.  If, however, you tune out things in your life over which you have no control and which can only deplete your mental energy, a whole new world of possibilities presents itself made up of things that you can control and outcomes that you can influence.  To me, that's much of what Harry Browne's entire body of work was about.

MediumTex wrote: I have met too many people who only seem to want to take their turn at the wheel of driving the governmental apparatus and imposing their own ideas on the rest of society.  IMHO, the worst future tyrants are often the revolutionaries who are certain that all of society's ills can be remedied by placing them in power.of what Harry Browne's entire body of work was about.

A quote from I am That, a spiritual book up there with Tao Te Ching (it is dialogs of spiritual seekers with an enlightened being)

"When you deceive yourself that you work for the good of all, it makes matters worse, for you should not be guided by your own ideas of what is good for others. A man who claims to know what is good for others, is dangerous."

MediumTex wrote:

Libertarian666 wrote:

MediumTex wrote: Since we all have to live, and a life made up of bitterness or even distaste at not living in a libertarian utopia doesn't sound like a good way to move through life, what is your suggested response to the current state of things in the U.S.?

What would you suggest someone do who preferred to live only in a free society as you define it?

I understand your critique.  I just don't know what to do with that knowledge.

If I had the money to buy citizenship in an EU country and live in Switzerland, I would do that, but I can't afford that. Unfortunately, not having a solution doesn't make the problem go away.

For some reason, people always seem to think that "somewhere else" is better than where they are now.

Switzerland is far more socialist than the U.S.  I don't know why someone today looking for more freedom would move from the U.S. to Switzerland.

The situation you live in will never be perfect.  There are, however, many opportunities in the U.S. to live a relatively free life.  There are also many places in the U.S. where you can live very cheaply, which is IMHO a large component of freedom.

Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Switzerland may be more socialistic than the US, but it is clearly less fascistic.

And there are in fact no opportunities in the US to live a relatively free life, if by that you mean that you:
1. Are not required to comply with immensely complex tax rules that often change to your detriment without notice and
2. Can invest as you wish without interference from the US government.

Not to mention the other aspects I have alluded to previously.

By the way, many of those rules also apply to US citizens wherever they reside in the world, which is unique to so-called "advanced" countries.

Of course, if you are comparing the US to Ukraine or some other third-world hellhole, then it may be better. I don't consider that a valid comparison, though.