Q: The point of a gun? Governments, when they work, provide us with roads, schools, R&D from everything from the internet to Apple and Tesla (who both received government money until they succeeded). The gun was apparently put away in favor of a handshake.
DB: Try not paying your federal taxes or housing taxes or building a private road or even sending your child to public school without a vaccine. Try growing a garden or building a housing addition without government approval. The government is even confiscating raw milk and trying to incarcerate its providers. Western governments shatter families and lives by putting thousands, perhaps millions in jail for marijuana infractions -- yet now there is talk of decriminalizing marijuana. What was the reason for the initial criminalization? Always if you refuse to obey, you will find yourself on the other side of a METAPHORICAL gun -- as modern government at its heart is force; this force inevitably involves the threat of jail. You don't obey laws -- no matter how irrational or unjustified -- and you will go to prisons as tens of millions have.
Q: What regulations are you talking about that caused the S&L crisis? It was dysfunctional, to be sure, but dysfunctional as in weak and under-used, not overly strict. Please provide counter-examples, if there are any.
DB: Why don't you just use a search engine? This is common knowledge. See this: "The S&L crisis, 10 years later: Government errors caused the problems and they still do." http://www.milkeninstitute.org/publications/publications.taf?function=detail&ID=204&cat=Arts
Q: BTW, we should bring back Glass-Steagall too - it's only a grade B solution, whereas Public Banking and Land Value Taxation are grade A solutions, but it's better than Gramm-Leach-Bliley (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gramm--Leach--Bliley_Act) that led to the wild west of banking we have today, and even bigger TBTF banks.
DB: You can't cure government created problems with more regulation and more government solutions. See this: "Let's shatter the myth on Glass-Steagall." http://www.washingtonpost.com/lets-shatter-the-myth-on-glass-steagall/2012/07/27/gJQASaOAGX_story.html
Q: LETS are always voluntary arrangements, even counter-government arrangements.
DB: If this is the case, why are LETS systems endorsed and promoted by the United Nations? See this: http://www.thedailybell.com/news-analysis/4224/Why-Is-the-UN-Installing-Mutual-CreditPure-Fiat-Systems-Around-the-World/. They are endorsed and promoted because they provide a paper trail that can be used by authorities for a variety of purposes.
Q: Many in the reform movement see DB as offering no solutions, and as actually being government apparatchiks themselves, working to involve serious reformers in endless virtual time-sinks so they can't effectuate actual change.
DB: We are not responsible for people in the "reform movement," if you are mostly talking about committed socialists/democrats like yourself who believe in the perfectibility of government and thus government solutions. Governments supposedly murdered some 150 million in the 20th century so far as we know and unfortunately could do it again in this century.
Q: Well, I see you have admitted to being anarchists. This has never been, and could never be, a workable arrangement for groups of people to interact under.
DB: What we actually wrote was, "Apparently, you don't understand that anarchy is merely the absence of government force." People need to live and relate in smaller communal groups if at all possible. Power needs to flow up, not down. One can exist in communal societies within an anarchical context as these societies are VOLUNTARY.
Q: Governments has naturally arisen from within the smallest tribes, to the largest nation-states, and " the trend will only continue.
DB: History shows us these trends are NOT inevitable and that Leviathan collapses under its weight sooner or later.
Q: There are certainly too many people in prison, but it is closer to 2 million not 6 million as you said (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_incarceration_rate) an interesting fact you chose to exaggerate.
DB: Here is the excerpt from Wikipedia to which you refer: "In total, 6,977,700 adults were under correctional supervision (probation, parole, jail, or prison) in 2011 -- about 2.9% of adults in the U.S. resident population. You want to maintain these people are NOT "incarcerated" go ahead. Try to tell that to someone under parole or probation (including home arrest).
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