I can't believe I am writing an article like this one but really the cognitive dissonances in my head have piled up to a level that it really had became obvious to me that I had some contradictory beliefs in my head, which is unhealthy. I had to rethink my beliefs and political positions, economics and my general social view of the world.
Now first of all I am not a Socialist/Marxist/Communist or anything like that (which would be really funny for my username), so it's not like I have jumped to the other side of the fence, which would be pretty stupid, I will explain why. But sort of this "Ultra-Capitalist" mentality that you see on /r/Anarcho-Capitalism (or actually these days you see Neo-Nazis there openly advocating for throwing people out of helicopters) just doesn't seem to resonate with me anymore for a very simple reason:
CENTRALIZATION OF POWER
My biggest problem with Anarcho-Capitalism is the centralization of power aspect. In fact most of the history of Capitalism revolved around this. This so obvious fact I couldn't ignore any longer. And I am just disgusted by centralized power, totally, the cryptocurrency phenomena made this clear to me as it is so much better when things are decentralized.
POWER CORRUPTS, DON’T FORGET THIS
So the least power a person can hold the better, it won’t be equal, but it should not be way more than the average or we are dealing with a dictator there.
Of course this immediately throws our Socialism/Marxism/Communism out of the window as well.
- Communism can't exist naturally, thus you have to give an overwhelming authority to a State to make everyone "equal", like equally enslaved in a Gulag or equally starving to death in Venezuela.
- Marxism is too theoretic, any practical application of it would be exactly like how the Soviets or other Red Factions did it.
- And Socialism is just nothing more than Mafias controlling factories and behaving exactly like that (no wonder in the USA all labor unions got taken over by mobsters in the 20th century, it's ironic)
So the Left is just as guilty here if not more, because Capitalism at least can give some freedoms initially for people to make money, but which get's taken away as soon as the Monopolists get a hold of the State.
So the biggest issue is CENTRALIZED POWER whether it's a State or a Corporation, it doesn't matter, in fact most Corporate board members were past politicians or vice versa. There is just a huge intermingling between giant Corporations and the State, which is disgusting, especially if it's at the detriment of your average people.
CORPORATE CAPITALISM
So let's take it one by one, you have a Corporation which is a legal entity incorporated into the State, so it's literally a part of the State. It not just obey's it's laws (or not if they have connections) but it is even used to enforce laws. Because let's face it, it's impossible to enforce unpopular laws, there are not enough cops in the world to do that.
So you have a little bit of PRISM here a little bit of Censorship there, a little bit of Labor Camps here, a little bit of more Surveillance there, and it's almost like you are living in comrade Stalin's Soviet Union, but wrapped in pink ribbons instead that you paid for with your "UltraSuperMegaHyperShopCard™".
In fact in most cases the corporations don't even resist the tyranny, which they could very well do since they could challenge it in the courts, they have the money, and it would be a good prestige move, but they don't since they are probably paid off well to do it.
Of course you also have the usual suspects, the:
- Banksters of 2008 robbing you
- Pollution Cartel polluting you
- Big Pharma tied to Nazis, poisoning you
- GMO monopolists, poisoning you
- ISP monopolists throttling your connection
- Searcn Engine monopolists filtering reality for you
- Social Media monopolists desocializing and censoring you
- IP Law monopolists literallly making you pay for using words
- And the latest addition: Bitcoin, the Corporately controlled coin which is under banking control now, costs 40$ to send a transaction, and all platforms heavily censored
It doesn't take to be a genius to figure out that the Corporate system is not there to help people, and I knew this, I just thought that maybe if they would be criticized enough, they would change their behavior.
Well that didn’t happen, and now you can’t criticize them since they pull off people from all communication platforms, this woke me up massively, plus they might use bogus IP law claims to shut people down.
I mean literally these people are trademarking fruit names and other common English words, so you can’t even speak about them badly or they’ll sue you. Yeah talking about freedom of speech.
ANARCHO CAPITALISM
Well I don’t think the Corporate Capitalists would let it happen. Chomsky explained this perfectly, he said that the existing corporations profit just so massively from State Intervention and subsidies that they will never allow any kind of Voluntary Capitalism to exist.
I am not sure how Mises and Rothbard viewed big corporations, I don’t think they were practically against them.
INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Rothbard was somewhat against IP laws, Mises wasn’t. Rothbard was a good guy, I think he was just confused about some things, and can’t blame Mises either he just grew up in an aristocratic environment, but he still did good deeds in the economics field. I was feeling that perhaps some IP laws were invasive but I wasn’t really sure what to believe as illustrated in this article.
Now I am totally against it, and I fail to see how an Ancap society would “enforce” IP laws without a Big Government. I mean you literally have to go to the other part of the world and sent tanks to their houses to arrest them for nonviolent copyright infringement. Also note that most recent Ancaps are very much pro IP even though it is literally being used to censor people now.
There is nothing that stops people from changing their business model, if you are worried that somebody is pirating your book or your music, have the price lowered for fuck sake. I have literally seen engineering books being sold for 400$, for 400$ you can buy an entire lab set to reinvent the knowledge for fuck sake. Have your books or music sold for 2-3$, and make sure you accept cryptocurrency like Dash or Monero (not BTC because the fees there are 40$ already) since most payment processors suck so people are not incentivized to buy stuff online. Plus get rid of these fucking protectionist border policies where the import duties are high and stuff is regularly being stolen at the border by corrupt border guards, there needs to be a decentralized method for delivering stuff to people.
Otherwise subscription models are decent too, you can release your songs one by one to your subscribers, and if they leak, no big deal, you make a new song soon anyway. Hey you can’t be a world known famous music star but who the hell wants to be that anyway, they are spoiled by the fame anyway and have all sorts of psychological issues afterwards.
SO WHAT NOW?
So what should I believe now? The thing I noticed is that Leftists are State worshippers. I am not. They get disgusted by monopolist corporations and they immediately start worshipping the centralized State as their savior that will save them from the corps. Well if they are intermingling and CEO’s are running for political offices back and forth, then that doesn’t look like a savior to me. Plus politicians can be corrupted anyway, so it doesn’t even matter.
But really, who will save people from the monopolies? Is it going to be a big “trust-buster” like Teddy Roosevelt?
Leftists are really stuck in that paradigm, that maybe some Socialist like Bernie Sanders or Teddy Roosevelt will save them, but it probably ain’t gonna happen.
But it’s literally a horribly dichotomy if they think those are the 2 solutions, either worship the State or the Corporations, which are pretty much the same thing. There is another solution though, which is the real solution, but neither party promotes is because it’s not about gaining power by promising goodies, but about losing power, which quite frankly, nobody wants.
DECENTRALIZATION OF POWER
The REAL solution is to decentralize power, quite simply. Now I don’t know what political landscape this would manifest itself in.
Probably the closest thing would be some sort of direct democracy at the local level, but it’s hard to do it, because opportunists would always stand in line to grab power locally and be a “mayor” , “town leader” , “village leader”, etc…
I mean I guess the Socialists believe that this is possible, but I don’t. So it has to be totally decentralized and trustless, probably some kind of blockchain based voting system, sort of like a Decentralized Online Government. Or multiple ones for any kind of project or location.
A DAO would come closest to it, putting aside the 1st one's bad reputation, a well built DAO could do all of this. It could form a community based around a currency of their own, and provide all social services for it’s members.
So it doesn’t have to be corporate healthcare (which is pretty shady) neither Government socialized healthcare (which is a joke), but it could be a voluntary community oriented system.
Sort of like the friendly societies were doing, but instead digitally, transparently, and voluntarily.
So make no mistake about it, I am still a Voluntarist, but it has became my belief now that Voluntarism is based on decentralization of power, and not on the abolishment of violence.
Because let’s face it, there will always be violence, it’s human nature, the only thing can be done is to just keep people away from the “ring of power” so that the damage they can cause would be minimal.
People are always corrupt no matter what, so it would do a great service to both them and to society if their bad habits are kept in check. Neither by a monolithic State nor by an Oligarchy, nor through any other coercive means, but by people interacting with eachother in a friendly and informative way.
BUSINESS IN THE DECENTRALIZED PARADIGM
So I am not against business, in fact I encourage it, but free businesses, not monopolies. A business really shouldn’t grow above a certain size. Certainly not to the size where it controls nearly the entire internet Google does through Youtube, Google Search, Google Analytics (even when I login to Steemit some Google stuff is loaded, they are literally everywhere now), Ads, CDN, etc…
At least with Facebook, which I don’t use, you could say that it’s voluntary, though they still track people through cookies from Like buttons that are almost everywhere. But Google is not even voluntary, it’s forced on us, why the hell must be I subjected to Google if I want to use Steemit. On Bitcointalk they just added a ReCaptcha, so you can’t even login there now without filling that in every time. Same with many other websites that either use Google, Cloudfare or any other 3rd party CDN to load in the background. So annoying!
Normally there would be competition, but either the capital requirements make it hard to found or raise capital to such a company (thanks to Securities Laws), or they outright use IP law or other regulations to keep people out like with Taxi Monopolies and other dirty stuff.
So family businesses, small businesses with 10-20 employees, those are cool, and even some large businesses aren’t bad either if they are constantly kept under rigorous criticism and transparency checks (which most of the time is not tolerated, but outright censored).
You can’t escape it, after things grow above a certain size, they stop being beneficial and they start becoming a pain in the ass to the world.
“Oh but if you don’t like it leave” kind of argument still comes up often. Well I would but there is nowhere to go. The Internet is controlled by giant corporations, creating a 2nd Internet platform requires tons of capital which you can’t raise without the Securities Regulator’s approval, and the Meshnet is heavily regulated by RF frequency regulations. So you are fucked. Not to mention as soon as some Meshnet within legal channel limits would pop up the ISP cartels would probably lobby for their ban.
What the fuck are people supposed to do? The control grid by 2017 is just so deep that there is no way to escape it, you can’t even live in the woods now, it’s illegal. So the only thing is left to change it.
A peaceful revolution of decentralization of power. This can be achieved, and must be achieved without violence, that is the whole point. It’s not about coercion, but undoing coercion, all kinds of coercions.
It started with Bitcoin, but unfortunately Bitcoin had fallen back into the web of control, and you can already see a massive opposition to this from the Bitcoin Cash crowd, it’s not perfect, but it’s a voluntary choice to hold accountable the corruption that has been going on with BTC.
This is the beauty of a decentralized community, it instantly corrects itself, which would result in an instant fixing of the problem, if not for the censorship and propaganda tactics that keeps in power the corrupt ones.
So this is not Socialism nor Marxism nor “Traditional” Capitalism, this is a 3rd Path, I think it’s the path towards the real truth that has been hidden away by the power grabbers. It is just simply Decentralization, what form it will take that doesn’t matter afterwards.
Sources:
https://pixabay.com