5 ms·

> The answer, to a depressing extent, is that our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossibl

> The answer, to a depressing extent, is that our basic freedoms are threatened today because our political system and our very culture make it nearly impossible for us to act. That's why action should not come as an open fight. History is full of examples when revolutions only lead to blood, after which other elites simply take over and keep exploiting everyone else. Or, alternatively, revolutions fail and after a bloody fight the same elites stay in power. If you want real change and bloodless revolution, start using Bitcoin. Don't pay them a cut if you disagree with what your money are spent on. It's not democracy that keeps politicians in check. It's simply money. If they have none, they're powerless.

princeverma 13y ago
Please don't make this a case for bitcoin. This is much more serious and complicated issue and will not get solved just by using bitcoin. I think you are over-romanticising the use of bitcoin, nothing else... Just saying,..
- brokenmusic 13y ago
  All I said that NSA, Drones and imprisonment of the population for victimless crimes requires money. I would also claim that if taxes were not collected (or would be impossible to collect) with a threat of force, very little number of people would pay them voluntarily. Also, if people were not forced by law to use national currencies for exchanging goods and services, they wouldn't be subject to hidden taxes, such as inflation. Bitcoin makes taxes prohibitively expensive to collect and inflation impossible. How is it an oversimplification then?
  - rpicard 13y ago
    > hidden taxes, such as inflation. Maybe it was a typo, but I think you should double check what inflation means.
    - Roboprog 13y ago
      The effect of the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply, and making it available to favored banks and the US Treasury at low rates helps cause inflation and has about the same effect as a tax: your holdings are worth less, and somebody else, albeit indirectly, is able to tap into the value that those dollars held.
      - rpicard 13y ago
        Sounds like a pretty big stretch to call it a tax in my opinion.
        nthj 13y ago
        The government has more money and I have less. I'd be interested to hear your suggestions for a better descriptor?
        rpicard 13y ago
        I'm not convinced that the government gets more money when inflation goes up. I've only taken an introductory level economics course, but I'm pretty sure the value of a currency goes down for everyone - government included - when inflation rises.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - eli_gottlieb 13y ago
    If it was not forced by law there would be no private property at all.
    - whiddershins 13y ago
      empirically not true: http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragments_%20Anarchist_Anthropology.pdf http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragme...
      - Joeri 13y ago
        Please make a proper argument, nobody is going to read through all of that.
        whiddershins 13y ago
        TLDR; Anarchist systems have existed throughout history both alongside and within, and most certainly in awareness of hierarchical systems which they often explicitly reject. Most assertions about the nature of those societies are based on ignorance. Most relevant to your comment, they tend(ed) to maintain rules, conventions, personal property, arbitrate disputes, take care of the weak, and do any number of other things considered impossible without government. Various types of egalitarian social order have existed, it isn't one monolithic concept, and it certainly doesn't necessarily result in chaos or might-makes-right. If you want specific examples and actual information, take the time to read the pdf. It is written by an anthropologist, so it is his gig to footnote all this stuff.
        mpyne 13y ago
        How have these anarchist societies fared after hierarchically-driven societies came through? I don't seem to recall it working out well in Africa, Asia, North America, or South America.
        whiddershins 13y ago
qwertzlcoatl 13y ago
You would need a substantial percentage of a population to stop paying taxes to send the government a message. If you do it on your own, you run the risk of getting a message. A coercive one.
MisterWebz 13y ago
I wholeheartedly agree with your last point. Hit them where it hurts, and that's their wallet. If you dislike what's happening and you notice a certain corporation is associated with that, simply stop using their services and stop giving them money. If you dislike your information being shared, stop using Facebook or any of the other tech giants. They didn't have much incentive to protect their user's privacy, but they would if they noticed people moving away from their services because they can't be trusted.
- brokenmusic 13y ago
  To be perfectly honest, I wasn't saying exactly that. Yes, you got the point right: if you don't like the services a private company provides - stop paying. It works. With government it has historically been impossible to do, because it controls money supply and extracts taxes with the threat of force (don't want to pay? Go to prison). Bitcoin offers a simple non-violent and effective way out of this, because it would be prohibitively expensive to collect taxes if people used Bitcoin. It would only be possible when they converted it to fiat or physical things big enough to be noticed and tracked (like houses or cars). Thus, my point: use Bitcoin as a unit of exchange and don't pay a cut.
  - dllthomas 13y ago
    Bitcoin offers very little here. If you are smart about how you interact with it, it might be substantially more anonymous than other digital payment mechanisms. It is not any more anonymous than physical cash, and governments collected taxes just fine when everyone was paying with cash. They do this through audit and threat of force, and that is just as applicable to bitcoin.
    - brokenmusic 13y ago
      Not true. 1) Is gets a lot harder and more expensive to collect taxes when you have to conduct audits 2) It is impossible to collect the inflation tax 3) It's easier to control people when you can close down or freeze their bank accounts for any reason you like. Bitcoin offers a lot of freedom at a price of learning a little bit about the technology.
cpursley 13y ago
The Diamond Age is based in a reality where all countries collapsed due to the advent of cryptocurrency and cryptocommunication which undermined nation states' ability to collect tax. I think this is an eventuality.
- daeken 13y ago
  One of my favorite books, but the chicken and egg problem is substantial. Hitting the "tax dodger" tipping point requires a huge number of people to break the law before it 1) has any impact at all, and 2) becomes unenforcable. I think that there's a clever missing step.
- pekk 13y ago
  Nations are not based only on the ability to collect tax. And a percentage of income or sales are not the only kinds of tax which have been collected in history.
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  The Diamond Age is also a sickening crapsack world filled with immensely dangerous uncontrolled nanotechnology. And of course the mandatory Neal Stephenson lectures on programming and bizarre sex cults. That said, Snow Crash was an even worse crapsack to live in.
monsterix 13y ago
Here is an alternate dimension too. If both left and right political wings are full of dubious people, then don't bring them both to power. Create an alternative political party of your own and then compete in the next elections. Vow to kill all the FUD such as mass surveillance, Gitmo, SOPA, PIPA, bring in transparency, bring youth to power etc. I mean fight 'em with the system, and fight outside the system too as more and more people, I noted, have been suggesting the latter on HN here. This is how India is currently planning for the 2014 elections. The ground reality is so intense that one cannot describe in words. We have a legion of corrupt assholes both in our Government and its opposition that is called the congress and BJP duo. These guys have a history of carrying out some of the biggest scams on the planet. Shamelessly. They are known to have killed thousands of innocents, like Congress done away with Sikhs in 1984 [1], BJP done away with Gujrati muslims in Godhra in 2002 [2] and so on ... Not much of a choice w.r.t democracy, you know! So people lately have built a third political party called the 'Aam Aadmi Party' AAP [3], meaning common man party, whose president is Mr. Arvind Kejriwal [4] (A young engineer from IIT and an ex-diplomat of Indian Government.) Ground is swelling with support to put the new face into power, give power back to youth of our country. And yet traditional and powerful media continues to sleep with the incumbents, so a similar situation of dimwit reporting too. I don't know how the elections in the US work, heard it is complicated and messy, but this is one angle that perhaps you guys could look at: form a party of your own. Call it something else, like a pirate party, and then fight the elections. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal
- dasil003 13y ago
  The big problem is that fear is such an effective weapon to use again any such campaign. The establishment would have to spend barely a penny to totally crush such a movement before it got off the ground given the general status quo of relative comfort for most Americans. The two party system, as alluded to in the article, really is a huge problem for getting momentum on any movement that has any kind of easy sound bite rebuttals. However I think a good place to start would be to proclaim strong support for congresspeople like Udall, and start going after the NSA shills like Kerry.
daeken 13y ago
> If you want real change and bloodless revolution ... destroy politicians' careers and make their techniques impossible to maintain. I've written on this subject before, but I believe that destruction is the most effective means of change in politics today. The obvious way is to dig up as much dirt on politicians as possible and back them into a corner, but 1) that can easily backfire, and 2) it's hard to deal with the systematic problems. A great example of how to deal with a serious technological hurdle: In Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother" (absolutely worth a read -- my favorite of all time, FWIW) everyone in the bay area has RFID passes for traveling on BART and paying tolls by car. One of the characters comes up with plans for a device that will suck in IDs from these devices, then randomly swap them with others, preventing the DHS from tracking people based on their location. By distributing this far and wide, the system becomes completely and utterly useless. I think that things like this are the way forward. Destroy, guide the rebuilding (using positive -- not negative -- means), destroy again if it doesn't fit the proper form. Semi-rapid iteration of government.
- brokenmusic 13y ago
  Why do you want a government so much?
  - daeken 13y ago
    I don't. Unfortunately, most people do, and I'm a pragmatist at the end of the day.
  - tripzilch 13y ago
    > Why do you want a government so much? Because it's the only way to take proper care of the elderly and the disabled. No anarcho-syndicalist pipe dream has ever convincingly sketched me a scenario where the elderly (without family) do not just waste away in isolation, and the schizophrenics are rotting in the streets. Now, a government is not a guarantee to fix this (see for example the NYC homeless), but without a government, the weaker groups in society are just shit out of luck.
    - 13y ago

princeverma 13y ago

Please don't make this a case for bitcoin. This is much more serious and complicated issue and will not get solved just by using bitcoin. I think you are over-romanticising the use of bitcoin, nothing else... Just saying,..

brokenmusic 13y ago
All I said that NSA, Drones and imprisonment of the population for victimless crimes requires money. I would also claim that if taxes were not collected (or would be impossible to collect) with a threat of force, very little number of people would pay them voluntarily. Also, if people were not forced by law to use national currencies for exchanging goods and services, they wouldn't be subject to hidden taxes, such as inflation. Bitcoin makes taxes prohibitively expensive to collect and inflation impossible. How is it an oversimplification then?
- rpicard 13y ago
  > hidden taxes, such as inflation. Maybe it was a typo, but I think you should double check what inflation means.
  - Roboprog 13y ago
    The effect of the Federal Reserve increasing the money supply, and making it available to favored banks and the US Treasury at low rates helps cause inflation and has about the same effect as a tax: your holdings are worth less, and somebody else, albeit indirectly, is able to tap into the value that those dollars held.
    - rpicard 13y ago
      Sounds like a pretty big stretch to call it a tax in my opinion.
      - nthj 13y ago
        The government has more money and I have less. I'd be interested to hear your suggestions for a better descriptor?
        rpicard 13y ago
        I'm not convinced that the government gets more money when inflation goes up. I've only taken an introductory level economics course, but I'm pretty sure the value of a currency goes down for everyone - government included - when inflation rises.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- eli_gottlieb 13y ago
  If it was not forced by law there would be no private property at all.
  - whiddershins 13y ago
    empirically not true: http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragments_%20Anarchist_Anthropology.pdf http://www.eleuthera.it/files/materiali/David_Graeber_Fragme...
    - Joeri 13y ago
      Please make a proper argument, nobody is going to read through all of that.
      - whiddershins 13y ago
        TLDR; Anarchist systems have existed throughout history both alongside and within, and most certainly in awareness of hierarchical systems which they often explicitly reject. Most assertions about the nature of those societies are based on ignorance. Most relevant to your comment, they tend(ed) to maintain rules, conventions, personal property, arbitrate disputes, take care of the weak, and do any number of other things considered impossible without government. Various types of egalitarian social order have existed, it isn't one monolithic concept, and it certainly doesn't necessarily result in chaos or might-makes-right. If you want specific examples and actual information, take the time to read the pdf. It is written by an anthropologist, so it is his gig to footnote all this stuff.
        mpyne 13y ago
        How have these anarchist societies fared after hierarchically-driven societies came through? I don't seem to recall it working out well in Africa, Asia, North America, or South America.
        whiddershins 13y ago

qwertzlcoatl 13y ago

You would need a substantial percentage of a population to stop paying taxes to send the government a message. If you do it on your own, you run the risk of getting a message. A coercive one.

MisterWebz 13y ago

I wholeheartedly agree with your last point. Hit them where it hurts, and that's their wallet. If you dislike what's happening and you notice a certain corporation is associated with that, simply stop using their services and stop giving them money. If you dislike your information being shared, stop using Facebook or any of the other tech giants. They didn't have much incentive to protect their user's privacy, but they would if they noticed people moving away from their services because they can't be trusted.

brokenmusic 13y ago
To be perfectly honest, I wasn't saying exactly that. Yes, you got the point right: if you don't like the services a private company provides - stop paying. It works. With government it has historically been impossible to do, because it controls money supply and extracts taxes with the threat of force (don't want to pay? Go to prison). Bitcoin offers a simple non-violent and effective way out of this, because it would be prohibitively expensive to collect taxes if people used Bitcoin. It would only be possible when they converted it to fiat or physical things big enough to be noticed and tracked (like houses or cars). Thus, my point: use Bitcoin as a unit of exchange and don't pay a cut.
- dllthomas 13y ago
  Bitcoin offers very little here. If you are smart about how you interact with it, it might be substantially more anonymous than other digital payment mechanisms. It is not any more anonymous than physical cash, and governments collected taxes just fine when everyone was paying with cash. They do this through audit and threat of force, and that is just as applicable to bitcoin.
  - brokenmusic 13y ago
    Not true. 1) Is gets a lot harder and more expensive to collect taxes when you have to conduct audits 2) It is impossible to collect the inflation tax 3) It's easier to control people when you can close down or freeze their bank accounts for any reason you like. Bitcoin offers a lot of freedom at a price of learning a little bit about the technology.

cpursley 13y ago

The Diamond Age is based in a reality where all countries collapsed due to the advent of cryptocurrency and cryptocommunication which undermined nation states' ability to collect tax. I think this is an eventuality.

daeken 13y ago
One of my favorite books, but the chicken and egg problem is substantial. Hitting the "tax dodger" tipping point requires a huge number of people to break the law before it 1) has any impact at all, and 2) becomes unenforcable. I think that there's a clever missing step.
pekk 13y ago
Nations are not based only on the ability to collect tax. And a percentage of income or sales are not the only kinds of tax which have been collected in history.
eli_gottlieb 13y ago
The Diamond Age is also a sickening crapsack world filled with immensely dangerous uncontrolled nanotechnology. And of course the mandatory Neal Stephenson lectures on programming and bizarre sex cults. That said, Snow Crash was an even worse crapsack to live in.

monsterix 13y ago

Here is an alternate dimension too. If both left and right political wings are full of dubious people, then don't bring them both to power. Create an alternative political party of your own and then compete in the next elections. Vow to kill all the FUD such as mass surveillance, Gitmo, SOPA, PIPA, bring in transparency, bring youth to power etc. I mean fight 'em with the system, and fight outside the system too as more and more people, I noted, have been suggesting the latter on HN here. This is how India is currently planning for the 2014 elections. The ground reality is so intense that one cannot describe in words. We have a legion of corrupt assholes both in our Government and its opposition that is called the congress and BJP duo. These guys have a history of carrying out some of the biggest scams on the planet. Shamelessly. They are known to have killed thousands of innocents, like Congress done away with Sikhs in 1984 [1], BJP done away with Gujrati muslims in Godhra in 2002 [2] and so on ... Not much of a choice w.r.t democracy, you know! So people lately have built a third political party called the 'Aam Aadmi Party' AAP [3], meaning common man party, whose president is Mr. Arvind Kejriwal [4] (A young engineer from IIT and an ex-diplomat of Indian Government.) Ground is swelling with support to put the new face into power, give power back to youth of our country. And yet traditional and powerful media continues to sleep with the incumbents, so a similar situation of dimwit reporting too. I don't know how the elections in the US work, heard it is complicated and messy, but this is one angle that perhaps you guys could look at: form a party of your own. Call it something else, like a pirate party, and then fight the elections. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal

dasil003 13y ago
The big problem is that fear is such an effective weapon to use again any such campaign. The establishment would have to spend barely a penny to totally crush such a movement before it got off the ground given the general status quo of relative comfort for most Americans. The two party system, as alluded to in the article, really is a huge problem for getting momentum on any movement that has any kind of easy sound bite rebuttals. However I think a good place to start would be to proclaim strong support for congresspeople like Udall, and start going after the NSA shills like Kerry.

daeken 13y ago

> If you want real change and bloodless revolution ... destroy politicians' careers and make their techniques impossible to maintain. I've written on this subject before, but I believe that destruction is the most effective means of change in politics today. The obvious way is to dig up as much dirt on politicians as possible and back them into a corner, but 1) that can easily backfire, and 2) it's hard to deal with the systematic problems. A great example of how to deal with a serious technological hurdle: In Cory Doctorow's book "Little Brother" (absolutely worth a read -- my favorite of all time, FWIW) everyone in the bay area has RFID passes for traveling on BART and paying tolls by car. One of the characters comes up with plans for a device that will suck in IDs from these devices, then randomly swap them with others, preventing the DHS from tracking people based on their location. By distributing this far and wide, the system becomes completely and utterly useless. I think that things like this are the way forward. Destroy, guide the rebuilding (using positive -- not negative -- means), destroy again if it doesn't fit the proper form. Semi-rapid iteration of government.

brokenmusic 13y ago
Why do you want a government so much?
- daeken 13y ago
  I don't. Unfortunately, most people do, and I'm a pragmatist at the end of the day.
- tripzilch 13y ago
  > Why do you want a government so much? Because it's the only way to take proper care of the elderly and the disabled. No anarcho-syndicalist pipe dream has ever convincingly sketched me a scenario where the elderly (without family) do not just waste away in isolation, and the schizophrenics are rotting in the streets. Now, a government is not a guarantee to fix this (see for example the NYC homeless), but without a government, the weaker groups in society are just shit out of luck.
  - 13y ago