A rambling stream of consciousness on libertarianism, blockchains, and reality

I started writing this in a reply to a reply to a comment on a post by @davidpakman which was a discussion by someone asking about libertarians and basically why David thought libertarianism wouldn't work in real life.

I won't pretend this post is well thought out and not full of fallacies - it is a rambling stream of consciousness after all. But I have thought about these things before and have come up with ideas that other people seem to come up with too. I'm fond of saying something like "libertarianism is utopian ideal that is very alluring, but it'll never work because people don't work like that". I think that is essentially what David was saying too. Could we reprogram people, especially if we strip away all of society's current trappings? Maybe... but as mentioned below in my original comment (which I decided to just paste here instead) I think you'll still get people people who complain whatever system there is theft and violence they didn't sign up for.

Anyway, here is the comment by @nullpointer I was going to reply to and my rambling response:

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@nullpointer
I understand that people hold political ideas not because they are evil or want to hurt others intentionally - some maybe do, but most don't, but "problem" with non-libertarians or statists that they mostly don't have any principles to stand on. When libertarians call for ending the war on drugs for example, we do it out of principle, not because we want people do drugs, but because we think that every person owns himself and his body and he is free to do whatever he wants with it (studpid things included), when we call for cutting welfare benefits and lowering taxes we don't do it because we hate the poor, but because we understand that taking other's people hard earned money is wrong, it would be wrong for someone to force people to do stuff for him, so it's wrong for someone to take other people's money by force... Libertarian idea is so simple, yet you can apply it to so many areas.

I think there is a fallacy in the ending the war on drugs argument based on the belief that people own their body and can do whatever they want with it. To me the fallacy is that it assumes someone doing drugs, even if in the privacy of their home has no effect on the rest of society. That they won't be supporting drug dealers and producers who will seek to grow their markets and try to lure others into using the product. "Hey, it's legal, I'm just marketing". Or that in a drug-fueled rage they won't take their gun (they have a gun of course right) and do something crazy like shoot up a room full of co-workers, etc. etc. Maybe if you just grow weed in your back forty, consume it yourself, don't go out in public when inebriated - you're pretty much okay (so long as the neighbor's kids aren't stealing your weed, getting baked every day and flunking out of school)

It would be the same if you said someone can do anything they want on their property so they set up a meth lab, which blows up, sets their house on fire and of course they didn't bother to pay for the libertarian pay-per-hose fire service so their house burns down the neighbors house and their neighbors house and before you know it the entire neighborhood is up in flames (Great Fire of London anyone?) and kills a bunch of people. Same for pollution - we can take a few coal burners but if everyone drove them people will die from pollution, temps will rise, people will drown and lose their properties which may take decades or hundreds of years to take effect and due to hysteresis, you could be hundreds of years from a solution taking effect.

So in real-life - non-libertarian utopian life, over the years, decades, and centuries bad outcome after bad outcome gets turned into laws by societies that vote on them and then the government is designed to enforce the laws. But over and over people are born and say "Hey I didn't sign up for those laws! Leave me the f**k alone, your taxation is theft or violence!" conveniently ignoring all that history that led us to where we are now. To me every person is born against their will and inherits debts and credits they didn't earn.

Squaring those things away - it's hard - but you have to realize your existence - to even be born at all, does not start your life with a blank slate. And if you're a net positive at birth it may be only because your parents, ancestors, and their friends and collaborators spent their lives using theft, coercion and violence against others to enrich themselves. Or maybe the wealth was earned fairly and squarely, or similar arguments for those born in "debt". Ancestors could have been exploited and cheated their entire lives - or they could have just been a long line of screw ups who gambled everything away on 21-black. While it is common for people to be born and raised thinking they are owed something by society, it seems unusual if not unheard of for people to grow up thinking they owe something to society. Why is that?

Getting back to the topic of taxation is theft...

Now I fully agree that the current (US) government that acts inefficiently, does not evolve quickly or efficiently, does not represent the will of the people just the rich elite people and corporate persons that own it and operates it for their own rent-seeking profit (admit it, they do - if you don't think they do then you're either one of them towing the party line to perpetuate the system or you just have not been paying attention). But that does not mean government could not be operated efficiently - it just that so many of the things that drive libertarians nuts like nepotism and collusion with private interests that cause government to suck. Why not just stop doing those things? Some states, Nevada I believe, seem to have it right - being in government is not a high paying job for life (maximum of $9000 per year for State legislators), it is small, it meets infrequently as needed.

IMO government should act like a blockchain - new things can be tried in forks, if they don't work out they can be undone and killed, and in fact, would naturally go that way by consensus rules. Only private-government collusion could stop that and keep changes that are bad for the majority alive and benefiting the minority and blockchains can prevent that kind of collusion because there is no government, just consensus.

And I think the idea that communities of people, or individual people could voluntarily opt into alternative "blockchains" that regulate their life and they would have to deal with other chains rules only when interfacing with other people for trade or passage - that sounds pretty libertarian to me.

The question is, if pretty much everyone here opts into a "USA blockchain" that guarantees the bill of rights - who is there to adjudicate and protect those? We need witnesses/oracles to convert real-life actions into blockchain inputs that affect contracts, and the opposite (which no one is talking about) which convert blockchain contract outputs into real life actions (think law enforcement).

Now you could just say the latter is an org that creates contracts that say when paid X it will do Y and if an Oracle doesn't observe Y then X will not be paid. If the org gets a reputation of not doing what they are supposed to do then no one will want to use them and they will go away. But that requires someone to fund payment X in the first place - eg. when some walks into town and shoots another person, there is a funding source such that if an oracle observes that event it can trigger payment to the "don't kill people" enforcement org which will dispatch humans track down the perp and detain them.

So that assumes that a group of people have colluded to provide funds to make that happen . People who don't care about murder will choose not to chip in but they will probably still benefit - they are leechers. In my experience, voluntary participation with money in a community is very low - in a recent example a sporting org I belong to with about 10,000 members needed to raise $2M to purchase group insurance. Only 20% actually participated to the tune of about $1,000 each on average. And that was even though the activity the community formed to support would become largely impossible to participate in without the insurance. Common arguments were the org was corrupt or inefficient or never helped them. They were willing to throw it all away to prove a point - in spite of already voluntarily paying $100 a year to be a member of that community and benefit from it. It made no sense and I think most had just not taken time to read about what the money was for, read how things were going to be better, understand the consequences of not participating etc. etc.

Which is to say while radical transparency with multiple blockchains and contracts governing our lives may seem like the utopian ideal there will be large numbers who will just drop out and not play by any rules. There will be people who simply don't understand how it all works will become as suspicious of "the blockchain" stealing their liberty as they are of the government. Libertarians, I believe, simply say that such people would be starved out of the system if people saw that behavior as a bad thing. By strong enforcement of property laws (I don't think there is any public property in libertarian land right?) they can be forced to stay home, people can refuse to do business with them, and a community can economically incentivizing people not to give them charity. In the end, they would literally "just go away" (eh hem, either turn into hermits with no impact on society or just starve and die). It's kind of a like killing someone with downvotes on Steemit. They kick and scream and in the end no one sees them and they disappear or abandon Steemit altogether.

However the one thing a radical blockchain based society should have going for it would be transparency - at least in theory. If blockchains are not working you at least have the option to see and analyse all the inputs, output and contracts, trace bad actors, have members of those chains vote for improvements and iterate or even rollback a fork (like the currently ill-fated Tezos blockchain) potentially undoing previous consequences, at least any that were purely represented in the blockchain - tokenized wealth and ownership.

In my previous pollution example (let's just assume for now you accept anthropogenic global warming is a fact and not just a giant global conspiracy by scientists for reasons no one can adequately explain) where cause and effect could be decades or centuries apart how could blockchains help there? Could you write a contract that says if the consequences of this action are bad 50 years from now you're going to lose all your money retroactively and that will pay for the cleanup? Probably - you might even have to write it so it is like the Ethereum DAO snafu "undo" fork - so it works if they have spent all their money and have no tokenized property. Every person they ever dealt with may forfeit money they got from you. To guard against that people would have to use insurance to protect them from dealing with you and they would charge you more. So consequences of every behavior might require insurance for which you pay extra on every transaction. Hmmmm, that begins to sound a lot like a tax... I mean insurance really is just a tax on society because of bad actors (including "god" who is always acting badly apparently).

How about if consequences that happen after you die? Well money you had and passed onto your successors could be at stake. So they too would need insurance just for having that money. It would be a wealth insurance. Eventually consequences would be negated or ruled impossible - money would be released and from multi-sig escrow contracts (assuming it wasn't frozen by hackers or script-kiddies) and people would get money back. People who had nothing might suddenly find themselves with something.

One thing you can't do with a blockchain - you can't just fork your way to getting someone's life back, to undo their experiences, negative or positive. A person dead is a person dead - it's a token burned for good. Dealing with consequences of that - very difficult. Maybe a full tokenized society with everyone on the blockchain would find it easy to find and punish a murderer - but can a blockchain authorize violence (jail, execution, etc.?) Do you allow such a thing? Or inject humans again.

Another issue with blockchains - so many are set up so that wealth give disproportinate power in the forming of consensus. If you use your wealth to do PoW mining or directly to do PoS staking - your poor community members may have little say, it's like they aren't even a part of that society. Without wealth they are nothings, meer minnows. Using consensus that is more Proof of Pulse / Proof of Brain centric might be essential (sorry Steemit kind of falls over here even if technically everyone with a brain is free to publish awesome works and make a fortune until they are a whale too.

Anyway, that's about the end of my rambling. Maybe others have already thought about a fully blockchained society, if you have or know someon who wrote about it let me know in the comments...