RE: Don't Blame, But Reclaim Government
Democracy is meant to do that. So we can get rid of politics and stay relatively free, if you believe in a system of voting with dollars. I don't. Not when person A has billions of votes and person B doesn't even have one vote.
I can see that my way of thinking is extremely alien to you because you're not even close to interpreting what I said. I don't believe in voting at all and you should not be voting with dollars or any other currency either (except in the sense of exiting the system). Democracy is an evil system. It basically says to every participant that you must all have your tails tied together and to the victor of the cat fight goes the spoils. That's why parasites like it because there is always a loser and the eventual loss of sovereignty and financial control that they can scrape up for themselves after the dust settles is in the form of massive profits.
What ever happened to letting everyone live in their own way as long as you're not hurting anyone else? Why should I be forced to live under anyone elses rules? Forget to wear your seat belt? Give $100 USD to the state. Who was the victim? Nobody except myself for failing to "protect" myself. This is just illegitimate BS. If there is no victim, there is no crime.
If you want to vote on something, then it must be opt-in first otherwise everything that comes after that is illegitimate decree. You can't force someone to participate in a vote and make it binding without massive violation of moral and ethical principles.
Thanks @zoidsoft, you've made everything clear now. And to be honest, I knew it would boil down to you being another one of the many, many variations of anarchists that are drawn to the crypto space. And boy, do I respect you for your passionate wish for more freedom. That's what makes this so frustrating: I love your goals and I fully agree with your analysis of how we got where we are now. At least where it comes to explaining how government has been hijacked by the "money-power".
However, there's a good reason why I started with setting aside the dictionary and Wikipedia. I one takes a few minutes even to think about things in a fundamental way, that is explain for yourself what every word means when we talk about economy and politics, you quickly see, or at least I quickly see that the kind of freedom the voluntarist wishes for is simply a mission impossible. It will only worsen the problems of our current economic model.
And you're right: the voluntarist, the anarchist viewpoint is alien to me. Wich means my viewpoint is probably just as alien to you ;-) Here's how I see it: the lesson we learned is not that centralization is by definition a bad thing. The lesson we learned is not that it's bad by definition that leaders and followers exist; that lies at the heart of our biology and instincts. The lesson is not that freedom is always a good thing. Try and exchange the word "freedom" with "co-existing", and you'll get a sense of what I think freedom really is. Freedom is not something any individual can obtain, freedom is always found in and granted by the community of people you're part of. And lately we've learned that Dapps and smart contracts do not protect us from basic human behavior; "-isms" aren't programmable.
And that's just it: voluntarism is just another -ism, built on the same dodgy foundation we've conjured up since we started producing more than we need. A funny thing happened back then: we started overproducing but kept the scarcity mindset. We live now in times of hyper-materialism and social hyper-atomization. If there's anything we don't need right now, it is another -ism that further accelerates the evolution toward a world where every individual is an island on its own. The extent to which this hyper-individualistic mindset is evolved in the anarchist mindset is so clear in my mind when you say, not just you but anarchists in general, that you "own" your body. That's alien to me. I am me, I don't own me, there's no contract involved when it comes to defining who or what is "me".
Freedom and capitalism, markets, trading, are ultimately incompatible. This starts with that alien concept of ownership. What does it mean to own something? Ownership is a legal construct, thought up by owners. But it's a legal construct and there freedom is lost immediately. When "worth" is measured by material ownership, there's no way on earth to have real equal opportunity without a totalitarian government. This is the phantom of that other -ism. Both are doomed to fail and none is preferable.
Freedom and some measure of equality of opportunity is obtainable in one way only: discussion. And that is what "democracy" basically means. We discuss before we act. And we decide by majority vote. And we have a constitution to protect the ones left behind by those decisions. That's it. Starting with the basic truth that an individual is literally worth nothing, and that all we've ever achieved we've achieved by intense collaboration (and not competition, don't even get me started on that one...), a democracy is the best guarantee for maximal freedom for the maximum number of individuals.
It's difficult, I know; no one said a functional democracy is a simple thing to do. And yes, we'll have to accept that things won't always go our way, which is also a simple basic fact of life. It's too bad that none of us has experience with true democracy, without the machinations of ownership and owners that constantly try to maximize their material wealth. Freedom is incompatible with that basic mindset. Not all human interactions are voluntary. Some just are. Freedom lies in the acceptance of that basic fact.
We're miles apart, my friend, where it comes to the means by which we want to achieve a mutually shared goal :-) But I do truly appreciate you discussing this with me. And I know I'm the extremist here; your viewpoint has a lot of support in the cryptoverse ;-) And I'm also glad that we can both agree that the current status quo should be fought in a peaceful way, so yes, "exit" the fiat economy might well be the best course of action for the moment; that's why we're both here I suppose. And who knows, I might be wrong on all of this and be pleasantly surprised when voluntarism takes over. Thanks again for your generous responses @zoidsoft :-)