Dave Scotese — Voluntaryism is a purposeful misspelling of volunteerism or voluntarism (take your pick) because it is not founded on 
providing services for free. Instead, it’s founded on the non-aggression principle. More precisely, it’s founded on the idea of never threatening to violate another person’s rights. That makes it sound very common, and I believe it is, but threats of right-violation can be hidden. For example a tax is a state demand for property, and if it weren’t backed by the threat of violation of property (seizure) or movement (incarceration), then it wouldn’t be a tax. Sadly, most people accept taxation while also remaining largely voluntaryist otherwise. I believe this duplicity has been a core reason for human suffering for many centuries.
I like to provide some work for free to new clients and allow them to encourage me to work more by paying me. If they don’t like my work, they don’t pay, and I don’t work for them any more. This way, there’s no contract. My view of contract itself has changed too because to me a contract is merely a written specification of an otherwise joint agreement, intended to nail down details that might otherwise be forgotten. I would never rely on a contract in court, but rather, if I have kept up my end of a deal but the other guy hasn’t, that’s my fault for trusting someone who is untrustworthy. If you read “Woe Unto You Lawyers” by Fred Rodell, you’ll see that both myself and my clients are protected from the legal profession through this strategy.
About 20 years ago, my friend Brian Gladish suggested that when we vote, we are attempting to control the ways in which we can violate each other. One guy says we can take more money from everyone and spread it around to the less fortunate. Another guy says we can take more money from everyone and use it to spread Democracy. After thinking about it, I realized what he meant. Both of these guys want it to be OK to raise taxes and spend them on various presumably good efforts. But taxation, as described above, is stealing. Voting is generally just an attempt to control what we do with our plunder, which is managed by the state. He asked if I had read Atlas Shrugged and I said yes. He said that explained some of the advanced understanding I seemed to have.
A couple years before I met Brian, I noticed that the Internet was connecting people, which presented a tremendous opportunity for cooperation. The problem is information overload. I wanted to find or build a website that would allow the readers to increase or decrease the likelihood that other readers would see a piece of writing. That way, information that was useless would only have to be seen by a few people before it got filtered out. My friend Jeff Hardy said “Like slashdot?” I’d never heard of slashdot, so I checked it out. One of the posts I found there mentioned Condorcet Voting, so I checked it out. It is one of the best mechanisms for finding consensus, but it isn’t used much. Brian and I shared an office, so I mentioned Condorcet Voting to him one day, and that led to his point about taxes.
I built my website, litmocracy.com, based on this voting method, used to accomplish my goal of filtering out the less appealing writing submissions. What it has taught me is highly instructive: When the Condorcet Method is used by a large group of people, the group naturally separates itself into multiple pieces, each with its own set of values. For example, women tend to like one kind of writing better than another, whereas men like the other. Democrats and Republicans do the same thing, and so does subject matter: funny, about food, about animals, philosophical, etc.; each has its set of followers. In terms of picking someone to rule you, the lesson is this: Every person who wishes to be ruled should choose his or her own ruler. No ruler should be imposed on someone who doesn’t want that ruler to rule them.
The non-aggression principle is more important than filtering out low quality information, so when I think about what the Condorcet Method taught me through my website, I conclude that we don’t need rulers – we need leaders. My friend Don Eminizer said I am one, but I don’t have enough exposure. Another friend, Ernest Dempsey, said my writing is good and wanted to use it on a site he works with. Voluntaryism rejects electoral politics and so do I, but Ron Paul is a great leader and educator, and if you’re going to keep trying to force me to obey rules invented by politicians, then I urge you to choose someone like Ron Paul (or Gary Johnson) to be the president. Just remember that you are supporting what Bastiat explained: “The state is that great fiction by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else.” It is a tool of oppression and the more people stop using it and instead defend themselves and others from it, the better. And that means being a Voluntaryist.
“The state is that great fiction by which everyone attempts to live at the expense of everyone else.”
So please explain how people would function without the state?
I believe Dave’s point is not to overthrow the state overnight but allow ourselves the opportunity to work hard, get civilized in the real sense so that we don’t need a central authority to control us – to become sensible humans who don’t have to be controlled but who know the proper limits and respect it. If all of us could become so, would we need a state?
Don Eminizer asked “So please explain how people would function without the state?”
The same way we function without a doctor living in our homes to make sure we eat every now and then. Your question shows the effects of mainstream media and public schooling. If we were forced to allow doctors to live with us to monitor our eating and sleeping habits, and the same propaganda machines were used to justify that instead of the existence of the state, then it would be difficult to see that there is no need for the doctor to live with us.
Ernest wrote “…so that we don’t need a central authority to control us – to become sensible humans who don’t have to be controlled but who know the proper limits and respect them.”
Very close, but the catharsis in a lot of people’s lives who sense a burden comes when they “set down [their] chains, until only faith remains” (Jewel Kilcher, Life Uncommon). That faith is a faith in oneself, and comes from the Rite of Passage of which I wrote in my interview (http://greenheritagenews.com/rite-of-passage-dave-scotese-weighs-power-of-pen-against-sword/). There is no need for a transition – just live without using the state and you’ll see that it’s more of a burden than a help.
Do you live without the state? When was the last time you didn’t pay taxes? Use roads? Need a policeman or the fire department?
There are glass houses, and then there are glass stones. This sounds like throwing a glass stone to hear it go ping inside the glass house so you can say you made some noise.
So I’ll repeat my question: So please explain how people would function without the state?
And I mean in concrete terms. What are YOU doing? What should I do? What should we all do to remedy a situation that I think most people believe is untenable, yet no one seems to have answers as to how to go about this.
I live without using the state, but I can’t live without the state, because it’s there and too difficult (so far) for me to eliminate.
The roads and firemen and police are useful to me, and if there were no state to steal money from me in order to pay for them, I suppose you worry that they might cease to exist. However, one of the conditions of my home loan is to maintain fire insurance, so I’m pretty sure the bank would pay the firemen if the state didn’t. Fire insurance might go up in cost – or it might go down. Unfortunately, the existence of the state prevents us from determining the market price of firemen.
What would I need police for? So that instead of knocking on my neighbor’s door when his dog keeps me up at night, I can use the coercive state? To file a report AFTER my wife’s purse was stolen?
If your question is honest, then I suggest you identify exactly what the state is providing you, and find a way to get it without the state. And Identify what it’s taking from you and find a way to keep it. This is not only ethical (since relying on the state is relying on theft), but practical too. The nation state is dying. Politicians have promised more than they can deliver. Look at Greece.
Nice way to avoid my question by not answering it. You pay taxes, that is an answer in and of itself. You use these services the taxes provide, you simply complain about the cost. You completely ignored the fact that you benefit from the roads and sidewalks, etc., in your reply to my real question, but so be it. Let’s go with the rest.
“The roads and firemen and police are useful to me, and if there were no state to steal money from me in order to pay for them, I suppose you worry that they might cease to exist.”
I didn’t say or intone that, and all my questions, and every statement I ever make is honest, BTW. Period. Your answer, however, belies some dishonesty on your part. because you also said: “I live without using the state, but I can’t live without the state.”
How can you do that and use the roads? That means you are using the state, whether you like it or not, because it is convenient to you. Those roads were built from coerced or stolen, as you say, money. Yet you use them anyway. As you point out, you can simply hire someone to build other roads or devise some system yourself to get around them, but you haven’t, so it’s not quite so simple, is it. You use them. You haven’t constructed new roads
Yet use the roads, so you DO USE the state.
“If your question is honest, then I suggest you identify exactly what the state is providing you, and find a way to get it without the state.”
The state provides me with restrictions and rules and taxes…. and roads and firemen and policemen. Soon healthcare. I’m FULLY AWARE of what it provides AND what it takes. It seems that is is you who ignore the one, and take advantage of the other. You admittedly use the roads, etc., and pay the taxes, yet you want ME to find a way to get these things WITHOUT the state, something you are unwilling to do. And my question was, how would you propose WE go about this, yet you don’t say you will implement this change yourself, just that I should.
Again, I ask: “What are YOU doing? What should I do? What should we all do to remedy a situation that I think most people believe is untenable, but no one seems willing to make a move to actually change?
We’re having a similar discussion here: http://greenheritagenews.com/state-law-and-parenting-another-aura-of-moral-legitimacy/ and I have addressed most of the questions you asked.
One of the issues here is that I benefit from the expenditure of the taxes I am forced to pay. This is like saying that when the thieves who steal all my food feed some of it to me, I am benefiting from them. This is a peculiar way to look at the situation, so, with some effort, I will admit it, but I ask that you admit that I’d be better off if they hadn’t stolen my food in the first place. I have good reason to ignore the benefits provided by the state, and that is the violation of my rights and the rights of all other taxpayers (our rights to what we have earned). I cannot justify the benefit to me of immoral behavior, and bringing up those benefits in an argument about the morality of that behavior simply invites confusion. So yes, I generally ignore it, but am not ignorant of it.
By the way, if I had the means to build private roads and I made an attempt to, the state, using money it took through coercion, would shut me down. I can make the attempt, but using the roads they built while encouraging others to work toward the day when we can build our own roads without resorting to theft is a better use of my time.
“One of the issues here is that I benefit from the expenditure of the taxes I am forced to pay. This is like saying that when the thieves who steal all my food feed some of it to me, I am benefiting from them. This is a peculiar way to look at the situation, so, with some effort, I will admit it, but I ask that you admit that I’d be better off if they hadn’t stolen my food in the first place.”
No, it’s like saying that when the thieves who steal all my food feed some of it to me, I am benefiting from them AND from the food of all the others that they have stolen from. You seem to miss that point. You don’t just get a piece of your own original stolen loot back. You get other pieces of loot stolen from other people as well, which you admit to benefiting from. This is an objective problem of the whole of society, not a subjective problem afflicting only Dave. You must adjust that view in that grand, insightful brain of yours when viewing the pieces on this ugly, massive Chess board as you and others like myself try and devise a solution.
This, is a great answer, and definitely the root of what I’m looking for: “By the way, if I had the means to build private roads and I made an attempt to, the state, using money it took through coercion, would shut me down. I can make the attempt, but using the roads they built while encouraging others to work toward the day when we can build our own roads without resorting to theft is a better use of my time.”
If you threatened to do it they would shut you down, so how do we expose this problem, that the government won’t even ALLOW US to fix things at our own cost because it would both obfuscate and nullify them.
“You must adjust that view in that grand, insightful brain of yours when viewing the pieces on this ugly, massive Chess board as you and others like myself try and devise a solution.”
This is true, that I may actually get more food from the criminals than I would be able to get for myself. Am I rare in having a disgust for this benefit because it is certainly impoverishing others, who get less food, and certainly atrophying the ability and motivation in all of us to provide for ourselves? I don’t think I am rare, but rather just more observant. One of the goals of my writing is to make people more aware that they may be benefiting or suffering from an untenable and immoral system, and one which is destroying motivation on a catastrophic scale.
“If you threatened to do it they would shut you down, so how do we expose this problem, that the government won’t even ALLOW US to fix things at our own cost because it would both obfuscate and nullify them.”
People are trying their own solutions all the time, and getting shut down. Check out Bernard von NotHaus’ attempt to provide a hard currency with his Liberty Dollar. I guess I should post articles about these heroes and the damage being done by the state.
Here is a very good discussion of two general solutions that compete with each other for the minds of those who care about liberty: http://voluntaryist.com/nbnb/party_dialogue.html
Yes, so you agree that “People are trying their own solutions all the time, and getting shut down.” then you give me links to other solutions that are being shut down, though they are helpful.
Writing to inform people is a noble cause, and I applaud you for that, but people are reading YOUR writing. Give US HERE, who are reading THIS, YOUR insight into how we fix this mess.