Fav quotes

[MrBogosity]

"Remember, whatever the government can do to others, it can do to you. We are only free when everyone is free." --Lee Wrights

[MrBogosity]

The whole video is great, but the win part starts about 3:23 in:

[yt]3nOgdc5JmYM&start=203[/yt]

[MrBogosity]

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." --Dwight D. Eisenhower

[MrBogosity]

A reworking of an old economics saying that's going around the internet:

"Recession is when you lose your job. Depression is when I lose mine. Recovery is when Obama loses his."

[AnCap Dave]

This is a pretty good piece by John Stossel.

Here's my fantasy: Libertarians are elected to the presidency and to majorities in Congress. What would happen next? Well, if libertarians were "in charge," you'd have more freedom and prosperity.

Freedom frightens some people. They say if no one is in charge there would be chaos. That is intuitive, but think about a skating rink. Before rinks were invented, if you proposed an amusement in which people strap blades to their feet and skate around on ice at whatever speeds they wish, you'd have been called crazy. There's got to be speed limits, stoplights, turn signals. But we know that people navigate rinks safely on their own. They create their own order, with only minimal rules.

Society would work the same way — and does to a large extent even today. "Great part of that order which reigns among mankind is not the effect of government," Thomas Paine, the soul of the American Revolution, wrote. "It has its origin in the principles of society and the natural constitution of man. ... Common interest (has) a greater influence than the laws of government."

If libertarians were "in charge," there would be laws to protect us from foreign enemies and those who would steal from us or injure us. Today, by contrast, under the rule of Democans and Republicrats, we're drowning in rules — 160,000 pages' worth. Micromanagement kills opportunity and freedom.

Maybe if there were a way to have more competition among governments, things would be better. Competition forces people to become more efficient and to get rid of stupid rules. What if we let people take over some unused land in America to create areas with fewer rules, simpler legal systems, smaller government?

I explored that subject last week with Michael Strong and Magatte Wade, founders of the Free Cities Project.

Strong said, "We want to encourage thousands of people to create new governments that have different rules, each competing for customers with the best education and best health care, the most peace and prosperity you could imagine."

Of course, state governments would have to approve this.

"There are already Native American reservations in the U.S. ... They can become more free.

Honduras already has something like this. In Senegal, we're encouraging a move toward an autonomous city-state that would allow for peace and prosperity."

Wade is Strong's wife and an entrepreneur from Senegal, where she saw firsthand how bad rules prevent people from creating prosperity.

"We need jobs. Who creates jobs? Entrepreneurs," she said.

But Senegal is awash in rules. There was a government monopoly on cement. When the government allowed competition, prices fell by a third.

She started a beverage company.

"It was an ordeal. I did it because I am from Senegal. I have an interest in trying to improve things. But for an American company ... why would they put themselves through such a thing?"

"What people don't realize is the developing world is massively overregulated," Strong said. "Africa is the most regulated continent on earth."

In the Congo, it requires 18 documents to import anything.

Wade added: "The fact we have so many rules — who benefits most? Multinationals."

"And crony capitalists," Strong added. "Corruption in Africa is a symptom of massive overregulation."

Are there any free cities along the lines Strong and Wade envision?

"Hong Kong and Singapore are the best examples," Strong said. "Now they are among the wealthiest places on earth."

And there is a free city in Dubai because the emirate wanted to create a financial sector, but sharia law prevented it.

"Dubai was brilliant," Strong said. "They looked around the world. They saw that Hong Kong, Singapore, New York, Chicago, Sydney, London all ran British common law. British common law is much better for commerce than is French common law or sharia law. So they took 110 acres of Dubai soil, put British common law with a British judge in charge, and they went from an empty piece of soil to the 16th most powerful financial center in world in eight years."

It's what libertarians have said: Freedom works, and government, when it grows beyond the barest minimum, keeps people poor.

[MrBogosity]

Full of win:

[yt]cQYQ4ZVXjZQ[/yt]

[AnCap Dave]

[yt]NTx6t3FUSkM[/yt]

One quote that really stands out from the video:
"The moment that I have a right, a basic foundation on human right, to somebody else's labor, to somebody else's knowledge, to somebody else's expertise, to somebody else's time, that person has become my slave and I do not advocate slavery and you damn well should not advocate slavery if you are in the business of extending and expanding human freedom." - Stefan Molyneux

[MrBogosity]

Every American needs to read this one: http://peacefreedomprosperity.com/5734/oathbreaker/

[Ibrahim90]

Full of win:

[yt]cQYQ4ZVXjZQ[/yt]

yeah-that was a great one. it's on my favorites list right now.

[Travis Retriever]

[yt]Cd-SLRyuRq0[/yt]

Yet another reason why government will never work.  Ever. Period. End of Story.

[AnCap Dave]

[yt]lXNOxnn7_uA[/yt]

[Ibrahim90]

[yt]Cd-SLRyuRq0[/yt]

Yet another reason why government will never work.  Ever. Period. End of Story.

well, this guy has found himself a new sub.

EDIT: watching more of him makes me even more convinced that he is a good YT investment. 

[Lord T Hawkeye]

If you think that's good, check out his vid "The Story of your enslavement"

[AnCap Dave]

"If that moron Columbus hadn't of gotten lost we would have a Buddhist instead of a native American in the Village People. I love the fact we make a holiday over a guy who got lost and did his best to enslave and rape a nation. It's like making heroes of the Somalia pirates-if they discover something while they are robbing and murdering folks! Just my opinion!" - John Layfield

[evensgrey]

This is a pretty good piece by John Stossel.

This reminds me of a Radio documentary (almost comically, from CBC Radio 1's long-running series Idea, which is a Canadian government-sponsored broadcaster that had a surprising number of government-skewering documentaries on that particular show, that is to say, any at all) I heard.

Some years back, Peru attempted to sell its' public telephone monopoly for something like $100 million.  Nobody was interested.  On investigating why, the government of Peru discovered that nobody was wiling to buy it because Peruvian property law was so messed up that it was impossible to define exactly what was for sale.  They cleaned up the law so that there was a clear identification of the exact property that was for sale, and got something like $1 BILLION for it.

This caused a group of Peruvian academics to ask the question:  Does the Developing World fail to develop because of bad property laws?

They investigated a number of countries, and found that the lack of functioning property laws was a major economic problem.

In most Western, developed countries, if you want to build a building on a piece of land that you own, you do something like this:

You go down to the planning office, and file a request for a building permit (which usually requires a copy of the plans for what you want to build, and for common things like detached garages many jurisdictions will even supply you with stock plans for a reasonable design for a nominal fee).  You file that one request with one office, and usually you get an answer back in no more than a few days.

Compare that to the situation in Egypt at the time.  The Peruvians calculated that if you wanted to build a house on an empty stretch of desert, with no agricultural, mining, historical, or other significance, and you spent 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year (what we typically consider full-time employment levels of time and effort in North America), it would take you 18 YEARS to do all the paperwork.  To build a house on an empty piece of desert of no importance to anyone for any reason, except yourself.  This was so pointless and wasteful, that more than 90% of buildings in Egypt had no official paperwork on them whatsoever.

This lack of official paperwork has serious economic repercussions.

In a Western country, if you own a piece of land, there's normally a registration of that fact with the local Land Title (or equivalent) Registry Office.  This is used for assessing property tax, but it also acts as a place where liens of various sorts can be registered and checked for.  This means that when buying land, it is possible to verify that the person you are buying it from has legal authority to sell it, and you can check for encumbrances on the use of that land (such as easements, flood plain restrictions, waterway use and access limitations, etc.).  It ALSO means that a lender can be reasonably certain that all is what it's supposed to be when loaning you the money to buy it against the value of the property itself (the typical way you buy property with a mortgage).

That simply isn't possible in Egypt for almost all people, since there's no paperwork on almost everything.  That means that, for instance, while everyone in the neighborhood may agree who owns a particular house, and so the sale of that house for cash will be accepted, no lender will give a mortgage on the property because there's no way to register that it exists anywhere that informs people about it, and no mechanism available to effectively enforce the mortgage if it goes into default.

That means that most Egyptians have no access to loans against the value of the homes they own, making it very hard for them to get the money to start or expand a business.  Egypt is practically CARPETED with people running small businesses of all kinds.  Some of these people doubtless have the skills, drive, and luck needed to expand their small businesses into larger, more efficient, and more profitable businesses, but they have no way to get the capital needed to do so.

Fixing the mess isn't easy, and won't be quick.  The property laws in the West aren't perfect, and we've been working on them for several centuries.  Acknowledging that there's a HUGE problem with the property law regime (namely, that in many countries it's outright BROKEN) is the first step towards trying to fix the problems.