The proof is the result. The results we've obtained are tyranny. Thus, competent "movers and shakers" must want tyranny, or at least not want freedom too badly.
What is reality? There are two basic choices: "Some people are very competent, but don't want freedom" or "no people are very competent." Because I (a relatively poor person) figured out how to win individual freedom, I have to assume far more accomplished people could do it, if they wanted to. (I lack the skill to build a rocket to mars, a tesla car, its battery, or a hyperloop mag-lev train. But I could get someone elected to a state legislature easily enough, for a fraction of what the Ds and Rs spend.) ...But it never happens. Therefore, either I'm wrong (I have only one reason to believe this), or winning dramatically more freedom is almost impossible.
Throughout History, more freedom has been won, and freedom has often been dramatically-expanded. Therefore, it's not impossible, unless some special situation makes it impossible right now. But none of the conventional paths are even being tried: I know this because I watched the Libertarian Party waste over $1M every 4 years, for 16 years. I also looked up how much it cost Dick Randolph to win 4 State legislative seats in the AK State Legislature. I also saw how it could be done even more cheaply. ...If I could see it, others could too. ...Everyone except these genius titans of industry who call themselves "libertarians."
...Sorry, I'm not buying it!
With the amount of money Peter Thiel has spent on elections, I could have elected many state legislators and sheriffs, and there would now be proof that libertarianism (classical liberalism) is the best social system, and improves life the most for both rich and poor.
So what do we know from "the outputs" of Thiel's spending?
He spends to influence "electoral political contests as they are currently framed" in the same way others spend to influence "electoral political contests as they are currently framed." Meaning: He spends on people who have not taken his advice("Zero To One" Peter Thiel, Blake Masters), and have been competitors in a rigged game with small profit margins. He has spent nothing on people who are looking to exploit likely political domains that have high payoffs (or, if he has, these people have wasted his money or been killed in the process of not wasting it). This is an example of people competing (at very high cost, for very limited "best case scenario" gains) and losing because they're competing in a cybernetically-controlled (statistically controlled) domain without acknowledging that control.
It appears Thiel gave to Ron Paul's parasites("SuperPAC" structured by the FEC that exists purposefully to make sure no libertarian is ever successful in elections) as a form of "virtue signaling" ...because the lowest-common-denominator libertarians through the brightest pragmatic libertarians(Randy Barnett) held Ron Paul in high regard. But as to asking what this money would accomplish, and insisting it accomplish the consequence of expanding freedom? NOPE.
Ayn Rand despised and scoffed at the sentiment: "The law, in its fairness, forbids the rich from sleeping under bridges, as well as the poor." ...And she was right to, in one sense, and to some extent. But her binary "all or nothing" view of reality and of scalar values led her to a sub-optimal(for obtaining what she claimed to want) stated view. Yes, I fully understand that everyone should be "equal under the law," but that statement that Rand despised led her to qualify her hatred, in the following way: (3a) Everyone should be 100% equal under the law. (And all libertarians except those who have been corrupted by liberalism can generally agree on that.) (3b) She admitted that inequality under the law has always and does always hurt the poor far more than the rich. (3c) She admitted that "lifeboat scenarios" were not legitimate means of constructing laws which are intended to render such scenarios unlikely. (And she admitted that it would be moral for a survivor to engage in cannibalism in a lifeboat scenario where that was the only option that led to survival.) ....The problem for Rand, (and Thiel, in this analogy) is that they don't defend cop-killers. Now that seems like a non-sequitur, but think it through: (3d) The laws currently harm the poor in an illegitimate way, in a way that is a death-sentence to the poor, but hardly noticeable to the rich. (3e) Police enforce all those laws. (3f) The rich libertarians want to be seen as "mainstream," so they don't defend the desperate measure to which the poor are pushed under the current regime of highway-theft and imprisonment. They abandon their philosophy when the radical implications of that philosophy would only benefit the poor, and not them. (After all, if they attract attention to themselves defending cop-killers, and other extreme measures to unmake the scalar, extreme, value-based, consequentialist unfairness of illegitimate laws, that will then put them at GREATER risk, even if it minimizes the ultimate expansion of the "no sleeping under bridges laws" that would ultimately affect them.) (3g) In short, they join the majority in saying "fuck the poor" by simply not defending the poor from the worst of the unfair laws. (3h) In Atlas Shrugged, she paid lip-service to doing exactly that, when Rearden was thanked by the mob of supporters outside of the courthouse, and a man said, "These (illegitimately, stupidly)rich bastards don't realize that when they're giving away their mansions, they're giving away the shirts off of our backs." (3i) In real life, she never defended the right of the poor man to shoot a cop in self-defense, and she championed Alan Greenspan and other totalitarians who had attained power, by using her ideas as a parasitic bacteria uses a plasmid: a means of defeating the guard of your philosophical enemies by pretending to be philosophically similar to them. (3j) In real life, Rand would not have taken the side of Danneskjold or Galt, because she wouldn't have actually recognized that her ideas are understood by the poor: they have a bad deal precisely because of corrupted government, degraded democracy, and the police state. She would have continued to do what she did: claim that "It's too early to rebel" (as if it was getting easier to rebel, over time).
Thiel is a little better in this regard: he seems to recognize that his ideas are morally righteous, and "to hell with all the critics": he speaks for the unknown man, and sees part of Rand's obstinacy in "Zero to One." ...But he, like Rand, doesn't have the intellectual integrity to act on behalf of the unknown but righteous man. Also: Why take the personal risk? Rand never even spoke up for the unknown poor people being crushed under the boot of the cops. She defended the cops, and this defense has informed the current totally illegitimate libertarian movement in the USA. (And her "ray-screen" has caused them to be delusionally in favor of imaginary, "all or nothing," binary solutions in the domain of politics/warfare.)
- No billionaire libertarians, including Thiel, have spoken out against SuperPACs, and in defense of free speech. George Will is the only one! That's fucking inexcusable, because that's one of the primary reasons there is no freedom: government silencing of political speech, and sabotaging of minor party funding. (The NY State finance reporting requirement was allegedly the reason Howard Stern dropped out of the NY governor's race.)
So the LP limps along, under FBI control, as "controlled opposition."
Politics is war. The two disciplines are the same, but politics knows the world is watching. One side of American politics has been victorious and dominant for over a century: the side of parasitic tyranny.
Personally wealthy libertarians can and should all be included with "the enemy" until they fight HARD to win freedom, because "siding with the incumbent power by default" is the only reason the incumbent tyrants have won.
Tyrants like Trump couldn't win with every outspoken person like Thiel disagreeing with them, and giving continual criticism and opposition.
If they demanded that traffic ticketing, drug arrests, prostitution stings, raw milk raids, tax raids, and all other police actions with no valid, 2-part corpus immediately cease, and stated that "The Trump Administration cannot be morally acceptable while it is doing these things. These actions violate christian morality, as well as basic secular morality. Very few people would ever do what is expected of police officers, and if they did those things, they would be pariahs in their community, and rightfully so. We need to stop excusing the actions of police officers because they wield badges and a totally corrupted law and court system. The Nuremberg defense is not legitimate: When a cop pulls one car over on the highway for traveling at 85 mph, he must also pull over every car, in order for that to not be an instance of arbitrary and selective law enforcement. Arbitrary and selective law enforcement is the direct opposite of "equality under the law."
In short, Thiel (and John Mackey, and all the other wealthy libertarians) should discover Thoreau, and apply Thoreau's wisdom fully and consistently.
Here are some relevant parts of that wisdom:
Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence. A minority is powerless while it conforms to the majority; it is not even a minority then; but it is irresistible when it clogs by its whole weight. If the alternative is to keep all just men in prison, or give up war and slavery, the State will not hesitate which to choose. If a thousand men were not to pay their tax bills this year,Note that would not be a violent and bloody measure, as it would be to pay them, and enable the State to commit violence and shed innocent blood. This is, in fact, the definition of a peaceable revolution, if any such is possible. If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, "But what shall I do?" my answer is, "If you really wish to do anything, resign your office." When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has resigned from office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now.
and
They who know of no purer sources of truth, who have traced up its stream no higher, stand, and wisely stand, by the Bible and the Constitution, and drink at it there with reverence and humanity; but they who behold where it comes trickling into this lake or that pool, gird up their loins once more, and continue their pilgrimage toward its fountainhead.
The prior paragraph probably gave Rand the title for "The Fountainhead," either consciously or otherwise.
Empathy(not Randian logic or "objectivity" or "non-contradiction") is the source/"fountainhead" of legitimate governance and the Jury is the means by which empathy (limiting of punishment) is inserted into the government. The Jury is the only significant source of empathy in government. Now that we no longer have proper juries, we no longer have the minimum standard of western civilization, because civilization is defined by governance(cybernetics). While it's true that logic should align with empathy, this need not be the case for the jury system to exert emergent "logic" or "optimal outcomes" of sorts, in the same emergent manner in which statistical estimation often gives good results. The neuron firings that give rise to emergent thoughts are no more intelligent than an empathic juror who decides based on empathy: but the real value there is in realizing, logically, that most state punishments are illegitimate, unnecessary, and ill-advised, and that a strong means of discerning between pot-smokers and serial killers is NECESSARY to the proper functioning of law and government.
The best modern summary of the pattern referred to by Thoreau is from Blackwell's famous essay, "The Real Nature of Politics":
You owe it to your philosophy to study how to win. You have a moral obligation to learn how to win.
If the libertarian philosophy is correct, then the powerful who allow tyranny are appeasers. There's no way around this logical implication.
Now, fellow libertarians who have an admirable character will say, "You're a pretentious asshole for claiming to require work from others. You're no better than the communists who claim to know what's best for others."
...But the inescapable facts of cybernetics are true: Whatever causes tyranny is the enemy. Defense of socialism is well-funded. Defense of capitalism lacks even a spare nickel, relatively speaking.
OK. Then the material reality of humans, as we enter the Singularity (the most important time in human history to get the ideas correct) will be a bland tyranny.
...And this will very likely lead to "a boot stomping on a human face, forever." "Very likely" in my estimation is 30%. ...But that's way too high a number to proceed mindlessly into the future, as we have been.
Peter Thiel claims these ideas, but there isn't a corresponding level of hunger in his belly.
Compare that to the fire in Joe Stack's belly: He gave his life for the ideas. (What could he have done with real wealth?)
Compare that to the fire in Schaeffer Cox's belly: He's serving a life sentence for a trumped-up RICO charge, because he set up a private court system that delegitimized the socialist courts of lies in Alaska.
Compare that to the fire in Ross Ulbricht's belly: He's serving a life sentence because he built technology that circumvented the mindless totalitarian state(albeit imperfectly).
Compare that to the fire in Aaron Patterson's belly: He's serving a life-sentence because when he was exonerated and relased from his 17 years on death row by DNA evidence, he began walking door-to-door organizing against the Daley machine. The Daley machine had a highschool friend and informant drive drugs and guns to Patterson's house, framing him, and then using lying testimony from someone who was coerced into giving it.
Compare that to the fire in Rick Ross's belly, to learn what he needed to know to teach himself to read, and then teach himself the law at a level high enough to set himself free from a life-sentence, while he was in prison.
I could go on, and on, and on.
...But the truth is provided by Thoreau, and Mencken:
Thoreau:
[20] I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both in person and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait till they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.[21] I meet this American government, or its representative, the State government, directly, and face to face, once a year no more in the person of its tax-gatherer; this is the only mode in which a man situated as I am necessarily meets it; and it then says distinctly, Recognize me; and the simplest, the most effectual, and, in the present posture of affairs, the most indispensable mode of treating with it on this head, of expressing your little satisfaction with and love for it, is to deny it then. My civil neighbor, the tax-gatherer, is the very man I have to deal with for it is, after all, with men and not with parchment that I quarrel -and he has voluntarily chosen to be an agent of the government. How shall he ever know well that he is and does as an officer of the government, or as a man, until he is obliged to consider whether he will treat me, his neighbor, for whom he has respect, as a neighbor and well-disposed man, or as a maniac and disturber of the peace, and see if he can get over this obstruction to his neighborlines without a ruder and more impetuous thought or speech corresponding with his action. I know this well, that if one thousand, if one hundred, if ten men whom I could name-if ten honest men only, nay, if one HONEST man, in this State of Massachusetts, ceasing to hold slaves, were actually to withdraw from this co-partnership, and be locked up in the county jail therefor, it would be the abolition of slavery in America. For it matters not how small the beginning may seem to be: what is once well done is done forever.Note But we love better to talk about it: that we say is our mission. Reform keeps many scores of newspapers in its service, but not one man.
H. L. Mencken, speaking out against a lynching:
Not a single bigwig came forward in the emergency, though the whole town knew what was afoot. Any one of a score of such bigwigs might have halted the crime, if only by threatening to denounce its perpetrators, but none spoke. So Williams was duly hanged, burned and mutilated.
The primary reason we have tyranny is that parasitic tyranny fights to maintain its power, and libertarianism doesn't fight to win power. This is true from the lowest bacterial or fungal infection to the largest, most malevolent and technologically-sophisticated parasite, the modern police state.
G. Edward Griffin said it best, of all the modern libertarians:
If libertarians don't try, the future will be enslaved, and those libertarians who didn't try will be dead. They will not live to see their beloved Singularity, because the most destructive force on Earth (organized sociopaths manipulating society into a self-serving prohibitionist police state) will have destroyed them, by denying them technological progress at market speeds.
There's no getting around this: innovation comes from all market participators, from unknown directions. All competent brains must be engaged in the market. Government education cripples the young. Government-controlled FDA outlaws all treatments not yet "approved" (only slaves need "approval"). Government prohibitionists kick down doors, looking for drugs, guns, prostitutes, gambling chips, etc. All but the tiniest amount of government activity is bullying and extortion.
The message is simple:
- STOP, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO USE FORCE.
- ALL INTERACTION SHOULD BE VOLUNTARY.
- I DISAGREE THAT ANY OF THIS IS BENEFICIAL, DO YOU WANT TO FORCE ME TO PAY FOR WHAT I BELIEVE IS HARMFUL? IF SO, YOU ARE A MONSTER.
- THE COMMON LAW SET UP A VOLUNTARY GOVERNMENT WHERE JURIES WERE SUPREME OVER THE OTHER 3 BRANCHES OF GOVERNMENT YOU LEARNED ABOUT IN GOV SCHOOL, HERE'S HOW WE LOST IT:
- IF I DISAPPEAR, THEN THE GOVERNMENT IS TOTALITARIAN AND MUST BE OVERTHROWN WITH FORCE OF ARMS. EVERY VIOLENT, GUN-CARRYING GOVERNMENT EMPLOYEE IS FAIR GAME. (AS IN THE SCI-FI MOVIE, "THE DAY THE EARTH STOOD STILL.")
The above five arguments, and their sub-arguments, skilfully wielded, would bring the US totalitarian police state to its knees.
...But you don't hear those arguments from the wealthy libertarians. Why not?
Short-sightedness.
They think they're going to live forever, without a free market, because they can buy comfort and luxury right now, and things are slowly improving.
Sorry! Things are improving too slow to save your lives, and you know it! Ray Kurzweil's ideas won't come to fruition if we allow artificial general intelligence to be born on a battlefield in service to sociopathic idiots who want to dominate the world. (And sure, ISIS is worse, but that's no standard to compare ourselves to! How degraded are we?!)
Want to live forever? Invest in freedom! Or die. Your choice. This isn't a threat, this is a realistic view of reality.
Take off the rose-colored glasses and the nose-plugs. You're in a rising swamp, and Donald Trump just let a big leech(Jeff Sessions) loose in it, while saying how much he loves all the little leeches (police, prosecutors). It doesn't matter if some of his appointees appear to be "better than the other side would have given us" ...the entire totalitarian swamp really does need to be drained. ...And Trump is hiring a lot of career politicians to fill totally illegitimate positions.
Stop assuming the existing government has a shred of legitimacy. It doesn't.
It's time to stop the damage, and the best way to do that is to, first, stop contributing to it, and second, to insist that those doing the damage immediately cease and desist, or pay a steep price.
Carrot and stick.
Incentives govern human action.
When John Mackey gives $40,000 to the Libertarian Party, it looks like he's serious and wants to help.
But when you find out that he kicks libertarian activists out of his store parking lots when they're politely trying to gather nominating petition signatures for state legislative candidates (who won't be on the ballot unless there's an easier place to petition inside the state legislative district than the out-of-district statewide petitioning areas on universities), you realize: He doesn't give a fuck if abolitionists (libertarians) actually take power from slavers (Ds & Rs). ...He's just "virtue signaling."
Mackey actually said that LP petitioners had a right to petition in front of his stores on public sidewalks! (Gee, thanks for "giving us permission" to do something that even the tyrannical Supreme Court of the USA has said is our 1st Amendment Right!)
With friends like these, who needs enemies?