I’m not saying that the state will collapse because of “economic laws”, but that the state will collapse because entrepreneurs will create better tools. After all, whether you believe that the people running the state know what is going on or not, people accept the state as a tool. If some entrepreneurs come around who can build and market a better tool, it really doesn’t matter what the masses think before that happens.
Spooner created a better Mail Service, has the U.S. postal service dissolved since?
We need to convince somebody, but we don’t really need to convince the masses. If all of the geniuses in our society are trapped in the statist paradigm, nothing is going to come of this. But, if the geniuses start realizing this stuff, and start escaping from the statist paradigm - and I’m sure that this is happening right now, then we could expect something to happen.
“The geniuses” don’t exist outside of the public sphere of influence. They won’t be able to escape the state without, at least, public acceptance. If the public resents the geniuses having their own courts, they will use the state to take it away.
I agree with your main point, in fact, I’ve argued similarly elsewhere. Claiming that the best way to spread liberty was to convince wealthy people that they need private security forces and then let the envious middle class adopt them, and so on. However, this all still rests on the publics acceptance, as they still know the state to be a tool at their disposal, and the more they understand about real economics and less they believe in folk-economics the more likely it will be accepted.
Hopefully I can clear this up in the next part of this post:
But we need to make a distinction between “practical acceptance” and “theoretical acceptance”.
I’m saying that it is a mistake to look for theoretical acceptance, because they simply don’t care about your theories, but that we should look for practical acceptance. I don’t care what the masses think in theory, but only what they do in practice.
I don’t care what the masses think in theory, but only what they do in practice.
Yes. Theory without practice is the same garbage we got from the liberalism of the ‘founding fathers’. It does, of course, help if people support liberalism theoretically. However, de facto liberalism is the goal; people’s beliefs are only a means to this end, and often not a very practical one.
It doesn’t prove anything. It can be used to help illustrate a point though.
No, that isn’t at all what I’m saying.
Really, you weren’t saying we need to convince select groups to adopt new measures? (Thats all I was saying)
But we need to make a distinction between “practical acceptance” and “theoretical acceptance”.
I’m saying that it is a mistake to look for theoretical acceptance, because they simply don’t care about your theories, but that we should look for practical acceptance. I don’t care what the masses think in theory, but only what they do in practice.
And I think its a mistake to make a large distinction between the two. I think peoples actions are heavily influenced by their ideas and the more people understand and adopt good ideas (theory) the more likely they are to practice and accept them.
I think peoples actions are heavily influenced by their ideas and the more people understand and adopt good ideas (theory) the more likely they are to practice and accept them.
Ever been to church. Ever seen how Christians behave? For most people ‘ideas’ are about fitting in, not figuring out.
It’s not necessarily, but very few people adopt abstract ideas on the basis of facts or reason.
I haven’t asked them to, nor should they for some (such as religion). That doesn’t mean the knowledge cannot or should not be imparted on them, that it would be a useless endeavor to attempt, or that the results wouldn’t be positive if it was.
That “public acceptance” is so trivial as to already exist.
That really read like you were pushing the cart before the horse.
The most extreme example of this is a company saying “ok, the state takes 20% of your income per year; if you sign up with us, we will require only 10% per year and will defend you from the state”. After a while, when other companies competing with them keep lowering it, we will finally be left with such a powerless state that we will need something other than the state to provide protection from petty criminals; and those companies would probably morph into general defense agencies.
The only such a company could survive is due to widespread support.