Recent content by DriftWood

Protectionists and survivalists want for independence will lead to more poverty. One individual should not try and do everything he needs himself, and neither should one country. Its the opposite of division of labour, specialization, and efficient production. Mutual dependency might sound...

The best think would probably be to sell the commons.. like selling fresh water lakes to some private companies. They would sell us fresh drinking water, and if some other company polluted its water supplies.. that would mean a loss for the first companies, as it would mean an increase in the...

Here is another post i wrote some weeks ago.. saying the same thing in a slightly different way. Actually the speculators are innocent scapegoats. Speculation in consumable commodities (as in most things except gold) does not increase the price of the commodity. Check it out: Speculators do...

Nope, because just like with all commodities.. If someone keeps supplies off the market to drive up prices.. then someone else will have the insentive to flood the market with it, to make a profit and gain market share. Thats what happens when prices go up.. people will increase supply. It does...

You asked what was the utopia with free market anarchism.. and I told it. You cant wish away the state. Where there is no state, someone will create one threw civil war. Imagining that the state magically dissappeared overnight and a number of private companies where allowed to take its place...

The utopia is thinking that we can employ someone to protects our rights, without in the process giving away our power to ensure that this party does not abuse his power. The problem with free market anarcism is that there are no checks and balances that keeps the person/company who is employed...

The reason your neigbour does not kill you while you sleep, or steal your things when you are not looking.. even if he wanted to is because the authority (aka the party with an monoply on violence aka the govt) has made rules forbidding it. If he did, he would get into serious trouble with the...

Nope, all speculators can do is drive up the price of paper oil, not the real thing. All they can do is drive up the price of futures contracts. A speculator would "rather be dead" than to actually own any real barrels of oil. So they always sell the futures contract before the time comes when...

Very good link. I think its a way of arguing that the power of violence always trumps the power of any contract. It's a bit naive to think that we can control the govt by contract, or that we could control anyone else by contract that is providing us protection from violence services (like the...

I'm getting a bit tired of reading about anarcho-capitalists idealistic fantasies. Just like the communist fantasies could not work, neither can the anarcho-capitalist ones. They simply do not take human nature into account. I'll spell it out again, no laws are respected without an authority...

Latest news. "Czech government blesses EU treaty" http://euobserver.com/9/26422 Cheers

I agree that paper money is just a commodity as gold, or potatoes, cows etc.. every commdodity has a value because it has some amount of supply and a demand. However not every commodity is a good money, simply because its value changes to drastically. Its like standing on a scale during an...

"When this credit system contracts (and it is), would this not drive up the value of the dollar?" No, I dont think so. For everyone that lived above their means, there was someone that loaned him the money, and that therefore lived below his means. You see it al equals out. For everyone that...

I very much doubt it. I don't know how many of these internet rumored war with Iran deadlines has passed since last year. The public is already war fatigued. It would be political suicide for "them" to start another one. Cheers

There is no deflation, and there probably wont be any. About the only thing price deflating at the moment is the price of housing. This is simply because the supply of housing was growing way faster than the demand was. (People built houses, not so much to live in, as a way to make a profit off...