Bloody Goldilocks!
... you are destroying the very fabric of a forum for FREE and PRINCIPLED INTERCHANGE of INFORMATION!
I disagree. I think you might enjoy this.
Just as an aside, I just came under some kind of denial of service attack ~ my machine at IP address 63.190.40.142 ten minutes ago ~ at my end of the path to Liberty Forum, the Forum was not under attack or overloaded, my machine was being blocked from getting out onto the Web, while I was writing this. I doubt whether it was coming from anyone associated with Liberty Forum, probably some teenager at school with nothing to do, but it was directed at my Web connection. Funny. Ten years ago it might have been scary, but I just dumped the dialup connection and reconnected and it's cleared. Takes less than a minute.
So ...
The electri-gold-plated consolidation of policy we're discussing, "paying" Oink in electronic Web-accessible gold deposits for performing an apparently clerical function, kicking off the Liberty Forum Gold Specie Economy project on the ground. Surely and purely an imaginative enterprise so far. And you think it's also destruction of a free and principled interchange of information. Maybe you're right, but I think not.
There are many factors playing into this dynamic. The practical need for an economic foundation independent of the existing closed or closing and nearly terminally competitive empires of great and minor houses is becoming manifestly apparent to increasing numbers of people, not least because the population is beginning to face the fact that it is terrorized, and that this is irremediable and unavoidably moving measurably toward economic collapse. This is a quite nebulous threat, but very tangible when people consider the possible implications and impacts on their own lives. So there is motivation, but there is not knowledge or the requisite means, to erect an economy to weather the looming storm and quite possibly replace the thunder with sunshine.
I can appreciate John Deere's desire to seize the time with a tangible effort on the ground. I think that in terms of integrity and sincerity and faithful representation of his aims, he can be trusted. He, and others in this Forum, believe they have the requisite knowledge and seek the requisite means. I think that belief is sincere and reasoned in most of them.
Meanwhile, Liberty Forum languishes in terms of attracting individuals capable of forming the necessary bonds of trust ~ which are really quite slight ~ or the inspiration or the wherewithal to realize the opportunity. Our hosts seek to use market forces to bind a new economy, and it is not selling at Liberty Forum.
Market forces develop from human needs and wants, more powerfully from the latter, but more widely from the former. It is the widening that offers success to the enterprise set up to fulfill needs, such as here a need for an independent economic order. Here, the "need" fulfilled is abstruse and perceived by only a few, and the "wants" are those of those same few. They become driving forces, moreover, only when people are confident that a certain effort will yield a certain result reliably to fulfill the need or satisfy the want, which means trust in the efficacy of the effort.
Neither does the present membership wish to be taxed with a burden of obligation to attend this enterprise in any way, and the psychological factors involved push a simple trust ~ in the possible realizeability of such an ambition ~ itself further away from any hope of realization. It redoubles on itself as people spend effort to push themselves away from the idea and the sales pitch, however low-key and subtle it might be.
There are many reasons for this, the central of them again being another dimension of trust. Individuals do not trust the medium, that is, the Web, and they know in their guts that this is a correct stance even though they may not be able to do any of the analyses that prove it. However, like the prevailing economies, the Web is a confidence game ~ which is why having a population terrorized and lacking in confidence destroys it ~ and it's necessary in any enterprise to have confidence that a good outcome is among the potentials, and not less than more likely due to other factors.
And since there can be no realistic confidence in the Web, particularly for conducting an enterprise that has independence as its aim and will axiomatically come under attack from competitive market forces, it is necessary to pretend that it is otherwise. Thus the aim of invoking trust, by asserting trustworthiness, while openly denigrating or suppressing plain evidence that the Web is intrinsically insecure and susceptible to deceptions of hitherto unknown varieties, is self-defeating.
There is no privacy on the Web. There are no provably secure and realizable channels of communication on the Web. A billion-dollar industry has arisen to secure the Webworx of corporate giants with ~ literally, which is the specific problem in all this ~ all the money in the world to spend, and it routinely fails to preclude successful attacks. Believing trust possible on the Web sufficient to raise an economic order ~ when it can't even sustain it for an existing robust economic order firmly rooted on the ground in realtime ~ is flying in the face of reality.
It's easy to go from there to realizing that when people are in an environ lacking trust, then generally they do not trust those who say they know something, whether it is how to do something, how something fits together, or where something should be going, or even what's wrong, if anything. They don't trust someone who is asking something of them or expecting something of them to be actually offering a reciprocal relationship. It plays through all of those things that comprise a coherent social dynamic, and that includes market forces as well as basic understandings of what liberty liberates and what security secures.
And when John Deere says he intends to secure a marketplace of ideas on liberty principles, then institutes policy that makes that impossible in some manner, it's time to sort out what should have been thought through at the beginning, rather than leaving things sufficiently open that organized floor parties ~ standard, historical, ordinary, universally-deployed political instrumentalities comprised of people cooperating to realize an agenda ~ could usurp the flow of liberty through this forum.
Hence consolidation of policy is worth an emolument, since there is a potential return on the investment. It appears to me that it's coming out of someone else's pocket, not mine or yours. I think whoever it is may spend their gold specie as they wish.
And since John Deere seems to think that blood alone can bring a body to life, when there is no body to bring to life, we have this interesting poser.
Money, as has been abundantly shown on this Forum, is the lifeblood of an economic order. It circulates and distributes the vitality of the organism throughout its components of industry, consumption, distribution and service, which are the arms and legs of the economic order. The analogy goes much further, in short what we have here is a matter of blood supply to the head ~ John Deere and his coterie of thinkers on how the economic organism functions well.
In whose thinking, unfortunately, few have confidence, and far fewer have trust. The medium exaggerates the latter factor of trust, literacy and understanding mitigate ~ or perhaps militate against ~ the former factor of confidence. Without that trust and confidence there is no possibility of growing arms and legs, the blood supply dwindles, and the thinking meets a blank wall which is the focus on the blood of the order and no body of the order through which it might flow.
Hence again the proffer of money for a product, to initiate trust and confidence and stimulate a flow using the proper medium of blood, gold specie or perhaps bimetallic currency, which it happens unsurprisingly to promote, the electronic gold, flowing in the untrusted medium of the Web.
These "RFQ" classified ads are attempts to establish capillaries through which to grow a body ~ injections of nutrients to develop musculatures and sinews and production and distribution and consumption and service.
Looks good in theory. It certainly has worked that way in practice many times. But nobody's buying because there's no established trust, and there are factors that militate against developing even that miniscule trust required to move market forces.
But I definitely think it's a good idea to consolidate and review policy for Liberty Forum. It would be better to be able to prove the frauds than be restrained to cover them up. Suppressing information on disingenuous representations is not a really good way to inspire trust in the establishment of libertarian principles in a free forum and marketplace of ideas.
Especially if the misrepresentations are associated with the people making representations about their proposals for an economic order.
Personally, I think I like Oink. He reminds me of myself. I was the smart-aleck equal-opportunity wiseguy who tormented people with their own undeniable and patently obvious folly. He's better at it than I ever was ~ he really has a knack for making people angry, for getting under their skin and making their blood boil. Were it to come down to designing a set of rules that allowed everyone to do what Oink does, Liberty Forum would be hands-down the most free discussion forum on the planet and nothing could possibly shut anyone up about anything. I think Oink could devise such a policy as an intellectual exercise.
But I don't think he can as a liberty exercise.
But I'm certainly happy to watch someone spend their money on this kind of folly. It's highly amusing. I can hardly wait to see the straight-jacket OWK comes up with for Skunk, that he convinces John Deere is a protection of privacy.
LOL!!!™ This should really be a hoot!
Divert, distort, denigrate, disrupt or destroy any discussion of the corruption of American liberty by the organized lobby of a foreign powerThere's no cabal, no floor party, nothing to see here, move along, Folks.®
Libertarianism ~ a feral territorialism of the mind