What would you do if you were appointed King of the USA today? [Edit: To clarify, I mean what would do to advance libertarianism, assuming you didn't let the power go to your head. The power is greater than a traditional king, in fact every single person in the land will do whatever you say.]
Assume you have absolute authority and no one will ever try to question you, assassinate you, or overthrow you, as long as you choose to remain King. Whatever you say, goes.
(All the State machinery remains as it is, unless you demand changes. So the situation is as if Obama were appointed absolute dictator today, but immediately died of a heart attack and for some reason you were appointed in his place. Feel free to change the scenario to "King of the World" if you prefer.)
Why anarchy fails
what is the point of this? what do you expect to be the kind of things people will write? is this a joke?
Where there is no property there is no justice; a proposition as certain as any demonstration in Euclid
Fools! not to see that what they madly desire would be a calamity to them as no hands but their own could bring
Democratic governments nowadays have much more sweeping powers than any king ever had. Next question please.
Take all the gold (held by government), then abolish the government and resign.
Something like abolish all spending, abolish all taxes, use remaining funding to print out anarchist literature and give everyone some literature to read, declare government bankruptcy, abolish the government.
Political Atheists Blog
nirgrahamUK:what is the point of this? what do you expect to be the kind of things people will write? is this a joke?
I'm interested in how libertarians would approach being put into that position. I don't mean, what would you really do (take the money and run, decree all virgins your property, etc.), I mean, "What would you do to advance libertarianism?" Just resign? Suppose for the sake of argument that you actually have a mind to bring about the best society possible in your lifetime, for example an AnCap society. The trick is of course that you being King kind of negates AnCap, but if you resign some random other person will take your place.
Kakugo:Democratic governments nowadays have much more sweeping powers than any king ever had. Next question please.
For the sake of argument, I'm saying you have ultimate authority and every single person in the land will follow your orders. Assume can keep your head in that situation and you want to bring about a libertarian society.
AJ:I'm interested in how libertarians would approach being put into that position.
AJ: "What would you do to advance libertarianism?"
AJ:Suppose for the sake of argument that you actually have a mind to bring about the best society possible in your lifetime, for example an AnCap society. The trick is of course that you being King kind of negates AnCap, but if you resign some random other person will take your place.
damned if you do and damned if you dont eh? sucks for everbody then. good thing real life isnt like that.
AJ:For the sake of argument, I'm saying you have ultimate authority and every single person in the land will follow your orders.
oh in that case... i would make a heaven on earth. by decree and every single person in the land will follow my orders.
nirgrahamUK: AJ:The trick is of course that you being King kind of negates AnCap, but if you resign some random other person will take your place. damned if you do and damned if you dont eh? sucks for everbody then. good thing real life isnt like that.
AJ:The trick is of course that you being King kind of negates AnCap, but if you resign some random other person will take your place.
The point in posting this was that struggling with this dilemma could be elucidating. After all, we all probably lament how little power we have now, and assume that we could do more for the cause "if only we had more power." But take it to an extreme and your next course of action becomes un-obvious. I found it a very useful exercise for rethinking basic assumptions, so decided to share. Specifically, for me it showed me that there is more than meets the eye in the difference between Minarchism and AnCap. Perhaps all this is old hat for you guys, but I enjoyed it.
nirgrahamUK:i would make a heaven on earth. by decree and every single person in the land will follow my orders.
I think my statement was too ambiguous. I didn't mean you'd be able to grant people superpowers, just that they would follow your orders in the usual sense (i.e., within the limits of their physical and mental capabilities).
Liquidate state assets to buy back debt.
Replace all taxes by direct property tax.
Open up a market for justice and security.
Abolish state governments and transfer all their assets to local communities.
Privatize and open up a market for local communities.
But that is also my program for a revolution.
The fallacies of intellectual communism, a compilation - On the nature of power
The only answer anyone on this site should give is something along the lines of "shift the government from monarchy to capitalist democracy, resign as king, abolish president position, set up free market."
Can you appoint a dead guy to be King? Like John Lennon? Or a fictional prince? "After I resign only Prince Hamlet can take my place!"
Stranger: Liquidate state assets to buy back debt. Replace all taxes by direct property tax. Open up a market for justice and security. Abolish state governments and transfer all their assets to local communities. Privatize and open up a market for local communities. But that is also my program for a revolution.
This was pretty much what my response would've been. I would also probably also publically ask every libertarian, austrian econ professor (or libertarian econ professors, since not all libertarian econ professors are Austrian) to explain what it is going to happen so nobody is left in the dark. There would be in a sense a social networking team to fend off pro-statist reactionary propaganda (but at the point where all assets of state government are transferred to local communities, it would probably be too late for such pro-state propaganda to be truly effective).
"Look at me, I'm quoting another user to show how wrong I think they are, out of arrogance of my own position. Wait, this is my own quote, oh shi-" ~ Nitroadict
AJ: Assume you have absolute authority and no one will ever try to question you, assassinate you, or overthrow you, as long as you choose to remain King. Whatever you say, goes.
In that case, we can safely say that the masses do not want liberty, in which case why give it to them?
"As long as there are sovereign nations possessing great power, war is inevitable."
ama gi: In that case, we can safely say that the masses do not want liberty, in which case why give it to them?
Because tyranny does not allow for choice in liberty or servitude. In the state of liberty one can choose either.
'Men do not change, they unmask themselves' - Germaine de Stael
Surprised no-one went with self righteous [eh] line; Mises stated when he was asked the same question.
"Resign".
AJ: What would you do if you were appointed King of the USA today? [Edit: To clarify, I mean what would do to advance libertarianism, assuming you didn't let the power go to your head. The power is greater than a traditional king, in fact every single person in the land will do whatever you say.] Assume you have absolute authority and no one will ever try to question you, assassinate you, or overthrow you, as long as you choose to remain King. Whatever you say, goes.
In that case, it would be impossible to advance libertarian pursuits.
Will minimize to a minarchist state, and then stop taxation so then I become to susceptible to free market forces, and tehrefore end my monopoly, or my State or Monarch or whatever you want to call it.
I would run for my life. Seriously.
People don't appoint kings because they genuinely think this one person's wisdom is so great they're prepared to obay him unconditionally. They do so in order to get what they want, while having a figurehead in place to deflect public attention. So who's appointing me king? And what do they want? If the existing powers-that-be appointed me king, the kind of decrees I would make would undermine the positions of the ones that made me their king... and therefore I'd be the next target of regicide!
If the American Liberation Army (a fictional revolutionary army to overthrow the hegemony of Washington D.C.) tried to declare me king (unlikely, as I'd make a poor populist general), I'd simply decline the offer, asking them to disperse, go back to their civilian lives, and promote liberty, as they see fit, at the local level. I'd probably keep contact info, just in case I needed a favor, if either foreign invaders or a local crime lord became a bigger problem than my community could handle alone.
Dictators are nowhere near as powerful as people seem to think... or rather, the position is nowhere near as powerful. The men themselves, the kind who create and successfully hold dictatorial positions, are masters of politics, expert readers of men; able to create, juggle, and balance a great variety of factions that, though they do consider the dictator to be an enemy, consider another to be a greater enemy, and the dictator indispensable to holding this greater enemy at bay. The successful dictator is a slave to the task of holding his potential enemies at bay.
I could never be a successful dictator.
Oh, thought experimen, sounds like fun.
This article sums it up quite elegantly: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=13247.
However, I'd:
1. Abolish all taxation and sources of government (federal, state and local) revenue (Federal Rserve/Inflation tax, that means you).
2. Abolish all regulation, period, allowing states and local areas to start from the ground up.
3. Abolish all copyright/patent/intellectual property laws (DMCA, that means you).
4. Abolish all laws regarding victimless crimes (drugs, gun ownership, prostitution, speeding, tax evasion, copyright infringement, etc) and let those people out of jail by executive order, and restore their civil liberties.
5, Forgive all government owed debt (medicare's for instance), such as the ~$5.9 of debt government owes to itself.
6. Abolish all federal beraucracies, and state and local ones (as soveriegn states, they can rebuild them if they like, but I'd want them to start clean).
7. Have a constitutional amendment that specifies that for a federal law to even be considered, let alone passed, it must meet two criteria:
a. A person other than the aggressor must be harmed.
b. the law itself must have a state precendent that shows the law making things better ("burden of proof" precedent).
9. Withdraw all our troops from around the world, and a-null all treaties via executive order.
10. Get us back onto a gold standard ASAFP; one where the private sector mints money.
Basically, I'd take steps to make it so that the main powers of each level of government:
Federal: National Defense
State: Deciding their punishments/restitutions/abortion laws
Local: Police and courts.
But allow the private sector to be able to provide police, courts, and nation defense too. I don't want a government monopoly on those things.
Conza88:"Resign".
OH!
Also, after at least making steps to make sure our national debt is payed off, via a new (less insane) tax code (e.g. just a 10% excise and tariff on all goods, domestic and foreign respectively until the debt is payed off (lowering the amount as the debt decreases of course!), and selling off the prodigious amounts of government owned land, I'd resign, as Harry Browne would suggest, not to become a professional politician, and let the atmosphere get to my head, and be glad that I made a difference, and let someone else have a try at this.
Actually a thought just occured to me about this so called "expirement".
No one here should be saying "resign" or "abolish". We should be proving that even we, the austrio-lib types, are not above the influence of ultimate power that goverment permits. If our logic and rational is that goverment is simply a coercive structure in which a man can accomidate his selfish incentives (as opposed to free enterprise, which is not coercive) then we should all be responding in ways that show that we too would use the goverment to serve ourselves as individuals above others.
Just a thought.
but my answer is still something along the lines of "abolish and resign"
Well, we never know how we would actually react to having such power.
I answered mine as if I were a president overstepping the bounds over state sovereignty, but that was about it.
Set up a prestigeous multi-day World Series of Craps tournament event, ldo.
Then do what most others have mentioned regarding abolishing taxes and setting up free markets and whatnot. But only after the WSOC.
1. Redistribute some money to myself.
2. Abolish the government.
3. Resign.
If I wrote it more than a few weeks ago, I probably hate it by now.