Professor
Ioannis (John) N. Hatzopoulos
University
of the Aegean , Department of the Environment
Visiting
professor at Chapman University Orange CA , USA
Tel. (714)
289-2016
E-Mail: ihatz@aegean.gr
URL:
http://www.env.aegean.gr/labs/Remote_sensing/EnglishBlock/Remote_sensing2.htm
During the
last two centuries there were proposed and tested by the "system"
various ideologies on how people to live together and be happy. Communism,
socialism, facism, democracy, etc. However, although anarchy was there it has
not been tested yet, and as I understand this is what you propose to do. I
personally do not trust any paternalistic ideology including anarchy because they
fit to the description of F. Niche who considers ideology a donkey that people
follow to find their happiness. I have a quite different view which is
summarized in my work concerning education and if you are interesting you may
find it in the following links:
http://www.env.aegean.gr/labs/Remote_sensing/EnglishBlock/publications/Hatzopoulos-Hsss-Us.pdf
http://www.webmazine.org/issues/bull237/documents/rightWrong.pdf
According
to my views if there are individuals who care about people and quality in life they
have to look deeply inside the human mind and try to free it from the
intellectual rape which is persistently and methodically applied by the system.
With other words they have to help people develop a healthy mind which is
obtained by the effort of the logic to keep balancing desire and anger (Plato
The Republic). To achieve this healthy mind state it is important to understand
the destructive mechanisms used by the system to disturb this balance through
the intellectual rape process as follows: (a) wildification mechanisms to
increase the anger, (b) marketing mechanisms to increase the desire and (c)
excessive faith and mutual support mechanisms to neutralize the mind.
Θέμα:
[eurofreedom] GIVE ANARCHY A CHANCE
The recent
financial crisis confirms that anarchy is much better than democracy. Only
kleptocrats and looters do better in democracy. Wars, terror, massacres, and
misery are instigated by governments, not people. Anarchy is an ideal limit;
the closer a system is to anarchy, the better it is. We should all strive for
anarchy now.
Henry David
Thoreau(1817–1862) was an important early influence in individualist anarchist
thought in the United States Europe . Thoreau was an American author,
poet, naturalist, and tax resister. Celebrated economist Murray Rothbard(1926 –
1995) constructed the theory of individualist anarchism and proved it's the
best possible political system on Earth.
Anarchist
society is one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression
against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state
because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of
private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of
defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and
coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual
rights.
The
Rothbardian definition of the state is not arbitrary, for these two
characteristics have been possessed by what is generally acknowledged to be
states throughout recorded history. The state, by its use of physical coercion,
has arrogated to itself a compulsory monopoly of defense services over its
territorial jurisdiction. But it is certainly conceptually possible for such
services to be supplied by private, non-state institutions, and indeed such
services have historically been supplied by other organizations than the state.
To be
opposed to the state is then not necessarily to be opposed to services that
have often been linked with it; to be opposed to the state does not necessarily
imply that we must be opposed to police protection, courts, arbitration, the
minting of money, postal service, or roads and highways. Some anarchists have
indeed been opposed to police and to all physical coercion in defense of person
and property, but this is not inherent in and is fundamentally irrelevant to
the anarchist position, which is precisely marked by opposition to all physical
coercion invasive of, or aggressing against, person and property.
The crucial
role of taxation may be seen in the fact that the state is the only institution
or organization in society which regularly and systematically acquires its
income through the use of physical coercion. All other individuals or
organizations acquire their income voluntarily, either through the voluntary
sale of goods and services to consumers on the market, or through voluntary
gifts or donations by members or other donors. If I cease or refrain from
purchasing Wheaties on the market, the Wheaties producers do not come after me
with a gun or the threat of imprisonment to force me to purchase; if I fail to
join the American Philosophical Association, the association may not force me
to join or prevent me from giving up my membership. Only the state can do so;
only the state can confiscate my property or put me in jail if I do not pay its
tax tribute. Therefore, only the state regularly exists and has its very being
by means of coercive depredations on private property.
Neither is
it legitimate to challenge this sort of analysis by claiming that in some other
sense, the purchase of Wheaties or membership in the APA is in some way
coercive. Anyone who is still unhappy with this use of the term coercion can
simply eliminate the word from this discussion and substitute for it physical
violence or the threat thereof, with the only loss being in literary style
rather than in the substance of the argument. What anarchism proposes to do,
then, is to abolish the state, that is, to abolish the regularized institution
of aggressive coercion.
It need
hardly be added that the state habitually builds upon its coercive source of
income by adding a host of other aggressions upon society, ranging from
economic controls to the prohibition of pornography to the compelling of
religious observance to the mass murder of civilians in organized warfare. In
short, the state claims and exercises a monopoly of crime over its territorial
area.
The second
criticism Rothbard would like to defuse is the common charge that anarchists
assume that all people are good and that without the state no crime would be
committed. In short, that anarchism assumes that with the abolition of the
state a New Anarchist Man will emerge, cooperative, humane, and benevolent, so
that no problem of crime will then plague the society. Rothbard confesses that
he does not understand the basis for this charge. Whatever other schools of
anarchism profess – and Rothbard does not believe that they are open to the
charge – he certainly does not adopt this view. Rothbard assumes with most
observers that mankind is a mixture of good and evil, of cooperative and
criminal tendencies.
In
Rothbard's view, the anarchist society is one which maximizes the tendencies
for the good and the cooperative, while it minimizes both the opportunity and
the moral legitimacy of the evil and the criminal. If the anarchist view is
correct and the state is indeed the great legalized and socially legitimated
channel for all manner of antisocial crime – theft, oppression, mass murder –
on a massive scale, then surely the abolition of such an engine of crime can do
nothing but favor the good in man and discourage the bad.
In a
profound sense, no social system, whether anarchist or statist, can work at all
unless most people are good in the sense that they are not all hell-bent upon
assaulting and robbing their neighbors. If everyone were so disposed, no amount
of protection, whether state or private, could succeed in staving off chaos.
Furthermore, the more that people are disposed to be peaceful and not aggress
against their neighbors, the more successfully any social system will work, and
the fewer resources will need to be devoted to police protection.
The
anarchist view holds that, given the nature of man, given the degree of
goodness or badness at any point in time, anarchism will maximize the
opportunities for the good and minimize the channels for the bad. The rest
depends on the values held by the individual members of society. The only
further point that needs to be made is that by eliminating the living example
and the social legitimacy of the massive legalized crime of the state,
anarchism will to a large extent promote peaceful values in the minds of the
public.
Many people
think the state is vitally necessary to provide police protection, the judicial
resolution of disputes and enforcement of contracts, and the creation of the
law itself that is to be enforced. Rothbard's contention is that all of these
admittedly necessary services of protection can be satisfactorily and
efficiently supplied by private persons and institutions on the free market.
One
important caveat: new proposals such as anarchism are almost always gauged
against the implicit assumption that the present, or statist system works to
perfection. Any lacunae or difficulties with the picture of the anarchist
society are considered net liabilities, and enough to dismiss anarchism out of
hand. It is, in short, implicitly assumed that the state is doing its
self-assumed job of protecting person and property to perfection.
We cannot
here go into the reasons why the state is bound to suffer inherently from grave
flaws and inefficiencies in such a task. All we need do now is to point to the
black and unprecedented record of the state through history: no combination of
private marauders can possibly begin to match the state's unremitting record of
theft, confiscation, oppression, and mass murder. No collection of Mafia or
private bank robbers can begin to compare with all the Hiroshimas, Dresdens,
and Lidices and their analogues through the history of mankind.
It is
illegitimate to compare the merits of anarchism and statism by starting with
the present system as the implicit given and then critically examining only the
anarchist alternative. What we must do is to begin at the zero point and then
critically examine both suggested alternatives. Suppose, for example, that we
were all suddenly dropped down on the earth de novo and that we were all then
confronted with the question of what societal arrangements to adopt.
And suppose
then that someone suggested: "We are all bound to suffer from those of us
who wish to aggress against their fellow men. Let us then solve this problem of
crime by handing all of our weapons to the Jones family, over there, by giving
all of our ultimate power to settle disputes to that family. In that way, with
their monopoly of coercion and of ultimate decision making, the Jones family
will be able to protect each of us from each other."
Rothbard
submits that this proposal would get very short shrift, except perhaps from the
Jones family themselves. And yet this is precisely the common argument for the
existence of the state. When we start from zero point, as in the case of the
Jones family, the question of "who will guard the guardians?" becomes
not simply an abiding lacuna in the theory of the state but an overwhelming
barrier to its existence.
The
anarchist is always at a disadvantage in attempting to forecast the shape of
the future anarchist society. For it is impossible for observers to predict
voluntary social arrangements, including the provision of goods and services,
on the free market. Suppose, for example, that this were the year 1874 and that
someone predicted that eventually there would be a radio-manufacturing
industry. To be able to make such a forecast successfully, does he have to be
challenged to state immediately how many radio manufacturers there would be a
century hence, how big they would be, where they would be located, what
technology and marketing techniques they would use, and so on?
Obviously,
such a challenge would make no sense, and in a profound sense the same is true
of those who demand a precise portrayal of the pattern of protection activities
on the market. Anarchism advocates the dissolution of the state into social and
market arrangements, and these arrangements are far more flexible and less
predictable than political institutions. The most that we can do, then, is to
offer broad guidelines and perspectives on the shape of a projected anarchist
society.
One
important point to make here is that the advance of modern technology makes
anarchistic arrangements increasingly feasible. Take, for example, the case of
lighthouses, where it is often charged that it is unfeasible for private
lighthouse operators to row out to each ship to charge it for use of the light.
Apart from the fact that this argument ignores the successful existence of private
lighthouses in earlier days, as in England in the eighteenth century, another
vital consideration is that modern electronic technology makes charging each
ship for the light far more feasible. Thus, the ship would have to have paid
for an electronically controlled beam which could then be automatically turned
on for those ships which had paid for the service
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