Against Intellectual Monopoly with David K. Levine

https://youtu.be/1E\_EC9H0Qy8

@libertarianism

What are your thoughts on Geolibertarianism? - The Power of Land: Georgism 101

https://youtu.be/smi\_iIoKybg

Geolibertarianism is a form of Georgist libertarianism. The basic idea behind Georgism is that land and natural resources are not the fruits of anyone's labor, so no one has a natural right to it. Georgism proposes based on this that collective ownership arrangements be applied to such resources. Geolibertarianism supports full private property rights in the products of labor. @libertarianism

A discussion question I have for libertarians and users of this website.

Hello everyone.

I wanted to share this one thought with you that I really became aware of just recently. Libertarianism, at its core, is all about personal freedom. It is therefore the highest good worth protecting. But how exactly should it be protected and by whom?

It is obvious that a society writes its core values into its constitution and affirm them by law, but it becomes more complicated when it comes to adhering to these common values. Who ensures that these rules are followed? Who punishes violations?

Whether it is the state or a private company, in all cases you are dependent on the reliability of a third party. How this third party deals with the task it has been entrusted with is, however, its responsibility. As long as this third party is not controlled by another third party, it can act with the trust as it sees fit, not always to the benefit of the client.

That bings up the question why we should ever rely on the state or any private company to protect our values. In the end, we are all on our own. Whether freedom, privacy or security, we cannot afford to become dependent on others. We have to find ways to do it ourselves and these ways exist. I don't want to rule out that third parties may be given the task of protectiing them but I think that we need a technically independent safeguard. Encryption, privacy tools or self-defense devices are just few examples of this.

Hey fellow libertarians,

I'm writing this post because I really got annoyed by the recent increase of low effort and often also low information posts shared in this community. When I tried formulating the rules when creating this community, my main focus was to create a culture of civil and constructive discussion.

There are a lot of possible ways to contribute to this goal and I don't want to exclude any type of content in any way. But to prevent meaningless spam, I thought about adjusting the 3d rule to better align with the aforementioned goals.

Lemmy offers the great opportunity to share an image or a link together with some text to explain it. Based on this, I'd add something like: "the context and relevance of otherwise textless or shared content should be explained in words by it's contributor." or "the information of shared/remote types of content should be evident from the post itself without the need of visiting the source." Also, we could start requiring a TLDR for shared news posts.

What do you guys think?

• Wallace, M. "Interview with Ayn Rand". (1959 February 25). The Mike Wallace Interview.

Hey dear freedom lovers

The other day I was thinking about my journey of becoming a libertarian and would like to share my thoughts with you. To start with the reason: It was minimalism. Let me explain.

Ever since I was a child, I have had the habit of collecting my possessions around me, organising them and occupying myself with them. In the beginning, I wanted to have as much as possible and hoard everything around me in my small "kingdom". Over time, I realised that this was a very tedious task. At the latest when my parents admonished me to finally tidy up my things, I clearly felt the burden of owning so many things.

As a reaction to this, I decided to give away everything I didn't really need. Everything that I wouldn't use very often or that I had a particularly strong emotional attachment to, I cleared out with my parents about once a year and took it to a collection centre.

This ritual has accompanied me through my life ever since and is by far no longer limited to real objects. It is now much more about software tools, ideologies or even political principles. The latter raises the question for me: What does it really take for a society to function well? What is the core, what is the essence that is sufficient to enable everyone to live the best possible life?

For me, the answer is clear: if everyone has the absolute freedom to do with their lives what they think is right without interfering with the freedom of others, then the prerequisites for a good life together are given. Everything else can be deduced from this and can safely go to the collection centre.

• Robinson, P. "TAKE IT TO THE LIMITS: Milton Friedman on Libertarianism". (1999, February 10). Uncommon Knowledge. Hoover Institution. (archive.org)
• Piped.video

Hey fellow libertarians!

I have wanted to share my thoughts on this topic for some time now, but unfortunately I have only just got around to it.

For context: Lemmy.world started as an open, general purpose platform. When I migrated from Reddit at the beginning of june, I opened my account on this instance, as the said values correlate strongly with my freedom-oriented values. I was convinced of the idea of a generalist and uncensored platform that is open to any school of thought and can serve as a frontpage for the broad internet user.

At that time lemmy.world was a fresh instance with few users. Today it is the biggest lemmy server and one of the biggest insances of the whole fediverse. With this rapid growth come new problems and responsibilities that need to be managed in a short period of time.

Recently, lemmy.world, on which this community is hosted, has distanced itself from piracy communities and has increasingly adopted a more restrictive and cautious policy. Even though they still belong to one of the most open instances, the demand for a radical step in the direction of an absolutely free, community-owned and authority-free instance has been sparked in me. ***

An instance that is based entirely on user-based moderation and basically allows any content given that no one has been directly harmed through it (see NAP). One where the moderators are provided by the communities and have the sole right to intervene where the NAP has been violated. The protection, maintenance, upgrading and other management of the instance would be completely decentralised and left to the community.

However, such a server hosting the instance would be illegal in most countries and no matter in which country it is hosted, it would still be a single point of failure that could be shut down at once. The only way to avoid this bottleneck would be not to set up a central administration at all. If no one, or rather everyone, owns this instance at the same time and everyone is only responsible for what they write themselves, there would also be no single responsible entity where legal complaints could be addressed to. ***

From a technical perspective the content would have to be stored on a decentralised storage, the computing power would have to be distributed and the domain would have to be hosted independently of any governmental control. Regarding self-regulation, users should have an easy way to block unwanted content with little effort. This could be done with presets and publicly shared filter lists.

At the moment, this is nothing more than a pious hope, or rather a general vision. But I think it can be a goal worth working towards. On the way, this vision will probably change fundamentally, but the goal is to enable free communication without compromise.

Please feel free to write what you think and make suggestions for improvement. But please remain constructive! Thanks for reading!

I noticed this for quite some time now: Regular discussions or simple questions just like in the last post about the difference of anarchism over libertarianism get downvoted hard but nobody gives a damn about providing some info or just explaining their point of view. I understand that people may use downvotes to show their disagreement but why don't they specify their opinion with just one simple sentence?

Most of what I've seen sounds like Libertarians are actually anarchists who've been misinformed by the dominant culture about what anarchism really is.

What would you say is the reason you identify with libertarianism over anarchism?

Hey everyone,

I would like to share with you some thoughts that came to me the other day. I was basically wondering what is really meant by the maximisation of freedom and where does this limit actually lie. At what point can we say that freedom is maximised? Is it only a matter of individual freedom or the maximisation of freedom for society as a whole?

I believe that this maximum is somewhere on the spectrum between absolute individual freedom and absolute community coordination. Salop said somewhere between anarchism and communism or a dictatorship.

In the one extreme, each individual has maximum freedom to do what he or she wants, there are no common tasks or competences, because for that you would have to give up some of your own competences. At the other end, however, there is a totalitarian state in which the individual no longer has any power but is defined solely by the collective or the ruler to whom he surrenders all his powers.

Most political theories are somewhere in between and approach each other from the left or the right. Libertarianism clearly does this from the liberal left side. In contrast to anarchism, there are public institutions, facilities and places to which one surrenders a minimal part of one's authority. In my opinion, this is formed spontaneously because we humans naturally organise ourselves into groups and the resulting specialisation helps us to perform more complex tasks more quickly.

But where is this minimum level of competence at which society can develop optimally and the individual still has the maximum possible freedom? What do you think?

Update

I have been trying to fight off 4 people attacking the picture, and I cannot keep up on my own. I will certainly be willing to keep trying if anyone in this thread tells me that they want to help, but, if not, I cannot continue if these griefers keep at it.

I don't understand how so many people can be so vehemently against the mere idea of freedom, and liberty. Why would one willingly prefer to be oppressed?

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Original Post

I've plotted out an area at ~(226,206) on the Canvas (it's community can be found at !canvas@toast.ooo) for the Gadsden Flag. I'm using this image as a reference (I drew it by using a scaled down version of this svg that I found as a reference, and drawing over it like a stencil in gimp. It's not amazing, but I think it does the trick.). The reference is placed with a horizontal position of 129, a vertical position of 163, and a width of 117.

What do you think about Ron Paul? Was he the hope and dream of our movement or just a republican quack?

I am strongly convinced that the possession of ideas and creations of the intellect is not possible. In my opinion, only physical things can be possessed, that is, things that are limited, that is, that can only be in one place. The power or the freedom to do with the object what one wants corresponds to the concept of possession. This does not mean, however, that one must expose everything openly. It is ultimately the difference between proprietary solutions, where the "construction manual" is kept to oneself, and the open source philosophy, where this source is accessible to everyone.

As the title says, I would oppose this thesis to your arguments and hope that together we can rethink and improve our positions. Please keep in mind that this can be an enrichment for all, so we discuss with each other and not against each other ;)

Hello fellow libertarians,

After receiving some good feedback in a thread yesterday I was encouraged to maintain the open and user driven character of this community. I have therefore made the community description including rules a little more precise. I don't want to leave them as they are now, but offer you, the users, the possibility to give feddback and suggestions for improvement. You can start giving feedback right in the comments.

I realize that this approach is subobtimal, because in the best case there is no need for a central power center like the mods. I would like to give this community fully in the hands of the users, but since this is not possible, I try to achieve this goal as much as possible with the current means. Make all mods is also not an option, because otherwise all would have the power to lock out others which would certainly quickly lead to a disaster. But we must not forget: Lemmy is an open platform. Maybe we as a community can set a good example and show that it also works best with self-regulation of the content.

Update 1

I added some text to describe the ideas of libertarianism a bit better. Please feel free to make adjustments by writing them down in the comments.

Hello fellow libertarians,

A few hours ago, a user here linked to an article about the protests in france. It suggests that the lack of armament of the public has led to an uncontrolled outbreak of violence on the part of criminal gangs. I found this perspective exciting, but unfortunately the post was quickly deleted after he received some downvotes, so I would like to share my thoughts here.

Even though I am not in favor of gun bans, I have serious doubts as to whether such relaxed gun ownership as in the us would have deescalated the situation in any way. In my view, owning weapons to protect oneself and one's fellow human beings is absolutely justifiable, but the uncontrolled acquisition and loose carrying regulations in public spaces are definitely not.

I would very much look forward to a discussion with you about this topic and maybe OP might say something about it?

The link for reference: https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/as-france-disintegrates-gun-control-leaves-citizens-defenseless-against-rioters/

Is this a real Libertarian environment?

Am I going to get banned for saying something that all Libertarians should stand for?

There exists certain sectors of the market that, by their very nature, end up becoming monopolies, and, therefore, anti-competitive. The most obvious example of this would be utilities (think power distribution (even the poles themselves), water mains, sewage, etc). Is there any way to combat these sorts of monopolies with the existing system, or would a new system have to be devised using decentralized alternatives?

Hash it out amongst yourselves.