Vlad, one place I'll agree with you is that the political compass questions leave something to be desired. It is, for instance, difficult to know how to answer a question about state support for the arts when one is an anarchist. That's because it's a triple-headed question. The first implicit question is whether one values the arts; capitalists here will limit their value to market value, which undermines the entire concept of artistic value. The second implicit question is whether the state should even exist, a question never asked in the political compass questions. Yet we are only asked whether the state (whose value is unquestioned) should support the arts (without clarifying one's attitude toward the arts).

The issue of artistic value, as distinct from market value, hints at another problem that limits the (correction) three rabid capitalists' thinking here.

I value ideas and I challenge the status quo. But the status quo derives its power from the interests of the wealthy, who have, through our system of education and mass media, including college, trained the young to be cogs in the corporate wheel, exploited as laborers, pacified with a consumerist fantasy that they too can be rich. It is what I call the myth of unlimited opportunity, that anyone in this country, with talent and hard work, can succeed.

But the sociological evidence is that class mobility is rather limited. Because access to capital is limited--and none of you faithful capitalists have addressed the class division issue that limits access to capital--even those in the middle class who start their own businesses and put in twenty hours a day marketing and administering them can mostly look forward to just more of the same. It is a hard scramble, just to stay even.

Evidence from the Labor Department that you capitalists also prefer to ignore is that wages are at best keeping even while the rich have become dramatically richer. In fact, as manufacturing and high technology jobs have left the country, wages have declined, rather precipitously. And the only jobs being created in this country are in the low-paid service sector. And guess what? If you move to lower cost parts of the country, these wages only go down. But you don't address how an economy can sustain itself by limiting to fewer and fewer people the means to acquire the necessities of life, let alone how it can sustain itself by importing goods that fewer and fewer can afford to buy. Both Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke have recognized the growing gap between rich and poor as a threat to "capitalist democracy;" they call it unsustainable. But I guess it's okay with you folks.

You capitalists must be quite wealthy. Because you expect people to work hard and to save their money, as if they weren't already working hard, in some cases two and three jobs just to pay their bills, and as if doing so would leave enough money to save enough to risk it all starting up their own business. You can't imagine the condition of not having enough money. For you, it would be the ultimate in irresponsibility to wind up homeless and on the streets. But most people are just two paychecks away from just that condition. For you, I guess that's okay.

The apparent prosperity in this country in recent years has largely been based on consumer spending, with the money coming from second mortgages, in an arrangement that can only continue as long as home prices continue to rise. I mentioned predatory financing; the subprime mortgage industry is only one aspect of predatory financing, and now there is a glut of foreclosed homes that the banks can't sell, creating serious problems in the housing market. It hasn't happened yet, but if housing prices fail to recover, consumer spending will be cut off like someone closing a valve. But you haven't addressed this point either.

The other place I'll agree with at least one of the capitalists here is that our education system serves a propaganda function rather than an education function. Each day, for instance, students begin by reciting the pledge of allegiance that obscures the class structure of society. Horrific incidents in US history are glossed over, allowing children to think a brutal imperialist history of at least five hundred years (really depending on how you count) is somehow okay. In this frame, it is somehow okay that we committed genocide against the Indians, appropriated one third of Mexico's territory (after provoking the Mexican American War), failed to suppress the Philippines (as we later did in Vietnam and now in Iraq), instigated coups in Hawaii, Iraq, Chile, and who knows how many other places.

But it's been good for business. You have acquired so much prosperity by appropriating the resources of people throughout the world. Even Iraq's puppet government parliament won't agree to sell out the country's oil to multinationals, but the passage of this law is one of the criteria agreed on by both factions in the US one-party system for evaluating Iraq's progress towards self-government. You capitalists claim that your system promises equality of opportunity, but in reality, it functions by robbing the labor and the resources of others, just as it did in the mercantile system. You haven't answered that either.

And lastly, you still haven't answered my original question: How is it that an arbitrary claim to property ever became a rational basis for exercising control over others? Instead, you simply endorse it, even as it deprives people of fundamental human rights.

When I was invited to this forum, "Alternative Money and Economics," I thought that it would not be a forum for rationalizing the same old economic values. But mostly what I'm hearing here is a rationalization for slavery, and social and environmental catastrophe, the ultimate destination in a race to the bottom. I would certainly like to hear from someone besides those who think they're men enough for a "law of the jungle" economic system.

Libertarian is a beautiful thing, but the name is a modern invention.
We used to be called LIBERALS. We used to be the progressives
and free thinkers who questioned the Powers of Kings, Priests
and hereditary Nobility to run our lives for us. Liberals founded
this most progressive of all countries. Sadly we no longer live up
to the Constitution and Statists both right and left are doing everything
in their power to undermine individual self determination, individual right
of ownership, and rule of law.

The old fashioned Statists, Kings, Priests, Socialists usurped
the term Liberal in the same way that the Religious Right stormed
the citidel of consevatism (the country clubs) and took over the their
venerable intention to preseve everything of value.

But the most beautiful thing about Libertarians is that when we join
the LP we sign an oath saying that we do not accept the use of force
to accomplish social gains. We are true to our word.

Ct, it is important to understand that there are two kinds of libertarian, as the political compass indicates. One kind of libertarian is the kind we see in the US and Britain, the capitalist libertarian who objects vociferously to political hierarchy yet accepts economic hierarchy as an unchallengeable law of nature. The other kind of libertarian, the socialist libertarian challenges all hierarchy, but continues to accept a role of government. Anarchism, on the other hand, repudiates all illegitimate authority, distinguishing between legitimacy and illegitimacy on the basis of utility.

I see government, along with capitalism, as a hindrance to human development towards the best characteristics of humanity, these being empathy, compassion, and cooperation; these are values that are incompatible with purported virtues of competition.