Looking for fellow anarchocapitalists.

[Borodog]

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If you are paid with taxpayer dollars, money that has been confiscated from individuals who could have used it to send their kids to a better school, take their family on a vacation, buy a new car, invest for their retirement, or blow on coke and hookers, it is immoral, in my humble opinion.

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Does that make it wrong for me to accept/treat Medicare patients? (well over half my practice)

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No, it is not immoral for you to accept and treat Medicare patients. But it is immoral to accept payment for those services in the form of stolen goods, i.e. taxes.

Believe me, I know how pervasive the system is. And I know that it can often seem in the self-interest of people such as yourself and our friend the neuroscientist, and for that matter myself, to "work the system" with an "I'ma git mine" attitude. I just eventually came to the conclusion that the benefits you supposedly receive do not come close to what you have to give up (whether it is easily apparent or not).

Government is the great fiction wherein everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.

[pvn]

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Free-market capitalism requires contractual obligations to be enforced by some disinterested 3rd party that has the power to compel compliance. That 3rd party is government.

"Anarcho-capitalist" is a self-contradictory concept.

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That third party can be government, but it's by no means necessary. People have used private, non-governmental arbitrators for literally centuries.

[dogreplacer]

I don't consider myself an anarcho-capitalist, but i'm very sympathetic to much of its ideology.

Anarcho-capitalists and likeminded people are not against government aid to the poor because we think a purely privately-funded charity system would serve the poor better. We oppose it because we fail to see what gives the government the right to appropriate the wealth of a private citizen and give it to another private citizen for any reason. Period.

Maybe the homeless would be better off under a totally privatized system. Maybe they would all starve to death in the first week. I don't know. But it's really irrelevant until someone can explain what gives the government the right to force private citizens to give their money away to others.

[renodoc]

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No, it is not immoral for you to accept and treat Medicare patients. But it is immoral to accept payment for those services in the form of stolen goods, i.e. taxes.

Believe me, I know how pervasive the system is. And I know that it can often seem in the self-interest of people such as yourself and our friend the neuroscientist, and for that matter myself, to "work the system" with an "I'ma git mine" attitude. I just eventually came to the conclusion that the benefits you supposedly receive do not come close to what you have to give up (whether it is easily apparent or not).

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Well, I don't understand you here. I treat medicare patients mostly because I can't successfully "opt out" without causing undue harm to 1) the patients 2) my staff 3) myself. I am not allowed to privately contract with a medicare patient unless I want to forego taking any medicare money for two years.

Obviously, I do accept taxes (stolen goods) when I provide services.

The benefits I receive don't come close to what I am giving up, especially the thought of jackbooted thugs coming to my office to audit charts. But the unfortunate reality is that even my most wealthy patients who own multimillion dollar second homes at Lake Tahoe, still are on the government dole when it comes to their healthcare.

I have suggested before that Medicare and Social Security need the same 40 years to phase out as the Israelites needed to learn to live as freemen rather than slaves when they wandered in the desert awaiting the promised land.

[Borodog]

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Well, I don't understand you here.

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On the contrary, it sounds like you understood me perfectly.

[renodoc]

[img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

so you think you know another anarchocapitalist when you see one then?

[Cyrus]

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I don't give exemptions to someone that doesn't "believe" that stealing or murder is a crime.

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Please bear with me : Suppose a large group of people instigated a code of moral conduct that condones stealing and murder. These people allow stealing and murder among themselves. They could all be located at the same geographical area -- or, then again, not, but be connected/grouped through another criterion.

What would we be supposed to do with 'em, according to your idea of an ideal society ?

[tomdemaine]

If we reverted to anarch-capitalism tomorrow, eventually people would come together and form governments. Do you wanna know how I know this? Because it already happened. What do you think pre-civilised societies were? It's betterfor the survival of the species if we group together and penalise the strong to help the weak. You can't fight human nature, well you can but I doubt you'll win.

[pvn]

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Please bear with me : Suppose a large group of people instigated a code of moral conduct that condones stealing and murder. These people allow stealing and murder among themselves. They could all be located at the same geographical area -- or, then again, not, but be connected/grouped through another criterion.

What would we be supposed to do with 'em, according to your idea of an ideal society ?

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As long as they keep it to themselves, I don't see a problem. By joining such a group, one voluntarily agrees not to defend his rights. They aren't aggressing against anyone that did not agree to it.

In Anarcho-capitalism, I can selectively choose not to pursue some damages claims, while choosing to pursue other claims.

Now, a more interesting claim is what happens when a member of such a group decides to leave the group, but other members of the group murder him anyway? I would suspect that the aggressors would be liable, since a contract that *irrevocably* surrenders your property right in yourself is non-enforcable.

[pvn]

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If we reverted to anarch-capitalism tomorrow, eventually people would come together and form governments.

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People would steal and murder, too. Does that justify it?

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It's betterfor the survival of the species if we group together and penalise the strong to help the weak.

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You can't be serious. Read that again.

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You can't fight human nature, well you can but I doubt you'll win.

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I agree. Human nature is how we come up with the concept of self-ownership, and from there, property rights. From that we can derrive the axiom that no man may initiate force against the person or property of another man.