Similarly, your characterization of a coercive state monopoly that confiscates, under threat of incarceration, over fifty percent of the product of its subjects, and spends *all* of it on war, militarism, empire, counterfeiting, a growing police state, corporate handouts, inflating the currency, manipulating interest rates, creating and maintaining economic bubbles, privileges for political favourites left and right paid for by consuming capital on a grand scale, price controls, restricting productive activity in tens of thousands of ways, and every kind of arbitrary attack on voluntary liberty, as “hyper-capitalism” is to proceed by misunderstanding, empty slogans and circular argument instead of critical thinking.

“Nothing can be known about such
matters as inflation, economic crises, unemployment,
unionism, protectionism, taxation, economic con-
trols, and all similar issues, that does not involve and
presuppose economic analysis. . . . A man who talks
about these problems without having acquainted
himself with the fundamental ideas of economic the
ory is simply a babbler who parrot-like repeats what
he has picked up incidentally from other fellows who
are not better informed than he himself.”
Mises

"It is no crime to be ignorant of economics, which is, after all, a specialized discipline and one that most people consider to be a 'dismal science.' But it is totally irresponsible to have a loud and vociferous opinion on economic subjects while remaining in this state of ignorance."
Murray Rothbard

Your self-contradictory belief that arbitrary imprisonment is a good or clever way to produce socially beneficial results is wrong both in ethics (that’s why you’ve just contradicted yourself), and in practice.

But if you are interested in understanding the basis of social co-operation on the basis of intellectual honesty, instead of slogans and beliefs that cannot withstand critical scrutiny, then I respectfully commend the following to your readership:
http://mises.org/Books/mespm.PDF

It's incongruous that a country like the US that takes freedom to the nth degree--even to the point where free health-care is seen as a threat to this ethos--is simultaneously the world's most prodigious incarcerator. If people are free to die in the streets unmolested, why are they punished for expressing themselves via crime? Despite all the rhetoric, the US is the ultimate in neoliberal stateism--that is collectivism is only only observed to protect the rump.
I'm blowed if I can see what there is to admire about the US, "the land of the free", what a joke!
More like the land of double standards, cowboy diplomacy and lies.

Dear Peter,

The missing word was 'minimizing' but it would not have made complete sense either as I don't want to be seen to support hunger strikes.

Just to be clear I personally don't want to forcibly take money off anyone to spend it on what I want.

I do however want to live in a society that takes a portion of each individuals earnings, based on their ability to pay, to finance the services of a government that allow us to live safe, healthy, and educated lives. There may well be some areas of spending that I may stridently disagree with but I'm not interested in overturning the system because of them, nor am I going to withhold the tax I pay.

So while others might disagree with paying tax (I don't think we shoot people for that in this country) I support the requirement to do so for exactly the same reason I want an excise tax on fuel and a tax on cigarettes.

As for the diatribe against my use of the word hyper-capitalism it smells of the rather lame argument of an ardent economic rationalist and I have heard it before. Whenever the West's most laissez faire capitalist society is challenged the retort is always something like "You call that capitalism? It ain't even close. If it was true capitalism then all the problems would disappear." The argument is no different to that used by those espousing communism.

The proof is plain to see. I have enjoyed, through many years of running small businesses, a capitalist society but I want it to continue to be of a civilized nature with restraints on both ends to address the obscenely poor and the obscenely rich.

Cont..

Cont..

Despite your claims to the contrary the US version is 'hyper' compared to the rest of the world's major capitalist countries. All of us have our visions of Utopia but the messiness of human affairs will always see them unrealized without substantial suffering for at least a segment of society. I'm not prepared to pay that sort of price for an ideology. So we try to work things into some degree of equable stability. I don't think the Yanks have got it right on incarceration nor we. The Danes would appear to be a lot closer.

An increasing number of a country's citizens behind bars is should be of concern to any thinking government. While the notion of full employment seems to be lost to capitalist whims and a figure of 5% our new 'stability' rate, what should we accept as an incarceration rate of our fellow citizens? 50 per 100,000?

I want to any move for tougher sentencing laws for instance to be counterbalanced by policy to maintain an agreed figure. Why is this unreasonable?

I don't want my country to end up with 1/4 of it's adult population ineligible for a job at an increasing number of businesses because they have a record. This is the case in the US.

Dear Squeers,

Lol. Slightly unexpected but taking no prisoners as always (so to speak). There was a time when a mock Gulag was build on the grounds at Havard University I think it was to highlight the incarceration of hundreds of thousands of Russians citizens. However rates in the US have left the Russian figures for dead. Why isn't a mock Texan Supermax replica being build now?

The answer of course is 'ours aren't there for their political views'. But surely that is worse.

To quote from our Watkin Tench, a young Marine officer with the original expedition to settle convicts in Australia: "The first step in every community which wishes to preserve honesty should be to set the people above want."

Squeers

I lived in the USA many years ago. It is a land of contradictions, being both damned and blessed. I became very irritated at being regarded as less fortunate for being from another country - many Americans know little beyond the 'shining seas'.

I also found it friendly, positive and magnificent in its self-confidence. And equally astounding in its myopia.

However:

>> More like the land of double standards, cowboy diplomacy and lies. <<

Show me a nation that isn't blinded by its own rhetoric. We are a tribal species, our brains have yet to catch up with our domination of this planet.