Believing that banning a piece of fabric will stop police oppression is, ironically, encouraging such oppression by coercively violating the right to private property and freedom of expression.

Can we afford for everybody to try to live at the expense of everybody?

Moral outrage against corrupt leaders is not an isolated historical phenomenon but a common precursor of change. It happens again and again whenever one era gives way to another. . . . This widespread revulsion comes into evidence well before people develop a new coherent ideology of change. As we write, there is as yet little evidence of an articulate rejection of politics. That will come later. It has not yet occurred to most of your contemporaries that a life without politics is possible.

No amount of prolix explanation excuses even the act of stereotyping.

It depends on why and how you use stereotypes.

Prejudice only properly refers to judgments formed without consideration of the available information.

Prejudging is legitimate when we do not have all the relevant facts of an object or subject, having to resort to inductive reasoning in order to try to induce and predict its individual characteristics.

It's all about trying to make new information about someone or something, so we can economize information.

The dilemma is how you define harming others and what implies being intolerant to an idea rather than a person holding that idea.

Economists of the classical school were right to define a monopoly as a government-grant privilege, for gaining legal rights to be a preferred producer is the only way to maintain a monopoly in a market setting. Predatory pricing cannot be sustained over the long haul, and not even the attempt should be regretted since it is a great benefit to consumers. Attempted cartel-type behavior typically collapses, and where it does not, it serves a market function. The term "monopoly price" has no effective meaning in real market settings, which are not snapshots in time but processes of change. A market society needs no antitrust policy at all; indeed, the state is the very source of the remaining monopolies we see in education, law, courts, and other areas.

Amazon is just another big company that benefits from corporatocracy.

Democracies get sick and then die from within.

Representative democracy has allowed for peaceful transitions from one ruling elite to another, but the use of institutional coercion is still there. The government is not the problem, it is the mere existance of the Monopoly of Violence, that is, the State.

"Probably no other belief is now so much a threat to liberty in the United States and in much of the rest of the world as the one that democracy, by itself alone, guarantees liberty."

Obviously, this mechanism of peaceful change is an important distinction, but does not absolve democracy of its shortfalls.

Instead of focusing in on how the various Republican candidates for speaker, both individually and collectively, embody how today’s Republican Party is an existential threat to the country’s multiracial pluralistic democracy

As mentioned before, the State itself is a threat. The model of the parliamentary dictatorship, that is, an oligarchy of politicians and public employees, does not serve our interests: it serves elites and violates rights to self-ownership, and efforts to limit governmental powers tend to fail.

I HATE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY I HATE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The problem is that they fall in a false dilemma.

Evaluating the world and the people around you with labels so generic as "left wing" or "right wing" is not useful at all. Another problem is being too politicized, as I think it can damage your relationships with others.

Under TRUE capitalism the market is free but regulated as needed.

The market can't be free if it's regulated. Any intromission of the State in any voluntary exchange is stepping in the natural rights of its citizens.

We don’t live in real capitalism, there is no regulation, the oligarchy has captured the agencies that were supposed to regulate the market.

The agencies are the oligarchy. The politicians and lobbyists benefit each other by the existence of regulations, taxation, subsidies, FIAT money, intellectual property, public licenses, monopolical privileges, etc.

Yes, we don't live in "real capitalism" (that is, in a free-market setting), we live in a corporatocracy.

It would appear that democracy benefits the rulers, as democracy alone has provided the most consistent means for those formerly in power to sleep and die in peace. And the same holds for the courtiers, nomenklatura, and apparatchiks. These sycophants need no longer dread midnight's knife and muffled cries, and the subsequent crowning of a new king. The elite and bureaucracy can retire to their farms and while away their passing years without fear — their riches and posterity intact. As I see it now, democracy is not to the advantage of the demos, it is to the advantage of the power elite. Something to think about.