The UK Libertarian

Whatever your take on 9/11, religion or Islam in particular, this video should at the very least be understood:

Thought provoking stuff:

Her channel.

The Amazing Atheist isn’t always on the right side of every issue, but this video I’m extremely happy to get behind:

Succinct and to the point from Jacob Spinney. A nice video to link people to if they argue that income tax or property taxes are as legitimate as a landlord charging rent because the government ‘owns’ the country.

Fascinating lecture that helps shed light on many of the myths that statists spread about “monopolies forming” on the free-market.

Snapped this in Cardiff a few weeks back. No idea who is responsible and it has since been cleaned up but it made me smile, like a single ray of badly-spelt sunshine trying to burst through a sky overcast by layers of immovable concrete clouds.

The “problem” of free market monopolies is constantly on the minds of our more state-loving friends; next time they question you about this topic, save yourself the energy of arguing with them and simply link them to this video:

I guess this has already gone viral but if you haven’t seen it, you need to; only because the animation is so beautiful!

I’d have preferred the final tag line to just have been “End Prohibition” because the video could apply to many substances, but can’t grumble when the graphics are so pretty!

Okay I’ve been seeing a lot about this on the social networking sites and even though I’m not especially knowledgeable about the inner workings so of the Internet I know for damn sure I do not want the government interfering one iota. For a start the Internet is AMAZING. It WORKS.  It is by far the greatest human invention of my generation. The idea that it needs regulating seems insane on the face of it, and yet, I am seeing more and more calls for “net neutrality”.

Firstly I’ll link to a mises.org article that is a good starting point for a Libertarian POV on this issue.

But it was the comments for that article that I think offered the most succinct libertarian defence. A dissenting voice spoke:

“The owner of the network is interested in obtaining as much revenues as possible. He can only do so if the service he provides is satisfactory to his customers. Otherwise, they will change to another network or discontinue the contract.”

Bollocks!! What if one provider allows me to read reddit and other allows me to read digg, while i want to read both — do i need to get two connections and keep switching between them?

This doesn’t even talk about unwillingness of providers to go to certain areas, all the while blocking “government intervention derp derp” in the form of municipal broadband connections.

To which lizard450 replied:

Clearly you don’t understand how the internet works. If a provider wants to actually “block” content that will be found out rather quickly. Then you can use a proxy and go around it. Mirror sites will pop up. The press for that company will be terrible and the stock will suffer. A few months go by and you’re good. Depending on how you do it you might even use a different DNS. Hell you could even contract with a company to encrypt your data and the ISPs would be entirely powerless to block you.

Now if the government decides that it wants to block access to say thepiratebay, 4chan, or wikileaks. It can do this and you can use a proxy and go around it, but then it is illegal and you can be arrested. Good luck using the avenues of government to reverse that shit.

Now as for ISPs providing better service to their products then competitors like comcast vs. verizon. Well that already happens of course because you’re on their network. The only thing we want is for them not to fuck with the competitor’s traffic.

Point is technically its really not possible to stop net neutrality. You can always get access. This is why people in China can still access porn and facebook. You just have to be smart enough to do it. When the demand gets high enough methods for the masses to do it will come out as well. Complaints.

So many sites are distributed from many different locations. Lots of money goes into providing good response and uptime. Large companies can contract with Akamai for example to really scale out their website.

Perfect!

Net Neutrality is an issue that seems to be hot amongst young people; even though who normally take little interest in politics. This probably stems from a fact this generation relies on the Internet in so many ways they can’t imagine it not existing. Scare stories about ISPs blocking content tend to work very well on such people. But as we libertarians know, government always expands its power by scaring people and claiming to fix problems that either don’t exist, or it created in the first place. I think it’s important that we share articles like the one above with as many people as we can so they at least realise another side of this issue exists because at the moment I’m seeing a lot of ill-informed articles getting upvoted to the front pages of Digg and Reddit and, I’ll be honest now, it’s really freaking me out.

Some good information in this episode about practical instances of privatisation in areas people often say the state just has to run things. Part 3 also has some fascinating stuff about how, in many instances, removing traffic lights actually lowers traffic accidents and reduces congestion. When I picture a purely free society I certainly imagine private road owners employing traffic signals so this part of the episode was genuinely something I’d never even considered.