I deal with people I trade with all the time, and I deal with people I work for every day. These are real people I meet face to face that can affect my lives directly. I know their names and I recognize them when I see them on the street. There are others out there that individually or collectively make rules I must follow, but they are like the weather. I simply adapt to them when I can and fight them when I must.

And since you presume to tell me what I really think but am to dense to realize, I’ll return the favor.

“Statists” are an abstraction, a convenient villain you’ve defined to provide the opposite pole to your own gravity. But gravity, does not have a positive and negative pole, it is a spectrum.

Statists are your new Commies, the Jews to your Nazi, the Zionist to your Arab, the Bourgeois to your Bolshevik. You need to create this entity because you have no coherent definition for your own position, it only makes sense to you when described in terms of its opposite. When world communism collapsed the Right had to invent this phantom because you no longer had anyone to blame for your own contradictions and inconsistencies.
You needed a villain and a scapegoat.

There is no conspiracy, Tom. There are just people in suits. Some work for the government, some work for companies, and some just work. Everybody screws someone, but it’s gravity, not magnetism. The lines of force only go one way.

Personally, I make no distinction between state and capital because they merge gradually from one to the other. The players are interchangeable. Oh sure, there are administrative distinctions, but in either case it is the flow of power that matters. Life is not a contest between ideologies, it is an avalanche in slow motion.

TB, your obsession is psychological, not ideological. You are not a soldier fighting in a contest. You are trying to make sense of your world by defining it in the way you wish it were organized. This is why you simply cannot conceive of anyone who does not accept your bipolar vision of reality. Just because I find your Libertarian Objectivist vision of reality a puerile and adolescent fantasy does not mean I must therefore favor a hive collective dystopia. There are other alternatives, not only in the line between the two choices you have defined, but at right angles to that line, and at varying distance.

The social universe is much richer and complex than just statist vs freedom. In fact, most of it is totally indifferent to us.

Oh, and one more thing. When you say only you understand what freedom is, you really piss me off. What arrogance, what gives you the right? Did it ever occur to you that maybe this is why people want no part of your “freedom”?

You’ve never met a statist because you’ve defined the concept for yourself completely out of existence. It’s like eliminating the concept of “planet” by insisting that a planet is defined as any body orbiting the sun that’s at least one astronomical unit in diameter.

I read the papers. I know that people have been cheated by businessmen, some on a major scale, but compared to the vast majority of business dealings?

What is the level of corruption as a percentage in the private sector with the public sector? I honestly don’t know. My dad would say it takes two to tango, and every private entity trying to screw with the system generally has to hook up with someone in the public sector who’s willing to play ball.

Think about it. Everybody. Have you really had as much trouble with people you buy things from as you have had with, say, the IRS? Or fewer options to deal with problems when they come up?

Throughout history the most successful societies, the ones it’s been best to live in, have been the ones with the most freedom in their economic system. Is this just a weird coincidence?

But my mother spent her whole life working her guts out for those bastards.

Private businesses do exactly the same thing when it is in their benefit; it’s called the “fine print”. But I suppose it’s OK when they do it, eh?

The truth is indeed somewhere in between, but I have shown with many examples (like the rabbit one) that government power passed “moderate” years ago, and is plowing firmly toward “psychotic.”

I still don’t know exactly where your position actually lies. I do know that the many examples of the most ridiculous levels of statist overkill I’ve been able to dredge up have yet to hit your “too much” level.

You might need to take another look at how Haiti has been running its economic system.

My position, not obscured by self-serving zealotry, states that some regulation is essential, and that indeed that is why American regulatory standards are respected and copied world-wide, and precisely why we are indeed safer and more prosperous than most other countries.

If you want laissez-faire, move to Haiti.

Miserable poverty, which has killed more people than anything else in the world, is a small price to pay for perfect safety.