TheJach.com

Jach's personal blog

(Largely containing a mind-dump to myselves: past, present, and future)
Current favorite quote: "Supposedly smart people are weirdly ignorant of Bayes' Rule." William B Vogt, 2010

Simple Non-Cooperation

While I don't know enough about Law to confirm this is exactly how the system works, I think it's not unreasonable to believe it works very similar. Imagine a family of four: mother, father, son, and daughter. The breadwinner is the father, and he lost his job a few months ago. Because of the recession, he has yet to find a new job.

He has been lacking in the house rent for the past few months, and now he can't pay it at all. After a few months of patience, the land lord finally kicks him out and files a lawsuit for the money. The court finds in the land lord's favor, but the man obviously cannot pay it. Because of that, the court agrees to garnish his wages. But the man has no job, and isn't looking to get one in the near future. The court then proceeds to report some fancy-named thing or another that will come up on credit reports or background checks for the man, and from now on no one will wish to deal with him because he's been proven untrustworthy. Of course, some people still might deal with him on pity, but if he burns them as well he's just digging himself deeper.

I thought about this because the time for paying taxes is approaching, and as I've worked as an independent contractor my wages weren't taxed for me. So I'll end up paying $400 or so in total. I thought to myself: "What if I refuse to pay my taxes?"

After a brief delusion that lasted less than half a second of the Supreme Court overturning the power of government to tax, I figured I'd probably get sued for it (if they found out), and the court would find in favor of the government. If I refused to pay then, they'll just accept the loss and flag me so that any time I try to do something like get a loan or get a job or apply for a credit card, that information will come up. There might even be laws for people to refuse cooperation with me, I don't know, but I do know many people would refuse cooperation.

So that's just an example of the power of non-cooperation, and how it can be dangerous and harmful if misused. The USA could refuse to pay back the debt owed to China, but China could then simply refuse cooperation with the USA on anything ever again, which would hurt this country a lot. China might even be willing to go to war over it, but war isn't exactly their forté. (Japan wasted them in WW2.)

The example I gave shows how my database system would work, and I again assert my distributed, no-government system is better. It's not under control of the government; no one controls it. One can enter accusations against anyone else at any time, but without any evidence those accusations are baseless. When there is evidence, everyone will see, and based on their own beliefs will decide what action to take after. Non-cooperation is at the heart of Social Pressure, and both are very good and very powerful forms of enforcing "Law" and changing the world.


Posted on 2009-10-23 by Jach

Tags: Anarchy, non-cooperation

Permalink: https://www.thejach.com/view/id/38

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