[Lnc-business] Food for Thought

[Starchild]

	Great stuff David, thanks for sharing! Love the Arundhati Roy quote – that is going into my quote file. And I'm with you on basically everything else you say here.

	One piece of additional food for thought, though – and to the extent it's a criticism, it's of myself as well, because I have often done the same thing – It's generally to hold up the Ubers, the Airbnbs, and the Googles of the world as our examples, because they are the big companies with which we and others are most familiar.

	But we should consider that lots of voters focus on Clinton and Trump for similar reasons! And the effect of doing so is similar in both cases: It reinforces the dominance of the big players at the expense of the little guys who are often more libertarian.

	The larger and more established a company is, the more likely on average it is to be in collusion with the State and to exhibit other un-libertarian characteristics. Of course there are exceptions, but as a rule I think it's safe to say that smaller businesses tend to be more pro-freedom in their business practices.

	How many small businesses, to use one example that's a pet peeve of mine, make a practice of automatically recording your phone calls without your consent when you call them up, and not even giving you direct access to those recordings should you want to listen to them later? I have yet to encounter a small, local business that does this. Conversely, it seems rare these days to find a big corporation that doesn't violate your privacy in this manner.

	Thus when talking about the sharing economy, I might try to cite Lyft instead of Uber, Misterbnb instead of Airbnb, etc. There are likely other even smaller competitors that would be even better to cite, if we take the time to learn their names.

	Anyway, the idea of undercutting government with bottom-up, voluntary, and peer-to-peer type solutions is definitely one we should keep in mind as we develop goals and strategy.

Love & Liberty,
                                 ((( starchild )))
At-Large Representative, Libertarian National Committee
                              (415) 625-FREE


On Sep 3, 2016, at 6:13 AM, David Demarest wrote:

> Food for thought:
> 
> “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness – and our ability to tell our own stories.” – Arundhati Roy
>  
> To paraphrase Arundhati Roy’s inspiring quote: “Our strategy should be not only to confront empire”, we need to understand that when we limit ourselves to a top-down legislative election strategy, the empire has the decided advantage. A top-down strategy confines us to playing on their turf and the empire is too good at it. Do we really want to become ruling authorities too? No, that is what we are fighting against. But you say, how can we defeat the evil empire if we do not get candidates elected?
>  
> Our best strategy to level the playing field and overcome the empire is to undercut it. To bypass it. To circumvent it. To do an end run around it. To delegitimize it. To make it irrelevant by taking back our empowering responsibilities. We need to outperform the empire, not by relying solely on a top-down election tactic, but by pursuing an even more powerful strategy, the bottom-up approach. We must throw our moral support behind a voluntary bottom-up grassroots entrepreneurial peaceful freedom revolution fueled by peer-to-peer technology and peer-to-peer voluntary-society concepts.
>  
> Our bottom-up strategy starts with social media that cuts out the empire middleman in the communication of ideas. Social media gives all of us the freedom to digest unfiltered information and especially our young that will become our future leaders. As we leverage social media, our peaceful revolution will catch fire with peer-to-peer mobile apps like Uber that thrive, no surprise, by also cutting out the empire middleman. The peer-to-peer genie is already out of the bottle and the evil empire cannot put it back in without the risk of strangling their ill-gotten source of revenue. The authorities know they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. The only strategy left to them is to ignore it and hope that it will go away. We must not and will not let that happen.
>  
> We need to celebrate the “Uber-ites” among us, employ their powerful and empowering keys to freedom and become independent peer-to-peer entrepreneurs in our own right. Then and only then will we open the top-down door to elect Libertarians at all levels of government that will quickly put themselves out of business as they dismantle the empire.
>  
> As we hammer the empire with our bottom-up peer-to-peer fist, the specter of authoritarianism will fade away into history with our shout of freedom ringing in their ears: “May the peer-to-peer force be with you!” – David Pratt Demarest, September 3, 2016
>  
>  
> The War on Majority Rule Cronyism Begins NOW
>  
> ~David Pratt Demarest
> Secretary, Nebraska Libertarian State Central Committee
> Region 6 Representative, Libertarian National Committee (IA, IL, MN, MO, ND, NE, WI)
> Nebraska State Coordinator, LP Radical Caucus
> Cell:      402-981-6469
> Home: 402-493-0873
> Office: 402-222-7207
>  




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