Raise the Hammer

And this is exactly what we need, Bob. To discuss this stuff. The problem is that the "status-quo" option is extreme and militant. As resources decline, this will only get worse.

I don't like the term "Extremist" because it's a relative view. Everything is extreme compared to the status quo somewhere. There are fundamentalist Quakers, Buddhist monastics with very "extreme" views, but in real terms they are far more peaceful and moderate than those of most centrist liberals.

What we need to do is separate radical and simply extremist perspectives. Radicals, such as those of myself, or A Smith, form coherent sets of solutions based on deeply questioning our basic premises. Others, especially militant and authoritarian ideologies like Fascism simply promise to solve everyone's problems through absolute power over all of us. The next step, though, is far more difficult - comparing these extreme (and often rather sketchy) viewpoints to more traditional status-quo viewpoints of Liberals and Conservatives.

Though I thoroughly disagree with A Smith's perspectives, I deeply appreciate them. The libertarian right has proposed a set of policies based on logic rather than power. And because of people like the Mises institute or Taxpayers Federation, I've learned far more about classical economics than I ever had from the conflicting and self-serving drivel put out by the Business community. Understanding the world means understanding many perspectives, how they overlap, and what, which is valuable, to take from each. From Karl Marx to Noam Chomsky, Adam Smith has a pretty good reputation with anti-capitalists, and that says something very interesting.

I'd highly reccomend the work of Kevin Carson and the Centre for a Stateless Society (c4ss.org) to more than a couple people on here, especially A Smith as they present a very up-to date economic vision of an anarchist society based on free markets, collective ownership, networking, and decentralized production.They talk a lot about intellectual property and the open source movement, and make a very convincing argument that things like patents cost far more money than they make. And they're not afraid to pull punches against the left or right.