What’s most exciting for me is that the project itself is being cooked up with some ingredients that are really conducive to it evolving into the Broker Market Domination System I talked about here a few months ago:

The Marketplace is a large Metro Area with lots of interesting geographic niche opportunities and a naturally progressive audience of prospective buyers and sellers.Bloodhound of a Broker/Owner who’s committed both philosophically and financially to providing ultimate value for new agent partners and has the patience to consider and actually execute tasks that may take months or even years to pay off.

Here below is a quick tour of AreaAtlantaHomes.Com in its relative infancy. I hope it’s entertaining and maybe a little clarifying for the folks that thought my little Broker Domination spiel was interesting…

Forgot to mention in the screencast… on that last part about the Agent Technology Package. The idea is to get prospective agents to consent to receive more info on the agent technology package, then drip them with emails designed to further sell the company. Seems that in most cases, brokers take a hit or miss approach to recruiting and few have a longer term, automatic relationship building system like this in place….

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The fees are being used for a variety of purposes.  In some cases, they have been used to satisfy demands from environmental groups.  Developers have also used them, by securitizing them up front, to help pay mitigation costs and up-front infrastructure costs on new developments.  Supposedly even private home owners might be able to add a 1% transfer fee to their homes with revenues serving as future household income.

The NAR, American Land Title Association and the NAHB are all looking at ways to prohibit or limit private transfer fees.  While that tends to make me like the idea of transfer fees on its own, I really don’t see issues with them.  Admittedly, I develop properties from time to time.  Yes, I am frustrated with impact fees, mitigation and infrastructure fees that have climbed to the stratosphere in my little part of the world.  This approach could really help to create some affordable homes that people might actually buy.

Freehold Capital Partners is active in the reconveyance fee financing arena working with developers to structure financing for infrastructure improvements.

Essentially, the concept is based on the premise that improvements which enhance real property are in the immediate and long-term public interest; and a system enabling present owners of private property to better and more fairly apportion present costs and profits amongst multiple future beneficial owners increases economic efficiency.

Traditionally, initial buyers shoulder 100% of the burden of amenities, infrastructure and other improvements, which creates a high barrier to entry into the development. By utilizing this funding tool, developers can now more fairly apportion expenses incurred for permanent improvements among successive owners of the property who will be enjoying the amenities and improvements for years to come. (A familiar example would be bonds issued to finance new schools, where the bonds are paid off over time by the same families whose properties continue to benefit from having a school in the community.) In fact, Transfer Fee financing has often been referred to as the creation of a “mini-bond”. However, unlike traditional bond financing, the transaction costs associated with creating Transfer Fees Rights are minimal.

Flowing from this premise, reconveyance fee financing enable institutional owners and developers to allocate costs amongst future willing buyers by requiring, in connection with each subsequent transfer of title, the payment of 1% of the gross sales price.. – Freehold Capital Partners

The NAR, ALTA and others cite concerns about disclosure.  However, a properly recorded covenant should show up in a title search so I think that cannot be the real concern.  They cite concerns that people never read covenants.  That floors me!  I can’t imaging buying a home without reading the covenants.

The National Association of Realtors and the American Land Title Association, for example, are asking their members to persuade legislators to prohibit or limit the use of investor-oriented private transfer-fee programs. Even the National Association of Home Builders, some of whose members reportedly have signed up to offer transfer fees, isn’t convinced the idea is sound.

“It’s a very creative concept,” said David Ledford, the builder association’s senior vice president for housing finance, “but it’s largely untested and controversial politically.” – Seattle Times

Homes that are subject to a reconveyance fee should sell at a lower price due to the reconveyance fee.  That lower price should be reflected in assessments and lower property taxes.  So, all those infrastructure improvements the developer had to put in wouldn’t show up completely in the taxed value of the property.  I like that the property owner may not end up paying property tax on improvements which are typically deeded to the local government which was simply double taxation before.

California has laws that require upfront disclosure of reconveyance fees.  Texas has some prohibitions on them.  Kansas, Oregon, Florida and Missouri do not allow them.

So, here’s a method that helps developers fund projects, lowers the price of housing and lowers the ongoing cost of property taxes for a home.  The instrument of this tool is recorded on the title of the property for all to see.  Tell me.  What’s not to like?

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Starting April 5th, hundreds of thousands of delinquent borrowers will be encouraged to sell their homes through this process.  Since the basic laws of economics still apply, that flood of inventory at fire sale prices will create heavy downward pressure on other homes in their markets.  Prices should fall.

That’s just one problem with this approach.  The Home Buyer’s Tax Credit was already a magnet for fraudulent filings. The government mandated short sale process could be even worse.

Short sales are “tailor-made for fraud,” said Mr. Lawler, a former executive at the mortgage finance company Fannie Mae.

Last year, short sales started to increase, although they remain relatively uncommon. Fannie Mae said preforeclosure deals on loans in its portfolio more than tripled in 2009, to 36,968. But real estate agents say many lenders still seem to disapprove of short sales.

Under the new federal program, a lender will use real estate agents to determine the value of a home and thus the minimum to accept. This figure will not be shared with the owner, but if an offer comes in that is equal to or higher than this amount, the lender must take it. – MSN

With the high regard that the public holds for real estate agents, they should be a pinnacle of integrity when it comes to setting values for lenders.  Or, could that be a problem?  I’ve found that real estate agents offer different values, at times in spite of the comparables, to suit their desired outcome to get a listing. Also, there is rarely enough information on comparable properties, particularly in a small market like Lake Chelan, to make a realtor’s Comparative Market Analysis statistically meaningful (for those the agents that understand statistics) making the estimate, at best, a hopefully educated guess.  How much of your tax money do you want to see spent this way?

For responsible home owners who might be looking to sell if this new program actually attracts sellers, you could be facing sales competition from subsidized homeowners in as little time as one month.

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I wrote this in 1996, I think. This was a fun story for me, a chance to play with two characters I like a lot. Brian Brady has wondered about locales in these stories. There always is one, a real place where the events transpire, but the narrative is so minimal, I can’t see how anyone could guess where they’re set. Not this time. Brian will be able to tell us exactly where His Radiance was standing.

 
Reflecting His Radiance…

A Ramblin’ Gamblin’ Willie story

“Imagine yourself larger,” said His Radiance.

Stopped me in my tracks.

“Imagine yourself larger. You are everything you’ve ever hoped to be, but you’re afraid to let yourself be it. Free your mind. Imagine yourself larger.”

I imagined myself warier. Hanging around in a college town you’ll pay if you let your guard down. Things are not always what they seem, after all, and that’s the point. The bohemian enclave on the left bank of every university in America is a little Accidental Disneyland where distraction is the main attraction. So even as I approached His Radiance, I backed off mentally.

He was not a pretty man, particularly, but something inside him was beautiful and subtly seductive and, I thought, very, very dangerous. He was Hispanic, and he held himself like a king. He was wearing a radiant white linen suit in the hot summer sun, and the contrast of the bright white against his brown skin was stunning. His sleek black hair was swept straight back from his forehead and his teeth were straight and white and perfect.

In truth, he made me think that this might be what god would look like, if any god of any religion had ever managed to grow beyond the age of three. I called myself an idiot for thinking that, but I thought it anyway.

“Imagine yourself whole. Rid yourself of every drain on your energy. Purge yourself of doubt and fear. Stretch yourself to reach the completion of your life’s destiny.”

He was standing in a little cobbled alleyway between a New Age bookstore and a fern bar, and I wasn’t sure whose wares he’d been sampling.

“Imagine yourself glorious. You are an immense soaring bird, and the Earth is your toy, not your tether.”

And you can only spit so much before you hit your own shoe: I wasn’t buying a word of it, and yet I sat down on a bench to hear His Radiance out.

“We are not here to crawl. We are not here to grovel. We are not here to plead and suffer and mourn.”

“Yeah? What we here for then, stick?” The Gangster said that. He was a spindly black kid, maybe seventeen. He was wearing white jeans and a blue sweatshirt and a baseball cap turned sideways, and everything was large enough to fit two or three more gangsters at the same time. He had walked up and stopped to watch. He walked like he had a permanent shoulder injury.

“We’re here to dance,” said His Radiance.

“Hey, yow! I can dance!” the Gangster said. He began to prance around, his presumably injured shoulder dipping closer and closer to the ground.

“You could if you’d let yourself.”

“You sayin’ this ain’t dancin’?” The pitiful little boy struck a menacing pose.

His Radiance smiled radiantly, forgiving everything in advance. “You behave that way because you’re so afraid. But you don’t have to be afraid of anything. Nothing that matters can hurt you, not if you won’t let it.”

Bars. Buses. Parks. Subway trains. Stadiums. Living rooms. Everywhere you find a bully and an audience, social intercourse is ruled by this law: Bad things will happen if you name a bully’s fear.

The Gangster started prancing around again, only this time there was a knife at the end of his good arm. “You sayin’ I’m afraid, stick? You sayin’ I’m afraid of you?”

“It’s not me you’re afraid of,” said His Radiance, not moving, and seemingly not afraid.

“Yeah, well, then who?”

“Who are you trying to silence with that knife?”

Stopped the Gangster in his tracks. For a moment, anyway.

“Imagine yourself finished,” His Radiance said. “I have nothing to give you, and there’s nothing of mine you can take. You already have all you need. Dare to seize it. Dare to live!”

The Gangster folded up his knife and put it in the pouch of his sweatshirt. He said, “You crazy! You crazy, man…”

He tried to saunter away, but just then Officer Unfriendly grabbed him by the dipped shoulder. “How many times do I have to run you down?” he asked. Accidental Disneyland is a sales tax bonanza, after all, and the locals will do anything to make free-spending Yuppies feel safe.

“I didn’t do nothin’!” the Gangster insisted. “You oughta bust this stick. He crazy!”

“Come on, Crazyman,” said Officer Unfriendly. “Over at the stationhouse you can show me your permits.”

“I am licensed by my sovereignty. You are, too.”

“Yeah. Right.”

“I tol’ you he crazy!”

And I just sat there and watched as Officer Unfriendly took a hard grip on their elbows and pushed the two of them away.

And I was still sitting there when a homely little college geek slumped down next to me.

Freshman. Homesick. Lonely. Afraid. But there was more than that. He was a farm boy from head to toe. Black, razor-cut hair redolent with some kind of tonic. A cheap cotton-poly plaid shirt. Black jeans, not Lee, not Levis, not even Wrangler, but Dickies — the fashion statement of the unfashionably frugal. Clunky, scuffed leather shoes over grungy grey-white socks.

And there was still more. Because someone had treated that poor boy terribly. He sat there looking at nothing, his elbows on his knees, his clunky black back-pack still slung over his shoulders. He wasn’t weeping, but it might have been better for him if he had been.

And I knew exactly what had happened to the poor little jerk. He’d come from a high school of thirty or fifty or three hundred students, a place where he had amounted to something in his own strange way. And now he was enrolled in a university of thirty thousand and he was less than nothing. Infra-geek, sub-human.

And a moment before, an hour before, a day before, someone had said so, said it in a way that had hurt him right to the core. And, though it’s absurd to say it, it seemed as if he were becoming smaller and smaller right before my eyes…

Hanging around in a college town you’ll pay if you let your guard down. But everybody’s gotta take a side.

I touched him gently on the arm to get his attention. I said, “Imagine yourself larger…”

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Extracted from BloodhoundBlog post #1590:

This came in as a comment last night.
There is nothing wrong with wanting to be competitive and wanting to win, but, reading your posts the last few weeks, you ego is a little bit too big at times. Yes, you are a heck of a writer and you have one heck of a blog and you have assembled a heck of a team of contributors, but your ego is getting a bit cocky.

This is ad hominem, so it violates our comments policy, but I’m not averse to discussing the issue it raises in a general way.

[....]

A Bloodhound’s virtues are genetic accidents, but that doesn’t make them less than perfectly admirable, whether evidenced in the dog or anthropomorphized and expressed in thoroughly conscious human behavior. Brought up right, a Bloodhound is a natural alpha, regal and indomitable. The dog will move with a lanky, un-self-conscious arrogance that is simply heart-breakingly beautiful to look upon: This what a thriving organism looks like.

I am steadfastly, philosophically opposed to the idea of humility. I think it is one of many evil ideas foisted off on us by malefactors who love us best at our absolute worst. To say to me, “You’re arrogant,” or, “you have a big ego,” is no reproach. On the one hand, it is a statement of obvious fact. But on the other, it puts me on my guard against you. A healthy, normal human being moves and acts and thinks and speaks with the lanky arrogance of a healthy, normal Bloodhound. When people don’t behave that way, I want to know why. When they affect to preach against healthy, normal human behavior, I go on defense — and not by half-measures.

The comment quoted above is nothing, just so much word salad. People repeat what they’ve been told their whole lives — monkey-see, monkey-do — for no reason they can name. They have habituated emotional reactions to behaviors they have been told since childhood are wrong without ever puzzling out what is right, what is wrong, and what their habituated emotional reactions have to do with either. None of this means anything to me. Either you can defend your position in cogent reason, or I am occupied elsewhere. I know why my lanky arrogance is better for me, in the context of my own one irreplaceable life, and there is nothing anyone can say to persuade me to hate my life in other people’s behalf.

Even so, this makes for a good lesson in weblogging. Art is social, and a secondary objective of any work of art — even a work of art as banal as a weblog post — is to elicit a response. Not simply a comment, mind you, not the enblogged equivalent of a high-five, but an authentic, heart-felt response: “Thank you so much for saying that!” “Oh, what crap!!” “I thought I was the only person who felt this way!” “Your unwillingness to kneel to the vicious trolls I affect to worship as gods leads me to unpleasant doubts about their divinity, which I am obliged to blame on you.” Oh, wait, that last was a translation of email I get all the time…

In fact, other people’s responses to your work should never be a primary consideration to you. The writing is either good or it isn’t. But if you are not eliciting emotion-laden responses from your readers, what you are doing is brochure-production, not weblogging.

But, in any case, if you feel a strong urge to tell me that I am as arrogant as a normal, healthy Bloodhound, regal and indomitable — what can I say in reply except, “Thanks!”

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MLXChange (obviously)
Docusign
Zipformonline
QuickbooksOnline

I planned to use VNC to access MLXChange from my windoze desktop I keep running (which does crash, and I then call Ali to restart so that I can access it,) but I was pretty shocked that the other 3 vendors aren’t truly cross browser compatible.  So, for now, Ubuntu is my great “around town” OS, but it looks like I’ll have to use my windoze machine on road trips (until I get a mac.)

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Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.

Wicked stupid, huh? It gets better:
Then there’s cyberbusiness. We’re promised instant catalog shopping—just point and click for great deals. We’ll order airline tickets over the network, make restaurant reservations and negotiate sales contracts. Stores will become obsolete. So how come my local mall does more business in an afternoon than the entire Internet handles in a month? Even if there were a trustworthy way to send money over the Internet—which there isn’t—the network is missing a most essential ingredient of capitalism: salespeople.

It’s interesting to me to note that the predictions Stoll is denouncing were amazingly accurate. This is a clear-cut distinction between “expertise” and vision. My take: Mind what goes into your mind. Most “experts” are dipshits with a pedigree — usually a phony pedigree, at that.

(Just FYI, I fixed all the spelling errors in the text quoted from Stoll’s article.)

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Francisco looked silently out at the darkness. The fire of the mills was dying down. There was only a faint tinge of red left on the edge of the earth, just enough to outline the scraps of clouds ripped by the tortured battle of the storm in the sky. Dim shapes kept sweeping through space and vanishing, shapes which were branches, but looked as if they were the fury of the wind made visible.

“It’s a terrible night for any animal caught unprotected on that plain,” said Francisco D’Anconia. “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.” –Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The photo above is the Sonoran Desert, a vast unpopulated wasteland in the midst of which is Metropolitan Phoenix, home to three million children of Cain.

Contrary to popular opinion, the desert was not designed by Walt Disney, and it will kill you with a blithe indifference if you make even one small mistake. If you have never been to the desert, you do not have a referent for solitude. Far more than the serenity that comes from a fundamental awareness of your own aloneness, true solitude must carry with it at least a tinge of fear. When you experience a silence so total that you can hear the footfalls of a tiny lizard fifty yards away, you also come to realize that no one, no one, no one will hear you if you shout for help. Twist an ankle and you die. Lose the path and you die. Misjudge the weather and you die. Set you hand where you should not — and you die.

And yet I can go to the desert on a lark, armed as a child of Cain with nothing but two bottles of water, a tank full of three dollar gas and my cell phone.

This is the same sort of desert Los Indocumentados cross to escape a hell even more barren: Socialist Mexico. Those two proud citizens in the middle-foreground are high-tension pylons, moving power to Phoenix from the Palo Verde Nuclear Power Station.

The children of Abel, in white socks and Birkenstocks, will insist that the meaning of that desert is the desert, that an ambulating organism is nothing more than tumbleweed, a fleeting ephemera racing through an eternal permanence. I think the meaning of the desert is me — or you — or Cain. I think the meaning is perfectly expressed by those pylons, so man-like in their form. The desert is nothing without humanity, but humanity is everything. This — this blistering deathtrap — “This is when one should appreciate the meaning of being a man.”
“There is only one kind of men who have never been on strike in human history. Every other kind and class have stopped, when they wished, and have presented demands to the world, claiming to be indispensable — except the men who have carried the world on their shoulders, have kept it alive, have endured torture as sole payment, but have never walked out on the human race. Well, their turn has come. Let the world discover who they are, what they do and what happens when they refuse to function. This is the strike of the men of the mind, Miss Taggart. This is the mind on strike.” –Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

Los Indocumentados are about to stage a little strike of their own, and I expect they will be the parties most dismayed by it. I have tremendous respect for the people who cross the Sonoran Desert — many of them on foot! — in pursuit of a better life. Anyone who wants a job that badly is all-American in my book. But it remains that our undocumented friends represent the weakest tenth of the economy, at best. We say, “They do the jobs Americans won’t do,” but it would probably be more accurate to say that they do jobs that otherwise would not be done at all. No cheap landscapers? Hello, xeriscaping. No hotel maids? Oh, well, we’re only staying for three days. No cheap restaurants? That’s why Cain put a microwave oven in the break room. The planned strike by Los Indocumentados is likely to be underwhelming to most — where it doesn’t go entirely unnoticed.

But the news of this strike put me in mind of Ayn Rand and the strike of the men of the mind in Atlas Shrugged. I have thought for years that I should take June 1st off as John Galt Day. This is the day in the book that John Galt, Francisco D’Anconia and Ragnar Danneskjold set aside every year to celebrate the world they hope someday to be able to live in. I don’t even take days off, but when I read the book for the first time 25 years ago, I thought that I should make it a practice to take that one day off.

Los Indocumentados hope to make a point by hurting people. I don’t think anyone is going to be hurt much, but that’s really beside the point. If I make a holiday of John Galt Day, my goal is not to hurt anyone. But I do want to withhold my values, if only for that one day, from my despoilers. I love to work so much that I don’t often think about — and care quite a bit less — how much of my effort is going to people I despise — and who despise my work ethic. But if I create any wealth on John Galt Day, I will craft it only for myself and for those few others I know who share my values. I will not share myself with people who would claim my mind, my time or my effort as a matter of right.
“I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number, or how great their need. I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.” –Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead

I am not campaigning. I have never been able to live comfortably in what Richard Mitchell called “The World of We” — and I don’t ever want to be comfortable in that world. But if you feel as I do, you might consider making a holiday of John Galt Day as well.

No looters, no moochers, no parasites, no crybabies — for one day, at least. My life, my way — and I never really feel any other way. But for that one day, my life all my way. No one will dare oppose me, of course, but, if someone should, I know just what to say:
“Get the hell out of my way!” –Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

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What does this have to do with real estate?

Human liberty begins when you have a redoubt that is yours to defend from any would-be usurper. That’s real estate, and, as I write every year at Independence Day, the civilizations we associate with human freedom are those where ordinary people had the power to claim, own, use, enjoy, buy and sell the land. If you want for a real estate weblog to concern itself solely with surface-level bread-and-butter real estate news, you’ve come to the wrong place. If, on the other hand, you want to learn how better to defend your liberties, including your power to buy, sell and broker real estate, stay tuned. None of this is easy, but it is fundamental for understanding real estate as philosophy.

Isn’t anarchy a creed of chaos and violence?

1. No, that would be socialism in its collapsing phase.

2. No, that is what you have been told by people who want you to volunteer to be their slaves and toadies.

3. No. Anarchism as I define it is the politics of egoism, which itself is the ethics of self-adoration. People actively pursuing self-adoration will tend to avoid chaos and violence except when chaos and violence are the only means of avoiding even worse fates. When might this be the case? When socialism undergoes its collapsing phase, for example.

So what is anarchism “as you define it”?

What we have been discussing at BloodhoundBlog is a body of ideas I call Janioism, this after the first name of a character in a book I wrote in 1988. This is a poor appellation, for a couple of reasons. First, if you don’t already know what I’m talking about, a name consisting of a proper noun offers you no guidance. And second, doctrines named after people imply a cult of personality, which Janioism most certainly is not.

So why give it that name? Simply as a distinction from other flavors of free-market anarchist doctrines. Any one of these names can be accurately applied to Janioism as a member of a distinct category of political philosophy: Anarcho-Capitalism, Market-Anarchism, Agorism.

There are a number of different theorists of free-market anarchism, along with a great many more advocates of a doctrine serious libertarians usually call minarchism — arguments for an extremely minimal style of government.

What’s different about Janioism?

Minarchism obviously entails systemic coercion against anyone who does not freely volunteer to join the polity and to accept its terms of governance in all particulars. Minarchist philosophers (such as Ayn Rand or Robert Nozick) either deny this coercion or insist that it cannot be avoided.

In general, advocates of free-market anarchism will insist that the polities they envision will be entirely voluntary. I dispute this claim. The two best known defenders of free-market anarchism — David Friedman (son of Milton Friedman) and Murray Rothbard — both envision free-market police forces that would engage in violent trespass onto private property and forceful coercion of individuals suspected of having injured other members of the polity. I think this is simply thoughtlessness — the failure to have thought through the unwillingness of each member of the polity to volunteer for this kind of abuse. But, to my knowledge, Janioism is the only argument for free-market anarchism that foreswears system coercion both of members of the polity and of strangers who might find themselves subject to the dispute resolution systems of a Janioist polity.

Why does Janioism foreswear systemic coercion?

I can offer an infinite number of arguments against systemic coercion, but these are the three — in ascending order of philosophical importance — that I think are most useful for understanding a truly human civilization:

1. As a practical matter, no volunteer to a polity is going to consent to the kind of behavior that has become all too routine among statist police forces: Trespass, breaking-and-entering, physically-devastating and violently-intrusive searches, wholesale expropriation of personal property, coercion and imprisonment of your person, torture and, ultimately, murder. All of these things are possible, of course, but no sane person would risk having them done to him, if given a choice.

2. As a matter of ontology, each human being is equal, as an entity, to all the others. To assert any sort of dominance over a human being is, tacitly, to argue that you are super-human and your victim is sub-human. This much is false to fact. Still worse, acting upon this false premise can be demonstrated to have persistently and acceleratingly unhappy consequences, resulting, ultimately, in the chaotic and ultra-violent collapse of any civilization built on a creed of dominance of some people by others.

3. As a matter of ethics, the coercion of one person by another is damaging to the ego of the person effecting that coercion. There are a number of reasons for this, but what matters most is that behaving coercively toward other people requires the coercive party to make war on his own mind: You must first argue to yourself that you are super-human and your victim is sub-human. Then, while you are coercing your victim, you must make false mental claims about your own real-time behavior. And then, after the fact and for as long as you live, you must work constantly to deny your own self-knowledge of the kind of person you have made of yourself. If you have ever wondered why so many bad people are drunks or drug-addicts, now you know. You cannot ever hide from your own self-image.

The corollary proposition — actually the primary proposition — is that acting upon other people as they are, in full cognizance of their autonomy — is the best path to achieving peace, prosperity and the greatest attainable level of self-adoration while living among other people.

In other words, Janioism foreswears coercion not for political reasons but as the best expression of ethical egoism in a social context.

As is obvious, there can be occasions when a coercive response to a real-time infliction of injury by another person can be necessary — as the means to avoiding an even worse injury. But even then it is important to understand that you will be acting in a way that will result in enduring and irreparable damage to your own ego. Human life, most fundamentally, is the awareness of being alive as a human being — awareness in real-time, memories of past awareness, anticipation of future awareness. That your having acted coercively was preferable to failing to act, in that particular circumstance, does not imply that that damage you will have done to your own self-image is therefore somehow not damage.

The proper goal of egoism is self-construction, the progressive assembly of an image of your own life and mind that is worthy of your own highest adoration. This is what I mean by the word splendor. Acting coercively, even in morally-justifiable self-defense against an attack on your person or property as it is happening, will result in the partial destruction of your self-image. It’s a calculus of loss, and less-worse is obviously greater than still-more-worse, but worse is still less than better.

The fundamental equation of Janioism, which can be applied to any sort of philosophical dilemma, is this: 0 !> 1. Zero is never greater than one. The consistent pursuit of positive values is the path to splendor. The persistent pursuit of negative values is the route to squalor. Coercion is always a form of squalor-pursuit, even when it is the least-worst alternative available in a particular circumstance.

If there is no systemic coercion, how will people resolve disputes?

By mutual agreement, of course, just like now.

Almost everyone is sane and normal. Few people understand egoism as I defend it, but that’s simply because the forces of evil in our civilization do everything they can think of to smear ideas like egoism, individualism, capitalism, anarchism, etc. Their dominance games will not work without your active, continual surrender, so they indoctrinate you from childbirth to submit to their authority, to fear and resist your own desires, to yield to them in any conflict, to be their perfect little slave at all times. And it works, too. Not only do you sacrifice fifty percent or more of every dollar you produce, you will defend with righteous indignation your glorious servitude.

But even so, you’re only a sucker where the government is concerned. In everyday life, you’re almost certainly sweet, personable, generous, forgiving and non-confrontational. You let the lady with just two items go ahead of you on line at the supermarket. You smile and wave back when a nice man waves you into traffic. When your kid’s foul ball puts out the neighbor’s window, you tape a note to the door saying you’ve already called the glazier to make the repair. When the geeky teenager at MacDonald’s gives you too much money back in change at the drive-through, you park your car and go into the store to give back the excess bills. You are a proud and noble trader, neither giving nor taking of the unearned — even if it never occurs to you to be proud of your nobility.

Yes, there are sociopaths among us, and megalomaniacs and malignant narcissists. They’re everywhere, but they comprise less than one percent of the population. If you want to find them in significant concentrations, you have to look to various branches of the state: Psychotic politicians like Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon stand out, but government is a magnet for every sort of sadist, paranoiac, control freak and martinet. This is not to imply that there cannot be decent people in government, but systemic, pandemic, epidemic coercion is a drug most people in government learn to crave more and more over time. Every decision a government makes is necessarily arbitrary and corrupt, so I find it hard to argue that even the nicest person could stay nice in an environment that rewards only evil and penalizes — eventually unto death — every form of the good.

But none of that matters in a Janioist agora. In a civilization composed entirely of volunteers, dispute resolution would be effected, in the overwhelming majority of cases, as a matter of ordinary human social contact — just as it already is right now. “Your visitor parked in my spot. Could you ask him to move?” “My daughter accidentally dripped her ice cream on your front walk, so she’s coming over to clean up the mess.” “I mistakenly took your overcoat instead of my own from the church cloak room, so I had it dry-cleaned for you.” This is the way civilized human beings behave when they have caused an injury or loss to another person.

But what if the parties don’t agree about the nature of the injury or loss — or about its proper redress?

Where their dispute is not obviously and easily addressed, sane, normal people might reasonably take their arguments to a neutral third party. Who? How about that wise old geezer up the street? He can cut through any knot! Where the stakes are higher, one or both parties might take the dispute to a free-market judge for resolution.

How could anyone trust a free-market judge?

Because his sole stock in trade will be his reputation for fairness. In a free-market, a corrupt judge would have no customers.

But if “one or both” parties could go to the judge, doesn’t that imply that a trial could be held in absentia?

Yes, of course. There is no systemic coercion in a Janioist agora, so no one could be compelled to go to court against his will.

But if there is no coercion, who will enforce the judge’s rulings?

Anyone who wants to — which means everyone who is living in pursuit of splendor.

Assuming a normal injury, resulting in a small financial loss, the judge’s verdict would consist of a financial judgment against the losing party, possibly also including all the attendant court costs — an incentive for both parties to go to the old geezer up the street instead.

What good is a judgment if no one is compelled to pay it?

I can think of a lot of different ways to organize a non-coercive polity, so this is just one of them — one I happen to like a lot because it fits well with the way we already conduct our financial affairs. So here is what I would propose: The judgment is entered as a debt into the credit reporting system. This is how judgments work now in civil court. You have the “right” to be paid, but you do not have the power to coerce your compensation. If the party found against repays or makes arrangements to repay the debt within a reasonable span of time, life goes on as before.

But if the party found against refuses to pay the debt, every member of the polity who feels that civilized people should make good the injuries and losses they cause to other people can and should boycott the offending party entirely, refusing to trade with that person in any way.

This is non-coercive. Trade is always mutually-voluntarily, so if I unilaterally withhold my commerce from you, I am not denying you anything to which you have an enforceable claim. Yes, it is an ultimatum-based response to injury, but neither the person nor the property of the party found against is being coerced in any way. That party can choose to pay the debt, thus regaining his former status in the polity. But he can also choose not to pay.

What will happen if someone fails to pay a judgment?

Death by starvation. Remember that all property is privately owned. If you are met with an agora-wide economic boycott, you cannot traverse any land except your own — not without trespassing. You cannot buy food or any other sort of economic good — and your access to the trading medium has been cut off entirely. In most cases, your alternatives will be to pay the debt, run away as far and as fast as you can, or starve to death. In any of those cases, the objectives of the other members of the polity will have been met: If you cannot live as a sane, normal, civilized person, our individual pursuits of splendor will be best served by your absence.

If the debtor runs away, what happens to the creditor’s loss?

Dang. Bad things happen. Not my fault. Not my problem. Importantly: Penalizing me because someone else has suffered a misfortune is the worst kind of injustice.

What if the debtor is really and truly innocent of having caused the injury?

Dang. Bad things happen. My advice would be to pay the debt and then work toward restoring your good name. Or run away. Or just shrug your shoulders and acknowledge that perfection is an attribute of a world other than this one.

What if the debtor doesn’t run but doesn’t pay up, either?

If he stays on his own property, I don’t much care. My goal is to be rid of people who won’t cooperate in a civilized fashion. If an offender elects to become a hermit, he presents no on-going peril to me. The judgment would stand until it is paid, of course. And if our hermit decides to invade my home, perhaps in quest of jam for his bread, I will end his life in defense of my own, if this seems needful.

But what about people who are not sane and normal, who insist on trying to live by the coercive, violent domination of other people?

A free people, civilized volunteers who have not been legally or psychologically disarmed by the state, will administer as many free injections of lead as are necessarily to change that person’s behavior. This is not brutality. This is how sane people deal with predators who will not change their bad behavior. Each one of us has volunteered to join this polity in pursuit of our own values. If someone in our presence presents a clear and present danger to our own lives, one or more of us must either kill that person or suffer under his domination.

This would be the rarest kind of circumstance in a truly free society, first because there are no mechanisms in place to reward and exalt criminal insanity — the incentives all run the other way — and second because young people who are predisposed to criminal insanity would probably not survive very long into adulthood. But if the only way to be rid of a pestilential threat to your own survival is to take another human being’s life, then this you must do — or live thenceforth as that person’s slave.

What about people who either do not or cannot complain, when they are injured?

Dang. Bad things happen. Not my fault. Not my problem. Their business — or, at a minimum, none of my business. If you absolutely cannot leave your neighbors free to pursue their own values in their own way, it could be that you yourself are suffering from a lead deficiency.

What if the army of a vicious tyrant tries to conquer our Janioist agora?

I’m fond of the motivating premises of the cult of the Hashishin: Assassinate the big boss, and keep on assassinating each new big boss until the only stooge willing to wear the crown is an incompetent fool. Why don’t governments fight this way? Among other things, government is a mutual protection racket for big bosses everywhere.

Obviously there are all kinds of other ways of defending our lives and property, each of us acting alone or in mutually-voluntary groups. A war of conquest would have to be house-by-house, since there is no centralized Quisling to surrender for everyone. And people who understand that they own their lives, their land and their chattels only to the extent that they can defend them are apt to come up with some very effective active and passive defenses.

But suppose all of this fails. Suppose the conqueror succeeds. What then?

Dang. Bad things happen. It is all but universally common to lament and decry failures of anarchism that are present in every other form of human political organization. “What would prevent rape in an anarchy?!?” What prevents it now? “What would prevent unintentional injustices?” What prevents them now? “What would prevent conquest by ill-tempered foreigners with bad breath?” What prevents it now?

If all property is privately owned, why would anyone ever build a road?

For profit. Obviously, only profitable roads would be built, so the footprint of a Janioist agora on the land is likely to be much smaller than our current state of sprawl.

Why would anyone build a dam or a canal — or internet backbone?

For profit. All forms of transportation and communication were built for profit before governments monopolized these businesses.

What about free riders?

Dang. If you didn’t negotiate your compensation before you baked the bread, Henny Penny, don’t come crying to me afterward.

Everything we’re talking about already exists, in the form of written commercial contracts and tort law. What we now call the civil courts would no longer be a statist monopoly, and there would be no criminal courts at all — nor any fiat law nor fiat money nor fiat dictates issued by armed functionaries of the state. Everything that you might want to do — that you cannot do by yourself — you would have to work out by negotiation with free and equal traders, but there would be no statist tyranny forbidding you to do as you choose.

If there is no fiat money, what will we do for currency?

Whatever free and equal traders choose. We already understand that the clearinghouse function is the sine qau non of thriving economies, so this is not a huge problem to work out.

Would there be competing currencies?

How would you prevent this, without systemic coercion?

In the threads where these matters are being discussed, there are all kinds of highly-detailed speculations about how things would have to work out, in the absence of the state. My take is that most of these propositions are useless. How will things work out in an anarchy? However the participants want them to.

What about marriage and the family?

Why don’t you learn how to mind your own business? I’m sure that’s what you would say if I poked my nose into your family life.

What if my neighbors are abusing their child, in my opinion?

Dang. What if the kid gets stung by a wasp? Bad things happen — and we know nothing about any of it, all over the world, virtually all of the time.

If you really think the child’s life, health or safety are at risk, and if you think failing to act would result in an injury worse than breaking into your neighbor’s house and kidnapping his kid, knock yourself out — and live with the consequences after the fact in court. If you’re right, you’ll be a hero. If you’re wrong — or if your neighbor is a good shot — you’re screwed. Not my problem, either way.

Please understand: You have spent your whole life being lectured about the vitally important necessity of minding other people’s business. But actually doing it — poking your nose into your neighbor’s business — is crime, and the people who do this habitually are almost certainly a greater threat to my own pursuit of splendor than are the supposedly-evil people they propose to protect me from.

If you think that unilaterally taking a forceful action is the best way to preserve the peace in a particular circumstance, then take the action and live with the consequences. But if I decide that you are the greater threat to my peace, it will be you I will want to see gone from my life.

Here’s what matters: There is no group. There is no collective. There is no “us” — no state, no chosen people, no glorious proletariat. There is only you, a free and equal individual. You can do anything you are capable of doing, and for the most part I can’t stop you. But you are responsible for everything you do — and don’t do. In a free society, the state is not going to push your neighbors around for you at your behest, but it won’t be there to push you around, either. If you want something done, and no one else is doing it, you will have to do it yourself, persuading your neighbors to join you if you can. But you may be amazed to discover just how many things aren’t worth fighting about if you have to fight with your own body and your own money — with both of them at risk.

So how do we get there from here?

Good news: We’re already here. You’re already a sane, normal person, and you already live among your neighbors in peace and prosperity. Yes, the state preys upon you like a vast, hideous vampire, reeking of death, impetuously random in its predations. But it matters less and less to civilized people with every passing day.

I don’t ever favor trying to defeat or take over evil institutions. It is sufficient to supplant them. And this sane and civilized people are already doing, just by living their sane and civilized lives. Consider eBay. Consider PayPal. Now think of a clearinghouse like PayPal unknown to anyone except its depositors. Does anything like this already exist? How would you know if it does? How hard would it be to create, now that you know it could exist?

In our discussions, we have referred again and again to so-called “state of nature” theories. This is my fault. It is very useful, in talking about political philosophy, to think in terms of zero, one, two or three people. Three postulated people are sufficient for describing every politically-interesting social arrangement. But there is no state of nature — no unpopulated world, no unclaimed land. In real life, land is acquired either by purchase, by bequest or by conquest, never by being appropriated from the unclaimed. We have to learn to get along with each other not alone because we are all already here.

But the truth is, this is very easy to do. We are already very good at it, and we will only improve as we learn Janio’s equation — that zero is never greater than one. We live in a sick civilization because we have all been indoctrinated from childbirth to cling to the zero — pain, guilt, suffering, doubt, poverty, anger, resentment, fear — while always yielding up the one to our self-proclaimed “betters.”

Do you want to see Janioism in real life? Stop worshipping the zero and devote all of your attention to the pursuit of the one. Seek profit only — never loss. Live, work and play only with people who share and support your values — never with those who denounce or deride or denigrate your pursuit of splendor. Don’t wait endlessly for some universal epiphany among everyone else — a mass awakening that will never, ever happen. Shun evil now. Boycott crime now. Be who you are. Do what you want. Have what you love — now.

It were well to pursue indestructibility — as much as you can. Defend what you have, and find ways to make yourself unappetizing to predators. But life is not about avoiding loss — this is the worship of the zero. Life is about earning and deserving every profit you can attain with your mind, your time and your unrelenting effort. Live for the one and let the zero go straight to hell — where it belongs.

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