Okay, I should probably just come clean and say that I'm an anarchist (an anarcho-socialist for those that believe that "anarcho"-capitalism is actually a form of anarchism). Anarchists have a bunch of ideas about what are the causes of the problems in our civilisation are and what can be done to change it and our lives for the better which are more or less internally consistent. So do capitalists, "anarcho"-capitalists and even the Catholic Church. All of these respective philosophies are internally consistent, or at least can be made so. So, I guess it was kind of pointless for me to say "capitalism causes poverty", which although I believe in the truth of that statement, most of the people on this site are capitalists and have a set of basic assumptions which justify capitalism. The statement I was making doesn't attempt to question or identify those basic assumptions, which I guess was my intention, but was just a lazy post that really just seems a bit absurd by capitalist set of assumptions. It makes sense perfect sense from the anarchist set of assumptions. So really, the post should have said "hey guys, while that drug policy sounds good, there is a school of thought that says that the real problem is capitalism itself, and I would subscribe to that school of thought and vouch for its applicability to the real world, and maybe you might find it interesting to think about that and read up on it a bit", but in order to do that I would have had to explain everything in a much deeper way than I was prepared to do at the time.

I want to get back to the point about internal consistency though. It's pointless to exchange our theorems (things like "if we change X about drug policy, Y about homelessness will change") when the axioms on which we build such theorems are different. The only truth we can get from a discussion like that is "well, given the capitalist set of assumptions, we can prove that this is true, but it is not true given the anarchist set of assumptions". That's a lemma you can use in the proof of the truth of such a statement, but to prove that it's true you have to show that capitalism's (or whatever) assumptions accurately model the real world. I admit I'm very much guilty of ignoring this in my post above, and I'm sorry for lazily making such a meaningless post. (By the way, the reason "anarcho"-capitalism isn't anarchism is because anarchism and capitalism have assumptions which contradict each other, so to be able to make it internally consistent, they must lose some of the assumptions that anarchists have which contradict capitalism's assumptions.)

So, economically then, what do I propose? A sort of decentralised socialism, I guess. I would broadly subscribe to the ideas outlined here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism#Economic_th...), which probably explains it better than I can. The reason I think these ideas and the ideas and the assumptions that justify them are more applicable to the real world than those of capitalism is basically just because they line up with better with what my intuitions have been. I've always been unhappy with authority and being coerced, and the justifcations offered to me for such coercion have always seemed kind of circular. In is-piracy-bad debates, I've always been on the side of the pirates, but also always felt that there's more to it than this, that there's some sort of logical conclusion that we (pirates) are not taking this to, and now I think anarchism is that logical conclusion. Anarcha-feminism agrees with and expands on ideas and feelings I've had about gender before I knew about it. Anarchism gives legitimacy to my intuitions and offers a framework in which they can be made logically consistent, and also offers an explanation for some social problems that I hadn't ever even thought about that are consistent with my intuitions. Basically, and I know this is pretty much a false dichotomy, but it does kind of get the point across - I've always felt that it's much more satisfying and generally better to be co-operative than competitive, and I think capitalists basically think the opposite and say that it's human nature to be greedy, etc. My experience has shown that I get a great pleasure out of sharing my things and with people and helping them out, but capitalism makes it difficult to share with people because you need money and everything in order to survive in a capitalist system, so by giving stuff away, you're risking your chances of survival, or at least decreasing your freedom. I think capitalist ideas might appeal to people because it gives them justification for being many times richer and therefore freer than other people. I don't think that is justifiable, certainly not when it's something that affects a person from birth (how wealthy a background they come from), and it's incredibly naive to think that everybody who's poor can just go out and start a business and get as rich as anyone, as if it's their fault that they're poor (for not doing this) and that everybody is completely in control of how wealthy they are.

Those are pretty much the ideas that I have. Anarchism is the school of thought that makes them logically consistent, but capitalist ideas are also logically consistent in their own framework, and if we disagree on the axioms then there aren't really any words or logic that can be done to resolve that disagreement. I'm really just trying to make people aware of anarchism, and maybe make them feel that their ideas are legitimate if they have anarchist ideas (because I think a lot of people have anarchist ideas but don't take them to their logical conclusion or realise that it's possible to do so), and maybe make people realise that there's more to anarchism than punk rawk, if there are people who haven't taken it seriously until now because of that kind of perception. That's it. Sorry about the initial post.