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ANCAP ENTREPRENEUR NETWORK
BUILDING BUSINESSES FOR A FREE SOCIETY
INTRODUCTION TO THE ANCAP ENTREPRENEUR NETWORK
MARK THOMAS
Hi! Good morning!
It's nine o'clock Eastern Daylight Time so I'm going to kick off on the AnCap Entrepreneur
Network Channel.
I've got some exciting things--exciting for me at least--today.
I'm going to be
talking to a
range of entrepreneurs from different industries-- different sectors of the the Liberty Industry--
as I'm hoping that people will start calling it,
and I'm also talking to
Peter Klein, a scholar
who's been doing research on entrepreneurship, so I hope to get some information from
him.
And then finally, I hope to be talking to you!
If you're interested in
helping develop the AnCap Entrepreneur Network; into turning it from
not just my interest in studying
entrepreneurial activity in the
Liberty Industry,
then I hope you'll
share some of your ideas with us during the roundtable sessions. If you'd like to get
in touch with me
my skype name
is
"marks_phone".
Send me a skype and during the roundtables I'll add you in, otherwise if you have a
Justin.TV account you can chat in the window.
I've got that on a
second screen just behind me.
"contrarylemming" said "hi" this morning.
I'm not going to try and
disturb things--I've got everything just
barely balanced to send this stream out!
If I hit a wrong button and lose people, then I'll
apologize in advance. But it
seems to be sticking together, so we'll go ahead.
Feel free to chat; feel free to send me a skype
and in the meantime i'm going to take a short break to get things set up of a couple
minutes and then I'll launch into my
presentation at 9:05.
I'll see you then!
I'm going to start my presentation today with an introduction to AnCap Entrepreneur Network.
ELEVATOR SPEECH
The AnCap Entrepreneur Network is my connection to
people
who, like me, would like to build businesses for a free society.
The word "AnCap"
means that
I believe in the philosophy
that
is based on the simple ideas that no one should do violence to an innocent person.
This proscription
applies to all individuals;
initiating force fraud is not a legitimate way for people to treat each other.
As an entrepreneur,
I put this in practice by examining the needs of individuals and finding ways to meet their
needs, and at the same time my own--
ways that don't require aggression.
Sometimes that need might be as simple as having unobstructed trade between a willing
seller and a willing buyer.
Other times it might be something more tricky, like providing defense against a criminal
attack.
I want to look at these needs and try and figure out
how we can solve them without in turn committing crimes ourselves.
In all these cases, when I look at people's needs I hope for--and I believe it's possible to achieve--
a society that doesn't depend on some individuals
imposing their will through aggression
against other individuals.
I expect some people will commit crimes,
but I think the worlds of poorer place when they do,
and i think it's always just and proper for the intended victim to avoid the harm that a
crime would cause.
Now, I wish there weren't,
but I recognize there is, opposition to this idea of non-aggression.
Many people believe, in contrast to me, that ordered society can only be achieved by imposing the
will of rulers upon the ruled.
When these people perceive a conflict between the rulers and the ruled, they try and solve
it by expanding the situations where the rulers may use violence against the ruled,
and at the same time restricting the actions that the ruled to allow exercise.
A society of central control can only exist if the ruler is granted special exceptions
to ethical rules that constrain his subjects.
This means it's the polar opposite
of a society of individual peers.
I can try and avoid conflict
with those who believe in central rule, but
I know,
I believe, that ulitmately a centrally controlled society
requires the total subservience of all
to a single ruler.
I just hope that if the conflict comes, I have sufficient defenses to escape this
violence.
I don't believe that I, or those I associate with, or anyone else in the world for that
matter, needs permission to live in a free society.
I think we can build it today.
Parts of it have already been built and indeed of existed throughout history.
New pieces of the free society are falling into place more rapidly than we can keep track
of.
It's an exciting time to be involved in the Liberty Industry.
PERSONAL INTERLUDE
I'll introduce myself. My name's Mark Thomas.
I grew up in Virginia
and studied
math, physics, philosophy as an undergraduate; went on to do some graduate school in Texas;
quit after a year's worth of course work and got involved in the oil industry
working for a company that provided mapping software to the oil industry.
From there I
soon started doing technical support for them in London.
And the
pertinent part of that
little bit of history is that it started me traveling.
I traveled throughout Europe and ended up spending fifteen years in South Africa. My
children were born there, I was married there to a
woman that grew up in Holland.
And this meant I was exposed to lots of different
countries, lots of different governments,
different societies,
Of course, growing up in America, I was exposed to the the same things that most people were
back in the sixties and
seventies. As I was a child there were three television stations--
if you wanted to get "alternative news" then you tuned in to the government owned television
station.
I ended up having to recite
my "Pledge of Allegiance" every morning at school, and I was a good Boy Scout--
I was an Eagle Scout--
and so I got lots of indoctrination in to
the way that
you were supposed to believe to be part of the government-approved american society.
But, as I started traveling, and getting exposed to different cultures, I started
getting cognitive dissonance. I started having questions come up.
For example, while I was in England. It was 1985 and Margaret Thatcher
had just been embarrassed by a book that came out by
a civil servant--I believe he worked for MI-5. He wrote a book called "Spy Catcher"
and she didn't approve of that and banned it,
and went on to
order that newspapers not discuss it.
And I thought this was strange.
Of course, I hadn't heard of such things happening in America and I asked an Englishman,
"What is it?
You're supposed to be a free society. You're supposed to
be part of the free world. How can it be
that England allows book banning?"
And he said, "Well, you come from America.
In America, I hear that children have to recite a loyalty oath to the
government every morning at school.
How can you call yourself part of the free society?"
So, the things that one culture would take for granted, the other would question.
And the more I traveled, the more things got brought into question. The more questions I
started asking,
the more radical the answers started becoming!
It was accelerated when I moved to South Africa.
I moved there in 1988. It was still the age of apartheid.
I wasn't sure of what I was going to learn in South Africa, but i was sure I was going
to learn something.
I lived there for fifteen years, and as I did, South Africa became
three different countries. It went from the Apartheid regime
to the transitional period when
Mandela came into power,
and then finally back to the Mbeki years, when
really one-party rule was re-established in the country.
So that gave me a lot of experience in the transitions that society's make.
About that time, I started reading around,
found Ayn Rand,
was
impressed with "Atlas Shrugged", but even more so with her non-fiction after that