[latefordinner]

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The Austrian claim is that 'acting', i.e. purposeful behavior, is necessarily in one's self-interest because it makes no sense to say that someone would purposefully act against their 'interests'.

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fair enough, but what I would say is that "self-interest" is not so cut and dry as the "self" is a construction of social forces - there is no "self" outside of society that can decide what its interests are - self-interest is essentially a social construction

therefore, there are some socieites in which socioeconomic arrangements strongly tend towards seeing self-welfare as intimately bound up with others - buddhism for example which sees the self as an everchanging illusory phenemenon with no real boundaries, or the ideals of the Wobblies ("An injury to one is an injury to all" "Where one is imprisoned, no one is free" etc) Most pre-civilized societies had no real concept of any sort of self-interest that somehow lies outside of community interests (and furthermore any sort of self-interest that could be divorced from the landbase that they lived on)

In some sort of way, we all experience this at various times - for example in strong kinship communities of friends or family -

i would argue further that there are both highly social tendencies within human nature towards cooperation, empathy, love, solidarity, sharing etc and also asocial tendencies towards selfishness, greed, accumulation at the expense of others, alienation, etc and that capitalism is often destructive insomuch as it encourages those antisocial tendencies and at the same time constrains social tendencies because they are often unprofitable - so i don't share the view that somehow humans generally act in their own self-interest and that because of that, a free market is the best way to maximize wellbeing/productivity/however you want to define it.

It may well be a decent way of ameliorating the effects of antisocial tendencies, but it sure doesn't beat a society with a socioeconomic system that constrains those tendencies and replaces them with different social norms of kinship, shared wellbeing, etc

the belief that voluntary exchanges will in short order dismantle a relatively egalitarian system only holds if the members of the community do not place very high value on that egalitarianism and choose to act in ways that maintain it -- surely there is some degree of "social control" here in so much as it would be seen as exceedingly abnormal and pathological to want to hoarde things from the community for example, but social control is imho highly different than violent state redistribution

this is, i think, what a lot of anthropological work around socities that existed without a state tells us insomuch that most of them had very strong egalitarian preferences where for example social status was often equated with generosity, or the potlatch ceremonies of some Native American tribes or South Pacific peoples for example where literally people would work for months to accumulate a lot of things that they could then give to a neighboring community