Anarchocapitalism questions

[vhawk01]

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There seems to be a lot of SMP ACists that don't post in politics. Paragon, Vhawk, are you both ACists? I know madnak (though I haven't noticed him in a while) was also.

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I don't know. I'm not entirely sure I understand all the ramifications of it, but I have a hard time objecting to the core 'tenet' that coercive states are wrong. I lurk in politics, post occasionally. I'd say I'm on my way down the road to AC.

Side note, it sucks that madnak doesn't post here any more. I could tell he was getting really tired of it a few months ago, and then he just stopped posting. Too bad, he was my favorite SMP poster. Plus we were supposed to do a SMP meet in AC this summer, which is now probably not happening.

[vhawk01]

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The most ironic thing about "Anarcho" capitalism is that, like Marxism, it is a Utopian ideology with totalitarian implications.

AC believes in authority based on mutual "free" association, the idea people will naturally and effectively create a free society. The summation of the choices they make will create a just and relatively equitable society. Resources will be allocated much more effectively than through interference by the "artificial" entity of the state.

The problem with this is the state is not an artificial construction. It is not some unnatural anomaly. Organized authority will develop in some form, be it in the form of a Mafia family, or a state, which as Borodog has correctly argued, and I tell my polisci classes, ARE fundamentally similar. They are both political entities. So would be a "free" association of organization responsible for collective security, public health, and transferring information regarding salient issues ("who to boycott"). Collective associations will effectively BECOME the state.

Okay Entourage is on. More later.

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Two things: AC is anything but a utopian ideology. Also, I agree with your second point, in that I have no idea how the world is going to be so much different now than it was throughout human history. What innovations or developments have we made that will prevent the transtition from stateless groups to feudal monarchy or any other version of the state, that happened the first trip through history?

[Taraz]

With regard to the Jim Crow laws, I just think it was a bad example. There are plenty of problems with government, but I personally don't think much would have changed in a free market system.

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Yes, but I would contend that the voting block will never have the power to actually do this. If you polled every government elected politicians consiousness 95%+ would support having special interest groups in Washington.

Part of the problem is that a state treasury is a tragedy of the commons problem. You get elected and then while elected you take as much as you can out of the treasury to yourself and your connections. It doesn't bother you if every other official also get's his either, in fact it's beneficial for you.

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I dunno, maybe I'm just more optimistic. I think people are starting to realize how corrupt the system is. A big start would be to make things transparent so that you can see who was financially backing every side of every issue on every ballot.

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I don't really see how we go from our current system to an AC system anyway. I mean, even if AC was the answer, how can we possibly get there from our current state? If we just shut down a bunch of government programs there will be another host of problems before we can let the free market decide things.

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First step is getting a large percentage of taxpayers to see the state as illegitamate. Refuse to pay taxes, the state will come crumbling down. I used to think that the best choice would be gradual reduction of the state, but the more I think about it the more this seems improbable.

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I don't think that is very probable either. It sucks, but we need to work within the system to get anywhere. I personally think it can be dangerous to advocate AC ideas within the current system, because the government isn't going anywhere. When people advocate letting privatization take care of certain things within our system, it's not actually the free market that is deciding things. The government is handing out contracts and things get even shadier.

[ShakeZula06]

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The most ironic thing about "Anarcho" capitalism is that, like Marxism, it is a Utopian ideology with totalitarian implications.

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Why, because yousay so? You have no idea what you're talking about if you think ACists are promoting a utopian society. Statists are much closer in their thinking that if they give a group of power hungry politicians the power and incentive to screw others over they won't.
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The problem with this is the state is not an artificial construction. It is not some unnatural anomaly.

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Who said the state was artificial and why would anyone care if the state was artificial or not?
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So would be a "free" association of organization responsible for collective security, public health, and transferring information regarding salient issues ("who to boycott"). Collective associations will effectively BECOME the state.


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Again, why? It's really easy to make anything look bad when all you do is make wild assertions and strawmen.

[ShakeZula06]

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I personally don't think much would have changed in a free market system.

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Business owners were fine with hiring black people. The white people who could either lose their job or take a pay cut from the sudden surge in black people needing jobs. Whites then used government to "fix" this.


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It couldn't of happened with a free market. That's why they went to government.
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I think people are starting to realize how corrupt the system is. A big start would be to make things transparent so that you can see who was financially backing every side of every issue on every ballot.

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Anyone I've noticed who think the system's currupt are becoming libertarians and anarchists (I'm aware that doesn't mean everybody, but i'd imagine it's the large majority).

But unfortunately people aren't by and large seeing the problems of the system. They've seen the problems of a lot of the Republicans. Rather then seeing this as a fundamental problem they see it as a single problem isolated to a certain group within the system, and they now throw their support behind either (a) unelected republicans yet to be shown as curruptable or (b) Democrats.
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I don't think that is very probable either.

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Well, i don't think either is probable. [img]/images/graemlins/frown.gif[/img] Just think a crumbling of the state (when society is mostly supportive of ACism) then a slow safe reduction in government.
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I personally think it can be dangerous to advocate AC ideas within the current system, because the government isn't going anywhere. When people advocate letting privatization take care of certain things within our system, it's not actually the free market that is deciding things. The government is handing out contracts and things get even shadier.

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No ACist would support this type of activity, and we make sure to denouce it when ever it comes up. At the very least it leads to a lot of strawmen (we got a lot of those in the politics forum after a company was awarded by California the right to handle the power grid and screwed it up).

[Taraz]

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It couldn't of happened with a free market. That's why they went to government.

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It wouldn't have been law, but I was just saying the situation would still be unbearably awful. Again, I just think that it's a bad example for showing why governments are bad. I take your point that it wouldn't have been law, but I don't think the situation would have been appreciably better.

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But unfortunately people aren't by and large seeing the problems of the system. They've seen the problems of a lot of the Republicans. Rather then seeing this as a fundamental problem they see it as a single problem isolated to a certain group within the system, and they now throw their support behind either (a) unelected republicans yet to be shown as curruptable or (b) Democrats.

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Yeah, it's pretty sad. We keep giving each side a turn instead of fixing the underlying problems. We'll give it to the Democrats until they muck something up and it turns out they're corrupt too and then we'll vote Republicans back in.

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Well, i don't think either is probable. Just think a crumbling of the state (when society is mostly supportive of ACism) then a slow safe reduction in government.

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I think it would be easier to convince people that certain policies lead to corruption in government rather than trying to prove that the idea of government itself is flawed. Governments give us some positive benefits and it's the only system we know, so I think lots of people are rightly skeptical when someone advocates a society free of any government.

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No ACist would support this type of activity, and we make sure to denouce it when ever it comes up. At the very least it leads to a lot of strawmen (we got a lot of those in the politics forum after a company was awarded by California the right to handle the power grid and screwed it up).

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Yeah, like I said, I haven't had much exposure to AC ideas. I'm trying to figure out how they differ from privatization advocates because they seem to be in favor of lots of the same things. I believe in free market capitalism, but I also believe that government can be useful as well. Theoretically they both should work very well, it's the practical application that gets things all messed up.

[mojed]

I didn't read all the posts, so this could well have been mentioned, but in case it hasn't been..

It seems that the case for intervention in markets is when externalities exist, that is, the market fails to account for negative externalities (like pollution), or when an industry fails to be profitable despite positive externalities (like education, perhaps).

In the case of pollution, I suppose that ideally in a free market, consumers would demand products that don't pollute (ie they will account for the negative externality in their consumption decision, and therefore market failure hasn't occured as pollution is represented in the demand side and therefore is represented in the price of a good). The trouble with this is tragedy of the commons issues.

[Nielsio]

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This would probably get a lot more responses in the politics forum, but I would just as soon not have to deal with all the bullsh*t over there.

As far as I understand it, an AC world rely on perfect information [..]

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So it's only for God?

[tolbiny]

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Who owns the air?

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Air could easily be considered owned by the person breathing it in (or the person who owns the plants/animals breathing the air). If you dump X tons of crap into the air and Y number of people get lung cancer that can be traced back to those chemicals then they ought to be able to sue you right?

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The pacific ocean?

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Why are there problems with owning the pacific ocean? People can own land, rivers and lakes. I admit it would be difficult to transition from our current situation to ownership because of the size and also our history of treating it as unowned (and unownable), but our history of acting like its unownable has lead to massive overfishing and massive dumping of waste. This was posted last week in politics. Who sues the army now? The us public, so not only will the public have to suffer the consequences of the dumping, they will also have to pay for it to be cleaned up!

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That sounds really good and yet it completely evades the point. The point being, there is no body to ensure that everyone does in fact have that freedom.

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People have defended and attempted to defend what they considered their own liberties for a long, long time. If I value them shouldn't I be the one to figure out how to defend them best?

[tolbiny]

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The trouble with this is tragedy of the commons issues.

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If there are no commons, then there can be no tragedy of the commons.