Anarchocapitalism = economic totalitarianism?

[pvn]

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Furthermore, the more the concentration of capital increases, the more the ability to make profit off that capital without doing anything increases.

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Without doing anything???

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Now if you want to argue that by investing $1mil in the stock market I am creating value, fine. But don't pretend that capitalism doesn't allow for a minority to use their accumulated wealth to essentially make massive amounts of money off other's labor without laboring at all.

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What's magical about "laboring" that makes the money you make doing that somehow "better" than other money?

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Your definition of a just economic system may include a situation where someone can make more wealth every day without doing anything simply by inheriting a few million dollars and owning capital than a laborer can make each year working 80 hour weeks. Mine does not.

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What's unjust about this? Should workers be prevented from saving and investing?

[latefordinner]

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What's magical about "laboring" that makes the money you make doing that somehow "better" than other money?

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It's not that something is better about laboring it's the fact that some people are in a situation where they have to labor to survive and others are in a situation where they don't, thus making any "mutual" decisions that arrive at coercive IMHO

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What's unjust about this?

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The fact that you can ask that question honestly is why the thought of an AC society terrifies me.

[pvn]

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What's magical about "laboring" that makes the money you make doing that somehow "better" than other money?

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It's not that something is better about laboring it's the fact that some people are in a situation where they have to labor to survive and others are in a situation where they don't, thus making any "mutual" decisions that arrive at coercive IMHO

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You're just shifting the words around. What's special about labor? Why are those who have to "labor" to survive different than those who do something else to survive? What about those who labor AND profit from others labor? I work for a living, but I have several times my annual income in various investments (not including real estate). Am I a laborer, or an exploiter of labor? Do I magically switch classes when I retire and derrive *all* of my income from "doing nothing"?

[nietzreznor]

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ACers=the magic of a market economy is that everyone acting in their own best interests (which is human nature)

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Allow me to be a nit for a second: Most ACists (the Austrians at least) wouldn't claim that 'acting in one's own best interest' is human nature.

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'. (This is the foundation of praxeology, and the argument can be traced back to the Socratic dialogues of both Plato and Aristotle).

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the belief (whether of Lenin or Adam Smith) that we can devise a social system so perfect that no one will need to be good, is one of the great delusions of our time.

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So in keeping with the above, an Austrian might say that, if we knew nothing about how bad/good people were, a market-anarchist society would be the best bet for a prosperous society. Obviously if EVERYONE is completely dishonest, or most people are, then no social arrangement will work particularly well.

[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

[nietzreznor]

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If you want to argue that somehow in an AC society everyone would have capital that's fine, however then you have to deal with the fact that the tendency under more lassiez-faire capitalist societies has historically been one of increasing inequality and more concentrated property ownership

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What makes you think this? This is an honest question, since I think that *most* people who believe this (and this is what *most* people believe) don't realize how much statist intervention there was in times that were supposedly 'laissez-faire' (19th century anerica is an excellent example of markets, in reality, not being nearly as free as they are made out to be).
I'm not going to give a detailed argument why, but I tend to think that while free markets and voluntary transactions will lead to some inequality, the expanding inequality that we have seen is a product of the state/corporation alliance, and would not be possible without the coercion of the State.

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however when literally billions of dollars of capital can move in and out of markets nearly instantaneously seeking short-term gains instead of long-term investment, I think workers in developing countries will always lose.

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Of course, the government is *again* part of the problem here, since government policies (inflation and [censored] with interest rates) often radically change how and when people invest, and inflation tends to cause people to spend (and go for short-term gains) rather than invest long-term.
And part of the reason why workers in developing countries 'consistently lose' is because corporations locate in places where the country's tyrannical government has already made the peasantry desolate by stealing their land; they then turn around and give the huge corporation monopoly rights in a given area (ensuring low wages), and generally use violence to prevent unionization.

[nietzreznor]

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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

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Well, I'm not sure I agree with the stuff about 'self' or 'self-interests' being social constructs, but I mostly agree with the rest.
Since the Austrian theory of self-interest is solely concerned with the structure of human action, and not the content, there is nothing here denying the fact that humans have tendancies toward love, community, etc. (whether or not such tendencies exist, and I think they do, is a psychological or biological question, not a praxeological/economic one).

But, yeah, I pretty much agree with the stuff you said.

[pvn]

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Suppose - to take a hypothetical - that a king notices unrest among his peasants. He has, of course, a mercenary army at his disposal, but for whatever reasons he'd prefer not to use it.

He issues a decree, in which he abdicates, disbands his government, and sets up an auction. He then buys up the land the peasants live on.

The peasants are now free of taxes. Instead, they must pay rent. He stops calling his men "mercenaries," and starts calling them a "Private Defense Association," instead.

What, if anything, has changed?

Does the king have any less authority over the peasants as their private landlord, than he did when he was their monarch?

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I know you think you've discovered the achillies heel here, and you're beaming and patting yourself on the back, but this is nothing new. Yes, AC is nothing more than privitized government. Every individual is a soverign monarch. It has been argued as such by ACers (including myself and boro) numerous times on this board.

Now, your specific hypothetical is, of course, fatally flawed, since the monarch here didn't legitimately own the property before, and certainly doesn't now.

DUCY?

[Skidoo]

OP,

In a situation where anarchy of capital prevails, i.e. where wealth is not subject to the rule of law but rather is the "law" in its own right, the natural consequence is that those with more money are selected for in terms of power in society, which results in plutocracy.

[ShakeZula06]

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OP,

In a situation where anarchy of capital prevails, i.e. where wealth is not subject to the rule of law but rather is the "law" in its own right, the natural consequence is that those with more money are selected for in terms of power in society, which results in plutocracy.

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lol, as if we don't have a plutocracy now.