nvm

[a_propagandist]

Then do you say we need to go against the will of the people? Cause it seems the will of the people supports having a well-defined, established system, no?

 

[Dachs]

The same reason why even serfs themselves were scared of liberty, afraid that no one would take care of them, the same reason as people were scared that without an absolute monarch order couldnt persist in a country.

Serfs were scared of liberty?

 

[Princeps]

You assume that all employers would take part in the cartel, but if even one doesnt, the mechanisms of a cartel breaks down.

No, they don't. Totally unregulated cartels would easily become complusory or acquire elements of compulsion over the private power brokers who form it in the first place (the subjugated workers are a different matter). Of course the cartels would break down evantually, all organizations and institutions do. But given access to weapons, resources, manpower and politically coercive powers, they could easily last for decades, hundreds or even a thousand years. The charateristics of a loose league would fade entirely, thus giving birth to new states and empires.

And an employer has every reason to not join a cartel since by offering higher wages they have a bigger choice of labour and can get all the smart guys to work for them.

Cartel takes away the uncertainty and insecurity of competition on part of the employers. The cartel ringleaders could, for example, decide together to lower wages across the board while privileging themselves and their associates. This is what the big business did in Germany when they allied with the nazis (who might be considered the equivalent of the elite's violent political arm, like a PDA). Evantually, as the cartel grows more integrated and its rules become more compulsory, its leadership can enforce majoritarian policies (i.e. policies that most of the members prefer, while few object). Individual companies are too intimidated to secede, either because they fear that they cannot compete in long term or because they might be attacked, sabotaged or otherwise subverted by a hostile Cartel-loyalist PDA.

As for private governments not being responsible for their actions(lets call thempda-s) they can fully expect to be retaliated and their clients' capital be destroyed(and the rich elite certainly have a lot of capital to lose) for unjust action by other pda-s if they choose to not work together with them.

So, if the private government is responsible to the rich big business elite that controls it, the regime will be humane and decent. Sure!

This system works, it worked well in iceland and ireland for 300 and a 1000 years respectively(until they were interfered by other countries).

Well, they didn't. Which is why they don't exist today.

Also, ancient Iceland was hardly an anarcho-capitalist society. It was simply unintegrated, extremely sparsely populated and primitive: the exact opposite of modern society. Where communities did exist in Iceland, they usually had very uncapitalist constructs, such as a compulsory primitive welfare state that, for example, required farmers to contribute to a reserve of food, which could be used to help the unfortunate.

notice both areas are islands. so it could be assumed the reason for monopolistic governments come to be accepted is through them propagating fear of outside dangers and how only through coercion can the population be safe.

Britain and Japan were islands too, but both islands could spawn some of the most arrogant, hateful, violent and sadistic regimes on earth. And Ireland had enemies, foreign and domestic, as well, so it's not as if the place was a paradise.

people are generally not sadistic predators, unless they are agitated by oppressive rule.

No, people are not sadistic predators, but oppression is usually started by someone, often by a sufficiently powerful minority. Anarchism is fallacious because it seeks to create a depoliticized society, oblivious to the fact that humans are an inherently political species because of these basic reasons, I believe. 1. Humans can inflict harm on each other, 2. humans have free will, 3. humans have needs, 4. resources are scarce. (Notice that the causes of government are not that far from the causes of markets).

Humans, unlike say honeybees, are an inescapably political species. Government, as an institution, is merely the logical extension of this fact. Someone needs to draw the barriers, writes the laws and enforce them. In a public and democratic government, that lawmaker is accountable, at least in theory. In a private government like the Soviet Union or Nazi germany, there is no accountability or regulation of those in power, which leads to war, genocide, staggering pollution and oppression (among other problems).

So it is in everyones interests for pda-s to be reasonable and offer good services, otherwise their customers will be hurt and they will remove their own income.

So, why would conquest and slavery be bad service or bad for business?

The same reason why even serfs themselves were scared of liberty

No, instead of fatuous and condescending comments like the one above, perhaps you should first try to understand the basics of politics. There are transparent fallacies in your ideology, which is why people laugh at it.

Anarcho-capitalism is simply premised in the prejudices of some people, namely libertarians. Libertarians and Ancaps call these premises "Natural Law", "axioms" or "Natural Rights" and claims that they are self-evident and universal. But they are simply prejudices. The idea that a person is self-evidently and inalienably entitled to his turf and property is a rare opinion, not a universal doctrine.

Maybe if anarcho-capitalists would stop proposing some of the most insane and stupid ideas, which are far too numerous to mention (from unrestricted baby selling to free killing zones, from privatization of air and seas to free proliferation of any and all weapons*), people might actually even know what anarcho-capitalism is.

*I'm not kidding about any of that. I've heard it all, having debated libertarians and ancaps.

 

[Cutlass]

I adressed this issue in post 57. what are your counter-arguments?

delete........

 

[Orange Seeds]

Perhaps you could give some examples and ideas to make our debating more productive? Its hard to correct mistakes when theres little help to use.

Its simply not worth the time and effort required. Arguing with a libertarian or the like is very similar to arguing with a creationist: they disregard evidence, premises are entirely hypothetical and it eventually relies on equivocation to support its contradictions.

 

[Cutlass]

To be more specific: All utopian schemes fail on the simple reason that none of them deal with the diversity of human behaviors and abilities. In any possible scenario there will be people who scam the system through laziness, and there will be people who take advantage of it through predation. What anarchy and libertarianism do is to remove all obstacles from the way of the predator.

Government at its worst is the strong imposing their will on the weak. But government at its best is people combining to protect themselves collectively when they lack the power to do so individually.

If you remove the power of collective defense, than all that is left is a government of the strong imposing their will on the weak. It is essentially feudalism, where the strong form a hierarchy for the purpose of domination and control.

That is the only possible outcome of libertarian or anarchy capitalism.

 

[Frank327]

To be more specific: All utopian schemes fail on the simple reason that none of them deal with the diversity of human behaviors and abilities. In any possible scenario there will be people who scam the system through laziness, and there will be people who take advantage of it through predation. What anarchy and libertarianism do is to remove all obstacles from the way of the predator.

Government at its worst is the strong imposing their will on the weak. But government at its best is people combining to protect themselves collectively when they lack the power to do so individually.

If you remove the power of collective defense, than all that is left is a government of the strong imposing their will on the weak. It is essentially feudalism, where the strong form a hierarchy for the purpose of domination and control.

That is the only possible outcome of libertarian or anarchy capitalism.

No government does not mean no power. It just means no almighty hierarchical power. If a community sees a threat, they'll act to it. Then the threat will see it's better to not be a threat. Also, the less laws there are, the more responsibility one takes. A law is an outsourcing of responsibility.

Still, milder forms of this actually increase people's safety. You can't say your laws serve you anymore, because you can't even understand them. That's not because of you, but because there's so many difficult laws that you'd have to do years of research at the very least for it. Today's law isn't there to serve the people anymore. If it were there to save the people, they'd make it understandable for the people.

Oh, by the way, I'm not one of the anarcho-capitalists. I actually think one day the monetary system will get obsolete. I'm more left wing anarchist so to say.

 

[Princeps]

Workers would form unions and mass strikes(why wouldnt they?)

Because maybe they're facing a nuclear armed PDA with tanks and assault rifles (why wouldn't they acquire such weapons if they could?). Even lesser weapons would do fine. Common laborers who are of little value, cannot afford to buy weapons of their own in suffiecent quantity (or cannot, if the workers are locked inside the factory or otherwise stopped by the mercenary goons.)

if such cartels form, and return to work when an equilibrium froms between the demands of workers and employers.

So you assume that when property owning businessmen who can readily purchase the services of heavily armed mercenaries form these cartels they intent to allow their subjugated workers to form unions? Of course not!

Your theory has other major problems too as i already adressed with the wiki article( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privat...ession_and_abuses_by_private_defense_agencies ), what is your response to those problems?

They are a bunch of assumptions. They assume 1. the atrocities that the Private agency is commiting are considered crimes. 2. Other businesses care. 3. People know what is taking place and who is commiting the atrocities (money trails can be hidden, armaments can be buried, identities (assuming any general system of identity even exists) can be concealed, masks can be worn during the heists, kidnappings, or even during the massacre of a unionized worker's family. 4. They assume that people can't be silenced. 5. They assume that private regimes cannot conceivably purchase services of unregulated PR institutions and faux institutes, faux labor unions, faux consumer groups etc. The PR-industry is multibillion dollar business. So it is perfectly possible since the entire court system is essentially based on voluntarism that the judgements passed by private courts would just fall on deaf ears (especially on global level). 5. They assume that competing courts would not pass differing judgements, which they of course could.

Many, many more objections exist.

Private companies can often be very secretive institutions, even if they don't do anything illegal.

The nazi government could work because people wanted it to.

Well, yes some people did. Irrelevant point really. This is like saying that bears urinate in the woods.

Germans wanted revenge for the humiliating ww 1 peace treaty, so there was a large enough number of people to support it.

Nonsense. First of all, "enough number of people" isn't an argument against democracy. Hitler didn't come to power through a popular vote, rather he actively subverted public power, turning the state into his own private tyranny. Almost all despots have come to power not through democracy, but rather through violence and crime... like Pinochet, Lenin (who even lost an election), even Hitler, and well almost everyone.

Youre basically wondering why people support governments.. Its because they've never had it any other way so they think it needs to be like that,

That's ridicolous. People support governments because they know they're necessary institutions. And they logically are, because they're an extension of the human inherent political nature.

even if a different form of society would work better and even if governments use coercive force against their people. Like any type of order, an-cap needs a large enough support first before it can work. We simply dont have that yet, its a very new form of society, whose theoretical work has only been done during the last few decades.

Well, seriously, there has never been any anarcho-capitalist society. And it is not possible.

Again, business elite is not a concealed bubble whose power cant collapse unless it is put into a privileged position which can only happen if there is a coercive force SUPPORTED BY THE PEOPLE

Always, any despotic regime that seeks to keep its private rulers in power, destroys collective institutions that are responsive to the population. That's the Road to Serfdom. Rarely the population votes for a tyrant. Tyrants mostly come to power through the support of big business or violent groups.

In anarcho-capitalism, the privileged and powerful would simply purchase the services of private militaries and products of capitalist arms vendors. There's nothing to stop them from just anonymously buying mercenary armies from the other side of the globe, give them AK-47s and transport them to Kentucky, where they have no sympathies or loyalties with the locals, mask them and let them loose on the working people who make pesky raise demands. Then reward the mercs lavishly, kill those who open their mouth.

There's nothing really to stop this from happening in an anarcho-capitalist society if some people are enough powerful.

Ill give you that, capitalist principles were not that well realised back then, but a form of independent courts which people could choose between did exist so it provides some idea of how it could work.

Yes, and the "anarcho-capitalist" elements spurred inequality, concentration of wealth and power, etc.

Please explain how b derives from a.(and dont use some abstract idea like "political" as a mediator because it doesnt show anything if you dont define what exactly it means and how its derived from the first)

A free competition between PDAs is better than one central government.

No, it's not. Free competition between unregulated mercenary armies is not a good thing.

The reason pda-s havent been able to form thus far is that people havent wanted them to!

Maybe because private armies don't have a good reputation (perhaps for a good reason.)

The idea of a central government taking care of us is simply so inbred, that people prefer it even though its less efficient.(and yes PDA-s are able to enforce laws if they have support from their clients and other pda-s)

How? It wouldn't work in practice and doesn't seem to work in theory given all the yawning holes. Having many private dictatorships with private armies enforcing their own rules on their own turfs, well that has obvious consiquences. We can see that in Somalia, for example.

Because it will be retaliated (its talked about in the wiki article man, did you read my posts?)

Of course people would retaliate. A slave that is being whipped might spit back, but how does that affect his slavers who might be in New York, in a fancy hotel, protected by a complex system of secretive banking, limited liability and anomity? It probably wouldn't. Even if some private investigator could associate these crimes with the affluent businessman, nothing might come of it, because the businessman might threaten him, silence him, launch a PR-campaign with the support of totally unregulated PR-groups etc etc.

 

[Cutlass]

No government does not mean no power. It just means no almighty hierarchical power. If a community sees a threat, they'll act to it. Then the threat will see it's better to not be a threat. Also, the less laws there are, the more responsibility one takes. A law is an outsourcing of responsibility.

Still, milder forms of this actually increase people's safety. You can't say your laws serve you anymore, because you can't even understand them. That's not because of you, but because there's so many difficult laws that you'd have to do years of research at the very least for it. Today's law isn't there to serve the people anymore. If it were there to save the people, they'd make it understandable for the people.

Oh, by the way, I'm not one of the anarcho-capitalists. I actually think one day the monetary system will get obsolete. I'm more left wing anarchist so to say.

The government is the means the community uses to do that. Prohibiting the one and only tool available leaves only violence and revolution.



I was just reminded of this experience with private armies:

Product Description
A Brief History of the Birth of the Nazis is a timely and concise history of the Freikorps, the voluntary paramilitary groups that dominated German political life from the abdication of the Kaiser in 1918 to Hitler's Beerhall Putsch of 1923. Theirs is an often overlooked story of political intrigue and murder. Raised in the chaotic aftermath of war, the Freikorps were composed mostly of veteran soldiers, embittered and out of place in civilian life, and young, right-wing students determined to crush those forces who had "betrayed" their homeland. First used by the Social Democrats in power to defeat their enemies on the extreme left in Berlin and Bavaria, they soon launched a counteroffensive in which the Freikorps all but overturned the State in their attempt to set up a full-blown Fascist military government. Once thwarted, however, the disgruntled Freikorps embarked on a campaign of political murder; their leaders retired briefly to Bavaria, where they came under the influence of the little-known but rising political agitator Adolf Hitler. The ideology of the Friekorps was adopted, almost unmodified, by the Nazis, who, fittingly, marked their arrival in 1934 with the massacre of many former Freikorps members. Photographs are included.

http://www.amazon.com/Brief-History...=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1235183904&sr=8-2

 

[Traitorfish]

Although I sympathise with some elements of "anarchism", as it's commonly understood, although I subscribe to a more subsiditaritarian viewpoint, anarcho-capitalism has always seen somewhat absurd to me. A system which not only fails to provide for it's own continued existence, but actively encourages it's own destruction does not strike me as particularly logical, and the fact that it does so through rewarding the most ruthless and vicious participants with power over the weaker and more compassionate strikes me as something less than moral.

No government does not mean no power. It just means no almighty hierarchical power. If a community sees a threat, they'll act to it. Then the threat will see it's better to not be a threat. Also, the less laws there are, the more responsibility one takes. A law is an outsourcing of responsibility.

I will agree with this to some extent- a major problem, I feel, with the perceptions that most people hold of the concept of "government" is that they are so very attached to the hierarchical, essentially authoritarian form which we've inherited from the old despots. Democratised as they are, they so often reflect ancient tyrannies in their centralised, dehumanised and hierarchical natures. Government could just as easily be "bottom-up" as "top-down", grass roots and subsidiaritarian as centralised and authoritarian. Potentially, a system could be constructed spanning the entirety of human civilisation, from the individual to a world government, decisions being made at the level of the lowest competent authority.
What I do not believe, however, is that this means an anarchist utopia. So many problems which are inevitably generated within society mean that decisions must be made at a level above the immediate "community", if such a thing can be said to exist in a meaningful way in an industrial or post-industrial society. What I see, rather, is a society dedicated to the principal of universal self-determination. Each person is at once an autonomous entity and under a moral and social obligation to support the self-determination of others. Democracy, in other words.

 

[a_propagandist]

According to you, anarcho-capitalism is the best system for humanity.

The people of the world, in general, do not want anarcho-capitalism.

So, it follows that the people of the world apparently do not want the best system for them.

However, the very basis of your system implies that everyone is rational, acts with perfect information, and wants exactly what is best for them etc.

 

[Frank327]

The government is the means the community uses to do that. Prohibiting the one and only tool available leaves only violence and revolution.

How is it the one and only tool? It's the one and only tool we use nowadays, but that doesn't mean others don't exist. Again, a community police/army force can protect the people without government having control over them. Besides, by arming everyone with something basic, violent oppression will have a big price for the oppressor because he risks his life.

 

[Cutlass]

How is it the one and only tool? It's the one and only tool we use nowadays, but that doesn't mean others don't exist. Again, a community police/army force can protect the people without government having control over them. Besides, by arming everyone with something basic, violent oppression will have a big price for the oppressor because he risks his life.

There is no possibility of that working. A few of the armies will band together, defeat the others, and rule.

You cannot devise a system that utterly ignores human behavior and expect it to stand.

 

[Frank327]

There is no possibility of that working. A few of the armies will band together, defeat the others, and rule.

You cannot devise a system that utterly ignores human behavior and expect it to stand.

Human behavior is created by its environment. Change the environment, you change the behavior.

 

[Cutlass]

not by that much. You cannot stop people from scamming the system to their own advantage. You cannot stop the existence of predators. And you cannot stop the fact that the most aggressive tend to rise to the top.

Anarcho-capitalism simply guarantees that no power can stop that from happening in record time.

 

[aelf]

The motivation of supporters of anarcho-capitalism would collapse once they've learnt something substantial about politics. Until then, we can expect to see counter-realistic assessments of state and society. And until then, it would be useless to debate with them, for how do you debate with someone who refuses to accept even some basic truths? It's like trying to discuss mathematics with people who don't even agree that 1+1=2.

 

[Fayadi]

So does supporter of Socialism. Because every sensible Eastern Europeans, Russians and Chinese who have lived under that system the longest would agree.

At least Xarthas approaches the topic with an attitude of learner by giving suggestion rather than acting-smart by criticizing.

For the record, I disagree with anarcho-capitalism too. But I think socialism is a greater disaster.

 

[Mowque]

For the record, I disagree with anarcho-capitalism too. But I think socialism is a greater disaster.

How do things GET any worse then an anarchistic state? Unless i misunderstand what anarchy means?

 

[Fayadi]

Socialism in its purest form attempts to seize private property (which is a crime) with government instruments.

Anarchy in its purest form means no standard rule of law. An individual might commit crime against one another without the instrument of the government.

By the way this is getting off-topic. Let's get back to the point. We should not ridicule Xarthas as long as he is discussing it with a spirit of learner.

He is a pretty cool guy. He doesn't get emotional even after some snob call him names.

 

[Integral]

Setting aside feasability for a moment, I'd like to ask xarthaz a few questions.

1/ You think that anarcho-capitalism is the best form of political/economic association available. What, specifically, do you mean by 'anarcho-capitalism'? What do you mean by 'best'? How does anarcho-capitalism achieve that best outcome?

2/ What does anarcho-capitalism provide me (or society as a whole) that the current democratic mixed economy does not? What do I gain (What does society gain) from switching?

3/ Under an anarcho-capitalistic system, will society be able to enjoy the standard of living seen in the US and EU? Why or why not?

I look forward to your responses.