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I don't care about votes as much as I do accountability. The important thing is that government should be accountable to the people. If the people are not satisfied by the efforts of a government to fulfill the role set for it, to do those things communities of individuals cannot do as independent agents, then it must be possible for that government to be replaced by one that does. So far 'democracy' is the system we use to try to do this... perhaps we'll discover a better less game-able way at some point.  

No offense but your passionate hatred of 'government', somewhat typical of this forum strikes me as deeply naive and misguided. Government is just a word for an organization of management in society. These days we call that the 'state', in days gone by 'government' would have been the tribal elders or whatever. Hating 'government' is like waging a war on terrorism.

For me, the state is a product of society. Without the state society remains, and a society has needs that are greater than just commerce. States come and go, societies generate them as they need them. Society is the human and the state is her machine. If this machine is broken, fix it, or replace it or something. Just don't think that a society is merely the buying and selling of stuff because it's not.

Besides what is businesses but private dictatorship? Sell me things I'd like to buy sure, make a profit if you do it well enough. Personally however I don't want to live in a commodified jungle of private dictatorships where everything in life is a matter of sweaty wads of cash. I don't believe in the economics of the sociopath.

Anyway competition must always give way to combination, your enamored attitude to market forces is misguided, you'd soon find yourself ruled by the iron boot of totalitarian/monopolistic arrangements. Totalitarian precisely because you would have made sure that nothing is outside the reach of your hallowed Market.

Anarcho-fascism: All within the market, nothing outside the market, nothing against the market.

Not for me thanks.

We identify the state as an organization that have the monopoly on force. It is not just some "word" for anarchists. It is a particular type of "organization of management" in society.



Commerce is a way to achieve what human beings want, not a need.


Way to strawman anarcho-capitalists and voluntaryists.

I don't want force to be something any old jack with a baseball bat is free to apply. The use of force should be the sole preserve of an agent that is accountable to the community. That's my ideal anyway, sometimes force is necessary, there are psychos and madmen out there after all. But we've obviously got a long way to go before accountability is properly factored in. I'm still bitter and angry about what the US and UK did to the people of Iraq for instance. Now the perpetrators are off on the speech circuit and flogging books. Assholes.

Commerce is a need, without it we find it difficult to achieve what human beings want. Just ask the command economists. I'm pro free-market, I just don't think everything should be in the realm of market forces. The market is an amazing and useful animal, but society should not be run by an animal. Government's the guy that should be holding the reigns.

This is not what the voluntaryists/anarcho-capitalists argue for.

You fail to see the point that government naturally and generally attracts the corrupt, and this is the very weakness of government, that it has nothing above it so to corrupt it will corrupt the whole of society. Also the concept of society is something people are too attached to while they overestimate it's actual usefulness. Think about what consists in a nation and you'll see what I'm talking about.

I'd rather decentralize the power then keep it all in a small group of individuals who invariably become corrupted.  You want to give a single group of people the coercive monopoly, allow them to write the laws, allow them to enforce the laws and then keep them accountable?  Is it any wonder it's never worked?  The Great American Experiment was the best so far, but it too is about to end in a death-throw of tyranny. 

The key concept for me is voluntary interactions versus coercive interactions.

no to the gold cult, I think you're being really unfair to the "anarcho" capitalists. They aren't fascists. It's just that their ideas would result in a mafia run society.

(Not that I like the government any more than they do.)

tl;dr.

If people are good we don't "need" government
if people are evil we don't dare have a government

So then is humanity completely fucked?  What would the ideal, yet workable system be in your opinion?  Direct democracy?  Anarcho socialism?

Edit:

P.S. Your name makes me think you lean more towards anarcho-socialism/communism.  How would that society be any better than an anarcho-capitalist society? 

It's an attitude thing. A culture of sharing, giving, of not exploiting, etc. along with an anarchist society, 'd be nice.

We libertarians like to think commerce and sharing/giving are not in direct opposition.

Yeah, it's more the whole infinite accumulation of property that is permitted and encouraged that would cause mafia type activities I think.

You inevitably need protection organizations to help protect your property, because you can't do it yourself. The reason you can't do it yourself is that you have too much of it.

If I have one house, I can live in it, and defend it. I can also rely on the local community to help me out, 'cause I would help them out.

If I have two houses, I can live in one. I can't live in the other, so I have to pay someone else to look after it. The community around that second house isn't going to care what happens to the house as much, because they don't have any personal contact with the owner.

If I have 1000 houses (perfectly possible in an infinite accumulation capitalist society), I have to pay other people to look after them. Based on humanities previous experiences with societies where infinite resource accumulation happened, I'd have to say that it doesn't bode well for those who don't have.

But, you know, I think we have different priorities, in which case arguing is pretty pointless.

Way to go strawmanning the anarchocapitalists, I dont know where to start.  First off, anarcho capitalists arent nexessarily opposed to force, but rather are opposed to coercive monopolies.

Basically the key to all this is whether or not you believe the initiation of coercion is an acceptable method of solving social problems.  The only way you are going to limit people from owning more capital than they can "use" is through coercion.  If you allow markets to thrive, and as long as interactions are voluntary, then yes, some people will end up with more capital than others.  Possibly more than they can use.

However, to say that someone has more capital than they can use is completely subjective.  Who gets to decide how much each person is going to have?  Is two houses really more than someone can use?  Could they not live in one and let their son live in the other one?  Is four rakes too many for a gardener?  What if he has three children who help in the garden?  If so, is five too many?  If it is, how will you enforce that no one will have more than five rakes?

Also, the free market is actually the best defense against infinite resource accumulation because it rewards those who uses their resources the most efficiently and punishes those who don't.  In a society with government, the wealthy can use the coercive monopoly of the government to gather and hold resources.  They don't have to protect their resources themselves, because they can get the government to do it for them with the taxpayers footing the bill.  However, in a free market they would have to hire someone to protect their property, as you say, and this would necessarily limit how much capital they could accumulate.  The more they had the harder it would be to take care of it and protect it.

You are making the assumption that protection agencies are a bad thing, whereas they would actually help hold society together.  Mafias coalesce around black markets, which are created by governments.  There are no alcohol or coffee mafias because society isn't arbitrarily banned from purchasing and producing those products.  Conflict is almost always more expensive than cooperation, so in a free market society mafias would not be able to maintain the strength they can under government.  Mafias and governments do not seek to please their customers, unlike private companies who have to please their customers in order to survive.  Private defense and insurance institutions would have vested interests in cooperating with each other and providing fair, excellent service to their customers.

Basically the key to all this is whether or not you believe the initiation of coercion is an acceptable method of solving social problems.  The only way people are going to own more capital than they can "use" is through coercion.

If you have 1000 houses¹, and I wish to live in one that you aren't using, there are a few things that can happen (here's two). I can agree that you are the "owner" (even though you don't use the house), and pay you a certain amount of rent for the privilege of living in "your" house. Or, I can say that you aren't the owner, the house doesn't have an owner because it isn't being used. I then move in and ignore your claims of ownership.

In the second case, whether or not the community will support your "ownership" will be based on how well they know and like you. If you only turn up twice a year to collect rent (or not at all, and send goons to collect the rent) they'll probably support my claims of ownership, because I'm actually using the house. In this case, you will have to forcibly evict me (use coercion) to get "your" "property" back.

As for the rest of your post, I think it's sufficient to say "I disagree". Mafia-type society is where a "family" basically runs an area, using force and coercion to make the point. It's not just selling "blackmarket" goods, it's also protection rackets (beautiful shop you got here, be a shame if anything happened to it) etc.
From Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia#Protection_rackets)
This seems suspiciously like what I've read the private protection agencies are meant to do. The Wikipedia article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_defense_agencies) suggests that others have made the same point. Nozick, in "Anarchy, State, and Utopia" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia) (which I've mentioned before on this board) also talks about how these PPA's would effectively form a state.


Also, I reject your claim that companies have a vested interest in providing the best service to customers. Companies have a vested interested in making as much money as possible. If they can find a cheaper way of making money rather than provide good service² then they will do that.


Footnotes:
1. I think we can both agree this is more than can be "used" by a single individual, but if you don't agree, assume X, where X is a number that you do think can be "used" by a single individual.
2. E.g. by locking in customers by being the only supplier of software that can read files produced by their software - see MicroSoft etc.

This is simply brilliant. I think I'll go get my house today! Everyone hates this one rich guy who has all these houses built, so when he comes to claim his "property" back, everyone will support me. I can't believe I didn't think of this earlier. I don't know why anyone in their right mind would ever pay for a house when you can just do this!

Hell, after I get my house I'll go to the grocery "store" and grab some shit to stock up my new refrigerator. The "store owner" isn't using those items, they are just sitting there on the shelf, so they aren't really his property. After all he has thousands of canned goods. The community doesn't really like him either, always raising prices on his food and whatnot.

And there is a nice Porsche that sits in the same spot all the time, I've never seen anyone drive it. I think it's for sale or some bs. I do need something to get from the food distribution center to my house. Perfect.

As long as the community supports me, I'm golden. After all, might makes right!

Forget this no house, no car, no food shit. I'm going out to get mine today! Thanks dude, you've changed my life!

So what you gonna do when you leave that house in the morning to go work and I step in it while you're out and claim it mine the same way you claim it yours? And I ain't leaving, I'm a basement dweller.

Bullshit.  If someone has enough money to buy 10 houses and they engage in voluntary exchanges with people who'd rather have the money than their house, how is that coercion? 


Again, while I might agree that 1000 houses is more than a single individual can use, who decides what that number is?  Is it ten?  Is it two?  Also, do you have the same standard for all capital?  Can you only own one computer, one house, one camera, etc.  Surely not.  But then how do you decide how many is "too many" for a person to own?  What if people disagree on that number?  Will you come and take my third camera because you've decided that I can't use more than two cameras? 

The problem with this type of system is you are essentially advocating theft and then attempting to justify it with abstract, subjective reasoning. 



Fair enough, and as you said earlier


I think you are probably right.  I don't advocate a system where theft is acceptable based on someone's subjective opinion about how much capital an individual can "use".  You do, apparently.  So we'll have to agree to disagree.

Government is that which taxes. Taxing is the taking of money by force. Government is the mafia, and government makes you pay it protection money. Government spends this protection money lining the pockets of their friends who in return provide low quality goods to the public, or in many cases goods many do not even want (for example, I don't want my tax dollars to pay for the war on drugs, not that it matters since I don't want to be extorted from in the first place).

Anarchocapitalists are against taxation, seeing it as the theft that it is. Instead, they suggest that you should be FREE to pay for services you want, but not forced into them. If you want to be part of a public health care pool, you get to do that but if others don't want to be a part of it they dont have to. In short, you pay for what you want, need and use. This makes for far more efficient systems, freer people, but less happy government and less happy people who would rather use the government to extort their neighbors for money.

Anarcho-capitalism is pretty much decentralized libertarianism.


Government demands taxes, versus what cryptoanarchists would prefer, private defense agencies, who accept payments, and private market services to meet needs such as education. With out government involved, everything actually improves, and no more violation of peoples rights takes place.

PROTIP: Use hyphens ("coercive-government" or "monopoly-government") to avoid silly debates over semantics.

Property is theft.

Proudhon who wrote that phrase was, I believe, talking about excess property. Possession (use and occupation) is the only valid form of "property", and obviously you can't posses 1000 houses in the sense that I am talking about.

As to what defines use and occupation, that is, I believe, something more generally for the community to decide.

Have a nice day :)

Benjamin Tucker says that community sucks, and rejects "that there is an entity known as the community which is the rightful owner of all land, Anarchists deny...I...maintain that ‘the community’ is a non-entity, that it has no existence..."

Tucker and I disagree on things! Shocker! (Also, where's that from? Also, Tucker had a strange phase before he died where he went all Stirnerite. I'm not sure I'd count anything he said from that phase as relevant to the conversation.

:D

Tucker and George conversation: http://uncletaz.com/liberty/dialogue.html (http://uncletaz.com/liberty/dialogue.html)

I think the difference between "anarcho-capitalism" and "anarcho-socialism" (personally, I think both of those terms are meaningless, you cannot impose your will on anarchy) simplifies to a difference in the amount of time necessary for abandoned property to be considered unclaimed. Does this seem correct to you?

If anarchy is achieved, would you accept that some people (myself included) would prefer to live in a system resembling anarcho-capitalism? I accept that some prefer to to live in a system resembling anarcho-socialism.

No. Capitalism, to be capitalism, has to have a system or method of accumulating capital, which is an excess of resources beyond what can be used by an individual. The capitalist will then permit others to use those resources, in exchange for payment. This equates to rent, interest on loans, and not paying workers the full value of their labor. "Anarcho" capitalists like to pretend that you can have capitalism without a state, and that it would be a free society. (I disagree on both points.)

Other anarchists reject the entire notion of accumulating capital as it would bring about an unfree society (and, eventually a state like structure to protect the capitalists).
Other anarchists would also say that "anarcho" capitalism isn't anarchistic because to enforce "property" rights (in this case the right to own capital), is to impose "your will" on others.

Personally, I'm an anarchist without adjectives. I believe that the best system is on that promotes the maximum freedom (which I also believe will promote equality). I think that it would be wonderful if people could choose the economic system they live in. But realistically, I think that something resembling communism (stateless and classless communism) would end up producing most manufactured goods in an anarchist society. But, there would be nothing to stop you, or anyone else, from exchanging labor or products.

A market might well exist in an anarchist society, but it won't be a capitalist market.

excess resources are not capital. if I harvest my entire crop and store it for winter I have accumulated an excess of resources but it's not capital. This is deferred consumption and is a perfectly legitimate form of wealth accumulation.
If I trade a portion of my crop for things I need "then" it's capital.

No capital, no market  :P


I think the main problem is that anti capitalists think the owners of capital would control a capitalist system.
without the force of the state a capitalist society would be controlled entirely by the whims of the consumer and any capitalist who didn't fall in line would be out of business.

I understand where you are coming from when say "property is theft", but it still seems to be a logical contradiction to me.  I'd like to read up on "leftist" anarchism so I can fully understand where you are coming from.  You have repeatedly mentioned the anarchist FAQ and I will go take a look at that, but I was wondering if you can refer me to other readings on the traditional anarchist position.  Perhaps some of Proudhon's works or Tucker's?  Keep in mind that I have a lot of books on my reading list and limited time so if you refer me to some 1000 page magnum opus I will not likely be able to finish it.  :P  Anyway, thank you for being willing to discuss these topics and being civil about it.  I appreciate it as it causes me to question my own opinions and their validity.  I don't ever want to get to the point where I blindly believe something and cannot defend it.

I strongly suggest that you attempt to read the bits of the "FAQ" (though it's obviously not a traditional FAQ, what with being so, large) that interest you. If you are a capitalist supporter, checkout the section and appendix on Capitalism.

Personally I'm a huge fan of Errico Malatesta and Emma Goldman, both of whom were communist anarchists (though Malatesta was also 'without adjectives'). The trouble is, there is so much writing on anarchism out there, that I can't really select just a few notes and say it is representative.

However, here are some pieces that I like, though I doubt they will satisfy you (at least they are short):

http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/malatesta/note.html
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/malatesta/towardsanarchy.html
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/aando/anarchism.html
http://praxeology.net/BT-WIA.htm (this one by Tucker, the reason I'm an anarchist is because I don't like anything else)
http://www.panarchy.org/kropotkin/1905.eng.html (by Kropotkin, written for the eleventh edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica)
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/godstate/index.htm (Famous work from Bakunin, God and the State, his work On Authority is also worth a read)

More generally, for a variety of anarchist writers, there are numerous websites that collect writings, including: <http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/>
<http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives>
<http://www.marxists.org/subject/anarchism/index.htm> (Though they are Marxists and have a typically Marxist objection to and misunderstanding of anarchism.)

Most of the above writings will not really address state-less capitalism, because it wasn't really existent until after WW2.

However, also check out RevLeft <http://revleft.com>, for a variety of "leftists" (including Stalinists and other such scum, worse than misguided anti-state capitalist supporters) though I personally don't post there. Perhaps sign up, post in the OI section and ask why they think that "anarchist"-capitalism is not real anarchism?


@deadlizard, any 'capitalist' society without a state would, I believe, rapidly produce a state to protect the interests of the capitalist class. I point you to Nozick's book Anarchy, State and Utopia. I disagree with both the conclusions and premise of the book, but can't fault the logic that a stateless capitalism would produce a state.

That proposition is self-refuting. You can't steal something unless it's the property of someone else. If you reject the notion of property, the notion of theft goes too.

not really.  Someone hiding / hoarding something in a tribe could be considered 'theft' even if there is no concept of property.

This is true if you mean that all property is theft.  But I think from what I've read in some previous posts on this forum, Proudhon said that as a shock tactic and meant it to apply only to "excess" property.  I'm not convinced that you can have "excess" property, but I'm willing to read up on that position.  

I've heard the argument that you need to take ideas out to their logical extremes in order to see if they're valid.  So with the idea that you cannot own more property than you can use one would need to take an extreme example.  The one that was presented to me was if one individual or company managed to control the world's entire water supplies (in a free market).  Now, I realize that the likelihood of a single entity controlling the entire water supply of the world is virtually nil, especially in a free market.  But if they could, would we recognize their claim?  Would we agree that they can own all the water and therefore deny it to us if they chose, or would we say we have some sort of right to that water?

I'm curious to know what you think about this as you seem to have a really good grasp on economics and libertarian philosophy.  

I don't believe that "excess" has any objective basis. It's an opinion, nothing more.

I would agree with you.  But what would you say about the hypothetical example wherein one person controls all the world's water supply?  Do they have a right to deny it from us?  I tend to think that arguments should be scaleable, but perhaps this one isn't and the example isn't worth examining because it's never going to happen in reality.

I can make your example workable if you'll allow for a little fanciful imagination. Imagine the world as it is, nothing changed except, let's say that I own a fresh water lake on my fenced in property. There's no question that I own the lake. I fish in it everyday. I've also built a plastic dome over it to make sure that none of it evaporates. Everything is fine so far.

Now, let's say that aliens show up, beam away all the water in the world, clouds and all, except for my lake. I now control the world's water supply. Has the legal status changed with regards to my lake? Obviously not. The lake is still legally mine. How about the moral status? That, I'm not sure of because we've created a crisis situation and those should never be used to make general laws from because "hard cases make for hard laws."

Regarding the question of whether the moral status should change because we've created a crisis situation and those should never be used to make general laws from because "hard cases make for hard laws, one could argue that human society is always in a "crisis" situation.  Since it is no longer a specific isolated crisis situation, then one could argue that the moral rules should reflect this.

True but I meant that relatively speaking. There's a difference between wandering around Sam's Club trying to find the bottled water section vs. the scenario I've described in my last post.

The reason I bring that up is that I do hear some argue that "due to global warming, etc., we are in a crisis mode and need implement democratic institutionalized coercion to survive.  Therefore statism."

Actually that's pretty accurate. Considering that we define "the market" as the sum of all voluntary human interaction and completely oppose involuntary human interaction, it's almost dead-on in fact.

And by what standard does "the community" (which is nothing more than a group of self-interested individuals) get to decide that?

How about instead of putting a person at the mercy of a group of persons (which is nothing but playground bullying all growed up and with fancy clothes on), we use an objective standard to determine those things? Something like an identifiable threshold of difference between something that is being properly used or not used, like... maybe the transformation of a part of nature through labor into a productive good? But nah, that's property theory. So much better to let the power-seeking yammerheads who rise like flotsam to the head of "the community" decide.