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Has anyone else read this book?  I just finished it a few days ago and it blew my mind.  Butler Shaffer describes how private property is essential for social systems to function correctly, where people treat each with respect and respect themselves as well.  A lot of people seem to have the misconception that anarcho-capitalists are strident individualists who just want to watch out for themselves and fuck everyone else and that an anarcho-capitalist society would lack the social aspect necessary for most people to thrive.  Shaffer destroys this misconception.  And he does it so beautifully.  I highly recommend this book.

I will be fucking lots of people in our future anarcho capitalist society; they will all enjoy it.

This book sounds good.

Oh sweet, mises has the pdf. I already want to send this guy my bitcoins.

 :D



Exactly.  That's the best thing about libertarian literature.

Thank you for this recommendation. I'm up to page 50 now, and finding it interesting and worthwhile.

Because libertarians are rejecting imaginary property in FAVOR of real property!

Well yes, to some extent, but "Boundaries of Order" still carries a copyright notice and strongly-worded IP warning.

No problem.  I'm fairly new to anarcho-capitalism and don't have the exposure some you probably do, and this book really solved a lot of the theoretical issues I had with the theory. 

Thanks. Looks interesting.


+1

One of the things that the state does, is to turn subsets of society against each other. Each group clamors to be awarded a bigger share of candy (i.e. confiscated property) by the government, to the detriment of the rest of society. As soon as you take away the state, it's more productive for people to co-operate.

I had become aware of this empirically over the years, but I hadn't seen it explained in this way before, by focusing on the nature of property.

I also found the tie-in with entropy interesting. Total entropy (disorder) in the universe is always increasing. But living organisms take in energy and can achieve a local decrease in entropy - not just in their bodies, but also in the things they create: their property. I've never thought about property and entropy like that before.

I'm working through Chapter Three at the moment.

It's brilliant, isn't it?  He founds his definition of property in life itself, and ties biology and social reasoning together.  I've always heard of property rights justified by "Natural rights" or "God-given rights", but these are subjective in themselves.  He defines property as a necessary component of human life itself. 

I will warn you he does get a bit verbose and tends to repeat himself to hammer points home, but it's well worth reading through the whole thing.

Yes, I'm discovering that. I'm up to page 100, and have been noticing some wishy-washy "filler" creeping in here and there.

Yep.  Persevere through it though, the conclusions he makes throughout the Chapters are worth the extra repetition of ideas.

The time has come for us to not be ashamed of our political beliefs.
But all we wish for is that people treat each with respect and respect themselves as well.
We no longer need to fear who we are.
I was a closeted anarcho-capitalist for too long.

OK, I've finished reading this book. Although it was a struggle, I'm glad I finished it.

The writing style is easy to read, but the content is repetitive and dilute, which meant that my mind kept wandering onto other things while I was reading it. Nevertheless, it was worthwhile.

The best chapter, in my opinion, was the one about the environment and property rights. The author addresses a lot of concepts that are glossed over by other many authors. He analyses who has property interests in clean air, clean water, etc, and how those people interact. Very nicely covered.

Thanks for recommending this book.

No problem, glad someone else enjoyed it as much as I did.  Now the trick is to get my statist friends to read it....  :P