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RE: But Anarchism is LAWLESS CHAOS! Clearing up some common misconceptions about Voluntaryism/Anarcho-Capitalism.

in #anarchy7 years ago

I mean, that's nice and all, but it also seems to fly squarely in the face of human nature, or to insist on ignoring it to make an ideological point.

A few problems:
1> Acutally living in such a world would be a nightmare. Imagine a world where there were no overarching sets of laws, standards, a system in which traveling across state, county, city, neighborhood, even property lines means constantly entering and leaving fluctuating sets of laws. Perhaps here your marriage to a man is recognized, move into an apartment two streets over and you can't co-sign because the apartment owner doesn't like gay marriage, go to the next city over to a hospital and your husband can make medical choices on your behalf, get transferred to a specialist in the next county and now they can't, have to move a few hundred miles away for a great job and now you are a reviled sinner and your employer fires you upon finding out and nobody in town will hire you or serve you. And they only resource you'd have against such situations would be to try and find an area sympathetic enough to your homosexuality that you could buy property and encourage other gays to move there and do the same forming a gay mini nation where you can ensure you are treated with basic decency. Of course that is assuming the home owners in that area don't see what you are trying to do and set a gay quota, refusing to sell to additional gays beyond a certain point. You can think of a thousand other scenarios, but such a world would be hell for any demographic other than the dominant one in the culture.

2> Recourse against those who do cause harm would be difficult if not impossible. Say someone does bash your window in with a brick. What can you do? Well if they are a member of your homeowner's group that all agree to follow certain rules, perhaps you can level consequences against them, but what if they arent? To what authority do you then appeal for recompense? What if someone lives upstream from your community and is horribly polluting your water, but their actions are accepted, even approved of by the community they are part of as their industry benefits the community. What if that community neither needs nor wants your trade/partnership/business, and doesn't care how mad you are? To whom to you appeal with no larger governing body?

3>The Rise of tribes and warlords would be inevitable. At some point the gays would get tired of getting kicked around, town A would get real tired of being poisoned by town B, without larger governmental recourse the choices would be to either suck it up and deal with the status quo, or find some way to force satisfaction from the offending party. Violence would erupt, privately paid for police forces used to protect your community interest would evolve seemlessly into armies, and towns/communities/regions would no doubt erupt into war, with regional warlords absorbing territory.

4> What we have now is, in a sense, anarchy-capitalism. What we are looking at in our world right now, as of this moment, is the current state in a long and complicated series of systems and arrangements that primitive man has made to create greater security and prosperity for themselves. Rules that groups have agreed to live under, leadership and authority that rises naturally among pack animals taken and codified. Any system of anarcho-capitalism that did manage to strike a healthy and prosperous balance would have to essentially evolve something that is functionally the same as government.

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Thanks for your comment. I think maybe reading a little more about what market anarchism actually is might help to clear up some of your concerns.

Imagine a world where there were no overarching sets of laws, standards, a system in which traveling across state, county, city, neighborhood, even property lines means constantly entering and leaving fluctuating sets of laws.

The world is already like this now, isn't it? I can have CBD oil in Colorado, and then be put in a cage in Kansas if I take it there. I can run around naked in my house, but not in yours. Society is already loosely based on private property, just with a cancerous, coercive state heaped on top of it, perverting those ideas via the application of force against non-violent individuals.

Recourse against those who do cause harm would be difficult if not impossible. Say someone does bash your window in with a brick. What can you do?

I would encourage you to watch the video above in the post explaining private law society. How this would work ( and already does in so many ways) is covered there.

What we have now is, in a sense, anarchy-capitalism.

This is categorically false, as the bedrock and non-negotiable foundation of anarcho-capitalism is the axiomatic reality of self-ownership, and by extension, the Non-Agression Principle, which states that all legitimate human interaction is consensual. Government is based foundationally upon coercion. These two systems are diametrically opposed, by definition.

1: That first part did not at all address the concern of the hypothetical minority traversing an unpredictable and diffulct landscape of hostile laws. Your reply that that already happens as things are now does nothing to address how infinitely worse it would be under your proposed arrangement.

2: I will watch that when I get home and see if it is some new take on law enforcement and anarchy that I've never heard before.

3: I disagree. Well I mean I agree that coercion is a major part of our actual reality, what I disagree with is that it is even remotely possible to create any kind of stable and prosperous system that did not involve coercion. My statement was that a system of government and coercive laws is what a species or originally private and free creatures have come up with due to the stability and prosperity it affords, and that any anarchic system would eventually have to adopt that model or fall into an inoperable mess.

I don't find the chaos currently engulfing the world stable or prosperous. And no, rulers and violent people "came up" with applying force to rule. The second part, "...any anarchic system would eventually have to adopt that model or fall into an inoperable mess," is an assertion. You would have to substantiate it to make it a valid argument.

You'll have to have an open mind and understand that the philosophy is not a pacificistic one, either, as self-defense is necessary for self-preservation and a nature conferred capacity as a result of individual self-ownership.

Here's the video again.

Your self defense is another man's aggression, and chasing long chains of incrementally escalating agression to find out who was the true aggressor and who was acting defensivly is a fool's errand. The world is full of places where such a question is beyond untangling.

In any event, I'm unlikly to change your mind, and that's fine, but this seems to me to fly directly in the face of everything we know about human nature.

I would only caution you against assuming that a person not seeing things your way means they lack an open, clear, or clever mind.

Your self defense is another man's aggression..

Actually it has a very clear definition. You've made another assertion, but until you substantiate it, or ask how I define self-defense, this conversation will not be fruitful, I'm afraid.

Many things with very clear definitions on paper aren't nearly so clear in the real world, even assuming that men are angels and pride/anger/tribalism won't skew or twist their opinion on matters.....which of course it will.

We are talking fairly well-defined concepts. You keep moving the goalposts here. Thanks for the exchange.