Originally Posted by independent

It was self-described anarchists who were most vocal about these issues in the 19th and early 20th century.

That does not make them the same issues. One can be in agreement with the anarchists about all of them, and still be in disagreement about the desirability of overthrowing the state. By the same token, an anarchy is a stateless society -- and may or may not be an egalitarian, feminist, or sexually liberated, or democratic society (actually I might argue that the last is incompatible with anarchy) -- and vice-versa.

I'd like to see the liber back in liberal. Then we can talk about money and social welfare programs.

Money is the most important thing in the world, if you have no money. Having been there, I know this. If you have money, then you can be concerned about such things as political freedom, which becomes more important (or at least more urgent) than money -- but only because that money stuff is taken care of already. The starving are never free. An adequate income and the meeting of material needs are prerequisites to liberty.

Political philosophy has never, and probably will never, match reality. That doesn't stop us from creating them and becoming attached to them, and it doesn't stop them from influencing the course of societies across time.

No, but I would submit that while political philosophy can never perfectly match reality (just as no model can perfectly describe the thing modeled), still it ought to have at least a nodding acquaintance with it. The great flaw in Marxism is in the complete divorce from reality that pervaded its predictions and prescriptions. This required those committed to Marxism to engage in totalitarian oppression (which is certainly opposed to the Marx' thought) in order to force reality into a Marxist mold that it did not want to fit. Anarchism suffers from the same drawback.

Of course, if all you're looking for is an inspiring ideal, and you have no pretense that what you're talking about can ever be a real political/economic system, then there's no need for any connection with reality. That's not really what I'm about, but if it's where you're coming from and if we have mutual understanding on the point, cool.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

I'll second Mikebert's challenge. I quite believe you capable of creating an internally consistent theory of property, but if you want to assert that your theory is uniquely correct to the extent of having disproved all other theories of property, I'd like to see some sort of formal proof.

Well, I don't claim to have all the answers. There are some things that I'm quite sure of, and others of which I'm less sure. But I'm no different than anyone else in this regard.

Re: property. My idea is that property rights, in general, are legitimate because they reflect (to some extent) that person's labor. When you deprive someone of their product of their labor, not only are you committing a wrong, but you are aggressing against them, as justly-acquired property is an inalienable adjunct of a person.

Originally Posted by haymarket martyr

The libertarian argument about theft - when it applies to income - always ignores or sidesteps the reality that a person lives in a society of people and was only able to earn that money because of others. No man is an island entire unto himself.... and if you don't like the consequences of that what you need to get your own island and support it yourself or with people of like mind.

A lot of this is very true, but I don't see how people who have helped you along the way have established a rightful claim to something that you acquired via free exchange. Their input was not of a contractual nature. Perhaps one has a moral duty to give back to the community, but that's a different story.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

You listed a number of institutions in your reply to Bob that, while they have obvious negative effects, also serve desirable purposes. Arguably, they are not the best mechanism for serving those purposes, but that raises the question of what they should be replaced by.

OK, just keep in mind that replacement institutions need not be explicitly defined. General ground rules are more important than the exact organization.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

This {the corporate form} is a way to encourage investment in wealth-creation by reducing risk. As Ambrose Bierce put it, it's "an ingenious device to allow individual profit without individual responsibility." In the case of publicly-traded corporations, it's also a way to raise investment capital. Absent the corporate form, investment would be discouraged by comparison and the result would be a (relatively) depressed economy.

Would investment be depressed overall, or just discouraged from going into corporations? Are you predicting increased consumption in response to a lack of the corporate form? If you aren't, then those savings would go somewhere -- to other types of firms.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

The functionality of this is obvious: it encourages invention by guaranteeing a temporarily high level of reward to the inventor.

Does it?

If there is any encouraging effect, it has to be limited to the first year or two after invention, but beyond that (and possibly right away) the effect of a patent system is to retard the process of invention.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

What mechanism should replace patent law for the purpose of encouraging invention?

There may not be a need for one. How about this: drop patent terms down to five years, then drop the term one year for every three thereafter. If there's really a problem, it will be clear before you get down to zero. And, if patent critics are right, the terms will reduce to zero and there won't need to be any replacement at all.

It's possible that you'd have to explicitly allow anyone to reverse engineer anything they owned and prohibit anti-tampering clauses in purchase contracts. Really this follows from the standard concept of ownership. If I buy a computer pre-assembled, opening the case might void my service agreement but it doesn't mean they can take the computer back. Some aspects of patent law might be beneficial, but most if not all of them could be mitigated via service agreements.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

(Side note: this is really separate from a discussion of the abuse of patent law in which employers force employees to sign away their rights in any inventions created while working for the employer. Although that's a worthy subject of discussion, too.)

Yes, but I'm pretty sure we'd agree on those issues, so I'll leave them aside.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

By facilitating nationwide trade {subsidized transport} encourages wealth creation overall. It also subsidizes at public expense something that results in a public good: availability of goods from other parts of the country, and individual travel. While I do understand that it encourages large-scale enterprise and so the concentration of wealth, it seems to me that lack of it would discourage these things mainly by depressing the economy, which strikes me as a poor trade.

Superficially, this seems plausible, but what you're implicitly doing here is treating transportation costs as a special part of production. You probably don't support subsidized land or mineral rights, or subsidizing product marketing or suppressing labor mobility to keep wage costs down. Yet, shipping costs get special treatment. I guess this is because the availability of goods is a consumer benefit as well.

However, since you've made it easier to compete over a wide area, you're going to have larger average firm size, which means a less favorable labor environment. So you end up with consumers getting goods from a wider area, but the goods aren't any more diverse and they have lower wages with which to buy them. I'm not sure this works out to anyone's benefit except people who ship large amounts of physical product.

This argument also assumes that the specific transportation types that we've subsidized aren't themselves wasteful. Consider that since you've subsidized them, you get more of them and moreover, there's less incentive to be efficient. As a result, while you may spend a higher percentage of overall social resources on transportation, you may not actually be getting more effective transportation. An unsubsidized system might also spread goods over the same area, just with higher wages and greater product diversity.

As with the patent argument above, I'd recommend scaling back the subsidies. Roads do present an interesting case, as one thing we shouldn't do is "privatize" them (i.e. let the state sell them off*).

What should be done is to turn roads into commons property. For non-highways, you allow any contiguous group of landowners to form a road co-op. At that point, they become responsible for traffic rules, maintenance, the whole deal. I think the most likely initial claimants would be clusters of streets in cities. I.e. a neighborhood would take charge of the roads and designate speed limits, traffic flow and tolls (if applicable). Where there were local holdouts, the state could continue as before while an agreement was reached.

With highways we could grant road shares to everyone living near a particular highway, turn it into a toll road and distribute extra toll money to shareholders. If multiple roads competed for traffic, the tolls would drop to cost of maintenance. Since the primary maintenance costs for roads are from large trucks, progressive tolls would likely result (due to the desires of the average share holder). To get subsidized transport, shippers would either have to build their own roads -- which isn't really a subsidy at all since they'd have to pay to gain the benefit of low truck tolls. The road shares should not be transferable; since they represent a portion of a common law right-of-way, the shares should really be an aspect of the land in vicinity of the road. (I.e. when you move to a new town, you get new road shares and your old ones stay where you lived before.) When building a road, you'll need to buy the land to build the road on, and with no eminent domain that probably means granting road shares to the person you're buying the land from.

There's a lot of complexity there and I concede that doing this in an orderly fashion through a government rather than by revolutionary means is more likely to come out fairly. The goal is to make all costs of production be borne by the producer themselves, but in the case of roads and other transport subsidies, there is a significant "subsidy of history" to overcome. (Short version: This is a "slow" anarchism, where the state has a role to play in getting rid of itself.)


* A lot of libertarians get this one wrong, but it results in a contradiction. If state ownership of property is illegitimate, then letting the state fence their stolen goods isn't legitimate either. The correct view of abandoned state property is to consider it unowned and thus claimed by its current users.

Originally Posted by Matt1989

Well, I don't claim to have all the answers. There are some things that I'm quite sure of, and others of which I'm less sure. But I'm no different than anyone else in this regard.

Re: property. My idea is that property rights, in general, are legitimate because they reflect (to some extent) that person's labor. When you deprive someone of their product of their labor, not only are you committing a wrong, but you are aggressing against them, as justly-acquired property is an inalienable adjunct of a person.

Originally Posted by haymarket martyr

The libertarian argument about theft - when it applies to income - always ignores or sidesteps the reality that a person lives in a society of people and was only able to earn that money because of others. No man is an island entire unto himself.... and if you don't like the consequences of that what you need to get your own island and support it yourself or with people of like mind.

Originally Posted by Matt1989

A lot of this is very true, but I don't see how people who have helped you along the way have established a rightful claim to something that you acquired via free exchange. Their input was not of a contractual nature. Perhaps one has a moral duty to give back to the community, but that's a different story.

I think most of us have heard of the movie Dances with Wolves. A cavalry officer stationed in the old west ends up living with the natives. It's a rare western that explores the native side of the Old West.

There is a buffalo hunt scene where the officer looses his hat during the chase. One of the natives picks up the hat and puts it on. After the hunt, the officer asks for his hat back. He gets told that if one abandons property, said item becomes the property of anyone who picks it up. There is a potential for further discussion. One would get the sense that the US Army would not agree with the native approach. Still, that scene involved a lot of natives being present and one cavalry officer. The standards of the community prevailed.

Humans are social animals. They form groups, select leaders, make up rules and defend territory. I would expect any human group to have rules regarding property. I'd expect that the leader of that territory would see said rules enforced. Not all these sets of rules are equally fair or desirable. I don't see our current society as perfect. I advocate change. Thus, I can hardly tell you you can't advocate change.

It would be nice if all social contracts could involve an explicit consent of the governed. A libertarian, walking into a territory controlled by another type of social structure, might ideally like to say that the territory's leader and rules of that territory have no hold over him. If you would care to propose how such a system might work, and propose how one might create such a society, I'd be interested.

I'd also be skeptical. Humans form groups, select leaders, enforce rules and defend territories. While you are within a territory, you'd likely have to be aware of the rules associated with the territory. I would look skeptically on whatever scheme you came up with to make sure it is compatible with how humans really behave.

But go for it.

Meanwhile, some humans provide services rather than creating property. Soldiers, policemen, road builders and other government employees work for the public good. Many societies use taxes so that the providers of such services can enjoy the benefits of being part of society. Such societies generally frown upon those who enjoy the benefits without wishing to contribute to those who provide the services.

I am not saying the current system of representative democracy supported by taxation is ideal. It does, however, work. It works well enough that alternate schemes don't seem to attract many followers. The current system does have moral problems, things which might be done differently in the best of all possible worlds. This is not the best of all possible worlds. People aren't apt to throw away a system that works without solid details on how the replacement scheme would work.

Quote:
Originally Posted by haymarket martyr
The libertarian argument about theft - when it applies to income - always ignores or sidesteps the reality that a person lives in a society of people and was only able to earn that money because of others. No man is an island entire unto himself.... and if you don't like the consequences of that what you need to get your own island and support it yourself or with people of like mind.

response from Matt

A lot of this is very true, but I don't see how people who have helped you along the way have established a rightful claim to something that you acquired via free exchange. Their input was not of a contractual nature. Perhaps one has a moral duty to give back to the community, but that's a different story.

I do not understand the libertarian insistence about contracts. It seems to me to be a phony issue set up as a intentional roadblock to prevent society from acting like... well, acting like society must act.It is simply semantics designed to rationalize the hatred of paying necessary taxes so society can function. And many libertarians are excellent at such semantics and rationalizations.

None of us are free and independent gods who can function without others. When you earn money in this society you do so with the assistance of the society around you. You use the public roads even though you rail against them. You breathe air which has been regulated through laws you rail against. When you get sick, you use the medical system which is regulated and controlled and get better even though you rail against such regulation. You go to sleep at night without tossing and turning that some other nation may invade us and kill you during the night even though you rail against such expenditures. I could go on and on and on but I think we all get the idea.

The customers who get to your shop do so on roads built by taxes. If you are a druggist, everyone who buys off your shelves does so with the knowledge that the products you sell them are safe for use because of government control and regulation. The same for food in your grocery store or liquor in your liquor store. When a customer comes into your clothing store and buys pajamas for their little children, they do so with the knowledge and security that they will not burst into flames when a single spark from a cigarette or fireplace goes astray.

I could go on and on but we all get the idea.

No man is an island entire unto himself.

When I began arguing with libertarians many years ago, one of the first intellectual rationalizations I found them using was the idea that "I never signed any damn social contract". It is important for the libertarian to separate himself from the centuries old idea of a social contract and elevate himself to the idea of an independent god.

And then, of course, comes the response that your daily continued participation in the society of your own free will constitutes your agreeing to the social contract so your signature or even your verbal agreement to it is not necessary because your participation has sealed that deal. There is a sure fire way you can remove yourself from the social contract and the society which enforces it.... but that is ignored and excuses and rationalizations are found why it is not possible.... right now.

And then we go round and round and round and we have heard it all before and I suspect we will continue to hear it all again.

Some anarcho-libertarians here have little patience with me because I have no patience with all the theory and abstraction that constitutes much of the discussion here. I have heard it all before and know exactly where it goes and what is at the end of that road. It is a road that keeps going in circles without a destination or end point.

We will soon celebrate the part of autumn where we remember the Pilgrims and why they came to America. These people were proud men and women who had the strength of their convictions. They said they could not live in a society which they abhorred and objected to so they risked everything they had including their very lives and they left. And many of them did die and lose everything.

Today, we have no more Pilgrims of such resolve and conviction. We have people who rant and rail against society and laws and taxation and all that it produces and then go out and drive on public roads so they can attend teabag parties against the government who protects their right and ability to do so.

The anarchist has no plan.... no program .... nothing to put in the place of what we now have as society and a nation .... its all pie-in-the-sky dreams. That is a great expression 'pie-in-the-sky'. It fits the anarcho-libertarian dream perfectly. It is a pie that has no recipe. It is a pie that has no ingredients. It is a pie that is never made by any baker. It is a pie that is never sold in any shop. It is a pie that is never tasted or never eaten. All because it is a pie that does not exist. But in the mind of the advocate of the pie-in-the-sky its the best pie ever and would taste better than any pie ever baked or sold or eaten. Yes indeedy it would.

Oh how far we have come..... or is it how far we have fallen?

Originally Posted by haymarket martyr

...I do not understand the libertarian insistence about contracts. It seems to me to be a phony issue set up as a intentional roadblock to prevent society from acting like... well, acting like society must act....None of us are free and independent gods who can function without others. When you earn money in this society you do so with the assistance of the society around you. ...
We will soon celebrate the part of autumn where we remember the Pilgrims and why they came to America. These people were proud men and women who had the strength of their convictions. They said they could not live in a society which they abhorred and objected to so they risked everything they had including their very lives and they left. And many of them did die and lose everything.

Today, we have no more Pilgrims of such resolve and conviction. We have people who rant and rail against society and laws and taxation and all that it produces and then go out and drive on public roads so they can attend teabag parties against the government who protects their right and ability to do so....

I am in general agreement with your thoughts on this issue. The libertarian philosophy is very attractive and appealing to many (I have some libertarian leanings myself). However, as you noted, none of us operate in a vacuum and acknowledge the contributions of society in the past & in the present, and (hopefully) our obligations to future generations. The libertarian views that I have encountered seem to be sincerely held (not set up as phony issue); I just think that some of their conclusions are wrong.

The Pilgrims are a good example. If some are so convinced that they are correct and the majority is misguided, then they could form a collective and buy their own island to develop a libertarian nation. I think that many in the “tea-bag” movement are so convinced of their positions that they are unable to see how their extreme actions prevent consideration of any real issues.
- If things get really bad, I haven't given up hope that a modern set of Pilgrims would emerge.

It is my opinion that the dogmatic postions staked out by libertarians, conservatives, liberals, etc. tend to prevent constructive dialog. I consider myself an independent because I have problems with all of them. It is good to have these discussions.

Originally Posted by Kurt Horner

OK, just keep in mind that replacement institutions need not be explicitly defined. General ground rules are more important than the exact organization.

Understood.

Would investment be depressed overall, or just discouraged from going into corporations? Are you predicting increased consumption in response to a lack of the corporate form? If you aren't, then those savings would go somewhere -- to other types of firms.

Or to other forms of investment, not firms -- not wealth creation -- at all. Bear in mind that great disparities in wealth preceded the existence of the corporation. The original template for the monied elite was not capitalism but the landowning aristocracy, and the first to invest in modern capitalism were titled nobles. Since the industrial revolution coexisted with the enlightenment and the birth of liberalism (for good reason), this didn't last, but the idea of a wealthy elite took root ages before the first capitalist existed.

A wealth-creating enterprise is a risk, more of one than investing in real estate, precious metals, artwork, bonds, etc. It can incur not only financial losses, but also liability. If an investor could lose, not only everything he puts into the business (that's reasonable), but also his home, his life savings, and 50% of his net income from other sources for the next 20 years, because of non-criminal negligence on the part of, say, an employee that he hires, that's going to increase the risk of investment and make wealth-creating enterprises less attractive compared to non-wealth-creating investments. The corporate form has been abused in a number of ways, but I don't see the basic idea as a bad one.

Does it?

Ha! Interesting. Not necessarily, and I was merely repeating the standard line without serious investigation. Obviously I need to look into this a bit more.

Superficially, this seems plausible, but what you're implicitly doing here is treating transportation costs as a special part of production. You probably don't support subsidized land or mineral rights, or subsidizing product marketing or suppressing labor mobility to keep wage costs down. Yet, shipping costs get special treatment. I guess this is because the availability of goods is a consumer benefit as well.

However, since you've made it easier to compete over a wide area, you're going to have larger average firm size, which means a less favorable labor environment.

That's not necessarily so. It all depends on the strength of the labor movement and the attitude of government. With a strong labor movement and a favorable government, unions can get better deals from big companies than from small ones simply because the big companies can afford to make those deals better. Of course, bigger employers also have more leverage to suppress labor movements, which is what you're getting at here. With an unfavorable (capital-friendly) government and a weak labor movement, that can be a nightmare. But it doesn't have to be that way, and in any case before wealth can be shared it has to exist in the first place.

Since there's no realistic prospect that I can see (at the moment) of going back to most people being self-employed, there's really no advantage to being employed by a small company as opposed to a big one, provided the government is labor-friendly.

So you end up with consumers getting goods from a wider area, but the goods aren't any more diverse

That's also not true. I live in California, which has fantastic agriculture and grows a lot of stuff, but there are things we can't grow well here: apples, pineapples and other tropical fruit, winter wheat. There are also mineral resources that need to be transported from one area to another in order to facilitate production.

This argument also assumes that the specific transportation types that we've subsidized aren't themselves wasteful.

No it doesn't, and obviously that's been the case at times. The most obvious example is the interstate highway system. Clearly transporting goods by truck is wasteful compared to doing so by train. However, that's an argument for factoring in such considerations to what form of transportation is favored. It's not a good argument against public transportation per se, given the benefits thereof.

What should be done is to turn roads into commons property. For non-highways, you allow any contiguous group of landowners to form a road co-op. At that point, they become responsible for traffic rules, maintenance, the whole deal.

While this might conceivably work, it strikes me as far less efficient and convenient than the present arrangement. Since I don't have any ideological reason myself to oppose the idea of publicly-owned transportation, that's enough reason to oppose it. Also, when looking at the idea ab initio rather than after a long period of public involvement in transportation, it's not at all clear how the roads would have been built in the first place.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Originally Posted by Odin
As opposed to the ideological fantasy that everyone will act ethically if the evil, corrupting boogyman of the state were gone?

Whose fantasy is that? I've never run into anyone so blind as to think that people under any system would be angels. So again (or still...), whoever you're arguing against, it isn't us...

It's called a strawman argument.
It happens most often when your opponent cannot defeat your position so therefore he creates a distorted version of it.

This is what Odin is attempting to do:
1) create a strawman
2) attach the strawman to his opponent's position
3) attack the strawman

Originally Posted by Kurt Horner

Originally Posted by haymarket martyr
One Gilded Age in America was one too many.

Other than perhaps fruitcake, no one here is advocating a return to that era.

Unlike Liberals, I do not subscribe to an ideology that says the world must revolve around my ass.


Let me give you an example of how a Liberal thinks.
If the market moves against them a Liberal will say, "OMG the market has failed!"
ahhh do you see?
There is no such thing as market failure --> only people who fail to understand that the market owes them nothing.
Of course the market will go up and also down, but that is not failure.

The next step a Liberal takes is to turn towards government and hope they "do something".
Liberalism is an ideology that advocates "going against" the market and believing they can win --> good luck!
I believe the actions that Liberals ask government to take to avoid loss are the exact same actions which will lead us to the next "Gilded Age" or the road to serfdom.

But you don't have to worry about me Kurt Horner
I do not plan on being one of the "serfs" in this new gilded age, I plan on being one of the aristocrats.

Fruitcake

Could you please reference which members of this Board you were quoting and in what thread and in what posts they made these statements?

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Whose fantasy is that? I've never run into anyone so blind as to think that people under any system would be angels.

It's an understandable mistake, Justin. Odin, like most people, isn't blind to the fact that in a stateless society people would have to be angels in order for it not to be a violent, monstrous nightmare. He assumes that you are equally aware of this (incorrectly, of course). Thus, he concludes that you believe people are angels.

He's wrong about that, but as I said it's an understandable mistake.

Originally Posted by Kurt Horner

* A lot of libertarians get this one wrong, but it results in a contradiction. If state ownership of property is illegitimate, then letting the state fence their stolen goods isn't legitimate either. The correct view of abandoned state property is to consider it unowned and thus claimed by its current users.

They get it wrong on a lot more issues than roads, too.

Rothbard outlined a great program for dealing with state assets (he did so for the USSR, iirc -- shame it wasn't put into action -- but it would work just as well anywhere). Consider it all unowned and therefore each part homesteaded by its worker/user/occupant. It would mean that state enterprises which served a legitimate (that is, actually justified by adequate demand from the people relative to cost) function would be able to continue operating under much more customer-responsive management, and also that the illegitimate ones would be quickly converted to better use. I think his example was that all the KGB prisons and holding cells might end up being rented out as grain storage or warehouse space, since there would be no significant public demand for torturers and secret police.


Hey! Maybe Bob will take that as an example of an anarchist 'program'! Do I get a cookie, Bob?

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Odin, like most people, isn't blind to the fact that in a stateless society people would have to be angels in order for it not to be a violent, monstrous nightmare.

It's funny how you keep repeating that as if it were any more than reflective of your [apparent] bias against people. It's hard to imagine a more transparently counterfactual claim than the whole "people are evil unless forced to be otherwise".

It makes a person sound like a Puritan or other of the fanatics that fled the civilized world to go live in the wilderness. Fortunately for everyone who is biased in favor of people, it turns out that, unless we are taught otherwise, the number of us who are not good people is pretty small, the number who aren't at least decent is quite tiny indeed, and the remaining minuscule portion consists largely of people who at least are capable of recognizing their need to be able to keep living among people.
Would there be sociopaths in a stateless society? Yes, just like in any other one. Would they be able to hurt people? It would happen, just like in any other one. At worst, the argument about deviants is a wash.

(One could try to tip that by pointing out that state-based monopoly-service provision is necessarily less responsive to customer demand than non-monopoly would be. And that the provision of 'protection from predators' and the like is, at least in that respect, fundamentally no different from any other service. So there'd be reason to suspect the non-monopoly stateless system would, in fact, outperform the alternative. But that's a different argument.)

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Hey! Maybe Bob will take that as an example of an anarchist 'program'! Do I get a cookie, Bob?

I suspect the cost of shipping you the cookie would far exceed the cost of the cookie. Thus, like other proposed anarchist programs, I'm not really looking to put it into practice.

But feel free to practice good old capitalism and buy your own cookie. ™

Originally Posted by Justin '77

Rothbard outlined a great program for dealing with state assets (he did so for the USSR, iirc -- shame it wasn't put into action -- but it would work just as well anywhere). Consider it all unowned and therefore each part homesteaded by its worker/user/occupant. It would mean that state enterprises which served a legitimate (that is, actually justified by adequate demand from the people relative to cost) function would be able to continue operating under much more customer-responsive management, and also that the illegitimate ones would be quickly converted to better use. I think his example was that all the KGB prisons and holding cells might end up being rented out as grain storage or warehouse space, since there would be no significant public demand for torturers and secret police.

There would also be no significant public demand for military forces, government regulatory agencies, maintenance of highways in a free-use, non-toll status, or anything else that benefits the nation as a whole rather than a small part of it disproportionately. I claim (and spend money to keep in use) what benefits me. I will not spend my money to keep up what benefits us. If you want to spend your money to keep up what benefits us, I'll be happy to make use of it on your nickel. Which is, of course, why you won't do that, either. Perhaps, if we're neighbors, or if for some other reason I know and trust you, we can work together to spend our money on what benefits us, but only if it doesn't at the same time benefit them. And so on. There are limits to how people can cooperate for a common end, based in human nature, and so absent a state of some kind no human societies can exist that exceed those limits in size and scope.

Of course, if you did this, you would eliminate the KGB and secret police prisons -- at least on a nationwide scale. The likely outcome, though, is that the existing ones would fragment and use their powers and skills (which really don't depend on the state) to make themselves local tyrants. And military officers, deprived of centralized national authority capable of keeping them in line, would do the same and become warlords. Power in the aggregate is a function of population and technology. It cannot be destroyed. Destroy an agent of its operation, e.g. the state, and the power formerly wielded by that agent does not disappear but passes into the hands of others. In actual history, the power wielded by the Soviet Union passed into control of the governments of its component republics and its former satellite states; if those had been destroyed at the same time, then it would have gone to local thugs and warlords. In no case would it have vanished, nor could it have been dispersed equally among all the people, creating genuine liberty.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

But feel free to practice good old capitalism and buy your own cookie.

In keeping with the spirit, I'll invoice you.

Originally Posted by radind

The Pilgrims are a good example. If some are so convinced that they are correct and the majority is misguided, then they could form a collective and buy their own island to develop a libertarian nation. I think that many in the “tea-bag” movement are so convinced of their positions that they are unable to see how their extreme actions prevent consideration of any real issues.
- If things get really bad, I haven't given up hope that a modern set of Pilgrims would emerge.

One problem with that is that the Pilgrims settled on the site of a native village that had been wiped out in its entirety by a plague imported from the Old World. We are now much closer to Malthusian limits than we were back then. There seems to be insufficient land available for every group who doesn't like established society to create one of their own.

Originally Posted by Justin '77

It's hard to imagine a more transparently counterfactual claim than the whole "people are evil unless forced to be otherwise".

This is, of course, not what I'm saying, since "people" don't exist. That is, there is not much one can say about every single member of the species Homo sapiens that will hold true, at least on the level of behavior. Even something as basic as self-preservation has exceptions.

What I am saying, though, is that some people are evil unless forced to be otherwise, and that's not counterfactual at all. Further, I'm saying that if those people who are evil unless forced to be otherwise aren't forced to be otherwise, their evil will prevail and give them a competitive advantage over the better sort of person. That's not counterfactual, either; there are many historical examples.

I'm not saying, nor is it necessary for me to say in order to support my argument in favor of the state, that everyone will be evil unless forced to be otherwise. That would indeed be counterfactual, but it is also quite irrelevant to the discussion.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Of course, if you did this, you would eliminate the KGB and secret police prisons -- at least on a nationwide scale. The likely outcome, though, is that the existing ones would fragment and use their powers and skills (which really don't depend on the state) to make themselves local tyrants. And military officers, deprived of centralized national authority capable of keeping them in line, would do the same and become warlords. Power in the aggregate is a function of population and technology. It cannot be destroyed. Destroy an agent of its operation, e.g. the state, and the power formerly wielded by that agent does not disappear but passes into the hands of others. In actual history, the power wielded by the Soviet Union passed into control of the governments of its component republics and its former satellite states; if those had been destroyed at the same time, then it would have gone to local thugs and warlords. In no case would it have vanished, nor could it have been dispersed equally among all the people, creating genuine liberty.

This is not necessarily true. If the population of the USSR had been made up entirely of angels, benevolent anarchy would have followed. ™

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

This is not necessarily true. If the population of the USSR had been made up entirely of angels, benevolent anarchy would have followed. ™

Well, and in keeping with the above point about the diversity of human behavior, it must be acknowledged that some people are indeed angels, just as some people are evil unless forced not to be. (Some are even evil to the point that they can't be forced not to be unless physically restrained or killed.)

The problem with anarchism is not that it requires that human angels exist, but that it requires them to be co-extensive with humanity. Alas, that's just not the case.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Well, and in keeping with the above point about the diversity of human behavior, it must be acknowledged that some people are indeed angels, just as some people are evil unless forced not to be. (Some are even evil to the point that they can't be forced not to be unless physically restrained or killed.)

The problem with anarchism is not that it requires that human angels exist, but that it requires them to be co-extensive with humanity. Alas, that's just not the case.

I would go a bit further. I still believe any discussion of human nature should require some knowledge of nature. I'll briefly mention lions. If a new alpha male drives an old one away from a pride, he will often kill cubs bred by the old alpha. This is in abstract a move that will perpetuate his genes. The female's energy becomes devoted to spreading the new male's gene pool rather than being dedicated to maintaining his old rivals.

This would be clearly evil by human standards. Yet, it is natural behavior. Natural behavior is neither Good or Evil, but is something entirely different.

Humans won't do the exact same thing, generally. Yet, man uses force against others of his own species. It is important, when creating proposed social structures for humanity, to understand how man's instincts manage his use of violence.

A bit ago I quoted several books on the subject: The Territorial Imperative, The Hunting Hypotheses, On Aggression and On Killing. Man is a violent animal. I repeat, with every drive to use force constructively there is a counter drive to prevent over use of violence. A tendency to excess violence is not a survival trait. Yet, the tendencies to violence are also survival traits. In the environment in which humans were bred, violence was often both necessary and advantageous.

In many a political post I've listed my four major crimes against humanity that seem to fall out of failed states: genocide, ethnic cleansing, organized rape and political famine. I'll repeat the book titles again. The Territorial Imperative, The Hunting Hypotheses, On Aggression and On Killing. If you hear a distant roar, it is a male alpha lion confronting a female of his new pride. The female is trying to defend her young. She is going to fail. Mankind is no more Good or no more Evil than those lions.

And yet, in many circumstances Justin is correct. If there is enough land and resources to go around, there will be very little violence within a pack, be it a human community or a lion pride. After that alpha male lion kills his predecessor's cubs, he might become the very model of a modern major general. He will breed that female and the pride might well thrive. Most of the people, most of the time, will form a society in which very little violence between members of a community exists. If the correct circumstances are created, men and lions can resemble angels.

But one had best fully understand what these correct circumstances are.

Man is a social animal. He forms groups which select leaders, create rules and defend territories. Some anarchists seem to propose that they should be able to walk onto any territory, ignore the leader, and dismiss the rules. If one does not voluntarily join a social contract, it has no power or authority over them, whether they are on another group's claimed territory or not.

Not all of them might profess this, and not in the extreme. I've seen a bunch of recent admissions that some coercion to make less social individuals behave will be required.

But the basic model of anarchy does not seem structured to fit the conditions which tend to push men to behave well. I believe there must be a feeling of belonging to a group in order to have the rules of the group respected. The basic philosophy of anarchy is to enable fragmentation, to empower the individual, to resist the formation of any central oppressing authority. In abstract, I can sympathize greatly. In practice, if there is no sense of community, no sense that everyone should respect a common sense of morality, one is apt to get the undesirable symptoms of a failed state. If someone is not one's brother, he is The Other. If he is The Other, it is far too easy to fall into the pattern of genocide, ethnic cleansing, organized rape and political famine.

The notion of every little group of humans taking control of local resources and inventing their own rules is scary.

Men can be angels, or can be demons. It seems very important to understand under what conditions they switch from one to the other. In designing a wannabe utopian community, it might be prudent to design around what causes said switch.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

I know that you see states as committing precisely this offense, and they sometimes do, but at least there are rules to try to keep them from doing so and it's reasonable to believe that those rules do reduce the incidence of injustice. A stateless society, if indeed it does include coercive mechanisms to maintain peace and prosperity, would lack those rules and be more unjust.

The rules for coercive mechanisms are quite similar in both instances. In non-totalitarian states, there is a de facto division of powers and mechanisms for determining how people come to power. Furthermore, the State limits its legal capabilities to coerce individuals either out of an idealistic respect for humans or because it is trying to preserve its integrity for the populace. But as you note, rules may be broken if the State thinks that it can get away with it, so preserving integrity is what it ultimately comes down to. In an anarchist society, coercive mechanisms (DROs, collectives, etc.) would be subject to the regulation of the people -- hopefully out of respect for humans they will have side-constraints on what they can do, but if not, then there still that need for support from the populace (and so will probably develop side-constraints). As there is no monopoly on enforcing justice in anarchy, people will be inclined to opt-out of organizations that do not obey their own rules or the rules that society sets.

Of course, there's a wrinkle, but it's the same problem into which states run. If the population is willing to let these organizations commit numerous violations out of society-wide paranoia, then the rules which protect us from tyranny mostly become moot. Still, the inclination for organizations to use unjust techniques to enforce justice on others is severely limited because the possibility to actually withdraw consent, something that is not possible under statism, provides a powerful check on earned authority.

Somalia is an example of chaos, and if it remains in a stateless condition it is simply because it has devolved into localized rule by warlords. I don't think it is anything worth emulating.

I'm not suggesting that we emulate Somalia. It's probably intellectually dishonest to make a point about how awesome states are by comparing living conditions in Somalia to America. A better comparison is Somalia under the Barre dictatorship to Somalia in anarchy or near-anarchy. Anyway, I do think you are overestimating the amount of chaos in Somalia that is caused by their lack of a central government (again, much of the supposed chaos is caused by outside forces), and it's probably worth noting that Somalia is one of the fastest improving nations in Africa with a sweet telecommunications system.

Of course it does. You must in the end draw everything back to the real world, because even the clearest theoretical reasoning may be based on flawed assumptions. We cannot know everything, and so cannot rely on reason without checking the results against reality.

Fair enough, but I don't think this mirrors my discussion about "stateless" coercive mechanisms as being problematic. It is perfectly acceptable to look at the qualities of something and draw conclusions about how things ought to be, such as how human society ought to be organized, (I know you have issues with normative claims, but bear with me) based on those qualities and some moral reasoning. However, the fact that human societies have historically not been organized the way they ought to have been does not necessarily challenge one's analysis of human qualities. As my understanding of humankind is one in which the species' capabilities render its path as being decidedly non-deterministic and social, I'm not sure how your objection forces me to reevaluate my assumptions.

Originally Posted by Bob Butler 54

Thus, I have a different perspective on reason, emotion and morality than those coming from a Philosophical perspective. I agree one should be careful when describing human behavior as natural or unnatural. To me, this means one should study natural behavior a bit before expressing opinions on what natural behavior might consist of. Man is among many animals which have instincts or emotions which induce 'moral' behavior. To a great degree, the more deadly the animal, the more often an animal is apt to engage in conflict with its own species, the stronger the 'moral' instincts have to be. If man is a moral animal, it is because his nature is also shaped from a long history of engaging in deadly coercive acts.

You will note that free will complicates things considerably. I'm perfectly willing to discuss natural tendencies of individuals that are grounded in biology, but they are just that: tendencies, and they can (and have!) been overcome by our capacity to choose.

Originally Posted by Brian Rush

Money is the most important thing in the world, if you have no money. Having been there, I know this. If you have money, then you can be concerned about such things as political freedom, which becomes more important (or at least more urgent) than money -- but only because that money stuff is taken care of already. The starving are never free. An adequate income and the meeting of material needs are prerequisites to liberty.

There's a bit of a difference in the questions: "Would you rather be broke and have negative liberty, or have money but no freedom?" and "Should you have money and/or freedom?" To the first question, there isn't a correct answer; it's just preference. But to the second question, I think the correct response is that you should indeed have freedom (as there is some principle violated by not being free), but there is no rightful guarantee to money.

(Of course, egalitarianism usually follows from true freedom, but let's get the lexicographical order of principles right.)

Originally Posted by Matt1989

You will note that free will complicates things considerably. I'm perfectly willing to discuss natural tendencies of individuals that are grounded in biology, but they are just that: tendencies, and they can (and have!) been overcome by our capacity to choose.

I can acknowledge this in individual cases.

I don't think it prudent to go far with this when talking about setting up entire societies. One cannot design a society under an assumption that individuals will always overcome tendencies. One should not design a utopian anarchy under the assumption that everyone will always choose to be angels. One should give nod to reality by taking the tendencies into account.