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RE: But Who Would Build The Roads?

in #anarchy8 years ago (edited)

I am not sure you realize that Ancap replaces government with something like globalist. If you assume success in an Ancap scenario and iterate it forward a while, you will find that cooperative groups will out-compete individuals. Among cooperative groups, the more competitive ones will out compete the less competitive ones. Unless you borrow a divine power to enforce good will, you will have to rely on nature. In nature competition has productive and destructive components. The hyper competitiveness that the top competitors will tautologically display will employ the means available to them to compete - including destructive or deleterious attacking means.

Now, Ancap likes to say that members will be subject to a group enforced clause of doing no harm to others. Sounds nice. What it means is each person defines and interprets 'harm'. What that is to a hyper competitor, such as a brilliant individual, a sophisticated company, or an artificial super intelligence - is a game. It is a game where the rules are discovering and manipulating the definition of harm and willingness to act and the payoff matrix is a table summarizing the costs and gains of it.

I think that the 'freedom' idea that proponents of AnCap anticipate it delivering will be quite a different thing than the 'freedom' that they actually experience from it.

I think it is redundant for me to state that Anarcho-Capitalism is a simplistic conception that amounts to a wishful fantasy that uses imprecise ideas as a cosmetic to gloss over its many flaws. That being said, it has parts of ideas and goals that can be extracted and fit into better systems - so it shouldn't be discarded entirely.

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muh freedoms!

I'm not sure I follow your line of argument. Are you saying that competition produces coercive monopolies, and that the principle of nonaggression guarantees aggression? If so, that doesn't make sense.

The argument is not that humanity is magically good, but rather that the market process rewards virtue while the government structure guarantees corruption and destruction. Production and plunder are mutually-exclusive. Productive profit only occurs through mutual benefit. Politics is the process of plunder through coercive force to gain profit at another's expense. Centralized power guarantees the latter. Decentralized services reward the former.

“Anarchists did not try to carry out genocide against the Armenians in Turkey; they did not deliberately starve millions of Ukrainians; they did not create a system of death camps to kill Jews, gypsies, and Slavs in Europe; they did not fire-bomb scores of large German and Japanese cities and drop nuclear bombs on two of them; they did not carry out a ‘Great Leap Forward’ that killed scores of millions of Chinese; they did not attempt to kill everybody with any appreciable education in Cambodia; they did not launch one aggressive war after another; they did not implement trade sanctions that killed perhaps 500,000 Iraqi children. In debates between anarchists and statists, the burden of proof clearly should rest on those who place their trust in the state. Anarchy’s mayhem is wholly conjectural; the state’s mayhem is undeniably, factually horrendous.”

  • Robert Higgs

"Anarchism is not a romantic fable but the hardheaded realization, based on five thousand years of experience, that we cannot entrust the management of our lives to kings, priests, politicians, generals, & county commissioners."

  • Edward Abbey

"Anarchy is no guarantee that some people won't kill, injure, kidnap, defraud, or steal from others. Government is a guarantee that some will."

  • Gustave de Molinari