Refuting "anarcho"-capitalism

I have to throw my views in on this one.
Who enforces contracts and defends human rights? You could say "private security", but who enforces your contract with the private security firm?
Also, once you're in a stateless..... state - how do you enforce the "no government" rule? Do you simply overthrow any government that starts to develop? Any time there's a power vacuum, someone will start to band together and obtain the monopoly on violence required to setup a government - and it might be far worse than a past government. My guess is that multiple political ideologies would cause multiple "pre-governments" that would then wage war against each other.

For that reason i'd have to say that total anarchy, as utopian as it sounds at first if you love free trade, could turn out to be a lot worse than existing systems. Minarchy (small government) is good however - and i'm not talking about the british conversative party's fake minarchism ("big society" - plain BS) either, but honest and true minarchism.

Responses are going to be a bit rushed now, I'm a bit busy with uni work and other real life things.

The Austrian School attributes market crashes to Central Banks artificially setting interest rates low. This is called The Austrian Business Cycle Theory. If you would like an explanation of how this occurs, here is a good video on the topic.

But he didn't intentionally kill 40,000,000 people. If you're going to continue with this line of reasoning, then you need to back up this claim with evidence, and you also need to demonstrate why every other communist regime resulted in a decreased supply of food.

I didn't use it as an example. I said "it was only stateless for around 5 years, during which there was a constant war between warlords and the new state", thus implying that it is not a good example, but in spite of this, it still experienced an increase in standard of living.

You just made my argument for me.

Without the state, they can't lobby for subsidies.

No they don't, they don't do anything to pressure family farms. The problem is family farms are not as efficient and as such their produce is more expensive, and people want to buy the cheapest products, and so family farms can't compete. It's simple. If you want to support family farms, then go buy their expensive food, I won't stop you, nor will the farming corporations.

All that article does is show that anarcho-capitalism is not the same thing as collectivist-anarchism, which is what classical anarchism was associated with. And which is why anarcho-capitalism is called anarcho-capitalism and not anarchism.

If anything anarcho-capitalism is more anarchist than collectivist-anarchism, as it gives you the freedom to decide whether you want to engage in free trade or share your resources with others in a commune. Collectivist-anarchism does not give you the choice to engage in free trade or own private property. Thus there is an indirect 'law', contradicting the lawlessness that classic anarchism promotes.

And this is irrelevant anyway, I stated in my original post that I do not support pure/classical anarchy.

Well I could put you in a recursive loop here and ask you who regulates the government? Who regulates the regulators?

I'm sure you would like to respond "people regulate the government", but could you not then save a step and conclude that people regulate the businesses?

To answer your question more directly, though, courts regulate and enforce free trade, and courts are regulated by each other. If one court does not follow common law closely enough and starts enforcing crazy and stupid laws, it gives the other courts a legitimate reason (in the eyes of the people) to forcibly remove or punish the violating court. It also means the violating court gains a poor reputation and thus loses business. Stateless courts are a very complex topic and I will try to explain further when I have the time.

Well hopefully in a stateless society people will be intelligent enough to recognise that a state is not necessary, and as such will not follow the orders of an entity that asserts itself as such.

The problem today is that it is engrained in people's minds (mostly the fault of the schooling system, which governments have a monopoly on) that a state is necessary, and thus will desire a new government if their current one ceases to exist. This is most evident from recent events in Egypt, etc. One of the most frequently asked questions of Egyptians is "who do you want your new government to be?", as if statelessness is not an option.

To each his own.

This post was last modified: 03-16-2011 09:45 AM by Burzum.

My connection is so slow that I don't bother trying to watch videos. The whole point is that market fundamentalists believe that unrestrained markets are self-adjusting, so that even if central banks set artificially low interest rates then the markets will adjust for that. The conclusion that the central banks need to get the interest rates exactly right in order to avoid crashes or recessions is an argument in favour of more regulation - not less regulation.

I still say that anti-statism is really just an extreme form of market fundamentalism. Which has been shown to be heavily flawed to begin with.

That implies that most people in a stateless society will be more intelligent than everyone on this thread (except you), since nobody else here believes that a stateless society is the best option.

The bad news is that a stateless society won't actually make people smarter or less ignorant.

An entity that asserts itself as a state usually finds a way of making people follow its orders.

You hit the nail on the head, Austrian Economists conclude that the market crash is an adjustment that reallocates mal-invested resources. It mentions that in the video. I will try and write out the theory for you in the future if you would like.

Sorry, I did not mean it to be interpreted as derogatory.

I beg to differ, and my evidence is the revolutions that recently occurred in Egypt, Libya and Tarisia. If people do not believe their government to be beneficial, they will not follow its orders. The government can try to stop them, but it ultimately will not succeed if enough people oppose it.

What I meant to say was "If a society decided it wanted to be stateless, and went through the process of eliminating its government to become stateless, its people would be intelligent enough not to allow a new government to form, because they had already come to the conclusion that a state is not necessary."

Obviously it would be pretty dumb to get rid of your government in support of anti-statism and then just follow a new government.

Paraphrasing, and author unknown:
"Men fight for liberty and their children never knowing the struggle end up slaves all over again"

One generation fights for freedom and overthrows a government, the next generation or the one after will sleepwalk back into the same state (heh) again.

Also - stateless courts? Where do they get their authority from? A court gets its power by virtue of being an agent of the state (which can enforce a court's rulings through the use of force if need be). A stateless court would not have any power or authority to bind people to its rulings.

Some nice quotes from Ayn Rand:

Ayn Rand was as free trade as they come (well, I disagree with her on some things and would call myself even more free trade - specifically copyrights), but yet even she saw the need for a government to act as defender of human rights and enforcer of contracts. The only alternative is for everyone to arm themselves to the teeth all the time or to have blind trust or some sort of honour system. While it's certainly not a bad thing in many ways for private citizens to bear arms for self-defence, it would be a bad thing for it to be vital for everyone to absolutely require arming and training themselves in the use of weapons and deadly force. Personally i'd be happier with only having sufficient self-defence skills to get out of any immediate conflicts and later outsourcing justice itself to the police force - the police force who are guided by laws that we all at least have some sort of input on, thus giving more liberty despite the apparent contradiction.

My ancient history is rusty, but from memory, ancient Rome had courts but no police force and the army was not permitted to operate within Rome (a rule which Julius Caesar famously broke). The Pretorian Guard only protected the emperor, it did not enforce the law.

So courts could make rulings but could not enforce them. To enforce the rulings of the courts one had to enlist the help of one of a gang. So, of course, winning a case in court meant nothing if you were up against someone who was wealthier and more influential than you were.

And that was not a stateless society - merely a city which did not operate all of the functions of state that we are used to today. A truly stateless society would be even more chaotic.

Jeopardy (question) answer last night.  Julius Caesar was APPOINTED to be a dictator.... 44-47 BC (odd huh?)

Here in America, we don't exactly have a stateless society, but one of the major political parties (Republican) runs on the platform of getting government as out of the way as possible. I can tell you from direct observation that getting government out of the way involves people dying.

We have "the best health care system in the world," which is entirely run by for-profit corporations. There are government-run systems for veterans, old people, and disabled people, but everyone else has to have private health insurance. The insurance companies actually tell doctors what they are allowed to do, based on what will get paid for. This means that if the insurance company does not want to pay for a procedure that will save someone's life because it's too expensive, that procedure will not happen. Even if a procedure is approved, the insurance company will do whatever it can to avoid paying for it, ultimately placing a multi-thousand dollar cost on the patient.

Banks are almost completely unregulated in America. If you over-draw by even a few cents, they can keep trying to draw the money out of your account several times a day, with a $20 overdraft charge each time, and not even tell you until several days later. This happened to one of my co-workers, and he got hit with about $4,000 in overdraft fees. And that's just one example of what they might do with your money.

Credit cards are almost completely unregulated in America. Credit card companies can and do raise your rates if you miss a payment, try to charge more than your limit, don't use your credit card enough, or just because they feel like it. How is a person supposed to buy food without any money after they've been ripped off by their bank or credit card company.

Food was almost completely unregulated in America until recently. Look up all of the recalls that happened during the last decade. I know, most of those were voluntary. But people died because of diseases in food that was placed on grocery store shelves. People died because of E. Coli in spinach and peanut butter! It's not like it's hard to keep that from happening.

Im sorry but i was browsing the net and i just HAD to respond to this, so i made an account.

Actually the burden of proof is on you to prove your statist system to be legitimate, claiming unowned plots of land and taxing them without any form of contractual or explicit agreement, and don't tell me the social contract is agreeing because most people would agree that something arbitrary like that can never be truly legitimate. If the social contract is legitimate then why cant common people set up social contracts like buying 50 cars for the neighborhood and then sending the bill to your neighbors and if they don't want to pay then they can move somewhere else, now you see the idiocy of this?

The state is not maintained by force alone, the ideology of the state must be also implanted into people *cough* public education camps *cough*. It would be fine if we could live and let live but your "statist" system affects me even if i refuse it giving me a death threat if i follow that road.

Now tell me why you support the use of threats against me for refusing to pay for things you think are important for society and abiding by your rules, notice i say "you think" because it is just your opinion in the end.

Damned straight boss!  Tell 'em like it is.

This post was last modified: 08-09-2011 11:20 AM by mdr.

Actually both of you are as wrong as you are both correct. If a person makes a claim, the burden is on them to substantiate it, lend supporting arguments, show proof, etc regardless of the claim in question, who that person is, what their ideology is or what ideology forms the foundation of their claim, or whether or not you personally approve of said claims.

At least, that is true if either one of you want to be taken seriously.

Until someone can convince me that a stateless society is genuinely sustainable, and not just in some highly theoretical sense, then I think I'll stick with the devil I know.

Look at how many people have been converted by this thread to thinking that anti-statism is workable. Abso-f***ing-lutely nobody. And for it to be workable you would have to convince just about everyone that it was a great idea. That fact alone is enough for me.