[CaptainSwing]

I think that this is a really interesting concept, but dislike the name. All social anarchists (anarchist-communists, anarchist-syndicalists, even mutualists etc) would see anarchy as a social process rather than a purely individualised "every man for himself" system. It disregards the possibility for non-coercive collective forms of decision making.

but, saying this, a concept that discovers the loss in a system where each actor is purely self-interested is useful and interesting.

[ue_]

I talk with a lot of anarchists and perhaps the only ones of them who are truly in the spirit of "every man for himself" are an-caps and Stirnerists.

[dunslandsboo]

Most anarcho-capitalists that I know and from who I learn are absolutely not about "every man for himself" at all. Charity and voluntary cooperation are major parts of the society as they would like it to become. See https://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Friendly_society and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dispute_resolution_organizatio...

[throwaway729]

> ...as they would like it to become... Friendly society... DRO...

I think this has always been my primary gripe with ancap -- it's Utopian. And all Utopian thinking has the same problem -- it's either irrational, or very rational but starting from very strong axioms. Ancap writers, to their credit, tend to care a lot about crafting strong, rational arguments.

When I think about ancap (or any political theory that sets off my Utopia alarms), I reason through the entirety of society. I raise a lot of objections to myself, and make a note each time I come to the conclusion that I need some assumption about how people will behave.

Then I take those assumptions, and apply them to various state-based systems. Usually I end up with an equally Utopian world, or only require a small delta in the axioms to end up at a Utopian world. To me, that suggests that it's the axioms that are doing all the heavy lifting. If you can make enough assumptions, the state is much more than unnecessary -- it's also irrelevant! You get a Utopia either way! The enemy isn't the state, it's human behavior.

FWIW the same exercise can be used to derive ancap out of a thorough analysis of communist literature. And it also applies to more centrist policy proposals that posit Utopian-level returns.

At least, that's my experience with struggling through ancap literature. YMMV.

[nickik]

I don't think its all that Utopian. An-Caps take a lot of care to make there institution prove against human weakness. There is also a lot of study into historical examples that explain part of how a An-Cap society would work.

I don't one can expect more from any group. An-Capism is as un-utipian as you can get while still having some vauge definition of an ideal system.

Most AnCaps happily admit that the assumed society would not be near perfect. In fact, I would actually say that it would probably not be that much better then what we have now.

I don't think the axioms are that special, its basic rational choice political science/economics that is applied in most AnCap arguments.

[throwaway729]

> An-Capism is as un-utipian as you can get while still having some vauge definition of an ideal system... Most AnCaps happily admit that the assumed society would not be near perfect.

Perhaps. That doesn't make it any less Utopian in my book.

> I don't think the axioms are that special, its basic rational choice political science/economics that is applied in most AnCap arguments.

Depends on the writer. There certainly are writers for whom this is true. IMO it's not true of Molyneux, to name one.

Of course, rational choice is not special, but it is an enormous assumption that we're pretty sure is not a realistic description of how people actually behave...

[nickik]

Then I don't understand your definition of Utopian or how it is useful.

Molyneux is no longer an AnCap, he has gone of and is basically something on its own now.

There are actual economics/poetical science PhD working on this stuff, see for example Peter Leeson, Bryan Caplan.

> Of course, rational choice is not special, but it is an enormous assumption that we're pretty sure is not a realistic description of how people actually behave...

Rational choice in this context means not Homo Economicus (as in mathematical maximisation of expected outcome) but rather rational choice limited by information and so on. This assumtion is much weaker and applies to enough people as to make it useful.

Its basically what much micro economics and political science already does. I don't know what better scientific disciplines we have to make better evaluation of theoretical system of humans.

[VLM]

"prove against human weakness."

You were likely thinking of moral and ethical lapses, but there's also the crucial problem of IQ and disability. Could a ancap community of PHD students work? Probably. Elsewhere? Well...

[nickik]

Actually no.

Humans as they are now, not some PhD. Again, its that same analysis used when talking about democracy or any other system.

You can go back to David Hume. How can we design democracy so that we can limit what the worst people can do.

This exact same way I approach any system. The reason why I think AnCapism might work, is exactly because I don't think it needs any change in human psychology, IQ or whatever else.

[di4na]

Well welcome to nearly all political theory. There is a reason we are still stuck with some fairly well known different systems for all these years.

Human bahaviour is the same so far. And saying that we need to modify human behaviour to make it "better" is a complex road too... The thing is, we tryied to did it with the widespread education of since the 50s, with a more or less loose objective and set of policies, implemented differently in different countries.

We now have more data than ever... But can we really shape our future toward something that help our species to survive?

I think that it is the big hole in the set of goal that Elon Musk set for himself, and it talks also a lot to the goals that sama want for YC. How do we educate, teach, create opportunities, so that humanity keep going or have the tools to overcome what is to come...

[danharaj]

> Well welcome to nearly all political theory. There is a reason we are still stuck with some fairly well known different systems for all these years.

There are plenty of anti-utopian and materialist political theories. The real reason why we've seen only a few different systems is that they are the ones that most effectively wield power and violence to maintain their class relations. That's the position of Marxists. Most strains of anarchism are also anti-utopian.

I think it is naive to say that the reason we haven't progressed is because we don't have the right set of ideas. Idealism itself is an obstacle. Understanding the material forces that create and propagate our world is essential. Most mainstream political ideologies pretend the world is driven by ideas when it's the other way around.

[mmirate]

> it's either irrational, or very rational but starting from very strong axioms.

I'm not sure I understand why the latter is anywhere near as bad as the former, or even bad at all.

... Err, by "very strong" did you mean "makes (a conjunction of) many claims" rather than "resilient"?

[throwaway729]

> Err, by "very strong" did you mean "makes (a conjunction of) many claims" rather than "resilient"?

Kind of. I certainly did not mean "resilient"!

when speaking of axioms, typically "strong" means "a lot of stuff follows from the axiom". It's in reference to the deductive power of the axiom, usually when taken as part of a larger system of deduction.

So for example, "False" is a really, really strong axiom in most systems of deduction.

Strong axioms aren't necessarily a bad thing. But if you need a lot of strong axioms, you might be saying something about a very specific hypothetical situation...

[antocv]

Doesnt that seem like an oxymoron, anarcho-capitalist?

Like up-down?

[logfromblammo]

"Anarchist" is antipodal to the "nationalist" part of "nationalist mercantilism", which is historically associated with "capitalism" in such a way that many people confuse the two.

This is exactly why some people prefer the term "propertarian anarchist" to "anarcho-capitalist", so as to avoid arguing over the meanings of words rather than the tenets of the school of thought.

An anarcho-capitalist cannot make and enforce any law establishing rights in property, but instead recognized that by societal convention, people can claim objects for their exclusive use, and defend such claims by voluntarily respecting the reasonable claims of all other participants in the society.

If you have faithfully watched the television series of The Walking Dead, "The Claimed Gang" that was featured in season 4, episode 11, were basically anarcho-capitalists. If you said "claimed", whatever it was became yours, and if you violated someone else's claim, you got a beatdown from the whole gang.

[boona]

As far as I can tell it's the only consistent form of anarchy. For instance in discussions with anarchy-communists, if I were to develop a machine that manufactures widgets in my spare time at home, that machine would have to be seized since communism is the public ownership of the means of production. The communists I've talked to believe that there would be some public police force. When asked how any decision would be made by the collective, since it is a system run by "society" not by any individuals, the answer often hear is through democratic means (i.e. not anarchy). Considering only those two aspects, you already moved from anarchy to a form of democratic socialism.

Edit: If you have a different point of view, please tell me where I err. The view point I've developed is based on my discussions with the communists, but it obviously doesn't mean that I've gotten the full story.

[antocv]

Is your magical widget machine shitting bricks out of thin air?

If it needs input, energy, resources, suppliers, other people for developing ideas around it, then its not "your own making", it is already a community project, you can keep it at your home, its produce will have to be spread to other people like they are spreading energy and resources to you, a community of sharing and caring, and not this braindead capitalist ayn-rand bullshit "my own shit is shinier than yours".

The communists are a bunch of their own, why not just ask with anarchists?

[ue_]

> if I were to develop a machine that manufactures widgets in my spare time at home, that machine would have to be seized since communism is the public ownership of the means of product

No. That's personal (not private) property. The MoP are manned by labour supplied by the proletariat. If you are having people working with that widget maker (aside from yourself), and you are paying them wages (or slavery), then it qualifies as MoP and the workers would seize it.

In the same way, a programmer's computer, provided the owner is not using it as MoP for wage-labour, belongs to the programmer.

>When asked how any decision would be made by the collective, since it is a system run by "society" not by any individuals, the answer often hear is through democratic means

Our experiences differ; usually the response is that people can organise themselves freely into collectives or communes. There is no police force to force you to join a commune or obey their rules.

[snrplfth]

But if people can freely organize themselves into collectives or communes, then some of those collectives will be more successful than others, and without mandatory redistribution, you'll have inequality again. Also, if people can leave collectives, then inevitably there are going to be collectives with few or only one single member left, and you're back to individual ownership.

[stale2002]

You CANNOT freely organize yourself in an communism.

This is because as soon as you start "freely organzing" a whole bunch of my property now apparently becomes "means of production" and gets siezed from me.

What if I and a group of other people want to organize and work together, in exchange for wages with fully voluntary other people?

[notzorbo3]

> if I were to develop a machine that manufactures widgets in my spare time at home, that machine would have to be seized since communism is the public ownership of the means of production.

This is a very wrong view of communism. If the communists you've talked to have told you that this is what communism is, then I'd very strongly advice you to consult some introductory texts on communism.

[vidarh]

A common basis for handling this is to discuss what maximises liberty for society as a whole.

If you make a widget manufacturing machine, and it doesn't use much resources, and others can make their own, then there's no reason for society to care that you have your own widget manufacturing machine. Public ownership of widget manufacturing can be done simpy by making another widget manufacturing machine. Liberty is maximized by cloning your machine rather than by seizing it: You get to keep yours; society still gets widgets.

If you make a widget manufacturing machine, and it requires significant use of shared resources - more than your fair personal share - or require more people to operate, then a society that wishes to maximise liberty for all will simply deny you more than your share of shared resources, and deny you access to other workers unless you share control over your widget manufacturing: You are using not just your resources, but the resources of others too, and maximising their liberty involves not handing control over that to you as an individual.

And this is the big gaping contradiction between anarchy and ancaps: Whether you can monopolise resources beyond some reasonable definition of "personal property".

Almost all societies put strict limits on private property because we recognise that enforcement of private property, while it may enhance the liberty of some, will deprive others of liberty. Some societies more than others. E.g. I've in the past brought up the Scandivian countries "freedom to roam" which guarantees extensive access rights to non-built-up private land on the basis that letting a land owner prevent people from walking through their forest, for example, is a massive limitation of liberty on the overall public and only provides very minor additional liberty for property owners in comparison (in Sweden such rights are part of the constitution; in Norway it wasn't legislated until the 50's or 60's because the principle was considered so self-evident it wasn't seen necessary to codify it in law)

So from my point of view, ancap is incredibly logically inconsistent: It wants to enforce property rights, but doesn't want the power structures (the state etc.) are have been emergent from strong property rights.

[quirkafleeg]

"Anarcho-capitalist" was coined by Murray Rothbard, who himself was finally forced (by reality) to admit that:

    we are not anarchists, and that those who
    call us anarchists are not on firm etymological
    ground, and are being completely unhistorical

Unfortunately the internet gives voice to lots of people who don't let facts get in the way of their opinions.

[baddox]

Okay, I don't like Rothbard, but here I go defending him. The context of that quote is important. It turns out that Rothbard was making the point that arguing over the etymology of these labels is not as important as arguing about actual policies. He concedes that historically those who label themselves "anarchists" have very different and mutually exclusive beliefs than anarcho-capitalists. But he also maintains that they are "without archons" because they oppose coercive rulers.

The entire paragraph of that essay:

> We must conclude that the question "are libertarians anarchists?" simply cannot be answered on etymological grounds. The vagueness of the term itself is such that the libertarian system would be considered anarchist by some people and archist by others. We must therefore turn to history for enlightenment; here we find that none of the proclaimed anarchist groups correspond to the libertarian position, that even the best of them have unrealistic and socialistic elements in their doctrines. Furthermore, we find that all of the current anarchists are irrational collectivists, and therefore at opposite poles from our position. We must therefore conclude that we are not anarchists, and that those who call us anarchists are not on firm etymological ground, and are being completely unhistorical. On the other hand, it is clear that we are not archists either: we do not believe in establishing a tyrannical central authority that will coerce the noninvasive as well as the invasive. Perhaps, then, we could call ourselves by a new name: nonarchist. Then, when, in the jousting of debate, the inevitable challenge "are you an anarchist?" is heard, we can, for perhaps the first and last time, find ourselves in the luxury of the "middle of the road" and say, "Sir, I am neither an anarchist nor an archist, but am squarely down the nonarchic middle of the road."

https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists

[nickik]

Just because Rothbard stop using the term does not mean anybody else did.

Etymological or historical are not actually relevant.

A name is a name, self assigned and people use it, many people now it.

[vidarh]

But modern welfare systems were largely a result of the moral issues caused by the millions who were not covered by such solutions.

E.g. accepting the 9m number for ~1910 in the UK, that left ~75% of the population uncovered.

[pyrale]

Anar-caps have always been separated from anarchists. I don't know why they took this name -they were in quite an identity crisis about it [1]-. A better name could be stateless capitalists.

[1] Murray Rothbard, "Are libertarian anarchists" : https://mises.org/library/are-libertarians-anarchists

[em3rgent0rdr]

Actually anarcho-capitalism permits anarcho-communist, anarcho-syndicalist, and mutualist enclaves (in addition to any voluntary organization) within of a polycentric legal order. It is the most inclusive variety of anarchism.

[pyrale]

Anar-caps permit any other form of anarchism - provided you own land.

Statism permits any other form of government - provided you pay taxes and respect the law.

[em3rgent0rdr]

Under US form of government, it is not permitted to have multiple overlapping anarchist legal orders, unless the system was radically reformed.

[em3rgent0rdr]

You don't actually have to own the land...You could rent the land or hold the land as a collective.

[pyrale]

Yeah, if someone is willing to enter a contract with you, which they are free to decline.

Anyhow, beyond the mere principle of having to be part of a system you reject, it is quite weird to say that any anarchist could live in an anar-cap utopia, when there are such differences between them ; just like it would be weird to say that any anarchy can fully develop as a community within a statist society.

[Proven]

I don't think ancaps are all like that. You can't run business if you don't serve your customers well. Does that translate into pathological selfishness and other extreme behavior that goes in customers' nerves? I don't think so, because such business wouldn't last long.

I agree with the GP post above, and I'd also like to point out the idiocy of the "scientific" assumption from Wikipedia that "central planners" have superior information compared to self-interested agents who follow their own optimization strategies. F. A. Hayek is one of best authors on this topic.

[ue_]

>You can't run business if you don't serve your customers well.

Serving your customers well is entirely out of self interest, especially in large corporations; in fact, this is the easiest example of "every man for himself". You serve your customers well because ultimately it brings you more profit. Sure, it's not as sure sighted as screwing over every customer, but people who are selfish aren't necessarily stupid. I would argue that the very act of running a business in such a society is not only wrong due to the exploitation of workers, but also the motivation underlying (almost) every transaction in which your goal is to sell things in such a way as to get yourself the largest profit.

Of course that doesn't happen in real life. People have moral standards. I think I'm just a cynical ancom with regard to how people would really behave in the absence of all regulation. Let's not forget what large companies can still get away with today, and imagine what it would be like with anti-competitive monopolies, oligarchies, and two or three organisations controlling mainstream information sources.

So sure, your business doesn't last long because you were too obviously selfish. Your next plan of action is to pay a news outlet (or better yet, already be in control of one) to cover you. Or if you can't do that, there's still hope - you can band together with like minded people and start another business. Not without worker exploitation, of course. You need all the surplus value you can get.

I simply do not have the hope that "serving your customers well" is enough to prevent what actors in a capitalist system are truly capable of doing.

Let's not forget the sheer paradoxical nature of "anarcho-capitalism" (the inherent class system set up of the bourgeoisie and proletariat is the exact opposite of non-hierarchical relations).

I'm not really a proponent of central planning myself, so I agree with you on that.

[pdonis]

> the motivation underlying (almost) every transaction in which your goal is to sell things in such a way as to get yourself the largest profit

And the goal of the buyer is to buy things in such a way as to get himself the largest surplus, i.e., the most value for a given cost. So by your reasoning, all buyers are selfish just as much as all sellers are selfish.

> People have moral standards. I think I'm just a cynical ancom with regard to how people would really behave in the absence of all regulation.

Moral standards existed long before any regulation. We have moral standards because we evolved that way--i.e., because they are adaptive for a species that has to form cooperative relationships in order to survive. Cooperative relationships include economic relationships--specialization and trade. That's how we build wealth.

It is true that, as soon as people start building wealth, there is an incentive to plunder it instead of building more. One way of describing a key problem with many (if not most) modern societies is that they are set up to reinforce, or at least not discourage, the incentive to plunder.

> Let's not forget what large companies can still get away with today, and imagine what it would be like with anti-competitive monopolies, oligarchies, and two or three organisations controlling mainstream information sources.

Um, you're describing what things are like today. And the reason they're like that is, in large part, because one of the things large companies can get away with is buying political power and influence, which they can then use to plunder instead of building wealth. But the reason they can do that at all is that political power and influence can be bought, because it's centralized.

[ue_]

>So by your reasoning, all buyers are selfish just as much as all sellers are selfish.

I don't disagree with this. But I think that there is more harm that comes from the corporation to the consumer than there is from the consumer to the corporation, or at least more potential harm. And I think that arises out of selfishness that is unfortunately built into the system.

>Moral standards existed long before any regulation.

I'm sorry; I wasn't trying to make the point that moral standards have anything to do with regulation, but rather that regulation creates a "bare minimum" for the kind of behaviour expected of the participants, regardless of moral views that very much differ from person to person (and of course from sociey to society).

I think that a relationship can be cooperative, but with one side being favoured much more than the other - the capitalist who exploits a workforce. Of couse both need to cooperate - but it does not mean that such cooperation is fair. It is often accepted because there aren't fairer alternatives.

I wish for a different kind of cooperative relationship, one which I view as more equal and participatory. At the moment, I view it sort of like an EULA.

[pdonis]

> it does not mean that such cooperation is fair

"Fair" is subjective. Our moral intuitions give us fairly consistent answers for simple cases, but most cases are not simple.

One response to this problem is to point out that a free market is the best mechanism we know of for maximizing "fairness" in the sense of bargaining power. But free markets are actually pretty rare. For example, large corporations' wage structures, which dictate the terms of many people's employment contracts, are not the products of a free market; they are the products of the corporations' internal processes, which are dictated by top-down centralized control. (To some extent they are also products of negotiations, for example with labor unions, but that just extends the top-down centralized control to the unions.) So an obvious way to make cooperation fairer is to decrease the average size of corporations, in order to expose more transactions to free markets. In the absence of regulation, I suspect that this is what would actually happen, because most large corporations are the products of regulation, not of free market competition.

[justinmk]

> Serving your customers well is entirely out of self interest,

Right, just like "altruism" is also rooted in self-interest. It turns out that people are motivated by all kinds of things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Praxeology

[ue_]

I don't mean to say that everyone acts entirely for themselves, with no action motivated by kindness. I mean to say that in a sytem with multiple people trying to do the same thing you are doing (selling for a profit), you'll have to compete with people with various moral standards and ways of getting their profit. This kind of system, I believe, eventually forces out those who are not "aggressive" enough with their methods, and if not eventually, it will happen over time due to the fact that capitalism requires ever higher and higher returns.

While admirable in itself to act kindly in a capitalist system, it is ultimately detrimental to the success (and thus survival) of the company. There are of course examples of ethical practices (free range eggs for example), but they only continue once they become sufficiently practical.

[vidarh]

Capitalism does not require ever higher returns. It requires ever higher efficiency in extracting surplus. Barring monopolies etc., this should be expected to continue dropping as competition gets more fierce.

Other than that, your argument above is basically Marx thesis for the cause of the eventual collapse of capitalism: He praised capitalism for providing that efficiency necessary to provide sufficient wealth to eventually be able to erase poverty, but at the same point argued that this efficiency ultimately means that to stay competitive, salary costs will eventually need to be systmatically pushed down (whether by actually lowering salaries or through e.g. automation) until capitalism keeps hitting crises where the production capacity outstrip demand as the competitive forces throw more and more people into unemployment, eventually pushing people to revolution.

This is also the basis for why Marx unlike many others of the time was cautious in his criticism of capitalists for being capitalists: He points out that the same mechanism will keep throwing capitalists into the working class through failure, and hence capitalists are according to Marx just as much unable to change the system from within as workers.

[greggyb]

> ...the fact that capitalism requires ever higher and higher returns.

Capitalism requires private ownership of the means of production.

Ever higher and higher returns are a result, so far, of capitalism.

[stale2002]

I don't think you understand.

Yes, they are serving their customers, and they are doing it because it is the selfish, self-optimizing solution.

That's the whole point! You have this awesome outcome, where purely selfish people are still doing the "right" thing.

You don't need nice people in order for people to do nice things.

[ue_]

> You have this awesome outcome, where purely selfish people are still doing the "right" thing.

I don't think it's awesome. Sure, it may not be bad just because of the fact that it is selfish, but I do not think that capitalism produces "awesome", at least compared to theorised alternatives, solutions. In contrast to feudalism, I would agree.

I think that motivation not only sets the tone for the current transaction, but it also influences the sort of relationship that builds over time. While not immediately apparent, it has a great effect on the power dynamic of the relationship. This is readily visible in human to human relationships, and I thnk it can be carried over to the relationship between bosses and employees, the bourgeois and proletariat, etc.

[omegaworks]

>Serving your customers well is entirely out of self interest

This general tenet starts to break down the fewer competitors operate in the market. Monopolization allows corps to capture supernormal profit and externalize as much cost as possible. When there's only one person that's got what you need, they can treat you how they want.

tl;dr: Comcast.

[nickik]

A common argument against AnCapism is the idea that monopoly will form and eventually there is a sort of superstate.

This is of course a old marxist argument, capital is inherently centralising.

There are however good reason to believe this is not true. In fact, most economist don't follow this line of thinking anymore.

No AnCap would deny that there would be some larger then healthy cooperations but its an acceptable problem that is pretty hard to solve for any system and is often made worse by state based systems.

[snrplfth]

Well, Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers. It's not a natural monopoly.

[pdonis]

> Comcast's oligopoly is largely established by the fact that rights-of-way and pole-attachment rights are monopolized by municipalities, which tend to approve only a single, or few providers.

Only because, when municipalities do try to treat bandwidth as a public utility, which they can sell to all providers equally, Comcast and other large ISPs sue them.

> It's not a natural monopoly.

I agree, but I don't think it is primarily local municipalities that are propping it up.

[coldtea]

>I don't think ancaps are all like that. You can't run business if you don't serve your customers well. Does that translate into pathological selfishness and other extreme behavior that goes in customers' nerves? I don't think so, because such business wouldn't last long.

It can last long enough to make you rich. Or it can last for several lifetimes as long as you have the clout to make it the only deal around (or historical and regional accidents made it so).

In fact, there's also the old saying "there's a sucker born every minute": you just get new customers.

[pron]

> the possibility for non-coercive collective forms of decision making.

Can you define "non-coercive"? If you want to disallow coercion you must study how coercion actually works on humans rather than decide a priori what constitutes coercion. It is therefore possible that a "non-coercive collective forms of decision making" does not exist (or can only exist under certain unrealistic parameters).

[jessaustin]

Alternatively, one could simply pay attention to how life is lived. Most things humans do are done out of habit. One might suspect that all our beneficial habits would break down if there weren't an almighty parental figure lying in wait to punish us, but that also contradicts lived experience: humans in more permissive societies habitually live in relative harmony even more than those in less permissive ones.

[RodericDay]

Any socialist etc. who studies history will point out that our permissive peaceful society exists with a lot of implied violence that is just made invisible or normalized.

American incarceration rates and health care tied to employer come to mind.

[snrplfth]

Not sure that "too many people in prisons for victimless crimes" and "tax law that makes employer-tied healthcare almost inevitable" are aspects of society's permissiveness.

[AimHere]

His point is that the society might be apparently permissive, at least to those who live in it, but there are parts that aren't (such as those two examples), and people don't generally recognize them as such.

[snrplfth]

But the comment he was responding to said "humans in more permissive societies habitually live in relative harmony even more than those in less permissive ones."

So the fact that, upon trivial examination, a society is revealed to not actually be that permissive, is not evidence against the assertion that permissive societies are harmonious. I mean, I don't think RodericDay was saying that those two examples were impermissiveness that actually increases harmony.

[CaptainSwing]

You're right that it is tricky. Many social anarchists and communists use the phrase 'voluntary cooperation' to describe the social order in a communist society (in the sense of a society without either capitalism or the state).

Whether this is possible or not is beside the point. The argument I was making was simply that the use of the word anarchy in the concept is at odds with its use by most adherents to anarchism

[nerdponx]

Economists tend to go for whimsical names for their high concepts, cf. "Tragedy of the Commons"

[Hoasi]

That's when their inner poet does the talking.