> ...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.
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.
> 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...
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.
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...
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.
In other words, solve a minimax problem over human behaviour. Good luck with that - we do not even have strong scientific notion of how people make decisions in various conditions on micro level.
AnCap likewise does not work, because we do not know when people would renege on their contracts (essentially steal, injecting accumulation of wealth due to lack of information about what was stolen). Not to mention it does not start from zero and accumulation of wealth is obviously easier when you already have it and becomes easier.
Result is a state = a monopoly, oligopoly or a cartel.
Such a result is only avoidable if somehow economics is not a zero sum game and individual progress/gain is quick enough to outweigh all such initial tendencies, which would only happen in the singularity.
An alternative would be an utopian uncorruptible oracular jury with unlimited power = God.
Hacker News is not the right place for such a discussion.
We do not have perfect information on everything, but we still need to do the best we can to make informed choices. So I use the same we use in standard Science.
There is a ton of literature on law in non-state situation, from legal, political and economic scholars. I suggest you look at it. Its the basis of AnCapism.
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...
> 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.
> 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...
"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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
A lot of communists posit that capitalism (and perhaps in some cases statism) cause and/or arise from something kind of resembling a mental illness. Marx's "Alienation" and especially Delueze's "Desire" have this flavor. I think this is one reason why there's a whole brand of communism that's closely tied to Freudian/Lacanian style psychology.
That psychological aspect usually plays some role in transitionary theories for certain brands of communism, especially anti-statist brands. Although nailing down exactly what role it's supposed to play is usually pretty difficult, it's fair to say that the answer to your question would -- for a lot of anarcho-communists -- boil down to something related to these psychological theories.
This post may sound uncharitable to those communists. And I don't agree with their theories. But I also think that their work contributes something very important to discussion of fringe political theory:
Flipping a psychological switch in the minds of the masses is an absolute pre-requisite for most anarchist theories.
IMO that includes anarcho-capitalism. The communists at least recognized this way earlier than everyone else and are very careful about identifying psychological theories that match well with their sociological theories.
We can argue whether psychological switch-flipping is a realistic expectation -- I'd argue not. But any time I read political theory, I try to identify where the author invokes a form of switch-flipping. 99% of the time the author just makes overly charitable assumptions about human psychology -- that's usually the case in mainstream politics. Communists sometimes have some Freudian psycho-analytical flavored theory. Anarcho-communists like Molyneux prefer weird pseudo-logical reasoning about moral axioms.
Implicit assumptions of switch-flipping show up in mainstream politics as well (IMO "drain the swamp" and "black lives matter" both make implicit assumptions about switch-flipping that under-estimate the stubbornness and importance of human psychology...)
Well, that's a big weakness of these theories, I think. My question is not terribly complex or dependent on unusual or unrealistic situations.
I would also note that sometimes, people operating off a 'psychologist' basis like you've identified, misunderstand the critiques of others as being also 'psychologist'. For example, the Hayekian critique of central economic planning is often characterized as a psychological argument that "people are naturally selfish and greedy". Thus, if you can get them to stop being so selfish, the objection is overcome. However, what the critique is actually about is inherent limits to knowledge and information, which would apply regardless of psychology.
If that 'collective of one's legitimately only needs one worker, then that isn't a problem. If someone else joins him later then he has to share the MoP.
But are collectives allowed to exclude people? If not, how will they select appropriate workers? If you can just show up at a collective and say "I want to work here, and you can't exclude me or kick me out" then how will they be able to function? People will just leave collectives with poor returns and make collectives with good returns take them on.
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?
>What if I and a group of other people want to organize and work together, in exchange for wages with fully voluntary other people?
There's no problem with that, but the people working for you wouldn't be very clever - there would be no reason to sell your labour under Communism. In fact, it would be so backward, the exploitation so evident, that nobody would even bother. Why would you want to work for wages when there are no wages under Communism?
Nobody is going to stop you from doing it. Communism is stateless. But you'd be pretty stupid to be doing it, and it would be a massive waste of time and resources. Nobody in their right mind would work for wages in a system where everyone else gets the product of their labour.
In this wonderful future, there will still be scarcity. There isn't going to be an infinite number of things.
Sure, maybe all my food and housing is paid for. But what if I want more stuff, that I couldn't normally get?
What if I WANT to work for a wage, in order to get these other things? That doesn't sound stupid at all.
Or perhaps the person who I am working for, due to him having a really good business model, or idea, or skill set, produces so much product of labor that I rather get a small portion of my product of labor from him, than get an even smaller product of labor the "normal" way, even if the normal way I receive is my "fair" share?
I as an employee do not care a single bit about getting my "fair share" of product of labor. I care about MAXIMIZING my absolute amount of product of labor.
As in, I'd rather have 10 percent of 100,000$ than 100% of 1 ,000$. Why would I care if my boss gets 0 dollars or 90,000$s?
I don't care if my boss "exploits" me, as long as it is a better option than working for a "fair" share anywhere else
> 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.
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.
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."
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.