| > "It seems, as you say, that the only distinguishing feature is its size" No. Well yes, but it's confusing to say so, the point is in the location of the government in the "pyramid" if you will, it's the "top dog". If government is not such as to allow competition and is willing to enforce such position, and it's reach is far and wide, the rest of the environment is doomed. In such an environment, there will be no competition for government-like institutions, and they will suck forever and ever. That is to say, there is no hope in those institutions getting better if you don't have the environment fixed first. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with those institutions existing, since in a competitive environment they do not have the force to compel you. They may fool you with fashion and fads and reality distortions, but fundamentally they can not compel you with force. And that force to compel is something the government has and does use, in fact it asserts a monopoly on using such force. If some government-like institution has such a force, you can dig down and see that the force is actually granted to it by the government. (this follows from the government's assertion of monopoly on such force) Since most current governments allow some kind of limited competition, things do usually get a little better very very very slowly, speed depending mostly on the amount of competition allowed. Obviously culture has an effect on how bad it will get if the government's power is great etc. etc. > "Now that works for most modern libertarians, but I think it would not work for Ayn Rand" To me Ayn Rand is more like romance novels for libertarian leaning people. Her points are seductive but ultimately lack rigorous substance "in the real world", fun to read though (or watch the movies, or listen to, since there are some songs that have some quotes in the lyrics). So I don't really care if some argument would work on Ayn Rand or not. It is my understanding, from n = a small number, that similar positions are not rare. Very cautious attitude is also exercised towards other cult-ish stuff like stefbot. > "More interesting are the libertarians who take a doctrinaire opposition to the government, but it really requires, as I said earlier, an anarcho-socialist vibe of ... those are already Initiation of Force in some fundamental sense" To me, that has an anarcho-capitalist vibe, granted this is probably because of difference in social scenery. I do know that the anarcho-socialists have similar arguments, I'm mostly familiar only with Chomsky's. Btw. anarcho-capitalists are infuriating and interesting to talk to. Wow that's a lot of text for a point that is so clear in my head. I hope it gives you a plausible explanation why some reject the government but not the government-like institutions. |
I think your response earlier took the form "not so! there's an entire environment outside the university which does not necessarily suck!". But there's also an entire environment outside of your present government that does not necessarily suck. A modern state isn't much more than a bureaucracy tied to territory. (There is a pretense of independence from other institutions but in reality that can often be compromised by military actions, treaties, and sanctions.) To be fair, since World War II the countries of this world have gotten much more shy about letting people cross their borders, and it's much less like driving into the university quad and a bit more like requiring swipe-card access and ID to enter a university cleanroom. But let's not mistake rights exercised with rights possessed.
Actually, most of this way of thinking comes to me from stefbot. Stefan Molyneux is... well, let me put it this way: when he says something I agree with, I become much more skeptical of that thing: so I actually treat him as having a negative correlation with reliable knowledge. This happened most prominently when I started reading his tome on objective moral facts. I would like, on a good day, to believe in objective moral facts. This has been shaken by reading his work which attempts to prove them.
So, like, if you just listen to the very first Freedomain podcasts, he seriously constructs a totalitarian government-like dystopia inside of a libertarian minarchy, and all the while he seems to be perfectly happy about this embedding. I will confess that I had given up Objectivism many years before I first heard this podcast, and no longer considered myself a libertarian at this point, but this was the moment where I started being really skeptical of the libertarian promise. That is where I started to think about to what extent libertarians really oppose totalitarianism, if it can exist in government-like examples.
Maybe this phrasing of the problem goes too far, and it's only a suspicion: but it almost sounds like 90% of libertarian philosophy would be thrown out of the window if the government phrased its position like, "(1) we own all of this land, we just sublet it to the nominal owners for a rent that we call property tax, (2) you are only allowed to be on our land if you agree to our terms and conditions, which includes laws and income taxes, (3) you may at any time opt to be kicked out of our country permanently, rather than being imprisoned etc."
The difference between the ancap and the ansoc, and the reason that I find the ansoc view really interesting, is that the ansoc feels free to say, "yeah, that's all total crap because the government can't own the land either." By saying that the government obtained its "rule" over the land by being a big bloody bully, and questioning that legitimacy, anarcho-socialism actually has something of a place to stand. But it's about as radical as the Buddhist doctrines of no-self and emptiness, and I'm not sure that such a powerful negation is a wise idea.
I'm rambling at this point, so I'll shut up now.