@Skeptical: Kokesh is a tool. He paints himself out as being aligned with Ron Paul… yet the Ron Paul camp wants nothing to do with Kokesh and Kokesh has lashed out at Ron Paul at length in the past. Kokesh is engaging in typical anarcho-troll behavior: obsessing on anarchy as the end. The anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists are no different than this Kokeshic right-anarchy… it’s still a form of collectivism. If you have in mind some kind of “ideal society”, then you’re missing the point. The point is that if people really are free, they’re going to do things you don’t like - including having strong power structures and systems of privilege.
Of course, systems of privilege throw into question the meaning of what it is to be free. Clearly, we cannot say that the slave is free on his owner’s plantation. And every weaker form of privilege than outright slavery still contains within it that germ of rulership, aka ownership. This has led me to a few points in my own thinking:
a) We should not expect “society generally” to not be insane. In other words, we should expect that “the world out there” is generally going to be screwed up, filled with oppression and misery, etc. This is not a point of despair, rather, it’s a technical conclusion that follows naturally from trying to answer the following question: “How do you internalize at least some of the benefits of healthy social order to the healthy society itself?” Clearly, in the general case, there is no internalization of benefits, thus, there is no reason for the social order to be healthy, thus, the general social order will always suffer from a tragedy of the commons. The State may best be thought of as the scavenging rodent that feasts on the discoordinated elements of society who do not benefit from a healthy social order for whatever reason.
b) Thus, a natural order society must be essentially Hoppean… that is, it must consist in privatized “enclaves” that emborder themselves (not necessarily geographically…) and keep out undesirables and enforce some kind of social order within themselves. To the extent that such social orders insist on controlling speech and personal behavior in order to maintain certain social mores that reinforce the survival of the enclave itself - that is, are constitutive to the enclave’s continued existence - they can be characterized as coercive, even aggressive. At what point such an enclave crosses the border into violation of NAP is not entirely clear to me… what is clear is that there is a line that can be crossed but that it is also absurd to insist that anything less than libertine mores is evidence of an aggressive social order.
c) The principle of the State can be critiqued on philosophical grounds - that is, ethical grounds - without translating this critique into any specific plan of action in regards to the expression of the State principle: the government. In particular, we can shrewdly apply the principle of the lesser of two evils to conclude that we do not need, nor should we even desire to, tear down all governments. Government in every part of the world is built layer upon layer. It is the top-most layers which are naturally the most odious, the most removed from any conceivable justification for aggression, however contorted, and which are the most wasteful, and exercise the most outlandish privileges and are simply the most deadly. We do not need to strip off all layers in order to point out that we don’t need the top layer at all because there are smaller, more local layers that can do all the jobs that the top layer of government is supposed to be performing just fine. In short: secession, not anarchy.
Clayton -