Communist in general cannot be trusted, history has verified that. Agorist, for the time being, are our only concrete ally.
Yes, in that sense libertarianism regaurds people as “equal”, as in the equal liberty to voluntarily pursue one’s ends. Liberty is not a gaurantee to positive ends for everyone in any uniform sense though. That being said, liberty generally leads to more positive ends for everyone, and what’s called “positive liberty” (I.E. benefits for the masses) is merely liberty’s product. By no means does libertarianism rule out mutual aid, and the essence of any genuine social anarchism reduces to a preferance for mutual aid. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have a preferance for both mutual aid and more individualistic endeavors at the same time.
Hoppe has merely taken Rothbard’s political philosophy and extended it. Having just finish D:TGTF I can’t help but be amazed.
Agorists (like myself) are generally left-rothbardians, and in alliance with mutualists. Agorism is a separate category from anarcho-capitalism only to the extent that it emphasizes strategic differances and is influenced more by Rothbard’s left-libertarian years. I see the range of alliance internal to anarchism as potentially ranging from mutualist to anarcho-capitalist. I’ve generally had bad experiences with anarcho-syndicalists and anarcho-communists, but I still defend the them to the extent that it has its place within the history of anarchism and the possibility for there to be a few more reasonable individuals in the bunch.
That begs the question of how and in what direction he extended it. I claim he extended it in a more conservative direction, and draws most heavily from Rothbard’s most conservative years.
There’s not really any doubt about that. Nonetheless D:TGTF is an essential work for all libertarians. Hoppe is wonderful.
Indeed. You get the most positive ends for everyone when you stop forcing them on everyone at gunpoint. Albeit to be a libertarian because of that would constitute utilitarianism.
However you do not need everyone to enjoy equal positive benefits for everyone to be equal. Perhaps I can not play basketball as well as somebody else does, but that does not make him my superior.
Well that’s all I really mean when I claim that libertarianism can reasonably have an egalitarian element to it. Who here doesn’t generally favor a more prosperous society for everyone? Pure equality isn’t the goal, just the expansion of good consequences.
Yeah, a trade does not need to be bring about an equal benefit for both the buyer and to the seller to be legitimate. It is enough that is is voluntary and therefore by definition subjectively benefitial to some degree for both.
To block such a trade because one side is getting “exploited” by not getting equal benefit as the other harms both sides.
I really want an official philisophical system based on Rothbard’s prime years, and I hope it will be called “Rothbardianism”. It would be a huge asset to the Libertarian movement.
Alright, so then you agree that to be an anarchist one must adhere to a system of individual rights, and at the very minimum that entailed by the NAP. If you want to disclaim those who would persecute capitalists for owning property from the rubric of anarchism, I have no disagreement.
Indeed, but that would be because the state has absolutely no right to anything it owns.
Luck is unnecessary. It can be very easily done by way of restrictive covenants.
Private property is an individual right, just like life, and liberty. If you agree that to be an anarchist one has to support individual rights, then you are in fact agreeing with what some of us have said all along – private property is a prerequisite. In voluntaryism everyone would be acting within the framework of private property, and contract (since it’s a part of individual rights). NAP includes the respect of private property, and if one doesn’t respect private property one is not against initiation of force at all. You’ve claimed that: “All one has to do is advocate non-initiation of force as a norm. One can advocate non-initiation of force as a norm and not accept the legitimacy of private property at the same time.” In the light of the above said that statement is false.
It already exists. It’s called left-rothbardianism. 
Hence the insanity of trying to make a libertarian case for state border enforcement and migration restriction.
My point is that such restrictive covenants won’t be libertarian in the absence of unanimous consent to them; they will be coercive institutional discrimination. Otherwise, integration will occur at the margin, and there’s very little that can be done about that short of coercion. The entire thing is predicated on literally everyone in the community agreeing to be restrictive to that degree, which I find to be close to impossible, particularly as the generations pass by.
Again, ideological support for private property is not necessary for one to act in a way consistant with the NAP, and neither does ideological support for private property necessarily mean that one will act in a way consistant with the NAP. We’ve already beaten this dead horse.
I would propose that most people, regaurdless of their ideology, more or less follow the NAP in their day to day lives (and even ideologically support it on a personal level). This indicates that the connection between one’s ideology and one’s behavior is often severed. People tend to expect others to enact their ideologies for them, they rarely behave in a way that is consistant with their ideology. I doubt that most people would be willing to take the personal risk necessary to go through with stealing other people’s stuff or shoot others in the process of trying to gain their stuff, regaurdless of their ideology. The state is what presents them with a mechanism and oppurtunity to have others violently enforce their ideology for them. I think it’s wise to try one’s best to judge people on the basis of their actions as opposed to their ideologies, considering that the two are rarely coherantly connected.
This is what I mean when I say that one can ideologically reject private property without violating the NAP. Someone can proclaim how much they hate private property and how much they want everyone to live on an ant farm all they want until they are blue in the face, but their behavior often indicates otherwise, their behavior implicitly supports private property and generally peaceful interrelations. I think that without the ability to externalize the responsibility for acting on one’s ideology onto an institution like the state, violent conflict among people in society with different ideologies is disincentivized. To take the opposite viewpoint, to me, would be to fall back on a Hobbesian vision of what anarchy is like. I think that when it comes down to it, people tend to follow economic incentives despite their ideologies, and to take it one step further, I think that over time the following of economic incentives makes cultural and ideological differences increasingly irrelevant.
You are contradicting yourself, and it’s getting annoying. On one side you say that anarchism (or what you consider to be anarchism) recognizes individual rights, and on the other you say that one can be an anarchist without accepting the validity of private property.
My above post explains my perspective more in depth.
I haven’t contradicted myself, we seem to be talking about somewhat different things. In order for an ideology to count as anarchist, yes, it must recognize individual rights. This does not mean, however, that one must have an anarchistic ideology to function as an anarchist or to function in an anarchistic society. Neither does it mean that those who have an anarchistic ideology will necessarily behave in a way that is consistant with it. Someone can reject anarchist ideology and function in 100% accordance with the NAP as an individual, and someone can accept anarchist ideology and function in contradictionto the NAP as an individual. In short, there almost never is a coherant connection between one’s ideology and one’s behavior.
Furthermore, even if one does ideologically accept the fundamentals of individual rights, from that point onwards there are endless conflicts in terms of interpretation and application. For some examples, libertarians can’t even agree among eachother if it’s okay for the state to restrict migration and close its borders, wether or not abortion violates the NAP, the legitimacy of corporate limited liability and intellectual property. Minarchists have convinced themselves that they support individual rights and then go on to propose a state, the greatest rights violation possible. So I think in some sense it is definitely an oversimplification to say that it’s a matter of “you either accept individual rights or you don’t”.
I think all one needs is a passing familiarity with the history of the modern libertarian movement to realize that any alliances with the so-called left or right can never bear much fruit in the long run. At certain times and places, fleeting instances of cooperation and solidarity can be useful, but become dangerous once they’ve outlived their purpose. This is because the very nature of such alliances can never be anything more than “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” When libertarians get suckered into believing otherwise, the results usually aren’t what the suckers expected. The worst is of course when the suckers don’t even realize they’ve been duped and go on for years and years furthering someone else’s agenda.
It’s perhaps a tad ironic to use something Reagan said in a post like this, but he was spot on about “up and down” being more important than right and left.
Not really. Just particular segments of a given community. I’m not sure where the problem is, most likely people who differ in their preferences will not approach such a community to begin with, unless they don’t mind living there as guestworkers perhaps or something of that sort. That pretty much rules out commies - again, if their ideology is so great, and they have the opportunity to live in a commune, it speaks volumes against their confidence in it if they insist on living in capitalist societies.