Nonsense. All state interference is “bad”, and this includes copyright and patent law, the police monopoly, the money monopoly and monetary intervention. All of this restricts competition and/or involves some form of price control.
There is no such thing as a necessary evil. If something is evil, oppose it.
And they’d be wrong, although no more wrong than you about taxation.
Yeah, so we need a monopoly on force to prevent private associations from gaining power over this monopoly of force… very reasonable.
The state’s very existence implies market disorder.
-Jon
Brainpolice, I think you go a bit too far here. It’s not law or the use of violence in enforcing law that we typically believe is a problem; it is the monopoly conditions surrounding it. If the state provides a service, this does not mean such a service would (or should, whatever that means) fail to be provided by a free market, only that its provision will not be monopolized. In the absence of monopoly, “bad law” is simply not cost effective. This applies to property rights as well.
But then if some output of property is not “demanded” by the market as much as violence against some property owner, the market will produce wealth redistribution. Justice is an arbitrary term, especially considering how much state intervention has been embedded into prior property “ownership”. Anarchy cannot guarantee a free market, nor can it guarantee universal capitalism or communism.
The only thing that can stop non-free market use of violence is a populace that desires a free market more than legal plunder. This requires an informed public, but it’s hard to think we’ll ever get there when we have such incompatible and vague arguments about what system of property rights is just or not.
I tend to think all of these things as disjointed. Is our goal a free market, anarchy, capitalism, or communism? The traditional veil pulled over our heads is that we that we often think one or two of these things are always aligned and others are incompatible. We need to think in ways that balance the benefits of all these things, as put to a task of liberty and justice.
I think our largest problem is that so much prior injustice has created a situation where specific actions to overcome privilege and unfairness are unknowable and perhaps even completely unacheivable. We turn to vendetta.
We must balance liberty and justice, and we must balance future liberty with past injustice.
We also need to realize it doesn’t matter what our conclusion on such matters are - what matters more is what most people think, who those people are, and what actions will occur because of that. People develop property rights theories no matter how much they have or have not read, just as people believe in morality, law, and just violence naturally. If people want to endorse intellectual property theft whereas others want rigid protection of it, which system is most capable of providing the necessary economic incentives to enforce its laws? …and in what cases? Things may depend entirely upon the specific owner and property in question rather than an economic philosophy.
Anarcho-capitalism and an-com can go both ways. If you have an-cap, you can create communes as legal constructs just like business partnerships/corporations. If you have an-com, then individuals get to decide what “public” means and who actually gets to own what. So long as “communes” are voluntary, they compete, in either underlying system of law, and property ownership will eventually come to be owned by those who are most productive with capital. Ultimately, if either system produces a free market, over time the end goal would probably be very similar. Communes of forced charity of income and hegemonic control by planners typically seem best as very small units, usually of the family size, but to some degree including co-workers, friends, and community members. The cases of rent-seekers and wage slavery typically isn’t created, so it’s never a problem. If it were, the people would become more socialist minded and decide to publicize some ownership of some property, which would ultimately end up being a new arrangement of private property. Regardless of what it’s called, if it makes the market happier, it would likely happen.
Our fundamental goal is to use knowledge to make the market desire a free market.
Is this not reflected in my statements? I say “the police monopoly” and “the money monopoly”. I did not condemn protection or money as such, and I don’t see where how you could imply that from what I said.
And I never implied that. The problem is that the person clearly was a minarchist defending the state provision of these services. That’s what I was critisizing. They were clearly defending the state.
In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with wealth redistribution. The very nature of an economy involves a constant dynamic flux, a constant redistribution of wealth. The real problem is forced wealth redistribution.
Well, as I understand it, anarchy is a meta-free-market, from which your statement about the lack of a universal system logically follows.
BP, I think we do have the same point and the same stance here. I think I was thrown off by how you used the words “government interference”. There is a large difference between the state intervening to protect property rights and the state intervening to violate them.
When I said the market may demand wealth redistribution, I meant forced wealth redistribution. The market can choose whatever it believes is justice. If one guy owns all the land and starts hiking up rents, it won’t matter if he worked his ass off all his life and freely acquired it or used the government to steal it - it doesn’t matter if one defines justice in their heart or their mind. When force is a means to an end, the force that protects the most productive sect of society should also be the most capable of force (the better production is protected, the more desirable resources it can offer to those who protect it). Thus, if capitalists attempt to use property rights in a way that upsets the market, the market may become communist/socialist as far as that property is concerned. They can argue this is in the context of a free market by calling the forced wealth redistribution not a transfer of wealth, but a re-establishment of proper property rights.
Basically, I am saying that private economic power can be abused or mistakenly used in a manner that prevents it from efficiently providing its own defense against the rest of the market. Ultimately, do we protect the free market or the most prosperous market? While these things should be equal 99% of the time, what about the other situations?
For example, let’s take a guy who opens a restaurant in the middle of Detroit called “No N*****s Allowed”. He doesn’t allow black people in his restaurant. He is operating completely in the context of a free market, but given his aggressive philosophy about who should eat in his establishment, he will most likely be vandalized, boycotted, and robbed. He cannot generate the revenue to hire (or produce) protection due to the boycotts. Obviously, he has chosen what he has gotten. We don’t need to sympathize with him. Yet, this is a situation where those who abide by a free market cannot protect itself.
So what happens? He has to sell his capital at less than its prior value, due to the unauthorized actions of others. Or it is stolen. Or it ends up in such disrepair he simply abandons it. All of these things have some equivalence to forceful transfer of wealth. Just as easily the state (or market-endorsed violence) could steal it and redistribute it or put it up for auction or whatever. Anarcho-communism can be a useful means of claiming wealth transfer as justice. What situation is more favorable? If we simply use reputable companies to steal and re-appropriate his property, before enraged individuals simply vandalize it in darkness, we might do so in the most peaceful and least destructive way (barring indirect results such as moral hazard). Nevertheless, I don’t think this is a good idea.
Ultimately, we’d like people to simply boycott and unprofitable businessmen to liquidate their assets, especially natural resources. And we’d like communism to mean simply the freedom to organize communally. It is simply my personal belief that accepting arguments about “just” transfers of wealth in order to maintain a free market will result in more “legal plunder”. Almost everyone makes the mistake of believing that some one thing can become universally agreed upon. The political system, laws, agencies, and definitions of justice can and do change. If people see legal plunder working and accept such a definition of justice, they’ll resort to it until they find others have different definitions of justice than they do, and more guns to express themselves.
I guess my point on capitalism/communism is this: the market becomes either given some context. We share the largest amount of work - educating people to accept and support a free market. Only specifics and consensus opinion of justice will determine what we get more of (capitalism/communism) once there. Where force is concerned, they both do some ugly things. Hopefully, when stripped of force, we get the benefits and not the “legal plunder”. I think we should never concede to the argument that some aggressive use of force is both just and socially beneficial. This is why we advocate a free market. Arguing for the tenets of socialism seems to suggest there are cases where neither justice or prosperity is served by a free market. Maybe there are, but no other structure guarantees these two principles so consistently, so often, especially when the general population understands how it works.
I agree about minarchism’s self-contradictory nature, but I’m also one of those people that believes what we really have already is anarchy and that government supremacy at all geographic levels is an illusion. It seems that it isn’t the “boots on the ground” power of government, only the complicity of most individuals who irrationally fear crime more than government, that keeps it in place. Thus, I’m for “minarchy” if it means most people will respect property rights because they still think we have a central government who has control. I’ll have Pinkertons guarding my property though.
The problem I have with minarchists is that they want to shrink existing states, yet they do not want to divide them. What is the proper size of a government? It seems if you have multiple states and allow people to change their citizenship based upon the laws and ability to protect them, you have anarchy. Are minarchists then arguing for New World Order - they just want a limited world government? If there exists any balance between the size of a state, the underlying capital it works upon, and its people, why would not a market system determine the best arrangements rather than a monopolistic geographical taxation system? One has no goals other than to grow, the other to serve.
I think it’d be helpful to first define communism, socialism and capitalism before discussing them. As far as I am concerned, all can come about in a voluntary order - though not all will survive, and personally I’d like nothing to do with the former two. I do not consider redistribution of property to be “socialist” if it is redistribution of property taken by force from legitimate owners - a lot of libertarians make this mistake, but I fail to see what is “socialist” in this regard; it is merely righting wrongs. Socialism is institutionalized aggression against property owners, not restitution.
-Jon
Completely agree, Jon. What I’m saying is that “original unfair distribution” or “unjust appropriation” is often a banner for forced wealth redistribution, often only appearing once economic conditions have soured for some party. Given all of humanity’s history with statism, it seems like no redistribution of wealth could ever establish a voluntarily-agreed-upon, mutual definition of justice. Play this wealth redistribution game enough with a common lot of forceful thugs, and you effectively have socialist/communist management of property. I’d rather not be refunded my taxes if it means socialism. I value the security of my future property more than the restitution of past property.