Emergence Anarcho-Capitalism

Economics Political Theory
281

“A better question is why the right is inalienable. It’s inalienable because by nature you control yourself and no one else does.”

I’m just picking this quote as representative of the “natural rights” point of view…

I personally don’t have a problem with the social institutions - the contractual arrangements, really - that follow from a natural rights view. I generally prefer what we have been calling a “capitalist” definition of property.

But that is just a statement of what I would choose in a free market of societal rules systems. Like any other market choice I would make, who am I to insist via force and violence that my market choice should be everyone else’s?

This is the danger I see from the “natural rights” camp: they seem to be so sure that their derivation is One Real Truth that they are willing to impose that definition on everyone else. Note, for example, the subtle appeal to a last authority: in this case, it is “nature”. It’s odd that my derivation is called a “slippery slope”, when it seems to me that anyone purporting to have the one “true” definition of property or “rights” that everyone else should use: what happens when you run into people with a different one “true” definition? How can there be any room for compromise when two sides think they have the one universal truth that everyone should have? It’s a recipe for constant conflict and violence, at least until one side is completely killed.

282

“The legal concept of a right is no more than the legal aknowledgment of a fundamental reality. You control yourself. End of story.”

And what do you do with those who have a different story? Your might makes right over them?

I just think this kind of philosophical “I have the one right answer. End of story” thinking is really dangerous, as it cannot handle the reality that there are many, many different “one true philosophies” that are in conflict and that will inevitably end up in a war - a real, physical, guns blazing war - over which one truth is correct.

“Political systems help or harm themselves in accordance with how much their laws reflect reality.”

If you are correct - and with the caveat that this is one relatively vague sentence, I think you probably are - that will come out in the market. That is, the contracts that we sign will - I predict! - mostly define contractual “rights” that will largely match capitalist concepts because, I think, those are the ones that work best for most people and thus the ones that they will choose in a free market.

But there is a gulf of difference between advocating that people choose such concepts - “political systems” as you say - and imposing your definitions because you are so sure that they are the “end of story”.

“To say no one has innate rights except that which exists between contractees is to sanction murder, theft, rape, torture, and worse between those who have not yet contracted.”

I think you are very mistaken and creating a distracting strawman. Can I encourage you to think about this a little more before making such an unjustified conclusion?

283

You’d be free to sign away your rights, but it wouldn’t be enforceable in a court of law

Why not? Inalienable rights doesn’t mean that you yourself can’t give them up. They’re just inalienable by anyone else.

The great revolution of American democracy was the aknowledgement of the rights we all have as part of our nature as human beings.

Don’t mix democracy into anarcho-capitalism, because democracy as a type of government (and not contract) is a type of statism. Acknowledgement of natural rights was a great revolution, but you make it seem like American democracy upholds said natural rights. The idea of the social contract could have been great if taken to the conclusion of anarcho-capitalism, but it instead remained as an excuse for statism. Not even the founding people of this nation all signed the social contract, so it is invalid. Plus, people are born every day who do not sign the contract. So while Locke’s idea was steps away from an amazing conclusion of a voluntary society, it instead resulted in a government established by the few - the few that are now dead.

I do agree in my uninformed opinion that human beings have the inherent value of human life which gives us self-ownership, but people on this board seem to disagree. Though they quickly assert that right to property exists (and don’t give anything but empirical evidence).

284

I think you are very mistaken and creating a distracting strawman. Can I encourage you to think about this a little more before making such an unjustified conclusion?

That’s not a refutation. You simply said try again.

285

I think you are very mistaken and creating a distracting strawman. Can I encourage you to think about this a little more before making such an unjustified conclusion?

That’s not a refutation. You simply said try again.

I’m not trying to refute. I’m having a constructive discussion, not a philosophical debate, because any philosophical “truth” or argument is a market decision: it’s one way that people may make their decision about what societal institutions they would consume in a free market of such, but there is no requirement that people make their decisions that way, because the only way their can be a “requirement” is to posit some force-using enforcer of that requirement.

What I am suggesting is that your attempt to link someone who doesn’t agree with a natural rights view of things to “sanctioning murder, rape, etc” is clearly a strawman since I clearly don’t sanction those things.

If instead you would like to make a market-based prediction that in a world dominated by contractual arrangements, murder, rape, torture, etc will be especially prevalent, I think that would be interesting. I just think that in the process of trying to construct that prediction, you are likely to see why it’s unlikely to be true. In the process of doing so, you will internalize the logic of markets in social institutions in a way far, far more useful than my trying to “argue” it. No one ever internalizes something new from an “argument”, only from thinking about it themselves.

I do suspect you are likely to just point out again that I haven’t “refuted” anything or similarly accuse me of dodging the question. Hopefully not, but it’s what I’m predicting, not based on anything specific to you - I don’t know you - but past history in such circumstances. Well, ok. To me it ends up kind of like being, say, a white person in Coer D’Alene (I just happened to visit there this past weekend and experienced the anachronism of being in a “racially” homogeneous and frankly prejudiced and bigoted place, not surprising since the Aryan nation locates their headquarters in that area): despite my being “white” and, to the bigots and hatemongers, being “in their camp”, I’m extremely wary of the violence inherent in their position. I agree with you that I prefer a capitalist concept of property rights, but I am exrtremely wary of the violence of the position you take around that, since I advocate that that is a market choice and you seem to advocate that it is a “universal truth” that must be imposed on everyone whether or not they agree or not. Hopefully I’m wrong about this last.

286

Alternatives Considered wrote:
But that is just a statement of what I would choose in a free market of societal rules systems. Like any other market choice I would make, who am I to insist via force and violence that my market choice should be everyone else’s?

  • What you’re missing here is that aknowledgement of natural right is what your notion of “force and violence” rests upon. You’re assuming my position by appealing to it. An aknowledgment that people own themselves is what’s necessary to consider it wrong to initiate violence or coercion against them.

But you say, why should we “force” this legal principle on everyone else? We don’t need to force it on others–reality has done it for us. We need to make law respect reality in the same way that scientific laws respect reality. What use would a law of science be that had no correspondence to reality? None at all! The fact that reality itself has already made you an owner of yourself is not forcing our legal principle on people, only aknowledging what reality has already forced upon them.

Alternatives Considered wrote: This is the danger I see from the “natural rights” camp: they seem to be so sure that their derivation is One Real Truth that they are willing to impose that definition on everyone else. Note, for example, the subtle appeal to a last authority: in this case, it is “nature”.

  • Would you criticize the laws of science in the same way–claiming they’re wrong for imposing the law of gravitation on other scientists who might have a different view. This scientist says it feels like he’s being pushed down more than pulled and we’re supposed to accept that?

It’s odd that my derivation is called a “slippery slope”, when it seems to me that anyone purporting to have the one “true” definition of property or “rights” that everyone else should use: what happens when you run into people with a different one “true” definition?

  • They’re free to start their own society, away from me. And you know what, they’ve already done it. Many societies around the world operate as if the law of self-ownership were not in operation. Generally it’s the philosophic foundation of communalism and all its derivations. And, what’s funny is, they simply don’t work. Because they are not aknowledging a fundamental fact about reality and human nature as given by reality.

We must take reality as a given and build within the limits set by it.

It’s like you have one guy saying “that car needs gasoline” and another saying, “Naw, it can run on water.” Which one is going to work? Engines cannot run on water because it is not in the nature of water to explode when given air, pressure and heat. It is not imposing upon another to say they are wrong for trying to run their engine with water. Damn right we can appeal to reality, what else do we have? Philosophy is not a game of equally legitimate concepts, it is abstractions pulled from reality.

Self ownership and the ability to own what you produce is the necessary fuel for human freedom.

How can there be any room for compromise when two sides think they have the one universal truth that everyone should have? It’s a recipe for constant conflict and violence, at least until one side is completely killed.

  • There can be no compromise between someone who says 1+1=3 when I say 1+1=2. To compromise in such a case only makes us both wrong instead of one of us right.

In fact, one cannot compromise or make progress at all with others who have a defective epistemology. If we cannot agree that reality is reality then there is no further basis to communicate.

You seem to be assuming that an argument must take place within a closed society. You believe this means that violence is inevitable–I don’t think that’s a warranted conclusion because we have for all intents and purposes infinite amounts of space in this universe and separation will always be posisble (naturally I assume space colonization at some point).

Competition between societies is more interesting to me than competition in a single marketplace. Looking at history on that basis it’s perfectly clear that a property ethic and aknowledgment of natural rights has resulted in more human progress than any alternative.

287

What is the source of your expectation (right?) to have your contracts respected by the parties with which you had signed them? Wouldn’t you had to have a *previous “*contract-respecting” contract signed with each and every one of them? Iterate ad infinitum…

“Contracts” or “natural rights” are not the only possible answers. Actually, they’re both wrong. I think that the source of (societal, property) norms is as simple as this:

“The natural selection of cultural rules is another instance of spontaneous order. Hayek contends that cultural evolution proceeds through a group selection process in which rules conducing to productivity spread at the expense of less-efficient practices. A group that observes better-adapted rules can support a larger population, so its practices displace other practices as it grows and as members of competing groups adopt these more effective behaviors.”

288

Anenome, can you explain what you mean by “society”? I think we are a lot closer than you seem to think we are (though looking back over the thread, it wasn’t you that said that I sanctioned murder, rape, etc). Depending on what you mean by “They’re free to start their own society, away from me.”

If your definition of “society” includes some notion of “geographic continuity/locality”, than we’re not in agreement, but maybe I could convince you that sticking to that conflation is more damaging to your cause than not doing so. If if does not include that - if a “society” is just a collection of people operating under more or less the same societal institutions and definitions, regardless of their physical proximity - than we’re basically advocating the same thing, though admittedly through fairly different language (you are taking a philosopher’s point of view, where I am taking what I will call a more pragmatic/market point of view. I am not interested in proving what is “right”, because in the end, it doesn’t matter. My waving a philosophy book in the face of someone who is about to shoot me is not going to change their mind, and ultimately, what I need to live in the kind of society that I want to live in is some sort of “buy in” from the majority of the people that I’m going to interact with. That, to me, is a market issue, an issue of “sales”, not of being right. I need to sell these people on some sort of institutions/agreements/definitions that they will voluntarily agree to live by, and I’m submitting that the vast majority of people are not going to be swayed by a philosophical argument, no matter how rock-solid. They are going to be sold by self interest. That’s why I’m pretty much with you when you say “Looking at history on that basis it’s perfectly clear that a property ethic and aknowledgment of natural rights has resulted in more human progress than any alternative.”, but I see that as a sales pitch, not as the end of the story, as in, QED, I’ve proved it, now fuck off and die if you don’t acknowledge the superiority of my philosophy (of course I’m exaggerating for effect, not saying that’s what you said).)

Perhaps the semantic conundrum between us lies in this statement of yours: “Competition between societies is more interesting to me than competition in a single marketplace.” I don’t really understand: in an anarchic-world, societies do compete, in the marketplace of societies. That’s exactly what I’m saying: I advocate that people should only be included in a “society” if they contractually agree to do so (with the other folks in that “society”) and then the societies can compete, BUT, I think it is most likely that in such a free market of societies, that the one with strong private property definitions will "do better’, become larger, etc., basically for the reasons you list (IOW, when you arguing why you prefer private property etc,. you are preaching to the choir: I’m already there. I’m just very careful about not forcing others to use the same definitions. It’s their choice, and if it ends up that they live in squalor, well, that’s the consequences of their bad decision and perhaps they’ll switch over after they see things in action. Or perhaps they’ll just like to live like that, even if it sucks by our standard, because it matches their morality. Whatever. I’m still not going to force them to adopt a different definition amongst themselves. As for what happens when they interact with a “capitalist” and try to impose their definition of property, well, I’ve discussed that at quite some length in this thread, but the short version is: I don’t think it will happen very much and thus isn’t really that big of an issue).

289

“What is the source of your expectation (right?) to have your contracts respected by the parties with which you had signed them?”

Mutual self-interest, like all voluntary trades (a contract is just a trade, albeit it isn’t usually thought of this way. It’s basically a trade wherein we agree to eschew certain actions. It’s kind of a “negative trade”, if you will, but that’s just a descriptive term, not one meant to conflate issues like positive vs negative “rights”). Both sides sign and stick to contracts because it is in their (perceived, at least) self-interest to do so.

You don’t need anything else and, in the end, anything else is violence and thus really isn’t going to work. There are only two kinds of interactions between people: unilateral, and not unilateral, the latter being “bilateral” and thus mutually voluntary. If it’s not mutually voluntary, then it is just one side imposing their will on the other via violence. We have only violence, or contracts. Since I take as the starting point for “anarchists” and others on this list a general disdain for violence (as reflected to a large extent in the NAP), I think it’s pretty natural to start from contracts.

“The natural selection of cultural rules is another instance of spontaneous order. Hayek contends that cultural evolution proceeds through a group selection process in which rules conducing to productivity spread at the expense of less-efficient practices. A group that observes better-adapted rules can support a larger population, so its practices displace other practices as it grows and as members of competing groups adopt these more effective behaviors.”

Totally agreed, but also, I find this is totally in support of what I am saying, not against it. Since there is no violence or force mentioned here - he is not saying that one group imposes their cultural rules on others, but rather that they emerge from a competition of such rules - he is referring to a marketplace in such rules. In such a marketplace of rules, one is not bound by any particular rule unless one chooses to be so as a “member of a competing group”.

What is it you see in this quote that you think contradicts what I am saying? Maybe I’m missing something.

290

Then “contracts” can not be the source of norms. Mutual self-interest is already what’s making it more likely that we don’t slit each other’s throats without a contract covering it. The societal norm that a contract is better respected (than not) can not be established via contracts.

The “creator” of norms is cultural evolution (i.e. group selection process). Your “contracts” are not an answer simply because they themselves depend on the same norms which you suggest they must create. The norms must come before “contracts”, not the other way around.

291

Sorry, Z, I don’t understand what you are talking about in your multiple references to “norms”. Can you explain it some other way? What exactly are you objecting to?

292

AC, nevermind. I think I already said what I wanted to say as well as I could say it. Sorry it didn’t flow through to you.

293

Alternatives Considered,

Do you acknowledge that there are undeniable truths that exist and that we can comprehend them with logic/reason? -“they seem to be so sure that their derivation is One Real Truth that they are willing to impose that definition on everyone else.”

First of all, “nature” is a reference to reason-against nature means your acting illogically/in a contradictory manner. Are you denying the universality of the laws of logic? If you are; you are using those very constructs of reason to form your point, so again you are contradicting yourself and making no sense.

Lastly, you clearly don’t understand the implications of “natural” rights, as the proponents can only resort to argumentation and non-coercive means to persuade as it is based on the fact of self-ownership.

“I shall smite thee relativism, with my third leg of logic” -gladiusrationis

294

Z, well, I think you’re arguing kind of a technical point that doesn’t really contradict the basics of what I’m saying, particularly if I were to explain - belatedly! - that my use of the term “contract” here is relatively informal. I really just mean any mutually voluntary “trade”, including a trade in which people agree to operate with each other using certain definitions or norms.. I am trying to make the point that any social convention or agreement or institution or definition is purely a function of whether people choose to accept it: it requires buyin from people. What I get frustrated with is those that reference something other than the buyin of the very people that they need to accept these institutions, whether that reference be a diety (“the Bible prohibits such and such!”), the state (obviously), or philosophy (“natural rights”). No institution has any power over anyone unless they agree to let that institution have power over them; the only other thing that has power over them is literal physical power, that is, violence.

Do you disagree with that? Does a mental abstraction/construction like “natural rights” actually have any power over anyone unless they voluntarily agree to let it have power over them?

As I said, I don’t think what I’m saying is very controversial at some level, if I could actually say it correctly.

295

I don’t. I may have read into your “contracts” proposition too literally.

296

I may have read into your “contracts” proposition too literally.

If you did, the fault is in my writing, not your reading. But you have been helpful in showing me that I need to be careful with how I use the term “contract”. Thanks!

297

Wheylous: Why not? Inalienable rights doesn’t mean that you yourself can’t give them up. They’re just inalienable by anyone else.

  • No, even you cannot alienate your rights from yourself. This is a basic legal principle even our system recognizes today. If, even in our system, someone paid you not to speak and you spoke–there’s no law against speaking and there cannot be, it’s an inalienable right. If you agree not to speak you’re not alienating yourself from your right to speak, you’re choosing not to exercise an inalienable right. And the only recourse for the other party would be loss of whatever benefit you two had contracted for.

Don’t mix democracy into anarcho-capitalism, because democracy as a type of government (and not contract) is a type of statism.

  • The rejection of all things statist is inappropriate–which clearly is why I’m not an anarchist. The state does have a legitimate function, that being to protect the right of its citizens, to punish those who initiate aggression with aggression and coercion of its own. This power of the state to use physical force is only a problem when the state is initiating force rather than using it in response to coercion.

Sure democracy itself, in the strict sense of the term is a terrible concept which allowed majority rule to trample on every minority and was essentialy tyranny by mass vote. But I said American Democracy, which is democracy paird with both strict government limits and aknowledgment of individual inalienable rights, which is the best form of government that’s been pulled off so far in the history of the world. Show me an operating mass anarchist state and then you can talk.

Acknowledgement of natural rights was a great revolution, but you make it seem like American democracy upholds said natural rights.

  • It did initially. Not so much anymore. Too many loopholes in the Constitution have led to massive expansion of statist controls and power far beyond what was intended. No argument there.

The idea of the social contract could have been great if taken to the conclusion of anarcho-capitalism, but it instead remained as an excuse for statism. Not even the founding people of this nation all signed the social contract, so it is invalid.

  • I half agree with you here. I think you’re right that people should not be automatically considered agreed to the existing social contract they were born into. I’m working on a concept where children would exist within the parent’s chosen framework until these children reached self-sufficiency, at which point they’d be allowed to choose what social contract they want to live under. Such a society would encourage experimentation. It would allow for things like communal living and even Sharia, as long as the people inside agreed to it willingly. But their rights would still be unalienable on a basic level.

I do agree in my uninformed opinion that human beings have the inherent value of human life which gives us self-ownership, but people on this board seem to disagree. Though they quickly assert that right to property exists (and don’t give anything but empirical evidence).

  • The fact of self-ownership is simply self-evident. You control you. The necessity of individually owned property is obvious when you try to eat something. You’re consming property obtained for your exclusive use. No one can live without similarly obtaining a food-good for their sole use. Not even animals. Property in a larger sense is an extension of your ownership of yourself. You own a tract of land, you own it exclusively and you control it.
298

“The rejection of all things statist is inappropriate–which clearly is why I’m not an anarchist.”

Aha, now I see why I’m not finding much common ground with you: I (and most people here) am an anarchist, and think that embrace of a state is embracing aggression.

“Property in a larger sense is an extension of your ownership of yourself.”

Which is, AnCaps will say, incompatible with the state, since the concept of the state assumes that the state owns everything within its domain even if it offers the illusion of private ownership by doling out control when it suits it.

“You own a tract of land, you own it exclusively and you control it.”

If you’ve read this thread, you’ll find people who define property differently. To impose your definition of property on them is another form of aggression.

299

(how the hell does the quote function work on this forum? I highlight text, hit ‘quote’ and nothing happens. And there don’t seem to be any quote controls in the box down here >:expressionless: )

Alternatives Considered wrote: Anenome, can you explain what you mean by “society”?

  • I mean something like a community of individuals. Could be a city large or small, nation or family. Generally there’d be some geographic separation between societies.

I’ve been trying to work on a political system that didn’t require geographic separation to allow for different laws to exist, but it’s something of a nightmare for enforcement. Either you’d have to split criminal and civil law and put everyone under the same criminal jurisdiction and then let people pair up in civil law societies, or you need geographic separation.

Suppose you had a marketplace for laws, and different police departments enforcing different laws in the same region. What happens when Police A show up at Joe’s door and Police B come to defend Joe. It’s not really realistic unfortunately. The only solution is minimal criminal law via very limited government.

But, explain to me why you think geographic separation is a problem there?

I am not interested in proving what is “right”, because in the end, it doesn’t matter. My waving a philosophy book in the face of someone who is about to shoot me is not going to change their mind, and ultimately, what I need to live in the kind of society that I want to live in is some sort of “buy in” from the majority of the people that I’m going to interact with. That, to me, is a market issue, an issue of “sales”, not of being right.

You might think so, but societies are ultimately led by philosophies, so much so that they refuse to change them even when drawing out to the ultimate conclusion of that philosophy. If you ask me, the real problem in politics today is that the defenders of capitalism have not taken a philosophic, principled approach, and thus fall prey to philosophers on the other side, and cannot effectively refute the statists and collectivists. I don’t know of any historical examples of a society “buying in” to another way of life, EXCEPT for Japan during the Meiji period. However, Japan has a centuries long tradition of cultural importation from China and thus was ready in multudinous ways to simply switch importation targets to the West that have no parallels in other cultures.

Beyond that, while you’re pushing this market based adoption approach, your philosophic opponents are effectively innoculating the entire world against your approach through the spread of cultural relativism. However, communalism’s consequences after 150 years have become pretty blatant, such that even communist China has ceded the effectiveness of markets. India is growing, and Africa’s on its way as well.

The bigger danger is that the West itself seems ready to give up on capitalism. And that’s because we don’t have a good philosophic, idealist philosophy behind it that the young can grasp. They latch onto the supposed fairness of socialism without realizing they’ve been had philosophically.

Perhaps the semantic conundrum between us lies in this statement of yours: “Competition between societies is more interesting to me than competition in a single marketplace.” I don’t really understand: in an anarchic-world, societies do compete, in the marketplace of societies.

I wrote that because you seemed to be arguing ways to change minds within a society. In my opinion that’s not going to be possible in the short term. What would be possible is creating a new society founded upon the principles of limited government, private property, and free trade and building from there. Most people haven’t been thinking that way because–where would you go? But, increasingly, I think we can build a floating nation on the water. There’s a lot more space in the ocean than all the continents. And we finally have the tools to allow parcels of water to be owned (GPS).

One parting shot: your idea of success forcing other to adopt a way of life that ‘works’ takes decades. It requires them to fail and them another society to succeed to such a degree that they change. A principled approach, otoh, engages Man’s reason, allows them to check their thought process and premises, and adopt willingly a way of life from the root from which everything else will follow. If you combine the two, a working, prosperous society AND a philosophically principled and consistent culture, the result would be magical.

And I think the primary thing we need is the equivalent of a constitutional provision that creates a separation of economy and government, and bans income tax–much in the same way that 200 years ago we separated church and state. Such a society would rapidly advance in ways we’ve never dreamed and lead the way into the future.

300

Alternatives Considered: Aha, now I see why I’m not finding much common ground with you: I (and most people here) am an anarchist, and think that embrace of a state is embracing aggression.

But, are you some kind of pacifist? The state’s use of force is often appropriate–specifically to prevent your rights from being violated. Without some legal institution imbued with the right of coercion on a legal basis, the only alternative is mob competition at the point of a gun. If you reject all forms of state coercion, even that in response to the initiation of aggression, then surely in your own life, to be consistent, you would have to reject the responsive use of coercion against, say, someone trying to kill you. Because it’s the same principle. Thus, the pacifism question.

If you simply make a distinction between the initiation of coercion, and coercion used to prevent the initiation of coercion, seems to me your entire reason for being an anarchist melts away. And, btw, there is no other effective response to physical coercion than the use of physical coercion to stop it. Without a legal body to stamp down the initiation of coercion, you’re at the mercy of the strong and armed.

Which is, AnCaps will say, incompatible with the state, since the concept of the state assumes that the state owns everything within its domain even if it offers the illusion of private ownership by doling out control when it suits it.

Not true in the slightest. I’d be interested how you derive the idea that the state must act as if it controlled everything. It’s a rather european way of looking at the State. Certainly, that attitude does exist in some states, but it’s perfectly possible to wall off entire sections of the society from any state intervention at all. We must make a distinction between society-wide jurisdiction and outright ownership. Only in a socialist/communist society could the state be said to own/control everything.

If I and everything I possessed were owned by the state, I would require its permission to do anything. I do not. I am free in most respects.

If you’ve read this thread, you’ll find people who define property differently. To impose your definition of property on them is another form of aggression.

Again, they may have another definition of property, but that’s the definition that reality forces upon us. If you own land the same way you own your arm, then you have exclusive control over it. It’s a philosophic extension of the principle of self-ownership. There are other kinds of ownership but they share many traits.

If one is said to own something but cannot control it, it’s clear they don’t own it, for they don’t have the freedom to dispose of it as they like. The statists like to say property is owned by everyone, but in practice who actually ends up controlling it? The state. Thus, the state really owns everything in deeply statist societies.