Please learn some economics. Capitalism is possible to disparities in wealth.
The state relies on consent. People love noble lies like leftists love emotional narratives.
Capitalism is possible to disparities in wealth.
It could be. But the concept of the rule of law (dating back at least to Hammurabi) was only possible w massive power disparities (wealth = power). Capitalism may or may not have a causal relationship w statism. But property sure does; or more specifically, abundance of said property. Now, if you argue capitalism’s basis in property protection it’s prime basis (as I’m sure you do), I don’t see how you can make the jump to anarchist capitalism outside of ahistorical theory.
IOW; the theory is solid. Sure, market government… okay. I tend to agree with Chomsky that such a society would be a nightmare, economically (not necessarily socially). But, hey… I can’t say that it would be a nightmare. Maybe it works out better than anything we’ve had before.
But property in history has been the source of statism. Most of the earliest laws deal w economic issues; even the 10moral laws of judaism contain one about not stealing, and another about not coveting. The modern democratic state was designed as a protection of the merchant and business classes, who had been growing in power due to various circumstances against the landed aristocracy and the poor unbridled masses.
[This is why the labor movement, imo, was so progressive. Those without began to cooperate in unison, giving them much greater economic power. Once cannot argue the standard of living is far higher today than it was in 1900, or even 1920 ]
The state relies on consent…
…of those with the power to exercise control. Or are you saying slaves consented to their position?
Epicurus, law and the state are not the same thing. The state has only become the major source of law in the past century or two.
law and rule of law are not the same thing either. The rule of law is a soveirgnty thing. It is synonymous with statism.
You are entirely mistaken. The rule of law implies nothing about the state. Have you read anything about customary law, English common law or Roman law (before Justinian)? I suggest the works by Bruno Leoni and Bruce L. Benson freely available in the mises.org literature section. You will find the state need not have anything to do with the ‘rule of law’.
Why not?
You do understand that value is subjective and nothing is inherently valueable, correct?
This sums up my problem with egalitarianism. There can’t be different kinds of equality. Two (or more) entities are either equal or not; A or NOT A. When the “left-libs” say “No, we do not value absolute equality,” they necessarily mean that they value inequality to some extent. Anything that is not absolute equality is by definition, inequality. There can be varying degrees of inequality, not of equality. There is only one 2=2, but we can find infinite things that don’t equal 2, some closer to 2 than other.
I understand that maybe equality is just shorthand for “closer to equal than unequal,” but then left-libs have the curious problem of explaining why they really value a particular level of inequality. The logical positions are either “I value absolute equality but recognize that it is impossible” or “I don’t value equality.”
“Correction; Statism is only due to massive disparities in wealth.”
what’s your reasoning for that conclusion.I’m willing to listen.
The idea for statism I would say just exists naturally within the hearts of man. As does the idea of libertarianism People tend to both; 1) want to protect themselves and 2) think themselves right first. The problem is this is simply not able to express itself in an authoritarian way when wealth (IOW power, wealth being the most effective form of power) is largely inequalized.
How could one tax you w/o the military power to threaten you? And how does one have a strong military w/o the means to pay for it?
"How could one tax you w/o the military power to threaten you? "
By having you believe that the tax is legitimate. If all tax-payers in the USA refused to pay tax, there is no way that the government would be able to carry out its demands.
As a very brief illustration, 1/3 of the 1860 USA refused the legitimacy of that state and it took half a decade for the other 2/3 to get them to accept their legitimacy again. If all the taxpayers had revolted, what could the government have done?
Left-Rothbardians sound to me like socially “progressive” agorists.
Well, I consider myself a left-libertarian and a left-Rothbardian. By left-libertarian I have in mind a few (related) ideas:
That the primary impact of government intervention has been, and must always be, to secure privilege for a favored class (i.e. “the rich”) and that any ‘welfare state’ is there to prevent riots and co-opt the dissidents
That a free market would tend towards more equality and less concentration than we have now, and smaller firms in general
That businesses face two constraints on size: economies of scale push them to grow larger, and calculation problems restrict their size. Subsidies and corporate welfare allow a business to exceed the size that would result on the market, making labor worse off and securing a position against competition.
That, in addition to honoring the NAP, my ideal society would also not have racism and sexism. For instance, a ‘traditionalist’ society with segregated soda fountains would not appeal to me, and neither would one where women are considered valuable insofar as they get married and pump out babies. Because of the lack of choices, I couldn’t call such a place a free society.
That government is the primary source of the loss of freedom, but not the only one, and that the real issue is freedom, not government.
By left-Rothbardian, I mean that I accept the economics of MES in addition to being a left-libertarian. I also mean by this that I believe that libertarianism is properly a “leftist” philosophy (Bastiat saw on the left) and that the true enemy of libertarianism is conservatism, not socialism (which Rothbard called a confused middle-of-the-road position.) I also mean that I would find a well-intentioned socialist commonwealth safer and more conducive to freedom than a conservative one - but neither is a good idea. Finally, as a strategic point, I mean that we’re also more likely to find converts on the left than the right, and that Chomsky, Gravel, Zinn, and company are more likely allies than the Tea Party.
Maybe it’s just my background, but it seems to me that a lot of things in this post can be dealt with by reference to mathematics. For instance, you say there can only be one kind of equality, but in math, we’re used to working with a variety of equivalence relations, and we understand things to be equals with reference to the task at hand. For a simple example, consider modular arithmetic, with varying values of n. Stepping outside of math, we consider 4 quarters to be identical in some senses with a dollar bill (equally worthless, equally low and decreasing purchasing power) but clearly there is a sense of equals in which they are not equal. Similarly, a lemon and a lime are equally servicable if you need acid. An apple and a rock are equally servicable as a doorstop.
For another instance, you suggest that maybe equality means “closer to equal than unequal.” A suggestion on a similar line would be “as close to equal as possible” which invokes, for me anyway, the idea of a limit - thus refuting your claim that left-libs actually value “a particular level of inequality.”
Explanatory value subjectivism doesn’t exclude the possibility of objective (ethical) values.
It could be that there is no such thing, but explanatory value subjectivism itself isn’t an argument, as far as I see.