Don’t forget “agorism.”
@Cal, I agree anarchism is a poor term to describe my political beliefs, because well, I am not an anarchist. I don’t care if other people want to have a government rule over them. That is their choice. What I want is for the governments of the world to recognize my sovereignty and leave me alone. Stop stealing my money and stop telling me how I should live my life. Now, if governments allow people to opt out, that may very well result in anarchy. But that does not mean I am an anarchist.
As to your comments, “And, I would argue that serious libertarians need to do less talking about how ‘taxes are theft’ or how evil governments are. It’s a very negative framework.” So what? Telling someone they have cancer is negative too, but they still should know the truth.
People here don’t refer to themselves as Anarcho-Capitalists in dealing with others? 
It’s a good one, because while I still sometimes endure accusations of being a “collectivist” at first, it’s far easier to correct people on the terminology, and skip straight to the substance. It’s also just similar enough phonetically(Anarcho-Capitalist) that while people can think about it in terms of anarchy, I’m also able to get them to accept the major differences with the two.
I think we should just stick to “libertarian,” since it’s already a known term that conveys a positive message (“for liberty”), as opposed to some of our other options, like “abolitionist,” which conveys a negative meaning (“abolish the state”) or “voluntarist,” which is an unknown term.
There are formal and informal power relations in an anarchist society. Property owners (which is everyone) have absolute power over their own property.
Are you making this statement based on your observation of a fully anarchistic society, or are you making this based on a fictional society designed by your own judgments of value?
Have you ever read Human Action? Praxeological legal philosophy uses the same methodology as Mises’ economics. There’s no constants to be isolated so we use Gedankenexperiment, or in Mises’ terminology “imaginary constructions”. The science of human law is wertfrei, so when opponents become fixated on “personal, subjective value judgements” it speaks to their complete ignorance on the subject.
How about “plutocratism?” Advocating only for private market organizations to the exclusion of any “collective,” democratic or egaitarian organizations is basically advocating rule by the wealthy anyways, why not at least be open about it?
@ Benjamin
Ah, yes! Advocating against eminent domain so that the poor, single mother of two in a ghetto doesn’t lose her house to some politically-connected real estate developer is actually advocating in favor of the wealthy.
Benjamin doesn’t understand why “the consumer is king”. Surprise, surprise.
@ Benjamin
Ah, yes! Advocating against eminent domain so that the poor, single mother of two in a ghetto doesn’t lose her house to some politically-connected real estate developer is actually advocating in favor of the wealthy.
The same people who will bring up the “poor kids starving in the ghetto”, seem to, without fail, support drug prohibition which of course leads to gang violence and ghettoization.
Well to start off, you don’t understand Misean praxeology, which is based off of the Kantian synthetic a priori. In the Kantian framework, the reason that synthetic a priori judgments can provide content about reality is that they relate to subjects that cannot be thought any other way without contradition. Unlike the analytic a priori judgment that, in the Kantian framework, can yield only tautological statements, as Kant says on B11, thought through idenity that add no content to a judgment about the world, the synthetic a priori judgment does add more content to a judgment. Much of the Critique of Pure Reason is dedicated to the study of how synthetic a priori judgments are possible, and Mises’ a priori view of economics was distinctly Kantian thus Kant’s own views must be kept in mind when discussing Mises.
The only reason how economics can be understood as being a synthetic a priori judgment is if and only if there is no other logically coherent way of thinking about human action. While in pure economic exchange this elucidation of epistemology may very well be sound (I shall pass no judgment here since it doesn’t really matter), it is absolutely not sound in exploring such a question as whether an anarchistic society will respect property rights. There is simply no logical necessity here, rather it is possible that all that would happen in an anarchist society all that would happen is warlords fighting over who can loot who just as it is possible that a Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist order emerges. To determine which one is correct would take an a posteriori judgment since, as I’ve said before, there is simply no logical necessity that the order emerges which ever way. As a result, “praxeological legal philosophy” is either a contentless statement, or it is a contradiction since it depends on a posterori judgments to provide it with knowledge about human society for it to make judgments.
Furthermore, as Hayek has so wisely pointed out, it is simply impossible to centralize the amount of knowledge necessary to make a judgment about society will emerge. Ergo, to make a judgment like: “private property will be respected in an anarchistic society” is simply hubristic, and overestimates the realm of human reason and by doing that corrupts its use.
Yeah, the single ghetto mother should just hire private security guards to protect her stuff, right?
@ Benjamin
Or rely on the police? Yeah, because people in the ghetto love the police.
What I’ve seen happen, is that in ghettos, such as areas in Oakland, California, most people don’t trust the police and many people have begun to set up their own PDAs to protect their neighbors.
And by those PDAs, you mean gangs like the cribs and the bloods, which have only served to worsen the violence in those areas.
"When you’re dealing with language it is.
Language is entirely intersubjective and entirely dynamic. If you want to communicate and spread ideas, you must recognize that and strategize accordingly."
This debate has been up so many times and it is so pointless.
People that can’t be bothered to stay around long enough to figure out what you actually mean with anarchy will never bother listen to your message about voluntary solutions to social problems and the error of using violence anyhow. We aren’t populists advocating a quick fix so it doesn’t matter what we call us, our audience will be interested enough in the ideas that it doesn’t matter. As far as appealing to the crowd goes we are doomed to do that with words. The label isn’t the problem the complexity of the message and relative comfort and supply of other distractions in our relativly wealthy society is the reason people don’t listen.
@ laminustacitus
No. By those PDAs, I mean entrepreneurs who want to make money in their communities by providing a service at a profit. I’m not talking about the politically connected gangs.
So yeah, gang-bangers are now officially entrepreneurial heroes providing their community with a demanded service.
Lam: “So yeah, gang-bangers are now officially entrepreneurial heroes providing their community with a demanded service.”
That’s not what I said, but if that is what you believe, mmmk.
Alas, it is what you implied when celebrating the PDAs of the ghettos.
@Lam,
That’s not what I implied. Besides, I already clarified. .. Hey, that rhymed. Rejoice!