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Comment by Sniffnoy | Hacker News Reader

> Interesting, I'd disagree though. Say you live in a fascist society or a feudalist society, you get absolutely no say.

These are hardly the only alternatives. In case you haven't noticed, the other people here aren't implicitly contrasting democracy with e.g. monarchy; they're implicitly contrasting it with anarchy (probably anarcho-capitalism).

Again, there's lots of possibilities out there. Personally I like the idea of futarchy, though it's untried. But that's not the point; the point is, there's a lot of degrees of freeom here.

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Anarchy (and some of its branches) value very much the values of democracy, with the added benefits of stressing the search of compromise.

In my opinion, anarcho-capitalism is merely feudalism, with some brainwashing for people to accept their fate. There's a reason some prominent anar-capitalists want to be differenciated from anarchists.

>In my opinion, anarcho-capitalism is merely feudalism, with some brainwashing for people to accept their fate. There's a reason some prominent anar-capitalists want to be differenciated from anarchists.

There's also a reason all anarchists want to be differentiated from ancaps ;)

Isn't anarchocapitalism a contradiction in terms? Capitalism is perhaps the most statist of all forms of society. It's development coincided with the birth of the nation state. Markets have been a part of human societies since the birth of agriculturalism, but it was the state that created the large scale market systems required for capitalism to flourish. Historically markets were established in conquered areas to support standing armies. The same story for currency, which is introduced alongside the market as a means of tax payment levied upon the population by the conqueror; the army comes with the currency and the population has to acquire it through market transactions with them. Schooling is another big one, the Karolingian expansion first instated it in Europe and around the time of the industrial revolution there was a clear need of schooling the peasantry into the new market driven systems, unifying disparate dialects, teaching basic arithmetics, making sure they can read instructions and do basic record keeping. It's around that time you see the establishment of new public institutions such as prisons and police for enforcing private property law, expansion of courts for arbitrage, the list goes on. Almost all of the foundations of capitalism were created by state power and coercion.

You're reasoning based on a name. Names are not necessarily accurate descriptions. From what I've read of theirs, it doesn't seem that anarcho-capitalism would support capitalism in the sense you describe.

Remember, "capitalism" is an overloaded term. Sometimes it means what you describe, and sometimes it means the free market. Make sure you know what sense it's being used in in a given context, or you can't have a meaningful discussion! In the case of anarcho-capitalism, it refers to the free market. (But even though that works out in this case, you really should be wary of reasoning based on names.)

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