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Comment by cmhamill | Hacker News Reader

What's funny about your response, to me, is that 'libertarian,' outside of the U.S., and in Europe especially, is generally associated with an anarchist position, and most anarchists are socialists or communists. The associations with the French revolutionaries is strong.

"The first anarchist journal to use the term 'libertarian' was La Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social, published in New York City between 1858 and 1861 by French anarcho-communist Joseph Déjacque." [1]

The U.S. Libertarian Party's use of the word is an intentional effort by free market supporters to express their support of a certain kind of "hands-off" policy without the baggage of the left.

You're also insisting that "libertarianism"—a political philosophy—tells us anything about morality or ethics. The stance your describing above is actually a deontological ethics which takes aggression and coercion as its principal 'bad acts.' That's a much stronger position than what, in my experience, even U.S.-style libertarians tend to espouse.

Your position is also incoherent, to be blunt. You say that "using force to take property from others violates the NAP." You mean to say that a workers' occupation is an act of aggression or force, if I understand correctly. I simply ask you this: if the taking of property via force is a violation of your "NAP," what do you say to the implicit threat of force which establishes the principle of property in the first place? If your answer is that that force is not used, then I ask you whether it is okay for me to follow you around with a gun, as long as I never actually use it. If your answer is that property is a natural right or a self-evident 'thing,' I ask you to please explain why you feel this way.

I don't want to start a political flame war, but these are the issues at the heart of the article's claims. I'd love if you'd be willing to engage.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libertarianism#History

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First, I don't quite understand how you can be socialist and anarchist at the same time.

Second, 'libertarian' means 'anarchist' in the same way 'Republican/conservative' means 'fascist' and 'Democrat/liberal' means 'socialist'. Anarchist/Fascist/Socialist are extremes, and libertarian/conservative/liberal are regions along the spectrum. IMO.

> First, I don't quite understand how you can be socialist and anarchist at the same time.

Simple: anarchism refers to the belief that governments are unnecessary and/or unjustified; socialism refers to the opinion that the means of production ought not to be owned by private individuals or entities.

> Second, 'libertarian' means 'anarchist' in the same way 'Republican/conservative' means 'fascist' and 'Democrat/liberal' means 'socialist'. Anarchist/Fascist/Socialist are extremes, and libertarian/conservative/liberal are regions along the spectrum. IMO.

Depends who you ask! These words all have different meanings across societies and cultures. I don't think these ideologies can be collapsed into points or regions along a spectrum.

Hmm... I had forgotten about that particular definition of socialism- but, if the means of production are not owned by individuals, they must either be commons or government owned. In anarchy there is no government, so the means must be "owned" by all, but how do you maintain such a structure in a government-less society...

Very good question. That's probably one of the largest sources of division between various anarchist schools.

One way to tackle the problem is to separate governance from the state, and say that we want a governance structure accountable to the workers, and populated by workers, but no associated state apparatus—no police, no army, no state lines, etc.

Many forms of anarchism turn into a kind of pastorial agrarianism because of this. It really is hard to come up with a governance structure beyond a certain size that meets the accountability requirements for the kind of society socialism wants, and so many socialist anarchists see the answer as the self-governance of communities small enough to manage some kind of general council.

many socialist anarchists see the answer as the self-governance of communities small enough to manage some kind of general council

The irony is that as best I gather, the founding fathers were shooting for much the same! (Federalism)

(Of course that was states rather than small towns or something, but states were far less populous then- and Rhode Island is still pretty small!)

Some of the founding fathers were, yes. There are real problems with the maintainability of that model, of course.

This is way, somewhat famously, Noam Chomsky considers his anarchism a straightforward extension of the principles of enlightenment political philosophy to industrial society.

There's a layered irony, of course: most of the founding fathers were members of a political and economic elite which openly favored aristocracy and commerce over the 'regular folk.' Not all of them of course. The American Revolution was a strange tenuous cooperation between an economic elite that saw independence as the way out of a mercantile demand on the part of Britain, and a political class which was versed in Enlightenment political philosophy and saw an opportunity for using Locke and Montesquieu as a handbook for a new kind of government.

> what do you say to the implicit threat of force which establishes the principle of property in the first place?

One has a natural right to at least one property: one's own body. A natural right that is routinely violated in most so called 'free' societies; I should add. This notion of property is established (and recognized) without the threat of force, implicit or otherwise.

Now assume the existence of only one person on the entire planet. None of our political philosophies have any effect on the dealings of that one person. If another person is added however, the two have now the possibility of interaction over a limited resource. The two can attempt aggression as a means of securing the resource, or they can attempt to set out a contract. That is, a set of rules that determine how the two deal with scarcity. For example, they can agree that the person who finds something first shall consider it their property.

The two can reach this conclusion in the absence of any force, implicit or otherwise. They can reach this conclusion in the spirit of cooperation, or for entirely selfish reasons: to avoid or at least minimize the stress of conflicts.

The two can indeed introduce the possibility of aggression as a means of enforcing the contract. But if you think closely, you will see that this aggression is not defined as an initiation of force, but rather as a response to it. That is, contract or not, the first person to go against the will of the other is the aggressor. And since there is no political philosophy which prohibits one to defend themselves - libertarianism included - it seems safe to assume that everyone would agree: the return aggression is justified.

So all the contract winds up doing, is codifying the interaction and determining exactly what the two view as aggression. For example, unilateral contract termination is typically viewed as such.

When scaled up to more than two persons, the complexities increase, but the principles remain the same. A contract is a document that governs interaction. This is markedly different from a person who governs interaction in that the contract requires the agreement of all parties involved, whereas a tyrant simply imposes his or her will, unconcerned about the will of others.

Libertarianism is a way of thinking that rejects the initiation of force. It is not a way of thinking that denies the existence of force. Neither does it deny the necessity of force -- but only in response to it.

I've heard the "Libertarians are one step away from anarchists" argument multiple times before, but I've honestly always found it perplexing. At least with regards to my own libertarian views, government is essential. In libertarianism, the government is the objective enforcement of contract laws and the defender of rights. Without the government, you would have anarchy, which is a rule by force by intrinsically dishonest people resulting in the exact opposite of the upholding of contract law and rights.

That is the _opposite_ of libertarian desires for freedom from the desires of others. Why would any libertarian desire this?

I'm going to speculate, as I'm not well versed in the history of libertarianism, but I suspect it grew out of anarchism inasmuch as it was a righteous rejection of government abuse. You see this occurring today with the Occupy movement; the government has failed and rejected its duties, therefore they reject the government. I consider this throwing the baby out with the bath water.

With regards to the NAP and force, the American founding fathers regarding the 2nd Ammendment did not even believe the government should have a monopoly, but instead the whole of the populace should hold its propensity for tyranny in check with its own force so to speak. This is consistent with the libertarian value of the right to defend oneself. Force is therefore permissible whenever necessary to rectify the violation of one's rights (contract law being subsumed by this). As far as whether violating my (property) rights is an initiation of force, according to the NAP[1] it is:

     Specifically, any unsollicited actions of others that physically affect an individual’s property, including that person’s body, no matter if the result of those actions is damaging, beneficiary or neutral to the owner, are considered violent when they are against the owner’s free will and interfere with his right to self-determination, as based on the libertarian principle of self-ownership.

So at the end, the obvious glaring disparity between socialist and libertarians is whether the right to own property is in fact a right. Socialists as you see here (comments), obviously refuse to acknowledge the assumption of this right. Unfortunately, the natural progression of having no right to own property is the socialist value that everyone else has a right to your own mind, sweat, etc... Or in other words, we are all beholden to the desires of others as all that we own, even ourselves, are community property.

This in my mind is the most unimaginable tyranny of all, and thus I see socialism as fundamentally incompatible with libertarianism.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-aggression_principle

> I've heard the "Libertarians are one step away from anarchists" argument multiple times before, but I've honestly always found it perplexing. At least with regards to my own libertarian views, government is essential.

Perhaps I haven't been clear, but I'm pretty sure I'm (mostly) agreeing with you.

U.S. Libertarianism is incompatible with most forms of anarchism espoused by those who use the term.

The term "libertarian," however, has a much longer history in Europe, associated with the spiritual heirs of the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, and so forth. Which is, to me, a fascinating transition in the commonly-accepted meaning of the word.

Also, I would note that:

> Without the government, you would have anarchy, which is a rule by force by intrinsically dishonest people resulting in the exact opposite of the upholding of contract law and rights.

is your editorializing. No self-described anarchist would accept that definition, and neither would most political scientists.

If you mean, on the other hand, that any form of anarchy as espoused by those who self-identify as such would lead to the kind of scenario you describe, then there's a whole other issue.

I was operating under the notion that we were discussing political philosophies as espoused by those who advocate them, not the plausibility of those philosophies as they might be plausibly implemented in the world.

The fact that the non-aggression principle cannot stand without an underlying philosophy is precisely why Ayn Rand, who originated that principle, rejected the U.S. libertarians' attempts to promulgate that principle in a way that was divorced from her philosophy.

Libertarianism is basically anarchism + property rights + government that enforces freedom.

Calling the ethics as described above "deontological" is risky and ill-advised because that term is commonly used to describe Kantianism and a use of the categorical imperative[1]. These two (if taken seriously) rule out a marketplace because participants treat each other solely as a means to an end. Deontology, as it is commonly referred to, and the NAP are incompatible systems of ethics.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics#Kantianism

My understanding was that 'deontological' simply means (indeed, almost literally means) having been derived from rules. Deont being the Greek to refer to duty or rule.

Kantianism is probably the most famous from of all the deontological ethical systems. But structurally the NAP and the categorical imperative serve the same purposes in Kantianism and nirvana's libertarianism, respectively: they provide the principle by which all other actions are held to account.

And that principle differs irreconcilably in NAP and Kantianism, so using "deontology" here is not helpful.

Except that Kantianism is by no means the only form of deontology, and in fact has nothing to do with any of this.

I do _not_ mean deontological in a derogatory sense. I mean it descriptively in contrast to consequentialism.

Edit: To quote your own source, "The non-aggression principle, also known as the non-aggression axiom and zero aggression principle, is an ethical stance which states that any initiation of force is illicit and contrary to natural law. It is the basic moral axiom of deontological libertarianism, most upheld by philosophers such as Robert Nozick and Murray Rothbard.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics#Non-aggre...

> most anarchists are socialists or communists

How would this work? How would they enforce a 'no-ownership' or 'communal-ownership' principle without a state to prevent people from claiming and defending private property?

I never said the position was coherent or viable. ;)

That said, I think there are various answers.

One is to have a militia to enforce those kinds of principles. Anarchists who are also pacifists naturally reject this option.

Another option is to claim that in a society where everyone's needs were met, there'd be no desire by anyone towards private property, and that the desire for private property is a historically conditioned product of capitalism, and feudalism before that.

Another argument is that it wouldn't much matter as long as the default state was no private property. John T. Private can take his guns and go live in the woods if he wants to, what is essential is that the majority of property is public and therefore private property does not give a specific class control over the output of others' labor.

Another position, and this was Proudhon's, is that there is a distinction between personal property and private property. Proudhon would actually say that a family's household is an empowering, important kind of property which must be protected and preserved. Ownership of capital, however, Proudhon objected to, because it allowed, in his view, for those who owned the factories, machinery, mills, and plantations to present those who had no stake in the means of production to either work for one of them or to fend for themselves. As industrial society developed, fending for yourself because less and less plausible, and eventually the choice was between selling the output of your labor for (a socialist would say) less than its cost, or dying, basically.

Calling that choice barbaric is the essence of the social-anarchist critique of capitalism.

> One is to have a militia to enforce those kinds of principles.

How is that not a government?

> Another option is to claim that in a society where everyone's needs were met, there'd be no desire by anyone towards private property, and that the desire for private property is a historically conditioned product of capitalism, and feudalism before that.

I'd like a society that can plausibly exist in the world as it is now, thanks.

> Another argument is that it wouldn't much matter as long as the default state was no private property.

This would work on a small scale in the presence of massive social pressure to conform. All anarchy seems to be predicated on the existence of massive peer pressure to conform to their social norms, and we all know where not being able to question peer pressure leads.

> Proudhon would actually say that a family's household is an empowering, important kind of property which must be protected and preserved. Ownership of capital, however, Proudhon objected to, because it allowed, in his view, for those who owned the factories, machinery, mills, and plantations to present those who had no stake in the means of production to either work for one of them or to fend for themselves.

This is incoherent because it tries to force a distinction where none exists. The very existence of cottage industries and family farms puts the lie to the concept.

In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.

> How is that not a government?

You could call it that. But most anarchists are not opposed to the existence of structures of government, but rather the existence of the nation-state.

> I'd like a society that can plausibly exist in the world as it is now, thanks.

Okay, now you're being much more specific.

> This would work on a small scale in the presence of massive social pressure to conform. All anarchy seems to be predicated on the existence of massive peer pressure to conform to their social norms, and we all know where not being able to question peer pressure leads.

I'm not sure; where does it lead? ;) But really, we already have massive social pressure to conform, that's how societies work. Anarchism doesn't get rid of that. Anarchism isn't utopianism, or at least not only utopianism.

> This is incoherent because it tries to force a distinction where none exists. The very existence of cottage industries and family farms puts the lie to the concept.

What do you mean? Distinctions never exist a priori, they're always conceptual tools for the sake of delimiting between situations.

> In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.

Not quite; according to most anarchists you're still kosher, unless the renumeration you give that field hand is worth significantly less than the surplus value you obtained via his cooperation. Moreover, most anarchists object to an entire society being based on that model, not simply the existence of it.

Again, I'm not saying these are all 100% coherent or viable political options, I'm just trying to articulate my understanding of an anarchist position.

> unless the renumeration you give that field hand is worth significantly less than the surplus value you obtained via his cooperation.

So... how do we figure that? Seriously: How do we do the math in every possible case to ensure I'm not exploiting the person who freely agreed to work for me?

> Moreover, most anarchists object to an entire society being based on that model, not simply the existence of it.

Most anarchists need to study the Sorites paradox.

> But most anarchists are not opposed to the existence of structures of government, but rather the existence of the nation-state.

This means there still would be a hierarchy based on the fact that, one, a government with no ability to make binding resolutions is pointless; two, unless some group has the ability to veto others the body gets mired in endless debate due to bikeshedding; three, despite the previous point, most people don't want to govern nearly as much as they want to argue over the trivial things they feel entitled to have an opinion on, so trying to even things out by putting everyone into government would require a draft backed by, you guessed it, the threat of force.

> Again, I'm not saying these are all 100% coherent or viable political options, I'm just trying to articulate my understanding of an anarchist position.

I understand this. I wonder what someone who actually believed in this would be saying.

"So... how do we figure that? Seriously: How do we do the math in every possible case to ensure I'm not exploiting the person who freely agreed to work for me?"

By "freely agreed", do you mean it in the restricted sense that the worker was not physically coerced to work?

> By "freely agreed", do you mean it in the restricted sense that the worker was not physically coerced to work?

Only as a first step; it has to be more complex than that, which is one reason unions exist (in the ideal world with ideal unions that accurately represent the needs of the people they represent).

> In other words: My family farm is empowering until I hire on my first field hand to help bring in a big harvest, at which point I become an evil capitalist oppressor.

How does a homestead become owned? Many accounts for such a transition tend toward some labor-mixing theory. But then the field owner invites someone else to mix their labor with the field and that mechanism is now denied to the new person. Why does an appeal to labor-mixing confer ownership in one instance but not any part of it in the other?

> Why does an appeal to labor-mixing confer ownership in one instance but not any part of it in the other?

You can't say that in general: I could hire on the hand for partial ownership in the farm. However, the actual answer is that the hand freely agreed to the deal and does not want partial ownership of a family farm.

I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists. I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement.

Libertarians are often anarchists because they believe the state cannot exist without violating the NAP. The state (By definition as an entity with a monopoly on the use of force in a geography) thus uses violence to conquer a land and takes for itself rights that naturally belong to the people.

>You mean to say that a workers' occupation is an act of aggression or force,

I don't see how this follows from anything I said. I can't connect it so, I can't respond.

>You're also insisting that "libertarianism"—a political philosophy—tells us anything about morality or ethics. That's a much stronger position than what, in my experience, even U.S.-style libertarians tend to espouse.

I'm not insisting anything. I'm giving you the definition. I'm a Libertarian, and that is what we believe. This is consistent across the US, and in my experience, among libertarians across the world. This is consistent with the founders of the Libertarian party in the 1970s, Rothbard and Nolan, and with the philosophical groundwork and economics that they took inspiration from.

FWIW, wikipedia is a crowd sourced entity. It is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased when it comes to political topics that leftists have a strong opinion about.

> I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists. I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement.

You'll be glad to know, then, that Proudhon, the first to self-describe as an anarchist, is also perhaps most famous for coining the phrase "property is theft". It's hard to imagine how socialists could be co-opting anarchism, given that both ideologies were born in the same intellectual climate and have, as a matter of historical fact, been associated time and time again.

You said: "The workers taking over a company and kicking the owners and managers out to run it as a 'workers collective': Immoral. Using force to take property from others violates the NAP." Am I wrong in taking this to mean that you consider a workers' occupation an act of force?

> I'm not insisting anything. I'm giving you the definition. I'm a Libertarian, and that is what we believe.

I cannot apprehend the confusion of ideas which lead you to believe that defining a term, enumerating your own beliefs, and speaking for an entire political movement, are one and the same.

> FWIW, wikipedia is a crowd sourced entity. It is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased when it comes to political topics that leftists have a strong opinion about.

Do you object to my using of Wikipedia to simply note the existence of a leftist journal calling itself "The Libertarian" over a hundred years prior to the founding of the U.S. Libertarian Party? If so, feel free to read the French yourself:

http://joseph.dejacque.free.fr/libertaire/libertaire.htm

No engagement with my second-to-last paragraph, I see. I'm sorry to find that you're no more serious about your politics that all the other libertarians I've encountered. I had hoped you'd be willing to engage with the content of my argument instead of its dressings. I am disappointed to find that you are not.

Edit: spelling.

You're arguing on semantics. Anarchy has been split up into sub groups specifically because it can be taken to mean multiple things. Now there are Anarcho-capitalists (American Libertarians), Anarcho-socialists, Anarcho-syndicalism, etc.

Of course; virtually all arguments are semantics. I was simply looking for clarification into nirvana's intended meaning. That that involved getting into the semantics of anarchism/socialism/libertarianism/what-have-you is the nature of this kind of discussion.

If I was concerned with finding the 'right' answer, or pushing my own political ideology (which happens not to be any of those currently under discussion), then I could see why we'd need to have a discussion about what 'anarchism' with or without adjectives really is.

I was, however, only concerned with the history of these ideologies (as a former student of precisely this topic). I had hoped to probe into that by bringing up the diverging uses of the category libertarian in the broader history of European politics and the divergence of U.S. political categories from those.

Certainly never meant to upset anyone.

You are technically correct, which Futurama calls 'the best kind of correct', but it isn't really.

When you're arguing about what kind of thing a thing is, you can call that a semantic argument, but if you're trying to characterize something that exists in practice, this is different from fighting over dictionary definitions.

(Interestingly, I got into the contrapositive of this argument on HN the other day: I tried to use a math term to mean something closely related to the standard definition, and people jumped on me for misusing it.)

"I'm sorry to find that you're no more serious about your politics that all the other libertarians I've encountered. I had hoped you'd be willing to engage with the content of my argument instead of its dressings. I am disappointed to find that you are not."

The entirety of both of your responses consists of either inaccurate characterizations of what I've said, of history, or of me. You have, on more than one occasion made derogatory characterizations of me, and you close with the above ad hominem. This is a form of anti-intellectualism which I will not indulge further. I shouldn't have given you the benefit of the doubt, but unlike you, I am generous that way.

I do not believe "Ad Hominem" means what you seem to think it means. Furthermore I don't think anyone has ever won an argument by calling out the names of random logical fallacies. The purpose of them is you call them out, in your own head, to yourself. And then you use that information to explicitly examine and question the argument at hand. Oftentimes it is not necessary to point out any fallacy at all if the overall conclusion of the argument does not depend on the truth value of the fallacious statement- So the best strategy in argument then, is to first identify what that overall conclusion is, identify the premises that the conclusion depends on, discarding any premises that are irrelevant, and address those explicitly. To call out things like "strawman!" and "ad hominem" is to be pointlessly distracted, or, in a less charitable reading, a strategy intended to distract the reader, so you can avoid having to do all that hard work of addressing the person's actual argument. I believe in this case it is the latter, but I may give you the benefit of the doubt if you can come back and address the content of the argument instead of throwing a fit and refusing to negotiate with intellectual terrorists, as you have.

I'm genuinely sorry that you feel that way.

Those are not my feelings, they are the objective fact of reality. I'm sorry I wasted time giving you the benefit of the doubt when your only intention was to engage in personal attacks.

If you were "genuinely sorry" for your actions, you would apologize for them.

If you want to raise the level of discourse on the internet is it your obligation to object to people's core statements, rather than ancillary fallacies that might surround them.

Did you ever answer this from cmhammil?

    I simply ask you this: if the taking of property via force is a violation of your "NAP," what do you say to the implicit threat of force which establishes the principle of property in the first place?

If I make a chair, and I claim it as mine, where's the force?

Nowhere. But that's not property, right? I mean, that's a man claiming he owns a chair.

Now let's say I steal your chair. This is the moment in our narrative where we get to see whether you and I live in a society that adheres to the property principle.

If I steal your chair, and everyone gets sort of angry with me, and I say shove off and sit on my new chair, then we live in a society where the property principle is at most weakly enforced.

Let's say I steal your chair and get arrested. That implies that there are police, who are funded by some kind of entity which has taken it upon itself to enforce property rights. Which means that the means by which property becomes a real social fact is force enacted by, say, the state, against those who choose to disregard the principle.

Thus in a society where the property principle is taken for granted, that principle is in itself upheld by the implicit threat of force.

I could just as easily say that theft occurs via the threat of force, explicit or implicit: I don't resist your theft because, usually, I know or strongly suspect you have a firearm, or a knife, or a greater willingness to use your muscle mass to rearrange my organs.

So, if I resist your theft, am I asserting property rights or am I exercising my right to self-defense?

I'd personally be inclined to say that what you're doing when you resist my threat is contingent upon what kind of social arrangement we find ourself in.

In a Western-style parliamentary republic, your action will probably be interpreted as asserting property rights. If my intentions were obviously physically harmful, then we can throw in the self-defense, too.

But let's change the chair to something more consequential—a small crate of canned food. Let's say that you and I both know that you are not lacking for resources or food, and that I am homeless. And let's say that I steal this crate.

According to the interpretation of the NAP which takes property rights as a fundamental and does not admit of property already being an act of aggression in the first place, I'm the criminal, and you'll be in the right (maybe an asshole, but in the right) to resist my theft.

But assuming all the above, is it any more of an aggression to take your food (assuming I'm not off to stab you or whatnot) than for you to benefit from a societal interpretation of rights that threatens me with retaliation if I attempt to feed myself?

Perhaps it is easier to explore the limits of individual ownership when they are taken to the extreme, rather than to a minimum asshole status example.

Consider that an entrepreneur could obtain ownership of an entire nation purely through voluntary contracts that mutually benefited the parties involved. This differs from a despot only in justification of ownership being based in rights rhetoric rather than the divine. If the new king decides to shutdown all of the factories and farms so he can have more hunting land, what are the counterparties supposed to do? Lay down their plows and quietly consent to death?

At the point where individual ownership creates a power structure over other citizens' ability to use their labor to reproduce society's needs, that ownership has obligations of higher moral standing than the individual owner's whims. I tend to think preventing people from working to help themselves is even more abhorrent than merely hording resources, so better highlights the limits of ownership. Which power structures we consent to in our economic ecosystem and which individuals we offer to run them should always be up for renegotiation.

If I take the chair from you, you'll force me to give it back (or rather the police will, on your behalf).

...which sounds reasonable enough to non-anarchists. But consider something closer to our hearts:

If I design an algorithm and patent it as mine, where's the force?

> If I design an algorithm and patent it as mine, where's the force?

Ultimately, in the legal system implementing patent laws. However, as you well know, patents and chairs aren't the same kind of property, in that chairs are a rivalrous good and patents are not.

Quite frankly, I don't see too much to take offence at in cmhamill's words.

It really doesn't appear to me that there was an intention to attack you personally, although it was perhaps blunt in places.

You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. Bakunin was in the first international with Marx, Russian anarchists participated in the 1917 revolutions, etc etc. Your idea that socialists are trying to "co-opt" anarchism is probably due to a misunderstanding of what socialism is both historically and currently. Socialists and anarchists had a similar goal, which was to create a society free from coercion, whether by force or by need. While socialism failed at this rather spectacularly in practice, the authoritarian states of Mao and Stalin were never the end goal of socialists.

Also, your offhand dismissal of a quite well cited wikipedia article was rather classless tbqh. We know wikipedia is crowd sourced and vulnerable to bias, but to ignore cited factual statements because of that just leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions of both anarchism and socialism.

"You're either being extraordinarily disingenuous or ignorant if you're trying to claim that socialism and anarchism haven't historically been aligned with each other. "

I find it amazing that you're using a strawman- something I've never said, and don't believe-- as an excuse to call me names.

Anarchism is incompatible with socialism and communism. That is what I pointed out. You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government, and if you have a central government, you have no anarchism.

"is probably due to a misunderstanding of "

You're projecting on me....

" was rather classless"

... and characterizing me based on YOUR characterization: "offhand dismissal " and then you outright lie: "to ignore cited factual statements" (two lies by my count there) is used as an excuse to rationalize more ad hominem: " leads me to believe you don't want to see anything that doesn't confirm your conceptions"

Why is it, so often, people refuse to argue to the points and instead insist on arguing to the person?

I made my points in my original comment. All of these references to history of socialism are completely irrelevant to my point, I wasn't even talking about socialism, I was talking about libertarianism.

You two are bringing it up as an opportunity to manufacture rationalizations to engage in ad hominam, nothing more.

You can't enslave people and make them act against their nature without a central government

Uh, of course you can. Slave owners of yore relied on paid guards and bounty hunters to keep their slaves. Sure, they were legally protected by the state, but they didn't need its actual interference. In fact, even after the importation of slaves from Africa was illegalized in the US, thousands continued to be imported just because the ban wasn't enforced.

Even in modern times and in countries were slavery was abolished, this is still true. For example, the Brazilian government had to free 4500 slaves just in 2008: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/03/brazil-slavery-p...

There's also the hundreds or thousands of women who are forced to marry in their teens by their own parents and husbands-to-be, without the government doing anything except letting it be. It's a major problem in India, Pakistan and even in Britain.

> Slave owners of yore relied on paid guards and bounty hunters to keep their slaves.

I think an Anarchist would call this a kind of de-facto government. It certainly had a monopoly on the use of force.

Look, I'm not trying to attack you personally, I'm trying to say that the way you are arguing is detrimental to discussion. This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them, dismissing other peoples' attempts to refer to outside sources ("[wikipedia] is not authoritative, and it is often quite biased...") without providing any of your own, changing your definition of what you are arguing (you say "I think this is just an example of socialists attempting to coopt another movement", and later claim that "I wasn't even talking about socialism")and getting overly defensive and refusing to engage with people because of perceived insults.

Any discussion about something important is going to get a little hot, taking your ball and going home anytime someone says something sharp is not going to be conducive to convincing others of your position or learning something yourself, dorkburlger.

> This includes things like making controversial statements ("I find it endlessly amusing that communists or socialists would call themselves anarchists") without expanding on them

The phrase you cite is "endlessly amusing" because it is a contradiction in terms; communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government, and anarchism is predicated on the lack of one. If you need that explained, I'm not sure why you're participating in this thread.

> communism/socialism is predicated on the presence of a government

It's really not. Socialism is about collective ownership of property, state socialism is only a subset of socialism. But perhaps you could explain why prominent anarchists like Bakunin aligned themselves with socialists when their ideals were so diametrically opposed? It seems like you're using rather ahistorical definitions of anarchism and socialism.

All communism or socialism directly imply is that the means of production is not held privately, but by some kind of collective communal or social entity. This is often the state, but was often imagine to be some kind of community council or representative entity.

The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.

> The distinguishment between that hypothetical entity and the 'state' as we know it is certainly up to debate, but I wouldn't therefore say that anarchism and communism or socialism are therefore contradictory.

How can we debate the necessity of the existence of government when we can't even decide what a government is?

We can't, really! But we try anyway. That's the nature of political and social problems: there's no specification that we can refer to to clarify our terms.

Anarchism is not predicated on the lack of government. Anarchism only requires non-hierarchy. It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.

> It is entirely possible that a government be composed in a non-hierarchical way.

A government can only exist when it has a monopoly on the legitimate use of force in most situations. How can that, where only one group can use violence without being punished for it, possibly fail to impose a hierarchy?

Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

We can have a government because we can set expectations and behavior. Only when we have police and a state apparatus do we then become a society whose mode of governance is via the state.

> Well what if we say that government is the means by which a people organize their business and a state is that entity which maintains a monopoly on the legitimate use of force?

I'd say that 'government' would be nothing more than a debating society, like the League of Nations, and just about as useful in preventing, say, homicide as the League of Nations was at preventing WWII.

>dorkburlger.

I don't engage with people who are begin dishonest, as you are, or people whose only form of "debate" is to characterize their opponent, or call them names, as you have.

Elsewhere several people have disagreed with me, attempted to show contradictions in my position, and surprisingly enough, they didn't need to resort to ad hominem or dishonesty to do it.

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