After Technology Destroys Capitalism
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
The two great expanding economic sectors of the future I foresee is conspicuous consumption (luxury cars, clothes) and emotional prostitution (massages, photoshoots, personal trainers). Indeed, prostitutes are a great example of this. High-end prostitutes earn as much as doctors and lawyers, all for providing emotional support for their clients/johns. They are the ultimate modern workers, in my opinion, and most of us will be following in their footsteps soon enough.
We have the technology to share the profits of AirBNB right now. The "sharing economy" can work on many levels now that we have the technology. Or we could all share YC, or Google, or even TechCrunch.
Who will step up to the plate first, then?
That's where this line of thinking goes, universal ownership not just of commodity resources, but of everything.
Who will lead us?
Note- While I sound satirical, I'm really not. This is the logical and likely necessary progression. And it really does require some leadership.
edit: The material dialectic, if it exists in any meaningful way, is far stranger than we once supposed.
everyone wants everything
and also;
nothing is more commonplace as the wish to be remarkable
I'm sure there are good ideas. Maybe that's yet another tech solution?
A quick google about abuse of Zipcars brought up this article
http://www.triplepundit.com/2012/07/zipcar-users-dont-good-c...
One could also argue that sole ownership leads to abuse simply because it is "allowed". For example, if you "own" a field, you can salt that field and leave it barren for many years.
I'll add another observation - library books. They are "shared stuff" by any definition. Libraries will rebind books to make them more durable and sharable. This suggests that a 5th point is to design shared things for higher amounts of abuse.
However, it's much easier to rebind a book than a car.
1. If you damage the book that you are "borrowing" or "sharing" then you are to pay a fixing/repair fee.
2. Natural degradation/wear & tear of books is covered by a general library fee/subscription.
It's odd how all these political schemes always work in "absolutes", and never allowing anyone to take themselves out of it voluntarily. Hint: If someone doesn't like the political system, then you're acting immorally and violently by forcing them to abide by it.
Do you really mean this? It seems completely unrealistic, and is just the flip side of the parent's comment.
I don't know of a single political system in the entire world which allows residents to opt out of its legal system, and nor should they.
Maybe you mean something rather specific by political system and I just don't understand what you're saying?
This sounds, if anything, less realistic than the OP's proposal.
It's also completely vacuous... which ones are obvious? The process of finding a sufficiently acceptable set is called politics.
There is historical precedent. We may be submerged in the fabric of the monolithic state with supreme political power, but it is not the only way. Obvious ones are ones that you personally would feel uncomfortable dealing with someone not bound by. For me those would be assault, murder, theft, fraud, and things of this level.
Do I care if you have a moral objection to compulsorily funding the war machine of the state? Most certainly not. How about if you smoke proscribed plant matter? No problem, once again. The vast majority of laws are useless.
Also, politics has nothing to do with finding an acceptable set of laws. Politics (from Greek: πολιτικός politikos, meaning "of, for, or relating to citizens") is the practice and theory of influencing other people on a civic or individual level. Making laws is one method of exerting influence, but it will do just as well for the state to resort to plain old thuggery. The point is to maintain and increase their power.
Of what? The Wikipedia article only indicates that there's a historical precedent of people talking about the idea, not its actual implementation at scale.
There is a one sentence mention of ethnic self-rule in Roman times, but it's complete hogwash. We've done exactly the same in the modern era by not doing the whole conquering other ethnic group's land and colonizing it thing.
> The vast majority of laws are useless.
I agree, but prefer this inefficiency to something which makes exploitation easy.
> politics has nothing to do with finding an acceptable set of laws. Politics is the practice and theory of influencing other people on a civic or individual level.
These statements are incompatible in democratic societies; in fact, that's the chief innovation of democracy.
Medieval Iceland, Ireland, Somalian xeer, various merchant law throughout history. I assumed you would actually research things yourself before jumping to incorrect conclusions. No such luck I suppose.
> I agree, but prefer this inefficiency to something which makes exploitation easy.
Worse than a false dichotomy, this is ignorant of the fact that many of the modern laws we have are what make exploitation easy.
> These statements are incompatible in democratic societies; in fact, that's the chief innovation of democracy.
And yet, they're true. It is almost as if democracy were not an adequate hedge against the intrinsic exploitation of political authority.
Reading your responses, you come across a lot like someone utterly convinced that the present dominant paradigm is the one true path and anyone who thinks different is just throwing poorly thought out ideas around.
Keeping in mind how comprehensively the political paradigm under which we currently are enslaved is proving to be not just ineffective, but an instrument of our oppression, you might want to have a long hard think about your biases.
If there is one thing you can say for the anarchocapitalists, it is that there is no shortage of literature and discussion about every conceivable edge case which could ever be imagined already discussed in great detail, largely because the reaction you've displayed here is extremely common. Before dismissing it after extremely shallow consideration, actually try doing your own research.
These are all basically just examples of decentralized governance over a large set of clans/ethnic groups. The Roman Empire example is particularly flawed as a piece of evidence toward the question of whether a political system without force is possible. Flawed to the point of extreme intellectual laziness and blatant disregard for historical truth.
Also, some other notes about your last reply:
1. Not everyone who disagrees with you is an "ignorant" tool of the "dominant paradigm" and "incapable of research". If you believe your political opinions to be that infallible, you're extremely niave.
2. Our societies today have real, systemic problems. These problems are important. But your current rhetorical approach (domination! exploitation! slavery!) is very ineffective. It makes you sound like a crack-pot. This isn't intended as an insult or meant to discredit you. I'm simply describing my perception -- one I'm sure many people share -- and offering some advice regarding rhetoric. You don't have to change your claims, just tone it down and be more specific.
(edit: organization and typos)
> Not everyone who disagrees with you is an "ignorant" tool
I never said you were an ignorant tool, I said a statement you made was evidence that you were ignorant of a single fact. It was.
> of the "dominant paradigm"
You are debating in favor of the current dominant paradigm, I don't think you're an "ignorant tool" of it, but the fact that you're in favor of it despite your objections to some of the symptoms of it seems to be completely true? If that's not the case by all means enlighten me.
> and "incapable of research".
I didn't say you were incapable of research, I said you clearly had not researched the answers to the questions you raised, and simply jumped to the conclusion that they must not exist. Then I recommended that you perhaps shouldn't do that.
> If you believe your political opinions to be that infallible, you're extremely niave.
The state of your position, regardless of how weak or strong that is, has no influence on the fallibility of my position. All I've ever claimed is that I am certain that political authority needs to be destroyed, it is a completely corrupt concept and utterly beyond redemption. (See Michael Huemer; The Problem with Political Authority)
Note in particular that this is not a positive claim, it is a negative claim. In much the same way as atheists don't accept the proposition that god exists due to lack of evidence for the proposition, I do not accept the proposition the political authority is valid, also due to lack of evidence for the proposition. It can be no more "fallible or infallible" than any other negative claim, it doesn't seek to prove anything, it just rejects the attempts at proof for something else. Similarly, this is not a "political position" any more than atheism is a "religious position".
As for what comes after political authority is dispensed with I have no belief at all in the infallibility of. From what I have seen, anarchocapitalist systems seem like the best candidate for a post political system. I hold no illusions of it being "infallible". If it really was the absolute most perfect system for social organisation in the entire universe going forward, that would be extremely surprising.
> My original point in this thread is that it is impossible to have a political system where someone doesn't force someone else to do something.
To the extent you're right, that is one of the reasons why we should not have political systems, and reliance on political authority is invalid.
> None of these historical examples of polycentric law disprove that claim, and in none of these examples did the least powerful members of society have the right to choose their legal system.
On the contrary, that is entirely the point of polycentric law, anarchocapitalist systems would be the first example of individuals within the system being able to freely choose between arbitration and security services, that doesn't alter the fundamental structure of a polycentric legal system, it just adds competitive incentive to the entities therein to be attractive to potential subscribers.
> These are all basically just examples of decentralized governance over a large set of clans/ethnic groups.
Which are effective examples of the concept in history, and adding the ability for participants to freely choose amongst providers in a competitive marketplace is not a long stretch.
> The Roman Empire example is particularly flawed as a piece of evidence toward the question of whether a political system without force is possible.
The citation is for the concept of polycentric law, not the complete absence of political authority (read: force).
Look, this is just true. We can trot out stupid (but valid) pedantic examples of crazy murderer dudes if you want. And you can try to move the goal posts, and I can object that you're trying to make me prove something much stronger than what I actually stated and also that your system stabilizes somewhere near the status quo because the only fair way to define "global harm not permissible across groups" is by democratic vote, and we can both lose an hour of our time over nothing.
But ultimately, fundamentally, pedantic games aside, if you want a bunch of people to work together closely, you're eventually gonna have to use some force against some bad actors.
This tangent about historical examples is mostly irrelevant, but I'll point out an important concession from your post, which I think underscores our disagreement:
> anarchocapitalist systems would be the first example of individuals within the system being able to freely choose between arbitration and security services
Exactly. So there is no historical evidence that this is feasible. Which was /exactly/ the claim for which you accused me of ignorance.
> Which are effective examples of the concept in history
Examples of polycentric law. Absolutely not examples of lower ranking members of society having carte blanc autonomy to join/create new groups. This much you've conceded above.
You've been conflating these two, which is why you accused me of being ignorant.
I'm not ignorant of the former. Rather, I'm pointing out that it is absolutely absurd to conflate examples of the former with examples of the latter (sans substantial justification, but ultimately I believe any such justification is fundamentally motivated more by ideology than sound, objective scholarship. In general, I am always skeptical history "research" which is both novel and also just happens to validate the author's political ideology.)
Regarding the rest of your post, there's a huge difference between not advocating anarchocapitalism and defending the status quo. You are accusing me of being complicit in every systemic injustice of the status quo because I think your specific alternative is unrealistic. Consider your company.
For starters, Anarchocapitalism isn't really a political system so much as one of the ways which using free market organisation alone, society might end up according to game theoretic principles of mutual self interest of individual actors. Anarchocapitalism is not about elimination of the use of force. It is about the elimination of A) Political authority as a concept, that is, there is no singular party vested with special privileges that all people are supposed to acknowledge and respect and B) Aggression as distinct from force. That is the initiation of force.
For example, acting against someone because they don't want to pay a fee you decree by political authority that you owe them, despite the fact that they have no relationship or agreement with you in any way shape or form and have never accepted any form of service from you, which is both force and aggression (taxation). As opposed to forcible self defense from an attacker intent on causing you physical harm, which is force, but not aggression. (self defense)
Holders of political authority throughout history have been heavy on the use of aggression as distinct from force, this is what anarchocapitalists mostly take issue with. They are not pacifists, force in self defense is perfectly acceptable.
To recap, the original claim you were attempting to refute is;
"If someone doesn't like the political system, then you're acting immorally and violently by forcing them to abide by it."
Nobody forces anybody to abide by the anarchocapitalist system (even neglecting the whole it's not a political system angle), but that doesn't mean people within that system will not defend themselves when aggressed upon.
> Exactly. So there is no historical evidence that this is feasible. Which was /exactly/ the claim for which you accused me of ignorance.
Wrong. The claim I accused you of ignorance with regards to was this, exactly;
I agree, but prefer this inefficiency to something which makes exploitation easy.
Worse than a false dichotomy, this is ignorant of the fact that many of the modern laws we have are what make exploitation easy.
That is, you are ignoring the fact that modern laws make exploitation easy, not that polycentric law is without historical precedent.
Polycentric law does have historical precedent, however anarchocapitalism in particular incorporates polycentric law as well as a raft of other ideas, and did not exist as a fully defined concept until around the 1960's iirc. There has not been enough time to actually see it implemented in reality yet, although this is a distinct possibility in the midterm future (Seasteading proposals typically revolve around ancap organisation).
Disqualifying an idea as sensible because it has not yet been tried however doesn't make any sense, sticking to that idea we should still be practicing tribal hunter gatherer social organisation alone. That the ideas are well thought out and practical are demonstrated by citing historical precedents that are similar, as well as going into great detail as to all of the potential flaws with the system and how those things may be addressed. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTYkdEU_B4o)
> In general, I am always skeptical history "research" which is both novel and also just happens to validate the author's political ideology.
Once again, it's not a political ideology, it is an attempt to destroy the entire concept of political ideologies. If it is a political ideology, bald is a hair colour and atheism is a religion.
> Regarding the rest of your post, there's a huge difference between not advocating anarchocapitalism and defending the status quo.
By all means, I'd be interested to hear your ideas on what you see as superior to the status quo, especially if they don't rely on political authority, the major reason I am ancap is because I will not under any circumstances accept political authority as valid. But it's not wrong to point out that simply shooting down alternatives without offering other systems is de facto support of the status quo.
> You are accusing me of being complicit in every systemic injustice of the status quo because I think your specific alternative is unrealistic. Consider your company.
Supporting the status quo does make you complicit in the effects of that status quo, this is uncomfortable I know. It is the reason I abandoned it, and a large part of the reason I am now a perpetual traveller. However, you seem to be claiming not to support the status quo, although it's unclear as to what you do support.
Okay, I tried to avoid this because it's so juvenile. I'll give the pedantic, stupid example.
Guy wants to kill people for fun.
Everyone tells the guy it's not allowed.
The guy tries to do it anyways.
Any sane implementation of anarchocapitalism provides a legal mechanism for forcing violent dude to not kill other people. That legal mechanism has to be defined and staffed. The process for doing that is a political system.
Forcing people to do something against their will is not irrational or violent. It's inevitable and that's good.
> ...is not a political system
> ...it's not a political ideology
This is the rabbit hole definition game I was referring to. You're just wrong per the standard use of both words. Worse, you're quibbling over definitions when the essence of my argument is absolutely clear.
> That the ideas are well thought out and practical are demonstrated by citing historical precedents that are similar
Right, you just keep ignoring my many, many arguments that these historical examples are not similar.
> I'd be interested to hear your ideas on what you see as superior to the status quo
Democratically selected reforms to specific problems with solutions selected on the basis of scientific discussion of the evidence.
I have an aversion to "silver bullets" and radical departures, especially those that make extreme claims for which there could never, ever be satisfiable evidence. Even if the idea is good, claiming that you know things will work out because you "thought through the common objections" is nothing more than conjecture and blind faith. There are always good answers to every single argument. There is no way to know how a society will behave, and the central implicit assumption tying everything together is almost always "everyone is like me and wants to live in a world I would like living in". Which of course is never ever true.
There are much simpler systems whose behavior we cannot predict. Any scientifically-minded person would concede this point, and for that reason would not even venture to offer an "alternative" to something as radical as anarchocapitalism other than "I choose the middle option".
And FWIW your appeal to "game-theoretic principles" proves my earlier point regarding implicit assumptions. People behave sub-optimally and violate game theoretic axioms of every variety. People are not formal logical systems, and you can't model the dynamics of human relationships using these tools except in extremely limited contexts. And that's setting aside the (probable) fact that most people who understand the literature on game theory well (oh, I'm probably one of them; it's not an area I understand well, but I try to keep up with conference proceedings related to my work) do not consider it a reasonable basis for governance or societal organization.
> simply shooting down alternatives without offering other systems is de facto support of the status quo.
Believing this is why revolutionaries have a nasty tendency of chopping off the heads of lots of people they should essentially agree and get along with on the majority of issues.
And that mechanism does not rely on political authority (it's not "legal" in the sense to which you refer, sanctioned by a political authority holding body). This is the critical point that you keep on utterly missing or mistaking for some semantic point that is not important so I'm going to try and be really specific about why this is important and why it doesn't fit into the example you've constructed.
Let's lay out the scenario you used in the current system and go through where political authority comes into play;
Guy wants to kill people for fun.
Everyone tells the guy it's not allowed.
The guy tries to do it anyway.
Because it is against the law, which is a set of rules defined by a singular monolithic body imbued with political authority, agents of that body step in to either stop the event from taking place or clean up afterwards in accordance with the law defined by that singular monolithic body. Self interest, non aggression and natural law don't come into it at all, it's simply an execution of "the rule of law".
And what is the rule of law? Whatever the holders of political authority say it is, your consent is irrelevant, your opinion is irrelevant. You have a duty to obey the holders of political authority because that is the entire point of the idea, they have absolute power over you and you are supposed to behave in accordance with the rules that they write because they hold political authority. Force is only being used in accordance with the rules of political authority in this scenario.
There have been instances in history where political systems didn't even consider it murder to kill specific classes of people for fun, the interests of the potential victim were never the point in a political system, it's always just been about the maintenance and expansion of political authority. Police can be corrupt and incompetent, the military can be decrepit and outmoded, none of that matters. All that matters is the head of the body politic gave orders and they are being obeyed.
As opposed to;
Guy wants to kill people for fun.
Nobody tells him "it's not allowed" in the sense that is discussed above. People would point out it would be extremely bad for his health to try, potentially, but the justification for this is not political authority or the rule of law, it is because the people he wants to kill for fun don't want to be killed. That is irrelevant in the case of political authority as opposed to the most important thing in this instance.
A competitive market arises for security providers that offer security to potential victims of aforementioned crazy psychopath. These providers have no special legal privileges and are not imbued with any specific powers that anyone is supposed to respect and nobody owes them a duty of anything. If they want to accrue and keep customers they must offer good service. If they are not competitive with other providers in the same sector they will cease to exist.
Their motivation is entirely focused on protecting the interests of their subscribers, maintaining and propagating their political power never comes into it, there are no elections to buy, no politicians to swear fealty to, just the single very simple equation; are they competing well in the market. Nobody can exploit their position of political authority which would allow them to evade actual accountability for their performance, they cannot levy a tax to pay for their incompetence despite abysmal performance, they have no special powers or privileges and any other agency may arrive at any other time in order to outcompete them if they see an opening in the market to be exploited.
This is what I mean by constantly restating the fact that it's not a political system or ideology. There is no political authority employed by any of the participants within the system, and thus it is not vulnerable to any of the myriad failings which plague all political systems. This is not sleight of hand or defining away the problem, it is a very critically important point.
> Democratically selected reforms to specific problems with solutions selected on the basis of scientific discussion of the evidence.
This seems like a contradiction in terms, democracy and scientific evidence have nothing to do with each other. So which is actually important? If it's scientific evidence you have yourself a dictatorship, if it's democracy you have mob rule.
> Even if the idea is good, claiming that you know things will work out because you "thought through the common objections" is nothing more than conjecture and blind faith
I don't know things will work out, I think the extensive discussion of the edge cases is pretty good, and certainly enough that it should at least be tried (which is already a near certainty with all the various seasteads and ZEDE's that are in setup mode around the world anyway). I do know that political authority is proving an achilles heel in all systems of social organisation around the world, but that is not a claim that something else is a silver bullet to fix that problem, just that the problem exists and appears to be intractable with the current paradigm of political authority holding bodies.
> There is no way to know how a society will behave, and the central implicit assumption tying everything together is almost always "everyone is like me and wants to live in a world I would like living in".
No, that's a large part of the reason for discarding the concept of political authority. Nobody should have the right to a special position that gives them the ability to define how everyone else must live their lives and how the world must be organised.
> People behave sub-optimally and violate game theoretic axioms of every variety.
And when they do, and there is no political body to back them up, at least it will be they who suffer the consequences and are outcompeted in the market, thus fixing the problem they represent rather than instituting ever increasing burdens on the sectors of society that do not similarly fail. When a state behaves sub optimally and violates game theoretic axioms, it just forcibly extorts the price of its malfeasance from its captive subjects by virtue of its position of political authority.
> Believing this is why revolutionaries have a nasty tendency of chopping off the heads of lots of people they should essentially agree and get along with on the majority of issues.
Violently attacking a system I despise largely because of its violent domination of people who don't approve of it would be quite hypocritical. This position has been shared by every anarchocapitalist I've ever spoken to. We don't need or want violent revolution, the system will be tried in small scale on seasteads and ZEDE's, based on those results it should be apparent if it is worth taking it any further than that. No bloody revolutions necessary.
That still doesn't change the fact that you're fundamentally agreeing with the statement that refusing any alternative to the status quo is de facto support of the status quo. You just point out that some people who use that argument are crazy and want to see a bloody revolution of the proletariat.
Or, more likely, the most effective "security providers" will just decide that they have political authority by dint of might makes right. I mean, the emergence of warlords in the absence of established political authority isn't exactly a phenomenon that hasn't been observed repeatedly in history.
See prior post re: the insufficiency of axiomatic systems.
This is also unresponsive to the empirical observation in the parent's post.
Theories are beholden to fact, not the other way around.
Which does not make it impossible to come up with theories, strangely enough.
Yeah, but you still don't get to call what really has been shown to happen wrong because it doesn't match the theory you came up with. (Well, I mean, you can if its a theory of morality rather than a predictive theory, but its important not to confuse the two.)
Warlords fighting over political authority is not a proof for what happens when the entire society rejects the concept of political authority and refuses to accept it as valid. Political aspirants wage war for political authority only because it has value. The point you raise is so common that it actually has a parody term; Argumentum ad somalia.
Now I grant that this still does not mean we are right, but this is no "provably effective" rebuttal, either.
I mentioned both.
> that's a large part of the reason for discarding the concept of political authority.
No, it's a reason for grounding political theories in empirical, scientific evidence instead of extrapolating from misapplications of theory.
I don't think these are even misapplications; they're just random useful conjectures you then claim to be substantiated by some unnamed game-theoretic framework.
Your entire post is a litany of claimed theorems about an unstated axiom system that doesn't mirror reality anyways.
The one piece of evidence for ground truth you've actually provided -- historical precedence -- is so flawed in the wider context of your argument that you're not even defending it anymore.
Let me remind us of the original claim I was refuting: "If someone doesn't like the political system, then you're acting immorally and violently by forcing them to abide by it."
zo1 and I claimed that anarchocapitalist systems are not vulnerable to this criticism by virtue of not actually being political systems and violently forcing people to abide by the rulings of the political authority in that system. Whether or not they work, this is simply true. It is not an effective defense of political authority to point out "All social organisation systems use political authority and are thus vulnerable to the same criticisms as our current system with its dangerously wielded political authority".
You've then gone on a very long back and forward with me over the various ways in which you think it might fail until terminating at this conclusion, that being; "I don't believe that the common responses to these questions which have already been raised are valid from a game theory perspective" with some ad hominem about my understanding of what game theory actually is thrown in for good measure. And a restatement of the frequently proven wrong point that I am utterly convinced that this is the way that things would turn out in reality.
To rebuke that, again, and thoroughly this time because I think we've reached the point at which continuing this discussion is pointless; Merely being completely convinced that political authority in any system is an achilles heel does not carry over into believing that one potential post political system is definitely the one true path forward. When a religious narrative for the origin of the species is discarded on scientific grounds, and one believes that the most promising current theory is the scientific theory of evolution, even in the event that they turn out to be wrong about the latter does not automatically make them wrong about the former.
Succinctly, that is to say that I am utterly certain that the politicians are wrong, but not utterly certain that I and those who think as I do are right.
With regards to the fact that you don't accept the common rebuttals to one of the commonly raised objections within anarchocapitalism, that's your prerogative. I can't say that I find your handwaving over "you're getting game theory wrong" a particularly convincing argument that you are right, but I have no real desire to try and sway you from your position. What we think largely doesn't matter, it is likely it will be tried in reality and at this point all the game theory handwaving in the world will not make a difference, one of us will be wrong, and one of us will be right.
Until then, we have our positions.
1. Private property. Covers ownership. 2. Non-aggression principle. Keeps people from hurting others.
And the reason the parent poster said "obvious" is because they are completely agreeable and obvious to most reasonable people. Everyone can agree that their property is their own (assuming they didn't steal it), and that hurting others is bad.
The OP was criticized as unrealistic. But anarchocapitalism is, if anything, more obviously unrealistic.
As soon as you cover all of the common sense questions which arise about just these two public goods you end up a long way away from anarchocapitalism.
> Private property
This is more of a philosophy than a workable proposal for a legal system.
What constitutes property? What do you do when new sorts of property crop up?
What's a valid contract?
What happens when someone breaks your stuff and can't pay for it?
What happens when someone is accused of breaking the non-aggression principle but doesn't have any stuff? Who covers investigative costs etc.?
And those are just the very high level and topical things. There are thousands of other side cases where US case law does "the obvious thing"
> Non-aggression principle
Again, philosophy is not law.
What is aggression?
What about harm caused to the polity by non-aggressive use of force (drunk driving without regard to other's lives? Reckless taxi driving without regard to other's lives (to make some extra profit)? Dumping deadly chemicals in rivers? Pollution to the point of black-out smog? All the way down to more banal public health things like public smoking and drug use. Every person has a different, and usually passionately held, opinion on each of these.
There is no bright line, every issue has to be considered separately and people will always disagree. By the time you answer all these questions, you have substantial government to arbitrate and enforce.
Oh, and this is all assuming that private property + non-aggression, if balanced correctly, give rise to a good society. Internal consistency is a pretty low bar, and it's entirely unclear how anarchocapitalism or related positions are consistent without a completely unrealisitic over-simplification of human dynamics.
I'm not trying to cop out of this discussion, it's just that these are all things that have been covered numerous times. There are a lot of very smart people spending a great deal of time enumerating all the complications you seem to think are deal-breakers.
I'll address you more generally, then, and pick a few big ones to respond to.
Anarcho capitalism, and the two rules I mentioned. They don't just encompass a legal system, but a philosophical system as well (like you mentioned). The idea being that if we can come up with basic set of rules that are moral, and we don't break them, then we have come up with a moral/fair judicial system that is grounded in fairness for all because the same rules apply to everyone.
"What's a valid contract?" Anything that you voluntarily enter into and whoever you've chosen to help you arbitrate disputes with the other contractees. You're free to do so, even if you enter into a contract to do bad things. The contract is valid between you two, but you will no-doubt get in to trouble for the things you end up doing. Again, a big implementation-specific question. No morals here. But if you must know: most arbitration committees/courts/whatever you want to call them will probably not look kindly on contracts that break the basic tenets of harm/property.
"What about harm caused to the polity by non-aggressive use of force (drunk driving without regard to other's lives?" First of all, in a free society, there is no "polity". Second, reckless driving is handled by private property. Whoever owns the road you drive on sets the rules; if you don't abide by them, you can't drive on that road because it's private property. It's already that way, really, it's just that you don't notice it because you see the state. If someone wishes to create a set of roads where people can drive recklessly, then others are free to use other roads that agree to their sense/level of security.
"What happens when someone breaks your stuff and can't pay for it?" Insurance, on either side. Look past the state, and you will see ingenious solutions to remedy and dampen risk/loss.
I'm on my third one, and it seems you're just trying to come up with contrived/weird scenarios. Solutions to these problems are just endless, but remember, they must not behave in an immoral way (by breaking the two basic rules mentioned in my previous post). Perhaps if you have a taste, you might be curious to read up some more.
"There is no bright line, every issue has to be considered separately and people will always disagree." People disagree now. It's just that you have no choice in it at all. We're all forced to "agree" on a certain set of arbitrarily and "consistently" chosen set of rules that only a majority of us supposedly agree on.
On a side note, I look forward to the day when free-minded individuals can come up with solutions to all these problems in a peaceful and non-coercive manner. Until then, we'll be stuck coming up with utilitarian solutions.
If you're curious, I can point you to some resources/books regarding anarcho-capitalism and related topics. There are some nice introductions out there; some of which detail all the possible combinations of problems you can think of.
This is the claim we're discussing (to the extent we're not off topic).
You've agreed several times in the post above that this claim is hogwash. You'd just prefer individuals to be setting rules about their property (e.g. roads) instead of the government setting similar rules. But at some point, any reasonable system allows someone to force someone else to do (or not do) something.
>If you're curious, I can point you to some resources/books regarding anarcho-capitalism and related topics. There are some nice introductions out there; some of which detail all the possible combinations of problems you can think of.
Maybe. Here's a problem I want the answer to.
I believe it's inevitable that tons of power will become concentrated in a few hands.
When this centralization of power happens, it's always abused and lots of people get screwed. It seems that democratically elected governments are easier to exert pressure on than privately held corporations.
Therefore, I prefer for vital resources -- water, food and the energy/transportation networks necessary for providing them -- be owned or at least heavily regulated by a democratically elected government.
I'm only willing to entertain something like anarcho-capitalism if it prevents centralization of power and/or considers itself subservient to democracy. I believe that the former case is impossible and that the latter case is incompatible because most people prefer significant government involvement for lots of reasons, mostly based on self interest (see status quo).
If you have resources addressing this problema which are well-grounded in behavioral or social science research methodology, I'd be interested in reading them.
(p.s. thanks for the civility)
A recent example of this is; San Francisco (I think) municipality opening up it databases to the citizens so that people can figure out a way to get involved in how their living space is governed.
Googles AI of course.
Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the shape of it.
All this extra value didnt fall from the sky, but has been produced by somebody elses labor. If you dont want to work to trade the products of your labor for the products of his labor, why should he share with you?
Whether it makes sense for you or not, the discussion around this basic income nonsense regularly neglects the fact that in order for you to get money for not working, it has to be forcibly taken from somebody who actually did work and refuses to voluntarily share with people who dont work. Forced sharing (aka communism) is outright theft, and working people will fight you to stop you from taking the products of their labor.
> it's structural disconnection from labor opportunities.
Being "structurally disconnected" doesnt entitle you to forcibly take stuff from people who are not structurally disconnected. You can of course try, but then you got a war and people will fight you until you stop trying to take their stuff.
People tend to think that Marx argued for the overthrow of capitalism because it is/was in his eyes morally "bad" or "evil", but that's not really the case.
Marx argued that capitalism was better than any previous system, and - despite failings - vitally necessary to bring the world to a point where production would for the first time in history make it possible to meet the basic needs of everyone
(without which, he insisted, a socialist revolution would be doomed to failure: in such a situation, redistribution would just make want common, and cause the old class struggle to re-assert itself - like it did in the Soviet Union etc. with the party installing itself as a new upper class).
But he expected capitalism to continue to push production efficiency to the point where it would overproduce and under-employ, and that this would eventually trigger socialist revolutions.
> Instead of trying to lower costs for big companies by creating software that replaces people, we should strive to create something of value that can also employ people in meaningful numbers. Don't know what exactly, but that is the shape of it.
Why? If we can reduce or remove the need for people to work, why should we not?
If somebody else has to work so you can eat without working, thats theft and your victims will try to kill you to stop you taking the products of their labor.
Nobody pays taxes voluntarily either, yet we collect them and use them to pay for services everybody uses. I see absolutely no reason why we couldn't do the same thing for all of people's basic needs.
Like communism, basic income (which is just another word for communism) is outright slavery, where person A is being forced to involuntarily work to feed person B who doesnt want to work.
Wanting to work vs not wanting to work is not even a relevant question. Everyone wants to feel useful. Not everyone has a job. Whether someone gets a job or not depends on market forces, not just desire or motivation.
Like communism, basic income (which is just another word for communism) is outright slavery
Machines can not be slaves. When machines produce everything we need it is unconscionable to allow some people to starve while others grow rich and fat with profit.
Imagine, say, a world where clouds of von Neumann self-replicating builder robots fly around and plant seeds, tend trees, harvest, and deliver food. They also charge and repair and modify themselves, take material from mined asteroids, and are so plentiful that they may respond to every nonviolent human whim.
That world may have problems (which I don't care to discuss, I am just throwing out a possibility), and it's nowhere near reality. Not close. But I think such a pie-in-the-sky scenario is the one under discussion, where assumptions like 'nobody will feed you voluntarily' are not as bedrock as they are for us.
Once we have that hypothetical robot slave army feeding everyone of us, the discussion would be over by itself because there would be nothing left to discuss. Everyone would have all he needs and that would be it.
The only reason we do have the discussion already now, long before the star-trekian replicator utopia has been realized is because a lot of people are so impatient to stop working, that they want to engineer a system where not robots, but _other people_ are working for them, of course involuntarily.
> Why? If we can reduce or remove the need for people to work, why should we not?
Well, it is because I figured people would want to feel valued and like they have a meaningful place in society. But, if people don't want to work and there is no need for it (assuming a low-scarcity future, as the author described), then sure. That should be an option too.
Who is "we"? There is no "we". Capitalism exists because different people have conflicting desires and unequal abilities. Capitalism is just another word for natural selection. Any attempts to get rid of capitalism as the "default" state of interhuman relations, will have to be accompanied by massive amounts of force, because you cant fight human nature without force. And even then, the only people willing to invest force and suffering to end the natural state of things are people who would personally profit from ending it, otherwise they would have no motivation to lift a finger, let alone lose one fighting to end capitalism, which then makes the attempt to violently end capitalism just another, more brutish form of natural selection.
You can not somehow "out-smart" natural selection and evolution and make people live happily together ever after without anybody exploiting anybody else. Inequality is a fact of life. By forcibly ending capitalism, the most humane form of natural selection to date, you can merely make the endeavour more bloody again.
Capitalism with large, deep, anonymous markets only arose along with powerful nation-states with a monopoly on force.
The default condition is probably what existed before nation-states -- tribalism, feudalism, serfdom, slavery, and roaming gangs of local thugs.
Humanity only rises above Hobbes' state of nature through collective action, which inevitably requires some force or coercion.
Without that, life is nasty, brutish and short.
Or we could try to lower costs for people by creating software that replaces big companies (and government.)
Just a thought.
> I strongly suspect that any post-capitalist society
> will be built around a technologically sophisticated
> reputation economy, very very loosely a la Cory
> Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom.
> Obviously we already live in a world full of subtle
> reputation economies — you see one in action any time a
> celebrity gets special treatment. Nowadays, though,
> technology could enable something much more codified and
> quantitative. (Crude hacks like Klout may at least light
> the way, for all their flaws.)
With money the more you get the easier it becomes to manipulate the system so you can acquire even more, with reputation you go from no reputation to maximum reputation in one particular subject.
History is full of people who tried to fix society's ills and virtually always have things wind up even worse. The French revolution started out as idealism and wound up using "technology" to chop off people's heads.
I'm not at all against technology trying to make things better but unless we eliminate people it's not going to change basic human behavior.
Race Against the Machine,
by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee
http://www.amazon.com/Race-Against-The-Machine-Accelerating-...
It has some ideas on how to get from where we are to there. I think the philosophies of Race Against the Machine and Capital in the 21st century are pretty insightful and the truth may be somewhere in between the two.
I don't believe in completely unregulated markets, either. But let's not fool ourselves into thinking government will ride in to save the day. They were complicity in creating a system whose soul purpose is to drain 99.9% of people in the country of their money and leave nothing for anyone else. That's not trade, that's not capitalism. That's scorched earth warfare. You won't get reform out of Congress, they have too much skin in the game of the current system.
In a world where corporations can't buy off congresscritters, and congresscritters can't pass laws to give unfair advantage to their cohorts, I don't believe you can have an oligopoly of giganto-corporations. There is such an inefficiency to them that a truly capitalist system would have swarmed, killed, ate them up, and spat them out already.
We need to continue to push the internet to be independent, to grow an economy disconnected from governments, one that can, through mutual benefit of trade (i.e. capitalism) support the individuals within it with understanding and fairness, with no favor provided to any individual just because they won the Ivy League roommate lottery.
Economist Ludwig von Mises a long time ago demonstrated that a cashless society couldn't function because there would be no method for effectively allocating scarce resources. While it's nice to predict some moneyless utopia in the future, it presents real and insurmountable problems.
So I guess he never heard of the Incans.
I'd put it slightly differently. We need a method for the allocation of scarce resources and money is the one we have developed that has the least transactional overhead, and any methods that seek to replace it not only needs to look at achieving a better allocation, but also needs to be able to do it with less overhead or else you lose any benefits gained.
McCarthy is not ancient history, and Marxism is still viewed mostly met suspiciousness and ridicule in the us.
No one in the US and in their right mind would claim to be Marxist in order to fit in our due to social pressure. If anything, the exact opposite.
He makes this sound like it was something bad.
The problem I see with gigs, as can be seen on the various freelancing sites, is you're competing with people on the other side of the world who need way less than you to get by. As far as online gigs go, I'd like to see some borders go up in all but special cases.
I'm in the UK and we have UKIP getting popularity, but if they implemented their migration policy it would utterly destroy the UK economy for one fundamental reason that nobody seems to consider.
There are more UK nationals who have migrated and are working abroad than foreign nationals working in the UK.
And in total, the UK government thinks there are around 13,115,406 people outside the UK who can be classed as British national community ( From Hansard, bottom of the page - http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/v... ).
If the UK implemented a tit for tat migration policy with the rest of the world, then it would actually have to accept more migration than it currently does and if it just blocked migration altogether and threw people out, well then other countries would be very likely to return the favour and the UK would see several million new workers arriving in the country, all with fantastic global experience, full immediate rights to work and benefits, and excellent english.
But still, UKIP is popular, and people who don't want to lose anything are trying as hard as they can to shoot off their own foot with a ballot.
Also, there are a hell of a lot of people from the UK who work round the world doing jobs like dishwashing and wouldn't be able to afford to travel if they didn't.
Visas for gap-year type travellers are less common and usually very time limited.
Most countries operate a tiered approach to visa allocation and often heavily restrict applicants from certain countries if they have disagreements with them.
Is funny that while people from abroad are painted as devious manipulative devils when they are trying to enter the country, they suddenly get portrayed as shining beacons of angelic forgiveness when it comes to the subject of what would happen to all of the British working abroad if we shut our borders.
But luckily there's plenty of things that /can't/ be done from the other side of the world.