Some honest questions for proponents of #anarchism, specifically of the individualistic sort (ie, #anarchocapitalism):
🧵
What do you make of the lack of [significant experiments in the real world](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities) (note that most examples on that page are collectivist societies, communist #libertarians, etc — not experiments where all property is private)?
I get that a modern nation doesn't sell a region or a province to a group of like-minded individuals to let them live and interact as they please, and that even if that were possible, such community would still depend on the “outer world” for lots of important things.
Still, isn't is suspicious that there aren't at least a bunch of long-lasting, functioning libertarian experiments where members voluntarily ditch outer courts and laws, shun subsidies and quotas of any kind, rely on an inner grey market to conceal income and wealth as much as possible, rely solely on voluntary agreements among them, etc?
With so many passionate supporters worldwide, why isn't that happening, at least to the extent it's feasible within the framework of existing jurisdictions?
>"Still, isn’t is suspicious that there aren’t at least a bunch of long-lasting, functioning libertarian experiments where members voluntarily ditch outer courts and laws, shun subsidies and quotas of any kind, rely on an inner grey market to conceal income and wealth as much as possible, rely solely on voluntary agreements among them, etc?"
You mean like the Mexican drug cartel?
I very much doubt that drug cartels function as free societies where members enter voluntary agreements, act according to the #NAP, and respect the property of others…
I just asked #ChatGPT (take this with a ton of grains of salt):
> _“Overall, the political organization of a Mexican drug cartel is **highly centralized and hierarchical**, with a strong emphasis on loyalty and obedience to the top leadership. The cartel leaders operate as quasi-political figures, exerting control over large territories and often engaging in **violence and corruption** to maintain their power.”_
In any case: if a Mexican drug cartel were the best example we had of a #libertarian society in action, then I rest my case.
I was thinking they acted more like anarchists -- no laws or formal gov't. But, as you say, that can't last long since someone always wants to be king.
The US started out mostly libertarian.
After a libertarian or anarchist group/society starts, they quickly run into situations where something harmful needs to be addressed with some kind of regulation.
And if there is no harmful thing, then some wanna-be king will invent a harmful thing so they can justify creating enough regulations that they can exploit to become king.
That's my intuition too, yes.
(#Anarchism is absence of hierarchies (we usually call that a State). A drug cartel is definitely _not_ hierarchy-free.)
I get the sense that anarchism is more of a philosophical concept to facilitate thought experiments, rather than an actual system to be implemented. It's kind of like philosophers used to speak of a "state of nature" as a starting point for the development of political philosophies. It's not an actual situation that actually exists or existed, it just a way to help conceptualize a problem.
My issue is with people who defend #anarchism (or fascism, or communism, or authoritarianism) as a viable system, as a recipe for human flourishing and well-being. There are many of those.
Anarchism doesn't mean "no rules" - it means "no *rulers*".
It means that power should flow up from below, from the people, and not be bestowed from on high, from our rulers.
There is no individual feature of our society that couldn't be replicated in an anarchist one in much the same way, and that includes driver's licenses.
+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄
@tripu
> Still, isn’t is suspicious that there aren’t at least a bunch of long-lasting, functioning libertarian experiments where members voluntarily ditch outer courts and laws, shun subsidies and quotas of any kind, rely on an inner grey market to conceal income and wealth as much as possible, rely solely on voluntary agreements among them, etc?
>
> With so many passionate supporters worldwide, why isn’t that happening, at least to the extent it’s feasible within the framework of existing jurisdictions?
short answer: because the much larger body of statists send people with guns having no problem with shooting others for not participating.
if you need a central enforcing thing you have just another oppressive system.
e.g. with private streets you need a contract to use them which may include "needs a certificate and insurance". those things aren't unfixable problems, they often only appear this way as we only know how it's done currently.
mutualist cooperations where people have ownership worked pretty well in the past.
anything without ownership ("anarcho"-syndicalism/communism) requires coercion and is not anarchism.
you really only need ownership, universal non violence and _if_ you are attacked by someone not adhering to that the right for proper self defense. everything else follows from that.
I don't understand your answer.
To reiterate: what exactly is preventing a group of hundreds or thousands of like-minded anarchocapitalists from implementing their ideas in a small closed community (within the boundaries of the law imposed by the parent jurisdiction)?
They could trade among themselves using zortskilfs as currency; hire, save and invest using zortskilfs; and convert to/from USD only when they absolutely need to interact with the outer world (eg to buy goods they can't produce internally). All that economic activity would be hidden from fiscal authorities, thus tax-free, since they all reject the authority of outer fiscal authorities and courts of law and nobody would denounce or sue their comrades.
Members in need of, say, a doctor, a teacher or a driving instructor would use the services of other members (regardless of whether they have the degree or are licenced to work).
Comrades who suffered illness or injury would rely on inner mechanisms (charity, a mutual insurance company) or simply resign to their bad fate — anything but relying on social services, well-fare, subsidies, etc.
Members could have guns at will. As long as they're used only internally and other members don't sue or snitch, that should be OK for all.
Violence, trespassing, theft, etc within the community would be handled internally (private court, fellow arbitrator, etc), not via State or Federal law, public courts or prisons, etc.
Why aren't they doing all that?
@tripu
> To reiterate: what exactly is preventing a group of hundreds or thousands of like-minded anarchocapitalists from implementing their ideas in a small closed community (within the boundaries of the law imposed by the parent jurisdiction)?
the boundaries of the parent jurisdication, starting with taxation continuing with other laws about what you can own etc.. you'd have a constant drain of value without anything in return because of taxation.
also, they'll find a reson to fuck with you. no guns for you. no drugs for you. no explosives for you. no distilling alcohol. no growing of tobacco.
after all, what would happen if people notice that anarchy works? can't allow that!
_but_ for a limited amount of time and in limited ways these things work rather well. i went to small/medium music festivals where people were motivated to work together and not be a trouble to others and it worked maybe only because there is much money put into it upfront? still nice!
> _“You’d have a constant drain of value without anything in return because of taxation”_
Taxes would be avoided to a large extent if such community worked as I explained, obscuring much of inner economic activity. (Some taxes are evaded _outside_ libertarian utopias, after all.)
You say “drain” of value. What about the alleged increase in value (as per libertarian ideas)? What about all the things members could do on their own, and with each other, in such a community?
> _“They’ll find a reson to fuck with you”_
The onus is on defenders of #anarchocapitalism to prove that all those things have been tried in libertarian communities, and how _exactly_ the State or outer authorities stopped all that.
I get back to my short list of examples above.
> _“For a limited amount of time and in limited ways these things work rather well”_
If libertarian ideas work only within the very narrow confines of a music festival (a couple of days or a week at most, with only a few hundred quids per person at stake, limited to very specific activities), then it's further proof that libertarian ideas wouldn't work for society.
@tripu
> The onus is on defenders of #anarchocapitalism to prove that all those things have been tried in libertarian communities, and how exactly the State or outer authorities stopped all that.
why does the idea of people being just left alone need a proof? hell, we are on a science instance, for things like mutualism or voluntaryism you literally only need the few principles listed in my previous post.
to defend the existence of a state with armed goons coercing you into obedience you need many more assumptions in place.
i think it's rather self evident that the idea which requires fewer assumptions about the reality and humans is more likely to be correct.
> Taxes would be avoided to a large extent if such community worked as I explained, obscuring much of inner economic activity. (Some taxes are evaded outside libertarian utopias, after all.)
>
> You say “drain” of value. What about the alleged increase in value (as per libertarian ideas)? What about all the things members could do on their own, and with each other, in such a community?
you have taxes which make these things hard like property tax etc. to pay these taxes, you have to create value and exchange that for the outside money. then you have to pay taxes on _that_. this goes on and on. the state just forces so many big and small payments on you, that you don't have a realistic chance of establishing such a community without breaking any laws. as soon as you _do_ break the magic laws, you'll have people with guns at your doorstep robbing you.
> If libertarian ideas work only within the very narrow confines of a music festival (a couple of days or a week at most, with only a few hundred quids per person at stake, limited to very specific activities), then it’s further proof that libertarian ideas wouldn’t work for society.
i never said they _only_ work in these situations, i only said that those were the closest instances to a free peaceful market anarchy where "the law" is largely absent that i've witnessed.
"i think it’s rather self evident that the idea which requires fewer assumptions about the reality and humans is more likely to be correct."
Only if those assumptions are correct...
Clearly enunciate all those “assumptions” of yours and we'll tell you how exactly they are “incorrect” or incomplete as basis for a peaceful and prosperous society.
/cc @ceoln
My fellow humans are like me in some ways, some of the time. There's a pretty wide distribution on some axes.
I'm not sure who is arguing that there will be widespread rape, murder, and robberies; where was that?
Experience suggests that there would be a significant number of people willing to exploit the system for their own short-term benefit, and that there will be even more people who are just bad at cooperating spontaneously on things that require cooperation; see for instance the bears of Grafton.
All of these things cause trouble in the current systems that we have, also! But it seems facially unlikely that they will not happen in something like an ancap system; so people advocating for that should have some story as to how they would be dealt with, if they want to be taken seriously.
(I was once a libertarian, and decided that there was no plausible story about, for instance, how a small government could control a large organized crime organization.)
@ceoln
the rape & murder was in another part of the thread:
https://qoto.org/@tripu/110140219702295161
> My fellow humans are like me in some ways, some of the time. There’s a pretty wide distribution on some axes.
it isn't about food preferences but "not being asshole". which most people are likely not.
> [..] so people advocating for that should have some story as to how they would be dealt with, if they want to be taken seriously.
so, one would have to account for every possibility?
That doesn't say "widespread", it notes (correctly) that those things happen.
'it isn’t about food preferences but “not being asshole”. which most people are likely not': it's not enough that most people aren't. It's that enough people are that any system that can't deal with them, isn't going to succeed.
Practically any system will work if everyone is rational and kind. We need systems that work in reality.
One doesn't have to account for every possibility, but if a system can't handle possibilities that are likely to occur, it's much less interesting.
Of course! And, imperfect though it is, we have elaborate institutions (including the government) to reduce their frequency, and to mitigate and reverse and undo the bad effects when they do happen.
It seems intuitively that without those institutions, things would be significantly worse. A claim that that isn't true would seem to require a supporting argument.
Collectivist anarchisms of various kinds can generally at least outline some practices of mutuality (for instance) that would take over for at least some governmental institutions.
I'd be interested in what anarchocapitalism does.
@ceoln @tripu
why should it be significantly worse though?
collectivist anarchisms are a oxymoron. how would you enforce the collectivist part? you'd have a body with the "right" to use violence against individuals.
those things are just communism with a fancy name. you can't disassociate from those things.
If the problems are at a given level with lots of countermeasures and mitigations in place, then the natural assumption is that without the countermeasures and mitigations, they'd be worse.
It's possible to argue the contrary, but it requires an argument, not just a "why not?".
Capitalist anarchisms aren't any better; how would you enforce the ownership relations required for capitalism to work?
I think I'll get off the train soon because I don't think we're understanding each other, sadly. No offence, it may be a problem from both sides.
@ceoln pointed out that needing fewer or simpler “assumptions” is no indication that a political system is better than another, or even feasible in the first place. You asked how exactly the assumptions needed for libertarianism are incorrect. I then asked you to list all those assumptions in detail so we can proceed to discuss their merits.
And you answer with a single sentence, a platitude that is rather poetic and ambiguous.
I just don't know what to do with that.
@tripu @ceoln well, i think that either one assumes that the overwhelming majority of people are good and interested in cooperation. that means we don't need someone to rule us.
or one assumes that people are evil anyway. then the "democracies" will be guaranteed to degrade into fascism over time, just because the power attracts the most evil people.
it's that simple.
you just demanded explanations why things would work. the whole point is that i don't get to universally decide that for everyone. things could radically differ as long as you have property, universal nonviolence and as last resort self defense against someone attacking you, your things and others.
We don't need to assume universal goodness, not the opposite. We just look at the distribution of the population. There's so much variation in there.
Both extremes (dictatorship and anarchy) are obviously wrong to me.
/cc @ceoln
It is definitely not that simple; there are far more than two alternatives. And all of the evidence and experience suggests that reality is somewhere between them.
This is the attraction of all ancap and libertarian adjacent theories, I think; they are nice and simple. That is certainly what attracted me to them when I was younger.
@ceoln is reading my mind often throughout this conversation 👍
/CC @bonifartius
@tripu @ceoln
don't "when i was younger" me.
i _was_ commie. after that i _was_ a proponent of "democracy".
there is a war in europe going with only "democracies" participating. democracy forces farmers in the netherlands to close their farms because the nitrogen they produce is supposedly killing natura2000 areas. while democracy is loosening the rules to enable building bird shredding wind turbines near or in natura2000 areas. democracy declared truckers as terrorists for parking, blocking and honking. democracy locked up julian assange, chelsea manning, and many more. democracy bombed and killed millions in middle east, lying to everyone about weapons of mass destruction. etc. ad nauseam.
these injustices and this blood in the name of "democracy" is on my hands, it is on your hands, it is on the hands of everyone.
everything is fine while the chains are long and the collars are nicely padded. they even come in different flavors to pick from!
what are you going to do when you are drafted for WW3 against russia and china? won't happen because "democracy"? that's what the poor ukrainean men put to the front after two weeks of training also thought.
picture millions of young fathers and sons leaving their families at gunpoint, knowing they'll be dead in a few weeks.
i know this will very likely happen to me too. we're already late for ww3. our politicians will be safe. the government thugs rounding up people to send them to war will be safe. they are "essential workers".
countless lives wasted just because people hadn't enough courage to be free.
I regret to inform you that the war you're referring to was started by an authoritarian regime (not a democracy), later supported by yet another authoritarian state (not a democracy). Even if you think the invaded nation is somehow guilty too (I don't think so), if we had to consider that a democracy it would just barely make the cut (it's rather a hybrid regime).
Anyway, all that's pointless. It's very easy to list the stains of “democracy” after centuries of History. It's equally easy to gloss its achievements in the same period. (I take it that you're posting so eloquently while you're sitting comfortably in the midst of a democracy, and that democracy let you be the person you are now, and allowed for you to be so critical and well informed as you are? That surely counts for you!)
Anarchy doesn't even have a track record to compare against.
My "in my youth" was not intended as an attack; I was in fact a libertarian back then.
I understand the anger at the abuses of governments. But the conclusion that therefore if we just got rid of governments, it would be better, does not convince on its own. The people who abuse governments will just as eagerly, and with fewer impediments, abuse a lack thereof.
I was critiquing your claim that "the idea which requires fewer assumptions about the reality and humans is more likely to be correct".
Since that's obviously not true in general. :)
I talk about “prove” and “defend” in the sense of arguing convincingly (or better: demonstrating in practice) that a certain set of political and economic ideas are feasible and conducive to human well-being and flourishing — or at least that they are _better_ for that than _other_ sets of ideas.
“People being just left alone” sounds simple enough. But that is not #libertarianism, because many necessary ingredients are missing there (individualism, private property, the #NAP, voluntary contracts, etc). Also, it is trivial for anyone to formulate a political system with even fewer “assumptions” that we would all agree would be disastrous in practice.
Parsimony is definitely a virtue in descriptive natural science, but not necessarily in prescriptive social science. We're not discussing why homo sapiens came to be what it is, we're discussing what are the best ways to organise complex societies.
I “defend the existence of a state with armed goons coercing you into obedience” (not that I would phrase it that way) only insofar as that's a better state of the world than some given alternative. We don't know of a better alternative to liberal capitalistic social-democratic nations. Whoever defends that a different system would make a better society as a whole needs to provide much better arguments than “my idea requires fewer assumptions”, because the stakes couldn't be higher.
@tripu
> “People being just left alone” sounds simple enough. But that is not #libertarianism, because many necessary ingredients are missing there (individualism, private property, the #NAP, voluntary contracts, etc). Also, it is trivial for anyone to formulate a political system with even fewer “assumptions” that we would all agree would be disastrous in practice.
those things are natural rights until you invent someone taking them. voluntary contracts are the natural state. ownership is the natural state for things you either create or extract.
stirner argues that if everyone decides upon egoism and stands by it, things would be fine.
> Parsimony is definitely a virtue in descriptive natural science, but not necessarily in prescriptive social science. We’re not discussing why homo sapiens came to be what it is, we’re discussing what are the best ways to organise complex societies.
social science has a problem with replication _and_ is done according to the "democratic" system. i'm not aware of research for a better societal construct. there seems to only ibe research for how to fix the shortcomings of our current one.
> I “defend the existence of a state with armed goons coercing you into obedience” (not that I would phrase it that way) only insofar as that’s a better state of the world than some given alternative. We don’t know of a better alternative to liberal capitalistic social-democratic nations. Whoever defends that a different system would make a better society as a whole needs to provide much better arguments than “my idea requires fewer assumptions”, because the stakes couldn’t be higher.
you have people you never legitimized taking things from you by force. if that isn't a racket then i'm not sure what is. if the mob does trash your restaurant after not paying up it's an unjust crime. if you don't pay taxes paying the people who rob and beat you (as last consequence) you are the criminal somehow.
how would _you_ call it?
you seem to limit the choices to has been tested and not failed by now. there are plenty of democracies which failed though. why not try something else without someone in power?
You know what else is “natural”?
The will of the strong upon the weak. Dying of diarrhea. Falling prey to a predator if one's short-sighted. Rape and pillage. Many degrees of servitude and slavery. Spoiling the river for everyone else downstream.
All that is far more natural than respecting the property of others and “contracts”. All that predates ideas such as ownership, non-violence and voluntary agreements, and is found throughout the natural world in both human and non-human animals. Yet we don't defend those things as good in any sense.
It's the “appeal to natural” fallacy what you're invoking.
@tripu that isn't what natural law means.
natural law means deducing principles like ownership from things other than "the king said so" or "some politicians decided that".
But that's exactly what I did.
I deduced principles like pillage, theft and war from things other than “the king said so” or “some politicians decided that”. I deduced then from natural selection, survival, hundreds of thousands of years of evolution, and the fact that those “principles” got us humans so far until relatively recently forms of government, the law, human rights, etc were introduced.
Your own source:
> _based on a close observation of **human nature**, and based on values intrinsic to human nature that can be deduced and applied **independently of positive law**_
Oppression of the weak, rape, and expecting pain and death due to mysterious illnesses fit that definition perfectly.
(And that's precisely my point: rights based on natural law can be wrong.)
“If everyone decides upon egoism and stands by it” is too big an “if” to base the viability of the system upon it.
What if many (or even most) people do not practice perfect selfishness, and feel the moral urge or the religious imperative to act to prevent what they see as disastrous outcomes, *as is actually the case in the real world*?
@tripu then they are free to do that and the egoist wouldn't have much say?
Because they will do that in ways that the egoist sees as interfering with him; as not "leaving him alone".
It would be great if people always engaged only in mutually-desired interactions, and otherwise had no effects on one another.
Given that that is not a thing that happens spontaneously with any reliability, what should we do about it? I think that's the question. The anarchocapitalist answer seems to be something like "nothing, it'll be fine," and that seems implausible?
> Taxes would be avoided to a large extent if such community worked as I explained, obscuring much of inner economic activity.
"Obscuring economic activity" is a felony in most countries. Trump is being charged with essentially this.
So your plan is for everyone in the community to be a felon, and for the larger society to be able to arrest them at any time.
You can see why that won't work.
"anything without ownership (“anarcho”-syndicalism/communism) requires coercion and is not anarchism."
Sincere question: how do you have ownership, without coercion? In what sense do I own my bicycle, if someone who takes it from me cannot be "coerced" by some entity or other to return it?
@ceoln
there's ownership and possession.
in libertarian philosophies you are the owner. you can _decide_ what happens to _your_ things. if those decisions are going to be made reality depends on if you are in possession. if the thief is in possession you still have ownership. this is exactly the same how our western - if not most - states handle things. it also is a pretty old concept in general.
following your line of thought you currently don't own your bike as well.
the thing you did achieve though is that you enabled someone all-powerful - the state - to steal your bike because you didn't pay your taxes. which the state invented. if you want to protect yourself against this robbery you are kidnapped or murdered.
If two people disagree about who owns a thing, what determines which is correct?
In the current society, the government has standards for that, and procedures to fix the situation if ownership and possession get out of sync. This is frequently abused! But it seems better than the alternatives.
Capitalism cannot work if owners are not secure in their control of the capital that they own. How does that work in an ancap system? Where does the required security come from? Assuming everyone will be nice and respect each other's property seems impractical.
@ceoln @tripu
how often did this happen to you?
i once had my bike stolen. that's about it.
how things are done is upon the members of society to handle. that's the point about freedom, you have responsibility to handle things.
relying on the government to fix things will backfire as soon as the next _really bad_ psychopath is in power. those currently are just laymen.
That's why we keep trying to develop better models for government; democracy is better than monarchy, democracy with an independent judiciary is better than one without, etc.
When you say it's "upon the members of society to handle", what does that mean? Can they form guilds? Gangs? Protection agencies? Private armies? Governments? If not, what stops them from doing that?
Help to organize collective institutions to mitigate the problems. Depending on your exact definitions, it would be either a collectivist thing that I suspect you'd count as "communism", or else a government. Or both!
I don't know of an alternative that works better.
@ceoln @tripu
i'd actually do the same, mutual societies are a pretty good idea!
i see no problem in working together, i see a problem in forcing people to associate which is what the "red" anarchies _have_ to do.
with mutualism your property is respected, and you voluntarily give funds for a mutual business (or whatever). pretty cool!
That depends on what you mean by "forcing people to associate". If that means, for instance, "forcing" people not to run off with all the stuff that the association is keeping in the barn, then yeah, we sort of have to do that. :)
Property doesn't get respected by magic; it gets respected when not respecting it, has consequences.
It may be that only 0.1% of the people in the county would do that "running off" thing; but that's all it'd take.
@tripu
Grafton, NH? :)
Thanks for the pointer. I've saved [this article](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling) for reading.
@tripu I feel the answer is pretty obvious, and fairly sad - it's the sociopaths.
Something like one person in twenty is an anti-social personality who seeks to profit at everyone else's expense.
Even in our current world, the Trumps and Musks cause much more than their share of misery. In an anarchistic society, they demolish the whole structure.
i have always thinked that these things are not stable/militarily-defensive against states, but there are some close things:
+ criminal relations: "The Invisible Hook" by Peter T. Leeson covers the pirate case well(theres a funny video version by CGPGrey). It is not a positive picture really, but it covers the economics of pirating and a bit about inter-pirate stuff.
+ regions too expensive to conquer: i think "The Art of Not Being Governed" James C. Scott covers positive stuff. It's on my reading list but i have not read it yet.
+ relations between sovereigns
+ some feudal arrangements might have been very ancap between lords. Poland, Iceland(see The Machinery of Freedom for more on this one)
but yeah, the lack of pure all-private anarchist pockets in the physical world is remarkable
~~But who would build the roa…~~
How would such a society handle driving licences (or lack thereof!)?
Even if courses, examinations, issuing documents, etc were done by private entities, wouldn't you need some kind of central authority to enforce some minimums?