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Libertarianism, Anarchism, and Society with Voluntary Self Governance
Posts
Well, when people eat contaminated food and die they won't buy food anymore, so profits will decrease, and so the free market will solve the problem.
I mean, the strategy worked for cigarette companies, didn't it? They were a harmful product that made people ill, and so people rationally chose to stop consuming the product that harmed them.
I wasn't.
He specifically said that we ALL have been pretty rude.
I think the counter-argument is that there's not much of a healthier alternative (if you do decide to smoke, which a libertarian would believe is completely your own decision... second-hand smoke be damned). If you have one stand selling salmonella lemonade, and one stand selling salmonella free lemonade, people will naturally decide to go to the salmonella free stand. The salmonella stand would then be forced to compensate by getting rid of the salmonella, or they'd go out of business.
The counter-point to that, that there might not be an alternative stand (or that all the stands might work together and all decide to use the salmonella lemonade to keep everyone's costs down) is usually kind of handwaved away. "The government is making the entry barrier too high, that's why we don't always have an alternative!" or things like that.
There's also the point that one should not have to contract salmonella to discover a stand is selling an unsafe product.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
But to prevent them from getting salmonella, someone would have to sacrifice some freedom.
my unofficial autobio will be accompanied with tips on how to smile
cause I've found that when they don't see you frown, they never know that you're a threat
and they don't sweat you when you came around
My favorite part of libertarianism is listening to all the things that "the market" does.
Positing predicates / volition onto a non-entity is adorable.
Edit: In the same way that anarchists are adorable, since, for them, The State does things.
Oh, there's an alternative stand, just no way for you to tell which is free of salmonella. It's not like you can identify foodborne illnesses by sight, you have to see how the lemonade is made, and in the absence of enforced top-down regulation the lemonade company has every incentive not to let anyone see that process.
Historically this sort of situation has led to the rise of private regulatory agencies, and historically private regulatory agencies have been a disaster every time they've been put into place. The company that wants approval will simply go from regulator to regulator, firing any who won't certify them until the only regulators left are the unscrupulous ones. We've seen this in pre-FDA America where snake oil salesmen and the sorry state of the meat packing industry forced that particular government agency to come about. More recently we've seen it in businesses like Enron and, soon after, the financial collapse. You can't have a private business dedicated to evaluating a particular entity, when their primary source of income is from that exact entity.
Again, there's no need to speculate because as a society we've done this experiment. Read about the snake oil abuses of the late 1800s. Look up Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle" and the effects it had. Without the evil government there's no way to know whether the bottle you're buying off the shelf contains Aspirin or Rat Poison, and prior to the establishment of the FDA the answer was always "whichever is cheaper."
I'm curious. Would hardcore libertarians argue that one could, in principle, rationally discern which lemonade stand sold poison lemonade without having to watch people die? Or is the idea that no one would sell poison lemonade, because it's an unsustainable business model (ignoring snake oil salesmen)?
The thing to understand about libertarianism is that it's largely based on Keynesian economics, which assumes perfect information by all parties. In the libertarian economic model there's simply no concept of a consumer who lacks perfect information about the product they're buying. As with most libertarians, you'll get a split of wishful-thinking types who believe the free market will regulate itself and sociopathic Randroids who'd argue that people who don't "do their research" deserved to get sick and die anyway.
In practice we don't live in a world of perfect information, and there's no reasonable way for a person to know how much lead is in the paint on the toy they just purchased. But for those who subscribe to Keynesian economics the idea of consumers making uninformed decisions en masse simply doesn't enter into their world view.
Oh. Well. Problem solved, then.
You don't have any clue what you're talking about do you?
A: No, you don't.
Protip, libertarians hate Keynes. And they hate him largely because he
A: Proscribed large public spending in order to cure recessions
B: Did not believe in perfect information or perfect markets.
Which argument?
"You're all mean and won't agree with the nice anarchist"?
Perhaps reading through your posts a few times before finalizing them would be helpful to you in the long run, Chaos Theory. I say this because I've noticed in the quoted post here, that you employ manipulative passive aggressive language in your presentation. You call out others as being rude or insulting(without quoting said behaviour, making it an empty accusation), and pepper your paragraphs with insinuations of lower worth to those who spend their time here arguing as an enjoyable or fruitful endeavor. It's fine if being part of an internet community is something you're not interested in, but I'm sure you can recognize that there are those who are, on this forum even. So when you say things like 'piss away my time' or 'I used to do it when I had time in high school', you're implying that those who do participate on a level you do not, are somehow wasting their time, you're being condescendingly judgmental in your language use. I'm saying this is in part manipulative, because I don't think you're totally unaware and have chosen to use this type of weaker strategy in conjunction with victim hood to employ some sort of shame tactic.
I think what you may remain unaware of is the ineffectiveness of your chosen strategy. For one, it's quite transparent, and on another note those who are posting here are astute in the ability to discern genuine argument and light trolling.
This could in part come from the confidence breaking of arguing against multiple opponents, but if you really feel passionate about your beliefs it may be prudent to stick with it even in the face of adversity.
This.
If you aren't willing to maintain an argument when presented with opposition, then you've stated that your argument isn't worth maintaining.
And if they went to several lemonade stands, the salmonella stand could go "wasn't me, it was totally the other stand". Forcing consumers to guess which stand gave people salmonella. After all how a lemonade stand makes it lemonade is a trade secret. You don't have a right to force them to reveal proprietary business information just because some other stand gave people salmonella.
By the way the secret ingredient in our lemonade is love
This is something libertarians generally don't really care about and is therefore unfortunately a pretty ineffective argument against them.
"They freely chose to expose themselves to a situation they knew could result in their getting salmonella."
Right?
Do try to stick the flounce. Otherwise you just come across as a five year old who shouts "I'm running away from home!" and then, when his parents don't react with panic, stands on the porch yelling "I'm REALLY leaving this time!"
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replaced by JPEGs.
The mapuche had a state though, simply not one which had massive centralized authority. There are plenty of examples of that throughout history, where a group of loosely assosciated tribes had minimal laws applying to all and local laws set by a chief. These chiefs had been selected in all sorts of different ways, from hereditary ruler ship to selection by elders. However, its still a state, the abundance of resources and uniform population just means that the state doesn't have too many big disputes to resolve. Furthermore, the legions of incas pouring over the river probably served to Focus the mind on external concerns rather than stealing Jim's corn. However, like every other society like this eventually their natural barrier was overcome and the lure of more specialists and better stuff led to integration into a bigger society.
I took a gen ed. once which was entirely guilty of this. Since it was just to fill in gen. ed. requirements I was entirely disruptive during it, since the guy lecturing couldn't get through more then 2-3 sentences without using sweeping generalizations to deride the current state of world affairs, and then suggesting it would be fixed by applying the principles of some really specific small-town/native tribe, and thoroughly glossing over the obvious places it falls down (i.e. what happens when participants in your "reciprocity economy" disagree on the relative value of something).
That actually isn't a problem. The real problem is "how does one reciprocate with someone they will never see again?"
States didn't just spring up into existence. When civilization started, individuals joined up into communities. Those communities, over the course of history, have formed/transformed into what we call states, and it has been/still is an iterative process. No, we don't live in a perfect system, but we sure live in a better system than a century/a millennium ago. While over the course of history many states' goals have been domination and conquest, that has also been true for many single tribes. Likewise, especially in modern days, states like America, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, etc. have (for the most part) their citizen's welfare in mind. That isn't their sole motivation, but we're quite ahead of "lets conquer the world!" mentality, especially when we consider that ideologies who openly tried to (fascism, communism (not so much the ideology itself, but it's latest proponents)) have lost that battle.
Anarchists like to throw around the word "freedom" around in the hope that it will automatically make their cause seem good and just, but the concepts of human rights is just as important to everyone, and sometimes some freedoms must be sacrificed to preserve basic human rights. An oversimplified example: we as a society have sacrificed our freedom to murder people to preserve our right to live.
Freedom is nice, but one's freedom ends where another person's begins, and not every person has the same interests. Freedom is also a highly abstract concept, completely dependant on one's interests and desires. Someone in the USSR who completely agreed with the government was essentially free. Someone who didn't wasn't.
Wherever, whenever centralized authority has been too little or completely absent, whether we're talking about when people lived in tribes, or about a modern day government collapse/power vacuum, X group's interests end up clashing with Y group's (their freedom ending where the other group's begins), and almost every time one ends up wiping out the other, because there's always someone unwilling to sacrifice his personal view of freedom for the benefit of the other.
No, not everyone is like that; most people, as some libertarians/anarchist say, are inherently good. But not all people are, and it takes a lot less people to fuck up a good thing than it takes to make it work. This is essentially why people defend the idea of a State, and would rather improve it rather than get rid of it. A centralized authority, representative of all it's diverse groups, will do a way better job at making them coexist than the alternative.
Using a single tribe, or a factory (hell, I think most people here agree that traditional management styles in companies are outdated and inefficient) as an example of "working" anarchism is not a valid argument against the necessity of state, because you're talking about a single, homogeneous group of people. We're not saying that communities of people who agree with each other needs a centralized authority, we're saying that multiple groups with conflicting interests need it. I may not need the government to cook breakfast for my family, but I do need it to build roads/inspect food/protect borders/enforce laws etc.
Also, notice that a lot of people have characterized a world where government wasn't needed as utopian. People aren't arguing that the abolition of state would be bad in a perfect world. They're saying that the abolition of state in the real world would have horrible consequences, as history has shown us.
Simple enough, just issue reciprocity tokens whose value is set by a central voluntary committee. They would of course need the authority to prevent forgeries and control the number of tokens minted. People could use them to easily track the value they had created and consumed.
Don't call it money though! Or mention a government backed central bank!
I was just about to say that from what Chaos Theory has been throwing at us, he is a syndicalist, not an anarchist, and Anarcho-Syndicalism is about as anarchist as the DPRK is democratic.
That's because most anarchists who fight back have no idea what they are doing. Just look at the OWS movement.
'The State' isn't some abstract evil, just look at the Vietnam War or the current wars in the middle east. How many thousands have died to catch one man who was never even convicted? Look at the Battle of Blair Mountain and the Civil War. May Day is coming up, most people don't even know what it's about. Look at the war on drugs and the actions of the CIA (who have admitted in congress that they back several of the countries largest street gangs). Look at all the cases of police dealing heroin to communities who then have to work to get it out of their communities.
Just because 'The State' does some good things that doesn't excuse all the evil they are guilty of and are never punished for. People feel helpless in fixing these problems because to get proper representation would require changing the constitution, but how do you do that if you can't get proper representation? Some are trying to call a constitutional convention but that requires getting the states on board and that requires proper representation which people can't get. So some, like the Weathermen, in their desperation and adherence to non-violence, blow up desks and walls and cars.
>One last point, this time rhetorical and not logical: You keep insisting and insinuating that we are indoctrinated. Yeah, so what?
The indoctrination is pretty blatant, and it's dangerous. It starts in kindergarten, you pledge your allegiance every day, write essays on how great the US is, you're told that your country is the only true free country, and then people are surprised when you get those crazy right-wingers. It's literally fascism, creating mindless drones who obey the state without question is what the prussian school system was made for.
When I refused to salute the flag in kindergarten I was yelled and physically forced to stand and salute. When I wrote my essay on why I didn't think America was the greatest country I got yelled at and got detention. This didn't end with just American patriotism, I was actively discouraged for thinking for myself in school many many times.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2012/3/8/humans-are-nicer-than-we-think
Studies have shown time and time again humans are naturally non-aggressive, empathic, and sharing. Studies have also shown that people will do horrible things they never thought they would do if ordered and threatened with violence.
It's not a conspiracy, people honestly think we need a state and so it keeps coming back almost every time they mange to overthrow it. If you look at the few instances in history where the state was successfully crushed and people returned to anarchism, people enjoyed much more healthy non-violent lives. A few examples off the top of my head are ancient Caananite cities and England. In ancient Caanan there was a massive uprising of the poor and working class and they completely destroyed their ruling class. They then returned to an agricultural life style. In England this happened as well. When Europe invaded they took the land and forced everybody into cities by making it too expensive for them to live an agricultural lifestyle.
During European feudalism, which enabled more freedom than the earlier empiricism, people lived more agricultural lifestyles and increased the average lifespan from 28 to 30. People were also safer and militias usually consisted of voluntary members, wars tended to be smaller because of this.
Yes let's look at that. Two communities when in unable to reach agreement over scarce resources attacks each other and creates a blood bath until the federal government shows up with troops to stop them.
And are you ever going to explain how, if there is no central authority to enforce rules, your system would not result in another Guilded Age? The era that was the very product of the government letting people doing what they want.
This also false. When people are threatened they generally resist following orders. When they think they're doing something for the greater good though then they will do terrible things.
Wow, what kind of crazy kindergarten did you go to?
Anyway, your argument cuts both ways. Just because the state does bad things doesn't mean we should ignore all the good it does. You're making a compelling case for some important reforms, which I don't think anyone would disagree with. We should talk about that! But you're not making a very compelling case for anarchism. In fact, you're making a very good case that most anarchists are just aimless, angry youth who are dissatisfied with things in general but don't want to take on the responsibility of coming up with something better, so they just resort to thuggery and petty crime. Which certainly contributes to the negative image that most people have of anarchists.
And maybe they are getting proper representation, there just aren't very many of them. Which is frustrating, I'm sure, but them's the breaks.
Actually, there are several landmark psychological studies that show that people will do horrible things they never thought they would do, absent of any threat of violence.
For example, the Milgram experiments did not involve any threat of violence to the subjects whatsoever, yet in those experiments people were willing to administer what they thought were lethal electrical shocks to unseen victims simply because an authority figure ordered them to.
People can be non-aggressive, empathic, and sharing towards certain people, especially those they know personally and are in close contact with, but once there's any amount of psychological distance or deindividuation, that empathy and compassion flies out the window. Hence, the issue of translating non-hierarchical, anarchist-style organizing from small groups to larger societies.
The first part of your post is horribly incorrect, I don't think I'd be able to explain it to you your misunderstanding of the situation is so wrong. The second has already been answered:
>For example, the Milgram experiments did not involve any threat of violence to the subjects whatsoever, yet in those experiments people were willing to administer what they thought were lethal electrical shocks to unseen victims simply because an authority figure ordered them to.
And of course there was the whole genocide of the Jews who for the most part didn't fight back, and almost none of the soldiers protested.
This is because of the protest culture that came up in the 1900s. It's caused a lot of confusion and in-fighting among activists. This is starting to change and anarchists are becoming more organized. That's a long complex discussion though.
>And are you ever going to explain how, if there is no central authority to enforce rules, your system would not result in another Guilded Age? The era that was the very product of the government letting people doing what they want.
There's a lot of confusion here on what the Gilded Age was. The Gilded Age is a brilliant example of crony capitalism run amock. There was plenty of government, it was just in control of the rich capitalists. Just look at The Battle of Blair Mountain, the mining companies had the sheriffs and judges completely under their control, and then the federal government came in and started killing the protesters rather than the mining companies.
Central authority is the problem, not the solution.
So again. After fierce fighting between two forces a central power is what stopped it.
You said capitalism would prevent it. That is not an answer. Capitalism with no government regulation is what caused it.
Which was done by people believing they were doing what was best for their country. So... your still wrong?
Aside from the grammatical oddity of this sentence, this isn't really an appropriate way to argue with someone. You aren't saying anything aside from 'I'm right, you're wrong'. If you are confident in your knowledge and understanding of the matter you're discussing, it shouldn't be too difficult to explain to the opposition. You're employing transparent rhetorical strategy, and it doesn't contribute anything to your argument.
That's not state policy though. That is the behavior of the people/community you lived with, and getting rid of the state won't solve it. They might replace "USA" with "anarchist communty #143", but their behavior will remain the same. Which brings us to:
Yes, most, but not all. State or no state, there will be violent people, and that will scare other people into committing horrible actions or using violence to try to control people (like those who'd physically force you to salute). Those situations are amplified, not lessened, by a lack of central authority, because people will feel more threatened in said scenario. When there's a sudden power vacuum in a country, people don't start holding hands and singing songs: they loot/harm/hurt each other. A very small amount of those because they're violent thugs, and a very large amount of those because even though they're normally good people, they get scared shitless of those violent thugs and start acting on basic survival instincts.
It seems to me like you're blaming "the State" for individuals' behaviors, and then proceed into saying we should trust those very same individuals.