Topic: Anarcho-capitalism, Monopolies, Private dictatorships - page 8. (Read 14919 times)

That's where the debate gets interesting.  I'll write more about that later.

Never looked at it in this way, but you do have a point.

But you will get states anyway. Anarcho-Capitalists have a revolution or something, and society is delivered into a perfect competition of violence.

Though Anarcho-Capitalists are peace loving and think everyone should avoid violence, some people out there don't give a fuck.

Weeks past, bands form, after a few months or years an oligopoly of violence forms. After a few decades... a vast monopoly of violence has formed, and makes sure everyone plays nice. It is essentially a state.

What's the difference from this state that has arisen after an anarcho-capitalist revolution and a subsequently perfectly competitive period of violent turmoil, and the states of today? (at least in the West, many parts of the world are still dealing with unrepresentative state power)

The states today are subject to a long history of mistakes and struggles where state power went massively wrong, had to be grappled with by the people, revolutionized and laws amended, made war for and made war against... movements raised and imperialisms rolled back, workers empowered and sections given the vote... until finally today we have.... Liberal Democracy. Oh well, a long way to go yet.

And the post anarcho-revolutionary state? Well, it gets to start from scratch, starting with the rise of some guy whose second name may as well be Caesar or Charlemagne or something and ending with some guy who may as well be called Mao, or Adolf, or Nixon. All the mistakes and horrors of centuries from scratch.

I say let's evolve the states and fuck Year One, I say let's not smash it all down and start again, I say modify what we have. Improve it, it's worth fighting for and that's why it exists in the first place. There will always be a State, we should take responsibility for the things instead of pretending we owe nothing to history. We're products of history, sick and demented as it is.

The Koch Brothers et al are totally happy for you to throw your hands up in frustration and devote yourself to various solipsist delusions like children that have thrown their toys from the pram. Meanwhile untold millions that have fought and died for the services that the state now render us (where it's previous concerns were only for the welfare of kings and nobles) now roll in their graves. I'm against this.

And it comes down to what the people are willing to accept.  If you have a culture that accepts violence, you end up with a lot of violence.  If you centralize power, it makes it that much easier to make even more violence, and harder to stop.  If people do not accept violence, then a centralized system it still is hard to stop, but at least it can be possible.  It is virtually impossible to make it very far with violence.

Agreed.  Local violence used by individuals, with their own means, is certainly less dangerous than global scale industrialised violence from States, financed with taxation.

States have used tax money to design nuclear bombs, do genocides and so many terrible stuffs.  In many ways, twentieth century history is much scarier than any MadMax movie.

On one hand you have states:



And on the other hand you have anarcho-capitalistic icones:




Now, is anarcho-capitalism really scarier ?

But if the main fork goes down a bad path, then forks become desirable.  If there was a critical problem in the Bitcoin protocol or an improvement to be made, a fork would be a good thing.  But no one is forced to use any individual fork, so whatever is best will tend to win out.  But sometimes there is room for forks.  See: OpenOffice.

Free competition doesn't mean that everyone is a producer of the good.


You don't want to worry about the complex process how the materials for your computer are gathered from all over the world, turned into components, assembled and finally delivered to you. You don't need to, you just buy it. Granting a violently enforced monopoly to computer production would ruin the industry just like state has ruined justice.

Monopolies are only a bad thing in a propretarian economy, because there they often exclude people from using capital in a more efficient way than the owner of that capital.

In a non-propretarian economy monopolies can be desireable.  One example is open-source software. Too many forks can be detrimental. It's better if everyone just sticks to ONE standard.

Bitcoin too could become a monopoly, even if nobody really owns or controls the Bitcoin protocol.  IMO that would be superior to several competing block chains.

The other thing is, the most violent gangs and criminals absolutely dwarf the level of violence that the state has been able to get away with.  Look at how many people have been outright murdered by states.  Compare that to all regular criminals in history, including gangs.  It's not even a close comparison.

While most states can rule people peacefully and with their will, occasionally states turn so bad and violent that they absolutely slaughter millions of people.  I'm willing to deal with Mad Max if it means no Pol Pots, no Stalins, no Hitlers, no Bushes, no Trumans, no Qadaffis, etc...

True, everybody would like to live in a peaceful society, with no gun or any other kind of violence.

But not at any price.  At some point if the oligopoly of violence asks too much to the people it is supposed to protect, then individuals get weapons and reorganize distribution of force.

So if we have to step towards a Mad Max or Clint Eastwood society in order to get rid of the scumbags who spoil every single inch of freedom we desire, be it.

I think you're being naive. Gangs co-exist peacefully for long periods of time because balances of power set in.

Wishing for Peace and Love is all very well but does not accord with human realities. There's always going to be somebody that didn't get the memo. Violence exists, it must be dealt with. Frankly I'd rather leave that sort of thing to the police force. I also insist that said police force be accountable to me and my peace-loving fellows, minorities and majorities and all.

Sweet, a Mad Max reference, never seen that before.

Violence is very counter-productive for society.  Most people can interact peacefully and gain more by being peaceful than by being violent.  Uninitiated violence is *never* just, and the more people that believe that, the better.

Hell, even gangs, who cannot settle conflicts peacefully in the legal system, are able to get along peacefully for a long period of time, handling disputes internally.  Of course this doesn't work very well since they have no legal recourse for their disputes, so violence is the only answer in that case.

If people believe violence is ok, you will live in a violent society.  If people believe violence is wrong except in the case of defense, then you will live in a peaceful society.  What's the problem?

Exactly. Most states have a monopoly on violence and people accept the premise of such a monopoly existing. For most people the question is how the monopoly is run and to what end, who controls it. Most people do want there to be a body on whose authority "laws" are created and enforced. In times past the say-so of some king was enough but no more. Now most people want laws to be created and enforced in democratic processes and they don't want private wealth or religious leaders etc to have more say in this process.

Well, you can have a perfect competition of violence, a kind of every man for himself situation, which will inevitably become an oligopoly of violence, warlordism basically, which would eventually may become a duopoly of violence before finally settling into a monopoly of violence.

Most people prefer at least an oligopoly of violence, because then they don't have to worry about violence as much and can get on with gazing at the stars and wondering what's out there, studying pond-life under microscopes, building and growing stuff and thinking up new ways to buy and sell things in shops or whatever.

If you want to live in a perfect competition of violence, good luck to ya.

There is nothing wrong in a monopoly, as long as it is obtained legetimately, ie. without violence.

Google for instance has almost a monopoly on web searches.   Does anyone complain?  No.  Because searching information on the web is just something that they do better than anyone else and that is why they have a monopoly.  There is a demand and they satisfy this demand.  Where is the problem?

+1

The Voluntaryist insight - "All power ultimately derives from consent, whether it be willingly given or based on reluctant compliance or that derived from strict enforcement of governmental law."

The state monopoly of legal violence is there only because enough people accept it. It's not like the state (or a private company) could violently keep all the citizens under its power.

All, I highly recommend reading this article. Don't be put off by the title, the point is that it makes no sense to talk about "anarcho-capitalism" or "anarcho-socialism", there is just anarchy, which is incompatible with preconceived notions of how such a society would function. I think the author makes a good argument that such large accumulations of capital as we have today would not occur, due to unsubsidized costs of protection. Combined with a population more or less agreeing that statism is undesirable, which is achievable through conversation and education, I think anarchy is sustainable.

Why will a monopoly of violence always end up forming?  If so, it's not an anarcho-capitalist society.  Is it possible human's can never be convinced of that? Possibly.  But I don't argue something based on what people may or may not do, I argue based on what is best, and if people are convinced, then it will happen, otherwise it won't.

All I'm saying is a monopoly of violence will always end up forming, anarcho-capitalistss and anarchists both seem to not get that. I don't conflate the two as they are very different, but they both seem to believe in the possibility of a power vacuum. Libertarians are slightly better except they believe in a simplistic faux-human sociopath-Randist type being that can accurately be described both as 'Homo-Economicus' and 'wanker'.

For me the question is who controls the monopoly of violence (aka the state). Private share-holders, or public stake-holders?

I'm a public stakeholder man myself. Everyone gets an equal stake in the state, and that stake's worth something, a decent education, decent healthcare (and not just some shitty American style medicare or something), decent roads and housing and an essential amount of income whether you're rich or poor if you need it and the right not to be victimized by said state or anyone else within its borders.

There's plenty of space left over in a society like that for surpluses and business models and profits and private swimming pools and the like.