Topic: Anarcho-Capitalistic Dogmatism (Read 2637 times)

Not true.  Austrian's acknowledge that models can be useful (and have used them) for pedagogical purposes, they just aren't very useful for predictions.

I think Rothbard put it best:


Disagree as well.  The Anarcho-Capitalist position is that no government is superior to any government, which relies in part on economic analysis but is not wholly dependent on a specific model.

The anarcho-capitalist position is not derived from the naïve perfect competition model (which is, as a model construct, useful for pedagogy, but not so when attempting to obtain a more nuanced understanding of the market).  In fact, to get to the anarcho-capitalist position from a mainstream economic model one must simply consider the following:


If you recall, Pareto efficiency means that no change to the situation can be made that isn’t at the expense of any particular individual.  Furthermore, economies tend towards equilibria over time due to trade, which is by definition mutually beneficial.

Therefore, a competitive market will result in improvements in the quality of life for all participants at the expense of nobody (because of trade), and will tend towards an equilibrium that is efficient and where no central planner could possibly improve the situation (because of the First Welfare Theorem), which is tautologically true under certain conditions.

The primary economic criticism of this position is the assumptions built-in to what makes a market competitive and why trade is mutually beneficial.  The former is usually expressed in terms of various points of “market failure”.  But criticizing the market for not being perfect is one thing; the question is, is it possible to create a sustainable system to address market failure?

The first criticism, that market failure can arise via imperfect information and therefore government is needed, is absurd.  Perfect information can be safely ignored without affecting an argument in favor of minimal/no government.  This is because both government and private actors face the same information constraints.  Information, in a sense, can be (and is, in Austrian economics) no different from any other good and service.  Consumers with superior information make more informed choices which leads to better gains from trade, just like producers with superior capital have lower costs which leads to better gains from trade.  There is an incentive to accumulate valuable, practical information in the same manner as there is an incentive to accumulate capital.

Economic accumulation of useful information leads to superior quality of life for the person in question.   Similarly, when it is not worth the cost to gather relevant information, the tendency to do so unnecessarily will be curbed.  As such information (or lack of it) is not a significant constraint on the market except to say that there are always improvements to be made and room for entrepreneurship.  This dynamism is what makes free markets a system and not a state; it has built-in tendencies towards resolving this problem over time since it rewards entrepreneurs who act on these information disparities.

Comparatively, there are less, and weaker, incentives for politicians, voters, and bureaucrats to be as informed, as Public Choice theory explains.  Big Government types invariably carry with them the belief that they know what’s good for you and can fix all the problems; in some (coincidental) cases they might, but there is no reason to believe it is a systemic feature of government (in fact, there is ample reason to believe otherwise when examining history).  People reason that because it’s possible for individuals to criticize a particular state of the market at a particular time (even a seemingly persistent state), this justifies inserting a system of government over top of it.  This is unfounded.  Those who propose such arguments rarely have a coherent and well-designed “system” in mind, only various states they wish to resolve through which they attempt to justify their impractical system.  The failures of the government system are legendary but no pro-government type has taken sufficient steps to resolve this.

Similarly, the “complete markets” assumption can safely be dropped when advocating for a pro-market position.  The complete markets assumption basically boils down to the fact that to the extent that something isn’t traded on the market (particularly as it pertains to future speculations), calculations involving it will tend to be suboptimal and externalities will arise where one group can benefit at the expense of another.  The Austrian response to this is to eliminate said externalities by expanding the market to encompass such things, thereby resolving the problem.

The Statist response is to expand the role of government.  This is even less defendable than the prior position.  Whereas the preceding one is framed as an empirical or pragmatic position (“well if you just elect the right people to enact the right policies…”), this one is a solely deductive critique that fails to make any coherent sense.  In effect, it states: “The market fails to work efficiently when its actors cannot make wholly internalized profit-and-loss calculations over certain goods and services.  We fix this problem by making it harder, impossible, or illegal for actors to make wholly internalized calculations, since we hand the job over to an external party thereby magnifying the problems of externalization.”  The government is just as susceptible to critiques of externalization, given that a given government policy is generally the literal embodiment of externalized costs and concentrated benefits.

An organism is an organism and a tumour is a tumour. A blood related Community is an organism and a Society is a parasitic tumour. It is determined to collapse as soon as the host will be sucked empty. Society is collective stupidity/disease of brainwashed moral cowards, a destructive and self-destroying evolutionary cul-de-sac.

Best regards

FTFY

herzmeister's  metaphor is a good one, the universe like a fractal has a structure and through evolution we can see how single celled organisms cooperated to form multi cellular organisms and those sells specialised to form organs and became interdependent, all the while competing chaotically in balance with the evolution of everything else including the parasites.

It is only through corporation, not predefined rules (or religious dogma) that higher states of conscious being can be reached.  

A Society is not an organism. A Citizen is not a human. A blood related nuclear Community is a (self-sufficient) organism. Society is cancer, collectivism; and all economic interaction (socialist or capitalist) within this tumour is abnormal, dysfunctional behavior and never ever anarchistic.

basically, property rights and non-aggression principle my ass.

Land and property historically has always been the source of conflict, which is quite logical, due to the pressure of expansion.

If you see society as a (micro-) organism, like a (bacterial) culture, which is multiplying and expanding within limited space, you'll realize there is no fixed property that a cell can claim, or that it can expect to be protected in a free or even just cheap way.

Chicken or the egg.

A single human being cannot rightfully "own ALL the land" (in the world, geographic region) without being able to singlehandedly enforce its possession - which is impossible. All else being equal, good monopolies are made possible by collective/voluntary action. Bust the arch (coercion, fraud inherent to governments), and all the bad monopolies lose their armies and funding thereof.

I don't have time to subscribe to or read dogma when I should be making money. Speaking of which, I'm not getting paid for this... /facepalm

Your visceral response illustrates my attempt at identify an Anarcho-Capitalistic Dogmatism.

In response to your point there is a spontaneous order that includes social norms, and if enforced or adhered to without consideration of evidence or the opinions of all others as Zangelbert Bingledack pointed out it requires "Central planning of law".  
Anarchic organisation through social norms will have to evolve and change as humans needs change.

To illustrate:  prior to homesteading, all humans had access to the land and its produce, so by calling it your own and relying on the non aggression principal and the use of violence to deny the rest of humanity and all of nature there inheritance is in itself a very aggressive position, history dictates you need a centrally controlled army to achieve that level of force.

I would hypostasise it was the dogmatic idea of homesteading that lead to the meme of land as property in the first place which in turn lead to Feudalism (land owned by the king and the occupants as serfs or working slaves) - revolutions and dividing it up again doesn't solve the problem you will eventually evolve to the equivalent of the state today.

Once you own all the land you have a monopoly and for Anarcho-Capitalism to flourish you need a system that is free of the ability to create (coerce) monopolies.

A "non-violent occupation" of land is still an act of aggression. Defending against aggression is justified. It is not violent aggression to pick someone up and remove them from their act of trespass. If they escalate their aggression, then defensive violence is justified.

I agree with the above, but would add:

Non-aggression principle = eventual monopoly of land. 

 
I see the principal as a little hypocritical in the light pacifist wisdom, non aggression may be a more productive approach, but defending ones land with violence against non violent occupation is being aggressive. 

Non-aggression principle = Central planning of law

What kind of anarchist doesn't understand spontaneous order? Rothbard got the economics but missed the fact that economics is just one aspect of a more general spontaneous order that includes law, language, social norms, etc. They all functions on the same principle.  Saying that everyone must follow the NAP is no different than saying everyone must charge below a particular rate of interest on loans or that everyone must avoid splitting the infinitive. The legal order in society, like the economic order, isn't so simplistic.

Neither Mises, nor Rothbard were assuming ideal conditions. There was a thought experiment of "evenly rotating economy", but it is only to investigate several ideas before applying them to real world situations. Both of them considered how coercion and other various real human actions change economic structure (Rothbard in a much more detailed and structured way). None was advocating any separate macroeconomic theory. Everything was discussed on a level of individual decisions (micro-economics) and how it may lead to some big-picture patterns.

Anarcho-capitalism, first of all, is non-agression principle. No one proclaims how society should be "modelled" or function. The only idea is to never allow institutionalised violence as a method of "solving" problems. Then, in absence of federal mega-mafia, people can figure out how to live their lives, how to protect themselves, how to communicate and how to resolve conflicts.

I don't see anything "dogmatic" in applying everybody's desire to live in peace to ALL activities in society. Dogmatism is what all other philosophers and politics use when trying to excuse their desire to apply force to achieve their ends.

Yes, especially the anarchocapitalist one. Tribes are selfsufficient.

Anarcho-Capitalists of the strict Rothbardian stripe can be bad, but minarchists take the cake. Minarchism is just a weird transitional phase people go through. Even Ron Paul isn't a minarchist.

All flavors of statism are ridiculous. Yeah, let's have tribal elders over tribes of millions of people. No matter how few their powers or how they are chosen, that is just insane talk.

This post turned into an interesting back and forth between Amanda Billyrock and the Analytic Economist:

Her response is here:
http://amandabillyrock.com/the-truth-about-anarchism/

and the Analytic Economist expands on his original post here:
http://analyticaleconomist.blogspot.com/2013/06/the-truth-about-anarchism-reply-to.html

I'm still swayed by the minarchist arguments, but I need to spend more time with the debate... 

Just like central banks' operation, many things have become so complex and no one really understand how it works, eventually everyone is gambling (from long term point of view)

 

Thanks for actual content,  but being that this discussion started back in 2009 it will take me awhile to get through it all... great discussion so far!!

Insofar as AnCaps like Rothbard claim to know what an ideal society would look like (it would/wouldn't have intellectual property, etc.), they contradict themselves. However, it is entirely unnecessary for an anti-statist to claim they know how society should ideally operate; consistent AnCaps understand that the market (the natural order of society) will determine everything.

Great debate on this exact point:

http://wwww.qjae.org/community/forums/p/10277/273307.aspx#273307

I have read Marx...  I was simplifying/dismissing the Marx comment because I wasn't interested in getting into that argument on this thread I was specifically looking for others opinions on the Friedman/Rothbard issue presented in these posts.

My understanding of Marx's economic and philosophical positions can be summed up as this:
-a historical dialectic grounded in materialistic metaphysics
-a contemptuous view of the results the division of labor has on society
-the inherent class struggle found in a capitalistic political economy due to the division of labor and labor theory of value
-the fruition of these positions resulting in the alienation of man

Now if you want to get into any of these discussions I would be happy to entertain in a different thread, but I would LOVE it if we could keep this post on topic. 

you folks should actually read some Marx before being qualified of an opinion. Not that I agree with most of his work, but when I see ignorant comments like this, like the blind talking about colors, I can't help but wonder why many people seem to need a simplistic strawboogeyman to assert their equally simplistic position.

TLDR,
I got as far as unraveling Milton Friedman, and gave up. I'm ADHD
For me it is about principal the rest is noise.

Keynes isn't the problem. He may not have had Hayek's logic but he understood human greed and spite better than Hayek, and sort a system to manage it. The beauty of Hyaek's approach is it is closer to the order of nature and doesn't need to be managed.

Why you shouldn't dismiss Marx is because his teachings show us how that we need to make the free market work and by eliminate monopolies the tool of greed that screws up the free market. *edit*

Friedman a charismatic friendly spokesperson with a sharp mind, is easy to dismiss on principle he undermines everything Keynes has done to maintain checks and balances in the market, uses Hayek's teachings to prove the free market is the solution but he distils the Keynesian model down to a single point of control and sanctions a monopoly through monetarism, and gives control to elite bankers. While much of his teachings are good he is ignorant to greed and the imbalance he has created in giving control of the money supply as a monopoly to private bankers.

If you have an intellectual problem with the idea of the Fed, you are at odds with Friedman.

Well apparently this is a series...   specifically dealing the with the minarchist/anarchist issue.  The next post is rather interesting...

http://analyticaleconomist.blogspot.com/2013/06/anarcho-capitalistic-dogmatism-part-ii.html

"A general principle to follow when critiquing somebody elses views is you have to properly represent what they have said.  If this principle is not followed you will miss your mark and fail at your endeavor.  There are various degrees to how far a person can miss the mark but if you aim small you will miss small.  At one end of the spectrum you have the complete straw-man where the critical analysis does not even give the slightest impression the critic desired to accurately portray the view under scrutiny.  Usually when this happens it has the distinctive whiff of a smear job and should not be taken seriously.  On the other end of the spectrum you have the case where the critic takes the view under analysis quite seriously and strives to accurately portray it in order to allow a proper hearing.  The judiciously constructed critiques are much more difficult to write because it requires meticulous attention to detail and careful intellectual craftsmanship."

...  I'm not going to get into the comment about Marx, the idea that his work is philosophically enlightening is silly.

But I'm more curious about what anarchists have to say about this matter in that I am on the fence on some of the minarchist/anarchist issues.

That's silly you can be dogmatic in rejecting models... there's a "healthy dose" and then there's complete rejection. 

A healthy dose of cynicism about models can go a long way towards not falling into ANY kind of dogmatism. The map is not the territory.

I suppose I should have read the article linked, I will.
But first in the opening: "Yesterday I read a comment posted by an anarcho-capitalist that was truly mind boggling."

I'd say the author just read something very enlightening, unfortunately didn't link to it, and hasn't yet understood it.

" this anarcho-capitalist has more respect for the reasoning of Marx" this is good news as it opens the door to understanding the problems we are grappling with today.   

There are aspects of economy which are subject to human preference this is what makes Economics a Social Science not a Science.   
Economic models that encompass human preference will need to employ Social Science to derive an outcome, as human preference is subjective the results will be subjected to interpretation of human preference.

Take a monopoly for an example, as soon as the monopolist starts overcharging, human preference shifts, so as not to be overcharged. So it is not possible to create a scientific model of an economy because human preference is a "whack a mole" variable.

Now there are economic laws that are scientific, take the law of supply and demand in determining price for example.  It is possible to argue that supply is not in fact a law, because you can manipulate human preference, by adjusting the money supply and price.

So any economic model that uses variables that counteract laws will be inaccurate and will eventually fail, and thus should be rejected. 

However distill an economic models to the most fundamental level can illustrate simple principals e.g. A scenario to demonstrate supply and demand, defines a law.  It is from this point you can define a scientific model of an economy, and if you do you very quickly learn it can't be modeled, and is best to build on a solid base leaving every individual correcting and controlling his own preference / destiny than to try and control through a central authority divorced from responsibility or consequence.

 Of the fundamentals you list I can understand why one should model on them - except Property rights, I have yet to be convinced. 

http://analyticaleconomist.blogspot.com/2013/06/anarcho-capitalistic-dogmatism.html

"Yet another problem is the Neo-Austrian/Neo-Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist rejects model theory in economics because they believe that models cannot properly capture reality.  So for example, the perfect competition model shows what an economy would look like given these assumptions:

    Infinite buyers and sellers
    Zero entry and exit barriers
    Perfect mobility of goods and services
    Perfect information
    Zero transaction costs
    Profit maximization
    Homogeneous products 
    Non-increasing returns to scale
    Property rights               


All economists realize that these factors do not exist in real-time but nonetheless, it is a theory that can be utilized for advancement of a free society.

Here is the problem for the Neo-Austrian/Neo-Rothbardian anarcho-capitalist; while rejecting models for lack of realism, the perfect competition model IS the anarcho-capitalist theory of society.  This, of course, is highly problematic."


thoughts??...