Topic: How Libertarianism was created by big business lobbyists - page 6. (Read 24009 times)

I don't follow. If there is real superadditive production going on shouldn't there be extra fruit in the end? Maybe I don't know what you're getting at.

Almost all production occurs in super-additive cooperative arrangements. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superadditivity

There are many sources of each single fruit. We cannot divide up a fruit and give a portion to each individual based on their marginal contribution. This is physically impossible due to lack of sufficient fruit. Thus the state comes in to make some laws that regulate fruit division.

I don't see any trickery. It's just that all the other countries seem far less AnCap-ish. There's always a lot of theorising going on, but no real-world examples to back up assertions of AnCap's awesomeness.

It seems plausible that the Singaporean leaders see themselves as a very large shipping conglomerate with all sorts of HR and Marketing chores that keep eating into their profit margins. That would mean there is no conventional 'State' in Singapore, just Capitalism. Does that fit the definition of AnCap, or is the "non-aggression principle" a compulsory part of it?



But that has already been solved. It's not as if there are so many criminals in society that they can't be dealt with. Just create a State instead, which is run by some of the many normal, nice people who are also inhabitants and who therefore have a stake in their society's overall well-being. The 'assholes' tend to be opportunists -- lovers of Capitalism -- who look for profitable niches to fill, such as a power vacuum. However, if normal, nice people lend their support to a friendly State apparatus, then the criminals would have a much harder battle.

It's like "Communism is bad", "Communist leaders enrich themselves at the expense of others", "That's Capitalism", "Isn't capitalism evil?"

Capitalism is simply the belief that one should be able to retain the fruits of one's efforts.

I've said it before. I believe AnCap is a breeding ground for criminal organizations. It's the ultimate petri dish for unethical behavior, power plays, crime, gangs, etc.

That is one criticism which you guys have now admitted to.

Is Singapore an  AnCap society? If not, why are the evils of Singapore being blamed on AnCap principles? There is some sort of logical trick going on there. If two things share a subset of the same properties, then they will share all the same properties, or something.

Also its funny that the main criticism of AnCap (which I agree with) is that there is a threat from assholes who want to create governments... yea, exactly. Thats what we want to figure out how to stop.

This is true enough, if the attacker is okay with using conventional forces.  Not really true if he is okay with a few well placed neutron bombs.

The only way that I can see that an ancap society is sustainable is if the whole world becomes ancap within three generations, anything beyond that and there is the possiblity of an external risk.

An armed populace, with no restrictions on the ownership of weaponry, is the best defense against something like this.

What you are describing is a criminal organization, and it would be seen, and treated, as one. Why should I fear the Mafia when I have my own security force who can, and will, shoot the mafia thugs when they come calling? For that matter, if I can do that myself?

Unfortunately, I can't agree with you on this one, Myrkul.  And this is where I can't make that last step into ancap political theories.  This above statement is true only if the assumption is that the end goal of the threat is to conquer and subjegate a population.  Which is true for most of human history, since that is how value is extracted from subjects.  But it does not deal with the possibility that the survivablity of the incumbent population is unnecessary.  What if the goal is simply to aquire the landmass and natural resources of the incumbent society, and the attacking society has enough of it's own population as to not care whether the incumbent population survives at all.  This is the kind of event we might see with resource wars, should the world's population actually discover a physical limit to the Earth's total sustainablity; or for that matter simply believe they have discovered same.

I've said it before. I believe AnCap is a breeding ground for criminal organizations. It's the ultimate petri dish for unethical behavior, power plays, crime, gangs, etc.

What you are describing is a criminal organization, and it would be seen, and treated, as one. Why should I fear the Mafia when I have my own security force who can, and will, shoot the mafia thugs when they come calling? For that matter, if I can do that myself?

Indeed. So the "threat from outside" and the "someone will take over" arguments have been defeated. With no capitol to seize, no president to assassinate, no power structure for a coup to take over, these things are impossible.

For this particular issue, I think your answer is rather naive. Remember, he has money and guns. He has influence. People want his money. People are afraid of his thug force. It usually works opposite to the way you describe it.

An AnCap society would deal with bad apples that refused arbitration by excluding them. If someone does not play by the rules, you simply don't play with him anymore.

In other words, you can't kill a snake by biting off its head when it has no head. Understood. Terrorism is similar, in many ways.

However, your argument is relying on other components of AnCap which have been pointed out to be flaws themselves. Who will spend the money on 250 million dollar weapons?

Who manufactures them? Who will sell them to you?

Even so, the consumers will not be a centralized force. They will be competing forces.

Why do the competing forces compete? For efficiency, of course, to better serve the consumer. Are they not there to handle disputes among the citizens?

Where does this money come from? The citizenry, of course. But I thought they didn't want to pay taxes, so they'd have more money for themselves! Now they're paying so much to have weaponry for the defense agencies to be effective against outside forces.

We don't live in a world where you get your weapon from a tree outside. Ah, plastic printed guns is the answer, then. Perhaps. I can't totally discount it. More likely, your system will simply have bad apples within. And if they're rich, that's a problem. And if they're sociopaths, they might agitate other nations. I hope your society is not dependent on imports.

And these bad apples? How does NAP deal with them? Arbitration? How does NAP force arbitration? It doesn't. The only thing in AnCap that forces anything is money and guns. He who has power wins. Sounds very tyrannical. And that's exactly what it is. A society whose virtues are the attractors of tyranny.

If a society can't actually be the society it wishes to be due to either internal or external threat, then it's not very viable, is it?

By 1521, just two years after Cortes first laid eyes on Tenochtitlan, the entire Aztec empire—a civilization that traced its roots to centuries before the time of Christ—had collapsed. The Aztecs weren't alone. A similar fate befell the Incas. The Spanish army, led by Francisco Pizarro, captured the Inca leader Atahuallpa in 1532. A year later, with all the Inca gold in hand, the Spanish executed Atahuallpa and appointed a puppet ruler. Again, the annihilation of an entire society took only two years.

These monumental events eventually gave the Spanish control of the continent. By the 1680s, the Spanish forces seemed unstoppable. With the winds of victory at their backs, they headed north and encountered the Apaches. This meeting—in the deserts of present-day New Mexico—is crucially linked with the music industry's fight against the P2P sites. Why? Because the Spanish lost.

They lost to a people who at first seemed primitive. Unlike the Aztecs and the Incas, the Apaches hadn't put up a single pyramid, paved a single highway, or even built a town to speak of. More important for the conquistadors than pyramids or highways, the Apaches also had no gold. So, instead of pillaging, the Spanish tried to turn these people into Catholic farmers by forcing them to adopt an agrarian lifestyle and converting them to Christianity. Some of the Apaches did in fact take up rake and hoe, but the vast majority resisted. Not only did they resist, but they actively fought back—raiding everything in sight that was remotely Spanish.

You'd think that against an army like the Spanish, the Apaches wouldn't have had a chance. But that wasn't the case. As Nevins told us, "By the late seventeenth century, the Spanish had lost effective control of northern Sonora and Chihuahua to the Apaches. The Apaches had successfully wrested control of North Mexico—not that it was ever their desire to do so." This wasn't a single accidental victory, however. The Apaches continued to hold off the Spanish for another two centuries.

It wasn't that the Apaches had some secret weapon that was unknown to the Incas and the Aztecs. Nor had the Spanish army lost its might. No, the Apache defeat of the Spanish was all about the way the Apaches were organized as a society. The Spanish couldn't defeat them for the same reason that the record labels weren't able to squash the P2P trend.

Nevins told us how he arrived at the solution to the mystery. A few years ago, he spent three years living with the White Mountain Apaches in Arizona, studying their culture, observing their rituals, and learning how their society really works. He immediately recognized differences between the Apaches and other tribes: "If you look, for example, at the Sioux—the Dances with Wolves people, right?—they had some degree of political centralization. They resisted spectacularly for short periods of time, but they were really not successful for more than ten years. Whereas the Apaches were fighting this battle for hundreds of years." How did they survive? "They distributed political power and had very little centralization." The Apaches persevered because they were decentralized.