Topic: The transition to AnCap - page 4. (Read 6697 times)

This is pretty much the soul of my argument, It doesn't really matter where you start, so long as the system is fair.

FWIW, if someone can show, or even give a really good argument as to, the land I reside on being ancestrally theirs and taken by force, I probably would at least give them some manner of reparations.

I can't ignore it. I think it's not logical to advance arguments about absolute respect for property rights in a world where most property was acquired unjustly unless you make clear that it only applies to justly acquired property.

That's why I advocate a gradual transition. I don't think anyone has any idea how to do this, and I don't think the problem will actually arise during any foreseeable transition.

Fortunately, I don't think it matters all that much. The initial distribution of wealth in a fair system won't matter all that much in a few hundred years. But I honestly cannot reject out of hand those who argue for a massive redistribution of wealth as part of a transition to a just government.

It is a very, very thorny problem. And I think advocates of AnCap are doing precisely the opposite of what they should be doing by ignoring or dismissing the transition problem. It's the transition that's the key to a non-violent AnCap, if there's ever going to be one.

So, you don't ignore the fact that nobody's land was gotten peacefully in the first place?

What would be an equitable arrangement for determining property rights, in that transition? Any theories?

I can't find any moral grounds to accept a "flag day" on which everyone who lawfully possess property under the law prior to the flag day is deemed to have moral title to it under the just laws after the flag day. I don't believe that I have just moral title to my house because I acquired such title under the present laws.

For one thing, the laws of the United States of America presently make possible to private property owners only a fee simple interest in property. I'd have to acquire allodial title by magic. No private property owner in the United States today owns their property free and clear. And the folks I bought this property from never had such ownership and could never have transferred to me something they themselves did not have.

If you're going to make a society-wide gift of free and clear property ownership, I can't see how giving it to those who most prospered under the unjust system you are replacing is a sensible distribution plan.

It's a transition problem, of course. It's not a criticism of AnCap itself. My larger point is though is that we don't have to address these issues now. We can't predict what problems we will face as such a transition begins, so it's all just wild guesses. We need a consensus on the direction that we have to move, and then we'll see what goes right and what goes wrong and, with luck, we'll maintain a consensus to move in that direction.

There won't be a great moral victory because the moral claims aren't really right yet. They translate into absolute respect for property rights, and nobody yet has any property rights deserving of that respect because they've not been justly acquired.

Well, you've come to the right thread.

I see two main options, at least in this case. We'll - for the moment - ignore the fact that if you're in the US or Australia, the land your house was built on was probably taken by force from the natives that occupied it, and if you're in Europe, or most of the rest of the world, your land has been fought over more times than we can count.

If you've paid off your house, We don't even need to ask this question, you own the land free and clear, the only people claiming obligation from you is the Tax man, and we won't be needing to worry about him in this discussion.

If you're in a mortgage, that's where the two possibilities come in:

1.: You entered a binding contract with the lender, and that debt still needs to be paid off, though the denomination might need to change, and you might be able to renegotiate.

2.: That contract was entered in bad faith on the part of the lender, and should be repudiated.

So in a transition scenario, either you own your house outright, or you still owe the bank, just you now have to pay it something other than Gov't fiat scrip. (renters still have to pay their landlord, but the landlord might have a property free and clear now, resulting in a reduced rate)

First, I don't think that moral argument works. If I eat a banana, is that using violence to get what I want? Well, yes if it's your banana. But no, not if it's a mine. So that argument translates into an absolutist argument for defense of property rights.

Now, I actually agree with the absolutist argument for defense of property rights. The problem is, it just doesn't apply to the world we currently live in. It puts you straight into the transition problem. Who has morally clear title to "my house"? Well, right now, nobody, and it's not clear how anyone could get it.

There's no compromise involved. I still fully intend to condemn the state when it does wrong. And while I accept that concepts behind NAP, it makes a lousy rallying cry because it's a dishonest version of "property rights are absolute".

+1. Leave your anger issues out of this.

If you are unable to distinguish between self defense and aggression, and don't understand how to resolve differences of opinion without resorting to violence you should talk about these things with your therapist instead of projecting your limitations onto the world at large.

if thats really all that is to libertarianism, its a damn stupid idea. a large enough society cannot exist without violence. at some point, interests always collide. you can declare that senf-defense is justified, but very often there is really no specific line at which you can say its my survival thats threatened or just "what i want".

I mostly agree with your vision quoted above.
My point was that not that much changed for post-soviet people after the death
of the Soyuz.
In fact , even while the USSR was well alive, the environment(culture, economy,
demography) was very different in different parts of the USSR.

The problem with this attitude is that it rejects the moral argument that is central to libertarianism: Using violence to get what you want is wrong. As soon as you allow for a state, you're saying "violence is wrong except when the state does it".

From the Libertarian perspective, after you make this compromise, your fighting the wrong battle. You've gone from a philosophical revolution (war of ideas) to a plain old revolution (fighting the state directly, since you have condoned it's existence and rejected NAP).

roflmao.  I'm not sure where you got this from, but it is literally as dead wrong as it could possible be.

Hitler was immensely opposed to all decentralized forms of government, specifically stripping away the rights of all of the German states and co-opting those powers. 

page 566 of Mein Kampff "[T]he individual states of the American Union . . . could not have possessed any state sovereignty of their own. For it was not these states that formed the Union, on the contrary it was the Union which formed a great part of such so-called states."

Hitler (p. 567) mocked what he called "so-called sovereign states" in Germany because they stood in the way of a centralized Reich with their "impotence" and "fragmentation."

"And so today this state, for the sake of its own existence, is obliged to curtail the sovereign rights of the individual provinces more and more, not only out of general material considerations, but from ideal considerations as well" (p. 572). Thus, a rule "basic for us National Socialists is derived: A powerful national Reich . . ." (emphasis in original, p. 572).

"Certainly all the states in the world are moving toward a certain unification in their inner organization. And in this Germany will be no exception. Today it is an absurdity to speak of a ‘state sovereignty' of individual provinces . . ." (p. 572)

"the cry for the elimination of centralization is really nothing more than a party machination without any serious thought behind it" and reveals "the inner hypocrisy of these so-called federalistic circles. The federative state idea, like religion in part, is only an instrument for their often unclean party interests" (p. 573).

"Since for us the state as such is only a form, but the essential is its content, the nation, the people, it is clear that everything else must be subordinated to its sovereign interests. In particular we cannot grant to any individual state within the nation and the state representing it state sovereignty and sovereignty in point of political power" (p. 575).


Do you need any more than that, or did that do enough of a job of showing you that you need to seriously read your actual history and not come to an intellectual discussion armed with a nerf gun and a bag of overcooked pasta...

Hitler was dead opposed to individual state rights.  As was Stalin, as was Muzzonlini, as was Mao.  There are 100 million innocent bodies on those men.  The religion of statism is not one you should be proud to endorse, since it's got more murder, rape, torture, and destruction in the last 100 years than any and all other religions combined in the history of the human race.

This is where you're missing the big picture.

The dissolving was incredibly signifigant because that's the means by which the rulers dumped the dependent class. The rulers discovered that totalitarian central planning is not an effective method of extracting wealth from the population so they abandoned it for a more efficient (for them) system, and most importantly they defaulted on the promises made to retirees, which were unaffordable even if the rulers cared about paying.

It's a lesson that apparently not many government dependents in the West have learned from.

I'm sorry, but you are wrong here.
Almost all current establishment of post-USSR countries are people from former communist
 governing elite of the USSR. So dissolving of USSR was not a big deal, but formality.
The most important change was "privatizatsiya" == theft of former state-owned property
 by elite clans and affilliated tycoons.

I'm not exactly a minarchist. I know we have *way* too much government now and I know we could make things a lot better by getting rid of most of it. But I don't pretend to know just how much we can actually get rid of. It's entirely possible (though I don't think it's likely) that we get all the way to minarchy and decide we don't need the rest of government. But I'd prefer not to get bogged down in those theoretical issues because there's so much we just don't know.

And tactically, it's better to build a consensus on the direction we need to go and the fact that we need to go very far in that direction. That could make a broad consensus among Libertarians, Anarchists, Objectivsts, and Minarchists possible.

Joel makes some good points, as usual, but he's a minarchist.

You actually wouldn't want to deal with it at that level of generality. Let's say a school wanted to prevent any property installing landmines within 200 meters. (Pretty wise, actually, I'd rather not have my kid blown to bits.) So the school administrators call or visit the locals, conversing with each of them personally. Every property owner within that 200 meters gets a visit, and they negotiate a contract with them. Goes something like this:

Hey, we'd like to ensure the safety of our students, what can we offer to get you to agree to never install landmines?

Once they work out a deal, they'll include a rider where that contract gets incorporated into the next (and all subsequent) owner's purchase agreement.

Problem solved.

You don't run the society at the level of specificity. We don't have to change our societal structures to make a trivial rule and neither would an AnCap society. If people wanted the ability to create such rules, they'd create structures with the power to pass them. For example, in our society, we have homeowner's associations that can pass rules that benefit all the people who live in a particular area. Nothing prevents such organizations from existing in an AnCap society.

However, this gets back to the transition problem. It's hard to see how you can make these kinds of organizations when you don't have them already. Theoretically, 100% universal agreement of every landowner in a region is required. Perhaps you could achieve that by using ostracism and social pressure.

I think most AnCap advocates would tell you that they don't want laws that are that specific. They're happy with a general rule that you can't do anything that poses an unreasonable threat to your neighbors. They don't think we need a law to solve every minor problem. (And that's a particularly bad law because it allows some jerk to set up a one person school right next to a landmine factory and blackmail the factory owner.)

Adolf Hitler was a great believer in "survival of the fittest" and had the different branches of government compete against each other for maximum efficiency. I wonder how well that worked out. Anyone know?

stupid question: how exactly does anything ever get done in an ancap society? i mean, if you already have a community, group or whatever you want to call that entity, that has contracted companies to enforce laws, maintain all the infrastructure, provide schools and whatnot, how to you ever make a new contract, law or whatever? without having voting contracts that turn your ancap into a totally mundane democracy?
how exactly do you maintain total freedom over your property with the need for a society to, at some point, enforce a new rule for everyone?
say for example you want to make it a new rule that its forbidden to have landmines on a property within 200 meter radius of a school.

Anarcho-Capitalism allows for most of the sub-categories to exist within itself, but they have to be on a voluntary level (i.e. you don't get to have your magic uniform going around and skewering people who don't do what you want them to do when you have no moral grounds for making them do it, other than some post-modernist drivel bullshit or some attempt at imposing an outside "morality").

In an an-cap society, it is perfectly acceptable for a bunch of people to try to get together and create a syndicalist neighborhood.  If they are all willing participants in the soon-to-fail experiment (sorry, you just can't rewrite human nature.), that's fine and well.  They get to bear the consequences, good or bad, or whatever way of organizing themselves they have decided upon.  Or let's say you have a sub-division or neighborhood that everyone who buys a house there must sign a behavioral contract, restricting them from doing gaudy things with their lawns or houses, and have to pitch in to pay for 24/7 security and lawcare services.  If I walked into that as a voluntary, non-coerced participant and I decide that it is worth it for me to sign a contracting guaranteeing X amount of my resources per month, then that's cool.

Anarcho-capitalism is about morality and ethics!  Free markets are only a cog in that essential machine - they are an extension of the recognition of inalienable human rights, simultaneously possessed by all human beings by nature of the fact that they are human being.  All of the details are not and can not be up to one group to decide "on behalf" of another, or what not.   The "morality" of those other societal structures and Utopic dreams is not moral if it is blanket applied to all human beings.  It always requires some to be slaves to others at gunpoint, without exception.  Anarcho-capitalism is the highest form of morality because all of its moral axioms can and must be applied equally to all human beings simultaneously.  Within that, you will likely have people doing a lot of really, really stupid shit, like believing that you can re-write human nature, etc.  But you have the right to think that stuff and hang out with and do business with other like-minded people.  An-cap just makes sure I have the right to give the crazies a really wide berth and do business with, be friends with, and associate with people who exist in the rational world...