Anarcho-capitalists - Free markets on steroids, Rothbardian lunacy, and other Ancapistan stupidity

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No government? Everything privatized?

It's like these people read shitloads of William Gibson and other cyberpunk novels and said "yes, this is a good world that I want to live in."
 
Anarcho-capitalism is like shitting in the bed: unpleasant to look at, reminds me of a dirty crack-house, smells bad, seems funny at the time, and makes the two formative ideas worse for having paired together.

Anarcho Capitalism: American Libertarianism for Venture Capitalists, Psychotic Cyborg Futurists, Fans of Mad Max, and Edgy Objectivist Libertarians.
 
The only time that anarcho-capitalism works is when you need a setting for a dystopian future. Otherwise, it's even dumberer than traditional Anarchism.
 
Ancapistan debunked. There are some butthurt ancaps in the comment section who don't like this as expected.


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Fun fact: The best example of their ideal world was probably the Indian Subcontinent under the East India Company. It was an unmitigated nightmare for the Indians of course, who had to deal with those "private" armies and the like.
 
Any time anyone proposes any form of anarchy, whether Anarcho-Capitalism or Anarcho-Communism, or any of its other mutations, all I can think of is Somalia and the current situation in Syria. We have modern, current examples of countries with extremely weak or non-existent central (and regional) governments; look where that's got them. Everyone's champing at the bit to run off to the freedom-filled utopia known as Somalia! .....Wait.
 
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Any time anyone proposes any form of anarchy, whether Anarcho-Capitalism or Anarcho-Communism, or any of its other mutations, all I can think of is Somalia and the current situation in Syria. We have modern, current examples of countries with extremely weak or non-existent central (and regional) governments; look where that's got them. Everyone's champing at the bit to run off to the freedom-filled utopia known as Somalia! .....Wait.
About the only level it works at is local, which can work fairly well based on what happened in Spain prior to the Civil War it had. Any bigger and it melts into shit as an ideology.
 
"only liberty, individualism, monarchy, anarchy, and of course, capitalism...."

monarchy and anarchy

monarchy and anarchy

wut

About the only level it works at is local, which can work fairly well based on what happened in Spain prior to the Civil War it had. Any bigger and it melts into shit as an ideology.

Well, yes, I suppose if every human community decides that it is no larger than half of a city block, and every human settlement on earth is essentially its own anarchist collective with absolutely no interference from anyone from the outside then sure, I guess.

EDIT: a bit off topic but my wanderings in Wikipedia alerted me to the existence of anarcho-pacifism which is just :story:. How could that even work? "We won't fight and there'll be no political authoritative apparatus to protect our interests. What could go wrong?"
 
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EDIT: a bit off topic but my wanderings in Wikipedia alerted me to the existence of anarcho-pacifism which is just :story:. How could that even work? "We won't fight and there'll be no political authoritative apparatus to protect our interests. What could go wrong?"

It works if everyone agrees to go with the pacifism shit.

They don't explain how, without a system of governance, you actually educate people to have that set of ethics, though, or why sociopaths wouldn't exploit it and go rogue.

I don't know if these people understand the concept of game theory and that if you have some cooperative strategy, how to discourage people from defaulting when it is in their benefit to do so.
 
Euphoric Timeline.

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Seconds later, a robber came around and held a gun to his head: "Money or life!" Don't-need-no-government-dude frantically reached for his 3D-printed gun and pointed it at the robber's head. "Die, private-property stealing parasite!" he shouted and pushed the trigger. Click. Click... click... click...? Click... BOOM! exploded the gun in his hands. The robber slowly walked away: "Sorry, I don't want your money. You know, I don't steal Bitcoin!"

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The dollar once was tied to the gold standard. Bitcoin is tied to the... um... euphoria standard, maybe?

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You know, anarchy has been tried, and abandoned each time for a grand number of reasons.

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...and mailmen are annoying fuckers who make you get up before noon, and roads are these ugly useless long things all over the landscape, and national laboratories are nerd farms and firefighters make annoying noises with their firetrucks' sirens, etc., etc., etc...

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I support the legalization of drugs as long as there is a government agency to check the quality of psychoactive substances sold legally in smartshops -- just like there is for food and other consumer products. The great thing about drug legalization is that it would make quality control of drugs which are sold possible.
OH WAIT I forgot. Teh gubinmint iz evul. We don't need no gubinmint evar. Companies should be allowed to mix beer with urine and put industrial waste into burgers they sell because the free market is magical.
 
It works if everyone agrees to go with the pacifism shit.

They don't explain how, without a system of governance, you actually educate people to have that set of ethics, though, or why sociopaths wouldn't exploit it and go rogue.

I don't know if these people understand the concept of game theory and that if you have some cooperative strategy, how to discourage people from defaulting when it is in their benefit to do so.

I'm pretty sure AnCaps think the Tragedy of the Commons is a Shakespear play.
 
I never quite understood these guys' point of view, or the differences between them. What exactly are the differences between Rothbardian and Friedman anarcho-capitalists? Is it sort of like communism in that you have Leninism, Stalinism and Maoist doctrines of it?
I can't speak to the differences between different schools of thought among anarcho-capitalists, but for the most part, any branch of anarchism evolved in opposition to communism. Communal anarchists oppose MLM theories of establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat, and especially the Leninist notion of an intelligentsia-based vanguard designed to 'awaken' the revolutionary drive of the lower classes; any form of top down/centralized/rigid government institution building is the enemy.

Without getting into the differences between how the two anarchist camps conceive of 'economic freedom,' anarcho-capitalists take that idea a step further, I think? Basically that even the organization into a commune and/or the basic assumption that you have a societally-imposed (or encouraged) duty to your fellow man, a socially-oriented responsibility, is oppressive in the communal anarchist form, and that any confederation/organization of communes under communal anarchism would just fall straight into the same trap that communism does.

TL;DR - In my understanding, Anarcho-capitalists are very Hobbesian and social-darwinist-y, and anti-authority in any and all forms, so the short answer is that no, you wouldn't have a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist equivalent in anarcho-capitalism
 
I'm still wondering what in Anarcho-Capitalism is going to stop a dude from rallying a bunch of other dudes under his banner, brutally subjugating the rest of the commune, and establishing his own dictatorship.

Anarcho-Capitalist may look down on "Socalist Hippies" but their view point is exactly the same ("People will be good to each other naturally!") except with absolutely no mechanism to protect the good people from the bad people.
 
I'm still wondering what in Anarcho-Capitalism is going to stop a dude from rallying a bunch of other dudes under his banner, brutally subjugating the rest of the commune, and establishing his own dictatorship.

Anarcho-Capitalist may look down on "Socalist Hippies" but their view point is exactly the same ("People will be good to each other naturally!") except with absolutely no mechanism to protect the good people from the bad people.
Pretty sure anarcho-capitalists are anti-communes and anti-pacifism (at least the types capped in these threads, again, I'm sort of out of my depth on this end of the spectrum), it branches out of individualist anarchism which has some pacifist (even Christian) roots in Russia, but it's more every-man-for-themselves shit, and they assume that people/potential dictators won't fuck with others, or won't be able to because everyone else would fuck with them right back because everyone would be more or less armed and isolationist.

The faulty assumption there is that there wouldn't be some necessary resource (oil comes to mind most immediately in the present day; back in the olden days it was typically things like salt and iron that built empires in this fashion) that some dickhole dictator would be able to stockpile and gain coercive authority and build an army and overtake individual resistance.
 
I know that this has been said a thousand times before, but any Goldmanesque "governance without government" proposal is going to fall flat on its face. Who will enforce contracts and private property rights? The competing "law enforcement" militias that many ancaps would want in place would be at constant war with each other until one wins and maintains the monopoly on force, therefore forming a government. Madison was right.

Fun fact: The best example of their ideal world was probably the Indian Subcontinent under the East India Company. It was an unmitigated nightmare for the Indians of course, who had to deal with those "private" armies and the like.
It was a government-chartered (and later government-controlled) company with a monopoly on force in the region, so they'll probably dismiss any criticism of anarcho-capitalism invoking the East India Company on its face.
Anarcho-capitalists are very Hobbesian
If they were Hobbesians, they wouldn't be anarchists or even minarchists. Hoppe might be one of the exceptions to that, but since he endorses monarchy and supports some pretty statist policies (e.g., immigration restriction), I highly doubt that he'd even qualify as an anarchist. He and his ilk are closer to neoreactionaries (many draw their ideas and arguments from him) and some other alt-rightists than most ancaps.
Would these be any relation to Randites?
Yes. I was actually thinking about how sometimes the ancaps tend to crossover quite well with the objectivists. I am sure that objectivists as a whole are something of their own to talk about.
Objectivists are explicitly minarchists and support a state, but objectivism is very rigid and authoritarian for an ideology that claims to allow for the greatest expression of free will. According to objectivism (or Rand's version of it, at least), charity is wrong because it enables parasites, and Israel should be supported above the surrounding Arab states because it's civilized while they aren't. Many people who claim to be "objectivists" are not objectivists but either simple minarchists or ancaps. That being said, I've seen a lot of people get nutty over objectivism. I remember a stupid Internet argument in which someone called his opponent an "objectivist" simply because they supported school vouchers. The latter mentioned that they were Catholic, any religion at all being anathema to objectivism.
 
If they were Hobbesians, they wouldn't be anarchists or even minarchists. Hoppe might be one of the exceptions to that, but since he endorses monarchy and supports some pretty statist policies (e.g., immigration restriction), I highly doubt that he'd even qualify as an anarchist. He and his ilk are closer to neoreactionaries (many draw their ideas and arguments from him) and some other alt-rightists than most ancaps.
I was thinking more in the sense of Hobbes' conception of human nature but you're right, it's not really what the term invokes at first thought. Sorry for any confusion.
 
Just a few feelings I have on these guys...

  • The thing with anarch-capitalists (other than their beliefs are a bit like reverse Communism) is that they tend to fall a bit into three categories: the ultra naive ones, the arrogant ones and the sociopaths (though they can blend together). Yet they pretty much see The Market as an infallible god who can do no wrong and will solve all their problems.
    • And it's never The Market's servants (entrepreneurs, CEOs, etc) fault if they do something bad through their own negligence or greed. Because they can do no wrong and are the wonderful elites. I once came across a guy on a forum where we were discussing this piece of news where a Russian bar owner ignored the inspector's claims of his bar being a fire hazard, ran a fire show anyway and caused the bar to burn where 18 people lost their lives. He then said it was the customers' fault for not learning about the situation instead of the owner being irresponsible.
  • Let's just say that Murray Rothbard's little essay on where children stand pretty much (it's okay to let your infant starve, neglect your kids and sell them off to others) cemented my dislike of the man. To him, they're your property and anyone who tries to stop you is a big, freedom-hating meanie (besides, they can always run away if they want to). As long as you don't beat, molest or force them to go to school.
  • Another interesting thing is how many of them will condemn "A Christmas Carol" for making Scrooge out to be the bad guy because he valued money and himself over people and love. They seem to hate Bob Cratchet for not being like Scrooge, caring more about his family than trying to run a business of his own or making money.
  • It's these sociopathic aspects of this philosophy that makes me unable to support it.
 
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