I don't deny objectivity exists. In fact, I'm defining law in such a way that it can be objectively measured as opposed to your pet definition which relies on moral standards which are fundamentally unprovable. I don't mean to be rude but what's going on here is you're having a hard time differentiating fact and opinion.
A show trial is a show trial regardless of what the law says. If the outcome was predetermined and the trial is just done for appearances, then a show trial it is. How I feel about them is irrelevant to what they are. "Good" or "bad" never enter the equation.
The law is what the law is regardless of whether it is just. If the action incurs punishment on the part of the dominant power structure, then a violation of the law it is. How I feel about them is irrelevant to what they are. "Good" or "bad" never enter the equation.
I've taken the time to carefully re-read everything you've said so far and I think that, at this point, it makes sense to lay out your position syllogistically:
- The nature of law
Premise A: Law is whatever rules are consistently enforced by the dominant power structure.
Premise B: If rules cannot be enforced, they are not law, only requests.
Conclusion: Law is an observable social fact, not a principle.
- Law vs justice
Premise A: Justice is a matter of moral judgment, dependent on an ethical framework
Premise B: Law is independent of justice, since it is defined purely by enforcement
Conclusion: Something can be law even if it is unjust (Nazis, Taliban, slavery)
- Property
Premise A: Ownership is not an objective category, but a rule convention
Premise B: Without a central arbiter, boundaries are only as valid as your capacity to defend them
Conclusion: Property reduces to "what you can hold onto", not an independent principle
- Aggression
Premise A: Aggression is dependent on perspective, tyrants see themselves as defending, just like their victims do
Premise B: With no neutral third party, "who aggressed" is indeterminate
Conclusion: Aggression is arbitrary, not objectively nameable
- Enforcement and gangs
Premise A: Principles only matter insofar as you can enforce them
Premise B: Enforcement capacity scales by wealth and followers
Premise C: This inevitably produces gangs with monopolistic power
Conclusion: Stability requires monopoly of force, which produces more objectivity than dispersed enforcement
As far as I can tell that seems to be the framework you've been proclaiming throughout the thread. Can you confirm that this is in fact your position? In case I misrepresented it, please correct the syllogisms where you think they go wrong.
What stops people in an anarchic system from getting together and just forming a state?
In the sense of preventing association, "nothing" stops them. People have the freedom to pool resources, build rules, and even claim authority. The thing that anarcho-capitalism rejects is this claim giving them legitimate jurisdiction over unwilling others. They can go and call themselves a "state" if they want, but unless outsiders accept their demand to rule, it's nothing but another gang trying to expand.
What stops that group of people from using their collective resources to strongarm individuals into joining that state, possibly through use of violent means? (Although more likely by economic benefit).
The same thing that stops any aggressor. Resistance. If they try to impose their will by coercion, these people cease to be "progressive community organizers" and become aggressors. It is precisely for this reason that defense, alliances, insurers, and mutual defense pacts exist. "What stops them?" presupposes that aggression automatically succeeds. In practice, force is met by counter-force, and nothing about calling yourself a "state" makes your bullets fly straighter.
What would a collective of individuals resisting such an enemy collective attempting to force their statehood upon them be called?
Exactly what they are, people defending their property and liberty against invasion. If you want a label, "self-defense association" seems appropriate.
I never got the whole ancap thing as anything other than a larp, since no one is really stopping you from living out your ancap fantasies except the rest of civilization. Cooperation is the natural state of humanity, and whether that coalesces as family, corporate, or democratic power structures, 2 dudes with sticks beat 1 dude with stick 90% of the time
That's not an argument against anarcho-capitalism. It's a truism about physical conflict.
The question isn't whether force exists. The question is whether law is defined by force (as you seem to assume, and others are arguing by) or whether force is evaluated against an objective principle (the anarcho-capitalist position). If you collapse the two, then every successful gang in history was "the law" simply because they won.
You said it yourself, cooperation is natural. And that's exactly what anarcho-capitalism is. People are cooperating through property, contract, and voluntary association. What isn't natural is a monopolist claiming the right to speak and act for everyone else without their consent. If you call that "cooperation", then mugging is sharing.
@XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG Mr. AnCap, I have a question for you: how do you prevent your country from being filled with drug addicts, prostitutes, and illegal immigrants if all of those things are legal?
What irks me is that you're bundling three very different things under "legal".
Drug addicts and prostitutes are examples of personal behavior. If these people stay on their own property or in venues where the owner consented to their entry, that's their choice. If they bring it onto your property without your consent, you exclude them. That's what property boundaries mean. There exists no "right" to be in someone else's home, business, or community against the owner's will.
Immigration, on the other hand, is not a state policy. The concept of "immigration" only makes sense when a state exists, because one can only "migrate" through state borders. Under anarcho-capitalism, every border (or rather, property boundary) is private. You admit who you want and you exclude who you don't. Mass importation of people against the wishes of residents is literally only possible because the state overrides the will of the property owners. Without that machinery, there simply is no way to flood millions of people into unwilling towns and communities.
So the "prevention" mechanism is the same across all cases. Property rights. You decide who and what is allowed on your property, as do others, and disputes are settled by contract and enforcement. What you don't get is a central authority forcing everyone to tolerate or subsidize what they reject. No such thing as forced inclusion and no such thing as forced exclusion either.
You keep circling back to him. But in your example, Khalil is not "an institution", he's just a thug. All you achieve by calling Khalil an "institution" is to baptize brute force with a fancier name.
The whole point of anarcho-capitalism is that Khalil's violence does not become
law just because he has a gang. You can call it power, you can call it coercion, but it is not authority. That's the critical difference.
Look, I'm not a retard anarchist who says ABOLISH ALL HIERARCHIES!!11
Hierarchies of competence, wealth, reputation, and voluntary following have always existed and will always exist, there's nothing wrong about these things. But from that it does not follow that coercion deserves to be canonized as legitimate government.
One of the biggest criticisms of an-capistan is the fundamental lack of an institutional immune system
What makes you think the state is the vaccine against Khalil? In reality, the state was the carrier that brought Khalil into our communities. Every government in history has been Khalil with better branding. A gang saying "we are the institution, therefore our thuggery is law". I don't see how you solve the Khalil problem by putting him on a throne, giving him a uniform, and telling the rest of us that his decrees are sacred.
Are you perhaps laboring under the misapprehension that ancaps deny that Khalils exist?
All we ancaps deny is that Khalils have any rightful jurisdiction. They can be resisted, punished, and excluded just like any other Shlomo. And really, what you're calling "institutional protection" is really just asking for a bigger Khalil with a more extended magazine to make sure he gets to rule everyone.
the mother of idiots [is] always pregnant and [will] try grooming some of her sires for political aspirations.
I agree. Then what is your excuse for not realizing that the last place you want idiots in is a monopoly office where their stupidity becomes binding on millions of people?
Anarcho-capitalism keeps the damage of idiots localized. If Khalil is a fool, only those who voluntarily follow him suffer for it. If Khalil is made president, everyone suffers. Concentrating this folly is a disease, it's not an immune system.
Typically, the state maintains
the usage of emergency services to be called upon and respond accordingly. Also, water plants are not
privatized. The groundwork is set; no government, how would those services work now?
I assume that, when you were around 4 years old, a parent or older sibling of yours tied your shoes for you. From that, does it follow that only a parent or older sibling can tie shoes?
The premise "no government means no fire department or water plant" simply does not hold. Both fire services and water treatment, even in this highly communist world we live in, are already mixed models, with some public, some private, and some hybrid. Literally the first sentence of the water plants thingy you linked says "but there has been a growing movement towards privatization", and that's through outsourcing, management contracts, or even full private ownership. Likewise, emergency services like 911 are not uniform, some states centralize it, others leave it to local agencies, and some don't have a state authority at all. Like, even now these services are not inherently monopolized, they're provided through overlapping and often decentralized systems.
Now, if they would refuse to supply for whatever reason, then force would be necessary to combat the fire. I'm thinking what if it DOESN'T work as it should.
This scenario is not unique to anarcho-capitalism. Fires sometimes do go unanswered today because of underfunding, mismanagement, bureaucratic failure, or straight up evil.
The real question is what incentive structure provides the best realiability.
In a free order, insurers, water suppliers, and private brigades all have a direct financial interest in minimizing fire damage, because destroyed property means paying claims and losing clients. If one refuses to supply, others have every reason to step in.
If a house two streets over were on fire and everyone is refusing to help the owner, I would personally get out of bed in the middle of the night and arrange for all kinds of containers and wheelbarrows that I can come up with, because it might be the quickest and easiest paycheck I can get.
But, yeah, if literally all else fails and no supplier whatsoever exists, it's likely that people will improvise or use force to contain a fire. But that's not a bug that's unique to anarcho-capitalism. It's the mere reality under scarcity. If your neighbor's house is burning and threatening the integrity of your house, then you will act regardless of contracts. The difference is that, under anarcho-capitalism, it is clear what the incentives are and the playing field is open for anyone to provide the service. You are not forced to entrust a monopoly bureaucracy that often fails and can't be replaced.
The "what if nothing works?" scenario is so much worse under statist conditions, precisely because you can't replace a failed fire service or water utility when the state has locked out everyone else.
My point is that, while I agree on the principles of limited government and strong property rights, those can *only* exist in a society made up of a certain type of people (intelligent, future-time oriented, able to control impulses), with an established State that includes strong walls and armed men to defend it from the 5 billion envious people who just want your gibs.
The moment you reverse cause and effect, by trying to divorce your principles from a principled people, or assigning magical protective powers to a piece of paper (instead of recognizing that paper just formalizes what your people believe), you start doing things like obliterating your border and letting those who don't respect your principles overrun you.
And then the Goblins burn your oak door, shut down your Church, purge you from the institutions you build, and machete you to death on the private property they don't acknowledge.
Thanks for clarifying; I think you're mixing two separate claims, namely
1: Property rights only work for certain kinds of people
2: A state with walls is the only way to preserve these people
Regarding 1, I agree that principles only "work" if people respect them. That is in no way unique to libertarianism. Even the most heavily policed totalitarian state collapses if the people don't uphold its norms, the USSR and South Africa are examples of that. The thing is, anchoring law in property is that it gives an objective line, independent of race, religion, or whatever other category you think is decisive. Anyone can grasp "this is mine, that is yours". Literal wild animals can grasp that. I've seen maps of GPS-tracked packs of wild animals very clearly staying in their own turf and respecting the turfs of others. If literal wild undomesticated non-human animals can see it...
Regarding 2, that is plainly wrong. States are not the safeguard of rights and liberties, they are the greatest violators of rights and liberties in all of human history. It's governments that wage wars, engineer big migrations, confiscate weapons, and then tell you "don't worry, the walls are there to protect you". And when the state betrays its own people, which is the rule and not the exception, your "principled paper" is not going to save you.
Mobs with machetes exist, nobody denies that, but that does not prove that the state is the cure. The state is the biggest mob with the sharpest machetes. The choice is whether you canonize that violence as law or you recognize it as aggression.
... unless you just want to say "might makes right", in which case, I suppose congratulations on rediscovering Goblinism?
Do not tell me you trust
insurance companies to operate in good faith all the time.
View attachment 7803295
Actually, this guy may actually prove your point.
I don't trust
anyone to act in good faith "all the time",
not even myself.
And that's the whole point of anarcho-capitalism.
In a libertarian worldview, nobody is assumed to be holy and above the law (unlike under the state, in which government agents get to legally do things that would be illegal for mere private persons). However, the assumption is that people act on incentives. If insurers lie or stall, they lose clients and credibility. If a state fire brigade lies or stalls, congratulations, you still pay their salaries and you have no recourse.
Luigi actually makes the point. In a market, even the "bad guys" have to compete for trust. In a monopoly, they don't.
