#NoticingThings
Discussion
Strawman...
Voluntaryists simply deny the legitimacy of rulers, not a rule based society.
Borders are how you keep unwanted foreigners out. Why agitate for abolishing them, unless you want to increase immigration?
There is no other logical reason to agitate for that.
As an anarcho-communist I see no differences here 💯
Yeah, I also see no conflict of interest.
Neither has a concept of "foreigner", so they both hate borders because they see them merely as a restriction upon an individual's ability to move around freely.
They want to dissolve the borders and allow everyone to move around freely, and they are at most apathetic about the fact that the resulting movement would all tend in one direction.
There's a difference between anarco-communists and anarco-capitalists, in the latter, property rights are a thing. I wouldn't let random people with different values and mindsets onto my property for obvious reasons and I'm sure most people feel the same way.
But you both have no concept of communally-held property, which would afford a group property rights. No "ethnic homeland" or "regional territory".
Just one guy and his apartment or country house, or whatnot.
You mean public land?
From what I understand, and correct me if I'm wrong, you're arguing that we need a government to protect a region of land and secure the borders, because individuals cannot do it as efficiently. So anyone arguing for anarchy, is going to get that piece of land invaded or overrun by immigrants. Is that correct?
Also some questions to understand the context:
-You mention "just one guy", are we talking about 1 anarchist living amongst statists or a hypothecal area of land inhabited by anarcho-capitalists? I wouldn't demolish a nation at the snap of a finger right now if I could, people don't understand economics and property rights, so it would all devolve into chaos and you'd most likely get another state to replace the previous one. I'm more for slowly defanging the state initially (minarchism or libertarianism), parallel economies, separating money and state, monarchies replacing democracies would be interesting, etc. Then and only then do I think that anarchism over an area of land makes sense.
-What are group property rights? Who decides what happens or is done with the property in the group? Can you take your property within this group property along with you if want to opt out?
Yes, that is correct. At least, at the present time in the West.
Area of land inhabited by anarchists
At the moment, the disposal and management of common property is decided by representatives elected by majority vote. You can take some of the property with you, but not the immobile bits. You can't take a supporting column of a bridge with you, for instance, or a school, but you can have your pension paid out while living in a foreign country.
There's a lot to unpack here, and there's no way to fully express the ideas of Murray Rothbard, Saifedean Ammous, Hoppe, etc in one post but I'll do my best. Also, your meme is describing what's going on with the current system around the world, no anarchism necessary.
I don't know your background on Austrian economics, but basically, it has been seen time and time again that government is unable to perform economic calculation over production decisions, because of the economic calculation problem. Yet...government can protect property and protect against foreign enemies, right? But, isn't protecting property just another market good? Why can government produce property protection but not apples? Defense is an economic good, it has utility and it is scarce. Individuals can produce it for themselves or acquire it from others on the market. The market for defense is highly developed, from safety locks, alarms and surveillance cameras to drones, guns, security guards and armored vehicles. Also, there are more private security personnel than state security personnel in the world.
There is no satisfactory answer to the allocation of defense resources without private property and economic calculation. Without property rights, there is no objective unit against which to measure the utility from individual allocation decisions. There is no way to allocate scarce resources to where they would produce the most value.
The reality is that defense is provided on the market already. Government defense is mostly about defending the government, not the people. They really couldn't stop the BLM riots or January 6th? Yet they managed to force thousands of businesses to close during the pandemic and lock up millions in their homes.
In a free market individuals would be able to calculate the best allocation of resources and property to meet these needs in the best way they can. Without a free market in these resources, allocation is made without calculation. Tax-funded security providers have no incentive to care about customer satisfaction or resource conservation.
Security and defense are like any other good: best provided through division of labor, capital accumulation, and entrepreneurial calculation in an extended market order. In practice, most security is provided by the market. But it would be a lot better if we didn't have a monopoly (the government). Americans pay enormous sums to police and military, but they are very unsafe. Imagine if the people of Chicago or New York had all their wealth that goes to the police and army available to them to spend on security services that were responsible to them, had no monopoly, no special legal protections under the law, no right to initiate aggression, and no ability to extract tax.
Long story short, if you can't trust the government in running things like the economy, education, transportation, etc. Why would you entrust them with something as important and necessary as defense? Also, voting harder doesn't work.
I highly recommend Saifedean Ammous' book, Principles of Economics, a great read and something I plan my children on reading too one day.
I consider myself anarcho-communist but I think under anarchy there would ultimately be property rights in the form of people defending what they have laid claim to. Anarchy would be kinda good for property owners because there wouldn't be a tax man to take your home by force. But anarchy means there can't be any communist force controlling land distribution to make sure it's communally equitable. Just stuff like the food supply could be communist considering how much food we throw out, people could just share enough food without a controlling force
Communism implies there has to be a central planner in some area of life, you just mentioned food. If people didn't sign up to follow the food laws of this commissar and are coerced to obey, that's not anarchy. If they can opt out and are not coerced, then it can be anarchy, but not really communism as individuals are given priority. You could, as an individual, sign into a community with these rules though. But can communism work as a whole? I don't see a way around the economic calculation problem to be honest.
Communist rules about food can work without a central authority but land use laws can't in my view. Anarchy could come with everyone just agreeing they don't allow restaurants to throw food away and farmers agreeing they won't allow anyone to starve to death. No authority forces everyone to stay in line except the collective of everyone else, which isn't organized in a central way.
The question is, how would this society enforce the "don't allow" part?
I can see this food scenario becoming more of a societal norm in some places (ie. Germans don't like littering but it's very common in poorer countries) and in other areas you'd probably sign an agreement. That's the rules without rulers part of anarchy and I agree that is something plausible, to have almost everyone handle their food responsibly *and* voluntarily. The important thing is avoiding control of the food supply and how it is used by some central authority, maybe some people would want to "throw away" food to make compost. Would they be punished and how would that go about? The free market would end up offering the best solutions.
Yeah, social norms basically become the closest thing to statute under anarchy. I don't think it would ever become a social norm to punish composters; more like if you get caught wasting food to pad profits as a restaurant, you get targeted with some theft and people are less keen on protecting you or eating at your restaurant, and if you keep doing it your reputation becomes inherently unprofitable in that community. When it comes to farmers it would just be that most farmers negotiate far too generously to let anyone starve to death and there's no tax man coming to say "your prices are undercutting Walmart so we're taking your farm if you don't cough up money for us"
The scenario you're describing with the restaurant is a free market scenario, where the restaurant stops wasting food not because a law made it so but because of profit motives. People look down upon certain actions and if they become aware of it, they vote with their money and go somewhere else. The restaurant either gets it or goes out of business.
I lot of farmers would probably have better yields as well if they would leave all the monocrop Fiat agriculture behind, sure it might be profitable in the short term, but long term you destroy your own soil and are therefore reducing yield in the long term. With time, many are forced to pay for expensive fertilizers and pesticides to grow and protect their weak crops. Now, these monocrop agricultural tendencies exist because of government intervention; wheat, corn and soy are heavily subsidized by the US government in the USA, for example. Farmers have a guaranteed price on this these crops and humans love certainty, so that's what a lot choose to grow. If the free market wasn't being manipulated by government intervention, then you probably wouldn't see a lot of people growing things that make them poorer over time.
Also, people are generally more generous the less they are stolen/taxed from. I can see charities working in an anarchic society, better than they work now, and people being taken care of if needed. So without a government to "take responsibility" for the poor and to steal from productive people, those with some money would probably be self-interested in helping out locally to take care of the homeless in their neighborhoods.
So basically, I don't see the need for the adjective of communism in anarchy. Left to their own devices, humans naturally cooperate and trade with one another, and those who respect property rights the most, develop civilization the most. Human action and property rights are the cornerstone of capitalism. It's not some greedy entrepreneur with a big hat, they become a problem (corporations) when they get in bed with the government and that has an actual name, fascism (which stems from socialist ideology). Unfortunately, people toss that word around so much that they don't even know what it means.
Posted this reply from snort.social and it doesn't seem to be showing up anywhere else -
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Copying and pasting with an extra paragraph at the end I thought of later:
The key thing about it that makes it communist in my view is the adherence to the principles of fairness, equality, making sure everyone has what they need, etc.
The key thing about capitalism that makes it capitalist in my view is people being obsessed with money.
The two aren't opposite ends of a spectrum as people treat them - the opposite of communism is allowing slave owners and the opposite of capitalism is having no currency at all. You could abolish currency and allow slave owners and have very-not-communism and very-not-capitalism at the same time. You could also have the system I described but with "profit" not existing and it all just being a matter of people wanting or not wanting to share needed goods and labor. In the system I described, social norms include both a capitalist way of doing trade and a communist way of handling the trade of food.
I believe the main reason communism and capitalism get compared as counterparts because they have names and the actual counterparts to them don't really have names. There probably is a word for a society without currency, but I don't know what it is.
On that last part I added - looks like there isn't even a word, just a descriptive phrase https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-monetary_economy
This is really dumb. If there is no nation state, there is no country. And foreigners would gain nothing by coming here. Without a nation state, no one will give them free shit. So dissolving the nation state would not flood the “country” with foreigners.
Plus, communists don’t want to dissolve the nation state. They want to strengthen it and give it the power to run everyone’s lives.
Europe is a superior territory. Valuable land will be invaded. 💯
Things Europeans have a surplus of:
Bitcoin
physical gold
fertile women
clean, fresh water
pleasant climate
high-quality, cheap food
energy (it's true!)
infrastructure
manufacturing centers
beautiful nature...
If there is no country, it will take about five minutes for another country to decide it's part of their country now
Didn’t know all it took was to just call dibs
it's calling dibs and using their country's army to convince everyone of the dibs
The only reason a “country” would use military power to show the world they have dibs over a territory is to declare that they have the sole privilege of extorting the people through taxes. If the prior government was dissolved by the people, what makes you think it would it take 5 minutes for another country to just take over and start taxing everyone?
Well, surely you can point us to the many examples of free peoples in the world, living free like the wind without any country collecting their taxes
This guy literally researches which *countries* will be nicest for you, in terms of tradeoffs between rights and privileges and taxation.
Smh some of them don’t tax you at all. Read the article.
If your only objective is to live without paying taxes, you can probably manage somehow, but it seems like a strange objective in life. It also seems hypocritical if you're living in a country where you use services financed by other people's taxes. What is your main reason?
I don’t think it’s strange to not want my money stolen. And what services am I using that other people pay for with taxes?
Depends where you live, but defense, schools, hospitals, roads, trains, police, courts, etc.
I only use services that I pay for.
“Defense” is just a term they use to maintain their ownership of tax cattle. I’m not interested in government indoctrination camps for my children. Hospitals are not free I would have to pay for the services. Roads are paid for by gas taxes and car registration. If I drive, I would pay my share of the roads. Trains are not free. Police and courts exist to enforce the tyranny of the rulers. Most of the time people are using private security and arbitration to resolve these disputes. If they’re forced upon, that does not mean I must pay for them.
I agree with hardly anything of what you wrote above.
But let me ask you: what would the place that you would like to live in look like, and how come it doesn't exist?
I cannot see the parent so… no context. But I think one argument is that without a state foreigners will come and take what they want. And I’ve yet to see a serious explanation of how & why they wouldn’t/couldn’t
Guns
You’d need tanks, jets, drones, and so much more….
Why?
Gosh, idk. Heck maybe BB guns or squirt guns would be enough of a defensive deterrent too? Whaddya think?
These threats are unrealistic. A foreigner would typically attack you if they wanted something from you. In this case, it would be your home. Using tanks and jets to steal your home is retarded because the cost of using tanks and jets is more than the cost of the home lmao
You’re either missing or refusing to acknowledge the point here. It’s not gonna be one foreigner that you have to worry about.. but an “army” of foreigners. If there is no standing army then another army will come in AND history and even current events undeniably prove this.
Okay so an army of foreigners show up and they burn everything to the ground. Then what? What did they gain by doing that? This is stupid reasoning because they don’t gain anything by doing that.
Whatchu talkin’ bout? Armies been taking land since armies existed. Still do. It’s going on right now. Anyhow it’s cool mah dood, I know you’re fuckin’ wit me 😜 ✌️
Instead of burning everything to the ground, they could tax or enslave you
That’s the ultimate goal but it wouldn’t take 5 minutes for a country to just declare they own you
I don't understand what you're saying here
This is what the original argument was about lol someone claimed that if the nation state was dissolved, another country would declare this new free land belongs to them within 5 minutes.
I've looked back in the thread and i don't see anything about "5 minutes."
The "take over and enslave/tax" thing has happened many times in history, so i dont see how you can brush it off.
Open my reply to op
I’m not brushing it off. I’m just saying it’s not as simple as another country just declaring they own you.
We are not in that thread, we are in a different thread.
Oh my bad. Too many convos to track. But yeah I was trying to get him to reach the conclusion that these large groups of “foreigners” would not have anything to gain by senselessly attacking you. Instead, they’d want to enslave you. If it was an individual foreigner, they’d want to maybe steal your property. Defending against one or two “foreigners” is more doable and you don’t need a standing army or tyrannical government for that.
I don't ever find the idea that "we need government" compelling. What i always get stuck on is that warlords can gain from enslaving/taxing people, and the only thing that has ever stopped them is either 1) other warlords, 2) unusual technological situations where rag-tag defensive groups have a temporary advantage, or 3) areas where the targets are too spread out, for example a few random mountain men scattered in the wilderness.
In the future the Soveriegn Individual thesis might play out, but until that happens, a highly populated anarchist societiy ("Ancapistan") is unlikely to last long.
This does not mean the state is good or just in any way.
And none of this denies that it's possible for an individual to do a lot to free themselves.
This article helped me refine my views on these things, and also contains a pretty solid prediction about the coming decentralisation of the US.
https://www.anarchonomicon.com/p/after-the-state-the-coming-of-neo
https://libertarianism.uk/2017/10/20/libertarianism-and-the-alt-right-hoppe-speech-2017/?amp=1
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An excerpt from Hoppe:
Many libertarians hold the view that all that is needed to maintain a libertarian social order is the strict enforcement of the non-aggression principle (NAP). Yet... it does not hold and apply, or rather it is insufficient, when it comes to people living in close proximity to each other, as neighbors and cohabitants of the same community.
A simple example suffices to make the point. Assume a new next-door neighbor. This neighbor does not aggress against you or your property in any way, but he is a “bad” neighbor. He is littering on his own neighboring property, turning it into a garbage heap; in the open, for you to see, he engages in ritual animal slaughter, he turns his house into a “Freudenhaus,” a bordello, with clients coming and going all day and all night long; he never offers a helping hand and never keeps any promise that he has made; or he cannot or else he refuses to speak to you in your own language. Etc., etc.. Your life is turned into a nightmare. Yet you may not use violence against him, because he has not aggressed against you. What can you do? You can shun and ostracize him. But your neighbor does not care, and in any case you alone thus ‘punishing’ him makes little if any difference to him. You have to have the communal respect and authority, or you must turn to someone who does, to persuade and convince everyone or at least most of the members of your community to do likewise and make the bad neighbor a social outcast, so as to exert enough pressure on him to sell his property and leave. (So much for the libertarians who, in addition to their “live and let live” ideal also hail the motto “respect no authority!”)
The lesson? The peaceful cohabitation of neighbors and of people in regular direct contact with each other on some territory – a tranquil, convivial social order – requires also a commonality of culture... multi-culturalism, cultural heterogeneity, cannot exist in one and the same place and territory without leading to diminishing social trust, increased tension, and ultimately the call for a “strong man” and the destruction of anything resembling a libertarian social order.
And moreover: Just as a libertarian order must always be on guard against “bad” (even if non-aggressive) neighbors by means of social ostracism, ... so, and indeed even more vigilantly so, must it be guarded against neighbors who openly advocate communism, socialism, syndicalism or democracy in any shape or form. They, in thereby posing an open threat to all private property and property owners, must not only be shunned, but they must, to use a by now somewhat famous Hoppe-meme, be “physically removed,” if need be by violence, and forced to leave for other pastures. Not to do so inevitably leads to – well, communism, socialism, syndicalism or democracy and hence, the very opposite of a libertarian social order.
Idk if I agree with that. That’s how you establish a governing body. The cycle would just repeat.
But what's the alternative?
A good answer from Larken Rose
Which part is the response?
The NAP paradox
Do you know how each of the two wants to get to this ??? 👀