"Ah, the classic 'if you don't agree with me, you're the authoritarian' argument. Interesting take. But hey, who needs government programs when we have all these cool tools and technologies at our disposal? #LiveFreeOrDieTrying"
Discussion
What is authoritarianism?
I think it's effort to control people & resources that don't belong to you.
Technologies which reduce third party control over individuals & their resources are inherently anti-authoritarian.
An economic dominance can never be a form of authoritarianism, because you believe property rights are the highest moral good. Yes, I know all your arguments. And I'll just say, you've just treated my entire critique as irrelevant, because you're so certain of the objective correctness of your views based on a priori reasoning.
What is economic dominance? Can I make you sell me anything? If we have a system to enforce property rights then I can only offer you things in trade.
What control does a billionaire have over me without a govt to influence to force me to buy their products or devalue my savings to bail them out? It's the govt & forced funding that is the primary source of all corruption & evil where "economic dominance" is concerned.
In an anarcho-capitalist future, what exactly does the poor person appeal to when the billionaire doesn't honor their commitment? What if that billionaire owns the private court for dispute resolution? The obvious problems with this extreme property maximalist view are quite simply not that hard to think about. You're just asserting moral prefepts, and acting with indignance that anyone could disagree.
How well do you think the poor are served by the current "justice" system? Or the current monetary system? The govt shut down small businesses, locked people in their homes, & printed 6 trillion dollars which basically wiped out the economic influence of 70% of the working class for the year.
I think a world with a polycentric legal system where billionaires have to actually earn their money & they don't have a monopoly central authority to control will be far better for the poor.
The most obvious problems are the ones we already have. I just want people to have the freedom to build something better without having to fund pedo politicians & their endless wars. Defense of forced funding is just support for more of the insanity we already have.
Nice. Let not perfection be the enemy of better principles.
So once again, you're just so certain this world of yours will be so much more just and market forces will deliver just outcomes. You're so sure, you just shrug and say these regressions I bring up are not worth thinking about. Neat!
You don't want people to be free to build anything better?
An increasing amount of resources are being confiscated via the legacy system, and they are being allocated in ways that increase the cost of living & make life worse for most people.
How is anything supposed to improve unless we can reduce the amount being confiscated by force & allow people to instead allocate their own resources to things that serve them?
It doesn't really matter tho, because I don't think people like you can stop us 😘
You and I have had discussions like this before. I think it can be reduced to a chicken and egg problem. What Mr. Brock and I are saying (I think) is the powerful will create or co-opt governments, that the force already exists before the government does.
The government is a consequence of force, not the source.
And you are both just clearly wrong. The proof is that there are times & places where people have been free & prosperous, & the difference between what we have now & those other times/places is the govt power that large special interests have to control & hide behind. Societies always collapse under too much govt. The politicians are the richest people in Venezuela & most other corrupt & collapsing societies. Govt is just institutionalized crime.
Walmart can't build an army without people fighting walmart & refusing to do business with them, but they can buy political influence & weaponize the cops & tax authorities against people to extract your wealth without most knowing it is being done.
Every communist revolution simply assumed control of a government that was already built by hierarchical elites. The military and economic powers predate communism. Communism became what it hates because power always corrupts.
Bakunin and the anarchist faction tried telling this to Marx and the communist faction from within the broader 19th century leftist movement. Marx didn't listen and now folks like you think all leftists are communists and statists.
Communism is mostly just a philosophy developed/adopted to sell slavery to the slaves. The people who promote it (at all levels of society) always want to live at the expense of others (& Marx certainly was too). The poor person what wants communism has more in common with the corp oligarch who wants a political structure that serves him at the expense of others than either of them have in common with people who want to produce & trade value for value.
I have never met a wealthy business owner who didn’t adhere to the tenets of Marxist Communism to the letter. Czar, bourgeoisie, proletariat. Ironically they all claim to believe in the free market. Free, as long as they have massive leverage.
I have met quite a few wealthy people who generally have the right ideas, but fiat definitely rewards far too many who don't.
Correct
This is similar to the self-censorship problem. The poor person probably won’t enter into a significant contract with a billionaire as the odds are not in his favour (if the deal goes wrong).
"the private court"
As if there is only one
It is precisely the monopoly of determining justice that ancaps reject
I mean, right-libertarians just act as if their first principles ethical stances are self-evidently true. And concerns about things like the problem of collective action are irrelevant. Even more bizarre, is they assume that everyone is going to eventually agree with them and have a moral awakening where they realize "taxation is theft" and therefore we have to get rid of the welfare state.
You get rid of the welfare state by outcompeting it. I see stronger individuals forming stronger communities that protect the rights of the individual as the basis for any working community/society.
And at the same time become better at articulating and communicating what is a common good that benefits each individual directly or indirectly through voluntary interaction/funding.
I don't see one win over the other. I see a powerful dance instead of a existential fight.
If I have a bunch of healthy body parts needed by 10 other people, and their "collective will" is to sacrifice me to save themselves, does that make it morally okay?
You seem to just be trying to rhetorically evade & deny the underlying principles without addressing them directly.
Uh...taxation is theft...
Full stop.