DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship.
A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--"
Posted on 11/17/2014 4:31:58 AM PST by Pan_Yan
This talk was delivered at the Costa Mesa Mises Circle on Society Without the State, November 8, 2014.
The term “anarcho-capitalism” has, we might say, rather an arresting quality. But while the term itself may jolt the newcomer, the ideas it embodies are compelling and attractive, and represent the culmination of a long development of thought.
If I had to boil it down to a handful of insights, they would be these:
(1) each human being, to use John Locke’s formulation, “has a property in his own person”;
(2) there ought to be a single moral code binding all people, whether they are employed by the State or not; and
(3) society can run itself without central direction.
From the original property one enjoys in his own person we can derive individual rights, including property rights. When taken to its proper Rothbardian conclusion, this insight actually invalidates the State, since the State functions and survives on the basis of systematic violation of individual rights. Were it not to do so, it would cease to be the State.
In violating individual rights, the State tries to claim exemption from the moral laws we take for granted in all other areas of life. What would be called theft if carried out by a private individual is taxation for the State. What would be called kidnapping is the military draft for the State. What would be called mass murder for anyone else is war for the State. In each case, the State gets away with moral enormities because the public has been conditioned to believe that the State is a law unto itself, and can’t be held to the same moral standards we apply to ourselves.
(Excerpt) Read more at zerohedge.com ...
Very interesting, thanks for posting.
I thought it was too. We don’t often consider a new model instead of a reboot.
Thanks for posting. WE definitely need much less government. Beware you may have angered the powers that be. The writer’s website is forbidden here. Cannot post articles from it.
I just thought it was an article worthy of discussion. I know nothing about the author.
NO criticism of you. I just think it curious that his site is forbidden and thoroughly leftist/progressive/liberal site are welcome. You could post from the Communist Party site. But not Lew Rockwell’s.
I support the concept completely, especially that whole “let society take care of itself” part.
Some very cogent observations. I’ve heard of Murray Rothbard but I’ve never studied him. Time to change that.
This is why an income tax is immoral because it’s a tax on a man’s labor.
He's rabidly anti-Israel.
Capitalism without government only works when all parties act within moral boundaries and don’t try to screw someone else in order to make a buck.
DENNIS: You're fooling yourself. We're living in a dictatorship.
A self-perpetuating autocracy in which the working classes--"
Doesn’t the same hold true for a representative republic? As we can clearly see it doesn’t much matter what’s written in the charter when the electorate become corrupted.
You know, back when the US became the most powerful industrial engine in the world and the standard of living skyrocketed.
What's happened since is that, having acquired some prosperity (and the upper class having acquired a lot of prosperity), people have sought to 'lock in' that prosperity through everything from zoning regulations to labor laws, etc., and massive burdens have been imposed on economic life in the pursuit of bobo aesthetics: everything from historic preservation to the environmentalist extremism that closes off almost all development of Federal land and imposes lunatic 'environmental impact' statements on almost every business plant project.
Real capitalism threatens those who have already gained the most, not those at the bottom.
Given our current state of affairs, perhaps having some watery tart throw a sword at someone really is a better system of government :-)
Well written. Thank you.
I would add only one comment:
All of us (or at least most of us outside of government and the academy) are familiar with the pain of the unintended consequences stemming from government regulation and regulatory uncertainty.
But as much as the Hayekian in me may be loathe to admit it, there is a similar drag in "anarcho-capitalism:" the frequent boom/bust cycle and market distorting actions of big companies (think Standard Oil) add a tremendous amount of "noise" to economic signals, something compounded by the fact that markets themselves are occasionally irrational (booms, panics).
It seems to me that there is a happy medium somewhere, which we somewhat achieved between 1945 and 1965 (before the not-so-"Great Society").
To restore that we need to slam the door shut on immigration, raise tariff barriers to help guarantee markets to American producers and attack internal monopolies to prevent price gouging by American companies. In brief, gore just about every big player's ox: not easy to do politically. But I think the right kind of populism could do it.
Ping.
It's fun stuff as social/economic models go, though. I would not call it utopian necessarily (although it is a bit reminiscent of Rand, isn't it?) but it does appear to require perfect citizens to make up for the imperfections of the model. That is a classic problem of utopias. If the system requires human behavior to change - remember the New Soviet Man? - then it's probably not happening. I don't see us changing much since Og the Caveman decided he could steal somebody's crops easier than he could grow them himself.
“Everyone more or less lived under “anarcho-capitalism” until the early 1900’s and (arguably) until the 1930’s.”
Not quite. The moniker anarcho-capitalism obviously is a combination of anarchism and capitalism.
We hardly had anarchism (no government) prior to the ‘30s.
I believe anarcho-capitalism existed very early in human history when people first came together in small communities. However, I also believe that it quickly failed as a social structure, as soon as an anarcho-capitalist society came in contact with one that was more centrally organized and had developed a combat force.
Imagine a US without a centrally planned armed force, and how it would have fared against the Japanese and the Germans.
There’s a reason nothing even remotely close to anarcho-capitalism exists anywhere in the world today - it doesn’t work, it cannot survive long.
The founders, lovers of personal freedom and the sovereignty of the individual, came close to it by severely restricting the role of the central government, but even they wisely saw that national defense was a legitimate and necessary role of the federal government.
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