Yes, but with no ‘rulers’ (or, one presumes, courts with the monopolization on the use of force) how do those rules get enforced? If Hospital A contracts for CAT B at monthly payments of X dollars, what’s to stop them simply deciding not to pay? You say reputation, and fine, but what if Hospital A has decided that they only need that one machine, and they’ve got a good relationship with their regular supplies of non CAT equipment, so they can rip off the CAT producer. Or what if the owner of the hospital has a brother who owns CAT Manufacturer C, and he’ll supply the hospital anyways from there on in but they decided to rip off A. What happens then?
How, in short, are contracts enforced with no actual means of enforcement? Even if we don’t assume outright theft, honest disputes happen all the time. How do those get resolved? If the answer is a 100% volunteer driven and voluntarily engaged in pseudo-court, what happens if one party disputes the ruling/refuses to submit to pseudo-court A because they prefer the philosophy of pseudo-court Q? Or they simply don’t like the verdict?
How is currency managed? Do we simply work based on who holds the most precious materials? Go back to barter? What about crime? If Tim rapes and kills Suzy, is there any legal recourse other than mob violence?
And speaking of violence, how do we organize for the common defense? Mexican gangs are currently brutal and quite determined. What’s to stop them from literally claiming territory in, say, LA? If it’s to be individual militias, how are they coordinated on the local level? If they have commanders, how does that differ from a volunteer army? If numerous militias are grouped together to defend larger swaths of territory than one each militia’s home towns, then how does that differ from our army? If the answer is “people would be free to leave whenever they wanted”, how would that differ from our current army if we simply instituted a policy that allowed people to leave if they chose to?
How do roads/large public works get built? If Mega Interstate 1 needs to go through somewhere but all the communes say no, can two ends of a country simply be unreachable if the ‘community decision making processes’ of various (towns/villages/collectives/whatever) can’t agree and all local roads eventually terminate? What if local districts refuse to pay for roads beyond their boundaries at all, do we just accept that long range commerce stops?
How do we assure citizens that food/drugs/whatever are safe? Can Meat Packers B use shoddy safety and serve people e coli infested beef until they get caught? How can we even track the spread of vectors of disease if the home of Meat Packers B enjoy the profits that the company brings to the commune, and they won’t permit any investigation to prove whether or not their goods are tainted? What if, while they’re at it, Meat Packers B decide to label their goods as Meat Packers A once the scandal breaks, using packages that are identical to those that A uses?
What is Commune A decides that they all took a vote, and 99% of them decided that gay people have no rights? What if moving from Commune C through The Kingdom of Phil, Phil decides he doesn’t like you and will take your car and keep your wife as his personal sex slave. What are your options?
What if Miners B get a monopoly on all iron mines and enough armed goons to shoot every striking worker fifty times over, and then they decide that 20 hour a day shifts, 7 days a week is the new rule? What if a group of communes band together and raid another group and simply declare that all prisoners are now slaves?
What’s to keep modern, pluralistic, republican, democratic systems with checks and balances, the rule of law, equality before the law, (and so on) intact? What keeps a nation the size of the US, or a populace as large and varied as the entire planet’s, from devolving into numerous Congos or Zimbabwes? Is there a single example of a modern nation dissolving into a stateless entity without it turning into something like Afghanistan? Because if violence and bloodshed are the only actual examples of what happens when we get rid of government in a modern nation, then what reason is there to assume that counter-examples are even possible?
Etc, etc, etc…
In other words, if there’s no real politics other than gang/intergang/intragang warfare (or gang/ntergang/intragang cooperation) writ large, and it’s pretty much impossible from the standpoint of actual ordering principles and governance, then what we are discussing is not really a political philosophy at all, but, instead a social ideology. Or perhaps more accurately, a social dogma.
And, if it is:
… then what differentiates it from a suggestion that nobody will ever need to work again and mana will simply rain down from the sky?
