Not at all, internally (which is what I was talking about). My company is free to adopt a model of dictatorship for decision-making. This isn’t uncommon in business at all: the owner or owners make all business decisions and only give limited decision-making power, within set boundries, for the employees. Ultimate control is in the hands of the owner. Of course this is always true, given any realistic perspective of “property”. But the use of that property needn’t be determined by an authoritative stranglehold.
First of all, invaders always make up whetever justifications.
Second of all, 200 million disorganized individuals are no match for 2 million properly trained, equipped and led soldiers. Read your history. Military speaking, an amed mob is useles. The battle always goes to the side that has organization. Partisans may be a problem, but with sufficient brutality they will also be suppressed. If that doesn’t work, there’s always genocide.
Third of all, they won’t have to fight all 200 million at once, just a town at a time. First they’ll take the ones near the border, pacify the populace and install a garrison, and then they’ll move slowly on. Before you know it your country will be gone.
And even if they fail, millions of you will die and your cities will be reduced to rubble. These are the benefits of “Anarcho-Capitalism”?
:smack:
As you can see, I’m not comfortable thinking anarchically. Still, substitute firm for corporation, and I think my original point is fine (no one’s refuted me yet…)
And my name is Kluge, which is a variant of Kludge, so I understand the mistake.
You see, this is a major failure of your argument. You assume that all citizens will be armed, presumably with firearms.
The problem is, how does one make firearms? You need mines and chemical factories to make the propellant for the bullets, you need different mines and factories to make the guns themselves. You need roads to transport the raw materials to the factories, and the finished products to a market. You need oil wells to produce oil to stop the guns seizing up, and to run the vehicles that transport the materials and the products. You need training for your chemists, factory workers and managers, gun designers, logistics people and so on, some of which would be at a very high level such as can only be provided by a well-equipped and -staffed university. You need specialized equipment and plant for your mines, factories, road-building, oil-wells and universities. If one or two of these elements fail or is drastically reduced in efficiency (eg roads become multiply-tolled tracks with no upkeep, industrial mining equipment breaks down and is replaced by a guy with a pick and shovel), the entire system becomes unworkable.
Your citizens have only the guns they have now, unequally distributed. Those with access to military-grade weapons will have a colossal advantage over those with nothing. Eventually, all modern weapons would break down and you’d be reduced to swords and spears, if you can get the metal for those and find a trained blacksmith.
So, in a few years, the citizens of Anarchistan are merely prey for foriegn armies with organization, communication and decent weapons.
lambchops, not that I favor anarchy, but the lack of a government does not mean that division of labor will fail, per se. Why would tracks have no upkeep, even though they would hypothetically be privately owned? Likewise, mining equipment would be privately owned, so I don’t see why it would break down. The owners have every reason to ensure the maintenance of their possessions. I think you need to elaborate on why division of labor fails under anarcho-capitalism a bit better.
I don’t want to speak for lambchops. But I can postulate a reason that the division of labor would fail under anarchy. Division of labor is dependant on reliable property rights. That is, the mine is maintained because the owner of it is the one who creates value with it. Under anarchy the owner of the mine is the one who can force all others to stay away from it. This is little better than fuedalism. Certainly society would not collaps overnight, but more and more resources would go into defending or taking resources and less and less into developing those resources. This would criple if not kill the division of labor as we enjoy it today.
I might add, that today the mine is owned by those who can force other to leave it only if they can also convince the government to be on their side. That is there is a very large impediment to entering the “rob the rich” market. You have to be stronger than the government.
Hey, maybe most of the parts of the track are well-kept. But well-kept with what? Where does all the heavy equipment come from? Who will build a bridge across some big river? You can postulate some cabal of track owners, but how do you make sure Bill pays his share? How do you raise capital to begin? How do you legally enforce contracts for supply of asphalt? Who makes the asphalt? How would you pay your labourers? How would you ensure your labourers don’t kill you and sell your materials to others?
A very simple-looking thing like a road takes a great deal of resources and manpower to create. It is entirely reliant on a web of other resources as well as the manpower, and more importantly the goodwill, of others. Without some kind of government, comprising an enforceable legal system and some sort of monetary system, the whole lot collapses when one or two elements collapse. Then you’d be back in the Dark Ages.
pervert, I agree with you entirely.
lambchops, I thought you said you were an anarchist. Also, there’s some flaws in your argument, so I’ll play devil’s advocate a bit more. What you fail to realize is that all of these factors of production would’ve been privatized during the shift to anarcho-capitalism. You think roads require goodwill? Hardly. With modern advances in technology, having privately owned toll roads is increasingly feasible.
But you know what, I agree with you. The problem again comes back to public goods, which will inevitably be underproduced in an anarchy. Maybe not roads (which can arguably be a private good just as effectively), but national defense and “criminal” investigators, for instance, will all be underproduced. Oh sure, anarchists can propose dodgy solutions to most of these, but I believe that the government excellence in the area of public goods far outweighs the supposed benefits of anarchy, especially when you factor in other problems with anarchy.
The word “legally” doesn’t belong there, since there are no laws in existence. But anyways, I would think that the anarchist would responsd that mob justice would be the deterrent in place of a police force. Again, I don’t agree with this idea in the least, since mobs tend to be myopic and fickle. If the anarchists have an alternative in mind, I’d love to hear it.
“What’s the currency?” you ask. This question was already asked and answered. Hypothetically, firms could compete in the market of currency. A medium of exchange is ultimately an economic good as well, and you therefore can have producers and consumers.
Admittedly, I’m a little unsure why anyone would bother producing currency, though, since I can’t see how a firm would profit from it. griffen2, care to answer this one?
Or maybe it is silly to think of currency only as paper money, which is what I confess to be doing. Now that I think about it, technology could allow us to convert currency to digital information, and the access of this currency could be through debit cards that would, of course, have fees for usage. Maybe that could work… Nonetheless, I’d still like to hear an anarachist’s take on the matter.
On second glance, I’m not satisfied with my wording on this:
What I mean to say is that there would exist no legal actions for contract enforcement because there would be no legal system. What would ultimately discourage the breaking of contracts and acts of murder would be the possibility of revenge from an angry mob, or so I believe.
Okay, it may not be a significant improvement, but what I originally wrote was driving me crazy.
Kluge, the main thrust of my argument is that production of advanced products that we take for granted nowadays (eg roads, guns etc) is dependent on a great number of other advanced products and producers.
If some of these fail, the whole system goes down, or at least becomes dramatically less efficient.
Your opinion on this general point, if you’re still playing devil’s advocate? (Remember, I’m only an anarchist in Civ 3…)
I know what you mean - that was my original point. Poorly worded, perhaps, but it looks like we’re all in the same boat today…
erl:
What are we debating here? Nobody I know would advocate government for the sake of it - we’re all anarchists in that respect. I am arguing that government is necessary given human unreasonableness, which anarchy is utterly unequipped to deal with.
Surely any political system, from anarchy to democracy to dictatorship, works just as well if everyone is reasonable?
If I thought that the repeal of laws had vastly increased the amount of suffering around I might very well fight, and kill, for their restoration. Of course it would be lovely if people didn’t kill each other ever, with or without laws. But I might as well propose a system of government wherein magical elves surreptitiously set right any wrong using time travel, and call myself an Anarcho-Elvist.
I don’t wish to sound prejudiced or belligerent, but is your commitment to anarchy realistic or purely philosophical? I’m afraid I struggle to distinguish it from simple wishful thinking, which I admittedly also indulge in from time to time. Where do you think we actually disagree?
For all the anarchists here, I will ask: given the current level of human unreasonableness, would anarchism not engender vastly more suffering?
There’s one thing I really don’t get. It seems to me like anarcho-capitalism tries to solve a problem that doesn’t exist in the first place.
griffen2’s system hinges on basically everyone being reasonable and rational. Everyone gives what they can to charities and so on. When everybody is like that, why would we need a free market, or indeed a market at all? Why would we need firearms or private security forces to protect our property? Everybody’s a rational altruist anyway, so why don’t we just share everything and live in total happiness?
I’m still awaiting an explanation for how a money system could exist at all in the absence of an establishment of the authority to print it or mint it.
Perhaps we’d be reduced to a barter economy? I don’t see how any other medium of exchange is possible, at least not on the scale it would need to be.
I’m also confused as to why humanity would phase out centralized governement in the first place. Have we not tended toward greater organization over time, rather than less? I’d assume we’d need to talk about some fundamental change in either 1) human nature or 2) the scarcity of resources 3) the means of production before this transformation occurs.
I’m sure there are participants in this thread who do not believe anarchy is a viable option, period, but I wasn’t really addressing you folks.
I’m asking the OP, though, presumably a person who does think so, to explain how, if we’re going to have an anarchy, we can still utilize a money system. I’m an anarchist myself, but I totally don’t get that. Money is intrinsically archist, depending as it does on an established authority to print it and probably also to defend the notions of property and ownership inherent in the idea of purchase and profit.
So, one more time, with feeling, to those who propose this “anarcho capitalism”: please explain this. How the heck can a money system coexist with anarchy? How is that conceivably anything other than a contradiction in terms?
It’s like proposing the existence of massless, invisible objects and then talking about their gravity and the shadows that they cast.
Well, I guess individuals or businesses could print their own money, backed by property or reputation. You saw something like that in early colonial Virginia, for example, with “tobacco notes” There wasn’t very much in the way of cash, so tobacco farmers would issue notes backed by tobacco, and they circulated and were used as currency.
I know, but why would these advanced goods fail without government? The anarcho-capitalist’s stance is that they wouldn’t.
I was being facetious when I said “I thought you were an anarchist”. I knew you were referring to Civ 3.
I think griffen2 already answered this question.
I know that’s their stance, but what is their argument for such a stance?
Remember, things don’t have to fail, they just have to get drastically less efficient, which would have much the same effect. Say, you could replace money with barter, or personal / company notes (but what is backing these notes? Any reason anyone has to honour them?), but that’s a disaster for anything bigger than primary produce. How do I buy a house, for example?
Here’s a few things that would be nearly impossible without government / law:
- Holding together a company bigger than whoever you can directly pay or threaten. If someone can swipe all the company’s property or money, they’ll do so. Why not?
- Venture capitalism, the stock market. If there were no laws, these wouldn’t be possible.
- Contract law. You want me to pay my bills? Well, I don’t want to. You got security contractors? I’ve got security contractors myself.
The best possible outcome would be feudalism - personal power in the hands of the few, backed up by fickle militias. Most people would be forced to ally themselves with the powerful, or be in perpetual danger of death or theft. Of course, your lord would have the droit de siegneur to kill or rape you and take all your property anyway. What the hell are you going to do about it?
How would we preserve a world anything like the one we have today and stave off disaster?
Good, was just making sure.