Another problem; what about things that no one owns, but everyone needs ? Who’s going to stop me and my buddies from dumping used motor oil and solvents into the lake that everybody gets water from ? Who’s going to stop overcutting of forests from denuding the land, Easter Island style ? What about overfishing and overhunting ? What about air pollution ? Nobody owns the air, but everyone breathes it.
It wouldn’t just be the outcasts who did this. Humans can be lazy and vicious creatures–and I say this coming from a long line of humans myself–and it’s a lot easier to steal someone else’s food than grow it yourself. The hills would be alive with bandit gangs preying on the farmers. Eventually one or two of the more intelligent bandit leaders would realize it would be even easier simply to settle in a farming community and demand food as the price of protection. Soon a new feudal system would develop.
Of course all this occurs after the chaos and famine that occurs when people flee the now unlivable cities. And this assumes that a worried Canada and Mexico wouldn’t invite troops from Europe or China to restore order in the failed state on their borders.
It’s generally a lot more dangerous, too, which will cut down on it. But there are a lot of people–especially teenaged males–who revel in danger; this isn’t going to prevent it as much as one would like.
Daniel
On a slightly more elevated note, It’s usually a bad idea to develop a political system based on a lot of axioms and first principles carried to their logical conclusions. A political system should be based on a single simple goal: building a secure and prosperous society. It should draw lessons from history rather than abstract principles.
One of the things I admire about the U.S. is our constitution. It starts out with a simple statement of goals and then completely ignores philosophy to get to the nuts and bolts of a system of government. Most of the constitution is simply a boring manual of governance, which is how it should be. It ends with an enumeration of certain specific rights rather than grandiose principles.
The lessons of history teach us that the best government humans are likely to have is a western-style democracy with a mixed economy. We can debate how much the economy should tilt to socialism and how much it should tilt to capitalism–clearly the U.S. and Europe have made different choices here–but the general form of society will be pretty similar.
It’s easy to say “Taxation is theft.” It’s also false. Few theives take the money they steal from you and spend it on roads and schools. Taxes are necessary to avoid the free-rider problem. We can debate how large or small the tax burden should be, but any stable society will have some taxation, I’m sorry to say. (I don’t like paying taxes any more than anyone else.)
So in this society, anybody could get away with anything as long as it wasn’t egregious or repeated?
Ostracism does not seem to me to be a reliable method of conflict resolution. In fact, it seems more logical if I feel I have been wronged to take matters into my own hands.
Since the OP seems to have abandoned this thread, and no one else wants to take up the banner for AC, I would suggest that anyone who is interested in discussing AC check out the Politics forum on the 2+2 message board. It’s primarily a poker MB, and since its membership is almost exsclusively young men it tends to be less civil than the SDMB, but there are lots of very intelligent, opinionated people there. Significantly, ACers seem to form at least a plurality of the contributors to the Politics forum, and several of them are very smart, very active, and relatively courteous. They’re also well read, so bring your cites.
Hey, it works for the Amish 
Actually, there’s a good point there - Amish society works because there’s buy-in by everyone, and young adults have a chance to see other systems at work and leave should they so choose.
Idealist political systems, on the other hand, always seem so all-encompassing, and opting-out is never an option (assuming worldwide uptake of the system).
It’s only if the offender really, really wants to be a member of the society that ostracism works as a valid rules enforcement system. I’ve seen the breakup of even very small anarchist-hippie communes because of lack of buy-in.
::waves::
I am not an anarcho-capitalist. I am an anarchist. To me the term “anarcho-capitalist” makes about as much sense as “vegetarian beef”, or “linear curviness”. Those who ascribed to anarcho-capitalism are entirely welcome to their dissenting opinion, and to explicate same in this thread or elsewhere.
But to my way of thinking, if you have anarchy, you have no formalized structure of people with power over other people. I cannot reconcile that prerequisite with the existence of a currency system as we know it (with a single, or finite quantity at any rate, of authorities who get to print the money). I can’t even really reconcile it with anything beyond a loose, impermanent, and hgihly informal sense of ownership: your notion that you “own” something may or may not be shared by those of us who are around you.
I don’t think you’d have trouble with the assertion that you own the shoes on your feet or even the Cadillac you like to drive, but pretend for a moment that you think you “own” these 4 acres of land as “your property”.
We, who like to pick the pecans from the pecan trees growing on it, do not have to comprise a formal system of power-over in order to disabuse you of the notion, but you’re going to have to reference such a system, to protect your claims to anything this complex as “your property”. And once you’ve got a system like that, you ain’t got no anarchy, baby.
Anarchy can have organizational structures, systems, and even hierarchies of systems, as long as they don’t place any one person in a position of structured power over another. Meanwhile, anarchy can coexist with people using force, having tempers, and being coercive — as long as none of it is formalized in a structure.
I can’t for the life of me conceive of capitalism existing in the absence of law enforcement, government, currency-guaranteeing authorities, and official registers of ownership and whatnot.
Why are formal structures bad things? Formal structures codify the amount of power anyone can have. Without them it’s just the people who have the guns and the people who don’t. That’s just as much of a structure as any legal structure, and it seems to be worse for the people who have to live in it–even, I’d say, for the people with the guns.
I agree with you that “anarcho-capitalism” is a contradiction in terms. Capitalism requires laws (So does socialism), particularly contract and property laws. Only the state has the power to make laws.
A currency standard has emerged in almost every human culture that ever existed that developed as far as any form of barter system. To achieve sustained anarchy without an official currency, you are goingt to have have someone to enforce a lack of it, or it will simply develop on its own again.
Assuming you mean “formal structures arranging people into power over other people” (which is not the only type of formal structure, btw), I disagree with you, but that’s almost beside the point. If you are right, there can be no anarchy. But whether you are right or I am right, there’s not much room in which to discuss “anarcho-capitalism”.
scotandrsn:
Or else sustain a different system that addresses the same needs that are addressed by a currency system. Or place the whole thing in a different context such that those needs do not even manifest themselves and therefore do not give rise to anything of the sort.
What I’m trying to clarify is what an anarchic “system” is supposed to do when several people living within it decide on a standard medium of exchange and decide to accept nothing else presented as barter? And suppose the convenience of this standard catches on, and becomes widespread, as has happened throughout history? Who, in an anarchy, is going to remind them they’re not supposed to do that?
Standard anarchist doctrine (“standard” in the sense that you’ll find it in a political textbook) would say that the key is education: you can teach these people that their actions are wrong, and if only people were reasonable and thought about things they would reaslise that their actions were not benefiting the community. Bakhunite anarchism (socialist anarchism- which AHunter3 may or may not follow) believes that people can be trained to live together caring for the common good, rather than their own interests- thus it intersects with Marxism/Socialism at the edges.
It’s not that they are not supposed to do that (use a signifier as a medium of exchange), it’s that without a hierarchical controlling body, competing currencies can and will arise, leading to choice in the medium of exchange. How does your hypothetical currency group force compliance of valuation and prevent counterfeiting without instituting some authoritive coercion? What’s to stop me, outside their group, printing or minting more of this “standard medium of exchange” myself?
Currency requires state support, whether that’s sanction of the moneychangers’ guild or government anti-counterfeiting squads. An anarchist system doesn’t have the backbone a single currency system requires to sustain itself, IMO.
As I said, I agree with you on the anarcho-capitalism contradiction. I’m just arguing with you because the OP seems to have left the building.
You’re right I don’t believe that anarchy is possible at all. Humans are naturally hierarchical. AFAIK all social mammals are. Hierarchies grew naturally in early societies, and developed more sophistication as culture evolved. Better to have the hierarchies which are codified by law and subject to the constraints of a constitution and popular vote than the ones which would emerge from a state of chaos.
A personal anecdote which may be of some relevance:
Many many years ago I had the misfortune of living in a group house with a bunch of hippies. I mean real honest to god self-identifying California hippies. The life lesson I took away from this experience–since confirmed by other experiences–was that hippies can be far more authoritarian, rigid and–dare I say–fascistic than even the Republicans I’ve lived with. House decisions were supposed to be made by consensus. This led to endless meetings full of soviet-style accusations about who was or wasn’t pulling their weight. As with any group of people, some of the hippies were more assertive and charismatic than others. Inevitably these were the people who ruled the meetings and made the decisions about who’s behavior needed to change. Because there was no formal structure limiting their power, they became authoritarian and cruel, though always in the guise of making suggestions and creating positive energy. To this day I’m still astonished how willing people were to buy into the illusion.
But who is going to standardize the education that must be presented to the next generation, and who will see to it that the curriculum is presented properly, with no one allowed to tell anyone what to do? It seems to me there is an inherent contradiction in anarchist philosophy formulated this way.
You’re making my point for me. When you have a bunch of different things that people want to use for barter, it gets to be a pain in the neck for all involved, and a standard develops among the people who want one. Yes, this is incompatible with anarchy, as someone eventually needs to be in charge of what is and isn’t currency.
You seem to propose here that this will not take place because people will realize that they will have to give up their precious anarchy to get currency. History tells us that people are more than willing to abandon anarchic principles in favor of stability and convenience. Anarchy as you describe it was tried for pretty much tens of thousands of years, and eventually found wanting.
You’re assuming that there would be something that in some shape way fashion or form serves as a medium of exchange. It’s not an unreasonable assumption: the notion of an economy based around “I’ll give you this if you’ll give me that” — specific reciprocity — probably seems even more fundamental to you than the notion of a standard currency, doesn’t it?
I don’t think specific reciprocity is compatible with anarchy. An anarchy would almost by definition be a general reciprocity economy. Give what you feel like giving, take what you wish to take, pitch in to do work where you are useful and willing, ask for the participation and assistance of others when and where you need it. Oh, and if you are a non-altruistic self-serving greedy bastard, umm, well it may come as a shock to you, but evena in the absence of specific reciprocity, people are gonna notice. Guess what serves as the closest thing to currency in a general-recip no-currency system? Reputation.
To an extent, a hypothetical individual in a hypothetical anarchy could stay on-the-move, always being a stranger, so as to benefit from “default assumptions” about strangers that might be better than the individual’s reputation once folks get to know you.
But even if we assume that human nature is somewhat self-serving and that there’s a streak of laziness and greedy opportunism within us, there’s a powerful social payoff (and by social I’m very definitely including what we think of as “economic”) for having a good reputation.
It has been done before. People get to be Big Shots by being generous and helpful. Great shame gets attached to deadbeats and shnorrers, even to the point of attaching to people who are disturbingly unbothered by them and their behavior.
No, it would not be perfect as far as producing ideal human conduct at all times from all people, but consider what we’ve got — anyone wanna argue that the meritocratic system of free market capitalism has done a helluva job at rewarding only helpful cooperation, sharing, doing one’s share, and not taking advantage of exploitable situations? Mm?
People would not need to learn to be angels. They probably would need to gain practice at getting their way in a social environment not divided up by rank and authority, but we’ve all done at least some of that (going on a fishing trip with buddies, playing in a garage band with your friends, etc).
Don’t forget what I said earlier about “ownership”, btw. All possible occurrences of sharing, exchange, taking, participating, etc, occur in a non-policed environment. The absence of a rigorous (quantified or otherwise) keeping-track system and/or wrongdoer-punishing system in no way guarantees that an exploitative greedy SOB isn’t going to run afoul of some informally unorganized pissed-off commonfolks who decide it’s time for a little unstructured unofficial lesson in manners!
And what happens when people form gangs?
You must realize that all government originally rose from gangs of young men who went around offering not to hit people with their bronze swords in return for those people giving them food, wine, and women? And these gangs sometimes raided for their loot, sometimes decided to settle down and permanently exploit a particular group of farmers as their personal property? And if another gang tried to loot their personal farmers/slaves, the first gang would fight the second gang? And stronger gangs would subjugate weaker gangs, powerful gang members would ensure that their relatives and buddies got choice positions in the gang, and what they heck, let’s make the whole thing heriditary. And remember young gang members learn to fight from the day they’re born, and young farmers learn to plow the fields, so that if the farmers try to fight the gangsters the gangsters kick the farmer’s asses 99 times out of 100.
And so we have taxation. And government. And “coercion”. And heirarchy. And the mass of men born with saddles on their backs, and a favored few born booted and spurred.
Government, society, heirarchy, arose naturally out of the anarchy of our paleolithic past.
Unless you’ve got a fancy new way of preventing gangs from taking power, anarchy will fail and fail and fail and fail and fail, as it has failed for the last 12,000 years. Or not so much fail, as never actually occur, because the first time someone with a sword orders someone with a plow to hand over that sack of grain anarchy is done with.
And guns and radios and airplanes don’t make it more difficult for the gangs, they make it easier. And so we have the totalitarian dictatorships of the 20th century that the most power-crazed Egyptian Pharoah could only dream about. Or we have Somolia, where if you can organize a few kids with a few AK-47s you can make yourself a king.
And liberal democracy is the only known antidote to this problem. Instead of the gangs organizing themselves to loot us dumb farmers, we dumb farmers organize ourselves, and kick the ass of anyone who looks like they’re setting up a gang. And we make ourselves soldiers, instead of the gang members, and we make ourselves policemen, instead of the gang members, and we make ourselves judges, instead of the gang members, and we make ourselves consigliere, instead of the gang members, and we can make ourselves kings, instead of the gang members. And so we farmers compete against the gangsters on their own terms, and liberal democracy replaces the feudal system.
Now, unless your anarchic society has a better way to defend itself against feudalism, then that’s what we’ll head for in about 5 minutes, and we’ll have another 10,000 years before some farmers figure out the best way to organize themselves for self protection again.
What’s in it for the gang members?