RE: The Precarity of Anarchy: A Reason to Doubt
The flipside of negative liberty (autonomy) is positive liberty. You are not free if you happen to be too poor to exercise your liberty. Under pure free markets, the masses have starvation wages and miserable working conditions. It is government regulations that made "laissez-faire" bearable by mandating minimum safety requirements, minimum wages, and certain rules against air pollution. America would be a hell-hole without OSHA and the EPA. Infringements upon negative liberty are sometimes necessary to ensure a bit of positive liberty. You aren't free to go for a jog if you have to work 20 hours a day or if smog makes it unsafe to breath outside without a mask. I would contend, also, that liberty/autonomy is just as subjective.
Suffering can be measured though. There are metrics for measuring human happiness. You can ask people on censuses. You can look at the rates of depression and addiction in various countries. According to all the metrics, people are happier under social democracy than under more laissez-faire systems. (Cf. World Happiness Report)
As for the overpopulation stuff, that's just Malthusian fear-mongering. Don't let them trick you. The world is nowhere near overpopulated. Most of the world's land is neither occupied nor used for agriculture. Cities are overpopulated. Why? Because we have a system of wage-slavery so people have to flock to where the jobs are. If we abolished wage-slavery by adopting a universal basic income, funded via land value tax, people would no longer have to flock to where the best-paying jobs are. People would spread out more and live in smaller communities. Also, it would stimullate technological and scientific progress, so we might even be able to reach the singularity and enter into a transhumanist era. In which case it may be feasible to break free from this planet and establish an interstellar civilization.
I agree that free markets limit individual liberty. Because of the nature of the corporation and hiarchies inherent in production based society, those at the top have greater liberty than those at the bottom. But this itself is a violation of using your will to impede another’s. I think our entire society is structured poorly, and I wouldn’t advocate for the removal of government or its regulatory bodies in our current culture and context. I believe the best way forward is through heavy regulation on corporations. In fact, I think corporate personhood should be revoked. Worker owned businesses should replace the modern corporation and slowly corporate power reduced to nothing. Once the corporation has been dissolved, I think we can then discuss the necessity of centralized and violent government.
The population issue is not a myth or scare. I did the math on one of my posts a while back. As it stands, we are perfectly ok, and can double in population if we replace animal meats with insects or hemp. But this is not what I’m especially concerned about. High population densities create epidemics and degrade the environment. Even rural America can have populations too high for sustainability without proper care for the land and respect for nature.
I think technology will lean towards creating a dystopian future, rather than a utopia. I tend to think it’s likely humanity will be wiped out before we can colonize other planets. But that’s all guess work.
I can see, overall, we envision a similar future of decentralized populations that can live freeely and happily without cohersion or force. I’m going on somewhat of a vision quest to imagine/invent an ideal society and work my way backwards of how we can get there from here. I believe this to be a healthy practice for any individual. Thanks for your insight and reply.
I wish more people would realize this: "But this itself is a violation of using your will to impede another’s."
There's also so much food waste. If society becomes more equal, society becomes less consumeristic, and society becomes less wasteful, farmers are rewarded better for their labor, small housing take root (rather than the urban sprawl of giant lawns and giant houses), etc, we could allow many more people to live comfortably. Still, there is a limit.
Interestingly, people do tend to give birth to fewer children if they get out of poverty, and after they go through advanced education.