RE: The Precarity of Anarchy: A Reason to Doubt
Two years ago I would have loved this post :)
The society will always be a reflection of its people. The question is only to which extend the people can express themselves and how easy it is for individuals to get influence. A police state is the one extreme and anarchy is the other. As you state it may not be clear where on this spectrum maximum life standard is reached. We just need to experiment more (but please not again with police states I think we know them quite well by now).
If something that you like can be decided in a democracy (e.g. health care), why would you not be able to organise it in anarchy?
For new ideas anarchy is actually far superior to democracy as you can easily test proposals that have a committed 20% of the population behind them. If they work out the conservative 80% will follow. If the dont it just depends on how stubborn the 20% are :)
There are certain policies that are only beneficial if they are applied universally within a community. E.g. Obamacare in America only makes insurance more affordable if the individual mandate is included (if people can opt out of getting insurance, costs rise). Land value tax only prevents gentrification and land speculation if it cannot be opted out of. Basic income too must be universal, otherwise it doesn't eliminate poverty and wage-slavery within a community. If only 20% of the populace supports universal healthcare, then it will only be funded by that 20% and likely won't be feasible to make free healthcare available to the rest of the community. That's the problem in America, healthcare is universally available on the condition that you voluntarily pay for insurance/services, so most people opt out of insurance but then can't afford healthcare when they do need it. Obamacare was beginning of a solution, but left much to be desired. Direct democracy in America is unlikely to ever vote for a tax increase, so they will never support cap and trade, raising taxes on the wealthy, or land value tax, even though it is in the best interest of the American people to do so. Representatives tend to be more educated on policy proposals and the reasoning behind them, so progressive taxation and cap and trade have been passed through representative democracy. While the American system is currently not working, the Nordic countries demonstrate that republican institutions can work for the people.
Of course there are policies that work only or better when everyone is participating.
Heath care has the problem that denying it may be morally questionable.
Retirement funds have the problem that when you want to reap their benefits you have no more power over the company that is supposed to pay them. Plus the individual risk is huge and there is no way to plan how much you will need.
On the other hand before imposing something on the whole humanity you better have clear arguments and make sure that the restriction of freedom is nesescary and that what you want is precise. For healthcare I dont see this at all. You must decide the question which people will be saved and which are left to die since treatment is to expensive. That is a tough choice. Instead I prefer maybe suboptimal but voluntarist approaches to these problems, considering that I do not trust humanity to answer such questions, without exploiting the position of power that the deciders obtain.
Lets consider we have 1% rich and 99% poor. Now the poor establish a system of insuring each other against certain risks and the rich opt out. If the poor have the ability to organise that gives them tremendous power over the 1% which depend on the 99% as a market and as workers. In that way they can effectively "tax" them in a fully voluntarist way. In the past these technologies were not available yet making large scale trustless organisation impossible. But now we can do it.
I also find your argument on representative democracy questionable. You agree that it does not reflect the view of the population, but state that the representatives are making better choices for the people. I think the opposite is true. The representatives are weak points for corruption. In addition politicians tend to be a very biased sample of the population. Now maybe they are more likely to implement changes you like, but they are less likely to implement changes I like. How do we solve that problem?
On land and resource distribution the most common anarchist notion of claiming what you see is much weaker than on owning your labour. I think it can be argued who is the aggressor in such a case, and I think it is compatible with anarchism to divide the resources of the world g theyven that they are not rooted in human labour.
This also brings us to universal income. You dont own the labour of others, so any universal income should be derived from natural resources. This also means that there is no one deciding on the amount. In the past when work was the most dominant source of wealth, there is no way to introduce a workable basic income. Life is hard, you either work or starve. When the amount of food is scarce a universal basic income cannot magically make more food appear.
But in the future, when robots have replaced most of human labour, the dominant source of wealth is the exploitation of natural resources. Distributing these will let everyone participate without the requirement to work. In that case you dont need to work anymore when your share of the world, combined with modern technologies, can support your lifestyle. When collecting basic income you are not taking money from others that are nice to you, you simply deserve that money. Again, no need for anyone to decide when this will happen, it is just a function of human development and I think we are much closer to this point than we expect.
I like most of what you otherwise said though! :)
We're finally at a point where there's abundance of food and resources for everyone, just that our distribution mechanism, culture, and economic system are so faulty that people would rather poison and throw away food rather than feeding them to the hungry. At this point, something like universal basic income is finally something that could feasibly empower everyone and cover the cost of everyone's basic needs.
I think what you two are mostly pointing towards is how to go from the current system to a better one. I agree that most wealth currently is distributed extremely unfair and that the people benefitting from the corrupt system will not hand it over without a fight. That is a problem i honestly have no answer to. I hope that we can disrupt their power using new decentralised technologies. Also resource distribution is a leading cause for wars around the world and improvements are direly needed.
Where I disagree is that once you are in a hypothetical anarchist society, that people that accumulate wealth could exploit it. The solution to voluntary slavery is self-employement. Currently this is made difficult due to unnecessary entry barriers. But we see the rise of a peer-to-peer economy and I think there is nothing rich people could do short of trying to establish a police state.
Also we are not as free to leave our states. Yes, we can travel but getting another citizenship is a matter of 5+ years and requires me to move and leave my home. That is a quite high barrier that makes competion between states an almost non-issue. States may compete for the top 1%, but not for the rest and that is part of the reason why they suffer. Unless the sate is so bad that there is a large scale migration, they are fine in doing whatever they want.
A few years ago I used to hold to more traditional market-anarchist views, but I realized that the current distribution of wealth was unjust; the current distribution of wealth is the product of government subsidizing certain persons and groups at the expense of others. I realized that others were kept from freely competing and thriving because of restrictive government policies. This meant, in my estimation, that we would need something like distributism in order to get us to a point where the means of production is no longer unjustly concentrated into the hands of the few. I proposed distributism as a way to transition towards voluntaryism, and voluntaryism as a transition to market-anarchism. I think you might, perhaps, find my idea of anarcho-distributism more interesting. (Cf. An Intro to Anarcho-Distribuism)
Taiwan is an important example that kind of demonstrates the basic principle that underlies the idea of anarcho-distributism. In Taiwan, they adopted distributist policies, such as "land to the tiller," and then allowed a free market to follow. When General Douglas MacArthur, a distributist, got control of Taiwan, he implemented distributist policies that laid the foundation for a truly free market to function. Later on, free-market economists like Milton Friedman would praise Taiwan as an example of the success of free markets, without even realizing the distributist foundation that built those markets. It was the "land to the tiller" program that made free trade so successful in Taiwan.
Taiwan's situation mentioned by @ekklesiagora was interesting:
https://taiwantoday.tw/news.php?unit=10,23,45,10&post=15716
Clearly we have to solve the issue of land and resource distribution. I think that our concepts of ownership have to be questioned in this regard.
Any distribution of resources that is not uniform will be questioned by those that dont get their share. As a consequence every human born should receive a part and that is not compatible with private ownership. In the past the solution of this problem would have required authority and a state. But I think that we can finally solve the problem without a middle man using distributed organisations and the blockchain.
The blockchain is quite a transformative technology. It's the dawn of a new world with new possibilities. :)
Yeah. I do think that we might ideally have a more and more anarchistic society in the future. The various anarchistic solutions just need to someday be tested until they're proven, as we change our culture to something that's not as exploitative. I mean, at some point, if genuinely good rules become accepted as the norms maybe laws could become voluntary cultural practices observed by everyone, while the bad rules/laws are not needed by anyone. :)
Capitalists and land-owners will hoard all the wealth and leave the rest of us to starve, if we allow them to. They will hire private police and private militias to protect their resources. The resources (or the wealth that it generates) will have to be forcibly taken from them and the wealth generated redistributed amongst the people. That can be done by the State, which might be able to leverage its superior power so as to convince them to hand it over without a fight, or it can be done by people organizing directly, grass-roots style, and using violence to take those resources. The latter is more libertarian, sure, but also more violent and will cause more suffering and distress. The former solution actually seems better, especially since the State doesn't have to do it all at once, it can gradually take more and more by increasing taxes slowly over time, making it possible to take over those resources over time, maybe over the course of several generations, without the private owners even realizing what is happening or, at least, without shocking the private owners into rebellion.
In regards to your following response to @ekklesiagora: "Lets consider we have 1% rich and 99% poor. Now the poor establish a system of insuring each other against certain risks and the rich opt out. If the poor have the ability to organise that gives them tremendous power over the 1% which depend on the 99% as a market and as workers. In that way they can effectively "tax" them in a fully voluntarist way. In the past these technologies were not available yet making large scale trustless organisation impossible. But now we can do it."
I'm not sure if allowing anyone/any arbitrary group to control the survival necessities on earth and having them say that "If you work for me for free, I'll give you some moldy bread and a tiny cave to survive with", could be considered a fully voluntary arrangement. That's what I believe will happen without any form of control which is why many libertarians ended up becoming geolibertarians.
That would be a new form of feudal government w/ voluntary slave labors that have no better choice but to be exploited, in an extremely inequal exchange of labor vs rewards just so they could barely survive.
I mean, anyone is free to leave the countries they live in as of now. The land is owned by the state, as much as it could be owned by a group of any individuals. Therefore, if land ownership is the only thing that matters in how its owner treats people that is there, we could even claim taxation is just as long as they're enshrined in the laws of the land. Marie Byrd Land and Bir Tawil Triangle are both unclaimed territories that anyone can go to if they want. That doesn't mean people could easily leave and live in those locations, and there are only so many people that can live in those places.
I think a lot of the disagreement stems from the consequentialist right Libertarians beliefs that it is impossible for a natural monopoly to arise in a way that horizontal restraint becomes ineffective. As far as deontological libertarians, they are libertarians that care more about their ideology than the terrible consequence of their beliefs, even if mankind will go extinct because of it. So, words about consequences might be meaningless with them.
My position personally aligns better with the geolibertarians even if not perfectly so. I think their argument is much less flawed and more thorough, while their proposal is just better in general consequences for every individual. Here are a few interesting quotes from "Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian?":