RE: A Message From the Chief Anarchist For the Anarcho Capitalist Peasants.
I think there is a fine balance and rarely, if ever, does any one way of doing things work. If someone has a house and by mutual agreement rents a room or the house out, then that's freedom of choice. When things start to become accrued on such a scale that there is no longer any chance of anyone else ever having being able to do anything, but rent, then it's coming out of the realms of free choice. It becomes a monopoly and monopolies don't allow for choice.
On the other side, if you have a bit of land and you produce to provide for yourself and family, but you're now not allowed to own land so anyone is allowed to come go as they wish taking what is grown there, then your labour is potentially lost. So that's not a desirable situation either.
Both capitalism and communism have their merits, at least in theory. Generally communism becomes tyrannical sooner, so we've already seen the outcome of that. Capitalism has only recently become problematic as the more powerful companies are monopolising and the more control they have the more we start looking tyrannical.
The hardest thing seems to be finding a middle ground. One thinks capitalism alone is the answer, another communism, another socialism. They all have their faults and no one way works for everyone. An ideal situation would be everyone having the option to join in with whatever system or community they choose and having the choice to opt out if it isn't working for them.
Voluntarism is essentially the state of being able to freely choose to live in whichever way you prefer and change at will. Everything is done voluntarily.
The problems arise when someone tries to control others and limit their free will - at which point, for them, things are not voluntary. Did I voluntarily agree that x/y/z corporation can stop me walking on what they say is their property (that may once have been a forest that my grandparents played in?) - absolutely not - so from my pov, it is valid to say that such systems of control and ownership are not voluntary at all.
In fact, the moment anyone lays claim to land and says that others may not enter, they are forcing their will on others who may not agree. They are literally saying "No, you don't get to decide whether or not you want to live totally free on this planet, you must abide by my boundaries and rules, whether you like it or not". That is not anarchy!
In an ideal world, to my mind at least, we wouldn't need to worry about ownership because everybody would have enough respect to consider that others have the right to make use of everything too and curtail their own use to what is necessary instead of using in excess. Unfortunately this isn't an ideal world, so it's no surprise when people want to be able to keep what they've worked for, especially when the example they see is what it currently is.
In some ways it probably comes down to tolerance levels. Why begrudge ownership if that's what someone feels they need to survive, as long as it causes no harm or impact on others? The hard line to draw is where that starts to impact others. If someone had a belief that capitalism/communism/ socialism is the way for them, then who am I to judge as long as it doesn't impact me or others? My issue is when others feel that their way needs to be forced onto everyone else. I agree that voluntaryism is probably the closest description we do have to a live and let live situation.
Just a point of fact, at the height of the Gilded Age, the US engaged in replacing governments in the former Spanish colonies in Central America, mainly to benefit the United Fruit Company.
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/United_Fruit_Company
So, capitalism turned toward implementing tyranny abroad by the late 1800s, not more than a couple centuries into its existence.
But, before it did that, it created slavery for Africans in the Americas. That predated capitalism a little bit, but not by too much. It wasn't "government tyranny", but it allowed slaveowners to implement private tyranny at a small scale, or, sometimes, in the cases of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, medium to large scale.
The governmental folks who founded the government kept their tyrannical actions to their own households, where they certainly engaged in torture regularly, for the sake of agricultural productivity, and possibly their own personal entertainment.