Protected: quotes + random points.

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All people in a society affect each other, and you never know who it’s going to be.

I recall a Milton Friedman video (ironic  that I should mention one of the most valiant defenders of capitalism, I know) in which he uses a pencil to demonstrate the power of the market, which brings me to my next point.

We are all interconnected.

Think of the clothes you’re wearing, the food you ate today, the computer you’re using. Try to imagine the entire productive process that brought you these things. Imagine, for one moment, how many people contributed to making that computer. (Try a Google on the production of a computer– the results you’ll get will often be only a sliver of the actual production, right down to each and every scrap of material.) If we go all the way down to the atomic level, the atoms of your computer come from practically everywhere on the globe. An enormous amount of people in different societies have contributed to the productive process. (That is what collectivists often mean by the label– that they recognize we are all inter-dependent and connected in some way, however distant it may be.)

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Well many of these [Anarchists who support Universal Health Care, minimum wage, public education, etc.] come from the state socialist path, so often they are more anti-capitalism than anti-State. From their view, it does make some sense because they’re simply using the State as a means to combat the negative effects of capitalism.
They often view anarchy to be closer to a masses-oriented participatory social democracy than a elitist minarchy, and have yet to shake off that remaining short-term pragmatism. (Similar to how you have people who want anarchy in the end, but will settle for minarchy now.)

I’ve talked with these Chomsky-type people, and they view social welfare, progressive taxation, etc. to be treating the symptoms of capitalism even if it involves using the State (which they view as a lesser evil).

I don’t agree with that view, but it makes some sense given their past and values. It’s just being inconsistent and short-term oriented.

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The market is not going to magically solve everything, and you have a lot of faith if you believe it will. You don’t smash the State and POOF! all other irrational beliefs disappear. You need a social context for anarchism.

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I don’t really think of everything in terms of ‘aggression’ vs. ‘non-aggression’ these days, preferring to stick with how much an action limits another’s alternatives to achieve their values, and ‘force’ is only one of those. The State limits my alternatives by making me either obey them or be caged, so I’m ‘forced’ to consent since I may simply prefer that over the worse alternative, and that’s what limits my liberty.

Technically we’re always in a chain of causality, so you could trace everything back to a human agent but that would be pretty pointless. I’m not going to bother blaming the forefathers for the status quo. It’s got to be more direct.

I’ve had this idea that if someone did something to you that you didn’t want, you’re justified in doing something to the offender that he doesn’t want done, just as much, and this applies to everything including physical force and ‘verbal abuse.’ If a millionaire stole a dollar from a beggar, the beggar would be justified in taking $100 from him since the millionaire valued the $100 just as much as the beggar valued the dollar. If someone verbally abuses me, I’d be justified in using force that he wouldn’t like just as much as I don’t appreciate the verbal abuse. Of course we can’t know exactly how much a person values something, so we’d have to try our best at an approximation.

Anyway, the reason for this is that I want a clear definition of ‘aggression’ from the ‘voluntaryists’– I’ve also heard of people saying that yelling is ‘aggression’ because it’s not ‘voluntary.’ Which would seem to make an equivocation fallacy with ‘non-forceful’ and ‘voluntary’ (as in what one prefers). Just because all (physically?) ‘forced’ situations are not ‘voluntary’/preferred does not necessarily mean ‘non-forced’ = preferred.

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Usury leads to a centralization of wealth, and centralization of wealth is bad because it enables a plutocracy to form, because for just one example, now the wealth-center can bribe anyone (in say, a court case) and easily get away with it. Money is power.

He also owns a vast estate of land from all the renting, and under property-ownership he can make up any rules he wants and enforce them. Hell, he could also enable every single statist program for his ‘tenants’, such as Medicare, public schooling, Social Security, etc. while continuously extracting money from his tenants living on there, and caging them if they refuse to pay.

If his tenants don’t like something, their only option is to leave.

The fact that the landlord is abusing his ‘ownership’ and power claims over the land to claim a right to a portion of the tenant’s labor, when he himself did not actually labor for that, is what libsocs call exploitation. The same way the State uses its power claims over the land of the USSA to claim a right to a portion of the citizen’s labor, when the State-people themselves did not actually labor for that increase.

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The kind of inequality that libsocs criticize is inequality of authority/power/privilege, anyways. And by ‘authority’ no one opposes it in the sense of ‘being an authority’ (as in a doctor being an authority over medicine), but rather ‘having authority’ (over others) in the social sense.

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Offering someone a one-time gift for use of their stuff, is very different to them claiming a right to continuous increase from it.

For example, take a plot of land. A tenant contracts with the owner/landlord to live on it, and the landlord gets a flow of money from it. The landlord dies, and the land is passed on to his son, who also gets the flow of money. The tenant has a baby, and the child is born under the landlord’s monopoly of land, and the child ends up owing a steady flow of money to the landlord as he grows up. But the child never ever explicitly contracted to it!

So here we have a situation where the ‘voluntary’ nature becomes something authoritarian, and the new landlord still maintains his monopoly of aggression over it all along with authority over the tenant’s child. The situation becomes what Spooner criticizes about the government in No Treason– the Constitution was indeed a ‘voluntary contract’ amongst the original founders, but it became an authoritarian situation. In fact the only difference would be that the ‘founders’ did not actually ‘homestead’ the land– so basically, the entire US government today would be justified if the ‘founders’ had acquired the land in the ‘right’ way back in the 18th century. That’s where everything falls apart, because ancap property theory criticizes the State while simultaneously rationalizing statism if the land was acquired the ‘right’ way.

But under a libsoc system, where the tenant offers to give a one-time gift to the landlord, the contract is finite, and cannot become something authoritarian in a generation or two.

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It’s not so much about the immediate relationship between two individuals (which can often be consensual, just like the Constitution was consensual for the founding fathers) at hand, but rather the situations and systems that a right to continuous increase ends up justifying.

There’s also another element– the right to. I obviously do not have a right to gifts from you (as in, a right is a justification of violence), so you can simply refuse me if you feel I’m hoarding it all, and I’m not justified in forcefully extracting a one-time ‘gift’ from you. But if I claim something as my property, I have a right to ask for a continuous increase and I’d be justified in doing whatever I can to extract that un-labored money out of you.

Besides, it’s not that my system is ‘vulnerable’– technically, any system suffers from the possibility of devolving into statism in practicality, but what matters is whether the theory justifies that statism. It doesn’t matter if both libsoc and ancap devolve into statism– what matters here is that ancap would justify that statism as long as the land was ‘rightfully’ acquired.

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My point is that it all ends up being a “love it or leave it” situation in regards to the territorial ownership, because many would argue that the tenant is ‘free to leave’ if he doesn’t like the system. Which is the exact reasoning statists use to justify the state today. A justification for authority does not follow from that you are free to leave.

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It might be a ‘mutually voluntary’ situation at first, but it ends up justifying authoritarian and aggressive situations.

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Society (that is, other people) recognizes it as your possession, and a society that doesn’t recognize any form of ownership will fail.

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Franc’s ‘hard’ version of the LTV basically says that the final price of a good ought to be based on the amount of labor put into it. So in this version if you were to put two hours of labor into producing something, someone else wanted it, then the person ought to pay you with something that took two hours of labor put into it as well.

There’s also Carson’s version which states that the final supply-and-demand price will be proportionate to the amount of labor put into it. Handmade versus factory-produced, for one.

Saying that prices are determined by subjective desires or supply-and-demand tells us nothing, really. It doesn’t tell us what caused those prices, nor what the prices ought to be, so it’s pretty useless on its own. Carson’s version fills in that void by providing an explanation of why people value some things more than others, and Franc’s version attempts to state what they ought to be. There’s other versions of the LTV floating around as well.

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Being opposed to something, in no way, necessitates ‘forceful intervention.’ Anymore than militant atheism would be about using ‘force’ to wipe out all prevailing religious beliefs.

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In a ‘free’ economy with private property, yes I’d imagine they would end up that way. The landlord would just expand his territory and maintain his monopoly of rule over it, like I already explained earlier on this thread. Even if they didn’t that would be irrelevant– what matters is that these authoritarian situations would be justified under ancap property theory.

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I think the fundamental issue is the system they end up justifying. A right (a justification of violence) to a continuous increase ends up justifying an exploitative and aggressive system– as in, at some point (out of several points in regards to rent) if the tenant is unable to pay, the landlord is justified in using violence to extract it out of him.

You’re not justified in using violence to extract a one-time gift out of the guy, though. You don’t have a right to one-time chunks.

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Under capitalism, I can hire a hundred workers to work on homesteading an island, and I can rightfully proclaim myself the owner of it.

The fault here is that you can’t transfer responsibility.

If the workers were the ones who actually labored on the island, they are responsible for it, not me. They are the actual possessors, not me. But under capitalism, I am effectively attempting to transfer responsibility over to myself, so it seems like I am the one that actually labored and not them, and therefore I’m the rightful owner.

You are responsible for what you do, and you cannot sign away that fact with a contract.

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