(noting again: I’m not an ancap, and don’t think it’s a realistic or even necessarily desirable outcome)
The amusing thing here is that Syria is one of the places that shows what happens when you get a collapse of the state
You can also pretty easily label syria as an example of what happens when you get a collision of four states, all shitty to different degrees (the old syrian regime, their russian backers, ISIL, and the us coalition proxy state).
History suggests almost nobody actually wants to live in this atomized state, they will form associations and thus attempt to reform the state almost immediately. Although that state could be one of aristocrats or warlords.
I agree, statelessness is probably not stable and this one of the reasons I am not an ancap. However, this still leaves 95% of the ancap position intact, even if it ruins their sound bytes. There are ancaps who will admit that statelessness may be unachievable, but that this has no real bearing on the rest of their platform.
The whole anarcho-capitalist idea set is filled with such astonishingly unrealistic projections on what people will do it astounds me.
I don’t think this is a reasonable criticism. Sure, the bottom 95% of ancaps are hugely unrealistic, but this is true of every ideology. I’ve not read the literature widely, but in his book, the thing about david friedman (one of the more important ancap writers) that impressed me the most was how realistic he was.
I disagree with him in a number of places (I wrote an entire series of posts mostly criticizing him!) but his arguments were mostly well thought out and set realistic expectations for how successful such policies could be.
One of the things that tends to draw me to libertarian policies is that they are often the only people in the room who are actually paying attention to incentive systems and how people actually act. The places where I most often disagree with libertarians are, in my estimation, the places where they’ve failed to consider historical precedent, but this is not the most common case.
See, I think incentives are the problem with their system. One of the main times you see this is when they think of everything in property rights. You can see that’s the primitive they use to manipulate the world. The problem is, it’s a legal construct. It’s this whole idea that society is governed by rules and not power. The attempts they try to use to patch this are ridiculous, and without it the whole system falls apart instantly into violence.
I see these incentives, but I see these incentive arguments as ridiculous because there is so much they fail to consider. It’s the classic libertarian-arguing point, when they say “Let us suppose“ you have to say “Let’s absolutely not suppose“ because the whole thing is often based on unrealistic assumptions. These synthetic problems are constrained to give the result that they want and these toy problems are used to show how great their system is.
I’m of the opinion that “incentives“ is not a good system to use, because you can construct problems such to give any incentive you want. People take actions because they have an incentive, opium knocks people out because it has a dormitive power. These arguments have the problem of unfalsifiability, I prefer to pay attention to what people do than make arguments about incentives. You can tell just-so stories to give anyone any incentive you want, doesn’t mean that corresponds to any reality. Much better to observe what people actually do.
So, friedman again, both because he’s the author I’m most familiar with and mainstream enough that I don’t think this is cherrypicking. Here are the opening and closing paragraphs of a chapter he spends arguing against unsophisticated strains of libertarianism:
Many libertarians appear to believe that libertarianism can be stated as a simple and convincing moral principle from which everything else follows. Popular candidates are ‘It is always wrong to initiate coercion’ and ‘Everyone has the absolute right to control his own property, provided that he does not use it to violate the corresponding rights of others.’
…
My purpose is to argue that libertarianism is not a collection of straightforward and unambiguous arguments establishing with certainty a set of unquestionable propositions. It is rather the attempt to apply certain economic and ethical insights to a very complicated world. The more carefully one does so, the more complications one is likely to discover and the more qualifications one must put on one’s results.
I think if you look at the stronger versions of these claims, rather than j random tumblr ancap’s retelling of them, you’ll find that they are mostly close examinations of real situations. There’s still plenty to disagree with, but ignorance of the idea that society is governed by power is not one of them. One of the goals of libertarian policy is to limit the extent to which that power can coerce.
Friedman’s text in particular is full of historical observations and precedents that support many of his arguments, and almost all of his practical ones.
His section on a hypothetical ancap future is just that, hypothetical. But that has no bearing on his practical policy claims.
In his section on reform, he often starts with something along the lines of “let us suppose”, but for the most part he merely wants you to suppose things that have really happened.
You see, I reject his entire framing. I go with the legal realist point of view here, property is coercion. Property is permission to do violence.
So, you could regard this as a bit of rhetorical irrelevance, but it’s not. You can recreate horrible government systems using libertarian ideas. I know this because one libertarian has, Hans-Hermann Hoppe. He suggests that in a libertarian system, most people will exist as tenants on the property of rich people, there will be no free speech and no rights apart from that the landlord gives you, and leftist, homosexuals, feminists, and minorities must be expelled. Libertarianism is quite compatible with genocide in that way, you just starve people. When you get to how people in an actual “libertarian“ system might act who aren’t bound by postulates like theoretical people, it can get even worse.
Property is power, there’s no getting around that. They have to do this “non-coercion“ bit to dodge that, but ultimately it is power and generally what the rich say goes. The game of closing your eyes and pretending that this isn’t power is ridiculous. And then he imagines that these powerful people will play even by the rules he sets?
His historical arguments are, as in other other article, cherry-picked examples he uses to suggest that things will work the way he intends. Because something happened once in one context he doesn’t fully understand and in fact nobody does, he suggests that it definitely will happen that way this time. It’s wishful thinking on an extreme scale, and as stated in that other article when he is wrong it will cause unimaginable catastrophe for everyone except possibly him and his rich friends.
And the “let us suppose“ bullshit not only allows you to phrase questions to get the answer you want, it also allows you to ignore certain causes that you may judge as irrelevant. It’s all about phrasing shit in the way of high-school math problems that we’re all trained to just accept and not question the premises or results to get out the “correct“ answer.
