I’ve said it several times over the last few days, but a lot of this comes off more with not liking the implications of the principles, and they disagree with your sensibilities. You made a claim, in the prior post, about it not being emotional, but frankly, this post doesn’t really lend credence to that, it instead makes it far more likely that it is a highly, perhaps even primarily, emotional response.
I was explaining why I hate Anarcho-Capitalism, not why I think it’s logically incorrect.
Because it’s not ‘under anarcho-capitalism, my life doesn’t matter to the wealthy’ that is really the complaint, it’s ‘my life has no intrinsic value and I don’t like that.’ Because in truth, that’s the complaint, and it would be so under any system that proposed the same. Yet value is subjective, it can’t be intrinsic. Value is just an abstract concept of how we measure things. There is no absolute value to anything.
Value, as I consider it, is directly experienced, on a root level of reality in the same park as “I think, therefore I am”.
Value is not an axiomatic concept, not to me and I’m guessing not to you either, because if you’ve got issues with my axioms of self-ownership you can’t rightfully turn around and declare one for value.
I’m not assuming value, I’m experiencing it.
I could go on about the constructed scenario, but lets go for it. Yes, if that loaf of bread somehow belonged to this man, it would be a violation of their property rights to take it. It actually would be a violation to even be on the planet, if they did somehow own the whole thing. I suspect you’d still do it (and so would I) if my life depended on it on that moment, but that doesn’t make it not a violation, it merely places you in a shit scenario were you’re gonna have to make some choice and live with the consequences. There is no argument of why it isn’t a violation of their property rights, you outright admit that it is.
People are fundamentally more real than property. Your idea that essentially argues that property is people (as an extension of them) is part of why you do not accept the people > property ordering.
but the issue about scruples is precisely why I don’t what you and your plan for some authority to control the breeding population of the planet, among a vast number of other frankly terrifying proposals.
My default support for Bland Liberalism, which I don’t discuss much on Tumblr, is grounded in my own skepticism based on previous events. Further, while it may be the case that it turns out we don’t have to resort to such measures (it looks like population growth is falling, but technological advancement rate is not guaranteed), what I more accurately object to is taking them off the table entirely completely independent of actual conditions.
And if you recognize the unscrupulous nature of humanity as you seem to, than it is fundamentally irrational to propose creating the very Actual Boot we joked about not long ago, now with fancy lights attached.
Water flows without regard to where we wish, but with sufficient accuracy we can control it and force it to. However, Anarcho-Capitalism, much like Communism, is too willfully unaware of the nature of the water to adequately plan for it. Communism can ‘work’ too if you assume everyone goes along with it and doesn’t obey the local incentives or behave irrationally (or ‘irrationally’).
Although I would like to see both it and an AnCom commune attempted. I predict both would implode dramatically and subsequently be denounced as not real Scotsmen, but I’m not all-knowing.
And that’s why your consequentialism is both ethically and logically bankrupt. You list all these reasons, and contrast them to “lol I don’t want to,” but “lol I don’t want to,” is no less arbitrary than any of those other reasons you listed.
People are real and precede property. They ‘physically’ exist regardless of the nested layer of reality and available metadata in a way that property does not. Likewise, the subcomponents of their minds also exist.
I bring it up because frankly, a lot of your objections in prior places, and now here about charity spending, are essentially this, and perhaps the role reversal is doubly ironic then, because you are transhumanist technocrat, yet you seem to be criminally unimaginative about these problems, because you’re basically just turning back to the old style responses to them all. I don’t need charity giving to reach 30-40% of GDP, I need ways for charity to be less necessary.
It isn’t a lack of imagination, it’s an observation of how businesses and individuals have proceeded in the past, and then assuming that hey, they will likely do so again in the future.
If you want to hear a more imaginative solution - I want the government to subsidize the distribution of an executive-function-enhancing genetic modification. Not only would this significantly decrease crime, but it would boost the economy, lower welfare budgets, and have all sorts of positive secondary effects. Also, it would be hilarious watching the “just pull yourself up by your bootstraps lazies” people get BTFOd by the simultaneous increased competition and evidence that it was non-trivially biological all along. But that’s trivial in comparison to the likely reduction of the prison population to 1/10th of current levels, fewer homicides, etc.
I know you don’t follow me, so you haven’t seen my favor of wage subsidies at the current level of technology, which would also likely - reduce crime, reduce welfare spending, have positive secondary effects, recover some economic value, etc etc.
But like, why would I say that in an argument such as this, since it would essentially go without saying, and does not in any way justify the AnCap position to me? This is a coordination problem. States are a method of solving coordination problems. I don’t consider using states to solve coordination problems inherently immoral.
You can’t make people value you, though. And you’ve no right to try to use force to make people value you, or anything else. This sucks. It’s a horrible thing to accept, and that’s why so many folks reject it. Because the implications aren’t nice.
Because I experience value directly, I have value independently of whether other people value me.
But neither good or truth are reliant on being nice, or the sensibilities of any given person. Or even all the peoples that exist and ever have. No amount of offended sensibilities will stop the sun from rising.
AnCap is not truth.
And the flat truth is that you and your sensibilities are exactly the sort of folks who lacked scruples prey upon and thus drove (and, in truth, created) the communist horror that has afflicted the world, and many movements before and since.
Communists often don’t actually behave like Consequentialists. You’ll notice they argue a lot about “oppression” and “justice” and the moral responsibility of classes in society, and wax poetic about killing perceived enemies. Not, you know, just jailing them. Or exiling them. Killing them for reasons of collective justice.
For many of them, including Tankies, the “good” includes suffering of class enemies. Likewise with SJ. Likewise with Feminists.
And as for people like you, the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire was justified by such sensibilities, and rampant support of Capitalism has enabled every other tragedy perpetrated in its name. (I don’t collect detailed lists of those because hey, I’m not a Communist. But I know it isn’t trivial. You may object that this is not true AnCapism, but Commies talk about how No Really That’s Not Socialism’s Fault all the time, and failures of this kind reflect on Capitalist markets generally.)
And the property instinct? Itself emotional, as another commenter noted elsewhere regarding people getting offended at ‘stealing’ images they had themselves ‘stolen’ and not credited them for, for example, cleaning up and organizing pages of manga that they had never paid for. So don’t pretend that you’ve escaped emotionality when choice of axioms is itself under the influence thereof. If your mind were devised differently, you would not have likely ended up as an AnCap.
