On Sat, 16 Dec 2000, Jim Choate wrote:
Crypto-anarchy and libertarianism are just another form of fascism at best and socialism at worst. It's a means for one group of people to oppress and control another.
Note: I really wish that people would "get" the distinction between socialism and fascism on this list. I realize both look substantially the same from the libertarian/anarchist perspective in that they involve controlling people. But they have different ideologies and reasons for controlling people, and to use them interchangeably is to be WRONG slightly more than half the time. If you want a word you can use for both types of government, plus dictatorships and feudal/aristocratic systems, try "totalitarian".
Is your premise that anarchy doesn't lead to a 'socialist' society? A society in which the choices of the individual are made en masse? Consider the congruency of world view a working anarchy requires? Then consider the disparity of world views between any two people. How do you resolve this obvious conflict?
I have long felt that we could comfortably shrink government if open markets were established to help settle such conflicts.
How does a working anarchy resolve real world disputes? I offer you the example of a tree which is rooted in my back yard but has limbs impinging on my neighbors roof. Is it his or my responsibility to cut the limbs back to deter damage? Why? Whose responsiblity to pay for any damage that does occur to the roof from limbs? Why? When the tree dies who is responsible for the bill to remove the dead husk? Why? What happens if at any point during this resolution phase one of the parties refuses to participate further? Who do they go to for arbitration? What standards of arbitration will be used? Who is responsible for assuring compliance? What are the limits of compliance enforcement?
If there are no laws, and both of you are committed to resolving the issue without violence, you probably both put money on the barrelhead to be paid to the other in the event you don't abide by an arbitrator's decision, and then go to an arbitrator and ask his opinion. That's if you're civic minded, I suppose. The fact is though, a lot of people wouldn't do that if they thought the arbitrator was likely to side with the other guy. Things become a lot easier if your property deed is a truly *complete* description of the property; in that case you know who owns the volume over the fence (or whether it's held in common) and your neighbor started charging you rent for the encroachment of your tree into his volume years ago. If you don't want to pay the rent, you have a few choices; you can trim your tree to keep it in your property, you can buy from him the volume over the fence where the tree's limbs are spreading, or you can offer tenancy in common of the volume in question, giving him the right to encroach into the volume near your house too. Note, this assumes sufficient government that property rights and contracts are meaningful. This is not true in a complete anarchy. If you don't have at least that, then you and your neighbor will eventually either work things out in some non-specific way or one of you will kill the other. The closer to anarchy a system gets, the more completely every last thing in it has to be accounted for and owned in order to avoid breakdown.
Now, let's assume we've a neighbor making bombs and his garage is 15 ft. from your childs bedroom? Let's ask the same sorts of questions?
If it's a residential neighborhood, then it was probably developed by a commercial real estate developer. In order to improve his bottom line, he will probably retain ownership of certain property rights and sell the rest. For example, he may retain the sole and exclusive right to build bombs on this property -- and advertise far and wide his intent not to exercise it. Now the guy with the 55-gallon drum of gelignite is in violation of the developer's property rights and the neighbor calls the developer who sends around some security guys. This is really just an extension of the kind of "neighborhood association" bullshit that a lot of real estate developers try to do now -- they deny the homeowners the right to paint their houses purple, etc, as a condition of sale. This puts the property developer in a sort of lawgiver role, but it does not establish a government that can pass arbitrary laws; every right of ownership *NOT* sold to the homeowners would have to be spelled out in the purchase contract, and there wouldn't be grounds for anyone to change those laws after the point of sale. Basically, you could see right up front what property rights were withheld from you, and what property rights were withheld from your neighbors, when you were contemplating the house purchase decision. I think this is the ideal of a "functional" anarchy: You are beholden only to the rules and restraints which you personally have freely chosen. There may be just as many as there are laws in the current setup, but they are there because you personally chose them and they are enforced against you because you voluntarily signed contracts accepting them. If you bought the house with the understanding that you had no right to build bombs there, and that your neighbors also had no right to build bombs in their houses, and you have a contract with the property developer that says the right to build bombs in your neighbors' houses will *NOT* be granted to your neighbors without your explicit approval, that's fine. It's a restraint you (and your neighbor) have chosen. If you wanted to build bombs in your home, you should just have bought a house that was sold with that right intact. But if you bought your house with "all" property rights and then some twit far away changes the value of your house by changing what property rights you have over it, then you have a problem. Currently we allow people to change the sets of rights we own (including property rights) without recompensation -- hell, without even *bidding* for those rights on an open market.
As we've discussed before on the list, in the cases of commen services like fire fighting which are converted to profit making enterprises, how is intentional fire starting to be prevented?
It's very hard. Probably the best route would be again through property developers; the property developer could retain the exclusive right to sell fire insurance on these buildings, and then license the right *only* to insurance companies who contributed a set percentage of premiums to a local firefighters company. Getting all these services straightened out is just good business from the property development POV. Bear