CDR: Re: Insurance (was: why should it be trusted?)

[Bill Stewart]

Both of those arguments are incorrect.
Anonymous has no business telling us how anarchic we can be :-)
If people want to voluntarily engage in hierarchical relationships,
that's still anarchy.  And you can still have leaders in anarchies -
it's just that if they screw up and find there's nobody following them
any more, they can't force their ex-followers to come back.

There are versions of anarchist theory that accept private property
and versions that don't, but both deal with types of "property"
that can be taken or protected by physical force.
"Intellectual Property" deals with the rather sillier concept
that some ideas belong to some people and it's ok for them to
hire guys in blue suits to beat up other people to protect it.

Crypto anarchy creates different kinds of protection mechanisms
for ideas, in ways that beating people up is neither necessary,
useful, or possible, so you can limit most of your transactions
to genuinely voluntary ones.  This isn't perfect either -
if somebody defrauds you, you can't sue them or beat them up,
because your only contacts are a bunch of bits on the net.
So reputations become important, and you've got to build more
incremental transaction mechanisms, and you've got different 
tradeoffs of risk versus cost (for instance, credit's hard to do.)

Crypto-anarchy isn't Sternerism or Kropotkinism.
It doesn't say anything about whether you maintain traditional 
hierarchical relationships with your wives, though it does give
you more options for sharing resources with people you like
(whether you consider those resources to be property or not.)
It doesn't mean that the government or mafia can't collect 
property taxes on your house - though it may mean they
collect them from the resident rather than the "owner",
and threaten to kick out the resident if they don't pay.
It also doesn't mean your mother or work krewe or syndicate 
or commune or wives can't tell you to clean the bathroom - 
but it gives you more options for who "owns" the house, 
and more options for paying somebody to clean it 
without the government taking a piece of the action.  

James is right that getting rid of private property gives you
other problems, but he's wrong that this means one huge
centralized plan that rules everybody - such things are
typically very hard to enforce and maintain, even with
modern technology to make it easier.  You can, and do,
have lots of distributed economic decisionmaking even in most
totalitarian states, between black markets, Russian jokes about
"they pretend to pay us and we pretend we're working",
favors,  bribes, etc.  And there are socialist alternatives
like syndicates and small communes, and there are farming villages
or hunter-gatherer villages out in remote areas,
and lots of other alternative structures for societies
besides just propertarianism and totalitarianism.
Many of them don't work very well, or work fine but fall to
outside invaders, but that's a separate problem.

>At 09:20 PM 10/18/2000 -0600, Anonymous wrote:
> > Crypto-anarchy is in fact not really anarchy, since it only
> > addresses some kinds of authority, ie government, and only in
> > certain situations. True anarchy involves the dissolution of other
> > hierarchical relationships, including those that spring from private
> > property. Get rid of private property and many of these problems
> > disappear.
>
At 07:53 AM 10/19/00 -0700, James A.. Donald wrote:
>Been tried.
>Without property rights to separate one man's plan from another man's plan, 
>only one plan can be permitted, and any pursuit of alternate goals, or 
>pursuit of the same goals through alternate methods is "wrecking", and must 
>be crushed.
>Without property rights in the means of production there there can only be 
>one plan, and one set of planners, to which all must submit.
>
>The alternative to private property rights in the means of production is a 
>single plan, one plan for all, one plan that must be imposed on all, which 
>necessitates unending terror, as we have invariably and uniformly seen in 
>practice.

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
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