Anarchist Bibliography, please? (was Re: Deconstructing an Institutional Slander...)

jim bell jdb10987 at yahoo.com
Thu Aug 4 14:37:46 PDT 2016



 From: Steve Kinney <admin at pilobilus.net>

On 08/04/2016 03:00 AM, Cecilia Tanaka wrote:
>> I asked Steve some suggestions in private, but it's better to ask 
>> publicly, so more people can profit the clues.  Oh, you know, he
>> loves books, uses cute emoticons and makes oink oink.  He's a good
>> reference for me, hahaha!!  ;)

>When dredging the Internet for information, I am sure you won't have
>much trouble picking out the State sponsored anarchist literature and
>pseudo-radical propaganda fronts: 


I hope people will forgive me for tooting my own horn.  I was a minarchist Libertarian in 1994,not an anarchist Libertarian.  But it wasn't because I somehow wanted to keep around someminimal government.  Rather, it was because I couldn't figure out a logically-consistent method'to entirely get rid of those last vestiges of government.  Lacking such an plausible method,I chose the intellectually-honest route of accepting (at the time) that some residual governmentwould be necessary.
While not specifically aware of David Friedman's (son of famous economist Milton Friedman)"Hard Problem"  http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2009/04/will_david_frie.html   , from his book, "The Machinery of Freedom" (1973; revised in 1989; again 2014),  I was effectivelyaware of the  same barrier, and like Friedman, I could not see any solution.  Anarchy, I concluded, was impractical, and unachievable. 
It's a good thing that I wasn't aware of Friedman's "Hard Problem", or the idea it was "hard".In January 1995 I because to contemplate the idea that turned into my "AssassinationPolitics" essay.   https://cryptome.org/ap.htm  
  I wasn't intending to solve that problem:  Rather, I was trying to figure out howan otherwise-powerless public could defend itself from bad acts, mostly from governmentemployees.  I realized that to combine the contributions of anonymous individuals,  allowsthat public can deter and prevent those bad acts.  I further realized that this system wouldbe extremely economical, allowing (for instance) the region known as "America" to defenditself, not merely from external threats, but also internal crime, probably for a total cost of under $1 billion per year, far less than the $600 billion in defense spending currently done.

A simplistic, initial analysis (which I initially assumed, even before I wrote the first part of theAP essay) was that AP would simply fix government.  But the ultimate "fix" was actually farmore powerful than I'd initially realized, not merely fixing governments, but destroying allgovernments, and thus protecting an anarchist or minarchist region from threatening neighbors.
Put simply, I solved David Friedman's "Hard Problem".  I haven't yet seen the 2014 revisionof his book, Machinery of Freedom, to see if he has acknowledged this yet.    I think it wouldbe extraordinarily strange if he doesn't do so:  After all, ostensibly we are on the same sideof this matter.  He advocates a zero-government solution:  Why wouldn't he cite a proofthat a zero-government solution is actually possible, contrary to his apparent previousopinion?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machinery_of_Freedom 
But in effect, I think I was quite correct, pre-1995, for me  to believe that anarchy was impractical.   I don't know how people who labelled themselves as 'anarchists'  resolvedthe apparent contradiction.  Were they aware that anarchy wasn't stable?  (At least notabsent my 1995 invention, AP).   Most likely I think they were simply unaware that anarchywasn't going to be stable.  Or, perhaps they assumed that then-future events would somehowsolve the problem.  As, ultimately, they did, but it didn't have to be that way.  I, virtually byaccident, solved that problem.  But things could have been very different.
                Jim Bell


  
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