Guys,
For those of you who don't know, StormCloudsGathering is a channel on YouTube, the author is a voluntaryist guy. I think he is very intelligent and his arguments are generally logical and clear. He posted a video some days ago.
Now, this is not a post "he criticized anarcho-capitalism, destroy it!". I actually consider myself a truth seeker, and I don't think I'm attached to the way I think the world should be, in the sense that I immediately disregard any argument that goes against it.
That said, I don't think his arguments in this video were bullet-proof. I don't know much about DRO theory, but, for example, his characterization of the way they would supposedly work is off, imo.
What are your opinions on this video?
Right off the bat, he begins by differentiating "voluntarism" with "anarcho-capitalism". I've pretty much always considered the former, a synonym, or even a euphemism of the latter.
I've never heard the suggestion that "anything and everything can and should be owned, with the exception of people and ideas." That sounds like something he made up.
In fact, his entire explication of "anarcho-capitalism" sounds like nothing more than a more detailed description of what a voluntarist society would look like. He talks about a lack of regulations and overarching authority and the like, as if that were a bad thing, and as if that is any different than a system of voluntarism.
Next, he doesn't exactly criticize anarcho-capitalism...first he claims he's listened to "hundreds of hours" of audio explaining how a private society would likely function. Then he claims that none of these explanations address how violent criminals would be dealt with, and how justice would be served. And (apparently) to prove this, he picks one single segment of one single Molyneux video that doesn't address this, and then spends 25% of the video trying to pick it apart. Is this seriously what passes for argumentation?
Philosophical ignorance
Then he goes on to assert that "a completely privatized criminal justice system just wouldn't work. And it wouldn't result in anything even closely resembling a free society." First of all, I fail to see how someone who claims to be a "voluntarist" and subscribe to the non-aggression principle could presume to propose a criminal justice system that is not private...that is, as far as I know, there are only two options: privately owned, or "publically owned"...the latter of course referring to "public property", which is a subset of "state property". This all of course would imply that if something like a "criminal justice system" was not private, there would be a state.
Second, how exactly does would he presume the existence a truly "free society" if anything was not private? Again, it sounds like he's implying the existence of a state...that doesn't exactly sound voluntarist.
...but then again, nowhere in his explanation of "voluntarism" does he clearly address property rights...he merely says that "any claims of human ownership, whether explicit or implied, are illegitimate", and that "exchanges of resources and labor should be voluntary." The latter would sound like he shares the libertarian understanding of property rights (as it implies that resources can be privately owned)...but the former statement essentially contradicts that notion, as, if one cannot own himself, how does he presume to own anything else?
I have to assume this guy was only talking about slavery, and was just sloppy in his wording. But this to me would suggest a lack of understanding of the concepts he's presuming to discuss.
Although I could be wrong, as he only claims that the state, as defined as a monopoly on violence in a specifc region, is "a dangerous and destructive social construct"...he never expresses any advocacy against such a thing. So he may very well accept the premise that the state is legitimate and a "necessary evil".
This would make sense, as it would be in line with his un-elaborated concept of property...as, a confused concept of property rights would be the only way one could claim to subscribe to the NAP, while simultaneously being in favor of, or at least accepting of, a state. (In other words, it's not aggression against you if it's not your property. You can see an example of this kind of confusion of property rights here: "Casey at Occupy DC is not sure if he owns himself")
If you really think about it, this is actually a very clever and sneaky way to sound like you're a friend of anti-statists, when really you're advocating something very different. If I were Clayton, I might be inclined to suggest this guy is a plant.
Economic ignorance
Moving on, he claims that "the concept that a pure free market will mitigate the abuses of power by businesses who are able to use violence — such as private police forces or private militaries — or that free market forces would prevent the establishment of monopolies or cartels and criminal syndicates, is based on faulty logic."
We'll get to his misunderstandings of economics and why he's wrong on this in a second, but putting that aside and assuming what he says is true...that a pure free market wouldn't mitigate these things...what exactly is he proposing? Is he then suggesting that there should be something other than a pure free market? Would that not imply a need for the initiation of force against individuals acting peacefully?
He claims that the market itself is "amoral", and only works towards "the equillibrium of supply and demand as expressed in prices"...but that there are immoral business practices such as improper waste disposal and slave labor. Okay, I can live with that. But immediately he shows his economic ignorance by claiming that those kinds of practices "save money for the company, and therefore allow them to undercut more ethical competitors."
This is the classic leftist economic-illiterate nonsense that is used to justify the state all the time. It's completely untrue and I find it quite suprising that a self-proclaimed voluntarist would suggest such abject nonsense, but then again, I suppose one doesn't have to be a free-market economist to be a voluntarist (however this guy doesn't seem to be either.)
He then goes on this Marxian-esque tirade, basically claiming that the free market doesn't incentivise morality, but rather the opposite. He uses the BP oil spill as an example, and asserts that there was no boycott and BP is still in business, and that this therefore illustrates that "people voting with their dollars" (i.e. his explication of "market forces") is not sufficient to prevent immoral business practices.
Obviously what he completely ignores here is the fact that the BP oil spill did not occur in a pure free market, and BP was not only not regulated by the market in the first place (as, of course the state claimed jurisdiction and was therefore responsible for the safety level of BP's activities), but also when something did go wrong, the company was shielded from billions of dollars in liability by the state. This would obviously not be the case in a free market. If a company (and as some would argue, its officers) were fully liable for damages, the people involved would be more incentivized to act with more discretion.
He continues with more leftist rhetoric and fearmongering about "completely unregulated" businesses , and eventually makes the claim that they are essentially no different than states. He goes on and on about how without regulation you'd have monarchy and feudalism. Obviously he never explains why that doesn't exist today, when we have no regulating authority over government (i.e., who is limiting the government's actions? Where is this overarching authority that is preventing the government from enslaving the people? And most importantly, why exactly would whatever is preventing the state from enslaving people all of a sudden disappear if the current "government" state went away, and was replaced by a set of "business" states, as he claims would happen?)
This goes on for about another 20% of the video, "blah blah blah, you could change the name employee to serf, blah blah blah"...
Nonsense "fixes"
Finally at 14:19 he gets to his "fix" of anarcho-capitalism:
1) an-cap needs to account for a unified set of rules. You can call it a "constitution" if you'd like. And in the end it would need to be treated like a contract.
[continued]... The rules of engagement in your society and the consequences for not obeying them are the terms of the contract. And citizenship would be established by signing the contract in full awareness of the terms. This would be a voluntary decision and therefore does not violate the NAP.
Okay, so basically there's no such thing as a child citizen, or infants and children can enter into contracts?
2) blah blah blah, horizontal decision-making processes and non-hierarchical business models need to be a part of the overall vision of a free society, otherwise you're just going to end up with a collection of miniature dictatorships.
Seriously I waited 15 minutes for this shit?
3) Stop trying to fit every human interaction into a business model.
Who the hell is doing that?
Finally in his epilogue he surprisingly does bring up the question of whether a system consisting of what he describes would still "be a form of voluntarism"...and his answer is:
"it would depend on how you fill in the gaps. I would assert that yes, you can organize it in a voluntary fashion and I have a description of how you would approach that, but I'm not going to present it here..."
Basically it seems to me this douchebag doesn't really have a firm grasp of the concepts he's presuming to tackle here...and the only thing broken is his understanding of libertarianism and economics. But hey, he has a neato fire loop video.
Eh,
A lot of more leftist fears and viewpoints in the video. As soon as you assume a developed society with strong libertarian morality is the reality in which the anarcho-capitalist society comes about then pretty much every point goes away. Since this is also the only viable society anarcho-capitalism would develop in, his objections largely go away. If the morality in society heavily promotes non-initiation of violence and is also heavily armed then good luck finding the soldiers to wage a war, the money to wage a war, and the ability to actually win a war. Primitive nations often don't have the level of "civilization" or standard of security to promote real non-violence on a societal level. Abuse and violence is often part of an impoverished culture, not a civilized one.
I do agree with him about some problems being much more easily approachable by non-profits and community-run organizations, however. I do think that people who call themselves "anarcho-capitalists" are too focused on the capitalism part of society, rather than non-monetary interactions and social forces.
John James: hmm... brwy
hmm... brwy
Ok, and thanks for the links on your signature! I fixed the video link and learned (again; it's been a long time since I last regularly read the forum) how to quote properly.
Neodoxy: A lot of more leftist fears and viewpoints in the video.
A lot of more leftist fears and viewpoints in the video.
Indeed. In another video of him, he said he thinks that a left libertarian society would be more viable than an an-cap one.
Neodoxy: As soon as you assume a developed society with strong libertarian morality is the reality in which the anarcho-capitalist society comes about then pretty much every point goes away. Since this is also the only viable society anarcho-capitalism would develop in, his objections largely go away. If the morality in society heavily promotes non-initiation of violence and is also heavily armed then good luck finding the soldiers to wage a war, the money to wage a war, and the ability to actually win a war. Primitive nations often don't have the level of "civilization" or standard of security to promote real non-violence on a societal level. Abuse and violence is often part of an impoverished culture, not a civilized one.
As soon as you assume a developed society with strong libertarian morality is the reality in which the anarcho-capitalist society comes about then pretty much every point goes away. Since this is also the only viable society anarcho-capitalism would develop in, his objections largely go away. If the morality in society heavily promotes non-initiation of violence and is also heavily armed then good luck finding the soldiers to wage a war, the money to wage a war, and the ability to actually win a war. Primitive nations often don't have the level of "civilization" or standard of security to promote real non-violence on a societal level. Abuse and violence is often part of an impoverished culture, not a civilized one.
Yeah, it seems unreasonable to think that companies would start enslaving people without retaliation.
Somalia came to mind as well. Even with its poor standards of living, it managed to slowly improve without a government. And we are talking about a place scoured by tribalism, and that was run by an utterly corrupt government.
I think it would have been more profitable for the author to have addressed the set up (proposed legal frame work) in 'Ethics of Liberty' instead of rebutting some random Molyneux video.
... just as the State has no money of its own, so it has no power of its own - Albert Jay Nock
Meistro: I think it would have been more profitable for the author to have addressed the set up (proposed legal frame work) in 'Ethics of Liberty' instead of rebutting some random Molyneux video.
That's true. That Stefan passage was far from being good enough to sintesize the entirety of an-cap legal theory. What Stefan (or anyone, for that matter) says is not gospel. It would be a much better analysis if he had given his opinion about Murray Rothbard's, Hans-Hermann Hoppe's and/or Roberth Murphy's pieces on the subject, since they are more likely to picture the common anarcho-capitalist theory.
EDIT: And the remainder of the video was based on the first assumptions, that were based on the rebuttal of Stefan's passage. About the prevention/cure dichotomy, there may not be a specific "formal" economic law about it, but people generally take a lot of preventive measures in their daily lives. Think about locks, alarm systems, passwords, sunscreen, etc. That's because the cost of taking this actions is relatively low compared to the possibility of something terrible happen (being robbed, getting skin cancer, etc.). So there sure exist demand for preventive measures, and where there is demand...
John James: Right off the bat, he begins by differentiating "voluntarism" with "anarcho-capitalism". I've pretty much always considered the former, a synonym, or even a euphemism of the latter.
I see what you're saying, and I agree. I think it all boils down to property rights (as said by Rothbard, I think). There's no way around this. You either have private property or (try to have) "public" property. If you have a society based on the NAP (therefore, a voluntarist society), then you have an an-cap society. Public property is an impossibility (as demonstrated by Hoppe). The public property illusion is people using force to steal and redistribute private property (keeping a huge chunk of it in the process).
John James: I've never heard the suggestion that "anything and everything can and should be owned, with the exception of people and ideas." That sounds like something he made up.
Neither have I. What I think is correct is: everything that is owned should be privately owned. Some things are not owned at all, e.g., the majority of the Saara desert. I might as well homestead a little unowned portion of it. Until then, it is anybody's property.
John James: Then he goes on to assert that "a completely privatized criminal justice system just wouldn't work. And it wouldn't result in anything even closely resembling a free society." First of all, I fail to see how someone who claims to be a "voluntarist" and subscribe to the non-aggression principle could presume to propose a criminal justice system that is not private...that is, as far as I know, there are only two options: privately owned, or "publically owned"...the latter of course referring to "public property", which is a subset of "state property". This all of course would imply that if something like a "criminal justice system" was not private, there would be a state.
Yeah. Let's say that we have a free society and I offer dispute resolution services. Even if I don't charge anything, as his implicit solution seems to involve, it is still a private service. This really is an important distinction to make, and he seems not to grasp it, as you state.
John James: Although I could be wrong, as he only claims that the state, as definet"...he never expresses any advocacy against such a thing. So he may very well accept the premise that the statd as a monopoly on violence in a specifc region, is "a dangerous and destructive social construce is legitimate and a "necessary evil".
Although I could be wrong, as he only claims that the state, as definet"...he never expresses any advocacy against such a thing. So he may very well accept the premise that the statd as a monopoly on violence in a specifc region, is "a dangerous and destructive social construce is legitimate and a "necessary evil".
Yeah, I missed the "morally wrong", coupled with "dangerous and destructive".
John James: We'll get to his misunderstandings of economics and why he's wrong on this in a second, but putting that aside and assuming what he says is true...that a pure free market wouldn't mitigate these things...what exactly is he proposing? Is he then suggesting that there should be something other than a pure free market? Would that not imply a need for the initiation of force against individuals acting peacefully?
I guess that yes, that would imply coercion. Assuming that people would engage in free trade (and they would, as demonstrated by history billions of times), including in defense and law services, what else would it imply?
John James: Obviously what he completely ignores here is the fact that the BP oil spill did not occur in a pure free market, and BP was not only not regulated by the market in the first place (as, of course the state claimed jurisdiction and was therefore responsible for the safety level of BP's activities), but also when something did go wrong, the company was shielded from billions of dollars in liability by the state. This would obviously not be the case in a free market. If a company (and as some would argue, its officers) were fully liable for damages, the people involved would be more incentivized to act with more discretion.
Absolutely.
John James: Obviously he never explains why that doesn't exist today, when we have no regulating authority over government (i.e., who is limiting the government's actions? Where is this overarching authority that is preventing the government from enslaving the people? And most importantly, why exactly would whatever is preventing the state from enslaving people all of a sudden disappear if the current "government" state went away, and was replaced by a set of "business" states, as he claims would happen?)
Obviously he never explains why that doesn't exist today, when we have no regulating authority over government (i.e., who is limiting the government's actions? Where is this overarching authority that is preventing the government from enslaving the people? And most importantly, why exactly would whatever is preventing the state from enslaving people all of a sudden disappear if the current "government" state went away, and was replaced by a set of "business" states, as he claims would happen?)
Great observation! I must admit that that didn't even cross my mind, however true that it is.
John James: Who the hell is doing that?
Indeed.
John James: But hey, he has a neato fire loop video.
But hey, he has a neato fire loop video.
LOL.
I'm really grateful for the time you put in this thoughtful response. I must say that I have yet to breach a barrier in my quest in mastering the English language: I don't have yet the same understanding of a video compared to a written text. Your review helped me to collect my thoughts. Thanks a lot!