goldfish21 wrote:
And replace it with what? More profiteering layers of corporate greed facilitated by American oligarchs?
https://www.thecollector.com/is-anarchism-a-bad-idea/Quote:
...Anarchism comes in many forms, some more individualistic, others more communal. Some anarchists advocate strong property rights, others push for their abolition. What all forms of anarchism have in common, however, is their rejection of the state....
...Despite their differences, anarchists all converge on one belief: the state as we know it is illegitimate and unjustified. As a consequence, we ought to abolish the state. The reasons for this belief are varied. Anarchists such as Peter Kropotkin argue that the state exacerbates economic inequality, and lends legitimacy to unnatural hierarchies of domination. Anarcho-capitalists such as Murray Rothbard and David Friedman argue the state violates people’s property rights.
All anarchists, however, hold that the state violates people’s freedom. State institutions, by their very nature, restrict our freedom by imposing obligations to obey the law (and coercing and punishing those who do not comply). Anarchism as a social philosophy seeks to free people from both the political domination and economic exploitation of the state...
...The first major criticism of anarchism is that the stateless world anarchists describe is undesirable. Even critics who agree that the state, under current conditions, causes inequality and legitimizes domination, sometimes hold that the anarchist cure is worse than the disease: domination and inequality would be worse if there were no government.
Perhaps the best illustration of this argument can be found in Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. Written shortly after the English Civil War, Leviathan makes the case for the importance of absolute sovereignty as a means of avoiding the harm people experience in the state of nature. Life without government, Hobbes argues, would be “poor, nasty, solitary, brutish, and short.” In a world without government, there would be none of the benefits of civilization, and people would live in continual fear of robbery or violent death. In this state of nature, the strong rule over and subjugate the weak.
The desire to avoid this state of nature is what leads individuals to create governments in the first place. In the words of Ruth Kinna, “The prevailing view is that human beings want to escape from the inconvenience or violence of anarchy and, because they have the wit to do so […] they submit to government. Anarchy is the order they run away from. It implies chaos, sometimes vigilantism, sometimes mob rule, and it cannot guarantee peace or security.”
In Hobbes’ view, we can avoid anarchy through the creation of a social contract, in which individuals give up some of their freedoms to govern their lives to a sovereign in exchange for protection and the rule of law. Even if the state perpetuates inequality, it is nowhere near as bad as a state of anarchy...
...The critique that anarchists are utopians, however, isn’t limited to their view of human nature. Their blueprints for future societies are also seen as being unachievable...
...The third major critique of anarchist political philosophy is that anarchism is inherently unstable. We have already considered one of the versions of this critique above when considering Hobbes’s argument for the state. In Hobbes’s view, given that a state-less society would be poor, nasty, brutish, and short, even if we could abolish the state, individuals would quickly come together to re-establish one...
...Anarcho-capitalists and Agorists both argue that private enforcement and insurance companies could replace the justice functions the state plays. Instead of calling the police and taking our disputes to government courts, in a stateless society, individuals would have contracts with different private companies to insure them against the destruction or theft of their property and to enforce their rights against hostile others.
Agorists and anarcho-capitalists envision a lively market for enforcement, with a variety of private companies competing for clients by offering different rates and levels of service. The problem is the markets for protection and enforcement lend themselves to natural monopolization. That is, they are markets in which there are high barriers to entry and in which economies of scale are very powerful. In other words, the cost of protecting one individual or small group is high, but the cost of protecting an additional person is low. As a consequence, larger companies will continually outcompete smaller up-starts.
Over time, Nozick argues, we will end up in a situation in which there is only one company (or a small group of companies) that can provide these services. As a consequence, people will have very limited choice over who protects them. Although these companies may not be technically states, they will be de-facto states. The freedom that anarcho-capitalism promises thus turns out to be an illusion.
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May you be blessed by YHWH and his Asherah
21 Nov 2023, 8:34 am
for supporting trump. Because doing so is deplorable.
