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“AnCap Has Never Been Tried!” and Other Myths
One of the great myths I hear from people who believe in a utopia is that things like Communist, Socialist, and, yes, Anarcho-Capitalist (AnCap) societies “Have never been tried”. This is, of course, nonsense. The USSR, China, Venezuela, Romania, Cambodia, and countless other nations give lie to the idea that a Communist Socialist society has not been tried. Dr. Jordan Peterson says it well here:
I really like his point, that this is an arrogant position: If I were in charge, I am so good and so competent I could usher in the utopia. I apply it to anyone making any utopian claims.
That brings us to the anarcho-capitalists, and the claim that their version of utopia has never been tried, either. This is also nonsense. We have seen, time and again in history, that when there is no state, there is not anarchy for long.
“Anarchy is the least stable of social structures. It falls apart at a touch.” — Larry Niven
What made me think about all this is this article today, on the death of an AnCap promoter: John Galton Wanted Libertarian Paradise in ‘Anarchapulco.’ He Got Bullets Instead
Galton and Forester were anarcho-capitalists who slipped U.S. drug charges worth 25 years in prison, they said in a YouTube video that night. They’d hopped the border and resettled in what Galton called one of the world’s “pockets of freedom,” a community billed as a libertarian paradise.
Almost two years later, Galton was murdered.
Last week, gunmen burst into the couple’s mountaintop home, killing Galton on the spot, and seriously wounding one of the couple’s friends. (Forester survived, badly shaken.) The killers are presumed to be a drug cartel; Mexican authorities say Galton grew marijuana at the home
Wow. In the absence of a strong government, a gang burst into his home and killed him.
Galton was part of a small community of fellow anarcho-capitalists formed by Jeff Berwick, who promised a drug-friendly haven and hosts the annual “Anarchapulco” festival. Berwick says Galton and Forester should’ve known what they were getting into.
“They started up a competing conference to Anarchapulco, called Anarchaforko and John continued to be involved in one way or another with the production or sale of plants,” Berwick told The Daily Beast in an email. “Unfortunately, that is the one thing that is very dangerous to do in Mexico as the drug cartels will attack anyone they see as competition and that appears to have happened to John.”
So, even in the AnCap utopia, you cannot grow weed in your own home and you cannot sell it because some other group, one with more guns, will come kill you. And there is no government to even punish them for it. I guess this really does mean might makes right in the AnCap world.
This whole story demonstrates, once again, that any real moves towards a libertarian AnCap utopia will always collapse into what I call “Warlordism”: He who has the biggest guns, wins.
Anarcho-capitalists who complained of robberies or street corner assaults faced ridicule, Mike claimed.
“Because this is a very ideological group, everything Jeff says is dogma,” he said. “If you said anything contra to the dogma, you’d be ostracized and in some cases doxxed. I know people who moved there and got robbed… However, when they publicly state this, the whole community turns against them and treats them as some kind of informant or spy.”
Heh. Cultish following of a leader. Not like communism or socialism at all, right? I love the way it closes:
“Anarchists understand that the government’s prohibition of plants and substances cause these problems and if anything it just makes events like Anarchapulco even more important in order to change the world and get rid of the violence and chaos caused by government,” Berwick said.
Blaming the government for everything is just like the socialists blaming racism for every ill under the sun. With no government, do we really think organized crime gangs would stop doing what they are doing? The price would drop? Somehow, I think the would just go into “legit” business, and their anti-competition behavior would go right on. No government to stop them. Heck, the one in Mexico right now is so weak it cannot.
Utopia is not coming to this world, not for communists, not for socialists, and not for AnCaps. Any attempt to create a utopia will always result in tyranny. Always.
Published in Economics
Flicker,
I doubt either one ever spent that much time to really understand any philosophic position. Their position centers around maximizing their bottom line. Their bottom line is increasing the size of the federal budget and increasing their ability to control as much of that budget as they can for their own interests. After that, they might think about the interests of the American people and the Human race in general but that gives Chuck & Nancy a headache so they try not to think about it too much.
Regards,
Jim
I think this is exactly right and it is a very big deal. It is a mistake for Republicans to not have this on the forefront of their minds at all times when they’re trying to figure out what to do or what to worry about etc.
They love central planning and power and they aren’t about to admit that it doesn’t work. It would kill them psychologically.
Might means right in any / every world. All that is being discussed is who has the might / right.
I think there are a lot more AOCs in Congress and the Senate than we really know. She’s just made her ignorance and foolishness blatant for all to see. Most of them know to keep quiet. But have a feeling that Capitol Hill has far more complete ignoramuses than we realize.
I suspect that she know a bit more about what is going on than she lets on. Much of what AOC does reminds me of the reverse of trolling the libs. She is trolling the right and living off the fame from her notoriety.
AOC’s chief of staff was an investment banker and is some big time progressive political operator. I forget all of the details, but he is a very big deal on the left.
@lowtech-redneck: You keep writing like this, we gonna have to revoke your redneck creds, son.
@jamesgawron: perfect. Thank you.
That is the thing. AOC did not happen by accident. There is serious political machine behind her somewhere with a fair amount of money. Joe Crowley was a serious politician with a seriously experienced and mature political machine behind him. That some upstart unknown political type knocked him down on her own is unlikely. Somebody that knew what they were doing backed her and her agenda, and / or she backed theirs. If it is anything like most Left politics I am aware of then the connection will have a family component.
Is she Il Chucco’s niece?
I think the guy that uncovered Jonathan Gruber, his name is Rich Weinstein, proved all of that. I think that’s where I got that.
Rich Weinstein is an epic Hell raiser. He’s smart as hell. I wish someone would resource him a ton. He needs an assistant or two. He’s been on Glenn Beck a few times.
I think Pelosi and Schumer view liberty as the restriction of other people’s ability to reject the values and behaviors that progressives esteem. They are willing to categorically restrict our right to operate outside their narrow codes of behavior without government coercion. Those liberties of non-progressives are exchanged for widespread cultural and material support for the attitudes and behaviors of certain endorsed victim groups.
They really don’t distinguish the ultimate coercion of a powerful government from the rather weak influence that one person’s refusal to bake a cake or rent a duplex has on another.
I suppose their lack of concern for government coercion is based on the fact that our government is now doing less and less to stop anyone from doing things that progressives care about.
I could continue and apply this same logic to the left’s attitudes about taxation and commercial regulation, but I’ll save that for another day.
I’m not sure about that. We all are coerced by trade-offs that confront us. I’d amend the statement to say that liberty is the absence of being coerced by a government authorized to enforce its will with violence.
Government coercion may be too specific. How about any external force to affect a specific behavior. As wikipedia puts it:
Coersion is the practice of forcing another party to act in an involuntary manner by use of threats or force. It involves a set of various types of forceful actions that violate the free will of an individual to induce a desired response, for example: a bully demanding lunch money from a student or the student gets beaten.
On of the reasons I don’t want a dictatorship is that I cannot be sure I will be the dictator!
And the political process decides what “maximized” looks like.
I think the point here was that, especially these days, the prison authorities may shirk their responsibilities for one reason or another – one of the most common being liberal insistence that prisoners not be “mistreated” – and so the inmates end up establishing their own “governments” based on gangs, etc. And the gangs might even assume government roles such as the monopoly of violence: if one of your side is injured by one of ours, they don’t settle it themselves, they bring it to the “leaders.”
To prevent that sort of thing, government is empowered to use coersion, and violence to stop or deter the bully.
The moment you have more than one person, some compromise will have to happen. This gets back to a key difference for me between libertarian and conservative thinking: I am first concerned with my nation being here in the future. Then I am worried about coersion. Both are important, but if we have to force people with the plague into camps to keep the rest of us disease free, so be it.
Bryan,
Of course, the political process will flesh out the sketch. For instance, the Constitution can’t guarantee that it won’t be badly interpreted. However, it provides a clear opportunity for those who have the right idea to come forward and assert it. By the same token, if you lock yourself into a political philosophical point of view that won’t allow you to use government at all for anything or you lock yourself into a political philosophical point of view that insists government is the solution to all problems, you won’t be able to pragmatically make any reasonable choices. We can argue about what maximizing Liberty looks like. Just like we can argue about whether a postnatal abortion constitutes murder.
Now that we are in the right ballpark arguing about the right things, we can hope that good people will rise to the occasion and win the day. No guarantees just hope.
Regards,
Jim
I don’t get AnCaps at all. I don’t get how I can have so much in common with someone yet be so far off on the fundamentals. I know AnCaps that read Milton Friedman and Thomas Sowell. I’m with ’em there.
But the protection of private property is a fundamental aspect of liberty. That cannot be done through altruistic means. You NEED a state to enforce law. Remove the state and you will see the ugly side of human nature real quick.
Yes, and this is what we see in Venezuela today, and will see here in the US tomorrow if the Democrats have their way. In Venezuela, violent criminal gangs are permitted by the government depending on their loyalty. For Maduro and the gangs, its a win-win. But the country is still, I would say, looking at the blocked exit roads, a prison.
I don’t think it’s just Congress or government in a wider sense. To repeat one of my longest-lasting maxims, “Most people have an IQ of 100 or less, by definition.”
That said, there do seem to be some incentives for non-thinking/non-productive people to end up in government at one level or another.
It seems pretty easy for intelligent people to assume some kind of intelligence in situations where there really isn’t any. That’s also where conspiracy theories usually come from.
Which supports the idea that she’s not the one actually planning anything.
But what about when someone turns up their stereo too loud? Or lets their dog run loose? etc, etc.
My maxim is: Don’t discount malice in the face of repeated irrational destructive incompetence.
You’re right, when you have strong government, the “gang” has the legitimate backing of the state, and the state can’t murder you, by definition.
So we shouldn’t call it Swatting anymore, but a return to Stoning?
Maybe. But again, it’s easy for intelligent people to ascribe intelligence to other people who actually have little or none. So when those non-intelligent people do damaging things, it’s too easy to assume that they’re intelligent and therefore the damage is done by malice. But it’s not. Stupidity can explain putting a hand on a hot stove, and it can explain confiscatory taxes, Green New Deals, etc.
The problem then becomes, how to stop the non-intelligent people from doing – or voting for – stupid things, or other non-intelligent people to run the government. You can’t require people to pass an intelligence test before voting etc, for about the same reason you can’t pass a constitutional amendment removing minority protection from states (all states have the same number of senators, etc): you’d never get a majority of the largely-non-intelligent people to vote to not be able to vote more “free” goodies for themselves, etc.
Maybe, maybe not. All these things are political machines, groups of people with shared interest or goals. How much say the candidate (face of the political machine) has varies by team. Most canidates have some upper level interest in the politics without the the wonk level interest. AOC seems to have a dreamer vision of politics with a pretty decent retail grasp of it. Her pie in the sky version of politics plays well to troll the conservatives and plays well with her base.