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I'm anarchocapitalist; I don't believe that "working democracy" is a thing. Or, perhaps, if it is a thing, it's not what you think it is.

• sergiosgc 10y ago
  I'm falling for the "someone on the Internet is wrong" trap, but neverthless: Anarchocapitalism is fundamentally flawed because it rests on the assumption that capitalist markets optimize for the best utility function. They don't. Further, even in the optimization they do provide, they are flawed. Capitalist markets are powerful optimization systems, but they routinely fail, in pretty well described scenarios. Namely: 1. Wherever there are externalities, capitalism fails. For negative externalities, individual entities are motivated to capture the positive value, burdening the whole with the negative. For positive externalities, individual entities are not motivated to absorb the negative value when they can't capture the positive one. 2. Capitalist markets are, on aggregate behaviour, short-term oriented. This is a risk reduction strategy, but society requires some long term investments. Some of these long term investments also classify as positive externalities. 3. Pure capitalist markets have no provision for wealth redistribution and tend to accumulate wealth. While this is morally defensible, huge disparities in wealth tend to produce revolutions. Revolutions are undesirable. 4. Due to (3), pure capitalist markets devolve into monopolies and oligopolies, producing local maxima in the resource optimization utility function usually associated with capitalism. All in all, anarchocapitalism is a naïve view of capitalism, where a good optimizer is mistaken as the perfect optimizer.
  • jessaustin 10y ago
    "Externality" is a useful concept, but its mere existence doesn't mean that capitalism has "failed". Sure there are unfair conditions for lots of people, but in general there aren't too many Holodomors or Great Leaps Forward in capitalist societies. That's worth something. That said, I'm no capitalist. So much seems so arbitrary. Like me, most people who advocate "radical" critiques of the status quo don't do so because they seek the most extreme disaster scenarios one can imagine resulting from those critiques. Rather, they see that current society isn't perfect, and could be improved by moving away from rigorously enforced neoclassical neoliberalism.
  • Anthony-G 10y ago
    That’s an interesting comment so thanks (and upvoted). I’ve come across the term “externality” used to refer to capitalist enterprises off-loading part of the cost of their economic activity to wider society, e.g. dumping chemical waste into a river. However, I wasn’t aware of what the term specifically means or the difference between positive and negative externalities. I was going to request a follow-up comment to enlighten me but it turns out that there’s already a good Wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality