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Exchanging things for things is fine under anarchism. Exchanging your freedom for money would be bad. The question: how do you keep it from happening without

Exchanging things for things is fine under anarchism. Exchanging your freedom for money would be bad. The question: how do you keep it from happening without a big nasty authoritarian state? Is a valid one. In my view there would be 3 safeguards: 1) it would be seen as morally repugnant, like banging your cousin. 2) the other, democratic businesses in the area would just refuse to do business with you 3) in the absence of material want, nobody would feel compelled to sell their labor the way they do now, where they have no real choice. The first thing that happened when England went capitalist in (I think) the 1700’s is that the land that used to be held in common was privatized and people were displaced to the cities, where they had to find jobs. In other words the state deliberately created a situation where people had no choice but to sell their time for money. In the case of someone accumulating actual weapons and attempting an armed power grab, there would be local citizens militias which would converge on the outbreak of violence and contain it. Maybe it won’t work, maybe it will, but we won’t know until we try.

whatshisface 8y ago
>there would be local citizens militias which would converge on the outbreak of violence and contain it. What if the first step in my evil plan was to gain the loyalty of the local militias by lauding their virtue and advocating that they should receive a bigger cut than everyone else because they're so brave and put themselves in the line of danger? Groups fall to ambitious leaders all the time, because people really eat up a charismatic leader with big promises. (See: how the Legions were talked installing a dictator in Rome.)
- fallingfrog 8y ago
  I think there are 2 points I would use to respond to that. 1) it’s really, really hard to accumulate a large stockpile of money without exploiting the labor of other people and 2) no political system is immune to a 50% + 1 attack. By “citizens militia” I meant just ordinary people who own weapons so yeah if somebody comes along who is so charismatic that they can convince 50% + 1 people to follow them, it’s game over.

whatshisface 8y ago

>there would be local citizens militias which would converge on the outbreak of violence and contain it. What if the first step in my evil plan was to gain the loyalty of the local militias by lauding their virtue and advocating that they should receive a bigger cut than everyone else because they're so brave and put themselves in the line of danger? Groups fall to ambitious leaders all the time, because people really eat up a charismatic leader with big promises. (See: how the Legions were talked installing a dictator in Rome.)

fallingfrog 8y ago
I think there are 2 points I would use to respond to that. 1) it’s really, really hard to accumulate a large stockpile of money without exploiting the labor of other people and 2) no political system is immune to a 50% + 1 attack. By “citizens militia” I meant just ordinary people who own weapons so yeah if somebody comes along who is so charismatic that they can convince 50% + 1 people to follow them, it’s game over.