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As an ancap, I’d say this is pretty insightful, and reflects the way I interact with politics fairly well. Would I like no government at all? Sure - assuming s

• Eisenstein 4y ago
  You seem reasonable, which is an exception amongst the ancaps I have encountered, so I will engage. How do you respond to the notion that government is a way for society to protect itself the best way it can? How do you manage to deal with orphans, old, infirm, poor, disabled, etc? How do we collectively fund things that are usually terrible for private markets to control, like research, military, education, law enforcement, infrastructure, and ecological preservation? How do you deal with injustice? There are so many jet-airliner-sized holes in this philosophy to me, and I can't wrap my head around why anyone with any empathy and intelligence could follow it. Help me out here.
  • Ancapistani 4y ago
    > You seem reasonable, which is an exception amongst the ancaps I have encountered, so I will engage Well, thanks :). My experience shows that a lot of people who call themselves ancaps are mostly either after the “extreme” nature of it, or want to use it as an excuse to argue. I’m too old for that. > How do you respond to the notion that government is a way for society to protect itself the best way it can? So far, I’d say you’re largely correct. My position is that mankind has basically achieved a local maximum, and that the conditions that led us here have to change before we can search for a global maximum. > How do you manage to deal with orphans, old, infirm, poor, disabled, etc? The TL;DR here is “private charity”. I hold that charity is significantly suppressed because of the widely held belief that it’s “someone else’s problem”. I could write at length about the reasons I think that’s the case, and how state interventions exacerbate the scale of those problems today, but I’m sure you’ve already read those arguments elsewhere. > How do we collectively fund things that are usually terrible for private markets to control, like research, military, education, law enforcement, infrastructure, and ecological preservation? Of those, I hold that all are better left to private enterprise - for different reasons, for each. Law enforcement is the only one that really has much nuance. While many others have written about that topic (see my other partially-tongue-in-cheek post about PDAs), I’m not 100% convinced that we can really predict how it would be handled in a world where governments died of neglect - as opposed to power vacuums, which is how almost all anarchic societies today and in living memory have formed. > How do you deal with injustice? Ah, this is the big one - in fact, I’d say it’s a superset of all of the above. Injustice would existing in an ancap society, just as injustice exists today. In fact, because injustice exists today in a state-based society, my primary argument here is that it’s intellectually dishonest to insist that an ancap society must eliminate injustice to be acceptable. Specifically, though, I’d think a functioning anarchic society would place a very high value on personal honor. Reputation would matter, and that alone would provide significant incentive to work things out without drama. > There are so many jet-airliner-sized holes in this philosophy to me, and I can't wrap my head around why anyone with any empathy and intelligence could follow it. Help me out here. There are similar sized holes in the way we do things today, when you apply the same standards to it. Consider all of the grievous injustices that have occurred until our various systems of government: war, genocide, chattel slavery, enforced divisions based on religion, race, caste, etc. I think the biggest place where I diverge from “mainstream” Anarcho-Capitalism is that I don’t think it’s the solution to all of the world’s problems. I don’t think a society structured around it would be perfect, because I don’t think human beings are perfect (or capable of perfection).
    • Eisenstein 4y ago
      > There are similar sized holes in the way we do things today, when you apply the same standards to it. Consider all of the grievous injustices that have occurred until our various systems of government: war, genocide, chattel slavery, enforced divisions based on religion, race, caste, etc. My response is that we have been progressing, and we continue to do so. There is no 'philosophy' that I think will work -- the only thing that I can see happening is that we iteratively improve until we either destroy ourselves, run out of the ability or desire to harvest energy, get conquered by AI/Aliens/Genetically-engineered-beings, or failing all of those, somehow reach perfection. Removing the one thing that people can use to enforce collective will on each other is a terrible idea, IMHO, because people are not (usually) able to individually work towards communal good. Sure, in small groups such as tribes or villages we can look after each other's families when needed and pitch in together to get works built or enforce understood norms and punish crime, but in aggregate as a species in large enough groups this is just not possible. Expecting for-profit motivations to accomplish this is either self-serving or naive. Of course you have built in an escape-hatch for yourself with the 'if I am wrong' bit, so kudos for that. I guess you can use that to have a clear conscience since you appear to have intelligence and empathy enough to know what the consequences are if such a philopsophy fails. For what it is worth, the preceding was written in a non-combative stance, so please don't interpret it that way (it is judgmental, though; I can't help that).
      • Ancapistani 4y ago
        I’ve been busy the past few days, and haven’t been on HN. If you’d like to chat sometime, I just created a Twitter throwaway account: @ancapistani_ (note the trailing underscore) Shoot me a follow and a mention, and we can chat over DMs if you’d like, or move to another platform. It’d be a lot easier than a long-running comment thread here. A couple quick thoughts: > Of course you have built in an escape-hatch for yourself with the 'if I am wrong' bit, so kudos for that. I guess you can use that to have a clear conscience since you appear to have intelligence and empathy enough to know what the consequences are if such a philopsophy fails. Well, I’ve been wrong on things before. It seems to happen less as I get older and gain experience, but one that same experience leads me to consider the consequences of my being wrong and mitigate them to the extent possible when recommending a course of action. It only takes one time of recommending a company move everything over to microservices to learn that lesson! > For what it is worth, the preceding was written in a non-combative stance, so please don't interpret it that way (it is judgmental, though; I can't help that). Only talking to people you agree with doesn’t make for very interesting conversation. If you didn’t think I was wrong, we wouldn’t be having this conversation! So no, I’m not going to interpret defending your beliefs as being combative.