Anarcho-Capitalists Against Ayn Rand
Posted by richrobinson 9 years, 11 months ago to The Gulch: General
Mises has disappointed me before so I was hesistant to post this but I wanted to get other input.
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The sad, but true conclusion of my lifetime of observing peoples and governments all around the world is obeying the rules doesn't work, violence does. The party most willing and able to break the rules and visit violence upon its foes will win.
To wit: The Democrat Party breaks the rules and wins via vote fraud and unlawful persecution of its foes by government agencies. Militant Islamists retake control of anyplace left in the hands of "moderate Muslims".
Thus, if a government cannot or will not exercise force, it will soon be an ex-government, because somewhere inside its habit will exist a party that will use force.
And, once bereft of forceful governments, we're reduced not to mob rule, but tribal war. Think for awhile and you can imagine us dividing ourselves into tribes. They already exist in street gangs and, even though we might not choose to join the Bloods or MS-13 or the Satanas, when government lacks force, eventually, as a means of survival, we will form tribes. When seen objectively, "Deliverance" was a tribal war, us against them.
One can only strive for a government willing to allow us to be us within our tribes, but strong enough to defeat any tribe that attacks another. Our problem at the moment is the Totalitarian Socialist Tribe is attacking the rest of us and the once (perhaps) beneficent, or at least neutral government has joined in on the side of the attackers.
http://www.amazon.com/In-Search-Jefferso...
This book is relevant to this discussion. This book shows self-organizing systems with no need of a centralizing power, authority. I think what the author misses in both cases (discusses the American West and the internet) there was a fundamental set of values that all the non-centralized participants roughly agreed upon. Without those, the biggest bully would have won. The internet is falling apart due to "bullies" who want to use it not as a free exchange of ideas and gather knowledge, but a way of exerting control. It started with state and local govts taxing and regulating. There is no short cut to NAP. Systems based on reason and logic.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that liberty loving people will always succumb to tyrants. It is endemic with liberty - those that love liberty have no desire to impose their views or desires on others, thus they don't seek elective office. Tyrants, on the other hand, live to impose their will on others, and thus actively seek out elective office as the modern societies acceptable way to be a bully. Thus, we end up with the tyrants in charge. These same tyrants know that placating the populace is the way to maintain their power (Bread and Circuses) and thus lull the majority of the populace into willing serfdom. When the liberty lovers (aka Tea Party) try to reassert themselves, they are vilified and their efforts to restore liberties are twisted to seem to be bigoted, anti-minority this or that.
And those positions of power are not merely political. They have infiltrated the schools, at every cycle of political power they entrench more and more persons in the courts, and the media - those that like to tell others what to think - slant to the collectivist left.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=...
If, in capitalizing "Republicanism" you refer to the progressive political party, then you don't know what you're talking about.
As for the cartoon, as corporations are more heavily regulated than everyone else, I can see the need to deregulate them so that they can generate wealth and provide employment, especially since they know their business far better than professional bureaucrats.
"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."
Well, that has unfortunately happened past the point of no return.
The idea of limited government was indeed part of our nation's foundational principles. The non-aggression principle, however, was not. There is not a single Founding Father who ever advocated anything even remotely similar to the non-aggression principle. It is a modern philosophical concept which didn't fully develop until the mid-20th century.
Basically I agree with you and I'd recommend searching through theobjectiviststandard.com to find the article on how a voluntary government would work, you may find it enlightening.
I agree completely, but it's not the same as my everyday definition of force. I might say, "I left the door unlocked, so the thieves were able to come in an steal my property without using force." That's just a colloquial definition of force. By the objectivist definition, they did use for, and they had pointed a gun at me during the theft it would have been further use of force.
However, that isn't what I'm talking about. There are other ways of violating the rights of another person that have nothing to do with physically injuring them or stealing from them. This is a problem that I keep running into during debates with Objectivists (or anyone else who believes in the non-aggression principle). Under the non-aggression principle, the only actions which qualify as a violation of rights are assault and theft, which is an incredibly simplistic and naive way to look at the world. That's why the non-aggression principle is fundamentally flawed.
Unlimited constitutional government here:
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2011/...
Another example of unlimited constitutional government here:
http://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2011/...
I am not an anarchist. I understand "government" to be like "clothing" or "language" or "tools", an institution of any and every society and culture. The government could hold a monopoly on police powers and effect that by contracting it out to competing others who are all nonetheless bound by explicit laws. We have this today in that many police forces contract out specific services such as parking enforcement and central dispatch. In te wake of the current recession, cities squeezed by fiscal constraints have contracted out police patrols. The cities maintain the fundamental cultural recognition of primary authority, but the delivery is sold to multiple others. It seems to work well enough.
It does _NOT_ work so well in Somalia...
Culture runs deep and broad. The Enlightenment agenda of the West is not to be imposed from the top down, but must grow from the roots. We benefit from that. It will take a some time and effort to bring that to other peoples. In fact, it has yet to be completely and consistently recognized here...
That theory is fundamentally flawed in that it totally misses a fundamental nature of humanity - some humans will always seek to rule other humans. If we only had spears and axes, we could probably deal with a society without government. But with the ability of one human to exert the types of force available today over huge swaths of humanity, we need a countervailing force. That force would necessarily be governmental in nature.
That's not to say that the governmental structure shouldn't be severely limited, it should. But not having any government is foolish.
That said, you might want to find my comments on another thread about my feelings on the inevitability of tyranny, regardless of whether created by a government or just a powerful individual. I think that a well crafted government can slow the inevitable tyranny, but I still have come to the conclusion that tyranny is inevitable.
Realize, also, that Rand lived through a real civil war. (Our War Between the States was not a civil war.) For her, that was the realization of "competing governments."
I point out that Ford Motor Company and General Motors both had large police forces literally next door to each other and none ever fired a shot at the other. Pinkertons never fought it out with Burns. (Police have killed security guards. I have yet to find the reverse case.) The larger narrative is that all sides in the only working free market we know actually subscribe to the same body of law -- and more importantly to the same culture and society.
If you're referring to the conflict between the nation of the United States of America and the nation of the Confederate States of America... one generally doesn't refer to wars between sovereign nations as "civil wars".
Nearest thing we had to a civil war was the whiskey rebellion in the late 18th century, and the cultural revolution of the mid- 20th century.
If they were not a separate nation, then the United States is still a PART of Great Britain...
"That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. " - Declaration of Independence
"... liberty loving people will always succumb to tyrants."-- Posted by Robbie53024
"I agree. People are incredibly short-sighted." Posted by khalling,
With regard to projection, it is the default reaction for liberals and, unfortunately, suprisingly common amongst non-liberals.
Insisting on abolition at that time would have resulted in several nations, rather than one nation. Not to say the result would have been the unions of free colonies and slave colonies, it might have resulted in 13 separate nations, attempting to go their own ways, that certainly would have included slavery's propagation. Though the Constitution left room for slavery, in the minds of the abolitionists it left no room for exit. It bound the slave states to the public opinion of the antislave states.
Though an imperfect solution, I think the Founders' unwritten tactic, binding themselves together while allowing slave states to think there was a means of unbinding themselves, was their means of eliminating slavery.
Would Ayn Rand have recognized this and gone along with it? I don't know, because it required the public appearance of thoughtlessness or intellectual dishonesty. Would she have accepted the Constitution as it functioned, a plot to destroy slavery, without the public acknowledgment of that fact?
Note the total absence of discussion in the Constitution of the potential exit from the Federation of any member. Slave colonies didn't think they were binding themselves irrevocably to the public opinion of the North. Neither did northerners state it explicitly.
The Founders were bright men. They saw and foresaw many things. I believe, for that reason, many southerners came to see this as duplicity. Delegates from antislave colonies anticipated the day when the issue would divide the nation and purposely failed to address it. I can imagine delegates from the antislave colonies quietly conniving to bind the slave colonies to a union in which the population of abolitionists was growing much faster than were the proslavery populations of the south. In fact, I think this is exactly how most southerners then and now see the issue.
Growing up, it was always "Founding Fathers".
In point of fact, they lacked the *privilege* to vote. If voting were a "right", then we would be remiss in preventing a billion Chinese from voting in our elections...
I point this out because I hate the modern proclivity to try to have one's cake and eat it, too. First, moderns want to assert how women were oppressed back then because they couldn't vote, own property, whatever, as per to modern ideology (revisionist history based on an erroneous conclusion); at the same time they want to magnify women's contribution to (only positive) historic events.
If they were consistent in their idiocy, I mean ideology, then moderns would equally condemn Eva Braun for the Nazi excesses, as they condemn her bedmate.
But, no, moderns attribute the evils of history solely to those with man-parts, even as they share credit for the good of history with women, slaves, foreigners... anybody but the very men responsible.
And my guess is she probably would have found some way to insist that the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution (even with the Bill of Rights) were both wrong, given that the very last page of Atlas Shrugged depicts Judge Narragansett rewriting the Constitution and crossing out the alleged "contradictions" in its statements (though Ayn Rand never specified what exactly those contradictions were).
The founding FATHERS... MEN gave us our country. Women contributed. So did slaves. So did horses. But it was a comparatively small group of MEN who organized, ran, risked and in the end gave us our republic. Like it or not, that is the historic reality.
Too bad if the testosterone challenged don't like this historic fact. I'm tired of being made to feel guilty-by-association with the men who gave us the foundation of the U.S. It wasn't Swahilis in Africa or Samurai in Japan or Imams in Persia who came up with and created the forms of our nation. Nor was it slaves on the plantation or women in their homes.
But, thanks for making me once again feel grateful for Karen Straughan...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHkGZvC0...
And I'm not being intellectually dishonest at all. I'm simply following Ayn Rand's idea's to their logical conclusion. Most of these arguments are laid out by John W. Robbins in his book "Without A Prayer: Ayn Rand And The Close Of Her System," which was praised by Ron Paul who said it should be read by anyone who wants to endorse freedom using arguments that cannot be refuted. You can get the book here:
http://www.amazon.com/Without-Prayer-Ran...
"If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress, to shoot any strangers approaching his door—or to join a protective gang of citizens who would fight other gangs, formed for the same purpose, and thus bring about the degeneration of that society into the chaos of gang-rule, i.e., rule by brute force, into perpetual tribal warfare of prehistorical savages.
The use of physical force—even its retaliatory use—cannot be left at the discretion of individual citizens. Peaceful coexistence is impossible if a man has to live under the constant threat of force to be unleashed against him by any of his neighbors at any moment. Whether his neighbors’ intentions are good or bad, whether their judgment is rational or irrational, whether they are motivated by a sense of justice or by ignorance or by prejudice or by malice—the use of force against one man cannot be left to the arbitrary decision of another." Virtue of Sefishness
If you continue to conflate capitalism with anarchism and ascribe it to Objectivism, I will down vote-it will not be productive becasue it is an untruth