101 - 101 - 101

Post number one-hundred-and-one.

I will not be doing any more Commentaryism videos for the next few months because I'm sick of getting into aimless arguments with people who can't be bothered to learn even the bare minimum about economics before mouthing off at people like me who've studied economics for years.

I have also encountered many smart people who have challenged me and forced me to grow and change my outlook, and while I'm grateful for that, none of these arguments are making me any less an anarcho-capitalist.

So I guess it's time to explain what I actually am, considering all the shit I've flung at various leftists these past couple of months. I am an anarcho-capitalist, or anarcho-liberal, or private property anarchist. Basically what I'm saying is that rather than a mish-mash of liberalism and socialism, which are what go into classical Left anarchism, I am philosophically a liberal through and through.

I believe that the limit of people's freedom to act should be respect for the equivalent freedom to act of others. That might be summed up as the liberal axiom. I hold to that axiom because of my conscience, though I tried in the past to justify it according to universal, natural-rights principles.

I'm sure you remember my post about the question of who, what, where and when. A bit after that I asked who is entitled to what and ended up justifying the private ownership - including in absentia - of land.

My take is that it just makes the most sense, indeed it's obvious, and it's the way every single civilisation on record arose. There are literally zero counter-examples, so right-away I have one over the Left anarchists, whose ideas are almost all drastically wrong. For example...

Turns out that market concentration in VoIP ain't set in yet. Discord, a new app in the webtalk space, offers users lossless audio, low CPU usage and high reliability, not to mention it works through the browser, though a client is optional if you wan't to use even fewer of those precious CPU cycles.

I'd say "I told you so" but the Lefties are so far removed from reality - just look at those FAQ posts I disputed here and here - that they can easily just fit things like Discord into their conspiracy theory.

Back to anarcho-capitalism. It is a stupid name for an actually pretty cool outlook on life. Basically it's the position that the state is either evil or unnecessary. The difference between this heinously named ideology and all the other anarchisms is that an anarcho-capitalist (or ancap) doesn't have to forego private property.

The name is stupid because 'anarcho-' comes from the anarchism of people like Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Carlo Cafiero, Mikhail Bakunin, Benjamin Tucker, Lysander Spooner, Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and Voltairine de Cleyre. And the present-day devotees of these dead guys' anarchisms all hate private property.

Which brings us to a big problem with the anarchists above. Without exception they all identified as both anarchists and socialists. This has the result that socialist anarchists today think that any anti-statist who is not a socialist is not an anarchist. The answer to this depends on one's perspective on the words anarchy and anarchism.

To an ancap and most non-anarchists ancaps count because they are anti-statists, where statists are archists, strictly speaking. If you're into not-archy you are into anarchy, and so are an anarchist. But the socialist flavoured anarchists would argue that since 'anarchism' and 'anarchist' were coined by a socialist that they hold some unbreakable exclusive right to the word.

But the other word in there is a problem too. Capitalism is a mode of production, not an ideology. Capitalism is not the point of anarcho-capitalism, rather peaceful human interaction and respect for law and order are. In practice any civilised society consists in humans respecting each other's exclusive control over the rivalrous and excludable stuff in the world like land, buildings, waterways, vehicles, toys, computers, skateboards, clothes, food, et cetera.

Therefore liberalism is the philosophical underpinning of ancap preferences, not capitalism. This makes ancaps liberals without pretensions re the state. The state is an attempt to centralise matters that (like matter) cannot be centralised. Therefore it is as close to a fallacy made flesh as is possible.

So I'm unhappy with the name ancap because other anarchists perpetually moan about the 'an' part and the 'cap' part genuinely doesn't make sense. There must be better terms out there! Well, all the different forms of socialist anti-statism have names which don't involve the A-word; communism, syndicalism, mutualism, individualism, and georgism. In this tradition ancaps can also be called voluntarists / voluntaryists, and our outlook voluntarism / volutaryism.

That word sums up the idea that only relationships initiated peacefully should be legal. But Robert LeFevre offers an alternative to the labels anarchism and anarchist altogether in his essay Autarchy Versus Anarchy.

While anarchy means no governance, autarchy means self-governance, making it a much more attractive word. So maybe in future people like me should drop the ancap label in favour of autarchism and voluntaryism. Strictly maybe. Trends move as they move. I can't change how these words are used today.

So I've mentioned that I won't be doing a certain thing, and given a tiny description of my take on political philosophy. What about the things I am doing in this New Year? I'll be putting up posts disputing the claims of John Maynard Keynes, Paul Samuelson, Stiglitz, Krugman, even Fareed Zakaria. I'm moving on to these people because the left anarchists are unreasonable children with nothing useful to add to the field of economics as should be evident by reading their FAQ on the matter.