No worries.
Just keep in mind his application of the quote was fallacious. The reason being, he chose to confine his point to this forum, which is retarded. You can't choose to ignore the rest of the world in an attempt to consider yourself an individual. He chose to mirror himself as an outsider, he loved making himself a target and it was no-ones fault but his own. The "individualism" he espoused is pretty much the same 95% of the population. Yet he'd be here and say "we're all collectivists." <-- which is collectivist thinking in itself.. lol
^ Clinically retarded.
Of course...that's why I spent the rest of my post detailing the meaning of collectivism.
Kade completely misconstrued the meaning of the word "subjugation" in the Rand quote. He broadened the word's meaning to the absurd level where a person is "collectivist" simply by being of the majority opinion (among just one small social/political sphere, at that!), regardless of whose opinion in and of itself constituted
political collectivism (which actually does advocate the violation of individual rights through subjugation of the individual to the group). Meh. I still miss him though, and I kind of feel bad criticizing him without him here to fight back.
Hopefully the anarcho-capitalists have taken over.. not the anarchists
Herein lies the problem with the distinction you're going to such pains to make: Philosophically, you're correct, but structurally, anarcho-capitalism is exactly the same as every other type of anarchism. It's entirely stateless (at least for a time, depending on its stability) and without any clear rules except those which "enough" people agree upon via social contract that order spontaneously arises to enforce them. How, then, are you going to make sure that if we ever fell into anarchy, it would be anarchy of a desirable and stable kind, where the unwritten rules would be based upon the non-aggression axiom? There is only one way: You must use a
gradual approach of slowly scaling back the state as you educate people about why!
Btw, attempting to limit the state is also clinically retarded.
<snip>
To use similar hyperbole, I'd also argue that attemping to abolish the state all at once is also "clinically retarded," along with the idea that anarcho-capitalism would ever be the result of a sudden government collapse. After all, just consider the mentality of about 95% of people in America: Even if I were ready to accept the idea,
they are obviously nowhere near ready for even strictly limited government, let alone anarcho-capitalism! Because of that, any kind of anarchism if attempted today would turn out very ugly. The only way you could ever possibly accomplish your stated goal of anarcho-capitalism is with a gradual approach, as mentioned above: You must educate people enough to have more and more libertarian views, as you chip away at the state and dismantle it one piece at a time...and of course, you must strip away each piece of the state in such a way that everything goes smoothly and there isn't a reactionary shift back towards statism.
If all government (federal and state) were ever demolished too quickly - in some kind of violent revolution of the mob, for instance - anarcho-capitalism would not just spontaneously result from the aftermath. There would be anarchy for a time, but it would be the violent sort of anarchy resulting from a leviathan state collapsing into a power vacuum. Some of the uneducated mob would take advantage of the confusion and disorder to loot and pillage, and the rest of the uneducated mob would scramble together some kind of iron-fisted government to bring back order. After all, how many times have you seen the fall of one government spontaneously turn into peaceful anarcho-capitalism?
In such a scenario, we would have no choice but to deliberately come together and form the most limited government we possibly could, while mustering up grudging support from the reluctant "centrist" masses. Otherwise, they would take charge and form another government with a Constitution
much more explicitly collectivist than the current one. After we formed the most limited government we could, we would then have to resume our work of educating people, limiting the new government, and downsizing it until the "appropriate" size is reached. In your eyes, the appropriate size is "nonexistent,"
but you must still first pass through minarchism to get to any kind of stable and orderly anarchism, let alone anarcho-capitalism in particular.
If just the US government collapsed but state governments remained, that would be the optimal situation, since organized law enforcement could still keep order and quell the violent looting, pillaging, rioting, etc. of the shellshocked masses during the immediate aftermath. Certainly, it would be much easier to subsequently limit and scale down state governments than the federal government, assuming the federal government were already out of the way.
In that case though, we're once again back to gradually limiting and downsizing a government.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
No matter how you slice it, the only way you can ever successfully achieve anarcho-capitalism anyway is with a gradual approach, and that is inherently an excercise in simultaneously limiting and downsizing government. To explicitly restate the implications of this necessarily gradual approach, I will quote something I said to you a few weeks ago (that I never got a real response to):
In other words, achieving anarcho-capitalism pretty much REQUIRES you to be wrong about your assumption that no checks and balances could ever restrain a state! If you actually want to achieve anarcho-capitalism, then you more than anyone should be interested in what Constitutional checks and balances might actually work well enough to keep government limited for a very long time.
