Yes, if the great masses of people were ardent libertarians, and understood and accepted those views, anarchy would be possible.
Need not occur. Need only be resistant to coercion in a consistent way, OR be completely politically agnostic. For example, the American revolution was won when 30% of people took to the Patriot cause and another 30 or so percent didn't give a shit either way. Only about 30-35% were Tories. So, not even a majority needs exist that accept libertarianism (insofar as we defining that as anarchists or people who embrace the philosophy of liberty enough to not be opposed to the goal of a stateless society even if they are pragmatically minarchists - like yourself and Judge Napolitano, as examples...some people call this position ameliorism)...we need about 1/3 libertarian (anarchist, autarchists, agorists, and ameliorists), and another third be agnostic politically. Right now about some studies show more than 30% are libertarian-ish, while well more than 30% are agnostic and don't vote. All we need is a shift from agnostic/authoritarian to libertarian-ish in a pretty large number, OR a shift from libertarian-ish by 30% minus the existing libertarians, to libertarianism. In other words, all we need for such a social norm to exist that would facilitate a stateless society would be for libertarians to be a large, loud minority of about 30% of the populace, and another 20.1% if people to be libertarian-ish or politically agnostic (any combination of those two). I'd remark as well, most young people these days lean or are libertarian or libertarian-ish, and are more likely to be agnostic than voters.
But the great masses of people will never be ardent libertarians, or ardent socialists, or ardent fascists, or ardent anything.
As you can see, I agree, it doesn't matter one bit to the realization of a stateless society.
The average person is too irrational, emotion-driven, and ignorant to understand these complicated economic/political/ethical issues.
I agree, but that again has no relation to a stateless society being possible. In fact, it's a better argument why they shouldn't be allowed to vote on such issues, or ANYONE should be allowed to decide these things alone, as opposed to the market deciding things. It's a great argument against the state, because it is circular argument for it: "Some people are irrational, emotion-driven, and ignorant, so we need a government made up of...some people who are irrational, emotion-driven, and ignorant, so wee a government made up of...". Rinse, wash repeat ad nauseam. The people who get into government and vote are NOT the most rational, least emotion-driven (except when they are to the extreme of sadism or sociopathology), and least ignorant...in fact, they are some of the worst people in society. Sortition would be preferable to elections, as those who get power are not only corrupted by the power, but worse yet is that most people drawn to power are already corrupt and want power for that reason. Wanting power should automatically disqualify you from having it (in politics).
The masses are never the source of ideology, they merely reflect the ideology of the elites (who are, of course, not always well-intended or honest).
Then explain libertarianism. There are no masses, only individuals...a mass of individuals are the masses. Thereby, all ideology comes from individuals, some in the elite and some not, and since individuals are what make up the masses, ALL ideology comes from the masses. Now, if you want to arbitrarily distinguish between elites in political power and those without it, I wonder where this line stops. Politicians? Cops? Soldiers? Mail men? voters? Any place you put the line will be outside philosophical proofs (truth). The principle is those who coerce non-victimizers and that action is deemed socially (en masse) acceptable, they are elite over those they wield power over in such unethical ways. In that way, all ideology comes from the masses, as they can at any time (and have before in history) change what they are willing to accept. This is why the masses get the government they deserve...not because they don't vote enough, but because markets and the state are reflections of mass aggregate ethics. The market is the mirror which shows the actual undistorted reflection of that mass moral compass, whereas the state shows a distorted funhouse mirror reflection of those ethics. This is because consumer choices trump what consumers SAY (or do, with forced subsidization from those who disagree with them, which lowers costs for the majority in a vote's outcome). No poll or vote can ever reflect mass morality as clearly as consumer choices...but it is a distorted reflection, so it isn't in majority a complete illusion - it does in fact reflect mass morality to a large degree.
Any political system which relies on an informed and ideologically-driven population checking the power plays of the elite is doomed to failed.
This is a good argument against the state and the idea of an informed voter. Public Choice Theory, and the Myth of the Rational Voter, predict this well. This is why a stateless legal order is NOT a system...it's an unsystem, or anti-system. A system is defined as: "a set of principles or procedures according to which something is done; an organized scheme or method". There is no single scheme or method in anarchy...it's a panarchist synthesis among any number of voluntary economic and organizational methods, in any combination, in a totally decentralized and stigmergic way. This means no method or scheme can be identified from a long view, only when looking myopically at each individual method in place in the micro. The word system has long been rejected by anarchists - we don't advocate any system. We advocate the abolishment of coercive systems in exchange for order....a legal order that isn't based on coercion of non-victimizers.
Since the state is a closed system, and an open, free and competitive market is an open system (that is to say, a non-system when no state exists at all, making a plurality of all free markets, or a free market economy in total, not simply a single free market - a single free market in the context of a state can be considered a system), chaos theory mathematics show the former is doomed to collapse into anomie (they call it "anarchy", but what they are referring to is chaos, and anomie describes social and economic chaos), and the latter is able to operate in perpetuity without entropy afflicting it, IF the system doesn't become closed (in this case, if the two social norms don't emerge or re-emerge that allow coercive monopolies, monopsony, or cartels). In essence, if you are in a completely open system, it ceases to be a system, and starts to be a stigmergic order, or spontaneous order. Calling it a system from that point seems to impose some idea of centralism or scheming that no longer exists. "I, Pencil" is informative to this point in how markets operate with no central planning, but only stigmergic order.
This applies to both democracy and anarcho-capitalism.
As you can see, I don't completely agree or disagree...but for the record, I'm an anarchist, a free market and individualist, but NOT an anarcho-capitalist exactly. I'm actually an anti-capitalist...but by that I do not mean I'm against property, profit, etc. I'm a left-libertarian, and an anarchist, in the tradition of Benjamin Tucker, but with the updated theory of subjective value and not the old school labor theory of value. You can find people like me at Mises...like Roderick T. Long, for example. He's considered an anarcho capitalist, but also a left-libertarian. He describes himself as the latter most often. Gary Chartier is also one of these types, but calls himself a socialist. Both belief in essentially the same things. So do I. The free market, anti-capitalist, propertarian, individualist, etc., forms of anarchism are tough to label as left/right, capitalist anti-capitalist, socialist or anti-socialist, etc...this is because these labels are clumsy. Roderick Long gives a lecture at Mises we he explains the logical ridiculousness of how these terms are defined throughout different periods of history, different cultures, different people, and with different criteria. They end up meaning nothing. I don't get offended when people mistake me for an anarcho capitalist because most of my anarchist friends are in fact AnCaps. They are more like me than most anti-state socialists. However, I cannot be Rothbardian anarchist for a couple of key differences we have in economic theory and ethical methodologies.
They argue (correctly) that cartels cannot exist in a free market.
But that's beside the point.
I'm not arguing that there will be cartels in ancapistan's free market for security.
I'm arguingthere won't be a free market for security in ancapistan, because security firms will form coercive monopolies.
This makes no sense to me, given getting to a stateless society cannot occur until first the acceptance of these cartels, monopolies and monopsony (defense is a monopsony of the state, not a monopoly or cartel, per se) is not socially acceptable. If we don't change those two social norms then of course you can't get to a stateless society, let alone maintain it. You contention is that we can't get to no state in society because something that requires a social acceptance will occur. It cannot occur without social acceptance of it, and therefore the obstacle to statelessness is not guns necessarily, or bombs, or tanks...it is the social acceptance of such acts of tyrants. The moment that is withdrawn, they can't stop the state from going away with all the nukes in the world. All they could do is commit suicide...and even then, how? If the army soldiers refuse to follow the illusion of authority over the ethics of reality, en masse, then who launches all the nukes to destroy us all? People seem to think those who beat us with batons and march on us with tanks or bomb us with jets and bombs are somehow robots. They aren't. Some of them will defect to our side (and judging by their political donations, they are more libertarian in the military than most of the population).
So, you saying the state can't go away pragmatically because these monopsony, cartels, or monopolies in law and defense would form is ignoring the fact that requires mass sanction of the victims. That is the obstacle, not the formation of those institutions of coercion that is merely symptomatic of the disease of social acceptance of coercion against the innocent. How long can you pay soldiers when you can't get 30% of people to pay taxes, and need to therefore borrow less (with no collateral assured to the lender state), and need to steal from 70% of the population therefore via high inflation (which only drives more of them to our side)? How long can you sustain war against a populace as you go bankrupt, when 30% actively resist you, and another 30% don't give a shit to aid you beyond paying taxes? Eventually the logistical facts catch up, and the war of aggression by the state is over, they killed or jailed, or judged in stateless arbitration (courts) to pay remuneration in large sums, etc.
The social norms are the obstacle, not the men with bombs and guns. They are mind who can change their minds too, and they are also not gods with the ability to defeat mass changes in social norms. Think about the drug war or the American Revolution...or any number of wars or semi-peaceful revolutions...the state is totally incapable of enforcing laws a sufficiently large minority refuse to abide and follow. The state is also incapable of holding power if enough people in a large, loud minority actively refuse to recognize its ethical, and therefore legal, legitimacy. The state crashes and burns anytime a large enough minority essentially say "fuck you, I won't do what you tell me".
Right, see above regarding popular ideology's inability to check elite power.
In fact, that is the only thing that has ever checked their power...and not through a ballot box either, but instead via mass resistance.
It was also extremely primitive: hunter-gatherers living in small groups at subsistence level.
For the full 97%, yes...not the entirety of stateless society however. For at least 14,000 years humans have had laws, defense, roads, trade, etc...and the state is not even 6,000 years old. So the majority of human justice and liberty was NOT in a state. Also, many stateless societies of that latter period of statelessness were agrarian (in fact, most were), and lived in many cases in urban settings, not sparsely populated rural settings. It being urban or rural doesn't really matter, as those were symptoms of market economic shifts long before they understood any of it, and long before it had a name. Population doesn't matter (in fact states suffer from scaling issues more than stateless societies do, due to centralization issues). The fact is survived in such primitive settings is a credit to it, not a drawback. Technology today is making the state's existence and role increasingly obsolete. Smart contracts. reputation ratings, the internet and social networking, etc., etc., etc. all make stateless legal order and defense coordination more and more feasible and advantageous than centralized coercive alternatives.
The more tech and people the more complexity in the closed system (the state), and thereby the more entropy leading to collapse to anomie. The larger the population and more advanced the tech the harder the state is to maintain. This is why totalitarian regimes tend to place serious limits on tech dispersion in the populace, especially weapons tech and communications tech, and also place large obstacles in the way in an attempt to limit population (immigration restrictions that aren't mirroring the market demand and supply, like the Wall in Germany or North Korea's attack on immigration to and from their country, America's failures at regulating immigration flows to thwart the market's natural supply and demand, etc., and China's rules on birthrates and male children, etc., and Nazi Germany's, Pol Pot's Cambodia's, etc. genocides when faced with finite caloric outputs that were greater than the population's need, an undesirable class of people, and Cambodia's want to limit populations of intellectuals, or even anyone suspected of being higher than average intelligence).
Anarchy/free markets don't care to limit population or technology invention, innovation, or dispersion, unless it is meant and used to coerce the non-victimizer. It doesn't hurt free markets and force entropy...in fact, it aids free markets and avoids entropy.
The absence of the state prior to the emergence of civilization is not an argument for the viability of statelessness in civilized societies.
There is no civilized behavior or social behavior where the state is present. Anywhere the state is, antisocial and uncivil behavior reign. Anytime the state isn't present, we tend, in the vast majority, to pro-social and civil behavior.
The first city-states were NOT the first places people acted in a civil matter...and in fact, whenever the state imposed itself and its authority via coercion of non-victimizers to fund itself, etc. that logically was NOT civil or pro-social.
How can that which is uncivil and antisocial by definition (it is necessary for coercion of non-victimizers to exist for the state to exist) be what creates, maintains, or supports civility and society? It logically cannot. It is antisocial and uncivilized behavior that destroys, degrades, and undermines society and civilized actions of that society.
If you define "civil" and "social" behaviors of the masses, and thereby "civilization" and "society", as necessarily relying on a state, not only would I say that definition is quite convenient (albeit popular, especially among academics) and logically false, but I would also say that if I am forced to concede, for the sake of debate, that these are indeed the definitions, then I would suddenly become one of the anarchists who, while NOT in the pursuit of chaos, would support the abolition of "civilization" and "society" in favor of the masses acting in civil ways to one another and acting pro-socially among each other.
The goal isn't a word...it's civil and social behavior, and an opposition to uncivil and antisocial behavior. If that means being pro or anti civilization/society, then count me in.
The state could not possibly have existed prior to civilization, regardless of ideology, because there was insufficient physical output (e.g. food) to allow for the specialization of labor required for the state to exist.
Hence my stance that the state is not in any way required for civilization or society to exist, and in fact can be nothing more than a parasite and degrader of both. These things persist in spite of the state, not because of it. When the state get's too large and centralized, it collapses and takes those things down with it.
Indeed, and thus it will never re-emerge.
Never is a very long time. I remember when people said there would never be a black President, and I read about people saying chattel slavery would never be outlawed, and if it were then prices of cotton relative to incomes would skyrocket. "Never" is a bad argument. It assumes a consistency and stagnate nature to human social norms and technology that does not exist.
It will re-emerge, because if humans be trusted to do one thing it is to do the RIGHT (ethics) thing...only after exhausting every other WRONG (ethics) thing first.
We are a trial and error species, and the radicals in every time always end up being right when they are radical (that means 'to go to the root of the problem" and to avoid addressing only symptoms of the problem) with no coercion of the non-victimizer being argued for. Anarchists are just the last abolitionists...we are wanting to abolish forced labor. We succeeded with chattel slavery...now we have only tax slavery/wage slavery (depending what it meant by the 2nd term) left to attack. Then we might, in a stateless society, become radicals against the coercion of certain social norms and want their abolition as well. After all, social norms can be just as, or more, coercive than the state itself (hence, the state is just a symptom of those two social norms I keep mentioning).
It is an error to attribute libertarian ideology to pre-historic human beings simply because the state did not then exist.
As I pointed out earlier, that doesn't matter. You can a totally ideological libertarian but be a total hypocrite when it comes to your own self-interests, and thereby rationalize both being a libertarian and yet violating its principles. I see people do it all the time. There is a difference between ideological and lifestyle libertarianism. For example, you CAN BE both a ideological and lifestyle libertarian, but you can also be an ideological libertarian and narcotics cop. They exist, look at LEAP's (Law Enforcement Against Prohibition) membership! Many are former or current narcotic officers who enforce the very laws they SAY they are unethical, because their pensions and job security, and thereby income, depend on it. Here greed gets in the way of lifestyle libertarianism.
All political agnostics are lifestyle libertarians if they don't coerce non-victimizers. The fact they don't vote, hate paying taxes but do it to be left alone, and don't have strong enough opinions (although they may SAY they do) to vote on those issues or lobby for them, makes them indistinguishable from libertarians in action. This is better than a hypocrite who is ideologically a libertarian.
Now, everyone makes mistakes, so if you were charged with assault at 21, but since then haven't done anything and are now a 40 year old, then that one transgression against libertarian lifestyle doesn't make you an example of a flaw in this observation. It's when your lifestyle as a whole is one of coercion of non-victimizers that you violate this criteria.
Stateless societies need not be ideologically libertarian to have lived a libertarian lifestyle. Stateless societies were libertarian by default. By definition, libertarianism is a reactionary philosophy...it has no reason to be given a name or deep thought until coercion of the non-victimizer is introduced. That's why in early periods if city-states in China and Greece, where writings of philosopher's survive, we see anarchist thought among Cynics, Stoics, and Taoists. They didn't call themselves anarchists yet because they hadn't fully developed the philosophy, and were proto-anarchist as a consequence. But they preached the virtues of spontaneous order and statelessness, with no coherent underlying ideologies to give it a name or category unto itself. There is no anti-crime crusader without crime. So, of course the stateless societies didn't have liberty and justice as an ideological goal...they didn't have anything else to compare it to. They had default liberty and justice, and didn't know they'd made a mistake in changing the social norms toward allowing a parasitic and criminal ruling class until it was too late. Their economic ignorance that led to coercive monopolies, monopsony, and cartels is not their fault, and isn't something we today have (to the same level - most people today realize these monopsony, monopolies, and cartels are negative for us as a society, they just fail to recognize them when they wear the label "government").
The state was not physically possible at that stage of social development, and no one could have ever contemplated the idea in order to have an opinion.
Precisely. Hence, libertarian ideology only makes it more likely to emerge and remain. It's much easier to establish and maintain, or allow to resurface, a state when the populace has no experience with one and all its horrors, AND they have no ideology that opposes it being articulated by some large, loud minority (and the tacit approval of the large, silent minority who are agnostic on the issue).
This is anachronism, like attributing Marxism to pre-historic people because they weren't opposed to Marxism.
But that isn't at all what I did. What I did do was point out stateless society is what anarchists want, and that it is not only possible, given human history, but that it is indeed ethical. Since this occurred in the absence of any strong ideological support, then any ideological support for it would only enhance this case. So, the real comparison would be to Marx saying stateless societies had communal relations, thereby it is possible for that to happen without a state (his withering away of the state theory, although his means to get there was illogical - you cannot get to decentralized and voluntary society by way of centralization and coercion...it is like trying to get to cancer-free by getting more cancer).
The state is not necessary to the existence of society, civilization, property, any economic or organizational relations existing voluntarily, etc. In fact, it is a hindrance to those things. Showing that indeed statelessness is not pragmatically impossible and is indeed the only ethical way to organize and economically interact, without any mass ideological pushes toward it to establish it or maintain it, only strengthens the case when you add to those pragmatic and ethical realities the ideological support by a single person or, more to the point, a loud and large minority. It doesn't hurt my case, it only aids it. Plus, this case shouldn't be confused for a case of "they weren't opposed because it didn't exist". Quite the contrary, it was because it didn't exist yet that they didn't oppose it yet. However, it is notable that the moment they began to exist as states, philosophers began ideological opposition to the state and statist philosophers (like Socrates being opposed by Diogenes of Sinope, and Plato being opposed by Zeno of Citium, and contemporary Chinese statist philosophers being opposed by Lao Tzu and other Taoist philosophers).
As soon as the state became a reality, opposition to it began. It is worth noting that stateless societies were opposed to coercion of the non-victimizer as a social norm broadly, however...their entire customary legal orders were based upon this, hence they had no victimless crimes in customary legal orders. They simply didn't realize this standard could not hold if they just turned a blind eye to it when done by providers of legal and defense services. Had they known the consequences, they would have probably taken an truly ideological position, and likely not in favor of the state. The same is true today of chattel slavery; had the masses had the benefit of hindsight, in how slavery increased the cost of cotton and other crops by disincentivizing innovation and invention, and how well things worked out economically and socially without slavery, and how evil it was when it was able to be viewed after-the-fact, they likely would have opposed its inception).
(By "inception" of "slavery", I'm not referring to all "slavery"...I'm referring to the enslavement, systematically and legally, and therefore institutionally, of those who were innocent non-victimizers and NOT debtors willingly selling themselves into servitude contractually, or criminals forced in to servitude as means to remunerate victims of their actions. In stateless societies slavery was most usually criminals and debtors, most often taking the form of attackers from other areas who had not been acting defensively, and less often debtors...relatively few (but not an insignificant number, were innocent non-victimizers pressed into slavery. Slavery as an institution is almost as old as humanity itself, but customary law prevented it from being as large as it was under states, because states forced those opposed to slavery to subsidize the costs to catch runaway slaves to the benefit financially of slave-owners and those just fine with it. This led to diminished costs to own slaves, which lead to more slavery than in stateless periods. The same is true of war....stateless societies had very small gang fights in comparison to wars under the states, and they were not only smaller in scale, but far less frequent. However, crime was very high back then, especially violent crime. This, however, was true of states and stateless societies in early periods where they both existed in comparable qualities at the same time. Crime falling dramatically since then is covered in my first comment above, and has very little to do with the state itself, but instead has to do weapons technology advances and mass adoption of these technologies, and few other factors.)
Just to repeat myself, and try to make it a little more clear - I'm not suggesting that statist ideology is part of human nature, I am saying it is part of human nature for the mass of people to be ideology consumers rather than ideology producers and thus incapable of mounting ideological opposition to the elite.
I partly agree, but the last part I disagree with. They are mostly consumers, not producers, of ideology. However, eventually Truth always wins in the scope of human history. Eventually people realized chattel slavery was wrong. Before that they eventually realized murder, rape, and theft was wrong and established law. Before that they realized cannibalism was wrong (in most places). It takes multiple generations, sometimes thousands of years, but Truth always rises to the top, and since Truth is the basis of any consistent ethical theory, consistent ethics eventually win the day.
I'm not an elite. I've managed to convince some to "convert" to libertarianism, and even a few to become anarchists. None of these people were libertarians to start with. Few were even agnostic to politics. If everyone had just a little of that success, this whole thing is over in just a few generations more.
The Enlightenment and its opposition to the supremacy of monarchy and religious superstition over reason took aver 300 years to rise and win. That was but a fraction of the enlightened transition in mass thinking needed to achieve statelessness. It's a degree of change in statism, to the correct direction (from an anarchist perspective). Anarchism is a much larger and long term project, and will take much longer as a result. The ideas of anarchism can be traced back to at least 6th century BC...and it is likely that earlier thoughts were lost to time. It took until the beginning of the 20th century, end of the 19th, for anarchism to even gain a name. It took until the late 18th century to even have its first widely read advocate (although Godwin, father of Frankenstein's author Mary Shelley, was before it had a name)...and incidentally, Godwin may have been one of the first transhumanist theorists.
Anarchy is going to be achieved any time soon...but it isn't impossible. It isn't even unlikely, given enough time. As we say in poker, "your assumptions are based on myopic statistical bias - your sample size is too small, and your Standard Deviation is too high". The Truth is like mind virus...is inevitably spreads. It's the only known "virus" that no matter how hard people are inoculated from it, they get infected anyways. If we view the species as a single organism, the virus of Truth always wins. This is why it always pleases me to see police abuses go "viral" on the internet. True, not all viral things like that are based in Truth, but Truth tends to stick over the long look at the species, while untruths tend to die off.
Doesn't this imply that anarchy would be possible if the elites themselves were ardent libertarians?
If they were ardent libertarians they would oppose elitism in political power. Of course, this reflects my preference for lifestyle libertarianism over ideological libertarianism. A political agnostic non-voter does more for the cause of a libertarian society than a political elite who is themselves an ideological libertarian.
it is not unrealistic to suppose that the elite would understand libertarianism.
Understand, or accept? I'm quite sure they understand it now. It isn't innocent ignorance that leads them to oppose it, it is their sadism, sociopathy, and control-freakery in their very disturbed mental disorders that draw them to being elites, and draw them to seek office. They get it...they just oppose it willfully. Power corrupts, but more than not, the corrupt are drawn to power. They oppose it because they understand it, and despise it. Liberty and justice are rewards to cronies and themselves, not default rights of the people. They see individuals as a means to an end, not individuals in and of themselves. Some people are just damaged for life as children, and many of them choose to be political elites. See psychologists lists on the Top 10 Jobs Sociopaths/Psychopaths choose. You'll see jobs like politicians, public "servant", bureaucrat, cop, soldier, CEO, union boss, mega-church leader, surgeon, journalist, media member, etc.
But, it is unrealistic to suppose that the elite would have humanitarian motives. It is entirely possible for one to understand libertarianism and reject it in favor of selfishness.
Agreed.
A system relying on the good will of the elite is doomed to failure, nor less than a system relying on the good sense of the masses.
This is why the state is doomed. And majority rule depends on the good sense of the masses, not markets. In markets if you spend money unwisely YOU pay for it, not your neighbor who disagreed with it but was forced to subsidize it via taxation. Markets don't require complete rationality or even equal rationality among those who are rational to varying degrees. In fact, it NEEDS irrational/unequal rationality and information.
Think of language. Is that centralized? Then why hasn't Esperanto been adopted yet? Because language is not centrally planned with any success...it is organic and stigmergic. It develops inevitably from the bottom up. Unpopular slang gives way to massively accepted slang, which gives way to elite acceptance. In this way, things not dictated to the masses can and do get adopted by society and the elite. The elite didn't end slavery because of humane thought...in most places it was ended without a war due to bottom-up changes in social norms, which started among a tiny minority of non-elite thinkers and preachers. Eventually the state HAD to allow the change, or face overthrow. Self preservation dictates a lot of what the state must do. The masses have far more control of social norms than the elites, insofar as we look over larger sample sizes of time and populations.
The only stable system is one in which society as a whole benefits from everyone pursuing his own selfish interests (because that is all that human beings can be reliably depended on to do). This is the beauty of laissez faire as an economic system, and the beauty of proprietary government as a political system.
You had me until "proprietary government as a political system". It isn't helping property exist and isn't upholding property rights consistently. It steals via taxes and eminent domain, fines, regulation cost compliance, licensing fees, etc...then it claims to invent and uphold property rights. That which steals property to exist cannot be seen as necessary to the invention of, or maintenance of, property and property rights. It's paradoxical.
And where the state exists, there is no free market/laissez faire. The latter term means "let it be", or "let it go". That isn't at all what the state does. It is itself a series of coercive monopolies, monopsony, and cartels over specific markets (nonviolent dispute resolution/law, defense, transportation infrastructure, etc.). Even if it never regulated or taxed any other markets, it is nevertheless enough to constitute an incompatibility with a free market economy (an economy with only free markets comprising it). The state's mere existence is mutually exclusive from the existence of open, competitive, free market economy.
Advocacy/support for a minimal state is minimal opposition to laissez faire/free market economies. There is no logical way around this.
In both cases, ideology is irrelevant, no particular ideology is required for the system to work - individual selfishness benefits society through the "invisible hand."
Sort of...the ideology necessary for the state to exist are the two social norms I already mentioned, and for a state to not exist those two social norms must change. The former maintains a system, the latter abolishes a system in favor of a legal order and economic order via spontaneous/stigmergic order.
My question is, if you truly believe in this, and simultaneously agree that coercion of the non-victimizer is outside market relations, but instead is unethical/criminality, why do you not accept the state is unethical and unnecessary (and in fact is just legalized criminality), and why do you not realize that consistent application of market ideas lead to no state at all given a totally free market economy/laissez faire economy is logically one without a state?
The state is not compatible with a totally free market economy/totally free society. And to expect it to stay clearly limited to only the sectors it needs to exist has been shown be history to be impossible and unrealistic. It will grow, and grow, and grow until it destroys the host and itself in the process. The host is the market (the sum total of all voluntary interactions and transactions in society)...it isn't a part of the host; it's a parasite and cancer upon the host. I don't how it is logical or historically correct to think otherwise.
And thanks as well for the reply, past, present, or future. I'm here infrequently, so don't think I'm ignoring you if I don't reply immediately or for quite some time.
