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Hi there. I joined the board a while ago, but haven't really posted anything serious until now. I have spent the last 10 years discussing politics with all people holding all kinds of viewpoints, from objectivists to libertarians to liberals to conservatives and others. As someone who is building a company to empower people and unite communities, I believe that technology lets us decentralize power structures and help people do things better. I've been fortunate enough to meet and correspond with many political thinkers thinkers, such as Noam Chomsky, etc. I would say that my political leanings, at the end of the day, wind up somewhere between Social Democrat and Techno-Liberal. Preamble: Although I admire Stefan Molyneux's convictions, I think he is too ideological and incorrect on many issues. Many times he invites people to provide "real arguments" to challenge his viewpoints, so it's frustrating that I have never been able to get ahold of him. Probably his show is so popular that he gets tons of mail a day. I would be very happy to discuss issues of anarcho-capitalism with him on his show or in person, but since I'm on this board, I may as well bring them up here, so as to get a real discussion going. To say at the outset: I believe that Capitalism enjoys the status of a quasi-religion in the United States. Every time it's mentioned, someone has to add how amazing it is, and every time someone points out a flaw, proponents are very quick to point out the problem is *never* with actual Capitalism, because Capitalism is just (presumably) the natural state of man, voluntarism in its essence, and the problem must be somewhere else (hint: Government, which exists everywhere and at all times). I realize that presenting problems with Capitalism here is a bit like presenting problems with Mohammad in Saudi Arabia, but nevertheless, I know there are plenty of people who are open to reason and logical discussion. I feel a bit like Sam Harris challenging SJWs: https://www.samharris.org/blog/item/the-end-of-liberalism so at the outset I need to give my bona fides: I think Capitalism is an amazing system for many things. Free trade, low barriers to entry for enterprises, and bankruptcy protections (the latter is not anarcho-capitalist) have led to a lot of innovation. However, there are many externalities as well. One may say the free market is A and B deciding C is for dinner. Most problems come down to this. Anarcho Capitalism: While Capitalism is great, I don't think it's perfect, nor do I think it's the inevitable and only system which can develop under voluntarism. There are anarcho-socialism and many other possible systems people can voluntarily enact. But they, and anarcho-capitalism, are just ideologies, they are not achievable in practice. Here is my first problem with anarcho-capitalism: it is incoherent. Suppose we take a principled, deontological approach to it. We insist that our entire society must be built upon the Non Aggression Principle. Anything that violates the principle is out. Well then, what is private property? I think it's fair to define it as a monopoly right to exclude others from the use of some resource. And how are you going to exclude them? By force. So that's what it means when people "enforce" private property. Preferably by some private security or paramilitary group, cause government violates NAP. But wait, men with guns? Aren't they initiating force? "No," says the anarcho-capitalist. They are not, because they are using "defensive force". But what is "defensive force"? "Well, one example is defending property." Ah, so we're kind of begging the question here. We're carving out a specific exception for "property", whatever that is. Well, some anarcho-capitalists believe in Intellectual Property. I can go ahead and use "defensive force" to go and attack a peaceful person who I never met and never had any problem with, because they built a contraption that infringes on my "intellectual property". They "stole my idea". So, we can own ideas? Other an-caps say no, you can't own ideas. But now we are stuck. Some people believe you own the idea and I infringed on it. Some believe I didn't. Now you use force, and we're stuck: did you initiative force, or not? Maybe you believe in copyright but not patents. And I share a movie that I bought that you spent $50 million making. And now no one buys your movie anymore. So you attack me. Because your business model is built on the idea that people can "own" bits inside other people's computers. It creates artificial scarcity, and extracts rents. What is Property? OK, you may say, intellectual property is just an exception, like age of consent. No system is perfect, and in those cases we just have to resort to whatever the majority of people think in the area. Well, that's exactly what happens with laws and jurisdictions. Let's suppose (as Stefan probably does) that you can't own ideas. So, can an individual own large bodies of water, like Lake Superior? Can they own a huge forest? Suppose I don't recognize your right to (read: use force to exclude people from) large swaths of land. I'm in good company: many Native American tribes did not believe in such extreme land ownership. Even John Locks, whose idea of "homesteading" many libertarians use, explicit said about homesteading that a person should not be able to legitimately own far more land than can feed him and his family. I have never heard anarcho-capitalists admit that this was John Locke's actual position about "homesteading". And suppose John Locke was wrong, and you set out to prove to me that, no, in fact one should be able to own everything they "homestead". So Johnny Appleseed can plant a tree every 50 square feet and he can come to own plots of land the size of Kentucky? Even if he abandons each spot for 50 years? What about adverse possession, easements, and all those other aspects of actual property law, don't they get in the way of the simple idea of "homesteading"? Consequentialism And suppose you wanted to prove to me that one should be able to own property of any kind and exclude people from its use, by force if necessary, and this doesn't violate the NAP. How will you go do that? Typically you will use consequentialist arguments! "Look, if we don't pay content creators for their work, who will make content?" "Look, Capitalism leads to greater prosperity than Socialism". These are questions that deal with facts about the world, and we can explore them, and you may even be right. But that admits that consequences matter and not just arbitrary principles. Milton Friedman was one of the few consequentialist libertarians and his arguments are far different from then NAP. They are arguments like "no one spends another's money as well as he spends his own". I am far more receptive to consequentialist arguments, but that also opens the door to the possibility that Social Democracy, Open Source Software, Science, etc. may be better at achieving some outcomes than Capitalist systems. Force So, the NAP definitely can apply if we define "initiation of force or threat of force" to be against a person's body. That is well defined. How about against a person's mind or psychological well being? Maybe. But once you start arguing that "the 1000 acre forest" is an extension of you, or an entire lake, and peeing in "MY LAKE" is the same as having sex with "MY BODY" and therefore the private cops arresting you are not "initiating force", you lose a lot of people. It's a stretch to believe that private property has no limits. Maybe chattel, like owning a pencil, or food that you're going to eat. But owning 1 million apples that you're not going to eat? Probably not everyone will agree. So what if they don't agree, and eat those apples or squat in "your" 1000 acre wood and refuse to leave? How will you get them out without using force? The whole system of property falls apart if you can't enforce it. At some point, the NAP requires people to recognize your unlimited right to property. And they may not do that. And also, the NAP says nothing about what force is proportional. Suppose I find myself on your land, or I pee in "your" bushes, in your back yard. You call the cops, and they ask me to leave. I say I don't want to. Can they now put me in a cage where I will be raped? Why not skip all that and you just come and keep the intruder as a sex slave for 30 years? I mean, what kind of a system is it where you base everything on one principle, and insist all other legal principles are illegitimate? And if other legal principles are legitimate, then you're right back to jurisdictions and laws. Some people believe some things, and in other areas, other people believe other things. Depending on where you live, people may have different laws, different ages of consent, different ideas about property. So my point is ... basing your entire worldview on the NAP is incoherent, unless you don't believe in property. But anarcho-capitalism is all about property. Bottom line ... how are you going to get that anarcho-socialist voluntarist intruder out of your forest if you don't believe in initiating force? How are you going to get him from not re-selling that movie you worked so hard on? All this is just the first (and most direct) issue I have with anarcho-capitalism.

Alright, I'll keep this one even more to the point. Government Anarcho-capitalists seem to think that "the government" is some crazy monopoly thing, that owns land or whatever. There is no "the" government. There are organizations. People are free to form organizations, and once they do, the organizations have to be managed somehow. The management team of every organization is its government. FreeDomainRadio is an organization. This board is an organization. My posts are being moderated. So there is no "freedom of speech" here. My posts have to be approved, because my first post said something like "I would like to challenge Stefan to a debate", and it probably was flagged by a moderator. This is normal – this is to ensure the board doesn't veer off into "bad things", and to "maintain quality". Welcome to government! Freedom Praxeology and Methodological Individualism holds that organizations can't own things, only individuals can. Well, who do you think released that bank app you're using, on that app store you're using? Which individual released that iPhone or Android phone you're using? If that individual goes away (RIP Steve Jobs) who is doing it now? Obviously, organizations can own things. Apple owns a lot of cash at the moment, and no single individual owns that. Banks own things. It would be the same in an anarcho-capitalist utopia. The fact is, if you abolish government and make people completely free, they will form organizations. Companies, corporate parks, neighborhoods etc. They will form alliances, and join into city-states. Cities will join into commonwealths. And you'll go right back to what we have now. Free Market How would we define a free market? How about, "a market with no monopoly of force". Well, in that case, free markets do exist! Every international market is a free market, because the participants have no "world government" over them, only multilateral agreements such as international law. The labor market between countries, or how about the Forex market. Isn't that a free market by the above definition? Yet it is not meaningfully more efficient than, say, the publicly regulated stock market. Of course, this does not mean that government distortions of markets are necessarily always OK. In fact, distortions and incentives in general can have unforeseen consequences. But we do have free markets and we are about to judge how well such "lack of monopoly of force" really works. Tribalism Here is what I would talk about with Stefan if I ever was on his show. Throughout history, we do have a "lack of monopoly of force" at the highest levels, and we can study the results. People had tribes, which fought one another. We can study how much violence there was among prehistoric man, including by looking at blunt trauma. Or look at the uncontacted tribes today. Read the book The Better Angels of our Nature: How Violence has Declined by Steven Pinker. He has figures after figures comparing societies from prehistoric to modern, on the amount of violence. You don't need to go far. Hey Stefan, your ancestors in Ireland as well as nearby Scottish highlands and the rest of Britain fought in clans and tribes among each other. And in fact, most of Europe was a backwater during the Roman Empire. In many ways the "barbarians" were considered so brutish and backward as to beunworthy of assimilation, much like you consider the "other races" today. More on that below (empires). And by the way, World War 1 may have started because there was no monopoly of force, or one should say, one federal government in Europe. The alliances between individual countries triggered a cascading effect that led to a huge war. You can also see retribution cycles on smaller levels with Hatfields vs McCoys etc. This what Hobbes talks about in The Leviathan when he talks about "the war of all vs all". World War 2 also saw different countries fighting each other, and a lot of brutal things. Now there is a EU and there hasn't been war for 50 years. Empires Is imperialism and empires totally bad? We all speak English, on the internet, using protocols on computers. English is due to the British Empire. The United States is an empire of 50 states which do not war with each other (except for the civil war), speak the same language, have the same McDonalds due to the shared interstate highway system, and permit free travel between them. Digital computers and CPUs, were invented using army financing into microwave research during World War 2 (read Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley). The internet was invented using DARPA. Before electronics, there were huge infrastructure projects by cities and states. Aqueducts in Rome. Interstate Highway System in the USA. In the last 20 years, China has just raised the most people out of poverty than ever in history (in absolute numbers). Incomes have risen 500% every 10 years. The USA had average incomes rise from around $5,000 to $22,000 from 1920 to 1990. In that same period the USSR, which you consider to be far inferior at creating wealth, made incomes rise from $500 to $5,000 a month, a 10-fold increase versus the USA's 4-fold increase. Yes, Socialist USSR helped bring electricity and literacy to many Muslim republics, for example, such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. (However, I do NOT approve of the forced confiscation of wealth, political repression, great terrors etc. of the USSR's authoritarian regime. Just talking about productivity measures in a vaccuum, here.) When we say "China invented paper 2000 years ago" or "Chinese invented gunpowder 1000 years ago" what we are really saying is that there was an EMPIRE called "China", with an EMPEROR. Someone in that empire invented paper, and it spread. Because everyone spoke a similar language, and had the same writing system. Because empires invest in military technology and science, and attract smart people to the center, and disseminate information. Yes, free markets work, but everyone speaks the same language because empires. With technology today, I believe we can finally increase decentralization, but throughout human history that wasn't always the case. Races So Stefan likes to espouse "race realism", and certainly there are differences between races. No one disputes average height is different, for example, or skin or hair color, or facial features. But "IQ" is a nebulous measure. How about a different analysis: Sub-Saharan Africa is different from Europe and Asia in one aspect: it had no large empires. Asia had China, the Mongols, the Guptas, etc. The mediterranean had too many to count, including Alexander's Greek-speaking empire, Romen's empire, and Carthage. (Some may say Carthage is an African empire, but it clearly never beyond a sliver of Africa.) When we say "Arabs invented algebra", once again we mean Arab-speaking people under an Arab freaking empire! And why were they more advanced than the Europeans of the time? Was it racial theory? No. It was empire. Why were Arabs more advanced than the Persians during the Arab empire, but Persians were much more advanced 1000 years earlier during the Persian empires of Xerxes and Darius? By contrast, Africa had no empires, but had a great "lack of monopoly on force" that Stefan and anarcho-capitalists love so much. Tribes spent endless energy fighting one another, and when alliances did form, they led to prosperity (such as in Zimbabwe). If you do look at the empires in Africa, you will find they formed along rivers. There is no accident that Stratfor's analysis of the US "Part 1: The Inevitable Empire" starts by discussing the geological features of the USA with its rivers and transportation cost of perishable foods. These are major factors, and it would be an interesting question to ask "Why did Africa not develop any large empires?" I bet you that if they had, they'd have a lot more military might and the Dutch colonists sailing around the Cape Horn of Africa would never be able to so easily colonize South Africa. The English maybe, who later took it from the Dutch with their military might. Just as people join into commonwealths or get crushed by marauders and neighboring powers, so do countries join into empires and spheres of influence, and that's still going on today. Africans did not have any real huge empires or economic centers of their own, and thus were plundered for their ivory trade, and later the diamond industry. There were brutal wars but most of the wealth left the country. State Capitalism of course leads to this plundering, despite many well-intentioned people. Look at the Opium Wars in China, or the Raj in India, or United Fruit Company in Guatemala, or BP in Iran before the MI5 and CIA helped overthrow democracy there and installed a Shah. Does Stefan really think that Persians are an inferior race than whites with lower IQ? They had democracy ... we ruined it. They are still very educated btw. Oh and ironically the Iranians are "Aryan". Summary So I hope this analysis shows... people join into organizations to get economics of scale, mutual protection, etc. And then investments in science and technology, common language, etc. these bring not only wealth but resilience against plundering. That explains what we see in the world today, in some ways far better than anarcho-capitalist theories. People form organizations. The organizations own things and make laws within their jurisdiction. The management of those organizations is called "government". That is all.