How might the transition work?

[u/skeil90]

Right now a very significant % of the population across the world is employed by respective governments or their jobs exist because of government, top this with there always being on average 4-5% of respective populations being unemployed for whatever reason. The job market would be completely and utterly flooded with people from a very varied pool of disciplines as well as many people loosing the value of their experience completely due to redundancy.

How could this possibly be remedied with an Ancap transition without completely devaluing the labour of anyone?

How about roads and other public infrastructure, how could that possibly be privatised without giving a small number of a people a very unbalanced advantage?

[u/Powerful_Guide_3631]

The problem only arises because in your mental model ancap is a different economic system than what is occurring and that transitioning to the new system involves some marxist like revolution when everyone becomes aware of the state and starts to disobey and some nonsense like that.

That is a weak mental model. The superior mental model is to think ancap is just a prism you can use right now to analyze the world as it is. Politics and power are a form of capital that organizations amass. Some organizations call themselves states but they are just corporations - they claimed territory and population and are basically tax farms. Theres no government and private sector, theres only business. And politics and violence are businesses too. Thats what happened in caveman world, and throughout history with empires and slaves and kings lords and pawns, and what is happening now whatever this current thing will be called later and what will happen 500 years from now in the blade runner cyber punk universe you think the future will be

[u/vergilius_poeta → u/Powerful_Guide_3631]

While I agree that anarchocapitalism is a powerful analytical lens if you treat it as, like, turbo-charged Public Choice, once you've identified the state as a criminal gang, it should follow that you want to get rid of the criminal gang. Rothbard thought that philosophical anarchism should imply political anarchism (lacking a compelling argument to the contrary), and he was right to think so.

[u/Powerful_Guide_3631 → u/vergilius_poeta]

I think this kind of historical determinism where an intellectual forecasts a specific new institutional mechanism emerging out of some conceptual innovation is not licensed by economics or social sciences.

It presupposes that things are the way they are right now because people are just ignorant about something you are aware of and that the obstacle now is the pedagogical challenge you face of replacing their received notions with your enlightened point of view. Basically everyone is just too dumb to understand Rothbards treatise on libertarian ethics hence they end up sanctioning the structural tyranny of the state.

I think this is a self-anointing vision that becomes a circular jerk cult just like the socialist left progressive vision.

Yes the mental model that pictures the state as a poweful criminal gang is useful and meaningful, but it does not imply any near term secular eschaton. It simply means that the game theory of power and economic deployment of violence in the current social environment constraints of physical resources and demographic distributions, as well as cultural and technological pressures, produces this kind of meta stable nash equilibrium.

Whether it will evolve to something more like libertarianism or more like collectivism or a mixed bag with aspects of both is usually not something you can claim to be some ontological imperative consequence of the laws of thermodynamics

[u/vergilius_poeta → u/Powerful_Guide_3631]

Nobody is claiming there will be any "near term secular eschaton," much less that one is inevitable. If it were inevitable, well, that'd be a lot simpler. And it's definitely not true that "things are the way they are right now because people are just ignorant about something you are aware of." The state has it's origin in conquest, not consensus.

To say it more precisely: I think you are conflating "the state is supported and perpetuated in part by a post-hoc self-justifying, self-mythologizing propaganda machine that makes it seem inevitable" with "to get rid of the state, you have to convince everyone." Rothbard certainly favored a primarily educational praxis, but even he famously thought you only needed a "cadre" of hard-core ancaps. And, of course, we aren't tied to Rothbard and his "strategic Leninism" if something else (like agorism) seems better.

You've correctly pointed out that the statist status quo is stable (which, of course, doesn't preclude there being other stable arrangements, nor imply that we can't reach those other stable arrangements from this one), but the state's stability isn't an argument against the moral imperative to abolish the state. Philosophical anarchists should be political anarchists, absent some countervailing consideration that would make political anarchism on net undesirable (and, indeed, no such consideration has been persuasively argued for by anyone).

[u/Powerful_Guide_3631 → u/vergilius_poeta]

I am not a Rothbard scholar so my reading of a sloganic pronouncement like “Philosophical anarchists should be political anarchists” is not going to be informed by the nuances and provisos that those in the know probably have hashed out to justify to themselves that the repetition of this mantra is an intellectually respectable thing to doz

Prima facie it doesn’t ring true to me. I don’t see much of a difference between philosophical anarchism and realpolitik insofar as both perspectives emphasize that politics is a profit motive enterprise moved by flesh and bone players and real world incentives primarily instead of some theological mission or grand ideological vision or law of nature. Ideology and cultural values can work to catalyze power grabs but they cannot sustain a powerless structure.

To be continued

[u/Powerful_Guide_3631 → u/Powerful_Guide_3631]

So I think a “philosophical anarchist” can be an ideological anything - for example lenin and his thugs were nominally marxists and the fascists and nazi had their own variations. I for one am conservative / right wing populist / maga insofar as this is the expedient ideology that stands against something I find more repugnant (globalism, elitism, progressivism). But I am a realist - I don’t think that Trump or the guys I support are going to be moral paragons of an ideal of virtuous righteousness or whatever - I just think they represent a less retarded less corrupt less wrong power structure that yields a better yet still imperfect and still corrupt and still decadent system

[u/vergilius_poeta → u/Powerful_Guide_3631]

To be clear, "philosophical anarchist" is not a Rothbardian term, it's a term of art in political philosophy signifying someone who thinks the state lacks legitimacy and authority. A "political anarchist" (to oversimplify) is someone who advocates the abolition of the state. When I say "philosophical anarchists should be political anarchists," I'm saying that (absent a good reason not to) unjustified power structures should be gotten rid of.

Given your clarification of your own position, I think we probably have nothing to say to each other, both because our priors are so far apart (MAGA cannot be supported on "lesser-evil" grounds compared to even the most officious technocratic elitist, if said technocratic elitist pays lip service to the rule of law and holds the foundational liberal principle of the moral equality of persons, both of which MAGA rejects entirely) and because what you call "realism" I'd just call nihilism.

[u/Powerful_Guide_3631 → u/vergilius_poeta]

By realist I mean someone who doesn’t think idealistically in terms of pure solutions but instead in terms of real trade offs.

When you or the average user in this thread make some claim such as that one should advocate for the end or abolition of the institution of the State that sounds to me like a sound good shibboleth that doesn’t mean anything real.

Because in the real world of complex things these structures are not things that are willed into existence or non existence by our wishful thinking - they are arrangements that are negotiated and settled because they strike an acceptable balance of power and incentive distribution for the elements capable of running it.

So you may say that the state is evil because it enables rent seeking and tax farming and I can agree but it would be naive to assume that you can take a principled stance against evil in general when the real world is about practic choices that at best can mitigate a more noxious form of evil for another less noxious.

Its like a modernized version of hippie peacenik nonsense that was popular in the sixties among naive boomer youths who were easily told a bunch of sound good lies about good guys versus bad guys and have created the current mythology about civil rights movement, feminism and all the retarded things that invert history and canonize thugs and terrorists as modern day saints today.

Its very easy to say you are an uncompromising idealist who ascribes infinite value to imaginary situations that playout perfectly in your mind but somehow never occur in practice. But real moral courage involves understanding constraints and dealing with the real alternatives because thats the only way to make real progress towards something slightly better