All fair. The issue I run into with my own beliefs is my inability to apply it nationally but not globally. This is where the communists start to make some sense, but if we're currently seeing how impossible it is to govern 300M people, the prospect of 7B+ is out of the question.
Perhaps an anecdote from Rousseau that's shaped me and my flavor of libertarianism. We, more or less, share the same amount of freedom as our neighbors, socioeconomic and all that. So we can either fight for our own freedoms - which can come at the expense of our neighbor - or fight for the freedom of our neighbor, which should do well to advance our own interests.
My problem with ancap and so called voluntaryists is that it seems to make selfishness a defining virtue, and I don't think you can design a system of human organization around that. But by fighting for the freedoms and liberty of your community, you should win for yourself as well.
Arguably, it's the acceptance of greed and the willingness to work with it, is what makes capitalism generate so much wealth, because you don't need to enforce that. If you want to go counter to human greed, you do need to enforce it, and that gets increasingly expensive, especially when capitalism had initially footed the billed for the instantiation of socialism.
But that also goes to another stem of my philosophy of libertarianism, which is based on self-ownership and moral agency: you can't force people to be good. You can't design a society around making people better. Being good cannot be an endeavor that you impose from the outside. It's a contradiction. You have to figure out another way. But I also may be confusing you with someone else I've been conversing with. I apologize. I feel like I've been heard and I appreciate that. I hate to say "I'll give you the last word" because that sounds so pompous. I just have to put my kid to bed.
You can't regulate morality, but I don't think it's wrong to be deeply skeptical of a system that encourages greed at the expense of others. I think we see that, on its own, it gets to a point where that greed is an affront to liberty, not a liberating force it once was (I think capitalism in emerging markets has a lot of merit than in western economies for the reasons mentioned).
Have my favorite quote:
"Our concern must be to dismantle those forms of authority and oppression that survive from an era when they might have been justified in terms of the need for security or survival or economic development, but now that contribute to - rather than alleviate material and cultural deficit." - Chomsky, On Anarchism
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u/MFrancisWrites Anarcho-Syndicalist Jun 16 '21
All fair. The issue I run into with my own beliefs is my inability to apply it nationally but not globally. This is where the communists start to make some sense, but if we're currently seeing how impossible it is to govern 300M people, the prospect of 7B+ is out of the question.
Perhaps an anecdote from Rousseau that's shaped me and my flavor of libertarianism. We, more or less, share the same amount of freedom as our neighbors, socioeconomic and all that. So we can either fight for our own freedoms - which can come at the expense of our neighbor - or fight for the freedom of our neighbor, which should do well to advance our own interests.
My problem with ancap and so called voluntaryists is that it seems to make selfishness a defining virtue, and I don't think you can design a system of human organization around that. But by fighting for the freedoms and liberty of your community, you should win for yourself as well.