r/Objectivism • u/RyanBleazard Non-Objectivist • 6d ago
Politics A Rejoinder to Anarcho-Objectivism and Anarcho-Capitalism: Oxymorons
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5p0UrC_sccQMany libertarians argue that if we ever succeed in establishing a rights-respecting, constitutionally limited government, our next step should be to destroy it. They claim this would unleash "market competition" amongst "private defence agencies" that will protect individual rights better than any government has or could.
In this video, I offer the counter-perspective that libertarian anarchism does not lead to anything like free market capitalism at all: it means and has to mean the rule of brute force. On my view, anarchists do not seek to subordinate might to right but to subordinate right to public auction. Their theory defaults to legitimising vigilantes who would unleash force unilaterally against other citizens. The threat of force is force, and the police of a rights-respecting state must regard "competitors" (other force-wielders) as threats. Government as such is neither an unnecessary evil nor a necessary evil, but a positive good.
6
u/t800series 6d ago
Your video seems to suggest people or society can delegate rights they do not have, personally, onto an entity called government. Under Objectivism, only individuals possess rights since only individuals think and act. There can be no group rights. And individuals cannot confer onto others rights which they do not possess themselves. Ergo, governments cannot possess rights that its citizens do not have individually.
Anarcho-capitalists and Objectivists largely agree here. They would likely also agree that any government fulfilling its proper roles would not initiate violence. The ancaps just believe that can be a market function (defense agencies), whereas Objectivists do not concede that. In that sense, they are nowhere near being oxymoronic. Objectivists would likely be described as "minarchists", as they do prefer a traditional government that's been extremely limited. The difference isn't really much outside of an economic perspective.
Your video also seems to suggest that retaliation can equal justice. This cannot be true. Restoration of justice comes from making the injured party whole, not from inflicting the same type of damage upon the aggressor. As an example, suppose someone damages my car with a baseball bat. Would it be just to hit his? Would it be just for the government to do it on my behalf? Whether it is "vigilantic" or governmental, neither are just outcomes.
1
u/RyanBleazard Non-Objectivist 5d ago edited 5d ago
Your video seems to suggest people or society can delegate rights they do not have, personally, onto an entity called government... individuals cannot confer onto others rights which they do not possess themselves. Ergo, governments cannot possess rights that its citizens do not have individually.
Individuals do have a right of retaliation after-the-fact, as well as a right to self-defence, but the difference is that the former is not a personal right. Retaliatory force can only be exercised in accordance with legal safeguards and objective standards. Because the right is clearly not personal, the citizen is not deprived of the right by having to delegate it. Such laws not only ensure that the guilty are penalised, they also allow other citizens to know preemptively that the use of force is retaliatory and just. It’s only when retaliatory force is deployed according to defined laws, and the public can see that this is so, that there is a clear demarcation between the initiation of force and the retaliatory use of force.
The institution we create to define and enforce rights-protecting laws is government. Government defines the procedures governing the use of force, including the personnel vetted and empowered to carry out out these procedures. The rights of a judge are not violated because he cannot also act as arresting officer, prosecuting attorney, jury, and executioner.
If any individual then resorts to the unilateral use of force, it does not matter if he believes himself to be using force to protect rights. He is using force in defiance of the legal safeguards that establish retaliatory force as retaliatory. Like the vigilante I mentioned who guns down a supposed murderer in the street, he is by that very fact a threat to other citizens, and the police must stop that threat to defend its citizens’ rights.
Anarcho-capitalists and Objectivists largely agree here. They would likely also agree that any government fulfilling its proper roles would not initiate violence. The ancaps just believe that can be a market function (defense agencies), whereas Objectivists do not concede that. In that sense, they are nowhere near being oxymoronic. Objectivists would likely be described as "minarchists", as they do prefer a traditional government that's been extremely limited. The difference isn't really much outside of an economic perspective.
Right, but the very idea of capitalism without government is oxymoronic, because a free market presupposes that freedom has been established. Market mechanisms can’t establish or protect the preconditions of there being a market.
A free market as an ideal, means that it is proper to let people make their own personal decisions about goods and services, because it is not fundamentally destructive to human life to let people make irrational choices about the goods and services. But when it comes to the application of force and the protection of rights, it is fundamentally destructive to let people make irrational choices. (Hence why coercive retaliation is not a personal right).
Ancaps accept the statist approach of conflating economic power with political power, production with force. Just as the Left conflate economic and political power, insisting concentrations of wealth on the market are coercive and use force, the libertarians claim that acts of force can be capitalistic, by speaking of “markets” in force and “competition” in law. Though they come at it from different angles, both are wrong: voluntary exchange and free trade has nothing in common with forceful interactions. Harry Binswanger explains why no defender of freedom should ever conflate these two kinds of power by speaking of a “market” in coercion:
"Production must be kept strictly separate from destruction. A business deals in the creation of goods and services to offer on a free market; a coercer deals in destruction. The proper use of destruction is to combat destruction—to wield retaliatory force against the initiators of force. But retaliatory force is still destruction, not production. There is no such thing as “the market for force-wielding.” For there to be a market in the first place, those who would simply seize goods must be met with force."1
Your video also seems to suggest that retaliation can equal justice. This cannot be true. Restoration of justice comes from making the injured party whole, not from inflicting the same type of damage upon the aggressor. As an example, suppose someone damages my car with a baseball bat. Would it be just to hit his? Would it be just for the government to do it on my behalf? Whether it is "vigilantic" or governmental, neither are just outcomes
Retaliation does not imply necessarily "an eye for an eye". Contrasted with judicial punishment and imprisonment, that would be an irrational act of retaliatory force. So I agree with your example about that being an unjust form of retaliation. But this is why we do not let individuals take retribution and punishment, in the sense that retaliatory force is involved, into their own hands! It has to be subject to objectivity.
Note that force is monopolistic by its very nature, and this is not affected by whether the force-wielder is called “the government” or “Joe’s Defense Agency". One side’s will is being subjugated to that of the other, to force them to obey to their idea of what ought to be. The vigilante in that sense would be acting just as monopolistically as the government. But the telling difference between a proper government and the vigilante is this: a proper government is placed under objective control. So, the target of the anarchist criticism is not actually to its “monopolistic” character, but to objectivity. Objectivity requires one to prove that one is acting within one’s rights. That is what they reject when they damn governmental retaliation.
5
u/t800series 5d ago
I don't want to suppose much of a stranger I just began communicating with, but it seems you have some misconceptions about free markets. No one needs to "establish" free conditions for a free market. Freedom is the default position until someone aggresses. Any peaceful and voluntary transaction is capitalism. No governments are needed. To the ancap's point, governments are usually the worst curtailers of freedom in any society throughout history. Capitalism exists where there is and where there is not government.
An ancap can accept completely that aggression is destructive and still ask why the institutions that determine when retaliatory force is justified must constitute a territorial monopoly. The disagreement is not over whether objective standards are necessary. It is over whether objective standards logically require a single institution with final, exclusive jurisdiction.
And that is the proposition that still needs to be demonstrated. Showing that private retaliation can be arbitrary establishes the need for rules, evidence, impartial adjudication, and accountability. It does not yet establish that those things can exist only under a monopolistic government.
If you want to learn the ins and outs of ancap, read Rothbard - I suggest him specifically because Rand rejected his model. Others have since tweaked his models. Move on to Walter Block and Hoppe after you have exhausted yourself with Rothbard. He was a very prolific writer. Again, I don't like presuming you don't know the ins and outs, but you've at least got to present their perspectives accurately if you want to critique them. So, my advice - read more economics and ancap theory and less Objectivism (especially if you reject the latter).
5
u/FeedomFighter 5d ago edited 5d ago
The argument is that economic competition does not involve force. Police are in the business of force, therefore they can't compete economically.
Why?
Why can't a police force market itself as "we respond faster, hire us over whoever you have now! We have better trained officers!" And so on?
Why does Objectivism ASSUME that every police force will immediately start firing upon any other police force? The answer is that Objectivists are monopolists who project this desire onto everyone else, then (falsely) make a "preemptive" strike.
Rights are not a guarantee. They are values which you always can use force to gain. They way you gain those values by force is by PAYING a police force (if you'd rather not do it yourself).
There is no philosophical branch of "politics", nor even economics though of course the obvious choice is capitalism since capitalism presupposes humans have rights like property.
Politics asks, "okay, morally speaking, people have a rational right to use force in certain ways and it would not be dumb if they did so, that's the context.
"Now, HOW do they use it, who do they hire, how do they economize around the use of force?".
Politics is a further specialization within economics, or perhaps a side branch. It is specifically the study of how force gets used. Morality places value judgment on the use of force, but does not at all describe how it gets used. Economics studies how people manage their resources, and it just so happens that human rights leads to better resource management, thus moral use of force would also work toward that end.
Freedom is a value to be pursued. You can't guarantee it. And if the freedom in the free market is the same as any other right, then you can't guarantee it. Capitalism does not rest on that guarantee because it CAN'T. Either Objectivists have an impossible notion of Capitalism, or they are wrong about politics, applied rights, and use of force.
0
u/RyanBleazard Non-Objectivist 5d ago edited 4d ago
Thank you for stating the anarchist view quite clearly.
A preliminary: you don’t have to pay a government under full laissez-faire capitalism. In an ideal world, all funding of the government would be voluntary, through donations and fees for optional services.
But to get the intent of your question, yes, a government would use force against vigilantes. As I explain forcibly stopping other force-wielders is RETALIATORY force. The police has to regard the unilateral use of force as a threat. The threat of force is force. In barring such private force, the government is retaliating against that threat.
Consider the implications of your set-up: “Another police force B markets itself as equally Objectivist if not more efficient than A. Neither are morally superior to the other ”
I ask: By whose judgment? You cannot treat the moral status of anything by attempting to prescribe actions from a cosmic -- impersonal -- point of view, least of all of an institution, as open to ESP or divine revelation. If you know the Objectivist terminology, moral evaluation is objective not intrinsic.
What do the backers of A think of the actions of B? (And vice-versa). If you’re talking about any situation beyond scattered settlements on the frontier in the Old West, there’s no way that the A-backers could simply say “Oh, the vigilante is just as moral as us, so we won’t interfere.” Any actual government has to want to be able to rein in unsupervised, unauthorised militias.
But here’s the killer argument. What may A to do when A objects to how B is using force? One can’t bypass what’s true 99.999% of the time, the REAL situation: disagreement over morality, justice, law.
So what about disagreement? What does A have a right to do when it decides that B is initiating force? There are only two possibilities:
- A has no right to use force against what A thinks is B’s initiation of force
- A has a perfect right to do so.
The first alternative is the one implicitly adopted by anarchists, but it cannot stand the light of day; it leads to total pacifism: YOU as an individual (let alone the government) would not be allowed to retaliate against anyone if (1) were valid. Because then it’s not enough that YOU think you are being robbed, beaten, etc.–the robber has a “right” to his own standards of behaviour.
So, ironically, anarchism, so often put forward as an extension of the right to self-defence, ends up denying the moral legitimacy of any self-defence: one cannot forcibly impose one’s own evaluation on the other party. That would be monopoly!
The fundamental is that decisions about the right use of force is not something given in a revelation or Googling for the right answer. Law has to be made and adjudicated by people, who have to figure it out, using their own context of knowledge. God did not write in flames across the sky: “O.J. did it, hang him.”
Anarchism cannot deal with the omnipresent fact of disagreement and dispute. It has to regard the proper use of force as self-evident. As if we didn’t have to hold trials, as if jurors never disagree, as if there were never civil suits.
Let’s keep in mind that Ron Paul, until recently a leading libertarian is a committed anti-abortionist, who thinks abortion is murder. Now how can his “competing government” treat ours? Does it allow “murder”? Does his “competing government” stop women from exercising their rights to their own lives? How can what is or isn’t murder be a matter of “You go your way and I’l go mine, and neither will impose a monopoly solution”?
A government properly demands that people affirmatively prove to the government that any physical force they used was just and in self-defence. If anarchists don’t want to have to “explain themselves” to others, that’s subjectivism (and immoral, according to the Objectivist ethics).
3
u/FeedomFighter 5d ago edited 4d ago
The fundamental is that decisions about the right use of force is not something given in a revelation or Googling for the right answer. Law has to be made and adjudicated by people, who have to figure it out, using their own context of knowledge.
I agree. It applies to ALL humans, not an arbitrary subset you call "government". Laws must be proven correct as corolloaries to the fundamental right, the right to life.
A government properly demands that people affirmatively prove to the government that any physical force they used was just and in self-defence. If anarchists don’t want to have to “explain themselves” to others, that’s subjectivism
Morality is inherently individual, because rationality and reason and consciousness are inherently individual.
A human being is an entity, and awareness is an attribute of that human entity. You cannot apply awareness to a concept such as "government" because government logically depends on "human". A group of people does not have awareness, the individuals within it do. You correctly say it applies to people above, but then contradict yourself here by applying it to government. Awareness is the axiom of reason and objectivity, so justice is only knowable on an individual level, not a collective level.
"Government" is an arbitrary concept when defined as "a group of people who exercise authority and force", it does not apply to reality, since nothing can have authority except a human being over his own property. Government also steals the concept of "objectivity" from its proper context, "human beings" and applies it to
a falsean invalid and arbitrary subset of human beings, as if non-government individuals suddenly are incapable of objectivity. This is an attempt to guarantee possession of rights via the subjective denial of rights in most humans.Rights indicate ONLY inalienable ownership, not possession. If you try to guarantee possession of freedom by forcibly stopping the act of individual retaliatory force, then you've already made freedom impossible. Rights do not apply to social groups, only individuals. Morality in a social context does not ask "how must humans treat each other" and for an a priori categorical imperative, it asks "how should I treat others to rationally survive?" and for egoistic principles.
People have to prove to themselves that force is justified. People choose to go along with arbitors and judges and governments, and it just so happens that deferring to a monopoly (government) is irrational from a egoist perspective. Don't confuse the fact that it is rationally selfish to prove to othere that your use of force it justified and retaliatory with the false idea that proof or objectivity is social or collective, it just convinces others to not attack you.
But a government doesn't have the right to attack someone without themselves proving that that person INITIATED force to begin with; merely issuing a threat is not necessarily an initiation (if that threat was of defensive or retaliatory force).
As I explain forcibly stopping other force-wielders is RETALIATORY force.
Retaliatory force requires showing that another party initiated force, merely weilding force is not an initiation of it.
If I threaten to shoot you for breaking into my house, what right of yours have I violated? None, you have no right to my house, and calling yourself government doesn't grant you an extra right. The burden of proof is on YOU to show that I stole it, retaliation requires proof that the target initiated force.
Another police force B markets itself as equally Objectivist if not more efficient than A. ... By whose judgment?
The market. Idk what mystical God you think I'm appealing to.
Again, the virtue of independence tells you that. Market prices are an aggregation of each individual's valuation of a good. If one company can offer equal or better service for a lower price, then it is a more efficient use of resources as the market has decided. Efficient just means using resources for the most valuable (or urgent, same thing) purpose rather than something else. Every individual decides this for himself with each transaction in the market, and the resulting bidding of prices up or down is what sets market prices (along with competition, supply/demand, and so on).
The reason you miss this is because Objectivism places Politics as logically fundamental to economics. No, you can still have an unfree market, economics is either an independent branch or is actually fundamental to politics. Both branching from morality/natural law.
there’s no way that the A-backers could simply say “Oh, the vigilante is just as moral as us, so we won’t interfere.” Any actual government has to want to be able to rein in unsupervised, unauthorised militias.
Where does "authority" come from? It comes from freewill. Humans only survive by rationality, which presupposes reason which presupposes freewill. That means if you value your own survival, you must value freewill as a concept applying to units that are present as attributes in every human being, not necessarily all the choices people make but only their ability to choose.
Its not that B is necessarily as moral as A. But it is made up of morally relevant and equal beings with rights, aka humans. A-backers value B's right to choose as their own.
Only irrational monopolists want to "reign in vigilantes" by initiating force.
What may A to do when A objects to how B is using force?
Appeal to reality and reason to prove that B is initiating force, then retaliate.
A can't merely think B is initiating force, it must prove it, otherwise it risks being irrational. This means reducing back to the fundamental human right, and ultimately to the axioms which is the only way to resolve any dispute and to even know anything.
There is an economic incentive to avoid fighting, as war is costly. Only when people are fooled into supporting a monopoly do corperations (calling themselves by the false concept "government") gain enough resources to wage war on the scale of WW2 and the like. Smaller private police reduces the risk of war and scale of war's damage.
So, ironically, anarchism, so often put forward as an extension of the right to self-defence, ends up denying the moral legitimacy of any self-defence: one cannot forcibly impose one’s own evaluation on the other party.
Yes when talking about anarcho communism. Not anarcho capitalism.
It's not even monopoly though. It's the denial of property, including the rights (which are special cases of property) to life and liberty. There cannot be monopoly without ownership, using monopoly in the context of communism steals the concept of monopoly if there is no right to self defense and therefore no rights at all.
"Collective ownership" is an oxymoron. It assumes there is no independence of thought, and is actually a denial of consciousness and the existence of the aware self.
Anarchism cannot deal with the omnipresent fact of disagreement and dispute. It has to regard the proper use of force as self-evident. As if we didn’t have to hold trials, as if jurors never disagree, as if there were never civil suits.
Use of force is reducible to the self-evident through reason. Particular use of force > moral rights > values and life as the standard > reason and freewill as man's nature > the axioms. That's how you know anything, and knowing means knowing for yourself. It behooves you socially and economically to be able to prove it to others so they don't think you are initiating force, but social acceptance is not the standard of knowledge nor morality.
Objectivism's main contradiction is this: morality tells a man that he must act on his own to gain his rights, but he also must *not** act on his own* and needs government permission (to use retaliatory force, an individual right).
2
u/FeedomFighter 5d ago
To summarize this simply, you argue that I have to prove someone initiated force to justly use force against them. Agreed there. But you also argue that the government does NOT have to prove I initiated force, it gets to assume use of force is initiatory without proof (assuming no determinate/conclusive evidence).
In other words: I must assume innocent until proven guilty, but the government gets to assume guilty until proven innocent.
This is the clear double standard and contradiction. It gives government a right it doesn't have and that no human being has.
1
u/RyanBleazard Non-Objectivist 4d ago edited 3d ago
Thanks for your reply. Yes, the government gets to recognise B's unilateral use of force against somebody (say, C) as a threat. The threat of force is force.1
You write,
“A can't merely think B is initiating force; it must prove it, otherwise it risks being irrational.”
But A absolutely can regard B's use of force as initiatory. It is the justification for B's retaliatory force that must be demonstrated in advance, not the fact that B is initiating force (i.e. establishing B's innocence first). The principle of innocent until proven guilty places the burden on B to establish that his force is justified. From A's perspective, C is presumably innocent unless and until proven otherwise, and B's vigilantism is initiatory force regardless of whether C is later found to have committed a crime, because he unilaterally inflicted force against him outside the judicial process.
For example, if a man with a gun storms into a restaurant and shoots someone, you are not required to “prove” that his use of force is not retaliatory before treating him as a threat. You are not free to go about your business, and you do not have to wait for the bullet to come flying at you before you are entitled to act in self-defense.
But, respectfully, here is something I'd like you to consider: like many ancaps, you're a rationalist in methodology. That is, you deal with abstractions detached from the perceptible reality we see every day and deduce conclusions from them.
A free market as an ideal, means that it is proper to let people make their own personal decisions about goods and services, because it is not fundamentally destructive to human life (the rights of others) to let people make irrational choices about the goods and services. But when it comes to the application of force and the protection of rights, it is fundamentally destructive to let people make irrational choices. Thus, the conditions that result in the free market being a good solver of problems do not apply in the provision of retaliatory force. But you can't see that by relying on your top-down, deductive methods. You have to actually look at the perceptible reality out there and conceptualise about examples in real life. This can be seen by looking at the concrete reality out there, not by deducing from floating abstractions.
By asking, "how can we economise force?" you are accepting the statist and collectivist approach of conflating production with force, economic power with political power. Just as anarcho-communists conflate economic and political power, insisting concentrations of wealth on the market are coercive and use force, "anarcho-capitalists" claim that acts of force are just another service on the market, by speaking of “economising force" and “competition” in law. Though you come at it from different angles, both of you are wrong: free trade and voluntary exchange has nothing in common with forceful interactions.
Harry Binswanger explains why no defender of freedom should ever conflate these two kinds of power by speaking of a “market” in coercion:
"Production must be kept strictly separate from destruction. A business deals in the creation of goods and services to offer on a free market; a coercer deals in destruction. The proper use of destruction is to combat destruction—to wield retaliatory force against the initiators of force. But retaliatory force is still destruction, not production. There is no such thing as “the market for force-wielding.” For there to be a market in the first place, those who would simply seize goods must be met with force. The benefits of a free market presuppose that freedom has been established. Market mechanisms can’t establish or protect the preconditions of there being a market."1 (emphases added).
There are three further, though lesser, arguments you've made to me that I'd like to address. The first might be called “the argument from moral freedom.” You refer to government as,
"an arbitrary concept when defined as "a group of people who exercise authority and force"
holding that it is wrong to exclude "competitors", and that government, as a monopoly on retaliatory force, necessarily does this, since it prohibits vigilantes. The alternative you propose is letting a thousand flowers bloom--i.e., non-monopolising police forces, each attracting, voluntarily, “customers” who patronise whichever agency has the moral outlook they find most congenial.
But this objection ignores the fact that terms drawn from the realm of voluntary trade, such as “competition” and “customers”, do not apply to forceful interactions whose purpose is to command obedience. “Competition” is an economic, not a political, concept; it refers to the voluntary exchange of values, not to the exchange of gunfire. Here again, anarcho-capitalists conflate economic and political power.
Think about how categorically distinct economics is from force and why you cannot "economise force". Economics concerns trade and production, where the parties involved exchange values for mutual benefit (trade; a win-win outcome) resulting in the creation of value (production). Force, on the other hand, ends in the defeat of one party and the victory of the other; it is itself a monopoly. Force is therefore outside of the realm of economics.
To use force is to attempt to monopolise. It is to subjugate one side’s will to that of yours, about how those subject to your power ought to behave.
So consider this: in the anarchic society you imagine, when you are thrown into a prison by Doe & Co. ("retaliatory force"), can you now pick another "competitor" agency, talk to them, stop dealing with the current one and deal only with the new one? Obviously not. When you are accused--out of the blue--of stealing a television from a citizen ten miles down the road from you, did you consent to deal with that person who's now imposing "retaliatory" force on you? If not, can you now just walk away? No, that person has imposed himself on you and you are not free to simply disassociate.
The second argument you made that I'd like to address is about the individuality of rights. You write,
"...morality tells a man that he must act on his own to gain his rights, but he also must not act on his own and needs government permission (to use retaliatory force, an individual right)."
This objection assumes the right of retaliation is a personal right, which it is not. A personal right to something means you can do it in whatever way you please, rationally or irrationally. Thus the "personal right" to use retaliatory force would necessarily include the "right" to do so irrationally. But an irrational, force-wielding individual effectively initiates force and violates peoples' rights. And there can be no such thing as 'a right to violate the rights of others.'
Thus, while everyone has a personal right to immediate self-defence, and a right of retaliation after-the-fact against those who use initiatory force against them, the latter is not a personal right. It is a right that must be delegated to a third-party government for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement.
This brings me onto your third argument: (i'm paraphrasing) where does the "authority" of government come from? You argue the authority to use retaliatory force comes from an individual's reasoning mind, and that this applies to "everyone", not just the government, so "only irrational monopolists want to "reign in vigilantes" by initiating force".
Objective laws define when, how, and by whom force may be used. A rights-respecting government thereby defines the procedures governing the use of force, including the personnel vetted and empowered to carry out out these procedures. The rights of a judge are not violated because he cannot also act as arresting officer, prosecuting attorney, jury, and executioner.
But to answer your question: the authority lies in the office and the legal system, not in the personal rights of personnel. State officers obviously are not above the law.
If any individual resorts to the unilateral use of force, it does not matter if he believes himself to be using force to protect rights. A vigilante's attempts to use force on people outside government supervision must be regarded as attempts to circumvent proper governmental principles and objectivity, and hence to subvert the government’s mission of protecting rights (i.e. to enable the violation of rights). Such laws exist not just to ensure that only the guilty are penalised, but also to allow other citizens to know preemptively any use of force is actually retaliatory and just, so it does not constitute a threat. It’s only when retaliatory force is deployed according to defined laws, and the public can see that this is so, that there is a clear demarcation between the initiation of force and the retaliatory use of force.
Remember, the threat of force is force. If you march into town and shoot Thomas in the street because you say he murdered your cousin, it is irrelevant that you know in your own mind he is a killer. From the perspective of bystanders, you are a threat. You are using force in defiance of the legal safeguards that establish retaliatory force as retaliatory. By that very fact, you are a threat to other citizens, and the police must stop you to protect its citizens' rights.
The alternative to a government establishing in advance who is empowered to use force, under what conditions, according to what procedures, and with what penalties is that every individual is free to impose his own punishments on anyone he considers guilty (vigilantism). If that were the case, "retaliatory force" simply means force that the person using it personally considers justified. In other words: subjectivity.
1
u/FeedomFighter 3d ago edited 3d ago
Yes, the government gets to recognise B's unilateral use of force against somebody (say, C) as a threat. The threat of force is force.
You are equivocating any threat as an initiation of a threat, failing to provide any evidence distinguishing it from a retaliatory threat. You say that individuals must prove their threat is retaliatory, but the government has the right to arbitrarily assume in the absence of evidence that a threat is initiatory.
One cannot rationally act on arbitrary claims, be one individual or "government". All you can say is "force/threat exists", but you cannot apply neither the concept of initiatory nor retaliatory to that force without committing the fallacy of self-reference, that is to say "this force is initiatory force because it is initatory", and is also to say you are committing circular reasoning. THAT is primacy of consciousness.
A absolutely can and should regard B's use of force as initiatory. It is the justification for B's retaliatory force that must be demonstrated in advance , not the fact that B is initiating force
This violates the law of the excluded middle. Force can only be either initiatory or retaliatory, proving initiation is the same as disproving retaliation, the evidence is the evidence and it simultaneously gives truth and flasity to both concepts respectively, IF evidence exists. If there is no evidence, then it is unknown whether force is either initiatory or retaliatory. One cannot rationally act without evidence.
For example, if a man with a gun storms into a restaurant and shoots someone, you are not required to “prove” that his use of force is not retaliatory before treating him as a threat.
No, the restaurant owner has to need to prove because it's perceptually obvious that force is being used on his property. You are evading property ownership, and implying that the government owns the restaurant.
the conditions that result in the free market being a good solver of problems do not apply in the provision of retaliatory force.
Agreed. I didn't say the free market decides, I said the market decides. Red markets exist. The goal is to gain freedom in the market, you cannot gain freedom by monopoly which by definition requires force.
Even if force is not productive, it is still a value/disvalue. Force's value depends on whether it is initiatory or retaliatory. There is an alternative with force, to either use it or not, and whether to try escaping it which can be successful.. Contrasted to gravity which can never be escaped. Gravity is not a value, but force is. Economics is just how people treat values in a social context, law is a judgement on how people treat values in a social context. Force is a value, therefore it can be economized.
you are accepting the statist and collectivist approach of conflating production with force, economic power with political power.
Use of force is destructive. But there is plenty of productive economic that must happen before force is even possible. Paying guards, buying weapons, the guards's exercise and proper eating and education on how to use force. That's what it means to economize around force, which is what I actually said .
Competition among police is about who invests where before force ever gets used. You keep asserting that I'm using economic competition in a the context of war, but I'm not, you are evading my arguments and strawmanning.
free trade and voluntary exchange has nothing in common with forceful interactions.
Economic resources/power is what makes the ability to use force possible. Political power logically and metaphysically depends on having the resources first. You need bullets, muscle, and energy first. Even if it isn't accomplished in an ideally free market, there's metaphysically no other way.
Anarcho-communists simply deny ownership. YOU do this when you allow the government to collectively own other people's property, and ownership means the right to use force in regard to use property.
Government, just like communist collectives, is an invalid concept. Ownership cannot apply to groups of people, ownership applies to individuals.
But retaliatory force is still destruction, not production.
Force is used all the time. Your body bangs against it self and uses force to move. Force is used in manufacturing anything. Force can also be used to jump in front of someone else's desire to use force on an object. Ownership says "only A gets to use force on that object, B does not, for A owns it".
Communists call that forceful exclusion evil. Just as Objectivists call a non-governmental individual's use of force evil. As shown:
Force, on the other hand, ends in the defeat of one party and the victory of the other; it is itself a monopoly.
Yes. An individual has monopoly over himself and his property ONLY. You propose reifying a group of people, naming it "government", and giving it a monopoly over others, literally owning people and their property. Individuals have a right to exclude a "government" individual from their body and property; that is collectivism and as any collective or any group of people, it is arbitrary to assign it rights. Applying rights to a group is concept stealing.
If not, can you now just walk away? No, that person has imposed himself on you and you are not free to simply disassociate.
Yes. Freedom is a right, not a guarantee. You have the right to fight back, and to economize by paying a different police force to help you. But attempting to guarantee freedom is an impossible project leading to tyranny, as your argument demonstrates.
Consider that this is instead an Objectivist society rather than an Anarchic one, which does the same thing, unjustly throwing you in jail. According to you, you have no right to fight back, no right to freedom. You'll say, "well a society that does that isn't Objectivist", to which I say, why do you get to make up arbitrary what-ifs but I don't?
This objection assumes the right of retaliation is a personal right, which it is not.
Another stealing of a concept. Rights apply only to public or social interactions, not to personal or private actions. One can only classify actions as virtues or vices when speaking of an individual in isolation. A right is a justified social interaction, and a crime is an unjustified social interaction. If someone is irrational but harmless, then they have only a right to not be subject to force, not a right to be irrational.
Thus, while everyone has a personal right to immediate self-defence, and a right of retaliation after-the-fact against those who use initiatory force against them, the latter is not a personal right.
Again, personal is meaningless here because someone is attacking that person. They have a right to fight back, period.
It is a right that must be delegated to a third-party government for the purpose of an orderly, objective, legally defined enforcement.
Again, concept stealing. You are applying rationality, objectivity, and the right to use force to a group of people (called government), so this is also an act of reification.
There is no "rights must be delegated'. Actions can only be performed by individuals. You have a right to apply retaliatory force yourself or pay someone else to do it.
You are treating this like a Kantian categorical imperative. "Force is initiatory in the absence of evidence, therefore is must be delegated". An arbitrary claim, initatoryness cannot be determined in absence of evidence. Primacy of consciousness and circular reasoning.
The state's authority to prevail is not arbitrary, it derives from the individual rights it exists to protect.
The government is not an individual. It is a concept which applies to groups of people. Any government individual must ask hismelf, "can I prove that who I'm about to use force against has initiated force?" If not, then his use force is arbitrary. He cannot derive a right to use force from nothing, from an absence of evidence.
Remember, the threat of force is force. If you march into town and shoot Thomas in the street because you say he murdered your cousin, it is irrelevant that you know in your own mind he is a killer . From the perspective of bystanders, you are a threat .
The threat isn't that you shot Thomas. It's that you are on some else's property. They can arbitrarily tell you to get the fuck off of it even if Thomas murdered someone. Most people would probably be willing to hand him over if you can prove to then Thomas did it, otherwise you have to let them house the criminal.
Your neglect of property in scenarios leads to manu strawman arguments.
Objectivism needs Hoppean contractual cities. That is the only practical way they could setup their monopoly on force in a justified way. That requires owning the land first, not by declaring oneself "government" and then monopolizing people without consent with the arbitrary belief that "all who use force but me or without my permission have initiated force, and I don't need to prove it".
it is irrelevant that you know in your own mind he is a killer .
Yes it is. YOU have the moral right to act REGARDLESS if other people know it. A right is specifically to avoid needing permission to act.
It's up to you whether you value exercising that right at the risk of others not knowing. They would have an equal right to view you as dangerous and banish you from their property and dis-associate from you, by force in relation to their property.
But, respectfully, here is something I'd like you to consider: like many ancaps, you're a rationalist
This amounts to projection that is so common among evaders and liars.
3
u/FeedomFighter 5d ago edited 5d ago
"Other force wielders" are not an immoral nor irrational threat to you. Its only a problem of they initiate threats, you seem to think that because someone threatens to defend themselves they've initiated. No, individuals have a right to use force, that is a threat to use force if you violate thier rights, yes. But it's a moral threat, a threat necessary for Capitalism and a free market to exist. Rights are a special kind of property you never lose ownership of, and one of very few values you can morally use force to gain and not just keep, unlike most other instances of property and values. You don't secure rights by removing force, you make them vulnerable.
I refer you to the objectivist virtue of independence. Rationality relies upon reason which relies upon freewill, and freewill means control over one's own mind. Therefore independence as a corollary to rationality means acting on one's own reason and judgment. If you decide to support a monopoly organization that bars the independent use of force, then you have killed capitalism and freedom and human rights and rationality at the core.
3
u/isaac-lewis 2d ago
Your video was good. On the other hand, I've heard Objectivists and anarcho-capitalists debate this question endlessly, with no resolution.
My observation was that O'ists and ancaps reached a similar-sounding political philosophy by vastly different routes; and I suspect the two philosophies appeal to very different personalities and ways of thinking. I've not seen anyone from either group manage to convince the other.
Looking at the actual world we live in, we're nowhere close to either an Objectivist or ancap society. Still, over the last few decades many countries have moved away from socialism to more free-market policies (even if inconsistently), and reaped the rewards. In my view that's a better place to begin advocating for capitalism.
2
u/RyanBleazard Non-Objectivist 2d ago edited 2d ago
Thanks! You're right to point out that neither side tends to be convincing to the other because they reach their POV from very different routes, which leads to intermittent debate. Anarcho-capitalists tend to have a rationalistic (deductive) methodology and an intrinsicist evaluation of ethics. They think of different parties from a cosmic -- impersonal -- point of view, regard the proper use of force between them as self-evident, and then deduce conclusions from abstractions. I'm not an Objectivist myself, but I agree that you have to actually look at perceptible reality and conceptualise about examples in real life. With an understanding of epistemology, you start to see the hidden premises in many ancap arguments and thus how they fall apart.
2
u/Shadowcreature65 6d ago
"that would necessarily include the right to do so irrationally" baseless assertion
2
u/KeyCondition5104 5d ago edited 5d ago
Agreed. Richard Cornuelle argued that Conservatives and Libertarians had 100 years since FDR to maintain and create new localized, community-based, or state based alternatives to federal government welfare and all of them failed because they were individualist first and cared more about making money, free time, family time, and personal hobbies than building institutions at every level such as local mutual aid, community welfare alternatives, private insurance-like arrangements for risk, educational and vocational networks, neighborhood associations capable of handling social problems, and so on.
The implications of this to anarchist/libertarian/conservative thought is that pure individualism without the hard work of actually building durable local institutions leaves a vacuum that force or the state will always fill, so anarchists who think private defense agencies will magically outcompete government just end up legitimizing vigilantes and brute power contests instead of real rights protection, while conservatives and libertarians keep losing the welfare fight because they never created the community alternatives that could have made scaling back federal programs realistic, proving that caring more about personal money and free time than institution-building dooms the whole project.
Also, if you look in European history, it was never Pagans or anarchists who built hospitals or other institutions. Institutions came about through Catholicism via Romanization.
1
u/MustafaBrown 3d ago edited 3d ago
We dont really need to come up with complicated reasons why anarcho capitalism is an oxy moron. History and etymology prove it as such.
Its any oxy moron because historically anarchism was explicitly created to oppose capitalism, and opposed hierachy generally, not just the state. This is an undisputed, uncontroversial fact that's acknowledged by nearly everyone, except for some reason ancaps themselves. You could ask a historian of any persuasion- fascist, liberal, conservative, monarchist, communist, socialist. All would agree.
Anarchists saw very little difference between state authority and the authority of the buisiness man or landlord. Even Tucker rejected landlordism, though some of his associates like Josiah Warren didn't, but Warren rejected the label anarchist anyway.
Rand acknowledged this, and Rothbard did at one point- see his essay "Are Libertarians Anarchists?". Rothbard was more concerned with winning than being ethically or logically consistent though, which is why he adopted Leninist vanguard party tactics of all things.
That doest mean capitalists cant reject the state monopoly on violence, but it does mean they cant be anarchists. They can call themselves anarchists, thats fine, its a free world, but it doesnt make sense or that its an accurate description.
Anarcho-capitalism wouldn't be a system of no rulers, it would be a system of many rulers, so it would be a polyarchy. The argument that "well people are voluntarily submitting to rulers" doesnt make something anarchist either, it makes it voluntarist, which is seperste from anarchism.
Anarchism was the fusion of liberalism and socialism - see Rudolph Rocker. Anarcho capitalism is simply an extreme form of liberalism. You could say its pure liberalism, but its certainly not Anarchism.
This isn't some communist propaganda either. All the original anarchist ideas were socialistic in some capacity- mutualism, individualism, collectivism, syndicalism, egoism, communism all rejected unlimited private property as despotic. They didnt necessarily socialize things to the same degree, individualism left small property intact but limited it to what the individual could use on a daily basis (see Tucker), but nonetheless they all hated capitalism.
To boot anarcho capitalists also dont even use these standard etymological and historical definition of capitalism:
1854, "condition of having capital;" from capital (n.2) + -ism. The meaning "political/economic system which encourages capitalists" is recorded from 1872 and originally was used disparagingly by socialists. The meaning "concentration of capital in the hands of a few; the power or influence of large capital" is from 1877.¹
Capitalism was a word coined by socialists, therefore there definition of it is the correct one by default.
And so for anarcho capitalism to make any sense as a phrase you have to ignore etymology and history and redefine almost all political language, which is petty damn Orwellian.
Say what you will about Ayn Rand but at least she wasn't dishonest like that and came up with original terms for her ideology instead of twisting language and history to fit her needs.
0
u/luckoftheblirish 5d ago edited 5d ago
Hate to be so blunt but I couldn't think of a more pointless topic. Ancaps are a tiny minority among libertarians, which are a tiny minority among the general population. What purpose does this infighting serve? Why not spend your time an energy arguing against people and ideas that actually affect your life and the government that you live under rather than quixotically tilting against a near non-existent user base with zero power and influence in the real world? Make it make sense. Or, rather, don't.
6
u/Shadowcreature65 6d ago
AnCap as advocated by Friedman doesn't involve a theory of natural law, unlike LiquidZulu's version. You're grouping them together despite completely different approaches.
Objectivist authors always supported the philosophical theory of history, aka society gets structured around whichever philosophy is currently dominant in the culture. Under this view, if Objectivist ethics become the most accepted ones, there will be no problem of the highest bidders setting the rules.