One article type I’d like to spend time exploring on this blog are those questions that people commonly throw at Anarcho-Capitalists as critiques of their system.
Tag: citizens
Dissent Welcome – Prove States / Citizens / Governments Actually Exist
You have to prove reciprocal obligations of allegiance and protection were created and exist to be able to prove there are citizens; then you can prove there are states and governments. If you can prove that, then you need evidence that their rules, called “laws” actually apply to us and create obligations on us just because we’re physically in Arizona, or wherever.
Should Governments Even Try to Solve Problems?
Otto von Bismarck famously described politics as “the art of the possible, the attainable.” People who like politics love this sentiment. It suggests workable pragmatism rather than impractical principles, compromise over conviction, action rather than inaction. I find this sentiment both hypocritical and misleading.
Valid Laws Are Universalizable And Immutable
The laws of morality have been described as Common Law, Natural Law, or the Golden Rule. They are something most parents endeavor to teach their children. Don’t hit and don’t take other people’s stuff. This is a very concise summary of recognition of self-ownership, property rights, and non-aggression. A law degree is not needed to understand basic rules of morality.
How Econ Textbooks Sanitize the Horrors of Communism
When I was first learning economics, I was surprised by how pro-communist many economics textbooks were. I don’t mean, of course, that any economics textbook ever said, “Communism is good.” What I mean, rather, is that textbooks were very positive relative to communism’s historical record. Indeed, many seemed deeply ignorant of actual communism, basing their assessment on second-hand information about communists’ stated intentions, plus a few anecdotes about inefficiencies. Many textbook authors were, in a phrase, communist dupes: Non-communists who believe and spread a radically overoptimistic image of communism.
Tariffs, Pickpockets, and the Nationalist Snake in the Moral Grass
Protectionism, as it is misleadingly known, has always been an insider’s game, a political gambit aimed at enriching those to whom the government is especially beholden or seeks to seduce at the expense of other people. Incumbent producers who produce products on which tariffs are imposed succeed in repelling competition by force of the government’s customs officers, which is to say that they succeed in increasing their profits by force, not by offering consumers a better deal.
Pseudo-Skeptics Fail Basic Skepticism
Criticism of my work seems to be immune from the skeptic process. The mental conditioning of statism appears to be so strong that those who claim to be skeptics forget these principles and rely on logical fallacies to support their preconceived conclusions. I thought it would be instructive to demonstrate how some pseudo-skeptics have criticized my work.
If Men Were Angels
Although I admit that the outcome in a stateless society will be bad, because not only are people not angels, but many of them are irredeemably vicious in the extreme, I conjecture that the outcome in a society under a state will be worse, indeed much worse, because, first, the most vicious people in society will tend to gain control of the state and, second, by virtue of this control over the state’s powerful engines of death and destruction, they will wreak vastly more harm than they ever could have caused outside the state.
The “Problem” of Immigration
Before I was introduced to voluntaryism I believed that illegal immigration was a huge problem for the people of the United States. However, I now understand that all of the alleged problems of illegal immigration disappear when we take government out of the equation.
Imports Create Jobs and Trade Deficits Don’t Matter
It is no good objection to reply that America’s current-account (or “trade”) deficit means that foreigners don’t buy from us as much as we buy from foreigners. First, the investments in America made by foreigners (and that increase the U.S. trade deficit) also typically involve demand for U.S. inputs, including workers. When, for example, Ikea builds a store in Dale City, Virginia, American workers and other input suppliers are employed in that project.