Capitalism is good, anarchy is the default political position. A good argument against anarchism is “but what if someone forms an army”, or in other words “we can’t just stop punching ourselves”. A lot of evil seems strictly downstream of having X-archy / X-cracy, for any value of X. Power corrupts, as they say, including democratic power. But it’s not true universally: autonomous power doesn’t corrupt, relative to its own values.
Another argument against anarchy is, “but we have to enforce rights”. It makes sense to have larger scoped laws, even global laws, as a clarification of an implicit threat by almost everyone. But that’s a far cry from law as we have it. Law is better than war, but it’s worse than freedom. The idea of Law seems like mostly a cover of legitimacy for imperialism / democracy / universalism / anti-experimentation; local customary law is a more natural sort of thing—what to do if two guys are having a fight. I’d rather there were many tiny states, as some have suggested. To put it another way, universalism—trying to maximize agreement—seems to have failed, never worked in the first place, and never even plausibly seemed workable in the first place.
States are militaries parasitic on producers. Parasites are suicidal (or rather, matricidal—destroying their own substrate, like a forest fire), or at best symbiotic after victory (like a conqueror who has plundered until there’s nothing left to do but try to help the peasants produce more loot). Democide is suicide, so the 20th century was the century of suicide, at least if you believe in states. Universalism is a worthwhile project, but it’s only possible between free autonomous agents who wish to live; parasites don’t wish to live, and hosts to parasites aren’t autonomous, and agents living under false Law aren’t free; “universalism” among unfree agents is imperialism, “universalism” among hosts to parasites is suicide, and parasites don’t think and so aren’t candidates for participating in universalism.
Capitalism is good, anarchy is the default political position. A good argument against anarchism is “but what if someone forms an army”, or in other words “we can’t just stop punching ourselves”. A lot of evil seems strictly downstream of having X-archy / X-cracy, for any value of X. Power corrupts, as they say, including democratic power. But it’s not true universally: autonomous power doesn’t corrupt, relative to its own values.
Another argument against anarchy is, “but we have to enforce rights”. It makes sense to have larger scoped laws, even global laws, as a clarification of an implicit threat by almost everyone. But that’s a far cry from law as we have it. Law is better than war, but it’s worse than freedom. The idea of Law seems like mostly a cover of legitimacy for imperialism / democracy / universalism / anti-experimentation; local customary law is a more natural sort of thing—what to do if two guys are having a fight. I’d rather there were many tiny states, as some have suggested. To put it another way, universalism—trying to maximize agreement—seems to have failed, never worked in the first place, and never even plausibly seemed workable in the first place.
States are militaries parasitic on producers. Parasites are suicidal (or rather, matricidal—destroying their own substrate, like a forest fire), or at best symbiotic after victory (like a conqueror who has plundered until there’s nothing left to do but try to help the peasants produce more loot). Democide is suicide, so the 20th century was the century of suicide, at least if you believe in states. Universalism is a worthwhile project, but it’s only possible between free autonomous agents who wish to live; parasites don’t wish to live, and hosts to parasites aren’t autonomous, and agents living under false Law aren’t free; “universalism” among unfree agents is imperialism, “universalism” among hosts to parasites is suicide, and parasites don’t think and so aren’t candidates for participating in universalism.