But if you talk about social Darwinism today, people will call you a racist. The reaction to the Randian view is not nearly so negative.
So I could guess the corporations (or whoever) think that anarcho-capitalism is useful while social Darwinism is not. But I don't think that's the whole story. It feels like it's also related to how many poor people in the US tend to vote against their interests (or so I've heard). That is, the idea of "I will be the one to win the capitalist lottery by skill alone" has become very effectively part of the culture... and from there, I imagine it's not so long a jump to say "but I don't have a chance, whereas I should have... something must be wrong, it's the state!".
But that doesn't entirely work either. It's not the poor who are proposing anarcho-capitalism - it's the Austrians, technologists, etc., who are comparably well off. If I were to construct a story there, I think it'd be something like "see all the good capitalism has done to us" ("I've never been poor so I see only the benefits"), "if we did away with the state entirely, we would have outrageous progress only heard of in science fiction". I.e. that the "success" of capitalism sells the radicalization in that direction. Then money would come into the picture in two ways: first, from the corporate support of the think tanks, and second, that money of the people who talk about anarcho-capitalism (since they aren't poor themselves).
I've heard libertarians and anarcho-capitalists complain that the scientific method is a "statist" methodology.
It appears you can find Lysenkos on the right, too :)
Worse, anarcho-capitalism is paradoxical: If contracts are binding, period... well, what do you call it when the government sells you land with the understanding that, so long as you and your progeny use the land, you will obey certain laws?
That's an amusing thought: that in some prior day, perhaps there was a natural right - and then the people gathered together in groups and made laws for themselves, collectively owning the property. That would just mean the anarcho-capitalists were late to the party: every group has agreed to subordinate its property to a state and so there's no free property left (absent the high seas, of course). The thought is made all the more amusing by that if the state legitimately owns the property, then an anarcho-capitalist revolution would be the very essence of imposition of force, the very thing they claim to be against.
I know it doesn't quite work like that: nobody would claim that the North Koreans voluntarily gave their property to Kim Il-sung. But it does show that states could easily reappear, and when I think about it, the megacorporations usually depicted in cyberpunk (with their private armies and so on) do quite resemble (plutocratically oligarchical) states. One might draw a comparison to the fall of Rome: a greater state crumbles, smaller "states" appear (the fiefdoms or megacorporations), each with their own defense apparatus. Again, the comparison is not perfect (the lords of the feudal realms did use the kind of force anarcho-capitalists abhor to control their people), but it's interesting.
It reminds me of something I read not long ago, where the author claimed free-market proponents misinterpret Coase (considered to be of "externalities can be handled by the market" fame). What he's saying is rather that a perfect market would produce the same pollution-handling outcome as a perfect regulator. But that goes both ways. If it's too hard for people to deal with the polluters one-on-one, they may use the equivalence in the opposite direction. I.e., states provide lower transaction cost compared to the alternative. There's no reason to automatically expect that markets would minimize transaction cost (the existence of corporations themselves suggest otherwise, since they are internally planned economies); and if the markets don't, then there's a perfectly good chance that states would just reappear.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2013-09-29 10:16 am (UTC)So I could guess the corporations (or whoever) think that anarcho-capitalism is useful while social Darwinism is not. But I don't think that's the whole story. It feels like it's also related to how many poor people in the US tend to vote against their interests (or so I've heard). That is, the idea of "I will be the one to win the capitalist lottery by skill alone" has become very effectively part of the culture... and from there, I imagine it's not so long a jump to say "but I don't have a chance, whereas I should have... something must be wrong, it's the state!".
But that doesn't entirely work either. It's not the poor who are proposing anarcho-capitalism - it's the Austrians, technologists, etc., who are comparably well off. If I were to construct a story there, I think it'd be something like "see all the good capitalism has done to us" ("I've never been poor so I see only the benefits"), "if we did away with the state entirely, we would have outrageous progress only heard of in science fiction". I.e. that the "success" of capitalism sells the radicalization in that direction. Then money would come into the picture in two ways: first, from the corporate support of the think tanks, and second, that money of the people who talk about anarcho-capitalism (since they aren't poor themselves).
I've heard libertarians and anarcho-capitalists complain that the scientific method is a "statist" methodology.
It appears you can find Lysenkos on the right, too :)
Worse, anarcho-capitalism is paradoxical: If contracts are binding, period... well, what do you call it when the government sells you land with the understanding that, so long as you and your progeny use the land, you will obey certain laws?
That's an amusing thought: that in some prior day, perhaps there was a natural right - and then the people gathered together in groups and made laws for themselves, collectively owning the property. That would just mean the anarcho-capitalists were late to the party: every group has agreed to subordinate its property to a state and so there's no free property left (absent the high seas, of course). The thought is made all the more amusing by that if the state legitimately owns the property, then an anarcho-capitalist revolution would be the very essence of imposition of force, the very thing they claim to be against.
I know it doesn't quite work like that: nobody would claim that the North Koreans voluntarily gave their property to Kim Il-sung. But it does show that states could easily reappear, and when I think about it, the megacorporations usually depicted in cyberpunk (with their private armies and so on) do quite resemble (plutocratically oligarchical) states. One might draw a comparison to the fall of Rome: a greater state crumbles, smaller "states" appear (the fiefdoms or megacorporations), each with their own defense apparatus. Again, the comparison is not perfect (the lords of the feudal realms did use the kind of force anarcho-capitalists abhor to control their people), but it's interesting.
It reminds me of something I read not long ago, where the author claimed free-market proponents misinterpret Coase (considered to be of "externalities can be handled by the market" fame). What he's saying is rather that a perfect market would produce the same pollution-handling outcome as a perfect regulator. But that goes both ways. If it's too hard for people to deal with the polluters one-on-one, they may use the equivalence in the opposite direction. I.e., states provide lower transaction cost compared to the alternative. There's no reason to automatically expect that markets would minimize transaction cost (the existence of corporations themselves suggest otherwise, since they are internally planned economies); and if the markets don't, then there's a perfectly good chance that states would just reappear.