Author of "Scratching By: How Government Creates Poverty As We Know It" here. I'm sorry that you didn't like the article. However, a couple things. First, William cited it as an example of a particular kind of view about freed markets (the view that they tend to have centrifugal effects on economic ownership and thus to undermine bossism, landlordism, and other forms of economic hierarchy). This view may be relevant to some discussions about anarcho-capitalism, but I am not an anarcho-capitalist. My view is specifically that freed markets radically undermine capitalism, which is the joint product of historical and ongoing state violence to subsidize and insulate capitalists. And if freeing markets alone does not suffice to make capitalist privilege collapse under its own weight,(*) then I advocate freed people making use of bottom-up stateless social organization like direct-action unions, mutual aid associations, neighborhood asembleas and workers' councils, local gift economies, etc. etc. to _push_ it over the rest of the way. (* As in fact I think it _won't_. My theory is that capitalism is, among many other things, _less efficient_ than less hierarchical alternatives, so the centrifugal effects of markets will go a long way. But I doubt that they'll be enough on their own, for reasons that are not discussed in that article and are a bit of a digression to get into here. Hence, the need for the social activism I mention above.) Second, you write: > Also, due to property theft by the capitalist class, they have a monopoly over the means of production. Notice how every capitalist gets all huffy and puffy over intellectual property as monopoly but you apply the same argument to land property and they change their tune. I don't know if you intended this as a reply to the argument that I make in "Scratching By." But if you do, it is a weird reply. (1) I'm not a "capitalist," either in the ideological or in the professional sense. (2) Although I certainly do view copyrights, patents, etc. as a plutocratic legal monopoly,(**) the article in question didn't say anything about Intellectual Property. But it did have several paragraphs on land and the effects of plutocratic land monopolies (it's the section under the heading "Urban Homesteading"), which included a discussion of the Take Back the Land movement in southern Florida and a defense of squatters reclaiming vacant lots. (**) A view which was not historically shared by most anarcho-capitalists, incidentally. Nowadays many or even most have become anti-IP but originally most of them were pro-copyright and some were even pro-patent. The shift to anti-IP views came really rapidly -- mostly in the past 10 years or so. A couple of other things less directly related to the content and context of the article. You write: > Please explain how horizontal relationship will emerge on a free market. The answer, briefly, is that I am an old Proudhonian on this. In my view trade, contract and competition between equals *are* horizontal relationships. Of course the important part is the "between equals." There are lots of economic contexts of radical inequality which can transform these things from equal relationships to a relationships of dominance and dependence, like in wage labor or the landlord economy. But then what needs to be explained is not "how horizontal relationships will emerge," but rather how the contexts that deform or block them would emerge. ("But we have to deal with them every day! They've already emerged!" Yes, but not on a free market. "So? They're still there and we'll have to deal with them, not just fantasize about what a free market would have produced. So how do we deal with them?" Through the revolutionary self-organizing of the working class and by building the social and material infrastructure for the General Strike. What did you think I was going to say?) > Capitalism does not work without hierarchy. I agree with you about that. But "capitalism" is not the same thing as "markets." (There are non-capitalist markets, and capitalism depends in part on suppressing them.)

Of course I’m not OK with civilian deaths, …

Well, that’s mighty white of you.

… but I wouldn’t have ruled out an invasion of Auschwitz if I knew some German civilians might die.

Would you consider it a defeater for your planned invasion of Auschwitz if the overwhelming majority — something like 70%-90% — of the people that you would be killing in the process of your invasion were the Jewish prisoners you were allegedly trying to liberate?

If not, what would you possibly consider a defeater for a putatively “humanitarian” invasion? If so, then do you not consider it a defeater for Kinetic Military Action in Libya? For any reason other than deliberating in a Patriotically-Correct fantasyland with no cognitive connection to the realities of modern aerial warfare and “humanitarian interventions”?

Absolutely. Rothbard was also better on children's rights, etc., but on most issues and on general outlook I massively prefer Tucker. I just think it's important to separate out issues where they're separate -- e.g. one's position on reappropriation doesn't always have a perfect correlation with one's position on money or unions or whatever. "Tucker" and "Rothbard" may be good rough signifiers for constellations of positions (*) but it's usually counterproductive to understanding where folks are coming from to try to draw a single line (**) so that Good Anarchist Socialist Tucker will always be on one side and Fake "Anarchist" Capitalist Scumbag Rothbard will always be on the other. Hence, I try to complicate the conversation when it becomes relevant. (And thx! for the kind words!) (* Which to be fair is more or less how you were using them.) (** Not at all saying that this is what you were doing above.)

Absolutely. Rothbard was also better on children's rights, etc., but on most issues and on general outlook I massively prefer Tucker. I just think it's important to separate out issues where they're separate -- e.g. one's position on reappropriation doesn't always have a perfect correlation with one's position on money or unions or whatever. "Tucker" and "Rothbard" may be good rough signifiers for constellations of positions (*) but it's usually counterproductive to understanding where folks are coming from to try to draw a single line (**) so that Good Anarchist Socialist Tucker will always be on one side and Fake "Anarchist" Capitalist Scumbag Rothbard will always be on the other. Hence, I try to complicate the conversation when it becomes relevant. (And thx! for the kind words!) (* Which to be fair is more or less how you were using them.) (** Not at all saying that this is what you were doing above.)

[Rothbard was more willing to endorse revolutionary re-appropriation](http://mises.org/journals/lf/1969/1969_06_15.aspx#3) than [Tucker was](http://fair-use.org/benjamin-tucker/instead-of-a-book/monopoly-communism-and-liberty).

Steve, Markets are a decentralized means of transferring ownership (individual ownership and quid-pro-quo exchanges of goods and services). Capitalism is a particular pattern of ownership (a class monopoly -- where capital and land are concentrated in the hands of employers, landlords and financiers). Some people think that market forms of exchange (individual ownership, contracts, etc.) will naturally lead to capitalist patterns of ownership. Mutualists dissent. Mutualists think that the concentrations of ownership that exist right now are not the natural tendency of the market form, but the result of government privileges and prohibitions that deform existing markets -- including privileges to capitalists (think bail-outs, corporate welfare and government-granted monopolies), and suppression of more grassroots or horizontal forms of economic organization (think of governments mandating people to buy in to the corporate insurance market, shutting down free clinics and mutual aid societies, busting unions through Taft-Hartley and "Right-to-Work," etc. etc.). So they think that the best way to get rid of capitalist economic privilege is to get rid of the plutocratic political privileges that prop it up, and let it collapse under its own weight. Any social or economic problems that remain would be addressed through social activism and bottom-up, community-based forms of free association -- mutual aid societies, neighborhood asembleas, co-ops, unions, etc. Freed markets would be co-ops, worker-owned shops and individuals trying out new experiments and trading with each other for the things they need or want, rather than staging grounds for highly-leveraged corporate capitalist mega-fuckery. Does that help?

Gene,

Which “real world people” would those be, and which of “our” policy prescriptions were they trying to follow?

I mean, my core “policy prescription” is the abolition of the State as such. Or if you want a nice, gradualist program broken down by specific policy goals, we could start out with the complete abolition of all border laws, unconditional amnesty for all currently undocumented immigrants, the elimination of all standing armies, the dismissal of all government police forces, the abolition of all intellectual property restrictions, the abolition of all drug laws and the release of all nonviolent prisoners from government jails, the complete abolition of eminent domain, the elimination of all government monopolies in the issuing of money and credit, the opening of all government owned and long-term vacant land to free homesteading, the repudiation of all government debts, the dissolution of the IMF, World Bank, Ex-Im, WTO, NAFTA, CAFTA, Federal Reserve, and the repudiation of all debts owed to government-owned or bailed-out banks. Also the repeal of compulsory school-attendance laws and the release of all involuntarily committed psychiatric prisoners, for good measure. I’ve left out a lot, but that’s a start; certainly, all of that is more important to me than whether or not ACTA stays on the books, say, or whether corporate tax rates go up or down. Perhaps you know of some “real world people” in positions of power or political influence who have been trying to implement these policy items, and yet somehow managed to come up with the prevailing monopolistic corporate capitalism. But if so, I’d like you to tell me who these folks are.

Or maybe you mean some Republican dickhead who actually has no interest whatsoever in anything even remotely resembling my policy prescriptions, or those of most of the Anarchists around these parts, but does think that supporting a trillion-dollar war, a trillion-dollar bail-out, a massive border police state, and some fiddling around the edges with Medicare or NPR funding constitutes a principled defense of free markets. If so, it’s clear that those kind of policy prescriptions do lead to something like what we see around us (since they hardly prescribe anything different from the status quo at all), but it’s hard to see how those are “our” policy prescriptions. Maybe they are yours; but if so you should speak only for yourself.

How many hardcore kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 21. 1 to change the lightbulb and 20 to sit around talking about how much better the old lightbulb used to be.

How many hardcore kids does it take to screw in a lightbulb? 21. 1 to change the lightbulb and 20 to sit around talking about how much better the old lightbulb used to be.

It's true that in a society without government, nobody would have inflicted that worker-killing, industry-subsidizing, unsustainable, ecocidal clusterfuck on the Mojave desert. I also think in a society without government, nobody would be spending trillions of dollars to bail out failed financial companies; and probably nobody would be building robot death planes to fire missiles at Pakistani weddings. In each of these cases, I don't consider that to be a *problem* for a society without government; I consider it to be one of the *best things about the idea.*