SO,

I broadly agree with most everything you suggest. Generally speaking, with or without technological leaps in green energy, I definitely think it’s the case that decentralizing power production is both do-able for a surprising number of people under present circumstances. And that it’s certainly the best way by far to address peak-oil related concerns.

Soviet Onion: I imagine they’ll like that solution much better than the current environmentalist fixations which, among other things, include glorifying AIDS and pesticide-ban enabled malaria epidemics as forms of “natural population control”

I don’t think it’s fair to describe this kind of anthropocidal stuff as “current environmentalist fixations.” Any more than it would be fair to describe a Ra’s al-Ghul scale mass die-off of humanity as a “current Anarchist fixation,” even though I can think of some doofs who published calls for that sort of thing in Earth First! and other deep-ecology journals while self-identifying as Anarchists. The movement has a lot of different facets and shouldn’t simply be defined by its worst exponents.

Soviet: We’ve only got about a half-billion years before the sun boils the oceans and turns “Mother Earth” back into the lifeless rock she used to be.

Fortunately we apparently only need about 1,000,000 more years before we can all relocate to the Vorlon homeworld, anyway.

Marx was wrong.

There, that was easy.

It’s worth noting as well, in addition to the points that Roderick and Tracy make, that the relevant question, in this particular case, actually isn’t whether the economies of scale in online retail sales would be large or small under freed-market conditions. For all I know, they might well turn out to be considerable. (Certainly, there is a natural economy of scale involved in a lot of long-distance shipping and tightly-packed warehouse storage.)

But the real question here is what the economies of scale are, not only for potential competing retailers, but in all competing uses for the distribution center worker’s labor — since the question is not only whether the worker could make as good a living or better setting up as a competitor for Amazon, but also whether or not the worker could make as good a living or better in other lines of work outside the industry, or possibly outside of the cash-wage economy entirely. So there is not only the question of opportunities for entrepreneurial competition with Amazon downstream in the retail market, but also the question of opportunities for entrepreneurial competition with Amazon upstream, in the labor market.

If it is true (as Kevin has argued, and as I argued in Scratching By) that, absent the state, most ordinary workers would experience a dramatic decline in the fixed costs of living, including (among other things) considerably better access to individual ownership of small plots of land, no income or property tax to pay, and no zoning, licensing, or other government restraints on small-scale neighborhood home-based crafts, cottage industry, or light farming/heavy gardening, I think you’d see a lot more people in a position to begin edging out or to drop out of low-income wage labor entirely — in favor of making a modest living in the informal sector, by growing their own food, or both, quite apart from the question of economies of scale in the formal retail sector. If that’s the case, then, on the one hand, workers who dropped out wouldn’t have to deal with Amazon’s taskmastering at all; meanwhile, back at Amazon, in order to convince others to stay in, Amazon would have to offer them a corresponding premium to make it worth their while — whether in the form of wage increases, improvements in conditions, or both.

Hey, that’s our question mark — used continuously since February 2009, as you can plainly see — which you are using without attribution.

Expect a call from our lawyers (all of the lawyers we have) soon.

Kinsella: The original left-right spectrum is confused and anti-libertarian.

Well, if you’re going to get all originalist on us, Stephan, the original left-right spectrum ran from ultra-royalist mercantilists who believed that the State was the instrument of God on Earth, to radical free marketeers who favored the abolition of State control in the name of the Rights of Man [sic]. (Bastiat sat on the Left; so did Proudhon.) Doesn’t seem especially confused to me; seems like a pretty straightforward spectrum from statists to anti-statists, with a laissez-faire economist and an avowed anarchist holding down the leftward end.

Anon73,

Rothbard’s plumbline position in “Kid Lib” (1974) and The Ethics of Liberty ch. 14 (1982) is that parents have a right to set household conduct rules, as the proprietor of the household, until children move out and take up living on their own; but that parents have no right to physically aggress against children [*], that children should be able to legally prosecute parents for injuries committed against them in the name of “discipline,” that children have an unconditional right to end their parents’ guardianship at any age where they are physically capable of running away, to strike out on their own or to take up with any foster parents who agree to take them in, and that neither parents nor the State have any right to force “runaway” children to return to the guardianship of any adult against the child’s will.

In “Kid Lib,” Rothbard aims to position his view as a middle-road between traditional coercive parenting and (his notion of) “Progressive” anything-goes parenting, with most of the rhetorical energy being spent on the latter, so he spends a fair amount of time grumping about kids “kicking adults in the shins” and discussing how he thinks that parents should insist on rules of conduct and a certain degree of unilateral authority, but that it must be on a “my house, my rules” basis and not on the basis of using physical or legal coercion to keep the child captive. But the last, which he views as “the fundamental tyranny” of the contemporary parent-child relationship, he denounces as “kidnapping,” and as “enslavement” of children by parents.

In “Ethics of Liberty” most of the stuff about theories of parenting and house-rules is dropped in favor of a more systematic examination of children’s rights, with a long section on the violation of children’s rights by statist law in particular, with highlights on the evils of truancy and other Fugitive Child laws, use of catch-all “juvenile delinquency,” inquisitorial proceedings without basic due process rights, the parens patriae doctrine, etc. to extend and intensify the power of abusive parents over “wayward” children, or to step in if a parent isn’t vigorously abusive enough, etc.

[*] Rothbard talks about “mutilating” and “abusing” children as aggressions and as violations of the parent’s role as trustee for the child’s self-ownership. I think his position logically implies that it’s illegitimate for parents to use any form of corporal punishment at all against children, but as far as I know Rothbard neither confirmed nor denied that in his writing on the topic.

As far as I know, even after his paleo turn, Rothbard never actually declared that his prior position on children’s rights was false. (He actually hardly ever repudiated any ideological positions, no matter how many strategic 180s he did; just swapped out his rhetoric and tended to write a if he had never said the things that he said before.) But by 1992, mainly in the interest of demonizing Hillary Rodham Clinton, he was scare-quote ridiculing any discussion of children’s rights, declaring that children should quote-unquote “get governed by their parents,” and denouncing Tibor Machan for supporting children who sued their parents for damages or for termination of custody. (I haven’t read any of Tibor’s stuff from that period, so I can’t be sure, but from the date and from what Rothbard writes, my guess would be that this was in response to high-profile cases like Kingsley v. Kingsley, in which a child was granted legal standing to sue for a transfer of custody from his biological parents to foster parents. Anyone know for sure?)

Anyway, after the paleo turn, Rothbard was looking to hook up with political allies who took rock-ribbed conservative positions on parental control, so all that stuff about the rights of wayward children and the use of state violence to keep children enslaved to their parents was pretty quickly dropped out, in favor of a line about the state’s meddling in parental rights, with folks like Hoppe throwing in paeans to the authority of the paterfamilias and the order of rank within the family, and the occasional supportive shout-out to the pro-child-beating conservatives from LRC.

Of course, after Rothbard’s paleo turn, there were still plenty of other non-paleo anarcho-capitalists who differed with Rothbard and with his newfound allies on all this stuff, and who generally took something more like the older Rothbard line. (George H. Smith, for example, defends the early Spencer’s position against parental coercion.) And the decline of paleolibertarianism (both as a strategic alliance and as an ideology) since Mr. Bush’s wars and the rise of Red State America has resulted in a pretty significant drop-off.

Most anarcho-capitalists, however, just don’t write about the issue at all. Presumably because they either don’t think about it, or don’t care, or both. Which is unfortunate but not surprising: most political theorists don’t spend much time discussing the status of children. Not because it’s unimportant to them (patriarchal authority is very important to lots of theories) but rather because they have reasons for wanting certain bedrock commitments to be left unspoken so that they cannot be identified, and without any explicit defense so that they cannot be challenged.

william:

I’m interested in the rights-ist take on all this. … I’m a long time intuitive supporter of nuclear proliferation into the hands of individuals (albeit hopefully at some as yet undetermined time in the future after everyone has evolved into enlightened anarchs)

Well, either people have an unconditional right to possession of atomic weapons or they don’t. If they lean towards the position that you say you intuitively support, then the rights-based case is pretty easy to make out. (Right to nonviolently possess powerful tools as long as you don’t threaten to use them aggressively against any identifiable victims, etc.)

If you lean more towards a position that would allow forcible disarmament, then the challenge is to come up with a non-strictly-consequentialist argument to the effect that it doesn’t violate the rights of the person being disarmed. That’s a lot harder but I don’t think it’s impossible. (Presumably it would have something to do with the lack of possible non-aggressive uses for currently-feasible sorts of atomic weapons and some conception of a standing threat. And presumably you could make out much the same case against, say, private possession of some killer nanoplague. If we’re imagining near-future-plausible but not-yet-actual situations where there would be some non-aggressive use — e.g. asteroid demolition, low-yield weapons, whatever — then that would tend to undermine the rights-based case for forcible disarmament in those cases. But it’d also tend to undermine the demand for such a case, since those are just cases where it looks like the intuitive demand for forcible disarmament is as weak as the theoretical case for its legitimacy.)

For someone like Roderick, who holds that considerations about what has good or bad results can actually play a role in deliberation about what rights people have (and vice versa, in deliberation about what would count as a good or bad result), there are a lot of further nuances that I haven’t mentioned.

Either way, it seems to me like this issue is probably orthogonal to the consequentialist-natural rights debate. Or if it’s angled a bit, the angle actually would tend to tilt rightsers more towards your own expressed position than it would consequentialists.

Richard,

Well, part of the reason that so many native Russian and Ukrainian anarchists were excited about the October Revolution is that they had participated in making it, and figured that the Revolution was a big step towards the realization of power in their lifetimes. In 1917, the issue was not so much that they trusted or were excited about the Bolsheviks or Party communism, but rather because the Bolsheviks were only one of many different factions involved in the October Revolution, and often not the most important. Their enthusiasm about the whole project started dropping off in mid-1918-1921, as the state socialists started seriously putting together their workers’ state, the Bolsheviks started moving to consolidate power within it (with the Civil War serving as the health of their state), and the Bolsheviks formed up the Cheka and the Red Army and put them to work imprisoning and shooting anarchists. Most of the exiles from out of the country started arriving toward the end of that period (e.g. Goldman, Berkman, and most of the other exiles from the Palmer raids arrived in January 1920).

For what it’s worth, Charlotte was a sympathetic interviewer who among other things took time to contact Dana Ward before she ever interviewed me, in order to get some background on anarchist ideas. She didn’t miss or misrepresent my distinction between senses of “law”; rather, I used the phrase “lawless order” several times in the course of the interview without stopping to mention the distinction between law-as-general-prescription and law-as-government-edict (although I did mention the importance of private mediation and arbitration along the way), because I figured (rightly, I think) that spelling out the distinction would only introduce complications that couldn’t be very well captured in the story — not because of any problem with the reporter, but simply because of the format of a short newspaper feature is such that the medium won’t bear the message.

The only thing that really baffles me, actually, is the headline. I mean, yeah, down with “The Man” and all, but my appropriation of New Left argot hasn’t gone that far yet, and I don’t think those two words were ever even uttered in that order at any point during the meeting.

Neil,

Because the profit-maximizing point in a monopolistic market is at a higher price and a lower quantity than the market-clearing prices and quantities.

The solution, of course, is to remove the government-granted monopoly on the printing and distribution of ideas.

quasibill:

As long as we’re playing “add to the hypo”, I’ll grant your addition, and add this: Those that the woman struck were standing by silently, watching the “pantsing” and doing nothing to assist. In some cases, they actively cheered on the instigator.

Is it now a tougher call as to piling on the woman?

You might think it’s a tougher call, insofar as bystanders have some kind of ethical obligation to intervene when they see someone being physically assaulted in front of them (and when the potential danger involved in intervening is such that not intervening would be cowardice or complicity).

But the problem, then, is that I think you’ve now extended the thought experiment to the point where it has lost contact with the situation it’s supposed to be analogous to. If you believe that everybody reading a comment thread, or writing on it, or whatever level of involvement is supposed to be, has the same sort of ethical obligation to come in to rescue Keith from uncalled-for insults or strawman presentations of his views, then you might find it odd that many people didn’t get involved into Keith started slinging insults based on gender identity or started pulling out the most colorful sorts of schoolyard taunts in order to bash whole groups of people based on their sexuality and suggest, at length, in a stand-alone essay that has nothing directly to do with any kind of personal back-and-forth with Aster, that those groups of people (identified with the crudest sorts of schoolyard taunts) be run out of the anarchist movement.

But what makes you think that there is such an obligation to intervene in such a case?

We are not, after all, talking about a physical assault; we’re talking about people calling each other names over the Internet. Is there some reason why I should feel compelled to put myself in the middle as long as the two parties are only engaged in bagging on each other in an open comment thread?

If you’re going to charge a double-standard, you need a case in which the things being evaluated differently are actually the same. But they’re not the same, and there are obvious reasons why people who do not care to intervene in the purely personal part of the sniping that both Aster and Keith engaged in, and who have no real reason to, might nevertheless have good reasons to get involved once Keith starts slinging the fag-bashing, not to mention the standalone essay-length extended arguments for running large groups of people out of the movement based on their sexuality, gender identity, or racial or sexual politics. (Which was studded with vile insults against all kinds of people, sure, but which was primarily objectionable because of the substantive position taken in it, not because of the tone or diction.)