Comments Elsewhere

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.*

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.*

Dan,

It’s not clear to me what level the question is supposed to be asked on. If it’s a question about moral ideals — what really ought to be done — then I think the obvious answer is complete and permanent repudiation — government debts …cannot be repaid except through government revenues, and government revenues are always extracted by force from unwilling third parties (viz., us). Those of us from whom they are extracted never consented to the debt at all, and have a perfect right to refuse to pay one damned dime. Of course, if those who did contract the debt (viz., governors at various levels) want to pay out of their own pockets, or to pass the plate and ask for donations, they should be free to do so. But I personally don’t give much of a damn whether or not U.S. or Chinese banks or petrocrat “sovereign wealth funds” ever get “their” money back. I’d be just as happy if they all starved.

If it’s supposed to be asked on a level that’s constrained in some sense by practical political possibilities, then I think the answer is still repudiation, but for a different reason. Not only are none of the possible “solutions” to the structural problem (massive spending cuts and/or tax increases to gain tax-surpluses, selling government “property” out to big buyers, etc.) even minimally just; they aren’t minimally likely, either. Nobody in government is going to do the things that they would practically need to do in order to reduce deficits or pay down government debts because they make decisions on a political, not a fiscal, basis, and face structural incentives that make permanent, sky-high-and-growing government debts not only unavoidable, but actually quite attractive. The structural constraints are such that they are almost surely never going to stop running up debts until their capacity to continue running them up breaks down completely and irreparably (either due to diminishing returns from tax increases, or due to diminishing returns from inflation, or from a complete crack-up bust of the financial system); at which point they will partially or entirely repudiate anyway. (The hope is that they will repudiate entirely because they will collapse and not get up again. But whether they do or not, I have no expectation that any politician would or could ever do anything to pay off the government’s debts, ever.)