Have you ever read The Dispossessed? Inevitably, I think, your anarchist society would end up being a society with a government - just not the same government as we currently have. Maybe the power would be more hidden, or less responsible to the people, but there would still be a government managing it. That's not to say it wouldn't be better in some ways - but people have to coordinate in order to solve large problems, and that's what governments do.
In an ideal version of your system, everything is great. In an ideal version of my system, everything is great. Comparing your ideally functioning system to the Soviet Union is like comparing a perfectly ripe apple to a decaying, moldy orange from 20 years ago. Likewise, the EU is an imperfect example of the thing it is trying to be, but it is still better than the things that preceded it. The pains of Brexit we are seeing now are not "growing pains" or "adjustment pains", IMO - they are the pains of moving from a better way of doing things (which had its own sets of downsides) back to what a worse way of doing things, where "better" and "worse" mean "more efficient at helping people get what they need and do what they want" and "less efficient and helping people with those same things".
The likely reality is that if a system is populated by people incentivized to behave badly, it will suck to exist in for a lot of people, probably most. A good system is one populated mostly by people incentivized to act well. The incentive could come in many forms - cultural expectations, religious teachings, economic incentives, and so on. You could definitely establish an allegedly anarchist society that had the right cultural and societal incentives to be stable - if you could set up those incentives first. Ditto with a communist society. The problem is not what we call the organizations responsible for managing cooperation between people at scale, it's how we train humanity to interact with and consider them.
Therefore, the right system to pick is whichever one we can achieve that is most likely to be an improvement on the one we have given the current set of incentives - and right now, given the scale of the problems facing global society, I think a more globalized, less isolated, more open system is the one to choose. Brexit is a step back, to me, because it moves us more towards systems that will not work for the challenges we face, no matter what we call them or how we culturally couch them, because it disincentivizes people from caring about others at the scale necessary to solve problems common to both.
I'm familiar with Le Guin's books and, while I like her writing, I don't think anarcho-syndicalism has any chance at being practical. I assume you refer to the anarchist colony believing to be free while depending on selling minerals to the mother country - which sees it as a mining colony. It's tricky whether to frame it as trade or taxes. What would happen if they stopped selling minerals to the mother country? Probably an invasion?
If you're interested in expanding your library on anarchy (jumping on the ancap side), I'd recommend David Friedman's The Machinery of Freedom (or its YouTube summary), which talks about the possible practicalities of running an anarcho-capitalist society.
Replying to your point: Companies solve large problems as well. They also compete with each other to provide a solution, providing more efficient solutions. Do you think the government could have come up with Google or Tesla?
I think the discriminating feature of a government is not large scale synchronisation but holding the monopoly on violence (and threats: if you don't pay a percentage of your profits, you'll be thrown in jail). Hopefully an anarchic society wouldn't be able to replicate that (thanks to the balance of multiple Rights Enforcement Agencies (as Friedman call them)).
In an anarcho-capitalist society you're likely going to end up with different companies providing protection and health care - and insurances on top. Not having a single defining law but multiple contracts (that can be arbitrated in private courts) could give people the flexibility to live closer to their ideal rules. You don't like your health care? Look for another provider.
The choice is in the hands of the consumers.
I don't understand what Europe is trying to be, if not another USA. The USA went from being a minarchist federation to the largest employer in the world, charging taxes as high as Europe to all its citizens. If that's not moving toward socialism, I don't know what it is.
The pains felt by the UK are:
- More VAT import taxes levied by its Government
- More bureaucracy with the flow of goods and people imposed by EU and the UK
I sincerely hate both with a passion and I think they have no space in society - with any country: I see your point, things actually got worse in that regard and Brexit will make trade worse and more expensive between UK and EU.
Still, if that's the price to pay to avoid greater redistributive European policies (like the 750bln€ for Covid affected countries), I think that's the lesser evil.
> I assume you refer to the anarchist colony believing to be free while depending on selling minerals to the mother country - which sees it as a mining colony. It's tricky whether to frame it as trade or taxes. What would happen if they stopped selling minerals to the mother country? Probably an invasion?
Given that the colony is free, in that the other countries don't in any way interact with (or even have awareness of) their affairs, I don't see what the issue is with that presentation. The colony is engaging in an agreement with another entity to sell goods to a different one - isn't that what such a polity does? Le Guin is clear that the politics of the homeworld, until the events of the novel, have no bearing on the politics of the colony.
> Do you think the government could have come up with Google or Tesla?
Yes. The US government is arguably responsible for the existence of the Internet via DARPA. It put a man on the moon. It developed the most powerful weapon in human history, in secret. Naturally, this is as part of a complex system of interrelated government, academic, corporate, and even non-profit groups - but these were government programs first and foremost. Why couldn't it have? Further, how much of Google and Tesla's technology is based on government-funded research?
> I think the discriminating feature of a government is not large scale synchronisation but holding the monopoly on violence (and threats: if you don't pay a percentage of your profits, you'll be thrown in jail).
I am open to considering "near-monopoly on societally acceptable violence" as a secondary purpose for government, but I still think - and this can be seen as far back as the early United States' founding documents, and well before - that "organizing large groups of people for a variety of purposes" is a more defining charactaristic.
> In an anarcho-capitalist society you're likely going to end up with different companies providing protection and health care - and insurances on top. Not having a single defining law but multiple contracts (that can be arbitrated in private courts) could give people the flexibility to live closer to their ideal rules. You don't like your health care? Look for another provider.
What if there isn't one? What if you can't afford any of the good ones? What if the one you have locked you into a lifetime contract and you can't leave? What if your employer is the only power in your area and won't change its mind about what kind of healthcare they allow you to get?
> The choice is in the hands of the consumers.
Is healthcare a basic right, or a commodity? Is anything a basic right? If not, why not?
> I don't understand what Europe is trying to be, if not another USA.
If that is what it wants to be, I don't see a problem with it - and, to be clear, if Britain really wanted out from that, it is their right. Nowhere am I suggesting that they didn't have the right to leave. I just wish they hadn't, and think it is bad for them.
> The USA went from being a minarchist federation to the largest employer in the world, charging taxes as high as Europe to all its citizens. If that's not moving toward socialism, I don't know what it is.
It definitely is. In fact, one of the frustrating things about American society today is that we're so afraid of using the word "socialist" to describe what we are (because it is Evil Bad Term because USSR and Venezuela) that we have no good simple word to describe the fact that we are a socialist mixed-economy Western-style republic, just a somewhat less socialist one than most of the others.
I just don't see that as a bad thing - in fact, I would like us to be more like the others, not less. The problems in American society, in my view, are much more systematic and intractable than they are in many other places in part because we're not willing to give more people more of what they need. (Though, to be honest, I think we could both get what we want if the US turned into a federation of less-closely-aligned states with different policies and laws for people who wanted different ways of living and being governed. That just feels like a fantasy/not realistically achievable.)
> Still, if that's the price to pay to avoid greater redistributive European policies (like the 750bln€ for Covid affected countries), I think that's the lesser evil.
I completely disagree, and indeed, I don't see redistributive policies as an evil of any kind.
But honestly, you don't have to answer all these questions or respond to all these points, if you don't want to take the time. I'm stating them to explore the corners of all the ways I feel your preferred systems of society are insufficient in the context my worldview. I suspect that there may be enough daylight between our fundamental perceptions of what people are, what they are allowed to do, and what they are obligated to provide to each other that we will not agree on many core principals, and a discussion of those is certainly outside the scope of this thread on Brexit - not that I am not happy to have it.
I won't reply to everything as we're getting into several conversation at the same time, beers on me if we ever meet in real life :D
I think we found the the source of divergence!
I don't think there should be any "rights", simply because having a right implies someone else will have to uphold it, which means it's unclear how much we're paying for it. Given a right is something that affects me, I want to be free to lose it, if I so desire.
The reason I don't like redistributive policies is because they non consensual.
I don't believe in free will (I don't think we are more than very clever machines), and maybe that's why I put a higher value on choice than on guaranteeing life.
At the same time, I think that voluntarily donations are more than enough to cover for those in needs.
There are so many people I talk to who are genuinely happy to pay taxes and there are many people who are not happy to pay taxes (in my case, mainly not to pay for an inefficient and warmongering model) who are happy to donate money in other causes.
So here I am, dreaming of a truly voluntarily society.
> I don't think there should be any "rights", simply because having a right implies someone else will have to uphold it, which means it's unclear how much we're paying for it. Given a right is something that affects me, I want to be free to lose it, if I so desire.
Your goal, as I understand it, is never to force anyone to do anything they don't want to do. Is that right? If so, it must be affirmative only - if I want to kill you, but you do not want me to kill you, then I don't get to kill you because I can't kill you if you don't want me to.
If that's a correct understanding, here's what I would like you to answer:
> I don't believe in free will (I don't think we are more than very clever machines), and maybe that's why I put a higher value on choice than on guaranteeing life.
What does it mean to have free will? "The power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion?" That's the definition I'm familiar with.
If we have no free will, what's the point of choice? What does it matter, if we are machines, whether we can choose anything? Why can't I do what I "want" to you, given that the concept of "want" implies, deterministically, that I must desire it and therefore must do it?
That is, if I am going to kill you, that is because I must and always will. It isn't up to me, because nothing is. So what is the point of a rule trying that tries to stop me?
In an ideal version of your system, everything is great. In an ideal version of my system, everything is great. Comparing your ideally functioning system to the Soviet Union is like comparing a perfectly ripe apple to a decaying, moldy orange from 20 years ago. Likewise, the EU is an imperfect example of the thing it is trying to be, but it is still better than the things that preceded it. The pains of Brexit we are seeing now are not "growing pains" or "adjustment pains", IMO - they are the pains of moving from a better way of doing things (which had its own sets of downsides) back to what a worse way of doing things, where "better" and "worse" mean "more efficient at helping people get what they need and do what they want" and "less efficient and helping people with those same things".
The likely reality is that if a system is populated by people incentivized to behave badly, it will suck to exist in for a lot of people, probably most. A good system is one populated mostly by people incentivized to act well. The incentive could come in many forms - cultural expectations, religious teachings, economic incentives, and so on. You could definitely establish an allegedly anarchist society that had the right cultural and societal incentives to be stable - if you could set up those incentives first. Ditto with a communist society. The problem is not what we call the organizations responsible for managing cooperation between people at scale, it's how we train humanity to interact with and consider them.
Therefore, the right system to pick is whichever one we can achieve that is most likely to be an improvement on the one we have given the current set of incentives - and right now, given the scale of the problems facing global society, I think a more globalized, less isolated, more open system is the one to choose. Brexit is a step back, to me, because it moves us more towards systems that will not work for the challenges we face, no matter what we call them or how we culturally couch them, because it disincentivizes people from caring about others at the scale necessary to solve problems common to both.