So who is for Anarchy?

I don't know. Is this a rhetorical question? anarchy to me only seems to vent unresolved anger issues. Is it really a catalyst for change? It seems somewhat bullyish to me. I honestly do not know, I feel ignorant inthis, but that is the first thing that comes to mind.



maybe I should look at wiki first before I spew what may appear as rude

ok.....survey creator is a complete smart ass

Nope

It'd be a great idea if only there was some way of stabilizing anarchy. The problem is that if there is no government, many governments will spring up and they won't be good ones. The main beneficial purpose of a government is to keep other governments in check.

Idiots.

I am out. Unless we're talking Iran. Or Saudi Arabia....

anarchists

me

No one I've knowingly met in many years.
Less control by business and government, perhaps, but we would all mostly die if we adopted anarchy today.

Not I.

Would that mean we'd have to get rid of Qual?

No. We wouldn't have to do anything. That is the whole point of anarchy.

Well, on a personal level, I like to think of myself as something of an anarchist. Most people tend to think of anarchy as an absence of order, zero governance, no social order. Strictly speaking, this isn't actually true though. Anarchy simply means "without a leader". Those who believe that anarchy means chaos and rioting might do well to remember that when we see examples of chaos and rioting, it is usually in the presence of armed agents of government. The Rodney King riot in LA for example. The Watts riots in the 1960s.

That said, I am not sure that a true anarchy is entirely feasible. But I can dream.

I've seen it work awesomely as a spiritual state, but an invisble leader actually running the show is part of that paradigm, kind of like how an eco-sphere works, the parts were designed to fit together in the first place.

Uh... that's my life right now. No thanks, got enough.

What kind of anarchy?

Uh... Everything is out of control and no one's at the helm...

Well now that Obama is president.... We're practically already there.

> What kind of anarchy?


Kristal, have you ever read Our Enemy, the State by Albert Jay Nock?

He says that when Europeans first came to America and made contact with the American Indians, they wrote of them, "They have no government." Nock claims this was not true though. The only form of governance the Europeans were familiar with was the mechanism of the State. The Indians had no State, but they had government nonetheless. In some instances, this was even a non-coercive form of government. The best example I can provide actually comes from a work of fiction, the novel Dances With Wolves. Not the movie, mind you, the novel. There was an episode in the novel in which the Lakota tribe near which a fort was being built was wondering what they should do about the fort. The Elders of the tribe decided to do nothing for the time being, just wait and see what would happen. Some young braves of the tribe did not like this decision and set out on a raid of the fort to reconoiter and steal some horses. Well, they were captured. The tribe then launched a raid to get their young braves back. When the braves were returned home, they were not punished in any way, not even a stern lecture.

The point of that story of course, is to show that although the Elders governed the tribe, their decisions were not actually binding. Members of the tribe could disagree even to the point of contrary action. If they got into trouble on that account, the tribe would still stand up for them.

Now, back to Nock and Our Enemy, the State (1935).

Nock tells another story that may be familiar to some. Some say that the State originated with the early foundations of agriculture, when people started living in fixed villages. These villages were surrounded by nomadic hunter-gatherers who saw the plenty enjoyed by the villagers and took to raiding them. The usual story goes that in response, the villagers organized themselves into the State in order to defend themselves from the raiders. Nock offers a plausible alternative, that the raiders would demand tribute of the villagers to leave them alone for a time. After a few raids over time, the villagers took to gathering the tribute in advance, then when the raiders showed up, they would trundle the tribute out them. After more time, the raiders stopped showing up in force, they would send a handful of armed men to the village with a wagon to collect the tribute. These later became known as "tax collectors" and thus, the State was born.

Nock draws a sharp distinction between "government" and "the State". He says that when you have government, justice is available to all at little or no cost, but when you have the State, justice is available only at high cost and only to those who can afford it. He also says that the State, far from being a form of governance is only a mechanism for transferring wealth from one set of pockets to another, that it ahs never had any other purpose.

Albert Jay Nock is often characterized as an anarchist. I'm not sure how true this is, but that Depression era treatise of his sure made an impression on me.

If you are interested (or if anyone is for that matter), there is an e-text edition online here: http://mises.org/etexts/ourenemy.pdf

Never heard of it.

I'm fond of the tribal model. I can imagine it working a world where every sky-scraper is a self-contained village doing global trade.

I can't say though that I'm happy with the notion of a minority jeopardizing the entire tribe on a whim.
My preference would be that the elders were consulted first. If any minority view actions were severely or consistently out of line with the common wisdom, it's time to think about unwelcoming such members in the community. It's all still voluntary and non-punitive, but reasonable cooperation with the prevailing zeitgeist is also implied if you wish to stay and have your activity respected.

I can see his use of terms, but 'state' is also a useful term for indicating a collective body, apart from any government that body may have.

I expect the origin of toll roads was even more common, though makes the point less. If marauders actually maintained the roads, instead of just acting like a protectionist mob, that could have been a nice evolution.

It's really hard to say what the origin of taxes was. It's a good guess though that tribal communism with a church leader was the most typical origin.

Even your examples of marauders indicates a marauders union having formed.

I'm pretty sure sharing of resources as distances between members of a group became more distant and abstract is behind the origin of taxation, rather than the result of outside parties.

Collective wealth was the basis of early baronies, even if the governing barons had a somewhat master slave relationship going. Farming for a baron who had a grain reserve and army for tough times was still better than heading down the road alone.

> Even your examples of marauders indicates a marauders union having formed.

Perhaps I failed to make that quite clear. The point of the story was that it was the marauders who first formed the State, not the villagers organizing to protect themselves from the marauders.

Possible, but rather unlikely.

I doubt the relationship was much different than that of alley bandits today. They do network, but generally live in more competiton amongst each other than any community. It's that temperment which makes them outsiders in the first place, and I expect this was true five millienia ago as well.

I think we have 'church' to blame for 'state', even in it's most primitive origins. 'Authorities' are the key component to state control, and authorities were unlikely to evolve without widespread complicity, thus I blame 'church'.

I hope your author cites the pirate nation. It comes closest to the form of networked anarchy he wishes to explain. That may trace it's origins to the origins he describes. Pirates though have always been periphery to other cultures, and not primal causes.

It's worth noting that both pirates and natives were fluid and migratory, and that modes of anarchism are simply more suitable for their circumstance than bodies of government requiring persistence and centrally geographic stability; An anarchist government is composed of whom ever is present at any juncture, and involves no fixed hierarchical representatives.

Not me.

> An anarchist government is composed of whom ever is present at any juncture, and involves no fixed
> hierarchical representatives.

This would be similar to the time of the Judges in ancient Israel. This period lasted about three hundred years according to archaeologists. After this period, the people of Israel came to Samuel and demanded that he appoint a King over them so they could be like other nations around them. Samuel basically told them, "Well, okay, but you'll beee sooorrryyyyy..." After three hundred years of an anarchistic type government, they lasted as a united nation about three generations before civil war tore them apart into Israel in the north and Judea in the south, after which Israel was conquered and carried off into captivity.

The beginning of this tale can found in First Samuel, chapter 8.

The Israelites were relativively migratory as well.
The Roberts system of minutes lies half way between representational democracy and spur of the moment anarchistic decision making.

Are you a fan of anarchism? Do you think it could work for modern society?

> Are you a fan of anarchism? Do you think it could work for modern
> society?

I distrust all governments on principle. I prefer to act as an anarchist in my personal life. I am unsure whether or not anarchism is actually feasible in a modern society. I dislike coercion of all sorts. I am not a fan of prisons. I believe there are better ways of handling actual crimes such as theft, rape and murder than imprisoning humans liked animals in cages. In the case of rape and murder, I actually believe execution is more humane than imprisonment. I suspect most people disagree with me on that account though. Crimes such as theft, fraud and trespassing can be handled in other ways than imprisonment though, I am sure, without resorting to execution, which I believe should be reserved only for rape and murder.

George Washington once said, "Government is not Reason, it is not Eloquence; it is Force, and Force, like fire is a dangerous friend and a fearsome enemy." Oddly, Mao Tse-tung seemed to agree with Washington when he observed, "All power proceeds from the barrel of a gun."

I like Albert Jay Nock's distinction between the State and government. I would greatly prefer Nock's conception of government, which is the exercise of social power over the State, which is the exercise of political power, or coercion by force. Forced to a choice, I would probably agree that I would prefer Nock's conception of government over anarchy as well.

Perhaps not very concise, but that is the best I can explain my relation to anarchism. Make of it what you will.

I am a fan of some anarchists though such as Lysander Spooner, author of Vices Are Not Crimes and a nineteenth century anarchist who successfully operated a private postal service in competition with the US Postal Service for a while, until he over-reached himself and underbid the US Postal Service for the contract to carry mail from Washington, D.C. to New England.
This drew him to the attention of the Federal government and they shut down his operation.

I agree with the corruption and distrust even well intentions. On the other hand you've probably noticed I'm a bit of a systems engineer. If the planet could actually tightly cooperate we'd be capable of incredible things.

We lost a lot of efficiency when we lost the national socialism that made dams, rural electrification, and the space program possible. Quarterly return corporations can't produce such feats, and individuals certainly can't. We are at a point where we need to replace that stuff with similarly ambitious projects.

I share your thoughts on cooercian, which is why independent contractors were at the heart of my plan for socialism.

As to prisons, I believe in rehab. The worst punishment I might apply to sane criminals is to put them on an island with farm implements and such, such that their survival depended on combined effort of whatever form they might choose to devise.

I can't say I agree with your position on rape and murder for two reasons, for one, some life criminals create a productive life for themselves, and for two, I believe anyone who is not brain damaged can become a new good person, and should be a productive member of society based on who they are, not who they were. {telling who is who is the tricky part}.

I think the right to bear arms is obsolete. In a city there is no good reason for them to exist. If there were cause for a revolution today, we'd never know who to shoot, and the rebels wouldn't be shot, they'd be subject to a series of banking and utility errors which effectively shut them down without proof of intentional harm.

Government can be purely consentual and voluntary, and still be government.

I was never a fan of reward and punishment, and it played almost no part at all in raising my kids, at least not while I was married. My ex took to grounding my son as a teen later, apparently unaware that my philosophy had already sunk in, and that such external circumstances had no bearing on what he would do anyhow by that point.

I have plans to build up my business until I can provide services like energy and trains which I think the government should have been doing. My model is somewhat simple, the consumers are co-owners, and there are no outside investors or CEOs with profit motives, wages are equalized, although education expenses leading up to employment are reimbursed over years of employment.

Spooner appears at a glance to be more of a libertarian than an anarchist.

> Quarterly return corporations can't produce such feats, and individuals certainly can't.

Certainly individuals working by themselves can't, but you do need the gifted individuals to arrive at real breakthroughs in theory that make such feats possible. As far as quarterly return corporations are concerned, I believe this is more a matter of "they won't" rather than "they can't". The heads of corporations are necessarily conservative in nature, unwilling to take risks that won't pay off in the near future. I'm sure most of these corporate heads understand that research into almost anything does offer large returns, but the perceived time scale is too long for most of them.

> I believe anyone who is not brain damaged can become a new good person, and should be a productive member
> of society based on who they are, not who they were. {telling who is who is the tricky part}.

Perhaps I can go along with this notion to the extent that a person convicted of one rape or one murder could be let off with say a public lashing or something of that nature. After a repeat offense, I would say you've solved the tricky part of determining whether or not they could become a good person.

> I think the right to bear arms is obsolete. In a city there is no good reason for them to exist. If there
> were cause for a revolution today, we'd never know who to shoot, and the rebels wouldn't be shot, they'd be
> subject to a series of banking and utility errors which effectively shut them down without proof of
> intentional harm.

You probably will not be surprised if I disagree here. My thoughts are that the right of the individual to keep and bear arms is exactly equivalent to the right of the cobra or the black widow to possess deadly venom and fangs. The State can effectively hinder the ability of individuals to purchase certain types of arms, certainly. They can't prevent it though. Anyone of normal intelligence and a modicum of skill can fashion deadly weapons from a variety of materials near to hand. You can't deny a man a stick when he lives in the woods, and the quarterstaff has proven to be quite an effective deadly weapon throughout recorded history. That is only one example. Far deadlier weapons are readily available to anyone who cares to research explosives and such, and motor oil and fertilizer aren't the only commonly available materials from which they can be synthesized.

> Spooner appears at a glance to be more of a libertarian than an anarchist.

The modern Libertarian Party takes much of their philosophy from Spooner's works. However, he was a self-described anarchist. Vices Are Not Crimes was not his only work either, merely one of my favorites. Other of his works are doubtless freely available online.

Someone like GE might be able to make a dam or Amtrak, but rounding up a nation of defense contractors would make it more probable.

The repeat offense thing occurred to me, but considering the risks, that only indicates who doesn't get out again, not who gets out for a chance at a rehabiltated life in the first place.

I don't like guns because people can shoot them faster than they can even contemplate without a chance to retract. I also consider "I will kill someone 'IF'" to still be a form of pre-meditated murder even in self defense. I'm not too keen on cobras or black widows either.

I have this plan for global disarmament in which all electrical, chemical, and incendiary weapons are banned worldwide except the UN which may carry non-automatic guns who's manufacture is tightly controlled and use allowed only to disarm illegal weapon owners/manufacturers. Use all the sattelites and surveillance drones in any country you please though. I figure the defense industry can keep itself busy with multi-billion dollar contracts for intercontinental trebuchets, glass shard sling-shots, and such. Also, for the 2nd ammendment revolutionary defense crowd, this evens up the score when citizens can make bows and arrows nearly as effective as government cross-bows.

I'm not too happy with today's drones either. I figure if a cause is worth fighting for, people should at least put themselves up at risk.

It dawned on me last night that ironically the one time I was in handcuffs was on Independence Day for watching a neighbor's fireworks.

I think anarchy could only work in a group with a specific type of people. Ethical and co-operative, with similar standards. Any deviation would just muck things up.

*raises hand*

If this isn't it, I'd be interested in the real deal.

Anarchists