The force that will keep you from monopolizing natural resources is whatever force society pays to do so, just like in your scenario. Here's the quick rundown of the logic. Land starts out useable by all. You don't own any land to start with, therefore mixing your labor with it is stealing from everyone. If you use force to try to keep the land you stole, that's initiation of force and we are justified in using force to take it back. If you want to mix labor with land and have some say over it, you need permission from the people you are taking it from.
I really don't see how you can postulate a capitalist enforcement system and not acknowledge the legitimacy of a socialist enforcement system. Non-local force? Where do you even get that idea? It certainly isn't inherant in anything I've written.
I also don't see how you will get the majority of people to go along with a system that screws them. If justice is not equally accessible to all, it isn't just.
I find myself becoming frustrated when you, as many anarcho capitalist types do, throw out years of economic science and state that economics works the way you say it should without any kind of science or research to back it up. The points I raised are acknowledged as real failures of the free market by the vast majority of economists. I know, appeal to authority, so let me explain.
Natural monopolies, lemons (and other cases of imblanace of information) and externalities represent an inefficiency in the market. By efficiency, I mean Pareto Efficiency. The fact that you don't understand what I'm getting at implies that you have little training in economics and base your economic ideas on things you've heard from one source: other anarcho-capitalists. Sorry, but that information is flawed. It is not based on science and research, but on the way certain people wish the world worked. You have no evidence to back up your position, I have years of economic science to back up mine. Tossing out a whole field of scientific endeavor is tinfoil-hat territory.
Hoppe doesn't address the major issue, that stealing land from others does not give you the right to mingle your labor with it in the first place.
Wealth is also power. Power to generate further wealth, and power to change the rules by which wealth is generated and societies are run. It's a positive feedback loop with no governor. I'm simply dumbfounded that you cannot see how wealth will concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. Do you not notice what's going on in the world? Or do you, like so many libertarian types, believe that is due to interference in the free market rather than a failure of the free market itself? If so, consider that the interference comes from power and wealth generated by the free market.
I'm getting the impression that you are some kind of social darwinist, that you think everyone should have the right to screw over everyone else. I think society's main purpose is to keep people from screwing over others. I am my brother's keeper. We inherited this world and all our knowledge of it from society. We owe society an incalculable debt for that. In addition, we are not permanent owners of anything, mortality ebing what it is, so we have a responsiblity to those who will come after. I think anarcho-capitalists see every individual as an island, capable of action without impact.Frankly, I find that disgusting and anti social and see no reason why that way of thinking should be supported, Thankfully, most of the world agrees with me.
They said I was daft to build a lunar rocket in a swamp, but I built it all the same... just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So I built a another one... that sank into the swamp. I built another one... that fell over and THEN sank into the swamp. So I built another... and that stayed up. And that's what your gonna get, lad: the most powerful rocket on this island!
Are we? I thought that digesting cellulose was the whole reason critters such as ungulates have a plethora of stomachs and huge long digestive tracts. Sure, ungulates make up the largest order of land animals, but there are plenty of critters that, AFAIK, can't digest cellulose. Birds. Never seen a bird munching grass. Other primates. Monkeys. Pretty much any carnivore (yeah, dogs eat grass sometimes, but only as a laxative). Um, tree sloths, and, uh, aardvarks and racoons. Fish! Okay, fish eat plants, but do water plants generally contain cellulose? I'm going to pull an answer out of my ass: no, because water plants are generally primitive plants and only higher plants produce cellulose. Bugs. What, you say? What of termites? Haha! Termites rely on a symbiotic protozoan to do their cellulose digesting for them, and if termites, the most famous devourer of wood on the planet can't digest it on their own, what hope do other bugs have?
I could go on, but I think I've hit the bullseye with that last one, and the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!
The means of produciotn must either be managed collectively
Who is going to enforce this?
The same people that would enforce private property. That is, whoever the people collectively decide will enforce it. The same people who enforce the prohibition against murder, for instance.
Next question, same answer.
Final question, same answer.
Conversely, what natural force would keep me and my posse from simply ignoring your unilateral decision that you own a certain natural resource?
I feel like I must be missing something here, this does not seem that complicated or hard to understand. Perhaps I haven't managed to discern what your real objections are? In any case, the dialectic is, as always, immensely interesting to me because I feel that arriving at the best possible answer to these questions is a very important goal.
Let me ask you a few questions. First, in your anarcho-capitalist world, how do you deal with the three major breakdowns of the free market: natural monopolies, imbalance of information, and externalities? Second, how do you keep wealth from concentrating into fewer and fewer hands, leading to an eventual dictatorship of the owning class over everyone else? Third, how do you fairly address the "original sin" of primitive accumulation? Fourth, what system of justice do you envision, is it equally available to the haves and have-nots, and who carries out the enforcement of decisions?
I've got a whole long list of questions, but I think that's enough for now.
You are misinformed about the anarcho-syndicalist stance on private property. Personal property, those things that are created through labor, can be owned. Things that can't be created through labor, such as land and natural resources, cannot. You are also misinformed about human motivation. Most people are more motivated by the ideal of justice and reciprocity than by selfish gain. At least according to recent experiments in economics. Google "economic research reciprocity fairness" if you want to find out more.
The means of produciotn must either be managed collectively or limits must be placed on the amount that any one person can own. Otherwise, ownership will concentrate into fewer and fewer hands until one ends up with a dictatorship of the owners. Can you honestly claim your system would work if we switched today, without redistributing wealth?
You assume that envy is a basic human emotion, yet it is not one of the five universally recognizable human emotions. I would say that it is a learned emotion, not a natural one. In the polyamory community, we use the term cathexis (perhaps incorrectly, at least by Freud's definition) to mean the opposite of jealousy or envy. It is the good feeling that one gets when someone that one cares about is happy and secure. I would say this feeling (whatever the correct term) is more natural than envy.
In fact, your whole philosophy seems based on unnatural conditions. This constitutes a feedback loop, where your (and many other people's) beliefs actually serve to create and reinforce the conditions that are believed to be natural, but in fact are highly disfunctional.
Starting with false assumptions leads to false conclusions. Your false assumptions about human motivations and happiness can easily be traced to a self serving desire to justify a system that has worked for you. By blaming the people whom the system has failed instead of the system itself, you absolve yourself of any feelings of guilt and justify your own unfair advantage within the system. This is so illogical, hypocritical and self serving it makes my whole being hurt. See? Two can play at that game.
Backing away from the insulting and condescending language, I can see you are a person who honestly desires what's best for humanity. So do I. That doesn't make me any kind of saint. I just like being around happy humans, and desperate humans scare me. I want a world where as many humans as possible are happy, and as few as possible are desperate. I want that for entirely selfish reasons.
We just differ on the details. I can honestly say I have looked at your position and reject it not based on rigid dogma, but my own best thinking. Still, I could be wrong, and if that can be shown to my satisfaction, I will change my beliefs in a heartbeat. I've done it before and I'm sure I'll do it again. But claiming my ideas are "so illogical it makes your brain hurt" does not help win me over to your position.
That's a very interesting take on the topic. I had always considered humans to be generalists, but you make a strong point. I don't think we have quite all our eggs in one basket, though. I can think of two other outstanding human traits. First, we have incredible endurance. Only canines really come close. We can't outrun prey in the short term, but we can run it to ground over the course of hours. When we finally catch up, it's because the beastie can't run anymore, and likely can't fight as well as it could have if we'd outrun it quickly. Few other land animals have our stamina. The other outstanding trait is our digestion. We have one of the most adaptable digestive systems on the planet.
Both these traits are generalist traist. So I think the picture is a bit more complicated, but the sheer amount of calories we pump daily into running our massive brains does make a good case for our being "intelligence specialists"
Come on, it's called "Intelligent" design, not "Frickin' Genius" design. The guy had like six days in which to do it all, of course he had to cut corners. What, do you think he's omniscient and omnipotent or something?
My criteria for "better" is the ability to set criteria for "better." Therefore I'm better than a bacteria. But maybe the bacteria have better criteria.
Sad but true. At least for America. But look at the Mondragon Collective in Spain for an example of (IMHO) a good mix of private property, free enterprise, and collectivism. I mean, a 90% success rate for new businesses after 5 years is none too shabby. It kinda proves the old African saying, "Only free individuals can create a strong tribe. Only a strong tribe can create free individuals." Thus showing that individualism vs. collectivism is a false dichotomy.
It sounds as if the author is trying to invent a reason why free software won't be free. If Linux is relegated to the embedded market, it's not really free anymore. Oh sure, you can download the open source part, but if you don't have the hardware or the bundled commercial app, it won't do much for you. He doesbn't like the idea of free software, probably feels too damn commie to him, so he invents a fantasy in which it is relegated to a role where it isn't free, and the fat happy capitalists get to make money off of it, as God intended the fat happy capitalists make money off of everything.
Every time I drive over a bridge, fly in a plane, use an elevator, or anything else designed by engineers (damn near everything in our modern world) I'm going to remember what you posted, and feel a little safer. Ok, maybe not every time, but cheers anyway. As someone who has not yet died in an engineering disaster, thanks for taking your job so seriously.
I agree that personal property should be protected. Natural resources should be allocated democratically. But no one should steal the fruits of another's labor. Socialist anarchists such as myself believe as you do, that we should agree to share. But we also feel it is our right to deny the benefits of living in our society to those who don't want to share. I'm sure you will agree that this is not force or coercion.
You have no right to own things. You have the ability to take them and keep them by force, and you have the ability to convince others to do likewise. You have no natural rights at all, except for the right to do whatever it is in your power to do. Rights are derived from social contract. You agree to uphold a right for others because they agree to uphold that right for you. Rights are simply a special case of contract law.
So you cannot falsely argue from authority, and claim that the rights you would like upheld are "natural" and all others somehow less authentic. Rights must be justified in terms of benefit to the individual, not in terms of some arbitrary authority such as nature or God. I argue that the right to own natural resources cannot be justified to all individuals, because some will always be born with less. How do you convince those people that they should accept your arbitrary definition of rights when that definition deprives them of something they would have had, if only you, the owner, weren't around? They get nothing in return for giving up the right to go someplace and use some resource without someone using violence to keep them off. Only other property holders get something from this arrangement.
I agree with your claim that things produced can fairly be owned. But what gives you the right to own land or resources? You did not produce them, and anything you build on them you do without a fair rational for your ownership of them. If I build a house on someone else's property, is the house rightly mine? If not, then how can you justify ownership of land simply through putting labor into it? You didn't own it before you put the labor into it.
Libertarians are late comers to the anarchist game, they don't get to claim the whole of anarchist thought and philosophy as their own. Read some Proudhon if you care to investigate the line of thought I present here. He said property is theft, but he also said "the laborer retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right of property in the thing which he has produced."
Yes, false. And glib. Meant to illustrate a point made later. Would you care to argue the point that anarchists can, in fact, have a system of organization that is in some ways similar to government, and still fairly call themselves anarchists? Because that is the point I was trying to make.
It's not imposed if everyone agrees to it. And I said wikipedia was a good place to start, not the final definition. I'm just trying to state what I and other anarchists believe the word to mean. You can believe it means angel food cake if you like, but we'll keep on using as we have been for the last 150 years.
God damn it! Here I was, perfectly happy to wring my hands and moan about how nothing can be done, and you have to go and ruin it. Now I'm going to feel guilty if I don't do something! Why can't you do-gooders just shut the hell up and leave me to fuck up the planet in peace?/sarcasm
Arizona doesn't have DST, but the Navajo reservation in the northeast corner does. And inside the reservation, you'll find another reservation (Apache? Zuni? can't remember) that does. On one stretch of road, in about 150 miles you can go !DST(AZ)->DST(Navajo)->!DST(Apache?)->DST(Navajo)- >!DST(AZ). Have fun setting your clocks!
Yes, but none of that benefits me directly, right now. Therefore it is all hippy hogwash and I'm going to keep burning baby-seal-fat lanterns for my illumination./sarcasm
You have a very limited understanding of anarchism, but one that is sadly all too common. Anarchism isn't about no government, it's about no rulers. The wikipedia article is a fine place to start if you'd like to learn more about what anarchism really means.
Any sufficiently organized community is indistinguishable from government. You'll find most flavors of anarchism outside the safety-pin-through-the-nose-circle-A-street-punk variety actually advocate for a sufficiently organized community.
Anarchism comes in two basic flavors, for convenience I call them right wing and left. It all boils down to how property is treated. Libertarianism could more accurately be called propertarianism, espousing as it does very strong protection for property. Socialist anarchists (like anarcho syndicalists, for instance) believe in Proudhon's saying, "property is theft." They believe that natural resources and real property should be managed through collective, not individual ownership.
I call Libertarians right wing because it seems as though they value property rights over human rights. Before there were fences, anyone could go anywhere and use any resource. What gives one person the right to exclude all others from using that property? Is it because they have "mingled their work" with the property? Well, what gave them the right to mingle in the first place?
Propertarians bring up the tragedy of the commons, which is an unfair example because it compares managed private ownership with unmanaged collective ownership. A collective could excercise just as much responsibility as an individual, and it could even be done democratically.
In contrast, protection of real property (as opposed to personal property. I do believe in that, I'm not a communist!) requires initiation of force. You want to see sophistry in action, try to get a Libertarian to define initiation of force. You'll find it boils down to "any use of force I don't like."
Propertarians also hold the view that there is a mutual contract between property owners. You protect my right to private property, I'll protect yours. This does not address the vast majority of people who aren't a party to that contract because they own no real property. What compensation are they getting as recompense for having their rights abridged?
As for personal responsibility, that is common sense and just as many hippy leftists believe in that as do libertarians and right wingers. The right wingers and libertarians just like to claim they have a monopoly on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The force that will keep you from monopolizing natural resources is whatever force society pays to do so, just like in your scenario. Here's the quick rundown of the logic. Land starts out useable by all. You don't own any land to start with, therefore mixing your labor with it is stealing from everyone. If you use force to try to keep the land you stole, that's initiation of force and we are justified in using force to take it back. If you want to mix labor with land and have some say over it, you need permission from the people you are taking it from.
I really don't see how you can postulate a capitalist enforcement system and not acknowledge the legitimacy of a socialist enforcement system. Non-local force? Where do you even get that idea? It certainly isn't inherant in anything I've written.
I also don't see how you will get the majority of people to go along with a system that screws them. If justice is not equally accessible to all, it isn't just.
I find myself becoming frustrated when you, as many anarcho capitalist types do, throw out years of economic science and state that economics works the way you say it should without any kind of science or research to back it up. The points I raised are acknowledged as real failures of the free market by the vast majority of economists. I know, appeal to authority, so let me explain.
Natural monopolies, lemons (and other cases of imblanace of information) and externalities represent an inefficiency in the market. By efficiency, I mean Pareto Efficiency. The fact that you don't understand what I'm getting at implies that you have little training in economics and base your economic ideas on things you've heard from one source: other anarcho-capitalists. Sorry, but that information is flawed. It is not based on science and research, but on the way certain people wish the world worked. You have no evidence to back up your position, I have years of economic science to back up mine. Tossing out a whole field of scientific endeavor is tinfoil-hat territory.
Hoppe doesn't address the major issue, that stealing land from others does not give you the right to mingle your labor with it in the first place.
Wealth is also power. Power to generate further wealth, and power to change the rules by which wealth is generated and societies are run. It's a positive feedback loop with no governor. I'm simply dumbfounded that you cannot see how wealth will concentrate in fewer and fewer hands. Do you not notice what's going on in the world? Or do you, like so many libertarian types, believe that is due to interference in the free market rather than a failure of the free market itself? If so, consider that the interference comes from power and wealth generated by the free market.
I'm getting the impression that you are some kind of social darwinist, that you think everyone should have the right to screw over everyone else. I think society's main purpose is to keep people from screwing over others. I am my brother's keeper. We inherited this world and all our knowledge of it from society. We owe society an incalculable debt for that. In addition, we are not permanent owners of anything, mortality ebing what it is, so we have a responsiblity to those who will come after. I think anarcho-capitalists see every individual as an island, capable of action without impact.Frankly, I find that disgusting and anti social and see no reason why that way of thinking should be supported, Thankfully, most of the world agrees with me.
Let's just be glad he got this idea out of his head before he made women.
They said I was daft to build a lunar rocket in a swamp, but I built it all the same... just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So I built a another one... that sank into the swamp. I built another one... that fell over and THEN sank into the swamp. So I built another... and that stayed up. And that's what your gonna get, lad: the most powerful rocket on this island!
Are we? I thought that digesting cellulose was the whole reason critters such as ungulates have a plethora of stomachs and huge long digestive tracts. Sure, ungulates make up the largest order of land animals, but there are plenty of critters that, AFAIK, can't digest cellulose. Birds. Never seen a bird munching grass. Other primates. Monkeys. Pretty much any carnivore (yeah, dogs eat grass sometimes, but only as a laxative). Um, tree sloths, and, uh, aardvarks and racoons. Fish! Okay, fish eat plants, but do water plants generally contain cellulose? I'm going to pull an answer out of my ass: no, because water plants are generally primitive plants and only higher plants produce cellulose. Bugs. What, you say? What of termites? Haha! Termites rely on a symbiotic protozoan to do their cellulose digesting for them, and if termites, the most famous devourer of wood on the planet can't digest it on their own, what hope do other bugs have?
I could go on, but I think I've hit the bullseye with that last one, and the rest of the dominoes will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!
because before viewing the violent porn, this guy was obviously a choir boy...
Aha! I knew it. He was a choir boy! Obviously, being a choir boy leads to becoming a violent murderer. We need to abolish choir boys!
The same people that would enforce private property. That is, whoever the people collectively decide will enforce it. The same people who enforce the prohibition against murder, for instance.
Next question, same answer.
Final question, same answer.
Conversely, what natural force would keep me and my posse from simply ignoring your unilateral decision that you own a certain natural resource?
I feel like I must be missing something here, this does not seem that complicated or hard to understand. Perhaps I haven't managed to discern what your real objections are? In any case, the dialectic is, as always, immensely interesting to me because I feel that arriving at the best possible answer to these questions is a very important goal.
Let me ask you a few questions. First, in your anarcho-capitalist world, how do you deal with the three major breakdowns of the free market: natural monopolies, imbalance of information, and externalities? Second, how do you keep wealth from concentrating into fewer and fewer hands, leading to an eventual dictatorship of the owning class over everyone else? Third, how do you fairly address the "original sin" of primitive accumulation? Fourth, what system of justice do you envision, is it equally available to the haves and have-nots, and who carries out the enforcement of decisions?
I've got a whole long list of questions, but I think that's enough for now.
You are misinformed about the anarcho-syndicalist stance on private property. Personal property, those things that are created through labor, can be owned. Things that can't be created through labor, such as land and natural resources, cannot. You are also misinformed about human motivation. Most people are more motivated by the ideal of justice and reciprocity than by selfish gain. At least according to recent experiments in economics. Google "economic research reciprocity fairness" if you want to find out more.
The means of produciotn must either be managed collectively or limits must be placed on the amount that any one person can own. Otherwise, ownership will concentrate into fewer and fewer hands until one ends up with a dictatorship of the owners. Can you honestly claim your system would work if we switched today, without redistributing wealth?
You assume that envy is a basic human emotion, yet it is not one of the five universally recognizable human emotions. I would say that it is a learned emotion, not a natural one. In the polyamory community, we use the term cathexis (perhaps incorrectly, at least by Freud's definition) to mean the opposite of jealousy or envy. It is the good feeling that one gets when someone that one cares about is happy and secure. I would say this feeling (whatever the correct term) is more natural than envy.
In fact, your whole philosophy seems based on unnatural conditions. This constitutes a feedback loop, where your (and many other people's) beliefs actually serve to create and reinforce the conditions that are believed to be natural, but in fact are highly disfunctional.
Starting with false assumptions leads to false conclusions. Your false assumptions about human motivations and happiness can easily be traced to a self serving desire to justify a system that has worked for you. By blaming the people whom the system has failed instead of the system itself, you absolve yourself of any feelings of guilt and justify your own unfair advantage within the system. This is so illogical, hypocritical and self serving it makes my whole being hurt. See? Two can play at that game.
Backing away from the insulting and condescending language, I can see you are a person who honestly desires what's best for humanity. So do I. That doesn't make me any kind of saint. I just like being around happy humans, and desperate humans scare me. I want a world where as many humans as possible are happy, and as few as possible are desperate. I want that for entirely selfish reasons.
We just differ on the details. I can honestly say I have looked at your position and reject it not based on rigid dogma, but my own best thinking. Still, I could be wrong, and if that can be shown to my satisfaction, I will change my beliefs in a heartbeat. I've done it before and I'm sure I'll do it again. But claiming my ideas are "so illogical it makes your brain hurt" does not help win me over to your position.
That's a very interesting take on the topic. I had always considered humans to be generalists, but you make a strong point. I don't think we have quite all our eggs in one basket, though. I can think of two other outstanding human traits. First, we have incredible endurance. Only canines really come close. We can't outrun prey in the short term, but we can run it to ground over the course of hours. When we finally catch up, it's because the beastie can't run anymore, and likely can't fight as well as it could have if we'd outrun it quickly. Few other land animals have our stamina. The other outstanding trait is our digestion. We have one of the most adaptable digestive systems on the planet.
Both these traits are generalist traist. So I think the picture is a bit more complicated, but the sheer amount of calories we pump daily into running our massive brains does make a good case for our being "intelligence specialists"
Come on, it's called "Intelligent" design, not "Frickin' Genius" design. The guy had like six days in which to do it all, of course he had to cut corners. What, do you think he's omniscient and omnipotent or something?
My criteria for "better" is the ability to set criteria for "better." Therefore I'm better than a bacteria. But maybe the bacteria have better criteria.
Sad but true. At least for America. But look at the Mondragon Collective in Spain for an example of (IMHO) a good mix of private property, free enterprise, and collectivism. I mean, a 90% success rate for new businesses after 5 years is none too shabby. It kinda proves the old African saying, "Only free individuals can create a strong tribe. Only a strong tribe can create free individuals." Thus showing that individualism vs. collectivism is a false dichotomy.
It sounds as if the author is trying to invent a reason why free software won't be free. If Linux is relegated to the embedded market, it's not really free anymore. Oh sure, you can download the open source part, but if you don't have the hardware or the bundled commercial app, it won't do much for you. He doesbn't like the idea of free software, probably feels too damn commie to him, so he invents a fantasy in which it is relegated to a role where it isn't free, and the fat happy capitalists get to make money off of it, as God intended the fat happy capitalists make money off of everything.
We anarcho-syndicalists want things voluntary, too. That's so like you anarcho-capitalists. You want to own all the best ideas for yourselves. :P
Every time I drive over a bridge, fly in a plane, use an elevator, or anything else designed by engineers (damn near everything in our modern world) I'm going to remember what you posted, and feel a little safer. Ok, maybe not every time, but cheers anyway. As someone who has not yet died in an engineering disaster, thanks for taking your job so seriously.
I agree that personal property should be protected. Natural resources should be allocated democratically. But no one should steal the fruits of another's labor. Socialist anarchists such as myself believe as you do, that we should agree to share. But we also feel it is our right to deny the benefits of living in our society to those who don't want to share. I'm sure you will agree that this is not force or coercion.
You have no right to own things. You have the ability to take them and keep them by force, and you have the ability to convince others to do likewise. You have no natural rights at all, except for the right to do whatever it is in your power to do. Rights are derived from social contract. You agree to uphold a right for others because they agree to uphold that right for you. Rights are simply a special case of contract law.
So you cannot falsely argue from authority, and claim that the rights you would like upheld are "natural" and all others somehow less authentic. Rights must be justified in terms of benefit to the individual, not in terms of some arbitrary authority such as nature or God. I argue that the right to own natural resources cannot be justified to all individuals, because some will always be born with less. How do you convince those people that they should accept your arbitrary definition of rights when that definition deprives them of something they would have had, if only you, the owner, weren't around? They get nothing in return for giving up the right to go someplace and use some resource without someone using violence to keep them off. Only other property holders get something from this arrangement.
I agree with your claim that things produced can fairly be owned. But what gives you the right to own land or resources? You did not produce them, and anything you build on them you do without a fair rational for your ownership of them. If I build a house on someone else's property, is the house rightly mine? If not, then how can you justify ownership of land simply through putting labor into it? You didn't own it before you put the labor into it.
Libertarians are late comers to the anarchist game, they don't get to claim the whole of anarchist thought and philosophy as their own. Read some Proudhon if you care to investigate the line of thought I present here. He said property is theft, but he also said "the laborer retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right of property in the thing which he has produced."
Yes, false. And glib. Meant to illustrate a point made later. Would you care to argue the point that anarchists can, in fact, have a system of organization that is in some ways similar to government, and still fairly call themselves anarchists? Because that is the point I was trying to make.
Having seen it in action, I can say this is not how it works. You must be thinking of libertarians.
It's not imposed if everyone agrees to it. And I said wikipedia was a good place to start, not the final definition. I'm just trying to state what I and other anarchists believe the word to mean. You can believe it means angel food cake if you like, but we'll keep on using as we have been for the last 150 years.
God damn it! Here I was, perfectly happy to wring my hands and moan about how nothing can be done, and you have to go and ruin it. Now I'm going to feel guilty if I don't do something! Why can't you do-gooders just shut the hell up and leave me to fuck up the planet in peace? /sarcasm
He may have been a jerk to you, but he has a point. Heat rises. Is it really efficient to have your heater near the ceiling?
Arizona doesn't have DST, but the Navajo reservation in the northeast corner does. And inside the reservation, you'll find another reservation (Apache? Zuni? can't remember) that does. On one stretch of road, in about 150 miles you can go !DST(AZ)->DST(Navajo)->!DST(Apache?)->DST(Navajo)- >!DST(AZ). Have fun setting your clocks!
Yes, but none of that benefits me directly, right now. Therefore it is all hippy hogwash and I'm going to keep burning baby-seal-fat lanterns for my illumination. /sarcasm
You have a very limited understanding of anarchism, but one that is sadly all too common. Anarchism isn't about no government, it's about no rulers. The wikipedia article is a fine place to start if you'd like to learn more about what anarchism really means.
Any sufficiently organized community is indistinguishable from government. You'll find most flavors of anarchism outside the safety-pin-through-the-nose-circle-A-street-punk variety actually advocate for a sufficiently organized community.
Anarchism comes in two basic flavors, for convenience I call them right wing and left. It all boils down to how property is treated. Libertarianism could more accurately be called propertarianism, espousing as it does very strong protection for property. Socialist anarchists (like anarcho syndicalists, for instance) believe in Proudhon's saying, "property is theft." They believe that natural resources and real property should be managed through collective, not individual ownership.
I call Libertarians right wing because it seems as though they value property rights over human rights. Before there were fences, anyone could go anywhere and use any resource. What gives one person the right to exclude all others from using that property? Is it because they have "mingled their work" with the property? Well, what gave them the right to mingle in the first place?
Propertarians bring up the tragedy of the commons, which is an unfair example because it compares managed private ownership with unmanaged collective ownership. A collective could excercise just as much responsibility as an individual, and it could even be done democratically.
In contrast, protection of real property (as opposed to personal property. I do believe in that, I'm not a communist!) requires initiation of force. You want to see sophistry in action, try to get a Libertarian to define initiation of force. You'll find it boils down to "any use of force I don't like."
Propertarians also hold the view that there is a mutual contract between property owners. You protect my right to private property, I'll protect yours. This does not address the vast majority of people who aren't a party to that contract because they own no real property. What compensation are they getting as recompense for having their rights abridged?
As for personal responsibility, that is common sense and just as many hippy leftists believe in that as do libertarians and right wingers. The right wingers and libertarians just like to claim they have a monopoly on it.