RE: Authoritarian Sociopathy: Toward a Renegade Psychological Experiment, Part 4
This is pretty good. I like Davi Barker's ideas. Personally, I'm not an AnCap though.
I keep thinking of how this all relates to the interplay of power, violence, and ignorance. In "Beyond Power/Knowledge," David Graeber made the case that power leads to ignorance, since people in positions of power can make executive decisions without establishing consensus, etc. I think F. A. Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society" ties into that too, if you want to follow that rabbit hole in a different direction.
Anyways, I would raise the objection that wealth is power. I know that Davi's point seems to be that questioning the legitimacy of power may be a big help to solve the problem, but we also need to eliminate positions of power when they aren't absolutely necessary. Employers are in a position of power over their employees. People with lots of wealth have a relatively large amount of power over people that are poor. And the ideology of capitalism (even "anarcho-capitalism") legitimizes wealth, which legitimizes power from wealth. It seems that capitalism, then, would cause negative power relations and legitimize them in a way that would have negative social consequences. It seems to me like the question of distributive justice needs to be brought into the equation.
"The power which a multiple millionaire, who may be my neighbor and perhaps my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest functionary possesses who wields the coercive power of the state, and on whose discretion it depends whether and how I am to be allowed to live or to work."
-Friedrich von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
Wealth alone does not create power. Wealth is neutral. Megacorporations and billionaires rely on government coercion to gain and retain wealth.
Concentrated wealth is power. If I go to court (have a lawsuit) against my neighbor for a legitimate thing that he did wrong, and he has billions of dollars at his disposal and I have only a couple thousand, then he has an unfair advantage, which virtually guarantees that there will be no justice. This holds equally true if there is a system of private courts instead of government courts.
As long as there are people with large amounts of wealth, they will create governments in order to protect their privileges. Governments are largely just a mechanism of control used by the economic elite. Even if we abolish the State...as long as billionaires have large amounts of money at their disposal, they will hire our private armies and private police to create another State to protect their privilege and rank within society. It is in the best interest of the wealthy to have a corporatist State that does their bidding for them; and as long as they have trillions at their disposal, they can afford to use their money to create a new State; and they will create a new State because it is in their own interest, since the wealthy get wealthy and stay wealthy because of artificial property rights (especially intellectual property), government subsidies of all sorts, etc.
In order to have a truly free society, I think we need to eliminate concentrations of wealth. Plus, I think most uber-wealthy people became wealthy by exploiting others, using government-granted monopolies/privileges, etc. Without government-backed intellectual property monopolies, people like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs would never have become quite so rich. Without the government stealing land from the people (enclosure of the commons) and giving it to privileged landlords, the primitive accumulation of capital would never have taken place. We can’t have equality of opportunity in a world where 6 people hoard 50% of the wealth, especially since those individuals did not come by that wealth honestly. None of them would be anywhere near where they are today if not for government-granted privileges. Granted that the current concentration of wealth into the hands of the few was the result of theft, fraud, and illegitimate monopolies, I think market-anarchists should really consider the possibility that a massive redistribution of wealth might be necessary for the creation of a just and equitable free-market economy. Something like distributism, transitioning into minarchism, then market-anarchism makes more sense than the standard AnCap proposals IMO. That used to be the position that I held at least, but I currently advocate something somewhere between libertarian socialism and social democracy.
Under government, concentration of wealth is protected when gained through plunder, and plundered when gained through production. Under government, a monopoly court system guarantees injustice every day as non-crimes are punished severely and real crimes ate "legalized." Under government, a wealthy oligarchy is established to lord over us.
In a free economy, wealth can only be held securely through serving others in voluntary exchanges for mutual benefit, and a judge would need to demonstrate impartiality in order to be acceptable as a dispute resolution agent. A corrupt judge and security agency would be liable directly for the harm they inflict, instead of being protected by government "law."