Control by "government"

I absolutely believe in free economies. The thousands of years in which we rejected personal freedom so that our economy could be controlled by a centrally administered set of rules have been an abject failure - time and time again, we witnessed central management of economies turn into totalitarianism, in one form or another, whether the empires of the past, or the empire of today.

And I will draw a line between a "free economy" or "free market" - an economy not controlled by a "government" - and "capitalism", in which the greedy few can control the many in systems of production akin to modern "corporations".

It is an absolute fact that good reason and common sense should enjoy absolute precedence over violence and threats as the means to keep human behavior in line, and it is extremely difficult to imagine a single scenario in which violence is preferable to discussion. This alone is a basic consequence of understanding human rights - we deserve to be treated as logical, thinking creatures, not as irrational things that need controlling. I wouldn't even stoop so low as to describe animals as irrational. If the machinery of society treats humans as irrational monsters, that is what they'll become.

Attempts at promoting state "regulation" of the economy are easily dismissed in a single sentence - they propose that the greedy and irresponsible outliers should be kept in line by simply investing the power to issue mandates over an entire society into a few hundred people - the idea is that dangerous individual control should be replaced by a tiny group of people controlling everyone!

This idiotic abdication of responsibility, in which 300 million of us give up control to a few hundred, has created or worsened nearly every problem we experience as a society, from widespread pollution, poverty, endless war, cancer, and heart disease, to the idiotic social issues we constantly debate, where we question if the government should ban a variety of victimless crimes, such as gay marriage or cannabis usage. We find ourselves debating why we are prohibited from doing things we want to do, and why our money is spent on things we don't want, while it's not spent on things we want. We find ourselves at the point where the "government" is passing laws about our eating habits, and where we cannot properly manage for ourselves what enters our mouths and what doesn't. You don't have to be a psychologist to recognize this as a severe dependence relationship - where we would naturally be responsible for our own existence, we simply expect others to manage it for us. We now seriously find ourselves debating the idea of drone airplanes being used to surveil citizens, as if that idea wasn't so psychotic that it would be grounds for a preschool teacher to call someone's parents over it.

But the errors in thinking go even deeper.

What's mine and what's yours

One of the strongest economic beliefs of all time is that any economic system not designed for equal provision of wealth to its participants, and the equal distribution of responsibility to those best suited to perform it, can only result in an unfair and inequal distribution of the same. This idea came in many forms, but notably was championed by Karl Marx as his "From each according to his ability..." principle - by itself, a rare example of a great truth he annunciated.

Equality, sustainability, and prosperity - the meeting of human economic needs - are roughly the best measures of success for any economic system, and were achieved thousands of years before us - so why do we fail to achieve them today? Obviously, because our society isn't designed to achieve them. There is only one other way to explain the way our society is designed - greed. Ignorance doesn't even come close to describing it by itself - in terms of economics, ignorance is a perfectly paved road for greed to travel on.

In terms of the modern monstrosity of state-managed "capitalism", this error takes the form of the belief that, since communal systems will supposedly inevitably fail as a result of lack of individual contributions, and excess of individual takings, that accordingly, we must provision ownership of everything that could conceivably be owned into individuals, with no regard for anything but whether or not the law recognizes it as their property - whether a result of "free trade" (so often rigged by the state), or taxation or eminent domain seizure.

The error in this thinking is extreme. the fallacy is that, since greed prevents us from sharing, we must permit greed to grow into its most extreme forms. a young child can see through this monstrous error in logic.*

So, having already debunked the idea of "state-managed economies", we now look to anarchism, and the obvious schism in modern anarchism - the schism between "anarchosyndicalists" and "anarchocapitalists".

How to be fair

The position of more insightful "anarchocapitalists", although misaligned to the contrary, surprisingly takes the last error into consideration at times, and thus emerges with a remarkable similarity to the position of "anarchosyndicalists" - that the benefits of production and control of production must be provisioned to the workers. Such "anarchocapitalists" believe that this is a logical consequence of a truly free market with unrestrained union activity, or of a moral society in general, while the "anarchosyndicalists" hold it as a fundamental building block of their system, and often hold the anarchocapitalists in scorn for not doing so.

Obviously, the reconciliability of these two positions depends only on how essential the anarchocapitalist society believes this syndicalization of ownership is - their willingness to enforce

The divergence in thought appears to arrive specifically from the lineage of thought practiced by both schools. The "anarchocapitalists" derive their thought from the "classical liberal" tradition of the totalitarian Adam Smith, and later, the more respectable Friedrich Hayek, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig von Mises, while the "anarchosyndicalists" derive their position from the totalitarian Karl Marx, and later, the more respectable Mikhail Bakunin, Emma Goldman, and Joseph Proudhon (among others, for both schools of thought).

Stunningly, both schools of thought reached their current states by identifying the errors of thinking in their predecessors, which had led them to create, respectively, the totalitarian disaster of the United States, and the totalitarian disaster of the U.S.S.R..

So how may "anarchocapitalism" and "anarchosyndicalism" be reconciled? It's simple - both schools of thought need to reject any totalitarian tendencies in thought which may or may not be present, and arrive at a single agreement on what characteristics are necessary and sufficient to produce a just society/economic system. Both schools of thought should reject any violent tendencies that they have, in order to not alienate the rest of society, and the "anarchocapitalists" must understand that there are common sense limits to what can justly be considered one's "property", which the "anarchosyndicalists" have, for the most part, codified as "usage" or "possession" rights.

And what is the shared enemy of anarchists of any flavor? It's not really even a group or a system, even multinational corporations or the state. It's the human failure to self-actualize - to become a responsible being. And who suffers the worst from this failure? Those who we identify as our oppressors.

The only thing you need for a working society is for its members to be responsible people! Of course, for responsible people, you need a culture that understands what responsibility actually means. And that is what we do not have.

*One of the most common examples used to justify ownership-based systems is the example of the Jamestown Colony in Virginia:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/dilorenzo/dilorenzo86.html

Giving Thanks for Private Property by Thomas J. DiLorenzo The first British settlers of America arrived in Jamestown, Virginia, in May of 1607. There, in the Virginia Tidewater region, they found incredibly fertile soil and a cornucopia of seafood, wild game, and fruits of all kind. But within six months, all but 38 of the original 104 Jamestown settlers were dead, most having succumbed to famine. Two years later, the Virginia Company sent 500 more settlers, and within six months 440 had died of starvation or disease. This was known as "the starving time" (See Warren Billings, ed., The Old Dominion in the Seventeenth Century: A Documentary History of Virginia, 1606—1689).

The error in reasoning here is insane, but easily missed. The Native Americans who preceded those colonists enjoyed communal living, and managed to live comfortably, avoiding the starvation and disease this article cites.

It's only that the extremely privileged European colonists, totally alienated from nature, by thousands of years of monarchism and Judeo-Christian religion, that managed to botch an experiment communal living and nearly kill themselves off - and then proceeded to genocidally exterminate the Native Americans who knew how to make it work. The society they emerged from - the British Empire - was so crazed that an attempt by American colonists to cut ties with the empire was met with a military invasion staged across the Atlantic Ocean! With greed so extremely ingrained into their culture, is it any surprise that their attempt at communal living failed on account of greed? It is a tremendous mistake to blame that on human nature itself.

And we still, to this day, use this story as an example of why communal property structures cannot work? It's true, then, that we haven't really learned anything about ourselves for hundreds of years! "Capitalists" at one extreme worry that communalism means absence of any goods for everyone, while "communists" at one extreme worry that capitalism means the domination of all goods by the few. Where is the happy medium of people having what they sanely need and want?