05-13-2024, 06:34 PM
False. The specious arguments in favor of a magic-earth-daddy who's going to make everything into Utopian paradise-on-earth by the wave of his magic scepter -- which amounts to nothing more than clubbing people over the head according to his own whims and interests -- is what "fails to take into account human nature". It's a great story for those who currently hold the scepter. But as with any Ring of Power or Iron Throne, the only thing it creates is a universal war-of-all-against-all to hold that pinnacle of power. To have it is to be a god in human terms. All others, but the man-god who holds the Ring of Power, are but slaves.
It's true that getting on a megaphone and shouting, "Hey everyone, we're doing anarchy now! OK?! So, stop trying to grasp the Ring of Power! 1-2-3... GO!" will not work. But this is a complete strawman of what philosophical anarchy is arguing. Rather, philosophical anarchy begins with realism about the political order. A royal house, for example, is practically indistinguishable from a large, monopolistic corporation. It's a profit-maximizing institution, where its sense of "profit" is far more general than just dollar amounts. Thus, every State that has ever existed is really just a market competitor in the market of sovereign territory. Some competitors were very successful, as the Romans, others were annihilated, as the Carthaginians. From this vantage-point, we are not critiquing the State from the artificial distinction typical of Republican think-tankers between "public sector" and "private sector", as though anything "private sector" is inherently good and anything "public sector" is inherently bad for reasons unknown. No, the critique is much more rational than all that.
One of the best starting-points for people who fall prey to the "inevitability" argument and other worn-out talking-points, is Hoppe's argument that social democracy is objectively inferior to monarchy. This argument is frequently misunderstood as though Hoppe is arguing for monarchy. No, it is not an argument for monarchy but, rather, an argument against democracy. What is the problem with democracy? In short, democracy converts territorial boundaries, public finance and government decision-making into a tragedy-of-the-commons. In the case of a monarchy, most of these interests are at least internalized. The monarch has a strong interest in preserving the asset value of the public lands, even if those lands are not legally categorized as "Crown lands", that is, even if they are not the private property of the monarch. That is because the monarch is an indirect beneficiary of the value of all land and assets under their territorial power.
Philosophical anarchy is just the result of extrapolating this reasoning process to its logical limit. Monarchy is better than social democracy, but the monarch still socializes or externalizes many aspects of the social order by virtue of the power of monopoly. In many ways, social democracy itself is the inevitable historical failure-mode of monarchy... as the monarch creates an ever-more centralized bureaucratic hierarchy of monopolistic privileges, the more vulnerable the teetering tower of tyrannical privilege becomes to collapse into some kind of collectivism or other. More often than not, it's the second-most powerful man besides the monarch who provides the nudge required to topple the tower, and is best positioned to reformulate a new government with himself at the top, in the aftermath. This entire category of social order is inherently self-destructive and unstable. It necessarily results in an endless cycle of revolutions and (as a corollary) massive, scorched-earth campaigns as the rivaling civil war factions each take opportunistic swipes at the other, trying to weaken their opponents whenever they get the opportunity, destroying any long-run value (capital) which may have been built in the interim. The alternative to this is, rather than having one king, to...
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