god, it’s so tiring. These people legitimately believe that natural monopolies never exist and the only monopolies are created by the government. It’s so fucking tiring and just impossible to argue with someone when all of their points are just so wrong. I can post some of their worst offenders if anyone wants to see them.
Isnt monopolization an unavoidable effect of capitalism? Like, didn't Marx predict this?
Ancaps are idealists in the sense that they don't interrogate the world as it exists but rather imagine a world in which ancap rules already exists. So ask an ancap how exactly they would build an ancap society in the world as it exists today where there is no more "unclaimed" land left lmao. Revolution? Rebellion? Lol.
Imagine you're a capitalist with a lot of money sitting around. Ancaps think that the most market rational thing for you to do is invest that money in ways that will return the biggest profits. Cool, makes sense. But this is where reality starts to diverge from ancap ideology. If I have a lot of money, then why would I risk it on developing new products when I could spend a fraction of that on a politician who will give me tax cuts, tariffs on foreign competition, or will allow me to be even more vicious towards labor. Investing in R&D is extremely risky. Which is why you can see drastic cuts in corporate R&D budgets over the past 50 years. Why would I drop millions on hiring more scientists and engineers to create much better products when I could do the absolute minimum in terms of R&D and buy out the political system. A political system, by the way, that other capitalists set up to allow them to do exactly this.
Ancaps ignore the fact that land and resources are finite. Their idea works great up until there is no land left for anyone to acquire and create their ideal wonderland in.
It's frontier colonialism with natives removed spun out into absolute madness.
Yes if the world functioned like fucking minecraft and had an infinite amount of land just magically generating as you walk off into the distance then we'd have no monopolies or issues with land, laws, resources and so on and so forth.
But we fucking don't. And therefore when all the land is owned everything will turn into a corporate dictatorship monstrosities pretty much overnight. You're also fucking kidding yourself if you think the owners of that land won't go to war with each other to acquire other pieces of land if they see it as plausible expansion of their empires when the primary motivator in their society is profit.
Fully Enslaved Austere Straight Space AnCapism is their only salvation
Yes, it's a natural outcome of free market competition and one of the correct predictions of his. Ancaps are basically reactionaries who think they can turn the clock back and get a different outcome this time.
Have they finally managed to create the theory of road building in their utopia?
Why would you argue with Ancaps? It's like arguing with a houseplant.
Anarcho-Capitalism is like a religion so there is no point in arguing with them. The magic of the market is just going to solve all the worlds ills, you just have to believe.
Don’t bother arguing. They’ll change their mind after they spend some time in the post-Revolution re-education centers.
Why do this to yourself? They're never going to change their minds
Self hatred, combined with directed hatred at ancaps. Also I have a brain and it annoys me seeing people who clearly don’t
I used to argue with ancaps and it was not only completely unproductive but ended up taking me to a kinda dark place. I think it was the first time I really felt hatred. It's dumb because obviously there are worse people in the world but like, rationally I know serial killers are bad but I don't really feel anything when I think about them, they're a threat that need to be stopped and that's that for me.
Ancaps, otoh, got under my skin like nothing else has. Every single one of them is unbelievably dishonest. They constantly twist words around to mean things they don't, which serves the dual purposes of making communication with anyone outside of the cult virtually impossible, and of being able to make "technically correct claims." Imaging trying to dispute the claim "Hitler is great" and finding out halfway through the conversation that they're defining "Hitler" to mean "ice cream." That's hardly even an exaggeration of what talking to one of them is like. Meanwhile they explicitly reject empiricism, so it's literally impossible for there to be any factual evidence you can use to persuade them. As for theory, they simply begin with assuming their conclusion that everything any government ever does is bad, and they think that makes them principled because they don't understand what that means. And meanwhile, they'll constantly divert the conversation to unsolicited life advice that are based on their completely delusional vision of reality.
You cannot reason with these people because their beliefs are not based on reason. If you show that their beliefs are contradictory they literally won't care at all. If you're going to engage with them you're better off simply bullying them than getting caught up trying to untangle all their brainworms.
Fucking tell me about it. I literally said that the idea that if you’re poor in America you can fix your situation is false, and I explained a variety of social factors caused by capitalism. His response? “Me finding one example of a successful poor person completely destroys your entire argument”.
“Anarcho” capitalist. Pretty much they believe in pure, unregulated capitalism. That means private and for hire police, schools, roads, no taxes, etc. Their ideal world is quite literally one in which the world is run and motivated completely by profit, and where somehow everything sorts itself out because apparently everything good in the world will happen simply because good things are more profitable.
it's like they aren't even familiar with the concept of an externality
A person who asks themselves this question daily: what if child consents though? Alternative definition: a person who thinks everything is rape and slavery but actual rape and slavery are cool and good.
Also here is a hilarious video of them in action, do note that libertarians are like ancap lite. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZITP93pqtdQ
Pretend to be an extreme market socialist who leans very heavily on the market side. That sometimes gets through to them, and the rest of the time it's funny.
That is, capital ownership only exists because of government intervention in the market. Tenants have to pay rent because of a piece of paper in a drawer somewhere saying the police will come help evict them. Workers can't just use the capital for themselves and tell the owners to fuck off because of more government intervention. Any business that's not a coop is the result of a government intervention in the market that violates the NAP.
They'll probably go for the private army line of reasoning, but if that army is a coop too then you're just coming up with a funny name for community defense.
like the thing i find really funny is that companies themselves like don't want a ancap society they just don't wanna pay taxes they love that they can get big state contracts
I was arguing with the centrist the other day, and he was very convinced that all social programs and workers rights and protections are because of capitalism...
