Traditions like filial duty may at times be difficult to understand but in one sense they work. Atomization could be seen as a potential market failure of sorts. The breakdown of trust between parents and offspring means that parents can no longer guarantee to get back what they put in. Probably contributing to the drop in birth rates developed societies?

If you want to engage with others who are different politically, it’s important to see the things that you are advocating warts and all, not your idealized version of how you would like them to be.

Amen.

But I’ve been a libertarian for some 30 years, of the Hayekian, Reason, and Cato variety. We are not anarcho-capitalists, or anarchists of any stripe.

I’ve only been a libertarian for 10 years (before that I was an apolitical high school student) and I used to believe the same as you - until I discovered David Friedman. Soon thereafter I realized that many of libertarian thinkers and institutions I had previously regarded as minarchist were in fact either explicitly anarchist or anarchist-compatible. Both Reason and Cato are replete with anarchists - some more explicit in their anarchism (e.g. Brian Doherty), than others (Tom Palmer, Randy Barnett).

Angelica,

Well, as most people think democratic government is a good idea and it’s the idea we’ve used for a long, long time, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that your idea is better.

This reminds me of a story I once heard from a man named OWK: The Hanover Street Shoe-Shine Boys.

A snippet:

I was whistling a tune, and there was a noticeable spring in my step, as I flung open the door to the bank, and swaggered up to the teller. She counted out my $97.32 with the precision of a machine, and then with a wink offered me the customary loli-pop usually reserved for the children of customers (which I must admit took a bit of the swagger from my gait). Still though, I had my hard-earned money, and it was good.

So out the door I went. After only three steps, or maybe four, I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to face a man with a gun in his hand. Behind him, were dozens more. Street toughs from the look of ‘em.

“Can I help you?” I asked, doing my best to look menacing. “You sure can” he said with a smile and a flourish. To my amazement, he turned to his associate and barked “Shine his shoes Mickey”.

At that point a little rat-faced fella with a wooden box and a brush scampered up, and plopped himself unceremoniously at my feet. I simply stared at him. He returned my gaze with expectation, and after awhile he complained, “I can’t shine your shoes if you don’t put your foot on the box”.

“But… but, I don’t want a shoe-shine” I protested, “I’m wearing sneakers”.

“It don’t really matter what you want” he shot back. “We had a vote, and decided that everybody needs a shoe-shine”.

Well, as most people think democratic government is a good idea and it’s the idea we’ve used for a long, long time, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that your idea is better.

But see, that’s the problem: I don’t really care whether my idea is better or not. I just want to live in a society that reflects my values - just like everybody else. This is only a competition because the State and its defenders are intolerant of different forms of organization. There is no real dilemna here; it’s all about power.

Plus, as Dain said, there’s no place to go.

We can’t be demolishing our way of life every time somebody comes by and says they have a better idea.

You make a great argument for free association there. It’s not a very good argument for the state, though. Your way of life and mine are not in the LEAST collectively determined, at least as far as internal organization, except through the abstraction of the state.

Well, as others have pointed out, that’s not necessarily accurate. And, as others have pointed out, the real question comes down to one of consistency - anarchist types are consistent believers in self-ownership, while minarchists are believers up until the point there is something that *they* truly value and think is worth violating the self-ownership of others for. So the distinction is one of degree and not one of kind, as you attempt to posit.

“We don’t have our heads in the clouds about notions of, say, dismantling the entire federal govt and returning to a confederation, which is never going to happen.”

I could just as easily demean your position as a head in the clouds belief that 225 years of increasing statism under the constitution can be overcome by following the constitution - *it’s never going to happen!* The constitution is doing pretty much precisely what the Hamiltonians wanted it to do, and which the anti-federalists predicted it would do.

“We do not deplore the common law; we uphold and even revere most of it, especially as it has dropped some of its religious trappings.”

Funnily enough, I pretty much revere the common law as well. But, well, that’s *because* it had its genesis in what you would consider anarchy. Read up on the history of the “King’s Bench” and early common law. You’ll find that your belief that it somehow contradicts anarchists’ arguments is ill-founded.

At any rate, the concentrations I was referring to were not so much the land holdings of the Whig Oligarchy as the great industrial corporations, which were the primary concern of distributists at the time Belloc was writing (industrial serfdom was clearly the primary focus of The Servile State). And IMO the latter couldn’t possibly exist without the ongoing support of the state.

I also downloaded Molesworth on (late 17th century) Denmark quite a while back, but I haven’t got into it yet. He was also commenting on England in a coded way, by way of what he brought out in comparisons, because it wasn’t very safe to be more direct. You should be able to google for it (it’s at a constitution site, so try putting “constitution” in the search too).

But regardless of the values of the individuals, don’t intentional communities *function* in a less atomized way? I mean, you can hardly live in one without knowing your neighbors, or have a Wal-Mart in it with no ties to the community.

And I have no problem with enculturation as such. My problem is with the fact that the culture people are being encultured into is a culture largely manufactured for them, and that it was manufactured to serve the interests of institutions that are almost totally unaccountable to them.

These institutions were created by the imposition of a top-down revolution on society in barely a generation’s time, around the turn of the 20th century. A cultural transmission system designed to serve these institutions then successfully encultured a majority of people into values that shaped them to serve the same institutions. In so doing, it pulled off the greatest sleight of hand of all: it created a population that saw these monstrous institutional changes as “natural” and “inevitable,” and their own limited choices made within the parameters set by these institutions as “autonomous” or “revealed preferences.”

PML: Thanks for the Belloc references. The Servile State is a monumentally important work. Another thing Belloc missed was failing to see how much the concentration of property he obseved depended on ongoing state intervention (odd, since he gave an excellent account of the state’s role in its *origins* by expropriating the peasantry). As a result, the debate was framed on the assumtion that the concentration of property and centralization of enterprise was the natural outcome of a market, and the only matter for contention was how the state might intervene to counteract it.

…Which ties in pretty closely, it seems to me, with my discussion with Jackson. One reason there hasn’t been more of a debate over the corporate revolution is that “both sides” in American politics are so closely associated with centralized institutions, and have been able to get away with framing the debate in such false terms. Both mainstream liberals and conservatives promote the myth (for all intents and purposes an official myth, in the “received version” of American history taught in the schools), that the corporate economy emerged spontaneously from 19th century “laissez-faire,” and that only government exercise of “countervailing power” can counter this natural tendency. It simultaneously serves the conservatives by implying that the present corporate economy is the natural product of superior performance in the market, and serves the liberals by implying that big government is necessary to fight big business (rather than being necessary to prop it up).

As for the Lincoln thing, whether culture war can fool *enough* people for the successful diversion of economic pain against cultural scapegoats, is what remains to be seen. I don’t think it can, in the long run, because even the kind of idiots obsessed with Janet Jackson’s tit are smart enough to know Bear Stearns can’t be blamed on “latte-sipping elites” who drive Volvos and read little magazines. But if a GOP ploy involving flag lapel pins and “God damn America” is decisive this fall, this stratagem will have at least managed to squeak through another time.

KC, that is almost precisely what Belloc foresaw in his The Servile State (downloadable here).

As for “From the ’70s on, American elites were forced to renege on this social compact. And people are pissed off over downsizing, stagnant wages, and so forth.“, here is what I wrote on that side of things at Limitedinc:-

“Belloc missed a few tricks about reaching collective ownership through gradual purchase. In particular, funds for it can be obtained through issuing fiat currency (which Marx had already suggested, because it would also damage the bourgeoisie), and taxes and other burdens on private industry can create a competitive advantage for the other sort (think Zimbabwean agriculture). Neither did he foresee today’s corporate system in which managerialism has crowded out actual individuals rich in their own right as the class needing to be squared - but that is a detail, as far as his thesis is concerned.

“Belloc also did not foresee the present situation in which industry would be willing and able to sideline workers, instead thinking of conditions in which workers would be desired and the need would be to marginalise them. But still, the trends are there to have the remaining workforce dependent, if not yet receiving the quid pro quo of security that he thought necessary for stability. That may be a matter of not yet having reached the level of instability he saw coming - but the trends are there.”

On ‘Karl Rove and Frank Luntz had limited success in diverting some of the resentment against “cultural elites” (a la Thomas Frank), but all the people aren’t stupid enough to be taken in by this all the time‘, that’s Lincoln’s famous misdirection all over again. What counts isn’t whether you can fool some of the people all of the time, whether you can fool all of the people some of the time, or even whether you can fool all of the people all of the time - it’s whether you can fool enough of the people enough of the time, which is the ball that Lincoln made the people take their eyes off by emphasising those other things.

Thanks for the link, Dain.

Hayek and Galbraith had a dispute over enculturation. Greg Mankiw summarizes Hayek’s argument here.

“the back to the land movement, slow food, community supported agriculture, LETS systems and other alternative economics, etc.”

None of these movements named atomization (in the sense Angelica is using the word) as their main, explicit enemy. That suggests that atomization is fairly low on the list of things that people, even radicals, really want to protest. My own experience with intentional communites has been that in each one there are some dedicated cosmopolitan individualists (my tone of voice here is “God damn, even there you find some cosmopolitans”). Even among radicals who are part of counter-hegemonic movements, atomization doesn’t seem to often get named as the enemy. I’m left feeling that atomization is fairly popular. I’d guess there is a fairly wide portion of the public that feels as Angelica does: “I choose atomization”.

You can call that enculturation, and I don’t disagree with you, but is enculturation illegitimate? Aren’t people allowed to vote their cultural values?

The reason there hasn’t been more of a mass movement, IMO, is enculturation. The majority of people tend to have very little historical memory or basis for comparison–because, in part, the publik skools have done such a damned good job of making sure most of the human resources they process never develop a sense of perspective from which they might criticize the corporate state. Every society tends to have a hegemonic ideology which defines the existing structure of power as “normal” and “inevitable,” and the educational system and mass media tend to reproduce that ideology from one generation to the next. Part of the process the Marxists call “reproducing human labor power” involves reproducing the popular attitudes the system needs to survive on a stable basis.

Of course, it doesn’t do a perfect job of this. There have been mass movements, of sorts, against atomization: the back to the land movement, slow food, community supported agriculture, LETS systems and other alternative economics, etc. But they’ve pretty much been in a position of swimming against the tide.

But the system does face problems in reproducing the proper mass mindset. For one thing, as Chomsky pointed out, for its functioning the system requres a bit more openness and correspondence to the truth in the picture of the world its educated elites have, if they’re to do their jobs. So there’s always the danger of proles jumping the fence and reading beyond their pay grade.

And the system faces crises of legitimization, because elites are forced to act in ways that contradict their official values, or because what they’re saying now contradicts what they were saying six months ago. Whenever the corporate economy enters a crisis, the state is forced to intervene in ways (”socialism for the rich”) that directly contradict the official “free market” and “individual responsibility” rhetoric. And over time, by the nature of corporate capitalism, the state is forced to institutionalize more and more such intervention to keep the system going. And the danger is very real that average people will put two and two together and perceive a glitch in the matrix. That’s especially so now that the Internet has made it possible to bypass the old gatekeepers of the semi-official media.

Another source of legitimation crisis is when the state fails to deliver on the promised goods in return for acquiescence. From FDR through 1970 or so, the corporate liberal compact was that the average person would have a house, job security, and wages that kept up with productivity, in return for leaving the corporate economy to its managers and supporting the corporate state’s adventures overseas. From the ’70s on, American elites were forced to renege on this social compact. And people are pissed off over downsizing, stagnant wages, and so forth. Karl Rove and Frank Luntz had limited success in diverting some of the resentment against “cultural elites” (a la Thomas Frank), but all the people aren’t stupid enough to be taken in by this all the time.

I think we’re headed for a full-blown legitimation crisis where the state is simply unable to avoid contradicting its own official ideology and exposing the contradictions in it.

Damn funny to try to imagine Angelica saying “America, love it or leave it.”

She’s already left it, so I guess she’s free to criticise it if she wants to. She already mentioned that if she ever comes back to North America, she’ll give Canada a try.

Of course I was thinking of stuff like executive power, intrusive government, etc., not gay relations.

Right. Those that scoff at the “slippery slope” argument take heed.

Kevin, just curious, but why do you think people don’t fight harder against the current framework? Your words suggest that there is a lot to dislike about the framework in which people need to make decisions about their personal lives. People could, of course, agitate against the system that promotes atomization. Yet I don’t see much in the history of 20th century that suggests people really hate that atomization (I’m confining my remarks to the U.S.). Even during the periods of mass political mobilization (1912, the 1930s and 1940s, the 1960s) most of the laws agitated for seem designed to increase individual autonomy.

“The corporate state has promoted social atomization and demographic mobility”

Okay, but the corporate state is not the only actor on stage. Where is the mass movement that opposed social atomization? When you look at the history of the last 100 years, do you see a mass movement that, say, fought against demographic mobility?

I’d add that most people, nowadays, are crazed baby-eaters, from the perspective of folks 300 years ago. What would the witch burners of Salem say of our current sexual mores?

I was recently reading about the big crackdown on soddomites that the Sherrif of London carried out from 1728 to 1730. Hundreds of men were hanged. The Sherrif’s opinion on gay marriage can be guessed at.

I live in Charlottesville, Virginia, in the United States. Just today I saw a black man walking down the street while holding hands with a white woman.

My point is that once the majority comes round to some point of view, things that were once deemed beyond the pale come to seem perfectly reasonable. (The sexual aspects of Brave New World seem less exaggerated now than in 1932.)

Do you believe people have some rights that are inalienable? Would accept tribal traditions that violate people’s rights?

This an excellent summary of Friedman’s views. Quite lenghty and substantive:

http://www.the-dissident.com/theory.shtml

As states cannot tolerate non-state entities to coexist within it, I would have though that was fairly obvious — can’t have people be exceptions if you’re going to have things like taxation and law enforcement.

Well, you can always leave the country and start your own elsewhere. That doesn’t sound reasonable?

There are no areas of the earth left not claimed by some nation-state or group of them. And the vast majority of this territory was claimed merely by decree and backed up by the philosophy of might makes right. This is an extremely illiberal political theory, no? (Or is the question an oxymoron?)

The only room left is within nation-states. There is no way, then, to “experiment” - to peacefully withdraw - without challenging the first statement above.

The state is NOT about harmony and goodwill. Remember this the next time a presidential candidate uses such buzzwords.

I understand I may sound like a Stalinist “purger,” but honestly, I think it is important for some labels to maintain integrity. Anarcho-capitalism is an interesting view I have explored, and rejected, even as I admire the minds of some of its proponents.

But that is not libertarianism as commonly understood in contemporary America. The Constitution, as a starting point, is very fine with me — I would just add a well-crafted privacy amendment, as well as one clarifying that the Executive cannot wage war without a 2/3 vote from both houses of Congress, absent a direct attack on the nation. (And any war response must then be ratified by Congress within, say, 30 days, or the defensive violence must cease.)

I’m at the point where I’m trying to figure which route to take. The Reason/Cato groups offers more prestige, but is less inspiring to me. I almost think becoming a philosophical anarchist academic at some community college would be preferable.

There’s something to be said for agitating for anarchy and realistically expecting only limited government. Advocating for limited government as end goal, at least in my opinion, is intellectually dishonest.

Rather than defining anarcho-capitalism and other forms of market anarchism out of libertarianism altogether, I think it would make more sense to treat them as one subgroup within the broader libertarian movement. I’ve seen arguments by market anarchists that minarchist or small government libertarians aren’t really libertarian because they don’t consistently apply the nonaggression principle (which in the anarchist view is the defining feature of principled libertarianism). I don’t think this makes sense, either.

No attempt at redefinition. But I’ve been a libertarian for some 30 years, of the Hayekian, Reason, and Cato variety. We are not anarcho-capitalists, or anarchists of any stripe.

We don’t have our heads in the clouds about notions of, say, dismantling the entire federal govt and returning to a confederation, which is never going to happen. I appreciate the intellect and provocative ideas of folks like Kevin Carson, but he is well outside the libertarian world I have long-occupied. We do not deplore the common law; we uphold and even revere most of it, especially as it has dropped some of its religious trappings.

Libertarian = limited govt. Anarchist = no state.

I chose “gingers” because I had recently seen this.

For an examination of anarchy without a legal system, see Order Without Law.

Theodore Dalrymple discusses the extended family relations he observed in Rhodesia here.

David Friedman has a series of posts on the church compound in Texas.

That’s quite a loaded statement, but let me just point out that the Weimar Republic was a democracy with a culture with a fanatical respect for ‘the law’.

I’d say that a society with a strong grounding in morality and a willingness to challenge authority (even “the law”) when the results appear to be immoral is the least likely system where that kind of insanity could happen. Democracy is a likely by-product of such a society - not a cause.

Interestingly, among the libertarian (despite Mona’s attempt at re-defining the term) commenters here, I’m probably the only one (other than Mona, of course) that, as a practical matter, is willing to accept states in the end goal. I just want those states to be no larger than municipalities, and I want them to be organically organized from the ground up, not imposed from the top down.

I still believe in the ethical principle of self-ownership and the non-agression principle that flows from it, and make my moral judgments from that standard. But I have a gut feeling that people will organize into democratic states at local levels naturally. And at that level, the exit costs are so low that I don’t fret (much) about the violations of self-ownership that may occur - I would agree that, at that level, the state imposed costs are roughly equivalent to the costs imposed by social forces, and therefore, while still ethically wrong, not something that poses a large problem.

But it is important to focus on the fact that centralization of political power is actually the *cause* of most of today’s problems. Therefore, any rational person must, at the very least, question the assumption that centralized power can be the cure of these problems.

And I’m sorry to see that you’re a “‘merica, luv it or leave it!” type. You know, the Jews in Germany had the same choice. Just because a plurality of the population supported the policies, doesn’t make them defensible. Quite often, the direct opposite is true.

You also write “Since you guys are always talking about personal responsibility, why not take the personal responsibility to move to some small but democratic country, dismantle the government there and try your ideas out on a small scale.” Funnily enough, some people have tried that, and even more funnily, some like the Strangites succeeded - and the reward of their success was to be overthrown. (And, of course, the same thing happens when people instead opt to leave; the powers that be come after them in due time - see what happened to the Boer voortrekkers, and indeed most of the Mormons.)

Kurt Horner, be careful with “Even anarchists assume that some sort of formal system of dispute resolution should exist“. That is mediation, a mere matter of convenience, not an acceptance of something that has binding authority - and not all anarchists would even accept a formal system, for fear it would move towards the latter (in fact, that’s just precisely what happened with the Common Law, which started as a feudal mediation that adversaries didn’t have to accept).

Angelica, there’s a subtle fallacy in “…Democracy: it minimizes the Baby-eating“. Your hypothetical is a one off, but in fact we are subjected to repeated iterations covering a multitude of topics. Not only do the agenda setters revisit matters until the people get it right (sorry, “… until the people are ready”), but also we ourselves are remade by what they create - the second half of tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis (times are being changed and we are being changed in them, as I’m sure readers knew). This happens to the point that individuals of a later generation, or sometimes even the same individuals, accept changes that would once have horrified them. With the multitude of topics and the horse trading, there is always going to be something nobody else likes that some minority agenda setters get through anyway. A case in point: the ringbarking of the cultural base of constitutional monarchy and revisiting the republican issue by Australian republicans. Another: referenda on European Union structures.

KC, if you must borrow that horticultural example, either adapt it to something more universally accessible or clarify it in its turn (which might be more trouble than just clarifying the original point you want to make). I only understand it because someone else once used Kudzu as an example and I had to ask for clarification. As it stands, only people in the USA have experience with the problems it causes, so for anyone else the analogy will just be confusing. (And Dain, even Social Security apparently means something else in the USA than it does here in Australia.)

Angelica, you’re probably too close to it to recognise it, maybe with some unexamined assumptions feeding it, but you have achieved a circular argument with the first part of “Well, as most people think democratic government is a good idea and it’s the idea we’ve used for a long, long time, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that your idea is better“. (The second part amounts to “we’ve always done it that way”, which is an argument for caution as to potential downsides of change which don’t have to be checked for the status quo; it is not in its own right an argument for stasis.)

TGGP, it’s interesting that you should ironically bring up “Really, if most people want to exterminate redheads and a small minority [don't] (the damn gingers themselves and the odd ginger-lover), I don’t see why we have an ethical obligation to give in to that minority“. A.E. Housman used that same imagery in his poem “Oh Who Is That Young Sinner“, a coded reference to the situation of homosexuals (like Housman himself) in a time and place where (the practice of) that sort of thing was dealt with as a crime. It’s amusing (in both senses) that you should call them “gingers”, too (cockney rhyming slang: ginger=ginger beer=queer).

Now for something of my own. It was a feature of the tribal bonds still prevailing in Nigeria when I was a teenager there that our and other families’ servants always had near and not so near relatives descending on them and burdening them - most importantly, overcrowding the servants’ compound, something we had to discourage as tactfully as possible to stop slum conditions developing. Essentially, they were using the traditional family based support system, sharing the good fortune with no shame or condescension on either side. In fact it would have been a non-problem, maybe even a good thing up to a point, if it hadn’t been for the sanitary issues that (of course) had never been factored in before, in a system that hadn’t evolved in a suburban setting but in a rural one. It did prevent hard work and thrift paying off in upward mobility, though.

Really, if most people want to keep the state chugging along and a small minority don’t, I don’t see why we have an ethical obligation to give in to that minority.
Really, if most people want to exterminate redheads and a small minority (the damn gingers themselves and the odd ginger-lover), I don’t see why we have an ethical obligation to give in to that minority. I’m willing to say that with a straight face because I don’t believe in any ethical obligations. Are you? And can you avoid the unprincipled exception salvaging majoritarianism?

The argument seems to be centering around choice vs exit. Jeffrey Friedman has argued that’s a superior way of viewing things than libertarianism. I don’t think Jeff has a blog of his own, but I last came across him here.

And how come you get the country and I have to leave?
Well, as most people think democratic government is a good idea and it’s the idea we’ve used for a long, long time, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate that your idea is better. We can’t be demolishing our way of life everytime somebody come by and say they have a better idea.

As states cannot tolerate non-state entities to coexist within it, I would have though that was fairly obvious — can’t have people be exceptions if you’re going to have things like taxation and law enforcement.

Of course, if you are willing to start a new community/system/company/whatever organization while still obeying all the rules set forth by the government, then you are very welcome to do so.

Mona,
Just to be clear, I do not regard “libertarians” who hold the goal of totally dismantling the state as libertarians; they are anarchists. I’m not an anarchist, and neither are most libertarians I interact with.

Ah, but the anarchists here call themselves libertarians. Tricky one.

Kevin,
It’s a lot harder to take refuge in the catacombs when they’re all posted “Access regulated by People’s Ministry of Interral and Disposal–Keep Out!” And it’s a lot harder to live cheaply on your own skills when everything you want to do is subject to some licensing regime that costs tens of thousands of $$.

I take your point is more general. But in the future can you use examples that are less…bucolic? First it’s talking over unimproved lots of land and now it’s hiding out in catacombs…I have a feeling when framed this way most people would choose to stay in their air-conditioned offices.

Just to be clear, I do not regard “libertarians” who hold the goal of totally dismantling the state as libertarians; they are anarchists. I’m not an anarchist, and neither are most libertarians I interact with.

For example, I do not advocate privatizing the courts or the police, and I think our common law deposit evolved from the British version is well worth preserving. And to a limited and careful extent, as a Hayekian, I do accept less-intrusive, not-so-govt-empowering safety net programs. But I do so with greater care than I think many liberals are willing to consider.

Take the king’s coin, dance his jig — that is not an unreasonable fear.

In the 80s, I had a T shirt that read, “L’enfer, c’est les autres.” And I did and do believe that. It is just that the little bit of heaven also comes from “les autres.” I’m not really a Sartre fan, but I think he would have agreed.

KURT: This slippery slope can be tilted the other way . . . i.e. is there a limit to personal autonomy? All legal systems assume that some behavior is not permissible and the decision about what is and is not acceptable has to be made. Even anarchists assume that some sort of formal system of dispute resolution should exist.

DAIN: Personal autonomy defined as the right to be left alone? Yes, there is a limit, defined as the moment at which ones subjective feeling of no longer being “left alone” infringes on the property of others in their bodies and justly acquired external objects. (If Ted Kazynski were to bemoan a new neighbor on a nearby hilltop, this would be an example.)

There was no need on my part to include that first sentence. Consider my answer to begin with “Yes, there is a limit…”

Well, you can always leave the country and start your own elsewhere.

Now you’re bringing up the argument that grates on me. Why can’t we share the country and not point guns at each other?

And how come you get the country and I have to leave? Why not the other way around? As Karl Hess once said, “Liberty means the right to shape your own institutions. It opposes the right of those institutions to shape you simply because of accreted power or gerontological status.” Is there something special about your system because it got a foothold before mine?

If you want to engage with others who are different politically, it’s important to see the things that you are advocating warts and all, not your idealized version of how you would like them to be.

An excellent point worthy of a bump.

My point isn’t that it should be your way or my way. My point is that people should have a choice about which way to pursue. The only way that we can have a choice about how we’re oppressed, since you want to put it in that way, is if a variety of systems of economics and value coexist, so that people can abandon communities or systems they find unpalatable.

But in order for this to happen, we have to get off the universalist bandwagon that justifies the use of force as a means to realizing our values. This is essentially all I want; Quasibill is making a much more effective and articulate version of that argument, so I think I’ll bow out, as I’m not being understood.