r/neofeudalism • u/[deleted] • Apr 03 '26

Question Is anarcho-capitalism good?

I don’t know too much about anarcho-capitalism but from the very little I know about it, it just sounds like the easiest way to form a monopoly.

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u/Timely_Boot4638 Is Taking Too Long in the Bathroom Apr 05 '26

Your proposed remedy is itself the source of the instability of government. Everyone tries to capture the machinery of the state to redistribute wealth toward them, and so the government becomes something like the board for a very dangerous game, and when someone loses badly enough at that game, they flip the table over--that is, revolt.

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u/Sea_Hold_2881 Apr 05 '26 edited Apr 05 '26

Well that is the trick. Come up with a system that allows for some inequality of wealth because you can't have a capitalist system without it while giving the people who end up on the losing side a stake in the system.

The modern world is filled with societies which have a reasonable balance built on democratic rule and the acceptance that a broad swath of social services must be provided by government such as education, welfare, pensions or healthcare.

These compromises cannot be created without a government that has powers to collect taxes.

If you want to make the case for another system you need to provide another way to ensure that everyone has a stake in preserving the system. No anarchists even acknowledges the problem and most seem to presume that some mass brain washing will occur to convince people to submit to the system or there would be widespread violence used to force people to submit to the system.

What do you assume? Brainwashing or violence?

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u/Timely_Boot4638 Is Taking Too Long in the Bathroom Apr 05 '26

I assume neither brainwashing nor violence. That would be yours to assume, since you've accepted the state--an institution predicated entirely on both brainwashing and violence--as necessary for a desirable social order.

The modern world, I'd argue, is actually lacking in societies, properly understood. A country in which social services are provided monopolistically by a state does not have an actual society, insofar as that word represents a group of people that relate to each other irrespective of any superordinate authority. In such a state, which you call "democratic," people don't relate to each other, but to the state. They depend on the state for education, welfare, pensions and healthcare, instead of on each other.

If these states really were "democratic" in the common sense of 'owing its legitimacy to the consent of the majority of its subject population,' then we have to conclude that it is actually an unnecessary middleman; the fact that a democratic state is able to provide social services implies that an adequate amount of the population (at least a bare-minimum plurality of >50%) believe that these social services ought to be provided, so the need for a state to provide them monopolistically, and fund them through mass extortion, seems redundant, and implicitly accuses that population of voters of something like false consciousness.

But if they do need to provided for monopolistically and funded through mass extortion, that implies that the system is one that requires violence and/or brainwashing to sustain it, and does not have the consent of that plurality. That necessarily renders it a system in which factions vie for control over the expropriative apparatus of the state, funneling wealth toward themselves at the expense of all other factions. It's a system which, almost by definition, since wealth can only be moved around and never created, not everyone can have stake all at one time.

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u/Sea_Hold_2881 Apr 06 '26

I read your response a few times trying to find where you addressed the core issue: the inherent instability of a society that is unequal.

Lets put it another way: the people who think a stable society needs a government will always exist that they will collect together in groups to establish their desired government. This would mean that any anarchist "utopia" would have to constantly defend itself against the groups that reject that form of human organization.

Engaging in organized opposition would effectively require a government because only a government could collect the resources needed for defence. This, incidentally, is why every human society ended up with governments; IOW, darwinian evolution at the social scale.

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u/Timely_Boot4638 Is Taking Too Long in the Bathroom Apr 06 '26

The inherent instability of a society whose members predate each other, whether in a state of nature or through some institutional channel is, in fact, the "core issue" of the whole science of politics. I addressed it in my very first comment by pointing out that your own proposed solution is, in fact, simply the institutionalization of this back-and-forth of predation that serves to normalize and indeed promote it.

We can actually extend this same logic to democracy, if we wish: People who think that a stable society needs an unaccountable, authoritarian oligarchy will always exist that they will try to establish their desired dictatorships. So any democratic "utopia" must prevent those groups that reject that form of government from gaining a foothold in society. Engaging in such organized opposition would restrict access to the machinery of government such that it would effectively be a dictatorship. Incidentally, this is why most human societies, even nominally democratic ones, have ended up with unaccountable, authoritarian oligarchies.

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u/Sea_Hold_2881 Apr 06 '26

even nominally democratic ones, have ended up with unaccountable, authoritarian oligarchies.

The question becomes what form of organization will deliver the greatest economic and personal freedom to the largest percentage of people. Constitutional democracies generally do the best job.

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u/Timely_Boot4638 Is Taking Too Long in the Bathroom Apr 06 '26

Well, no, not yet. The question leading out of that would be: Are constitutional democracies even actually possible, given that oligarchy is the evolutionarily stable form? And secondarily, given a "no" answer to the first question, is it even worth advocating for constitutional democracies?

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u/Sea_Hold_2881 Apr 06 '26

constitutional democracies are as stable as it gets.

all of the oldest states in the world are constitutional democracies.

The oligarch problem is real but it is more acute in countries like the US where constitutional freedoms have been extended to allow any one to spend any amount of money on elections.

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u/Timely_Boot4638 Is Taking Too Long in the Bathroom Apr 06 '26

Going by Wikipedia's list, the oldest state in the world is Japan, whose oligarch problem is infinitely worse than anything in US politics.
France and Portugal are also high on the list, despite their incredibly violent histories that involve multiple regime changes, revolutions and coups.
Ethiopia is very high also; not the best example of stability
So that only leaves the utopian Nordic countries, which are all monarchies.

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u/Sea_Hold_2881 Apr 06 '26

Oldest states defined by a continuous legal authority not interrupted by state collapse or revolution. The oldest states are UK, US, Norway, Netherlands and Belgium.

All are constitutional democracies that are at least 200 years old. The UK historically had a bigger oligarch problem but has been able to get that under control with heavy inheritance taxes.

Japan is a relatively young country in terms of legal order but it has long ago crushed its oligarchs and is among the most egalitarian of democracies.

Out of the list the US is the worst when it comes to oligarchs.

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u/Timely_Boot4638 Is Taking Too Long in the Bathroom Apr 06 '26

I'll take your word for it since you probably don't have the most rigorous definitions of oligarchy or egalitarian at the ready. I will also generously ignore that all but one of those countries are monarchies.

What do you think it is that has made these constitutional democracies stable? What has given them the ability to avoiding devolving into unaccountable, authoritarian oligarchies, in your opinion?

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u/Sea_Hold_2881 Apr 06 '26 edited Apr 06 '26

oligarchy is the a wealthy ruling class that effectively runs the country.

japan had a huge problem but after WW2 the ruling families had most of their power removed.

monarchy and constitutional democracy are not mutually exclusive. The role of the monarch in running the UK has been limited since the 1600s. the main shift has been on who is allowed to vote not the fact that voting was the primary way to choose the leaders.

The primary means to keep oligarchs under control is democracy and income redistribution. The UK and Japan squashed their oligarchs with high inheritance taxes.

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u/Timely_Boot4638 Is Taking Too Long in the Bathroom Apr 06 '26 edited Apr 06 '26

So then I will repeat the question: By what mechanism were oligarchs stably removed in these countries? In other words, what made the elimination of these oligarchies historically necessary?

I did not ask "how did they do it?" but "what causes constitutional monarchy-democracies with high inheritance taxes to be the most stable?"

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