Thursday, November 17, 2005

MDM on multiple orders in a free society

An interesting new blog post has been written by MDM over at Upaya. In this post, MDM takes on a critique of anarcho-capitalism made by Gus DiZerega. Before getting into this response, MDM notes that:
I think he’s one of the most important thinkers in the current left-libertarian milieu (though he doesn’t call himself a libertarian, but a left-Hayekian liberal). I also think his criticisms are answerable from a market anarchist perspective (I’m not an anarcho-capitalist, but his criticisms seem to me aimed broadly at all flavors of market anarchism).

Part of his response involves painting a rough picture of a make believe mutualist community called Tuckerville, which should be of interest to those who are interested in mutualism and goes to show how not all arrangments that are compatible and possible in a market anarchist society have to be entirely dependant upon a strictly market order.

1 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

To some extent though, I think almost everyone involved in this debate is being very nitpicky about making this distinction between "the market" and ... other things. I guess one way I would put it is that "there's no such thing as 'the market'".
My first gut-level response to Mr. DiZerega's Disney example is that, in a free society, something like Disney wouldn't exist to do that. To be more technical, in a "homesteading" society, anyone who wanted to buy up large tracts of land would have to buy them from the local community itself, so if none of them wanted to sell that land, the would-be 'developer' wouldn't get it. These 'holdout' cases happen so frequently even in our corrupted system of property that there is an "eminent domain" controversy. Without eminent domain and with stronger property definitions, those sort of undesirable development projects just can't happen, unless large numbers of local inhabitants are willing to let them, in which case, where's the beef?
I think a lot of these criticisms of free-market anarchism underestimate the effect that our current monetary/credit system has in facilitating large-scale economic behavior.
IMO, a free society couldn't sustain large monolithic organizations, but spontaneous networks would develop when people needed/wanted to work together on larger projects.

(I don't have posting access to hnn, or I'd comment there...) :)

Anyway, it was good food for thought.

12:29 PM  

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