Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Am I an Ancap? And what is Anarcho-Capitalism?" video.

"1. Is man always rational? Short answer is yes" You've already gone off the rails there. People do things they know to be self-defeating all the time.
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If you want to be left alone, and the Crips want to rob you, and you're too poor to pay for Michael Moore's private security entourage, and there's no state with a police force and courts and prisons, how do you accomplish being left alone? Self defense is all very nice, but I'd prefer not to get in gunfights on a weekly basis - even winning 95% of them my long-term outlook would be pretty poor.
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@bludfyre Absolutely. Just like communism, it can work wonderfully as long as human beings stop being human. I'm sure Vulcans could have a perfectly functional ancap society. But they cold also have a perfectly functional communist society. It is logical for everyone to contribute everything they can and take only what they need, so of course that's what every Vulcan does. Humans, not so much.
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@pauliusiv6169 What happens when Putin invades your village? Nation-states exist for a reason - and the reason is they used their military-industrial complexes to swallow up all the villages that weren't part of other nation-states and didn't have military-industrial complexes. And what happens when the village next to your village pours mining slag in the river you both use as your water supply, but they're upstream of the pipe and you're downstream?
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@patricksachs3655 How does a private party provide you with a nuclear deterrent but not the people who don't choose to pay for it?
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@panzerofthelake506 "how would those bigger organised groups raise money if everyone only cares about themselves and their own well being?" And there we have it. Anarcho-capitalism, like communism, works perfectly once you perfect human beings so that none of them would ever seek power over others or abuse any advantage they have or can obtain. In other words, once humans stop being human.
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Anarchy is your sixth grade gym class, forever. Anarcho-capitalism is much like socialism: it's a great idea that cannot possibly work because it requires human beings to be Vulcans, elves, or something other than human beings. It's also a religion. Libertoons irrationally worship the market in the exact same way Marxists worship the inexorable march of history. Your blind faith that the market, which is incapable of ever being wrong, will take care of everything is no less irrational than the blind faith of socialists that the government or the Party, which is incapable of ever being wrong, will take care of everything. And anyone over the age of twelve who think taxation is robbery is profoundly ignorant of the foundations of liberal (in the classical sense) economics and politics. Again, it's exactly as ignorant and naive as "property is theft". It's something a teenager who knows nothing about the real world says. I would highly, highly recommend you study of on Edmund Burke and the American Federalist Papers and proceed from there. Or better yet, study economics and political science at a university. And study some history that doesn't involve tanks. And the belief system you're describing utterly and completely fails to take into account that some things (not restaurants) are inherently communal. Clean air and water, for example. Sure, the market can provide drinking water for a price. But I don't just want my own personal drinking water to be clean, I want the creek behind my house not to be toxic and stinking and kill all the wildlife, and also not kill me if I happen to fall into it. How can a market possibly provide that? How do I buy my own individual creek and not have the same creek that flows past everyone else's house? And what if my upstream neighbor values pouring the waste from his lead mine and smelter into the creek more than he values the water downstream from him being clean? How can market possibly address that? And do we really want to pay individually for clean air to be pumped into our own little airtight bubbles so we can breathe it? The reality is that everyone breathes the same air, regardless of how much we pay or how much we pollute as individuals. You're too young to remember the days when we had "market-provided" clean air and water and the government kept its nose out of it, which meant we had rivers catching on fire and life expectancy cut by ten years or more by breathing smog all day. In practice, the way the market provided clean air and water was that rich people all lived upwind and upstream from the pollution and poor people lived with the smog and toxic rivers. But that only worked so well, and the wealthiest men in London still breathed toxic fumes when they went into the City. And the idea of a "market for security" is quite simply idiotic. Yes, there can be market solutions to providing those services - but the market cannot possibly determine how much funding should be put into security, or provide the funding, because security (beyond the level of private bodyguards, who are pretty much zero use when another country invades or lobs nukes) is also inherently communal. If I think I need $100 per capita worth of security, and the other 99 people in the area to be secured decide they want to pay zero for security, my $100 will buy $1 per capita of security for me and also for all of my 99 neighbors, who will pay nothing but get the exact same security that I get. Thanks, I'll take the state military-industrial complex over that any day of the week. And then we can get into a market for justice. Then again, let's not. I can only take so much brain hurt from the stupid in one day.
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@Undead38055 And what happens when everyone agrees that we need something, but no one decides to pay for it because they assume someone else will? Do I pay my fair share knowing that others aren't? It can't possibly work.
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@richardmcdonald8724 Because without coercion a moderate amount of greed, selfishness, and dishonesty would cause it to fail spectacularly. It can't work if enough people try to game the system by being free riders. In our current system that is counterbalanced by the government putting people in jail if they try to cheat. No punishment for cheating = no reason not to cheat. Human beings require coercion to get anything done at a scale larger than a village because we are greedy and selfish by nature. Communism has the same problem. It would work great if everyone were honest and fair and altruistic - in other words, not human.
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@jokubas3391 It lasted for centuries when centralized state bureaucracies hadn't been developed to the point where larger states had an unbeatable advantage over small ones. But that capacity was developed, and then it was all over but the warring. The process of absorbing them did take some time because of competition between the great powers to see who got which little principalities, but the process was inexorable. And if you study the Thirty Years' War you will see that during that time you would absolutely MUCH rather live in one of the larger, more secure states than in any of the little ones that were the battleground. Does the term "Swedish drink" mean anything to you? Just like much earlier during the Hundred Years' War you were much better off living under England's more modern centralized bureaucracy than France's feudal system. The Middle Ages ended for a reason. Actually several. But what you're arguing is like saying, as Jared Diamond does, we'd be better off if we'd never adopted agriculture. That may be so, but someone was inevitably going to invent the more efficient system, and once that happened it was inevitable that the more efficient system would drive out the less efficient system, even if the less efficient system actually made people happier. It's not just where history ended up, it's understanding how and why it ended up that way. There's no substitute for education.
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@vladimirrodionov5391 Defund the police? No thank you, we've seen where that's led - a 30% increase in violent crime. And it's not the police who have failed, it's the politicians who have failed to allow them to do their job.
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It's even harder to be an ancap after receiving a university education in history, economics, or political science. Libertoons are like flat earthers, they think that having an education and actually understanding the subject disqualifies one from speaking on it. "If that micro state then uses its power to force others into, it is no longer ancap." Right. And that's why ancap, like anarcho-syndicalism, exists only in theory. Because there will always be someone to form a larger, more rapacious system and absorb it.
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@robertsmith4681 For ancap to "work" it needs all the people who participate in it to be Vulcans, scrupulously honest and logical. oddly enough, that's the exact same problem communism has.
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Liechtenstein is a historical anomaly that exists for peculiar reasons. There used to be hundreds of Liechtensteins in central Europe, now there is only one. Why do you imagine that is? Same with city-states. In 500 BC Greece was made up of dozens of independent city-states, in 300 BC it was part of a unified empire, and in 100 BC it was part of a much larger and foreign-run empire. How do you think that came to be?
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@Astronist Would love it to death. Enjoy the embrace the warm, cuddly bear.
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@ImperialSenpai "The Holy Roman Empire is pretty great and it has the Habsburgs." How'd that work out historically? I can't seem to find a "Holy Roman Empire" on any map after 1806 - in fact, all of them after 1870 also seem to lack any of the constituent sovereign states that were formerly in that empire.
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@alexanderchenf1 But it didn't. Are you at all familiar with the Thirty Years' War?
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@alexanderchenf1 OK Putin.
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@ImperialSenpai Nonsense. Read the original Constitution.
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@@leanja6926 "Centralization of power and resource is the root of all that's wrong in the world. " No, that's just a symptom and a method. Lust for power is the root of all that's wrong in the world. Unfortunately it's also baked into our DNA. The only way for systems like communism or anarcho-capitalism to work would be for humans to evolve into Vulcans. I'm not holding my breath.
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@panzerofthelake506 The big state next door will definitely come back. What do you think happened to all those hundreds of little HRE principalities?
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@ImperialSenpai The social and technological conditions that made medieval society work are not recurring again any time soon, unless Putin nukes the planet and we have to work or way back from the stone age. And even then, probably not.
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@ImperialSenpai The current one.
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@ImperialSenpai The Holy Roman Empire was a relic by then. It didn't really function at all the way it did in the Middle Ages after 1648. There was a thing called the Thirty Years' War, perhaps you should read about it. I just recently read a book about the Napoleonic Wars which concentrated on the political arena and argued that the Napoleonic Wars were less like the revolutionary wars and more like 18th century wars in terms of great power goals, ambitions, and tradeoffs. The carving up of the former HRE, as with the Ottoman Empire, took several centuries not because the petty states being carved up had any meaningful say in the process, but because each great power very carefully balanced the costs and benefits of any territorial change against the costs and benefits to its rivals. Also, Napoleon never called himself the HRE, he was styled Emperor of the French, which was a novel institution that claimed no continuity with the Roman Empire. Austria still exists because the Allies won WW2 and didn't want Germany getting any territory it hadn't had in 1918. Czechia was never German. Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony, all the other old German states do not exist as sovereign states as they were in 1700, they are constituent parts of Germany the same way New York and Virginia are merely constituent parts of the US. In both cases its a federal union but supreme power resides at the federal level.
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@alexanderchenf1 And it's what will always happen, unless freedom is willing to sacrifice some independence - I did not say freedom - in the cause of efficiency. If all of central and western Europe turned itself back into hundreds of Lichtensteins tomorrow, by next month there would hundreds of new little provinces in the reconstituted Russian Empire.
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@alexanderchenf1 Apparently you aren't. Millions of people (out of a much smaller population at the time) died and some areas of Germany lost half or more of their population.
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@alexanderchenf1 Familiar with the Thirty Years' War.
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