Stef comes up with a proof of anarchy in existence...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIs5r3ujBmw

That seemed pretty convincing to me, after thinking it over a while.

What do you guys think? This is probably a good video to watch for minarchists too

I don't think it's the Darwin Theory he thought he found.  The politics of special interests is a closed system with alot less variables than civil society.  If you're going to say A works in X and therefore A works in Y, you need to show a strong similarity between X and Y, and I don't think special interests mimics real society close enough to draw strong proof .

Communism/socialism seems to work in small communities like Kibbutzim but we know that it's actually a horrible system.

 

I'd say socialism works in small communities because there is little complexity. Without division of labour, in small communities it becomes fairly easy to manage things, although the fact that there is some governing body will prevent any real growth, and people doom themselves to low standards of living.

In terms of special interests and government corruption though, things are far more complex than a simple farm community. The sheer amount of different lobbyists representing varying special interests, all going against each other at one moment, and then spontaneously organising coalitions the next - this is something you could equate with dvision of labour and specialisation, perhaps? It seems fairly akin to the market economy (including concepts such as opportunity costs in dealing with one special interest instead of another due to limited funding).

Fred Furash:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIs5r3ujBmw

That seemed pretty convincing to me, after thinking it over a while.

What do you guys think? This is probably a good video to watch for minarchists too

This isn't really new. See the following predecessors:

Alfred Cuzan, "Do We Ever Really Get Out of Anarchy?"

James Ostrowski, "The Myth of Democratic Peace: Why Democracy Cannot Deliver Peace in the 21st Century"

Geoffrey Allan Plauche, "On the Social Contract and the Persistence of Anarchy" (Synthesizes and extends the previous two.)

 

I feel like I just wasted 20 min of my life.  This guy is a pretty good speaker, so it was pleasant, but the "payoff" sucked.  "Anarchy works almost perfectly when done within the state, so it'll work even better without the state?"  This is completely unconvincing and useless, and it sure didn't require 20 min to present.  Very disrespectful of my time, IMO.  Cut it down to 1 min and maybe it'd get more than 400 views.

 

Molyneaux has 'discovered' that governments are voluntary associations. Of course they are. Anybody can join the mafia. But from the fact that membership in a criminal gang is voluntary it does not follow that a free society is possible.

I'm not sure I see why his argument would convince statists that they are wrong.

 His argument doesn't make sense, though. Isn't the entire idea of anarchism based on that the state cannot work, since it is a coercive monopoly? Using that argument, it means that since this non-contractual anarchism doesn't work, individualist anarchism wouldn't work either, and that means that no political system could work. I would say that he has opened up a paradox here.

I didn't watch the video, but if that's what a huge revelation is, I would vote that this video puts him at risk of jumping the shark.  I thought voluntaryism was in Anarchism 101 ?

Nitroadict:

I didn't watch the video, but if that's what a huge revelation is, I would vote that this video puts him at risk of jumping the shark.  I thought voluntaryism was in Anarchism 101 ?

His alleged innovation is the idea that state's are internally anarchic, i.e., the branches of government are in an anarchic relationship with each other. He may or may not have developed the idea independently, but the idea is not new (see my first post above). Also, the idea that the international system of states is anarchic is very far from new; it's been understood by international relations scholars (my second doctoral examination field is IR) for a very long time.