(The Short Case Of) Why I'm Not An Anarcho-Capitalist/Right-Libertarian

I'm not going to make "warlords/it's not anarchism/it's for privileged people" arguments.

1. They make the same mistake as Marxists (perhaps a "Why I'm Not A Marxist" post is in order?) as reifying economic abstractions like private property, exchange in a cash nexus, and economic relations are axiomatic baselines of human behavior. But in order for behavior to happen at all, in order for there to be private property and cash exchange for goods and services, there must be legal, ideological, political rules and norms agreed to or forced upon that are enforced that precedes any of this at all. By claiming them to be axiomatic they become incoherent and put the cart before the horse. 

2. They treat contracts and markets (really, cash nexus capitalist markets) as automatically generating the "base" (in Marxian terms) of society. But as we've established, society by definition precedes these things, and by society I mean the legal-ideo-political "substructure" (hereupon referred to as just the substructure). Contracts themselves are established after this substructure, as is their validity. The economy they reify as self-generating depends upon a pre-existing substructure of norms, rules, institutions, trust, etc. The contract is not a self-justifying magic object independent of this.

3. Their entire vision of a cash nexus market where people just trade according to time preference and marginal utility, where force and politics do not enter into the picture, is just completely ahistorical and a serious misreading of actually existing capitalism. Capitalism to this day requires constant intervention and market distortion to accelerate capital accumulation. Vagrancy laws, poor laws, Laws of Settlement, Enclosure Acts, Combination Acts, Riot Laws, etc, and this continues today in the form of IP, regulation, neoliberal foreign policies, central banking, and so on. The existing property distributions have nothing to do with a "self-correcting market"- even Rothbard himself admitted this

4. Right-libertarian self-ownership -> exclusive private property norms makes no sense. You own and possess your body because you are the sole, active living user and occupant. This same rule governs land and physical tools. Cessation of use ends the claim. But Lockeans claim that mixing labor creates *exclusive, absolute rights* in the form fo permanent private property. But there is no logical reason why we get from the fact of self-ownership to such a thing. A mother mixes her labor and energy to make a child, but she doesn't permanently own the child as a product. To get around this, right-libertarians and ancaps invent an arbitrary exception claiming human bodies follow one set of rules (inalienable self-ownership) while all external physical matter follows another (of alienable homesteading, absentee title). The asymmetry is... not appealing. Furthermore, Lockean theory uses active human labor to establish why unowned land and resources beyond to individuals. But capitalist property norms say that an absentee owner, who does not mix their labor or occupy and use the property or land, can hold the title, and the occupiers and users cannot. Another contradiction

5. "Marginal utility" and "time preference", especially employed as defenses against radical socialist political economy, are circular. A worker works for a boss according to a higher time preference and according to preferring the marginal unit additional satisfaction or utility a worker gains from earning an extra unit of income. Value is subjective and goods are sold according to marginal utility for the consumer. Very well. But this is an abstraction; this may very well work for a worker in a free society, but it fails to take into account the reality of actually existing capitalism and even economics in general; how could products *exclusively* be sold according to marginal utility, with cost of production or labor never entering the picture, unless it was a monopoly situation where they can charge whatever the market will bear? Marginal utility is thus a dependent variable; the influence of value on price assumes a snapshot of the balance of supply and demand in a market at any given time. Per Kevin Carson, making scarcity and utility depend on the balance of demand and “present goods” at the present moment ignores the dynamic factor. In taking the balance of supply and demand in a particular market at a particular time as a “snapshot,” and deriving value from “utility” in this context, it ignores the effect of short-term price on the future behavior of market actors: the very mechanism through which price is made to approximate cost over time. As for time preference, it similarly is a dependent variable. Like Maurice Dobb says, respective time-preference values of different groups depended on the prior postulation of a certain income-distribution and hence a certain class structure. Preference for present over future depends on income, the nature of the fundamental costs which affect the rewards of the factors of production will be determined in turn by the distribution of income. Ancaps usually take such existing distributions as a given. Even Bohm-Bawerk partly admitted this; "All things come to him who waits, and, in economic life, this describes the capitalist. But this fact involves that the labouring classes who cannot wait, and cannot compete with the productiveness of lengthy processes, are put in a position of peculiar dependence: hence the possibility of exploitation of wage, of usurious rates of interest, of unjust rents."

6. The NAP and private property rights being axiomatic/"the default norms" are circular. What I mean is, what is defined as "aggression" is defined by the property theory already assumed to be subscribed to (which, as we've established, is one norm or rule among many.) The NAP establishes that "no one may aggress or initiate force against another person or their property." But, as Proudhon asked, "what is property?" Without knowing this, we don't know what counts as aggression. If aggression means literal physical force in a blanket sense, then any initiation of physical force at all is disallowed, which is a bit absurd. Ancaps would not disagree with the idea that you are not allowed to grab and yank away the watch from someone who pickpocketed your watch. The thief in this case uses no physical force, but the owner's forcible repossession does. If we instead assume "aggression" to mean "a violation of legitimate property rights", then we have a vacuous tautology: "do not violate legitimate property rights." But we need to define what property rights are in order for this to mean anything- thus this cannot be an axiom at all! Let us say property rights are axiomatic then. But what kind? Ancaps use Lockean labor theory to derive this, but again, if it needs to be demonstrated and explained, it isn't an axiom. We either presuppose property rights or property rights aren't axiomatic; neither is satisfactory. To go back to a prior example (and one that Rothbard uses), to know whether or not X aggresses by seizing a watch from Y, we need a prior theory of property. At the same time, Rothbard claims that the NAP is an axiom and prior to the rest of libertarian ethics. What he really does is subscribe to a Lockean theory of property to define property, and then uses the NAP to, ahem, "deduce" that same property order. This is also a problem with Ayn Rand, who I can only assume Rothbard got this axiom from, despite his public falling out with her. To go back to a point established earlier, it is impossible for the NAP to generate a property distribution or a property distribution right-libertarians want because it already depends on one. It is parasitic on a prior legal-ideo-political substructure that defines and enforces the titles, contracts, and boundaries in a given society. The NAP presupposes a theory of property, and the theory of property presupposes the NAP to make it function. The "axiom" is neither independent nor self-evident, it just forbids violations of whatever property rights one subscribes to. And this is completely fine! Anarchists like Berkman, Tucker, Spooner, etc subscribe to this already, just with different norms that they recognize as convention or normative commitments, rather than completely self-evident axioms. You don't need a deontological justification of a preference.