Re: why "anarcho-capitalism" is an oxymoron

From: Phil Osborn (philosborn2001@yahoo.com)
Date: Sat Oct 26 2002 - 17:45:54 MDT


This discussion is starting to sound more and more
like those silly programs on the local Pacifica
Station in which black activists would make the most
utterly absurd and racist claims - like that
caucasians were inherently incapable of living
peacefully because they had a deficiency of melanin in
their brains (confusing melanin and melatonin, I
suspect). Or the deal with young black boys in
Atlanta being kidnapped so that their foreskins could
be excised for some kind of diabolical experiments by
the CDC. Of the plot by whites to destroy the black
race by sterilizing young black women. Ect. Ect.
There were worse examples, but I've managed to forget
them, finally.

And then, however, if someone finally got fed up
enough with this nonsense and called in to the program
to accuse these black racists of being black racists,
immediately some black Marxist/Leninist would call in
to refute them by class analysis. Racism was of
course merely a tool of the capitalist class to
subjugate the proletariat. Using the claim of class
subjugation as a defining characteristic of racism, it
then followed that whites, as part of that class, were
all inherently racist by nature. Blacks as part of
the subjugated class could not possibly be racist, no
matter what they said or did.

Capitalism as a term has many meanings, but the basic
economic principle by that name simply refers to any
system in which the accumulation of capital is
employed to enable the doing of projects that no
individual could possibly afford. This is true of any
society above the subsistance level. As a more
general term, it refers to societies in which the
private - non-state - accumulation of capital is
permitted. The accumulation of capital, of course, is
only possible if you have enforceable property rights.
 Otherwise, it will simply be siezed by the first
opportunist to come along.

Anarchy, as I have pointed out and as is easilly
discovered in any decent political encyclopedia, is
not a system at all, but simply the rejection of
rulers - meaning the monopoly state or any similar
establishment of coercive power. So, the question
arrises then: is property dependent upon the existence
of a ruler or state to force people to recognize it?
If so, then anarchy and capitalism are incompatible.
If not, then anarcho-capitalism is not any oxymoron.

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