: : : Oh I understand it only to well, I've read Adam Smith, Milton Friedmann (the 'anarcho' capitalist who calls for state provision where, shock, horror the market fails!), Novack or is it Nozick something like that and more, I find it all wedded to ideological utopias and very, very ready to ignore, not just reality and consequences but their own logic.: : I will respond to your long post when I find the time, but I just had to say a quick "thank you" for demonstrating your ignorance of what is called anarcho-capitalism. FYI, Robert Nozick, Adam Smith, and Milton Friedman (that's with one "n",) don't qualify. Nozick is a philosopher, not an economist.
: Early Nozick or late Nozick?; after all, much of Thatcherism/Reaganism was based on Nozick's ideas of minimalist state - ideas which he later rejected.
I know he did. To tell you the truth, I've never read any Nozick. I'm familiar with his approach, and it just doesn't interest me. Maybe one day.
: When you hear someone talking about 'rolling back the state', you're listening to one of Nozick's disowned kiddies.
: I'd broadly agree with Lark's assessment of anarcho-capitalism; and I've no more faith than he does in rule-by-corporation.
: Why do you think that corporates would make a better government than a state? - after all, if real-world corporations were any more benign than governments, then McSpotlight wouldn't exist.
I don't think corporates would make a better government than the state, but perhaps my definition of goverment is different than yours. I think corporates would be better behaved in a world w/o a government, one where they were regulated by their own actions in a free market of private property. I believe that, in place of inefficient government regulating agencies, private regulating agencies would pop up in the market, along the lines of Underwriters' Laboratory, or any of the other currently existing consumer advocacy organizations.
I don't believe that real-world corporations are benign, because a truly laissez-faire, anarcho-capitalist society does not currently exist in the real world. You'll get no argument from me that many corporations today are out of control, polluting the environment, etc. It's just that these corporations are monsters of a very particular kind of social arrangement: the mixed economy, a mixture of "free-market" and "government intervention". But it's not the "free-market" part that's the problem.
: Neither would Corporate Watch.
: And British American Tobacco wouldn't be supporting black-market smuggling in order to expand their market share in South America and the Far East.
: : I'd tell you who you should be reading, but somehow I doubt that it would make much difference.
: (What are the bets that Ayn Rand crops up somewhere?)
You'd lose the bet, friend. If you simply must know, I'd point you towards Ludwig von Mises, Murray Rothbard, and David Friedman.
Now, somebody (Stoller?) will probably say, "Pff! Murray Rothbard! I might have guessed!" without bothering to offer any actual analysis.
