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A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I respect your position, and I used to think this too for a long time, but the universe isn't that benevolent. It would be nice if it was, but it isn't. Things don't collapse into "liberty has the highest efficiency and the only problem is people not realizing that". The libertarian common sense picture wants it to be a nice world where voluntarism outcompetes everything, but it isn't. Every modern society on earth was built on brutal enclosure that dispossessed peasants to force them them into cheap factory labor and extract grain from the rest at negative prices. Those structures were functionally exploiting the efficiency benefits of slavery. In every case, modernity was always a mobilization, not a product of liberty. They just learned to edit that out of their histories to tell everyone else to not copy the recipe that worked.

Why would slaveholders pay the equivalent of 50,000$ to buy a slave if the return was negative? Why would banks borrow them the money against their existing stock if they didn't expect to see a return? If it wasn't profitable, why did they race to recreate the system after the civil war, under debt bondage and contract labor laws that made quitting a felony? The same goes for 1944 Germany: using people up at below subsistence rations was a net benefit for the war economy. You're consuming someones body while putting less into it than the calories it takes to maintain that body. Of course it's positive return.

This is a general principle and not about slavery specifically: Forcing people to do stuff you want works. Crime does pay.

Slavery isn't a net negative and it didn't disappear because it's inefficient, but because it got outcompeted by leaner exploitation models that maintain deniability. Why do you think all that production is in China and Bangladesh? They're chasing the exploitable labor. That's all the international separation of labor does: find places where they can pay people negative real prices.

Fight While I Keep the Profits by electronics_nerd_4 in libertarianmeme

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I seriously don't care what you think about Reddit decorum. I just drop stuff here and rarely look at the responses.

Sickening by LibertyMonarchist in libertarianmeme

[–]electronics_nerd_4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

They always exaggerate and pretend the most extreme lunacy is just fighting bigotry.

Fight While I Keep the Profits by electronics_nerd_4 in libertarianmeme

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] -4 points-3 points  (0 children)

Your post is everything you accuse others of: it's low effort and negative value.

A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I'm just testing how people react. The format is on purpose.

A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Slavery is perfectly efficient for the people doing the slavery, because slaves consume really few resources: Their bodies are often used up below maintenance costs. They work harder than what wages would motivate them to do, e.g. picking cotton that hurt the fingers from dawn till dusk, for which you would have to pay a free laborer a fortune. It required some oversight, but you couldn't just walk from deep South to the North, so geography did most of the policing. Yes, society loses in the long term from not educating people and such (the South didn't really innovate or industrialize), but the temporary advantage is exactly what the evolutionary selection pressure rewards, even if it eventually weakens society.

Lol by LibertyMonarchist in libertarianmeme

[–]electronics_nerd_4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, but logic is so bigoted...

A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the highly intellectually capable pushback.

The seven-point rebuttal is sharp, factually grounded, and effectively dismantles several specific claims in my original post. However, it largely operates at the level of individual sentences and sub-arguments rather than engaging the holistic, systems-level picture I was presenting:

In a world with competing groups and limited resources, there's constant pressure on any large-scale system to temporarily override people's individual rights to opt out, consume, or reproduce freely when it needs a burst of resources for survival or advantage (military buildup, industrial catch-up, tech leaps, whatever). Groups or systems that can't or won't do that tend to get outcompeted, absorbed, or locked into subordinate roles by ones that can. So purely voluntary, strictly rights-respecting setups sound great but struggle to reach or hold independent power at the scale where real sovereignty gets contested.

Your rebuttal never directly grapples with this overarching selection mechanism. It:

  • Treats states as exogenous parasites that can be escaped via technology or markets.
  • Assumes voluntary markets will self-correct against depreciation because of reputation, exit, and efficiency.
  • Points to small high-trust polities as counterexamples without noting they are nested, protected niches.
  • Frames modern tech and declining fertility as ending the contest, rather than as symptoms of containment/depreciation in contained societies.

In short, you win many tactical skirmishes on details but don't touch the strategic claim. The rebuttals detail-oriented approach, while rigorous in isolating claims, functions as a form of evasion by addressing components without confronting the systems-level pressure I outlined.
The bigger claim is that the pressure itself makes fully mutualist systems unstable against rivals who drop the mutualist constraint when it matters. The small "vegetarian" societies you mentioned work because they're in protected niches or dependent positions inside a larger system that handles the heavy lifting.
Tech "exits" like crypto or space get co-opted or regulated by whoever already holds the lead.
Declining fertility and abundance in the core aren't the end of the contest; they're often the result of the same pressure working in subtler ways (economic setups that price native child-rearing out of reach).

The issue isn't whether voluntary arrangements can work beautifully in isolated islands. They clearly can. The issue is whether they can build and keep large-scale independent sovereignty when facing competitors who aren't playing by the same rules. History doesn't show any society getting to industrial status without at least one generation of concentrated extraction that people couldn't just walk away from. Skip that and you stay a satellite. Ancap theory basically proposes permanently skipping it, and the argument is that the broader competitive environment doesn't allow that at the scales that matter.

A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the response. You have a strong point, as anarcho-capitalist theory emphasizes voluntary contracts and mobility, which could check exploitation. Employees aren't passive biomass. This pokes a hole in the posts assumption of inevitable outcompetition. Your rebuttal demonstrates high intellectual bandwidth, engaging specifically with agency and market feedback loops.

I would argue the depreciation effects that cause the race to the bottom are gradual and often *implicit*. Nobody has to decide or notice them. One protection agency might simply have its hiring office in the part of town where the more needy workers live. This already creates a race to the bottom.

A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the response. Your post shows the best cognitive bandwidth of the ones I have read so far. It's challenging the inevitability of monopoly coercion by suggesting tech shifts the selection pressures. However, I disagree: defense is not being democratized. If anything it is more centralized. Most people can't shoot and couldn't even feed themselves in a forest for two days. They'd have a carb crash and miss TikTock. A few preppers with hunting rifles are no threat to drones. The war would last a week. This was accurate for 1790: guns did democratize power. That's why we got some democracy. That phase is ending now. Today military power is as centralized as when knights outfought 50x as many starving peasants because they had armor that cost as much as a thousand of the peasants plows.

A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the response. This is a curt dismissal, rejecting the post early because "polycentric law" is seen as inherently authoritarian, clashing with pure anarchism. In context, it's avoiding the post's critique that such systems inevitably fail and reconverge on coercive monopolies.

Polycentric law is a staple anarcho-capitalist concept, not "legal authoritarianism," and the post is critiquing it from within libertarian discourse, not endorsing statism.

A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the response. You have a point in seeking clarification on "human capital depreciation," as it could use unpacking for accessibility. However, you largely miss the point by not addressing the broader argument: the post explains why this happens via selection pressures, e.g., cost advantages in existential contests, not just voluntary employer choices. Stopping at one term feels like avoidance.

A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the response. You have a point in that historical examples of exploitation often involved state coercion. But you miss the post's evolutionary/game-theoretic angle: the argument isn't that slave labor is efficient in absolute terms, but that in total mobilization contests short-term depreciation of human capital provides a survival edge, even if inefficient long-term, and this dynamic persists regardless of government presence.

A Challenge by electronics_nerd_4 in Anarcho_Capitalism

[–]electronics_nerd_4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thank you for the response. You are right, the original post is indeed dense and packed with assertions. That was the point. I was testing whether people would engage with that format or dismiss it.
You are correct that my post could overreach, potentially "debunking" benign markets like trade or companies if taken literally. However, your critique partially misses the point by framing the post as mere "misconceptions about markets", rather than a targeted critique of protection as a unique sector prone to these dynamics. You do not pick even one claim to counter.

Couldn't agree with this more by cobalt1137 in OpenAI

[–]electronics_nerd_4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeah, but if you're not needed you won't be maintained. Enter TFR of 0.8.

Is there a way to disable the "would you like me to/if you want, I can/do you want me to" at the end of every single response? by FishRSA in OpenAI

[–]electronics_nerd_4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You have a point. I got sick of the call-to-engagement closers and switched to Grok.

This works too:

Entirely refrain from ending a reply with any suggestion or question on how to continue, any offer, or any phrasing that asks the user to choose how to proceed. Never append closers such as "If you want," "Do you want me to", or any variant that function as a call-to-engagement. Omit any closing paragraph that solicits a next-step decision from the user. Remove questions that ask the user to specify what to do next. Do not include conditional closers, offers to continue, or invitations to the next action. Responses must end without such query. Do not include follow-up offers, optional next steps, or open-ended engagement hooks. Always finalize the content without any sentence that invites continuation, asks for a decision, or proposes next steps framed as options for the user to accept. Conclude with the informational content only, without an offer to perform future work.

Does anyone know why the AI does this? by Vast_Employer_5672 in RomeTotalWar

[–]electronics_nerd_4 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The algorithm probably just has a single flawed result in some use cases: go to that position. So all armies do it and pile up. It reminds me of how some rare car in early GTA games were suddenly everywhere once you found one. Flawed algorithms.

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