Jerry Kalish

http://mises.org/story/1778

http://mises.org/story/2066

I especially like the story about Somalia because it points out a huge thing–it works there because there are other forms for societal organization, including tribal/familial structure and religious ethics/morality. I have a harder time imagining anarchy in a more secular society without such underpinnings.

I have done quite a bit of reading about anarchism. Especially related to the christian church. In the end I believe the word anarchy has a negative connotation, but it can be a beautiful ideal.

The one issue we have seen throughout history is sustaining anarchy. It is cyclical. Something shakes everything loose and we have anarchy working. The borders and inhibitions are down. Then these communities start to congeal. A pattern is formed. When we study a country or people group we look at: religion, government, economics, among other things.

All of these things are part of any people group whether they have an official name or not.

Ok, off my philosophical haranguing and back on my bike!

Hey Eric, it’s cool to see so many Boulder people here. I’ll keep this short since this is supposed to be a biking website. I agree with you about innovation and the internet, my question is just how stable the internet would be in an anarchy. Would Qwest (for example) have the ability to go in to a sovereign city-state if they had to make repairs to a major fiber-optic cable? and how would it be maintained if currencies start to diverge?

I’m sure I can find some of these answers on the FAQ above, I’ll check it out.

The idea is direct democracy in which people do not hold authority or power over others. Their ability to accomplish things other than survival as a hermit would pretty much depend on cooperation and

@Andrew: You make some good points. Anarchy is anarchic and it’s hard to make sure that people are good, but an anarchic society would support human rights, environmental protection and justice. Look, there’s a lot of evidence that capitalism and centralized federal power structures suck for the environment and people. I don’t think they’re a necessary evil either corporations probably reduce more innovation than they promote (more innovation happens these days outside of them in small companies that collaborate with others, often with help of the internet, eg. Kogswell, Cetma, Xtracycle; Thomas Friedman talks about this for hundreds of pages). Anyhow, I could blab about this a while, but this doesn’t seem quite like the place. I just think we should think about alternatives in more areas than just transportation. Please check out the Anarchy FAQ above and actually think about if we really need all this stuff. Modern civilization depends more on language, agriculture and human creativity than it does corporations or hierarchical power structures.

PS. I live in Boulder as well and think city-states like Boulder and Colorado Springs could probably keep to themselves…so long as they had enough bikes, food and beer. I’ll put it this way: liberals, at heart, just distrust the market, conservatives distrust the state, and anarchists distrust both. In the end, I think we can all find things we agree on as human beings.

PPS. I’ll stop posting now. Sorry.

Ward has their own little anarchic republic going, with their doomsday roadblocks in place to keep the wealthy Boulderites out of town when TSHTF.

And anarchy might be the best for human rights (I assume that’s the main thrust of your argument, Eric), but it wouldn’t be a good thing in the modern world. We need a large centralized government that has the power to write rules that cover big groups of people and large swaths of land.

If we didn’t have that it would be nearly impossible for larger corporations or institutions to operate. This might seems like a good thing at first pass but without large corporations we probably wouldn’t have things like the Internet, highways, standardized health insurance or international aid groups.

Also, say we break it down to the city level… the isolated groups could very well get more and more extreme in their beliefs or government, as a more liberal/conservative city would attract a larger liberal/conservative voter base. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t feel very safe living in Boulder, knowing that just 2 miles south is Colorado Springs – essentially our political opposite. We could easily turn into modern-day battling greek city states.

I’m sorry, I need to correct one thing:

The US isn’t a “democracy”. It’s a representative republic. Please understand this very important difference that most people don’t get, if you’re going to bring it up.

“Direct democracy” sounds to me like “rule of the masses”. That idea makes me *very* uneasy.