I recently authored a cute little story in which I illustrated some of my concerns with voluntaryism/anarchism.
Read the story if you like; it's written mostly in my adorable, chatty prose, but be warned: some of my commenters were right - it's a little straw-mannish.
Basically, it's the story of two towns connected by a river, and of a tragedy-of-the-commons problem where landowners along the river start charging tolls and eventually stifle trade between the two towns, all because there was no government there to help them coordinate. Then I wrap it up with a nice barbarian invasion and everybody dies. See, you shouldn't be anarchists! (Maybe I should have left the barbarians out; they definitely enhance the straw-man aspect...)
You should probably check out the discussion that ensued from the post; it's pretty wide-ranging and civil. Nobody got into a flame war, which is nice. One topic that came up again and again was this question:
How do you talk about ownership of the river?
There were two flavors of answers:
- The landowners can't charge for river passage, because they don't own the river!
,
, and
were in this camp.
- Of course they can own the river, they have to be able to own the river! Actually, only
said this. Nice, man. Way to commit fully to the anarchist story. :)
Here is the question for discussion today: How should the "commons" be treated in an anarchist utopia?
By "Commons," I mean things like:
- Waterways
- Oceans
- Fisheries
- Air (as in quality)
- Air (as in access for aircraft)
- Air (as in radio spectrum)
- Forests, for logging, hunting, whatever forests are for
The coordination problem is that the only way to protect the commons is for people to universally agree not to overexploit them. In anarchy, universal agreements are unenforceable (with no threat of civil or criminal penalties, everybody has an individual incentive to cheat on the agreement), so you have to get around that somehow.
The rote answer (read, the wrong answer) is that "everybody would see that it's in their best interests to comply, so they'd comply. If one person deviated, then everybody would punish them economically." The reason I view this as the wrong answer is that "everybody" is not an agent - in anarchy, "everybody" is a collection of individual agents, each with their own individual incentive to cheat. A solution to the problem is a proposal of how to realign agents' incentives so that they're actually better off not cheating, both now and long-term. Anyway, feel free to give the rote answer - but I'll ignore you. I want to go deeper.