commie

Obviously you choose not to notice. Not noticing is what we do. It was a nice video, thanks! But the best parts had no words. I keep being perplexed by people's infatuation with these. In other words, I don't know that you're blocking anything. I wish I could be of more help...

How is the infamous "invisible hand" of all theories straightforward?!? And on the face of it, it's about markets rather than capital. If we're going to talk hopelessly dated political economy, Marx's MCM' is flawed but at least it describes something you can actually observe in the wild even today. Granted, I've got no degree or job in that field. But I've got some experience trolling the professionals you are referring to by taking part in graduate seminars, chatting with people who wrote books about this and so forth. Look at data or ask questions and any clarity falls apart. I can't tell you the name of anyone who published a workable system, and it's not for lack of looking. Never mind building something new, just keeping the existing system from crashing is basically trial and error. Which isn't to say that you can't define a word or being clear about a concept. The problem I posed earlier is: how much traction does the definition or concept have when dealing with "reality"?

Your brother seems to be kind of like me in some ways. I'm not into all this "self-help" stuff, talk of "personal responsibility" and suchlike leaves me cold, I've been obese since before puberty, hate the very idea of careers and so forth. I don't know what are your circumstances or where you live but ideally there ought to be some sort of system out there with people more experienced than you at helping people like your brother. It's not in anyone's interest to have him show up at an ER requiring costly interventions for a preventable disease for instance (not to mention more costly outcomes of social neglect). But assuming you're on your own... Since you are generous enough to think in terms of years, what seems to be missing from the picture you painted is power. Being paid is nice but a problem with careers is that if you don't have great credentials or talent, they're likely to involve doing someone's bidding or even doing harm. Vaguely liking life or enjoying distractions may not be enough of a motivation to put up with that. So instead of going straight for the cash, maybe your brother could start by doing something that makes him feel powerful even if it doesn't pay or pays very little. Maybe he's already spending time helping people but if not, you can feel powerful doing that. Helping you would balance the help you're giving him a bit and would be a start but helping people who actually need it is something else. If you can prove to yourself that you can do that, maybe you can think about doing other things as well. This may not be useful but I'm sorry to say that the only other thing I can think of is that you shouldn't be on your own with this.

It's surprisingly hard to find a coherent definition of capitalism which has traction on "reality" (as our host might put it). Any industry can be made private for instance, as long as it's sufficiently regulated. That is, it might as well be public expect for capitalist ideology.

What a monopoly has to be is... monopolistic. I agree it doesn't need to be perfect but it still needs to be overwhelming in practice whenever the monopoly is challenged. Even as far as intent was concerned, one of these laws was the 2nd amendment which was explicitly aimed to prevent such a monopoly. A true federation has no monopoly of force. The EU for instance also has laws, courts, agencies and a legislature. It doesn't need overwhelming military force because members are allowed to secede. Please keep in mind that in the context of this thread I'm trying to argue the mainstream anarchist (or federalist) position and not the individualist position which I loathe. No doubt I'm doing a poor job of it, not being an anarchist myself. But I'm not trying to say you don't need a monopoly at some level but rather that the monopoly need not be in the hands of a state (which necessarily has little in the way of accountability to its subjects).

I think the first phase of the war belies quite eloquently the notion that the early USA had a monopoly of force over its territory. You talked about kings and so forth earlier but other non-monarchical polities in history had a similar makeup: common defense against outsiders but no monopoly of force internally. Whatever libertarianism is, it has thankfully not been the only alternative to absolutism for quite a while. edit: I forgot that the violence before the war also illustrates the weakness of the federal state

There was effectively no monopoly of force until the US civil war, which was quite bloody. While a global monopoly of force could in principle result from a sort of global civil war, it would require a monopoly of WMD arsenals which would be much harder to achieve. Before the nuclear age, if one party has overwhelming military force, it could not be opposed and was therefore in a position to disarm potential opponents. But you can't get rid of a decent WMD arsenal with threats. This is similar to the reason the 13 colonies united, and doesn't require a monopoly of force. Alliances can wage war quite effectively without all parties effectively submitting to a single leader, as shown by the defeat of the Axis and its multipolar aftermath.

I haven't seen Star Trek but this doesn't sound like the path we're on. For a little while during the collapse of the USSR it seemed (if you looked away from China and France) that the USA was gaining global supremacy but it has since lost ground and no other state has come anywhere near that amount of power since. Some of the supranationals (the UN, the EU and so forth) have grown over the past decades but none has significant military force. They have a different kind of force which has grown more important over the decades. If a global state ever forms along those lines, it won't have a monopoly of force. And it won't need to.

That was another problem with the video which brought up a moralistic account of the US civil war. White homesteaders were competing with slaveholders for land. Slaveholders could not win economically and so resorted to wanton violence. Freeing the slaves was simply a way to fight back against the slaveholders. Yes, this was simplistic but answers your question I think.

"A" large military force? "We"? How do you keep WMDs in check in the first place? This didn't work with nukes and yet nuclear war has been avoided so far. The age of monopoly is over. The only novelty with these hypothetical space corporations is that only state actors have controlled sizable WMD arsenals so far.

Even if an ill-defined fantasy is worse than the monopoly of force, how does that make my point moot? If that fantasy was the only alternative to the monopoly of force, then I have bad news for you about the consequence of these future space corporations you are so optimistic about: anything largish and fairly solid becomes a WMD when deorbited.

Really? Enemies make peace, or indeed avoid war in the first place all the time. The monopoly of force provides a kind of insurance against the cases where people do not manage to settle on an acceptable agreement. But it doesn't work every time either, and comes with a cost. And sometimes that cost has been exorbitant! The monopoly of force performed so well historically not through peace but through war. Indeed its main achievement has been the thorough mobilization of polities against outsiders rather than conflict resolution.

Google is rich but pretty harmless. Lookup the East India Company for a better example of what corporations can do in a weak/failed state environment. But yeah: as long as people do not agree on who initiates "violence" in every instance or indeed on how to define that in the first place, we're going to keep trying to live and prosper by any means necessary. Police powers simply dissuade some away from certain means.

Now that I think about it, the issue of what gets called "government" might be worth commenting upon as well. For instance I (as someone who has been known to advocate for freedom) generally favor the monopoly-of-force government supporting agreements made between independent organizations (such as business associations and trade union confederations) as opposed to governing by fiat. This I would call "small government" even though it is arguably a way for society conceived as a whole to govern itself in greater detail than the monopoly-of-force government efficiently (and therefore sustainably) could without such devolution.

"Anarchism" is a word that has been used to mean many things and I've only watched the beginning of the long video... but that part at least is clearly not about what is generally called "anarchism". For one thing, its conception of oppression is actually based on what Leo might call an "identity" (though I wouldn't frame it in such an Anglo-liberal way) so it's not based on the objective conception of morality Leo argues against. I'd say it's trying to address a problem that comes along with the benefits of government rather than opposing it as such. The video seems to be about political individualism which would include some anarchist tendencies (indeed some people call themselves individualist anarchists in order to distinguish themselves from mainstream anarchism). Disclaimer: I have no idea what "anarchy-capitalism" is supposed to be and I'm not an anarchist (but I'm sympathetic). I've not read anything by Leo or watched any other video of his and this is the only thread I've read here.