This road became accessible & Open to everybody in the state…farmers didnt claim their chunk they built as their private property or did this with an incentive for private capital accumulation or under a venture capital investors wages. These are regular people (and not prospective capital owners) doing work that contributes to the commons. This looks a lot more like Mutual Aid than capitalism or the free market forces at play.
Voluntary cooperation for mutual benefit is precisely what free market libertarians advocate for. It has nothing to with forcing everyone into any particular one size fits all system, nor is it about the blind pursuit of profit at all costs. It’s a pluralistic social order where the most socially beneficial institutions are allowed the freedom to flourish without the government interfering on behalf of those seeking to benefit not through the merits of their contributions to society, but through political expediency: rent seeking, protectionism, and other legal privileges.
There are lots of ways to maintain common resources and public goods voluntarily. Many early roads were privately provisioned through simple, common sense solutions. In the absence of a monopolistic state, nothing would stop communities from building and maintaining roads however they considered best for their specific needs.
If you believe people should be free to associate, exchange, and collaborate with others without coercive third party interference, then congratulations. You’re basically a libertarian.
I am a Libertarian, just a socialist one. Maybe you already know this but the word “Libertarian” and its ideology was actually coined by French anarchists who were opposed to capitalism and all forms of unjustified hierarchy (The State being a source of hierarchy and power). Majority of Libertarians who aren’t American are anti-capitalist.
Nothing technically STOPS acts of mutual aid and communal ownership under “true Adam Smith-ian free market” capitalism but it’s odd that mutual aid and communal ownership stopped once capitalism began being implemented. Even without concepts of state aid (like tax breaks, tax cuts, subsidizing, etc.), just because “technically it would be allowed” doesn’t mean that a market and society based on private ownership of resources and profit motive and motivation to maximize profit wouldn’t create nearly the exact same problems but worse. Nothing stops labor abuses and wage slavery under “stateless capitalism”, and an individualist philosophy based on “these are MY resources and MY property” is a miserable way to live in the 1st place. Right Libertarian concepts of private property came about in the first place FROM state-enforced private property building from Western European colonial powers in the 19th Century.
Hope I’m not sounding condescending if you’ve already heard this before, but if you like concepts like mutual aid and everybody being able to create societies based on mutually helping one another and one that doesn’t create vertical power structures or hierarchies of power (based on Statehood or Capital/Resource Ownership), I’d really suggest looking up The Conquest of Bread by Peter Kropotkin (its a short read especially on audiobook), and also Murray Bookchin.
“but it’s odd that mutual aid and communal ownership stopped once capitalism began being implemented.”
I highly recommend that you refrain from using such conflationary terminology. All it does is obfuscate the true root causes of problems with unnecessarily partisan rhetoric.
Mutual aid associations were very mainstream and successful in the US, especially amongst the poor and socially marginalized groups. What caused their dismantlement was government policies which intentionally sought to usurp their role in society. Instead of neighbors helping themselves and empowering their own communities, the bureaucrats would rather have everyone dependent on a paternalistic state which was now demanding higher taxation in return for their “generous” welfare services. And dependency is exactly what we got.
“just because ‘technically it would be allowed’ doesn’t mean that a market and society based on private ownership of resources and profit motive and motivation to maximize profit wouldn’t create nearly the exact same problems but worse. Nothing stops labor abuses and wage slavery under ‘stateless capitalism’”
This is what you don’t seem to understand. No one would be telling everyone “you need to keep all your possessions private” or “you need to work for a boss.” People would simply make whatever decisons worked best for their circumstances given their available options. If working within a voluntarily organized union is so much more preferable for workers, nothing would stop unions from dominating the market based on their own merit and rendering capitalistic firms irrelevant.
The whole point of a free market is that it allows for different institutions to compete on a level playing field and determine which is the most socially beneficial. To say we shouldn’t have a free market is like saying the rules should be bent in your favor because you suspect you wouldn’t be able to win fairly otherwise.
Same thing with communal living arrangements vs. private ownership. If communism is so much better than private property, then simply allow people the freedom to make that choice for themselves. The only people who would object to this are people who either believe others are too dumb to manage their own lives, or those who suspect their system would not be embraced willingly by the masses and therefore rationalize state compulsion to execute their grand schemes.
“an individualist philosophy based on “these are MY resources and MY property” is a miserable way to live in the 1st place.”
Then why do people stuck living under socialist regimes risk their lives to move into more prosperous and individualistic pro-market societies? If your argument is “That’s not real socialism,” then how about New Harmony, Indiana or the Israeli kibbutz system? And if not even those empirical examples pass your purity test, then why?
“Right Libertarian concepts of private property came about in the first place FROM state-enforced private property building from Western European colonial powers in the 19th Century.”
Property rights, like many other complex social institutions such as communication, predate humanity itself. This is similar to the common myth that ancient kings invented currency to keep the poor down. No single person invented these concepts. Far from being arbitrary constructs, they emerged spontaneously to serve specific needs that were not otherwise being met.
I could go on and on about how private ownership of property allows for price signals, the best use of tacit knowledge, and so on but I suspect there’s probably no point in doing so. It was fun, but I feel like I’m just talking to a brick wall at this point and the thread’s already too long so I’ll leave it at that. Thanks for participating.
Obscure Fandoms 