Teaching college is no longer a middle-class job, and everyone should care

In these comments, my advocation of a "state" is an advocation of small ( more representation.

A capitalist's idea of "ruining the land" is not Gaia's idea of "ruining the land". If a logging company owns a rainforest, it will want to plant more trees when it's destroyed everything else there. The company has no financial incentive to care about the ecosystem it's destroying by logging in the first place, nor the collateral effects of that elsewhere. Your retort may be that the logging company has to acquire the rainforest first - yes, but logging is probably the most profitable activity for a rainforest, so logging companies will tend to acquire such land. I feel sick typing this...

Another major example of markets encouraging overharvesting is when the harvesting occurs on land/water that no one owns (or can reasonably own). Then, the harvesters have no regard for the replenishment of the resource; they just want to make money. In unrestricted capitalism, a herd of bison or a pod of whales is a goldmine at market. A puerile defense to this may be that no one would whale if no one wanted to eat it. You may also say that we'd "cease our dealings" with anyone who ate whale - how would we know? Why would a capitalist care what this other guy eats on weekends if this guy's company is giving him a better deal?

Capitalism has little regard for Gaia. Individuals are mostly selfish, and capitalism runs on individuality and selfishness, so Gaia gets no consideration. We need states to ensure that companies don't act contrary to our long term interests.

You made the point that in modern states, neighbors never consent to one another's conduct, and they rely on the state for control and mediation. Yes, I agree, this is a failing of modern statist societies. But, in my view, if states were significantly smaller, those governing would be your neighbors too, and so legislation would effectively be a "mutual conduct agreement" anyway.

Sure, a state's governing may not please everyone - but if everyone is within walking and living distance, the society would be more able to resolve its differences, or come to a compromise. Thanks to this quality, I think smaller states could function with requiring more than the majority in parliament to pass legislation: e.g. 66% or 75%. Either way, at worst, you can move to a nearby state that aligns more with your beliefs. In this way, "governing" would become a market for ideas that work.

Governments are not violent nor amoral if they have the consent of the governed. If you want to live by your own rules, move somewhere that isn't governed. If you want to live in a town, you have to follow that town's law as determined by popular will.

On your remaining points:

- No, the actions of markets and companies can affect me without my deciding to interact with them, and to say otherwise is laughable and offensive. Capitalism is destroying our planet. Companies can lowers working standards, salaries and social welfare across the industry - especially when they collude.

- The whole non-aggression principle of libertarianism is tiring. Libertarians have to contort their beliefs around the NAP because the philosophy requires an absolutist principle for organizing society. Here are the contortions I see libertarians make: private property is not aggression, corruption is not aggression, market manipulation is not aggression, theft when necessary is aggression, governing-by-consent is aggression, etc. Other political philosophies take a more nuanced view of organizing society, and rightly so.

- Policing by economic deprivation doesn't work, because it's less immoral to deal with someone who committed an immoral action, than it is to commit that immoral action. Say Alice hunts whales (which are endangered), and Bob sells Alice her ships. Bob is viewed as less immoral, because he didn't actually kill the whales, and so it's less likely that others would stop dealing with him. The only reason Bob wouldn't sell Alice ships is if the whales are more important to him than the profit of selling the ships. You would require every {shipbuilder, oil company, ...} in the world to believe this, for whaling to be prohibited - and even then, you can sometimes whale from shore.

- Over the last 100 years, we've learned that consumers act selfishly, and so relying on the consumers to police doesn't work either. If you put whale in a market, consumers will buy it. If a company from a locality abuses people elsewhere, local consumers don't care.

- Your point on corruption is unrelated to mine. If we define "company corruption" as employees acting contrary to the company's interest for their own personal gain, and "market corruption" as companies acting contrary to public interest for their own profit, then only company corruption is inefficient. Market corruption is certainly "efficient", and there's little to stop it in anarcho-capitalism.

- Free markets tend towards complete monopoly; the more "freedom" companies have, the quicker they will conglomerate. There's a startup in this city? The incumbent(s) will price them out. As an example, the American media conglomerates are just the result of market forces (and physical realities). The sprawling, centralized US government helps them along, but they would've got to where they are now sooner or later.

- In an ideal world, with people who could make an anarchist society function well, what then would be your objection to a state (by my definition), or to abolition of private property (noting respect for personal property)? And hence, what base is there for anarcho-capitalism?

My belief in anarcho-communism is predicated on the idea that power is bad, as is my disbelief in capitalism and large-statism. Unfortunately, this is also why anarcho-communism is unlikely to ever be implemented successfully: you need power to usurp power, and power attained is unlikely to be forfeited.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stateless_society

It may very well be that the various 20th-century post-war G.I. Bills started the college bubble in the first place, by democratizing the expectation of higher education to the lower classes for the first time in history.

1. Worldwide adoption of libertarian society at some fixed point in time (e.g., by magic), meaning that the largest land holders would soon absorb their neighbors and form estates of a size equivalent to US states or small countries. These people would presumably be responsible for families or even entire clans, forcing them to take a long term outlook. But "selling" might be problematic if there is no reliable store of wealth other than land.

2. Adoption limited to a geographic region (e.g., through a political process), with the commercial economy dependent a foreign currency. In this case, the rational strategy for a small land holder (less than 100 square miles) might be to extract foreign money from the land by selling crops, ores, etc., and then abandon the land.

I'm guessing that the optimal size of land holder that is big enough to be efficient, but small enough to saddle some larger entity with their externalities such as the cost of protecting them from the territorial ambitions of their neighbors. The bigger the estate, the bigger the cost of absorbing one's own pollution, crime, etc.