Episode #195 ... Could Anarcho-Capitalism be the solution to our problems? - Anarchism pt. 4 (Rothbard, Friedman, Malice)

Hello, everyone. I'm Steven West. This is Philosophize This. Thanks to everyone that supports the podcast on Patreon. Any support at any level on Patreon gets an ad free RSS of the show as well as the stickers, pens, t shirts that we send out for whatever the tier is. Thanks for helping the podcast keep going. I hope you love the show today. So a question that's worth asking of these anarchists we've been talking about, you know, the kind of anarchists that would say we're better off without the police, without laws, without a central authority, with a military warding off other countries invading, A question the skeptic has to ask these people is if all these ideas of yours are so great, why in recent history, every time they've been tried, have they eventually failed? I mean, we mentioned the Seattle strike last time, the Ukrainians post World War one, the Spanish Civil War, and Peter Gelderloos in his book mentions dozens of other moments in history with anarchist principles in action. But one common theme among all these examples is that they all ended up collapsing. What does an anarchist have to say about the fact that their track record here isn't exactly great? Well, the answer to that is that there's specific reasons each of them went south when they did. Admittedly, sometimes it was a tactical error by the anarchists themselves. Other times, like in the case of the Seattle strike, sometimes things just reverted back to the way they were before there was a need for people to organize themselves. Most of the time though in recent history, regardless of the specific reasons each of these experiments ended, you could say that a major factor is that there's really just been a lack of solidarity with other anarchist societies. You could say that many of these examples from history would still be going on today if there just happened to have been more international support at the time for bottom up organization like this. In fact, if the reason you're even asking that question is because you're actually interested in the viability of anarchism in the world we're living in today, needs to be said, lot of anarchists out there would say that far from anarchism being the strategy that's been totally debunked, on the contrary, we're in about as prime a territory as we ever have been for these ideas to catch fire. I mean, there's certainly some promise and things you could point to. How about the fact that twenty years ago, a lot of publishers wouldn't even consider printing a book on anarchism? Nowadays, you got bestsellers on anarchism. Nowadays, we're talking about anarchism on a show like this. And, you know, short of a few emails from people saying I must be huffing Elmer's glue to be even covering something like anarchism, short of that, there's not really as much of a social cost that people have to pay …