The foundation of capitalism is exploitation. The wealthy land owner gives the starving serfs a choice between dying on the streets or working for whatever wage he desires. if you are asking about the roots of capital then that comes form workers owning (for lack of a better term) the means of produciton. Farmers "owned" their fields, as did blacksmith's their irons. Only as warlords and thugs began to concetrate power did the idea of absentee property and capital (as seperate from the worker) arose. You system was started by exploitation and continues in it.

In its true sense, what is capitalism?

Capitalism is not markets or money or voluntary exchange. Capitalism is the concentration of wealth to absentee landlords. The idea that anarchism and capitalism can be put together in any way is laughable as the capitalist is no different from the king or the politician.

Capitalism is as natural to the human as sex or breathing. If it wasn’t, humanity would still be roaming the Earth naked, shelterless, and eating only for today. Capitalism wasn’t forced, coerced, or directed.

That's rhetoric over logic. Interaction and trade do not cpitalism make. Not to mention the fact that humanity brought itself up with a variety of states form the tribal hierarchy, to the bloody dictator, and the feudal lord. Capitalism is a modern take on feudalism, no natural office of man.

I, an individual, am the base arbiter of force regarding my property.

Your property only exists either through forcing others to recognize it through violence or by collective institution. We'll skip the absurdity of non-agression in the context of initial aquisition and move on. You are the arbiter only of your own force, you are not arbiter of your property because you can be killed and your property taken.

You might consider spontaneity as the solution to the answer to your question here. When traders met they created their medium of exchange, rules, and took it for granted each would get the best deal they could and it was up to each to defend themselves against being taken.

Yes a wonderufl system by which no man could be trusted save at the point of a knife. My point remains that without objective standards trade becomes primitive brutal barter. You might want to look into the forensics of your average drug deal. No impersonal force to worry about or objective arbiter so you can gain through illicit action.

Time evolved customs and procedures in trading that becme commonly known, but not created by a state no enforced by a state.

Yes, enforced by the state. Customs and procedures that if broken would do what? Bring a third party to bear? And what is a state again? Oh yes, an arbiter beyond the knife-point deal that can deal objectively with both men. You are acting off of a definition of the state that requires a county seal or fancy title. Let's not forget that customs are collective cultural rules for behavior that are enforced by a state, even if that state is the collective will of that culture. Just look at amish justice. When the rules are broken a man is cut off from speaking or trading. That's collective pressure, a state by any other name.

What happens to property if the arbiter is the force? The arbiter of force becomes the de facto owner. More reason to fear the arbiter than to embrace him in my view.

Yeah because losing that land to a system by which you can seek redress is so much worse than a system of where you have to risk your own life employing force.

It worked all over America until it faced a force that it could not comprehend and waited too long to repel.

America was recklessly capitalist during the robber baron age. However it was far from voluntaryist or anarchist. It is simple revisonism to decalre otherwise.

I don’t hold humanism as a highest value. I hold individual freedom as the highest value, therefore any coercion is the ultimate sin.

Except freedom-from is useless and without value in an of itself. Freedom can only instrumental value due to what it allows us to do. The the freedom of speech isn't valued because a lack of censorhip is in-itself good but because it allows us to speak our minds. Freedom-to is far more valuable than simple freedom from and neither deserves to be the highest value. To value freedom-from as the highest value is a brigand's morality.

The state can not create a better life for one without reducing the quality of life for another because the state has no money or resources other than that it steals from the people.

And the lone man can only ever produce a hut and some game. Only by becoming a member of a collective can he become more than a primitive. Government produces value not only in services it offers but the risks it removes. As a matter of fact nothing you make today is free from obligation to the state as without them you could not now (as opposed to ever) produce. The roads, the education, the police, the military, and son and so forth were all used in anything produced today. To simply stop at the individual in whose hands a thing resides is arbitrary and intellectually dishonest.

Not to mention that removing the capability of a person from buying a leer or a solid gold toilet is insignificant compared to the giving the capability to eat, learn, and strive. Taking from the rich their diminishing returns luxury money in no meaningful way harms them but letting the poor starve to death in the streets is meaningful and is real harm. Now do you see why the claim of social darwinism is so often lodged against your philosophy?

This Café has had this discussion and beat this horse for so long and in every way possible that it is amusing and slightly ridiculous to see someone come along and assign rejection of collectivism as “knee jerk”.

I don't think you have ever had this conversation before or are having it now. It's obvious from your tone that you have no interest in debating but rather outshouting. You are knee-jerk in that you step into this discussion with absolute faith that you are in possession of the one true philosophy that will create a utopia.

You're just as bad as fundamentalist christians. Your attitude is knee-jerk and your rhetoric is kneejerk with an outirght dismissal of anything that does not agree with you faith, without even an argument.

In my opinion you come close here, Jimmy D., but you make that collectivist/socialist mistake again of knee jerk lumping rich in with corrupt and greedy. Just isn’t so you know. The rich are no more prone to lapses of morality than the poor. The politicians, leaders, kings of communism and socialism have shown themselves to be equal in corruption and venality to anything a capitalist society ever produced, actually worse because of their hypocrisy of motive.

I find it laughable that you are spekaing fo hypocrisy of motive. Look at you claiming that the concetration of welath is not the concentration of power. That concentrated power is a state, it is the power of the right to control the lives of the poor. By the rich I mean the uber-wealthy, the top 1% who are all corrupt and all their gains are ill-gotten. Those that come to elath honestly are the upper middle class honest small-business man and middle manager with a heart of gold.

I am no foe to competition/markets, no advocate of centralization, or opponent of profit. I am an opponent of capitalism.

Now, I agree with you whole heartedly about the squandering of our resources by the corruption of politicians. I ignore Kings in context of our discussion vis-à-vis America, we don’t have them. Corrupt politicians, the word politicians in my mind automatically draws forth the knee jerk reaction of thinking corruption.

And the rich who pay off the politician and create monopolies, restrict neccesary resources, pillage the coffers of the people, and exploit the worker is no different. I also find it hilarious that you think it was the politicians who seduced the kind onld millionaire to become a special interest and not the other way round.

I think you’re besotted with the word collective. Pairing the word anarchy with word collective is more than a little strange to me. Then the second sentence, just how is a true market a collective endeavor?

I think you don't udnerstand what the collective is and are besotted with the myth of the individual. Imagine the human being born into a windowless room. There he never develops complex language, or the concept of property, or morality. These are inventions of the group experience. Individuals are nothing outside the group just as the group is nothing without the individual, it's interdependance both materially and psychologically. This Ayn Rand Neitzchian superman that will supposedly populated you Utopia doesn't exist.

Perhaps before you play at sociology you look into what creates a man and what creates customs. To claim that man alone is anyhting more than an animal is libertarian creationism, man springing full formed without ever being molded by the collective environment.

Thanks for the reply. Now to keep it up…

First, let me make certain I understand the points you put forth in your reply.

1. That humans, because of lack of perfect information, cannot be judged rational with any certainty.

2. That evolution is not completely random due to the constraints of natural law.

Therefore: Because both processes are semi-random (constrained random, if you will), they are similar.

First, let's agree on a definition for "rational". Webster's defines rational as "a: having reason or understanding b: relating to, based on, or agreeable to reason".

Reason, then, is "2 a (1): the power of comprehending, inferring, or thinking especially in orderly rational ways : intelligence (2): proper exercise of the mind (3): sanity b: the sum of the intellectual powers".

Evolutionary systems, then, are rational only in the sense that they can be understood by ourselves (in an incomplete fashion), as per definition b of "rational". In and of themselves, they possess no rationality (no intelligence). The laws that govern evolution do not, by popular scientific position, arise as the result of intelligence (otherwise we're positing Intelligent Design).

Economics also contains certain "laws", or theorems, such as that of supply and demand. However, these theorems are based upon the observation and generalization of human behavior. As such, lack of perfect information does not change the fact that economics is based upon the action of intelligent beings, however constrained. Limited rationality is not equivalent to irrationality.

Those items produced by humans within a capitalist system are the result of intelligent effort despite limited information. This limited information is also the reason for group efforts: the pooling of information. This helps mask the more limited information of individuals. Altogether, products such as microprocessors can be produced. The issue then, is not whether or not the product survives in the market, but the fact that it was produced in the first place.

One can argue that organic populations seek their own survival, but we're not talking about survival. We're talking about initial creation.

Of course, since this discussion is framed within the assumption that evolution is true and that intelligence has been produced through random processes completely untouched by intelligence, it makes my case that much harder to fully posit.

The only end point I can really make, then, is that economics and evolution compare poorly because of the fact that evolution is necessarily devoid of rationality in its natural operations, while economics is based upon the rationality of humanity, however limited.