taxizen wrote:By that token anything is an absolutist unreachable construct. Liberal democracy is a complete non-starter if anyone doesn't vote or even a sizable minority don't vote and what if the majority don't vote (as quite often happens). What if they can vote for what colour ribbon they wear but not whether or not they want to be forced to buy dogpoop for 40% of their income, is that a non-starter?
Some things aren't absolutist because they don't try to reduce current and consistent historical properties of reality to nothing. Liberal-democracy is not absolutist because all it does is try to vary the mix of things which have never been observed not to exist. Anarchism is absolutist (much like communism really) because it goes as far to say that coercive hierarchy can be
eliminated, in spite of any thought experiment you can make up leaving incentives for such coercion. Libertarianism as a larger category is not absolutist by contrast, because it simply includes the sets of political ideologies which aim to reduce coercive hierarchy (though anarchism is a sub-category).
taxizen wrote:No it doesn't require high barriers to entry and exit, you have it backwards, some kinds of activity naturally are hard to do without first throwing a lot of capital at it but that is a consequence of natural conditions not a requirement arbitrarily set by some mythical sky king. In any case a high capital investment can be made by many small investors just as easily a few big ones.
Those natural conditions ensure a convergence on just a few big firms owning most of that particular market. This market structure is sometimes called oligopoly by economists, or to greater extremes; monopoly. Barriers to entry can include loaning, because firms which are already big have passed some measures of success, so would be trusted more by lending institutions than start-ups, which are seen as riskier. Other barriers to entry are created by economies of scale, such as bulk buying. These things allow firms which are already big to get even bigger and gobble up more of the market.
This exposes the fundamental problem with Austrian economics; it acts like there's just one natural market structure, that of perfect competition, and all the other market structures contain purely governmental barriers, rather than intrinsic ones. Austrian economics is most applicable in the market structure of monopolistic competition (Not to be confused with monopoly. Economists are weird with naming things), where barriers to entry and exit are low, there is good market knowledge, and elastic demand to the products being produced.
The Austrian argument against monopolies centers around the idea that if one firm is earning supernormal profits (average revenue above average cost), other firms will be attracted into the market and compete away the advantage, until the market contains lots of smaller firms earning normal profits (AR=AC). The fatal flaw in this notion is that it only applies when firms can easily enter and exit markets, and natural barriers to entry and barriers to exit (sunk costs) don't apply in the free market. If we know that they do, then the Austrian argument is reduced to a fair argument for market forces left alone in the appropriate market structure, but not in all markets within the economy, and therefore can't be used to support "Utopian Capitalist" anarchy.
taxizen wrote:Possibly. 
Sincerely: my feels.
taxizen wrote:The market is the people. Realise that anyone who tells you that "the market" is an enemy or a wild beast that must to be tamed or a monster is actually telling you that YOU are an enemy, a wild beast that must be tamed and a monster.
The market is some people over here doing one thing, other people over there doing something else. If one person gobbles up all the resource control, they might not be obvious aggressors, but if the economy is composed of a mass proletariat, dispossessed of means of subsistence, then they are beholden to the monopolists dictatorship over that capital, and the freedom they have, is the freedom to choose between accepting the monopolists terms or starving/other serious ailment for lack of their own productive land (and technology).
The conditions which are best for people to be amiable to others rights, are those where each person can possess that which can support their life without desperate struggle. If the populace is instead dispossessed of such things, and it is given that markets can indeed produce monopolies as shown, any extreme libertarian concept will not be stable due to the extreme class conflict created by the masses being dependent on the decisions of an elite few over how they will survive. This is true for market actors as surely as it is for government ones.
The more dispossed conditions are evident, the more coercion there will intrinsically be. We shouldn't be surprised, in the unlikely event of the mass populace accepting anarcho-capitalism, and its theory consequently being proven wrong, to see the reaction lead eventually, perhaps inevitably, to a socialist dictatorship.
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