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Notes -
I think the Frontier is at least a part of what's putting a thumb on your scale. Both the fact that it was there, and the fact that technologies of transportation and communication didn't allow for any meaningful control over it.
Anarcho-capitalism-lite looks way better when anyone who doesn't like your society can go five miles down the road or get on the railway and find a parcel of beautiful, fertile land upon which the sweat of a man's brow is enough to give him a decent life. It breaks down when it is no longer possible to Exit from a situation you find intolerable and therefore you have to Voice your complaints and coerce people to fix them, and live with the attempts of others to do likewise.
Ah, that is part of what makes it appealing, for sure. But communes have strong Exit rights too, so I don't think it's obviously biasing the comparison. Is the argument that Exit is more important for anarcho-capitalism-lite given reduced Voice? I'm not actually sure Voice is reduced in ancap societies -- you have all the tools of persuasion and politics to get your way and you can pay to get it too, whereas in ancom you only have the former.
This might seem superficially counterintuitive: Sure, in ancom you don't have money, but you also don't have to work for money. Doesn't it cancel out? But in fact theory predicts this result: You are rewarded for your service to the interests of others with influence over others' actions in turn. This has the natural effect of maximizing total utility, as each individual makes money doing what most efficiently enables them to help others and spends money on the help they most want. In other terms, trade is positive sum: both parties are better off for it, both get more value out than they put in. So forbidding (or failing to adequately facilitate) trade reduces total utility.
The communist ethos may be 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,' but getting one's needs (and wants) satisfied is the whole incentive for providing one's ability. If you remove that incentive, people just aren't going to try as hard. Auth-left can force them (which is just slavery, and is inefficient and destabilizing in the same ways, but isn't completely unworkable), but lib-left can't, really. So the only way it can ever really work is if people want it to.
What I mean is that anarcho-communism doesn’t work at all (probably) and that anarcho-capitalism worked a lot better when you had the internal ability within a broadly ancap American society to say ‘fuck you I’m making my own log cabin’ and have that work out pretty ok most of the time.
In general one problem with trying to make alternative societies now is that you are likely to be doing it somewhere inhospitable that nobody else wants to be. Having a virgin, fertile continent makes such things easier.
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