Philosophical Vegan Forum

Hello everybody! So, for the past few months, I have been thinking and researching a lot about politics and things related to it. I used to be an anarcho-capitalist, but, now, I have to admit that my views have got significantly more moderate. So, I have two questions for anarchists.

First, provide me some realistic solution to antibiotic resistance caused by agriculture that doesn't involve the government. Because I have never seen any anarchist or libertarian think-tank talk about that. Like, quite literally, nothing. And I have asked that question on a few Internet forums, and the answers I got are ridiculous. Most of the responses were denying that's even happening, even though everyone who is familiar with basic biology can confirm you that it has to be happening.
Shane Killian, an anarcho-capitalist blogger, is claiming that the government removes the incentive for scientists to discover new classes of antibiotics. I don't think that's the case at all, but even if it were, I don't think we can expect that a new antibiotic would be discovered every now and then. The fact that we have discovered a few tens of chemical compounds that, by different mechanisms, kill procaryotes but not eucaryotes is already miraculous. We cannot expect that there are infinitely many such compounds and mechanisms.
It's important to understand that widespread vegetarianism, even if we cosider that realistic, would not address the problem. Most of the antibiotics today are used in the egg industry, not in the meat industry.
Widespread veganism, which I don't think is realistic, would indeed address the problem, but it would not completely solve it. Namely, significant amounts of antibiotics are used in plant agriculture, mostly vineyards, for disease prevention and speeding up the growth. If bacteria which attack plants become resistant to antibiotics, most biologists seem to agree that those genes will sooner or later transfer to the bacteria that attack humans, via horizontal gene transfer. Bacteria, unlike other living beings, can conjugate with their quite distant relatives.
So, once again, provide me some realistic solution to that problem that doesn't involve a government. It seems obvious to me that the government should do more about that problem, rather than less.

Second, explain to me how the economy would work in an anarchy without contradicting the basic game theory. Because anarchists tend to either subscribe to the Marxist School of Economics or to the Austrian School of Economics. The problem is that neither of them work even on paper. The basic game theory predicts that a society that tries to base itself on Marxist economics will fail almost immediately due to the Tragedy of the Commons, and that a society that bases itself on Austrian economics will fail very soon due to the Paradox of Thrift. Since economics is a soft science, what works on paper might not work in reality, but the problem is that anarchists are unable to even provide an explanation of how economy should work that at least works on paper.
I have never really bought into the Austrian School of Economics. From the very beginning of my research of anarcho-capitalism, it was obvious to me that it's pseudoscience. I thought, basically, "Government action is always immoral, even if consequences may be positive.". But if your judgements result in economy not working, then perhaps you are not a good judge.
Now, which algorithm should a government follow? I don't know. But you do not need to know the right answer to recognize a wrong one, that government should never do anything. Obviously, since economics is a very soft science, government actions should be very humble, and government should be sensitive to the evidence that their actions are not producing desired results. But that's different from saying that we should discard basic game theory.

To be clear, I still think most mainstream policies, such as prisons, the police and the mainstream pandemic management with lockdowns and mask mandates are misguided. And I am against unjustified government intervention. Government should be our last resort. But the ugly truth is that it should still be there for the problems such as antibiotic resistance caused by agriculture. Thanks for watching!

The government already regulates antibiotic use in agriculture. Without government regulations, the amount of antibiotics used in the egg industry would arguably be much bigger.

Why do many more economists buy into the Keynesian economics than into the Austrian economics? Well, the answer seems obvious to me: because Keynesian economics is at least not an attempt to deny basic game theory. It at least works on paper. Now, I am not saying that Keynesian economics is right, I am just saying it is way more probable than Austrian economics.
Anarcho-capitalists try to deny the predictions of game theory with rhetoric such as Mises'es "Government actions always suffer from the economic calculation problem. Prices can only be determined in a decentralized manner." or Friedman's "Government spending means less money spent carefully and more money spent carelessly." or Michael Huemer's "Governments are in the position of medieval physicians, any cure that government attempts to apply will have either no effect or turn out to be counter-productive.". I am not comfortable making such rationalizations.
The Mises'es argument appears to contradict basic informatics: find me some algorithm in computer science that is easier to implement in a multi-threaded way than in a single-threaded way. It seems obvious to me that there cannot be such algorithm.
As for the Friedman's argument, I don't think it addresses the Paradox of Thrift at all.
As for the Michael Huemer's argument, well, that actually makes some degree of sense. However, we need to understand that even medieval medicine was more likely to help than to hurt you. Bloodletting in medieval medicine was actually rare. The death of George Washington was an exception, rather than the rule. Furthermore, I think it is undeniable we know more about how society works than medieval physicians knew about how body works. Furthermore, we have the scientific method to evaluate our supposed cures. Medieval physicians didn't have that.

You need to understand that antibiotic resistance is a way more serious problem than global warming. The dangers of global warming are all hypothetical: we don't know what will happen if the Earth gets two degrees warmer. The dangers of a pandemic of a superbacteria are not hypothetical: we have seen what happens in such cases with the recent pandemic. Even if we shouldn't do anything about global warming, it doesn't mean we should do nothing about antibiotic resistance.

Proponents of uncontrolled capitalism, such as John Stossel, often say that the idea that the uncontrolled capitalism is unstable is based on our flawed intuition. But that intuition is based on game theory. Many intuitions are indeed flawed, but that one doesn't seem to be. The Austrian School of Economics seems to be worse than intuition.

Milton Friedman wrote:A government cannot get us out of an economic depression by increasing spending, because higher taxes and more spending always mean less money spent carefully and less money spent carelessly. Nobody spends someone else's money as carefully as he does his own.

Individuals are careful with how they spend their own money? Really? To me it seems that even people who try to be careful not to hurt the society with the way they spend the money spend money in a harmful way all the time. Almost everybody buys eggs from factory farms, for example, even though that's the number one thing that increases the risk of a pandemic of superbacteria occurring. And even if that were true, how does it follow that government spending cannot get us out of a depression?

Second, ask yourself, what would happen to the Internet if government regulations didn't exist? I am a third-year computer science student who has done some research about it, and it seems to me that, without government regulations, the Internet would be paralyzed by the denial-of-service attacks made easy by many ISPs incorrectly setting up their DNS servers. If not for the government regulation, many ISPs would probably set up their DNS servers to respond to requests from all IP addresses (rather than just the IP addresses of the users they are supposed to serve). And, since DNS servers often respond with long responses to short queries, hackers would spoof their IP addresses as if their DNS requests come from the IP of the server they are attacking, flooding the server they are attacking with DNS responses to queries it did not actually make. Hackers would need to use very little bandwidth for that, since they could massively amplify their attacks using improperly set up DNS servers of various ISPs. What is some realistic solution for that problem that doesn't involve a government? I don't see one. In my opinion, the government is not doing enough here. In my opinion, governments should force the ISPs to use DNS over HTTPS, rather than unencrypted DNS. That will slightly slow down the Internet, but would make both the DDOS attacks utilizing DNS for amplification (as you cannot make DNS-over-HTTPS requests while spoofing your IP address) and spying which websites you visit using DNS impossible. Why should it be that web hosting services should have to have some anti-DDOS defences and that it is possible to track what people are doing on-line just because the ISPs are using legacy technology? So, once again, it seems obvious to me the government should do more, rather than less.

I have asked this question about how DNS depends on the government to work properly on a forum about anarchism, and most of the responses there assume that your ISP can somehow protect you against that kind of denial-of-service attacks at the expense of your Internet speed. When asked how exactly your ISP can protect you against that kind of a denial-of-service attack, people there are not giving coherent responses. If you ask me, I think people on that forum don't understand the basics of how the Internet works.

What made me realize just how stupid those anarchist so-called schools of economics are was this. I published a paper applying information theory to the Croatian river names, and I went on to discuss it on various Internet forums. Many people there, in fact most of them, apparently had blind faith that information theory has nothing to say about the names of places. My arguments weren't even attempted to be refuted, they were simply rejected. People were rejecting my arguments without finding any specific flaw in them, they simply had blind faith that information theory had nothing to say about the names of places. That made me ask myself whether I sounded just as stupid when I was denying the predictions of the basic game theory. It seems to me now that I did sound that stupid. Anarchists are inventing unarticulate reasons why the game theory wouldn't apply to economics, just like people on various Internet forums are inventing unarticulate reasons why information theory wouldn't apply to the names of places. Both is irrational.

brimstoneSalad wrote:People are saying information theory has nothing to say about linguistics?

brimstoneSalad wrote:Do you believe prisons are real now

brimstoneSalad wrote:accept the historical truth of various genocides

brimstoneSalad wrote:It seems like those beliefs stemmed in part from your faith in anarchism (or fed into it?).