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Comment by pharmakom | Hacker News Reader

Thiel is right wing but definitely not libertarian.

Honestly don't know the true nature of his politics, and I didn't mean to get political in my comment. I simply meant that in Thiel's discussion alone during the podcast comes from a less-government-would-help-here perspective. I don't know his opinions on virtually anything nor do I really care; I just thought that a variety of the points he made in that episode were at least interesting and made me think in a way I had not thought previously.

Isn’t Thiel essentially anarcho-capitalist?

So pretty far right and extremely (in the literal sense) libertarian.

EDIT: anachro->anarcho

I thought Theil was a self-described neoreactionary, which is explicitly anti-democracy.

Which I interpretted to mean something like Aristotelian philosopher-king style governance. A fairly obvious logical conclusion when one's starting assumption that people (the polis) are fundamentally stupid and corrupt. By the standards of the self annointed philosopher-king, of course.

I presume you meant anarcho-capitalist but I love the concept born from your typo : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anachronism

Thiel's hawkish military (and self-interested, given Palantir's contracts with Defense) positions on China probably put him outside of the pale of "normal" libertarian politics.

Considering the primary trait of right wing libertarians is hypocrisy-fused self interest, I'd say he's right on the mark.

Normally libertarianism has an 'exception' for defense because it's a pure commons. There's no obvious way to have private sector military due to the nature of wars and invasions. Indeed, the government having a monopoly on violence is a core part of libertarian thinking.

> Normally libertarianism has an 'exception' for defense because it's a pure commons. There's no obvious way to have private sector military due to the nature of wars and invasions. Indeed, the government having a monopoly on violence is a core part of libertarian thinking.

This is an entirely parallel subject. The monopoly on violence (which is just a concept in the theory of state, not a uniquely libertarian concept) doesn't imply a hawkish foreign policy outlook. Put another way: the libertarian perspective (even the minarchist variants) don't entail the kind of aggression that Thiel publicly advocates.

Being a hawk on China (e.g., extolling the US MIC to take a more aggressive stance in territorial disputes and information warfare) is a very conservative, not libertarian, position.

Yes, libertarians generally define a government as having a monopoly on violence. That does not necessarily mean they think the government should have a monopoly of violence.

I've never encountered a libertarian who thought otherwise, although I guess you can have 'sub-contracted violence' via things like private police forces licensed by the government. What exactly are you thinking of here?

Anarchism-capitalism isn’t a exactly a right wing ideology. It’s really only useful to think of it that way in comparison to the traditional anti-capitalist flavors of anarchism.

Right anarchism and left anarchism only really differ in what they predict the steady state of anarchic conditions would be… and the culture of their advocates I suppose.

That's sort of what I'm driving at. I would note that anarcho-capitalists are not pro social hierarchy which is a central belief in right wing political philosophy. Murray Rothbard described the ideology as being neither of the left nor fo the right, basically saying that self ownership is incompatible with both traditions.

Notwithstanding Thiel isn't and anarcho-capitalist, he seems in practice to be almost a neoconservative. He describes himself as a "conservative libertarian", but has wrapped himself up in the war state and the surveillance industry, both of which are HIGHLY at odds with any kind of libertarianism. Thiel is much more like Liz Cheney than say Ron Paul.

> anarcho-capitalists are not pro social hierarchy

Are you sure about that? I mean, I believe they don't explicitly argue for it. But the ones I've come across seem to be practically in favor of the sort of wealth concentration and freedom of the rich to do as they please that they seem to be effectively in favor of strong social hierarchy.

Some of them are natural law types and some are definitely misanthropic but they are all opposed to central authority and hierarchy. The high concentration of wealth we see today seems to be met with Teo main responses by the more well read ancaps I know. They either view it as the result of government capture or in some cases the reward for finding a great idea first. I think it’s a weak spot for them ideologically, personally.

Interesting. Thanks for the reply.

In which case, it sounds like they're perfectly ok with authority and hierarchy as long as they see it as "fairly" achieved via amassing wealth in ways that they deem moral, yes?

I'd certainly agree that's a weakness, in that it really seems to undercut the "anarcho" portion.

I think they'd see it as fine as long as you don't come to it by force, either your own or the government's. Generally these folks seem to think that in a free market that it's easy to be toppled by upstarts and hard to become very large without the state helping you. Would that be the case? I have no clue.

I mean, anarchy is about removing the central state first and foremost. The economics bit is where these folks differ from the traditional anarchists.

Huh. That's not my impression of anarchism. Not the people I've met for sure. And given the long history of anarchism in labor activism, I have a hard time believing it was ever purely about "the central state".

I'm obviously simplifying a complicated topic quite a bit. I'm leaving out the whole distinction to be made around Anarcho-syndicalism which is the labor organizing focused strain of anarchy, however these folks are very much against the state. These folks are sometimes historically called left-libertarians and have a strong historical claim on the term libertarian itself. But again, they all don't like the state. There are also collectivist and communist anarchists, however the latter may even be possible.

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