Brad Spangler did some thinking out loud the other day, & touched on some things I’ve wanted to clarify myself on for awhile.  Consider this a laying down of cards…

Apparently what first triggered Brad’s post was him having a beef with the Wiki entry on market anarchism, specifically the differentiation between mutualists & (what are currently called) anarcho-capitalists on the basis of the Labor Theory of Value.  Having read that, I have an issue with it too, though not Brad’s:

IMO, it is not a “theory”, it’s fact.

Yes, you read that right.  Not only do I believe that all value comes from labor, I personally don’t get what the big fuss is about saying so, it strikes me as shit-obvious.  I remember once in an arguement on a message board w/ a self-identified Marxist I conceded a point he’d made about it (he used this hypothetical about people stranded on an island, w/ one person hoarding coconuts so they could make the other survivors work for them to get any).  He seemed shocked for some reason or other.

I’d think that it would actually be very difficult to come up with another view of what value comes from that actually meant anything.  Sure, you could say that everything is worth nothing until we think it is, but that’s veering away from discussion of property and into psychology.  Ever since the first man to walk the earth we have had to do SOME form of work to survive, that is well known.  The reason that people get it confused now is because the definition of “labor” has been warped over time into something more complex than it actually is.  For example, imagine a vulture — yes, those birds that eat dead stuff.  Even that is “labor” if you think about it: they have to find it first…

That said, I personally don’t have a problem with profit, despite feeling so strongly about LTV being a fact, so in that way I completely contradict the Wiki article on what holding to LTV means.  More specifically, profit at its root — getting back from labor more than subsistence — is not incompatible with a market order in a just, post-state society.   It would look very different though, since in such a society it would be impossible to shift costs onto others by force.  Profit as a thought would have to detach itself from profit as its current action, essentially being reborn minus even the implication of corporate-state collusion — in English, that’s “worker-owned and/or local scale yes, Wal-Mart no”.  No surprise there, but the implications are deafening.  Hey, that’s what you get when a natural market order gets usurped and you take forever to rectify it, you can’t just chip off a single piece & declare the statue to be done.
The reason I view the world the way I do is moral: using force for personal enrichment, IMO, is unquestionably wrong.  Some that may point in the same general direction (though maybe not as far along) of opposition to statism have other reasons, and on those I pretty much agree with how Brad put it:

The state and its allies are understood [by Rothbardians] to be a criminal gang — an ongoing system of theft, oppression, slavery and murder. The thought of the Friedmanites, by contrast, is a mere intellectual discourse upon what would maximise total prosperity in a society. Utilitarianism is an academic exercise suitable for economics textbooks. Such studies are to be welcomed to the extent that they make justice (i.e. anarchy) more appealing to the amoral and boost our own confidence in the workability — but to substitute utilitarianism for natural rights theory within anarcho-capitalism is to quite literally sell out ethical principle for a mess of pottage.  (emphasis mine)

Couldn’t have put it any better.  As you may have noticed, with a couple of exceptions (SCOTUS Blog, which focuses entirely on US judicial issues, & Washington Monthly, which I just like to read for my own reasons even though I staunchly oppose their general views — kinda “know your enemy” in a way) my blogroll is inhabited by people who in some way or another generally point to the end result I’d seek.  Whether it’s disgruntled “conservatives” or “liberals” just now coming around to the moral bankruptcy of politics and confused by what they see, political activists spreading skepticism of the State at the least, or full-blown capital-A Anarchists, each could be said to be on a journey where the final stop is to seek the death of politics.  It’s only a matter of whether they keep going or not.  I may not agree with some of what is said right now, but I’m not going to run them off the road for it.