Actually, what TEA Party members want is less government power. The example you ares seeing in China is fine example of why less government is a good idea. See, the all-powerful government that leftists like you want allows a government to set up all the regulations required to keep a population safe from those evil capitalist pigs. Unfortunately, it includes government power to choose who to apply those regulations to and when.

China may have a strong government, but they're not using that government power to enforce any environmental regulation. At all.

The comparison of the Tea Party/Libertarians to China is their desire to remove all government enforcement of environmental regulations, thus turning the landscape into a polluted nightmare resembling China... which you would know if you weren't deliberately missing the point.

It's not that human workers are competing with machines, but that human workers are competing with cheaper human workers.

I'd say it's both. As far as a business is concerned, they don't really care how a job gets done, they just want it to be done as cheaply as possible for an acceptable level of quality. If that can be done with a machine, they'll do it with a machine. If that means outsourcing to a cheaper labor pool, they will outsource.

The gap is bigger now than a few decades ago, but that's not because of increased use of robots. It's because we're running out of oil that fuels them (also a few other reasons, but that's too far off-topic). And when wealth is decreasing, those who have power can make sure their share isn't affected.

But wealth isn't decreasing- it continues to increase for those who already have wealth and power. It's not like they're feeling the pinch of dwindling resources too. They're becoming vastly more rich, at an ever accelerating rate, while the majority of people are seeing their real income and purchasing power decrease.

It hasn't? Take a look around.
We're in an era where workers are extraordinarily productive, yet average wages keep falling, and the wealth of the ownership class has increased massively.

You could also think of industrial machines like agricultural slaves in US history.
Push down the wages of the free workers, enrich the large plantation holders, impoverish many more people who can't compete with what is essentially extraordinarily cheap labor.

You don't know any countries that import water?
In the UK Evian and Volvic are two popular brands of bottled water that come from France. I've even seen bottled water from Fiji, despite having a plentiful supply of water ourselves.

As soon as I posted, I realized someone would point that out. This kind of imported water is a luxury item, not massive quantities of drinking water to maintain a population.

Unlikely. Nearly all population growth is occurring in developing countries. They would handily lose any war with the industrialized countries where most of the food is grown and consumption takes place. Most industrialized countries are at or near zero growth, with some experiencing negative growth (they are shrinking in population).

A few issues with that theory:
1. Wars could break out between neighboring developing countries, it doesn't necessarily have to be about food. It might be about water, for example, which is more likely to be locally scarce if there is a high demand on it. Some countries import a lot of food- I don't know any that import water.

2. "They would handily lose any war with the industrialized countries..." Sure, so the developing countries won't necessarily pick a fight with the industrialized countries, but they do tend to have resources (oil, etc.) that the industrialized countries want/need, so the industrialized countries may very well pick a fight to gain access to the resources.

$150k clearly goes a lot farther in your fantasy world than in reality.

Maybe if you spend your money like a drunken sailor, then yeah. If you exercise some judgment and restraint in your spending, $150k should go pretty damn far no matter where you live.

The area in the US with the highest median household income is City of Falls Church, Virginia: $113,313.

$150k puts you well above average in even the richest community in America.

"Daggerfall? that game was horrible broken pile of crap"
"Morrowind and Oblivian where plain and the art was boring"

Wow, you must really be looking forward to Skyrim then!

And we don't have a way of storing, but if we did, we would need to double the area to collect it to store for the night.
SO panel are out.

But most power is consumed during the day. If we could fill most of our daytime power needs with solar, that could greatly reduce the reliance on fossil fuels. Even if we'd never be able to fulfill 100% of our power needs with solar, any reduction in power generation by coal plants would be beneficial. It doesn't have to be an all-or-nothing scenario.

The world is a stage; Time is money Both simalies, genius.

Better check the handbook again, genius.

I had an account at a bank that did something like this.
It sure was great fun having to type in my password 3 times because it didn't like the way I typed it.
And forget about trying to log-in from a mobile device.

(and before you tell me to switch banks, they do have other advantages that make it worth it. Just online-access is a pain-in-the-ass.)

There are about a thousand individuals in the US with enough political power to get the ball rolling for change in this matter. Of them, their demographics put them with an average age of upper 40's to lower 50's making well over a million each year. Among those who still have kids living at home, to most of them, their thousand dollar settlements is chump change.

It may be chump change to them, but there are plenty of millionaires who would sooner knife their grandmother than willingly give up a thousand dollars for something stupid like that.

That's assuming a rather broad definition of "hierarchical power relationships". The only power people have over each other in an anarcho-capitalist society is that which is granted voluntarily. If people choose to form hierarchies, on what basis do the anarcho-syndicalists justify coercive interference against those relationships?

I guess I'm not familiar with examples of anarcho-syndicalists justifying coercive interference against those relationships. At most, I could hear an anarcho-syndicalist arguing that such relationships aren't really anarchistic in nature, and then an anarcho-capitalist disagreeing with that assessment, and then that's the end of it (after some fruitless arguing.) If people re-align themselves into structures that mimic what we typically think of as a governing hierarchy, is it anarchism? An anarcho-capitalist would argue that a person always has the right to sell themselves into slavery. Maybe, but is that an anarchistic relationship? Does a person have the right to allow someone to initiate violence (or a threat of violence) against them? Is it still anarchism if that's done voluntarily?

If you take the exact same roles that are provided by the government today and put them into private hands, suddenly it's OK? The underlying power structure hasn't changed one bit. What's the difference?

First, that's a big "if"; capitalism does not require or imply highly concentrated ownership of property. That does, however, tend to be a consequence of corporatism, the use of political power toward the aggrandizement of certain wealthy or well-connected individuals or organizations.

We'll have to disagree on the nature of capitalism. I'm sure you've heard all of the arguments against it, and I've heard all of the arguments for it. I maintain that it necessarily results in the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, with or without government interference, while the anarcho-capitalist argues that it's only government interference that allows such wealth to accumulate. No one is changing anyone's mind here. I'd go one-further and argue that it's the nature of civilization itself, with our class stratification and division of labor and land ownership that necessarily results in the consolidation of wealth and power in the hands of a few, and as long as we continue to organize ourselves in this way, there's no way around it, regardless of the economic system we attempt to use. There are some upsides to civilization, but that's one of the downsides.

Second, even if wealth is concentrated, that does not mean those with more wealth have "power" over those with less.

Again, here is another major point of disagreement. Those with control of property can deny the use of that property to others. If all property is already claimed (land and resources are finite) then some people are going to be fully reliant on the property of others in order to live. You can argue that it's voluntary, but as long as the owner can decide the fate of the workers at a whim, it's not exactly a relationship entirely without coercion.

I'd argue that the closest things we've seen to anarcho-capitalism are the old "company towns" which usually were pretty disastrous for the workers when in the hands of less-than-enlightened ownership.

You are glossing over at least one very important distinction, which is how those guns are used. Any security organization worthy of the name will naturally have the ability to act coercively; that's their purpose. However, the difference between a genuine security organization and a government (if perceived as legitimate) or criminal organization (if not) is that the security organization only uses its coercive abilities defensively, to counter prior aggression. A government / criminal organization is not so selective. As you say, the latter practice aggression simply "because they can, because they have the guns."

I'd argue that the difference is largely irrelevant. Any company is going to behave in a manner that maximizes profits. If they can do that through straight-up theft, no amount of philosophizing is going to stop them.
What's the difference between existing governments, criminal protection rackets, and private security forces? One is the law, one operates outside the law, and one operates within the law. Why would a private security force act differently than a criminal protection racket if it was no longer subjected to the law?

I fully expect some organizations would make the attempt. However, even ignoring the resistance they would face from rival organizations, such acts would be clearly recognized as criminal and illegitimate.

And then what?
If there's money to be made, why would rival organizations not also participate in that? Why would people view that as illegitimate and criminal, but they don't view the way similar organizations act today as being criminal and illegitimate? What would change?

Governments get away with collecting taxes not just "because they have the guns" but also because far too many people see them as "legitimate" and refuse to stand up against them, even going so far as to demonize their neighbors who do choose to resist.

So why is this a problem to an anarcho-capitalist? People are voluntarily surrendering themselves to government authority. Do they not have the right to do so?

Are you saying that these hunter-gatherer societies typically don't have a "head-man" or respected matriarch or small decision making council of elders?
That's still a nascent form of hierarchy.

Often they don't, and when they do, those people don't have any real power. They might be the oldest/wisest/smartest, and people might listen to them because they're old, wise and smart, but there's no full-time leadership class, full time police/soldier/enforcement class, etc.

If you want to call that a hierarchal power structure, fine, but we'll have to agree to disagree there.