Go into business for myself, huh? If you must know, I do have a self-generated income. I also do pervasive work with numerous NGOs, as well as local volunteer groups and collective spaces. You can do both.

I have to say you've been using a heavy tone of condescention throughout your letters and I don't really appreciate being talked down when I've done nothing like that to you. You also seem to have a pretty limited idea of what an anarchist can be and have apparently already made up your mind that anyone who doesn't agree with you is somehow uneducated or a simpleton.

In my experience the most surprising people can be anti-authoritarians, teachers, anthropologists, biologists, engineers and even accountants. A lot of them don't shout their opinions from the rooftops but their beliefs have metasized into their lives and are reflected in all their actions and moral choices.

Look, I just think this comes down to a fundamental difference in our ideas of what people are capable of. Scarcity was for most of our history an issue that drove us to competition and selfishness out of a biological neccisity, but it also drove us to seek social company and produced the drive for sharing and solidarity. Currently our society, in my opinion, is illogically geared too much for the competitive and selfish aspects of our nature and our drive for group existence is channeled into ineffective and often unrewarding directions.

I've been trying to keep this a debate about ideas, rather than personal attacks.

If you're so wedded to your political ideas that you view an unsparing critique of them as condescending toward you personally, there's nothing I can do about that.

I'm not saying you are, but if not, you'll have to show me where I've attacked you personally.

I note that your response didn't engage me as to whether or not you could find a place anywhere in your political philosophy to grant that my points on the reconciling overlaps between capitalism and anarchism might have some merit.

Instead, you changed the subject entirely, following the dismissive head shake in your opening clause of your response.

I agree that workers in NGOs, regulatory agencies, and educators are involved in work that partakes of a different character than running a business enterprise. Vital work. But a society does not run by their efforts alone.

I'll note that your final summary, you've linked "competition" and "selfishness" inextricably, which thereby taints any competitive enterprise with the moral failure of Greed. Ironically, there are plenty of niches still out there in the world that are hurting for someone to open just one private enterprise. Capitalism isn't even linked with competition, much less being emblematic selfishness and greed.

I can't imagine the horror that would ensure if every small private business had to be made into a cooperative, or collective enterprise. I admire cooperatives that work...but try to find one. They pretty much demand consensus decision-making, which is inherently more unwieldy than a private owner getting an idea, trying to carry it out, and experiencing the consequences for themselves. Cooperatives are best suited to a few narrowly circumscribed spheres. And even then, the politics can be chronically problematic. In a cooperative, so many struggles come down to one faction- as few as one person- claiming to speak for "us", when it's actually a lot more about "me."Single-owner proprietorships, or even limited partnerships, make it easier to be honest about self-interest. And self-interest is not to be confused with the moral and ethical failure of "selfishness."

As long as you persist in mischaracterizing all forms of private business as enterpreneurialism as motivated by antisocial impulses, you better get used to people correcting you- or, more frequently, dismissing you without second notice. I hope you can sort out any cognitive dissonance existing in the situation from there- as to whether more of it exists within those disagreeing with you, or within yourself.