Saw the 'Debate a Conservative' blog going, and seeing as I'm really bored right now I figure I'd start my own.
There are two main schools of anarchism. Left-anarchists think we should get rid of government and private property and share everything, basically communism without a government. I have no idea how that would work. Myself, I'm a free market anarchist, which means I want to get rid of government and believe strongly in private property rights and laissez-faire capitalism. Free market anarchism (or Anarcho-capitalism) is based on the idea that there is no economic good which the public sector (government/ coercive monopoly) can provide better than the private sector.
Questions welcomed.
UPDATE: *****I would encourage everyone to at least skim this article: http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p215 before posting, it is the basis for my arguments and outlines anarcho-capitalist theory in alot of areas that people often bring up, like law, the courts, and the police.*****
How would that even work? Don't you need some kind of overarching power to support free trade, because otherwise you just get people building forts in the middle of a field with fortifications to keep everyone they don't like out, and then go on hunting expeditions to get food.
On March 08 2008 11:50 zdd wrote: How would that even work? Don't you need some kind of overarching power to support free trade, because otherwise you just get people building forts in the middle of a field with fortifications to keep everyone they don't like out, and then go on hunting expeditions to get food.
Protection would be provided by private companies, referred to in anarchy circles as PDAs (personal defense agencies). They would most likely be provided through insurance companies, so you'd pay a monthly premium for protection. Kind of like taxes now, except the difference being that PDAs would have to compete to offer the best security at the lowest price lest they risk losing customers, whereas the current government does not need to cater to its customers in this way since people are forced to pay, and it is illegal to form a competing firm.
I don't see how that is better at all. Democratic governments are made with the idea to uphold the will of the people. Companies are interested in their bottom dollar. And for that to work, some form of currency must exist, which requires a governing body. Whether to not you call it a government, it doesn't matter, the same structure would exist.
On March 08 2008 11:50 zdd wrote: How would that even work? Don't you need some kind of overarching power to support free trade, because otherwise you just get people building forts in the middle of a field with fortifications to keep everyone they don't like out, and then go on hunting expeditions to get food.
Protection would be provided by private companies, referred to in anarchy circles as PDAs (personal defense agencies). They would most likely be provided through insurance companies, so you'd pay a monthly premium for protection. Kind of like taxes now, except the difference being that PDAs would have to compete to offer the best security at the lowest price lest they risk losing customers, whereas the current government does not need to cater to its customers in this way since people are forced to pay, and it is illegal to form a competing firm.
Here you're assuming that competition will be of the fair type. However, with no laws, nothing stops a powerful security company from simply destroying a less powerful competitor with weapons. Eventually the best security company will destroy everyone, and impose whatever laws they want on their people, and you'd get a totalitarian regime.
The best-case scenario you could hope for is the "power triangle", where you have 3 companies, and each one fears attacking the others because losing soldiers will put the company that is not fighting ahead of the 2 that are fighting. But then you just get 3 totalitarian regimes.
On March 08 2008 12:02 Kwidowmaker wrote: I don't see how that is better at all. Democratic governments are made with the idea to uphold the will of the people. Companies are interested in their bottom dollar.
Companies are accountable to their customers. If they make lousy products or overcharge, a competing firm will offer a better quality item or lower their price and the customers will purchase from that company instead. And so for companies to attain their interests, they must satisfy their customers interest. Compare this with government; government will throw you in jail if you try to compete with a business they have a monopoly over. They have much less incentive to improve their product. In addition, the price they set is not determined by the free market as it should be, but it is set arbitrarily by politicians, which guarantees that the market will not be operating up to its potential. And you're forced to buy their product.
And for that to work, some form of currency must exist, which requires a governing body. Whether to not you call it a government, it doesn't matter, the same structure would exist.
No, government does not have to exist nor does currency require a governing body. It would be in the interest of banks to agree upon a common currency for the sake of efficient business, and they will do what is in their economic interest.
What would you use as currency? Without any government a piece of paper seems pretty worthless. Would we go back to using gold? Or bartering with livestock?
On March 08 2008 12:05 Mindcrime wrote: How do you prevent those with more power, such as your personal defense agencies, from setting up their own little authoritarian governments?
If they did, they would quickly lose customers to other PDAs. Also, to set up an authoritarian gov involves conflict, and conflict is expensive. Firms like these would quickly go out of business.
On March 08 2008 12:10 Falcynn wrote: What would you use as currency? Without any government a piece of paper seems pretty worthless. Would we go back to using gold? Or bartering with livestock?
We would likely go back on the gold standard, but this does not mean no paper currency. Banks can still issue paper notes, and it would be in their best interest to standardize them.
On March 08 2008 12:05 Mindcrime wrote: How do you prevent those with more power, such as your personal defense agencies, from setting up their own little authoritarian governments?
If they did, they would quickly lose customers to other PDAs. Also, to set up an authoritarian gov involves conflict, and conflict is expensive. Firms like these would quickly go out of business.
The problem here is that there is no code of ethics for company behavior. They could threaten to kill anyone that tries to run away from their protection, which would mean that in order to poach customers, another company would have to attack the oppressive one, and then you just get conflicts all around regardless of profitability.
What? When did I say it was okay? How could you possibly even deduce that from my post? Are you trolling?
I was just pointing out that you avoided his question by pointing out that worse cases of mass starvation have happened under other systems than the one you support. Just because there are other ideas that are worse than yours doesn't make your idea the right one.
Edit: Not to mention that you are just assuring us that it wouldn't be as bad as communism based solely on your personal beliefs, and not on any sound reasoning.
How do you avoid stuff like "wildcat banks" and the savings and loan crisis? How would public goods be provided (defense, fire protection, etc)? (The free-rider problem.) How would goods such as roads be provided? How would the airwaves be managed? How would pollution be handled? How would those unable to pay for protection be protected? Who would arbitrate disputes?
Here you're assuming that competition will be of the fair type. However, with no laws, nothing stops a powerful security company from simply destroying a less powerful competitor with weapons. Eventually the best security company will destroy everyone, and impose whatever laws they want on their people, and you'd get a totalitarian regime.
This is no more likely, actually less likely, then our own military turning against us imposing their will on us. You're assuming that a large amount of people are really evil and want world domination, but most people are not this way.
The best-case scenario you could hope for is the "power triangle", where you have 3 companies, and each one fears attacking the others because losing soldiers will put the company that is not fighting ahead of the 2 that are fighting. But then you just get 3 totalitarian regimes.
War is expensive. There is no reason companies would actively seek conflict, and no they wouldn't be totalitarian.
What? When did I say it was okay? How could you possibly even deduce that from my post? Are you trolling?
I was just pointing out that you avoided his question by pointing out that worse cases of mass starvation have happened under other systems than the one you support. Just because there are other ideas that are worse than yours doesn't make your idea the right one.
Here you're assuming that competition will be of the fair type. However, with no laws, nothing stops a powerful security company from simply destroying a less powerful competitor with weapons. Eventually the best security company will destroy everyone, and impose whatever laws they want on their people, and you'd get a totalitarian regime.
This is no more likely, actually less likely, then our own military turning against us imposing their will on us. You're assuming that a large amount of people are really evil and want world domination, but most people are not this way.
The best-case scenario you could hope for is the "power triangle", where you have 3 companies, and each one fears attacking the others because losing soldiers will put the company that is not fighting ahead of the 2 that are fighting. But then you just get 3 totalitarian regimes.
War is expensive. There is no reason companies would actively seek conflict, and no they wouldn't be totalitarian.
History shows both of your counterpoints to be completely incorrect, fyi.
The problem here is that there is no code of ethics for company behavior. They could threaten to kill anyone that tries to run away from their protection, which would mean that in order to poach customers, another company would have to attack the oppressive one, and then you just get conflicts all around regardless of profitability.
Again you're assuming that people are pure evil here. Yes this is possible, but it's not likely, and less likely then our own government becoming oppresive, although to some extent our gov already does this (try not paying your taxes, see what happens).
What? When did I say it was okay? How could you possibly even deduce that from my post? Are you trolling?
I was just pointing out that you avoided his question by pointing out that worse cases of mass starvation have happened under other systems than the one you support. Just because there are other ideas that are worse than yours doesn't make your idea the right one.
Socialism worse than Anarchy? LOL
I don't believe so, but obviously he does. I'm just saying that responding to criticism by pawning it off on another idea doesn't improve your argument.
Here you're assuming that competition will be of the fair type. However, with no laws, nothing stops a powerful security company from simply destroying a less powerful competitor with weapons. Eventually the best security company will destroy everyone, and impose whatever laws they want on their people, and you'd get a totalitarian regime.
This is no more likely, actually less likely, then our own military turning against us imposing their will on us. You're assuming that a large amount of people are really evil and want world domination, but most people are not this way.
The best-case scenario you could hope for is the "power triangle", where you have 3 companies, and each one fears attacking the others because losing soldiers will put the company that is not fighting ahead of the 2 that are fighting. But then you just get 3 totalitarian regimes.
War is expensive. There is no reason companies would actively seek conflict, and no they wouldn't be totalitarian.
History shows both of your counterpoints to be completely incorrect, fyi.
Here you're assuming that competition will be of the fair type. However, with no laws, nothing stops a powerful security company from simply destroying a less powerful competitor with weapons. Eventually the best security company will destroy everyone, and impose whatever laws they want on their people, and you'd get a totalitarian regime.
This is no more likely, actually less likely, then our own military turning against us imposing their will on us. You're assuming that a large amount of people are really evil and want world domination, but most people are not this way.
The best-case scenario you could hope for is the "power triangle", where you have 3 companies, and each one fears attacking the others because losing soldiers will put the company that is not fighting ahead of the 2 that are fighting. But then you just get 3 totalitarian regimes.
War is expensive. There is no reason companies would actively seek conflict, and no they wouldn't be totalitarian.
Ideally a government should be independent of human nature, that is, able to work with any given set of people. I am just assuming worst-case scenarios in which the government would do quite badly. Of course, the likely scenario would be that 99% of the people would not be violent, but that 1% will still be able to oppress the 99% using weapons, because there would be no laws to prevent them from doing so. A security company could help remedy the situation, but as soon as you get a company that is sufficiently powerful headed by an evil person, you'll get the scenario I mentioned above.
I don't believe so, but obviously he does. I'm just saying that responding to criticism by pawning it off on another idea doesn't improve your argument.
My point was that communism creates starvation because it arbitrarily sets the price and amount of food to be produced, which is guaranteed to bring about market failure. Anarcho-capitalism is the opposite, and it would lead to less starvation than any type of government.
Here you're assuming that competition will be of the fair type. However, with no laws, nothing stops a powerful security company from simply destroying a less powerful competitor with weapons. Eventually the best security company will destroy everyone, and impose whatever laws they want on their people, and you'd get a totalitarian regime.
This is no more likely, actually less likely, then our own military turning against us imposing their will on us. You're assuming that a large amount of people are really evil and want world domination, but most people are not this way.
The best-case scenario you could hope for is the "power triangle", where you have 3 companies, and each one fears attacking the others because losing soldiers will put the company that is not fighting ahead of the 2 that are fighting. But then you just get 3 totalitarian regimes.
War is expensive. There is no reason companies would actively seek conflict, and no they wouldn't be totalitarian.
History shows both of your counterpoints to be completely incorrect, fyi.
Which history are you referring to?
War can be profitable. The most apparent example is WWII getting the US out of it's depression.
Ideally a government should be independent of human nature, that is, able to work with any given set of people. I am just assuming worst-case scenarios in which the government would do quite badly. Of course, the likely scenario would be that 99% of the people would not be violent, but that 1% will still be able to oppress the 99% using weapons, because there would be no laws to prevent them from doing so. A security company could help remedy the situation, but as soon as you get a company that is sufficiently powerful headed by an evil person, you'll get the scenario I mentioned above.
Anarchy isn't a perfect system, we don't live in the Garden of Eden and not everyone is a saint, so you can paint a worst case scenario where everyone would get fucked, but that could happen in any government as well. The scenario you bring up is more likely to happen with a government. First, more people would own guns, since no one would sign up with an agency that doesn't allow you to carry your own protection. So this outlaw firm you mention would be going up against armed citizenry, PLUS any competing PDAs whos customers are violated by the outlaw firm. If a government wanted to do this, it would be a very simple thing since they are already in complete power.
Some sort of body would have to be set up to have a standard in currency. That would be a governing body.
Also, what guarantees your rights? You say that the free market will, but how? Executives aren't stupid, they know that if every company is screwing you over, then you have no where to go. You just have to bend over and take it.
You don't believe that those that become rich and powerful will use their wealth and power to keep themselves at the top? You don't believe that monopolies are the natural progression of unhindered economic activity?
I don't believe so, but obviously he does. I'm just saying that responding to criticism by pawning it off on another idea doesn't improve your argument.
My point was that communism creates starvation because it arbitrarily sets the price and amount of food to be produced, which is guaranteed to bring about market failure. Anarcho-capitalism is the opposite, and it would lead to less starvation than any type of government.
I don't know much about anarcho-capitalism but if you have no government to regulate the economy, you are going to have a HUGE gap berween the rich and the poor. The majority of the people will be poor obviously and this could lead to unimaginable starvation.
Communism is a perfect system. It has never existed and probably will never exist due to humanity's greedy nature. Ideally there should be no problems of mismanagement in a true commiunist system.
The "communist" regimes throughout history were NEVER under a communist system. They were either dictatorships or socialist republics. And yes mismanagements did happen but it is not like the central govt. blindly sets prices and amounts of food to be produced. Local governments participated as well and they had knew more or less the optimal price and quantity.
Anarchy isn't a perfect system, we don't live in the Garden of Eden and not everyone is a saint, so you can paint a worst case scenario where everyone would get fucked, but that could happen in any government as well. The scenario you bring up is more likely to happen with a government. First, more people would own guns, since no one would sign up with an agency that doesn't allow you to carry your own protection. So this outlaw firm you mention would be going up against armed citizenry, PLUS any competing PDAs whos customers are violated by the outlaw firm. If a government wanted to do this, it would be a very simple thing since they are already in complete power.
There's a reason governments have checks and balances. And how often has an army turned on its people? Take a look at the mafia - that's the kind of people you would have running security in absence of a government. Take a look at drugs - theoretically nonviolence should be cheaper, but that's simply not the case. It's misleading to blame it on the government for making drugs illegal - the drug business is not violent because of the inherent illegal nature of drugs, it is violent because the government does not enforce property rights for said producers/distributors.
My point was that communism creates starvation because it arbitrarily sets the price and amount of food to be produced,
Hardly arbitrary.
which is guaranteed to bring about market failure.
And in the absence of a market?
Anarcho-capitalism is the opposite, and it would lead to less starvation than any type of government.
You can come up with systems where nobody will starve, such as anarcho-capitalism + the guarantee of food. As people can theoretically starve under anarcho-capitalism, this is not true.
Even the most adamant conservatives believe government plays a vital role in keeping society going. I've come up with some objections based on these roles.
In most capitalist economies, there are ways for one corporation to become so powerful it can kill off all competition. We call this a monopoly. In a society under "free-market anarchism", what would keep one or more companies from becoming so powerful they're able to manipulate all the other companies -- protection/insurance companies included -- into doing what that company wants, and not what's best for the market? When there is no competition, the market will never operate at peak efficiency.
The protection agency idea is flawed on so many levels. Money is a form of power, yes, but force is an even stronger source of power. Why would a protection agency protect when it could extort? If you have the military means to protect a region, you also have the power to rule it. This would be a much more profitable for the protection agency. You wouldn't have protection agencies, you'd have warlords. From there, each protection agency will want to further expand its power by gaining control over other regions. Eventually, it will be contesting territory held by another agency. War is a terrific stimulus to help get an economy industrialized, but it is a terrible waste of resources. Instead of going back into society to help the economy grow, everything will be used for the war. The standard of living for people living under these protectorates will diminish considerably.
That seemed to me like the biggest problem. The second issue has to do with public works. Who would invest in infrastructure like roads or dams? The cost of such investments and the free-rider problem make them infeasible and unprofitable for private companies. The good they do for society however, is considerable. Say by building a system of freeways across this continent you can increase productivity by 15% continent-wide. Yet the cost is beyond what any one company can afford. A bunch of companies come together and say "we need a these roads." Company A, which imports fish and currently distributes them using trains, stands to gain the most. Company B, however, competes with company A in areas trains don't reach. Company B refuses to contribute to the road. Company A can't afford it himself. The road does not get built. Everyone suffers.
Finally, and this isn't a critical problem like the above two, but it is substantial. Free markets can actually be less efficient than a government-run organization. A good example is private health care. It's estimated about 30% of the cost of health care in the US is due to the staggering size of the health care bureaucracy. The more private agencies you have, the more redundancy develops. Instead of one, centralized database, there are hundreds. Ten people are doing the same job, ten times over, that under a consolidated organization, one person could do. Etc. etc.
I don't believe so, but obviously he does. I'm just saying that responding to criticism by pawning it off on another idea doesn't improve your argument.
My point was that communism creates starvation because it arbitrarily sets the price and amount of food to be produced, which is guaranteed to bring about market failure. Anarcho-capitalism is the opposite, and it would lead to less starvation than any type of government.
All real-world "communist states" are failed communist states. Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never existed in any form in any country. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," has never been implemented.
It's sort of funny because anarcho-capitalism would meet the same fate. Either the anarchy, or the free market (or both) would end pretty quickly if it were to be attempted in the real world.
I don't know much about anarcho-capitalism but if you have no government to regulate the economy, you are going to have a HUGE gap berween the rich and the poor. The majority of the people will be poor obviously and this could lead to unimaginable starvation.
I disagree, you're going to have to make a compelling argument for this, you can't just toss it out as a fact.
The "communist" regimes throughout history were NEVER under a communist system. They were either dictatorships or socialist republics. And yes mismanagements did happen but it is not like the central govt. blindly sets prices and amounts of food to be produced. Local governments participated as well and they had knew more or less the optimal price and quantity.
No, they didn't know optimal price/quantity because those can only be known through the free market, unless the people setting the prices were some type of gods. That's the biggest problem with communism, and why it never has and never will work.
I don't know much about anarcho-capitalism but if you have no government to regulate the economy, you are going to have a HUGE gap berween the rich and the poor. The majority of the people will be poor obviously and this could lead to unimaginable starvation.
I disagree, you're going to have to make a compelling argument for this, you can't just toss it out as a fact.
I'm sorry, but you have been tossing out untested conjecture as fact this whole time.
All real-world "communist states" are failed communist states. Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never existed in any form in any country. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," has never been implemented.
It's sort of funny because anarcho-capitalism would meet the same fate. Either the anarchy, or the free market (or both) would end pretty quickly if it were to be attempted in the real world.
Nope, there is a big difference between the two. Communism can't work because it tries to change human nature. Communism assumes that people will work without incentive. Anarchism can work because it works with human nature. Companies are working for profit, and to profit they need to create the best product at the cheapest price. Free market anarchy makes greed and efficiency coincide.
Ideally a government should be independent of human nature, that is, able to work with any given set of people. I am just assuming worst-case scenarios in which the government would do quite badly. Of course, the likely scenario would be that 99% of the people would not be violent, but that 1% will still be able to oppress the 99% using weapons, because there would be no laws to prevent them from doing so. A security company could help remedy the situation, but as soon as you get a company that is sufficiently powerful headed by an evil person, you'll get the scenario I mentioned above.
Anarchy isn't a perfect system, we don't live in the Garden of Eden and not everyone is a saint, so you can paint a worst case scenario where everyone would get fucked, but that could happen in any government as well. The scenario you bring up is more likely to happen with a government. First, more people would own guns, since no one would sign up with an agency that doesn't allow you to carry your own protection. So this outlaw firm you mention would be going up against armed citizenry, PLUS any competing PDAs whos customers are violated by the outlaw firm. If a government wanted to do this, it would be a very simple thing since they are already in complete power.
I agree that the armed citizenry will pose a significant problem, but competitors can be defeated without armed action before the evilness starts by a simple monetary buyout, just like in regular capitalism. So eventually, if there is the "microsoft" of protection companies (no anti-trust laws without government), and that company somehow gets an evil leader, the only thing in his way would be the armed citizens. This however, can be solved through simply not letting anyone bear arms if they want protection, since you are the top company so you get to set the rules.
Competitors could let their people bear arms, and people would flock to them, but now we have to take into account human laziness. If you have been protected by company A for many years, and all of the sudden you have the choice of either throwing away your gun, or redoing all your paperwork and moving locations to live with company B, you will get people who are unwilling to change companies because it's inconvenient. At that point a smart evil leader will have no obstacles to conquering everything.
I print money. I print more money than can be redeemed. My investments go under. People run the bank. Most people are left without any money.
The public goods theory is one of the most flawed, perpetuated economic concepts.
The article rests itself basically rests itself on the idea that altruism will make people cease to be free riders. This is, for free-market anarchists and libertarians, a very dangerous. For one thing, the "communism has no incentives" argument (or "taxes lower incentives"), you can throw way since I can just claim, "well everybody is going to be altruistic so nobody will shirk. It's a lose-lose for you. In addition, it's pretty hung-up on the specifics of national defense. Try crime, then. Sure, you won't catch the thief if they steal from my house - but you will pay to catch thieves in the neighborhood.
Private companies.
Suppose I hold the lifeblood of a city. What stops me from gouging said city?
Hrm?
An organization has to be set up to allocate the airwaves. Otherwise you get intereference and general failure.
If people don't like a company that pollutes, then they can take their business elsewhere.
Free-rider problem. Also, suppose a set of consumers isn't impacted.
Ideally through charitable organizations.
There's that whole altruism thing again. You should look into communism.
Arbitraters.
What forces an organization to respect said arbitrators? Suppose I don't like the verdict and I ignore it. Now what?
[QUOTEThere's a reason governments have checks and balances. And how often has an army turned on its people?[/quote] That's what I'm saying. The idea of one firm growing huge then dominating then turning on civilians is as likely as the army doing it. People just aren't that evil.
Take a look at the mafia - that's the kind of people you would have running security in absence of a government.
Mafias can only exist BECAUSE of government. Mafias exist where police are NOT doing a good job of protecting people. In a free society, if one firm wasn't doing a good job, then people could turn to another firm. In government states, people have no other option so they have to deal with the mafia, and they still have to pay for the police.
Take a look at drugs - theoretically nonviolence should be cheaper, but that's simply not the case. It's misleading to blame it on the government for making drugs illegal - the drug business is not violent because of the inherent illegal nature of drugs, it is violent because the government does not enforce property rights for said producers/distributors.
Not quite sure what you mean, but most of the violence surrounding the drug market would go away in an instant if drugs were legalized.
Hardly arbitrary.
It is arbitrary, they can't know what the real market price is going to be without letting the real market work. So they set a price, which is going to be either a ceiling under market clearing price or a floor above market clearing price, and you have market failure.
You can come up with systems where nobody will starve, such as anarcho-capitalism + the guarantee of food. As people can theoretically starve under anarcho-capitalism, this is not true.
There is no feasible system where no one starves, but if you want to advocate for one, start your own blog :p
All real-world "communist states" are failed communist states. Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never existed in any form in any country. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," has never been implemented.
It's sort of funny because anarcho-capitalism would meet the same fate. Either the anarchy, or the free market (or both) would end pretty quickly if it were to be attempted in the real world.
Nope, there is a big difference between the two. Communism can't work because it tries to change human nature. Communism assumes that people will work without incentive. Anarchism can work because it works with human nature. Companies are working for profit, and to profit they need to create the best product at the cheapest price. Free market anarchy makes greed and efficiency coincide.
Something I've always wanted to ask a firm believer in the free market, but have never had a chance:
Please explain how it should be possible for a private corporation (which must necessarily have a profit motive, if there is no public sector and everyone must make their own living) to provide a service needed by everyone (i.e. health care, education) as affordably as a government agency with no profit motive.
That's what I'm saying. The idea of one firm growing huge then dominating then turning on civilians is as likely as the army doing it. People just aren't that evil.
You don't need everyone to be evil. You only need a few people. In absence of a big state, little states emerge. In the absence of control, people conquer their neighbors. Its just a fact. You would think that nobody would ever join up with Ghengis Khan and go conquering your neighbors, but they do.
Mafias can only exist BECAUSE of government. Mafias exist where police are NOT doing a good job of protecting people. In a free society, if one firm wasn't doing a good job, then people could turn to another firm. In government states, people have no other option so they have to deal with the mafia, and they still have to pay for the police.
The mafias, here, are the protection agencies. I guess if you don't like the local mafia you could get a second mafia to help you out.
Not quite sure what you mean, but most of the violence surrounding the drug market would go away in an instant if drugs were legalized.
Yes, because once legalized, the government would be able to protect the property rights of drug dealers.
It is arbitrary, they can't know what the real market price is going to be without letting the real market work. So they set a price, which is going to be either a ceiling under market clearing price or a floor above market clearing price, and you have market failure.
I assume we're talking about state capitalism here. Market failure means the equilibrium point is not being reached, which can lead to shortages or surpluses. In addition, the amount of food the nation requires isn't especially hard to predict. It's not like you would eat ten times as much food if it were twice as cheap. Here's a question - how does Microsoft keep itself running? Then ask yourself why a monopolistic food provider couldn't do the same thing.
just to think of a few things the government does well
roads
regulating natural monopolies. the ones with super huge start up costs but make lots of money when they do. like power companies and stuff.
education/schools/subsidized college things with positive externalities.
museums
preventing unfair market practices like dumping, where a company temporarily lower prices to beat competition and then raises them again after they're gone
provide funding for things with very high costs like boeing vs airbus or something like that.
On March 08 2008 12:06 zdd wrote: The best-case scenario you could hope for is the "power triangle", where you have 3 companies, and each one fears attacking the others because losing soldiers will put the company that is not fighting ahead of the 2 that are fighting. But then you just get 3 totalitarian regimes.
You're talking about a balance of power. Only once that I know of has there been a similar system in history, and that was in Europe. But even that was artificially constructed at the Congress of Vienna. Further, its collapse led to the first world war.
No, government does not have to exist nor does currency require a governing body. It would be in the interest of banks to agree upon a common currency for the sake of efficient business, and they will do what is in their economic interest.
If a bank fails and it's in enormous debt, what's to keep it from inflating the currency to help pay off its debts? The only thing that would keep this from happening is some kind of regulatory agency that decides how much currency gets put into the system. Which is exactly what the government does.
I expect your response to this would be that we'd be using the gold standard. But you'd still HAVE to have paper money, unless you expect people to trade by lugging around giant nuggets of gold. With the internet and electronic banking, representative currency is indispensable. It would be extremely inefficient to run the economy without it.
What about poor people ? Let them starve ?
Poor people don't contribute to anybody else's good. The only reason to help them under such a system is if their presence was hurting the public good somehow. Which is a good point, and I'd like to see CaptainMurphy address this. Under this system, people with low-income and unlikely to purchase a lot of goods would be severely neglected.
War is expensive. There is no reason companies would actively seek conflict, and no they wouldn't be totalitarian.
With all due respect, this is extremely naive. Gaining control of an especially wealthy and industrious piece of territory means more profits for you in the long run. Read my analysis from my other post. That said, give us some warrants. this is a HUGE issue with your argument and you don't even support it. Why wouldn't they be totalitarian? It's in their absolute interest. You can't just say "people are good". If you want to make that argument, give us examples. Don't just claim that people aren't evil. Likewise, you can just look to just about every non-western country in the world as an example of just how likely governments are to resort to corruption and abuse to maintain power.
My point was that communism creates starvation because it arbitrarily sets the price and amount of food to be produced, which is guaranteed to bring about market failure. Anarcho-capitalism is the opposite, and it would lead to less starvation than any type of government.
The term market failure refers to when unregulated markets fail to provide the optimal social good. This can be for a variety of reasons. Besides monopoly, corporations sometimes can't see what's in their best interest. They make bad decisions. The music companies are a good example -- they were so scared of the internet that they didn't see its potential as a medium for promotion and distribution. Another cause of market failure is when moral value and monetary value do not equate. I would argue that the life of a poor person has considerable moral value. But because they're not likely to spend a lot of money, there's no reason for corporations to cater to them.
Communism is a perfect system. It has never existed and probably will never exist due to humanity's greedy nature. Ideally there should be no problems of mismanagement in a true commiunist system.
Communism is a fucked up system that doesn't work. If we met your criteria for a perfect system, I could argue that an absolute dictatorship is a perfect system... we've just never found the right dictator. Ideally, dictators wouldn't be human beings. They'd be angels from heaven.
In most capitalist economies, there are ways for one corporation to become so powerful it can kill off all competition. We call this a monopoly. In a society under "free-market anarchism", what would keep one or more companies from becoming so powerful they're able to manipulate all the other companies -- protection/insurance companies included -- into doing what that company wants, and not what's best for the market? When there is no competition, the market will never operate at peak efficiency.
Well, the worst case scenario is that you would end up with a government again. As for monopolies, they are not necessarily bad. If they arise because they produce the best product at the lowest price, then they are a good thing. If they arise because use coercive measures to force competitors out of business, then they are bad. This is exactly what government does. In a free market, people could simply decide to take their business elsewhere. Under government, we have no such choice.
The protection agency idea is flawed on so many levels. Money is a form of power, yes, but force is an even stronger source of power. Why would a protection agency protect when it could extort?
This is exactly what government does. If a company did start doing this, people would turn to other companies, unlike now where we don't have the choice to.
If you have the military means to protect a region, you also have the power to rule it. This would be a much more profitable for the protection agency. You wouldn't have protection agencies, you'd have warlords. From there, each protection agency will want to further expand its power by gaining control over other regions. Eventually, it will be contesting territory held by another agency. War is a terrific stimulus to help get an economy industrialized, but it is a terrible waste of resources. Instead of going back into society to help the economy grow, everything will be used for the war. The standard of living for people living under these protectorates will diminish considerably.
You're assuming that everyone is evil here. Even if everyone was evil enough that this was a realistic option, you'd be no worse off then the perpetual warfare of current governments.
That seemed to me like the biggest problem. The second issue has to do with public works. Who would invest in infrastructure like roads or dams? The cost of such investments and the free-rider problem make them infeasible and unprofitable for private companies. The good they do for society however, is considerable. Say by building a system of freeways across this continent you can increase productivity by 15% continent-wide. Yet the cost is beyond what any one company can afford. A bunch of companies come together and say "we need a these roads." Company A, which imports fish and currently distributes them using trains, stands to gain the most. Company B, however, competes with company A in areas trains don't reach. Company B refuses to contribute to the road. Company A can't afford it himself. The road does not get built. Everyone suffers.
If roads get bad, people will complain to the company that owns them. Kind of like how people complain to their local government now when roads get bad. Currently, the gov can put it off since they still collect taxes either way. But if a private firm ignored the complaints of its customers, then they could shop elsewhere so the private firm has much more incentive to fix its roads. As for the free-rider issue, it again relates to the deeply flawed 'public goods' theory. Good article: http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE4_1_4.pdf
Finally, and this isn't a critical problem like the above two, but it is substantial. Free markets can actually be less efficient than a government-run organization. A good example is private health care. It's estimated about 30% of the cost of health care in the US is due to the staggering size of the health care bureaucracy. The more private agencies you have, the more redundancy develops. Instead of one, centralized database, there are hundreds. Ten people are doing the same job, ten times over, that under a consolidated organization, one person could do. Etc. etc.
There is no reason to think that healthcare would be better off in government hands, unless you think that every industry should be better off in government hands. If you want to discuss the merits of communism, please start your own blog on that.
Mafias can only exist BECAUSE of government. Mafias exist where police are NOT doing a good job of protecting people. In a free society, if one firm wasn't doing a good job, then people could turn to another firm. In government states, people have no other option so they have to deal with the mafia, and they still have to pay for the police.
Why would any firm be interested in doing a better job if it can make more money by letting the mafia bribe it?
A monopoly on roads is more efficient than competition. How do you propose two organizations compete to build a highway from Washington to Alaska? Build two massive highways? I somehow doubt that private companies will be able to compete to the point where its cheaper to construct two separately competing highways than one noncompetitive highway.
If you would drop the whole anarchist thing and become an eminently more reasonable minarchist or libertarian, we could talk about a lot of other, less ridiculous things. Anarcho-capitalism is just full of ridiculous problems.
Well, the worst case scenario is that you would end up with a government again. As for monopolies, they are not necessarily bad. If they arise because they produce the best product at the lowest price, then they are a good thing. If they arise because use coercive measures to force competitors out of business, then they are bad. This is exactly what government does. In a free market, people could simply decide to take their business elsewhere. Under government, we have no such choice.
Ideally, monopolies are formed because they produce the best product at the lowest prices. When they become monopolies there's no reason for them to keep producing the best product. Without competition, companies will charge a price that is most cost-effective for them, which is normally way above the market price. There's also no incentive for them to improve their product. Microsoft and the browser wars is a good example. IE sucked for along time. It wasn't standards compliant, it lacked basic features like tabbed browsing, etc. Then Firefox started eating at their share. Now, IE8 is standards compliant and has all kinds of useful features. It took competition for microsoft to start improving their product.
You're assuming that everyone is evil here. Even if everyone was evil enough that this was a realistic option, you'd be no worse off then the perpetual warfare of current governments.
Democratic governments at least are self regulating. I'm not assuming everyone is evil. I'm assuming people will behave the way they've continued to behave for the last ten millenia.
This is exactly what government does. If a company did start doing this, people would turn to other companies, unlike now where we don't have the choice to.
When somebody has military control over your city, you don't HAVE any choices. You're under their control.
If roads get bad, people will complain to the company that owns them. Kind of like how people complain to their local government now when roads get bad. Currently, the gov can put it off since they still collect taxes either way. But if a private firm ignored the complaints of its customers, then they could shop elsewhere so the private firm has much more incentive to fix its roads. As for the free-rider issue, it again relates to the deeply flawed 'public goods' theory.
That's not what I was talking about. I was referring to goods that no one company could afford to build, but that would benefit everybody. Without a government, these goods never get built.
You're too idealistic. There is only one road. I do not have a choice of roads. I have to go to work. I have to pick up my kid from soccer practice. I can complain to the road making company all day, but as I don't have any choice except to use their roads, why would they listen?
There is no reason to think that healthcare would be better off in government hands, unless you think that every industry should be better off in government hands. If you want to discuss the merits of communism, please start your own blog on that.
Why? I mean, give us some reasons at least. You're not convincing anyone just by making unsubstantiated claims.
On March 08 2008 12:50 EmeraldSparks wrote: I print money. I print more money than can be redeemed. My investments go under. People run the bank. Most people are left without any money.
That would be possible, just like it is possible now. Anarchy isn't flawless, but imo it is better than any other system.
The article rests itself basically rests itself on the idea that altruism will make people cease to be free riders.
No, people will pay for goods if they have a reason to. There is no empircal evidence (that I'm aware of) to support the idea that in a 'free riders' situation, nothing would get done. People commonly will cite the use of lighthouses, but private firms built lighthouses and ran them more efficiently then government. Here is a good article on that that gets into specific examples: http://mises.org/journals/scholar/Sechrest7.pdf
This is, for free-market anarchists and libertarians, a very dangerous. For one thing, the "communism has no incentives" argument (or "taxes lower incentives"), you can throw way since I can just claim, "well everybody is going to be altruistic so nobody will shirk. It's a lose-lose for you.
Anarchy does not rely on altruism, communism does. You might as well say every gov relies on altruism if you want to paint it that way (which has some truth to it, depends on how altruistic you mean).
In addition, it's pretty hung-up on the specifics of national defense. Try crime, then. Sure, you won't catch the thief if they steal from my house - but you will pay to catch thieves in the neighborhood.
It covers national defense alot because that is probably the most common argument against anarchism. Not sure what you mean about the crime thing.
Suppose I hold the lifeblood of a city. What stops me from gouging said city?
Competing firms, but its just as realistic to assume a government would do that.. they don't even have to deal with competition.
An organization has to be set up to allocate the airwaves. Otherwise you get intereference and general failure.
Radio companies would most likely come to an agreement on this.
Free-rider problem. Also, suppose a set of consumers isn't impacted.
Ignoring the free rider 'problem', why should you force a set of consumers that doesn't care about pollution to care about pollution? That sounds unethical to me.
There's that whole altruism thing again. You should look into communism.
Again, not saying its perfect, just that it would work better than any other system. And plenty of people are charitable.
What forces an organization to respect said arbitrators? Suppose I don't like the verdict and I ignore it. Now what?
K this part gets complicated. Check this link: http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p215 Scroll down to Chapter 12: The Public Sector, III: Police, Law, and the Courts. And read the part about the courts, if you still take issue after that I will try to argue the anarchists perspective as best I can.
On March 08 2008 12:50 CaptainMurphy wrote: [QUOTEThere's a reason governments have checks and balances. And how often has an army turned on its people?
That's what I'm saying. The idea of one firm growing huge then dominating then turning on civilians is as likely as the army doing it. People just aren't that evil.
Take a look at the mafia - that's the kind of people you would have running security in absence of a government.
Mafias can only exist BECAUSE of government. Mafias exist where police are NOT doing a good job of protecting people. In a free society, if one firm wasn't doing a good job, then people could turn to another firm. In government states, people have no other option so they have to deal with the mafia, and they still have to pay for the police (which are really just a legalized mafia.)
Take a look at drugs - theoretically nonviolence should be cheaper, but that's simply not the case. It's misleading to blame it on the government for making drugs illegal - the drug business is not violent because of the inherent illegal nature of drugs, it is violent because the government does not enforce property rights for said producers/distributors.
Not quite sure what you mean, but most of the violence surrounding the drug market would go away in an instant if drugs were legalized.
Hardly arbitrary.
It is arbitrary, they can't know what the real market price is going to be without letting the real market work. So they set a price, which is going to be either a ceiling under market clearing price or a floor above market clearing price, and you have market failure.
You can come up with systems where nobody will starve, such as anarcho-capitalism + the guarantee of food. As people can theoretically starve under anarcho-capitalism, this is not true.
There is no feasible system where no one starves, but if you want to advocate for one, start your own blog :p [/QUOTE]
On March 08 2008 12:59 Macavenger wrote: Something I've always wanted to ask a firm believer in the free market, but have never had a chance:
Please explain how it should be possible for a private corporation (which must necessarily have a profit motive, if there is no public sector and everyone must make their own living) to provide a service needed by everyone (i.e. health care, education) as affordably as a government agency with no profit motive.
If a private corporation is not providing adequate service, then a competing corporation has the economic incentive to offer better service at a lower price. The government doesn't have the incentive to do this because it collects taxes either way. It's profit isn't tied to consumer satisfaction.
Hi. I'm a researcher. I depend on massive grants from the government and nearly none of my work pays for itself, but eventually a nugget of incredibly knowledge will be discovered from one of me and my ilk and billions in profit will be had. I also depend on other companies, which depend on the same type of person that I am.
Oh wait, I'm not welcome in your world? : (.
Guess we can forget about going into space too.
War is expensive. There is no reason companies would actively seek conflict, and no they wouldn't be totalitarian.
War is profitable. Why do you think it keeps happening? On a personal level: I buy a gun. I shoot you in the head. Now i rape your wife, sell your kids into slavery, and liquidate all your assets. Pretty goddam huge payoff. Scale that up a bit, and that's war.
How would legally binding contracts hold any value then if the government stays completely out of the economic picture? Business deals would mean nothing, they would be based solely off peoples words and reputations. Which never really means much :/
Think about this, what about your idea about the free market, it worked well for a while in american history, around 150 years, and the economy always got back on its own 2 feet, up until the great depression, where President Hoover let the economy stay the way it was and figured it would solve it's own problems, which never happened it took a new president in FDR to bring the economy more so under the governments watch, to make sure it didn't happen again. Becuase it couldn't stand by itself again.
If you were to suggest that we are strong enough of a country economically right now to not need governemnt, that would be wrong, since the bush era our economy has been slipping and we are falling more and more into dept. Your idea of a free market would lead to a depression on an even worse scale, due to the fact of the many threats we are under now, as comapired to the late 1930's and early 1940's. Now we must deal with other countries of similiar power to us, who aren't in an economic depression (Many countries were still recovering from WW1, especially the main powers, IE any potential threats to the U.S.) Right now and for the future, China is just getting stronger, so is japan. Then we have psychotic countries like North Korea, and Nutjobs like the leader of Iran whose name escapes me who for any sign of weakness would gladly nuke the hell out of us.
Then my question is now, would you really want to risk the potential hazards that come with a free market, a depression and then horrible wars? Which is entirely possible if we were to continue in the directin we are heading without any help. Admitadly bush is a retard, and that didn't help much.
On March 08 2008 12:59 Macavenger wrote: Something I've always wanted to ask a firm believer in the free market, but have never had a chance:
Please explain how it should be possible for a private corporation (which must necessarily have a profit motive, if there is no public sector and everyone must make their own living) to provide a service needed by everyone (i.e. health care, education) as affordably as a government agency with no profit motive.
If a private corporation is not providing adequate service, then a competing corporation has the economic incentive to offer better service at a lower price. The government doesn't have the incentive to do this because it collects taxes either way. It's profit isn't tied to consumer satisfaction.
Yes, but once a corporation has become powerful it can make it difficult/impossible for another firm to encroach on their territory. You can't just cherry pick which parts of economics you support based on what you want to be true. The powerful use their power to keep themselves powerful, period.
That would be possible, just like it is possible now. Anarchy isn't flawless, but imo it is better than any other system.
Um. FDIC? Bank regulation? None of this rings a bell?
http://mises.org/journals/scholar/Sechrest7.pdf
As for lighthouses, there isn't too much information for me to look at. I would hazard that there are few enough shippers that free-riding is less of a problem, but again there isn't very much information. As for privateers, it's very easy to not protect a number of ships. It's harder not to protect Kanasas when you're protecting all the states around it.
Anarchy does not rely on altruism, communism does. You might as well say every gov relies on altruism if you want to paint it that way (which has some truth to it, depends on how altruistic you mean).
In the article you cite, at the bottom where the author points asks, "so why does classical public-goods analysis fail," he says that the answer is altruism. Your economist, not mine.
It covers national defense alot because that is probably the most common argument against anarchism. Not sure what you mean about the crime thing.
I benefit when you pay for protection. Easy.
Competing firms, but its just as realistic to assume a government would do that.. they don't even have to deal with competition.
No, because governments are accountable to the people. If a government needs to do something it needs to pass a law to do something. If a legislature were to try to pass said legislation and reap the profits, everyone supporting it would be impeached (and they wouldn't see any of the profits anyway). Nothing like this exists for private companies.
Ignoring the free rider 'problem', why should you force a set of consumers that doesn't care about pollution to care about pollution? That sounds unethical to me.
Suppose I'm polluting in New England and selling in England.
K this part gets complicated. Check this link:
I'll have a look at that.
[[EDIT]] I'm assuming you mean a somewhat democratic country. If we're considernig a totalitarian government, I might have to concede that anarcho-capitalism might be slightly better.
Radio companies would most likely come to an agreement on this.
Ok, I want to address something in general that you bring up a lot. Self-regulation is not something that will work unless there is some means of enforcement. That's why the GOVERNMENT does most of the regulating, because it has the power to enforce. An agreement between companies is not binding. By breaking these regulations, each individual company can potentially gain a huge advantage over his competitors. In the case of radio, there would be no way for any of the other companies to stop the station violating the regulation.
The free rider article sounds interesting, but I don't have the time to read it. Wanna summarize it for us?
Oh and, if this argument gets heated, it's nothing personal. I appreciate the opportunity to be able to think about these things.
You don't need everyone to be evil. You only need a few people. In absence of a big state, little states emerge. In the absence of control, people conquer their neighbors. Its just a fact. You would think that nobody would ever join up with Ghengis Khan and go conquering your neighbors, but they do.
I don't want to belabor this point much more but there is no reason to think this is more likely to happen in anarchic society then in a society of states, and in fact governments have been responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths.
The mafias, here, are the protection agencies. I guess if you don't like the local mafia you could get a second mafia to help you out.
The police already extort people, with PDAs if one did this you could go to another. It's not like every PDA would try to extort you, if they did they'd lose business to PDAs that didn't practice extortion.
Yes, because once legalized, the government would be able to protect the property rights of drug dealers.
Ok? I don't understand what you're getting at.
I assume we're talking about state capitalism here. Market failure means the equilibrium point is not being reached, which can lead to shortages or surpluses. In addition, the amount of food the nation requires isn't especially hard to predict. It's not like you would eat ten times as much food if it were twice as cheap. Here's a question - how does Microsoft keep itself running? Then ask yourself why a monopolistic food provider couldn't do the same thing.
So why has a communistic food system failed everywhere it was tried? Why not put everything in the hands of a centrally planned economy? As for Microsoft, they need to compete with the free market, they can't coerce competitors to stop competing. In a centrally planned economy there is no competition.
Think about this, what about your idea about the free market, it worked well for a while in american history, around 150 years, and the economy always got back on its own 2 feet, up until the great depression, where President Hoover let the economy stay the way it was and figured it would solve it's own problems, which never happened it took a new president in FDR to bring the economy more so under the governments watch, to make sure it didn't happen again. Becuase it couldn't stand by itself again.
All FDR did was spend shitloads of money on public works that didn't do anything except waste money and steal employment from the private market that needed it most. Not that he wasn't a terrific leader, but his economic management was hugely overrated.
I don't want to belabor this point much more but there is no reason to think this is more likely to happen in anarchic society then in a society of states, and in fact governments have been responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths.
So you're conceding that this WILL happen in an anarchic state, that people will act in their greedy self interest, and that wars will happen?
Stop telling us there's "no reason to think"... There are plenty of reasons. We're giving them to you. You're just not acknowledging them.
On March 08 2008 13:23 L wrote: Hi. I'm a researcher. I depend on massive grants from the government and nearly none of my work pays for itself, but eventually a nugget of incredibly knowledge will be discovered from one of me and my ilk and billions in profit will be had. I also depend on other companies, which depend on the same type of person that I am.
This is a good point. A HUGE portion of research is government funded. Research in general is too costly and too much of a risk for any individual company to spend money in. I'm referring to very expensive research projects with questionable value, like fusion energy. This relates to my argument about investing in public goods like roads. Without governments, research will never get funded.
Ok, I want to address something in general that you bring up a lot. Self-regulation is not something that will work unless there is some means of enforcement. That's why the GOVERNMENT does most of the regulating, because it has the power to enforce. An agreement between companies is not binding. By breaking these regulations, each individual company can potentially gain a huge advantage over his competitors. In the case of radio, there would be no way for any of the other companies to stop the station violating the regulation.
This is certainly the most arguable point about anarchism. I don't know a whole lot about air wave regulation so I can't address it properly, but as for regulation, I would refer you to this article I mentioned earlier to another poster: http://www.mises.org/rothbard/newlibertywhole.asp#p215 Ch 12 on police, law, and the courts.
The free rider article sounds interesting, but I don't have the time to read it. Wanna summarize it for us?
First, the 'free rider problem' is not justified empirically. Every good is a public good to some degree, every good has externalities. To subjectively determine which have 'enough' externalities, or which are good and then extort people to pay for them makes no sense. If a good is desired people will pay for it, there are ways to exclude potential free riders. I obviously didn't cover all of it but those are some points.
Oh and, if this argument gets heated, it's nothing personal. I appreciate the opportunity to be able to think about these things.
Stop telling us there's "no reason to think"... There are plenty of reasons. We're giving them to you. You're just not acknowledging them.
I acknowledge that it's possible for every territory to turn back into states, and then we're back to statehood. You haven't shown me why it's more likely to happen in anarchical society then state society. I've told you why I think it is in fact less likely to happen in anarchical society then in a state. It's like people have this idea that if there was no government everything would just descend into chaos. But people, for the most part, like order. If people were as chaotic as you suggest, there wouldn't even be democratic society, the whole world would be ruled by military dictatorships.
On March 08 2008 13:23 L wrote: Hi. I'm a researcher. I depend on massive grants from the government and nearly none of my work pays for itself, but eventually a nugget of incredibly knowledge will be discovered from one of me and my ilk and billions in profit will be had. I also depend on other companies, which depend on the same type of person that I am.
This is a good point. A HUGE portion of research is government funded. Research in general is too costly and too much of a risk for any individual company to spend money in. I'm referring to very expensive research projects with questionable value, like fusion energy. This relates to my argument about investing in public goods like roads. Without governments, research will never get funded.
If people think the research is worthy of funding, people will fund it. Why is it okay for you to force others to fund your research with their money, just because you think it might provide some value? Let people spend their own money how they see fit.
So why has a communistic food system failed everywhere it was tried?
Because a farmer who's producing his own food + food for profit has much more incentive to produce a shitton of crop per unit land when compared to a coalition of farmers who are being paid a stipend by the government. The soviet union's food production per area dropped from 40 bushel/acre to 25 bushel/acres after communism swept the country (not sure if those are the right units, but the ratio is.). China's food supply, however, has worked pretty fine.
I'm referring to very expensive research projects with questionable value, like fusion energy. This relates to my argument about investing in public goods like roads. Without governments, research will never get funded.
Oh, no, it extends to all research. All our knowledge is passed down generationally, and how can you assure that will happen in an anarchist system? You can't. Within 2 generations, nothing at the college level would be even remotely accessible to the public, and with that brain drain, you'd lose nearly all our optical, satellite, and electrical networks, and we'd regress a good 200 years.
Historical precedent?
The dark ages.
QED.
You haven't shown me why it's more likely to happen in anarchical society then state society.
Because humans started at a version of free market anarchy and now are in a state society. Interestingly enough, the past 6000 years have seen humanity radically advanced in terms of technology and capability. Co-incidence that all of the most incredible advances have taken place in dynastic long term 'empires' for lack of a better word?
I don't want to belabor this point much more but there is no reason to think this is more likely to happen in anarchic society then in a society of states, and in fact governments have been responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths.
There is a good reason to think that an established, democratic state like Switzerland is far less likely to do this than a state / dictatorship that is accountable to nobody (warlords.)
The police already extort people, with PDAs if one did this you could go to another. It's not like every PDA would try to extort you, if they did they'd lose business to PDAs that didn't practice extortion.
Okay, if you see the provision of taxpayer-funded police as extortion, more power to you. The vast majority of people agree that the would rather have the current police as the enforcers of law than the mafia (the police, for example, won't shoot you if you insist on going into the garbage business.) And if you think that established laws are as arbitrary than a mob boss's wishes, more power to you. Most people disagree.
Ok? I don't understand what you're getting at.
Government protection of property rights = peace. No government protection of property rights = violence.
So why has a communistic food system failed everywhere it was tried? Why not put everything in the hands of a centrally planned economy? As for Microsoft, they need to compete with the free market, they can't coerce competitors to stop competing. In a centrally planned economy there is no competition.
Cuba hasn't starved, for example. Oh, and just for your information, the Soviet Union was not, in fact, only around from 1918 to 1950. It curiously enough existed also from 1950 to 1989, where there was in fact very little starvation. Simply put, "communism leads to starvation" is a lie. And pretty stupid, to boot.
As for the courts - okay, suppose I'm an employer. I suscribe to the Business Court. My employee suscribes to Worker's Court. Surprise surprise, they didn't agree. Now what? Appeal, I would suppose. I appeal to Capitalists United and you appeal to the Labor Tribunal. I further appeal to Employers Arbitration Inc. and you appeal to Workers-R-Us. So long as a court gains its appeal from one section of the populace, then it only makes sense to pander to it. And we haven't even touched the issue of paying off judges.
All FDR did was spend shitloads of money on public works that didn't do anything except waste money and steal employment from the private market that needed it most. Not that he wasn't a terrific leader, but his economic management was hugely overrated.
Well, it depends whether you buy into Keynes or not. (Another thread, that one needs.)
First, the 'free rider problem' is not justified empirically. Every good is a public good to some degree, every good has externalities. To subjectively determine which have 'enough' externalities, or which are good and then extort people to pay for them makes no sense. If a good is desired people will pay for it, there are ways to exclude potential free riders. I obviously didn't cover all of it but those are some points.
If I pay for an apple, I benefit. If I pay for the fire department, everybody benefits. It's not very hard.
It's not justified empirically the same way that "pure communism fails" hasn't been justified empirically.
So why has a communistic food system failed everywhere it was tried?
Because a farmer who's producing his own food + food for profit has much more incentive to produce a shitton of crop per unit land when compared to a coalition of farmers who are being paid a stipend by the government. The soviet union's food production per area dropped from 40 bushel/acre to 25 bushel/acres after communism swept the country (not sure if those are the right units, but the ratio is.).
Aright, I've been responding to a ton of posts here so I don't remember what you're arguing against here, but it sounds like you're agreeing with me that communism is bad..
China's food supply, however, has worked pretty fine.
Communist China had plenty of problems, if you mean its current food supply is fine, I don't know much about current China other than that they have been making strides toward capitalism.
I'm referring to very expensive research projects with questionable value, like fusion energy. This relates to my argument about investing in public goods like roads. Without governments, research will never get funded.
If private companies or individuals see benefit in funding research, they can fund it. Why should people be forced to fund your research, especially if the value is questionable?
Oh, no, it extends to all research. All our knowledge is passed down generationally, and how can you assure that will happen in an anarchist system? You can't. Within 2 generations, nothing at the college level would be even remotely accessible to the public, and with that brain drain, you'd lose nearly all our optical, satellite, and electrical networks, and we'd regress a good 200 years.
???
Historical precedent?
The dark ages.
QED.
The dark ages was a feudalistic society. There has not existed, to my knowledge, an anarco-capitalistic society.
Because humans started at a version of free market anarchy and now are in a state society.
I will quote from someone on another message board: ""[Responding to why anarchism hasn't worked in the pastAnarchy" worked, because in situations without government or state, people did what occurred naturally. Anarchism, on the other hand, complete with PDA's, is a more recently conceived and developed political philosophy. People in early anarchies had no conception of anarchism, merely the absence of formal authorities, and thus were lead (or misled) to believe that anarchy could not be stable. The development towards an anarchist society, therefore, requires a deliberate and conscious development on the part of men, including the various aspects of anarchism that show that it can indeed be stable."
Interestingly enough, the past 6000 years have seen humanity radically advanced in terms of technology and capability. Co-incidence that all of the most incredible advances have taken place in dynastic long term 'empires' for lack of a better word?
No.
Since all society is based on a government, of course advances are going to occur under governments. The correlation is bound to be unavoidable, but you have not established any causation.
Stop telling us there's "no reason to think"... There are plenty of reasons. We're giving them to you. You're just not acknowledging them.
I acknowledge that it's possible for every territory to turn back into states, and then we're back to statehood. You haven't shown me why it's more likely to happen in anarchical society then state society. I've told you why I think it is in fact less likely to happen in anarchical society then in a state. It's like people have this idea that if there was no government everything would just descend into chaos. But people, for the most part, like order. If people were as chaotic as you suggest, there wouldn't even be democratic society, the whole world would be ruled by military dictatorships.
...and that is exactly the reason that anarchy wouldn't last for long.
There is a good reason to think that an established, democratic state like Switzerland is far less likely to do this than a state / dictatorship that is accountable to nobody (warlords.)
The more free a society is, the less likelihood of this happening. Democracies are more free than dictatorships, but anarchic societies are the free-est of them all.
Okay, if you see the provision of taxpayer-funded police as extortion, more power to you.
How can you even argue that it's not? You are FORCED to pay taxes. You go to jail if you don't. How is that *not* extortion?
The vast majority of people agree that the would rather have the current police as the enforcers of law than the mafia (the police, for example, won't shoot you if you insist on going into the garbage business.) And if you think that established laws are as arbitrary than a mob boss's wishes, more power to you. Most people disagree.
The mafia, as I mentioned earlier, can only exist because of police. But to assume that no "good" police body would arise on the free market is absurd. It arose from government because enough people wanted it. Good defense services would arise on the free market as well, ones that have incentive to constantly improve.
Government protection of property rights = peace. No government protection of property rights = violence.
Take the word 'government' out of both those sentences and I agree.
Cuba hasn't starved, for example. Oh, and just for your information, the Soviet Union was not, in fact, only around from 1918 to 1950. It curiously enough existed also from 1950 to 1989, where there was in fact very little starvation. Simply put, "communism leads to starvation" is a lie. And pretty stupid, to boot.
If communism was so great, why did all the former soviet states opt for some type of capitalism following the dissolve of the soviet union? Government intervention creates market failure.
As for the courts - okay, suppose I'm an employer. I suscribe to the Business Court. My employee suscribes to Worker's Court. Surprise surprise, they didn't agree. Now what? Appeal, I would suppose. I appeal to Capitalists United and you appeal to the Labor Tribunal. I further appeal to Employers Arbitration Inc. and you appeal to Workers-R-Us. So long as a court gains its appeal from one section of the populace, then it only makes sense to pander to it. And we haven't even touched the issue of paying off judges.
Please check the link I edited into the first post, Ch 12 on the police, courts, and law.
Well, it depends whether you buy into Keynes or not. (Another thread, that one needs.)
The Austrian school of economics, which is what led me to believe in anarchism, vehemently disagrees with Keynes on just about everything. Keynesian theory isn't very popular anymore, according to one of my econ professors.
[QUOTE]On March 08 2008 13:51 EmeraldSparks wrote: [quote]If I pay for an apple, I benefit. If I pay for the fire department, everybody benefits. It's not very hard.[/quote] First, it is very easy to exclude people from using firemans services. If someone subscribes to a private company, they would get a sign from that company to put in their yard.
Back to the apple. Yes, you are probably the only one who benefits from it. You also buy and put on deoderant. Are you the only one that benefits? Other people get to enjoy the lack of your smelly armpits as well. If you build improvements on your house, your neighbors property goes up in value and they didn't have to pay a cent. They got a free ride. Point being that there is no real line between 'public good' and 'private good', every good has externalities to some extent.
Anarchy is the opposite of orderly. A bunch of people only looking out for number one does not lead to an orderly and peaceful society. If people are as altruistic as you say, why aren't people giving money to random strangers that are worse off than them, it is not like the government is keeping people from helping each other, and yet it isn't happening, so how is this supposed to magically change?
On March 08 2008 14:35 Lemonwalrus wrote: Anarchy is the opposite of orderly. A bunch of people only looking out for number one does not lead to an orderly and peaceful society. If people are as altruistic as you say, why aren't people giving money to random strangers that are worse off than them, it is not like the government is keeping people from helping each other, and yet it isn't happening, so how is this supposed to magically change?
There are TONS of charitable organizations. People have this ridiculous assumption that everyone is really evil, and the only thing keeping them in check is government, and all hell would break loose if government went away. Government, by the way, is the opposite of orderly. Inherent in government is extortion, and stifling of competition. Then using their monopolistic authority of armed force, and funding that they take from their citizens, they go out and fight wars.
Anarcho-capitalism is the only political philosophy consistent with freedom. If you believe that a mans property belongs only to him, then it is illogical to support government.
Another paper arguing against the notion of 'public goods', citing real examples
Which again, depended on altruism. Become a communist already.
There are TONS of charitable organizations. People have this ridiculous assumption that everyone is really evil, and the only thing keeping them in check is government, and all hell would break loose if government went away.
Not everyone has to be really evil. Take, you know, twelfth century Mongolia. Lots of organizations that have their own protection forces. One guy decided that he was going to conquer his neighbors. Now, the fact that there were a whole lot of peaceful people milling around and I guess all the people were nice and friendly and stuff, Ghengis Khan invaded all of his neighbors and formed an empire anyway. There will always be a monopoly on force in an area; if you break it up, a new one arises. The question is simply who is going to hold the ability to use force? A body accountable to the people seems like a good idea. People go to war. People invade each other's land. People enslave other people. You're the one with the idea that people in your ideal society are simply just going to be that much more civilized then every other group of people in history.
How can the issue of "neighborhood effects" possibly be dealt with in an Anarcho-capitalist society? For a better explanation of the term:
A second general class of cases in which strictly voluntary exchange is impossible arises when actions of individuals have effects on other individuals for which it is not feasible to charge or recompense them. This is the problem of "neighborhood effects". An obvious example is the pollution of a stream. The man who pollutes a stream is in effect forcing others to exchange good water for bad. These others might be willing to make the exchange at a price. But it is not feasible for them, acting individually, to avoid the exchange or to enforce appropriate compensation.
A less obvious example is the provision of highways. In this case, it is technically possible to identify and hence charge individuals for their use of the roads and so to have private operation. However, for general access roads, involving many points of entry and exit, the costs of collection would be extremely high if a charge were to be made for the specific services received by each individual, because of the necessity of establishing toll booths or the equivalent at all entrances. The gasoline tax is a much cheaper method of charing individuals roughly in proportion to their use of the roads. This method, however, is one in which the particular payment cannot be identified closely with the particular use. Hence, it is hardly feasible to have private enterprise provide the service and collect the charge without establishing extensive private monopoly.
I don't believe so, but obviously he does. I'm just saying that responding to criticism by pawning it off on another idea doesn't improve your argument.
My point was that communism creates starvation because it arbitrarily sets the price and amount of food to be produced, which is guaranteed to bring about market failure. Anarcho-capitalism is the opposite, and it would lead to less starvation than any type of government.
All real-world "communist states" are failed communist states. Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never existed in any form in any country. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," has never been implemented.
It's sort of funny because anarcho-capitalism would meet the same fate. Either the anarchy, or the free market (or both) would end pretty quickly if it were to be attempted in the real world.
It's going to be attempted-- http://seastead.org/--courtesy of Milton Friedman's grandson.
Also, link to the anarcho-capitalism handguide written by Milton Friedman's son, David Friedman, here.
I honestly don't think it's as crazy as it sounds. Down with government!
If private companies or individuals see benefit in funding research, they can fund it. Why should people be forced to fund your research, especially if the value is questionable?
Why should people be forced to pay for the police, when its in their interest to get a gun and rule the town on their own? Durr, people fund research because ALL RESEARCH IS QUESTIONABLE. Go do some, seriously. You don't know if it'll be viable until you do it specifically because of the fact that it is research and not implementation. Research doesn't work like in Civ 2 where you devote a section of tax dollars, then suddenly you learn writing. Moreover, research is unprofitable in a world without significant intellectual property rights.
Why would i research a better way to build bricks when my competitor can get someone hired in my company, steal the secrets, then go back to work for his employer. What would I do to stop him? Hire my PDA to go shoot him up? Rofl.
The dark ages was a feudalistic society. There has not existed, to my knowledge, an anarco-capitalistic society.
The dark ages was the result of the massive destruction of the dominant government order in the time, and resulted in around 3-400 years of lost progress for humanity. If you want a modern parallel, go look at any nation which is primarily governed at the municipal level by warlords. In an anarcho-capitalistic society, the person who can buy the most guns the fastest becomes the new warlord/dominion chief/king, and there's fuck all you can do about it. What worth is your money (oh, money? Is that a government issued certificate which only has power because they coerce you to accept it? Yes it is) to an opposing PDA if that PDA will get slaughtered?
Oh, nothing.
What stops a PDA from being greedy and assuming control of production to protect your lands from a rival PDA? Oh, nothing : D.
What stops you from robbing poor people who can't afford PDA protection? Oh, nothing : D.
What stops you from robbing rich people and killing them, thus making PDA mediated vengeance useless from a buisness point of view, because you're still paying them (and likely paying them off with your newfound riches). Oh, nothing : D.
Since all society is based on a government, of course advances are going to occur under governments. The correlation is bound to be unavoidable, but you have not established any causation.
All society is based on a government? Oh no, sir. All NOTABLE societies have, but there are plenty of bushmen and non-governed tribes in the world. Is it unavoidable that all of the largest governing structures have always been risen and fallen, but produced the greatest works of their time, bar none? No. What is unavoidable is that government has a correlation with all of the assurance and niceties of society, making division of labour exceptionally possible and thus extreme specialization possible.
People in early anarchies had no conception of anarchism, merely the absence of formal authorities, and thus were lead (or misled) to believe that anarchy could not be stable.
People with no conception of government were lied to and told that the way they and all their predecessors had lived was unstable? Wow, you'd need a pretty big piece of evidence to back that up.
Just as a note (totally plugging a board of mine) http://www.politicsforum.org/ exists if you really like political discussion. I haunt it and obviously don't dislike it.
Just don't tell them I sent you (I'm on another username). An anarcho-capitalist joins the boards every few months and they aren't recieved with the utmost joy. There's also a guy there who's just like you. You could hit it off.
On March 08 2008 14:53 EmeraldSparks wrote: Which again, depended on altruism. Become a communist already.
People are altruistic to a certain extent. The examples shown are real ones, and realistically people can be somewhat altruistic. Communism assumes people will work harder with no incentive. Anarcho-capitalists believe incentive drives people to work harder.
Not everyone has to be really evil. Take, you know, twelfth century Mongolia. Lots of organizations that have their own protection forces. One guy decided that he was going to conquer his neighbors. Now, the fact that there were a whole lot of peaceful people milling around and I guess all the people were nice and friendly and stuff, Ghengis Khan invaded all of his neighbors and formed an empire anyway.
Ghengis Khan rose to power amidst a society of governments.
There will always be a monopoly on force in an area; if you break it up, a new one arises. The question is simply who is going to hold the ability to use force?
Private firms that are accountable to its customers.
A body accountable to the people seems like a good idea.
I agree, that's one of the problems with government. Governments are hardly accountable to their people. Every four years we get to vote someone in who may or may not change policy, but their taking money from you whether you like their service or not. The private sector, on the other hand, is directly accountable to its customers; if the customer isn't satisfied, they can take their business to another defense provider.
People go to war. People invade each other's land. People enslave other people. You're the one with the idea that people in your ideal society are simply just going to be that much more civilized then every other group of people in history.
I don't make anarcho-capitalism out to be a utopia, just that it would be more effective then having a government. Coercive monopolies (governments) are much more likely to be corrupt than private institutions.
the theory is rather idealistic in origin, meaning then it overestimates how much perceived features of then existing institutions are natural to each. the difference between government and private institution as conceived under yer capitalism is not that fundamental. each enjoys monopoly of authority in the relevant society. your private property for instance is public in the sense that everyone is supposed to recognize it, and therefore it describes a society, not merely your 'private' sphere. compared to the private propertied institutions, govt just has a different structure and reach, a difference of organization and form. the formation of each is historically contingent but also reflect the reality of spontaneous social action, that it takes on certain forms of organization. making govt out as a distinct entity a priori is without much merit in any case.
im not interested in debates. just to say that the discussion is not touching on the most pertinent and fundamental issues.
On March 08 2008 15:06 L wrote:Why should people be forced to pay for the police, when its in their interest to get a gun and rule the town on their own?
People *shouldn't* be forced to pay for police, how could you have missed me saying that?
Durr, people fund research because ALL RESEARCH IS QUESTIONABLE. Go do some, seriously. You don't know if it'll be viable until you do it specifically because of the fact that it is research and not implementation. Research doesn't work like in Civ 2 where you devote a section of tax dollars, then suddenly you learn writing. Moreover, research is unprofitable in a world without significant intellectual property rights.
You have yet to justify why it is okay for YOU to force ME to fund YOUR questionable research.
Why would i research a better way to build bricks when my competitor can get someone hired in my company, steal the secrets, then go back to work for his employer. What would I do to stop him? Hire my PDA to go shoot him up? Rofl.
The dark ages was a feudalistic society. There has not existed, to my knowledge, an anarco-capitalistic society.
The dark ages was the result of the massive destruction of the dominant government order in the time, and resulted in around 3-400 years of lost progress for humanity. If you want a modern parallel, go look at any nation which is primarily governed at the municipal level by warlords. In an anarcho-capitalistic society, the person who can buy the most guns the fastest becomes the new warlord/dominion chief/king, and there's fuck all you can do about it. What worth is your money (oh, money? Is that a government issued certificate which only has power because they coerce you to accept it? Yes it is) to an opposing PDA if that PDA will get slaughtered?
Oh, nothing.
What stops a PDA from being greedy and assuming control of production to protect your lands from a rival PDA? Oh, nothing : D.
What stops you from robbing poor people who can't afford PDA protection? Oh, nothing : D.
And what stops government from turning the military on its citizens and enslaving all the women and children and putting the men into labor camps and taking even more money then they already do from its citizens? What stops the government from being this greedy, since they already have a coercive monopoly on force?? Government is made up of people, and most people have at least some ethics. Sure it's possible for PDAs to pull stuff like that, but it's no more probable then it is for govenrment to do the same, it is less probable because these outlaw PDAs would lose customers whereas the government does not have to worry about that since they force people to pay them.
What stops you from robbing rich people and killing them, thus making PDA mediated vengeance useless from a buisness point of view, because you're still paying them (and likely paying them off with your newfound riches). Oh, nothing : D.
Rich people hire PDAs as well.
Oh no, sir. All NOTABLE societies have, but there are plenty of bushmen and non-governed tribes in the world. Is it unavoidable that all of the largest governing structures have always been risen and fallen, but produced the greatest works of their time, bar none? No.
Most trible societies practice some form of socialism or communism.
What is unavoidable is that government has a correlation with all of the assurance and niceties of society, making division of labour exceptionally possible and thus extreme specialization possible.
Government is not why we have efficient specialization, the free market is.
People in early anarchies had no conception of anarchism, merely the absence of formal authorities, and thus were lead (or misled) to believe that anarchy could not be stable.
People with no conception of government were lied to and told that the way they and all their predecessors had lived was unstable? Wow, you'd need a pretty big piece of evidence to back that up.[/quote] Anarcho-capitalism is a relatively new theory. Absence of government is not the same thing. I'm not saying people were lied to by someone, but they believed they needed governments to function before markets and property rights had even evolved as concepts. I should not that the quote is not mine (although I of course take responsibility for it since I injected it into the discussion).
On March 08 2008 15:21 oneofthem wrote: the theory is rather idealistic in origin, meaning then it overestimates how much perceived features of then existing institutions are natural to each.
?
the difference between government and private institution as conceived under yer capitalism is not that fundamental. each enjoys monopoly of authority in the relevant society.
There is a huge difference. Government forces its citizens to fund itself, and government forces competitors out by arresting them. Private institutions enjoy no such luxury.
your private property for instance is public in the sense that everyone is supposed to recognize it, and therefore it describes a society, not merely your 'private' sphere.
My private property is not public, it is mine only. Your use of the word 'public' here is not in line with any common economic definition.
compared to the private propertied institutions, govt just has a different structure and reach, a difference of organization and form. the formation of each is historically contingent but also reflect the reality of spontaneous social action, that it takes on certain forms of organization. making govt out as a distinct entity a priori is without much merit in any case.
Government is defined as an organization that extorts its citizens and has a coercive monopoly over the use of force. These are sharp contrasts from capitalism.
I don't believe so, but obviously he does. I'm just saying that responding to criticism by pawning it off on another idea doesn't improve your argument.
My point was that communism creates starvation because it arbitrarily sets the price and amount of food to be produced, which is guaranteed to bring about market failure. Anarcho-capitalism is the opposite, and it would lead to less starvation than any type of government.
All real-world "communist states" are failed communist states. Marx's "dictatorship of the proletariat" has never existed in any form in any country. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need," has never been implemented.
It's sort of funny because anarcho-capitalism would meet the same fate. Either the anarchy, or the free market (or both) would end pretty quickly if it were to be attempted in the real world.
It's going to be attempted-- http://seastead.org/--courtesy of Milton Friedman's grandson.
Also, link to the anarcho-capitalism handguide written by Milton Friedman's son, David Friedman, here.
I honestly don't think it's as crazy as it sounds. Down with government!
At best, this will be to anarcho-capitalism what the Jewish Kibbutzim were to communism; a small scale success that in no way means that it would be effective on a large scale.
If communism was so great, why did all the former soviet states opt for some type of capitalism following the dissolve of the soviet union? Government intervention creates market failure.
Russia would have voted a Communist president back into office if it hadn't been for Yeltsin effectively buying the election. (No, this isn't red propaganda or fanciful stuff. This is actually fact.) And if capitalism is so great, why did some nations opt for communism? I'm simply playing devil's advocate here.
Please check the link I edited into the first post, Ch 12 on the police, courts, and law.
I did. The link said that people would subscribe to courts. If the courts disagreed, we would appeal. The article said something about, "eventually, we would stop appealing." I don't see a mechanism by which this would happen. In any case, it doesn't mention what would happen if courts were essentially controlled.
Point being that there is no real line between 'public good' and 'private good', every good has externalities to some extent.
Yes, but some have very small externalities where it makes sense to pay for something simply because paying for it gives you net benefit, and things with very large externalities and very little exclusive benefit where it does not.
People are altruistic to a certain extent. The examples shown are real ones, and realistically people can be somewhat altruistic.
It's possible to furnish public goods, to a certain extent, under anarcho-capitalism. It's also possible to furnish private goods, to a certain extent, under state socialism. I simply hold that anarcho-capitalism would do a really bad job of it.
Ghengis Khan rose to power amidst a society of governments.
Yes. Obviously if those governments had instead been defense companies nobody would have followed Ghengis Khan.
You have yet to justify why it is okay for YOU to force ME to fund YOUR questionable research.
To avoid the free rider problem.
Private firms that are accountable to its shareholders.
Fixed.
I agree, that's one of the problems with government. Governments are hardly accountable to their people. Every four years we get to vote someone in who may or may not change policy, but their taking money from you whether you like their service or not. The private sector, on the other hand, is directly accountable to its customers; if the customer isn't satisfied, they can take their business to another defense provider.
If you're not satisfied with the government, vote in another party. Some things just don't happen. Suppose an entire city suscribes to a defense provider. Suppose also that they don't allow other defense providers to operate on the roads that they covered by some contractual agreement. How are you going to switch? What happens when the two organizations conflict? Don't say they won't, because the whole "war is unprofitable" thing you've been going on about is simply false.
I don't make anarcho-capitalism out to be a utopia, just that it would be more effective then having a government. Coercive monopolies (governments) are much more likely to be corrupt than private institutions.
Corrupt? What does it mean for a private institution to be corrupt? If by corrupt, you mean "aren't accountable to the people", they certainly aren't. They're obligated to their shareholders. If you replace corrupt with incompetent, you might be right. If you don't, you get mafias. It's that simple.
And what stops government from turning the military on its citizens and enslaving all the women and children and putting the men into labor camps and taking even more money then they already do from its citizens? What stops the government from being this greedy, since they already have a coercive monopoly on force?? Government is made up of people, and most people have at least some ethics.
1. We don't elect fascists to government. Politicians can be impeached. We have no control over who runs companies. 2. A soldier's duties are to the Constitution. 3. Most of the money that goes into government doesn't actually go to the people who run it. A senator does not profit when revenues go up. Corporation are entities set up to focus solely on profit.
Simply put, which of these would be more likely to enslave its population - A private company whose leaders are not legally bound to anything (customers don't count, since as soon as you have a monopoly you no longer need to satisfy your customers; they have no choice) or a democratic nation such as Switzerland, Japan, Canada, or Australia.
Sure it's possible for PDAs to pull stuff like that, but it's no more probable then it is for govenrment to do the same, it is less probable because these outlaw PDAs would lose customers whereas the government does not have to worry about that since they force people to pay them.
The great thing is that with inequality the way it is today, the rich who hold ridiculous amounts of money (1% of the population controls over a third of the money; the bottom half of the population controls less than a twentieth) will simply have the resources to control the military, courts, etc. Who owns major corporations today? Who will control the defense / military / courts in your world?
As a side note: The wonderful thing about anarcho-capitalist's use of the words "extort" and "steal" is that they're only bad because the things they describe, we view as bad, not the other way around. If by some semantic miracle you're about to get those word used to describe government, they're going to lose all their emotional impact.
If communism was so great, why did all the former soviet states opt for some type of capitalism following the dissolve of the soviet union? Government intervention creates market failure.
Russia would have voted a Communist president back into office if it hadn't been for Yeltsin effectively buying the election. (No, this isn't red propaganda or fanciful stuff. This is actually fact.) And if capitalism is so great, why did some nations opt for communism? I'm simply playing devil's advocate here.
I'll take your word on the Russia thing. As for the nations that opted for communism, have any been successful with it?
I did. The link said that people would subscribe to courts. If the courts disagreed, we would appeal. The article said something about, "eventually, we would stop appealing." I don't see a mechanism by which this would happen. In any case, it doesn't mention what would happen if courts were essentially controlled.
The idea is that PDAs would contract arbitration services with each other and agree to allow a certain number of appeals on behalf of their clients.
Yes, but some have very small externalities where it makes sense to pay for something simply because paying for it gives you net benefit, and things with very large externalities and very little exclusive benefit where it does not.
Where do you draw the line on public good vs private good? There is no theoretical distinction between them, it's just where you subjectively decide that one good has 'enough' externalities to warrant forcing people to pay for it.
Yes. Obviously if those governments had instead been defense companies nobody would have followed Ghengis Khan.
Not saying it wouldn'tve happened in a stateless society, but that as an example doesn't prove anything.
To avoid the free rider problem.
Which isn't a problem at all, since the private sector can and has provided "public" goods.
Fixed.
Yes private firms are accountable to their shareholders, but they are also dependent on their customers. If they don't satisfy their customers, then the customers will turn to a competitor. Compare that to government where they extort their customers whether they want to pay or not. The government has much less incentive to improve itself because it isn't accountable to its consumers in the same way private firms are.
If you're not satisfied with the government, vote in another party. Some things just don't happen. Suppose an entire city suscribes to a defense provider. Suppose also that they don't allow other defense providers to operate on the roads that they covered by some contractual agreement. How are you going to switch? What happens when the two organizations conflict? Don't say they won't, because the whole "war is unprofitable" thing you've been going on about is simply false.
War is unprofitable, it costs massive amounts of money. But yes, sometimes war will break out if PDAs cannot reconcile their disagreements any other way. If you're looking for a society completely devoid of fighting you're not gonna find one.
Corrupt? What does it mean for a private institution to be corrupt? If by corrupt, you mean "aren't accountable to the people", they certainly aren't. They're obligated to their shareholders. If you replace corrupt with incompetent, you might be right. If you don't, you get mafias. It's that simple.
Private institutions are accountable to the people because they need to provide quality service otherwise the customers leave. Government doesn't have this incentive because they don't let customers leave. As for mafias, they can only exist due to police. If we allowed competing firms, there would be a high demand for them as protection against the mafia.
1. We don't elect fascists to government. Politicians can be impeached. We have no control over who runs companies.
What if the president just decides to use the military to oppress it's citizenry? Who's gonna stop him? He's got all the power, and the weapons.
2. A soldier's duties are to the Constitution.
A soldiers duties are to his commanding officer. But you act like people are going to just abandon their moral compasses if government disappeared. Government doesn't make people moral.
3. Most of the money that goes into government doesn't actually go to the people who run it. A senator does not profit when revenues go up. Corporation are entities set up to focus solely on profit.
Right. A senators income is not tied to his job performance. This is the problem with advocating communism/coercive monopoly over any economic market. He does not have the same incentive to do his job to the best of his abilities. The fact that corporations are profit driven is a (net) GOOD thing. Because the way they make their profit is by satisfying the consumer.
Simply put, which of these would be more likely to enslave its population - A private company whose leaders are not legally bound to anything (customers don't count, since as soon as you have a monopoly you no longer need to satisfy your customers; they have no choice) or a democratic nation such as Switzerland, Japan, Canada, or Australia.
Customers do count. Natural monopolies still have to satisfy their customers, or else a competing firm will arise to meet the market demand. What you're basically asking is which is more likely to enslave its population: A natural monopoly that gets revenue from customers who voluntarily pay for its service, or a coercive monopoly that forces people to pay for it and jails any potential competitors. I'd say the latter is much closer to slavery.
The great thing is that with inequality the way it is today, the rich who hold ridiculous amounts of money (1% of the population controls over a third of the money; the bottom half of the population controls less than a twentieth) will simply have the resources to control the military, courts, etc. Who owns major corporations today? Who will control the defense / military / courts in your world?
I'd rather the military be in the hands of corporations than politicians.
As a side note: The wonderful thing about anarcho-capitalist's use of the words "extort" and "steal" is that they're only bad because the things they describe, we view as bad, not the other way around. If by some semantic miracle you're about to get those word used to describe government, they're going to lose all their emotional impact.
Of course we think stealing is bad. It is bad. Government steals. They force you to pay taxes, and if you don't, they lock you up. People are ingrained from birth to think that when the government does it its okay, because they know what's best for you. But there is no disputing that taxes are stealing. It's no different then the mafia "asking" for protection money.
You have yet to justify why it is okay for YOU to force ME to fund YOUR questionable research.
The electricity you're using on the computer you're typing on which connects to that internet thing? Those are the reasons why. You know that lightbulb thing? I don't think edison's trial by failure search for a filament was anything other than questionable, but there you go, discovery.
No, I don't need to justify shit all to you, the fact that you aren't in the middle of a jungle foraging for berries does so all on its own.
Rich people hire PDAs as well.
Unless PDAs are 100% effective, which they won't be, It really doesn't matter, does it? I doubt everyone can hire a personal manservant/bodyguard, and the moment an iota of chance hits, killing someone is the best, most lucrative thing to do in your system. Rich people have PDAs? Good for them.
And what stops government from turning the military on its citizens and enslaving all the women and children and putting the men into labor camps and taking even more money then they already do from its citizens?
You mean besides the fact that they'd need a massive military, the fact they'd face a mass insurrection, the fact that the military is comprised of citizens and the fact that enslaving people is useful when the work to be performed is physical labor, yet we're in an information/service based economy?
Besides all those, maybe because the government has an extensive series of checks and balances, and you'd need more than one person to flip the switch between "happy democracy" and "lunatic nation". If good ol' W tried this flat out, he'd be impeached and likely thrown in jail.
Interestingly enough, the above situation is far more likely to happen by the CEO of the most powerful PDA than from a democratic nation's government. Again, see warlords.
People *shouldn't* be forced to pay for police, how could you have missed me saying that?
Paying a PDA is nearly 100% a requirement in your world. They amount to the police. Either way, Why would I bother when killing other people is better for me? You've set up a world in which everyone needs to pick the co-operative choice in a prisoners dilemma. You can't escape that.
Government is not why we have efficient specialization, the free market is.
No, It isn't. It isn't at all. Safety, a shifting from nomadic to rural society and agriculture are the reason why specialization happened. You need a safety net before you decide that you're going to forego the knowledge of how to clothe, feed and shelter yourself and work on something else: those essentials have to be provided for you. They are assured by governments, not the market. The market just looks at your pocketbook and checks to see if its profitable to let you live, nothing else. If the cost of feeding, clothing and sheltering you isn't greater than the value of your work, you're dead.
Actually, you aren't dead. The productive guy next door is, because you'll kill him. Sure as hell hope the PDA he hired had some guards at his house the moment you decided to break in and steal all his valuables. I especially hope the PDA he hired operates on a worldwide scale, because otherwise murder followed up with... Oh wait, we've already been over this, the moment you've killed someone, its unprofitable to bother trying to punish the offender if he's paying you, unless you can seize his property, in which case PDAs would randomly kill off their own clients for maximum profit. Preferably 2 at a time to claim that one killed the other.
BRILLIANT.
I'd rather the military be in the hands of corporations than politicians.
ROFL.
War is unprofitable,
False. Stop spouting this nonsense.
Government steals.
So it can make shit for all of us? That isn't stealing.
Society is a Blessing, but Government is Evil by Thomas Paine http://www.mises.org/story/2897 an excerpt: "For upwards of two years from the commencement of the American war, and a longer period in several of the American states, there were no established forms of government. The old governments had been abolished, and the country was too much occupied in defense to employ its attention in establishing new governments; yet, during this interval, order and harmony were preserved as inviolate as in any country in Europe. There is a natural aptness in man, and more so in society, because it embraces a greater variety of abilities and resources, to accommodate itself to whatever situation it is in. The instant formal government is abolished, society begins to act. A general association takes place, and common interest produces common security.
So far is it from being true, as has been pretended, that the abolition of any formal government is the dissolution of society, it acts by contrary impulse, and brings the latter the closer together. All that part of its organization which it had committed to its government, devolves again upon itself, and acts as from reciprocal benefits, have habituated themselves to social and civilized life, there is always enough of its principles in practice to carry them through any changes they may find necessary or convenient to make in their government. In short, man is so naturally a creature of society that it is almost impossible to put him out of it."
On March 08 2008 15:21 oneofthem wrote: the theory is rather idealistic in origin, meaning then it overestimates how much perceived features of then existing institutions are natural to each.
the difference between government and private institution as conceived under yer capitalism is not that fundamental. each enjoys monopoly of authority in the relevant society.
There is a huge difference. Government forces its citizens to fund itself, and government forces competitors out by arresting them. Private institutions enjoy no such luxury.
your private property for instance is public in the sense that everyone is supposed to recognize it, and therefore it describes a society, not merely your 'private' sphere.
My private property is not public, it is mine only. Your use of the word 'public' here is not in line with any common economic definition.
compared to the private propertied institutions, govt just has a different structure and reach, a difference of organization and form. the formation of each is historically contingent but also reflect the reality of spontaneous social action, that it takes on certain forms of organization. making govt out as a distinct entity a priori is without much merit in any case.
Government is defined as an organization that extorts its citizens and has a coercive monopoly over the use of force. These are sharp contrasts from capitalism.
private institutions enjoy property rights, which apply to all and everyone based on pretty much the pleasure of the 'private' holder.
you seem to operate under the assumption that property is not a social institution, and that it is natural and not coercive. all of which are pretty dead horses.
[QUOTE]On March 08 2008 16:40 L wrote: [quote]The electricity you're using on the computer you're typing on which connects to that internet thing? Those are the reasons why. You know that lightbulb thing? I don't think edison's trial by failure search for a filament was anything other than questionable, but there you go, discovery.[/quote] So it's okay to steal from me because of scientific discovery? Ignoring the fact that neither of those examples, to my knowledge, where government funded, you are missing several logical steps from your premise to your conclusion.
[quote]No, I don't need to justify shit all to you, the fact that you aren't in the middle of a jungle foraging for berries does so all on its own. [/quote] See above. You haven't justified government funding in the slightest.
[quote]Unless PDAs are 100% effective, which they won't be, It really doesn't matter, does it? I doubt everyone can hire a personal manservant/bodyguard, and the moment an iota of chance hits, killing someone is the best, most lucrative thing to do in your system. Rich people have PDAs? Good for them.[/quote] Police aren't 100% effective either. No system is. And not everyone today has a personal bodyguard, but most people manage to avoid getting murdered. Prviately provided protection is better because the firms have an economic incentive to do their job well.
[quote]You mean besides the fact that they'd need a massive military, the fact they'd face a mass insurrection, the fact that the military is comprised of citizens and the fact that enslaving people is useful when the work to be performed is physical labor, yet we're in an information/service based economy? [/quote] Government already has a massive military and all the weapons. A PDA, by the way, would also be comprised of citizens.
[quote]Besides all those, maybe because the government has an extensive series of checks and balances, and you'd need more than one person to flip the switch between "happy democracy" and "lunatic nation". If good ol' W tried this flat out, he'd be impeached and likely thrown in jail.[/quote] Not if everyone in power went along with it. And you might say, "well that wouldn't happen". But it's just as unlikely to happen in the private sector. You think people would just let a firm take over and become oppressive? The same people who would rise up against GW could rise up against a private firm.
[quote]Interestingly enough, the above situation is far more likely to happen by the CEO of the most powerful PDA than from a democratic nation's government. Again, see warlords.[/quote] What do you mean by warlords? Do you mean an organized military body that forcibly collects taxes from people in its domain? That's a government.
[quote]Paying a PDA is nearly 100% a requirement in your world. They amount to the police.[/quote] Yes, they will be like police. The difference is that you will have a choice of which firm to employ, as opposed to being forced to pay one firm. It's like with food. Sure you have to buy food, but you have a choice of which supermarket to go to. You can choose the one with the lowest prices and the best food. Can you imagine if the government took over food production and sale? There is no difference with police.
[quote] No, It isn't. It isn't at all. Safety, a shifting from nomadic to rural society and agriculture are the reason why specialization happened. You need a safety net before you decide that you're going to forego the knowledge of how to clothe, feed and shelter yourself and work on something else: those essentials have to be provided for you. They are assured by governments, not the market. The market just looks at your pocketbook and checks to see if its profitable to let you live, nothing else. If the cost of feeding, clothing and sheltering you isn't greater than the value of your work, you're dead. [/quote] The safety net can be provided by private defense companies more effectively than by government. The difference is that government forces you to pay for them, whereas if defense was privatized you could choose your own supplier.
[quote]Actually, you aren't dead. The productive guy next door is, because you'll kill him. Sure as hell hope the PDA he hired had some guards at his house the moment you decided to break in and steal all his valuables. I especially hope the PDA he hired operates on a worldwide scale, because otherwise murder followed up with... Oh wait, we've already been over this, the moment you've killed someone, its unprofitable to bother trying to punish the offender if he's paying you, unless you can seize his property, in which case PDAs would randomly kill off their own clients for maximum profit. Preferably 2 at a time to claim that one killed the other.
BRILLIANT. [/quote] We're just going in circles now. You for some reason think that people would lose all sense of morality if we took away government, which is ridiculous since its people that created government in the first place and decided on codes to live by. People want to live in orderly society. As for PDAs that do stuff like kill their own clients for money, they would lose all business in a hurry to a company that didn't do that. Govenrment, on the other hand, could decide to do that since there are no competing firms. They probably wouldn't since it would incite a revolution and it generally isn't good to be oppressing your own people, but it is equally if not more absurd to imagine that happening under an anarcho-capitalist system.
So is it a coincidence that up until the Iraq war, every US president has raised taxes? War is an expensive operation, sometimes you can plunder enough from the country you conquer to pay for it, but war is very expensive. All the weapons and ammo that are built and used cost money.
So it can make shit for all of us? That isn't stealing.
Do you know what stealing means? If you don't give the government your money, they put you in jail. Pretty clear cut. What they do with your money is irrelevant. If I take your computer but give you a book, did I steal your computer? Would you argue 'no' since I gave you something in return?
So is it a coincidence that up until the Iraq war, every US president has raised taxes? War is an expensive operation, sometimes you can plunder enough from the country you conquer to pay for it, but war is very expensive. All the weapons and ammo that are built and used cost money.
War is expensive now between large mechanized forces, but the payoff that you'd get from ransacking a country is now largely impossible to benefit from, because the international community isn't quite happy with letting someone carpet bomb an entire country, then come in with a looting squad to steal shit. I'm sure if there were no supranational forces at work, slaughtering everyone in the country and then just re-selling off their oil, commodities, livestock, etc would be profitable.
Do you know what stealing means?
Do you? When i get up, I get up in a house that the government was nice enough to build roads to, install a sewage system for, set up traffic lights outside, provide public transit, and a hospital down the street. They paid for all my schooling, and they clean up the streets and build parks. If i didn't invest in that, why am i benefiting from it? I'm stealing someone else's park space, I'm wearing down their road, I'm pooping into their pipes. That's stealing.
If I take your computer but give you a book, did I steal your computer? Would you argue 'no' since I gave you something in return?
If you stole my wallet, but gave me a bank, would i call that stealing?
Clearly your argument is that government gives back too little for the amount of benefit your tax dollars provide. Fair enough, but go ahead and prove that the massive amount of infrastructural 'payments' to private corporations will be more effective. Especially with respect to infrastructural work like roads and plumbing.
What, you're going to have 2 competing sewage companies in an urban area, with two sets of sewage pipes, 2 sets of purification plants (oh, wait, would they even build those? Survey says: no), 2 sets of desalinization plants, etc? Hilarious.
Yes, they will be like police. The difference is that you will have a choice of which firm to employ, as opposed to being forced to pay one firm. It's like with food. Sure you have to buy food, but you have a choice of which supermarket to go to. You can choose the one with the lowest prices and the best food. Can you imagine if the government took over food production and sale? There is no difference with police.
Err, so? This doesn't change the fact that the PDAs have no vested interest in protecting someone after they've ceased to pay them. The entire system is ridiculous. Why would you seek vengeance if the only force at work are those of the market, when killing someone removes them from that market. There's nothing to gain. More importantly, there are a few huge flaws in the entire system:
1) police networks function by being nearly omnipresent. If your corporation is not massive in scale, it cannot protect anyone.
2) your corporation has a vested interest in either letting people get away with murder, or killing people themselves.
3) your corporation requires a massive amount of overhead, unlike the current system. This isn't 1 police force with a unified database of information from which to find criminals.
4) nearly any unserviced sections of society (take the poor as an, but not the only, example) will be free for any type of offence against them. More importantly, they will likely form an insurrection.
5) There is no reason a PDA cannot, or will not, usurp control and form an unstable or undesirable government.
We're just going in circles now. You for some reason think that people would lose all sense of morality if we took away government
No i don't. I just think that there's no disincentive to being immoral. Doesn't take everyone being assholes to ruin a nice thing. Just one.
The safety net can be provided by private defense companies more effectively than by government. The difference is that government forces you to pay for them, whereas if defense was privatized you could choose your own supplier.
PDAs can assure me physical safety, but can't really do much for clothing, shelter, required materials for my buisness or anything else having to do with supply. Guy who owns the water plant raises rates 200%. I can't stop that.
So it's okay to steal from me because of scientific discovery? Ignoring the fact that neither of those examples, to my knowledge, where government funded, you are missing several logical steps from your premise to your conclusion.
First off, go look up how those things got invented. I'll point you towards CERN for one, which was clearly a private organization. Right? No. Second, No, my conclusion is pretty much directly derived from the evidence i posted.
Police aren't 100% effective either. No system is. And not everyone today has a personal bodyguard, but most people manage to avoid getting murdered. Prviately provided protection is better because the firms have an economic incentive to do their job well.
Yet, unlike the PDA, the government has a very very VERY vested interest in catching the criminal, if only to shut people up. Its that deterrent which keeps most people on the straight and narrow.
What do you mean by warlords? Do you mean an organized military body that forcibly collects taxes from people in its domain? That's a government.
No, its a shitty government, and its the first thing that forms out of anarchy soup. We have a fairly good system of government, and I'd rather not devolve any.
As for PDAs that do stuff like kill their own clients for money, they would lose all business in a hurry to a company that didn't do that.
If people found out about it, maybe. But the way I set it up, they would be seen as a highly effective PDA, always catching and killing the murderer. You pretend like people in this government-less society now have niceties like government inspectors, regulations and non-biased mass media. They don't.
War is expensive now between large mechanized forces, but the payoff that you'd get from ransacking a country is now largely impossible to benefit from, because the international community isn't quite happy with letting someone carpet bomb an entire country, then come in with a looting squad to steal shit. I'm sure if there were no supranational forces at work, slaughtering everyone in the country and then just re-selling off their oil, commodities, livestock, etc would be profitable.
They don't need to be supranational, any opposing force will mind.
Do you? When i get up, I get up in a house that the government was nice enough to build roads to, install a sewage system for, set up traffic lights outside, provide public transit, and a hospital down the street. They paid for all my schooling, and they clean up the streets and build parks. If i didn't invest in that, why am i benefiting from it? I'm stealing someone else's park space, I'm wearing down their road, I'm pooping into their pipes. That's stealing.
If you stole my wallet, but gave me a bank, would i call that stealing?
Clearly your argument is that government gives back too little for the amount of benefit your tax dollars provide. Fair enough, but go ahead and prove that the massive amount of infrastructural 'payments' to private corporations will be more effective. Especially with respect to infrastructural work like roads and plumbing.
It doesn't matter how much they give you back. They take your money without your consent. Now generally they will give you back less than you gave them since some of your money goes toward paying for the inefficient beaurocracy, but that is irrelevant. You can sub in whatever euphamism you want, but the government steals from you.
What, you're going to have 2 competing sewage companies in an urban area, with two sets of sewage pipes, 2 sets of purification plants (oh, wait, would they even build those? Survey says: no), 2 sets of desalinization plants, etc? Hilarious.
It is likely that one company would have a monopoly on a certain block of houses, kind of like how private internet providers now tend to do.
Err, so? This doesn't change the fact that the PDAs have no vested interest in protecting someone after they've ceased to pay them. The entire system is ridiculous. Why would you seek vengeance if the only force at work are those of the market, when killing someone removes them from that market. There's nothing to gain. More importantly, there are a few huge flaws in the entire system:
Of course there is something to gain, if a PDA lets a customer die and then doesn't seek justice they will lose all their customers to better PDAs. Clearly people have a desire for justice since there was enough public support to build a police department in the first place, there's no reason private companies wouldn't be more effective.
1) police networks function by being nearly omnipresent. If your corporation is not massive in scale, it cannot protect anyone.
False. Why do they need to be omnipresent? They only need to protect the people who pay for their services.
2) your corporation has a vested interest in either letting people get away with murder, or killing people themselves.
False. Reputation is important, and outlaw PDAs would lose business to legitimate competitors. The publics general interest in having a police force shows that there is a desire for just protection.
3) your corporation requires a massive amount of overhead, unlike the current system. This isn't 1 police force with a unified database of information from which to find criminals.
Having multiple databases doesn't require massive overhead.
4) nearly any unserviced sections of society (take the poor as an, but not the only, example) will be free for any type of offence against them. More importantly, they will likely form an insurrection.
People who could not afford protection would indeed be in a tough spot. They would have to depend on the charity of others. I maintain that it is less moral to force other people to pay for their protection, as we do under the current system, then to allow people the option of paying for thier protection.
5) There is no reason a PDA cannot, or will not, usurp control and form an unstable or undesirable government.
The reason is that other PDAs and citizens would revolt against them. Of course its still possible, and then worst case scenario we have a government again like we have now.
No i don't. I just think that there's no disincentive to being immoral. Doesn't take everyone being assholes to ruin a nice thing. Just one.
If there's no disincentive to being immoral why isn't there chaos in the streets all the time? Police? What's stopping them from being immoral? People, in general, are moral creatures. The fact that we can function in relatively stable society proves this. Taking government out of the equation doesn't change this.
PDAs can assure me physical safety, but can't really do much for clothing, shelter, required materials for my buisness or anything else having to do with supply. Guy who owns the water plant raises rates 200%. I can't stop that.
Are you advocating communism now? What's to stop microsoft from raising prices 200%? They would lose business. Basic economics of the free market dictate that raising your price above market price is going to cut into your profit, unless there is some government mechanism in the way.
First off, go look up how those things got invented. I'll point you towards CERN for one, which was clearly a private organization. Right? No. Second, No, my conclusion is pretty much directly derived from the evidence i posted.
You didn't post any evidence. Edison didn't need government funding to invent the lightbulb, and plenty of drug companies make advancements doing private research. You have in no way justified stealing for the "common good". It's pretty simple; if your reseraching something that could have a positive effect for society, then you're researching somethign people will be willing to pay for. If people will be willing to pay for it, then private companies will be willing to fund it. If they don't want to fund it because they don't trust your reserach enough, then you have no business stealing from them to fund your work.
Yet, unlike the PDA, the government has a very very VERY vested interest in catching the criminal, if only to shut people up. Its that deterrent which keeps most people on the straight and narrow.
PDAs have even more interest in catching criminals because that is their business, and if they do a poor job, they lose customers. Police can't lose customers since they extort citizens for their protection no matter what. PDAs have all the same incentives as police, and then some.
No, its a shitty government, and its the first thing that forms out of anarchy soup. We have a fairly good system of government, and I'd rather not devolve any.
There was a brief period of anarcho-capitalism after the founding of America for 2 years before any government formed, and it was great according to Thomas Paine. Then a republic sprung up, not a warlords system. Your claim is contradicted by historical evidence.
If people found out about it, maybe. But the way I set it up, they would be seen as a highly effective PDA, always catching and killing the murderer. You pretend like people in this government-less society now have niceties like government inspectors, regulations and non-biased mass media. They don't.
Police could kill there own clients for money as well. It's always in the realm of possibilities that someone could do something really evil like that, but it's very rare, and no more likely to happen with PDAs then with police. Mass media of course would still exist and word would get out and the PDA that was guilty of doing said crime would lose all its business so they have very good reason not to do that. Of course, you here about corrupt cops murdering people with some degree of regularity, but you have no option to switch firms.
"Government control gives rise to fraud, suppression of Truth, intensification of the black market and artificial scarcity. Above all, it unmans the people and deprives them of initiative, it undoes the teaching of self-help...I look upon an increase in the power of the State with the greatest fear because, although while apparently doing good by minimizing exploitation, it does the greatest harm to mankind by destroying individuality which lies at the heart of all progress...Among the many misdeeds of the British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest....We find the general work of mankind is being carried on from day to day be the mass of people acting as if by instinct....If they were instinctively violent the world would end in no time...It is when the mass mind is unnaturally influenced by wicked men that the mass of mankind commit violence. But they forget it as they commit it because they return to their peaceful nature immediately the evil influence of the directing mind has been removed....A government that is evil has no room for good men and women except in its prisons." -Ghandi
On March 08 2008 12:21 EmeraldSparks wrote: How would pollution be handled?
If people don't like a company that pollutes, then they can take their business elsewhere.
You often use this 'they can take their business elsewhere' argument however you cannot guarantee that there will always be an elsewhere. In fact the whole situation depends on there being competition. With no way to guarantee competition it won't work.
Ignoring the free rider 'problem', why should you force a set of consumers that doesn't care about pollution to care about pollution? That sounds unethical to me.
How unethical is it to force someone who doesn't care about murder to care about it ? Nowadays, pollution is equal to ( at a lesser extent ) killing. If not directly, then indirectly through delayed soil, air and water poisoning mostly, then degradation of our living environment and exploitable resources for future generations, etc. If you feel, that murder delayed over 100 or 1000 years through pollution is ''ok'', well you sound immoral to me and I'm very willing to go ''unethical'' and enforce those morals upon you.
This being said, don't call in a some twisted debate on the ethics of value enforcement ( about abortion or whatnot ) since the pollution debate is clearly not a moral issue but an economic one.
_______________________
Now on morality, how do you feel about a PDA employee ( let's call him a protection enforcer ) having to sort out through which person he helps or not depending on their corporate allegiance ? An enforcer on patrol is called upon by some bystander for help but ,unfortunately, he hasn't subscribed to the right company. He might shine 20 bucks and get that mugger's ass kicked but if he looks poor, he's a goner. And, no, the enforcer cannot act by altruism and run to the rescue anyway since nobody will pay fees and receive free protection, or he will be spending some of his time saving non-profit customer while a paying one might need help and will change provider since he's getting a bad service. And please don't compare this to racial profiling and social stereotyping problems among current police force as those would occur as well through private services.
( And by the way, publicly founded police services DO have incentives to do a great job and they're called risks of being fired for misconduct or corruption, promotion opportunities and funding through district efficiency, mostly the same as corporate ones would have.)
_______________________
I feel the most important point you're willingly ignoring about this ''tax stealing'' is wealth redistribution. Nowhere in America are taxes so high you cannot afford to live at all. Progressive rates allow poor people some room to breathe while receiving decent other services if food and lodging eats up all their income. The ''stealing'' occurs only on a wealthier level where the money you get ''extorted'' would supply to 3rd or 4th grade needs. How could you morally state that freedom to choose your own firm for protection should override the possibility of other persons to just afford this protection? How unethical of me is to force people to share without their consent... The way you put it, anarcho-capitalism is not an issue about freedom or ethical questions of incompetent government stealing, but more about generating wealth through an efficient but very peculiar economy system.
I would gladly take immoral stealing for an inefficient redistribution of wealth over effective creation of abundance for an elite or, let's call for a surreal outlook, having 50% of the global population swimming in cash and worldly goods.
_______________________
Finally, to reuse one of your favourite arguments, if you feel that ''government is stealing from you and you don't like it.'' you can ''go take your business elsewhere'' to some country where taxes are low or non-existent and where you'll create hundreds of corporations to provide the locals what they need...
You often use this 'they can take their business elsewhere' argument however you cannot guarantee that there will always be an elsewhere. In fact the whole situation depends on there being competition. With no way to guarantee competition it won't work.
The government doesn't guarantee competition, the free market does. The government in fact restricts competition. Through their monopolies on certain industry to antitrust laws, the government stifles competition which hurts the consumer. Antitrust: The Case for Repeal http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae2_3_5.pdf
[QUOTE]On March 09 2008 12:00 TinaTurner wrote: [i]How unethical is it to force someone who doesn't care about murder to care about it ? Nowadays, pollution is equal to ( at a lesser extent ) killing. If not directly, then indirectly through delayed soil, air and water poisoning mostly, then degradation of our living environment and exploitable resources for future generations, etc. If you feel, that murder delayed over 100 or 1000 years through pollution is ''ok'', well you sound immoral to me and I'm very willing to go ''unethical'' and enforce those morals upon you.[/qote] I'm not making a moral judgment on whether or not pollution is okay, I'm saying people can reach their own conclusions it without a mandate from the government.
[quote]Now on morality, how do you feel about a PDA employee ( let's call him a protection enforcer ) having to sort out through which person he helps or not depending on their corporate allegiance ? An enforcer on patrol is called upon by some bystander for help but ,unfortunately, he hasn't subscribed to the right company. He might shine 20 bucks and get that mugger's ass kicked but if he looks poor, he's a goner. And, no, the enforcer cannot act by altruism and run to the rescue anyway since nobody will pay fees and receive free protection, or he will be spending some of his time saving non-profit customer while a paying one might need help and will change provider since he's getting a bad service.[/quote] Again, you have this assumption that without a formal government, people would lose all sense morality.Our morals don't come from government, they come from ourselves. First off its unlikely that this scenario would arise since one company would probably have its customers bunched together on blocks, but if it did, you really think a professional security officer would be that cold hearted? If he was, a story like that would easily make the news and be terrible for business. But yes, there is a chance of that happening.
[quote]( And by the way, publicly founded police services DO have incentives to do a great job and they're called risks of being fired for misconduct or corruption, promotion opportunities and funding through district efficiency, mostly the same as corporate ones would have.)[/quote] Theres a new police corruption story in the news at least once every few weeks. They hardly have the same level of incentive, since the customers are forced to continue paying. If you're going to argue that the police department should be controlled by the state you might as well argue that every market should be controlled by the state. There is no reason why security is different then any other economic good; it too will be more efficiently produced on the market than by central planning.
[quote]I feel the most important point you're willingly ignoring about this ''tax stealing'' is wealth redistribution.[/quote] You are the one being willfully ignorant if you can't acknowledge that as stealing. If I put a gun to your head and demand your wallet, that's also wealth distribution. I'm distributing it from you to me.
[quote]Nowhere in America are taxes so high you cannot afford to live at all. Progressive rates allow poor people some room to breathe while receiving decent other services if food and lodging eats up all their income. The ''stealing'' occurs only on a wealthier level where the money you get ''extorted'' would supply to 3rd or 4th grade needs.[/quote] The stealing occurs against every tax paying citizen. Plenty people are poor because of high taxes. If you're going to argue that socialized education is good, you should be advocating communism. Education is a normal economic good just like every other good provided on the free market, and if you defend socialized education then you must defend the socialization of all industry, otherwise it is clear that emotion is clouding your logic.
[quote] How could you morally state that freedom to choose your own firm for protection should override the possibility of other persons to just afford this protection? [/quote] If you're going to come at morality from this angle, privatizing security would increase quality and result in less overall deaths, so I would say that your position to keep it public is immoral.
[quote]How unethical of me is to force people to share without their consent... The way you put it, anarcho-capitalism is not an issue about freedom or ethical questions of incompetent government stealing, but more about generating wealth through an efficient but very peculiar economy system.[/quote] Forcing people to share without their consent is STEALING. Anarcho-capitalism is entirely about freedom, the freedom to own your own property and be secure in it. Government is "legitimate" stealing. Because we are led to believe that "government knows what's best for us." WE know what's best for us. Government steps on our freedoms to secure them. There is NO difference between government and the private sector, except that government extorts its customers and coerces competitors to maintain its monopoly.
[quote]I would gladly take immoral stealing for an inefficient redistribution of wealth over effective creation of abundance for an elite or, let's call for a surreal outlook, having 50% of the global population swimming in cash and worldly goods.[/quote] Not effective creation of abundance for an elite, for everyone. The free market is better for everyone except those who are too lazy or incompetent to hold a job. Government interference with minimum wage and welfare increases unemployment. Even for them, though, there are still charitable people, and people will be even more charitable if they aren't gouged by taxes every year. I feel the need to again point out that if you think socialization is okay in one industry, you should be able to defend it for every industry, but economists agree theoretically and have seen empirically that the free market is more efficient than government.
[quote]Finally, to reuse one of your favourite arguments, if you feel that ''government is stealing from you and you don't like it.'' you can ''go take your business elsewhere'' to some country where taxes are low or non-existent and where you'll create hundreds of corporations to provide the locals what they need...[/quote] This argument is bunk. I like the response from the Anarcho-capitalist FAQ: "One could simply turn this around, and ask, "Why doesn't the State just leave?" The "love it or leave it" bromide begs the underlying question, who is entitled to occupy this space. Perhaps a hardcore statist would simply assume that the government rightfully owns everything, but anarcho-capitalists reject that assumption, given the State's history of conquest and plunder. We believe rightful property comes from homesteading and voluntary exchange, not conquest. A good anarcho-capitalist response may be, "The State doesn't rightfully own this property; people do.""
Just want to add that I was very liberal up until recently, and I understand the seduction of the socialist perspective. But once you're able to break free from the statist mentality that has been instilled in you since birth, it becomes clear to see that any government function could be provided better by citizens on the free market. There is no logical reason to think that some specific services are more efficiently produced by a coercive monopoly than by the free market. Government is a hinderance to liberty.
It doesn't matter how much they give you back. They take your money without your consent.
If you recieve X value, and then give out Y value to the person you got X from, the X:Y ratio is a huge factor in what 'stealing' is. Moreover, they don't take your money without your consent, by living in their cities, under the protection of their military and police, and benefitting by their utlities, you've made a choice. If you dislike living or paying taxes, you can go live in a nation without taxes.
You aren't doing that. Odd.
But again, you still haven't touched the free rider problem, and you won't. No one is going to pay for the lives of people not yet born in a capitalist system. Every possibly area to be nickle and dimed will be exploited, and there will be no reason to close the loopholes, because an assembly of citizens with the power to enforce such restrictive means would be a government, thus ending your pipe-dream society.
PDAs are similarly untenable and flawed by conception. You're essentially hoping that mercenaries with forensic labs will save us all, postulating such hilarious crap as the scope of enforcement is irrelevant. If you commit a crime, then leave the area of enforcement, suddenly you're scottfree. Most nations have extradition treaties for that very purpose, so that you can't murder a bunch of schoolgirls, then hop a train before they find out it was you, and be immune to punishment. If your PDAs have similar agreements, they essentially have stopped competing, and now operate exactly like mafias do, using territory to delineate boundaries of control. Living in one and not having protection is unviable, as you've said, thus you're getting stolen from, since you HAVE to pay them. Oh wow.
There was a brief period of anarcho-capitalism after the founding of America for 2 years before any government formed, and it was great according to Thomas Paine. Then a republic sprung up, not a warlords system. Your claim is contradicted by historical evidence.
There was a brief period of unrest following the creation of a nation from its overthrowing of another government? Didn't see that coming. People who already had the institutions of government were able to last 2 years, a period of time shorter than needed for infrastructural decay to occur significantly? Wow. Call me up when you find an example which has withstood outside forces (including malicious governments), for a period of 100-200 years while making significant progress in the arts and sciences and increasing the standard of living. Historical evidence hasn't contradicted anything. Look at the settlement of new france, and how the shift of power took place, or the current situation in non-kabul afganistan. How's about the situation in the Balkans after Tito, who, for all intents and purposes, was the government, died. Check, for instance, the entire method of feudalism which occured after the dissolution of the roman and byzantine empire.
You still don't have a response to how you'd support general development of mankind through research, or how mankind would be able to react to non-localized issues, like extensive water pollution, defense against a NEA on an impact course, air polution, nuclear radiation, etc. Moreover, you don't give any supporting evidence of why corporations would be nearly infallible on all counts. Say 2 corporations build nuclear plants, and one fucking blows the hell up. Doesn't really matter that you're left with a monopoly, because you might have the entire service area for both stations, and made them uninhabitable for thousands of years.
The free market cannot and will not invest in such things, and the capital required for many of these projects requires you to to have an obscenely wealthy oligarchy anyways, which again, completely trashes your ideal.
Government is a hinderance to liberty.
Guiderails are a hinderance to liberty too. Not all liberty is good.
As a note - the "well if governments form then we're no worse off." Um, no.
The world started off in anarchy and gradually small states developed, and some of these small states conquered each other and hundreds of thousands of people died and larger states arose and went to war and millions of people died. Today Europe is a amalgamation of liberal democracies. If we decided we were going to dismantle it out all, PDAs and warlords will end up conquering each other again. Sure, switch PDAs. I'm sure PDA number one, with complete jurisdiction over an area, will take kindly to PDA number 2 driving in a few battle tanks into its area. Don't want to deal with PDA 1? You can move... except, I suppose you asid that it's bunk. Somebody will have a monopoly of force, and in all likelihood those who control the vast majority of the nation's will be those who hold the military in the future. Want to know something interesting? The reason government is corrupt is because those with wealth corrupt them, trading wealth for what they want. I suppose your solution would just cut out the middleman. You yourself said that you are in favor of corporatist dictatorship or fascism (the conclusion of merging corporations with government) over liberal democracies. You are alone in this regard. So, suppose we dismantled what has been achieved - worse case, we're back to where we started, right? Yeah. And in the process of rebuilding you can look forward to a few million deaths.
Second, your "if we are going to have government intervention in one area then we might as well have full-blown state socialism." Um, no. There's a grade and its hard to draw a line, but do you know what happens in these cases? You pick a point and draw a line. If it creates a better outcome than either extreme, then people go with it. It happens all the time - when scientists need to find out what percentage of likelihood is good enough to scientifically draw conclusions from, they picked ten percent. There is nothing special about ten percent. After all, at one percent we would have really solid results and at the other end we would have few missed results. Any argument used to lower the threshold from 20% to 10% can also be used to lower the threshold from 10% to 0.000000001% (which, in case you aren't familiar with this means, would be really useless.) Pick a point.
If there's no disincentive to being immoral why isn't there chaos in the streets all the time? Police? What's stopping them from being immoral? People, in general, are moral creatures. The fact that we can function in relatively stable society proves this. Taking government out of the equation doesn't change this.
In the absence of an overarching collective, people and organizations tend to go to war. History has borne this out for thousands of years.
Are you advocating communism now? What's to stop microsoft from raising prices 200%? They would lose business. Basic economics of the free market dictate that raising your price above market price is going to cut into your profit, unless there is some government mechanism in the way.
Incorrect. If demand is almost completely inelastic, raising your price above the equilibrium will lead to shortage and might reduce the quantity sold by a small extent, but the increased profit per unit could easily increase profits. In addition, in industries where economies of scale and geography would tend to increase efficiency in large entities, monopolies have a tendency to develop. Here's a question. How does the water company (with a governmentally guaranteed monopoly) know what to charge you? I suppose people are starving in the streets today?
In addition, you haven't demonstrated to me how two highways running from Alaska to Washington could be more efficient to one. You have to give up either competition or efficiency.
You didn't post any evidence. Edison didn't need government funding to invent the lightbulb, and plenty of drug companies make advancements doing private research. You have in no way justified stealing for the "common good". It's pretty simple; if your reseraching something that could have a positive effect for society, then you're researching somethign people will be willing to pay for. If people will be willing to pay for it, then private companies will be willing to fund it. If they don't want to fund it because they don't trust your reserach enough, then you have no business stealing from them to fund your work.
Free. Rider. Problem. A government can do a better job of providing a public good. If you refuse to see this - which you are doing - then there's nothing we can really do to convince you. The internet wouldn't exist without Cold War government funding. Most particle accelerators and physics developments of the past fifty years wouldn't exist without government funding. If you think they haven't contributed anything, then you are seriously turning a blind eye to anything that the state can do.
The case you can make for altruism for public goods on the individual level (which is laughable anyway, and the justification is pretty good; the assertion is that if it is theoretically possible to have them provided at some level without coercion, then you should do it that way, is about as good as the assertion that if it is theoretically to maintain a society without a market at all, then you should do it that way) completely implodes for corporations, which are set up and required by their charters to essentially focus on profit only.
You are the one being willfully ignorant if you can't acknowledge that as stealing. If I put a gun to your head and demand your wallet, that's also wealth distribution. I'm distributing it from you to me.
And if I kill you because you haven't purchased protection services from a PDA, that's anarchy. Just because it's not good in one instance doesn't mean it can't be good.
I feel the need to again point out that if you think socialization is okay in one industry, you should be able to defend it for every industry, but economists agree theoretically and have seen empirically that the free market is more efficient than government.
If by economists, you mean the small percentage of economists affiliated with a few small branches of economic thought (Austrian, Chicago, and that's about it), you might be right.
less overall deaths
Then it depends if anarcho-capitalism is better at its provision. If you're right then morality obviously follows, if you're wrong it doesn't matter, so it really isn't an issue.
Forcing people to share without their consent is STEALING. Anarcho-capitalism is entirely about freedom, the freedom to own your own property and be secure in it.
Um, no. It's perfectly legal for me in anarcho-capitalism to shoot you and take your stuff because there aren't any laws I'm bound by that say that I can't.
This argument is bunk.
Then so is your "you can choose another PDA" argument.
You often use this 'they can take their business elsewhere' argument however you cannot guarantee that there will always be an elsewhere. In fact the whole situation depends on there being competition. With no way to guarantee competition it won't work.
The government doesn't guarantee competition, the free market does. The government in fact restricts competition. Through their monopolies on certain industry to antitrust laws, the government stifles competition which hurts the consumer. Antitrust: The Case for Repeal http://mises.org/journals/qjae/pdf/qjae2_3_5.pdf
is that the only thing you've read on the topic. would be like reading the bible for history.
If you recieve X value, and then give out Y value to the person you got X from, the X:Y ratio is a huge factor in what 'stealing' is. Moreover, they don't take your money without your consent, by living in their cities, under the protection of their military and police, and benefitting by their utlities, you've made a choice.
You don't consent simply by virtue of using their services, you consent if you voluntarily pay them for their services. They don't give you a choice of whether to pay or not. By your logic it is acceptable for the mafia to demand protection money from people at the threat of violence as long as they provide some protection service. This is what government does.
If you dislike living or paying taxes, you can go live in a nation without taxes.
You aren't doing that. Odd.
I addressed this pathetic argument in the post above, but I will repost for you from the anarcho-capitalist FAQ: "One could simply turn this around, and ask, "Why doesn't the State just leave?" The "love it or leave it" bromide begs the underlying question, who is entitled to occupy this space. Perhaps a hardcore statist would simply assume that the government rightfully owns everything, but anarcho-capitalists reject that assumption, given the State's history of conquest and plunder. We believe rightful property comes from homesteading and voluntary exchange, not conquest. A good anarcho-capitalist response may be, "The State doesn't rightfully own this property; people do.""
To add an anology of my own, suppose I own a shop. One night my shop gets robbed. I go to the police to complain, and according to your argument they would tell me to go set up my shop somewhere else.
But again, you still haven't touched the free rider problem, and you won't.
Either you ignored some of my responses or you are purposely lying. I addressed the free-rider problem in earlier posts. I direct you to these articles: http://mises.org/journals/jls/9_1/9_1_2.pdf http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE4_1_4.pdf http://mises.org/journals/scholar/Sechrest7.pdf To go over it again for you; the free-rider 'problem' rests on the public goods theory, which states that certain goods have beneficial externalities for those who don't pay for them, and therefore are non-excludable. The theory goes that in cases like these, no individual will step up to pay for them since everyone would try to free ride. This theory is flawed in many ways. First off, we've seen in history that this hasn't shown to be true. Lighthouses, one of the most commonly cited examples of a public good, have been effectively provided by private firms in the past. The most important thing to realize though is that there is no actual distinction between a public good and a private good; the line drawn is entirely arbitrary and subjective. Every good has externalities to a varying degree. If I build a mansion, my neighbors property value will rise. Does that mean I can extort him to pay for my mansion since he is benefitting from it? If I get a new lawn mower that is quieter than my old one, my neighbor gets more peace and quiet. Can I force him to pay for that? My state builds a public school that grants free access to the children of all tax payers in the state. Can they force me to pay for that? Would you argue that schools have "enough" positive externalities to warrant extortion? What if I would rather send my child to a private school because I don't like the education that is provided by the state? I can pay for that, but I'm still forced to pay for the public school as well even though I don't want to use their services. Externalities exist on a spectrum, not on a dichotomy. There is no magical point where any service has enough good externalities(a subjective measurement) to conclude that it is okay to extort people into paying for it, by any objective standards.
Even if you believe that the private sector will not allocate resources efficiently when dealing with 'public goods', what makes you assume the government will be able to allocate them efficiently? They can't know the true market price since they don't let the market function. Any system of taxation (extortion) is guaranteed to be inefficient and result in dead weight loss. It is price fixing using stolen money. Up until the invent of satellite radio, radio stations fit the criteria for public goods. Anyone who owned a radio could not be excluded from listening to certain stations, and the amount of listeners did not effect the supply. But radio has proven to be provisable on the free market. The private sector can provide public goods, and there is no reason to assume the government could provide them better by arbitrarily setting what they think is a "fair" price.
Both me and my suitemates I share an apartment with benefit from me wearing deodorant, by the free-rider theory then no one would actually buy it since we would all wait for someone else to. Clearly this doesn't happen.
If something is an economic good, the market will provide for it.
No one is going to pay for the lives of people not yet born in a capitalist system. Every possibly area to be nickle and dimed will be exploited, and there will be no reason to close the loopholes, because an assembly of citizens with the power to enforce such restrictive means would be a government, thus ending your pipe-dream society.
What loopholes? What exploitation ala "nickel and diming"? What does nickel and diming even mean? Charging someone for services? Is the grocery store "nickel and diming" me when they charge 3.25 for a jar of pasta sauce and I voluntarily engage in such an exchange? "Nickel and diming" and "exploiting" (in the Marxist sense that you're using it in) mean nothing more than charging for goods. You are arguing against the free market in every industry when you take this position.
PDAs are similarly untenable and flawed by conception. You're essentially hoping that mercenaries with forensic labs will save us all, postulating such hilarious crap as the scope of enforcement is irrelevant. If you commit a crime, then leave the area of enforcement, suddenly you're scottfree. Most nations have extradition treaties for that very purpose, so that you can't murder a bunch of schoolgirls, then hop a train before they find out it was you, and be immune to punishment. If your PDAs have similar agreements, they essentially have stopped competing, and now operate exactly like mafias do, using territory to delineate boundaries of control. Living in one and not having protection is unviable, as you've said, thus you're getting stolen from, since you HAVE to pay them. Oh wow.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding about how PDAs work. PDAs don't have geographical areas of jurisdiction, their jurisdiction is based on who pays for their services. If someone paying for the service of a PDA gets robbed, it doesn't matter where the robber runs to, he will be hunted by the PDA if they want to maintain profitability.
There was a brief period of unrest following the creation of a nation from its overthrowing of another government? Didn't see that coming. People who already had the institutions of government were able to last 2 years, a period of time shorter than needed for infrastructural decay to occur significantly? Wow. Call me up when you find an example which has withstood outside forces (including malicious governments), for a period of 100-200 years while making significant progress in the arts and sciences and increasing the standard of living. Historical evidence hasn't contradicted anything. Look at the settlement of new france, and how the shift of power took place, or the current situation in non-kabul afganistan. How's about the situation in the Balkans after Tito, who, for all intents and purposes, was the government, died. Check, for instance, the entire method of feudalism which occured after the dissolution of the roman and byzantine empire.
There are not many instances of anarcho-capitalism being implemented in history, I was pointing to one of the few I can find and showing that according to at least one source from the time, it was a good period. As for your examples, none of them have to do with anarcho-capitalism. In the Balkans, the death of Tito exposed problems that were created by imperialist nation drawing. And you're using the fact that the dissolution of the roman empire led to feudalism as an argument against anarcho-capitalism, which is illogical.
You still don't have a response to how you'd support general development of mankind through research,
Yes I do, you just missed it. I argued that if the research your doing is potentially valuable, then it must be potentially profit-making. If it is, then private companies will invest in it. I'm sure you don't need me to provide you examples of private investment leading to technological advancement. The issue isn't whether research *should* be funded, the issue is whether it should be funded through voluntary exchange or forced exchange.
or how mankind would be able to react to non-localized issues, like extensive water pollution, defense against a NEA on an impact course, air polution, nuclear radiation, etc.
This goes back to the externalities issue which I have explained the problems with above and will elaborate on in the following post. But the short answer is that people will boycott services that they feel are causing enough problems to warrant a boycott. There is no reason you should subjectively get to determine which companies people should be forced to boycott; let consumers decide.
Moreover, you don't give any supporting evidence of why corporations would be nearly infallible on all counts. Say 2 corporations build nuclear plants, and one fucking blows the hell up. Doesn't really matter that you're left with a monopoly, because you might have the entire service area for both stations, and made them uninhabitable for thousands of years.
Why should I give supporting evidence for a claim I never made? Consistently throughout the thread my claim has not been that corporations are perfect, but that legitimate corporations can provide better than ones that extort and coerce. What is your example supposed to get at anyways? What if the government builds a nuclear power plant and it blows up? This argument is meaningless.
The free market cannot and will not invest in such things, and the capital required for many of these projects requires you to to have an obscenely wealthy oligarchy anyways, which again, completely trashes your ideal.
The free market does invest in these things, as history has shown. Oil companies now are investing in alternative energy not because of a government mandate but because they choose to. Some industries may result in oligarchies, but a natural oligarchy is preferable over a coercive monopoly.
Government is just like a private corporation, only they extort customers and coerce competition to maintain their monopoly over certain industries. Explain how this is good for society.
Hans Hermann Hoppe on public goods, from the first link provided two posts up:
"There is something seriously wrong with the thesis of public goods theorists that public goods cannot be produced privately, but instead require state intervention. Clearly they can be provided by markets. Furthermore, historical evidence shows us that all of the so-called public goods that states now provide have at some time in the past actually been provided by private entrepreneurs or even today are so provided in one country or another. For example, the postal service was once private almost everywhere; streets were privately financed and still are sometimes; even the beloved lighthouses were originally the result of private enterpri~ep;r~iv ate police forces, detectives, and arbitrators exist; and help for the sick, the poor, the elderly, orphans, and widows has been a traditional concern of private charity organizations. To say, then, that such things cannot be produced by a pure market system is falsified by experience a hundredfold. Apart from this, other difficulties arise when the public-private goods distinction is used to decide what and what not to leave to the market. For instance, what if the production of so-called public goods did not have positive but negative consequences for other people, or if the consequences were positive for some and negative for others? What if the neighbor whose house was saved from burning by my fire brigade had wished (perhaps because he was overinsured) that it had burned down; or my neighbors bate roses, or my fellow passengers find the scent of my deodorant disgusting? In addition, changes in the technology can change the character of a given good. For example, with the development of cable TV a good that was formerly (seemingly) public has become private. And changes in the laws of property-of the appropriation of property-can have the very same effect of changing the public-private character of a good. The lighthouse, for instance, is a public good only insofar as the sea is publicly (not privately) owned. But if it were permitted to acquire pieces of the ocean as private property, as it would be in a purely capitalist social order, then as the lighthouse shines over only a limited territory, it would clearly become possible to exclude nonpayers from the enjoyment of its services. Leaving this somewhat sketchy level of discussion and looking into the distinction between private and puhlic goods more thoroughly, we discover that the distinction turns out to be completely illusory. A clear-cut dichotomy between private and public goods does not exist, and this is essentially why there can be so many disagreements on how to classify a given good. All goods are more or less private or public and can-and constantly do-change with respect to their degree of privateness to publicness as people's values and evaluations change, and as changes occur in the composition of the population. In order to recognize that they never fall, once and for all, into either one or the other category, one must only recall what makes something a good. For something to be a good it must be recognized and treated as scarce by someone. Something is not a good as such, that is to say; goods are goods only in the eyes of the beholder. Nothing is a good unless at least one person subjectively evaluates it as such. But then, when goods are never goods-as-such-when no physicochemical analysis can identify something as an economic good-there is clearly no fixed, objective criterion for classifying goods as either private or public. They can never be private or public goods as such. Their private or public character depends on how few or how many people consider them to be goods, with the degree to which they are private or public changing as these evaluations change and ranging from one to infinity. Even seemingly completely private things like the interior of my apartment or the color of my underwear can thus become public goods as soon as somebody else starts caring about them.1° And seemingly public goods, like the exterior of my house or the color of my overalls, can become extremely private goods as soon as other people stop caring about them. Moreover, every good can change its characteristics again and again; it can even turn from a public or private good to a public or private had or evil and vice versa, depending solely on the changes in this caring or uncaring. If this is so, then no decision whatsoever can be based on the classification of goods as private or public." In fact, to do so it would become necessary to ask virtually every individual person with respect to every single good whether or not he happened to care about it-positively or negatively and perhaps to what extent-in order to determine who might profit from what and who should therefore participate in the good's financing. (And how could one know ifthey were telling the truth?) It would also become necessary to monitor all changes in such evaluations continuously, with the result that no definite decision could ever be made regarding the production of anything, and as a consequence of a nonsensical theory all of us would be long dead. But even if one were to ignore all these difficulties, and were willing to admit for the sake of argument that the private-public good distinction does hold water, even then the argument would not prove what it is supposed to. It neither provides inclusive reasons why public goods-assuming that they exist as a separate category of goods-should be produced at all, nor why the state rather than private enterprises should produce them. This is what the theory of public goods essentially says, having introduced the aforementioned conceptual distinction: The positive effects of public goods for people who do not contribute anything to their production or financing proves that these goods are desirable. But evidently they would not be produced, or at least not in sufficient quantity and quality, in a free, competitive market, since not all of those who would profit from their production would also contribute financially to make the production possible. So in order to produce these goods (which are evidently desirable, but would not be produced otherwise), the state must jump in and assist in their production. This sort of reasoning, which can be found in almost every textbook on economics (Nobel laureates not ex~luded'~is) c ompletely fallacious and fallacious on two counts. For one thing, to come to the conclusion that the state has to provide public goods that otherwise would not be produced, one must smuggle a norm into one's chain of reasoning. Otherwise, from the statement that because of some special characteristics they have, certain goods would not be produced. One could never reach the conclusion that these goods should be produced. But with a norm required to justify their conclusion, the public goods theorists clearly have left the bounds of economics as a positive, werrfrei science. Instead they have moved into the realm of morals or ethics, and hence one would expect to be offered a theory of ethics as a cognitive discipline in order for them to do legitimately what they are doing and to justifiably derive their conclusion. But it can hardly be stressed enough that nowhere in the public goods theory literature can there be found anything that even faintly resembles such a cognitive theory of ethics." Thus it must be stated at the outset, that the public goods theorists are misusing whatever prestige they might have as positive economists for pronouncements on matters on which, as their own writings indicate, they have no authority whatsoever. Perhaps, though, they have stumbled on something correct by accident, without having supported it with an elaborate moral theory? It becomes apparent that nothing could be further from the truth as soon as one explicitly formulates the norm that would be needed to arrive at the conclusion that the state has to assist in the provision of public goods. The norm required to reach the above conclusion is this: Whenever one can somehow prove that the production of a particular good or service has a positive effect on someone else but would not be produced at all or would not be produced in a definite quantity or quality unless certain people participated in its financing, then the use of aggressive violence against these persons is allowed, either directly or indirectly with the help of the state, and these persons may be forced to share in the necessary financial burden. It does not need much comment to show that chaos would result from implementing this rule, as it amounts to saying that anyone can attack anyone else whenever he feels like it. Moreover, as I have demonstrated in detail elsewhere" this norm could never be justified as a fair norm. To argue so, in fact to argue at all, in favor of or against anything, be it a moral, nonmoral, empirical, or logicoanalytical position, it must be presupposed that contrary to what the norm actually says, each individual's integrity as a physically independent decision-making unit is assured. For only if everyone is free from physical aggression by everyone else could anything first be said and then agreement or disagreement on anything possibly reached. The principle of nonaggression is thus the necessary precondition for argumentation and possible agreement and hence can be argumentatively defended as a just norm by means of a priori reasoning."
"But the public goods theory breaks down not only because of the faulty moral reasoning implied in it. Even the utilitarian, economic reasoning contained in the above argument is blatantly wrong. As the public goods theory states, it might well be that it would be better to have the public goods than not to have them, though it should not he forgotten that no a priori reason exists that this must be so of necessity (which would then end the public goods theorists' reasoning right here). For it is clearly possible, and indeed known to be a fact, that anarchists exist who so greatly abhor state action that they would prefer not having the so-called public goods at all to having them provided by the state. In any case, even if the argument is conceded so far, to leap from the statement that the public goods are desirable to the statement that they should therefore be provided by the state is anything but conclusive, as this is by no means the choice with which one is confronted. Since money or other resources must be withdrawn from possible alternative uses to fmance the supposedly desirable public goods, the only relevant and appropriate question is whether or not these alternative uses to which the money could be put (that is, the private goods which could have been acquired but now cannot be bought because the money is being spent on public goods instead) are more valuable-more urgent-than the public goods. And the answer to this question is perfectly clear. In terms of consumer evaluations, however high its absolute level might be, the value of the public goods is relatively lower than that of the competing private goods because if one had left the choice to the consumers (and had not forced one alternative upon them), they evidently would have preferred spending their money differently (otherwise no force would have been necessary). This proves beyond any doubt that the resources used for the provision of public goods are wasted because they provide consumers with goods or services that at best are only of secondary importance. In short, even if one assumed that public goods that can be distinguished clearly from private goods existed, and even if it were granted that a given public good might be useful, public goods would still compete with private goods. And there is only one method for finding out whether or not they are more urgently desired and to what extent, or mutatis mutandis, if, and to what extent, their production would take place at the expense of the nonproduction or reduced production of more urgently needed private goods: by having everything provided by freely competing private enterprises. Hence, contrary to the conclusion arrived at by the public goods theorists, logic forces one to accept the result that only a pure market system can safeguard the rationality, from the point of view of the consumers, of a decision to produce a public good. And only under a pure capitalist order could it be ensured that the decision about how much of a public good to produce (provided it should be produced at all) would be rational as well."
The world started off in anarchy and gradually small states developed, and some of these small states conquered each other and hundreds of thousands of people died and larger states arose and went to war and millions of people died.
We didn't start off with anarcho-capitalism. For any political theory to be successfully implemented, it must be accepted by the general public. Anarcho-capitalism was not how people started off. Most families formed tribes that were communistic in nature, not anarcho-capitalistic.
Today Europe is a amalgamation of liberal democracies. If we decided we were going to dismantle it out all, PDAs and warlords will end up conquering each other again. Sure, switch PDAs. I'm sure PDA number one, with complete jurisdiction over an area, will take kindly to PDA number 2 driving in a few battle tanks into its area.
As I already explained, PDAs don't have jurisdiction over areas, they have jurisdiction over anyone who aggresses against a client of theirs.
Somebody will have a monopoly of force, and in all likelihood those who control the vast majority of the nation's will be those who hold the military in the future.
If someone gains a monopoly, it will be because they provided a better service at a lower price than competitors. That is the difference between a natural monopoly and government, which enforces its monopoly through aggression.
Want to know something interesting? The reason government is corrupt is because those with wealth corrupt them, trading wealth for what they want. I suppose your solution would just cut out the middleman. You yourself said that you are in favor of corporatist dictatorship or fascism (the conclusion of merging corporations with government) over liberal democracies.
I said I was in favor of "corporate dictatorship" or "fascism"? Quote me where I said that, liar. Dictatorship IS government. Free market anarchsim is CHOICE. Free market anarchism is the opposite of fascism.
You are alone in this regard. So, suppose we dismantled what has been achieved - worse case, we're back to where we started, right? Yeah. And in the process of rebuilding you can look forward to a few million deaths.
Nothing has caused more deaths than government.
Second, your "if we are going to have government intervention in one area then we might as well have full-blown state socialism." Um, no. There's a grade and its hard to draw a line, but do you know what happens in these cases? You pick a point and draw a line. If it creates a better outcome than either extreme, then people go with it. It happens all the time - when scientists need to find out what percentage of likelihood is good enough to scientifically draw conclusions from, they picked ten percent. There is nothing special about ten percent. After all, at one percent we would have really solid results and at the other end we would have few missed results. Any argument used to lower the threshold from 20% to 10% can also be used to lower the threshold from 10% to 0.000000001% (which, in case you aren't familiar with this means, would be really useless.) Pick a point.
A better outcome is guaranteed by the free market. You wouldn't argue that food production or clothes production would be better produced by the government, would you? What distinction can you make to argue that security or education should be? There is none. Your science example is disanalagous because the scientist gets to decide for himself whether a result is good enough. My point is that everyone should get to decide for themselves. With government, a few people are making these decisions for everyone else.
In the absence of an overarching collective, people and organizations tend to go to war. History has borne this out for thousands of years.
States have the worst records of war by far!!! States can't stop going to war, and it is easy to see why when you examine the mechanism of states. Leaders can go to war for their own reasons even if a signifigant portion of those funding the war don't agree with it. Statism puts extreme power in the hands of the elite, and the state is not accountable to its customers in the same way corporations are. Statism also carries nationalism with it; the notion that people who are within the same arbitrarily defined geographic boundaries as me are more important than those outside.
Incorrect. If demand is almost completely inelastic, raising your price above the equilibrium will lead to shortage and might reduce the quantity sold by a small extent, but the increased profit per unit could easily increase profits.
If they raise prices above market price, then a competitor will rise to satisfy the demand. The only reason market could fail in this scenario is if competitors aren't allowed to do business, which is a result of government intervention.
In addition, in industries where economies of scale and geography would tend to increase efficiency in large entities, monopolies have a tendency to develop. Here's a question. How does the water company (with a governmentally guaranteed monopoly) know what to charge you?
You're the one who should be answering this question to me! I'm saying that government monopolies can't know what to charge because they don't let the free market act, and thus will necessarily set a price that is either too high or too low which would lead to market failure.
In addition, you haven't demonstrated to me how two highways running from Alaska to Washington could be more efficient to one. You have to give up either competition or efficiency.
I don't know if one highway or two would be more efficient. I do know that if one highway was more efficient, then people would only use one. If people do use two, then they are saying that two are more efficient for them; because if two weren't efficient, they would only use one.
Free. Rider. Problem. A government can do a better job of providing a public good. If you refuse to see this - which you are doing - then there's nothing we can really do to convince you.
I have thoroughly addressed the falsehoods of the free rider problem in my last three posts. Read them and then get back to me.
The internet wouldn't exist without Cold War government funding. Most particle accelerators and physics developments of the past fifty years wouldn't exist without government funding. If you think they haven't contributed anything, then you are seriously turning a blind eye to anything that the state can do.
Prove any of this. Prove that none of these goods could've developed without government funding. You can't prove it empirically since the public sector did fund it, so you must argue from a theoretical standpoint why the private sector could not have funded the research. You have failed to make that case. I have argued that if the research will lead to something people want, then there is profit to be made. If there is profit to be made, then the research will be funded by private investors who wish to profit.
The case you can make for altruism for public goods on the individual level (which is laughable anyway, and the justification is pretty good; the assertion is that if it is theoretically possible to have them provided at some level without coercion, then you should do it that way, is about as good as the assertion that if it is theoretically to maintain a society without a market at all, then you should do it that way) completely implodes for corporations, which are set up and required by their charters to essentially focus on profit only.
I assumed that you would at least agree that coercion is bad for the production of most goods since you don't seem to be advocating communism. Did I assume too much in believing that you think the free market is the most efficient way to allocate most resources? If I did, then we are opening up a whole other topic. But if you agree with me that free markets are generally good, then the burden of proof is on you to justify the exceptions, which you haven't even touched from a theoretical perspective, and have attempted to justify empirically using poor examples that don't prove your point.
And if I kill you because you haven't purchased protection services from a PDA, that's anarchy.
If you did this, no PDA would accept you as a client since you would be a giant liability. Good to see that you are no longer fighting that taxation is extortion.
Just because it's not good in one instance doesn't mean it can't be good.
Okay, but you haven't shown why extortion is good. You point to examples saying "state extortion led to the advent of this and this is good", but your side of the argument is that the state can produce it better than the free market, and for that you have provided no evidence. In my last couple posts I have shown why your assertion is not true at all.
If by economists, you mean the small percentage of economists affiliated with a few small branches of economic thought (Austrian, Chicago, and that's about it), you might be right.
Most economists think the free market is fine for production of everything from watches to video games to paper. The Austrian school just takes it to its logical conclusion.
Um, no. It's perfectly legal for me in anarcho-capitalism to shoot you and take your stuff because there aren't any laws I'm bound by that say that I can't.
PDAs would obviously protect against aggression. Security is an economic good which would be provided for by the free market. For the most part its unlikely PDAs would even look or act very different then the police (drug laws would be lifted, they are clearly unjust), but in general people seem to like the laws we have now, and thus those are the laws that would be protected by PDAs and enforced by arbitrators, since they respond to the will of their customers to be successful. If you shoot me and take my stuff, my PDA will hunt you down. If you do it now, the police will hunt you down. If the police don't catch you, I'm still forced to pay them. If my PDA doesn't catch you and I am unsatisfied with their performance, I can stop paying them. And so PDAs have greater incentive than public police to enforce justice against aggressors.
Then so is your "you can choose another PDA" argument.
No. Choosing another PDA does not require forfeiting my property. I am forced to fund the state whether I want to or not. I am not forced to fund any particular PDA.
And courts can still be bought off.
Yep. Bribary is always possible. Now tell me why it's more likely in private courts than public courts.
Some facts pertaining to World War II: -Inflation is not intrinsic to an economy. Inflation in the U.S. began in the early 1940s. -The federal deficit went from $6billion in 1940 to $89 billion in 1944, and a signifigant tax hike occured as well to finance the war. -The federal reserve increased our money supply to the point that it roughly doubled during the war, causing inflation. -According to the Austrian school, the reason for the WW2 boom was not deficit spending or pumping money in which creates inflation, but an increase in savings, which Keynesian economists would think are bad. Personal savings increased from $3.8 billion in 1940 to $37.3 billion in 1944. The above mentioned actions of federal spending and money-pumping can cause a short-term boom, but they do so at the expense of causing future economic down-turn, as seen by the ever-rising inflation, and non-stop recessions. -$230 billion was spent by the U.S. on WW2 in total. -Based on 1947—49 prices, the nation's wealth amounted to $748.4 billion in 1939. In 1945, it was $763.7 billion. But in per capita terms, the national standard of living appears to have declined.
Guiderails are a hinderance to liberty too. Not all liberty is good.
What are guiderails? The only bad liberties are ones that infringe on other peoples liberties. Killing or stealing from someone infringes on their liberty to be secure in their property. All liberty to protect voluntary exchange and property rights are good liberty, yet the existence of government tramples these liberties at the threat of violence.
Property rights by definition infringe on other people's liberties. The very concept of ownership is defined by removing everyone else's liberty to use whatever it is that you own. Ownership itself isn't even as natural as government is, seeing as Native American societies had very little concept of it, whereas they did have a concept of hierarchical government.
You don't consent simply by virtue of using their services, you consent if you voluntarily pay them for their services. They don't give you a choice of whether to pay or not. By your logic it is acceptable for the mafia to demand protection money from people at the threat of violence as long as they provide some protection service. This is what government does.
They do give you the choice. The choice has always been there. What you're asking for is the choice to live at an equivalent standard of living in the territory of a nation without paying taxes. Your following ridiculous reply about the 'people owning the land' is similarly ridiculous'. People DO own the land. Governments have very little power of seizure, and can typically only act on them when there is a massive need for the land towards the public good. The growth of taxation and public works is very recent (has its roots in the reform movement of the 1860-1920s), and has led to a massive increase in the quality of life for people living in urban areas, Prior to these investments, the FREE MARKET had not invested in quality of life or sanitation in inner cities and working districts, which is precisely why there was growing discontent about labor v management and the battle between classes.
Unlike the mafia, government taxation has been done in response to a growing need for un-profitable infrastructure development. There's a difference between filling a need and extorting people.
First off, we've seen in history that this hasn't shown to be true. Lighthouses, one of the most commonly cited examples of a public good, have been effectively provided by private firms in the past.
Lighthouses were typically built by wealthy traders who didn't want huge sums of money in shipped goods being wrecked on the side of a bay at night. There was a MASSIVE economic benefit for them, at a very low cost.
There is no magical point where any service has enough good externalities(a subjective measurement) to conclude that it is okay to extort people into paying for it, by any objective standards.
Yes there is. There's easily a magical point at which a service has enough good externalities to conclude that its okay to make people pay for it. Take the following thought experiment: A town rests on the edge of a desert which is rapidly eroding topsoil away. If they don't take action, their town and everything in it will literally be blown to smithereens in a few months by massive sandstorms. The town requires that everyone pay a special 10$ one time fee to purchase trees and long root grasses to stem the erosion, which is only progressing because of the weak plantlife in the area (due, perhaps, to slash and burn agriculture in South Africa. Go look that up, its history spitting in your face with free-ridership).
You'd require that a corporation would take it upon themselves to stop the problem, or that some kind folks from the town would. In both situations, the problem would be averted, but in one case, the people with the most merit who were willing to put their own time and effort into saving the town were put most at disadvantage, perhaps dolling out hundreds of thousands of dollars where a flat 10$ fee could have been put down. I'd call that extortion.
Even if you believe that the private sector will not allocate resources efficiently when dealing with 'public goods', what makes you assume the government will be able to allocate them efficiently? They can't know the true market price since they don't let the market function.
This is false. The true market price can be determined even in a state controlled economy, as long as there are comparative indicators of value, which there are. China's rice doesn't sell for 9999$/kg because they forgot the global price of rice.
More to the point, there are reams of situations when the free market has clearly shown itself to be inept, and in nearly everyone of those cases, the government has been forced to step in to rectify the problem, as noted before.
Both me and my suitemates I share an apartment with benefit from me wearing deodorant, by the free-rider theory then no one would actually buy it since we would all wait for someone else to. Clearly this doesn't happen.
If something is an economic good, the market will provide for it.
Actually, you benefit by a having a stick of deodorant by not smelling like a pile of asses when you walk outside. More to the point, a stick of deodorant isn't 2 billion dollars sunk into NASA. It isn't ecological protection. It isn't carbon neutrality. It isn't green chemistry. It isn't any one of a million things which AREN'T economic goods, or things which simply will not be profitable, but are highly desirable.
What loopholes? What exploitation ala "nickel and diming"? What does nickel and diming even mean? Charging someone for services? Is the grocery store "nickel and diming" me when they charge 3.25 for a jar of pasta sauce and I voluntarily engage in such an exchange? "Nickel and diming" and "exploiting" (in the Marxist sense that you're using it in) mean nothing more than charging for goods. You are arguing against the free market in every industry when you take this position.
Rofl, No I'm not. There's a massive difference between abuse of the free market, and having it run in an idealized system in which it has the capacity to react to any stimulus instantly. A pure free market system without restrictions (which would be the case, given that you can't enforce any restrictions without your PDAs being governments) suffers from numerous problems, already listed. More importantly, you completely ignored my point about borrowing from future generations, which we're already doing, despite quoting it.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding about how PDAs work. PDAs don't have geographical areas of jurisdiction, their jurisdiction is based on who pays for their services. If someone paying for the service of a PDA gets robbed, it doesn't matter where the robber runs to, he will be hunted by the PDA if they want to maintain profitability.
Its now profitable for a PDA based in the US to send people overseas when their leads run dry stateside? Like I said, unless you're assuming they have near unlimited reach, there is no point to having them extend their searches elsewhere. Also, as was previously stated, PDAs will have massive overhead if they need to keep boots on the ground in areas with clients if clientelle isn't limited geographically. If you think this system is more efficient than governments partitioning areas of jurisdiction, I don't know what to say. That's even before considering the justice system (or lack thereof) which would exist. Would PDAs kill offenders? Would they lock them up, which would clearly decrease profitability? If they didn't, how would it be any different from the current situation on death row where wrongful convictions are massively rampant?
There are not many instances of anarcho-capitalism being implemented in history, I was pointing to one of the few I can find and showing that according to at least one source from the time, it was a good period. As for your examples, none of them have to do with anarcho-capitalism. In the Balkans, the death of Tito exposed problems that were created by imperialist nation drawing. And you're using the fact that the dissolution of the roman empire led to feudalism as an argument against anarcho-capitalism, which is illogical.
You have one guy waxing romantic about 2 years in a situation which is totally unlike the one you want to create, and I have the presented a spectrum of societal evolutions following the breakdown of governments. Even bereft of central control, governance was re-established. You said it yourself: There are not many instances of anarcho-capitalism being implemented in history, and there's good reason for that: It doesn't work.
Why? Because government is reactive, reflexive, and evolutionary. It might seem like a misnomer, but viewed over long periods of time, governments actually modify themselves to suit the needs of their populations, whereas anarcho-capitalism will modify itself to suit the needs of those who have wealth.
Yes I do, you just missed it. I argued that if the research your doing is potentially valuable, then it must be potentially profit-making. If it is, then private companies will invest in it. I'm sure you don't need me to provide you examples of private investment leading to technological advancement. The issue isn't whether research *should* be funded, the issue is whether it should be funded through voluntary exchange or forced exchange.
And you've failed to deal with the caveat that research into many fields is not immediately lucrative economically, but incredibly important. I already gave you the keystone example: The internet. Funded by the US department of defence, and then made mostly public by a publicly funded massive particle physics organization in europe (who's research would also not have been funded, due to the fact that its so prohibitively expensive for single entities, and would have had a mediocre to nonexistant ROI).
Pharmaceutical research? Fine. Pharmaceutical research into rare diseases? Lol, not happening. Pharmaceutical research in an environment where intellectual property laws couldn't be enforced? Hilarious.
You have no recourse for any information resource, or for any resource, really. There's no intellectual or physical property rights that you can enforce on people without an enforcement mechanism, the controllers of which are the new defacto government.
I have argued that if the research will lead to something people want, then there is profit to be made. If there is profit to be made, then the research will be funded by private investors who wish to profit.
People eventually want to fly in space, but discovering the top quark really isn't profitable. QED. You said it yourself. The motivation is profit, but some research 'lines' take upwards of 50 to 100 years to yield fruit, IF they yield fruit. There is no motivation to fund these types of research, despite the fact that they are the large majority of scientific progress over time. More importantly, most of the middling research before a breakthrough can be researched by someone else, and the capstone achievement can be lifted by someone else.
I assumed that you would at least agree that coercion is bad for the production of most goods since you don't seem to be advocating communism. Did I assume too much in believing that you think the free market is the most efficient way to allocate most resources? If I did, then we are opening up a whole other topic. But if you agree with me that free markets are generally good, then the burden of proof is on you to justify the exceptions, which you haven't even touched from a theoretical perspective, and have attempted to justify empirically using poor examples that don't prove your point.
The free market has worked well for certain commodities, worked horrendously for others, and worked comparably well to a centralized economy in other cases. I, and others, have already thrown out plenty of examples of the free market having failed, and plenty of theoretical examples of where it would fail, and plenty of examples where it was systemically designed to fail, but you just haven't really cared enough to read them. :/
Why should I give supporting evidence for a claim I never made? Consistently throughout the thread my claim has not been that corporations are perfect, but that legitimate corporations can provide better than ones that extort and coerce. What is your example supposed to get at anyways? What if the government builds a nuclear power plant and it blows up? This argument is meaningless.
Its not. The difference between a corporation and the government is that the corporation will face insolvency, its workers will work somewhere else, its management will likely be a bit poorer, but oh well, whereas the government will exist and need to decontaminate the area, while under the collective watch of the rest of the world. I'd rather have accountability.
The free market does invest in these things, as history has shown. Oil companies now are investing in alternative energy not because of a government mandate but because they choose to. Some industries may result in oligarchies, but a natural oligarchy is preferable over a coercive monopoly.
Government is just like a private corporation, only they extort customers and coerce competition to maintain their monopoly over certain industries. Explain how this is good for society.
Uh, no, oil companies have largely started to research alternative energy because of extensive taxation on fuel, incredibly high prices due to an oligarchic control over the world's energy supply, and because most fundamental research on alternative energy had already been performed by researchers being funded by government grants at universities. Even then, history is replete with situations in which private corporations have NOT decided to invest into infrastructure of research. The best example i know in detail is the method of housing construction in suburban canada between the1900s and 1940s. Before government and municipality regulation, standards of living were remarkably poor because private contractors were building houses, and then charging to retroactively rip up the land around them to install sewer systems, and put up power lines. Additionally, these same contractors sold racial segregation in the form of land covenants.
I'm going to repeat that again:
Racial segregation was an economic good which was being maximized for a profit.
I can see great things coming out of segregating people by race and providing different standards of living because of that. Great things. Like, maybe, armed insurrection again.
Nothing has caused more deaths than government.
I'd vote heart disease. Medieval Europe would likely vote Black Plague. Clearly governments did better than slaughtering 1/3rd of the continent's human life, right? Right?
Property rights by definition infringe on other people's liberties. The very concept of ownership is defined by removing everyone else's liberty to use whatever it is that you own. Ownership itself isn't even as natural as government is, seeing as Native American societies had very little concept of it, whereas they did have a concept of hierarchical government.
So because native american societies were communal, property rights are unnatural? If we shouldn't have property rights why don't we just let the state control everything? You should be arguing that theft isn't a crime if you don't believe in property rights.
They do give you the choice. The choice has always been there. What you're asking for is the choice to live at an equivalent standard of living in the territory of a nation without paying taxes.
You don't have a choice about whether or not to pay taxes. Obviously I might as well use their services if I'm being forced to pay for them anyways, but I'd rather have various firms competing for my dollar then one firm take it from me involuntarily.
Your following ridiculous reply about the 'people owning the land' is similarly ridiculous'. People DO own the land. Governments have very little power of seizure, and can typically only act on them when there is a massive need for the land towards the public good.
Governments have massive seizure power in taxation, but anyways what is your point here?
The growth of taxation and public works is very recent (has its roots in the reform movement of the 1860-1920s), and has led to a massive increase in the quality of life for people living in urban areas, Prior to these investments, the FREE MARKET had not invested in quality of life or sanitation in inner cities and working districts, which is precisely why there was growing discontent about labor v management and the battle between classes.
The increase in taxation and public works has hurt many on the fringe of poverty and had harmful long term consequencese. High taxes is a huge burden on alot of people. When you give to one group of people, you are doing so at the expense of another.
Unlike the mafia, government taxation has been done in response to a growing need for un-profitable infrastructure development. There's a difference between filling a need and extorting people.
The only 'needs' are the bare essentials of food and water. Everything beyond that is a 'want', or an economic good, which any economic model will tell you can be produced more efficiently on the free market than by a centrally planned economy. You've admitted that some goods are better produced on the free market, but you maintain that other goods are not, but you haven't given any reason other then the 'free rider problem', which I smashed a few posts ago, and you haven't yet been able to respond to.
Lighthouses were typically built by wealthy traders who didn't want huge sums of money in shipped goods being wrecked on the side of a bay at night. There was a MASSIVE economic benefit for them, at a very low cost.
Any economic good is going to have a benefit. Even most public choice theorists agree that lighthouses fit the criterea of a public good. Any boat near them will benefit from them, and having multiple boats use them at the same time doesn't impact any other boats ability to use them. So according to the public goods theory, which is the main argument for government intervention, the state should be the best provider of lighthouses, but historically they have been most efficiently provided by private entrepreneurs.
There is no magical point where any service has enough good externalities(a subjective measurement) to conclude that it is okay to extort people into paying for it, by any objective standards.
Yes there is. There's easily a magical point at which a service has enough good externalities to conclude that its okay to make people pay for it. Take the following thought experiment: A town rests on the edge of a desert which is rapidly eroding topsoil away. If they don't take action, their town and everything in it will literally be blown to smithereens in a few months by massive sandstorms. The town requires that everyone pay a special 10$ one time fee to purchase trees and long root grasses to stem the erosion, which is only progressing because of the weak plantlife in the area (due, perhaps, to slash and burn agriculture in South Africa. Go look that up, its history spitting in your face with free-ridership).
You'd require that a corporation would take it upon themselves to stop the problem, or that some kind folks from the town would. In both situations, the problem would be averted, but in one case, the people with the most merit who were willing to put their own time and effort into saving the town were put most at disadvantage, perhaps dolling out hundreds of thousands of dollars where a flat 10$ fee could have been put down. I'd call that extortion. [/quote] Your example here does NOTHING to prove your premise! "There exists a magical (or objective) point where something has enough externalities to warrant extortion.Here's a hypothetical scenario of a town in trouble. QED." Do you see how nonsensical your argument is? Furthermore you think it's extortion to voluntarily do work? To address your example though, if disaster can be averted for a $10 fee, then people will gladly pay it voluntarily.
This is false. The true market price can be determined even in a state controlled economy, as long as there are comparative indicators of value, which there are. China's rice doesn't sell for 9999$/kg because they forgot the global price of rice.
You are really skating on thin ice here. I don't think any serious economist would go so far as to suggest that the state can know the true market price without letting the free market act. 'Comparative indicators of value' can hep you get close, but no two economies are the same. Knowing the global price doesn't tell you what the price would be in a specific area within China. Everyone has different preferences and places different value on goods, which are impossible for the government to know.
More to the point, there are reams of situations when the free market has clearly shown itself to be inept, and in nearly everyone of those cases, the government has been forced to step in to rectify the problem, as noted before.
You have not provided a single example where the unfettered free market has proved to be inept, and you are still dodging the fact that there is no theoretical distinction for where government should step in.
Actually, you benefit by a having a stick of deodorant by not smelling like a pile of asses when you walk outside.
Obviously I benefit, so does everyone else. The deodorant example is simply to highlight the failure of public choice theory. Do you deny that deodorant has positive externalities for those who don't pay for it, and that one person benefiting from the lack of my smelly armpits isn't effected by someone else benefitting from it? Then it should, by your logic, be a public good that the market won't provide for.
More to the point, a stick of deodorant isn't 2 billion dollars sunk into NASA. It isn't ecological protection. It isn't carbon neutrality. It isn't green chemistry. It isn't any one of a million things which AREN'T economic goods, or things which simply will not be profitable, but are highly desirable.
Of course this stuff will be profitable if people want it. Desiring something is the proof that it will be profitable. If people desire something, they will pay for it.
Rofl, No I'm not. There's a massive difference between abuse of the free market, and having it run in an idealized system in which it has the capacity to react to any stimulus instantly. A pure free market system without restrictions (which would be the case, given that you can't enforce any restrictions without your PDAs being governments) suffers from numerous problems, already listed.
And already countered. You still haven't gotten around to addressing my arguments against public choice theory, or shown why anything has to be provided by government. Government, by the way, can't react to stimuli instantaneously either; government will in fact be slower to react than the free market.
More importantly, you completely ignored my point about borrowing from future generations, which we're already doing, despite quoting it.
What is your point about borrowing from future generations? What arguments have you made to show that government is better than anarcho-capitalism, pertaining to borrowing from future generations?
Its now profitable for a PDA based in the US to send people overseas when their leads run dry stateside? Like I said, unless you're assuming they have near unlimited reach, there is no point to having them extend their searches elsewhere.
"Stateside" doesn't mean anything if there are no states. But are you asking if PDAs have a viable lead would they pursue a criminal who tries to run away? Of course they would if they want to maintain their reputation. If they get known to be lazy, then they will lose all their clients so they have every incentive of police departments and then some.
Also, as was previously stated, PDAs will have massive overhead if they need to keep boots on the ground in areas with clients if clientelle isn't limited geographically. If you think this system is more efficient than governments partitioning areas of jurisdiction, I don't know what to say.
So you're saying PDAs would be bad because its expensive to keep security around? It's expensive for the state too! The only difference between the state providing these services and the free market providing these services is that the state extorts and coerces. Period.
That's even before considering the justice system (or lack thereof) which would exist. Would PDAs kill offenders? Would they lock them up, which would clearly decrease profitability? If they didn't, how would it be any different from the current situation on death row where wrongful convictions are massively rampant?
If people like the prison system and are willing to pay for it, then there would be a prison system. There are plenty of ways to sanction offenders, the most popular way according to the people will be the most successful way since that's what people will pay for.
You have one guy waxing romantic about 2 years in a situation which is totally unlike the one you want to create, and I have the presented a spectrum of societal evolutions following the breakdown of governments. Even bereft of central control, governance was re-established. You said it yourself: There are not many instances of anarcho-capitalism being implemented in history, and there's good reason for that: It doesn't work.
The reason there haven't been many examples is a debatable topic, your conclusion hardly being demonstrated true. In most situations military conquest led to government implimentation. True anarcho-capitalism has not been tried in modern times, and it is fallicious reasoning to say that it therefore can't work.
Why? Because government is reactive, reflexive, and evolutionary. It might seem like a misnomer, but viewed over long periods of time, governments actually modify themselves to suit the needs of their populations, whereas anarcho-capitalism will modify itself to suit the needs of those who have wealth.
Anarcho-capitalism will modify itself to suit the demands of the citizens (consumers). That is how the free market works; consumer sovereignty. Government will be able to do this to some extent, but more clumsily and slowly. The free market is reactive, reflexive, and evolutionary far more so than government is.
And you've failed to deal with the caveat that research into many fields is not immediately lucrative economically, but incredibly important.
When you say it's incredibly important, you're making a subjective judgment. Your placing your judgment above that of everyone elses. You're saying "I think this research is really important, so it's okay for me to steal from you to fund it." As Hoppe says, you're smuggling a norm into a positive science. I think it is unethical for you to place your judgment above everyone elses and use that to justify theft.
I already gave you the keystone example: The internet. Funded by the US department of defence, and then made mostly public by a publicly funded massive particle physics organization in europe (who's research would also not have been funded, due to the fact that its so prohibitively expensive for single entities, and would have had a mediocre to nonexistant ROI).
If people don't want to fund something, you have no right to force them to fund it just because you think it's a good thing. If enough other people think it's good, then it will get funded, but you don't have sovereignty over the minds or wallets of others. This flawed argument of yours could always be turned around: who knows what great discoveries haven't been made because of government stealing from the citizens and putting that money into the wrong research, thus depriving citizens of voluntarily investing in another line of research that could've led to great advances. We can't know the road not travelled, all we can do is let people choose for themselves which road they want to travel.
Pharmaceutical research? Fine. Pharmaceutical research into rare diseases? Lol, not happening. Pharmaceutical research in an environment where intellectual property laws couldn't be enforced? Hilarious.
You have no recourse for any information resource, or for any resource, really. There's no intellectual or physical property rights that you can enforce on people without an enforcement mechanism, the controllers of which are the new defacto government.
If people want them to, then of course PDAs will enforce these laws. There is obviously a desire for these laws since none of them could've come to pass without the consent of the general public, and those that did are immoral in their very nature.
People eventually want to fly in space, but discovering the top quark really isn't profitable. QED. You said it yourself. The motivation is profit, but some research 'lines' take upwards of 50 to 100 years to yield fruit, IF they yield fruit. There is no motivation to fund these types of research, despite the fact that they are the large majority of scientific progress over time. More importantly, most of the middling research before a breakthrough can be researched by someone else, and the capstone achievement can be lifted by someone else.
This has already been thoroughly addressed above; it is not your right to subjectively determine what lines of research you THINK yield enough benefits to force other people to fund them.
The free market has worked well for certain commodities, worked horrendously for others, and worked comparably well to a centralized economy in other cases. I, and others, have already thrown out plenty of examples of the free market having failed, and plenty of theoretical examples of where it would fail, and plenty of examples where it was systemically designed to fail, but you just haven't really cared enough to read them. :/
I cared enough to read them and expose the flaws and logical missteps you've made, I guess you just didn't care enough to read my responses.
Its not. The difference between a corporation and the government is that the corporation will face insolvency, its workers will work somewhere else, its management will likely be a bit poorer, but oh well, whereas the government will exist and need to decontaminate the area, while under the collective watch of the rest of the world. I'd rather have accountability.
If an area is contaminated then the citizens living there would certainly want to pay for the services of decontamination, or the PDAs could take the plant to court and present the argument for why they should pay for it.
Uh, no, oil companies have largely started to research alternative energy because of extensive taxation on fuel, incredibly high prices due to an oligarchic control over the world's energy supply, and because most fundamental research on alternative energy had already been performed by researchers being funded by government grants at universities.
Obviously most fundamental research on alternative energy hasn't been completed yet, otherwise we would've stopped buying oil by now. Research is being done by companies that see potential profits in doing so.
Even then, history is replete with situations in which private corporations have NOT decided to invest into infrastructure of research. The best example i know in detail is the method of housing construction in suburban canada between the1900s and 1940s. Before government and municipality regulation, standards of living were remarkably poor because private contractors were building houses, and then charging to retroactively rip up the land around them to install sewer systems, and put up power lines. Additionally, these same contractors sold racial segregation in the form of land covenants.
Again, you're subjectively determining for others what type of contracts are "okay" and what type aren't. People are responsible for the contracts they voluntarily enter in to. As for racial segregation, what's your point? It is a sellers right to choose who he does or doesn't sell his product to.
I'd vote heart disease. Medieval Europe would likely vote Black Plague. Clearly governments did better than slaughtering 1/3rd of the continent's human life, right? Right?
Governmemnt and all the wars launched by them have resulted in far more deaths than heart disease or theh black plague. Governments have been responsible for hundreds of millions of deaths.
Still waiting for your defense of the public goods theory... To quote again my favorite part from Hoppe: In terms of consumer evaluations, however high its absolute level might be, the value of the public goods is relatively lower than that of the competing private goods because if one had left the choice to the consumers (and had not forced one alternative upon them), they evidently would have preferred spending their money differently (otherwise no force would have been necessary). This proves beyond any doubt that the resources used for the provision of public goods are wasted because they provide consumers with goods or services that at best are only of secondary importance. In short, even if one assumed that public goods that can be distinguished clearly from private goods existed, and even if it were granted that a given public good might be useful, public goods would still compete with private goods. And there is only one method for finding out whether or not they are more urgently desired and to what extent, or mutatis mutandis, if, and to what extent, their production would take place at the expense of the nonproduction or reduced production of more urgently needed private goods: by having everything provided by freely competing private enterprises. Hence, contrary to the conclusion arrived at by the public goods theorists, logic forces one to accept the result that only a pure market system can safeguard the rationality, from the point of view of the consumers, of a decision to produce a public good.
One more thing to point out in regards to your examples of the free market "failing"; you will often point to a situation, say that it was beneficial for this a particular subset of people, and conclude that therefore government intervention is good without taking into account the negative effects on others caused by the government policy.
For example, minimum wage is something often cited by liberals as being a great thing. I used to agree, until I actually studied the economics of it. Liberals argue that minimum wage helped a certain subset of people, therefore it is a good thing. What they don't point out is that minimum wage increases cost to the consumer and creates unemployment. Are these externalities offset by the wage increase for those who do benefit from it? The answer must be no, because if the externalities caused by implimenting a minimum wage were offset by the benefits to those who gain from minimum wage, then you wouldn't need government to force people into accepting these regulations; the market would settle at the appropriate wage. Every act of government intervention is a limitation on consumer sovereignty.
To go over again the absurdity of your research argument, you're again saying that if there's something you subjectively deem as being "good enough" for society, it is okay to force people to pay for it even though they don't want to. What if I'm doing research that involves buying a swimming pool for my backyard so I can study buoyancy effects, can I force you to pay for it? My subjective judgment tells me it would have enough positive externalities for you that it is acceptable to steal the money from you. There is, of course, no way to determine whether a reserach project actually does have enough positive externalities to warrant theft; either no research project does, or every research project does, which could essentially be used to justify all stealing, as Hoppe explains. It only makes logical sense to conclude that no research project warrants stealing, and that people should be free to spend their money as they deem fit to, so long as it is not in support of aggressive/criminal enterprise.
Another FAQ: http://freedomain.blogspot.com/2007/06/freedomain-radio-frequently-asked_03.html An excerpt on road construction from the FAQ: " The most important thing to understand about anarchism is that it is a moral theory which logically cannot be over-concerned with consequences. For instance, the abolition of slavery was a moral imperative, because slavery as an institution is innately evil. The abolition of slavery was not conditional upon the provision of jobs for every freed slave. In a similar manner, anarchic theory does not have to explain how every conceivable social, legal or economic transaction would occur in the absence of a coercive government. What is important is to understand that the initiation of the use of force is a moral evil. With that in mind, we can approach the problem of roads more clearly.
First of all, roads are currently funded through the initiation of force. If you do not pay the taxes which support road construction, you will get a stern letter from the government, followed by a court date, followed by policemen coming to your house if you do not appear and submit to the court's judgment. If you use force to defend yourself against the policemen who are breaking into your home, you will very likely be shot down.
The roads, in other words, are built at the point of a gun. The use of violence is the central issue, not what might potentially happen in the absence of violence.
That having been said, roads will be built by housing developers, mall builders, those constructing schools and towns – just as they were before the government took them over in the 19th century."
You don't consent simply by virtue of using their services, you consent if you voluntarily pay them for their services. They don't give you a choice of whether to pay or not. By your logic it is acceptable for the mafia to demand protection money from people at the threat of violence as long as they provide some protection service. This is what government does.
And which will happen under anarcho-capitalism. The only difference is that I trust the government slightly more than the mafia.
I addressed this pathetic argument in the post above, but I will repost for you from the anarcho-capitalist FAQ:
So what do you do when your PDA (assuming geographic monopoly; I will elaborate later) or the road provider, if there is one provider, or the electricity provider, if there is one provider, does stupid things? You can't feasibly switch. So what are you going to do?
Externalities exist on a spectrum, not on a dichotomy. There is no magical point where any service has enough good externalities(a subjective measurement) to conclude that it is okay to extort people into paying for it, by any objective standards.
We can create a magic point. You haven't discussed my statistical threshold argument. The crux of your argument, which is essentially, "if there's a continuum, then you can't draw a line" is really stupid, and can in addition be resolved by doing arbitrary stupid things if you're sensibilities are offended enough by trying to find a proper point, by assigning each industry a "government intervention value" that varies continuously from 1% for things we really really like solely under private control and 99% for things we really like under state control, gradually increasing with the number of externalities. Note that this argument has nothing to do with the efficiencies thereof, so don't bring it in; I'm simply demonstrating how stupidly absurd the "continuum means no lines can be drawn, therefore you must choose one hundred percent free market" is. Every society on Earth today has made that decision, some farther to the left, some farther to the right. You say they can't, but they have. I will not touch this "continuity" argument anymore..
Even if you believe that the private sector will not allocate resources efficiently when dealing with 'public goods', what makes you assume the government will be able to allocate them efficiently? They can't know the true market price since they don't let the market function. Any system of taxation (extortion) is guaranteed to be inefficient and result in dead weight loss. It is price fixing using stolen money. Up until the invent of satellite radio, radio stations fit the criteria for public goods. Anyone who owned a radio could not be excluded from listening to certain stations, and the amount of listeners did not effect the supply. But radio has proven to be provisable on the free market. The private sector can provide public goods, and there is no reason to assume the government could provide them better by arbitrarily setting what they think is a "fair" price.
If the inefficiencies that result from public provision are greater than the profit of a private provider, society wins. What makes the sole provider of a good to a certain town able to allocate prices efficiently? Terms like "price fixing" are inaccurate because there is simply no reason that a state industry can't respond to supply and demand.
Both me and my suitemates I share an apartment with benefit from me wearing deodorant, by the free-rider theory then no one would actually buy it since we would all wait for someone else to. Clearly this doesn't happen.
Given a straight choice between wearing deodorant and not wearing deodorant, all things equal, you decide to wear deodorant because the benefit that you recieve from wearing deodorant outweighs the cost, for you alone. If you were given the choice to not pay taxes but still recieve the benefits of recieving police protection, fire protection, and the use of roads for free, given that everyone else were paying for them, I am pretty sure that you would choose not to pay them.
You have a fundamental misunderstanding about how PDAs work. PDAs don't have geographical areas of jurisdiction, their jurisdiction is based on who pays for their services. If someone paying for the service of a PDA gets robbed, it doesn't matter where the robber runs to, he will be hunted by the PDA if they want to maintain profitability.
That's all nice and dandy in theory. What's more likely is that a large PDA, having sufficient presence in an area, will in all likelihood decide that it should have a monopoly over the area, and declare that everybody in its jurisdiction must obey this PDA. A neighboring PDA, with sufficient presence in another area, has two choices - 1. Go to war. This could potentially be profitable, but the question is whether victory is likely and whether 2. Partition the area, would be more profitable. Nothing is going to stop a large PDA that controls an area from declaring monopoly. It can furthermore declare itself a state and deny other PDAs the opportunity to pursue criminals into the area.
There are not many instances of anarcho-capitalism being implemented in history, I was pointing to one of the few I can find and showing that according to at least one source from the time, it was a good period. As for your examples, none of them have to do with anarcho-capitalism. In the Balkans, the death of Tito exposed problems that were created by imperialist nation drawing. And you're using the fact that the dissolution of the roman empire led to feudalism as an argument against anarcho-capitalism, which is illogical.
Its quite logical. The point is that anarcho-capitalism collapses.
Yes I do, you just missed it. I argued that if the research your doing is potentially valuable, then it must be potentially profit-making. If it is, then private companies will invest in it. I'm sure you don't need me to provide you examples of private investment leading to technological advancement. The issue isn't whether research *should* be funded, the issue is whether it should be funded through voluntary exchange or forced exchange.
The research that one company does will benefit all companies. Classic public good.
This goes back to the externalities issue which I have explained the problems with above and will elaborate on in the following post. But the short answer is that people will boycott services that they feel are causing enough problems to warrant a boycott. There is no reason you should subjectively get to determine which companies people should be forced to boycott; let consumers decide.
The problems aren't being caused for the supplier. They are not being caused for the consumer. The consumer has zero reason to stop purchasing because the poor sods getting the shaft aren't the ones who will be consuming a product. You can say, "well, if it should be stopped, then people will stop it. The fact that it's not stopped means that it shouldn't be stopped." But this only holds if you have already accepted the AnCap principles. The way it works is that anarcho-capitalism + human nature = bad shit, with pollution and the like. You're the one declaring that "any deviation of anarcho-capitalism, aka coercion" (ignoring the fact that you already accept coercion simply by having enforcement mechanisms for courts against the unwilling) is bad, therefore aforementioned bad shit must be okay. We (being everyone else) don't. We see coercion as a lesser evil than pollution.
Why should I give supporting evidence for a claim I never made? Consistently throughout the thread my claim has not been that corporations are perfect, but that legitimate corporations can provide better than ones that extort and coerce. What is your example supposed to get at anyways? What if the government builds a nuclear power plant and it blows up? This argument is meaningless.
Because if the people living in the area of a nuclear power plant don't want a nuclear power plant, under liberal democracy, they're not going to get a nuclear power plant. If they want certain safety measures, they will get certain safety measures. Under ancapitalism, a corporation can simply build a nuclear power plant if it has sufficient force of arms behind it.
Government is just like a private corporation, only they extort customers and coerce competition to maintain their monopoly over certain industries. Explain how this is good for society.
It is not, in fact, a private corporation, because it is a public corporation. That word makes all the difference. In the absence of a publicly owned corporation extorting customers, private ones will. With regards to
I said I was in favor of "corporate dictatorship" or "fascism"? Quote me where I said that, liar. Dictatorship IS government. Free market anarchsim is CHOICE. Free market anarchism is the opposite of fascism.
, you said "I would rather have corporations in control of the government that politcians." Corporatism, and the logical result of ancaptalism.
Nothing has caused more deaths than government.
Nothing has caused more deaths than human beings acting in concert. Guess we should ban free association.
A better outcome is guaranteed by the free market. You wouldn't argue that food production or clothes production would be better produced by the government, would you? What distinction can you make to argue that security or education should be? There is none. Your science example is disanalagous because the scientist gets to decide for himself whether a result is good enough. My point is that everyone should get to decide for themselves. With government, a few people are making these decisions for everyone else.
Well, how can the scientist choose from himself? It should be impossible! The simply fact of the matter is that these decisions can be, and are, made. With regards to the first statement, I could, but that's not the issue at hand.
States have the worst records of war by far!!! States can't stop going to war, and it is easy to see why when you examine the mechanism of states. Leaders can go to war for their own reasons even if a signifigant portion of those funding the war don't agree with it. Statism puts extreme power in the hands of the elite, and the state is not accountable to its customers in the same way corporations are. Statism also carries nationalism with it; the notion that people who are within the same arbitrarily defined geographic boundaries as me are more important than those outside.
States will form from anarcho-capitalism, and they will be states without the safeguards that liberal democracy has evolved in its centires of existence. A liberal democratic state is more accountable to its "customers" than a coercive privately owned corporation.
If they raise prices above market price, then a competitor will rise to satisfy the demand. The only reason market could fail in this scenario is if competitors aren't allowed to do business, which is a result of government intervention.
Not only government intervention. One is simply the inefficiency of building two roads where one will suffice. Another is that you are assuming zero to minimal startup costs. In addition, given sufficient efficiencies resulting from economies of scale, a profit-driven corporation can simply raise the price to a point where it is still cheaper than for a small competitor to start up, not having these advantages of economy of scale (and we're ignoring collusion between, for example, said large corporation and the suppliers to clamp down on competitors.) Given a reasonably efficient public service which is not operated for the simple purpose of profit maximization, it would not have said incentive to raise the price.
You're the one who should be answering this question to me! I'm saying that government monopolies can't know what to charge because they don't let the free market act, and thus will necessarily set a price that is either too high or too low which would lead to market failure.
I'm simply pointin out the fact that tey already do. And nobody has died of thirst in my town yet. This brings up the question of whether the degree of market failure involved offsets the possible benefits of public ownership (for example, ease of avoidance of negative externalities.) Secondly, how do naturally occuring monopolies (again, the only shop in a small town, or the only highway to a remote area) know what prices to charge? This is why I bring up the two highways scenario.
I have thoroughly addressed the falsehoods of the free rider problem in my last three posts. Read them and then get back to me.
I have. Don't assume I haven't; I can do the same for you, but the discussion would go nowhere.
I assumed that you would at least agree that coercion is bad for the production of most goods since you don't seem to be advocating communism. Did I assume too much in believing that you think the free market is the most efficient way to allocate most resources? If I did, then we are opening up a whole other topic. But if you agree with me that free markets are generally good, then the burden of proof is on you to justify the exceptions, which you haven't even touched from a theoretical perspective, and have attempted to justify empirically using poor examples that don't prove your point.
There is a large gulf between pure anarcho-capitalism and communism. Just because somebody believes in a degree of coercion does not make them a communist; in that case, more or less every economist that has ever lived that isn't in the Austrian school was a communist, which you can clearly see is a load of crock. My "poor examples" are merely here to poke holes in the *assumptions* in your poor example. Most economists believe that enforced property rights are necessary for the functioning of a free market, and furthermore many don't believe that anarcho-capitalism provisions this properly. Their definition of a free market is simply different from yours, and is the general one from which we are to draw assumptions, since it is the generally agreed on term. Here's some simple theroetical reasons coercion might be useful: The free rider problem. Even your Austrian economists concede, in the very articles you link, that it exists, if to a limited degree. They furthermore declare that "because it is theoretically possible to provision them under anarcho-capitalism, it must be the best method of doing so." The monopoly problem. If the nature of a service means that there will be a monopoly, with it containing immense power over the area of said monopoly, giving the public control over the entity might be more useful than giving a private entity control over the service / good which might end up being price gouged, if the demand is inelastic (it being difficult to simply switch providers, and if you say the "why don't you move" problem is bunk, then you can't use it yourself). The free rider problem is, in fact, really the source of everybody's criticisms of pure communism. Less incentive to work, exists, sure. So does less incentive to fund a public good.
If you did this, no PDA would accept you as a client since you would be a giant liability. Good to see that you are no longer fighting that taxation is extortion.
I simply see no reason to quibble over definitions when it is clear that we are not approaching them from the same point.
Okay, but you haven't shown why extortion is good. You point to examples saying "state extortion led to the advent of this and this is good", but your side of the argument is that the state can produce it better than the free market, and for that you have provided no evidence. In my last couple posts I have shown why your assertion is not true at all.
Negative externalities, free rider problem. The issue is far from resolved, so we can avoid the consequences thereof and simply debate the issue from which all others follow, the problem of negative externalities and the free rider problem (and no, we're not done yet; you can declare victory if you pretend that I haven't been following your links).
PDAs would obviously protect against aggression. Security is an economic good which would be provided for by the free market. For the most part its unlikely PDAs would even look or act very different then the police (drug laws would be lifted, they are clearly unjust), but in general people seem to like the laws we have now, and thus those are the laws that would be protected by PDAs and enforced by arbitrators, since they respond to the will of their customers to be successful. If you shoot me and take my stuff, my PDA will hunt you down. If you do it now, the police will hunt you down. If the police don't catch you, I'm still forced to pay them. If my PDA doesn't catch you and I am unsatisfied with their performance, I can stop paying them. And so PDAs have greater incentive than public police to enforce justice against aggressors.
This returns to the issue of PDA monopoly.
Yep. Bribary is always possible. Now tell me why it's more likely in private courts than public courts.
Because in public courts, there is an incentive to be impartial because otherwise those in charge of keeping them that way will be voted out of office. The wonderful thing about anarcho-capitalism, though, is that a court is only as legitimate as the PDAs that accept it. If I use only courts that have been paid off by me, no two courts will come to the same conclusion, and if my courts are attached to a powerful PDA which I control because I am so much incredibly richer than everyone else (surely you cannot argue that state intervention acts to keep the Gini coefficient low; case studies demonstrate the opposite effect when more contorl is handed to the free market), then your PDA and your courts can rail uselessly against my large PDA with bribed courts. A court, after all, needs little to no overhead, and a few rich customers can shell enough to put a thousand poor ones to shame.
-Inflation is not intrinsic to an economy. Inflation in the U.S. began in the early 1940s.
Um, no. Ever heard of a Continental Greenback?
The increase in taxation and public works has hurt many on the fringe of poverty and had harmful long term consequencese. High taxes is a huge burden on alot of people. When you give to one group of people, you are doing so at the expense of another.
The group being taken from generally aren't the people on the fringe of poverty.
The only 'needs' are the bare essentials of food and water. Everything beyond that is a 'want', or an economic good, which any economic model will tell you can be produced more efficiently on the free market than by a centrally planned economy. You've admitted that some goods are better produced on the free market, but you maintain that other goods are not, but you haven't given any reason other then the 'free rider problem', which I smashed a few posts ago, and you haven't yet been able to respond to.
Yeah, nice way of putting it. Anyway, now that I've clearly demolished your rebuttals to the free-rider problem, we're done, right? ... You see where talk like that leads us?
Your example here does NOTHING to prove your premise! "There exists a magical (or objective) point where something has enough externalities to warrant extortion.Here's a hypothetical scenario of a town in trouble. QED." Do you see how nonsensical your argument is? Furthermore you think it's extortion to voluntarily do work? To address your example though, if disaster can be averted for a $10 fee, then people will gladly pay it voluntarily.
Yes, but disaster can also be averted without paying $10.
You are really skating on thin ice here. I don't think any serious economist would go so far as to suggest that the state can know the true market price without letting the free market act. 'Comparative indicators of value' can hep you get close, but no two economies are the same. Knowing the global price doesn't tell you what the price would be in a specific area within China. Everyone has different preferences and places different value on goods, which are impossible for the government to know.
Pick a price. Start selling. Determine the demand. Governments can operate the same way that corporations with massive amounts of market share to figure out if their prices are too high or too low. And prices don't sit at equilibrium anyway. In the airline industry, prices can be sitting at some value at quite a while, and at some point one of them will slash its rates, leading all the others to follow in a price war. I suppose that the "true market price" dropped suddenly as the first business to do so decided to?
You have not provided a single example where the unfettered free market has proved to be inept, and you are still dodging the fact that there is no theoretical distinction for where government should step in.
Well, it's not working in Somalia, if by unfettered free market, you mean that the rule of "coercive" law is nonexistent.
Obviously I benefit, so does everyone else. The deodorant example is simply to highlight the failure of public choice theory. Do you deny that deodorant has positive externalities for those who don't pay for it, and that one person benefiting from the lack of my smelly armpits isn't effected by someone else benefitting from it? Then it should, by your logic, be a public good that the market won't provide for.
This is demonstrated false by the fact that you do buy deodorant. Also, your "private companies will solve pollution on their own" can similarly be demonstrated false by the fact that they didn't.
And already countered. You still haven't gotten around to addressing my arguments against public choice theory, or shown why anything has to be provided by government. Government, by the way, can't react to stimuli instantaneously either; government will in fact be slower to react than the free market.
First, demonstrate; second, by how much?
The reason there haven't been many examples is a debatable topic, your conclusion hardly being demonstrated true. In most situations military conquest led to government implimentation. True anarcho-capitalism has not been tried in modern times, and it is fallicious reasoning to say that it therefore can't work.
Neither has pure communism, but I don't think you're willing to make that leap.
When you say it's incredibly important, you're making a subjective judgment. Your placing your judgment above that of everyone elses. You're saying "I think this research is really important, so it's okay for me to steal from you to fund it." As Hoppe says, you're smuggling a norm into a positive science. I think it is unethical for you to place your judgment above everyone elses and use that to justify theft.
Saying that it's wrong to steal is also smuggling a norm into a positive science.
For example, minimum wage is something often cited by liberals as being a great thing. I used to agree, until I actually studied the economics of it. Liberals argue that minimum wage helped a certain subset of people, therefore it is a good thing. What they don't point out is that minimum wage increases cost to the consumer and creates unemployment. Are these externalities offset by the wage increase for those who do benefit from it? The answer must be no, because if the externalities caused by implimenting a minimum wage were offset by the benefits to those who gain from minimum wage, then you wouldn't need government to force people into accepting these regulations; the market would settle at the appropriate wage. Every act of government intervention is a limitation on consumer sovereignty.
Yeah, if you think that consumers are simply socially conscious enough to increase wages on their own. The price of something tells you nothing about how the wages are paid, and in the end simple self-interest is enough to keep people buying things that they like, because of the free rider problem. The free rider problem is really the only answer to a number of problems! Why does the liberal not pay extra taxes to the government? Because he doesn't want to! Why does the anarcho-capitalist use roads when he could instead refuse to benefit from "extortion"? Because he needs to use roads! Why does the minimum wage advocate buy clothes made in China? Because they are cheaper! You could instead say it's because they're dirty dirty hypocrites, but that's simply the way it goes down. Perhaps to avoid norms, you should avoid the term "appropriate" and instead substitute "market-determined." In the end: Pure libertarianism + human nature and self interest = unpleasant outcomes (which most people agree on.) Most people would solve this this by placing restrictions on pure libertarianism. Anarcho-capitalists are essentially the only ones who would declare "coercion must be wrong in all cases one hundred percent." The rest of us are willing to look at other things.
The most important thing to understand about anarchism is that it is a moral theory which logically cannot be over-concerned with consequences. For instance, the abolition of slavery was a moral imperative, because slavery as an institution is innately evil. The abolition of slavery was not conditional upon the provision of jobs for every freed slave. In a similar manner, anarchic theory does not have to explain how every conceivable social, legal or economic transaction would occur in the absence of a coercive government.
Actually, if the logical conclusion upon the abolition of slavery was that the slaves would be instead shot, we would like to take into account the consequences. You can just as easily justify it because of consequences rather than "innate evil." And in fact, isn't it a bit hypocritical for somebody declaring that some things are "innate evil" to criticize others for making vlaue judgments?
The article dealing with how DROs would never take over is laughable. It rests on such idiotic assumptions as the unprofitiability of war, assuming that arms manufacturers would never, ever think to manufacture arms and sell them to warlords because they would immediately go out of business (ignoring the fact that such things happen,) completely ignoring the military-industrial complex that exists today, unfounded assertions like "Clearly, all the other DROs will immediately cease doing business with Bob's DRO" and "Thus arms manufacturers would have to provide rigorous accounts of everything they were making and selling, to be sure that they weren't selling arms to some secret army, probably in the foothills of Montana." Yeah, arms manufacturers are really really careful that the arms they manufacture never get to Darfur or into the hands of factions that use child soldiers. That's why it doesn't happen at all today! It's a fucking joke.
So because native american societies were communal, property rights are unnatural? If we shouldn't have property rights why don't we just let the state control everything? You should be arguing that theft isn't a crime if you don't believe in property rights.
No, property rights AREN'T natural. They stem from the government's assurance that they will use their coercive power to return what's 'yours' to you if someone else takes it. This is the very crux of what property rights are: They are the act of stripping everyone but the owner's right to some goods. That stripping is not a passive occurance: it is the result of an active enforcement.
Theft ISNT a crime if you live communally. How is that even debatable? There's nothing to 'steal' because everything there is already everyone's.
You don't have a choice about whether or not to pay taxes. Obviously I might as well use their services if I'm being forced to pay for them anyways, but I'd rather have various firms competing for my dollar then one firm take it from me involuntarily.
Yes you do. I've already stated this. There are plenty of ways to avoid taxation. The fact that you refuse to consider anything other than the government supplied lifestyle is a testament to the fact that they pulled it off pretty well, some better than others. And you'd rather have various firms competing for your dollar? There are hundreds of governments competing for your citizenship, offering a wide array of taxation levels, public services, local climates, etc. I'd rather have them compete for their long term prosperity by jockeying for educated individuals in an information economy.
Which they already do.
Fiercely.
Governments have massive seizure power in taxation, but anyways what is your point here?
Taxation has already been dealt with; Point is that taxation being on the rise is actually one of the driving forces underlying the recent explosion in quality of life in the western world. Corporations in new france didn't give a shit about their workers literally living in the exaust fumes of their industries, it took people petitioning and getting into government to get change. Why is that? Because the wealthy elites with all the capital lived on mount royal, in the opposite direction of the smoke, and their workers were very poor and were living hand to mouth existances. Only the intervention of public workers (doctors, priests, etc) did the change occur, and it didn't occur as a result of a market force, it came about as a political force.
The increase in taxation and public works has hurt many on the fringe of poverty and had harmful long term consequencese. High taxes is a huge burden on alot of people. When you give to one group of people, you are doing so at the expense of another.
Yeah, because public works and taxation didn't pull america out of the great depression or anything. And who's saying anything about 'high' taxes. Obviously you're taking from one and giving to another, that's the entire point of taxation; you take from where it hurts least, and give to where its most needed. Like in my previous example regarding urban sanitation in new france; the rich industrialists couldn't give 2 fucks about the living conditions of their workers, and their workers had no where to move to. They were too poor to emigrate, and conditions were similar elsewhere.
But yes, taxation has had long term harmful consequences like: The development of a large middle class : D. The quelling of class warfare : D. The massive upsurge in quality of life : D.
I fucking hate it when those things happen. Well played.
The only 'needs' are the bare essentials of food and water. Everything beyond that is a 'want', or an economic good, which any economic model will tell you can be produced more efficiently on the free market than by a centrally planned economy. You've admitted that some goods are better produced on the free market, but you maintain that other goods are not, but you haven't given any reason other then the 'free rider problem', which I smashed a few posts ago, and you haven't yet been able to respond to.
Food, water, clothing, shelter, and a method to obtain the money from which to pay for the aforementioned 4, which typically involves transportation. The infrastructure needed for these in an urban environment is not trivial. Interestingly enough, these 4 options + health care and education, which can be lumped in in an information economy are generally the PRIME concern of modern national western governments, and account for the large majority of their expenses. Thanks for proving my point. More importantly, government regulation doesn't mean a centrally planned economy. This isn't Soviet russia vs Fairy tale anarchy land. This is successful, happy nations, the Netherlands, Sweden, England, Canada, USA, etc vs. Fairy tale anarchy land. Last I checked, the government in most of these nations provides only the rudimentary backbone for which the free market is allowed to run wild on, and only steps in when there is a large problem.
We don't operate in a top down driven economy. We operate in a free market with notable restrictions to protect the wellbeing of people.
You have not provided a single example where the unfettered free market has proved to be inept,
This... thread is covered with them. Maybe you've got your rose glasses a bit too close to your eyes. For starters, I'll toss out 'run on the bank'.
And that's all for now. Maybe more later, but you're basically just dodging points at this juncture in time.
And which will happen under anarcho-capitalism. The only difference is that I trust the government slightly more than the mafia.
The government is no different than the mafia. Both don't give you the option of not paying. Privatizing security gives one the option of not paying, or choosing a different provider.
So what do you do when your PDA (assuming geographic monopoly; I will elaborate later) or the road provider, if there is one provider, or the electricity provider, if there is one provider, does stupid things? You can't feasibly switch. So what are you going to do?
If enough people feel that one provider is doing a poor job, then there is opportunity for profit if another firm were to offer better service or prices, and if this profitable opportunity exists, the gap will be filled by a competitor. A natural monopoly does not exclude competition. Only coercive monopolies such as the government do this.
We can create a magic point. You haven't discussed my statistical threshold argument. The crux of your argument, which is essentially, "if there's a continuum, then you can't draw a line" is really stupid, and can in addition be resolved by doing arbitrary stupid things if you're sensibilities are offended enough by trying to find a proper point, by assigning each industry a "government intervention value" that varies continuously from 1% for things we really really like solely under private control and 99% for things we really like under state control, gradually increasing with the number of externalities. Note that this argument has nothing to do with the efficiencies thereof, so don't bring it in; I'm simply demonstrating how stupidly absurd the "continuum means no lines can be drawn, therefore you must choose one hundred percent free market" is. Every society on Earth today has made that decision, some farther to the left, some farther to the right. You say they can't, but they have.
If you're going to say that a line should be drawn, you should be able to offer proof as to where the line should be drawn. But there is no good way to do this because a line can't be drawn that isn't arbitrary. Externalities are subjective, not objective. You can't just rate them on a 1-99% scale because externalities don't have objective cash value, and different people will value them differenlty. The only way to know how people will value them is to let consumers make the choices themselves in a free market. I think people should be able to decide for themselves which goods they want to fund. In saying that government should be able to draw the line, you're saying that some people (government) know better than its citizens what is best for them, which raises all sorts of issues. Why should this particular subset of society get to determine how others spend their money?
If the inefficiencies that result from public provision are greater than the profit of a private provider, society wins.
What?
What makes the sole provider of a good to a certain town able to allocate prices efficiently? Terms like "price fixing" are inaccurate because there is simply no reason that a state industry can't respond to supply and demand.
The state by necessity will be slow to respond to supply and demand. Since they do fix the price, and since they force others to pay their price, true demand will be unknown. But suppose we grant your impossible assumption that the state could know the true price of what a good would be offered at on the free market; then why not just let it be sold on the free market if government would set the same price anyways?
Given a straight choice between wearing deodorant and not wearing deodorant, all things equal, you decide to wear deodorant because the benefit that you recieve from wearing deodorant outweighs the cost, for you alone. If you were given the choice to not pay taxes but still recieve the benefits of recieving police protection, fire protection, and the use of roads for free, given that everyone else were paying for them, I am pretty sure that you would choose not to pay them.
If these services were already paid for and I was given access to them, then no I wouldn't pay for them. But if no one was paying for them then I absolutely would. But none of these goods are non-excludable even by your standards. It would be very simple for fire departments and police departments to know who was paying them and who wasn't.
That's all nice and dandy in theory. What's more likely is that a large PDA, having sufficient presence in an area, will in all likelihood decide that it should have a monopoly over the area, and declare that everybody in its jurisdiction must obey this PDA. A neighboring PDA, with sufficient presence in another area, has two choices - 1. Go to war. This could potentially be profitable, but the question is whether victory is likely and whether 2. Partition the area, would be more profitable. Nothing is going to stop a large PDA that controls an area from declaring monopoly. It can furthermore declare itself a state and deny other PDAs the opportunity to pursue criminals into the area.
The research that one company does will benefit all companies. Classic public good.
I've already demonstrated the fallacies of the public goods theory, your only counter has been that it's okay to subjectively draw a line somewhere, thus putting your opinion above everyone elses, because you think there is a point (which you haven't defined) where it is okay to do this.
The problems aren't being caused for the supplier. They are not being caused for the consumer. The consumer has zero reason to stop purchasing because the poor sods getting the shaft aren't the ones who will be consuming a product. You can say, "well, if it should be stopped, then people will stop it. The fact that it's not stopped means that it shouldn't be stopped." But this only holds if you have already accepted the AnCap principles. The way it works is that anarcho-capitalism + human nature = bad shit, with pollution and the like. You're the one declaring that "any deviation of anarcho-capitalism, aka coercion" (ignoring the fact that you already accept coercion simply by having enforcement mechanisms for courts against the unwilling) is bad, therefore aforementioned bad shit must be okay. We (being everyone else) don't. We see coercion as a lesser evil than pollution.
There are several ways the pollution issue could be worked out in anarcho-capitalistic society. The most likely being that the residents of the affected area would take the polluting company to court on the basis that the pollution was seriously harming the residents. As for coercion against unwilling, the unwilling are the ones who initiated aggression in the first place. It's the difference between murder in cold blood and murder in self defense.
Because if the people living in the area of a nuclear power plant don't want a nuclear power plant, under liberal democracy, they're not going to get a nuclear power plant. If they want certain safety measures, they will get certain safety measures. Under ancapitalism, a corporation can simply build a nuclear power plant if it has sufficient force of arms behind it.
Anarcho-capitalism is not 'might makes right'. If the building of a power plant causes pollution that harms the nearby residents, they can take the plant to court. If the construction of the power plant doesn't harm the nearby residents, then they have no business opposing its construction.
It is not, in fact, a private corporation, because it is a public corporation. That word makes all the difference.
Right, and that difference is that the 'public corporation' (government) is legally allowed to coerce and extort.
In the absence of a publicly owned corporation extorting customers, private ones will.
Oh really? I don't see this extortion happening in any other private industry. I'm not extorted by certain clothing companies or electronics companies or car companies. Only government does this.
I said I was in favor of "corporate dictatorship" or "fascism"? Quote me where I said that, liar. Dictatorship IS government. Free market anarchsim is CHOICE. Free market anarchism is the opposite of fascism.
, you said "I would rather have corporations in control of the government that politcians." Corporatism, and the logical result of ancaptalism.
Lie. I said:
I'd rather the military be in the hands of corporations than politicians.
As in, I'd rather armed forces be privately owned then owned by government. Your misquote of mine doesn't even make sense since my whole argument is that there shouldn't be government.
Nothing has caused more deaths than human beings acting in concert. Guess we should ban free association.
Government, you cannot deny, has a lousy track record of killing tons of people. Built into the idea of government and sovereign states is nationalism, the idea that people who live near you are worth more and so grows a hatred for people from other nations. Another problem with nations is that innocent civilians are dragged into these wars launched by leaders. In an anarcho-capitalist society, hostile exchanges would remaind between the parties having the dispute. Leaders drag whole countries into their wars.
Well, how can the scientist choose from himself? It should be impossible! The simply fact of the matter is that these decisions can be, and are, made. With regards to the first statement, I could, but that's not the issue at hand.
The scientist can draw his own conclusions for himself; he can use his own subjectivity to decide for him. What you're saying is that people should be able to use their own subjectivity to decide for others.
States will form from anarcho-capitalism, and they will be states without the safeguards that liberal democracy has evolved in its centires of existence.
This is false, for reasons listed in the short article I posted above.
A liberal democratic state is more accountable to its "customers" than a coercive privately owned corporation.
In anarchic society, corporations wouldn't be allowed to coerce otherwie PDAs would go after them. If you're trying to say though that coercion leads to decreased accountability, I would agree with that, and point out that is the problem with government.
Not only government intervention. One is simply the inefficiency of building two roads where one will suffice. Another is that you are assuming zero to minimal startup costs.
As mentioned, if two roads are ineffecient then the second one won't be used, likely not even built. Start up costs are part of any operation. Low or high start up costs don't mean that competitors aren't allowed to compete. I currently don't have the finances to start up my own fast food chain. That doesn't mean I'm barred from the industry. Only government has the legal authority to bar competition.
In addition, given sufficient efficiencies resulting from economies of scale, a profit-driven corporation can simply raise the price to a point where it is still cheaper than for a small competitor to start up, not having these advantages of economy of scale (and we're ignoring collusion between, for example, said large corporation and the suppliers to clamp down on competitors.) Given a reasonably efficient public service which is not operated for the simple purpose of profit maximization, it would not have said incentive to raise the price.
Why is it bad for a company to try and make a profit? If the company is able to charge a given price that no competitor can match and it isn't using aggression to prevent other competitors from entering the industry, why do you have a right to step in and take away its profit? Because you arbitrarily deem it to be making 'too much' money?
I'm simply pointin out the fact that tey already do. And nobody has died of thirst in my town yet. This brings up the question of whether the degree of market failure involved offsets the possible benefits of public ownership (for example, ease of avoidance of negative externalities.)
So you're saying that water companies must be charging optimal market price because no one has died of thirst? You can't always know how much economic benefit society is missing out on by having the government fix the price, but just pointing to government intervention and saying "well, this is working okay" in no way proves that it could not be more effeciently provided by the private sector.
Secondly, how do naturally occuring monopolies (again, the only shop in a small town, or the only highway to a remote area) know what prices to charge? This is why I bring up the two highways scenario.
They know what price to charge because they want to maximize their profit. They will charge the price that maximizes their profit, which will be the market price. If they charge above the market price, a competitor will come and cut into their business.
I have. Don't assume I haven't; I can do the same for you, but the discussion would go nowhere.
Ignoring the fact that you did, at one point, assume I hadn't read your posts, the reason I assumed so is because you did not address them.
There is a large gulf between pure anarcho-capitalism and communism. Just because somebody believes in a degree of coercion does not make them a communist; in that case, more or less every economist that has ever lived that isn't in the Austrian school was a communist, which you can clearly see is a load of crock.
In practice we see that there are different levels of government in different states. I'm not saying that you have to be a communist if you are not an anarcho-capitalist, but I am saying that it is logically inconsistent not to be, if you defend government intervention.
My "poor examples" are merely here to poke holes in the *assumptions* in your poor example.
My assumptions are theoretical since I do not know much of real implimentation of anarcho-capitalism in a society. Your empirical examples supposedely against anarcho-capitalism have nto actually involved anarcho-capitalism.
Most economists believe that enforced property rights are necessary for the functioning of a free market, and furthermore many don't believe that anarcho-capitalism provisions this properly.
That's great for most economists. I *do* believe the free market can properly enforce property rights.
Their definition of a free market is simply different from yours, and is the general one from which we are to draw assumptions, since it is the generally agreed on term.
False. Most economists share the same definition of the free market, there are just disagreements on how much government intervention is necessary.
Here's some simple theroetical reasons coercion might be useful: [The free rider problem. Even your Austrian economists concede, in the very articles you link, that it exists, if to a limited degree. They furthermore declare that "because it is theoretically possible to provision them under anarcho-capitalism, it must be the best method of doing so."
Right the whole point is that the free-rider situation is not a real problem at all, and that the market can handle this better than government.
The monopoly problem. If the nature of a service means that there will be a monopoly, with it containing immense power over the area of said monopoly, giving the public control over the entity might be more useful than giving a private entity control over the service / good which might end up being price gouged, if the demand is inelastic
Monopolies are not necessarily problems. Natural monopolies are fine. Coercive monopolies are the problem, but this would be illegal under anarcho-capitalism (assuming most people think initiating violence should be illegal, which I hope you would agree is a fair assumption to make). Giving an industry to the public sector is giving the industry to a coercive monopoly. Price gouging is a pejorative. Who are you to subjectively decide what constitutes a fair price. If a firm is able to increase its price of an inelastic good, and they aren't forcing competitors out through aggression, and no competitor is able to charge a lower price, then the price set by the firm is the market price. To give this industry over to the public sector would be to put in a price ceiling under market clearing price, creating dead weight loss.
(it being difficult to simply switch providers, and if you say the "why don't you move" problem is bunk, then you can't use it yourself).
Why would switching providers be difficult if no one is coercing you to stay with the same one?
The free rider problem is, in fact, really the source of everybody's criticisms of pure communism. Less incentive to work, exists, sure. So does less incentive to fund a public good.
What you're calling the free-rider problem in this regard has been one of my arguments against government for several pages now. Government intervention destroys incentive because of this.
I simply see no reason to quibble over definitions when it is clear that we are not approaching them from the same point.
I'll give my definition of extortion: forcing someone to give you their money at the threat of violence. Surely you must argue that my definition is wrong, or that government doesn't do this. You can and have been arguing that extortion is good in some cases, but to deny that government is extortion is a dead end for you.
YBecause in public courts, there is an incentive to be impartial because otherwise those in charge of keeping them that way will be voted out of office.
It is extremley, extremley, difficult to get a judge kicked off the bench. You would need to build a rock solid case, which is pretty much impossible. Even if you feel that a judge slighted you, you still have to continue to pay taxes that go toward his salary. If courts were privately provided, you could simply choose not to employ his services again, which, if enough people do, will hurt his salary. The impartiality argument works in favor of anarcho-capitalism.
The wonderful thing about anarcho-capitalism, though, is that a court is only as legitimate as the PDAs that accept it. If I use only courts that have been paid off by me, no two courts will come to the same conclusion, and if my courts are attached to a powerful PDA which I control because I am so much incredibly richer than everyone else (surely you cannot argue that state intervention acts to keep the Gini coefficient low; case studies demonstrate the opposite effect when more contorl is handed to the free market), then your PDA and your courts can rail uselessly against my large PDA with bribed courts. A court, after all, needs little to no overhead, and a few rich customers can shell enough to put a thousand poor ones to shame.
This scenario could just as easily be applied to public courts. Public judges too can be bought off. As I said above though, the difference is that in a public court it is almost impossible to get a judge barred, and you must continue to pay his salary whether you like it or not. If enough people are corrupt, anarcho-capitalism will run into trouble. This is true of any form of government as well.
Um, no. Ever heard of a Continental Greenback?
There may have been occasional times of inflation; there was also a 50+ year period of deflation before the 1940s. Unfortunately I am not at school right now so I can't get to my textbook which agrees with me, and isn't from the Austrian school either. But here is a graph showing how inflation has increased dramatically since the 1940s with the advent of unprecedented social spending and flooding of money to fund it from the federal reserve:
The group being taken from generally aren't the people on the fringe of poverty.
Everyone pays taxes. Taxes hurt everyone. Those who would be just above the poverty threshhold without having to pay taxes are forced into poverty by them. Some people who are on the border and would like to work a second job don't do so because that would put them into a higher tax bracket and shoot their healthcare costs up (I live in MA which has already implemented government mandated healthcare).
Yes, but disaster can also be averted without paying $10.
Not sure what you mean here, if you want to elaborate feel free but otherwise I will drop this since I don't know what you are getting at.
Pick a price. Start selling. Determine the demand.
And therein lies the problem; government can't determine demand, because they don't give you the option of not buying the service.
Governments can operate the same way that corporations with massive amounts of market share to figure out if their prices are too high or too low. And prices don't sit at equilibrium anyway.
Right, prices don't sit at equilibrium because the market is constantly changing due to changes in technology, income, preferences, and other factors. This change is reflected in the market by consumers exercising their choice of what goods they do or don't purchase, and the price then reacts accordingly. Government can't adjust in this way because they don't let consumers opt out. That is why coercion creates market failure.
In the airline industry, prices can be sitting at some value at quite a while, and at some point one of them will slash its rates, leading all the others to follow in a price war. I suppose that the "true market price" dropped suddenly as the first business to do so decided to?
Yes. If companies price war in the way you describe, the 'true' market price (I'm not sure how you are distinguishing it from a 'false' market price) falls.
Well, it's not working in Somalia, if by unfettered free market, you mean that the rule of "coercive" law is nonexistent.
I don't know much about Somalia, but in what way is it not working? Incidentally, I was looking on wikipedia and found this quote: "The owner of Daallo Airlines says, "Sometimes it's difficult without a government and sometimes it's a plus", but "Corruption is not a problem, because there is no government." :D
This is demonstrated false by the fact that you do buy deodorant.
If you are saying that deodorant is not a public good by virtue of the fact that I purchase it, then you are essentially arguing my point. Security, too, has and would be purchased if there was no government. Therefore, by your own logic, security is not a public good.
Also, your "private companies will solve pollution on their own" can similarly be demonstrated false by the fact that they didn't.
Because we live in state society, anarcho-capitalism has not had the opportunity to see if it would "solve" pollution.
First, demonstrate; second, by how much?
I demonstrate why a couple lines up, as to by how much I don't know, there are many variables in there, but it must be slower to react than the free market would be.
Neither has pure communism, but I don't think you're willing to make that leap.
I don't reject communism on empirical grounds, reject it on theoretical grounds for the same reasons I oppose all government intervention on theoretical grounds.
Saying that it's wrong to steal is also smuggling a norm into a positive science.
Indeed, you have hit upon the non-aggression axiom of libertarian theory; that it is wrong to initiate violence. If you want to debate the merit of this axiom you are indeed welcome to, but if you accept it generally, which surely you must, since otherwise humanity would've killed itself off by now, then the burden of proof is on you to find why exceptions exist.
Yeah, if you think that consumers are simply socially conscious enough to increase wages on their own. The price of something tells you nothing about how the wages are paid, and in the end simple self-interest is enough to keep people buying things that they like, because of the free rider problem.
I meant price as in the price of a workers labor; his wage. If you draw up a simple supply and demand curve, with supply being the price a worker is willing to supply his labor at, and demand being the demand of companies to employ his labor, it is easy to see that by imposing a minimum wage, you are imposing a price floor above market clearing price, which creates a surplus of the labor force; unemployment.
The free rider problem is really the only answer to a number of problems!
The free rider problem is really the center of our whole debate. If this debate continues (which I'm honestly hoping it won't at this point since we are just going in circles), hopefully we can cut out most of these thesis-long replies and just focus on the legitimacy or illegitimacy of the public goods theory...
Why does the liberal not pay extra taxes to the government? Because he doesn't want to! Why does the anarcho-capitalist use roads when he could instead refuse to benefit from "extortion"? Because he needs to use roads! Why does the minimum wage advocate buy clothes made in China? Because they are cheaper! You could instead say it's because they're dirty dirty hypocrites, but that's simply the way it goes down.
To say that you support minimum wage and then buy clothes from China is hypocritical because you are voluntarily engaging in commerce with companies that don't uphold this value. To use a service that you were already forced against your will to purchase is not hypocritical.
Perhaps to avoid norms, you should avoid the term "appropriate" and instead substitute "market-determined." In the end: Pure libertarianism + human nature and self interest = unpleasant outcomes (which most people agree on.) Most people would solve this this by placing restrictions on pure libertarianism. Anarcho-capitalists are essentially the only ones who would declare "coercion must be wrong in all cases one hundred percent." The rest of us are willing to look at other things.
Ah, the good old "well most people agree with me, so I'm right" argument ;p
Actually, if the logical conclusion upon the abolition of slavery was that the slaves would be instead shot, we would like to take into account the consequences. You can just as easily justify it because of consequences rather than "innate evil."
I assume you mean they would be shot not as a coercive tactic by the slave master, but say they would all be killed accidentally or something; to say that the killing would be coercive just weakens your premise.
If the slaves would've been shot as a result of being free, then no rational slave would want to be freed, and at this point they would cease to be slaves because they are voluntarily obeying their master. Say one slave did, though, wish to be freed, knowing that he would be shot. What right do you have to force him to remain a slave?
And in fact, isn't it a bit hypocritical for somebody declaring that some things are "innate evil" to criticize others for making vlaue judgments?
Innate evil stems from the nonaggression axiom I mentioned above. I do acknowledge that this is the most vulnerable point of anarcho-capitalism, and as I said if you want to debate the nonaggression axiom, and by extension property rights at all, we can do that too. But if you accept the nonaggression axiom, the burden of proof is on you to justify the exceptions.
The article dealing with how DROs would never take over is laughable. It rests on such idiotic assumptions as the unprofitiability of war, assuming that arms manufacturers would never, ever think to manufacture arms and sell them to warlords because they would immediately go out of business (ignoring the fact that such things happen,) completely ignoring the military-industrial complex that exists today, unfounded assertions like "Clearly, all the other DROs will immediately cease doing business with Bob's DRO" and "Thus arms manufacturers would have to provide rigorous accounts of everything they were making and selling, to be sure that they weren't selling arms to some secret army, probably in the foothills of Montana." Yeah, arms manufacturers are really really careful that the arms they manufacture never get to Darfur or into the hands of factions that use child soldiers. That's why it doesn't happen at all today! It's a fucking joke.
Using current arms dealers under our statist system to demonstrate that something similar would likely happen under anarcho-capitalism is not an accurate comparison because many arms dealers today have exclusive contracts with governments that allow them to do the shady deals they engage in. The assumptions that you call idiotic I see as quite reasonable. War is unprofitable; war drains money to produce goods that are not reusable and many of which aren't useful in peacetime. Hell just look at the Iraq war, it's probably going to cost the US some 2 tril. You say it is unfounded that other DROs would stop doing business with one that tried to take over. What is wrong with this? If one DRO tries to take over, that means at some point they will be taking over the other DROs, which is of course not in the interest of the other DROs so they will cease doing business with the rogue DRO. A rogue DRO would have to have massive public support to become a government.
If you are arguing for laissez capitalism and calling it anarchism, you need to make the case for this being a system without rule. I think there are very good critiques of capitalism along the lines that a capitalist system will always be highly heirarchical with massively unequal distributions of power and wealth. Indeed, we see this happening in the most capitalist societies. How is this anarchy? The people without power and wealth are forced to serve those who do have power and wealth. They are not free. How is this anarchy?
Note, before you attempt to critique what I am saying, that I am not advancing any plan of my own here. Anarchy (no-rule) is an abstraction. The purity of this abstraction will never be reached, no matter how we try to go about it. Still, there is clearly a spectrum between anarchy and totalitarianism, and we can get closer to either extreme without necessarily ever fully reaching either. As an anarchist, again, you must make the case that laissez faire capitalism truly brings us closest to "anarchy," a state of no rule... no coercion.
"A free market means that those who don't have the money to buy what they need do not have a right to live."
Happy to continue the discussion privately or here.
Just wanted to drop in to thank CaptainMurphy for bringing so many good points and making such a strong case for an idea I really like to believe in but will always have doubts about.
From reading almost the entire thread I'd say the things you people will not agree upon are: - whether the free rider problem is a problem - whether statelessness will lead to war and dictatorship or not
On March 11 2008 00:46 nA.Inky wrote: Anarchy means "without rule."
Anarchy means without government. We don't need government to create rules for us. It was us who created government in the first place.
If you are arguing for laissez capitalism and calling it anarchism, you need to make the case for this being a system without rule. I think there are very good critiques of capitalism along the lines that a capitalist system will always be highly heirarchical with massively unequal distributions of power and wealth. Indeed, we see this happening in the most capitalist societies.
Make this case then. I would say that in generall, the more free economies have higher standards of living then those that are more centrally planned. And hierarchy is a product of government.
How is this anarchy? The people without power and wealth are forced to serve those who do have power and wealth. They are not free. How is this anarchy?
No, they are not forced to do serve anyone. That is precicely the difference between anarchism and govenrment. Government extorts people to fund it. Capitalist firms don't.
"A free market means that those who don't have the money to buy what they need do not have a right to live."
This, I think, is an unfair assertion. First, the prime rule of economics is that people have limited resources and unlimited wants. So no one can get everything they want. Also, even today we have thousands of charitable organizations thousands of people who volunteer in homeless shelters. These people wouldn't just go away if anarcho-capitalism was implemented. This line of thought, though, is generally used to justify welfare (stealing). What you're essentially saying is that poor people are more important than everyone else; that their utility is worth more than everyone elses combined, and it is okay to drain overall efficiency from the market to give to those who don't have as much. This leads to all types of inefficiencies which hurt consumers overall.
On March 11 2008 01:39 zatic wrote: Just wanted to drop in to thank CaptainMurphy for bringing so many good points and making such a strong case for an idea I really like to believe in but will always have doubts about.
Not a problem :D
From reading almost the entire thread I'd say the things you people will not agree upon are: - whether the free rider problem is a problem
So to summarize, I maintain that that the free rider problem isn't really a problem because there is no true distinction between public and private goods, and the market can provide any good better than the state. L's position has been that it's okay to arbitrarily draw a line somewhere, based on where he thinks this it is appropriate (never mind that everyone would probably draw it in a slightly different place). He used the comparison of a scientist testing a result and (this is how I took it, anyways) trying to determine whether, for instance, the actual results are far enough from the expected results to justify accepting or rejecting the null hypothesis, a process which is up to the judgment of the scientist. But here's what I see as the difference. Whether you apply the null or alternative hypothesis is not an objective measure. Whether or not the state can produce a particular good more efficiently than the market is an objective measure; we can compare two points on a supply curve or a PPF to see which is more efficent; and so you must have objective criterion to determine under what situations it is best to let the state handle affairs. But there is no such objective criteria.
- whether statelessness will lead to war and dictatorship or not
I stand by the points raised in the article as I defended them in the previous post.
Main Entry: an·ar·chy Pronunciation: \ˈa-nər-kē, -ˌnär-\ Function: noun Etymology: Medieval Latin anarchia, from Greek, from anarchos having no ruler, from an- + archos ruler — more at arch- Date: 1539 1 a: absence of government b: a state of lawlessness or political disorder due to the absence of governmental authority c: a utopian society of individuals who enjoy complete freedom without government 2 a: absence or denial of any authority or established order b: absence of order : disorder <not manicured plots but a wild anarchy of nature — Israel Shenker> 3: anarchism
From Answers.com:
1 Absence of any form of political authority. 2 Political disorder and confusion. 3 Absence of any cohesive principle, such as a common standard or purpose.
We can make it a semantics issue. I argue the word means "having no ruler." If you study the vast majority of anarchist literature, this is how the word is used. The answers.com definition is the best: "absence of any form of political authority."
Politics is about power. Politics are in play when your Mom tells you to clean your room or be grounded. Politics goes well beyond governments. Politics are everywhere, and everything is political in some sense. Therefore, anarchy must address more than governments.
As to the quote about free markets meaning those without money have no right to live, it is not an argument for a welfare state. Instead it is to highlight the play of power in a free market situation. I intentionally offered no alternative or solution.
L's position has been that it's okay to arbitrarily draw a line somewhere, based on where he thinks this it is appropriate (never mind that everyone would probably draw it in a slightly different place). He used the comparison of a scientist testing a result and (this is how I took it, anyways) trying to determine whether, for instance, the actual results are far enough from the expected results to justify accepting or rejecting the null hypothesis, a process which is up to the judgment of the scientist.
That position is vaguely correct, but the comparison is incredibly off. The comparison I've used repeatedly is one that matches a chemist's view on the spontaneity of reactions. Chemical reactions can be spontaneous, and yet not occur despite the presence of all the required reagents in a flask. The reason why most of these reactions will not occur and bring the species to a lower energy level is that like in the case of a rock on the mountain, it will not tumble downhill until it is pushed from the small depression it is currently in. This push is called the activation energy, or Ea.
In terms of economics, we can view it as the following: assuming there are various needs and wants, generally those with small Eas will be dealt with efficiently by the free market, because they have low start up costs and are thus easy to reach equilibrium. Those with massive Eas, however, like construction of a nuclear power plant, or research into a field which will not yield significant economic windfall in a generation (but are still cost effective over the entire span of research) will be much harder to reach equilibrium because of the scarcity of reaction events leading to the proper outcome. If nuclear reactor company A does a bad job, its not like concerned citizens can conjure up millions and millions of dollars for the creation of nuclear reactor company B. This extends to an incredible array of infrastructural elements, including highways, sewer systems, and nearly all other natural monopolies. Despite what you've stated, these monopolies ARE coercive, in that the only option to avoid them and exert market pressure on them is to move.
Now, there's the key point: movement of people is not a low Ea reaction for standard individuals. Typically it takes a lot in the way of planning and financial resources to uproot one's self, which is why the original argument of 'if you don't like it, move was posited.
On top of that, there's the priorities and direction of societies under the two different forms of government, and the consequences of a failed transition to your prefered method of non-government. Yours is based on the paramount supremacy of the individual, and the capability of corporations to provide for them, whereas democratic societies have an interplay of personal and community rights. Added to that, even a very slim government with minimal to 0 personal taxation (which is both possible and in existance in the world) can allow for near complete control of the free market in most matters. The question isn't whether or not there are slim government options, but rather that the government option can evolve to fit your ideal of how society should be directed, whereas the reverse is not true. If you believe, contrarily, that society should band together to form a highly socialized system in order to promote the well being of citizens based on their intrinsic humanity, for instance, there would be no way for that political will to express itself. The free market ISN'T evolutionary in that respect, unless it turns into a government, or develops an analogous hierarchy. In my rebuttals, I noted that a rich oligarchy would essentially develop into this hierarchy by default. While we have the option of voting out ineffective or improper leaders in a democratic government, no such option resides in an economic oligarchy, besides armed insurrection.
There's quite a bit more than that. Society has more of a role to play than a distributor of goods, which is something economists have problems quantifying, and thus understanding. A pure free market society would likely fracture under the crushing weight of class struggle, and has no method of preventing the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few dominant industrialists. This society is fundamentally flawed by the fact that its priority isn't the well being of its constituents.
Basically, you've taken a system which can adapt the best parts of a free market economy, and stripped from it the regulatory mechanism which keeps the system working for the people, instead of just working the people, like it did in the past. A more sensible approach would be to take the position that nearly every other economist in the world does, and refine the current system's hybrid benefits, without the risk of the world being plunged into the dark ages again.
Let's go through the history of mankind, slow and nice. It is intended to illustrate how the current state, i.e. evil government which makes you all red with rage, is in fact the exact product of your anarchism.
First, there were solitary people. [Note: Simplification. We would need to start before the history of man to actually cover this, with various pack animals.] They went around and enjoyed their anarchist freedom, making fur clothing and tiny straw houses. Everything was fine and dandy. Then, some of these solitary people banded together and figured, Hey, why the fuck are we making our own clothes and houses? Let's go rob somebody else's shit! They did, and solitary man was history - man was bound to mob together in families and tribes to protect their shit.
Now, at this point one might have expected all of mankind to make some kind of supermob. There was, however, one thing preventing this from happening - the world is more than one square mile large, and everybody can't be anywhere at once. An arbitrarily large supermob would overtax their lands and kill itself off. Instead, we had the largest-possible-groups-of-people forming, as limited by gradual agricultural advances (animal husbandry, farming, i.e. ad naseum).
Already at this point, you have governments developing. Take Egypt, where you eventually wind up with various religious leaders. Let's keep thing simple and undetailed. You have a fucking Pharao. For some or other reason (actually, this is a natural consequence of anarchy), the fucking Egyptians say, This motherfucker is our leader, we'll do whatever he says. The Pharao says, Hey, you Egyptians are a dandy bunch - all non-Egyptians have to pay me 50% of their BPP (Gross personal product). That way, we Egyptians can stop farming and instead start making swords and fucking pickaxes.
At this point, one and other moron goes Fuck this government shit, they are stealing my cash. These are, of course, the non-Egyptians, seeing as the Egyptians are getting free food and spending their time shaving their heads, fucking their non-Egyptian slaves and killing motherfuckers who don't pay their 50%BPP with their fucking pickaxes. Obviously, the forementioned morons are cut down and gutted, their entrails decorate the streets and the less stupid people realize, the best thing is to pay the 50%BPP and hope your wife isn't sexy.
One particularly stupid prick is going around thinking this is freedom, because there is no government. Well, yes, it is the freedom to do whatever the fuck the Egyptian with the pickaxe tells you to do or gave your entrails used for improvisational theatre. Great shit, right?
Now, one and other fuckwipe figures out, hey, this Egyptian government thing is really working out for them - they have fucking pickaxes, they fuck our women and goddamnit, we are slaving day and night. Let's make our own government and fucking kill these Egyptians.
Now, the Egyptians have played their cards right. They have pickaxes, remember, and nobody else does. They were the first to band together, so they have established a monopoly. Tough fucking luck.
As it happens, there is another government across the Mediterreanean. This government, the Roman Motherfucking Empire, happens to have even more people. They have got shortswords and tower shields and fucking iron brigandines. Their Emperor knocks on the Egyptians' door and says, hey, dickweeds, 25% of your BNP (Gross National Product) or we fucking feed you to the Huns.
So, we have these governments shitting all over people right's and flinging poo at eachother, basically making eachothers' lives miserable. War is really goddamn fucking profitable for the Roman Fatherfisting Empire - they are raking in taxes from all kinds of play-pretend governments around them within really having to lift a finger. Roman Women spend their time fucking Roman Men and gossiping, while Roman Men spend their time fucking Roman Women and Egyptian slaves and Greek boys and Hun Barbarians and drinking fucking wine and watching Gladiators battle eachother to the death.
This shit goes around and comes around for about 1700 more years, Romans taking turns fucking and getting fucked. Then some important stuff happens which kind of changes exactly how governments (read: large fucking groups of people who give eachother handjobs) extort lesser governments (read: smaller fucking groups of people who give eachother handjobs). This is some complicated fucking shit, but let's take a look at some of the simpler stuff:
- Boomsticks, i.e. rifles, combined with massive industry. For one thing, these motherfucking thundersticks can be massproducted, ten per head, and takes about three minutes of training to use. Whereas at an earlier time, a smaller group of well-armed and well-trained people could a huge fucking lot of catle in check, power now becomes much more evenly distributed per head. - Sophisticated economies, meaning people aren't taking a fucking spear and going to the forest to hunt boar every day, means that the demand for educated and cooperative labour grows. You can't threaten a guy with a fork to make him develop explosives and build fucking trains. When it takes three years of education to make a dickweed do his job properly, it is more economic to feed him well and take care of his health.
And, thus happens magic - whereas the government was earlier relying on slave labour, it now needs a system to make people shut their fucking mouths, learn their job and storm headfirst with a rifle towards the other motherfucking government whenever it is needed. We move from various despotisms, monarchies and feudal systems into nationalistic republics, because the forementioned can no longer supply educated labour and war-eager youth.
Note that slavery is still not completely out of fashion - it is just generally done abroad, in Africa, Asia and South America.
Now, we could have hoped that this meant the Roman Brotherboffing Empire was no longer extorting everybody within fifteen zillion leagues, and that is true. Instead, we have France trying to conquer the whole of fucking Europe (which it seems every country has to try at some point) and subjecting Italians, Spaniards and Germans to their rule. Great shit.
What happens, what happens? Well, big surprise, the British and the Russians and the godfuckingdamned Austrians scratch eachothers' backs and say, Hey, Vladmir, how 'bout them French, we don't want to have them fuck our wives and steal our food and piss in the mouths of our children. We need to make a larger goddamn mob than them.
As said as done, we get a new alliance. Cultural, religious and racial diversity, but more importantly the logistic impossibility of a super-European Empire create some sort of balance of power in Europe, and we proceed through a couple of World Wars to arrive in the Cold War.
Note, that at this point, everybody in the fucking world have picked a super-government, either US of fucking A with groupies or Soviet Russia and her cubs. Try and stay out of the shit, and the US and Russia shows up at your fucking door and shove their cocks down your throat.
Some countries entertain dreams of freedom and think large multinational alliances, i.e. governments, are stupid. These are the same which cough mansperm a few thrusts later.
Well, big surprise, Soviet Russian Cubs need to keep up with US of fucking A, so they invest ridiculous amounts into military (i.e. protection) so as to not get rubber-gloved by the US. Needless to say, US economy is about ten times as strong and eventually the Russian Bear collapses of exhaustion. The Cold War ends, the Cubs join the US, and, we are arriving at the end of the story here: We have one single motherfucking world wide alliance, i.e. NATO, ruling the world and doing pretty much as they damn well please.
At this point in time, technology has advanced so much that uneducated manpower is pretty much worthless, and natural resources most easily accessed through fair trade agreements, i.e. ecofuckingnomical extortion. Sell us your shit cheap, or nobody buys it and you die of fucking AIDS.
So, there you have it. Anarchism through about a hundred thousand years of the history of man, evolving from solitary man to the super-PDA known as NATO/UN.
This is exactly what happens. This is what is bound to happen. There is no magical, mysterious force at work, creating and orchestrating governments and the US. Large bodies of people fighting together survive, motherfuckers who don't die, and, simsalabim, we have a government. If you ignore the fucking letters, it is completely indistinguishable from a PDA.
There is no argument here. The world has, by necessity, gone through exactly what Captain Murphy advocates, and just as everybody has prophesized, you get large PDA-monopolies otherwise known as national states which extort people of taxes and provide protection. There is no difference between anarchism, whatever way you bag it, and modern national state socialism/capitalism. There are no external forces, there is no bullshit. This is the natural evolution of survival of the fucking fittest. We have no fucking choice - the national state and the post-modern Worldwide Alliance is the strongest, most sensible and only possible organization. It is the inevitable evolution of anarchy.
L's position has been that it's okay to arbitrarily draw a line somewhere, based on where he thinks this it is appropriate (never mind that everyone would probably draw it in a slightly different place). He used the comparison of a scientist testing a result and (this is how I took it, anyways) trying to determine whether, for instance, the actual results are far enough from the expected results to justify accepting or rejecting the null hypothesis, a process which is up to the judgment of the scientist.
That position is vaguely correct, but the comparison is incredibly off. The comparison I've used repeatedly is one that matches a chemist's view on the spontaneity of reactions. Chemical reactions can be spontaneous, and yet not occur despite the presence of all the required reagents in a flask. The reason why most of these reactions will not occur and bring the species to a lower energy level is that like in the case of a rock on the mountain, it will not tumble downhill until it is pushed from the small depression it is currently in. This push is called the activation energy, or Ea.
With Ea, there is a clear objectifiable formula to figure out what level of Ea is enough that it would cause the rock to fall. With economics, this cannot be quantified.
In terms of economics, we can view it as the following: assuming there are various needs and wants, generally those with small Eas will be dealt with efficiently by the free market, because they have low start up costs and are thus easy to reach equilibrium. Those with massive Eas, however, like construction of a nuclear power plant, or research into a field which will not yield significant economic windfall in a generation (but are still cost effective over the entire span of research) will be much harder to reach equilibrium because of the scarcity of reaction events leading to the proper outcome. If nuclear reactor company A does a bad job, its not like concerned citizens can conjure up millions and millions of dollars for the creation of nuclear reactor company B. This extends to an incredible array of infrastructural elements, including highways, sewer systems, and nearly all other natural monopolies.
Where do you draw the line? You say that it's hard for a group of citizens (entrepreneurs) to build a competing power plant. Sure, it's difficult to pool together enough money. What if I don't like the Burger King down the street. It would be hard for me to get enough money to start my own fast food chain, but enough peolple got together and decided to do it. There's no reason entrepreneurs can't pool their money together, it would just take alot of people and money. Other businesses require less people and money. Where is your cut off point for how much money is required to enter an industry that justifies government interference? Cost will always be a natural barrier to entry in any market, no matter the size; it is inescapable. I don't think it is appropriate or reasonable to decide on a certain point, using no objective criterion, where it is okay for government to intervene.
Despite what you've stated, these monopolies ARE coercive, in that the only option to avoid them and exert market pressure on them is to move.
Coercion is initiating aggression against someone to force them into doing something, or accepting your service. Consumers are not forced to pay monopolies. Even if the demand for a good is inelastic, it is not the producer that dictates the consumers preferences, and they can't be held responsible for them.
On top of that, there's the priorities and direction of societies under the two different forms of government, and the consequences of a failed transition to your prefered method of non-government. Yours is based on the paramount supremacy of the individual, and the capability of corporations to provide for them, whereas democratic societies have an interplay of personal and community rights.
My theory is indeed based on the supremacy of invidual rights. And when you speak of community rights, you are talking about ceding the freedoms of the individual- something I am already suspect of- to the judgment of the "community; other individuals. You are creating artificial hierarchy.
Added to that, even a very slim government with minimal to 0 personal taxation (which is both possible and in existance in the world) can allow for near complete control of the free market in most matters. The question isn't whether or not there are slim government options, but rather that the government option can evolve to fit your ideal of how society should be directed, whereas the reverse is not true. If you believe, contrarily, that society should band together to form a highly socialized system in order to promote the well being of citizens based on their intrinsic humanity, for instance, there would be no way for that political will to express itself.
I don't believe people "should" or "shouldn't" band together, but I do believe people should be free to make this decision for themselves. Government takes that choice away.
The free market ISN'T evolutionary in that respect, unless it turns into a government, or develops an analogous hierarchy. In my rebuttals, I noted that a rich oligarchy would essentially develop into this hierarchy by default. While we have the option of voting out ineffective or improper leaders in a democratic government, no such option resides in an economic oligarchy, besides armed insurrection.
I don't think a rich oligarchy would have to develop. If one did, it would be in the economic interest of another firm(either previously nonexistent or already within the oligarchy) to offer the same services at a lower price. So I don't grant your premise that these oligarchies would have to form. Even if they did form, I don't grant your implication that they are necessarily bad. I'm actually reading an article right now related to that, if you're interested: http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE9_2_2.pdf But I also dispute your conclusion. Customers have the option to stop buying from the oligarchy.
There's quite a bit more than that. Society has more of a role to play than a distributor of goods, which is something economists have problems quantifying, and thus understanding. A pure free market society would likely fracture under the crushing weight of class struggle, and has no method of preventing the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few dominant industrialists. This society is fundamentally flawed by the fact that its priority isn't the well being of its constituents.
Basically, you've taken a system which can adapt the best parts of a free market economy, and stripped from it the regulatory mechanism which keeps the system working for the people, instead of just working the people, like it did in the past. A more sensible approach would be to take the position that nearly every other economist in the world does, and refine the current system's hybrid benefits, without the risk of the world being plunged into the dark ages again.
I disagree with this because I believe regulating bodies can arise on the free market, assuming people wish to have regulation (which they clearly do).
Thanks for the history lesson. The point you are trying to make has already been discussed at length in this thread so I will not go over it in detail again. To go over it quickly; anarchy is not the same as anarcho-capitalism. Like any political philosophy, the general public must accept it or there will be revolution. Anarcho-capitalism has not been tried except for in a few rare instances, none of which you've mentioned. When people first came to be, they naturally formed communistic tribes. The fact that anarcho-capitalism has not thus far been successfully implemented on a long term basis does not mean it cannot work.
Where do you draw the line? You say that it's hard for a group of citizens (entrepreneurs) to build a competing power plant. Sure, it's difficult to pool together enough money. What if I don't like the Burger King down the street. It would be hard for me to get enough money to start my own fast food chain, but enough peolple got together and decided to do it. There's no reason entrepreneurs can't pool their money together, it would just take alot of people and money. Other businesses require less people and money. Where is your cut off point for how much money is required to enter an industry that justifies government interference? Cost will always be a natural barrier to entry in any market, no matter the size; it is inescapable. I don't think it is appropriate or reasonable to decide on a certain point, using no objective criterion, where it is okay for government to intervene.
I already drew the line repeatedly. And if you have an issue with that point, its a shame. The criterion have already been posited in the thread as well. Feel free to do more than skim over posts : ). The only time the 'point' varies, is when you vary your definition of what society's ultimate aim is. Even the Austrian scheme has its own assumption in this regard, which is built on an irrational position borne of preference. Despite that, the government system allows you to closely attain the Austrian system's goal, but also allows you freedom to adopt other configurations according to public opinion. Is that currently true and borne out by history? Yes. Even today there is a wide variety of different options for you to choose from across the globe. Again, your system doesn't give that identity option, ours does.
Coercion is initiating aggression against someone to force them into doing something, or accepting your service. Consumers are not forced to pay monopolies. Even if the demand for a good is inelastic, it is not the producer that dictates the consumers preferences, and they can't be held responsible for them.
No, coercion is not 'initial' aggression. Coercion is the act of using force to make something occur, period. If there is a monopoly on an essential (and don't state that food and water are the only essential goods, they just plain aren't) service, then the corporation which controls that service leaves no choice but to solicit payment for their service. Transport is a fantastic example. Clearly essential in an urban environment, because without it people simply cannot work, feed themselves, clothe themselves, or heat their houses. If roads in general aren't sufficient for you, take the case of a bridge. There may be multiple bridges between destination A and B, but the distance difference between the two can make paying a toll at one bridge a fait accomplis. Even then, consider the case of a single bridge system, and you've returned to the duplication error originally stated against your market efficiency if a solution was to come into effect by the free market. Any statements contrived in the form of "well, one could do xyz to correct that" are of the same form that I stated earlier in regards to how to deal with taxation. This is an indirect tax, and from your account, that would be stealing no matter what the return was.
I do believe that's the concrete proof for a reductio ad absurdium on your initial position too with regards to taxation, despite the fact that I already disproved it using the wallet bank reduction.
My theory is indeed based on the supremacy of invidual rights. And when you speak of community rights, you are talking about ceding the freedoms of the individual- something I am already suspect of- to the judgment of the "community; other individuals. You are creating artificial hierarchy.
No I'm not. There is nothing artificial about communities having rights as a summation of the individual rights of many trumping the individual rights of one. You do not have the right to build a nuclear reactor on my front lawn, not because the 'community' is raping your rights, but because your action is infringing on a collectively larger amount of individual rights in the form of the community. If your position is that individual rights are supreme, then community rights inevitably follow. The only way to escape from this dilemma is to argue that individual rights are not supreme and that there is another form of 'merit' other than being a human which confers rights. In your case, it would be wealth.
This, again, under the argumentation that you've stated yourself is ridiculous. You admit you've accepted individual rights as supreme, and thus unwittingly as you may, you have the choice between accepting that individuals in the free market society have no value intrinsically (as they do in democracy by a 'coercive' set of government mandated rights), or accepting that the 'community' must have rights by the simple summation of rights. That leads to another interesting example: without an altruistic overtone to society, there is no basis for the abolishment of human trafficking in your ideal society, since humans are goods in the form of labor. Even assuming that physical labour is not a predominant or valuable form of labour at this point, which is dubious in many underdeveloped areas, the sex trade has, and will likely continue, to use indentured workers.
Child labour is another type of economically sanctionable form of pseudo-slavery. Class friction between industrialists and workers in a largely ungoverned free market during many countries' industrialization period led to such large social problems that many which didn't have extensive natural resources or capital to maintain national control of developing industries overwhelmingly turned to socialist replies to their issues. What wealth redistribution does a pure free market have? Oh, None. That's why your reply to a rich oligarchy forming is false: How do you start up large competitive institutions when wealth concentrates itself in the hands of those who have wealth? You presuppose a large middle class with the ability to pool funds towards a large goal, but large middle classes have typically never been achieved without the aid of wealth redistribution. More importantly, societies with small middle classes tend to be overwhelmingly unstable.
I don't believe people "should" or "shouldn't" band together, but I do believe people should be free to make this decision for themselves. Government takes that choice away.
Government also takes away such extraneous choices as 'living in a thatched roof hut'. You clearly DO believe that there is a societal choice, since you haven't left society (which you can do). You've accepted the benefits of a governed system, yet refuse to remove yourself from that system in order to develop your ideal choice filled existence. What you're lamenting is that you cannot live outside of the government system while benefiting from all of its accoutrements. Like all choices, accepting something by necessity deprives you of something else. By choosing to write a reply here, you lose the ability to have flown to jamaica in the same time. Choices are finite, and eliminating them is in no way evil. What is good, however, is providing quality choices, and by your inability to separate the CURRENT stateless societies that exist from the obviously superior state based societies implies that you already realize that governments have given you fantastic options.
That has nothing to do with the efficient distribution of public goods, it has to do with your wishes to simply be a free rider on all issues that you can rationalize as acceptable as private.
Also, in many of your replies, you state that customers can exert a negative market pressure on companies that they don't agree with morally. This relies on customers being able to identify the products they're purchasing with the companies which manufacture them, which in many cases, is incredibly difficult. Second, you assume that customers care enough, which in many cases they clearly don't (Built here, sold in UK, for instance, as noted before). Third, you assume that consumers are rational, which they aren't. Four, you rely on consumers being informed. Each of these four pitfalls have been independantly verified by various economic models as being significantly important towards the purchasing power of consumers.
Take Dupont as a case study:
Without wikipedia, google, or any sources you wouldn't have a point of purchase, tell me what dupont manufactures, precisely, to the point that you can identify products with dupont as a supplier. Now, tell me that if you lived in easy asia and dupont was found to be spilling excess chemicals into a river in the US, if you'd boycott their goods (i'll do this one for you, you wouldn't even know about it :D). Lastly, even if you knew that dupont products were potentially bad for the world or some shit like that, but they cost 50% less than their competitors products, would you still buy them? Yes you would, because your bottom line would get much better.
The fact that anarcho-capitalism has not thus far been successfully implemented on a long term basis does not mean it cannot work.
The fact that XYZ has not thus far been successfully implemented does not mean it can't work, but that's the thing: we don't need it to work. Societies needed communist/socialist regimes to deal with certain social problems. What stimulus naturally draws people to anarcho-capitalism? Putative slightly increased efficiency with a massive side order of instability? No thanks.
I already drew the line repeatedly. And if you have an issue with that point, its a shame. The criterion have already been posited in the thread as well. Feel free to do more than skim over posts : ).
If I missed where you drew the line, please point it out. What I've seen you do is give two extremes from opposite sides of the spectrum, and use that to justify the existence of said line.
The only time the 'point' varies, is when you vary your definition of what society's ultimate aim is.
Everyone's 'point' is different because everyone has different preferences and ideas of ethics.
Even the Austrian scheme has its own assumption in this regard, which is built on an irrational position borne of preference.
The position of the Austrian "scheme" is that people should be able to determine how to spend their money based on their own preferences, not on anyone elses.
No, coercion is not 'initial' aggression. Coercion is the act of using force to make something occur, period.
Coercion is using force against someone; it involves infringing on their property rights. If company A lowers or raises their price, that is not using force against anyone.
If there is a monopoly on an essential (and don't state that food and water are the only essential goods, they just plain aren't) service, then the corporation which controls that service leaves no choice but to solicit payment for their service. Transport is a fantastic example. Clearly essential in an urban environment, because without it people simply cannot work, feed themselves, clothe themselves, or heat their houses. If roads in general aren't sufficient for you, take the case of a bridge. There may be multiple bridges between destination A and B, but the distance difference between the two can make paying a toll at one bridge a fait accomplis. Even then, consider the case of a single bridge system, and you've returned to the duplication error originally stated against your market efficiency if a solution was to come into effect by the free market. Any statements contrived in the form of "well, one could do xyz to correct that" are of the same form that I stated earlier in regards to how to deal with taxation. This is an indirect tax, and from your account, that would be stealing no matter what the return was.
So we can just group these into goods that have an inelastic demand, right? Anyways, if a firm charged "too much" (assuming such thing exists) the value of all property that rely on those roads is going to go down. People would stop buying houses in that area, and other people who don't depend on those roads but use them frequently anyways would stop patronizing them as well, so it is in the bridge owners ineterest to adjust to consumer demand.
I do believe that's the concrete proof for a reductio ad absurdium on your initial position too with regards to taxation, despite the fact that I already disproved it using the wallet bank reduction.
What you described above isn't a tax. Taxation is "pay me or I will take your property (or you)".
No I'm not. There is nothing artificial about communities having rights as a summation of the individual rights of many trumping the individual rights of one. You do not have the right to build a nuclear reactor on my front lawn, not because the 'community' is raping your rights, but because your action is infringing on a collectively larger amount of individual rights in the form of the community.
Disagree. The reason I do not have the right to build a nuclear reactor on your front lawn is because you own your front lawn. I would be violating your property rights, aggressing against you as an individual.
If your position is that individual rights are supreme, then community rights inevitably follow. The only way to escape from this dilemma is to argue that individual rights are not supreme and that there is another form of 'merit' other than being a human which confers rights. In your case, it would be wealth.
Please explain what community rights follow.
This, again, under the argumentation that you've stated yourself is ridiculous. You admit you've accepted individual rights as supreme, and thus unwittingly as you may, you have the choice between accepting that individuals in the free market society have no value intrinsically (as they do in democracy by a 'coercive' set of government mandated rights), or accepting that the 'community' must have rights by the simple summation of rights.
You have not shown how community rights must follow. The only belief I hold is that of property rights; people have the right to exercise their own discretion to use their property how they see fit, so long as they do not infringe on the property rights of others in the process.
That leads to another interesting example: without an altruistic overtone to society, there is no basis for the abolishment of human trafficking in your ideal society, since humans are goods in the form of labor. Even assuming that physical labour is not a predominant or valuable form of labour at this point, which is dubious in many underdeveloped areas, the sex trade has, and will likely continue, to use indentured workers.
Voluntary human trafficking would be permitted.
Child labour is another type of economically sanctionable form of pseudo-slavery.
If the contract between the child and his employer is voluntary, how is that slavery?
Class friction between industrialists and workers in a largely ungoverned free market during many countries' industrialization period led to such large social problems that many which didn't have extensive natural resources or capital to maintain national control of developing industries overwhelmingly turned to socialist replies to their issues. What wealth redistribution does a pure free market have? Oh, None. That's why your reply to a rich oligarchy forming is false: How do you start up large competitive institutions when wealth concentrates itself in the hands of those who have wealth? You presuppose a large middle class with the ability to pool funds towards a large goal, but large middle classes have typically never been achieved without the aid of wealth redistribution. More importantly, societies with small middle classes tend to be overwhelmingly unstable.
I would argue that oligarchies are not necessarily a bad thing. Here is an article I am currently reading on oligarchies and cartels, if you care to read: http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE9_2_2.pdf I don't think "high" natural barriers to entry are reason for government intervention. You seem to think there is an arbitrary point where a company is making "too much" profit (ignoring the fact that all the employees benefit, and it allows the company to expand and then hire people who were formerly unemployed, and that the consumers are willing to pay the price), that it is okay for the government to step in. I don't believe this to be the case.
Government also takes away such extraneous choices as 'living in a thatched roof hut'.
It does? I don't remember reading about the passing of a Thatched Roof Act...
You clearly DO believe that there is a societal choice, since you haven't left society (which you can do). You've accepted the benefits of a governed system, yet refuse to remove yourself from that system in order to develop your ideal choice filled existence.
The love it or leave it argument regurgitated. I should not have to forfeit my property to be free from tyranny.
What you're lamenting is that you cannot live outside of the government system while benefiting from all of its accoutrements.
What I'm lamenting is that I cannot live outside the government system without leaving my home and moving into the wilderness.
Like all choices, accepting something by necessity deprives you of something else. By choosing to write a reply here, you lose the ability to have flown to jamaica in the same time. Choices are finite, and eliminating them is in no way evil. What is good, however, is providing quality choices, and by your inability to separate the CURRENT stateless societies that exist from the obviously superior state based societies implies that you already realize that governments have given you fantastic options.
I think a western democratic government is better than any government that has more power, I just think that less government would be even better.
That has nothing to do with the efficient distribution of public goods, it has to do with your wishes to simply be a free rider on all issues that you can rationalize as acceptable as private.
This is bullshit and you know it.
Also, in many of your replies, you state that customers can exert a negative market pressure on companies that they don't agree with morally. This relies on customers being able to identify the products they're purchasing with the companies which manufacture them, which in many cases, is incredibly difficult.
With mass media and the desire for standards which most people have, this is not difficult, and there it is not less difficult in a capitalist society than in a government one.
Second, you assume that customers care enough, which in many cases they clearly don't (Built here, sold in UK, for instance, as noted before).
If they don't care, I don't think you have a right to force them to.
Third, you assume that consumers are rational, which they aren't. Four, you rely on consumers being informed. Each of these four pitfalls have been independantly verified by various economic models as being significantly important towards the purchasing power of consumers.
If consumers aren't rational or informed, sucks for them. What does this have to do with government?
Take Dupont as a case study:
Without wikipedia, google, or any sources you wouldn't have a point of purchase, tell me what dupont manufactures, precisely, to the point that you can identify products with dupont as a supplier.
Why are you saying I can't use any sources to find this info? What is the point of that?
Now, tell me that if you lived in easy asia and dupont was found to be spilling excess chemicals into a river in the US, if you'd boycott their goods (i'll do this one for you, you wouldn't even know about it :D). Lastly, even if you knew that dupont products were potentially bad for the world or some shit like that, but they cost 50% less than their competitors products, would you still buy them? Yes you would, because your bottom line would get much better.
Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn't. It depends if I, personally, thought the 50% price reduction was worth whatever level of pollution was caused. My point is that this decision is mine to make and no one elses. How I spend my money is my business.
Hey can we at some point pretty soon just agree to disagree? Most of the issues we're talking about stem from whether there is a real difference between public and private goods, or whether all economic goods are of the same character in that respect. Can we just agree that I think there is no difference, you think there is, and neither one of us will convince the other? We can go on endlessly about how this or that would function in a stateless society, but I would like to reiterate at this point what I said above that it is the institution which I think is evil, and getting rid of that should be the priority; not the consequences, just as with slavery.
Now I realize it isn't fair to ask this debate to stop since I am still posting here, and if you want to continue it I will oblige, but I do hope we can rap this up soon. Anyways, here is a quote I would like to share on morality:
"The first thing that philosophers must do is lead by example. A key ingredient in the moral ideal of a stateless society is that there is no such thing as positive obligations. Being born in a country does create a moral obligation to pay taxes. Being poor does not create a moral obligation for others to give you money. Being successful does not make you a slave; failure does not give you the right to be a parasite. Having children does not create a moral obligation for others to give them an education. Getting old does not create a moral obligation for others to pay for your retirement." http://freedomain.blogspot.com/2007/06/freedomain-radio-faq-part-2.html
No, it really isn't. Efficiency can be achieved through a multitude of intra-system means without the gross inefficiencies associated with rebuilding pretty much all of our main institutional players for compatibility with your ideal world. Since that's case, efficiency cannot be the sole reason you wish for a switch, and since you haven't posited a 'goal' which you wish to achieve in the current system, but cannot due to its flaws, your motive falls straight back to you wanting to opt out of as much as possible.
It does? I don't remember reading about the passing of a Thatched Roof Act...
Zoning laws and fire ordinance regulations do pretty well there, don't they : ). A thatched roof hut in the middle of an urban area would be evicted and condemned.
What I'm lamenting is that I cannot live outside the government system without leaving my home and moving into the wilderness.
Your home and the utilities built to support it are direct results of the government. If you want to opt out of their system, stop trying to do so by stealing their goods.
Please explain what community rights follow.
I did, thanks for reading the entire post.
Voluntary human trafficking would be permitted.
Involuntary human trafficking would also be permitted, and encouraged under your system, as it is in the sex trade.
Disagree. The reason I do not have the right to build a nuclear reactor on your front lawn is because you own your front lawn. I would be violating your property rights, aggressing against you as an individual.
Front lawn is a euphemism for nearby. Say you own the lot across the street, now you build your nuclear plant. According to your logic, there's no problem here.
So we can just group these into goods that have an inelastic demand, right? Anyways, if a firm charged "too much" (assuming such thing exists) the value of all property that rely on those roads is going to go down. People would stop buying houses in that area, and other people who don't depend on those roads but use them frequently anyways would stop patronizing them as well, so it is in the bridge owners ineterest to adjust to consumer demand.
Remember how you posited that moving is not acceptable? Net flux of people from the area which got gouged is not sufficient to justify the gouging in the first place. More importantly in the road situation is that there ARE people who are dependant on those roads, and they have no recourse but to move to a place where the same situation has no societal safeguards against the exact same abuse. Again: moving is not an acceptable solution because it has prohibitive cost for most individuals. The very fact that the road building company has a captive market makes them a monopoly in a certain area, one which can be far more coercive than government based on the directives of both institutions. You've essentially ignored that and pretended like a road building company will not have a sizable portion of an urban area under its control. Even then, you've admitted that there is no recourse for someone other than relocation in the case of a particularly aggressive company.
Either way, the coercive taxation analogue reoccurs, which makes your entire drive for implementing this rest on efficiency, which you can't prove, or a selfish desire to free ride as much as possible. Human desire being what it is, and given the risk/reward ratio for a simple efficiency gain over something massive like emancipation or free agency, the only logical choice, again, is the third one.
I would argue that oligarchies are not necessarily a bad thing.
Oh good, then you accept a form of government, making the rest of this topic moot. Good day, sir.
What you described above isn't a tax. Taxation is "pay me or I will take your property (or you)".
The above is "pay me or you have no way to make money and die in a month when your cash supply runs out". That's even worse than jail time. Proof stands.
If I missed where you drew the line, please point it out. What I've seen you do is give two extremes from opposite sides of the spectrum, and use that to justify the existence of said line.
I'm not going to do your reading for you. You've consistently ignored points because you didn't understand them, couldn't dispute them, or didn't feel like touching them. I'm not going to go and start reading for you because you can't be asked. Why would you tax my time in that manner? That's stealing.
I think a western democratic government is better than any government that has more power, I just think that less government would be even better.
Okay, and in attaining your preference, you'd remove that choice from everyone else living in your environs, or you'd be hypocritically living off their tax improvements to your surroundings. Again, leave your house and start your own commune, or you doing the first thing that philosophers must do, which, I believe, is leading by example.
Cake.
Eating of Cake.
You can have but one.
I should not have to forfeit my property to be free from tyranny.
You don't wish to pay the Ea for exacting the change you want, but you'd request that everyone else that enjoys the current system give up their world for yours? This purely selfish stance explains both your ineptitude in seeing anything but a purely individual viewpoint, and why you want to ride on other people's work as much as possible :/.
If consumers aren't rational or informed, sucks for them. What does this have to do with government?
Its one of the fundamental assumptions you've been repeatedly vomiting out when faced with instances of market failure and other large flaws in pure capitalism. That's what it has to do with your proposed replacement for government: everything.
Why are you saying I can't use any sources to find this info? What is the point of that?
One does not walk into a store with pre-researched lists of environmentally friendly peanutbutter brands, from peanut to storefront. Why would you pretend to have information that other consumers generally don't have at the point of purchase? Oh, because you'd like to idealize a capitalist transaction so that it fits a perfect free market system.
My point is that this decision is mine to make and no one elses. How I spend my money is my business.
Haha, No. That's wrong. It isn't no one else's decision, because they're all gravely impacted by the result of your choices. If this entire generation sold the next one into 24/7 acid rain, deforestation and mass starvation, you're saying the next generation shouldn't have agency because of the fact that they didn't react in the market to your choices? I guess that's what you're saying, because that's how capitalism has always worked from its inception.
Now I realize it isn't fair to ask this debate to stop since I am still posting here, and if you want to continue it I will oblige, but I do hope we can rap this up soon.
Okay, then the fastest way to end this is to just stop posting.
Most of the issues we're talking about stem from whether there is a real difference between public and private goods
No, they don't. Most of the issues I'm talking about are created by a lack of agency of a wide swath of population based on the fact that the two systems have dissimilar aims by definition. This lack of agency is only partly created by the lack of true public goods. That said, 'public goods' and 'private goods' are both subclasses of 'goods' which is the natural state of an item or service, with the only difference being that private goods are assured to be yours by some coercive force. Similarly, there is no assurance of private goods without the very coercive force you seek to dismantle in another form, which by definition will grow and reassemble into government, as it already does in half your articles in all but name.
But yeah, most of my main points were flat out ignored. I've systemically answered all of yours, whereas you largely used one-liners to debate semantics. I can see why you want to end this.
No, it really isn't. Efficiency can be achieved through a multitude of intra-system means without the gross inefficiencies associated with rebuilding pretty much all of our main institutional players for compatibility with your ideal world. Since that's case, efficiency cannot be the sole reason you wish for a switch, and since you haven't posited a 'goal' which you wish to achieve in the current system, but cannot due to its flaws, your motive falls straight back to you wanting to opt out of as much as possible.
And now you're changing your disputed claim. I want to opt out. What you said was that I wanted to opt out and continue using government provided services. Big difference.
My goal is freedom. I believe that efficiency is a natural by-product of freedom.
Your home and the utilities built to support it are direct results of the government. If you want to opt out of their system, stop trying to do so by stealing their goods.
How exactly am I stealing goods that I pay for?
I did, thanks for reading the entire post.
I thought you said we weren't playing this card anymore? Anyway, I did read your post, and you did not explain how 'community rights' naturally arise from individual rights, which doesn't even make sense since all these community right must step on at least one persons individual rights in the process.
Involuntary human trafficking would also be permitted, and encouraged under your system, as it is in the sex trade.
No, it wouldn't. PDAs would protect against it. They may not be perfect, but they would be better then the police.
Front lawn is a euphemism for nearby. Say you own the lot across the street, now you build your nuclear plant. According to your logic, there's no problem here.
Right, there's no inherent problem. But are you saying this nuclear plant produces pollution? Is it hurting the people who live nearby, infringing on their property rights? Then the people who live near by may have a strong court case, like how things are currently. If the plant is not causing pollution, then the nearby citizens have no right to forcibly prevent another person from building on their own land. What if, for instance, I don't want you to build a house next to me because the construction noise will bother me? Do I have the right to compel you, by force, not to build the house even if you own the land next to me?
Remember how you posited that moving is not acceptable? Net flux of people from the area which got gouged is not sufficient to justify the gouging in the first place.
Gouging is just a pejorative for charging a price, arbitrarily deemed by some as being "too high" (never mind that the market is clearly willing to pay that price). I don't need to justify "gouging"; you should justify why it is okay to force others not to sell their own goods at any price they choose.
More importantly in the road situation is that there ARE people who are dependant on those roads, and they have no recourse but to move to a place where the same situation has no societal safeguards against the exact same abuse. Again: moving is not an acceptable solution because it has prohibitive cost for most individuals. The very fact that the road building company has a captive market makes them a monopoly in a certain area, one which can be far more coercive than government based on the directives of both institutions. You've essentially ignored that and pretended like a road building company will not have a sizable portion of an urban area under its control. Even then, you've admitted that there is no recourse for someone other than relocation in the case of a particularly aggressive company.
If one firm decides to charge lower prices then the one you decide is charging an "unreasonable" price, then everyone is going to flock to his neighborhood and he will make a profit. So every road providing firm has incentive to lower his price, and that's how market price gets established. Road prices, btw, would likely be worked into housing contracts so people know what they're getting into before they sign them.
Either way, the coercive taxation analogue reoccurs, which makes your entire drive for implementing this rest on efficiency, which you can't prove, or a selfish desire to free ride as much as possible.
What analogy? The one you said before that somehow coercive taxation can arise on the free market? That's false. And no I haven't attempted to prove that the free market is more efficient because I thought we were taking for granted that the free market is better than a centrally planned economy. The burden of proof is on you to show why some goods are exceptions to this rule. And enough with telling me that I want to free ride. I have no such intentions, so don't assign them to me.
Oh good, then you accept a form of government, making the rest of this topic moot. Good day, sir.
Sorry, I thought you were talking about oligopolies, not actual oligarchies..
The above is "pay me or you have no way to make money and die in a month when your cash supply runs out". That's even worse than jail time. Proof stands.
It's "pay me, or don't and I won't do anything to you or force you to pay me." Consequences beyond that are outside the scope of whether or not it is coercive.
I'm not going to do your reading for you. You've consistently ignored points because you didn't understand them, couldn't dispute them, or didn't feel like touching them. I'm not going to go and start reading for you because you can't be asked. Why would you tax my time in that manner? That's stealing.
Or you could just admit that you never actually drew the line. Not that it matters, since we're probably the only ones still following this thread.
Okay, and in attaining your preference, you'd remove that choice from everyone else living in your environs, or you'd be hypocritically living off their tax improvements to your surroundings.
My preference is that people should get to choose what institutions they give their money to! If people want to band together and pitch in money to fund services in their community, that's fine. All I'm saying is don't force others to join. Let them decide for themselves.
Again, leave your house and start your own commune, or you doing the first thing that philosophers must do, which, I believe, is leading by example.
I'm working on trying to get people to realize the evils of government, that government cannot grant you freedoms, it can only take them away. Going off to join a commune isn't leading, it's running away from the problem. I'd rather work on getting rid of government here.
You don't wish to pay the Ea for exacting the change you want, but you'd request that everyone else that enjoys the current system give up their world for yours? This purely selfish stance explains both your ineptitude in seeing anything but a purely individual viewpoint, and why you want to ride on other people's work as much as possible :/.
Lol so now you're ragging on me for using sources to help prove my point? Get bent. As for everyone else who 'enjoys' the current system; they would be free to voluntarily fund similar organizations in a free society. The only difference is that those who don't want to fund or participate in any type of organization like that would be free to opt out. You're asking "why not let the people who currently enjoy stealing from you to redistribute your wealth continue doing so? Selfish!" The only selfish stance is to say that it's okay to force others to fund whatever the hell you want to fund.
Its one of the fundamental assumptions you've been repeatedly vomiting out when faced with instances of market failure and other large flaws in pure capitalism. That's what it has to do with your proposed replacement for government: everything.
Most people are rational and somewhat informed. You just brought up a hypothetical saying what if people aren't rational or informed. Everyone except retards are rational, and information isn't perfect whether or not you have government. Let me try one; hey, what if government turns the military on its citizens and rapes the women and kills the men. So much for government society!
One does not walk into a store with pre-researched lists of environmentally friendly peanutbutter brands, from peanut to storefront. Why would you pretend to have information that other consumers generally don't have at the point of purchase? Oh, because you'd like to idealize a capitalist transaction so that it fits a perfect free market system.
So you are saying researching products would be impossible under stateless society? Research would be just as possible whether or not you have an oppressive institute.
Haha, No. That's wrong. It isn't no one else's decision, because they're all gravely impacted by the result of your choices. If this entire generation sold the next one into 24/7 acid rain, deforestation and mass starvation, you're saying the next generation shouldn't have agency because of the fact that they didn't react in the market to your choices? I guess that's what you're saying, because that's how capitalism has always worked from its inception.
If it's not my decision, who's is it? Yours? The person you vote into office, even though I didn't vote him in? You're just deciding that there is one person who is more fit to handle my property than I am. If everyone is 'gravely impacted' by the result of my choices, lets just cede all my choices over to government because, hey, government knows best.
Okay, then the fastest way to end this is to just stop posting.
I'm sure you know how hard it is when you vehemently disagree with anothers position ;D
No, they don't. Most of the issues I'm talking about are created by a lack of agency of a wide swath of population based on the fact that the two systems have dissimilar aims by definition. This lack of agency is only partly created by the lack of true public goods.
Yes, they do. Most of your argument for government intervention stem from the idea that the community could get hurt by the actions of an individual- externalities. So it does go back to the public goods theory.
That said, 'public goods' and 'private goods' are both subclasses of 'goods' which is the natural state of an item or service, with the only difference being that private goods are assured to be yours by some coercive force.
Lol, just present the very basis of dispute as a blanket fact. I can do that too: private goods and public goods are not real distinctions, all economic goods are economic goods.
Similarly, there is no assurance of private goods without the very coercive force you seek to dismantle in another form,
Difference again between murder in cold blood and murder in self defense.
which by definition will grow and reassemble into government, as it already does in half your articles in all but name.
Except that participation in stateless society is voluntary. You may not see that as a big difference, but I see it as the biggest.
But yeah, most of my main points were flat out ignored. I've systemically answered all of yours, whereas you largely used one-liners to debate semantics. I can see why you want to end this.
I covered all your main points, I cut out snippets that were either just empty rhetoric or weren't making any point. And it's not like you've ever omitted any text I've posted... Anyway, I want to end this debate because we are going in circles over the validity of the public goods theory.
Not a direct argument by any means, but if you're in the mood here is a fun rant against government:
On March 11 2008 07:12 Zherak wrote: Read a-fucking-gain. There is no communism. There is nothing but pure fucking PDA.
PDAs, by definition, are not coercive. Governments, by definition, are coercive.
Hint: Coercive PDAs, i.e. governments, eat non-coercive PDAs alive, simply because they are that much more efficient. A PDA is never going to be able to protect you from a coercive PDA, i.e. a government. Simply because, a government is a PDA with more freedom, thus stronger.
You can pretend anarcho-capitalism is something very different from regular anarchy, which is as far as you can explain nothing but let's take anarchism and pretend that people are going to act in this specific way even though they have no incentive to do so whatsoever. Essentially, one dose anarchism and one dose naive.
I give you altru-communism. It's like communism, except we pretend that people have no self-interest and are going to look out for everybody else. Really, it is the best government. I promise. It would work if only people were altruist.
Or maybe you prefer übermensch-tyranny. It is kind of like tyranny, except all people are geniuses.
Hint: Coercive PDAs, i.e. governments, eat non-coercive PDAs alive, simply because they are that much more efficient. A PDA is never going to be able to protect you from a coercive PDA, i.e. a government. Simply because, a government is a PDA with more freedom, thus stronger.
Coercive PDAs depend on public support. They can't get big without public support. If they tried to use coercive tactics against a society that didn't want government, there would be revolution. If enough people didn't currently want coercive PDAs, there would be revolution. I don't think, if it were even possible, dismantling government this instant would be stable. But if enough people are able to realize the problems of having a government, I think it can be stable.
You can pretend anarcho-capitalism is something very different from regular anarchy, which is as far as you can explain nothing but let's take anarchism and pretend that people are going to act in this specific way even though they have no incentive to do so whatsoever. Essentially, one dose anarchism and one dose naive.
If people are as evil as you seem to think they are, we would be living in chaos. There would not be thousands of charitable organizations, or people protesting on the street for animal rights or free Tibet or what have you. Humans, by nature, have morals, that are not given to them by government. I'm with Ghandi on this one: "We find the general work of mankind is being carried on from day to day be the mass of people acting as if by instinct....If they were instinctively violent the world would end in no time...It is when the mass mind is unnaturally influenced by wicked men that the mass of mankind commit violence." Communism ignores human nature, not capitalism.
govt is not necessarily coercive, just like yer mom is not necessarily coercive. it just has the position of having the initiative in organization and also the last say. leaving aside the absurdity of capitalists going against the concept of government in general, the simple fact is that humans are limited in their ability to process information and their organization follow patterns outside of their choices. in fact, the very space of their choices is very much a peculiar and open question. government happens to be the form through which public actions take place, and the question of participation is posed to the individual, whether to take part. leaving aside again the question of ultimate justification for govt coercion, we can admit that this is not a justified solution without saying that the individual then is absolved of all obligations and duties (not necessarily in the ordinary sense). we do this by treating cooperating with the government as a fully open ethical question. on the point of whether one should endeavor to contribute to society, help others, or simply choose the solution of most welfare or good life for all, the anarchist does not have any defense. in fact, most of them sweep aside the question, saying coerced contribution is not right. but maybe it is right, maybe there is nothing honorable in rights in defense of callousness. if it is honorable, then surely it is still bad to be callous, even if you have the right to do so. that the right to be bad is given more weight than the badness of the activity speaks volume. perhaps the central motivation for anarchocapitalism is reactionary self regard, that, we don't really give a shit about the rest of the bums and we'll frame our understanding of political theory on this crude impulse. if one is not under possession of such a logic, the very fact of arguing for the rights instead of the good is already taking a particular social attitude. this is fair game for condemnation.
if we even recognize the point of social welfare in the first place, and keep in mind the limits of human organization, it is easy to see that the govt or some form of centralised decisionmakign is arguably necessary. (the anarchist does not seem to object to forms of centralised decisionmaking, as the status of corporations and really the entire capitalistic system of production demonstrates. you are fine with a factory owner directing the behavior of laborers, and coercively at that) but at this point, already the question concerns instrumentality. the effectiveness of a certain political arrangement of power and institutions that would be best fit to deliver the consequences we care about. on this point, the anarchocapitalist position is sweepingly blind.
the point is, most of your average 'anarchocapitalists' are simply alienated from government and society in general, and hence they respond to govt as if the govt is holding them at gunpoint in an alley. well, part of this perception is really their own attitude. one may in fact be involved in government without also 'being a slave.' because government, as it stands, is how society operates. it is a begrudging fact of political reality, but one that has weighty functions, functions we care about. it is fine to argue about the forms of government, but one must do so on the condition of being a participant in society, with a sense of commitment to others and the general welfare.
I believe that efficiency is a natural by-product of freedom.
you are painfully wrong. not to mention, efficiency is not the only criterion for judging a society.
in any case, coercion and power in society extends far beyond the simple idea of government.this is a common blind spot for anarchocapitalists, in fact, this is the critical blindspot. if you are privileging somehow this vague idea(vague in the sense of incoherent without the concept of government) of a private group's coercive activities, while condemning the arguably more sophisticated, progressively minded, and introspective practices of government, your theory is pretty bunk already.
Hint: Coercive PDAs, i.e. governments, eat non-coercive PDAs alive, simply because they are that much more efficient. A PDA is never going to be able to protect you from a coercive PDA, i.e. a government. Simply because, a government is a PDA with more freedom, thus stronger.
Coercive PDAs depend on public support. They can't get big without public support. If they tried to use coercive tactics against a society that didn't want government, there would be revolution. If enough people didn't currently want coercive PDAs, there would be revolution. I don't think, if it were even possible, dismantling government this instant would be stable. But if enough people are able to realize the problems of having a government, I think it can be stable.
You can pretend anarcho-capitalism is something very different from regular anarchy, which is as far as you can explain nothing but let's take anarchism and pretend that people are going to act in this specific way even though they have no incentive to do so whatsoever. Essentially, one dose anarchism and one dose naive.
If people are as evil as you seem to think they are, we would be living in chaos. There would not be thousands of charitable organizations, or people protesting on the street for animal rights or free Tibet or what have you. Humans, by nature, have morals, that are not given to them by government. I'm with Ghandi on this one: "We find the general work of mankind is being carried on from day to day be the mass of people acting as if by instinct....If they were instinctively violent the world would end in no time...It is when the mass mind is unnaturally influenced by wicked men that the mass of mankind commit violence." Communism ignores human nature, not capitalism.
Coercive PDAs do not by any means rely on public support. They rely on monopoly on brute force, which may be gained through a small, favourized and powerful elite (read: military dictatorships) or through general acceptance (read: modern democracies). I outlined why a modern democracy is more efficient given the current technological level in my original long-ass post.
PS: How the fuck can you stupid enough to claim that: a) People don't go to war because they aren't evil and war isn't profitable. b) People will revolt against coercive PDAs. Question mark.
It is the same fucking thing. Large group of people sticking bayonets up eachother's number twos. There is not qualitative difference between what happens in a war and what happens in a revolution.
No, evil people do not live in a disorganized chaos. This was also meticiously detailed in my first longass post. Even if everybody was purest Hannibal Lecter evil, government would happen. Put four hundred crazy cannibals on an Island - do you think they are going to live in disorganized chaos, or do you think a hundred of them are going to team up and eat the other motherfuckers at leisure? Sure, as the others have been eaten, you will have the group fragmenting into some smaller groups, same thing again.
(SEE AMERICAN FUCKING SURVIVOR. DO THEY ORGANIZE, WHEN THEIR ONLY GOAL IS TO WIN INFINTE DOLLARS, OR DO THEY LIVE IN A DISORGANIZED CHAOS?)
BIG GROUP = STRONG SMALL GROUP = WEAK
BIG GROUP SMASH SMALL GROUP. BIG GROUP REMAINS.
It's as simple as it fucking gets. And, no you cannot have a big group without order.
The second thing we need to explain is why coercive PDAs are necessarily stronger than non-coercive PDAs. The first, simple truth is that a coercive PDA is just a non-coercive PDA with an advantage. A coercive PDA doesn't have to coerce, always and in all forms. So, a government can be no-coercive wherever that might be the strongest option, and else be non-coercive just like the PDA, and thus only be stronger.
My big, initial longass post also details why PDAs become coercive. Take the Egyptians - they start out as a non-coercive PDA (well, a fucking PDA can't coerce before it gains at least one member non-coercively). The Egyptians hunt and farm together and share the burden of raising children, which is, for obvious reasons, much more efficient than not doing so.
Well, however, we now have a strong PDfuckingA called Egypt. There are other PDAs around - let's Babylonians, Israeli and Zulus. Between some of these PDAs, there exists a balance of power, so that neither PDA benifits from going to war and enslaving the other. However, everybody who is not under their own hugeass PDA are going to get shafted. There is nothing to lose for Egypt if they enslave all insufficiently protected peoples around them. Which is just what has happened throughout history time and fucking time again - we enslaved Indians, Africans, Asians, Aboriginals, stole their land and raped their wives. Because it fucking works. The USA is here today, Native AfuckingMerica isn't.
The only theoretical possibilites for a non-coercive PDA to stay non-coercive are: - a) balance of power. Everybody has a non-coercive PDA to protect them. This has never happened, ever, in history. There may be a reason. - b) altruism from a large-ass PDA, which essentially loops back into A - if a PDA actually gives a crap about non-PDA members, then they will, to this or that extent, actually be PDA-members. Not members-with-all-benifits, but members.
If you agree this far, I can start ramming reasons why stable non-coercive PDA-equillibrium doesn't happen down your throat. It is all fairly logical, though.
PS: How can, strictly speaking, a PDA be non-coercive? A PDA works like a corporation: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. What is the difference between withholding a service, i.e. food and protection, and threatning to excercise force? Is there magical difference between active and passive measures? You clearly define throwing your white ass in prision as coercive. How about, owning all the fucking farmland and not feeding you unless you do whatever the heck we tell you to, is that coercive?
I believe that efficiency is a natural by-product of freedom.
you are painfully wrong. not to mention, efficiency is not the only criterion for judging a society.
Tell that to the Roman Empire, the Native Americans, Imperial Japan, Afganistan, Iraq. Non-efficient socities, or governments, or cultures, or whateverthefuck, get bossed around and vanishes.
You might just as well say that fitness is not the only criterion for evolutionary success.
survival in the evolutionary sense is not the only judge. we are free to evaluate the societies based on other criteria of our choosing. this is rather basic.
the aim of the evolutionary approach is explanatory, not normative. it may shape a certain outlook on things, but to engage in this outlook is not the same as simply going over basic mechanics.
if you take the pda approach, one can say that being in a civil society is already getting in a pda, and this thread is simply a board meeting of such a pda that is not aware of its own nature.
On March 11 2008 18:10 oneofthem wrote: survival in the evolutionary sense is not the only judge. we are free to evaluate the societies based on other criteria of our choosing. this is rather basic.
the aim of the evolutionary approach is explanatory, not normative. it may shape a certain outlook on things, but to engage in this outlook is not the same as simply going over basic mechanics.
if you take the pda approach, one can say that being in a civil society is already getting in a pda, and this thread is simply a board meeting of such a pda that is not aware of its own nature.
Hum, that is exactly what I have been doing?
Of course you are free to evaluate however you want. I am simply saying than any anarcho-capitalist society will inevitably evolve into what we have today, because what we have today evolved from the anarcho-capitalistic status quo. Therefore, non-government is non-possible. This voids the whole anarcho-capitalistic discussion - in the non-governmental sense, it is impossible, in the PDA->government sense it is exactly what we have today.
why did you raise issue with my statement then. there is nothing in your 'simply saying' that would contradict what i have said.
i was talking about the gesture of selecting normative economic policy based on efficiency alone. that sort of efficiency, talking about productive efficiency and growth, is not the same as evolutionary fitness.
On March 11 2008 17:15 oneofthem wrote: govt is not necessarily coercive, just like yer mom is not necessarily coercive.
Government IS necessarily coercive. If you don't pay taxes, you can rest assured they will throw you in jail.
it just has the position of having the initiative in organization and also the last say. leaving aside the absurdity of capitalists going against the concept of government in general, the simple fact is that humans are limited in their ability to process information and their organization follow patterns outside of their choices. in fact, the very space of their choices is very much a peculiar and open question. government happens to be the form through which public actions take place, and the question of participation is posed to the individual, whether to take part.
No, it isn't. The government doesn't ask you to pay your taxes, they force you to. And if 51% of the people vote in someone who says he's gonna take action that the other 49% resent, no one asks them if they don't want to participate.
leaving aside again the question of ultimate justification for govt coercion, we can admit that this is not a justified solution without saying that the individual then is absolved of all obligations and duties (not necessarily in the ordinary sense). we do this by treating cooperating with the government as a fully open ethical question. on the point of whether one should endeavor to contribute to society, help others, or simply choose the solution of most welfare or good life for all, the anarchist does not have any defense.
The anarchist position is that these choices should be just those; choices. Not mandates.
in fact, most of them sweep aside the question, saying coerced contribution is not right. but maybe it is right, maybe there is nothing honorable in rights in defense of callousness. if it is honorable, then surely it is still bad to be callous, even if you have the right to do so. that the right to be bad is given more weight than the badness of the activity speaks volume.
When yo say the right to 'be bad', you mean the right to be secure in ones own property. I think the right to force unwilling citizens to give up their money for a cause that someone else thinks they should is bad.
perhaps the central motivation for anarchocapitalism is reactionary self regard, that, we don't really give a shit about the rest of the bums and we'll frame our understanding of political theory on this crude impulse.
Anarchocapitalism is caring about everyones right to not be stolen from. There are tons of people now who voluntarily staff homeless shelters and donate food and time to help the less fortunate. No one would prevent this from happening.
if one is not under possession of such a logic, the very fact of arguing for the rights instead of the good is already taking a particular social attitude. this is fair game for condemnation.
The problem is, different people have different ideas of what is good. You're forcing your idea of good on everyone else and using it to justify theft.
if we even recognize the point of social welfare in the first place, and keep in mind the limits of human organization, it is easy to see that the govt or some form of centralised decisionmakign is arguably necessary. (the anarchist does not seem to object to forms of centralised decisionmaking, as the status of corporations and really the entire capitalistic system of production demonstrates. you are fine with a factory owner directing the behavior of laborers, and coercively at that) but at this point, already the question concerns instrumentality.
I'm fine with factory owners using coercion? Where did I say that? My whole point is that I'm against coercion. Corporations enter in to voluntary contracts with citizens. Governments force contracts down peoples throats. That is the key difference.
the effectiveness of a certain political arrangement of power and institutions that would be best fit to deliver the consequences we care about. on this point, the anarchocapitalist position is sweepingly blind.
Obviously this "we" is not all inclusive. If we (all inclusive) care about something, then we wouldn't need to be coerced into doing it. So when you say 'we', what you really mean is that there are some people who don't care about it, but you force them to participate in it anyways. You put your subjective judgment about how to use their money above their own judgment.
the point is, most of your average 'anarchocapitalists' are simply alienated from government and society in general, and hence they respond to govt as if the govt is holding them at gunpoint in an alley. well, part of this perception is really their own attitude. one may in fact be involved in government without also 'being a slave.'
Lol. Anti-government is not anti-society. It is pro-freedom. And you say "as if" the government holds people at gun point. How can you even question that? If you don't give them money, they take you to jail. If you resist going to jail, they shoot you.
because government, as it stands, is how society operates. it is a begrudging fact of political reality, but one that has weighty functions, functions we care about. it is fine to argue about the forms of government, but one must do so on the condition of being a participant in society, with a sense of commitment to others and the general welfare.
There you go again, deciding what people must care about. Hey I think you must care about me getting an HD tv. I'm just gonna run over to your house with a 44 magnum and take your money so I can buy it. Since afterall, you say its okay to force people to care about other peoples needs.
in any case, coercion and power in society extends far beyond the simple idea of government.this is a common blind spot for anarchocapitalists, in fact, this is the critical blindspot. if you are privileging somehow this vague idea(vague in the sense of incoherent without the concept of government) of a private group's coercive activities, while condemning the arguably more sophisticated, progressively minded, and introspective practices of government, your theory is pretty bunk already.
It's possible for corporations to act coercively, just like it's possible to commit murder even though we have laws against it. But there are safeguards against both. In state society, coercion is legalized. So even though it's impossible to get rid of all coercion, you don't have to sanction it. And lol at government being "sophisticated" and "progressively minded"; government is the most corrupt institution known to man, and they can't seem to stop going to war all the damn time.
the distinction between 'government is not necessarily coercive' and 'government has coercive practices' is vast. im sleepy right now, but the rest of the stuff is essentially the same. you are operating also with a naive view of property. i dunno how else to say it, but property is a coercive relationship.
Coercive PDAs do not by any means rely on public support. They rely on monopoly on brute force, which may be gained through a small, favourized and powerful elite (read: military dictatorships)
You're assuming that there is a coercive PDA to start with. Once one exists it is harder to get rid of, but since people would have the right to own guns, they would be able to resist. Since one wouldn't naturally exist, it would be incredibly hard for one to gain a monopoly. Once it started trying to take territory and extort customers, the other legitimate PDAs would band together to fight it. So it would require people to want a coercive PDA for one to come about.
or through general acceptance (read: modern democracies). I outlined why a modern democracy is more efficient given the current technological level in my original long-ass post.
General acceptance = public support.
PS: How the fuck can you stupid enough to claim that: a) People don't go to war because they aren't evil and war isn't profitable. b) People will revolt against coercive PDAs. Question mark.
Watch it with the insults. Obviously we don't agree with each others position, but try exercising alittle courtesy. a)Governments go to war. Individuals don't go to war, and corporations don't go to war. b)If people didn't want coercive PDAs, of course they would revolt.
No, evil people do not live in a disorganized chaos. This was also meticiously detailed in my first longass post. Even if everybody was purest Hannibal Lecter evil, government would happen. Put four hundred crazy cannibals on an Island - do you think they are going to live in disorganized chaos, or do you think a hundred of them are going to team up and eat the other motherfuckers at leisure? Sure, as the others have been eaten, you will have the group fragmenting into some smaller groups, same thing again.
(SEE AMERICAN FUCKING SURVIVOR. DO THEY ORGANIZE, WHEN THEIR ONLY GOAL IS TO WIN INFINTE DOLLARS, OR DO THEY LIVE IN A DISORGANIZED CHAOS?)
BIG GROUP = STRONG SMALL GROUP = WEAK
BIG GROUP SMASH SMALL GROUP. BIG GROUP REMAINS.
It's as simple as it fucking gets. And, no you cannot have a big group without order.
Just because people organize, it doesn't mean anarchocapitalism has to fail. As I said before, more people would have to accept it, but if enough people do, it doesn't matter if some people are evil because they wouldn't be able to impose their will on everyone else.
The second thing we need to explain is why coercive PDAs are necessarily stronger than non-coercive PDAs. The first, simple truth is that a coercive PDA is just a non-coercive PDA with an advantage. A coercive PDA doesn't have to coerce, always and in all forms. So, a government can be no-coercive wherever that might be the strongest option, and else be non-coercive just like the PDA, and thus only be stronger.
A government is coercive by its very nature. All laws it enacts that take away liberties (all that violate the nonaggression principle) are coercive. Again, if a PDA became coercive in anarchocapitalist society, the only way it could survive is if people wanted it to, otherwise it would lose all its patrons to non-coercive PDAs that would squash the coercive PDA. It's not like it can just click its heals and gain a monopoly.
My big, initial longass post also details why PDAs become coercive. Take the Egyptians - they start out as a non-coercive PDA (well, a fucking PDA can't coerce before it gains at least one member non-coercively). The Egyptians hunt and farm together and share the burden of raising children, which is, for obvious reasons, much more efficient than not doing so.
Well, however, we now have a strong PDfuckingA called Egypt. There are other PDAs around - let's Babylonians, Israeli and Zulus. Between some of these PDAs, there exists a balance of power, so that neither PDA benifits from going to war and enslaving the other. However, everybody who is not under their own hugeass PDA are going to get shafted. There is nothing to lose for Egypt if they enslave all insufficiently protected peoples around them. Which is just what has happened throughout history time and fucking time again - we enslaved Indians, Africans, Asians, Aboriginals, stole their land and raped their wives. Because it fucking works. The USA is here today, Native AfuckingMerica isn't.
While its okay to see how many times you can fit 'fuck' into a history lesson, it's not really relevant. Non of these societies were ever anarcho-capitalistic.
The only theoretical possibilites for a non-coercive PDA to stay non-coercive are: - a) balance of power. Everybody has a non-coercive PDA to protect them. This has never happened, ever, in history. There may be a reason. - b) altruism from a large-ass PDA, which essentially loops back into A - if a PDA actually gives a crap about non-PDA members, then they will, to this or that extent, actually be PDA-members. Not members-with-all-benifits, but members.
No, there is no reason why a PDA has to become coercive.
PS: How can, strictly speaking, a PDA be non-coercive? A PDA works like a corporation: you scratch my back, I scratch yours. What is the difference between withholding a service, i.e. food and protection, and threatning to excercise force? Is there magical difference between active and passive measures? You clearly define throwing your white ass in prision as coercive. How about, owning all the fucking farmland and not feeding you unless you do whatever the heck we tell you to, is that coercive?
Besides the fact that owning all the fucking farmland and not feeding you unless you do whatever the heck we tell you to, is unrealistic in anarcho-capitalist society and has only happened with government structure, the difference between withholding a service and initiating aggresion is that withholding a service doesn't violate anyone elses property rights. Shooting someone in the head does( their face is their property). By your logic, every firm ever is coercive. McDonalds won't give me my chicken nuggets unless I give them $4. How dare they hold out on me!
EDIT: THE FOLLOWING POST IS NOT WRITTEN WITH A DISTINCTION BETWEEN GOVERNMENTS AND PDAs AS THE FORMER VIOLATING PROPERTY RIGHT AND THE LATTER NOT DOING SO. I HAVE USED THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN PHYSICAL COERCION (WHICH IS, OF COURSE, THREATNING TO VIOLATE A PERSON'S BODY, WHICH BY YOUR CLAIM IS HIS PROPERTY) AND NON-PHYSICAL COERCION (ALL OTHER MEANS, SUCH AS WITHHOLDING GOODS AND SERVICES). THIS DISTINCTION AMOUNTS TO THE SAME.
Seeing as you obviously don't understand the words you are reading, or are simply electing to not give actual replies, I am going to try going at this with short sentences:
FIRST: AMERICAN SURVIVOR This is a television show. Every week, all participants vote for one person to be removed from the island. The person who recieves the most votes is removed. The person who is the last to remain wins about a metric fuckton of dollars. (They don't vote when they are only two people left, but that's besidse the point.)
Now, the only incentive here is earn a metric fuckton of dollars. The people may opt to act purely out of selfinterest or do something else entirely. It really does not matter.
What happens in every single one of these shows is that a majority of the participants join up. They vote off each and every one not in the group, until only that majority is left.
Then, the group is fragmented into a smaller group, a majority and a minority. The new minority is voted out.
Repeat ad naseum.
In short: Self interest gathers in a large group and slaughters everything else. Pure evil (i.e. pure self interests) does not turn into chaos. It allies and dominates.
This is a pretty good model of human behaviour. Note how exactly the same happens in these shows as happened in the real world throughout the entire course of history. Note also how this behaviour contradicts your claim that if everybody was evil, there would only be chaos. There is nothing more evil than pure self interests, yet there is no chaos. There is order.
Note also that this majority group is coercive. After is has attained a majority of voters, the only thing you can do is join up. The only defense is trying to attain majority first.
SECOND: ARMED CONFLICT
Revolution is armed conflict. PDA vs PDA is armed conflict. PDA vs armed civilians is armed conflict.
The only way armed civilians can fight a PDA is by grouping (i.e. forming their own PDA). We now have a PDA vs PDA, or a war. This is the very thing you seem to consider impossible because it isn't profitable.
In other words, you have two theories which contradict eachother. Either, war happens or revolution doesn't.
THIRD: CHANGING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
Your assumption is that AnCap can work, while it has never done so before, because we can make people be AnCap-istic. Who is this we? Why hasn't it happened before?
Communism can not work because it, by your claim, contradicts human nature. Why can we not make people be Communistic?
FOURTH: WHAT IS COERCION?
This was an open challenge to you. By your claim, the difference between a government and a PDA is that a government is a coercive PDA. To properly understand how this is a difference, I wanted you to tell me what is coercion and what is merely exchange of services.
A government obviously makes laws. It then acts on its own members with (non-)lethal force in accordance with these laws.
A PDA also has to excercise (non-)lethal force. There is no other way to preven a lunatic from stabbing you with a knife. It actually does this towards non-members.
Maybe the thing here is that a PDA only excercises force to prevent others from excercising force. Essentially, you forbid the use of force for any other purpose than to prevent the use of force. Is this correct?
If so, what is the qualitative difference between physical force (i.e. muscle, gun, pistol, whip, fucking Egyptian pickaxe, Teutonic knight with a heavy lance) and other forms of force? Why is the use of the first kind of force necessarily evil (after all, by your claim, governments are evil, coercion is evil, and this is the reason you want AnCap - to get rid of governments)?
Here we go: We have an isolated room. In this room there are only four people. These are as follows: - Healthy adult male. - Crippled twenty year old girl, paralysed neck and down. - Twelve year old boy. - One year old girl.
Also, there is a machine in a corner. This machine, when a code is entered, dispenses food and water. As it happens, the only person to know this code is the healthy, adult male.
Now, by your claim, the healthy adult male should not excercise any physical force (this is evil, and we get a government, which is bad, while AnCap is good). Thus, he cannot take any physical action towards any of the others.
However, by your claim, the healthy adult male is entirely in his right to use other, non-physical means of coercion. Seeing as the other three people in question are completely incapable of getting food or drink on their own, it is obvious that the healthy adult male will completely dominate this group. Using his all-powerful means of coercion, he can make the twenty year old girl suck on his weener (else, after all, she is not getting any food, and she will most likely comply to this). He can do anything he wants to - he holds absolute power, and I figure people are going to be outraged if I start going graphical on what he does to infants, paralysed girls and a twelve year old by.
He would also have held this power if he was allowed to excercise physical force. Both AnCap and good old evil self-interest lead to the same thing. Clearly, there is something non-good about how we are defining coercion here.
It doesn't take extreme amounts of insight to realize you can have similar situations in real world examples, if less extreme. The main idea is that some form of non-physical power can be used in the exact same tyrannic way as physical power.
Now, let's add a twist to our thought experiment. We add three burly biker men to this room. Still, only the adult male knows the sercret code for food and water. We now have two possible scenarios again:
PDA, i.e. physical coercion is out: - The burly biker men are completely powerless, and are subject to healthy adult's male every whim. They are disgusted to see what the paralysed girls consents to do. Coercion by non-physical force is, after all, not coercion. However, being good AnCap's by nature (even as laughable as the idea is, seeing as AnCap by your claim is not in human nature), they are powerless to do anything to stop this. Healthy adult male (if maybe somewhat twisted of mind) rules our room with an iron fist and orchestrates the sickest of orgies.
Non-PDA, i.e. physical coercion is in: - The burly biker men tell the healthy adult male Hey, fuckwipe, stop mouthfucking paralysed girl or we fucking feed you your own poop.. At this point, we have the typical hostage situation: If neither party backs down, the healthy adult male chews down his own excrements and is killed, whereupon all others die of starvation. If either party backs down, the other holds supreme power. If they come to an agreement, (i.e. burly biker men do not feed adult healthy male his own (and their) excrements, adult health male does not oralize paralysed girl, healthy adult male provides food and drink for all parties in exchange for reasonable services, such as backrubs and occasional worship), we arrive at a much better equillibrium that the PDA-equillibrium.
So, as we can see by this example, ruling out physical coercion, while it does change the exact balance of power, is not necessarily beneficial for the whole group, nor necessarily harmful. It depends on the situation. While the typical scenario shows how physical force fucks shit up, this is clearly not necessarily the case.
The only thing which actually mattered in the above example was clearly a balance of power - total power, not physical. A total imbalance screws things up. There is nothing more balanced, in theory, about removing physical force from the equation.
And, thus, your only distinction between PDA and government (as far as you have presented it to me) vanishes. You either need to present a new one or rework your whole theory.
Appendix 1: You may want to claim that the core of the problem in the healthy-adult-male model is how he controls their access to food and water (which are necessary for life), and that there would not have been any problem if he did not. You may very well place each party in an individual, isolated cell which provided all they needed to survive. You now give healthy adult male the control of allowing these people to leave their cells to go to a common entertainment room for exactly one hour, before they are automagically returned to their cells. The adult male will once again be able to force the others to do just about everything.
Appendix 2: You may want to say that adult healthy male, by being the gifted man he is, should have all the benifits he is able to leverage from his power. By your claim, this is only true if his power stems from non-physical strength, i.e. sheer genius, technological advantage or sex appeal. The logic here is nowhere to be found.
Appendix 3: You may want to give the sucker argument that my hypothetical is unrealistic (it is, in truth, outright ridiculous). It does, however, merely illustrate, and accurately illustrate, what happens in any situation lacking balance of power. It also illustrates how physical force might just as well provide a balance as it might remove a balance.
Appendix 4: You may want to claim that adult healthy male is a sexually obsessed and twisted man, by no standards healthy, but very much both adult and male. Essentially, this is the hypothetical that people are not self-interested but altruistic, or that self-interest and altruism calls for the same behaviour is a given situation. This is, of course, ridiculous, but for the sake of completion, let's go there.
If self-interest and altruism coincided, there would be difference between PDA, government or anything. Nobody acts against both self-interest and altruism. If anything is against human nature, this is. (Actually, a distinction between self-interest and altruism is ridiculous. Altruism merely creates a self-interest for others' interests.)
People are altruistic and not selfish is the other possibility. This has time and time again been your reasoning for communism not working. You do after all claim to be AnCap, and the main tenet of capitalism is that people act out of selfishness, and that an AnCap system employs this self-interest for the whole's benifit. This is in conflict with the opening assumption.
On March 12 2008 07:42 Zherak wrote: EDIT: THE FOLLOWING POST IS NOT WRITTEN WITH A DISTINCTION BETWEEN GOVERNMENTS AND PDAs AS THE FORMER VIOLATING PROPERTY RIGHT AND THE LATTER NOT DOING SO. I HAVE USED THE DISTINCTION BETWEEN PHYSICAL COERCION (WHICH IS, OF COURSE, THREATNING TO VIOLATE A PERSON'S BODY, WHICH BY YOUR CLAIM IS HIS PROPERTY) AND NON-PHYSICAL COERCION (ALL OTHER MEANS, SUCH AS WITHHOLDING GOODS AND SERVICES). THIS DISTINCTION AMOUNTS TO THE SAME.
This logic is absurd. If there is no distinction (even though I clearly pointed out what the distinction is), then either all coercion is bad, meaning that every single decision a person makes is evil, or all coercion is acceptable, meaning there would be absolute chaos.
Seeing as you obviously don't understand the words you are reading, or are simply electing to not give actual replies, I am going to try going at this with short sentences:
Seeing as you don't understand how irrelevant your examples are or the difference between coercion and non coercion, I find it funny that you blindly persist without understanding how my replies prove you wrong.
FIRST: AMERICAN SURVIVOR This is a television show. Every week, all participants vote for one person to be removed from the island. The person who recieves the most votes is removed. The person who is the last to remain wins about a metric fuckton of dollars. (They don't vote when they are only two people left, but that's besidse the point.)
Now, the only incentive here is earn a metric fuckton of dollars. The people may opt to act purely out of selfinterest or do something else entirely. It really does not matter.
What happens in every single one of these shows is that a majority of the participants join up. They vote off each and every one not in the group, until only that majority is left.
Then, the group is fragmented into a smaller group, a majority and a minority. The new minority is voted out.
Repeat ad naseum.
In short: Self interest gathers in a large group and slaughters everything else. Pure evil (i.e. pure self interests) does not turn into chaos. It allies and dominates.
This is a pretty good model of human behaviour. Note how exactly the same happens in these shows as happened in the real world throughout the entire course of history. Note also how this behaviour contradicts your claim that if everybody was evil, there would only be chaos. There is nothing more evil than pure self interests, yet there is no chaos. There is order.
Note also that this majority group is coercive. After is has attained a majority of voters, the only thing you can do is join up. The only defense is trying to attain majority first.
The rules of the game force participants to vote people off one at a time. All strategy must be based around this. This is not so in the real world, so it really doesn't matter what people do on Survivor (there are of course plenty more differences, but that is the most important).
SECOND: ARMED CONFLICT
Revolution is armed conflict. PDA vs PDA is armed conflict. PDA vs armed civilians is armed conflict.
The only way armed civilians can fight a PDA is by grouping (i.e. forming their own PDA). We now have a PDA vs PDA, or a war. This is the very thing you seem to consider impossible because it isn't profitable.
In other words, you have two theories which contradict eachother. Either, war happens or revolution doesn't.
I never said war can't happen, but I maintain its less likely then in state societies. You are taking the assumption for granted that PDAs will fight each other, or always try and become oppressive. It will often be in the interest of PDAs not to fight, since fighting cost money and lives and if your PDA is constantly getting into fights it will dissuade potential and current customers.
THIRD: CHANGING HUMAN BEHAVIOUR
Your assumption is that AnCap can work, while it has never done so before, because we can make people be AnCap-istic. Who is this we? Why hasn't it happened before?
There are a few brief instances of anarcho-capitalism working, but this is a red herring.
Communism can not work because it, by your claim, contradicts human nature. Why can we not make people be Communistic?
Because communism assumes people will work without economic incentive.
Your fourth argument does present a very interesting scenario. I find your logic to be flawed because you are saying that withholding a good from someone is coercion. If that is so, then you are 'coercing' me if I ask you to give me your computer for free and you refuse. All property rights break down, and you have pure chaos. In your scenario, for example, if both the man and the girl received an income of $500/month and the man instead of charging a blowjob charges $1 per meal, is he still being coercive? Where do you draw the line, in price, for what constitutes coercion? You are relying on the idea that people have the right to forcibly take from others. You have not shown that what you describe is coercion, you've just found one unrealistic situation where not allowing coercion puts one person in a bad spot. That would indeed be an unfortunate scenario for the girl, but it does not prove that government coercion is okay. It is not just unrealistic, though, it is not even similar to any conceivable real situation. If there is a monopoly of a particular industry in a town, and the people think the monopolist is charging "too much", the towns people have ways of exerting pressure on the monopoly such as they can all decide to ostracize him and cease selling anything to the monopolist, and his quality of life would decrease dramatically. In the real world there is also opportunity for another firm to enter the market. And of course, we are talking about one rare situation that has just about no chance of occuring in an actual anarcho-capitalist society, and ignoring all the untold millions who have been hurt or killed due to the coerdcive actions of government.
I agree with you that altruism is just taking a self-interest in the interest of others. I don't know if you meant that as part of your argument (I don't see it as such). If we pretend, for a moment, for semantics sake, that the distinction exists, I think we can agree that 99% of people are, to some extent, altruistic. Most people, by nature, also are more self-interested than altruistic, but still both. Communism requires people to be more altruistic than selfish, but anarchism can work within the confines of human nature; that people are more selfish than altruistic. No form or lack of government could work if people were entirely self-interested and not at all altruistic.
in any case, coercion and power in society extends far beyond the simple idea of government.this is a common blind spot for anarchocapitalists, in fact, this is the critical blindspot. if you are privileging somehow this vague idea(vague in the sense of incoherent without the concept of government) of a private group's coercive activities, while condemning the arguably more sophisticated, progressively minded, and introspective practices of government, your theory is pretty bunk already.
It's possible for corporations to act coercively, just like it's possible to commit murder even though we have laws against it. But there are safeguards against both. In state society, coercion is legalized. So even though it's impossible to get rid of all coercion, you don't have to sanction it. And lol at government being "sophisticated" and "progressively minded"; government is the most corrupt institution known to man, and they can't seem to stop going to war all the damn time.
no. i owning a piece of land is by definition coercive. rights are in conflict as far as people can interact and occupy the same physical space, etc. and there are various other formulations in which no physical contact is necessary for rights to conflict. such as ip. you are basically taking serious problems like property and distribution as nonexistent, and that is the basis of yer philosphy.
no. i owning a piece of land is by definition coercive. rights are in conflict as far as people can interact and occupy the same physical space, etc. and there are various other formulations in which no physical contact is necessary for rights to conflict. such as ip. you are basically taking serious problems like property and distribution as nonexistent, and that is the basis of yer philosphy.
??? Far from taking the problem of property as non-existant, it is the very basis of my philosophy. My philosophy is that stealing someone elses properly is universally immoral. Or put another way, the initiation of violence is universally immoral. To advocate any form of government is to deny this principle. And if you deny the validity of property rights, you are saying it is okay to steal. This is advocating utter insanity, because if the initiation of violence can be moral, then chaos will ensue. Please explain how you owning land is coercive.
On March 12 2008 15:42 EmeraldSparks wrote: Well you said child labor is okay.
You furthermore said prostitution is okay.
So...
You asked if I found it wrong. I personally find child prostitution disgusting, but if the child voluntarily enters into the contract (ignoring the question of at what point does a child gain free will and reasoning skills and assuming that the child does), then no one has the right to initiate force against two people voluntarily engaging in sexual behavior.
I have a question for you; if the senate, following all the proper democratic procedures, votes to amend the constitution to legalize rape, does that make rape just or moral?
However, it's slightly more likely that one out of three hundred million people will be inclined to prostitute children than one hundred fifty million people.
Also, suppose the child does not have free will. Suppose the child is six. Now what? Can you 'initiate force,' violating the non-aggression principle?
How is it unjust if it was decided by the democratic procedures that you accept as being able to determine justice?
However, it's slightly more likely that one out of three hundred million people will be inclined to prostitute children than one hundred fifty million people.
The scenario I described isn't particularly likely, but the idea that congress could pass immoral legislation we have clear evidence of. Slavery was legal for a long time, and the 'war on drugs' is still going on, and congress voted to send troops into Iraq (the latter two examples both being funded by coercion against the American people).
Also, suppose the child does not have free will. Suppose the child is six. Now what? Can you 'initiate force,' violating the non-aggression principle?
If the child does not have free will, then he can not enter into voluntary contracts and thus anyone having sex with him would be initiating aggression against him, so defending the child would not be an initiation of force.
EPT
Anarchy" worked, because in situations without government or state, people did what occurred naturally. Anarchism, on the other hand, complete with PDA's, is a more recently conceived and developed political philosophy. People in early anarchies had no conception of anarchism, merely the absence of formal authorities, and thus were lead (or misled) to believe that anarchy could not be stable. The development towards an anarchist society, therefore, requires a deliberate and conscious development on the part of men, including the various aspects of anarchism that show that it can indeed be stable."
![[image loading]](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/70/CPI1913-2006.svg/800px-CPI1913-2006.svg.png)
