Anarcho-capitalism, why can't it work? - Page 48

On September 18 2010 22:51 teekesselchen wrote:

No end? It only takes a few decades to make a growth expectation of 5% a year go explode into over a thousand percent. At that point you almost have no employees left, all working for you barely recieve any loan and you still have to build a few hundred percent more items at the same cost. There are limits to growth. Worst case would be that every company stopping to grow gets swallowed by a still growing company, resulting in one company sololey dominating the market. That's the point where growth can stop following current logics. But not before that.

On September 18 2010 20:01 scion wrote:


Idealistic? I merely stated what it was meant to be.Time and again I say this. In an unrestricted market, the most dominant firm will eventually take over the majority of the market share. History has taught us this. Election replaces the government. There are no equivalent replacement for a monopoly.

What about necessary goods? like gasoline? Speaking of which, who should BP answer to if there were "no representation of the public interest"? Are you gona stop buying BP oil to protest for the spill? because people attempted that and BP is doing just fine.

On September 18 2010 23:04 TanGeng wrote:

Again my role in this debate is not to support anarchist capitalism. When you are arguing against anarchist capital address that to Yurebis. I'm only here to demolish false statements and unsophisticated arguments:

On September 19 2010 00:07 Djzapz wrote:
Intellectual dishonesty, nice! The only way to defend this ideology.

Consumers benefit from pricing wars between oligopolies and unrestrained innovation by market leaders.

On September 19 2010 03:41 L wrote:


Ignoring history: A hallmark of not caring if your conclusions are right or not.

On September 19 2010 03:41 L wrote:


Ignoring history: A hallmark of not caring if your conclusions are right or not.

On September 18 2010 22:35 Yurebis wrote:

No. You're cherry picking evidence to correlate with the great depression. Simply asserting it to be casually related won't do.
And not being able to see how people would manage risk, absent the socialized watchguards that always fail, is an argument from ignorance. If you want me to explain how, I could, but I'm not going to for someone who just proclaims that it's impossible and apparently has no interest to know. Ask me properly and I may oblige.

Who controls the supply of shoes in ancap? Whoever makes shoes, obviously; why is it an issue to start with? Are you entitled to having things and services? I hope you don't think that.
Free, noncoercive institutions, profit off realized demand. If a bank is found to be corrupt, it loses reputation and goes bankrupt, instead of you know, persisting no matter what in case the state supports it.
Will a shoe seller become a hegemony and exploit everyone with their terrible, overpriced shoes? I don't know, but I would think not, and the market incentives to prevent that are more responsive than political ones. In fact, political interests would tell you that the tendency to centralize beyond return is something that the state does more often, and incentivizes with every regulation.

The banks are already a monopoly, and already use the state. You seem to have the causation chain inverted. Banks don't emerge out of proportion first, then raise their own private armies to coerce the population. That is economically unfeasible. Banks would have to overcharge their customers in order to not only provide the usual banking services, but to stockpile weapons and militias until the day they're able to gamble it all. A much easier way to massively coerce - and the way it has been done so far - is to use the legitimized statist apparatus that already exists, and pay some ten thousand dollars in lobby, leaving the police force and federal agents to be paid by the slaves themselves...

You don't get to make the population pay for it's own slavemasters UNLESS the population doesn't see it as coercion. You, the outlaw institution, would just go bankrupt in ancap. I hope this was enough of a briefing.

On September 18 2010 19:12 scion wrote:
Firms exist to make profit. Who is going to pay these investigators for what reasons? Let's say there was a demand for fraud investigators. Under current system, it is the representative of the public interest, aka the state, that is paying the investigators.

Without such entity, who is supposed to pay these guys? NYSE? the Investors?

Fraud firms have no incentive to pay for obvious reasons.

Honest firms have no incentive because they wouldn't use/need the service.

Investors would pay for auditing a firm they would like to invest but for fraud investigation? why should they pay when it wasn't their fault?

It could be managed by the stock exchange organization, yeah. They can charge a minimal, <1% fee on every transaction that occurs. Maybe they already do that, I don't know, stock market is not my forte, but it's hardly difficult to charge a service for people voluntarily and publically joined in a certain market environment.

Honest firms and investors don't have an incentive to catch the cheating opposition? Are you really saying that? Certainly they do, and certainly everyone in the stock market would be willing to ingress to certain rules and fees that make the market possible. Dishonest firms that don't simply wouldn't be able to enter. And guess what, if it's something that no one can agree to, then too bad, everyone misses out on the opportunity of having a stock market period. No rules, no game, but at least no one will be cheated. Though of course, I believe that they will agree on some viable model. It's too much money to be missing.

On September 18 2010 19:12 scion wrote:


I don't think you understood the lemon argument.

Let me lay the argument out, using Health insurance industry as an example.

Let's say there are 2 types of people, the healthy and the unhealthy.

The unhealthy people want health insurance because they know they will have to go see a doctor often. (bad family history, smoker, bad life style, ect...)

Where as healthy people sort of want health insurance if its cheap. They won't be needing it much after all.

Basic coverage plans will be good deal for the sickly people. The result is people who are confident about their needs will purchase health insurance. Meaning they WILL have to use the insurance at some point.

As you probably know, insurance cannot thrive with most of the customers making a claim. Insurers are forced to cut benefits and raise the premium to cover its cost, causing people in the middle (sort of healthy) to cancel because its too expensive. This forces insurance companies to raise the premiums even higher in order to stay in business. In the end, only the most sickly and the rich will be able to afford health insurance.

Sure, the health insurance company can attempt to make more thorough background check in order to make better estimate, but the nature of this business dictates that they will NEVER be able to accurately guess a person's medical cost. If insurance companies cannot estimate the cost better than its consumer, it will simply go out of business under the burden of claims. Sickly consumers also have plenty of incentive to lie about their history.

Insurance industry can only thrive under "mutual ignorance". That's why theft/fire/automobile insurance sort of work. where as for health, you KNOW your own health. You KNOW your family history. Insurance companies dont.

Sigh. I *have* addressed the issue. Your insurance example just reverses the knowledge advantage. In that, customers can assess risks better than the business, and they can kind of rip off the insurance companies and other honest customers. So insurances become more expensive, and/or honest customers are driven out. Okay, what is wrong with that? You yourself have answered how to better deal with risks - you raise costs because the risks increased. Big whoop-dee-doo. That's what insurance companies do. Believe me, they know how to best allocate their resources, because if they did not, they would go broke either to their own faults, or to better competing actuaries.

What the STATE does however.. does NOT solve such an issue. What can they do, if not merely enforce their own limited knowledge, their arbitrary risk assessment onto everyone? How can they know that's ideal? How can you know it's ideal? I say you cannot, the only way you could, is if you let consumers and business adapt to the best of EVERYONE's knowledge. Any deviation from that, is necessarily subpar. Either too much insurance will be bought, and the market gets further inflated, further overpriced, or too little, which well, also increases costs overall because people are unprotected from risk. The STATE does not have the necessary market signals to know what to do, they only have their inefficient bureaucrats who could care less what happens to the economy, as long as they stay in power, and get elected for "saving" the poor elderly who can't afford health insurance (even though they're indirectly paying for it anyway, now even more inflated than before)

On September 18 2010 19:12 scion wrote:
This is why people keep saying Healthcare in USA is failing. This is why the USA is spending 12% of its GDP on health care. (as of 2002) compared to Canada (9%) , UK (6%) and Japan (6%) This is why 47 million+ Americans are uninsured.

See the mises healthcare portal at http://mises.org/daily/3737.
Healthcare was a non-issue until the AMA started to get government backing and propped up their salaries by raising barriers of entry for uncertified doctors. Surely the cost of healthcare is going to go up when in order to practice it, you have to be a member of their gang. Less doctors, less healthcare. Duh.
After that scam, everything else just aggravated the issue. Further and further making healthcare an artificially scarce resource.

On September 18 2010 23:04 TanGeng wrote:


It's naive because you are taking the government's own rhetoric and justification for extraordinary powers at face value.

Again my role in this debate is not to support anarchist capitalism. When you are arguing against anarchist capital address that to Yurebis. I'm only here to demolish false statements and unsophisticated arguments:

"Anti-trust laws benefit the consumer."
No they don't. Consumers benefit from pricing wars between oligopolies and unrestrained innovation by market leaders. The pricing dynamic between oligopolies under anti-trust laws look a lot like that of monopolistic competition. The Anti-Trust laws prevent market leaders from getting too far ahead of their peers for fear of being branded as a monopoly. Recent examples Google & Microsoft. Just claiming "monopolies bad!" is not enough.

"DEMOCRATIC government is out to look out for public interest."
It's axiomatically true that all organizations look out for its own interests first and foremost. Government's purpose might be to uphold the public interest but that is secondary. A police department will subvert justice to cover for its members, etc.

Organizations will respond quickly to existential threats. Thus, bankruptcy is stronger threat than re-election. Organizations don't commit suicide. The corporate breakups where companies get picked apart and sold for its scraps never get suggested by the company's own management. It's always external "corporate raiders" that do the destruction.

BP is an issue of property rights and pollution. It's not exactly the same as delivering bad product to their customers, but I can think of an effective backlash. BP has some large refineries in the gulf coast area. Those could get shutdown by protests easily - convince the workers to strike and blockade the roads and ports. Do it until BP cleans up the oil and pays out liabilities for damage.

On September 18 2010 19:42 scion wrote:


The rich already has better education under current system. MUCH better in fact. Under current system, private schools are not necessarily meant to make profit, but rather for prestige and higher quality education. Even amongst public schools, there are significant gaps between richer area and poorer areas.

The great equalizer here is the state. The state collects tax from its populace, and redistributes to public schools in a way so that poorer area that can't afford a school gets as much funding as richer areas's public school. The differences between 2 area even amongst public school occur because as you mentioned, portion of the property tax goes to fund portion of the public school system. If this were to be replaced by a private system, firms have no incentive to provide decent education to poorer areas that can't afford it. (the base funding from State/province government is gone)

Road and the firefighter I said sarcastically. However about the road, Japan is a great example of this. Lot of roads are tolled and the prices are absurdly high because there is no regulation on it. Unless you are gona claim firms will build multiple freeway between LA and San Francisco to compete, which would be completely absurd waste of space and create economic inefficiency through opportunity cost of the land.




It would definitely be more expensive for the less wealthy areas. I said before, State act as the equalizer. State collects money from the wealthy and redistributes it so that everyone gets equal funding. If the wealthy suddenly only pays for his own police, school, and other public service, it would in fact not become any more expensive than it is now for the wealthy. but for the less wealthy, they've suddenly lost Federal, state, provincial funding and likely to give up on certain services.



Business can put one another by aggressively lowering its price below its cost, which is by no means having better knowledge of supply and demand. By lowering the revenue below its cost, firm will suffer, but so will the competitor. If your firm is bigger, it can outlast their firm. After your competition starves out, you can then set the price to whatever you want.

Also, Who do you think has better incentive to provide better public welfare structure to the less wealthy? The government, who treats these people as potential voters or Firms, who are out to make more profit? Firms have no reason to provide less wealthy areas with anything more than what they can pay, which is going to be FAR less than what they are getting now.

This brings us to the great "equal opportunity" argument. This is a fundamental policy for any developed nation's education policy. To provide everyone with equal opportunity. The reason why less wealthy areas receive funding from federal/provincial/state government. (However, I do not mean they have equal chance now)

When firms control education, kids unlucky enough to be born of a poor parents will have far less opportunity than they do now. In fact, it may become like 19th century where there were no middle class, but rich employers and the labourers.




Now that i've read this, I think you are mixing up what I said. What I meant was, era BEFORE the great depression was unrestrictive free market. We had firms doing whatever they want up until that point. It is when the Great Depression hit, people realized government needs to control certain aspects in the market in order to maintain stability and fairness.

Hoover is a terrible example. Hoover did not think The great depression was a big problem and believed free market would fix itself. It did not, so he made some terrible efforts to restore the economy (that didn't work) in order to win the election.

The whole point of talk of government intervention is NOT, I repeat, NOT to get an economy out from a slum. The point is, the regulations set in place will prevent economy from going down that road in the first place. Subprime crisis is good example. It is no where near the level of the Great depression, nor will it get to that level. We got into a recession because of it, not a depression.

Again, what I meant was events leading upto the great depression was a lesson about unrestricted economy, NOT the depression itself.

On September 19 2010 08:22 scion wrote:
Anti-trust laws are there to promote price wars. In fact, its there to promote FAIR price wars. Using a firm's size to put others out of business is unfair competition, and this leads to economical inefficiency, for both firms and consumers. What Anti-trust laws are for is to stop the alliances between oligopolies and fixing prices, which was rampant in the 1880-early 1900s.

On September 19 2010 08:22 scion wrote:
Microsoft is already far ahead of their peers unless you think 90% market share is not enough; fortunately Apple is growing larger to become an actual threat, and this is good thing.

On September 19 2010 08:22 scion wrote:
Organizations respond quickly? Then why did all those banks fail in 2007-8? They would have been gone if it weren't for government intervention.

On September 19 2010 08:22 scion wrote:
Also, if threat of bankruptcy was so great over individual interest, the great depression would have not occurred.

On September 19 2010 11:06 TanGeng wrote:


Please show me the rampant oligopolies in the 1880's. I'd love to see them price fix with such stability as those huge oligopolies did in the 1950's and 1960's.

The firms in the oligopoly signal price changes to each other and move together in step - a softe,r gentler, collusive kind of competition. After all, real cut-throat price competition would be "unfair competition" and actually winning the price war would result in a big bad monopoly. boo!

Every sector of the economy reorganized into stable oligopolies after the passages of the Anti-Trust acts. It happened because market leaders finds being too successful, too good, too compelling for the consumer will only buy them an DoJ investigation.

LOL @ FAIR and "promote price wars". Would love to see a definition. Haha.


90% or 100% whatever, it doesn't matter. Microsoft's continued innovation was hampered by legal issues with Anti-Trust investigators. The same thing is happening to Google. Or how about Intel slowing down innovation to let competitors catch up or pulling them along in order to preempt DoJ investigations.

Apple? Is this supposed to be some kind of joke? Apple is where it is because of great innovation and a select market niche. It's not a threat to Microsoft.


They should be gone! The government bailouts (an a history of bailouts - LTCM in 1997) promotes a moral hazard and teaches these organizations the wrong lesson.

Learning the right lesson, that the existential threat of bankruptcy is real and serious, is far more important than individual firms and even entire market sectors. There were always financially-sound firms waiting in wings to fill in the void.

...
BP suggestion is what it is. Your objections look very trivial. What if newspapers got paid to lie? Well, they wouldn't have a customer base pretty soon. Besides, plenty of alternative media sources.

On September 19 2010 11:11 L wrote:

Standard Oil.

Look it up.

As a productive sidenote, you'll find out why they're called anti-trust laws and not anti-monopoly laws.

On September 19 2010 11:33 TanGeng wrote:
Standard Oil's tactics were legal and they produced kerosene at the best price in the Appalachian and Midwest region. The price of kerosene also dropped by a factor of 10 during the "reign" of Standard Oil. Their biggest "unfair competitive practices" happened during this period of its history where it reached topped 90% of market share.

By the time of its breakup in 1911, Standard Oil was losing market share since consumer demand outstripped its capabilities. As such, Standard Oil no longer tried to muscle its competitors out of the marketplace - because it couldn't. Public outrage in the 1911 seemed to be very artificial.

Organization-wise, Standard Oil also benefited from the breakup because the various divisions needed more operational flexibility to keep up with the growing market. I'm of the opinion the break-up was beneficial, but Standard Oil management could have simply done it themselves.

On September 19 2010 11:46 scion wrote:
You don't think they fixed prices when they had 90% market share? The law declared them an unreasonable monopoly. Dropping prices by factor of 10 is fair competition?

I don't know if you are just getting these from Wikipedia, but Standard oil was symbol of corporate "evil" and Greedy monopoly during its time.

Companies like these hired guys like Pinkerton Detective Agency to coerce labour unions to break up.