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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.
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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.
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"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
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Sydney2287 Posts
On March 08 2008 12:38 CaptainMurphy wrote: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.
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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.
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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.)
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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.
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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...
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
not to mention, wealth is not taxed, only income, and that, wage income disproportionally.
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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
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[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.""
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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.
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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.
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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.
And courts can still be bought off.
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Cayman Islands24199 Posts
On March 09 2008 13:17 CaptainMurphy wrote:Show nested quote +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.
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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.
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is that the only thing you've read on the topic. would be like reading the bible for history.
Good strategy.. don't attack any points raised, just liken it to the bible.
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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."
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"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."
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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.
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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.
http://mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE2_1_14.pdf
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EPT
