Debate an Anarchist - Page 7

Guiderails are a hinderance to liberty too. Not all liberty is good.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

Nothing has caused more deaths than government.

Property rights by definition infringe on other people's liberties. The very concept of ownership is defined by removing everyone else's liberty to use whatever it is that you own. Ownership itself isn't even as natural as government is, seeing as Native American societies had very little concept of it, whereas they did have a concept of hierarchical government.

They do give you the choice. The choice has always been there. What you're asking for is the choice to live at an equivalent standard of living in the territory of a nation without paying taxes.

Your following ridiculous reply about the 'people owning the land' is similarly ridiculous'. People DO own the land. Governments have very little power of seizure, and can typically only act on them when there is a massive need for the land towards the public good.

The growth of taxation and public works is very recent (has its roots in the reform movement of the 1860-1920s), and has led to a massive increase in the quality of life for people living in urban areas, Prior to these investments, the FREE MARKET had not invested in quality of life or sanitation in inner cities and working districts, which is precisely why there was growing discontent about labor v management and the battle between classes.

Unlike the mafia, government taxation has been done in response to a growing need for un-profitable infrastructure development. There's a difference between filling a need and extorting people.

Lighthouses were typically built by wealthy traders who didn't want huge sums of money in shipped goods being wrecked on the side of a bay at night. There was a MASSIVE economic benefit for them, at a very low cost.

There is no magical point where any service has enough good externalities(a subjective measurement) to conclude that it is okay to extort people into paying for it, by any objective standards.

This is false. The true market price can be determined even in a state controlled economy, as long as there are comparative indicators of value, which there are. China's rice doesn't sell for 9999$/kg because they forgot the global price of rice.

More to the point, there are reams of situations when the free market has clearly shown itself to be inept, and in nearly everyone of those cases, the government has been forced to step in to rectify the problem, as noted before.

Actually, you benefit by a having a stick of deodorant by not smelling like a pile of asses when you walk outside.

More to the point, a stick of deodorant isn't 2 billion dollars sunk into NASA. It isn't ecological protection. It isn't carbon neutrality. It isn't green chemistry. It isn't any one of a million things which AREN'T economic goods, or things which simply will not be profitable, but are highly desirable.

Rofl, No I'm not. There's a massive difference between abuse of the free market, and having it run in an idealized system in which it has the capacity to react to any stimulus instantly. A pure free market system without restrictions (which would be the case, given that you can't enforce any restrictions without your PDAs being governments) suffers from numerous problems, already listed.

More importantly, you completely ignored my point about borrowing from future generations, which we're already doing, despite quoting it.

Its now profitable for a PDA based in the US to send people overseas when their leads run dry stateside? Like I said, unless you're assuming they have near unlimited reach, there is no point to having them extend their searches elsewhere.

Also, as was previously stated, PDAs will have massive overhead if they need to keep boots on the ground in areas with clients if clientelle isn't limited geographically. If you think this system is more efficient than governments partitioning areas of jurisdiction, I don't know what to say.

That's even before considering the justice system (or lack thereof) which would exist. Would PDAs kill offenders? Would they lock them up, which would clearly decrease profitability? If they didn't, how would it be any different from the current situation on death row where wrongful convictions are massively rampant?

You have one guy waxing romantic about 2 years in a situation which is totally unlike the one you want to create, and I have the presented a spectrum of societal evolutions following the breakdown of governments. Even bereft of central control, governance was re-established. You said it yourself: There are not many instances of anarcho-capitalism being implemented in history, and there's good reason for that: It doesn't work.

Why? Because government is reactive, reflexive, and evolutionary. It might seem like a misnomer, but viewed over long periods of time, governments actually modify themselves to suit the needs of their populations, whereas anarcho-capitalism will modify itself to suit the needs of those who have wealth.

And you've failed to deal with the caveat that research into many fields is not immediately lucrative economically, but incredibly important.

I already gave you the keystone example: The internet. Funded by the US department of defence, and then made mostly public by a publicly funded massive particle physics organization in europe (who's research would also not have been funded, due to the fact that its so prohibitively expensive for single entities, and would have had a mediocre to nonexistant ROI).

Pharmaceutical research? Fine. Pharmaceutical research into rare diseases? Lol, not happening. Pharmaceutical research in an environment where intellectual property laws couldn't be enforced? Hilarious.

You have no recourse for any information resource, or for any resource, really. There's no intellectual or physical property rights that you can enforce on people without an enforcement mechanism, the controllers of which are the new defacto government.

People eventually want to fly in space, but discovering the top quark really isn't profitable. QED. You said it yourself. The motivation is profit, but some research 'lines' take upwards of 50 to 100 years to yield fruit, IF they yield fruit. There is no motivation to fund these types of research, despite the fact that they are the large majority of scientific progress over time. More importantly, most of the middling research before a breakthrough can be researched by someone else, and the capstone achievement can be lifted by someone else.

The free market has worked well for certain commodities, worked horrendously for others, and worked comparably well to a centralized economy in other cases. I, and others, have already thrown out plenty of examples of the free market having failed, and plenty of theoretical examples of where it would fail, and plenty of examples where it was systemically designed to fail, but you just haven't really cared enough to read them. :/

Its not. The difference between a corporation and the government is that the corporation will face insolvency, its workers will work somewhere else, its management will likely be a bit poorer, but oh well, whereas the government will exist and need to decontaminate the area, while under the collective watch of the rest of the world. I'd rather have accountability.

Uh, no, oil companies have largely started to research alternative energy because of extensive taxation on fuel, incredibly high prices due to an oligarchic control over the world's energy supply, and because most fundamental research on alternative energy had already been performed by researchers being funded by government grants at universities.

Even then, history is replete with situations in which private corporations have NOT decided to invest into infrastructure of research. The best example i know in detail is the method of housing construction in suburban canada between the1900s and 1940s. Before government and municipality regulation, standards of living were remarkably poor because private contractors were building houses, and then charging to retroactively rip up the land around them to install sewer systems, and put up power lines. Additionally, these same contractors sold racial segregation in the form of land covenants.

I'd vote heart disease. Medieval Europe would likely vote Black Plague. Clearly governments did better than slaughtering 1/3rd of the continent's human life, right? Right?

On March 10 2008 03:02 MarklarMarklar wrote:
anarchists are idiots

foolish bunch of people with lack of perspective

On March 10 2008 07:57 MarklarMarklar wrote:
Anarchism is against human nature tbh

Check mate, I win

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.

I addressed this pathetic argument in the post above, but I will repost for you from the anarcho-capitalist FAQ:

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nothing has caused more deaths than government.

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.

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.

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.

You're the one who should be answering this question to me! I'm saying that government monopolies can't know what to charge because they don't let the free market act, and thus will necessarily set a price that is either too high or too low which would lead to market failure.

I have thoroughly addressed the falsehoods of the free rider problem in my last three posts. Read them and then get back to me.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Yep. Bribary is always possible. Now tell me why it's more likely in private courts than public courts.

-Inflation is not intrinsic to an economy. Inflation in the U.S. began in the early 1940s.

The increase in taxation and public works has hurt many on the fringe of poverty and had harmful long term consequencese. High taxes is a huge burden on alot of people. When you give to one group of people, you are doing so at the expense of another.

The only 'needs' are the bare essentials of food and water. Everything beyond that is a 'want', or an economic good, which any economic model will tell you can be produced more efficiently on the free market than by a centrally planned economy. You've admitted that some goods are better produced on the free market, but you maintain that other goods are not, but you haven't given any reason other then the 'free rider problem', which I smashed a few posts ago, and you haven't yet been able to respond to.

Your example here does NOTHING to prove your premise! "There exists a magical (or objective) point where something has enough externalities to warrant extortion.Here's a hypothetical scenario of a town in trouble. QED." Do you see how nonsensical your argument is? Furthermore you think it's extortion to voluntarily do work? To address your example though, if disaster can be averted for a $10 fee, then people will gladly pay it voluntarily.

You are really skating on thin ice here. I don't think any serious economist would go so far as to suggest that the state can know the true market price without letting the free market act. 'Comparative indicators of value' can hep you get close, but no two economies are the same. Knowing the global price doesn't tell you what the price would be in a specific area within China. Everyone has different preferences and places different value on goods, which are impossible for the government to know.

You have not provided a single example where the unfettered free market has proved to be inept, and you are still dodging the fact that there is no theoretical distinction for where government should step in.

Obviously I benefit, so does everyone else. The deodorant example is simply to highlight the failure of public choice theory. Do you deny that deodorant has positive externalities for those who don't pay for it, and that one person benefiting from the lack of my smelly armpits isn't effected by someone else benefitting from it? Then it should, by your logic, be a public good that the market won't provide for.

And already countered. You still haven't gotten around to addressing my arguments against public choice theory, or shown why anything has to be provided by government. Government, by the way, can't react to stimuli instantaneously either; government will in fact be slower to react than the free market.

The reason there haven't been many examples is a debatable topic, your conclusion hardly being demonstrated true. In most situations military conquest led to government implimentation. True anarcho-capitalism has not been tried in modern times, and it is fallicious reasoning to say that it therefore can't work.

When you say it's incredibly important, you're making a subjective judgment. Your placing your judgment above that of everyone elses. You're saying "I think this research is really important, so it's okay for me to steal from you to fund it." As Hoppe says, you're smuggling a norm into a positive science. I think it is unethical for you to place your judgment above everyone elses and use that to justify theft.

For example, minimum wage is something often cited by liberals as being a great thing. I used to agree, until I actually studied the economics of it. Liberals argue that minimum wage helped a certain subset of people, therefore it is a good thing. What they don't point out is that minimum wage increases cost to the consumer and creates unemployment. Are these externalities offset by the wage increase for those who do benefit from it? The answer must be no, because if the externalities caused by implimenting a minimum wage were offset by the benefits to those who gain from minimum wage, then you wouldn't need government to force people into accepting these regulations; the market would settle at the appropriate wage. Every act of government intervention is a limitation on consumer sovereignty.

The most important thing to understand about anarchism is that it is a moral theory which logically cannot be over-concerned with consequences. For instance, the abolition of slavery was a moral imperative, because slavery as an institution is innately evil. The abolition of slavery was not conditional upon the provision of jobs for every freed slave. In a similar manner, anarchic theory does not have to explain how every conceivable social, legal or economic transaction would occur in the absence of a coercive government.

So because native american societies were communal, property rights are unnatural? If we shouldn't have property rights why don't we just let the state control everything? You should be arguing that theft isn't a crime if you don't believe in property rights.

You don't have a choice about whether or not to pay taxes. Obviously I might as well use their services if I'm being forced to pay for them anyways, but I'd rather have various firms competing for my dollar then one firm take it from me involuntarily.

Governments have massive seizure power in taxation, but anyways what is your point here?

The increase in taxation and public works has hurt many on the fringe of poverty and had harmful long term consequencese. High taxes is a huge burden on alot of people. When you give to one group of people, you are doing so at the expense of another.

The only 'needs' are the bare essentials of food and water. Everything beyond that is a 'want', or an economic good, which any economic model will tell you can be produced more efficiently on the free market than by a centrally planned economy. You've admitted that some goods are better produced on the free market, but you maintain that other goods are not, but you haven't given any reason other then the 'free rider problem', which I smashed a few posts ago, and you haven't yet been able to respond to.

You have not provided a single example where the unfettered free market has proved to be inept,

And which will happen under anarcho-capitalism. The only difference is that I trust the government slightly more than the mafia.

So what do you do when your PDA (assuming geographic monopoly; I will elaborate later) or the road provider, if there is one provider, or the electricity provider, if there is one provider, does stupid things? You can't feasibly switch. So what are you going to do?

We can create a magic point. You haven't discussed my statistical threshold argument. The crux of your argument, which is essentially, "if there's a continuum, then you can't draw a line" is really stupid, and can in addition be resolved by doing arbitrary stupid things if you're sensibilities are offended enough by trying to find a proper point, by assigning each industry a "government intervention value" that varies continuously from 1% for things we really really like solely under private control and 99% for things we really like under state control, gradually increasing with the number of externalities. Note that this argument has nothing to do with the efficiencies thereof, so don't bring it in; I'm simply demonstrating how stupidly absurd the "continuum means no lines can be drawn, therefore you must choose one hundred percent free market" is. Every society on Earth today has made that decision, some farther to the left, some farther to the right. You say they can't, but they have.

If the inefficiencies that result from public provision are greater than the profit of a private provider, society wins.

What makes the sole provider of a good to a certain town able to allocate prices efficiently? Terms like "price fixing" are inaccurate because there is simply no reason that a state industry can't respond to supply and demand.

Given a straight choice between wearing deodorant and not wearing deodorant, all things equal, you decide to wear deodorant because the benefit that you recieve from wearing deodorant outweighs the cost, for you alone. If you were given the choice to not pay taxes but still recieve the benefits of recieving police protection, fire protection, and the use of roads for free, given that everyone else were paying for them, I am pretty sure that you would choose not to pay them.

That's all nice and dandy in theory. What's more likely is that a large PDA, having sufficient presence in an area, will in all likelihood decide that it should have a monopoly over the area, and declare that everybody in its jurisdiction must obey this PDA. A neighboring PDA, with sufficient presence in another area, has two choices -
1. Go to war. This could potentially be profitable, but the question is whether victory is likely and whether
2. Partition the area, would be more profitable.
Nothing is going to stop a large PDA that controls an area from declaring monopoly. It can furthermore declare itself a state and deny other PDAs the opportunity to pursue criminals into the area.

The research that one company does will benefit all companies. Classic public good.

The problems aren't being caused for the supplier. They are not being caused for the consumer. The consumer has zero reason to stop purchasing because the poor sods getting the shaft aren't the ones who will be consuming a product.
You can say, "well, if it should be stopped, then people will stop it. The fact that it's not stopped means that it shouldn't be stopped." But this only holds if you have already accepted the AnCap principles. The way it works is that anarcho-capitalism + human nature = bad shit, with pollution and the like. You're the one declaring that "any deviation of anarcho-capitalism, aka coercion" (ignoring the fact that you already accept coercion simply by having enforcement mechanisms for courts against the unwilling) is bad, therefore aforementioned bad shit must be okay. We (being everyone else) don't. We see coercion as a lesser evil than pollution.

Because if the people living in the area of a nuclear power plant don't want a nuclear power plant, under liberal democracy, they're not going to get a nuclear power plant. If they want certain safety measures, they will get certain safety measures. Under ancapitalism, a corporation can simply build a nuclear power plant if it has sufficient force of arms behind it.

It is not, in fact, a private corporation, because it is a public corporation. That word makes all the difference.

In the absence of a publicly owned corporation extorting customers, private ones will.

With regards to


, you said "I would rather have corporations in control of the government that politcians." Corporatism, and the logical result of ancaptalism.

I'd rather the military be in the hands of corporations than politicians.

Nothing has caused more deaths than human beings acting in concert. Guess we should ban free association.

Well, how can the scientist choose from himself? It should be impossible!
The simply fact of the matter is that these decisions can be, and are, made.
With regards to the first statement, I could, but that's not the issue at hand.

States will form from anarcho-capitalism, and they will be states without the safeguards that liberal democracy has evolved in its centires of existence.

A liberal democratic state is more accountable to its "customers" than a coercive privately owned corporation.

Not only government intervention. One is simply the inefficiency of building two roads where one will suffice. Another is that you are assuming zero to minimal startup costs.

In addition, given sufficient efficiencies resulting from economies of scale, a profit-driven corporation can simply raise the price to a point where it is still cheaper than for a small competitor to start up, not having these advantages of economy of scale (and we're ignoring collusion between, for example, said large corporation and the suppliers to clamp down on competitors.) Given a reasonably efficient public service which is not operated for the simple purpose of profit maximization, it would not have said incentive to raise the price.

I'm simply pointin out the fact that tey already do. And nobody has died of thirst in my town yet. This brings up the question of whether the degree of market failure involved offsets the possible benefits of public ownership (for example, ease of avoidance of negative externalities.)

Secondly, how do naturally occuring monopolies (again, the only shop in a small town, or the only highway to a remote area) know what prices to charge? This is why I bring up the two highways scenario.

I have. Don't assume I haven't; I can do the same for you, but the discussion would go nowhere.

There is a large gulf between pure anarcho-capitalism and communism. Just because somebody believes in a degree of coercion does not make them a communist; in that case, more or less every economist that has ever lived that isn't in the Austrian school was a communist, which you can clearly see is a load of crock.

My "poor examples" are merely here to poke holes in the *assumptions* in your poor example.

Most economists believe that enforced property rights are necessary for the functioning of a free market, and furthermore many don't believe that anarcho-capitalism provisions this properly.

Their definition of a free market is simply different from yours, and is the general one from which we are to draw assumptions, since it is the generally agreed on term.

Here's some simple theroetical reasons coercion might be useful:
[The free rider problem. Even your Austrian economists concede, in the very articles you link, that it exists, if to a limited degree. They furthermore declare that "because it is theoretically possible to provision them under anarcho-capitalism, it must be the best method of doing so."

The monopoly problem. If the nature of a service means that there will be a monopoly, with it containing immense power over the area of said monopoly, giving the public control over the entity might be more useful than giving a private entity control over the service / good which might end up being price gouged, if the demand is inelastic

(it being difficult to simply switch providers, and if you say the "why don't you move" problem is bunk, then you can't use it yourself).

The free rider problem is, in fact, really the source of everybody's criticisms of pure communism. Less incentive to work, exists, sure. So does less incentive to fund a public good.

I simply see no reason to quibble over definitions when it is clear that we are not approaching them from the same point.

YBecause in public courts, there is an incentive to be impartial because otherwise those in charge of keeping them that way will be voted out of office.

The wonderful thing about anarcho-capitalism, though, is that a court is only as legitimate as the PDAs that accept it. If I use only courts that have been paid off by me, no two courts will come to the same conclusion, and if my courts are attached to a powerful PDA which I control because I am so much incredibly richer than everyone else (surely you cannot argue that state intervention acts to keep the Gini coefficient low; case studies demonstrate the opposite effect when more contorl is handed to the free market), then your PDA and your courts can rail uselessly against my large PDA with bribed courts. A court, after all, needs little to no overhead, and a few rich customers can shell enough to put a thousand poor ones to shame.

Um, no. Ever heard of a Continental Greenback?

The group being taken from generally aren't the people on the fringe of poverty.

Yes, but disaster can also be averted without paying $10.

Pick a price. Start selling. Determine the demand.

Governments can operate the same way that corporations with massive amounts of market share to figure out if their prices are too high or too low. And prices don't sit at equilibrium anyway.

In the airline industry, prices can be sitting at some value at quite a while, and at some point one of them will slash its rates, leading all the others to follow in a price war. I suppose that the "true market price" dropped suddenly as the first business to do so decided to?

Well, it's not working in Somalia, if by unfettered free market, you mean that the rule of "coercive" law is nonexistent.

This is demonstrated false by the fact that you do buy deodorant.

Also, your "private companies will solve pollution on their own" can similarly be demonstrated false by the fact that they didn't.

First, demonstrate; second, by how much?

Neither has pure communism, but I don't think you're willing to make that leap.

Saying that it's wrong to steal is also smuggling a norm into a positive science.

Yeah, if you think that consumers are simply socially conscious enough to increase wages on their own. The price of something tells you nothing about how the wages are paid, and in the end simple self-interest is enough to keep people buying things that they like, because of the free rider problem.

The free rider problem is really the only answer to a number of problems!

Why does the liberal not pay extra taxes to the government? Because he doesn't want to! Why does the anarcho-capitalist use roads when he could instead refuse to benefit from "extortion"? Because he needs to use roads! Why does the minimum wage advocate buy clothes made in China? Because they are cheaper! You could instead say it's because they're dirty dirty hypocrites, but that's simply the way it goes down.

Perhaps to avoid norms, you should avoid the term "appropriate" and instead substitute "market-determined." In the end:
Pure libertarianism + human nature and self interest = unpleasant outcomes (which most people agree on.)
Most people would solve this this by placing restrictions on pure libertarianism. Anarcho-capitalists are essentially the only ones who would declare "coercion must be wrong in all cases one hundred percent." The rest of us are willing to look at other things.

Actually, if the logical conclusion upon the abolition of slavery was that the slaves would be instead shot, we would like to take into account the consequences. You can just as easily justify it because of consequences rather than "innate evil."

And in fact, isn't it a bit hypocritical for somebody declaring that some things are "innate evil" to criticize others for making vlaue judgments?

The article dealing with how DROs would never take over is laughable. It rests on such idiotic assumptions as the unprofitiability of war, assuming that arms manufacturers would never, ever think to manufacture arms and sell them to warlords because they would immediately go out of business (ignoring the fact that such things happen,) completely ignoring the military-industrial complex that exists today, unfounded assertions like "Clearly, all the other DROs will immediately cease doing business with Bob's DRO" and "Thus arms manufacturers would have to provide rigorous accounts of everything they were making and selling, to be sure that they weren't selling arms to some secret army, probably in the foothills of Montana." Yeah, arms manufacturers are really really careful that the arms they manufacture never get to Darfur or into the hands of factions that use child soldiers. That's why it doesn't happen at all today! It's a fucking joke.

On March 11 2008 00:46 nA.Inky wrote:
Anarchy means "without rule."

If you are arguing for laissez capitalism and calling it anarchism, you need to make the case for this being a system without rule. I think there are very good critiques of capitalism along the lines that a capitalist system will always be highly heirarchical with massively unequal distributions of power and wealth. Indeed, we see this happening in the most capitalist societies.

How is this anarchy? The people without power and wealth are forced to serve those who do have power and wealth. They are not free. How is this anarchy?

"A free market means that those who don't have the money to buy what they need do not have a right to live."

On March 11 2008 01:39 zatic wrote:
Just wanted to drop in to thank CaptainMurphy for bringing so many good points and making such a strong case for an idea I really like to believe in but will always have doubts about.

From reading almost the entire thread I'd say the things you people will not agree upon are:
- whether the free rider problem is a problem

- whether statelessness will lead to war and dictatorship or not

Still, a really interesting thread to read!

L's position has been that it's okay to arbitrarily draw a line somewhere, based on where he thinks this it is appropriate (never mind that everyone would probably draw it in a slightly different place). He used the comparison of a scientist testing a result and (this is how I took it, anyways) trying to determine whether, for instance, the actual results are far enough from the expected results to justify accepting or rejecting the null hypothesis, a process which is up to the judgment of the scientist.