"Immune" in the same sense of the current legal system as regards aggression. Nobody can initiate force against you without incurring the related penalties. If you aggress against someone, though, you're licensing that person (or hired intermediaries, if that person has contracted out some of his retaliatory power) to return the favor.
So in other words, people ought not to initiate force against you, except in self defense?
I've been reading that you have a philosophy degree, so you'll understand the contractarian parallel--everyone generally agrees to refrain from aggression against one another (and perpetually affirm that agreement so long as they continue to act in accordance with it), but forfeit its benefits as soon as they violate the agreement.
Actually, contractarianism is usually more nuanced than that. After all, criminals don't fully forfeit the protections of the social contract - it's not open season on thieves. Rather, they incur certain penalties circumscribed by the contract.
Freedom, as I discuss it, means political freedom, i.e. the absence of external coercion/constraints on action. The nonaggression principle is a large-scale way of recognizing and labeling the de facto absence of such constraints, and the introduction of intermediaries (e.g. private police organizations, insurance networks) represents the de jure prohibitions on (or rather, disincentives to) aggressive actions.
But the nonaggression principle isn't actually followed, so it's not de facto. It seems like you're going to have a lot of trouble trying to argue that the nonaggression principle ought to be followed.
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
There is no free lunch in economics, as distribution still maintains a level of cost in any supply chain. The longer the supply chain, the more costlier the product. The maximization of resources relates to the level of cooperation, and as such within the framework of society without punishment mechanics there is a form of "bad anarchy" and civil degeneration.
First, its a myth that states are an "alternative" to anarchy. They are an alternative to universal anarchy, but state agents themselves are in a state of anarchy vis-a-vis each other, and interstate affairs are also anarchic. So the relevant question of anarcho capitalism is "why we can't have anarchy for all innocent people", or "why we should restrict anarchy to a privileged political class". I think those are good questions.
1. The more centralized and less corrupt the state, the less the murder rate is domestically
2. The "bad anarchy" places have a higher murder rate than the statist places
So if states create domestic stability and a lower murder rate in exchange for limiting some freedoms, and under your argument about states being in a state of nature which other increasing the murder rate institutes a reason that it is the inherent lack of an arbiter that increases the violence.
So at each "tier of anarchy" there is violence in the state of nature either internally or externally. Anarchist states lack mechanisms to rebuff imperialist ambitions such as what occurred with the Spanish Civil War where the anarchists were steam rolled by Franco and friends and lose life and liberty.
So far the basic gist is:
1. You have no mechanism against conquest by a superior force of sustained collectivists in the state of nature/anarchy,unless if everyone becomes an anarcho-capitalist somehow
2. You have no answer to decreasing murder rate as compared to modern civil societies in terms of efficiency. Your best system was for people to purchase guns to act as deterrents.
If all those examples of anarchy had actually been states, they'd have died out by now too. Maybe they would have died out faster. The point is you can't just say that "anarchy was replaced" because most governments get replaced in similar timeframes.
Why should we support a model that lacks sustainability that just leads to statism anyway? It seems we go from state to state with infrastructure systems remaining constant, if states are the "norm" then governments, whether soft or hard, are an accepted,tested, and ancient form of corporatization.
Equally forms of governance, at whatever level, go with groups and identity. What you seem to be aping for is a post-nation state model without a state yet still maintain state functions within a framework that nation-states built. Yet, as humans we still have the same emotions and altered states of mind through mobs, extremes of patriotism, and ect. that still entice masses to violence.
And as for the "we don't know whether a good anarchist system existed," one of the fundamental aspects to social stability is transference of power from one generation to the next. As dynastic struggles and the like equally lead to collapse, power struggles equally have also created states in their wake. I would also add that the "we don't know if a good anarchist system ever existed" is like arguing whether God exists as there are no records to argue from nor are there much archaeological evidence for complex social systems and only the appearance there of.
What I can say is that in the long of history, the complex the state the more complex the economy and the higher the living standards and internal peace. Whether you compare the Incas to Plains Indians or Romans to Celts in Ireland, the results are all the same.
The countries that actually wind up as anarchies do so for a reason.
And they judicially suck at protecting individual rights specifically Iceland until they established a better government system to act as arbiter against blood feuds.
In the latter case, it isn't an example of the superiority of statism because those people already tried a state and failed. They're probably just screwed for non-organizational reasons.
There's a correlation between high economics and high government intervention through out the last several thousand years of history. Quite simply not using resources properly triggers a "tragedy of the commons" that is directly linked to a structural issue over a resource dilemma. A case in point would be Easter Island as compared to Singapore or Japan which trades for resources such as lumber abusing what Ricardo shows.
What I'm getting at is that anarchy has its best chance to work in modern times when incentives for cooperation are high and on an international level.
There's been a few periods of globalizations and romanticism concerning free trade and the like that has descended into war. The Middle Ages had several state and non-state actors similar to the modern period and many times descended into war. The same with the 19th century. Many of those international levels are done mostly by large institutions such as NGO's, multi national corporations, and other non-state actors.
However, even in globalization markets are much more regional than they first appear. So the bounds of regional sentiments and regressions into aggression is still high in either system.
Anyway, that's a Marxist argument that "there exists no true communist state yet." Similar to Marxism, wanted an entire readjustment of the whole social order and structure to adapt to a niche philosophy. Equally you waver into a "zero sum game approach" or whatever, and at this point I'm just going to quote von Clausewitz:
Quote from Carl von Clausewitz[/quote »
War is not an independent phenomenon, but the continuation of politics by different means.
As with any assertion so as long as man is political so shall war, be they massive genocides or blood feuds. So far we've solved the "blood feuds dilemma" through statism, the war issue not so much and probably never will under realpolitik.
Yet, there's also a few other problems that get solved via private-public partnerships such as cholera epidemics, Green Revolution, and other such things and there's been some work to actually go through the 20th century as the "bloodiest century" versus the "most life saving century." Some argue a net positive, others argue a net negative. It really comes down to how you stack the statistics.
What we can say though is that states using policing actions have decreased violence domestically as compared to anarchist states of existence in history. Coercion therefore distributed with immediacy of consequence and not severe relative to the crime creates more stability.
Points you seem to not be able to address:
-Enforcing the nonaggression principle
-Lack of a pertinent real world, modern model for "good anarchism"
-Disregarding people's hatred for violence in their immediate vicinity, which the state has more than adequately proven to reduce better than other systems in modern times.
-Inadequacy to deal with invasion and eventual subjugation by a superior force, which is the antithesis to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
-Explaining how in a constitutional system you have "anarchy between the institutions," when the Constitution has inherent anti-government mechanics inside of the government to instill a level of min anarchism to perpetuate competition.
I'll make it simpler, show me a min anarchist system or such a system that is moving in the min anarchist direction that has the same level of freedoms, prosperity, and safety as we do in the US, Canada, and ect.
Inevitability of the state has already been covered--by Grape and Sieben, if I'm not mistaken. I agree that it's human nature to band together, cooperate, self-organize, all that sort of thing--but government isn't required for any of that.
That IS government. Or don't people who "band together" have any form of government?
Why don't you "vague it up" a bit more when it comes to governing?
Corporations have governments, and most of them are pretty much totalitarian.
That's not really markets at all. I don't understand how people criticize monopolies in every other area, but somehow praise monopolies on the most important services (i.e. rules, force, arbitration). You'll never find an economic study saying that monopolies are good.
I call bull**** again.
Monopolies are good for those who are owners of the monopoly.
Monopolies are bad because those INSIDE the monopoly take advantage of those OUTSIDE the monopoly. Monopolies are GREAT economically... to those who are members of the monopoly. In fact it's yet another illustration of the principle of the advantages of larger organization.
If you look at the US Nation is a near monopoly, it's GREAT to be the US Nation, and it SUCKS to be those who compete with us. It's great for the
WORLD if there is competition with the US dollar... like Europe and their Euro...
Monopolies ROCK.
There is nothing bad about the INTERNAL structure of a monopoly. Monopolies can be structured internally in any way you like. A monopoly is DEFINED by its competition.
The way you take a bit of faulty, fuzzy thinking, and suggest that government (even a democratically elected one) is a "monopoly"... it's ludicrous.
I once had a conversation with somebody about why big corporations aren't internally structured with markets... like having 5 different legal divisions, each competing with the other at all times... or 8 different internal shipping divisions. There is ALWAYS tight central control in any big company. There has to be. Same with military: we do not have anarcho-organized armies with people coming to a "mutual understanding" about which team's turn it is to make the suicide charge up the hill to distract the enemy. Why? Because that's how you WIN.
Even if they internally have competing units... ultimately there is a guy or a committee running the show. There has to be. They can be reassigned by the president and the people though.
Depends on what you mean by "things that are important to them". If you mean things like property disputes or something, then it's possible, but heavy ideological conflict can often be settled pretty well internally. Arbiters are only necessary if the conflict can't be settled internally.
You say "A". I say "B". What does "settled" even mean?
All you're saying is that you won't have government except when you need one... and making some ridiculous claim that conflict doesn't happen very often.
Quote from Cody_Franklin »
Quote from dcartist »
If you start talking about the "community" what you're really talking about is mob rule.
That doesn't really do much for the argument about a government ruled by "the people" then, does it?
Your talk about 'community' deciding what's right or wrong for bad people is law of the lynch gang: "Mob rule".
Rule "by the people" is an expression describing representative government and democracy.
You really can't tell the difference?
Sure are. Even if there weren't, though, that has no bearing on my argument's validity. The best theory is chosen based on evidence and argument, not popular academic consensus (consensus being the cart, truth [ideally] being the horse).
Actually the validity of your theory would best be tested by any kind of successful real world experiment.
I can drone on and on about the potential virtues about my theory of "government by loudest voice", where the person with the loudest voice makes all decisions, but I think a SUCCESSFUL real world experiment would be the only thing that would give "lunatic fringe theories" like ours any kind of serious traction.
Hello, Cody. I consider myself to be pretty open-minded. I've talked with Anarchists before and when I first heard of the concept it sounded like a good idea. But as I thought about it more on my own, I started to see problems with it -- problems that I felt were serious enough that I'd prefer living in a Representative Democracy over living in an Anarchist society. I've occasionally mentioned these issues to anarchists and I've never really heard them addressed adequately (by which, I mean adequately enough for me to support the idea of an Anarchist society). Seeing as how you're being pretty persistent here, I may as well bring them up and see what you have to say.
My issues with Anarchy:
1. The justice system of an Anarchist Society. How do rules/laws get made, decided upon precisely what they'll entail, enforced, and trials held for accused rulebreakers/criminals/whatever-you-want-to-call them? I would not feel comfortable if these tasks were engaged in by the private sector who answer only to the market and cannot be directly influenced by the people they are supposed to be protecting. Specifically, could you mention how a rule/law concerning DUI would be made, have its limits established, be enforced, how violators would be tried (if at all), who would make sure this is all being done fairly and correctly, and how violators determined guilty would be handled? Like jails. What if I don't want to pay for jails? What does that mean for me? Do I not get thrown in jail? Does someone who commits an offense against me not get thrown in jail? Why is anyone going to bother paying for jails if they're not mandated to?
2. Societal Defense. How can you effectively defend an Anarchist Society from hostile outside forces without mandatory chip-ins to Defense? And "There won't be hostile outside forces." does not address this. If another society with tanks, jets, bombs, missiles, etc. attack an Anarchist society that decided it doesn't want to pay much for Defense, the Anarchist society is gone. How would the society even decide how much to pay for Defense? Or would it be left up to each individual? Would it be like: I pay a firm for protection against invading armies, but my neighbor doesn't so they defend my property but stay off his? That would put the security firm at a tactical disadvantage, having to allocate their forces specifically to those who paid but staying out of areas they weren't paid to defend while the invaders wouldn't be dealing with this issue.
3. Dispute Resolution. This kind of ties back in to the first one, but when two parties disagree over ownership of something how does this get handled in an Anarchist society? Who pays for dispute resolution? If one side pays more for dispute resolution, what prevents them from just having the dispute ended in their favor? What if someone doesn't want to pay for dispute resolution? Do they automatically lose all disputes against them?
Also, I'm kind of curious, do you think that, say, just the USA could break up into a region of anarchist societies and survive, or would it have to be the whole world?
Thank you for your time.
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"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." --Carl Sagan
It's not accurate that the state has that right, nor that the state commands that monopoly. It's that we, as members of the state, grant it that monopoly.
Who is we? I sure don't grant it that monopoly. I assume that what you mean it "the majority of people assert themselves through the governmental structure and impose themselves on whomever remains", which doesn't sound like a political theory dedicated to "justice". This assumes, of course, that democratic theory is correct about "people" controlling the government, which I certainly don't grant at face value. They certainly don't control the bureaucracy, or the courts, and hardly control the legislators (and are really violating peoples' liberty if they do control those institutions).
Quote from Harkius »
You're assuming that the state usurps this privilege, but it doesn't. We cede it to the state in the interest of having our interests looked after by a larger, impartial body in the pursuit of justice.
This is very interesting, because basically everyone in this thread has made the argument that anarchy is impossible because private defense agencies will go to war and establish a government by force. I hope you've not made that argument.
In either case, I again question who is "we", how you can know what "our" interests are, what makes the state impartial, and how this privilege is ceded.
Quote from Harkius »
And we're back to contentious points. What grants those private intermediaries that right, aside from someone who has paid them?
Nothing. If I contract with someone to provide a service, I've given them the power to act on my behalf.
Quote from Harkius »
What you're suggesting is that, should I be wronged, I have the right to pay someone to go right it. But, since the people seeking "justice" are being paid by me, they have a vested interest in seeing that my will is done, not what is objectively correct. This is especially true with
respect to iterated situations.
You can pay off judges and cops in statism, too, so you're not uniquely indicting anarchism by pointing out that corruption exists.
Quote from Harkius »
I don't think that it is coercive, first. The government gets taxes from people who implicitly accept its governing by virtue of not leaving.
If some number of people X are living in a country, what portion of X needs to consent to a government to be legitimate? May I ever withdraw my consent? If so, how? If I'm one of those who doesn't consent, what options do I have? Assuming that it's implicit, how often does consent have to be renewed (especially given births/deaths and stuff like that)? See, with private agencies, you actually have to sign a contract with specific terms. The "social contract theory" you're pushing not only comes out of really shaky abstractions (i.e. the state of nature), but also takes the form of "as long as you stick around and don't get violent, you're consenting to whatever the government does". I mean, if I move into a town that I know is dominated by a gang of bandits, it might be practical for me to move, but it doesn't make the bandits not-bandits or their extortion not-extortion just because people choose to continue their residence. I may acquiesce to the demands of the bandits when they stop by, just as I acquiesce to taxation and regulation and whatnot, but acquiescence is a far cry from consent.
Quote from Harkius »
To some extent, everyone has the ability to leave the country. Let's be brutally honest here. There isn't a lot of desirable land that hasn't been claimed by some polity, largely because the ceding of individual rights to a larger governing structure has so much potential for greasing the wheels of non-zero sumness, mostly because of punishments for defection. As such, you're probably not going to be able to find ideal land that is not currently held by a government, and so your question is mostly what government are you going to implicitly accept as governing you.
So, it's not that government is legitimate, it's just that practical reality dictates I basically can't escape it?
Quote from Harkius »
Cite one, please. I'd like to see some evidence that a monopolistic government performs better than
Uh... You sort of ended mid-sentence there, so I don't quite get what you're asking.
Quote from Harkius »
There are dozens of reasons to believe that a government is different from a company, not the least of which is that it's accountable to the whole of the public, not just the shareholders. In addition, governments have rights that companies don't, responsibilities that governments don't, and there are reasons, such as those that I've cited in this particular post.
Actually, I'm pretty sure companies are more accountable to the "will of the people", i.e. their customer base, than governments are. See, companies have to use a profit and loss test, have to persuade people to pay voluntarily, have to satisfy the individuals they serve, that sort of thing. States have no profit and loss test, can throw people in prison for refusing to pay, and mostly pay lip service to satisfying people (especially when you get into things like voter apathy, regulation and capture, state secrecy, that sort of thing). In fact, it doesn't really matter how many people they kill, how much money they take, how much property they confiscate (whether you're talking FDR-style gold confiscation or pure eminent domain), how much subversive logrolling goes on, or whatever other act of aggression some institution in government commits--it can be justified as "the will of the people". After all, they elected the people who are responsible for these things, and the voters haven't started a mass exodus... Surely they must consent then, no? Saying that the government is "accountable" is just a regurgitation of basic democratic political theory, not an argument.
Quote from Harkius »
Use whatever example you like.
Mmkay.
So, business cycle starts when you expand the money supply (which can happen with private currency, but is significantly less likely when you don't have unilateral control of the money supply a la central banks/the Fed, which basically all countries have, because of political rhetoric about "responsible governing" of the money supply). Typically, this occurs when banks print money or type numbers into a computer and then put it out to banks to get loans going. In the modern financial system, fractional-reserve banking is how things get done. If the reserve rate is 10%, then a bank which gets $10,000 from monetary expansion can further expand by lending out $9,000 (leaving $1,000, or 10%, in its held reserves). Of that $9,000, $8,100 is lent out (leaving $900, again 10% reserves). So and and so forth. But the money doesn't just bounce around different banks--they'll usually loan it out, or invest it in some something or other.
Unfortunately, what increases in the money supply do is the same thing that actual savings do (keeping in mind that supply expansion isn't actual savings)--interest rates go down. When interest rates are low, it's a signal to the market to take out loans to invest in goods to be purchased and/or consumed later (e.g. houses). The market usually gets this signal because interest rates are driven down by increases in savings (which demonstrates that consumers' time preferences have changed, reflecting their decision to delay consumption now so that they can consume later). In the case of monetary expansion, however, the same signal comes out, and businesses start investing in goods under the assumption that consumers' time preferences are decreasing. But time preferences remain the same, and people aren't actually delaying consumption, which means that resources have been misallocated by a kind of "false positive" stimulated by monetary expansion.
This big boom in production and employment can't last forever, though, because it's sustained by malinvestments which have to correct themselves when it becomes apparent that people didn't actually want the goods being produced. During the housing boom, for example, many more houses were being produced than were actually being demanded. Because the investments were badly made, and a lot of resources were badly allocated, there necessarily has to be a crash--this is the "bust" part of the cycle. Investors lose their money, property values plummet, people end up trapped in terrible mortgages (often because of the same loans being made to homeowners, tax credits artificially increasing purchasing power to try and sustain the boom, banks buying a bunch of mortgages and getting stuck with a bunch of useless, valueless houses because they can't sell the CDOs), unemployment rises because of the outflow of capital, and a slump is basically guaranteed for a while as the market corrects for the misallocation by redirecting resources toward more productive uses and stopping resources from being pumped into bubbles.
You can try to argue "well, we should only have responsible monetary policy", but that's not really responsive because governments monopolize currencies for the same reasons they claim to need to monopolize force, law, arbitration, often utilities, and so on. AnCap directly responds to this by doing away with central banks/Federal Reserve-esque agencies, providing competition in the currency market to allow alternative escapes to dominant currencies if/when it's devalued, allows economic health to return quickly by refraining from harmful intervention (e.g. bailouts of companies like AIG), etc.
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Good thing my theory is that the business cycle isn't a consequence of free markets.
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So in other words, people ought not to initiate force against you, except in self defense?
No, because it isn't a moral statement. It's a descriptive statement about why you have incentive to refrain from aggression, and what you're affirming in terms of potential consequences as a result of being aggressive.
Quote from Blinking Spirit »
Actually, contractarianism is usually more nuanced than that. After all, criminals don't fully forfeit the protections of the social contract - it's not open season on thieves. Rather, they incur certain penalties circumscribed by the contract.
That's why I didn't say "you'll appreciate that I'm pushing contractarianism". I was saying that you'll understand the parallel.
As far as "penalties incurred by the contract", those penalties are typically determined by a multiplicity of contracts, including insurance contracts, contracts with arbitrators, and contracts with defensive agencies. AnCap emphasizes a society based on deep interconnectedness, intermediary networks, economic relationships, stuff like that.
Quote from Blinking Spirit »
But the nonaggression principle isn't actually followed, so it's not de facto.
I mean de facto in an AnCap society. It's recognized to an extent already because of prohibitions on aggressive actions like murder and theft, but it's not consistently respected. It won't be even in an anarchist society, which will be populated by some number of criminals, but the point is that the nature of the nonaggression principle is just a perpetually-renewed agreement among people who refrain from aggression against each other. By choosing to argue right now, rather than me coming over and clubbing you over the head until you agree with me, we're affirming the nonaggression principle (which you have to do to argue, otherwise you run into a contradiction--something which explains, for example, why you can't argue with someone that he ought to be your slave, since you're presupposing the need for his consent/agreement, that he's a free agent, etc. Insofar as he consents to be your "slave", he isn't actually a slave at all. Argumentation ethics).
Quote from Blinking Spirit »
It seems like you're going to have a lot of trouble trying to argue that the nonaggression principle ought to be followed.
That's why I don't argue that it ought to be followed--I argue that you can't engage in argument or rational communication without affirming it, and that, at the point you engage in violence, you're affirming force, rather than reason, and are throwing all discussion of "rights" out the window, which explains my political conception of the NAP as something which both offers a kind of immunity and is a way of describing how legal liability is allocated.
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Hello, Cody. I consider myself to be pretty open-minded. I've talked with Anarchists before and when I first heard of the concept it sounded like a good idea. But as I thought about it more on my own, I started to see problems with it -- problems that I felt were serious enough that I'd prefer living in a Representative Democracy over living in an Anarchist society. I've occasionally mentioned these issues to anarchists and I've never really heard them addressed adequately (by which, I mean adequately enough for me to support the idea of an Anarchist society). Seeing as how you're being pretty persistent here, I may as well bring them up and see what you have to say.
Sure thing. I'll see what I can do to answer you.
Quote from InfinityAlarm »
My issues with Anarchy:
1. The justice system of an Anarchist Society. How do rules/laws get made, decided upon precisely what they'll entail, enforced, and trials held for accused rulebreakers/criminals/whatever-you-want-to-call them? I would not feel comfortable if these tasks were engaged in by the private sector who answer only to the market and cannot be directly influenced by the people they are supposed to be protecting.
There's a problem with that, since the relevant market for any firm is the market within which its own customer base is contained; ergo, by being accountable to the market, it must also necessarily be accountable to the individuals with whom it has outstanding contracts.
Quote from InfinityAlarm »
Specifically, could you mention how a rule/law concerning DUI would be made, have its limits established, be enforced, how violators would be tried (if at all), who would make sure this is all being done fairly and correctly, and how violators determined guilty would be handled?
I think there are a couple different dynamics which would be in play there.
1. All property and roads would be private in an AnCap society, which means that owners would be able to set rules based on their ownership. Given massive public sentiment opposed to drunk driving, there's a huge incentive to require sobriety as a precondition to driving on your property (which is more of a concern for road owners than anything).
2. Contractual costs. Driving drunk could lead to getting taken to an arbitrator for aggressive action/driving, which could lead to a rise in those insurance costs (the probable cost increases from drinking at all notwithstanding, though I think the liability increase as a client would lead to higher premiums). Medical insurers would probably drive costs up for drinking, as well, since it represents a larger risk of claims. Probably also true for vehicle insurers, since lifestyle choices factor heavily into payment plans (hell, teenagers alone experience huge hikes in costs because they represent huge risks).
3. I'm not as sure about this one, but it's also possible that cars could be outfitted with that breathalyzer-type technology if your insurers discover that you drive under the influence with any frequency.
It's hard to say exactly how any problem will be handled, because societies are heterogeneous, but those are some good possibilities.
Quote from InfinityAlarm »
Like jails. What if I don't want to pay for jails? What does that mean for me? Do I not get thrown in jail? Does someone who commits an offense against me not get thrown in jail? Why is anyone going to bother paying for jails if they're not mandated to?
Defense/policing agencies will probably fund jails, since they have a vested interest in keeping criminals off the street to maintain confidence in services. Plus, it allows them to add a fee for jail maintenance, which I imagine they would like well enough.
Quote from InfinityAlarm »
2. Societal Defense. How can you effectively defend an Anarchist Society from hostile outside forces without mandatory chip-ins to Defense? And "There won't be hostile outside forces." does not address this. If another society with tanks, jets, bombs, missiles, etc. attack an Anarchist society that decided it doesn't want to pay much for Defense, the Anarchist society is gone. How would the society even decide how much to pay for Defense? Or would it be left up to each individual? Would it be like: I pay a firm for protection against invading armies, but my neighbor doesn't so they defend my property but stay off his? That would put the security firm at a tactical disadvantage, having to allocate their forces specifically to those who paid but staying out of areas they weren't paid to defend while the invaders wouldn't be dealing with this issue.
I already addressed defense earlier in the thread. In fact, I think it may have been on page one.
Quote from InfinityAlarm »
3. Dispute Resolution. This kind of ties back in to the first one, but when two parties disagree over ownership of something how does this get handled in an Anarchist society?
Assuming they can't settle it amongst themselves? A third-party arbitrator.
Quote from InfinityAlarm »
Who pays for dispute resolution?
That depends on how things are structured. People might agree upon an arbitrator and pay themselves, they might get their property insurers to agree upon an arbitrator, it might end up that the "loser" bears the costs... There's not really a definite method for that happening inherent to anarchism. I think you're kind of asking the wrong questions, because you eventually get to a level of detail where you're asking me to outline the entire anarchist legal system, which is tantamount to me drilling you on how exactly similar things occur--to a similar level of detail--will occur in statist societies. It eventually becomes a matter of continually shifting the goalposts, which I think derails the discussion.
Quote from InfinityAlarm »
If one side pays more for dispute resolution, what prevents them from just having the dispute ended in their favor?
What prevents that from happening in a statist society? Are state officials somehow inherently more honest than private individuals? I don't really think that the statement "corruption exists" defeats anarchism. I do think that incentives to be corrupt are fewer in an anarchist society (example: companies losing reputation, and therefore business, if individuals know that paying more = victory, especially if the arbitrator has to be agreed upon for services to begin), and that the consequences of corruption are more tangible than in a state.
Quote from InfinityAlarm »
What if someone doesn't want to pay for dispute resolution? Do they automatically lose all disputes against them?
If a person is going to sit and complain about their property being stolen, why wouldn't they pay to prove that it's theirs?
Quote from InfinityAlarm »
Also, I'm kind of curious, do you think that, say, just the USA could break up into a region of anarchist societies and survive, or would it have to be the whole world?
Personally? As an intermediate step, I advocate breakdown into democratic micro-states, and I think that the US could get to anarchy by itself, though it's obviously better if others join in (though I certainly don't think that every state has to do it at once for things to work out).
None of you have proved how a fiat system works in an anarchy. At all. Not even a little. You simply say "it will be done". At best you have private currency going back to the gold standard, but in reality private currency would be backed with commodities - especially oil.
Also, the privatization of currency has been proven to be an abysmal failure in practice. Coal mining all but permanently ruined the economies of many areas in the US.
I mean de facto in an AnCap society. It's recognized to an extent already because of prohibitions on aggressive actions like murder and theft, but it's not consistently respected. It won't be even in an anarchist society, which will be populated by some number of criminals, but the point is that the nature of the nonaggression principle is just a perpetually-renewed agreement among people who refrain from aggression against each other. By choosing to argue right now, rather than me coming over and clubbing you over the head until you agree with me, we're affirming the nonaggression principle (which you have to do to argue, otherwise you run into a contradiction--something which explains, for example, why you can't argue with someone that he ought to be your slave, since you're presupposing the need for his consent/agreement, that he's a free agent, etc. Insofar as he consents to be your "slave", he isn't actually a slave at all. Argumentation ethics).
That's why I don't argue that it ought to be followed--I argue that you can't engage in argument or rational communication without affirming it, and that, at the point you engage in violence, you're affirming force, rather than reason, and are throwing all discussion of "rights" out the window, which explains my political conception of the NAP as something which both offers a kind of immunity and is a way of describing how legal liability is allocated.
This concept intrigues me since I have yet to see a way of deciding what would be considered 'aggression' and would legitimize my actions in response. When push comes to shove when more civilized ways to have someone stop doing something fail, you are only left with the option of physically restraining them from continuing their actions.
The cynic in me says that ultimately 'aggression' will be defined as whatever a person/group/society does not agree with.
That IS government. Or don't people who "band together" have any form of government?
Why don't you "vague it up" a bit more when it comes to governing?
Corporations have governments, and most of them are pretty much totalitarian.
All you're doing is talking past me with a different definition of government.
Quote from dcartist »
I call bull**** again.
Monopolies are good for those who are owners of the monopoly.
Monopolies are bad because those INSIDE the monopoly take advantage of those OUTSIDE the monopoly. Monopolies are GREAT economically... to those who are members of the monopoly. In fact it's yet another illustration of the principle of the advantages of larger organization.
If you look at the US Nation is a near monopoly, it's GREAT to be the US Nation, and it SUCKS to be those who compete with us. It's great for the
WORLD if there is competition with the US dollar... like Europe and their Euro...
Monopolies ROCK.
There is nothing bad about the INTERNAL structure of a monopoly. Monopolies can be structured internally in any way you like. A monopoly is DEFINED by its competition.
The way you take a bit of faulty, fuzzy thinking, and suggest that government (even a democratically elected one) is a "monopoly"... it's ludicrous.
I once had a conversation with somebody about why big corporations aren't internally structured with markets... like having 5 different legal divisions, each competing with the other at all times... or 8 different internal shipping divisions. There is ALWAYS tight central control in any big company. There has to be. Same with military: we do not have anarcho-organized armies with people coming to a "mutual understanding" about which team's turn it is to make the suicide charge up the hill to distract the enemy. Why? Because that's how you WIN.
Even if they internally have competing units... ultimately there is a guy or a committee running the show. There has to be. They can be reassigned by the president and the people though.
You're just talking past me again by redefining government and making a trivial statement about monopolies enjoying being monopolies. In terms of coercive monopolies (i.e. monopolies established through force/legal power, like the state), they're comparatively bad for everyone who isn't the monopoly (which can just exploit everyone because there's no one to stop it). In terms of non-coercive monopolies (like the expected monopoly an inventor has on his invention, or companies with big market share), I think they're essential to stimulate exploratory investment. These sorts of monopolies and their busting, you might say, are necessary and beneficial pieces of the way the market works
Quote from dcartist »
You say "A". I say "B". What does "settled" even mean?
In the context of my statement, I mean that we can argue and debate to come to a conclusion on our ideological dispute without needing to appeal to an external arbitrator.
Quote from dcartist »
All you're saying is that you won't have government except when you need one... and making some ridiculous claim that conflict doesn't happen very often.
I didn't make that claim at all. I said that a lot of conflicts can be argued and settled internally, and those that don't can be funneled through a third-party arbitrator.
Quote from dcartist »
Your talk about 'community' deciding what's right or wrong for bad people is law of the lynch gang: "Mob rule".
1. I never said anything about "the community" making those decisions.
2. Even if I did, lynch mobs isn't what would be implied by such a statement. In the same way that individuals in a market decide what the dominant good/service (i.e. dominant company) will be, same story applies to defense agencies and arbitrators.
Quote from dcartist »
Rule "by the people" is an expression describing representative government and democracy.
You really can't tell the difference?
Representative governments are indirect lynch mobs...?
Quote from dcartist »
Actually the validity of your theory would best be tested by any kind of successful real world experiment.
I can drone on and on about the potential virtues about my theory of "government by loudest voice", where the person with the loudest voice makes all decisions, but I think a SUCCESSFUL real world experiment would be the only thing that would give "lunatic fringe theories" like ours any kind of serious traction.
I would very much enjoy a large-scale experiment. The best we lunatics can do at the moment (in terms of empirical data) is to set up a sliding scale of countries, and point out the improvements as the scale slides closer and closer to what we claim to want.
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None of you have proved how a fiat system works in an anarchy. At all. Not even a little. You simply say "it will be done". At best you have private currency going back to the gold standard, but in reality private currency would be backed with commodities - especially oil.
You mean fiat currency? I'm a fan of that not existing.
And I honestly don't see currencies being backed by oil, because backing something with a commodity means that you can redeem your notes for some unit of the commodity. With oil, it seems like that would be an abysmal failure (especially as oil supplies diminish, and the value of the currency tanks compared to competing currencies).
Quote from emo_pinata »
Also, the privatization of currency has been proven to be an abysmal failure in practice. Coal mining all but permanently ruined the economies of many areas in the US.
Scrip still exists in a lot of places--gift cards, "tickets' at amusement parks, the money at Disneyland, Bitcoin, MMO currency, transportation companies issuing currencies in the mid-19th century,... I don't really think it's a failure simply because some instances haven't produced ideal results (especially since they've occurred largely under monetary monopoly by the state). It's like saying that statism is a failure solely on the basis of failed states existing. Even being an anarchist, that would just be a weak argument.
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I'm having trouble understanding how the non-aggression principle is being applied here.
Is it a hypothesis? In other words, "it's not Cody Franklin-Brand Anarcho-Capitalism unless it has a Non-Aggression Principle?" If that's the case, then all you've got is a vision that tumbles down like a house of cards once you introduce even one agent of sufficient power that doesn't accept the hypothesis.
No, anarcho-capitalism is based on the NAP regardless--I just conceptualize it a bit differently, in a way which I think makes more sense, but also resolves the tensions which result from my being a moral nihilist.
Quote from Crashing00 »
Or is it a consequence? In other words, is there some heretofore undescribed mechanism in place that compels agents in an anarcho-capitalism to abide by a NAP even if they would not otherwise do so?
People aren't compelled to do so--it's just a way of recognizing the agreement among agents to refrain from aggression, the likes of which is constantly reaffirmed by people continuing to refrain from violence. Our arguing, for example, affirms nonaggression/self-ownership. It's why I can't logically argue that you should be my slave, because the presuppositions you and I must necessarily make to engage in an argument preclude the possibility of slavery as resulting from rational communication.
In terms of aggression, though, using violence necessarily breaks the agreement with whomever you're engaging in violence with because you're affirming force, rather than communication/rationality/argument (which means you're also rejecting your immunity to violence and legal liability). Basically, affirming the use of force does so universally, in the sense that you're also affirming others' right to use force in return.
Quote from Crashing00 »
If so, then you have all the problems that Blinking Spirit et al. are trying to point out.
Lol @ et al. I probably invited it on myself, but I'm being filibustered a bit more than I expected, what with numerous members bringing up arguments (many of which are actually the same, I think, albeit with different wording), and doing so in a manner which is really, really long (which is compounded by the fact that I can't double-post without being hit with a warning).
Quote from Crashing00 »
One problem that I can see is that in an anarcho-capitalistic model, every single agent needs enough guns (hired or otherwise) to defend itself against the maximum threat level posed by any agent
The maximum threat for an agent is death, and saying that people have to find ways to protect themselves from it doesn't really say anything unique about anarchism or statism. The only thing that changes is the way in which individuals go about seeking that protection.
Quote from Crashing00 »
whereas with larger nation-states, those burdens manifest themselves more at the larger scales than the small. In other words, if nation-states have bloated budgets at the large scale of defense, then anarcho-capitalistic agents have bloated budgets at the local scale.
True, though I hesitate on "local", because that could mean a lot of things. The defense that one employs against criminals, whether that means contracting with a policing agency and/or carrying a firearm (large-scale carrying being a pretty big disincentive to openly committing crimes, in my opinion), is a far cry from the kinds of contracts made with larger military defense agencies, who, though very likely not as large as the US in terms of power and budget, will probably be big enough (and numerous enough, given polycentric defense) to make it a fair non-issue, in addition to the fact that anarchist societies aren't really a threat anyway (the other disincentives to invasion, and the fact that geopolitics isn't like Risk notwithstanding).
I'm having trouble understanding how the non-aggression principle is being applied here.
Is it a hypothesis? In other words, "it's not Cody Franklin-Brand Anarcho-Capitalism unless it has a Non-Aggression Principle?" If that's the case, then all you've got is a vision that tumbles down like a house of cards once you introduce even one agent of sufficient power that doesn't accept the hypothesis.
Or is it a consequence? In other words, is there some heretofore undescribed mechanism in place that compels agents in an anarcho-capitalism to abide by a NAP even if they would not otherwise do so? If so, then you have all the problems that Blinking Spirit et al. are trying to point out.
One problem that I can see is that in an anarcho-capitalistic model, every single agent needs enough guns (hired or otherwise) to defend itself against the maximum threat level posed by any agent, whereas with larger nation-states, those burdens manifest themselves more at the larger scales than the small. In other words, if nation-states have bloated budgets at the large scale of defense, then anarcho-capitalistic agents have bloated budgets at the local scale.
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A limit of time is fixed for thee
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
You mean fiat currency? I'm a fan of that not existing.
And I honestly don't see currencies being backed by oil, because backing something with a commodity means that you can redeem your notes for some unit of the commodity. With oil, it seems like that would be an abysmal failure (especially as oil supplies diminish, and the value of the currency tanks compared to competing currencies).
Scrip still exists in a lot of places--gift cards, "tickets' at amusement parks, the money at Disneyland, Bitcoin, MMO currency, transportation companies issuing currencies in the mid-19th century,... I don't really think it's a failure simply because some instances haven't produced ideal results (especially since they've occurred largely under monetary monopoly by the state). It's like saying that statism is a failure solely on the basis of failed states existing. Even being an anarchist, that would just be a weak argument.
Since you failed to answer, I'll ask some questions more plainly:
1) What gives the AnCap currencies any value?
2) How does a bank lending all their money economically viable?
As to what you have said, if there is no fiat system then any currency is backed by a physical commoditity. Period. Gold and silver are the common standard, but anything can be used by taking it out of the market and setting it aside for currency. Failure to set it aside means that the economy would collapse. That means that the scarcer the commodity, the more each unit of currency is worth (functionally).
The difference between a gift card, tickets, etc. and the situation I provided is evident. What you listed as "script" is backed by the government as having value, while what I gave as an example was corporations printing private currency and controlling their population by driving inflation themselves. So the failures actually existed where there was not a government monopoly (gold standard) and the successful scripts only exist because of a government monopoly (USD) - not the version you presented which is factually backwards.
Since you failed to answer, I'll ask some questions more plainly:
1) What gives the AnCap currencies any value?
What gives any currency value? The government sure doesn't do it. The government can print as many green pieces of paper as it wants, but it won't create value unless there are goods to trade for it (and the more paper you have, the lower your purchasing power). The backing of the currency, stability of the money supply, general supply and demand, prevalence vs. competitive currencies, etc.
Quote from Emo_pinata »
2) How does a bank lending all their money economically viable?
I don't even understand this question.
Quote from Emo_pinata »
As to what you have said, if there is no fiat system then any currency is backed by a physical commoditity. Period.
Yes. I acknowledged that, and also pointed out that I'm glad for it. I don't like fiat currency, especially in the hands of central banks.
Quote from Emo_pinata »
Gold and silver are the common standard, but anything can be used by taking it out of the market and setting it aside for currency.
True, but saying that X can be used as a commodity backing doesn't say anything about how successful that currency will be.
Quote from Emo_Pinata »
Failure to set it aside means that the economy would collapse. That means that the scarcer the commodity, the more each unit of currency is worth (functionally).
That isn't true at all. In fact, the reverse is true. If you have a currency and a commodity to back it, then you have to have enough of the commodity to redeem all notes for a particular value. If you increase the money supply, then you're devaluing the currency unless you also increase the supply of the commodity (looking only at those two goods, and ignoring all other goods and services, anyway), because each unit of currency now redeems for less of the commodity that prior to the supply increase. The same effect occurs if supply of the commodity backing the currency shrinks.
Quote from Crashing00 »
The difference between a gift card, tickets, etc. and the situation I provided is evident. What you listed as "script" is backed by the government as having value, while what I gave as an example was corporations printing private currency and controlling their population by driving inflation themselves.
Corporate scrip could be redeemed for USD (i.e. were backed by the state)--additionally, wages in those days were paid in dollars, not in scrip.
Quote from Crashing00 »
So the failures actually existed where there was not a government monopoly (gold standard) and the successful scripts only exist because of a government monopoly (USD) - not the version you presented which is factually backwards.
I never said that corporate scrip was unequivocally successful. I was just pointing out that A) there are a lot of private currencies which work well, and B) pointing out that private currency is bad because some currencies haven't produced ideal results is as bad an argument as saying that the state is bad because failed states exist.
I am honestly asking these questions it is not meant to be snide. To give some context i live in America.
I personal feel like i have all the freedom that i need. Everything that i truly have wanted to do i have been able to do. I wanted to learn math from professional mathematicians i was given that freedom. I wanted to teach my knowledge to others i have been given that freedom. I wanted to start a family and i have. I wanted a home and i have one. I do not believe the system was perfect, but i truly do not know of any other freedoms that i am lacking. So what does anarcho capitalism offer me that i do not already have.
I have never been subjugated by the state. The worst thing a police officer has done to me is ticket me for not having insurance. If you are going to say that i have to pay taxes well that is true and it does not bother me. I am focusing on my life not on what governments do so any argument about the moral issues associated with war are real but they do not address my question. As a human i care about my personal self interest and want to know what an anarcho capitalistic system would grant me that i do not already have.
Also i personal believe that large corporations in America already have to much freedom. I have seen the problems created by the freedom that corporations already wield. The best argument i have seen from anarcho capitalist about restraining the corporations is through public opinion. i want more of a barrier than human opinion. Right now human opinion is not strong enough to restrain corporations. You make some very large assumptions about the power of humans to restrain corporations through public opinion.
1.) that the public will gain the knowledge of what corporations do.
2.) that people will understand the knowledge if they receive it.
3.) that people will have the will and ability to do something about the knowledge they understand.
I will provide an example of how already corporations have to much power and that the will of the people is not strong enough. It is obvious that the mercury that has been released in the air has been collecting in wildlife most notably fish. There are water ways in America right now where the fish are too toxic to eat. This is true for most of America. Why? Well most people do not know about the mercury poising issue. This to me is a clear case that public knowledge and opinion is to week to restrain corporate pollution.
Is there anything possible in an AnCap society to prevent monopolies from forming?
Also, if the economy becomes "top-heavy" with the vast majority of wealth in the hands of a few, does that not motivate the arbitrators to rule in favor of where the money is? Why would they care what their reputation became amongst the poor masses when resolving a conflict between a poor person and a rich person? A reputation of ruling in favor of the rich is more beneficial to the arbitrator, isn't it? And what happens if the two parties in a dispute cannot find an arbitrator that they agree will be fair? Do they settle it with guns or their private armies? This again seems to favor the rich, since they'd have more money for those things.
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"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love." --Carl Sagan
Hello, Cody. I consider myself to be pretty open-minded. I've talked with Anarchists before and when I first heard of the concept it sounded like a good idea. But as I thought about it more on my own, I started to see problems with it -- problems that I felt were serious enough that I'd prefer living in a Representative Democracy over living in an Anarchist society. I've occasionally mentioned these issues to anarchists and I've never really heard them addressed adequately (by which, I mean adequately enough for me to support the idea of an Anarchist society). Seeing as how you're being pretty persistent here, I may as well bring them up and see what you have to say.
My issues with Anarchy:
1. The justice system of an Anarchist Society. How do rules/laws get made, decided upon precisely what they'll entail, enforced, and trials held for accused rulebreakers/criminals/whatever-you-want-to-call them? I would not feel comfortable if these tasks were engaged in by the private sector who answer only to the market and cannot be directly influenced by the people they are supposed to be protecting. Specifically, could you mention how a rule/law concerning DUI would be made, have its limits established, be enforced, how violators would be tried (if at all), who would make sure this is all being done fairly and correctly, and how violators determined guilty would be handled? Like jails. What if I don't want to pay for jails? What does that mean for me? Do I not get thrown in jail? Does someone who commits an offense against me not get thrown in jail? Why is anyone going to bother paying for jails if they're not mandated to?
They do it via handwaveology. If you major in it you get a BA though, not a BS. Though technically speaking, it smells a lot more like BS.
Basically all 300 million people in the US just sort of "agree" to resolve the conflict one way or another.
In the rare times that people disagree on small issues like abortion, conflicts are resolved by, y'know... a "concensus", when all the parties finally see "reason" and agree.
2. Societal Defense. How can you effectively defend an Anarchist Society from hostile outside forces without mandatory chip-ins to Defense? And "There won't be hostile outside forces." does not address this. If another society with tanks, jets, bombs, missiles, etc. attack an Anarchist society that decided it doesn't want to pay much for Defense, the Anarchist society is gone. How would the society even decide how much to pay for Defense? Or would it be left up to each individual? Would it be like: I pay a firm for protection against invading armies, but my neighbor doesn't so they defend my property but stay off his? That would put the security firm at a tactical disadvantage, having to allocate their forces specifically to those who paid but staying out of areas they weren't paid to defend while the invaders wouldn't be dealing with this issue.
Real world examples of anarcho capitalist societies like the Sudan and Afghanistan solve that problem via (1) general poverty and (2) individual, heavily armed clans providing "justice" in their own circles. The combination of the 2 prevent outside forces from really wanting to stick around, since they can't establish order or benefit from "conquering" the territory.
3. Dispute Resolution. This kind of ties back in to the first one, but when two parties disagree over ownership of something how does this get handled in an Anarchist society? Who pays for dispute resolution? If one side pays more for dispute resolution, what prevents them from just having the dispute ended in their favor? What if someone doesn't want to pay for dispute resolution? Do they automatically lose all disputes against them?
Also, I'm kind of curious, do you think that, say, just the USA could break up into a region of anarchist societies and survive, or would it have to be the whole world?
Thank you for your time.
Given there are no "recognized government authorities, I would think the only recognized authorities are those that have armed themselves to protect their criminal enterprises.
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@Cody_Franklin:
Hey, I just realized that organized crime (crips v bloods, italians v russians, Colombians v Jamaicans etc.) is an example of de facto "anarcho capitalism"!! The business are all operating without a central government determining the rules, and privatized businesses all do conflict resolution via 'concensus'.
For some reason, they all feel the need to be heavily armed, and not to fight the government or police... but to guard against being stolen from by EACH OTHER.
How is the illegal drug business in this country NOT a perfect example of "anarcho capitalism"?
They are not ruled by the government in any way. Which is in fact why they must protect their wealth via force. Great system...
You're just talking past me again by redefining government and making a trivial statement about monopolies enjoying being monopolies. In terms of coercive monopolies (i.e. monopolies established through force/legal power, like the state), they're comparatively bad for everyone who isn't the monopoly (which can just exploit everyone because there's no one to stop it).
In a democratic state, EVERYBODY is the monopoly except for foreign nations. We are ALL shareholders in the monopoly.
How can you possibly argue that we are NOT the owners of the monopoly, when WE elect the board of directors, WE elect the CEO, WE fund the entire thing, and collect dividends?
In the context of my statement, I mean that we can argue and debate to come to a conclusion on our ideological dispute without needing to appeal to an external arbitrator.
I want the land. You want the land. Which one gets the land?
Do all 300 million Americans decide?
Or a small subset of 10,000?
Or do we decide via which one of us wins at arm wrestling?
Or which one of us brought more friends?
I want the land. You want the land. Who decides who gets the land?
Its utterly ridiculous how you refuse to be concrete in your explanation of how conflicts would be resolved. How do we pick the arbiter, if it comes to that point?
It's all handwaving bull**** on your part.
I didn't make that claim at all. I said that a lot of conflicts can be argued and settled internally,
Internally to WHO.
For there to be an "internal" there has to be an "US" that includes you and me. There is no "US". There is YOU. And there is ME.
I want the land. You want the land. How do we settle it?
and those that don't can be funneled through a third-party arbitrator.
Who picks the arbitrator? Who grants him authority? What if I don't like his decision?
1. I never said anything about "the community" making those decisions.
2. Even if I did, lynch mobs isn't what would be implied by such a statement. In the same way that individuals in a market decide what the dominant good/service (i.e. dominant company) will be, same story applies to defense agencies and arbitrators.
Markets are based on explicit rules of conduct that are understood by all parties. Markets operate within the rules of LAW defined by the government.
Black markets are the only "anarcho capitalist" markets.
If you believe that black markets always work better than legal markets, then be my guest to them in your fantasy world. For me "black markets" are places of pure caveat emptor where you can get your clock cleaned by scumbags.
Representative governments are indirect lynch mobs...?
And here I thought my opinion of you couldn't get lower. it's tiresome enough dealing with your arguments when you're misguided but sincere. This crap borders on "I know you are what am I?".
I would very much enjoy a large-scale experiment. The best we lunatics can do at the moment (in terms of empirical data) is to set up a sliding scale of countries, and point out the improvements as the scale slides closer and closer to what we claim to want.
What you "want" is so vague in terms of IMPLEMENTATION, that nobody knows what you "want".
What you constantly describe is HOW you want things to HAPPEN, and there is virtually NOTHING about how you would actually implement anything.
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Even if you could live in a fantasy world where you do work out all the impossible issues of national defense, conflict resolution, etc., I'm unclear on what the theoretical positive benefits of anarcho capitalism are to justify even a small reduction in societal efficiency, etc.
A little improved market efficiency? What is the MAGNITUDE of theoretical benefit that an anarcho-capitalist society gives us? What is the promise of it? What makes living in an anarcho capitalist society soooooo appealing to you? Is it THAT huge an advantage that an AnCap society is just going to outperform other societies? Or is it some vague "principle" thing that you love so bad, Cody?
No, anarcho-capitalism is based on the NAP regardless--I just conceptualize it a bit differently, in a way which I think makes more sense, but also resolves the tensions which result from my being a moral nihilist.
I probably worded that poorly by putting your name in it. I don't mean that your personal conception of the term is different or wrong. I mean to ask if you are asserting that the NAP is a necessary condition in your arguments. If so, then by contraposition you must also acknowledge that if the NAP is violated, so are all the conclusions that rely on it. And in this case, the conclusions are (in my opinion) too fragile to be relied upon, especially knowing as I do that we are an incompletely evolved primate species with a fundamentally aggressive nature that is brought to the surface all too easily.
Quote from Cody Franklin »
It's why I can't logically argue that you should be my slave, because the presuppositions you and I must necessarily make to engage in an argument preclude the possibility of slavery as resulting from rational communication.
Really? Doesn't this assume that you and I are both a lot nicer than we might actually be? For instance, I could be debating you merely as an intellectual diversion (true) and if I had the ability to do so I wouldn't hesitate to enslave you (false, but only because I happen to be a nice guy) -- nothing about the nature of debate in itself rules out such a scenario. And I'm sure if it came down to it I could come up with some logic extolling the benefits (to me) of having a cadre of slaves on hand.
Not all debate is intended to persuade and not all debaters are persuadable; don't let the fact that the persuasive mode of writing is used fool you.
Quote from Cody Franklin »
Basically, affirming the use of force does so universally, in the sense that you're also affirming others' right to use force in return.
Sure, but then you're up against the "who has the most guns" problem.
Quote from Cody Franklin »
Lol @ et al. I probably invited it on myself, but I'm being filibustered a bit more than I expected, what with numerous members bringing up arguments (many of which are actually the same, I think, albeit with different wording), and doing so in a manner which is really, really long (which is compounded by the fact that I can't double-post without being hit with a warning).
Everybody gets dogpiled once in awhile. As for double posting, I could be wrong about this, but I think you only get infracted if you actually double post. If someone is actively replying to you, I think it is acceptable to reply to them so as to maintain the chronological structure of the conversation. For instance, this particular reply confused the crap out of me because it was above my OP and there was another reply below my OP that used my name, but quoted something that had nothing to do with me.
Quote from Cody Franklin »
The maximum threat for an agent is death, and saying that people have to find ways to protect themselves from it doesn't really say anything unique about anarchism or statism. The only thing that changes is the way in which individuals go about seeking that protection.
No, no. You misunderstand me. I'm not talking about the worst possible thing that could happen to me as an individual. When I say greatest possible threat, I mean the largest potential quantity of manpower and armament that could be coercively levied against me.
To throw out an example (putting aside the NAP for the moment), suppose my private security contractor, who maintains a force of 10,000 armed men in defense of my local area, sends me a scouting report that the Nike Corporation is marching through my area with a force of 1,000,000 conscripting anyone unable to resist into forced labor at the nearest Nike plant. Knowing that my private contractor will not be able to oppose such a force, I must either hire a bigger, better defense contractor or learn how to mold leather.
In other words, my defense budget has to adjust itself upward to match the greatest threat I might potentially face, even if that threat is on a megacorporate or national scale as compared to my individual scale.
The inevitable outcome of such a scenario is that there is one unique largest army (let's call it the Army), anyone who is not under the Army's protection is not adequately protected (because there is a larger army that could be levied against them), and competing armies eventually become pointless (either because they act aggressively in opposition to the Army and are therefore defeated, or are ideologically aligned with the Army but because a small, efficient force can easily out-compete the Army by availing themselves of the peace enforced by the Army's presence, the Army must either crush it or risk being replaced by it).
Then one of two things happens; the Army is controlled in a despotic way and the end result is an empire of some sort, or the Army is controlled in an enlightened way and ends up as some kind of a republic. Either way it essentially becomes a government, collecting taxes (it's the only defense contractor and everyone needs defense, ergo...) and wielding all of the essential diplomatic and legal powers of a nation-state. (for instance, the terms of everyone's contract could contain, by reference, a code of laws to be followed, and so forth.)
What gives any currency value? The government sure doesn't do it. The government can print as many green pieces of paper as it wants, but it won't create value unless there are goods to trade for it (and the more paper you have, the lower your purchasing power). The backing of the currency, stability of the money supply, general supply and demand, prevalence vs. competitive currencies, etc.
Currency is indeed backed by the government, but is not tied to any set commodity. That would be what fiat currency is, and the government is the only thing that gives it value - not business. The government also cannot "print as much [currency] as it wants".
Also you provided a list of words with no context, they explain why one currency has value not a world where anyone can invent a currency.
That isn't true at all. In fact, the reverse is true. If you have a currency and a commodity to back it, then you have to have enough of the commodity to redeem all notes for a particular value. If you increase the money supply, then you're devaluing the currency unless you also increase the supply of the commodity (looking only at those two goods, and ignoring all other goods and services, anyway), because each unit of currency now redeems for less of the commodity that prior to the supply increase. The same effect occurs if supply of the commodity backing the currency shrinks.
YOU CANNOT JUST INCREASE THE MONEY SUPPLY WITH NOTHING BACKING IT.
If X amount of currency is X amount of something, you cannot add Y amount of currency without adding Y amount of whatever something that backs it. You also cannot take Z amount of that something away without removing Z amount of currency. That's how that works. That is the only way that can work. If you try and change that, then the economy collapses because the money has no value.
Corporate scrip could be redeemed for USD (i.e. were backed by the state)--additionally, wages in those days were paid in dollars, not in scrip.
You are simply wrong on all accounts. The workers were paid corporate scrip, and the scrip was backed by gold not the state, the banks accepting the company scrip determined interest rates, and all the general stores that accepted the corporate scrip determined the prices of all goods sold there.
As a bonus, you don't get to say the state does not back the current currency and that the state backing was what made this example of AnCap go wrong.
I never said that corporate scrip was unequivocally successful. I was just pointing out that A) there are a lot of private currencies which work well, and B) pointing out that private currency is bad because some currencies haven't produced ideal results is as bad an argument as saying that the state is bad because failed states exist.
You pointed out public backed currency claiming it was private scrip, and I've pointed out an exact analogy of your system and why it failed while you tried to say it was the state's fault. You cannot claim it won't fail and then claim that any failings in the past are moot and then claim that a previous failing does not prove the system doesn't work. Pick your pony.
On top of that, the state can recover from economic collapse - corporations cannot.
If the cycle is not caused by capitalism expanding into new markets and then stalling and crashing when those markets are full, what is the cause?
Without reading everything I think he's referring to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. The easiest way is to attack it through neo-classical economics and attacking the basics of Austrian economics altogether on how it shifted from mathematics and emperical research to intellectual history.
How are cable companies, utilities, or any service funded? You draw up a contract for their services, and you make a payment every month. Nobody forces you to pay into it.
Sorry, the social compact is non-negotiable. Either murder is wrong for everyone, and everyone who attempts it gets punished / restrained / prevented / whatever, or the entire idea of crime prevention doesn't work. This is why (at least some) government services are different from private services. And, incidentally, why coercive taxation is justified - if everyone benefits equally from a system which could either reward or punish based on behavior, obviously no one will pay in to support it unless either they have to or they get some sort of "above the law" status. The "private security" systems Anarcho-Capitalists prefer would have plenty of people willing to pay - but they themselves would also be able to get away with murder. I don't find that acceptable. Justice should not be limited to those who can afford it.
That isn't a solution, though. Like I said, the state doesn't do what you want just because you advocate it doing something.
Well, it won't probably do *exactly* what I want, but it will do what the majority wants, and that's usually something that tends to muddle through.
1. I'm very dubious of regulation unequivocally having "good intent". A large number of business-related legislation passed is typically the consequence of lobbying pressures, rather than some benevolent urge on the part of our congressmen.
Lobbying pressure can also come from, for instance, concerned citizens trying to make sure agribusinesses don't adulterate their products, or from professional organizations of doctors or scientists seeking to enforce open and ethical behavior in healthcare and research. I will never understand where so many people get the fantasy notion that somewhere out there the evil liberals are having dinner parties and saying to one another, "Gee, you know what I hate? Small businesses! Let's make up a regulation just to screw with them!" Obviously you'll get this impression if you listen to the sort of bloviates you get on Fox or AM Radio, but I would credit you with more intelligence than that. Most regulatory proposals have the intention of curbing some sort of potential abuse. Obviously, during the legislative process some, even many, bills get perverted away from their original purpose with pork and amendments. But that's not an argument against regulation as a concept, it's an argument for transparency in government.
I just don't think that there's much incentive to do well,
Retaining one's office come election day isn't incentive any more? Stop the presses!
...much less follow your argument (which is just "regulation would be good if it has good intentions and works as it's intended", which is kind of obvious, but very trivial).
Not trivial, just extremely basic. You were basically making a sweeping argument that regulation, as a concept, did not represent a sensible solution to a given problem. Now, you might not *prefer* it as the solution, you might prefer another solution. But it is *a* possible solution. Unless, of course...
And that caricature of unregulated business as trampling and destroying everything doesn't strike me as realistic.
...you just deny the problem altogether. >_<;; *sighs* Have you ever heard the term "fiduciary responsibility" (or "fiduciary duty")? In this case I am referring to corporate board members. They are expected and required to do their very best to increase shareholder value. That is, at its core, all that a corporation is about. Some corporations start in one field, branch into another, and then abandon their original field altogether. So you can't define a business by *how* it makes its profits. All a corporation is, is a big pile of money and the managers of that money, whose task is to provide the owners of that money - the investors - with a return on their investment. Some companies do so by manufacturing things, some sell services, others buy and sell commodities or speculate on futures. That's all irrelevant: you grow the pile of money, or the shareholders fire your ass and replace you with someone who will.
So beneath the board, are the officers who run the company. Since they report to the board, they too are responsible to grow the pile of money, or be fired. All the way down to the mail room clerk - if he's constantly late to work, then he's ultimately causing the pile of money to grow more slowly than it could if the company had a mail room clerk who had good attendance. So he's fired and replaced. With me so far?
So, now picture this. You are the (to this day unknown, unnamed, and unpunished) Ford or Firestone middle manager who was faced with a critical decision. Do you do the ethical thing, and inform the NHTSA of the tread separation defect in the tires intended for, among other vehicles, the Ford Explorer? Well, let's examine the possible outcomes of that decision. Lives might be saved. Your company will suffer a public relations setback when the error is made public. This will translate to lost sales. Your company might even be sued. If these things happen, you will have caused the money pile to grow more slowly - or even to shrink. Obviously, you will be fired, demoted, or otherwise punished for this outcome. (Your boss will have no choice - otherwise s/he will be punished by his/her boss, and so on, up the ladder.) The alternative - not telling anyone and crossing your fingers that the tires do OK anyway - obviously still has the chance of all these things happening, but there's a chance they won't, and you'll preserve deniability. Of course, lives might be lost. But this doesn't mean your company is losing a principle stakeholder - just a potential future repeat customer. Obviously, in the real life example, the unknown suit at Ford or Firestone chose to keep silent and keep his job (at least, for the short term). The companies then engaged in a cover-up because profit was placed before ethics.
I'm not saying all people who work for corporations are evil. Most of us, I'd imagine, work for corporations. I work for a corporation. But the higher you go up the chain towards the top, the more pressure is placed upon you to make decisions based on a value system that places profit before any other motivator. And if you won't make that kind of decision, you will be replaced with someone who will - because ROI is, in the end, the only thing the shareholders are paying attention to. There is a sort of Darwinian inevitability to it, because there are plenty of clever folks out there who would love to be elevated to such a position, and if the price for their mini-mansion and yacht is some unknown toddler in another city choking on an unsafe toy, well, they put it from their mind. That toddler isn't really real to them anyway. It's just another way of externalizing costs.
You can hire bodyguards and a PI, but there's so much capital trapped up in the state that these types of industries are much, much weaker than they would otherwise be.
It's not their strength, but their motivation that is their flaw. A government's charter, at least in the case of the government of a democratic society that offers a universal franchise, is to serve all members of that society equally. No other organization can make such a claim - no corporation, no church, no citizen's coalition, no political party, no professional organization. They each have their membership, their stakeholders, their shareholders or employees, their customers - and they don't care about anyone else. They are also not transparent to the public - they are free to hide their goals, their methods, their organization structures, even their membership, from outsiders. The government is the only entity whose stated goal (however poorly you may feel it lives up to it) is to serve us all. That IMO makes it the only organization worthy of being trusted with essential social services such as law enforcement and health care. Sure, it may be less efficient, but I consider transparency and moral authority more important when it comes to essential social services than efficiency.
(Have you detected yet that I'm mostly a European-style Social Democrat? ^_^)
Taxes are, by nature, coercive. Private intermediaries don't force you to do anything. To use a slightly obscene metaphor,
it's the difference between a lady being offered a "VIP dance" from a male stripper for $50 and the stripper dragging her into the back room, raping her, and then demanding $50 at knife point for the privilege.
A nonsensical metaphor. Taxes pay for things like police, firefighters, and roads, which a vast majority wants but no one can afford alone. THAT, btw, is what I mean by "collective action". Government taxation and spending allows our entire society to act collectively to achieve things that no corporation could do unless it were a corporation of all of us as shareholders (which would, again, just be another way of saying "government"). Taxes obviously must be coercive or else people will freeload on these public services.
There are some services that are supported by other fees, and this is sensible when sensibly applied. For instance, I find it personally inconvenient to constantly be stopping to pay tolls on the highway through West Virginia, but it makes sense. No doubt a lot of the traffic on that road is through traffic (people from out of state, passing through to another state), given WV's low population density. And yet repairs and maintenance on that road is paid for by WV taxpayers... definitely not fair, since the majority of the wear and tear is being caused by non-WV-taxpayers. The solution is to partially support highway maintenance via tolls.
Similar systems exist throughout society, to exact payment for some localized services from those who benefit the most. But some services simply can't be funded this way. The military, for instance, protects all of us at all times from threats which are difficult to predict and which could (at least in theory) come from any direction. (In reality: probably not from Canada. ^_^) It's not like there's one sub-group of us who are "more protected" than others, who therefore rightly ought to pay more. Therefore we all pay our share (again, in theory), and our military remains funded.
Now, individual cases can be made for or against various social services, whether they're needed at all, whether they should be paid for on a federal, state, local, or individual level, etc. But those are individual cases and in no way constitute a coherent argument for the dissolution of the state.
Except governments are impervious to market forces and will force you to pay for whatever they decide to do (which is much more than "protection").
Heh. Tell that to John Boehner... said market forces just handed him an embarrassing political setback. He'd be thrilled to learn he's "impervious" to them...
My objection definitely isn't based on ethics.
This is why your arguments trouble me: you don't seem to address questions of ethics at all. Only your personal freedom-from, and a sense of general outrage over that. You're very certain of the ethical wrong of coercive government - but you don't seem to be very intellectually curious about the potential ethical problems involved in no-government. :\
Then they're intellectually dishonest, and they would be better off never speaking to anyone at a level above "how's the weather?"
Well, this is where you will fail with them, time and again, until you learn or give up. Differing definitions will lead people of good heart and sound mind to disagree honestly. And you can't just shrug that off with an argument that your definition will trump theirs and that THEN if they don't agree then they're being intellectually dishonest... because, taking again the example of abortion, Americans have been fighting for more than 30 years over the definition of when life begins and we're no closer than we were before to a consensus.
Calling the people on the other side "dishonest" because they refuse to betray their principles for your sake isn't very useful. You haven't convinced them yet - work on it.
But when the subject of discussion is politics, agreeing to disagree is pretty useless.
I highly recommend you go read a High School Civics textbook, stat. Agreeing to disagree is much of politics and is responsible for most periods of peace in human history. I wouldn't call it useless.
The whole "the people control the government" thing is a big myth.
I'm curious, is there a specific reason you do not have faith in / trust the democratic process? Do you feel the concept is fine but the execution is flawed? Or do you have some fundamental philosophical dispute with the ideal of democracy in general? Because if the latter, I hate to break it to you, but the only way you'll ever GET your anarcho-capitalist system is if you get enough other people to agree with you. Which is just another kind of democracy.
All power is democracy. Even Saddam Hussein's power was democratic - he murdered, persecuted, terrorized, and warmongered, but he also had the support of the powerful Ba'ath faction and enough of the other demographics of Iraq either supported him or were willing to look the other way as long as the dictator kept the trains running on time. They could have revolted, literally, at any moment, and he would have been gone. An army can fight against many things, but not its own mothers and brothers.
So, really, when I saw that ridiculous sham trial and execution, what I was really looking at was the symbolic revenge of a minority upon the figurehead of the majority who were the true culprits of that regime's crimes. But this is how it always goes. He was a monster, sure, but if he didn't exist the Ba'athists would have just picked someone similar, or someone similar would have connived and murdered his way to the top of the heap. Because ultimately, the majority always gets what it thinks it wants...
Sure they are. I've met plenty of people who are openly anti-liberty.
They were begging and clamoring to be put in chains and enslaved? I'm sure you meant, anti-other-people's-liberty. That's not what I said. That's just a pro-liberty person who defines only himself as a person worthy of liberty.
The whole "I'm entitled to my opinion and this is my opinion and it isn't up for debate" thing that a lot of people do is really annoying.
Yet this is their planet too. And sadly, they outnumber people like you and I, who are willing to reconsider everything we believe.
Also, that's not what I said. My claim was that, if people disagree, they have specific reasons for disagreeing, and that it would be intellectually dishonest to maintain the same position if their disagreements were resolved.
Yeah, but some of those disagreements are not resolvable because they're based on differing philosophies, and there is no objective, external standard by which philosophies can be compared in order to determine which is superior. Sadly. :\
Okay? That just demonstrates that people can define things differently--not that their politics is coherent.
Huh? There was nothing incoherent about the political ideology of the antebellum South. Naive and blind to economic factors that were soon to doom it to history's trashheap, yes. Arrogantly uncaring of world opinion, certainly. Morally wrong by our modern standards, and the standards of their contemporary abolitionist foes? Definitely! But how "incoherent"? Remember, within their political ideology, only the white man was an invested stakeholder in society. And therefore naturally their political structure had as its function the protection of the liberty, property, and way of life of white men. Today we call that playing to your base.
My "middle ground" is "the least amount of government possible if we can't have anarchy".
Well, you can't have anarchy, ever. Might as well just put that out of your mind, it's even more of a pipe dream than communism was. Because as soon as there is a power vacuum and no one is coercing anyone else, some would-be dictator will start trying to enslave everyone else by enlisting some thugs who are willing to hurt and kill in exchange for living in luxury as his helpers. To prevent this, other people will have to band together.
In other words, the recipe for government is as follows: Take one group of people; add food, water, and shelter; stir - and wait.
Well, since I don't advocate coercive territorial monopolies on force, law, arbitration, etc., I don't advocate states--by any name.
I don't see how you can have a government of any kind without a monopoly on the application of force. That is the very definition of sovereignty.
It's left me very, very jaded.
Well: please don't take that out on us.
I disagree that there should ever be an application of "collective power" (whatever that is). Calling something the "common good" is just another way of substituting some set of preferences for someone else's.
Nothing is being substituted. The majority's wishes are always enacted (see my above example about Saddam Hussein), whether actively through commission or passively through permission / omission. Therefore there's never a substitution, though of course the demographics and politics are subject to change and flux, so the majority's wishes can shift. And obviously this is an application of collective power: the totality of society is the largest collective there is within that society, and is essentially capable of vetoing any decision made by any smaller sub-group within itself - if it wants to badly enough.
Because the democratic process is better than markets at allowing people to act on their preferences.
Was that sarcasm? Because I agree with that statement. Of course, democracy (in order to be truly effective) requires transparency, which unlike in the markets, allows people to make more efficient decisions in order to more accurately give the majority what it thinks it wants. (It always comes back to that.)
Then, by all means, take up arms and try to overthrow it. Until that point, you're implicitly giving it that right.
Not really. You have to presuppose that the government's territorial and jurisdictional claims are legitimate to make that statement. Plus, you're still conflating acquiescence and consent.
Your assumption is wrong. I meant everyone within the jurisdiction of the United States.
Then change my statement to "the majority of people in the United States", since that's what I meant anyway, and since it doesn't change my argument.
Based on what evidence? I can see clear signs that we do, such as the elections that are held periodically.
You're no less a slave just because you get to choose a new master every so often. Plus, casting a ballot for someone doesn't mean consenting to everything they do or vote for, it definitely doesn't consent to everything other legislators do, and it most definitely doesn't consent to things which non-elected officials, like bureaucrats, do. And it says nothing of people who choose not to vote, i.e. not to "give their consent".
You can't violate a person's liberty if they have ceded said liberty to the oversight of said government. Also, we do control all levels of bureaucracy, both implicitly and by vote. If we were, as a people, upset by the mechanisms of our government, we could, we should seize the means for changing it.
They might or they might not. Basically, we're talking about two different things.
First, I believe that we currently, and always, have control of our government. The recent uprisings in the Middle East pretty solidly demonstrated that principle.
That's just a statement that violent revolutions can occur. It doesn't demonstrate that we actually control government in a meaningful way. It just means that some would-be rebel group's tolerance level for public slip-ups isn't infinitely high.
Second, I think that government, therefore, exists because we both individually and collectively grant it the powers that it has, not because it usurps them.
This just rests on that really shaky "state of nature" assumption which, though a convenient hypothetical for social contract theorists, doesn't really bear any relation to reality.
We do this for several reasons, not the least of which is that it makes functions of economy and protection (both from one another and from other states) much easier and more cost-effective.
Actually, I'd be willing to argue that it's less cost-effective, because states aren't sufficiently incentivized to economize.
Third, provided a catastrophic collapse of the US federal government, I believe that a new form of government would replace it, probably at the state level. Should that fail, I think that city governments would replace it. And so on. The idea that government will simply disappear entirely is a really strange belief. Even if it did, people would rush into the vacuum to recreate it. Should it somehow happen both that the government was gone and all memory (and reference) to how it worked was wiped out, I think it is likely that it would not take a very long time (probably less than 100 years) for state-level governments to reappear.
This is the same "inevitability of the state" argument which has been dealt with elsewhere.
We is the people governed by a polity. Our interests are those which we pursue, and endow the government to ensure. All privileges are ceded in the form of the laws that give the government its monopolistic properties.
1. You're free to choose leaders for yourself, but I don't see how you can justify granting the consent of some other individual or group of individuals simply because you and your group have a vested interest in doing so.
2. Nobody is ceding any privileges, because there isn't a contract. There aren't even any definite terms--it's literally "the state can do whatever as long as you bend over and take it", which is more an argument about what people will acquiesce to than an argument about government being legitimate.
In statism, such an act is, itself, punishable under law. In anarchy, it is not. Ergo, the deterrence of laws and punishments and the consequences of breaking said laws reign in the practice more effectively than, "tu quoque" would indicate. Moreover, it's a logical fallacy, even if it were true. You'd be better served indicating how it would be less of a problem in anarchic situations.
1. It's not a tu quoque because I'm not claiming you're in error due to systemic hypocrisy--I'm claiming that you can't uniquely indict anarchy by claiming that corruption exists.
2. You're very right in asking for a comparative analysis. Personally, I think the incentives to refrain from corruption are much more visible in a market than in a state. If you're a company, say, an arbitrator, you have reputation concerns to worry about. If you start taking bribes, or people know that you'll decide in favor of whoever pays the most, basically nobody is going to agree to use your service, in which case you'll lose business and probably tank. I'd even argue that there's an incentive to bill each party equally since A) they're both using the same service, and B) equal payment reduces the risk of bribery accusations. It might also be paid through insurers to further mitigate the risk of accusations.
That's a tricky question. What would your answer be? 100%? Frankly, I'm not sure I have an answer.
You would basically have to have perpetual 100% consent, otherwise you have to concede that you don't care about consent when considering governmental legitimacy.
I basically answered this above. You can try to reassert a different government more in keeping with your ideals (either by non-violent or by violent means), you can refuse to abide by the rules of said government and accept the consequences in a form of civil disobedience, or you can move.
If it's "more in keeping with your ideals", it's obviously the case that you aren't consenting to everything the government does. In the second case, you're just advocating that people roll over and take the consequences of disobedience, which doesn't legitimize government. The last case also doesn't legitimize government, so much as saying "even if they are criminals, why not just leave?"
Implicitly? Constantly. Explicitly? Well, that's why we vote, isn't it?
Voting doesn't really imply consent. It's a demonstration of preference. I would prefer to be robbed, rather than murdered, but that doesn't imply I'm "consenting" to robbery when given the ultimatum "your money or your life".
Which you assume will be non-coercive, and not the protection racket so popular with organized crime. Why do you make that assumption, by the way?
Because criminals can be treated like criminals?
Sure.
So, it's not really a question of government being legitimate so much as what people will lay there and take?
You're conflating consent with justice, here. Just because a government does it doesn't necessitate that it is just. Or define it that way.
I think you're conflating consent and acquiescence.
Government is unavoidable. What you seem to be advocating is a change from cherry to lime.
In the status quo, it's basically unavoidable. Not an affirmation of its legitimacy, though.
Let me rephrase question. It is backward. "I'd like to see some evidence that a monopolistic government performs worse than competing governments in a single area."
Because a coercive monopoly gets to do whatever it wants--there's no profit and loss test, no incentive to allocate resources efficiently, there's room to exploit because of legal barriers to entry and static (or increasing, as was the case post-9/11) demand--the state just doesn't same the same incentives/market forces influencing it. You can literally google "monopolies bad" and find a host of evidence demonstrating why a coercive monopoly performs worse than markets, and I don't know how you imagine government would be better just because it has more monopoly power. It makes no sense whatsoever.
I am not convinced that this is true.
Okay then.
Actually, they don't. The consequences for not doing those things are undesirable, but there is no reason that they must do them.
There's no reason that anyone "must" do anything. But I say they "have to" based on business owners' desire to not tank.
The fact that people do not use the mechanisms of change does not guarantee that the mechanisms of change are useless. You assume that they are solely because you assume that your mindset is universal. Obviously, it isn't.
That's just the Magic Wand Theory of the State. Saying "there are processes for reform, we should use them" isn't an argument, since the state won't do whatever you want just because you're a statist. States aren't subject to the same incentive structures and market forces. That states can do good stuff sometimes isn't a reason to bet all your chips on it, because "we need more good government and less bad government" isn't a political theory.
As opposed to claiming that in anarchy everything would be better? Sounds like a regurgitation of teenage angst theory, not an argument. So far, I haven't heard any arguments. Hopefully, that is one right down there.
I think that, even with "violent anarchy", states have a worse record of violence.
You're saying that when many people control money, it is less likely to be expanded than when one centralized group holds it? That's counter-intuitive.
How is it counter-intuitive? I think that a government monopolizing the money supply, keeping it static, and backing it with some commodity (like gold) is possible, but I don't bet on it, because sound currency would only stay as long as things continued to roll high. If a big business went down, and unemployment spiked, people would be shouting at the government for intervention, monetary expansion, and stuff like that (which I think is good evidence that, to the extent to which people do control their government, they often make really crappy decisions). People don't like dealing with the consequences of their bad decisions, and are more than happy to ask the government to save them, regardless of the fact that interventions tend to make things worse.
I'm with you so far...
Alright.
Which is what I would argue...
I'd be happy if the government only did good things, too.
To prevent irresponsible use? Like this? The fact that they failed in their goal doesn't mean that dissolution is the only answer. For example, changing the nature of fractional-reserve banking would be a different answer.
It would be nice if there was sound monetary policy, but it's really unlikely to stay when times of crisis hit. Difference between the Panic of 1920 (which no one really remembers because it ended quickly without any intervention apart from slashing spending and tax rates) and the Depression.
But creating a completely different problem, as currency exchange becomes a rather coercive action. For example, in a place with a single currency exchange, that person/group has the ability to further devalue currency, and the only options a person wishing to exchange has are:
The difference is that, with central banking/Fed-type systems, you have no real choice in terms of currency, because it's monopolized. If a dominant currency is devalued in a market, there's room for other currencies to develop, since there's basically nothing to back the "dominant" currency (as the only way for it to be devalued is if it's fiat or the supply of the commodity/currency is decreased/increased, specifically, eroding the reliability of that currency (especially as purchasing power/value of savings shrinks).
Regardless, I don't think it's "coercive" in the sense in which I use the term.
1) Hope that the trend reverses as people dump their currency
2) Take the coercive rate
3) Desperately look for someone else to exchange while the rate continues to plummet
Okay?
Moreover, it's prone to manipulation as people could load up on one kind of currency and then destabilize a competing currency to drive up their investment, and exchange it for a third type of currency, inflating the third and devaluing one in place of another. Think of it as insider trading, but with currency instead of stocks.
1. How does the destabilization of competing currencies occur, exactly? You didn't make it clear.
2. Exchanging for a third currency doesn't cause inflation, because you're not increasing the money supply by exchanging. You're buying some amount of the other currency for some amount of the currency you're holding, which means that the money supply stays the same, unless you're talking about buying straight from the producer, but the producer has no incentive to jeopardize his business by devaluing its own currency in exchange for a competing currency...
Then consider that groups would assemble to facilitate this kind of action, and you can start to see problems. And, before you claim that I am pointing out hypotheticals, this is why the SEC exists. To prevent activity like that.
Groups would assemble to facilitate currency trading? Probably. That's sort of how it works with trading international currencies.
It's not clear to me that would bring back economic health, for the reasons above.
You mean it's not clear that refraining from intervention would return economic health?
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I am honestly asking these questions it is not meant to be snide. To give some context i live in America.
I personal feel like i have all the freedom that i need. Everything that i truly have wanted to do i have been able to do. I wanted to learn math from professional mathematicians i was given that freedom. I wanted to teach my knowledge to others i have been given that freedom. I wanted to start a family and i have. I wanted a home and i have one. I do not believe the system was perfect, but i truly do not know of any other freedoms that i am lacking. So what does anarcho capitalism offer me that i do not already have.
Rather than going into every possible advantage (especially many things which are more passive than "you get to do X"), I'm content to point out that this is largely a red herring. There are other relevant questions, like "why does the state get to monopolize certain services", "why should other individuals be barred from exercising certain liberties", and stuff like that.
I have never been subjugated by the state. The worst thing a police officer has done to me is ticket me for not having insurance. If you are going to say that i have to pay taxes well that is true and it does not bother me. I am focusing on my life not on what governments do so any argument about the moral issues associated with war are real but they do not address my question. As a human i care about my personal self interest and want to know what an anarcho capitalistic system would grant me that i do not already have.
Theoretically, nothing, because you can just say "Well, government should just do good things if it doesn't already do them or if it's doing bad things.".
Also i personal believe that large corporations in America already have to much freedom. I have seen the problems created by the freedom that corporations already wield.
Like what?
The best argument i have seen from anarcho capitalist about restraining the corporations is through public opinion. i want more of a barrier than human opinion. Right now human opinion is not strong enough to restrain corporations. You make some very large assumptions about the power of humans to restrain corporations through public opinion.
Actually, my argument is to preclude government from ever being able to involve itself in the economy, which is what allows corporations to get so much power in the first place.
1.) that the public will gain the knowledge of what corporations do.
2.) that people will understand the knowledge if they receive it.
3.) that people will have the will and ability to do something about the knowledge they understand.
I will provide an example of how already corporations have to much power and that the will of the people is not strong enough. It is obvious that the mercury that has been released in the air has been collecting in wildlife most notably fish. There are water ways in America right now where the fish are too toxic to eat. This is true for most of America. Why? Well most people do not know about the mercury poising issue. This to me is a clear case that public knowledge and opinion is to week to restrain corporate pollution.
That's not really as much of a problem when all property is privatized, since poisoning someone else's water supply (which could compound into poisoning PEOPLE) is a huge legal liability.
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Is there anything possible in an AnCap society to prevent monopolies from forming?
In terms of coercive monopolies, yes. In terms of natural and expected monopolies (like an inventor's monopoly on his invention), I don't think so, but I think this latter sort of monopoly is both necessary and beneficial to a market.
Also, you can't criticize something for being potentially monopolistic when the alternative (government) is a guaranteed monopoly.
Also, if the economy becomes "top-heavy" with the vast majority of wealth in the hands of a few, does that not motivate the arbitrators to rule in favor of where the money is?
The state already does that pretty often as a response to lobbying, campaign finance, issue networks (between bureaucrats and interest groups), and so on. Even if you want to argue "corruption exist", I think it's less damaging in AnCap.
Why would they care what their reputation became amongst the poor masses when resolving a conflict between a poor person and a rich person? A reputation of ruling in favor of the rich is more beneficial to the arbitrator, isn't it?
I don't understand why arbitrators would charge people more for being rich? I imagine they would just offer a service at X price. Lawyers and Are these companies going to thoroughly check the income records, net worth, and investment portfolios of each individual before deciding how to scale the charges, or what?
I mean, alternative dispute resolution already exists in multiple forms, and it's not really the plague-ridden thing you suspect it to be.
And what happens if the two parties in a dispute cannot find an arbitrator that they agree will be fair? Do they settle it with guns or their private armies? This again seems to favor the rich, since they'd have more money for those things.
Their insurance companies will have to agree on one? I dunno, you're basically asking me to describe the whole anarchist legal system in a deep level of detail, when it's like, the point of anarchism is that it isn't planned. You could literally sit here forever and keep asking "how does X happen", "What if Y", etc., but you're not asking the right questions. With enough random hypotheticals and a hurricane of "what-ifs", one can make any system look bad.
There are like 4 other huge posts to respond to, and I honestly don't feel like stringing those along right now. I'll cover the rest of the filibuster a bit later.
I dunno, you're basically asking me to describe the whole anarchist legal system in a deep level of detail, when it's like, the point of anarchism is that it isn't planned.
No, no, no. Don't pull that weasely misrepresentation of the facts: Your use of "describe" is misleading in this context. It implies that you know the detail, but are being forced to explain it all is an unfair demand.
The fact is that you're this huge proponent of a political-economic system you HAVEN'T THOUGHT THROUGH in a "deep level of detail".
I'll cover the rest of the filibuster a bit later.
it's not a "filibuster". It's you stonewalling and handwaving a proposal to toss our entire way of life down the toilet because the idea of "anarchy" and "unlimited freedom" is shiny and appealing to you, and you'd be happy to wing it, toss the dice, and see whether you'd personally do better than mediocre under a different system... A system for which security, conflict resolution, insurance, and dozens of other issues that will become painfully, obviously critical within a minute of implementation... "ISN'T PLANNED".
Nobody is "filibustering" you. Its just that there are so many obvious questions that would arise on day 1 of operations, that most people would normally consider important to a working system.
It's like you're playing, pretend a meteor hit Washington DC, and every state & local government in the US, killing every politician: And you believe that after a brief hiccup stage of adjustment, the US people and economy could get along better than they are now, unfettered by all the bureaucratic government non-sense, and national defense, police, fire, ane everything else could be handled by "concensus" or some sort of "didnt' think about the details yet" arbitration. Don't need a PLAN or a CONSTITUTION or laws or anything. Everybody would just "agree" on stuff.
We already have international economies that exist outside of govt intervention. One of them is called the heroin trade. We have these highly organized corporations/er..governments called 'cartels' running the individual businesses. It is a working example of anarcho capitalism, and it's very efficient and profitable.
Quote from Kasreyn »
This is why your arguments trouble me: you don't seem to address questions of ethics at all. Only your personal freedom-from, and a sense of general outrage over that. You're very certain of the ethical wrong of coercive government - but you don't seem to be very intellectually curious about the potential ethical problems involved in no-government. :\
No, because it isn't a moral statement. It's a descriptive statement about why you have incentive to refrain from aggression, and what you're affirming in terms of potential consequences as a result of being aggressive.
Immanuel Kant notwithstanding, all moral statements can be reframed as if-then statements. They're broadly the same thing.
I mean de facto in an AnCap society. It's recognized to an extent already because of prohibitions on aggressive actions like murder and theft, but it's not consistently respected. It won't be even in an anarchist society, which will be populated by some number of criminals, but the point is that the nature of the nonaggression principle is just a perpetually-renewed agreement among people who refrain from aggression against each other. By choosing to argue right now, rather than me coming over and clubbing you over the head until you agree with me, we're affirming the nonaggression principle (which you have to do to argue, otherwise you run into a contradiction--something which explains, for example, why you can't argue with someone that he ought to be your slave, since you're presupposing the need for his consent/agreement, that he's a free agent, etc. Insofar as he consents to be your "slave", he isn't actually a slave at all. Argumentation ethics).
Seems to be conflating "persuasion" as a social activity with "argument" as a logical chain of premises and inferences. If you have persuaded someone to be your slave, it is perhaps true that they are not your slave. However, it is perfectly self-consistent to make an argument that ends with the conclusion that you ought to enslave someone, since it doesn't matter to an argument whether someone agrees with it or not.
To bring it around to a more relevant example, arguments abound as to why the government is justified in coercively collecting taxes. Your position as I understand it is that these arguments are self-defeating because anyone who accepts them is not being taxed coercively. But this fact is beside the point. The argument is not that the government is justified in coercively taxing only the people who accept the argument. It's that the government is justified in coercively taxing, period.
Socrates is mortal even if he doesn't accept the argument "Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal."
That's why I don't argue that it ought to be followed--I argue that you can't engage in argument or rational communication without affirming it, and that, at the point you engage in violence, you're affirming force, rather than reason, and are throwing all discussion of "rights" out the window, which explains my political conception of the NAP as something which both offers a kind of immunity and is a way of describing how legal liability is allocated.
What is your thesis in this thread? Are you actually arguing for the implementation of anarcho-capitalism, or are you just presenting it as an interesting hypothetical? I had assumed it was the former - but if it is, then there will be a point somewhere in your argument at which you assert "We ought to do X", either "We ought to be anarcho-capitalist" or "We ought to follow the non-aggression principle" or even "We ought to behave logically consistently".
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
They do it via handwaveology. If you major in it you get a BA though, not a BS. Though technically speaking, it smells a lot more like BS.
Not an argument.
Basically all 300 million people in the US just sort of "agree" to resolve the conflict one way or another.
I never said that.
In the rare times that people disagree on small issues like abortion, conflicts are resolved by, y'know... a "concensus", when all the parties finally see "reason" and agree.
Never said that. A coherent rights theory can be drawn up to settle the issue of abortion--I'd argue that the debate over personhood is irrelevant.
Real world examples of anarcho capitalist societies like the Sudan and Afghanistan solve that problem via (1) general poverty and (2) individual, heavily armed clans providing "justice" in their own circles. The combination of the 2 prevent outside forces from really wanting to stick around, since they can't establish order or benefit from "conquering" the territory.
1. How are Sudan or Afghanistan examples of anarcho-capitalism?
2. Even if they are cases of anarchy, it would be like me saying "North Korea and Zimbabwe are examples of statism. They're bad. Therefore, statism is bad." It's not a valid argument.
Given there are no "recognized government authorities, I would think the only recognized authorities are those that have armed themselves to protect their criminal enterprises.
You can't compare one country with "good government" to another country with "bad anarchy" and claim that you've done a legitimate comparative analysis. You have to compare anarchy and statism using the same group of people (i.e. demonstrate that a community which would be peaceful and orderly under a state would devolve into perpetual war absent the state).
@Cody_Franklin:
Hey, I just realized that organized crime (crips v bloods, italians v russians, Colombians v Jamaicans etc.) is an example of de facto "anarcho capitalism"!! The business are all operating without a central government determining the rules, and privatized businesses all do conflict resolution via 'concensus'.
Actually, they operate because there's a central government determining the rules. Because certain markets are repressed, you necessarily get black markets so long as demand persists.
For some reason, they all feel the need to be heavily armed, and not to fight the government or police... but to guard against being stolen from by EACH OTHER.
Organized crime and the government don't fight each other? Have you ever studied the War on Drugs in any depth?
How is the illegal drug business in this country NOT a perfect example of "anarcho capitalism"?
They are not ruled by the government in any way. Which is in fact why they must protect their wealth via force. Great system...
If the government didn't try to control certain markets, then the black markets (and associated cartels) wouldn't really be problematic. They don't comply with the law, but that doesn't mean that government intervention is nonexistent.
In a democratic state, EVERYBODY is the monopoly except for foreign nations. We are ALL shareholders in the monopoly.
No we aren't. Democratic theory just assumes that everyone consents because voting exists and because people choose not to uproot their entire lives and move to a different country. It's funny, because people are said to consent if they vote for a representative, to consent to majority action by voting at all, and forfeiting his right to complain if he refuses to vote. It's just a rationalization for state power that keeps suppressing the correlative to keep the argument about legitimization of state power.
How can you possibly argue that we are NOT the owners of the monopoly, when WE elect the board of directors, WE elect the CEO, WE fund the entire thing, and collect dividends?
Some people vote for the legislators. Some people vote for the President. Nobody votes for the bureaucrats. Almost nobody can actually keep track of everything the government does (what with secrecy being necessary for "national security"). Everybody is forced to pay, and is jailed for refusing. Whereas other people in this thread have been treating the state as their personal magic wand, you're running what I've come to call the Green Lantern Theory of Democracy, which basically argues that the only obstacle to a democratic paradise is willpower.
I want the land. You want the land. Which one gets the land?
Do all 300 million Americans decide?
Or a small subset of 10,000?
Or do we decide via which one of us wins at arm wrestling?
Or which one of us brought more friends?
I want the land. You want the land. Who decides who gets the land?
Use/homesteading.
Its utterly ridiculous how you refuse to be concrete in your explanation of how conflicts would be resolved. How do we pick the arbiter, if it comes to that point?
It's not ridiculous, because there's no way to be totally concrete about it. The whole point of anarchism is that it isn't a planned society, which makes the infinite chain of "how" and "what if" useless.
It's all handwaving bull**** on your part.
You're not being very nice.
Internally to WHO.
The people involved in the dispute.
For there to be an "internal" there has to be an "US" that includes you and me. There is no "US". There is YOU. And there is ME.
So, there's no "us" including "you and me", but there's a "you and me"? You realize that makes no sense, right? Especially when your whole political theory is based on a huge "we" that claims to include everybody and exercise one big collective will.
I want the land. You want the land. How do we settle it?
Who picks the arbitrator? Who grants him authority? What if I don't like his decision?
Already answered this.
Markets are based on explicit rules of conduct that are understood by all parties. Markets operate within the rules of LAW defined by the government.
Black markets are the only "anarcho capitalist" markets.
If you believe that black markets always work better than legal markets, then be my guest to them in your fantasy world. For me "black markets" are places of pure caveat emptor where you can get your clock cleaned by scumbags.
1. Government isn't required for markets. You're just assuming that.
2. Black markets only exist because governments have laws repressing certain markets.
3. Not all black markets are dangerous.
And here I thought my opinion of you couldn't get lower. it's tiresome enough dealing with your arguments when you're misguided but sincere. This crap borders on "I know you are what am I?".
I'm trying really hard to be nice, because basically every other individual in this thread is being civil and friendly, but your attitude is really starting to get on my nerves.
What you "want" is so vague in terms of IMPLEMENTATION, that nobody knows what you "want".
That's because implementation methods wouldn't be internationally homogeneous. North Korea's method would be different from the United States' would be different from India's would be different from Liechtenstein's.
What you constantly describe is HOW you want things to HAPPEN, and there is virtually NOTHING about how you would actually implement anything.
Because I'm not a social planner, and I don't intend to be.
Even if you could live in a fantasy world where you do work out all the impossible issues of national defense, conflict resolution, etc., I'm unclear on what the theoretical positive benefits of anarcho capitalism are to justify even a small reduction in societal efficiency, etc.
A little improved market efficiency? What is the MAGNITUDE of theoretical benefit that an anarcho-capitalist society gives us? What is the promise of it? What makes living in an anarcho capitalist society soooooo appealing to you? Is it THAT huge an advantage that an AnCap society is just going to outperform other societies? Or is it some vague "principle" thing that you love so bad, Cody?
The benefits would differ from state to state, and from person to person. What I would get is different from what a businessman would get is different from what consumers as a class would get.
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I probably worded that poorly by putting your name in it. I don't mean that your personal conception of the term is different or wrong. I mean to ask if you are asserting that the NAP is a necessary condition in your arguments. If so, then by contraposition you must also acknowledge that if the NAP is violated, so are all the conclusions that rely on it. And in this case, the conclusions are (in my opinion) too fragile to be relied upon, especially knowing as I do that we are an incompletely evolved primate species with a fundamentally aggressive nature that is brought to the surface all too easily.
Politically speaking, I assume it as a necessary condition. But that assumption isn't that everyone will abide by it all the time--it's that, if people abide by it, things will run smoothly. For people who don't abide by it, i.e. criminals, they don't have access to the same kinds of immunities that people who do abide by it have. By using force, you're indiscriminately affirming its use. This means that all talk of nonaggression, self-ownership, and individual rights is thrown out the window, and you're heaped in liability.
Really? Doesn't this assume that you and I are both a lot nicer than we might actually be? For instance, I could be debating you merely as an intellectual diversion (true) and if I had the ability to do so I wouldn't hesitate to enslave you (false, but only because I happen to be a nice guy) -- nothing about the nature of debate in itself rules out such a scenario. And I'm sure if it came down to it I could come up with some logic extolling the benefits (to me) of having a cadre of slaves on hand.
It doesn't really matter whether you're debating me as a diversion until you can find a big enough stick. As long as we're engaged in rational communication, we must both necessarily presuppose self-ownership and nonaggression for as long as we continue to argue (regardless of motives). You could make a logical argument about why you would benefit from having slaves, but you couldn't logically argue with me why I should be a slave. That you're arguing presupposes my free agency and a need for my consent, which precludes my being a slave.
Not all debate is intended to persuade and not all debaters are persuadable; don't let the fact that the persuasive mode of writing is used fool you.
The act itself is what's relevant, not its motives or methods.
Sure, but then you're up against the "who has the most guns" problem.
That's what all political philosophy eventually boils down to. If a dictator has enough power, it doesn't matter whether you're a monarchy, a democracy, an anarchy, a republic, an oligarchy, whatever. When states go to war, it's always a question of who has the most guns. It's just a fact of life that when someone uses force, they're affirming the use of force in retaliation.
Everybody gets dogpiled once in awhile. As for double posting, I could be wrong about this, but I think you only get infracted if you actually double post. If someone is actively replying to you, I think it is acceptable to reply to them so as to maintain the chronological structure of the conversation. For instance, this particular reply confused the crap out of me because it was above my OP and there was another reply below my OP that used my name, but quoted something that had nothing to do with me.
Handling the dogpile is a bit more difficult than it would usually be. I'm working on rebutting at least 7-8 people (I haven't really counted), I think, and most of the posts are remarkably long. Just stringing together 2-3 at once is exhausting. So, either I keep going at this ad infinitum, I complain, at which point I probably get lightly flamed for "asking for it", or I stop the discussion, at which point people will probably be like "lol we won, he's running away". No matter what my actions, it's not going to turn out well for me.
No, no. You misunderstand me. I'm not talking about the worst possible thing that could happen to me as an individual. When I say greatest possible threat, I mean the largest potential quantity of manpower and armament that could be coercively levied against me.
To throw out an example (putting aside the NAP for the moment), suppose my private security contractor, who maintains a force of 10,000 armed men in defense of my local area, sends me a scouting report that the Nike Corporation is marching through my area with a force of 1,000,000 conscripting anyone unable to resist into forced labor at the nearest Nike plant. Knowing that my private contractor will not be able to oppose such a force, I must either hire a bigger, better defense contractor or learn how to mold leather.
If Nike is paying the soldiers $50,000 a year, it would literally have to shell out $50 billion a year to keep that army funded. Even if it's only paying half of them half that, it's still $12.5 billion a year. Nike's total revenue in 2010 was $19 billion (not even factoring in expenses and spending and such). I mean, the whole company itself only has slightly over 34,000 employees. Forgive me for suggesting that your scenario is massively unlikely. If you want, you could replace it with "Belligerent, militaristic state X", at which point all I really need to argue is that an AnCap society probably couldn't stand up to the full might of Nazi Germany, but neither could France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
In other words, my defense budget has to adjust itself upward to match the greatest threat I might potentially face, even if that threat is on a megacorporate or national scale as compared to my individual scale.
That isn't really true at all. How much defense spending is considered "necessary" is based on an individual's level of fear and risk aversion. A paranoid neocon will advocate more military spending than a sincerely anti-war Democrat (who still advocates some spending to defend against potential aggressors). There's never really a "correct" level of defense spending.
The inevitable outcome of such a scenario is that there is one unique largest army (let's call it the Army), anyone who is not under the Army's protection is not adequately protected (because there is a larger army that could be levied against them), and competing armies eventually become pointless (either because they act aggressively in opposition to the Army and are therefore defeated, or are ideologically aligned with the Army but because a small, efficient force can easily out-compete the Army by availing themselves of the peace enforced by the Army's presence, the Army must either crush it or risk being replaced by it).
I don't think that's necessarily true. "The Army" isn't one single, autonomous unit. It's populated by people who are employed on a voluntary basis. I think arbitrage works pretty well in that respect, since companies will have to compete for employees. Other companies can chip away at employee bases by offering better employment conditions--more money, better benefits, whatever. If the company makes good on its contract, there's a transfer of employment. If not (either the bigger company undercuts by offering better conditions or the other company doesn't follow through), the employee wins anyway, and the company has earned the "right" to keep its share of the market and capital.
Plus, apart from the fact that even economies of scale don't inherently grant monopoly power, there's also the fact that a defense contractor that large would have to have its capital distributed over several communities/regions, at which point it would have to compete with other contractors of similar sizes in addition to competing locally on a per-branch basis. You're also working on the "market share" theory of monopoly, which doesn't really tell you anything other than the percent of the market captured. One has to ask how these companies would garner increases in market share in the first place.
Then one of two things happens; the Army is controlled in a despotic way and the end result is an empire of some sort, or the Army is controlled in an enlightened way and ends up as some kind of a republic. Either way it essentially becomes a government, collecting taxes (it's the only defense contractor and everyone needs defense, ergo...) and wielding all of the essential diplomatic and legal powers of a nation-state. (for instance, the terms of everyone's contract could contain, by reference, a code of laws to be followed, and so forth.)
I'm not really buying that (it's the same inevitability of the state argument that others in this thread have made).
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Currency is indeed backed by the government, but is not tied to any set commodity. That would be what fiat currency is, and the government is the only thing that gives it value - not business. The government also cannot "print as much [currency] as it wants".
Calling it "legal tender" is the only thing separating it from useless pieces of paper (legally speaking). There's also the fact that a lot of private currencies are illegal, but that's peripheral. My point is that the government doesn't determine the actual value of currency. Unless it starts setting price controls, it doesn't determine what you can buy with it or how much of something you can buy with it. It only persists as a "legal tender" because people continue to use it. Saying that the government is responsible for the value of money demonstrates a fundamental understanding of what money is.
Also you provided a list of words with no context, they explain why one currency has value not a world where anyone can invent a currency.
They explain why any currency has value in its own right. It just doesn't factor in competition among currencies.
That would be an issue for someone saying that irresponsible money lending is a good idea.
I mean that the question was worded in an incomprehensible way. I never looked back to see if you edited it. Also, I never said that irresponsible money lending is a good idea, so I don't know where you're getting that from.
Then quit trying to act like an AnCap currency would behave like a fiat currency.
I never claimed it would. In fact, I made a point that market currencies would probably have to be backed by commodities to be successful.
But it does mean that the most precious harvest-able materials will be the ones used to back currency.
I don't think that's the only consideration when trying to determine what you're going to use as a backing.
YOU CANNOT JUST INCREASE THE MONEY SUPPLY WITH NOTHING BACKING IT.
Tell that to the Federal Reserve.
Honestly, though, of course you can increase the money supply without backing--it's just a stupid idea.
If X amount of currency is X amount of something, you cannot add Y amount of currency without adding Y amount of whatever something that backs it. You also cannot take Z amount of that something away without removing Z amount of currency. That's how that works. That is the only way that can work. If you try and change that, then the economy collapses because the money has no value.
... Obviously. That's sound monetary policy. I'm not advocating increasing the money supply without increasing the supply of the backing commodity (or vice versa), I'm just pointing out what happens to the value of a currency to the extent to which you try to disconnect the currency from the commodity.
You are simply wrong on all accounts. The workers were paid corporate scrip, and the scrip was backed by gold not the state, the banks accepting the company scrip determined interest rates, and all the general stores that accepted the corporate scrip determined the prices of all goods sold there.
The only reason scrip was issued against wages is because those areas were really low on cash anyway. And I've never heard of any company backing its scrip with gold. It was a system of credit issued against accrued wages so that people could buy stuff in company stores. They were "backed" by the state insofar as scrip could be redeemed for USD (they just usually weren't since the reason for scrip being issued in the first place
As a bonus, you don't get to say the state does not back the current currency and that the state backing was what made this example of AnCap go wrong.
I didn't say that the state doesn't back the current currency...?
You pointed out public backed currency claiming it was private scrip, and I've pointed out an exact analogy of your system and why it failed while you tried to say it was the state's fault. You cannot claim it won't fail and then claim that any failings in the past are moot and then claim that a previous failing does not prove the system doesn't work. Pick your pony.
I never said it "won't fail"--I just pointed out that the possibility of failure doesn't invalidate anarchism any more than statism.
On top of that, the state can recover from economic collapse - corporations cannot.
Are we talking total economic collapse? Because I don't see how companies can't weather economic collapse (or how new ones wouldn't just take their place once capital settles in the "new" economy).
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I'll finish up the last few posts later.
Rather than going into every possible advantage (especially many things which are more passive than "you get to do X"), I'm content to point out that this is largely a red herring. There are other relevant questions, like "why does the state get to monopolize certain services", "why should other individuals be barred from exercising certain liberties", and stuff like that.
I do not expect you to list all the advantages that an anarcho capitalist society would grant the individual over the current American system. I would like for you to list a few so i can grasp a better understanding of what the individual should expect from an anarcho capitalist system. This is not a red herring but a request if you can not fulfill such a request then i will have to accept that.
Theoretically, nothing, because you can just say "Well, government should just do good things if it doesn't already do them or if it's doing bad things.".
I am not sure what this statement means are is supposed to mean. I was basically describing how i am not a slave and i have never been subjugated. I do not understand why i, from a personal level would, want to live in an anarcho capitalist system, so i was asking what freedoms i would enjoy that are currently being taking from me by the state. If your response is theoretically nothing well then i am not convinced.
I am really not being snide here i think one of the big selling points that anarcho capitalist bring up is in the current situation the government has seized your liberties and in anarcho capitalism you will have those liberties back. I literally can not think of a liberty that i am wanting that a lack of government would give me. If you cannot offer me any more liberty with your system then why would i care.
Like what?
I did give you an example in my post. I understand that you have been flooded with responses and requests in this forum. I personal think that the pace of this conversation is hurting this conversation. I will offer the same modern day example of a problem that where the concerns of the people and the current government cannot control a real threat. Mercury is being released in the air this mercury is then brought back down to earth by rain and has poisoned several American water ways. The reason the will of the people cannot address this issue is because of the three assumptions you have made about the power that people could wield in your anarcho capitalist structure.
1.) that the public will gain the knowledge of what corporations do.
I consider this a false hope that when a corporation or really any entity engages in a negative behavior that the public would gain knowledge of the activity. One of the first acts of engaging in negative activities is to hide what you are doing. History has shown that humans are actual very good at hiding and misrepresenting their activities. i do not want to place my personal protections into this false hope. For my mercury example this is actually the biggest problem most people do not know that it is even happening. People were poising their kids with mercury because they did not know the mercury levels in the fresh fish that had caught were poisonous. The poisoning of our waters ways have been going on for decades already and there is no sign of it stopping because people do not know about it.
2.) that people will understand the knowledge if they receive it.
People have a hard time understanding how a coal fire electricity plant can poison fish. When you explain it to them you will here responses like well the mercury will eventually wash out of the fish and the water system. Even though there is evidence that refutes such a claim it has been shown that the mercury builds up and does not simply wash away. I do not want to rest my safety in the hope that people can make informed and rational decisions with information that they do not understand.
3.) that people will have the will and ability to do something about the knowledge they understand.
This is another big issue i have run into with people. You can explain a situation to them what is good about what is bad about it what are the solutions and in the end you are meet with statements like "well that is very unfortunate but i do not have the time to do anything about it." People lack the will to do things about situations that they agree are egregious. The reason why the founding fathers are revered is because they were the exception and not the rule. It is rare to find a group of people with the determination to stand up for what they believe in and succeed in the fight for their beliefs. History has forgotten the billions of people that have never tired. I find it very hopeful of you that people will suddenly become active and involved in problems presented to them. i do not want to rest my safety in such a false hope.
Actually, my argument is to preclude government from ever being able to involve itself in the economy, which is what allows corporations to get so much power in the first place.
This brings up another thought i have had in reading these anarcho capitalists beliefs. What inherent flaw prevents you from accomplishing this and many of the goals you have in a representative democracy. I agree that the government will help certain bushiness with subsides, lenient tax laws, or any other number of things. This problem is solvable in the current government structure. I agree that the current government structure moves very slowly, but that are also real problem in a government that moves too swiftly.
My point is what inherent flaws in representative democracy prevent any of the problems that you want to fix to be fixed. After you point out those inherent flaws in representative democracy i would really like you to point out the inherent flaws in anarcho capitalism. If you cannot point out the inherent flaws with anarcho capitalism then i will assume you are biased towards that system because no system is perfect. This is not a red herring but one of the most effective ways for people to make good decisions by comparing relative strengths and weaknesses.
As an aside large corporate power is not an inherent flaw with democracy, but rather a flaw with capitalism. When i see that a company like monsanto has cornered the farm market and it has received subsides from the government i see a company so strong that it gets to tell government what to do and not the other way around. The 2 big American bailouts showed me how weak the government is in the face of large multinational corporate interests.
That's not really as much of a problem when all property is privatized, since poisoning someone else's water supply (which could compound into poisoning PEOPLE) is a huge legal liability.
Most of the property in my mercury example would not be privatized unless you advocate the privatization of lakes, rivers, aquifers, and oceans.
Most of the property in my mercury example would not be privatized unless you advocate the privatization of lakes, rivers, aquifers, and oceans.
Which leads directly to the "desert island with only enough coconut for one of us" scenario.
If all the water is privately owned, and I don't own that water, there is nothing stopping the water owners from charging whatever they want for it. I don't have the option of forgoing that service, nor can I just make my own water. And what happens if the water owners simply decide that they don't want me to have any? Then the idea of being the "aggressor" becomes far more gray; am I being the "aggressor" for stealing water or fighting for it, or are the owners being the "aggressor" for denying my access to something I need to survive?
And we can't assume that some enterprising water owner will see a niche and decide to sell his or her water at a low price. It's far more profitable for him or her to collaborate with the other suppliers to maintain the monopoly. This is ignoring the fact that the cheaper water supply might be across the continent and I can't reach it. I may live in some low population town in the middle of nowhere, where the cost of doing business just isn't feasible.
This isn't some theoretical scenario. We have very real examples of this happening with food supplies and many places in the world already have water supply issues.
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So in other words, people ought not to initiate force against you, except in self defense?
Actually, contractarianism is usually more nuanced than that. After all, criminals don't fully forfeit the protections of the social contract - it's not open season on thieves. Rather, they incur certain penalties circumscribed by the contract.
But the nonaggression principle isn't actually followed, so it's not de facto. It seems like you're going to have a lot of trouble trying to argue that the nonaggression principle ought to be followed.
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
There is no free lunch in economics, as distribution still maintains a level of cost in any supply chain. The longer the supply chain, the more costlier the product. The maximization of resources relates to the level of cooperation, and as such within the framework of society without punishment mechanics there is a form of "bad anarchy" and civil degeneration.
No substantiation for the assertion.
Opinion.
I've given you plenty of opportunities to provide a counter point to the historiography of this subject.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
Couple trends with homicide rates:
1. The more centralized and less corrupt the state, the less the murder rate is domestically
2. The "bad anarchy" places have a higher murder rate than the statist places
So if states create domestic stability and a lower murder rate in exchange for limiting some freedoms, and under your argument about states being in a state of nature which other increasing the murder rate institutes a reason that it is the inherent lack of an arbiter that increases the violence.
So at each "tier of anarchy" there is violence in the state of nature either internally or externally. Anarchist states lack mechanisms to rebuff imperialist ambitions such as what occurred with the Spanish Civil War where the anarchists were steam rolled by Franco and friends and lose life and liberty.
So far the basic gist is:
1. You have no mechanism against conquest by a superior force of sustained collectivists in the state of nature/anarchy,unless if everyone becomes an anarcho-capitalist somehow
2. You have no answer to decreasing murder rate as compared to modern civil societies in terms of efficiency. Your best system was for people to purchase guns to act as deterrents.
For historiographical models:
http://econfaculty.gmu.edu/bcaplan/anarfaq.htm#part17
I took them from there and Rothbard.
Why should we support a model that lacks sustainability that just leads to statism anyway? It seems we go from state to state with infrastructure systems remaining constant, if states are the "norm" then governments, whether soft or hard, are an accepted,tested, and ancient form of corporatization.
Equally forms of governance, at whatever level, go with groups and identity. What you seem to be aping for is a post-nation state model without a state yet still maintain state functions within a framework that nation-states built. Yet, as humans we still have the same emotions and altered states of mind through mobs, extremes of patriotism, and ect. that still entice masses to violence.
And as for the "we don't know whether a good anarchist system existed," one of the fundamental aspects to social stability is transference of power from one generation to the next. As dynastic struggles and the like equally lead to collapse, power struggles equally have also created states in their wake. I would also add that the "we don't know if a good anarchist system ever existed" is like arguing whether God exists as there are no records to argue from nor are there much archaeological evidence for complex social systems and only the appearance there of.
What I can say is that in the long of history, the complex the state the more complex the economy and the higher the living standards and internal peace. Whether you compare the Incas to Plains Indians or Romans to Celts in Ireland, the results are all the same.
And they judicially suck at protecting individual rights specifically Iceland until they established a better government system to act as arbiter against blood feuds.
And states collapse into anarchy, which is associated with violence.
There's a correlation between high economics and high government intervention through out the last several thousand years of history. Quite simply not using resources properly triggers a "tragedy of the commons" that is directly linked to a structural issue over a resource dilemma. A case in point would be Easter Island as compared to Singapore or Japan which trades for resources such as lumber abusing what Ricardo shows.
There's been a few periods of globalizations and romanticism concerning free trade and the like that has descended into war. The Middle Ages had several state and non-state actors similar to the modern period and many times descended into war. The same with the 19th century. Many of those international levels are done mostly by large institutions such as NGO's, multi national corporations, and other non-state actors.
However, even in globalization markets are much more regional than they first appear. So the bounds of regional sentiments and regressions into aggression is still high in either system.
Anyway, that's a Marxist argument that "there exists no true communist state yet." Similar to Marxism, wanted an entire readjustment of the whole social order and structure to adapt to a niche philosophy. Equally you waver into a "zero sum game approach" or whatever, and at this point I'm just going to quote von Clausewitz:
As with any assertion so as long as man is political so shall war, be they massive genocides or blood feuds. So far we've solved the "blood feuds dilemma" through statism, the war issue not so much and probably never will under realpolitik.
Yet, there's also a few other problems that get solved via private-public partnerships such as cholera epidemics, Green Revolution, and other such things and there's been some work to actually go through the 20th century as the "bloodiest century" versus the "most life saving century." Some argue a net positive, others argue a net negative. It really comes down to how you stack the statistics.
What we can say though is that states using policing actions have decreased violence domestically as compared to anarchist states of existence in history. Coercion therefore distributed with immediacy of consequence and not severe relative to the crime creates more stability.
Points you seem to not be able to address:
-Enforcing the nonaggression principle
-Lack of a pertinent real world, modern model for "good anarchism"
-Disregarding people's hatred for violence in their immediate vicinity, which the state has more than adequately proven to reduce better than other systems in modern times.
-Inadequacy to deal with invasion and eventual subjugation by a superior force, which is the antithesis to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
-Explaining how in a constitutional system you have "anarchy between the institutions," when the Constitution has inherent anti-government mechanics inside of the government to instill a level of min anarchism to perpetuate competition.
I'll make it simpler, show me a min anarchist system or such a system that is moving in the min anarchist direction that has the same level of freedoms, prosperity, and safety as we do in the US, Canada, and ect.
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Why don't you "vague it up" a bit more when it comes to governing?
Corporations have governments, and most of them are pretty much totalitarian.
I call bull**** again.
Monopolies are good for those who are owners of the monopoly.
Monopolies are bad because those INSIDE the monopoly take advantage of those OUTSIDE the monopoly. Monopolies are GREAT economically... to those who are members of the monopoly. In fact it's yet another illustration of the principle of the advantages of larger organization.
If you look at the US Nation is a near monopoly, it's GREAT to be the US Nation, and it SUCKS to be those who compete with us. It's great for the
WORLD if there is competition with the US dollar... like Europe and their Euro...
Monopolies ROCK.
There is nothing bad about the INTERNAL structure of a monopoly. Monopolies can be structured internally in any way you like. A monopoly is DEFINED by its competition.
The way you take a bit of faulty, fuzzy thinking, and suggest that government (even a democratically elected one) is a "monopoly"... it's ludicrous.
I once had a conversation with somebody about why big corporations aren't internally structured with markets... like having 5 different legal divisions, each competing with the other at all times... or 8 different internal shipping divisions. There is ALWAYS tight central control in any big company. There has to be. Same with military: we do not have anarcho-organized armies with people coming to a "mutual understanding" about which team's turn it is to make the suicide charge up the hill to distract the enemy. Why? Because that's how you WIN.
Even if they internally have competing units... ultimately there is a guy or a committee running the show. There has to be. They can be reassigned by the president and the people though.
You say "A". I say "B". What does "settled" even mean?
All you're saying is that you won't have government except when you need one... and making some ridiculous claim that conflict doesn't happen very often.
Your talk about 'community' deciding what's right or wrong for bad people is law of the lynch gang: "Mob rule".
Rule "by the people" is an expression describing representative government and democracy.
You really can't tell the difference?
Actually the validity of your theory would best be tested by any kind of successful real world experiment.
I can drone on and on about the potential virtues about my theory of "government by loudest voice", where the person with the loudest voice makes all decisions, but I think a SUCCESSFUL real world experiment would be the only thing that would give "lunatic fringe theories" like ours any kind of serious traction.
My issues with Anarchy:
1. The justice system of an Anarchist Society. How do rules/laws get made, decided upon precisely what they'll entail, enforced, and trials held for accused rulebreakers/criminals/whatever-you-want-to-call them? I would not feel comfortable if these tasks were engaged in by the private sector who answer only to the market and cannot be directly influenced by the people they are supposed to be protecting. Specifically, could you mention how a rule/law concerning DUI would be made, have its limits established, be enforced, how violators would be tried (if at all), who would make sure this is all being done fairly and correctly, and how violators determined guilty would be handled? Like jails. What if I don't want to pay for jails? What does that mean for me? Do I not get thrown in jail? Does someone who commits an offense against me not get thrown in jail? Why is anyone going to bother paying for jails if they're not mandated to?
2. Societal Defense. How can you effectively defend an Anarchist Society from hostile outside forces without mandatory chip-ins to Defense? And "There won't be hostile outside forces." does not address this. If another society with tanks, jets, bombs, missiles, etc. attack an Anarchist society that decided it doesn't want to pay much for Defense, the Anarchist society is gone. How would the society even decide how much to pay for Defense? Or would it be left up to each individual? Would it be like: I pay a firm for protection against invading armies, but my neighbor doesn't so they defend my property but stay off his? That would put the security firm at a tactical disadvantage, having to allocate their forces specifically to those who paid but staying out of areas they weren't paid to defend while the invaders wouldn't be dealing with this issue.
3. Dispute Resolution. This kind of ties back in to the first one, but when two parties disagree over ownership of something how does this get handled in an Anarchist society? Who pays for dispute resolution? If one side pays more for dispute resolution, what prevents them from just having the dispute ended in their favor? What if someone doesn't want to pay for dispute resolution? Do they automatically lose all disputes against them?
Also, I'm kind of curious, do you think that, say, just the USA could break up into a region of anarchist societies and survive, or would it have to be the whole world?
Thank you for your time.
Who is we? I sure don't grant it that monopoly. I assume that what you mean it "the majority of people assert themselves through the governmental structure and impose themselves on whomever remains", which doesn't sound like a political theory dedicated to "justice". This assumes, of course, that democratic theory is correct about "people" controlling the government, which I certainly don't grant at face value. They certainly don't control the bureaucracy, or the courts, and hardly control the legislators (and are really violating peoples' liberty if they do control those institutions).
This is very interesting, because basically everyone in this thread has made the argument that anarchy is impossible because private defense agencies will go to war and establish a government by force. I hope you've not made that argument.
In either case, I again question who is "we", how you can know what "our" interests are, what makes the state impartial, and how this privilege is ceded.
Nothing. If I contract with someone to provide a service, I've given them the power to act on my behalf.
You can pay off judges and cops in statism, too, so you're not uniquely indicting anarchism by pointing out that corruption exists.
If some number of people X are living in a country, what portion of X needs to consent to a government to be legitimate? May I ever withdraw my consent? If so, how? If I'm one of those who doesn't consent, what options do I have? Assuming that it's implicit, how often does consent have to be renewed (especially given births/deaths and stuff like that)? See, with private agencies, you actually have to sign a contract with specific terms. The "social contract theory" you're pushing not only comes out of really shaky abstractions (i.e. the state of nature), but also takes the form of "as long as you stick around and don't get violent, you're consenting to whatever the government does". I mean, if I move into a town that I know is dominated by a gang of bandits, it might be practical for me to move, but it doesn't make the bandits not-bandits or their extortion not-extortion just because people choose to continue their residence. I may acquiesce to the demands of the bandits when they stop by, just as I acquiesce to taxation and regulation and whatnot, but acquiescence is a far cry from consent.
So, it's not that government is legitimate, it's just that practical reality dictates I basically can't escape it?
Uh... You sort of ended mid-sentence there, so I don't quite get what you're asking.
Actually, I'm pretty sure companies are more accountable to the "will of the people", i.e. their customer base, than governments are. See, companies have to use a profit and loss test, have to persuade people to pay voluntarily, have to satisfy the individuals they serve, that sort of thing. States have no profit and loss test, can throw people in prison for refusing to pay, and mostly pay lip service to satisfying people (especially when you get into things like voter apathy, regulation and capture, state secrecy, that sort of thing). In fact, it doesn't really matter how many people they kill, how much money they take, how much property they confiscate (whether you're talking FDR-style gold confiscation or pure eminent domain), how much subversive logrolling goes on, or whatever other act of aggression some institution in government commits--it can be justified as "the will of the people". After all, they elected the people who are responsible for these things, and the voters haven't started a mass exodus... Surely they must consent then, no? Saying that the government is "accountable" is just a regurgitation of basic democratic political theory, not an argument.
Mmkay.
So, business cycle starts when you expand the money supply (which can happen with private currency, but is significantly less likely when you don't have unilateral control of the money supply a la central banks/the Fed, which basically all countries have, because of political rhetoric about "responsible governing" of the money supply). Typically, this occurs when banks print money or type numbers into a computer and then put it out to banks to get loans going. In the modern financial system, fractional-reserve banking is how things get done. If the reserve rate is 10%, then a bank which gets $10,000 from monetary expansion can further expand by lending out $9,000 (leaving $1,000, or 10%, in its held reserves). Of that $9,000, $8,100 is lent out (leaving $900, again 10% reserves). So and and so forth. But the money doesn't just bounce around different banks--they'll usually loan it out, or invest it in some something or other.
Unfortunately, what increases in the money supply do is the same thing that actual savings do (keeping in mind that supply expansion isn't actual savings)--interest rates go down. When interest rates are low, it's a signal to the market to take out loans to invest in goods to be purchased and/or consumed later (e.g. houses). The market usually gets this signal because interest rates are driven down by increases in savings (which demonstrates that consumers' time preferences have changed, reflecting their decision to delay consumption now so that they can consume later). In the case of monetary expansion, however, the same signal comes out, and businesses start investing in goods under the assumption that consumers' time preferences are decreasing. But time preferences remain the same, and people aren't actually delaying consumption, which means that resources have been misallocated by a kind of "false positive" stimulated by monetary expansion.
This big boom in production and employment can't last forever, though, because it's sustained by malinvestments which have to correct themselves when it becomes apparent that people didn't actually want the goods being produced. During the housing boom, for example, many more houses were being produced than were actually being demanded. Because the investments were badly made, and a lot of resources were badly allocated, there necessarily has to be a crash--this is the "bust" part of the cycle. Investors lose their money, property values plummet, people end up trapped in terrible mortgages (often because of the same loans being made to homeowners, tax credits artificially increasing purchasing power to try and sustain the boom, banks buying a bunch of mortgages and getting stuck with a bunch of useless, valueless houses because they can't sell the CDOs), unemployment rises because of the outflow of capital, and a slump is basically guaranteed for a while as the market corrects for the misallocation by redirecting resources toward more productive uses and stopping resources from being pumped into bubbles.
You can try to argue "well, we should only have responsible monetary policy", but that's not really responsive because governments monopolize currencies for the same reasons they claim to need to monopolize force, law, arbitration, often utilities, and so on. AnCap directly responds to this by doing away with central banks/Federal Reserve-esque agencies, providing competition in the currency market to allow alternative escapes to dominant currencies if/when it's devalued, allows economic health to return quickly by refraining from harmful intervention (e.g. bailouts of companies like AIG), etc.
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Good thing my theory is that the business cycle isn't a consequence of free markets.
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No, because it isn't a moral statement. It's a descriptive statement about why you have incentive to refrain from aggression, and what you're affirming in terms of potential consequences as a result of being aggressive.
That's why I didn't say "you'll appreciate that I'm pushing contractarianism". I was saying that you'll understand the parallel.
As far as "penalties incurred by the contract", those penalties are typically determined by a multiplicity of contracts, including insurance contracts, contracts with arbitrators, and contracts with defensive agencies. AnCap emphasizes a society based on deep interconnectedness, intermediary networks, economic relationships, stuff like that.
I mean de facto in an AnCap society. It's recognized to an extent already because of prohibitions on aggressive actions like murder and theft, but it's not consistently respected. It won't be even in an anarchist society, which will be populated by some number of criminals, but the point is that the nature of the nonaggression principle is just a perpetually-renewed agreement among people who refrain from aggression against each other. By choosing to argue right now, rather than me coming over and clubbing you over the head until you agree with me, we're affirming the nonaggression principle (which you have to do to argue, otherwise you run into a contradiction--something which explains, for example, why you can't argue with someone that he ought to be your slave, since you're presupposing the need for his consent/agreement, that he's a free agent, etc. Insofar as he consents to be your "slave", he isn't actually a slave at all. Argumentation ethics).
That's why I don't argue that it ought to be followed--I argue that you can't engage in argument or rational communication without affirming it, and that, at the point you engage in violence, you're affirming force, rather than reason, and are throwing all discussion of "rights" out the window, which explains my political conception of the NAP as something which both offers a kind of immunity and is a way of describing how legal liability is allocated.
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Sure thing. I'll see what I can do to answer you.
There's a problem with that, since the relevant market for any firm is the market within which its own customer base is contained; ergo, by being accountable to the market, it must also necessarily be accountable to the individuals with whom it has outstanding contracts.
I think there are a couple different dynamics which would be in play there.
1. All property and roads would be private in an AnCap society, which means that owners would be able to set rules based on their ownership. Given massive public sentiment opposed to drunk driving, there's a huge incentive to require sobriety as a precondition to driving on your property (which is more of a concern for road owners than anything).
2. Contractual costs. Driving drunk could lead to getting taken to an arbitrator for aggressive action/driving, which could lead to a rise in those insurance costs (the probable cost increases from drinking at all notwithstanding, though I think the liability increase as a client would lead to higher premiums). Medical insurers would probably drive costs up for drinking, as well, since it represents a larger risk of claims. Probably also true for vehicle insurers, since lifestyle choices factor heavily into payment plans (hell, teenagers alone experience huge hikes in costs because they represent huge risks).
3. I'm not as sure about this one, but it's also possible that cars could be outfitted with that breathalyzer-type technology if your insurers discover that you drive under the influence with any frequency.
It's hard to say exactly how any problem will be handled, because societies are heterogeneous, but those are some good possibilities.
Defense/policing agencies will probably fund jails, since they have a vested interest in keeping criminals off the street to maintain confidence in services. Plus, it allows them to add a fee for jail maintenance, which I imagine they would like well enough.
I already addressed defense earlier in the thread. In fact, I think it may have been on page one.
Assuming they can't settle it amongst themselves? A third-party arbitrator.
That depends on how things are structured. People might agree upon an arbitrator and pay themselves, they might get their property insurers to agree upon an arbitrator, it might end up that the "loser" bears the costs... There's not really a definite method for that happening inherent to anarchism. I think you're kind of asking the wrong questions, because you eventually get to a level of detail where you're asking me to outline the entire anarchist legal system, which is tantamount to me drilling you on how exactly similar things occur--to a similar level of detail--will occur in statist societies. It eventually becomes a matter of continually shifting the goalposts, which I think derails the discussion.
What prevents that from happening in a statist society? Are state officials somehow inherently more honest than private individuals? I don't really think that the statement "corruption exists" defeats anarchism. I do think that incentives to be corrupt are fewer in an anarchist society (example: companies losing reputation, and therefore business, if individuals know that paying more = victory, especially if the arbitrator has to be agreed upon for services to begin), and that the consequences of corruption are more tangible than in a state.
If a person is going to sit and complain about their property being stolen, why wouldn't they pay to prove that it's theirs?
Personally? As an intermediate step, I advocate breakdown into democratic micro-states, and I think that the US could get to anarchy by itself, though it's obviously better if others join in (though I certainly don't think that every state has to do it at once for things to work out).
You're very welcome. I like you.
Also, the privatization of currency has been proven to be an abysmal failure in practice. Coal mining all but permanently ruined the economies of many areas in the US.
This concept intrigues me since I have yet to see a way of deciding what would be considered 'aggression' and would legitimize my actions in response. When push comes to shove when more civilized ways to have someone stop doing something fail, you are only left with the option of physically restraining them from continuing their actions.
The cynic in me says that ultimately 'aggression' will be defined as whatever a person/group/society does not agree with.
All you're doing is talking past me with a different definition of government.
You're just talking past me again by redefining government and making a trivial statement about monopolies enjoying being monopolies. In terms of coercive monopolies (i.e. monopolies established through force/legal power, like the state), they're comparatively bad for everyone who isn't the monopoly (which can just exploit everyone because there's no one to stop it). In terms of non-coercive monopolies (like the expected monopoly an inventor has on his invention, or companies with big market share), I think they're essential to stimulate exploratory investment. These sorts of monopolies and their busting, you might say, are necessary and beneficial pieces of the way the market works
In the context of my statement, I mean that we can argue and debate to come to a conclusion on our ideological dispute without needing to appeal to an external arbitrator.
I didn't make that claim at all. I said that a lot of conflicts can be argued and settled internally, and those that don't can be funneled through a third-party arbitrator.
1. I never said anything about "the community" making those decisions.
2. Even if I did, lynch mobs isn't what would be implied by such a statement. In the same way that individuals in a market decide what the dominant good/service (i.e. dominant company) will be, same story applies to defense agencies and arbitrators.
Representative governments are indirect lynch mobs...?
I would very much enjoy a large-scale experiment. The best we lunatics can do at the moment (in terms of empirical data) is to set up a sliding scale of countries, and point out the improvements as the scale slides closer and closer to what we claim to want.
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You mean fiat currency? I'm a fan of that not existing.
And I honestly don't see currencies being backed by oil, because backing something with a commodity means that you can redeem your notes for some unit of the commodity. With oil, it seems like that would be an abysmal failure (especially as oil supplies diminish, and the value of the currency tanks compared to competing currencies).
Scrip still exists in a lot of places--gift cards, "tickets' at amusement parks, the money at Disneyland, Bitcoin, MMO currency, transportation companies issuing currencies in the mid-19th century,... I don't really think it's a failure simply because some instances haven't produced ideal results (especially since they've occurred largely under monetary monopoly by the state). It's like saying that statism is a failure solely on the basis of failed states existing. Even being an anarchist, that would just be a weak argument.
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No, anarcho-capitalism is based on the NAP regardless--I just conceptualize it a bit differently, in a way which I think makes more sense, but also resolves the tensions which result from my being a moral nihilist.
People aren't compelled to do so--it's just a way of recognizing the agreement among agents to refrain from aggression, the likes of which is constantly reaffirmed by people continuing to refrain from violence. Our arguing, for example, affirms nonaggression/self-ownership. It's why I can't logically argue that you should be my slave, because the presuppositions you and I must necessarily make to engage in an argument preclude the possibility of slavery as resulting from rational communication.
In terms of aggression, though, using violence necessarily breaks the agreement with whomever you're engaging in violence with because you're affirming force, rather than communication/rationality/argument (which means you're also rejecting your immunity to violence and legal liability). Basically, affirming the use of force does so universally, in the sense that you're also affirming others' right to use force in return.
Lol @ et al. I probably invited it on myself, but I'm being filibustered a bit more than I expected, what with numerous members bringing up arguments (many of which are actually the same, I think, albeit with different wording), and doing so in a manner which is really, really long (which is compounded by the fact that I can't double-post without being hit with a warning).
The maximum threat for an agent is death, and saying that people have to find ways to protect themselves from it doesn't really say anything unique about anarchism or statism. The only thing that changes is the way in which individuals go about seeking that protection.
True, though I hesitate on "local", because that could mean a lot of things. The defense that one employs against criminals, whether that means contracting with a policing agency and/or carrying a firearm (large-scale carrying being a pretty big disincentive to openly committing crimes, in my opinion), is a far cry from the kinds of contracts made with larger military defense agencies, who, though very likely not as large as the US in terms of power and budget, will probably be big enough (and numerous enough, given polycentric defense) to make it a fair non-issue, in addition to the fact that anarchist societies aren't really a threat anyway (the other disincentives to invasion, and the fact that geopolitics isn't like Risk notwithstanding).
Is it a hypothesis? In other words, "it's not Cody Franklin-Brand Anarcho-Capitalism unless it has a Non-Aggression Principle?" If that's the case, then all you've got is a vision that tumbles down like a house of cards once you introduce even one agent of sufficient power that doesn't accept the hypothesis.
Or is it a consequence? In other words, is there some heretofore undescribed mechanism in place that compels agents in an anarcho-capitalism to abide by a NAP even if they would not otherwise do so? If so, then you have all the problems that Blinking Spirit et al. are trying to point out.
One problem that I can see is that in an anarcho-capitalistic model, every single agent needs enough guns (hired or otherwise) to defend itself against the maximum threat level posed by any agent, whereas with larger nation-states, those burdens manifest themselves more at the larger scales than the small. In other words, if nation-states have bloated budgets at the large scale of defense, then anarcho-capitalistic agents have bloated budgets at the local scale.
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
1) What gives the AnCap currencies any value?
2) How does a bank lending all their money economically viable?
As to what you have said, if there is no fiat system then any currency is backed by a physical commoditity. Period. Gold and silver are the common standard, but anything can be used by taking it out of the market and setting it aside for currency. Failure to set it aside means that the economy would collapse. That means that the scarcer the commodity, the more each unit of currency is worth (functionally).
The difference between a gift card, tickets, etc. and the situation I provided is evident. What you listed as "script" is backed by the government as having value, while what I gave as an example was corporations printing private currency and controlling their population by driving inflation themselves. So the failures actually existed where there was not a government monopoly (gold standard) and the successful scripts only exist because of a government monopoly (USD) - not the version you presented which is factually backwards.
What gives any currency value? The government sure doesn't do it. The government can print as many green pieces of paper as it wants, but it won't create value unless there are goods to trade for it (and the more paper you have, the lower your purchasing power). The backing of the currency, stability of the money supply, general supply and demand, prevalence vs. competitive currencies, etc.
I don't even understand this question.
Yes. I acknowledged that, and also pointed out that I'm glad for it. I don't like fiat currency, especially in the hands of central banks.
True, but saying that X can be used as a commodity backing doesn't say anything about how successful that currency will be.
That isn't true at all. In fact, the reverse is true. If you have a currency and a commodity to back it, then you have to have enough of the commodity to redeem all notes for a particular value. If you increase the money supply, then you're devaluing the currency unless you also increase the supply of the commodity (looking only at those two goods, and ignoring all other goods and services, anyway), because each unit of currency now redeems for less of the commodity that prior to the supply increase. The same effect occurs if supply of the commodity backing the currency shrinks.
Corporate scrip could be redeemed for USD (i.e. were backed by the state)--additionally, wages in those days were paid in dollars, not in scrip.
I never said that corporate scrip was unequivocally successful. I was just pointing out that A) there are a lot of private currencies which work well, and B) pointing out that private currency is bad because some currencies haven't produced ideal results is as bad an argument as saying that the state is bad because failed states exist.
Wasn't the problem with the corporate scrips that they could only be redeemed in company stores and wages were paid in scrip only?
I personal feel like i have all the freedom that i need. Everything that i truly have wanted to do i have been able to do. I wanted to learn math from professional mathematicians i was given that freedom. I wanted to teach my knowledge to others i have been given that freedom. I wanted to start a family and i have. I wanted a home and i have one. I do not believe the system was perfect, but i truly do not know of any other freedoms that i am lacking. So what does anarcho capitalism offer me that i do not already have.
I have never been subjugated by the state. The worst thing a police officer has done to me is ticket me for not having insurance. If you are going to say that i have to pay taxes well that is true and it does not bother me. I am focusing on my life not on what governments do so any argument about the moral issues associated with war are real but they do not address my question. As a human i care about my personal self interest and want to know what an anarcho capitalistic system would grant me that i do not already have.
Also i personal believe that large corporations in America already have to much freedom. I have seen the problems created by the freedom that corporations already wield. The best argument i have seen from anarcho capitalist about restraining the corporations is through public opinion. i want more of a barrier than human opinion. Right now human opinion is not strong enough to restrain corporations. You make some very large assumptions about the power of humans to restrain corporations through public opinion.
1.) that the public will gain the knowledge of what corporations do.
2.) that people will understand the knowledge if they receive it.
3.) that people will have the will and ability to do something about the knowledge they understand.
I will provide an example of how already corporations have to much power and that the will of the people is not strong enough. It is obvious that the mercury that has been released in the air has been collecting in wildlife most notably fish. There are water ways in America right now where the fish are too toxic to eat. This is true for most of America. Why? Well most people do not know about the mercury poising issue. This to me is a clear case that public knowledge and opinion is to week to restrain corporate pollution.
Also, if the economy becomes "top-heavy" with the vast majority of wealth in the hands of a few, does that not motivate the arbitrators to rule in favor of where the money is? Why would they care what their reputation became amongst the poor masses when resolving a conflict between a poor person and a rich person? A reputation of ruling in favor of the rich is more beneficial to the arbitrator, isn't it? And what happens if the two parties in a dispute cannot find an arbitrator that they agree will be fair? Do they settle it with guns or their private armies? This again seems to favor the rich, since they'd have more money for those things.
Basically all 300 million people in the US just sort of "agree" to resolve the conflict one way or another.
In the rare times that people disagree on small issues like abortion, conflicts are resolved by, y'know... a "concensus", when all the parties finally see "reason" and agree.
Real world examples of anarcho capitalist societies like the Sudan and Afghanistan solve that problem via (1) general poverty and (2) individual, heavily armed clans providing "justice" in their own circles. The combination of the 2 prevent outside forces from really wanting to stick around, since they can't establish order or benefit from "conquering" the territory.
Given there are no "recognized government authorities, I would think the only recognized authorities are those that have armed themselves to protect their criminal enterprises.
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@Cody_Franklin:
Hey, I just realized that organized crime (crips v bloods, italians v russians, Colombians v Jamaicans etc.) is an example of de facto "anarcho capitalism"!! The business are all operating without a central government determining the rules, and privatized businesses all do conflict resolution via 'concensus'.
For some reason, they all feel the need to be heavily armed, and not to fight the government or police... but to guard against being stolen from by EACH OTHER.
How is the illegal drug business in this country NOT a perfect example of "anarcho capitalism"?
They are not ruled by the government in any way. Which is in fact why they must protect their wealth via force. Great system...
In a democratic state, EVERYBODY is the monopoly except for foreign nations. We are ALL shareholders in the monopoly.
How can you possibly argue that we are NOT the owners of the monopoly, when WE elect the board of directors, WE elect the CEO, WE fund the entire thing, and collect dividends?
I want the land. You want the land. Which one gets the land?
Do all 300 million Americans decide?
Or a small subset of 10,000?
Or do we decide via which one of us wins at arm wrestling?
Or which one of us brought more friends?
I want the land. You want the land. Who decides who gets the land?
Its utterly ridiculous how you refuse to be concrete in your explanation of how conflicts would be resolved. How do we pick the arbiter, if it comes to that point?
It's all handwaving bull**** on your part.
Internally to WHO.
For there to be an "internal" there has to be an "US" that includes you and me. There is no "US". There is YOU. And there is ME.
I want the land. You want the land. How do we settle it?
Who picks the arbitrator? Who grants him authority? What if I don't like his decision?
Markets are based on explicit rules of conduct that are understood by all parties. Markets operate within the rules of LAW defined by the government.
Black markets are the only "anarcho capitalist" markets.
If you believe that black markets always work better than legal markets, then be my guest to them in your fantasy world. For me "black markets" are places of pure caveat emptor where you can get your clock cleaned by scumbags.
And here I thought my opinion of you couldn't get lower. it's tiresome enough dealing with your arguments when you're misguided but sincere. This crap borders on "I know you are what am I?".
What you "want" is so vague in terms of IMPLEMENTATION, that nobody knows what you "want".
What you constantly describe is HOW you want things to HAPPEN, and there is virtually NOTHING about how you would actually implement anything.
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Even if you could live in a fantasy world where you do work out all the impossible issues of national defense, conflict resolution, etc., I'm unclear on what the theoretical positive benefits of anarcho capitalism are to justify even a small reduction in societal efficiency, etc.
A little improved market efficiency? What is the MAGNITUDE of theoretical benefit that an anarcho-capitalist society gives us? What is the promise of it? What makes living in an anarcho capitalist society soooooo appealing to you? Is it THAT huge an advantage that an AnCap society is just going to outperform other societies? Or is it some vague "principle" thing that you love so bad, Cody?
I probably worded that poorly by putting your name in it. I don't mean that your personal conception of the term is different or wrong. I mean to ask if you are asserting that the NAP is a necessary condition in your arguments. If so, then by contraposition you must also acknowledge that if the NAP is violated, so are all the conclusions that rely on it. And in this case, the conclusions are (in my opinion) too fragile to be relied upon, especially knowing as I do that we are an incompletely evolved primate species with a fundamentally aggressive nature that is brought to the surface all too easily.
Really? Doesn't this assume that you and I are both a lot nicer than we might actually be? For instance, I could be debating you merely as an intellectual diversion (true) and if I had the ability to do so I wouldn't hesitate to enslave you (false, but only because I happen to be a nice guy) -- nothing about the nature of debate in itself rules out such a scenario. And I'm sure if it came down to it I could come up with some logic extolling the benefits (to me) of having a cadre of slaves on hand.
Not all debate is intended to persuade and not all debaters are persuadable; don't let the fact that the persuasive mode of writing is used fool you.
Sure, but then you're up against the "who has the most guns" problem.
Everybody gets dogpiled once in awhile. As for double posting, I could be wrong about this, but I think you only get infracted if you actually double post. If someone is actively replying to you, I think it is acceptable to reply to them so as to maintain the chronological structure of the conversation. For instance, this particular reply confused the crap out of me because it was above my OP and there was another reply below my OP that used my name, but quoted something that had nothing to do with me.
No, no. You misunderstand me. I'm not talking about the worst possible thing that could happen to me as an individual. When I say greatest possible threat, I mean the largest potential quantity of manpower and armament that could be coercively levied against me.
To throw out an example (putting aside the NAP for the moment), suppose my private security contractor, who maintains a force of 10,000 armed men in defense of my local area, sends me a scouting report that the Nike Corporation is marching through my area with a force of 1,000,000 conscripting anyone unable to resist into forced labor at the nearest Nike plant. Knowing that my private contractor will not be able to oppose such a force, I must either hire a bigger, better defense contractor or learn how to mold leather.
In other words, my defense budget has to adjust itself upward to match the greatest threat I might potentially face, even if that threat is on a megacorporate or national scale as compared to my individual scale.
The inevitable outcome of such a scenario is that there is one unique largest army (let's call it the Army), anyone who is not under the Army's protection is not adequately protected (because there is a larger army that could be levied against them), and competing armies eventually become pointless (either because they act aggressively in opposition to the Army and are therefore defeated, or are ideologically aligned with the Army but because a small, efficient force can easily out-compete the Army by availing themselves of the peace enforced by the Army's presence, the Army must either crush it or risk being replaced by it).
Then one of two things happens; the Army is controlled in a despotic way and the end result is an empire of some sort, or the Army is controlled in an enlightened way and ends up as some kind of a republic. Either way it essentially becomes a government, collecting taxes (it's the only defense contractor and everyone needs defense, ergo...) and wielding all of the essential diplomatic and legal powers of a nation-state. (for instance, the terms of everyone's contract could contain, by reference, a code of laws to be followed, and so forth.)
Which if thou dost not use for clearing away the clouds from thy mind
It will go and thou wilt go, never to return.
Also you provided a list of words with no context, they explain why one currency has value not a world where anyone can invent a currency.
That would be an issue for someone saying that irresponsible money lending is a good idea.
Then quit trying to act like an AnCap currency would behave like a fiat currency.
But it does mean that the most precious harvest-able materials will be the ones used to back currency.
YOU CANNOT JUST INCREASE THE MONEY SUPPLY WITH NOTHING BACKING IT.
If X amount of currency is X amount of something, you cannot add Y amount of currency without adding Y amount of whatever something that backs it. You also cannot take Z amount of that something away without removing Z amount of currency. That's how that works. That is the only way that can work. If you try and change that, then the economy collapses because the money has no value.
You are simply wrong on all accounts. The workers were paid corporate scrip, and the scrip was backed by gold not the state, the banks accepting the company scrip determined interest rates, and all the general stores that accepted the corporate scrip determined the prices of all goods sold there.
As a bonus, you don't get to say the state does not back the current currency and that the state backing was what made this example of AnCap go wrong.
You pointed out public backed currency claiming it was private scrip, and I've pointed out an exact analogy of your system and why it failed while you tried to say it was the state's fault. You cannot claim it won't fail and then claim that any failings in the past are moot and then claim that a previous failing does not prove the system doesn't work. Pick your pony.
On top of that, the state can recover from economic collapse - corporations cannot.
Without reading everything I think he's referring to the Austrian Business Cycle Theory. The easiest way is to attack it through neo-classical economics and attacking the basics of Austrian economics altogether on how it shifted from mathematics and emperical research to intellectual history.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austrian_business_cycle_theory
Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
Individualities may form communities, but it is institutions alone that can create a nation.
Nothing succeeds like the appearance of success.
Here is my principle: Taxes shall be levied according to ability to pay. That is the only American principle.
Sorry, the social compact is non-negotiable. Either murder is wrong for everyone, and everyone who attempts it gets punished / restrained / prevented / whatever, or the entire idea of crime prevention doesn't work. This is why (at least some) government services are different from private services. And, incidentally, why coercive taxation is justified - if everyone benefits equally from a system which could either reward or punish based on behavior, obviously no one will pay in to support it unless either they have to or they get some sort of "above the law" status. The "private security" systems Anarcho-Capitalists prefer would have plenty of people willing to pay - but they themselves would also be able to get away with murder. I don't find that acceptable. Justice should not be limited to those who can afford it.
Well, it won't probably do *exactly* what I want, but it will do what the majority wants, and that's usually something that tends to muddle through.
Lobbying pressure can also come from, for instance, concerned citizens trying to make sure agribusinesses don't adulterate their products, or from professional organizations of doctors or scientists seeking to enforce open and ethical behavior in healthcare and research. I will never understand where so many people get the fantasy notion that somewhere out there the evil liberals are having dinner parties and saying to one another, "Gee, you know what I hate? Small businesses! Let's make up a regulation just to screw with them!" Obviously you'll get this impression if you listen to the sort of bloviates you get on Fox or AM Radio, but I would credit you with more intelligence than that. Most regulatory proposals have the intention of curbing some sort of potential abuse. Obviously, during the legislative process some, even many, bills get perverted away from their original purpose with pork and amendments. But that's not an argument against regulation as a concept, it's an argument for transparency in government.
Retaining one's office come election day isn't incentive any more? Stop the presses!
Not trivial, just extremely basic. You were basically making a sweeping argument that regulation, as a concept, did not represent a sensible solution to a given problem. Now, you might not *prefer* it as the solution, you might prefer another solution. But it is *a* possible solution. Unless, of course...
...you just deny the problem altogether. >_<;; *sighs* Have you ever heard the term "fiduciary responsibility" (or "fiduciary duty")? In this case I am referring to corporate board members. They are expected and required to do their very best to increase shareholder value. That is, at its core, all that a corporation is about. Some corporations start in one field, branch into another, and then abandon their original field altogether. So you can't define a business by *how* it makes its profits. All a corporation is, is a big pile of money and the managers of that money, whose task is to provide the owners of that money - the investors - with a return on their investment. Some companies do so by manufacturing things, some sell services, others buy and sell commodities or speculate on futures. That's all irrelevant: you grow the pile of money, or the shareholders fire your ass and replace you with someone who will.
So beneath the board, are the officers who run the company. Since they report to the board, they too are responsible to grow the pile of money, or be fired. All the way down to the mail room clerk - if he's constantly late to work, then he's ultimately causing the pile of money to grow more slowly than it could if the company had a mail room clerk who had good attendance. So he's fired and replaced. With me so far?
So, now picture this. You are the (to this day unknown, unnamed, and unpunished) Ford or Firestone middle manager who was faced with a critical decision. Do you do the ethical thing, and inform the NHTSA of the tread separation defect in the tires intended for, among other vehicles, the Ford Explorer? Well, let's examine the possible outcomes of that decision. Lives might be saved. Your company will suffer a public relations setback when the error is made public. This will translate to lost sales. Your company might even be sued. If these things happen, you will have caused the money pile to grow more slowly - or even to shrink. Obviously, you will be fired, demoted, or otherwise punished for this outcome. (Your boss will have no choice - otherwise s/he will be punished by his/her boss, and so on, up the ladder.) The alternative - not telling anyone and crossing your fingers that the tires do OK anyway - obviously still has the chance of all these things happening, but there's a chance they won't, and you'll preserve deniability. Of course, lives might be lost. But this doesn't mean your company is losing a principle stakeholder - just a potential future repeat customer. Obviously, in the real life example, the unknown suit at Ford or Firestone chose to keep silent and keep his job (at least, for the short term). The companies then engaged in a cover-up because profit was placed before ethics.
I'm not saying all people who work for corporations are evil. Most of us, I'd imagine, work for corporations. I work for a corporation. But the higher you go up the chain towards the top, the more pressure is placed upon you to make decisions based on a value system that places profit before any other motivator. And if you won't make that kind of decision, you will be replaced with someone who will - because ROI is, in the end, the only thing the shareholders are paying attention to. There is a sort of Darwinian inevitability to it, because there are plenty of clever folks out there who would love to be elevated to such a position, and if the price for their mini-mansion and yacht is some unknown toddler in another city choking on an unsafe toy, well, they put it from their mind. That toddler isn't really real to them anyway. It's just another way of externalizing costs.
It's not their strength, but their motivation that is their flaw. A government's charter, at least in the case of the government of a democratic society that offers a universal franchise, is to serve all members of that society equally. No other organization can make such a claim - no corporation, no church, no citizen's coalition, no political party, no professional organization. They each have their membership, their stakeholders, their shareholders or employees, their customers - and they don't care about anyone else. They are also not transparent to the public - they are free to hide their goals, their methods, their organization structures, even their membership, from outsiders. The government is the only entity whose stated goal (however poorly you may feel it lives up to it) is to serve us all. That IMO makes it the only organization worthy of being trusted with essential social services such as law enforcement and health care. Sure, it may be less efficient, but I consider transparency and moral authority more important when it comes to essential social services than efficiency.
(Have you detected yet that I'm mostly a European-style Social Democrat? ^_^)
A nonsensical metaphor. Taxes pay for things like police, firefighters, and roads, which a vast majority wants but no one can afford alone. THAT, btw, is what I mean by "collective action". Government taxation and spending allows our entire society to act collectively to achieve things that no corporation could do unless it were a corporation of all of us as shareholders (which would, again, just be another way of saying "government"). Taxes obviously must be coercive or else people will freeload on these public services.
There are some services that are supported by other fees, and this is sensible when sensibly applied. For instance, I find it personally inconvenient to constantly be stopping to pay tolls on the highway through West Virginia, but it makes sense. No doubt a lot of the traffic on that road is through traffic (people from out of state, passing through to another state), given WV's low population density. And yet repairs and maintenance on that road is paid for by WV taxpayers... definitely not fair, since the majority of the wear and tear is being caused by non-WV-taxpayers. The solution is to partially support highway maintenance via tolls.
Similar systems exist throughout society, to exact payment for some localized services from those who benefit the most. But some services simply can't be funded this way. The military, for instance, protects all of us at all times from threats which are difficult to predict and which could (at least in theory) come from any direction. (In reality: probably not from Canada. ^_^) It's not like there's one sub-group of us who are "more protected" than others, who therefore rightly ought to pay more. Therefore we all pay our share (again, in theory), and our military remains funded.
Now, individual cases can be made for or against various social services, whether they're needed at all, whether they should be paid for on a federal, state, local, or individual level, etc. But those are individual cases and in no way constitute a coherent argument for the dissolution of the state.
Heh. Tell that to John Boehner... said market forces just handed him an embarrassing political setback. He'd be thrilled to learn he's "impervious" to them...
This is why your arguments trouble me: you don't seem to address questions of ethics at all. Only your personal freedom-from, and a sense of general outrage over that. You're very certain of the ethical wrong of coercive government - but you don't seem to be very intellectually curious about the potential ethical problems involved in no-government. :\
Well, this is where you will fail with them, time and again, until you learn or give up. Differing definitions will lead people of good heart and sound mind to disagree honestly. And you can't just shrug that off with an argument that your definition will trump theirs and that THEN if they don't agree then they're being intellectually dishonest... because, taking again the example of abortion, Americans have been fighting for more than 30 years over the definition of when life begins and we're no closer than we were before to a consensus.
Calling the people on the other side "dishonest" because they refuse to betray their principles for your sake isn't very useful. You haven't convinced them yet - work on it.
I highly recommend you go read a High School Civics textbook, stat. Agreeing to disagree is much of politics and is responsible for most periods of peace in human history. I wouldn't call it useless.
I'm curious, is there a specific reason you do not have faith in / trust the democratic process? Do you feel the concept is fine but the execution is flawed? Or do you have some fundamental philosophical dispute with the ideal of democracy in general? Because if the latter, I hate to break it to you, but the only way you'll ever GET your anarcho-capitalist system is if you get enough other people to agree with you. Which is just another kind of democracy.
All power is democracy. Even Saddam Hussein's power was democratic - he murdered, persecuted, terrorized, and warmongered, but he also had the support of the powerful Ba'ath faction and enough of the other demographics of Iraq either supported him or were willing to look the other way as long as the dictator kept the trains running on time. They could have revolted, literally, at any moment, and he would have been gone. An army can fight against many things, but not its own mothers and brothers.
So, really, when I saw that ridiculous sham trial and execution, what I was really looking at was the symbolic revenge of a minority upon the figurehead of the majority who were the true culprits of that regime's crimes. But this is how it always goes. He was a monster, sure, but if he didn't exist the Ba'athists would have just picked someone similar, or someone similar would have connived and murdered his way to the top of the heap. Because ultimately, the majority always gets what it thinks it wants...
They were begging and clamoring to be put in chains and enslaved? I'm sure you meant, anti-other-people's-liberty. That's not what I said. That's just a pro-liberty person who defines only himself as a person worthy of liberty.
Yet this is their planet too. And sadly, they outnumber people like you and I, who are willing to reconsider everything we believe.
Yeah, but some of those disagreements are not resolvable because they're based on differing philosophies, and there is no objective, external standard by which philosophies can be compared in order to determine which is superior. Sadly. :\
Huh? There was nothing incoherent about the political ideology of the antebellum South. Naive and blind to economic factors that were soon to doom it to history's trashheap, yes. Arrogantly uncaring of world opinion, certainly. Morally wrong by our modern standards, and the standards of their contemporary abolitionist foes? Definitely! But how "incoherent"? Remember, within their political ideology, only the white man was an invested stakeholder in society. And therefore naturally their political structure had as its function the protection of the liberty, property, and way of life of white men. Today we call that playing to your base.
Well, you can't have anarchy, ever. Might as well just put that out of your mind, it's even more of a pipe dream than communism was. Because as soon as there is a power vacuum and no one is coercing anyone else, some would-be dictator will start trying to enslave everyone else by enlisting some thugs who are willing to hurt and kill in exchange for living in luxury as his helpers. To prevent this, other people will have to band together.
In other words, the recipe for government is as follows: Take one group of people; add food, water, and shelter; stir - and wait.
I don't see how you can have a government of any kind without a monopoly on the application of force. That is the very definition of sovereignty.
Well: please don't take that out on us.
Nothing is being substituted. The majority's wishes are always enacted (see my above example about Saddam Hussein), whether actively through commission or passively through permission / omission. Therefore there's never a substitution, though of course the demographics and politics are subject to change and flux, so the majority's wishes can shift. And obviously this is an application of collective power: the totality of society is the largest collective there is within that society, and is essentially capable of vetoing any decision made by any smaller sub-group within itself - if it wants to badly enough.
Was that sarcasm? Because I agree with that statement. Of course, democracy (in order to be truly effective) requires transparency, which unlike in the markets, allows people to make more efficient decisions in order to more accurately give the majority what it thinks it wants. (It always comes back to that.)
--Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who is up in Heaven now. EDH WUBRG Child of Alara WUBRG BGW Karador, Ghost Chieftain BGW RGW Mayael the Anima RGW WUB Sharuum the Hegemon WUB RWU Zedruu the Greathearted RWU
WB Ghost Council of Orzhova WB RG Ulasht, the Hate Seed RG B Korlash, Heir to Blackblade B G Molimo, Maro-Sorcerer G *click the general's name to see my list!*
Not really. You have to presuppose that the government's territorial and jurisdictional claims are legitimate to make that statement. Plus, you're still conflating acquiescence and consent.
Then change my statement to "the majority of people in the United States", since that's what I meant anyway, and since it doesn't change my argument.
You're no less a slave just because you get to choose a new master every so often. Plus, casting a ballot for someone doesn't mean consenting to everything they do or vote for, it definitely doesn't consent to everything other legislators do, and it most definitely doesn't consent to things which non-elected officials, like bureaucrats, do. And it says nothing of people who choose not to vote, i.e. not to "give their consent".
They might or they might not. Basically, we're talking about two different things.
That's just a statement that violent revolutions can occur. It doesn't demonstrate that we actually control government in a meaningful way. It just means that some would-be rebel group's tolerance level for public slip-ups isn't infinitely high.
This just rests on that really shaky "state of nature" assumption which, though a convenient hypothetical for social contract theorists, doesn't really bear any relation to reality.
Actually, I'd be willing to argue that it's less cost-effective, because states aren't sufficiently incentivized to economize.
This is the same "inevitability of the state" argument which has been dealt with elsewhere.
1. You're free to choose leaders for yourself, but I don't see how you can justify granting the consent of some other individual or group of individuals simply because you and your group have a vested interest in doing so.
2. Nobody is ceding any privileges, because there isn't a contract. There aren't even any definite terms--it's literally "the state can do whatever as long as you bend over and take it", which is more an argument about what people will acquiesce to than an argument about government being legitimate.
1. It's not a tu quoque because I'm not claiming you're in error due to systemic hypocrisy--I'm claiming that you can't uniquely indict anarchy by claiming that corruption exists.
2. You're very right in asking for a comparative analysis. Personally, I think the incentives to refrain from corruption are much more visible in a market than in a state. If you're a company, say, an arbitrator, you have reputation concerns to worry about. If you start taking bribes, or people know that you'll decide in favor of whoever pays the most, basically nobody is going to agree to use your service, in which case you'll lose business and probably tank. I'd even argue that there's an incentive to bill each party equally since A) they're both using the same service, and B) equal payment reduces the risk of bribery accusations. It might also be paid through insurers to further mitigate the risk of accusations.
You would basically have to have perpetual 100% consent, otherwise you have to concede that you don't care about consent when considering governmental legitimacy.
If it's "more in keeping with your ideals", it's obviously the case that you aren't consenting to everything the government does. In the second case, you're just advocating that people roll over and take the consequences of disobedience, which doesn't legitimize government. The last case also doesn't legitimize government, so much as saying "even if they are criminals, why not just leave?"
Voting doesn't really imply consent. It's a demonstration of preference. I would prefer to be robbed, rather than murdered, but that doesn't imply I'm "consenting" to robbery when given the ultimatum "your money or your life".
Because criminals can be treated like criminals?
So, it's not really a question of government being legitimate so much as what people will lay there and take?
I think you're conflating consent and acquiescence.
In the status quo, it's basically unavoidable. Not an affirmation of its legitimacy, though.
Because a coercive monopoly gets to do whatever it wants--there's no profit and loss test, no incentive to allocate resources efficiently, there's room to exploit because of legal barriers to entry and static (or increasing, as was the case post-9/11) demand--the state just doesn't same the same incentives/market forces influencing it. You can literally google "monopolies bad" and find a host of evidence demonstrating why a coercive monopoly performs worse than markets, and I don't know how you imagine government would be better just because it has more monopoly power. It makes no sense whatsoever.
Okay then.
There's no reason that anyone "must" do anything. But I say they "have to" based on business owners' desire to not tank.
That's just the Magic Wand Theory of the State. Saying "there are processes for reform, we should use them" isn't an argument, since the state won't do whatever you want just because you're a statist. States aren't subject to the same incentive structures and market forces. That states can do good stuff sometimes isn't a reason to bet all your chips on it, because "we need more good government and less bad government" isn't a political theory.
I think that, even with "violent anarchy", states have a worse record of violence.
How is it counter-intuitive? I think that a government monopolizing the money supply, keeping it static, and backing it with some commodity (like gold) is possible, but I don't bet on it, because sound currency would only stay as long as things continued to roll high. If a big business went down, and unemployment spiked, people would be shouting at the government for intervention, monetary expansion, and stuff like that (which I think is good evidence that, to the extent to which people do control their government, they often make really crappy decisions). People don't like dealing with the consequences of their bad decisions, and are more than happy to ask the government to save them, regardless of the fact that interventions tend to make things worse.
Alright.
I'd be happy if the government only did good things, too.
It would be nice if there was sound monetary policy, but it's really unlikely to stay when times of crisis hit. Difference between the Panic of 1920 (which no one really remembers because it ended quickly without any intervention apart from slashing spending and tax rates) and the Depression.
The difference is that, with central banking/Fed-type systems, you have no real choice in terms of currency, because it's monopolized. If a dominant currency is devalued in a market, there's room for other currencies to develop, since there's basically nothing to back the "dominant" currency (as the only way for it to be devalued is if it's fiat or the supply of the commodity/currency is decreased/increased, specifically, eroding the reliability of that currency (especially as purchasing power/value of savings shrinks).
Regardless, I don't think it's "coercive" in the sense in which I use the term.
Okay?
1. How does the destabilization of competing currencies occur, exactly? You didn't make it clear.
2. Exchanging for a third currency doesn't cause inflation, because you're not increasing the money supply by exchanging. You're buying some amount of the other currency for some amount of the currency you're holding, which means that the money supply stays the same, unless you're talking about buying straight from the producer, but the producer has no incentive to jeopardize his business by devaluing its own currency in exchange for a competing currency...
Groups would assemble to facilitate currency trading? Probably. That's sort of how it works with trading international currencies.
You mean it's not clear that refraining from intervention would return economic health?
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Rather than going into every possible advantage (especially many things which are more passive than "you get to do X"), I'm content to point out that this is largely a red herring. There are other relevant questions, like "why does the state get to monopolize certain services", "why should other individuals be barred from exercising certain liberties", and stuff like that.
Theoretically, nothing, because you can just say "Well, government should just do good things if it doesn't already do them or if it's doing bad things.".
Like what?
Actually, my argument is to preclude government from ever being able to involve itself in the economy, which is what allows corporations to get so much power in the first place.
That's not really as much of a problem when all property is privatized, since poisoning someone else's water supply (which could compound into poisoning PEOPLE) is a huge legal liability.
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In terms of coercive monopolies, yes. In terms of natural and expected monopolies (like an inventor's monopoly on his invention), I don't think so, but I think this latter sort of monopoly is both necessary and beneficial to a market.
Also, you can't criticize something for being potentially monopolistic when the alternative (government) is a guaranteed monopoly.
The state already does that pretty often as a response to lobbying, campaign finance, issue networks (between bureaucrats and interest groups), and so on. Even if you want to argue "corruption exist", I think it's less damaging in AnCap.
I don't understand why arbitrators would charge people more for being rich? I imagine they would just offer a service at X price. Lawyers and Are these companies going to thoroughly check the income records, net worth, and investment portfolios of each individual before deciding how to scale the charges, or what?
I mean, alternative dispute resolution already exists in multiple forms, and it's not really the plague-ridden thing you suspect it to be.
Their insurance companies will have to agree on one? I dunno, you're basically asking me to describe the whole anarchist legal system in a deep level of detail, when it's like, the point of anarchism is that it isn't planned. You could literally sit here forever and keep asking "how does X happen", "What if Y", etc., but you're not asking the right questions. With enough random hypotheticals and a hurricane of "what-ifs", one can make any system look bad.
There are like 4 other huge posts to respond to, and I honestly don't feel like stringing those along right now. I'll cover the rest of the filibuster a bit later.
The fact is that you're this huge proponent of a political-economic system you HAVEN'T THOUGHT THROUGH in a "deep level of detail".
it's not a "filibuster". It's you stonewalling and handwaving a proposal to toss our entire way of life down the toilet because the idea of "anarchy" and "unlimited freedom" is shiny and appealing to you, and you'd be happy to wing it, toss the dice, and see whether you'd personally do better than mediocre under a different system... A system for which security, conflict resolution, insurance, and dozens of other issues that will become painfully, obviously critical within a minute of implementation... "ISN'T PLANNED".
Nobody is "filibustering" you. Its just that there are so many obvious questions that would arise on day 1 of operations, that most people would normally consider important to a working system.
It's like you're playing, pretend a meteor hit Washington DC, and every state & local government in the US, killing every politician: And you believe that after a brief hiccup stage of adjustment, the US people and economy could get along better than they are now, unfettered by all the bureaucratic government non-sense, and national defense, police, fire, ane everything else could be handled by "concensus" or some sort of "didnt' think about the details yet" arbitration. Don't need a PLAN or a CONSTITUTION or laws or anything. Everybody would just "agree" on stuff.
We already have international economies that exist outside of govt intervention. One of them is called the heroin trade. We have these highly organized corporations/er..governments called 'cartels' running the individual businesses. It is a working example of anarcho capitalism, and it's very efficient and profitable.
100% cosign this statement about Cody.
Immanuel Kant notwithstanding, all moral statements can be reframed as if-then statements. They're broadly the same thing.
Seems to be conflating "persuasion" as a social activity with "argument" as a logical chain of premises and inferences. If you have persuaded someone to be your slave, it is perhaps true that they are not your slave. However, it is perfectly self-consistent to make an argument that ends with the conclusion that you ought to enslave someone, since it doesn't matter to an argument whether someone agrees with it or not.
To bring it around to a more relevant example, arguments abound as to why the government is justified in coercively collecting taxes. Your position as I understand it is that these arguments are self-defeating because anyone who accepts them is not being taxed coercively. But this fact is beside the point. The argument is not that the government is justified in coercively taxing only the people who accept the argument. It's that the government is justified in coercively taxing, period.
Socrates is mortal even if he doesn't accept the argument "Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal."
What is your thesis in this thread? Are you actually arguing for the implementation of anarcho-capitalism, or are you just presenting it as an interesting hypothetical? I had assumed it was the former - but if it is, then there will be a point somewhere in your argument at which you assert "We ought to do X", either "We ought to be anarcho-capitalist" or "We ought to follow the non-aggression principle" or even "We ought to behave logically consistently".
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Not an argument.
I never said that.
Never said that. A coherent rights theory can be drawn up to settle the issue of abortion--I'd argue that the debate over personhood is irrelevant.
1. How are Sudan or Afghanistan examples of anarcho-capitalism?
2. Even if they are cases of anarchy, it would be like me saying "North Korea and Zimbabwe are examples of statism. They're bad. Therefore, statism is bad." It's not a valid argument.
You can't compare one country with "good government" to another country with "bad anarchy" and claim that you've done a legitimate comparative analysis. You have to compare anarchy and statism using the same group of people (i.e. demonstrate that a community which would be peaceful and orderly under a state would devolve into perpetual war absent the state).
Actually, they operate because there's a central government determining the rules. Because certain markets are repressed, you necessarily get black markets so long as demand persists.
Organized crime and the government don't fight each other? Have you ever studied the War on Drugs in any depth?
If the government didn't try to control certain markets, then the black markets (and associated cartels) wouldn't really be problematic. They don't comply with the law, but that doesn't mean that government intervention is nonexistent.
No we aren't. Democratic theory just assumes that everyone consents because voting exists and because people choose not to uproot their entire lives and move to a different country. It's funny, because people are said to consent if they vote for a representative, to consent to majority action by voting at all, and forfeiting his right to complain if he refuses to vote. It's just a rationalization for state power that keeps suppressing the correlative to keep the argument about legitimization of state power.
Some people vote for the legislators. Some people vote for the President. Nobody votes for the bureaucrats. Almost nobody can actually keep track of everything the government does (what with secrecy being necessary for "national security"). Everybody is forced to pay, and is jailed for refusing. Whereas other people in this thread have been treating the state as their personal magic wand, you're running what I've come to call the Green Lantern Theory of Democracy, which basically argues that the only obstacle to a democratic paradise is willpower.
Use/homesteading.
It's not ridiculous, because there's no way to be totally concrete about it. The whole point of anarchism is that it isn't a planned society, which makes the infinite chain of "how" and "what if" useless.
You're not being very nice.
The people involved in the dispute.
So, there's no "us" including "you and me", but there's a "you and me"? You realize that makes no sense, right? Especially when your whole political theory is based on a huge "we" that claims to include everybody and exercise one big collective will.
Already answered this.
1. Government isn't required for markets. You're just assuming that.
2. Black markets only exist because governments have laws repressing certain markets.
3. Not all black markets are dangerous.
I'm trying really hard to be nice, because basically every other individual in this thread is being civil and friendly, but your attitude is really starting to get on my nerves.
That's because implementation methods wouldn't be internationally homogeneous. North Korea's method would be different from the United States' would be different from India's would be different from Liechtenstein's.
Because I'm not a social planner, and I don't intend to be.
The benefits would differ from state to state, and from person to person. What I would get is different from what a businessman would get is different from what consumers as a class would get.
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Politically speaking, I assume it as a necessary condition. But that assumption isn't that everyone will abide by it all the time--it's that, if people abide by it, things will run smoothly. For people who don't abide by it, i.e. criminals, they don't have access to the same kinds of immunities that people who do abide by it have. By using force, you're indiscriminately affirming its use. This means that all talk of nonaggression, self-ownership, and individual rights is thrown out the window, and you're heaped in liability.
It doesn't really matter whether you're debating me as a diversion until you can find a big enough stick. As long as we're engaged in rational communication, we must both necessarily presuppose self-ownership and nonaggression for as long as we continue to argue (regardless of motives). You could make a logical argument about why you would benefit from having slaves, but you couldn't logically argue with me why I should be a slave. That you're arguing presupposes my free agency and a need for my consent, which precludes my being a slave.
The act itself is what's relevant, not its motives or methods.
That's what all political philosophy eventually boils down to. If a dictator has enough power, it doesn't matter whether you're a monarchy, a democracy, an anarchy, a republic, an oligarchy, whatever. When states go to war, it's always a question of who has the most guns. It's just a fact of life that when someone uses force, they're affirming the use of force in retaliation.
Handling the dogpile is a bit more difficult than it would usually be. I'm working on rebutting at least 7-8 people (I haven't really counted), I think, and most of the posts are remarkably long. Just stringing together 2-3 at once is exhausting. So, either I keep going at this ad infinitum, I complain, at which point I probably get lightly flamed for "asking for it", or I stop the discussion, at which point people will probably be like "lol we won, he's running away". No matter what my actions, it's not going to turn out well for me.
If Nike is paying the soldiers $50,000 a year, it would literally have to shell out $50 billion a year to keep that army funded. Even if it's only paying half of them half that, it's still $12.5 billion a year. Nike's total revenue in 2010 was $19 billion (not even factoring in expenses and spending and such). I mean, the whole company itself only has slightly over 34,000 employees. Forgive me for suggesting that your scenario is massively unlikely. If you want, you could replace it with "Belligerent, militaristic state X", at which point all I really need to argue is that an AnCap society probably couldn't stand up to the full might of Nazi Germany, but neither could France, Poland, and Czechoslovakia.
That isn't really true at all. How much defense spending is considered "necessary" is based on an individual's level of fear and risk aversion. A paranoid neocon will advocate more military spending than a sincerely anti-war Democrat (who still advocates some spending to defend against potential aggressors). There's never really a "correct" level of defense spending.
I don't think that's necessarily true. "The Army" isn't one single, autonomous unit. It's populated by people who are employed on a voluntary basis. I think arbitrage works pretty well in that respect, since companies will have to compete for employees. Other companies can chip away at employee bases by offering better employment conditions--more money, better benefits, whatever. If the company makes good on its contract, there's a transfer of employment. If not (either the bigger company undercuts by offering better conditions or the other company doesn't follow through), the employee wins anyway, and the company has earned the "right" to keep its share of the market and capital.
Plus, apart from the fact that even economies of scale don't inherently grant monopoly power, there's also the fact that a defense contractor that large would have to have its capital distributed over several communities/regions, at which point it would have to compete with other contractors of similar sizes in addition to competing locally on a per-branch basis. You're also working on the "market share" theory of monopoly, which doesn't really tell you anything other than the percent of the market captured. One has to ask how these companies would garner increases in market share in the first place.
I'm not really buying that (it's the same inevitability of the state argument that others in this thread have made).
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Calling it "legal tender" is the only thing separating it from useless pieces of paper (legally speaking). There's also the fact that a lot of private currencies are illegal, but that's peripheral. My point is that the government doesn't determine the actual value of currency. Unless it starts setting price controls, it doesn't determine what you can buy with it or how much of something you can buy with it. It only persists as a "legal tender" because people continue to use it. Saying that the government is responsible for the value of money demonstrates a fundamental understanding of what money is.
They explain why any currency has value in its own right. It just doesn't factor in competition among currencies.
I mean that the question was worded in an incomprehensible way. I never looked back to see if you edited it. Also, I never said that irresponsible money lending is a good idea, so I don't know where you're getting that from.
I never claimed it would. In fact, I made a point that market currencies would probably have to be backed by commodities to be successful.
I don't think that's the only consideration when trying to determine what you're going to use as a backing.
Tell that to the Federal Reserve.
Honestly, though, of course you can increase the money supply without backing--it's just a stupid idea.
... Obviously. That's sound monetary policy. I'm not advocating increasing the money supply without increasing the supply of the backing commodity (or vice versa), I'm just pointing out what happens to the value of a currency to the extent to which you try to disconnect the currency from the commodity.
The only reason scrip was issued against wages is because those areas were really low on cash anyway. And I've never heard of any company backing its scrip with gold. It was a system of credit issued against accrued wages so that people could buy stuff in company stores. They were "backed" by the state insofar as scrip could be redeemed for USD (they just usually weren't since the reason for scrip being issued in the first place
I didn't say that the state doesn't back the current currency...?
I never said it "won't fail"--I just pointed out that the possibility of failure doesn't invalidate anarchism any more than statism.
Are we talking total economic collapse? Because I don't see how companies can't weather economic collapse (or how new ones wouldn't just take their place once capital settles in the "new" economy).
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I'll finish up the last few posts later.
I do not expect you to list all the advantages that an anarcho capitalist society would grant the individual over the current American system. I would like for you to list a few so i can grasp a better understanding of what the individual should expect from an anarcho capitalist system. This is not a red herring but a request if you can not fulfill such a request then i will have to accept that.
I am not sure what this statement means are is supposed to mean. I was basically describing how i am not a slave and i have never been subjugated. I do not understand why i, from a personal level would, want to live in an anarcho capitalist system, so i was asking what freedoms i would enjoy that are currently being taking from me by the state. If your response is theoretically nothing well then i am not convinced.
I am really not being snide here i think one of the big selling points that anarcho capitalist bring up is in the current situation the government has seized your liberties and in anarcho capitalism you will have those liberties back. I literally can not think of a liberty that i am wanting that a lack of government would give me. If you cannot offer me any more liberty with your system then why would i care.
I did give you an example in my post. I understand that you have been flooded with responses and requests in this forum. I personal think that the pace of this conversation is hurting this conversation. I will offer the same modern day example of a problem that where the concerns of the people and the current government cannot control a real threat. Mercury is being released in the air this mercury is then brought back down to earth by rain and has poisoned several American water ways. The reason the will of the people cannot address this issue is because of the three assumptions you have made about the power that people could wield in your anarcho capitalist structure.
1.) that the public will gain the knowledge of what corporations do.
I consider this a false hope that when a corporation or really any entity engages in a negative behavior that the public would gain knowledge of the activity. One of the first acts of engaging in negative activities is to hide what you are doing. History has shown that humans are actual very good at hiding and misrepresenting their activities. i do not want to place my personal protections into this false hope. For my mercury example this is actually the biggest problem most people do not know that it is even happening. People were poising their kids with mercury because they did not know the mercury levels in the fresh fish that had caught were poisonous. The poisoning of our waters ways have been going on for decades already and there is no sign of it stopping because people do not know about it.
2.) that people will understand the knowledge if they receive it.
People have a hard time understanding how a coal fire electricity plant can poison fish. When you explain it to them you will here responses like well the mercury will eventually wash out of the fish and the water system. Even though there is evidence that refutes such a claim it has been shown that the mercury builds up and does not simply wash away. I do not want to rest my safety in the hope that people can make informed and rational decisions with information that they do not understand.
3.) that people will have the will and ability to do something about the knowledge they understand.
This is another big issue i have run into with people. You can explain a situation to them what is good about what is bad about it what are the solutions and in the end you are meet with statements like "well that is very unfortunate but i do not have the time to do anything about it." People lack the will to do things about situations that they agree are egregious. The reason why the founding fathers are revered is because they were the exception and not the rule. It is rare to find a group of people with the determination to stand up for what they believe in and succeed in the fight for their beliefs. History has forgotten the billions of people that have never tired. I find it very hopeful of you that people will suddenly become active and involved in problems presented to them. i do not want to rest my safety in such a false hope.
This brings up another thought i have had in reading these anarcho capitalists beliefs. What inherent flaw prevents you from accomplishing this and many of the goals you have in a representative democracy. I agree that the government will help certain bushiness with subsides, lenient tax laws, or any other number of things. This problem is solvable in the current government structure. I agree that the current government structure moves very slowly, but that are also real problem in a government that moves too swiftly.
My point is what inherent flaws in representative democracy prevent any of the problems that you want to fix to be fixed. After you point out those inherent flaws in representative democracy i would really like you to point out the inherent flaws in anarcho capitalism. If you cannot point out the inherent flaws with anarcho capitalism then i will assume you are biased towards that system because no system is perfect. This is not a red herring but one of the most effective ways for people to make good decisions by comparing relative strengths and weaknesses.
As an aside large corporate power is not an inherent flaw with democracy, but rather a flaw with capitalism. When i see that a company like monsanto has cornered the farm market and it has received subsides from the government i see a company so strong that it gets to tell government what to do and not the other way around. The 2 big American bailouts showed me how weak the government is in the face of large multinational corporate interests.
Most of the property in my mercury example would not be privatized unless you advocate the privatization of lakes, rivers, aquifers, and oceans.
If all the water is privately owned, and I don't own that water, there is nothing stopping the water owners from charging whatever they want for it. I don't have the option of forgoing that service, nor can I just make my own water. And what happens if the water owners simply decide that they don't want me to have any? Then the idea of being the "aggressor" becomes far more gray; am I being the "aggressor" for stealing water or fighting for it, or are the owners being the "aggressor" for denying my access to something I need to survive?
And we can't assume that some enterprising water owner will see a niche and decide to sell his or her water at a low price. It's far more profitable for him or her to collaborate with the other suppliers to maintain the monopoly. This is ignoring the fact that the cheaper water supply might be across the continent and I can't reach it. I may live in some low population town in the middle of nowhere, where the cost of doing business just isn't feasible.
This isn't some theoretical scenario. We have very real examples of this happening with food supplies and many places in the world already have water supply issues.