Hello, in another thread I proved that anarchy promotes competition for the ability to coerce; since anarchy promotes the abolishment of government, and government is a monopoly on the use of coercion. That thread had gotten off topic, and is now all but dead. I posed a question that I would like to discuss further here.
Am I correct that the Austrian School advocates free-market capitalism? Is it not true that under a system of free-market capitalism, a natural monopoly can emerge where a business is offering the best product for best price in a market, and therefore has no competition? If the product that this business is selling is the ability to coerce, then by default it becomes government. Do anarchists ignore the possibility that under a system of anarchy, one business could eventually emerge as gaining the monopoly on the power to coerce, and therefore become government by default? Would you necessarily be against this government, and if so what makes the market for the ability to coerce so unique that capitalism would then be declared a failure in this market?
It is possible that one company may offer better security services for a better price (there is no “competition for the ability to coerce” - I don’t know where you got that idea). However, they can never become government becuase other companies will always be allowed to compete. If that dominant company’s services start to get sloppy another company may enter the market to compete. As such this company would never become a government, the best they can do is to become the security company that provides the best services.
(I think that you are confused regarding the “competition for the ability to coerce”. The whole point of market anarchism is that no one has the legal right to coerce. That is what anarchist sees as wrong with governments - they can ‘legitimately’ coerce. Anarchists say that services now provided by government can be provided on the market without coercion.)
No it is not true. There’s no such thing as natural monopolies, and competition means that anybody is free to enter the market, not that there’s more than one provider of a service or good.
What seems to be true is that you’re usign a wrong defintion for competition.
If a producer is literally so good at providing something that 100% of consumers will buy from him and nobody else, that is not a failure of the market process. Rather, it is an astonishingly good producer.
What do you mean by “the power to coerce?” Do you mean the power to keep the riff-raff out and the lights on and the water running? Lots of people will pay good money for that and there will always be plenty of competition for producers in this area.
No. You asserted it. Proving involves more than assertion. I’m not sure what kind of person thinks one needs to institute a goddamn monopoly of force in order to avoid their belief of supposed monopolies arising under market anarchism, which hints to me that they’re not even familiar with Austrian monopoly and competition theory.
You’re joking, right? By what logic does it follow from “libertarians are by definition opposed to coercion” and “the state is a monopoly of coercion” to “libertarians support competition in coercion”? Aggession is not some product to be traded, it is the violation of another’s property rights. There’s a word for competing to coerce, it’s called imperialism, and I assure you libertarians are very, very opposed to it.
Your premises are false and your logic is unsound. Either end your buffoonery or leave this forum.
you have it all backwards. As mitcjm and Solomon point out “anarchists” promote the abolishment of the use of coercion and thus the government because it is nothing but coercion.
Two, when you say;
well, what do you think the main part of the History of Civilization is, if not the chronicles of few individuals either purchasing or commanding the ability to coerce other people and thus imposing upon them a particular form of governance?
This has got nothing to do with monopolies arising in free markets; simply by definition of terms!
I could be wrong but I dont believe monopolies could ever exist in an anarchist society because they would lack economic calculation much like a socialist society.
What anarchists seek to replace is not government coercion with private coercion, but government-provided justice and law-enforcement. We do not seek competition in coercion, but competition in law and arbitration. It is this difference that is confusing you.
How about you respond to the people who answered you the first time you asked that, instead of starting a new thread? If you’re just going to copy and paste your question, I’m going to copy and paste my response. You don’t get off the hook that easily.
Not picking on you macsnafu, but you basically summarized what I have been hearing from the anarchists here. So the anarchists claim that in the absense of goverenment, there will be competition in law and arbitration. The question then becomes how is this law and arbitration enforced? The answer obviously comes down to coercion. Therefore “competition in law and arbitration” is coercion.
Sasquatch: How do you arrive at the conclusion of “competition in coercion”?
Does justice and abritation requires some amount of coercion? I am pretty sure that policemen showing their machine guns off as a deterent to theives is not coercion.
No problem, I expect someone to try and pick apart the argument. Basically, though, you need to break down what law is and what justice is, and apply libertarian principles. The basic libertarian principle is the non-aggression principle (the NAP). It says that it’s wrong to intiate force or fraud. However, if someone initiates force or fraud, one is justified in using force to defend oneself. Retaliatory force is justified only to the extent that it is restitutive, that it restores the victim as much as possible to the condition they were in before the crime was committed. Restitution is also the primary concept of libertarian justice.
So when you talk about ‘coercion’, are you talking about all types of force, or just the initiation of force? Libertarians usually mean the latter, not the former. Thus, defense and the provision of justice are not coercion, merely force under certain circumstances. What an anarchist libertarian expects from private law enforcement is not someone to initiate force, but to provide defense and a means for restitution. If you want someone to initiate force, you go hire a criminal goon or gang, not a PDA.
Furthermore, there are other aspects of law that may or may not involve force. A violation of a contract, for example, may call for certain penalties, but not for the use of force. The ultimate threat of contract violation can be nothing more than ending the contract, since a contract must always be mutually agreed-upon.
That is theoretically possible, in the same way that it is theoretically possible for a tornado to rip through a junkyard and accidentally assemble a working lawnmower. But in reality, it is extremely unrealistic to expect a monopoly to provide a quality product at a low price. A monopoly, whether “natural” or political, suffers from the same calculation problem as a socialist commonwealth.
That would be the definition of a “monopoly”, yep. But because a free market, by definition, entails unlimited competition, such a thing cannot exist in a free market. It is true that a single company can gain a lot of control in a particular area, for a while. But their peers in other areas will always be in competition with them, and if they ever begin to act like a monopoly (which, if they get big enough, they will because of the calculation problem), they will also have to deal with innumerable smaller, more efficient firms popping up in their own “territory”.
You keep making assertions, but haven’t yet bothered to prove one of them.
A person, having become an anarchist, will have already considered this problem and realized that it’s not at all likely.
First, your ideas about natural monopolies are erroneous, as I explained above. Second, would a people, after living in a society in which they are able to choose the most efficient, polite, inexpensive, and unobtrusive protectors from a roster of - who knows, hundreds? - faced with a company who would abolish such free choice and establish a compulsory monopoly, just throw up their hands and say “well golly gee damn, I guess we’re slaves again. Pity.”
No, such an institution would be fought bitterly. And since in such a society there would be no restrictions on private arms ownership, it wouldn’t last long.
Will they tax, regulate, pass laws against non-aggressive activities, and/or forbid people from opting out of their “service”? If so, you’re damn right I would.
Because it wouldn’t be “capitalism” (as you call it) that would bring about such a situation. It would happen through a widespread, simultaneous, successful violation of everyone’s rights - by definintion, the opposite of a market process. And such a successful violation in a completely free market, in the absence of a political apparatus already in existence, is pretty much an economic impossiblity.