Since trying to enforce a territorial monopoly would count as threatening or using initiatory physical force, why pray tell would we still have a single over-arching government with integrated executive, legislative and judicial functions operating in a given territory with no competitors? I just don’t see how we’d have the “exact same government” we have now just without the initiation of force. If it doesn’t act like a territorial monopolist it is hard to see why any government would remain structured like states are today for very long.
I don’t think he’s useing Hoppe’s definition.
It’s perfectly possible for a group of volunteers to form a community barely distinguishable from the current system. Eminent domian can be set up on a voluntarist basis by everyone binding their property with a covenant allowing it to be confiscated at a price to be determined by the confiscator. Arrest warrants, similarly, by granting full access to one’s property to anyone having a signed warrant. Taxation? Simple: create a contractual liability for whatever fraction of one’s pay is demanded, and contractually bind employers not to employ anyone who violates the agreement. And so on. You can recreate virtually every aspect of the current system on a purely voluntarist basis.
Ego is arguing that a “free” society will probably preserve conventions and institutions resembling what we have now, but created voluntarily. All I can say is, “Man oh man I hope not!”
–Len
It’s pretty much the standard definition of the state since at least Max Weber.
This may in principle be possible and it may even occur in some places on a small scale but I don’t see it happening over large territories with large populations.
Same here. Even restrictive covenant communities make me leery and queazy. I think this sort of all-inclusive voluntary (at least at first!) government is undesireable from a libertarian standpoint for a number of reasons, one of them being the argument I have made elsewhere that it is illegitimate, due to the inalienability of the right to liberty, to grant any person or organization the right of arbitrary dominion over yourself, another being what seems to me a likely tendency for voluntary (at least at first!) governments structured like that to develop into states over the course of generations. A polycentric legal order would be far more preferrable from a libertarian standpoint. We should oppose excessive centralization of such important services as law and security, not to speak of others that states tend inevitably to take on.
Yeah, but you could consider it a typo in Ego’s post. He means that an anarchist society could look “exactly” like what we have now, and it pretty much could. But once again, with every fiber of my being I hope not.
–Len
You’re making the leftist mistake of treating the “state” as if it’s some magical entity. Any group of individuals, including private defense companies, can turn “help” into “force”, etc. Nothing changes just because you call a particular organization the “state”.
What’s your point…? When people think of anarchy, they think of spray-painted "A"s, leftist thugs dressed in black lighting things on fire, and stupid pretentious college students chanting useless anti-war, anti-capitalist slogans.
You don’t have to put anything on crutches, just try to avoid words that the left has given a horrible connotation.
Absolutely! I would never lie to anyone.
Why do you insist on saying there isn’t a state? How does that help your argument? It might help with some 22 year-olds who think being a rebel is cool, but it wouldn’t help with anyone else. There’s nothing wrong with a state as long as it doesn’t violate anyone’s rights.
I average 2 burglaries and one act of vandalism (graffiti or broken windows) a year, with state protection - and I live in a relatively low-crime city. Personally, I’d prefer to do without the state in this case - they’re remarkably less effective than a head on a spike would be, decoratin’ my property. What I’m wondering is whether I’d be in the wrong for overreacting to a property crime, and how I would, in a practical fashion, prevent their heirs and assigns from comin’ over to escalate the dispute into a traditional clan feud. If the levels of force were fairly level, the noise alone would be disturbing to my neighbors. The third one I shoot, comin’ to my place to avenge the one prior, I’d be sorely tempted to make a preemptive strike - would I be in the wrong for doing so? Would I be in the wrong for shooting the 12-yo kid with the spray can who I catch decorating my garage?
It could get downright noisy. Who decides what’s inappropriate for my response to minor aggression? Arbitration? Can I know, in advance, what the decision would be? Law is so handy for such things…
The electric company that has lines to my neighborhood is still a monopoly - they’re the only ones allowed to run power lines. To be blunt, I’m not that sure I’d prefer to live in a city with 4 or 5 different power grids available - it’d be unsightly, and economies of scale would probably raise the cost to the consumer anyway. The same goes for cable hookup - only one allowed in any area, to keep the lines to a minimum - and probably better that way, as long as there’s a mechanism to keep monopoly pricing out of the juncture. (Come to think of it, they’re really not a monopoly - I could get a generator for the electric, buy a tank and LP rather than natural gas, etc - there are alternatives, but they’re quite expensive and far less efficient.)
By an atypical physical restriction on this commodity, only one entity can own the street that goes past my house - and it’d be a remarkable inconvenience to me if a different one owned the alley that goes past the back of my house. Unless the neighbors to the north or south of me convert their dwellings into thoroughfares, those are the only two possible routes. As they are the only two roads with access to my house, they’re a monopoly to me. When economists talk about the difficulty in being a monopoly because there can be other sources, well - there can be other sources. Absent a multi-level structure, with other companies allowed to build alternate roads above or below the level of existing structures, roads will have to be monopolies - at least, locally. When we achieve personal transit by air, without roads, it’ll be less of an issue - but so far, we haven’t. Most economists acknowledge roads as being a special case.
Not so much different - I could move to, say, Montana, if they had great roads, and roads were that important to me. Nor do I see that much correlation between road quality and traffic fatality.
When the local roads provider is bad enough, I can move elsewhere. When the local government gets bad enough, I can do the same. For USAians, so far, when federal government is vile enough, one can expatriate. I’m not seeing much difference here. Not that I wouldn’t happily do without 98% of government “services” - but that other 2% is hard to do without, in any kind of society.
To my understanding, the electric companies were doing just fine, and didn’t much like the government competition (TVA), but the Federal government insisted on getting involved, over the existing utilities’ protests. There was no government-sponsored level of monopoly - just the recognition that it was a better decision to build plant/grid where there wasn’t any competitor yet. At least until 1940, nobody was asking for government protection: there were still parts of the country that didn’t have electric service yet. (This from Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, which I highly recommend.)
I’ll need no instruction on market failure, but thanks - while I’m not an expert, I’ve studied enough to know that the market cannot fail unless it’s interfered with externally. I have traveled on a privately-owned, public-access road - the guy with property on both sides of the stream built a bridge, about midway between the two “public” bridges, and charged a toll - reasonable enough in price to make it an easy decision to use it. This was 30 years ago, though - he’s probably been regulated out of business.
However, roads exist on a 2-dimensional plane, and cannot easily overlap, or compete - which makes them different from most markets - I’d be tempted to call the situation unique, but there’s probably another example of a supply/demand where There Can Be Only One.
Politicians who buy votes with cash alone are rarely successful - there’s an awful lot of votes, and few will sell their votes for less than a pack of cigarettes. Giving concessions to the unions is less personally expensive, and the union mindset can be remarkably sheeplike. But a DOT commissioner, with lousy roads on the day of elections, is unlikely to remain in office, and they know that, so it’s competition of a sort that’d be unavailable with private ownership of the roads.
As I acknowledged, roads are an exception to most market rules - but they’re an exception that most people need to deal with on a daily basis, and a free market there won’t reflect usual market forces and options. This will need to be addressed before I’m going to be convinced that government has no use at all.
I’ve seen, on another thread, a huge list of books dealing specifically with roads from the libertarian standpoint - I expect that there are convincing ones from the anarchist standpoint, as well. I’ll get to looking at further evidence, but I’m not that hopeful that it’ll work out convincingly. Murphy’s contention in Chaos Theory that non-relevant clauses in voluntary contracts would cover aggression that’s not usually contracted about was plausible, but not convincing - the available contracts themselves would be part of competition, and simpler is usually preferred by the customer.
Danno, the doubtful.
I’m curious, why do people who worry about natural monopolies (let’s say, arguendo, one was the case) evoke government as the solution? Why not a firm owned by the individuals in a given community, for instance? I really don’t see how this lends any support to the idea of a minimal government. Governments do not handle anything well, why expect them to handle a supposed monopoly well? Why this persevering addiction to forcing others to pay for what one desires?
-Jon
See Rothbard on validity of contract.
The reason why some of us object to what you’re saying is that, as we understand it, a state violates rights by definition. We’re anarchists, implying that we oppose the state as an institution, so it makes no sense to say “the state can be good” if only it ceases to have the very traits that would make it a state or if only the right people were in control of it. In my understanding, in order for a state to form and sustain itself, people’s rights must be violated. If you took away the key features of territorial monopolism and coerced payment, the institution would cease to be a “state” in any sensible definition of the word and have no more legitimacy or meaning than a local country club. Why would you continue to call such an institution a “state”, and why would a self proclaimed anarchist propose that they support “states” based on some criteria for legitimacy when anarchists are supposed to reject the legitimacy of states?
Your position seems to mirror that of the objectivists who think that if only you took away taxation you can have a legitimate state that can go invade Iran or Venezuela.
No, not all individuals think of anarchy as what you say it is; if this were true, how would there be a debate in the first place if everyone thought anarchy as such? Argue all you want on that point, but each individual has a different set of perceptions on anarchy, assuming of course an individual knows the word anarchy at all (not the meaning, the word itself; some of my family members have not actually heard the word used before; something I actually find odd & interesting…). You are treating as if everyone who is not involved in this debate automatically has a certain view of something, and it is not logical at all.
I will not avoid words that drive towards consistiency; I do not find your words of “a government that doesn’t use force or coercion is fine” as consistient, because the government, or state, or what makes up the government, the various agencies, the 3 branches thereof, etc. etc. since you were obviously confused by my “abstraction” of calling it The State, which oddly enough, again, anyone, not just leftists, can make. There is a difference between shorthand & abstraction.
I’m sorry if I do not feel like typing paragraphs to fully explain a shorthand phrase that is thrown around here in context quite a bit for the sake of wordiness. I’m sure it would be an abstraction if I could not explain the state consists of (again, 3 branches of government, congress, the various federal& state beuracracies, the FED, corporations in bed the government, etc. etc. etc.) at all, and just stared blankly at you. I suppose from now on I’ll just say ‘government’ as I’m tiring of your automatic use of “leftist” on things you don’t agree with. In other news, those damn leftist kids just won’t stop walking by my house every few hours when they need to get to their car !
Additionally, my point in googling such is that your arrogant generalizing of what everyone else seems to view of anarchy falls apart on the invdividual level (those 22 year olds that you refer to included), and I did not find any source nor site advocating that exact term as being “anarchy”.
As for PDA’s, other’s have addressed this better than I:
(even though this addresses the Objectivist view of minarchism, it still addresses minarchism):
"Objectivists advocate something a bit different than what most libertarian minarchists support. They oppose taxation and advocate what may be called “subscribed government” or voluntary donations to the government. But if this is the case it ceases to be a state can may as well be called a “private protection agency”. For if it is truly patronized just like a buisiness, then it has market prices, and instead of saying “donations” we may as well call it “investment”. However, if this institution still maintains a coercive monopoly by initiating force or threatening to do so in order to stop people from forming or patronizing any other protection agency within the territory, then it is not truly voluntary either and it still is a state. So even if taxation were abolished, states would still be involuntary if they still tried to maintain a coercive territorial monopoly. This is the underlying problem in the ideal of the Objectivist state (despite the fact that they eliminate taxation from the picture). " ~ BP
"What guarantees that private entrepreneurs under Market Anarchism will not behave in tyrannical and abusive ways? The answer, of course, is that nothing “guarantees” it, just as nothing “guarantees” that governmental politicians will not behave likewise. But under which system is such behaviour most likely to be restrained? The superiority of anarchy over government here lies in the fact that under government the tie between the decision to commit aggression and the cost of that aggression is far weaker than under Market Anarchism. Under a governmental system, the cost of state policies leading to war is borne by taxpayers and conscripts, not by the politicians who crafted those policies. Under Market Anarchism, by contrast, agencies who resolve disputes through violence rather than arbitration will have to charge higher premiums and will thus lose customers. A government can’t lose “customers” (taxpayers) unless they take the drastic step of moving to a new country; by contrast, switching protection agencies would be as easy as switching long distance service. " ~ Roderick T. Long
In some cases, anything but a monopoly is by definition immoral. What you support competition for natural rights?
Do you believe that monopoly naturally results from a free market? I certainly don’t. I think that competition is the only thing that can possibly function as a check and balance against monopoly. Competition and monopoly are diametrically opposed in my understanding. So what do you mean when you imply that anything but a monopoly can be immoral by definition? Competition is immoral? Plurality is immoral? Polycentricity is immoral? How so?
I meant that the concept of a “monopoly” isn’t what’s evil; what’s evil is the violation of rights that generally props up the monopoly. That’s all I meant.
Essentially, there needs to be a “default” legal system that respects natural rights. There can be infinite competing legal systems in which consenting parties can try their cases, of course!
That choice would have to be consensual, though.
I’ve yet to see or hear of a monopoly that isn’t propped up through violations of rights, particularly by coercive restrictions on competition. So to me the very nature of a monopoly is immoral. Centralization is a bad thing as a matter of principle. The entire point of a free market is to avoid having a central authority determining things and instead allow a spontaneous order to emerge as a consequence of free association and competition.
Is it wrong to coercively restrict theft or murder?
I consider myself to have a monopoly on my will - nobody else can control it unless I give that control to them freely, of my own will. Not all monopolies are about the marketplace.
Would that default legal system need to have 100% voluntary agreement to be valid? In any random collection of 100 people or more, you’re not going to get that level of agreement. If the majority can enforce it upon the unwilling minority, we may have problems.
I don’t wanna leave - I was born here. I don’t agree with your laws. You have problems. Sorry.
Danno
Theft and murder does not equal competition. Bad attempt at an analogy. If you think that it is legitimate for an institution to outlaw their competitors, then your position is closer to that of the objectivists than market anarchists and you support a key feature of all states throughout history - the coercive territorial monopoly.
Furthermore, to make the argument you seem to be wanting to make, you have to bludgeon the meaning of coercion beyond repair. Bringing a thief or murderer to justice does not constitute “coercion”.
Why do you think I want to outlaw anything? I specifically said that there can be infinite competiting legal systems; one must be the default legal system, though, just like there must be a default currency (for repaying damages).
What do you mean by a “default legal system” and a “default currency”? Market anarchists oppose a monopoly on the provision of law and a monopoly on money. Different legal systems and currencies must freely compete, otherwise this isn’t market anarchism. If a “default” or nearly universal standard happens to emerge out of free competition, that’s fine and dandy. But it cannot be some kind of imposed and over-arching thing preceding competition, for that would just be statism all over again. You can’t set up some preceding “rules of the game” that restricts the experimentation of competition in order to preserve or enforce a one-size-fits-all standard. It simply wouldn’t be a free market.
By “default legal system” and “default currency”, I mean both parties are forced to fall back upon those in the case that neither can agree upon something else.