Neither is a PDA obliged to provide restitution; as long as they are better armed than anyone else, they can dictate the terms of their service. There is nothing stopping a powerful PDA from saying: “I’m sorry you house was broken into, but I don’t give a damn.”
That’s an extremely naive answer - that contract has about has much teeth as the government saying that they will prevent your house from being broken into. In reality, it is absolutely not as simple as a contract.
Not to mention the fact the PDA of Bernie Madoff will be outright superior compared to anything that will challenge it from his clients.
Indeed, its the rule of the individuals who can protect their crimes with the most guns.
The PDA has incentives to provide restitution or it will lose business to competing PDAs. Government cannot lose its business and therefore has zero incentives.
The contract has teeth because the PDA will lose business from me and from others as its reputation becomes tarnished. Again, government cannot lose its business. In this way are the PDA contracts teethed [8o|]
Set up the situation as badly as you want. The introduction of a monopoly power will not help the situation.
If you’re so smart at predicting how it all won’t work out, you’d make a smashing CEO for a PDA that could solve these problems.
Except the incentive not to do so. Reputation is everything. I wonder how the PR arm of the firm is going to handle the old lady who: goes to the A Current Affairs programs / news services / consumer groups / rival companies & blogs about it on the internet in an effort to make them pay. How will the share holders feel about that? How will the current customers feel about it?
I’m also sure there would be incentives for intermediaries that help customers choose insurance policies & providers, to keep the pda’s in check. Wouldn’t they also benefit from a sudden exodus of customers leaving a pda provider because of actions mentioned above? You don’t think the market is capable of regulating itself?
I mean this is so ridiculous. This example is where 1 party has a de facto monopoly on force. That’s what a government is called, and explicitly what we’re advocating against.
The best you can possibly do is point to this as an example of how government is inevitable. There’s already an active thread for that.
Wrong, one can select a contract with a PDA where it is obliged to provide restitution. We do it all of the time with insurance agencies. The contract with the state (social contract) does not include restitution at all. It is an unenforceable contract from the citizen’s [sic] perspective.
Are you arguing for natural monopoly as synonymous with state monopoly?
Sure there is. Competition. The same reason why Israel and the US have not attacked Iran yet. The same reason why the Russians and Americans never engaged in head on conflict.
Lam, you can attack the idea of PDAs. That’s fine. But what remains is that you can’t make the case for the state.
In all discussions concerning “market failure”, negative proof is not a victory condition.
As an aside, people who have a statist mindset, can’t think beyond the zero sum game of violence. And this is really the real hold back to advancements in libertarian thinking. The lack of creativity when it comes to dispute resolution. We’re rapidly approaching the age where individuals are going to have personal weapons of mass destruction. Violence will be moot, because the power to destroy will be pervasive, and so dispute resolution that doesn’t go to violence (and mutually assured destruction) will have to based around something more than just a flexing of muscles and punches in the nose.
Folks trapped in mid 20th century cold war thinking, can’t even begin to imagine the way dispute resolution will be handled in 50 or 100 years. But I feel somewhat confident that we won’t see a repeat because technology has moved us futher from casual violence by leveling the playing field for the 98 pound intellectuals.
What’s quite interesting is how you’re saying that the market is superior a priori out of one side of your mouth whilst saying that we need to look at recent and future developments to see how the market might handle the production of security out of the other.
I mean, you make comments such as “people who have a statist mindset, can’t think beyond the zero sum game of violence”, which just aren’t true. Almost all economists out there are wont to admit that the market isn’t a zero sum game and that whilst the market will usually be a positive sum game, politics has the ability to reserve that.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter how creative ones approach to conflict resolution is, if the incentives aren’t correct. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that the incentives under anarcho capitalism will never be correct. My point is just that there’s a lot of literature on these subjects and I don’t think people here have addressed it.
Actually he doesn’t say we have to look at future developments of the market. He simply points them out in an attempt to convince you empirically since you seem unphased by a priori arguments.
Isn’t this basically what you and PT do when you assume a monolithic PDA will ruin things on the free market?
There’s a lot of anti-anarchy literature, from Hobbes and Rush Limbaugh to the writings of Mises. Maybe you should specify and construct whatever arguments you are referring to so that we can finally claim we’ve addressed them.