The Government doesn’t have an answer for a meteor either, so what’s the fuss?
If a Government has need for meteor defense they will turn to the private sector for a solution. But then they’ll waste a lot of time and money trying to tell the private sector how or what the solution should be.
Should there be sufficient time for a technical solution, which there probably wouldn’t be, odds are the Government would screw it up. The state has a nifty way of doing that.
When speaking of the long term investment to create a technical solution to a problem, not everyone is required to pay. Just because not everyone pays doesn’t mean no one pays. There would be a market for meteor defense, just as there would be for foreign state or criminal defense, if there wasn’t a monopoly in place for such services. Insurance would be available, and probably would be at a very reasonable premium in the case of meteor defense.
Note: Blasting a meteor to bits could still create a debris field. The meteor defense would cover the technology to eliminate the larger threat of an extinction level event plus damages caused by all of the bits and pieces destroying property at the local level. Fools who wouldn’t pay the small premium would still live, but lose their property.
Have you forgotten the last thread you made talking on the meteor scenario where I completely picked it apart? Now you are back again saying the exact same thing and saying that “we” don’t have any answers. “We” don’t have a problem with the answers. You do.
How has David Friedman failed you? I don’t understand.
I think it’s incredibly pessimistic to claim that humans won’t act cooperatively to save ourselves from a preventable disaster (e.g., meteorite, global warming, etc.). The “free rider” problem, while true insofar as humans can be simplified as self-interested rational agents, doesn’t adequately capture the full details (e.g., social norms, moral values, etc.). One person might “free ride,” but many others might feel the pangs of conscience.
Furthermore, The Myth of National Defense is a book you need to read (although, I’ve always liked Rothbard’s succint criticism: if there is no nation with no central command, what exactly will a foreign aggressor take over?). But, principally, a private alternative to “national defense” would, prima facie, be superior: consider how our monopolistic agency externalizes costs, commits domestic transgressions of liberty, aggresses against foreign nations, etc.
On the issue of public goods, you and I will agree that this is an economic and philosophic problem that needs to be carefully investigated and worked through; however, you’re dealing with Austrians here, too, and they don’t even believe in public goods! But, to answer your concerns: democratic politics introduces many more public-good problems, and that should help you sleep at night (for instance, informed voting is a public good, hence it is underproduced). David Friedman’s textbook Price Theory: an Intermediate Text explores public goods very well.
On the other hand, if there are 100 people left who can contribute, he might think “hmm well I’ll just leave it up to them and save my $1”.
If EVERYONE thinks this way, then the public good fails to be provided.
Hmm, in my opinion I already dealt with these: you are falsely assuming that people will think deterministically, rather than probabilistically. The first guy won’t think the way you suggest, he will instead say “if I choose not to pay the dollar, there must be some probability that no one else will pay the dollar (because I have made that choice and I assume that other people are more or less like me, not only a relatively rational assumption but more than that one that has been bred into us by natural selection), so my expected value in that case is some probability that nothing happens, and another probability that I and everyone I care about dies; if I choose to pay the dollar, I know for a fact I am out a dollar and I and everyone I know lives.” The calculation is trivial, since almost any nonzero probability that no one else will pay the dollar makes the expected value of the second option far better than that of the first.
And again, the problem gets even better if you consider it a process. Each person is not making a single binary decision; they are making a series of binary decisions, one at each moment in time. Part of this scenario must be a stipulation that the money has to be found by a certain time, enough time to build whatever it is that will save us from the meteor. With a year to go before that deadline, people will naturally calculate the odds that others will pay for the public good higher. As time goes on, however, and the deadline approaches, the probability that others will pay for it without you kicking in goes in, and eventually crosses the line where the expected value of “contribute” is higher than that of “freeload”. In this particular case, sure, if there’s still a year to go the dude might not pitch in his dollar hoping that someone else will, but if it’s gone a year and there’s now 5 minutes to go and it still hasn’t been paid for it, he is much more likely to do so.
Probability, and process. If you ignore these, you are artificially constraining the problem in a way that the resultant answer doesn’t offer much insight.
[All that said: I still like the idea of thinking about more proactive ways to “solve” the problem ala your probabilistic contract. It’s promising. I just don’t think you should try to justify it in terms of an artificially setup problem that falsely suggests that the magnitude of the problem is larger than it really is.]
Right if everyone didn’t think this way, the public good could be provided. But it is in the rational, narrow self interest of people to try to free ride.
@KC Farmer
The government can solve this problem because it entirely bears the costs and benefits of the “public good”. I.e. it becomes a “private” good for them.
@Kaley
No, all you guys did was say “maybe national defense is not a pure public good”, to which i replied “I don’t care. I’m considering the case of pure public goods”. There was also some nonsense about charity, which is all well and good, but does not concern me.
DDF “failed me” because I had been in the habit of relying on him for strong arguments for anarchism.
Again, charity is extra-topical for me. I’ll argue the charity case when I get desperate.
I’ve read Hoppe and Rothbard on large scale defense. They make a lot of good points, but really just gloss over the free rider problem.
I agree that good government is itself a public good in a democracy. Its kind of funny - there aren’t any reasons why people would all of the sudden vote for public goods in an election when they wouldn’t sign a dominant assurance contract in the market…
Regardless, an established monarch would have no problem providing some public goods. He might not provide any aesthetic public goods, but would certainly defend the country as his private property. Whatever he does with his citizens, or livestock, he will not let them be slaughtered.
I’ve heard DDF talk about public goods, and he essentially argues that some aspect of them can be made private (lighthouses bundled with port fees), provided alongside goods with negative cost of production (radio, advertisments) etc. But a really pure public good is never taken head on. I had searched desperately for one of these rock and roll anarchists who smash on every other issue to deliver some crucial insight into this problem, but no luck.
Being familiar with the cases for charity/emotion/dominant assurance contracts, I tried to take a stab at a unique solution on a previous thread.
@Alternatives Considered
People weigh probabilities to make determinsitic decisions. But it is exactly the changing probability of outcomes that I try to use to get people to sign my contract.
Its true that as the benefit of the public good increases you can produce it more easily.
It may be true that he is more likely to do so, but he still might take the option of being a free rider. The “wait till the last minute” game is basically a test of who has the most guts. Additionally, the “last possible second” might not be the most efficient thing to do, so even if we can provide the public good in this way the statists can still turn around and accuse us of being inefficient. So my contract idea is an attempt to accelerate the final decision for who gets to be a free rider to t=0, so whoever provides the public good can do it under certain economic conditions with as much time as possible.
The government has not solved the problem of meteor defense.
When you say that government bears the cost, don’t you really mean the taxpayers. These are individuals who are compelled to pay for something they might not even want. The government will then contract a company or several companies to come up with a solution. The cost of a solution will be bloated based on government incompetence, and passed on to the taxpayer. The government will utilize their typical political B.S., and the solution that may have worked may not work at all. The cost of this so called “public good” will be much higher, and the solution will be less efficient than any voluntarily funded, private venture.
Makes you wonder whether there really is such a thing as a “public good”.
If there is a “free rider” problem which applies to those scenaries, how did our conscience develop to nevertheless overcome it? If there is a free rider problem, it should apply not only to “economic activity”, but also to how we evolved, unless it has a specific limitation.
You obviously forgot 100% and need to reread that thread. In any case, there is no “we” about having problems solving it. The meteor scenario is simply bogus. The sooner Friedman fanatics accept that and get over it the sooner something worthwhile can be discussed.
No, I’m not arguing that “what if people are stupid”. I’m arguing that if everyone acts in their own narrow self interest, they will all try to go for the free rider position. Get the benefit of the public good without paying. If they all try to free ride, or “think like this”, the public good will fail to be provided. As I said before, it is rational to try and free ride.
Why not? They’d just build a giant laser with all their stolen loot.
Yes yes of course, but this is assuming the private sector could raise the capital to fund it at all.
Because its the worst case scenario. If everyone is narrowly self interested this will happen. As others have pointed out, charity or emotion might spur them to defend the earth, but I’d prefer not to rely on this argument because it is circumstantial.
Looking back on it, you just kind of say that people will ignore the free rider option because they want the benefits of the public good. But even if they can profit from providing it, a priori they can profit even more by free riding if the good would be provided anyway.
Exactly. The individual nature of markets is what makes large scale non-excludable goods so difficult.
Really? You haven’t explained why. I have a public goods problem with my friends all the time. We could do our homework early so no one has to scramble at the last minute, except everyone wants to free ride off everyone else’s homework, so I wait untill its almost too late, do the homework, and usually one or two of them will free ride off what I’ve done. The only reason the public good gets provided is because it is partially private, and its provision is not the most efficient solution (although you can argue that it is since our communication costs are prohibitive, which is another argument against markets providing public goods).
After taking a long, circuitous journey through the labyrinths of libertarian ideas, I not only agree with Friedman here, I would state it more strongly. We should not wish to abolish government outright, even though government is an obvious evil. That is, it is immoral to attempt to overthrow government outright. I just watched the original Wall Street movie (saw it before seeing Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps) and it is filled with many insightful quotes. One of the most insightful is when Bud Fox confronts Gordon Gekko.
Bud Fox: Why do you need to wreck this company?
Bud Fox: Why do you need to wreck this company?
Gordon Gekko: Because it’s WRECKABLE, all right?
Governments exist because people are governable. Now, this is entirely different than saying we ought not to explain all the reasons that humanity - individually and collectively - would be much better off without any government at all, even for national defense. As Henry Thoreau says at the beginning of Civil Disobedience, “‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.” [Emphasis added]
Also, I think that human social relationships in the small are sufficiently fuzzy that we can’t always clearly delineate between coercion and cooperation. You can apply an acidic individualism to derive a pretty sharp definition but even that breaks down if we zoom into the level of a parent caring for a child (I hardly think that bodily taking a sick child who expresses verbal disagreement to the doctor against his or her wishes counts as coercion). You can start applying customary arguments to circumvent this but then you’ve just cracked the door open to rationalizations for coercion in special circumstances and you’ve moved the standard of definition of coercion away from rationalistic individualism (ala Rothbard) to something more fuzzy, i.e. having to take into account all the tangled complexities and quirks of human nature.
As much as our hidden rulers would like to apply this sort of reasoning to the type of coercion practiced by their thugs in the IRS, Federal Reserve and the Pentagon, it clearly doesn’t apply. So, scale matters and would likely matter more in a natural order law society than it does in our modern, statist law society.
Are you familiar with de Jasay’s work on public goods? He has written atleast four books that deal with the issue. BTW, Bryan Caplan argues that national defense doesn’t really fit the definition of a public good. The argument can be found here.
Very interesting post. Althought I do agree that a gradual, piecemeal approach to dismantling government is more practical because people would be more ready to accept it than a sudden abolotion, there are pitfalls to that approach.
First, Rothbard’s invocation of Garrison’s view that (paraphrasing) “We don’t expect slavery to be abolished tomorrow, but that it ought to we shall always contend.” I do think we need to be “extremists” because that is the kind of passion and clarity of message that will be required actually accomplish a meaningful reduction in government exploitation. It’s hard for me to believe that we could ever be at risk of having “too little” government.
More importantly, though, although I do agree there are some functions of government that are pretty innocuous in the big scheme of things, it seems to me that the events of the 20th century have proved that it’s too potentially dangerous of a tool to keep alive. The U.S. Government of the early 19th century seemed fairly innocuous, but it was able to steadily grow over the years into the most exploitative orgainzation in the world. Like Freddy Krueger, I don’t think we can rest easy until it’s dead dead DEAD, because we’ve seen small governments grow into big governments, and we’ve seen what big governments are capable of. I think if we’re ever in the position to deliver the coup-de-grace and hammer the nails into government’s coffin and we fail to do so, we are doing our descendents a disservice. If we fail to relegate government to the ash heap of history, joining slavery, divine right of kings, prohibitions on women owning land, and hopefully soon, war, we or our children will eventually come to regret not doing so.
I don’t expect to see any of this happen in my lifetime, but I don’t see the value in taking a lukewarm approach or showing mercy to any government institution if we were ever in such a position. I (speaking for myself) would even accept some temporary economic dislocation if that’s the price it would take to get that accomplished.
@Mises Pieces: While I’m at it, let me bend your brain a little further. The most famous quote from Wall Street always gets truncated in popular media to “Greed… is good” (until I watched the movie, that’s the only thing I knew about it, is that Gordon Gekko thinks greed is good). Turns out, he’s making a much more subtle point:
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind. And greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.
What Gekko is describing is human action. He’s calling it “greed” but what he’s really talking about is the calculated application of means to achieve ends which are valued by an individual (maybe Oliver Stone would never put it in that Misesean language, but I think that’s what he was using “greed” to denote). If we take this idea seriously, then the fastest route to the destruction of the State is the unedited evolutionary process itself. The Machiavellians are their own antidote.
Let me throw in one last thought that has been fermenting in the recesses of my brain. Hans Hoppe describes the nuclear family as a privatization of the costs of reproduction (where in tribal culture, the costs of reproduction were shared more or less equally, regardless of who actually fathered the children). Extending this idea, cuckoldry can be thought of as a form of fraud. The genetic consequences of cuckoldry are immense and evolutionary psychologists have explained a great deal of human behavior (especially male behavior, such as insane male possessiveness of females) by pointing out that we are not the descendants of men who were cuckolded. We are the descendants of men who cuckolded other men or of men who made sure they didn’t get cuckolded by other men.
Translating this line of thought back to the political realm, what is a man who doesn’t work and has 6 or 7 kids with his girlfriend on welfare but a cuckolder? He is using the resources of other men to propagate his own genes. The solutions for cuckoldry which evolution has selected are brutal: jealous male rage, killing and neglect of step-children (by both males and females), and so on. The progeny of the human species will not be of those who worked as tax-slaves their whole lives to raise and feed one child of their own, if that, while expending the remainder of their efforts feeding the children of welfare dads and putting the children of government bureaucrats through Harvard. Our descendants will be of those men who defended their resources from expropriation by other men and dedicated those resources to the propagation of their own genes, or expropriated other men through political means to propagate their own genes. In other words, from Darwin’s point of view, the “good guys” really are going to finish last. The half-life of Western welfarism is going to be very small. To me, this conclusion seems inescapable.
Very interesting… I’ve been accustomed to viewing humanity as being evolutionary stasic, but I definitely see your point. Makes you wonder whether the movie Idiocracy isn’t a somewhat realistic vision of the future.
You seem to have a pretty deterministic attitude about it. Do you feel this fate was always inevitable for man since the day he diverged from the apes? If not, when do you think we went off track? If there’s nothing that we can do about it, is it best to just have a beer and stop worrying about it?
Err, the only thing Caley did in the other thread was to show that public goods have a private component to them, and that individuals can profit from providing the public good. This says nothing about the actual group dynamic because people don’t simply seek out profit, they are profit maximizing, which is why the free rider option is so attractive.
He also seems to forget that I’m actually advocating a rational solution to the problem… its the “just logistics” he’s talking about, which is actually the whole subject of debate - under which conditions are the logistics solvable.
Read the book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters… it will knock your socks off. We are on the cusp of a revolution in the social sciences.
Or maybe the opposite. Who do you think modern Russians are the descendants of? Those smart enough to tow the Soviet party line outwardly while doing “whatever it took” (i.e. trading on the black market, getting into the nomenklatura, cooperation with organized crime, etc.) to keep themselves and their children fed. Those without any sexual moral compunctions (having a lot of kids, as I understand it, was frowned upon but the State couldn’t keep track of that if you were sleeping around with lots of women and having lots of illegitimate kids). You get the idea. Three generations may not be enough to make a marked difference but who knows? Those are the evolutionary pressures which the Soviet regime created. Evolution acts against anything that inhibits reproduction. VHEMT is doomed to a perpetually short membership roster. We are not the descendants of people who thought having kids was a bad idea.
No, I’m not a determinist. Human culture can overcome maladaptive behavior selected by past evolution. The example I like to use is rape - the reproductive advantages of forcible copulation in the ancestral environment should be obvious… “whatever it takes.” Yet, despite the reproductive advantages that rapists enjoy(ed, abortion kind of changes that), women are not frequently raped. Whatever the explanation for this (harmonious division of labor, male-female protection bonds, etc.), we are not simply consigned to fate by our evolutionary past.
I think there’s not a lot we can do about it. LvMI is doing the single best thing I can think of. It would be nice if we could get a modern Machiavelli, someone with credibility, who really understands the intricate workings of the modern elites and willing to set it to down for everyone to understand. All we have today are bloviating academics, the ridiculously optimistic nouveau riche (like you see interviewed on these business news programs all the time), and then the criminal insiders who aren’t about to say a word about what really makes the world go round.
The other thing that I think doesn’t get mentioned enough on LvMI and LRC, is that probably the best way for the “little guy” to really sock it to the regimists is just go out and do everything we can to earn money. Build capital. The more capital we each build, the harder life is for the anti-capitalist pigs in their Olympian ivory towers. Capital is economic decision-making power and the more of it each individual builds, the more decision-making power is being wrested from the grasping hands of our would-be emperors. I would like to see more emphasis from LvMI on this point. Go start a business! Peddle things over Craigslist! Do whatever it takes to make a profit and build your little capitalist empire! Be a Godfather, rule your domain. Don’t fight the powers that be, they’re too well defended. If they outlaw your current line of work, just do something else instead. Never let them slow you down.