I truthfully don’t know if a strong defense from other nations would be possible with an anarchical society. If there was true anarchy and other nations didn’t view us as a unified front, I feel like they would be much more likely to try to take us over. If other nations were to drop bombs (or something of the sort) on an anarchical society, they would be doing so just to cause harm and chaos in general. However, this is assuming we can’t all ‘come together’ to fight war against a foreign nation to protect our freedom, which I’m not sure is possibly in your definite of anarchy.
As for the defense from domestic threats, I think that’s the last thing we’d have to worry about. With everyone most likely armed to the teeth with weapons, I think everyone would be much less likely to even think about attacking someone else because of the lethal revenge upon which would be ultimately acted due to the lack of formal laws. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing at all.
Overall I believe we’d be better off domestically with every person having weapons of their own, but as far as security from foreign nation goes, I think we’re way better off how we are now.
"I truthfully don’t know if a strong defense from other nations would be possible with an anarchical society. If there was true anarchy and other nations didn’t view us as a unified front, I feel like they would be much more likely to try to take us over. If other nations were to drop bombs (or something of the sort) on an anarchical society, they would be doing so just to cause harm and chaos in general. However, this is assuming we can’t all ‘come together’ to fight war against a foreign nation to protect our freedom, which I’m not sure is possibly in your definite of anarchy.
As for the defense from domestic threats, I think that’s the last thing we’d have to worry about. With everyone most likely armed to the teeth with weapons, I think everyone would be much less likely to even think about attacking someone else because of the lethal revenge upon which would be ultimately acted due to the lack of formal laws. And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing at all.
Overall I believe we’d be better off domestically with every person having weapons of their own, but as far as security from foreign nation goes, I think we’re way better off how we are now."
I don’t get your argument that in an Ancap society, everyone would just sit on their thumbs as we’re bombed to oblivion. There will still be large, global companies who will have plenty to lose if their customers are killed and the infrastructure destroyed. We are too accustomed to thinking that only the coercive territorial monopoly of the state is capable of defense. Certainly if companies are no longer able to free-ride on the public dime for their military protection, they will have to make provisions to procure their own.
Moreover, the state maintains its forces primarily to defend itself, not its subjects. Private defense would have much more incentive to focus on limiting monetary damage rather than guarding government power centers.
I suspect one large security company would dominate the regional market, so it would be just as effective as the statist regime is now.
There’s a big difference between a company and a state, for instance profit motives. I think that your suspicion is highly suspect. There’s huge variation in cultural values among most geographic areas, especially the ones who might adopt libertarian anarchy first. Besides that, there is reason for people to demand that multiple firms may handle a case along a chain of arbitration, think conflict of interests.
You’re imagining that everyone would agree to contract with some firm that, because of its economy of scale, would be able to undercut all the competition. Then, after it has police on all the street corners, it can take power. The contract won’t matter because there’s no one to enforce it.
The reason this won’t happen is because people don’t agree to unenforceable contracts…
Along with Walter Block, I hold that inalieable rights can be traded away. Obviously you disagree with this. However it we allow inalieable rights to be traded away, then there is an obvious method to which the contract could be enforced. If you don’t pay a fee for security, we will do “x” to you.(X being whatever you agreed as a punishment for non payment in your security company contract. It could be imprisonment, whipping, stockade etc).
But really, I think there are other methods to which the contract could be enforced. If you don’t pay the security company, the company could have a clause in the security contract that transfers all of your property to the company upon nonpayment.
And if that doesn’t work, there are othe rmethods. For instance, the company could label you “unwelcome” and penalize its customers unless they choose to refuse to allow you on their property.
I don’t think multiple firms are neccesarily more benign than a large regionally dominant firm. One large firm can have a corporate charter than avoids conflict of interests. The firm could have branches of the company, mandated by the corporate charter, labeled the judiciary, executive, legislative. It could also have regional subsidiaries with a clear division of power in the corporate charter.
Personally, I would prefer to work with a security company that resembled the previous statist institutions in its structure(though of course, not in its use of aggression). It would be more familiar in its workings to the shareholders and customers. The company could also be a non-profit, chartered so shareholders could only have one vote.
1/ How do you prevent this “use of agression” which would be a permanent risk fo all?
The security company you are refering, as any group of human being, may look after many other interests than just “making profit”. Some does not care about profit and money, but in other goals which are refered by our cultures as “un-rationalistic”: religions, reward in the afterlife if you bomb a train station, destroying the enemies targetted by your superior, or for revenge, etc. If company just run for profit on an exclusive way, why do companies follow social rules and accept to limit their own profit making and direct individual interest? Why children don’t try to sell their parent’s weeding rings in order to increase their profits? Why companies don’t just kill competitors in order to gain markets?
Not so sure that all cultural backgrounds and social rules would just vanish and that the world would convert into a perfectly rational bunch of individuals with no other goal than making profit. The same can be applied to the “firm” from your comment: how can you ensure that it will only follow rationalistic behaviours? one answer is that the day it will not, then we’ll be slave or dead, without any possible balance of power against this firm.
2/ How do you distinguish this security firm in Monopoly without any will of aggression, from a state with monopoly of coercition in its territory but peacefull goals?
I started to read the essays by Hermann Hoppe and early on I came across I came across a passage about how the government will always act the same when charged with protection. The passage is “a government’s answer will always be the same: to maximize expendentures on protection - and almost all of a nation’s wealth can be consumed by the cost of protection - and at the same time to minimize the production of protection.” What struck me is that this doesn’t characterize any country in Europe that I know of, some countries in Asia doesn’t fit either. A million miles off the mark. The quote is on p. 8, and I haven’t read the whole thing, but right off the bat it feels like hyperbole. I also don’t understand what it means to minimize the production of protection.
For instance, the US total defense budget is now standing at ~$1 Trillion, or ~7% of GDP. It has been creeping up over time. There is no indication that this volume will shrink, despite a falling real GDP.
Europe and many Asian countries have been isolated from military expenditure effects by US global hegemony for the last 60 years.
You should read Hoppe’s analysis in a more historical context – obviously any country which has been consumed by military expenditures has little time left (consider N. Korea), so at any given moment, virtually all stable countries will have relatively low military expenditures. At that point at which military expenditures cripple the country, it tends to implode, and the nation is usually “reset”.
A prime example of this is the European Dark Ages, which dragged much of Europe into economic oblivion following the implosion of the Roman military-state via inflation and the legislative countermeasures (the book Fourty Centuries of Wage and Price Controls covers this topic).
Anarchy and free markets begin to work better as awareness of relevent information increases. So there is a dependency upon an infrastructure of information technologies.
Do Austrians/libertarians subscribe to natural selection and/or evolution? If so, do they think natural selection can work in non-living fields? Like medicine, monatary policy, government services etc.
Of course. Natural selection is a fact. And it is at work everywhere there is reproduction with random mutations, and a non-random selection mechanism. I don’t imagine where you are going with this and I am curious.
Do you think it’s possible that if a single anarchist society flourished for at least a couple of years, e.g. a seasteading platform, all governments would face the risk of collapse within the next decade?
Because it would be proven that anarchism brings more prosperity, and governments would be proven to be merely parastic entities? In that case, defense wouldn’t be much of a problem, because everyone would have great revulsion towards an entity that cheated them to such great heights, and statism would begin an inevitable decline towards complete collapse. Just a theory.