Ancap-ism depends on the idea that agencies will not exploit clients. However, each profit-maximizing agency has to find clients to exploit to maximize its profits so it can compete. Agencies that “play nice” and try to attack bad agencies to enforce their security contracts lose out to one ones that are exploiting clients. There’s strong incentives to defect from contracts and natural law collective agreements. If there wasn’t, and fear of action by other agencies was sufficient to convince every single agency to behave according to collective agreements, then things like price-fixing and monopoly trusts would be possible.
Nuclear weapons guys? It amazes me sometimes how far away from practicality these discussions can stray. You all realizethat something like 8 or 10 countries out of almost 300 have them. I am willing to wager that if an anarchist society ever gets together, it will not be capable of producing or procuring a nuclear weapon for at least 50 years in the best case scenario.
What is crazy is thinking that social fictions, coercion, conscription, extortion, and propaganda are necessary inputs for physical defense.
The problem with the ancap thing, put in another way, is that it rests on a knife edge between two positions.
Either:
- Private defense firms act in their individual profit maximizing interest and pillage their clients, as they would be required to in an efficient, competitive market,
or
- These market processes are constrained by the threat of force from other firms and horizontal agreements and collusion (including “natural law”), which are forms of anticompetitive, monopolistic market structure
Both lead to bad outcomes.
Nonsense. In a market, they would get the most profit by refraining from pillaging their clients. Quit making stuff up.
If that were true, warlordism would be unprofitable. The legal system is basically irrelevant. Anarcho-capitalism assumes that pillaging would be punished by other agencies who served their clients.
The important question regarding whether anarcho-capitalism would work is how profitable pillaging is versus how profitable protecting clients is. In practice, pillaging seems to be a much more common behavior for private armies.
Historically, private armies havent competed in a market to offer protection services. People dont generally hire someone to fix their toilet,nif that individual has extorted them in the past. The most important thing to remember is that warfare is costly, and for-profit agencies wouldnt want to add violence to te situation, because it would affect their market position. The extortionist always adds violence to a situation, or the possibility thereof which is the same thing. Defense contractors seek profit which is antonymous with violence.
It depends on whether the private army can expect to be able to maintain their position long term or not. Long term, it is more profitable to shear the sheep, rather than kill them for the meat (or harvest eggs rather than butcher the chickens). But that only works if ownership is respected. Applied to humans, this means that the State, which can claim long term ownership, is more likely to preserve its “herd” than a private agency.
That’s weird. I wasn’t intending to reason myself toward what will doubtless be regarded as a trolling of sorts, given the venue. :-\
What is long term? How are humans the sheeps of private armies? Why can private armies not claim long term business relations? (I substituted the former phrase for “ownership”, because it is ridiculous to insinuate that because someone hires the services of another, they are owned by that provider.)
I guess I need to be more clear. I was using “profit” in an austrian sense, in that profit can only occur at the end of a business cycle from catallactic actions, wherein the customer must necessarily be satisfied. In this situation, wealth is created because the firm owner gains monetarily and the customer gains according to his preferences, in this case gains a measure of security in his person.
Extortion is a completely different situation and does not produce wealth. The victims will be less productive, the criminal gangs gain less monetarily, but this gain could hardly be considered profit, as it is not derived from a firm’s productive process and catallactic actions.
That’s an assumption. If extortion dones’t produce wealth, why isn’t it less common in areas without a functioning central government?
It’s probably as much an assumption that it is less prevalent with a government than without. And then if you’re just asking why it isn’t less prevalent than it is with no comparison, that’s a somewhat arbitrary question like, “why doesn’t Wendy’s put more fries in their orders since customer satisfaction would rise and that is preferable?”
The fact that it exists anywhere (with or without a government) is no indicator of its ability to PRODUCE wealth. It occurs because their are groups of people that wish to, instead of working to produce their own wealth, extort wealth from producers and live at the expense of others. This includes governments and pirate-like criminals.
You believe that there is as much extortion going on in politically stable countries as there are in unstable ones? Feudal Europe, Somalia, the Congo, Colombia, and other places without a functioning central government over large parts of the country?
Point taken. There are many reasons why people extort and pillage and under ancap-ism, there would have to be enough agencies following natural law to defeat the agencies which chose to extort and pillage. If there are not enough, then the outcome is not pleasant. If there are enough agences following natural law, then that implies the possibility of a collusion being enforced (natural law is a collusive horizontal agreement), and there isn’t any particular reason why this one type of horizontal agreement may be enforced and not others.
Yes. No one in the US, for example, escapes the extortion of the government. Sales tax, income tax, property tax, capital gains tax, gift tax, inheritance tax, estate tax, death tax… The government steals from all members of society. Without a government, some people are not being stolen from, because they are allowed to resist and hide from the thieves. Government is more efficient at extortion than a band of pirates.
The point is, a centralized governing body that attempts to put all people under it (as subjects) will always be the largest and most efficient example of the living-at-others-expense mentality. I cannot guarantee that that mentality won’t exist in some under an anarcho-capitalist society with libertarian values, I can only say it is far less likely to be successful, sustained, maintained, or enforced on any significant portion of the population, and even then, the victims or would-be victims are allowed to defend themselves against the thieves, but you are not allowed to defend yourself against the taxman.
It may not be sustained by any one party. The difference is that different defense agencies have the ability to engage in warfare with each other, or engage in a horizontal agreements to restrict competition, which can greatly increase their destructive and exploitative ability.
Yes, it’s called the government. If you write the largest, most organized group of murderers and thieves out of one side then of course everywhere else looks worse. It would only be fair to include the government’s actions when making such a comparison. The US government is the richest and most successful extortion racket in the history of mankind.
Absolutely, but this is the same as with a State. Again, you have to compare apples to apples. When people say “ancap loses to warlords, etc.” what they inevitably end up comparing is a relatively peaceful society under government to a not-so-peaceful society that happens to not have a government. Ancaps aren’t saying that a society of brutal murderers or jihadists or people with generally no respect for property rights are suddenly going to shape up under anarchy. Ancaps are just saying that whatever that society might be like without the State, it will be worse with the State.
Robert Murphy has a good Mises Daily on exactly this subject: http://mises.org/daily/1855
We’re already living in an anarchy, aren’t we? There’s no single government for the entire human race. It’s just that the anarchy we live in isn’t one that systematically respects the self-ownership and non-aggression principles.
We’re already living in an anarchy, aren’t we? There’s no single government for the entire human race. It’s just that the anarchy we live in isn’t one that systematically respects the self-ownership and non-aggression principles.
Sure, I didn’t disagree with that (other than the “anarchy” semantics).
If you think those societies were less exploitative than the liberal welfare state, would you want to live in them?
Assuming we had proof that that was true, the other problem is that the natural law idea itself relies on enforcement of a horizontal agreement.
You’re still comparing Society A that solves it’s issues somewhat peacefully to Society B that immediately resorts to killing each other. Of course Society B sucks.Rival government factions can’t engage in warfare with each other? It’s called a civil war, and it happens quite often. Governmental parties are an agreement to restrict competition.
I could sum up your argument as: “ancap could potentially give way to all of this bad stuff, which if it happens results in behaviors identical to those of government. Therefore, we need government to prevent it”. It’s that last part that makes the argument nonsensical.
I wouldn’t call mass pillaging and warfare identical to a modern government. The difference with government is that it’s usually limited by a system of balance of powers. Libertopia involves competing defense agencies with power centralized each of their executives.
This system only “works” on a knife-edge between monopolization and profit-maximizing abuse of power.