Assuming your friend had murder insurance (likely very cheap since murders are statistically rare) then the insurance company would have to pay out a lot of money to his heirs. This insurance company would want to get back as much of that money as it could so they are going to do everything they can to locate the murderer which would include buying the CCTV tape from the club and then locating you and extracting the insurance payout from you.
I think I am going to have to step away from this conversation because it is becoming too difficult to argue a point that I don’t fully support. In reality, it is my opinion that if more children are harmed in the ancap society than in the socialist society I am okay with that. I believe that Darwinism will show in the end which is a better form of child rearing, abuse or no abuse. Over the span of n generations one of the two populations will thrive and the other will not. If it is, as I personally suspect, superior (more efficient, more effective, etc.) to raise children in a non-abusive way then eventually abusive parents will fade out of existence, or diverge from the species (do you get upset when a gorilla hits it’s offspring?) due to a weaker gene pool.
My problem with socialism is that it interferes with natural selection in that the majority force their views on the minority so the minority can not attempt new ways of behaving, thinking, etc. Imagine if there was a system back in the bacterial phase of the earth whereby the DNA of all the bacteria in the world had to conform to the norm. Anytime anyone diverged from that normalized DNA they were suppressed by the system and not allowed to efficiently survive or reproduce. If that were the case we would all either be the same bacteria as we were billions of years ago or dead because our environment changed and we were unable to change with it.
So what it comes down to is that my view is that if people want to abuse their children they can but as soon as a child (or adult) expresses interest in leaving such a scenario my society will be there waiting for them with open arms. The same goes for someone in my society who wants to switch to the abusive society. I won’t stop them from doing so.
I think what you are misunderstanding here is that the school is private property. The only thing you can’t do is prevent the child from leaving if they decide to do so. Anything you do on your property is acceptable except detaining someone (murdering them would count as permanent detention in my book). If you want to use corporal punishment in your classroom, chances are your student body will be very small since there aren’t a lot of supporters of that these days. You can even say that if you don’t go to detention (time out, sit in the corner, etc.) you can’t come back, so you can utilize all of the same techniques you currently use. Unless you actively prevent the student from leaving the private property, you aren’t doing anything that goes against ancap. Your house, your rules, they agree to that when they enter.
I’d like to refer you to that post I linked you to in our private conversation earlier. I will discuss (very briefly) my thoughts on the Fritzl case. My thoughts would be that it is unjustifiable for the state to return home any child that has run away (and does not wish to return home). However, that in and of itself does not mean that the act of intervening in the child’s household unjustified. You also argued in the above that the state cannot and does not always intervene at the right time; as I explained in that post I linked you to, it is my own personal feelings that it is hard to say whether or not in the market, individuals would have the ability to intervene in a household that they suspect may be engaging in child abuse. However, the state owns a monopoly on coercion and may do so. My only argument is that such interventions would happen more frequently under government. Again though, it is hard to say without a whole bunch of statistics showing what AnCap would be like. Clayton brought up some further potential issues, however, for instance, state-paid psychologists inducing children to ‘remember’ false memories about child hood. There is also the issue of child abuse within state owned children’s homes. It could be a possible solution to privatise the psychology departments and children’s homes whilst limiting the state’s function to intervening in reported incidents of cruelty to children but I have not thought this one through, admittedly.
If, say, less people were to receive education (than they do now), resulting in fewer doctors, electricians, plumbers, etc. which is likely to lead to a reduction in total economic output.
My argument to this so far has been that we can at least look towards the hundred years or so we have had as a mixed economy when considering risk A (relatively free market economy with a reduced state); we cannot consider anarchy, risk B, on equal footing, since it has never been implemented on a large scale. Hence, when we consider the two risks, it is easier to assess the risk factor of risk A; with risk B we are ‘plunging into the depths of the unknown’. We can only guess what it would be like theoretically speaking. We know that relatively free trade ‘works’ from studying history. We don’t know much about anarchy.
Indeed, and I am not blaming the failure to implement a free market justice scheme on the idea itself (as you point out, government has prevented it). However, as I stated its hard to consider something that hasn’t existed :P. Having said that, you mention earlier instances of common law which I’d be interested to hear about.
MINE! In all seriousness, I mean objective calculations of a society’s economic output, standards of living, gini coefficients and levels of crime, etc.
When I said objective standard, I was mainly referring to the law. As you would have seen in that post of mine that I cited, I tend to trend towards individualist (libertarian) legal theory. However, I also see the need for certain aspects of collectivism in certain scenarios, just because, well some scenarios are more complicated than that (you see that I cited instances of mentally incapacitated adults, et cetera). Indeed, there are probably a whole heap of complications that I had not considered.
@ Liberty Student:
I will try
Ok, fair enough. I would just like to point out though, that I only think certain aspects of society are best organised by coercive utilisation of state apparatus. I talked about some of the complications, here: https://forum.freecapitalists.org/t/education-and-voluntarism/17638/202 though I don’t know what you will make of my post :P. Also, as we have established, legitimate utilisation of force and coercion is implemented to maintain order, protect property rights and enforce contracts in the free market; it is the initiation of aggression that does not happen (in theory). Obviously, as you can see from my posts, I openly endorse a limited degree of initiation of aggression (since it is impossible for the state to operate without initiating aggression to force people to pay taxes and so forth). Excuse me if I have erred here at some point in my understanding of the aggression axiom but my understanding of it is that (a) initiation of aggression constitutes of force or coercion utilised to achieve an undesirable outcome from a body and/or to harm that body’s physical property or individual rights and that (b) retalliation constitutes of force or coercion utilised in self-defense of one’s own body or to right wrongs (e.g. seek monetary compensation for physical damage to property).
I will not attempt to refute the logic you have applied here Also, this is the kind of answer I’m looking for in terms of my ‘risk analysis’ theory.
Sorry I should have clarified; by ‘overthrow’, I merely meant to peacefully undermine. It was in part because the communist-anarchists wished to use violence that I left them behind. However, I still question undermining the state if it leads to economic/social regression (as defined above - see exchange with Autolykos).
Interestingly enough, and I was planning on bringing this up at some point - but you ruined it - I would employ the same logic if we were living in a slave society (that it is not worth the risk to destroy slavery – who will make the food?, etc.) unless there was empirical evidence prooving a slaveless society that had greater standards of living, economic output and so forth. I can fully appreciate why some people might have been scared back then to abolish it. The only difference between then (slave society) and now (slaveless society) though would be that we have decent overall living standards; they did not. For this reason, we actually have something to risk losing which the slaves didn’t. Giving women the right to vote does not necessarily constitute radical change of an economy. As far as being radicals for peace and prosperity, well this depends on whether ‘peace and prosperity’ would be the outcome (how are we defining peace and prosperity? ‘Tis a vague concept, no? – sorry I have to get my own back here :P).
I must say, I am very impressed with you here EvilSocialistFellow. The vast majority of people wouldn’t accept that their current point of view could be logically extended to something that is considered reprehensible by their peers. The same way that most people will argue a point but when shown that it has the same logic behind it as say, Nazism, they claim that there is some difference (even though logically there is not). Kudos for sticking to your guns on the subject and not trying to avoid the logic of the comparison!
Relative to now, the standards of living for slavers were low. Relative to their own history though, their standards of living were high. From the point of view of the slavers they considered themselves to be living well (compared to their peers and to history). In hindsight, we can see that they could have done better.
Anarchists believe that we could be living better, but we have no way to empirically prove that without first trying out our theories (which is all we really want to do). I really wish global governments would leave Somalia alone. I think left to their own anarchist devices (without outside state influence) they could thrive and be a beacon of hope for the anarchist cause.
This is not entirely correct. Anarchists KNOW they can be living better. They are able to do that by removing the cancer that is the state and replacing it with any degree of competition.
People who come to libertarianism and then ancap without understanding economics usually struggle with simple deductive reasoning. I’ve watched this play out here for 3 years now. It’s always the same. Nearly every left-libertarian I have met did not understand free market economics, which is why they were able to adopt positions that were self-contradicting at a fundamental level.
Again, a stateless society will lead to higher living standards, more justice, more creative expression and more prosperity. The state does NOTHING for those things, and instead serves as an impediment, or roadblock to the flourishing of those social factors.
Without testing anarchy it is still only a theory and something that can only be believed to be true (unproven). Because human action is unpredictable we can not say for certain what exactly would happen in anarchy. I believe very strongly that the world would be a much better place with a much higher standard of living but I can not say for certainty like I can with the laws of physics.
I do believe that there is a lot of evidence we can use to make certain deductions about how an anarchist society would play out and I believe those deductions have a pretty small probability of error. None the less, an unforseen consequence of anarchy may arise that shows anarchy as being more problematic than the state. This seems very unlikely given what we do know, but it’s still probable enough that I don’t feel comfortable stating with absolute certainty that anarchy will work. If it weren’t for the human component this would be far easier but, as I said above, humans are largely unpredictable.
This could stem from the fact that I generally feel uncomfortable saying anything with 100% certainty, even the laws of physics tend to progress with time and become disproven.
Again, this depends on how many people are willing to pay ‘murder insurance’, ‘rape insurance’ (as you suggested in another post), fire insurance, all the 5 hundred million possible types of insurance in an AnCap society
I must say, I am not a massive fan of social darwinism. It works great as a theory of evolution (natural selection, competition between species and so forth) but it does not have a massive implication to the diversity and huge complexities of modern day society (when I say ‘society’ in this particular context, I am talking about the specific network of relationships between individuals which is perfectly legitimate, I believe, so long as I am not referring to ‘society’ as a decision making body). Even as a theory of evolution, there is a conflicting theory that parents pass down certain traits that they have achieved during their life time to their children (though I can’t remember what it is called). I believe both have implications to the theory of evolution. I would not take the latter to the extreme of ‘if I go to the gym and get muscular my children will be born muscular’ rather that they will adopt these traits I have achieved in small doses. When I studied this in biology (a long time ago) there is some empirical evidence, I believe supporting this.
But all of that wishy-washy biology stuff is irrelevant. If you study human action you will know that human action is an axiom, an ultimate given; its causes/triggers are irrelevant. This is the problem with materialism - it is too static; it believes that the mind is the ultimate product of matter (influenced, if you will, by extraneous circumstances) but it does not take a further step and make deductive reasoning based upon the axiom of human action (which derives from thinking - the product of mind). Hence, the theory of social darwinism could be true but it is irrelevant to economics.
Even as a theory of evolution, there is a conflicting theory that parents pass down certain traits that they have achieved during their life time to their children (though I can’t remember what it is called).
Probably Lamarckism, which in 20th century was popularized by Soviet (pseudo-)scientist Lysenko.
I remember a funny refutation of this theory: how does it explain birth of virgins (again and again, despite their mothers obviously acquiring non-virgin “trait” before giving birth)?
No, I myself am highly suspicious of the belief. However you will note that I also said I only believe it would happen in very small doses. There is (some) evidence studying the evolution of a certain species of fish forming harder shells in response to concentrations of specific chemicals to suggest small changes can occur in the genetic structure (genes are obviously passed down in birth) throughout a life time as a result of adaptation to the surrounding environment. But I am not a biologist and I do not wish (or rather possess insufficient knowledge) to pursue this argument further. I still maintain that Darwinism is the superior theory of evolution but certain aspects of Lamarckism could obtain (in very small doses).
The theory is that the vast majority of people would purchase a generic umbrella insurance that pretty much covers everything the average person would want for a single monthly fee. This would include everything from murder and rape insurance to car and homeowner insurance. If you put all current insurances together (car, homeowner, life, health, etc.) and then take away the massive government intervention fee you’ll come out with about what such an umbrella insurance would cost (a bit more than that since it will likely cover some things currently covered by the government). Of course, if you decided you didn’t want rape insurance I imagine there would be options for people like you and perhaps some “build your own insurance” options on the market as well not to mention the ability to buy insurance from multiple places at once (geico for car insurance and keiser for health insurance).
Insurance effectively replaces taxes but in a far more equitable, market driven, and non aggressive way. Any reasonable person would put their first dollars to the bare minimum of food/water/shelter to survive, then insurance second, then increased quality of life third (though this is not forced on you).
I would contend that the human body is on par with society when it comes to complexity. There are on the order off 10s of trillions of cells in the human body, all of different types. These sells make up 206 bones, ~600 muscles, and 22 internal organs. These combine to comprise of 11 different body systems. This is assuming we start at the cellular level even though evolution could be argued to have started pre-cellular, at the molecular level and cells are made up of a ton of different molecules, which of course are made up of anywhere from a couple atoms to on the order of billions.
In my opinion, if Darwinism can turn atoms into humans I have believe it can also work on society.
For the curious, the scientific community these days is pretty set on how evolution works. We have a strong understanding of how human growth and reproduction works on the cellular level, including the difference between gamete cells and all the rest (gametes being egg/sperm), how they are produced, how DNA transfers from parent to child, how mutations occur on gametes, etc.
You lost me with this last part. Do you think you might be able to rephrase it somehow?
I am not familiar with the exact evidence you are referring to but my guess you are talking about gene expression. The inner workings of gene expression is largely unknown and there is a lot of research going on at Universities around the world trying to fully understand it (kind of the holy grail of biology at the moment) but the short of it is that even though your DNA encodes everything about you, your envirnoment (especially when initially developing from an egg) determines how your genes are expressed. Gene expression is the reason that the same set of DNA can produce different body parts rather than just a blob of 10 trillion matching cells. Certain fetal environmental queues can also impact gene expression which can be viewed (to a very limited extent) as the mother passing down traits to her child outside of her genetic code (though it’s not nearly as simplistic as this).
But in modern day society how come no such ‘umbrella scheme’ exists? I mean we already have to pay separately for life insurance, car insurance, etc. - things not covered by the nanny state. It does sound like a good idea but I question why it does not already exist
I think one of the reasons is that individuals need different types of insurance that they must figure out themselves; I don’t need car insurance because I don’t drive. But an ‘umbrella insurance scheme’ could not figure out for every single one of its clients what different forms of insurance they need themselves. When you take away all the things government provide it could become more complicated for the person themselves to figure out… (I realise the inefficiency of the government trying to figure out what everyone needs for them, by the way, I just mean that the individual can take his case to the government to claim support upon figuring out s/he needs something [e.g. if they have had a crime comitted against them and they need to go through a legal procedure which the government can then fund by means of tax money).
Having said that, I would not oppose slowly implementing a more market driven, less government driven approach to this kind of thing.
I would recommend reading some of Ludwig von Mises’ human action since it is difficult to explain without going into a massively long drawn out discussion: http://mises.org/resources.aspx?Id=3250&html=1
I’m no biologist and had not exactly meant for the discussion to get side tracked into this but my point was that the Darwinist theory is that those species (or specific members of species) that are not very well adapted to their environment die out whilst the stronger species or members survive and pass on their genes. In this way, all species (including humans) are constantly evolving. This has little relevance to economics though, as I explained above, and it also has little relevance to the complexities modern society, especially given that we are now in a stronger position to support ‘weaker’ people, for instance people with downs syndrome or severe autism can receive a lot of social support from family and loved ones, people with physical handicaps can receive medical support, technology to enhance their life (e.g. wheel chairs), etc. Its not a brutal game of survival of the fittest anymore like in nature. I believe Darwin himself said this. Lamarckism is the theory that rather than survival of the fittest, we have individual members of a species adapting to their environment and developing mechanisms to help them adapt to their environment; presumably this makes very slight alterations to their DNA which they can then pass on to their children. I don’t know whether this is true or not but I read a few times that there was a (minimal) amount of evidence that suggests it could be true.
It wasn’t the human action part I got confused on but rather the what you are trying to say regarding human action why my views on Darwinism don’t relate to economics.
Perhaps the misunderstanding is that I wasn’t talking about economics specifically but rather just that in general, my interests are in the advancement of the species (technological, evolutionary, etc.), not in the individuals that make up the species. A humanitarian won’t take a life to save 1000 but a Darwinist would (e.g.: human testing for cancer research).
In fact, this may be the core difference between us. You seem to care a lot about saving the individual children whereas I don’t so much about the individual children but more so about the children as a whole. I would rather see 99 children with a 1% increase in overall wellbeing and one child suffer terribly than see 99 children without the +1% in and the one child not suffering.
Again, this may be where we differ. I feel that attempting to stop evolution hurts the species as a whole, even if it saves a few of the individuals. If you completely stop evolution we will stagnate. If we stagnate long enough something else will come along that wins out in a competition of resources or our environment will change without us and we will die off without even any competition.
That being said, Darwinism doesn’t necessarily mean everything fighting for survival. Just as often as you see competition for resources in the wild you also see symbiotic relationships. There was a theory I read a while back about how homosexuality evolved seeing as how it is contrary to reproduction (a basic tenant of Darwinism). The theory (very vague summary here) stated that having a homosexual family member is beneficial to the family family and increases the families chance of success/survival/reproduction. Because of this it is an evolutionary advantage to have a recessive homosexual gene that expresses itself about every so often (but not all the time).
While I can’t say what evolutionary advantages autism brings to the table (or perhaps none) I also don’t presume that it is evolutionarily disadvantageous either. Because of this I have no problem with people supporting autistic individuals and I don’t have a problem with them joining society and functioning in it in whatever ways they can. However, that doesn’t mean that I think everyone should be forced into supporting autistic people anymore than they should be forced to support a wealthy, intelligent, ‘normal’ individual.
TL;DR:
Without freedom to try things that fall outside of the norm and are socially unacceptable to the majority, humanity cannot evolve.
I want humanity to evolve.
Therefore, I want people to have the freedom to try things that fall outside of the norm and are socially unacceptable to the majority.
I’m not going to get into all the biology stuff you get into below because I find it all a bit ‘wishy-washy’, so to speak.
What I will talk about is my points about human action that you did not understand;
(a) human action is an ultimate given or an axiom much like the creation of the universe: we do not know what created the universe - some say God, some say science, some say magic but no-one really knows. Having said that, it does not matter what created the universe because of what lead on from there (science, matter, organic life, solar systems, etc.) - we can deduce all sorts of things from simply assuming the creation of the universe somehow happened (but that we do not know how).
(b) human action is a result of thinking, we know that much. It is an axiom, much like the creation of the universe; the creation of the universe definitely happened, we know that much. We just don’t know how it happened. In a similar way human action is just there; its an irrefutable ultimate given (an axiom).
(c) panphysicalists try to explain the creation of human action in terms of scientific mind to body relations; i.e. thought is a result of complex chemical processes. Perhaps. Maybe God has provided us with the power of thought. But that doesn’t matter; the initiation of mind is irrelevant to the concept of human action. What does matter is what can be deduced from the principle of assuming that human action is there.
(d) in a kind of similar way to the panphysicalists you are trying to explain the root cause (the environmental influences, if you will) on human behaviour in a social darwinist fashion. I’m saying that this might be true but it is irrelevant to the concept of praxeology (the science of human action) which is the root of Austrian Economic thought. What follows on (what can be deduced) from human action is the concepts of scarce factors of production, scarce means to achieve ends, the actors ranking of values, diminishing law of marginal utility theory, etc., etc. - this is the deductive logic of the Austrian school of economics. Thus, the concept of human action explains why we even have an economy.
I do believe that there is a lot of evidence we can use to make certain deductions about how an anarchist society would play out and I believe those deductions have a pretty small probability of error. None the less, an unforseen consequence of anarchy may arise that shows anarchy as being more problematic than the state. This seems very unlikely given what we do know, but it’s still probable enough that I don’t feel comfortable stating with absolute certainty that anarchy will work. If it weren’t for the human component this would be far easier but, as I said above, humans are largely unpredictable.
This could stem from the fact that I generally feel uncomfortable saying anything with 100% certainty, even the laws of physics tend to progress with time and become disproven.
The joint effort and application of empiricism/Data gathering and testing working in tandem WITH a prioristic reasoning.
The two work together. Empirical studies absent a prioristic reasoning are nothing more then un-educated guesses. At best all you find are random correlating events. It’s generall meaningless.
**
Any good scientist will tell you that prior to entering any type of hypothetical test, in an effort to really understand your results, you enter the test with a certain number of assumptions based on reason. This will minimize y our lab time and increase your understanding of the data. For example, we know that no two parallel lines will ever cross paths. We know that for each coin toss, weight distribution being even, there remains always a 50% chance to land heads or tails.
Going into these tests absent reason means running a coin toss to test the likelyhood of landing heads or tails. In other words it means guesswork in the dark which result in conclusions that often lead the individuals flabergasted and or confused.
Those of you here who are trying to pit aposteriori reasoning against aprioristic are falling into a false-dichatomy fallacy. You are not acting as a scientist, and are largely confused about the scientific method.
I very much hope that you were not trying to state that Austrian’s reject the use aposteriori reasoning. I certainly hope that you don’t actually believe that.
For what it’s worth, those who are interested as far as A priori vs a posteriori is concerned see Esuric’s excellent post here. This is some what of a digression from the discussion so I’ll leave it with that.
In all seriousness, I mean objective calculations of a society’s economic output, standards of living, gini coefficients and levels of crime, etc.
Also, this is the kind of answer I’m looking for in terms of my ‘risk analysis’ theory.
- I would employ the same logic if we were living in a slave society (that it is not worth the risk to destroy slavery – who will make the food?, etc.) unless there was empirical evidence prooving a slaveless society that had greater standards of living, economic output and so forth. I can fully appreciate why some people might have been scared back then to abolish it. The only difference between then (slave society) and now (slaveless society) though would be that we have decent overall living standards; they did not. For this reason, we actually have something to risk losing which the slaves didn’t. Giving women the right to vote does not necessarily constitute radical change of an economy. As far as being radicals for peace and prosperity, well this depends on whether ‘peace and prosperity’ would be the outcome (how are we defining peace and prosperity? ‘Tis a vague concept, no? – sorry I have to get my own back here :P).