The result is a crime infested, smog ridden riot in which the town gets together and reasons that they create a small government to prevent said result from occuring regularly.
If the town gets together and reasons that they should create a small government, then the town doesn’t need a small government to get together and reason.
If everyone in a town believes they need a small government to get together and reason, then they will plant the seeds of leviathan. If everyone gets a clue, however, they will contract with each other for security and dispute resolution services.
The basic misconception that people have about anarchy is that policemen come from mars, and criminals come from venus.
Because there is no political support for legalized chaos, it is clear that nobody in your community actually wants chaos, save a couple of teenage punks. So going back to the Family Guy example, where everyone in the town is meeting to discuss how to achieve an environment of order that enables the division of labor. If they don’t establish a government immediately, friends and family members will contract with people in their social networks to provide security and dispute resolution services. Any community has a virtually inexhaustible supply of security guards, as demand will always meet supply in terms of marginal units.
It was the fallacy of the classical economists to consider goods and services in terms of large classes; instead, modern economics demonstrates that services must be considered in terms of marginal units. For all actions on the market are marginal. If we begin to treat whole classes instead of marginal units, we can discover a great myriad of necessary, indispensable goods and services all of which might be considered as “preconditions” of market activity.
http://mises.org/rothbard/mes/chap13.asp
Why didn’t the London rioters go near residential areas? Because there were thousands of sleep-deprived people peering out their windows with a baseball bat in one hand and a knife in the other. The commercial areas were empty by comparison. Take an extreme hypothetical example, that the British government suddenly vanishes and every store in London gets sacked by the rioters. What happens next?
At this point, we can categorize criminals into two groups; those who can tie their shoelaces and those who cannot. Those who can’t tie their shoelaces are not going anywhere. Those who can tie their shoelaces are smart enough to know that they desperately need a society that utilizes the division of labor and mass production. After all, they’re parasites! What parasite wants to grow his own food and knit his own clothes, just so he can go out pillaging other people’s vegetable gardens and clotheslines?
After somehow sacking every store in London, the looters wake up one morning to find themselves very hungry. They rush out into the shopping centres, only to find that every last can of food has been stolen, and everything else is rotting. Do they then converge on the suburbs?
Hell no. The suburbs are full of armed vigilantes patrolling the streets, ready to put to death anyone found carting a plasma TV screen. We know these vigilantes would vastly outnumber the looters, because there has never been any political support for unorganized looting. Since the government collapsed, the 99% would have formed their own protection associations and dispute resolution mechanisms, if only for the meantime. If they have all been reading Rothbard, however, they know that they don’t need to create a new institution for a problem they already solved. Eventually, protection associations will develop complex ways of dealing with criminals. Production will get back into gear because even the looters want to survive.
