And yet each voting cycle and each day on the news political action is advocated to ‘change the way things are’. It never does converge upon what the majority wants. The majority and the political system of voting and having representatives IS enacted because there is always a problem that needs to be fixed. Each voting majority is never satisfied or else they wouldn’t have to keep voting in people they want. There wouldn’t be opposing parties and opposing ideologies if it was simply the majority trying to hold power and keeping it “stable”. The republic system is actually very unstable and thousands of people and an ever-growing number of them and government agencies are formed constantly in an effort to keep an unstable ship afloat.
I’m not discussing it outside of the discussions context. Your using a collectivist argument. Also you accused me of speculating, but your entire accusation was founded on one big [logical fallacy](http://www.csun.edu/~dgw61315/fallacies.html#Argumentum ad ignorantiam).
Furthermore back to my point, it was no conjecture. You nicely evaded the punchline. I’ll re-state it for your convenience. The success of humanity has not been so because of the existence of the state. The statement is non-sequitur. Additionally, states have formed violently you call the victims of that violence ‘failures’ and ‘unstable’. Historical impiricism on the other hand shows that countries that allowed the most anarchy equally prospered the most. Countries that allowed the least anarchy or no anarchy, and total state control, gained the least economic prosperity. Anarchy is the market.
This is not punching at a ghost. It’s hitting your problem on the head. Stop evading.
So argue about it. Logic and evidence determine the winner. It is a cop-out if you’re going to bail on all empirical arguments just b/c some people might have different interpretations.
Well we have good arguments as to why it would be, we’re not asking for blind faith. In fact its all about who can make the most convincing case so as to reduce the amount of trust involved.
And this was possible at one time in history. You’re thinking that Power is the kind of thing that one person can have all of. If one person has all the power and uses it abusively, this is called a state. All you’re talking about is that you think the state is inevitable. There are many responses to this that have been covered in other threads. Simply do a search of “state inevitable” and you’ll pull them up…
Well by cooperating with the stronger. It costs a lot of money to build up armaments especially if you’re not going to use them. Sure PDAs could join together and do battle with competing PDAs but they have to bear the costs of their conflicts. The State on the other hand can externalize its costs so it is much more likely to engage in warfare.
Human beings have free will. There are no guarantees in anarchy or the state; we can only say that the incentive strucuters tend to promote certian types of behavior. The state structure promotes abuse.
And before democracy, Monarchy was the only setup that had worked. When America got started as a democracy, people were predicting that it would fall apart in total chaos within a matter of months; they were wrong. It is one thing to use evidence to come to conclusions, but when you have no experience with proper democracy or anarchy, you cannot condemn them.
Indeed you haven’t really addressed my example of the internet as a stable anarchy… and I would go further to say that the internet could not be a stable anarchy without the affordability of personal security on the internet. Imagine that there were no antivirus or firewall programs, and that everyone was vulnerable to attacks from everyone else. It would be chaos, and then restrictions on what you can and can’t send over the internet might be justified. For example, make it so that terminals can only send basic information through secure channels or something draconian like that. But instead, the internet has evolved cheaper and cheaper means of consumer protection spontaneously on its own, so that we don’t need a state to regulate our interactions on the internet. Innovation, competition, and private property rights have made it a revolution for all of mankind.
Can you imagine if the internet were run by the government? Mises.org probably wouldn’t exist.
Bull. There are many historical examples of unpopular laws and wars. You keep using this analogy of a pin standing; that if the pin were to fall over we would have chaos and everyone would shoot everyone. The deterioration into a hobbesian state of nature occurs very quickly under a state because the state will never give up control peacefully. You have to fight it, usually with guerrilla tactics. So in this way, the State itself is a pin, but this does not mean that all social arrangements are pins.
On the market, if one PDA went out of business it would be because another had taken its place or that demand had fallen too low. There is no pin here in the provision of security any more than there is a pin in any other industry. If the vegetable industry collapsed, everyone would not run into their backyards and start farming vegetables, so why do you think that if the security industry collapsed everyone would run into the streets a start shooting. If an industry were somehow to die when demand was still high, new companies would arise to meet the demand.
Even if this were true, it would simply mean that the market was self regulating and could solve this problem easily. Because if there is profit to be had by trading, and trading can only occur under a certain set of rules, then the market will tend to uphold whatever rules these are.
I hope you realize that people play by the rules in chess without government intervention.
So If I buy a hammer, does this mean I acquire “power” equivalent to political power since I can misuse the hammer and cause injury or death to someone?
Do you not see the absence of coercion in the process of acquiring “defense” services on a voluntary basis? The fact that the defense agency can theoretically turn criminal does not somehow make it more “powerful” then then anybody else in the free society. Any group of individuals can come together, buy firearms, and attempt to commit criminal acts against others. But “criminal” is the key term here! Misusing my hammer to inflict injury is criminal, just as it would be to misuse a defense agency.
No, it didn’t. Now either address your problems or concede. It’s time you grew up.
What population? The country’s population? The state’s? The county’s? The city’s? The neighborhood’s? The family’s? The individual? Please consider these options, and also consider why in the first place voting should be territorial at all. Why does the population have to all be in one place?
This is a strawman. Lack of monopoly on force does not mean lack of standards.
We already have a free market in power and law, it’s just that one “company” is monopolizing it in each territory: the State. The question is not whether we want to have a free market in power and law, because strictly speaking there’s really no way to escape a free market in power and law. The question is that, given we will always have a free market in power and law, do we want one group to have a perennial monopoly on it?
we already have a delicious meal, its just that the main course is disgusting.
We already have a would-be free market in power and law, it’s just that one “company” is monopolizing it in each territory.
With or without a state, there is not ONE human being that has ever lived on this planet toward whom force hasn’t been initiated. Force/aggression WILL be initiated, period. Take it as an axiom, if you prefer. If you don’t, we may as well argue the superiority of the HP (Happiness Principle) by which the only proper behavior is the one which makes the most people around you happy – and other such fairy tales.
The question we are discussing is merely about the TYPE (nature, size, predictability, volatility, and all other aspects) of the forces around you. I prefer a stable and predictable force – one whose whim changes at glacial speed due to the checks/balances of the democratic process. You prefer a dynamic and volatile one – driven by the “free” market in POWER. This difference is not unlike the difference between a conservative and an aggressive investor or a mortgage buyer – the former preferring fixed and predictable income/payments over the long term vs. the latter who’s willing to take (MUCH) more risk for (presumably) higher returns. Except the risks and returns of the riskier strategy are nothing more than a conjecture on your part since there’s no data to perform a back-test.
So no, I don’t have to prove anything to you as we’re both living the sustainable REALITY that I claim. It is YOU who has to prove that your sand castle model is in fact transferable into reality if you want people to subscribe to the concept. So far, after this thread, I am equally (perhaps even a bit less) convinced that your model holds water.
And FYI, I prefer losing to winning my arguments. I am merely a curious skeptic before anything else, and am not married to any ideology (life is too short for commitments of such sort). This allows me to especially look forward to losing an argument. Sadly, it hasn’t happened here yet.
Z.
so you advocate initiating physical aggression and say you “WILL” do it. thanks for letting us know you just flew off the handle. i hope you aren’t making bombs in your attic. [8-)]
edit: dude you really need to start explaining yourself. you don’t sound too good.
So what? Why don’t you try again–this time, a measure of thought before you post would help.
America wasn’t started as a democracy.
I think what Snowflake’s point is, and a valid one for Z135, is that large scale change has happen and resistance to that change have always had the same arguments. Destruction, chaos, turmoil. meanwhile ignoring the destruction and chaos of their existing system. Mises states it well in human action.
You reveal to us that your entire arguments are backed by nothing more than opinions. You like the freemarket only sometimes. The distinction of when you do and do and do not wish to use the market is entirely arbitrary and based on unsubstantiated fears.
You need to pull your emotion out of this and do your historical and economic research with a clear head. Don’t be scared of the truth bud. 
You can always unplug your computer from the network or push the power button off. You get up from your chair with merely a “Wow, that didn’t work out as expected.” Or in the case with private security working today, you can always call the state when/if things get out of hand. You know it, they know it, and everyone knows it. Examples of stable anarchies abound under the uncontestable power of a “night watchman” incentivising every agent’s behavior in a profound way – and you get to live another day, to give it another go, even if your risk/reward model was wrong. But what about merchant M4 sitting at your dinner table with an “offer you can’t refuse” – his men with guns getting antsy in the truck out in front? Who are you going to call then? What are you going to do? Ostracize him into shame, or slap him into submission with your copy of “Ethics of Liberty”? Or go ahead and “voluntarily” sign the “protection” contract under your nose? Yes, exactly the same way it works with apples and carpet-cleaning.
Z.
But you can refuse it. Stop trying to justify theft.
So? You can always avoid crime by moving to the middle of the desert. You shouldn’t have to forfeit your private property to avoid aggression; that itself would be aggression.
Haaaaah. The opposite. The state won’t put men outside your store or outside your apartments cus it doesn’t care. Its the failure of the state to provide security that private agencies have arisen. The whole point that there are more private security agencies and more cases settled in private courts was that the State doesn’t even do most of the work as far as social order is concerned.
I wouldn’t be able to call anyone, not even the state. Look this is an idiotic and childish example. ANARCHY WON’T WORK CUS WHAT IF YOU WERE SURROUNDED BY TERRORIST KILLERS. derp.
But let me indulge you: You’re just saying I need to be in a group to defend myself against gangs like this. Anarchy doesn’t say you can’t organize, it just says you can’t force people to join your cause. So, say for example, the landlord at my apartment complex takes part of our rent and uses it to protect us from baddies. This is exactly analogous to a tax, so anything a state can do, my apartment complex can do. The difference is that the landlord has legitimate ownership over the complex, and our rights are defined in voluntary contracts.
Actually it does. You can die if someone somehow monopolizes penicillin, or food, or electricity. Someone could threaten you by cutting off any one of these resources, exactly like an M4. Except its going to be insanely hard to do so, because monopolizing these industries is near impossible.
Look: We have free will. Anything could happen at any time. Its just that the incentive structure of the state is towards despotism and war. The incentive structures of anarchy are towards cooperation and compromise. This is why we prefer anarchy to the state. Anarchy is not a Utopia. Shit happens. But it is far superior to the idea that we should cede our power to a central authority.