What’s stopping the private militias from seizing power? I’ve been entertaining the idea of no government as I start to get into Austrian Literature (recommended by you all!). Also, what’s stopping the militias from bickering/being destroyed by a larger, more centralized foreign force?
Must. contain. fist. of. death.
Seriously: what prevents McDonalds from destroying Burger King? What stops governments now from all-out war on every other government?
Answer: people are more rational than you might think.
Because they would risk their own destruction, and that wouldn’t be profitable? I think…?
Self-interest. This questions comes up all of the time…
How would you fund a militia? How would you fund an invasion? Why would anyone invade a geographic area where there was no central command?
These questions are irrelevant, although I went through the same phase of trying to understand how it would work.
Wars are expensive. Governments can externalize the costs of war (taxation, inflation, debt), so the have incentives to go to war more often. Private businesses, on the other hand, must pay all the costs of war.
Nothing. Either a sizable amount of people realize that libertarianism is the only civilized way to live, or we’ll be stuck with governments forever. It’s true that war is expensive, but that doesn’t stop war, as should be obvious to anyone who looked at 20th century history.
The laws of economics.
But how does that legitimize the state? You may think your government protects you from the buggie men of anarchy, but what right does that give you to force your government onto other people?
There is really little incentive for militias to do anything but defend their homes. Militias when used offensively are a disaster, which is their strongest selling point to me. They desert and frag commanders and generally become uncooperative and usually band together to demand just compensation if they ARE to go a marching off. The militia has little incentive to go a viking because they are normal everyday people with arms, tehy are already busy engaged in their lives outside of any war. They have more desie to plow a feild or lay a brick than pillage a town or slaughter a neighbor. It takes a lot of conditioning (read: military training) to get a man used to the idea of killing as a everyday activity.
My question about anarchy and this isn’t tongue-in-cheek.
in anarchy what stops everything from being exactly the same as it is now? powerful factions gain control of ever larger pieces of land until everyone is living under one of them. under anarchy the collectivists eventually win.
Humans are social and hierarchical beings. They will naturally coalesce into communities of shared interests. In anarchy, these communities will have to compete for capital. A natural elite (as opposed to the bottom-up elite imposed by democracy) will arise and enable the peaceful activities of intellectuals, artists and the merchant and trade classes. The cuckoo-clock crazy thug with his band of lesser thugs will eventually find himself living under a bridge or scratching out a living on some land nobody wants.
Wrong. There’s no such thing as a ‘natural elite’ enabling anything. What people here term ‘natural elites’ are actually oligarchies. The libertarian polical system is based on mutually respected individual rights, not on hierarchical organization. Libertarianism is not ‘voluntary’ feudalism.
You can sermonize all you want. It doesn’t change the nature of humans as social and hierarchical beings.
I didn’t say humans are not social beings, though it’s not totally clear what’s meant by that. And you can sermonize all you want, too. The only difference is that your conservative sermon doesn’t square with the facts.
From the Mises Institute to your local football team to the crew at your watering hole, human society is hierarchical. You’d have to live in a communist hellhole to find a flat society. And in that event, you still have hierarchs: the ones tasked with stamping down people of merit.
Which one would that be, the division of labour?
You forgot the first kind of hierarchy: the family.
HA. I was just about to post this as a response to Byzantine :
You’re confusing division-of-labour with hierarchy.
Leadership is a marketable commodity.
To recap : No such thing as ‘natural elites’ in the political realm. If you want to say that the best engineers belong to some abstract natural elite, fine, but as a social theory that’s wholly irrelevant.
I get it, you just ignore the inconvenient facts.