Question for Minarchists, Anarchists, AnCaps etc?

[shawn77]

I’ve been wrestling with the logical inconsistencies with arguing for the free market as the best allocater of scarce resources in every sector except the traditional minarchist areas, the law, and national defense. Can anyone make an argument for minarchy without claiming the market will under produce these goods?

[Simon_Lote]

The argument for minarchy is that the provision of law and justice in any given territory is a natural monopoly and any competition in the provision of law and justice in any given territory will simply result in one winner who will then establish a monopoly.

i.e. What’s to stop private defence agency A, from launching a hostile takeover (quite literaly!) of private defence agency B and establish a territorial monopoly.

Minarchist will also point to the 6,000 years of recorded history which show that civilisation and the state march in tandem.

[Angurse]

Competing protection agencies will battle.

[Snowflake]

And whats to stop them is sound here http://www.lewrockwell.com/long/long11.html

[scineram]

I’ve been wrestling with the logical inconsistencies with arguing for the free market as the best allocater of scarce resources in every sector except the traditional minarchist areas, the law, and national defense. Can anyone make an argument for minarchy without claiming the market will under produce these goods?

The free market assumes law and order. Therefore they cannot be products of the market.

[Snowflake]

@scineram

The free market assumes law and order. Therefore they cannot be products of the market.

You should like, read.

Another popular argument, also used often by the Randians, is that market exchanges presuppose a background of property law. You and I can’t be making exchanges of goods for services, or money for services, or whatever, unless there’s already a stable background of property law that ensures us the property titles that we have. And because the market, in order to function, presupposes existing background property law, therefore, that property law cannot itself be the product of the market. The property law must emerge – they must really think it must emerge out of an infallible robot or something – but I don’t know exactly what it emerges from, but somehow it can’t emerge from the market.

But their thinking this is sort of like: first, there’s this property law, and it’s all put in place, and no market transactions are happening – everyone is just waiting for the whole legal structure to be put in place. And then it’s in place – and now we can finally start trading back and forth. It certainly is true that you can’t have functioning markets without a functioning legal system; that’s true. But it’s not as though first the legal system is in place, and then on the last day they finally finish putting the legal system together – then people begin their trading. These things arise together. Legal institutions and economic trade arise together in one and the same place, at one and the same time. The legal system is not something independent of the activity it constrains. After all, a legal system again is not a robot or a god or something separate from us. The existence of a legal system consists in people obeying it. If everyone ignored the legal system, it would have no power at all. So it’s only because people generally go along with it that it survives. The legal system, too, depends on voluntary support.

I think that a lot of people – one reason that they’re scared of anarchy is they think that under government it’s as though there’s some kind of guarantee that’s taken away under anarchy. That somehow there’s this firm background we can always fall back on that under anarchy is just gone. But the firm background is just the product of people interacting with the incentives that they have. Likewise, when anarchists say people under anarchy would probably have the incentive to do this or that, and people say, “Well, that’s not good enough! I don’t just want it to be likely that they’ll have the incentive to do this. I want the government to absolutely guarantee that they’ll do it!” But the government is just people. And depending on what the constitutional structure of that government is, it’s likely that they’ll do this or that. You can’t design a constitution that will guarantee that the people in the government will behave in any particular way. You can structure it in such a way so that they’re more likely to do this or less likely to do this. And you can see anarchy as just an extension of checks-and-balances to a broader level.

For example, people say, “What guarantees that the different agencies will resolve things in any particular way?” Well, the U.S. Constitution says nothing about what happens if different branches of the government disagree about how to resolve things. It doesn’t say what happens if the Supreme Court thinks something is unconstitutional but Congress thinks it doesn’t, and wants to go ahead and do it anyway. Famously, it doesn’t say what happens if there’s a dispute between the states and the federal government. The current system where once the Supreme Court declares something unconstitutional, then the Congress and the President don’t try to do it anymore (or at least not quite so much) – that didn’t always exist. Remember when the Court declared what Andrew Jackson was doing unconstitutional, when he was President, he just said, “Well, they’ve made their decision, let them enforce it.” The Constitution doesn’t say whether the way Jackson did it was the right way. The way we do it now is the way that’s emerged through custom. Maybe you’re for it, maybe you’re against it – whatever it is, it was never codified in law.

[Sage]

A magical parchment will protect individual rights more effectively than a competitive institutional structure of checks and balances.

Competing protection agencies will battle, so we need to establish one super-agency that has the ability to plunder everyone more thoroughly than any private agency ever could.

[scineram]

Legal institutions and economic trade arise together in one and the same place, at one and the same time. The legal system is not something independent of the activity it constrains. After all, a legal system again is not a robot or a god or something separate from us. The existence of a legal system consists in people obeying it. If everyone ignored the legal system, it would have no power at all. So it’s only because people generally go along with it that it survives. The legal system, too, depends on voluntary support.

Yes. This is why modern industrial economies and nation states emerged together.

[Angurse]

Sure, sure, I thought the OP just wanted to read some arguments not the entire debate, otherwise he probably came to the wrong place.

[Snowflake]

@**scineram

**Yes. This is why modern industrial economies and nation states emerged together.

“legal system” is not synonymous with a state.

[MatthewF]

“The free market assumes law and order. Therefore they cannot be products of the market.”

[Zavoi]

@"[Long's

(http://www.lewrockwell.com/long/long11.html)"]But their thinking this is sort of like: first, there’s this property law, and it’s all put in place, and no market transactions are happening – everyone is just waiting for the whole legal structure to be put in place. And then it’s in place – and now we can finally start trading back and forth. It certainly is true that you can’t have functioning markets without a functioning legal system; that’s true. But it’s not as though first the legal system is in place, and then on the last day they finally finish putting the legal system together – then people begin their trading. These things arise together. Legal institutions and economic trade arise together in one and the same place, at one and the same time. The legal system is not something independent of the activity it constrains.

But it’s also not the case that first there’s free market exchange, with no legal disputes happening, and everyone’s just waiting to create a legal system until there’s a functioning free market in place. After all, the market is not something independent of the legal system under which it operates.

The point is that if the government were to disappear overnight, it is not at all certain that the incentives would lead to the creation of a libertarian order. Indeed, if the abolition of the current government happens in the wrong way, we may well find an even more oppressive regime rushing into the vacuum of power.

[Snowflake]

@**Zavoi

**The point is that if the government were to disappear overnight, it is not at all certain that the incentives would lead to the creation of a libertarian order. Indeed, if the abolition of the current government happens in the wrong way, we may well find an even more oppressive regime rushing into the vacuum of power.

Maybe. But people have all these incentives to form voluntary associations with one another. I think its more likely to get a more oppressive regime through government rather than its absence, since the means of oppression (centralized military, percieved legitimacy) won’t be around anymore.

The anti anarchist camp usually imagines that exogenous superwarlords could just move in and people would be like “aww man that sucks but I guess I have to live with it” and you’d have this involuntary society persisting. But no modern government has ever ruled without general approval. Warlords typically aren’t very beloved.

[DD5]

“The free market assumes law and order. Therefore they cannot be products of the market.”

Everything is a product of the market unless it is an abundant (non-scarce) resource, i.e., air, sunlight, etc…