Guns.
Arbitration
Is the alleged privately owned Fed (as the socialists will insist it is) a good refutation to free banking? It is enough that you say no for you to reexamine the Machiavellian mercenaries analogy. I don’t want to have a discussion on mercenaries. Maybe it deserves another thread, but it is enough that you realize that you cannot employ socialist tactics of conflating Capitalism with Interventionism, to show that free market defense agencies fail.
Which is why we need government roads, government water and sewer system, government regulatory agencies, and government healthcare… All because we are living in a Greek tragedy.
A complete Straw man. No assumptions about any change in human nature are made in the ancap society. On the contrary, it is human nature that makes the laissez-fair limited government society a utopia.
All of the problems of economic centralization and planning, i.e., knowledge problem and incentives, are present for defense and law just as they are for any other commodity. They are also just as coercive in nature as any other government intervention.
The burden of proof should be on you to explain why such services cannot be produced and traded by voluntary means on a free market just like any other good. The reasons you’ve stated thus far are all fallacies. The inner contradictions and inconsistencies can be easily exposed and have never been properly responded to other then resorting to mystical grounds.
And I asked and did not get a response.
How will the criminal gang finance its costly war to “seize power” in a society of individuals who maintain the right to defend themselves and hire defense agencies on the free market to safeguard the smooth operation of the market?
In a free market there would be no drug gangs since for about $80 you could buy an ounce of cocaine or kilo of marijuana which would last most folks a long long time (maybe a week if you were John Belushi or Bob Marley)
PDAs would become successful for providing defense not aggression.
Free markets don’t concentrate the wealth, they spread it allowing the rich to get richer and the poor too. The best competitors in a free market are not the greediest but the one who can cooperate with a variety of ‘customers’ more effectively.
You misunderstand. I am not saying that is why we NEED govts. I am saying that is why THEY WILL SPROUT UP AGAIN AND AGAIN, even though we DON’T need them. The evidence for such a Greek Tragedy theory is that is has happened over and over without fail.
Same thing with the second part of your post, which for brevity I won’t copy here. You say it is up to me to explain why we need a govt, how it will solve the knowledge problem, and on and on. I’m not saying we need one, and I’m not saying it will do a good job when it comes to be. I am saying that it seems like a sound argument that some kind of govt will always arise, like it or not. Not because we need one, not because its solves anything, but because the dark side of human nature will produce it.
As for human nature making lassiaz faire a utopia, sure that’s true. It also makes falling in love a pleasant experience.
But people have a dark side as well, and that dark side will, like Dr Frankenstein making his monster, create govts.
By extortion. Those Mexican peassants are poor and unarmed. Why can they not be enslaved?
A really great post.
The only quibble I have is with the last paragraph, and I quote:
“In a society where the state can no longer succeed in preserving its extreme disequilibrium of force, it is obvious that no other organization can recreate such a situation, no matter how wealthy. It will always be vulnerable to a retaliation if it attempts to wield power on others.”
My thinking is, maybe they cannot recreate it on as large a scale, over a whole country. But what is to stop alot of localk gangs to set their own little fiefdoms, each one terrorizing a small community?
You’ve understood nothing of what you read.
oh. ok [8-)]
That’s a fallacy.
Anyway, it’s no sound argument against the possibility of a free society. We’ve lived through the most liberal era of the human history. According to your historical determinism, this passing era should have been deemed impossible the eve before the Industrial revolution.
A small minority of gangsters cannot enslave an entire population unless there is some degree of consent. No government can exist without such consent.
Anyway, your hypothetical scenario doesn’t make any economic sense. How could this small minority of criminals finance their initial conquest to begin with? Who would finance it? Who would they initially expropriate in order to finance their war? And even if the peasants were not poor, how could they use extortion to finance their war, without first conducting the war and winning it? You run into a circular argument, which does not make any sense. It is not as easy as you think it is for a government to form in any type of society, let alone a society that is initially free.
Benjamin, thanks for asking these questions. 
Here is my attempt at an answer. We’ll see how good of an anarcho-capitalist I really am
First of all, let’s keep straight what we mean by a government.
The basis of anarcho-capitalism (which I think is the correct term for what you call “right wing libertarianism”) is that aggression is never justified.
Thus, what an anarcho-capitalist objects to is the fact that governments claim the power to tax (take goods without mutual agreement) and to legislate (define situations in which they can legitimately use aggression).
Aggression, by the way, is different from violence. As an example, suppose that you beat me up and steal my wallet, and the next day I find you, beat you up, and steal your wallet. We have both used violence, obviously, but only you have been aggressive. Aggression means initiating violence against someone else. Thus, self defense and punishment of aggression with violence are acceptable to an anarcho-capitalist.
No, this is not correct. They would only be a new government if they claimed the power to either take other people’s money (tax) and use aggression against others in situations they define (legislate), or both.
So if their rules amount to “do not take someone else’s stuff” and “do not attack other people,” then no, they are in fact not a government.
You are correct, you will always have aggressive people. You are also correct that there cannot be a power vacuum.
In my mind, your question can be summed up as “what if some evil people take everybody else over”? The rest of your post is about this very problem, as far as I can tell.
There are a couple of anarcho-capitalist replies.
- On a positive side (a good solution to the problem)
The idea is that individual people realize that they need help to protect their life/property (duh) and that entrepreneurs set up protection agencies that collect fees from people in exchange for protection/insurance. Think insurance companies that offer policies against being robbed, murdered, etc… (see the excellent article by Hans-Herman Hoppe for a vision of such a system: http://blog.mises.org/8235/on-the-impossibility-of-limited-government/ ). What this wold effectively do is level the playing field between the wealthy (who could afford their own private armies) and everybody else (who can’t individually, but through the medium of a large insurance company could).
These insurance companies have a built-in restraint on becoming too evil (in the eyes of their customers): competition. If my insurance company starts collecting extra “protection money” and threatens to break my knees if I don’t pay, I can turn to their competitor. Now it is possible for said competition to fail, but it would mean that almost all of the insurance companies simultaneously become evil (and that their employees don’t quit… etc…), which is a bit far-fetched.
- On the negative side (why a government is not a good solution)
An anarcho-capitalist would point out that a decentralized directly democratic government IS an offense pact (how is it funded? by donations?). So you have in fact NOT solved the conundrum. What you are suggesting is this:
- Set up an offense pact (a decentralized directly democratic government)
- Ensure that this organization does not commit aggression EXCEPT for in a few specific ways.
- Ensure that this organization is strong enough to get rid of any other aggressive organization.
The kicker, of course, is number 2. You have no historical example that I know of of how to successfully do this. Even direct democracies can become quite despotic (tyrany of the majority anyone?)
Fulfilling number 3 (which is easy enough) makes fulfilling number 2 difficult. Furthermore, there is no logical stopping place as to what aggression is “okay” and what types are “not okay”. If it is okay to confiscate property in order to provide safety from thieves, why is it not also okay to do so in order to provide safety from sickness, or unemployment, or …
The point is, you are left with the same conundrum. In fact, you have made the problem worse: now all a malicious person seeking for power has to do is gain control of the existing government coercion mechanisms (which are already in place and which people are already used to).
In contrast, let’s look at the situation you proposed. One rogue gang is trying to take over the whole society and effectively become the government. Their task is much more difficult, since they need to overpower all rival gangs and all protection organizations individually. They need to do this in the face of a society that is not currently under a unified regime: they have to introduce their own coercive mechanisms on a populace that is not accustomed to them.
This is certainly possible to do, but much harder than simply swaying the populace to appoint you (as opposed to someone else) as the fuhrer. You must first “persuade” everybody that there should BE a fuhrer.
As some others have pointed out, that sum of money could bribe a great number of politicians
This is an example of what I am talking about. Slim the Second’s job is much harder if he’s trying to gain the power to aggress in a society without an accepted government, because he literally has to fight the whole way there. On the other hand, if he only has to bribe a few hundred politicians, or sway the hearts of much of the populace with phony arguments (think of Hitler or the like) his job is much easier.
The truly free market does in fact have limits to the extreme concentration of wealth, and that is the enforcement of private property rights. If I acquire wealth by aggression, I will necessarily acquire enemies along the way. Acquiring my wealth by trade is more efficient and will get me farther (assuming that there is no government to grant me special favors and thus give me the benefits of coercion without the price of actual combat). But in order to amass a significant portion of the wealth of an economy (the comments about the inappropriateness of the GDP to wealth comparison are valid and important here), I would need to have provided goods and services that were worth the same as that wealth in the eyes of my customers (or else they would not have swapped with me). Thus, having one person (or small cohesive group) with “all the wealth” is a very hard situation to construct in real life. This is partly because it is quite far-fetched to assume that only a single person is smart enough to provide such valuable goods and services. While Carlos Slim is indeed quite wealthy, are there not other wealthy people in Mexico? Perhaps they do not have wealth as great as he does individually, but suppose we take a group of them together?
My point is that:
- the situation of a single almost-all-powerful rich person(or cohesive group) is very hard to construct, unless he acquired his wealth by violence.
- it is almost impossible to get that level of wealth by violence unless you can somehow cloke the violence with legitmacy, which requires the favors of an accepted government. Otherwise, others will oppose you before you’ve reached the point where your victory is assured.
I hope this post proves helpful to you.
As to what to read for more perspective:
I again recommend Hoppe’s article: http://blog.mises.org/8235/on-the-impossibility-of-limited-government/
you could also try: http://blog.mises.org/10500/the-irrelevance-of-the-impossibility-of-anarcho-libertarianism/
Murray Rothbard’s “Ethics of Liberty” is good in this regard too http://mises.org/rothbard/Ethics/Ethics.asp
as is this article by Rothbard: http://mises.org/daily/2120 (“law, property rights, and air pollution”)
I trhink it’s the best one. Got to the heart of the matter, provided some links, assumed the reader had a brain.
TY.
There you go again. Making up these scary campfire stories. Are you having fun doing it? Is it your fear you’re spreading or what? Anxiety on your part or what? If that’s the only way to get people to follow along with a person’s story, by scaring them, that only shows how bunk the story is to begin with. It’s only a short hop-skip and a jump away from appeal to coercion. Start with scaring people into another individual’s arbitrary propagandist story-line; next it’s coerce them into living the story. I mean we could talk about how the boggie-man is going to gobble up all the kids if you want.
And your inevitable greek tragedy is the Historical School. Add on it’s all caused by materialistic production and soon we’ll be reading the sect called Marxism.
Prove to me we need a gov’t.
Listen to what DD5 is saying.
Wow. Just Wow.
Well if you are really good at drawing paintings but piss poor at handling a firearm, wouldn’t it make sense to use some of the money from the sales of your paintings to buy some protection services?
I don’t really understand what you are getting at. You think pulling a trigger is hard? Or do you think everyone will have body guards? Because how is a protection service going to be any better than the cops of today? Would you rather wait for someone to get there to help you out, or would you rather just have a gun? I myself would rather just have a gun, and I think most people would too. Its cheaper and quicker, for self defense.
I can’t do it while standing on my head so don’t ask.[:P]
I hope you know it was nothing personal, but at least you saw what I saw in that demonstration of the OP.
A gun is useful for suppressing assailants, but as a real combat weapon it’s becoming less and less effective. Bombs are the new guns, and as they get cheaper and more precise the world’s guerrillas are relying on them and avoiding gun battles as much as possible.
Of course any self-respecting place will have armed security guards. It’s absurd to believe that you can arm women, children and the elderly at all times.
I don’t know if anybody else lives in the country or knows of these, but I think ‘hunting clubs’ and ‘fishing clubs’ will become very popular again. They are now. But I wouldn’t doubt an explosion of popularity even more than now would happen. Sometimes firehalls around here pull in hundreds of people for gun shows. But the hunting clubs where families go out in the country and have picnics at these designated places are active today. The kids run around play maybe fish at the pond some have or shoot at the rifle range, and the adults that desire to shoot at the rifle range during that day or any other free day they have I think will become even more prevalent. Good community bonds can happen there and if somebody ever gets into trouble well they know who has a gun.
Hi stochastic, that does clarify the intent to me.
I suppose my hangup is that I would be wary of hiring an insurance company or anyone else who’s motivation is monetary for protection, on the account that financial rewards have a limited ability to motivate people. Money can’t be enjoyed by a deceased person, for example, and money usually provides less of an incentive than threats of retaliation against family members, for example, which would presumably be the problem.
If I were a citizen of Juarez, I probably would have enough money to afford a firearm, but not enough money to afford to hire another to wield a firearm for me. If I pooled my resources with neighbors, we could possibly afford to hire a small number of people to help defend us, but this number would be far fewer than than the number of people contributing to their salaries. If the private defense agency we had hired had similar or lesser capabilities than the aggressive force, then there is a decent chance that, anticipating high casualties, they would refuse to fight.
In other words, whether we hired others or not, we would probably still have to fight ourselves and organize ourselves into an effective militia to achieve our common defense from the threat of organized bandits.
The question then becomes, on what lines do we organize our militia, and how do we deal with the problem of free riders. The twin dangers are that on the one hand, that by not dealing with the problem of free riders, the citizens defending their rights do not have the military resources or necessary cohesion for victory and are enslaved along with the free riders, or, on the other, the militia aggressively deals with the problem of free riders, achieves victory but then behaves similarly to the vanquished bandits, extorting money under threat of violence.
I don’t think there is a perfect solution to this problem, but rather that the best solution is a compromise between two bad situations; defeat due to excessive free riders and victory through imitation of the bandits. The middle path, in my opinion, is for the militia to be directly democratic and decentralized. The militia of Juarez would raise taxes to the extent that the citizens of Juarez decided through plebiscite, and military obligations would be decided by plebiscite as well. Such an organization would very probably be strong enough to deal with local banditry, but its policies would also not be to the liking of the minority of its citizens. Citizens who were displeased could either attempt to use persuasion on their fellow citizens to achieve a different outcome on the next vote, or, if they were seriously displeased, would be free to move to a nearby town, which presumably would be having its own plebiscites and setting its own policies. Large scale defense could be achieved by mutual defense pacts between communities, and the pooling of resources to hire a professional army as a supplement to the militias. If drawn from the constituent communities, such an army would likely be far more effective than any private agency, because its soldiers would be fighting in defense of their own communities.
2. Ensure that this organization does not commit aggression EXCEPT for in a few specific ways…
The kicker, of course, is number 2. You have no historical example that I know of of how to successfully do this. Even direct democracies can become quite despotic (tyrany of the majority anyone?)
I would posit that Switzerland is a historical example which as used the basic approach I’ve outlined above, although of course there is ample room for improvement. I would also posit that this model is also basically followed by many hunter-gatherer tribes, and was the ideal of the anti-Federalist leaning founders of the U.S., and that the U.S. has fallen away from these ideals mostly because of the “representative” and centralized as opposed to direct and decentralized nature of our democratic institutions. I would consider the ability to significantly participate in the system and also the ability to relocate easily to a different community to be a sufficient response to the tyranny of the majority problem, given that is also likely a sufficient response to the the tyranny of Attila the Hun problem, which, as I said above, I do not believe could be adequately addressed by the profit motive.
Personally, I would not feel adequately safe or protected by individuals who offer protection on the basis of the individual profit motive. I would be happy to live adjacent to a community which practiced or experimented with free-market defense, but I would like to be able to choose a community to live in which would be defended on the basis of communal, ideological and democratic solidarity. If free market defense did seem to be working out more efficiently in other communities I could certainly reexamine my analysis.
What makes you think that the profit motive isn’t based on communal, ideological, and democratic solidarity? [of course I mean in the non-gov’t sense cause a gov’t isn’t communal, ideological, and isn’t democratic in its solidarity unless somebody wants to try to argue that forcing people to do something with physical aggression is somehow ‘solidarity’]
So I don’t get what you are getting at here. You think every home and building in a free society will have armed guards posted? If so, who will be watching the homes of the guards? If not, then how do we disagree?
I just don’t think there will be mass violence in a free world. There would just be localized violence, namely assailants.