Is the FED more powerful than government? If so does this not prove that in a truly free market, corporations would work together to form their own central banking system (which deviates from the gold standard) and potentially a state, much like how Rockefeller helped create the FED in the first place. After all the FED is a private company…or is it only because of state regulation, subsidisation, elusive secrecy (the “people’s” bank) and protection from bank runs that help maintain the FED? I understand that in theory monopolies cannot obtain under voluntaryism, but that is not exactly my question; my question is really whether politics have more influence over capital or capital more influence over politics. Who owns who, so to speak?
Under voluntaryism, would the entrepeneur not be likely to install toll boothes on every stretch of road and pavement? It would cost me a lot just to walk to the shops in such a scenario! Haha.
How do you propose keeping bankers from deviating from the gold standard, as clearly they have been all to willing to do so, historically…
A foreign state cannot invade an anarchy because there is no centralised power scheme to infiltrate and most people own a private protection agency to protect their land. That seems a good system, but what if a foreign state were to sneakily fund a private protection agency to form a monopoly on coercion and subsequently a new state?
What happens if two people who have a conflict pay for courts that have different rulings in the free market?
Can you prosecute someone on the behalf of their victim? For instance a murdered man cannot launch a prosecution himself, etc.
I had some more questions but can’t think of them at the moment…
No. The Fed can only be that powerful through being protected by the state. Which is only possible because of peoples superstitions about the usefulness of the state. Private companies couldn’t pull that off.
Not if he competes for customers. The only problem I could come up with is that the road owner would be so rich that he doesn’t care about the profits. Meaning it’s worth the losses for him to harass some people he doesn’t like, for example a religious or ethnic group. Anyone got a response to that?
I wouldn’t support such centralized control. This is a complicated issue and there have been whole threads about this. This one comes to mind. My short answer would be that any bank could offer any currency they want and customers would prefer those backed by commodities.
I realize that complete anarchy is problematic as long as there are still authoritarian states in the world. In my mind anarchy is not something that some regions implement while the rest of the world still are authoritarian dictatorships. Rather, all countries gradually build down their state involvement in the economy as they are becomming more economically interdependent. At the point where some countries decide to outright abolish the state there won’t be any evil dictatorships around any more.
Read The Machinery of Freedom. It’s free. Short answer is that there would be higher layers of courts that they hand the decision to. Also, fighting legal battes is expensive and keeps you from engaging in profitable work, so everyone has an incentive to accept a slightly imperfect ruling rather than to keep fighting.
I think so. It’s in the book if you care about the details.
As for your blogpost. I read that back when you mentioned it in the other thread. I wrote a partial response, and never posted it. I will write a new response and post it in this thread.
In order for the FED to exist it requires the government to enforce it. Without the government the FED (as it is now) wouldn’t exist.
While they can install toll booths on every stretch of road it’s more likely they’ll charge the shop owners. Think of a mall, you aren’t charged to enter a mall but rather the cost of upkeep on the mall is covered by the shop owners who get customers because the mall exists. If I am a shop owner I am going to want my customers to have easy access to my shop, this likely means a well maintained road system, mass transit system, etc.
In a free market there is competition in all ventures which includes banking. There is no need to keep bankers on the gold standard unless that is what the consumer wants. Some consumers may desire a wholely unbacked currency while others may desire fractional reserve backing and yet others full reserve backing.
Nothing, but realize that these foreign states would need to serve their customers in such a way as to be competative in the market. This reminds me of Austin Powers (movie) where Dr. Evil comes back and his evil empire is making boatloads of money legitimately yet he still wants to be evil about the whole thing. If someone can effectively run a business and get wealthy that way, what motive is there for domination? I understand that this is a subjective argument so the short answer is there isn’t anything stopping that. Once they revealed their purpose as secret hostile takeover though they would immediately lose almost all of their business and the market can come up with competitors very fast when it’s needed.
I would suggest a separate topic for this one as it is the most controversial.
Insurance solves this problem. If I have murder insurance then when I am killed the insurance agency has to give a ton of money to someone. The insurance agency would rather not have to give up all that money so they have incentive to locate and get the money out of the person who killed me so they get their money back.
What is the voluntaryist stance on prisons vs. outlawry? I tend to lean towards prison since I believe it is important to protect the individual rights of could be victims but only for more serious crimes, like rape, murder, etc. I oppose capital punishment not so much on an ethical basis but on the basis that offenders have no chance to reappeal or disprove the allegations launched against them. In prison, however, they may reappeal. That said, I do not oppose the prisoners right to commit suicide, e.g. by means of lethal injection.
Or what if he blocks the road from potential business competitors, hence driving away competition in order to protect his own monopoly?
Huh? But states aren’t market entities and thereby do not have to serve their customers…
Agree with LS here. Fed IS governement. They only exist due to a violenetly enforced monopoly
They could, or they could not. But most likely they will figure out ways to collect money that make using their road the easiest and cheapest option for the consumers.
Competition. I would rather accept currency backed by 100% commodity than one that isn’t
Again, LS stated it well: back to square one.
This I am not sure of since we really don’t know how a free market would handle this. I’m sure though, that competing entities will come to a better and more fair solution to the problem than the current violent monopoly has.
Btw, if I have not responded to a point it is because I feel it has sufficiently addressed my question so don’t take offense
But, then we have a state again? Surely the violence involved in recreating the state would not have been worth it? I think Nero was correct to point out anarchy cannot be established without foreign states being reduced in size themselves, so to speak. I think this is where you and LS are coming from also (think)
As it happens I read this a while back but had a few objections in my head (though some are probably forgotten) like what about the pacifist that doesn’t make a will, or what about the pacifist that objects to his killer being prosecuted but then his killer goes out and kills someone else. Also, would not such a legal system essentially revert to the lex tallionis - an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, etc. (I say this because as I recall he advocates something like equal retribution for the crime committed - you kill, you die and so forth - but when taken to the logical extreme of, say, you get drunk and attack someone you must also suffer a broken jaw as consequence, things start getting a tad ridiculous - though I may have misunderstood and Rothbard would actually advocate a financial recompensation of sorts in such a scenario). Also it is all very well to favour individualism over utilitarianism (a stance I mostly favour) but the individual rights of others besides the victim are also important if the agressor could potentially strike again, so to speak (hence explaining why some liberals bring up the ‘greatest good for the greatest number of people’ arguments, advocating rehabilitation, community service and what not - though I do not necessarily agree, admittedly).
I also have objections to capital punishment where the evidence is not always conclusive (I have no problems with capital punishment when the killer is clearly guilty - e.g. irrefutably CCTV footage) because it means the suspect never has a chance to reappeal. Hence, I personally prefer life imprisonment. What about crimes of passion or crimes on diminished responsibility (though I realise Mises’ disagrees with light punishment for diminished responsibility in human action on the grounds of all action being rational).
I must say, I never quite understood that last part. So if I missed the point and it’s something you still believe, then let me know.
It’s not really important. We could for example tax oil at the point of production for the potential environmental damage, and that cost would be passed on to car manufacturers, car users and such.
Environmental problems are not growing. They are the least threatening ever.
Everyone at least owns themselves, so even the propertyless can sue over for example being exposed to air pollution. Although I doubt there will be too many propertyless in a radically free market.
We have no reason to believe that private courts would favor the rich. Their greatest incentive is to appear fair to attract customers. Also, in a radically free market society wealth would be far less concentrated. I think I responded to this part in the other thread.
The damage done by for example dumping waste is more than what you save by dumping it, you are always imposing a disproportionately greater damage. Therefore the fines for environmental crimes (the cost of cleanup and proper disposal) would always be higher than the savings.
Resources without commercial value are not worth saving. You have to remember that everything comes at a cost. More forests means fewer machines for cancer treatment. We have to decide what we want and environmental protection is not always th desirable good. Environmental protection is not a good that is categorically valued above everything else. Luckily we have the market to guide us, the most profitable venture for the capitalist will also be the most valuable for humanity. If chopping down a forest to build a factory is the most profitable for the owner, then that’s what makes humanity the richest, through what that factory produces, which we wouldn’t have had otherwise. Humanity needs toxic waste disposal sites. Although it is likely that less environmentally valuable areas will be used for building factories and waste disposal sites, not prime wildlife reserves. They have greater value as hunting or leisure areas. Also remember that environmental damage is rarely permanent. We chop the forest down now, but it will grow back once we are rich and have the luxury to maintain the environment.
Non-environmental externalities don’t exist. A company can’t save costs by reducing safety measures. That is because safety measures exist in the first place because companies compete for labor, so called compensating differentials. A company for example has a safety measure costing 1000 Dollars because that attracts workers that will produce 2000 Dollars. If a company reduces safety measures it will lose that productivity and therefore make less profit. So the company had to bear the cost itself. Externalities are only possible when there’s collective damage, e.g. air pollution.
That being said, you are, somewhat tediously, making the argument that the market does not take environmental externalities into account, and therefore overvalues environmental destruction. That is true, but the problem really only exists as long as there are commonly owned resources that companies can pollute without anyone suing them over it. I.e. the losses are socialized. In other words, environmental degradation is a socialist (non-propertarian) problem. And in fact every example where “the market fails” to protect the environment is an example where a resource is outside of the market, i.e. not privately owned. The conclusion therefore should not be that propertarianism failed, but that it wasn’t applied thoroughly enough.
I am personally a fan of reparations rather than punishment. Also, I think something people often get stuck on is the utopian ideal that all crime can be avoided. No matter what form of government you have there will always be crime. The goal is to make it so such crimes have the least impact on society. If someone is set on killing someone else whether you have capital punishment, life in prison, rehabilitation or reparations it doesn’t matter because they are set on killing someone. The goal is to make it so their murder results in as little harm to the overall system as possible.
The human body is a good example of this. The human body accepts that cells will die or be damaged. It is built in such a way though to minimize the effect on the human as a whole. If you try to build a system that removes all crime then you are left with a utopia as the only option. If you first accept that crime will happen then you want to look for ways to minimize it’s effect on society.
Reparations takes the approach of accepting crime will happen and acting reactively to it in the most efficient way possible. Proactive policing in my opinion is far too fuzzy to deal with and leads inevitably (opinion) to the state.
Example: Drunk drivers have a tendancy to kill people with their cars. We can do things like are done now to make it illegal to drink and drive, or ban alcohol, etc. Alternatively we can let people behave how they want and when they do kill someone with their car make them pay for the damages (free market insurance allows us to put a price tag on everything, including human life). While this may sound appauling to some it has the result of both detering drunk driving to some extent while also reducing the net damage done to society when it does occur.
If you take the state approach and try to police drunk driving and/or ban alcohol you end up hurting the society more due to wasting a whole lot more resources trying to catch drunk drivers, keep alcohol off the streets, etc. than you gain by saving a life every now and then.
I’m a bit idealistic, so forgive me on this one. I’d like to ask, if we “remove” all crime, wouldn’t people focus on something else, something that isn’t necessary criminal?
You are making it sound as if crime is necessary, it is, it “creates” jobs for policemen. But then again, we could be able to spend that money on something else rather then fighting crime.
On the other hand we can’t spend our money on something else as long as crime exists, therefore crime must be removed and it is important that we get the right approach.
Example: Is it ok to stop drunk drivers who aren’t doing anything to disrupt other drivers?
Obviously not, we don’t stop drunk drivers because we hate drunks, we stop drunk drivers because they endanger our life in the streets. You can be incredibly drunk, but if you aren’t doing anything stupid on the road, you will most likely not be stopped.
It seems I have misrepresented my point. I am not claiming that crime has a positive effect on society, I am claiming that the costs associated with preventing it are higher than the costs associated with letting it happen and then seeking retribution afterwards.
The closest we can get to eliminating all crime is locking all humans in prison. Obviously, the costs associated with this outweigh the costs associated with having some crime. It is my opinion that this is linear and the further away we get from preventing crime the lower the costs are to society.
A good example of this in the modern world is TSA in the US. The costst associated with the increased airport security outweigh the costs associated with the 9/11 attack. This is especially true when you start considering the economic losses associated with time wasted at the airport getting through security, the time wasted on outrage against TSA and the costs of the security itself.
I know this is an appauling concept to some and I do not expect everyone to side with me on it. Please consider that if you truely want crime reduction would you be willing to be imprisoned for your own safety? What about house arrest? What about confined to your neighborhood? What about giving up all of your privacy?
Is the FED more powerful than government? If so does this not prove that in a truly free market, corporations would work together to form their own central banking system
I believe that his question is based on one very popular fallacy, please correct me if I am making a straw-man. The fallacy actually has the following two different independent premises, from which is derived the conclusion that is contained in your first question. The first premise is:
the fed is privately owned, so it will do whatever it likes, so it is more powerful than the government.
The answer to this fallacy is as follows: it does not matter who owns the FED what matters is that its decisions are backed up by the State’s force. so no matter what is the content of each particular decision the key here is that it is enforced thanks to the support of the central apparatus of coercion. So this makes them actually State’s decisions after all , since the State is the one which controls the force and say whether or not it should back up what the FED wants to implement.
The FED prints the money, so it is more powerful than the State. Well, who in the first place granted the FED the monopoly over emitting money base and making other banking regulation. The answer is - the STATE.
Interesting responses everyone, I will read them all more closely in a tick.
You will have to excuse me for some of the assumptions I made in that blog were based on false premises logical fallacies that I would not make so easily now.
My main points were towards the end/the last half so I guess this is fairly important (and my weakest arguments piled together at the beginning somewhat embarassingly).
The last part was basically referring to the idea that 'the distortion of market signals can lead to over-evaluation of a companies potential green credentials and overall profitability leading to overproduction and resultant boom and bust periods which destroy the green market’ - in other words mal-investments lead to overproduction of overrated . However I can now see that high levels of public spending on money printing are an even higher cause of this issue and, as you have explained, the market signals do not get distorted in a free market. Furthermore, there would be no investments possible under pure central planning, so the potential of mal-investments is a lesser evil.
Also that '**there is a misperception of demand due to income inequality which means green alternatives are less likely to be invested in ‘’'. Firstly I phrased this wrong, what I really meant was desire, not demand since demand is only desire backed by sufficient purchasing power (I desire a fleet of volkswagons and a house the size of the Esterhazy courts but have no sufficient purchasing power, thereby there is no market demand for such items). So my point when I wrote the blog post was basically that, environmentally friendly products cannot be purchased by the average man (caused by income equality caused by ‘evil capitalism’), hence there may be desire but no subsequent market demand and that investors would underrate the potential market for such goods and services. But average incomes would probably be far higher in a free market in any case. Subsequent investment in such products would be far greater, furthermore, there would be no investment under central planning let alone ecological investments.
I just have a small grip with this point…wouldn’t taxation be illegitimate under voluntaryism?
Ok, but how would you trace the source of them? That said, how would a socialist government trace the source of them?
Yeah, I know more about how private courts would operate now, so that is pretty much ok.
I have a problem with this namely that it is quite possibly worth sacrificing high levels of economic activity in certain cases to save human life, for example:
This is quite possibly true, but I would have been happy to see more money spent on maintaining Airport Security than to have seen the atrocity of 9/11 (as relatively cheap the costs were to the economy when compared to the atrocious amount of money spent on TSA, anyhow). That is not to say of course that I believe government security is necessarily better than private security (not relevant to this discussion - though I believe private security would be more efficient, personally), I am just attacking the stance that ‘the cost of repairing the damage done to property during 9/11 - the twin towers, etc. - was less than the cost on overall security, thereby it would be cheaper to narrow done security costs in future situations for the sake of the economy’.
Also, a loss of human life is a loss to the economy → a loss of builders, carpenters, plumbers, bankers, investors, executives, doctors and so forth and so forth. Hence, it is certainly worth the cost in my opinion.
In your drink driving scenario, I would be perfectly happy to see private bodies testing drivers for levels of alcohol than to see the criminal damage done in the first place, even if it is a net loss to the country’s economy (lives being more important and all the rest).
Do you support outlawry over prison? If so, surely the damage done to the economy by offenders let loose is greater than keeping them behind bars? My thoughts were that prison wardens could sell the goods produced by prisons on the market and use the profits to provide better prison infrastructures/standards of livings/more security for the prisoners in exchange. They are simply kept there for the safety of other would-be victims.
My question was not utopian in nature, rather it was the concern over whether certain crime procedures under the free market would be more short-sighted or less efficient than certain crime procedures under the state. An example would be the individualist approach, favoured over the utilitarian approach, which partially suggests that it is the individual rights (or loss of rights) of all involved in a conflict - both victim and criminal - that we are concerned with and not so much bettering society as a whole. However, clearly the individual rights of other would-be victims is also important, hence why I argue against no justice for an offender if the victim is say a pacifist who explicitly rejects prosecution under such a scenario. The thief who steals from a rather more lenient family (who press no charges) is free to steal from another family in the future (who would not be so happy).
Furthermore, I am concerned with capital punishment as crime retribution not on ethical grounds but for the purpose that the offender never has the opportunity to reappeal. Hence, I propose that capital punishment is used only in the case that there is irrefutable evidence, such as video footage.
By the way, I am taking this stance assuming that crime deterrance does not exist, that ‘punishing evil’ is irrelevant, rehabilitation is also irrelevant and that the only relevance of legal justice is to protect the rights of citizens and succesfully cause a zero percent reoffence rate (the murder who is subjected to capital punishment can never reoffend).
Also, I propose the crimes of passion are not punished by capital punishment, since the woman who has a vengeance motif against her rapist whom she subsequently murders bears no threat to others (unless they too committ a similar atrocity against her body), again meaning that punishment is not necessary since there is a zero percent reoffence rate.
Obviously, we still have to spend money on stopping crime. It’s more important that the money is spent in a good way so that it doesn’t ruin the economy.
On the other hand, crime ruins the economy, that must be stopped.
What if they trained the pilots in fighting techniques and allowed them to wear a gun onboard? Wouldn’t that be better?
I saw Ron Paul advocating this when talking about Somalia.
What if these pilots allowed with a gun onboard are secret terrorists themselves? It is obviously different with a ferry of cargo (referring to the incidents of priacy on the Somalian coasts) but with the potential havok a plane could reak it is a completely different kettle of fish…
Small point here, how would you, the consumer, know that currency is 100% backed by commodity.
I fully agree that human life is a very costly loss. However, I also believe it can be valued through insurance. Life insurance specifically allows the market to determine the value of individual human life. It takes into account life expectancy, productivity, personaly value, etc. Even assuming everyone killed in the 9/11 attacks had a multi-million dollar policy that still doesn’t outweigh the cost of the security measures since then. Not even close.
Also, I am fully aware that assigning numeric value to human life is considered to be an atrosity by many people which is why they are willing to accept a massive loss to economic efficiency in exchange for a very small reduction in loss of human life. What I find interesting though is that people are very willing to let people die of heart disease and cancer because those are “natural causes” while someone dying to unnatural causes is a huge deal. My general line of thinking is that if we were to put all the money spent on “national security” toward curing heart disease and cancer we would save orders of magnitide more lives than by stopping a bombing or two.
I support reparations. This means that if someone kills someone else and an insurance agency has to pay out a million dollar insurance policy the killer now owes the insurance agency. If they can’t pay their debt in full then they essentially become a slave to be auctioned off in order to repay their debt. For white collar crimes, it’s likely that the level of security for such “prisoners” will be low and I can see them working off their debt in a cubicle at an office building with maybe a tracking anklet or something. For mass murderers I imagine they will be sold off to medical research institutions for human testing in clinical drug trials or manual labor while chained to a post.
This concept is similar to private prisons, but it is much less defined. In short, insurance agencies have the right to rent out the individual to a comany until their debt is paid off. The type of people that will rent a criminal depends on the crime they committed. Renting out a white collar criminal will probably be common in big businesses. Renting out a murderer will probably only be done by prison factories and medical research groups looking for bargains (i.e.: undesireables).
