I have proven you wrong in the post above by doing exactly what you said I couldn’t. I did not use a time or place or anything like that. It’s time for you to find a new argument.
You actually didn’t. Here’s your actual claim, which is precisely what I said it was:
“If an anarchist cannot explain how their system would work in every situation asked of them down to every last scrutinizing detail then they would certainly not be able to come up with a viable business plan for a protection agency / insurance company to present to potential investors. And if they cannot do that, then there will be no market anarchy because no one would set up the required commercial institutions to make it happen.”
It’s time for you to get a new argument.
While I don’t agree that we need to have it “down to every last scrutinizing detail”, I do generally agree with what you’re saying.
I know there’s a ton of information out there on how various government functions would be replaced, but it’s largely theoretical, and there’s not much of a consensus on key issues. We’ve had stateless societies for brief moments in history, but a new state has sprung up every time. We haven’t seen the theoretical market anarchy emerge and sustain itself.
One way of looking at the world is we always have a free market. Right now the guys with guns are outcompeting us. People demand the state, they want the guys with guns. We need to figure out a way to outcompete the state and win customers. If you eliminate the current state, but people still believe in the state as a valid concept, they’ll demand it again.
It’s time to start turning our theory into action. We need to start building out the types of companies we’ve been talking about. And I know it’s hard, I’m working on a business plan right now for something like this, and it’s very difficult to structure such a thing in anticipation of potential state interference.
I don’t see that the “guys with guns” are “outcompeting” us; rather, they are using the guns to prevent competition.
That might make sense if every planned move was guarenteed to be successful. How do you account for all the planned moves like New Coke that ended in failure?
If you seriously think that two guys starting a business in their garage carefully planned every move to become one of the most successful marketing firms in the computer industry then I don’t know what to say. No, no, not Apple, Google.
Actually, now that I think about it, I would like to see a basic chain of carefull planning that lead from Apple almost going bankrupt to the success story they are today with people lining up for days to purchase their products.
Many small steps of trial and error or a carefully orchestrated plan from the original hand built Apple PC to the much hyped iPhone 3G or whatever it’s called?
Nice strawman though…
Make sure you account for a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa causing a hurricane to take out a major city in the US or nobody will invest in your business because you haven’t shown the ability to sufficiently plan for unforseen circumstances.
Because, you know, it could happen and I want to be protected.
Hi Gigaplex,
I won’t speak for every anarchists, but for me and for, I think, a majority of them.
We, market anarchists, don’t want to impose market anarchy on everyone. We don’t need and don’t want to convince you to live without government. What we want is to live free, to live our market anarchy. We want you to let us live how we want, to stop stealing us and dictate every aspect of our live, somewhere on this planet. That’s all. “Don’t thread on me”.
If market anarchy doesn’t work, we would soon learn it. If it works, we might be an example for other people.
The anarchist could well believe that a society without government would be chaos and still advocate it and as long as they’re consistant with the NAP.
If you were a programmer and your boss said, “I need to know every detail of how that application works. Get it all documented”, would you just assume they meant that they wanted to know where every 1 and 0 is at every millisecond as it goes throught the various chips in the computer, along with temperature of every atom and tracking of every dust particle on the motherboard? Well, they said every detail didn’t they? Let’s not be childish here. I do not take what you say and twist it until it is incomprehensible and then claim that is what you believe even if you tell me it isn’t. I must have clarified what I meant 3 or 4 times but you didn’t want to understand because if you did, you’d have trouble debating me. So keep pretending that you don’t get it because you wouldn’t want to have to debate my actual point - how scary that would be.
False analogy and strawman of your own OP!
Try again.
Well, I’m not stopping you from living how you want and I’m certainly not stealing from you. You are talking as though I am not an anarchist. But putting that aside, I don’t think you will get to see if market anarchy works or not until there are protection agenecies, etc. started up. While you may be comfortable trying market anarchy, being very much in the dark as to what might happen, the people that would start the protection agencies can not just go on hope or warm fuzzy feelings. They would at least need to see some theoretical examples of how things might play out. This is why I see the burden of proof, so to speak, on me and other anarchists. I may not like that this is the situation but I can confront it. I’ve always thought it was kind of fun anyway, going through different situations and coming up with ways it would be handled in market anarchy.
I made a post. You took the post to mean something completely different than what I set out to convey. I clarified to make sure you understood what I meant. You said, no that is not what you mean, you mean this. No, I am afraid you are wrong and I am the one that would know that, not you. Give it a rest.
And again, you don’t want to debate what my actual point is because you can’t. That’s why you are still, even with your last post, avoiding my point.
Oh no, you conveyed it quite clearly. Then you backpedalled and ran away from it as fast as you could. That’s why you’re avoiding dealing with what you originally wrote.
Absolute accuracy is not required. And I liked New Coke! 
I bet you any amount of money that Apple and Google have project managers and do plan things.
That information is guarded by Apple. I’m not going to break into Apple and steal their files for you. My company has a chain of careful planning like this that goes back to it’s beginning. A lot of it is documented and still on file. We don’t just give this out to random people but we do in fact have this kind of thing. Companies don’t just do random actions to get where they are.
I will bet you any amount of money that the iPhone was a project or group of projects where there were people whose sole job was to plan and adjust planning when anything unexpected happens. That’s how important planning is to big corporations (especially someone like Apple).
So I am afraid you are completely wrong. Companies do in fact plan. You appear to be one of the few last people on the planet that does not know this. I’m glad I could help you out.
Okay, you got me. You are right. I did mean that I expected the entire future to be written out, every second of every day, every action, every person, place and thing, the position of every molecule, etc. Yes this is exactly what I meant in the beginning. Boy do I feel stupid now. Can we move on now?
Well we’d certainly need to have it down to every last scrutinizing detail that the investor addressed and I imagine they’d be pretty scrutinizing 
I like that there is someone else here wanting to turn this theory into action. As you say, we currently don’t have the level of detail that an investor would demand. So it is up to us to come up with those details if we want to make this a reality. I’m working these out too and I’ll be posting a lot of this stuff in the future.
I look at it as competition as well and this is how I see that going… If we got a company like this set up in a country where the government was a bit preoccupied or absent (there are many countries like this right now, especially in Africa), then a government would be seen by the company as just another competing business. The company would be forced to go to war with them or lose their business. If the company got big enough before that happened, we’d be set. A lot of these third world armies would be pretty easy to defeat. The UN/US might come in but if the UN/US destroyed these companies, those areas that the company did business in would go into chaos and the UN/US would be seen as an enemy. I think the business would have the upper ground as they could get a lot of the residents to fight for them. What’s the UN/US going to do? Kill everyone and then install a government to rule over the dust? I think our odds are better than some might believe.
Not until you actually own up to it, no.
The burden of proof is always on the Statist or anyone else who ever tells an individual that he ought to submit to their judgement and commands. The State fails because it can not rationally convince me to obey it, at most I might fear it or take its advice. This is pretending that the ‘state’ actually exists, which it does not. As Molyneux put it so colorfully, theories of Statism are epistemologically equivalent to “I had a dream about a turtle”. “Obey the state” is epistemologically equivalent to “Obey the turtle from my dream.”
Because there is no reason or real possibility for any person to ‘obey’ anyone, and the State stands or falls on people actually obeying ‘it’, it is clear that the State can only be supported by mythology or error.
You still seem to be avioding the ‘down to the last detail’ bit of your original argument that you both didn’t address and as I have shown is not the way the world works.
So what if you liked New Coke? Doesn’t change the fact it was a major misstep that basically shows how wrong your argument is.
Nobody is claiming that corporations don’t plan (except you using it as a red herring) but the basic argument is that nobody will invest in a company without exact plans drawn out for the investors to view. You also seem to have the opposite view with your “the iPhone was a project or group of projects where there were people whose sole job was to plan and adjust planning when anything unexpected happens.”
As a matter of fact there are plenty of examples of private arbitration and security companies in existence today that work outside the government monopoly legal system that can be looked at as a base system of a PDA or private legal system. True they don’t have full arrest and detain powers but that’s because the State has a monopoly on that aspect of the market and they can’t legally provide those services to their clients.
All you’re doing is constructing strawmen and red herrings to back your original assertation.
I didn’t read the rant.
Why is the burden of proof for the state fixing things not on the statists?