What I am saying is that no one who could act as a protector will have any incentive to do it unless they desire exclusive exploitation rights.
why isn’t being paid the market rate for providing a service good enough? plus you have to weigh that against the downside of being the predator, he who must fight all of civilisation with its multifarious competing defence agencies, all who are bound to serve consumer sovereignty.
its the state of competition that keeps any one ‘rogue’ agency honest in the face of all the others.
why isn’t being paid the market rate for providing a service good enough? - it would seem the lust for power and parasitically expropriated wealth prove too tempting a prize to settle for just the ‘market rate’.
its the state of competition that keeps any one ‘rogue’ agency honest in the face of all the others. - What actually would happen is there would just be a state of competition between ‘rouge agencies.’ (i.e. exactly what we have now, a world dominated by nation states)
It works in every other industry, even with inelastic demand. Free entry into the marketplace…
There’s no demand for rogue agencies. There is a demand for cheaper goods and services.
[edit] There’s basically anarchy on the internet. Do you see all providers of security charging one cent below the damages they cover? Are you regularly threatened by “rogue agencies” you can’t say no to? No. Internet security is so cheap its free.
Now what if we were all forced to patronize a government antivirus program? It would probably suck or be really expensive or both. A monopolist does not care if you get good products. Competition for consumers is the best check on provision of any service.
It works in every other industry, even with inelastic demand. Free entry into the marketplace… - If i produce a good, the only way i can profit is to locate demand for that good and trade. If i produce the “capability to effectively exercise force” (as you have agreed PDAs do), I do not run into this restriction. I can profit either by trading this good to others (say defensive services), or by forcefully exploiting weaker parties. You can not analyze this state of affairs in the same way you can analyze the demand for ‘Nintendo games’ or ‘crack-cocaine.’ It is not a automatically a situation involving voluntary exchange. You have yet to establish that a market for defensive services could ever get a start in reality, or if all firms would just exploit from the very beginning.
one cent below the damages they cover - thats twice i have seen this claim. you are saying private security agents already are maximizing profit (prior to exploiting) b/c they charge all the way up to the amount of damages they prevent. Therefore they are not leaving any potential gains “on the table.”
If this were the case… we should be indifferent to the existence of defenders. Hiring a defender and not hiring one is a break even proposition. Note that this actually proves my point. As I said you cant make any extra profits by becoming a defender. If the aggressor if powerful enough to take half of everything, any defender could take at least half, and any victim will only pay less than half, or be indifferent. Thus it is always better for the defender to simply exploit the victim.
At which point you have to fight defensive PDAs, which makes life very expensive and uncertain for you.
I’m saying this wouldn’t happen. And it doesn’t on the internet or any other free industry.
Free entry into the market stops this kind of exploitation… if company A threatens to attack me, companies B-Z are all competing with one another for the right to defend me and have my continued business.
If company B is powerful enough to stop company A from exploiting me, then company B would be better off just exploiting me instead. If i then go to another company C, who is powerful enough to defend me from B, then C would be better off exploiting me. It I go to company D, who is powerful enough to stop company C, … well you get the point. Until you get the the most powerful company, who would be best off becoming a monopolist exploiter.
The Internet example can be placed in the same category as private-police, mercenaries, bouncers, etc. All of these private security agents differ from their anarchist counterparts in that they operate under the umbrella of the monopolist exploiter (govt) and are subjects of the same. As such, they have no opportunity to establish an organized exploitation racket as the monopolist will not allow it.
McAffee can’t start stealing from you without running into the monopolist exploiter (gov’t) who is taxing its victims. This places downward pressure on the profits from exloiting. Further, private-Internet-security providers do not bear the full cost of combating the Internet aggressors, who again must face the monopolist exploiter. This drives down the cost of defending. Thus McAffee is freeloading off gov’t defense. Otherwise they could not possibly earn as much defending as they could by exploiting.
I’m only going to pay the one who gives me the best deal. Its not like companies A-C dissapear when I go look at D’s rates… and its not like D will automatically want to attack C just because it can win. The costs of attacking another company or companies are higher than the returns.
Nonsense. While the government might be able to (theoretically) stop rogue bouncers and private security agencies, which I doubt because the government cannot even fight a war on drugs properly, governments are even less competent online. So what if its illegal to send spam in America? Anyone smart enough to come up with a spamming bot can evade the US authorities. Its competition among private international providers of security that lowers the price to nil.
So you would predict that there would be some upper limit on “exploitation” by private firms, and that because private firms suffer from your alleged “exploitation problem”, they will tend towards this upper limit. You again ignore competition among different defense providers, since empirically the costs of private protection are very low… probably right at the average market rate of return.
Government can’t and won’t do anything. See above. It doesn’t care if my computer is full of viruses.
Moreover, you are guilty of criticising something and not providing an alternative. Utopia is not an option. I am advocating the best option, which may or may not have serious problems, but it is less problemmatic than the alternative.
[edit: off for the night. pick up tomorrow morning]
I have proposed one alternative. That is accepting the inevitability of monopolist exploiters. Therefore, only by becoming the monopolist exploiter can any philosophical movement ever gain traction.
Mises was asked what he would do if he were ultimate dictator. “resign” was his response.
But i am certain i would be better off under a Mises/Rothbard dictatorship than i would be under our present system. Therefore, Libertarians need to revise their stance on seeking political power. For the sake of humanity we must aggressively pursue it.
Waiting for a post-apocalyptic, after-the-collapse, anarcho/libertarian awakening is a big mistake. Not suggesting you advocate that, but i do get that feeling sometimes from the big intellectuals in the movement. Maybe that’s why Libertarians haven’t seen more of their recommendations manifested in reality. Too content to stand on the sidelines and point out the mistakes. Or too used to it.
Philosophical consistency can only get you so far in a harsh natural world filled with violent exploiters. It is possible to temporarily secure freedom within a life time and keep it for a few generations, w/o ever “solving” the force/exploitation problem.
Who believes that a sustainable, liberal society could arise out of the ashes of some social catastrophe? In the total absence of social institutions, cultural and legal norms, etc., then yeah, you’re not going to have much of a working capitalist society. You would have no society at all. If your objection is that a group of die-hard libertarians would be unable to establish their utopia following an unimaginable calamity, then damn son, you got us. I don’t expect it to go over so well either.
In a society with a long tradition of respecting private property and free contract, in which there exist not three individuals who don’t plan beyond tomorrow, but a whole group of individuals who depend upon one another according to the division of labor… I don’t think your argument holds water. A PDA in such an environment is incomparable to a “PDA” in a social vacuum.
Or perhaps some believe that the political system is intrinsically biased against achieving libertarian goals.
So you would have to prove the inevitability of monopoly exploitation, which you haven’t, and then you have to show that everyone trying to become the monopolist exploiter is a good thing. Sounds to me like this would be constant bloody revolution… most governments aren’t so exploitative that they’re worth dieing for.
All we have to do is be able to defend ourselves against intrustion from the state. If we can convince people not to attack secessionist territories or seasteads, we basically have anarcho capitalism. If we can evade the authorities by uploading our minds to cyberspace and existing on the web, men with guns won’t matter.
The libertarian movement is overinvested in ideas rather than entrepreneurship. But ideas are still very important, and none of the entrepreneurship involves recreating a state with libertarians at the helm.
I am not so cynical about the possibility of being able to convince people of free market libertarianism. We have come a long way already, and if there is one country on earth that tries free market policies and succeeds, it could start an avalanche.
In short, you have not proven that seizing the position of monopolist exploiter is superior to advocating free association and competing legal systems. To do so you probably need to address my rebuttals above.
An answer to why the mcaffee virus protection doesnt do exploitation is that it cant get monetary value by doing so. It is not offering the service of taking monetary value with force from someone(to protect someone else) unlike protection agencies who would offer the use of force.
If i could word the fundamental problem with protection industry, it is that
The same thing that they offer is the thing they are paid to prevent.
And regarding no proof over why state better than competing agencies, it was in the first post: state has incentive to keep its subjects relatively well off for future profits, competing agencies dont(since they cant guarantee themselves the profits)
of course there are short term criminal profits to be made by the unscrupulous in exploiting the computer systems of others. That’s a big reason why Mcaffee(and its rivals in the computer protection industry) provide protection services in the first place…
not true. Defence is simply not the same as attack, aside from your insistence on this point. We can go into much more detail than arguing by brushing all the qualities under the catch-all of ‘force users’, what about consumer demand for things like honesty/trustworthiness?consumer demand for seeking peaceful negotiated solutions to issues etc?
what? by this logic we would be best with a monopolist food provider who has incentive to keep enough people fed and alive to secure future profits, as opposed to a competitive market for food provision where competing food agencies aren’t “guaranteed” profits.
-The US national debt increases by $4.13 billion per day, and has over $60 Trillion in unfunded obligations.
The US dollar has lost >96% of its value since its origin. It has lost half its value in the past three decades, and it is continuing to decrease at an ever-increasing rate.
These points form a disastrous negative feedback mechanism: Money supply expansion leads to economic retraction/stagflation/whatever, poor economy leads to more government spending, more government spending leads to more money expansion and so on.
This simply CANNOT be sustained. This ship is sinking, whether we “want it to” or not.
My nihilist/misanthrope side makes me feel that people kind of deserve a collapsed state…
but it certainly would not be the foundation for a successful stateless society. The state is like being impaled by a large piece of shrapnel.
Sure, that shrapnel is extremely harmful, but just rapidly tearing it out all at once will kill you. The state needs to gradually dissolve; taxes eliminated, regulations/controls etc removed, anything important is privatised, anything not important will just be phased out (and the market won’t do anything about it because it was unimportant i.e not reflective of actual demands on a free market), then welfare payments etc will be slowly phased out, and phasing out of police etc and so on
but like I said, none of this matters, we hit the iceberg years ago. We’re going down, and the “lifeboats” are simply an illusion.
nirgraham, mcafee doesnt hurt(damage property) virus makers. neither do food producers meet my proposed condition.
But in the case of defence agencies, it is about doing the same(or similar) thing to attackers that attacker want to do to defender. At least in rothbard’s proportionality principle(which seems also in the interest of the would be victim so would lead consumer demand in that direction). So it creates the problem of if would be defender being better than the attacker, it would be profitable for the defender to be the attacker himself.
perhaps you think a defense agency mostly goes out to bust heads of ‘enemies’; no, a large part of their function is to ‘protect’, just as mcaffe protects. this is the most important element
I mentioned a market for food, only as a counter example to your assumption that monopoly providers of a service have the proper ‘incentives’ to serve their consumers. which is plainly false. was your point something other than that? try again, and I will reconsider
The same thing that they offer is the thing they are paid to prevent.
But a defense agency does not offer attack, it offers defense. much like a ‘protection against viruses and hackerz’ company does not use its knowledge-skills relating to hacking and the workings of viruses to predate.
And defensive services are all about the ability to bust heads(or take money whatever), or guarantee such things at least.
no, they are about providing services to their customers, force is a mere ‘aspect’ of that. of course if you strip away all other aspects, you just have a mindless force of violence… and I could understand how that ‘vision’ could lead your thinking astray on this point.
If you are on the defense, you only have to spend enough to make sure your opponents costs are greater than his benefits. The reason gangs can’t go door to door robbing people despite the fact they’ll always win is because one or two of them might get shot in the process. Its not worth a 1/10 chance you’ll die just to steal my television.
Conversely, aggressive PDAs are unsustainable on the market because they’ll just get into an arms race, and then go broke when they are outcompeted on price by defensive PDAs.
Again, as nir pointed out, we already have this situation on the internet. Malicious aggressors want to steal our credit card information/identities/etc. There is a demand for protection from this service, so it is provided. Despite the fact that customers have to put themselves in the ultimate position of risk by actually installing third party software on their computer, it works out great.
If you think about it, internet protection is more likely to fail (but hasn’t) than physical protection. Because even if I can’t hire ANY PDAs, I can still sit at home with a shotgun pointed at the door. There is no analogous last resort in computing.
“If you are on the defense, you only have to spend enough to make sure your opponents costs are greater than his benefits. The reason gangs can’t go door to door robbing people despite the fact they’ll always win is because one or two of them might get shot in the process. Its not worth a 1/10 chance you’ll die just to steal my television.”
the “defensive” pdas rely on the same thing. going to someones door and busting it in and damaging property.
Again, the internet security companies themselves dont participate in aggression, so it is not a valid analogy.