Again, the internet security companies themselves dont participate in aggression, so it is not a valid analogy.
ok, please admit that a) they have the knowledge and skills b)they choose not to because they choose a protect model over an attack model to make profit
Defensive PDAs dont actually have to go out and attack anyone. They just have to stop my property from being damaged. The most efficient way to do this would probably not be to go try and find criminals and attack them. Even if it were, the force the PDA musters to attack someone else would not be used back on their customers, who would quickly switch PDAs. Then you have a situation where two PDAs are fighting eachother, and because they care about money, they agree to not have an arms race and go their seperate ways.
They could but they don’t. We are predicting that real life PDAs would operate the same way.
they dont offer the same thing they are hired to prevent. so it doesnt break my system. If defense agencies could protect the customer without harming the aggressor, they too could work without exploitation. But how could that possibly work? Would they pat you on your head while your wife is getting raped by a burglar?
Sieben, that could work all well and good if the pdas were moral white knights. But in the real world, where people are after money, it is monetarily more useful for each pda to exploit money. A Pda comes around and thinks its a great idea to offer defense from those evil pdas? In order to do that, they would have to be stronger than them, in which case they themselves would have the monetary incentive to be the mafia
Internet security stops other people from getting on your hard drive and accessing personal information by installing a program on your hard drive that could access your personal information.
Internet PDAs are in fact in an even better position to steal stuff from you because they are let in voluntarily, bypassing all the OS’s built in defenses. Its just that… if an internet PDA ever did anything like that, everyone would know about it instantly and change PDAs. Its customer choice that keeps any business honest.
Defense agencies don’t offer the service of predation but of defense!
conversely ‘ethical hackers’ know how to hack , and could predate,. but choose not to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_hat
If defense agencies could protect the customer without harming the aggressor, they too could work without exploitation.
they can work without exploitation even if they occasionally need to counter force with force in the service of the defense of their customers. private security firms do this all the time !!! they don’t predate on wealthy businessmen and corporate clients, they provide a level of service that the state does not provide, they fill the gap just fine.
For internet protection to fit my criterion it would have to harm the property of the aggressor, but it doesnt, so its not proof of my criterion being wrong. How hard is to understand lol.
Nigraham, the current protection services doesnt fit the cirterion either, the part that does meet the criterion is filled by the state. In anarchy they however would have to fill the part, which would lead to exploitation.
The fact that they don’t participate in aggression was the point of the analogy.
The argument that you were raising was that, because the knowledge and resources needed to defend people from attacks is very similar to the knowledge and resources needed to attack people, the defensive companies, once they get rich enough and develop their knowledge to a very high level, might turn their attention to attaking people. In other words, they could practice for a long time in a legitimate way, but then turn around and use all of the knowledge and resources that they developed from the legimate practice to engage in illegimate activities in a really effective way.
But the counterargument that they were raising was that the same situation exists on the internet, where aggression is messing up your computer, stealing your information, and so on, but what you are saying would happen hasn’t happened. The internet security companies spend all of their time developing their knowledge and resources in a legitimate way, but they could just turn around at some point and use those same knowledge and resources in an illegitimate way, yet you don’t see that sort of thing.
Saying that the analogy isn’t analogous because they don’t participate in aggression is missing the entire point of the counterargument.
They are arguing that it wouldn’t be likely that defensive companies would turn into aggressive companies and you are arguing that it would be likely that defensive companies would turn into aggressive companies. And they were pointing out that internet security companies, which are analogous to private defense agencies in that they spend all of their time developing the knowledge and resources needed not only for providing defense services, but also needed for engaging in aggression, don’t turn to aggression, so that is a reason to think that private defense agencies wouldn’t turn to aggression.
Whether they would or wouldn’t turn to aggression is the point of contention. To show that internet security companies aren’t analogous to private defense agencies in whether they have the incentives to turn to aggression, you need to show that they are disanalogous in some other way other than in the point of contention.
You could respond to any analogy in the way that you did, without ever giving a real counterargument.
I Ryan gets it, very good post.
Nigraham, the current protection services doesnt fit the cirterion either, the part that does meet the criterion is filled by the state.
private defense agencies, those existing presently under the ‘umbrella’ of the state, have been known to use defensive force, sometimes lethal.
Thanks Ryan
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.
The customer will pay only less than half, and the defender will only accept half because they can get it? What if the customer decides he doesn’t want to pay half. That defender get’s nothing, and his business suffers for it. The customer has a bargaining position even in zero competition. Of course, the customer could derive utility simply by ensuring the aggressor doesn’t get half of his stuff, and so he gives it voluntarily to the defender, but he is getting something out of that trade, or he could derive utility from not giving half his stuff to the defender who isn’t making it worth his while to hire him. So no, it is not a break even proposition. It depends on the customer preference.
You also ignore the possibility of all the people who are being stolen from combining to hire someone to kill the exploiter, which they would have no incentive to do if they weren’t being exploited in the first place.
It takes more resources to exploit then it does simply to defend, so with fewer resources, you could have a larger customer base, which may or may not equal out the gain from simply exploiting with the resources you currently have. But then you have to ask other questions. Would it be easier to expand a defensive business, or an exploitive business? Why do you think that a firm would destroy the extra potential for expansion gained by being a non exploitive firm to become an exploitive firm, especially considering the risk of retaliation. So the prize of exploitation isn’t that great considering the opportunity cost of decreased difficulty in expanding your defense business to other willing customers, and the security of exploiting isn’t that great considering the decreased risk of retaliation by other firms.
Ryan, internet security is possible without aggression(or retribution). Good for us! And we can thank technological wonders like public key encryption for that. If there was public key encryption for real life property, im sure there wouldnt be need for punishment.
Unfortunately, that is not the case and to enforce laws to protect property, some kind of punishment is necessary. Either Rothbard’s proportionality principle or something else(“value free” statist model, etc) but the fundamental problem remains: it meets my criterion. Which is a positive feedback loop for exploitation(and only thing limiting it is exploiters’ wish to maintain capital value).
Nigraham, yeah security companies might use a bit of violence, but only as long as the state does not feel its monopoly right for the capital be threatened. THat is not an argument against my criterion, but about the imperfections of the state.
Sam, you assume morality from the defender. If they were out for money, they would rob the victim themselves(as they are more powerful than attacker) and wouldnt care about brotherhoods of moral defense agencies or whatnot.
Okay, I showed that internet security companies and private defense agencies are analogous to each other because they both develop the knowledge and resources needed to defend people from a certain thing, which is the same as the knowledge and resources needed to attack people in a certain way, but that it isn’t clear that private defense agencies would turn around and use those knowledge and resources to attack people, because we know that it doesn’t work that way with internet security companies.
I showed that they are analogous in that they both develop what they need to do illegitimate things by doing legitimate things, they get people to voluntarily give them money and power because they are doing legitimate things that those people want, and that they could use the same money and power that the people gave them because they were doing legitimate things that those people want to turn around and do illegitimate things that those people don’t want, but that it isn’t clear that would happen with private defense agencies, because we know that it doesn’t happen with internet security companies.
I don’t think that anyone could come up with a good counterargument against that unless they want to say that internet security companies actually do turn on their consumers, but I don’t think that anyone would want to say that.
But what you are saying in the above quotation doesn’t seem to have anything to do with that, though that was at least a part of your original argument. It seems that you have turned to only talking about how private defense agencies have to punish the people through force, but how internet security companies only have to set up idle defenses which don’t touch the property of any hackers who try to do anything against the person that they are defending.
I understand that is a difference between them, but it seems like you just threw that out there and said that it would lead to exploitation without saying why.
You had a substantiated argument about the fact that the private defense agencies develop the same sort of skills that they need to attack people when they defend people, and that it they would be in a position to turn on their consumers if they think that it would be more profitable to use those skills to attack them than to defend them, but I think that I clearly showed that internet security companies are in the same position, but that they don’t seem to turn on anyone.
But you don’t seem to have given us a substantiated argument about the other problem that you see. You are telling us they internet security companies don’t have to punish anyone, they just have to set up idle defenses, but that private defense agencies actually do have to punish people, which explains why internet security companies work though you think that private defense agencies wouldn’t. But you never explained why that is relevant, you never explained why it matters that they have to punish people, and why that would make it so it isn’t possible for them to work without exploiting people.
By the way, it is easy to throw out that difference between defense agencies that exist right now on the market and the defense agencies that anarcho-capitalists think would exist if we got rid of the state, simply because what the state monopolizes is that function. Realize that, if the state were to be gotten rid of, it wouldn’t be far-fetched to say that internet security companies might retaliate against the people who are attacking their client, whether by messing with their computer, information, or whatever, or by actually showing up at their house. I don’t know whether either of those things would happen, but I just want you to realize that you aren’t bringing up a difference between private defense agencies that we see now and the ones that we don’t that has anything to do with how they themselves run, but only that you are pointing out that private defense agencies can’t do that sort of thing simply because the state monopolizes it.
Before I close out this section of my post, I want to put a limitation on your argument, which stands whether or not you are able to substantiate it. People often act like it is the police who would protect us, it is the people who run around and carry guns and whatever who are our protection, but, really, probably overwhelmingly the most important source of protection, whether you are in a statist society or an anarcho-capitalist society, is the sort of idle defenses that you think are able to work on a market. Locks, doors, safes, and other idle defense things, are and would be the most important part of your defense.
Isn’t that what the state does?
But, besides that overwhelmingly obvious and powerful objection to what you are saying, you aren’t proving anything at all. The anarcho-capitalists say that it would be more profitable for a private defense agency to stay legitimate for a bunch of different reasons. And you are saying that it would be more profitable for them to just attack them and steal all of their money, but you haven’t given any reasons at all. If you want to disprove anarcho-captalism, you will have to give reasons why it would be more profitable to turn into an attacker than to stay a defender, but you haven’t even attempted such a substantiation.
The most obvious thought that people have about that is, if it would be more profitable to stay legitimate, why would their be anyone would doesn’t? If it would be more profitable to defend against attackers, why would there be any attackers at all?
But I can answer that easily.
It is more profitable for the private defense agencies to stay legitimate only if they have a low time preference. If they have a super high time preference, they might decide that it would be a good idea to attack their clients and steal all of their money.
So, yes, that sort of thing could happen, defenders might turn into attackers, if the people in charge of the private defense agency had a super high time preference. But the problem with that is that it takes a pretty low time preference to build up a company like that to be strong enough to be able to pull that off, so you would expect the people running it to have a low time preference, which would let the arguments that the anarcho-capitalists use apply.
And, if your first thought is that someone with a super high time preference would just buy up one of those companies and use it to attack people, and, because they are buying it up, wouldn’t need to have had to low time preference needed to build it up, my response is that someone with such a high time preference probably wouldn’t have been able to get enough money to be able to do that sort of thing anyway.
So the people who have high time preferences would be the attackers and those with the low time preferences would be the defenders. But the lower the time preference of someone, the more roundabout their production will tend to be, and the more roundabout their production will tend to be, the more effective their production would be. (That was somewhat superficial, but I think that I made my point.)
So that might be one of the simple reasons why the defenders would be more powerful and effective than the attackers, and might even have something to do with how society is even possible, considering their always will in society be a tension between the attackers and the defenders, and whether the society will continue to exist is a function of how that tension tends to play out.
Sam, you assume morality from the defender. If they were out for money, they would rob the victim themselves(as they are more powerful than attacker) and wouldnt care about brotherhoods of moral defense agencies or whatnot.
I did no such thing. I assumed you knew what reputation was. If a defender steals from someone, the next time someone wants to be defended, they will see that firm X steals from their customers, and will look elsewhere for defense. That pressure in and of itself is a deterrent to theft of your customers.
I did show all current private-defense agencies differ from anarchist-PDAs in that they are subjects of a monopolist exploiter who will not allow them to establish their own exploitation ring. Thus, ‘‘Blackwater’’ (or whatever they are now) couldn’t seize Los Angeles and start taxing people and making laws and taking slaves and women without the monopolist exploiter (govt) preventing them from moving in on their game.
Not that interested in Internet security b/c you can’t conquer people through the Internet. However, Internet security companies are not fighting hackers any more than putting bars on your windows is fighting burglars. The bars simply augment the protection already offered by the monopolist exploiter (govt). If the burglars could set up siege positions around your home, burn you out, tunnel in etc, you would need more than bars to keep them out. If you needed any level of defense greater than self-defense (ie needing to hire another armed gang), that gang would be better off taking your stuff than taking what you can pay them..
Why? Because you can’t pay one penny more than you stand to loose if you don’t pay anything at all. In other words, you must necessarily offer the defenders LESS than you expect the attackers to get or there is no point. Thus the defenders get a smaller prize if they are successful then the attacks get.
I suppose it is true that if the cost of defending are less than attacking, such that that smaller prize represents a greater profit, than this would not be a problem. By then you would wonder why the original attackers would even bother … you come back to this problem which i stated earlier:
“You see, before defense is ever needed in society it must be the case that all currently existing users of force are exploiters. What you are arguing is that as soon as there exists one or more aggressive exploiter using force, the next group to develop the capability to defeat them should go into the defense industry … this is the most profitable way to use the new capability in the anarchist view. But why not just exploit the individuals that the original aggressors were exploiting? How are you better off trading with them instead. The use of force need not be mutually beneficial to be profitable.”
and this:
The only reason any armed group would ever defend any weaker group is if they are long-term exploiters who wish to preserve their ‘capital stock.’ There is no other economic reason to engage in trade with individuals you can simply dominate. This is why we live in a world dominated by states. Much to my dismay.
One problem I am having with the various counter arguments is that they all assume a robust, healthy, competitive market in PDA’s already exists in order to show that they are viable. I am more interested in looking at how these things could ever get a start. Something similar to the way Hoppe starts in the garden of Eden and slowly introduces problems to develop his set of just rules. At what point does a 3rd party ‘use-of-force provider’ have incentive to defend some other helpless group.
I’d like to point out a few premises which mgmcintyre and xarthaz seem to have put forth.
First off, there’s mgmcintyre’s point of “there’s no such thing as private security today”, which he more recently extended to include all businesses. In other words, he’s implying that all businesses today (or even all organizations of people whatsoever) do not typically commit aggression because they operate under the “umbrella” of the state. I see no difference between this and Thomas Hobbes’ assertion that, in the absence of an all-powerful “Sovereign”, all of mankind exists in “the state of nature”, which consists of “the war of all against all”. Quite simply, both mgmcintyre and Hobbes seem to completely discount the probability that people will behave according to their inner morality.
Second, there’s mgmcintyre’s point that hypothetical defensive-services businesses are necessarily exploitative. To begin with, he hasn’t provided his definition of “exploitation” anywhere. But if I infer correctly what his implicit definition is, the logical conclusion can only be that all market transactions are inherently exploitative on the part of the seller against the buyer. That is to say, if I buy a car for $20,000 from a car dealership, it seems that he’d argue that said dealership exploited me because I could’ve bought it for less. From that, it would follow that, if one had to give up anything he had in order to obtain something else, mgmcintyre would say he’s being exploited. At this point, his logic is crystal clear: in order to “maximize profits” (which he seems to implicitly define as “get the most stuff possible”), one should never engage in voluntary transactions with anyone; rather, he should always and everywhere steal what he wants.
Thirdly, xarthaz talks about punishment in the context of private defensive services. I fail to see how punishment, which (in its modern usage) is necessarily retributive, would be part of such services. It seems much more likely to me that they would deal (at least primarily) with restitution – that is, with the restoration of property or monetary compensation for it. Given the apparently high demand of nearly all people for the protection of their property (including their persons), it would seem that the regularity of restitution would provide at least as strong of a deterrent against crime as the threat of punishment seems to do today.
The same technology that protects from threats also creates threats.
Ryan, basic racketeering economics:
Adding a threat of violence increases the benefits received by the customer from the exchange compared to not threatening violence, so he will pay more money.
The counter argument to this is the increased danger from counter pressure from other pdas, and discrimination from companies. But if a group of pdas is strong enough to provide aggression towards the strongest other pda (or alliance), then they are strong enough to exploit the populace.
And if they dont work towards getting aggressive power, then the criminals can just laugh at them and do hit and runs and go unpunished.
That is my take anyway, mcintyre explained it somewhat differently, better address him too(and peter leeson)
One more thing. The dichotomy of attack and defense. I think this is an error. They are the same thing(except for passive defense, but im not rejecting possibility of non-exploitative market there). The only difference between active attack and active defense is the ethical argumentation(or lack of one) used to justify it.
Autolykos, my take on exploitative market is it is where higher ability to provide service is also higher ability to create demand for service. That is, a positive feedback loop leading the most capable suppliers to the highest position in the society(the state).
And this is where the no difference between attack and defense comes in. Because they are the same thing, the market for security fits the criterion of an exploitative market; the same thing that is being demanded is the very thing that creates the demand
@xarthaz
Why leave ethics out of the equation?
Please explain what you mean by “create demand”.
Please explain what you mean by “the highest position in the society”.
Attack/aggression and defense are both forms of violence, sure. But there’s not only an ethical distinction between them. There’s also a temporal distinction (which, in fact, drives the ethical distinction). Namely, attack must happen before defense can happen. I didn’t think I’d have to point that out in this thread, but there it is. Now, if you’re going to claim that attack/aggression and defense are the same thing, I think you’re implicitly throwing the Non-Aggression Principle out the window.
I leave ethics out because, when you do violent business, you probably arent a non-aggression kinda guy
Would you agree that rape and sex are really the same thing, but for the ethical argumentation used to justify it?
I’m don’t believe in “natural rights”, but it seems to me that attacking someone is a tort while defending against an attack is not a tort. What counts as a tort is conventional and the result of an evolutionary process, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. Affirming the presumption of liberty and denying the rule of submission would set us on firm ground for claiming that attack should not be allowed while defense should. Do you disagree?
And are you going to provide the explanations I asked for?
Violence is not the same as aggression. Surely you can understand that. For example, I would be as violent as necessary to defend my home and my life against an invader, but I’m still a “non-aggression kinda guy”.
Furthermore, doesn’t “violent business” strike you as an oxymoron?