Nir, your TV example, C is exploitive because the better a B becomes, the better B is also at being C. The advancement of C’s capabilities is also the advancement of B’s capabilities. The best robbers are the best protecters. In symbolic language:
If A hires C to use action on B that B used on A(in this case, aggression or threat thereof), it is exploitative business(C exploiting A). This means that the best Bs are also the best Cs, which makes the problem created by B a paradox(better solution is also a bigger threat), and leads to B being C(through elimination of weaker Cs and Bs).
Autolykos, both mine and mcintyre’s ideas suggest formation of state, not total violence, as the time progresses. The reason why you dont(or any one else) exploit in walmart is because the exploitation industry has been monopolized.
The temporal difference between aggression and defense is purely subjective. The assumption that its relevant to real life assumes that everyone believe in NAP(in which case defense industry would be pointless anyway), and further believe a certain formulation of the “shady” areas of homesteading and NAP principles(what specifically constitutes homesteading in a certain case, what consitutes just punishment, etc),
Summary: Any individual who cannot adequately defend for himself will always and forever be either:
1) The victim of multiple non-monopolist exploiters who will race with one another to take everything they can as quickly as possible. Being that there are no long-term profits to be made by non-monopolist exploiters, they will take everything they physically can. In other words, the individual will be completely undefended.
OR the individual in need of defense will be
2) The victim of a monopolist exploiter who protects him only from other exploiters but charges whatever he wants to for this “service”. This “charge” includes the value of all exploited wealth, weather from direct taxation or various other means of exploitation (special interest legislation, the draft, hereditary titles, privileges, slaves, etc.) This monopolist will “charge” only up to the point the he believes will maximize his long-term gains from his victims, and thus does not face a calculation problem.
The third option, being protected by a web of private defense firms, simply does not exist. There is no economic reason any such market for defense could or would ever develope. Exploitation will always be a more profitable use of the the “ability to use force effectively” against helpless defenders. There is no reason to engage in voluntary trade with those whom you can physically dominate, as potential victims must necessarily pay less than they would loose by being exploited, or else there is no point.
The point is no one will pay for this service. Entrepreneurial thiefs might try to start one, but there is a demand in the market to supply the necessary defense.
We should expect defense to work pretty well, since most thiefs outside the US government are pretty poor. The USG just has superficially low operating costs because of its perceived legitimacy, which any other criminal organization would not have.
Yes and you repeatedly ignore our counterarguments. You’re relying on one protection firm being able to capture an entire market. You have not proven that this will happen, nor spoken to our analysis of how a competitive market would work._
Again, internet example. Private PDAs are more than capable of exploiting their customers. They have the tools. They choose not to because everyone would just switch providers. Its exactly what we’re saying would happen in the physical world.
Your examples are convoluted and assume ex nihilo that the market can be cornered and there will be no benefit from competition. You never say the word “criterion” in your last post so I don’t know what you’re referring to.
Summary: Any individual who cannot adequately defend for himself will always and forever be either:
1) The victim of multiple non-monopolist exploiters who will race with one another to take everything they can as quickly as possible. Being that there are no long-term profits to be made by non-monopolist exploiters, they will take everything they physically can. In other words, the individual will be completely undefended.
OR the individual in need of defense will be
2) The victim of a monopolist exploiter who protects him only from other exploiters but charges whatever he wants to for this “service”. This “charge” includes the value of all exploited wealth, weather from direct taxation or various other means of exploitation (special interest legislation, the draft, hereditary titles, privileges, slaves, etc.) This monopolist will “charge” only up to the point the he believes will maximize his long-term gains from his victims, and thus does not face a calculation problem.
The third option, being protected by a web of private defense firms, simply does not exist. There is no economic reason any such market for defense could or would ever develope. Exploitation will always be a more profitable use of the the “ability to use force effectively” against helpless defenders. There is no reason to engage in voluntary trade with those whom you can physically dominate, as potential victims must necessarily pay less than they would loose by being exploited, or else there is no point.
In order to say that you need to show it is likely that Y’y’-Yy-Ff-Dd-X*x > Z’z’-Ff
The larger the amount D equals, the more likely it is that firms will calculate that defense is more worthwhile. We only need the critical mass of some value of D, and then forever more, exploitation will be less worthwhile.
No, it has nothing to do with the cornering of markets. It is a fundamental idea unrelated to any general market or social situation. The criterion:
If A hires C to use action on B that B used on A(in this case, aggression or threat thereof), it is exploitative business(C exploiting A).
Also Sam, youre using a circular argument(and everyone else who is using the reputation/angry defensive pda’s argument) - firms will use protective violence instead of innovative violence because they are using defensive violence.
Why is it exploitation of A. C is simply providing a service… its only exploitation if the costs of doing business with C aren’t the marginal revenue product.
You are saying that a system will multiple PDAs is unstable and that for the same reason, so are states. But states have been around for a long time and haven’t yet formed into a single super-state. This makes your claim of unstability look pretty weak. If PDA competition worked for thousands of years, so what if it is unstable? That would probably still mean thousands of years of unprecedented progress.
I will address your Internet thing one more time, in more detail. The Internet example is not of particular relevance to this discussion. Strictly speaking, one can not exercise the use of force over the Internet, any more than i can harm you with a phone call. I would also argue that you can’t actually steal anything over the Internet either. Using the same logic as the anit-Intellectual-property people, computer files are not a scarce resource nor is any particular arrangement or pattern of digital signals. Therefore, any theft that took place would actually occur at some real point, say at an ATM, bank teller, merchant storefront, warehouse, etc.
These acts of theft would/do fall under the jurisdiction of the monopolist exploiter whose activites dramatically drive down the profitability of this type of behavior. Thus all Internet security companies, just like all combination-lock makers, merely augment self-defense measures and do not fall into the category of defense-providers any more than firearms manufacturers do. They do not earn nearly enough money to fully combat the problem, from prevention, to enforcement, to prosecution, to extracting compensation, courts, prisons, etc, etc. etc.
I guess it is going to have to be me who undermines my own argument. Here are a few ideas i came up with this morning. See what you think-
Self defense is a big factor - Suppose I have a precious gem worth $1 million dollars. I expect it to come under attack from a gang of villains and need to augment my self-defense capabilities. Suppose the nature of technology allows me to spend $500,000 on defensive services which could cause $million worth of damage to any potential attacker. This would prevent the attack… IF my self-defense capabilities are sufficient to cause $500,000 worth of damage to my would be defender, he cant exploit me profitably either.
Doomsday Machine - If I can pose a credible treat that any attack will also destroy all the exploitable wealth then no one will ever attack me (for my wealth).
Also Sam, youre using a circular argument(and everyone else who is using the reputation/angry defensive pda’s argument) - firms will use protective violence instead of innovative violence because they are using defensive violence.
It’s not circular. I’m making the calculation from a single firm’s perspective, and calculating how other firm’s actions will affect the costs of this operation. At the beginning of anarchism, I agree, it is hard to establish this because D is dependent on the morals of firms, whether or not there will be massive resistance by Y, whether or not F firms will be roughly equal in size (causing a stalemate, and firms gaining an edge from people supporting those firms willing to switch to D), and precisely what the difference between Z and Y is (Z would be greater, but how much greater would it be). But once the system is in place, it is stable because D is in a positive feedback loop. For every firm that adds to D, that makes costs to F that much higher, thus making more firms choose D. The higher the amount of D, the lower the amount of F, but the relationship is not reversed. F has no effect on D because even if D firms decided to be F firms, they would still be dealing with the other F firms.
*Doomsday Machine - If I can pose a credible treat that any attack will also destroy all the exploitable wealth then no one will ever attack me (for my wealth).*
Sounds like how Kansas defeated the Republic of New Mexico:
This is not what the IP people say. If someone guesses your pin number, they did not steal the pin number from you. But if they go onto your property (your hard drive) without permission and take it, it is theft.
Even if you don’t buy that, USING the pin to access my bank account is still theft.
Even if you don’t buy THAT, its still stomething I want to stop happening to me. Whether it is a violation of libertarian rights is irrelevant.
So just because it doesn’t look like the status quo it isn’t a security industry? Dude we are using a system of law enforcement from the 1800’s. Ancap enforcement of property rights is going to look WAAAY different.
Regardless, your central point seemed to be that since in order to be a protection agency, you have to build up capital that could also be used aggressively. You say this is not true on the internet, but I insist it is. Protection companies want you to install THEIR software on your computer, which they could EASILY program to keylog all your information. They also employ white-hat-hackers to test their systems. In fact, I would say their capital is easier to use for exploitation than defense, since they spend all their time figuring out how to block other hackers when they themselves could hack your computer in a couple clicks of a button.
Competition keeps them honest. The multiple uses for capital does not impact anything.
Well I mentioned this before when talking about why the real-life protection agencies would have a harder time monopolizing than internet protection agencies. I can make life seriously unprofitable for would be aggressors because if all the protection agencies collude, then I can just enter the market as my own protector.
I don’t think it will come to this. Division of labor > everyone growing their own crops, clothes, protection…
Sam, your formula assumes D is not exploitation. My criterion rejects that. Or other words, your calculation idea is a sort of aggregate of market activity, mine is about the fundamental nature of the good of violence.To debunk me, youre gonna have to show the difference between attack and defense(so the B and C would not be equivalent),and please, no rothbardism, or some other way my criterion doesnt fit reality..
So what you are saying is that attacking someone is the same thing as actively defending someone except for how they are different, what you are saying is that they are the same thing except for how they aren’t the same thing. But I think that what you were trying to say wasn’t that they were the same thing, but that the only way that they are different, which you said is the “ethical argumentation” used to either justify it or not, doesn’t have anything to do with how providers of either one would develop and function in a market economy or something like that.
Well, I think that you are incorrect, I think that difference between them is very important to how they would develop and function in a market economy. I already alluded to the reasons why I think that, but I will try to clearly spell them out in this post.
I think that I can summarize what you are missing by pointing to the fact that you trivialized the difference between them as just the “ethical argumentation” used to either justify it or not, like it had nothing to do with economics or something. But, if you look deeper into what it means to be an “ethical justification”, you might be able to see where I am coming from, though you might not be able to accept it without us going through a long detour, which I of course wouldn’t object to, depending on what sorts of views you have on ethics.
I think that morality, which I think is what you were talking about when you were talking about the “ethical argumentation” used to justify it or not, is just a bunch of rules that developed that show us how to preserve and strengthen society. If you don’t follow the moral rules, you are disrupting the strength of the social order, and, if you rely on the social order as a means to any of your ends, you are disrupting yourself. The reason why society is able to exist is because most people value what they get from the social order more than what they what they would get from destroying it or just leaving it. If people didn’t feel that way, they would just become criminals or leave society, and society would be gone.
The attackers are the people who go against the moral rules, which means that they are the people who work against the preservation and strengthening of the social order. The defenders are the people who go against the people who go against the social order, which means that they are the people who work against the people who work against the social order. That means that the only thing that separates the attackers and the defenders is morality, the “ethical argumentation” used to either justify it or not, but that is more important than you acted like it was, considering what morality really is.
Now you get the benefits of the social order only in the longterm. When a business goes out of business because someone came up with a substitute for their product that is better, they lose in the shortterm, but they gain in the longterm. If they were to prevent the people from releasing their substitute by getting monopoly status from the government, they will benefit themselves in the shortterm, but, in the longterm, they will be stifling innovation that they would benefit from and stifling the advance of the economy, which is something that they would benefit from. The people who have high time preferences tend to be the people who disrupt the social order just to get the small shortterm benefits, though it might destroy their ability to get the large longterm benefits, and they are the people who we usually call “criminals”.
So what the anarcho-capitalists are saying is that staying legitimate, which means staying defenders and not turning into attackers, is more profitable in the longterm, if you care about what the social order can give you, and nothing less significant than whether society can exist rests on the question of whether enough people care about being more profitable in the longterm in terms of what they can get from the social order to make that sort of thing work. What I am saying is that, if enough people didn’t care about being more profitable in the longterm in terms of what they can get from the social order to make it so private defense agencies were possible, it wouldn’t matter anyway, because society itself wouldn’t be possible.
I don’t have any idea what you are trying to say, especially in the first paragraph. Can you rephrase it or something?
If someone guesses your pin number, they did not steal the pin number from you. But if they go onto your property (your hard drive) without permission and take it, it is theft.
I cant, “go onto your hard drive” as I am not an electron. I might be able to steal the physical device from your cpu, but that would be different.
Also, I can’t “steal” your pin number. You pin number is just some arbitrarily sequence of single-digit numbers. You can’t own that.
What I can steal is your money. I would do that by taking it from your bank or ATM or such w/o your permission. At what point has Mcaffe ever had to investigate ATM theft, find the guy, and get the money back? At what point have they ever compensated anyone for identity theft if they fail to protect them? Obviously it would cost them a great deal more to provide the services which you claim PDAs would provide in an anarchist society, which brings their supposed profitability as such under question.
What I am saying is that, if enough people didn’t care about being more profitable in the long term to make it so private defense agencies were possible, it wouldn’t matter anyway, because society itself wouldn’t be possible.
Monopolist Exploiters (states) are concerned about long-term profitability. The whole point of monopolist exploiters (states) is to establish long term exploitation rights, which are better than both short-term exploitation profits, and long-term voluntary trade arrangements.
There is no reason to engage in voluntary trade with those whom you can physically dominate, as potential customers must necessarily pay less than they would loose by being exploited, or else there is no point. Thus, potential defenders must necessarily be able to make more by exploiting those in need of defense.
Sam, your formula assumes D is not exploitation. My criterion rejects that. Or other words, your calculation idea is a sort of aggregate of market activity, mine is about the fundamental nature of the good of violence.To debunk me, youre gonna have to show the difference between attack and defense(so the B and C would not be equivalent),and please, no rothbardism, or some other way my criterion doesnt fit reality..
I’m not assuming D firms even exist. If you think D firms won’t exist, then D = 0. Exploitive firms are covered under F. You obviously think F will be greater than 0. My formula doesn’t assume any values for any of those variables. But you still need to show the values for each of those variables will make it so that the left equation is greater than the right in all cases, and then show that enough firms won’t “miscalculate” and choose D, making it unprofitable for F to exist when compared to D. This is a calculation that each firm has to make on it’s own, before they decide to defend or exploit. So even if you were correct in assuming that F is more profitable than D, if enough firms miscalculate that D is more profitable than F, D will in fact become more profitable than F.
