GooPC, thanks for the resources. My use of the word “better” was not well thought out. It’s more that I just don’t understand how a private police system or court system would be provided exclusively to those who paid for it (i didn’t say anything about the amount of a product produced by free actors being “not enough”).
I’ll need to read more on this and then i may post my thoughts/comments to an article that explains how private courts and defense systems would function.
Izzy, i don’t think i am the first to pose these questions.
I agree that i make the leap from rule#1 to make the statement #2 that the government should interfere with individuals who are interfering with the self-interests of others. The reason i make this leap is because i don’t understand how a private police system would protect only the people who subscribe to their services, and how a private legal system would enforce their own private laws, and how people would even know what laws are if there is not a centralized government to provide those laws (i’m not saying that because i think that my conclusions must be correct. i’m just writing my thoughts and i’m sure you have a response to this but if you don’t respond i understand).
Again, i don’t think i have the knowledge of these things that many others on this forum have. I’ll have a look around the site and may post my reactions to an article that explains a private legal/defense system.
That’s okay, because no one does at first. I recommend reading Murray Rothbard and David Friedman to get a grasp of this. After reading them and thinking things through, I realised the arguments for a free market in law / police / defense are exactly the same as for a free market in anything else. It’s just a bit harder to imagine how that would work compared to how, say, a free market in education would work. In other words, not only can a free market provide these things, but we would expect a free market in those services to be better (i.e. better quality, lower price, more choice, less corruption, etc) than a monopoly of those services, for all the same reasons as any other products or services.
Specifically on national defense, I recommend Roderick Long and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.