Done. Fascinating. A bit of an eye-opener, actually. I now understand why slums exist and what an anarcho-capatalist protection against pollution might be (something for which libertarian doctrine never seemed to have a real answer).
Excellent. Speaking of eye-openers, have you read Walter Block’s Defending the Undefendable? It’s a little bit off the subject of this thread, but he goes into detail on pollution issues, slums, and many other things. It’s available in the literature section, in both audio and .pdf format. I highly recommend it.
The very essence of war, as opposed to simple massacre, is the uncertainty of the outcome. If the outcome of a conflict is known in advance, it is not a war.
The fact is that it cannot be determined if hypothetical anarcho-capitalists could with certainty defeat the state, but that is not an argument against anarcho-capitalism - quite the opposite, it is a proof of the legitimate war-fighting and protective abilities of the anarcho-capitalists that the state could not massacre them with impunity.
ha ha ha ha [*-)]
I have little time to really consider what you wrote but let me just ask you how you feel about the following. I will try to get back to you tonight. (trying to avoid a snowstorm and have to drive a few hours)
- We can observe empirical regularities (laws) between variables.
- Hypothetical explanatory generalizations are constructed from which the empirically observed laws can be deduced (and thus “explained”)
- Since competing hypotheses can be framed, each explaining the body of empirical laws, this “coherence” or consistent explanation is not enough. To validate the hypotheses, other deductions must be made from them, which must be “testable” by empirical observation.
- From teh construction and testing of hypotheses, a wider and wider body of generalizations is developed. These can be discarded if further tests invalidate them, or be replaced by new explanations covering an even wider range of phenomena.
I just want to make sure we are on the same page here. I want you to address my previous point too because you seem very lost. Do you understand the difference between prediction and forecasting?
I suspect that such an ancap society wouldn’t even come under the same concepts as utilized in theories of warfare and here’s why. Consider how companies setup their infrastructure the world. They need capital and customers. Capital is a complex component holding things like buildings, factories, employees, contractors, and resources (which this component is also complex as it covers a wide array of items onto itself…). Customers are just about anyone that can enjoy the use of a company’s product/service, so it can be B2B, B2P, and etc.
Anyways, my point in this illustration is that a company in this example may require at minimum some land to occupy as obviously people and products (or services) need space to be utilized, but the important feature is that it can be any land that fulfill the requirement for the company’s purposes. That means a company can literally have its product produced many ways that don’t result in a centralized infrastructure. To steal a phrase from RAH in his novel Friday, “Where is IBM?” And that question is very important because a company has no real territory, nor does it need territory. It simply needs capital and customers, all other factors can be described as accidents of its own history.
Thus to attack IBM or any other company requires assassins as it’s the brains of the company operations that count (as it does for a military strangely enough). Attacking a single building full of accounts on IBM/company payroll won’t hurt it where it counts, it will count it as a loss of operating in a hostile environment and move on. But if you kill off its key engineers or managers, then you can cripple it or have it relent in its operations (forcing it into receivership and liquidation).
Similarly, an ANCAP society would be an animal that is very much independent from territorial claims and concerns, rather it would live or die by its brains and social bonds. If you can eliminate the brains, then it’s helpless. If you can eliminate its bonds, it ceases to exist. But all other factors in terms of war, such as fronts and territories have no applicability to it.
In war, the objectives define the weapons, not the other way around. This is why tanks, fighter-bombers and nuclear weapons are useless against non-state fighting organizations, for example.
War after the state will look much more medieval, consisting mostly of raids, short sieges and random massacres. (Like this battle.)
QFT/E.