It’s silly argument anyway, especially seeing as he’s posting it on an internet forum, which didn’t exist all that long ago and therefore by his standards should be impossible.
War leaders who couldn’t declare war? That’s a novel concept. My studies in Celtic/Gaelic history usually focus earlier than that - Ireland, never having been conquered by Rome, didn’t really have a post-Roman society. The big demarcation around that time was pre-Christian and Christian. In any case, the kings could, indeed, mount an invasion on a neighboring region - the Irish did that far too often for their own good. No, they were not above the law - but they did have duties to enforce the law, they could change the law if their decision would have popular support, and it really wasn’t anarchy.
Our current leaders (in the USA) may seem to be above the law, but that’s not part of the law - that’s a failure of the legal enforcement system. That probably worked better then - but, again, we have very little proof of this, one way or another. Their distrust of the written word, coupled with the later Christian editing of the records, leaves us guessing about much of it.
Nope - it’s because no one can explain how road systems would not become monopolies in urban areas that I don’t believe anarchy would work. There are some minimum of services that are best supplied by monopolies, and those monopolies would need to be very closely regulated by a higher authority. That’s why I’m a minimal-government psycho, rather than a no-government nutcase. As for my definition of anarchy - I learned it here, in these forums and the reading material available from Mises.org.
I view anarchy very much like I view socialism - it’d be lovely if it’d work as intended, but it won’t - and the folks who insist upon their utopias that won’t work get in the way of us who are working toward a “better” system that could, rather than a “perfect” system that’ll fail.
I have yet to see any example of such. If a stranger can knock on my door, invoke the rights of hospitality, requiring me to feed and house him for the night, I may be living under a lot more freedom than the future USAians, but I’m not living in anarchy. (Yes, that was a well-documented feature of Brehon law.) Quite a few people seem to get along just fine under the horrid system I’m living in now - but it ain’t freedom. I prefer to strive for a maximized level of freedom that’d work rather than a more-free system that’s purely theoretical.
Which one said that that style of law would be impossible because of advances in technology? I never saw that go by. He claims that an anarchic or near-anarchic society would be workable, and that he knows of examples of it having worked. I’m saying that it’d be lovely, but unworkable. He claims that there are Real World examples of it working - I’m waiting to hear about them. Why do you think level of technology is relevant?
So your solution to this whole monopoly problem is what? To institute another monopoly, a far more dangerous one in fact. Roads wouldn’t be monopolised anyway, unless of course one company was able to provide roads better than any others in that area, and if that was the case, then there’s no problem.
However, if the roads were managed badly people would take other routes to work, other companies would build roads either underneath or over the existing roads creating yet more competition and perhaps most importantly other forms of transport would arise. In other words, competition would stop monopolies from forming.
Roads in urban areas wouldn’t really be a problem, the road companies would simply make most roads dead ends in urban areas to avoid traffic and therefore keep the cost of maintaining the roads down, which would ultimately mean that the only people using the roads would be those that lived on them. The problem is you’re thinking in the statist paradigm of roads, as do most people who try to make the same point you just did. I’d argue that this is ultimately because roads have been socialised to a greater extent and for longer than most other industries. Hoppe points this out and attributes it to the fact that governments needed roads to exact taxes from the citizens.
Walter Block did a rather good paper on this actually I advise you read it.
I think the best thing about socialism is that it doesn’t work.
Or, alternatively, it’s the inconsistant “libertarians” who are getting in the way of the rest of us.
You state that as if it’s a fact, it isn’t, if governments can be trusted to provide roads then why not healthcare and education?
It is relevant actually but that’s besides the point.
The point was it’s really not worth arguing about the past, because all we can learn from that is what has happened, not the more important questions of what can happen or what will happen.
Well…sometimes. I would not have learned Bulgarian if that rule was completely true. Sometimes the people who know English well are shockingly untrustworthy. In 2001 I found a restaurant in Cap Hatien Haiti where everyone spoke perfect English. So I went to the counter and ordered breakfast and was met with blank stares…stares that were a bit on the angry side.
i tried to order again and the woman behind the counter told me:
“you think you can come here and demand that we serve you food?”
The dreadlocked guys behind the counter were really scowling at me now so I decided to take my business elsewhere.
But in Cap Hatien near the Tap Tap depot that was the only restaraunt in town that was selling food that was not roast corn or burned chicken bones.
A Haitian who I sat next to on the tap tap to Milot (where the Citadel is..the coolest, spookiest castle in the world) told me that the group that owned that had been deported from America and hated white people. He was suprised that they didn’t give me poisoned food and assumed that there must have been a poison shortage.
But their English was awesome.
I’ve read that list - and, apparently, my understanding of anarchy is remarkably narrow. I’d had no idea that societies that feature taxation (well, the Celts called it something I can’t pronounce, but it worked like tribute), legislative power bought and sold more openly than the US legislature (Iceland’s ‘thing’ system), enslaving others (Barbary Pirates?!?), communal ownership of property (many cases), restrictions on possessing cameras, automobiles, etc. could be considered anarchies. In one of the cited ‘to present’ groups, the residents are entitled to vote in (and get on the dole of) Great Britain.
Many of the cited societies had, by modern standards, remarkably non-intrusive governments. This does not mean that they were not governed, and in many cases, they were small groups within the territory of governments who are/were being tolerant - which does not make them free of government.
Wikipedia is a fun and oft useful source - but it’s not authorative, or, at least in this case, accurate. There were, I’ll admit, a couple of actual anarchist societies in the list - remarkably small and short-lived. This gives no proof that anarchy can work on any scale other than small, or that it can survive governmental neighbors.
But the basics for polite conversation are easy.
If I were moving to Somalia I would figure out what language would be best to know. A visit to google points to here:
So I would decide on the type of Arabic spoken in Yemen.
Next step is to make yourself flash cards of the Arab “alphabet” with the corresponding sounds on the back. Then practice writing words in English with the Arab alphabet right to left. A day or two of doing this will make you be able to read any notice of an impending road block in Mogadishu or find a grocery store that sells edible insects.
Then memorise the words for yes, please, thank you, no, and numbers 1 to 10. And then make more flash cards to learn the proper names for things that you might need like “taxi” , “body guard”, “tea”, “anti-biotic” and “sun glasses”. After doing this you won’t be TE Lawrence but you will amuse the locals to a degree that they will be less likely to strangle you.
My friend met a guy who moved to Mogadishu to go to the university there. I am not really sure as to what kind of medical doctor he will be when he graduates but people do it. Most of the entrepreneurship there is done by ex-pat Somalis selling services and Coca Cola to their countrymen. So I suspect that clan ties are the thing that trumps all there.
Of course not. Much land that we think is unoccupied is actually used by people on a seasonal basis…or a group of farmers might have let it fallow for seven years. Imagine coming to plant a millet crop on what you are hoping will be revitalised land and finding that a bunch of weird white people are there opposing abortion and trying to print up passports to sell online. Your choice as a local would be:
a) Starve…since your millet is not going to plant itself.
b) Be in awe of their superior passport printing technology and offer to mow their lawns once they get lawns.
c) Kill them so you can plant your millet.
That’d be a fun place to live - a stack of 6 turnpikes going past my house, one of which I must do business with to get off of my property - but I’d need to deal with several of them, likely, to get to all of the places I’d like to go to. Subterranean mazes would deliver water from several competing sources to my house, to offer me the choice of the marketplace - but it’d lose me the economy of scale that makes my water bill as low as it is.
“Other forms of transport would arise”? Ones that would enable me to leave my property without trespassing or paying a toll to another? Beam me up.
This would greatly enhance my shopping experience, and make it so much more pleasant for my customers to travel to my shop, or to travel to their jobs. Under the vision you propose here, the only use for roads would be to visit the neighbors, or work at the neighborhood industry - reducing, rather than expanding, everyone’s practical choices.
Actually, the citizens needed roads to keep passersby from trampling their fields. All governments needed to exact taxes were armies and thugs. Fortunately, the armies and thug squads usually kept the neighboring nobles from coming by to exact loot taxes.
I’ll have to look for Mr. Block’s paper when I have some more time to spare for this.
Sure it does - my household runs just fine on socialist principles. From each according to their means, to each according to their need, and like that. It just runs so poorly on any scale larger than that. I’ll acknowledge the value of their goals, though I find the means repugnant.
Who’s inconsistent? I’ve generally maintained that government’s role was to provide those services that all must use, at the most efficient scale, and to act to enforce the rights of it’s citizens - period. If presented with a workable plan for a private contractor to provide such services, then the government can get out of that business.
Not that I expect to see that happen any time soon, either.
I never said that governments could be trusted for anything. That’s why I’d prefer one that was small and nervous, and only used for those things for which is was the most efficient provider.
That wouldn’t happen, you wouldn’t to know why monopolies wouldn’t arise in certain areas. I said previously, roads that lead to houses in urban areas would largely be dead end in order to keep the cost down. Obviously it wouldn’t be worth it to build 6 layers of turn pikes there for only a few customers. Assuming for whatever reason they did build it, people would simply move, since I doubt they’d want “6 layers of turnpikes outside your house” and those that stayed or moved into these houses simply wouldn’t have a problem with that.
Because monopolies are notorious for keeping prices low. You assume the only way to get water to houses is through underground pipes, it isn’t.
I thought your issue with anarchism is that it isn’t viable, not that it isn’t desirable?
It wouldn’t reduce anybody’s opportunities anyway, you’d still be able to get to places (more efficiently too) there would simply be roads in urban areas for the purpose of getting to houses and those roads designed to travel long distances.
It’s still inconsistant, government can provide services X efficiently but not every other service, why is this?
Road production is just one aspect of land ownership amongst others. The confusion stems from the fact that some people don’t understand they rent land from land production companies instead of outright owning it. These land owners are presently a monopoly, because the government controls how land can be incorporated, but they do not need to be. City A is going to compete with City B, they are going to have different forms of organization and incorporation, and so on.
Also read my posts in private roads and cities, linked below.
Just a correction, a road cannot be a dead end by definition. Its purpose is to connect a place with other places. The more connections it forms, the most useful it is.
A cluster of house can be grouped around a single entrance, but that is private space and not urban space, no different than the elevator in a condominium tower.
You live in Costa Rica and speak Spanish, yet the Limon Provence (REAL Limon Project http://libertariannation.org/a/f54s1.html ) is NOT on your proposed colony list.
Why is it missing?
I’ve been wondering that myself.
Go with what you know and all that…
Okay - in what way would I have several different road owners competing for my business, without the turnpikes?
You do seem to minimize the effort and cash it would take those people to “simply move” - particularly since selling a house with 6 layers of roads overshadowing it would present something of a problem.
There is, as far as I know, no perfect solution to the conflict between this person who would like to do whatever they’d like on their own property, and that person who does not want to suffer the effects next door. Current USAian government is remarkably imperfect in this regard - I’m unclear about how anarchy would somehow present a perfect (or even as efficient) solution to the problem.
Actually, monopolies are notorious (famous with a negative connotation) for keeping prices high; the fact is that the only two ways to maintain a monopoly are to keep prices too low to compete against, or the use of force. In the provision of an inexpensive commodity such as water, with a high infrastructure cost (such as water pipes), a monopoly is probably the most efficient method - how would this work without government force and regulation?
Yes, I’m aware that, rather than using underground pipes to get water to my house, I could buy little plastic bottles of water at the grocery store and use that for bathing, laundry, and watering my garden. Do you intend to imply that there is an alternative method that is as cost-efficient as underground pipes for water delivery?
Anarchy is, philosophically, desirable. Its practical application, in some situations, are so undesirable as to make it unviable.
Allow me to hazard a guess that you do not live in a large metropolitan area. A road system that serves my house, but does not serve the grocery store 2 miles away, is not going to make my life better or more free. I suspect that you’re passing along ideas that you’ve heard, but have not thought about carefully. How would a multi-owner road system be more efficient, and its services be billed? A toll system works, somewhat, on long-distance roads - but it’d be a nightmare on urban streets. Traffic congestion is enough of a problem without adding a multitude of bottlenecks.
This is a straw man argument. Alcoa was an actual monopoly, because they could provide aluminum more efficiently than anyone else. Standard Oil was a near-monopoly, because they provided oil products better and cheaper than anyone else.
Nobody argued that Alcoa could have competed with Standard Oil by expanding their product line.
Road systems are not equivalent to health care services or education, which are not equivalent to each other (outside of teaching hospitals). The Mayo Clinic is world-famous for providing health care; nobody is clamoring for them to start building or maintaining roads. Your insistence that such disparate services are equivalent is disingenuous, at best.
All I could find were his Road Socialism, International Journal of Value-Based Management, 9 (1996) and a podcast with him and Lew Rockwell - and I avoid podcasts where possible, absorbing text far easier than audio. Road Socialism focused primarily upon the flaws in methodology of economists he disagreed with, and safety issues on highways - it did not cover urban, neighborhood roads.
Could I get a title or pointer toward the paper you’re referring to?
Thanks.
Did I say everyone who spoke English was trustworthy? My point is if you want to make it work you can. Language is not usually the barrier to getting things done.
Right here: http://mises.org/journals/jls/3_2/3_2_7.pdf
I’ll reply to your other post soon.
This a common misconception about an anarchic society. You assume for this to exist that it means there is 100% compliance and agreement by everybody in the world. There will always be criminals in a society and people violating other peoples rights. The government is the same as any other criminal. In some things and in some places the criminals are numerous and powerful and in other places there are much weaker to the point of non-existence. What you require is that no criminals ever exist. You are correct that your definition of anarchy is impossible.
I would argue that most of the planet currently lives at least in some degree in an anarchic society. For example, the farmers market here where I live is untaxed and unregulated. People selling stuff in the street are untaxed and unregulated. There are lots of examples of this activity.
There will always be somebody somewhere that claims they are in charge. It is the actual application of the coercive force that you should look at.