Monopolies of force rely on deceit and implicit consent, not naked aggression. De la Boetie and all that jazz.
For the benefit of you late-to-the-party anarchists, I will re-post here the portion of my first reply to this thread pertinent to the difference between Objectivists and Libertarians of the anarcho- faction:
"4) Differences with anarchists over the nature of liberty:
Objectivists and Libertarian anarchists are in agreement that the principles of Austrian free-market economics as presented by Mises are valid. When it comes to defining the proper government structure to enable that economics, however, the anarchists are subjectivists. That is why Rand labeled them “the hippies of the right.”
Objectivists can go a long way towards the decentralization of government through the use of private contractors and their preference for smaller units of government over one large one. And a lot of anarchists will concede that justice requires a single set of principles that will be enforced, and some will even concede that it requires some single function of oversight for appeals of the last resort to those principles. But ultimately, they will circle the wagons around one single argument.
Anarchists maintain that a government may not exercise their monopoly of force to stop them from the inherently just and moral act of using force to defend themselves from an initiation of force by others—not just in those spontaneous acts of self-defense when attacked, but anytime ever, because it is in itself an initiation of force.
Objectivists reject that argument altogether, pointing out that the anarchists are relying on an incomplete understanding of the nature of liberty itself. Unique to Rand’s capitalism is the recognition that the primary prerequisite for liberty is that the exercise of defensive force will be objective and expected, not arbitrary and unknowable. All laws, procedures, and acts of enforcement must be objectified in the Constitution, the laws, the adjudications, the rules of enforcement, and the punishments for violations.
The anarchist, in condoning the use of force in self defense without having to comply with objective standards that are known or knowable to all in advance, violates the liberty of others by enabling an arbitrary use of force that in the daily life of the populace becomes indistinguishable from an act that initiates the use of force.
The principle that anarchists ignore is that over half the value of liberty is the justifiable expectation of it in one’s daily life.
Anarchy is thus inherently incompatible with liberty."
Contradiction. You need to check your premises Michael.
I agree. Whatever works. The fact is that it does.
Power/force asymmetry is a major ingredient in any tacit bargaining and pay-off calculation. This hugely distorts outcomes away from where they’d otherwise rest in a free market without such asymmetry. The mere existence of this asymmetry (without any ‘naked’ exercise of power/force) is enough to affect the negotiation and blur the boundary between a voluntary and involuntary exchange. The problem is that a buyer of power/force services is entering the negotiation/exchange exactly because of his need to eliminate his power/force deficit, so such asymmetry is present almost by default.
Z.
Does it? Who is it working for? And how do you define working?
Absolutely.
Agreed.
Argument from ignorance. You wanna double check this one. You’re assuming a value scale.
I would say (without any proof) there are more Americans who pay taxes because they think they are supposed to, than because they are afraid of violence. Again, government is by consent. The social contract is a myth, a lie, and a farce, but people believe in it, just like they believe in spiritual realms and other abstractions. And their belief, whether in nationalism, patriotism, objectivism etc, is enough for them to go along, without needing to be shown or reminded of the foremans lash.
You’re making the same mistake Objectivists make. You’re assuming a value is objective.
Competition is a term that only applies to the FREE exchange of goods.
This is false, competition is certainly restrained and hampered under an environment but it will occur to an extent wherever the coercion/monopoly is not total.
I believe that the most extenstive competitive environement acheivable… the freest market possible… must emerge through competitive activity of agents under an environment which was ‘somewhat less’ ‘freely’ competitive. How could it be any other way?
Without an institution having already removed force from the market, there can be no free exchange and hence no competition.
There is no possibility of any single institution removing all force from the market, this is utopian. All a reasonable libertarian can hope for is a maximization of achievable liberty somewhat below the limit of abstractly theorizable liberty. Keeping illegitimate force at bay, is a service that will require economic resources, and like all service industries, competition gets consumer sovereignty working, it spurs efficiency, it disincentives negative externalities.
The logical fallacy here is that we cannot have ‘economic freedom’ worth the name unless we first receive a ‘perfect monopolistic government’ . But ‘economic freedom’ is a matter of degree…
There may have been a misunderstanding. I was not referring to a citizen<->government but to a client<->PDA relationship, and related to the linked essay in my previous post. I’d appreciate your comment on it.
Pls explain my ‘value scale’ assumption.
Z.
I don’t need you to just reassert the same things over again, as if I haven’t heard you loud and clear. (As if I haven’t heard it a million times before)
What is all this “guaranteeing” nonsense? What happens when I finally do get robbed? Your theory is then finally declared to be fallacious?
There can be no such service that guarantees anything.
But yes to police. I get it. Well, it’s still a territorial monopoly on a particular service by your own admission. Telling us that you are sympathetic towards the idea of private police as “subcontractors” does not overcome the inherent contradictions in your argument. You still require one central authority with a monopoly on force in a given territorial area.
Now, there are only two methods by which such a government (or any agency) can attain such a monopoly:
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Using force to drive out all competitors and keep them out, i.e., coercion.
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By some miraculous achievement, one (and only one) such agency is able to acquire the voluntary consent of every individual who happens to reside in a given territory and maintain this consent by constantly remaining so efficient that no competition can ever emerge.
Now, unless you’re attributing mystical powers to this thing you call “objective government”, operating beyond the realm of economic laws, then you’ll have to explain how this monopoly emerges not by one of the above 2 methods.
I’d like to start a new discussion about this, because you have this habit of inserting your pda critique everywhere, and this thread is about objectivism and austrianism.
That said, I read 4 pages of what you linked to, and I think it misses the point completely.
But I will discuss it with you in a new thread.
DD5,
Me: “An Objectivist government does not do anything but guarantee that force will not be exercised arbitrarily.”
You: “I don’t need you to just reassert the same things over again, as if I haven’t heard you loud and clear. (As if I haven’t heard it a million times before)”
And never once understood that competing services for defensive force are ipso facto instruments of arbitrary force, and liberty exists only in an absence of arbitrary force. So to the degree an Objectivist government with a territorial monopoly on the use of force excludes arbitrary force in its jurisdiction, it sustains liberty there, and that cannot be coercion.
Furthermore, the prevention of arbitrary force in a society is a moral and just pursuit with or without anyone’s consent and even if it were imposed in the face of unanimous opposition.
Examples of competing private defense services engaged in the arbitrary use of defensive force per their own principles and standards of implementation would be blood feuds and gang wars.
Michael, what if I live in an Objectivist country and I decide that the Objectivist government is not doing a good enough job of protecting liberties… and I create my own (competing) government in response? The original Objectivist government has no moral right to shut down my government unless I violate other people’s rights… but in this hypothetical example what would the Objectivist government do if I created a competing government that simply aimed at protecting the rights of others more efficiently? If the original Objectivist government tried to shut my government down, then it would be using the initiation of violence and breaking its own moral code.
(4) Ayn Rand: Private Protection Agencies Will Battle
Probably the most popular argument against libertarian anarchy is: well, what happens if (and this is Ayn Rand’s famous argument) I think you’ve violated my rights and you think you haven’t, so I call up my protection agency, and you call up your protection agency — why won’t they just do battle? What guarantees that they won’t do battle? To which, of course, the answer is: well, nothing guarantees they won’t do battle. Human beings have free will. They can do all kinds of crazy things. They might go to battle. Likewise, George Bush might decide to push the nuclear button tomorrow. They might do all sorts of things.
The question is: what’s likely? Which is likelier to settle its disputes through violence: a government or a private protection agency? Well, the difference is that private protection agencies have to bear the costs of their own decisions to go to war. Going to war is expensive. If you have a choice between two protection agencies, and one solves its disputes through violence most of the time, and the other one solves its disputes through arbitration most of the time — now, you might think, “I want the one that solves its disputes through violence — that’s sounds really cool!” But then you look at your monthly premiums. And you think, well, how committed are you to this Viking mentality? Now, you might be so committed to the Viking mentality that you’re willing to pay for it; but still, it is more expensive. A lot of customers are going to say, “I want to go to one that doesn’t charge all this extra amount for the violence.” Whereas, governments — first of all, they’ve got captive customers, they can’t go anywhere else — but since they’re taxing the customers anyway, and so the customers don’t have the option to switch to a different agency. And so, governments can externalize the costs of their going to war much more effectively than private agencies can.
i think the issue here has to do with the fact that the use of force to prevent violations of private property is generally conceived of to be monopolised, in the example you cite of gang wars, you are suggesting that the implementers of this force would compete over the boundaries of their jurisdiction… or indeed perhaps in the scenario i’m imagining, with multiple operators overlapping in regions, acting on the behalf of multiple antagonistic private individuals or organisations. it is problematic indeed, how does one restrain force without using force?
i believe this is what was intended in the US constitution in the second amendment. unpaid, informally trained and self funded citizens of the very places they defend operating the defensive forces. the way i understand it, agents implementing force for pay are inherently corrupt or rapidly become corrupt and will quickly escalate into the statist system that we see today and indeed this was exactly how it happened. the only solution to the question of the crime of initiating violence or coercion against the private property (or persons, referring to further up in the discussion being that each individual constitutes a sovereign private property) is that nobody defends anyone except their direct neighbours, and that thereby, while voluntary, it would be incumbent upon all able bodied persons to acquire a competence in the use of force ideally with the aim of minimal killing in order for the natural justice often called ‘lynch mobs’ can implement a public punishment which in the case of property crime would be remunerative and in the case of crime against persons physically - this is a tricky one, but i think it could be validly stated that any use of violence against a person even the most skillful use could ultimately become mortally wounding. this therefore logically suggests that the punishment to the initiator after a public trial should be at least partially determined by the publicly recognised victim of the violence. that is to say, if reputable medical advice states that the injuries could have easily been mortal that would then permit the punishment to be actually mortal. i guess it depends on the exact group of people in a community as to how this should be treated, and as would be suggested by libertarians and anarchists alike (i have no idea what the objectivist view would be) will be entirely dependent on the will of the people within the vicinity of this act of violence.
i guess what i’m saying then is, vigilantes and lynch mobs. i don’t know exactly where this concept and demonisation of citizens militia came from but i suspect it would have to be statist propaganda. the odd occasion where a violent perpetrator was stopped by a combat-skilled citizen generally the person stopping the violence was hailed as a hero. shouldn’t every street, every neighbourhood have several such folks? really, the only way to stop the concentrated use of violence is to train everyone. i would say ‘compulsory military training’ but that is in violation of the principles of liberty. but any person interested in doing so should be allowed to do so, acquire the weapons required and take and give the training required.
The issue has nothing to do with force. It is with how Objectivists claim objective value(s). The force stuff is just a sidebar discussion which has nothing to do with the differences between Objectivism and Austrianism. Objectivists have a flawed value theory.
I suspect this is why Michael continues to ignore my posts, after challenging me to a debate. Objectivists don’t like their premises being questioned.
right… so i guess what i described would be called the pure libertarian/anarchist version of violence/crime prevention, because i basically said that it would be decided by the people in the place where the violence/crime occurs. from what i’m gathering then, the objectivists would say that once the crimes and the parties are identified the punishments would be handed down by moral authority, whoever that is.
i’m interested to hear who defines where this objective value is defined, or perhaps i should be a bit more succinct: WHO defines it. cos it sounds remarkably like christian socialism wrapped in agnosticism to me, this idea that people have a uniform sense of justice and conscience, and thus the power would thereby rest in the hands of those granted with the moral authority from whichever mystical source they claim it came from. LOL! ok, but really, who is this nonpartisan third party who has this ‘objective’ viewpoint? objectivity is simply a kind of abstract subjectivity anyway, it always ultimately amounts to ‘the consensus view’ or ‘the judgement of the powers that be’ and any way you slice it, it amounts to self-deification.
the anarchist view that talks about community implemented defense and justice is at least honest and puts it all back upon the social network involved and keeps things narrowed down to a local situation, every other version of the restraining of arbitrary force summons abstractions, deities and things like states and federations and syndicates etc etc etc.
the curliest bit about the whole suggestion that communities operate their own defense and justice is that there is nothing preventing groups of communities creating arbitrary, larger organised militias, how do you stop that? it’s a rather fascinating subject altogether, i’m sure i’m gonna put a lot of thought into it… but my preliminary conclusion is that such pan-regional groupings of paid police/soldiers should be regarded as an incursion no matter where they are and driven out before they even gather, and as such the real defense against them is widespread knowledge of the danger of concentrated power.
krazy kaju,
“what would the Objectivist government do if I created a competing government that simply aimed at protecting the rights of others more efficiently? If the original Objectivist government tried to shut my government down, then it would be using the initiation of violence and breaking its own moral code.”
It would do nothing until and unless your “government” exercised force arbitrarily (not subject to verification that it was consistent with the objectified principles, laws, and procedures known or knowable to all in advance.) Since such arbitrary force is a violation of the rights of all members of the populace to a liberty that is absent of such arbitrary force, it would take whatever measures were necessary to stop you from exercising that force just as it would any other violator of their liberty.
Who determines what those “principles, laws, and procedures” are?
The third party is Rand. Nothing she said can be contradicted by Objectivism because she cannot be wrong in Objectivism. If she said something where A was equal to not A, Objectivists won’t address that premise. They can’t, because as John Ess explained, Objectivism is a closed system. You can’t innovate the ideas or improve them.
Michael makes a very key error. Anarchy is without rulers. He claims that Anarchy is not compatible with liberty. It’s pretty simple to understand that Michael is saying that liberty is not possible without rulers, and yet we know that being ruled is not being in a state of liberty. This is an example of A being equal to not A.
And yet Rand was against Anarchism, so he has no choice as an Objectivist but to also be against Anarchism.
Misesians don’t have this problem. Mises isn’t considered infallible, his work can be improved upon, because like all men (including Rand) he is only as perfect as the rest of us, which is to say he isn’t perfect at all.
This is a bit misleading, and why I said that the discussion about force was a distraction. Anarcho-capitalism is based on a very simple moral principle. The non-aggression principle says, that it is not right to aggress, where aggression is defined as the initiation of force.
The rest of the challenges against anarchism, are based on theories, which cannot speak for all of ancap, because ancap is only constrained by the NAP and outside of the initiation of force, everything is fair game. To pin down ancap to specific ideas or theories outside the NAP is a red herring. To take a discussion about Austrianism and Objectivism, where the key difference is value theory and make it about force, is also a red herring.
The majority. Just like in ancap, or any other system. In both minarchy and ancap the red-haired will be eaten for dinner if the majority found such action acceptable.
Z.
I. Ryan,
Michael M: not subject to verification that it was consistent with the objectified principles, laws, and procedures known or knowable to all in advance
“Who determines what those “principles, laws, and procedures” are?”
Those who establish and sustain the government.
Which would include the people making up the PDAs, right?