I’m not entirely convinced we’re headed into a depression and I’m also not convinced that depressions are always caused by state interference in markets. Markets can and have produced depressions on their own. Bankers can fall victim to the same euphoria that borrowers and speculators do. This isn’t to say that central banks haven’t been at the heart of booms and busts before, just that they haven’t always been at the heart. Booms and busts can happen with a state or without a state. They can probably happen with multiple floating currencies too. This doesn’t excuse market intervention, it just means that I don’t accept the strong efficient market hypothesis.
Who’s attacking you? Names, please.
It’s inconsistent and nonsensical to legitimize one form of theft, while not legitimizing all the other forms of theft.
But Daniel, are humans rational, sensible and consistent?
Thats partially true. What Ancap seeks to address is the economic calculation issue akin to state-run systems and coercive monopolies alike. Removing the coercive monopoly puts economic calculation back into the game. By Econ calc I mean, directly addressing the needs of the individual, the consumer.
Calling it re-inventing the wheel isn’t entirely correct. We don’t know what types of security services will be rendered on the free market. Those types of discussions are to be left to the speculative entrepreneur.
Without the ability of being a coercive based monopoly the state wouldn’t be so bad. It wouldn’t be a state, but a businesses seeking to address consumer demand. The rest of the PDA argument is entirely speculative and prudent at this point in time. If you don’t like how security is delivered to you than change services, or make your own.
Attacking the aesthetics of how it sounds doesn’t make it a bad idea or a good idea. Its mostly beside the fundamental point of ancap. It would be more productive if we stuck to the arguments of why Ancap may or may not fail rather then get caught up on it’s naming convention. Unless that is what your post was to be about?
This statement is awfully hypocritical? Your scared of a private security agency so you defer to public ones. Your scared because you believe private agencies will exploit you and take advantage of your property. But you defer to security system that does that by default. Public security agencies are a direct violation of your rights, unless they are volunteered into existence.
Your scared of a what-if, and you deter to an actuality of negative exploitation. If you are worried about abusive PDA’s your first attack should be against the in-efficiencies of state police, not against hypothetical fear stories of PDA’s. You cannot argue against PDA’s and be pro state police without having an inconsistent case.
This is quiet a claim. PDA’s have to work within market laws. That means being efficient and returning a profit. That doesn’t mean using it’s revenue to develop a space shuttle or missile defense grid program. Unless it was their desire to loose their customers and ultimately their funding.
negative. It’s the sovereignty of the consumer that reign’s supreme in ancap.
I haven’t read it but I assume you realize it’s only hypothesizing about types of business models in an ancap society? Not necessarily what will happen. Your welcome to take issue with what he says but that doesn’t mean Ancap is flawed per se, it may mean his argument is flawed I’m somewhat disappointed that you give it so much weight and don’t realize that it’s all speculative talk.
For all the reasons you attack Anarcho Capitalism you defer to a state system which essentially the same thing though without economic calculation. First off defining criminality is difficult, especially over large geographical regions. Some things like murder are simple, but on occasion finding out if it’s murder or defense can be confusing. You assume it should always be cut and dry but it is, you pretend like it already is cut and dry with the state. I have a friend whos father was killed over a year ago. She’s been waiting for a year to get any news of the killer from the pol dept. Meanwhile a cop was killed a few weeks ago, the entire state was dispatched to find the cop killer.
Point is? State police have no incentive to meet consumer demand, only incentive they have to is to maintain themselves and grow.
You want everyone in a community to decide the fate of a man via trial. You want all members of society to sacrifice their time in making such heavy judgements, yet you explode the idea of insurance. You argue, “What if someone can’t get insurance”. I argue “What if someone cannot assertain if he’s a criminal or not”?
The trick you need to be carful of is removing yourself from this ‘collectivist’ ‘societal’ fallacy. We live in a world of individuals, and thusly only individuals can act. That means that individualsw ho murder will be tried by individuals. Not by the community. That means individuals may need to pool their risks via insurance. That means some individuals may decide not to as some individuals may not want anything to do with the judicial systems.
Try your best to weed out fairy tale notions. I know it’s hard as Anarcho-Capitalism can already be seen as un-realistic to many but surprisingly we seem to get more obsured arguments against it which are far more un-realistic in the first place.
What does that have to do with the current situation? Anyway, 20% plus unemployment plus higher rates of taxation while real wages are dropping seems pretty good to you? Transferring trillions of dollars of purchasing power to Wall Street and away from everyone else seems pretty good to you?
Economically speaking yes, they are. We have not the tools to judge them otherwise. Lest we consider ourselves omniscient.
Obviously not, since you may one that’s not.
Why would you think the former if you see it so often on this site?
Ridiculous why? Nothing about AC guarantees uniformed cops patrolling the streets, especially if the streets are private. The last last two sentences don’t make any sense. Those poor subscribers “have” to pay for the best PDA, because… they want it? Poor, poor, consumers.
Why can’t private mercenaries use pepper-spray?
Yeah. Too dynamic, too responsive. If only shoes, cars, computers, etc… could be elected every X number of years.
Thats AC all the way.
That isn’t in Chaos Theory. Could you point is out to me?
Yeah, try looking up Estoppel. Problem solved. (Not the ethical problem, but you don’t have an ethical problem there)
No, none of those things are good. But the question I can’t help but ask is “couldn’t that same stuff happen without a government?”
Fair enough. But at least I’m aware of it. What about the people who aren’t?
Most of the people here have had their views changed due to debate on the forum… I was one of them. By reading the debates and ideas spoken here, I reflected on my own ideas, and saw how inconsistent they were, which is why I am now an anarcho-capitalist.
But, why would anarcho-capitalists change their internally consistent views to something that is completely inconsistent (minarchism).
You are the one who believes most people are evil, therefore we need to give these evil people a monopoly over everyone else, and hope they are benevolent with their monopoly.
At least under anarcho-capitalism, the PDAs won’t be able to forcefully take money away from everyone and print money out of thin air, they would have to pay for their violence themselves. Violence is very expensive, and the premiums which would have to be paid to a violent PDA, would be much higher than those paid to a peaceful PDA, who would be paid to protect your property (and be “minarchist”). Thus the market would keep PDAs in check, and keep them minimal.
Under minarchism, nothing keeps the government in check since it is a monopoly, and can take money from you whether you approve of them or not… as history has repeatedly shown.
So how do we explain manias and panics? Are people acting rationally even when they’re buying assets at prices that can’t possibly be sustainable with the hope that they’ll find the next sucker? Is that really rational?
Is it possible that in the quest to make politics, economics and philosophy entirely consistent that you’ve signed onto a system that will never be tried and if tried won’t work?
You could have said the same exact thing about Democracy. (Ignoring all historical evidence) Its still a big So what?
Well there’s two explanations for this. The first is the Keynesian, and the second is the Austrian.
The Keynesian explanation says that animal spirits arise in people all at the same time, causing a frenzy in the market. After people have found out that they have mis-calculated, the government must step in to fix the problem.
The Austrian explanation says that credit expansion causes increased consumption and purchasing on the part of the producer and the consumer. Since the consumer purchases more (houses in this case, and has little use for them as an end-product) they end up having more stuff than they can use themselves. This leads to an unbalanced economy where some asset classes have increased activity and increased prices. In this case, the asset class has been houses.
I suggest that you read the first couple of chapters of Human Action to understand praxeology and what it means for a person to be “rational”. http://mises.org/resources/3250
You know I have this book, it was written during the housing boom. I think it came out around 2005 and it’s called something to the effect of “How to play the housing market” or something like that, I have it around here somewhere. Anyways, I got this book after the banks had been bailed out and whatnot so I got to read it with the advantage of hindsight. And what I found remarkable was the assumptions being made about the prices of houses and how credit was going to be available forever and how we were seeing a new norm in housing prices etc. And I think to myself now that people really were in a period of irrational exuberance, to borrow the phrase. What I’m saying is that the Keynesian explanation may hold some water.
So are you still willing to give it a shot?
They Keynesian explanation doesn’t mention the increase of credit by a central bank being the cause for a “rise in animal spirits”. The Austrian explanation does mention that the central bank is involved in the increased consumption that causes an unsustainable boom.
Ok, has an unsustainable boom ever occurred where there was no central bank?
Manias and Panics? Such as?
To them they are, otherwise they wouldn’t have made the purchase now would they? Also remember that there is no such thing as price stability. Such a concept is a deep fallacy.
Well when you die you can ask god, until then no man has the omniscient ability to judge.
Is it rational to buy a lottery ticket? Just because it’s not to you does not imply a universal no. It certainly was economically rational for various million dollar lottery winners around the country.
So as I said, there is no such thing economic irrationality. The only way you could argue that there is would be under a state of omniscience.