nvm
- Thread starter xarthaz
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JerichoHill
Bedrock of Knowledge
This?
First, maybe the smart ass imperialists invaded becaus the system had a systemic risk for such invasion?
Secondly, google Posner and Friedman. Not tough.
In a society without a state police force (instead reliant on a system of private security firms) to protect against the initiation of violence and breach of contracts, civil disagreements that lead to violence can be perpetuated by the formation of gangs, creating a fragmented tribal environment of civil wars; and that anarcho-capitalists are too quick to deny the possibility of a constitutionally limited government. (grabbed from Wiki)
Myself: There exists an incentive for a PDA to attack a rival's clients, to show that their rival cannot provide safety. It is a critical error of Rothbard's work.
Rashiminos
Fool Prophet
Not to mention that it has been done and discarded a long time previously. It would be devolution instead of evolution.
Suppose the courts and PDAs have internal motivations that would violate those trusts.
For example, if PDAs have the power to protect clients, then they have the power to intimidate and control them (for example: the Mafia). Clients seeking refuge from these corrupt organizations need an organization with the wherewithal and structure to repel rival organizations. That usually means preventing clients from undermining the system as well. Essentially you've removed a government only to wind up with another government.
This is the one of the fundamental assumptions that proponents and detractors disagree upon.
Is communal and mutual individual safety a system that arises naturally or is it something that must be spelled out in law from an semi-arbitrary authority? What are the economic advantages and disadvantages of both thoughts? What are the incentives that come into play when you make these assumptions? Are there alternatives to this diametric situation?
It sort of arises naturally - but in the form of the people giving someone the authority to enact those laws.
There are plenty of other examples of intimidating paramilitaries in history, and you offer no reason as to why there would be genuine market competition in the first place. You have thousands of different assumptions that normal people do not agree with, and you need to argue for every single assumption, as the burden of proof of why your society is better, and why the society would function, is on you. You never even explained why a free market is "more efficient" to begin with, much less why one with no government protection is even more efficient.
Gustave5436
Emperor
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In communism (and by that I mean communist anarchism) we recognize that most crime occurs due to poor material conditions. By improving the conditions of everyone in the commune to a state of general well-being (in modern day society, this would effectively mean the abolition of scarcity), we eliminate the primary cause for crime and, with it, most criminal acts, thus making the question somewhat moot.
There is still, however, the possibility for some small amount of violent crime, committed by e.g. people with paranoid schizophrenia or severe mania (I would guess it would be predominantly axis I disorders with significant genetic basis as environmental factors of stress etc. would be significantly reduced in communism). However, we need not imprison people suffering from such severe mental illness that they become a danger to themselves or others, rather we can simply confine them to a mental institution for treatment, to continue until such time as they achieve a level of remission sufficient to allow them to function in society again.
This is one area in which capitalism (including 'anarchist' capitalism) can be criticized. Instead of using our resources to improve the material conditions of the poor, we spend money hiring police and jailers to capture them and lock them up in prisons. Furthermore (on the mental illness side of things), people with e.g. antisocial personality disorder are significantly over-represented in prison compared to general society; prison will not do anything to treat their underlying illness, and as such when released from prison they will invariably continue their antisocial behavior.
That has nothing to do with capitalism. You can have a retributive, restorative, or transformative justice system in any economic system. Probably the only thing related to the justice system in capitalism would be the private jail, which has shown to be incredibly inefficient, expensive, and corrupt.
Gustave5436
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Yet "having antisocial personality disorder" is not a crime punishable by lifetime imprisonment. Assuming we accept your basic premise that these people are incurable and must always by nature of their disorder present a danger to others, should we not confine them indefinitely, preferably in specialized institutions where they do not have the opportunity to interact with and harm (physically or psychologically) others who are not affected by the disorder (whether prisoners or members of the general population)?
Though this is really more of a side-note, not my main point, and indeed tends toward off-topic so I am reluctant to discuss it further.
The "justice" system is an invention of authoritarianism (and capitalism as an economic system is inherently authoritarian). Sure, jails and such existed in feudal and classical societies just as they do in capitalist ones, but all modern societies are capitalist in nature and, for that matter, the subject of the thread is 'anarchist' capitalism.
No capitalist system has realistic prices. Price, and more specifically production, is organized based on whatever gives the capitalist the highest profit, not what is most needed by the workers who are doing the producing. This causes prices of everyday goods (i.e. the ones most consumed by the workers) to be artificially and unnecessarily increased, due to production being wasted on things which are not needed, like expensive luxury goods for the consumption of capitalists. Furthermore, as I have already suggested, labor is also wasted on professions which are completely unnecessary, like the police.
Well, yes, they're called jails.
Read my post for my edit - this issue of criminal justice isn't specific to capitalism.
That doesn't mean that productivity through technology cannot be high enough as for scarcity of a product to be nil for the indefinite future. If we fully harnassed the energy of the sun, our needs would be met until the sun ran out of energy. Then we could move on to more suns. Et cetera. It's entirely possible for scarcity for basic needs to be made nil for an indefinite time into the future. The fact that greedy capitalist haven't exploited the possibilities is simply because of the fact that the technological level isn't high enough.xarthaz said:
Okay, but it has nothing to do with the economic system of capitalism.Gustave5436 said:
If there is an essentially infinite amount of supply and a finite demand, the price is going to be essentially zero. This essentially infinite amount of supply is caused by the complete automation of labor and a huge abundance of resources. Our consumption of energy is still matched by the fact that there is still scarcity.
Princeps
More bombs than God
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Perhaps you should realise that violence and coercion are not like any other service. In an anarchist free market, the powerful and the wealthy could purchase the services of vast PDAs or establish their own private death squads, and they could buy weapons from arms vendors or manifacture their own. This is would not be so hard to do if no public regulations existed. However, the poor would not be able to purchase the services of any or suffiecently powerful PDAs, thus they would get crushed.
Without public power -- that is COLLECTIVE institutions -- the weak are quickly subjugated by the strong. Truely, the path to serfdom doesn't begin from collectivism, it began, in Czarist Russia, from the erosion of collective institutions and popular political means of influencing deicison making. The Czarist regime became a fully private tyranny.
I would be quickly stopped by the law enforcement.
Yes. The United States.
In an anarcho-capitalist society, the private regimes would be much smaller (at least initially). Thus there would be more wars.
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Yes, there's an element of truth to that. But the same is true in individual interaction. Government is merely an extension of the fact that humans need laws. In democracy, the lawmakers and law enforcement have to be accountable to the population in one way or another, which would not be the case in anarcho-capitalism because private tyranny would be the norm: the common folks would be living in whatever communityy they're born in while the rich move around freely, choosing whatever community is willing to work for their explotation with ever lower demands for compensation. Of course, these rich people would also have their own paramilitaries, more or less their own armies.
Anyway, you should study some more of those examples of anarcho capitalism that you presented. Many of the problems of inequality, rule by unaccountable rich, violent enforcement of private law, etc, all plagued Icelandic and Irish medieval socities.
Furthermore, I think you argued that slavery was abolished and working conditions partially/purely due to the rational self-interest of capitalists. Well, this isn't really the case. Serfdom was, in its medieval form, born in the very free market empire of Rome. The Roman Empire was essentially a huge free market zone, unprecedented in the world. Serfdom was formed in the Roman Empire partially because of this for reasons I'm too tired to explain (I'll do that later, perhaps.) Serfdom persisted, but was largely abolished in the highly protectionist Britain. And no, serfdom wasn't abolished due to the rational self-interest of "landowners". The privileged almost always violently opposed the abolition of serfdom, resulting in political upheaval and massacres.
No, but, seriously, anarcho-capitalist spend all the time denouncing government violence while denying that the violence of private tyranny would be comparable. In fact, the existence of smaller totalitarian private regimes would create more wars. The existence of a couple of hundred largely democratic governments, is likely to result in less political instability because the population can actually effect things.
Again, governments are merely the logical extension of a human need for rules. Lawless and ungoverned regions are, on the avarage, very inhospitable.
Not really. The economic crisis was erupting already... as it had been, somewhat silently, since 2007. The Georgian war might have worked as a catalyst, but if the economy had been swinging like it did in 2005, the war probably wouldn't have resulted in a major loss of investment.
Government work isn't ineffiecent if its appropriately handled. There are many government success stories and failures.
Yes, very easy due to deliberate lax of regulation.
Assuming the political situation would be even remotely like that, and it probably wouldn't.
Yea, and you can also use that private patch of forest or sea as your own nuclear waste dump site because you want personal wealth. You don't have to live there if you don't want too, because you want to feel good.
JerichoHill
Bedrock of Knowledge
You *do* realize that John Nash pretty much proved that Adam Smith was wrong about the invisible hand and laissez-faire free markets leading to optimal outcomes?
I mean, Nash won a Nobel in 94 for his work that was published in 1950
Which paper was that one?
JerichoHill
Bedrock of Knowledge
That was his doctoral thesis which developed game theory (cooperative and non-cooperative). Nash showed how rational self-interested individuals can behave in accordance to their best interests and wind up at a suboptimal outcome. These were originally called Nash Equilibria, until that label took a more general form.
It was that paper that rendered the invisible hand incorrect. Note that it does not refute the free market, Nash's point developed later is that markets need as good as information as possible, players must be able to communicate, and many other characteristics to reach the pareto optimal outcome.
Rashiminos
Fool Prophet
Why bother with the expense of creating wealth when you can just form a "criminal" organization and take it?
Barbarians at the what?
Hygro
soundcloud.com/hygro/
Ah jeez I didn't think of that one. Talk about a slam dunk. Here I was writing paragraph upon paragraph, and you nailed it with one line.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I would dispute this definition. Government simply means the regulation of a society, so a self-regulating society can be called "self-governing". The traditional perception of government's being inherently hierarchical is simply the result of traditional governments being hierarchical.
