Re: How would the free market organise national defence ?

fingolfin — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 00:49:15 GMT

1) Infiltration into what? You can't have a state unless the vast majority of the people are religious or violent-minded and willing to obey such authority in the first place. If they are, then clearly there's nothing anyone can do about it anyway. hence the point of this discussion, and to bring philosophy to the masses! Anarchy is not a 'system' which has X, Y or Z specific solutions - I don't know how many times I can repeat that it simply means 'without masters'. If you are worried about religious tyranny, then clearly the absolute last thing you would want is a violent monopoly on force.

2) Capitalists don't 'dominate' anyone. Companies can only survive by providing goods or services which people want to use, voluntarily. 'Governments' do dominate people without their consent. Certain so-called 'capitalists' may use the government to their own ends - this is corruption - but it's not capitalism which is at fault - it's the existence of government. Violence is economically crippling and completely unsustainable, unless you can forcefully externalise the costs of violence onto tax livestock.

3) It's a chance I'm willing to take. Megalomaniacs achieve their ends through the state apparatus. Psychopaths don't just randomly bump into nukes lying around, get some crazy idea, build their own launch site and fire it off into the abyss for no reason. How does government solve this 'problem' anyway? If someone really wants to murder people, right now, he can go outside and do it, government or not. Only governments or government funded militias have committed genocide, created wars, used nuclear and biological weapons, funded or supplied terrorist and extremist groups etc. Even the mafia is simply an extension of the government anyway, for it can only exist through prohibition of certain goods and services (ie the "war on drugs").

The free-market always works against violence and corruption, which is why you don't see Mcdonalds murdering customers, or Microsoft forcing people to use their products by threatening them. What I was saying was, you can't just invent these scenarios as disproof of 'anarchy', by saying something like (for example), "what if X gang decided to murder Y village..." - because that kind of thing clearly doesn't actually happen anywhere in a modern society (without state intervention somehow) and is an extreme and manufactured scenario. It also assumes it were possible for that situation to even occur in the first place under anarchy, and that even if it did occur - that somehow it is a valid argument for or against government/anarchy.

I still don't quite understand your reluctance to accept non-violent solutions to social problems. Did you listen to any of the podcasts about DROs? They are excellent. As a previous user suggested, Stef's 'Practical Anarchy' is an excellent (free!) book covering these very topics. I'd also recommend David D. Friedman's 'The Machinery of Freedom'.

"Fin"

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Re: How would the free market organise national defence ?