Externalities

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Mlee replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 11:39 AM

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Forgive me, but wasn't 9/11 just one giant externality? 

If governments create externalities that kill 3000+ people, what makes these people think that government can solve externality problems. 

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laminustacitus replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 11:41 AM

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Mlee:

Forgive me, but wasn't 9/11 just one giant externality? 

If governments create externalities that kill 3000+ people, what makes these people think that government can solve externality problems. 

Al Qaeda is not a government, surely they were harbored, and given security by a government, but the organization itself is not.

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Mlee replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 11:44 AM

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Al Qaeda is not a government. But if we consider that 9/11 was a result of a combination of factors, including US foriegn policy, it is certainly a cost incured by a third party. 

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laminustacitus replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 11:52 AM

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Mlee:

Al Qaeda is not a government. But if we consider that 9/11 was a result of a combination of factors, including US foriegn policy, it is certainly a cost incured by a third party. 

Then you should have changed the wording of your post: if "9/11 was a result of a combination of factors" then speaking of it as if one government "created" it is utter nonsense. 

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DD5 replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 12:25 PM

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Christophe:

I agree that there is no incentive to start wars in a capitalistic world, but I also think you don't have to kid yourself into thinking that that's ever going to happen; you'll always have non-capitalistic regions as well and they'll go to war sooner or later. The death toll for decentralised armies tends to be a lot higher, etc?

The sooner or later arguments apply to your Socialized army as well, only in your case it may be sooner then later. 

I fail to see why a Socialized army must be superior to an army evolving in a free market unless you are talking about the shocking surprise of a friendly State turning enemy over night.  Tensions between States usually arise over time.  Any perceived threats would create a market for defense.  Unlike the socialized army which is inefficient and suffers from all of the economic problems of socialism, the army arising in the market would suffer no such problems.  No central planner is needed to provide defense just as no central planner is required to provide food, clothing, energy, schools, medical care, etc….  There is no need for any King or elected body to authorize military action just like you don’t expect the fire department to receive authorization when a fire breaks out.  Defense would be like a fire fighters squadron:  To put out fires, and not to start them.

   It is hard to see why such tensions would arise or with whom for that matter since there is no coercive central authority, but even if there was, you must provide a good reason to as why the market would fail to respond to such a demand for defense.  Most likely, the mere existence of some defense against such attacks would provide adequate insurance against any attacks in the first place.  "Sooner or later" is no justification for the existence of the government.  Sooner or later anything can happen. 

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Christophe replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 6:08 PM

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Jon Irenicus:

Keep in mind in practice what counts as "homesteading" is up for courts/arbiters to decide (and will likely vary according to local standards.)

Fair enough but with the private courts, if the two parties involved beling to two different courts which have differing views, then who gets to decide which way it goes and what is to be done about it if court A says "screw your third party and screw your court system, we have more guns".

The problem I have with private courts is they either seem to lack the power to enforce their laws or when and if they would have the power to enforce their laws upon those who don't align with that particular court in case it is somehow decided as such, I think you can easily see that as an initiation of force against the party who does not agree?

Private courts seem to reek of moral relativism in a way, I don't see how one court can justify ruling in a particular way compared to another if there isn't one overarching set of at least basic minimum rules. Which again leads to the very same thing: who's going to enforce those basic rules against groups that don't care about them, and based on what moral right?

With private courts and disputes between "subjects" of courts with different opinions, it seems to me that the right and wrong has nothing to do with abstract law or justice in whatever form but with whose court can buy the biggest guns and basicly ignore the smaller ones (ofcourse, you can argue that the one who can buy the biggest guns is always right, but then again it doesn't seem all too satisfying when placed alongside all the talk of "no initiation of force" and such). Intuitively it seems to me that private courts in that way would go from being a "court" to just a private militia/attack dog.

the person claiming the property may lack enough recognition from other members in society

So we're basicly back to democracy and voting to ensure popular/majority support of a particular rule?

As for private military forces: armies require intelligence on enemy activities, otherwise there is no way to know whether the threat is real or not in real life situations. Who's going to pay a free market variety of the CIA and such?

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nirgrahamUK replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 6:14 PM

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there are such things as negative enforcement i.e. shunning, social rejection etc.

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Jon Irenicus replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 6:21 PM

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Fair enough but with the private courts, if they have differing views then who gets to decide which way it goes and what is to be done about it if somebody simply doesn't want to argue and says "screw you guys, this is mine".

Substitute "private courts" with "state courts" and the problem remains. This in particular does not pose a huge problem for states with varying laws, why should it for competing courts?

The problem I have with private courts is they either lack the power to enforce their laws, and if they have the power to enforce their laws upon those who don't align with that particular court I think you can easily see that as an initiation of force?

Why does this "problem" vanish with the state? There is no issue with enforcing their laws (in multifarious ways, including ostracism), and if the defendant has an issue with it they may appeal it.

With private courts it seems to me that the right and wrong has nothing to do with law or justice in whatever form but with who can buy the biggest guns (ofcourse, you can argue that the one who can buy the biggest guns is always right, but then again it doesn't seem all too satisfying when placed alongside all the talk of "no initiation of force" and such).

Substitute "private courts" with "state courts" and it sounds about right.

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Knight_of_BAAWA replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 6:26 PM

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Christophe:

As for private military forces: armies require intelligence on enemy activities, otherwise there is no way to know whether the threat is real or not in real life situations. Who's going to pay a free market variety of the CIA and such?

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Christophe replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 6:29 PM

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I think the solution is out there, but playing the devil's advocate it still doesn't seem satisfyingly clear yet.

I don't mean this in a bad way but the arguement of "the other guy has the same problem" doesn't really cut it as far as I'm concerned when talking about changing something; why go through changing it if the problems remain the same regardless of the change.

If purchasing power is the only deciding factor I don't see what would keep a random millionnaire from literally turning me into a slave since he can afford bigger guns than I can.

I also don't see how private courts deal with for example women who are forced into prostitution. If you don't have the money to buy yourself into a court, you're outside of the law basicly?

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Andrew Cain replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 6:38 PM

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Christophe:

If you don't have the money to buy yourself into a court, you're outside of the law basicly?

You have a claim for compensation which you can sell.

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Jon Irenicus replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 6:59 PM

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I don't mean this in a bad way but the arguement of "the other guy has the same problem" doesn't really cut it as far as I'm concerned when talking about changing something; why go through changing it if the problems remain the same regardless of the change.

If the proposed "solution" (i.e. the state) solves nothing, why keep it? It isn't so much having the "same problem" as it is having it and having it worse, now is it?

If purchasing power is the only deciding factor I don't see what would keep a random millionnaire from literally turning me into a slave since he can afford bigger guns than I can."

Why is it the only "deciding factor"?

I also don't see how private courts deal with for example women who are forced into prostitution. If you don't have the money to buy yourself into a court, you're outside of the law basicly?

Why would they have no recourse? It is true though, if you do not have the resources (money or otherwise) to defend yourself and procure justice, you are by no means entitled to its provision at the expense of others...

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Christophe replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 8:34 PM

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So basicly:

I form a group with a bunch of people I know, let's imagine for a moment that we're all extremely rich for whatever reason (perhaps because we first built up our fortune in a purely capitalistic world) and we're sufficiently numerous. We decide to buy ourselves an army and physicly enslave several capitalist enclaves (divide and conquer as it were). We feel like it.

It's all a matter of taste, right? I read the texts that were linked to, and I quote:

There could exist side by side, for instance, Catholic protection agencies or insurers applying Canon law, Jewish agencies applying Mosaic law, Muslim agencies applying Islamic law, and agencies applying secular law of one variety or another, all of them sustained by a voluntarily paying clientele. (http://mises.org/story/2265)

I don't know where you guys all live, I'm from Belgium and let me tell you something: experience says that multiculturalism does not work; if there isn't peaceful living now there's no way there would be if everybody has their own court system on top of it. Sharia law here alongside Western law? No thanks. I don't want my neighbour's hands getting cut off because somebody accused him of stealing bread; neither do I want to live in an area where women are murdered if they get raped, etc. Those are pretty basic and uncompromisable disagreements that lead to conflict because compromise on the basis of "let's trade" is not an option there; if it isn't for me than it isn't for a lot of people so what else than conflict is there.

My morality isn't that one, and while that's as I am perfectly aware of the entire point (everybody disagrees so 1 set of laws is absurd), in an absolute way you either commit to and prove a categorical imperative (which to me seems pretty unlikely, but feel free to give it a go) or you have moral relativism and your point of view is as arbitrary as anybody elses. How can this lead to anything but full blown civil war if it is tried to make it exist next to eachother, it's on the edge of civil war already as it is in some neighbourhoods.

Anyway, to continue with the example: my private court says I own you (that's what unites me and my cronies), yours says I am not allowed to initiate force against you. I however don't care about what you think I "should" do and I don't care about letting a neutral party intermediate, your "should" does not count for anything with me and my militia is bigger because I'm a millionnaire and you happen to be in a position of relative poverty and I happen to be in a non-benevolent mood, I simply have no reason to care about your objections in this scenario. I don't see how that's any better or any less unlikely than state oppression. You can perfectly be a millionaire psychopath, and there's nothing stopping you from joining up with others.

Purchasing power is here then the only "deciding factor" because it's the only thing that can enforce its will as the only enforcement comes from buying more or better arms than the guy with lesser purchasing power. "Should" means nothing to "is" in the world of practical reality. As the saying goes, "where's your god now" when you're being nailed to a cross by men with clubs and spears. You say you'd have a machine gun to defend yourself? Fine in theory, in reality there's absolutely nothing to keep a different group from accumulating more purhcasing power (=force) than you, I doub't that any of you is the omega man, there's always a faster gun out there as they say and there's no reason why he and his group should be benevolent and why you and your group will be able to stand up against it as a certain and a priori fact. Every single one of you, individually or combined, is just as likely to be caught with your pants down by the group of psychopath millionnaires. Think about aggressive versions of Howard Hughes.

Force is the only thing that matters, and if force is decided by purchasing power I don't see how that makes it any less arbitrary in any way at all. That's the key thing I'm questioning here, beyond talk of good and evil. What makes your court less arbitrary than mine and what recourse do you have if you have relatively less purchasing power (=force) even if you consider moral justice to be on your side. I don't see the difference between that and state opression, I in fact see it as much more likely and a pretty quick degeneration into the realm of bad gangster movies with a few "dons" running around calling the shots. "Where's your freedom now". Remember the scene from the Soprano's with the guy reading Anarchy, State and Utopia before being scared shitless and withdrawing his testimony? Talk is cheap.

As to "why keep it" (democratic system and state) : the essential difference is that the state is what social evolution produced, if there is no amelioration because the problem stays the same then there is no (economic or moral) ratio to change it, the material of the blade doesn't matter as long as it is hard or sharp enough to kill me, and similarly it doesn't matter whether I'm protected from a physical assault by paper or by cardboard, I'll still get cut up by the raging psycho. So yes, you have to have reasons for changing it beyond "this is bad as well". Otherwise it's purely arbitrary and you have nothing more to base your opinion on than anybody else (in a moral sense).

Added to that it also seems that overarching legislation is more cost effective than 1000 different varieties, simply because 1 legislation means no transaction costs. Just like when you have to do business in 1 currency or with 10 different ones, the group with one currency is more efficient and will ceteris paribus outclass the other. In the end the product of natural selection is all that remains, and apparantly at this point it's democracy because it quite simply wouldn't be here if it weren't as the original state was anarcho capitalism; how could it have been anything else if that's what natural law is and we evolved from nature. Did civilization defy the laws of evolution? If it does not, what other option is there than to evolve to a system of singular law if given enough time, because numerically more different legislations equal transaction costs between them, less means less transaction costs and ceteris paribus higher efficiency. What other outcome is there over the span of 5000 years than to end up with 1 currency and 1 legislation because efficiency demands the transaction costs to be eradicated.

The only way that civic reality as it is today exist is because there is an economic/evolutionary ratio behind it; democracy evolved because non-democratic groups were torn up internally and either killed eachother or got taken over and outproduced by groups that did not have to deal with the constant friction in its physical manifestion as civil strife. Democracies that vote themselves into collectivism die, those that vote for minimal states and clear abstract rules end up prosperous, but they still remain as a democracy and serve their purpose as negating the cost of constant civil war. If not reality and history would be counter-evolutionary. It has been tried, and yes it has failed but apparantly it has failed less than anything else and that seems good enough to justify its existence in a biological and economic sense; much like human eyesight is inferior to that of other animals but it gets the job done well enough to allow humanity to dominate the earth.

That's why I personally am not an anarcho capitalist ("yet", perhaps) but consider myself to be a libertarian, I don't see any satisfying way around stuff like courts and military, even by the arguements presented here, simply because if it was the most efficient it would have stayed that way instead of having evolved into what it is now. The axiom "divide and conquer" stands for a reason. This does not automaticly mean total unity or complete collectivism, it's all a matter of degrees and the degree I pick is an arbitrary one, just like yours is, and that's where the trouble starts.

Theory from behind our computer is one thing, practice is another. Just like in theory all mathematics is the same grade of difficulty because - in theory - mathematics is pure logic and outside the realm of "difficult or easy", in practice 1+1=2 isn't of the same difficulty level to solve as advanced mathematical problems while in theory it is, as "logic" and mathematics as such cannot be "difficult" or "easy" regardless of the volume of the formula. The theoretical homogenous difficulty level is in practice heterogenous due to human beings being limited entities, whether you like it or not. That's why i don't like presenting any theory of society as utopia, it goes against the human condition.

That's not saying that even minimum state is not an evil, I fully agree, but if it wasn't a practical necessity it wouldn't have formed on a world wide scale and remained where communism for example hasn't, because the non-democratic group would have taken over, while now the democratic group is the dominant force by a very long shot.

Loads upon loads of data show that minimum state wields the highest results, and the original "anarcho capitalist world" died out just like neanderthales did. I don't mean that as an offence but that seems to me the way the cookie crumbles (which does not mean that I like it).

In the end justice in a moral sense has nothing to do with private courts, it's whim accompanied by the money to use brute force against dissenting opinions. Just like there is no guarantee that millionnaires will have their militia's bust in your door and rape your wife and do so unpunished (I use rape as it usually invokes "strong" reaction), there is no guarantee that they won't either.

You might agree with being allowed to rape poor women who can't afford legal counsel or can't as many mercenaries as a different group, I don't see any moral basis for it.

And here we get to the basis of it, I say the same thing to most socialists I encounter: it would be an entirely different story to me if you allowed it to just boil down to arbitrariness and personal preference, both on your part and that of others. But I don't see where your (and consequently my) claim on "absolute truth" is in essence more morally justified than the idea of any other crackpot.

Force and the Nietschean will is what ends up deciding who dominates and who does not. Moral relativism seems to be the only logically defendable starting point, all other valuation from there on is then de facto arbitrary and its implementation depends on the force that can be summoned to impose it. That's fine, but if so then all talk about "natural law" and all that comes with it simply is superfluous and it boils down to "I think I'll have enough money to be the guy calling the shots, society's got me down at this point in time but woe their bones if they allowed me to be free". It smells like a particular brand of slave morality to me if you take classical liberalism to the point of blaming the state of keeping you down, to the same degree as it is the case with full blown socialism.

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Jon Irenicus replied on Wed, Aug 12 2009 8:50 PM

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OK, I am going to be polite, and suggest you read up on the topic before musing ignorantly about it - possibly starting with a book like Anarchy and the Law or The Market for Liberty, then coming back to discuss the topic, having disabused yourself of your misconceptions thereof (esp. if you think there is actually "loads upon loads of data" in anyway "proving" that minarchism is superior relative to anarcho-capitalism.) Musings upon morality, imagined distinctions regarding "theory" and "practice", exaltations of the role of "force", Nietzschean ramblings and so on are all obiter, to be honest, when the basic problem here is an utter ignorance of how a particular market functions.