[sophacles]

So then the insurance company becomes the government. (Insurance companies will merge until there is a single one... if the history of companies is to be believed).

Or the insurance company also just says "No I don't like you, and since there is no actual way for you to enforce me paying you out, I just won't". Again, if the insurance company decides not to pay, they are enacting bad things on someone and not honoring an agreement. Fortunately since they have lots of free money and no expenses (other than those required to manipulate perception -- cheap payouts etc), they can just have their newspaper buddies out-shout anyone else and not actually be harmed by bad practices.

[baddox]

> So then the insurance company becomes the government.

Why? Retail stores don't become the government or merge into one. Neither do private security agencies. It's unlikely that any organization could "become the government" unless a vast portion of society accepts them as the sole legitimate purveyor of violence, which is precisely what I don't want to happen.

> Or the insurance company also just says "No I don't like you, and since there is no actual way for you to enforce me paying you out, I just won't".

Then what would you do? Personally, I would stop paying them (and probably switch to another insurance company), and I suspect a vast majority of their customers would do the same thing, and probably long before it got to the point where it "became the government."

The only ways for a private insurance company in a free society to remain dominant while consistently not honoring their agreements would be if society as a whole didn't care about the agreements being honored (which seems unlikely), if they gather enough power to physically oppress an entire region (which also seems unlikely these days, since very few governments are even able or willing to pull that off), or if they convince society that they should be allowed to have a monopoly on violence. That last one is a pretty good definition of "becoming a government," and it's certainly possible, but the whole argument I'm making is that society should not recognize any organization as having a monopoly on violence.

[leot]

... and "in the long run" everything would work out, right?

Except for the most part, there's no such thing as "the long run", since the entire concept depends on the universe being relatively stationary (from a probabilistic/statistical perspective). In fact, the universe, and especially the economy/culture/society, is highly non-stationary, making the entire notion of "the long run" fallacious.

In other words, your model assumes that aggregate consumer demand for a particular basket of goods will "stay still" long enough for bad actors to get weeded out. But this is an empirical claim, and one that has been shown to be frequently false. Indeed, its falsehood is in part responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

The world is always changing deeply and unpredictably. In the imagined scenario above, your needs for insurance wouldn't remain constant, and neither would the base of providers. Indeed, the entire ontology of the marketplace would be constantly in flux, making "in the long run" free market approaches mostly impotent as compared with collective action that directly deals with the problems we face right now.

[baddox]

> ... and "in the long run" everything would work out, right?

Don't be silly. The world would still be a horrible place. Heinous acts would be committed every day. People would be murdered, tortured, and raped. There would still be a lot of violence—it would just be a lot less than what we have today.

> In other words, your model assumes that aggregate consumer demand for a particular basket of goods will "stay still" long enough for bad actors to get weeded out. But this is an empirical claim, and one that has been shown to be frequently false. Indeed, its falsehood is in part responsible for the 2008 financial crisis.

Of course there is truth in all of this. But how is the government a better solution?

> The world is always changing deeply and unpredictably. In the imagined scenario above, your needs for insurance wouldn't remain constant, and neither would the base of providers.

Again, that's true of insurance just like it's true of cell phone providers, automobile manufacturers, etc. Again, how does government solve any of this?

[sophacles]

You're the one proposing a radical change, onus of evidence and "how it would be better" is on you. By the way "but there would be no government!" is not a valid argument of how it would be better, only a tautological statement of "if there was no government, there would be no government". We have seen governments arise for as far back as there is history, and not really a lot of evidence of how great things are without government, suggesting (but not proving) that a government is a good thing.

[baddox]

Well, that argument is ludicrous. We've never had a society without murder either, but I dare say that a society without murder would be superior. How would a society without murder work, you say? I don't know how to respond to that. It would be a bunch of people living together, like today, except there wouldn't be murder.

[sophacles]

This is a disingenuous analogy. It is easy to imagine a society without murder. It is a singular act that most everyone frowns upon, and generally we work to prevent anyway. In fact, since I don't know anyone who's been murdered, I actually have a harder time imagining the consequences of the murder of someone I know than I do imagining there is no murder.

Further, a society without government is much harder to imagine, because the idea of rules enforcement is sort of built into every society I've ever heard of - your proposal is "no rules enforcement at all, everyone do what they want in all cases". Sounds frightening - I would have to treat every single person I encounter as a terrible person, and they would have to do the same for me. If you think that is really not different than what exists now, you have the following issues: 1. you are too paranoid to do anything, 2. you must be extremely rude and agressive to people if they always treat you that way. 3. you must be terribly lonely. I pity you.

[leot]

The entire premise of libertarianism rests on the notion that the world will stay still long enough for market forces to weed out the baddies. Government can sometimes be the better solution because regulations can respond much more quickly to baddies (e.g., I can inspect the restaurant within a week of its opening, or we can wait 6-12 months for enough people to get sick and for the restaurant to develop a bad reputation). Without regulations, the restaurant can just close its doors if it develops a bad reputation, sell its assets, change its name, go somewhere else, and repeat the cycle.

The point isn't that "government will solve any of this", it's that laissez-faire economics can't. Bad actors can skip from exploitation to exploitation -- if there would be less government, then everyone would need to look out for themselves all the time and there would be less social trust, with all the attendant effects.

[baddox]

The false assumption a lot of critics to libertarianism (or nearly any political philosophy) routinely make is that libertarians believe their proposed system would be a utopia with no violence, no "baddies," no market inefficiencies or market failures, etc. Granted, some libertarians who aren't really educated in the political philosophy probably do claim that. But I don't. I certainly don't think that a pure free market would solve all problems. I just believe there would be more prosperity, less poverty, and less violence in a society without a government than in a society with a government.

[leot]

Libertarians often claim that laissez-faire will always do better than intervention. From the above, it should be relatively obvious that depending on the government and depending on how non-stationary the economy is, laissez-faire could work either quite well or exceptionally poorly.

It's the possibility that laissez-faire could do a much worse job than regulations that libertarians refuse to accept.

[sophacles]

Nope, not even close to a reasonable response. If insurance is supposed to pay out in the cases of the big black swan events, and I in good faith of the insurance agreement have put a significant amount of capital towards restitution, repairs, what-have you, expecting to be reimbursed. Now the insurance says "oh nope, fuck you"... What means do I have of paying a different company? What means do I have of getting word out that they have fucked me? I can't afford to buy off majority of reporters like a big insurance company does.

I guess I could hope for one reporter to be nice... but all the others making crap up about me for a few $K would make the other customers not actually pay heed. No penalty for the shady insurance.

Similarly you are making a big fuss over the difference between physical and economic violence. Yet you adamantly refuse to explain how a bunch of economic policies via collusion of the players, resulting in a scenario of "play by our rules or else get no way of eating or sheltering yourself" is any less violence than "do what we say or we shoot you". To me the difference is a false one: forcing me to do something with one death threat really isn't different than with another.

Finally, you somehow are confusing free market with "open and transparent operation of all economic players". We already see that isn't the case - most business hide most information about themselves the best they can, and rebel against any attempt to shed light on them. In fact government is more open about operations than almost all businesses, yet somehow there will be magic knowledge transfer between consumers and business about what those businesses really do once you take away government.

[baddox]

> Now the insurance says "oh nope, fuck you"... What means do I have of paying a different company? What means do I have of getting word out that they have fucked me? I can't afford to buy off majority of reporters like a big insurance company does.

How do people find out that certain automobile are crappy? How do people know to avoid certain hospitals or certain doctors? I would never make the ludicrous claim that any arrangement of society would be utopia. People will get ripped off and bad things will always happen. It would simply be less common without government.

> you adamantly refuse to explain how a bunch of economic policies via collusion of the players, resulting in a scenario of "play by our rules or else get no way of eating or sheltering yourself" is any less violence than "do what we say or we shoot you". To me the difference is a false one: forcing me to do something with one death threat really isn't different than with another.

In the former situation, the "collusion of the players" is offering a crappy deal (with no physical violence) as an alternative to starvation. That means that if you truly would starve without the crappy deal (which would require you to be incapable of growing your own food), you are genuinely better off taking the deal. I don't see how this qualifies as "violence." You could make a decent argument that it is exploitation, which is a different argument altogether.

[Mz]

I worked for an insurance company for five years. A good one with high ethics. The entire insurance industry is predicated on not paying you. It is the very basis of the business model.

I think you have no idea what you are talking about. None.

[baddox]

Are you claiming that the very idea of group insurance is fallacious? Or are you just saying the the big players in the industry are bad?

[Mz]

I am saying that group insurance is so close to con artistry that it boggles my mind that it is legal.