[embolism]

Taking your two answers together, it seems that hiring a security company to provide armed guards to protect me would be perfectly acceptable to you.

What's to stop consolidation amongst the security companies? What would prevent them from using their monopoly of force to set up whatever government they liked?

That's essentially how central government formed in the first place. Why wouldn't it just happen again?

[oleganza]

Even if it could, is it a justification for it?

I think government is only possible when many believe it's good. It's not only raw violence. If people see violence they don't like it. That's why government tries hard hiding it under abstract concepts.

[embolism]

What has justification got to do with anything?

People aren't arguing with you because they like the fact that the government uses force. The argument is that if you eliminated the government, the alternative (private dictatorships) would be even less accountable.

Certainly people are susceptible to a kind of strange loyalty to governments, but if you remove the government that won't just disappear. People will just become loyal to the most powerful mob for protection. That's what happened before. It's up to you to explain why it would be any different now.

[eatitraw]

I think we already have "private" dictatorships in most of the world. 2/3 of states are fucked up, just look at failed state index or press freedom index.

> The argument is that if you eliminated the government, the alternative (private dictatorships) would be even less accountable.

If you are right and private defense organization would collapse into one, then why there is no single government? (Moreover, some of states(like USSR) get decomposed into few more, so the number of states even grows). Why do you assume there is no reason to prevent a number of PDO turning into violent one?

There are great books: Murray Rothbard's "For a new liberty: libertarian manifesto": http://mises.org/document/1010/

David Friedman's "The machinery of freedom": http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

[embolism]

Actually we do have a overall decrease in the number of states over the past few centuries. The USSR is a special case because it was actually based on ideology and not just strength.

We can equally ask why, if your libertarian philosophy is so naturally stable, it has not emerged into the world yet?

[eatitraw]

> Actually we do have a overall decrease in the number of states over the past few centuries.

It doesn't really affect my argument(if all states didn't collapse into one over past couple of centuries, then multi-government system is quite stable), but I am quite interested in the source(out of pure curiousity).

> The USSR is a special case because it was actually based on ideology and not just strength

Almost all states utilize some sort of ideology. In fact, I agree that ideological component was really strong in the USSR, but the USSR did use raw power - it annexed baltic states for example.

Also, there are other examples: Czechoslovakia, South & North Sudan.

> We can equally ask why, if your libertarian philosophy is so naturally stable, it has not emerged into the world yet?

I would define stable as "won't collapse once established". The problem of stability is orthogonal to the problem of establishing. It is not easy to organize a market anarchy when all territory is occupied by the state(note: you cannot easily organize another state either, though existing states are relatively stable). In past there were more or less "anarcho-capitalist" societies which lasted for thousands of years: medieval iceland, medieval ireland.

Iceland: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Iceland#Medieval_Iceland_and_Anar...

Ireland: http://pucksmith.blogspot.ru/2013/02/libertarian-ancient-ire...