[Houshalter]

I was an anarcho-capitalist for awhile. I thought it was the perfect system. There would be absolutely no incentives to do bad things. Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so.

But I no longer think it's a perfect system. People don't behave like perfect rational market actors, there are edge cases like natural monopolies where normal market mechanisms don't lead to the best outcome, and then there is just enforcing altruism (like looking out for animal rights or children's rights, who couldn't buy legal services under this system, or redistributing income so you don't end up with people starving to death or in poverty.)

Of course the current system we have is so far from a perfect system it makes these problems seem trivial. But at least it seems ok and generally stable, whereas what would happen in an anarcho-capitalist world is a complete unknown.

There still might be a near-perfect system. Robin Hanson's ideas on prediction markets for making policy decisions might be a huge improvement, at least in some areas, and a semi-private legal system for some things might work. And I think libertarian policies in general are better.

[derleth]

> Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so.

And we call that system a government.

Seriously. Every time an anarchist seriously gets down to brass tacks about how their world would work, there's some agency by 'the people' which does things which have to be done, and it's indistinguishable from a government. It's just a Good Government, a Responsible Government, and, really, an Ideal Government.

Either anarchy has never happened or it's the only thing that happens. I don't know which is more damaging to the case of doctrinaire capital-A Anarchists.

> a semi-private legal system for some things might work

This is called contract law.

[icebraining]

(Playing Devil's advocate)

> Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so.

And we call that system a government.

The problem here is the foolish tendency of English speaking people to use "government" for everything, when we should distinguish the government from the State.

Anarchists are obviously not opposed to having systems of government, but they are opposed to the state (and governments as their executive bodies), and in general to the concentration of power, authoritarianism and repression that emerge from it.

[derleth]

But without a state, governments are worthless. They can't do anything, as we've seen time and again.

[icebraining]

"Governments", as in executive bodies, yes. "Governments", and in systems of government, definitively not. There are multitudes of non-hierarchical, stateless mechanisms that arise from communities and societies trying to solve a cooperation problem.

Just four years ago, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her work demonstrating how institutional arrangements were developed in various societies facing the problem of resource exhaustion due to overconsumption, without the intervention of the State.

But these are just a few concrete examples of an uncountable number of norms and institutions there are everywhere, and much more there would be if the State intervention didn't crowd them out by imposing its own solutions and banned all others.

[Houshalter]

It's not really a government as you can't (ideally) force people to participate even if they don't want to (or if you do it's through tamer methods like boycotts or whatever rather than threat of imprisonment.) And it doesn't have to be a central organization. It sounds like a minor difference but it's really not.

Importantly most things that are done by government would be done completely differently and by private organizations. The point is, that if the way government does something is truly superior, then people would still do it that way. They just couldn't force people to participate or pay for it. But you could still have a non-profit with elected officials and all that, if it's really better and can compete on a free market.

Again, I'm no longer certain this is the best system as there really are things where a free market doesn't lead to the best outcome and participation has to be forced (like public goods.) But there are ways of funding public goods without a government that might work, and most of what government currently does doesn't fit in that category anyways.

[derleth]

First, boycotts are a use of force. Everyone ganging up on someone to boycott them (shunning, as it used to be called, or making them an outlaw) is one of the oldest, cruelest forms of punishment, and we're well shut of it now. Putting someone in prison is one thing; kicking them out of society entirely is another.

> The point is, that if the way government does something is truly superior, then people would still do it that way.

Then why hasn't this ever happened in the past? Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?

> They just couldn't force people to participate or pay for it.

Then nobody's going to pay for it, and the people who opt out of the laws entirely are going to be robbing everyone else.

[icebraining]

A boycott is not the same as ostracism; nobody said anything about kicking people out of society.

Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?

Somalia is not some country who had an anarchist society; it's a country which had a state and a government, and where a civil war broke out, eliminating all possibility of a stable society regardless of its political system.

Judging anarchism by the state of Somalia makes even less sense than judging non-anarchist societies by the actions of the Third Reich.

[Houshalter]

>First, boycotts are a use of force. Everyone ganging up on someone to boycott them (shunning, as it used to be called, or making them an outlaw) is one of the oldest, cruelest forms of punishment, and we're well shut of it now. Putting someone in prison is one thing; kicking them out of society entirely is another.

In order for that to work you would need nearly 99% of the population or more to agree to that punishment and to actively participate. Which is a lot more than required in a democracy or pretty much any system.

>Then why hasn't this ever happened in the past? Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?

Somalia is a collapsed society, not really a good example of anything. The same could be said for democracy until 200 years ago. It took a long time even after the first democracy was established for the idea to spread, and the creation of the US itself took a war and a few centuries of cultural evolution before that to get to that point.

The point is that you can't just say "well if it's a perfect system why has no one done it before?" Libertarianism is counter-intuitive for most people, how do you expect them to form perfect anarcho-capitalist societies overnight?

>Then nobody's going to pay for it, and the people who opt out of the laws entirely are going to be robbing everyone else.

People would defend their own property or pay into some private legal system that promised to do so.

[derleth]

> In order for that to work you would need nearly 99% of the population or more to agree to that punishment and to actively participate. Which is a lot more than required in a democracy or pretty much any system.

But it has happened in the past. Never underestimate the power of groupthink to do horrible things to minorities.

> Somalia is a collapsed society, not really a good example of anything.

No better place, then. Nothing for the anarchist utopia to compete with.

> Libertarianism is counter-intuitive for most people

No, it isn't. Not from what I've seen both online and off.

> People would defend their own property or pay into some private legal system that promised to do so.

We've tried this and it didn't work.

[1_player]

> Seriously. Every time an anarchist seriously gets down to brass tacks about how their world would work, there's some agency by 'the people' which does things which have to be done, and it's indistinguishable from a government. It's just a Good Government, a Responsible Government, and, really, an Ideal Government.

Which are these "things which have to be done" that only a government could take care of?

Crime prevention? Does our government police prevent crime, or just punish criminals? I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.

Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.

One thing is for sure, we're not ready yet for anything like that, since many necessary services and resources are "scarse", and scarsity makes people fight for their survival with brutal results. But we're (slowly) solving scarsity through science and technology.

[dragonwriter]

> Crime prevention? Does our government police prevent crime, or just punish criminals?

Both.

> I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.

Without any state-established law there would be no criminals, just the much broader category of people that other people don't like. Quite arguably, the whole purpose of state-established law is to limit the scope and severity of punishment compared to what happens in the absence of central authority, and to provide clear rules. This aids in deterrence, since, to the extent that antisocial behavior is rational and deterrable, there needs not merely be an expectation of punishment if you do 'wrong', but a clear idea of what 'wrong' is in the context, and a clear expectation that punishment will not be imposed if you do not do 'wrong'.

Certainly, one can argue that modern states are less than ideal in each aspect of this, but that's very different than arguing that they are worse than the absence of a state would be.

> Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.

The problem here isn't that there would be no medical practitioners apart from a mandate to provide them (after all, most states that provide medical services don't compel people to become doctors and nurses), but that medical services lack features that make it the kind of service modeled well by econ 101 rational choice assumptions, with (among other things) a very high and uncorrectable cost of bad (or even merely incompetent) suppliers.

> But we're (slowly) solving scarsity through science and technology.

We may be reducing the resource costs of some goods and services, but that doesn't solve scarcity (it reduces the opportunity cost of some while increasing the opportunity cost of others, since it is unequal progress, and opportunity cost is what else you could have gotten for the resources you put into getting what you chose.)

Suggesting that we are "solving scarcity" demonstrates a lack of understanding of what "scarcity" means.

[mrow84]

> Crime prevention? Does our government police prevent crime, or just punish criminals? I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.

Sure, criminals would be punished, but in a much more arbitrary manner. Do you really think that would be an improvement?

> Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.

Yes they would, but as people get richer they start to want there to be standards, at which point you need some kind of group to codify and enforce those standards. Over time, these thousands of different groups that are setting rules for their own little domains end up being grouped together, for a range of reasons, and then you have a dreaded 'government'.

Formality offers protection. In all the cases I can think of, weaker government corresponds to an increase in either the arbitrariness or the corruption of justice. This applies both to criminal justice and to the wider sense of an equitable (not equal) distribution of resources.