Would you rather be living in a communist gulag? I don’t think the Soviets would be very tolerant of anarcho-capitalist bloggers within their reach. And with their Marxist ideology of sabotage and conquest, and their Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, you definitely would be within their reach.

Why doesn’t anybody understand this?

There is no other global empire.

Nope. Not anymore.

(grins snidely)

p.S. I never said that the presence of government prevents bigotry in people’s minds. Government does, however, prevent people from acting on that bigotry on a massive scale. To pretend that it would disappear without the government’s intervention (or existence, for that matter) is fallacious at best. It took years of government intervention, and military force, to eradicate the near-universal ethnic strife and human rights abuses.

Since the “elderly” are both the poorest, and wealthiest, demographic, why do you expect greater attacks against them? Since carrying of weapons is allowed to be the decision of the individual, and the wealthy already have private police and guarded living spaces, it is exactly the “poor” who are given greater latitude in self defense and therefore attacks against them decrease. A dead mugger cannot be a repeat offender.

Bigotry is inside a person. Having the state say “Bad kitty, bad bad!” doesn’t make bigotry go away. So this assertion is unsupportable.

Maybe you missed how governments are what made slavery profitable (by placing the costs of tracking down escaped slaves on the taxpayer).

In those documentaries you cite (likely “Forest Gump”) did you fail to notice that they were _government_ schools? Yeah, you forgot to mention that.

Sorry, but your point 15 is insane. The “Evil Empire” is the American empire. There is no other global empire. So reducing the power of the American government has the instant result of reducing the “Evil Empire”‘s power.

This is a good thing.

13) Increased crimes against the elderly. The elderly would be the least capable of physically warding off attack, and the least capable of paying for private protection. The threat of state retribution is the only thing that could keep miscreants from attacking feeble old grandmas (not that that always works).

14) Increased bigotry against minorities. If it were not for the U.S. government, slavery would not have been stopped; lynchings would still be taking place; the civil rights act would have never been passed; we would still have fountains that say white and black. All of the practices were stopped by laws, by propaganda, and by force. If you have seen the documentaries, you know that the only way black kids could go to school in the deep south was under the shadow of an American soldier.

15) The Evil Empire would still be going strong, with global reach. If it were not for American foreign aid to non-communist governments, American military forces defending free (and sometimes not-so-free) nations against communist aggression, the threat of American nukes, and the space race and arms race which helped bankrupt the Soviets, the USSR would still be alive today, and probably in your backyard.

I certainly am confused by the concept of the free market. I struggle to make sense of it. At first I am told it involves freedom and liberty and is voluntary and requires no government force. But when I dig deeper I find it involves heavy restrictions backed up by force and violence.

If we are to transition from today’s society to a “free market” with no government then I would expect a two-stage process:
1 – change laws to create the “free market”. Existing government enforces these laws for a while
2 – disband the government but somehow stop the second most powerful gang from spoiling the “free market”

I can not understand how either of these could be done:
1 – where can I find the list of laws that create a “free market” (a list that mises people generally agree on)
2 – how to stop the most powerful gang from replacing the free market with what it wants (in the absence of more-powerful government)

I think you are confused. “Freedom” and “liberty” refer to freedom from aggression. Freedom from injustice. Freedom from infringement of our rights. Freedom to do as one wishes, except for the freedom to infringe on the life, liberty and property of others.

Any time that one enters the realm of morality and justice, one is talking about right and wrong. “Freedom” does not refer to the absence of restriction altogether, but the absence of unjust restriction. This distinction springs from the idea that the universe of violence can be divided into two categories — the right and the wrong. The principle of reciprocity helps define that line as the difference between aggression and defense, which, one might say, is the first moral rule, the first rule of human civilization — that violence can be either right or wrong.

The kind of “freedom” that you are describing, David, is better known as “the law of the jungle,” which is to say no law at all, save the urge for survival.

This has not been demonstrated. Hoppe’s The Myth of National Defense and Stringham’s Anarchy and the Law demonstrate otherwise.

“It is nonsense to refer to a restriction as a freedom.”

It is nonsense to argue that freedom could exist otherwise. At any rate, the rapist cannot even coherently argue not to be punished, without performatively contradicting themselves in the process (see Kinsella’s estoppel approach). After all, why should they have the ‘freedom’ to rape and not expect retaliation in kind?

This is completely wrong. Markets are the result of a restriction applied by government and require the force of government in order to work. The government is the most powerful gang. Property rights allow weaker individuals or gangs to control resources. This can only happen with the blessing and support (force) of the most powerful gang. Property rights and markets are hence defined by the most powerful gang. Whatever it says goes.

Private property is a restriction. eg Under your proposed system, every human must be restricted from controlling other human’s bodies, and every human must be restricted from controlling any natural resources that are “owned” by other humans. This is a huge restriction that must be placed upon every human. It is nonsense to refer to a restriction as a freedom.

Imagine a dictator who wanted to step-down from power in 5 years and dismantle his controlling force, but first wanted to install a “free market” that would last in his country.
1 – exactly which laws would have to be removed or added to create the “free market” for the first 5 years?
2 – how can this dictator dismantle his government (police,courts,etc) and yet prevent the second most powerful gang from changing the market just created?

I remain unimpressed with your statment “If people value it, the market will provide it”
My retort “If voters value it, democratically elected government will provide it”
Neither statement is particularly useful.

As George Gaskell said, my statement is not precise, and it would need to expand considerably (a few pages, perhaps) to leave you with no doubt of my meaning. It is my attempt to distill down the way markets respond to demand and the concept of division of labor, truths that I find very impressive. As a matter of fact, I believe it is only people who do not understand these concepts that place blind faith in government action.

Here is a delightful essay that will illustrate the point of my statement for you:
I, Pencil

Both statements are true, even if somewhat imprecise.

There is a critical between the provision of goods by a market and the provision of (supposed) goods by government, and that difference is highlighted by the Calculation Problem.

The market will only provide such goods when, in addition to being wanted, their production is ALSO economically sound. People express their true preferences when they must make economic choices. The same money can’t be spent on two different things. I may want (in a vague, abstract and therefore useless sense) to give my family the best Christmas gifts they have ever seen, but doing so would entail losing our home to foreclosure a few weeks later. That’s economically harmful. Therefore, those extravagant purchases are not made, and the producers of those goods never see that measure of potential sales.

Government exists to provide things (I hesitate to call them “goods”) that are economically unsound. The market does not provide the things that government produces, or else there would be no need for the government to provide them. When the market DOES provide them, the government uses some form of artificial legal restriction to protect its market position.

For example, the government ran mail service back in the 18th century because delivering mail to remote areas was economically unsound, due to the expense. So, the government not only subsidized it, but took over the entire enterprise. Now, there are many large-scale companies that are eager to provide this service, but the US Post Office remains. It only does so because of its legal monopoly on first-class mail delivery.

Government CANNOT provide the goods as the market would. It is not merely difficult. It is impossible. Government can’t calculate, because it has purposely insulated itself from the critical economic information on which to make decisions about what to produce, how, how much, what to charge, etc.

Scott D
You have given a very interesting idea for preventing shoplifters from going into certain stores.

Thanks for the compliment. I don’t think it’s all that original or creative. I just wanted to point out the untapped potential of casual crime prevention by private enterprise.

One problem is that a big shop has little incentive to give a fair go to a tiny minority. Walmart might decide to ban all blacks from drugsville where 99% of people are thieves. This makes economic sense but is very unfair to Mr and Mrs NiceBlack who never stole a thing in their life.

Is this a realistic example, or a contrivance to prove a point? If 99% of a certain group of people acts a certain way, then yes, I think it might be reasonable from a risk-assessment viewpoint to exclude 100% of that group. I also think that the remaining 1% would create a nice niche market for another retailer who can’t compete with Wal-mart otherwise.

I have heard of real estate agents who blacklist bad tenants. Great idea, but when they make a mistake and blacklist a nice family, the agents have little incentive to go to the trouble of straightening out the error. Govt can ban the use of unfair blacklists and solve the problem created by this market.

You say “created by the market.” Don’t you mean “created by human error?” We have to accept that there will be errors made. Government puts innocent people on trial all the time, some are convicted, and we only know about those who are later exonerated.

Nevertheless, it is in the best interests of the real estate agents to keep their records as accurate as possible so that both the best and worst candidates are identified. If people are wrongfully blacklisted, a mechanism is likely to develop to allow them to regain good status, in much the same way that it is possible to rebuild credit.

Food supply is a basic human need. There is a danger that shops might monopolise the food supply (within a 10km region in a city) and then make a blacklisting mistake and make it very hard for an innocent person to live in that area.

As I said, mistakes happen, in the private and the public sector. Usually there is a means of solving these errors. Just as stores cannot afford to price every item in their shelves so that every conceivable customer can afford to purchase them, they may not be able to perfect the system so that every innocent person will have access to the store.

Tough luck, I say. That’s what the state says when it makes a mistake that is too costly to fix. If you expect perfection at all times from the market, I think it is not unreasonable for me to expect perfection from the government. The difference is that, without a monopoly, there is the chance for a competing market solution to arise and handle the mistake.

You also say “If people value it, the market will provide it.” This is religious nonsense.

I had a hard time coming up with anything civil to say about this and the rest of that paragraph. I think that you understood the full meaning of my statement and chose to create a straw man. Going from “If people value it, the market will provide it,” to “The market will give you anything you want,” is a bit of a stretch, don’t you think?

2) It logically follows that we need laws enforced.

3) An entity that makes and enforces laws is, by definition, government.

4) I would gladly take our government over any other, in spite of its flaws.

There was a case of Mr. Dimitrov vs. nazi Germany. He was acused of arson of Reichstag. And Dimitrov WON.

It was on 9/21/33 when Hitler was a Chancellor of Germany. And was actively pushing for panishment of Dimitrov.

Anonymous,
most of you examples of pre-911 era are good nevertheless. We are still better of then the most of the world.