Four fears for authoritarians

>They have not accomplished anything because the majority opinion (by a wide margin) is that government power is benign and for our own good.

Their problem is that they don't distinguish between government power and government services. You can't object to public roads and schools and expect to be taken seriously.

We need to organize a group of people who are willing to accept that the government should operate a fire department without accepting that the government should operate a police state.

Of course. We're the crazy ones, and yet you and everyone like you expect to be taken seriously when you ignore the inherent negative externalities in a system in which force is the sole pillar supporting it and distinguishing it from the alternatives?

Few liberty minded people who wish to reduce the reach and scope of government have any in principle disagreement with the goals of most of the service providing branches of government, they just believe they could be far better handled by market entities directly accountable to economic forces for their performance rather than the political alternatives which fail to escape market forces entirely at any rate and just end up dumping their negative externalities on more productive sectors of the economy in the form of taxation.

It's not that they don't want schools or fire departments, it's that they don't want people mugged on an epic scale to fund them. Accepting that it's OK to use violent force on people to go along with your plans takes the argument out of the territory of what means are acceptable and only to what ends are acceptable, and that is far murkier territory when there are almost seven billion largely divergent ideas on what those ends ought to be.

You don't need force to run a fire department or a school, you do need force to run a police state. Some ends are only possible with the acceptability of certain means, and those ends are typically the ones people want to avoid like tyrannical police states. It's much easier to reach a consensus on means than ends, so do that and let the best ends win by competition amongst voluntary, enfranchised participants rather than slaves gradually falling into despair as they find that everything they believed in is a lie and there is no way out.

>Accepting that it's OK to use violent force on people to go along with your plans takes the argument out of the territory of what means are acceptable and only to what ends are acceptable

Any means has to be weighed against the alternatives to decide whether it can be accepted. You are proposing to entirely eliminate an effective means to raise money for beneficial programs without providing any effective alternative. "The market will provide it" is empirically false with regards to e.g. environmental protection or education services for the poor.

> You don't need force to run a fire department or a school, you do need force to run a police state.

You do need force to run a fire department or a school. You need someone who is going to impose a penalty on suppliers when the school or the fire house pays them for equipment and they don't deliver. That isn't any less a use of force than imposing the same penalty on someone who doesn't pay their taxes.

The argument you want to make is that the supplier agrees to provide the equipment but taxpayers may not agree to pay taxes. But you still have the same problem: I never agreed to the existing allocation of resources in the world. I never agreed that the gold in your vault or the land that you mined it from should belong to you and not me but you are still going to have to exclude me by force in order to exercise dominion over it.

You have to argue that someone who participates in a market transaction solely for the purpose of avoiding starvation or freezing or dying of a preventable disease is doing so "voluntarily" notwithstanding the complete lack of any viable alternative, which is ridiculous. The only way to avoid that is to somehow create a world in which everyone who refuses to work for existing owners of capital in lieu of pursuing their own interests will still be able to procure the necessities of life. We aren't there yet, so we have to pay taxes.

>Firstly, I am proposing that it is flat out wrong to engage in forcible extortion from peaceful people who do not desire to finance your pet projects.

You can't have peace without the threat of force. If I come to your house and start claiming all your stuff, either you or somebody else is going to have to stop me by force or you're soon not going to have any stuff.

>But even disregarding that, I am pointing out that taxation is not effective, exactly because it divorces the incentive of actually delivering on the thing being purchased from the buyer.

Now you're conflating effectiveness with efficiency. The government is enormously wasteful for all the reasons you list. The existing size of government is ridiculously out of control, especially the federal government, primarily because of blatant corruption. You still haven't provided an alternative effective means of educating millions of poor children whose parents can't afford to send them to private schools.

>If it's not effective, why do all non government services use this model? Would you be willing to advocate the complete abandonment of markets and have everything provided by government via taxation? Saying that markets are not an effective means to fund the provision of goods and services is effectively doing so. >All services throughout history have at one point been provided by free market models, and in at least some instances these have been better than the extortionately funded alternatives.

You're trying to claim the middle. I don't want the middle. Nobody is arguing that the government would be better at manufacturing microprocessors than Samsung or Intel. Nobody wants the government to manufacture and sell microprocessors. The issue is that there are circumstances where the market fails and society benefits from government intervention.

Let's look at education. Educating the poor is socially beneficial because it converts would-be vagrants and criminals into productive members of society by allowing them to do skilled labor and earn higher wages, which in turn makes them less desperate and less likely to end up in prison or draining the resources of social welfare charities. So what are the private sector options for funding the education of poor children? Either you make the kids and their families pay for it (student loans), or you find somebody else to pay for it (charity).

The problem with student loans (in addition to the indentured servitude problem we already see at the college level) is that it fails to capture the externalities. Part of the benefit of someone becoming a doctor instead of a thief goes to the hospital, to its patients, to the would-be thief's victims who no longer have their property stolen, to whoever it is we have funding the prisons who no longer have to pay to incarcerate this person, etc. Those benefits aren't entirely captured by the higher wages earned by the person to be educated, which means they can't be paid in interest to the bank providing the student loan, which means the bank will often be unwilling to make the loan at an interest rate the borrower would be able to pay even though educating that person would nevertheless result in a net benefit to society.

So we're left with charity, which means we're in trouble. Because all those individuals who benefit from the externalities of educating the poor? They're not organized. They don't individually have time to do a cost/benefit analysis on charitable donations, and doing so is hugely inefficient in any event because it requires a massive duplication of effort by millions of individual contributors. Which means contributions don't go to the right place, and there is the same sort of lack of accountability as there is with government because millions of individual contributors have trouble holding a charity accountable in much the same way as millions of voters do a government. You mix these two together and you get a fact of modern charities: The charities spend an enormous amount of donated money soliciting for more donations, because spending two million dollars on advertising which brings you three million dollars in additional donations nets you a million dollars of cash money. So much for private sector efficiency.

On top of that, charities have a free rider problem that taxation solves. You benefit from the work of charities whether you know it or not and whether you contribute or not, and you don't have to contribute. Perhaps you're socially minded and you do anyway, but some people aren't, and they won't. So in order to collect the same amount of money, the charity will have to solicit more from each contributor. Not all contributors will be willing to pay more, which once again increases the amount the charity needs from those remaining, and increases the amount of money the charity has to waste soliciting donations to net the same amount of funding. A few rounds of this and you quickly end up with large inefficiencies and a significant shortfall from the socially optimal level of education funding.

>In the case of the environment, this is equal to saying that there is no financial incentive for any entity to provide space free of environmental contaminants.

See, this is why nobody takes you guys seriously. The market is going to provide specific locations which are free of environmental contaminants and the rest of the world is fair game for toxic waste and unbreathable air? Seriously?

On top of that, how are you expecting to maintain these pristine environments against unregulated neighbors? What is your hypothetical theme park supposed to do when its closest neighbor starts burning used tires in an open pit? Pick up and move? Buy all the surrounding property for a hundred miles?

>In the case of education, never before has it been so cheap to provide educational services as it is today, and never have they been spiralling so wildly out of control.

Good teachers teaching small class sizes are expensive. The internet hasn't changed that.

> You mean like the fact that when they don't deliver they cease getting any business from anyone because it has never been easier to rate the efficiency of any given vendor and quickly distribute that information amongst all potential buyers of any given product or service?

That being the exclusive means of enforcing contracts would create insurmountable barriers to entry for new market participants with no reputations and create a significant advantage for larger and more established companies, resulting in market consolidation, monopolies and the consequent massive inefficiency.

>And that's what we end up with in all cases.

This is really the whole flaw in your argument. What we end up with in most cases is not what we end up with in all cases. There are important cases where the market fails and the government can do better.

>And I and everyone else in the world never agreed to let you have a say in what we have earned through our own labour. Why should we care about your opinions on what you believe you are entitled to by virtue of being born? If you are willing to argue an absurdity and ignore all warnings that if you attempt to initiate force in order to make that absurdity a reality, the result for that is quite easy to predict.

Aren't you now refuting your whole philosophy? The citizens of this country earned the right to govern it by taking independence from the crown. We now collectively own the country. If you want to live here you follow the rules we collectively set through the process of democratic elections. If you want to live in a state of anarchy then feel free to win your own war of independence or colonize Mars and establish your own government or lack thereof.

>It is not ridiculous to claim that this is voluntary action compared to the alternative of everyone having a few months out of every year forcibly confiscated by an enormous inefficient bureaucracy that is actively willing to kill you if you have a problem with this.

It is ridiculous, because neither is voluntary:

>As for "the complete lack of any viable alternative" consider what this really means; it implies that the entity in question is completely unable to provide any kind of value to anyone at all in any way to the level necessary to continue their own survival

The ability to get a job or have a choice between several jobs doesn't imply that taking any such job is voluntary when refusal to choose your master results in homelessness and starvation. That's the point. You pay your taxes under the threat of incarceration, you work for the owners of capital under the threat of death by starvation. I don't see that the one is particularly morally superior to the other.

>and also noone else in the world is willing to voluntarily help them

How can this be foreign to you? The whole "children starving in Africa" thing is actual reality. Actual human children with no food, no medicine and no education. That's what the complete lack of government looks like.

> You can't have peace without the threat of force.

No, You or someone else would only come to my house and start claiming all my stuff if you believed it was in your best interests to do so. It might get you killed is indeed one reason that it might not be in your best interests to do so, but firstly there are many ways to implement the "it might get you killed" condition, and none of them necessarily rely upon a westphalian nation state as supporting infrastructure. In addition, if you believed it was not in your best interests for other reasons than "it might get you killed" it wouldn't matter, the end result would be the same.

People act in accordance with their best interests, it doesn't all have to be stick, it can be carrot, too. If you do not respect the property rights of others, it is only logical to assume that in turn, they will not respect your property rights. This makes it not in your best interests to do that.

Also, this response was directed at something that has nothing to do with the compulsion against the appropriation of private property by random people, it was a statement that it is wrong to extort people to finance your personal pet projects. If I set up a protection racket in my neighbourhood and enforce it with violence, it doesn't make it alright as long as I donate a portion of that to charity.

> The government is enormously wasteful for all the reasons you list.

So whilst acknowledging that the current system is completely broken, you still can't see the value in exploring alternative avenues for the cases where currently government acts as the sole service provider? Even in a case like education where they do a terrible job of it to boot? You really don't see a problem with that perspective?

It strikes me as someone living in a feudal system arguing for the necessity of landed nobility to protect them from roaming bandits despite the fact that they spend the majority of their time scraping together a subsistence existence to feed a parasite class. Or someone that has convinced themselves that an embedded baroque thrown together regex parser for html processing is better than an open source alternative because they're not familiar with it and it wasn't invented here.

> The issue is that there are circumstances where the market fails and society benefits from government intervention.

I see no evidence for this claim, the provision of any product or service allocated to government invariably ends up rated by political rather than performance metrics, it is necessarily inferior to alternatives where the performance can be directly rewarded or punished by the customer.

> So what are the private sector options for funding the education of poor children?

Or you radically overhaul the entire educational process to drastically reduce the investment necessary for attaining a superior quality education, the process as to how this is done is best decided by market forces, which as previously established drive costs as low as possible and quality as high as possible. Reducing costs results in the risk for loans going down and the ease of paying them back going up, as well as the coverage of scholarship / charitably funds for education going up.

Taking the entire sub performing public education infrastructure which has been sucking at the extortionate government teat for the majority of modern history and instead simply hooking it up to a directly user pays system will simply result in the vast majority of people refusing to patronise it due to its ineffectiveness and the cost relative to that ineffectiveness.

If "Let the market figure it out" with regards to educational means is too hand-wavy for you, consider Khan Academy or the vast crop of humans who have managed to self educate from the growing amount of information freely available on the internet for anyone with a desire to do so. There is enormous room in the machinery of education for improvement, and like everything else in history, there is no evidence that this is best managed by central planning and bureaucratic committees.

And it's still no justification for sticking a gun in the face of everyone in the world to finance the system, even if it actually wasn't as poorly performing as it is.

> See, this is why nobody takes you guys seriously.

Actually, it implies that the owners of any given location are responsible for the contaminants in that location. It implies that there is a market for the responsible disposal of hazardous environmental waste, and when people are held to account by their neighbours for the negative externalities of their own environments who are incentivised to do so they will be eager to make sure that they are not contaminating their surrounding environments. For the full details, see;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_environmentalism

http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Future_Imperfect/Chapter22.htm...

Alternatively, your system is what led to CFC Ozone depletion, Chernobyl and all other associated nuclear incidents, Water board contamination from fracking, Exxon Valdez, Deepwater Horizon, the Bhopal disaster, the epidemic of rising lead levels in the air and all the knock on negative externalities from that even though at the time of the creation of leaded fuel lead poisoning was extremely well understood and there were alternatives, Ethyl corp actually used the blunt force of the government to stop its competitors from even questioning their practices in this area.

And who is the biggest polluter in the world? I'll give you a hint, it's not a private enterprise. So you'll excuse me if I actually think it's more reasonable to have a problem taking your approach seriously.

> That being the exclusive means of enforcing contracts would create insurmountable barriers to entry for new market participants with no reputations

Because no new entrants in the bespoke software development ever start up and gain traction from clients when there is no local framework to hold them to the delivery of their promised goods and services like say outsourced arrangements with businesses from other countries where the direct application of the legal machinery of the local state is off the table, right? Alright, maybe that happens sometimes, but it's at least extremely uncommon right?

Markets are extremely well tested methods for the dispersion and management of risk, and that's all this particular issue is.

> Aren't you now refuting your whole philosophy?

I certainly would be if your assumption about the nature of my existence as a normal every day citizen moored to a typical nation state and all the infrastructure thereof were true. However, it is not. Also, we were discussing the results of behaving in a way counter to the rules set by an alternate society that at this point in time does not exist, and in that context I was pointing out that it would be easy to predict the results of your proposed behaviour.

> It is ridiculous, because neither is voluntary

It is voluntary, in the system under discussion you are free to choose not to engage in transactions with your fellow human beings. Yes, this might mean you starve or freeze to death, but that is the consequence of your voluntary inaction that nobody is forcing upon you. If you want to bring a case for that one, you'll have to take it up with entropy and nature itself I'm afraid.

> You pay your taxes under the threat of incarceration

You pay your taxes under threat of death, which will be actively imposed on you by a thinking entity which believes that it has the right to do so.

> you work for the owners of capital under the threat of death by starvation.

You engage in a free market because you want to gain the things that it has to offer you, like food and shelter, if you do not want these things you are not forced to engage in that market. No thinking entity will actively hunt you down for your refusal to participate in the system in question. In fact it is more likely that a thinking entity will offer you charity in sympathy for your position to protect you from the natural consequences of your own inaction.

That is why the two could not be more different, one is parasitism and slavery, the other one is symbiotism and trade.

> How can this be foreign to you?

Actually Africa has no shortage of government and the one area in which it does have a shortage of the form of government with which most of the modern world is familiar is actually outperforming all of its similar peers.

African governments are typically extremely corrupt and inefficient even by the standards of other world governments, which are as previously discussed corrupt and inefficient by nature. The charitable donations that are funnelled here are often parasitically controlled by the governments in question and doled out to the parties whom it is politically useful to do so, that you would use this as justification for the necessity of the state once again defies belief.

As for what "complete lack of government looks like" there is no place on the face of the planet that does not have some self important blowhard or committee thereof who believes that they have the right to parasitically impose their personal brand of law upon a static geographical area. Even Somalia which is the oft cited go to example for "without government" is simply a patchwork coalition of warring factions who claim sovereignty over a given territory. So citing examples is not really possible, people of the earth are still too addicted to the drug of the state for now.

With the growing discontent with that status quo all over the world though coupled with advances in technology that make it practical to choose to adopt systems like anarcho capitalism I have hopes that this might not always be the case. Back to the original question, I see this as one of the more promising ways to throw off that yoke.