From: lvc@cbnews.cb.att.com (Larry Cipriani)
Subject: Re: Anarchy
Organization: Ideology Busters, Inc.
Date: Fri, 22 Jan 1993 21:12:30 GMT
Followup-To: talk.politics.guns

Note followups.

In article <1993Jan22.003417.12715@shearson.com> pmetzger@snark.shearson.com (Perry E. Metzger) writes:
>lvc@cbnews.cb.att.com (Larry Cipriani) writes:
>
>>People want to be secure in their persons and property, among other things.
>>Anarchy does not and cannot offer this.  People value something which
>>anarchy cannot offer.  People prefer something which is not perfect, but
>>is better in their view than anarchy.
>
>I believe you are operating on a false premise, which is that security
>can only be provided by a monopoly provisioner, i.e. the government.

You're talking about the "executive" function of gov't.  There's more
to it than that; in particular you said nothing about the legislative
branch.  Eventually your "protection agencies" or whatever you want
will come to a irreconcilable difference concerning law, e.g., my
favorite such difference, is or is not late term abortion murder ?  I
don't want to get into an abortion thread, please.  Just pointing out
that folks whose views are pro-abortion will hire a protection agency
to protect abortion clinics, and folks whose views are anti-abortion
may well hire a protection agency to wage war against abortion clinics.

>Now, I'm not an anarchist-socialist like most of the people you've
>been conversing with -- I'm an anarchocapitalist. I believe that
>security services can and should be provided by the free market. As
>evidence that this can work, I cite the case of Iceland, which
>operated perfectly well with only private methods for settling
>disputes from ~900AD to 1252AD, which is longer than any western
>government I know of has lasted.

Why are you only looking at western governments ?

>Now, the arguments for why I believe the private sector could provide
>security services and the evidence for it are rather long and
>involved, but I'm happy to go into great detail if you like.

No thanks, Perry.  I've read Friedman's book on the subject, and frankly
I'm not very impressed.  It's just a lot of hand waving, a theory of
everything and nothing.

>Ah, but anarchy, or at least my kind, is not the same as a situation
>where people are not forced to be accountable for their actions. It
>would merely imply that people would be held accountable for their
>actions without a monopoly provider of this service -- it does not
>mean that this service would not be provided by the marketplace at
>all.

Who makes the law ?  It doesn't come down from a mountain on stone
tablets these days.

>I would strongly agree that without deterrents to crime society
>would degenerate into chaos -- but I am not proposing that society do
>without such deterrents, only that it do without a government.

Who defines what a crime is ?

>No, I believe they might try -- but they also try under government.
>The question is only whether abortion clinics would have more or less
>protection in an anarchy, and I would argue that, provided the bulk of
>the population at least weakly supported abortion, which is more or
>less the situation now, the clinics would be better protected in an
>anarchocapitalist society.

US society generally supports the right to an abortion as long as it
is in the first trimester.  After that, people generally are opposed.
And the question isn't just whether abortion clinics would have more
or less protection.  If killing a just born baby is bad, but killing
an about to be born fetus is legal in your society I think you'll
find blood in the stretts.  So again, who makes the laws ?

>Again, as I have noted, there is no reason to assume that an
>appropriately structured anarchy could not provide for deterrents
>to crime without the need for a government.

If protection agencies enjoy economies of scale eventually there will
be an oligarchy; which is no big improvement over what we already have.
-- 
Larry Cipriani, att!cbvox1!lvc or lvc@cbvox1.att.com
Newsgroups: alt.society.anarchy