Debate: Free-Market Police: Better or Worse?
Side: Much, much better...

is reminds me of arguments with creationists over abiogenesis and the Miller–Urey experiment. They deny the Miller–Urey experiment on the grounds that it didn't produce a bacterial cell. In other words, like creationists, you discount portions of evidence that fit a free market/stateless region and regulated market/state equally because it works against your conclusion and so you demand unreasonable criteria for evidence to qualify.Ah, I just know I'm in for a real treat when you open your argument with reference to your prior debates with Christians...States and anarchies are comparable in a way, but not in the way you seem to think they are. My criteria for evidence is relevance. It doesn't even have to be catalytic, so long as it's relevant I'll look into it. So far, all your arguments have been either irrelevant, non-cognitive and/or non catalytic. You can't know how a country would behave without a state relative to its statist self. You'd have to look at it's non-statist counter parts and consider the variables. "There are no transitional fossils" is a lot like the claim that under free markets there are no monopolies.The difference is, this is true. (non-state) Monopolies are rare enough with a state and without one they're almost impossible and unsustainable even when they do happen.The goal post hasn't been moved. I've been saying since my first post that monopolies don't happen on a free market and even on a non-free market, (non-state) monopolies are unsustainable.Reading the rest of this, you're making several new points as though you've proven them before or something. You haven't shown me monopolies forming on free-enterprise... you've yet to debunked my claim that monopolies (oligopolies) are much more plausible with barriers to entry... you haven't even said anything akin to "those barriers came to exist after the monopoly"... you seem to think showing how the market naturally balances itself out via the pricing system (supply and demand) is analogous to "god did it" (somehow).There's just far too many logical errors in these six paragraphs to go over point by point. I hope you've concentrated all your fail into these few paragraphs and that the rest of your post is fallacy-free...A hierarchy. Just as I predicted must arise from anarchy.A shit... well you beat me. I never looked at it that way... oh wait, yes I did and in fact explained to you several times already that hierarchy =/= a state. A company has a hierarchy. Are companies states too?I want to live there. Well then again, I have a criminal mind... a life of theft might work for me.So the Irish were insane by our contemporary standards. So? The rest of Europe was crazier still. Compared to the rest of Europe, Ireland had relatively few wars that lasted much less time. Hell, most of the warring in anarchic Ireland was against England.The persons of the time were crazy all around, the difference is a state allowed kings both a near infinite money supply (tax base) and near infinite man power to fight in their wars (conscription). Ireland had no states, thus had no tax base or conscription, thus rendering large-scale European style wars unprofitable and inefficient. So, a choice between a life of stealing from other tribes and ultimately rearing cattle, or fighting in wars to support the local king.Which one has the libraries, science, academies and universities?... You want to site education standards in Europe between ~650 CE to ~1650 CE as proof we need a state? Now I KNOW you have no leg left to stand on in this debate if this is all you have to argue with. XDI don't know if you've ever cracked open a history book, but Europe in the middle ages wasn't exactly pro-academia. In fact, basic understanding of literacy and math was something heavily suppressed in this time. Now, there were no IQ tests back then, so I can't tell you that the Irish were definitively more intelligent than the rest of Europe, but given the choice between, say, England ~1000 CE and Ireland ~1000 CE, I'd opt for Ireland because at the very least in Ireland I wouldn't have my hands scorched via ordeal by fire for simply being accused of the "crime" of coveting a neighbors property, or something stupid like that. What you're really saying is that present anarchy is better than living in a repressive state on the verge of anarchy.A stable state (I.E. one not ravaged by civil war, totalitarianism, excessive poverty) will outcompete Somalia.In absolute terms, Somalia shows that a society that's been 50% capitalistic for a hundred years or so will out-preform a country that's 100% capitalistic for 10 years, especially if that country undergoes constant invasion from other states during this time.In relative terms, Somalia shows that a nation sees improvement once taxes and fiat land claims are abolished even if that country continues to see civil war after the collapse.I think I'll just ask someone who knows what you hate about government:There's a difference between voluntarily paying for a service and having your money coercively extracted so you and everyone in the country can fight over what it will be spent on.... Is this supposed to prove that I haven't spoken out against the state's fiat land claim? This quote is obviously in reference to taxation, but you'd be a fool to make the claim that I haven't clearly expressed my lack of approval for both taxation and fiat land claims. Ive mentioned them together so many times already, I'm sure I could pull up just as many examples of me using them together as you can of me using them separately. Not that it would matter though, as mentioning it once is enough to get the message across that I oppose both, but whatever. =/Paying for rent of land apparently isn't a service to you...Rent is a voluntary agreement, taxation is a coercive debt imposed onto you because you were born. The analogy fails.... Ah, how silly of me. Opting out of government services is so simple, all you have to do is live a life of poverty and homelessness. =/Oh wait, that doesn't work either since all (or most, depending on which country you live) goods and services are taxed anyway...Presumably because they demand money for services...I'm not advocating free services. I'm advocating that these services are more efficient when left to the market. Which they are.Mafia and gangs are just small governments. I'm opposed to governments. There's no contradiction.Are you in support of gangs and mafias? ;)A town existing on state land, using state military to protect its sovereignty is apparently not expected to pay...Again, it's a question of voluntarism and efficiency, not free services. The "like it or leave it" argument works with a stateless society, but not with a state run society. If a bunch of persons decided to leave the states rule and start up there own little town and started to become prosperous, the state would eventually intervene and force their "services" on them.This is because the state has a fiat land claim. It "owns" every square inch of land from ocean to ocean (In the case of the U.S./ Canada etc.).So there you have it. Anti-tax is your credo. Anti-tax is what defines your cut-line. If something taxes it is a state, no matter how blunt of a definition that may be.... facepalmThe quote you're responding to is very clearly talking about fiat land-claims. It actually has the words "fiat land claim" directly in it.Again, Somalia wasn't stateless for three decades, so this civil war you're talking about is unrelated. Besides, Somalia improved not only in absolute terms, but also relative to Ethiopia and Kenya. Oops.Ethiopia and Kenya: Some of the poorest and most corrupt nations on earth.If you had faith in lack of state, I'd expect you to compare Somalia to a free state that isn't ravaged by poverty.What the hell are you talking about? There is no better comparison than the countries directly bordering Somalia. All three were poor, Somalia's state collapsed and it saw improvements that weren't seen in Ethiopia or Kenya despite all three starting at roughly the same point and despite there geographical similarities. It's almost as though at this point you were willing to say anything to just be able to pump out another post. =/I said civil war for almost three decades which is true, there was something of a civil war before the state collapsed. What, you think all was good, then one day the state topples and anarchy takes over as a better system?Wha? Even within the context of your own sentence, what you've just said makes no sense. I said that if there was an ongoing civil war that began before the fall of the Barre regime, then the civil war that existed during the time that Somalia was stateless is not the result of it being stateless, therefore rendering your previous argument that anarchic Somalia sucked because it had civil war apocryphal. Whatever you want to call it, you're living in it now and need not fear death squads storming into your house and killing you with a macheteUnless I happen to own the wrong kind of vegetation and try to defend my property, or something trivial like that, of course... or a new gang taking threatening to take control of half your country while demanding new laws, like no religion but Islam is permissible.This is called compromise.This as opposed to the state already controlling the entire country while demanding new laws? Like, no non-government form of currency is permissible?...http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberty_Dollar They dropped imperialism, and emperors.Ah, I see. We need government so it can nuke less advanced countries and force democracy on them. I suppose that justifies the state.This still is in no way an example of a state successfully imposing itself on a country of anti-statists.Chieftains have political power. They can make laws, or edicts, or agreements with other Chieftains for special territorial privilege. Maybe by providing a special luxury to the chieftain you will be allowed to open booths in the village sacred site, or will be allowed to mine in the nature reserve.Seeing as you're so ardent in not looking into this, I'll just tell you what the chieftains of anarchic were responsible for. The chieftain of an Irish Tuatha was only responsible for presiding over the annual assembly, to serve as high priest and to lead the Tuatha in war (which was very rare in ancient Ireland). These chieftains had no power over the market, no ability to enact barriers to entry, no ability to subsidize or monopolize, no ability to conscript and no ability to coerce taxation. You could pay a chieftain for market advantages in the same way you can pay a tree to produce more wood...Ponits and links on the industiral revolution (I had to summarize you argument because I surpassed the charactar limit)These persons continued working for the large factories, didn't they? So at least they found it better than working for their families. Also, for the cost of goods to be high would mean the supply is low. If the supply is low, less persons are employable. So, perhaps the workers got paid a little more relatively speaking, but there was also more relative poverty because of this.The standard of living of the factory workers was shockingly bad when compared with the contemporary conditions of the upper classes and with the present conditions of the industrial masses. Hours of work were long, the sanitary conditions in the workshops deplorable. But the fact remains that for the surplus population which the enclosure movement had reduced to dire wretchedness and for which there was literally no room left in the frame of the prevailing system of production, work in the factories was salvation. These people thronged into the plants for no reason other than the urge to improve their standard of living.The processing trades of earlier ages had almost exclusively catered to the wants of the well-to-do. Their expansion was limited by the amount of luxuries the wealthier strata of the population could afford. Factory production, on the other hand, was geared toward the mass production of inexpensive goods for the common man. This represents an extraordinary step forward in everyone’s standard of living.The truth is that economic conditions were highly unsatisfactory on the eve of the Industrial Revolution. The traditional social system was not elastic enough to provide for the needs of a rapidly increasing population. Neither farming nor the guilds had any use for the additional hands. Business was imbued with the inherited spirit of privilege and exclusive monopoly; its institutional foundations were licenses and the grant of a patent of monopoly; its philosophy was restriction and the prohibition of competition both domestic and foreign. The number of people for whom there was no room left in the rigid system of paternalism and government tutelage of business grew rapidly. They were virtually outcasts. The apathetic majority of these wretched people lived from the crumbs that fell from the tables of the established castes. In the harvest season they earned a trifle by occasional help on farms; for the rest they depended upon private charity and communal poor relief. Thousands of the most vigorous youths of these strata were pressed into the service of the Royal Army and Navy; many of them were killed or maimed in action; many more perished ingloriously from the hardships of the barbarous discipline, from tropical diseases, or from syphilis. Other thousands, the boldest and most ruthless of their class, infested the country as vagabonds, beggars, tramps, robbers, and prostitutes. The authorities did not know of any means to cope with these individuals other than the poorhouse and the workhouse. The support the government gave to the popular resentment against the introduction of new inventions and labor-saving devices made things quite hopeless.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZImO9O-Xkqw I advise you to read deeper about what sweatshops are like, I provided some historical links. Please read them, and also about modern sweatshops. They are terrible places and should not be called progress when, with some charity, proper working hours, safe facilities, and decent pay are all within reach.I agree that these things are in reach, but not with or because of the state. Sweat shops still exist now despite the state (in the third world) after all.http://mises.org/daily/2384http://mises.org/daily/3218I've already seen this kind of stuff before and it really means nothing to me, because the heart of his argument is a false dichotomy between being pulled into a machine and crushed into salsa, or dying from your jaw deteriorating due to phosphorous (both common occurrences, and among many fates) versus thieving or being a prostitute. The third path would be a regulated factory system, with strictly enforced safety, wage, and work hour guidelines. Sure, it might be less profitable, but I imagine that the fate of so many children is more important than the bottom line of factory owners.Happy workers tend to be more productive, so the capitalist has incentive to supply the aggregate demand for working condition standards.I completely agree that regulation stops much potential worker exploitation, but it's simply asinine to claim that this sort of regulation can only come from a firm equip with a fiat land claim and several coercive monopolies on various services. Especially when there is already monetary incentive for capitalists to offer good working conditions. Right, but as we all know, the price of something doesn't always reflect the cost to society, or the environment.Opportunity cost is also considered in the market. Ultimately, how the market shapes itself is decided on market demand. If the demand values a clean environment, then the market will resemble this demand unless there are forces antagonist to market demand that have incentive to be as such. For a capitalist, knuckling under to market demand is the most profitable track as it is the path of least resistance. Cartels such as the state, however, have both the incentive and ability to go against the market demand as they both monopolize force and education. Perhaps this sort of cartel is justifiable if the market demand is for the castration of all Mexicans, or something crazy like that, but historically it's been these cartels themselves that have propagated such insanity.I understand that the market is full of quasi-conscious neanderthals that demand insane things, even if still to a much lesser extent than total Mexican emasculation. This is why I say the stepping stone to anarchy will be meritocracy. Again: price doesn't necessarily reflect cost. In the case of 19th century England, the price of a cotton shirt did not reflect the cost in dead children, diseased workers, and dumped waste.Because of these simple facts you cannot expect a market to care about ethical or social issues.This is an argument from your personal preferences. You value the well-being of workers above market efficiency. That's fine, but understand this are your preferences and it's unreasonable and egotistical for you to violently force the world to conform to you. Having said that, the market has means of inspiring congenial working conditions without the state's extortion racket. Firstly, providing market demand is the path of least resistance therefore the most profitable. Secondly, the formation of unions has made state interference obsolete. If "union busting" becomes a serious problem, then anti-union busting becomes market demand. I won't pretend to know what supply will arise from this demand, but from what I can see the most obvious solution would be paid union protection (PUP, as it will be called ^-^). Actually neither.The economy was improved by the elimination of a corrupt state. Kind of like how if North Korea collapsed, even free-market capitalism would improve the situation better than totalitarianism. This is more a point about something being so bad that even an unregulated market is better.Wrong. The U.S. is prosperous to the extent that it is free enterprise. This is why state-run services like the post office suck, while FedEx doesn't. Just as creationists exclude scientific data, like transitional fossils, from their viewpoint you exclude all recorded governments and stateless regions in order to compare them side by side, and then you insist that one stateless area is representative of statelessness in general.Wrong again. I stand behind Anarchic Ireland because it is the best example of statelessness. No state formed to begin with, so there was no fumbling around to create an economy of scale after some government topple. As a result, it had (profusely) less war, less religion and lasted a millennium (!) all without taxation or fiat land claims. This isn't a question of aggregates and averages, but of recognizing the repercussions of statist societies vs. statelessness. In this case, Anarchic Ireland best represents statelessness and as a result, etc. etc. etc.Now, let's try taking the spin out of what you said: Somalia experienced growth in the face of civil war. Civil war is costly and depletes resources. Therefore if the civil war ended the growth would be higher. What can end a civil war? A state. What did not? Stateless Xeer.What you're saying is mere conjecture in the face of what actually happened. These factions didn't get their money from the Somali's themselves as a central government would have, so their ability to war wasn't directly tied to the income of the Somali's. Which means you're very wrong in assuming that a state would have allowed Somalia even greater economic growth both theoretically and factually as the actual events of Somalia's economic growth has shown.Back in the Greek, Egyptian, and Roman eras there isn't indication that literacy was ever as high as it is now.There isn't indication that it wasn't (though, it probably wasn't). My point is that the heavily statist middle ages came hand in hand with the single worst era of education and wealth suppression in European history. And, it wasn't until the abolishment of such heavy statism that these demands began to see a supply.Though, I know you'll just say that this is the fault of poor government, not government. Fine. A government that doesn't directly control class and occupation our-preforms one that does, then again a government that doesn't even subsidize the market out-preforms one that does.I'm sure you can see where I'm going with this and the end result depends on how you define government. So, how would you define government, avesk? (in your own words, of course.)Also, note what I said: The New Deal attempted to prevent another Great Depression.So?Both actually. More exactly, the first then the second occurred, since you need money to buy political favours.Kind of like, you need to be athletic before you take steroids otherwise they don't work as good, so once you're near the top you take them to really excel beyond everyone. Soon everyone uses them to just be able to compete since the bar has raised so high.Yeah, it's a real shame that scrawny young men use steroids (usually necessarily) to get "swole" while already "swole" young men are using them just to push past their genetic potential... but that's neither here nor there.It's only cost effective to exploit the working class so long as you can subdue your companies market elasticity via state favours to suppress competition. In order to get to the point where your company is profitable enough to buy state favours is to first supply market demand. This includes the demand for fair working conditions. (quote from article)Overgrazing in this example happens regardless of whether it is private or public land, the reason is that even if we respect boundaries the herdsmen will add to their flock to maximise productivity until each land plot becomes overgrased.Wtf? Are actually arguing that herdsmen will voluntarily buy more animals than they can upkeep in order to stay competitive on the market? That's like saying a company will purposefully undercut their products prices to sub-profitable rates just to remain competitive on the market (predatory pricing). If the property remains sovereign rather than collective, then there is no problem. Even if the property is contiguous, so long as they are separate, tragedy of the commons becomes, at best, tragedy of one guy too stupid to realize he's sacrificed productivity to remain competitive... which ended his ability to remain competitive anyway. Sure, the state does a great job of propping up guys like this. Come to think of it, that's probably why the state sucks so much. ;)