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

I really don't know how to respond to someone as delusional as you are, half of the time. You see a typical person makes a claim, you can contradict them, they accept it, and adjust their views. You can even mock or ridicule them so that they see how silly their reasoning is, forcing them to drop it. In your case you simply disregard anything that doesn't fit with your preconceptions by calling it "not a true example" or "tainted by state" and so you never have to actually think very hard because you already have your conclusion.You're projecting, avesk. Not only that, but you're quite egotistical. "You see a typical person makes a claim, you can contradict them, they accept it, and adjust their views." This assumes that I haven't made any counter arguments and indeed I opened this debate with counter arguments to your original post, if you recall. Which makes you the receiver in this your example. Which means by your own words you must be the one to "accept it". XDYou'll also notice that the only time I said that your examples were not examples of stateless societies were because they actually weren't stateless societies... It doesn't get much more simple than that.I've given you examples of what I consider stateless societies and in all cases they've functioned perfectly. If anyone is merely disregarding the points of the other, it's you.You've been the one making the straw-man arguments and unequivilent analogies after all. =/I've encountered this a lot with young earth creationists over the years. You explain examples of how life evolves to them and they just purposefully reject it as "random chance" or "there are no transition fossils" or repeat ad nauseum stock phrases which have no depth. In your case these are "market solves X," "that's not a true free market," and "taxes are theft."Ah, speak of the devil. Do you even understand the mechanics of an analogy? I can't think of one time where an analogy you've made actually follows and this is no exception. "Taxes are theft" = "there are no transition fossils"? "that's not a true free market" = "random chance"? All you're doing is taking what I've said and trying to connect it to YE creationism in order to connect it to something stupid. The problem is you're connecting the positive assertion of creationism with the negative assertion of stateLESSness.Here's an analogy that actually follows. Take notes:I've encountered this a lot with YE creationists over the years. You explain of how life is emergent and they just purposefully reject it as "impossible without God" or "there has never been an example of (macro) evolution".In your case these are, "order is impossible without God-erm... government" or "there's never been an example of a (true) free market that has functioned."As though you have the right to tell me how I define anarchism. XDIt is already sufficiently demonstrated through modern and historical gang wars, tribal conflicts, and animal behaviour that conflict repeatedly occurs over resources, and that it can last years or even centuries if permitted. Any rational reader can determine that you are in denial of human nature.Wow buddy, after everything I've sent you on this topic , after everything I've told you on this topic... I'm beginning to think it would just be easier for me to copy/paste my arguments from all the sources I've linked that you should have checked out, because you clearly have not. Anarchic Ireland. There was feuding, but since there were no kings or any geographic political bodies or taxes the chieftains weren't able to conscript vast numbers of men to fight for him. So quarrelers typically fought out there quarrels amongst themselves via fist-fighting.This as opposed to the rest of Europe at the time (~650 CE to ~1650 CE) of which had constant monolithic wars and also, a central government. shock!Any reader can see you just haven't bothered looking into any of this and are just repeating what your school teachers have told you like a good little boy.When a state plummets to civil war, especially almost three decades of civil war, it isn't better until the war ceases.Just gunna' completely ignore that you straw-manned me before, eh avesk? Well, given the rate at which you do this it would be a rather large pain to have to apologize constantly...You know, this point is especially strange. The part about "three decades of civil war", because Somalia hasn't been stateless for thee decades... or even two for that matter. Oops.Also, I'm not saying war is better than no war. That's not the point of what I'm saying. I'm saying no state is better than a state, with having several small states somewhere in between total state and no state. Somalia got better when there was no central government. Sure, there were other governments trying to establish power, but with none actually in power Somalia saw astounding economic growth. Which is to be expected as the more capitalistic a country is allowed to be, the more prosperous it is.You're a real idiot. Thank god you do my hard work for me. I could never make you look as stupid as you do when you say things like this.Yet another assertion with no argument backing it... you're a boring guy avesk. Debating you is like watching your kids on a ferris wheel. You send them around, but you know they're just going to come back around again. Not because there's any relevance to them, just because you're mind works in circles, avesk.No. Your entire view of what constitutes a best state, isn't anarchy, or informal government. You are anti-tax. That is where it ends.Yet another straw-man, yawn. I've mentioned my opposition to fiat land claims as well at least a dozen times already. I've cited examples of what I mean by anarchy as well as defined how I use the word for you. If you're definition of "state" includes "non-state"... I guess that's really the only way for what you're saying to make sense...I don't want a "best" state. I want no state. I really do hope I don't have to tell you this yet again, but I won't hold my breath given your track record. =/There were marginal improvements to a population in almost three decades of civil war. Life marches on, even in war.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. You really should have looked into this stuff before banging your pots and pans together. But at this point I guess you'll say just about anything to pump out another post... Civil wars remaining unresolved for over two decades is much higher on the list than being able to afford a television.A state brings stability. If a state was able to get hold of the area and expunge the Islamic factions, by now there would be a much higher quality of life because by now there would have been decades of time to rebuild the infrastructure and support basic needs.I mean, it barely takes 30 seconds on a Google search to know that Somalia wasn't an anarchy for even two decades. And if there is still civil war now despite the fact that Somalia now has a central government, it only proves my point that these wars were a state failure, not a market failure. The state brings "stability", but only once it has amassed it's coercive monopolies through decades of war and murder. Oh yeah, that sounds real swell, avesk. XDOccupied Japan shows us an example of how through much effort a culture can be subjugated and eventually remoulded to stand on its own and act as an ally towards the invaders.Ah, I see. So instead of setting out to show that a state can emerge and amass control over a nation like I was talking about, you decided to take it upon yourself to prove something that nobody was talking about or even cared about... Good job, buddy. Good job. What you're saying proves nothing. Japan had a broken economy after it's state lost a war and a non-broken state occupied it and turned into an ally. You're point?Your argument was:How are you going to go about establishing a state? Religion? Persons aren't so stupid anymore. Convince them you can do more for them with their money than they can? Good luck. Even the current government has trouble with that, and they have the advantage of forcing children into twelve years of compulsory "education" camps to indoctrinate them in the values of the state. =/Occupied Japan is an obvious example of where we reshaped a culture.I don't know if you've been to Japan, but their culture is about as opposite to ours as a culture can be. Occupied Japan only proves that when two governments war and one loses, the other has the military force to occupy the other. This has nothing to do with a state emerging when there was none, let alone from none and in a nation of anti-statists. If you really can't tell the difference you have no business debating politics. Gangs form naturally as a means of power for a group with similar interests or backgrounds. They do not depend upon a state.I'll repeat. Gangs are states, only smaller. They are the same thing fundamentally. Even the U.S. has it's "gang symbols" and "gang rituals". Also, I said gangs form in response to the state as a means of either protection from it, or to supply a repressed demand. Nothing I've said is untrue. This is why gangs have emerged. If you're worried about armed robberies or small time gangs popping up without a state, that's what the police agencies are for.Evading the discussion.Why do you insist on saying such things when this clearly isn't the entirety (or even the main point) of my rebuttal? I mean, I even opened that paragraph with "second of all" so there was obviously more to it. Sure, you can complain about anything you want, but this is just silly. =/Which doesn't change the fact that you can buy favours from the leaders.What favours? The chiefs don't have a tax base, they have no market control... did you even read the information I sent you? Why am I even asking, given what you've said thus far it's clear you haven't...Just in case you didn't know (I can't imagine how you couldn't...) the state has made a habit of selling favours including (but not limited to) barriers to entry. We, as amongst the first to enter the industrial revolution, suffered through free market reform, child labour, pollution, and sweatshops. Modern developing nations can simply jump from farming to union-backed factories and stiff market control to prevent monopolies and buying of favours. That way they need not suffer our mistakes. It depends on what they want.The industrial revolution was better than what preceded it. Understand? Compared to our standards, it sucked. Then again compared to our standards every past society sucked. Sure, the industrial revolution had child labour, but what preceded it was child prostitution. Which do you find is worse?Modern developing nations have the same issue. They have sweatshops, and they pay poorly, but they still pay more than these children earned before the sweatshops being prostitutes. We can send aid to them, but a state is in no way necessary. You've just said it yourself, it depends on what they want. Please, for the love of science, watch this so you'll stop making arguments that are already debunked in the information I send you.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZImO9O-Xkqw The idea of redistributing wealth is based on the fact that we all tend to have a surplus of money, and the cost while high is much less when split amongst a large population, so that effectively we all pay a small amount so that some can afford an expensive good. In this case housing, welfare, unemployment, etc.The behavior of a typical free market economy is to redistribute wealth to those area's of the economy that are considered the greatest need by the consumers. Ultimately the consumer decides where wealth, capital, and investment are directed. This is done via the pricing system. In this way wealth is typically directed away from the least productive ineffecient market actors to the most productive producers.This is all managed by the formation of meaningful prices.A centrally managed redistribution of wealth undermines the pricing system. This system moves money away from productive area's of the economy usually via taxation, and moves it to unproductive area's of the economy. In the long run this wastes natural resources driving up the cost of living for everyone. Consumers are no longer sovereign in deciding where capital, investment, and wealth should be placed.The government interference perverts the pricing mechanism and leaves government no clear direction on where the confiscated wealth should be directed. As a result their redistribution is often arbitrary. The government does not have the market tools capable of deciding which services are in demand, and which are not. By default all of their services are placed into artificial demand by compelling it's citizen's to participate.This basic economic error occurs because of the inability for the government to calculate, and the undermining of the pricing mechanism. A redistribution of wealth will always be a detriment to the economy as a whole. However it is important to point out that it harms the poor the most, as the cost of living rises under such conditions. The very people the welfare is meant to help, it usually harms.... but you would have known all that if you had bothered to look into any of the information I've sent you. ;)I provided a link to freedomhouse and wikipedia. The conclusion is an obvious one.Sure, you sent a link that said Somalia had civil war. It gave no statistics comparing pre-collapse Somalia to post-collapse Somalia, though, so it meant nothing. And, according to you the civil war in Somalia has been going on for nearly three decades, which would make it unrelated to the collapse of the Somali government. Not that correlation equals causation, but causation requires correlation, which there isn't here.Ah, I remember this part, it's exclusion of relevant data so that you can keep your pet delusion. See, if we accepted that factions naturally develop in a power vacuum, then your delusion that anarchy can work would crumble because it would be apparent that anarchy leads to a state with violence in between. Solution? Call the factions mini-states, so you can ignore them.Creationists do this with transitional fossils by saying "Where is the missing link behind and in front of your fossil in the chain?"Exclusion of data? U.N. and Islamist states tried to take over Somalia after its central government failed. This is a fact. These new states all went to war with each other for power over Somalia. This is also a fact. I oppose government, so does it not follow that I oppose the governments trying to establish power via warfare?All these mini-states existed before the collapse, so it's not as though a new state emerged. But even if it did, it would only prove that the persons of Somalia believe they need a state, not that one is necessary for an economy. Since Somalia saw such economic growth without the central government, you're left with two options. Either civil war improves an economy or statelessness in general improves an economy.If you can't figure out which is the true reason, you have no business debating politics. So, you're left with a pretty tough problem. You have to explain how Somalia saw such economic growth after the fall of the government and despite the civil wars going on. Keep in mind, Somalia improved both in absolute AND relative terms.Also, your analogy once again makes no sense. I'm talking about a government collapsing and several government invaders warring with each other to establish a new central government. How is this in any way analogous to the missing link? There's no missing link here, everything is accounted for.You're just trying to connect what I'm saying to creationists because you're trying to connect what I'm saying to something stupid. You're banging your pots and pans together again. =/Which doesn't matter if every three or four years a new faction forms and starts bombing your cities and shooting your civilians.Why are you even here when you clearly can't grasp such concepts? These factions warred with each other to establish control over the public. If Somalia saw this growth despite the constant murder of civilians at the hands of these governments, it means that the prosperity following the collapse of the central government was so great that it was able to absorb it and still grow despite the murders.Written language goes back for thousands of years, so do universities. None of them achieved what we did. I know, I know, it was all a massive, inter-era and inter-governmental conspiracy to keep people dumb.No, you don't know. Not at all. I'm sure in all your alleged debates with creationists you've seen several graphs showing the wealth/education/inventions throughout the ages up to the medieval era. This was a time of massive expansion in religion and state power and a time of massive suppression of civilian wealth, education, and invention/innovation. No surprise there. Six thousand-nine thousand years ago, the idea of markets was different and it couldn't have driven the breeding for better foods (at least directly) since there was no known outcome for selectively breeding grasses. They simply used a method that worked, and produced food.Your point? Is not trial and error how all innovation occurred during the antiquity of society? There was nothing else to go on. Besides, it's not as though there was no government six-nine thousand years ago. The methods produced then got us to where we are now, so what's the problem?Actually not. This what private property distinguishes.Don't misunderstand, I'm all for private property. Don't be naive. The state has the right to enter your home and take your belongings so long as it decides it has the right to. The only thing that protects you from the state is other persons. If the state is unable to convince other persons that it had the right to enter your property, it looses approval. Not that this particularly helps you since the government has gotten pretty good at propaganda and even if it were to fail it would take more than a little privacy infringement on you to create a notable backlash. The voluntary actions of the public is the driving force and indeed the only thing stable in the market. Government is the instability.No, it was caused by insider trading, collusion, etc.The New Deal tried to prevent this from happening again.Do you even try to self-debunk? Don't you ever go out of your way to see if there are any flaws in your own arguments? I mean, the debunking of everything you just wrote is barely a Google stones throw away. Here, I'll do it for you...Macroeconomic model builders have finally realized what Henry Hazlitt and John T. Flynn (among others) knew in the 1930s: FDR’s New Deal made the Great Depression longer and deeper. It is a myth that Franklin D. Roosevelt "got us out of the Depression" and "saved capitalism from itself," as generations of Americans have been taught by the state’s education establishment.This realization on the part of macroeconomists comes in the form of an article in the August 2004 Journal of Political Economy entitled "New Deal Policies and the Persistence of the Great Depression: A General Equilibrium Analysis," by UCLA economists Harold L. Cole and Lee E. Ohanian. This is a big deal, since the JPE is arguably the top academic economics journal in the world."Real gross domestic product per adult, which was 39 percent below trend at the trough of the Depression in 1933, remained 27 percent below trend in 1939," the authors write. And, "Similarly, private hours worked were 27 percent below trend in 1933 and remained 21 percent below trend in 1939." This should be no surprise to anyone who has studied the reality of the Great Depression, for US Census Bureau statistics show that the official unemployment rate was still 17.2 percent in 1939 despite seven years of "economic salvation" at the hands of the Roosevelt administration (the normal, pre-Depression unemployment rate was about 3 percent). Per capita GDP was lower in 1939 than in 1929 ($847 vs. $857), as were personal consumption expenditures ($67.6 billion vs. $78.9 billion), according to Census Bureau data. Net private investment was minus $3.1 billion from 1930–1940.Cole and Ohanian write as though they were surprised—even shocked—to discover these facts, not so much because they were bamboozled by the Myth of the New Deal, but because of their devotion to "neoclassical model building" as opposed to the study of economic reality. They label as "striking" the fact that the recovery from the Great Depression was "very weak" (a dramatic understatement). And why is it so striking? Because "[t]hese data contrast sharply with neoclassical theory."http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=515 Do yourself a favour and read the rest of it so you don't make any more arguments that are already debunked in the information I send you. Taxes provide income redistribution, which is designed to help us, it can however be hijacked by business interests. That is why we have oversight.However, it doesn't and I addressed this earlier...In this case, you think it is only a few greedy men (actually true because relative to the population the rich are a tiny minority) and therefore they cannot be much of a threat to the workers (ignoring that they command the majority of the country's wealth). So your sense of scale ignores that a few scrooges hoarding really means millions of men and women earning a combined minority of wealth.And what persons like you don't seem to understand is that without a monopoly on currency you aren't financially tethered to everyone else as you are with the state model. I'm sure you've heard that something like 90% of the world wealth is owned by 10% of the population? Now what sounds more likely to you? That a bunch of capitalists entered the market and through their brutal iron fist tactics, exploited the common man and made of with a fortune... somehow, OR that a bunch of capitalists worked in collusion with the politicians to ensure their corporations had advantages on the market through state controls (i.e. regulation) and barriers to entry so that they could amass a fortune despite not actually producing a better product than their competition? That... was one hell of a sentence. What does wealth do? It buys power. So by letting those scrooges hoard, you allow them to buy taxes and barriers to entry, and so we see the corruption of the spirit of the tax system thanks to your blind faith in a simple solution to a complex problem.... Did you forget that there is no tax or barriers to entry in a stateless society? Having no state to appeal to really makes appealing to the state a difficult task. ;) In case you're not aware, private property combined makes up common land. The model still holds true, therefore.No, common land is not the combination of private property because by definition private property is not combined. It's privatized. Look up the definition of commons you fool.It's clear you didn't read the article I linked you as it dealt with exactly what you're saying and I'm getting sick of reading all your claptrap sources when you clearly do not do the same or even attempt to self-debunk.