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

Then your previous comment about the "two decades of civil war" in relation to Somalia's statelessness was wrong. Very wrong... I still have no idea where you got that number from. I guess you just pulled that argument right out of your ass.No, it was correct. It just depends on how you quantify the violence. If you define civil wars as strictly between large factions, then the civil wars started in the late eighties and ended in the mid to late nineties. If you also include smaller factions fighting, due to offshoots from the ICU, then it continues to the mid 2000s.The violence following the Barre regime's collapse came from already existing states trying to establish power, not from the Somali's themselves trying to rule each other.You really have no clue, huh? The ICU had success because the Islamic Somalis wanted Sharia courts and Islamic supremacy. The Transitional Government had success because secular (and I think it was Christian also) Somalis wanted a new government.The wars came because, as usual, Islamic terrorists and warlords wanted to seize a moment of instability to establish power under the guise of religion.How the hell is this a non-sequitur? YOU brought up the phrase "death-squad", I merely showed you how the phrase is best applied to states. Also, this is the first time you've called "non-sequitur" on me, so how exactly is this "more"? It seems you'd type pretty much anything so long as it sounds like it supports you. =/Are you at threat of having your limbs chopped off by a machete? No? Then you do not fear death squads. End of discussion. It is irrelevant, I.E. it does not follow that a government is a death squad, despite your attempt to change the topic.Sure, there's no gang busting down my door, unless I happen to own the wrong kind of vegetation or if I try to opt-out of state services. So, I suppose I'm safe so long as no gang finds reason to convince themselves that they have reason to invade my home... yeah that sure is a rock solid argument for the state. =/Police follow rules and are accountable by courts. Death squads are not. Hyperbole and innuendo do not make an argument.And a free market defense agency is accountable to its customers, the difference is the free market agency is subjected to competition, requiring it to constantly improve in order to get customers.http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/ cifamerica/2010/oct/23/iraq-war-logs-us-military http://english.aljazeera.net/secretiraqfiles/2010/10/20101024111231222814.html Does that answer your hypothesis?Actually, does it even need to be said that you don't want companies armed with guns competing with each other for profits? Seriously?How is this a counter argument? Once again you've just re-asserted what you've already been saying.Coercion was enough to conquer an "anarchy."Yeah, corruption happening at request is more likely than corruption happening due to a payment. I hardly see how the method of request matters.If you pay a leader of a clan to request that his followers buy your goods, then no longer is competition driving your quality of service. You have rigged the system.Do you know what the number one request from sweatshop workers is? For the shop to expand so that their relatives can also get jobs there. Are you really this slow? When you exploit a group of people, it is possible to abuse them without them even knowing about it, because from their perspective they are receiving an improvement to a prior life.Sweatshops provide extremely low wages to their workers, cramped and unsafe working conditions, and longer hours than would be allowed in the developed world. It is an improvement to them because farming is labourous work, but it is still exploitative to them because the company could afford to employ them in standards like those which we enjoy here: unions, good wages, retirement funds, safe conditions, etc.I'm not even going to listen to your spurious reasoning here because you are happy to employ people at slave wages, knowing full-well how badly we treat those people because you live in luxury in the west and can see the difference, but you choose to live here rather than work in those sweatshops yourself.I really hate stupid, selfish people.Looks like your the one arguing against history. ;)Have you ever worked as a child in a sweatshop? Are you in one now? Is it a matter of habit to find children missing limbs and fingers where you live? No? Then shut the hell up and appreciate that the elimination of child labour and opening of public schools has improved our living conditions.What else am I going to compare it to? Monarchism? Tribalism? Should I compare it to how chimps interact? Obviously I'm going to compare a market with sweatshops to what the market was like before it had sweatshops to see if it improved or not. How could this not make sense to you? Are you missing a chromosome or something?Feudalism ended in England long before the Industrial Revolution. Comparing the Industrial Revolution to it is like comparing McDonalds' jobs to factory jobs in the 18th century and concluding that we should appreciate them, despite that decades ago working at a small restaurant would be considered more enjoyable work.Specifically, Feudalism declined between the late 14th and mid-16th centuries. The Industrial Revolution started around the early to mid-18th century. Reforms occurred after feudalism like a money-based economy and centralised government.Yeah, it's easy to point at working conditions back in the industrial revolution relative to contemporary standards and say it sucked, but relative to what preceded it, it was a step forward. I'm struggling to be more explicit, but this really is the simplest way to explain it. Relative to what preceded it, it was terrible. The only advantage to the Industrial Revolution was a major rise in goods produced. The cost was health, poor working and living conditions, crowded cities, and a steep difference in wealth.Think of the Industrial Revolution like Mecha-feudalism as revenge for Feudalism's fall centuries earlier. Instead of owning land and signing vassals, you owned factories and signed workers. They were your slaves, basically.If you just don't understand how something can be better than what preceded it yet still have room for improvement, then you've got bigger problems on your hands than this debate against me.This is not the issue. The issue is that those methods which improved upon it and reformed it, are what you're fighting against. You're against oversight, accountability, regulation. You want factories to return to those conditions.What facts? This was ONE story that may not even have been true. There were no statistics, there was nothing to go on other than your word and I already know you're not above being manipulative.It was one out of a long list of personal accounts. But ignoring that, the facts are that the wealthy will always corrupt the local political hierarchy. A state is irrelevant to this. You like to pretend that only states are corruptible.Yeah, so the only way to solve this is to remove the firm that allows the wealthy this power.Repeat:Do people form groups? (Correct answer: yes)Do groups form hierarchies? ("...")Is such a hierarchy more efficient and powerful than the individual? ("...")Therefore, the wealthy, that always exist in any system, will have a political advantage, no matter what kind of state you build or if you imagine an anarchy (read: stateless collective or tribe)No, that would be you. I just happen to know the same thing that these factory workers and "robber barons" knew, that unhappy workers are sluggish, shabby and more prone to killing themselves. Why do I even have to defend this point? Is it not obvious that unhappy persons don't work as efficiently as happy persons and that the depressed are more likely to kill themselves? Point blank: if they "knew" as you do, then there wouldn't have been the need for unions, labour reforms, and so-on. The factory owners would have worked to improve the conditions themselves. They fought against labour reforms which suggests that they didn't know, or knew better than you.Don't you see how this makes no sense? These persons are already working for you, they're doing the job. What reason is there to needlessly beat them? As you've said, the supply for these workers is high. Why the hell would you sooner beat your workers when you can easily fire them and hire a worker that actually wants that job? You know, I understand your problem now. You're too wide-eyed to understand how cruel and callous people are. The factory owners spanned over a hundred years and still found that the best way to get work done was to intimidate their workers.Back in the industrial revolution there was a "window tax". this tax made it so fewer windows where placed around sweat shops. This made them needlessly dark and dreary. The owners would have liked to add more windows, it would make the workers more cheery and improve productivity, but the tax...Not congruent with the other information. The managers docked workers for a long list of offenses related to individuality, they beat workers too. It is not within their nature, therefore, that they should wish to bring good cheer to the workers. Especially when it was the factory owners which fought labour reforms.Real income per person doubled between 1760 and 1860. Therefore, the share of income going to the lowest 65 percent of the population would have had to fall by half for them to be worse off after all that growth. It didn’t. In 1760 the lowest 65 percent received about 29 percent of total income in Britain; in 1860 they got about 25 percent. So the lowest 65 percent were substantially better off. Their average real income had increased by over 70 percent.1760: No regulations on factory labour.1860: Many labour regulations have already been passed, they were simply not enforced.Still, it must be said that their wages were pitifully low anyway, so 70% of almost-nothing isn't very impressive especially as they were starving or malnourished most of them time.Never had the British been better off prior to the industrial revolution. Who exactly? The wealthy were better off. Those in parliament were better off. The workers were not better off. The Industrial revolution killed so many, left the rest malnourished, injured, and diseased.Seriously have you any concept of what life was like in those days? Living quarters would suddenly collapse due to poor construction, tuberculosis and cholera were common epidemics, the local water supply was toxic from sewage and industrial waste, and there was nothing but constant toil.Before that the population was lower, living arrangements were more spacious, jobs had more space for workers, etc.Which is exactly why the state should be abolished. You can't lobby for state control over the market when there is no state.Repeat:Do people form groups? (Correct answer: yes)Do groups form hierarchies? ("...")Is such a hierarchy more efficient and powerful than the individual? ("...")Therefore, the wealthy, that always exist in any system, will have a political advantage, no matter what kind of state you build or if you imagine an anarchy (read: stateless collective or tribe)If a factory farmer is farming beyond his factories means then he is damaging his own farm, not everyone else's. So this example is by definition not an example of barriers to entry. Factory farms are private property, they aren't public. =/http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_bowlThe Dust Bowl or the Dirty Thirties was a period of severe dust storms causing major ecological and agricultural damage to American and Canadian prairie lands from 1930 to 1936 (in some areas until 1940). The phenomenon was caused by severe drought coupled with decades of extensive farming without crop rotation, fallow fields, cover crops or other techniques to prevent erosion.[1] Deep plowing of the virgin topsoil of the Great Plains had displaced the natural grasses that normally kept the soil in place and trapped moisture even during periods of drought and high winds.A "chieftain" with no market influence cannot sell market regulations. Your statement is as stupid as saying you can get a tree to produce more wood by offering it money.You could buy market favours from a Tuath chieftain in the same way you can buy market favours from the president of a local book club. =/So if I take a moment to think like you do, then when the state vanishes, magically it becomes impossible for money to trade hands between authorities for favours. It's almost as if you live in an alternate reality where the rules of social interaction are completely different.Why do you think it is possible for the wealthy to subvert a state's existence? Do states have collection boxes next to all their leaders? Is money only possible in a state? It is possible because a state is an authority, like any which forms in a group of humans, and authorities may be bought and sold.