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

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. Of course you can know. Find two identical market niches, one regulated and one unregulated. Compare them while removing irrelevant consequences due to unique situations.Example: Intellectual Property in the USA and China. In the USA tight regulations has created all sorts of device incompatibility problems, has stifled the creation of cheaper lookalike/reproductions of expensive labels, and has resulted in expensive goods. In China it is almost the opposite: built-in decryption and/or lack of respect for patents means much more compatibility, reproductions are everywhere, and digital content is cheaper because DVDs are pirated which means they sell closer to production cost.Now adjust for censorship imposed by China and we see overall much more freedom when a big business is disallowed to affect laws.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.Standard Oil.Now watch as you ignore it, like how a creationist ignores a transitional fossil. Then you'll just keep repeating the rhetoric "monopolies don't happen on a free market."I suppose in your mind, monopolies cannot happen on a free market, so when they do happen, it's the fault of the evidence.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?Hierarchies emerge into states because states are another tier of management.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.Wars were frequently due to in-fighting as it was expected for young men to pillage.I don't know if you've ever cracked open a history book, but Europe in the middle ages wasn't exactly pro-academia. Actually, between 800AD and about 1400AD the Islamic world was nearing and fading from the height of scientific knowledge. In Europe between 1400AD and 1650AD was a period of great minds.Definitely better than subsisting on war and skirmishes.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. No, you'd be a bothach or mug, toiling away for some landowner. You could of course join a band of fighters and try to raise your status, however... if you're not afraid of cutting into people or being cut yourself.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.You cannot make those claims. You're just guessing that taxes and state are requisite, when all that was shown is that a repressive state ended.Why aren't you arguing for Xeer or Sharia? Those actually had a respectable impact on recent Somalia.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. You're comparing a collapsed state to two horrendously corrupt and poor states, and then propose that because the stateless one does better, this proves that states handicap development. Try comparing to a state that isn't handicapped.This reminds me of homeopathy, which does nothing, but it was lauded as successful because other "cures" from the time like bloodletting were actually harmful. Anarchy probably did little more than remove the stifling government that was there at the time, and we should be more interested in the Xeer.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. You never heard of ongoing civil war by newly developed factions?Unless I happen to own the wrong kind of vegetation and try to defend my property, or something trivial like that, of course... Not a death squad.This as opposed to the state already controlling the entire country while demanding new laws? Like, no non-government form of currency is permissible?...The state is presently accountable. An invasive state is not.Ah, I see. We need government so it can nuke less advanced countries and force democracy on them. I suppose that justifies the state.Exactly.This still is in no way an example of a state successfully imposing itself on a country of anti-statists.Ireland and Iceland, da?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). They had control of their clans and property. Buying favours from them would entail affecting their decisions with their clans.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...For example, as businessman A I buy a favour from chieftain B so that he requests his subordinates buy their goods from only my market.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.They didn't find it better. They found it necessary. Kind of like how the African slaves didn't find working in cotton fields better than fighting tribal wars in their homeland or living in villages, they found it a necessity.The factory owners chose to pay low wages, as little as possible, because there was high turnover. Workers were dispensible, death was everywhere.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.I'll share a story with you, so you might understand this a little better. A boy was interviewed about how he was recruited. He said that he and a bunch of children were asked if they wanted to go on a trip to the country, enjoy meats, and so on. He of course said yes and they were on their way. They would sign these contracts which mandated their servitude until 21 years old. There was much pomp as if they were selected for something special but they arrived at a labour facility. I read about how a boy, whose job it was working with thread the entire day, I believe twisting scraps together, would wait for the shift to end each day, and then walk to his bunk sore and cry himself to sleep, waiting, praying for death.These factories were little better than slave shops and we allowed them, because after all there were no laws against them, and they emerged from the technology, and once they gained momentum the protests fell on deaf ears because in parliament the wealthy had a louder voice than the working class. You have no idea how wretched this life was, and how it is what must occur when there are no prohibitions against it, because it exploits a commonly available environment: mass production technology, a surplus of labour, and a demand for cheap goods.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.It took state intervention to abolish them. A mere hundred years ago people were working like this, but enforcement of those labour laws made these factories unheard of in the US and Britain.Happy workers tend to be more productive, so the capitalist has incentive to supply the aggregate demand for working condition standards.Whipped, penalised and beaten workers tend to be more productive too, with the advantage that you need not raise overhead costs because of a soaring replacement worker population. However, don't believe me, look into the standard practices of sweatshops.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. So why then did these poor conditions continue from around the mid-1700s to the early 1900s? Why did it take bloody worker protests and state intervention if the secret to higher productivity was merely happy workers?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. I don't think it is, especially since the vast majority of workers would agree with me.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.It took state intervention to officially declare unions legal, because the default position was that they were to be violently repressed.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. I suggest you read this:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaelic_ireland 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.)A government is the rule of a region of land under a common declared symbol or bond, with a single authority managing all those below it until they enumerate all within the state.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. Which seems to happen all the time.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. Did you not learn from Standard Oil and the Industrial Revolution?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). Factory farming is an example of this. So was/is mass agriculture in some areas.