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

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).Yes, yes, the wealthy will always have an advantage over the poor in that they have access to a greater disposable income. That's not the problem and that's not what I'm talking about.The problem isn't wealthy persons being wealthy, the problem wealthy persons lobbying the state to cripple competition.Rule of nature: monopolies happen.Second rule of nature: monopolies are transient.Third rule of nature: a monopoly will seek to prolong its existence (in this case through political meddling).This is yet another argument you've pulled right out of your ass. There is no law of nature causing to monopolies to happen! XDIf you were to say it is the law of nature for monopolies to NOT happen, that would be closer to the truth, but to say nature dictates that monopolies would happen is stupid. As though physics points to market monopolies. XDIf you were smart you would read my reply to mean "large super-hierarchies have an intrinsic advantage in efficiency as compared to many small hierarchies or individuals acting on their own. This is why states exist as the dominant political end-game." You might also appreciate that a state is originally an emergent phenomenon.Yeah, I know. I'm an idiot because I've given up guessing what exactly you're trying to argue. =/States have power because persons project power onto them. States without public support collapse hard and fast. The state emerges from psychology, not from some economic superiority. When dealing with economics you have to be able to differentiate between the two. Your comments on economic theory are so wrong it's usually funny, therefore when you quote some authority which is actually a think-tank with an obvious agenda, it looks like a crackpot to me.My favourite lines so far: "sweatshops are good!!! rofl" followed by "somalia is better for being an anarchy in civil war omglol!!!"Mises is an authority now? Do you think before you type? You're basically admitting that your previous comment was an ad-hominem attack.While we're sharing our favourite quotes, lets look at a few of yours. "The only way to stop monopolies is to allow one firm a coercive monopoly on all of societies most vital services hurr-durr!""You can get market advantages by lobbying persons with no market influence derp-de-derp!"Or my personal favourite..."You shouldn't compare Somalia to the countries most like it to see if it improved after that fall of the state. You should compare it to much more successful, yet much less relevant states! Hurp-a-Durp!!!"How long did Gaelic Ireland exist? Almost a thousand years? The in-fighting was a common part of growing up, from what I read. It actually seems like a part of growing up was becoming a criminal in a gang. Over a thousand or so years, this adds up to a lot of wasteful violence.I consider that a failure. Should I add "Irish teen gangs are cool lol!!!" to your memorable quotes?You're just being willfully ignorant at this point. It was more that a thousand years and all the violence and death in that time was nothing compared to the rest of Europe. This "in-fighting" argument of your is a joke. "in-fighting" is something that happened everywhere. The difference being states had massive wars on top of internal discrepancies I would prefer to live in an area with a few punk-kid gangs than a massive monarchical gang. Should I add "Gangs who's ruler wears a fancy crown are cool!" to your list of quotes?We have apparently transitioned "evolved" past foraging and hunting game.Oh, so now the argument is "evolved out of hunter-gatherer" rather than "we've evolved past violence", eh? Nice little switch-a-roo there.I see no contradiction there. Pursuing these things doesn't require that we be entirely peaceful, just that we are no longer preoccupied with hunting.Yeah, there's no contradiction under these new argument reforms you just made. =/We succeeded in capturing Iraq. The insurgents are a problem for stability, not conquest. Put more bluntly, if we devalued life and only wished to spread fear and distrust like the insurgents do, we have the technology to turn the entire Middle East into a glowing, glass-top wasteland within hours. Those guerrillas do not have this technology.It's also not profitable to nuke an area you want to control, which makes conquest of a stateless society even less likely.Also, succeeded in capturing Iraq? What qualifies as capturing? Getting power over it? Given the insurgents you just spoke of, that hasn't happened. Defeating the state army? That happened years ago and it didn't matter, because of the insurgents. Putting it in a god damn poke-ball? That looks to be the most likely right now. XDMaybe that is our weakness. If we made an example of Iran for its supply of aid to the insurgents all these years, by reducing it to a radioactive death-zone with dirty bombs, maybe we would actually have respect from these so-called men in arms.You're not even going to pretend to be rational at this point, eh?It is a fact that that period saw many advancements in science by the Islamic world, and that the 1400s and later saw the slow birth of the scientific method in the west.And the desire that sparked these advancements wasn't a state invention. It came bottom-up from the public. And when the state exploded in power, these advancements dwindled to nearly nothing. Correlation does not equal causation. I guess I was too subtle with my over-the-top pirate analogy. You see I thought if I just stated outright the flaw in your reasoning, you wouldn't see how the flaw applied, so I invented an absurd parody to highlight it.Yeah, except the only absurdity in it was in you thinking you made some brilliant counter-point. Correlation does not equal causation, but causation requires correlation and in this case correlation is in both Somalia improving after the state's collapse and in the uprising of pirates to take advantage of this improvement. The only difference as I see it is that the argument for Somalia's improvement has been broken down and had it's subtleties and mechanisms explained. Also, since the adjoined countries didn't see this growth it rules out external reasons and coincidence. Soooooo, SOMETHING around the time of the Somali state's collapse caused massive growth in Somalia. Most persons, both statist and not, looked at this and hypothesized that the reason for this had to do with the fall of the state and when you do a little digging into the event, it turns out to be true.I see how Somalia improved in some areas, but also collapsed in others. I don't toe a party line and allow myself to see the complexity of a situation.The quickest areas to absorb the collapse where areas that functioned outside of the assumption of a state. Obviously the services that the state monopolized where harder to build up since they did function under the assumption of a state.