[ExI] anarchy

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 11:57 AM, William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com>
wrote:
> One argument seems to settle this issue:  if there is no government of
any kind, then
> there is no police force of any kind.
>
> If no one can be told what to do or restrained from doing it, then you
have chaos and
> rule of the mighty, who then will tell people what to do.  QED

People need to be told what to do because? You seem to be presuming that no
one will coordinate or cooperate at all in the absence of a state. Yet
history shows people do coordinate and cooperate without a state. (We can
debate how well they do and whether a state makes this happen better, but
were there no coordination or cooperation, how would a state arise in the
first place?)

As for predation -- which I take as your real concern here -- why couldn't
people defend against this and also coordinate for their defense against
this?

Now, you might, like Ayn Rand, believe this would only result in rival
gangs fighting over turf, but there are good historical and current
examples of stateless societies where that doesn't happen. Add to this,
actual gang wars do happen under statism -- aside from wars between states
-- usually because states have prohibited (or heavily restricted) some
activity (gambling, sex work, recreation drug trade, etc.) to make it
lucrative to war over and because the state has legally disarmed (and not
just guns, but all remedies*) the general populace.

We can, of course, discuss the details of all this, but I don't feel it's a
slam dunk argument for a state as you believe.

Regards,

Dan
  My latest Kindle book, "The Late Mr. Gurlitt," is free today PDT from:
http://mybook.to/Gurlitt

* Similar to how the US and UK governments slowly regulated mutual aid
societies to benefit doctors and insurers. These aid societies were a
non-state means for working poor folk to buy healthcare without relying on
charity.
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