[ExI] anarchy

[John Clark]

On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 2:57 PM, 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
>


​
Not necessarily, there are other and probably better ways society could be
organized
​,​
but
​at this late date ​
getting from here to there would be astronomically difficult and perhaps
impossible. The idea behind Anarcho-Capitalism
​ ​
is
​ ​
there would still be police and there would still be
​ ​
law, but it would be private police and private law. PPL's (privately
produced
​ ​
law) in
​an ​
anarchic world would
​ ​
have private protection agencies (PPA's) to
​ ​
back them up. Disputes among PPA's would be settled by an independent
​ ​
arbitrator agreed to by both parties BEFORE the disagreement happened.
​ ​
Something like that can happen today. When companies sign complicated
​ ​
contracts they sometimes also agree on who will arbitrate it if differences
in interpretation
​ ​
happen
​s​
. Nobody
​ ​
wants
​ to
 get caught up in the slow, expensive court
​ ​system
 run by governments. The arbitrator would be paid by the case,
​ ​
and because he is picked by both sides, it's in his interest to be as just
as
​ ​
possible. If he favored one side over another or made brutal or stupid
​ ​
decisions he would not be picked again and would need to look for a new line
​ ​
of work. Unlike present day judges and juries, justice would have a positive
​ ​
survival value for the arbitrator.
​ ​
Today ​a
 bad judge makes just as much money as a good judge, but a good arbitrator
makes far more money than a bad arbitrator.

All parties would have a reason to avoid violence if possible. The
disputing parties would not want to turn their front yard into a war zone,
and violence is expensive. The successful protection agencies would be more
interested in making money than saving face. Most of the time this would
work so I expect
​ ​
the total level of violence to be less than what we have now, but I'm not
such a utopian as to suggest it will drop to zero. Even when force is not
used the implicit threat is always there, another good reason to be
civilized.

I'm not talking about justice only for the rich. If a rich man's PPA makes
unreasonable demands (beatings, sidewalk justice, I insist on my mother
being the judge if I get into trouble)  it's going to need one hell of a
lot of firepower to back it up. That kind of an army is expensive because
of the hardware needed and because of the very high wages it will need to
pay its employees for an extremely dangerous job. To pay for all this they
will need to charge their clients enormous fees severely limiting their
customer base and that means even higher charges. They could
​ ​
never get the upper hand, because the common man's PPA would be able to
outspend a PPA that had  outrageous demands and was just for the super
rich. A yacht cost a lot more than a car, yet the Ford motor Company is far
richer than all the yacht builders on the planet combined.

No system can guarantee justice to everybody all the time but you'd have
the greatest chance of finding it in Anarcho
​-​
capitalism. In a dictatorship one man's whim can lead to hell on earth, I
don't see how 40 million Germans could have
​ ​
murdered 6 million Jews in a Anarcho-capitalistic world. Things
​ ​
aren't much better in a Democracy, 51% can decide to kill the other 49% ,
nothing even close to that is possible in Anarchy ,even theoretically.

In general, the desire not to be killed is much stronger than the desire to
kill a stranger, even a Jewish  stranger. Jews  would be willing to pay as
much as necessary, up to and including their entire net worth not to be
killed. I doubt if even the most rabid anti Semite would go much beyond 2%.
As a result the PPA protecting Jews  would be much stronger than the one
that wants to kill them. In Anarchy, for things that are REALLY important
to you (like not getting  killed) you have much more influence than just
one man one vote.

​If we were starting from square one the above is what I would recommend,​

​but we are very very far from square one so we just have to do the best we
can with what we've got.

 John K Clark
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