[ExI] The Problem With Counterfeit People

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, May 20, 2023 at 9:37 AM efc--- via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> On Sat, 20 May 2023, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:
> > We have at least one member who is opposed to taxes.  I asked him how we
> would pay for police and fire and streets etc. and never got
> > an answer.  What is the answer, you think?  I am a classic liberal and
> libertarian. bill w
>
> I think those are services that can be bought from private companies if
> you need them. Alternatively, they could be bundled into the service
> package of insurance companies.
>

It's been tried many times, and it doesn't work.  Turns out, you can buy
bodyguards that way but not police.  The difference is that police will -
at least, often enough - enforce justice even when it is against the
immediate interests of those who pay them.  Think of part of the service as
keeping the funders honest.

Those who think that such anticorruption services are merely nice to have,
and not absolutely essential to the functioning of any modern nation state,
need only look at the Russian armed forces and how their invasion of
Ukraine has fared.  There are many factors at play, of course, but
corruption's degradation of Russian military capabilities is a major one,
hard to miss unless one is either naive or in active denial about it, as
many Russians are out of worries about self-preservation (a result of said
corruption),.

Likewise, private fire protection tends to protect your properties but not
your neighbors' who aren't paying them - which means your property burns
down and there's nothing they can do when your neighbor's property burns
down, which could have been prevented had they stopped it when it was a
small fire on your non-paying neighbor's property.  Private streets are a
textbook tragedy of the commons: private streets don't allow for good
commerce, while public streets make everyone relatively richer.  Hard as it
can be to understand, in many cases they pay for themselves precisely by
being free for everyone to use.

This isn't theory.  This is hard historical fact.  There is no "the true
form hasn't been tried yet".  This is what happens when it is tried, every
time, enough to show that it is the true form.  It has been done to the
death of millions.

It is possible to imagine this not being the case, in the same sense as it
is possible to imagine accelerating past the speed of light using ordinary
rockets.  Just because you can imagine it, does not override centuries of
data proving that private police/fire protection/roads simply does not work
as well as public police/fire protection/roads.
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