[ExI] The Problem With Counterfeit People

efc at swisscows.email efc at swisscows.email
Sat May 20 21:08:37 UTC 2023


On Sat, 20 May 2023, Adrian Tymes via extropy-chat wrote:

> 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

Oh, so _you're_ the authority here? ;) I can for sure tell you about
neigbourhood cooperation to reduce crime, of the old west, old iceland,
gated communities, security companies, private investigators and
countless other situations, times and dates where it was tried and it
did work.

So you will have to do way better than that to convince me.

> 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.

My experience of state run police is extremely shitty. They don't care
about anything, they don't perform, and the only thing they do in my
experience is to harass honest citizens, while arresting and punishing a
symbolic amount of small crooks. So no thank you, I'd rather buy the
services of a private security company, because in my life, the track
record of police is just ridiculous.

> 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

Oh, but russia is an example of why the state should not exist. Once a
bad guy hijacks the public sector, all that power causes immense
destruction. Much better to have the ultimate decentralization of power
and a profit motive to keep people in check. Capitalism is engineered in
such a way that the one who helps the most people makes the most profit.
No other system cooperates so well with human natures.

So yes, ukraine is horrible, and russia to, and guess what's, prime
example of the state and its corruption and why libertarianism is the
only way.

> 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

Contract law and negotiation my friend. Yes, it might not work
perfectly, but neither does the state. I think the entity of the state
has a record in killing and deaths caused compared with companies and
markets.

> commons: private streets don't allow for good commerce, while public streets make everyone relatively richer.  Hard as it can be to

This is just a statement and not a proof. I state the opposite and point
to the fact that I've done plenty of business in private locations and
it worked out beautifully.

> 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.

I disagree. Some times it has worked, and sometimes not. Sadly the
experiments never ran to conclusion since a maffia with monopoly on
violence ended it called "the state". But, I'll give you this much, the
state is a powerful entity and crowds out all competition to the
detriment of everyone.

Fortunately in modern society, there are cracks in the system where
people at an indiviual level can escape a lot of ills of the state.

Best regards, 
Daniel


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