[ExI] The Problem With Counterfeit People

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sat, May 20, 2023 at 2:10 PM efc--- via extropy-chat <
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

> 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.
>

How many of those are police, as in enforcing a formal criminal code on a
large scale?

And that is a factor.  We're talking about societies well beyond the
"everyone knows everyone" level.  It is not possible to break the entire
world into such small communities.  For the most part, any groups that try
to do so, eventually wind up with way too many people for small community
solutions to work.  It is common for them to try to enforce their law onto
their growing population, with no guards against corruption or other
problems that keep setting in when this happens.

So, no, we're talking about police, not small community guards.


> > 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.


And my experience has been rarely shitty - only when they broke their own
rules.  When they did, other police were able to hold them accountable.

Personal anecdotes are not data, though.


> I'd rather buy the
> services of a private security company
>

I'd rather everyone was rich enough to have that option.  But that's not
the world we live in.

Besides, if you tried to do so?  Look no further than George Santos right
now.  A member of Congress, being defended by the Speaker of the House, who
would very much like to deny the police the ability to arrest George on the
grounds that George is a currently serving congressman.  What do you think
would happen if he got a private security company, charged with making sure
he stayed out of jail and remained able to do his job in Congress?

He got into this situation by committing fraud and other actions
objectionable to libertarians.  Surely you wouldn't suggest that he should
be allowed to get away with these things, even if he somehow had
the protection of the US military.  But the police are the only means by
which he can be stopped.

> 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.
>

And who engineers it?  Who keeps the markets fair?  Who makes sure that one
group doesn't simply use force to achieve dominance?

If the answer is "no one", then someone's going to turn it into a
dictatorship before long.

If you require everyone to be armed so that doesn't happen - who's going to
require it?  What happens if one group takes advantage of everyone else
being armed and foregoes the expense of having their own weapons, instead
using those resources to outcompete everyone else, offering cheaper goods
and services knowing that others will use their guns to defend them in
order to get said cheaper goods and services, and thus start amassing
capital so they can take over?  This may seem like a complex scenario but
this is what naturally occurs.

The most successful answer we've had so far is to build in mechanisms to
keep bad guys from hijacking the public sector, or to limit what they can
accomplish if they do.  The reaction to Trump's attempted coup a few years
back is a good example of this defense mechanism in action.


> > 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.


Enforced by who?  It is already the case, with state enforcement, that
companies try to cheat and rip off the vulnerable.  Without a state to
enforce the law, negotiations tend to start when someone who wants
something from your family shoots anyone holding a gun and takes everyone
else prisoner.  See many "failed" or "rogue" states that are essentially
run by such banditry.


> Yes, it might not work
> perfectly, but neither does the state.


It doesn't have to be perfect, just massively better.

> 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.
>

I point to the history of public roads as evidence.  Again: data, not
personal anecdotes.


> > 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".


That is the conclusion: eventually, someone muscles in and takes charge.  A
long-term libertarian anarchy appears to be impossible, based on all the
attempts to create one there have been.  So, since there will eventually be
a state, the answer is to make that state the best it can be, including
guards against some bad guy seizing power forever.  Part of this is having
police that guard against corruption.
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