[ExI] The Problem With Counterfeit People

[efc at swisscows.email]

Hello Bill,

On Sat, 20 May 2023, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat wrote:

> Could it happen that going private could result in a country-wide system of four lane highways?  Or nuclear missiles?  Or aircraft
> carriers?  I can see private forces useful in very small situations but not in national interest ones.  bill w

I admit that this is one weakness in my position. Since it has never
been tried at full scale in the modern world, there's no way to know.
However, I'd argue that a benefit of a private world is that the
incentives to create nuclear bombs and aircraft carriers are way
smaller, so I'd speculate that in a private world, no one would be
foolish enough to waste money on that.

Best regards, 
Daniel

> 
> On Sat, May 20, 2023 at 4:10 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.
>
>       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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> 
>