Ain’t no ‘we’ either
There is an often fundamental misunderstanding about worldviews when it comes to your average libertarian sort talking to, say, your average lefty or righty. And bridging that gap is impossible because while we’re on the same planet, we come from different worlds. Bringing this dose of reality to the we are the world crowd is a mostly pointless exercise. But when it’s done, it’s pretty good reading.
May 9th, 2011 at 10:38 am
I think Anarcho-Capitalists make the same foolish assumption about humankind that Socialists do, in that they assume that human nature is inherently good and that everybody wants the same things in life. This is a demonstrably false premise. I have always felt like there was too much government involvement with our everyday lives, but the idea that the world would be a better place with no government at all strikes me as terribly naive.
Free markets are inherently better than government at managing systems which already exist and are already in place, but rely on supply and demand for essential services. People shouldn’t be allowed to opt out of sewage processing and treatment. There’s too many people in the world now to just say “Well, I’ll dump all my excrement in the river that flows through my property because that’s what my ancestors did.”
You can’t have for profit firefighters (a classic example) because they’d have an economic incentive to make sure that house fires happen, wouldn’t they? Anyone who says “firemen are good people and wouldn’t do that” is just being foolishly idealistic. If your only source of income is putting out fires, why would you do everything you could to prevent them from happening? What’s your incentive to find proof of arson in the event of a fire? If fighting fires is merely a secondary source of income, where will you be when a fire breaks out?
Our judicial system is far from perfect, but who arbitrates cases in an anarcho-capitalist society that’s devoid of a “we”? Can you even have a for-profit impartial judge? What higher ideals do they stand for beyond their own interest? Couldn’t they be bought by the highest bidder? What incentive does a juror have to show up to a trial? Do you pay the jurors as well? Out of your own pocket? If your suing the local land Barron because the fire department that he owns keeps setting fires on your property, and then paying exorbitant fees to put them out, do you have to front the money for the judge, the jury, the court officials, your lawyer, and any other administrative or essential court related personnel, such as bailiffs and security? Couldn’t your wealthy neighbor simply buy them off?
Where’s your justice then? Is every argument supposed to be settled with a streetfight? Because that’s what will happen in a society without “we”. And the person who can buy the most mercenaries will be the one who makes the law. That person becomes the authority. They are the government, and their will is law. These used to be called “Monarchs” back before people united as a culture to force kings to submit to a document, agreed upon by the wisest amongst the masses, which governed and restrained the actions of kings. This document was called a “Constitution”, and without an official agreement made on the behalf of the society by the majority of society there will be no private property, or freedom, or liberty as it was for the vast, vast majority of human history. If people don’t work together, they’ll work against each other until one force becomes dominant, and is ruled by no will by it’s own.
May 9th, 2011 at 10:43 am
“You can’t have for profit firefighters (a classic example) because they’d have an economic incentive to make sure that house fires happen, wouldn’t they?”
Uh, not if they’re run by insurance companies with every interest in seeing that fires don’t happen.
May 9th, 2011 at 11:42 am
Tam – that’s not a for-profit firefighter, it’s an expense-minimizing for-profit insurance company.
May 9th, 2011 at 12:19 pm
Ellen,
Exactly, it’s just a response to the assumption made above that there’s a binary situation between “Government operated fire department” and “for-profit fire department”.
It’s as oversimplified as “government roads” and “toll roads”. I can think off the top of my head of at least two industries with a very serious interest in good paved roads…
As I stated in comments over at my blog, I’m not a believer in anarchotopia any more than I’m a believer in heaven, but I do believe that it’s a direction worth moving in, if only to try and counterbalance the “There Oughtta Be A Law” faction.
(And it will never work, of course. Governments don’t remain small and circumscribed, no matter how many Enlightenment geniuses draw up the blueprints.)
May 9th, 2011 at 12:22 pm
I think you have extremes in every view point and having no form of government at all is at one of those extremes. I don’t see how society would be able to function without a centralized representative of the people providing basic services and acting as referree in certain, limited, situations. That being said I do not believe the majority of the “sevirces” currently provided by state and federal governments are reasonable and necessary. Government is far too large and intrusive.
May 10th, 2011 at 12:11 am
Why exactly would you pay for homeowner’s insurance if you weren’t required to by law? Do you think your house is gonna have a tree fall on it, like, next week? Since I live in Florida, were premiums are absurd, I’d save a ton of money if I could opt out of homeowner’s insurance. My house can still burn to the ground whether or not I have insurance, but I’d rather gamble that it’s not gonna burn to the ground and pocket the difference. Once a house is paid off, you shouldn’t have to pay to insure it if you don’t want to. If the only way you could ensure protection from fires or have other emergency services was to pay for insurance would mean that you’d have to pay for extra-premium insurance forever.
If you’d also have to pay for services that are provided by the whole of the taxpaying base. Property taxes pay for things like fire prevention and police, but you have to pay property taxes on vacant lots you own, too. Why would you expect people to insure a vacant, undeveloped lot? It can still catch fire, but what do they care? If it all burns up, they don’t have to clear as many trees and shrubs. What’s the incentive to pay for police services when you own a vacant lot that you don’t live on or near? Should people be allowed to opt out of police protection? I don’t know about you, but I don’t want my only recourse against burglary to be lethal force, because I’m not always here to ensure that the later will happen, and I’m not going to spend the rest of my days with the all consuming goal of figuring out who stole my TV.
Since you’d have to pay for fire, police, and medical services through your homeowner’s insurance, it would cost dramatically more to have homeowner’s insurance, because the responsible homeowners would be the only ones footing the bill for what are now government entities, excepting when non-policy holders elected to pay for fire services under the pressure of watching their homes burn to the ground. Not really the time to hagle over rates or read the fine print.
I can agree that government does a shitty job running schools, and the money should definitely be tied to the student and the parents should be allowed to choose which school their kids will attend. But if I don’t have kids, and you don’t have kids, why should we pay for schools? Even under a voucher system, what incentive is there for us to pay for someone else’s kid to be provided with a free education? Because it benefits the whole of society? Fuck that! I got bills to pay. If I wanted to pay for a kid’s education, I’d have one, right?
Just because you elect to pay a private company to maintain a sewage system in our neighborhood, what business is it of yours if I wanna shit in a bucket and dump it into the streets? The smell doesn’t bother me, and I think flies are lucky. I’m sorry your kid is sick. It’s probably because he didn’t say his prayers last night, not because I dumped human excrement in our mutual living space. Help! Help! I’m being repressed!
We should all work towards a realistic, non-batshit crazy goal of less government, but when people start bantering on about how “all taxation is theft” and the legitimate actions of government are unjustifiable oppression, we lose rational people. The debate is lost when someone tunes you out, and the vast majority of the people are in the middle, and they will be lost to the Socialists on the left if they make alot more sense than the people saying we should have private fire departments.
May 10th, 2011 at 7:45 am
@armed partisan:
Here in TN you are not required by law to have homeowners insurance. You are required by your mortgage contract to have homeowners insurance. Once the house is paid off the only person with an interest in insuring the property against damage is the owner. No requirement to maintain insurance. Oh Noes! Capitalism at work! (in FL, YMMV)