What if the U.S. lost the Whiskey Rebellion?
I don’t know what you’re getting at here, that voluntary defense forces don’t count as a system to deal with bad people, or if they’re just an ineffective system that’s doomed to fail.
That’s the heart of why I put no stock in the video you linked to. If you conclude that volunteer self-defense forces would be inadequate to maintaining order in the face of organized, evil people, fine, that could be.
But the video’s explicit approach, and seemingly yours as well, was to posit that this problem had never occurred to any anarchist libertarians, so they must not have any ideas on how to deal with it. That’s just silly.
Well, I’m certain there are people who have not come across those concepts before. I’m sure they were once foreign to you as well. Actually, I didn’t know what the reversal to that would be since I don’t see things from that point of view. So, I was simply looking for some clarity.
What I am getting at is that it is better to have democracy across all the world. So that we all have a vote and a say, and we don’t have to leave it to fighting. In this way, the good people will outnumber the bad in a peaceful manner.
That’s fine, I was just explaining why I thought it was a fairly weak argument against anarchist libertarianism.
Ultimately, though, we do have to leave it to fighting. Force is the foundation of every system, it is the source of all power. When your democracy is challenged, fighting will be the result. When an anarchist society is challenged, fighting will be the result.
I agree that a government monopoly on lawful force is more conducive to peace than one maintained by a wide array of private firms, but that doesn’t mean the private firms wouldn’t work, I just don’t think they would work as well.
ETA: And note that democracy isn’t without its flaws or dangers either.
I’ve never thought of it that way, but I do see what you are saying about force. So why do Libertarians clutch onto their non-aggression principle so tightly?
I have never heard of a Libertarian “non-aggression” principle. Do you maybe mean non-initiation of force?
Huh? If you disagree, say so.
Largely, yes. Not entirely, and, by virtue of cooperation, enclaves of Doves have a competitive advantage over Hawks, who (in the model) don’t cooperate well. To a certain degree this is how Jews survived for so long in places that were bitterly hostile to them.
No, you made a mistake: I never said that moral people were defenseless. I said (and stand by it) that in a community dominated by immoral people, moral people will have certain (limited) advantages, and that in a community dominated by moral people, immoral people will have certain advantages. Classic game theory.
I believe such a society would not be stable; it would be susceptible to undermining from a small subpopulation of rotters and stinkers.
I also do not see any meaningful pathway to get to such a society from here. In contrast, I see lots of pathways to local improvements of the general basic model of representative government possessing real power of enforcement.
I’m aware that bad people will exist. That’s why I have mentioned private protection services. Does the video address why the state must have a monopoly over protection services?
Wait–what? You can point to historical militias that were purely voluntary? As in, “come on down to fight off the bad guys if you want, but if you don’t, no biggie”? With no support from compulsory taxation, either formal (income tax, e.g.) or informal (looting and pillaging)? I’d love to see the evidence of this.
Yes. The argument against anarchism and libertarianism in this regard isn’t that they are uniquely subject to infiltration or subjugation by bad guys. It’s that they’re especially weak at resisting such infiltration or subjugation.
This is, of course, highly general (I’m a libertarian, though not of the same type as the OP): because they believe that individual freedom is the highest political end, meaning that the best political system is one that protects individual freedom, both from itself and from other individuals, above all other concerns. Aggression, defined as attempting to deprive someone else of their life or property, is a violation of that freedom. Given that protecting freedom is the highest aim, preventing or at least managing aggression is a key part of the philosophy. That can mean a small government that’s still strong enough to protect your freedoms from other people, or not state and various voluntary arrangements to see to that protection.
It’s not much different from most people’s moral stances (you can only harm others in self-defense), really, at core.
No.
Yeah, pretty much.
Well, libertarianism privileges private property a lot more than most folks’ moral stances do. The stealing-medicine-to-treat-a-sick-child scenario has one answer for libertarians and a very different answer for most other folks. That same dynamic applies to a lot of other real-world scenarios, such as public education, public health care, and, yes, taxation.
Same thing, it has several names.
I can point to historical militias that were wholly independent of the state, which is what I was trying to illustrate: non-state, emergent methods of fighting off brigands when the need arose, that were largely voluntary.
As to purely voluntary, meaning that you didn’t have to go fight but still got your home protected, I can do a bit of research, but again, that’s not exactly what I meant.
Certainly not uniquely so; look at Communism. “Infiltration by bad guys” is its whole miserable history, the bad guys just came from within the society instead of conquering it from without.
I would also posit that minarchist libertarianism isn’t especially vulnerable to subjugation or infiltration.
It’s not identical, no, but there is major overlap, especially when it comes to physical attacks rather than property crimes. Hence, “not much different”. Compare to, say, colonialist morality, which was fine with physical harm being done to lesser peoples.
At the point where they’re not voluntary, though, they seem functionally equivalent to a state to me.
Well, if you’re happy putting libertarianism on the same footing as communism, I won’t stop you :). Seriously, though, I agree that they both suffer from the same sort of utopian failures: they’re systems that work a whole lot better if your citizens are a whole lot better.
There’s no bright-line difference between state and de facto state, correct. Whoever has the guns and the numbers gets to be the de facto state. Which gets back to my rejection of anarchist libertarianism.
There was a time when democracy was sneered at as “mob rule”, and the notion of every adult getting an equal say in how the nation was run was unthinkable. Now, running our nation any other way is unthinkable. Did the citizens change for the better in the interim? Perhaps, perhaps not. I don’t think it’s out of the question that a stable, free, prosperous libertarian nation could emerge over the next century or so, but if we started it all tomorrow, it would be a disaster.
I do own myself! Sweet, I own whatever the fuck I do! It is work breaking windows, entering homes, and carrying TVs. That shit is heavy!
I do. As I’ve demonstrated, government merely applies the veneer of legitimacy to otherwise immoral acts.
Ok doves would be free to form enclaves in a stateless society.
These same advantages exist in a government controlled society. What about our society today makes it superior at curtailing any advantage immoral people have in our mostly moral society?
Again you must show why a stateless society would be worse at curtailing evildoers.
There’s a lot of talk about how an anarchist society is vulnerable to some sort of infiltration by bad guys. Is it too much to ask for some specific examples of how a stateless society could be undermined in a way a democratic republic could not?
For example, I see a democratic republic vulnerable to executive overreach. An executive could, oh I don’t know, have dissenters incarcerated. This has happened many times in history as far as I can tell, even if I’m not as up on my history as others would like.