If the government ran all the supermarkets, you'd say the exact same thing about food. You would worry that all the grocery stores would close and you would starve. But, the thing is, in an AnCap world, there's money to be made by solving real problems. If the problem you've identified is a real one, then someone will find a way to solve it and charge you for that solution. And then someone else will find a better way to solve it and charge you less. And before you know it, the problem's gone. Problems are opportunities.
You might think it sucks to have to pay for everything. But the fact is, you're paying for everything now. It's just being done by an inherently inefficient government with little to no incentive to innovate and facing no competition.
you are always paying for everything, in any possible scenario. however i dont see any indication that companies solve every problem better than governments do. for many services, there is very little competition or incentive to provide the cheapest or best possible service. in some markets, there are so few players so that price agreements are very easy. in other markets its very hard for a layman to jugde the overall quality of the service, so the best marketing wins. in the end, the assumption that companies solve all problems better is just a dogma. you will always find examples in which governments handled something ridiculously ineffecient. but that doesnt prove anything. or if it does, what does fukushiima say about the ability of companies to handle critical infrastructure? companies have scenarios where they fail really badly just as governments do. mostly those that require long term reliability and viability, minimizing risks, minimizing external costs. a company can always just cut their losses and run, or go broke. As for the land ownership issue, there's a more specific response. Land ownership includes some bundle of rights. And society, if it's going to have property, has to work out what that bundle of rights is. It may be that preventing people from reasonably crossing your land to access other people's land isn't in that bundle of rights. It may be that shooting anyone who accidentally stumbles onto your land isn't in that bundle of rights. Just as, for example, taxing satellites that pass over your land likely wouldn't be.
i like the thought that absolute property rights might actually lead to having less rights regarding your property  in practice though, that might be impossible. for example, would you still be allowed to build very high walls around your property? or have dangerous stuff lie around in the open? Also, covenants can run with land and can specifically exclude some rights for the benefit of nearby land owners. A society has to come up with rules for how those covenants can be enforced, whether they can be valid in perpetuity, and so on.
i agree that can solve many possible problems. but sometimes you just run into problems you coudnt foresee. or could but didnt. for example the necessity for land expropriation can be the result of bad planning. the property could have been aquired much earlier. or the infrastructure could have been built elsewhere. but when there really just one place left to build something or use property in a specific way, there is no existing contract and the owner is completely unreasonable, what do you do in ancap? yes, land expropriation sucks and should be kept to an absolute minimum. but you cant always avoid all situations in which honoring property rights of a single person will be to the detriment of a whole society. |
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Yes, your house is on one road. Good for you. If you don't like the rules of that road (more likely, community), don't move into that house. As for the water pipes, electricity system, and such, those are "dumb pipes" and can be operated as a co-op by the various providers, no need for duplication. "hundreds of overlapping wireless networks"... sounds like a mesh network to me, a very good idea.
Roads is such a non-issue to be stuck on. Road operators want traffic. They can be predicted to do things that will maximize traffic.
i really wonder what planet you live on. maximizing profit by creating artificial shortages happens all the time. maximizing profit is an optimization process in which number of sales is just one parameter. look at oil for example. saudia-arabia isnt producing at maximum capacity. they intentionally hold back to increase the price. and if, for whatever reason, russia and saudia-arabia decided not to sell oil anymore, the consequences would be devastating. like millions of deaths-devastating. others nations would never accept that and react with violence, and rightly so. |
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get the monopoly of an essential resource, then blackmail your society.
Do you know a system that prevents this? I mean, other than "if you have what we want, even if you justly acquired it, we'll take it from you". It is extremely difficult to build a monopoly without using force. If you used force to get it, nobody disputes that others can take it away from you by force. If you somehow do manage to build it without force, it's going to be very temporary. And the more you leverage it, the more incentive others have to find some resource that replaces it. In any event, who cares? I'd gladly trade the remote possibility of some temporary blackmail for living under those conditions permanently where the government has an eternal monopoly on a long list of things. its not totally preventable, no. but leaving essential resources at somebodies personal whim greatly increases the likelyhood of resources being used in a fashion that is very unfavorable for a society. there are no magic market mechanisms that force a person to do whats best for his society to gain profit. its a fun theory, but the world never actually worked that way. a government can, to some extent, ignore profitability and effectiveness. and i believe it can also be designed in manner that the power of any single person inside the government is small. i admit that we are, at this point, far from having any governments that is both able and willing to pursue the best for its people. on the other hand, its very unfair to compare current implementation of governments with some sort of ideal ancap. you either have to compare current implementation of both or the ideal implementation of both. in practice, ancap isnt implemented anywhere, so it cant be compared. in theory, i like an ideal government better than an ideal ancap. can an ideal government exist? probably not. but at least we still got very very much room for improvement within existing systems. id say improving existing governments is a much more viable option than trying to transition into an utopia, that, in my opinion, is neither possible nor desirable. Or get on a different road. There's more than 1, you know. Monopoly is the problem we're looking to solve here, remember?
yeah, redundancy is an awesome solution. i really want ten roads to my house, ten water pipes, hundreds of overlapping wireless networks...thats soooo much more effective than whats currently done  |
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You're cute, you know that? Let me lay some truth on you:
In a world* where roads, and indeed all property, is private, roads and other means of transportation would, in fact, be "establishments which invite customers," and which are free to eject them, as well. Just like at McDonalds.
If you wish to move about, you would be patronizing these establishments. They want your business, either because you're eyes on their billboards or because you pay the subscription fee, or entry tolls, or however they monetize. Since they want your business, they cater to your needs. Just like at McDonalds.
Since they want your repeat business, they will endeavor to make your experience pleasant. This means that if you do not want to be harassed by people going above a specific speed, there will most likely be a road company that requires drivers to keep to a speed limit. If you wish to be unfettered by speed limits, there will most likely be a road company that allows that. The freedom to choose ensures that everyone gets the service they desire. Just like at Burger King.
*(if you like, you can imagine Don LaFontaine saying this)
you really believe in such a naive scenario? what happens, if, for whatever reason, like racism, religion, personal grudge, you become an unwanted customer to the road company owner? you buy a helicopter? |
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OK, let's say you're the richest man on the planet, in an AnCap society, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, and Carlos Helu all rolled into one How do you wield your wealth so as to make others miserable?
get the monopoly of an essential resource, then blackmail your society. |
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Survival is not assured. There is no known system that can ensure survival. If a person cannot produce enough to ensure their own survival, then the only choice is for them to rely on the charity of others. The only question is whether such charity will be voluntary or coerced.
in my opinion, a society that doesnt guarantee a minimal living standard for everyone is both barbaric and inefficient. all moral arguments aside, i just wouldnt want to live there. Okay, then there's no limit to that kind of power. But that kind of power is not harmful because pretty much the only way you can acquire it is by giving others what they most want. That's what will be compensated with wealth.
how that power is aquired has really nothing to do how it is used. specificly, the harmful effects you can cause with your wealth dont need to have any proportion with the supposed good you did when you aquired it. |
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If someone else has something that you want, there are only two ways you can get it from him. You can offer him something in exchange for it or you can take it by force. You seem to think these things need to balance each other out. However, I would say it's preferable to eliminate the latter leaving only the former.
what about those that dont have much to offer? and those that dont need anything else? if trade is no option how do you ensure survival? i am not saying force should be the counterbalance to willing cooperation. i am saying poperty can itself be force and therefore needs another force to balance it. If an AnCap society is working correctly, there really isn't any "power". Of course you can trade material wealth for other material wealth you may desire and you can trade your labor for wealth. But everything else we would hope would be cancelled out -- unjust force met with just retaliation with as little net effect as possible.
having things other people need is power. when there are no restrictions on what you can have and what you can do with the things you have, there is no limit to power. |
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That would be a good counterargument to anyone who argued that an AnCap society wouldn't have any violence. However, I don't think anyone is arguing that paradise on Earth is possible. The idea is to avoid making a system that rewards violence and theft. But of course, there will still be the occasional case where people either irrationally resort to violence or, despite our best efforts, find themselves in a situation where violence will benefit them. In those cases, there will definitely be violence.
i am not talking about paradise on earth. i am talking about the thing between paradise and civil unrest. maybe i am understanding absolute property rights wrong, but to me it seems material wealth is the only source of power in an ancap. so it accumulates even faster than usual and the system will quickly become unstable, because there is nothing that provides a counterbalance to wealth. |
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if thats really all that is to libertarianism, its a damn stupid idea. a large enough society cannot exist without violence. at some point, interests always collide. you can declare that senf-defense is justified, but very often there is really no specific line at which you can say its my survival thats threatened or just "what i want". If you are unable to distinguish between self defense and aggression, and don't understand how to resolve differences of opinion without resorting to violence you should talk about these things with your therapist instead of projecting your limitations onto the world at large. +1. Leave your anger issues out of this. lol, where exactly did i say i was talking about "different opinions"? with limited resources there will always be situations in which one group of people doesnt have enough resources to survive. be it food, water, heating, electricity or the means to produce or transport any of those. unless they get those resources for free, there will eventually be violence. as far as i understand ancap doesnt force anybody to give anything away for free, ever. so what exactly is the regulatory mechanism here that will stop violence from arising? |
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The problem with this attitude is that it rejects the moral argument that is central to libertarianism: Using violence to get what you want is wrong. As soon as you allow for a state, you're saying "violence is wrong except when the state does it".
From the Libertarian perspective, after you make this compromise, your fighting the wrong battle. You've gone from a philosophical revolution (war of ideas) to a plain old revolution (fighting the state directly, since you have condoned it's existence and rejected NAP).
if thats really all that is to libertarianism, its a damn stupid idea. a large enough society cannot exist without violence. at some point, interests always collide. you can declare that senf-defense is justified, but very often there is really no specific line at which you can say its my survival thats threatened or just "what i want". |
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lol, had to look up shank first and when i got to the end of the sentence i was like "wtf is a toilet prison" gotta read some pages of kant to get my remember-the-start-of-a-50-lines-sentence-skills back up... |
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stupid question: how exactly does anything ever get done in an ancap society? i mean, if you already have a community, group or whatever you want to call that entity, that has contracted companies to enforce laws, maintain all the infrastructure, provide schools and whatnot, how to you ever make a new contract, law or whatever? without having voting contracts that turn your ancap into a totally mundane democracy?
how exactly do you maintain total freedom over your property with the need for a society to, at some point, enforce a new rule for everyone?
say for example you want to make it a new rule that its forbidden to have landmines on a property within 200 meter radius of a school.
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the fun part: We don't have an extradition treaty with Sweden but we'll look into our laws and see how we can handle this case
translation: we give a fuck about our own laws unless they suit us. |
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mal die basics: eine bitcoinadresse ohne netzwerk-id, prüfsumme und encoding ist einfach ein ripemd-160 hash. die anzahl der möglichen adressen ist also 2^160. die prüfsumme hat 4 byte, also sollte es pro gültige adresse 2^32 (ca. 4 milliarden) ungütlige adressen geben. ich bin nicht so der ganz große wahrscheinlichkeitsrechner, aber die kollisionswahrscheinlichkeit kann man sich ja grob anhand der tatsache verbildlichen, daß 2^160 = 2^32^5, wenn man also 4 milliarden benutzte addressen hat ist die kollisionswahrscheinlichkeit für die nächste generierte adresse immer noch nur 2^32^4 und damit 2^32^3 eine obere grenze für die wahrscheinlichkeit mindestens einer kollision innerhalb der ersten vier millarden, was dann immer noch 2^96 ist. achtung, diese rechnung kann totaler bullshit sein |
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ocz ist nicht gerade für qualität berühmt. also da 30 euro extra im ladengeschäft lassen für service ist echt mal lol. dann lieber gleich eine verlässlichere ssd kaufen, die kriegt man dann am ende online für den gleichen preis.
das ding wirst du nie für 150€ oder mehr los.
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das problem ist, daß private keys, die in mehreren wallets drin sind, aufgrund der tatsache, daß bei transaktionen die sendeaddressen immer komplett geleert werden, merkwürdige geldverschiebungen auftreten können. faktisch ist es auch einfach so, daß es für solche aktionen keinerlei rationale gründe und potentiell nur probleme gibt. das ist in etwa so als wenn du hier ankommst und sagst "ich habe mir gestern eine schildkröte gekauft und möchte jetzt mal ausprobieren, ob man der gut eine kerze auf den rücken kleben kann". gehen tut viel....
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geh doch mal ins alternate clients forum und frag den entwickler vom android wallet. vielleicht bist du auf ein bis dato unbekanntes sicherheitsproblem gestoßen.
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So... you're comparing governments that almost always have epic fail policies with companies that rarely do? Great argument.
sorry, but i live in a country with pretty good roads & public transport, rockstable electricity, water quality above that of most bottled water brands, close to 100% dsl avaibility, health insurrance, low crime rate and mostly free education. there is still lots of problems and fuckups i can blame the government for. but all in all i cant call our government an epic fail and i am sure companies wouldnt have done better. in fact, i can see it in the usa that they dont. Google's motto was "don't be evil" until they went public. Then they did just that.
Companies can be good. It's corporations that tend to be like governments. Again, you're comparing something with has the possibility, perhaps even a tendency to be good (a company) with something that is almost always bad (a government).
you just claim its like that. i disagree. Governments that distribute ANYTHING are inherently bad. The ideal government is one that protects the rights of the people, nothing more. Anything else leads to self serving career politicians.
i dont think i understand what you talk about. so the country is law, judge, police and thats it? zero infrastructure? if thats what you mean, id rather pass on it. i dont really want to live in the wilderness. I was referring to organized religion. Most as corrupt and inept as most governments and corporations are.
I'm talking about godliness, not religious zeal. The various wars fought over religion have nothing to do with religion, it's the intolerance of other people's beliefs that causes it.
while i have no problem with people being spiritual, every religion that claims some absolute truths is intolerant by design. There is no right answer outside of inherently good individuals.
Corporations aren't inherently evil, it's the people that run them, and the greedy "give me something for nothing" shareholders.
Governments aren't inherently evil, it's the career politicians that lie through their teeth and sell themselves to the highest bidders.
Unions were created to protect employees from "evil" employers. Now we have self serving unions that cause more problems than the solution they are supposed to provide. It's not the union itself, however, it's the greedy self serving individuals in it.
Guns aren't bad, it's the individual that pulls the trigger.
Organized religion isn't inherently bad, it's the individuals who seek to put themselves between people and god.
Only animalistic "carnal" man is evil. Only once man (generalistic term, not sexist) realizes his true nature will things change.
i dont do "good" and "evil". everybody acts and judges from his own perspective and thinks he is the good guy. ethics are made by man and contain no inherit truth. which one we choose is not a decision between good and evil but a choice about the society we would like to live in. take abortion for example. most people argue about when life "officially begins" and stuff like that. to me that doesnt matter at all. i prefer pro-choice, because women are living, conscient and acting people and their rights have an immediate effect on the society i live in, while the existence or nonexistence of rights for a fetus has no consequence at all. there is no right and wrong in that decision. just actions and consequences that i deem desirable or undesirable. and yes i know that a worldview like that is pure evil to any (likely religious) person with eternally codified moral rules. |
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Not quite. There is no detriment to government to being wasteful. In fact, their solution is usually to throw more money at it! It's really easy to spend someone else's money.
Where as in the private industry, if you are wasteful, you go out of business.
you might have noticed, companies go out of business all the time. you have to put those in the equation too. you cant just look at all the successful companies and compare them to that superwasteful government. What utopian society do you live it? The vast majority of government is not for the greater good of all.
i agree. but companies arent even intended to be. so how can you improve something you dont even see as a goal? Until government is run by selfless individuals who are indeed there for the good of the people, nothing will change. If you look around you, society is full of selfish busy body control freaks. Today's government, including the alphabet acronym agencies, are full of such individuals, which is why we have the problems we have today. Greed and corruption exist everywhere, it just makes itself more evident in large corporations like governments.
thats a natural phenomenom in pretty much all forms of government. when people struggle for power those that will do anything for power will eventually prevail over those that only seek power to achieve something different. but anarchy, with or without a touch of capitalism, is not the solution. imho its far better to find a form of government that distributes power more evenly, making both corruption and power for its own sake less attractive. The underlying cause of it all is a lack of morals. Morals come from godliness. Godliness tends to come from religion, but isn't required. We have a lack of morals today, and it shows.
as an agnostic i might feel insulted. fortunately i consider truly religions people to be either too uneducated or too estranged form reality to properly judge their actions and statements, so i dont hold them accountable. |
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I tried to phrased that specifically to premempt this response. Government debt (in addition to the organizational issues) encourages excess use of resources. So even if you hand wave away the organizational issues that can be solved at any time  , we are still left with future generations with fewer resources and more waste sitting around because the illusion of extra wealth encouraged wasteful consumption. Another thing not mentioned here is government spending is inherently inefficient and anti market based, as politicians spend it to pay favors and buy votes. Hence the renowned $1,000 hammers and toilet seats. So not only is the government stealing wealth from those who earned it (don't forget, governments don't make money ANYWHERE ANYHOW, they only forcibly take it from others), they are spending it incredibly inefficiently. I remember last year with a the american reinvestment act, a perfectly good parking lot was repaved at a park'n'ride, and the highway had the middle piece of the lanes (2 lane on each side, middle of the two) torn out and replaced, only to have the whole thing repaved later on. M you can have the exact same thing with private spending. if the government doesnt borrow money, the lender still has it. he might do something exactly equally meaningful or equally stupid and wasteful with it as the government. its true that governments projects have the tendency to be inefficient. on the other hand, private projects are often more efficient but do not care about the greater good at all. the patent and copyright laws are pretty much only there to protect profit against the greater good, which would be free access to art, scientific results or medicine for example. building infrastructure is often only profitable if you reduce redundacies and safeguards. or look at private prisons trying to maximize the number of inmates for profit. how perverse is that? in my opinion, critical infrastructure should never be in private hands. the same goes for any official duties. that is something companies will never do right. the very thought is as absurd as it gets, trying to extract profit from a function thats essentially necessary for a society. its like playing russian roulette for money. lifelong profit guaranteed, literally... and if a government cannot perform those duties, its failing. it either needs to raise taxes or efficiency. reducing the government to a talk club is not the solution. improving its mechanisms to make decisions as democratic, well-informed and rational and efficient as possible is. i know the existing social democracies are very far from being ideal. but you dont throw a good idea away because its not working well yet. you improve it. |
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