Unfortunately not all humans feel this way and they are a large enough group to form a society of their own with completely different sets of laws from your local laws which will prevent interoperability.
No one is arguing that the only way this society can function is if it is the only society. There is plenty of room on this planet for some people to try this particular experiment and for others to try other experiments.
Well, these have been tried out in many forms in the past and it turns out humans are pretty bad at self government. People have to operate along certain psychological lines (because of our specificness) and the social dynamics of human groups prevent fairytails like the one in the video from actually occuring in stable form. It is just not how human groups operate on a psychological level.
Another striking brainfart on the part of the narrator is that he seems to think that the most profitable way for any company to operate is by getting the best possible deal for their customers.
if a companies offers are not competitive enough consumers will opt to use a different company. This forces companies to compete with each other on the basis of price and quality. Thus we see there is no dichotomy of giving the customer a good deal vs making more money, in a free market giving the customer a good deal is the only way (besides fraud) to make money.
But what if you signed a 10 year contract with that company to get their service cheaper? As if companies have no means to financially or emotionally bind people to them.. Just look outside and see how (large) companies operate on this relatively peacefull battlefield of an economy. Then imagine we give them the power to police themselfs.
You make the mistake that every human can choose how their life will be. It's just not that simple. Most people don't make a choice of living somewhere purely on rational choices. If it was like this then i bet there would be no 3rd world countries and almost everyone would live in the west. People don't get to chose most of the time so its better not to pretend they will have a real choice i a different situation. There are many (legal) ways for taking someones freedom and most of these are not obvious.
If that can be achieved by screwing over their customers than that will become a reality sooner or later.
in a free market why would it be in the interest of a company to screw over its customers? if we are talking about fraud, as an example if we are talking about a bank rading its customers accounts than this is a type of fraud that would be extremely rare absent limited liability. if you are talking about the company not defrauding but just taking unreasonable profits, than this company will quickly be crowded out of the market by entrepreneurs who are willing to work for smaller profits.
Even in a free market comanies can be too powerfull. You assume that competition will assure that noone will become dominant. But that is just a fantasy. There are many ways for companies to become bigger than others and a lot of those have nothing to do with actual economics. Important things like geographical conglomeration of these companies will have a strong effect. You get neighborhoods controlled by separate firms untill the whole city will be controlled by just one company. This is because the service becomes cheaper for the top dog so they can offer that service cheaper and people will go for it.
And even better, those pesky checkpoints between the neighbourhoods are gone! Hooray! But of course by then you have sold your soul to the biggest devil.
Security services are just another natural monopoly so the majority of people can always be persuaded to take the cheaper (more monopolistic) service.
This naturally leads to stuff like treaties and in the end you get a multiheaded dragon not disimilar to our current military systems, but with the incentive of making money.
there is some truth to this but it is important to understand that david is not claiming to offer the keys to heaven, he is claiming to offer a system that would be better than what we have now and better than atleast most other proposed alternatives. Granted this market will never exist in the theoretical state of perfect competition but ANY amount of competition among service providers is better than a full on, out in the open, non apologetic, monopoly. Sometimes in life we are forced not to chose between good and bad or right and wrong, but bad and worse or wrong and wronger. The best case scenario is that everyone behave peacefully and we wouldn't need law, but since this is not realistic and we do need law, its *better* to have that law be provided by competing firms than by a monpolist.
I claim that it would not be better than what we have now. In fact, i'd wager it will be far far worse.
Security should never be at a competing edge within a society. It will lead to escalations.
The whole idea of an open monopoly is so that everyone knows they should play nice or face the consequences.
It is litteraly the glue that holds our society together.
Competing security forces will give a lot of unrest and insecurity (the consequences of the separate laws of the companies will first have to be evaluated) and noone actually knows how their laws will hold up against other firms laws.
It would be bedlam. People would have no clue about their current and future situation. (what if the negociations don't go well and we get into a war with the other security company?).
Seriously, All he proposes is to take the big dominance fights right back to our streets. It's like microcredit of militance.
You'll get houses with tanks in front because they are secured by company A in a company B neighborhood.
It Would Be A Mess.
You don't seem to realize that competing over security means getting the other guy out when he doesn't want to leave. And if he doesn't want to leave you kill him. That process will not change with these new security structures.
Moreover, they all will have a different idea and you can be sure that many potential dictators will seek the leadership jobs in these companies just to prove how good they are.
And gain, companies just have one incentive. Money.
If they can use 'security' to keep you inside so you can work for the factory that pays underhand money to your local dictator then that is exactly what will happen.
You DO know there is decades of research gone into how to keep people complacent, don't you?
Why do you think north korea is acting like it is? It is one big security firm and the people cannot get out. Try competing with that.
The bizarre thing is that those people actually at some point had a choice about how their local security force acts.
In the situation mister friedman describes the firm with the largest 'security' force will have the better negociation position and their 'laws' will prevail. People will conglomerate around them BECAUSE the have more guns.
It is realy unthinkable that security firms, consisting of human beings with human emotions, will be able to compete in a civilized way. Security is about domination.
The dynamics that are proposed by the video are completely synthetic and need to be kept in check or they will not exist. But who is going to enforce these dynamics? Who will prevent a war between competing factions? Who will prevent a 3rd firm taking advantage of that situation and take over both competing territories so they can offer cheaper service to their sheep?
What if a certain firm has most of its customers in a region that has no resources? Will they go to war with other firms to secure resources? And how is that different from the current situation?
There are just too many things intertwined with this notion of security and however cute the proposal is, it is pretty amazingly naive.
The world, and people in general, just doesn't work like this guy thinks it does.
No ammount of free market will change human drives. His ideas only give you the temporal ilusion of things being ok. But this too will escalate in dog fight and we will be in the same situation we are now only with governments replaced by private military corporations. Thank you mister friedman. :/
