Response to a response
"A central lesson of history is that States are parasites which always expand until they destroy their host population."
Maybe I was too high when they taught that lesson. He must be talking about inward expansion, because outward would destroy other populations instead. I'll use the example of industrial Britain, because it happens to be what I'm forced to study these days. I can guarantee to you that life was a hell of a lot worse for the general population during industrialisation before the government expanded into the realm of workplace control. Maybe libertarians like yourself want the option to send your 8 year old to work in a textile mill for 14 hours a day, but most would concede that the Factory Act was a benefit to society. In any case, I'm unaware of any society in all of history that has been destroyed by its own state. Certainly segments of society have been viciously assaulted occasionally, but an entire society destroyed by its own state? That's like snake eating itself: at a certain point it becomes impossible.
Rome. It grew until it could not manage itself
"The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism...since it fails at everything except increasing its power..."
Yes, increasing its power. And other minor things like eradicating polio and landing on the moon.
One can argue the utility of landing on the moon, especially since they only did it to demonstrate superiority over another nation. Let's stick with polio. Wikipedia tells me that it in fact was not the state who cured polio, but Jonas Salk, and Albert Sabin. Salk worked at the University of Pittsburg. Sabin worked ith the University of Cinncinati. It was people that cured polio, not the state.
"Most of these amazing intrusions into personal liberty have occurred over the past 90 years...State predations are now so intrusive that they have effectively arrested the forward momentum of society, which now hangs before a fall. Children are poorly educated, young people are unable to get ahead..."
This is just straight-up bullshit. Children are better educated today than they were 90 years ago by any rational standard. States force parents to have their children educated because if they didn't, a lot of parents would put them to work instead. Proven lesson of history, I guess Molyneux was high during that one. Young people are unable to get ahead? Where do they want to go? I'm in Europe for a year on a mix of minimum wage employment (thankfully there is a law mandating a minimum wage) and government money. Young people think they are unable to get ahead because they expect a standard of living which is ridiculously above that which was available even 40 years ago, forget before the modern nation-state.
You seem to have a very dim view of humanity in general. I suspect this is where our main differences come from. Children worked because company towns shut out competition and drove up prices.
"There is no example in history of a State being permanently reduced in size."
RUSSIA.
And that took huge economic problems, millions of lives and the shrinkage was not permanent.
"Everyone, of course, realizes that civil war is a rather bad situation, and so it seems likely that the DROs would consider alternatives to armed combat."
The funny thing about "everyone" is that not everyone thinks the same thing. Usually the people that start civil wars don't view them as a bad situation, because they assume they're going to win, and enforce their superior system. The other side, and the people stuck in the middle, don't have a choice.
The difference is that a DRO could only keep this 'civil war' going on as long as their customers were willing to pay for it. If one or both companies are boycotted, people certainly do have a choice. It's the lack of choice inherent in taxation that removes choice.
But we could argue all day about whether or not (currently) fictional companies would do. Let's look to the real world for an example. Like this security company that just pulled out of Iraq. It lost four people. The rates their mercenaries were demanding where too high for it to be profitable.
"However, to go to the extreme, perhaps the worst has occurred and Stan has been unjustly fined a million dollars due to DRO corruption. Well, he has three alternatives. He can choose not to pay the fine, drop off the DRO map, and work for cash without contracts."
Stan can just not pay the fine! Makes sense, since there aren't any laws to prevent this. Sure, his shitty credit rating will bar him from any meaningful contracts in the future. But hey, fuck it! Maybe Stan's got bigger problems. Cancer, a hit-squad after him, he's 92, or he's just flat-ass broke. I know I'd rather just not pay a fine and have shitty credit than go a million dollars into debt.
Yes, that is an option of his. He has a choice. And he may well be able to get contracts, just on stricter terms. A person who gets in a car accident can still get insurance, they just pay more.
Let's move on to the third option.
"However, if Stan is an intelligent and even vaguely entrepreneurial man, he will see the corruption of the DRO as a prime opportunity to start his own, competing DRO..."
With what money!? Maybe Stan can just pull a million dollars out of his jacket and move on. Most of us, however, would be too broke to get fries with out burger, forget go start our own competing agency. What's going to insure the possibility of free entry into this market? What prevents the DRO's from colluding to crush new entrants?
With a good business plan investors will come running, and banks will give him loans.
How could they crush new entrants? They could refuse to negotiate with him, but then they would have their customers to answer to.
"Stan’s third option is to appeal to the contract rating agency. Contract rating agencies need to be as accurate as possible, since they are attempting to assess real risk."
Who pays them? Stan? He's fucking broke. The DRO's? That would be a bit of a conflict of interest. Everybody together? Sounds like taxation to me.
I would think that anybody who wanted information from them would pay for them. That's usually how it works now. There would be no conflict of interest between a DRO and a contract rating agency. Each has something the other one wants.
"The first is the challenge of reciprocity, or geography. If Bob has a contract with Jeff, and Jeff moves to a new location not covered by their mutual DRO, what happens?...Just as a person’s credit rating is available anywhere in the world, so their contract rating will also be available, and so there will be no place to hide from a broken contract save by going ‘off the grid’ completely..."
Until DRO's in one area decide to act as haven's for ill-gotten money. What makes him think a DRO would act more reponsibly than the Cayman Islands?
Who would do business with them? DRO's have to be able to interact. If you don't buy that, then we have to accept it as a risk of doing business, just like we do now.
"The second problem is the fear that a particular DRO will grow in size and stature to the point where it takes on all the features and properties of a new State. This is a superstitious fear, because there is no historical example of a private company replacing a political State."
He needs to stop citing history because he knows shit-all about it. Ever heard of company towns? Mining companies in the 19th century used to own the mine, all the tools used in it, the houses in town, the school, the store, everything. They controlled the credit of the workers and by extension their families. They had their own private militias to enforce their whim. How different is that from a state?
Molyneux is overlooking (probably intentionally) the painfully obvious reason that a company has never grown into a state: because the states don't let them! Corporations only governed by profit margins, through the DRO's, would be much more frightening than they are today.
In other words, they used force, something which would certainly be something that could be appealed to a DRO. A sensible worker has a clause in his contract that forbids the use of force (or something to that effect) and if a company breaks that agreement, they appeal to a DRO.
The reason a company has never grown into a state is because you can choose to stop giving them money.
"First of all, if any DRO can take over society and impose itself as a new State, why only a DRO? Why not the Rotary Club? Why not a union? Why not the Mafia?...in the final analysis, if society is so terrified of a single group seizing a monopoly of political power, what does that say about the existing States? They have a monopoly of political power."
Here Molyneux is telling us that there's no tangible difference between a society run by existing States and one run by the Mafia. He needs to rotate living a year in Canada with a year in Zimbabwe until he understands the difference.
So you're comparing Mugabe (the state) to a thug. Exactly what Molyneux was doing. He says it is a matter of degrees, since both rely on the threat of force (via arrest) to collect their tribute. Mugabe is just a lot nastier about it.
"Roads, sewage, water and electricity and so on are also cited as reasons why a State must exist. The problem that a water company might build plumbing to a community, and then charge exorbitant fees for supplying it, is equally easy to counter. A truck could deliver bottled water, or the community could invest in a water tower, a competing company could build alternate pipes and so on."
Ok, so lets look at the water problem. Fees for using the water pipes are too high. So we truck in bottled water? Not only is bottled water going to be more expensive, trucking it in will be mostrously ineffective and environmentally damaging. On top of this the cost of trucking it in will be raised by the road fees (let's hope they're not exploitative as well!) Not all communities are big enough to afford a water tower, and some are too large for that to solve anything.
The alternate pipes solution brings me to another point, which also applies to roads and power lines. You only need one! One road from A to B. Having competing roads trying to undercut each other for cost is a waste of raw material, not to mention space. What happens when road companies start offering monthly passes? Then you need a map to remember which roads you can drive on for free, and you better hope they go to your destination, because fees on the other roads are higher for members of the competition. It's all a pretty pointless exercise.
If they're trucking in the bottled water, clearly it isn't more expensive. They would choose the least expensive solution. Compeition drives down prices. Road fees would be offset by the fact you wouldn't be paying taxes.
That's assuming competing companies can both buy property. A pass system (for example) could get complicated, but again, the market will create solutions. And who is to say I can only do business with one company? I may need to drive on three people's roads to get to where I work, so I make a deal with all three. It is in their best interest to make access to other people's roads easy (why would I pay for a road that doesn't go anywhere?)
"A lumber company cannot buy woodlands from the State, just the right to harvest trees. Thus the State gets a renewable source of income, and can further coerce lumber companies by enforcing re-seeding. This, of course, tends to promote bribery, corruption and the creation of ‘fly-by-night’ lumber companies which strip the land bare, but vanish when it comes time to re-seed. Auctioning State land to a private market easily solves this problem, because a company which re-seeded would reap the greatest long-term profits from woodland, and so would be able to bid the most for the land."
He's right about the current system, but hopelessly optimistic about his own. What I see happening is this. The land is auctioned to a private company, which moves in and cuts down all the trees for lumber. Then, they sell the land to a development agency to build some suburbs. The lumber company folds, and the owners and stockholders go home with pockets full of cash. His problem is that he expects the companies to think long term, when in reality corporations rarely think more than 5 years ahead due to constant shareholder pressure for profit.
Trees take more then five years to grow, so they must out of necessity. Many paper companies do actually own the plots of land they grow on, and they are among the best managed around.
"Also, it should be remembered that, in the realm of air pollution, governments created the problem in the first place. In 19th century England, when industrial smokestacks began belching fumes...the farmers took the factory-owners to court...Naturally, the capitalists had gotten to the State courts first...The free market did not fail to solve the problem of air pollution - it was forcibly prevented from doing so through State corruption."
Let's be clear: industrialism, not governments, created the problem. All the government did was ignore it. The court's decision was not an isolated one, and corruption can't be blamed for a general policy of non-intervention. The irony is that the British government before WW1 was very reluctant to involve itself in new areas, which allowed pollution to spiral out of control.
Government actively supported it, as Molyneux mentioned in the example cited.
"If the aforementioned group of homeowners is afraid of pollution, the first thing they will do is buy pollution insurance, which is a natural response to a situation where costs cannot be predicted but consequences are dire."
Um, no. Pollution, unfortunately, is something the vast majority of people wouldn't hand a penny over to prevent. Molyneux talks about people downwind from a factory because you can almost picture the scenario playing out as he sees it. In reality, most pollution doesn't visibly impact individuals. Companies dumping into the ocean aren't going to be facing irate DRO's, because no one is going to take out clean ocean insurance. How can you have global warming insurance? It affects everyone, and thousands of factories contribute to it.
They would if it affected them directly. I don't want my house smelling like tar, and neither would my neighboors. Oceans (except maybe deep-sea areas) would be owned, so those dumping would be liable for the damages it does to other people's property. Global warming is a by-product of other forms of pollution, such as smog, which would be prevented because of other people's interest in preserving the value of their own property.
"The idea that society can only survive in the absence of a centralized State is the greatest lesson that the grisly years of the Twentieth Century can teach us."
Well, it also taught us that if you strip away the state completely, you have Somalia. As fun as feudal warlords are (not to mention the imposition of radical Islam!), I think I prefer to live somewhere with federal law.
Again, going by Wikipedia, what happened was that there were assassinations going on in a military government, and nothern Somalia seceeded, calling themselves Somaliland. They are, to quote the article "relatively stable compared to the tumultuous south." The two year UN effort primarily took place in the south. After that, it seems to me that the biggest problem is that civilans are caught in the middle of those who want to establish a state with them at the head. I think post-Katrina New Orleans is a better example of a stateless society. I don't think it can be argued that the government royally cocked up there, and now have little influence. Things went to shit for awhile, mostly looting while people tried to survive. Now things are still being re-established, but it strongly demonstrates the value of private enterprise over state assistance. Common Ground Collective is an example of where private enterprise stepped in to fill a gap government had failed at.
"Whatever the risks involved in dissolving the central State, they are far less than the certain destruction which will result from its inevitable escalation."
Certain destruction! Jack Layton's diabolical plan revealed...the blood tax!
Hyperbole revealed! Why exactly is some beaurocrat a better judge of how money I earned should be spent? If government wants my money the best thing they can do is create a service I would be willing to pay for.
Maybe I was too high when they taught that lesson. He must be talking about inward expansion, because outward would destroy other populations instead. I'll use the example of industrial Britain, because it happens to be what I'm forced to study these days. I can guarantee to you that life was a hell of a lot worse for the general population during industrialisation before the government expanded into the realm of workplace control. Maybe libertarians like yourself want the option to send your 8 year old to work in a textile mill for 14 hours a day, but most would concede that the Factory Act was a benefit to society. In any case, I'm unaware of any society in all of history that has been destroyed by its own state. Certainly segments of society have been viciously assaulted occasionally, but an entire society destroyed by its own state? That's like snake eating itself: at a certain point it becomes impossible.
Rome. It grew until it could not manage itself
"The idea that the State is capable of solving social problems is now viewed with great skepticism...since it fails at everything except increasing its power..."
Yes, increasing its power. And other minor things like eradicating polio and landing on the moon.
One can argue the utility of landing on the moon, especially since they only did it to demonstrate superiority over another nation. Let's stick with polio. Wikipedia tells me that it in fact was not the state who cured polio, but Jonas Salk, and Albert Sabin. Salk worked at the University of Pittsburg. Sabin worked ith the University of Cinncinati. It was people that cured polio, not the state.
"Most of these amazing intrusions into personal liberty have occurred over the past 90 years...State predations are now so intrusive that they have effectively arrested the forward momentum of society, which now hangs before a fall. Children are poorly educated, young people are unable to get ahead..."
This is just straight-up bullshit. Children are better educated today than they were 90 years ago by any rational standard. States force parents to have their children educated because if they didn't, a lot of parents would put them to work instead. Proven lesson of history, I guess Molyneux was high during that one. Young people are unable to get ahead? Where do they want to go? I'm in Europe for a year on a mix of minimum wage employment (thankfully there is a law mandating a minimum wage) and government money. Young people think they are unable to get ahead because they expect a standard of living which is ridiculously above that which was available even 40 years ago, forget before the modern nation-state.
You seem to have a very dim view of humanity in general. I suspect this is where our main differences come from. Children worked because company towns shut out competition and drove up prices.
"There is no example in history of a State being permanently reduced in size."
RUSSIA.
And that took huge economic problems, millions of lives and the shrinkage was not permanent.
"Everyone, of course, realizes that civil war is a rather bad situation, and so it seems likely that the DROs would consider alternatives to armed combat."
The funny thing about "everyone" is that not everyone thinks the same thing. Usually the people that start civil wars don't view them as a bad situation, because they assume they're going to win, and enforce their superior system. The other side, and the people stuck in the middle, don't have a choice.
The difference is that a DRO could only keep this 'civil war' going on as long as their customers were willing to pay for it. If one or both companies are boycotted, people certainly do have a choice. It's the lack of choice inherent in taxation that removes choice.
But we could argue all day about whether or not (currently) fictional companies would do. Let's look to the real world for an example. Like this security company that just pulled out of Iraq. It lost four people. The rates their mercenaries were demanding where too high for it to be profitable.
"However, to go to the extreme, perhaps the worst has occurred and Stan has been unjustly fined a million dollars due to DRO corruption. Well, he has three alternatives. He can choose not to pay the fine, drop off the DRO map, and work for cash without contracts."
Stan can just not pay the fine! Makes sense, since there aren't any laws to prevent this. Sure, his shitty credit rating will bar him from any meaningful contracts in the future. But hey, fuck it! Maybe Stan's got bigger problems. Cancer, a hit-squad after him, he's 92, or he's just flat-ass broke. I know I'd rather just not pay a fine and have shitty credit than go a million dollars into debt.
Yes, that is an option of his. He has a choice. And he may well be able to get contracts, just on stricter terms. A person who gets in a car accident can still get insurance, they just pay more.
Let's move on to the third option.
"However, if Stan is an intelligent and even vaguely entrepreneurial man, he will see the corruption of the DRO as a prime opportunity to start his own, competing DRO..."
With what money!? Maybe Stan can just pull a million dollars out of his jacket and move on. Most of us, however, would be too broke to get fries with out burger, forget go start our own competing agency. What's going to insure the possibility of free entry into this market? What prevents the DRO's from colluding to crush new entrants?
With a good business plan investors will come running, and banks will give him loans.
How could they crush new entrants? They could refuse to negotiate with him, but then they would have their customers to answer to.
"Stan’s third option is to appeal to the contract rating agency. Contract rating agencies need to be as accurate as possible, since they are attempting to assess real risk."
Who pays them? Stan? He's fucking broke. The DRO's? That would be a bit of a conflict of interest. Everybody together? Sounds like taxation to me.
I would think that anybody who wanted information from them would pay for them. That's usually how it works now. There would be no conflict of interest between a DRO and a contract rating agency. Each has something the other one wants.
"The first is the challenge of reciprocity, or geography. If Bob has a contract with Jeff, and Jeff moves to a new location not covered by their mutual DRO, what happens?...Just as a person’s credit rating is available anywhere in the world, so their contract rating will also be available, and so there will be no place to hide from a broken contract save by going ‘off the grid’ completely..."
Until DRO's in one area decide to act as haven's for ill-gotten money. What makes him think a DRO would act more reponsibly than the Cayman Islands?
Who would do business with them? DRO's have to be able to interact. If you don't buy that, then we have to accept it as a risk of doing business, just like we do now.
"The second problem is the fear that a particular DRO will grow in size and stature to the point where it takes on all the features and properties of a new State. This is a superstitious fear, because there is no historical example of a private company replacing a political State."
He needs to stop citing history because he knows shit-all about it. Ever heard of company towns? Mining companies in the 19th century used to own the mine, all the tools used in it, the houses in town, the school, the store, everything. They controlled the credit of the workers and by extension their families. They had their own private militias to enforce their whim. How different is that from a state?
Molyneux is overlooking (probably intentionally) the painfully obvious reason that a company has never grown into a state: because the states don't let them! Corporations only governed by profit margins, through the DRO's, would be much more frightening than they are today.
In other words, they used force, something which would certainly be something that could be appealed to a DRO. A sensible worker has a clause in his contract that forbids the use of force (or something to that effect) and if a company breaks that agreement, they appeal to a DRO.
The reason a company has never grown into a state is because you can choose to stop giving them money.
"First of all, if any DRO can take over society and impose itself as a new State, why only a DRO? Why not the Rotary Club? Why not a union? Why not the Mafia?...in the final analysis, if society is so terrified of a single group seizing a monopoly of political power, what does that say about the existing States? They have a monopoly of political power."
Here Molyneux is telling us that there's no tangible difference between a society run by existing States and one run by the Mafia. He needs to rotate living a year in Canada with a year in Zimbabwe until he understands the difference.
So you're comparing Mugabe (the state) to a thug. Exactly what Molyneux was doing. He says it is a matter of degrees, since both rely on the threat of force (via arrest) to collect their tribute. Mugabe is just a lot nastier about it.
"Roads, sewage, water and electricity and so on are also cited as reasons why a State must exist. The problem that a water company might build plumbing to a community, and then charge exorbitant fees for supplying it, is equally easy to counter. A truck could deliver bottled water, or the community could invest in a water tower, a competing company could build alternate pipes and so on."
Ok, so lets look at the water problem. Fees for using the water pipes are too high. So we truck in bottled water? Not only is bottled water going to be more expensive, trucking it in will be mostrously ineffective and environmentally damaging. On top of this the cost of trucking it in will be raised by the road fees (let's hope they're not exploitative as well!) Not all communities are big enough to afford a water tower, and some are too large for that to solve anything.
The alternate pipes solution brings me to another point, which also applies to roads and power lines. You only need one! One road from A to B. Having competing roads trying to undercut each other for cost is a waste of raw material, not to mention space. What happens when road companies start offering monthly passes? Then you need a map to remember which roads you can drive on for free, and you better hope they go to your destination, because fees on the other roads are higher for members of the competition. It's all a pretty pointless exercise.
If they're trucking in the bottled water, clearly it isn't more expensive. They would choose the least expensive solution. Compeition drives down prices. Road fees would be offset by the fact you wouldn't be paying taxes.
That's assuming competing companies can both buy property. A pass system (for example) could get complicated, but again, the market will create solutions. And who is to say I can only do business with one company? I may need to drive on three people's roads to get to where I work, so I make a deal with all three. It is in their best interest to make access to other people's roads easy (why would I pay for a road that doesn't go anywhere?)
"A lumber company cannot buy woodlands from the State, just the right to harvest trees. Thus the State gets a renewable source of income, and can further coerce lumber companies by enforcing re-seeding. This, of course, tends to promote bribery, corruption and the creation of ‘fly-by-night’ lumber companies which strip the land bare, but vanish when it comes time to re-seed. Auctioning State land to a private market easily solves this problem, because a company which re-seeded would reap the greatest long-term profits from woodland, and so would be able to bid the most for the land."
He's right about the current system, but hopelessly optimistic about his own. What I see happening is this. The land is auctioned to a private company, which moves in and cuts down all the trees for lumber. Then, they sell the land to a development agency to build some suburbs. The lumber company folds, and the owners and stockholders go home with pockets full of cash. His problem is that he expects the companies to think long term, when in reality corporations rarely think more than 5 years ahead due to constant shareholder pressure for profit.
Trees take more then five years to grow, so they must out of necessity. Many paper companies do actually own the plots of land they grow on, and they are among the best managed around.
"Also, it should be remembered that, in the realm of air pollution, governments created the problem in the first place. In 19th century England, when industrial smokestacks began belching fumes...the farmers took the factory-owners to court...Naturally, the capitalists had gotten to the State courts first...The free market did not fail to solve the problem of air pollution - it was forcibly prevented from doing so through State corruption."
Let's be clear: industrialism, not governments, created the problem. All the government did was ignore it. The court's decision was not an isolated one, and corruption can't be blamed for a general policy of non-intervention. The irony is that the British government before WW1 was very reluctant to involve itself in new areas, which allowed pollution to spiral out of control.
Government actively supported it, as Molyneux mentioned in the example cited.
"If the aforementioned group of homeowners is afraid of pollution, the first thing they will do is buy pollution insurance, which is a natural response to a situation where costs cannot be predicted but consequences are dire."
Um, no. Pollution, unfortunately, is something the vast majority of people wouldn't hand a penny over to prevent. Molyneux talks about people downwind from a factory because you can almost picture the scenario playing out as he sees it. In reality, most pollution doesn't visibly impact individuals. Companies dumping into the ocean aren't going to be facing irate DRO's, because no one is going to take out clean ocean insurance. How can you have global warming insurance? It affects everyone, and thousands of factories contribute to it.
They would if it affected them directly. I don't want my house smelling like tar, and neither would my neighboors. Oceans (except maybe deep-sea areas) would be owned, so those dumping would be liable for the damages it does to other people's property. Global warming is a by-product of other forms of pollution, such as smog, which would be prevented because of other people's interest in preserving the value of their own property.
"The idea that society can only survive in the absence of a centralized State is the greatest lesson that the grisly years of the Twentieth Century can teach us."
Well, it also taught us that if you strip away the state completely, you have Somalia. As fun as feudal warlords are (not to mention the imposition of radical Islam!), I think I prefer to live somewhere with federal law.
Again, going by Wikipedia, what happened was that there were assassinations going on in a military government, and nothern Somalia seceeded, calling themselves Somaliland. They are, to quote the article "relatively stable compared to the tumultuous south." The two year UN effort primarily took place in the south. After that, it seems to me that the biggest problem is that civilans are caught in the middle of those who want to establish a state with them at the head. I think post-Katrina New Orleans is a better example of a stateless society. I don't think it can be argued that the government royally cocked up there, and now have little influence. Things went to shit for awhile, mostly looting while people tried to survive. Now things are still being re-established, but it strongly demonstrates the value of private enterprise over state assistance. Common Ground Collective is an example of where private enterprise stepped in to fill a gap government had failed at.
"Whatever the risks involved in dissolving the central State, they are far less than the certain destruction which will result from its inevitable escalation."
Certain destruction! Jack Layton's diabolical plan revealed...the blood tax!
Hyperbole revealed! Why exactly is some beaurocrat a better judge of how money I earned should be spent? If government wants my money the best thing they can do is create a service I would be willing to pay for.