When Bryan talks about International Relations, it is literally the only time I'm not blown away by his thinking. For example, this is from the post:
"If you object, “The stronger business will just forcibly impose its will on the weaker business,” you’ve got to explain why the U.S. doesn’t just force its will on Canada. Which it obviously doesn’t. For a great many reasons."
Well, the US would absolutely impose it's will upon Canada if Canada's intentions deviated too far from what the US considered acceptable behavior. Do you really think the US would have allowed Canada to become a communist country in the 1950s? Of course not, just like the US intervened in various ways all through Central and South America to prevent exactly that. The US doesn't impose it's will violently against Canada because it doesn't need to.
Or pointing to the fact that France and Germany haven't fought since WW2. Few points. In the lives of countries and warfare 70-80 years isn't very long. Also it's not clear they wouldn't have fought if the giant behemoth that has been the US wasn't there to mediate disputes, just like a much larger and more powerful parent mediates disputes between siblings (in terms of power discrepancies, not saying those countries are children)
Over to others exactly what that means in the context of the article, but it's certainly not a slam dunk to say "all countries don't always use force against each other, therefore businesses won't."
Hey Bryan, what do you think about the Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei? Prediction markets give him about a ~75% chance of winning. He's a half-Austrian half-orthodox economist and a self professed anarcho-capitalist. His style of politics is a sort of Rothbardian libertarian populism. He regularly characterizes politicians as evil and parasitic, as you have often done.
His policy positions and/or views include:
> Closing the central bank, liquidating it in US dollars, and eliminating the Argentine peso.
> A Gary Becker incentive-based economical approach to policing.
> Implementing education vouchers and eliminating state control of school syllabi.
> Implementing a more market-based government healthcare system.
> Deregulating the labor market and replacing firing restrictions and severance payments with a more flexible unemployment insurance system.
> General deregulation in all areas of the economy.
> Privatizing all state companies.
> Eliminating all price controls.
> Lowering taxes, public spending, and eliminating the deficit. Reforming the tax code so that it is less distorsive.
> Unilateral opening of the economy, moving towards absolute free trade.
Why would this possibly be good? I can't imagine Argentina is a big destination for high IQ migrants, so you're just going going to be getting people incapable of making Argentina better. Unless Argentina has a severe shortage of low income low skilled workers...?
Argentina is empty and needs more people. Lots of immigrants are highly educated Venezuelans escaping socialism, or hardworking (less educated) people from Paraguay. Besides, freedom of immigration is protected by the Argentine Constitution and that can't be changed.
Just finished watching/listening to this debate on my lunch break today, and I've gotta say that Bryan's contribution of any system being stable (not optimal or even good, just stable) once the weight of public opinion is on its side was eye-opening to me. It shouldn't have been since it's very similar in nature to Rothbard's point in Anatomy of the State that the state also rests on public opinion, but I guess since that put me in the mindset of dismantling public opinion as it relates to the state, I completely overlooked the possibility of making anarcho-capitalism stable by inducing public opinion towards it. Unfortunately, political beliefs such as this likely are paradigms in a similar sense to Kuhn's paradigms of scientific thought, so we will just need to keep arguing against the state at every opportunity to speed our approach to the tipping point.
Anarcho-capitalism and communism are products of the unfocused mind. The possibility of evil and error require govt to forcibly protect rights. There is no Garden Of Eden where the focused mind is irrelevant. In the very early days of Objectivism, some Catholics were attracted to Rand's absolute morality but eventually rejected it because it was rationally absolute. As Catholics, they had expected faith-based absolutes. Exactly like anarcho-capitalists, they valued the unfocused mind.
"So what? If you claim that anarcho-capitalism would be a complete disaster for humanity if were tried today, I agree. But the problem isn’t that anarcho-capitalism fails to provide good incentives, or that the system “logically” collapses in gang warfare. The problem is expectations. Moving from stable democracy to stable anarcho-capitalism is like moving from stable dictatorship to stable democracy. Shifting expectations is very hard; but the problem is the transition, not the destination."
I was reminded of this quote from Peter Singer on Marx (from Scott Alexander's review):
"This is the gist of Marx’s objection to classical economics. Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science. Instead, he takes a viewpoint outside those presuppositions and argues that private property, competition, greed, and so on are to be found only in a particular condition of human existence, a condition of alienation."
It seems like your argument for Anarcho-Capitalism takes a similar structure to Marx's argument for Communism- stressing the importance of a transformation of people's expectations.
>Shifting expectations is very hard; but the problem is the transition, not the destination."
In the unfocused mind is the Garden Of Eden and when that is recognized as impossible, demons. Thus the Leftist change from communist idealism to environmentalist/racist nihilism.
I think Bryan did an excellent job in the debate. Sadly this is one of those issues people might be too stubborn to convince (David Friedman could not convince his father even after decades).
I voted for Trump twice and was basically a regular conservative who was a bit less populist when it came to economics. A couple years ago when inflation started happening I got curious about economics and now I'm an ancap. So, it's not totally hopeless.
>A society where businesses contractually acquire sizable tracts of land, then provide police, courts, and so on as part of a package deal. When conflict spills across their “borders,” they adjudicate their disputes much as the U.S. and Canada do today.
A problem is the generation of rules. If someone wants abortion to be illegal after 20 weeks, they want it for everyone, not just for themselves and others who already agree. What use are rules against vagrancy or public intoxication or public nudity or open meth labs whatever if people just subscribe to the libertine agency and do what they want in the street in front of your house anyway? If you don't like these examples, you can come up with ones that probably apply to you. I find it hard to envision a way around people wanting such rules to be a function of physical location. Physically partitioning along lifestyle and cultural lines seems to be an ingrained natural thing to humans.
I've read David Friedman's books on this topic and his logic is good, but it's still hard to envision. Also, my takeaway from his stuff was actually that if his logic/predictions played out we'd end up with something not too different from what we have now in the end, as people with resources could drive the de facto enforced rules anyway. It's been many years since I read his stuff though.
For those unclear as to how an anarchocapitalist society might work, laid out in detail, check out the chapter in Randy Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty that discusses exactly that. Randy, both a former prosecutor and a legal scholar specializing in both contracts and the Constitution, explains how it could work in great detail. This chapter was first published in a law journal in the mid 1990s, so it’s not as if libertarian scholars haven’t given the issue any thought.
Interesting. Definitely an important part of discussion of future options. Human societies have been developing for a long long time. Communication and organizational tools have been developing as well.We (humans) are really at a very very early stage (hopeful; I'd like to think we'll be around for millions of years). Barely (and I'm stretching here) 10,000 years of writing (much of that on clay tablets and papyrus). a little over 100 years of quantum physics, etc etc... we're really barely scratching the surface of knowledge. to think that we've figured out optimal governance, allocation of resources, priorities and so on is silly. We're at point we are just learning how to combine atoms and molecules into really interesting things. We need a lot more imagination about how to structure society and civilizations. Nature has been working relentlessly for several billion years experimenting with all kinds of approaches for life, communities, societies, and clusters of cells organizing in different ways. Keep at it. Keep imagining and experimenting with different approaches. It'll a fascinating journey and hopefully a nice one for most involved.
With many traffic accidents we don't know the identities of the people involved or who their insurer is. When a murdered body is found, it's also not obvious who caused it. But police have jurisdiction based on geography and can handle it anyway. I've read Benson's "The Enterprise of Law" and know the private sector can handle many things, but police patrols do appear to be a "public good" within a geographical area that reduce crime.
Not necessarily, there are apartments guarded and patrolled by private security guards. I don't see how that cannot be done in a larger scale. Regarding a murdered body, if the risk of being murdered can be pooled so that murder insurance is profitable, then the compensation can be done by insurance companies. As for retaliation and deterrence, I think the insurance company and the security service provider have enough incentives to take that into their hands.
> apartments guarded and patrolled by private security guards
...suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.
-Rand
Caplan is not a systematic thinker, not even within economics. He grabs ideas in the moment when they solve an out-of-context problem. Pragmatism is the product of an unfocused mind. Thus the return of religion, to provide the illusion of mental unity without the risk of knowledge of the focused mind.
>As for retaliation and deterrence, I think the insurance company and the security service provider have enough incentives to take that into their hands.
Have you heard of the free rider problem? The only ways of reducing the risk of public homicide at scale are those that make thing safer for everyone regardless of whether they have insurance or not.
By free riding, I assume you are talking about deterrence? Well, deterrence is connected with retaliation, so the externality is at least partially internalized. I am pretty sure there are also other ways to internalize externalities. For instance, business owners, or landlords, might pay private security service to improve their income because the place is safer and thus more profitable.
What about the poor who cannot pay for security service? One way David Friedman mentioned in his book, and was indeed implemented in Iceland, or even among gangsters, is to make compensation and retaliation sellable. In this way, the victim can sell their right for compensation to someone richer as a form of compensation.
One more note about externality. I think people often exaggerate externality problems too much. In real life people generally care less about that. If you live in an apartment guarded by private security agents, would you charge your guests for the safe time they spend in your apartment room?
I fail to understand this fascination with a government police monopoly. I don't agree a courts monopoly is necessary either, but it at least seems an understandable mistake. But individualists wanting government monopoly police is beyond my comprehension. Corruption is inevitable in any artificial monopoly.
And then this subscription service model, also known as protection agencies or private law, but better known as protection rackets, astounds me. How anyone can imagine that it won't devolve into a few big agencies all following the same set of laws -- ie, government -- and making a mockery of "private law" (imagine MADD and DAMM negotiating, or pro- and anti-abortionists) is also beyond my comprehension. I must be missing something every time I read of them, but darned if I know what its proponents see in them.
My fantasy world would have just one general rule, "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" and prosecuted by victims (or guardians etc). Anything more complicated is begging for a revival of lawyers and quibbles and bureaucratic administrative government suffocating rights and the economy.
Anarcho-capitalists lose me very quickly for semantic reasons, because I see their "private security companies" simply as governments. It might be good for governments to be more rigorously consensual and have more of an exit option, but I wouldn't call that anarchy. I think Leo Tolstoy has more of a right to claim the term for his extreme pacifism. No room for "private security companies" there. Just moral suasion leading to nonviolence dissolving all use of force including by governments.
So the problem with Haiti is that the government is too stong and has too much control over society? You think a place so poor that they literally have to eat dirt is a place where private defence and legal systems are going to be established?
Don't you think its kind of absurd to suggest that many developing countries are extremely poor, violent and undeveloped compared to the west due to the presence of states, despite the fact that industrialization ocurred in western countries with strong states? All of this depends on an endless series of just so stories for why statism categorically fails to explain differences in economic development through history and today.
But what else would you expect from a hereidity denier?
When Bryan talks about International Relations, it is literally the only time I'm not blown away by his thinking. For example, this is from the post:
"If you object, “The stronger business will just forcibly impose its will on the weaker business,” you’ve got to explain why the U.S. doesn’t just force its will on Canada. Which it obviously doesn’t. For a great many reasons."
Well, the US would absolutely impose it's will upon Canada if Canada's intentions deviated too far from what the US considered acceptable behavior. Do you really think the US would have allowed Canada to become a communist country in the 1950s? Of course not, just like the US intervened in various ways all through Central and South America to prevent exactly that. The US doesn't impose it's will violently against Canada because it doesn't need to.
Or pointing to the fact that France and Germany haven't fought since WW2. Few points. In the lives of countries and warfare 70-80 years isn't very long. Also it's not clear they wouldn't have fought if the giant behemoth that has been the US wasn't there to mediate disputes, just like a much larger and more powerful parent mediates disputes between siblings (in terms of power discrepancies, not saying those countries are children)
Over to others exactly what that means in the context of the article, but it's certainly not a slam dunk to say "all countries don't always use force against each other, therefore businesses won't."
Hey Bryan, what do you think about the Argentine presidential candidate Javier Milei? Prediction markets give him about a ~75% chance of winning. He's a half-Austrian half-orthodox economist and a self professed anarcho-capitalist. His style of politics is a sort of Rothbardian libertarian populism. He regularly characterizes politicians as evil and parasitic, as you have often done.
His policy positions and/or views include:
> Closing the central bank, liquidating it in US dollars, and eliminating the Argentine peso.
> A Gary Becker incentive-based economical approach to policing.
> Implementing education vouchers and eliminating state control of school syllabi.
> Implementing a more market-based government healthcare system.
> Deregulating the labor market and replacing firing restrictions and severance payments with a more flexible unemployment insurance system.
> General deregulation in all areas of the economy.
> Privatizing all state companies.
> Eliminating all price controls.
> Lowering taxes, public spending, and eliminating the deficit. Reforming the tax code so that it is less distorsive.
> Unilateral opening of the economy, moving towards absolute free trade.
> Free immigration.
> Legal kidney markets.
What do you think? Have you heard of him?
"Free immigration"
Why would this possibly be good? I can't imagine Argentina is a big destination for high IQ migrants, so you're just going going to be getting people incapable of making Argentina better. Unless Argentina has a severe shortage of low income low skilled workers...?
Argentina is empty and needs more people. Lots of immigrants are highly educated Venezuelans escaping socialism, or hardworking (less educated) people from Paraguay. Besides, freedom of immigration is protected by the Argentine Constitution and that can't be changed.
Just finished watching/listening to this debate on my lunch break today, and I've gotta say that Bryan's contribution of any system being stable (not optimal or even good, just stable) once the weight of public opinion is on its side was eye-opening to me. It shouldn't have been since it's very similar in nature to Rothbard's point in Anatomy of the State that the state also rests on public opinion, but I guess since that put me in the mindset of dismantling public opinion as it relates to the state, I completely overlooked the possibility of making anarcho-capitalism stable by inducing public opinion towards it. Unfortunately, political beliefs such as this likely are paradigms in a similar sense to Kuhn's paradigms of scientific thought, so we will just need to keep arguing against the state at every opportunity to speed our approach to the tipping point.
Anarcho-capitalism and communism are products of the unfocused mind. The possibility of evil and error require govt to forcibly protect rights. There is no Garden Of Eden where the focused mind is irrelevant. In the very early days of Objectivism, some Catholics were attracted to Rand's absolute morality but eventually rejected it because it was rationally absolute. As Catholics, they had expected faith-based absolutes. Exactly like anarcho-capitalists, they valued the unfocused mind.
No, anarcho-capitalism is not the product of the unfocused mind. That's cope.
I was surprised you went in this direction:
"So what? If you claim that anarcho-capitalism would be a complete disaster for humanity if were tried today, I agree. But the problem isn’t that anarcho-capitalism fails to provide good incentives, or that the system “logically” collapses in gang warfare. The problem is expectations. Moving from stable democracy to stable anarcho-capitalism is like moving from stable dictatorship to stable democracy. Shifting expectations is very hard; but the problem is the transition, not the destination."
I was reminded of this quote from Peter Singer on Marx (from Scott Alexander's review):
"This is the gist of Marx’s objection to classical economics. Marx does not challenge the classical economists within the presuppositions of their science. Instead, he takes a viewpoint outside those presuppositions and argues that private property, competition, greed, and so on are to be found only in a particular condition of human existence, a condition of alienation."
It seems like your argument for Anarcho-Capitalism takes a similar structure to Marx's argument for Communism- stressing the importance of a transformation of people's expectations.
>Shifting expectations is very hard; but the problem is the transition, not the destination."
In the unfocused mind is the Garden Of Eden and when that is recognized as impossible, demons. Thus the Leftist change from communist idealism to environmentalist/racist nihilism.
I think Bryan did an excellent job in the debate. Sadly this is one of those issues people might be too stubborn to convince (David Friedman could not convince his father even after decades).
I voted for Trump twice and was basically a regular conservative who was a bit less populist when it came to economics. A couple years ago when inflation started happening I got curious about economics and now I'm an ancap. So, it's not totally hopeless.
Also a company conquered India technically
>A society where businesses contractually acquire sizable tracts of land, then provide police, courts, and so on as part of a package deal. When conflict spills across their “borders,” they adjudicate their disputes much as the U.S. and Canada do today.
Congrats Bryan, on inventing feudalism.
He addresses the claim of feudalism in the debate.
I'm sure it's as well thought out as the rest of his politics.
A problem is the generation of rules. If someone wants abortion to be illegal after 20 weeks, they want it for everyone, not just for themselves and others who already agree. What use are rules against vagrancy or public intoxication or public nudity or open meth labs whatever if people just subscribe to the libertine agency and do what they want in the street in front of your house anyway? If you don't like these examples, you can come up with ones that probably apply to you. I find it hard to envision a way around people wanting such rules to be a function of physical location. Physically partitioning along lifestyle and cultural lines seems to be an ingrained natural thing to humans.
I've read David Friedman's books on this topic and his logic is good, but it's still hard to envision. Also, my takeaway from his stuff was actually that if his logic/predictions played out we'd end up with something not too different from what we have now in the end, as people with resources could drive the de facto enforced rules anyway. It's been many years since I read his stuff though.
Why do you need those rules, or any rules, outside of any individual contract between two parties?
Don't hurt people and don't take their stuff. Anything else is statism and minding everybody else's business.
For those unclear as to how an anarchocapitalist society might work, laid out in detail, check out the chapter in Randy Barnett’s The Structure of Liberty that discusses exactly that. Randy, both a former prosecutor and a legal scholar specializing in both contracts and the Constitution, explains how it could work in great detail. This chapter was first published in a law journal in the mid 1990s, so it’s not as if libertarian scholars haven’t given the issue any thought.
Interesting. Definitely an important part of discussion of future options. Human societies have been developing for a long long time. Communication and organizational tools have been developing as well.We (humans) are really at a very very early stage (hopeful; I'd like to think we'll be around for millions of years). Barely (and I'm stretching here) 10,000 years of writing (much of that on clay tablets and papyrus). a little over 100 years of quantum physics, etc etc... we're really barely scratching the surface of knowledge. to think that we've figured out optimal governance, allocation of resources, priorities and so on is silly. We're at point we are just learning how to combine atoms and molecules into really interesting things. We need a lot more imagination about how to structure society and civilizations. Nature has been working relentlessly for several billion years experimenting with all kinds of approaches for life, communities, societies, and clusters of cells organizing in different ways. Keep at it. Keep imagining and experimenting with different approaches. It'll a fascinating journey and hopefully a nice one for most involved.
> and hopefully a nice one for most involved.
Hopefully, not rationally.
With many traffic accidents we don't know the identities of the people involved or who their insurer is. When a murdered body is found, it's also not obvious who caused it. But police have jurisdiction based on geography and can handle it anyway. I've read Benson's "The Enterprise of Law" and know the private sector can handle many things, but police patrols do appear to be a "public good" within a geographical area that reduce crime.
Not necessarily, there are apartments guarded and patrolled by private security guards. I don't see how that cannot be done in a larger scale. Regarding a murdered body, if the risk of being murdered can be pooled so that murder insurance is profitable, then the compensation can be done by insurance companies. As for retaliation and deterrence, I think the insurance company and the security service provider have enough incentives to take that into their hands.
> apartments guarded and patrolled by private security guards
...suppose Mr. Smith, a customer of Government A, suspects that his next-door neighbor, Mr. Jones, a customer of Government B, has robbed him; a squad of Police A proceeds to Mr. Jones’ house and is met at the door by a squad of Police B, who declare that they do not accept the validity of Mr. Smith’s complaint and do not recognize the authority of Government A. What happens then? You take it from there.
-Rand
Caplan is not a systematic thinker, not even within economics. He grabs ideas in the moment when they solve an out-of-context problem. Pragmatism is the product of an unfocused mind. Thus the return of religion, to provide the illusion of mental unity without the risk of knowledge of the focused mind.
The Virtue of Selfishness
What happens if Bob Knight punches a cop in Puerto Rico and the state of Indiana does not accept the validity of Puerto Rico's complaint?
Thats exactly Rands rejection of anarchy.
I know. My point is it also happens in archy.
So she has to reject minarchy too.
Definition by non-essentials. Anarchy is a rejection of objectivity. Objectivity is the base of individual rights govt.
For those who don't know the reference, here is, off the top of my head, my version of a 45 year old incident:
Bob Knight punches cop in Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico asks Indiana to extradite him for trial
Indiana says no
Puerto Rico points out that SCOTUS has ruled that extradition within the US is not optional
Indiana asks how many divisions SCOTUS controls
Puerto Rico fumes for a while
Bob Knight issues an "apology" and it all goes away.
This seems exactly like what would happen in Caplan's ancap scenario.
>As for retaliation and deterrence, I think the insurance company and the security service provider have enough incentives to take that into their hands.
Have you heard of the free rider problem? The only ways of reducing the risk of public homicide at scale are those that make thing safer for everyone regardless of whether they have insurance or not.
By free riding, I assume you are talking about deterrence? Well, deterrence is connected with retaliation, so the externality is at least partially internalized. I am pretty sure there are also other ways to internalize externalities. For instance, business owners, or landlords, might pay private security service to improve their income because the place is safer and thus more profitable.
What about the poor who cannot pay for security service? One way David Friedman mentioned in his book, and was indeed implemented in Iceland, or even among gangsters, is to make compensation and retaliation sellable. In this way, the victim can sell their right for compensation to someone richer as a form of compensation.
One more note about externality. I think people often exaggerate externality problems too much. In real life people generally care less about that. If you live in an apartment guarded by private security agents, would you charge your guests for the safe time they spend in your apartment room?
A world of minarchy is unstable. Sooner or later a state embarks on conquest.
I fail to understand this fascination with a government police monopoly. I don't agree a courts monopoly is necessary either, but it at least seems an understandable mistake. But individualists wanting government monopoly police is beyond my comprehension. Corruption is inevitable in any artificial monopoly.
And then this subscription service model, also known as protection agencies or private law, but better known as protection rackets, astounds me. How anyone can imagine that it won't devolve into a few big agencies all following the same set of laws -- ie, government -- and making a mockery of "private law" (imagine MADD and DAMM negotiating, or pro- and anti-abortionists) is also beyond my comprehension. I must be missing something every time I read of them, but darned if I know what its proponents see in them.
My fantasy world would have just one general rule, "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" and prosecuted by victims (or guardians etc). Anything more complicated is begging for a revival of lawyers and quibbles and bureaucratic administrative government suffocating rights and the economy.
Anarcho-capitalists lose me very quickly for semantic reasons, because I see their "private security companies" simply as governments. It might be good for governments to be more rigorously consensual and have more of an exit option, but I wouldn't call that anarchy. I think Leo Tolstoy has more of a right to claim the term for his extreme pacifism. No room for "private security companies" there. Just moral suasion leading to nonviolence dissolving all use of force including by governments.
I think my book *Principles of a Free Society* pushes in a direction rather harmonious with the anarcho-capitalist project while being clearer. https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B004J8HV0Q/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1696069117&sr=8-1
It also elucidated how we move forward: CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE. It's through civil disobedience to unjust laws that great moral advances are made.
So the problem with Haiti is that the government is too stong and has too much control over society? You think a place so poor that they literally have to eat dirt is a place where private defence and legal systems are going to be established?
Don't you think its kind of absurd to suggest that many developing countries are extremely poor, violent and undeveloped compared to the west due to the presence of states, despite the fact that industrialization ocurred in western countries with strong states? All of this depends on an endless series of just so stories for why statism categorically fails to explain differences in economic development through history and today.
But what else would you expect from a hereidity denier?