I detest the "protection agency" idea. It strikes me as the worst kind of collectivist nonsense. Some writer, who liked them, said they should more properly be called "protection rackets" and he was right, whoever it was
What especially annoys me is the idea that they foster "private law". Depending on whose description you read, some have private law per protection agency, some add per private arbitrator.
But, you may ask, how can that work? What if a Mothers Against Drunk Drivers client wants to sue a Drunks Against Mad Mothers client? Whose private law applies, you ask.
Glad you asked, they respond. When agencies can't compromise, the alternative is literal war, dead bodies and grieving mothers and widows. Obviously that's too expensive, so such radical lawsets won't survive, and agencies will standardize on standard lawsets.
But, you ask in puzzlement, isn't that in contradiction to "private law"?
Crickets.
Then you ask what happens to criminals who don't pay their verdict debts. "Oh, their agencies drop them, no other agency will sign up deadbeats, so now they are easy scapegoats for unsolved crimes and can be enslaved to work off their unpaid verdict debt."
Slavery! you yell in suprise. "Of course, but because agencies want their money back, it will be kind and gentle and efficient slavery, and once released, they will be certified as rehabilitated members of society and agencies will sign them up again."
Obviously they are unfamiliar with thousands of years of slavery, and the recidivism rate of modern prisons.
And these guys are serious! Or at least claim to be.
Re: the private police force. This strikes me as an unstable equilibrium: insurance-like, a lot of people will not be able to afford it, or only a subpar version of it, resulting in either a permanent "outlaw" class (as in, a class with no recourse for protection by the law, a permitted victim) or an ever more onerous "protection fee" that will eat all disposable income moloch style without added benefits. And secondly, regarding the "our police vs their police" that you say is solved by incentives, I think you're under weighting the behaviours of cross population resentment (visible with USA ICE nowadays). People will accept heavy costs in order to harm their outgroups, and will do so in a coordinated manner.
Merge my two points, and you get death squads and ghettos in a few years.
Yes, they make no sense except in a perfect world of law-abiding criminals. Probability Broach makes more sense than protection rackets and private law.
I don’t understand how the basic rules of commerce, which underpin all market based systems, get enforced without either a central state with a monopoly on violence, or pretty constant conflict between warlords. Just shockingly historically illiterate to blithely state that violence will be avoided because it isn’t cost optimal.
On one hand, I don't agree about Rothbard's merits; I think David Friedman did a better job in The Machinery of Freedom. On another, I don't think anarchocapitalism works as a model of a free sociey, for reasons I discussed in a recent post: https://williamhstoddard793246.substack.com/p/anarchocapitalism-as-a-political
I don't either. But the US is pretty much unique in the world in being immune to invasion. Too much "national defense" only exists because we have bases and military stationed around the world which only exist to protect the overseas locations. The crony wanting garlic "protected" by tariffs is a fine example of how national security really means lining crony pockets.
A true defensive military doesn't need intercontinental bombers and transports, carriers, underway replenishment supply ships, and 99% of the military we have. "National defense" is an oxymoron; cronies and politicians (but I repeat myself) always find excuses to do just a little more, to be a little more prepared for the last war.
Rothbard liked The Godfather, which glamorized the mafia and was written by a man (Mario Puzo) openly ignorant about the subject and just trying to make money after his previous book sold poorly. He disliked Goodfellas, adapted from the confessions of an actual mafioso.
I worked up a real long rant about protection agencies after reading a few descriptions. Probably not worth anybody's time, but just in case someone wants a laugh at someone who gets so worked up about something so ludicrous ... https://chartertopia.substack.com/p/protection-rackets-01
What bothers me the most about the concept, as opposed to the unworkable internal contradictions I listed in my other comment, is this weird idea that insurance companies and police departments are natural allies so well suited for merger. Car insurance companies don't have their own mechanics. Fire insurance companies don't have their own construction crews. Why would crime insurance companies have their own police departments?
And if you ignore that and assume they would, and would all standardize on one set of laws, haven't you just reinvented government, with slavery for coercion? There's nothing at all libertarian about the idea that this is a natural outcome.
The average person never calls police, and most of those that do will only do so once or twice in their lifetime, for unpredictable problems. No one's going to sign up with separate burglary, mugger, and murder agencies, or libel, drunk driving, shoddy home construction, investment fraud, food poisoning, bad pharmaceuticals, and all the other possible agencies. When any of those crimes occur, they will shop around for someone who specializes in that area. Insurance may well foot the bill, but no one is going to buy separate insurance policies for all the private laws they want.
A much more natural outcome to the absence of government laws and police and prosecutors and courts is to fall back on "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" and hire a prosecutor for the specific harm you have suffered. That's the libertarian individualist spirit, not protection agencies with standardized sets of law who are governments in all but name.
The FBI's violent crime rate (murder, rape, robbery, and assault) in the US for 2017 (the last pre-COVID year) was 395 per 100,000 population; one out of 250 people every year, so 2/3 of the population will never be victims, although they will probably know a few. Property, burglary, and larceny together had a rate of 4500 per 100,000, one person out of 20, or four times in the average life. I don't know the distinction between individuals and businesses, or how many petty crimes were not reported. But it shows the pointlessness of making these protection agencies so central to society. Car insurance is only necessary for drivers. Home insurance is only necessary for home owners. Only 1/3 to 1/2 of renters have renters insurance. Why does everyone have to have insurance against becoming a criminal?
Because that's what this really comes down to. The core idea is that you call your agency, they find the criminal and negotiate with his agency. He pays his agency, his agency pays yours, and your agency pays you. But what if he doesn't have an agency? Then your agency has every incentive to not pay you, or to pay as little as possible.
And since most people will never need an agency, most people won't pay for the insurance, and will get away with it. The primary purpose of paying the insurance is in case someone else has a private law you violate unwittingly (MADD vs DAMM). If you have no agency to foot the bill on your behalf, you can be enslaved to work off the debt.
Your protection agency insurance is not about getting burgled, but about being fingered by some other agancy. Your insurance is against the possibility of being tagged as a criminal and enslaved to pay off the debt.
Insurance against being a criminal. It's about as dumb an idea as there is.
And, and, and ... what if you think your agency stiffed you or dropped you for no good reason? Who do you sue, now that you no longer have an agency acting on your behalf? What prevents your former agency from fingering you as a scapegoat so they can enslave you to shut you up?
Everyone needs insurance against bad protection agencies. Anyone who follows the news knows just how much good that will do. These agencies will cut deals with each other, just as government prosecutors and courts want nothing to do with prosecuting government police, and invented qualified and absolute immunity just for that purpose. It's why illegally obtained evidence is thrown out -- they don't want to prosecute bad cops. Does anyone actually believe that any protection agency would press a claim against another?
All right, no more rants on this. I can get pretty worked up over it.
Thanks for the write up. Literally nothing supposed ever deals with how often humans engage in " irrational and self-destructive behavior," nor "the next country over invades you takes your stuff kills the men and rapes the women."
Great chapter. A bit dubious that he off handedly says charity will replace the welfare state in a single sentence. I’m not sure if he’s actually persuaded that’s true or if it a knee jerk response.
The back half of the chapter opining on Ireland I also found questionable. I’m not well read enough to say anything definitively but am I really supposed to believe Ireland was a cultural capital for a millennia and that every art, music, literary, and cultural critic has completely failed to engage this?
I am definitely more open to the idea of private police though now. Not sure if I’m as sold on how everyone & the courts will spontaneously agree on his interpretation of law.
Also kinda copes on international defence. Afghanistan seems to vindicate him but would I rather live in Afghanistan because it’s harder to conquer than any other modern state? Probably not.
Can anarchism or anarcho-capitalism even define private property, never mind police or courts?
(1) Friedman's question about the extent of one's property in air space above one's parcel. It can only be defined politically.
(2) Nozick's example of labor mixing of pouring a bottle of ketchup into the ocean. How much labor is necessary to homestead precisely what thing can only be defined politically.
Does Rothbard make a case for private ownership of a valley or river where there is no way to make a competing road between two settlements? Or flood control over a county wide space.
* Private ownership of the sole means of access is more akin to scary monsters under a bed than a real problem. No one's going to buy property with no access, and blocking access later is theft in my book. It's like people who fear big box stores, pig farms, factories, skyscrapers, and sewage treatment plants in residential neighborhoods -- no one's going to waste money building where the infrastructure can't support its needs. I wouldn't be surprised (but I am just guessing) if Rothbard says easement contracts are the answer, but contracts can expire, and that still leaves theft for blocking access.
* Flood control usually means levees and dams. Dams are just infrastructure, but more easily blocked by holdouts than roads and railroads, which can bargain for deposits until it can establish a good route from the choices available. Airports are somewhere in between. But one thing to remember is that most people want the benefits. The Erie Canal of the early 1800s was so popular that some landowners along the route donated their land just to have that better transportation access. Levees aren't nearly the problem, because the threat of routing a levee around a holdout is scary. I imagine that once 75% or 90% of the landowners agree to a levee in principle and actual put up bonds, the holdouts will join in pretty quickly.
Remember that a lot of dams and roads were built entirely privately for a long time. Also look up Coase's lighthouses for an interesting eye-opener on private ownership of public goods.
As a P.S. ... Last time I spent time pondering easements for roads, pipelines, power lines, etc (as opposed to outright ownership), the matter of expiring contracts befuddled me for a while until I applied the same theft idea as for access rights. If some farmer decides to play hardball and demand a fortune for renewing a power line easement, he's denying access to their equipment. Naturally there can be disagreements over the value, but a farmer demanding a much higher renewal price, or a utility company demanding a much lower renewal price, can always be taken to court for theft or extortion, and it seems much too far-fetched to be realistic. Even apartment rental has limits; without government meddling, horror stories such as landlords demanding double the rent, or tenants refusing to pay more than half, strike me as Grimm fairy tales more than realistic, and that's in a market with far more flexibility than pipeline easements. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, or couldn't get messy, or wouldn't have community bias among the jurors. But that's the case in everything we do and applies to all criminal and civil court cases.
Public goods. According to professor Kanniainen the economics shows that NATO is the only public good that should be paid by utilizing the joint responsibility in the EU
I detest the "protection agency" idea. It strikes me as the worst kind of collectivist nonsense. Some writer, who liked them, said they should more properly be called "protection rackets" and he was right, whoever it was
What especially annoys me is the idea that they foster "private law". Depending on whose description you read, some have private law per protection agency, some add per private arbitrator.
But, you may ask, how can that work? What if a Mothers Against Drunk Drivers client wants to sue a Drunks Against Mad Mothers client? Whose private law applies, you ask.
Glad you asked, they respond. When agencies can't compromise, the alternative is literal war, dead bodies and grieving mothers and widows. Obviously that's too expensive, so such radical lawsets won't survive, and agencies will standardize on standard lawsets.
But, you ask in puzzlement, isn't that in contradiction to "private law"?
Crickets.
Then you ask what happens to criminals who don't pay their verdict debts. "Oh, their agencies drop them, no other agency will sign up deadbeats, so now they are easy scapegoats for unsolved crimes and can be enslaved to work off their unpaid verdict debt."
Slavery! you yell in suprise. "Of course, but because agencies want their money back, it will be kind and gentle and efficient slavery, and once released, they will be certified as rehabilitated members of society and agencies will sign them up again."
Obviously they are unfamiliar with thousands of years of slavery, and the recidivism rate of modern prisons.
And these guys are serious! Or at least claim to be.
https://mises.org/mises-wire/can-there-be-justice-outside-state-yes
How anyone can propose or swallow any of that justification for private law protection agencies is beyond my ken.
Re: the private police force. This strikes me as an unstable equilibrium: insurance-like, a lot of people will not be able to afford it, or only a subpar version of it, resulting in either a permanent "outlaw" class (as in, a class with no recourse for protection by the law, a permitted victim) or an ever more onerous "protection fee" that will eat all disposable income moloch style without added benefits. And secondly, regarding the "our police vs their police" that you say is solved by incentives, I think you're under weighting the behaviours of cross population resentment (visible with USA ICE nowadays). People will accept heavy costs in order to harm their outgroups, and will do so in a coordinated manner.
Merge my two points, and you get death squads and ghettos in a few years.
Yes, they make no sense except in a perfect world of law-abiding criminals. Probability Broach makes more sense than protection rackets and private law.
I don’t understand how the basic rules of commerce, which underpin all market based systems, get enforced without either a central state with a monopoly on violence, or pretty constant conflict between warlords. Just shockingly historically illiterate to blithely state that violence will be avoided because it isn’t cost optimal.
On one hand, I don't agree about Rothbard's merits; I think David Friedman did a better job in The Machinery of Freedom. On another, I don't think anarchocapitalism works as a model of a free sociey, for reasons I discussed in a recent post: https://williamhstoddard793246.substack.com/p/anarchocapitalism-as-a-political
David Friedman admits there he doesn't have a good solution for national defense.
True, but I don't think Rothbard has, either.
I don't either. But the US is pretty much unique in the world in being immune to invasion. Too much "national defense" only exists because we have bases and military stationed around the world which only exist to protect the overseas locations. The crony wanting garlic "protected" by tariffs is a fine example of how national security really means lining crony pockets.
A true defensive military doesn't need intercontinental bombers and transports, carriers, underway replenishment supply ships, and 99% of the military we have. "National defense" is an oxymoron; cronies and politicians (but I repeat myself) always find excuses to do just a little more, to be a little more prepared for the last war.
It's this sort of thing that made me feel more friendly toward mafias.
Rothbard liked The Godfather, which glamorized the mafia and was written by a man (Mario Puzo) openly ignorant about the subject and just trying to make money after his previous book sold poorly. He disliked Goodfellas, adapted from the confessions of an actual mafioso.
I worked up a real long rant about protection agencies after reading a few descriptions. Probably not worth anybody's time, but just in case someone wants a laugh at someone who gets so worked up about something so ludicrous ... https://chartertopia.substack.com/p/protection-rackets-01
What bothers me the most about the concept, as opposed to the unworkable internal contradictions I listed in my other comment, is this weird idea that insurance companies and police departments are natural allies so well suited for merger. Car insurance companies don't have their own mechanics. Fire insurance companies don't have their own construction crews. Why would crime insurance companies have their own police departments?
And if you ignore that and assume they would, and would all standardize on one set of laws, haven't you just reinvented government, with slavery for coercion? There's nothing at all libertarian about the idea that this is a natural outcome.
The average person never calls police, and most of those that do will only do so once or twice in their lifetime, for unpredictable problems. No one's going to sign up with separate burglary, mugger, and murder agencies, or libel, drunk driving, shoddy home construction, investment fraud, food poisoning, bad pharmaceuticals, and all the other possible agencies. When any of those crimes occur, they will shop around for someone who specializes in that area. Insurance may well foot the bill, but no one is going to buy separate insurance policies for all the private laws they want.
A much more natural outcome to the absence of government laws and police and prosecutors and courts is to fall back on "don't hurt people and don't take their stuff" and hire a prosecutor for the specific harm you have suffered. That's the libertarian individualist spirit, not protection agencies with standardized sets of law who are governments in all but name.
(People don't call cops all that much)
The FBI's violent crime rate (murder, rape, robbery, and assault) in the US for 2017 (the last pre-COVID year) was 395 per 100,000 population; one out of 250 people every year, so 2/3 of the population will never be victims, although they will probably know a few. Property, burglary, and larceny together had a rate of 4500 per 100,000, one person out of 20, or four times in the average life. I don't know the distinction between individuals and businesses, or how many petty crimes were not reported. But it shows the pointlessness of making these protection agencies so central to society. Car insurance is only necessary for drivers. Home insurance is only necessary for home owners. Only 1/3 to 1/2 of renters have renters insurance. Why does everyone have to have insurance against becoming a criminal?
Because that's what this really comes down to. The core idea is that you call your agency, they find the criminal and negotiate with his agency. He pays his agency, his agency pays yours, and your agency pays you. But what if he doesn't have an agency? Then your agency has every incentive to not pay you, or to pay as little as possible.
And since most people will never need an agency, most people won't pay for the insurance, and will get away with it. The primary purpose of paying the insurance is in case someone else has a private law you violate unwittingly (MADD vs DAMM). If you have no agency to foot the bill on your behalf, you can be enslaved to work off the debt.
Your protection agency insurance is not about getting burgled, but about being fingered by some other agancy. Your insurance is against the possibility of being tagged as a criminal and enslaved to pay off the debt.
Insurance against being a criminal. It's about as dumb an idea as there is.
And, and, and ... what if you think your agency stiffed you or dropped you for no good reason? Who do you sue, now that you no longer have an agency acting on your behalf? What prevents your former agency from fingering you as a scapegoat so they can enslave you to shut you up?
Everyone needs insurance against bad protection agencies. Anyone who follows the news knows just how much good that will do. These agencies will cut deals with each other, just as government prosecutors and courts want nothing to do with prosecuting government police, and invented qualified and absolute immunity just for that purpose. It's why illegally obtained evidence is thrown out -- they don't want to prosecute bad cops. Does anyone actually believe that any protection agency would press a claim against another?
All right, no more rants on this. I can get pretty worked up over it.
Thanks for the write up. Literally nothing supposed ever deals with how often humans engage in " irrational and self-destructive behavior," nor "the next country over invades you takes your stuff kills the men and rapes the women."
Great chapter. A bit dubious that he off handedly says charity will replace the welfare state in a single sentence. I’m not sure if he’s actually persuaded that’s true or if it a knee jerk response.
The back half of the chapter opining on Ireland I also found questionable. I’m not well read enough to say anything definitively but am I really supposed to believe Ireland was a cultural capital for a millennia and that every art, music, literary, and cultural critic has completely failed to engage this?
I am definitely more open to the idea of private police though now. Not sure if I’m as sold on how everyone & the courts will spontaneously agree on his interpretation of law.
Also kinda copes on international defence. Afghanistan seems to vindicate him but would I rather live in Afghanistan because it’s harder to conquer than any other modern state? Probably not.
Can anarchism or anarcho-capitalism even define private property, never mind police or courts?
(1) Friedman's question about the extent of one's property in air space above one's parcel. It can only be defined politically.
(2) Nozick's example of labor mixing of pouring a bottle of ketchup into the ocean. How much labor is necessary to homestead precisely what thing can only be defined politically.
Does Rothbard make a case for private ownership of a valley or river where there is no way to make a competing road between two settlements? Or flood control over a county wide space.
I don't know. But they are different matters.
* Private ownership of the sole means of access is more akin to scary monsters under a bed than a real problem. No one's going to buy property with no access, and blocking access later is theft in my book. It's like people who fear big box stores, pig farms, factories, skyscrapers, and sewage treatment plants in residential neighborhoods -- no one's going to waste money building where the infrastructure can't support its needs. I wouldn't be surprised (but I am just guessing) if Rothbard says easement contracts are the answer, but contracts can expire, and that still leaves theft for blocking access.
* Flood control usually means levees and dams. Dams are just infrastructure, but more easily blocked by holdouts than roads and railroads, which can bargain for deposits until it can establish a good route from the choices available. Airports are somewhere in between. But one thing to remember is that most people want the benefits. The Erie Canal of the early 1800s was so popular that some landowners along the route donated their land just to have that better transportation access. Levees aren't nearly the problem, because the threat of routing a levee around a holdout is scary. I imagine that once 75% or 90% of the landowners agree to a levee in principle and actual put up bonds, the holdouts will join in pretty quickly.
Remember that a lot of dams and roads were built entirely privately for a long time. Also look up Coase's lighthouses for an interesting eye-opener on private ownership of public goods.
As a P.S. ... Last time I spent time pondering easements for roads, pipelines, power lines, etc (as opposed to outright ownership), the matter of expiring contracts befuddled me for a while until I applied the same theft idea as for access rights. If some farmer decides to play hardball and demand a fortune for renewing a power line easement, he's denying access to their equipment. Naturally there can be disagreements over the value, but a farmer demanding a much higher renewal price, or a utility company demanding a much lower renewal price, can always be taken to court for theft or extortion, and it seems much too far-fetched to be realistic. Even apartment rental has limits; without government meddling, horror stories such as landlords demanding double the rent, or tenants refusing to pay more than half, strike me as Grimm fairy tales more than realistic, and that's in a market with far more flexibility than pipeline easements. I'm not saying it couldn't happen, or couldn't get messy, or wouldn't have community bias among the jurors. But that's the case in everything we do and applies to all criminal and civil court cases.
Public goods. According to professor Kanniainen the economics shows that NATO is the only public good that should be paid by utilizing the joint responsibility in the EU
"A common reductio ad absurdum of libertarianism is that it implies anarchism."
Worse, to me, is how many people equate anarchy with chaos. They are not synonyms!