"Under anarchy, children presumably wouldn't be customers of any rights protection agency."
Under government, children presumably wouldn't be participants of any political process either. There are obviously other incentives at play.
But I won't pretend the two cases are equivalent either. If Social Desirability Bias takes center stage in politics, then surely the quintessential question, "What about the children?" would have more focus in politics than in a market. But maybe "more focus" is not the same as "better results." Politics still has the same bad incentives when it comes to delivering good results.
Governments have historically enabled lots of bad things (by modern standards) to be done to children and young adults, pretty uniformly aswell, only in fairly recent history did it become non uniform, then uniform in the other direction, with a couple weird blips, moreover the manner in which it became uniform leveraged various decentralised mechanisms as opposed to a world government.
"if the “free market” (which, without a government, we might as well call the state of nature) leads to an efficient provision of the government services involving the use of force, then how did governments even come about in the first place?"
A key point. England in the Middle Ages had lots of barons competing to protect peasants (who could move to a new manor a few miles away). But this moved to one baron, the King, gradually increasing in the services he provided.
I don't have the research to back this up but I would guess that consolidation of power always came from some type of crisis. Think of Caesar. This might be an inherent attribute of us humans, in which case anarchy will always become stateism. Or (I hope), we know more today so that a return to anarchy might work in the sense that we know what Caesar will do if we give him all the power in a crisis so we find ways around that.
Rodrigo's point about child abuse is better than I wanted to admit at first. I had some glib answers, but this question deserves close scrutiny. Let me embellish his case a bit first, and then try to respond.
Children are not consumers of private security in the sense that they are paying the bills, so the services provided seem unlikely to respond to their preferences. Abusers seem unlikely to request or pay for restrictions on abuse. In most cases, parents are concerned about abuse, but we are not considering the average case, but the extraordinary. We can imagine a terrible situation where a disturbed person creates an environment for abuse, and no one knows or is able to do anything about it. The freedom to innovate entails the freedom to fail, and failure seems unthinkable.
But Rodrigo is overconfident about the status quo. The laws on the books sound good, but the way they are enforced has a lot to do with what is culturally acceptable rather than knowledge of the laws and fear of enforcement. So the bar is pretty low already. Would innovation make things worse or better?
Innovation would not be innovation if we knew in advance what is best. Ancapistan is not utopia, there will still be problems.
I expect some form of common law to exist as a default among security providers (use of precedent). I expect relatives, potential adoptive parents, churches, etc. to have standing to sue for custody in cases of child abuse. There are lots of people concerned about child welfare, presumably there is some effective means to express their preferences without resorting to an intrusive bureaucracy.
"The laws on the books sound good, but the way they are enforced has a lot to do with what is culturally acceptable rather than knowledge of the laws and fear of enforcement." There is quite a lot of historical case studies to support this, in the Brook debate, Caplan is asked a similar question by the audience and briefly mentions Denmark in the 1970s which had a significant legal and cultural change, but you could also add Sweden and the Netherlands, and probably lots of other parts of Europe although its less well documented. You could even look at the UK and North America with it sort of being a inconsistent grey area, but nevertheless widespread.
The state (Constitutional order vs Fealty Oaths for instance) is deeply intertwined with high-social-trust, and market economics. Speculation about anti-state politics ignores the fact that all social forms that are absent the state were medieval or primitive, relics of cultural evolution.
The bigger problem is that the institutions that rest on a foundation of high social trust (see Henrich’s WEIRD model) are being disrupted, are disintegrating and lack anti-fragility to disruption. They are no longer adaptive to emergent phenomena under postmodern social conditions.
Anti-statists don’t seem to have any idea how to evolve anti-fragility most of the time.
See John Vervaeke for starters. Or his buddy Jordan Hall, futurist.
From an anthropological perspective, the human species was dysfunctional before the state came into existence, and will remain dysfunctional in any "anti-state" system.
This post made me come here and comment, given that I'm in a similar position as Rodrigo. I'm also a Portuguese speaker, so please bear with me. My problem with ancapism is not with its institutions and functioning, as I do understand that they could work, but with the fact that an anarchic society seems to be in an unstable equilibrium: competing decentralized entities constantly skirmishing are not an issue, but it becomes an issue when a larger entity appears and starts "devouring" the smaller ones.
In such a situation, the logical course of action for the small entities would certainly be to act in a coordinated fashion against the larger one (something similar to several units acting in a guerrilla-like fashion), but there would be strong incentives to enjoy the moment to act against local rivals (nothing like hitting someone when they're preoccupied), which would, in the end, result in a stable equilibrium where there's no viable alternative to the new tyrant. Even if these local struggles were resolved, decentralized warfare depends on some level of coordination and centralized decision-making (it might make sense to give up a small unit if it puts the remaining units at an advantage, but we can hardly make war plans counting on self-sacrifices), so true coordination seems far away.
To top things off, state-like entities, given their capacity to dismantle individual rights and, thus, decision-making, seem to be prodigies in war (even if governments or generals aren't), since they have way more control over resources and people (if their power is well consolidated, the political negotiation process is easier than its counterpart in the private arena).
In the end, no matter how I look, an anarchic society seems vulnerable to large-enough warlords, and this process of consolidation would only end when there are several large-enough state-like entities running everything again, and we are back to international relations as we know them.
Regarding this particular post, I believe some of his points (development, kids and nukes) are actually resolved in some other ancap works, but I'm looking forward to the response.
Wouldn't smaller non-anarchic societies also be unstable and vulnerable to large warlords in the same way you outline? Do modern small states only continue to exist because they are a bit tougher than anarchic societies?
Actually, yes, I think they would. I believe a more nuanced view would be that there's likely a point after which the costs of war outweigh the benefits, due to any number of factors like crude resources, public image concerns, signaling between states, etc. In this view, modern small states offer enough of a cost of invasion to dissuade any possible invasion, but I believe this cost diminishes as internal cohesion goes down. Finally, the duality of big states vs small society is a bit dull, since this could possibly happen when an organized group gets some sort of decisive advantage over another (even if the size difference isn't important), and then this first advantage leads to a snowball effect, given the accumulation of resources. An equilibrium made up of state-like entities is more stable, given that states (even small ones) can significantly increase the cost of conquest.
Anarcho-capitalism is not a free-market system by its own definition ( NAP). It exists because of the credible threat of initiated violence ( being murdered, mugged, etc.). A market whose existence is based on initated violence is not free by definition.
The confusion between anarchism (or "anarcho-capitalism") and libertarianism is perhaps understandable, in that both oppose large government, but they are very different things.
Anarchism is a philosophy that advocates an absence of government; libertarianism is a prescription for successful government. In that one opposes government and the other aims to shape it, they are polar opposites.
As to the question "if anarcho-capitalism works so well, then how did governments even come about in the first place?", I think the answer might be that individual human beings might find it rational at times to favour a statist institutional arrangement over an anti-statist one due to particular external circumstances. Anarcho-capitalism can be defended as an ideal theory of governance without implying that it is actually likely (or even possible) to get it.
On the children issue I think kids would be covered under some sort of family plan just like health insurance. Your child would be protected by the same agency you are and the child or a third party could just report the abuser to that agency. Some might object that the parent is paying for it so the company won't want to charge their own customer, but I think the reputational damage of protecting child abusers would be much larger than the benefit of keeping a small number of them as clients.
Alternatively you might just be able to report it to your own agency and they'd contact the agency of the abuser. Maybe then it goes to arbitration. Either way, I don't think it would go unhandled.
Such a great post. I'm sure we all have these same questions and it's so great to have a forum and the harnessed knowledge and/or vision of so many people.
English isn't his first language? I couldn't tell. A good set of questions and comments.
As a Portuguese speaker, I'm 99.99% sure his name is Coelho, not Coehlo.
"Under anarchy, children presumably wouldn't be customers of any rights protection agency."
Under government, children presumably wouldn't be participants of any political process either. There are obviously other incentives at play.
But I won't pretend the two cases are equivalent either. If Social Desirability Bias takes center stage in politics, then surely the quintessential question, "What about the children?" would have more focus in politics than in a market. But maybe "more focus" is not the same as "better results." Politics still has the same bad incentives when it comes to delivering good results.
Governments have historically enabled lots of bad things (by modern standards) to be done to children and young adults, pretty uniformly aswell, only in fairly recent history did it become non uniform, then uniform in the other direction, with a couple weird blips, moreover the manner in which it became uniform leveraged various decentralised mechanisms as opposed to a world government.
"if the “free market” (which, without a government, we might as well call the state of nature) leads to an efficient provision of the government services involving the use of force, then how did governments even come about in the first place?"
A key point. England in the Middle Ages had lots of barons competing to protect peasants (who could move to a new manor a few miles away). But this moved to one baron, the King, gradually increasing in the services he provided.
I don't have the research to back this up but I would guess that consolidation of power always came from some type of crisis. Think of Caesar. This might be an inherent attribute of us humans, in which case anarchy will always become stateism. Or (I hope), we know more today so that a return to anarchy might work in the sense that we know what Caesar will do if we give him all the power in a crisis so we find ways around that.
Rodrigo's point about child abuse is better than I wanted to admit at first. I had some glib answers, but this question deserves close scrutiny. Let me embellish his case a bit first, and then try to respond.
Children are not consumers of private security in the sense that they are paying the bills, so the services provided seem unlikely to respond to their preferences. Abusers seem unlikely to request or pay for restrictions on abuse. In most cases, parents are concerned about abuse, but we are not considering the average case, but the extraordinary. We can imagine a terrible situation where a disturbed person creates an environment for abuse, and no one knows or is able to do anything about it. The freedom to innovate entails the freedom to fail, and failure seems unthinkable.
But Rodrigo is overconfident about the status quo. The laws on the books sound good, but the way they are enforced has a lot to do with what is culturally acceptable rather than knowledge of the laws and fear of enforcement. So the bar is pretty low already. Would innovation make things worse or better?
Innovation would not be innovation if we knew in advance what is best. Ancapistan is not utopia, there will still be problems.
I expect some form of common law to exist as a default among security providers (use of precedent). I expect relatives, potential adoptive parents, churches, etc. to have standing to sue for custody in cases of child abuse. There are lots of people concerned about child welfare, presumably there is some effective means to express their preferences without resorting to an intrusive bureaucracy.
This is still sort of glib, but I am in a rush.
"The laws on the books sound good, but the way they are enforced has a lot to do with what is culturally acceptable rather than knowledge of the laws and fear of enforcement." There is quite a lot of historical case studies to support this, in the Brook debate, Caplan is asked a similar question by the audience and briefly mentions Denmark in the 1970s which had a significant legal and cultural change, but you could also add Sweden and the Netherlands, and probably lots of other parts of Europe although its less well documented. You could even look at the UK and North America with it sort of being a inconsistent grey area, but nevertheless widespread.
I was willing to bite the bullet on children, although it also led me to stop identifying as a libertarian and instead just think of myself as favoring decentralization relative to the status quo: https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2008/02/09/rhymes-with-shmashmortion/
The state (Constitutional order vs Fealty Oaths for instance) is deeply intertwined with high-social-trust, and market economics. Speculation about anti-state politics ignores the fact that all social forms that are absent the state were medieval or primitive, relics of cultural evolution.
The bigger problem is that the institutions that rest on a foundation of high social trust (see Henrich’s WEIRD model) are being disrupted, are disintegrating and lack anti-fragility to disruption. They are no longer adaptive to emergent phenomena under postmodern social conditions.
Anti-statists don’t seem to have any idea how to evolve anti-fragility most of the time.
That’s an interesting way of looking at it. Do any pro-statists have a better idea?
Learn to ask the right questions.
Was that a “yes” or a “no”, or a “here's how to do it”?
re: the religion of no religion
See John Vervaeke for starters. Or his buddy Jordan Hall, futurist.
From an anthropological perspective, the human species was dysfunctional before the state came into existence, and will remain dysfunctional in any "anti-state" system.
Thanks.
This post made me come here and comment, given that I'm in a similar position as Rodrigo. I'm also a Portuguese speaker, so please bear with me. My problem with ancapism is not with its institutions and functioning, as I do understand that they could work, but with the fact that an anarchic society seems to be in an unstable equilibrium: competing decentralized entities constantly skirmishing are not an issue, but it becomes an issue when a larger entity appears and starts "devouring" the smaller ones.
In such a situation, the logical course of action for the small entities would certainly be to act in a coordinated fashion against the larger one (something similar to several units acting in a guerrilla-like fashion), but there would be strong incentives to enjoy the moment to act against local rivals (nothing like hitting someone when they're preoccupied), which would, in the end, result in a stable equilibrium where there's no viable alternative to the new tyrant. Even if these local struggles were resolved, decentralized warfare depends on some level of coordination and centralized decision-making (it might make sense to give up a small unit if it puts the remaining units at an advantage, but we can hardly make war plans counting on self-sacrifices), so true coordination seems far away.
To top things off, state-like entities, given their capacity to dismantle individual rights and, thus, decision-making, seem to be prodigies in war (even if governments or generals aren't), since they have way more control over resources and people (if their power is well consolidated, the political negotiation process is easier than its counterpart in the private arena).
In the end, no matter how I look, an anarchic society seems vulnerable to large-enough warlords, and this process of consolidation would only end when there are several large-enough state-like entities running everything again, and we are back to international relations as we know them.
Regarding this particular post, I believe some of his points (development, kids and nukes) are actually resolved in some other ancap works, but I'm looking forward to the response.
Wouldn't smaller non-anarchic societies also be unstable and vulnerable to large warlords in the same way you outline? Do modern small states only continue to exist because they are a bit tougher than anarchic societies?
Actually, yes, I think they would. I believe a more nuanced view would be that there's likely a point after which the costs of war outweigh the benefits, due to any number of factors like crude resources, public image concerns, signaling between states, etc. In this view, modern small states offer enough of a cost of invasion to dissuade any possible invasion, but I believe this cost diminishes as internal cohesion goes down. Finally, the duality of big states vs small society is a bit dull, since this could possibly happen when an organized group gets some sort of decisive advantage over another (even if the size difference isn't important), and then this first advantage leads to a snowball effect, given the accumulation of resources. An equilibrium made up of state-like entities is more stable, given that states (even small ones) can significantly increase the cost of conquest.
Is there a response by Bryan already or not yet?
Anarcho-capitalism is not a free-market system by its own definition ( NAP). It exists because of the credible threat of initiated violence ( being murdered, mugged, etc.). A market whose existence is based on initated violence is not free by definition.
The confusion between anarchism (or "anarcho-capitalism") and libertarianism is perhaps understandable, in that both oppose large government, but they are very different things.
Anarchism is a philosophy that advocates an absence of government; libertarianism is a prescription for successful government. In that one opposes government and the other aims to shape it, they are polar opposites.
As to the question "if anarcho-capitalism works so well, then how did governments even come about in the first place?", I think the answer might be that individual human beings might find it rational at times to favour a statist institutional arrangement over an anti-statist one due to particular external circumstances. Anarcho-capitalism can be defended as an ideal theory of governance without implying that it is actually likely (or even possible) to get it.
On the children issue I think kids would be covered under some sort of family plan just like health insurance. Your child would be protected by the same agency you are and the child or a third party could just report the abuser to that agency. Some might object that the parent is paying for it so the company won't want to charge their own customer, but I think the reputational damage of protecting child abusers would be much larger than the benefit of keeping a small number of them as clients.
Alternatively you might just be able to report it to your own agency and they'd contact the agency of the abuser. Maybe then it goes to arbitration. Either way, I don't think it would go unhandled.
> By contrast, stateless societies have been the norm for large chunks of human history.
I think for large chunks of human history people have been living under various states? Or at least it has been very very difficult to switch states?
Such a great post. I'm sure we all have these same questions and it's so great to have a forum and the harnessed knowledge and/or vision of so many people.
While we're at it I'd be curious to see Caplan respond to Scott Alexander's concerns over abolishing the FDA: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/beyond-abolish-the-fda
I can think of some responses but I don't think it's a clear-cut victory for an-cap would like to see Caplan's take.
I didnt read all 400+ comments, but there is one word I didn't see mentioned: Kosher.
We already have a template for a solution to a world without the FDA.