Question about fundamental societal construction

[wufwugy]

I call red herring.

I think most people wouldn't trust a police force they employ through craigslist. When the unknown police force adheres to a strict code of conduct set by people the person voted for, are held responsible and if needed punished for their actions, and the system has been shown to work over a few centuries, they might answer differently. Add "in theory" or "most of the time" tags where suitable, but that's the basic gist of it.

And before you start showing examples of the failings of the US police forces, that's just one example from many. There are plenty of examples that they can and do operate smoothly.

im not sure what youre getting at. people dont pick insurance companies over craigslist. private security and arbitration is basically insurance

police hasnt been proven to work. if anything, it has been "proven" to not work since crime is associated more with the intervention of the monopoly on violence

[CoccoBill]

im not sure what youre getting at. people dont pick insurance companies over craigslist. private security and arbitration is basically insurance

police hasnt been proven to work. if anything, it has been "proven" to not work since crime is associated more with the intervention of the monopoly on violence

Exactly, why don't people pick insurance companies over craigslist? Is it perhaps because you can't trust them to operate according to a code of conduct and no one is overseeing their operations?

1. A member of the community is robbed because he doesn't have the physical nor economical means to protect himself.
2. People around him decide they'll join together to protect the weak members, since they realize the same could happen to them or someone they care about.
3. ...
4. Police force

There's plenty of studies showing increasing police presence in an area decreases crime. There's nothing inherently different between safety provided by a police force or an angry local mob, apart from the police force being more organized, reliable and following a set of rules.

[wufwugy]

Exactly, why don't people pick insurance companies over craigslist? Is it perhaps because you can't trust them to operate according to a code of conduct and no one is overseeing their operations?

1. A member of the community is robbed because he doesn't have the physical nor economical means to protect himself.
2. People around him decide they'll join together to protect the weak members, since they realize the same could happen to them or someone they care about.
3. ...
4. Police force

There's plenty of studies showing increasing police presence in an area decreases crime. There's nothing inherently different between safety provided by a police force or an angry local mob, apart from the police force being more organized, reliable and following a set of rules.

I don't know what you're getting at. There is very little market for security since the government monopolizes most of it

You're euphemizing what you support and dysphemizing what you don't. The dichotomy is not "organized reliable rule following police" versus "angry mobs"

Have you considered some of the points for why markets more effectively organize societies than states?

[a500lbgorilla]

I don't know what you're getting at. There is very little market for security since the government monopolizes most of it

There's very little market without security.

[CoccoBill]

I don't know what you're getting at. There is very little market for security since the government monopolizes most of it

You're euphemizing what you support and dysphemizing what you don't. The dichotomy is not "organized reliable rule following police" versus "angry mobs"

Have you considered some of the points for why markets more effectively organize societies than states?

You say that as if that's a bad thing, that's what I'm getting at. There are plenty of examples around the world and from history when violence hasn't been monopolized. I'm quite happy to live in a country and era where it is.

I think you're doing the exact same. You're equating every organized, trained and supervised security force with corruption and oppression, and untrained armed vigilante mobs with your friendly local neighborhood patrols.

Have you stopped beating your wife? No, I haven't seen any actual evidence showing what you claim, just theories based on what I think are false premises. You skipped my question, why don't people buy insurance off craigslist?

I think the core problem here is you're disillusioned with your current government and attribute all that's evil in the world to it. What you fail to see IMO is that a government is an inevitable outcome of a society. It's just a management structure. On a smaller scale, a city council is a government, or the town elder. Likewise with the board of directors or the CEO. Are you saying all forms of management and structure are bad and if not, at what point exactly do they all become incompetent?

[Renton]

You say that as if that's a bad thing, that's what I'm getting at. There are plenty of examples around the world and from history when violence hasn't been monopolized. I'm quite happy to live in a country and era where it is.

I think you're doing the exact same. You're equating every organized, trained and supervised security force with corruption and oppression, and untrained armed vigilante mobs with your friendly local neighborhood patrols.

Have you stopped beating your wife? No, I haven't seen any actual evidence showing what you claim, just theories based on what I think are false premises. You skipped my question, why don't people buy insurance off craigslist?

I think the core problem here is you're disillusioned with your current government and attribute all that's evil in the world to it. What you fail to see IMO is that a government is an inevitable outcome of a society. It's just a management structure. On a smaller scale, a city council is a government, or the town elder. Likewise with the board of directors or the CEO. Are you saying all forms of management and structure are bad and if not, at what point exactly do they all become incompetent?

He's saying that the distinction is the monopoly. The lack of competing alternatives, and the lack of choice as to which alternative is used. In a prosperous modern economy, where there is a market for security, a market for police, and a market for dispute arbitration, firms will emerge that compete with one another.

Your argument that governments are inevitable probably held some water in eras of human history prior to the present. But we're so interconnected now. There are so many symbiotic economic exchanges in the current global economy that you just don't have the capacity for warlords to emerge. We can already see the entire concept of a nation-state crumbling before our eyes. Maybe this is the natural progression of societal organization. Maybe it was necessary to go from the hunter-gatherer tribal phase through the pharoah/caesar phase, kings/nobility phase, colonial phase, and representative democracy phases and now this is what's next. It started with power as a singularity and it progressed to a more and more equitable distribution of power. The natural next step is to have a incrementally weakening state.

[CoccoBill]

Security firms (think G4S, Securitas etc), private military contractors and so on seem to be doing really well, I wouldn't call security a true monopoly. Law enforcement yes, security no.

You may or may not be right, and to be fair I'm not equipped to argue that. I do however disagree with the direction we're headed, to more and more condensation of power. Within societies wealth and power condensing to the top. Nation coalitions and unions spreading and new ones emerging. Multinational corporations killing competition and gaining more market share globally.

[a500lbgorilla]

Your argument that governments are inevitable probably held some water in eras of human history prior to the present. But we're so interconnected now. There are so many symbiotic economic exchanges in the current global economy that you just don't have the capacity for warlords to emerge.

Until some insurance firm discovers that standing armies are ridiculous expenses and marching armies are enormously profitable. And so should begin the Insurance Firm Wars.

I'm being sarcastic, but here's the basic rub: You assume people will find no need for violence when free trade reigns, I assume people will always try to find a use for violence and it will prove useful.

edit: Back to the sarcasm, imagine the world after the wars: gov't literally only collects taxes to justify standing armies and doesn't pretend to handle anything else.

edit edit: until some noisy motherfuckers say, "hey, that standing army could also put out fires in their downtime!"

[wufwugy]

Until some insurance firm discovers that standing armies are ridiculous expenses and marching armies are enormously profitable. And so should begin the Insurance Firm Wars.

They're not enormously profitable. I think this is a crux in our disagreement. I do not think it is accurate to say that profit-seeking entities view marching armies and conquest as profitable. Every example I can think of in history shows its an enormous cost sink and that the real motives for armies and conquest is power. Going back to the British Empire, conquest was a total fucking disaster for its profits. Governments don't do profits, and profits aren't what comes out of conquest. Perhaps if you go back to such a primitive society as, say, during the Mongol Empire, it could be said that profits came out of control of a simple sector of raw resources. But that is not a concern today. There are magnitudes more types of resources and competition. Conquest is not profitable and the last thing you will ever see is the Insurance Firm Wars.

The key is that you're equating profits with legal power. All the stuff Dan Carlin talks about is societies that organize around legal power. Societies that organize around profits are fundamentally different. I do not think it is that illuminating to use pre-free-market-capitalism or anti-free-market-capitalism societies as examples of problems in free-market-capitalist societies

[wufwugy]

I think you're doing the exact same. You're equating every organized, trained and supervised security force with corruption and oppression, and untrained armed vigilante mobs with your friendly local neighborhood patrols.

Thank you for saying this, because I am not saying that. I am not arguing for the virtue of the people in a system, but for the system itself. Competition is the vehicle by which standards are improved. Government doesn't have much to compete with because it is a monopoly and its revenues are mandatory. Private capitalist entities die if they can't beat the competition. This is why we could elect 100 Einsteins to the US Senate and it would still be dysfunctional, yet an entire region of a bunch of average people who organize on self-interest without any legal authority are able to create an extremely functional system.

I think the core problem here is you're disillusioned with your current government and attribute all that's evil in the world to it. What you fail to see IMO is that a government is an inevitable outcome of a society. It's just a management structure. On a smaller scale, a city council is a government, or the town elder. Likewise with the board of directors or the CEO. Are you saying all forms of management and structure are bad and if not, at what point exactly do they all become incompetent?

I'm not disillusioned with my government. I think I probably prefer the US government to any of the other current renditions. That includes the ones the left-wing call Utopia, like Scandinavia. I think Scandinavia is heavily subsidized by the US economy. I think if it wasn't for the areas in which the US has relatively free markets, Europe would be far poorer, with far lower technology

There is still a reason why if you want to create something new, you go to the US. I don't mean to say that this is always the case, as there are some sectors (at least I think so) in different European countries that have strong entrepreneurial tendencies. But France, for example, would probably be a disaster without all the subsidization it gets from less authoritarian regions that create new technologies.

This is a really complex issue though. Something as simple as the culture of entrepreneurship can make so much difference. I recall Shane Smith saying he could never have gotten where he is now if the US was like Canada