It seems easy enough for a perfect Libertarian state to evolve/devolve into something very similar to what we have now without any non-Libertarian actions being taken along the way, if that makes sense.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
To me this makes Libertarianism relatively uninteresting except as a reminder not to micromanage things and that centralisation has costs and should be employed sparingly.
This is a bizarre criticism to me.
If somehow a single entity ended up with a controlling share in most property, then all ownership would be transformed into leases including terms that replicate the typical social contract, including state monopoly on violence.
There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position of an interventionist state. But again, I don’t see any reason why such a thing would happen without “non-libertarian actions being taken along the way”. And how to design institutions to minimize those is the chief project of libertarian jurisprudential theory.
In any case, I don’t see how this reduces the main points put forward by libertarianism, such as that nearly all of the arguments used to justify the existence of an expansive state are invalid, that nearly all government interventions in the economy or in people’s private lives are net harmful, etc. And if you agree with those, it’s hard to see how you could support an expansive state.
But if those arguments are wrong, that would be an entirely separate line of criticism from “a libertarian society would devolve back into a non-libertarian society”. Because in that case, the goal would be to prevent this from happening and/or minimize the role of the state as much as possible. Which is hardly the “middle of the road” position.
I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world across many industries today.
(In the case of monopoly on violence this is even more critical, and it is typical to see turf wars between nations or gangs flare up from time to time then settle into a steady state once they have negotiated who has control of which territory).
But the fact that this can easily happen means continual interventions and tweaking to keep the system from collapsing, maintaining it in a kind of dynamic instability much like a modern fighter plane, or going back further to Romance of the Three Kingdoms where any two of them can always gang up to prevent a takeover by the third. That’s not necessarily an efficient or fun process, though.
To take this line of thought further requires clarifying whether we are talking about a hypothetical state that still holds an absolute monopoly on violence or not, because that makes a huge difference.
Even a strong centralised state can be more discriminating in the interventions in which it undertakes, eg. a more sensible drug policy, fewer foreign wars, etc.
Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states even now holds absolute monopoly on violence.
I mean you are seeing the consolidation in industries, but not really comprehensively across industries. And it could be argued that tax systems and regulations actually disfavor non-big-businesses.
Few big corporations would be competitive against smaller challengers without state intervention to establish barriers to entry. Even the businesses themselves know this; advice to invest in those that have strong “moats” around them is cartoonish villainy and totally true.
Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually know their own situations better than outsiders do, and a lot of the problems in eg. universities emphasizing “””productivity””” in terms of publications, or employers of programmers counting lines of code, are instances of precisely this: people can’t do the actually useful things because someone is trying to measure something that doesn’t lend itself to effective measurement, and the bad measurers should get outcompeted away in a functioning market by those who aren’t impacted by mismeasurement. This probably explains a lot of why academicians perform best in traditional public/monopoly-corporate settings where the rules are basically “you’re smart, here’s a bunch of money, figure out something cool, we won’t bother you in the meantime” and programmers are more productive in startups instead of corps burdened by mismanagement.
And state intervention also creates artificial and inefficient property rights. Copyrights, patents, etc. would be basically unenforceable without the state or an organization equivalent to it, and they have a massive centralizing effect on the economy. I don’t believe organic-pragmatic property rights would ever be able to extend to information in such a way as nobody could afford to hunt down pirates on their own unless the starting position is absolutely centralized to begin with (and that’s like “what if we turned the Soviet Union into a megacorporation but didn’t change anything else”; not libertarian at all in practice).
Bans on stripping DRM and stuff get legitimacy from the state; we’re seeing the backlash to “corps are trying to steal the stuff we own” even now and absent a state-equivalent enforcer all it would take is one defector who sells free-as-in-speech 3d-printers etc. to render such positions unfeasible in practice. And the world has way more idealists than a single one.
State and gang violence is seldom economically efficient either; a lot of it relies on the existence of a population those benefiting from violence can pass the costs of that violence on. Drafting soldiers, harming civilians, destroying value, etc.
So all of this turns into an engineering problem: how to craft a system that has, when accounting for known human biases, stable incentives against harmful centralization. My anarchist side suspects that the monopoly on violence is the key, specifically in the sense that its existence enables all the other centralization by passing the costs of enforcing that centralization onto others. When someone has that degree of power, it can be abused to create other forms of power as well, but if violent enforcement of monopolies of any kind is ~disrupted~ the prohibitive expense of trying to recreate them could protect a system made of smaller, competitive actors, from re-establishing them.
Of course, this necessitates solving the three key issues that the popular legitimacy of states presently rests on. One is safety, one is equality, and one is moloch. If people believe that only a state can protect them from crime, they will want a state; and if people believe that only a state can prevent a slide into feudalistic rentseeking by capital-holders and destitute indebted poverty for the rest, they will want a state; and if people believe only a state can disarm the shitty multipolar traps that will destroy everything of value, they will want a state.
The first one has seen a decent amount of work done on it, and I guess empirical experimentation would be enough to sort it out.
The second is what a lot of people object to, but I think simply stopping the state/crony-capital symbiosis of using artificial property rights and assignments to monopolize zero-sum things and propertyize non-scarce things would render it relatively inconsequential (of course, easier said than done); a lot of deliberate violent, coercive, and value-destroying action has gone to creating and maintaining economic hierarchies between people favored by states and people preyed upon by states, and modern technology makes maintaining a basic standard of living trivially cheap if one isn’t bound by rentiers holding artificial property rights. Thus basic solidarity, mutual aid, distributed productive capital etc. could ensure that even non-productive people would be able to have their needs met better than in current illfare states.
The third one is hard, but even states themselves are subject to the same pressures, and if we got from “states everywhere” to “Firewall has the monopoly on x-risk prevention and will nuke you if you act irresponsibly and refuse to stop doing it but otherwise you may do whatever you wish” it would still be a drastic improvement. And the less significant multipolar traps aren’t that terrible; I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.
For example, the most simple solution would be that the Filter Pact threatens to kick Mike’s ass unless Mike uses the filter. Or Mike’s Dia Paying Group, having negotiated the same deal with everyone else’s protection agencies, would tell him that disconnecting the filter is agreed to be illegal and obligates him to pay $999 in damages to everyone else (+10% for DPG) or they won’t protect him from attempts to kick his ass. The state bans this because kicking Mike’s ass is a crime but polluting everyone else’s fish farms isn’t, but an anarchistic system of organic property rights wouldn’t draw such a distinction as Mike isn’t able to lobby himself a special protected position from which to harm others.
Alternatively, everyone could agree to start paying $.29945 a month to everyone else who uses a filter once everyone has agreed to this deal and joined the Filter Fund. Thus, everyone will join it to earn $700, and Mike won’t disconnect his filter because he would lose the $299.15 he gets from others plus $1 from pollution while only gaining $300 from not operating the filter, making a net loss of $.15. And Mike won’t stop paying the Filter Fund because if he does it, everyone else will disconnect their filters because now they would make a profit of ~$.15 from doing so, and everything will go to shit. This should be a game-theoretically stable equilibrium afaik.
But the basic thing is: if there’s a problem that causes net harms, someone could make a profit by solving it. In the fish farming example, the solution will exist if implementing it costs significantly less than the $700 000 a month it would create in value.
For food regulation I could join with a bunch of people to pay our own food certification agency, which in turn is held responsible for the costs of illnesses caused by tainted food, and is thus incentivized to minimize its occurrence. And it itself would pay restaurants, manufacturers etc. to inspect their facilities so that it could get accurate information on risks. If the seller pays the regulator they will have an interest to collude, but if the buyer pays the regulator (whose entire point, after all, is to be serving the buyer’s interests) it’s possible to construct a system where nobody has an incentive to sell unsafe food. And this can naturally be bundled with a whole lot of other services in insurance, healthcare, etc. to create a de facto regulatory regime that is nonetheless voluntary and actually incentivized to serve the people, instead of special interest groups and the careers of lobbyists and cya-obsessed bureaucrats.
So in ~theory~, (and this is very much the sort of theory which is just entertaining instead of serious) if the emergence of states is a harmful thing, people would find a clever way to prevent it as long as they are permitted to do so.
And then there’s the cultural thing. Nowadays when there is a problem, people automatically think the state should do something about it, and try to pass a law. Fixing that would go a long way; instead of what-is-basically-violence-at-the-bottom people could try a different way of solving it.
Unregulated trade unions were nice until the state stepped in and ruined the labor market (the socialdemocratic corporatist labor laws in Finland were literally implemented as an anti-communist conspiracy, but just as usual the left has forgotten this and nowadays everyone in the unions defends the thing that was intended to destroy their influence, because redwashed rentiers got comfy jobs from it and it got tribally associated as “left” so of course they must support it; and nowadays everything related to work and welfare is an unholy hell of bullshit which hurts workers and honest entrepreneurs alike).
Mutual aid societies were nice until the state stepped in to implement price floors for doctors and artificially restrict the supply because doctors didn’t want to be in an equal bargaining position with working-class customers; they wanted to be authorities and the state obligingly served those interests because screw the poor that’s why.
Rojava is nice, but Turkey is a state which is doing its damnednest to step in and prevent it from being successful.
But basically, getting people from the mindset “the state should solve this” to “okay how do we solve this” would help a lot. And that’s the mindset I’m trying to operate in, and I’d love for the state to get out of my way when I make the world better.
okay this got excessively long and rambly and I lost track of what I was originally saying and whatever, enjoy
I alone can name several clever ways of solving the fish farming example of @slatestarscratchpad‘s Non-Libertarian FAQ with trade.
But, as the FAQ comments, those clever ideas did not, in fact, happen and are continuing to not happen when it comes to fisheries in international waters nowadays.
Any fool can imagine a utopia; the problem is that the incentive structures of economics will produce exactly one thing out of the space of things you could imagine might happen, and the one thing they pick is not, usually, your favourite. From the perspective of a human, there’s billions of free variables we can tweak in our imagination to get the result we want to fall out; in reality, those free variables already have specific values, and they’re not conveniently setup for anything in particular. Insofar as stable equilibria do appear, there’s lots of them and there’s no principled reason to expect the one you like to emerge- as demonstrated by the lack of clever coordination schemes in the real world.
I’d like it if “how do we solve this” could be consistently and universally answered without involving coercion, but I’m very dubious. You need a very specific pattern of people being able to coordinate effectively whenever it’s good and unable to coordinate effectively when coordination is bad that’s unlikely to emerge by chance; you’ll get cases where people can’t/don’t coordinate effectively where it’d be desirable, and where they coordinate effectively where it isn’t, e.g. to set up cartels, or to torture and kill people for being “deviants” because the owners of the the three nearby violence-handling firms don’t care enough about deviants, are better paid by the people doing it, and trying to start your own is just helpfully highlighting yourself as the next target.
The only way I could see it sort of working is if you could coordinate everyone to *create* that pattern, because it’s vanishingly unlikely to occur by chance. If you could get everyone to agree to a norm of cooperating and coordinating if and only if coordinating is a good idea for everyone and had near-perfect (possibly perfect; a lot of stuff doesn’t handle even a single defector well) value alignment and agreement on game theory between people maybe it’d work.But I think this boils down to a complicated description of requiring perfect humans to make your society go, rather than fitting a society to your humans- every instance of individual corruption is people failing to do that in reality, and it isn’t clear how you’d get people to all agree to not try to create regional monopoly violence handlers in any world you couldn’t get them to all agree to just not commit crimes- or not run a centralised government shittily.
And one reason you can’t do that is that human actions are noisy; in your lake scenario, some human is going to pay the 15c to defect because they get in their head the idea that they’re not going to let the other people tell them what to do, or because of some stupid argument over how the filter should be implemented, or something else (15c is a cheap way to make a point). Any system needs to be able to tolerate individuals being wildly and ridiculously bad at optimising for their own interests, which means it needs to have stability after defections even if defection is stupid. Even perfectly mentally healthy humans behave stupidly often, nearly always if the argument for “correct” behaviour is not intuitive. It needs to be able to tolerate channers deciding in numbers of about a thousand to try to fuck things up for the lulz of seeing the world burn.
And I’m really doubtful you can get that kind of quasi-stability without coercion, especially since you need it to persist over technological development and other things which will wildly change all the factors involved in decision-making.
EDIT: To put this last bit in engineering terms, your system would need Byzantine fault tolerance for up to some reasonable number of byzantine (arbitrarily, possibly maliciously designed with intent to break the system) failures. (There are impossibility proofs for byzantine fault tolerance with more than a third failing, but a third is much more than a reasonable number, so the problem remains not *proven* unsolvable)
Obviously. Incentive structures are everything; but there’s a certain laziness in “let’s have the state solve it” which regularly backfires. And state action has an entire class of shitty incentive structures that inevitably cause those backfires and massive large-scale harms. Just as there are inherent issues in voluntary coordination/consensual subjection to coercively binding agreements, there are inherent issues in having a centralized implementer of arbitrary violence. My claim is that people should be allowed to test the hypothesis “voluntary systems are less shitty than coercive systems” without getting shot at, because voluntary systems eradicate one class of failures (voting on promethea’s body) and there are incentives to migitate other classes of failures.
I might not be able to save the fisheries, but I could save many people from the violence inherent in the system. In a world with NSA, gender identity clinics, FDA, the war on drugs, privatized prisons, regulations banning non-rich people from making profitable investments, criminalization of poverty, cronyist businesses and lobbyist rentseekers, the entire mil-ind complex, FBI destroying the Black Panthers because fuck you that’s why, etc. the decimation of the world’s fisheries doesn’t sound like such a big deal in comparison.
I’m all for letting people try stuff (so long as they’re not coercing people internally or abusing children or anything), and I definitely agree that there’s incentive structure problems with how the people-that-comprise-the-state (meaning civil servants/agents + ‘representatives’, not citizens) are selected and behave and use their power, too.
I’m just very dubious that what will fall out of the new incentive structures would be any better- cronyism between companies as well as with the state becomes legal and not restrained by any need for appearance of legitimacy, and those companies also now run everything the state used to, and this seems unlikely to be any better than the old cronyism and probably a lot worse, and to promptly lead to a lot of the rest of the complaints as well as fascinating new ones that are not readily predictable from here.
I do agree you’d lose the NSA, probably, and military entirely. If you could avert the “monopoly on violence re-emerges” problem and not wind up with a single Police Inc you’d avoid the war on drugs and Black Panthers getting destroyed because fuck you thing, but as I’ve said I find this extremely unlikely and can’t think of anywhere with multiple violence regulators which didn’t have them immediately hash out territories to individually be monopolies within and tolerate other armed groups only insofar as they were clearly not threats to their supremacy.
And if you did end up with a single Police Inc, well, you now live in a dictatorship where social norms are that if you want defence by the police at all you better be able to pay for it, the police can arbitrarily charge whoever they want however much they want (including deliberately pricing you out, if someone else wants you priced out), cronyism is set up to go because we explicitly threw out the regulators, and the head of the doctors’ union has a meeting scheduled with the CEO about all this dangerous drug taking going on scheduled for 2PM and the rest of the CEO’s day is packed too. I think this would be a lot worse, wouldn’t want to live under it, and think the best hope would either be to be popular, or that the market goes so wildly dysfunctional it collapses and lets you try some other kind of government.I guess what I’m really picking up on here, though, is that the current democratic system is ultimately checked by the empathy of the electorate. This is a shitty check, and a lot of people get overlooked, including you, and it’s bad at complicated problems. But it constrains how *far* a bad consequence of the incentive structures can go. The current system doesn’t have all its problems stop just before the point the majority would get outraged by chance- it has an incentive setup which ensures that.
This new system would have no empathy checks, not even the shitty one. Its bad consequences of its incentive structures go *all the way*. To the extent it shares any problems, those problems are now unrestrained, to the extent it has new ones, they start out that way. And for all the current non-human incentive structure does awful things, I think a non-human incentive structure unconstrained by even the minimal constraints on the current one would be worse. I can understand how that is not such a concern for you given how shittily the current system treated you, but it’s a fairly major one for me.
And while I mostly expect this means it would be immediately overthrown by an angry and appalled population as soon as it spits out 18 hour workdays for children or a Child Abusers’ Mutual Defence Force, or something else obviously cartoonishly evil, there’s a good chance the fix for that will come in the form of a dictatorial Police Inc or something else awful, and it’d probably take centuries to get back to a State even as bad as the current ones again.But yeah, I’m for people being able to try it, so long as they’re trying it mostly with other people who want to try it. But I wouldn’t want it anywhere near me or the people I care about, and would fear for the people trying it even as I thought they should have a right to.
Cronyism between companies is enabled by centralized control of the economy; a sufficiently competitive market without big dominant players would help in reducing those possibilities. And even then there’s a limit to how much damage cronyists can cause when their ability to coordinate it (and to violently extract corporate welfare etc.) is reduced.
And if the psychological-cultural issue of “there’s a problem, let’s have a state solve it” is reduced (which I consider necessary; freedom is facto, not jure, and the culture most people form is very unfree and inherently coercive and disrespectful of people), people can just band together to destroy the Child Abusers’ Mutual Defence Force.
Anarchism is under no obligation to be nice to coercive people; if some people decide that slave trade is legal and okay and try to take slaves, I’d fully support violence against them until they stop trying to take slaves. And I’d expect other people to feel the same; but I don’t think they would be willing to do violence to stop people from smoking weed if they couldn’t hide it behind the facade of artificial civility of “laws”. Maybe they would scorn weed-smokers in their communities, but weed-smokers could move to other communities. And since there is no crystallized essence of coercion somewhere in the laws of nature that things could be compared with, the exact boundaries would always be a question of negotiation, fluidity and constant adjustment, and ultimately determined by the combination of what people accept and what they are willing to fight for.
If power to do violence is sufficiently decentralized, the point where the majority gets outraged is just as dangerous for those who are causing it, as it is now, if not more. And with proper coordination systems in place, it might be possible to create a sufficiently stable equilibrium where principles of symmetry, “I don’t mess with you if you don’t mess with me”, etc. complement the woefully deficient empathy of the majority enough to eliminate most of the democratic failures of coercion, while still serving as a check on flagrantly intolerable practices.
Cultural liberals and cultural conservatives could agree that they won’t shoot each other for saying disagreeable things, and won’t try to vote each others’ cultures into oblivion. Trans people could sign up with the Tranarchist Mutual Defense Force which would, with help of allied security providers, keep them safe, or evacuate them from the worst communities where keeping them safe is too difficult. Judge Rotenberg Centre could be at risk of getting raided by Dawn Defense which lets children sign up at age ten, and has made a niche in challenging abusive parents both pro- and retroactively. Dia Paying Group could have its Large Employees harass ArguProtect Platinum members to convince them to stop harassing DPG customers and respect restraining orders. Everyone could band together against the CAMDF and the slavers because fuck them.
The late 19th century-early 20th century saw violence in labor battles because people considered some practices sufficiently intolerable. The difference is that back then the state intervened to artificially favor the cronyist robber barons (eg. in the Battle of Blair Mountain the government even bombed its own citizens from the air); without state support for some groups over others, the knowledge that workers and people sympathizing with them would be willing to draw a line and the mutual desire to avoid violent confrontation could incentivize everyone to prevent 18-hour workdays for children.
Or another example; banks evicting people after a financial crisis has fucked up everything and there are lots of homeless people and empty houses. Without the state to back up the banks with police violence, I’d expect greatly increased amounts of squatting and renegotiating terms.
And this is what I mean by organic property rights; if I made up a paper claiming that I “own” a specific number or the entirety of Kibera, everyone would laugh and tell me to heck off. If I claimed that I made my child with my own labor and thus I “own” my child and can abuse my child however I wish, people would unkindly ask me to go to hell with my claims. But the state enforces patents, clears slums without compensating residents, and kidnaps runaway children and returns them to abusive parents. Democracy can’t ad hoc monkey-patch its rulesets pragmatically, so the rulesets will result in ridiculous edge cases and ever increasing sprawl of conditionals of conditionals to try to deal with them; but if the legitimacy of such an attempt at an exhaustive monopoly ruleset is thrown out, there’s less incentive to abuse those edge cases when there’s the risk of people just going “fuck it, that shit won’t fly”. And knowledge of this incentivizes people to craft agreeable rulesets that can avoid instances of “that shit won’t fly” while still enabling all the good things that rulesets make possible.
I won’t claim that it wouldn’t result in absurdly horrible things happening because everything results in absurdly horrible things, but I’m saying that monopoly violence enables certain hard edges in the culture that I’d expect to be less pronounced without it; and thus an anarchistic system shouldn’t be assumed to be “hard edges taken all the way, plus the novel failure modes” but more like “mostly novel failure modes” instead.
And as far as stability is concerned, theoretically all it takes is that users of violence coordinate effectively against anyone trying to establish monopolies. There are some claims that administrative burdens of inefficiency in policing set a natural limit on the size of security providers somewhere significantly below “big metropolitan police force” which is notably far below “state” or that monstrous “Police Inc”. And (attempts at) monopolies in violence happen in an environment where the idea of a monopoly of violence is relatively taken for granted, and organized crime etc. operate in the same constraints of police existing.
Furthermore, there’s an argument to be made that without a coercive government, trying to establish a coercive government would run against incentive gradients when people would rather be consensually governed. And in ~hypothetical perfect coasean utopia land~, coordinating efforts to stop the Absurdly Horrible Thing would be easier than coordinating efforts to create a state, as almost everyone can agree that AHT shouldn’t exist but rightists won’t want taxes and leftists won’t want morality legislation and thus neither would be willing to cooperate beyond stopping AHT; and stopping AHT could be done even by paying people to not do it and not tolerate it, if paying money would be easier than using violence.
And pragmatic-empirically, Rojava is planning to abolish police by training everyone in policing and having well-armed citizens united by a common ideological cause, and I’m extremely interested in how it goes, and extremely angry at Turkey for trying to fuck with the experiment. So far it seems to be only getting fucked up by authoritarians who don’t want freedom on their backyard, instead of rojavans shooting up sea slugs and shooting at each other.
(via jbeshir)
4 weeks ago · tagged #violence cw #this is a rojava fanblog #promethea's empiricism fetish #drugs cw #i am worst capitalist · 40 notes · source: argumate · .permalink
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socialjusticemunchkin reblogged this from collapsedsquid and added:Rojava seems to be doing reasonably well on the “defence” front; not anarchistic but far closer than existing states....
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I’m all for letting people try stuff (so long as they’re not coercing people internally or abusing children or...
princess-stargirl reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:“Corporations aren’t magic; they are subject to the same information problems centralized states are. People usually...
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collapsedsquid reblogged this from socialjusticemunchkin and added:Defence is a problem that anarchist states/communities must solve, it is the core function of states. You can’t simply...
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imu-li liked this- neoliberalism-nightly reblogged this from argumate and added:
Doesn’t this sound exactly like how the world have been for a long time until relatively recently? It’s not not states...
- collapsedsquid said: I might have said “We know it could happen because it did happen, hence the state,” but your way works too
argumate reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:I think there are reasons why consolidation and centralisation would happen, as we are seeing in the corporate world...
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rendakuenthusiast reblogged this from voximperatoris and added:What was that SSC post about how we already live in an anarcho-captialist utopia because everything is permitted in an...
voximperatoris reblogged this from argumate and added:There is no reason this would happen. If it did happen, it would be a bad outcome, because we’d be back in the position...
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