Will Wilkinson - Latest Comments in Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Micha Ghertner — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 17:39:59 -0000

Fry,

I also simply disagree that geographic monopolies will not occur. Rural areas and sparse population don’t encourage business diversity, especially for something with a high market entry cost like defence. Of course even if you could absolutely guarantee, not just make geographic monopolies unfavorable, you would still incur the problem already discussed.

Well, I don't think any anarchist - definitely not this one - thinks that you can absolutely guarantee the non-existence of geographic monopolies; the best we can do is structure incentives in such a way that they are unlikely to arise.

As for your claim that "Rural areas and sparse population don’t encourage business diversity", I completely agree - all the more reason not the live in rural areas with sparse populations. This is an argument frequently made against privatizing things like the Postal service or public schools or roads. No one is entitled to live wherever they please. There is no reason why urban dwellers should have to subsidize rural communities. Part of the cost of choosing to live in a rural community is doing without some of the same services enjoyed by more concentrated populations.

One of the biggest of which is without uniform justice we have no guarantees that our DROs won’t simply enslave us.

But we have no such guarantee now regarding our governments. Demanding such a guarantee is utopian, for there is no higher authority to turn to to reign in the lower authority, for if there was such a higher authority, the problem would be recreated one level higher. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? The relevant question is not which system makes a guarantee possible, because no system does that. The relevant question is whether electoral democracy or market competition act as better checks on power.

All the arguments I’ve seen in favor or a just anarchism rely on a miracle of fine-tuning, to keep all DROs perfectly in line with each other, each individual signing up to a large bureaucracy of overlapping protection, and voluntary regulation.

And this differs from electoral democracy...how?

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Fry — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:21:05 -0000

you would still incur the problem already discussed.

Correction: Problems already discussed above.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Fry — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 18:16:30 -0000

"Notice the disconnect between the first sentence and the second two sentences. You first acknowledge that a free market in the use of force exists on an international level, but then immediately claim that a free market in the use of force (e.g. anarchism) is utopian. How is it that, under the international anarchist order (for there is no central state), the rights of weak countries remain protected against the will of stronger countries?"

Anarchism is more than just a market on the use of force and you're right, the current scenario of international competition is apples and oranges.

I also simply disagree that geographic monopolies will not occur. Rural areas and sparse population don't encourage business diversity, especially for something with a high market entry cost like defence. Of course even if you could absolutely guarantee, not just make geographic monopolies unfavorable, you would still incur the problem already discussed. One of the biggest of which is without uniform justice we have no guarantees that our DROs won't simply enslave us. All the arguments I've seen in favor or a just anarchism rely on a miracle of fine-tuning, to keep all DROs perfectly in line with each other, each individual signing up to a large bureaucracy of overlapping protection, and voluntary regulation.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Micha Ghertner — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 13:11:34 -0000

Fry,

“I’ve been thinking through this myself; I have an idea that short of some compelling justification, there is no reason to use force against people,”

The justification is that business interaciton between strangers can only be maintained through the threat of force.

Then that itself provides the compelling justification the person to whom you were responding is looking for. But that is not a justification for government, only a justification for using force in self-defense against contract violation.

Whats funny about wanting the ability to opt for another provider of force is that they can already do so, by moving.

Well, no, that's not funny. The Coase theorem taught us that what is most important for efficient market outcomes is transaction costs. When I want to switch cell phone providers, I just pick up the phone and make a call. That low transaction cost provides the check of competition on regulating cell phone providers. But if I have to move in order to switch governments, the transaction costs of switching are much higher, and thus the regulatory check of competition is much lower. Which is one of, if not the major reason we get piss poor government.

It is most likely that you will have to move in order to acquire the services of different arbiters of force in an anarchist system, but they see no problem with that.

Absolutely untrue. A central tenet of free market anarchism is that there is no need for granting firms geographical monopolies on force. The territories would overlap in the absence of monopoly. Search Google for the term "polycentric law" or "polycentric legal order" and read the work by Tom Bell and Randy Barnett on this issue.

We already have a free market on force, it’s call the world and there are many nations to choose from.

As to anarchism, I think it is utopianism. There is nothing in anarchism to protect your “rights”. With anarchism the strong will always prey on the weak.

Notice the disconnect between the first sentence and the second two sentences. You first acknowledge that a free market in the use of force exists on an international level, but then immediately claim that a free market in the use of force (e.g. anarchism) is utopian. How is it that, under the international anarchist order (for there is no central state), the rights of weak countries remain protected against the will of stronger countries?

Security companies (or DROs or whatever) will have geographic monopolies in mos areas,

This is precisely what anarchists deny. Without a government to enforce a monopoly, competition thrives.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Fry — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 08:50:36 -0000

"I’ve been thinking through this myself; I have an idea that short of some compelling justification, there is no reason to use force against people,"

The justification is that business interaciton between strangers can only be maintained through the threat of force. There is no reason for my gorcer to honor a deal or a price unless there is the threat of lawsuit. There is no reason for an oil company to honor my property boundries without the threat of police aciton. Without force purely consensual trading only works in tight-knit groups or in a perfect world. Even anarchism supposes the necessity of force, they just want to have multiple arbiters of force to choose from.

Whats funny about wanting the ability to opt for another provider of force is that they can already do so, by moving. It is most likely that you will have to move in order to acquire the services of different arbiters of force in an anarchist system, but they see no problem with that. We already have a free market on force, it's call the world and there are many nations to choose from.

As to anarchism, I think it is utopianism. There is nothing in anarchism to protect your "rights". With anarchism the strong will always prey on the weak. Security companies (or DROs or whatever) will have geographic monopolies in mos areas, where their the only game in town. So without another security company paid to keep an eye on the first security company, those with the training and the weaponry can do whatever they want with the citizens. Dictatorships will arise, price manipulation similar to the mafia will occur, and the rich will get away crime while the poor are victimized. Hobbes was right, life in the state of nature is nasty, brutish, and short.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

danial — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 23:22:35 -0000

just because state use of force and coercion (putatively) HAVE not been morally justified does not mean they CANNOT be justified.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Paul Gowder — Sun, 01 Jun 2008 07:00:22 -0000

Crispin, I'd submit that the impossibility of anarchy, which you accept (assert) is good reason to say the state is legitimate, on the "ought implies can" principle. Elaboration of the argument here: http://lawandletters.blogspot.com/2008/06/first...

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Peter St. Onge — Sat, 31 May 2008 23:35:55 -0000

If anarchy means absence of police powers at all (private or public), I think that's an unserious position, given man's proclivity to victimize his fellows. On the other hand, if we take anarchy to mean voluntary submission to police powers then, morally, voluntary beats involuntary every time.

So I think rather than "anarchy vs state" dichotomy the question becomes the granular "lower barriers to migration are better," combined with "no state should interfere internally with another."

Thus, as long as we had many jurisdictions with low barriers to entry, we could imagine a mix of states and non-states (eg Disney, La Cosa Nostra) coexisting, all "marketing" themselves to a mobile population as a check on quality and a spur to policy innovation.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

DPirate — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:21:46 -0000

True arguments or not, the base (and wrong, IMO) premise of the original (and I suppose any logical argument?) is that rationality is the highest facet of humanity. Intellect is subservient to human biology (ecology?).

I have a question regarding the anarchy/government discussion above. Can it be said that government is the inevitable result of anarchy? After all, government has been the definite historical result this time around.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

MRM — Fri, 30 May 2008 22:08:23 -0000

The following argument is invalid:

1. If you cannot provide a good argument for P, then you are rationally required to believe -P.

2. You cannot provide a good argument for P.

Therefore, you are rationally required to believe -P.

The argument's invalid because 1 is false. It can be rational to believe neither P nor -P.

Sartwell's argument is of this invalid form.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Ben M — Fri, 30 May 2008 20:37:33 -0000

I get the impression sometimes that anarchists view the following two situations as different:

1) On an island with 100 democrats, 90 of them vote to establish a tax and enforce it with guns. The other 10 opt not to pay the tax; the island police force arrests them under the law.

2) On an island with 100 anarchists, 90 of them band together and sign a contract to pay for common roads. The other 10 opt to use the roads, which go everywhere, anyway. The island's majority contracts to form a roadways-defense-force to prevent this misuse, and the 10 are locked up in a small POW camp.

One of these is unjustified and immoral coercion, the other is a rightful private action in defense of property. Yet the options available to all parties, and the results---10 people locked up because the 90 will them to be locked up---are exactly the same.

That's why I think anarchists are talking themselves in circles. If you use the word "government" they imagine themselves in the harassed-underdog role; if you use the word "private militia" they imagine themselves as the self-defending strongman on top.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Tayssir John Gabbour — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:21:15 -0000

(And please excuse for that unwieldy first paragraph; I just got home from travelling, and had to set things up so I could post.)

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Tayssir John Gabbour — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:16:57 -0000

Care should be taken to actually look at the anarchist tradition. Let's take one prominent anarchism observer's observation:

Anarchism is a very broad category; it means a lot of different things to different people. The main strains of anarchism have been very concerned with means. They have often tended to try to follow the idea that Bakunin expressed, that you should build the seeds of the future society within the existing one...

Further, he claims:

That is what I have always understood to be the essence of anarchism: the conviction that the burden of proof has to be placed on authority, and that it should be dismantled if that burden cannot be met.

With this in mind, it should now be clear that many anarchists believe that violently overthrowing (say) the US government is ludicrous. For one thing, national states control (and use) the greatest means of violence in human history. And even if it were possible, one entirely likely outcome is some form of fascism. Because the culture hasn't yet cultivated the sort of bottom-up social institutions that would be necessary.

Many anarchists believe in an advanced, industrial society run on principles such as solidarity and worker self-management. When we look at history, doing away with feudalism, chattel slavery, etc, required many generations of struggle and preparation.

If you're interested in one proposed anarchist vision to use as a frame of reference, Participatory Economics is an interesting possibility for some aspects of society. (Of course, any real improved society would require experimentation. So it's a vision, not some rigid blueprint.)

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

mr.fun — Fri, 30 May 2008 17:04:04 -0000

luagha: ever tried not paying your taxes?

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

luagha — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:43:19 -0000

A counterargument:

You are free to depart the social contract at any time. Plenty of places still exist where one can drop off the map and disappear, living for all intents and purposes free of any governmental attention or requirement. Some country may claim power over that area but as it will never choose to use it during your lifetime as long as you stay there and do them no harm it is a difference that makes no difference.

I argue that government does not rest on force or coercion insofar as you have the opportunity to take it or leave it. It rests on a social contract. It is the lack of understanding or adherence to this social contract either on the part of the government or the human that causes events which require the use of force on the part of either the government or the human. Many uses of force can be justified morally and many cannot, but it depends on the nature of the crime against the contract.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

M. Hodak — Fri, 30 May 2008 16:18:21 -0000

I have another theory. I should be able to use coercion against anyone to my advantage to the extent I can get away with it. Oh, wait, that's not a theory--that's reality!

The State is the consequence of that reality. Debating a morality of the state (or the legitimacy of states doing what they do, i.e., exercising their monopoly on violence) is as useful as debating the morality or legitimacy of gravity.

Personally, I would love to live in a world with much less coercion than we experience now. But nobody arguing for less coercion offers any reason to believe that it is possible given the current state of civilization. Creating a less coercive state in this world might be as functional as de-clawing a cat and releasing it into the woods.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

sc — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:50:31 -0000

How about this for a very modest, party-pooping rebuttal to Sartwell: there aren't morally legitimate ways to achieve anarchism from where we are now. We have a government; the public doesn't seem eager to vote for anarchism, and trying to remove the government through violence isn't justifiable.

Will's argument is interesting but I'm not sure that human flourishing and legitimacy are so independent. Consent is a big part of the legitimacy of an agreement; and in general people consent to what they believe to be good for them, what will increase their freedom or capacity to do what they want. If anarchy doesn't increase human flourishing, most people won't want it. If they don't want it, they won't consent to it, and I don't see how it can be legitimate to impose anarchy on the unwilling.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Chris Cathcart — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:10:57 -0000

I've been thinking through this myself; I have an idea that short of some compelling justification, there is no reason to use force against people, which makes the default position "anarchy" unless or until it is shown that you need an institution like the state to compel people to do things . . . but this is just to say that a compelling argument is one that reasonable, informed people would accept and sign onto (as in a contract) if you *could* get them all together and sign a contract. Of course, the argument contra Locke, Hobbes, et al there never was a real contract basically missed the point of their argument. Then again, there may be ways to efficiently get everyone to agree, or at least most everyone. David Schmidtz offers proposals as to how this might be done. And I'm not even convinced that you need to compel everyone to go along for the state to be able to do things -- just a large enough segment of the population that is convinced that they have a rational and moral stake in contributing. I have a hunch that Rasmussen and Den Uyl, who have all kinds of right things to say on other topics, have right things to say on the matter of state legitimacy in the pages of -Liberty and Nature-, so I'll probably revisit them sometime soon. In any event, the idea that even a "minimal" restricted state imposes unreasonable, liberty-destroying kinds of obligations on its citizenry is dubious. Even with the more extensive state that we have now, it does warrant questioning whether it makes us substantially unfree enough to significantly restrict our pursuit of human flourishing. The "proofs" that it does, strike me as rationalistic-deductivist, in the face of my own actual psychological perspective on my freedom. There's just a lot more of an empirical sort to put into our reasonings about this. I think that some "anarchist" economists like David Friedman are actually better at being more receptive to this than other anarchist theorists, even as much as he doesn't really grasp important philosophical fundamentals.

And, in the end, I don't think that there exists compelling justification for a state considerably more exstensive than a minimal one, even on the "social contract" reasoning. There are just too many hurdles one encounters at each step you attempt in moving away from Friedman-style "anarchy." Again, short of *compelling* justification, people should otherwise be left free in their own affairs and pursuits. If there were compelling justification for believing that people would be going hungry under laissez-faire conditions, and that private charitable institutions couldn't deal with such problems, you could justify state action in that area, but the compelling justifications just aren't there. And there is *certainly* no compelling justification for the egalitarian intuitions that a Rawls brings to his "original position" from which deviations have to justified. The only justifiable "intuition" (and it's not even right to call it that) to bring to such a hypothetical social-contract situation from which deviations have to be justified (via some compelling justification) is the libertarian one -- people should be left free.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

bafi — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:12:26 -0000

This post is very true. I enjoyed reading it. Great post!

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Micha Ghertner — Fri, 30 May 2008 14:02:35 -0000

JP,

If Mafia families are the alternative to the state, then the question becomes whether the market competition between Mafia families is a better check on power than the check electoral democracy places on a monopoly Mafia family. Anarchist libertarians generally view the power of Exit more favorably than the power of Voice; competition is superior to monopoly.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

jp — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:31:53 -0000

just because something isn't called a "State" doesnt mean you don't still have the same thing governing you.

the Mafia families are a prime example of alternative Govt. and orginizations like that are inevitable if/when the Civil State is gone..in theory. There is always Order in Disorder, that is a Scientific statement and applies politically.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

crispin — Fri, 30 May 2008 13:15:15 -0000

no i think people always create a society, and that there are always power differences. i just want to minimize coercion.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Rod T — Fri, 30 May 2008 12:34:25 -0000

Sartwell's assumptions avoid the nasty fact that human beings inherently will organize themselves into a society of some sort. The question isn't are states legitimate; it's what is the best way for such a society to organize itself. (What 'best way' is, is of course open to debate). Not having the biggest club in the neighborhood, the best way for me involves restricting others ability to use force to coerce me; we then proceed quickly down the path of the society (state) monopolizing the use of force as best it can. You can change the label but the situation will exist in any society.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

crispin — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:45:18 -0000

ok you gotta check out the book! anarchy no more supposes a sinless world than does statism, since both are run by people. that is: say people are evil. would a good solution be: let's give some of them guns, handcuffs, jails etc and see what happens?
but anarchy is impossible in the sense that the state is a snowball: it has increased the pervasiveness of its authority since it was established, and cannot be stopped. so, putting it mildly, we're fucked.

Re: Wherein I Do Not Accept Crispin Sartwell’s Challenge

Jason Malloy — Fri, 30 May 2008 11:43:57 -0000

TGGP,

Great Somalia link. The selected comparison drew some serious attention here, but I was mainly being glib.

For the most part I believe social organization comes from the bottom up, so an anarchist Sweden would in my opinion be a comparatively ordered society, just as East Germany was relatively functional compared to other Communist states. Both societies are filled with cooperative and capable individuals.

An anarchist society would function relatively well where the people themselves work, cooperate and organize spontaneously to a high degree (e.g. Japan; see Kristof on Kobe earthquake), and where threat from organized external violence is low; most likely due to the beneficence of a great state military power, as in the modern world, or from geographic isolation from others, as with the older Iceland. (unsustainable and externally predicated conditions)

But even with these conditions, such a society still would not live as well, or as fairly as under state government.