<a href='https://talkpolitics.dreamwidth.org'>Talk politics.

Voluntary systems are those which do not initiate violence against people who have themselves not violated anyone's rights. The Salvation Army, the Red Cross, or the St. Vincent de Paul society cannot and do not arbitrarilly tax and plunder unwilling individuals when they need revenue to carry out their various philanthropic projects. Government recognizes no such constraints on its authority. The use of political power, which is essentially collective violence, to accumulate wealth is what is involuntary.

Edited Date: 17/7/11 12:12 (UTC)

From:

So should the police department be made up of unpaid volunteers? The army? The highway department?

From:

Let's start by considering that these functions are already paid via taxation levied on most of the people who work. This is to establish that the funds required are not somehow out of reach or unaffordable to most people. What we're talking about is moving the funding so that it is not extracted involuntarilly from people who do not wish to patronize the service. Also this opens the service up to competition by firms who may offer to provide the same services at lower price.

So let's break this down a little further here, just to start. I notice that you started off with features which could only be considered part of a minarchy, not a large social welfare state. The big-L Libertarian Party would agree with you that the State should handle issues of national defense such as the raising and fielding of armies and navies. Of course libertarian anarchists claim that government, as such, is the problem and have discussed the private provision of collective security at length and are of the opinion that collective security is not necessarilly a set of goods and services provided by a sovereign entity such as a state.

Hans-Hermann Hoppe has devoted more than a little thought to the issue. If you're interested in seeing some libertarian thinking on the private provision of collective security you might start with him. There is a good 26-page PDF file essay called The Private Production of Defense (https://mises.org/journals/jls/14_1/14_1_2.pdf), published in the Journal of Libertarian Studies.

From:

M So let's break this down a little further here, just to start. I notice that you started off with features which could only be considered part of a minarchy, not a large social welfare state. The big-L Libertarian Party would agree with you that the State should handle issues of national defense such as the raising and fielding of armies and navies. Of course libertarian anarchists claim that government, as such, is the problem and have discussed the private provision of collective security at lengthyaddayaddayadddayadddayadddayaddayadda...

Is this a "yes," the police and highway department should consist of unpaid volunteers or a "no," the police and highway departments should not consist of unpaid volunteers?

From:

In some communities, security and road maintennance might be managed by unpaid volunteers and it might even work for those communities. If it does then those communities ought to be allowed to manage their police and road maintenance with unpaid volunteers in peace. In most communities, it probably wouldn't work and they would be paid a salary for their services by property owners, insurance patrons, or whatever agency owned or managed the roads.

From:

What you're proposing is a loose network of private security firms funded by those wealthy enough to afford them. Only communities (or for that matter, individuals) that could afford protection from crime would have it. The poor would be fair game for any criminals, especially if those criminals wee "property owners, insurance patrons" or anyone else wealthy enough to decide who warranted protection from crime and who didn't.

From:

Everything in the material world or which is created through the expenditure of human time and energy is already provided courtesy of those "wealthy enough to afford them. The insideous idea that the average human being is incapable of affording life itself without some well-meaning busibody socialist forcably confiscating it through the political system from somebody else and giving it to him on a platter "for free" is a ridiculous hobgoblin of the collectivist mindset. The problems that you are describing, involving "people who decide who warrants protection from crime and who doesn't" (although I assert that your phraseology is a grotesque oversimplification), are problems that plague civilization now, under the current paradigm. They do not go away just because you have politicized them and then attempted to perfume away the rot with patriotic or statist mysticism. The State is just another human organization, one with a monopoly on violence and no competitive feedback with regard to costs or profit. It is, contrary to Hobbes, not a god that can magically solve problems.

From:

M: The State is just another human organization,...

And yet, as if functions now my access to police protection is not dependent on my either having enough money to pay for my own private security firm or my not antagonizing whatever local strongman controls the regions private security firm. You consider that quite a sad state of affairs. You'd much rather someone like me had to live as a sort of cowed vassal to some local millionaire.

If the kind of society you fondly hope to bring about had been in place here, black southerners would still be living under Jim Crow, completely at the mercy of local wealthy white southern overlords. The murderers of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman would never have been tried -- Hell, the murders of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman wouldn't even have been defined as "murders." They'd have been executions.

From:

Systems change. I put it to you that the three murders involved people's efforts against government malfeasance, misfeasance and unjust legislation. You're blaming the private sector for not righting a problem that was at root political and governmental to begin with, this, after advocating that government retain its monopoly on violence which it has been repeatedly demonstrated to abuse. Try thinking first.

As for your claim that "my access to police protection is not dependent on my either having enough money to pay for my own private security firm or my not antagonizing whatever local strongman controls the regions private security firm," I say oh, really? Are you telling me then that you don't vote and don't participate in politics?

From:

M: I put it to you that the three murders involved people's efforts against government malfeasance, misfeasance and unjust legislation.

Actually, the three murders involved people's efforts to uphold Federal Law in the face of localized refusal to obey Federal law. The three murdered individuals were simply trying to register black voters in the south. It took the efforts of the federal government to bring the murderers to justice.

M: As for your claim that "my access to police protection is not dependent on my either having enough money to pay for my own private security firm or my not antagonizing whatever local strongman controls the regions private security firm," I say oh, really?

Yes. Really.

M: Are you telling me then that you don't vote and don't participate in politics?

Of course I vote, which costs me nothing. How is that the equivalent of paying some localized strongman protection money?

From:

The FBI was notoriously full of racists and people in that organization probably were involved in the plot to assassinate Martin Luther King. A federal badge does not select for saintliness. It does provide though, a ready platform for the comission and covering up of crime. It does provide impunity for bad actors.

Your participation in politics and voting is a form of attempting to secure the "local strongman" who controls the region's security firm. Telling me that people don't have to care about such things because we have "voting" and "democracy" is missing the point. It's as if the Mafia ran your neighborhood but you paper over the nature and import of what is happening by telling yourself something akin to what the Sicillian immigrants may have told themselves: "Ah well, at least he's a fellow countryman, like me, and not some Irishman!" The difference between private and public forms of security and dispute resolution are that we would never give a private firm the benfit of "patriotism" and conflate ourselves with them through collectivist mysticism. We would maintain our vigilence and never allow one such firm a coercive monopoly, such as we do with the State. If you participate in politics you do care and worry about which strongman controls the local provision of security and dispute resolution. That's my point. You don't want the wrong people installing their friends to have power over your life...and politics becomes, at least in the Western democracies, as far as I can see, more divicive and acrymonious by the year as the governments accumulate more power and the laws become more intrusive the stakes go up for everyone.

From:

M: The FBI was notoriously full of racists...

And it was no friend of the Kennedys.

M: A federal badge does not select for saintliness.

Never said it did.

Good thing the US attorney general was so determined to prosecute the murders.

M: Your participation in politics and voting is a form of attempting to secure the "local strongman" who controls the region's security firm.

And yet I don't have to pay out scads of cash to some hatchet faced thug to ensure I get basic police protection. In fact, I can be an emphatic critic of those in power, and still be able to use 911 to call the police.

That's what so great about voting. That's why people (like those three activists I mentioned earlier) have given their lives for its sake.

From:

Did you post that comment to the right thread? Nobody's arguing totalitarianism here.

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protection_racket

From:

A protection racket, like a government, makes people an offer they cannot refuse. A private company, operating in a free market, cannot arbitrarilly dictate that someone will patronize them and purchase their goods and services. That's the distinction. The problem with political provision of these services is that it is nothing more, in essence, than a protection racket whose nature is denied under cover of mysticism based ideology and patriotism.

From:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gangster
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banditry

From:

So armies are replaced with feudal levies. If this system were adopted in the USA, we'd find the 22nd Century seeing the Greater Mexican United States.

From:

Viva La Republica!

From:

Shockingly enough,

squidb0i has it precisely correct: "Viva La Republica!" indeed. The Libertarians aren't the cause of "La Reconquista." What you are trying to pass off as a hobgoblin of political decentralization is happening right under the noses of the cretins who claim to represent and manage a centralized, power-aggrandizing, imperial government which effectively spends more on defense than the rest of the planet combined. The "Latinos," especially those who want to change the present political system to one they believe suits "them" better, if one wants to paint pictures in colors grounded in culture and race and ethnicity, are already here, despite or perhaps because of the political government with which the U.S. is saddled right now. Your argument is specious.

Edited Date: 17/7/11 23:39 (UTC)

From:

Bullshit, and bullshit, respectively. The US government is steadily building up the kind of Republican mutation that characterized the Late Roman Republic: the growing coercive might of the state, unimpeachable, unchallengeable military, unstoppable hegemony.....if the US government goes anywhere we will repeat the fate of the Roman Republic, not that of the Empire. A strongman while in theory all else is the same.

From:

Oh please. The frontiers are open and the Visigoths are here, all the while the imperial capital plots to dominate the world entire. What a sad joke. The idea that the Republic still exists is a fantasy when the president can assert the power to detain and execute anyone for any reason or none on his own recognizance, and that is only one of the more eggregious and obvious usurpations and outrages perpetrated by those who claim to represent the U.S. government. Please, spare my ribs.

From:

No, the Republic still exists. We've even got our own Cicero in that radical Neo-Nazi Hitler-loving Pat Buchanan. As opposed to the original Cicero who equally lived in dreamland and loved him some slaughters of the Roman people.

From:

Why do brown people terrify you so?

From: