| | Bob, thanks for your comments on anarchism versus limited government.
You misunderstand my position, in that I haven't written anything about "the federation" (evolved from competing defense agencies) refusing or declining to do what its clients voluntarily pay it to accomplish, namely uphold and defend their negative rights to liberty. If a former client decides the federation is not worth what it charges, he has not violated anyone's rights by succeeding, and so he should, by rights, be left unmolested by the federation. However, if he subsequently engages in violating the rights of clients of the federation, then that institution would properly respond using defensive force. Nothing I wrote advocates non-enforcement by such a federation, which I think might evolve from "a state of nature" by competitive pressures among private "Pinkerton Agencies". Those competitive pressures emphatically do include profit and cost considerations, in that aggressive warfare is a long-term losing proposition financially. It makes sense that agencies that restrcit their activities to defending the contractual and property rights of their clients will be less likely to incur the horrendous costs of active warfare.
Of course, people and states have engaged in warfare without a scintilla of concern for costs, or consequences, or theories of rights, from time immemorial. Unfortunately, that fact doesn't prove your case, or my case. What it does prove is that cultures dominated by irrational philosophical "premises" produce people who behave destructively, and who organize and try to live through coercive institutions designed to impose hegemony. Such coercive institutions reinforce the irrationalism of the culture, for all sorts of reasons that you understand.
Under the rule of even a democratic state, meaning a "government" that routinely violates individual rights such as the U.S. federal government, the incentives for incessant warfare and endless feuding over unproven, rival ethical claims, are reinforced by the activities of the state. This reinforcement takes the form of the state picking up the tab for the battles people want to precipitate on behalf of their favorite gripe (abortion activists come to mind), or on behalf of robbing other people (farmers and their ridiculous demands for government subsidies come to mind). The state picks up the tab for this warfare by holding elections, the cost of which "everyone" bears, the outcome to which is "undisputed". True, some have to spend time and energy and money fighting these battles, but the political system rewards mid-level and higher level players generously. Even the political operators whose side loses an election win big, through book contracts, television and radio opportunities, and appointments and salaries when their side scores later. I know you oppose all this, as I do. But this warfare is real and very costly: ranchers driven off their holdings by the Feds at the urging of merciless environmentalists; confiscatory income taxes; rapidly proliferating regulations that cost money and make problem solving ever more difficult; lawsuits that enforce "social justice" for the express purpose of robbing Peter to Pay Paul and for the enrichment of the state's robber baron attorneys and judges. The unbridled warfare you write about is already partly in place. If the state were abolished today, would all of this go away, to be replaced by "utopia"? Of course not. The necessary condition, a cultural/philosophical regime of reason, is conspicuously lacking.
But given such a regime, private defense agencies would spontaneously gravitate toward a federation for the purpose of resolving disputes, thereby sparing federation members of the costs of dog-eat-dog warfare. Under such a system, the ultimate legitimacy for rights and rights-enforcement would be the ideas inculcated in judges and entrepreneuers by philosophers--just as it is today, in the United States. However, given a philosophical regime of reason, there is good reason to believe that institutions would evolve entirely consistent with the voluntarism that man requires in order to flourish. In such a non-utopian world, cranks and ambitious gun slingers would still create problems for other people, but the state would not be there to subsidize their anti-social trouble-making. For example, religious anti-abortion zealots would now be confronted with the reality of cost: they would have to organize and pay for an army to impose on the vastly larger number of sensible, peace loving folks their notions about the "murder" of terminating a 30 day pregnancy. Would a profit-oriented Pinkerton Agency really jump at the "opportunity" to incur the costs and risks of offensive war for the purpose of imposing the wacky ideas held by 5% of the population--scattered across a large geographical area--on the remainder? Of course, if such an army of religious zealots were to organize, it would be swept away for lack of tangible, financial support (talk is cheap, money speaks), and by defensive retaliation by agencies comprising the "federation" whose clients were bullied or murdered.
To provide one more example, assume that a rogue army of bandits were financed by a billionaire crank--say someone like George Soros, who wants to impose social justice on the unwashed masses before he dies. This fictitious someone buys out the largest two defense agencies, and after failing to take over the Federation, (composed of other reputable companies aghast at what this guy is advocating), prepares to impose taxation on the Federation's clients for the "greater good", or perhaps his own "good". Is Soritos likely to succeed in imposing his hegemony? It appears very unlikely, because his defense companies are now rapidly hemoraging clients, who are opposed on moral principle to robbery, and who would lose business and public respect by associating voluntarily with a war lord or ganster. True, Soritos has several billions to waste. However, the Federation agencies now collect voluntary payment from the former clients of the Soritos agencies. Nearly everyone who has a stake in peace, freedom, and productivity--businesses and business people, land owners, home owners, workers who earn their way and pay their own bills, oppose and are eager to pay for their defense against the depredations of a psychopath...voluntarily. The largest share of financing the defense naturally falls on those with the greatest assets at risk, similar to insurance. Anyone who sides with Psycho Soritos knows that his reputation--and his goose--is cooked when Napolean is defeated, because most of the economic resources of a free society are marshalled to defeat this ambitious, unmerciless war lord.
All of this is imaginary, so one can dream up any number of possibilities and counter possibilties. However, under a cultural regime of reason, competition of ideas and defense-enforcement companies would culminate in the institutionalization of widely accepted norms of justice. The natural tendency is for voluntary federation, and the emergence of government--not a taxing, regulating state. For example, if two clients are protected by different companies, and enter into a business or employment contract, each client has a financial interest in paying to secure and enforce his contractural rights. Each company shares that interest, and so have a standing agreement as to the principles and proceedures by which disputes will be resolved. Lacking such a standing agreement, their risks and costs skyrocket. The same calculus applies to domestic disputes, violent crime, and other forms of predatory activity. Among clients of such companies, violence is not an option. For if one initiates force or fraud, he imposes risks and costs on his defense insurance company, which responds by canceling his protective policy. Those who choose to associate with criminals are likely to become impoverished social outcasts. So, in contrast to a state, in which irrational, short-sighted behavior is rewarded, the principle of free competition encourages rational, long-range decisions and behavior, and evolves toward government consistent with the principle of voluntary association.
I'll reread your comments on your web site on the subject, Robert. I am also going to give more thought as to how competition would culminate in generally accepted norms of ethics, similar to the market process that selects a universally accepted medium of exchange, which becomes money.
One last comment. In reading about the history of the West, one discovers numerous examples of spontaneous and voluntary defense arrangements that were common-place. For example, the gold camps of the American West were situated literally beyond the reach of the American state, by a distance that required months of travel. If someone were caught stealing, he was brought before a miner's court, an informal panel of men who were respected and admired by most of the miners. No taxes were imposed to support this voluntary, spontaneous government, and it enforced justice rapidly and efficiently, often simply expelling from the camp someone who had been caught stealing, occasionally hanging a murderer. Everyone agreed as to the definition of theft and murder, and there is no record of waring, rival courts. However, when the state was imposed on Montana several years later, brigands and gangsters took over the administration of "justice". The Henry Plumber Gang , organized covertly by the sheriff of Helena, rountinely robbed gold-bearing stagecoaches, stole livestock, and murdered innocent passengers and ranchers. Now rival courts did emerge, as the vigilante movement spontaneously sprang into life to track down and eventually hang Sheriff Plumber, Big Nose George, and their ruthless associates.
The American West, far from the reach of the federal state over a period of decades, was predominently peaceful and respectful of individual rights, although certainly no Utopia. The Johnson County, Wyoming, range war, short-lived but violent, is one example; notorious because of its abnormality. More typical were Dodge City, and Abilene Kansas, teeming shipping points for the herds trailed north from Texas, and frequented by carousing, hard riding, fun seeking cowboys. These shipping towns have acquired an unwarranted history of notorious bloodshed and anarchy. Hollywood and court historians depict those towns, and others like them, as violent hellholes, where gun slingers made greenhorns "dance", gun fire rang out at the O.K. Corrals, and hoodlums ruled the bars and Mainstreet. In fact, the per capita murder and crime rate in both Dodge City, Abilene, (and other shipping points) have been shown to have been substantially lower than in the large Eastern and Midwestern cities that were supposed to be protected by the state. This comparison was during the height of the cattle shipping boom, which lasted only a few years.
Another example of the culture of peace and respect for individual rights dominant in the Old West, far from the arm of "The Law", comes from a story written by Teddy Blue Abbot, who worked as a cowboy trailing herds north from Texas to Montana in the 1870's. A group of cowboys, looking for entertainment, built a straw man which they hung from a telegraph pole in full view of the passengers of an approaching train. As the train rumbled past, the cowboys commenced firing their six shooters at the straw man, for the benefit of passenger and train crew. One of the cowboys lowered the "corpse", dallied the end of the hang rope around his saddle horn, and galloped off along side the speeding train, while his compatriots raced along shooting the bouncing, careening straw man full of lead! The passengers, from the East, were appreciative of and suitably horrified by the show, with two of the women fainting, or so claimed Teddy Blue. My point is simply that if men lived in a desperate culture of rampant murder and violent anarchy, would they be likely to find humor and entertainment in portraying more murder and more unbridled bloodshed? Of course not. The prank was funny because it portrayed the West as it was not, the West of dime store fiction. Most people were too busy working, trying to make money and accumulate something, to engage in gun slinging and robbery in spite of almost no organized authority. The few who chose that life hid away from respectable society, in the Missouri River Breaks.
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