No one remark in particular. I kept thinking of one of our previous discussions as well as your discussion with PhoneBooth and was reminded by some of his stuff. Figured you may enjoy him.

His book The State is available online here.

Some of his other stuff like Against Politics and his essay Freedom from a Mainly Logical Perspective is quite good, but I don't know if it is all that easy to find them online.

'Tis.

Again, you're ignoring that these are two different kinds of "force." And the existence of one doesn't justify the other. I am "forced" to eat if I want to live. I am also "forced" to fall to the ground if I try to fly over the Grand Canyon. Therefore, it's OK for you to "force" me to wash your car? It's all force, right? You were going to be forced to do something you didn't want to do anyway, this way at least one person gets something he wants.

So what? What does this have to do with the normative questions we were examining? You were a big fan of this just a few poasts ago, now you want to bail on that and limit conversation to what's "practical" (which is conveniently vague)?

Define "naturally arising"?

I would counterclaim that the idea of excess in imposition generated by desire to impose norms on others provides us with a powerful tool for examining whether we have too much or too little government. Coase notes this possibility in "The Nature of the Firm" when he observes that "the price mechanism... might be superseded if the relationship which replaced it was desired for its own sake." The desire to impose one's conception of what is good or right on others is overwhelmingly common, and people are correspondingly willing to accept some burden of other's norms in order to ensure their ability to make their own impositions. The extent of this relationship is defined and mediated by each participant's self-concept as a consenting citizen. This largely unconscious activity generates an excess in imposition, however, because it uses its coercive apparatus against unwilling third parties - those who fundamentally do not wish to take part in the particular social bargain. The impositions of implied contracts - so-called "social contracts" - on those who consider themselves to have dissented from the procedure that generated certain obligations is the excess in governance, and it creates inefficiencies. Again in Coase's words, "if the desire was not to be controlled but to control, to exercise power over others, then people might be willing to give up something in order to direct others; that is, they would be willing to pay others more than they could get under the price mechanism in order to be able to direct them."

I have no objections to these remarks in points of fact. As we've observed before, governance would very likely arise in a theoretical anarchist society, and indeed territorial power would very likely be consolidated in order to ensure rule of law. This set of conditions tends toward stability. Monopolization of violence generates social stability; this result is the market result. But rule of law appears to require only a de minimis set of services - namely, courts, police, defense, etc. An overwhelming number of state regulations have nothing whatsoever to do with providing rule of law, and many areas of the law represent mere meddlesome interference with individual decision-making with no valid police purpose. Only the kinds of negative legislation ("Congress shall make no law...", "No state shall...") that you noted have a countervailing effect.

Our Supreme Court at one point exhibited a strong willingness to act as the insurer that the state did not overstep its bounds as provider of rule of law. In Lochner v. New York, the Court invalidated a New York statute that set a cap on the number of hours per day and per week that bakers could work. Justice Peckham explained that, in general, simple contracts - as mediated through the common law - provided an adequate mechanism for mediating the relationship between employee and employer. The employee and employer reached an agreement on the terms and conditions of labor (bargained for one planning the activities of the other in exchange for monetary compensation), and the price mechanism in the labor market did the work of balancing their interests - there was no need for New York to intervene.

Perhaps it is an apolitical opinion. I nevertheless think it is what at least a couple others here mean by "anarchist." I recall Borodog, in a thread asking non-anarchist libertarians what was holding them back, entreating (I'm paraphrasing), "Can we at least say where we are going?"

I agree with these remarks, though. If you think this is a criticism of my views, I think it may have been caused by occasionally bold rhetoric on my part (sometimes I get upset, as when someone tells me I don't understand ontology ) that is out of sync with the subtlety of my actual views. When I am employing concepts like ownership, rights, and violence, my purpose is to reveal inconsistencies in the present application of such concepts, usually as those concepts are defined by the state through the law.

Was it not a few posts back when you (and I agreed) made a comment that my arguments were just a level above and really the same thing? I invoke your argument here. As long as you are prescribing an "ought" talking about what level that "ought" is on is silly - at least for this very nonspecific discussion of ours. I think where you are taking issue on is the level of details which are being prescribed....ie how much stuff the system says ought to be. Certainly noone is advocating a system that gets so specific as to detail how you ought to play tic tac toe. Consider, suppose I were to advocate (which I am not) a "one person, one vote" system for all things including resource allocation. Specifically it only makes one "ought" just as ACism only makes one "ought"....in neither case is the system advocating in insane level of detail about what is prescribed and what is not such as tic tac toe strategy. They are very much on the same "level" these two systems. Of course, and this was my point originally, they both have enormously far reaching implications for how the world works and all the consequences of such a system good and bad are being intrinsically prescribed by your "ought".



Cleverly escaping godwins law by evoking a minutely less extreme example, do you think that the rwandan genocide is a voluntarily equal act to eating pie? Perhaps the best way to amalgamate our "dimensions" is that you are talking about any voluntary action not getting judged as superior or inferior to another but I am arguing what voluntary actions one can employ are constrained by their means and opportunities. I don't think we can sidestep this latter point because it is very central to my comments of how a system based on how much one is willing to give up depends crucially on whether people have the means and opportunities to give things up...these constrain peoples behavior it is NOT just motivation (sociologists often say motive, means and opportunity = behavior). I think where you are getting at is that all motivations are equal (silly examples like that which I opened with aside) and someone motivated for coke is inherently equal to someone motivated for pepsi. I agree, but since motivation is only one of the three things that determine behavior it falls short.



ya I think we completely agree on these points. Let's bring on them well defined metrics and do some measuring! My cautionary note was that suppose we both agreed on a well defined metric like "that which produces the most hamburgers per capita" and realized that a government mandated solution to make hamburgers would win out in this metric it of course wouldn't mean much just because of the subjective nature of our chosen metrics. That said, since the methodology of choosing metrics is the only one likely to result in progress of any kind I still endorse it



If that is your definition, how can people ever be of different moral class? If what you are getting at is there isn't one set of laws for white and one for blacks or something then sure I agree a uniform moral class seems like a good thing. I think most people agree in some level about a general notion of "equality" of people. How that equality is implimented vastly differs...some argue for a sort of "equal rights" and others go further trying to get to "equal opportunities" and some even further to "equal means". ACism purports a sort of equality based on everyone is equal to act within their means and opportunities.


I mean sure logical inconsistencies are a bad thing but the problem is often when systems get abstracted into axiomatic systems logical inconsistencies appear that in practice simply don't because the abstract approximation is just not subtle enough. (sorry, math lingo) For instance, it is NOT a contradiction to conclude that "equality is good" and "inequality is good" simultaneously or "people are inherently selfish" and "people are inherently altruistic" simultaneously. Ultimately these things get explained in the real world fairly handily, it is clear that much of human existence is a struggle between our twin motivations of selfishness and altruism to the communities we are part of these motivations likely being the result of various evolutionary forces. Likewise with the equality vs inequality idealism people are fundamentally different with different motivations so inequality is fine, but at the same time we have a desire to be in communities of equals intrinsically so this is also fine. But I digress...

The point I suppose is yes in a fairly vacuous sense you don't want a system with gross inconsistencies but largely because of our nature there are conflicting motivations and just trying to come up with systems that eliminate them so that there is less inconsistencies when you abstract the system is not productive.

I already acknowledged that I consume resources. My point was that the money I receive is going to be spent or hoarded by me in the same way it is going to be spent or hoarded by those it came from. I may spend the money consuming resources, and others may have spent the money consuming resources. It is nearly impossible to say I consume more resources with the money then it would have otherwise.

Likewise if you want to talk about marginal benefits of transactions as economists so often do. I may induce more or less marginal benefits from the economic transactions I engage in then those who would have kept my money....I certainly participate in some extend in the economy growing it through marginal benefits.

Cool, thanks.

I don't know how you got your "therefor" at all. You clearly don't like the word force, perhaps let just just choose the word "constraint" instead. The point is that any system - ANY - puts constraints on the behavior of the people. It is completely pretentious to act as if your system doesn't and people are only constrained when it is the government doing the constraining. I guess it is a sort of passive vs active distinction you are getting caught up with. A system that encourages endemic poverty, for instance (not talking any system in particular), forces people into specific behavioral patterns...if poverty is forced on you by the system you are forced to act like someone in poverty.


This was a very specific response to your question "why don't people vote on whether someone can eat a cheeseburger". A priori, nothing but in practice it is practical considerations that eliminate all these extreme examples of microvoting. I have no interest in limiting the discussion to anything.



I was meaning only in the most vacuous sense of "it arose".

Incidentally, I do think there is a more meaningful sense of natural in that I think human naturally create hierarchical structures and support them and that creating organizational paradigms in the communities we are part of is an intrinsically human trait. As our technology allows for the growth in the size of our communities, our heirarchical structures tend to grow. Whether this is good or bad is very seperate.

No problem.

Let me know what you think of it when you get a chance to look it over.

Right, this is the most obvious, most fundamental, and probably most unavoidable essential "negative externality" or markets. Ideally, this is the one that governments would spend most of their time trying to correct, in a world where governments were capable of correcting externalities.

Instead they are ruthlessly efficient at FACILITATING and encouraging this negative externality. Government is basically the minority solution to the diseconomies of scale of this sort of transaction.

Please identify some people who consider themselves to have dissented from the procedure.

I don't see why my identification of anyone in particular matters. Anyone who sincerely claims dissent can be regarded as having actually dissented.

This argument gets you nowhere because the whole idea of efficiency of markets, pareto optimality, coasian bargaining, etc, etc, is all positive, not normative, unless you're willing to somehow accept the particular utilitarian assumptions of those models as your normative standards. Which is ridiculous, given how absurd, simple and incomplete the assumptions are, even compared to the preferences of even the dumbest.

Either way, what I'm describing isn't which amount of government is efficient right now. Rather, I'm asking, why can't reducing the amount of government right now increase the amount of government in the long run? Or, within your framework, what if reducing inefficiencies (or the discrepancy between the model and the reality) at the moment increases inefficiencies in the long run? Note that the framework you're using above cannot be used to address this question because the model considers the present world "inefficient" without pointing out the source of the inefficiency. In other words, the model doesn't itself explain why government of the sort that creates inefficiencies exists at all. It is fundamentally incapable of resolving whether reducing government size may increase government size in the future, since "government size" is not something the model can explain.

It's important to side with reality, whenever your model disagrees with reality. The only exception is when your model has to do with your behavior and the discrepancy may be resolved by altering your behavior. This is sort of how we work normally - we often develop some ideal notion of what we should be like and alter our behavior accordingly to bring reality closer to this ideal notion. It's our goal-oriented, problem-solving disposition. Yet this is where individualism as a basis for political opinions hits its limits - as long as one considers community as an acting agent, one can reasonably talk about community's behavior and argue about what community should do. This is the general basis for political discourse. But if you explicitly reject this level of collective effort, what meaning does it carry to say the world doesn't work the way you want it work?


To the extent that rule of law depends on the sense of community, which in turn depends on the relative similarity of customs and values across a large geographic area, social classes and various ethnic communities, not to mention certain stability of social relationships and general circumstances over time, why can't some meddlesome interference with individual decision-making in fact be necessary?


The problem with cases like this, given your perspective, is that state laws are far more like private contracts than federal laws are, especially from an economic standpoint. It's fairly easy to choose where to live and constitutional limits on states' powers are very much like limits on private contracts. This is even more true at the local level. Yet, if you look at laws and regulations, they get stupider the more local you get. By far the most ridiculous and unnecessary rules are at the family level. This doesn't bode well for the idea that if you reduce government, especially at the federal level, it won't be replaced with much worse government at other levels.


What then explains cheering for economic/political meltdowns, contempt towards those in power and consistent advocacy of anarchist/minarchist solutions for every problem at the moment? It's like going to some design meeting for the next version of iPhone and proposing solutions using technology that isn't close to being available and dismissing everyone else who's proposing solutions that are actually feasible.


One could argue there's no basis for human rights without implicit acceptance of those contracts - thus those who claim dissent can't meaningfully complain about any treatment they receive, since they forfeited all rights. It's incoherent to demand rights, which can only be afforded by others' restraints, without being obligated to restrain their own behavior.

The difference between ACists and others isn't that there should be implicit social contracts, but rather what should be in those contracts.

That how it works? You just sincerely claim dissent and bammo, out of the social contract? Cool!


But wait, how can we differentiate between sincere and insincere dissent? Perhaps we can use actions! For example, if someone pays their taxes, follows the law, and uses government services, their claims of secretly not agreeing to the social contract seem just a little bit like bull****.

I know there's some ******ed faux-clever line about "tacit consent isn't consent," but most people have no real problem applying the concept of tacit consent in individual contracts.

I thought that in that paper Coase argued that you didn't find people giving up something just to control people, so that wasn't why firms arose.

Though I will say it's a wonderful paper--and sheds a lot of light on the debate (at least, the one here, not the pvn and uke debate). Coase notes that firms arise because firms may be able to reduce transaction costs, by 'forcing' people--their employees--to do certain things. This is at a cost of not being able to use prices as signals anymore. He then notes that this puts a limit on the size of firms (larger firms induce more and costlier mistakes), and reasons firms may be different sizes in different industries. If the entrepreneur makes too many mistakes, then the losses from not using the signals outweigh the savings. So if mistakes don't cost much you'll get large firms (say, a firm making cars and trucks--putting the wrong guy installing lug nuts probably isn't a big mistake), but if the costs are big, firms would be smaller (putting the wrong guy on the diamond cutting machine...)

The paper does have stuff for both the statists and ACists. First, Coase is arguing that firms arise because there are *avoidable* transaction costs. But Coase also argues that those transaction costs put limits, because as the firm gets large, the mistakes eat away at the gains, and the *profitability* of the firm decreases. Governments don't really have those concerns.

Is there a big disagreement on the usual explanations for what's competing here: the usual public goods issues, long time horizon for math, risk adverseness encouraging the funding of many things (since some of them will eventually prove useful). I feel like mostly these is consensus on this, yes?

I imagine there's another side of opportunity costs (which I think in the case of some areas of pure math research is likely high), which is that it might be useful for society to pay a small price to maintain certain skills which are difficult to acquire in the short term, but which might become very valuable without much notice.

That argument equally well applies to the hole-digger, of course.

love it or leave it right? lets all just get thrown in jail for our beliefs!

Perhaps we're unclear about what the word "voluntary" means. The person getting murdered presumably does not consent to getting murdered, which makes such an interaction pretty clearly involuntary.

If the "victim" does consent, then we're talking assisted suicide, which IMO is a voluntary interaction.

I'm not really sure what you're getting at here. I don't deny that your opportunities are constrained by things outside your control. But to go back to the question you like so much, what sort of "ought" are you trying to advocate based on this constraint? OK, you can't be the quarterback for the Cowboys, so what?

Well they can't if we use MY definition. That's sort of the point.

Most people SAY they agree about a "general" notion of "equality" but when it comes down to it most people are really fine with saying that one class of people "ought" to be allowed to keep other people in a cage for (e.g.) consuming particular plants or they "ought" to be able to take a cut of others' income without repercussions.

Conflicting motivations don't necessarily have to lead to these types of inconsistencies. Of course, as you get more ambitious and start trying to build larger, more all-encompassing systems where you try to please everyone and solve everything are going to massively increase the chances of introducing more inconsistencies.

wat

The amount of resources you consume isn't really the issue, because as we know everyone has to eat. The issue is what you produced. You've basically told us that we should assume your output is zero. You're consuming without adding anything back to the economy. That isn't true for someone who (eg) makes chairs and sells them to people who need chairs.

You're looking at the wrong transactions.

This is what I'm talking about when I say "move up a level". Stop trying to "pick a system". Sure, people will still be forced to eat... but YOU won't be one forcing them. This is where the word "therefore" is coming from. Basically your argument here is a variation on "everyone else is doing it." What other reason could you be pointing this out for if not to justify your own impositions?

Cheeseburgers was just an example. The fact that they haven't been on the ballot (yet - there are plenty of stories of governments considering bans on particular foods, though) isn't really relevant. As I pointed out, there HAVE been micromanaging propositions on ballots here in the US.

I don't want to stop people from forming hierarchical structures.

Phone Booth,

My computer is, at present, malfunctioning, so I can't respond at length (currently posting from my phone), but suffice to say I either think you are misreading my views or I respectfully disagree at several junctures. Cheers for now, sir.

I haven't been trying to prescribe an "ought" in any more detail than you have when advocating a system that has voting in some part versus just market participation. Both are just systems that distribute resources among people in different ways without going into any detail. We have been having this somewhat silly discussion over the semantics of what silly examples are or are not voluntarism, but the point of it all stemmed from the original point of the following which hasn't really been addressed. Namely, the pretension that exists on the AC side where they feel their system is somehow "better" in vague metrics like "fairness" because their system is intrinsically more "voluntary". In ANY system, peoples actions are constrained by the means and opportunities as you admit, and that is what provides the biggest determiner of behavior. A system with a lot of very poor people isn't allowing for voluntarism despite the best ideals simply because the very poor have almost no choices avaliable to them. I have said this before, but feel the discussion has focused on definitions of voluntary and not the central concept which is I think clear regardless of semantics.

Incidentally, in light of our discussion of metrics for determining superior systems, my arguement can be construed as saying that how "voluntary" a system is is just a very poor metric to use. Certainly the extreme on one end - everything is controlled noone gets to choose anything - is bad but the extreme at the other end - people get to do whatever they want, ie motivation is the only determiner of behavior - is just fundamentally inconsistent with the realities of a constrained universe.



ya but you define what you set out to prove. It's like saying "I define X to be Y. Is X the same as Y?". Or in your case "Everyone is in the same moral class, is everyone in the same moral class"? What you need to do is give a definition of moral class separate from specifying who is in it and THEN ask your question. And there are many good definitions you could choose.


As for what people say....I think this just stems from the fact that people are simultaneously selfish and altruistic.....they want to benefit themselves but also have a sense of community. People like ideals of equality until it directly negatively affects them.

As for your specific examples of whether people ought to be imprisoned for pot, let us look at the other end of the spectrum to see how the voluntarism argument that might appear somewhat justified on this end just falls completely apart at the other....so ya lets look at a serial mass murderer and ask the question of whether he ought to be imprisoned? The answer doesn't much matter but the point is this: There are going to be times when peoples voluntarism CONFLICTS with each other....the ideal of perfect market voluntary transactions is just that, an ideal. You will get situations where one person wants to kill others and the other people want to not die and protect themselves and their community by locking him up. The ideal of trying to have a system where everything is voluntary just doesn't exist....no matter how you resolve it the result isn't going to be voluntary for someone and is going to be enforced on that person by the social ordering of the time. This is the same if it is a sophisticated western legal system or a social ordering where everyone hauls the culprit to a mullah in rural Afghanistan for judgment.

huh? My comment was explicitly not advocating for any system...or trying to "pick a system" in any way. It was talking very generally (and I made that it was generally very explicit) about ALL systems as a concept. The point of the comments was to illustrate that the way you and many others try and attack other systems be appealing to evocative words like "force" are products of ALL systems. I certainly wasn't trying to justify force because "everyone else does it" in any very vague system that I may or may not be advocating personally.

Regardless, as long as the pretension is dropped and we agree that AC like ideologies ALSO results in a distribution of resources and ideologies that intrinsically constrains peoples behaviors just as any other does at this general level then I am happy.



Ya, sure, anything CAN get on the ballot I have never contended this, it is just that a system which regularily micromanages your life through voting on a myriad of individual microdecisions is just practically impossible. Noone is ever going to vote on the examples you mentions like "should we fund uke_master's research" or "should uke_master be able to have a cheeseburger"....it is just far to impracticable. There may be some more specific votes like say on the scope of pure research or the banning of particular foods for health reasons but even that is unlikely at the level of public votings (as separate from representative votings)



What if the hierarchical structure they form is a government?

This whole paragraph just demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding. You should really stop debating until you can educate yourself.

I certainly haven't read all of the context for that, but there is a element of discretion in determining, for example, upon whom the burden falls to prove that some act was "non-aggressive". I hope you are not suggesting otherwise.