Stockholm syndrome?

What sort of coercive ways?

Lets say budweiser achieves a beer monopoly. What are they going to do? Shoot homebrewers? Is there a reason they weren't doing this BEFORE they achieved the monopoly?

They probably can't. THey CAN be defeated through competition.

Your entire argument here totally begs the question of how a firm can achieve a monopoly in the first place, not to mention the question of how effective coercive ways would be in protecting that monopoly. When budweiser starts spending money to build their army, what do you think is going to happen to their balance sheet?

Because they didn't have the resources / couldn't afford the short term consequences / hadn't yet sold their souls to Satan. Why don't terrorists fly planes into buildings as soon as they convert to Islam instead of waiting to go to flight school first?

(see, I can make silly analogies too.)

Which is why monopolists would create barriers to entry, as I described.

Where did I say Budweiser is assembling an army? How come every time someone tries to have a serious discussion about AC, all the responses are in the form of absurd analogies?

Potential theories:

1. ACists don't know enough about actual economics / real life to use realistic examples

2. ACists know their theories are weak and are just cynically derailing the argument

3. Selection bias - the most inventive and ludicrous analogies tend to play best on the internet, so people who make them tend to post more

4.

I'm not sure you understand what an analogy is.

But let's keep going anyway.

So they're just scraping by, in the thick of competition, then suddenly something magical occurs and they achieve monopoly, and now they can afford this stuff?

I'm not getting it.



I must have missed that part. Just saying they're going to do so isn't actually doing it.

I think we need to define "monopoly" and "barrier to entry".

A tough competitor is a barrier to entry, don't you think?

Again, I don't think that word means what you think it means. What am I analogizing here?

Regardless, if they're not building an army, WHAT ARE THEY DOING that is coercive? HOW are they going to project coercion without some sort of armed forces?

LOL IRONYAMENTS. All you do is attempt to derail discussions with your cliched inflammatory personal attacks and logical fallacies.

pvn,

I have described, in this very thread, all sorts of coercive ways for monopolists to create barriers to entry. You have ignored them. You would rather talk about the Budweiser army. I know it's hard when you can't talk about jackboots or hotdogs, but this discussion was moving along very nicely until you showed up.

What exactly is "too much market power"? Is there a right amount of market power? I ask in part because, while I am probably more skeptical of the necessity/desirability of bigger businesses than most ACists, I am also unconvinced that market power (e.g., having a high-% share of the market) is cause for alarm. To put what I mean in terms of historical examples, Gabriel Kolko shows in his Triumph of Conservatism that although many companies (e.g., Standard Oil) had extremely large market shares, these companies still didn't have the type of control over the market that monopolies created through legal barriers to entry enjoy.
Part of the issue is that, absent government regulation and legal restrictions on competition, cartels are extremely unstable and notoriously difficult to maintain (since the same profit motive that leads to the formation of the cartel eventually leads invdividual members to abandon it). So I think that general worries about consolidation of business, centralization of power, and so forth are more or less unfounded--this isn't to say that these things couldn't happen, only that it seems unlikely.
Given all of the above, I'm not inclined to think that security or courts provide cases so different that they require a completely separate line of reasoning. For one thing, security/courts/law aren't unique in that they require stability or standardization--pretty much all areas of the economy exhibit features that are best supplied in more or less stable ways (in Long's talk he uses the example of rectangular vs. triangular ATM cards).
And while your point about the market for security needing to be more stable than markets in other goods and services seems true, it's not clear to me why the only (or even most likely) way to secure this stability is via cartelization or consolidation of the industry (absent government coercion). Since stability is such an important feature of the security industry, it seems like 1) people would be willing to pay more for secuirty-that-will-remain-stable than they perhaps would for "risky" security firms, and 2) methods of stabilizing the security industry may arise through market and non-market sectors (non-mandatory licensing, neighborhood watch groups, etc.).
It is also worth noting that there are examples throughout history of security being provided through non-governmental means (check out, for instance, this article by Roderick Long about private protection in Britain). So it certainly doesn't seem inevitable that the need for stability will lead to a new State or to cartels (which are inherently unstable I should add).

So--to summarize--I just don't see an increased need for stability in market X or Y as reason enough to think that it can't be provided by changing and dynamic markets. Austrian economic theory shows that monopolies are the products of states, not free markets, and history shows as well that security, law, etc. can be provided--with stability--by the free market.

From someone who doesn't read much about politics, and had to look up AC after the first post, I agree 100% with Mr. Clean. These analogies are stupid and I really just wish someone would come out with plain language instead of bullcrap hypotheticals and actually debate some points. Thank god we aren't close to AC at all cuz you ACers are ****in crazy.....tons of you would fit in with those nutty eco-terrorists in Rainbow Six.

oh not this nietz guy obv, he is tite.

I don't dispute that monopolies are often aided or supported by states in the current setup, but I don't buy the argument that states are the only way for monopolies to exist. Currently they're the BEST way for a monopoly to exist - the most efficient, given their own territorial monopoly - and thus that is the predominant form. However, a monopolist could still pursue the same benefits of state aid - stronger barriers to entry than it can create on its own - through other means, such as private security companies, banks, etc. And note that a monopoly need not be perfect to violate the rights of a consumer or competitor; it merely needs to be strong enough to make enforcement against it prohibitively expensive.

As far as history showing that security can be provided privately, I haven't seen any such example from a modern society. Accounts of voluntary transactions between Icelandic settlers don't quite cut it for me. (The long article you linked came up as 404). Furthermore, even if security CAN be provided privately, that says nothing about whether it will be available to everyone. In fact, it seems likely to me that it wouldn't, and thus that your property rights would depend on your having property. (This is often the case today anyway, I know).

Your point about large market shares that do not actually exercise control over the market is well-taken, and again, I don't have a problem with a legitimately large or even total market share.

As far as the market not being able to provide stability in security, I think your point about the demand for uniformity of a product is valid, but I also think there are degrees of complexity, risk and overhead that make the ATM card analogy a little weak. The cost to the banking network of producing a uniform technology in this regard is pretty low, the same way it's pretty low for CD manufacturers to ensure that all CD's are the same size, etc. But not everything that a consumer might demand be uniform can realistically be provided at a cost at or below their willingness or ability to pay. Nor will the demand for property rights itself be uniform - I think it is fair to bet that some of those who do not have any property will in fact have a somewhat carefree attitude towards the concept. In this way the demand for property rights will shift and change in ways that correlate (roughly) with the allocation of property itself, and those shifts will threaten stability in the market. Businesses do not respond instantly do these types of changes. And in this case, the cost of a losing security venture is quite a bit higher than the cost of an ATM machine being closed down when demand for ATM cards shifts or disappears.

In short, I think it's fair to say that security in a world of economic inequality (which ACists tend to admit would be the case) would be a pretty high-variance market, making it challenging for firms to do enough volume that they can realistically be risk-neutral. On top of that, the incentive structure of the security market may lead firms to violate the rights of non-clients, particularly those who cannot afford any security service, or those who are more tenuously covered.

No, you haven't. You've said bad things will happen [eg].

You've created a huge "what is the RILLY WORST" hijack.

But you haven't articulated an actual mechanism these monopolies will use to erect barriers to entry.

Right now, artificial barriers to entry are erected by states, through legislation, regulation, etc.

Without the state apparatus, HOW is budweiser going to keep people out of the market? THey can keep prices so low nobody else can profitably enter. That's a "barrier to entry" but I'm going to assume that these sort of NATURAL barriers to entry are not what you're complaining about. So, they're not going to build an army, HOW ARE THEY GOING TO COERCIVELY ERECT BARRIERS TO ENTRY?

Private security companies??? I thought they were not building an army?

OK, bait and switch. What kind of actions do you see as necessary for this private security company to take in order to keep people out of the market?

How is the bill from the NOT AN ARMY PRIVATE SECURITY COMPANY going to look on their profit and loss sheet?

How do banks help companies create coercive barriers to entry?

pvn,

Once again, you are ignoring all the strategies that I mentioned earlier in this thread. And LOL at the idea that I am 'hijacking' a 'potential weaknesses of AC' thread by talking about potential weaknesses of AC.

Look at the way some of the more thoughtful ACists are responding to this thread. Look at how they take a whole post into account and give a logical response without simply trying to find fault with everything the other poster says. Look at how much more civilized this thread was before you showed up. And then hopefully make the decision to voluntarily STFU.

You'll have to be more specific. I'm looking and not seeing them.

In post #65, you mention the possibility of accumulating "too much" market power, and that firns that do so might exercise it in "a way" that is difficult to counter, but nothing about HOW they would actually do this.

In post #66, you've got an unbacked assertion:

No details of HOW this would occur. It just would, because I can't think of anything else.

Oh, I found it. It was hard, because it was buried in the middle of your "not a hijack" about what is REALLY a "worst case" scenario. Anyway, here it is, post #146:

So you've got two types of actions in here.

THe first (offering a better deal, negotiating exclusive deals) are not objectionable at all. These happen all the time in the status quo and are basically part and parcel of competition.

Others, such as "burning down your house" (oh, but you're so offended that I would suggest that you think people are building an army) are clearly coercive.

Bribery doesn't really make much sense in a truly free market. Without violence-backed monopoly, the incentives for corruption are GREATLY diminished. In a free market, a building inspector who is in competiton with others and has to rely on his reputation is considerably LESS likely to take bribes than a monopoly building inspector whose approval you need to go forward (you can't go to any other guy, so if he's slow, you just have to wait (or bribe him to get to you faster)) and who has no regard for his reputation at all.

"Smear campaigns" is to vague and emotionally-charged to be useful. Are we talking outright fraud or just marketing?

Ditto with "sabotage and infiltrate". Key employees move from firm to firm all the time. Your terms are to vague to really be useful in a meaningful discussion.

But most importantly, NONE of these tactics are UNIQUELY available to firms in a monopoly position.

A nitfest over what actually constitutes a "worst case scenario" isn't a "weakness of of AC". But I'll drop that point.

Uh, a logical response points out the faults in the statement it is a response to.

You're certainly a model of civilized behavior. I "showed up" to this thread in post #7.

Oh, I know! Someone else should be forced to subsidize your decision to live in a dangerous area!

And what if the area you live in goes from being safe to being dangerous without your input or through any fault of your own?

Of course bribery makes sense in a free market. It makes sense any time the expected risk/cost of the bribe is less than the expected benefit. You don't need a monopoly to make unethical practices profitable. The burden of proving a bribe or initiating a boycott against someone you believe has accepted a bribe is on the 'victim'... and, as I said before, the investigative resources of such a victim might be very low, or the person simply might not be very savvy. If the person doing the bribing is savvy about it, it's hard to detect and even harder to prove. In other words, poor people and people of low education or social standing would be at a high risk for being the victims of unethical business practices.

"Smear campaigns is too vague and emotionally charged to be useful." I don't see what more neutral or specific word you would like me to use, it seems perfectly clear. I am talking about slander, libel, and related crimes. Again, these are very difficult to investigate, prove or enforce in court. This lowers the risk of lost business for the perpetrator and makes the crime more attractive.

"Sabotage and infiltrate" is also a perfectly clear term. We are not talking about free movement of labor between employers, we are talking about employees or agents who breach the confidentiality of a business - which is part of their voluntary employment - in exchange for compensation from another party. You do not need a state for this practice to be profitable either.

Nope, but they are exacerbated in a system where property rights and personal safety are provided only to those who can afford them.

And then mercifully disappeared for quite some time. Let's hope history repeats.

Ditto. Someone else should have to pay for it, even though it happened without their input or through any fault of their own. AMIRITE?

What if you ______? We could play this game all day long. Bad things happen to people. You aren't entitled to a white knight to swoop in and make your life cushy.

If you want to go out and help other people, go right ahead. I've got a couple of chairities I donate time and effort to, we'll do what we can, you do what you can.

I am not making a moral argument here, I am making an objection to the way it will function. If this sort of thing is common - which I think it would be, as, for reasons I have already described, I think the security market would be highly volatile - then the property rights and personal safety of large numbers of people will be repeatedly violated. They will not give their assent to such a system.

I'm not saying I'm entitled to anything, I'm saying people have no reason to support or participate in a voluntary society where their basic security cannot be assured. People are risk averse, especially in this area.

I'm not denying that monopolistic companies could exist without the aid of government intervention--I just find it pretty unlikely in a free market. I add this emphasis since it seems that if a company were using physical force a la private security firms to ensure monopolistic prices that to some degree we are simply moving away from what it means to have a free market. Again, something like this could happen--but if a society is libertarian enough to abolish government, it sure seems like it will be libertarian enough to repel smaller monopolies that have lost the backing of State violence.

I think that in order for a company (or companies) to use "other methods" in order to attain a reasonably stable monopoly, it will have to include the formation of a reasonably stable cartel--which I still have no reason to believe is likely--or considerable consolidation of several different markets (banking, security, courts, and so forth), which again seems difficult to achieve given that 1) consolidation is benefitted by corporatist regulation and not by free competition, and 2) such companies are all operating within a society libertarian enough to have previously overthrown a State.

1. I checked the link earlier today, and it was working then, so you may want to give it another try (though if you find examples involving Icelandic settlers unconvincing I am not sure how convincing this would be either).

2. Why wouldn't security be available to everyone? If I may bring up "unconvincing" examples involving Icelandic settlers, there are historic precendents of dealing with situations in which a person's rights are violated but they have no money to file suit (since a person whose rights are violated has a legitimate claim to compensation regardless of whether they can afford to purse it, part of this claim can be used as a means to hiring a lawyer, funding security, etc.)
In any case, I don't really see issues involving "people who don't own property" as overly problematic since I think that most of our current economic inequality (most notably the divide between "people who own means of production" and "people who don't") is government-caused, and that in a stateless society people who wanted to own property could.

Honestly, I don't really disagree with much of this. I'm just not convinced that any of this is enough of a reason to think that security couldn't be provided by free markets. Keep in mind that, to the degree that more traditional firm-based approaches to security provision were difficult or unsuccessful, there are still other "non-market" avenues of providing such services. One example might be something like neighborhood watch groups, or even stuff as simple as individual families owning guns. I'm not sure that I would be entirely comfortable with these things replacing market approaches to security, but I would be quite surprised if they weren't an important complement to them, something that might fill in and alleviate market shortfalls (assuming there are any).

I should also add that I would be sincerely surprised if property rights, laws, etc. were uniform--obviously there needs to be uniformity of some degree between different towns and cities and whatnot (or at least customary rules for resolving disputes) but one of the advantages of a stateless society is that laws don't need to be the same everywhere. This does of course present some danger of certain areas developing highly unlibertarian interpretations of law or property rights, but 1) it would be much easier to "vote with your feet" in such a society, and 2) economic incentives would make it more costly for people to force rights-violating practices on others (since, unlike in our current system, a person would have to pay for security firms to enact such rules, rather than merely go to a booth and vote for them).

Well, as I noted above, while I am no economic egalitarian I think there would be a lot less economic inequality than we have today, and I think the cases where people can't afford security or claim compensation owed to them when wronged would be few and far-between.

niet,

Good points. I think what you say about the general libertarian disposition of a society that would move towards market anarchism being a sort of selection bias against monopolies is very true. From a practical standpoint, I see this as being very difficult to arrive at due to the current - and rapidly growing - level of economic inequality. The bottom line is that the driving force behind demands for liberal markets has never come from the poor, or even from the very rich - it comes from the bourgeoisie. That observation also lends credence to what you said about levels of economic inequality being lower in a truly free-market society.

I think it would be fair to say that a large portion of my objections to AC arise from difficulties that would follow from people who who were not in favor of AC in the first place, not from voluntarism itself. I think it's a problem of initial allocation, too - it is much, much easier to see a fair, free-market driven society evolving from a circumstance where initial allocation were fairly equal. But since it isn't, and isn't likely to be, I think the attempt to transition into a stateless society FROM a highly unequal initial allocation would be catastrophic. Honestly, if you had to ask me what would give the highest likelihood of a just AC society existing, I would say that it would be more likely to arise out of a collectivist libertarian society than a statist, capitalist society. If it were going to work, you'd probably need the anarchy first, and the capitalism second.

On one specific point, around property rights for the indigent. I believe the example you are referring to involves allowing a person to sell their claim to someone with the means to pursue it - I think this is mentioned in the Long talk that you linked earlier. Presumably any market where this could be provided profitably would involve a substantial risk premium, which would mean that the poor essentially lose a percentage of their property rights the less able they are to defend them. The selling of claims also doesn't totally address the issues of prohibitive enforcement costs when economic disparity is very high, although it is certainly an innovative solution.

Who is going to be taking bribes in the free market?

Who is going to be the "victim" of these bribes?

These are honest questions.

In a free market, why would I bribe, say, a food inspector?

Right now, in the status quo, such happens for the following reasons:

1) The food inspector, knowing that your business must have his approval in order to operate, extorts such a bribe.

2) The food inspector, having no motivation to actually perform his duty in a timely manner, is slow, and you have to bribe him to get to your store before you die of old age.

3) Your restaurant is filthy.

In a free market, 1 and 2 are of no concern (since you can go to a competitive inspector (or go without any inspection, even though you may have a hard time convincing people to eat food from your uninspected kitchen)), leaving 3.

In case 3, restaurants have a clear motive to offer bribes. But inspectors have a clear incentive to refuse bribes. If they get caught, their reputation is shot, and their real customers who are capable of passing a real inspection will drop their services and use a reputable inspector.

And creating whole new classes of bribery opportunities is going to improve this part of that situation?

As opposed to the way things are now?

That's much clearer than "smear campaigns". So you're just begging the question of these crimes being investigated? OK then. I'll just beg the question of what happens in statism and assume everything looks pretty much like North Korea.

So what's different about these under a state?

So you're again begging the question. You're saying people will violate contracts and nobody is going to care? The entire premise here is that the population overwhelmingly values contractual obligations etc. This makes no sense given the parameters of the scenario.

THat may be, but we're not discussing such a system.

Please point out where I've been "uncivil" in this thread. I mean, before you started throwing around insults, stuffing words in people's mouths, etc [eg]

People's property rights are repeatedly violated under the status quo. In fact, they are violated BY DEFINITION in the status quo.

The state cannot assure your security. The SCOTUS even explicitly says it is not the state's duty to do so.

There is no utopian security solution, with or without a state.

Do you also find AC objectionable because it has no workable model of providing flying ponies and rainbows to children every day?

Yes, I do.

I am not saying that the state provides a great security solution. I'm saying that it will do a better job than a 'free market' in any realistic scenario where we move from statism to AC, given the particular features of statist society (especially illegitimate patterns of allocation and enforced economic disparity).

As for the other scenarios, you are just being willfully obtuse at this point and I don't care to debate you. Once again, the ACist imagination is boundless when it comes to the capacities of the market and useless when it comes to any potential problems.

Well, duh. The rich use the state to their own advantage. The poor buy in because they get the promise of having the power of the state directed for their own advantage. We've seen how well that works out for them over and over again, whether it be in the form of Marxism or US-style democracy (certainly the poor do better under one of these than the other, but in no case are they actually getting a long-term advantage over the wealthy).

As has been pointed out, under AC, you would be free to join a state-like organization. One that had a constitution that suited your personal preferences, even.

Is this significantly different than paying lawyers on a contingency basis?

OK, great. Join a state. Why do you need me to participate?

Actually I'd prefer if you didn't.