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Oct. 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
41:34
457 Arguments Against Anarchy
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Good evening, everybody.
I come at you dark from the dungeon of the underground.
I hope you are doing well.
I am going to pillage a gentleman who wisely or perhaps unwisely posted some good topics on my board that he had received in an email conversation, had posted some criteria which he's going to write an article on.
His name's Wilt.
You can look for his fine, fine stuff on lewrockwell.com.
And long-time listener, long-time poster, and most excellent brethren of dance.
And he had some very interesting objections to market anarchy.
And, of course, it's been a while since I've really worked in the economic-political sphere.
But I thought it would be worthwhile going over a couple of these so that if you get people like this, you will know that your own answers are far better than mine.
But I'll put mine out there anyway.
Right.
So here he's got some criticisms.
This gentleman has written to him and said, Using libertarian to mean anarchist is a bad thing.
Sort of where one, you should use anarcho-capitalist, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
The second one is, you speak a lot about morals, but you must know that we all have or could have different morals, and when my morals differ significantly enough, the only option is to abridge my freedom or become a relativist.
These solutions, another wonder, solutions proposed by market anarchists will result in a police state worse than the one we already have.
No one has produced an example of stable anarchy, and until they do, assuming that market anarchism is a reasonable possibility is hubris.
Next one. The market does not always work.
In fact, the market may or may not reward force with a profit or bankruptcy.
So we might end up with lots more violence.
Next one. There exists a just right amount of government which is optimal for allowing liberty for the populace, but control for the bad elements in society and from without of our nation, from other nations, I guess.
He's slightly into Spoonerisms.
Market anarchism provides no authority superior to both the assassin and the victim to say the former is wrong, merely that the market result was that the price-cost benefit of violence exceeds that of protection-slash-security.
Market anarchism relies on property rights which are not universally agreed or supported.
If the market favors violence, force, fraud, theft, and other destruction of rights, including property rights, which will destroy a free market, should that be regulated or left to happen and develop?
A juicy, juicy series of questions and very common objections to market anarchy as a whole.
So I thought, I'm sure that Wilt, I had a look at his article, will do a fantabulous job of savaging and destroying these entirely understandable objections.
But nonetheless, he does not meet all of the...
He doesn't get to all of the listeners that I do.
He gets to other ones, and I'm sure more of them in some ways, but he doesn't get to...
Put this damn piece of paper down.
He doesn't get to all of the listeners that can be gotten to through...
The audio and video, so I thought I'd throw in a few of mine, though I'm sure his answers will be fantabulous, and you can have a look for his article as it comes out, as I'm sure it will, on LewRockwell.com.
Well, the first one is the sort of nitpicky stuff, and I get a fair amount of this in emails and posts and so on.
I remember one guy, I did an article, which you might be interested in reading if you haven't read it, which is available at freedomain.com.
I mean, let's not speak into the beep.
freedomain.blogspot.com It's called Approving Libertarian Morality.
It's also available on Lou Rockwell.
It's an audio cast, and I believe it's coming out as a tattoo and breakfast cereal next week.
And in it, I sort of take, I think, a fairly valiant stab at proving objective morality.
I sort of call it libertarian morality because I think that anything that's not based on sort of objective rationality is not too, too helpful.
And, you know, I must say that I think it's a fairly decent stab at the thorniest of human problems, the proof of morality in the absence of God or social convention.
And you get a lot of nitpicky emails where people say, you know, when you use the word premise here, I think you actually meant axiom.
You might want to get this stuff proofread before you send it out.
I mean, holy crap.
Forest for the trees stuff, right?
And this gentleman is saying, well, you use the term libertarianism, which encompasses small to no government, when in fact you mean market anarchism, which is no government, and you should use the term market anarchism to refer to market anarchism and not confuse it with libertarians.
Right? You know, that's exactly the same kind of precision that the really clear definitions and really precise use of language that you see in things like religion and politics.
And we can see that if only we could end up with definitions of terms as precise as those within religion and politics and statism and so on, then of course we would have all of the power that those two systems have.
Oh wait, they don't use any terms that are defined in those, and yet they still have all the power.
So clearly, the problem with us is not a lack of precise definitions of terms, because our enemies don't define anything in any way that is rational or reasonable, and yet they seem to hold all the power.
So I must say that empirically, I don't think that the frickin' problem is that we don't define all of our terms down to exact atomic precision.
This nitpicky kind of stuff, this is just a sort of irritable personality who likes to sort of nitpick.
And there's this great Dilbert where Wally is sort of saying, you know, of all the pleasures in life, he's sort of handing Dilbert back a presentation or a piece of text.
With, you know, 8 million corrections.
And he says, you know, of all the things in life, I think, all the pleasures in life, I think nitpicking is the greatest.
And Dilbert says, well, that would explain your third marriage.
And Wally says, yeah, you wouldn't believe what she thought was fun.
Quite true. And as far as the nitpicky people go, it's absolute passive aggression.
To focus on little inconsequential details rather than the large, broad sweep of the argument is hilarious.
And it really is people who have been raised with excessive criticism, you know, tiny little souls who just like to throw roadblocks up to anyone else who's making any kind of movement.
Their only goal is paralysis and this sort of stuff.
And that sort of stuff, right?
Because, of course, what you can do to somebody who fusses about particular terms and you should have used this word when you...
is say, okay, well, great.
You've obviously gone a lot further than I have through use of precise definitions.
So, of course, I emailed back the guy who said I should have been using the word axiom rather than premise and I should get people to proofread my stuff and I'm an amateur at this and that and the other.
And, of course, I emailed him back and said, wow, you must have gone a lot further than I did in these sorts of ideas.
Perhaps you could send me your arguments for the proof of morality, and I can see how your excessive precision or greater precision than you claim that I am using, how it has served you in terms of the pursuit of truth.
And, of course, I never heard back from him because the purpose of that kind of stuff is simply to nitpick and humiliate, not to serve to enhance knowledge or anything like that.
Because, of course, he didn't actually...
Go against any of the ideas.
He didn't actually find an argument against the ideas that I was putting forward.
All he did was nitpick about one word or the other, and it's total passive aggression and it's a complete waste of time for anyone to get involved in that kind of stuff.
So you can send these people on their way with a merry heart and a clear conscience, I think.
So I wouldn't worry too, too much about that kind of stuff.
Ah, yes, the question of ethics.
So when you start to talk about ethics, because it is considered to be a sort of surreal, modernist kind of fantasy painting, the idea of ethics, it is one of these words that gets people all hot and bothered, and as soon as you start talking about universal ethics, They see tyranny, they see all of the kind of bludgeoning of all differences of opinion that occurred through totalitarian implementations of ethics, i.e.
Nazism, fascism and so on, the 20th century slaughterhouses and genocidal death camps.
So as soon as you start using the word ethics, then people say, well, ethics are subjective, ethics are relative, or at least my ethics may not be exactly the same as yours, and therefore, if you start talking about universal ethics, you are crushing my independence and you have to not allow me to have my ethics, or you've got to become a relativist, and so on and so on and so on.
And to me, this is kind of funny.
It's kind of funny in a way.
Because, yes, there are local variations in terms of ethics.
And they're generally called things like politeness.
Or they just could be certain particular preferences, right?
So, you know, there is a universal ethic called don't steal, which is, I think, reasonable.
There is a more subjective ethic or kind of aesthetics called fiscal prudence.
Fiscal prudence is subjective.
Fiscal prudence, when you are 20 and in excellent health, is quite a different matter than when you are 60 and have received a death sentence from some kind of illness.
You've got three months to live or something like that.
Fiscal prudence, when you're 20 and you're in good health, is something to do with Getting a good education, putting money aside, being wise, saving for your retirement to some degree.
You don't put 99.9% of your income into your retirement savings and live in a cardboard box and all that kind of stuff because that would be a little bit over prudent, I guess you could say.
But physical prudence is one of these things that is sort of subjective, right?
And, of course, there's no ethics, right?
There's common sense. There's sort of sensible stuff.
But how much should you save and how much should you spend and this, that, and the other?
Well, who knows, right?
It's all relative to your circumstances.
Do you have kids? Are you in good health?
Do you expect to live for a long time?
And, of course, if you happen to have a personality with a really sort of short attention span, Then spending in the now would probably create a happier life for you than deferring gratification.
Although deferring gratification is going to have some benefits and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But there's no absolute answers to these kinds of things.
How much should you save? How much should you spend?
I think pretty much we can all get behind don't kill, don't steal, don't rape, and, you know, largely keep your contracts, right?
I mean, that would be, I think, an important set of rules to go by.
Don't harm other people and their property and do what you say you're going to do that you've legally contracted for.
I think most people could get behind that kind of stuff, but as to everything else, you know, what is the age of consent for sexuality?
Well, there's no objective definition of that kind of stuff that can be imposed upon all circumstances, right?
Some people are 30 and too immature for sex, and some people are 15 and perfectly mature enough for it, I guess, theoretically, right?
We get a proper educational system going.
So, that is the kind of stuff where somebody says, because ethics are subjective, You can't talk about ethics when designing a political system, and all that seems kind of odd, right?
It seems kind of strange to look at it that way.
And it seems to me that it would be much more likely to be considered an argument for anarchism or anarcho-capitalism.
It would seem to be much more an argument for anarchism than against anarchism to say, "Gee, you know, a lot of people seem to have a lot of different ways of viewing the world." because, of course, when you have a government, then you have a set and standard way of enforcing these kinds of things around the world, right, or around the country, for sure.
So how much should you save for retirement?
Well, of course, that's quite subjective.
It depends on this, that, or the other.
And yet, when you are involved in the state, you have your old-age pension taxes of whatever form they take in your society, and that's what you have to save, damn it.
And you continue to have to save for your Social Security, even if you're 50 and have just been diagnosed with a fatal illness, and you're an employee, well, you still have to pay for your retirement, even though you have no hope in hell of claiming it, right?
So the fact that there is some subjectivity around what is beneficial to a human being outside of the universal ethics, There is no absolute rule how much you should save, how much you should spend, what kind of house you should buy, whether you should go to school or not.
There's absolutely no There's a funny line in a movie, Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, which is not a bad film.
It's quite funny. Somebody's saying to him, this guy's applying to medical school, and he's screwed up his whole application, and he's pretty lackadaisical in the interview and so on.
And his interviewer says, but you know, you scored very, very high on your admission standards.
You have a great mind.
You should really use it.
Why would you not want to do medicine and so on?
And he's like, well, just because you have a big dick doesn't mean that you have to do porn.
Be a porn star. And I think that's kind of funny.
And there's some truth in that, right?
Subjectively, what makes people happy is, you know, outside of the basics, don't kill, don't steal, don't rape, don't assault and keep your promises.
Outside of that, it's pretty much wide open, right?
How much should you give to charity?
Is it better to alleviate poverty by giving to charity, or is it better to alleviate poverty by putting your money in a bank, or is it better to alleviate poverty by starting a business and hiring poor people, or is it better to alleviate poverty by buying consumer goods, which creates jobs, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Of course, if you put the money in the bank, the money's available for people to invest and start their own companies and so on.
So, there really is no clear answer to any of these kinds of things.
It's due to subjective preferences and personal abilities, right?
So if you are excellent at starting companies and very bad at picking out the worthy poor from the unworthy poor, if you can't tell if you give a guy money whether he's going to go to the racetrack and blow it or whether he's going to go and get himself sorted out in a job, get himself a job and get settled in, Then if you can't tell that, but you're really good at starting a company and hiring people and you're a great entrepreneur, then that's what you should be doing to alleviate poverty, right?
It's kind of funny about all these philanthropical foundations that people like Bill Gates set up.
It's like, dude, stop doing that stuff.
Leave that to the... to the charities and go start another company which hires lots of people.
That's the best thing you can do for poverty but of course they feel guilty about their wealth and so blah blah blah blah blah.
They don't recognize that creating new companies and making fabulous amounts of profits is the best way to alleviate poverty.
That's not something that they've really been taught and it's unlikely that they've learned it from the other champagne socialists that they hang with, right?
That's not a very likely scenario.
Ah, the endless oppositions to the Diero model.
Let's move on with those.
So, for those who are just tuning in, the dispute resolution organization model, or the DRO model, simply says that in the absence of a state, in order to protect contract and property and liberty and life and security and so on, People will contract out with insurance companies or dispute resolution organizations so that if you and I have a dispute, then our insurance companies talk to each other and this and that and the other.
Now, of course, everyone and their brother and a few dogs and one cat have written to me saying that this will result in a far more fascistic state than the one we currently have because instead of one government That is oppressing you, you end up with thousands of these DRO organizations that are continually binding you in their web and so on.
And I think that is not really the case.
I think that is not really the case.
And I'll give it sort of briefly as to why.
But there's lots of reasons.
The one that I haven't talked about before is that DROs are sort of a temporary situation when you're in business.
So, for instance, when you start out in business, your boss probably keeps like your very first job.
You're like 17 and you're going to go work at McDonald's.
They probably keep kind of an eye on you because they don't know if you're honest or not, right?
They have some sense of it, right?
It's your very first job. You have no experience.
Then they're going to make sure you don't steal food.
They're going to whatever, whatever, right?
Or if you are a temp and you're going in for your very first office job with no experience and no history, then they're going to say, you have to be at work by 9.
I'm going to check over your work and make sure you're not slacking off.
And if you sort of say on your second day, I'd really like to work from home now, they're probably not going to agree with it because you don't have...
Any real history of honest and self-motivated behavior that is smacks of integrity and so on.
But of course, as you get further along in your career, you can begin to take those kinds of, quote, liberties because you have earned respect based on how it is that you perform, right?
So I've been doing the software business now for, oh, I guess about 15 years, maybe a little longer off and on.
And I'm like in my third week or fourth week on this job, and I'm going to work from home tomorrow.
And they don't have to worry about whether or not I am going to actually be working or not because they can check on YouTube and see, oh wait, no, let's not have them do that.
No, because I sort of earned that, right?
So as you get along in your career as a business person or as anybody who trades for value, this can be on...
Something like eBay and that kind of stuff as well.
As you get along in your career, the need to check up on you diminishes.
One of the reasons why you get paid more is that you need less supervision, less training, less checking up.
Nobody needs to double-check your work and so on.
And so DROs are really only important when you're starting out in your career.
When you've been doing business with someone for ten years or five years or maybe even two years and you trust them and you have the same values and so on, then are you necessarily going to involve a DRO in every single one of your transactions?
Well, no, of course not. I mean, a handshake is going to suffice because you could have DROs that are completely passive and simply lodge complaints, right?
In the way that eBay lodges complaints after the fact, and that's about it, right?
It doesn't charge you up front to guarantee your deal.
It just, you know, all it does is lodge.
And I have this sort of idea for an anarchist society that would be sort of a contract rating, which is like your credit rating, right?
So... In the sort of real world now, the sort of fantasy world of the state, you have a credit rating.
And your credit rating is a reflection of how well you can be trusted to pay off a loan.
And, of course, if you have a good credit rating, then you get a very cheap loan, and that sort of said loan is subsidized by the people who have a bad credit rating who are charged more for the additional risk.
And to have a contract rating would make sense in a free society.
Ooh, things are getting rather dark.
Does that help a little bit?
I think that helps a little bit.
It's a vague microphone pumpkin head here.
Well, we're taking on a surreal journey of darkness through the brain vaults of Free Domain Radio.
So, I don't see that as you continue on in your life that you're going to want to pay 1% or 2% to a DRO to back up and provide dispute resolutions.
You might have reactive DROs that you only go to when you have a problem.
And there's lots of ways in which you can not have DROs be present in your calculations or in your economic calculations.
But of course, the one thing that is rather amazing, and this is what comes out of people who have grown up in a state kind of situation, the one thing that is absolutely amazing to me about people who complain about the probability or the possibility, or it seems sometimes the inevitability,
that DROs are going to just become these fascistic little organizations that rule everyone and encroach upon your liberties, like instead of there being a bear that you have to watch, it's like death by a thousand mosquito bites and so on, is that the one thing that is true in the market is that if everybody's scared of it, someone's going to find something that they need,
then someone is going to find a way to provide a service while minimizing then someone is going to find a way to provide a service So, if everybody's afraid of DROs becoming mini-fascistic organizations, mini sort of cluster-screw state organizations that attach to you and smother you with petty regulation after petty regulation, Then people are going to be very hesitant to sign up to these organizations.
They'll be very hesitant to sign up, and of course they're going to have a strong incentive to cancel.
If you get three letters a week, three sort of thick, bulky, manila envelope letters a week detailing all the new regulations that the DRO is imposing upon you, you're going to sort of say, Forget this.
Let's not do this.
I'm not going to deal with this DRO. I'm going to cancel my contract, and I'm going to go with someone who promises 12 rules.
There are 12 rules. That's it.
12 rules clearly spelled out, the 12 commandments of Bob and Jane's DRO, that are going to be simple, and if we add more rules, then we'll give you a refund, a full refund.
And if we do things that you don't like, We'll give you a full refund.
I mean, just the same way that every other damn store in the universe that's got any kind of integrity or worth behind it, that's the same way they do business.
So the idea that these DROs are just going to start swarming over and over-regulating and claustrophobically dragging down the spirit and independence of the age is simply ridiculous.
I mean, that's not how these sorts of things work.
Work, right? I mean, if you go to Best Buy, they have some fine print, but it's not like 12 volumes of fine print about how to return your stuff, right?
If you go to Best Buy, and they say, sure, you can buy this MP3 player, and you can return it on every second Thursday that's a full moon, as long as you bring the original credit card that hasn't been used since, and blah-de-blah-de-blah, all you're going to do is say, yeah, you know what, I think I'll just go to FutureShop instead, because they've got a no-hassle 30-day guarantee.
I mean, this is how things work in the free market.
This is how things work when people aren't forced at gunpoint to deal with each other.
They have to provide value.
And the DROs have to provide value.
And they will be constantly competing.
To be as unobtrusive as possible.
Now, of course, it's kind of tough for people to think about this kind of stuff in certain situations.
Like in the United States, of course, one of the problems is that you have these HMOs.
Maybe I should change DROs.
Maybe they sound too much like that.
But you have these HMOs.
And you have to fill out a lot of paperwork whenever you go to the hospital, but that's all government stuff.
The government regulations cause all of that kind of stuff.
It is absolutely in a company's best interest if you are wary of them over-regulating in you and you are wary of them causing you lots of hassle and paperwork and grief and restrictions, then they have to find a way to make you feel comfortable that they're not going to do that.
And the way that they do that is they provide you contractual refunds.
They provide you, you know, if we ever prosecute you unjustly, if we launch a suit against you as your DRO for a non-negotiable, we find against you and then our independent DRO, the one that you and I get to choose together, finds that we were wrong and we prosecuted you unjustly, but we guarantee that we will pay you a million dollars.
Whatever, right? Whatever.
Whatever it takes to calm people's fears about intrusiveness and over-regulation from the standpoint of the DRO system, whatever it takes to make people feel safe and secure and that they're going to be less and less regulated over time.
To the beginning, sure.
It's like your credit rating when you first start out.
If you've got no credit history, it's pretty bad.
It's like your insurance when you're starting to drive a car if you've got no history.
But then as time goes forward, these things get better or less obtrusive and so on.
I mean, the first quote I got when I was like 33, I didn't have a driver's license because I'd never had a car.
I got $7,000 with the first quote for insurance.
And I managed to get it down to like $3,500 by shopping around.
And now it's like, you know, $1,200, $1,300 because, you know, I'd gone like seven years without an accident.
So, of course, there is a danger that everybody's going to be afraid of that the DROs are going to become We're good to go.
Becoming intrusive and so on.
So this is just people who are used to working with governments and can't see the difference between a government which forces you and a private company which has to win your business and has to prove that it is not going to be intrusive and is not going to bother you all the time with all these nonsensical things.
Ah, yes.
Stable anarchy.
Nobody has produced a system of stable anarchy, and therefore, to say that it will work is pure hubris.
Well, I've got to tell you, that's not true.
It's not true on very, very many levels.
And it's just important to understand, when you're dealing with people like this who are coming up with these kinds of objections, they're yes-but people, right?
And this is a very common and well-understood psychological phenomenon.
So, somebody's not happy and you say, well, you could change your job.
Yeah, but I'm tied into the pension plan here.
Oh, well, you could get new hobbies.
Yeah, but I travel too much for work.
It's like, well, you could cut down on your traveling for work.
Yeah, but I got a big house.
I need the commission, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, you could do this. You could do this.
Well, but, yes, but, yes, but, yes, but, right?
These people are not interested in solving problems.
What they're trying to do is frustrate you, right?
So this is people who complain about something, and then when you provide a solution, they tell you in great detail and in exasperating detail exactly why that solution will not work.
So then you propose another solution, and they then tell you in great detail, well, that...
It won't work. And then when you say, well, obviously you're not interested in finding a solution for this, they'll say, no, no, no, I'm totally interested in finding a solution.
It's just that, you know, none of the ones that you're providing work.
And this is a sort of well-known psychological trap that people of a certain kind of emotional history and who've gone through a certain kind of strangulating kind of destructive abuse, usually of a passive-aggressive kind within their family,
These people are just trying to reproduce, for the pleasure of others, the same kind of emotional and psychological and spiritual, frankly, strangulation that they went through as children at the hands of their parents or teachers or whatever.
They're trying to reproduce that for other people, right?
So they're trying to make other people feel futile and frustrated and hopeless.
And so they do that by coming up with objection after objection.
So it's just sort of important to understand that, right?
When someone says, well, there's been no working anarchy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, first of all, that's sort of ridiculous insofar as even if there was no such thing as anarchy that had ever been proven to be stable in the past, so what?
So what? I mean, how ridiculously conservative can you be and say, well, until it's proven, I'm not going to believe it?
Until it's proven, I'm not going to believe it, right?
I mean, that's just ridiculous.
I mean, if that was the case, we'd still be in the caves, right?
Every single advance, whether it is in ethics or in knowledge or technology or sociology or whatever, any sort of advance has an untested aspect to it.
I mean, this obviously is not somebody who's ever had any exposure to or Interaction with venture capitalists are all about.
You've got this huge value in them.
The more unproven it is, the more value there is potentially in it.
Is somebody going to say, well, you can't show me, in the 17th century, you can't show me a society that has ever gotten rid of slavery, so getting rid of slavery, you should never think that it's a good thing.
You should never assume that it's a good thing.
That's just not true at all.
That's a valid approach.
So, even if there was no such thing historically or in the present situation as anarchy that was stable and worked, It would not be a valid objection.
However, of course, there are, you know, multi-hundred-year examples of societies that existed without governments, such as Iceland and shorter periods of time in Pennsylvania and so on.
There are tons of examples of societies that have existed without a government.
And, of course, I would say that this gentleman, in his own life, he exists without a government.
But even more fundamentally, there are lots of other examples about how a lack of centralized coercion, instead of breeding instability, breeds stability.
So, for instance, in the realm of price, we all know that socialist calculation, as proven by von Mises, is an impossible situation.
But you can never have a central planner who is ever able to validly allocate the prices for things because without a free market there's no way of knowing localized requirements and general consumer demand for products.
Price is an enormous computer printout of need and desire.
And so the problem with socialist calculation, of course, is that you can never get A central planner who's able to create any kind of stability.
Whenever you have central planning, extraordinary losses, starvation, lineups, hungers, incredible instability results.
There's an example where government produces vast amounts of instability.
In the free market, there is no central agency for setting price.
The only thing that sets price is the aggregation of each individual's demand and, of course, willingness to actually part with money to get a particular good.
And we find that prices turn out to be remarkably stable overall.
And I'm talking about sort of in the...
prior to the introduction of centralized coercive control of...
and privatized control of currency, right?
So, you know, a loaf of bread cost about the same in 1900 as it cost in 1800.
Although, of course, standard of living had gone up considerably because wages had, like, tripled.
But... There's an example of an extraordinary amount of stability coming out of more or less a free market approach to the question of price.
From that standpoint, it's important to understand that a lack of centralized coercion does breed extraordinary stability.
So if you remember what cell phones were like early on, you could barely get a signal without standing with tinfoil wrapped around your head, pointing your phone directly at the satellite and tracking as it went past, making sure there were no trees in the way.
And there's been no centralized coercion saying, now all of these cell phone companies, they have to offer all of these cross-marketing, cross-promotional benefits so that they each charge each other and give you service just about anywhere in the world where there is cell phone service.
Nobody's given them any directives, but of course your cell phone service has stabilized enormously since this sort of stuff was introduced.
So there's another example of how a lack of centralized coercion breeds an extraordinary kind of stability.
And you could sort of go on and on about this kind of stuff, right?
I mean, that there were no agencies that regulated the widths of railroad tracks, yet every railroad manufacturer on any given continent always worked with the same width.
There was no one that said, well, they have to be, I don't know, like two feet apart and it has to be regulated that way.
It never happened, right? But you get this extraordinary stability, right?
No one says that everyone has to handle TCP IP packets in the same way, but all ISPs and now networks do handle them in the same way because, of course, the price of deviating from a standard that everyone else accepts, even in the absence of central regulation, is far too costly.
So there is extraordinary stability in the absence of centralized coercion.
Now, of course, this guy would say, but that's only because the government forces people to obey their contracts and so on.
But let's look at the sort of changes around that, right?
Because the one thing that has definitely happened for most small to medium-sized businesses these days is that they have no real access to To the government, right?
There's extraordinary amounts of worse than anarchic kind of situations in the world.
The gray markets, the free markets.
Sorry, you've got the gray markets, you've got the black market, you've got the cash-only markets.
And for most small to medium-sized businesses, there's no real capacity at all for them to be able to actually get...
Access to the legal system, right?
To sue someone, I mean, it's just ridiculously expensive and slow and time-consuming and laborious, like everything that you would imagine from the state, right?
So if this gentleman's approach is right, that in the absence of the state, you just end up with more and more violence and all that kind of stuff, then he has to explain why there really is no violence that has increased Despite the fact that the centralized court system,
the state-run court system, the state monopoly court system, despite the fact that that state system has ceased to be an effective or available tool for any of the sort of small to medium-sized businesses.
Large businesses can use it to restrict the possibility of small businesses competing with them, but small businesses and individuals really don't have access to the court system and haven't had for many decades.
Because it's really just about sort of serving power.
It's not about actually helping anybody resolve disputes.
So given that fact, this is all testable theories, right?
These people should actually just start to work a little bit with the idea of testable theories.
You know, they can be quite useful.
The scientific method is quite useful in many ways.
And... Oh, look at that.
37 minutes to get home. How nice.
But, yeah, the scientific method's pretty good, right?
So you just have testable hypotheses rather than just firing emails around, right?
You say, okay, well, here in a situation where people have less and less access to the court system, we should get more and more violence, but we don't.
Right? If you look at something like eBay, people have no access to a court system to resolve disputes within eBay.
All they can do is threaten each other with bad ratings.
I mean, how anarchic is that, right?
I mean, there's no centralized...
eBay is like the largest single employer in the world.
I mean, first or second.
Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people make their primary living buying and selling on eBay.
And there's no court system there at all.
Not a single little bit.
Now, you'd think that eBay would then be rife with, you know, hit squads and violence and death squads and, you know, so on.
But it's not the case at all.
eBay is remarkably peaceful, and it's a remarkably prosperous and positive way to resolve these kinds of disputes.
So, you just sort of need to work a little bit empirically if you want to sort of come up with these objections.
That's sort of all we're asking for is to come up with stuff.
How did Windows become a standard, right?
Was it forced? No, of course it wasn't forced, right?
Consumers just wanted a standard, right?
Once you've learned... Like somebody wrote the other day on the Free Domain Radio board, it's like, oh my god, I can't believe you anarchists don't use Linux and BSD or whatever, and I can't believe that you don't use open source...
Software for doing your boards, this, that, and the other.
And it's like, yeah, but who's going to pay me to learn all that stuff, right?
Of course, that's what I said. I said, you know, I know how to use Windows.
I know how to set up a web server.
I know how to set up my... I had a fine and kind listener help me set up the community server board software.
And who's going to pay me to learn all of these other systems, right?
I know what it's like to learn a new operating system that you haven't had experience in before.
It's a nightmare. So who is going to pay me to do that?
Well, no one, right? I'm going to have to learn everything.
What benefit is it going to give me to learn a new word processor or to learn some new operating system?
It doesn't give me any particular benefit, but for sure what it does do is it costs me a lot of time, energy, frustration, emotional stability, and so on.
And so, yeah, you end up with like 95% of the computers running Windows.
No central coercion.
Extraordinary stability in the realm of operating systems and now largely, and this of course is quite different from when I entered into the software market.
I remember writing all this code for Word and WordPerfect and AmiPro and so on.
Extraordinary stability in the realm of Office productivity software, a word processor spreadsheet database presentation software.
Who made PDF, right?
Personal document format, I think, is Adobe's PDF. Who made that?
Who made Macromedia Flash, the standard for rich content on the web, right?
Nobody. Nobody whatsoever.
Yet, it's extraordinarily stable how all of this stuff works.
So, you know, there's about a bazillion examples of a lack of coercion and voluntary cooperation among large groups of people producing extraordinary stability.
Not violence. Violence is the hands of the state, right?
Violence is war. Violence is taxation.
Violence is regulation. Violence is coercion, and it centrally comes by from the state.
So, you know, we're really not asking for absolute miracles here when we're asking for people to argue against anarchy.
We're just asking for A, logic, right?
And B, let's hear some counterexamples that can't be traced back to the central coercive power of the state.
That's, you know, that's our major goal.
That's all we're sort of asking for, and I don't think it's a very high standard to ask for.
I think that people can survive, you know, producing that kind of stuff.
So I hope that you will, if you're listening to this either on YouTube or I guess through Free Domain Radio, that you will understand that I'm a little shy on donations this month.
We've got lots and lots of new hits, lots and lots of new listeners.
And if you're sort of bouncing around, please do recognize that I do ask for 50 cents a podcast.
To cover my time and resource costs for keeping all this stuff running, I certainly don't mind taking the hits for Liberty, but I do sort of want to get a sense of how valuable people find this stuff.
And if it ain't 50 cents a podcast, that certainly gives me a sense of where the rest of the world is philosophically.
So if you've been putting it off, please do send in a donation.
It has a lot to do with my motivation, and I really appreciate that.
Thank you so much for your time.
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