Do you think private police forces would ever engage in preemptive attacks? Or do you see preemptive measures being mostly defensive?
Read until you have something to write...Write until you have nothing to write...when you have nothing to write, read...read until you have something to write...Jeremiah
If a PDA is profit-driven and it can utilize coercion to gain a profit when peaceful exchange is not possible or more costly --- then coercion it is. Note that if a PDA is not profit driven then this model is not sustainable. In fact, coercion is a beneficial means to reallocate valued resources from unproductive and inefficient individuals and enterprises to productive individuals and enterprises when peaceful exchange is too costly or not possible. Moreover, if the transaction costs of coercion exceed the expected profit -- of course coercion is off the table. In sum, there will always be a market for coercion for profit in ancap society.
If a PDA is profit-driven and it can utilize coercion to gain a profit when peaceful exchange is not possible or more costly --- then coercion it is.
Note that if a PDA is not profit driven then this model is not sustainable. In fact, coercion is a beneficial means to reallocate valued resources from unproductive and inefficient individuals and enterprises to productive individuals and enterprises when peaceful exchange is too costly or not possible.
Moreover, if the transaction costs of coercion exceed the expected profit -- of course coercion is off the table.
In sum, there will always be a market for coercion for profit in ancap society.
This is false. The long term costs of coercion far exceed that short term benefits. There is many different negative externalities when it comes to using coercion in a free market.
1. Your reputation as a non-corrupt security agency will forever be tainted. Everyone from human right organizations to consumer protection groups to people themselves will bash the company, making the company lose in sales and investors.
2. Ontop of that, every person the company kills/robs is one more entity that will no longer be there in the future. For you just took away the means that lead to the creation of wealth the company desired.
The accountant (and the marketing department) of said company will be able to see this and quickly object to such a plan because the profit of killing is weighed heavily against the prosperity that is created via mutual agreement in transactions. If a company was to carry out a preemptive attack they would need a damn good reason too because now every company and individual associated with the company can be seen as supporting a company of murders. Essentially the security firm wouldn't exist without the free market and would fail to exist once it begins to abuse it.
Promoting Liberty at the expense of Tyranny.
www.e-renegade.com
Rettoper:Moreover, if the transaction costs of coercion exceed the expected profit -- of course coercion is off the table.
Perhaps you should spend more time considering the implications of this. For instance, wouldn't a PDA with a Napoleon, Lee, etc., that offers defense from your aggressive PDA also attract capital and talent?
Consider the following scenario.
Two farmers live next to each other on an island. FarmerA and FarmerB. FarmerA can temporarily increase his material wellbeing by stealing from FarmerB. This will increase FarmerA's relative wealth in conrast to FarmerB. FarmerA might even employ coercion to maintain this situation.
The restult of this relationship is as follows.
Matters become worse if we consider that FarmerB is specialized in the production of some particular good. Lets say that FarmerB is an expert at harvesting food. While FarmerA is better at agriculture, and structural development, like building.
If FarmerA forces FarmerB to work for him, he may not direct FarmerB to the activities in which he can best promote over-all economic prosperity. This is one reason why central planners fail. Furthermore the incentive for FarmerB becomes defensive, and not collaborative. If FarmerA does not manage his new slave correctly, FarmerA may find a sudden lacking of fish made available on the island(As now no one is harvesting fish).
All of these problems are solved if the two Farmers voluntarily exchange. FarmerA may recognize that he can temporarily increase his material wellbeing relatively speaking to FarmerB. However it's foolish to pretend that our Farmers have not conciderd the long term benefits of trade. Overall they will both be wealthier if they come together in collaberative exchange.
In this way we can take advantage of the division of labor, and comparative advantage.
In all cases of thievery a man can try to profit in a materialistic way. However if it was the case that man, in general, had a tendency to use violence to profit, society as we know it would have an entierly different face today. A government could not stop man's desire of violence, as government is nothing more then a group of men.
History has shown us that there is a tendancy to cooperate amongst men. Sure, there are examples to the opposite, but if it were true that men were mroe violent, and less peaceful, we'd likely all be dead by now.
The point is, any business who choses to use violence to profit, is demonstrating an extremely high time preference. Such a business has no concern for the future whatsoever. Human Action provides plenty examples of where man instinctively prepares for the future. It seems that the likelyhood of a rogue PDA demonstrating this childlike behavior, would be less common then those who would counter it.
Profit and interest comes from long-term investments. Not short term indulgences.
Thank you filc, essentially what I was trying to say. You put more eloquently though.
Filc:Most PDA's will be structured for defense. --filc
Retopper:wrong, most successful and sustainable PDAs would be structured to make a profit.
FTFY
Correct, any sustainable business does so because they profit. Thats a tautology.
Now its my turn to indulge
retopper:Moreover
MANIFESTLY ABSURED! WRONG! FALSE!
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Thanks for the kind words Mike! :)
Rothbard:.. police, in a libertarian society, must take their chances like anyone else; if they commit an act of invasion against someone, that someone had better turn out to deserve it, otherwise they are the criminals.
This makes sense economically even without a strictly libertarian legal code. Regardless of whether the police are called criminals or even held responsible for damages in this type of situation, they will gain a reputation of shooting first and asking questions later. Although this sort of policy might be attractive to psychopathic customers, investors will undoubtedbly be turned off by this behavior.
they said we would have an unfair fun advantage
Perhaps you should spend more time considering the implications of this. For instance, wouldn't a PDA with a Napoleon, Lee, etc., that offers defense from your aggressive PDA also attract capital and talent? -- michael green
all of the leaders I mentioned were offensive minded. Indeed, the great generals of the past were all offensive minded since they understood that a long term defensive posture surrenders the initiative to the enemy, misallocates resources since military capital is idle, and is a ticket for ultimate defeat
alexander, ceasar, napoleon, frederick, patton, mao, patreaus, et al were offensive minded hence the most successful and ultimately dominate PDAs will be offensive minded as well.
washington, lee, macarthur, et al fought defensive campaigns until they could revert to the offensive that they knew was the only path to victory.
in sum, nobody achieves victory by defense -- it just forestalls defeat or postpones defeat.
Liberalism differs radically from anarchism. It has nothing in common with the absurd illusions of the anarchists... Liberalism is not so foolish as to aim at the abolition of the state.-- von Mises, Omnipotent Government
filc wrote the following post at Mon, Feb 7 2011 3:47 PM: Consider the following scenario. Two farmers live next to each other on an island. FarmerA and FarmerB. FarmerA can temporarily increase his material wellbeing by stealing from FarmerB. This will increase FarmerA's relative wealth in conrast to FarmerB. FarmerA might even employ coercion to maintain this situation. The restult of this relationship is as follows. Less total economic output between the two The two live less wealthy over-all, despite the fact that FarmerA lives relatively more wealthy at the expense of FarmerB. How long will this economy sustain FarmerB?
filc wrote the following post at Mon, Feb 7 2011 3:47 PM:
consider this historical fact:
Colonists take land from native americans by force.
colonists prosper and form the most powerful and secure union on the planet.
Consider the alternative:
colonists do not take native american land.
pacifists applaud American decision to respect the property rights of native americans
instead mexico takes native american land , thereby expanding borders to canada in the north and the mississippi river in the east
war erupts with USA in 1848,
santa ana marches into washington dc in 1850.
USA becomes permanent vassal of mexican regime.
In the very least, US power would be severely compromised by failure to secure the Northwest Territory, Texas and the South-west.
In this case, coercion was beneficial
Germans enter the rhineland in 1936.
France and Great Britain refrain from invading Germany.
pacifists breath a sigh of relief and exalt two years later 'peace in our time'
WW II starts 3 years later with over 50 million dead.
Germany enters the rhineland in march 1936
France tanks roll into the Germany in april
Germany capitulates
french vilified by peace loving citizens worldwide.
hitler sentenced to life and imprisoned in 1937,
commits suicide in prison cell in 1945.
I can be argued that if france invaded germany in 1936 and enforced the peace treaty signed after WWI -- millions of innocents would have been saved
IN sum, i will leave it to independent thinking and objective ancaps to determine if aggression is always economically and socially destructive.
or are there opportunity costs to pacifism ?
It's a lot easier to be offensive minded when you have taxation and ideological support behind you. You cannot argue that PDAs will act and strategize like established and powerful states without first making the case that PDAs are not substantively different from such states.
You've been "Suggesting" posts that affirm security entrepreneurs are guided by profit and not (directly) by some libertarian moral standard. But you keep posting as if, contrary to what those posters (and myself, as I am in agreement) likely believe, warfare and domination is always or at least in many cases profitable. So, again, consider the costs which can make warfare unprofitable, and what people can do so as to raise these costs to ensure it stays an unprofitable endeavor.
You're deliberately ignoring the Sudetenland issue, which was pure aggression on part of the German state. Had the French and British governments had a backbone, the paper tiger Wehrmacht would've probably fallen in the year, without the moral quandary of whether taking back the Rhineland was moral or not.
Here's the problem: We're all trying to anticipate action. We're all making predictions of what one (or a group) would do, given circumstances X, Y, or Z, etc. etc.
How exactly did we get this idea that profit is the primary consideration? As I recall, human action is about satisfaction, which is not at all exclusively limited to profits. For instance, power, loss, suffering, and a million other things can stand for satisfaction. Who is to say that a PDA wouldn't prefer power or profits? Perhaps more power would attract more profits and more investment. I find it difficult to think we can throw a bunch of PDA's in a simulation, as it were, and come out with some sort of certainty on what the outcome will be. What kind of certainty do we want? Do we want apodictic certainty? Do we want probability? Can we say that on a probabilistic level, people prefer profits to power to ethics to all other conceivable options? That seems like a rather large and hefty burden of proof.
I think we could conceive of any number of thought experiments in which preemptive attacks would be profitable, perhaps not always in a monetary sense, but in a power sense. I think we can see this clearly playing out with warlordism--whether it be Afghanistan, or any other number of African states that are infested with battling sects, all of which could realize more profit if they acted in a different manner. Why arbitrarily rate profit higher than power as if it were a better motivator. If we take a more critical view of the development of the modern state and its pervalence today, then we might be able to explain this in terms of power as giving more utility or satisfaction than profit. And I want to sort out some confusion: it's not that we do not act according to the profit/loss system--in fact I do think that profit counts as an enourmous part of this satisfaction/utility/pleasure, it's just that I find it hard to rule out every other method of satisfaction that would make it rather difficult to sustain a society structured of PDA's.
So, if we can't claim apodictic certainty, what measure of probability can we give? Can we give any hard numbers?
Two words: strict liability.
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Clayton -
You're deliberately ignoring the Sudetenland issue, which was pure aggression on part of the German state. -- biotube
sudetenland was negiotating by treaty and later approved by the Czech government.
Are ancaps in favor of aggression in the face of negiotated treaties?
this is a perfect example of the folly and contradiction in the pacifist ancap position on force
these factors are apparent:
1) the use of coercion to acheive ends is rational and effective
2) its justification is entirely subjective.
3) pacifists ancaps will always be ffaith-based fringe players since they dont understand (1) and (2).