Why we can’t know exactly how the anarchic society will work

Just a quick post today about why we can’t know exactly how the market society will work. In some ways, to ask the question “Exactly how will it all work?” is to miss the point. Why? Because if we did know exactly how it would all work, then that would itself would prove the possibility of central planning.

As was proved decades ago by Mises and co, rational calculation cannot ever be performed by central planners, which makes central planning impossible. This automatically means we should stop trying to run government socialism, because we’re just wasting our resources and time. It also means that we shouldn’t try and completely work out all the details about how anarchic society will work, because this will only have about as much relevance to us as trying to draw a map of the Star Wars universe.

Now it is possible to come up with some rough ideas on how things will work, which is what I try and show you guys in this blog. But if there’s one thing non-libertarians take away from my blog, I want it to be this: Understand that the reason I propose no government is primarily because I consider it wrong that the government steals and imposes rules on us. The problem is that governments are allowed to do more than an individual person can. If an individual person went and took someone else’s money without their consent, we would call that theft. Why is it any different when a government does it?

So it doesn’t even matter if I can’t come up with some perfect alternative, all that matters is that the proposed solution (or guideline) is a morally acceptable one. So if there are two solutions to fund a project, one of which involves you pointing a gun at me and taking my money, and another that involves voluntary cooperation – I think we can safely rule out the one where you point a gun at me and steal my money.

So drop the gun, and let’s talk.

How do we decide what the law will be?

If you think about dictionary writers now, they don’t actually create or control development of that language, they’re generally just collecting words that are used and displaying them. There is no one man or authoritative power who “sets down what the rules of the English language are”, the language just changes over time. Maybe law would work in a similar way, so instead of one central authority (govt) setting it down, private citizens will just agree to abide by certain rules in their daily interactions with each other. Over time, these could become standard rules that everybody accepts.

Or maybe everybody will agree to the rules beforehand. Say you contract with an insurance/defense agency who agree to insure you against the risk of harm to your person/property, in exchange for money and a commitment on your behalf to abide by certain rules. And so with all the money pooled together, this private defense agency could go around trying to stop crime and maybe prevent it from happening in the first place.

There are also examples of private law working in the world today. Think professional sports, how do they manage to run sports across nations even with different rules? Do you think anybody says, “Oh no, we’ll never be able to resolve this issue, because each team is under the jurisdiction of its own government”? Or do you think that maybe they could find a way to voluntarily resolve their issues?

And if you think the professional sports are able to work by this system, simply because “the stakes are low and its just not important”, well then how do you explain the existence of international business? There is no single world-government that regulates and controls everything, and yet, we still see peaceful commerce work between firms. Governments had nothing to do with the original development of customary law and agreements between private businesses across nations, it was their individual self-interest in the matter that did.

A disgusting new law

Ok just found out about this yesterday:

State can sell your home

THE State Government plans to give its agencies and councils power to compulsorily acquire private land to re-sell to developers at a profit – or, if they choose, at a reduced price so the developers make even more money.

I bet if you were to look at the Labor party’s political campaign donators, you’d find a lot of money rolling in to the Labor party coffers via developers. This law looks like it is targeted specifically to make their lives easier, it doesn’t even make some kind of attempt to seem like it’s for a legitimate purpose.

They (Frank Sartor and co.) even have the nerve to try and say “oh but it’s only going to be used in cases where it has net public benefit”. Wtf? There is no properly defined public benefit, so clearly this is just a wankjob and it’s going to be utterly subjective.

This really really makes me mad, now any home owner can’t even live in the comfort that they actually own their own land. Because the government can just come along and say “oh wait, you don’t actually own that land, we’re just going to take it!”. And this part is my favourite:

Anyone could challenge any determination by the minister or the acquiring authority, including on the issue of net public benefit, in court.

Mmm, because I’m sure this is a completely unbiased way to decide whether or not land gets taken. It’d be like trying to “negotiate” with the ATO to not pay tax. The government can decide it wants your land, and if you want to dispute it, guess who you dispute it with? The government. Seems fair to me!

Why do you vote and support democracy when this what it creates? Government is all about different factions trying to win the right to steal from other people. In this case, the developers have won the game, and all property owners are the losers. Who will be the winners and losers of the next idiotic government policy?

Property rights are human rights

Ok so I often see people talking as though there is some kind of distinction between property rights and human rights, but I think that they are one and the same.

Why? Because I don’t think it makes much sense to talk about any kind of right, without having the first and most basic right: the right to self-ownership. How could we ever talk about “your individual right to healthcare”, without first establishing your own right to yourself?

But instead of letting each individual person what they do with their own body and property, our world thinks that “It’s really better when we use collective decision making and impose that on everybody else”. Somehow, even though each individual person has their own desires and their own situation, we should all vote on it first, just to make sure everybody else approves.

We are living, breathing individuals with individual preferences and desires. You could aggregate us into groups like societies, nations, communities etc, but we are individuals before we can be said to be members of any collective grouping term.

“But who will build the roads?”

This is a very common question, and I have a market anarchist friend who wrote up a very good answer, so (with his permission) I’m just going to put a direct quote of his answer here:

Private road construction can be both competitive and profitable. There is simply no need for road welfare. By 1800 there were over 60 private road companies in the United States and by 1830 they had built over 400 private “turnpikes” (highways).

People who think government must provide the roads (and bother to try to justify their beliefs at all) generally believe the way they do because of a small number of misconceptions they have about private roads.

1) They (falsely) believe there is no profit motive in providing roads. This is just silly. Roads are a product (and a service, when you think about it) that is demanded by everyone who is not a hermit. Therefore there are profits to be made.

2) They (falsely) believe that private road ownership would lead to monopolies. This boggles my mind because this, of course, is exactly the situation that we have now. But beyond that, it’s just not the case. Consider this. I have a navigation system in my car. Given a starting point and a destination, my navigation system can calculate thousands of different routes in seconds and weight them by which is either the quickest or the shortest (or even some combination thereof). If the data were available, you can easily imagine a system that would choose the most scenic routes! Similarly, if roads are privately owned such a system could easily devise routes that are the least expensive, or some combination of lowest cost and time, and say road quality (number of potholes for example, as rated by the company that provides the maps and datasets for the navigation systems). Thus there is immediate competition between road owners to provide well maintained low cost roads. Poor roads or roads that cost too much are avoided and their owners suffer losses. More efficient and competitive owners reap profits.

3) They (falsely) believe that private road ownership would imply what we now call “toll roads,” i.e. that people would have to stop at every corner or intersection and pay a toll. Nothing could be more ridiculous. I can drive virtually everywhere in the country at 80 miles an hour or more and have a conversation with someone anywhere else in the country also driving 80 miles an hour all without stopping every ten feet to plug my phone into a new outlet. Wireless technologies and encrypted transactions could easily make per-mile payment for road usage totally transparent and anonymous. You pay for gasoline, water, and milk by the gallon, electricity by the kilowatt hour, you pay for phone calls by the minute. In otherwords you pay for only the service that you actually use. Roads should be no different. As I have mentioned elsewhere, advances in technology make so-called “natural monopolies” less and less possible and eventually impossible (without government intervention). Wireless communications had this exact effect on the (government created) telecommunications monopoly.

4) They (falsely) believe that evil businessmen could essentially hold people and communities “ransom”. I love this one. It’s a completely pathological hypothetical that these private road conversations always lead to. “Oh yeah? Well what if Bill Gates [it's always Bill Gates, that evil bastard] bought up all the roads surrounding your house and charged you a million dollars to use them? Huh? Huh? What are you going to do TEHN?” It’s completely absurd, for a number of reasons:

a) One thing’s for certain: I’m not going to pay Bill Gates exorbitant amounts for access to the roads. So he’s not going to make as much as he could by simply charging competitive rates. It’s just a bad business plan.

b) To do this, one has to presume that the person buying up the roads has a large supply of capital to invest in his nefarious scheme. How did he accumulate that capital? Presumably through some profitable business (like Microsoft). No sane businessman is going to divert capital that could be invested into profitable businesses into kooky schemes like buying up all the roads in Gotham and then holding the city for ransom; the whole scheme is a bad comic book plot (Holy Robber Road Baron Batman!).

c) Who the hell would sell their roads once they saw what was about to happen? Even if Gates managed to buy up a large fraction of the roads surrounding a community, the inhabitants would quickly catch on and not sell their remaining roads, because they’d be shooting themselves in the head.

d) The whole idea relies on the wrong ownership model, an ownership model that is simply unlikely to exist in a free market. A free market road ownership model might look like this: Private property owners own the roads on their individual property (e.g. you own your own driveway). Within a subdivision the roads are owned by a company that all the homeowners have shares in (like a Homeowner’s Association). The company makes decisions about what company to contract with to maintain the roads, with homeowners voting their shares. Because subdivisions are small, numerous, and voluntary, if a homeowner doesn’t like the decisions his the HOA company is making (about the roads or anything else), he can easily “vote with his feet” and simply move across town.

Similarly roads servicing businesses would be owned by companies whose shareholders are the businesses they serve. Businesses would also own shares in the companies that provided the main roads connecting workplaces, recreation, and shopping centers to the residential neighborhoods, since they can’t produce if their employees can’t get to work and they can’t sell if consumers don’t have access to their products and services. This is how the private road companies were owned at the start of the 19th century in the US; local businessmen needed access for their suppliers and their distributors, so they invested in road companies. Main highways and “interstates” would simply be owned by companies looking to cash in on the huge demand for long distance travel and commerce.

How would a competitive private road industry be better than a monopoly one? In a number of ways:

1) The roads would be less expensive and better maintained. This is always the case when competition is allowed versus when it is not.

2) Because there is a huge profit motive to increase traffic flux, companies have an enormous incentive to make roads more efficient. If the road owner earns a penny for every mile every car drives on his road it clearly benefits him to increase traffic flux; i.e. the density of traffic the road may handle. Modern roads running at full speed and full capacity are 95% empty. This is simply because of psychological factors of human drivers; they need space and time to feel comfortable, break in time, and maneuver to avoid accidents. There is ZERO incentive for government to do anything about this. But a private road owner would be highly incentivized to perfect automated traffic control systems that would pack cars much more closely and increase traffic speeds. This would vastly increase the traffic flux and the carrying capacity of the roadways, while at the same time removing the human error, and hence the vast majority of accidents, injuries, deaths, and liability (another large incentive). I.e. roads would become vastly more efficient and at the same time safer. The technology required for this has been around for at least a decade. But there’s just no incentive for government to implement it. In fact, the worse the traffic problem is, the better it is for government, because the government can plausibly claim they need ever more money. Traffic jams are what you get when capitalists provide the cars but socialists provide the roads.

3) Pollution costs would no longer be externalized. Currently the costs of pollution from traffic is externalized, i.e. the people pumping out the pollution do not have to pay for the damages it causes. If the roads were privately owned and were polluting the air and affecting neighboring properties, they would be liable to lawsuits. In fact, they would probably be sued so often they would just negotiate payment schedules with surrounding properties owners to compensate them for their damages. This would be a internalized cost that the road companies would pass on to their customers. There would be incentives to purchase, and hence incentives to develop, ever lower-emissions vehicles because the the roads would be cheaper for the owners who drove cleaner vehicles.

If you’re interested to learn about it in more detail see here: Who will build teh roadz?. I also handle some common objections at this page: Common Objections to Private Roads.

States cannot own property

The state can’t have a property right in anything, because none of the ways that it comes to control land are actually valid ways for an individual or other group to legitimately take ownership of property.

1. By buying the land from previous owners. Since usually States must be financed by taxes (stolen money), any acquisitions made by States are illegitimate. Even in the States of old that did not tax, they were still coercive monopolies on protection (that is, they violently prevent anyone from competing with them in the rendering of protection). Thus, we cannot claim that the money they obtained was legitimate — they wouldn’t have obtained that much if not for violently preventing competitition.

2. By decree. Unoccupied land is “declared” to belong to the State. This is not a legitimate way to come into ownership of land. To obtain a property right over something, you must first homestead it. Simply pointing around yourself in a 360-degree circle and saying “mine” doesn’t constitute homesteading. Actually working the land does.

3. By conquest. This is outright robbery.

4. By emminent domain. Again, outright robbery, except of the States’ own citizens.

5. By actually “working” the land. Still, this does not give a property right. Working land is one requirement for coming into ownership of it. The other requirement is that the tools you use to work it were rightfully yours in the first place. If I steal your plow to work a plot of land, that plot of land isn’t legitimately mine. If I enslave you to plow a plot of land, that land isn’t legitimately mine. In short, it is impossible for States to homestead land.

States cannot own property

The problem with “externalities”

 So the statist argument for externalities goes something like this: “You derive a benefit from somebody else doing x, so we’re going to make you pay for that benefit. We think that the money you pay is less than the amount of benefit you personally derive, so therefore it’s worth it. Why? Because I say so!”

First of all, taking the money without consent is wrong, regardless of how “good” it is. Even IF taxpayer funded education was a good idea, it would still be wrong to steal to provide government schools.

Secondly, the entire concept of externalities is virtually irrelevant because there is no way to make an interpersonal comparison of utility.

“Happiness cannot be measured on a quantitative scale in the same way voltage can be.”

So it’s impossible to do some kind of calculation to work out whether or not society is at a net benefit by taxing and providing the public good via government programs. The way we know an action is going to provide some kind of benefit to people, is when they are willing participants in a transaction. This means that the people in that transaction are demonstrating their preference for that chosen action over all other options.

Since it is impossible to say this non-voluntarily chosen action is going to benefit society, the declaration of externalities is arbitrary. Why doesn’t the world pay me $60 million so I can provide them a ‘positive externality’ by growing flowers in my basement?

Sources / Further Reading:

• The “Externalities” Argument
• Solving the “Problem” of Free Riding
• The Privatization of Public Services

Does anybody give extra money to the government?

As proof of the idea that government is not a ‘good/service’, but rather a ‘bad/disservice’, show me somebody who has given money to the government so that they can “lend a hand to the poor people” for example. Note here that when I say “give”, I’m excluding taxation, since that is not voluntary.

Seriously, nobody in their right mind would ever give extra money to the government to help poor people, they’d give it to an actual charity.  So even in a small way, I feel that most people realise how useless governments are. If you want something done, you’d best not leave it in the hands of government.

Media scares

Powerful video from Stefan Molyneux

Why conservatives suck

In this post I’m going to target conservative type political parties, I’m tired of political parties talking the talk. How often do they truly liberate some aspect of society? Sure, you might see a government ’service’ sale happen, but it’s not the same as actually decreasing government intervention.

Typically there will be some kind of government regulation when a sell-off occurs, “To protect the public interest”. Never mind the fact that this goes against allowing private property rights, presumably the conservative voters wouldn’t permit it. Or maybe its just that the other side manages to get some concessions, but whatever the reason, the conservatives are caving in on it. They’re giving up on what is supposedly a principle. If they value free markets, they should not stoop to compromising.

Or how about free trade agreements that are specially negotiated with tons of exclusions, special carveouts for people who just bribe the politicians. Either bribes or some particularly vocal sector of the workforce whose jobs “Must be protected”. What kind of idiocy is it where the actual benefits that come from free trade are instead blocked by other elements of the government “free trade agreement”. The whole point of free trade is that resources and workers are put where they are needed most.

The very idea that the government knows where resources are needed most suggests that central planning is possible. In case you haven’t heard, it is not possible. The conservatives try to get credit for attacking socialism, but then they go and ruin it all by imposing socialism on themselves. They talk the talk, but do not walk the walk.