AC and power

[xorbie]

pvn,

I don't want to get into huge quoting here, so I'll just adress your points.

1. No... I'm now taking Y's money for myself, as opposed to being paid by X to get something and give it to X.

2. Glad we agree.

3. WTF are you talking about. What "hourly rate"? There are a bunch of poor people who - trust me - don't live in remotely the same neighborhood as rich people, and I can easily steal from them. That's my job. I'm Omar from The Wire. I see no way that poor neighborhoods don't just fall into huge violent zones.

4. Yes, good wager. You might even say that we might hire a company to do something about it. We would teach our children that this is the right thing to do, and tell them that, like it or not, they ought to pay this company to do the same in the future. We might set up courts and laws that we would want this company to follow in dealing with violence elsewhere. I thiink you see where this is going.

5. Right, violence is expensive. The cartel is nothing more complex than two companies simply charing tax in their own region and staying out of one another's way. I don't see how anything you've said adressess my point whatsoever.

In fact, nothing in your post adressed me concern.

[pvn]

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pvn,

I don't want to get into huge quoting here, so I'll just adress your points.

1. No... I'm now taking Y's money for myself, as opposed to being paid by X to get something and give it to X.

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OK, so why isn't this behavior widespread now?

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3. WTF are you talking about. What "hourly rate"? There are a bunch of poor people who - trust me - don't live in remotely the same neighborhood as rich people, and I can easily steal from them. That's my job. I'm Omar from The Wire.

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If people are too poor to afford security, how much do you actually think you can make by robbing them? Do you think you're going to make it to the forbes 400 this way?

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I see no way that poor neighborhoods don't just fall into huge violent zones.

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The limits of your imagination are not a convincing argument. If nobody cares about these people, why doesn't this happen now?

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4. Yes, good wager. You might even say that we might hire a company to do something about it. We would teach our children that this is the right thing to do, and tell them that, like it or not, they ought to pay this company to do the same in the future. We might set up courts and laws that we would want this company to follow in dealing with violence elsewhere. I thiink you see where this is going.

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So at what point do you start forcing other people to do something about it?

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5. Right, violence is expensive. The cartel is nothing more complex than two companies simply charing tax in their own region and staying out of one another's way.

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This is just a variant of the Death Star objection. You're still starting with a population that was so strongly opposed to government intervention that they were able to dissolve the state, and now we're supposed to believe they're going to stand for some thugs "taxing" them? Either this force is stronger than the state was to begin with, in which case the fact that they dissolved the state is immaterial, or they aren't, in which case the people would be able to get rid of these bozos just as well.

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I don't see how anything you've said adressess my point whatsoever.

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In fact, nothing in your post adressed me concern.

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Perhaps you need to re-state your concern.

[NT!]

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So you're saying that until somene convinces you that peace is good, you're going to default to violence?

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This is absurd. What I said was that I am unconvinced that the rule of force would be less prevalent in an AC society than it is in many nation-states today. Basically the exact opposite of what you are attributing to me.

[NT!]

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This "theory" is just another smoke-and-mirrors bamboozlement attempt, just slightly more sophisticated than the "social contract" that you've already agreed is BS.

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I never said that a social contract is BS. I admitted that it's an extremely difficult concept to implement due to issues of scale, representation, scarcity, etc.

So the IDEA of giving everyone an equal say and the ability to consent to the law is a bamboozlement attempt? Please explain how this concept was developed specifically with the goal of robbing or bamboozling others.

Market anarchists don't talk about accumulating and spreading power in the Arendtian sense. They talk about competition and voluntary transactions, but that is not the same thing as mutual esteem and the ability to cooperate. Most of the concepts that are the product of power in Arendt's language are supposedly provided via a competitive, for-profit market in AC. Not the same thing at all.

[pvn]

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So you're saying that until somene convinces you that peace is good, you're going to default to violence?

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This is absurd. What I said was that I am unconvinced that the rule of force would be less prevalent in an AC society than it is in many nation-states today. Basically the exact opposite of what you are attributing to me.

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You said you have to be convinced of the viability of non-violence. I don't know what other conclusion to draw.

[pvn]

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So the IDEA of giving everyone an equal say and the ability to consent to the law is a bamboozlement attempt?

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It is when it's peddled by people who know it's impossible, just as the "idea" of a pony for every child is.

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Please explain how this concept was developed specifically with the goal of robbing or bamboozling others.

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Developed? No, I'm sure some idealistic utopian came up with it with completely pure motives. Seriously.

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Market anarchists don't talk about accumulating and spreading power in the Arendtian sense. They talk about competition and voluntary transactions, but that is not the same thing as mutual esteem and the ability to cooperate.

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How can you have voluntary transactions if you don't have the ability to cooperate?

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Most of the concepts that are the product of power in Arendt's language are supposedly provided via a competitive, for-profit market in AC. Not the same thing at all.

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The only thing I can figure out here is that you want to get bogged down in details. You don't want to talk about a some set of actions which provide ice cream, you want to talk about ice cream. OK, go ahead. I'm not really sure what you want from me, or anyone else here. I'm not particularly worried about ice cream.

[bkholdem]

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hmk,

Thanks for at least one interesting response. I take some issue with your point number three, and moreover I don't feel you've adressed my question precisely. A "company" doesn't need to get paid by X to attack Y, they simply can attack Y on their own and take Y's goods/money.

To look at it from a game theory POV, if everyone is willing to spend a very high amount of $ on security, then no thiefs will exist. But then, there's no reason to spend such a high amount on security in the first place. There will always be an equilibrium... some theft will always exist.

There are several things to look at then. Some people simply won't have enough $ to be able to adequetly defend themselves. I've heard the counter argument that someone too poor to afford security would be too poor to steal from, but that's patently absurd to me. If someone had money and I could continuously and easily take it from them, you'd better believe I would.

Since in AC land services generally require money, I'm concerned that the general attitude amongst the populace might be that if poor people are constantly getting stolen from, it's really just not the rich's problem. Whatever, you may all agree - not a problem. It's problematic to me.

What's more bothersome to me is something you've hidden away by framing this the way you have. The problem lies precisely in "defense". If there's one company in the area that provides the best defense, the obvious implication is that they are quite powerful, because they must be able to monitor the region and have enough armed forces to dissuade criminals.

What does this mean then? It means that they have, if not a monopoly on force, something quite near it. Near enough to constitute precisely the coercion that we attribute to the state. Certainly people in the region could stop funding this group, but if it had made enough profit and accrued enough guns/troops in the meantime, they would have the power to start charging "taxes".

You can counter that the people would now start paying some neighboring defense company, but it would be quite easy for such companies to form cartels, or for it to be not worth their time to enter into a state of violent warfare with one another (or really any sort of battle).

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Why is the assumption to start with that there are going to be a bunch of dangerous people going around threatening people and trying to kill people or steal from them under the threat of murder?

I thought you agreed with me that AC would be very unlikely to happen with such a high instance of killing in the world as we have now. We can not go from .01% of the population wanting AC to 75% of the population wanting AC overnight, or in a year or 2.

And furthermore I think that you and others suffer from catastrophic thinking when contemplating life without government:

15 Styles of Distorted Thinking

5. Catastrophizing: You expect disaster. You notice or hear about a problem and start "what if's." What if that happens to me? What if tragedy strikes? There are no limits to a really fertile catastrophic imagination. An underlying catalyst for this style of thinking is that you do not trust in yourself and your capacity to adapt to change.

Here's the link I used, you can find these elsewhere as well

http://www.ewu.edu/x6671.xml

[NT!]

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So you're saying that until somene convinces you that peace is good, you're going to default to violence?

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This is absurd. What I said was that I am unconvinced that the rule of force would be less prevalent in an AC society than it is in many nation-states today. Basically the exact opposite of what you are attributing to me.

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You said you have to be convinced of the viability of non-violence. I don't know what other conclusion to draw.

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Once again, I said I am not convinced that force would be less prevalent in an AC society. I am not convinced that, if you got rid of the government, non-violence would be the norm.

You are either being purposefully obtuse or you didn't read my post very carefully.

[bkholdem]

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This is just a variant of the Death Star objection. You're still starting with a population that was so strongly opposed to government intervention that they were able to dissolve the state, and now we're supposed to believe they're going to stand for some thugs "taxing" them? Either this force is stronger than the state was to begin with, in which case the fact that they dissolved the state is immaterial, or they aren't, in which case the people would be able to get rid of these bozos just as well.



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I think he needs to go back to step number 1 and reexamine if he has in fact completed it.

[pvn]

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15 Styles of Distorted Thinking

5. Catastrophizing: You expect disaster. You notice or hear about a problem and start "what if's." What if that happens to me? What if tragedy strikes? There are no limits to a really fertile catastrophic imagination. An underlying catalyst for this style of thinking is that you do not trust in yourself and your capacity to adapt to change.

Here's the link I used, you can find these elsewhere as well

http://www.ewu.edu/x6671.xml

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Death Star Objection FTW.