War in Vietnam, war in Iraq, war on poverty, war on drugs

[hmkpoker]

[ QUOTE ]
The war on Drugs and the war on poverty are good if you want to be a government employee counting pot plants or feeding winos.

Foriegn wars are nice if you are a well connected contractor.

[/ QUOTE ]

Broken windows are good for window makers.

[hmkpoker]

[ QUOTE ]
What we had in the 19th century was anarcho capitalism and it provoked a socialist reaction. I don't advocate going back to that.

[/ QUOTE ]

Different governments/economies are better suited to different conditions. 1800's America also had much less capital than we do today, which had a huge effect on the labor conditions.

Let me explain. Suppose you and a thousand other (presumably non-violent) people were to suddenly wake up on a desert island. Food is scarce, and farmwork will need to be set up if the people are to have good sustinence. Health is limited to first aid, as there is no medical technology or doctors. Clothing is difficult and costly to produce. Transportation is limited to simple human-powered vehicles that are difficult to produce, or animals that require lots of maintenance. Music, video games, refrigeration, and global communication are non-existent.

In this condition, you are faced with a cold, hard, miserable fact of reality: you cannot have the quality of life you have in modern society. It doesn't matter what you think of social justice or equality or anything, you simply have fewer useful goods and that's that. In order to secure useful commodities, whether it be food, shelter or clothing, you are going to have to work harder and in worse conditions than you would in today's society.

Now let's assume that you and your fellow citizens construct some kind of competitive (but civil) market economy. If you were to impose the business regulations that we have today on the businesses in this somewhat primitive island, you will all starve. There simply will not be enough resources to support a minimum wage with modern purchasing power, overtime requirements, worker's comp, health benefits, etc; such regulations would prevent any kind of productivity from taking place.

This is the problem faced by nineteenth century businesss (albeit to a lesser degree, since they had better technology and more people). Modern business regulations imposed then would cripple society and productivity; businesses simply couldn't afford them. There was a dirty, pollutive and toxic fuel source (coal) that was difficult and dangerous to procure, and therefore extremely scarce...and unfortunately, because people were very poor and found mining coal to be an optimal means of securing food than farming it on their own land (if they had any), they were willing to take the job.

Now try to imagine what would happen if you offered that job to someone today: working back-breaking labor in a toxic mine shaft likely to give you black lung for only a fraction of the purchasing power of today's minimum wage. No one would take it short of having extremely impaired judgement; you could easily get a better job mowing someone's lawn for four bucks an hour.

As civilization progresses, capital becomes more abundant and options more plentiful. There was a serious backlash against large businesses in the early 1900's in the form of union strikes when the people realized they were getting a bum deal, and in order to survive, the businesses were forced to cater to their demands one way or another. Whether it was necessary to accomplish this through government intervention or whether it would have resolved itself through competition is something that can't be answered. (This is similar to questions like, could slavery have been resolved in the south without violent government intervention as it did in other parts of the hemisphere, or was the repeal of oppressive Jim Crow laws sufficient for civil rights, or did the civil rights act have to be passed as well?)

Anarcho-capitalism, as we ACists speak of it, assumes that capital is so phenomenally abundant that (what we consider) good living conditions can exist in the absence of government intervention. These conditions do not yet exist.