Our key insight is a pessimistic one: this is the sort of situation which, though individuals and markets don’t handle it well, isn’t actually handled well by governments either. The fundamental mistake of statist thinking is to juxtapose the tragically, inevitably flawed response of individuals and markets to large collective-action problems like this one against the hypothetical perfection of idealized government action, without coping with the reality that government action is also tragically and inevitably flawed. [...]In other words, don't take imperfect and possibly even very bad situations and make them even worse because you assume that individuals who act badly in the private sphere will suddenly become virtuous when they are part of the government.The second level of error, once you get this far, is to require that the market action achieve a better outcome without including all the continuing, institutional costs of state action in the accounting. So, for example, other parts of the continuing costs of accepting state action to solve this individual toxic-exposure problem in the Deep Horizon aftermath is that Americans will be robbed every April 15th of five in twelve parts of their income (on average), and be randomly killed in no-knock drug raids. And it’s no use protesting that these abuses are separable from the “good” parts of government as long as you’re also insisting that the prospect of market failures is not separable from the good behavior of markets! [...]
Rational anarchists like myself know that stateless systems will have tragic failures too, but believe after analysis that they would have fewer and smaller ones.
If this seems doubtful to you, do not forget to include all the great genocides of the 20th century in the cost of statism.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Flawed Metrics
One of the repetitive debates throughout society is when to leave things to individual action and when to have government intervention. Eric Raymond points out that flawed and incomparable metrics are sometimes used to compare private and government action. In his post he focuses on an example of a "collective-action problem" which anti-statists often have to answer for.
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6 comments:
Yeah, but in a democracy we can throw the government bums out.
It was obvious to me -- and to most of my friends -- that Wall Street was driving the financial structure over a cliff, but aside from grousing, what could we do?
Equating all states also is obtuse. Aside from Somalia and a few other places, almost everyplace has government. Not nearly every place has genocides.
The biggest current genocide is occurring right now in a min-archist area.
Governments carried out the Great Genocides/Politicides of the 20th century. So no, it's not obtuse, since governments were specifically the actors involved.
In free markets you don't have to throw the bums out. Just stop buying their products and services and they quickly become irrelevant.
I didn't buy any of their stinking products, so that didn't work.
If you don't distinguish between a participatory democracy and a military dictatorship, we have nothing to talk about.
Harry Eagar wrote: "I didn't buy any of their stinking products, so that didn't work."
Yes, but you need more than one voter to vote the bums out as well. If the bums don't get voted out I'm still under their thumbs. On the other hand, you didn't have to buy their stinking product even though they continued to exist.
Harry Eagar wrote: "If you don't distinguish between a participatory democracy and a military dictatorship..."
I do distinguish between the two, but things change. For example, the Weimar Republic morphed into the Third Reich quite quickly. Secondly, I wasn't under the impression that YOU considered the workers' paradises of either the USSR or Mao's China military dictatorships, yet major politicides happened in both those places.
Of course I consider the USSR and Red China military dictatorships. Each state was founded by a party-controlled army in a civil war, a relationship that never changed, despite some weaving of constitutional figleaves.
The Weimar Republic was a foreign creation, never accepted via a plebiscite or any other constitutional means, and as practical matter backed only by social democrats, and not enthusiastically even by them.
If you want examples of actual popular democracies that voluntarily switched, your best shot would be Italy.
Examples of more or less mature democracies that abandoned democracy are hard to find, but then so are mature democracies.
Examples of more or less mature democracies that abandoned democracy are hard to find, but then so are mature democracies.
The Founding Fathers had done their homework and this is something of which they were aware. Hence, "... a republic, if you can keep it."
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