I am in favor of anywhere from zero to 100% state depending on the circumstances.

what would be a zero % circumstance?

When the government is hugely corrupt and needs to be removed it would be better to just start from scratch. NK for example.

Or very small groups such that issues can be solved with the participation of the whole community and impersonal acting isnt possible. Anarchists often advocate for this kind of community setup where people just break into small communes and deal with affairs on their own. Its not really practical in the modern world but if such a scenario was to be forced on humanity having a government isnt really a good way to organize the survivors.

Humans kill each other to take their stuff even in the absence of government. The most prosperous societies have mechanisms to stop that from happening. Social mores aren't effective or we wouldnt see it as a historical constant.

Musk isn't a big enough positive on his own.

I elect to yeet em all.

in the top example wouldnt you replace the state with another state?

and on the bottom case it sounds like a libertarian talking point, ala: "this cant exist in modern society because of where we are but in theory only we'd like ______". after-all libertarians aren't anarchists by-and-large, because if they're even semi practical they understand limitation and not elimination of the state is the only feasible goal.



work on deterrence theory suggests that social stigma for committing crimes is as effective or more effective than punitive measures for preventing crime. no one wants a scarlet letter even if there's no fine/jailtime.

the true constant is that whether there is a strong state, no state, or a weak state crime happens, but is a small minority of the population. until you get so many laws that even morally acting citizens become "criminals" by speeding or other victim-less and unenforced crimes.

we live in a country right now with the most laws of any era in history, some countries might have more, but i wouldnt be shocked to find out the US legal code has the most lines in it of any country. and we still have massive amount of crime, generally due to poverty. this suggests poverty is the cause of crime, not the lack of punishment.

This post was edited by thesnipa on Jan 17 2020 01:17pm

Im not saying the modern state is perfect, we know the ways the modern state works and where it fails. Im asking how an anarchist state would deal with issues like being able to hire a private contractor to enact violence directly on another group. I.e. bigger stick diplomacy being easily accessible to anybody with more money than another group. In the modern state you can't hire a private contractor to "secure" the items in another neighborhood for you, but in the suggested anarchocapitalist state you easily could and in doing so would actively prevent the other group from having the wealth to fight back. The argument that social mores would stop this fails because we only recently stopped seeing this happening. It happened in the United States as recently as the 1920s.

We might live in a world with the most laws but we also live in the safest time in human history. Even going back to london in the 1700s you had rampant violent crime that was only abated by the establishment of a police force and government contracting of street lamps on every corner. This is the most obvious case that shows the effectiveness of a police force over less centralized systems even if police forces have their own issues.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Jan 17 2020 01:37pm

Thread started out mediocre but got spicy fast.

I am enjoying this conversation.

While social mores arent proven to be completely effective, neither are do i think are laws. sure laws and a govt are correlated to lowering of crime, but so is prosperity. how safe or unsafe a society is seems tied more to prosperity than a legal code or lack thereof.

as to streetlights or police i see no reason those can't exist in an anarchist state. especially since true anarchy is only theoretical and in reality pseudo anarchy with no centralized federal govt is what is feasible. in which case local control would be at least subject to a council of sorts.

i think the truth of the matter is the rise of the state and the improvement of life are correlated, while prosperity is caused by increases in technology and industry. if we broke down the functions of a central govt to protection of consumers and protection from other citizens, the US govt for example is inefficient but somewhat effective at protecting consumers, whereas they're not efficient nor effective at protecting citizens from other citizens. we're in an era where our physical safety is the best its ever been, but our safety in other measures (identity theft, misinformation, social bullying, etc) are at a fairly dire breaking point.

i think the best argument for the state is 2 pronged, 1. to protect consumers from dangerous or misleading products, 2. providing a court of law to access damages from these harmful products and business practices. the only places on earth with a good criminal justice system and low crime rates are incredibly prosperous (scandanavia, etc). so again we cant say for sure which has a causal role with 100%, but signs point to prosperity rather than the state. especially as things like restorative justice are new, even there.

one note, often libertarian arguments revolve around lawsuits for damages. a state is required for that, even if it's only function is to oversee such lawsuits and facilitate payments.

and as a last bit, answers given to your questions on a theoretical anarcho-capitalist state haven't, imo, been answered with "well that wont work" plans. more like "well that might not work well" plans. which when we look at the failings of the modern 1st world state seem at similar, even if they're not on par.

Yep.