On 09 Jan 2015, at 06:50, John Clark wrote:
On Thu, Jan 8, 2015 at 12:02 PM, Bruno Marchal <[email protected]>
wrote:
> What would you suggest in place of a democracy?
If we were starting from scratch I would suggest Anarcho-Capitalism,
I think it would be far superior to democracy, but unfortunately we
are not starting from scratch and so it would be very difficult to
get there from here; but don't let the word "anarchy" scare you, it
just means lack of government. Chaos necessarily implies anarchy but
anarchy does not necessarily imply chaos.
Chaos is good, and needed for anything alive. Brain lmacking chaos =
epilepsy. heart lacking chaos = heart attack.
I have known about an anarchist (a great-uncle, Ernest Marchal). he
made bombs, get rich by inventing a way to stabilize double-ladders,
and get killed (apparantly for a romance going wrong ...).
I see that "anarchism" is used today for a system without government,
but I like government and politicians. They do a job in which I am not
interested, and most of the time they do it rather well, as a majority
in our democracies can drink when thirsty and eat when hungry. They
don't solme all problems, and in some domain are manipulated by non-
democratic forces, but little by little they understands, and we can
hope they change (like in the Health domain, where democracy has been
prevented by monopolistic financial interests).
I am sketpical about anything not obtained through democracy, by which
I mean recurrent election of all people.
It is far from perfect, but, having some idea about the humans, I
think it smooth a lot the violence and the coercion by others.
Good laws are no different from anything else, if you want to
maximize something then make it a commodity and sell it on the free
market. But nobody does that for laws very much , that's why there
are far more good cars than good laws. In a world with minimal or no
government Privately Produced Law (PPL) would have Private
Protection Agencies (PPA's) to back them up. Disputes among PPA's
would be settled by an independent arbitrator agreed to by both
parties BEFORE the disagreement happened. Something like that can
exist today. When companies sign complicated contracts they
sometimes also agree on who will arbitrate it if differences in
interpretation happen. Nobody wants to get caught up in the slow,
expensive court system run by governments.
The arbitrator is paid by the case, and because he is picked by both
sides, it's in his interest to be as just as possible. If he favored
one side over
another or made brutal or stupid decisions he would not be picked
again and would need to look for a new line of work. Unlike present
day judges and
juries, justice would have a positive survival value for the
arbitrator.
All parties would have a reason to avoid violence if possible. The
disputing parties would not want to turn their front yard into a war
zone, and violence is expensive. The successful protection agencies
would be more interested in making money than saving face. Most of
the time this would work so I expect the total level of violence to
be less than in the nation state system we have now, but I'm not
such a utopian as to suggest it will drop to zero. Even when force
is not used the implicit threat is always there, another good reason
to be civilized.
Please note that I'm not talking about justice only for the rich. If
a rich man's PPA makes unreasonable demands (beatings, sidewalk
justice, I insist
on my mother being the judge if I get into trouble,etc) it's going
to need one hell of a lot of firepower to back it up. That kind of
an army is expensive
because of the hardware needed and because of the very high wages it
will need to pay its employees for an extremely dangerous job. To
pay for all
this they will need to charge their clients enormous fees severely
limiting their customer base and that means even higher charges.
They could never get
the upper hand, because the common man's PPA would be able to
outspend a PPA that had outrageous demands and was just for the
super rich. A yacht cost much more than a car, yet the Ford motor
Company is far richer than all the yacht builders on the planet
combined.
No system can guarantee justice to everybody all the time but you'd
have the greatest chance of finding it in Anarcho-Capitalism. In a
dictatorship one man's whim can lead to hell on earth, I don't see
how 40 million Germans could have murdered 6 million Jews in a
Anarcho-Capitalistic world. Things
aren't much better in a Democracy, 51% can decide to kill the other
49%, nothing even close to that is possible in Anarchy, even
theoretically.
In general, the desire not to be killed is much stronger than the
desire to kill a stranger, even a Jewish stranger. Jews would be
willing to pay as much as necessary, up to and including their
entire net worth not to be killed. I doubt if even the most rabid
anti Semite would go much beyond 2%. As a result the PPA protecting
Jews would be much stronger than the one that wants to kill them. In
Anarchy, for things that are REALLY important to you (like not
getting killed) you have much more influence than just one man one
vote.
I can't give you a iron clad guarantee that some Private Protection
Agency won't switch from being a protector to being an oppressor,
but I can't give you an iron clad guarantee that the US Army will
not overthrow the government and set up a military dictatorship
either. They certainly have the means to do so if they wished to. I
don't think that's very likely to happen, but it's far more likely
than the sort of organization I'm talking about doing it. The
instant a PPA starts acting in a totalitarian way customers would
abandon it , shut off its money supply and stop its cancerous growth
in the bud. That is a powerful tool that we don't have today, with
the US Army you are forced to keep sending it money through taxes
even if you hate what it's doing.
But this is all theoretical, as I say we are such a enormously long
way from Anarcho-Capitalism that it may be too late and it's just
not practical to get to there from here.
OK.
Bruno
John K Clark
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