On Wed, Jun 9, 2021 at 7:12 AM <[email protected]> wrote:
> > *I am very good with capitalism, * > Me too. Socialism won't work unless everybody is a saint, and that's why socialists in their natural environment are always observed to be in a constant state of righteous indignation; people just aren't behaving the way he wants then to behave and as they must behave for his system to function. In general I can only think of 3 ways to get anybody to do anything, force, love, or trade. I think most of us would agree that all else being equal force is the least desirable of the three. Love is very nice and it works for some things but any economic system that must rely on people loving each other is just not going to work. So unless somebody knows of a fourth way that I haven't thought of there is only one thing left. The farmer grows my food, the trucker moves my food and the grocer sells my food, I didn't make them do it and none of these people love me, yet the free market plunges them into a conspiracy to put food on my table. Capitalism can efficiently create wealth even if everybody is just looking out for themselves, I know of no other economic system that can do that. *> not what is termed Crony Capitalism, otherwise know as oligarchy. * > You have a problem with the law of conservation of energy, and that is not a law a parliament or even Big Brother can repeal, if you push down the power in one area the power just migrates to another place. If you don't like corporations because you think they have too much power the only thing that can get rid of them is something that has even more power, so instead of several hundred moderately powerful entities you have just one overwhelmingly powerful one. I don't see how that is an improvement. You still approve of Donald Trump even after he organized an attack on the capital to overturn a democratic election so you don't believe elected officials should be in charge of that overwhelmingly powerful entity, so who should be? You? Donald Trump? Big Brother? > *> My fix for everything is technology, applied science, engineering.* > [...] *"Tag the criminal, not the citizen." If one is a violent thug, > persecute them by monitoring them with a chip. If they aren't acting > better, to the jug they go.* > You're just talking about law-enforcement and that's the easy part, what I want to know is who makes the laws, who decides what is legal and what is illegal? *> **So that is what I would do. * > This is what I would do if we were starting from scratch which we are not; I would suggest Anarcho-Capitalism, I think it would be superior to democracy, but unfortunately we are not starting from scratch so it would be very difficult to get to 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. 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) 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 a difference in interpretation happen because 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 in 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 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 arbiter 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 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. It's easy to vote for some idiot politician who says he will stop your neighbor from sinning, it's much harder to shell out cold hard cash for it. For example, in this democracy many towns have laws against women wearing string bikinis on the beach, and it's simple to see why, there are plenty of prudes and it doesn't cost them anything to vote. Now let's consider this in a world of anarchy. The prude is considering 2 PPA's that are identical except for one thing, one has a decency patrol to harass women on the beach 20 miles from his home, the other doesn't but uses the money saved to send an extra security patrol through his neighborhood at 3Am. The prude would have to be very prudish indeed to pick the first PPA. 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 an 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 an 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. 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 an enormously long way from Anarcho-Capitalism it may be too late and it's just not practical to get to get to there from here. So we must make do with second best, democracy, the least bad way to organize people. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> vhi > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. 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