Jon, Very good; you don't make such errors. Then your reply to Sasan regarding PD was in no way a disagreement with (let alone a rebuttal to) anarchy.
Slavery and Nazism were not only both tyrannical systems that created many horrible dilemmas (PD) but also needed eliminating. So if one were advocating for their elimination back in the day, arguing that the dilemmas exist (citing PD) would not have been a relevant argument against said eliminations (any more than it is against the elimination of government today). Thank-you for providing another example of PD. Natural predators (carnivores) and prey provide many cases of PD. But thankfully none of it can be used to argue for human tyranny, since we are intelligent enough to have found many ways to rise above the savage brutality of Natural Selection. For example: we eliminated predation on our species by large carnivores with weapons and technology, and we eliminated the possibility of eliminating our prey species with domestication and agriculture and the natural conservation efficiency of free-trade. IOW we do no have to settle with horrible dilemmas simply because they currently exist. If we can figure out a way, we can eliminate them. But since you already admitted that you were not arguing against Sasan, there is no real debate left. And while you made the comments that "free men need a certain amount of tyranny to fight against to keep them fit for freedom" and "people who have too much freedom for too long tend to lose the aptitude for keeping it", I will not presume either to be either an argument against anarchy or a blaming of the victim - since you now have a history of making comments that only SEEM like disagreements, but are actually not. -------------------- No. One cannot derive an "ought" statement from an "is" statement. Logically impossible, and I don't make such errors. Merely doing a scientific analysis of certain kinds of complex systems, and an engineering analysis of how such systems might be restructured to produce different outcomes. I am saying nothing about what outcomes are better, or that we ought to seek. The analyses work as well regardless of what you want to achieve. However, I do expect that we will tend to agree on some outcomes being perverse and therefore to be avoided if we can find a way to do it. So what about your points on slavery and Nazism? Those are other varieties of PD behavior. Each occurred because there was a rational payoff for some individuals that caused them to act in ways that produced adverse outcomes for people in general, including themselves in the long run. Predation is good for predators if they are not too successful and wipe out all prey, and bad for prey unless it is held to a level that improves the gene pool. So in a balance situation predation and being preyed on are rational for the species taken together, but each has a positive payoff for tipping the balance so that one or the other wipes the other out. Sometimes such a balance occurs spontaneously and persists for millennia. Sometimes it doesn't and both predator and prey become extinct. It could be similarly argued that free men need a certain amount of tyranny to fight against to keep them fit for freedom. People who have too much freedom for too long tend to lose the aptitude for keeping it.
