Here's a question for all of our local anarcho-capitalist types: What keeps an anarchist society from slowly sliding towards despotism?
The problem I see is that you still have groups of men with guns (the PPAs). There is no law except what some PPA chooses to provide. IMO, this situation has lots of perverse incentives. A few examples:
To sum up my concern, it seems to me that a PPA system amounts to creating a market for intelligently applied violence. A PPA that can get away with shooting its competitors (or defecting customers) has a strong competitive advantage over one that can't. If this is true, we should expect a few generations of competition to produce the kind of nimble, competent, hyper-deadly special ops forces that currently exist only in cyberpunk SF. Instead of a clumsy, stupid, inefficient police state we get a smart, efficient, effective Yakuza. Is this really an improvement?
Billy Brown, MCSE+I
bbrown@conemsco.com