RE: POL: Extropianism and Politics

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Billy Brown [bbrown@conemsco.com] wrote:
>1) Why should the PPAs allow themselves to be legally accountable for
>anything?

Because if they don't, someone will shoot them. Unlike a government, the PPAs have no monopoly on force.

>2) There is nothing to stop PPAs from colluding to fix the market. If the
>two biggest providers in Houston decide to team up, kick out the competition
>by force, and divide the market, my only recourse is to leave.

In order to kick the competition out by force, they're going to have to fight a war, and that's expensive. It gets really expensive when your old customers all stop paying you and start paying the competitors who you are fighting; and since all your customers are armed, trying to force them to pay you is going to get really, really expensive.

>3) PPAs will frequently be faced with other situations where they can stack
>the economic deck in their favor with a little judicious use of force. What
>keeps them from doing it?

Because their customers will move to another PPA or shoot them.

>A PPA that can get away with
>shooting its competitors (or defecting customers) has a strong competitive
>advantage over one that can't.

And how are they going to do that? You're implicitly assuming a disarmed population who are happy to let the PPAs do whatever they want. That ain't gonna happen.

The whole point of anarcho-capitalism is that it by its very nature it has these negative-feedback mechanisms. You can't assume them away and expect to get any kind of reasonable view of what an anarcho-capitalist society would be like. In effect it's merely taking your glorious minimal state idea and expanding the competition between power structures to include everyone in the society, not just everyone in the government.

Mark

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