BASICS: Anarcho-capitalism

mark@unicorn.com
Fri, 11 Dec 1998 05:40:51 -0800 (PST)

Joe E. Dees [jdees0@students.uwf.edu] wrote:
>In such a case, ANY government would be susceptible to the charge
>of extortion, laissez-faire representative democracy or otherwise. "I
>didn't vote for it" would prevent ANY government from collecting ANY
>taxes needed for ANYthing - even to hire water or food inspectors,
>or defend borders, or vaccinate children, or even to exist.

Yes. You seem to be getting it. You do realise that this is a list full of anarchists, don't you? I don't particularly care about "improving" government because I dislike all forms of government; admittedly there are a bunch of libertarians on the list who believe in extremely limited government (e.g. defence, etc), but I don't believe that's possible. OTOH were the US Constitution actually enforced I'd be almost as happy to live under that as in an anarchy.

>In the
>absense of any other authority, the law of fang and claw dictates
>that the bloodiest bully with the biggest gun rules, and at the edge of
>his firing range would be the next big-gunned bloody bully's border.

That sounds exactly like modern Statism.

Now, go and read David Friedman's work on Anarcho-capitalism and get back to us. Just to make life easy, you can start at www.best.com/~ddfr.

BTW, I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned his new book (on the Web) about the economics of law in recent discussions; I've only skimmed bits of it, but it seems to have a lot of useful points to make.

Mark