Hugo

This is indeed how corporations and companies are formed - several people get together because they have worked out that by working together, all can get more since a problem can be handled better. Eventually, such a cooperative can reach tens of thousands of people. But the connection between that and a coercive State still has not been drawn. I've never seen a simulation that bears that out. Perhaps you can cite your source. The very existence of charities illustrates that there is an omnipresent tendency amongst humans for compassion and charitable giving (this was a problem Darwin was never really able to answer). The reason why it has diminished under the State is because the State has taken upon itself many of the matters that used to devolve upon private charity and family support. If you look at communities such as the Mormons that reject State charity you will see that they entirely support their own less fortunate members privately and noncoercively. If the abolition of the State would lead to less charity, then we could expect that under a smaller State charitable giving would be less than under a much larger one, however, people in the relatively minarchist North America were always far, far more charitable than the people of the USSR, and their poor were always much better off. I'm curious to see this evidence. I would also like to know why you think they are destitute and how it is you think that government can help. All countries, no matter how Statist, still have these problems. Sweden, for instance, has not been able to solve the problem of poverty - it still exists. All the Swedish State has bought is a huge debt and an unsustainable welfare state. For instance, if the homeless are destitute because they are unwilling to work, then taxing the workers to give to them is likely to compound the problem since it provides a disincentive for workers to continue working - their effective wage has been diminished. Doing this is likely to increase the ranks of the destitute, at which point more taxes are needed, and the problem balloons and the solution becomes unsustainable - the end result is that everyone is worse off for the State's intervention. This is irrelevant. Your original contention was that any access fee is a tort. My reply is that it isn't if it was consented to in advance. No, actually, it's pretty easy. Just request their credit rating. It's much the same thing, easy to obtain, and will tell you their entire history of dealings with others. Corporations have credit ratings too. This data will tell you who a person has dealt with (enabling you to contact them for their personal opinion of the person), what the business was, whether or not he upheld his end of the deal, and so on. The reason why these corporations are abusive is, ironically, the State. You see, back in the 18th and 19th Centuries Western governments made pollution no longer a tort. Before then, if some factory spewed soot all over your house, you could sue them. But in the name of social progress, States outlawed this. Predictably, the Industrial Revolution produced an incredible amount of pollution since the State had removed the principal reason bar none for them to reduce it. Now the reason why we have SUVs and so forth is because of that change to the law. If it were not the case, every internal combustion engine would be a tort, and they wouldn't be used anymore. Corporations are abusive where the State enables it. If you can provide me an example of a corporation that was "abusive" without State collusion or enablement I should like to hear it! This is just nonsensical. If the suppliers don't like it they can all sell to other resellers - they do exist, and if Wal-Mart had no suppliers they'd go out of business. Don't think it can't be done, because companies bigger than Wal-Mart have already been toppled in the free market - Diners Club, Standard Oil, A&P, HBC, Woolworths, IBM. What Wal-Mart has actually done is to achieve success by offering cheaper goods, which raises real incomes - basically, Wal-Mart got rich by making consumers richer. What Wal-Mart does, it does with the consent of all concerned. Doubtless there are some suppliers who can't meet Wal-Mart's demands, but are you advocating that Wal-Mart must be forced to buy? How is this any less wrong than (allegedly) forcing suppliers to sell? Government is the biggest colluder of all. Don't you think it's ironic to give a monopoly on pursuing monopolists? The first examples that come to mind of a monopoly (or near monopoly) that arose in the free market is Microsoft and Standard Oil. Neither ever had a total monopoly like the State has, both just had market share in the high 90th percentile. However, Standard Oil got this dominance by slashing oil prices to about 10% of what they were before, and Microsoft similarly became dominant by slashing prices - before MS Word, similar software cost $300-400. Microsoft cut that down by 80-90%. Financial software used to cost several hundred dollars, but since MS Money, the price is now around $20. And no, neither of these companies ever gouged their customers once they had domination. The reason is simple: in a free market, monopoly is not guaranteed and even the threat of competition acts like competition. Microsoft must remain competitive even though it has 97% of the desktop OS market, because it knows that if it does not, Apple, Red Hat, Sun et al will swoop down and take away their enviable position. Video consoles have a very high entry barrier. To build a chip fabrication plant alone costs between $2.5 and $3 billion dollars today. Retooling an existing one doesn't cost a lot less. A new coal-fired power plant in Omaha is being built for $0.8 billion. So that claim falls down pretty fast. But in any case, with a sound business model and a realistic chance of success, investment capital can be found for any venture. Even the threat that someone would do this would keep existing "colluders" competitive. What makes hydro, water, gas and other utilities uncompetitive now is that the State has guaranteed their business and outlawed competition with them. So, they don't have competition and they don't fear competition - they can be as inefficient as they like, and generally, their operations are run as a model of inefficiency.

It's correct. You reject objective rights. Your statement above illustrates that. Well, unless you can demonstrate to me that you are in some way objectively superior to other men I reject your claim that you should be able to tell them what they must believe.

But earlier you had said: So you were claiming that the Versailles Dictate was fair - "Germany got what it deserved" - and yet if Germany did not start WWI, and other nations were also guilty, and the German State should only be held responsible for what it did, then how was the Versailles Dictate, which punished Germany exclusively, fair? You're refuting your own argument. The Waffen-SS and the SS-TV were not the same organization. Sure, they were both SS - but the Marines and the Army are both under the Pentagon, are they therefore the same organization? In any case you cannot demonstrate that any concentration camp guards or anyone else entered the Waffen-SS before 1942 at the very earliest (most of your sources say 1944), and unless you are claiming that WWII began in 1942, you are simply wrong.

It does not matter. These qualities are an inescapable part of the nature of most human beings. Capitalism harnesses them to make a system that makes everybody better off. Collectivism and Statism deny them or hope they will go away, and then blame capitalism (ironically) for their own, inevitable, failure. After all, if people are selfish, arrogant, greedy and intransigent, what's worse - making them compete in a market for consumer goodwill, or giving them absolute power over those people? If people do value wealth over other things then, Mr. no-objective-rights-for-anyone, who are you to be telling them they are wrong?

There's nothing avoidable about elites, humans are not created equal. Some people are smarter, more charismatic and more driven, these people will tend to succeed. The connection between this and a State, however, has not been made to my satisfaction. Again, I don't see how this forms a State. You could say that credit card companies were an elite, they certainly collaborate and they hold a lot of money and influence. But how do you get from that to a State? Leader of what? In order to be leader of anything he is going to have to create the mechanisms of Government from nothing and persuade many people to help him do this. This represents a public-goods problem since people are unlikely to contribute to the creation of a State that most of them will not benefit from. There is also the avenue of private charities, simulations of which indicate that in the absence of heavy taxation and State appropriation of charitable means will enjoy increased funding. But how exactly does the State assist these people today? I see a great many homeless and destitute people in any society, so please don't tell me that the State is doing a better job helping those on the bottom rung of the ladder - it just ain't so! It would if you consented to it. Consider this: many credit cards charge an annual fee. This is like an access fee. Is it actionable because it affects the value of the credit card? No, and why? Because it was agreed to in advance. If Jones agrees to Smith's initial and reasonable access fee then there is no possible tort - Jones cannot sue Smith for doing something that Jones consented to. However, if Smith raises the access fee, thus breaching the original contract, it becomes up to Jones whether or not he accepts the new contract or rejects it. To say the system could not possibly work is nonsensical when you consider that such a system does work thousands of times a day already. Yes. Look at eBay. Are you familiar with their ratings systems? In any case, it's a subjective valuation. People will weigh the deal against the chance of getting screwed. If, in their eyes, it's worth it, then they'll make the deal. For you to say that is wrong is your attempt to tell other people what they should value and what they should do. Why would it be? Is fair-trade coffee a joke? How about Wal-Mart's no-questions-asked returns policy - is that a joke? If people demand fair dealing, then there is a market for fair-dealing companies, and an entrepreneur will address that. I have a credit card that charges me 9% APR, gives me free life, disability and unemployment insurance, air miles, and so on - is that a joke, too? If what you claim is true then perhaps all credit card companies should still be charging the maximum available under usury laws, hmmm? You're presuming an incentive to collude where none exists. If landlords are greedy and unfair, then they leave the market wide open to any competitor who is a fair trader. Once upon a time, Diners Club was the only credit card. Other companies got in on the act by offering better products, lower interest rates, and so forth. Standard Oil gained (temporary) market domination by slashing oil prices to perhaps a tenth of what they were before. Even where cartels exist they are very uneasy cooperatives and they break down all the time. You might argue that existing dominant players could simply buy out or intimidate anybody else out of the market, but you assume a big player from another market won't enter. For instance, Nintendo and Sega used to have the videogame console market wrapped up. Then Sony muscled in and was too big to be bought or intimidated. Then Microsoft entered, same story. Now Sega doesn't even make consoles any more and Nintendo is definitely in third place to the newcomers. This happens all the time. A&P used to be the biggest chain of stores in North America. They had thousands more stores than Wal-Mart has today. Now they're a bit-player, and it all happened by market means. The best way to get rich is to provide a product or service that lots of people want at a cheaper price, a better quality, or both, than the competition. Greed therefore serves people and makes everyone better off. This is the invisible hand, the magic of capitalism. Thanks to the greed of Henry Ford we have cheaper and better cars than ever before. Thanks to the greed of Bill Gates (and others) we have computers that are far cheaper and massively more powerful than anything even thirty years ago. And so on. As to which system idolizes greed, consider that the people of the USSR after long suffering under Statism were amongst the most closed-minded, self-centered, power-hungry and petty people you could find. I know a man who taught economics to Lithuanian immigrants just after the fall of Communism. He said not only could they not get their heads around basic economics, but if told to work amongst themselves or form groups they would usually sit silently and not work together at all and, when they did speak, the first order of business was to immediately establish a pecking order and a hierarchy before doing anything else. People in the more capitalistic West are a lot more friendly, helpful, gregarious and compassionate. Capitalism creates these virtues. It does so because it is the best method of facilitating human cooperation, and shows people that by working together and dividing labour they can get far more. Therefore, ironically, it is in the selfish interests of people to be friendly, peaceable, and cooperative, and against their interests to be closed-minded, unfriendly, or violent. Who cares how it works if it works? You are trying to cry 'foul' not because the system doesn't work but because people aren't motivated the way you feel they should be. What's your better idea? Have you found a way to create New Socialist Man? Tell it to the Russian Communists, they tried for over 70 years and failed completely. In fact, the people under their regime were even more selfish and greedy than before! Humans are what they are. You can either try and work with it, or pretend it's not there and design systems that will inevitably fail because they deny the facts upon which their operation depends. But as I have demonstrated above, the strength of the anarcho-capitalist system is that it does not depend upon changes in human nature. Of course any society will work better when people are more virtuous, that goes without saying. But for any given level of selfishness or altruism, anarchy will always work better than a State. It is collectivism and Statism that presume a selflessness in man that just isn't there. This is why they always fail.

All the accounts I have read state that Goebbels and his wife poisoned all their children before committing suicide themselves, together. Regardless, the fact of the matter is that there is plenty of evidence that Hitler was willing to accept a compromise with the Western Allies. I see no reason why Kaiser Wilhelm II would have been even crazier than Hitler when he still had far more to salvage and far more to lose and when his war was waged not for grandiose dreams of racial supremacy, but for simple realpolitik: his aim was the betterment of Germany, and when that became best served by peace I'm sure he would have accepted peace.

You guys are certainly intellectually honest. I thank you for making a reasoned debate possible. It's certainly possible to do things that way, if not in all cases then at least in many. However, even if a person were to suffer violence against his person or property as restitution for violence he had initiated I would not consider it a violation of his rights. For instance, if a burglar broke into my home I don't think it would be a violation of the rights of the burglar for me to clobber him with a baseball bat. The serial number is irrelevant. Serial numbers are only valid because the Mint says they are. It's still a circular argument.

But your point that Germany initiated the war is false. Serbia (or Austro-Hungary) actually started the war. So why was Germany made to admit guilt for the whole thing? I've already addressed this, so I will just quote myself. So, who was responsible for WWI? Yes, and Russia had it's eye on Eastern Europe for a long time, Austro-Hungary had its eye on Serbia, France wanted to retake Alsace-Lorraine, etc. So what does that prove? The first site you quote says that the Waffen-SS and concentration camps were merged in 1944. Source two mentions that conscription and rotation into the SS from other disbanded combat units also began in 1944. Source three makes no mention of what you are alleging but does confirm what I was claming: in 1943, when they were a purely combat unit, they stormed Kharkov and massacred 20,000 civilians. So, your first two sources only support your argument if you are claiming that the war began or the Waffen-SS was formed in 1944, neither of which is true. As regards the third source, you'd have been much better off not quoting that one at all - it doesn't support your argument, it supports mine. So was Joseph Goebbels, and the Goebbels Diaries confirm Shirer's account. Speer did have a motive for lying: he survived the war, and so it was in his interests to turn Hitler into a crazed monster and exonerate himself. Goebbels, however, had no incentive to lie since he committed suicide within hours of Hitler. I was not talking about Hitler's successor but about von Ribbentrop's: Goebbels.

That's what you live under now. I thought you liked it. Nobody is talking about abolishing anything. What I am proposing is removing the services of law provision, justice and policing from the hands of a coercive and violent monopolist into multiple, competing providers in a free market, to therefore arrive at better, cheaper and economically correct provision instead. Where did I imply that? Again, you are obfuscating. The fact that the State cannot do anything forbidden to private citizens affects not the fact that it can do some things forbidden to private citizens. The terms of the 'public scrutiny' you mention are themselves set by the State. They have created the rules by which we hold elections and by which various organizations are allowed oversight into what they do. They even make the rules about how information on their various activities is disclosed. See the Patriot Act and its successor for an example of how this can go wrong - see the Nazi abolition of democracy for an example of how it can go spectacularly wrong! Circular argument. If the State does it, it isn't illegal. Why isn't it illegal? Because the State does it. If that is your argument, then all privately forged banknotes are originals too. Therefore, private counterfeiting is not (or should not be) a crime. Is that your proposal?

de Jouvenel's theory does not make sense. He proposes that the accumulation of wealth will lead to elites forming and power being concentrated in their hands. Firstly, there is no evidence of this ever having happened: merchants do not become kings, warlords do. Secondly, his mechanism for the accumulation of power within families already presumes a State, it does not explain how one comes into being. Without a State no one entity will control who is able to amass a fortune and it is perfectly possible to amass one from nothing (50% of American millionaires inherited less than $1, 90% had parents who weren't millionaires). However, with a State created, it is possible for elites to expropriate up-and-comers or introduce legislation to stop them in the first place. To think that this could happen before the fact implies the fixed-pie economic idea, which was discredited a long time ago. Thirdly, he does not address how many elites will become one elite. How is the ultimately victorious elite able to gain his victory? Even when he becomes more powerful than any other elite, the others must surely recognise that he is a threat to all of them and band together against him, and against all of them he is weak. The only way this elite could gain his victory is if he leverages his wealth into military power and conquers them - which was my proposition in the first place. I'm also curious to know what the examples are of societies that have gained a State in this fashion. You're obfuscating. You have not addressed the circular nature of this argument. Again: kidnapping is not illegal if the State does it, because if the State does it, it's not illegal. Note, however, that this does not address the moral or ethical implications of such kidnapping at all. You are constructing a strawman argument: I never claimed that politicians could do as they want, I claimed instead that politicians are able to do many things without repercussion which, if done by a private citizen, would be punished severely. You have not addressed this. Are you claiming that all the State does is replace old notes, which are destroyed, with new ones? I think you'll find that that is very wrong. But the likelihood that it will attract a good person is far less than that it will attract a bad one, because the desire for power very rarely accompanies traits such as compassion and selflessness. Most people who are pacifistic and selfless would also reject the holding of coercive power over another human being and so would not be interested in political office. This is why Hayek claims that the State will attract many more bad people than good, and due to their nature, it is also almost certain that the bad people within the State will do their best to run the good out of it, thus, over time, any State will become populated almost entirely with selfish, arrogant, intransigent and self-gratifying individuals, which when married with the power of coercion over other people, makes a very dangerous situation. So you are telling me that if, for instance, your hydro company gradually raised its rates over a few years to several dollars per kWh or more, you wouldn't notice? You would receive your multi-thousand-dollar hydro bill and not even have the slightest inkling that this was more than you were paying a few years ago? Of course, this is nonsense. People notice very quickly that prices have gone up and complain about it most vocally. If Jones had a job he could certainly afford to rent somewhere else. You also assume that Jones is completely alone in the world without a single friend or family member who might take him in or otherwise help him out. And once he has done this he could sue Smith for causing the devaluing of his property, because Smith's action having negatively impacted Jones is very arguably a tort. No, he would not. He would now own a property that was worthless because, after what Smith has done to Jones, nobody is going to buy it or rent it from Smith. Smith is now the owner of a worthless property and is ostracized by everybody else in the community, who has seen what he did to poor Jones. If Smith had a day-job he'd almost certainly lose it since no company wants to be seen employing such despicable people - it speaks about their organization and loses them business. He wouldn't get another for the same reason. If Smith owned properties elsewhere that he had not yet extorted those tenants would move out quickly before he did to them what he did to Jones. So Smith ends up owning nothing of value, without an income or a means of getting one, and without a friend in the world. How is this "winning"? They'll be laughing on the other side of their faces when the fair-trading landlords take all their business away. Nobody wants to deal with a crook - just look at how fast all of Enron's shareholders pulled out once the news of their book-cooking came out.

That's very honest and noble of you. Apology accepted. In turn I apologise if you perceive me as overly confrontational and competitive, it's nothing personal, but I'm passionate about my views (although not intransigent). Renowned debaters of history are never known for their conciliatory nature and willingness to compromise for the sake of niceness. Not that I'm comparing myself to Socrates or anything, but if you find me confrontational, aggressive and unrelenting, you should get a load of him.

Except that such "governments" would have competitors in the same geographic region and would not be allowed to initiate force against people. That is what the State is all about - a monopoly over law and justice (at least) in a given geographical area and the so-called right to aggress. So because drug addicts might commit crimes we must lock them up? Are you in favour of locking up all young black males, since they are also more likely to commit crimes? Why not? At what point do you deem a chance of offence great enough to merit imprisonment before having committed a crime, and why? The works of Franz Oppenheimer. It's "Norman". I thought it was a typo but you've repeated it now. Anyway, if you go back far enough you'll find tribes based on mutual co-operation and consent, voluntaryists, but when they began to conquer and subvert each other you have the origins of imposed government. No, they are like lottery tickets, but with better odds. They are promises of a share in potential future earnings. The government has no plan for expanding the supply of gold and therefore new currency is plainly fraudulent - it represents neither anything that exists now or anything that may or probably will exist. But in any case, this is a nonargument because if you contend that for a company to issue new shares based neither on existing capital nor on capital it has reason to believe it will possess in the future, yes, I agree that that is fraudulent - just as the State is fraudulent. So I suggest you drop it since it cannot be used to prove me wrong.

That's not the issue. What I'm asking you is whether or not you feel that coercive detainment before a conviction amounts to a presumption of guilt until proof of innocence. Your reply is that detainment is not the same as murder. Be that as it may, it does not answer the question. Since the dictionary apparently forms the basis of your philosophy: "the state of being under the control of another person" -- Wordnet 2.0, Princeton University The State controls us and tells us what to do. We are also forced to labour for the State, since when we work, whether or not we like it or consent to it a certain portion of our income is skimmed off (or gouged off, more like) and taken by the State for whatever they deem appropriate. Therefore, every working person in Canada is a slave with the exception of those who live from government largesse or who are net beneficiaries of the State, receiving more than they pay. Anything other than this is going to give you an awfully funny definition of slavery. I invite you to posit an alternative.

Which is a circular argument, as I've demonstrated. So what the law boils down to is "we do as we please'. Which is my whole argument - a double standard in law, one for the ruled, another for the rulers (or none for the rulers). No, the original was backed by a commodity. The new note is a copy because it is not backed by anything. Word substitution does not an argument make. By this standard, criminal counterfeiters are simply inflating the currency, which isn't a crime - sayest thou. Actually, debate is supposed to be the pitting of two (or more) arguments against each other to find the truth. If I don't defend my argument to the best of my abilities I am doing you a disservice. Does the consent of perhaps a quarter of the electorate grant legitimacy? If a quarter of Canadians decided that PocketRocket must die, would you commit suicide? How many people do you need before something stops being illegal and becomes State activity? And if you don't like that, then don't go into bars. Go to malls, where the guards are courteous and don't get in brawls. The free market has something for everyone, not the one-size-will-fit-all dogma of the State. When you're done insulting me, could you answer my point? I contended (actually, the Nobel laureate Friedrich Hayek contended) that it is inevitable that the State will attract the worst of people. I offered you a logical argument as to why that would be. Your answer was, "well, it may." Why may it? Where is your argument? Why am I the only one expected to provide any proof or argument for anything?

Most likely it would be owned by the condo association or the housing owner who would probably also provide garbage disposal and so forth. Thus it would be leased along with the house. And then they'd watch their meal tickets dwindle to nothing as people moved somewhere else where the road-owner wasn't so extortionate. Let's say Jones owns a house surrounded a road owned by Smith. Smith decides he'll extort Jones. He raises prices to exorbitant levels. Jones has to leave at some point to work and buy food, after having done so he turns to Smith and says, "Ha ha, sucker! I just bought a house somewhere else! Won't be using your road anymore!" In the meantime, everyone knows that Smith is an extortionist and nobody will do any kind of business with him. With nobody left to deal with, Smith will have a miserable existence by himself. Smith's alternative is never to allow Jones to leave. Jones will eventually starve to death having paid Smith very little since he was not allowed to leave for work, and Smith's only source of income will be gone now that Jones has died and nobody else will do business with him. Again, his life will now be very miserable. Doesn't seem worth it, does it? If Smith hated Jones so much that he would ruin his own life to hurt him, then why not just shoot him and have done with it? Drug addicts don't have to go to jail. They haven't done anything wrong. The reason why drugs are so expensive that they have to commit theft is because they are illegal. There's very few crimes committed for cigarette money. On what evidence do you claim this? OK, so they're selling futures. Does newly minted currency represent gold futures? Where is the government's business plan for mining this new gold and minting it into bullion, please?

Sorry, but you are wrong. Hitler instructed von Ribbentrop and afterward, his successor Goebbels to propose a ceasefire with the USA, France and Britain to be followed by a joint attack by all four on the USSR. In his last days he comforted himself, encouraged by his cronies, that acceptance of this deal would soon be forthcoming. Review the last few chapters of your William Shirer.

You are more than welcome. Germany had no indication that this would be followed up with anything less than an invasion of Germany. Since the two alternatives seemed to be losing conquered ground or losing German soil, they picked the former, as anyone would. That wasn't the point. You claimed that Germany in both world wars would have fought on regardless of anything. This is not true. Yes, it was. A Serbian national attacked an Austro-Hungarian prince. Austro-Hungary therefore delivered an impossible ultimatum to Serbia. Serbia appealed to Russia, her ally, for protection. Russia mobilized its forces. Austro-Hungary appealed to Germany, her ally, for mutual defence against Russia. Russia appealed to France, France declared war on Germany, Germany struck at France through Belgium, Britain activated her guarantee of Belgian neutrality. It's hard to make the claim that Germany was any more irresponsible than any other European State in this tragic comedy of errors. Germany struck at Belgium because it was faced with a two-front war and Belgium refused German troops passage. Realpolitik, not war guilt. Wrong, wrong, wrong. You can't prove any of this and you have no evidence. Why? Because it's a lie. But you just told me that soldiers do what they do because they believe in their cause. If what you say was true, it doesn't make sense that so many volunteered for the Waffen SS and threw themselves into battle heedless of the risk to their personal safety, does it? Your story runs completely counter to historical fact. This, again, is because it is a tissue of lies. Yes, and in 1930 a German soldier could have said the same thing.

Where's the option to combat it by restoring private property rights and undoing the legislation which denied that pollution was a tort?

The value of all things is subjective. However, the value of a scrap of printed paper is very low. The reason why money is not valued so low is because it is supposed to represent a quantity of a much more highly valued good - gold. It would take a lot of paper to buy a car. For instance, if I turned up at a BMW dealership and offered them sixty pretty pieces of paper the size of $1000 dollar bills, I'd be laughed into the street. But dollars are valuable because they represent something else. They are promissory notes. Companies issue new shares to represent capital gain. The shares represent new equipment and other capital. To do otherwise would be fraudulent. The State, however, prints paper money representing capital that doesn't actually exist. Yet you claim this is not fraud. And if a corporation did issue new shares representing no capital, when they claimed that they did, yes, that would be fraud. When? Name one society. Here's a history lesson (a lot of work on this done by Oppenheimer): The Normans conquered and subverted the Anglo-Saxons. The Norman nobility lived among them as rulers. Then some of the peasantry overthrew those rulers and themselves lived among the conquered, as rulers. Then those people went overseas to North America, conquered and subverted the people living there and lived among them as rulers. And that is the Canadian Government today. At no point did the people ever get together and say, "You know what would be good for all of us? If we gave all the weapons and all the power to the Norman nobles and had them tell us what to do. That'd sure keep us safe." It sounds like what it is: ridiculous.

Murray Rothbard and David Friedman (amongst others) have written books on this subject and all of them are available for free online. I will attempt a summary, but it'll probably leave something out, or I'll forget it, so bear with me. First off, we all contract with protection agencies - private police. You'd contract with them like you buy insurance. As to the poor, they'd probably receive it for free as a PR stunt from the agencies, from charity, or from service bundling. Your protection agency is responsible for keeping you safe from crime. They guard your house and so on. When you enter someone else's property (in anarcho-capitalism, everything is property), you're under the protection of their agency. So in a mall, the mall guards look after you. All good so far. Now, what happens if your TV gets stolen? Well, your agency investigates and finds out that a guy called Smith stole it. They turn up at Smith's house and demand that he return your TV and costs for your inconvenience. Smith calls his protection agency and tells them that your agency is attempting to extort him. What happens next? They could do battle, but this is extremely unlikely. Doing battle is very expensive - trained staff members are killed, material resources are lost, injured bystanders will sue, dead staff members have to be buried, their life insurance companies will probably sue, and so on. Any protection agency that relied upon doing battle would price itself out of the market. You might like the idea, but you'd probably like it less when the premiums were fifty times what the competition charged. What they would do is go to arbitration. They would find a private court willing to hear the case. Both companies would have to agree to the court, and in all likelihood companies would probably agree on courts in advance (in case of future dispute), so you'd know when you signed your protection contract which courts you'd be using. The court has to attract the business of both agencies, so it is in its interests to be impartial, fair, and expert, and to have a just and good legal code. A court that is known to be biased or derelict would not find many customers. So you go to court. The judge hears all the evidence from both parties and decides that Smith stole your TV. It would in all certainty have stated in Smith's protection contract that his agency won't protect him from sentences of crimes he is found to have committed, so his agency will stand by while yours repossesses your TV and collects reimbursement for your (or their) costs. Objections? Well, what if Smith (or you, if it went against you) decided he didn't like the verdict and contracted with a new protection agency? Firstly, it's unlikely that this agency would protect him for the same reason that insurance policies generally won't honour claims made in a grace period - it's likely that you suffered the loss first and then got insurance with the intention of defrauding the company. Secondly, a person willing to do this is likely to cost the agency money and not be a loyal customer, which isn't good business. What if your agency and Smith's hadn't dealt before and didn't have a prearranged court? They would have to negotiate and agree upon one, most likely with your consent. Since both parties must agree to the judgement, no party can call 'foul' against a verdict that doesn't go his way. What if Smith knows he's guilty as hell and won't consent to any court? First, when he signed his contract he would have had to agree to use a court. It's also likely that his agency wouldn't let him keep refusing various courts indefinitely - it costs them money and also increases the likelihood that they are going to have to defend him against forcible action by your agency. After too much of this they would terminate his contract, at which point it's open season on Smith. What if your agency is corrupt and signs up with a corrupt court? Being a responsible consumer, you probably read the newspapers and Consumer Reports or Consumer Guide, and you read all the stories about which agencies are crooked and which ones are trustworthy - just as we can now to find out which car manufacturers honour their warranties and which give you the run-around. And if that fails, you can always find a new protection agency and complain that the old one was crooked. Being in the business, they'd almost certainly know if your claim had any merit, and if it did, they'd be glad to have a new customer and would help you. What if Smith decides he's not going to take it, gets a shotgun and announces that any agent who sets foot upon his property will die? Would they aggress against him? Not necessarily. Under anarcho-capitalism, everything is owned. Word would quickly spread - like a credit rating - that Smith was a criminal and untrustworthy. If he mortgaged his house, his lender would probably foreclose. If he refused to leave, or owned the property, his utility suppliers would close his accounts, knowing that there is now a good chance he wouldn't have paid them anyway. So Smith is living in the dark without heat or water. Nor will he have food, because the road in front of his house is owned, and nobody wants a known criminal walking down their street - it's bad for business, since innocent people wouldn't want to walk where criminals went. So they're going to stop him doing that, by force if necessary, which wouldn't be aggression since Smith would have initiated the violence by trespassing. Smith has three alternatives at this point: either surrender and carry out his sentence, starve to death, or (assuming he owns arable land) effectively carry out a life sentence of hard labour eking out a living as a subsistence farmer without any outside assistance. And what if all the Smiths of the world banded together and took over? Well, you'd have a Government again.

Exactly my point, and as you have admitted, there's really nothing to distinguish them from the State except success. Therefore, why is Fat Tony a criminal, and not the State? I don't have to, because the State already has and in such a way that they are the biggest criminals of all - excused only by a logically indefensible circular argument that boils down to, "it's not illegal when I do it because I said so." Are private security guards inclined to get involved in biker brawls? Why would it not? No, it's nonsense, unless you believe a person is guilty until proven innocent. I've provided logic to back my contention. All you've offered back is a utilitarian argument, which if taken to its logical conclusion, means that anything is permissible if done for the good of the majority, including murdering and robbing the minority, therefore my contention that your argument amounts to claiming that one can do anything one wants to a person accused of a crime, justly. This is wrong. The idea of a State as social contract is a myth, no Government was ever, ever created that way. The way all States came into being was the conquest and subversion of one group by another. Therefore, the system we have in place is not there because it seemed like it would be best but because some people are stronger than others and decided to make their lives easier by enslaving those others. It seems great because it is logically consistent and I'm not tying myself up in knots and self-contradiction.

What rights? What exactly are you claiming that private protection agencies would aggress against, and how is it that you believe the State does not already do any of that? Is this any more chaotic than our justice system, where apprehension and sentencing seem to basically be a lottery, and where victims pay for the criminal's upkeep? Tell me that doesn't sound like something from Alice in Wonderland. You are dodging the question. My point is that there are double standards in law. Your rebuttal is that there are a few laws that apply equally to governors and governed. That does not negate my point at all. It's a circular argument. It's not kidnapping if the police did it. Why? Because it's not illegal. Why isn't it illegal? Because the police did it. No. Let's assume the 3rd party in all these cases is Don Corlione. To make a copy of, usually with the intent to defraud; forge (American Heritage Dictionary). Canadian money is supposed to be backed by precious metals. However, the State creates money that is not backed by anything. This is therefore fraudulent, just as if I sold you something on the premise that it did something which it did not do. Since the fraudulent item is money, the State is a counterfeiter. The State copies existing banknotes but knows full well that, unlike the existing banknotes, there is no commodity to back the forgeries. Fine: if Legs forges currency (i.e. promisory notes with nothing to back them) at the behest of Fat Tony, who is the criminal: Legs, Tony, or both? You are splitting hairs.

As I said just now, when the accused is in possession of the complete corpus delicti there isn't much the State can do either. These cases are the ones where a hiker discovers a skeleton in the woods, no weapon, no forensics, no witnesses, nothing. Whatever evidence there was, the murderer had full control over it. Private police most likely wouldn't be able to solve this crime. But neither can State police. And what resources are available to build a case are equally available to private enforcers. If we had an anarcho-capitalist society, it's most likely that Paul Bernardo's lawyers and defence agency would have advised him to allow his house to be searched by representatives of his alleged victims, probably witnessed by an uninterested party to prevent accusations of planting, etc. If he does this and they find nothing, it makes his case stronger. If he doesn't, it makes his case weaker since it demonstrates to the judge and/or jury that he has something to hide. It's also perfectly possible that a protection agency would only protect you if you agreed to an investigation by another protection agency or court. If Bernado refused to abide by his protection contract then his protection agency would no longer be obliged to help him and he'd be on his own, at which point any family member of the victims or a well-meaning vigilante could blow his head off without any threat of recrimination. And that would be the end of it. He can be tried post mortem and, if found guilty, his possessions would most likely be awarded to the heirs of his victims as compensation. Well, your protection agency would have to protect you from the other one that's attempting to punish you. Rather than do costly and uneconomic battle, the two agencies would almost certainly agree to have the case heard again in a court that both agreed upon. If that court rules against you again, then your protection agency would be perfectly right to hand you over since you've had two strikes against you, and one was from a court you agreed to respect. If it doesn't, then they'd probably go to a third for a best-of-three (assuming it's even necessary, since the prosecutors would have had to agree on the second court too), and if you were found innocent again, the prosecuting agency would have to go back to their client and tell them that courts which they respected had found you innocent, therefore, they would not be taking further action against you.

Only if you believe people are guilty until proven innocent, because what you have told me is that you can do whatever you like to a person, and if he is found guilty it's justified, but if not, well, you'll just compensate him later. Is that what you are proposing - guilty until found innocent? Isn't that a rationale for imprisoning everybody in society? Well, going back to Paul Bernado, I will certainly say that the State did a thoroughly derelict and negligent job of punishing that particular crime. You must prove not that the anarchist solution is not perfect (which it won't be, because people are imperfect), but that the State will do better. And that is a much harder task. You must also admit that it is very rare that a criminal will be in control of the corpus delicti, and in such cases, the State police are really no better off than private police would have been. Of course people will get away with crimes sometimes. A lot of people get away with crimes under Government as well. My argument is that creating a law and policing market will give us much better policing and justice systems that will cut down the number of unpunished crimes and also provide better service to boot - and at less cost. I did answer your question. I also pre-empted a possible reply you might have. You fixated on the latter and ignored the former. Hardly my fault! Actually, this isn't true. The Mafia actually acts as a kind of policing and court service for the underworld. They take an interest in criminal activity in their area and police it. They do provide a service and must not gouge their prey too deeply, and must also at least appear to be useful, lest the people they "protect" go to a rival organization, or just decide they're not going to take it anymore and buy shotguns. So would I, if anybody could ever prove to me that Government actually was the lesser evil!

To seize and detain unlawfully and usually for ransom. (American Heritage Dictionary) So if I were to kidnap somebody on behalf of a third party, that would not be a crime? So if I robbed somebody and gave my ill-gotten gains to a third party, that would not be a crime? So, again, if I counterfeit money and give it to somebody else, it is no longer a crime? This basically says that Mafia stooges are not criminals. If Legs (the stooge of Fat Tony on The Simpsons) beats somebody up on behalf of Fat Tony, Legs has not done anything wrong. But this is wrong. Of course he has. The difference is that Fat Tony and Legs are both complicit in the crime, just as the police officer, the minter and the taxman are all complicit in the crimes committed by the Government that gives them their orders. All of these are agents of the State and all are party to the crimes that the State commits. Right back at you: in your case, crime seems to be in the eyes of the criminal, since crime is only crime where the State, the biggest criminal, says it is. Why would there be nothing at all to keep them in check? This is the old Polish Housewife fallacy. If we don't have a State, who will provide police, you ask? If we don't have a State, who will provide bread, she asked. Who provides our bread? It is the criminal gang perfected. It operates like the Mafia but with a systematic and thorough nature, with far greater power and far greater immunity to repercussion. It is the greater of evils. It is what would happen if the Mafia succeeded in eliminating all opposition, and if you look at human history, Governments are invariably born when one tribe or group conquers another and, rather than raping and pillaging them, decides to extend their gains by living amongst them as rulers. You also haven't answered my point that Government will necessarily attract the worst people in society because of its nature. Nor have you answered my point that any society reflects the attitude of individuals. Note that in places where people are aggressive and violent, Government is never a solution, like Rwanda, where the State did not prevent massive violence of one tribe against another, but helped commit it.