I suppose only your arguments can be considered reasonable. Hey, that way you can win any debate, just proclaim yourself holding a monopoly on reasonable arguments.
You're out of this thread, as you should be, because such an attitude is one of a troll.
Anyway, I will make one more attempt to enlighten you.
Don't make me laugh.:D
Your touching faith that all people can be persuaded to abandon violence is as impractical and doomed as the Communists' hope that all people will be unselfish someday. Neither case is realistic.
I didn't say I expect people to abandon all violence, just to abandon initiating violence. Self defense is perfectly valid and even desirable. I'm not a pacifist.
However, I don't need anyone to abandon initiated violence for me to abandon it myself and try to convince as many other people to do the same. I find it immoral to condone initiated violence (by condoning government among other things) and justify that, like you, by this ill belief that it is impossible for all people to not support initiated violence.
Yet how much evidence there really is to support such a belief if you look around yourself, your city, your country? If you ever think about it you might realize that most people already are peaceful and that most interactions already are voluntary.
There are some thugs and some mafia organizations, and the biggest one of them is government, which also does most of the damage, due to this sick perception of it as "legitimate".
Oh and your comparison with communists' hopes is completely inappropriate because communists wish to change human nature to be less selfish and FORCE altruistic behavior whereas voluntaryism wishes to leave every human alone free to be what (s)he truly wants to be. A voluntaryist society will not be built by force like every other government-oriented society.
And the reason is that the first to break the peace stands to benefit; it's a tragedy of the commons.
You're a hopeless collectivist apparently. On what basis do you conclude that the first to initiate violence is to benefit is beyond me, since doing such a thing in a society in which initiating violence is not seen ANY bit as legitimate as it is today (when the government does it) means that you're putting a big target sign on yourself and risking both your well being and your life.
And you say an initiator stands to benefit?
Tell that to your kids (if you have or will have any): "Kids, the first one of you who initiates violence stands to benefit" instead of "Kids, if you hit someone expect that someone to retaliate".
It's quite unfortunate that people like you would apparently teach their kids to be accepting towards violence out of this sick belief that all humans are violent and can never be otherwise. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Whether the thugs continue to succeed depends on how large an army you can raise against them -- and then you have to worry about the army making itself the new overlords.
And you tell ME I'm spinning in circles? That's just another way of saying what you said in the last post about factions, except this time you talk about armies. But the answer is the same. There is no army. Every individual is armed, but they aren't a part of some sort of an army. They will defend themselves individually if ever attacked by anyone, but there is no general or any sort of a hierarchy. How can they then become the new overlords? You're talking about the whole society, every person in a country, becoming the overlords.:D
Again I am ignoring the rest of your post, because you are still refusing to address the central problem.
No, you're ignoring the whole thing and you're the one spinning in circles. I've addressed the central problem from the beginning and in response you just rephraze the same old BS and proclaim I didn't address it.
You still need to answer my basic point though: if you have to split hairs to make your system seem more likely to succeed than the Wild West, then you are saying that libertarianism can only prosper under very narrow circumstances.
What exactly does "splitting hairs" mean to you then?
It is exactly opposite of narrow circumstances. The only condition to be met for a voluntary society to work is that people to stop initiating violence on each other and legitimizing violence done by others (including all violence being done by the government, which wouldn't be government as we know it without it).
Contrast that to democracy, for instance, which requires far more conditions to be met before it can even be called a democracy and even more so for it to actually work. Yet it is full of contradictions.
Proponents of democracy assume that humans cannot be trusted to behave themselves peacefully and non-fradulently, yet their solution is to put humans in charge of other humans. It is utterly insane, just as is the idea of securing non-violence and peace by the use of violence. Wtf?
I'm tempted to quote slogans from Orwell's "1984"; "War is peace", "Ignorance is strength", "Freedom is slavery".
And every system involving coercive government suffers from the same kinds of contradictions, because. Governing humans who can't behave themselves by humans who can't behave themselves. Fighting violence with violence. Etc. Nothing fundamental changes between all these government oriented systems but the shades. The fundamental problem remains.
A bigger society has more conflicts of interest; if the various factions all have plenty of guns, that society's immediate future is dire indeed.
You're stuck in the collectivist mentality. A collective cannot exist without an individual. I was not speaking of "factions", but individuals being the ones who are armed. How can an individual have conflict of interest if his only purpose and duty is to pursue his own self interest and defend himself against harm and theft?
An individual can enter into groups only by agreements, thus being in line rather than in contradiction to his interests. Once an agreement is no longer in his self interest the agreement ceases to exist and they part ways.
If individuals in a group enter into an agreement which involves defrauding or using force against other individuals (not members of the group) then those other individuals have the right to and will defend themselves against such force or ostracize and seek damages once fraud has been discovered (which media companies are well incentivized to discover, as already explained).
The scenario of conflicts of interest applies exactly to the systems involving government as individuals who would naturally pursue their own self interest are expected to act in the interest of others, as if they aren't fully self anymore. It never works. Corruption exists in every government because of this.
And something that tiny will not survive for long unless it is like Iceland, an island isolated by thousands of miles of ocean.
What difference does it make if it's isolated by an ocean? They're still humans. People in Iceland were still humans yet they lived in a successful stateless society.
If you'd argue that isolation makes a difference because other governments can't invade and disrupt an ongoing stateless society you're in fact making a point FOR stateless society rather than against it by admitting that the government is the problem rather than a solution.
And I agree that we need to explore different pollitical systems.
But I don't.
Politics, according to wikipedia, is "the process by which groups of people make decisions" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics). If you look closely you'll see that's impossible. Groups cannot make decisions. They are not singular entities with a singular conscious. Groups cannot exist without a multiple of individuals, th
Oh I'm sorry, looks like I jumbled that sentence. What I meant is that Wild West wasn't purely anarcho-capitalist which is what I believe to be the pure libertarianism. As I said in my first post here my position is usually called by multiple terms: anarcho-capitalism, market anarchy, voluntaryism or pure libertarianism (pure in the sense that it is purely based on the non-aggression principle and doesn't compromise it at all by legitimizing the existence of the state, that is, a coercive (thus aggressive) monopoly.
So to avoid the confusion, let me just define what I believe (and what I think the above terms represent). I believe that all human action must be voluntary rather than coerced. Because of that I cannot ethically validate the existence of state or government as we know it because it is a coercive monopoly. What that means is that this organization we call the government gives itself a monopoly on offering certain services, such as protection, charity (welfare) etc. and violently enforces this monopoly. Thus it did not earn this monopoly status by simply offering the best services. It took it by force and continues to maintain it by both threats and exercise of force and disinformation and spreading delusions (such as the delusion of existence or even possibility of such thing as "public property", "common good", "nation" and other collectivist ideas. Every time it pushes a collectivist idea it does so at the expense of an individual, yet a collective can never exist without an individual.
I believe that the best way to establish a stable voluntary society (market anarchy, an anarcho-capitalist system or a pure libertarian system; whatever you wanna call it) is for ideally all people to agree not to initiate force or fraud on others and instead agree to govern only their own life and no other.
I'm not however saying that absolutely everyone must agree to that (though I do think anyone who actually explicitely wishes to initiate force or fraud or another and control other people is a CROOK which has to be dealt with as soon as he exercises this desire), but there has to be a critical mass within a given area for it to form an axis upon which a stable free market based on voluntary interaction (the only way a market can be free) can be built.
So speaking of Wild West and Somalia, what I'm saying is that this critical mass was either not established and thus it couldn't have been a pure voluntary society, which is probably one of the main reasons it collapsed. So you can't really point to these examples as examples of voluntary societies that collapsed if they weren't actually such to the fullest extent.
That said, when we speak of their collapse we speak of the establishment of a WORSE state of things, one which involves legitimization of violence through the state. Instead of defending such a state of things I would think it to be more sensible to strive towards building a society in which such violence is not necessary instead of using every chance to point out how it's not worth building.
It's like accepting failure as the only thing that "works" because success was not achieved.
That said, there ARE examples of at least stateless societies which MAY have been anarcho-capitalist and which lasted for centuries. One such example is medieval Iceland, that is the Icelandic Commonwealth which lasted for 300 years. Here are some sources: http://mises.org/story/1121 on mises.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth on wikipedia.
Just like the Wild West, right? Oh wait, the era only lasted fifty years -- an eyeblink by historical standards. If you are trying to convince me that a libertarian society can be stable, you're not doing a very good job.
Wild West was not necessarily a pure libertarian society, that is anarcho-capitalist and what ended it largely seemed to be the intrusions of external government rather than its own implosion. This might shed some light on it: http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/3_1/3_1_2.pdf
You could have just as well quoted an example of Somalia, a recent stateless society, which was much more wild than the wild west and also ended by the intrusion of external governments. The belief into the illusion of necessity of legitimized coercive monopoly prevailed over the belief into exclusively voluntary interaction and thus they let themselves revert back to the system of legitimized violence. UN actually funded the strongest of the warring militias in order to establish it as a government. If anything that clearly tells you the true nature of government: an armed militia which took a monopoly on violence.
But if the voluntary society was built intentionally, with the strong belief in non-violence from the very beginning, and we have the closest example of that happening in New Hampshire, then the resistance to foreign external government intervention may equal that of the Swiss against Hitler's invasion. As you may know, Swiss were not conquered because the people were all well armed and trained for effective defense. There was no standing army, yet it was too much for Hitler to swallow and thus Swiss neutrality was preserved.
Same can happen in New Hampshire.
And that competition would shortly be dead, literally. It is extremely unhealthy to fight a mafia that is much bigger than your own.
You're ignoring the elements you don't see at play, such as the fact that the whole population of a voluntary society is ARMED, not just that brand new competing agency, thus any sort of a would be cartel or "mafia" as you call it would have to face the whole population instead of just those competing agencies.
It doesn't mean that as soon as there is suspicion that a given protection agency is trying to take over the market and proclaim itself as the government, the people will all of a sudden organize a mass revolt and go into war. No, that would be preemtive war and that's foolish. Instead they would go about their lives, but as soon as the given agency starts to exercise violence against anyone who competes, they will rise to defense. So it is impossible for them to do this without prohibitive costs, so why, again, do this if you can make more profits by being a good and peaceful protection service provider?
Note also that participants of the modern voluntary society know full well what government means. A return of government once it is established is the last thing anyone in the free market would want.
All this said, don't you see how ridiculous a position you're defending? All forms of socio-economic organization involving a coercive monopoly (government) have failed miserably and with incredible amount of destruction of wealth and life. Communism, socialism, fascism and as we are seeing today state controlled capitalism.
Yet people still keep calling for a system that involves a coercive monopoly and feverishly resist every suggestion that "Hey, perhaps we don't need a government! Maybe that's the huge flaw we have been having all this time - legitimization of coercion!".
But no.. people would rather come up with a gazillion of imaginary scenarios of how would a stateless society disintegrate into chaos, before they even give a chance to the idea, without realizing that... WE ALREADY LIVE IN CHAOS.
How do you enforce the non-violence? Well, tell me why are libertarians so bent on gun rights?
Yep, it's exactly that. Enforcement is done by the individuals themselves. If someone tries to steal from you or hurt you, you can defend yourself. If everybody in a society is well armed it is much harder and there's much less incentive for anyone to go robbing or hurting people.
You can indeed also hire a protection agency too. Your complaint that they would start warring between each other or merge into a big government of some sort is such an old complaint that it begins to sound like a cliche. The book I referred to explains it (The Market for Liberty) and Stefan Molyneux explains this among other practical issues in his book "Practical Anarchy". You can watch a trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVII-LgFVqo
They explain it best, but in a nutshell the reasons why that wouldn't happen are several. First there is a much lower barrier to entry so anyone can start or be a protection agency. Anyone can gather with a group of other people, buy some arms and advertise themselves as the new protection agency in the town. This means that no matter how much would the existing protection agencies try to consolidate (merge, cartelize, whatever), competition would come up very easily.
If people in the market at large do not like the idea of having too few or a single protection agency monopoly, and we don't, and you don't, then that means that the market will respond to such a situation with competition. Besides, it is well known that when you have a monopoly, the quality of the service declines, further necessitating competition.
Another reason is the fact that every company and perhaps especially those offering competition are obviously going to be very tightly monitored. There are likely to exist, as they do now, market watch agencies which observe the companies for any signs of force or fraud. Every sign that something fishy might be going on is going to be big news. To do anything that the most of the market disapproves off means a potentially giant loss of reputation, and in a free market reputation or lack of it can make or break your business, no matter how big it is.
In other words it would be very expensive to do what you suggest they might do, which strongly disincentivizes such actions, especially if we're talking about turf wars since that actually carries the risk of material destruction. Why do that when you can earn more money operating peacefully in the market?
The market regulates itself because it is perfectly aligned with human nature rather than depending in some sort of augmentation of it. As was acknowledged, in government there is a conflict of interest. This is because every human being acts in his self interest, yet any government position is supposed to be about acting in the interest of others, and enforce those acts by violent means.
In a free market however, self interest is not a bad thing. In a contrary, it is what makes it work. It is in everybody's self interest not to get hurt or stolen from, so they defend themselves. For the same reason practically everyone would be outraged if some company suddenly started acting coercively, because that obviously is a threat to them not being hurt or stolen from. This creates strong incentives to act against such corruptions until they become so expensive as to be simply foolish to undertake and push any further.
Free market is what exists when no system exists. It is the default state. What is needed for it to function is so ingrained in us as human beings that we don't even have to think about it. Just do whatever you want to do, pursue whatever you want to pursue, seek ways to enrich yourself and for the sake of your own safety don't get into violence (thus not initiating force). A little baby can understand this, just as an adult can.
The trouble is, today's adults have been brainwashed all their lives to believe
It's interesting that we've finally come to a time where people are actually vocally discussing a change of the whole system. That really says something about the magnitude of the changes that are happening.
That said I think you got it quite right about the problem being that humans govern other humans and thus face a conflict of interest.
However I dare to claim that the program you are proposing already exists and is in place and has been for practically ever since humans existed on this planet. That program is indeed open source to the core and completely free for everyone to participate in. It is called THE FREE MARKET.
If the problem is humans governing other humans how about letting human individuals governing ONLY themselves. I govern me and you govern yourself. If you want somebody else to do something for you or believe as you do, do not apply force to make them comply (like the current governments do), but instead use persuasion and other PEACEFUL non-violent means. And if it doesn't work then simply give up. Using violence against another (which current governments unfortunately legitimize, even while forbidding everyone else from doing it, thus taking a monopoly on violence) only results in more violence - violence breeds more violence.
This is not anarchy in the sense most people have been taught to look at anarchy. It is not lawlessness in the same sense either. It is simply a lack of a coercive ruler in place of self-rulers trading both value and ideas between each other on a purely voluntary basis. And it is law that is private where the only universal, and natural, principle to be followed by everyone and at the same time enforced by everyone (right to bear arms for defense) is the principle of non-initiation of force or fraud.
This philosophy is called by varying names: anarcho-capitalism, market anarchy, voluntaryism (because the CORE idea is that all human action should be voluntary, not coerced) etc. It is arguably also the original libertarian idea, although nowadays libertarianism is seen as compromising with coercion and government a bit too much so with respect to that we can call it a subset of libertarianism, or libertarian purism.
Lastly I want to refer anyone who didn't before think this idea through to check out these sites:
If you're curious enough that you'd give a book a chance, there's a free one with an audio book available here called "The Market for Liberty": http://freekeene.com/free-audiobook/
It changed my life.
And if you are convinced already or become sufficiently convinced after exploring this, there is good news: a place where free market and liberty stand most chance in the world: New Hampshire, because of a project of moving thousands of liberty minded people to it: http://www.freestateproject.com/
Thanks for your consideration (and sorry for such a long post, I'm just too passionate about this). I truly hope that instead of worsening conditions for our freedoms, this shift we are seeing happening in the world opens the eyes of people towards the true nature of coercive governance and what freedom truly is).
Gobuntu appears to be a dead project. It was supposed to be the official version of Ubuntu with non-free software, but in it's first release it failed to replace Firefox with IceWeasel since Firefox contains logos under restrictive licenses.
These days Mark Shuttleworth seems more willing to just let gNewSense play the role Gobuntu was supposed to play.
True enough, but I'd rather trust a bunch of Free Software developers whose code is always public than a bunch of proprietary software developers who can hide their code beneath the veil of ones and zeros.
And also there is a reason why you often have to install drivers from an extra CD yourself on Windows yet those same things just work on GNU/Linux, just plug and play. But that's only IF there is a Free Software driver, which is why having them is so important and seeing which of those are missing (which gNewSense effectively allows) is beneficial.:)
Cheers
It's much more than that. You'd be surprised at how careful they are not to ship with a single bit that is not Free Software.
It may seem ludicrous to some at first, but think about the benefit. Even if you wont use it as your main system you can use it to test just how much of your hardware is 100% Free Software compliant, or you can use it to see what hardware you should buy that is 100% compliant.
And Free Software compliant hardware equals best possible experience - since it will all then work out of the box, with bugs fixed and improvements steadily coming, because you don't need to depend on some third party for everything.
Why would Microsoft do a study on GPLv3 right now? I think that in trying to answer that question everyone can easily conclude what exactly is behind this study.
Microsoft fears GPLv3 quite a bit because it will effectively block deals like the one it made with Novell, and those deals are the only thing they favor as a way of dealing with the GNU/Linux threat because it seemingly validates their supposed patent rights over GNU/Linux and provides them some control over what is happening in the GNU/Linux industry. If they could make such deals with all commercial GNU/Linux vendors they'd be able to influence it significantly.
But GPLv3 is ruining that dream.
So what else are we to expect than Microsoft trying its best to downplay this license? I am not at all surprised to see this. It was expectable.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose only your arguments can be considered reasonable. Hey, that way you can win any debate, just proclaim yourself holding a monopoly on reasonable arguments.
You're out of this thread, as you should be, because such an attitude is one of a troll.
Regards
Anyway, I will make one more attempt to enlighten you.
Don't make me laugh. :D
Your touching faith that all people can be persuaded to abandon violence is as impractical and doomed as the Communists' hope that all people will be unselfish someday. Neither case is realistic.
I didn't say I expect people to abandon all violence, just to abandon initiating violence. Self defense is perfectly valid and even desirable. I'm not a pacifist.
However, I don't need anyone to abandon initiated violence for me to abandon it myself and try to convince as many other people to do the same. I find it immoral to condone initiated violence (by condoning government among other things) and justify that, like you, by this ill belief that it is impossible for all people to not support initiated violence.
Yet how much evidence there really is to support such a belief if you look around yourself, your city, your country? If you ever think about it you might realize that most people already are peaceful and that most interactions already are voluntary.
There are some thugs and some mafia organizations, and the biggest one of them is government, which also does most of the damage, due to this sick perception of it as "legitimate".
Oh and your comparison with communists' hopes is completely inappropriate because communists wish to change human nature to be less selfish and FORCE altruistic behavior whereas voluntaryism wishes to leave every human alone free to be what (s)he truly wants to be. A voluntaryist society will not be built by force like every other government-oriented society.
And the reason is that the first to break the peace stands to benefit; it's a tragedy of the commons.
You're a hopeless collectivist apparently. On what basis do you conclude that the first to initiate violence is to benefit is beyond me, since doing such a thing in a society in which initiating violence is not seen ANY bit as legitimate as it is today (when the government does it) means that you're putting a big target sign on yourself and risking both your well being and your life.
And you say an initiator stands to benefit?
Tell that to your kids (if you have or will have any): "Kids, the first one of you who initiates violence stands to benefit" instead of "Kids, if you hit someone expect that someone to retaliate".
It's quite unfortunate that people like you would apparently teach their kids to be accepting towards violence out of this sick belief that all humans are violent and can never be otherwise. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Whether the thugs continue to succeed depends on how large an army you can raise against them -- and then you have to worry about the army making itself the new overlords.
And you tell ME I'm spinning in circles? That's just another way of saying what you said in the last post about factions, except this time you talk about armies. But the answer is the same. There is no army. Every individual is armed, but they aren't a part of some sort of an army. They will defend themselves individually if ever attacked by anyone, but there is no general or any sort of a hierarchy. How can they then become the new overlords? You're talking about the whole society, every person in a country, becoming the overlords. :D
Again I am ignoring the rest of your post, because you are still refusing to address the central problem.
No, you're ignoring the whole thing and you're the one spinning in circles. I've addressed the central problem from the beginning and in response you just rephraze the same old BS and proclaim I didn't address it.
So keep being ignorant.
You still need to answer my basic point though: if you have to split hairs to make your system seem more likely to succeed than the Wild West, then you are saying that libertarianism can only prosper under very narrow circumstances.
What exactly does "splitting hairs" mean to you then?
It is exactly opposite of narrow circumstances. The only condition to be met for a voluntary society to work is that people to stop initiating violence on each other and legitimizing violence done by others (including all violence being done by the government, which wouldn't be government as we know it without it).
Contrast that to democracy, for instance, which requires far more conditions to be met before it can even be called a democracy and even more so for it to actually work. Yet it is full of contradictions.
Proponents of democracy assume that humans cannot be trusted to behave themselves peacefully and non-fradulently, yet their solution is to put humans in charge of other humans. It is utterly insane, just as is the idea of securing non-violence and peace by the use of violence. Wtf?
I'm tempted to quote slogans from Orwell's "1984"; "War is peace", "Ignorance is strength", "Freedom is slavery".
And every system involving coercive government suffers from the same kinds of contradictions, because. Governing humans who can't behave themselves by humans who can't behave themselves. Fighting violence with violence. Etc. Nothing fundamental changes between all these government oriented systems but the shades. The fundamental problem remains.
A bigger society has more conflicts of interest; if the various factions all have plenty of guns, that society's immediate future is dire indeed.
You're stuck in the collectivist mentality. A collective cannot exist without an individual. I was not speaking of "factions", but individuals being the ones who are armed. How can an individual have conflict of interest if his only purpose and duty is to pursue his own self interest and defend himself against harm and theft?
An individual can enter into groups only by agreements, thus being in line rather than in contradiction to his interests. Once an agreement is no longer in his self interest the agreement ceases to exist and they part ways.
If individuals in a group enter into an agreement which involves defrauding or using force against other individuals (not members of the group) then those other individuals have the right to and will defend themselves against such force or ostracize and seek damages once fraud has been discovered (which media companies are well incentivized to discover, as already explained).
The scenario of conflicts of interest applies exactly to the systems involving government as individuals who would naturally pursue their own self interest are expected to act in the interest of others, as if they aren't fully self anymore. It never works. Corruption exists in every government because of this.
And something that tiny will not survive for long unless it is like Iceland, an island isolated by thousands of miles of ocean.
What difference does it make if it's isolated by an ocean? They're still humans. People in Iceland were still humans yet they lived in a successful stateless society.
If you'd argue that isolation makes a difference because other governments can't invade and disrupt an ongoing stateless society you're in fact making a point FOR stateless society rather than against it by admitting that the government is the problem rather than a solution.
And I agree that we need to explore different pollitical systems.
But I don't.
Politics, according to wikipedia, is "the process by which groups of people make decisions" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics). If you look closely you'll see that's impossible. Groups cannot make decisions. They are not singular entities with a singular conscious. Groups cannot exist without a multiple of individuals, th
Oh I'm sorry, looks like I jumbled that sentence. What I meant is that Wild West wasn't purely anarcho-capitalist which is what I believe to be the pure libertarianism. As I said in my first post here my position is usually called by multiple terms: anarcho-capitalism, market anarchy, voluntaryism or pure libertarianism (pure in the sense that it is purely based on the non-aggression principle and doesn't compromise it at all by legitimizing the existence of the state, that is, a coercive (thus aggressive) monopoly.
So to avoid the confusion, let me just define what I believe (and what I think the above terms represent). I believe that all human action must be voluntary rather than coerced. Because of that I cannot ethically validate the existence of state or government as we know it because it is a coercive monopoly. What that means is that this organization we call the government gives itself a monopoly on offering certain services, such as protection, charity (welfare) etc. and violently enforces this monopoly. Thus it did not earn this monopoly status by simply offering the best services. It took it by force and continues to maintain it by both threats and exercise of force and disinformation and spreading delusions (such as the delusion of existence or even possibility of such thing as "public property", "common good", "nation" and other collectivist ideas. Every time it pushes a collectivist idea it does so at the expense of an individual, yet a collective can never exist without an individual.
I believe that the best way to establish a stable voluntary society (market anarchy, an anarcho-capitalist system or a pure libertarian system; whatever you wanna call it) is for ideally all people to agree not to initiate force or fraud on others and instead agree to govern only their own life and no other.
I'm not however saying that absolutely everyone must agree to that (though I do think anyone who actually explicitely wishes to initiate force or fraud or another and control other people is a CROOK which has to be dealt with as soon as he exercises this desire), but there has to be a critical mass within a given area for it to form an axis upon which a stable free market based on voluntary interaction (the only way a market can be free) can be built.
So speaking of Wild West and Somalia, what I'm saying is that this critical mass was either not established and thus it couldn't have been a pure voluntary society, which is probably one of the main reasons it collapsed. So you can't really point to these examples as examples of voluntary societies that collapsed if they weren't actually such to the fullest extent.
That said, when we speak of their collapse we speak of the establishment of a WORSE state of things, one which involves legitimization of violence through the state. Instead of defending such a state of things I would think it to be more sensible to strive towards building a society in which such violence is not necessary instead of using every chance to point out how it's not worth building.
It's like accepting failure as the only thing that "works" because success was not achieved.
That said, there ARE examples of at least stateless societies which MAY have been anarcho-capitalist and which lasted for centuries. One such example is medieval Iceland, that is the Icelandic Commonwealth which lasted for 300 years. Here are some sources: http://mises.org/story/1121 on mises.org and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth on wikipedia.
Thank you
Just like the Wild West, right? Oh wait, the era only lasted fifty years -- an eyeblink by historical standards. If you are trying to convince me that a libertarian society can be stable, you're not doing a very good job.
Wild West was not necessarily a pure libertarian society, that is anarcho-capitalist and what ended it largely seemed to be the intrusions of external government rather than its own implosion. This might shed some light on it: http://www.mises.org/journals/jls/3_1/3_1_2.pdf
You could have just as well quoted an example of Somalia, a recent stateless society, which was much more wild than the wild west and also ended by the intrusion of external governments. The belief into the illusion of necessity of legitimized coercive monopoly prevailed over the belief into exclusively voluntary interaction and thus they let themselves revert back to the system of legitimized violence. UN actually funded the strongest of the warring militias in order to establish it as a government. If anything that clearly tells you the true nature of government: an armed militia which took a monopoly on violence.
But if the voluntary society was built intentionally, with the strong belief in non-violence from the very beginning, and we have the closest example of that happening in New Hampshire, then the resistance to foreign external government intervention may equal that of the Swiss against Hitler's invasion. As you may know, Swiss were not conquered because the people were all well armed and trained for effective defense. There was no standing army, yet it was too much for Hitler to swallow and thus Swiss neutrality was preserved.
Same can happen in New Hampshire.
And that competition would shortly be dead, literally. It is extremely unhealthy to fight a mafia that is much bigger than your own.
You're ignoring the elements you don't see at play, such as the fact that the whole population of a voluntary society is ARMED, not just that brand new competing agency, thus any sort of a would be cartel or "mafia" as you call it would have to face the whole population instead of just those competing agencies.
It doesn't mean that as soon as there is suspicion that a given protection agency is trying to take over the market and proclaim itself as the government, the people will all of a sudden organize a mass revolt and go into war. No, that would be preemtive war and that's foolish. Instead they would go about their lives, but as soon as the given agency starts to exercise violence against anyone who competes, they will rise to defense. So it is impossible for them to do this without prohibitive costs, so why, again, do this if you can make more profits by being a good and peaceful protection service provider?
Note also that participants of the modern voluntary society know full well what government means. A return of government once it is established is the last thing anyone in the free market would want.
All this said, don't you see how ridiculous a position you're defending? All forms of socio-economic organization involving a coercive monopoly (government) have failed miserably and with incredible amount of destruction of wealth and life. Communism, socialism, fascism and as we are seeing today state controlled capitalism.
Yet people still keep calling for a system that involves a coercive monopoly and feverishly resist every suggestion that "Hey, perhaps we don't need a government! Maybe that's the huge flaw we have been having all this time - legitimization of coercion!".
But no.. people would rather come up with a gazillion of imaginary scenarios of how would a stateless society disintegrate into chaos, before they even give a chance to the idea, without realizing that... WE ALREADY LIVE IN CHAOS.
How do you enforce the non-violence? Well, tell me why are libertarians so bent on gun rights?
Yep, it's exactly that. Enforcement is done by the individuals themselves. If someone tries to steal from you or hurt you, you can defend yourself. If everybody in a society is well armed it is much harder and there's much less incentive for anyone to go robbing or hurting people.
You can indeed also hire a protection agency too. Your complaint that they would start warring between each other or merge into a big government of some sort is such an old complaint that it begins to sound like a cliche. The book I referred to explains it (The Market for Liberty) and Stefan Molyneux explains this among other practical issues in his book "Practical Anarchy". You can watch a trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVII-LgFVqo
They explain it best, but in a nutshell the reasons why that wouldn't happen are several. First there is a much lower barrier to entry so anyone can start or be a protection agency. Anyone can gather with a group of other people, buy some arms and advertise themselves as the new protection agency in the town. This means that no matter how much would the existing protection agencies try to consolidate (merge, cartelize, whatever), competition would come up very easily.
If people in the market at large do not like the idea of having too few or a single protection agency monopoly, and we don't, and you don't, then that means that the market will respond to such a situation with competition. Besides, it is well known that when you have a monopoly, the quality of the service declines, further necessitating competition.
Another reason is the fact that every company and perhaps especially those offering competition are obviously going to be very tightly monitored. There are likely to exist, as they do now, market watch agencies which observe the companies for any signs of force or fraud. Every sign that something fishy might be going on is going to be big news. To do anything that the most of the market disapproves off means a potentially giant loss of reputation, and in a free market reputation or lack of it can make or break your business, no matter how big it is.
In other words it would be very expensive to do what you suggest they might do, which strongly disincentivizes such actions, especially if we're talking about turf wars since that actually carries the risk of material destruction. Why do that when you can earn more money operating peacefully in the market?
The market regulates itself because it is perfectly aligned with human nature rather than depending in some sort of augmentation of it. As was acknowledged, in government there is a conflict of interest. This is because every human being acts in his self interest, yet any government position is supposed to be about acting in the interest of others, and enforce those acts by violent means.
In a free market however, self interest is not a bad thing. In a contrary, it is what makes it work. It is in everybody's self interest not to get hurt or stolen from, so they defend themselves. For the same reason practically everyone would be outraged if some company suddenly started acting coercively, because that obviously is a threat to them not being hurt or stolen from. This creates strong incentives to act against such corruptions until they become so expensive as to be simply foolish to undertake and push any further.
Free market is what exists when no system exists. It is the default state. What is needed for it to function is so ingrained in us as human beings that we don't even have to think about it. Just do whatever you want to do, pursue whatever you want to pursue, seek ways to enrich yourself and for the sake of your own safety don't get into violence (thus not initiating force). A little baby can understand this, just as an adult can.
The trouble is, today's adults have been brainwashed all their lives to believe
It's interesting that we've finally come to a time where people are actually vocally discussing a change of the whole system. That really says something about the magnitude of the changes that are happening.
That said I think you got it quite right about the problem being that humans govern other humans and thus face a conflict of interest.
However I dare to claim that the program you are proposing already exists and is in place and has been for practically ever since humans existed on this planet. That program is indeed open source to the core and completely free for everyone to participate in. It is called THE FREE MARKET.
If the problem is humans governing other humans how about letting human individuals governing ONLY themselves. I govern me and you govern yourself. If you want somebody else to do something for you or believe as you do, do not apply force to make them comply (like the current governments do), but instead use persuasion and other PEACEFUL non-violent means. And if it doesn't work then simply give up. Using violence against another (which current governments unfortunately legitimize, even while forbidding everyone else from doing it, thus taking a monopoly on violence) only results in more violence - violence breeds more violence.
This is not anarchy in the sense most people have been taught to look at anarchy. It is not lawlessness in the same sense either. It is simply a lack of a coercive ruler in place of self-rulers trading both value and ideas between each other on a purely voluntary basis. And it is law that is private where the only universal, and natural, principle to be followed by everyone and at the same time enforced by everyone (right to bear arms for defense) is the principle of non-initiation of force or fraud.
This philosophy is called by varying names: anarcho-capitalism, market anarchy, voluntaryism (because the CORE idea is that all human action should be voluntary, not coerced) etc. It is arguably also the original libertarian idea, although nowadays libertarianism is seen as compromising with coercion and government a bit too much so with respect to that we can call it a subset of libertarianism, or libertarian purism.
Lastly I want to refer anyone who didn't before think this idea through to check out these sites:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voluntaryism
http://www.mises.org/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/
http://freedomainradio.com/ (a fairly popular podcast by a genious market anarchist philosopher Stefan Molyneux which can with great proficiency answer every question you might have about market anarchy).
If you're curious enough that you'd give a book a chance, there's a free one with an audio book available here called "The Market for Liberty": http://freekeene.com/free-audiobook/
It changed my life.
And if you are convinced already or become sufficiently convinced after exploring this, there is good news: a place where free market and liberty stand most chance in the world: New Hampshire, because of a project of moving thousands of liberty minded people to it: http://www.freestateproject.com/
Thanks for your consideration (and sorry for such a long post, I'm just too passionate about this). I truly hope that instead of worsening conditions for our freedoms, this shift we are seeing happening in the world opens the eyes of people towards the true nature of coercive governance and what freedom truly is).
Float your boat so long as it doesn't sink mine.
Gobuntu appears to be a dead project. It was supposed to be the official version of Ubuntu with non-free software, but in it's first release it failed to replace Firefox with IceWeasel since Firefox contains logos under restrictive licenses.
These days Mark Shuttleworth seems more willing to just let gNewSense play the role Gobuntu was supposed to play.
Indeed. That's a very good point as well.
This also creates a whole new potential market in which programmers can work. Benefits just keep unfolding.
Cheers
True enough, but I'd rather trust a bunch of Free Software developers whose code is always public than a bunch of proprietary software developers who can hide their code beneath the veil of ones and zeros. And also there is a reason why you often have to install drivers from an extra CD yourself on Windows yet those same things just work on GNU/Linux, just plug and play. But that's only IF there is a Free Software driver, which is why having them is so important and seeing which of those are missing (which gNewSense effectively allows) is beneficial. :)
Cheers
It's much more than that. You'd be surprised at how careful they are not to ship with a single bit that is not Free Software.
It may seem ludicrous to some at first, but think about the benefit. Even if you wont use it as your main system you can use it to test just how much of your hardware is 100% Free Software compliant, or you can use it to see what hardware you should buy that is 100% compliant.
And Free Software compliant hardware equals best possible experience - since it will all then work out of the box, with bugs fixed and improvements steadily coming, because you don't need to depend on some third party for everything.
gNewSense plays a crucial role.
You can read a bit more about that here http://www.nuxified.org/blog/gnewsense_2_0_a_premier_freedomware_platform_based_on_ubuntu_8_04_lts_released
Cheers
Why would Microsoft do a study on GPLv3 right now? I think that in trying to answer that question everyone can easily conclude what exactly is behind this study.
Microsoft fears GPLv3 quite a bit because it will effectively block deals like the one it made with Novell, and those deals are the only thing they favor as a way of dealing with the GNU/Linux threat because it seemingly validates their supposed patent rights over GNU/Linux and provides them some control over what is happening in the GNU/Linux industry. If they could make such deals with all commercial GNU/Linux vendors they'd be able to influence it significantly.
But GPLv3 is ruining that dream.
So what else are we to expect than Microsoft trying its best to downplay this license? I am not at all surprised to see this. It was expectable.