That’s not what I’m really doing, although it may seem like it. A commenter writes,
things like eBay show that enabling cooperation (which does not require the use of force) provides advantages that overwhelm the costs of punishing defectors. In this regard economies of scale favor an-cap
Taking existing institutions as an existence proof for the feasibility of an-cap is not a valid argument. The fact is that eBay exists in a world with government. People who use eBay probably assume in the background that if a situation comes up where they think that they are getting shafted they can take the other party, or eBay itself, to a government court. That court will resolve the dispute, and everyone understands going in what that process will consist of. If we suddenly switched to an-cap tomorrow, that process would have to be worked out, and in the mean time, people might be a lot more cautious about undertaking transactions on eBay, or anywhere else for that matter.
I am suggesting that people see government as an institution that gives them confidence that disputes will be resolved in a reliable, peaceful way. If you take away government, you cannot be sure that people will still have that confidence, even if you think that in theory they should.
Can people (and do they) actually use government courts for an eBay transaction? In theory I suppose the government could address fraud, but my assumption is that people are generally aware that they have no recourse outside of what eBay is willing to do to maintain their reputation.
I agree. I don’t know what Arnold is thinking. Nobody thinks the courts are their recourse with an eBay transaction. Hell I ran a small business for nearly 20 years. Even contracts less than, say, $50,000 are only enforced through reputation. Even when I sold the business and was clearly defrauded by the buyer attorneys had to tell me that it wasn’t in my interest to use the courts. I did,andwon, but the only reason the judgment was more than my expenses was because I got some legal expenses and punitive damages. Now I have to try to collect with no help from the government. So, on the best possible outcome I could have had, with a low 6 figure judgment, it still would have been financially better to just let the thief have my stuff.
Actually, I wonder if our dysfunctional courts are a big part of the longstanding decline in new business formation, because reputation now forms a significant and valuable barrier to entry.
Its not that the anarcho-capitalists don’t want the institutions that govt provide. Its that they don’t want a monopoly on retaliatory force. That’s a very different argument.
Of course, many businesses use private arbitration services because they’re far more efficient than gov’t courts.
Also, I agree with Paul above.
Arbitration agreements and arbitration awards are enforced by the courts. Otherwise, the whole system would fall apart.
I disagree. Since they do it precisely to avoid the courts. But neither of us know for sure do we?
Torts all the way down?
Wrong. I work in the court system, we see proceedings to enforce arbitration agreements and awards (or to avoid them) all the time. Parties agree to arbitrate to avoid the higher cost and greater delay of court litigation, but arbitration does not replace judicial enforceability of agreements and awards.
Wait, something you do is what you see all the time?
The fact is, arbitration awards are enforceable in court, and are enforced in court all the time. This is legal background against which the arbitration system has operated in the US for close to a century. If you think arbitration would work without potential judicial enforcement, suit yourself.
There are billions of transactions every year. You are just making the same non-argument as Arnold accuses the anarcho-capitalists of making from the other direction.
There are billions of transactions every year, but not “billions” of arbitrated disputes in the US every year. I doubt that the number of arbitrations per year reaches a million.
I am making with regard to arbitration exactly the same argument Arnold is making with regard to Ebay. Arbitration, like Ebay, takes place against the background of a legal system that enforces agreements, including the enforcement of agreements to arbitrate and arbitration awards resulting from the performance of arbitration agreements. Even though the judicial enforcement system for arbitration is frequently used, you want to speculate that arbitration would work just as well without the court system standing behind it. I don’t think you have any basis for such speculation.
You don’t either. I think extremely low percentages are evidence my way. You apparently think very low percentages is evidence for the effectiveness of the threat.
I realize we are both speculating and I don’t have a conflic of interest!
Btw, if this were a run of the mill discussion and you said ” in my experience..cours are critical because…” I might say “okay, fine” but this is a discussion precisely about credit vagaries. Thus it is my duty to make the point that just because there exists a subsidized court system backing up arbitrations that back up reputations isn’t proof of which one deserves the credit. It certainly doesn’t prove that the last link in such a chain deserves 100% of the credit.
At root, property implies force. Ancaps and statists try to deny this in different ways, and get trolled (even if accidentally) as a result.
Even the least government-involved transaction you can imagine gets down to institutional force on some level. Say, buying drugs for bitcoins – no recourse (except reputational, perhaps) for quality or nondelivery of product, but it does depend on government protection against someone just coming over and rubber-hosing the person you now know has control of a valuable thing.
What about the liquor on the stump when the government wielded the rubber hoses?
Ancaps most certainly do not deny that property involves force – security guards and courts have a prominent place in the program. I am not 100% on board with an-cap, but domestic crime to me is another easy problem – we all know what the pieces look like, which are private security and arbitrators. The hard problem is stopping the crazy dictator across the world trying to make a H-bomb where the an-cap solutions (nuclear attack insurance) seem a lot more implausible
Well, I’ve pointed out there is no argument for anything that doesn’t already exists, but everyone hates that argument, especially progressives.
I’m pretty good at trolling ancaps. For example…
Sola_Fide (ancap): [Tax choice] doesn’t “create a market” for public goods. If you want to create a market for public goods, you end confiscatory taxation.
Xero: Confiscatory taxation is where money is taken from TAXPAYERS. Tax choice would give taxpayers the freedom to choose where their taxes go. If confiscatory taxation truly isn’t necessary… then taxpayers won’t spend their money on it.
If you want to argue that taxpayers are going to spend their money on something that isn’t necessary… then you’re arguing that taxpayers are stupid. Why should I care if money is taken from stupid people? They are going to lose their money anyways. As the saying goes, a fool and his money are soon parted.
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?487047-Is-Slavery-A-Continuum
Maybe anarcho-capitalists capitalists are smarter than I am because I don’t get it.
We should all cut holes in our socks too because all socks eventually have holes.
Ancaps are saying that socks aren’t necessary. Most of them want to push a button that would instantly eliminate all socks. I’m arguing that if socks aren’t truly necessary… then consumers won’t purchase them. If consumers do decide to purchase socks…. then either the market is wrong or ancaps are wrong.
You can never really know how many crimes or attacks were deterred by having security measures in place, and you can likewise never really know how many eBay disputes were avoided or resolved because of the presence of the legal and financial ‘security’ systems lurking in the background.
That being said, I’d guess the reputation system – for vendors, buyers, and the auction site itself – is doing most of the heavy lifting for most eBay transactions because most of them are really small (the average selling price is only $60).
You can’t know it the other way either. It is the same argument. It is just post hoc fallacy.
What you could do is look how eBay and similar trust-based systems are adopted (or not adopted) in other countries with different legal regimes where it is easier or harder to sue. For example, if eBay tended to be adopted relatively faster in countries that have poor court systems, this would be pretty good evidence that it is the reputation system that is giving people the confidence to buy and sell rather than the knowledge that government can use force to resolve your dispute. You could also try to find breakpoints within regions where the legal regime suddenly changed, for example if a region hypothetically abolished it’s small claims court, what was the the impact on online transactions? (my biased guess, zero)
If I were government I’d have to be completely stupid to not claim I was doing something desired, am indispensable, relatively effective, but at every vivid failure take that as an opportunity to claim I need just a little more to be more effective. Since they aren’t completely stupid that is,what they do. It doesn’t make it true.
By analogy…we can quibble over whether NSA spying has helped with either 1 if you are generous or zero terrorist plots if in my opinion you want to be more realistic. Of course they claim the program has objectives voters desire. They have to be lying, but I digress. Yaou would have me believe that it is effective by the threat of it simply by assertion despite an enforcement ratio of infinity.
Sorry, but be careful with your reputation.
Government force is at the end of a very lengthy confidence chain with eBay. First I have the reputation system that filters out nearly all the criminals and people trying to commit fraud. Then if the seller is an eBay-approved trusted seller, I can take a dispute directly to eBay Then, I can take my dispute to PayPal. Then, I can take my dispute to the credit card company to reverse the charge. I wouldn’t even know how to sue in any cost effective manner. Not to mention all the arbitration agreements that are in the fine print these days, which are another layer of abstraction over courts.
But doesn’t it all rest on government? I’d say there is a reasonable analogy with money. Originally money had to be backed by gold to have “value”. Then people realized that didn’t matter – at the end of the day, being able to exchange your bills for gold didn’t really do much. So, people were able to accept fiat currency without much fuss and new currencies like the Euro with no history of gold-backing could be introduced. Similarly, if people realize that if in practice very few consumer-level eBay disputes actually make it into bona-fide court cases, then maybe court-backing ultimately is not very necessary for eBay-like institutions
I think the consumer-level stuff for an-cap is pretty easy. The harder things are questions like “how do we remove children from abusive homes” and such
I got a good look at what an-cap would be like in Baltimore this summer.
The only thing holding back the hordes, who would easily revert to the primitive, is the implied threat that the police own a monopoly on force and you will go to jail if you get out of line. Without that you’d have mass looting and rape by the underclass, as happens whenever the underclass thinks such a monopoly on force has broken down.