Topic: Nozick vs. de Molinari: The Narcisism of small differences (round 1) (Read 1922 times)

So when will this debate begin? 

Access to information is a 2 steps forward 1 step back thing imo.  It definitely increased with the printing press, but then as governments began to institute public education, and radio and TV became in vogue the access to information by the regular citizen seemed to drop.  I only need to look at my parents and extended family to see this.  TV drones struggle to do any thinking at all.

Now we have the internet, and we have seen govts try to censor it, particularly here in Australia where they tried to follow the Chinese model.  I wonder what the future holds.  If there is some as yet unthought of way that access to information will be stunted again, the 1 step backwards essentially.

Access to information is an increasing trend. The printing press forced kings to give way to presidents, and play greater lip service to the people (access to guns might have helped a little with that;) ) but ultimately it wasn't enough, because printing presses are expensive things, and the average Joe can't necessarily get one to spread his ideas. The internet changed all that, because the 'zines and pamphlets were suddenly replaced by twitter and blogs. Now everyone can put their ideas out there, and market forces have taken over. Bad ideas wither, good ones spread like wildfire.

I often think of the 20th century as a dark age in terms of people's access to information.  The fact that we saw the greatest horrors of history committed by governments is not a surprise against that backdrop.

Not so fast--our last hope is an open and free Internet!  People are slowly realizing what the world is actually about; my generation, at least, is extraordinarily more open and understand than the preceding, and this is thanks to an abundance of easily accessible knowledge; now with our abundance of knowledge, we can achieve an abundance of intelligence.  Honestly, if it wasn't for the Internet, I'd still be dumber than a door nail.

If that's the case we might as well give up now. 

Do you have a theory as to why we still have governments?  And what it might take for society to overcome the idea that we need them and eventually get rid of them?  It's something I'm very curious about but haven't come up with any satisfying answers yet.

I think the only piece of the puzzle missing is an abundance of intelligent people.  It's far too easy to rule the stupid; is it any wonder state schools are so awful?

Do you have a theory as to why we still have governments?  And what it might take for society to overcome the idea that we need them and eventually get rid of them?  It's something I'm very curious about but haven't come up with any satisfying answers yet?

And you call it the State.

But now I'm confused; doesn't it cease to be a monopoly when you have competition?  (But then does it become an oligarchy?)

In the example of security: if you had government A competing with government B, C, D, etc, and most people choose government D because it's the best one there is, eventually they would go with A or B or C once government D got lazy and stopped providing quality work, right?  Unless, as you said, they maintain dominance through force, which would be exactly what we have now.

So natural monopolies are okay?  My gov teacher never said anything about more than one monopoly

Franz Oppenheimer was an early progenitor of the Bandit State theory. Based on some of his language and suppositions, I suspect he was influenced by Bastiat but haven't looked into it:

That's certainly mine and Rothbard's position, and for every State where we have any evidence, the evidence backs that up. de Molinari doesn't come at it from a moral POV, though, strictly economic, in the tradition of the classical liberals who were his contemporaries. I suggested that book because it addresses a few points in Nozick's formulation, namely on the natural monopoly angle.

There are two fundamentally opposed means whereby man, requiring sustenance, is impelled to obtain the necessary means for satisfying his desires. These are work and robbery, one's own labor and the forcible appropriation of the labor of others. Robbery! Forcible appropriation! These words convey to us ideas of crime and the penitentiary, since we are the contemporaries of a developed civilization, specifically based on the inviolability of property. And this tang is not lost when we are convinced that land and sea robbery is the primitive relation of life, just as the warrior's trade - which also for a long time is only organized mass robbery constitutes the most respected of occupations. Both because of this, and also on account of the need of having, in the further development of this study, terse, clear, sharply opposing terms for these very important contrasts, I propose i. the following discussion to call one's own labor and the equivalent exchange of one's own labor for the labor of others, the "economic means" for the satisfaction of needs, while the unrequited appropriation of the labor of others will be called the "political means."

The idea is not altogether new; philosophers of history have at all times found this contradiction and have tried to formulate it. But no one of these formulae has carried the premise to its complete logical end. At no place is it clearly shown that the contradiction consists only in the means by which the identical purpose, the acquisition of economic objects of consumption, is to be obtained. Yet this is the critical point of the reasoning. In the case of a thinker of the rank of Karl Marx, one may observe what confusion is brought about when economic purpose and economic means are not strictly differentiated. All those errors, which in the end led Marx's splendid theory so far away from truth, were grounded in the lack of clear differentiation between the means of economic satisfaction of needs and its end. This led him to designate slavery as an "economic category," and force as an "economic force" - half truths which are far more dangerous than total untruths, since their discovery is more difficult, and false conclusions from them are inevitable.

http://www.franz-oppenheimer.de/state1.htm

Does he acknowledge that monopolies are bad? 

Pretty much. Even Nozick acknowledges that an "ultra-minimal" state is essentially a natural monopoly on protection.

So in other words, to procure a state, you must first secure a monopoly on security.

And you call it the State.

So we are kind of saying protection was paramount in such a world and people wanted to go along with whatever lies these people would spin because it was generally the difference between a relatively certain world and an uncertain world.  Survival and death really.

I mean, if we look at the structure of Ancient Egyptian society with the Pharoahs for example, you kind of had the situation where the High Priest/s would tell everyone that the Pharoah was ordained by the Gods to be the leader.  And then the High Priest/s would get favours from the Pharoah in return.   So even back in the ancient world they had propaganda.  It wasn't simply a protection racket, there was more to it.

So it seems more likely to me that, and I'm only postulating here, I'm certainly no expert, that it had a lot to do with lack of resources.  Back when civilization started a hell of a lot more of people's resources would be allocated to farming than would be today.   Big groups were more likely to be able to defend from other groups.   There would have been a lot of fearfulness of a largely unknown world (which feeds into the religious ideas which provide answers to these questions).   I'm trying to put myself in the shoes of one of these people as to what life might have been like then.  And if there was a group that came along providing answers and protection from what must have been quite a scary world how I might react.

But at the end of the day, none of this is applicable anymore.  And government is like many of our old traditions that we are gradually purging, unnecessary and built on lies.  Just a convenience to keep people alive in a primitive world.