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Comment by Mediterraneo10 | Hacker News Reader

I know that Somalia as an example of a successful country and not an unsuccessful one has become popular among a certain subset of libertarians. (Probably not any large subset, just particularly vocal advocates like the Mises Institute.) But I have always found this odd, because classical libertarians tend to insist on the rights of the individual, and law in Somalia is based on the primacy of clans and extended families where the individual doesn’t count for much.

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I suspect they're just sick of people responding to "government is the problem, not the solution!" with "okay, well how is Somalia doing, then?"

People often get sick of being wrong.

Telling yourself that you're right in spite of overwhelming evidence is kind of the worst thing one can do when feeling tired of being wrong, though.

Nah, you can just band together and install a leader who agrees with you, and attempt to change reality to conform to your view.

The problem is when you and countless academics for the last 200 years, all the way up to modern day economists, can see the faults in capitalism (And mostly our government's policies of Austerity Beyond All Reason). But society is too entrenched in it to see any other possible system.

It's like being in a metro system where the roof is falling in and the rails are rusting into nothing, but nobody has figured out how to, or is not willing to, stop things, let everyone out and spend a few days overhauling the cave system so that it works better and isn't killing people. Instead people are utterly content spend the majority of the time painting over the cracks and hoping it won't happen and... oops, yet another recession.

"Housing market crash this time? Ah well. A lot of people in a first world country just died from lack of heating, preventable illness and homelessness... but I've got mine!" seems to be the dominant attitude because "what else can you do?".

The sociopolitical writings of academics have enlightened me beyond use. For what use is enlightenment if one cannot use it, yet I do not seek to lose it, as that is unquestionably bad now.

What alternative do you propose?

Good point.

Minor counter-point: I'm not sure if libertarianism is the goal of Somalians. A certain degree of liberty -- a significant say in how they conduct their own lives and not having a government telling them what not to do as much as we are used to -- but I think they also see the value of a court to temper individual liberty in certain cases.

A couple differences between their system and ours: the point where individual rights and social limitations meet is found where another individual suffers some grievance -- some of which, however, appear to be cultural and not material, although I'm not sure how small this segment is. Also, they seem to have some say in their courts, who administers justice for them, and how its administered.

And clans... are states.

It always confuses me how right libertarians can have such a huge blind spot for coercive power coming from anything that doesn't look exactly like a nation-state. If a private organization can exercise coercive power over me, is that somehow better than if a nation-state can exercise coercive power over me? I don't see how. If anything it is worse because at least a democratic nation-state has some level of accountability to me in the form of voting. A private organization has no accountability to me at all.

One of the most accepted definitions of State is "the entity that has the monopoly of power in a given region"

If a clan in Somalia, an indian chief, or a drug dealer in a ghetto has the actual power to punish, he's the State - not necessarily Government.

By that logic, as people organize themselves and get larger, there will always be someone with State prerogatives.

It isn't limited to right libertarians, really. Technically you can probably trace this to the general idea of Westphalian sovereignty: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westphalian_sovereignty In general, people today have a hard time conceiving of sovereign polities of any kind that are not also nation-states, or depending on your definition of nation, simply "states", as entities that have defined geographical boundaries within which they have a monopoly on violence and legitimacy, and outside of which they have no power of violence and no legitimacy. This is of course an approximation for all the reasons that half-a-dozen people are rushing for the reply link even now, but my point is not that this model is rigidly followed, but that it is simply the default mental model pretty much everybody approaches the world with.

It can help to see how rigidly we all tend to stick with this model to consider something radically different. Imagine a civilization consisting of 100 space stations, ranging in size from a little 20-person thing barely larger than the ISS to a massive million-person station, all in different orbits around different things. What is a "border"? What is "sovereignty" when you are not in an environment where you can (with enough effort) survive without other humans, or without very many other humans, and everyone is inextricably bound in life-or-death relationships, so there simply is no such thing as "self-sufficiency"? (Which I'd submit is a concept very important to sovereignty, even if it so basic to our Earth-thinking frame that we don't even consider it.)

I personally think almost everybody has a blind spot here, thinking a very particular part of the phase space of possible governance is the only one. Even the perennial debates on HN and such are basically between "modern capitalism" and "socialism", two systems that in the grand scheme of things are very similar to each other and only argue about how much sovereignty the state has vs. its citizens, where if you are against one then you must be in favor of the other, as if they are the only two possible methods of governance conceivable.

Even without going as crazy as hypothesizing a space-based civilization, history offers up quite a few alternatives to the modern conception. Some of them are hard to see, because we back-project our assumptions about nation-states on to history if we aren't very careful. But the early Roman empire had a much more complicated de facto structure, and Middle Ages Europe is quite difficult for a modern full of preconceived notions to properly understand, because we simply have no modern referent for the relationship that existed between the Church and the various other polities of the time.

Are they? The article was arguing that Somalia was a stateless society. I don't know much about these particular clans. Do they have a defined and more permanent central power structure?

As I understand it from van Notten, the power is institutional and fluid. There are accustomed, practiced, entrenched norms of behavior and custom, which provide general rules for what behavior is against the law -- although it becomes a matter of law only when it affects someone else to the degree they want to seek justice to redress a wrong. Power is embodied by clan leaders (elders who have the support of the majority of their community) and judges, etc, but is fluid in the sense that at any time, if they do something the community doesn't support, they will be replaced casually by their community.

Well, no, clans are clans.

A clan is a group united by a real or perceived kinship. It is a form of extended family.

A tribe is a confederation of families that live closely with one another, have a common culture/dialect/ethnicity/etc, and a leader.

A state is a politically organized community that may or may not be sovereign.

A nation is an aggregate of people and/or communities united by common traits and living within a particular territory or country.

Possibly worth noting - each of these is a coercive system which has some aspect of a "monopoly on violence," just at different levels of abstraction. So by that definition, a clan could be considered a degenerate form of state.

By that definition, even a nuclear family is a degenerate form of state. Let's not foist frankenstein phrases on ill-fitting subjects to justify an invalid premise.

I would agree that it is, although reasonable people can and probably would disagree. The most fundamental monopoly on coercion (and violence) is claimed by parents over their children.

Isn't the important point here to do with the point at which an individual can, if they want to and are willing to spend the energy, alter a particular instance of disagreement? whereas in the Somali (or other non-government system), individuals can both effect particular justice according to a particular grievance, and individuals can effect what justice is done and how, individuals in our countries have no such ability, overwhelmed on basically every level by the power of the government?

> By that definition, even a nuclear family is a degenerate form of state.

Indeed, it is. This is an ancient idea, going back to the Classical era at least.

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