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Comment by CryptoPunk | Hacker News Reader

Not that I'm an anarcho-libertarian, but the ideas he's advancing don't seem very scary when you remember that you can reformulate institutions very similar to governments in a world without states.

They wouldn't technically be government institutions, because everyone subject to their rules would be a contracting party that consented to the arrangement, but these institutions could have many of the same powers that governments have now, including the power to tax, regulate trade, and provision goods.

Anyway, a state-free world is neither plausible nor seen as desireable by the majority kf libertarians, so no point in worrying too much about it.

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It seems to me that the government provides a "Schelling point"[1] that we can't do away with for many purposes, particularly trust. We can't just have many private regulators or certifiers, because then everyone has an equally difficult problem of determining which one to trust, and no benefit to doing so, since they are stuck with what the market decides. Trust requires information, (not data) and information is a public good.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focal_point_(game_theory)

Perhaps the fact that the government, which both maintains its own monopolies and props up other regulators and certifiers through threats of violence, distorts this market.

It's kinda hard to trust someone that's either sticking a gun to your head, or got to the position they did by having someone else do it for them.

Monopoly and coercion are an essential part of regulation. You need regulation for the things you can't verify. I can only repeat myself in saying information (as opposed to data) is a public good and systematically undermining its production by government is bound to be catastrophic. Every criticism of how government works should lead us to say "let's fix government" not "let's get rid of government". Libertarians are like fish who want to abolish water because it seems to impede swimming...or a brain that wants to eliminate the heart because of its monopoly on pumping blood.

lmao

>>You need regulation for the things you can't verify.

What do you mean by this? Everything not understood should be prohibited, with exceptions provided by a centralized gatekeeper?

This goes against 500 years of Englightment Thought. It's total subservience to Big Brother, and total naivety about what that kind of centralization of power results in.

>>Libertarians are like fish who want to abolish water because it seems to impede swimming...

With the exception of a tiny minority of libertarians who are anarchists, the vast majority of libertarians do not want to abolish government. Yet opponents of libertarianism regularly attack this strawman as if it addresses libertarian arguments.

There is a time and a place for the government, but it is not in restricting voluntary interactions between consenting adults.

We may be a tiny minority, but the argument against libertarian anarchists is just as filled with nonsense and strawmen as it is against any other libertarian position.

It's not worth trying to reason with collectivists. They see aggressive violence as justified. The only interaction to be had with them involves letting them know that's a bad idea, or violence in kind. This is the core truth of all interaction with statists, including those who support democracy; despite their insistence that it is somehow more enlightened, there is a violent threat behind every supposedly civilized "debate."

>We may be a tiny minority, but the argument against libertarian anarchists is just as filled with nonsense and strawmen as it is against any other libertarian position.

Said ruskerdax, an intellectual, before declaring all statists to be psychopaths.

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