LPD: Libertarian Police Department (2014)

One long, brow-beating joke parodying one long, brow-beating joke. Symmetry there.

I'm sorry, but your comment has only served to increased the amount of laughing that I was enjoying.

You think rural crime isn't a thing? Livestock theft and poaching is an issue on both islands, to the extent that people avoid grazing near the road.

https://www.stuff.co.nz/business/farming/130397588/security-...

Again, this isn't South Africa, but it isn't Hobbiton either.

Property and violent crime disproportionately affects poor and disadvantaged people. Not just because they might be forced to live in "bad" neighborhoods, but because they have less money for home security measures, they may have to walk, cycle, or take public transport more frequently, they may have to work nights and odd hours and in public facing service jobs. And because the relative cost and difficulty of replacing and repairing their home and belongings, or getting physical or mental health care for the damage to themselves and time off work to heal, is far far higher.

The idea that police services to poor people and less advantaged neighborhoods should be cut, is one of the most out of touch, limousine-liberal notions that I have heard in a long time. The fact that it's an overwhelmingly popular idea on places like this with no discussion or concept of any potential downsides, shows how out of touch the crowd is when it comes to the problems people face.

Just because you've had to walk past some homeless people on the way to a restaurant in the city, or been occasionally offered drugs, or had your car broken into, or hear gunshots and sirens sometimes, or driven through a place where people don't stop at red lights, or read things on the internet, does not make an expert... My point after that long rant is, don't be surprised or upset by people pontificating on this subject with no idea what they're talking about.

What happens when a corporation becomes large enough and powerful enough to enforce its will on the citizens under it? Is it is still 'the market'?

Which is silly, because a corporation, in the end, is nothing more than a group of people cooperating. So a group of people agreeing to murder is just a market imbalance that will be corrected by market forces.

I think this is a limited view. Most libertarians would probably agree that collective defense, consent management, and management of rivalrous goods are the primary roles of the government, and the squabbling is mostly over what goods are rivalrous (is the environment rivalrous? Some would say yes and point to market based fisheries and nox/sox reductions as big successes, others not so much) and what exactly is consent.

> You seem reasonable, which is an exception amongst the ancaps I have encountered, so I will engage

Well, thanks :). My experience shows that a lot of people who call themselves ancaps are mostly either after the “extreme” nature of it, or want to use it as an excuse to argue. I’m too old for that.

> How do you respond to the notion that government is a way for society to protect itself the best way it can?

So far, I’d say you’re largely correct. My position is that mankind has basically achieved a local maximum, and that the conditions that led us here have to change before we can search for a global maximum.

> How do you manage to deal with orphans, old, infirm, poor, disabled, etc?

The TL;DR here is “private charity”. I hold that charity is significantly suppressed because of the widely held belief that it’s “someone else’s problem”.

I could write at length about the reasons I think that’s the case, and how state interventions exacerbate the scale of those problems today, but I’m sure you’ve already read those arguments elsewhere.

> How do we collectively fund things that are usually terrible for private markets to control, like research, military, education, law enforcement, infrastructure, and ecological preservation?

Of those, I hold that all are better left to private enterprise - for different reasons, for each.

Law enforcement is the only one that really has much nuance. While many others have written about that topic (see my other partially-tongue-in-cheek post about PDAs), I’m not 100% convinced that we can really predict how it would be handled in a world where governments died of neglect - as opposed to power vacuums, which is how almost all anarchic societies today and in living memory have formed.

> How do you deal with injustice?

Ah, this is the big one - in fact, I’d say it’s a superset of all of the above.

Injustice would existing in an ancap society, just as injustice exists today. In fact, because injustice exists today in a state-based society, my primary argument here is that it’s intellectually dishonest to insist that an ancap society must eliminate injustice to be acceptable.

Specifically, though, I’d think a functioning anarchic society would place a very high value on personal honor. Reputation would matter, and that alone would provide significant incentive to work things out without drama.

> There are so many jet-airliner-sized holes in this philosophy to me, and I can't wrap my head around why anyone with any empathy and intelligence could follow it. Help me out here.

There are similar sized holes in the way we do things today, when you apply the same standards to it. Consider all of the grievous injustices that have occurred until our various systems of government: war, genocide, chattel slavery, enforced divisions based on religion, race, caste, etc.

I think the biggest place where I diverge from “mainstream” Anarcho-Capitalism is that I don’t think it’s the solution to all of the world’s problems. I don’t think a society structured around it would be perfect, because I don’t think human beings are perfect (or capable of perfection).

Does the New Yorker profess to hate capitalists and corporations? Isn’t it owned by those?

I love capitalists I hate libertarians

> The America media pretends at the intellectual level it is leftist but at the bean-counter level it is more hard-core than a street drug dealer.

That's a false dichotomy (and the street drug dealer comparison is hyperbole).

Advocating for leftist ideas like a floor on the standard of living and ensuring equal opportunity doesn't contradict pursuing a smart, aggressive, and legal business strategy, except in the mind of a libertarian absolutist.

You don’t know if you can explain your own joke?

Check the profile. Someone’s throwing a fit and just saying anything to get downvotes.

It's a gimmick account