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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

I agree with some things he says,and some things he says are absolutely stupid. Private police force that you need to pay directly for protection? Reminds me of ancient Rome times, when if your house was on fire, the fire brigade would come and haggle with you first,trying to negotiate how much you are willing to pay to save your house. Having to pay somebody directly(rather than in your taxes) for protection is unfathomably stupid. Right now you can call the police literally anywhere you are in the world, and they will come and help, because that's what they do. With his solution, you could drive to a nearby city and nobody would help you,because you haven't paid the security agency there.

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There are bigger problems with the private police force idea than them not helping you if you don't pay them. The far bigger problem is that it would be way more profitable for them to just take everything you own than it would be to protect you and your things for a few coins or bills worth a tiny fraction of your net worth.

You forget that there wouldn't be just one private police force but many service providers. So if one offers bad service (by robbing you) you just hire one of their competitors.

... and pay them with... ?

This kind of cuts to my biggest problem with objectivists and anarchist-capitalists, no sense of time context or history.

"Let's abolish the government and all that stuff, it is bad and not natural", ignoring the fact that without the sort of government-structured society we've already made, they'd be in no position to have the wealth they are so afraid that taxes are going to "steal" and it works forward too in the sense that without the protections we take for granted from tax-sponsored government, they'd be robbed blind very quickly by those with the means and will to do it.

I enjoyed David Friedman's discussions of the incentives present under market anarchy in "The Machinery of Freedom", now available in its entirety online[1]. Your objections are not new and have been discussed at length by market anarchists. Whether or not you find the responses satisfactory is up to you.

David writes for a mainstream audience which is assumed to have some familiarity with concepts of economics and property, but does not need to already be a libertarian. I feel he is the best representative of market anarchist thought.

[1]http://daviddfriedman.com/The_Machinery_of_Freedom_.pdf

One thing I don't get with libertarianism is why this, second paragraph of the book, doesn't apply both ways:

"People who wish to live in a 'virtuous' society, surrounded by others who share their ideas of virtue, would be free to set up their own communities and to contract with each other so as to prevent the 'sinful' from buying or renting within them. Those who wished to live communally could set up their own communes. But nobody would have a right to force his way of life upon his neighbor."

I guess the police force would be worried about having a negative reputation, so robbing a small time person might not be worth the risk if it meant you wouldn't get the contract for the bigger fish. But at some point you could always just cash out by robbing your client.

I would also guess that the people you hire to protect your stuff would probably also accept payment to take other people's stuff so you would have a similar set of problems to medieval kings and their armies.

> This kind of cuts to my biggest problem with objectivists and anarchist-capitalists, no sense of time context or history.

No one attacked your person so I don't really understand why you get personal here. As it's my policy to avoid such poisoned discussions I'm going to leave this sub thread.

I don't think he got personal. He simply attacked a position which may or may not be your position.

Objectivist theory clearly states that government's one legitimate function is to protect an individual's wealth from usurpers.

I am not making this up.

Right, but it works the other way round, too: if your police thinks YOUR competitors (and this may mean, well, gangs) pay better, nothing would prevent it from turning over to protect their interests rather than yours.

This kinda sounds like phone and cable companies - sure, there are a bunch of them around, but nearly all of them suck.

Why doesn't your concern apply to public police forces? Oh, it does.

Regarding your Roman Fire Brigade example, we can now produce a much more effective system with modern bookkeeping technology. Instead of paying for fire protection as your house burns, you pay for the fire protection in advance. In fact, that's already the way it works in some parts of the world. You pay the fire department in advance (so they can pay for the upkeep of their machines), and if you don't, they have no obligation to put out your flaming house.

> You pay the fire department in advance (so they can pay for the upkeep of their machines), and if you don't, they have no obligation to put out your flaming house.

Two problems:

1. If not enough people pay for a fire brigade, the fire brigade is complete shit even if I do pay for it, because I can't fund a brigade all on my own. (If you tell me to move, you've lost the argument.)

2. If my neighbor's house is on fire, I really, really want the fire to be put out even if my neighbor hasn't paid for the brigade. I do not want the brigade to wait until my house is burning. (If you tell me to move, you've lost the argument.)

3. If you tell me to move, you've lost the argument.

>and they will come and help

the police are not obligated to help you in the US, this has been the subject of at least 2 supreme court cases.

If I didn't have a good opinion about the US system before, it's getting worse as we speak.

I don't think it's the responsibility of the police to protect you anywhere. By responsibility I mean, if you are not protected you can hold the police legally responsible.

Can you imagine how many police we'd need if there were an obligation to protect everyone at all times? There isn't a country on Earth with police forces that large.

There isn't a country with enough police to protect everyone from physical harm caused by others at nearly all times (statistically speaking)? I doubt it.

And I doubt OP was speaking about those times when the country is entirely on fire or the police department has been nuked. Rather, I think the point is that the police will do anything they reasonably can do to help.

> There isn't a country with enough police to protect everyone from physical harm caused by others at nearly all times (statistically speaking)?

Note the last two words (in parentheses). That's the point being made: There aren't enough police to guarantee everyone protection.

No, but at the very least I expect them to be legally bound to respond(in any way) to a 911 call, and not be able to just tell people to fuck off.

> No, but at the very least I expect them to be legally bound to respond(in any way) to a 911 call, and not be able to just tell people to fuck off.

Then we're talking past each other. That isn't what the Supreme Court decisions were about at all.

If a company won't provide a guaranteed service level, why should you trust them with your life?

> "With his solution, you could drive to a nearby city and nobody would help you,because you haven't paid the security agency there."

Why should commerce be limited by national borders? This conversation lacks imagination.

For all the invisible handers, let's not forget the London olympics where certain security roles were contracted out. The company involved failed to recruit sufficient numbers of personnel by a significant margin, failed to train adequately those that they did and failed to communicate the scale of the failure that was developing. In the end, the government had to bring in the army to perform the role.

While there are undoubtedly areas where the public sector can learn from private sector efficiency, I'd venture that there are some societal functions where the point of profit maximisation results in an inferior and inadequate service. Or - to look at it a different way - the public sector is the only provider incentivised to realise the positive externalities of that service. This might be the public benefit of putting out fires regardless of a person's payment status (stopping them spreading), the cumulative benefit of going about business safe from crime, the benefits of a healthy workforce, etc etc.

An invisible hander would probably say that the government should not have organised the olympics to begin with (effectively a monopoly).

Using tax money to put on an event of that scale where there was effectively only one organisation with the resources to provide security services is bound to make that one organisation optimize for cost saving.

If you had only private sporting events then security companies and event organizers would eventually optimize to a state of security that best served the expectations of their customers.

sounds very much like security at the vancouver 2010 olympics and the G8/G10 summit. i worked as security doing airport screening of people (x-ray & mag) and oh boy i have plenty of stories. There was so much waste, gaming the contract/system so the government would pay for far more man hours of under qualified under trained workers. Like keeping 40 people on the clock when 5 would have been sufficient. Granted the police were not much better.

I had never worked security before, nor have I science.

When you have profit maximizing contractors for an organization spending lots of Other People's Money, that creates all kinds of bad incentives.

I'm I missing what stands in the way of anyone currently setting up their own security agency? Especially in states with open carry. Unless it's not about freedom and more about channeling their feelings on the government.

In the very same paragraph he talks about the government stealing money from you in form of taxes, so I guess he would rather not pay any taxes at all and just choose who protects him himself, getting rid of the state-run police force. I can't even begin to describe how many things are wrong with that approach.

No because the communities will just refuse to admit people that take things by force /sarcasm.

I don't like big government either, but replacing it with fairy tales doesn't seem very rational.

By "security agency", most ancaps mean something that fills the role of government. Capturing accused criminals and holding them in jail is perfectly legal if you're the government, otherwise it's considered kidnapping.

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