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Comment by falk | Hacker News Reader

This guy is nothing more than an extremist. Ask him about his prison system and I'm sure he'll parrot how privatized prisons are the solution to our woes. Alas, they aren't. Be weary of someone trying to tell you that if we just did X everything would be so much better.

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There's a reason I described myself as a "true seeker".

"No theory, no ready-made system, no book that has ever been written will save the world. I cleave to no system. I am a true seeker." - Mikhail Bakunin

You're overestimating my risk for memetic infection and underestimating how much prior exposure I may have had to this subject. I often ask people for examples or book recommendations to learn more about them as much as I do to learn about a subject.[0]

Besides, it couldn't possibly be worse than Mussolini's autobiography.

[0]: An example. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6056707

The authors response was worth more to me than the response of other commentators because I find that socialists often like to say that X or Y society wasn't socialist. So as an exercise I asked what they consider a socialist society.

(And I was genuinely interested in what they had to say, so I wasn't lying.)

Just to clarify, I'm not a socialist by any measure, nor are the authors I mentioned.

I can't think of a better way to drive traffic to the authors that OP mentioned than to take this approach. You're going to make people wonder just what they're missing, if this stuff is so "extremist".

I'd be surprised if someone touting anarcho-capitalist politics would be in favour of private prisons, at least the flavour we're used to today, where governments pay companies to house inmates. There isn't anything particularly anarchist about such a thing.

Other comments made in this thread by snitko.

"Police officers, firefighters, teachers... Could it be that we don't really need any government to finance them? The demand is there. Private companies will be more than happy to fill it."

"I agree. Let's use Bitcoin. It's possible right here today and you don't give anyone a cut."

I hope people read the books OP mentioned. Anyone who advocates that we get rid police officers, firefighters, and teachers in place of private entities is an extremist. Plain and simple.

He mentions David D. Friedman and Stefan Molyneux whom are libertarians. It doesn't matter if the government is funding private prisons, private prisons have one goal and one goal only: to get as many prisoners as possible. They will do whatever they can to get more prisoners. They've permanently damaged families across the country. How would you fund prisons beyond taxes? Bill the prisoner? The family? What about someone who maintains their innocence? The point of the matter is that snitko has come into a thread and contributed absolutely nothing.

That's a very valid point about private prisons, but a completely wrong one. Let's think for a moment, would they indeed be acting the way you describe. To understand this, let's find out who funds private prisons. In the current system, a government does. Private prisons indeed have an incentive to keep prisoners for as long as possible to extract the maximum amount of money from the government. Since government doesn't spend its own money, it doesn't care nearly as much as each one of us would for every cent we have.

In a system I advocate, private prisons are, just like police and firefighters, funded by private citizens. A private citizen doesn't want to pay for the prisoner being held longer than it is truly required for him to become a decent member of the society again. If such a private prison decided to cheat its customers and extract more money by holding prisoners longer than needed, a customer may decide to stop paying it or switch to another prison (that is, switch to another protection agency). In many cases, people would not be send to prison at all, because it wouldn't be economically feasible from the protection agency customers point of view.

Now tell me, what's so extreme about my position? Why is it not reasonable?

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