There's a fundamental logic error in your analogy.
Difference here is that the cops have been going around with their battering ram and breaking down every door in town.
Difference here is that the cops have been going around with their battering ram and breaking down every door in town.
This is more like a society in which the police routinely break into houses by picking the lock in order to rifle through your papers secretly, without telling you. They say that they have secret warrants to do this, but since they're secret, and they do the breaking in in secret, you can't even find out if they have broken into your house.
People don't like this; they don't like the idea that some cop may be in their home rifling through their things. So they start developing stronger and stronger locks. The police get worried that they won't be able to pick the locks on your doors, and will actually have to get a warrant and not break in secretly. So they lobby to pass a law that all locks have to either be weak enough to be picked, or have a master key that the police have. Of course, the people, who don't like the police breaking in with impunity, defeat this bill.
So the police don't stop there. Instead, they just make secret deals with a few key lockmakers, to build locks that accept master keys anyhow. When lockmakers standardize on key designs that are more secure, the police add a section to the standard that makes it so that any lock that implements that standard will be able to be opened with a particular master key, but in a way that you can't tell what that master key is from the standard. Since there are enough lockmakers that they can't subvert them all, and not everyone implements those standards they subverted, they also talk to a few doormakers to add a secret part that you can push to disengage the hinges.
Now this information comes out. People are outraged; their lockmakers are supposed to make locks that even the police can't get in through; people don't trust these secret warrants and secret searches, and with good reason, as the police have used these secret searches to investigate ex-lovers before, not just terrorists. They're outraged by the betrayal of the police, making an end-run around the law that they thoroughly defeated to prevent the police from having master keys. They're outraged by the lockmakers subverting their trust.
And what's the police response? "We need these tools to investigate terrorists and criminals." Never mind that in order to investigate terrorists and criminals, they've weakened everyone's security, and everyone's trust in their government and the companies that sold the compromised locks. Never mind that they've been through the houses of many innocent people, in a wide sweep to try to find evidence of a few criminals. Never mind that the system has been abused many times, but the only way the abuses have come to light is by whistleblowers who the police prosecute severely.
The police (or the NSA, to step back from the analogy to the real world) find these tools useful in their job. I'm sure they do. But the public finds these tools too intrusive. I'm sure it would be useful for the police to be able to secretly break into any house they wanted, rifle through people's papers, and find people who had jihadist leanings that way. We have amendments in our constitution specifically forbidding that, for good reason.
Likewise, regardless of how useful the NSA finds these abilities, we the public find them abhorrent. Just like the police should have ways to get warrants and under the authority of those warrants, search houses, there are definitely legitimate uses for some of what the NSA does, if properly regulated. But weakening everyone's security, so they can intercept and read your mail at will, in secret, with no oversight, is just as wrong as the police breaking into your house in secret, at night, and rifling through your belongings.
Also, I'm surprised not more is being made of the massive security problem in Utah: who's defending the NSA perimeter?
It sounds snarky but it cuts to the core of the peoples' relationship with government. How much do you trust the government? How much can you trust the government?
That's why libertarians are generally logically consistent when they oppose the NSA, and entitlement programs, and giant government services, etc., because they're the ones who will tell you that a government big enough to give you $FOO is big enough to take it away from everyone else.
Sure, if it were possible to stop the government from doing anything at all I would be in favour of that, letalone obviously positive things like not spying on everybody or busting down their doors. Of course, there are no doors that require more energy than that available in the universe to forcibly enter. That's not the case for cryptography so it makes sense to exploit that. What am I missing here?
> It sounds snarky but it cuts to the core of the peoples' relationship with government. How much do you trust the government? How much can you trust the government?
This sounds like it is supposed to be some kind of profound question, but the answer is consistent and obvious in both cases, not at all.
> That's why libertarians are generally logically consistent when they oppose the NSA, and entitlement programs, and giant government services, etc., because they're the ones who will tell you that a government big enough to give you $FOO is big enough to take it away from everyone else.
Sure, I'd tell you that, I don't see why it's inconsistent to believe that and simultaneously want to dismantle the government? Isn't it actually pretty much the only logically consistent position?
It is one logically consistent position, yes.
I happen to disagree that it is the only logically consistent position, which is one reason I've been poking so hard at the notion that people need to examine under what logical basis government operates at all before they go 'rah rah government bad!'.
Much like a corporation is the legal stand-in for the will of the collective shareholders, a government is the societal stand-in for the will of the people at large.
A society that tries to maintain no government, or very limited government, is at an unstable point. In the best case it will collapse from internal conflict but be left alone from there (e.g. Somalia, tribal areas of Afghanistan/Pakistan). In the normal case the society will simply be eventually overrun by those who choose to organize (e.g. USA vs. the Native Americans, Hitler vs. the appeasers), but a government will spring up again one way or another.
When I say it's a logically consistent position, what I mean to imply by that is for people who think that government is an abomination, it is logically consistent for them to hope for the dismantling thereof. You, who most decidedly do not think that government is an abomination, as a lawyer, are logically consistent in thinking that it should not be dismantled.
> Much like a corporation is the legal stand-in for the will of the collective shareholders, a government is the societal stand-in for the will of the people at large.
Except that it most clearly is not.
> A society that tries to maintain no government, or very limited government, is at an unstable point. In the best case it will collapse from internal conflict but be left alone from there (e.g. Somalia, tribal areas of Afghanistan/Pakistan). In the normal case the society will simply be eventually overrun by those who choose to organize (e.g. USA vs. the Native Americans, Hitler vs. the appeasers), but a government will spring up again one way or another.
That's a normalcy bias, there have been many points throughout history with no centralised productivity extracting parasitic force initiating agency. In fact, the variant we have now with extremely high direct taxation on the incomes of almost all productive activity within a society is the historical anathema. Not only that, but this fails to take into account the methods of control the state actually uses to exercise control on its population, and that currency control was recently removed from their hands.
Agorism becomes a very real threat under these circumstances
As a nash equilibrium, an involuntary centralised productivity extracting parasitic force initiating agency is not at all stable. It stands to reason that it will only be able to maintain control by either force or fraud. Right now they're going with fraud, from the amount of discontent I see with the political state of the world I don't know how much longer it will last until they devolve to force.
Regarding your noted normalcy bias, I would suggest you're forgetting the very many more points through recorded history with a centralized purveyor of force and taxation.
In that light, pointing out isolated counterexamples isn't very suggestive of some realistic future possibility for most or all of mankind, just as pointing out that Athens once had a direct democracy isn't very useful as a way to organize the governance of a nation.
Of course, the agorism you point out doesn't even have voting. I can only assume the idea is for some type of useful emergent behavior to come about, but that only talks about how the society would function internally, and it doesn't even really provide details about how that would work in all the important corner cases.
Is there some type of existing emergent societal system that you can point out which works in practice and need only be scaled up?
> As a nash equilibrium, an involuntary centralised productivity extracting parasitic force initiating agency is not at all stable. It stands to reason that it will only be able to maintain control by either force or fraud.
If by 'stable' you mean 'impossible to overturn' then I would argue that no political system meets this. If you mean 'can continue perpetually' then it is certainly a stable equilibrium, though it does unashamedly require force. Fraud alone can't keep it going in any event, otherwise police wouldn't be needed.
I just double checked that and saw this;
rayiner 671 days ago | link
As someone who left software engineering for law, I have to say that partnership is a great motivator.
and this;
rayiner 274 days ago | link | parent | flag
So I'm a lawyer and you should take my opinion with a grain of salt, but I think you've misread the market.
and this;
rayiner 303 days ago | link
So my grandfather on my mom's side was a doctor and a lawyer. My mom's siblings include a couple of doctors, a military officer, a business executive, etc. My mom was herself a journalist, and of her sons I'm a lawyer and my brother is a banker. This is not a coincidence. Privilege is passed down from generation to generation, not just in money, but in social status, connections, values, culture, insight, motivation, outlook, etc.
amongst a great many other descriptions of legal minutiae that I can see how I may have gotten that impression. But it leads me to wonder what your story actually is? Feel free to ignore this request if you think it's breaching privacy.
Aaaand I just realised I was talking to mpyne, not rayiner.
Sorry, you two share positions on so much I get you mixed up.
Describes a system based purely around free market mechanisms. Free markets are emergent, and they certainly work very well, scaling them up to consume all the functions currently performed by government in the methods described by this book is in my opinion the best method for abolishing the state I've heard of so far.
There are many other ideas however, and I'm open to any of them to the extent that they employ persuasion / markets rather than force.
> Fraud alone can't keep it going in any event, otherwise police wouldn't be needed.
Yes, when the lies stop being believable, then you need the jackboots to come in and crack skulls and assert the true facts of the way those in power see things. This is part of my problem with the system in question.
If you don't like what the cops in your town are doing then you can campaign for local political candidates who will rein them in and have some hope of actually affecting the election outcome. Getting anything similar done at the federal level seems to require some combination of mass fatalities that incense the public and a box truck filled with hundred dollar bills to grease the wheels, which is obviously outside the control and ability of most normal humans.
That's a good point, but local civil servants enjoy due process too, so it's not always a matter of simply hiring the right politician, as the politician may not be able to simply fire or replace offending staff. Especially when we're talking about first responders, who typically enjoy strong union protection.
Either way though, your logic applies just as much to Federal cops as it does to local ones. Think the FBI dudes around your city are a bunch of dicks? Move to the other coast, maybe they'll be better.
Hell, you can even pick an entirely different nations' cops, if you want.