From: Technotranscendence (neptune@mars.superlink.net)
Date: Wed Nov 13 2002 - 08:32:50 MST
On Tuesday, November 12, 2002 4:04 PM Rafal Smigrodzki
rms2g@virginia.edu wrote:
>> All archist systems, after all, ultimately arose from anarchic ones.)
>
> ### Exactly. Why do anarchies inevitably evolve into states?
That's the $1 million question. Is it inevitable? Possibly... Does
that mean we should just give up? Maybe not. Death mgiht be inevitable
too, yet I'll still keep searching for immortality.:)
However, the timetable here is important. The anarchic societies we
know that evolved into archic ones took a terribly long time to do so --
in comparison to how quickly governments grow -- especially democratic
ones -- once they're in place. Of course, we would have to develop
measures here to see if my impression is correct here.
>> My point again: if you already have a state in place,
>> then all that is necessary is for that state to be
>> corrupted. If you have no state in place, then one
>> must build one _first_ before it can be corrupted.
>
> ### Who will stop a state from forming itself out of
> the dregs of the society, attacking the honest
> anarchists around them?
My hope would be that a mature anarchist society would evolve feedback
mechanisms to prevent such. I would like to run the experiment...
>> Also, what exactly do you mean by "if it won't last too
>> long"? The Icelandic example lasted for longer than
>> the United States has existed. Depending on how you
>> look at the American system, some would say the
>> Federal system ended with the Civil War. Also, I
>> reckon most would agree that America has certainly
>> gone through many political changes and the
>> government has grown immensely since the founding.
>
> ### Well, states in Europe and China existed in various
> guises for thousands of years. Anarchy existed even
> longer but only at the technologically marginal levels of
> development (50 000 years in Australia, etc.). So, yes,
> some types of anarchy are quite stable, like the aquarium
> before you put fish in it.
Maybe, though Iceland -- to stick with an example that was pretty
advanced for its time -- and the Wild West of the US were hardly like
aquaria without fish. Iceland was not technologically -- for its
time -- marginal. The Wild West was perhaps as technologically advanced
as any society of its time.
To turn your analogy around: government is like having an aquarium with
legally mandated tiny fish and a giant monster fish in the middle.
Yeah, the monster fish will probably keep the medium sized fish from
eating the small ones, but it will spend a lot of time eating the small
ones itself.
>> Also, less crafty and well meaning people too will see crises -- such
>> as the WTC attack -- as justification to set aside limits for a
while.
>> Higgs details this process in his _Crisis and Leviathan_. Demarchy
>> has no real barrier to this. Free market anarchy has one, though not
>> a perfect one. (If you're going to attack it for not being perfect,
>> then show me any previous or potential (I mean workable here -- not
>> just anything you can dream up) system that is?)
>
> ### The key to stability is to have a clear standard you
> want to enforce and a cohesive group powerful enough
> to do it.
No! The key to stability is to have internal mechanisms that don't rely
on a "cohesive group." Once you put your reliance on that, you are
depending not on the structure of the system but its content. A system
structure such that there are incentives for the powerful to abuse
power -- such as the ones we live under -- will have such abuse in
spades.
Don't get me wrong, initially such a group might do your bidding and
keep things all nice and minarchic, but over time people would figure
out how to work the system. Any source that provides a positive
feedback loop would increase over time. In its broadest sense,
concentrated political power is an attractor of such. Why? It allows
for wealth -- in its broadest sense: any desireable change in conditions
from having more stuff to be able to do more things -- to be
transferred. The market has negative feedback loops associated with it
generally, since the costs are clearly associates with profits. The
state does not since costs are either only loosely associated with
profit or hardly at all. (This is why political systems are so
inefficient and reforms tend to be episodic. Markets tend to constantly
track costs and reform is nearly constant also.)
> A demarchy with some
> constitutional checks and balances (effective procedures
> for preventing the representatives from exempting
> themselves from the laws they pass, forced disclosure
> of information, a bicameral supermajority IQ-weighted
> Borda count voting system, and others) should produce
> a much more stable and responsive system than current
> democracies, and we do know that democracies can last
> quite a long time, even in the absence of transparency
> and modern voting methods.
I disagree. I think the first emergency that comes along -- and such
emergencies always come along -- and the system will collapse into your
typical democratic system. You're merely adding a few more bandaids
onto the something like the US Consitution. Checks and balances as such
don't work when they're internalized into the same institution.
At best, what might happen in your system is slower government growth
than in other democratic systems. I doubt, however, it will achieve
long run stability.
>> Finally, in the long run, there is no such thing "a little bit of
>> enslavement." It's like a little bit of pregnancy. It grows and
>> grows. You are either free or a slave.
>
> ### No, I absolutely disagree here. Sometimes you
> become freer, sometimes you lose some freedom, but
> you almost never reach the extremes. If what you said
> were true, societies would progress from ancient slave
> societies downward, to, well,
I think the history of freedom is a cycle of slavery and freedom. The
reason slavery is never complete is that it just doesn't work.
Societies based on control tend to produce less and self-destruct in the
long run. For example, modern democracies tend to transfer more and
more wealth from the productive to the unproductive -- or to turn more
productive people into less productive ones. (E.g., unemployment
insurance sets a floor on what kind of work people will do.) This can
only go so far before you get the point of economic collapse or
stagnation. Eventually, such would hurt the nation-state trying to
enforce it. Its power would diminish. So, there are counterveiling
forces at work.
One major source of counterveiling forces is the market itself. It's
the market that drove deregulation since market participants were able
to outwit regulations. Does this mean all's fine? No. Efforts wasted
getting around government regulations are socially wasteful. Money
spent bribing officials or efforts spent on strategies to find loopholes
could have been used for other things in a freer market. It would be
much better to remove the controls. (In much the same way, the Soviet
Union still had a market economy underneath, but a very inefficient one
due to its being illegal and heavily suppressed. It has still not
recovered from this.)
> hard to tell what could be
> less free than an ancient tyranny.
Simple: a modern totalitarian state.
Cheers!
Dan
http://uweb.superlink.net/neptune/
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