Property Rights and Equilibria of Force

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

>>>>: Francois-Rene Rideau
>>>: Paul Foley
>>: Francois-Rene Rideau
>: Paul Foley

>> I suppose you meant this message for cybernethics@tunes.org
> Gah!  Yes, it was; I keep doing that -- you should have your mailing
> list software add a "Reply-To" header pointing back at the list.
Nah. Learn to use "Group Reply" feature of your MUA.
[I don't know what that is with your MUA -- I only use GNUS for news.]

>> There is an economic justification to some individuals
>> pooling their defensive efforts in a common force.
>> There is no justification whatsoever for anyone
>> to claim monopoly on such force and force everyone
>> to either join or be plundered (or killed if one tries to resist).
>
> OK, so no governments?
>
I'm opposed to any *externally imposed* government. Self-government is ok.

> In that case, there's no excuse for police forces to protect *any* property;
>
Anyone can pay anyone else to serve as a police to help protect
his own property. People can join together and pay a common police.

> no need to single out "IP" when denying protection.
There is definitely a need to single it out:
because although police protection of physical property is an
allegedly acceptable approximation of something that would exist
in a free world, "IP" protecton, on the other hand, is but pure theft.

> if people can subscribe to
> various different defensive organisations, they either end up
> cooperating with each other, in which case they're effectively a
> single organisation anyway, or fighting each other, which is
> expensive, and justice suffers on both sides. Perhaps, therefore, a
> public defence force *is* justifiable...and funding for such a thing
> must, by definition, be through taxation.
>
You forget a most important point: the fact that you can choose which
defensive organization you fund is critical in ensuring that defensive
organizations will be properly controlled, and that their equilibria
will reflect the needs of the public. In political regimes, you are
forced to pay for the same organization as everyone in the country,
and on the choice of whose direction you have little to no weight.
Control of the government has always been the major political problem;
constitutions are an attempts to solve it that governments have learnt
to cope with and do without.

Regards,

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
[  TUNES project for a Free Reflective Computing System  | http://tunes.org  ]
In a reasonable discussion, you can't communicate opinions, and you don't try
to, for each person's opinions depend on a body of unshared assumptions rooted
beyond reason. What you communicate is arguments, whose value is independent
from the assumptions. When the arguments are exchanged, the parties can better
understand each other's and their own assumptions, take the former into
account, and evolve the latter for the better.
		-- Faré