Nothing said above isn't already rebutted at http://libertarianmajority.net/d...ce-public-
goods
Brian,
Um, actually, no. Said "rebuttal" includes no method of objectively quantifying an optimal production amount. "Better off" and "worse off" (the variables considered in Pareto and Kaldor Hicks efficiency formulae) are subjective evaluations, as is resort to "preference."
Note that I am not claiming that whatever amount of a good uncoerced market produces is objectively "optimal." It's just that none of the other methods of defining "optimal" are any more objective.
Thus there are two ways of approaching the subject: Letting the market do what it does, or forcing the market to do what you think it should do. Both ways rely on subjective evaluation; the distinguishing factor is the use of coercion, or not.
Tedious tripe: "uncompensating consumption"
Shouldn't that be "uncompensated consumption?"
Anyway, Mr. Holtz should be quite happy with the status quo as enforced by the Republicrats. The free rider problem has been solved through financial surveillance and by turning every employer into an agent of the state, requiring them to serve as reporting agent and tax collector.
The Republicrats have already decided for us what is a public good (and what is good for the public, too). To solve the issue of whether one "can" consume a good, the state can require one to consume a good, thereby making forced payment for the same "fair."
Wonderful prisons, or the option of death, await any free riders who don't know what good is good for them and don't want to pay their fair share.
So, it seems Mr. Holtz would agree that the state has already solved the free rider problem to his satisfaction. Of course, he may feel that robotic sphincters with automatic retention capabilities must be installed on all citizens. Maybe he could author a graphic novel to convince the government to do so.
Perhaps there is a place in the Obama administration for Mr. Holtz where his talent for producing endless philosophical horse manure to justify the state could be utilized.
No, because the producer doesn't want to compensate the consumer -- he rather wants the consumer to do some compensating.
The rest of your comment is, remarkably enough, even more ignorant.
P.S. I love how you and Tom and others reflexively resort to scatology to signal polemical desperation. A very handy tell.
Brian,
It's not desperation, it's exasperation -- primarily it's because it's impossible to tell whether you're honestly fooled by your own arguments or just think that if you stack up enough subjective preferences, others will mistake them for objective facts.
Tom, you're a smart guy, but I suspect you're being tripped up here by a lack of a background in rigorous mathematics. You seem to think I can't claim that "underproduction of public goods is inevitable" without having a procedure for determining the objectively optimal production level. I don't know how to even begin explaining how wrong that is. You can start by reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Non...structive_proof and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Axi...Axiom_of_choice.
You guys can pretend all you want that rigorous thinking in modern political economy can only be "horse manure" and "bullshit" thinly masking some evil desire to impose one's will on others, but that's just not an intellectually serious position to take. Still, it's always nice to know precisely where the arguments of a Tom Knapp run out of gas -- it helps me plan my polemical time budget.
The penultimate paragraph of your main article is demolished by the last sentence of my wiki article.
As to your laughable claim that the desire for general protection of individual rights is a random and not-particularly-libertarian personal whim of mine, talk to my other friend named Tom:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed"
Also, your "Holtz's whim" argument fails to grapple with my wiki'd paragraph that begins: "The free-rider problem would exist even if 100% of the people had the same utility function."
At the risk of resorting to scatology or disrupting my polemical time budget . . . but has this piece been considered ?
"No, because the producer doesn't want to compensate the consumer -- he rather wants the consumer to do some compensating."
And the Marxist labor theory of value rears its ugly head.
I'd love to have everyone pay me for the "art" I produce and display in my yard. They, after all, consume it, whether they want to or not.
Voila! Public good. Please pony up!
And so far, the only person who is avoiding argument is Brian. His "rebuttals" have nothing to do with Knapp's critique. One wonders whether Holtz actually read the critique yet.
Brian correctly criticizes the argument by assertion that the optimal amount of production is whatever gets produced. I'm pretty sure that anarco-capitalists would agree, since "whatever gets produced" could be "whatever gets produced and consumed by threat of force." This appears to be a straw man. Furthermore, I'm not sure how Brian is defining the optimal amount of production.
You can not define something as "optimal" in a moral sense without asserting by axiom a set of values. Even mathematically, an optimal solution minimizes (or maximizes) the objective function. Without the objective function, the entire concept of optimality makes no sense.
Brian appears to prefer the minimization of coercionm, which is why he is a libertarian. I don't follow the argument, though, that because some goods are "under-produced" due to hidden demands, then naturally this leads to a loss of optimization. Please help me through the next step. How does state coercion in order to minimize under-production of some goods naturally lead to a total minimization of coercion?
Hey, Brian, your other friend Tom, even though he knew it was wrong, held slaves until the day he died. So please spare us your name-dropping bullshit.
Holtz wantonly quotes Walter Block from footnote 15, Chapter 9, "National Defense and the Theory of Externalities, Public Goods, and Clubs," from the volume titled THE MYTH OF NATIONAL DEFENSE (Ludwig Von Mises Institute, 2003, ISBN: 0-945466-37-4). The quoted footnote was associated with the following text:
"So we know there is something wrong with this argument from externalities-or, at least, that this argument somehow cannot be made to apply to groups of people such as nations. But there is no reason given for the inability to generalize this argument. On the contrary, for its adherents, [FN15] there are no limits to its applicability."
To characterize Walter Block as conceding the point Holtz endeavors to make is to ignore the context of the footnote. But don't take my word for it; I invite anyone reading this to actually read The Myth of National Defense [http://www.mises.org/etexts/defensemyth.pdf].
I'd suggest that rather than conceding "mainstream" economic texts are correct, Block reaches quite a different conclusion, a distinction carefully obscured by Holtz.
quasibil, I don't see a labor theory of value lurking in the notion that producers want to get paid for production. As for art being a public good, you are ignoring the last sentence of my twiki essay -- and then complaining cryptically that I'm not reading Tom.
Chris, Tom has indeed elsewhere argued that whatever gets produced (sans force initiation) is the optimal amount, and that there's no such thing as demand that would be realized if only you could be assured that similar demanders would realize their own demand. Tom apparently has never been involved in negotiating a multi-party contract.
I don't claim that state provision of rights protection is guaranteed to reach an ideal optimal level of minimized force initiation. Rather, I claim that it moves us in that direction, and does better on that metric than does the anarchist war of all against all.
Eric, weaknesses abound everywhere I look in Hummel's article.
1) He argues against the strawman position that the free-rider problem guarantees public goods are never produced. That actual argument is rather that they are systematically under-produced, and that a liberty-lover should consider the under-production of rights protection to be disastrous.
2) He argues against the strawman position that if the public goods argument for national defense is valid, then it justifies any level of proposed national defense spending.
3) He argues against the strawman position that social provision of rights protection is what prevents "most stealing and cheating" that doesn't actually occur. No, the actual argument is just that an unacceptably higher level of stealing and cheating would occur without social provision of rights protection.
4) He argues against the strawman position that people will always free-ride if given a chance. No, the actual argument is just that an unacceptably high level of free-riding will occur. (His example about voting doesn't grapple at all with the recent literature on the rationality of voting.)
5) He makes an embarrassing gaffe in his reading of the literature about iterated Prisoner's dilemma. Yes, the best strategy in IPD is cooperation, but that depends on the crucial assumption that players can recognize whether a given other player cooperated or defected in previous iterations. No such recognition is possible in the case of social provision of rights protection. In groups larger than villages, I can't look at you and recognize at a glance how much you've been contributing to communal rights protection. Given his oversight, it's devastating to his case that he admits that the public goods problem is equivalent to a multi-player PD.
6) He seems to argue that the risk of government failure (tyranny etc.) is always higher than the risk of market failure in rights protection, without any empirical evidence. From where I sit in 21st century America, I have a strong existence proof that
a state can provide national defense
without falling into tyranny. Now, it is true that changes in the factor outputs of production have made wars of territorial conquest very nearly obsolete, and this has drastically reduced the need for territorial defense from foreign invasion. However, as Hummel perceptively argues, defense against foreign aggression should not really be distinguished from defense against domestic aggression, and he gives me no reason to believe that disaster would not ensue if both kinds of defense were not socially provisioned.
The public goods argument for socializing the financing of rights protection comes down to 1) intuitions about counterfactuals and 2) interpretation of a historical record that is rich in organized aggression but effectively devoid of examples of working private defense markets. For more info, see:
http://libertarianmajority.net/w...ports-
anarchism
http://libertarianmajority.net/w...orts-
minarchism
Dan, it's sheer nonsense to say I'm suggesting that Block -- a committed anarcholibertarian -- concedes the correctness of the public goods argument for the justification of the state. I'm obviously just saying he concedes that it has nearly universal assent in the economics literature. If you think the latter situation should lead Block to that conclusion, I can't stop you from connecting those dots, but don't get mad at me if that's what your brain naturally wants to do.
Brian,
Let me take this from the top and make it as simple as possible -- not because I think you're stupid, but because I want you to attack my argument, not something other than my argument.
For any good X, the "optimal production" is a number which necessarily relates to something else, i.e. the purpose of production.
In basic free market economic theory, the "optimal amount" would be that amount which can be a) produced profitably and b) sold at a price buyers are willing to pay, with no product left over (i.e. no over-production) and no customers with money in their hand but no product left in stock that they can buy (i.e. no under-production). There might be at least one other factor in this optimality -- that the profit margin is high enough that the producer would not have been better off producing something else instead.
Imperfect information, of course, means that the free market is likely to not achieve optimality much of the time -- there'll usually be a little product left over that ends up getting liquidated at a loss, or there will be customers who have money and are willing to buy, but the stuff is gone (i.e. over- or under-production).
So, to the extent that I may have said market production is automatically "optimal" in the past, I was wrong. The defining characteristic of market production is not that it's optimal, but rather that it's non-coercive.
Continued in next comment.
cont'd
So, market production is necessarily a set of subjective evalations. The produce estimates likely demand, the customer subjectively decides how much he's willing to pay, etc. "Optimality" is merely a function of where those subjective evaluations intersect, and non-optimality reflects errors in calculating where that point is.
When you bring in the whole "public goods" notion, you're just adding some new sets of factors -- people who want X but won't pay Y for it, or who don't want X but whom you have decided NEED X and won't pay anything for it, etc., and those additions are full of subjective valuations as well.
How many B-17s will be required to defeat the Empire of Japan? That's a matter of opinion.
Those guys standing over there saying they don't want B-17s, and that if we want them we should pay for themselves -- do they really not want B-17s, or are they just trying to snooker us into paying the whole cost so that they don't have to cough up? No way to know.
Your "optimal level of production" assumes that defeating the Empire of Japan is a goal worthy of achieving, that it takes a certain number of B-17s to achieve, and that a significant portion of those saying they don't want the B-17s are lying and just trying to get them without paying for them, and that those who aren't lying just aren't as smart as Brian The Great Brain Holtz and should therefore bow before him and await orders.
Chris, Tom has indeed elsewhere argued that whatever gets produced (sans force initiation) is the optimal amount, and that there's no such thing as demand that would be realized if only you could be assured that similar demanders would realize their own demand. Tom apparently has never been involved in negotiating a multi-party contract.
There is a major difference between "whatever gets produced", and "whatever gets produced sans force initiation." I don't want to put words in Tom's mouth, but what I would assume he is/was arguing is that if the minimization of coercion is the objective function, then "whatever gets produced sans coercion" is the optimal solution to that function.
You seem to be defining "optimal" based on the satisfaction of demand, both open and hidden. Basically, you are both approaching the same optimization problem via different objective functions. If rigor in de-boning the argument of your opponent is what you strive for, then you need to at least agree on the fundamental terms of the argument (namely, the objective function), or argue about why your objective function is better. The latter is exactly what it appears to me Tom is trying to do.
He cares more about coercion, and you seem to care more about satisfied demand.
BTW, I don't necessarily agree that "whatever gets produced sans coercion" is the optimal solution to a "coercion" objective function. In fact, the scientist in me is with you on this point:
interpretation of a historical record that is rich in organized aggression but effectively devoid of examples of working private defense markets.
Tom, I'm going to cut-and-re-paste this more slowly this time so you can understand: 
BH) your "Holtz's whim" argument fails to grapple with my wiki'd paragraph that begins: "The free-rider problem would exist even if 100% of the people had the same utility function." (BH
The free-rider problem is fundamentally a coordination and demand-revelation problem. To stamp your foot and insist it's a question of privileging somebody's whims is simply to flee from the serious intellectual issue here. Despite all the problems I identified in Hummel's lengthy article on public goods, he never would dare to stoop to such a lame argument. If you're going to nevertheless insist that somebody's "whim" is being privileged here, then I dare you to use Thomas Jefferson instead of me as the poster child for the "whim" of protecting rights through government, per my quote of the DoI. I double-dog dare you.
Chris, Tom just recognized his mistake about optimal levels of production and retracted it two minutes before your comment. That's why debating Tom is so challenging -- he has a Knapck for gravitating toward the strongest arguments for his position, and is usually unflinching about throwing weak arguments to the wolves.
You very nearly perfectly summarized the fundamental disagreement here. Tom and other ZAPsolutist radicals indeed care more (only?) about abstention from force initiation, while I care more about further reducing net force initiation by satisfying more of the demand for rights protection. I've been making this point for nearly two years (so often that I've put my standard argument here: http://libertarianmajority.net/d...on-minimize-it)
but you may very well be the first person who's ever shown evidence of grasping it -- let alone extracting it unbidden from the public-goods debate.
I'm glad you agree with the importance of empirical evidence here, and I hope you followed the two links on that topic above. They're from this collection: http://libertarianmajority.net/
p...portal#Advocacy
Brian,
On the contrary -- in the absence of a valid argument that some level of production of a given good can, in fact, be defined as "optimal" against some kind of objective standard, I deny that "free ridership" is a "problem" at all in the meta sense.*
For reasons I've explained elsewhere -- our inability to unitize and quantify coercion, to measure the aggregate coercion in a system, or to establish that the introduction of additional coercion into the system can in fact result in lower that system's aggregate level of coercion -- "net reduction of initiation of force (i.e. coercion)" is not such a standard.
Regards,
Tom
* Yes, "free ridership" exists. Yes, it is problematic for producers who have to try to project how it affects their revenues, and for customers who have to try to figure out how low they can bid before the goods stop coming off the line ... but it's not the key to any great universal understanding of how we should act, any more than the rate of tire wear on your radials, which also affects production and consumption, is.
All I've really read is what Knapp linked to in the main article. (That, and your links to a mathematical axiom that I am finding incredible difficulty linking to the subject you're talking about. I'm sure there is a connection, but I can't see point Z from point A, and I have the relevant mathematical background. 
)
I find the public goods debate somewhat lacking in effectiveness, which is evidenced in this comment thread. Defining a "public good" as a non-rival, non-excludable good causes all manner of problems, specifically since it leads to the billboard and public art attacks shown above.
A better definition of a public good would be a non-rival and non-excludable good whose production requires minimal coercion in order to optimize a coercion-based objective function. This links the public good to the overall minimization of coercion and makes a stronger defense from what you call "Holtz's whim" arguments.
If the objective is to minimize coercion, then that should be the first statement made every time. Tom seems to recognize that the abolition of force is a non-achievable goal, hence private defense! However, you seem to be claiming that without SOME coercion, there would be an under-supply of rights defense, leading to the institution of ... drum role ... a coercive regime. So, if I am following you, you call rights defense a "public good", which could be paid for via coercion (though hopefully as little as possible). (Of course, installing a coercive regime to help prevent the establishment of a coercive regime may or may not be very useful. I am assuming the point is to install a minimally coercive regime in order to prevent a more coercive regime -- an optimization problem.)
However, showing that this little bit of coercion here will lead to an objective net reduction in coercion overall is a much more difficult task. I've read some pretty good arguments from Tom in the past on that very subject. The problem is in defining coercion and quantifying it.
Geez. Knapp keeps posting right before me!
While this great exercise in incomprehensiblity is going on, is anybody actually out working to build their respective Party infrastructures, or is everybody going to devolve into more philospohical erudation that makes everyone's eyes glaze over?
I choose to actually *do* something. Later!
If you want to compare "doing something" resumes, mine is at http://libertarianmajority.net/b.../bh-lp-
activism
P.S. Does stalking me around the Internet and repeatedly denouncing my incomprehensibility (at least to you) count as "doing something"?
Michael,
After months of work on a number of campaigns, I don't feel any great need to making excuses for taking some time off to have fun debating more abstract matters ...
... and if I did feel the need to justify myself, I could point to several "realpolitick" things I've done today betwixt and between posting here, including but not limited to recruiting some volunteers for an upcoming campaign and writing a letter to the editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch over my signature as chair of my county's Libertarian Party committee.
I could care less about building a party infrastructure.
That, and my entire career is based around seemingly incomprehensible debate about a subject many believe to be esoteric, though actually impacts their lives in numerous ways.
This is also fun. Do you chastise people for wasting time playing sports when they could be doing something "productive"?
We've already tried a little bit of coercion with the concept of constitutional limited government - it has apparently failed.
What Holtz suggests is that the metrics for all situations under any contingency can be determined and then applied to decide optimum production levels and the correct level of coercion needed to compensate the producer. Now, I'm just an idiot, but isn't that the argument for the implementation of totalitarian socialism?
I wish Holtz would set forth, in 60 volumes or more, a complete Manifesto For Pretentious Anal-Retentive Control Freaks that would codify the solutions to all problems under every possible situation so that us idiots could run our lives properly according to Holtz.
Surely it is just folly that simpletons like myself can believe that, in the absence of government planners and the enforcers of their rules, spontaneous solutions relevant to the situation can be applied to solve problems on a decentralized basis. It might not be the utopia Holtz promises to deliver under his little bit of coercion by control freaks theory, but it could lead to a lot more assholes minding their own fucking business.
I love it when an opponent's arguments are so repetitive they can be eviscerated merely by cutting and pasting from what I've already said in the discussion. This is true of Blanton's first three paragraphs. The argument of the fourth is so feeble that nobody had dared attempt it above.
1. http://libertarianmajority.net/w...orts-
minarchism
2. "I don't claim that state provision of rights protection is guaranteed to reach an ideal optimal level of minimized force initiation. Rather, I claim that it moves us in that direction, and does better on that metric than does the anarchist war of all against all."
3. "Minarchists claim that such trade-offs are morally justifiable only for 'pure' public goods aimed at protecting life and liberty, like national defense and universal access to the justice system."
4. Strawman. As an advocate of free markets in all rival excludable goods, I'm of course not claiming that we can never "solve problems on a decentralized basis".
Tom Knapp, I'll keep repeating (2) above no matter how often you ignore it. You don't need to be able to find an optimum in order to optimize (i.e. increase the value of) a function. See e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hil...i/Hill-
climbing
Your argument about calculation is already answered at http://libertarianmajority.net/a...fs-
incalculable.
I'm not saying that positive externalities in general should modify our ethics wherever they occur. Such a strawman is beneath you. I'm just saying that liberty-lovers ought to modify their ethics around one very specific kind of positive externality: the enjoyment among all liberty-lovers when any liberty-lover donates to protect the liberty of the weak from the predation of the strong. It is -- and always will be -- self-evident to 99.99% of Americans that such donations alone will under-produce such protection, and that we can expect net aggression to be decreased when we communalize the protection of rights in the proper way. This is just as true now as when Jefferson called this a self-evident truth in the Declaration of Independence.
Of course, if Jefferson meant it was something like a synthetic a priori truth, then I disagree. I think its truth or falsity is a fundamentally empirical claim, and I confess that I probably would have a different view of it except for the evidence of 1) the American experiment and 2) the history of lawless defense agencies (i.e. organized crime) in twentieth-century American cities. It's very understandable that you make your last stand on the analytic Calculation Assertion, because the empirical evidence is so univocal.
Brian,
We keep talking past each otherin two specific respects:
1) You seem to think I'm arguing that one can't optimize unless one knows the optimum as a specific quantity. What I'm actually arguing is that the concept of "optimum" seems to itself be subjective.
2) You seem to think that I'm attempting a defense of an Austrian apriorism based on acceptance of force initiation prohibition as axiomatic. I'm not. I'm merely pointing out that your approach is just as a priori.
Empiricism is great, but it requires measurement against standards of value -- and you haven't given me any reason to accept your standard as valid except that you insist it is.
Chris, non-libertarians indeed attempt public-goods arguments for social provision of all kinds of positive externalities. As I already told you, my thesis is that minarchists should argue only for one kind of pure public good -- the social provision of the protection of life, liberty, and property. (A public good is "pure" to the extent that its positive externalities outweigh its positive internalities.) If you're worried that you can't defend the distinction between this kind of public good and all others, then just remember Jefferson. He called it "self-evident" that governments are instituted among men to secure the rights of life, liberty, and property, and he said absolutely nothing about billboards and public art.
Your attempt to change the textbook definition of "public good" sounds like special pleading. The concept is the same, no matter what you call it. "Minimizing coercion" is indeed my first statement made every time. For example, my proposal for the LP Statement of Principles begins: "We, the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge all aggression against the rights of the individual. We advocate maximizing individual rights by continually minimizing the role and incidence of aggression in human society." I've been saying for years, to every radical I talk to, that the difference between us is abstention vs. minimization of force initiation. (You should use "force initiation" instead of "coercion", because defensive coercion is allowed.)
Regarding calculation, see the link above. The absolutist Austrian Calculation Argument is a very odd one for a libertarian to make. First of all, as GMU anarchist economist Bryan Caplan has noted, the argument on its own terms must admit that we cannot know the magnitude or even the sign of the net effect of a market intervention, and so as a consequentialist argument it is effectively impotent. Second, in denying our ability to say anything at all about the magnitude or even sign of unrevealed demand, the Calculation Argument sweeps away the very foundations of the argument for the benefits of free markets: consumer surplus, producer surplus, demand schedules, reservation prices -- i.e. almost the entire concept of gains to trade. This is why so many economists who consider themselves libertarian nevertheless do not accept the anarcholibertarian dismissal of the public goods argument for the existence of government.
The bottom line here is: if one's economics-based argument fails to impress the vast majority of economists who consider themselves libertarian, then one needs to consider that perhaps one's argument is more about convincing oneself than about convincing others.
TK) You seem to think I'm arguing that one can't optimize unless one knows the optimum as a specific quantity. (TK
You seemed to be arguing that, and then you explicitly retracted it. That's fine -- we're here to learn. (Others here continue to argue it, so don't think my comments to Tom B. were aimed at Tom K.)
TK) What I'm actually arguing is that the concept of "optimum" seems to itself be subjective. (TK
For like the fourth time: I don't depend on being able to find or recognize an absolute optimum. I only depend on making the always-imprecise never-guaranteed-to-be-perfect judgment that a given institutional design will likely lead to less aggression than an alternative design. You yourself seem to be making such a judgment, or else we'd be hearing you say something like this: "I have absolutely no idea whether social provision of rights protection could ever yield better protection of rights than the absence of such social provision, and neither do you or Thomas Jefferson, and so I say we should just abstain from the force initiation in such social provision, and hope for sufficient charitable provision." If I can just get one of you radicals to ever admit that this is your position, then I'll reply: "Fine, Thomas Jefferson and the American people and I will just have to agree to disagree with you." I'm under no illusion that your need to disagree with Jefferson's self-evident truths is something that I can overcome; I just want you to recognize what you're disagreeing with.
TK) your approach is just as a priori (TK
The identification of the free-rider market failure is indeed analytic -- it follows straightforwardly from assumptions (that you don't dispute) about excludability and rational self-interest. What's empirical in my approach is deciding whether government failure is always a greater danger than this market failure. I've already given you links to two essays about the respective empirical cases for anarchism and minarchism. And I just clarified above how two kinds of changes to the historical record would change my mind on this empirical question. (This makes Jefferson all the more impressive to me, since he put his life on the line for his intuition in a thesis that I doubt I would have shared at the time.)
Brian,
You write:
"For like the fourth time: I don't depend on being able to find or recognize an absolute optimum. I only depend on making the always-imprecise never-guaranteed-to-be-perfect judgment that a given institutional design will likely lead to less aggression than an alternative design."
That's the problem, right there. Your apriorism is in the assumption that "less aggression" is the standard of "optimization."
The problem is that you then proceed to discuss people's preferences and utility functions on the implicit premise that they agree with that idea of what is optimum or desirable. You're using sleight-of-hand to disguise your apriorism as empiricism.
"anarchist war of all against all"
I'm rusty at this sort of thing; so could one of you geniuses help me out? Would this phrase be a strawman or a red herring?
If there is a hell, and any justice in the universe, then Thomas Hobbes is feeling the heat.
It seems to me that Holtz is arguing in favor of the government we already have. He may believe that the politicians have made errors in judgment regarding what is necessary and what is not, but fundamentally he is saying that people should be forced to pay their share to destroy whatever hobgoblins the ruling elite fabricate.
The Holtz argument is not so much an economic argument but an argument validating the power of the ruling elite to extract payment for whatever purpose they determine protects the liberty of the weak and the power of the ruling elite to determine which hobgoblins threaten that liberty. Any economic argument does not come into play until these powers are validated and people consent to them.
So, even if one does consent to being governed by little tyrants, we must rely on them to know the unknowable and then correctly manage the production and distribution of public goods and at the same time determine the optimum level of coercion necessary to fund their agenda. Perhaps Holtz can explain to us why one would have any confidence in this system - it is in essence the system we now have. Is Holtz not telling us about some sort of perfected transhuman cyborg politicians that will one day rule the earth?
It seems to me that it is the ruling elite that is the true threat to liberty, far more so than the imaginary hobgoblins they create. Let them rule Mr. Holtz if he wishes, I want no part of them.
Okay, okay I'll bite. What is a public good? Is national defense a public good? If so why? Is keeping 11,000 troops in England a benefit to the American worker? How about all those national parks? Ever been to Moab, Utah? Y'all see those bike tracks left by mountain bikes? That park is over used. 'Course I have been to a park in the lower forty-eight that most people have never seen.
Point beenin' is that not all so called public goods are the same. If I am one person in a valley up near Forks, Washington I can smoke up that valley with smoke from my wood stove without harming anyone, but if there are 10,000 in the same valley it is a different story is it not.
And yes Brian I do have a few years of econ behind me, not a lot, but a few. One thing too many econ people do is rely on generalities far too much. They simplify what is often complicated and complicate what is often simple.
The phrase "public good" is poorly defined.
MHW
I've debunked Holtz's argument over at Freedom Democrats. Even we concede "market failure" in terms of under-production of "Public Goods," as measured by standard econometric methods, Holtz doesn't address the "government failure" problem, namely that States "over-produce" Public Goods. Over-production is no more Pareto efficient than the case of under-production. The State hardly "solves" any efficiency allocation in terms of so-called non-rivaled and non-excludable goods.
ka1igu1a,
Nicely done. One thing I'd like to add:
One reason for "over-production" of "public goods" by the state is that the state, although it is neither a person nor an organism, does possess something that corresponds closely to "rational self-interest."
To put it a different way, the state generally produces "goods" that support the existence, permanence and growth of the state. Even where those "goods" do in fact constitute "public goods," the criterion of production optimization is not providing an optimum amount for fulfillment of constituent preferences, but providing an optimum amount for building a bigger, stronger state.
Knapp,
Any thread that's got Hogarth, Blanton and Holtz has got to be good but I have no time to read it. God King Obama, our lord and saviour, seems to be recreating a neo-conservative foreign policy. If you could use the pull of Knappster to let people know that our work is not done at Antiwar.com.
Oh, and Doherty says that there are people who think God King Obama, Leader of the Fatherland can transform into a bat to fight evil robots from outer space.
I believe him.
Peace,
Keaton
Hmmmm, a billboard is not a public good; it is a public bad generally. Billboard-free stretches of scenic highway are the public good.
This is not necessarily an endorsement of anti-billboard laws. It may well be better to suffer this minor public bad than to suffer a state powerful enough to regulate billboards. So be it.
But when it comes to defense, we are talking apples to apples. Coercion to fund adequate national defense may well result in less coercion than relying on the market.
Yes, it is possible in a sufficiently civic-minded (i.e., non-Randian) society to have adequate national defense via clubs, donations, and perhaps corporate sponsorships. But once enough people look out for Number 1 vs. their country.
The Saxons had a relatively weak system of thanes, who competed for clients as per the anarchocapitalist ideal. They were conquered by the Normans, whose descendents still hold feudal titles and lands.
Murray Rothbard held medieval Ireland as his example of anarchocapitalism. The Irish lack of strong central government allowed the English to conquer and persecute the Irish for close to 800 years. The Irish would have been more free had they had an effective fascist dictatorship vs. the system Rothbard extolled.
Not that I favor fascist dictatorship. Elected republics are quite capable of fielding strong armies, and usually have better human rights records (for their own citizens; for outsiders and those denied the right to vote, this is not necessarily so).
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To recap: the public goods problem is not insurmountable, but it is a very serious problem. And given human history, it is quite reasonable for lovers of liberty to prefer republics over anarchy.
The burden of proof lies on the shoulders of the anarchists.
If the burden of proof that republics don't morph into fascist dictatorships is placed on the lovers of liberty that embrace government, those liberty lovers have a pretty high bar.
However, it is reasonable to assume that those who love liberty in the abstract but will do nothing substantive to protect it deserve the fascist dictatorship - which may be where we find ourselves today.
And Doherty may be right - I started getting the vampire vibe about Obama on Halloween: (www.pnar.org/helloween.htm)
Except I don't think he will fight evil robots from outer space - I think he may actually be controlling the evil robots on earth and in outer space.
Has anyone done any street interviews with random members of the public to see just how much people are afraid of the "free rider" "problem," or even attempted to measure the public's collective awareness of it?
Another quick thought: if you have enough libertarians available to vote to abolish the government, you have enough to reign in said government.
Conversely, if libertarians are a minority, you won't get anarchocapitalism, unless you have some truly kick-ass Bond villains on your side.
Convincing 100 people to legalize marijuana is about the same effort as convincing one person to be an anarchocapitalist. Ditto for other such reforms. Ergo, reigning in a republic is easier than instituting anarchy.
As for the instability of republics, compare with the instability of anarchy.
Carl, if the ease of convincing others to believe what I believe had anything to do with what I have come to believe, I wouldn't believe what I believe - I'd believe what everyone else already believes.
It could be that you aren't really convincing someone that pot ought to be legal. It could be they just don't have any objection to it being legal. Just like it doesn't take a lot of work to get someone to agree they should get a tax cut. Even Obama sells that hokum. But, we all know that tax cuts don't have anything to do with limiting government.
The truth is that once you consent to be governed by casting your vote, you consent to take whatever the corrupt repulicrats want to dish out.
If liberty lovers want to limit government, then they better learn civil disobedience and quit playing the game.
Carl,
You're confusing my argument that Holtz's argument in favor of the existence of the state doesn't hold water with an argument that no argument in favor of the existence of the state could hold water.
That said, my off-the-cuff recollection is that in the United States, the federal government alone has, in the modern era, generally consumed around 20% of GDP (not counting costs of regulation, etc., but only direct costs that are covered with taxation or indebtedness allegedly binding its subjects).
I strongly suspect that it would be impossible to find an historical example of a society which has even remotely resembled anarchy while also having as one of its features every one of its members being robbed of a full day's pay for every five workdays, week in and week out, in perpetuity.
The burden of proof falls on the shoulders of anarchists only if one ignores the facts of reality with respect to the state.
TK) Your apriorism is in the assumption that "less aggression" is the standard of "optimization." (TK
Sorry, I don't debate libertarians about whether aggression is bad. That's no apriorism, that's time budgeting. Among the general population, my empirical sense is that the overwhelming majority of Americans agree that aggression in general is bad.
SH) is "anarchist war of all against all" a straw man or red herring? (SH
Neither. Correct me if I'm wrong, but under anarcholibertarianism I (or my protection agency) have to be ready at a moment's notice to go to war with anybody -- from random homeless guys right up to my billionaire neighbor Andy Grove -- if we have a dispute about whether our respective rights are being violated. And if I have a dispute with my protection agency, I have to be ready to draw down on them too. Oh well, at least I'd save myself the price of the Sopranos DVD set, since I'd be living the show instead of watching it...
TB) fundamentally Holtz is saying that people should be forced to pay their share to destroy whatever hobgoblins the ruling elite fabricate (TB
Nope, what I'm saying is that people should be forced to pay their share to protect everyone's individual rights. I dare you to say "I don't agree with Holtz that people should be forced to pay their share to protect everyone's individual rights." Got game?
And no, I don't give "elites" a blank check. I'm the guy who put the following sentence in the LP platform: "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of individual liberty, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to agree to such new governance as to them shall seem most likely to protect their liberty."
Yes, I happily admit that the minarchism I support is vaguely isomorphic (but hardly identical) to America's current institutional design of government. Yes, we'd have elections and taxes and police. Quel horreur! As I already said above: I probably would have a different view of anarchism except for the evidence of 1) the American experiment and 2) the history of lawless defense agencies (i.e. organized crime) in twentieth-century American cities.
If minarchism is absolutely hopeless and minarchist rhetoric only validates "the hobgoblins of the ruling elite", then why should the Libertarian Party tolerate minarchism in its midst? Shouldn't the LP officially condemn all minarchist heresies against anarcholibertarianism, and rename itself the Anarchist Party? Do you walk the walk, or do you just talk the talk?
Michael, if you don't understand or like the definition of "public good", your disagreement is with all the Economics textbooks, not with me. I only advocate social provision of public goods when it's for the protection of life, liberty, and property. If you claim that such rights are too ill-defined for us to be able to recognize when they're being protected, then anarcholibertarianism is just a
just as doomed as minarchism.
Mike Blessing, the public doesn't need to know the technical term "free rider problem" in order to be aware of the issue. Just ask people two questions: 1) Would you pay all of your assessed share of taxes if doing so were strictly voluntary? 2) Are you worried that some government service you value would be under-funded if all taxes were voluntary? If you think the free rider problem is just a figment of economists' imaginations, then you should run some man-in-the-street Prisoner's Dilemma experiments.
ka1igu1a, the term "government failure" has not been posted on dfc_talk since I joined the group and discussed public goods there, so I don't know what "debunking" you think you're referring to. Your claim that I don't address "government failure" is pure bullshit -- a simple text search on this page shows that I was the first to use that phrase here. Search above for my detailed discussion of it and links to my empirical analyses of the relative risks of market failure and government failure (also now pasted below for the link-impaired).
Tom Knapp, you can cling to your deontological claim that all taxation is always equivalent to armed robbery, but passing that off as an empirical claim about how taxes are judged by real people in the real world is just silly. It's like when leftists claim that advertising is coercion, or when feminists claim that marriage is rape. If you want to evaluate how well different social institutions work for people, you have to use their revealed utility functions, and not impose yours.
Anarcholibertarians ask for a complete overturning of how this polity provides for its common defense and secures its members' right to life, liberty, and property. According to the three leading indices of freedom, only 13 nations (out of almost 200) are currently more free than America. America's constitutional republican framework has been by far the most successful in human history. It has been increasing personal and civil liberties almost monotonically for two centuries, and we are still among the most economically free nations in the world, with a per-capita GDP exceeded only by Norway and Luxembourg. Our 300 million people live and work in a continent-wide nation with a $13 trillion economy built on a twenty-first century technological infrastructure. By contrast, anarcholibertarians can merely wave toward a couple of medieval island nations with populations and population densities four orders of magnitude less than those of modern industrialized states. As great as America is, we have detailed, redundant, and current empirical evidence backing up the mainstream findings of modern economic science about how market-oriented reforms within the statist framework can make America even more free and even more prosperous. Anarcholibertarians have nothing of the kind to support their moralizing a priori claim that America would be a better place if we completely d
dismantled our system of rights protection in favor of a promise by liberty-lovers to set a good example of aggression abstinence.
History provides many examples of situations in which there was no functioning monopoly on force-initiation over a significant region for a significant period of time. I've never heard of a single case in the entire history of organized crime across hundreds of cities in scores of nations over multiple decades in which the unregulated market for protection behaved remotely like what is predicted by anarcholibertarian theory. This track record becomes even more dismal if you include all the cases in history in which there have been regions lacking effective sovereignty by a central authority. This amounts to an empirical falsification of the anarcholibertarian theory of protection markets that by the standards of social science is spectacularly conclusive.
Every single episode in which there wasn't a monopoly on force-initiation over a region becomes a test case for anarcholibertarianism. You can't whine that any given experiment in anarchy wasn't set up right, because the whole point of anarchy is that there is no central authority to configure it. Despite the literally hundreds of such test cases, the only purported successes advanced for the theory involve a few thousand pre-industrial farmers sprinkled sparsely across medieval Iceland and Ireland and the frontier of colonial Pennsylvania. In contrast to how even bastard forms of minarchism have been so spectacularly successful compared to all other significant social experiments, the track record of anarcholibertarianism is simply embarrassing. That's why 99.99% of anarcholibertarians are armchair anarcholibertarians, not applied anarcholibertarians. Somalia is calling, but anarchists let it go to voice mail.
Note that when I say "forced to pay their share", I'm talking about people who monopolize, consume, pollute, or congest the natural commons. If per Locke you leave "as much and as good" when you use the natural commons, and thus don't impair anyone else's right of access to it, then you don't get taxed. The public good of rights protection would be financed by recapturing ("taxing") the ground rents it creates in the protected area, rather than through any other kind of tax. So for example, Ted Kaczynski in his shack in the woods would not owe any taxes.
Brian, why should people have to pay their fair share to protect everyone's individual rights? And who determines what someone's fair share is? And what if someone doesn't want the state to protect their rights? Perhaps they can get a better deal with someone else.
Holtz says: "Somalia is calling, but anarchists let it go to voice mail."
That's rich. If I were willing to go to war with the Imperial American Empire and/or its proxies (in the case of Somalia, Ethiopia) in order to establish anarchy, I could just stay at home here in the good old USA and fight the bastards here rather than going to Somalia.
It seems the Republicrat bastards and their internationalist friends can't stand the idea of there being any type of decentralized government anywhere in the world - hence we are in a war with Somalia that isn't even acknowledged by most of the Americans that are paying for it.
Far better to simply refuse to comply and withdraw your consent to be governed. The risk of possible imprisonment exists, but that is better than certain death by taking up arms against the Empire.
By "we", I mean the citizens of Amerika.
Why should people have to pay their fair share to protect everyone's individual rights? The minarcholibertarian answer is: because effectively everyone wants there to be a guaranteed level of rights protection, but the free-rider problem guarantees that such protection will be under-funded. The geominarchist answer is: people don't have to pay a share at all, unless they try to monopolize scarce land and appropriate the geo-rent it receives because the surrounding community provides a guaranteed level of rights protection. The geoist argues that the latter sort of land value charge is not even force initiation, but rather is a defensive reaction to the force initiation of monopolizing land without leaving as much and as good.
Who determines what someone's fair share is? You do, by self-assessing the value of the land you monopolize, thus setting both the basis of your land value charge and the price at which someone can bid you off your land if you don't pay the corresponding charge (or don't let it accumulate as a lien against the eventual transfer of your land).
What if someone doesn't want the state to protect their rights? Much of rights protection -- national defense, crime deterrence -- is not something you can effectively opt out of, but I think you mean to ask: what if someone doesn't want to pay their fair share? The geoist answer is: don't try to capture geo-rent you didn't create (or pollute a commons you don't own, etc.), and you won't be charged for it. If you don't try to own any land (i.e. only be a tenant), or if you only try to own land that has no geo-rent (because you've left as much and as good for others), then you won't be charged anything at all.
Tom Blanton, I repeat my questions to you: If minarchism is absolutely hopeless and minarchist rhetoric only validates "the hobgoblins of the ruling elite", then why should the Libertarian Party tolerate minarchism in its midst? Shouldn't the LP officially condemn all minarchist heresies against anarcholibertarianism, and explicitly pronounce itself an anarchist party?
Brian:
I find a bit presumptuous on your part that I am somehow supposed to be familiar with any of your self-published blog postings on public choice theory. When I wrote my post at Freedom Democrats, "Government Failure" was only mentioned once by yourself in this comment section, namely this:
He seems to argue that the risk of government failure (tyranny etc.) is always higher than the risk of market failure in rights protection, without any empirical evidence. From where I sit in 21st century America, I have a strong existence proof that
a state can provide national defense
Solely judging by that comment, you were either unintentionally or intentionally misrepresenting the meaning of "government failure" as it pertains to public choice theory. In PCT, "goverment failure" does not refer to tyranny or inability to produce "public goods," but the inefficient overproduction of public goods that benefits the few at the expense of the general welfare.
But, nevertheless, I bit and went to your site looking for a post on Public Choice Theory and found this in 21st Century Political Economy
It's an open question whether democracy can work after majorities discover they can vote themselves money taken from other people. The theory of government failure is called Public Choice Theory, and while it too was only created in the last half-century, it has not yet given us any firm guidance on how to design institutions to prevent government failure. The findings so far from Public Choice Theory are very depressing. They demonstrate that voters have systematic incentives to deceive/delude themselves and to let politicians assist in the process. The best answer we have so far is to diffuse and decentralize government power as much as practical, so that jurisdictions compete with each other and people can vote with their feet if necessary.
So, apparently, your solution to the problem of government failure is competition in choice of government. Well, since I more or less define anarchy(market anarchy) as competition in choice of government, welcome to the fold, Brian.
And spare me the Rothbard strawman counter-attack, because I'm not a Rothbardian, certainly not in the sense that i would spend 5 minutes of my existence engaging in Hegelian-type anarcho-capitalist system building from some notion of Aristotelian ethics. I'm not here to defend Rothbard's anarcho-capitalist vision.
Rather my intent was to point out the flaws in "public goods" arguments for the State. The notion of Public Goods is rooted in the assumptions of Neo-classical economics, especially in the deep-rooted assumptions of human instrumental rationality. Experimental game theory and burgeoning new fields such as neuroeconomics have casted much doubt on these assumptions. The example of "Open Source Software" was a "Constructive proof" demonstrating that Samuelson's assum
Hmmn, Haloscan mangled my full reply. It's been reproduced at Freedom Democrats.
Ah, open source -- producing clones of proprietary systems for 30 years...
Let's see. Linux is a clone of an OS that came out of Bell Laboratories and was upgraded by academia. It still uses the horrible X Windows graphics layer -- a system developed at MIT. And with each edition of linux, you have a different way to cut/paste between applications. I have long since given up on using a printer with linux.
And yes, I like linux for certain tasks. I do use it. But I use Windows more of the time since Windows has documentation, a semi-unified user interface, decent fonts, a printer API that matches the graphical API, drivers that work...
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And yes, I can name an anarchist system where people paid out more than 1/5 their incomes: Rothbard's beloved medieval Ireland. Their lack of central government resulted in being enslaved for hundreds of years.
Do note: there is a significant difference between having to pay tribute and pay taxes for a government service. Yes, some of the federal taxes are transfers to others, but much is transfered back to the taxpayer. We pay gas taxes and get interstate highways back, for example.
If minimizing aggression is the standard for liberty, the case for anarchy is problematic at best.
Tom Blanton: Are you suggestion that we need anarchy everywhere before it can be tested? Sounds very Marxist! If anarchist protection services cannot protect against neighboring governments, then my case is hereby made.
Well, since I more or less define anarchy(market anarchy) as competition in choice of government, welcome to the fold, Brian.
And welcome to the world in which we live. There is competition in choice of government. So long as a government places no restrictions on your leaving (which the US government does not), you may pack-up and move to a region under another government, or raise an army, sit on some land, and form your own. Even if a government does place restriction of travel, you are completely free to stay right were you are and claim independence from your current government. However, you would still have to raise a sizable army.
The power goes to those that can keep it by means of force. The power to run my own life must be maintained by force, because the world is filled with thugs. I'm not seeing any fundamental difference between relying on a "private" rights-defense provider and those that exist right now ... namely, governments. Both either are, or have immense potential to be thugs. I would like the US government to focus more on the rights-defense, and much less on the other things, but they are the ones with the guns, and the other options are either no different or worse. Eliminate government via a magical snap of the fingers and what you will end up with after some relatively short time is ... another government.
To me government seems a little like gravity. It can kill you or it can be used productively. We can successfully fight against it, and we can move to places where its effects are minimal. Either way, it will always exists no matter how much we wish it didn't.
just to note, carl hosts his blog on a linux server for free...free-rider...
is it necessary to point out that linux on the desktop and linux in the datacenter are 2 different animals...
I said I use linux for some applications.
But I repeat: the core design work for linux was done by paid employees of Bell Labs. Coding is a small part of software development. Requirements analysis and documentation are bigger.
The freeware model works very well for bug fixes -- another part of the deal.
A great deal of the free software base was developed in corporations and academic institutions by people paid to do these things. Linux is not a pure hobbyist output.
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More to the relevant point: the proprietary Windows still dominates the market. And given that in war, domination is destruction, I am loath to turn over defense to second-place.
U.S. anarchocapitalist defense firms need to be able to defend the area against the Russians and the Chinese, should they get greedy for quality real estate/resources.
Linux is Unix-like, but there's not a single line of Bell labs Unix code in the linux kernel.
Windows dominates the desktop, but that's about it. It doesn't dominate the server market, nor hand-helds, embedded devices.
Brian, would you please explain what you mean by monopolize scarce land and appropriate the geo-rent it receives. And do it so that simple people (like me) can understand what the hell you are talking about.
Carl asks: "Tom Blanton: Are you suggestion that we need anarchy everywhere before it can be tested? Sounds very Marxist!"
Nope, I don't think I suggested that, or suggestioned it either. I suggest rather frequently that Americans would be better off with no federal government than with it. And I don't suggest that this would result in a utopia, only that it would be better than the growing dystopia.
Holtz asks again: "Tom Blanton, I repeat my questions to you: If minarchism is absolutely hopeless and minarchist rhetoric only validates "the hobgoblins of the ruling elite", then why should the Libertarian Party tolerate minarchism in its midst? Shouldn't the LP officially condemn all minarchist heresies against anarcholibertarianism, and explicitly pronounce itself an anarchist party?"
Who cares what the LP tolerates, condemns or pronounces? At this point in time, I think the LP should change its name to the Regular Guy Party. The statement of principles should be: We're regular guys and we believe what all moderate regular guys with common sense believe, just like you - if you're a regular guy, too. The pledge should be: I consent to be governed and I promise to pay my fair share of the cost of protecting my liberty (invading other nations, tapping my phone, tracking my finances, maintaining a database on me, etc).
Oh, and everyone should look like Wayne Root and smile a lot.
Chris:
A distinction should be made between "government" and "the State." Anarchism(or at least the market anarchism variety) is not advocacy of "no government," but rather advocacy of government without the State. The State is defined as a centralized, monopoly enforcement agent protected by high barrier of entry. Libertarian anarchists, particularly the left-libertarian variety, employ class analysis to demonstrate that such an entity--the State--is more about being a "redistribution coalition" than any type of guaranteer of natural rights or property rights. The mistake minarchists make in their conception of some idealized "limited government" State is that any State, to be "a State," must be powerful enough to enforce a high barrier of entry which thusly makes it powerful enough to eventually, if not immediately, serve as a mechanism for redistribution. Minarchism lacks a theory of class.
It should be noted that criticism of the shortcomings of the State does not absolve the problems associated with the notion of competing voluntary, consensual governments. There are certainly problems with the latter, for example, the Coordination problem, which I have previously mentioned in my FD posts.
And let's not conflate the "relative freedom" to move from one territorial monopoly State to another with any true notion of "competition in government." Unless your escaping the most putrid, heinous type of murderous State tyranny, you are not likely to find much relief in fleeing from State A to State B. The fact is the Nation-State model is moving more and more toward a Globally-coordinated Model, which makes fleeing itself an increasingly less viable option. I mean if you want to flee the US because, say, a simple drug possession conviction is hampering your employment opportunities, good luck with that. Who is going to accept you? Not today...
What is to keep a "competing voluntary, consensual government" from deciding to become a State, other than the vigilance of those within and consenting to the government?
My point is still valid. You are free to raise an army and fight the State for your right not to be ruled by it.
The mistake anarchists make in their conception of some idealized "government without the state" is that any such coalition must be powerful enough to turn back outside aggression, which thusly makes it powerful enough to eventually, if not immediately, turn into a State. Evidence: centuries of documented history.
Steven said: "Brian, would you please explain what you mean by monopolize scarce land and appropriate the geo-rent it receives. And do it so that simple people (like me) can understand what the hell you are talking about."
That's not possible, Steven. Sound principles always make sense to any audience, and can always be broken down into understandable elements. Enough said.
Didn't know it was so easy to take a simple little thing and complicate it so much. Maybe this is why the LP is getting no where.
After reading through this I think I need to change my name to Sludge Puppy.
MHW
Sound principles always make sense to any audience, and can always be broken down into understandable elements.
Not in the space of a blog comment, and certainly not all audiences. My students spend four years and thousands of textbook pages studying physics and at the end have barely scratched the surface of topics such as statistical and quantum mechanics. Many people could spend even more years studying these subjects and still cling to verifiably false conceptions in such "simple" topics as classical mechanics. I can guarantee you the same is true of economics. What "makes sense" is not necessarily what is true. Science is about determining what is true based on data, and quite often the data doesn't "make sense" based on tightly held, simple and so-called "sound" principles.
Holtz likes jargon, which should be avoided for a general audience. However, considering this started as a debate between Knapp and Holtz he isn't necessarily addressing a general audience.
I'm actually learning some interesting stuff from both sides, exactly because I'm looking up the jargon, keeping my mind open, and not clinging to "sound" principles without data. I'm still a fence sitter, but I think Holtz is doing a pretty good job arguing his case. All the other side is doing in this venue is arguing AGAINST Holtz's case, which is fine. However, that means I need to go and find the arguments FOR the anarchist case unfiltered by its opponents.
Brian writes: "A public good is defined as a non-rival non-excludable good, such as national defense. Because public goods are not excludable, they get under-produced. The pricing system cannot force consumers to reveal their demand for purely non-excludable goods, and so cannot force producers to meet that demand."
Using your example of national defense please explain how it is that national defense is under produced?
Grnated we have a lot of that in the U.S. and it may not be the right kind and I'll suggest it is over produced, because we do maintain a large military force abroad where plrenty of nations get a free ride.
Sometime "public goods" are over produced and at other time under produced. But like stars in the sky they are all stars and each somewhat different.
MHW
Even in the case of a non-excludable and non-rivalrous good, the question still remains: who decides if it is needed and how much of it is needed? The anarchist believes that each individual has the right to decide for himself, and only for himself. I think that this was Tom's main point.
Chris,
You're correct that I'm not trying to make the case for anarchism here. I'm merely pointing out that Holtz's particular case for the state is defective.
Doing this sort of thing is something I regard as a bit of familial obligation -- Thomas Hobbes was apparently an ancestor of mine. Since I wasn't around to slap him upside the head and beg him to stop embarrassing the family, I try to make little bits of restitution when possible.
Science is about determining what is true based on data...
Empirical sciences are, yes. But if you consider logic and mathematics sciences, things are different. There's no need (or way) to empirically demonstrate that 2+2=4.
Susan, did you flunk kindergarden?
Of course, you can verify 2+2 = 4. Any child who counts can do so. Take two objects. Add two more. Count the result.
A large amount of mathematics arose originally from empirical knowledge. To a significant degree, mathematics attempts at generalizing and playing with concepts we first come across in nature.
And yes, I am quite aware that 2+2=4 does not work when slowly counting rabbits. 2+2=4 is a rule of thumb when applied to real objects. It doesn't always work. Kind of like Rand's definition of a human, or the axioms of praxeology.
"There's no need (or way) to empirically demonstrate that 2+2=4"
Only in number bases greater than 3, and only when not dealing with government spending, where we all know that 2+2 = 2^2 + 2^2 = 8, which does require empirical demonstration, which is not done in government.
Man, my lunch hours are either interesting or it's a slow news day...and Holtz is still incomprehensible, as if anybody cares.
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