This is very much missing the point of there being any state at all. The notion of a single group having the monopoly on violence in a society is very important for that society to be able to function. To say it's the same because both government and mafia use force to get people to pay money is missing the point completely. Having only one source of violent coercion is vital for a society to function properly (see Syria for examples of what happens when you have many sources).
If you can have democratic constraints on how that violence get's used, then all the better.
I can only conclude that the people continuing to compare mafia and democratic governments are ideologically handicapped. Or maybe it's a steady procession of innocents believing the world has never considered their insight. Probably a bit of both.
There are a number[1] of anthropological investigations into this (outside the scope of anarchist theory to which this tenant is integral) although they're fairly diffuse.
This is similar to the idea that a a voting majority is the only reasonable way to make egalitarian decisions. As anarchist[2] and non-heirarchical organizations (whether we're talking Kobanê or Valve) are illustrating, governing by consensus is a rarely discussed but viable alternative.
[1]: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=society%20without%20ch... [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_anarchist_communities
I know a number of communists and anarchists who seem to believe they can just wish away aspects of primate psychology.
And I don't think even such a temporary arrangement can scale much above Dunbar's number.
That or they believe the Roman model of private armies vying for control of a state was a great idea.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Problem_of_Political_Autho...
[1] http://spot.colorado.edu/~huemer/Contents.pdf
[2] http://www.cato-unbound.org/2013/03/04/michael-huemer/proble...
So we'll have "protection agencies" who have military arms and logistics arms to manage the necessary affairs of the agency. Those agencies will somehow provide equipment to their military, or else they'll be inferior to the other agencies, meaning they will not be giving protection free of charge, instead they will run capitalist markets within their domain and somehow extract a profit (either by taxing transactions, or charging individuals). How exactly is that different from the current nation-state paradigm?
Huemer's anarchy is very different from the current state; it is not 'the same with one or two changes'.
Seriously? There is a huge advantage to being the biggest, baddest agency. If you're substantially larger than the competition you just go to them and say "hi there, give me all your stuff or we kill all of you and your clients".
> It is unlikely that the agencies will fight with one another, as they have strong disincentives
You're completely leaving out the incredibly strong incentive of "Give me your stuff or I kill you". It's infinite profit!
There are two ways history has proven to prevent "Hobbesian War" as he calls it: One incredibly powerful military hegemony, or a delicate balance of multiple exactly equally powerful military hegemonies. Anytime neither of those exist in an area, you get war because it's a lot easier to take someone else's stuff than it is to make your own. To think otherwise is hilariously naiive.
It will be very difficult for you to come up with off-the-cuff arguments which will best a book written by an experienced philosopher over more than a year, and you are unlikely to win over anyone who agrees with Huemer in this forum for exactly that reason. If you wish to discredit him, I suggest you find an academic who has written a thoughtful critique of "The Problem of Political Authority", or that you write a book or paper on its flaws. Anything short of that is most likely to be self-satisfying but ineffective rhetoric.
If my characterization is incorrect, please describe a viewpoint-neutral algorithm capable of determining whether the anarcho-socialist group has a claim to the goods they do not possess. If no such algorithm exists, the socialist protection agency is indistinguishable from a group of theives.
It should also be noted that Huemer explicitly states that socialist groups would likely exist in the anarchy he describes. They would, however, not be able to coerce non-members.
Do you have any idea just how much property in a capitalist economy is possessed by someone other than the owner? What happens if I'm renting a house from you and you try to evict me? Now it's your protection agency--not mine--trying to take something that other people possess.
In fact, capitalist economies also have shades of legal ownership, i.e. lienholding--so I might even be the legal owner of a Camaro, but if I don't pay the car payment the repo man is legally entitled to take something I not only possess, but actually have some legal title to! And this only works because there's an unambiguous and authoritative legal framework in which these kinds of actions are permissible within bounds of regulation. OK, so if your anarcho-capitalist protection agency tries to repossess my Camaro and my anarcho-capitalist protection agency doesn't think your protection agency followed enough due process, where do we go from there?
The entire point of having a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force is that these kinds of disputes are inevitably going to come up, competing sides are going to be unable to come to a settled agreement, and in the absence of a state, these disagreements will escalate to violence. This isn't a theory, it's the observed history of humanity.
If a government utilizes extensive propaganda against its citizens, can it really be called a democratic government? I'd argue that it cannot.
Large organisations might have better propaganda but the nature of the organisation might be a bigger factor in the equation.
There is some truth to this from a top-down, social organization perspective.
But governments don't just have a monopoly on violence, they actively use propaganda to hide the use of violence from the public, through an ongoing process of whitewashing and image management that is incompatible with democracy.
Violence is ugly. If our government does it, it ought to own up to every gory detail so that the public can honestly assess its appetite for more.
Now, that model also relies on the ability to trust that those chosen to make the hard decisions are doing so competently and in the best interests of the society at large. It also bakes in the assumption that everyone will have to make compromises.
In the immortal words of Calvin and Hobbes "A good compromise leaves everyone mad".
No, that's the point of representative government (which can be part of democratic society -- hence, representative democracy -- but is not essential to it.)
The point of democratic society is that society -- and government in particular -- should be responsive to the will of the people. One of the things the people frequently want, however, is not to spend all of their time dealing with issues of governance, so they often choose representative democracy as a mechanism for achieving that goal.
In a representative democracy like America yes, (a democratic republic actually) yet a pure democracy seeks majority compromise.
Actually that's not "part of the point" at all. The point of a democratic society is to elect representatives to act on the majority's will, not to take "decisions on your behalf" and not because they are "ideally best equipped to handle it".
In revolutionary France, as part of the purge of the old monarchy and replacement with a republic, there was a need for a more efficient way of killing people. See, the people wanted to kill all the old royals, but the old method was hanging, drawing and quartering, which besides being labor-intensive and incredibly painful, often used a stand-in in place of a rich nobleman. They wanted something more humane, more egalitarian, and of course, more efficient, since they had a lot of people to kill. The guillotine was introduced, and from Wikipedia:
"Its operation became a popular entertainment that attracted great crowds of spectators. Vendors sold programs listing the names of those scheduled to die. Many people came day after day and vied for the best locations from which to observe the proceedings; knitting women (tricoteuses) formed a cadre of hardcore regulars, inciting the crowd. Parents often brought their children. By the end of the Terror, the crowds had thinned drastically. Repetition had staled even this most grisly of entertainments, and audiences grew bored."
During both the Russian and Chinese revolutions, death tolls of those executed as traitors or proponents of the old empire were published widely by the state. After World War II, traitors were again executed in great numbers, and even during the war a "blocking detachment" might stay behind the lines to execute any deserters.
America has also had public execution pretty much since day one. Hanging was our preferred method before the electric chair, and then lethal injection. We make sure that both the families of the victims can witness these deaths, as well as other witnesses, and they're widely covered in the news media. We are still the only Western nation left that practices capital punishment, mainly because people here love it so much that they can't seem to pass a law banning it or follow the UN resolutions that ban it.
Now, there's plenty of abuse doled out by oppressive regimes against their people. But this abuse is still not necessarily propagandized or even hidden. A state may use secrecy and intimidation to continue their abuse, but propaganda is used more often to bolster some case the state is trying to make. Anyway, in modern times it's far more common for corporations to use propaganda to defend themselves from democracy than for the state to use it against its people.
Let's make this abundantly clear: the United States of America categorically does not execute criminals because "people here love it so much." Nothing about that idea is even slightly correct. Capital punishment is not used at all in several of the states, and in the ones where it's a valid sentence (or on the federal level,) your likelihood of ever actually being executed is excessively low. Since 1950, the Federal government executed 26 people. The entire country executed 35 people over the whole of 2014. Those 35 were in just five states. What a truly bloodthirsty culture.
As for executions being "public," there haven't been any of those since 1936. There is certainly room to argue that subsequent events stretched the definition of the word "private," but the day has long since passed where you could just show up at the town square on the scheduled day in your commemorative "I <3 watching people die" hoodie and watch the Man give someone the needle. The reason witnesses are present to view modern "private" executions is because having the government kill convicted criminals where nobody is allowed to see it happen is an absolutely terrible idea that defies common sense. Like, duh.
If Americans love watching their public executions so much, why do they never get around to actually doing it, and why aren't citizens allowed to just show up and take pictures?
Having only one source of violent coercion is
vital for a society to function properly
I mean, is it a problem if the French and German governments disagree, or if boxers hit each other, or if America decides to use drones to bomb some terrorist training camps in Pakistan, or if the tax authorities pursue offences the drug authorities are indifferent towards?
Growing up in a strong religious culture (though not a cult) that I later became disillusioned with, it almost hurt noticing the same trends in so many other areas of life that one would think immune from it. From sports to academics to social movements.
There is something inside of humans that has for centuries made religion very popular. Even now that many have been able to leave religion behind, what ever that is deep inside of use still exists and it is influencing the new social groups we form, creating systems of beliefs and rituals.
People expect leaders that are:
* strong * fair * capable * intelligent * loyal * available * caring * personal * decisive * on top of things * courageous
People who believe in God see that as a list only God himself could check off. That means we have an innate desire for a leader with the qualities of God himself. To the extent that people try to find perfect leadership in imperfect men and ideas, they will be disappointed. Pick literally any names: Bush, Obama, Trump, Jobs, Gates, Musk -- even Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Dr. King and Thomas Jefferson. So we become disappointed and move on to other people and concepts. Or we find God as He is, not just as we would imagine Him, and find peace in belonging to Him.
In a more personal take, I tend to be hard on my bosses and organizations; at times I have to remind myself to have reasonable expectations for human leaders.
(Or maybe you forget "real" in you list of leadership qualities?)
Anyway, on the off chance that you (or someone else) want a real answer:
* I decided to give God a shot and He proved himself. It's surprising the number of people that presume God doesn't exist without actually asking Him if He's there and if He cares.
* Christian theology makes a lot of sense. It provides for dignity and equality of all people. It provides for mercy and reconciliation and harmony. It provides for justice and protection of the downtrodden and wronged. It provides meaning for everyone regardless of ability or circumstances. It's simultaneously simple enough for anyone to grasp and deep enough to challenge our greatest minds.
Maybe that's not useful to you... here's a good talk Tim Keller gave at Google that can talk to it better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kxup3OS5ZhQ
I'm curious. What does this response look like? I can't say I've ever seen anything which would seem to match this, and it's definitely a question I've wondered about when I was a kid falling out of a sense of faith.
That being said, the Bible does say that if a son asks for bread, his father would not give him stones. So if someone asks God to make it clear that He exists and cares, God could literally start talking out loud if He felt that was best. But that's not typically my experience. Personally, I've heard God speak through feelings of conscience, relevant scriptures, wise words from godly people, a change in my heart over the course of a prayer, or serendipitous circumstances.
I'll be honest, it takes a certain level of trust in God for any of it to make sense. If someone approaches God with a sneer, I wouldn't count on God responding. If your child or SO spitefully challenged you to prove yourself, what would you do? That being said, God has a habit of going above and beyond for me.
To you, perhaps. It's pretty patronizing and narrow-minded to write off the views of billions of people as "archaic". In fact, theism is so common that you'd have to be in some kind of bubble to not have any friends, colleagues, or acquaintances that are theists. I'm sure they'd be disappointed (if not offended) to hear you refer to their beliefs like that.
If you want people to keep their religion to themselves, you should really treat their beliefs with a modicum of respect. Otherwise, you're just being abusive.
But your main point is well taken; infighting, irrationality, hypocrisy, and other bad behavior are certainly not unique to religious groups. Humanity is a much more common factor than theism.
As well all know, deprecated does not necessarily mean obsoleted. That is deprecated can eternal lie, and with odd futures even faith may fly.
More like millenia. When your little neo-human tribe could be coerced as a group into attacking the nearby human tribe to take their women and eliminate them as competitors for resources, the chances that your genes would survive went up. Religion and general leader following were great tools for group coordinated action. Any mutations in the brain that benefited those group coordinated actions tended to survive and spread.
Religious propensity was a survival trait.
As long as you recognize that absence of evidence cuts both ways. Assuming physiological predisposition towards religion and strong leaders, it's also possible that the disposition developed because God actually exists.
What came first, religion or God? Can you prove that scientifically? I'm not sure you can.
In short, regardless of what any individual believes, to science itself, God does not exist (unless He ever made Himself testable in some form).
If you suppose the absence of supernatural factors, of course you cannot conclusively prove the supernatural. Any why does science assume there are not supernatural factors? Well, there are valid reasons, but to a theist that's merely a model of reality for the purpose of discovery and pedagogy.
But to take the premise as the conclusion is a logical fallacy. And on top of that, the underlying premise (assume only the physical and measurable exist) is a metaphysical premise and outside the purview of science.
Of course, my hours of simulation are playing chess, Risk, Warcraft, and numerous other games -- but there's a reason those concepts are so often the core of games: they parallel real life and our desire to win at life.
Even modern psychology is fairly light on things that are proven. Insisting on proof to discuss psychological origins that we can't really test on real proto-humans before we even discuss it is just an attempt to shut down unpleasant ideas, like the idea that most religious beliefs are myths.
Yes.
Governance in modern societies is implemented by a party which holds power over the state. The mafia have a business model which is similar, but largely limits itself to a few select types of business strategies and markets, much like many other businesses. Their use of a threat of force is unique in terms of business models, sure, but the mafia has nothing to do with governance in general.
The key similarities are use of force and intimidation, taxation, hierarchy, and propaganda.
Once a criminal organization gets powerful enough, it becomes able to whitewash its own image and branch into legitimate/legal economic pursuits. Also, with sufficient growth and power, the very laws themselves can be bent to legitimize past and current actions.
Criminal organizations also utilize principles of decentralization as a scaling strategy. There are elaborate transfer of power rituals, some resembling democratic processes and others not.
The goal of any criminal organization is to become larger and more powerful, but there are extra spoils due to premium prices for black market endeavors. Criminal organizations seize opportunities where laws exist but are poorly enforced... or in other words, where there is no de facto prohibition against black/gray market activity (such as the tens of thousands of asian massage brothels in the US).
With additional revenue comes better propaganda and the freedom to clean up the organization's image. There is also a turning point when the group benefits more from harnessing moral indignation against certain behavior, and the wise populist criminal group will not let this go to waste.
China will make sure you go to school. China will make sure you have rice to eat. The mafia will make sure they get a piece of your rice and the school's lunch money. They're a selfish organization concerned with profit and not social issues, whereas the government's position is that the people matter.
If you want to compare government and organized crime, the Yakuza are probably the closest to a formal government. For example, they have some legitimate business interests and different tactics for gaining influence in multiple markets, they're more transparent than the mafia, and they're often altruistic.
However I'd argue that a stable, two-party corporatist government is essentially the same as a one party government.
Note that Hillary and Trump and Jeb are running pretty much the identical platform when you consider the substantive parts.
The rest pays for things that are far less transparent and far more corrupt(able), not to mention blatant wealth transfers to influential interest groups.
The conservative strategy works shockingly well: defund government, appoint administrators who are actvely opposed to the existence of the programs they run, then sit back and claim that government can't do anything right.
Not sure whose comment you are referring to. My comment was intended to illustrate some properties institutions built by primates with guns.
Obviously, governments (and criminal organizations) provide some valuable services to society (employment, structure, resource allocation, etc.)
The current status quo society and government provides lots of opportunity to some, and virtually no opportunity to others. "Criminality" provides a different distribution of opportunity. Drawing a firm distinction between legitimate and criminal pursuits is a profoundly conservative worldview.
And it seems you're conflating your economic system with our government; the society we have is because our government is toothless and unable to take real action, we are subject to the brutal whims of capitalism. Every time someone suggests we wield the power of our government to better our society it's decried as "socialist" and fails. So with effective government effectively banned by conservatives, we are left with ineffective government. Which gives conservatives more ammunition to ban any remaining government.
And you seem to wholly omit the consent of the governed; perhaps you reject it as a principle, and perhaps you simply don't wish to acknowledge its existence. In the first case, you should be aware your position is an extremist ideological one and shared by almost no-one outside of academic philosophy. In the second, this is a serious omission since it is the obvious counterpoint to your entire argument above.
In a country with advanced propaganda techniques and several extremely well-funded intelligence organizations (foreign ops and domestic secret police), consent is an interesting word.
I think the more relevant thing to measure is dissent. It's missing.
There is a constant fray on cable news on which actors make ideological pronouncements about everything from moral issues to the dresses worn by the first lady. They stay strongly in character and gather followings of people who find such content entertaining.
Then there is the serious news in which the overriding theme is the legitimacy of government institutions and the subtle bashing of other nations and foreign institutions and foreign ways of life.
Barely half of Americans vote, and nearly half pay no income tax whatsoever.
Such apathy and lack of dissent is a remarkable accomplishment. Many Americans think it doesn't matter which of the two parties they vote for, and they are right.
As it turns out of course as in every case consent is a slippery concept to grasp but the point we are getting at here is that it simply isn't that bad yet. The government is functional and generally it does what it's supposed to do. People have normal lives. Egypt had well-funded intelligence organizations and domestic secret police. The egyptians were perfectly capable of expressing the fact that they did not consent to be governed. They rioted.
People generally care about their daily lives. As long as their daily lives aren't interrupted and they can live happily and get most of the things they need they might complain about stuff but they won't REALLY refuse to be governed. But they could, of course. Americans just choose not to.
Partially that's I think a change in the American character: we are economically driven now, not driven by principles. We don't riot and kill people because of a tax. We're pretty far away from Bastille day. We care about buying a TV and getting a job to get out of debt and putting food on the table. Until those things are threatened we will consent to be governed; all of the threats are abstract and for all intents and purposes don't really exist in a tangible way for most people.
I'm not sure if it's sad or not but it's the state of things; we consent to be governed by not rioting and burning down government buildings.
Your criminality point is not meaningful; the initial point was about the societal effects of actions. Governments and government officials also go against their own laws all the time.
For society to function we need a government, and all people benefit from society functioning and therefore government and so we agree to give certain people power to make decisions and do things no private individual would ever be allowed to do. In exchange the government is responsible to the people, through elections, referendums, protests, general dissatisfaction, and generally tries to take actions which are fair and in the best interest of society and the people.
Of course sometimes the government isn't responsible enough to the people, and sometimes the government doesn't quite take actions that are fair and in the best interest of society; no system is perfect, but that's the principle upon which our government and all modern democratic governments are based. We can discuss all day whether or not it's currently working but that's not what you asked about.
You can vote out a bad government official who wields power unfairly. If it's a bad CEO, well, you can sit back and pray to Ayn Rand that our lord and savior "the market" punishes him for his choices one day though you know chances are he'll be rewarded.
A person who believed that stuff might say people implicitly consent to the status quo when they don't fight against it. You might dislike the two-party system, but could you get 5% of the population to dash off a quick e-mail to their representative? Could you get 10% of the population to choose who to vote for with that as the deciding issue? Could you get 20% of the population to donate $2,000 to a PAC campaigning on the issue? Could you get 40% of the population to buy a rifle and fight in a revolutionary war? If you can't do any of these things, doesn't that mean people are happy with things as they are?
Personally I've always been a bit sceptical about that argument, due to the obvious status quo bias.
They're spending money training on it, storing it, operating it, and organizing operations around it so that they can justify receiving and keeping it, as well as in personnel costs associated with the staff time devoted to doing the research, applications, etc., to be awarded it.
They may not be purchasing it, but its not appearing and hanging around without expenditure of department resources.
In what way is healthcare woefully underfunded?
Also: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/09/15/bridges...
Healthcare is too subject to devolve in political argument for me, someone else has to put up some data on that one.
Do you see that as "legitimate"?
It plays well for the Democrats too:
http://www.cnn.com/US/9812/16/clinton.iraq.speech/
""Their mission is to attack Iraq's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs and its military capacity to threaten its neighbors," said Clinton."
The name of that little difference is legitimacy.
So the difference between the mafia and government is the use of laws? Which are rules that governments abide by? Sounds very circular indeed.
Smaller organizations lack the propaganda reach and expertise to sanitize their actions and so they are classified as criminals. Larger ones have hordes of academics, journalists, philosophers, etc., proclaiming the moral righteousness of their use of lethal force and intimidation (see the "Bush Doctrine").
There is no such thing as politics without force, and force requires intimidation, killing, extortion, etc. Just like the shopkeeper who grudgingly but willingly pays the mafia for "protection", we pay taxes on threat of jail time for "infrastructure" and "education", etc. For all but the elite, education is just daycare and training for serfdom.
It's amazing how humans love the strong leader (Trump is capitalizing on this) and how we love to take sides against and enemy or other (sports, etc.) These are animal tendencies that we still embrace and that still have tremendous impact on us in spite of our large primate brains.
In the third world, politicians travel around with a few dozen soldiers carrying machine guns. Our leaders travel in a motorcade with limousines, to hide the raw projection of power from public view. But to an adversary it's a formidable show of force.