Re:Mark Zuckerberg Agrees to Give Away Fortune
by dpatru on Thursday December 09, 2010 @08:40AM
(#1987335)
I don't see why the police, military, and highways need to be funded through government. To the extent that these services provide a benefit, there's no reason to think they couldn't be supplied in a free market.
Re:Mark Zuckerberg Agrees to Give Away Fortune
by philwelch on Thursday December 09, 2010 @12:05PM
(#1988117)
You don't have a market without a government to protect property rights. You can't have competing entities protecting property rights, because the Marxist gang down the street is going to protect a different set of property rights than the capitalist gang up the street.
Libertarians like to think of private property as some kind of moral essential, and it might be, but that's not enough to make anarcho-capitalism work. While we can probably all agree to outlaw murder, we can't, in fact, all agree on enforcing the same property rights. Plus, there needs to be a way to authoritatively register and adjudicate property claims, not a dozen competing protection rackets[1], each with its own inconsistent rules.
[1] Even actual protection rackets try not to overlap in territory, for exactly this reason.
Re:Mark Zuckerberg Agrees to Give Away Fortune
by nickpinkston on Thursday December 09, 2010 @08:48AM
(#1987365)
Not that I'm opposed to private security forces or weapons ownership, but remember BlackWater et al are "private military/police - also known as mercs who are fully motivated by money. Even our police have loyalties to each other and their town - however stupidly they may act, they know they're not easily for hire.
Not sure...
As long as things like that need to be done, someone needs to pay taxes. And Warren Buffett would be the first to tell you he and his fellow billionaires should be the one paying the taxes.