See this entertaining thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5009244
His scenario is a little too bright though... more like minorities getting exterminated by the conservative & powerful.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gram_panchayat , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panchayati_raj
The only real problem with this kind of a set up is, systems by and large become culture centric. And this leads to medieval mindsets. Stuff like banning couples from having falling in love or having a love marriage, or laws against polygamy, support for child marriage, unfair treatment to widows, honor killings ... stuff like that.
There are also some extreme cases: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khap
Where does this leave us? Despite all their flaws(basically their own definitions of morality and thereby their own laws based on that) these sort of systems are the easiest and cheapest way of resolving a dispute with a very high rate of acceptable justice. Which continues be the case in many places in India today.
Only recently have we been able to overcome it.
Were the seeds of religion sown in primitive peoples observations of and attempts to reckon with all the scary shit they would witness in the natural world? Absolutely. But any "definitive" statements on pre-historical belief systems are probably anthropological hearsay, possibly weighted by our current knowledge of and feelings towards religion. What was going on back then could have been just slightly more complex than a dog hiding under the bed when there's thunder.
And keep in mind, we're talking about a 200,000 year run up to recorded history. However, I'm sure there was a more complex oral tradition of storytelling and mythmaking that was starting to develop before the Sumerians took off.
Weherein we have some evidence that such was not the case with moving towards public law.
Crazy anarchist.
Because there have been no extremely intelligent, logical, level-headed and productive people who are also anarchists.
Start with this guy and get back to me: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard
If you said "crazy statist" I could maybe agree, since statism is kind of crazy in my opinion, but I think attacking any ideas by disqualifying with adjectives like crazy is extremely narrow-minded and leads to poor results, even if you're talking about statists.
Just because you've never heard of something, don't be so immature to dismiss it without thinking it through... you expose yourself as ignorant of the hard work of many intelligent people that have come before you.
Would anybody who fits this description like to elaborate on why that happened? Found a convincing argument? General disillusionment with humanity?
But I no longer think it's a perfect system. People don't behave like perfect rational market actors, there are edge cases like natural monopolies where normal market mechanisms don't lead to the best outcome, and then there is just enforcing altruism (like looking out for animal rights or children's rights, who couldn't buy legal services under this system, or redistributing income so you don't end up with people starving to death or in poverty.)
Of course the current system we have is so far from a perfect system it makes these problems seem trivial. But at least it seems ok and generally stable, whereas what would happen in an anarcho-capitalist world is a complete unknown.
There still might be a near-perfect system. Robin Hanson's ideas on prediction markets for making policy decisions might be a huge improvement, at least in some areas, and a semi-private legal system for some things might work. And I think libertarian policies in general are better.
And we call that system a government.
Seriously. Every time an anarchist seriously gets down to brass tacks about how their world would work, there's some agency by 'the people' which does things which have to be done, and it's indistinguishable from a government. It's just a Good Government, a Responsible Government, and, really, an Ideal Government.
Either anarchy has never happened or it's the only thing that happens. I don't know which is more damaging to the case of doctrinaire capital-A Anarchists.
> a semi-private legal system for some things might work
This is called contract law.
> Anything a government could do, could in theory be done by a voluntary system if enough people agreed it was a good idea or it was a benefit to them to do so.
And we call that system a government.
The problem here is the foolish tendency of English speaking people to use "government" for everything, when we should distinguish the government from the State.
Anarchists are obviously not opposed to having systems of government, but they are opposed to the state (and governments as their executive bodies), and in general to the concentration of power, authoritarianism and repression that emerge from it.
Just four years ago, the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her work demonstrating how institutional arrangements were developed in various societies facing the problem of resource exhaustion due to overconsumption, without the intervention of the State.
But these are just a few concrete examples of an uncountable number of norms and institutions there are everywhere, and much more there would be if the State intervention didn't crowd them out by imposing its own solutions and banned all others.
Importantly most things that are done by government would be done completely differently and by private organizations. The point is, that if the way government does something is truly superior, then people would still do it that way. They just couldn't force people to participate or pay for it. But you could still have a non-profit with elected officials and all that, if it's really better and can compete on a free market.
Again, I'm no longer certain this is the best system as there really are things where a free market doesn't lead to the best outcome and participation has to be forced (like public goods.) But there are ways of funding public goods without a government that might work, and most of what government currently does doesn't fit in that category anyways.
> The point is, that if the way government does something is truly superior, then people would still do it that way.
Then why hasn't this ever happened in the past? Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?
> They just couldn't force people to participate or pay for it.
Then nobody's going to pay for it, and the people who opt out of the laws entirely are going to be robbing everyone else.
Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?
Somalia is not some country who had an anarchist society; it's a country which had a state and a government, and where a civil war broke out, eliminating all possibility of a stable society regardless of its political system.
Judging anarchism by the state of Somalia makes even less sense than judging non-anarchist societies by the actions of the Third Reich.
In order for that to work you would need nearly 99% of the population or more to agree to that punishment and to actively participate. Which is a lot more than required in a democracy or pretty much any system.
>Then why hasn't this ever happened in the past? Why is Somalia suffering through what it's going through when self-organizing communes are so much better?
Somalia is a collapsed society, not really a good example of anything. The same could be said for democracy until 200 years ago. It took a long time even after the first democracy was established for the idea to spread, and the creation of the US itself took a war and a few centuries of cultural evolution before that to get to that point.
The point is that you can't just say "well if it's a perfect system why has no one done it before?" Libertarianism is counter-intuitive for most people, how do you expect them to form perfect anarcho-capitalist societies overnight?
>Then nobody's going to pay for it, and the people who opt out of the laws entirely are going to be robbing everyone else.
People would defend their own property or pay into some private legal system that promised to do so.
But it has happened in the past. Never underestimate the power of groupthink to do horrible things to minorities.
> Somalia is a collapsed society, not really a good example of anything.
No better place, then. Nothing for the anarchist utopia to compete with.
> Libertarianism is counter-intuitive for most people
No, it isn't. Not from what I've seen both online and off.
> People would defend their own property or pay into some private legal system that promised to do so.
We've tried this and it didn't work.
Which are these "things which have to be done" that only a government could take care of?
Crime prevention? Does our government police prevent crime, or just punish criminals? I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.
Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.
One thing is for sure, we're not ready yet for anything like that, since many necessary services and resources are "scarse", and scarsity makes people fight for their survival with brutal results. But we're (slowly) solving scarsity through science and technology.
Both.
> I can argue that without any state-established law criminals would be punished, in some way or another.
Without any state-established law there would be no criminals, just the much broader category of people that other people don't like. Quite arguably, the whole purpose of state-established law is to limit the scope and severity of punishment compared to what happens in the absence of central authority, and to provide clear rules. This aids in deterrence, since, to the extent that antisocial behavior is rational and deterrable, there needs not merely be an expectation of punishment if you do 'wrong', but a clear idea of what 'wrong' is in the context, and a clear expectation that punishment will not be imposed if you do not do 'wrong'.
Certainly, one can argue that modern states are less than ideal in each aspect of this, but that's very different than arguing that they are worse than the absence of a state would be.
> Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.
The problem here isn't that there would be no medical practitioners apart from a mandate to provide them (after all, most states that provide medical services don't compel people to become doctors and nurses), but that medical services lack features that make it the kind of service modeled well by econ 101 rational choice assumptions, with (among other things) a very high and uncorrectable cost of bad (or even merely incompetent) suppliers.
> But we're (slowly) solving scarsity through science and technology.
We may be reducing the resource costs of some goods and services, but that doesn't solve scarcity (it reduces the opportunity cost of some while increasing the opportunity cost of others, since it is unequal progress, and opportunity cost is what else you could have gotten for the resources you put into getting what you chose.)
Suggesting that we are "solving scarcity" demonstrates a lack of understanding of what "scarcity" means.
Sure, criminals would be punished, but in a much more arbitrary manner. Do you really think that would be an improvement?
> Medical services? I think that some people really enjoy being doctors and nurses, and they would associate even without state-mandated organization.
Yes they would, but as people get richer they start to want there to be standards, at which point you need some kind of group to codify and enforce those standards. Over time, these thousands of different groups that are setting rules for their own little domains end up being grouped together, for a range of reasons, and then you have a dreaded 'government'.
Formality offers protection. In all the cases I can think of, weaker government corresponds to an increase in either the arbitrariness or the corruption of justice. This applies both to criminal justice and to the wider sense of an equitable (not equal) distribution of resources.
And you build your world on that, you see world might work well like that.
Then you get your job, car, house, 2 saplings, wife. You have to defend it, system that supports it and everything that holds it together.
Current system is very well alive, self replicating and with strong immunity, it is living intelligent being, completely different from human thinking and not really communicable in direct way.
It all is very interesting.
In my opinion, private law system is pretty much anarchism, since people tend to aggregate with similarly-minded people that share the same values and rules: rules and leadership tend to form spontaneously in human groups (since we actually are tribal animals).
I have the gut feeling that as we eliminate scarcity through technology a real anarchist system is possible. I just miss enough theory to back it up.
Does anyone know any good book/author talking about that?
It's certainly a compelling vision - at least to me - but it's not exactly a political treaty.