“The piper has to be paid.”
I think that’s the important conclusion that nostr:npub1m4ny6hjqzepn4rxknuq94c2gpqzr29ufkkw7ttcxyak7v43n6vvsajc2jl fails to make. I still pay a price to protect myself from violent people even with the existence of the state. But when the state doesn’t exist, the price I pay is cheaper. Why? Because 40% of my wealth is not extorted by the state, I have one less violent entity to deal with (the state), and the free market competes to provide me the best service at the cheapest cost (the opposite of the state). We also all pay a price in avoiding the violence of the state. People use privacy tools to avoid being spied on by dangerous people. Most of the time, it is the state doing the spying as Edward Snowden has shown us. People setup alarm systems in their homes and put steering wheel locks on their cars for a reason. Banks hire private security to transport their money not cops. Concerts and music festivals hire private security not cops. When you go to mall you’ll private security driving around keeping everything safe. And the biggest one is your neighborhood. Most people do their best to live in safe neighborhoods to avoid violent people. Libertarianism doesn’t stop violent people from attacking you and it never claims to do so. But everyone is already doing countless different things trying to protect themselves from violent people all the time. Libertarianism is just an ethical system based on the simple non aggression principle. There will be violent people but there will also be solutions to dealing with these violent people on the free market. The free market will always provide better solutions to problems than a compulsory state can provide. This is a fact. When you accept this fact, everything you believe a state is good for is easily replaced by a superior and cheaper service in the free market.
Going back to your example from before about property disputes. When you accept the premise that a free market always provides better solutions than a state, it becomes clear that arbitration becomes the go to for such disputes. In fact, most disputes over property rights today are resolved outside of the state by independent arbitrators because they are more efficient. If the individual fails to accept the ruling of the arbitration, he can appeal to another arbitrator. He can continue appealing until he runs out of money. Or if he chooses to ignore arbitration, you can hire security and protection yourself. You can provide the rulings of these arbitrations to the agency because they don’t want to damage their own reputation by wrongfully killing the owner of the actual property. Notice the difference here with the state. The agency cares about its reputation and does extra due diligence to make sure not to wrongfully harm someone. In the current system, cops kill people all the time and the state doesn’t receive any consequences. The state doesn’t lose customers over their mistakes. What about the other person’s security agency? Wouldn’t they battle with yours? No because the false owner of the property’s security agency also has a reputation they need to preserve and they don’t want to waste unnecessary resources (e.g. lives of their men, ammunition).
One flaw that people immediately point out is that these entities function like a state and therefore will eventually centralize power and act as a state. But this ignores the fact that the free market always competes with the shortcomings of other businesses. If any of these services try to abuse their customers, an opportunity for a new service to step in and take those customers has just opened up. The best checks and balances for a society come from the natural functions of the free market.
Couple things. Some of us won’t have security agencies. At least at anything beyond a basic tier. There’s other options. For some of us anyway. I got thousands of relatives in this county and the adjacent one. Call it a 50 mile radius. We’ve all got weapons. That can be a ready built equivalent for those eligible for membership but one based on the honor system. Settling it in court also assumes both parties, whom presumably think they are in the right, are willing to accept part of the whole as a compromise or abide by a ruling against them when no one can really intimidate them into it. It also assumes they value giving up what they see as their legitimate claim over spilling blood. Small stuff? Sure. Big stuff? How much blood we talking? How much of it is on the other side? How much is on your side? What are your chances of victory? Those conflicts happened all throughout history in the absence of a state. Maybe they don’t if we get rid of the state but I wouldn’t count on it.
I was talking more about paying the piper in terms of the blood on one’s hands. Government advocates being culpable for everything the government does to keep order. Anarchists like myself being on the hook morally for things like duels and feuds that might very well be inevitable under our preferred system when we could prevent them by exercising violence against everyone on a lesser scale constantly to prevent large flare ups here in there by having an organized force with an effective monopoly on force. Us anarchists making the decision that a certain amount of blood being spilled in disputes where both parties think they are in the right and have sufficient force projection to prevail flare up as the cost of our system being in place. Just like statists should accept the moral negatives of the state as the cost of implementing a system that puts the kybosh on those flare ups.
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