Dennis Hackethal

Economic competition presupposes a free market. A free market cannot exist until after force has been barred. That means objective law, backed up by a government. To say it can be backed up by "competing" force-wielders is circular. There is no competition until there is a free market, and some agency has to protect its condition as a free market by the use of retaliatory force.

The anarchist idea of putting law on "the market" cannot be applied even to a baseball game. It would mean that the rules of the game will be defined by whoever wins it.

Once again, supranational treaties refute this point. Germany and the US have no shared government or jurisdiction. (They each have separate governments, but together they have no common government above them.) Yet they have come up with rules of trade and justice and extradition and so on. Those are objective and evidently work really well since war between these two nations is unthinkable.

I think Binswanger is invoking the fallacy of the stolen concept here: he claims libertarians rely on a concept on which they logically depend. Clearly, as international relations show time and again, that is not the case.

[T]here is no conflict between individual rights and outlawing private force: there is no right to the arbitrary use of force. No political or moral principle could require the police to stand by helplessly while others use force arbitrarily--i.e., according to whatever private notions of justice they happen to hold.

What a horrible straw man. No libertarian advocates this view.

Libertarians agree that laws should be objective, ie non-arbitrary. They have that in common with objectivists. Libertarians disagree that a monopoly is required to make laws objective. They think that a monopoly makes laws less objective.

Anyone who tried to make ‘laws’ based on whim which, say, allow him to rob his neighbor, would be immediately greeted by the machine guns of that neighbor’s private protection service and their objective rules for engagement.

But if anyone could make his own laws based on whim, that would be arbitrary, no?

She looked at me grimly and said, "You mean like at the U.N.?"

Consider, instead, NATO – the ‘North Atlantic Treaty Organization’ – another supranational collaboration. It has been stable for decades and war amongst its members would be unthinkable.

Why does Rand choose a bad example that conveniently supports her case while ignoring a good one that doesn’t?

The part “enforced by whom?” is telling. There isn’t just ‘who’ but also ‘what’. For example, David Friedman refers to the discipline of constant dealings as an enforcement mechanism.

Could conflict among "competing governments" be taken care of by treaties? Treaties?--enforced by whom? I once asked Ayn Rand about the feasibility of such treaties between sovereign "competing governments." She looked at me grimly and said, "You mean like at the U.N.?"

The anarchists do not object to retaliatory force, only to it being wielded by a government. Why? Because, they say, it excludes "competitors." It sure does: it excludes vigilantes, lynch mobs, terrorists, and anyone else wanting to use force subjectively.

Competing arbitration agencies would develop objective (ie, non-arbitrary) laws and rules for coordination. And, just like governments, they would defend their customers against anyone who wants to use force subjectively. That’s their value proposition; their income relies on it.

Tragically, the original American theory of [limited] government was breached, shelved, trashed long ago. But that's another story.

Convenient. Maybe if he investigated that story a bit more he’d realize that the government qua institution isn’t all that? The rampant failures of the American government to remain limited are something objectivists need to explain, not just gloss over!

Ask yourself what it means to have a "competition" in governmental services. It's a "competition" in wielding force, a "competition" in subjugating others, a "competition" in making people obey commands. That's not "competition," it's violent conflict. On a large scale, it's war.

In reality, enforcement of laws would only be a small part of what competing arbitration services would have offer. They would come up with laws, revise, simplify, and otherwise improve laws, protect their customers, coordinate with each other, and more. Lots of value creation.

Ask yourself what it means to have a "competition" in governmental services. It's a "competition" in wielding force, a "competition" in subjugating others, a "competition" in making people obey commands. That's not "competition," it's violent conflict. On a large scale, it's war.

Governments already compete on a global scale. So why isn’t the world in a perpetual state of war?

See #17.

The wielding of force is not a business function. In fact, force is outside the realm of economics. Economics concerns production and trade, not destruction and seizure.

It cannot be. This is an attempt to step outside of nature rather than obey it, even though objectivists normally advocate obeying it.

The police force, prosecutors, judges, etc need resources and payment. Those resources don’t grow in nature. Scarcity and the economic calculation problem apply.

Any attempt to ignore or evade this reality leads to police forces and justice systems that are, all else being equal, worse than they would be in a free market because they don’t correct errors as well as they otherwise would.

Force properly employed is used only in retaliation, but even when retaliatory, force merely eliminates a negative, it cannot create value.

That isn’t true.

People want protection and justice. Retaliatory force does not merely eliminate a negative. Restoring and producing justice is a value.

Retaliating against one burglar can scare off ten others. The value that’s created here far exceeds the negative which the burglar created.

Harry Binswanger wrote a piece titled ‘Sorry Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government’ for Forbes, criticizing the libertarian position.

Could the errors around layouts be related to this?

I’ve heard that but I don’t know if that’s even true. If it is, the killing shouldn’t be considered a double homicide until after week 6.

Homicide is “a killing of one human being by another”. If an embryo isn’t a person yet, its death can’t be homicide.

Killing a pregnant woman is considered a double homicide, so aborting until week 6 can’t be right.