[From Mike Acree (990209.1650 PST)]
Martin Taylor (990204.1747)--
Thanks, Martin. No, I didn't experience your post as vacuous; that was
a complaint about a couple of previous unelaborated statements defining
government as a bunch of control systems working together--which
wouldn't distinguish government from an S-M club.
I was bringing to your attention that
it was once the norm to have private fire departments, at least in the
British Empire, of which North America was a part. It is no longer the
norm, for the good reason that if a house was insured by one fire
department, and another showed up, it would often not put out the
fire,
or if a fire being put out by the contracted fire department spread to
the next door house, which was contracted to a different department,
the
second house was likely to burn down. People eventually decided that
this
was unacceptable, and organized public fire departments paid for out
of
taxes.
One can certainly imagine the scenario of competing fire departments
that you describe; one would also expect that arrangement to be
short-lived. I don't know any reason why the problem couldn't have been
solved by negotiation among the fire departments--perhaps all companies
respond to a given (big) fire, with reimbursements between companies
handled later, or whatever. I also don't know the historical reason why
these areas would have opted for government fire departments instead,
but that was the arrangement that these countries were instituting with
respect to many other services (e.g., police, education). For all those
services provision by government has come to seem necessary and
unavoidable, as we've lost sight of paths not taken.
This is one area, however, in which we may have learned from history.
The modern communications industry has required coordination and
cooperation between businesses on a massive scale, lest they duplicate
the debacle of private fire departments you described; but in this case
I think many people were aware that if they didn't act quickly among
themselves to develop solutions, the government would step in and impose
its own. Probably everyone on the Net knows more of the details here
than I do, but my sense is that these privately initiated efforts have
worked and are still working across a broad range of problems.
But there's nothing that stops private fire companies from being
instituted, just as the security system in my house is backed up by a
private security response system in addition to the public police. It
is
just not cost-effective to have non-monopoly fire services in a area,
and
if you are going to have a monopoly, it's as well to have it either
owned
or regulated by some group whose responsibility is to the people
served
rather than to the profits of the owner(s). When "the owners are us",
both interests are served at the same time.
Typically government protection of a monopoly makes it _harder_ to
change providers if the present one is unsatisfactory. Not long ago an
Oklahoma couple was arrested for hiring someone to deliver payroll
checks to their employees because the government mail was so slow. When
you found government police protection inadequate, you didn't have the
option of simply switching providers, but had to pay twice, for an
_additional_ security system. Had the police been private, they would
have gotten the message--right in the wallet--from your switching
providers that their service was lacking. The government police can
still _see_ all the additional security services that residences and
banks and other businesses are hiring, but the signal is left as a
dangling wire: it doesn't connect back to any output system. As I've
pointed out before, the jobs of police or other bureaucrats are
connected only very remotely to the satisfaction of their supposed
customers. If you compare bureaucratic with market mechanisms, I think
you'll find in each case of the former that the feedback function has
been disconnected, with corresponding consequences for control. It's
interesting that precisely those systems set up to control others are
not organized as control systems themselves (with respect to what they
were supposed to be controlling), whereas those that aren't are.
The rhetoric, familiar from our high-school civics class, about
regulation by some group representing the public interest may sound
great; but public choice theory explains what we've been seeing for some
time: that it doesn't work that way in practice. The devastation of
Western rangelands and forests, to take just one example, has occurred
on land owned by the federal government and managed by the Forest
Service or the BLM. Private property owners, whether ranchers or lumber
companies, are not destroying the land on which their own livelihood
depends. The bureaucrats supposedly looking out for the public interest
haven't intentionally instituted destructve policies, so far as I know,
but we need to look at what else they are controlling for. Here's a
simple, generic example: Problems are what guarantee intact or
expanding agency budgets. If nothing is going wrong, your budget gets
cut. Usually you don't have to hunt for problems, but it is
nevertheless good practice to make things sound worse than they
are--something I see here at the Center for AIDS Prevention Studies, for
example, where a finding of a 2% HIV prevalence rate in some country is
written up as a crisis requiring an immediate, massive, expensive
intervention (the evaluation of which happens to be our business).
In an anarchy, one may be able to predict reasonably reliably the
actions
of someone with whom you have contracted, in respect of actions about
which you have contracted. Under a rule of law, this level of
predictability becomes available for a wide range of actions. It
becomes
easier for people to develop perceptual control hierarchies that work
reasonably reliably than it would be in an anarchy. It allows for the
development of mutual support structures that are _not_ based on
contracts, but on the statistically reliable beneficial effects of
side-effect influences. These can and will occur even in an anarchy,
but
it's easier when the environmental feedback systems are stable.
Bottom line, we are dealing with the reliability of the environmental
feedback functions that involve other people, and the effect of that
reliability on the ability of living control systems to build
reliable hierarchies and reliable social structures. It has nothing
to do with philosophy.
Your point about stability is the usual argument in favor of rule of law
(as opposed to "rule of men"). Stability--the lack of it, that
is--could be seen as the major reason for lack of development in Third
World countries. Property claims, in particular, often have a legally
vague status; and, with no assurance that someone can't come along to
kick you off your land at any moment, people are reluctant to invest
very much in buildings or agricultural improvements. These are all
countries with strong governments, of course.
Instability, or unreliability, has become a serious problem in our own
society. The success of a business depends on long-range planning, but
new laws can be passed that put you out of business without warning.
(Proceeds from the new cigarette tax are going to tobacco farmers to
compensate them for their loss, but those affected usually aren't so
lucky.) Legislation nowadays--the Americans with Disabilities Act is
the best example--is now written deliberately to be vague, with the
meaning to be worked out in case law. The actual purpose is of course
to guaranteed a windfall for lawyers, but in the meantime it creates a
nightmare for employers, who have no way of knowing how to design
personnel policies that will be found legal.
It may be worth noting that there is countervailing consideration to
stability. For living control systems, stasis is death. If the
question of anarchy vs. government is going to turn on the issue of
stability, we will have to consider more specifically the features that
need to be stable and those that need to be dynamic, and how these
features might best be realized. For economic development and
prosperity, I think one of the most important things to be able to rely
on is freedom from third-party interference in contracts. For this kind
of stability, anarcho-capitalism wins hands-down over government. I'm
not sure what you're thinking of with the statistically reliable side
effects that are more likely under government than under anarchy, but
I'm interested in hearing. Otherwise, it looks to me as though the
spontaneous order of the market, based on negotiation and contract, is
much more likely to provide the needed mechanisms both for stability and
for a dynamic balancing of stability with flexibility.
To my mind the most interesting aspect of your argument, however, is
that it amounts to a secular version of the Argument from Design: If
there is organization, there must be an organizer--someone or some
agency in charge, constantly intervening to keep things in proper
running order, breaking up the monopolies of IBM and Microsoft,
enforcing the monopolies of the post office and the fire department, and
so on. The spontaneous order that I believe Hayek discerned in
biological systems as well as in market economies is the focus of the
new science of complexity, cutting across many disciplines; what is
interesting is the horizontal d�calage between its application to all
sorts of biological and social phenomena on the one hand, and to
political organization on the other, where centralized, top-down control
is still unquestioned.
Mike