Continuing the philosophical discussion started in the "The ushers have gone TOO far" thread...

[Tom Lento]

First, thanks to Kyle and Keith for illustrating the difference. I'm not convinced that the privatized government system is better - I suspect it would be more cost-effective, but knowing as much as I do about social dilemmas and how people routinely fail to solve them, I also suspect the world would become a stupid, irritating, and probably more dangerous place to live. Not nearly as stupid and irritating a place to live as it would be if I was in charge, but more dangerous and less funny.

[quote krose]
I'm sure.  But if I had my druthers, I'd have houses in Ithaca, San Diego, Boston, New York, and Maui, along with a Hummer H1 and a Maserati.  But I have to make choices because of my limited resources.  Certainly having to choose between food and health care is a wee bit more distressing, but the fundamental problem---having multiple desires and needing to choose between them---is the same.

The problem is that all solutions in which everyone is 100% guaranteed to receive their most critical desires (shelter, food, water, clothing, or health care or some combination of those) is that uniformly they all can be implemented only by violating the rights of others.  I always put an individual's rights above others' desires, even critical ones.
[/quote]

First of all, even comparing multiple residences and expensive cars to FOOD and HEALTH CARE suggests a fundamental lack of understanding of how social structure impacts economic decisionmaking.

Second, this has nothing to do with the anarchy argument. Sorry if that wasn't clear. I was going back to the "irresponsible" argument from before. There is no decision there. The individual doesn't choose. I can either starve to death now, or risk potentially dying as a result of medical complications later because I can't afford quality care. Where, exactly, is my power to choose? I said nothing about falling back on the government. In fact, I made the distinction about quality health coverage because, frankly, Medicaid is not quality health coverage. Better than nothing, certainly, but it's awful. The problem exists, whether you fall back on government or not. The individual does not necessarily have the ability to choose, and so that individual should not be responsible for damages as a result of the actions of a third party. (remember that discussion? that's where this originated - which makes the rise of the whole anarchy topic that we're discussing now even more bizarre)

As for anarchy, people who put individual rights above everything are often completely blind to the effects of the social structure around them. I mentioned models which show that anarchy and altruism can coexist, and that reasonable solutions to social dilemmas are possible without a top-down governing system. However, models which create functioning anarchist societies ALL start with the assumption that everyone begins on equal footing. So in your anarchist revolution, I hope you'll first take all the resources in the world and redistribute them equally to everyone to allow them to make decisions from the same position. Otherwise, your system will spiral into a sub-optimal equilibrium where the existing division of resources (which incidentally drives the governing power at the individual level) will reproduce a society much like what we have today, but with those in power gaining more resources at the expense of everyone else.

Quite the conundrum. You might be able to have a world where the government isn't taking your property and giving it to others, but first you have to take property from the rich and give it to the poor. And then hope like hell that you've got the right mix of decisionmaking agents interacting with the correct set of alters to drive you to a positive equilibrium outcome.

I think I'd rather see a more limited form of government, personally, but then I'm fairly conservative when it comes to these things.