Comments on my debate with Jan Helfield
1.
Jan
repeatedly makes arguments of the form “isn’t such and such a
bad outcome
possible under your system.” The answer is that since we don’t
have an adequate
theory of human societies almost no outcome is provably
impossible. The issue
is whether particular bad outcomes are more likely under my
system than his.
In
the
case of civil war, which he argued could conceivably happen
under an
anarcho-capitalist system, we have some evidence for the risks
of his system.
The government set up by the Constitution, a limited
government of the sort Jan
wants, resulted in a very bloody civil war less than a century
after it was
established. Similarly, if nuclear weapons exist, whatever the
institutions,
there is some possibility that they will be used. But we
observe that in a
world run by states a lot of nuclear and thermonuclear weapons
got built and
two of them got used.
2.
One
of Jan’s arguments was that anarchy existed for most of
history and
civilization only got started when government came along.
There are two
problems with this. The first is that, as I tried to make
clear in my opening
comments (and in more detail in things I’ve written), the
workability of the
institutions I proposed depends on competition, on a society
large enough
relative to the equilibrium size of rights enforcement
agencies so that there
are lots of them. You can describe hunter gatherer societies
as either
anarchys or governments, but they did not have the sorts of
institutions I
describe.
To
put
the point differently, Jan would reasonably object if I
claimed that the
existence of some very bad governments, such as the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia,
proved that government is bad—because that isn’t the sort of
government he is
defending. A hunter gatherer band is not the sort of anarchy I
am defending.
The
second
problem is that he is making a post hoc ergo propter hoc
argument. Lots
of things changed that led to modern societies including the
first
agricultural revolution, the second agricultural revolution,
the industrial
revolution, and a variety of other changes. He thinks they
were set off by the
invention of the state but has no way of distinguishing that
theory from the
theory that the surplus produced by the invention of
agricultural made it possible
to establish states using some of that surplus to maintain the
apparatus
needed to funnel the rest of it to those ruling the states.
3.
Jan
keeps making arguments that hinge on his description of how he
thinks my system would work without, so far as I can tell, any
serious analysis of what
institutions would or would not be stable in that environment.
I keep pointing
out that a firm that wants to defend its customers right or
wrong, or even to
defend its customers whenever its own court says they are
right, faces a
problem. Either it gets other rights enforcement agencies to
agree or it
doesn’t. To get them to agree, it has to pay more than the
loss to them of
being unable to protect their customers’ rights against its
customers, which is
unlikely, since rights violation usually benefits the violator
less than it
harms the victim. If it doesn’t get them to agree, every
dispute results in
violent conflict and since it is facing that situation in all
disputes while
the other firms only in disputes with it, its costs are very
much higher.
Either way, it goes out of business.
4.
Jan
offers three responses to the argument for why voters will be
rationally
ignorant:
A. Sometimes, as in the
Florida vote in
Bush v Gore, a few votes make a difference. Even in that
case, a few
thousand votes made a difference—there was no voter who would
have changed the
outcome by changing his vote. And that was one case in one
state in all of U.S.
history, so the odds for a voter of ending up even in that
situation are tiny.
B. You can influence
other people’s
votes. That is true, but unless you are very influential
you cannot change
enough votes to have a significant effect on a major election.
So the
implication is that most voters will be rationally ignorant, a
few influential
individuals will find out what outcomes are in their interest
and try to
produce them. There is no reason to expect their interest to
be the same as the
general interest. You end up with a system that benefits
concentrated interest
groups, groups that do have enough at stake and enough
resources to affect
outcomes, at the expense of everyone else.
C.
Jan
thinks it is inconsistent for me to believe it is in my
rational interest
to argue for anarchy but that it is not in voters’ rational
interest to find
out who they should support and do so. What he is missing is
that, in both
cases, the main incentive to act is not to influence the
outcome. People
participate in politics because it’s fun, because they like
arguing, because it
makes them feel important, because it is a way of meeting
others with similar
views, for a wide variety of reasons almost none of which
depends on whether
they are on the right side of the issues they get involved in.
The problem is
not that people have no incentive to vote but that they have
little incentive
to be well informed voters, and if voters are not well
informed their voting
does not force government to behave well.
I
will probably expand this as more ideas come to me. If Jan
writes a similar commentary from his side, I will link to it.