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Dec 24, 2022Liked by Michael Huemer

There seems to be a problem in thinking about the role of government that I don't know how to resolve: For any possible issue, there exists an argument for government intervention due to 3rd party effects / externalities. These arguments are many times very far fetched or highly implausible, or not very important, but people deserve a response to them. A perfect example is kidney sales. It's a very easy argument because the property rights to a kidney are well defined. However, the argument somehow devolves into worrying about the small chance that someone is killed for their kidney and ignores the patients with a 100% chance of needing a kidney. It's almost like there needs to be a social norm established where the burden of proof should be on the person who invokes the sci-fi third party effects that could possibly happen. David Friedman has done a good job of explaining why determining who properly owns a piece of property is far more complicated than most people think. This is where I run into trouble: I don't think efficiently assigning property rights is as easy as some libertarians believe, but I rarely buy other people's externality arguments, and in agreement with your post, government intervention is a new externality problem aimed at fixing another externality problem.

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I phrase the problem as "How to prevent the strong (including strong coalitions) from preying on the weak?". I think your formulation boils down to much the same thing. (If you disagree, I'm very interested in your thinking.)

You say "crimes are mainly actions that have expected benefits to the agent but larger harms to others". From a rights-oriented viewpoint, there's a huge problem with that statement.

In practice, people do seem sympathetic to cases with apparent positive-sum outcomes - if a starving man steals a piece of bread from a wealthy merchant, there's a rights violation but few people support harsh punishment for such cases. By your formulation, maybe there's no "crime".

But If a sex-starved man rapes a woman, one could argue that the harm to the woman is less than the benefit to the man, but most people would be horrified at the idea that the relative harms and benefits make this "not a crime".

And, of course, your formulation says there's no crime when 5 starving people murder 1 innocent to eat him (saving 5 lives at the expense of 1), and no crime when a stadium of spectators enjoys the torture of a single innocent, provided the benefit to the spectators is greater than harm to the innocent. To me, just because the outcome is positive sum doesn't automatically make it "not a crime".

Some kind of rights framework seems necessary.

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I agree people are by nature self-interested; I see that in myself. However, like you, I have an “altruistic” bent to make the world a better place; hence, my libertarian ideology. This is likely true of millions of people who think their preferred political parties, policies, ideologies, etc. will better serve mankind. How do you explain that bent?

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I think that selfishness combined with a long term outlook is successful for the individual and for society. If the criminal adds up his long term gains and losses from hurting someone for short-term profit, he/she will realize this is not in their own best interest.

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Decent overview of the basic social problem here, but it seems inevitable that part 2 will fail to effectively handle what I consider to be the central (correct) libertarian insight: "Governments are best modeled as stationary bandits who exploit the population over whom they rule in order to extract resources for themselves."

My rejoinder to this insight is: Yes, but *so what*? What are you going to do about it? Governments tend not to willingly sacrifice their power (and why would they?), so if you want to get rid of them you'll have to do a lot of violence. And in the end, you'll wind up where you started, with the group of people most capable of executing organized violence in charge.

Advocating for competition is all well and good. I, too, am an advocate for competition. Markets work, incentives shape behavior, economics is real, etc. I'm not retarded, I'm not a lefty (but I repeat myself), so none of this is new. However, monopolists have no incentive to allow for competition that will drive them out of business, and this is true for governments as well.

You acknowledge that just teaching people to be nice is a fantasy solution. I claim that just teaching governments to allow for competition is no less a fantasy. What say you, Prof Huemer?

(Apologies if my tone seems hostile, as this is not intended to be a rhetorical question. I'd be stoked to have my mind changed about this; I'm not just expecting it.)

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Will you write a post that at some point explains the difference between anarcho-capitalism and individual retaliation? The private police force idea is basically just individuals or groups paying for collective retaliation forces that would operate like a state but with far less oversight as the people choosing them and their victims are entirely different

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There is one other version of the Fantasy Solution.

Some people are extremely altruistic, perhaps a similar percentage of the population as the psychopaths. The underlying psychological traits that lead to this behavior also seem (like most psychological traits!) to be highly heritable. Therefore:

2a. The Great Improvement People Find Monstrous

Let's put a lot of effort into artificially selecting / engineering morally better humans. As the first stage, let's put substantial thought into what a rights-respecting, voluntaryist approach to improving the gene pool would look like.

Sure, you *can* train a Queensland Heeler not to bite your friends when they hug you, but it sure takes a lot less work if you start with a Golden Retriever.

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deletedDec 27, 2022·edited Dec 27, 2022
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