This book offers some of the most cogent arguments for anarco-capitalism, so I want to give a brief illustration of what an Objectivist counter-argument would look like.
(For the uninitiated, Objectivism is a philosophical system that agrees with libertarianism on some points and disgrees on others. It's difficult to summarise all of the differences because modern-day "libertarianism" is quite a vague term. However, Objectivism is definitely opposed to the anarcho-capitalist wing of the libertarian movement. For the curious, [1] is a good basic introduction to Objectivism, and [2] contains a slightly more technical introduction.)
Page 62 of David Friedman's book:
> In such an anarchist society, who would make the laws? On what basis would the private arbitrator decide what acts
were criminal and what their punishments should be? The answer is that systems of law would be produced for profit
on the open market, just as books and bras are produced today. There could be competition among different brands of
law, just as there is competition among different brands of cars.
> In such a society there might be many courts and even many legal systems. Each pair of protection agencies agree in
advance on which court they will use in case of conflict. Thus the laws under which a particular case is decided are
determined implicitly by advance agreement between the protection agencies whose customers are involved. In
principle, there could be a different court and a different set of laws for every pair of protection agencies. In practice, many agencies would probably find it convenient to patronize the same courts, and many courts might find it
convenient to adopt identical, or nearly identical, systems of law in order to simplify matters for their customers.
It's precisely this point that every pair of protection agencies needs some kind of prior agreement that prevent normal market dynamics from applying to dealing between protection agencies in such a system. In normal markets any firm is free to walk away from any deal with any other firm, and find an alternative. This freedom to walk away and find an alternative offer is what gives both sides negotiating leverage.
This might be difficult -- if a startup makes iPhone apps, they will find it difficult to avoid dealing with Apple, but they do have options -- they can switch to making Android apps, convert their apps to purely web apps, petition Goldman Sachs to fund the next generation of iPhone-killing smartphones, and so on.
However, if Bob's Local Small Town Protection Agency (with 50 employees) is signing a deal with WalMart Mega Protection Agency (with 2 million employees), Bob has to agree to whatever terms the WalMart agency sets. If he does not, if there is ever a conflict between one of Bob's clients and one of WalMart's clients, the WalMart agency can simply send their vast army over and force Bob's agency to submit. Assuming that Bob and WalMart both realise this when negotiating their deal, both will also realise that Bob effectively has to agree to whatever terms WalMart sets.
The takeaway of all this is that it is not logically possible to have a system where "every chooses their own 'brand of law'". The reason is that since anyone can hypothetically interact with anyone else, whatever legal system you choose to adopt will have to "interface" with every other legal system, on terms that are ultimately set by naked force. Or: no matter which "personal legal system" you choose, you're locked into the same "meta-legal system" as everyone else, one with a very odd structure.
One million scientologists demand that anyone who criticises scientology be heavily fined? You have to pay the fines, unless your agency is able to fend off the scientologists. One hundred thousand Salafists declare that they will kill anyone who criticises Islam? Unless your protection agency is able to shut them down, you have to remain silent.
(The logical endpoint of these dynamics is that everyone subscribes to a few very large protection agencies, and anarcho-capitalism ends up looking something like medieval feudalism, where everyone ultimately relies on a few powerful "dukes" and "kings" for protection.)
> In such a society law is produced on the market. A court supports itself by charging for the service of arbitrating
disputes. Its success depends on its reputation for honesty, reliability, and promptness and on the desirability to
potential customers of the particular set of laws it judges by.
This creates an enormous incentive for protection agencies to covertly lie, smear, and destroy the reputations of competing agencies via whatever means available.
> Consider, as a particular example, the issue of capital punishment. Some people might feel that the risk to themselves of being convicted, correctly or incorrectly, and executed for a capital crime outweighed any possible advantages of capital punishment. They would prefer, where possible, to patronize protection agencies that patronized courts that did not give capital punishment. Other citizens might feel that they would be safer from potential murderers if it was known that anyone who murdered them would end up in the electric chair. They might consider that safety more important than the risk of ending up in the electric chair themselves or of being responsible for the death of an innocent accused of murder. They would, if possible, patronize agencies that patronized courts that did give capital punishment.
> Disputes between two anti-capital-punishment agencies will, of course, go to an anti-capital-punishment court; disputes between two pro-capital-punishment agencies will go to a pro-capital-punishment court. What would happen
in a dispute between an anti-capital-punishment agency and a pro-capital-punishment agency? Obviously there is no way that if I kill you the case goes to one court, but if you are killed by me it goes to another. We cannot each get exactly the law we want.
> We can each have our preferences reflected in the bargaining demands of our respective agencies. If the opponents of capital punishment feel more strongly than the proponents, the agencies will agree to no capital punishment; in exchange, the agencies that want capital punishment will get something else. Perhaps it will be agreed that they will
not pay court costs or that some other disputed question will go their way.
This is exactly the consequences of "everyone chooses their own laws" put into action. Not only can we not get "exactly the law we want", we have to either pay off or haggle with everyone who wants a competing law (the amount of payment driven by how strongly either side "feels" about the issue in question).
I've heard ancaps argue that the current system in the West is similar (in that you have to accept the laws that the majority votes for). The current system is certainly not ideal. My point is that an ancap-style system doesn't even lead to anything resembling what most libertarians are looking for in a free society. (Anyone curious can read the two links in the post above for references to more material on what I think a rational path to a free society would look like.)
Honestly, it sounds like anarchocapitalism would quickly devolve into something resembling street gang rivalries (barring an completely unrealistic, near-religious commitment to the principles of anarchocapitalism by all members of society). It's hard to believe that "choose your own laws" won't end up with many, many groups choosing "the law is we get what we want, and you have to support us or be punished."
"A second theme we have here is the complication of our view of the Dothraki – presented here as a sophisticated, culturally flexible people who can put on “rich fabrics and sweet perfumes” when they visit their second homes among the palaces of Pentos, yet who still hold to their own culture where everything is done under the open sky."
"One of George R.R Martin’s innovations that sadly didn’t make it onto the screen is the way in which he both displays and subverts the traditional fantasy tropes about barbarians and barbarism."
"Any fantasy work with a foot in the Middle Ages has to reflect this history. And yet, the line between “Christendom” and “barbarism” was never simple – Medieval Europe was built out of the invasions of Goths, Franks, and Vandals into the Roman Empire, just as Westeros was built out of the invasions of the First Men, Andals, Rhoynar, and Valaryians."
Have you read the book "Running on Empty" by Jonice Webb? It describes a pattern she identifies as "childhood emotional neglect" (a possibly misleading label). The pattern she describes usually includes a combination of lack of attention, lack of an emotional connection between parent and child, and lack of appropriate responses to problems the child faces.
Your comment made me think of that book, and I certainly found it very useful in overcoming some of the lingering consequences of my odd upbringing. My mother was not abusive, but was alternately neglectful and controlling, and I only recently found out that she was continuing patterns from her own childhood. I highly recommend the book if your situation is at all similar.
The rationale for the drug laws is interesting: when Singapore gained independence in the 1960s, it was essentially a small third-world city without much of a local economy.
Lee Kuan Yew realised that Singapore's future lay in becoming a trading city. They built a port, invested in infrastructure, and basically oriented all their policies around making the city-state as attractive as possible for foreign investment. One reason the streets were kept so orderly and well-maintained was to impress foreign visitors that Singapore was a reliable place to operate in (compare to many developing countries where the ride from the airport will pass ramshackle buildings, potholed streets, garbage everywhere, etc). They kept the British common law system because it's a good system to do business under. Etc.
They also knew that, given the region (SE Asia) is a hotbed of drug trafficking, if Singapore became a successful port then tons of drugs would pass through the city. Drugs would mean organised crime. Organised crime would mean corruption. Corruption would scare off foreign investment. Singapore could have ended up looking like most other third-world countries, only too small to retain its independence, and could easily have been reabsorbed into Malaysia or Indonesia.
The reason the drug penalties are so harsh is to scare away any possibility of drug trafficking happening there.
Just to be clear, I'm not condoning Singapore's policies. Weed is certainly not the same as heroin or crack cocaine. Harsh sentences for carrying a tiny bit of marijuana is pretty draconian. (I looked up some news articles, and it seems as though foreigners are unlikely to get the death penalty for small amounts of weed, but you can still expect jail time and caning.)
In a similar way, one rationale behind Singapore's censorship is a similar reason to the (effective) censorship many European countries have -- Singapore has some simmering ethnic tensions, and wants to prevent anyone publishing inflammatory rhetoric. (That's not the only reason, afaik, but it's one of them.)
Still: it's worth remembering that Singapore started out in an unusual position with unusual constraints. Everything they have done has been with the aim of turning themselves from a third-world to a first-world country in a few decades. They've seen many other post-colonial countries go down bad trajectories, despite said countries receiving tons of foreign aid, support from international organisations, allowing Western NGOs to operate internally, etc. So they don't have much time for Western journalists/academics/etc who push them to change their policies, because they think the policies they're being pushed to adapt would have led them to disaster.
If anyone's curious to learn more about the Singapore approach I'd point them to first look up Lee Kuan Yew's books, or interviews of him, to get an introduction to how he thought about governance and how he approached Singapore's challenges.
My own takeaway is that Singapore stands out because most other developing countries have been run so badly. It's not that Lee Kuan Yew had a brilliant political philosophy that all countries should adopt (he claimed to be skeptical of political philosophy), it's more that he was both pragmatic and took a long-range view, and put into practice many sensible policies that other developing countries could have adopted in an alternative timeline. On the other hand, that is definitely not to say that all of his policies are justifiable. I gather that Singapore is slowly changing now that they feel more secure in their first-world status, but they're still pretty averse to adopting the kinds of policies Western nations and the UN usually push other countries to adopt.
Your comment makes absolute sense especially when viewed with my Eastern upbringing lens. Let me use it to add a few more relevant points concerning other Asian countries.
The same logic is used by people like me to justify why only dictatorial state controlled capitalism with quick decision making, very serious censorship laws and crushing of any opponents to ensure single party rule etc. was important for a country like China to progress so fast. A democracy with multiple dissenting opinions in a third world country would mean many vested and crony interests would hijack the country and nothing would happen, e.g. India where only recently has the system started making faster, more transparent decisions.
I always see the kind of nuance you mention especially for a relatively easy to govern small state which leverages its location for growth is missing when discussing the problems of larger nations. Even in the larger outlets in the Western world. It is mostly a case of intellectual laziness where labels and general summary of a complex and large country is used in day to day discussions or articles.
Of course a woman can be a "maker". Of course an attractive person can be a "maker". But Naomi Wu's entire shtick seems to be "skimpily dressed girl with fake tits does stereotypically nerdy male activity". Look at her Youtube channel [1] - every video starts with an anime cartoon of her, obviously intended to titillate.
People have frequently criticised startups for using sex to promote their products. (E.g., Geeklist, a few years back [2]). Now a scantily clad woman is a feminist icon? I get that there's a view of the world whereby the Geeklist woman was being exploited, and Naomi Wu is simply owning her sexuality, or whatever. For most outsiders it simply looks like fashion. Using sex to promote tech products was passe, and now it's in again and slightly edgy, but only if you're cool enough to pull it off.
She has an explanation about how the breast implants really express her interest in bodyhacking and the outfits reflect the cyberpunk style of Shenzhen. (B.S., by the way - most of Shenzhen is just a normal Chinese city). And when all her photos and videos are of her in a skimpy outfit, wearing makeup and with hair styled - she's choosing to present herself in a certain way. She could do a video wearing a sweater, working on a late night project with a ponytail and bagged eyes, but she doesn't. She knows looking good will get her videos more clicks. (It takes a lot of effort to look good consistently, which is why engineers and scientists of either gender are stereotypically not good-looking. They're spending too much time on other things).
Then there's the fact that her Twitter [3] simply doesn't sound like a mainland Chinese girl. No, I can't prove this. But I spent enough time studying Chinese and living in China, speaking with a wide range of Chinese people, and I'd bet any amount of money that those tweets were written by an American. Even when translated by a native English speaker, Chinese has a ton of idiosyncratic phrasings and sentence patterns that give it a distinctive style. (For an example, see ChinaSmack [4], which translates Chinese internet culture into English).
Not only do Naomi's tweets lack that style completely, they definitely do not sound like they were written who grew up in a Confucian culture. China favours modesty, hierarchy and conforming to the group. Sure, there are sassy, independent young Chinese women, but they don't sound like sassy, independent young American women. Naomi Wu sounds like an American woman. (Specifically American and not generically Western - Europeans don't have that brash aggressiveness). Again, I can't prove this, but her Twitter postings simply do not have the slightest hint of Chinese-ness. [Edit: having listened to more of her videos, it is highly unlikely the girl in the videos made those tweets].
Then there's the fact that she screenshotted his tweet and uses it as part of her Twitter header photo [3]. And the huge pile-on to a guy who made one tweet and later apologised for it. She even goes digging and trying to associate him with Donald Trump on fairly spurious grounds [5]. This whole story designed to hit the tech industry's buttons and incite everyone to pontificate about "tech bros". My guess is that her company is intentionally using this episode as a guerilla marketing/PR exercise, but I have no idea.
This article keeps asserting its core premise, but never offers any evidence. It cites people who agree with the premise that wealth is underserved, but this is not the same as an argument.
You don't need economic theory to refute an article like this - you simply need to point to reality. Every human need beyond picking wild berries off the trees takes effort to produce. The vast wealth of modern industrial society relies on complex forms of organisation and specialists in discovering and applying knowledge. Anyone's who's built a company, or even advanced in a demanding career, knows that success doesn't just fall in your lap. Beyond a certain point you have to really want to succeed and be willing to put in place the actions that lead to success.
I've always thought of life as being a series of opportunities, and depending on how you live your life and how lucky you are, that number differs.
Having opportunities is very different from success though; the successful are those who are smart, clever and quick enough to realize that the opportunity exists, and are diligent enough to actually realize that opportunity. After all, isn't Y-combinator quite literally an incubator of those who have noticed an opportunity and chosen to pursue it?
To top it off, the author doesn't seem to be an economist, but rather a professor of Geology. He appears to have studied and written about wealth, but the fact is as you say the article lacks any references to studies that back up his point.
I re-read the article and it only mentions labour vs capital once, in passing. Mostly it talks in terms of owners vs managers, and the principal-agent problem. You refer to "greedy pigs" and exploitation making it sound as though the author is anti-capitalist, but that does not seem to be the case).
(I was curious enough to look him up. He's a finance professor at HBS. That probably explains the different slant compared to other Atlantic articles).
It think it was more that the author is a supporter of real capitalism where you actually have to possess a conscience. But I think the population has a whole has abandoned this notion either out of ignorance or apathy. This is my lament for the current and future state of capitalism.
The question is not: what are the relative costs and benefits to user-repairable products? Of course there are both benefits and drawbacks.
The question is: who should decide?
That is, should the government enforce a "right to repair" - which means a ban on non-repairable products? Or should companies be able to manufacture both repairable and non-repairable products, and let consumers decide which they want to buy?
A free society is broader than just the free market. No companies manufacture a repairable version of X product? You can use free association to form the "Society for User-maintainable X Devices". You can use free speech to campaign in the press for user-maintainable X devices. You can promote to others the virtues of having a user-maintable X, until there's enough latent demand for startups to spring up to fill it.
In a perfect world, consumers have perfect information and understand the subtleties of repairability and all of the unseen costs of disposable products. This is not a perfect world.
Government needs to step in because waste is a serious problem that affects everyone, not just the purchasing consumer (and, additionally, to compensate for the fact that consumer ignorance is unavoidable). Contribution to global warming by requiring the purchase of more appliances and devices, for example, is a classic negative externality. One of the core purposes of government is to correct for externalities (according to Adam Smith).
It doesn't matter what they are selling it as. It's only important that it gets passed.
Electronics in general make use of a variety of "Rare Earth metals," that we are quickly running out of. At our current pace, we are set to run out of some of these Rare Earth metals in just a few decades. The United States is already 100% reliant on imports for many of them. Some sort of reduction scheme is necessary, otherwise the cost of all electronics will skyrocket in just a few years.
People have (or should have) the right to manufacture whatever products they want, and other people should have the right to buy whatever products they want. The only restrictions should be to prevent fraud (product has to work as advertised) and protect consumer safety (product shouldn't blow up).
You already have the right to pay extra for an extended warranty, or go shopping around for a version of X product that is user-maintainable. You also have the right to pay less for a shorter warranty, or buy a compact, tightly-integrated, non-repairable product. The EU's "right of repair" is merely a ban on the second category of product.
It's great that such a phone exists. People should be able buy a Fairphone, or buy an unrepairable iPhone, or whatever phone fits their needs.
The "right to repair" doesn't give people the right to buy a Fairphone. They already have the right. It removes their right to buy other kinds of phone.
(For the uninitiated, Objectivism is a philosophical system that agrees with libertarianism on some points and disgrees on others. It's difficult to summarise all of the differences because modern-day "libertarianism" is quite a vague term. However, Objectivism is definitely opposed to the anarcho-capitalist wing of the libertarian movement. For the curious, [1] is a good basic introduction to Objectivism, and [2] contains a slightly more technical introduction.)
Page 62 of David Friedman's book:
> In such an anarchist society, who would make the laws? On what basis would the private arbitrator decide what acts were criminal and what their punishments should be? The answer is that systems of law would be produced for profit on the open market, just as books and bras are produced today. There could be competition among different brands of law, just as there is competition among different brands of cars.
> In such a society there might be many courts and even many legal systems. Each pair of protection agencies agree in advance on which court they will use in case of conflict. Thus the laws under which a particular case is decided are determined implicitly by advance agreement between the protection agencies whose customers are involved. In principle, there could be a different court and a different set of laws for every pair of protection agencies. In practice, many agencies would probably find it convenient to patronize the same courts, and many courts might find it convenient to adopt identical, or nearly identical, systems of law in order to simplify matters for their customers.
It's precisely this point that every pair of protection agencies needs some kind of prior agreement that prevent normal market dynamics from applying to dealing between protection agencies in such a system. In normal markets any firm is free to walk away from any deal with any other firm, and find an alternative. This freedom to walk away and find an alternative offer is what gives both sides negotiating leverage.
This might be difficult -- if a startup makes iPhone apps, they will find it difficult to avoid dealing with Apple, but they do have options -- they can switch to making Android apps, convert their apps to purely web apps, petition Goldman Sachs to fund the next generation of iPhone-killing smartphones, and so on.
However, if Bob's Local Small Town Protection Agency (with 50 employees) is signing a deal with WalMart Mega Protection Agency (with 2 million employees), Bob has to agree to whatever terms the WalMart agency sets. If he does not, if there is ever a conflict between one of Bob's clients and one of WalMart's clients, the WalMart agency can simply send their vast army over and force Bob's agency to submit. Assuming that Bob and WalMart both realise this when negotiating their deal, both will also realise that Bob effectively has to agree to whatever terms WalMart sets.
The takeaway of all this is that it is not logically possible to have a system where "every chooses their own 'brand of law'". The reason is that since anyone can hypothetically interact with anyone else, whatever legal system you choose to adopt will have to "interface" with every other legal system, on terms that are ultimately set by naked force. Or: no matter which "personal legal system" you choose, you're locked into the same "meta-legal system" as everyone else, one with a very odd structure.
One million scientologists demand that anyone who criticises scientology be heavily fined? You have to pay the fines, unless your agency is able to fend off the scientologists. One hundred thousand Salafists declare that they will kill anyone who criticises Islam? Unless your protection agency is able to shut them down, you have to remain silent.
(The logical endpoint of these dynamics is that everyone subscribes to a few very large protection agencies, and anarcho-capitalism ends up looking something like medieval feudalism, where everyone ultimately relies on a few powerful "dukes" and "kings" for protection.)
> In such a society law is produced on the market. A court supports itself by charging for the service of arbitrating disputes. Its success depends on its reputation for honesty, reliability, and promptness and on the desirability to potential customers of the particular set of laws it judges by.
This creates an enormous incentive for protection agencies to covertly lie, smear, and destroy the reputations of competing agencies via whatever means available.
[1] https://theobjectivestandard.com/what-is-objectivism/
[2] https://objectivismindepth.com/introduction-to-objectivism/