JThomas, if you read further back, you'll find the original unanswered challenge: evidence that private security is as bad or worse than government monopoly security, given that there are as many private security forces as there are government security forces.
I certainly wouldn't say that under the current system private security has as much freedom as government police. Why would they? If they had all the perqs that police do, they would be police and would act like police.
You had to reach back 25 years for a single solitary example, and had to admit that homeless people are shafted by the monopoly government "justice" system, and that the same homeless people have developed ways to locate competitors who will treat them better.
Well, their methods to find places they are tolerated are a bit hit-or-miss, and they can get badly hurt by missing, but yes. I could give other examples but the first one I saw was particularly vivid for me.
That hardly counts as an unqualified success for the state apologia side of the debate. Frankly, you are making more arguments for the AnCap side than not.
Why wouldn't I? What we have is not very good. AnCap enthusiasts might quite likely develop something much better.
I don't see that our current rent-a-cops compared to police tells us much about what to expect in an AnCap society. It would be different.
What kind of legal system would it have? Would there develop a few businesses doing arbitration that everybody used? Hard to get an agreement to use your own arbitrator if he doesn't have a leading reputation. Would some arbitrating businesses develop a strong tendency to side with particular private police?
In any system, you're in trouble if violent people get you alone and afterward it's your word against theirs, unless their word is considered particularly bad.
Very hard to get a perfect justice system. If an AnCap justice system is something most people can live with most of the time, it could be a great big improvement over what we have now even if it has some big flaws.
Meanwhile, you can google up dozens or hundreds of instances of unwarranted police brutality; there are at least two current cases raging in Denver even as I type these words.
When I thought about it, a collection of ideas came together. Bear with me -- we get these cases publicised mostly when middle-class white americans get mistreated. There are thousands and thousands of cases where it's poor people or blacks and it isn't news then -- nobody really expects anything different. Except for a tiny handful of cases where it's somebody who's underprivileged getting hurt and they get clear documentary evidence that all gets dismissed, like Rodney King.
So it looks to me like what's going on here is that people are making a great big fuss because increasingly the police are deciding that they can treat middle-class white people like niggers. And the middle-class white people hate that.
And as we increasingly separate between an upper class that gets richer and a middle class that's sinking, it gets safer for the police to treat middle class people like niggers. We don't like it, but the poorer we get the less we can do about it.
And when I think of it that way, it occurs to me that there would be a very big difference between an AnCap society where most people were pretty well off, versus an AnCap society with a small upper class and a large lower class.
If you can't get work unless some rich person will hire you, and you're homeless unless a rich person will rent to you, you're pretty much living on their sufferance and you don't have a lot of rights. And if pretty much everybody is in that position.... If the rich people and their police all strongly believe in AnCap ideals that would make some sort of difference. An AnCap society that started out great could gradually slip into control by a rich minority, and pay lip-service to the ideals.
It makes sense to try for a good AnCap society, even though there's a chance things could turn bad after you make them good at first.