... but one of the conditions of living in a free society is that one should have no cause to fear the initiation of force against you by the State unless you break a previously written and formally defined rule. With taxes and conscription being "fair to everyone" exceptions.
The problem is that the rules are (a) arbitrary and (b) imposed on the majority by the minority.
For the most part, the minority that makes the laws has a strong incentive to pay attention to what the majority wants. They don't pay enough attention to the laws of unintended consequences, etc. But they try to make sure that people don't object to their laws too much. The trouble is, by the time the administration interprets the new laws and makes directives etc, and the judiciary interprets the new laws their way, there's a certain arbitrary quality to the results. We have too many layers between the public and the legal system.
Make law informal, you can get an internal dictatorship: we've seen how small towns have enforced conformity with religion in the U.S. on many occasions.
Really? You say that as though you are quoting fact. Give me one documented historic example that didn't involve government force.
I think this kind of argument is futile. One guy quotes a generally-accepted stereotype. The other guy says to provide proof that it really happened. Many things that everybody knows are hard to document -- are they wrong, or are they only hard to document? Are there towns with speed traps, where they entrap visitors and make them pay unreasonable fines for traffic offenses they didn't really do? Are you really more likely to get a traffic ticket toward the end of the month? Have blacks been lynched for trivial offenses without being accused of actual major crimes? The towns have documentation that each of their traffic offenders broke the law. Daily traffic arrest records are not released. The large majority of lynchings were probably not published at all -- how would we find out about that unless we interviewed a lot of old people and believed what they said?
In general we have no way to prove whether "what everybody knows" is wrong or not. If you can prove it, it's science. Otherwise it's only history or law or something. Pick an authority and quote his "lucid" words. Argue that the evidence for what you don't want to believe is inadequate. It doesn't get anywhere. We might as well argue whether OJ did it.
There are certainly a lot of stories about small towns not leaving people alone, when those people are public about scandalous behavior. And in some cases practicing unusual religions has been considered scandalous. Often the local government has gotten involved in one way or another.
How about this -- in an ideal AnCap community, people would mostly leave each other alone. In a real AnCap society that might include lots of human beings with prejudices, those people might not leave alone the people who offend them. There's no ideal solution to this in any existing society so far, and there may not be an ideal solution in real AnCap societies either.
Abolish taxes and conscription, you can get a successful foreign invasion...
Really? How do you know? Where is your evidence that these things are necessary to defend yourself. Has any modern empire ever conquered Afghanistan?
Latest the USA. Previously, the USSR and Britain before them. Each of those conquests did eventually fail, as did all the ones before including the mongols and Alexander. Each of them added to the afghan gene pool.
Aghans suffered a lot in each invasion. Would they have done better with a better army? I don't particularly see that they would. When you keep a standing army to avoid getting invaded then you have all the problems of a standing army between invasions. And then when the invasion comes they're likely out of practice. To keep an army sharp they need actual hands-on experience at war, and between invasions they don't get that unless they invade somebody.
It's a problem when other people have armies, and I don't see a good solution. Having your own army may be the best you can do, or maybe it just isn't that good.
we've seen how well tanks and airplanes do against equine cavalry.
Yes, but the Afghan still survive and a modern market anarchy would have the wealth to buy all the defense you can eat.
I believe that hiring mercenary armies is not generally the solution either, but I can't prove it.
I say you don't have to know all the answers ahead of time. We've tried a bunch of statist approaches and we pretty much know what to expect from them. If you try something new then maybe we'll get a new result.
So if you set up a working AnCap society and then some state gets ready to invade and everybody runs around in circles screaming and then they decide they need conscription and taxes to stop the statists, what you you have? It was a good first effort.
And if you set up a second working AnCap society and somebody invades and they try some approach that doesn't work and the state takes over, what do you have? It was a good second effort.
If you keep trying, eventually you will find a way that works. You don't have to have all the answers before you start.
Behind our efforts, let there be our efforts. Gene Wolfe, _Claw of the Conciliator_
