I am not going to reply to all the points individually. I wrote up individual responses for some of them, but the results were even more repetitive than usual and not very interesting. So I will instead try to address the big points in one more or less coherent post, and if there is anything I have missed, please say so and I will respond to the point in question as best I can.
Mellyrn, we seem to be at risk of getting into a circular argument over whether the state or private entities kill more people. It's not an argument I want to get into, not so much because it's circular but because I never argued that a state apparatus would always be peaceful, or that government would always be benevolent. I am not that naive. Both individuals and states kill people; I won't go into numbers because it's a futile exercise. The website you linked earlier proves the point -- was Genghis Khan really a state actor, or was he a very effective leader who unified a nomadic people much as individuals attract followers today, save on a much greater scale? The answer is entirely meaningless. I suppose I view the state as sort of like a firearm -- it's a neutral tool that can be used for a variety of purposes, good, neutral, and bad.
I do argue that institutionalized methods of dispute resolution are essential in a modern industrial society. The nature of the mechanism does not matter, but its presence and legitimacy do matter quite a bit. On a theoretical level, dispute resolution that does not involve one party coercing the other is a form of cooperative behavior. Cooperation as a rule requires (1) symmetry of power and (2) iterative interaction between participants. Axelrod's
Evolution of Cooperation is one of the definitive theoretical texts on cooperative behavior, and the wiki article links to the paper on which the book is based, so I won't make a hash of trying to summarize why iterative behavior is important here. I will say that symmetry of power is important because if the power balance is heavily skewed towards one party in a dispute, the more-powerful party has little reason to cooperate in order to achieve a mutually beneficial outcome, absent other considerations which alter the cost-benefit calculus.
In practice, this means that while a dispute between neighbors can usually be resolved peacefully and to mutual advantage without involving a third party, disputes between relative strangers or between parties of asymmetric power can require some dispute resolution mechanism. And even well-meaning individuals might have trouble resolving their differences. I raised earlier the example of how "harm" can be interpreted in different ways in situations which are all to common in industrial society, to the point where one party might not even think it is causing any sort of harm.
A legal system establishes a basic set of rules for such disputes, whether through precedent or laws, but it must maintain the appearance of fairness and impartiality, else it becomes perceived as a Dickensian domain of drunk judges, biased juries, and soulless attorneys selling "justice" to the highest bidder. But fun descriptions aside, point is that a complex society needs a commonly-accepted dispute resolution mechanism that is seen as legitimate -- as impartial and fair. Not
everyone has to agree that it is fair, and the losing party will almost always complain about the injustice of it all, but that's a universal aspect of every system of dispute resolution.
That sort of dispute resolution system as far as I am concerned will not be any different from a state, because it still involves an entity legitimizing one party's use of force against another in order to enforce an outcome it deems fair. Such a system would also homogenize a society's "rules," to borrow Mellyrn's terminology, at least within its jurisdiction so long as decisions create precedent. It might be a very amorphous, minimalist state, but a state nonetheless. How fair such a system will be in an an-cap depends on its particulars, same as for any real-life justice system. In sum, at the local level individuals do resolve disputes on their own; but that doesn't happen in many cases, which is why parties seek arbitration, or mediation, or go to court, and will seek to do so regardless of the type of government they live under, or whether there is a government at all.
Certain problems posed by modern industrial society may also be better solved in advance, rather than by waiting for a harm to manifest so that the mechanisms of traditional litigation (or arbitration, or whatever else) may be invoked. Apologies to macstafu for not fully addressing his earlier point. It would be more correct to say that the solutions, or lack thereof, offered by the market have been consistently rejected by the people of every industrial society. I find many of Marx's theories naive, but his writings illustrate very well the complaints many people had against the near-unrestricted capitalism of the mid-nineteenth century; they are well-worth reading, if only for a historical perspective. Much of the legislation enacted under pressure from the Progressive movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the United States was a response to the inequities and problems posed by the free market. Modern environmental legislation is a response to the perceived inadequacies of litigation as deterrent to harmful behavior. We may see new workplace legislation and stricter enforcement of such rules in China within the next decade.
A society
might find the negative effects of unrestricted capitalism acceptable, of course. But historically that hasn't been the case.
I do not argue that everything a government does will always be good, or that every problem can be solved by more legislation or additional state intervention. In many cases state intervention causes more harm than good. But in many cases the state prevents greater harm as well. Ostrom's
Governing the Commons provides an interesting perspective on how people solve common-pool-resource problems using mixed public-private approaches.
State violence against its own citizens is frequently brought up here. Unfortunately, we do not know how much violence the state prevents in developed countries, since there's no available example of a working industrial society that's not covered by a state as far as I am aware. We do know that breakdown of state authority is associated with significant increase in violence by private entities against individuals and other entities, whether it is the complete breakdown of state authority in Somalia, or lack of enforcement in early 90s Russia or in some inner cities of the United States during that same time period.
The cost of having a state under a democratic government is the need for eternal vigilance against unacceptable use of the state's police powers. The cost of not having a state is the potential for violence and the lack of a framework by which to address various problems that the market doesn't solve adequately. It is, yet again, a matter of costs and benefits. My own experience growing up in Russia following the dissolution of the USSR is that people will embrace an autocrat if he protects them from random violence, doubly so if the autocrat also promises economic stability; for all the talk of democracy in Iraq, quite a few Iraqis are very ambivalent about the whole concept -- people did not have to worry about sectarian death squads or bombs under Saddam, since Saddam's brand of violence tended to be fairly rational and systemic. Of course, the degree of violence expected under in a developed society that embraces an-cap depends heavily on assumptions. A society composed of individuals who all seek to be left alone and who strive to avoid harming others doesn't need laws or rules; in my experience people can ostensibly "harm" one another even when their goals are commendable.
That about summarizes my argument, and I hope also addresses all of the responses. To repeat: I am not arguing that more laws are thee answer to all of our problems. Most problems faced by society can and should be solved at the local level, sometimes by deciding to not do anything at all. But there are times when the state's intervention is desirable. Similarly, I am not arguing that states are nonviolent, but rather that experience so far suggests that when subject to appropriate institutional and social safeguards, a state is fairly good at severely reducing or eliminating violence, mitigating conflict, and resolving problems.
I won't go into detail explaining why it's not a problem if a voter only agrees with his chosen candidate some of the time, and is possibly a good thing.
Federalist No.10 was written by a very smart person struggling with the problem of how to get people of contrary interests to exhibit cooperative behavior, and how to avoid both autocracy and mob rule in the process. Considering how the past two hundred years turned out, he seems to have been on to something. Aldrich's
Why Parties is probably more interesting, if only because he uses modern English language; he recently published a follow-up book which I will have to pick up at some point. Fact of the matter is that sometimes elected officials have to make choices the electorate overwhelmingly does not support, in order to avoid outcomes the electorate also does not support. Sometimes a representative will have multiple constituencies, especially in a two-party system where both parties are large umbrella organizations. Perhaps more importantly, we elect officials to run the country; if they mess up, we usually toss them out, at least in the developed world.
Also going to avoid discussing legitimacy of political systems. So much has been written on the subject that it's easier to just suggest using JSTOR or Ovid or another similar database.
