Barbara wrote:At this point, Hogeye, you have defined state, and apparently were defining Government, as an organizational entity in pocession of an army.
No, we were defining government as an organization which provides legal/arbitration services. This is not a standard definition, but is serviceable.
Barbara wrote:The only thing I can say about that is when you have "competing organizations" having armies, you have war.
Counter-example - the US and Canada have competing organizations an no war. There are many pairs of States, in "anarchic" relation to each other, with do not automatically go to war.
War between armed groups is a possibility. Let's compare a) the likelihood and incentives of statism vs anarchism, and then b) the worst-case scenerios for statism vs anarchism.
Incentives - A state can conscript its subjects, and plunder them by taxation and forced labor to pay for wars; a PDA (private defense agency) can't do either. It's customers would switch services if it tried to ramp up prices or enslave their customers. Thus, for States you have the perverse incentive that the rulers get the goodies, wealth, fame, power, while the subjects pay the costs. For a PDA, war is expensive and costly for the owners, and simply bad business. Thus, PDAs are more likely than States to opt for negotiated solutions.
But if war happens - States, being territorially-based, are willing and able to use weapons of mass destruction, like nuclear bombs and biological warfare. Hell, everyone "there" is the enemy, as the dogma of statism identifies rulers with subjects with land area. PDAs, not being territorially based, make use of such untargeted weapons untenable - a firm doesn't want to kill its own customers. Pepsi doesn't nuke Coke because they have plants and customers in the same towns. So if worse comes to worse, disputes between PDAs will use targeted weapons rather than weapons of mass destruction; PDAs will likely target only enemy combatants, while as we know State are notorious for mass murder of innocents ("collateral damage".) So disputes between States are immensely more destructive, murderous, and large-scale than disputes between PDAs.
Barbara wrote:When you have a single entity with an army and nobody else has one (monopoly) you also have despotic government.
Cool! I think you're getting it now! Statism =- monopoly government; anarchism = competing governments. When you have monopoly governments, they get authoritarian and even despotic, as we can see just by looking at the world. They violate people's rights, and provide lousy protection. That why I prefer anarchism. It sounds like you're coming around, too.
Barbara wrote:The societies that have or had what I call government and Hogeye calls "mutually agreed-upon wise elders" or "private judges" have been taken over by societies with armies.
Some have, some were able to defend themselves. States, even those with armies have been taken over by competing States with armies, too. I think the question you're getting at is,
which type of society defends itself more effectivly against foreign invasion? That's hard to say. Stateless Celtic Ireland more or less successfully defended itself against near constant-invasion for, what, ten centuries? That's longer than most States survive. Thing Iceland was not taken over by military conquest; it was perverted by Xtians. It lasted four centuries, twice as long as the USEmpire.
Barbara wrote:Anglo-Saxons had government, frequently of - or at least with co-ruling - warrior kings, as did the ancient Celts - they just had smaller territories than we currently think of, more like principalities or city-states.
You are mistaken. These "warrior kings" were more like militia commanders - they had little or no power except in wartime. They had no legislative or executive power - they could not make or decree law. Also, people could switch
tuaths. Here's some info about Celtic Ireland:
For a thousand years, then, ancient Celtic Ireland had no State or anything like it. As the leading authority on ancient Irish law has written: "There was no legislature, no bailiffs, no police, no public enforcement of justice…. There was no trace of State-administered justice."9
How then was justice secured? The basic political unit of ancient Ireland was the tuath. All "freemen" who owned land, all professionals, and all craftsmen, were entitled to become members of a tuath. Each tuath's members formed an annual assembly which decided all common policies, declared war or peace on other tuatha, and elected or deposed their "kings." An important point is that, in contrast to primitive tribes, no one was stuck or bound to a given tuath, either because of kinship or of geographical location. Individual members were free to, and often did, secede from a tuath and join a competing tuath. Often, two or more tuatha decided to merge into a single, more efficient unit. As Professor Peden states, "the tuath is thus a body of persons voluntarily united for socially beneficial purposes and the sum total of the landed properties of its members constituted its territorial dimension."10 In short, they did not have the modern State with its claim to sovereignty over a given (usually expanding) territorial area, divorced from the landed prop erty rights of its subjects; on the contrary, tuatha were voluntary associa tions which only comprised the landed properties of its voluntary mem bers. Historically, about 80 to 100 tuatha coexisted at any time throughout Ireland.
But what of the elected "king"? Did he constitute a form of State ruler? Chiefly, the king functioned as a religious high priest, presiding over the worship rites of the tuath, which functioned as a voluntary religious, as well as a social and political, organization. As in pagan, pre-Christian, priesthoods, the kingly function was hereditary, this prac tice carrying over to Christian times. The king was elected by the tuath from within a royal kin-group (the derbfine), which carried the hereditary priestly function. Politically, however, the king had strictly limited functions: he was the military leader of the tuath, and he presided over the tuath assemblies. But he could only conduct war or peace negotiations as agent of the assemblies; and he was in no sense sovereign and had no rights of administering justice over tuath members. He could not legislate, and when he himself was party to a lawsuit, he had to submit his case to an independent judicial arbiter.
Again, how, then, was law developed and justice maintained? In the first place, the law itself was based on a body of ancient and immemorial custom, passed down as oral and then written tradition through a class of professional jurists called the brehons. The brehons were in no sense public, or governmental, officials; they were simply selected by parties to disputes on the basis of their reputations for wisdom, knowledge of the customary law, and the integrity of their decisions. - Rothbard,
For A New Liberty ch. 12
