What pre-conditions/ingredients are needed for a republic and a market economy?

[doodle]

I would prefer the safe government tax-financed road up to a point. When my choices are dealing with banditry and risking the loss of my goods and life, or paying a 5% tax and travel in safety, the answer is pretty clear. But once the bandits are snuffed out, and I can hire efficient guards cheaply, and the tax goes up to 50%, and the toll/tax collectors themselves start to resemble bandits in their enforcement strategy and violence toward me, then the balance tips in the other direction.

At that point, I'd prefer to take my chances with the bandits. I'd also accept a different government with more favorable tax terms, but unfortunately the present government has monopolized the road and bans competition.

So you want the government to do all the heavy lifting up front building the efficient road system and securing it and once that is done and your trade is succesful you want to pretend that they are only a weight around your neck?

So if the government steps out and the country plunges into anarchy again and the roads are overrun by bandits in five years are you going to be crying for the government to come back in and restablish order? Remember your just a small time trader...you cant fund a private army alone.

Dont forget that the government is also governed by market forces. If their tariffs are too high, trade will stop and so will their tax revenues. It isnt in their interest to strangle you.

[Benko]

It isnt in their interest to strangle you.

This assumes that gov't doesn't have other interests like e.g. "fairness" (or just punishing the rich) which trump common sense financial considerations.

[Pointedstick]

Benko is right. Of course it's not in the government's interest to kill the golden goose… and yet they do, time and time again, all throughout human history. Governments aren't profit maximization machines like corporations. They may want to kill their own profit at the whim of a mad dictator, an emotional electorate, a cabal of influence-buying corporate lobbyists, or a coalition of progressive politicians who want the world fundamentally changed and decide that road travel is evil.

Moreover, I think you're misinterpreting my objection in your example. Like you said yourself, government is subject to market forces. A government service that may seem like a bargain at a 5% tax is much less of a bargain at a 50% tax. And if that "service" startes to resemble the banditry you're supposedly being protected from, that's another factor. And let's not kid around… I think we both know that the bulk of that money goes to things other than road safety. By the time I'm paying a 50% tax, most of it is probably going to provide reparations to the families of bandits killed in prior years. 

[moda0306]

PS,

OK I'm back.  Since we left this on the discussion of what society would look like w/o any government from the perspective of whether it would break down into destbilizing violence, I'll start with that.

Your equation indicated that because the peaceful people have such destructive weaponry they have access to, it's evened the odds to where the 15% don't corrupt the other 85% to badly.

There are a few things I'd disagree with here:

- I don't see how a peaceful person's ability to do harm to a criminal as opposed to vice versa is any more ideal than in 1750.  We have guns and bombs now... so do our enemies.  We had muskets and cannons then... so did our enemies.  I think what you may be saying is that a peacful person's ability to play defense in ways that are more unpenetrable (security systems, gated communities, etc) has risen.  That could very well be the case.  However, I don't see that as completely turning the tables on violence so much as offering a buffer.

- Peaceful people have a very, very low tolerance for violence in their community, even if they weren't even close to being harmed, in this day and age.  If I found out that a man broke into my neighbor's home and stole some of is stuff when he was away, I can assure you the entire neighborhood would be fearful as hell... at least for a while.  Fear is probably the biggest opponent of productivity and prosperity there is.  Peaceful people simply fear violence much more than the 15% would.

- We were talking about the "tiny mights" so much we may have forgotten about the "mighty mights."  If any other government saw that a fruitful, prosperous land was devoid of government, our AR-15's wouldn't stand a chance.  A central power would either develop or come from elsewhere.

Nevermind disagreements on who would own the roads, how we were supposed to negotiate with road-owners that many times we have no bargaining power against, who would handle the sewer system, same negotiation issue there, what would be done with all our military's weapons, what would happen to all our seniors on SS/Medicare, etc, etc.  It would destabilize the hell out of things.

[doodle]

Maybe we should go back to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and build a simulation society from the ground up. We can anticipate issues that would start to arise as the population grew and then Moda and PS could provide examples of how these problems would be dealt with.

So lets pretend we are on generation 3 and there are 100 people in the Garden of Eden (the size of my Condo Assoc.  ) . What sorts of issues would arise...sanitation, safety, roads, business disputes etc. and how would these be dealt with?

[Pointedstick]

Moda, I would hazard a guess that you live in a fairly liberal neighborhood, right?

I think we start to get into issues that fascinate me like the social utility of liberals and conservatives. In my experience, liberals often have such an abhorrence of violence that they are unwilling to defend themselves or even entertain the notion of preparing for conflict, instead sinking into a depression over the notion of violence being a thing when it rears its ugly head. Many others secretly harbor aggressive feelings that they vigorously repress. Conservatives, on the other hand, are much more willing to take up arms and defend themselves and others, but run the risk of seeing threats everywhere and becoming clannish, and all the while, they are producing less wealth. So a society need a balance. Too many liberals and society will be destroyed by violent people; too many conservatives and society will become poor, clannish, and oppressive to perceived outsiders. IMHO.

Successful societies have all developed means by which these preferences need not conflict. Liberals become professors, artists, engineers--anything where peacefulness is a virtue and force is never required, while conservatives gravitate toward occupations such as police officers, soldiers, businessmen--anything where force, vigor, and competition are a virtue. Again, IMHO (I am not a social scientist).

So the only way I can imagine a neighborhood becoming paralyzed by a property crime is if there are too many liberals living in it and not enough conservatives either living in it or protecting it. This is an issue in government societies as well. The question of how to protect the peaceful without lapsing into their oppression has practically been a constant question throughout human history.

I posit that the Private Society would do a better job of allowing liberals and conservatives to mix and mingle, which leverages each of their strengths. Without politics for them to bicker and fight over, their conflicts become much smaller and more localized, which are IMHO easier to resolve or deal with. I see this myself all the time; people are usually pretty friendly on a personal basis to members of opposing viewpoints, but when politics comes out in large-scale societal struggles, the hatred starts to spill out of peoples' mouths and noses (ew). And then we all become clannish, moving to places devoid of our supposed political enemies despite the fact that we might actually like them on a personal basis.

So I guess this is a long-winded way of saying that you may be right that the easy availability of AR-15s alone wouldn't really help peaceful people because most of them wouldn't buy them. But I believe that the lack of large-scale political struggles would promote the mingling of people who would buy AR-15s and band together in the face of crime among those who wouldn't, effectively protecting the latter from the fear of crime and violence that would otherwise hinder their production of large amounts of wealth.

Needless to say, this is all wild rank speculation and I'm pretty far from any argument I've ever made before so it's probably pretty rough and unrefined. I'm totally winging it here!

[doodle]

Successful societies have all developed means by which these preferences need not conflict. Liberals become professors, artists, engineers--anything where peacefulness is a virtue and force is never required, while conservatives gravitate toward occupations such as police officers, soldiers, businessmen--anything where force, vigor, and competition are a virtue. Again, IMHO (I am not a social scientist).

Stereotype much?  I've met plenty of radical left wing soldiers and plenty of radical right wing gay teachers.