Re: more electoral defeats for the feudalists

On Sat, 25 Nov 2006 17:38:10 +0100, peter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
(=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Peter_Bj=F8rn_Perls=F8?=) wrote:

ruetheday@xxxxxxxxxx <ruetheday@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Government is a necessary institution, the means to make the social
system of cooperation work smoothly without being disturbed by violent
acts on the part of gangsters whether of domestic or of foreign origin.
Government is not, as some people like to say, a necessary evil; it is
not an evil, but a means, the only means available to make peaceful
human coexistence possible."
--Ludwig von Mises

That must been in the early years of Mises. :=)

It's from Liberty and Property, 1958. Von Mises was never an
anarcho-capitalist, he always vigorously asserted the absolute need for
government. In today's nomenclature, he was a minarchist. Hayek
actually went quite a bit further than that in laying out the
legitimate functions of the state. Anarcho-capitalism didn't really
come onto the scene until the early 1970's with Rothbard's publication
of For A New Liberty and David Friedman's, The Machinery of Freedom.
It largely hit a dead end at that point, for reasons elaborated in
Nozick's ASU.

Nozick's own reasoning is spurious, as ROthbard has also demonstrated.

Rothbard has been comprehensively refuted, not least by events in
Somalia.

From the standpoint that coercian is principally bad, it follows that
government is also bad.

Nonsense. Enforcing property rights and contracts requires coercion,
regardless of who's doing it - the modern state, the night watchman
state, or the private mutual protection agency.

You have misunderstood something is you think that PDA is equivalent to
a state.

If coercion is bad, the PDA is also bad. However you wish to defend
the PDA, the exact same argument can be applied to government. End of
story.

-- Roy L
.

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    (sci.econ)