Pro Report this Argument Hi, I would like to thank you for letting me share my first debate argument here on debate.org. I believe anarcho-capitalism to be the right form of government, as it is not only possible to execute, but necessary in our America era of Big Government. I want to start off telling you all why government is harmful. First off, government imposes one world view on 100% of the populace, just because of the views of 51%. Many times not even 51% of the populace agree with the government, because once government officials are elected they make unpopular decisions, and the electoral college allows for less than 50% of the people to vote for the winning presidential candidate. There is no reason for everyone to be governed by everyone else, because the everyone else is a group of individuals, and individuals can govern themselves. Say for example that 60% of the population wants to ban abortion. But that is their decision for themselves as independent adults and often as strangers from the other 40%. One may argue that there is a need for a cultural unity, but culture is a personal matter, not a matter of the government. Culture is a matter of friends and family, people willing to buy popular culture that resonates with their unheard voice of suffering, and provides entertainment when needed. Now I will get to the matter of how this will work. I will start with defense. under anarcho-capitalism, individuals and groups pay for private defense agencies to protect them and their property. In order for this this to work, the private defense agencies have to get their act together if they are to make money, because there is plenty of competition for the consumer to choose from. If a company of other sorts wants to make money, they must do the same thing. If all the companies get together and say they will work together to make money at the expense of the consumer's physical health, the people will revolt with the aid of their defense agencies. This is unlike the system of politics under government, where one group has a monopoly of power based on feelings in addition to actual concerns, such as physical health and property rights, and through coercion, which means they can do anything they please so as long as they can deceive the people. Now, I will turn my focus to the environment. It is actually because of government regulation that pollution is happening so much. Companies will wish to preserve the land they own so they can reap more long-term benefit from it, unlike when it is state owned, where the government lays waste to it because of its inefficiency. In addition, pollution affects people's property rights as well, such as when smog causes lung cancer and asthma attacks, but due to the alliance between government and business, which is equally responsible in this case, this is allowed. Now I will pay attention to the issue of poor people gaining access to services. We often forget that people are charitable, and that the collective can pay for defense agencies as a neighborhood, city, etc. Others will say that unionization will be prevented as a result of letting companies run everything. However, they fail to realize that they are making an association with the historical physical attacks on striking workers with the ban on unionization by THE GOVERNMENT, when this is actually against anarcho-capitalist ideology, since one's labor belongs to him, and no one else, and is thus his property. Con



With that said, you seem to not have a complete understanding of how the government as a whole functions as you say that a 51% majority can rule the nation and then make some statement about individuals. While a marjory that slim can in theory "rule the land," it doesn't often happen in such a close margin, but alas that isn't the topic of the debate.



You're first idea that individuals and groups must pay for defense is completely unsound and proves the lack of oversight in the idea of anarcho-capitalism (I'll call it AC from here on out). Not everyone can afford a privet police for military force to protect the, are they to be left as the fodder to the evil whom our personal army keeps us safe from? What about firemen? Are they only to put out the fires and help those who pay the a mafia like protection fee? Your idea that people are charitable is true is some instances, but in essence, taxes do exactly that. They pay for a national military, local police, and the benefits of those who are less fortunate.



I also wish to retort your statement that government regulation is the reason pollution exists. I find that improbable as the government regulation wouldn't have been set into place had there been no pollution. While it's true that a privet entity may preserve the land and capital that is its own out of sake of maintaining its own production, there is not direct insinuative for it to protect the rest of the environment directly in a fiscal sense.



I agree on your point about an alliance between government and business, that is a point that I stand with you on.



The free market may work, but for it to work at its most efficient, you must deal with the cruelty of unchecked greed, a massive gap in equality, and the horrors behind a laissez faire style system to create a "capitalist utopia." Such a society wasn't created in the United States during the industry revolution, but in fact caused the counter, the Great Depression, nor has it happened in developing parts of the globe where capitalism is aloud to run wild. Parts of capitalism are okay, but the the nation needs some socialization to be functional, lest you feel that people should be void of roads and power. Report this Argument First and foremost, you're ideas of anarcho-capitalism while valid, are improbable and, if implemented in the entire nation, would cause social and political unrest on a global scale. Also, due to your statement mentioning "big Government" and America, I'll assume when you refer to government the past argument, that you are referring to the United States.With that said, you seem to not have a complete understanding of how the government as a whole functions as you say that a 51% majority can rule the nation and then make some statement about individuals. While a marjory that slim can in theory "rule the land," it doesn't often happen in such a close margin, but alas that isn't the topic of the debate.You're first idea that individuals and groups must pay for defense is completely unsound and proves the lack of oversight in the idea of anarcho-capitalism (I'll call it AC from here on out). Not everyone can afford a privet police for military force to protect the, are they to be left as the fodder to the evil whom our personal army keeps us safe from? What about firemen? Are they only to put out the fires and help those who pay the a mafia like protection fee? Your idea that people are charitable is true is some instances, but in essence, taxes do exactly that. They pay for a national military, local police, and the benefits of those who are less fortunate.I also wish to retort your statement that government regulation is the reason pollution exists. I find that improbable as the government regulation wouldn't have been set into place had there been no pollution. While it's true that a privet entity may preserve the land and capital that is its own out of sake of maintaining its own production, there is not direct insinuative for it to protect the rest of the environment directly in a fiscal sense.I agree on your point about an alliance between government and business, that is a point that I stand with you on.The free market may work, but for it to work at its most efficient, you must deal with the cruelty of unchecked greed, a massive gap in equality, and the horrors behind a laissez faire style system to create a "capitalist utopia." Such a society wasn't created in the United States during the industry revolution, but in fact caused the counter, the Great Depression, nor has it happened in developing parts of the globe where capitalism is aloud to run wild. Parts of capitalism are okay, but the the nation needs some socialization to be functional, lest you feel that people should be void of roads and power.

Pro Report this Argument First off, I want to respond to your argument that the poor will not be able to pay for services. My response to this is that there could be a model of defense agency governance similar to the theory of panarchy, where multiple communities in an area pay for multiple governments. I am saying this to assert that this a is a community effort. The whole community can pay according to each individual's income, meaning not everyone pays the same. There are multiple laws enforced in an area, according to who decides to follow who. Also, it is not just monetary payment that can contribute to these services, as the poor can do the defense agency work themselves or provide necessary services for the defense agencies. Furthermore, the poor communities (or ghettoes, if you will) can form defense agencies of an entirely new market, and an entirely new community. Lastly, defense agencies will not have to protect the poor as much because they have less property, and so the poor will have to pay for less service, driving down cost. Now, I want to respond to your statement about the great depression. While I see that there is solid reasoning behind your argument that if we have a laissez-faire market, there will be another great depression, I disagree. Now that the great depression has happened, and we know why it happened, we know not to make the same mistakes, and modern economists are moving away from the rational economic man model, which is something I disagree with in some respects, such as this one. I now want to reply to your argument about the environment. You say that the need to protect the land does not have an effect in a fiscal sense. This is not relevant, because although it cannot be measured fiscally, the future availability of resources does indeed have an impact on future finances. Con



The idea of a progressive payment into a centralized fund for protection is nice, but is similar to a tax, but instead of handing the money to a centralized government, the money is handed to a privet entity which isn't bound by laws. How would laws be created? How would the be enforced? Though privet enterprise. There lies the problem of justice. The punishments and trial aren't left to an un-bias public arena, but to privet enterprise. This can lead to a very corrupt society as the defense firms could make it "law" that if someone didn't want them to destroy their property because it was deemed "threatening," this could lead to people having to pay every single group simply to keep their lives and property.



While I can understand you retort about environmental preservation, if such a statement is true on a full scale, why aren't these actions taken by every company in the modern world of today? My simple explanation lies in one word: greed.



You've also failed to explain what is being used as currency, as without any form of central government, no uniform, standard currency would be issued, thus I'm left to assume that privet banks begin to issue their own notes. Such was the case before the United States began printing it's own paper money, and banks would issue bank notes form their own bank (oft backed by gold). This was fine as long as one did business with other customer of the same bank, Bank A we'll say, and everything was all fine and dandy. The issues arise when one decides to either travel or does business with someone who uses another bank, let us say, Bank B.



Bob is a customer with Bank A, he regularly does business with other people who are customers of the same bank so his bank notes are perfectly fine to use as payment. Bob sees a new sushi shop open up down the block form his house and wants to try it out, but when he goes to pay, the owner tells him that he is a customer of Bank B and not Bank A, but because the Banks are within the same town, they've worked out what the exchange rate for their notes are and everything is okayish. Bob then finds out he needs to go to a large city for work and upon arriving wants lunch. Bob goes and orders his lunch and goes to pay, but the cashier won't accept his bank notes as they have never heard of Bank A and use Bank C.



The idea of a uniform, standard currency while perhaps possible to be create using a your ideal "governing" body is improbably is the idea is that the market should decide. These market failures are perhaps the reasoning behind



Money isn't the only example of what a market could very well fail to do, there are so many more such as roads, clean water, ensuring that food and medicine are safe, people are granted safe working conditions and many more among other things. A completely free market with no centralized government regulation could, and has been disastrous for the majority of the population. Report this Argument True, unadulterated capitalism has periods of insane growth followed by periods of insane "busts" in an almost saw tooth pattern. These boom and bust cycles are one of the flaws and foundations of pure capitalism. The Great Depression was part of the bust side of the boom before it, and 2008 would have been another depression style bust side of a prior boom had the government safety net and Federal Reserve bailouts. These actions to prevent the bust cycle from destroying a collective economy relied on a central government.The idea of a progressive payment into a centralized fund for protection is nice, but is similar to a tax, but instead of handing the money to a centralized government, the money is handed to a privet entity which isn't bound by laws. How would laws be created? How would the be enforced? Though privet enterprise. There lies the problem of justice. The punishments and trial aren't left to an un-bias public arena, but to privet enterprise. This can lead to a very corrupt society as the defense firms could make it "law" that if someone didn't want them to destroy their property because it was deemed "threatening," this could lead to people having to pay every single group simply to keep their lives and property.While I can understand you retort about environmental preservation, if such a statement is true on a full scale, why aren't these actions taken by every company in the modern world of today? My simple explanation lies in one word: greed.You've also failed to explain what is being used as currency, as without any form of central government, no uniform, standard currency would be issued, thus I'm left to assume that privet banks begin to issue their own notes. Such was the case before the United States began printing it's own paper money, and banks would issue bank notes form their own bank (oft backed by gold). This was fine as long as one did business with other customer of the same bank, Bank A we'll say, and everything was all fine and dandy. The issues arise when one decides to either travel or does business with someone who uses another bank, let us say, Bank B.Bob is a customer with Bank A, he regularly does business with other people who are customers of the same bank so his bank notes are perfectly fine to use as payment. Bob sees a new sushi shop open up down the block form his house and wants to try it out, but when he goes to pay, the owner tells him that he is a customer of Bank B and not Bank A, but because the Banks are within the same town, they've worked out what the exchange rate for their notes are and everything is okayish. Bob then finds out he needs to go to a large city for work and upon arriving wants lunch. Bob goes and orders his lunch and goes to pay, but the cashier won't accept his bank notes as they have never heard of Bank A and use Bank C.The idea of a uniform, standard currency while perhaps possible to be create using a your ideal "governing" body is improbably is the idea is that the market should decide. These market failures are perhaps the reasoning behindMoney isn't the only example of what a market could very well fail to do, there are so many more such as roads, clean water, ensuring that food and medicine are safe, people are granted safe working conditions and many more among other things. A completely free market with no centralized government regulation could, and has been disastrous for the majority of the population.

Pro Report this Argument You claim that pure capitalism goes through periods of insane growth and insane crash, however this is not a trait of capitalism alone. Often times in history government has messed up an economy with excessive regulation or by moderate regulation that was misguided, leading to disastrous results. Also, you claim that the 2008 recession would have been a depression had it not been for the federal reserve bailouts, however, the Federal Reserve is not bound by government in many ways, and it IS a private company. Furthermore, you say that if the companies wanted to preserve the land already, why haven't they done so already, yet you fail to realize that there never was a time they owned the land themselves and messed up without government regulation, which means it could be that the government regulation is causing the problem. Even if they were too greedy and short-term minded to protect the land, the defense firms could stop them so long as they obtain payment by the people to do so through tort and contract law, or at least the majority of them need to, for if not all of them did it would be war, or an agreement by private courts to prevent war, though that would be rare. In addition to this, I'm guessing the people could own the land alongside the companies and ensure it is protected as a financial agreement, though I'm not an expert on Finance and that is not the issue here. Also, you bring up the idea that we will have multiple currencies, thus making trade difficult. However, there already is a private company issuing a SINGLE currency. And that company is the federal reserve. Con



The idea that firms never owned land themselves that "measured up," and this is why some firms don't partake in protecting the environment is ludicrous. If a firm was going to take measures to protect the environment, why would government regulation on protecting the environment prevent that? In the places with the least government regulation such as Mexico and China, companies can dump whatever they please into the environment, and they often do. This shows that regulation isn't the reason behind why firms decide to pollute. I feel personally, that using the concepts of capitalism itself, with no direct incentive to contain pollution, a firm will find that it maximizes profits to just dump it into the environment. The problem isn't that regulation exists.



I'd like to address the boom and bust cycle or market volatility in itself. While not at visible in micro-economic scenarios, on a macro scale, they are almost impossible to miss. Using stocks as an example, as investors add money to a company, or market, the company or market flourishes and the "boom" is seen, but when something causes a panic, and/or mass sell off, the price of the stock falls, and the value of the market falls, thus the "bust". Such a thing happened during the 1920s that led to the depression in the 1930s. People began making money of stocks, and it came to the point where everyone wanted to get in on the stock craze and people started buying stock on margin with loaned money. Eventually, calls were placed on the loans, and people had to sell the stock they had bought on margin prematurely, as more calls on the credit were issued, more people began selling, and prices across the market began to fall sharply. These quick sells led to a crash of the entire market, a bust following the boom of the roaring 20s. This bust led to the Great Depression.



Another bust can be seen in 2008, when the entire banking industry almost collapsed and took the world economy with it. Deregulation of investment banks led to unrealistic loans being made to people who knowingly couldn't pay them back. The housing market was the best example of this, and this is where the majority of "toxic assets" were created. Banks would issue bad mortgages, lump the bad mortgages together with good ones, and sell them to other banks or privet equity groups with insurance. The issue came when the assets began to show their dark side and spoiled and the "insurance" went to be collected, the bank that made the deal couldn't pay, thusly the housing bubble popped, the market crashed, and if it hadn't been for the government provided social safety net and the quick wit and actions of Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson to bail out the larger banks, the bust could have very well let to a depression much worse than that of the 1930s.



Boom and Bust cycles and market volatility are real, and are not a direct attribution to "regulation," but simple human nature acting on the principals of capitalism.



On a different side of your argument, I'd like to hear who creates the laws for which these private courts judge by, because if their are laws that differentiate good from bad behavior, then your argument for anarcho-capitalist society is flawed, and something is no longer anarchy when a centralized "legislative" power is in existence.



A centralized government is always better than no government, even if that government imposes regulation that prevent some firms from making a few dollars or a few hundred dollars here or there. Report this Argument The Federal Reserve operates outside of the the Federal Government like the post office, though it was created by congress in 1913. The Federal Reserve has charter from the United States government to manufacture money on behalf of the United States, the money is that of the United States, not the Fed, and yes, had the bank bailouts of 2008 not occurred, the entire global economy could very well have fallen in on itself even more than it had, but had deregulation not occurred under the thumbs of men like Greenspan and Larry Summers, the 2008 finical crises could have very well not happened. Deregulation caused the pure greed of the banks where were, "to big to fail," to over invest in toxic assets, insure toxic assets, do slimy business dealing between one another, and intertwine themselves with one another on such a global level, that if one went under, they all went under. You fail to understand that the Fed alone was not responsible for the bailouts, but required permission from the department of the Treasury as well, as US money was used in the bailouts. The "bailout" of GM was simply an act of government buying stock when GM hit rock bottom, and one GM's stock rises, the federal government will sell and all the money is back. This was a direct action of the United States government to prevent a recession from becoming a depression.The idea that firms never owned land themselves that "measured up," and this is why some firms don't partake in protecting the environment is ludicrous. If a firm was going to take measures to protect the environment, why would government regulation on protecting the environment prevent that? In the places with the least government regulation such as Mexico and China, companies can dump whatever they please into the environment, and they often do. This shows that regulation isn't the reason behind why firms decide to pollute. I feel personally, that using the concepts of capitalism itself, with no direct incentive to contain pollution, a firm will find that it maximizes profits to just dump it into the environment. The problem isn't that regulation exists.I'd like to address the boom and bust cycle or market volatility in itself. While not at visible in micro-economic scenarios, on a macro scale, they are almost impossible to miss. Using stocks as an example, as investors add money to a company, or market, the company or market flourishes and the "boom" is seen, but when something causes a panic, and/or mass sell off, the price of the stock falls, and the value of the market falls, thus the "bust". Such a thing happened during the 1920s that led to the depression in the 1930s. People began making money of stocks, and it came to the point where everyone wanted to get in on the stock craze and people started buying stock on margin with loaned money. Eventually, calls were placed on the loans, and people had to sell the stock they had bought on margin prematurely, as more calls on the credit were issued, more people began selling, and prices across the market began to fall sharply. These quick sells led to a crash of the entire market, a bust following the boom of the roaring 20s. This bust led to the Great Depression.Another bust can be seen in 2008, when the entire banking industry almost collapsed and took the world economy with it. Deregulation of investment banks led to unrealistic loans being made to people who knowingly couldn't pay them back. The housing market was the best example of this, and this is where the majority of "toxic assets" were created. Banks would issue bad mortgages, lump the bad mortgages together with good ones, and sell them to other banks or privet equity groups with insurance. The issue came when the assets began to show their dark side and spoiled and the "insurance" went to be collected, the bank that made the deal couldn't pay, thusly the housing bubble popped, the market crashed, and if it hadn't been for the government provided social safety net and the quick wit and actions of Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson to bail out the larger banks, the bust could have very well let to a depression much worse than that of the 1930s.Boom and Bust cycles and market volatility are real, and are not a direct attribution to "regulation," but simple human nature acting on the principals of capitalism.On a different side of your argument, I'd like to hear who creates the laws for which these private courts judge by, because if their are laws that differentiate good from bad behavior, then your argument for anarcho-capitalist society is flawed, and something is no longer anarchy when a centralized "legislative" power is in existence.A centralized government is always better than no government, even if that government imposes regulation that prevent some firms from making a few dollars or a few hundred dollars here or there.

Pro acidman forfeited this round. Con Taylor.Gregory forfeited this round.