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Well, what's the alternative to having majorities vote? Since I gather you're a libertarian, let's make a market-based argument. There will always be some dema

by scarmig 14y ago

Well, what's the alternative to having majorities vote? Since I gather you're a libertarian, let's make a market-based argument. There will always be some demand for violence (meaning the application or threat of force to cause other autonomous agents to act a certain way), and there will always be suppliers of violence. The question then becomes of market structure: do we want decentralized and competing suppliers of violence in a given geographic area, or a monopoly? Both can be Pareto-efficient, so that provides no guidance. Having a monopoly supplier, however, gives that supplier an incentive to maximize the net economic value of its customers: this allows it to extract more of that value. Competing suppliers, however, have no such incentive: if one cultivates a client, there's no reason for the others not to swoop in and extract the surplus. It's a race to the economic bottom. If economic well-being and surplus are good, then having a competitive market in violence is bad. Okay, so we have a monopoly supplier of violence. What then, though? How do we structure it internally? Well, the way it arises will be the way it's structured, regardless of what we might like in an imaginary world. And that will be some group of agents who have to negotiate contracts with each other and with the customers who are exchanging labor in exchange for violence. What remains is squeezing out the information and liquidity gaps that make every market inefficient. People should have a clear set of rules that they can assume will be okay with the monopoly violence supplier: then they will not miscalculate when they do something thinking it will not cause violent reprisals. That's what we call rule of law. That says nothing about what the contract is, though: it may be "everyone pays a flat fee," it may be commission based, it may be commission based on a sliding scale. Who should decide that? Well, you ultimately don't want internal factions to splinter off to compete with the original monopoly (after all, we like the monopoly! At least at the margins.) So you've got to set up an corporate structure where no large enough group of customers feel that they could have a better deal with another supplier in the market. Everyone needs equal input. We've tended to solve that problem with majority vote.

baddox 14y ago
> Having a monopoly supplier, however, gives that supplier an incentive to maximize the net economic value of its customers: this allows it to extract more of that value Could you explain this claim? I wouldn't agree with it if you we're talking about fulfilling the demand of other sectors (like music or food), so I'm curious why it would apply to violence.
- scarmig 14y ago
  Sure. Represent an economic transaction with {M, X, V}, where M is currency, X is some good or service, and V is violence. For a music cd, there's three parties involved, though the third is sometimes not explicitly accounted for. 1:{-M, +X, 0} 2:{+(1-p)M, -X, 0} 3:{+pM, 0, V} (aside: money, you see, plays a nice role of making it a 3-tuple instead of an infinite-tuple) The first two elements of a tuple have the constraint that they must sum to nullity across all the other parties involved. You can't make labor or goods appear out of thin air. Violence, however, doesn't have that constraint. You can always throw in more violence, and it's always a positive amount. (Why doesn't 3 just set p = 1? It certainly could, but that isn't the optimal proportion to maximize sum(M). The incentive structure breaks down: Laffer bites with a vengeance. So there's some other optimal p 0<p<1 that maximizes sum(M) over all clients--what that value is is simply an empirical question.) So let's look at a market of violence, with multiple suppliers: 1:{-(q+r)M', 0, 0} 2:{+qM', 0, V'} 3:{+rM', 0, V''} where q + r = p' and M' is the total value that 1 provides at p' where p' maximizes M'. This satisfies the required constraints, but it's not a stable equilibrium. q+r is that same optimal value p from before, but with a twist: it's not set by only one agent trying to maximize sum(M) but by two trying to maximize their own. There's no reason for 2 not to go for (q+e) instead of q, and the same is true of 3. Taking only q and r as varying qualities, and you rapidly end up at q + r = 1, which means no one gets anything. In practice, what happens is that 2 and 3 have their own separate transaction since they can foresee that upcoming equilibrium: 2:{0, 0, V'} 3:{0, 0, V''} That itself is unstable: assuming that V' > V'', the new equilibrium is 2:{0, 0, V'} Leading to 1:{-p'M', 0, 0} 2:{+p'M', 0, V'}
  - baddox 14y ago
    I lose you at the part where you essentially claim that violence is free or unlimited. In reality, violence is very costly and risky. In this sort of analysis, I don't see why violence would be considered a separate variable, rather than simply one cost factor for both sides of the transaction, just like the cost of advertising, or paying employees.
snitko 14y ago
I think you're assuming that violence is somehow more profitable than no violence. I disagree. In fact, I think it's the opposite: violence is much less profitable than a non-violent solution. Violence only becomes more profitable when you have a monopoly to it: it doesn't cost you anything to use it, because you know no one is even gonna try to challenge you. On the other hand, when you don't have a monopoly, even if the other side is weaker than you are, you would still have to factor in your potential losses and see if you can strike a deal that would allow you to avoid violence and, thus, losses completely.
- scarmig 14y ago
  I'd agree that without a monopoly you'd have lots of deals being struck. If you're just talking about violence-suppliers, the likely equilibrium is no violence at all. But you're always fighting over stuff and, moreover, people. In all the cases I can think of, violence-suppliers would look at all the people it can extract value from, look at each other, and then combine forces to extract the most value from people. The only time they'd fight each other is if someone miscalculated who had more capability to deliver violence. But either way, violence suppliers would either combine forces or get destroyed, ultimately leading to a monopoly and making violence a profit center.
  - snitko 14y ago
    Wait, so if you say the likely equilibrium is no violence at all, what's bad about it? If violence-suppliers form a cartel and people are happy about the way it serves them - what's wrong with that? If some become unhappy, they do 2 things: stop paying their monthly fees and seek a new company to protect them (which will inevitably emerge, because there's a demand). On a side note, libertarians call violence suppliers "private protection agencies". Reflects their nature better, since we agreed that the equilibrium status quo would be no violence.
    - ehsanu1 14y ago
      I think scarmig means that the equilibrium would be a monopoly which would then take the role of government. And in fact, on an international scale, there's an oligopoly violence suppliers, it's just that they're not "private", but "public".

by scarmig 14y ago

baddox 14y ago

> Having a monopoly supplier, however, gives that supplier an incentive to maximize the net economic value of its customers: this allows it to extract more of that value Could you explain this claim? I wouldn't agree with it if you we're talking about fulfilling the demand of other sectors (like music or food), so I'm curious why it would apply to violence.

scarmig 14y ago
Sure. Represent an economic transaction with {M, X, V}, where M is currency, X is some good or service, and V is violence. For a music cd, there's three parties involved, though the third is sometimes not explicitly accounted for. 1:{-M, +X, 0} 2:{+(1-p)M, -X, 0} 3:{+pM, 0, V} (aside: money, you see, plays a nice role of making it a 3-tuple instead of an infinite-tuple) The first two elements of a tuple have the constraint that they must sum to nullity across all the other parties involved. You can't make labor or goods appear out of thin air. Violence, however, doesn't have that constraint. You can always throw in more violence, and it's always a positive amount. (Why doesn't 3 just set p = 1? It certainly could, but that isn't the optimal proportion to maximize sum(M). The incentive structure breaks down: Laffer bites with a vengeance. So there's some other optimal p 0<p<1 that maximizes sum(M) over all clients--what that value is is simply an empirical question.) So let's look at a market of violence, with multiple suppliers: 1:{-(q+r)M', 0, 0} 2:{+qM', 0, V'} 3:{+rM', 0, V''} where q + r = p' and M' is the total value that 1 provides at p' where p' maximizes M'. This satisfies the required constraints, but it's not a stable equilibrium. q+r is that same optimal value p from before, but with a twist: it's not set by only one agent trying to maximize sum(M) but by two trying to maximize their own. There's no reason for 2 not to go for (q+e) instead of q, and the same is true of 3. Taking only q and r as varying qualities, and you rapidly end up at q + r = 1, which means no one gets anything. In practice, what happens is that 2 and 3 have their own separate transaction since they can foresee that upcoming equilibrium: 2:{0, 0, V'} 3:{0, 0, V''} That itself is unstable: assuming that V' > V'', the new equilibrium is 2:{0, 0, V'} Leading to 1:{-p'M', 0, 0} 2:{+p'M', 0, V'}
- baddox 14y ago
  I lose you at the part where you essentially claim that violence is free or unlimited. In reality, violence is very costly and risky. In this sort of analysis, I don't see why violence would be considered a separate variable, rather than simply one cost factor for both sides of the transaction, just like the cost of advertising, or paying employees.

snitko 14y ago

I think you're assuming that violence is somehow more profitable than no violence. I disagree. In fact, I think it's the opposite: violence is much less profitable than a non-violent solution. Violence only becomes more profitable when you have a monopoly to it: it doesn't cost you anything to use it, because you know no one is even gonna try to challenge you. On the other hand, when you don't have a monopoly, even if the other side is weaker than you are, you would still have to factor in your potential losses and see if you can strike a deal that would allow you to avoid violence and, thus, losses completely.

scarmig 14y ago
I'd agree that without a monopoly you'd have lots of deals being struck. If you're just talking about violence-suppliers, the likely equilibrium is no violence at all. But you're always fighting over stuff and, moreover, people. In all the cases I can think of, violence-suppliers would look at all the people it can extract value from, look at each other, and then combine forces to extract the most value from people. The only time they'd fight each other is if someone miscalculated who had more capability to deliver violence. But either way, violence suppliers would either combine forces or get destroyed, ultimately leading to a monopoly and making violence a profit center.
- snitko 14y ago
  Wait, so if you say the likely equilibrium is no violence at all, what's bad about it? If violence-suppliers form a cartel and people are happy about the way it serves them - what's wrong with that? If some become unhappy, they do 2 things: stop paying their monthly fees and seek a new company to protect them (which will inevitably emerge, because there's a demand). On a side note, libertarians call violence suppliers "private protection agencies". Reflects their nature better, since we agreed that the equilibrium status quo would be no violence.
  - ehsanu1 14y ago
    I think scarmig means that the equilibrium would be a monopoly which would then take the role of government. And in fact, on an international scale, there's an oligopoly violence suppliers, it's just that they're not "private", but "public".