perfidy

Belle and John have a fascinating brace of posts (part one, part two) on the huge, yawning chasm that stands between libertarian theory and practice.
Belle goes on the attack first, writing on the pony thesis of libertarian dreaming:

Now, everyone close your eyes and try to imagine a private, profit-making rights-enforcement organization which does not resemble the mafia, a street gang, those pesky fire-fighters/arsonists/looters who used to provide such "services" in old New York and Tokyo, medieval tax-farmers, or a Lendu militia. (In general, if thoughts of the Eastern Congo intrude, I suggest waving them away with the invisible hand and repeating "that's anarcho-capitalism" several times.) Nothing's happening but a buzzing noise, right?

Now try it the wishful thinking way. Just wish that we might all live in a state of perfect liberty, free of taxation and intrusive government, and that we should all be wealthier as well as freer. Now wish that people should, despite that lack of any restraint on their actions such as might be formed by policemen, functioning law courts, the SEC, and so on, not spend all their time screwing each other in predictable ways ranging from ordinary rape, through the selling of fraudulent stocks in non-existent ventures, up to the wholesale dumping of mercury in the public water supplies. (I mean, the general stock of water from which people privately draw.) Awesome huh? But it gets better. Now wish that everyone had a pony. Don't thank me, Thank John.

John writes in the second part on the problems that occur when you can't, say, fire the police, much less summon them:

Finally, I know that libertarians are sick of hearing about the Wild West (or the eastern Congo), but if you propose a model of rights enforcement whose nearest analogue seems to be the Clint Eastwood movie "A Fistful of Dollars", then you just have to suck it up. It can hardly be irrelevant or illegitimate to point out that in our world, which my people call "Earth", there already exist places where people must band together for self-defense and form militia-like organizations for private rights enforcement. In all these places, some bastard gets in charge of it and starts treating everyone like shit. Quis custodiet, etc. How do I fire my private-rights enforcement group again?

It's important not to fetishize the right of self-defense out of all proportion. I could be as heavily armed as I like, but I have to sleep sometime, and if I'm home alone with my children and fifty armed guys show up, I'm still screwed. Personally, I'd like to be able to call 911 and have the cops show up (I figure I could hold even 50 guys off that long, with a defensible position and a sniper rifle). In the libertarian utopia, those guys outside would be the cops. I know that there are places in the world where the cops are the bad guys. But this is a problem which we know, empirically, can be fixed. It seems to me there are insuperable, structural difficulties in proposing that private organizations take over all the functions of the state, which have to do with human nature. People will be bastards if you give them a chance. Stipulating this feature away does not make for good political practice. See: communism, passim.

And that is why I blogrolled them. They got long knives and steady hands.