this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2024
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If you exchange "buy insurance" for "pay taxes", you're awfully close to reality!
The difference is that you choose the insurance company.
Did you really choose which firestation was gonna send a truck?? That's the problem with using a "free market" argument for emergencies, yeah sure it's great to choose between different emergency providers when there's nothing happening.
But when a fire starts or you have a heart attack? The nearest Ambulance or Fire Truck that can get you is coming to get you, and you don't (and can't) have a choice in which Hospital they're gonna rush you to, or which fire station that truck came from, all that matters is that it came
Imagine being the first person to answer without insults or smug stupidity since I first commented under this post, and I wasn't insulting others then.
Yes. You need to have at least twice as many firestations to have a choice, if you want to choose between fire services, though.
Or if we are talking only about choosing between insurance companies, then there's no problem, but with only one fire service and some imagined jungle capitalism you'll have a problem, because it'll be very expensive as a monopolist.
I don't see a problem with having twice as many firestations, as in two parallel services. They don't have only one landline at the firestation after all. They have HA in any mass service system.
This all is unimportant, though, since it ignores the fact that something like a state fire service, only one separate from police, military and others and with administration formed separately from them is still allowable for ancap. Where membership would be like citizenship in our world, and a member gets the service on usual conditions (but pays something like taxes), while a non-member will pay a lot that one time. It's similar to state healthcare being free for citizens, but not for foreign nationals in some countries.
Notice how it requires no coercion or monopoly, so perfectly acceptable for ancap.
See my solution.
You're gonna sit there on your phone trying to decide which fire service to use while your house is literally burning down?
What about people who rent? It's not their own private property, are they supposed to pay for the whole building being saved? Does it get put on the landlord? He never consented to having his building saved, his tenants just called the fire station when a fire started. Are the tenants supposed to contact their landlord first so that he can properly consent to having a fire station save his property?
Well other than now having to pay for double the amount of infrastructure, you now also probably have people who own and profit off the stations, which introduces every normal market pressure, positive and corrupting.
"Pay our massive fee or your house burns down" certainly sounds coercive. You've also not established anything to guarantee that a fire station doesn't develop a monopoly.
If your solution to serious and urgent emergencies like "Oh my god, my house is on fire" or "Oh my god, I'm having a heart attack" is several paragraphs long, you've not actually developed a solution, just a hypothetical which shows painfully obviously why we stopped running society like this millenia ago.
Why "trying to decide"? One may have some kind of subscription etc. Also finding one quickly, like with taxi and food delivery services, is a demand to be filled. Markets and such.
It seems you haven't read the paragraph about separation.
You'll pay less, that's for sure, ask anyone who've worked with state services and big organizations. At their job, I mean. I have.
It seems you haven't read the paragraph about separation.
It seems you haven't read the paragraph about separation. Which is one (1) paragraph, not several. Also no, it doesn't show anything, because you haven't read it and can't make such claims.
The paragraph about separation:
Now what I don't understand is why you all refuse to read before commenting.
So you want every person to have to pay for a fire subscription? And if they don't have one their house burns down or they get extorted?
You certainly may have interacted with government during your career, but hearing this is all I needed to hear. There's nothing objectively different between Government and Private products, sure the private product may be cheaper sometimes, but there's also plenty of ways the private service could be more expensive, that's why every business, including the one I used to run, has conversations about cost vs. benefit of private vs. public for certain services.
I have read it, I just didn't mention it because not only was it irrelevant, it was also wildly incorrect, government services can compete with eachother, and private companies can have a monopoly even without government intervention.
There's a fundamental difference between most private entities and public entities: the profit motive, which is the reason why private companies' interests are misaligned with the interests of the people they're meant to serve in a lot of cases.
The search for profit is the source of a lot of waste of resources that would be better used providing actual services (eg. Marketing for a fire station makes zero sense).
Of course, this applies to entities that provide services and not those that build your phones.
But not the products they make, a government made screwdriver and a private made screwdriver are gonna be basically the exact same, the only difference being price and the market forces that the producer is impacted by.
Which is what my comment was about.
The thread was about services (like fire stations, police stations and the likes), so I think it's relevant to mention that markets are very often ill-suited to provide the best services you can get (and they're often more expensive than public options, too).
Yeah I kind of touched on that in this part,
But you're right, maybe I should've hammered harder specifically on market forces, but Ancaps treat the market as their god so I was trying to avoid it.
That's what you have now, only it's provided by the state. Well, if you don't have one, you are either an illegal alien or have it free or prosecuted for not paying taxes.
I agree, it's mostly about size and organization, not about ownership.
Well, I'm looking at it and I see it as relevant. Yes, they can, but it's not necessary for them to be part of the same structure. Yes, they can, but they may be organizations like Mozilla with the supposed goal of delivering the service, not profit. So just like with state services, but separated where no monolithic organization is really required. Also I haven't said what you are arguing with, so it can't be wildly incorrect if I haven't said it, obviously.
You can't be sure of that. Some companies have monopolies on certain goods/services.
One thing you can be assured of is that it would be way more expensive, and probably shittier, as is the case with that kind of privatized services.