-- At 01:08 PM 12/8/2000 -0800, auto110413@hushmail.com wrote:
Mr. Murphy complains that Gaza does not meet this "requirements" for being an anarchy - I would then respectully ask "what does???".. If Gaza is not anarchy, has there EVER been an anarchy in all of recorded history? The "State," as a structure of social organization, exists even in communities of animals that are of substantial sub-human intelligence (e.g., wolf packs, lion prides, dophins, ants, most primates and most other social, intelligent animals all exhibit some form of "pecking order" that can loosely be interpreted to be power structures that self-organized out of "random chaos"
I hope you also understand that from the perspective of a business man,
A state is a monopoly of legitimate force. What makes a state a state is that the policeman can whack me, and I cannot whack the policeman. This destroys and undermines law, it does not sustain law. Only a few animals have such severe inequality of force, mostly less intelligent ones, (chickens, social insects), and humans have not had a pecking order this severe and extreme throughout most of our evolution. What makes Gaza not an anarchy is that it has policemen, and these policemen answer to a single central authority. It is not absence of laws that makes places anarchic, but absence of rulers. perhaps the most important role that governments provide is not necessarily "an organized system of corrupt thugs to whom we pay protection money in the form of taxes" (to paragraph Mr. Murphy's arguments); instead, government most importantly provides business with an institution upon which businesses may pass on risk (if necessary). The businessman has no power. The ruler has power. So any risk will be passed in the other direction.
If Mr. Murphy believes that it is possible to run a business absent government (i.e., in an anarchy), I suggest he quit the pot-smoking grad school scene, get a REAL job (preferabbly in Northern California) and see firsthand how the world REALLY works.. (perhaps AFTER he spends several months in Russia, so he can compare and constrast..)
We are using the world anarchy to mean a system with no ruler, and seek an anarchy with laws and without rulers. When you describe Russia and Gaza as anarchies, you are using the term to describe absence of laws, rather than absence of rulers. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG PxGGRnzDTGbh7xI7ELaaCmRs1ZMgJDCe9kFgY3li 4wKPjVSjMKLcl3NV7RhJj+MA+Ly1B4cwfbDzXoARl