Assassination Politics

grarpamp grarpamp at gmail.com
Tue Nov 16 19:58:23 PST 2021


Govts are the sole proposal writer, contract awarder,
and money thief for roads, all enforced by deadly force,
an untenable situation by any measure.

Now while the headline title action of AP may for
various reasons never come to pass,
the more general form from which it derives,
that being Prediction Markets (PM's), will
definitely reach adoption for lots of uses.

In fact, PM's are ideal for answering the remaining
age old question of "But who will build the roads?"
in a voluntary NAP preserving libertarian society.

Therein, everyone who wishes is free to propose
whatever potential road contracts they wish
in the form of prediction questions.
Everyone is free to see all contracts,
to place and fund wagers raising the stakes of the
questions they prefer to have answered by takers.
Contracts could specify road quality,
which sections or sets of roads, etc,
anything from repairing a single pothole,
to entire new builds.
Anyone can now enter the market and be a taker,
can see all questions and funds in the market,
and are all free to grab any contract and begin
work as soon as any contract reaches
a price level that earns an acceptable profit.
Public proof of funds will give takers the
confidence of payment they need to initiate work.
The PM's, through oracles, etc will not award
payment until work is completed to specification.
Unlike government's crony favoritsm awards,
sole sourcing, subsidies etc, the openness
of a PM naturally drives down prices and raises
contract conformance and quality.
And wasteful roads and bridges to nowhere
will not be built.

Ownership of roads by the State, or by any
other entity, is no longer needed.
No GPS trackers, vehicle registrations, odometer
tracking, no bills or collectors sent to privacy
invading easily abused databases of residents,
no license plate scanners, RF tags, toll booths, etc...
all of those legacy models will disappear.
Roads become truly ownerless.
This does not preclude private roads,
yet clearly this may make the private model
annoying and inefficient by comparison.

Since people do not wish to have their
vehicles damaged and bumpy rides by bad roads,
they will be naturally incentivized
to use the free market to fund the
predictions covering the roads they
use or wish to use, this includes roads
to far off vacation destinations, used
trucking companies, etc. In fact, by
eliminating government and its waste tax and
regulation, users will have more funds available
to them to support higher quality roads.

In decentralization, crypto, education,
personal responsibility and charity, we trust.







https://reaction.la/anarchy/roads.htm

Anarchocapitalist roads, drains, and real monopolies.

Ordinary law and order in anarcho capitalism is unlikely to be a big
problem, one that ordinary people think about much or notice much,
except in the sense of large gangs or external governments attempting
to become governments.  All too often however, we will find someone
saying “if only there was someone who had enough authority to make
this road straight, wider, and free of charge”

If we look at the rise of kings, in the early stages of their rise one
of the chief advantages of dangerously great and highly centralized
authority was that the king would keep “the king’s road” open,
enabling money and people to get where they wanted to go, by killing
those who would set up barricades and shake down travellers.

Unless people in an anarcho capitalist society are prepared to keep
their own damn roads open, it is not going to work.

Lots of roads are privately owned today.  The roads in a housing
development are often owned by housing association, sometimes
voluntary, sometimes compulsory.  In some rather small developments,
the road is owned by the guy on the top of the hill, who passes around
the hat as necessary, but everyone has the right to use the road to
access the other properties.  In my case, I own one side of such a
road, and the owner of another property owns the other side, but
everyone has the right to use the road to access any one of five
properties.  All five properties own an easement on both sides of the
road.

In an anarcho capitalist society, the small roads would all work like
this, and the big roads would all be toll roads.

There is a problem with toll roads, and with any long linear property.
In principle, the owner could make a profit by providing an obstacle
rather than access, by charging people to cross his property.  This is
obviously illegitimate.  He can reasonably charge for providing
access, for allowing people to drive along his property, but not for
allowing people to cross it, charge for providing access to other
places, not for blocking access to other places.  For an anarcho
capitalist society to work, people would need to demand a right of
access, should be willing to pay for roads, but not pay for road
blocks.  If people succeed in charging for blocking, rather than
providing, access, then trade and commerce would be severely impaired,
as it was during the middle ages.

This, illegitimate toll collection, is the greatest problem parts of
the world that do not have a central government, for example Somalia,
and Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban.  For an
anarchic society to succeed economically, most people must believe
that they have a right to get to any place they have a right to be.
This is already a principle in English common law.  An easement over
private property is always presumed to exist to allow people to get to
any place they have a right to be, but for anarchy to work, this
principle has to be in people's hearts.  In an economically successful
anarchic society, if you do not want people barging over your
property, you have to provide a way around it.

Let us suppose for example someone owns a narrow strip of land running
all the way across the country from east to west, perhaps originally
acquired to build a road or some such.  Now if he makes it into a nice
road, it is reasonable that he should be free to charge anyone who
wishes to use that road to go from East to West.  But what of those
who want to go from North to South? Should he be free to make his road
into a wall, and charge those who wish to cross it? Obviously not.
But how, in an anarcho capitalist society will travellers stop him?

Obviously in an anarchist society, no one except those affected are
going to be concerned to stop him, so there has to be a norm, a widely
accepted view, that it is in fact legitimate for people to be free to
get from any place they have a right to be, to any other place they
have a right to be, and not be stopped, and that if they are
unreasonable and obstinately stopped, they can do what it takes to
pass, meeting force to force – which implies that if a union, or
anyone else, trys to blockade someone, that someone can start
shooting.  This was in fact the norm, reasonably accepted behavior, in
the early years of unionism in the United States, a fact that many
people find horrifying, but which seems pretty reasonable to me.  The
union would set up camp on the key road serving the employer’s
facility, and sooner or later, the employer would have to start
shooting.

Critics of capitalism tend to see monopolies everywhere, even where no
one else sees a monopoly, and fans of capitalism often do not see
monopolies, even when one seemingly exists.  But there is a reason why
a seeming monopoly is often not a real monopoly.  Suppose one large
business smelts all the aluminum, as in fact right now it does.
Provided there is nothing that stops anyone else from smelting
aluminum, what is the harm in that?  This would only be a problem if
no one else could smelt aluminum.  So the aluminum monopoly may look
like a monopoly, but really it is not, for it can only keep its
“monopoly” by keeping prices low and quality high.

Suppose on the other hand, one big landlord owned all the land, or
owned land surrounding every person's land and claimed the right to
prevent passage, and enforced his will.  Then that would indeed be a
monopoly.  That big landlord would have the power of a socialist
state, would in fact be a socialist state, and people would be right
to rebel against that state, kill its rulers, and redistribute the
state’s property to individuals.

If a real monopoly, not what socialists call a monopoly, but a true
monopoly occurs, then all the capitalist arguments against socialism
and justifying violence against socialist measures apply to that
monopoly, and if that monopoly dresses itself in the clothes of
property rights and voluntary agreements, then all the socialist
arguments against property rights and voluntary agreements apply to
the property of that particular monopoly.  But when property rights
are thus set aside, one always winds up killing people.  Before
confronting such an alleged monopoly, one needs to ask: should we be
killing people, or should we be seeking an alternate source of these
goods?.

In most cases, to ask the question is to answer it.  The so called
monopoly is usually no monopoly at all – but with local roads, local
drains, and the like, real monopolies really do abound.  How shall
anarcho capitalists deal with this without neighbors killing each
other too often?

The right to cut across other people's land if there is no reasonable
way around has to be upheld, the right of innocent passage, placing an
obligation on landowners to provide for travellers – the landowner has
to provide a way around his property, if he is to be entitled to shoot
people cutting across it.


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