Quote Originally Posted by Renton View Post
No libertarian is against laws or policing. We're only against monopolies on the provision of laws and policing.

I brought up the 3rd world country example to argue against your idea that the state is necessary in order for people to act peacefully. I really don't like the argument that laws are codified culture and without them we would all be savages. Even if that argument were true, then it would be just as true that laws codify a lot of really shitty things about our culture as well. For example, female-biased child support and custody laws have codified a very sexist culture toward fathers in America that probably wouldn't exist were it not for the laws themselves.
Laws are messy. They're informed by all sorts of trends and forces. Some laws aren't even formed from a violent authority, like Judean/Christian/Muslim laws. They don't need threats of violence in this world to sway behavior, merely rewards/punishments for the infinity here-after. And you want a new law more closely aligned with Judean law than State law that says initiating aggression is a no-no. If you were masterful, you could get a lot of people to follow it, but you won't get them all. And everyone who tries to break that law and fails, will teach the next guy what mistakes to avoid.

Finding a place for laws and policing in a libertarian society a priori doesn't change the fact that monopolies are immensely beneficial to the monopoly holder, especially when that monopoly is on violence. Once the scent of a possible monopoly gets around, what's going to stop people from dreaming? You can break market monopolies with violence, but how can you break violent monopolies?

And your solution to this problem that looms over everyone is to say, "well, we just won't have violent monopolies on principle." and that's foolish.

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3rd world countries that don't have anything worth the trouble of conquering and policing are your example of how people get along just fine if we all stopped believing in violent authorities?

Go ahead and build New Singapore and watch as a State forms with it.