Quote from: Matthew N. Wright on April 23, 2013, 09:16:18 PM

Quote from: Hawker on April 23, 2013, 09:15:04 PM

A non-police state is like a non-feline cat. There can never be such a thing.

Roger Ver once told me (at a dinner here in South Korea) that he believed police should be removed from the state and instead private security could be hired. Any thoughts on that?

My personal belief is that then the richest people would be in an uncheckable position of power.

I was just talking to someone the other day who's father is a police officer. They made the same objection.

My response to that was... Isn't that already the world we live in? The only difference is that competing private security firms would have financial incentive to uphold their company's brand. A ton of smaller clients is worth a lot more than a hand full of rich ones. Their competition is always lurking around the corner to gobble up the available market share should they slip up.

Public security has no such motivation because they're incapable of losing business. Their revenues are maintained by force with threats of violence and harm in the first place. "Pay us or we will confiscate your wealth and imprison you. Defend yourself against us and we will terminate you with extreme prejudice."

Quote from: Ekaros on April 23, 2013, 10:25:14 PM

So if there is no state is there any laws? Or just private contracts?

I wonder is statelessness preferable to having a state. If you aren't specially powerfull or have influence...

Stateless societies have existed before, and they will definitely exist again in the future. (The internet is a stateless society, for example.) There are two kinds of law. Legislative and judicial. Reputable judicial judgments are the basis of common law. We understand the concept of precedent.

We each, as individuals, take it upon ourselves in varying degrees to enforce what we know is right and justify that which we know is wrong. That is what is common among us, and it forms the basis of a common sort of law. Just as each individual molecule of air produces friction against something penetrating our atmosphere, so too do humans create friction against those would would aggress against ourselves and those around us. Enough friction and you'll burst into flames.

Now, I am the last person on earth to suggest that humans are able to accurately determine right from wrong. Human beings are radically warped creatures with a twisted sense of judgment. But we do have a general sense of it, and we can generally come to an agreement on most things, including how we operate and interact with one another. We don't need (and usually we don't want) some external regulatory body to determine that for us. Gray areas are gray areas, and we can always work those out later.

Quote from: Viceroy on April 24, 2013, 06:47:08 PM

I don't know. I started a new threat to address the question. Please see this.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=186636

You and your self-moderated threads, ho ho ho.

http://i.imgur.com/N3RYPHJ.jpg