1. Protection would be cheap if you can demonstrate you are avoiding risks and it would be made cheaper by innovation under competition. Also, the poor have fewer assets to protect. Finally, charity.

2. No, the people who decide on government wars do not have the same incentives as the owners of private protection agencies. They cannot profit from the savings peace would bring to taxpayers. They can fund wars with government debt and monetary inflation, with little cost to themselves or their families.

3. Many anarcho-capitalists (Bob Murphy, Rothbard, Walter Block, and I think David Friedman) advocate restitution. A victim has a right to two teeth for a tooth. This may include forced labor (or other negotiated terms) to compensate the victim. Prisons would not be paid for by victims, but by the criminal who is exiled and which peaceful societies would not accept, except for criminal hotels/prisons.

4. If people paid for their prejudice (anti-gay), rather than socialized their costs, there would be less. The anti-gay problem is worse with government, as it offers a greater power multiplier for a few and it makes more people care (people will fight on where the bus should go if the bus can only go to one destination).

5. Homeowners associations, Kickstarter and other creative funding schemes can pay for streetlights. See lighthouses, private protection agencies in San Francisco, much of the internet (freemium, ad funding, donation-based).

6. A protection agency which is secretly committing crimes risks being exposed by its competitors, lose all its customers and get punished by other protection agencies. Working for such a rogue agency would be very risky and workers would require higher salaries. Some my blow the whistle (and you could imagine good agencies offering prizes for such, as they will be able to make money by taking the assets of the rogue agency).

7. What is the optimal law zone and how do you know? This question is similar to what is the optimal number of shoe makers, or shoes produced, or the kinds of shoes produced. Besides market forces, there is no more scientific way of determining or approximating such optimal.

8. I’m curious about this too. Anarcho-capitalists like Stefan Molyneux would argue that much irrationality remains in our modern societies (although we made and are still making rational and moral progress, such as recognizing that slavery is wrong), in particular in parenting. This could be the reason why anarcho-capitalist systems could not sustain yet. On the other hand, Peter Leeson would say the world is already anarchist in the sense that countries don’t have worldwide ruler.

9. Countries are not degenerate voluntary protection agencies, as they are monopolistic. Also, historically, they were not formed with unanimous consent (ie. voluntarily).

10. It’s not clear that government “justice” is much better than what you describe. And on a more positive note, competition tends to democratize quality services. So if more people can afford smartphones because of competitive forces and innovation, then maybe more people can also afford superior protection services. Secondly, the rich also have more to lose. A rich person that commits murder would lose his life and fortune. The protection agencies of the poor could easily pool their efforts to pursue such loot. Lastly, the people who get rich by serving others successfully are probably less short-sighted and criminal than average. And the rich and virtuous parents could easily set conditions in their will for their soon-to-be-rich inheritors.

PS: if you’re interested in this topic, Bob Murphy’s “Chaos Theory” and Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s “The myth of national defense” are good reads. Someone else already mentioned Michael Huemer’s “The problem of political authority” (justifications for government contradict commonly professed principles of everyday civil life).

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I don’t think it is unreasonable to assume that a private charity can do at least as good/bad at providing lawyers for such people.

Well, it is.

In the US, the government funds defense attorneys because in 1963, the SCOTUS threw out a case when an indigent defendant requested, but was not assigned, a free lawyer. The courts are similarly willing to throw out cases where the specific legal representation provided in the individual case is incompetent. So the executive must provide quality legal representation to indigent defendants in order to obtain convictions that won’t be overturned: their hands are tied by an entity external to them, the judiciary.

Before 1963, did we see private charity stepping up to fund public defense? No.

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In this particular case you are quoting, and finding it painful to read, what Scott wrote, not what I did.

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But the King will watch half his children die before they reach adulthood, and still must constantly worry about losing his job through murder, coup, or invasion. Advantage modern.

An entire culture somehow manages to spontaneously coordinate an agreement whereby women will not try to earn an income but will instead endeavor to be nurturing wives and mothers, and things worked great until Moloch reared his ugly head in the form of feminism.

I’d lay long odds that had little to do with femenism, and more to do with technology turning the keeping and running of a household from 80+ hours of work/week to ~10 hours of work/week.
Remember that just because it wasn’t monetized doesn’t mean that women didn’t work. Now that that work is either made more automated or outsourced, and so the people who previously were employed as ‘home-maker’ can specialize in other trades.

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@Chevalier: That’s just me not giving the progressives an inch. There is little difference in practice between a system where 100% of wives are banned from working and a system where 90% of wives just happen not to work.

@onyomi: Well, yes, if you can figure out a way to let people keep more of the blood they produce, that would be great. But I’m not so sure that if you manage to restain the government the private vampires won’t simply take up the slack and consume everything above the essentials by themselves. Restraining government is a hard problem, anyway; America started out as a libertarian paradise by modern standards, and look at the way it turned out.

On the other hand, turning people into stones seems to have had some historical success. Child labor is banned, and all of a sudden nobody needs their children’s income to get by. A 40-hour workweek is established, and lots of people really do work 40-hours (or at least they did before the recession). An entire culture somehow manages to spontaneously coordinate an agreement whereby women will not try to earn an income but will instead endeavor to be nurturing wives and mothers, and things worked great until Moloch reared his ugly head in the form of feminism.

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Your objection was that given protection agencies respecting property, the poor who did not subscribe to a protection agency would have no protection or redress if they were victimized. My answer was one proposal by which they could get redress.

It does not answer the question of why protection agencies would generally respect property rights, because your objection was assuming that. I don’t want to switch arguments from what about the poor to why respect property.

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The customers will flock to the agency with the biggest pocket/stick which is more likely than the others to buy/intimidate the arbiters.

Of course the end result will be that nobody trusts the private arbitration/enforcement system.
But this is exactly the point: private arbitration/enforcement is not a Nash equilibrium, and if it happened somehow, it would quickly revert to a monopolistic agency which does all the enforcement and internal arbitration between its (obligate) customers, in other words, a government which collects taxes, settles disputes and enforces the rule of law.

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