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But the real point I was trying to make in my earlier post was unrelated to how good or bad the strategy is. I just argued that there isn’t much of a coordination problem with the strategy.

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On your second point I don’t think democracies are even remotely like restaurants. If we must use a bad food analogy think they’re more like food halls. Independent operators are allowed to sell stuff, but so people aren’t vomiting and dying at their tables, the customers choose a person to go knock heads together of anyone who lie about what they’re selling, or who spit in the food, or who make unsafe products and then appear under a new name the next week. And then when the gangster guy at the table next to you spits in your food or steals it, instead of you getting beaten when you compain, management bans the guy from attending the food hall. Also because it makes no sense to have the food stalls providing the lighting for the food hall, you get the food hall people to do that. Because there is a generally good setup you always have lots of vendors who want to sell at the food hall, and so you have lots of choice. As long as you actively make sure the management isn’t controlled by a-holes, things work really well. If that requires printing all alternative management approaches on everybody’s plates and tables, and maybe even spending a little money to make sure they read it, well so be it.

When you get rid of the food hall, one of the operators hires a smelly dude to stand next to his competitors stalls, and one by one they’ve all been bought out, although no body actually knows that’s happened. Suddenly prices triple. You wander around trying to find the food in the dark between the stalls because its not in any stall’s interest to provide lighting beyond their own immediate area. Also, you get mugged for your food because there is no food hall to kick people out of anymore.

Actually my food analogy is pretty bad, forget it. We should just speak plainly. I’m actually interested in any model anyone can show actually working, including libertarianism. But I’m not yet convinced a country without a government wouldn’t just be rule of the strongest/most ruthless operators.

I think you’re last point about the incentive gradients is by far the strongest of the three. Perhaps it’s a good argument for much more localised democracy, or at least safeguards to democracy organized at a much more local level. Obviously I won’t deny your experience, but all the Europeans I’ve known personally have said differently – they’ve generally said the average European at least knows the general ideological themes of the major parties, which isn’t the case in some other places. I’ll try to keep an open mind on the issue though.

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I get bonuses in company stock, so am an ~0.0001% holder of the company I work for; this is much less use to me than being the holder of 0.0250% of the votes for the workers’ council (there being about 4000 workers), and buying enough shares to get to 0.025% of the company would cost me roughly 131 years’ wage. I’ll admit that it’s an IT company whose price/earnings ratio is often considered somewhat on the high side.

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I remember it being a huge improvement in wait times, but it was regulated away, for “safety”.

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And this system works, that is, you can get from point A to point B, but marshrutkas are notoriously unsafe and uncomfortable. A public bus or trolley, if available, is always a preferred option.

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1. that without government we won’t get serendipitous blue-skies breakthroughs that turn out to have enormous practical application (e.g. the AC motor),

2. that without government we won’t get things that are not useful but really cool or aesthetically pleasing to people who are interested in science (e.g. the moon landings, the LHC).

I think the absence of the first class would be a very powerful argument against anarchism that most people would not tolerate, but the absence of the second is more of a value judgement and I suspect most people simply wouldn’t care. If the US were an anarcho-capitalist country in 1960 that was otherwise stable and as rich or richer than in reality, I doubt many people would clamour to build a government just to answer Sputnik.

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I suspect the answer to the apparent contradiction is that the “value” of not being unemployed or of leisure time is somehow norm-referenced against wages. I don’t enjoy playing football any more than a penniless Senegalese boy but the monetary value of that leisure activity by your proposed measure is much greater when I do it than when he does it only because I have more remunerative alternatives that he doesn’t.

One could argue then that the real measure of total available human labour is the monetary value of the average hourly wage multiplied by all available waking hours, rather than just those the average person chooses to work. But I suspect this doesn’t work well in practice: to get people to work more you have to pay them more, and if you have to pay people more to work for you, the purchasing power of your wages decreases. Leisure and working time probably can’t be redistributed much. So I think this is a fine approach, as a rule of thumb.

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