The "Free Rider" Problem is NOT a Problem for Anarchy.

Here is one of what might be a series of articles on the practicality of the abolition of states because I'm tired of getting into the same conversations with statists who think they are original but actually just have identical objections to every other statist.


The "Free Rider" Problem is NOT a Problem for Anarchy.

When you say you disagree with states as a concept people very often say something like "How will you get streetlights?????" Of course, you can substitute for street lights any other thing that the government happens to have a monopoly on doing at the moment, and you really have to wonder, if government provided ball bearings and had a monopoly on that would statitsts be saying, "How would we get steering wheels without government? That's maaaaaadness."

This is called the free-rider problem, and it's one of the most basic problems in economics. If you have a public good that many people benefit from, how do you stop people who don't pay from benefitting?

What I find most frustrating is people raise these objections as though all of the anarchists suddenly have to go have to go "Bah dub a duh duh good point I have never thought of that before, you're right, boo for anarchism, that's insurmountable, I'm now a statist... yup, giving all the guns to a single central authority who are allowed to violently extract income for everyone and distribute it as they might to whoever bribes them, or whomever they want to bribe to vote for them, sounds like a muuuuuch better solution. How very rational."

Such a basic objections, when they are presented with accompanying smugness rather than genuine curiosity, are  kind of insulting to your intellegence, because you'd have to be an idiot not to have thought of these problems. You get to wishing people would just pick up a book and learn a little about a theory before assuming they can knock it down in one blow.

Their argument basically goes ... "I get such-and-such for free and don't have to raise a finger, therefore the system in place is adequate."

But that does not logically follow. Just because there is a system in place does not meant is good, efficient, cheap, practical, suitable long term, preferable to what could be in it's place,  etc.

What is in effect being argued, is that the combined ingenuity of every individual in society who may have a versted interest in solving the free-rider problem when it comes to street lighting say, or quite frankly anything, is going to be inferior to the cenral dictat of a bunch of beaurocrats who are not even spending their own resources, and have less vested interest in solving any given problem than of bribing people to vote for them.

The make a "state of the gaps" argument and will forever point to this hole or that hole which is something which the state has monopolised and therefore cannot be met by another institution, be it a business, charity, consumer or worker cooperative, community project, or any other institution which is voluntary. They want you to say how exactly an endless list of things will be provided without a state, if you can't answer even one of them they go "Ha! See! Anarchism, doomed to fail."

The unreasonably biased nature of this line of questioning, which does not subject an ideology which has been responsible for killing 2-300 million of it's own people in the last hundred years not including the wars,  to the same scrutiny and need for evidence of the ideology they oppose, is only eclipsed by it's irrationality.

Firstly, if the free rider problem is a serious problem, then the government is the worst culprit, because they can grant themselves and their buddies special priveleges with public money which isn't theirs like no other institution in society, and everyone else would have to pay for it. Not only can they, they do.

And more, asking me, or any other anarchist, how exactly this or that would be done in a stateless society is no different from asking an abolitionist how cotton will be picked once slavery is abolished. It would have been literally impossible for anyone to accurately predict that the abolition of slavery would make human labour uneconomic and lead to the invention of great big heaving robots that run on dinosaur juice from thousands of years ago, but that's what happens. When you remove the arbitrary dictats of how things should be done by force, something better rushes in to fill the place, it's compelled to by trial and error. Statism is not trial and error, it's "lets do it this way and ban anyone from doing it any other way." That is why when you look at statist institution they seem frozen in time, but there is a new smartphone with better features every couple of years. How will street lights be provided? In whatever way optimises through trial and error - banning people from trying alternatives by making the government option mandatory certainly can't help in any way. How could it? 

We must note that the free rider problem is only a problem in cases where people consider it to be a problem. For example, if I mow my lawn my neighbour may benefit from his house having a higher value due to the aesthetics of the community, but I am very unlikely to demand remuneration for it. So we can conclue that our discussion of solutions is limited to cases where people receive external benefits from other peoples time or resources in ways which bother payers.

In such cases, maybe people who paid would get stickers on their doors and people who could pay but didn't would get dirty looks and prying questions from their neighbours who wouldn't have any business with them. Or maybe the lighting organisation would offer special priveleges to people who did pay like cheaper electricity for their house. Or maybe people who didn't pay would have to pay more for insurance because they weren't paying in to the safety of their community. Who can tell?

Personally I'd rather not be forced on threat of being put in a cage with murderers and rapists to pay for these things, I'd take my chances with someone being able to see all the solutions offered to me by people who have a real incentive to organise the best system and present the options to the people in my street, or the company that built the roads, or the one who built the houses, or whoever is responsible for making these decisions, so we can choose for ourselves.

How to respond to the "I Was Spanked, And I Turned Out Fine" Argument

1) that's not a vaid argument, only 1/3rd of long term heavy smokers get lung cancer, someone can smoke 60 a day for 40 years and say "I smoked and I was fine" and even though that might be true it wouldn't disprove the evidence that broadly speaking smoking large quantitites over a long period of time is harmful.
Likewise there is a large body of evidence that shows broadly speaking spanking is harmful, and just because you turned out fine doesn't disprove that evidence.

93% of studies on spanking agree It is harmful to children. This has been called "an almost unheard of consensus" in childrearing studies - in other words people who reasearch childrearing find it hard to agree on just about anything, but that spanking is harmful is just about as close to an established fact as you can get.

If you choose to smoke you take the risk with your health but if you spank you take the risk with your child's state of mental health.

Here are the facts on spanking, according to the last 20-30 years of science:
children who are physically punished even mildly:
- Tend to have a lower IQ and are less able to reason effectively.
- Have a poorer relationship with their parents than those who are reared non-aggressively.
- Are more likely to resort to violence as a means of solving problems and even become chronically defiant.
- Are more likely to smoke and twice as likely develop alcohol/drug addictions.
- Are more likely to develop anxiety disorders and depression and show symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
- Are more likely to display anti-social behaviour and abuse their spouse or children later in life.

The use of aggression on the young gains immediate compliance but results in more aggressive children prone to delinquency, anti-social behaviour and crime. The consequences correlate to dose, the more physical punishment, the greater the effects, and effects tend to reduce once physical punishment stops.

While many of parents justify spanking, 85% say they would rather not if there was an alternative.

2) you probably did turn out fine but that doesn't mean you couldn't have turned out even better if your parents knew other ways to influence your behaviour that didn't involve violence.

 
3) you shouldn't need an argument because we don't need an argument to know that a man shouldn't hit his wife, we don't hit our waiters, associates, employees, bosses, friends, spouses and we shouldn't hit children whose personalities and brains are still forming.

There is no gray area when it comes to whether or not hitting your spouse is acceptible, and there is no gray area in hitting your child. There are over 30 countries in which spanking is banned, Children in Switzerland, and Austria are not running wild in the street. Those countries have become less violent as a whole - it's more than likely a direct consequence of people hitting their children less since hitting even a couple of times (if the parent does not apologise and admit they should have used a non-violent approach) teaches that violence can solve problems in some circumstances so that belief comes integrated in the psyche. There is no need for violence and the alternatives which are expounded in books like Parent Effectiveness Training, How to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk, unconditional parenting, etc. actually use opportunities that most parents would see as a reason to spank as a useful time to teach good values and to bring caregiver and child closer together,





When you spank you're doing two bad things:
1) you're teaching kids to be selfish - ie. don't do this because of the consequences to you (as opposed to the consequences to others)~
2) you're missing the opportunity to use other methods which will teach your children both how to reason and think for themselves, and genuine values that concern caring about the consequences of their actions.

having said all that, rather than make those arguments which are all true, logical, and reasonable, the suggestion is to ask the spanking advocate to give an example of a situation where they think spanking is warranted and demonstrate how the progressive approaches would acheive their aims better within that particular situation.