According to professor emiritus Vesa Kanniainen, NATO is one, if not the only one, of those services that are so called supranational public goods.
But public police, on the other hand, is not. For instance, like in the United States of America, see Mises Institute: A Tale of Two Bureaucracies, published 21.3.2024
Objectivists claim that retaliatory force is different from other products and services traditionally offered on the (semi) free market: a deli owner, say, will leave you alone if you don’t want to interact with him, but the police and courts won’t necessarily. Therefore, objectivists argue, retaliatory force does not belong on the free market. What do you make of this argument?
I think the argument has merit. One problem, however, is that the use of force isn't always well-defined. When a market has externalities, you might be harming a third party, for instance, which would count as unprovoked aggression. Similar issues exist for other market failures – one that comes to mind is that when there's information asymmetry, it's easy to cheat people out of their money.
Those are real problems, but (1) they're usually negligible in private markets, (2) government intervention has similar, more pronounced problems, and (3) people are usually aware of such short-comings when they exist, so they try to solve them privately via, say, innovation.
Sam, if you are planning additional posts on libertarianism, I'm interested in your thoughts on the general latecomer problem: newcomers in the form of children and migrants, rents, etc. Do you have thoughts on geolibertarianism, land vs 'resources', (dis)incentives to entrepreneurship, the assessment calculation problem?
No problem, it just happens to be something that I've taken a dilettante interest in since I first heard the phrase 'closing of the frontier' as a child.
I think of the 'latecomer' problem as one of inter-temporal reallocation: what, if any, allocation should go to a newcomer (young adult, migrant) when scarce physical assets (principally land and natural resources, e.g., fresh water) have existing claimants? Henry George's idea, variously referred to as 'Georgism' or 'Geoism' and originating in a largely agrarian time, was to see the earth as a common asset and to tax the value of the *unimproved* parcel (usually in the form of a 'land rent'), allowing the owner/leaseholder to retain the value of any improvements. He sought to incentivize 'makers' and disincentivize 'takers' (rentiers). There are both theoretical and practical problems with this that have been explored by many, and there is a journal devoted to Georgism: http://georgistjournal.org/
A perhaps useful taxonomy and blistering critique can be found here:
I'm inclined towards the view that: resource = asset + knowledge. A paper by Zachary Gochenour & Bryan Caplan explores related ideas in the context of Georgism:
According to professor emiritus Vesa Kanniainen, NATO is one, if not the only one, of those services that are so called supranational public goods.
But public police, on the other hand, is not. For instance, like in the United States of America, see Mises Institute: A Tale of Two Bureaucracies, published 21.3.2024
Objectivists claim that retaliatory force is different from other products and services traditionally offered on the (semi) free market: a deli owner, say, will leave you alone if you don’t want to interact with him, but the police and courts won’t necessarily. Therefore, objectivists argue, retaliatory force does not belong on the free market. What do you make of this argument?
I think the argument has merit. One problem, however, is that the use of force isn't always well-defined. When a market has externalities, you might be harming a third party, for instance, which would count as unprovoked aggression. Similar issues exist for other market failures – one that comes to mind is that when there's information asymmetry, it's easy to cheat people out of their money.
Those are real problems, but (1) they're usually negligible in private markets, (2) government intervention has similar, more pronounced problems, and (3) people are usually aware of such short-comings when they exist, so they try to solve them privately via, say, innovation.
Sam, if you are planning additional posts on libertarianism, I'm interested in your thoughts on the general latecomer problem: newcomers in the form of children and migrants, rents, etc. Do you have thoughts on geolibertarianism, land vs 'resources', (dis)incentives to entrepreneurship, the assessment calculation problem?
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with those problems. Do you have a blog, article or video that you recommend in which they are discussed?
No problem, it just happens to be something that I've taken a dilettante interest in since I first heard the phrase 'closing of the frontier' as a child.
I think of the 'latecomer' problem as one of inter-temporal reallocation: what, if any, allocation should go to a newcomer (young adult, migrant) when scarce physical assets (principally land and natural resources, e.g., fresh water) have existing claimants? Henry George's idea, variously referred to as 'Georgism' or 'Geoism' and originating in a largely agrarian time, was to see the earth as a common asset and to tax the value of the *unimproved* parcel (usually in the form of a 'land rent'), allowing the owner/leaseholder to retain the value of any improvements. He sought to incentivize 'makers' and disincentivize 'takers' (rentiers). There are both theoretical and practical problems with this that have been explored by many, and there is a journal devoted to Georgism: http://georgistjournal.org/
A perhaps useful taxonomy and blistering critique can be found here:
https://web.archive.org/web/20120119025941/http://www.paulbirch.net/CritiqueOfGeorgism.html
A largely favorable series of guest posts on Astral Codex Ten can be found here:
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/does-georgism-work-is-land-really
I'm inclined towards the view that: resource = asset + knowledge. A paper by Zachary Gochenour & Bryan Caplan explores related ideas in the context of Georgism:
An entrepreneurial critique of Georgism
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11138-013-0218-8