If you refuse to learn about the non statist versions of law and order then you should observe that you have no credibility in your critique of said non statist law and order. Additionally you seem to be using a different definition of government than the one you are defending through your critique.
I'm not critiquing anything about law and order. I don't give a damn about law and order, because it's not really all that relevant to the subject. The fact is that a free (unregulated) market is universally incapable of maintaining a minimum standard of wealth, period, regardless of the law and order involved.
That said, the video you linked to is a horrible example of the idea of nonstatist law and order (at least, relative to this discussion) because it specifically holds aloft as an example thereof the Law Merchant (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lex_mercatoria), a set of laws
specifically designed to allow the merchant class to have their own rules that circumvented the normal procedures of civil law. That's the
exact problem that unregulated free markets have -- they allow the
wealthy to write their own rules!
From Wikipedia: "The guiding spirit of the merchant law was that it ought to evolve from commercial practice, respond to the needs of the merchants, and be comprehensible and acceptable to the merchants who submitted to it."
In the modern world, that guiding spirit leads directly to things like the disregulation of the financial industry, the failure to necessitate that synthesized collateralized debt obligations to be accounted for on the books, and thus the entire global economic collapse.
And then the video goes on to discuss Iceland's Althing as though any legal body wherein positions can be openly bought and sold is a) different from our current governmental scenario (it's not), or b) somehow capable of regulating the very market that is creating the bodies doing the buying and selling! The Althing is another example of
exactly the kind of governing body that would be even more vulnerable to corporate domination than our current system is, and as such, fails the nonstatist=better for the people test as well.
Furthermore, according to the video, under the Althing the responsibility for ensuring that judgements were rendered was on the shoulders of the PLAINTIFF -- tell me, looking around America today, does your typical plaintiff in a citizen-vs-corporation case have any ability to enforce a judgement against a corporation? All it would take for any modern corporation to escape the judgement rendered against them is a quick purchase of the Chieftan representing the plaintiff -- not a problem given the wealth inequality between a corporation and an individual -- and they get off scott free. (Hell, the video itself admits freely that the problem with the Althing is that it was eventually monopolized!)
Basically, the entireity of your non-statist law and order argument is nothing more than a giant 1-up to the power of businessness over the common man -- which is exactly the problem that needs solving, and thus is worse than irrelevant: it's an actively bad idea as applies to modern American politicoeconomics.
Have you heard of Channel 1 perhaps? It is a large series of private food shelfs and food banks in the midwest. In other words: In a free market we defend the bare minimum by helping those that are near it through charity.
Total charitable giving in the USA last year was around 307 billion (
http://www.nps.gov/partnerships/fundraising_individuals_statistics.htm). Even if you don't count
health care because the American health care system is completely f**ked, and
then you assume that the government is horribly inefficient and
half of the money that goes toward social safety nets is wasted -- and
THEN you assume that there is
no other need besides those covered by those social safety nets -- the total need in this country is easily double that amount ($1.266 trillion for Social Security and
Other Mandatory Spending, cut in half to represent waste is $633 billion -- more than double the amount of charitable giving in the USA. Numbers from Wikipedia (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_United_States_federal_budget)'s summary of the 2010 budget.
The theory that charitable giving can account for the amount of need in a country that has just been financially raped by the effects of an
unregulated market is pure fantasy.
Changes that occur in the relative gap are not relevant to the solution to the objective wealth problem.
Tell that to all of the private citizens that are currently raising utter hell because they're worried that the government is going to steal their money and give it to the poor.
Hence the objective wealth problem is not to be confused with the initial topic of this thread. Please do not equate them.
You
cannot separate them. They are both artifacts of the same market. You can be as coldly rational and logical as you want, but once you discount the power of charity -- and you have to, because it's not large enough -- you still have to have some force to keep the objective wealth minimum in place, and that force will necessarily alter the relative wealth balance.
Being greedy is not something worthy of theft. Therefore if there is a more optimal wealth distribution it should be achieved without committing "greater good" immoralities.
I've never mentioned the greater good, because I don't care about it. But if you want to talk about immorality, let's talk about those times when a society allows people in power in increase their wealth beyond their basic needs at the expense of another person's ability to meet their basic needs. That is provably exactly what the free market has done in modern America -- and
will always do without oversight.
History has demonstrated that there are essentially three sectors of human society that can perform that intervention with enough power to make it stick: states, businesses, and religions. Businesses being the problem in the first place, asking them to do it is inane. Religious authority is totally an option, but is it really any better than a state option in the long run? Either way, you end up asking private citizens to give up their power to an overarching body that will make decisions on their behalf, and will sometimes come down against their interests.
Philosophical sidenote.In conclusion: Are we going to finish discussing the relative gap or are you going to move on to discussing the objective problem that we all agree about? I prefer discussion over repetitive agreement.
There is no discussion of the objective problem without discussion of the relative gap. Charity won't close the objective gap, and it's the only non-force option on the table. The remaining option is to change the relative gap in order to repair the objective gap. That requires an authority to enforce the change in the relative gap against the
will of the wealthy. The wealthy either have the power to prevent that change, or they don't.
If they do have the power to prevent that change, they will, and the poor suffer (the problem that exists today).
If they don't have the power to prevent that change, the authority enforces a market adjustment, and people like you who don't like market adjustments will complain. Interestingly, however, no one will
suffer.
