and, for me, Herb, 50 years -- dirt was young in '48. -- j

Motivated by several of khalling's questionable claims, I took down a book, THE LAW GOES WEST by Forbes Parkhill (Western Sage Press, 1956). Parkhill was an autodidact who taught writing at the University of Denver. This book came from his discovery of two troves of unclassified judicial records from the territorial days of the places we now call Colorado. It was rough and ready justice, to be sure. However, some of those who rushed to Pike's Peak for gold in 1856 were lawyers. They set up courts in the methods described by Wolf Devoon in his "Constitution of Government for Galt's Gulch" reviewed in the Gulch here: http://www.galtsgulchonline.com/posts/9f... According to Devoon, courts are properly the creations of lawyers.

(Forbes Parkhill biography here:
http://kenoshakid.wikispaces.com/Forbes+...
His movie credits here:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0662751/)

cool. quit calling my claims-were they? questionable. I said "hired guns" I am well familiar with the santa fe trail and Bent's Fort. Thanks for the Devon reference again. "courts are the creation of lawyers." Courts are the creation of the mercantile class. Again, you are at 1856. I was discussing the 1820s-40s. Criminal cases were due to govt. To the extent that non-commercial issues were adjudicated, was an attempt to keep the govt from being the judge, jury and executioner.

Never is a very long time.

Mike: As to your 2nd paragraph, I hope you're right. As to my status, I am retired, and I spend my time writing, learning, and being a gadfly. Over my longish life, I've been a musician, a retailer, a photographer, and a publisher and editor. It has given me a view of ways to earn that lots of folks have not had the opportunity to have. I've been an A.R. fan for 66 years. I am older than dirt.

"It was not uncommon for entrepreneurs, former gunslingers, criminals and political appointees of the local government to band together and form police squads. This was how legendary lawmen such as Wyatt Earp and his brothers, Bat Masterson, and Luke Short got their start. Many of them were simply guns-for-hire." Legalsource 360
well, if we are considering early settlers of the west we are looking at the Santa Fe Trail 1820s and The Oregon Trail (1840s) long before 1878.

I am not sure that "sheriffs were privately hired." In America, the sheriff is a county officer of a court, elected by the voters. As far as I know under most state constitutions, the county sheriff's number one duty is running the county jail. Traffic enforcement and law enforcement in general come after that. You seem to be alluding to the frontier West. A federal territory had a federal marshal. Absent a legal county, there could be no legal sheriff. We understand that towns elected sheriffs or maybe the merchants hired gunmen, but we need more than "Gunsmoke" and "Bonanza" if we are going to find the facts here. Also, I am not sure what a federal fort would do for you except protect you from Indians. Posse comitatus (1878) prevented the army from engaging in law enforcement.

Herb, I agree with your broad claim as more people are more rational, we need less (external) government. That said, I do point out that YOU have the opportunity and ability to live a rational life in an irrational society. I trust that you are somehow gainfully employed in market activities of your own. You are neither a burglar nor an IRS agent -- even though it seems that most of the people around us apparently are. Even so, human society is improving. You expect long-term gains. When the Normans conquered England, they consolidated their hold by going into the countryside, capturing anyone who could oppose them, systematically slitting their throats and carting them off to a mass grave. There are still places on Earth where you can get that done, but England is not one of them.

Science and commerce share deep roots. Eventually, the rational-emoirical (objectivist) scientific method will be more deeply accepted by more people.

I wasn't making a comment about the longer, wider, and deeper history of the Pinkertons, but your point is well taken. I was referring just to the one incident and knew about their founding, but not anything about them since 1900.

Wackenhut used to be the security firm tasked with letting me through the fence daily for the year that I worked with on a project (before reading AS) that would not be approved of by Gulch citizens. I had no problem with Wackenhut during that year.

I agree regarding culture. Minarchist is a nonsensical term

Ok.

khalling, you miss the forest for the trees. The very existence of common law is the "mechanical engineering" of private force protection. Private forces had no other context but common law.

Here in America, private and public policing went back and forth. Public police were the agents of the wealthy, leaving the poor on their own; so the merchants in those neighborhoods hired their own guards. Then, the police were democratized and rich people hired their own guards. So, too, in London, were the Bow Street Runners made irrelevant by the Bobbies. Note, of course, as is famous, that the London Metropolitan was _unarmed_ unless circumstances warranted arms. In modern times, gangs outside the English tradition (IRA, Muslims) forced the Bobbies to arm. Even so, when they bust down your door, they announce themselves, "Armed police!" It is a cogent point.

No, professor, you seem to have an incomplete reading of that one event; and little context for the longer, wider, and deeper history of the company. Today, Pinkerton is owned by Securitas, headquartered in Stockholm, traded publicly as three different corporations, present in over 30 nations with over 300,000 employees and never firing a shot at the Number One agency in the world today, G4S, owner of the American "Wackenhut" label with over 400,000 employees in over 30 nations. We are talkiing of armies the size of France's and Germany's without the actual bloodshed of those nations' armies. You need to do more research.

Maphesdus wrote: "No one becomes a billionaire by selling perpetual motion machines." That is exactly the point, Maph. Although some people became hundredaires or thousandaires, it is an overblown accusation, divorced from reality, even from the reality of actual scams and schemes. Yet, that is by analogy, the claim of the anti-market people that _ALL_ protective agencies "would" (could, should) engage in a perpetual war-of-all-against-all, when in fact, few ever do, and those that do have become governments and abandoned businesses.

The protective services of Ford Motor Company and General Motors worked in the same cities, the same neighborhoods, without ever firing upon each other -- or their own workers (even labor disputes being limited in force). Minarchists claim that that was because they were under the dominion of a monopoly government... but that same monopoly government is incapable of stopping gangs such as M13 and the Zetas... So, what is the explanation that subsumes both sets of facts? To me, it is a commitment within the persons involved to engage in business or to engage in aggression.

Incentives matter. However, culture is deeper. Changing culture via incentives seems to require means and methods that are not well understood. These objecto-could-be-anarchos and their mini-objecto-would-be-governors all argue _should_ (everyone should do as I say) without ever referring to the actual facts of human action.

In other words, "you don't shoot; I don't shoot." With the caveat that anyone may defend his person, personal space, dwelling, curtilage, and effects--and that of another. Do I have that right?

Any philosophy, in order to be effective must deal with reality. The only way that any form of anarchy in any of its modifications can work is with a race of mature and rational persons. Unfortunately, that is not the human race. Some day in the far future perhaps, but neither today nor tomorrow will that be true. Objectivism deals with humanity as it exists today, with goals to be achieved as signposts on the road to rational maturity. The goals are achievable within our vision of tomorrow. If your object is a future without the need for government, then be an objectivist until you can actually see that goal on the horizon. It may take a while, so don't hold your breath.

sorry, typing on my Kindle. bleh. depraved heart is what I meant to type

Rolling back Federal overreach, and strengthening state government responsibilities is probably easier than trying to resection Federal responsibilities. Restructuring the tax codes to reduce the Federal bite is a start. Weaning the states off of "free" Federal monies will be painful, but doable.

Cutting the faceless government bureaucracy can be simple, if we elect people with the will to cut the budgets of Federal agencies. Reducing or eliminating the budgets will reduce the number of those who brutalize the American public without consequence.

President Wilson's fantasy of the apolitical, selfless government bureaucrat was behind the rapid growth of agencies. As we've seen, it also laid the path to an imperial Executive, able to conduct much Federal activity in defiance of the other branches of government.

I would add de -centralization of federal givt geographically and more deoraved heart convictions. Public officials who have no oversight by separation of powers. All of the govt agencies which came into existance for the most part in the 20 th century. All of those agencies should be abolished or severely limited in scope.

I'm not an anarchist, so the anarcho-capitalism idea seems either naive or unrealistically idealistic. As we've found, without some form of independent barriers, a strong entity can prevent fresh competition (as is being carried out now with big corporations buying government support). The idea of establishing self-serving defense organizations to somehow overcome corporate greed for power is unrealistic, so how to fine tune a lousy idea makes little sense.

Sometimes the government makes a (usually ineffectual) effort to reign in ruthless corporate entities. As far back as the Grover Cleveland administration, some attempt to curtail hostile destruction or theft of entrepreneurs new ideas was attempted, being viewed as harmful to the free market. Unfortunately, the half-life of such efforts is brief, given the opportunity to corrupt politicians to allow corporations to buy their way out of compliance.

Without abandoning the idea of representative government, there's a lot we can do to gum up the payoff game. Term limits for all political offices, including the judiciary is a good start. Banning the acceptance of any gifts, of any value from any source that could benefit from government largesse would help. Only then would I begin to trust government oversight to protect the free market.

By definition, NAP assumes property rights without defining them. The result is that many run around denying prooerty rights. That either they are a monopoly or initiation of force. A system which voluntarily collected money for rights enforcement is not an abstraction but very possible to do.

Would anyone here like to articulate the Non-Aggression Principle? And distinguish it from the Non-Initiation-of-Force Principle? Are they the same, or different?