Phred wrote:No Anarchist has ever been able to explain satisfactorily who will assume the task of enforcing and why the populace will accept their enforcement as legitimate.
I have often explained, and will be happy to continue to do so until I meet with your satisfaction.
Briefly, the populace will accept as legitimate any enforcement done following procedure the populace considers legitimate. That is what happens today.
The change is that while today, the democratic constitution together with its derivative legal institutions are considered legitimizing, a future anarcho-capitalist (hence "ancap") society would identify a different set of institutions as providing legitimization to enforcement action.
Today, police enforces state court order ("state" in the general sense, including local and federal).
In an ancap society, private enforcement organizations would enforce orders issued by credible, acceptable, legitimate private courts.
There are many areas in life (language and science, for example) in which the community has a fairly unified and coherent conception of legitimate authority, without the need for a central, monopoly authority to exist.
Phred wrote:If this is the case, how is the situation ameliorated by having multiple aggressors competing with each other for who can provide the best service - when the service provided is aggression? How do you envision your enforcers providing their service (enforcement of rules) in a non-aggressive manner?
Aggression is not synonymous with "force", but rather with "initiation of force". Government inherently
initiate force against innocents, at the very least through both taxation and forced exclusion of competitors.
Competing enforcement agencies in an ancap society would never (legitimately)
initiate force (i.e. engage in aggression). Their use of force would be restricted to defence or restitution. That rule would be checked through lack of functional immunity. In other words, an enforcement agency is as vulnerable to legal action as is any other person or organization in an ancap society.
If you believe you have been a victim of aggression by an enforcement agency, you can sue them, retaining the services of your own (competing) insurance/enforcement agency in the process. If you are deemed to have been thus harmed (by an independent court which you agreed to), you will be compensated by the aggressor. This restitution mechanism will ensure that those who do use force do not use it aggressively.
redcarpet wrote:How is special operations 'murder' anyway? It's not murder anymore than lawful combat between conventional forces between nations.
Setting aside positive legal questions (I am not expert on international law, but I am fairly certain there are differences between so-called "lawful" combat between conventional forces and special-operations executions), I am focusing on the moral dimension.
Both so-called "lawful" combat operations
and special operation executions are morally equivalent to murder when the people being killed are innocent. As there is no mechanism in either case of ensuring that the people in question are not, in fact, innocent, I make the sweeping assumption that, at least in some cases, innocents are being harmed (a determination that is often abundantly obvious, as when children and babies are killed).
In other words, there is no contradiction between an operation being "lawful" based on international or domestic law, and it being morally equivalent to murder.
Free men are not equal and equal men are not free.
Government is not the solution. Government is the problem.