12 May 2014

The Kids Can’t Get Enough Murphy

private law, Shameless Self-Promotion 4 Comments

Dennis Foster emails me (and gave permission to quote):

Message: Hi Bob,
I’ve had the pleasure of taking many of your on-line classes with the Mises Institute over the years (I can’t believe it’s actually been years!). In my Public Choice Theory class, we finish the semester with your Chaos Theory book, to illustrate the extremes to which we can push the idea of minimizing the role of the state. On the final exam, which we just finished, I have an essay question on your notion of a private defense system and I thought I’d share with you the opening paragraph one of my students wrote in addressing this topic:

“When I first read about Murphy’s idea of a private defense system, I was a little skeptical because I did not understand it. But now that I do understand it, I could advocate (for) it. The idea of having a privatized defense system is really interesting. The fact that it would be through firms and not the government is interesting.”

Dennis Foster

Here is the PDF of my pamphlet Chaos Theory. But, before you read that, I recommend these two articles I did for Mises.org which will provide a better foundation for the mechanisms I discuss in the pamphlet.

==> “But Wouldn’t Warlords Take Over?”

==> “The Possibility of Private Law”

4 Responses to “The Kids Can’t Get Enough Murphy”

  1. Matt M (Dude Where's My Freedom) says:

    I still regularly link people to the Mises U talk you gave about this. The one that prominently features Ned Flanders in the PowerPoint slides…

  2. Tel says:

    Somalia should not be used as an example of limited government. Somalia has strong government, actually it has several of them. The fact they are not all recognised by the UN is irrelevant but confuses some people.

    Warlords take over by use of force to impose rules on the population. Government does exactly the same thing. The only difference is which selection of rules you happen to end up with.

    The observable fact that we see again and again is that the warlords do take over… and then declare themselves to be legitimate government.

    • Enopoletus Harding says:

      I wouldn’t call the warlord-held areas of Somalia proper examples of particularly strong government, but al-Shabaab is certainly an example of unlimited government.

      The observable fact that we see again and again is that the warlords do take over… and then declare themselves to be legitimate government.

      -Agreed, though warlords declaring themselves the legitimate government are pretty rare among all warlords. The I.S.I.S. in Syria is the only rebel group there that actually acts like and declares itself a state.

  3. Mike Freimuth says:

    I took the liberty of writing a detailed critique of the two posts linked to here for anybody who is interested.

    http://realfreeradical.com/2014/05/16/the-trouble-with-anarchy/

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