WontStandForIt

(Thanks for the welcome!) It is already unacceptable to kill someone in society, but there are so many murders that happen anyway. Without Government to stop them, how would we keep sociopaths, psychopaths, and the rest of the crazy (Which already do not listen to social pressures.) people that may do it for money, and other things. Also private security agencies would be good to defend against other nations, but to protect a family from a gang of murderers or even a crazy individual, there would have to be a security detail with the family almost all of the time. This would surely be expensive and impractical.

I listened to 3 hrs of Practical anarchy and it makes alot of sense when you add private protection agencies to the equation. That answers the question on foreign invasions, because nukes would keep countries from trying to invade a stateless society, but I still haven't found an answer for what would keep someone from committing a crime like rape to someone else. I guess that an defence agency could hunt that person down, but that may result in a war between the rapist's defence agency and the person that was raped. If you get killed why would your defence agency need to avenge you? It is not like they are going to get paid by you anyway. So to get away from any kind of punishment all you need to do it kill the person that you steal from.

So if there was an absence of state, and you had no weapons but had a family, and someone came to your house and pointed a gun at you and told you that he wanted all of your money (Whatever currency would be in an anarchy) and you had to die and see your family killed, or give away all of your money, knowing that there was no way of getting justice for that man's crime unless you hunted him down, leaving your family unguarded whilst doing so, how would that be better than actually having laws and law enforcement?

Thanks for the links, I listened to both of these but they do not answer my questions, say that the U.S. government fell, what would keep it from simply just being taken back over by local mafia, or world powers such as Russia and China? Whether we actually wanted to be taken over other rulers would not stop the guns from being used to kill those who resist, maybe even leading to only woman and children and even some men that were submissive to be controlled by the new rulers, and the rest dead. At least in the U.S. that is currently existent we can petition to change something if we do not like it, leading to a solution.

But for instance, if the state were absent, what would keep me from going over to my neighbor's house and shooting them because I know they don't have a gun? (Of course I would not do this because it is horrible. But what about a horrible psychopath? )

I asked this in an email to the call in show, but it has been almost a month without a reply. (Which is fair because how big the show is.) I agree with most of Stefan's statements about anarchism, and have read quite a bit of his "Everyday Anarchy" book but I do not see how a society that is an anarchy would be able to have a defense force against countries like Russia, China or other empirical countries. What would you keep a group of people from simply deciding to forcefully take away land or resources from another group of people, or keep people from murdering each other, and keep parents from abusing children, etc. It seems that with anarchy, there would be great freedom, but only until someone has bigger guns than the population or another country decides that they want the population to be under their control, or someone with a knife wants to kidnap the little girl swinging on a swing while her mother goes to check if dinner is done. My question is why not try to reform the current system (Government) instead of completely getting rid it?