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Ask yourself what it means to have a "competition" in governmental services. It's a "competition" in wielding force, a "competition" in subjugating others, a "competition" in making people obey commands. That's not "competition," it's violent conflict. On a large scale, it's war.

In reality, enforcement of laws would only be a small part of what competing arbitration services would have offer. They would come up with laws, revise, simplify, and otherwise improve laws, protect their customers, coordinate with each other, and more. Lots of value creation.

Ask yourself what it means to have a "competition" in governmental services. It's a "competition" in wielding force, a "competition" in subjugating others, a "competition" in making people obey commands. That's not "competition," it's violent conflict. On a large scale, it's war.

Governments already compete on a global scale. So why isn’t the world in a perpetual state of war?

See #17.

The wielding of force is not a business function. In fact, force is outside the realm of economics. Economics concerns production and trade, not destruction and seizure.

It cannot be. This is an attempt to step outside of nature rather than obey it, even though objectivists normally advocate obeying it.

The police force, prosecutors, judges, etc need resources and payment. Those resources don’t grow in nature. Scarcity and the economic calculation problem apply.

Any attempt to ignore or evade this reality leads to police forces and justice systems that are, all else being equal, worse than they would be in a free market because they don’t correct errors as well as they otherwise would.

Force properly employed is used only in retaliation, but even when retaliatory, force merely eliminates a negative, it cannot create value.

That isn’t true.

People want protection and justice. Retaliatory force does not merely eliminate a negative. Restoring and producing justice is a value.

Retaliating against one burglar can scare off ten others. The value that’s created here far exceeds the negative which the burglar created.

Harry Binswanger wrote a piece titled ‘Sorry Libertarian Anarchists, Capitalism Requires Government’ for Forbes, criticizing the libertarian position.

Could the errors around layouts be related to this?

I’ve heard that but I don’t know if that’s even true. If it is, the killing shouldn’t be considered a double homicide until after week 6.

Homicide is “a killing of one human being by another”. If an embryo isn’t a person yet, its death can’t be homicide.

Killing a pregnant woman is considered a double homicide, so aborting until week 6 can’t be right.

If it were so clear to the chain smoker that he didn’t want to smoke he’d just stop. Having an internal conflict just means that you’re not sure what to do. You can come up with reasons for and against stopping or continuing.

(Amaro Koberle)

What makes such entrenchment possible in the first place?

Being conflicted about what to do for long stretches of time is not the natural state of any mind. It is an anti-skill ~everyone learns in their youth.

The chain smoker from my example is conflicted about smoking, right? Yet continues to do it anyway. Where do people learn to do things they don’t want to do?

Working on it. My preliminary answer is that it’s case by case. It depends on the nature of the particular entrenchment and the preferences involved. A more overarching answer might involve Randian ideas around introspection and getting one’s reason and emotions in the proper order.

I’ll leave this marked as a criticism until I flesh these thoughts out more.

This doesn’t explain how to solve the entrenchment, ie cure the addiction.

Entrenchment

Like Karl Popper, I think definitions rarely matter. But sometimes they do. So, just to clarify what I mean by ‘entrenchment’, here are some explanations and examples.

When a conflict is entrenched, it basically means the conflict resists solving. It’s like a barbed hook: pulling on it just causes more damage.

The Cambridge dictionary defines entrenchment as “the process by which ideas become fixed and cannot be changed”.

The word originally came from the literal fortification of a place through the use of trenches. “[A] position protected by trenches”.

Here are some examples of how physicist David Deutsch uses the word in his book The Beginning of Infinity, which contains lots of epistemology. They’re from various chapters and obviously taken out of context, but I think they should still clarify the term (bold emphasis mine):

Though they are blind optimists, what defines them as utopians is their pessimism that their supposed utopia, or their violent proposals for achieving and entrenching it, could ever be improved upon.

And:

[T]he institutions of science are structured so as to avoid entrenching theories […]

And:

There are also arguments about the stultification of society caused by the entrenchment of old people in positions of power; […]

And:

[W]hat is necessary for progress is to exclude ideas that fail to survive criticism, and to prevent their entrenchment, and to promote the creation of new ideas.

And:

[T]he evolutionary pressure is for the psychological damage […] to be deeply entrenched, so that the recipients find themselves facing a large emotional cost [for considering deviating from prescribed behavior].

And:

A Popperian analysis would focus on the fact that Caesar had taken vigorous steps to ensure that he could not be removed without violence. And then on the fact that his removal did not rectify, but actually entrenched, this progress-suppressing innovation.

Prevailing explanations are immoral (#739) and false (#742). My theory does not have those flaws from the linked criticisms.

Prevailing explanations do not mention entrenchment. They do not refer to any epistemological concepts. My theory does.