I mean, do you like that those people get off now if they’re powerful? Or if a cop decides to do that either nothing happens or they get let go with a million dollar pension?

At least in a flat society you’d have an equal say to advocate for w/e you thought is just.

Personally for me, and many others who lean left, prison or death doesn’t sit right because it doesn’t address the root of the problem and it’s often used to quash dissent. This is perhaps what you find unsatisfying but if you were magically placed into an anarchist community you’d have more ability to advocate for what you thought was fair.

Who are these people who we have evidence for such crimes and are let go?

Just don't pretend like killings of career criminals resisting arrest (like George Floyd) is what we're talking about.

Holy whataboutism!

With no laws, no police, no jails, no courts, and no justice system, everyone on of those incredibly evil people mention in the prior comment goes 100% free to continue their reign of terror.

Yet, of course, that's exactly the same as some people who slip through the cracks of a justice system that catches many such people a year. Prosecutes them with attempts to be fair. Puts them in jail so they can't hurt others.

Yup. Because someone might slip through the cracks, well.. that's precisely the same as what the prior poster said!

What a false equivalency.

I mean sure in a society where no one holds anyone accountable that would happen. That’s not what anyone is actually advocating for.

You cannot just give people stern looks.

The end result is, you need to be able to use violence, against those willing to use it against you. Note, that can be a last step, but without it?

Those who care not about stern looks, "talking tos", or cold shoulders will literally take everything you have, and kill everyone.

So now you fall to mob rule, lynchings, and what? Power of the strong man?

As soon as you organize, to provide for a response to organized thugs/criminals/rapists/murderers, you now have a government. That's how governments came into creation ; shared defense.

And you need that 24x7. And the people doing it for the community need to be paid. And you need a way to judge, and sentence, and on and on and on.

You cannot simply wave this away.

Thank you. Government is the logical conclusion of anarchy. The minute you have two people who want to do something together, you need rules.

Why can't they establish their cooperation rules between them, using existing static material (contract templates...) if they want to, without any third-party (for example a government) being mandatory?

First, who enforces the contract?

Second, it doesn't really matter. Two people working together is pretty much politics. It's government. It leads there. Cooperation requires coordination.

And thus you invented government. As soon as you have an independent third party deciding who is right, that's your judicial branch. And then you will need the police to enforce the decisions of that judge/referee.

And then when you start having insane judges who rule that raping a child is perfectly fine, you will want to stop it, and thus you will invent your standardized laws.

> As soon as you have an independent third party deciding who is right, that's your judicial branch

There IMHO is major differences between "a single government, dedicated to regulate" (which attracts people willing to control others, often letting the most unscrupulous gain power) and "any chosen third party".

Where most people are most of the time reasonable they will oppose insanity, if necessary forcefully.

People who are reasonable most of the time don't need that much laws to govern them. It's the cases of conflict, violence, murder, property ownership, property destruction, and other negative things that inevitably lead to the invention of government, judges, police, prisons. Every country in the world has them, and for multiple reasons.

Is it just the names that bother you?

Anarchy is the "I can do it over the weekend" of politics. It glosses over so many details.

You can organise without a government, using the free market. Having competing law enforcement firms would bring competition to a state monopoly that does little to nothing to prevent actual crime and persecute tons of innocent people.

Most laws govern interaction between two or more people, how exactly are you going to have that work with privately selected sets of laws? Is everyone going to have a little glowing icon above their head so I know what agency I'm dealing with? For N law sets, will we have N * N law set combinations when people from two different law sets interact? What about if there's three or four or five different ones at once?

Since 2001 we've spent $7T killing a million people and turning millions more into refugees. The only result is that the money was spent and the people are dead and in exile. This evil folly didn't make us any safer. The "really evil people" I can think of were the ones who did that. I don't want to live in their society, but what choice have I been given?

In an anarchic society with no government to protect people, the people would pay whoever likes this line of work to protect them. A system of private law enforcememt could emerge out of anarchy. The interactions between different law enforcement agencies (whether with simple agreements or third party private arbitration courts) and the different internal rules would create a market in which consumers are free to choose what laws make sense for them, or at least where laws converge towards what all people want. "The Machinery of Freedom" contains a more in depth description.

As an addendum, in an anarchic society victimless crimes wouldn't be crimes so there would be significantly less people to imprison / execute / send to force labour camps.

So we end up in Feudalism, because what prevents those agencies from establishing their power over territories and demanding payment for protection?

> What do you do with really bad / evil people who got caught doing evil things (there's enough evidence to put them in prison). I never heard a good answer from an anarchist.

I think most anarchists believe in self defense. So in that sense the really bad people are self-eliminating -- they try to kill and instead they get dead, and then they don't bother anybody anymore.

Obviously this is imperfect, but it doesn't seem dramatically more imperfect than the status quo.

As a guy who doesn't want to have to fight to the death, your version seems much worse than the status quo. As a guy who doesn't want his wife and daughters to have to fight to the death, your version seems even worse.

You don't actually have to do the fight to the death, all you need is a society in which people are willing to do it. Because that provides deterrence, which eliminates most of the would-be murderers, the same as the existing system except that you don't have to deal with getting it wrong based on second hand accounts or corruption because the people handing out the consequences are the witnesses.

Notice that for the would-be murderers who aren't deterred by the threat of death, you have to do the fight to the death even under the existing system.

Anyone in any society will try to defend themselves from murder by any means available to them.

So if that's all the defense Anarchism has from murderers, it will definitely have more murderers than any society that adds any extra countermeasures.

Not necessarily. In a society where people are expected to run away and rely on the police to catch them later, more murderers may get away, because more of the victims run away instead of defending themselves but then the police never catch them.

It's obviously easier to "catch" a murderer while you're still in the room with them than after they have a ten hour head start and you have to depend on unreliable third party testimony to even identify them.