But if breaking the law and getting away with it is unlikely, then the rational actors won’t try. What the companies would have wanted, had they been rational good predictors, was a well enforced law which heavily punished defection. This way they would all have had higher expected utility than the scenario in which there was no law.
Of course a well enforced law that heavily punished defection would be just as good as an Unbreakable Vow, but in a certain sense that’s my point. The best case scenario in the case of a law (that is, of the law being well enforced and with harsh penalties) is the default scenario if you are using Unbreakable Vows.
Government doesn’t just provide people with an enforcement mechanism for coordination problems, it also provides a workaround for lack of information, and ideally for irrationality, in coordination problems.
...
The “irrational choices” and “lack of information” sections of Yvain’s Non-Libertarian FAQ are good reading on this topic.
This is what I was saying earlier, the main difference between our points of views is one of the most basic political questions, of what viewpoint on the libertarian-statist axis you accept. In other words, how much of government should be workarounds for that sort of thing.
You know what, I honestly don’t know the real answer to that question. It is one of the biggest questions of that type, and so it is fitting not to know the exact answer to it. That said, I do slightly tend toward taking a more libertarian point of view. I do understand that what you said is in fact one of the main points against libertarianism and toward more government intervention. All in all, the answer is far from obvious, and here is not the best place to get into a big discussion about it.
So, all in all, I think that this discussion is a result of a much lower level and more subtle disagreement. Maybe I am being too idealistic and putting too much faith in human beings, and maybe you are being too cynical and putting too much faith in governments. In practice, the only way to see if this system works is to try it out, which is (sadly?) impossible seeing as the unbreakable Vow does not exist in the real world.
Of course a well enforced law that heavily punished defection would be just as good as an Unbreakable Vow, but in a certain sense that’s my point. The best case scenario in the case of a law (that is, of the law being well enforced and with harsh penalties) is the default scenario if you are using Unbreakable Vows.
This is what I was saying earlier, the main difference between our points of views is one of the most basic political questions, of what viewpoint on the libertarian-statist axis you accept. In other words, how much of government should be workarounds for that sort of thing.
You know what, I honestly don’t know the real answer to that question. It is one of the biggest questions of that type, and so it is fitting not to know the exact answer to it. That said, I do slightly tend toward taking a more libertarian point of view. I do understand that what you said is in fact one of the main points against libertarianism and toward more government intervention. All in all, the answer is far from obvious, and here is not the best place to get into a big discussion about it.
So, all in all, I think that this discussion is a result of a much lower level and more subtle disagreement. Maybe I am being too idealistic and putting too much faith in human beings, and maybe you are being too cynical and putting too much faith in governments. In practice, the only way to see if this system works is to try it out, which is (sadly?) impossible seeing as the unbreakable Vow does not exist in the real world.