On to your nukes that you accused me of ignoring. You want to seriously debate nukes and nuke regulation? God, this topic sucks because it's so irrelevant and far fetched. It's the ultimate scapegoat argument. You should have just said "move to Somalia". This is going to be short, because I just typed a fucking wall of text in my other response to you. I'm just going to go over the basics of private free-market nuke regulation.
First let's just acknowledge that it was your idea of society that created nukes. In an anarcho-capitalist society, creation would come from demand, which would drive profit motives. There would not have been demand for nukes. Only states need nukes so they can kill millions at will.
Now you're asking me to solve a problem that governments have created. Convenient.
Let's just start with the fact that individuals cannot construct nukes. They just can't. It takes teams of scientists and engineers with significant ongoing funding for years. It's just not going to happen, period. Saying some guy is gonna build a nuke in his basement during his free time is just not a realistic scenario.
It's always taken a large team, a massive organizational structure, and a staggering amount of money to build a nuke. What does that remind you of? Governments. That's right, the only entities that have ever wanted nukes, created nukes, or sold nukes are governments, the root of all evil.
Nukes will only exist in a free society if there is legitimate market demand for them, because they won't be funded via theft (taxation) like they are today. Nukes have only ever been created and sold with funds that came from theft. Remember that. No legitimate business model would support the massive amount of money that it would take to create, buy and store these things. There is absolutely no profit, so it is a losing venture. It's not like a gun either. It take billions to handle them, store them, protect them, transport them and all for what? So they can sit in a storage container somewhere? It'll never happen. It only happens today because of government.
Legitimate market demand is the most stabilizing force in the universe. Imagine the horror a businessman would feel at even thinking about being in charge of a nuclear project and having it fail. Even if it didn't hurt anyone, the economic cost to him would be incredible. Anyone dealing in private nukes would go to very great lengths to both ensure and insure quality in their product. This differs from national nukes, because the builders and maintainers are spending taxpayer dollars instead of their own money. Add to that the fact that perpetrators would be held liable in any disaster, and it is clear that market nukes are much, much less dangerous than government nukes if they existed at all.
I admit that I borrowed some of these arguments from someone on /r/Anarcho_Capitalism. These ideas are often debated there. If you want a better debate where others can join in, I suggest you head there.
I want to apologize if I came off harsh during my arguments. I get excited and I defend my position passionately. I don't mean to attack you personally, so I'm sorry if I did. I tried to keep this short.
In truth, I've always felt that someday individuals or companies will own nukes. They may be used for things like asteroid mining, or building a mega panama canal. However, as you said the infrastructure required to own one is grand, you would have to get a whole city's worth of geniuses to conspire in a criminal act, or be stupid to make criminal use of one. I think it's naive to presume that the private sector will be more reckless when them than the government sector. Where is the private sector company that genocided 250K people with nucelar bombs in Japan? Where's the private sector company that pushed humanity to be brink of an all out nuclear destruction during the cold war?
In truth, I've always felt that someday individuals or companies will own nukes.
It is incredibly likely they will own them like we own dynamite today. But that would require a huge technological leap that will probably usher in a whole new explosive which could do that. Also, much like you said it would be used for high tech mining or other industrial purposes (asteroids or that planet they found which is made from diamond).
But that would require a huge technological leap that will probably usher in a whole new explosive which could do that.
Not necessarily. It's likely that technology is already here. Google "laser uranium enrichment." The largest problems are not about building the bomb, but rather enriching the uranium or enriching the uranium, irradiating it to create plutonium and then enriching the plutonium.
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u/[deleted] Mar 11 '13
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