Brian Holtz,at Kn@ppster, deemed my critique of his Public Goods rationale for the State to be bullshit. Unfortunately, the Haloscan comment section at Kn@ppster mangled my full response, so I'm reproducing it here.

Brian:

I find a bit presumptuous on your part that I am somehow supposed to be familiar with any of your self-published blog postings on public choice theory. When I wrote my post at Freedom Democrats, "Government Failure" was only mentioned once by yourself in this comment section, namely this:

He seems to argue that the risk of government failure (tyranny etc.) is always higher than the risk of market failure in rights protection, without any empirical evidence. From where I sit in 21st century America, I have a strong existence proof that
a state can provide national defense

Solely judging by that comment, you were either unintentionally or intentionally misrepresenting the meaning of "government failure" as it pertains to public choice theory. In PCT, "goverment failure" does not refer to tyranny or inability to produce "public goods," but the inefficient overproduction of public goods that benefits the few at the expense of the general welfare.

But, nevertheless, I bit and went to your site looking for a post on Public Choice Theory and found this in 21st Century Political Economy

It's an open question whether democracy can work after majorities discover they can vote themselves money taken from other people. The theory of government failure is called Public Choice Theory, and while it too was only created in the last half-century, it has not yet given us any firm guidance on how to design institutions to prevent government failure. The findings so far from Public Choice Theory are very depressing. They demonstrate that voters have systematic incentives to deceive/delude themselves and to let politicians assist in the process. The best answer we have so far is to diffuse and decentralize government power as much as practical, so that jurisdictions compete with each other and people can vote with their feet if necessary.

So, apparently, your solution to the problem of government failure is competition in choice of government. Well, since I more or less define anarchy(market anarchy) as competition in choice of government, welcome to the fold, Brian.

And spare me the Rothbard strawman counter-attack, because I'm not a Rothbardian, certainly not in the sense that i would spend 5 minutes of my existence engaging in Hegelian-type anarcho-capitalist system building from some notion of Aristotelian ethics. I'm not here to defend Rothbard's anarcho-capitalist vision.

Rather my intent was to point out the flaws in "public goods" arguments for the State. The notion of Public Goods is rooted in the assumptions of Neo-classical economics, especially in the deep-rooted assumptions of human instrumental rationality. Experimental game theory and burgeoning new fields such as neuroeconomics have casted much doubt on these assumptions. The example of "Open Source Software" was a "Constructive proof" demonstrating that Samuelson's assumptions about "public goods" were not necessarily accurate.

The actual real problem with anarchism is the "coordination problem," but we can see with respect to open source software, how the various GNU licensing schemes solved this problem,so well, in fact, that open source dramatically impacted the software industry.

The coordination problem is formidable, but it's not an intractable problem. However, "government failure," or more generally, the problem of class in an environment of monopoly enforcement, is intractable and cannot be solved by what's written on a piece of paper("a constitution"). According to Holtz's own words, the only mechanism to overcome this problem is competition in government. But also notice Holtz, from his own website, deems "government failure" to be a consequence, not necessarily of special interests, but of the actions of the majority using the State for their own gain(Holtz seems to effortlessly switch back and forth between human instrumental rationality and voter irrationality). Therefore, there is no real hope for any "legal" democratic mechanism to achieve such competition in government in Holtz's conception of the State in a public choice context.

As I posted on Freedom Democrats, hoisted by your own petard. Sorry, don't take it personally.