If you think that the international relations of nation-states are a good model for the relations of individuals in a peaceful society, you must have well and truly slept through every history class in your life.
I don't think nation states provide law, security and defense any better than the nations that have tried it have provided food, shelter and clothing. That's why I support privatization of what is essentially a socialist industry.
Then why do states that have established police systems, strong regulations of food standards and working standards, and a well-developed court system all have lower incidents of violent and non-violent crime than the cases in which there have been either the type of local control and essentially anarchism that you have been proposed, such as Beirut in the Lebanese Civil War, Somalia, and so forth? Why do the former have higher economic growth and higher standards of living, with more outside investment?
Why does Somalia, that paragon of lack of overarching governmental control, have a life expectancy of
48 years, as opposed to the United States'
78 years? Frankly, if you are going to make a claim that the provision of the state of services such as law enforcement and the like is comparable to that of Communist Era states to provide various necessities, and use it as a reason to abolish state control of law enforcement, then you have a
huge hill of evidence that you need to provide, with very few examples.
There are very concrete reasons that individuals behave much worse when acting as part of state government than they would in their private dealings.
For one thing, state criminality is not generally regarded as such. Private murder is almost universally frowned upon. "Pre-emptive war" is discussed openly in polite company. Theft is thoroughly stigmatized, unless a government does it and calls it taxation. Bullying and assault are not tolerated unless committed by police officers. Even after the most egregious and indefensible acts of police brutality have incited widespread public condemnation, you will always find some goose-stepper willing to publicly defend such behavior. State agent simply aren't held to the same standards in their public conduct as they or anyone else is in their private conduct. I think nobody should be granted that same leniency, ever.
Yet not everybody embraces pre-emptive war; in fact, it's considered a contemptible position, at least in world human rights forums and official speeches. Nor do people think that bullying and the like by police officers is justified for the most part when it steps out of the line of fundamental human rights (of course, there's an element of "oh, it's that guy over there; ignore" as well, but people hardly look positively on bullying in polite conversation).
If anything, historically in the United States, it was the
lack of state intervention in certain affairs of these supposedly more accountable individuals that resulted some of the greatest offenses to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Just look at the history of lynching in not only the South, but in parts of the Midwest as well; these are private, community level actions that arise to punish some perceived 'transgression' (usually that of some unfortunate visitor being black), and they persisted until public exposure to a larger audience and police and governments actually started cracking down on this behavior.
Furthermore there are very compelling economic reason why states will behave badly vis-a-vis each other and their own populations.
Aside from your nice general statements, where's your actual evidence that mistakes by the government from lack of accountability is more harmful than the complete absence of any state authority in terms of law enforcement? As I pointed out, the societies we have that lack any time of central government and central source of law and punishment a la Somalia tend to have greatly inferior economic status and life expectancy for their citizens than those that do have a central government with governmental law enforcement.
Do you feel that the present international order is actually working well?
No, absolutely not. However, if you're going to criticize anarchy in general, then you have to criticize the sort of anarchy that already exists, the anarchy between nation states, and advocate one world government. If that's not what you advocate then lets talk about how to create a better kind of anarchy.
Who says he wasn't criticizing the anarchy of nations? But - and this is the big but - simply criticizing the anarchy of nations doesn't mean that one is inevitably led to one-world government (which I am not necessarily opposed to, myself). We have firm examples of peace being kept for periods of time by treaties between states (like the Congress of Vienna in Europe, at least until the geopolitical dynamics changed with the rise of unified Germany).
That's a wonderful theory which works beautifully, so long as all of the parties have roughly equal power. In a more asymmetrical situation, your model allows the strong to mistreat the weak. Has this ever occurred to you?
That's a problem that, unfortunately, can't be eliminated entirely by any system. I hope your not arguing that states have never abused the weak for the benefit of the strong?
Yet in a civilized society with laws and law enforcement a la the United States, we actually have the capability to address these injustices via the legal system (take the Gideon v. Wainright case, which resulted in the right of the defendant to an attorney. Or protections for whistleblowers, at least until the current administration). Unlike in your libertarian society with no central law enforcement, where - as Mike pointed out, the strong can mistreat the weak because there is no authority to keep them grounded.
What, for example, in a society where you have to purchase your protection, is preventing someone from simply using their wealth to dominate the 'militias for sale' and oppress all his neighbors? You could argue that the neighbors would rally, but in reality, they are limited by resources, their own livelihoods, and difficulties in communications and the like (hence why peasant rebellions up until the twentieth century tended to fail catastrophically for the peasants involved).
I'm also curious as to what exactly is the difference between a mercenary company you pay for (I'm not going to deign to use your weasel words, lets call a spade a spade here. Blackwater and their ilk are mercenaries) and a protection racket.
A "protection" racket mainly just protects you from having your kneecaps broken by its own agents. Its a coercive relationship very much like the ones governments have with their subjects. Blackwater is neither a protection racket nor a private security firm. It's a mercenary force which serves as an auxiliary to a state military.
Blackwater only doesn't get away with it because they are under observation in the US and the like for bad behavior, and when they have been given immunity, it resulted in abuses like the one currently being bandied about in Iraq.
A better example would be the half a dozen large security companies that already do business in my home town. If I'm not satisfied with the dismal quality of protection the police offer me, I can contract with one of these firms for additional security. If I contract with one, the others don't bother me. If I don't contract with any, none of them bother me. They leave me be until I request their protection, but they're willing to provide it if I'm willing to pay. I have no reason to fear that this would change simply because the police were absent from the equation. No one security firm would be able to overpower all the others and, knowing this, would be unlikely to try. The threat that its customers would flee to its competitors also provides a great deal of incentive to provide good service and refrain from violating their rights. Corruption, though not impossible, is less likely than with state police because even a profitable special relationship with one customer, by jeopardizing all the others, is a threat to a company's viability.
Except, of course, that said private protection companies are under the observation of the federal government, and can and will be imprisoned by the police after trial in a court of law if they act out of line. What's stopping them from acting out of line in a society without that stick planted firmly behind their asses?
Or, to put it another, taking the police out of the equation, what is giving customers the
option to flee to another contractor if they have no real official redress? I can easily see private security companies acting like they have in places like Zaire decades ago, where they set themselves up as little rackets over areas they control, and kill anyone who tries to contract with anyone else.
In a way, it's akin to saying that in a mafia-dominated area, where you get stuck paying protection money to a certain Mob, you're okay because, hey, you could always just go hire another Mob, right? Never mind that the particular Mob that is ripping you off probably is watching your neighborhood, and other Mobs will likely decide that it's too costly for them to jump in at the risk of hurting their members, or in taking big enough losses that
their rivals will take advantage of their weakness.
Mind you, all this doesn't even posit the existence of an effective anarcho-capitalist legal system, which would make my rights even more secure against rogue security firms by allowing me to hold them civilly liable for their misdeeds against me.
Really? How is it going to make your rights secure, if there is no enforcement mechanism against the extortion mechanism I listed above? How do you plan to hold them liable, if they are strong enough to simply ignore or buy off the private courts you go to, much less any arbitrators of disputes? Write a strongly worded letter?
What stops one of them mercilessly crushing countless others, then using that to it's benefit? Right, nothing - America has been doing that for years in your so beloved "international" comparison. 
