Having an orderly society: If not the state, then who?

Obviously, people (in general) want a peaceful and happy place to live. They want order. One of the oft-cited reasons that we must have a state is to provide order.

In this post, I will argue that order can be achieved without a coercive gun-bearing state.

1- Order is preferable to Chaos
I think that orderliness is all about planning for the future, it is about predictability. For example, a list of things in alphabetical order makes it so that you can predict where any given item that you're looking for will be found. This makes finding said item much easier.

In an orderly society, the events of tomorrow (or 5, 10, 20 years from now etc) can be reasonably predicted. An orderly society is a predictable society. If you are unsure about what things are going to be like tomorrow, it makes it very hard to decide what to do today in order to influence your tomorrow for the better. I think that the average person is quite interested in creating a better tomorrow for themselves, and having an orderly society makes this possible in ways that just can't be achieved otherwise.

I want to make the world a better place for me, my family, and all humans, and having order basically makes this possible. So, if you are like me and want to make tomorrow better, then order is preferable to chaos.

2- Violence Begets Chaos
Violence inevitably leads to chaos. Imagine a society where violence is commonplace. In this society people kill each other for fun, take each other's stuff, and have no regard for friendship or humanity. One day a person may be your "friend", and the next he is trying to kill you for sport.

In this society nothing productive can happen. If I were to, say, plant a field of wheat, then there is no guarantee that months later when it's harvest time that the crops will still be there, or that I'll still have the tools in my possession to harvest them, or even that I will still be alive. Any investment that doesn't yield immediate gains is folly, because there are no guarantees as to what you'll be able to do (or even if you'll be alive) tomorrow.

Now, imagine a society where there is just 1 person who is violent. In this society, most people can plan for their futures, because most people will never meet that guy. However, anybody that does meet that guy could suddenly have all their plans demolished.

Everything that violence touches becomes less orderly, because violence by it's very nature is unpredictable.

3- Law and Order
Since law is simply peaceful (rather than violent) resolution of disputes between parties, it by it's very definition reduces violence in a society and therefore reduces chaos. Additionally, having a framework (laws) that define how disputes will most likely be resolved provides even more predictability, since one can count on the law to be "on their side" as it were, if a dispute were to arise.

Note, however, that not all things called laws provide this predictability. Law is supposed to function as a guideline for how disputes are to be resolved. If there is no dispute, then there is no need for law. So, any law that defines behavior where there is no dispute (for example, requiring hair-dressers to get licensed before cutting hair) does not contribute to improving the predictability of a society.

4- The State and Order
The state is the traditional enforcer of law. The courts are made to be a place where law gets upheld, and the police are charged with responding to complaints (disputes) and preventing violence by encouraging the parties of a dispute to go to the courts to gain resolution. If a person has a dispute with you and is threatening to use violence to get his way, you can call on the police to prevent that from happening.

This sounds fine, and works OK for civil disputes. The problem arises when it is the state itself that is party to the dispute. If the state and I have a dispute, there is no way to resolve the dispute peacefully. Most likely the state will just decide that it is in the right, and forcibly enact it's decision.

Take, for example, eminent domain. If a private party tried to enact eminent domain, "Here's 2x your home's value in cash and now you have to leave" while holding a gun pointed toward you, that would be theft. If you called the police in this circumstance, they would take your side.

However, if the city decides that it needs to seize your home for a project, it can do so without your consent. E.g. when it's the one saying, "Here's 2x your home's value in cash now you have to leave" and holding a gun pointed at you, then there is nothing you can do. The police won't help you because they are the ones holding the gun. The state enforces it's policies through violence. Violence begets chaos.

Consider the USA. At any moment, congress or any one of the many, many regulatory agencies can create new rules that you have to live by. How can you predict what your life will be like in 20 years when the rules can change radically and without warning? One day you can freely cut anyone's hair who agrees to let you do it, the next, you must be licensed to do this. One day you are free to drink alcohol, the next you cannot, and the next you can again, but only if you're 21. One day you are free to assess your own risk of getting sick and purchase health insurance, the next you must purchase it whether you like it or not. One day you pay 20% of your income in taxes, the next 35%. One day you're going to college, the next you find yourself in an infantry training camp, soon to be shipped across the world to kill or be killed.

In the interest of order, there needs to be an agency to enforce law. However, this agency cannot be exempted from the law that it enforces. The state will always be able to be exempt from the law it enforces, because it is necessarily powerful enough that it's citizens cannot challenge it. Since it can do this, eventually, it will.

5- Anarchy and Order
There needs to be law to foster order. So, how can law be enforced without a state?

My response is fairly simple to explain, though the ultimate solution will likely be complex. There will be private, for-profit, competing companies that will do it.

But what would stop these companies from fighting against each other? What would stop one of them from taking over and becoming a new state?

My response to the first question has two parts. The first part is "mutual benefit" and "profits". War is expensive. How many people would sign up to be a security guard for your company if they might have to DIE? How much would you have to pay them to take that risk? How much does it cost to buy, say, a tank, just so that it can get destroyed while destroying an opposing tank? Since each of the companies would be for profit, none of them wants to go to war. It is much cheaper (and therefore more profitable) for them to work out their differences without violence.

The second part of the answer is competition. Since membership in the company is not mandatory, if you thought a certain law enforcement company was too violent or too power hungry, you could simply subscribe to one of their less violent competitors, thus taking the funding for the violent power-hungry company away. If most people in society didn't want power-hungry, violent companies running around, then competitive forces (as well as the fact that war is expensive) would tend to make non-violent companies succeed and violent ones fail. Additionally, who would sign up to die for a for-profit company's war?

To get a picture in mind about how this competitive force would operate, imagine that a law-enforcement agency salesman comes to your home to get you to subscribe to the agency that he represents. What safeguards would you shop for? Remember, that if you are not satisfied by whatever safeguards that the company has, you can subscribe to a different company that fulfills this desire of yours more accurately. As long as the majority of people don't want any one law enforcement agency to become a monopoly of force in an area, competitive forces will serve to prevent it from happening.

Additionally, having to worry whether one agency will grow too powerful and start oppressing people is a much better situation than what exists under a state, where there is already an agency that has claimed such power.

Order can be achieved in a stateless society as long as the majority of people want order and are willing to pay for it. Order can never be maintained with a state in control, because eventually a minority of people will always claim the power to, on a whim, enact and enforce arbitrary rules.