…of the same services at the same cost, without the additional cost going to profit.

They won’t, because in the absence of profit and loss, the bureaucracy won’t have any way of *knowing*
a) which services to provide – you’re just assuming that the function of predicting the future state of the market is entirely unproblematic. If it was, profit and loss would not exist.
b) how to combine the factors of production to avoid waste as much as possible.
And the bureaucracy will not have any *incentive* to economise because the bureaucrats will NOT have an ownership interest (that’s the whole point of the exercise) and will get paid the same no matter how wasteful or dysfunctional they are.

6.
Your entire argument depends on the supposition that there is something about infrastructure that distinguishes it economically from other capital goods, such that capital goods can run at a profit, but infrastructure must run at a loss.

Consider a bus service or a medical practice. These can be, and are, provided by both government and private providers. According to your theory, if they are privately-run and considered as NOT infrastructure, they can be profitable. But if they are considered as infrastructure, all of a sudden they not only *can* but *must* run at a loss, and furthermore that loss will be *more* than if they were taken over by the gumment – that paragon and thrift.

This homespun theory is confused laughable nonsense.

7.
I reject the personal arguments and misrepresentations that comprise the rest of your post.

You still haven’t shown any reason why direct democracy would be any improvement on the original problem, especially since it would be duty-bound to truly represent the people no matter how greedy, ignorant, violent or unaccountable they might be. It would actively aid and abet these anti-social vices.

8.
To answer your question about transition to voluntary society, like the abolition of slavery, it would be relatively easy to achieve in practice.

The impediment is the moral confusion and circular thinking that you evidence so well.

1.
I’m not running an “all resources public” argument
Oh my Peter, now you're backtracking on your own words?
As a matter of fact you tried to insist it WAS exactly that, TWICE. And then you went on to talk (well mention over and over) about socialism not working. Exactly in the same way you kept veering off DD to a PP-relationship/cronyism.
Really Peter this "discussion" has become more about you changing your own arguments each time and contradicting yourself, and then lying to deny it.
It's becoming boring.

1- where does this money come from if nobody is allowed to print it?
2- Define 'productive activity' and who gets to say what it is when most of the practices that altered the economy were themselves volantarily appreciated as productive?
3- "So if one person believed in sacrificing virgins, *anyone and everyone* would have a right to stop him." Under what justification? What laws? Whose laws? The difference between your anarchist version and DD is that DD allows for rule of law with a popular mandate- as opposed to a handful of people nominating themselves for a lynch mob.
Nice going Peter.

4"No-one's forced to do anything,"
You just contradicted 3 with your lynch mob. Completely random people can nominate themselves judge, jury and executioner to violate somebody else's rights simply because they feel like it, don't like what the target is doing.

5- In the absence of profit for infrastructural maintenance, the extra money required for profit is not needed to be paid by the consumers, and thus is either spent on extended service coverage, or reduced and in turn improves consumer freedom to spend it on businesses of their choice.
Thus creates a freer, more just society than yours where people have MORE freedom to spend their money on what they choose (unless of course someone miraculously lives entirely off the land)

Snore.

NON DD- Bureaucrats again- circular arguments indeed.
Peter, the fact you go so far out of your way to AVOID the argument is really quite telling.

It's quite simple Peter- the DD infrastructure financing would work in the same way, with quotes for needed funds to maintain. The only difference is funds that exceed the required amount are not actually aimed for except as a margin of error, and that excess is not simply pocketed. Taxpayers effectively fill the boots of shareholders, only their priority, as people that actually use the service, to maximize its output.

Defining Public infrastructure. Generally things that
1- have no basis for competition
2- are depended upon by society to function
3- a private individual would not have any justification claiming privately to himself.
4- May correspond to the basic rights as defined by the society.
5- Voted on as such.

Of course, you are happy to explain how exactly a private individual deserves the right to acquire public land, do what they like with it and force people to "voluntarily" pay to use it.

It's actually a lot less arbitrary than the circumstances that people would act the way they would in your 'voluntary' society.
"You still haven’t shown any reason why direct democracy would be any improvement on the original problem, especially since it would be duty-bound to truly represent the people no matter how greedy, ignorant, violent or unaccountable they might be. It would actively aid and abet these anti-social vices. "
And in your society, these people would be free to do whatever they like with absolutely no basis to restrain themselves. Laws imposed by a majority would consider things they at least, would NOT want done to them- thus creates stability that is entirely non-existent in your magical society.

I define ‘productive activity’ to be activity intended to produce goods and services to satisfy people’s wants EXCEPT wants, goods or services to initiate aggression. (I define *them* as destructive activity.)

Take a bus service for example. If it runs at a profit, the fact that payment was voluntary proves that the consumers prefer the satisfaction they get from the bus service over the satisfaction they could get from other goods or services they could spend the money on. If it makes a loss, it proves they preferred the satisfaction from the other things the factors of production – the fuel, the labour, the metal etc. - could have been used to produce.

Governmental ownership has all the same original problems and disadvantages, and none of the advantages: simplicity, practicality and ethicality of this way of managing complex production processes to decide how to allocated scarce resources to their most urgent or important uses.

For starters, a bus service will not be without competition, since the consumers could travel from A to B by car, or foot, or bicycle, or train, etc. The people may even prefer the satisfaction they would obtain by spending the same money on something unrelated to buses, like food, or art, or charity. There will be *competition* for the scarce resources required for a bus service. Therefore it will not qualify for your definition of infrastructure.
1. So what will stop the DD from voting for a bus service when we are both agreed that it will be an illegitimate use of public moneys, or rather confiscated private moneys?

How will the bus route, and the bus stops, be decided?
2. Will the people vote on them? If so, how will they know about all the bus stops, routes, services, trains, ferries, highways, dams, and all alternative uses of the factors of production?

3. But if the people are to delegate the task of managing the bus service to an executive, how is he or they going to know what the bus route should be?

If the excutive does it by copying the profitable route of a private bus service, there will be competition which doubly disqualifies it as infrastructure, even according to your theory.

4. But if he does not copy profitable routes, what is to stop him from choosing routes not justified by number of users? E.g. NSW buses recently ran the equivalent of *90 return trips to the moon EMPTY*. What would stop that kind of thing happening?

5. How are the people to rectify such waste without any economic feedback mechanism to know about it, and without having to get over 50 percent of the votes for the whole population for every bus route?

6. If they can get over 50 percent of the vote how are they going to *know*, without profit and loss, what action will rectify the original problem?

How could the executive officers possibly know the values and wants of the consumers which they are supposed to satisfy, especially since these wants:
• are *subjective*
• are dispersed throughout millions of people
• are constantly changing every day
• cannot be quantified or measured
• cannot be inter-subjectively compared.

Unless and until you can answer those question, you cannot maintain that government could provide infrastructure services cheaper. In fact you can’t even establish that:
a) anything could QUALIFY as infrastructure in the first place according to your own definition, because the very fact that taxation is a compulsory confiscation proves that there *is* a basis for competition for the resources and services government would supply; nor that
b) Government would know what services to provide at all, nor how, so as to satisfy the most urgent or important wants of the consumers of government services.

Under a voluntary market-based system, no centralized knowledge, and no definition of ‘productive activity’, is necessary. The price mechanism serves to inform, and co-ordinate the various different values, factors of production, and products. And it is done peaceably.

But the idea that governmental waste could be reduced by direct democracy is COMPLETELY WRONG...

because EXACTLY THE SAME IMPOSSIBLE PROBLEMS - of knowledge and incentive - would face the people or their delegates, as face the people’s representatives and their delegates now.

As for voluntary society, the question is, whether a general ethical and legal rule against initiating aggression would not be a better basis for society, than democracy, direct or otherwise.

You are either misrepresenting or misunderstanding the issues with your desperate sniveling about lynch mobs, and chaotic violence because
a) since such behaviour by definition involves initiating aggression, it is no argument against voluntary society
b) since there is nothing in principle or in practice about democracy preventing the initiation of aggression, and much to promote it, there is no reason to think that democracy, of any kind, could be in any better position.

All it means is that, when you look at examples of illegitimate aggression, such as our current military adventures, or war on drugs filling the prisons, or fleets of empty buses you simply DON’T RECOGNISE IT as illegitimate aggression and social chaos.

As for where the money’s going to come from, obviously you have given the whole topic approximately zero minutes thought in your entire life, so perhaps you should *think* a bit before babbling that it’s impossible?

So, in a voluntary society, *where do you think* the money would come from?

“Of course, you are happy to explain how exactly a private individual deserves the right to acquire public land, do what they like with it and force people to "voluntarily" pay to use it.”

Since government gets all its revenue by confiscating private property, you need to explain what justifies “public” (dishonest expression meaning governmental) land in the first place. Don’t tell me, lemme guess: because they can provide services better and cheaper than private suppliers, right? Fool.

If we take away your circular reasoning, mind-reading, misrepresentation, attribution of bad faith, hysteria, childish sniveling, and unjustified assumption that government atuomatically represents the greater good, there’s nothing left.

You have not shown that democracy is preferable to freedom, even according to your own theory.