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>Can you produce enough to overwhelm the examples of large populations living peaceably for an extended period of time WITH a central authority that I can produce?

I'm not quite sure if the following answers this question, but here it goes: I don't think central authorities have either the incentives or the ability to help large populations cooperate.

Centralization of political authority often leads to tyranny because rulers of large populations (and geographical areas) have little to fear from loosing citizens to free surrounding polities. I prefer decentralization to centralization because it leads to a sort of competition between Governments which results in more human freedom. Many historians partially credit the decentralized political order in Europe following the fall of Rome with the rise of an advanced Western Civilization.

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Moreover, when decision making for a large group of people is centralized, the decisions coming from the top usually fail to take into account the practical facts of the situations in which they're applied. Austrian economists refer to this as the economic calculation problem. It was mainly applied to the Socialists, but it applies to basically any centralized group making decisions. I remember hearing my father who worked for Pfizer (a large pharmaceutical corporation) always complaining about his bosses. Listening to him, you'd think Pfizer made it's best efforts to pick the least qualified people for management positions. However this wasn't the case. The reality was that because decision making at Pfizer was centralized, the decisions made by the management made no sense to those further down the line because the management didn't have the ability to take into account all the details that should have been considered in making their decisions. The same principles illustrated above apply both to large corporations and to governments, this is why so many people find Dilbert to be a funny comic.

>How about modern Iceland, which is definitely a state? How about Portugal, New Zealand, Canada, and the Scandanavian nations?

As much as I'd like to claim to be an expert on these countries and their current economic and political climates, I simply do not know much about them, so I'd recommend asking someone else.

>Can you counter the suggestion that a central authority is necessary for the kind of cooperation that produces roadways, a common language, a common economy, higher learning, and all of the benefits that these bring?

With regard to the public goods problem which you allude to in this question, I recommend this video which basically explains that public goods do not have to be funded via governmental compulsion. Roderick T. Long (the guy who wrote the essay read in the video) states that there are other methods, such as appealing to the conscience of people who use the good (he gives the example of church goers), packaging the public good with private goods, and a few others. Regarding language, I don't believe any State can be credited with the creation of a language. From skimming this wikipedia entry it appears that the exact origins are unknown, but that it was developed organically as people evolved and cooperated with one another. Regarding a common economy, all an economy is is the sum total of transactions among a large group of people. Since the division of labor arises naturally, it should surprise no one that an economy will follow. From my limited knowledge of history, it seems that the role of states has generally been to limit the economy by raising tariffs on foreign goods to protect politically connected producers in their respective polities.

>Would you agree that the primary reasons the succeeded for as long as they did was due to isolation and not requiring a defensive stance against invaders? How would we propose to adapt anarcho-capitalism to accommodate non-isolated areas that do have to adopt a defensive stance?

Isolation certainly helps anarchic societies evade states. I recently read a great book on this topic found on amazon which theorizes that the indigenous tribes in Southeast Asia formed their social structures in such a way as to avoid being enslaved and expropriated by the States that existed in the valleys. For example, they preferred to grow root plants which are easy to hide and maintain, as opposed to rice, which is difficult to hide from tax collectors and difficult to maintain. So yes, isolation and the "friction of the terrain" make it easier to avoid State power. Although the author doubts this applies as much in our modern era with all weather roads and aircraft.

With regard to the issues of defense in non-isolated areas, I think the best strategy is to have a well-armed populace which is more difficult to conquer, as well as private security agencies that pose enough of an inconvenience to invaders that the invasion would be too expensive to the invaders. An An-Cap economist, Bob Murphy wrote a couple of essays on this topic found here that deals with this issue (as well as law) in more detail.

One possible reason is that there are different types of fat and people often fail to distinguish them and even some scientists sometimes fail to note the difference as a confounding variable.

From Robert M. Sapolsky's book about the biological stress response "Why Zebras don't get ulcers."

> Time for one of the great dichotomies revered by fat cell aficionados: fat cells located in your abdominal area, around your belly, are known as "visceral" fat. Fill up those fat cells with fat, without depositing much fat elsewhere in your body, and you take on an "apple" shape.

> In contrast, fat cells around your rear end form "gluteal" fat. Fill those up preferentially with fat and you take on a "pear" shape, being round-bottomed.

> The formal way to quantify these different types of fat deposition is to measure the circumference of your waist (which tells you about the amount of abdominal fat) and the circumference of your hips (a measure of gluteal fat).

[...]

> This stimulation of visceral fat deposition by glucocorticoids is not good news. This is because if you have to pack on some fat, you definitely want to become a pear, not an apple. As we saw in the chapter on metabolism, lots of fat is a predictor of Syndrome X. But it turns out that a large WHR [waist-to-hip-ratio] is an even better predictor of trouble than being overweight is.

Another subtlety is that the often used Body Mass Index only accounts for weight, not fat specifically (much less which type of fat as explained before). So aside from the extremes, it does not really tell you much about the figure type (athletic, chubby, skinny-fat, etc.).

As a consequence some people get hung up on the flaws of the BMI and throw out the metaphorical baby with the bathwater.

Then there is the philosophical argument that people have the right to decide themselves how they want to look.

Unless the pharmaceutical distributor has lived in a hole the past 500 years, it knows that it's dealing with a limited liability entity. If it doesn't like that arrangement, it can refuse to deal, or request a personal guarantee on the debt (these do happen). The only thing limited liability does is give more options. It's not mandated, and it's not forbidden.

See The Company for a better understanding of limited liability and its role in the economy.

Regarding your alternative, you're simply shifting creditors to insurers. There is almost no actual difference. Creditors today evaluate the chances that the business will fail, and adjust the premium accordingly, as will your hypothetical insurers. The only difference is that your system will be less efficient because the insurer(creditor) coordinates with the investor, rather than the company itself. It also means investment goes through a single investor class, rather than allowing different types of capital arrangements.

You clearly have a brain, so I have to ask: where do you come up with this stuff? Is someone really touting this as a good idea?

(Note that I'm not saying limited liability is not without it's drawbacks, but unfairness to cognizant, voluntary creditors is not one of them)

Thomas Sowell and others debunk the claims that women and blacks earn less in the marketplace due to discrimination. When they are compared on equal footing, it is found they are not discriminated against, and in some cases even earn slightly more. For example, unmarried women without children tend to earn a bit more than their male counterparts. What is affecting the average woman? Having children, obviously. If you thought that women, on average, should be earning equal wages, you were clearly not using your brain effectively, as bearing children is such an obvious and enormous cost.

There is a cost to conducting irrational practices in the marketplace (racism, sexism in hiring and in customer discrimination are the examples we are concerned with in this discussion). For example, bus companies wanted to give equal treatment to Blacks during the era of segregation in the U.S., as Black Americans were their biggest customers. They were forced to conduct costly (in opportunity), racist practices in order to comply with government segregation laws. Most people simply are not willing to pay the cost if they are racist, but I also think that most people aren't racist.

If we look at Asian Americans and Irish Americans who's ancestors also experienced severe discrimination, as well as Irish in the UK who's ancestors experienced slavery, we find they don't have the same problems Black Americans face. Blacks immigrants do better on average than their American counterparts. It is clear it is not discrimination at the employer which is the problem. It is a culture of victimization that has been built around them by liberals attempting to "help" them through horrendous government policies--most notably education that amounts to nothing and subsidies of bad behavior--which has lead to alarming rates of single parenthood (usually mothers) which has destroyed the future of these young children. It really needs to stop.