Assassination politics: Not inevitable

In my previous video, I described Jim Bell's idea of assassination politics and said that I agreed with him that the emergence of such a system seemed inevitable. Thanks to the user, peace requires anarchy. I've since read an article by Bob Murphy, which has changed my mind about the inevitability of the system. Murphy points out that if the system guarantees anonymity for assassins, then there's no way for would-be assassins to know whether or not previous assassins were really paid the prize money. Since no one accepts the cheat, that assassin would know if the prize giving organization chose to keep the prize money. The incentive would be for them to do just that. The cheated assassin wouldn't be able to do much about it since he'd been hiding, presumably, and wouldn't want to announce to the world that he was responsible for the killing.

So, without any assurance that they'll actually be paid the prize money, it's hard to imagine assassins will be willing to take the risk of carrying out the killing. Either Bell's reasoning overlooks this, or I'm not currently understanding how he proposes this problem be dealt with. But for the moment, it looks to me as though this is an important reason to suppose that the assassination markets won't become established after all.

Murphy also takes issue with Bell's belief that a world in which assassination markets were functioning would be an improvement over the one we live in now. With regards to the question of whether a future that included assassination markets would be preferable to a future that didn't, a central question for me is how likely it is that assassination markets would emerge for unworthy victims, as Bell puts it. That is, victims who have not themselves aggressed against anyone but who are perhaps unpopular or inconvenient.

Bell's answer to this question draws our attention to the fact that donators will prefer assassins not to target themselves and their loved ones. So, there'll be some tendency towards people only patronizing organizations with the policy of listing worthy targets, and that's to avoid strengthening the institutions that could lead to their own killing in the future. I think that's a decent answer; it establishes why there'd be some tendency, at least, against the success of indiscriminate assassination markets.

But it does seem to leave open the possibility that they might be widely used anyway. The consideration that Bell seems to overlook is that in the advent of successful assassination markets, the cost of character of having a hit carried out would be likely much lower than it is now. This is because the likelihood of any assassin getting caught after the crime would be much lower because of their lack of any connection to the person with the motive.

At least in real life, if indiscriminate assassination markets existed, the low price of a hit might make it very tempting for some people to use this method to avoid costly legal battles, for instance, or to remove competitors, etc. This temptation may well end up being stronger than the instinct to self-preservation that would otherwise avoid strengthening an institution that may kill you in the future.