Disclaimer: The following represents my own thinking on this issue and may or may not be consistent with Objectivism, although I think it is.
Let me adress your second question first:
Second question, if men are not allowed to initiate the use of force, how would the men in government bar other competitors from services such as providing law, police, etc, without initiating the use of force?
Competition, services, trade, etc. None of this can exist unless the protection of individual rights has been instituted. You can’t compete to provide services such as law, police, etc. before these things have been set up to establish the context that makes trade and competition possible. Be careful not to forget the context being dealt with here.
Now back to your first question:
Okay I always get caught up here. We agree that property rights make the land you work YOURS. What right does government have to organize itself on YOUR land?
And you ask this next question later, but I will adress it in conjunction with your above question:
And if govt cannot own land, because all land is private, what right does it have to attack to gain land and set its boundaries?
The government is created and then maintained by its own future citizens. They are the ones who organzied their government, and it is on their land, not yours, that it is organized.
The government doesn’t own land and it doesn’t need to. It’s citizens own the land and it’s citizens are the ones who grant it the use of their land. There is no attacking invovled. The boundaries of the governments jurisdiction are set by the land owned by the citizens of that goverment.
Last question, if more than one govt is made, and they compete in service providing, how are lines drawn between govts? Is it just arbitrary, or determined by war?
Let me first adress a situation in which there is only one government and its citizens living in a geographical region with other inviduals who are not citizens of that goverment.
Now if we are talking about a single geographical region, how should this government (the people who agreed to form themselves into a government) treat everyone else in that region (the people who havn’t agreed to join the government)?
Well, the group of people who are in the government should pay no attention to those who aren’t. But if any of these non-citizens try to initiate force against the citizens of this government, then their government will retaliate against them just like it would against any foreign agressor.
If any of these non-citizens try to interact with those under the government jurisdiction through trade, then they will be doing so without any contract protection. Which means that if the non-citizen engages in fraud, the citizen’s government will retaliate. If the citizen cheats the non-citizen, the non-citizen has no recourse. If they try to steal their ‘merchandice’ back, the citizen’s government will treat this as an initiation of force and retaliate. In other words, the govenment only recognizes the rights of its own citizens. It is their government instituted for their protection, and it is these non-citizens who have chosen not to participate. Thus they reap none of the benefits.
But why would someone choose not to participate? Perhaps your thinking that they want to form their own government in that same region. So let me move on to adress that situation.
So what if all the non-citizens form their own goverment, thus creating two governments, government A and government B, in the same geographical region with A-citizens and B-citizens living side by side? How would this then work?
This is where the passage quoted by jedymastyr from “The Nature of Government” comes into to the picture. Remember that we are talking about two different governments that are run differently. They do not have the same set of laws and they are not enforced in the same way (If these factors were the same, then why on earth wouldn’t they just merge into one government?). As long as these two “countries” do not interact at all, then there would be no problem. But since they do overlap geographically, it would be near impossible for them not to overlap socially as well. And since they run things differently, the two systems an not ‘fit’ into together; the difference in law and enforcement neccesitates conflict.
That conflict would likely escalate into war and the winner would win the region.
So even if a single geographical region was set up with multiple governments, it would evolve into a single goverment by one of two ways. Either their respective laws would evolve so that they were identical and goverments would merge peacfully, or they would be an enevitable conflict, and they would merge violently, after the war was over.
Thank you…if you could answer these questions thoroughly I think that would just about solve my questions.
I hope I helped.