no unaccepted procedure will be applied to them. But there is another important difference: the protective agency, in doing this, can put some independents in a situation of disadvantage. Specifically, those independents who use a prohibited method and cannot afford its services without great effort (or are even too poor to pay no matter what). These people will be at the expense of paying clients of the agency. In the previous chapter we saw that it was necessary to compensate others for the disadvantages imposed on them. We also saw that this compensation would amount only to the extra cost imposed to the disadvantaged beyond the costs that he would otherwise incur (in this case, the costs of the risky/unknown procedure he would want to apply). Nevertheless, it would amount to even the full price of a simple protection policy if the independent is unable to pay for it after the compensation for the disadvantages. Also, the protective services that count here are strictly against paying clients, because these are the ones against whom the independent was defenceless in the first place. But wouldn’t this compensation mechanism generate another free riding problem? Nozick says that not much, because the compensation is only “the amount that would equal the cost of an unfancy policy when added to the sum of the monetary costs of self-help protection plus whatever amount the person comfortably could pay”. Also, as we just said, it is an unfancy policy that protects only against paying clients, not against compensated clients and other independents. Therefore, the more free riders there are, the more important it becomes to buy a full protection policy. We can see that what we now have resembles a state. In chapter 3 Nozick argued that two necessary conditions to be fulfilled by an organization to be a state were: Monopoly of the use of force. Universal protection. The protective agency resembles a state in these two conditions. Firstly, it is a de facto monopoly due to the competitive advantage mentioned earlier. It does not have any special right to be it, it just is. Secondly, most of the people are its clients. There may be independents, however, who apply procedures it approves of. Also, there might still be independents who apply methods that it disapproves of to other independents with unreliable procedures. These conditions are important because they are the basis for the “individualist