“The fact that compensation would often not be forthcoming either because of inability to catch the offender or inability to pay if caught would motivate us to take out “crime insurance”, which in turn would motivate the insurance company to catch such criminals as it profitably could. Criminals would have plenty to fear from these highly motivated companies, who of course would acquire from their clients the right to such compensation as they could exact, at least up to the level of full resitution. It would be interesting to know whether the net effect would be more satisfactory than the current system, but when you consider the all-but-total failure of the punishment system actually employed in, say, the United States and Canada, it is difficult to believe that it wouldn’t be a major improvement. Everyone agrees that we have very far to go in the way of improving our system of responding to crime. It is a sobering thought that getting rid of one of the most spectacularly cost-effective systems in the history of mankind short of war is perhaps even less likely to be seriously considered than is abolition of war.”
Jan Narveson, The Libertarian Idea, pages 230-231.
The problem with deterrence-by-consequences is that much of the time you’re dealing with people who don’t do consequences: Making the consequences monetary, or imposing them through a market mechanism, doesn’t change this essential fact. You may think you’re improving the quality of your threat, but really you’re just lecturing the deaf in Greek instead of Urdu.
Incarceration may not do criminals any good, but it has at least the virtue of getting them off the street for a while. We ought not to expect a lot more from it than that.
PFP: does Narveson’s scenario necessarily exclude incarceration?
Would there be anything Bill Gates couldn’t do?
I’ve got a great idea for a crime: selling bogus crime insurance…
Surely there’s a “not” missing from that sentence? Did he mean “cost-ineffective“? Or “least cost-effective”?
Frankly, I think that the old concept of weregild was a far more effective deterrant than criminal law. Remember, the underlying fiction is that crimes are not committed against an individual victim, but rather against the King (or the State). Nonsensical.
Indeed, Alisa, and PFP: isn’t the problem that criminals don’t “do” consequences because they gamble – often correctly – that there won’t be any consequences? It’s often been observed that crime rates rise in inverse proportion to the certainty of being caught, not the severity of the sentence. That’s partly the thinking behind zero-tolerance policing. As Narveson says, these “highly motivated companies” would have a vested interest in ensuring consequences.
Laird,
I’m not sure what he meant, on many levels.
There have been wars that are “cost effective”, and other wars that weren’t. If you fight a war for liberty and win, how do you measure its “cost-effectiveness”?
And while it’s a long way from being the most efficient human institution, threat of punishment does have an effect, or who of us would pay our taxes?
A marketplace for crime makes for a nice slogan, and if you are careful not to examine it too carefully, it does get a sort of point across that might make a useful starting point for discussion. But its assumptions are exaggerations or simply wrong and the solution full of holes.
That’s to be expected though, if you want to be brief enough to get quoted.
Libertarians, all too often, can take otherwise sound ideas, and carry them to their last logical conclusion, then run further, right off the edge of a high cliff. In this case, Narveson may have stopped s step short of actually delivering a good one.
If the insurance companies can sell crime insurance, then they would be responsible for catching the criminals, and exacting restitution from them. If this is set into statute properly, some equivalent restitution for crimes like assault, rape, or even murder can then be established. The insurance company would be entitled to run a workhouse of some sort where the offenders can toil away until enough profit has been returned to compensate the victims, and cover the insurance company’s cost of the operation. The commercialized equivalent to incarceration.
Of course an unskilled criminal may well be looking at 40 years of making bottle caps to compensate a purse snatching, whereas a skilled tradesman or professional might well have a short stay for a much more serious crime. I suppose that’s an incentive to finish school before you begin robbing people. (Why do MPs come to mind here?)
As we say in the Mad Science industry; “Further research is indicated.”
No, but incarceration does cost money and involve taking on responsibility for prisoners’ well-being. I suspect any commercial thief-taking operation would avoid it like sin, in favor of some method of turning a quick profit on the guilty.
If they could get a cash reward for turning the perp and evidence sufficient to convict over to the state, commercial policing might very well work out, though. But the ‘real’ police would probably rather have crime than competition.
Well, there seem to me to be quite a lot of problems with these anarcho-capitalist privatised law ideas.One big one is, who gives these thief-takers the authority to capture and punish criminals? A nationalised system has some kind of authority as coming from a “higher power” with a set of rules which are in theory equally applied to all, with various checks and balances. As such, most people tend to think the British common law system has some kind of merit because of those checks and balances (jury trial, laws and sentencing guidelines set by elected politicians and so on) and most cirticisms recently have been on the dismantling of that basically sound system.
But once we get to privatising the thing, and any old Tom Dick And Harry running their own private courts… where are the checks and balances? That is, I find my door kicked down at 5am and I’m hauled off to LawCo’s private jail, and given a kangaroo trial, because my next door neighbour said I stole his lawnmower. The point is, my next door neighbour has the contract with LawCo. I don’t. What gives them jurisdiction over me, and if they do have that jurisdiction (justified entirely by superior force, presumably), what interest do they have in giving me a fair trial?
It seems to me that often people hypothesising these private law systems are making an error of thinking “only the criminals have something to fear”, while ignoring the enormous problem that the purpose of a law system is to correctly separate the criminals from the innocently accused. There is little incentive in such a system to find people innocent. The whole point of a good legal system is that it errs on the side of the accused.
And I re-iterate; where do these companies get the right to capture, incarcerate, and extract restitution from private citizens?
PFP:
That was exactly my point. It doesn’t have to be the state, though, while on the other hand it doesn’t – and probably shouldn’t – be commercial. These can be voluntary associations, operating under principles agreed upon by their members. Much like current legal systems in the West, only membership is not compulsory. In any case, the point is that the commercial “branch” is charged with catching criminals (much like today’s bounty hunters), while it has no authority to decide who is a criminal.
BTW, he lost me too with that bit on cost-effectiveness and war and all that.
The central problem here so far as I can see is that unlike other forms of voluntary association (e.g. normal insurance) they have to extend power over non-members. The people who will be the subjects of any private law enforcement system- or, let us use the shorter name here, mafiosi- are not voluntary members of it.
The whole point of nationalised law is that it is compulsory on all, because if law isn’t universal and compulsory it becomes one of either (a) useless or (b)utterly perilous to the citizens’ liberty.
Nationalised law is certainly all kinds of peril; but if you privatise it, you just abolish the good bits, and all you are left with is the peril.
The other point worth making is that we already have an example of how a free market in law works; it’s called the civil law. The result, unsurprisingly, is that poor people are excluded. Wealthy people can easily use it to imperil the poor by ruining them with tort, libel law etc. This may be acceptable in civil cases. In criminal cases, you are literally asking for “one law for the rich, another for the poor”. Personally I find that unacceptable. Feel free to call me a statist socialist or something of that order.
I have to admit, this whole subject irritates me, because it’s one of the things our enemy can point at to prove that we’re a bunch of crazy moonbats. Right now, liberty is losing badly. We are nowhere, even slightly, near to being able to influence politics significantly, let alone start building a libertarian society… anywhere. We ought to leave this batshit stuff alone and concentrate on the stuff that might get us a few converts.
Ian B, you are certainly correct that there would be a myriad of details to flesh out before moving to a private law system, but the one you mention is the least of the problems. It could work like standard no-fault automobile insurance: If you steal from me, I collect the damages from my insurance company and subrogate my claim to them; they in turn recover their expenditure from your insurance company, which does whatever is necessary to collect from you and does indeed have privity of contract with you.
Of course, you still have the “free rider” problem of those without insurance (hey, no system is perfect!), but that can be dealt with in a number of ways (such as an “uninsured tortfeasors pool”, statutory authority for the last insurer in the chain to implement “self-help” actions against the uninsured, other punitive sanctions against those without insurance, etc.). There are undoubtedly many other possibilities. The important point is that every responsible person (i.e., who is insured) would be dealing with his own insurance company, which has incentives to deal with you fairly (to retain your business). That in itself would be an incentive to become and remain insured. Seems to me that the odds of fair treatment are at least as good as under the current system.
Ian: people who are not members will be left alone – which also means that they will not be entitled to the services of these associations. If they are violent, they will be dealt with through violence, just like various outlaws were dealt with in the not so distant past.
Forget the civil law. Are you really saying that the current criminal law systems in the West are not favorable to people who have money? Please. It’s like everything else: every time I mention the possibility of private education or private healthcare, I hear: yes, it would be great, but the poor won’t be able to afford it. Meanwhile, the rich hire private tutors for their kids, and buy private health insurance to “supplement” whatever their local equivalent of the NHS is. How is justice system different? In fact, the only area where I can see the free-rider problem being real is defense against external threats, and even there I am not so sure any more.
That system only works because it is a crime against the state to drive without auto insurance. If there were no such compulsion, no cross-claiming insurance system could work, since it would make more sense not to have any, and insurance would revert to insuring oneself, not the current state-imposed (and iMV rather bizarre) system of insuring people you happen to crash into.
This is where all this private law bollocks always seems to break down to me. It seems to presume the state actually existing and enforcing it on everyone, but then underhandedly never admits that and just blithely says “people will do this” and “people will do that” as if spontaneously, when all the evidence of history is that the last thing people do in the absence of a state is set up a nice polite insurance system, because in such a state, the easiest way to gain wealth is to form a gang with a bunch of other violent, well armed young men, and steal it.
Any examples, Ian?
Ian B wrote
Who gives this nationalised system “the authority to capture and punish criminals”? And who gives them this authority that wouldn’t be able to authorise private bodies, too?
In the end, states are made up of people, and so can have no rights that individuals have. If the people in states have a right to arrest and punish criminals, so does everybody else.
But this needn’t exclude anarcho-capitalism. AnCaps are people who think that there should not be a monopoly on the legal use of force, they need not be people who think every use of force should be legal.
Isn’t it obvious? If you want protection then you want people to work for you and devote resources to your ends rather than their’s. The libertarian way of ensuring this occurs is by persuading them to do so, most likely by offering them a financial incentive. This doesn’t change when the protection you want is protection against arbitrary arrest, protection against punishment without due process, etc. etc. You want protection? Persuade someone to give it to you for free, persuade someone else to buy it for you, or buy it yourself. Either way, the market provides the checks and balances.
They don’t want to get arrested or shot up by Justice R
Us, the company you do have a contract with. To avoid this LawCo have contracts with Justice R Us, which you were aware of when you made your decision to subscribe to the latter, establishing exactly when and how Justice R Us will permit LawCo to proceed against you, and arbitration clauses in case of dispute over these agreements.
Of course there is: If you “punish” an innocent person (which wouldn’t really be punishment) then you have aggressed against them. Their protection agency will proceed against you on this basis. You will be treated as a criminal, unlike law enforcers that commit crimes these days.
Those private citizen’s victims? Where does the state get its authority to do exactly the same thing (because this is the issue: Anarcho-capitalism is really nothing more than some people saying, “well, if you think X is ok for the state to do, on what grounds can you possibly think that it also legitimate to prevent other people doing it?” This question is not the same as claiming that people should be able to do things you don’t think that the state, or anybody else, should be able to do. It is simply saying that whatever you think is OK for the state to do should be OK for anybody else to do.)
“a gang with a bunch of other violent, well armed young men, and steal it.”
It’s called the government, Alisa.
Narveson is an interesting fellow(I actually know the man, though not especially well). He’s clearly thought out all of his positions in depth, but he has the rather nasty habit of doing philosophy like a mathematician – taking your premises as axioms, and following them wherever they lead. Math has no morality, but political philosophy does. It’s all well and good to stand up for liberty as a fundamental value, but when you wind up arguing that infanticide is legitimate, you’ve got the wrong axioms.
And while discussing anarchist methods of law enforcement isn’t nearly as bad, and is kind of a nifty theoretical exercise, it’s a scheme doomed to implode into gang warfare within a matter of days after it’s implemented. Anything that failure-prone is a bad idea, no matter how well it flatters your axioms.
Mike: Exactly. Anarchy leads rapidly to government, and usually an especially brutal warlord-based one. I’d rather have a government that at least tries to act nice and respect my rights, even if they aren’t very good at it.
I am confused, Mike: who were you quoting, and what does it have to do with me?
Alsadius: again, examples please? Note, anarchy is not the same as chaos.
Mike-
Actually it was me that said that. The point is, those armed gangs, those warlord states in the west, after centuries of strife, settled down into various types of constitutional democracy with reasonable legal systems like what we have now. You want to go through that whole process again?
Alisa-
All of history, Alisa.
Richard Garner-
I haven’t got enough money. I’m poor. I don’t get any law, right? Only rich people get law?
Well, in reality not even most rich people are likely to get law. Very rich ones can buy a little army to protect them. Everybody else becomes subject to those private armies. That is what history tells over and over again- warlords, chieftains, monarchs. If anarchism worked, it would already have worked!
The whole basic principle of libertarianism is that people have natural rights- self ownership, property rights, etc. You can only have that if there is a legal negative rights framework enforced on everyone. It has to be illegal to murder anyone, not just those who can afford an army to protect them. It has to be illegal to steal any land or goods, not just the land and goods of those who can buy an army. It has to be illegal to rape any woman, not just that pretty girl who has traded her freedom for the protection of the local warlord.
There is no way out of this bind. What is actually proposed in these systems is “strongest thugs win”. That is what any such system will rapidly devolve to. We know this because it is what always has happened throughout history. People with armed force don’t waste time setting up silly insurance companies. They invade your land, rape your livestock and steal your women, because that has a higher ROI.
Centuries later, these warlord systems’ populations get antsy and demand rights and stuff, and end up if you’re lucky turning into some kind of democracy with a constitution and maybe some constraint on power; in other words back where we started, right here.
As I said above- if anarcho-capitalism could spontaneously exist and maintain itself, it would already have done so; it doesn’t. You get gangs, tribes, chiefs, kings and states instead. It’s a mirage, a fun thought experiment perhaps. But it’s not actually an achievable system. History is the proof.
Or to put it another way, consider two business proposals-
1) Pay me a small fee and I’ll spend a lot of effort going after some guy who stole your lawnmower who can’t afford to compensate either of us when we finally catch him.
2) Give me a large regular tribute and I will not burn down your house and kill you and your family.
Which of these business plans has been most prominent and successful in history?
I tried a fancy alias for a while, but it never really seemed ‘me’, so ‘Nuke’ is back. no more Ostralion.
As for this thread, the Von Mises people had a review of a book on Somalia, which had governmentfree justice. People paid into private insurance, and each side in a dispute sent their men to hire a neutral party as a judge, and disputes were settled by customary laws. It worked for centuries, so private justice has precedence. (The review was a year or two ago.)
Not so fast, IanB. It seems to me perfectly sensible to ask the question of whether the hideously expensive, and infrequently useless, criminal law system as it is widely practised is in need of an overhaul.
I have some issues with aspects of the anarcho-capitalist approach, but there are points about restitution of victims etc that are well worth exploring, not kicking into the long grass for fear that we will be branded “moonbats”. Remember, not so long ago, privatisation was considered politically impossible, etc.
A book that is required reading on all this is Bruce Brenson’s The Enterprise of Law. It answers a lot of the standard arguments used against private insurance/arbitration that one comes across.
Johnathan, there are a lot of good discussions to be had about what is wrong, and what has gone wrong, with the criminal law. But those are different discussions to this stuff about privatised systems, which are clearly not ever going to actually work, for the reason Alsadius gave; they ignore reality. Extremist purist philosophy can take us interesting places, or lead us to endless discussions about how many Georgists can dance on the head of a pin, as we well know. But at some point one has to open the curtains, look outside, and recognise it’s all hypothetical and doesn’t actually connect with the real world.
The law is not like other matters libertarians discuss; it is qualitatively different. It is the ruleset by which the agents in a society are required to play. We may use the analogy of a board game. There is no particular reason that the rules of Monopoly are what they are (and indeed some players by common agreement use different ones to the official set). But nonetheless eveyrbody in a Monopoly game has to abide by the same rule set. You can’t have a game of Monopoly if everybody can make up whatever rules they like. It will rapidly descend to the boisterous child kicking the board over and grabbing all the money and pronouncing “I WINZ!”.
The rules- the law- of society deliberately restrict the permitted activities of the players. We impose property rights on everyone, thus preventing some people gaining an advantage by, for instance, killing their competitors and stealing their property. There is no ultimate justification for this axiomatic imposition of property rights. It is simply an agreed rule of the game. If you take away the universality of the rules, and allow anyone to make up whatever rules they like, the strongest will band together under a ruleset based on “we can take stuff from people, and kill them”, because that is more efficient for them than honouring the rights other people claim, just as the big kid in the Monopoly game, free to make his own rules, can terrorise all the other children into agreeing that he won the game.
As I’ve said, these discussions are dishonest. The proponents are really offering one of two “solutions”; one is gang warfare (some libertarians actually promote this, believing ludicrously that they’d be better off under such a system of naked aggression than under the flawed but still restrained power of the state, apparently not realising that their local mafia now is the state). The other “solution” presents a polite society of men in hats toddling around from insurance company to insurance company and writing contracts, while dishonestly pretending that such a system could exist without a coercive higher power to keep it in place. It is handwaved into place with “people will do this” and “people will do that” with the same blithe ignorance of human nature as communists declaring that once everybody is freed from their capitalist false consciousness they will all naturally fall into a sharin’ carin’ communist lifestyle. Yes, it’ll work if everybody in society is Soviet Man, but Soviet Man cannot actually be created.
So, it’s a choice of a patchwork of thuggish microstates which are certain to be far more brutal than the states we already live in, or an impossible fantasy. Either of those just bring libertarianism into disrepute with the wider audience.
IMV we really need to stop with all this aerie-faerie philosophy (and I’ll add in there the futurist-fictional get-away-from-it-all stuff like seasteading and moonbases) and concentrate on the practical task at hand, which is to attempt to steer the states we already have towards a more liberal ruleset.
Ian B. – you go. This sort of angels-on-pinheads argument reminds me of all that I like least about libertarians.
Justice and profit are mutually-exclusive concepts. It is, in fact,a triumph of our political development that the state will spend $25,000 to secure a conviction for the larceny of property worth a few hundred dollars at most, and then thousands more to lock the offender away. No insurance company in its right mind would do so. Any insurance scheme along the lines suggested will quickly devolve into de-facto acceptance and tolerance of a significant level of petty crime. This is, as I understand it, now pretty-much the case in the UK – burglary has been largely de-criminalized for those with decent insurance.
Somalia is mentioned. How nice that they found a state-free way to settle their differences.
How’s things in Mogadishu these days? Business-friendly atmosphere, would you say? Would you vacation there?
Regarding this – ‘all the evidence of history is that the last thing people do in the absence of a state is set up a nice polite insurance system, because in such a state, the easiest way to gain wealth is to form a gang with a bunch of other violent, well armed young men, and steal it.’
After Hurricane Katrina, it took mere days for this change to start occurring.
Libertarians always seem to assume that the whole world is made up of rational people who will coolly exmaine the totality of the circumstances and then act in a manner both altruistic and in their own best interest. Unfortunately, the real world contains a large proportion of witless fools, whose limits of forward thinking can be measured with an egg-timer, and who will do the most amazingly-stupid things to themselves and others for reasons that would leave you scratching your head in puzzlement. Doctrinally-pure notions of perfected state-free law-enforcement are not going to last very long in the face of these chuckleheads. They don’t care whether it’s the state or a private insurer that threatens them with sanctions – they don’t care about the sanction at all, so who’s bringing it is a purely academic issue for them.
You’ll note that the drug trade, which is by-definition a state-free system in which enforcement in matters of personal security and property rights is handled entirely privately between the parties involved in consensual transactions, has inexplicably failed to organize its affairs along the lines described, with private insurance handling conflicts and questions of improper behaviour. For reasons which must be completely inexplicable to any good libertarian, this trade is run almost-exclusively by young men with guns. They don’t settle disputes by independent arbitration by an agreed outsider – they settle disputes with handguns, and steal whatever’s not nailed down while doing it.
Amazing, isn’t it? How can they be so stupid?
llater,
llamas
In medieval Iceland claims against wrong-doers were private property that could be gifted, sold, or bequeathed to other people. This meant that, in practice, a person too weak or poorly connected to enforce his own claim could sell it to somebody more able. The same could apply.
Surely the “little armies” would sell to anybody they could make a profit selling to. Why would they turn down profit from protecting poor people if they had an opportunity to make it?
The whole basic principle of libertarianism is that people have natural rights- self ownership, property rights, etc. You can only have that if there is a legal negative rights framework enforced on everyone.
Sure. And? The issue is who should be able to enforce the law, not what the law should be: Should a single institution monopolise the legal use of force, or should there be free-entry?
Who is saying that it shouldn’t be illegal to murder everyone? Nobody, so far as I can tell. All anarchists are saying is that, if you have accepted self-ownership and property rights you have accepted that it is wrong to force people to protect you, because that would be forced labour, and in violation of self-ownership, and wrong top rob other people to pay people to protect you, because that would violate property rights. Given this, the only way of ensuring you get protection under the law is by persuading people to provide it for you charitably, or by offering them a financial incentive to provide it, or by forcing wrongdoers to pay your bill for you.
There is no way out of this bind: Protection must either be given voluntarily, charitably, or in exchange for money, or involuntarily, through force labour or robbery. Once you have accepted the latter you have already denied the claim that the law should apply equally to everyone.
Assuming that strength rather than skill in the courtroom is what this will come down to.
The British government has armed force. Why hasn’t it invaded France yet? Because the French government has force, too. And that means that what you claim is true, but only if the other side can’t put up a fight. When you have the sort of arrangements you propose: Institutions with monopolies on the use of force in a given geographica area it is necessarily the case that, within that geographic area, there is no institutional provision to protect against your monopoly, because if there were it would not be a monopoly. So whan a state, minimal or otherwise exists, that is precisely when there is nothing to rely on but the good will of those in power to prevent the state from breaking the law or punish it when it does. To have an institution able to enforce the law against the government necessarily implies an absence of a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, and so necessarily implies anarchy.
Then we might as well resign ourselves to the status quo. After all “History is the proof” against minimal states too, is it not? David Friedman: “It took about 150 years, starting with a Bill of Rights that reserved to the states and the people all powers not explicitly delegated to the federal government, to produce a Supreme Court willing to rule that growing corn to feed your own hogs is interstate commerce and can therefore be regulated by congress. . . . Anarchy at least might work; limited government has been tried.”
Because, of course, “limited government” begs the question “limited by what”? If there is some independent institution, financially independent, too, able to enforce the law against the government, and its agents, then the government has no monopoly on the legitimate use of force, since both it and the other institution can do so. But if there is not, then nothing enforces the law against the government except the government itself.
I was going to respond to the points of Llamas and IanB but Richard beat me to it. Well said.
Another point I’d make is this, although it is not conclusive, of course. When Ian, for example, says that history proves that non-state societies are unviable and Llamas says that places such as Somalia are examples of anarchy, I groan. I mean, how about acknowledging that the long, inglorious history of states also could be lined up as evidence that states, with a monopoly of violence in some given (given by whom?) geographical area have also not been very good protectors of liberty?
I am – just about – still a minarchist, rather than anarcho-capitalist. But unlike some of the commenters here, I look upon the state as a probably unavoidable evil, with dangerous tendencies.
Richard, you could have mentioned the issue of the right to self defence as a counterweight to government power. Arguably, the minarchist argument holds up better if the populace is armed, and if being armed is something that is regarded as a virtue, not a sign of being a loon, as is now the case amongs most of the “educated public”.
Not without reason do some US libertarians regard the 2nd Amendment as the most important.
“If anarchism worked, it would already have worked!”
Neither anarchy, nor history are a priori Ian – and I merely suggest that you quite lecturing others about their “dishonesty” if you yourself are full of it.
“Justice and profit are mutually-exclusive concepts.”
Because to you Llamas, liberty is merely a means to other ends and the most necessary question is only how much liberty is to be traded for how much justice, how much security etc. Look, a justice system can only spend tens of thousands to convict someone of theft of items worth a few hundred only because the system itself is funded by …. come on, fill in the blank and complete the circle why don’t you?
Jonathan Pearce wrote:
‘ . . . Llamas says that places such as Somalia are examples of anarchy . . .’
As they say in the Congress, I’d like to revise and expand my remarks.
I don’t think that Somalia is an example of anarchy. It’s an example of what you get without consistent, impartial and enforced laws that are based in natural rights.
It’s my understanding that Somalia has always had a very well-understood system of rules, based entirely in relationships between clans based on histories going back centuries – even millennia. They still recall the Crusades there, FGS, and it figures in their world view.
I’m sure that the average Somali knows perfectly-well what the law is where they live, and what they have to do to comply. It’s just that the laws that they live by bear no relationship to anything that the rest of us would consider fair, just or equitable.
llater,
llamas
The point which Richard has not and cannot address is the central one which I and others have made, which is that an anarcho-capitalist society cannot exist. It is like interrupting some Trotskyites discussing how their society will work- and you point out that it will, rather than be what they describe, become instead some form of bureaucratised tyranny. You point out that the marxist definition of exploitation is inherently conflicted with redistributionism, so one must either exploit the workers or accept inequality, and so on. And the Trots regard you with a puzzled expression, then return to their discussion as if they had heard nothing.
If one posits a type of society as desirable, but then are faced with the reality that it cannot possibly exist, then one must abandon it. It is useless to discuss it. One may as well be discussing the benefits of dragons and unicorns. We can only deal with reality. That is all there is.
Now one could certainly declare an anarcho-capitalist society; or, rather, declare the absence of a society at all, since that is what is meant. Perhaps after some revolution, you abolish the government. But this is the only moment of anarcho-capitalism that you have; it would exist only in the way some unstable element exists in a particle accelerator; glimpsed for a split second as it instantly decays into something else.
You can certainly, in theory, abolish the government, and the law, and the state, and all its functions. You now have no power over what will arise in its place. What we know will certainly not spontaneously arise in its place is the anarcho-capitalist dream of everything handled by insurance companies. You will instead have some period of conflict between gangs, territorial capture, and the arising of new proto-states. This is the only scenario which is actually on offer, because it is the way human beings naturally behave.
Richard mentions several times “the law”. And this is a direct example of the dishonesty I mentioned earlier. Under anarcho-capitalism there is no “the law”. There is no law to break. Nobody can know what The Law is, because it does not exist. All that replaces it are the arbitrary personal rules of individuals, and if one guy thinks that looking at his girlfriend in a funny way is against his law, expect him to kill you, because that is his law, and if that well armed gang of young men think your property would suit them better, expect to have to hand it over, because that is now The Law as far as they are concerned.
There is no metastructure any more, and it is the pretence that there is one, which somehow impels people to sign contracts and attend courtrooms, is dishonest. The law which you are compelled to follow is whatever arbitrary rules another man has decided he will live by, and will force upon you if he has the strength. And if he holds a gun against your head and tells you that as far as he is concerned murder ain’t no crime, well, that’s the law now. Consider-
My gang just blew up your crappy courtroom with some shoulder launched rockets. That’s fine by our law.
So here again is the point; the state your axioms lead you to desire is impossible to realise in practise. You will just restart the process of tribal struggle that led eventually, after centuries of bloodshed, to nation states last time around. You may glimpse in the bubble chamber tracks a brief moment when anarchism existed, but that is all you will have.
Since we have no choice but the territorial monopolies known as “states”, and since we know that it is at least possible for those mature states to be bearable and even pleasant places to live, and with our historical hindsight to educate us as to the pitfalls, let us concentrate on making the ones which exist more bearable and pleasant, rather than waste our time dreaming of how wonderful the world would be with dragons and unicorns.
(Also, the USA never was a minimal state, so *big raspberry* to David Friedman. It was at best a partially restrained federation with unlimited governance at the State level).
Johnathan, the whole point of what myself, Alsadius, Llamas et al have been saying is that you can’t have both those things. This is what I meant by the “dishonesty” of anarchism. In one breath, there is no state and complete freedom of action; in the next some Deus Anarchius magics into existence “consistent, impartial and enforced laws based in natural rights”. In an anarchy, you have abolished the system that enables such laws. Don’t you see? You can’t abolish the higher power then appeal to it for your natural rights. You either have one thing or the other!
Ooops, that second comment by me above makes no sense as I managed to confuse myself that Llamas’s comment was from Johnathan.
I have to say, I’m with Ian B on this one. It’s a common philosophical problem, this tendency of philosophers to try to get their system to pull itself up by its own bootstraps, without relying on anything external.
The market is a wonderful mechanism, capable of many things, but it depends on certain constraints for it to work. Trying to implement those constraints using another market simply pushes the same problem back one step. That other market mechanism also has to be enforced. You immediately get an infinite regress.
There is no way round this. You must ultimately rely on something external to the market to enforce the contracts. That doesn’t necessarily have to be a single authority like a State – people might abide by contracts because they are in a situation of mutually assured destruction, and all parties have convinced the others that they really mean it. But you need something; and preferably something with plenty of safety features, checks and balances, because it is also incredibly dangerous if it goes wrong.
As I indicated above, what if a criminal dispute arises between you and your criminal insurance company? What if I were to sell you bogus insurance – what could you do about it, since you’re now actually uninsured? What if I do a deal with the insurance company so that, for a large extra premium, I can commit crimes with impunity? A sort of Papal Indulgence? Any company will obviously be willing to exchange fines which make profit for prison which costs them. And with pre-payment, the company makes more profit since they get the lot instead of just a percentage. What if they decide to enforce some regulations, because they’re profitable, and ignore others that make a loss? (cough, cough… speed cameras… cough.) Or at least charge unaffordable premiums? Wouldn’t that be tantamount to private companies setting the law? Or companies could fight wars for market share, launching spurious prosecutions against their competitor’s customers. And what if I pay my company to conduct malicious prosecutions against people I don’t like? It’s more profit, right?
You see, once you substitute profit for justice, someone with sufficient money can make their own rules. And of course, one of their rules will be that they generally speaking get to keep their money. It used to be called “privilege” – private law.
You would need a second layer to keep the insurance companies in line. Because you can hardly appeal to your own insurance company to enforce the contract you have with them, should they choose not to abide by it. (So long as they only cheat a small percentage, they can be put down to attempted insurance fraud at no cost to the company’s reputation.) And so on.
I found it very easy to pick holes in the idea within a few seconds of reading it, and criminal minds would do so with far greater efficiency than I could. You can of course patch those holes with market solutions, and keep on patching as more holes are suggested, but ultimately you still face the bootstrap problem. The market cannot enforce all its own rules by purely market methods – unless you allow circular reasoning, when the rules would no longer be fixed, or even consistent.
You can do bits of law enforcement privately – with bailiffs and debt recovery agencies for example – but they always have to be subsidiary to a law and a system of enforcement external to themselves.
There are no easy answers.
This has been a most interesting discussion, and I have come to the conclusion that IanB and Llamas are right. Humans are tribal creatures, and we naturally arrange ourselves into a pecking order (we call it “leadership”). Some form of government (gang, tribe, nation-state; call it what you will) is inevitable. History may not “prove” this in a formal, mathematical sense, but it certainly makes a very strong a prior case. In other words, don’t bet against it.
Still, that doesn’t make this discussion meritless. At worst it shows the limits to libertarian theory. At best it might point the way to some sort of private legal system as a useful adjunct to the state’s criminal process. It is, however, “inside baseball”, not well suited for consumption outside of the group.
Ian B wrote
Why not? Plainly not by definition, since anarcho-capitalism is an absence of a state, not an absence of law.
How does what you offer provide anything different? People, without sufficient deterence, will use force for whatever reason they want, just or not. The same would be the case under a state.
I’m confused. Are you saying that you really believe that anarcho-capitalists don’t think that there should be institutional arrangements to prevent this. You are saying that there should be an institution that is able to prevent people from enforcing just whatever they think the law should be, but will constrain uses of force to specific uses. That is precisely what anarcho-capiatlists believe. They just think that anybody should be able to do such a thing, rather than only a single organisation be allowed to.
So you are attacking a strawman. Anarchists are not saying that individuals or private bodies should be able to do anything that minimal statists don’t think they should be able to do. They are only saying that everything minimal statists think the state should be allowed to do is something that any individual or institution should be allowed to do.
How is this different from the state? At least under anarchism I can hire some protection against this. Under a state the only protection I get from the state is the protection the state chooses to provide me.
If the higher power violates my rights, who do I appeal to? I mean, if the state is a state, there is no higher power than it for me to appeal to if it violates my rights, correct? If it is the highest power, then plainly there is no higher power other than it for me to appeal to if it violates my rights. That makes my relationship to the state precisely the same as my relationship to these biased “what I want is law” people you say we would have under anarchism… except that under anarchism when legal entity A violates my rights there is a legal entity B for me to appeal to, or C, or so on. It is statists who seem to be saying that there should be no higher power available for us to appeal to if our rights get violated.
Moreover, you still haven’t explained how you will ensure that protection is provided under
“consistent, impartial and enforced laws based in natural rights” without either forcing people to provide such protection without pay, thereby violating those rights, or robbing people to raise money to pay for such protection, again violating those rights, whilst preventing anybody else from doing likewise, thus undermining the pretense at those laws being “impartial” and “consistent,” since it would be illegal for some to rob and enslave, and yet not others.
The only alternatives to this is that either protection is provider by protectors for free, out of charity or a concern for justice, etc (can you imagine our police working for free?!), or it is provided for a profit at a fee.
Rather than type a long post again, let’s just clarify this-
You abolish the state. That means all functions of the state, including the creation and any enforcement of laws, are automatically and inevitably abolished, right? That means there is no power higher than the private law companies? And since there is now no state definining what a company is, this means any arbitrary group or individual who choose to offer law services or declare a legal code, yes?
Since you’ve abolished the state, what “institutional arrangements” can there be? Using a term like that implies again a higher power. But there isn’t one, is there?
Pa Annoyed said,
But anarchists agree. They aren’t opposed to having institutions able to enforce contracts, so this criticism seems to be a straw man. All anarchists say this that you should be able to choose which institution provides you this service, rather than be forced to accept and pay for a service, or go without, just because you live in one part of the world rather than another.
In fact, it is statists that think that there should not be an institution that exists to enforce contracts. After all, one body that can be a party to contracts is the state. But statists believe that nobody but the state, or those it licenses/authorises should be allowed to use force, legitimate or otherwise, within a given geographic area. That means that for everybody that has a contract with the state within that geographic area, there is no institution beyond the state to enforce the state’s constracts.
Then I hire a protection agency to enforce my rights under the law against this insurance company.
people without house insurance have to pay the bills themselves. People without health insurance have to pay the bills themselves. People without crime insurance have to pay the bills themselves. They pay the bill of a protection agency that punishes the bogus insurer or forces it to give a refund, and compensate for expenses.
Why would you bother? I mean, if you want to spend huge amounts of money to be able to beat Joe up, why not pay Joe to let you beat him up? If you want to spend hige amounts of money to take Joes car, why not buy Joe’s car off him?
I’m not sure this makes sense. Enforce what regulations against whom?
What if a restaurant charges unaffordable prices? Its business declines, and others pick it up. It loses to competitors and goes broke.
I don’t think that Narveson’s account says that the companies set the law. It says that they insure people against violations of it and pursue people who break it to get compensation, just like motor insurance companies do now.
How? A company’s profit margin is its revenue minus costs. If it adds spending on attacking its competitors to those costs whilst its competitors don’t, then it becomes less profitable, doesn’t it? I mean, its products don’t suddenly become more valuable to consumers.
That doesn’t happen under states? Isn’t that what has happened to Microsoft for the last decade at least?
Not really, since those people would want compensation against such things, and then Narveson’s scenario comes in again: “The fact that compensation would often not be forthcoming either because of inability to catch the offender or inability to pay if caught would motivate us to take out [miscarriage of justice insurance], which in turn would motivate the insurance company to catch such criminals as it profitably could. Criminals would have plenty to fear from these highly motivated companies, who of course would acquire from their clients the right to such compensation as they could exact, at least up to the level of full resitution.” A person’s miscarriage of justice insurance company would probably try to take this compensation from your insurance company, and they would charge you more because of that.
Of course you would. Anarchists have said so since the 1960s. What is wrong with that? They say that, instead of there being an institution with a monopoly on the legal or legitimate use of force in a given geographic area there should be competition in the supply of legal or legitimate force in that area. So, if I want protection of my rights, instead of being forced by the state to pay my taxes to it in exchange for protection, I instead pay my “taxes” to an institution of my choice to protect my rights. It makes no difference whether it is protection of these rights against private criminals, or whether it is against other law enforcement bodies, both are protections of my rights.
The bizarre thing that statists think, and that Ian seems to be saying too, is that saying that there should be competition in the legal or legitimate use of force is the same as saying that anybody should be able to use whatever force they like. That is really weird, since it would presumably imply that minimal statists think that any use of force is legal or legitimate. Anarchists, of course, do not think this, and think, therefore, that people should be forbidden for particular uses of force.
“anarcho-capitalism is an absence of a state, not an absence of law.”
Anarcho-capitalism places the law into the hands of the marketplace. Unless you happen to have a monopoly (in which case you have a state by another name), what you get is a set of competing laws.
“How does what you offer provide anything different? […] The same would be the case under a state.”
Yes. That’s the problem. There are no easy answers. If, as you say, the situation under anarcho-capitalism “would be the case under a state”, then the current situation under the state is the same as anarcho-capitalism. It’s a non-solution.
“They are only saying that everything minimal statists think the state should be allowed to do is something that any individual or institution should be allowed to do.”
You’re saying that you have two sets of laws: the ones the individuals and institutions set up, and the ones defined as “everything minimal statists think the state should be allowed to do”. So you’re avoiding all the issues that the first part throws up by saying they will be rejected by the second, overriding part. Neat. But it means that all the virtues of freedom you’re selling us with that first half are going to be replaced at the point of sale by a “dictatorship of minarchists”.
That sounds great if you’re a minarchist of course, but it isn’t quite what was advertised, is it?
“Are you saying that you really believe that anarcho-capitalists don’t think that there should be institutional arrangements to prevent this.”
No. We’re saying that anarcho-capitalists proposals for such arrangements wouldn’t prevent this. In a totally free market, any conceivable law is on offer. If you’ve got enough money, you can buy such a law. Institutional arrangements can’t prevent this, precisely because it would be interference with the market, and that would put those institutional arrangements outside and above the law. And if you have institutions that are above the law and not controlled by the market, you’re back where you started.
You end up ruled by the institutions, not the free competition of anarcho-capitalism. (Which might be a perfectly pleasant system to live under, but is nevertheless something completely different.)
Firstly, the state has not always been the source of law, and, in fact, much of state law has simply been the co-option of non-state produced law (this is the case, for instance, with the law merchant).
Secondly, what do you mean “abolished the state?” The state is an institution that has a monopoly on the legal use of force. If the state permitted competition in the legal use of force then it would cease to be a state. This doesn’t mean that any law making body ceases to exist, it just means that no institution exists that prevents anybody else from competiting with it in providing people with whatever constitutes “legal force.”
What “private law companies?” All we are talking about here is the provision of legal force. So, are you saying that there is “no power higher than the legal force companies”? Well, what do you mean “higher”? There are other companies providing the legal use of force.
In the end, you are doing nothing more than expand the definition of legitimate force. Beyond “force sufficient to protect against or justly punish violations of rights, force, fraud and theft” you are including things like “force sufficient to deter or justly punish convictions that don’t follow established rules of evidence, that don’t allow for due process, etc. etc.” After all, you are saying that people who might want to run around imposing whatever they think the law should be should also be deterred by defensive and punitive force.
But expanding the definition of legitimate force is irrelevant, since the entire anarchist vs statist debate is not about what constitutes legitimate force, but who gets to use it. An anarchist could agree entirely that “legitimate force” includes preventing people from punishing others under some “law” they invented that prohibits looking at their girlfriends. All the anarchist says is that if it is OK for the state to prevent such things, it is OK for anybody to do so, too.
No. You can have a state without having one single legal code, so opposition to the absence of a single uniform legal code is not sufficient to be a supporter of a state – or, rather, the existence of a state is not sufficient to say that there is a uniform legal code.
Beyond this, it is logically possible to have a single legal code over an entire geographic area, and yet for there to be no institution that monopolises the enforcement of that legal code (i.e., does not prevent others competing with it in providing enforcement of those laws). Since a monopoly on the legitimate use of force would be absent in such a scenario, a state would be absent in such a scenario, and so it would therefore by anarchic. But there would still exist a uniform body of laws.
This means it is possible to be a statist without supporting the rule of law, and an anarchist without opposing the rule of law.
To more directly answer your question, people can be forcibly prevented from imposing on others just any legal code they want, and forced to only enforce particular laws (preferably libertarian ones), rather than ones forbidding people from looking at your girlfriend, and the state stil nlot exist, because no institution claims this task exclusively for itself.
For heaven’s sake Richard, you said that “anarcho-capitalism is an absence of a state”. So what do you mean, what do I mean? I simply repeated what you had said, which is that under your system the state does not exist.
Is there a law making body above the private law companies Richard? Please answer the question. It’s a yes or a no.
Do the law companies write their own legal codes? If so, are they free to write any code they like? Can they set any punishment system they like? If not, what constrains them?
No, anarcho-capitalism allows competition in the provision of enforcement and adjudication of the law. Suppose that there were no competing laws. Does that, by itself, entail that there is an institution that has a monopoly over the provision of legitimate or legal force? No, of course not. So that means that you can have , conceptually at least, no state and yet no competing laws.
Come on, saying “this problem you say would arise under anarcho-capitalism arises under states too” is not the same as saying that the situation under anarcho-capitalism is the same as that under a state.
No, I am saying that the first part is entirely a strawman. Nothing in the Narveson quote suggested competiting legal systems, only competition in enforcement of the law. Nothing in the concept of anarchism, which is an-archy, an absence of a state, necessarily entails competing legal systems. All anarchy entails is that there be no institution with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force. It does not entail that all uses of force are legitimate, that all should be legal, or that the law should be whatever anybody decides the law should be. It just entails that, whatever the law is, there is no institution that monopolises enforcement of it.
What do you mean “law”? Precisely what is being bought here?
How so? Preventing me from paying somebody else to protect me whilst I go about robbing a third party may constitute interference with the market, but does preventing delivery of this service? Moreover, if that third party pays somebody to protect them against me robbing them, is that third party, or the people they paid “interfering with the market”?
Why? If I pay company X to protect me against anybody that would prevent me from robbing Joe, in what way does that mean that it is illegal for Joe to hire somebody to protect him against me robbing them? In that scenario there is an institution, the body Joe hires, that attempts to prevent me from robbing joe, and therefore attempts to prevent my company from protecting me against anybody that would try to prevent me from robbing Joe, precisely as I said.
“The state is an institution that has a monopoly on the legal use of force. If the state permitted competition in the legal use of force then it would cease to be a state.”
Then hurrah! For the state has ceased to be! Bailiffs, debt collectors, private security, and the hiring of lawyers for private prosecutions are all permitted, and all provided by the private sector.
“since the entire anarchist vs statist debate is not about what constitutes legitimate force, but who gets to use it.”
The debate here is surely about who gets to decide what’s legitimate? The state can privatise its entire police force if it likes, but it’s still the state that calls the tune.
Okay, so you’re using a unique and quirky definition of the word “state”. That is, the absence of force. You’re still allowing a collective, with collectivist institutions which create laws, perhaps by a parliament or something, and in fact maybe a considerable “state” that you’ve decided isn’t a “state” by your unique definition, since you’ve deprived it of the use of force. Well that’s one way to skin a cat, certainly.
The problem is, your non-state-thing that writes laws is powerless.Since it has no force to apply, it can’t actually require anybody to abide by its laws. You see, that’s the whole thing about law. It has to be backed by force, like any regulation. Otherwise it’s not a law, or a regulation, it’s a suggestion or a guideline.
So, when some private law co decides to ignore the “law”, how precisely does this powerless non-state get it to comply?
It can’t, can it? Without a “state”, the laws are automatically unenforcable, are they not? The LawCos, or private citizens, can just live by wahtever laws they like, and nothing can stop them doing that.
Yes, and all that is sufficient to say that the state does not exist is to say that there is not organisation that has a monopoly on the legal or legitimate use of force. Whether law exists or not is beside the point.
Yep, the answer is yes or no. Either way is irrelevent. If there is a law making body, that doesn’t mean that it, or any other body, has a monopoly on the legal or legitimate use of force in a given geographic area.
What “law companies”? You are the one that introduced the notion of “law companies.”
Write laws for whom? Binding on whom? The people who work in the company? The people who subscribe to it? If it is anyone else then how would that be different from me going up to somebody in the street and just saying “I don’t want you doing X, and if you do, I will punish you”? Nobody would pretend that what I was doing in that case was “making a law.” If somebody says “look at my girlfriend again and I’ll smack you one” they are not making a law.
Under David Friedman’s model laws are agreements. That is why he calls it a “market for legal assent”: People sell their assent to particular legal rules.
Ian B. – I admire you for sticking with it. I usally give up at about the 6th level of abstraction – you hire an insurance company to fix it when you are wronged, you hire a pivate agency to go after the insurance company when it wrongs you in not righting the wrong that was done to you, you hire another agency to go after the first agency, de-dah-de-dah-de-dah.
It’s all just proto-libertarian m&&turbation, because the one thing you can’t be allowed to have – never, ever, the worlds will be spun from their orbits if you do – is a state with a monopoly of force. As long as you eliminate that from your thinking, the principle remains Pure, and the Shrine is unsullied. It’s essentially a religious belief.
(However, as you see, it’s OK as long as you call it something else. And tell yourself it’s not really a state.)
There’s a reason they call this form of argument reductio ad absurdum. It make for a wonderful train of endless wrangling about the exact and perfect purity of doctrine. Garrison Keillor describes this sort of thing wonderfully-well. It just doesn’t bear any relationship to the real world.
Steve McQueen made a wonderful movie called “The Sand Pebbles”. In one memorable scene, the idealistic missionary and his daughter – both filled with the pure love of humanity and selfless devotion to the greater perfection of the world – tell the arriving Communist forces that everything is all right – they have written to the United Nations and are now Stateless Persons, and so they cannot be enemies.
They’re shot just the same, of course. When Perfect Principles meet Idiot Thugs – Idiot Thugs always win.
llater,
llamas
They are all licensed by a single organisation, and anybody that tries to operate such services without such a license would be punished. That is enough to meet, say, Nozick’s definition of a state, which is a refinement of Max Weber’s, which, in turn, is the textbook generally accepted definition.
Of course. Except for the problem of disputes with the state itself. If the I should not be able to decide whether my use of force is legitimate, then why should the state be able to decide whether it’s use of force is legitimate?
“They are all licensed by a single organisation, and anybody that tries to operate such services without such a license would be punished. That is enough to meet, say, Nozick’s definition of a state, which is a refinement of Max Weber’s, which, in turn, is the textbook generally accepted definition.”
Obviously it’s a state. 🙂 But it also allows to competing private agencies the legitimate use of force, who the public are able to contract. Agreed?
So far we seem to have a state which dare not speak it’s name, and a giant regulatory quango dispensing the right to use force to approved corporate bodies. (If one agency breaks the rules, does this forceless state hire another agency to punish it?)
Keep going. This is getting interesting.
No, I am using Max Weber’s definition of the state: he said that something was “a ‘state’ if and insofar as its administrative staff successfully upholds a claim on the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence in the enforcement of its order.” Nozick refines that definition, saying “A state claims a monopoly on deciding who may use force when; it says that only it may decide who may use force and under what conditions; it reserves to itself the sole right to to pass on the legitimacy and permissability of any use of force within its boundaries; furthermore it claims the right to punish all those that violate its claimed monopoly.”
Benjamin Tucker says, “Seeking, then, the elements common to all the institutions to which the name ‘State’ has been applied, they [the anarchists] have found them two in number: first, aggression; second, the assumption of sole authority over a given area and all within it, exercised generally for the double purpose of more complete oppression of its subjects and extension of its boundaries. That this second element is common to all States, I think, will not be denied, – at least, I am not aware that any State has ever tolerated a rival State within its borders; and it seems plain that any State which should do so would thereby cease to be a State and to be considered as such by any.”
The contemporary anarchist debate has risen in response to minarchists like Ayn Rand. My use of the term “state” is the same as her definition of government: “A government is an institution that holds the exclusive power to enforce certain rules of social conduct in a given geographical area… The fundamental difference between private action and governmental action—a difference thoroughly ignored and evaded today—lies in the fact that a government holds a monopoly on the legal use of physical force.” Likewise, another minarchist, John Hospers says “The government of a nation has a monopoly of legalized physical force within the defined boundaries of that nation” and “A government possesses exclusive jurisdiction over a certain geographical territory, and it exercises a monoploy on the use of force in that geographical area.”
So, not really that “quirky” and “unique.” Rather, pretty much the standard definition.
No, I have not defined a state as an absence of force, or defined it as force. I have defined it as an organisation that claims a monopoly on the legal or legitimate use of force in a goven geographic territory. A state, of course, does not exist if no institution is able to use force. That would be sufficient to say that there is anarchy; but it would not be necessary. If institutions exist that are able to use legal or legiitimate force, but don’t prevent others from using legal or legitimate force, too, then there is no state. Your failure to recognise this fact explains the errors in the next part of your post:
Why does it have no force? I didn’t say that it shouldn’t be able to use force. It can enforce the laws it produces, and so can anybody else. So long as there is free entry into the service of providing enforcement of these laws, it is not a state; that is, so long as it doesn’t prevent anybody else from enforcing its laws, it is not a state.
It, or other parties – probably private companies hired by the victims of this law co of yours – , force them to, using threats of violence, imprisonment, property seizure, etc. etc. How are laws normally enforced? They do that.
Why would they be?
I have an article on this topic to be published soon in Libertarian Papers. I will supply here, though, some paragraphs from it that are relevant to your comment here:
Hospers, as we have noted, admitted that preventing the private, competitive provision of legitimate force would require that the minimal state initiates force and thus violates rights. However, what if the state simply confined itself to acting like a licensing agency for private protective agencies? It could grant licenses to those that constrained themselves by a certain set of legal rules – Hospers’ “law of the land” – whilst using coercion to put out of business or override those that operate without licenses, or break these legal rules. Would such a scenario save Hospers from the anarchists’ objections? I think not. The first problem is why should it get to use force to put out of business all those agencies that are unlicensed and yet operate in conformity to the legal rules? They are following “the law of the land” when they provide legitimate force, and their only offense is not having successfully applied for permission to do so from the limited government. They have not violated rights or initiated force, so putting them out of business for merely not having a license would be unjust.
Secondly, and more importantly, though, this suggestion just knocks the anarchist objections back a level. Sure, the licensing authority would allow competition in the task of enforcing the law of the land, but what about in the task of approving licenses or suppressing those firms that broke the legal rules? What is being proposed is a that there can be a variety of competing protection agencies, but one of these agencies takes on the job of forcing all others to conform to the law of the land. But is this agency the only agency allowed to do this within a given geographic area? If not, then presumably we still lack a government since we still lack a monopoly on the use of legitimate force. What if this licensing authority did prevent new entrants into this field, and so functioned as a second order monopoly that permitted competition in protecting rights, but not in the task of certifying or licensing protectors of rights, even when other certifiers would be certifying in accordance with the right principles, enshrined in the laws of the land? Well, then surely it would be an unjust aggressor, since if, ex hypothesi coercively forcing protective agencies to conform to the laws of the land is permissible in justice, then it must be permissible for anybody, not just for that agency. If, on the other hand, it did allowed others to compete with it in the task of ensuring that protective agencies stuck to the laws of the land, then there would be nothing to distinguish it from its competitors, no reason to call it, and not them, the government, and, as such, it would not be a government.
Oh, right, I must have missed that part in school where we learned that the english language is held in trust by somebody called Max Weber, and if we want to know the official definition of a word we phone Max. Thanks for putting me straight on that.
Me, I was just using “state” like people normally do, meaning like a country, with a government and stuff. Pardon my ignorance.
Anyhoo, let’s get to your very precise definition of a state-
Yes, my gross error there was using the language as generally used, rather than checking with Max.
Anyway, we are now all singing from the same hymn sheet. According to you and Max, anything that does not monopolise force is not a state. So let’s imagine a place, let’s call it, say, Britain. It has a defined territory, and a government. It makes laws. It has a police force and an army, a health service and a national bread marketing board. But so long as it does not monopolise force, it is not a state. It is, according to you, an anarchy.
How do we know if it is not monopolising force? It allows private persons to enforce the law. It does not matter if it also enforces the law itself. It must simply allow others to also do so. According to you. Well, I hate to break this to you, but it’s called a “citizen’s arrest”. That’s right; private citizens are quite allowed, in Britain, to enforce the law. They can arrest people for transgressions of it, and haul them to the courts.
So apparently, Britain, by your definition, is not a state. It is an anarchy. You don’t need to argue for anarcho-capitalism. We already have it!
Sheesh.
Well, I’ve seen some rubbish arguments in my time, but I think you’ve won the prize. I must admit I didn’t grasp what you were trying to say, because what you were actually trying to say doesn’t make any sense at all. All you have done is carefully and bizzarely twist the definition of what a state is, to prove…
…well, I’m not sure what you’re trying to prove. A state that allows some private law enforcement agencies (as Britain already does, as does the USA) is not a state: therefore, it’s an anarchy. Somehow though I doubt that many anarchists would find this a very useful definition. I don’t think Murray Rothbard would consider 21st century Britain or America to be anarcho-capitalist.
I think you may need to have a chat with your friend Max about these definitions of his.
Gentlemen, before you start challenging each other to a duel, let me point something out that I think Richard has mentioned at least once, and which I think is rather central to the libertarian/individualist worldview:
Having a state with a monopoly of violence over geographical region X is NOT necessary to ensure the rule of law. Custom-based law, for instance, has and does exist outside a state, or at least does not necessarily require it. I think the reason why so many people think that laws need states and vice versa is because that has been the Western experience pretty much since the Reformation, when the polycentric system of churches, city-states, etc, gradually gave way to the new force of nationalism. But it was not always like this.
Instead of insisting on a final arbiter (the state), one could, I suppose, say that anyone who refuses to accept the verdict/agreement of say, two private abitrators/insurers would simply be declared an “outlaw”, and treated accordingly (banished, or shunned or avoided, etc). In fact, one of the most interesting things about non-state societies is the importance of reputation. In the age of the internet, etc, it will be increasingly easy (not always in a nice way) to find out who has a track record for abiding by agreements, and who doesn’t. It will be a bit like the reputational rankings on Amazon.
Just a thought.
How do we know if it is not monopolising force? It allows private persons to enforce the law. It does not matter if it also enforces the law itself. It must simply allow others to also do so. According to you. Well, I hate to break this to you, but it’s called a “citizen’s arrest”. That’s right; private citizens are quite allowed, in Britain, to enforce the law. They can arrest people for transgressions of it, and haul them to the courts.
Yes but those courts are in fancy buildings, and the people who judge in them wear fancy robes, you’re not allowed to haul people into your basement and try them before a few of your mates.
Johnathan-
What Richard is trying to do is get around the problem of where the laws come from by pretending that some institutional setup with all the trappings of a state, but which has private law enforcement- of a centrally generated legal code- is not a “state”. It’s just playing with definitions to get the right answer; an intellectual exercise that addresses none of the real world issues, because the central problem for anarcho-capitalist polycentric law, that is a truly free market, is what gives any particular law code authority over those it is supposed to be controlling. Not addressing where the law comes from, and what empowers it, is simply sweeping the Big Problem off the table.
The central problem with these anarchist interpretations of history is that these previous polycentric systems don’t bear any relation to a free market in law. These historical multiple legal centres were all law systems promulgated by hegemonic institutions- churches, city councils, guilds etc. individuals couldn’t just toddle off and declare themselves subject to a legal code of their own devising. People may have had a limited choice between hegemonies, but that’s not the same thing qualitatively as free market law. A central issue is that law has to be applied to people who have not consented to it– that is; if somebody steals my property, I want him caught and prosecuted regardless of whether he has agreed to “my” law or not. The whole point of law is that it is forced upon other people. The burglar law does not apply to me because I have no desire to steal others’ property and would not do so if it did not exist. The law applies to people who break it, not people who agree with it.
So you have to have some power structure imposing it, which in practical terms normally means the law has to be imposed on particular territories. You can have several different forms of law if you like in the same territory, covering different aspects of life- criminal law, civil law, ecclesiastical law, guild law- but without hegemony they are meaningless. If somebody committed a crime against you, you don’t give a tinkers’ cuss what law he would choose to live under. It’s the fact that he’s broken your law that matters.
It is fundamentally different to choosing an insurer or healthcare provider for instance, because these things apply to the self. Law applies to the other.
And again, you’ve slipped in a “statelike body” without admitting it, so’s to speak. Where does the ruleset requiring people to seek arbitrators, and defining who has refused to do so, and declaring them an “outlaw” descend from? There is an implicit collective here, isn’t there? In any situation larger than a village (that is, non-personal collectives) some structure has to enforce banishment or shunning and so on. You can’t get away without some kind of hegemonic enforcement authority with sufficient force to enforce its rulings. This is a major issue for anarcho-capitalism and you can’t sweep it under the rug. You always end up with some kind of statelike structure.
The law has to descend onto the population from above. That doesn’t have to come from something with the same form as a modern state (parliament, democracy, monarch, whatever) but it has to have hegemonic power over the law’s subjects; church, guild members, town council, etc. Appeals to historical structures tend to confuse what one could call fragmented law structures with anarchist polycentricity; in the former different hegemonic structures handle different legal fragments (moral law from the church, business law from the guilds, common law from the town council) which is quite different to the postulated anarchist polycentricity of genuinely competitive law codes and enforcement by competing agencies.
You have to say, suppose there is a law against murder. Who made this law, and where did they get the right to make it and enforce it? Either it comes from a higher power, which Richard has tacitly admitted, but relabelled a “not a state”, or there is a genuine free market in law, which means the law only applies to people who have volunteered to be subject to it, in which case you can’t answer why that agency can arrest a non-agency member for breaking its private law.
It seems to me in order for an anarch-cap type society to form it would have to follow something like this:
The majority of people would need to be armed and *willing* to use force to protect themselves, and others like minded.
The majority of those armed would need to wish to live in a “civilized” anarcho-cap society who all share some basic principles of property rights etc.
Then there would be a hopefully brief, though potentially violent period of time where those who are not particularly interested in others rights are killed off by those defending themselves against them, leaving a society of mostly politely armed people.
Then perhaps the society mentioned above could start to take place.
I like the idea of anarcho-capitalism — but can’t quite convince myself it could actually work.
Impressive sarcasm aside, first of all, schools do not teach the English language. In various subjects we learn the meanings of relevant phrases, but in no class do teachers list every single word and teach pupils the meaning. What they will do, of course, is give them a dictionary and teach them how to look words up. On the other hand, if you took sociology in school then Max Weber’s definition of the state would be used, as it is the standard textbook definition, though through the course of your lessons you would be expected to learn refinements of it.
It is no wonder that normal people are hopelessly confused, then, if they are running around thinking that “country” and “state” mean the same thing. Why, the British state alone is sovereign over three and a half countries. It is no wonder that the public will actually believe that “we provide free health care” when the state does, confusing themselves with the state, or that “we sent troops to Afghanisatn” when the state did, if they all believe that the enitre country is the state. Indeed, one would wonder how they would distinguish between private and public sector at all if they think that the country is the state.
The place has a government? Organisations have governing bodies; places don’t. You have already stopped talking about the country as a place and started talking about it as an organisation.
The British government does not and never has made all the laws in the UK. To claim it does is to confuse civil law and criminal law, statute and judicial ruling, and also ignore the whole history of law in Britain, such as the origins of the common law, the fair courts and, the law merchant, and admiralty law.
Quite right. If I am able to start my own organisation that also has a police force, an army, a health service and a national bread marketing board people would not normally refer to my organisation as “the state,” would they? But it would be identitcal to yours, so they should not refer to yours as the state, either.
Can they put them in prison? Can they detain them? Can they punish them? No. The state reserves powers for itself that it forbids private citizens from having. Now, if detaining somebody, putting them in prison, or otherwise punishing them is necessarily (as opposed to contingently) a violation of rights, then neither private citizens and organisation nor the state should be doing it; but if it is not necessarily (as opposed to contingently) a violation of rights, then a state (or any other organisation) who’s sole purpose is to prevent or punish violations of rights has no grounds to prevent other people from detaining, punishing or putting people in prison.
Correct. That is precisely what the debate about anarchism vs minarchism is over. The contemporary form of this debate probably goes back to Roy Childs’ famous open letter to Ayn Rand, in which Childs says
That is precisely the same as what I have said, and all debate overthe ethics libertarian anarchism versus the minimal state has been response and counter response to Childs’ argument here, from Randian defenses like those of David Kelley, Harry Binswanger and Robert Bidinotto, to people like Robert Nozick. You, meanwhile, seem to be treating my position as weird and new, whilst Childs’ article is forty years old this year! Expressing surprise at my position, then, is pretty much demonstrating lack of knowledge of entirely what this debate is about.
I am trying to prove that you were attacking a strawman in your criticisms of anarcho-capitalism, which advocates nothing except that there not be an institution that monopolising the legal or legitimate use of force, or the right to authorise the use of such force. Going on about people enforcing any “laws,” or more accurately, whims they want is not necessarily a criticism of the idea that anybody should be able to use, or authorise the use of, legal or legitimate force, is it? This means that an person can advocate the abolition of the state, as an institution that monopolises the legal use of force, or the power to authorise its use, over a given geographic area, without advocating that anybody should be able to enforce whatever “laws” or whims they choose, and whilst still advocating that force be used to prevent people from using anything but the legal use of force.
The British state allows private agencies, security firms and the like, to enforce the law… provided they have a license, or its permission. That means that the British state remains a state according to the Weberian definition, as refined by Nozick, who said: “A state claims a monopoly on deciding who may use force when; it says that only it may decide who may use force and under what conditions… furthermore it claims the right to punish all those that violate its claimed monopoly.” A firm that tries to enforce the law without permission or a license from the a particular organisation in Britain will be punished by the that organisation for doing so. A firm that tries to enforce the law with a license from somebody other than the that organisation will be punished for doing so. A firm that excedes the terms by which that organisation is willing to grant permission will have its licensed revoked and will then be punished if it attempts to enforce the law. And yet that organisation is able to enforce the law without a license, and no other organisation is able to punish it for doing so without a license of its own, or for exceeding the terms on which it is willing to grant licenses to others. It would seem to me that this organisation in Britain today meets Nozick’s refined version of Weber’s definition of a state, which means that Britain is not anarchist, since it has a state. A state exists, in the refined Weberian sense of the term.
That is because it isn’t. But since you have mentioned Rothbard, anybody familiar with Rothbard’s writings, which somebody should be if they claim to be familiar with libertarian anarchism, will recognise passages, like this:
Here Rothbard seems to be entirely sympathising with your concerns about people enforcing whatever laws they want. That was from “Society Without The State,” punlished in Libertarian Forum and in Tibor Machan’s The Libertarian Reader. Slightly earlier than “Society Without the State” was Power and Market in which Rothbard said in a footnote
Again, a single libertarian law code. Shortly after “Society Without The State” Rothbard wrote “Robert Nozick and the Immaculate Conception of The State,” published in the first edition of The Journal of Libertarian Studies but reproduced in his book Power and Market. In this he wrote
Again, advocacy of a single, uniform legal code.
Rothbard’s most widely read book is probably For a New Liberty. Here he said
Again, a uniform legal code, and again, sympathy with your objections about people enforcing whatever “laws” they want.
I realise that it is bad form to post long quotes in a comment section to a blog post, but I do so only to demonstrate that you do not seem to be acquainted with the views or positions of those you are attempting to criticise. Market anarchists, like Rothbard, like the earlier Roy Childs, did not advocate societies where anybody could use force for whatever they wanted and call it law, or advocate competing legal codes. Even in David Friedman’s model, which Rothbard criticises in “Society Without a State,” it is not the case that somebody simply decides “the law is X, and I shall now enforce the law,” but, rather, the law is what accuser and accused, directly or indirectly, mutually agree the law should be: Absent such an agreement, you are simply attempting to enforce your views, and I am simply attempting to use force to stop you.
Precisely. And, if you arnd your mates observe the most reliable rules of evidence you possibly can, perhaps even the same as the institution that calls itself the state, use the most relyinable proceedures for determining guilt that you can, perhaps even the same ones that the state uses, to establish guilt under libertarian principles of justice, of what the law should prohibit or allow, or perhaps under the same laws that the state uses, what rights do you and your mates violate that the state does not also violate? If the answer is none, then surely your actions should not be prohibited.
Of course, you are only get the accused in your court if they are willing to stop fighting your attempts to force them to attend, or have agreed on a protection agency that they know will not try to prevent you forcing them to attend your court.
. . . just don’t call it a state.
(ambles away, laughing quietly.)
llater,
llamas
Richard, I appreciate your comments and even agree with a good deal of them – good point about the late, much-missed Roy Childs – but try and keep things a bit shorter, please. Cheers.
A point worth making again is what I said about the right to self defence. One of the things that has happened under the modern Western state is the evisceration of this principle. The state is, according to some theorists, a sort of contract between state and citizen in which the citizen gives up some powers in exchange for protection. The trouble is, what happens when the state manifestly falls down on that bargain, and worse, prevents the individual from trying to protect himself? Democratic reforms often prove either useless, or are so indiscriminately oppressive as to create a whole new set of problems.
Which is why thinking about alternative forms of law enforcement, or about the notion of law enforcement through non-state lenses, is neither moonbattery, nor naive. And to other commenters like Llamas who mention the examples of Somalia, that is daft. One might as well raise the examples of the many crime-ridden societies in parts of the West as examples of how bad the state is.
Ian B said,
First possible response: What gives the legal code its authority is the relative justice of the laws it contains as opposed to other possible legal codes.
Second possible response: What gives the legal code(s) under David Friedman’s model authority is the assent of those on whom they are controlling, since Friedman’s model is a market for legal assent: The laws that exist are those that people are willing to pay others enough to be bound by.
Third possible response, you face precisely the same problem: Your state enforces particular laws against people. What gives that particular law code authority over those it is supposed to be controlling? Where does the state get its authority to control people from, and who decided in the first place that you need authorisation to control people?
As for polycentric law, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to by in favour of polycentric law in order to be infavour of anarchism. It is not necessary for the reasons I have given: Anarchism is about who gets to enforce laws, not what those laws are and who makes them. And it is insufficient because you can have a polycentric legal system in which competing legal codes are all enforced, ultimately, by a state. Geoffrey Samson, in his survey of libertarian and classical liberal thought An End to Allegiance rejects Rothbard’s position of every court having to use the same legal code in favour of Friedman’s competing legal codes, but ultimately says he (Samson) still favours a minimal state providing an final, monopoly court of appeal to enforce these legal codes, to eliminate bias. Historically, of course, plenty have states have enforced “one rule for us, another for the rest of you” or other such arrangements. To what extent these legal codes can be called “competing” is up for debate, but it is true that these states enforce legal codes that are not uniform. So one can support a state without opposing polycentric law, and one can oppose a state without supporting polycentric law.
I agree. Of course, with things like the law merchant, a person could accuse of of some offense and want a fair court to rule on whether or not you are guilty, and you could refuse to turn up, refuse to be bound by the ruling, and refuse to recognise the law. But, in the end, you are quite right: As a libertarian, I think there are things that you should not do, and that you can legitimately be punished for doing, whether you have agreed to be so constrained or punished or not – your consent is not needed. In fact, one of the reasons I am an anarchist is because I think that organisations cannot be states without doing some of these things (imagine how weak the anarchist position would be if anarchists said simultaneously “taxation is theft” and “theft is only wrong if people have agreed not to steal”! That anarchist position seems to necessitate that people are obliged not to do certain things whether they have agreed to such obligations or not, for otherwise the state could simply say, “ah, but we never agreed to be bound by obligations against theft, slavery, etc.”).
First, could you tell me which state produced a law against murder? I don’t think that any state in Britain did. Murder is a wrongful or illegal killing with malice or aforethought (this differentiating it from other unlawful killings, such as manslaughter, and requiring proof of mens rea). This presumes a list of other instances of lawful killings that, if an instance of killing does not conform to these, it is murder. It does not imply a specific law against a specified offense. Murder is notable for being “malum in se” – wrong in itself – as opposed to malum prohibitum – wrong simply because it is prohibited – but this distinction itself implies extra-legal presumptions: Murder is a crime because it is evil, not because it has been legislated against. It may be the case that there have been attempts to codify in law precisely what constitutes murder, but it that doesn’t change the fact that wrongful or unlawful killing is not something that only became prohibited byy the passing of statute or order from the crown, and that I doubt you will be able to say that any British state produce any law prohibiting an offense called murder.
Well, just taking the latter, and applying Friedman’s model of competing legal codes: Laws are produced by courts that sell them to their customers, protection agencies. Of course, protection agency A could say that in disputes between its own customers, legal code 1 would be used to resolve the dispute, adjudicated either by the agency itself, or by some court. But your question is about what happens when somebody who is a member or customer of agency A gets in a dispute with somebody who is not a member or customer of agency A. Well, A could enforce its customers wishes against this other person. You could say “well, by what authority does it get to enforce its “laws” against this person,” in which case the response could either be “by the same authority as the state does: It wants to, or its client wants to,” or a more accurate response would be, “by no authority,” or it could be “it is not enforcing its laws or anybody’s laws. It is simply using violence at the behest of its customers.” Of course, that may sound objectionable… except for the fact that you have just said that you don’t think that whoever enforces laws against theft against somebody who has robbed you needs the consent of the robber to do so. Why do they need to be authorised? If agency A punished somebody who rapes a customer of agency B, but has not been authorised by anybody other than that customer to do so, is that wrong?
If the person who is not a member or customer of agency A is a member or customer of agency B, and agency A and B have agreed to use court C, which rules according to legal code C to resolve disputes between themselves or their customers, then when A enforce’s the courts rulings against the person who is not a member or customer of A, but is a member or customer of B, it has been authorised to do so by the court that B signed up to, which the customer of B knew B was signed to in its disputes with A, and so tacitly or explicitly consented to himself, and so A has been authorised by B and by B’s customers. But only in this circumsatnce is A’s violence law enforcement, because only in this case is there a body of rules used by courts to resolve disputes between opposing parties, not in the first case where the non-member/customer of A was not a member/customer of B. In this case, then, law enforcement by agency A against non-members of A is authorised by the people it is enforcing the law against. Instead of saying that agency A is enforcing laws against its own members, we get a larger association of A, and B, linked by court C, under which A enforces the laws of C against mbers of B, who are not members of A.
Johnathan Pearce wrote:
‘Which is why thinking about alternative forms of law enforcement, or about the notion of law enforcement through non-state lenses, is neither moonbattery, nor naive. And to other commenters like Llamas who mention the examples of Somalia, that is daft.’
No, I didn’t say it was ‘daft’. What is daft is assuming that, because a specific system has been in effect for a long time (in Somalia), and that system is not based on current understandings of what constitutes a state, that it somehow will work for all places and all times, and is a priori ‘better’ simply because it is not state-based, and that because this sytem works in Somalia, that any non-state-based system that anyone can dream up will likewise work anywhere else.
Just as there are many state-based systems of law that work well in their own time and place, and yet there is no guarantee that you would like some of those other systems. No American would stand for law-enforcement as practised in Japan, or in many European countries, for example.
The Somali exmaple is often brought up in these circles, and I find it amusing how vehemently libertarians will argue that this is somehow an approach to emulate – solely because it is ‘private’ and not state-based.
What is daft is the assumption that what has grown to be the dominant system in a society composed entirely of hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers will somehow magically transfer complete and unchanged to anyplace else.
For those folks, I alwayy come back and suggest that what we need is the Albanian law of Lek, a system of blood feuds and blood oaths that still applies in that part of the world. It’s entirely outside the state (whatever that means in Albania) and loads of people subscribe to this concept and enthusiastically use it to run their daily lives. The trail of dead people is just a minor drawback of this otherwise excellent system – and it’s Private!
On the other hand, I’m entirely open to the idea that there can be many parallel forms of law enforcement, some private, some public, or all one and all the other. For example, I like very much the US idea of private bail enforcement aka ‘bounty hunting’. Why have the state involved in the process of keeping, tracking and finding pre-trial defendants, when the private sector can do it just as well and at no cost to the public? Great idea. There are a hundred more.
But The Law needs to be a single Law, universal, consistent, impartial, uniformly-enforced and based in natural rights, and with a strong and direct connection with the consent of those who live under it. To date, the best mechanism (albeit sometimes imperfect) for providing that has been the current idea of a State, which includes some form of a power to enforce that Law on all equally.
llater,
llamas
Richard Garner wrote:
‘If the person who is not a member or customer of agency A is a member or customer of agency B, and agency A and B have agreed to use court C, which rules according to legal code C to resolve disputes between themselves or their customers, then when A enforce’s the courts rulings against the person who is not a member or customer of A, but is a member or customer of B, it has been authorised to do so by the court that B signed up to, which the customer of B knew B was signed to in its disputes with A, and so tacitly or explicitly consented to himself, and so A has been authorised by B and by B’s customers. But only in this circumsatnce is A’s violence law enforcement, because only in this case is there a body of rules used by courts to resolve disputes between opposing parties, not in the first case where the non-member/customer of A was not a member/customer of B. In this case, then, law enforcement by agency A against non-members of A is authorised by the people it is enforcing the law against. Instead of saying that agency A is enforcing laws against its own members, we get a larger association of A, and B, linked by court C, under which A enforces the laws of C against mbers of B, who are not members of A.’
No, really, he did.
And the advantage of all this is alleged to be – what, again?
(ambles away, laughing quietly).
llater,
llamas
Jonathon,
Yes, I apologise about the length of the posts, and for the long quotes, though I think they were necessary. Also, whilst I know you comment about duelling was tongue in cheek, I should note that Ian, you and I, and perhaps even Llamas, agree on much more than we disagree, and really the anarchist debate is accademic whilst we presently have a state that is far bigger than any amount of state we would all be happy with! This is an academic dispute between allies!
One of the wikipedia pages I looked at about defining the state suggested that the state’s monopoly could be more or less absolute, so a state that allowed a right to bear arms, for instance, would be less absolute, perhaps. I didn’t raise the second ammendment as a check on the state precisely because saying “well, law will be enforced against the state by an armed citizenship” seems to be precisely like Rand’s claim that “If a society provided no organized protection against force, it would compel every citizen to go about armed, to turn his home into a fortress,” etc. The very argument for goverment acknowledges the advantages of a division of labour, so that, instead of expecting people to protect themselves, they can gain the benefits of gains from trade by turning the task over to specialists to free themselves to specialise in something in which they have a comparitive advantage. Just as a division of labour is beneficial in providing protection against criminals, it is beneficial in providing protection when those criminals are governments, and that means institutional arrangements that are able to use force against governments, or against each other, when they break the law… but the existence of such institutional arrangements implies an absence of a monopoly on law enforcement.
Llamas, remember, you wrote this on 24 August:
That comment establishes nothing substantive about whether anarcho-capitalism, as opposed to minarchism, is viable. It would have been equally asinine for me to argue that, for example, the state had been discredited by Stalin’s Russia. In truth, I’d happily settle for a Lockean minarchist state, but why I sympathise with the anarcho-capitalist position – despite my misgivings about the details – is because the minarchist model has hardly existed at all, or if it has, has been rapidly subverted, or inflated into Big Government.
I’d be a bit careful about what Americans, or other national groups, would “stand for”: judging by the election of The Community Organiser last year, US voters are – until they emerge from their Democrat narcosis – prepared “to stand” for quite a lot.
Llamas,
I almost found myself in agreement until you mentioned consent. First of all, the law in the UK is binding on everybody whether they have consented to it or not, and plainly some people haven’t continued residence in the UK is not a sign of consent, and neither is voting (the fact the law is binding on people who don’t vote aside).
Second of all, though, Ian has just said that consent is not and connot be required, and I am inclined to agree with him. He said “A central issue is that law has to be applied to people who have not consented to it- that is; if somebody steals my property, I want him caught and prosecuted regardless of whether he has agreed to “my” law or not. The whole point of law is that it is forced upon other people. The burglar law does not apply to me because I have no desire to steal others’ property and would not do so if it did not exist. The law applies to people who break it, not people who agree with it.” Lysander Spooner said that a person subjected to a government to which he hasn’t consented is a “political slave” because such a government deprives him of his ability to enjoy his rights over his person and property. Radical follows of Locke, such as the authors of “Cato’s Letters” said that taxation without consent was robbery. These people were saying that consent was necessary for a government to be just, but only because undertaking the activities one has to undertake in order to be a government entails doing things to people that everybody, whether they consented to be or not, is morally obliged not to do unless those people have consented. Likewise, if doing whatever it is you think the state should be allowed to do does not constitute a violation of rights, then a state who’s sole function is to violate rights has no business preventing people from doing precisely those things… unless they have promised not to, and given their consent to be so prevented.
So, it is not obvious that people bound to obey the law have all consented to be so bound, and it is not obvious that all laws require consent. The last point, of course, entails that if, under anarchy, some protection agency started enforcing laws that would violate libertarian principles against people that haven’t permitted it to, protection agencies can use violence to prevent it from doing so, and so prevent it from doing anything other than enforce libertarian laws, whether it has agreed to those libertarian laws or not.
Ian is irritated. So he makes a list of assertions, and when asked to substantiate them, cites history as their basis, and when asked to provide specific examples, he doesn’t disappoint: he cites ‘all of history’. Well, that sure settles it. He then proceeds to repeat his original assertions yet again, several times, in several different forms and versions. Now even the very slow me gets it. The case is well rested.
Richard’s comments are indeed very long: that’s what tends to happen when one is sucked into an argument about what ‘is’ is, while having to simultaneously fend off strawmen arguments with his free hand. And, BTW, before having been consumed by whatever it is we are going through here, he did give specific examples to substantiate his assertions, as did JP – which, quite unsurprisingly, were ignored, so as not to spoil the above mentioned irritation, and all the jolly fun it brings with it.
It’s a good thing most people here are not as irritable, or they might have just asked themselves: why would anyone want to rain on a parade that not only hasn’t started yet, but doesn’t seem to have a chance of starting in a foreseeable future?
BTW Richard: my hat is off for clear and cool-headed thinking, and not the least, endless patience.
Alisa, normally you’re a very clear headed thinker, so I am perplexed that you can’t grasp what myself and Llamas have demonstrated- which is the inconsistency and incoherence in Richard’s position.
For instance, his definition of the “state” and thus of “anarchy” are fine tuned, based on his “monopoly of force”. But where the laws in the state derive from, he does not say, but tacitly admits that they actually descend from some higher power, which the defense agencies are required to obey; and yet which has no “force” and is thus not a “state”. Somehow the defence agencies will naturally obey “libertarian principle”, but how this is to be assured we cannot know. And so on.
All that is actually on offer here is privatising of the police and courts in a corporate state manner, not anarcho-anything. The law itself remains nationalised, but we are given no clue as to how then the law is written; it seems to descend from above like the Holy Spirit. We have not even started to ponder what these defence agencies will get up to lobbying the not-state for particular laws in their favour, and how they become merely a cartel of force, because all Richard is concerned with is proving that his not-a-state is not a state by his particularised Weberian definition, which we are compelled to obey because it is apparently popular with those reliable experts, sociology lecturers.
Whatever we have here, it is not, to any normal person, recognisable as anarchism, or libertarianism, or liberty. It certainly does not free us from the state, nor centrally written and imposed laws. It does not contain any mechanism or surety of liberty. It is at best a corporatised law enforcement system, which could exist under many political structures.
Frankly Alisa, I can really only conclude that you haven’t understood the discussion. If you find my comments too long, read those of Llamas, who succinctly demonstrated the circularity and error in Richard’s strange proposals.
You have not demonstrated anything, Ian, other then the your willingness to endlessly repeat the same assertions over and over and over again, only interspersing them with an occasional sneer.
Richard’s argument is not about definitions (AKA what ‘is’ is – is anyone biting his lip yet?).
He said that the argument is not the origins of the laws or their legitimacy (as both remain unchanged under the proposed system), but simply about the ways to their enforcement. You are bemoaning the lack of a solution to a non-existing problem, as we all know very well what the laws would be: don’t kill, don’t rape, don’t steal. Simple, really.
Who cares what you call it? The point is that you keep banging that it won’t work, but never explain why, while absolutely ignoring all points made to the contrary.
Yes, I already admitted to being slow. Would you please repeat the whole thing for me again, only much, much slower?
There was one specific point raised by someone which I haven’t seen addressed (sorry if I missed it), and that is coexistence of systems with different legal codes derived from different sets of moral values. The answer is quite simple: everyone chooses to live in a system that best suits them. If in your system it’s OK to kill someone to get their car (or to flog them for drinking), and in mine it’s not, it’s none of my business, until you try to apply that to me and my car, at which point I and/or the people I pay to protect me treat you in much the same way a certain monotheisticular Austrian was treated when he tried to kill people from other systems to get their cars.
Alisa, I can’t comprehend your attitude, really. It’s quite obviously aggressive, and I am sorry to have inspired such ire.
The point is, anarcho-capitalism is supposed to be an alternative to the State, in which things the State currently does instead arise from a “natural order”. It thus needs to provide solutions to how the entire order arises. It cannot simply say “we’ll ignore that part of the order, it just exists”.
So we must have no state which applies force. Richard asserts that his not-a-state does not “monopolise” force, and thus asserts that because his private enforcers can also apply force, this requirement is satisfied. But in order for the NotAState to not monopolise force, it must be resistable by the other enforcers in all things. The problem now becomes, that the NotAStte cannot enforce its legal code. It cannot specify that murder, theft and rape are crimes but being a redhead is not a crime, because to impose that judgement it must enforce it. So, it will have to apply superior force, and thus “monopolise” force.
Why is superior force a monopoly? Quite clearly it must be; a superior force can overwhelm lesser forces and thus neutralises them- in the same way that the US government by this criterion monopolises force, because although its citizens may carry guns, their force is lesser and subject to the superior force of the government.
So, this order has not arisen spontaneously from the natural order. It is actually a system designed and managed by the- let us not call it a state- local governance, which is monopolistic. So, either it will not work, or it is not what it claims to be, since it needs a central governance to pin the system in place; which is a State.
The closest you can get in the real world is semi-private (corporatised) enforcement agencies empowered by a central government with superior power. The central intention of anarcho-capitalism as intended e.g. by Rothbard, of a system that “runs itself” without a governance authority, vanishes. The agencies- licensed and required to obey centralised law by government fiat- are simply semi-autonomous agents of the State, Quangos, as we’d call them in the UK.
Meanwhile, the big question, which is what kind of system of government makes the laws they enforce, has not even been addressed, which is probably what would actually interest most libertarians and anarchists.
Enforcement is replaced by mutual agreement, and is only reserved for those who are not party to the agreement – most likely those who operate under a different set of moral values, or those who operate under no moral values at all.
In the end, superior force always wins, regardless of the morals by which it is backed, if any. If you want to live and prosper while surrounded by like-minded people, you need to make sure that your force is superior to that of the bad guys. Nothing new here, really.
As to aggressiveness, just color me irritated.
I think it was Billy that opined once: Congress shall make no law., where the period is his, not mine. Government (if it even exists) doesn’t make laws, it doesn’t enforce laws either (see above). All it (or its alternative) does is help protect life and property.
“Communism will surely work, because most everyone will agree that it is the best system, and become Soviet Man”.
You have to actually explain how your system will work with people as they actually are rather than with some idealised imaginary people who automatically live by your system.
You can promote any system if you take it as axiomatic that people will just choose it and stick to it.
Oh, there is an axiom here Ian, but it is the opposite of the straw one you presented. The axiom is that there will be people who will not choose it and stick to it. They can be classified into two categories: those who come after my car and the cars of those who belong to my club, and those who only come after the cars of those in their own club (if such a club exists). I believe I already addressed that in a comment involving a monotesticular Austrian – scroll up.
Please specify precisely what straw man fallacy I committed, Alisa.
You attributed to me an axiom I (or anyone else on this thread) never posited, to wit:
“Enforcement is replaced by mutual agreement,”
I never said that everyone will agree. In fact I and others made several comments describing precisely how those who do not agree will be dealt with. I believe terms such as ‘outlaw’ and ‘Austrian’ made a recurring appearance. I am going to bed now, and will return tomorrow, possibly armed with a clove of garlic.
Here’s a related point- how many modern crimes could be changed into a fine or community service? We might have Revolution, but I think we can evolve into what we want to become, and de-imprisoning people is one way to start. Surely all offences not involving violence, such as fraud and embezzlement, could be turned into insurable fines?
Nuke, the answer to your question is no-one knows. Being able to guess how many wannabe criminals will be deterred by a restitution-based system vs a “lock em up” approach is impossible.
Actually, Johnathan, we CAN find out! Portugal has changed it’s drugs policies from imprisoning people to ifining them. Mexico and Argentina are interested in doing the same things.
How many other countries have systems which don’t imprison people, but fine them? One aspect of some muslim systems is that you can make payment for offences that we lock you up for! There are other reasons to not go these places, but their justice system seems more libertarian than ours!
Ian wrote,
This is a good argument, since it implies that if protection agencies enforcing non-libertarian legal codes, and courts that use them, are successfully prevented from existing, then the remaining legal code is non-competitive, since other legal codes are not permitted to compete against it. But I think you proceed too far too fast: If all those protection agencies that enforce nothing but a single, libertarian legal code successfully drive alternatives out of business, by force or otherwise (surely you are not saying that it is wrong to use violence against somebody trying to violate what you think of as your rights?), that does not imply that the remaining protection agencies, those that enforce only the libertarian legal code, do not themselves compete in enforcing that legal code. An anarchist is somebody who doesn’t want a monopoly on the legal or legitimate use of force, or authorisation of its use, which and so can be (but need not be) somebody who merely wants competition in the legal or legitimate use of force, or authorisation of its usage (competition simply being free entry). This in itself implies that such a person need not be happy with the existence of competition against the legitimate use of force, or competition in the provision of illegitimate uses of force. What libertarian anarchist is going to say he would be happy with firms competing to sell robbery services, or murder services? None, of course. Such an anarchist would be happy saying that such firms should be forcibly put out of business if need be, but there should be competition in the service of putting them out of business.
But I have already argued, both to you and to somebody else, that a licensing agency is not what I am talking about. Saying that there should be an agency that lets people compete to provide customers with legitimate force but only if they have a license issued by this agency firstly does not address the problem of where the licesning authority gets the right to prevent unlicesed firms from providing legitimate force: If provision of legitimate force does not violate rights, then it is preventing them from doing things that do not violate rights. But secondly, it also does nothing more than expand the definition of legitimate or legal force. After all, if we are saying that it is legitimate for an agency to issue licenses to other agencies, and use force against any agency that does not have a license (where “legitimate” means “does not violate rights”), then it should be legitimate for any agency to do likewise, which means that if the licensing authority does not permit competition in the issuing of licenses, and also permit other agencies to put unlicensed firms, itself included out of business, just as it does, then it has acted unjustly. Regardless of the paradoxes this creates, as already said, if using legitimate force does not violate rights, no institution charged solely with enforcement of people’s rights, is empowered to prevent competitors from providing legitimate force.
Well, in “Society Without a Government” Rothbard writes “For in that case, anarchists, in agitating for their creed, will simply include in their agitation the idea of a general libertarian law code as part and parcel of the anarchist creed of abolition of legalized aggression against person or property in the society.” In L. Neil Smith’s Pallas there is also a constitution, established by the entrepreneur that homesteaded and terraformed the asteroid, and yet it is privately enforced and disputes are privately adjudicated with reference to it.
On the other hand, we could say that the law will be a product of judicial rulings by courts that two parties go to, or their agencies go to, if they want to avoid the costs of fighting it out. It is possible that some people or their agencies will only agree to use a court in disputes against other parties or other agencies if it is known that that court uses a libertarian legal code, and will, instead, use violence against people that do not agree to this. If they are successful then the result would be a single uniform, or at least only slightly varying, legal code, since there would be no demand for courts that use a different code, because disputants won’t mutually agree on them.
Llamas:
Actually, it was the state that created most of the chaos and violence in N.O. It was not just the guns being confiscated from law abiding citizens without receipt and apparently then destroyed in many cases; it was the blocking out of citizen helpers from other areas. For one example, a major association of air boaters towed their boats all the way from south Florida to assist but ‘the law’ kept them out. Sorry, N.O. after Katrina is an argument against, not for authoritarian government.
Llamas:
and P.A.:
I’ll presume these are both brain-farts by otherwise highly intelligent people. ‘Profit’ is a return on ‘investment’. In a system without ‘justice’, ‘investment’ is impossible. I think what you both meant to say was that ‘theft’ is incompatible with ‘justice’.
I’ll try to put this in language that will avoid some of the confusion in the thread.
Five of us are about to have conflicts of interest in need of resolution. Alisa and I having very similar ideas belong to the same binding arbitration organization. Any conflict between her and me will, by our prior agreement, be resolved by Resolutions ‘R Us.
Laird and Llamas, having very similar opinions, belong to the same binding arbitration association, Orderly Resolutions Cooperative. Any disputes between them are resolved according to their terms of membership.
P.A., having mathematically calculated that it is optimal to belong to the same organization as whoever you have a conflict with, has joined both Orderly Resolutions Cooperative and Resolutions ‘R Us.
When Llamas failed to return Laird’s book he borrowed, Laird filed a dispute with Orderly Resolutions Cooperative and pursued the matter through their terms.
When Alisa stole my lawn mower to use for a portable dog tethering anchor, I filed a dispute with Resolutions ‘R Us.
But what about when Llamas stole one of my books to level his pool table? Well, I file a dispute with Resolutions ‘R Us and hope (or pre-established) that they have arbitration terms with Orderly Resolutions Cooperative and can work things out in a way that satisfies me.
P.A., was very clever and realized that the terms between different binding arbitration associations are not as favorable to the infringed party as within a single organization. So when Laird didn’t return one of his books, he was already a member of an association that Laird belonged to and was able to file an internal dispute.
Now back to my quotes, above. In any society where a plurality does not believe in and defend property rights, government is no substitute and is in fact, a moral enabler of the very theft it is posited to prevent.
Midwesterner – your point regarding NOLA and Katrina is true, as far as it goes. Many of the problems that developed within the city were indeed caused by ‘the authorities’ – but mostly because they were well-outside the city. Large parts of the city became lawless wastes very quickly precisely because ‘the authorities’ simply ceded them to – whoever. When General Honore and the fine folks from the LANG put their boots on the ground, seven days after the first flooding began, virtually all of the goblins simply melted away. If he’d have been there on day one, they never would have appeared.
My point was that, in the physical absence of controlled law-enforcement, the degeneration into tribal warfare commenced within days.
(One of the tribes that formed apparently consisted of NOPD officers, who allegedly robbed and looted with the best of them, using the colour of their lawful authority. In one well-reported incident, they commandeered a number of Cadillacs from a dealer ‘for police use’, some of which later turned up in the most-surprising places.)
When even the coppers, who are sworn to protect and serve the public, degenarate into roving gangs of vagabonds in just a few days – what right do we have to hope that the worst elements of humanity will not descend far further, upon far-less incentive?
I follow your description – very nice. But my question is – what mechanism does ORC have to enforce its resolutions upon – anyone? All these descriptions of the lovely ways we’ll sort out our little differences are all very well, but will soon collapse in tatters when faced with the world’s realities – which means Idiot Thugs. Public order and the safety and security of the individual are not threatened by the late return of a library book, but by young men with guns.
These sorts of systems – you’re essentially describing the cooperative justice system of Somalia again, except for the collective responsibilities – only work when there is a very powerful cultural imperative to comply with them. These cultural imperatives take centuries – millennia – to form. You can’t get it out of a bottle. And they are the very antithesis of any concept of individual liberties. Why should I have to pay to right the wrongs done by another – wrongs that I did not commit, had no part of, and would not countenance anyway?
Regarding justice-and-profit, I can see where my condensed statement is unclear, so I’ll restate what I said to say ‘no system that operates for profit can supply justice’. There’s a reason that barristers can’t sue for their fees – the administration of justice (note, not the law, but justice) falls apart as soon as the parties to the administration stand to win or lose by the outcome.
llater,
llamas
So when do I get my book back?
Crap. Mozilla has seriously lost control of Firefox and the clowns are in the kitchen. It nonchalantly erased all my tabs and pages (while keeping my browsing history) after I told it to save probably 50 tabs in 5 pages. My brother is having entirely different problems in his Mac version. Maybe it is time to find a different browser.
I had a comment almost finished and lost it. I’ll try again.
The problem in NOLA was preemptive of personal defense of self and property, abdicating of enforcement by authorities, prevention of outside assistance by law abiding people from reaching into the city, probably to conceal the activities of a certain subset of LEOs.
The coppers may have engaged in swearing and protection wrt the public, but probably not in the way the public anticipated.
How does ORC enforce its resolutions on its members? However you and Laird and the other members agreed when you joined. How does it enforce them on somebody in another binding arbitration association? Under whatever terms it can negotiate with them. Reciprocity is a very big carrot and lack of it is extremely expensive. I will select who I join based on two things, its terms between members and its relations with other BAAs.
Just a request, I think you already are but can you please be very careful when using the terms ‘collective’ and ‘cooperative’? Collective is imposed, cooperative is agreed to is the way many of us have been using the terms for quite some time here.
RE the ‘cultural’ imperative, yes. But absent the cultural imperative, do you really want to live under a majoritarian authoritarian regime? Think Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.
To twist Bastiat,
What the associations do is pretty much the same as what states do with one major, foundational difference. The associations do not by default own all of the individuals in a particular geographic area. You can join as many or as few associations as you like and your safety and property rights will reflect those choices. The different associations deal with each other on similar terms to friendly or enemy states.
I believe that just like in the ‘real’ world, the better of a job that associations protecting property rights, the more powerful they will become. Sure there will be associations of people like Kim Jung whatever but they will be just about as consequential and have just about as many friends. And if my association does some of the things that my government is currently doing, I have the option of joining a different one. But as long as I am the property of a state, I do not have that option.
RE operating for profit, the well being of members is its profit. I will pay as much as it is worth to me. If my association suddenly decides to attack the Australian Workers Resolution Trust in order to take the property of its members, well, it is going to lose mine and a lot of other members money. But if another association decides to attack the AWRT, I may elect, either through my association contract having a mutual defense clause with the AWRT or me personally, to come to their aid.
Think of it as states with two stipulations. They don’t ‘own’ their geographically assign subjects because, two, they don’t ‘own’ any geography.
Mid, the problem that llamas and me are trying to get at here is the anarcho-cap presumption that people will choose this polite resolution system (in fact Richard pretty much conceded that it will be state controlled, quoting Rothbard having some higher authority limiting what laws can be made, standards of evidence, sentencing guidelines and so on- so much for the thing being self-sustaining and anarchic, eh?)
But the fact that a system can be suggested as a way of working doesn’t prove that that system will actually arise. As an example, in the early days of the web, many people in comics etc believed that micro-payment systems would spontaneously emerge from the market. There were very good reasons for why micro-payments would make sense. But the micro-payment systems never caught on. They didn’t actually fit in with how people are, even though sound economic reasoning seemed to suggest they’d be a good system.
All the evidence we have of human nature is that in the absence of an imposed law system, people don’t form insurance agencies and contractors, they form into defensive (and aggressive) collectives- tribes, basically. The people most suitable to profit from providing defence services (aggressive, fit young men) are the people most able to profit from tribal aggression. They are only a minority of the population, but their superior aggressive capabilities give them the edge. Everyone else ends up having to fit in with them. The tribe offers security in the clan, in return for submission to it.
This has happened over and over again in history. The ancestors of the european monarchies were tribal leaders who conquered their neighbouring tribes. Or to give a specific example; when the Roman State abandoned Britain, the British invited the Saxons to protect them in return for payment and land… and then shortly after the Saxons conquered the defenceless Brits. The fact that many Brits would have had personal weapons made no difference, because the Saxons had the military superiority.
That’s why llamas keeps talking about young men with guns. Young men with guns won’t hire themselves to you as your protectors, because being your master is more profitable and more enjoyable; because young men love being at the top of the pecking order.
So all this “I will hire agency A and they’ll have a contract with agency B and a dispute resolution with agency C” sounds nice, but we’re saying that such a system is unlikely to arise in practise. You’ll get gangs, not agencies.
Mid, my dog saw your mower and raised you an old oak tree. OK, true, it is still standing, but only for the time being…Speaking of trees, what does the stake have to be made of?
Llamas,
Your points about New Orleans are good ones (though we should also remember that the group of people that pretends to be different from a gang, the government, was prepared to shoot at people for committing the horrific crime of refusing to be evacuated). There are, however, two possible responses. The first is that perhaps this is what happens if the state is abolished tonight, but might not be what happens after many, many decades of persuading people that the state is an unnecessary evil, that they should let others do as they choose with their person and property, and that also means not using the government to prevent this, and the gradual abolition of the state by cutting its activities slowly over a long period.
The second response is that there are occassions where external authority was removed from social situations suddenly and immediately, and chaos reigned… and then chaos was quickly rejected. This was the experience in the Peckham Experiment, where the founder, Dr Scott Williamson, found that in the first eight months, where people were left to themselves to do as they choose, there was chaos, but that “in less than a year the chaos was reduced to an order.” Other examples abound. So, perhaps you are correct: Immediate withdrawal or breakdown of externally imposed authority results in social chaos… but perhaps inly in the short term.
As for Ian’s arguments, they seem to have changed from being about what is possible to being about what is probable, so anarcho-capitalism is simply improbable, not impossible. That may be true, I don’t know. I did not posit a “state-like entity”. All I said is that such an institution could exist in order to provide laws in a society without that society ceasing to be anarchist, so long as the entity was not actually a state. That is not the same as saying that such an entity should or would exist. I certainly did not say that such an institution should have powers to limit what laws others make/provide/enforce that other people or organisations should not also have. It can do the job of “limiting what laws can be made, standards of evidence, sentencing guidelines and so on” without becoming a state so long as anybody else can do likewise (that is, when they are limiting what laws are made, they are preventing people from making laws different to this one). For example, suppose the legal code was just “British law.” So long as anybody can prevent the creation or enforcement of any other laws than “British law,” a task which would really just be part of the larger task of enforcing “British law,” and adjudicate disputes with reference to “British law” there would be no monopoly on the legitimate or legal use of force, or authorisation of its use.
Richard, I’m not jumping around. Part of the problem here is that you’re actually using features from various different and very different systems at random; for instance polycentric or monocentric law, state-like institutions or none, etc. A system with an obligatory central law enforced by agencies is different to a true anarchy without any central institutions, and the criticisms are different. It’s all very well to say “well, either could happen” but they are different approaches and quite different.
My criticism above is basically praxeological; that is, that the system of agencies as described won’t arise naturally from human action. We might like it to, but my best opinion is that it will not. Obviously one cannot absolutely prove that without running the experiment in the real world to find out- abolish the government and see what happens. We can’t do that, so everything we write is to some degree speculation. But one strong line of evidence is that such a system has never arisen in all human history, so we can at least be confident that it is not a certain consequence of anarchy.
If, on the other hand, your system will be deliberately designed by central institutions, who write the laws and set regulations governing how the agencies may behave, you don’t have an anarchy, you have a statist system with privatised police and courts; but as I said above it will require a centre with sufficient force to control the behaviour of the agencies, otherwise they can ignore the institutions and the institutional centre cannot require adherence to the “British Law”.
I think you’re trying to say that the agencies will all uphold the British Law by acting against any agency that steps out of line, but there is no system in your philosophy which guarantees that; the agencies may act as they wish and the Law could wander anywhere in the conceptual space. Indeed the central problem is that without a coercive central power defining what an agency is and how it behaves, the agencies themselves can be anything and act in any way they desire and we are back to the problem that nothing in your philosophy ensures that agencies on the Rothbardian model will arise in the first place, and nothing to ensure that they will stay on that business model, rather than decay into force cartels, tribes, extortion rackets, etc.
Friedman’s dubious criticism of small government is that it was tried and failed; I’m not convinced that the USA was a real small government anyway (only the Federal part had some restrictions) but even if we accept that, we must note that the “failure” was its decay from the initial small government state. If any system that decays from its ideal is a failure, then I would contend that anarcho-capitalism will fail because it will certainly decay into brigandry, and very rapidly, and that is even if it can come into existence in the first place.
I would prefer to try a genuine minarchy first, which I think has a better chance of functioning, and for much longer, even if all such systems are prone to decay. My own opinion is that a minarchy is not necessarily prone to decay; the one supposed failed example, the USA, was not a minarchy; its constitution was riddled from the start with mechanisms to allow the state to grow and the Hamiltonians started building a Big State from the first day of the USA’s existence, and the presence of State-level absolute government ensured that it would ultimately come down to a struggle over which level of governance would have monarchic power over the citizens.
For the record my opinion is that the key constitutional element in restricting government growth and decay is to not award the government the legislative power; it should have no legislature at all. It is the power of leglislation in the hands of the few- even if they are “democratically elected”- which is certain to ultimately enslave the mass of the citizenry. The anarcho-capitalist focus on enforcement is in my view a red herring.
Having posted that above, it struck me that another way to explain my position is this-
It seems to me that there is something arising here which has a flavour akin to the “is-ought” problem, and that is that the anarcho-capitalist presumes that what they want to happen is what will happen; we could call it the “want-will problem” 🙂
An-cap relies in its various formulations on a presumption that the mass of the population will act as we want them to; and in particular the crucial demographic of young men with guns. The presumption is that they will prefer to be security guards than gangsters. So an-cap discussions constantly refer to what will occur because that is what we want to occur. But while we may want a society in which young men with guns form security agencies from which the rest of us can purchase protection, there is nothing in the system that ensures that they will. Until one can demonstrate that this is the course of action that people will definitely take, it useless saying “this will happen” and “that will happen”, because all the predictions of how this society will function are based on no more than an act of faith.
What will ensure that our potential protectors become security guards, rather than gangsters? How do we get from want to will?
Richard Garner –
Oh, how it takes me back . . . I used to live on Mayow Road, so I am no stranger to Peckham.
But to business . . .
For every Peckham Experiment you name, I will name you a counter-example of a situation where “external authority’ was removed from ‘social situations’ and the behaviours of participants started out just as you posit they would – with cooperation, collaboration, joint striving to common goals and the common good, consensus – and then it all went pear-shaped.
A favourite example, which I have used here before, is the Burning Man Festival, which takes place each year in the Black Rock desert of Nevada.
This began about 25 years ago as an anarchic art festival, which takes/took place in about the most-desolate and deserted place on the North American continent. You really had to want to go to this. It was free, and there were (essentially) no rules. You could do as you pleased. And it was the ultimate experiment in such a community in isolation, where all the participants were pre-self-selected to be highly-favourably-disposed to such an experiment.
And for the first few years, it was libertarian nirvana. Everyone got along, everyone smoked what they liked, did what they liked, nobody got hurt, it was all one great big cooperative.
Now, 25 years on, it’s just another counterculture festival, dirty, obnoxious, filled with anti-social behaviours of all sorts. There are Rules, and Permits, and Plans, and Restrictions, and Speed Limits, and things are Banned, and there are Licensed Concessions – and everything that made it so free and anarchic has been washed away.
And for why?
Because people en-masse generally behave poorly to each other, and the longer they are left to do so, the worse the behaviour gets. The ‘utopian’ communities that flourished in the US in the C18/ C19 found the same things, and few lasted more than a generation. Greed, spite, envy, lust, indifference and the standard smattering of more-severe social pathologies will eventually doom all such attempts.
llater,
llamas
Jan Narveson is making an interesting error – one I have come upon many times before.
He has actually accepted (perhaps without knowing it) the definition of “crime” given by Thomas Hobbes – i.e. that a crime is violation of a government statute so the government punishes the violtator.
Up against this Jan Narveson puts the idea of a civil tort – with compesation for harm done to someone.
This totally misses the point that crime exists indepently of any state definition – or of the state itself. And that what is needed is PUNISHMENT not “compensation”.
When a women is raped she does not want money from the rapist – a rape victim is NOT a prostitute who is just worried about cheated of her payment.
Ditto if someone sees another person murdered one does not want “compensation” – one wants the mudererer hunted down.
And if no one else is going to hunt down the murderer – one does it oneself.
The murderer saying “the person I murdered (for fun) was not a relative or even a friend of yours – so there is no reason for me to pay you compensation” is best replied to as followers:
“I am not here for compensation – I am here to hang you”.
“But is the above effective Paul”.
Again, that utterly misses the point.
The criminal must be punished, either by the state or by someone else.
It has nothing to do with consequences or compenstion or anything else.
If a man kills your father by accidentally bumbing into him in the street (and thus pushing him into the path of an oncomming truck) there is, perhaps, a case for a civil action for “compensation” – although most people would NOT proceed with such a case (indeed I would even hide my irritation with the clumsy oaf and invite him to the funeral of the relative and treat the oaf with as much politeness as I could).
However, if a man kills your father deliberately (murders him – for fun) then an offer of “compensation” is an INSULT.
One hunts the murderer down – no matter how long it takes, and even if the chase leads to the ends of the Earth.
And when one finally hunts him down, money is not going to change anything.