Comments on: The A Word

By: Mark

Mark — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 01:18:48 +0000

If each person was able to govern himself, that is to restrain himself from violating others, then we could reach new heights of prosperity. Using all resources to expand knowledge & improve the human condition, instead of using some of those resources to prevent & punish violations, would require a lot of well-intentioned people. However, in the absence of an established fair system, even those with good intentions don’t know how best to distribute resources that are external to us all.
Our world is primitive. We are somewhere between the ape men fighting over the water hole in the opening segment of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the enlightened people necessary to make benevolent anarchy a reality. Not enough people practice metacognition. If they considered more often the causes of their desires, they might be more discriminating when choosing the means of satisfying those desires. Just as state initiation of force is acceptable to some as a means of obtaining wealth, so are the “king of the hill” and “finders keepers” methods of obtaining natural resources. All of these methods are unsatisfactory. So for our time in history, government fulfills a need for providing protection from those not evolved enough to visualize the benefits of universal non-aggression, and it should fulfill the need to establish a fair system of natural resource distribution.
As a geoist/ geolibertarian, I recognize the facts that nature came before people and that we all need & use nature. Since no one created nature, who is to say that one person has more of a right to nature than another? The peaceful solution is to say that nature should be equally accessible to all. Since we can’t be in the same place or use the same resource at the same time, this is unfeasible. So the practical solution is for an individual to compensate the rest of society for excluding them from a natural resource. For reusable resources like land, the natural resource tax should be proportional to the market demand. For non-renewable (or not easily renewable) resources like fossil fuels, minerals, and the earth’s limited ability to absorb pollution, direct democracy should set the rate of the natural resource tax. We have the technology to empower everyone to have a hand in energy policy & environmental protection.
By taxing that which comes from outside us, we would be able to shift the taxation focus from that which comes from inside us. Our labor, innovation, & risk would be free from extortion, so an incentive would be created to work as hard as one wants while conserving & using resources as efficiently as possible. The revenues from the natural resource tax would go to the currently necessary function of government: protection of individuals’ negative rights as well as the administration of the fair natural resource distribution system.
If it was left to the enlightened members of a suddenly benevolent anarchy to decide what is a fair share of natural resources, they might not know how to start. They might error on the side of generosity & take less than their fair share. But by providing a price system now that is determined by democracy & market forces, and which will be tweaked & adjusted as we grow out of the installation phase, we can provide a foundation from which future anarchists can estimate. As prosperity increases, the need for government protection and administration will diminish, & your vision of anarchy could become a reality.
Marxism & similar philosophies get a lot wrong, especially about some insights into human behavior and incentives, but one thing they do get right is that capitalism, defined where natural resources are considered to be capital, is doomed to abuse the natural factors of production. If we are able to make the distinctions clear between nature, labor, & capital to leftists, then they are more likely to realize that it’s evil to redistribute by force the fruits of labor & capital (capital, when defined as being distinct from nature resources that have yet to be affected by labor, is yesterday’s labor). Otherwise they envision an anarchic society as one that lets a few gather most of the resources so that they have a foothold on wealth & labor, and their vision wouldn’t be very incorrect. Libertarians need to pay more notice to the issue of nature in order to gain more credibility.

By: joe

joe — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:08:58 +0000

This video is lecture by David Friedman about anarchy and law. It is must-see for everybody interested in this topic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yz0AvdqRVnI

By: terrymac

terrymac — Mon, 01 Aug 2011 03:19:39 +0000

The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier book, by Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill suggests that people actually did manage to deal with criminal cases without having formal government, and were more peaceful than contemporary cities back East.

A more recent study by Robert C. Ellickson, Order Without Law, finds that the vast majority of conflicts in Shasta County were solved not by “going to law”, but by informal social norms, which include – when lesser means fail – measured and regulated amounts of violence.

I would not rule out the private production of law and justice without a fair trial. The State has a lot to answer for, considering the abysmal record of SWAT raids gone wrong, police going out of control, innocent victims imprisoned, and so forth.

To address Alan Loux’s question more directly: ebay and other sites work, do they not? Suppliers establish good reputations by making good on their promises. The shady dealer of whom you speak would not be able to swindle many customers before he’d have to move to another account. He’d have to change more than just his business name; I’m sure that having the same address, phone number, or account number would raise a red flag. Reputable dealers attract many more customers; their business model is far more successful, in the long run.

My father had a saying: “You cannot cheat an honest man.” Those who succeed at cheating do so by offering something “too good to be true” to people who are all too eager to play.

By: Ambiguous Lesson on Law

Ambiguous Lesson on Law — Mon, 30 May 2011 15:57:55 +0000

[...] have defended the possibility of a stateless society – one emphatically not anarchic; one in which order and prosperity exist, and where law is [...]

By: Alan Loux

Alan Loux — Sat, 18 Dec 2010 05:04:02 +0000

Mr. Boudreaux,

I find your argument interesting and largely compelling. However, I find one major weakness with your case for private law, one I think you tacitly acknowledge when you say, “(d)oes the success of private commercial law prove that other types of law-most notably, criminal law-can be supplied privately? No.” Private law necessarily requires voluntary cooperation.

However, consider the situation of an unscrupulous “merchant” who willfully and maliciously defrauds his customers with the intent of relocating in a new venue under a new name and repeating the process. In this case, the merchant has clearly stepped into the realm of criminal activity and the lose of reputation is no sanction as he intends to simply move on and repeat his criminal activity. Most reasonable concepts of justice would dictate that he be required to make whole those whom he has defrauded at a minimum both for the sake of the victim and to remove the incentive to continue such activity.

Unfortunately, in order to extract the repairations, it will likely be necessary to use or threaten the use of force. This will require agents sanctioned by the citizens to use such force. In a very small community it may still be possible for this to be a spontaneous voluntary posse of citizens, ala the old west. But as the society grows and attempts to enforce uniform standards of conduct over greater and greater numbers it will by necessity develop some form of government in which the exlusive use of force resides.

The question then arises, what form of government best provides suffient power to enforce the common laws while preserving maximum liberty? Here I believe the founders of the United States were on the right track, if somewhat naive in the extent which men must be restained from accumulating power over his fellow. They envisioned a system of diffuse authority, with all concerns being delegated to most local level practicable. The irony of human nature is that, while some government is always necessary, the strictest law and harshest sanctions must be applied to the governing and not the governed.