I have tried to find something about this in the literature section but couldn’t do it.
In a Libertarian society:
What happens if somebody (Mr. A) is denounced by another one (Mr. B) as a criminal, but Mr A isn’t affiliated to any security or justice agency and he won’t comply to go to trial? Maybe he is nuts or extremely poor and proud, but he won’t even accept pro-bono services.
How is he guaranteed a due process? Would he be taken by force to the trial and then judged without any defense? Doesn’t it violate the presumption of innocence?
And now that you changed my focus I realize that the Chamber of Law (a possible industry association of justice suppliers) could designate one among its members to act as the defender of the accused.
That could cover (for example) the cases of mental insanity where a seriously retarded boy could be charged with the rape committed by someone else.
You are right. It would be contrary to any presumption of innocence.
How people arbitrate disputes is anybody’s guess. There are many possibilities around the “problem” you mention.
everybody else may disassociate themselves with such a renegade and deny him service – that forces him to leave the territory
nobody would do business with him to begin with knowing that he is incapable or unwilling to arbitrate disputes
I think it helps to look at things in a practical sense. Ask yourself this: Would you hire an electrician that did not have insurance? Would your insurance company allow you to do business with renegades?
In Libertania, I think insurance companies would include arbitration services as part of their packages. So, if you wanted to get auto, house, security, etc. insurance, you would have to agree to their arbitration methods. That could include clauses which say: “If you do business with renegades, we do not cover any losses and we do not care to settle your disputes.”
To hell with that. Why should I pay for the defense of outlaws? That’s like the current situation of criminal victims being taxed for the defense and room, board and medical care of the very criminals that prey upon them.
In anarchy, if you want due process you will have to pay for it.
Or someone could choose to pay for it. In anarchy, charity will be an equalizer for the downtrodden, although the charity might come with strings attached, like, “I pay for your representation, and you promise to work two weeks for me” and so on. Is it taking advantage of a situation? Perhaps. I don’t believe in charity with no strings attached.
Also, “due process” requires a fairly complicated infrastructure that currently is funded thru taxation. In a voluntary society, you would have to convince subscribers to carry the freight for non-subscribers. I wouldn’t bank on it.
I’m afraid your understanding of what a free society means is flawed. You usually assert that individuals only have rights (in practice) if they can pay to have those rights ‘enforced’. Even ‘liberals’ and other commies don’t go as far when they want to ridicule the free-market. Your position is worse than a caricature.
And your position is an empty abstract. Arbitrators, the buildings that house them, the lawyers that appear before them, the mercenaries who execute their rulings, etc., will all have to be paid by somebody. You seem very uncomfortable with the fact that people who don’t agree to pay those costs would have no claim for their protections. You should therefore work to strengthen the central state, which uses coercive taxation of net producers to guarantee that even net consumers have due process.
The assumption that it requires a complicated structure is a wild one. Maybe we could just say that if the accused doesn’t defend himself in any way, but neither declares himself guilty, then anyone might apply to act as defender… even a highschool student. It would be up to the judge to choose the one who seems the best.
To take a practical case, the real homeless people (the ones living in the streets, not in abandoned houses or in shelters) are generally people who went insane and lost contact with reality. Given their insanity and their lack of resources, it would be way to easy to put blame of any crime on one of them. An uncle who abuses his niece could make the girl say that, if anyone asks, it is the old man around the corner who has been “touching” her. With the testimonies of the girl and her uncle, and being himself incapable of understanding the situation, if he hasn’t got someone to take care of the defense, he would end in a labor camp, castrated, dead, deported or whatever is the restitution/punishment there. Let’s assume he ends as a slave or deported (more fit to Libertarian theory), he still is removed from the place where he likes to be, forced to do something he doesn’t want to do, in punishment for something he didn’t do, while the real criminal is still free.
Even for the benefit of the victims, it is better if the accused is guaranteed at least some kind of defense.
It comes to my mind the common place of a retarded boy being sentenced to death in Texas for something he didn’t do. I don’t know if it is real.
If you wanted to defend accused persons gratis, you would be free to do so. If no volunteers could be found, then the accused would just be SOL.
I find it revealing that in these hypotheticals, people wring themselves into pretzels over what to do about people who can’t pay for a service. I guess net producers who can pay just need to be taxed. Or maybe we should just shoot them for being so heartless. But then who’s going to pay everybody else’s freight?
Hold on a minute. Guaranteed some kind of defense by whom?
I certainly have a lot of sympathy for a retarded or mentally ill person who gets hauled through a state justice system – I just do not think that is in the least likely to occur in a libertarian environment. Why would that happen?
That does not sound like a practical case at all. There are so many extravagant assumptions.
First of all, why would homeless people be living on the streets in any libertarian environment? I doubt that would occur.
Even if there are homeless people who can not afford legal representation, why would anybody believe anybody who blames them? Personally, I would think: “Oh, typical! The perverted uncle blames the homeless guy – again!” It would not take more than one generation for adult victims of perverts to spill the beans. Also, I think most people would also wonder why the perverted uncle let his daughter come in contact with homeless men – that is just me.
Next, if it really was the homeless guy who perpetrated the crime, why would anybody bother to take him to court? Vigilanteism would seem a lot more likely. Now, I realize that sort of perspective is not very liberal but that is the world in which we live. I am not going to make apologies for human nature.
I agree with you. I think all of these complicated poly-centric models are highly unlikely to occur although, conceptually they make sense. However, mastering a quick draw of a pistol may in fact be cheaper than arbitration. I mean that quite seriously. Personally, I think a libertarian world would have more people carrying fire-arms and generally acting so bloody polite that they would not even use cuss-words for fear of being misinterpreted. I also do not think people would be travelling very far from home or outside of town.
You know, I’ve thought about this problem. Obviously, you can define a free society as one where the negative rights of everyone are enforced regardless of their ability to pay, but then again, this would mean much more than just abolishing the state. I also wonder, just like Byzantine, if that is not a pretext for some kind of “libertarian coercion”.
In a state of anarchy, people who are unable to afford investigation of and enforcement of restitution for a crime may be helped by claim hunter agencies, as I prefer to call them. Most likely, these will be sub-companies of existing enforcement agencies which “buy” the restitution claim of a poor person for a certain percentage of their net compensation and bring the criminals to justice in exchange - this, of course, incentivizes them to do especially good work because payment depends on arrest and successful prosecution of the criminal. Profit motive and justice combined.
A free society IS a society where individual rights ARE respected. Obviously you can redefine any word in any way you like…
I won’t bother answering Byzantine’s attempt at misrepresenting what I’m saying, and if you share his ‘clever’ view of things I won’t bother answering you either. So, feel free to think that anarchy = free society = individual rights IF you can pay.
Also, the loser in a case should be required to compensate the winner for their legal fees, because the loser is the one who caused the winner to have to hire lawyers in the first place. (You should not be forced to spend your own money on lawyers just to defend what is rightfully yours.) This may also help level the playing field in legal battles.
See, I think you are just struggling with the practical fact that human beings tend to be selfish and commonly do not take lightly to being forced to pay for things.
Why would the judge choose? What gives the judge the right to dictate who’s a better defender?
In a libertarian society, people forget that the education system wouldn’t be the dumbed down public school system that is current. People would actually be learning how to live with each other in a non-coercive way. It is compassion to the core. When people learn about their freedom, they learn what is inherent in their life anyways. So knowing property rights is knowing free self and the relationship you peacefully have with others. Right now mstream education is about how to stand in the way of others. Libertarian society is all about freeing up people to enact what is inherently self-motiving aka free-will. If you are against free-will, then you perpetuate an aggressive attitude that is not good-hearted.
The whole point is the free market is here, but the State has corrupted it and one factor in its corruption is it stands in the way of free-will. The Soviet Union had a free market. Prison has a free market. The free market is always here, but State predatory patterns come and go feeding off the labor and reasoning of others who are actually trying to be productive and helpful. Now being educated in a way that rids this aggression to free-will is inherently self-propelling. You do it cause you want to, not cause of compulsory motives placed on the individual. You are learning how free you are, not how much you can steal and murder to get the job done. People need to just get out of others people’s lives and leave them alone. Stealing and murdering an innocent individual for their money to pay for somebody heart surgery is not good-hearted. I don’t see how that ever could cross somebody’s mind to mean otherwise.
If people really cared about a retarded boy, then they would go and defend him instead of making somebody else do it for them. If not, then it’s all talk and no action. It’s just a show.
No, the problem is that some (or most) people here have confused the means (anarchy and competition) with the end (a free society, which means individual rights)
Also, a reason why this confusion is popular (again, among some people) is because it lets them fantasize that they can set up their own little totalitarian but ‘voluntary’ tribal governments.
Anyway, the kinda obvious answer to the problem at hand is that any individual should be able to defend himself if he so wishes. Also, the ‘infrastructure’ for ‘just’ rulings should be in place because all providers of security are supposed to CONFORM to natural law.
Of course, ‘anarchy’ might mean that Byzantine’s tribe is able to lynch people who they don’t like and who can’t afford to pay protection, but of course that is not how a free society operates.