Have you not read David Friedman on polycentric law?
Why would they dispute it?
So people won’t have any incentive to improve their lives unless you tell them how?
Do you think people are willing to pay for it? Can you honestly make the case that the best use of your time is to argue about legal theorizing, as opposed to testing legal theories in the market, and gaining valuable experience dealing with real shortcomings and issues?
I agree with everything in this quote. You used me as one of those people abdicating responsibility (which seems fair enough), but I never believed there was going to be universal equilibrium of libertarian law. What you have to remember is that law doesn’t have to be the same everywhere or even for all the people in a given area. For much of history, different law has applied to different ethnic groups living within the same empire (even in the same neighborhoods)!
I think in a “state of nature” there would be many different kinds of law (so many different equilibria). There would probably be many who would opt for Sharia or Roman-style law, but there would also be localities that converge on an NAP-type legal system. There may be violent conflict between proponents of different legal systems, but the is no reason to think it will be any more likely than war between modern nation states (and some reason to believe that it will be less ).
Multiple conflicting conventional rule systems isn’t really a utopia, but it is probably better than the current monopolistic nation-state system of rules that we currently operate under.
I’m not familiar with this. I would be highly interested to read more about it, can you point me in the right direction?
Clayton -
It depends how its administered… it should always be a service for at least one party. Depending on the level of formality involved, both parties might agree to a third party arbiter before dealing with one another.
I would argue if you are violating the NAP you are engaging in violence. It might not be the traditional blood’n guts type, but pollution of someone’s water supply is definitely aggression.
The NAP is not stable in all scenarios, say for example if you have a deathray gun and a high time preference. But it behooves entrepreneurs to try and come up with some way to gaurantee the NAP for as many members of society as possible in order to maximize economic productivity. A blunt solution could be that a firm invests liabilities in a basket-of-goods, so that its incentive becomes the peaceful cooperation of all economic activities.
To not get bogged down in whether intellectual “property” is intrinsically legitimate. Just preface your sales with a “don’t share” clause and you have IP rights again… the real question is costs of enforcement.
I’ve read Machinery of Freedom; do you have anything specific in mind?
I don’t know; that’s why I started this thread.
Libertarianism would be an improvement for some and a harm for others. Legal theorizing can still change things by changing the informational structure of the bargaining situation, like an X on the maps of two lost travelers who are trying to find each other.
I don’t think it’s possible to test the core of a legal theory on the market, because of the peculiar characteristics of law as distinct from other products. However, the procedural window-dressing (e.g., jury trials, contract terminology, appeals systems, etc.) could certainly be market-tested through trial and error, to make refinements that would be difficult to anticipate from an armchair.
This sort of thing would almost certainly happen in an anarchist society, but this is not really the kind of “law” I’m talking about. You’re talking about different groups of people who mutually agree to resolve their conflicts by a certain method (e.g., Sharia courts) while leaving non-members out of it. This “agreed-to law” is different from the more fundamental law that tells us, among other things, who is bound by the Sharia rules in the first place. By saying “Only members of the Sharia court have to wear hijab, and non-members don’t,” you are making an argument about this fundamental law, which (supposedly) cannot itself be opted out of.
The Cowan/Sutter arguments apply to the extent that people interact with each other. To that extent they have to agree on a common law between them. For example, the local Christian and Jewish communities in ancient times might each have different rules regulating marriage and family, and nobody cares because there is no intermarriage. However, if there is commercial activity between the Jews and the Christians, then there will be pressure to settle on a common law, at least for the purposes of commerce. The more globalized people’s activities become, the more there will be a tendency towards a common law, and we’d better make sure it’s not “Do whatever the government says.”
I’m getting most of this from secondary sources, but I’d recommend checking out Thomas Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict, particularly Chapter 3 “Bargaining, Communication, and Limited War.”
The economic/game-theoretic analysis is indifferent to the NAP or any other method of determining whether a situation is “aggressive” except whether the parties are actually resisting each other. In this view, if the Mafia threatens to break your legs if you don’t pay tribute, and you acquiesce, this is not “actual” violence because nobody is actually struggling against another. All we can see from this perspective is that the mafioso said some words, you handed over some money, and the mafioso left. If we’re going to call this “aggression,” we need some value-laden definition of aggression (such as the NAP, property rights, etc.).
Coase’s theorem states that any allocation of property rights will result in an efficient outcome, so how can any particular allocation scheme be singled out by the goal of maximizing productivity?
Well, claiming that a contract like this can give somebody “rights” is already making a legal argument; but maybe you don’t disagree with this.
Good-will towards men? It might be a weak structure to ground all of entrepreneurial NAPism in a productivity argument, but personally I’d rather live in an anarchist society permeated with cordial relations as opposed to volatile ones.
“Coase’s theorem states that any allocation of property rights will result in an efficient outcome, so how can any particular allocation scheme be singled out by the goal of maximizing productivity?”
That isn’t what either the Coase theorem or the analysis of which it is a small part says. You left out the essential condition for the theorem’s conclusion–zero transaction cost. The point isn’t that all allocations of rights lead to efficient outcomes but that the reason they don’t has to do with the differing transaction costs of getting to an efficient outcome from different starting points.
Consider two ways of defining property rights to a thousand acres of farmland. Rule one says all hundred people own all the land, and it can be used only with the unanimous assent of all of them. Rule two says each of them has absolute ownership of ten acres. Do those rules result in the same level of output? If not, why not.
You can find a fairly detailed explanation of Coase’s analysis of externalities and related problems at:
The reason you respect the NAP is because of incentives. If society builds up a reputation for attacking farmers, agriculture will be discouraged.
Zavoi, this thread vibes with much of what I’ve been discussing (thinking about) over the last year. Yours (and the references provided) looks like another angle of explaining why/how power (force) cannot simply be considered as just a good/service amenable to free market forces. (And I’d rather not enter one of those discussions here again.) But I’m having trouble opening your file. Could you pls provide a link to the pdf itself?
But if violence is an essential element of the profitable business, you don’t have incentive for NAP anyways, i.e. Somali piracy.
I’ve read Rothbard on private defense firms adverse to confrontation. I understand his assertion that the NAP will prevail. But NAP is obligatory for the weak, poor, etc. It is not obligatory for someone weilding considerable market influence, i.e. Moguls or the State (most often hand-in-hand). Hence, piracy again proves my point. The English, it can be stated, are a prime historical example of an overgrown pirate society.
Wait, they call it a “Royal Navy”.
Somali piracy represents not only physical danger and confrontation, but a real profit-loss risk in competition with commercial, State-sanctified suppliers and transport.
Violence can be profitable, but that does not mean it is the most profitable option. People do not merely choose means to their ends, they are capable of distinguishing between expediency.
Utopia is not an option.
Anarchy is better at following the NAP than statist institutions.
I’m sure you realize that the potential for profit brings with it incentives to correct this situation. You don’t need an aggressive monopolist to come kick out the wannabe aggressive monopolists. Anarchy does not solve all problems automatically. Human beings will still make mistakes. But the potential for greater economic productivity creates the incentives to overcome failures.
I was afraid someone was going to say that.
Firstly, the costs of transacting towards efficiency, although non-zero, will often be the same for a number of different allocation schemes. For example, if the “optimum” location for the boundary between A’s dairy farm and B’s sheep pasture is at 36°00’30”N, then it will cost the same for them to bargain here from an initial position of 36°00’00”N as it will from 36°01’00”N. They still have to do the same amount of meeting, negotiating, etc. in each case.
Also, new technology makes it possible to do previously high-cost transactions at a lower cost, thus diminishing the relative difference. (I’m thinking of the examples given by Clay Shirky in Here Comes Everybody, as well as “dominant assurance contracts” for collective action.) While this is by-and-large a good thing, it too could make the outcome of a legal market more indeterminate.
But suppose that transaction costs remain appreciable, and suppose that somehow a sub-optimal (from a Coasean perspective) set of legal norms becomes entrenched as precedent. The game-theoretic aspects of the situation suggest that overhauling the entire common law to “optimize” it would itself have a prohibitively high transaction cost (“under the Coasean floor”). So it’s important to get it right the first time, rather than disinterestedly say “the market will take care of it.”
The PDF contains just the same text as this post up above. (The forum doesn’t allow users to upload files other than images or ZIPs.)
If you’ve had similar ideas, I’d like to hear them.
I’m not arguing against anarchy per se (and neither is cognitivist, I think); I’m challenging the particular strain of anarchism that is anti-government but not pro-anything. Showing that the State produces bad results does not suffice to show that anything other than the State will produce good results.
When Long says
[quote=“[Roderick T. Long]
(http://www.lewrockwell.com/long/long11.html)”]Do I have to bribe some bureaucrat a million dollars to get it done? No, because I’m not asking him to do it with his own money. Obviously, if I were asking him to do it with his own money, I couldn’t get him to spend a million dollars by bribing him any less than a million. It would have to be at least a million dollars and one cent. […]
Whereas, if you were the head of some private protection agency and I’m trying to get you to do something that costs a million dollars, I’d have to bribe you more than a million.
[/quote]
he is presupposing that there is a system in place where there aren’t any bureaucrats controlling tax money. This is positive (“pro-”) advocacy. On the other hand, what if we had a legal agency under which bureaucrats could control tax money? Then this agency would be easily bribable (and would make a lot of money this way).
I’m arguing against NAP as a productivity argument. I like anarchy.
Indeed comrade, the people cannot tolerate mistakes!
The Founding Fathers gave us a simple solution to this problem. It’s too bad that their heirs didn’t listen:
“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
Clearly the Founders intended for government to have little influence beyond maintaining a military and local police forces, to provide for basic physical security or the citizen. Lawmakers in recent history have taken their intentions to mean that since the Constitution doesn’t say you can’t create bloated bureaucracies, saddle our great, great grandchildren with government debt, or take fractional reserve banking to a global scale, then it must be alright.
The concept of negation is a wonderful idea, but I believe most state and local governments lack the courage to challenge Federal law. In the end, I believe the solution will lie in massive demonstrations of simple civic disobedience. If everyone simply refused to obey arbitrary laws, such as the New York City transfat ban and proposed salt ban, they would be unenforceable and take their place with the other “blue laws” around the country. Daring to dream, this could also be done with things like the income tax if enough people would just refuse to comply. No matter how big they made the IRS, it could never be big enough to enforce its will on three hundred million people before it collapsed under its own weight. Police would be overwhelmed, and be forced to stick to their basic duties of serving and protecting. Once the police force is non-compliant (and likely more efficient because of it), then negation has just occurred without any need to convince politicians, or risk anyone’s rights in the process.
Zavoi,
You are arguing that we ancaps are abdicating responsibility by saying ‘let the market decide what the laws will be’, and if we want to have an impact, we should be saying ‘these are the laws we should have’? Am I right in thinking the issue here is about strategy?
The reason I’m asking is that your essay is about a ‘mind-wiped’ population, and how initial rules develop, which is an interesting imaginary / theoretical question, but quite irrelevant for strategy I would have thought.
I’d also point out that when you really get down to it, anarchy, the way we define it, is not a “purely formal, non-content-based specification for a social order”, since our definition is: a free market in law. And by free, we mean in the libertarian sense: no one is to use aggression is to prevent new competitors emerging in the law field.
Yes, that’s right. (The issue here is not about the metaphysical status of legal claims.)
On the contrary, I think it’s exactly the opposite. The “let the market decide the laws” view is implicitly based on the mind-wiped population, since only that way can ideological advocacy be avoided. It’s not interesting to say “A society of communists will develop communism, a society of authority-worshippers will develop authoritarianism…” or even “A society of libertarians will develop libertarianism,” since supposedly people are driven to libertarianism purely by self-interest, and it is not necessary to make people ideological libertarians first. This would be an interesting claim if it were true, but I think it’s untenable.
People who are not mind-wiped are always going to have ideologies, and those ideologies are always going to shape the society.
If you can define aggression in a way that includes some activities but not others (as you must if you are advocating a change from the status quo), then your precept here is already a substantive claim of fundamental law that is not itself to be subject to market competition. In which case, we don’t disagree after all.