Gated communities, homeowners associations, whatever you want to call them are not voluntary contracts. They are quasi-states. Nowhere in a real estate contract do you sign up to join one of these communities, and in many states there’s no obligation to notify the buyer that the property they’ve bought is tied to such an organization. You cannot escape the contract you never signed.
Most of these organizations are set up by developers to minimize their liability for negligent or even fraudulent construction. The charters of these organizations also limit any recourse buyers have against the developer. In essence, the organization is set up as a contract between the state and the developer, who will act as the board of directors until a certain threshhold is established (i.e., so many units are sold). At no time does any resident sign up to join, and all residents are bound by the charter, rules and regulations (i.e., by-laws and covenants).
This is totally incompatible with anarchism. Any association must be voluntary, which by definition requires a process for joining and leaving the association without force or coercion. Forcing a sale of property in order to leave an association would not be a voluntary action.
Another aspect that is problematic is that dispute resolution is one-sided. Under such an association you do not get a say in who will resolve a dispute between you and the association, which to me is a fundamental right under anarchy. Instead, you are required to use only the association’s arbiter and you are required to pay the legal expenses of the association. Then the kicker, even if you win you pay because such are the terms of the association. So in this sense, there is very little difference between these types of associations and a state. They essentially have a monopoly on force in the territory described by the charter.
If you belong to an association, your only hope is that your neighbors don’t take advantage of the situation and rule the community like Hitler. Sad thing is, it really only takes one such person to turn it into a living hell.
Then no one in the gated community actually owns any land. So why maintain an illusion to the contrary?
Really? I’d say that the notion of a contract certainly rests on a common language (including common semantics), but the rules, promises, and obligations - and often the meaning itself! - are spelled out in the contract. That’s the whole point of a contract.
Given the above, please provide more support for this assertion. Actual logical support would be most appreciated.
Really? Everyone who currently resides in the US knows the entire US Code by heart, to say nothing of the Federal Register, state codes, local ordinances, etc.? You can’t be serious.
How is this an argument?
Hey, if you’re not allowed to leave at all, then that’s just the same as saying it’s incredibly costly to (try to) leave, right? So you should have no problem with situations like the Berlin Wall.
No.
I disagree.
The Abbot wouldn’t have a monopoly over the use of force in a free society, either.
It doesn’t amount to a fundamental difference to you because you’re thinking about this entirely in terms of states.
First of all the vast majority of people in the United States never directly approved the constitution, secondly the land is not expressly owned by the United States government in this case, it is an illegitimate structure that simply laid claim to lands which individuals settled. Your initial flaw is in comparing a country to a gated community in the first place, the state is an illegitimate owner and a frightening monopoly.
If people were en masse suddenly faced with a contract I don’t know exactly what they would do, there could well be quite a change actually, and also while you are quite right that not everything can be contractual (a lesson most anarcho-capitalists would do well to learn) the government is NOT everything, it is a very big and specific thing which one will have to interact with for the rest of one’s foreseeable future, and while many contracts are unspoken this is one that needs to be as it is a set organization with a very regular functionality.
Assumed contracts of this scale are ridiculous, if I’m in a fairly close knit neighborhood and I walk into someone’s house and take something of theirs, and I say that it’s because I need it, then they would be mad for me just barging in there when they know me and they’re very friendly with me and it’s just a small, irregular thing which could not have been anticipated. Now we abstract to the state which takes massive sums of money from people, without their consent, it is regular, it expects things of them, and so on and yet it asks for no consent even though it’s more alien, less reasonable, and more regular than the neighbor.
The United States’ federal government currently acts without the expressed consent of its people, if it were to directly request consent then anarchistic ideologies would flourish with that very question being in existence. The problem is specifically that people never ask, it is assumed. Assumption from birth is honestly the cause of many of the world’s biggest tragedies.
What Merlin said. The more I think about it, the more I think that part of the reason the State has been so successful is precisely because it does perform a valuable and necessary function in economically advanced society - border control. All living systems on this planet from the smallest virus to large groups of multi-cellular organisms exhibit the same principle: physical separation of the organized internal from the disorganized external. I think nationalism is half-correct on this point (you have to have a border) but it goes wrong on maintaining internal order through dual-law (privilege). In fact, I think that the highly aggressive posture of the modern State actually mitigates against borders by putting disparate regions and groups into forced hegemony. This is pretty much pure Hoppean theory. The answer is secession in order to allow political units to dissolve to their natural size. Secession in itself will not eliminate privilege but I think that the case for privilege gets a lot harder to make the smaller the political unit is. I’m pretty much just recapitulating this.
The difference between switching from MacOs to Windows is that Bill Gates won’t send a SWAT team to prevent such a transaction from happening. The idea in a polycentric legal order is that the land on which you happen to operate will not be tied down to a single legal agency that claims dominion over that land. In fact, the idea of a State is a lot like Bill Gates saying, “I own the area called the United States, and if you don’t do what I say, I will hunt you down and use physical force because you are on MY property.” To that, I would respond, “if I were on your property without your consent, then I think you should hunt me down. But I’m not on your property, so screw off.”
To say, “well you’re on the property of the US government and you know what you’re getting into” is to beg the question. Yes, libertarians are challenging the legitimacy of the land claim made by the United States government.
The “ease of leaving” point that I was making is that, technically, every buyer and seller is operating at a monopoly cost because they have the monopoly of that item at that particular time and that particular place. If I want to buy a Pepsi at one gas station, I’m purchasing Pepsi bottle X at Time Y at Location Z. But we don’t say the gas station owner has a monopoly price if there is another gas station down the road that is selling the same product cheaper. It doesn’t render the concept of a monopoly price meaningless. That would be a continuum fallacy.
"The idea in a polycentric legal order is that the land on which you happen to operate will not be tied down to a single legal agency that claims dominion over that land. In fact, the idea of a State is a lot like Bill Gates saying, “I own the area called the United States, and if you don’t do what I say, I will hunt you down and use physical force because you are on MY property.” To that, I would respond, “if I were on your property without your consent, then I think you should hunt me down.”
I fail to see how that is de facto differnt from a state. While the United States as we know it may not exist, there would still be a monopoly on the use of legitimate force within one’s property. I understand the argument for why a property claim is a legitimate monopoly of force, but I do not understand how that really differs from a state in the day-to-day functioning of someone who is not on their own property.
“…technically, every buyer and seller is operating at a monopoly cost because they have the monopoly of that item at that particular time and that particular place.”
The things that differentiate property in land is that land only exists in one place and we exist within it and not the other way around. Owning space inherently puts conditions upon one’s existence in which they either have authority over the space they inhabit or they do not. Moreover, it is neither improbable, nor impossible that the distance between two tracts of property would be quite a bit further than “down the road.”
I don’t think there should be a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within one’s property. For example, if I kill someone on my property who wasn’t trying to kill me first, or whom I didn’t believe or perceive to be doing so, I think I should be held liable for murder. Having a monopoly on the legitimate use of force within one’s property necessarily means that any use of force by anyone else on his property is illegitimate by definition. It could also mean that the property owner is considered to have sole discretion to define “legitimate use of force” within his property.
What’s the way around this? In my opinion, the answer is the concept of self-ownership. Considering everyone to have a property right in his own body would prevent such a monopoly over the legitimate use of force from being itself considered legitimate.
Ok, well let’s say that a rich tycoon owns a large chunk of contiguous land. He is able to offer a lot of well-paying jobs because he is so rich. Now he bought the land so he is considered to be its rightful owner. And he will let you onto his property with the sole condition that you have to abide by his laws and he has a law saying that non-retaliatory force is ok. Now it seems to me that, if all rights are property rights, then this should be a fine arrangement because it stems from consent of the people joining.
Now ignoring the logistics (who would voluntarily enter such a society?), it seems to me that if a PDA is going to fight aggression on people’s behalf, then they can’t do anything about this because the arrangement is consentual. This is similar to the voluntary slavery contract hypothetical. This would be an instance where it seems to me that there is a monopoly on the use of force within the tycoon’s borders but that the agreement is non-coercive (because the tycoon isn’t forcing anybody to join his city).
I don’t see how it would be illigitimate to say that by coming onto my property you agree to any and all conditions I may impose, one of which may be murdering you.
“Now ignoring the logistics (who would voluntarily enter such a society?), it seems to me that if a PDA is going to fight aggression on people’s behalf, then they can’t do anything about this because the arrangement is consentual. This is similar to the voluntary slavery contract hypothetical. This would be an instance where it seems to me that there is a monopoly on the use of force within the tycoon’s borders but that the agreement is non-coercive (because the tycoon isn’t forcing anybody to join his city).”
And I fail to see how that is radically different from a state.
I agree that it isn’t radically different than a state in terms of maybe law enforcement. I’m posing a question to Autolykos who thinks that nobody is guaranteed a monopoly of force on their property, which seems to go against the libertarian program.
But, there are two differences as I stated earlier. A) Size. A private individual could never acquire the land mass that would be equivalent to the size of a country. B) even if land centralized into the hands of capitalists and things kind of evolved into voluntary governments, they would have to compete for citizens anyway. If the rules for joining a community were abusive enough, nobody would want to go. There is no coercion involved, so the glorified landlords still wouldn’t grab people from the outside and force them to pay “dues” to the community.
Well, a lot of this rests on what your position on corporations is. I could easily imagine corporate bodies attaining enough land to be considered a country. Regardless, I don’t think it’s a stretch of the imagination to imagine a proprietor or partnership owning something the size of a country.
It doesn’t take force to make it reasonable to enter a country. If a large enough proprietor owns enough infrastructure, it would be hard to compete shelter-wise, given a lack of alternatives.
And this all really raises the question of how this will come about anyway. If the state is not the legitimate owner of what they own (which I think we all agree on) how do they have the power to sell or privitize their assets? Why would we allow them all the benefits of something that is theirs? And if they were to privitize would they be willing to sell assets to a group that challenges their authority and power or one that is likely to maintain their domination and control?
Well, Eric080 put it better than I did: “And he will let you onto his property with the sole condition that you have to abide by his laws and he has a law saying that non-retaliatory force is ok. Now it seems to me that, if all rights are property rights, then this should be a fine arrangement because it stems from consent of the people joining.”
So if I am a guest in someone’s home, and the owner of the home attacks me, it would be illegitimate for me to use force to escape the attack and/or defend myself?
I find the “property-in-land == king’s territorial sovereignty” schtick really irritating and I find it especially disturbing when so-called libertarians espouse it. What a king does is unlawful even if he owned all the land in a manner consistent with propertarianism. “A man’s home is his castle” doesn’t mean he may murder his guests as a king may murder a foreign dignitary to ignite a war. The act of murder is unlawful no matter what and it is defined entirely apart from any consideration of whose land it occured on or other irrelevant facts, such as the color of the lampshades of the room in which it occurred.
For the sake of lurkers, I will spell out a thought-experiment which will help you see why this is the case. Alan invites Bob to his home, intending to poison him. Before allowing him to enter, he points at a sign on his door that says “All who enter here do so at their own risk” and asks him to sign a waiver… even highlighting a portion that says “Alan reserve the right to poison or otherwise murder guests at his own discretion.” Thinking Alan must be joking, Bob signs the waiver and enters. All of this is also recorded on security camera. Alan has poisoned the dinner with a poison that will require about 3 bites to kill Bob. Luckily, Bob gets up after taking one bite because he urgently needs to use the restroom. While there, he becomes seriously ill and realizes that Alan must not have been kidding. Alan is nervous and wonders if Bob might be on to him but decides to play it cool. While in the bathroom, Bob calls his PDA for assistance and goes back to the dinner table. The PDA arrives and Bob is able to safely escape Alan’s residence.
Now, Bob sues Alan for sickening him with poisoning and endangering his life with poisonous food. Alan tries to argue with Bob that he freely agreed to the situation. But Bob points out that it is ridiculous to mention a contract which promises to accept aggression when the only reason Alan is in court is because Bob is suing him. By definition, Bob is not agreeing to aggression, no matter what he may have signed in the past.
You might argue “but then contracts are meaningless since anyone can claim this defense!” but that’s missing the point. It’s not really a legal defense, it’s a statement that legal argument by definition has as its aim the avoidance of violent conflict. Bob is simply noting that he can do no worse than open conflict and that Alan’s asking him to accept the terms of a contract - which Bob did, in fact, sign with proof on video-tape - in a legal dispute is simply absurd. At all points, Bob would prefer open conflict to abiding by the terms of a contract which specifies he must accept his own murder or attempted murder. Asking someone to sign such a contract is pointless and absurd. I believe this applies to slavery, as well. This is a slightly different approach to reaching the same conclusion that Rothbard does in Ethics of Liberty. I’m kind of sketchy on the “inalienability of the will” approach because it has an almost theological tone - unless Rothbard means what I’m saying above, which he could very well be.
Now I’m getting a better picture. The poison example is certainly ridiculous. What I still don’t get is at what point it becomes ridiculous by proprietarian standards. Imagine a contract signed that states, “By entering on my property you are subject to the customs and manners that I accept and acknowledge, and may face force upon the disobedience of my orders.”
The example, until the poison one, has been of a large land owner’s ability to make pseudo-laws. Your rejection of it and poison example somewhat negates the idea of exclusive private ownership and contract. I don’t see how your statement that signing a contract against one’s interest is absurd is really supportive of private ownership. The exact same could be said of labor contracts that state there are harmful chemicals in the factory that may kill you. By that token wouldn’t the contract be null?
For the record, I am not trying to support some sort of unlimited kingdom approach to property. I’m just digging.