As I read on the subject I find what seems to be an unwarranted jump in logic regarding the privatization of state services. I’m speaking of law enforcement and jurisprudence available from multiple providers on an open market. I’m sure this has been addressed but how exactly is such a system supposed to work under duress? If police company A and police company B enforce their own variations of a law how are conflicts among their client’s resolved? Violence? Wouldn’t that just be turning them into state A and state B? If there is a standard of law that both company’s are held to who holds them to it? Are we expecting a gentleman’s agreement between the purveyors of violence where everyone pinkie swears to act justly. That is no better than now and would fly apart just as quickly as the current justice systems have. If there is no hard standard of behavior to enforce how can an open market on enforcement not just lead to violence followed by the founding of a state (as one enforcement provider “wins”)?
I recommend doing some light research into the current state of the arbitration industry, also do a little digging and find out about the ‘law merchant’.
Once you get the flavour of these two, I would then recommend a text such as David Friedman’s Mechanics of Freedom.
Without having done the reading into the work you cited yet I would point out that the law merchant (if you’re referring to what I think you are) was a commercial mechanism as far as I can see. Arbitration also involves a legally binding decision by the arbitrator. The term legally binding implies a devotion to a law accepted by (or in the current state imposed on) the participants. This does nothing to address the appropriate resolution within a system that doesn’t have that grounding force of law. If my contracted law enforcement considers the penalty for assault to be $100 fine and the one another contracted considers the penalty reciprocal assault where do we go from there? What if our two enforcement agencies disagree on what assault is?
In all likelyhood the two would call upon an arbiter if they couldn’t negotiate a solution. To paraphrase Salvir Harden, aggression is the last refuge of the incompetent.
I agree. Unfortunately a system that is fundamentally reliant on all participants to be competent and completely rational at all times doesn’t seem particularly viable. Anomalies happen. Even in a polite society eventually someone decides to beat the hell out of someone for fun or profit. Someone decides that there is no way he is going to arbitration with a rapist or some other assailant to compromise between what HE chose as the penalty for rape (by hiring his law enforcement) and what the RAPIST chose as the penalty (by hiring his own). Since the maintenance of civilization being possible is a central tenet of anarcho-capitalism as far as I can tell this sort of question is vital to answer. What happens when an offender refuses to submit to justice?
In Germanic societies, those who refused to submit to justice lost all rights. Besides, security agencies have the incentive of liability to avoid all unnecessary conflict.
If you’re referring to a rapist, he’d better hope the family of the girl he raped doesn’t get to him first. Letting people (and their families) deal with their own problems is a much better deterrent to crime. Pretend you slap a girl: who are you more afraid of, the police or her father and brothers?
I’m much more wary of a society where the most emotionally involved, and thus irrational, people involved in a crime decide to form a posse at will and kill whoever they think probably committed a crime.
I’m looking for the piece of the puzzle here that makes anarcho-capitalism a viable system for CIVILIZED life as opposed to vague assertions that living mad max style would probably work out if we’d just try it. There is a difference between a system that maximizes freedom and one that maximizes license.
I’m about 1/3 of the way through the suggested Freidman book mentioned. So far its pretty good, but I already knew stateless was fairly viable for commercial matters.
CH7 of Market for Liberty answers your question: http://libertyactivism.info/wiki/The_Market_for_Liberty
The Freidman text is good, and comes very close to answering most questions. The foreign defense angle needs further examination I think. Justice and rule of law needs to be fleshed out a bit more as well.
“The market for liberty” has busted links.