Ryan,
I was talking about sentencing, not self defense. I believe people are justified in killing in self defense. I have no problem with women shooting rapists, for example.
My point is that sentencing happens differently without government.
In the examples I gave, the sentence was arrived at without a court process at all(if the person was not also a resident of my apartment complex or a parent of a student at my daughters school, or through arbitration (if they were). Remember, whats fair is not whats important. What is important is that the residents of my apartment complex and the students at my daughters school are safe and happy enough to make the monthly payments.
If you are visiting the person’s house, does he then gain a right to punch you? I still believe that inate rights are implicitly preserved, so that entering his property does not give him an automatic right to injure you unless it is an explicit condition of entry into the property, yet you cannot enforce any action against him if he injures you save what retaliation you can exact physically.
First of all, remember that if you are being attacked, you care more about recovering and future safety than retribution. I’m pretty sure this is the same scenerio, kick him in the balls and run away. If you need medical attention, seek it, and if you really think he needs to get punished, call your liability insurance company and tel them you want them to claim your medical bills against his renters policy.
Your company will call his, and make a claim, he will either accept the claim or reject it, if he rejects it, your insurance company and his will go into arbitration and use pre-defined rules to decide who pays. If his insurance ends up paying, his rates will go up to reflect the damage he might cause by punching other people.
So you believe that you do not have a right to punch people when they are on your property, if they are not intruding? Here I am concerned more with the abstract principle than in the actual result.
I believe that my moral beliefs behind the abstract principle may not be the ultimate definition of “liability” that is accepted by the insurance company I choose. Put simply, in a market anarchy, laws are determined by the market too, via competing insurance policies that insure against harm. I’m pretty sure most policies would cover getting punched, and they would probably also contain a provision saying if you throw the first punch, you are liable.
Here is where our ways must part. I still firmly believe in fundemental principles of justice, which are to be enforced in all situations. One could insure oneself against the harms of commiting an action that violates the rights of others without infringing justice, but that does not define justice. My definition of an anarchist society is one in which there is no government with the exclusive right to force, not one in which concepts of right and justice are abandoned.
Security would not be limited by localities. If someone hires a security firm, that firm isn’t going to let that person be murdered for trivial reasons. No matter where it happens.
A person that preys upon visitors is not only going to be unable to hire security for himself, he would probably find himself liable.
You have to get past the idea that somehow people would be less safe without a state monopoly on security. People would be much safer!
I was not arguing for a state monopoly on security, which I believe to be both harmful and unjust. Neither am I arguing that preying upon visitors is likely. On the other hand, history tells us that humans will occasionally do the most amazingly irrational things, and I do not believe that any system in which right and justice breaks down when humans act irrationally is a correct evaluation of justice.
I think one should first how conflicts are solved usually. You’ll find out that -in 90% of the cases- they are anyway resolved without a formal court. I see the problem with your example, but then there are similar problems with state-run courts as well.
Let’s assume the person was identified, didn’'t show up - In consequence he might be declared an outlaw which might get him banned in your area, but even in many other areas were there one does have agreements with.
Country clubs and other private organizations already work on a basis similar to this. You are asking for a society where the public domain is made private. Suddenly it will require a $250,000.00 yearly membership due to a club to visit Yellowstone Park. This, of course, will keep the thugs outs.
It is being argued that criminals will eventually be relegated to a black market underground. They will lose the ability to do business with respectable people and groups. What is to stop a mass murderer from killing someone nightly to eat from their fridge? Losing the ability to do financial transactions with society does not remove the ability to harm society. Since justice will be entirely economic, will a wealthy person merely pay compensation for killing a poor person?
I sincerely hope that this was not directed at me. I would never be stupid enough to go through all the time and trouble to buy all of a prestine property like yellowstone park to market it to the small and shrinking crowd of country-club goers. If you would, I hope you use the stock market to raise money so I can short your stock. What a supremely stupid business idea, waste of a huge opportunity.
Many of the middle and upper crust of California and the surrounding area are very big on being “green” and enjoying “nature”. Yellowstone is a perfect vacation destination for many of them. I say charge about $250/week/family, and you could earn much more money than a country club, which would probably earn less money than an interest-paying savings account.
Yes. And that is good.
Insurance, private security protection, and, if needed, guns.
True enough, but if you don’t have an insurance company willing to vouch for you, it doesn’t seem that expensive for an insurance company to kill you rather than pay more claims based on your crime.
Nothing at all. Unless this rich person also contributed a lot to society (all earned money reflects a contribution to society), eventually he would go broke, or be cut off from his family money.
This is actually a better system than we have now. If a rich person kills somebody now, 90% he gets away with it because of his rich lawyers, and 10% he goes to jail. 0% does he have to pay compensation to the family of the victim.
I’m aiming at no one in particular. My point is that social groups can and do often value status and association more than actual monetary gain. From a financial standpoint, it doesn’t make sense to live in mansions on massive estates, yet that is exactly what the elite tends to do. Privatizing the public space is inviting exactly that kind of thing to happen to our public spaces.
Also, in this decentralized and market-driven politic, how do we come to have protections for the environment, the poor, the helpless? How does an orphaned child hire a protection company? One can argue that dumping radioactive waste into a nature reserve doesn’t make economic sense, but it’s a flimsy real world argument when looking at what business has been willing to do to make a buck.
So we would have companies deciding when it is cheaper to just kill someone? I guess that answers my question about orphans from the previous post. Sorry, kiddo, this is for the greater good.
In this case, children born to criminal outsiders could be sold as property. And the wealthy could go hunting criminal outsiders like game animals since those people, by defnition, won’t have protection beyond what they muster with guns. And the wealthy could afford drones or whatever technology is needed to assure that they aren’t in real danger.
As for wealthy murdering insured poor, I suppose the wealthy would need to be smart enough to only kill who they can afford to compensate. Or, it seems it would be perfectly okay for them to bribe the authorities in the company representing the person they want to kill. Hush hush, you know.
Regarding pollution, you assume that the nature reserve would be public property. It wouldn’t. The only reason we need such extensive environmental regulations is because so much land and water is public. Were it privatized, polluting it would be harming another, and they could pursue compensation (and the historical record shows that companies known as major polluters do not last long). Regarding orphans and the disabled, the church and similar private charities took very good care of them for centuries. Before you point to the occasional failures, remember that our present system is not perfect either. We must remember that imperfection is only grounds for change if the alternative is better.
Regarding murder, I take an entirely different approach than some others in that I believe that standards of justice would be upheld. Would you like to be known as the insurance company that went around murdering people it suspected of crimes? I think not. Instead, a system of councils would probably arise to give some legitimacy to whatever enforcement action is used, as has happened in almost every other semi-anarchist society in history. If you killed someone you suspected of murder, but could not prove it before a council, that would open you up for a blood-feud. If the council you chose had a reputation for assigning guilt to easily, the same would result. Equilibrium would be reached at a standard of justice that benefited neither party unduly, as everyone would fear to be unjustly punished or to fail to obtain justice.
The police. The fact that they would be employed by a community via voluntary exchange instead of taxation doesn’t change their basic purpose.
Murderers will be murderers, and it would be possible for murderous organizations to flee from justice the same way they do today: By fleeing to locations which do not have agreements allowing fugitive recovery (Osama hid in Afghanistan for a reason, etc). Of course, this would be an extremely stupid thing to do for financial reasons. The areas of the world where people can get away with murder are of course extremely poor. Morals aside, murder does not make good economic sense for a society.
Justice will be served by self-defense, and firms hired to uphold justice. It may or may not be economic - that would depend on what sort of justice a society wanted. With the firm’s profit’s being dependent on how well they serve their customers by keeping crime down, I’d think the systems of justice could look far different than how they do today. As mentioned above, I’d hope the use of prisons would be cut down. The use of fines and economic penalties might be popular because they would decrease the cost of the protection to the firm’s law-abiding customers. Care would of course have to be taken that the protection firm did not abuse their power in a similar manner to how traffic citations are used today. I’d imagine many decisions would still be made via the democratic process, if that is what customers demanded.
If they were being sold in a society where slavery is legal, sure. Thats no different from how things work today, but fortunately such societies are very rare. I don’t think market anarchism would change this much. Markets reinforce morals, because moral behavior is needed to create wealth in a properly-protected free market, but they can’t completely change the morals of society any more than democracy can.
If someone’s crimes are so vile that they are expelled or flee from any protection firm, and the hunters lived in societies which did not criminalize the hunting you describe, then yes I suppose that is possible. However, most societies do not accept such behavior, even if it happens halfway across the world.
Again, it depends on the laws of the society. I seriously doubt anyone would choose to live in a society where murder wasn’t punished very harshly, just as few people would employ a person or firm that accepts bribes. Even within a firm, bribery would likely be punished as part of the employee’s contract.
Remember, money is only one medium of exchange in markets. A market transaction is simply one that occurs voluntarily, and the goods received may not be tangible.
I meant to be in agreement with you. Free market justice and security would defend human rights, regarldess of locality, much better than the State does today.
There is no ideal “solution”, the problem in market anarchy is the same as it is with governments. If you refuse to appear in court, the police firm(s) which have jurisdiction over Boston would need an agreement with firms in Baltimore to be able to arrest you (or have you arrested, depending on the level of cooperation between the firms). If they did not have permission from the Boston firms, they would not be able to arrest you peacefully. Similar things happen between countries today.
If you hole up on your property and arm yourself, then of course the police firms will use whatever force they deem fitting to subdue you.
A significant different between market anarchy and governments is the network effect (wikipedia has a good article on this). Police firms have an incentive to follow compatible laws with other firms, in order to resolve situations like were just described. Also, similar laws provide utility for customers who do not want to be faced with radically different methods of law enforcement if they travel from Boston to Baltimore. Governments tend to expand and create similar standards through force. But the problem with governments is that these standards are rarely undone if they become obsolete. Industry standards like VHS, Laser Disc, and DVDs were or are being replaced as they become obsolete and the cost of replacing the standards becomes worth the gains. But there is no rational way governments can select the standards most beneficial to its citizens, and there is often extreme resistance to removing standards once they are in place.
You speak as if a firm needed jurisdiction to arrest someone. Why would jurisdiction be necessary if the firm does not have a monopoly on force in the area (in which case it just becomes a different form of government) and if no consent was required on the part of the person arrested?