Well, let me know why would justice be the case that the people who are paying insurance have to pay the damages to the injured instead of the injurer? It has no sense. Courts would be a very important part of an anarcho-capitalist society, but as I told in a previous post, the reason of existence of the courts isn’t punishment; it is a restitution of the damages to the injured side.
How is forcing someone to leave not restraining their freedom?
I agree. I dislike the typical market anarchist emphasis on insurance because ultimately an insurance company must extract its costs from its clients, and thus if your insurance makes the damage good without itself extracting damages from the original perpetrator you end up paying for the damage yourself. I also reject the argument that insurance companies are necessary to determine if the damages are worth recovering from the criminal, because the criminal should be liable for the costs in recovering damages as well. If I steal from you, neither you nor your insurance company nor your protection agency should lose anything financially.
The ansver is quite simple 
you can force someone from your property without restraining his freedom, that is what we call right to defence your life and your property. Now if someone is a convicted murderer there is no question that he is a threat to your life and your property. And the street, the city is somehow the property of the people living in that society (some parts are directly your property - your house etc. and some parts are shared property) so you as an individual can ask the court to defend your life, property and all other individuals can do the same, which mean when you forcing a convicted murderer out of the society, you actualy doing nothing else than defending your life and property. One question arise, what about the property of the murderer, do he have the same right, the right to defend his property? I think his property whatever large, is to small as a restitution to the family of the victim, so hes property should be seized and transfered to the family of the victim. Some other questions arise also, like what will happend with the family of the murderer, as they are not responsible for the crime. Well the same question can be asked, what happens to the family of a man who lose his property on a poker game? It is his responsibility and the responsibility of his famly also, the responsibility of the parents because they failed in transfering moral values to their kid (the murderer), and of course the responsibility of the other members of the family also. Another question, how will those folks survive? Another answer the same way as the family of the gambler who lose his property. Is it cruel? Not at all.
I think that it would be difficult to get a murderer banished from everyone’s property without any court system (even a private one) to legitimize your accusation. I also think that seizing all of his property is no more justified than killing him (and less so, actually, as killing him can be justified by a law of retaliation while seizing his property is not justified under any standard of proportionality). If you follow a law of restitution, and I kill an aged and infirm relative of yours who contributes no money but is instead a financial drain on the family, and I am a billionare, what law of restitution allows you to take my billions?
Very interesting points. Lets utilize the Austrian school’s marginal theory of value, so 1 life vs. 1 billion dollar, but if I am right, we can’t put a number on this comparison (according to the marginal theory of value), we can only put it in a subjective order. You will probably think twice to kill a man if you know that you will lose your billion and will be banned from interaction and life with “normal people” and would spend the rest of your life isolated or among other murderers. In the other side most of the murderers kill with an expectation that they wouldn’t be caught, so this would weaken my theory a little. But your family, especially your parents would probably do a much better job in transferring moral values on you if they know that the entire family can suffer if you murder someone. You will also think twice if you know that your crime is not simply a potential “jail” for you but that your children will also suffer. This would probably raise the feeling for responsibility so there would be a much bigger chance that you won’t become a murderer at all. Also seizing property is a reversible act, killing someone is not; and beside that the restitution to the victim (and because he is dead so it means to his descendants/family) is a just case. Execution anyway in practice means only one thing - you will REPLACE the murderer with yourself- killing a murderer would make you a murderer if we maintain that the only justifiable killing is self defense, and execution is not self defense.
Whether or not it is an insurance plan or the state. You are still paying for other people’s evil deeds.
Regarding removing someone forcefully in a situation where your property rights are violated. Well you don’t respond by force the first thing you do. You have to establish intention that the other person is out to harm you.
When someone is intentionally out to violate the laws you set for your kingdom. That human can no longer be seen in regards to right as anything but equal to a beast. Because the beast and the human-villian have one thing in common, the disrespect for your laws. You can splash his brains out on the ground if you deem so necessary just like you would do with a beast.
For anyone following a natural-rights position, an aggressor loses his rights to the extent that he violates yours, and may not coherently object to his rights being violated to that extent. It is also necessary that the aggressor make good for any harm they have caused. PDAs may ask their clients to refrain from executions and may refuse to carry them out of course. Additionally, if it is proven that someone has indeed perpetrated an act of aggression, then they must cover all the procedural costs involved - victimized individuals and their PDAs will not suffer liability.
Well, I am not sure about this. A man is a man he is a reasonable creature and this is true even if he don’t act according to the moral principles and laws. A beast is not reasonable and as such it isn’t violating your rights because it isn’t aware of them. A man even a murderer is a completely different story. So you can’t just kill him as a beast and say, I just kill the beast. You have the right to defend yourself and if the only way to do that is to kill him, then it is OK, other ways you become a murderer because you violate the attacker rights simply because you kill him without a reason or simply you could defend your life/property without killing the attacker. And of course he must pay you the damages, he don’t have to be punished, because punishment is first totally incompatible with freedom and natural rights philosophy, second it won’t do any good to the injured side so it is completely unnecessary. An injured has the right for his life and his property but not a right to someone else life and property, and punishment would mean exactly the later.
It is worth to mention, that probably the reason why Mises was not an anarchist is that he did not believed that the anarchist society (even if it has no logical flaw) is possible. Why? Because Mises never forget the importance of Praxeology. Most people know that Mises was a very important economist, most of us even repeat the line “Mises the best economist of all time”, but the truth is that most people do not really understand the importance of Mises, the importance of Praxeology. One of the reason that we are basically unable to find any flaw in Mises works (except a few glitches / minor flaws maybe… which is nothing but a proof that he was just a human being), is because he applied Praxeology on every question when he tried to give an answer. And Praxeology told us, that a man acts because he is expecting that after this act his state, his position his life will be better than before the act. And if his believes are weak or “wrong” he is perfectly capable to act even against himself (both aware and unaware) and of course against other men. So this straightforward reason told Mises that anarchism is probably unachievable. That’s why he joined the club of a “strictly limited government as a necessary evil” gentlemen’s. And what would Praxeology tell us about private courts? First that if there is not a monopoly of the court over a certain territory (we can call it jurisdiction), and there would be competing courts, then there could and there will be competing court decisions. Rothbard would say, that the market would eliminate the bad court, because they will lose the clients the people who are need they services and pay for the services. But this assumption, I believe has a little flaw… that the reason we need courts in the first place is the criminals, the people who acts against our rights, life and property. So those people would want a bad court a court which will decide in their interest. This would lead us to the point where two or more courts decide differently and if we try to enforce any of those decisions, we will find ourselves in war, and war is not anarchy it is simply chaos.
One of the other problem why we make mistakes (other then not applying Praxeology) is that we are thinking about property inside the framework of the property rights derived from the state, which mean that most property are someone’s property because the law made by the state say so, in other words, my property is my because the state point a gun to you if you don’t recognize this. But natural rights tell us that the only thing qualify as property is something from the nature MIXED with our work. So we can’t say, these 100 square miles is my property because I was here first. And I said - OK, but it can be your property only when you MIX your work with it and when I say that I don’t think that killing a number of Indians you found on that area qualify as WORK. So there is a fundamental problem, that we are out of free land because everything become property (private or state doesn’t matter as long as it is not a property in a sense of MIXING work with nature but as enforcing it with guns). So remember Praxeology because it is extremely important. If you apply Praxeology you will be home in a heartbeat, if you don’… well, you can get home, but it will be a long journey and most of the times you find yourself in places you really want to avoid.
And “A strictly limited state as a necessary evil”… well the problem is that Praxeology will tell us, that when we establish the state we enter in perpetual war. Why? Because there would be other states and it is not a wise thing to except that all of them will act in a way compatible with moral and natural rights. So individuals within a State would act in order to improve their odds of surviving in a case that other state attacks them. Remember the ? was a wise man, a man of natural rights and he still act on this totally incompatible with his believes. Because he couldn’t avoid the laws of Praxeology, there was a possibility that the French empire attack the US, and Jefferson saw an opportunity to minimize this possibility, so he purchased the Louisiana territory (which was the property of the French empire – you probably notice that it is also because of the gun and not because the French empire MIXED work with that land, because it isn’t). So Jefferson had a choice and he had to put in order that two possibilities and answer to the question: What do I value more, the fact to be annihilated one day or the fact to violate my believes… on some level, because at the end he acted somewhat in accordance to the basics of freedom, he acted in order to defend his life and his property. The only difference is that he takes action against a future threat, but Praxeology / human action is possible only because we don’t know the future and we don’t know the consequences of our acting, and that he accepted that this land become the property of the state even if this property is not compatible with the natural rights philosophy, it is not qualify as property because it isn’t mixed with work.
So those are some of the reasons, why anarchy is probable impossible, because the laws of Praxeology tell us that man acts differently and some of them acts against anarchy against other men forcing all of us to from time to time to act against them because unfortunately, sometimes it is the only way to defend our life and property.
Mises more believed that people would, in the long run, get whatever sort of government they wanted. So he thought democracy and secession occomplished this without the violent revolutions required in other forms of government.
I agree with him, but I think democracy will eventually give way more and more to something resembling market anarchism. People in a democracy know the true costs of wars, and so generally do not participate in them if they can help it. The Iraq war is a minor thing compared to other unnecissary wars, and given the spread of information over the internet it may be the last of its kind. Economic progress only increases the costs of violence compared with cooperation. Once the people of a nation understand the costs of violence towards each other as well as other nations, the inwardly-focused violence of the state will be dismantled.
About 200 years ago some people in said… “There won’t be wars anymore”… I am sorry to inform you but as long as we have the state we would have wars, in a stateless world we would have only fights between individuals, when we organize ourselves in a group (state or any other kind of group) we will be in a perpetual war against other states and other groups, and what we call peace in this conditions is just a period when the group isn’t interfere with the other group interest or they can hurt each other comparably so they prefer to pretend to be in peace instead to be in war. In freedom where there is no collectivist mindset, there can’t be war, only a fight between individuals.
I should mention, that people can’t understand, nation can’t understand; only individuals can understand, only individuals can know, you simple can’t value something as a group because every individual has its own subjective order of value. And if you know this, you basically can’t measure the cost of a war for people, you can only measure it as the cost of a war to an individual, and the solder who die pay the ultimate price, the taxpayer will pay another price, and a number of men will actually gain in a war whatever the cost would be (like the “defense” industry complex for example). So talking about cost of war to people or nation is ridicules nonsense (no offense, but this is the truth). We must eliminate the collectivist mindset if we want to talk about freedom and free market. Democracy has nothing to do with freedom, democracy is just an instrument where you can eliminate a bad government and replace with a new one without a revolution, but it does not guarantee a good government. In democracy you also can have a dictator - rarely a person, but mostly a committee. If there is democracy, you can eliminate those people if you think they are acting against you, by voting on the elections, but history shows us that people will get rid of the ruler even if there is no democracy, they do this by revolution. So I prefer democracy over revolution, but if you don’t have limited government, democracy won’t help you. If you have limited government, then actually you do not have to get rid the government because they can’t hurt you, they action is strictly limited to protect your life and property and not to run your life. In that case, you don’t even need democracy, because every opinion would count but it could be put in action only if it serving the limited purpose of the government, if it is serving the efficiency and usefulness of the government to protect your life and property. So the only reason you would need to get rid of a government is if it doesn’t serve its purpose, and the only purpose of democracy would be to choose another government in hope that they will do a better job protecting your life and property. But we live in a completely different word, where people expect something for nothing (and they vote according to this), they expects from the government to arbitrate, to run their life…, but no man can avoid the laws of Praxiology in whatever world he lives.
http://mises.org/journals/jls/12_1/12_1_3.pdf
This should explain my position.
Praxeology also tells us that coercive monopolies have negative results, i.e. lower quality, higher prices, less responsiveness to consumer demand etc. All the problems that you posited could arise under market anarchy are all the more likely to occur in the context of a State, however minimal.
BTW, could you maybe shorten your posts a little or write in smaller paragraphs? It’d make it easier to read them.
You assume that the only reason we punish criminals is to deter crime. But in that case why do you argue against execution from a standpoint of right? If by killing a man unjustly I do not sacrifice all of my rights (as you assert when you claim that execution is unjustified), then we must consider financial compensation in the same light of human rights, for property is no less important a right than life.
From the standpoint of deterrence, I believe that instant execution (none of our langishing in jail for decades) would be a fairly impressive deterrent. This is not, of course, exclusive of restitution that could devastate your family, so the added incentives from your obligation to your family would not be diminished. Therefore if punishment is determined by deterrence financial restitution/retaliation and execution are better than financial restitutio/retaliation alone.
From the standpoint of justice, in killing another you clearly are liable for any financial benefit lost by his family, but that covers the harm to his family alone: the harm to the murdered man is unpunished. It can only be punished by retaliation, for the victim is beyond restitution. Consequently, I find a justification for executing murderers. On the other hand, additional restitution cannot pay the price of his death. No standard of proportionality or of punishment in kind can justify the seizing of more property than is destroyed by the crime, and so justice also points toward execution and away from massive financial retaliation.
The problem with this is that, even though property is needed to sustain life, property and life is not the same. There is one major difference considering a loss of property and a loss of life. Losing property is reversible, so when someone steal or destroy your property, you can force him to pay the damage; you can transfer property from the criminal to the injured. Life is a different story, when you loss it there is no way back, you cant transfer the life from the criminal to the victim. I don’t think that punishment is compatible with freedom, because if you punish the criminal you won’t do any good to the injured/victim, so it is completely useless and it is only an exercise of power by the court. And power is the deadly enemy of freedom. The other problem is how can you make a restitution to the victim (or to his family) if he is dead. The court would make an arbitrary decision and order a seizure of some part of the murderer property and pay it to the victim’s family? How can arbitrary decision be compatible with freedom? What amount is equal to someone life? Especially if you know that value is subjective.
So execution means this:
- The executor (and the court who order it) becomes a new murderer.
- The state of the victim stay intact (he is dead, and nothing can bring him back).
Now you can say that a murderer lose his rights to live when he killed another man… but I believe that the natural rights philosophy doesn’t recognize such a thing, Life and Property is unalienable rights of man. And when someone steals your property he must return it to you because of this “that property is unalienable right”, when someone destroys your property, he can’t return it to you so he must “return” your property out of his property. When someone kills you, he can’t return your life and your life couldn’t be returned out of his life. So the only thing you can do and not violate the natural rights principles is to forbid to the murderer to cohabit with you to share the space with you and to visit your property because he is dangerous, but you can’t take his life (it is unalienable). Anyway you can take his property because out of that property you try to make restitution to the victim (his family) and as losing life is irreversible it is infinitely more valuable than any property, so whatever large the murderer’s property is, it isn’t even a near equivalent to the value of life he destroyed.
I am unsure, but I believe that you are claiming that one possible explanation for Mises’ embrace of a limited-government doctrine could be as follows:
Man acts in an attempt to increase his satisfaction. The choices that man must make in order to increase his satisfaction are obstructed by uncertainty. The adoption of an anarchical legal order would increase man’s satisfaction. The uncertainty which obstructs man’s ability to make choices which do in fact increase his satisfaction, therefore, makes impossible his adoption of an anarchical legal order.
While, I won’t doubt that this may have been Mises’ thought process, it is invalid unless anarchy is a different sort of choice than is made to institute other types of legal orders. Otherwise, the same argument could be made for other types of legal arrangements.
I think that your argument is unsound. To argue that courts with exclusive jurisdiction will stop criminals from instituting competing courts is to assume that courts with exclusive jurisdiction are inherently non-criminal. So, the reason why your argument is unsound is that you are mis-using the word criminal.
In the light of this, I would like to make the case for Rothbard’s point by answering the question - If it is true that courts are neither inherently good nor inherently bad, how is it that courts protect the innocent from criminals? The answer - They don’t. A court is simply a social tool for arbitrating disagreements based on pre-established contract. Where no precedent exists, there is only war. For example, there is no precedent for two actors attempting to appropriate the same indivisible, unclaimed property at the same time. This is the essence of war (which is not incompatible with a just legal order). So, why is Rothbard right? Courts do not provide their service for free. For Rothbard to be correct, it must be the case that criminal courts are unable to generate the revenue necessary to avoid insolvency. And here all we need do is remember what a court is. Neither the innocent nor criminals will enter into contracts that do not protect them from corrupt legal proceedings or poor arbitration services. This means that corrupt courts do not arise to meet any longstanding demand. Neither criminals nor innocents benefit from using the services of corrupt courts, while both innocents and criminals stand to benefit from just courts. Which is why, even in an anarchical legal order, courts do not require protection from competing courts. In fact, according to this theory of court viability, setting up a non-competitive court system would tend to undermine the process of discovery necessary to ensure the highest level of arbitration services. In a non-competitive court system, corrupt courts would gain de facto support which would tend to prolong their rule and destroy the value of legal precedent, which is pretty much where we stand today.
Why do you think that only a state can defend itself from another state? During the US Revolution, the colonists successfully defended themselves from the government of England.
Finally, I would say that anarchy is not impossible, it is actual. We live in anarchy right now. The methods that we have implemented to deal with this fact are just not the most conducive to prosperity. When this is acknowledged, a new order can arise to bring the way things are into harmony with social policy.
Or, to make this case in economic terms. To deny that the free market works and to implement the steps necessary to “fix it”, is to cause greater problems than exist in a state of nature. To deny that anarchy works and to implement the steps necessary to “fix it”, is to cause greater problems than exist in a state of nature.
I wold add one more thing. The only rule we need to bring a system in compliance with the actual is, “Nobody may use someone’s property without their permission.” ie. Private property must be held inviolable. All forms of taxes and conscription must be brought to an end. There is no moral justification for any other policy.
I agree with these things. But as I said, we have a problem, that most of the current property isn’t qualify as a property by the principles of the natural rights philosophy, because according to that property is a previously unowned natural resource MIXED with your labor. And in our society a very large portion of overall property is conquered or occupied put under a fence (physical or imaginary on the map isn’t matter). So it is hard to implement “you can’t use my property without my permission” is hard to implement because as I said a large portion of that property recognized by the current laws is not a property according to the principles of liberty and natural rights philosophy.
What about the case that the Russians argue that the North Pole is their property? (no labor MIXED ever withthe North Pole)
Are you really held that the collectivist nanny states we are living in are qualified as anarchy?
Beside this, I mostly agree with you (no taxes, no conscription etc.)
Anyway I have read my posts… and I must say a few more things because someone would believe that I am a lunatic
Everything I wrote here is a kind of a blueprint very hard if not impossible to implement in practice. Why? Man has emotions. It is difficult even to imagine, but if someone murder my child, I will probably be the first who would blow off the head of the murderer. So yes, I still think it isn’t right but I would do it anyway, emotions are a very powerful driver, sometimes even more powerful than reason, so man can act this way also, and this is perfectly normal. Should a man be responsible for such an emotionally driven act just as any other murderer? I believe no. He is not a danger to the society. He can stay and live among normal people. He can keep he’s property also because the murderers property already belongs to him (after the murderer killed his family member – child). A man, who kills a murderer in deep pain because of he’s ultimate loss, on emotional basis, is not a criminal. He does not represent a danger to the society and he can’t be hold responsible for he’s non-reasonable act. Of course this isn’t a sound theory, I agree, but as I told, we can have a blueprint, but our reality would be far away from it, because nothing is perfect and no man is perfect.
I never said that courts are inherently neither good nor bad. I just said that in a case of two or more courts would lead us to different court decisions and that enforcing any of them will lead us to war. I never said a word about the validity of any of those court decisions. I just said that there will be some people who would pay the corrupt court because of their interest. Also some normal people will pay to those courts also because even normal people can misunderstand issues. Free market never eliminates bad products or bad services, just minimize them. But in a free market you don’t need to buy a bad product. But can you say to the court “sorry I think you are not good, so I don’t think that I should pay the damages to John, because the court I recognize told me so” and what would you do in that case? It is like in a family, if you are alone, you are the undisputed “authority” in your house, but if you live in a family, then conflict is possible or even unavoidable. Now if one family member made a monopoly on decision inside of a family other family members will be upset, the difference is that they can leave the family, they can fill a divorce etc. But you can’t leave a community because of conflicting decisions. Well you can, but what about your right to your property?
The US Revolution was a war for independence between the British Crown (state) and the (state) established shortly after the revolution has began with the Declaration of Independence and the Articles of Confederation. A short period before the was established the colonies were also a form of state (Thirteen Colonies). Not independent from the British Crown but they have almost all the other characteristics of the state.
In a stateless society (anarchy) you can defend yourself and you can help others to defend themselves, but there is no state to defend.