That is not what I meant by it. I should have said “basic libertarian code”. This is Rothbard’s phrase:
To go back to our original point of disagreement:
The bolded parts lead me to believe that you have a similar conception of anarchy to Rothbard. At a broad level, you envision a basic Law Code, which all reasonable courts would agree upon. All courts that do not sign up to this basic legal code are called outlaw courts. At a lower level, there is interpretation of this basic Law Code. Different courts may apply general libertarian principles (as specified in the agreed-upon Law Code) in different ways.
Is this a fair assessment of your conception of anarchy? (I don’t want to write out a response about the problems I see with looking at things this way, until I know I am not misunderstanding your position)
I am happy you made another attempt. It was an excellent post. I really like that there is someone else here familiar with Cox’s “Solution”.
As I wander between theory and pragmatism, I have found the simplest answers are sometimes staring us in the face, and the concerns the OP has, are concerns I have had. One can be too concerned with being a perfect libertarian, because force in libertarianism isn’t always explained properly as part of the restitution process, being so loaded with negativity from aggressive uses of force.
I agree that “no government was required.” By this I assume you mean, no state. The premise in my opening post is that we are in a state-less society, i.e., no government. I agree that in a state-less society the scenario would mostly likely play out they way you have explained it. There would be a non-violent resolution to the dispute.
But, I do not think your statement that “by the NAP [non-aggression principle] B has the right to take it [the property] back” is consistent with the statement “the use of force or threat of force was not required.” The incentives that encouraged A to submit to the court and abide by the decisions are several. It could be his ethical code encourages peaceful resolution of disputes. The threat of ostracism and outlawry could be others. Whatever they may be, A makes an economic decision that the benefits of submitting the dispute to the court and abiding by its decision exceeds the costs.
I submit that because under NAP B could use physical force to take his property back from A, and you seem to agree that B could, that one of the costs that A considers in his calculation to submit to the court and abide by its decision is the threat of physical force from B. So, while no one exercised physical force against A or overtly threatened physical force against A, there is at minimum an implied threat of physical force. Avoiding the costs have having physical force used against A is one of the incentives that encourages A to submit to the court and abide by the court’s decision.
I think it follows from this, that physical force stands behind the law and the courts even in a libertarian society.
Now, it may be as you and others have stated in these posts, that the courts may not be who actually exercises the physical force. In a technical sense, even the US courts do not exercise the physical force to enforce their decisions. The actual exercise of physical force is done by the sheriff or a police officer. But, since these are two parts of the state, I have not made this distinction. Whether the courts directly use physical force to enforce their decisions, or the injured party or some other agency does, the conclusion is still the same: physical force can be used in a libertarian society to enforce the law and court decisions. I think this is consistent with the NAP. The use of physical force must be proportional the the wrong committed, which I think is an extension of NAP as well.
I can’t speak for scineram (nor would I want to), but I was suggesting your premises need checking.
Other than that, I think we have made some good progress in this discussion.
But ultimately, trying to predict the outcome of a market process is going to be stargazing.
As a libertarian who abhors violence, I understand that it isn’t possible to pursue restitution without some degree of force to back it up. Where it comes from (or what specific forms it takes) is less important to me, than whether the force is used consistently with the non-aggression principle.
But, I do not think your statement that “by the NAP [non-aggression principle] B has the right to take it [the property] back” is consistent with the statement “the use of force or threat of force was not required.”
Under the NAP, the target of an initiator of aggression has the right to use proportional aggression in retaliation.
In my example, no force or the threat of force was required to resolve the dispute.
Neither of these statements are mutually exclusive. They are consistent.
Lyle D. Riggs wrote:
I submit that because under NAP B could use physical force to take his property back from A, and you seem to agree that B could, that one of the costs that A considers in his calculation to submit to the court and abide by its decision is the threat of physical force from B. So, while no one exercised physical force against A or overtly threatened physical force against A, there is at minimum an implied threat of physical force. Avoiding the costs have having physical force used against A is one of the incentives that encourages A to submit to the court and abide by the court’s decision.
I think it follows from this, that physical force stands behind the law and the courts even in a libertarian society.
A’s subjective belief that B will respond with proportional, retaliatory agression, as is B’s right under the NAP, is insufficient to make the claim that physical force stands behind the law and the courts even in a libertarian society. At least not in the way you’ve been implying it in this thread.
It would be an even further leap in logic to take this bold assumption and state something like:
“Because even in a libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist society the use of force stands behind the law and the courts, the use of force or coercion to enforce the law in any society is justified.”
-or-
“Because force stands behind the law and courts in a libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist society, the entire libertarian/Anarcho-Capitalist approach is flawed, and no better than the alternative systems including totalitarianism.”
I don’t believe you are saying this, but per the OP:
I guess my general question is what force or compulsion, if any, would be used to enforce the law in a libertarian society? Or maybe better said, how would the law be enforced in a libertarian society?
Based on your responses to the answers you’ve asked for, there is an appearance of bias towards the use of force or compulsion to enforce the law.
You’ve stumbled onto the primary motivation of what does indeed enforce the law in a libertarian society. It’s the subjective value of the perpetrator that tends to be the primary incentive. Do the costs of being a bad actor outweigh the benefits of being good? Force or coercion aren’t necessarily incentives if the perpetrator doesn’t hold value to those outcomes. In the present legal system there are numerous criminals who hold no real value to the punishment of imprisonment or even death. Some view imprisonment as a blessing compared to making a living in legitimate society.
For the victim of aggression, their motivation is also subjective. Restoration of property and compensation for their time is almost universal. Having the right to use aggression doesn’t necessarily mean the victim will act on it. For recovering stolen property, a person could hire a burglar just as easily as hiring a S.W.A.T. team. The costs of the burglar might even be cheaper, and could prevent any possible further escallation from a trigger-happy agent. In the present legal system, with respect to criminal law, the law doesn’t adequately address the victim. The victim must take his case before two separate courts, and could receive two separate outcomes.
The victim’s action is dependent on the perpetrator’s action, which makes the perpetrator’s action and his subjective value the primary consideration. It is this, much more than force or coercion, that comes into play.
I don’t think any such “basic law code” would be as formal as you or Rothbard describe it. Basically I’d consider the “basic law code” to be the Non-Aggression Principle. My understanding is that we’re nearly all born with the basis for the NAP already within us. Beyond that, I’d say a common-law legal framework would develop based on private-court decisions.
Regarding codification, there’d probably be profit-making opportunities in compiling past cases and extracting/inferring more general principles from them. Of course, such codices legis wouldn’t be legally binding on “members” of the society. They’d serve merely as reference guides for future cases and the like.
Hope this helps. Sorry for having taken so long to respond.
Here is the problem as I see it, with the idea of a Rothbardian “basic law code”…
Firstly: how detailed it this basic law code? Consider the two extremes:
Broadly defined. “No one may invade anyone else’s person and property”. No more detail than that. (“Invade” and “property” are not given definitions… that is for the courts to interpret)
Narrowly defined. The basic law code is identical to the libertarian law code, as developed by Rothbard, Kinsella, Block, etc… down to the details… like the basic law code is specific about IP, abortion, capital punishment, etc. (There is very little scope for interpretation of the basic legal code… the courts task is limited to applying the law code)
I’ve never been able to get a clear answer from Rothbardians about how detailed the basic law code is supposed to be. In the following analysis, I will show how the whole concept of the “basic law code” vanishes when you really think about it.
Rothbard says that the basic law code will be agreed upon by all reasonable courts. I take him to mean everybody except serial killers, rapists etc, i.e. 99% of the population. With such widespread agreement required, it seems hopelessly unrealistic to suppose that the basic law code is narrowly defined, down to the last detail. Even among libertarians, there is a disagreement over IP, abortion, punishments, etc. There is no way the entire population of reasonable people is going to agree on every little detail of libertarian theory. The entire field of economic analysis of law is skipped over by making this supposition.
To Rothbard, there were two types of court: reasonable courts, which have signed up to the basic law code, and outlaw courts, which have not. Rothbard does not provide any analysis - any mechanism - of how reasonable courts and outlaw courts will resolve disputes between them. This may not be much of an issue if we assume 99% of courts are reasonable, but see above.
So maybe the basic law code is broadly defined, leaving a lot of scope for interpretation, so that widespread agreement is possible. But then how will disputes about things which might fall into the area of interpretation - say IP disputes - get resolved? There needs to be a mechanism to explain this… how disputes between courts which have both agreed to the basic (broadly defined) law code will be resolved, when their interpretation of that law code differs. Rothbard has not provided us with a mechanism for this.
David Friedman has described a mechanism for how courts which provide different laws (perhaps very different laws) will resolve their disputes: the bargaining process. The same mechanism applies to all courts, so there is no need to call some courts “outlaw courts.” Hence the idea of a basic law code dissolves. Each court is just producing laws, which may or may not be close to plumbline libertarian laws.
<< But then how will disputes about things which might fall into the area of interpretation - say IP disputes - get resolved? There needs to be a mechanism to explain this… >>
The mechanism is a lot simpler than you may realize. All you need is for both parties to agree to comply with an arbitrator or judge’s ruling.
Judges will have have an incentive to be fair and reasonable if they want repeat business. Exactly HOW a judge arrives at his decisions does not need to be known nor does it need to follow any template. Think of wine tasters or American Idol judges.
Thank you. I realise I need to be clearer on what I mean by a mechanism. Of course we can just leave it at what you said. That is how any individual dispute will be resolved. But there is much more to say. What will the resolution be? Which party will be favored, and what will be the punishment for the unfavored party? In short, what laws will be produced?
It is perfectly legitimate to stop here and say: we don’t know, we can’t say, let’s just wait and see, let the market decide, etc. The items on the shelves of supermarkets reflect the demands of the consumers. That’s just how markets work. Economics explains how consumer demand determines, through a pathway crucially involving prices and profit signals, what producers supply. Consumers demand A,B,C and producers end up supplying A,B,C (rather than X,Y,Z which are less in demand) through this mechanism.
So my questions are equivalent to: what will the items in the supermarket be? The mechanism I am talking about then is the pathway from: consumers demand laws A,B,C and not so much laws X,Y,Z ------> producers supply laws A,B,C,rather than laws X,Y,Z. (Not the mechanism of how laws A,B,C are actually produced, which is what you took my meaning to be.)
My interest is in answering the question: what laws can we expect to be produced? This is a pretty important question. It will be the laws consumers demand, obviously. We could stop here, or we could ask: how will that work, what will be the mechanism?
This is where the Friedman-style analysis of bargaining power comes in. It is really just economics applied to the production of laws and more specifically, the production of law codes. (Rothbard never analysed the economics of law codes, probably because his conception of anarchy was based on his faulty basic law code idea).
Trulib, thanks for your response. Better late than never.
Interestingly enough, historical examples of “basic law codes” tended to become increasingly elaborate and refined over time. One example that stands out here is the law of Medieval Ireland. Also note that the codifications were done after the fact – that is, there was no legislation in the sense we understand today.
By the way, I hope you don’t think I’m taking a strict Rothbardian position on this issue. I haven’t read much of Rothbard’s own writings on the subject, to be honest. What I’ve put forth has been my own interpretations of what I have read.
If it’s narrowly defined down to the last detail, it’s not really a basic law code anymore, is it?
Maybe that’s your point, though. I do agree that there is plenty of disagreement over various legal details. I don’t expect all of those disagreements to be worked out in advance. My point has been that to take Friedman’s position literally would mean everything, including the NAP itself, would be up for grabs, and would be so all the time. In other words, it seems like he sees (at least implicitly) a rather Hobbesian struggle where any and all legislation can be tested in “the market for laws”.
Another important difference I see is whether “the law” really changes. I’d say it doesn’t. For example, “trespass” is always considered wrong, so it’s not a question of whether it should be considered wrong – it’s a question of what constitutes “trespass”, what restitution should be given in the event of “trespass”, etc. So again, it seems like we’re working with different semantics for the term “law”. You and (presumably) Friedman use semantics that are similar to those for “legislation”, whereas I and (presumably) Rothbard use semantics that are similar to those for “morality”.
Anyways, my own analysis (such as it is) says that “reasonable courts” simply wouldn’t deal with “outlaw courts” on the same level. That is, the former wouldn’t consider pronouncements by the latter to be legitimate. If martial contest results, so be it. Presumably the “reasonable courts” would at least heavily outweigh the “outlaw courts”.
My understanding of traditional common-law frameworks (which may be inaccurate and/or incomplete) is that common-law jurists were not supposed to be original or creative in their legal decisions, but rather they were supposed to uncover or reveal the underlying principles that applied. If I were to hazard a guess as to why this apparently was, I’d say that it was due to the need for judicial decisions to be seen as fair and unbiased. One of the best ways to do that was to be as logical as possible in one’s legal reasoning. So I’d say that logic would at least be a (if not the) major factor in disputes over legal principles, if nowhere else. When it comes to disputes over restitution payments, I side with you on market mechanisms being put to work.
One question I have is, what would be considered legitimate bargaining power? Would aggressive means and/or actions be included there? If so, I think Friedman’s analysis can lead right back to statism.
Autolykos, sorry for my delayed response. Part of the reason for it was that your last response made me think you were not making the same error (or at least, omission) as Rothbard. So by critiquing Rothbard’s basic law code idea, I thought I may be strawmanning you so I let it go. But your post here convinced me that you are definitely more of a Rothbardian on this issue, whereas I am more of a Friedmanite, so I thought it was worth revisiting this thread.
First off, I don’t really understand how you are using the term “legislation” in your post. Could you give me your definition please?
As opposed to what? What is going to safeguard the NAP so that it is not “up for grabs”?
Friedman makes no statement about the nature of man when discussing law. He’s just analysing things as they are, without making the unwarranted Rothbardian assumption that laws - at least the basic principles of law - are known, fixed and agreed upon by all reasonable people. If that’s all you mean by Hobbesian struggle, then I’d say the real world is indeed Hobbesian, because that Rothbardian assumption is unwarranted.
But to me Hobbesian struggle implies the view that “most people are bad”, which is the opposite of what both of us (and probably Friedman) have already agree upon: that most people are “good”. It is because we hold this non-Hobbesian view of human nature that we (Friedman and I) are quite optimistic about the kinds of laws that will produced in anarchy: that is, we expect largely libertarian law codes. They are (will be) highly demanded because they resonate with most people’s senses of morality, and the logical aspect of libertarianism is appealing, as you pointed out. They also tend to be cheaper to supply, which gives us another reason to expect libertarian law codes.
This is essentially what I was discussing earlier in this thread with Clayton. He sees very clearly that the ultimate bargaining power is how likely you are to win a martial contest. While this is true, I think the bargaining power that is more relevant in an established anarchy is “monetary bargaining power.” This also explains how we can expect the most successful producers of law to be the court agencies that best satisfy consumer demand. In Clayton’s world where “martial bargaining power” is key, we would expect the most successful producers of law to be simply the court agencies with the biggest armies, which seems wrong or incomplete to me.
Clayton, our conversation got a bit lost in this thread. I don’t think you responded to my latest post to you though.
Trulib, I’d respond to your (justified) concern that in an ancap world, the only way a court with a strong army can get away with coercing its way to a global monopoly is by surviving and resisting all attacks by the “free” world and their armies.
In other words, people will see a local coercive situation as a potential future infringement of their rights and act accordingly.
I can’t imagine one single entity being able to defeat 7 billion people.
No problem. It would’ve been nice if you had told me that explicitly, either in this thread or in a private conversation.
I mean any arbitrary edict that is passed by some group and then attempted to be enforced by them or agents on their behalf. As I’ve said before, everytime you mention “making law”, it makes me think you’re talking about legislation.
The innate moral instincts that are shared by nearly all people.
How can law be discussed without taking the nature of man into account? Even when taking a strictly economic analysis of law, as he apparently does, he’s still implicitly involving human nature. After all, what else drives economics?
By “Hobbesian struggle”, I was referring to Hobbes’ “war of all against all”. It seems that Friedman’s analysis presumes a struggle of all legislation against all other, at least taken to its logical extreme.
While logically speaking, no law or moral precept can be proven to be valid, human nature is at least relatively known and fixed. Therefore, I would say that the basic principles of law are – at least relatively speaking – known, fixed, and agreed upon by nearly everyone. However, this isn’t an assumption as far as I’m concerned. It’s a conclusion.
Right, in the Hobbesian view, everyone is trying to dominate, exploit, and/or conquer each other. Where Rothbard and I apparently differ from Friedman and yourself is that we take the statement “most people are ‘good’” to mean “most people agree on the basic principles of law”. Really, in my own view (and presumably Rothbard’s?), “law” is no different from “morality”.
When judges make decisions, would you say that they are “making law”? I wouldn’t. I’d say they’re applying and interpreting existing law. So if the law already exists, where does it come from?
While I don’t subscribe to the notion that might makes right, from a purely objective, amoral standpoint, might certainly makes. But most people eschew violent force. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense because violent force is 1) energetically expensive for the organism engaging in it, and 2) provokes retaliation and thus a higher risk that one might be worse off because he decided to engage in violence. However, that’s not why most people eschew it in their own minds. They’d say they eschew it because they see it as “wrong”.
Unfortunately, mere threats of violence can create a chilling effect, as people also don’t want to be injured (let alone brutalized). Take neighborhood bullies, for example. They typically don’t maintain “asymmetrical bargaining power” due to actual exercise of aggression, but mainly by the mere threat thereof. It seems like their bargaining power is also maintained because others in the neighborhood, for whatever reason(s), are unable or unwilling to stand up to the bully, either alone or united. Of course, simple avoidance is often the cheapest strategy, but the bully can respond by actively looking for his victims.
My point here is that these are, for better or worse, aspects of human nature that must be taken into account when talking about human concepts such as law.
<< My interest is in answering the question: what laws can we expect to be produced? This is a pretty important question. It will be the laws consumers demand, obviously. We could stop here, or we could ask: how will that work, what will be the mechanism? >>
You can not expect anything. I do not think that matters. One popular judge could provide written documentation with extra notes on how he reasoned on every single case. A different popular judge could simply be a smart-ass who makes shit up on a whim – his ruling today being completely unpredicatable and possibly contrary to what he ruled last year. A third popular judge could be a combination – like Judge Judy – and make a business out of his services by syndicating it on television.
I think it sounds like you are expecting a free market in law to produce something that is similar to how our common states document things. That is not a priori the case.
Try to step into the shoes of a primitivistic community or tribe whereby everybody is illiterate. They have a wise elder shaman to whom everybody goes for advice. Now imagine he is sooooooooo respected that he is also considered the high authority in arbitrating disputes. Such can be a dispute resolution system in a libertarian society.
I tend to like the Judge Judy model even though I think she is an idiot. Justice could be a better money-making industry if we just let it! I can eat bucket-loads of reality televsion. I think I could even be a rockstar judge myself. Nobody needs an education to determine right from wrong. The problem is that modern lawyers have artificially created their own industry such that nobody but them can understand what is even being discussed amongst themselves – thus, the rest of us who are subject to their nonsense are essentially illiterate.
So how come there’s so much aggression in the world? Why did that safeguard fail?
Economics makes no assumptions about human nature, in the sense that we do not assume any particular set of ends that men tend to have. It is irrelevant to economics what a man’s ends are. We just take it as a given that men have ends, and analyze how means can be used to achieve those ends. So it is with the economics of law. We don’t assume either that “most people are good” or that “most people are bad”.
The only assumption made when discussing the economics of law is that laws are demanded, which is to say simply that conflicts of interest over scarce resources happen, and there is sometimes a need for third-parties to arbitrate and find resolutions to conflicts, that is, to determine/decide/declare who the rightful owner of the disputed scarce resource is.
What do you mean by “basic”? How detailed are these “basic principles of law” which nearly everyone agrees upon?
Again, define “basic”. And explain why while most people are good, most people are not libertarian (or even close!).
I view law as applied political philosophy. Politicial philosophy is concerned with who owns what, so when conflicts arise, arbitrators necessarily apply some politicial philosophy to resolve the dispute. I view morality as much broader and includes personal ethics like believing that lying or adultery or drug-use is wrong, as well as political ethics which is about which acts are wrong and deserve punishment. But YMMV with those definitions.
Yes I would. I don’t see any reason to distinguish between “making”, “applying” and “interpreting” here necessarily. It really doesn’t matter whether a judge makes decisions by referring to a logical law code, or custom, or the Bible, or just making random decisions. If two parties go to him to resolve a dispute then whatever decision he makes is, by definition, a law that he has produced. Obviously we would expect logical courts, and ones that follow customs and precedents, etc, would be the most successful courts, because we would assume these things would be demanded. But see above about making no assumptions about what men’s ends are, when doing economics.
It is you that seems to be defining law in terms of already existing law, which leads to an obvious infinite regression problem. So your last question you should be asking yourself, not me.
I agree with all the above…
… but I see it as irrelevant when discussing the economics of law. Why not leave empirical evidence about ends out of the analysis? Else it’s not really economics, is it?
Clearly I have still not been clear enough, because you’re still referring to (speculating about) how laws might be produced. An interesting subject in itself, but this is not what I’m talking about here.
Let me try to put this another way…
As I understand it, public choice economics is the field that examines how public opinion (that is, what particular laws people demand), gets translated into laws that are actually produced. The mechanism here is to use the power of lobbying or voting to get the state to pass a demanded law. We know this is a terrible mechanism, but still, it is the mechanism that exists now. But without a state, when the field of producing laws is open to competition, what then will be the mechanism by which public opinion translates into particular laws? I posit that this mechanism is through negotiations and settlements after (although they will probably be made before in most cases) actual conflicts arise. Hence bargaining power is the key concept here.
Trulib, thanks for clarifying your position. I think I was somewhat mistaken about it, as my comments below will hopefully illustrate.
I’m not sure what you mean by “so much”, but I’d say that any real answer to why that safeguard failed must be long and complicated. Suffice it for now to say that, in this day and age (and for a long time historically), people seem to have been indoctrinated against their moral instincts.
Do you consider economics to include violent means in its area of study? Why or why not? How about praxeology in general?
Why assume then that non-violent means of dispute resolution are preferred over violent means of dispute resolution?
Right now, by “basic” I’d say I mean at least the non-aggression and homesteading principles. As I’ve noted before, until the advent of legal positivism, jurisprudence in its own terms dealt with “discovering” (more accurately, articulating or formalizing) and interpreting the law. The “law codes” of ancient societies (such as Medieval Ireland) apparently became increasingly elaborate and refined over time as new legal decisions were laid down and factored into the existing legal corpus.
I’d say that libertarianism is at least close to the natural state of man. Most people are probably more libertarian than they might think, but they’ve been indoctrinated from an early age with anti-libertarian ideas. Of course, this indoctrination has been something of an evolutionary process.
Thank you very much for providing those definitions. I do notice that they differ widely from my own. To me, “politics” necessarily concerns the state; therefore, I must define “political philosophy” as “philosophy that concerns the state”. Following that definition, a political philosophy that advocates no state is a contradiction in terms.
On the other hand, I make a distinction between “morality” and “ethics”. The fomer is negative – it concerns what one must not do. The latter is positive – it concerns what one should do. And this difference arises from the difference between actions which cause physical harm or intrusion and actions which don’t. But if it helps, you could consider my “morality” and “ethics” to be essentially the same as your “political ethics” and “personal ethics”, respectively.
Well, I understand now that, in a purely economic analysis of law, legal methodology doesn’t matter per se. However, I’m not sure whether I agree that economics cannot (let alone should not) make any assumptions regarding men’s ends.
If the law already exists, how can it be produced? It’s really a semantic issue, as I’ve explained before. If you want to define “law” as “refinement of pre-existing legal principles”, then it does look like new “laws” can be produced. But I don’t think there’s an infinite-regression problem here, as again it seems to me that the basis for law/morality is instinctual. Where did our instincts come from? Evolution.
Here I finally realized that our viewpoints are different in this discussion. You’ve been taking a purely economic viewpoint of law; I haven’t. Still, economics – depending on how you define it – isn’t necessarily the entirety of human action. I daresay that discussions of law/morality must take into account all of human action, not only the economic part of it (the definitional caveat notwithstanding). In other words, a purely economic analysis of law would seem IMHO to be incomplete.
That suffices. My point is that there really is no safeguard at all, not even our moral instincts. It is hardly a criticism of Friedman’s analysis to say that it leaves the NAP “up for grabs” or “allows for statism”, because he is just looking at the world as it is. If an economic analysis of law excluded the possibility of a state or somehow safeguarded the NAP, it would be rather useless because states are possible and nothing safeguards the NAP.
Yes, of course. Power and Market, for example, is an economics book.
Because if we don’t assume this, there is nothing to study. It would be like trying to study the car industry without making the assumption that there is demand for cars. If there was no demand, there’d be no industry to study.
What I mean is, how specific is this basic law code? Refer to my original post critiquing Rothbard: are you using the term “basic” to mean something broad or narrow? For example, would a pro-IP view be considered compatible with the basic principles - or would you simply call a pro-IP court an “outlaw court” and be done with it? Or how about a court with a non-Blockean view of abortion? How much scope for interpretation is there before you consider a court to have strayed outside these “basic principles” (which “all reasonable courts” agree upon in the Rothbardian conception)?
Are you starting to see why Rothbard’s “basic law code” umbrella conception of anarchy is flawed?
That’s all very interesting. It’s remarkable that we can understand each other at all with such different definitions!
Are you making an argument against Misesian economics as a whole, here? If so, this surely deserves it’s own thread. Or did you mean to say “economics of law” in your last sentence? (In which case, why would economics of law be different to economics of anything else?)
Yes we are taking different viewpoints. I am taking a purely economic viewpoint in this discussion. A few days ago, you were, I think, effectively denying the existence of the whole subject the economics of law. This was apparent when you dismissed Charles’ IP dispute example, by citing Kinsella’s convincing argument against IP, as if this was relevant. And when you were not taking the idea of a market for laws seriously, using scare quotes and such.
Of course a purely economic analysis of law is incomplete. There is lots to say about ethics, morality, jurisprudence, legal procedures, legal methodology, etc, which are all relevant to law. But a “complete” analysis of law that does not include the economics of law - specifically examining the mechanism through which we would expect demand for particular laws to shape the laws that are produced - would be lacking.
