Fair enough but with the private courts, if the two parties involved beling to two different courts which have differing views, then who gets to decide which way it goes and what is to be done about it if court A says “screw your third party and screw your court system, we have more guns”.
The problem I have with private courts is they either seem to lack the power to enforce their laws or when and if they would have the power to enforce their laws upon those who don’t align with that particular court in case it is somehow decided as such, I think you can easily see that as an initiation of force against the party who does not agree?
Private courts seem to reek of moral relativism in a way, I don’t see how one court can justify ruling in a particular way compared to another if there isn’t one overarching set of at least basic minimum rules. Which again leads to the very same thing: who’s going to enforce those basic rules against groups that don’t care about them, and based on what moral right?
With private courts and disputes between “subjects” of courts with different opinions, it seems to me that the right and wrong has nothing to do with abstract law or justice in whatever form but with whose court can buy the biggest guns and basicly ignore the smaller ones (ofcourse, you can argue that the one who can buy the biggest guns is always right, but then again it doesn’t seem all too satisfying when placed alongside all the talk of “no initiation of force” and such). Intuitively it seems to me that private courts in that way would go from being a “court” to just a private militia/attack dog.
So we’re basicly back to democracy and voting to ensure popular/majority support of a particular rule?
As for private military forces: armies require intelligence on enemy activities, otherwise there is no way to know whether the threat is real or not in real life situations. Who’s going to pay a free market variety of the CIA and such?
Substitute “private courts” with “state courts” and the problem remains. This in particular does not pose a huge problem for states with varying laws, why should it for competing courts?
Why does this “problem” vanish with the state? There is no issue with enforcing their laws (in multifarious ways, including ostracism), and if the defendant has an issue with it they may appeal it.
Substitute “private courts” with “state courts” and it sounds about right.
I think the solution is out there, but playing the devil’s advocate it still doesn’t seem satisfyingly clear yet.
I don’t mean this in a bad way but the arguement of “the other guy has the same problem” doesn’t really cut it as far as I’m concerned when talking about changing something; why go through changing it if the problems remain the same regardless of the change.
If purchasing power is the only deciding factor I don’t see what would keep a random millionnaire from literally turning me into a slave since he can afford bigger guns than I can.
I also don’t see how private courts deal with for example women who are forced into prostitution. If you don’t have the money to buy yourself into a court, you’re outside of the law basicly?
the rich arent a homogenous class that want to enslave the poor. they might also want to spend money on facilitating true justice, maybe so they can enjoy justice themselves. Courts which provide justice would surely be well enough endowed to not be bothered by crisis at dissapointing outlier rogue ‘rich people’ . its bad business to chase a few shiny dollars and lose everything .the mass market serves the poor and not the rich anyhow. how much revenue is there in the auto industry, divided out between luxury cars and cars that appeal to the mass consumer? the big money is in selling to the little guy. in a world where people are more likely to earn their dmvp (i.e. not a statist world with monopolies etc.) you can expect the outlier 'wealthiest people in the world, to be wealthy by a lesser margin.
also buy ‘rich guy having it in for you’ insurance if its such a big worry.
If the proposed “solution” (i.e. the state) solves nothing, why keep it? It isn’t so much having the “same problem” as it is having it and having it worse, now is it?
Why is it the only “deciding factor”?
Why would they have no recourse? It is true though, if you do not have the resources (money or otherwise) to defend yourself and procure justice, you are by no means entitled to its provision at the expense of others…
I form a group with a bunch of people I know, let’s imagine for a moment that we’re all extremely rich for whatever reason (perhaps because we first built up our fortune in a purely capitalistic world) and we’re sufficiently numerous. We decide to buy ourselves an army and physicly enslave several capitalist enclaves (divide and conquer as it were). We feel like it.
It’s all a matter of taste, right? I read the texts that were linked to, and I quote:
I don’t know where you guys all live, I’m from Belgium and let me tell you something: experience says that multiculturalism does not work; if there isn’t peaceful living now there’s no way there would be if everybody has their own court system on top of it. Sharia law here alongside Western law? No thanks. I don’t want my neighbour’s hands getting cut off because somebody accused him of stealing bread; neither do I want to live in an area where women are murdered if they get raped, etc. Those are pretty basic and uncompromisable disagreements that lead to conflict because compromise on the basis of “let’s trade” is not an option there; if it isn’t for me than it isn’t for a lot of people so what else than conflict is there.
My morality isn’t that one, and while that’s as I am perfectly aware of the entire point (everybody disagrees so 1 set of laws is absurd), in an absolute way you either commit to and prove a categorical imperative (which to me seems pretty unlikely, but feel free to give it a go) or you have moral relativism and your point of view is as arbitrary as anybody elses. How can this lead to anything but full blown civil war if it is tried to make it exist next to eachother, it’s on the edge of civil war already as it is in some neighbourhoods.
Anyway, to continue with the example: my private court says I own you (that’s what unites me and my cronies), yours says I am not allowed to initiate force against you. I however don’t care about what you think I “should” do and I don’t care about letting a neutral party intermediate, your “should” does not count for anything with me and my militia is bigger because I’m a millionnaire and you happen to be in a position of relative poverty and I happen to be in a non-benevolent mood, I simply have no reason to care about your objections in this scenario. I don’t see how that’s any better or any less unlikely than state oppression. You can perfectly be a millionaire psychopath, and there’s nothing stopping you from joining up with others.
Purchasing power is here then the only “deciding factor” because it’s the only thing that can enforce its will as the only enforcement comes from buying more or better arms than the guy with lesser purchasing power. “Should” means nothing to “is” in the world of practical reality. As the saying goes, “where’s your god now” when you’re being nailed to a cross by men with clubs and spears. You say you’d have a machine gun to defend yourself? Fine in theory, in reality there’s absolutely nothing to keep a different group from accumulating more purhcasing power (=force) than you, I doub’t that any of you is the omega man, there’s always a faster gun out there as they say and there’s no reason why he and his group should be benevolent and why you and your group will be able to stand up against it as a certain and a priori fact. Every single one of you, individually or combined, is just as likely to be caught with your pants down by the group of psychopath millionnaires. Think about aggressive versions of Howard Hughes.
Force is the only thing that matters, and if force is decided by purchasing power I don’t see how that makes it any less arbitrary in any way at all. That’s the key thing I’m questioning here, beyond talk of good and evil. What makes your court less arbitrary than mine and what recourse do you have if you have relatively less purchasing power (=force) even if you consider moral justice to be on your side. I don’t see the difference between that and state opression, I in fact see it as much more likely and a pretty quick degeneration into the realm of bad gangster movies with a few “dons” running around calling the shots. “Where’s your freedom now”. Remember the scene from the Soprano’s with the guy reading Anarchy, State and Utopia before being scared shitless and withdrawing his testimony? Talk is cheap.
As to “why keep it” (democratic system and state) : the essential difference is that the state is what social evolution produced, if there is no amelioration because the problem stays the same then there is no (economic or moral) ratio to change it, the material of the blade doesn’t matter as long as it is hard or sharp enough to kill me, and similarly it doesn’t matter whether I’m protected from a physical assault by paper or by cardboard, I’ll still get cut up by the raging psycho. So yes, you have to have reasons for changing it beyond “this is bad as well”. Otherwise it’s purely arbitrary and you have nothing more to base your opinion on than anybody else (in a moral sense).
Added to that it also seems that overarching legislation is more cost effective than 1000 different varieties, simply because 1 legislation means no transaction costs. Just like when you have to do business in 1 currency or with 10 different ones, the group with one currency is more efficient and will ceteris paribus outclass the other. In the end the product of natural selection is all that remains, and apparantly at this point it’s democracy because it quite simply wouldn’t be here if it weren’t as the original state was anarcho capitalism; how could it have been anything else if that’s what natural law is and we evolved from nature. Did civilization defy the laws of evolution? If it does not, what other option is there than to evolve to a system of singular law if given enough time, because numerically more different legislations equal transaction costs between them, less means less transaction costs and ceteris paribus higher efficiency. What other outcome is there over the span of 5000 years than to end up with 1 currency and 1 legislation because efficiency demands the transaction costs to be eradicated.
The only way that civic reality as it is today exist is because there is an economic/evolutionary ratio behind it; democracy evolved because non-democratic groups were torn up internally and either killed eachother or got taken over and outproduced by groups that did not have to deal with the constant friction in its physical manifestion as civil strife. Democracies that vote themselves into collectivism die, those that vote for minimal states and clear abstract rules end up prosperous, but they still remain as a democracy and serve their purpose as negating the cost of constant civil war. If not reality and history would be counter-evolutionary. It has been tried, and yes it has failed but apparantly it has failed less than anything else and that seems good enough to justify its existence in a biological and economic sense; much like human eyesight is inferior to that of other animals but it gets the job done well enough to allow humanity to dominate the earth.
That’s why I personally am not an anarcho capitalist (“yet”, perhaps) but consider myself to be a libertarian, I don’t see any satisfying way around stuff like courts and military, even by the arguements presented here, simply because if it was the most efficient it would have stayed that way instead of having evolved into what it is now. The axiom “divide and conquer” stands for a reason. This does not automaticly mean total unity or complete collectivism, it’s all a matter of degrees and the degree I pick is an arbitrary one, just like yours is, and that’s where the trouble starts.
Theory from behind our computer is one thing, practice is another. Just like in theory all mathematics is the same grade of difficulty because - in theory - mathematics is pure logic and outside the realm of “difficult or easy”, in practice 1+1=2 isn’t of the same difficulty level to solve as advanced mathematical problems while in theory it is, as “logic” and mathematics as such cannot be “difficult” or “easy” regardless of the volume of the formula. The theoretical homogenous difficulty level is in practice heterogenous due to human beings being limited entities, whether you like it or not. That’s why i don’t like presenting any theory of society as utopia, it goes against the human condition.
That’s not saying that even minimum state is not an evil, I fully agree, but if it wasn’t a practical necessity it wouldn’t have formed on a world wide scale and remained where communism for example hasn’t, because the non-democratic group would have taken over, while now the democratic group is the dominant force by a very long shot.
Loads upon loads of data show that minimum state wields the highest results, and the original “anarcho capitalist world” died out just like neanderthales did. I don’t mean that as an offence but that seems to me the way the cookie crumbles (which does not mean that I like it).
In the end justice in a moral sense has nothing to do with private courts, it’s whim accompanied by the money to use brute force against dissenting opinions. Just like there is no guarantee that millionnaires will have their militia’s bust in your door and rape your wife and do so unpunished (I use rape as it usually invokes “strong” reaction), there is no guarantee that they won’t either.
You might agree with being allowed to rape poor women who can’t afford legal counsel or can’t as many mercenaries as a different group, I don’t see any moral basis for it.
And here we get to the basis of it, I say the same thing to most socialists I encounter: it would be an entirely different story to me if you allowed it to just boil down to arbitrariness and personal preference, both on your part and that of others. But I don’t see where your (and consequently my) claim on “absolute truth” is in essence more morally justified than the idea of any other crackpot.
Force and the Nietschean will is what ends up deciding who dominates and who does not. Moral relativism seems to be the only logically defendable starting point, all other valuation from there on is then de facto arbitrary and its implementation depends on the force that can be summoned to impose it. That’s fine, but if so then all talk about “natural law” and all that comes with it simply is superfluous and it boils down to “I think I’ll have enough money to be the guy calling the shots, society’s got me down at this point in time but woe their bones if they allowed me to be free”. It smells like a particular brand of slave morality to me if you take classical liberalism to the point of blaming the state of keeping you down, to the same degree as it is the case with full blown socialism.
OK, I am going to be polite, and suggest you read up on the topic before musing ignorantly about it - possibly starting with a book like Anarchy and the Law or The Market for Liberty, then coming back to discuss the topic, having disabused yourself of your misconceptions thereof (esp. if you think there is actually “loads upon loads of data” in anyway “proving” that minarchism is superior relative to anarcho-capitalism.) Musings upon morality, imagined distinctions regarding “theory” and “practice”, exaltations of the role of “force”, Nietzschean ramblings and so on are all obiter, to be honest, when the basic problem here is an utter ignorance of how a particular market functions.
Your politeless is noted, your patronizing tone as well and I don’t care very much for it. If it’s all so clear to you I’m not stopping you from explaining it, that’s why I asked it and why I genuinely engage in the conversation, I don’t need the attitude and I don’t see where my own actions warranted it.
So just to get this straight, you’re saying that theory = practice and force doesn’t come into play into enforcing your set of rules?
Saying “you’re ignorant” is too easy, I don’t mind you not feeling like typing out a full reply but I also don’t see why I should accept your position on good faith either. I don’t force you to participate into the conversation, if you don’t feel like adding something useful, then don’t.
No, I am saying trying to dismiss something as “theory” (as if the word is meant on its own to somehow be denigrating in character) is not going to work with me (especially if you want to somehow claim minarchism is superior to erm… anything), and if you want to understand our position on law the best way is to read up any one of the volumes on it, then come back to iron out any misunderstandings on the topic, rather than groping about in the dark - given that these books provide answers to these questions to begin with (e.g. “poor” victims letting a lawyer take their case to court by offering as reward a share of the restitution they’re paid - this already happens to an extent…) You will waste less of both your and my time doing so. There is no “patronising” tone, I am merely suggesting you stick to what is relevant and omit anything else.
Which books have you read on the topic then? Because you are raising questions addressed in the literature on the topic seemingly oblivious to answers provided to them, hence my claim you are ignorant of the materials…
I don’t denigrate “theory”, if I did we wouldn’t be having this conversation in the first place as theory is what we’re limited to, but I acknowledge that theory and practice can be entirely different things just like intentions and results don’t have to coïncide.
In theory “poor” victims can get a lawyer take their case to court by offering a share of the restitution they’re paid. In practice, there’s no money in defending a woman in the hands of an otherwise broke pimp who drank and gambled it all away. The questions of whether or not the woman “should” be helped or not is one thing, but I’m not claiming to have all the answers, I even come to inquire after them since you seem to do, so there we are.
But make no mistake about it, my willingness to admit hiatus in my views does not equal to a lack of intelligence on my part. I don’t deal in dogma and I have no need for a religion. Your previous post was polite, the one before that wasn’t and had no place in a conversation in which I’m trying to understand your views in an honest way while nothing forces you to participate if you feel like you’re wasting your time, that’s all I have to say about the matter. Perhaps I misinterpreted the tone, perhaps I didn’t, let’s leave it at that and be done with it.
Minarchism is what seems the lesser of evils to me, the problems are there and I fully recognize those inconsistencies and the fact that I at the moment have no answer to them. I say that at the moment, taken the inconsistencies as they are, my opinion is de facto an arbitrary and subjective value judgement: I have no “absolute” to call on aside from my own preference, and its success is entirely dependant on the force I can summon in support of my ideal.
However, until convinced otherwise I have no reason to change my views as they currently seem to stand as the least problematic to me, Ockham’s razor if you will. I am willing to change them if logically proven false, if not we again would not be having this conversation. It is, however, something very different to accept reality as reality, A=A, as opposed to having the absolute ethical normative truth in your possession.
You however seem to start from an entirely different angle: if I gather it correctly you claim that in your view of things there is nothing arbitrary; you have all the answers as based on an absolute objective and universal truth, and personal preference has nothing to do with it. Natural law might bring you some solace if this is in fact the case, but reading along with the extensive (to put it mildly) thread about it I don’t consider it as “proven” beyond doubt just quite yet, but maybe you’re holding out on something?
In short my point of view is an acknowledgment of its shortcomings and its justification comes from what I percieve to be best given what I myself have up to now logically proven beyond doubt, with my personal preferences backing up that which is still logically lacking. But you claim absolute truth it seems (if not, then please explain what you are claiming then) so I would very much like to be “enlightened”.
Having said that, if you don’t want to continue the conversation then perhaps somebody else who doesn’t feel that explaining these things is a waste of time is willing to do it.
Edit: as to what books I’ve read about the subject (even though I doubt numbers mean much in things like this), these are the ones which I think are relevant on the subject of (political) morality:
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf
ISBN 978-8172241643
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essay on the Freedom of the Will
ISBN 0486440117
Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
ISBN 0451191145
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
ISBN 9780141188621
Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept
ISBN 0385514727
Desiderius Erasmus, Lof der Zotheid
ISBN 9025311296
Eric Hoffer, Reflections on the Human Condition
ISBN 1933435143
Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind
ISBN 1933435097
Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts on The Nature of Mass Movements
ISBN 0060505915
Francois Voltaire, Candide
ISBN 9780143039426
Francois Voltaire, The Philosophical Dictionary
ISBN 014044257X
Friedrich August von Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
ISBN 041540424X
Friedrich August von Hayek, The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism
ISBN 0415041872
Friedrich August von Hayek, The Road to Serfdom
ISBN 0415253896
Friedrich Nietzsche, Basic Writings of Nietzsche
ISBN 9780679783398
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
ISBN 014044923x
Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the prejudices of morality
ISBN 978-0521599634
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals
ISBN 978019283617
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche
ISBN 0140150625
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will To Power
ISBN 0394704371
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
ISBN 0140047484
Geert Mak, In Europa
ISBN 9789045003726
George Orwell, Animal Farm
ISBN 0451526341
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
ISBN 014118776X
Isaiah Berlin, Liberty
ISBN 978-0199249893
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
ISBN 0393317552
John Milton, Paradise Lost
ISBN 019280619X
Michael White, Machiavelli: A Man Misunderstood
ISBN 0349115990
Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom
ISBN 0226264211
Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince
ISBN 0140449159
Plato, The Republic
ISBN 0140449140
Roger Scruton, A Short History of Modern Philosophy
ISBN 0415267633
Robert Wright, Nonzero: History, Evolution & Human Cooperation
ISBN 0349113343
Samuel Beckett, Waiting For Godot
ISBN 0571058086
Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash Of Civilizations
ISBN 074323149X
Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle
ISBN 0393007693
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
ISBN 0393059952
Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id
ISBN 0393001423
Sigmund Freud, The Future of an Illusion
ISBN 0393008312
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo
ISBN 0393001431
Steven D. Levitt, Freakonomics: The Hidden Side of Everything
ISBN 0061234001
Theodore Dalrymple, The Necessity of Preconceived Ideas
ISBN 1594032025
Theodore Dalrymple, The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
ISBN 1566635055
Theodore Dalrymple, The Mandarins and the Masses
ISBN 1566636434
Although I contend that personal reflection and critical conversation, both of which I’ve done quite a bit of, can add as much as reading a book.
What is your thesis on? What is the degree you’re trying for?
Externalities are almost by definition caused by a lack of property rights. This is not an Austrian claim, this is the mainstream view. The problem is that is is difficult or impossible to enforce certain types of property rights. Air is a good example. Is that a problem of government or of the market? Such a question is pointless for this discussion I think. Externalities exist, period. The question is: should government provide public goods/Pigouvian taxes to alleviate the problem. If you believe government provision will make things worse overall, then the answer is no. If you believe some government action is better than nothing, the answer is yes.
You’re never going to get an adequate answer to how a “pure” market system would deal with massive pollution, so don’t go that route. Take a public choice approach to externalities overall and you’ll get more convincing results.
Also, saying you’re “as die-hard laissez-faire as it gets” is a bad attitude. This isn’t a “who’s more hardcore” contest. It’s a bad idea to come at everything from that standpoint.
This is off topic, and in no ways meant to be taken wrongly, but you do sound very much influenced by Dalrymple, esspecially with respect to is empiricists attitude about social philosophy.
It is still evil. Where is the evil in anarcho-capitalism? This myth about the wealthy killing and enslaving their customers?
We’re grown ups here. The notion that the successful see the rest of humanity as fodder or cattle is leftist claptrap. Who has done the most killing in this world? Secular ideologues. Who kills more people, the state or private individuals? Who tortures? Who murders? Who steals?
We’re all for voluntary societies where people embrace free exchange under a system of property rights. How minarchism, which can still steal from you, still take you to war, still mass murder, and still force you to kill or be killed for it is superior, I suppose is a matter of perspective.
The state, legally, is a complete fiction. No one signs a contract with it, and no one can secede from it. The state can kill you, without consequence under sovereign immunity, and at the same time, it is supposedly charged with protecting your individual rights. It can take your property, and yet it is charged with protecting your individual rights. It can jail you for what you do to yourself, and yet it is charged with protecting your individual rights.
Minarchism is a farce, and that is being too kind.
I already have a bachelor’s degree (3 years) in accountancy and fiscal law, did my “thesis” (don’t know the exact English word for the equivalent of thesis in a bachelor’s degree, I’m not a native English speaker) on the synchronisation of European anti-money laundering legislation. Currently I’m getting a master’s degree (2 years extra, of which I have 1 to go) in trade sciences (sometimes called “applied economic sciences”, depending on the school), specialising in strategic management.
Based on my thesis proposal last year concerning the flaws in the egalitarian interpretations of the capabilities approach (a proposed alternative to the basic needs and utility approaches) I got the ok to write my final thesis about a negative liberty interpretation of the CA. Basicly the idea is to make a blueprint for libertarianism/minarchism using CA semantics, while the CA has pretty much exclusively been used for what I consider to be the egalitarian purposes its author more or less intended it for. However, I think it doesn’t have to be that way and I could “use their own weapons against them” so to speak; which intrigued my promotors apparantly.
Alternatively, it could as well be adapted to suit the normative law structure of a “private court” (I still have a little under a year to turn it in, it isn’t set in stone as to how to approach the subject). That’s about as concise as I can explain it within the span of a few sentences Does it make any sense?
My promotors however told me to cut back on being “too militant” based on some essays I wrote over time. In true economic fashion I don’t feel like creating more trouble than it’s worth; I’m just after the “master” title and be done with it. To be honest, in practice it doesn’t matter too much, I can play devil’s advocate if need be to make sure that I pass, but that’s not how I work. If at all possible to do so, without costing me a year of my life because they shoot it down, I’d like to write my thesis “honestly” and in good conscience, defending my own views even if they’re unpopular. But to do that I need to make sure that they “can’t catch me” in my arguementation. That’s why I’m here, to see if I can learn more about what to avoid or how I can fill in the gaps and answer the personal questions I still have aside from just using the info I gather for the purposes of the thesis. The whole thesis thing is of a secondary nature, I just mentioned it “for fluff” if you will.
However, if you wish you can read a part of one of the essays composing the thesis proposal over here: link
Well, apparantly I’m not as die hard as I first thought I was before this conversation got started. I agree, I don’t have a need to be “more hardcore” for the sake of it; I try to back up what I say by understanding it
Like I said, there is no easy way to answer the question “how would ‘the market’ deal with externalities.” Most people include the provision of public goods in the list of responsibilities for “minarchist” states anyway. Law and national defense are public goods. Externalities are just the other side of the coin. I’m sure you could find a way to argue that externalities are a violation of negative rights. I think its plausible that air pollution is a violation of some negative right. The it would fall under the government’s domain.
Essentially, this a way of sidestepping the issue. I don’t know if it’s what you’re looking for but I don’t think you are going to find anything else, other than a point by point refutation of the rationale for government action against all conceivable externalities.
I thought you agreed that there is no economic incentive to instigate a war? Well then, where is your consistency?
Why would a millionaire try to enslave me when he can get a better deal hiring me? According to your logic, he will go spend his earned wealth on guns, risk financial damage and physical injury or death in a potential violent battle just so he can enslave me, then bare the costs of maintaining my slavery and keeping me captive. Not to mention that he now expects consumers of his products to be indifferent about his ethics?
Even if you ignore the above and I voluntarily sell myself to slavery, there is really no exploitative profit from slavery. Why? read Mises!
It is much more likely that a very rich man can buy unethical privileges in your Utopian small government system. You are the one who is maintaining the monopoly on law and violence. You are the one who is keeping a political process that actually benefits by accepting legal bribes. You are basically keeping the legal channel to steal and rob. I think you have it exactly in reverse. In your system the rich man can buy the law, in ours, he remains a criminal.
Does it make any sense?