Anarchy is not the same as the absense of law. The Rothbardians on this forum advocate the NAP as the law. Others, such as myself, advocate common law. Statutory law, which is derived from governments, is what you have been referring to. But, as I just stated, it is not the only form of law. And predictably (for some), I’m going to refer you to these two threads for further reading:
Clayton makes my point for me. How do you answer him here:
In a stateless society, it appears that an aggressor would have no incentive to seek non-violent resolution of a dispute with his victim. After all, an aggressor usually will not attack unless he reasonably believes he can get away with the attack in the first place.
That is, he has already calculated that he can win a martial contest with the victim. Therefore, the victim must be able to present a sufficient threat to the accused in order to motivate the aggressor to come to court. That is, both parties must have an incentive to seek a peaceful settlement of the matter. Law and security, then, are inseparable. You cannot have real rights without the capacity to present a real threat to aggressors who refuse peaceful settlement of disputes. In other words, if you steal my television, and I send you a notice saying, “You must appear in court regarding the matter of the theft of my television,” I must also be able to take forcible action in the event you refuse to settle the matter through non-violent means. Otherwise, you will simply ignore my summons.
In a stateless society, the strong man has no need to go to court. He can just intimidate you into acquiescence, or outright kill you. What mechanism prevents this in a state of anarchy?
I’ve spoken directly to this issue, saying that ultimately you need a court of last resort that can compel attendance, and since anything society imbues with the right to use coercion in society on behalf of society becomes a state entity, does not a court of last resort (not to exclude private courts naturally) become an essential structure in any free society?
And if you want an example of the strong man in a (quasi) stateless society, look only to the mafia, whom exist unlawfully, and use the worst sort of intimidation to get their way, and would exist in exactly the same manner in a stateless society. In fact, I contend that any truly stateless anarch society would actually encourage the creation of multiple mafia-like private mobs, grouped together for protection against other mobs, because any group will be more powerful than an individual. Individual existence will be impossible in an anarch society governed by the strengths of groups, where whom you belong to will matter more than principles, more than rights. Rather than banish aggression, you will have instituted it completely by neutering societal use of responsive coercion, of justice.
In such a place there are no more rights, there is only the will of the strong men, and the strongest man’s will is “law”.
this is also subject to the calculation problem. Only a private solution will suffice. In a private law society, private individuals would attain their own means of protection through market activity.
there are no weak men. The strong men find it to be profitable to settle disputes peaceably.
could this court be a sort of “legitimate strongman” who compels obedience? So you solve the problem by redefining it as a solution. Nice.
no. The threat of violence that compels attendance is inseparable from the dispute itself. No “court of last resort” is necessary.
are you suggesting that the mafia exist in some anarchic region somewhere?
thats an interesting and unique assertion. I would like to know why you think this is so.
aside from implying this would be a bad thing by referring to your unsupported assertion above, you actually depart the field of praxeology altogether here because groups are made up of individuals and must be understood as such. The idea that “any group will be more powerful than an individual” in a world with nuclear weapons is laughable in the extreme. Your entire criticism suffers from a lack of imagination. Humans have to communicate in order to coordinate their actions. Individuals command their limbs at the speed of thought. In tactical terms, this means that individuals usually have faster ooda loops (boyd cycle) than groups of individuals.
I hope you realize this is just emotive prediction, devoid of substance.
But you see the problem, don’t you? What about those whom have already been overpowered, made slaves to some strong man, and now cannot by any means obtain private protection. How is there justice where only those who can afford protection can afford justice. And not just slaves, but children, the mentally impaired, the elderly, the very poor, and a host of other people whom would find your proposition so difficult as to be virtually impossible. What about even the tourist, new in town. No hired protection means they’re free marks for thieves and looters?
No. Societies historically have hired police to enforce justice on a societal-wide scale, to ensure justice reigns wherever they find aggression within the borders of their jurisdiction, and regardless of the wealth or ability to pay of whomever needs help.
There would really be no difference between a society collecitvely hiring a private police force to dispense justice on a societal-wide scale and a government that does the same thing. The minute you begin acting as a collective for any goal, you’re tip-toeing into definitions of government. And when arguments arise as to what laws should be enforced, you’re likely to create some kind of law, and have some method for establishing law.
Except children, the elderly, the poor, and anyone else who has neither the physical muscle nor the ability to purchase as many weapons and henchmen as the richest man in any given anarchic society. Care to explain further, because this claim of yours makes no sense. Of course there are ‘weak’ people.
Perhaps some of them will, but surely some of them will not. You cannot dismiss the strongmen who also prefer being criminals. Whom will not settle disputes peaceably. How does an anarch society compel them to come to court? It cannot.
Only if you come to the offender’s gates with an overwhelming military such that he has no chance were he to fight back is he willing to accept being taken to court. In which case you’re telling me that anyone unable to afford or rent such a force will not receive justice in an anarch society, will not have their rights respected. It will open season on children, the elderly, the weak, the poor, whom can have their rights violated at the merest whim with the surety that no one can harm them.
To mitigate this, the weaker individuals will group together under the banner of a strong man, creating exactly my scenario: mob against mob, mafia against mafia. Now there are no courts at all, there is only open warfare, with wrongs settled by the spilling of blood, Hatfields vs McCoys.
Since it does so with the consent of the entire society, and is used purely for responsive-coercion to establish justice, it is in fact a legitimate strongman. That’s what an essentialist state is, a state limited to responsive-coercion and acting as the ultimate strongman, whose entire existence seeks to establish justice via the upholding of individual rights, no matter who you are or how much money you have.
Not at all. The only way to fight aggression, once words fail, is with coercion to compel the end of that aggression.
We could let family members seek justice. That would be vigilantism, and it generally does not result in justice because the avenger usually goes too far, having nothing to restrain them. They only perpetuate the aggression and provoke more aggression on the other side.
Or we could invest the right of vengeance in a dispassionate third party whom will hear out both sides and use obejctive rules of evidence and court procedures to ensure that the punishment meets the crime. That is true justice.
Explain then, because I think you’re skirting the issue. When you have someone whom has killed a man, and he refuses to go to court to pay for his crime. What then? Suppose the victim had no friends or family. Is the crime simply forgotten by society? Or does society in general have an interest, indeed a need, to oppose murder no matter who is murdered?
The criminal underworld is such an “anarchic region”, is it not? I suggest that the mafia acts much as a criminal organization would in any anarch society. And that what the mafia asks of its members is what would be asked of any group you’d be forced to join just to survive in the chaotic regions “ruled” by anarchy.
Simply because the mafia acts in a lawless manner, and thus a lawless anarchic society should produce similar organizations. I know some here claim an anarchy need not be lawless, however without an ability to compel attendance at a court of last resort you have lawlessness.
You think you’re going to hire a security force to take down the mafia? What happens when the mafia is better armed and manned than your security force. When the security force is bought and paid for themselves, intimidated just like everyone else? We have entire police forces that won’t take on the mafia directly in the US and have to be tackled by specialist federal police forces.
Just because groups are made up of individuals does not mean we cannot speak of groups :\ Come on. I said every individual would need group protection in order simply to survive. The would trade their freedom for compulsed loyalty just to live.
The idea that individuals will be using nuclear weapons is laughable in the extreme. Anything an individual can do a group can do, only multiplied many times. How is that hard to understand.
The ideal is a society that respects individual rights on a widespread basis so that individuals need not join mobs simply for protection from predatory mobs.
I could say the same thing.
-- are you serious. So, you’re telling me that individuals can take on entire armies and win. Right. that happens every day. Like that time Osama Bin Laden singlehandedly killed every member of the Seal Team sent to take him out in his house -- I shouldn’t receive any resistance from you when I say that two or three men can physically overpower any individual, generally.
I’m sure you like to think so. It is a forecast based on principle, rather obvious principle at that.
You want to talk about things like British common law–common law did not arise in an anarch society. It was a society under the thumb of a state. A state that left the peasants relatively alone, but nonetheless prevented large-scale abuses like wars between provinces and the like. The peasants setup their own police to administer their own laws. They may not have had state sanction in doing so, but they did have a state providing stability.
To think you can rip common law out of that overarching context and expect to live in the same peaceful society is beyond naive.
If you want to hide behind the idea that future forecasting is a logical fallacy, as Autolykos loves to do, then I pity you. It should be obvious that none of want to live under tyranny such as bruet communism. And the reason we do not is because we know what would result. We know the result would be aggression over every segment of society. You’re like the communists, faced with this allegation saying, “no one can say the sun will come up tomorrow! You can’t know that!”
Well, I know it. Communism would be a horrible thing to live under and so would anarchy.
I can sum up my entire argument with anarchists, and anyone else, quite neatly:
A society ruled by communism is under the tyranny of communism.
A society ruled by fascism is under the tyranny of fascism.
A society ruled by anarchy is under the tyranny of anarchy.
And a society ruled by justice is under–no tyranny at all. When justice rules, it will fight all injustice and ensure protection of individual rights, leading to the natural emergence of capitalism and a free society.
Why anyone would be against that is beyond me.
The anarchs think it impossible for a nation to remain just forever, and it is. But what if we could cull government when it becomes unjust, becomes aggressive, and start over with again a just state.
If one could create a constitution that kept a nation just and free for just 100 years, and then created a mechanism by which that society could be rebooted at the choice of its citizens, providing another 100 years of freedom, then why would that process ever need to stop? It could continue forever.
The USA had at least 100 years of freedom, and that was with a terribly-written constitution full of holes and power grants in every branch of government. The anarch must by implication assume that no better constitution could ever be written.
Well, I challenge that. And I intend to discover how to write one if no one else will.
who? In this hypothetical scenario that you have created as a strawman for anarchy, who are those people who are too weak to fight back but strong enough to work at productive labor, and who is this strongman who has enough wealth to conquer the calculation problem? Are you aware that slavery cannot compete with capitalist free enterprise, judged purely by productive output? So no, I do not see this problem where, once we convince people to stop allowing themselves to be enslaved by the state, somehow a rich man hires a bunch of other people to enslave these people and force them do what? Operate cnc machines? Make jewelry? What are these slaves doing that makes the slave master so much money, but somehow prevents them from overthrowing him, and why does no one else in society care enough to stop buying his products? Basically I need you to embellish on your hypotheticals a bit, or break it down barney style so the rest of us can see what it is about strongmen that exempts them from the calculation problem.
flip it around, natch. How is there justice when one man is slave to another? Somebody has to provide services, they dont just appear. That guy needs to eat too.
how is that? First of all, children have parents, and responsible parents will purchase protection if the situation calls for it. Those parents are the only ones who are able to determine how much and what sort of protection the children need. No government can do it, no matter how noble or disinterested
I reject the theory of congenital mental illness, and without the state to limit liability and force people to inject themselves and their offspring with chemical and biological warfare agents, there wont be nearly so many mentally ill. However, please tell me how your minimal state would ensure justice on their behalf. I am all ears, convert me to your side.
I really dont know where you go for fun, but typically places that enjoy commerce tend to prefer an orderly, peaceful environment where property rights are respected. Thats because if a guy spends a couple bucks and has a good time, he is likely to do so again. However if he gets robbed, then he will probably go somewhere else next time.
glad to see we agree on something.
someone needs to read Clayton’s posts again. Law comes from settling disputes, it isnt “enforced” it is interpreted. Property rights are enforced, and, I will say this as many times as is necessary, your method for establishing law is subject to the calculation argument. Respond to that and we can make progress
apparently you are unaware of the fact that defense is less costly and difficult than offense by several orders of magnitude. “an armed society is a polite society” Robert Heinlen. Once the richest man exhausts his wealth on weapons then what? He blows up his potential slaves? Your hypothetical has no meat, no bones, and no skin. Its hot air.
you mentioned the elderly, who among all your potential victims are most able to purchase protection, because they have had their entire lives to build wealth. Poor people do not have much to lose, and they need less protection because of it. This is like security 101, the cost of security rises as the value of the equity being protected rises.
neither can a state, BAM! if someone prefers violence to nonviolence, then neither you, nor I, nor the state, nor the constitution, nor the governor, nor anyone else can change their mind. However, you give them a position to aspire to as an agent of the state when you place a monopoly on legitimate violence.
o rly? People never choose to fight, knowing they will likely or certainly die? And you are appealing to history elsewhere in this thread…unbelievable.
well obviously it would take a bit of money to keep a force in the condition necessary to do such a thing, and how else is a guy supposed to earn a living? Of course I will use my private army to provide services for people who cant otherwise afford it. How else could I afford it?
as I said, you lack imagination. You are the archetypal “oh teh noes, anarchy!1!1!1!1!” collectivist pseudo-libertarian. As if markets somehow fail to provide quality goods and services at affordable prices.
ok, how do you obtain the consent of the entire society? Does this entire society exist on one person’s property? do they have the means to exit the property? Did they enter this arrangement with informed consent?
you mean to tell me that it is necessary to coerce people who regard the coercion as legitimate? or do their opinions cease to matter once they fall out of favor with “society”?
limited by what? Whose idea of justice? Who funds this operation, and who sets limits on its expenditures?
really? Are you saying that it is literally impossible to defeat an aggressor without using coercion? Define “coercion” please.
“we” as in whom? I certainly am not stopping any family members of mine from seeking justice. No one elses family members either, for that matter. it seems like you are the one who cannot mind his own business.
I would like to see some support for this. What is the historical basis for your assertion? How does a vigilante suddenly get special powers, like being free from all restraint? What does that even mean? How come the government doesnt get special powers but the vigilante does?
please identify a “dispassionate third party.” please explain how the “right of vengeance” is prevented from continuing the cycle of aggression you mentioned earlier. Please explain what an “objective rule of evidence” would be. Would both parties have to agree to enter the evidence, or could each party enter as much evidence as he wished? Please explain what you mean by “crime” as its unclear if you are talking about a dispute between two people or simply an alleged act that the court is displeased with.
I dont quite understand. How do we know this guy is guilty? Who is accusing him? What if he is refusing to go to that court because that court is biased against his religion? You’re saying he has no right to demand a fair trial? How do you propose to make someone “pay” for murder? Is there a fine? Why is there even a court, just send him a bill.
obviously with all that free time, he must have worked a lot, and therefore had a private detective on retainer, and when he was murdered the p.i. Could have tracked down the killer and brought him to justice, either inside or outside of a court.
youre asking me? It depends on the society. I wold prefer to live somewhere that considered violations of the n.a.p. To be wrong and would seek justice when appropriate. Thats the kind of security that I would pay for on the open market, and most people I know are the same way. Others would not prefer to pay for such a thing, and thats fine with me. I dont think they should be robbed because of my preferences.
trick question. Society in general has no interests.
it is not. That region exists within a state.
yes, but its a mystery why you think that would be the case when they could hire c.i.s. to provide protection and justices forces at a fraction of the expense, and actually get goods and services instead of becoming a serf. You are also alone in thinking that the mafia would not evolve as the world around it changes.
define “lawless.” I think its a weasel word, considering that organized crime like the mafia has a code of expected and prohibited behavior, and you dont consider this to be any sort of law. Your syllogism is also logically false. “mafia acts in a lawless manner” does not imply “anarcic society should produce similar organizations.”
so the united states is a lawless region right now? As we debate? Because ever day in america, people declne to appear at court and the government just charges them. There are literally thousands of fugitives all around us right now, and government cannot do a thing about it. Is this what you mean by lawlessness?
I have no need to “take down” anyone, simply a desire to transact and enjoy my property in peace. My own willingness to invest in protective measures should be sufficient for that, but the marke makes it easy for everyone. Does that answer your question?
it would cost them more than it is worth to get anything out of me. This is the first principle of personal protection.
before hiring them, I performed due diligence and found that out, so I hired somebody else I trust. This is a market, not a monopoly like you are used to. Nobody wants to hire a security firm that is intimidated, corrupt, inefficient, bla bla bla. Why do think we are firing the security monopoly we use now? Duh.
your argument seems to be that all we need is a reboot. How is the reboot supposed to take care of the mafia? Oh teh noes1!1!1!1!1!
yes, its ridiculous to assert that people would choose, let alone have, to cease acting as individuals in order to obtain personal protection services. Its like you forgot that markets exist.
It made me laugh, thinking about how impotent a group of people can be when confronted with certain specific technologies. So I assume that while you were laughing, you also realized how wrong you are.
its hard to understand how you can just hand-wave the entire study of human organizational dynamics away because it undermines your theory. How come the group doesnt overthrow the strongman instead of becoming his slaves?
there is no need for individuals to form mobs.
you certainly could, but it would be wrong.
in the same sense that a group of people “can” do anything an individual is capable of, except on a larger scale, an individual “can” defeat an army, no matter how large. Whats so hard to comprehend about that?
why are they in a physical confrontation? I shouldnt receive much objection when I point out that if three men are wearing hard soled shoes while robbing a house in the dark, that they believe to be unoccuppied and without electricity, and the homeowner is in slippers and has a sword and night vision goggles, the robbers would be in a bad spot for a physical confrontation. you lack imagination, whixh might be why you cannot imagine order without the state.
very well. I shall disabuse you of that notion.
show me how “individual existence” is impossible in any society. Of course “anarch society governed by the strengths of groups, where whom you belong to will matter more than principles, more than rights” is an obvious strawman, you imagine a world where people simply agglutinate out of necessity, forgetting their culture, their pride, and their identities, simply smushing together like so much peanut butter. somehow they reject the state based on principle then immediately cast those principles aside and simply abuse each other. As if a soccer team, upon winning an important game, took to engaging each other in spontaneous streetfights to the death. And how exactly do we “institute aggression” by banishing aggressive institutions?! Why does society suddenly become unable to use responsive coercion? Who regulated that out of the market? You have no argument, just emobabble. Calm down.
So you are telling me that you have never heard of the Barons’ Wars?
you are wrong. The state did not exist at this time. Government was explicitly personal.
its naive for you to consider that society to be peaceful.
actually, its obvious that there are real, live, walking, talking human communists and they are politically active. Its obvious that your predictions are emotive paranoia and your methodology is ad hoc justification for emotive paranoia.
well, yes. Its a matter of definition. Communism, by definition, is tyranny. Minarchism, by definition, is tyranny. A private law society is egalitarian by definition. Your argument is that “a private kaw society is impossible because it would become what we have now! We need what we have now, but different.” lay it out for me praxeologically.
youre like a black sheep in the emancipationalist movement. “I jnow slavery is wrong, but there will always be slaves who cant do regular jobs! If good people dont purchase them at auction and put them to work, then bad people will purchase them and bad people will have all the slaves, all the money, and all the cotton! Its our duty to own slaves and make sure they are happy being slaves!”
anarchy doesnt have a thing to live under. You live under the blue sky. Buy whatever roof you like. You say the market cannot provide roofs, we need to make them out of poison arrows. Right.
??? Do you even know what anarchy means? Its a condition describing a lack of something. How is that tyranny? Words please. Not baseless equivocations.
who is this physical incarnation of justice that you want to rule over society?
wow. Please describe what it means for “justice” to rule and for it to “fight all injustice.”
Thats because you are a full teacup
yes, if constitutions were men then they could act. But theyre not so they cant.
hahaha, doublethink much?
documents contain information. They dont compel adherance to principles. You are engaging in magical thinking.
the funny thing about a charter is that people have to not only read and understand it, but actually follow it. How are you going to compel obedience to your holy document?
True. And let’s suppose you or someone did create an anarchic society. Would you try to stop those who might want to live under a government from forming one? If so, you’re establishing a tyranny of anarchy. Seems pretty obvious.
It’s called law that prevents aggression and concerns itself only with responsive coercion. Don’t be obtuse on purpose.
We already discussed that. Justice rules if you have a republic ruled by just law, meaning non-aggressive responsive coercion-based law. Just law fights aggression within society, minimizing its effects on that society.
Ludicrous, you’re dodging the question with an accusation. Why would you be against a society with a state limited to responsive coercion? You wouldn’t. You just don’t think such a limit is possible long term. But clearly it’s possible for a certain term, maybe 100 years, maybe longer. In which case what really needs to be done is to create a nation-system capable of resetting periodically. Certainly not abandoning the state entirely, including the good things it can do to serve a society, and perhaps must do for society to exist at all without chaos.
A constitution circumscribes the limits of mens’ choices within a society. Don’t be deliberately obtuse again. You’re dodging the question. Again.
Not at all. Even with a rather poorly written constitution, which was still the greatest such document of its time, the nation was free for a significant time period. I could maybe understand anarchist complaints if even the best document in the world could only keep a nation free for say a year or less. But here we had a poor document, one which we could certainly write far better today in the light of history, and it worked for a hundred years. Plug those holes in a new document and you might pass 500 years before tyranny reared again. Either is by far enough time, assuming you build a mechanism for reset into your document.
I love this old canard. It’s a favorite of the anarchists, to simply dismiss all law as violable and therefore supposedly without relevance to governing a society. They don’t compel adherence, sure, but the majority will adhere to a law which they agree to, and will use responsive coercion to compel adherence by law breakers. Thus, your silly objection doesn’t matter. If you were right in the slightest, then nations everywhere would simply ignore their laws entirely. That simply doesn’t happen.
The fact that adherence can’t be compelled is why responsive coercion must exist in a society in order to establish justice. Anarchy is a negation of that mechanism, creating a society without the ability to compel an end to aggression.
I need not. Since, had you actually read what I wrote, I crafted a system whereby people only live under the laws that they choose to live under. It’s this central stroke of genius, if I do say so myself, that fundamentally changes the equation.
In my proposed scenario society, if you want to live as an anarchist, in an anarchistic jurisdiction with fellow anarchists, no one will stop you or bother you. You cannot foist anarchism on others either. And the only government to speak of would be the confederal government whose only role is protection of individual rights, they can do nothing else, and from which you could secede at will. Which, being anarchists, you probably would Until you discovered that anarchism result in little more than chaos.
yes, its manifestly obvious that you do not even understand the concept of anarchy. Of course I wouldnt interfere with my neighbors who wished to live any particular way, as long as they didnt violate my rights. I dont care if they dress up like communazis. You might know this if you opened your mind and closed your mouth long enough to understand “anarchy” instead of blatantly equivocating.
ok, please tell me what “law” is a physical incarnation of justice that is capable of actions like “preventing” things. Quit being evasive, tell me what you mean.
thats circular. How does justice rule? Is justice a physical thing, or a concept? If it is a physical thing, please tell me where I can see it or link me to a picture. If it is a concept, how does it “rule” a republic? If you want to form a government, these are questions you have to answer. You havent left the stage of “bull session.”
I asked you to define coercion and you failed to do so. Please explain what mechanism makes this law inviolate or causes it to “rule.”
are you suggesting that this “law” performs physical acts, or not?
a variety of reasons that you appear emotionally incapable of recognizing. First of all, limited by what? Secondly, responsive to WHOSE OPINION of what constitutes an aggressive act? Until you answer those questions, then of course my default position is to oppose it because I havent been satisfactorily apprised of the morality of your state. Is that the reason you like to skimp on the details?
actually, I dont believe you have shown that it is even conceivable, let alone possible short-term.
I rather doubt it, the articles of confederation were too libertarian so they got rid of those as soon as they possibly could. They needed a foundational document that authorized the state to rob people, and they got it.
based on a false premise and so needs no response.
ok I will bite. What “good” things? How does the state prevent chaos?
are you suggesting that a constitution acts to limit men’s choices, or are you acknowledging that it is simply a document that contains information that people may or may not choose to follow?
What parts of the nation? Just the ones you care about, or all of it?
please outline the mechanism by which a document “keeps” a nation free.
so any time you feel like reading and understanding my posts, go ahead. Strawmen like this do nothing for me but they do reveal the weakness of your position.
so you envision 51% of the population walking around enforcing your constitution because they agree with it?
you are wandering into collectivist territory again. Many people in many nations do ignore the laws. When they dont, its because of people, not “well-written documents” or whatever.
its revealing that you cannot imagine “responsive coercion” without a guy in a funny hat giving orders.
it has already been observed in this thread that you do not appear to know what anarchy actually is. Please do us a favor and explain how anarchy is a negation of responsive coercion.
how is that any different from anarchy?
what if I want to live on my property?
I wonder where you got this idea that I would want to foist anything on anyone
what mechanism limits their ability to do something else? and who funds this government?
What does that mean? They dont try to protect my rights anymore? I have to leave my property? am I still subject to their courts?
bla blah bleh, whatever, keep making dumb comments because its obvious that you abandoned 90% of your claims as soon as I asked you a few questions.
I understand it only too well. I understand that there are violent anarchists who wish to actively aggress against all forms of government. That’s how WWI got started. Don’t act as if there isn’t a darker side of anarchism.
And, if I’m right that people naturally turn to the various essential functions of a state, then in your brand of non-aggressive anarchism, you would be lonely indeed. For republics would spring up all around you.
Deterrence is prevention, it is forcing every criminal to do a mental calculation of risk of being caught versus reward of aggression. In an anarchic society without any enforcement of individual rights the criminal will make a different calculation, strength vs reward, since you’ve all admitted that there’s no entity existing in an anarchy capable of forcing anyone to go to court. Thus, it’s open season on the weak, the poor, the young, the defenseless, who can neither physically stand up to a thug nor hire someone to do so in their 'stead.
It is not circular; it is only less abstract. Justice rules if just laws are enforced within that society. Justice is established by means of the enforcement of just laws, meaning laws that oppose aggression, meaning laws allowing only responsive coercion. And since violating those laws would be an aggression against society, it prevents that violation too.
I do not claim there’s no place in such a society for a private police force, but neither do I think it sufficient for a free society. A private police force can only protect whom they’re hired to protect. Anarchists have never answered me on whom protects the powerless and the wealthless in an anarch society. If you have an individual holding entire families as slaves on his property, who protects them? You need a police force of last resort to protect the powerless.
Don’t be obtuse.
Through the agents of law; don’t be obtuse.
I have answered them. You refuse to read.
o_O Coercion is force. If I didn’t say that before, then there ya go. I believe I went a step forward and defined the two kinds of coercion as well previously, the moral and immoral kind. Why did you need it defined? We both clearly know what coercion is.
Law may not be involable, but it imposes consequences for violation. As for ruling, when a society is governed by laws and not by the whims of a ruler, it is said to be ruled by law, not by men. This is elementary.
No, I’m speaking in abstract terms. Only a dullard could imagine that law performs physical actions. Stop being obtuse.
Limited by law. What else.
I used the term ‘objective law’ for a reason. It’s not a question of opinion but of objective, provable reality. Such would be tested and proved in a court of law on a case by case basis. As for law itself, the opinion would be each individuals, who would group together along accepted principles in individual jurisdictions and could refuse to interact with anyone who had laws they didn’t accept.
A society in a condition of anarchy, however, is entirely governed by subjective opinion of what constitutes an aggressive act, since law does not rule that society. Law is only there, in the background somewhere, if you’re nice enough to come to court with me, Mr. Robber.
It may be the first completely moral state ever conceived, given that I allow each individual to live only under the laws they themselves accept in the first place. It’s as close to anarchy as anyone could get without actually disposing of the state. And, as far as the NAP is concerned, all I’ve been asking you to do is accept that if we could limit an essetialist state to only responsive coercion, wouldn’t it then be a completely moral state. In objective, idealistic terms. You’ve refused–for emotional reasons–to agree even to that.
Questions of actual implementation are what you’ve battered me with, seemingly because you have no way to object on theoretical or principled terms? That’s what I would expect to be faced with.
It is the questions of actual implementation that I don’t have set and would love to discuss, if you can get past a philosophic commitment to total anarchism. Which, I know, is a tall order, so I don’t expect it to happen. But the theory and principle of my concept for a state is sound.
The founding of the US shows it conceivable and possible, and not just in the short-term. The society I propose is very much like the state the individual US colonies were in legally before the US was founded legally. They had an overarching fed, the British crown, ostensibly providing national defensible and overarching political backing. That role would be filled by a confederal government limited very similarly to the same role: non-interference in city-states, and national defense.
The colonies went on like this for hundreds of years in as close to a state of anarchy as anyone could get. And what happened wasn’t that they naturally formed anarchic societies, such as the anarchs would hope would be natural to mankind, but rather they formed model societies in line with my idea: essentialist societies consisting of minimalist government and a general police-force.
That’s not the spin I’d put on it. It’s not that the articles were too libertarian, but rather that they were put into place without an intellectual foundation backing them. There was no theory of libertarianism back then, no principles of freedom to support an essentialist state. And, if you look at the history of the passage of the Constitution itself, it was railroaded in over the objections of the original founding fathers. But today we have that intellectual basis for a libertarian society, we can clearly articulate why it is moral moral and efficient than a collectivist or even mixed economy state.
As I said, it wasn’t the same founding fathers that gave us the Confederation. It was the revenge of the statists of that era.
That’s why acknowledging a right to political secession would make any repeat of that act impossible. If someone wanted to start a state like that, people can just walk away from them and let them fail on their own. They couldn’t force an entire society to conform. What’s important then is an initial core of libertarians to set such a nation’s culture and found it institutions along libertarian paths.
The nature of the ‘good things’ is take directly from the moral use of coercion, which is to oppose aggression–the immoral uses of coercion. So, the good things a state can do is to oppose aggression, and by that support individual rights. That means being a civil/criminal court of last resort, writing objective law limited to responsive coercion, and protecting society at large from war-aggression. Doing this has the effect of preventing chaos.
It is a document of information that people may or may not choose to follow, however it is a legal document with legal force, meaning choosing not to follow will result in prosecution. This is only a bad thing is the document contains an aggression within its laws. If it is purely designed to oppose aggression, then prosecution resulting from violations of it is a purely good thing for everyone.
I assume you’re referring to slavery. I’ll grant you that caveat, that was certainly a black mark in hindsight. However, since the US was among the leaders in ending slavery, and had outlaws it in roughly half their territory, at a time when nowhere else on the planet had outlawed slavery save for London city, I think they were leaders in establishing freedom from slavery as well. Who else fought a civil war over slavery.
By punishing aggression and allowing the only choices government officials can make, if they wish to stay within the law and avoid prosecution themselves, to be non-aggression ones involved with responsive coercion only.
The usual method of controlling what a government can do is severaly limiting its freedom to create laws. In the US, this is done by the Bill of Rights. The bill of rights has many holes today, through which it has take statism some two hundred years to seep through, and it still has not completely succeeded today. But with all the progress it has made, how upset would the statists be if we were able to revert, to send law back two hundred years and wipe the books clean, including legal precedent. The government would be scrambling to pass the obviously good laws again, and the controversial ones wouldbe stymied.
This, I have thought of creating a legal system by which laws have a shelf-life and automatically expire every X number of years, forcing them to come up for vote again, and return to first principles.
Such things as Gloria Allred’s attempt to use a 100+ year old speech law to arrest Rush Limbaugh couldn’t happen.
I’ve never said the government should be able to force taxes on anyone. This seems to be a theme among anarchists, that the state always taxes. The state will only tax if its founding laws allow it to tax. I do not propose the ability to compulse taxes on you.
No. I envision a system where the only laws governing a person are those they agreed to live under. How many times do I have to say it.
What does it reveal, exactly. I notice you don’t say.
I’ll tell you what it reveals. It reveals that I’m not naive enough to think that everyone can afford private security, that society can get exist without a non-partisan police force to protect the defenseless.
While I would certainly allow any anarchist their dream of private police protection, I also worry about the powerless who would be unable to contract for service. No anarchist has yet answered my challenge of how a slave obtains their freedom in an anarchist state. The slave cannot even sue, because they cannot leave their owner’s property.
But an objective 3rd party police force whose job it is to uphold justice on a widespread basis and without thought to compensation, serving as a poice force of last resort for the powerless and those who cannot afford to hire justice, seems a necessity unless you can answer the challenge of how the powerless obtain justice in an anarch society.
Why don’t you answer the challenge for once. Again, anarchs in this thread have said there need not be a court of last resort able to compel attendance. Without that, you have negated the mechanism of responsive coercion within society and allowed an aggressor to go free. Anyone not able to raise enough martial might to force an aggressor to court will not receive justice in an anarch society. Please answer that for once.
Exactly my point. I don’t understand why anarchs are opposing my idea so vehemently when it’s so incredibly close to your ideal.
It differs from anarchy in that this principle of chosen law only is institutionalized, encoded in law, thus creating a self-propagating system instead of a legal vacuum anarchy would exist in, a vacuum in which some may feel compelled to create a state and push out anarchists, and the state they would create would likely be statist, would be a far worse state than the one we’d build.
So we cut them off at the knees by creating a viable and self-propagating legal system in which you can have any level of government you want, and cannot be forced to accept others’ ideas of what government should be. Thus allowing the best form of government to rise to the top, like beer froth, and attract citizens via a pure expression of political ideals realized in actuality. People would see what every political theory of the best way to govern a society would result in, because each society would be allowed to govern itself without outside ideological interference, and thus no one to blame but themselves if things go wrong.
I would create a world where you as an anarchist could live as you so desire, w/e amount of government that is. I just don’t think you’d attract anyone except those already able to afford a private police force. But you’d be free to try.
It’s the only way I know that pure anarchy could be viable, ironically, is in the legal system I’m proposing.
Declare your property a unique jurisdiction and you’re done. You would declare this to the confederal gov who would then offer you confederal membership as a unique city-state. If you accept the confed’s offer, stay within the borders of the larger confederal territories. If not, ship out. Up to you. Probably many people would make their own property a unique jurisdiction, but would choose to join the confed for international protection.
In my proposed scenario, the confed’s only legal role is protection of individual rights on a societal-wide basis, tho not to the point of providing police-services. More like rooting out piracy, and if a charter city were found to be aggressing against their members, the confed would “arrest” the city-state and try it by jury and dissolve it if it were found guilty. In other words, the confed may only use responsive coercion.
Many anarchists do want to foist anarchy. Without some overarching legal framework, do you think anarchy can ever exist in actuality? Without a legal framework, you’ll be handing the society to the statists. And it will likely be created by someone who’s not an essentialist like me, without any notion of rational limits or holding government to the NAP.
I’m still working on this aspect. It sounds like you are implictly agreeing that if it were doable it would be good, but the devil’s in the details. I agree. I may spend the next ten years attempting to perfect the legal mechanisms involved. But I don’t expect there to be only one confed, but several, with people trying different mechanisms. This is a society of experimentation. If one confed began going off kilter, charter states could secede and join another confed. So once again, power is in the hands of the individual people. It would be possible for a well-run charter city-state to secede and start a new confed as well.
I’ll give you my best working answer I have today, with caveats that I don’t expect them to stand.
What mechanism limits the confed’s ability to do anything except protect basic rights? A constitution with a hefty limit to change (probably unanimous vote by charter state members), and a lack of any power to make law. The confed will be constrained to prosecuting charter cities which have begun aggressing against their citizens and proved to be doing so in a neutral 3rd party charter-city court (not a confed court). Prosecuting a whole city would be quite a dramatic affair, and the legal stands would rise. This would be written into the constitution. A charter city would be judged by its peers, with a panel of judges drawn from the neutral charter cities (odd number of course).
Thus, the confed has no unilateral power to harrass any charter city.
Similarly, any decision to go to war may require a similar prosecutorial approach, drawing together neutral judges from the pool of cities, to make a legal decision to go to war. Or perhaps the confed could appeal to the majority of legislatures of the city-states to go to war.
But the ultimate check on any process created is the ability to instantly secede from the city-state or the confed itself should you disagree strongly with any decision made. This right of secession will be the strongest guarantor of justice.
As for how it’s all paid for, in a nation of voluntary membership what could be more appropriate than voluntary payment. Not taxation, but something more like a subscription. The right not to be taxed against your will would be one of the new rights, along with secession.
Apart from that, I suggest a government in which government services are paid for by use, not by tax. For instance, rather than sales tax you could choose to have any court you like “insure” a transaction meaning you pay a small fee such that if there’s a dispute the court will litigate it. Most people would use a private court for that. However, if neither side can amicably reach a solution, there’s the state court of last resort able to compel a solution with the force of law. Similarly, criminals would pay for their own prosecution as much they’re able, or as much as can be extracted from their worldly belongings.
A. It means you severa all legal ties and bonds between you. You are not longer a citizen of that city-state or the confed, depending on which level you’re seceding from. As a result, you should move your property out of that city-state asap. Since I posit this society existing on the open-ocean, floating your house away is pretty easy. In the case of immovable property, either the city itself will move, or non-contiguous boundaries can be worked out in extreme cases.
B. They will protect your rights, much as they would any tourist. But any attempted obligations they passed will not fall upon you. Because this society is designed to allow even experimentation in government structures that I consider terrible, and to be tolerant of them as long as they don’t engage in citizen-capture, I find it rather likely that some people will try to create a statist version of a city-state, in which wealth redistribution exists, etc. They will be free to do this, because the only people who will live there will do so willingly, thus accepting the laws passed. But suppose someone passes an actual tax. They can do this at the city-state level, just not at the confed level. If you don’t vote for the tax and it passes, you may choose to accept the law or secede. Personally, I’d secede.
C. You float it away with you.
D. You’re subject to their courts only like a tourist would be, meaning only if you aggress against someone. As for the law you’re fleeing, I’d probably write something into the constitution to the effect that anyone seceding from a city state shall be allowed to do so within a reasonable amount of time before any law they obejct to can be forced on them.
Using ‘reasonable’ amount of time is a bit vague but allows a judge to take into account that diff people have diff situation and amounts of stuff to move. A day might be reasonable for a college kid, while six months reasonable for a manjor corporation.
Or did you just come to understand my idea more fully (at last, thank god).
Wait, what? How do you aggress against something that has already aggressed against you? The answer: to violate their rights more than they have violated your own…but is that even possible with a state? I suppose one could make the argument that to assault a postman is the same as aggressing against the state, but that seems kind of weird to me. Maybe other anarchists are okay with murdering postman, but I have never gotten that impression from anyone…
You might want to clarify what you are saying there, because as it is now, you are contradicting yourself. Also, I get it that you don’t seem to care for common law or customary law, and that you only consider statutory law to be law, but you can’t keep denying the existence of the first two…because after all, they exist.
This just isn’t even true…wikipedia entry for slavery.
See this here by Roderick Long. Anyway, the elite have it better under a statist system because they can spend less money to get their will done. In anarchy, the only way to pay for something is to pay for it yourself. Instead, the elite can go to war with Iraq because they tax everyone in the country to fund it. Imagine the fortune 500 trying to fund the Iraq war themselves. Couldn’t happen. Nevermind Afghanistan or Libya, or the probable wars to come with Syria and Iran. The elite could in no way dominate society and the world as they do now if there were anarchy. They just would not have the resources. And that’s if they were all to band together to fund it, which is a highly unlikely scenario anyway.
Anyway, who protects the poor now? The police recover stolen property in the ghetto all the time, right? And they solve all of the murders? No one goes unpunished? Puhlease.
I wanted to respond to your lengthy post, as it has some interesting tidbits in it, but I just cannot think that this discussion will be fruitful when you insist on lying about my positions. Several of your earliest statements are outright falsehoods, contradicted by my statements in this thread. Either you cannot read my posts, or you simply choose not to, or, the most likely option, you feel the need to misrepresent my case to make your position stronger. That might also explain why you stopped replying to Autolykos. Let me know if you are interested in having an honest discussion sometime.
People, whats wrong with you? you have better understanding of real world thats why you’re Libertarians right?
bunch of thing happend durring the colonial era, but this case is differant don’t you realize?
believe or not, there are lotsa miss used land (although i didn’t read the whole artical), whats wrong buying the land from it’s owners even that place is used by them?
sub devisions/sub states are already there, this idea just will bring it to next level, it’s a great idea.
Minerva republic and United states of America are 2 differant cases that we must learn from .
Minervans didn’t have long time strategy and they got kicked their asses by a backword kingdom.
not only the minerva they could lock the whole Tongan economy while they sit in there offices, but the kingdom troups sent them out, this was their mistake not anyone else’s.
However American founding fathers got long time strategy, they were well organized, not only they commit wars but also bought some of the land, this is pretty capitalistic and highly fair.
so if we want our ideals come true, we should think pragmatical and practical, what works best must be way to go for us.
I’m always interested in an honest discussion. I’m not an ass and will follow logic where it flows. And I admit I may not know enough about what you guys mean by anarchism in all its facets to discuss all aspects intelligently. If you want to point out where I’ve misrepresented your view, I’ll take another look with a fresh face and promise not to dismiss your concerns. Most likely it’s due to my own misconceptions about anarchy in general rather than purposeful misrepresentation, as I am deeply opposed to purposeful misrepresentation in any medium. In the meantime, I’ll do some research on anarchy in general and get back to this thread at the end of that journey.
Right now my working assumptions are as follows:
Any actual society of anarchism would have no defense (save violence?) against the masses around you whom would try to start a statist nation in the absense of one and simply assume you to be part of it, thus aggressing against you. However, not all states need be formed that way, and not all states need aggress. It it possible in principle for a state to exist that never aggresses against its citizens, and I’ve tried to actualize in legal form exactly that, largely because it doesn’t seem like anarchism ever could exist on its own–but I admit that’s not an as formed perception as it could be, based largely on lack of any historical examples of anarch society.
Any attempt to institute common law without an overarching legal backbone would likely fail because not every individual has the means of compulsing a law-breaker into court. Any situation where going to court is guaranteed to result in punishment of the criminal will find resistance to going to court, such as in nearly all criminal cases. Anarchs suggest using private security to compulse in the name of common law. Mob formation makes this scenario far more difficult to imagine leading to an amicable, much less peaceful, outcome.
I’ve read anarchists say that stigma and reputation will prevent people from acting criminally in the market, such that a banker who stole from receipts would find no one willing to do business with him again. I find the problem with that being that it creates incentive to store up as much reputation as possible and steal as much as possible in one big event. Thus, an owner of a bank would be incentivized to steal billions on his first embezzlement. He’d crash the bank, but no one would be able to force him to court, for he no longer needs anyone to transact with him as a banker, he’s set for life. And since he can both hire the best ‘protection’ and there’s no court of last resort, he’s home free. A court of last resort could forcibly recover funds from him. An anarch society would find that far harder to deal with or perhaps even impossible.
If in principle the state can act such that it remains within the bounds of the NAP, then the concept of the state is not innately immoral. And, tho we have but scant example, a non-aggressing state in actuality may indeed be possible.
As an argument from history, multiple people groups around the world developed governments independently. Probably because institutional governments were able to bring more force to bear on their neighbors than mere tribes which are tied to family groups. Governments could bridge multiple family ties. The ideal anarchist state cannot exist without facing the unified force of exterior nations, anarchs would be forced by necessity to group together in something like a confederalist organization simply to provide a unified front anyway. I provide a framework for that.
If anarch opposition to any form of government rests on the supposition that government always aggresses, yet I show how it’s possible for an essentialist government to exist without aggressing, then that seems to attack the heart of the principle of anarchism itself. Right or wrong about that I’m not completely sure. But I’ve talked to some wacky anarchs. Including some with supposedly varying definitions of property by which they justified outright aggression (supporting the labor-theory of property and by that justifying the theft of a factory by its workers from its owner, for instance. Leftist anarchs, mostly, are the irrational ones.)
As for Autolykos, I would prefer he exchange his idea of anarchism in actuality in opposition to my idea of essentialism, though I have no right to demand it. Since he’s interested only in tearing down my idea, being obnoxious generally, and has an irrational commitment to anti-statism, going so far as to call me a statist, which I find hilarious given my views, I see no point in continuing with him. He wields logic as a bludgeon rather than a tool to get at truth.
In light of this rather slanderous paragraph, in which you don’t even address me directly, I’m now going to repeatedly demand that you respond directly to this post of mine, which you now admit you’ve been ignoring. I will do this as many times as necessary. I will even go as far as to start one new thread after another to repeat this demand.
as i said in my other thread, using the word Anarchy, Anarchism wouldn’t ebenfit us other than use of market anarchy or description of a moode.
So if we use instead Anarcho capitalist term, we may use some general law prinsiple to apply social order and that will lead us thru constitutionalism…
Until you discovered that anarchism result in little more than chaos.