Even more: Hayek & Cowboys: Customary Law in the American West by Andrew P. Morriss
And It Takes Two Invisible Hands to Make a Market: Lex Mercatoria (Law Merchant) Always Emerges to Facilitate Emerging Market Activity by Bruce L. Benson
Quit editing your posts with more content, AJ. I need to get to bed.
Going through Hasnas’ “Hayek, the Common Law, and Fluid Drive,” he praises Lon Fuller’s essys collected in The Principles of Social Order; has anyone read it or other of Fuller’s works and consider it worth picking up? B&N has it new at half price, $33.
And what about Hayek’s LL&L? I like Hayek as economist, but have been underwhelmed with his writing as a social philosopher. I know I should read it eventually, but given how far behind I am on libertarian philosophy, does it deserve to be near the top of my reading list? Right now, Jan Narveson and some classical liberal authors occupy the top spot.
Also, de Jasay devotes a few pages to Hayek’s conception here:
http://libertyactivism.info/uploads/6/64/Against_Politics_-_Anthony_de_Jasay.pdf (scroll to pg. 120)
Heheh, I’m not reading any of these yet, just posting them here because I’ve found them. Here’s something on Fuller: Lon L. Fuller and the Enterprise of Law, and here’s something at Google Books, plus a book of his called The Morality of Law.
Provide us url to your yt channel.
“I mean, it’s way more brilliant than argumentation ethics, natural law, or other humbug deontologies.”
No, it’s not.
Yeah, Law and Economics is awesome.
What about Richard Epstein. He’s awesome too
AJ: What are you using to post your P2P content with web URLs in that way? I assume that you are not actually uploading to a server but just creating a link that permits a P2P download from your machine to mine, initiated by clicking on the URL? Am I understanding? If so, that’s freakin’ awesome and I want to know how to do it.
Clayton -
Back to Friedman, his anarcho-capitalistic assertion is that privatized law-making would be a market process, and hence as “emergent” and self-organizing as any other free enterprise.
How would we reach privatized law from our current system of government provided law without running into Hayekian knowledge problems? I don’t see how anyone could know what statelessness would look like a priori, and the emperical literature isn’t really that promising.
I think you have it backwards… the law monopoly suffers from the Hayekian knowledge problem since the State’s legislators and regulators cannot know all the facts that need to be known in order to prevent and resolve the innumerable disputes that will arise within the rules they construct and the State’s judges are necessarily too few in number and too homogeneous (non-diverse) because their primary customer is the State itself (they are working for the State), not the disputants who come to them for arbitration and adjudication.
As for how we would reach privatized law from our current system of government, I think we first have to delve uncomfortably deep into human nature and the human psyche before it will be possible. The root problem is moral. Human beings are amenable to a dual-morality under specific circumstances (that the moral exceptionalist be a duly recognized ‘alpha’). This widespread acceptance of dual-morality naturally leads to dual-law and, by extension, to trade privileges (monopoly and personal privilege is dual law in the realm of trade) and other personal and status-based privileges. Despite the supposedly widespread belief in democracy, our entire social order implicitly assumes the existence of elite classes bearing exceptional legal and moral privileges over the general population, whether these privileges are personal or official. At this point, I’ve basically given up on any possibility of short-term progress in the direction of liberty. Humans will only become freer after some number of generations have passed and those who are better at defending their property rights through cunning and avoidance of the expropriations of the State have been more successful at spreading their genes than those who have inured themselves into the State order.
Clayton -
Or more successful at spreading their ideas. Why does it need to be biological?
Law and economics is definitely better than natural rights; though due to the neoclassical framework it is typically flawed in many of its meanderings. It also can’t escape some sort of foundationalist view of just what the point of ‘justice’ is; which is easy to resolve if you don’t have a centralized state (‘justice’ is whatever people can agree to not fight over); but with a centralized state ‘law and economics’ just becomes more bullshit.
Because governments - or, at least, all the necessary ingredients for governments - exist in every culture. This suggests that the condition of acquiescence of a subject population which is a prerequisite for the existence of government is dispositional, not cultural or ideological.
The first necessary ingredient - in my theory of the origin of government - is the ethical vestige of our ancestors who existed in an alpha-male social structure. This vestige is the in-built tolerance for dual-morality. The primary distinguishing attribute of alpha-male social structure is the existence of two sets of social norms, one set of social norms applies to non-alphas and another set of social norms applies to the alpha (and those who act on his behalf). Mating, food, association, rank and other social factors may be controlled by the alpha. Mating is almost invariably monopolized by the alpha (this appears to be the primary purpose of alpha mating where the costs of reproduction are borne by the entire group, necessitating that only the best genes be permitted to propagate). The alpha pattern is itself a biological fact about the group in that species. That is, the alpha does not hold his status because he created the idea of alpha status, rather he holds it because every member of the group understands and accepts that someone has to be the alpha, the only question is who.
Similarly, kings and emperors do not exist solely by dint of will and conquest of their subject population despite its best efforts to repel their rule. An acquiescence on the part of the governed is requisite and it is this acquiescence that is puzzling, particularly if we begin our analysis with an assumption of economic rationality on the part of individuals in the subject population.
Clayton -
This is an awesome quote! Can I steal it?
Clayton -
Because governments - or, at least, all the necessary ingredients for governments - exist in every culture. This suggests that the condition of acquiescence of a subject population which is a prerequisite for the existence of government is dispositional, not cultural or ideological.
That’s an obvious truth that will piss a lot of libertarians off (though James J. Martin argued the exact same thing, and Walter Block nearly has). And sure.
I think you have it backwards… the law monopoly suffers from the Hayekian knowledge problem since the State’s legislators and regulators cannot know all the facts that need to be known in order to prevent and resolve the innumerable disputes that will arise within the rules they construct and the State’s judges are necessarily too few in number and too homogeneous (non-diverse) because their primary customer is the State itself (they are working for the State), not the disputants who come to them for arbitration and adjudication.
I agree that many government programs suffer from Hayekian knowledge problems (although I don’t think that is sufficient grounds for abolishing them). But the fact is that whether we like it or not, the government does exist, and everyone has short and long term plans built around this fact. Nobody could know what would happen if the government were abolished. I do not see how a transition from government to well functioning anarcho-capitalism (with PDA’s and the bunch) could be made without running into Hayekian knowledge problems. Any kind of widespread revolution would surely run into such problems, and I don’t think reformism is really a viable alternative if the goal is to have an AnCap society.
But anyways, a government mainly centered around the “rule of law” would largely evade such problems in my opinion, since the government policies are not aimed at achieving any particular specific result. To Quote Hayek, the government is “uniformly restricting the freedom of all by abstract rules that preclude arbitrary or discriminatory coercion by or of other people, that prevent any from invading the sphere of any other…Government is needed only to enforce these abstract rules, and thereby to protect the individual against coercion, or invasion of his free shpere, by others.”
Besides, are you sure that you really want anarcho-capitalism anyways? It is not like PDA’s are going to abide by the NAP. After all, didn’t the mafia originate as a private protection service for citrus farmers in Sicily?
I think that you are correct about that disposition, but it is clear simply from the fact that we are having this discussion that it is only a disposition. I don’t think that we will need to see a change in our biology to be able to move closer to freedom, because we already apparently have the chance to overcome those problems. I know what you are saying, that we are the few, and that it is hopeless to think that we could convince a critical mass of the idiots to accept our arguments, so will will end up having most people wanting statism regardless of whether or not we can reach some, or even most, of the intelligent people.
But it don’t think that it matters whether most people want statism. I think that we will see a transition from statism to non-statism while the idiots on the streets keep yelling about needing whatever part of statism that is the fad at that time. It will happen whether or not the ordinary people accept it in theory, because they will accept it in practice. They might not know what they are doing, or what part of history they are a part of, but it doesn’t matter. It will happen regardless of what they argue for in debates.
It is a relic from back when our science didn’t embrace non-statism to care about whether the ordinary people accept our theories. It is just a vestige of the evolution of our science from back when it still split its theory into two parts, (1) the part condemning monopoly providers as bad for consumers, and (2) the part carelessly forgetting about those insights when faced with the question of what we should want to government to do.
It should immediately be clear that we don’t accept that split anymore. We don’t think that law and law enforcement are subject to different laws than all of the other goods. We don’t break up our theory into two parts, (1) one about law and law enforcement, and (2) the other about the rest of the goods. We have what we think is a unified theory, where we apply the principles of the market to every corner of the map, and don’t make any arbitrary concessions to central planning. We don’t think that “it is different in the field of social organization and economic policies” anymore. We think that it is the same.
What happens when we take what he was saying in those two paragraphs, and repair the split? What happens when we bring the two pieces back together?
What happens is that we notice that the transitions of the practices in providing law and law enforcement, among anything else that the government does right now, isn’t going to be subject to the mystical, other side of economic theory, but is going to be subject to the same laws as anything else, to the laws of the market. We should see that the transition from the government providing certain goods, such as law, law enforcement, bridges, or whatever, to voluntary businesses providing those goods, doesn’t have to be a political process, but could be a market process. We won’t need to play by their rules to take them down.
We are already seeing this happening around us. It doesn’t matter that most of the ordinary people can’t even think of an alternative to the government copyright and patent systems. It doesn’t matter that most of the ordinary people would argue that we need copyrights, because musicians, writers, and so on wouldn’t ever do anything without them, because they wouldn’t be able to get a return on their work. It doesn’t matter that most of them would argue that we need patents, because inventers wouldn’t ever do give the world anything without them, because other, less inventive people would just steal their ideas right out of the gates. It doesn’t matter, simply because those same people eagerly pirate music, video games, and so on, right after an extended debate about the merits of copyrights. The people making pirating possible, and the people downloading the pirated stuff, are different people. We only need the former to be against copyrights in theory. It doesn’t matter whether the latter are, because they will be for it in practice, whatever they argue at their job or with their friends. Government copyrights are falling apart, and I don’t think that it has anything to do with the ordinary people changing their views about them.
We will see the destruction of everything that the government does happen like this. We don’t need to win the approval of inert people beforehand. No dullness and clumsiness on the part of the masses can stop the pioneers of improvement.
(Also see this post.)
@I Ryan: As I said, I think we are on a long, evolutionary arc away from absolute government. But I think the arc is very long (many generations) and the criterion for elimination of government is more stringent than just elimination of some aspects of government but the total elimination of the dual-morality outside of the family construct.
Clayton -
Who cares about the ordinary people and their biological attachment to “dual morality”?
Based on that you would have to conclude that any change from the circumstance is impossible. Which raises the question of why you would bother talking about this at all.