Law and Order and Anarchy

[Hard_Rain]

A friend of mine, who posts at other forums, sent me the following discussion he’s having with a Swede about law and order and how they differ in collectivist and individualist perspectives. I found his response interesting so he gave me permission to cross-post it here. Original discussion link.

OP:

"Can the anarchists here please tell me how crime investigations are going to be conducted in the anarchist society? Noam Chomsky says that the society that his ideology proposes may well have no policemen.

Just looking at the situation here in Sweden (the place I’m most familiar with) make me doubt how it is going to work. How would this man have been caught and convicted in an anarchist society? How would this man have been caught and convicted in an anarchist society? To simply say that economic equality will make no such things happening doesn’t make sense. Some people are potentially dangerous regardless of economics, and indeed, none of the people in questions seem to have suffered economic hardship. To boil down everyhting to economic status (rather common at the far left) seems to me to be a form of greedy reductionism."

Response:

Anarchists would seek to see all “crimes” reduced to torts or delicts in law. While there is a continuum between absolute collectivism (Nazi Germany, North Korea etc) and absolute individualism (anarchism), most individuals find that their preferences fall somewhere in-between, and the public policy of most ‘enlightened’ states reflects this.

If everything is collective, such as under communism, then individuals are framed as all having the same legitimate needs which must be provided by the collective. Their job, their place of residence, their food, everything… All is provided by the collective in proportion to how much someone “needs” something, in arbitrary terms.

In ‘mixed’ societies, such as contemporary Sweden or South Africa, there is a curious bifurcation between what is considered a collective right and what is considered a private one. Most people seem to base their preferences on what they’ve grown accustomed to. This is reflected in law, with the bifurcation between criminal acts and civil wrongs, or torts. Let’s say that someone is murdered - the dependants of that person may sue the murderer in a civil court for wrongful death and loss of support etc. If your breadwinner is killed, you have a real legal right to seek redress in a court of law for your loss against the person who caused you harm. However, there is no collectivist system for persuing civil claims - you won’t get assigned a public litigant to help you sue someone in delict, and the police won’t investigate to help your case either. Excluding lawyers who represent clients out of charity, it is only those who can afford lawyers’ fees and private investigators who ever get justice from civil claims. Unless one is a fairly hardcore socialist, most are not opposed to this system.

Of course there is also the crime of murder which will be seperately tried in a criminal court. While the plaintiff in a criminal case is usually an essential witness for the prosecution, it is not the plaintiff who is persuing a claim against the defendant - it is the state. If the state wants to, it can proceed with a criminal case even if the plaintiff has no desire to do so. A “crime” expands from more than just a wrongful act committed against its victims, into a wrongful act against “society” at large. Indeed, many crimes - particularly statutory ones - have no real victims at all. Finally, a criminal court very seldom seeks to provide any sort of compensation to the plaintiff - it’s all about punishing the offender for disobeying the state. In the case of Niklas Lindgren, that means fourteen years behind bars before he’s set lose upon society once again. In the case of Ulf Olsson, the state determined him to be “mentally ill” - instead of punishing him, they doped him up and hoped he’d “get better”. He killed himself instead, of course, but it’s the thought that counts. Neither of these outcomes help the victims much, wouldn’t you agree?

Is it right for wealthy victims of torts to be able to afford the lawyers necessary to persue their claims in court, while poorer people might not have that ability? Is it right that poorer people should effectively only have remedies available to them under criminal law, when criminal law seldom seeks to compensate the victim in any way? (There are exceptions, but usually only with very minor crimes which give rise to community service as a punishment.)

Murder is one example of a wrongful act which exists both under criminal law and tort, but let’s consider a wrong which only exists under the latter… Imagine you are severely injured due to the negligent conduct of another person (in a context not criminalised by legislation). Perhaps they ran you over in their car at a crossing because they weren’t watching the road. Of course it may well be a criminal offence to drive through a crossing without stopping, but a fat lot of good that will do you if you’re the victim - at most, the driver will be stripped of his license. If you want any sort of compensation, you have to sue the driver in a civil court, bankrolling the lawsuit with your own funds, unless you know a lawyer who will help you out of charity.

Where does the line between collective rights and individual rights actually lie? For communists and anarchists, it’s not a hard question… There are no individual rights under communism, and no collective rights under anarchism. There are no delicts in a communist legal system, and there would be no crimes under an anarchist legal system.

An anarchist society comes with certain presumptions… One of the chief ones being that a large number of civilians are armed, and that no one inherently has any greater monopoly over force than anyone else.

To boil it down into a simple answer… Individuals in an anarchist system have the right to defend themselves against violence. I’m not saying you’re invincible if you’ve got a gun, but if I were the Niklas Lingren type, I would not choose victims who were armed. To add to that, delict/tort/civil litigation would be enough to dissuade anyone with a reputation from engaging in wrongful acts.

There are always going to be violent lunatics and deranged criminals, no matter what you do. If you have a state, you give them a means through which to legitimise their behaviour.

[Snowflake]

People demand law and order
The market supplies what people demand
Therefore, the market will supply law and order. See private courts and private security guards.

In America, more cases are settled in private courts than outside. There are more private security guards than public police. Society would collapse without them. Society would not collapse if police stopped busting non violent drug offenders.

I don’t see why neighborhood associations and apartment complexes would be incapable of protecting themselves, considering that they already do purchase security in the form of guards, gates, and cameras.

Rothbard and Murphy push that individuals can overcome the collective action problem by purchasing insruance against injury or theft, thus transferring liability of the many into the hands of the few. In order to reduce their liability, insurance companies could then use their large pool of resources to reduce crime as much as possible, as efficiently as possible.