And if you were standing here telling me that cash will not ignite, that would be relevant.
No, that is not the point. In theory, you could have a monopoly on anything without using aggression, but it would only be on a small scale, because otherwise someone else would enter the market. For example, look at cable tv monopolies in towns. Many areas, and hopefully most, in America allow competition in cable tv now. The only way Comcast or Verizon could have a monopoly in any given town would be through force, unless the town was small enough where it would not be profitable for the competitor to set up shop.
It’s like that with government. You could not have a government monopoly in an area unless it was a small town. There would just be too much competition otherwise. The only way you could maintain a government monopoly in, say, the city of New York would be to aggress against any competitors.
So, we can imagine a government monopoly existing in New York without using aggression, and we can imagine all people in New York burning all their cash tomorrow at noon. But neither will happen in the real world.
So you’re qualifying that non-aggression in a state would only be possible in small jurisdictions, because “otherwise someone else would enter the market.”
Good. In the autarchic republic I propose, the size of a jurisdiction is dependent on the number of people whom accept that jurisdiction and subscribe to it.
So, say that New York overnight became autarchic. We tell all the people that they may form or join any jurisdiction they like.
Undoubtedly, many cities within New York state and New York City itself would immediately be split into smaller enclaves along ethnic and cultural boundaries, as well as idological boundaries, and the like.
This is precisely what I’d like to occur. I want to encourage competition between jurisdictions, competition for citizens.
These are not monopolies established by forced but rather established by voluntary cooperation. Precisely that.
No, I am not saying that. A state by definition has the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, aggressive or otherwise. I specifically was talking about governments. A government does not have to be a state. For example, you can have the Olympic government. It is the governing body of the Olympics.
The problem with your autarkic jurisdictions is that they are still jurisdictions. They still hold the monopoly on legitimate violence. They are still states, however free they may be in comparison to what we have today.
And the point I was making regarding the size of these non-aggressive governments was that they would have to be incredibly small. New York City wouldn’t cut it. The area population would have to be so small that no other government would form due to competition.
Those are largely voluntary associations, where if you disagree with the ‘governing body’ your recourse is generally to leave the organization. In a sense, this autarchic state converts jurisdictions to that same mechanism.
Therefore what? They are jurisdictions because within their boundaries there is law, and law by its nature has a monopoly within its jurisdiction on what is legal.
Are you saying that a jurisdiction would prevent another jurisdiction from cropping up inside its boundaries? Because that’s precisely what can indeed happen within this autarchy, and the original jurisdiction cannot stop the formation of a new jurisdiction within its boundaries, precisely because the limits of each jurisdiction is made up of the property boundaries of those whom accept that jurisdiction. So, for a new jurisdiction to crop up within the old, all that’s required is for a one or more citizens to repudiate X existing jurisdiction and declare a new charter city-Y made up of the contiguous property boundaries of these founding member(s).
Again, there’s a significant change in what a jurisdiction means, how it is established and how it maintained in this new idea of autarchy, and applying old concepts of immovable and eternal jurisdictions does not work.
I begin with the assumption that jurisdictional boundaries should serve people rather than the other way around, and that the government owns no territory or land at all. It’s jurisdiction is limited to those whom accept it and nothing more. And they can secede from it at will and join a new jurisdiction or even live in a jurisdiction-free zone.
I conceive of a poplitical structure of increasingly abstract principles governing the extension from city to nation. It would go something like this:
Nation → State → City
So far so good, anyone familiar with the American system will be quite familiar. But the definitions of those terms is going to be quite different in order to serve this idea of autarchy.
In this structure, the term ‘nation’ would be more like the UN than the US Federal government, because the Nation in an autarchy has only one law that it will enforce: voluntaryism.
For anyone to join the society, they must agree to abide by pure voluntaryism. The national government is a confederal government, one which the states and cities can secede from at will and start their own national government, but that is besides the point.
States will be more like the US Federal government, controlling a territory made up of the contiguous boundaries of member cities and the unpopulated regions in-between. States in this capacity have too a very limited law set, composed of enforcing a statement of negative restrictions on itself and member cities within it (akin to the bill of rights and nothing more).
And City-states will be more like the US state-system. Here is where the major legislation is proposed and accepted or not by each individual citizen.
The main purpose of a structure like this is to provide an overarching principle that anyone can agree with in order to extend others into it. For instance, should a country like say the Phillipines decide to accept voluntaryism and adopt an autarchic system, they could contract to join the confed as a State by agreeing to voluntaryism and them begin setting up autarchic cities out of their existing cities.
Similarly, if anyone believes they need a better bill of rights, or that the old one isn’t serving, they can leave that state and set up a new one without leaving the nation at large. The confed’s National role is to make sure the states live up to voluntaryism.
In essence, were it to succeed on an international level, the principle of voluntaryism would be catapulted to the central governing legal principle of humanity.
Which, I think, would be a fantastic turn of events for the entire world.
It looks like you have put a lot of thought into this idea of yours, but there are still certain aspects of it that are contradictory. In another thread, Autolykos pointed out that a court of last resort must necessarily use aggression to maintain its status as a court of last resort. Therefore, your autarkic governments are still states. And all states are aggressive.
See above. Also, the problem with a jurisdiction over any specific physical area (as opposed to perhaps jurisdiction over specific people or groups instead) is that it ends up being a “love it or leave it” argument. So long as the governing body maintains control over a geographic area, leaving the organization requires leaving the area.
This is not true. Law by its nature is not a monopoly. Laws are social norms that are enforced through violence. Statutory law is when the state issues decrees as to what these norms shall be. Case law is more decentralized, as judges build upon precedent to decide what these norms shall be. Customary law is the most decentralized, as instead of a group of individuals (such as the state or judges) deciding what is to be law, the customs and traditions of the community are what cause certain norms to become law.
Law is just a set of rules, only people or groups of people can have monopolies. However, there cannot be conflicting laws within the same area, as they are also norms. Perhaps that is what you meant.
The problem with this idea is that there is still aggression. The governments controlling these jurisdictions necessarily are aggressive, otherwise they would not be in control of the particular geographic area defined as its jurisdiction.
This all has to do with the idea of a court of last resort. Either these governments have the final say or they do not. If they do not have the final say as to what goes on in their jurisdiction, then there is no reason to claim that there is a singular government in any given area.
I think you would greatly benefit from reading Clayton’s two articles, What Law Is and A Praxeological Account of Law.
Regarding this quote and the rest of your post, your concept of an autarkic structure is still a state. It has courts of last resort, which are necessarily aggressive. So long as you have courts of last resort, your idea is minarchist in nature.
It depends how you define “liberty.”
I define it as: freedom from aggression.
Thus defined, liberty is IMO the most important political value, i.e. the value which should be honored to the exclusion of all others in all political considerations.
But it is not the ultimate value in life.
Saying that we ought to have liberty is easy in comparison to saying what we ought to do with that liberty.
This seems to be the theme so I’ll stop your quote here, with respect.
Thanks for the articles, I’ll do my homework and come back. I hope to be able to show with principled rationale why my courts of alst resort are not innately aggressive.
All I’ll say for now is that they do not control a jurisdiction they exist in, they do not have “final say on what goes on in their territory,” they are only there for dispute resolution both civil and criminal.
I agree they are something akin to a state, because they use public-sanctioned coercion, but I do not agree that they are necessarily aggressive.
Not to armchair anarchists that is. Their subjective value scale seems to tell them that it’s better to live under a regime of statism, then under real anarchy. Otherwise they would act by leaving the system/country moving to a more anarchic society.
This seems like a non sequitur, since it could easily be spun against a socialist, in that they are only ‘armchair socialists’ since they use and consume capitalist products and private property in a society where there are thriving private enterprises, and should move to North Korea if they’d like a more socialistic society.
But in both cases, the ancap and the socialist aren’t violating anything in their beliefs. The ancap doesn’t say to stop using government controlled services, or that belief in ancap necessitates the cessation of all public property, but that the status of such ‘property’ is illegitimate, vice versa for the socialist/communist who doesn’t believe that using private property in the current order violates their belief system, only that private property is illegitimate/leads to ‘exploitation’.
From your suggested reading:
Hans Hoppe, in a recent lecture[2], defines the State in the following manner:
Let me begin with the definition of a state. What must an agent be able to do to qualify as a state? This agent must be able to insist that all conflicts among the inhabitants of a given territory be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review. In particular, this agent must be able to insist that all conflicts involving himself be adjudicated by him or his agent. And, implied in the power to exclude all others from acting as ultimate judge, as the second defining characteristic of a state, is the agent’s power to tax: to unilaterally determine the price that justice seekers must pay for his services.
Based on this definition of a state, it is easy to understand why a desire to control a state might exist. For whoever is a monopolist of final arbitration within a given territory can make laws. And he who can legislate can also tax. Surely, this is an enviable position.
Comparing this to my proposal for autarchy, there are considerable differences. Perhaps the most glaring being that I would prohibit any form of compulsory taxation constitutionally (clearly a violation of voluntaryism otherwise), relying on fee for service and voluntary subscription-payments.
Neither would the court be able to insist that “all conflicts… be brought to him for ultimate decision-making or be subject to his final review.” As court of last resort, it must be appealed to by a complainant and cannot demand conflcits come to it. Indeed, I assume most conflicts would be resolved in private courts.
Neither does my proposal allow that conflict involving the state-mechanisms be adjudicated by “himself or his agent” as any conflict involving the state-mechanisms would be adjudicated by a 3rd party court outside that jurisdiction, taking that jurisdiction and the complainant as equal parts.
Lastly, does the court in my proposal even have a monopoly, even as a court of last resort?
That really depends on how the court is brought into being. You might assume that courts in this proposal would arise the way they do now, as permanent entities, with marble halls as political appointees. But I’m very much a fan of ad hoc processes in a libertarian political system. These courts of last resort could very well be drawn from the private judges of the region, or a collection of judges from local jurisdictions, operating as a panel, with or without jury depending.
I see a need for a court to be able to use coercion at some point, by which I mean to use the function known as a court order, in order to right certain wrongs, meaning to effect justice. As long as this coercion is always used to oppose aggression, meaning it is responsive coercion only, then the court is not innately aggressive.
Neither is it innately aggressive if it doesn’t tax, nor demand final say on things.
The one area where I see problem is that as court of last resort combined with fee for service it comes close to being able to de facto tax and demand any price it wants.
However, I think this is checked by the fact that jurisdictions compete with each other for citizens. Should one court become unreasonable, it’s a simple thing to repudiate that jurisdiction and walk across the street and join another or form your own.
Competition for courts is the result. Which means, no monopolies.
Though, I want to improve that mechanism if possible.
From Clayton’s What is Law post:
This definition immediately raises the question of how disputes can be resolved between asymmetrically powerful parties. In modern law systems, the aggressor (accused) has an incentive to resolve the conflict with his victim by means of law because the state will immediately retaliate against the accused for failure to comply with a court trial. In other words, the state offers the options of non-violent dispute resolution or immediate, overwhelming retaliatory violence (appear in court or be arrested or possibly even killed for failure to comply). 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.
This seems to be the central flaw of Anarchism in practice, namely that the powerful can avoid justice. I’ve never read anyone suggest anything that seems to mitigate this flaw.
You yourself even suggested that the party obtaining a judgment against an aggressor is the one whom should also carry out the enforcement of the ruling. Implicitly, you think this would become a contract for sale, a sort of enforcement market. Someone with a judgment against another could sell his claim to an enforcer at a discount and leave it to them to enforce it. They would then show up at the defendant’s place, army in tow, and threaten them into paying. Apparently.
That is supposed to be better than simply having a court with coercive ability issue a judgment and have neutral third-parties peaceably sanction bank accounts or property in order to rectify a claim.
It should be noted that none of the coercion used by a court in this process can be categorized as aggression. It would all be responsive coercion in the pursuit of justice. Thus, there are no moral grounds to oppose such an action.
What happens when the state appeals? The state might be forced to go to a third party initially, but so long as it controls the court of last resort, the dispute will eventually fall under its own domain. Also, don’t forget that today, not all SCOTUS cases are brought to them by agents of the state. People appeal to the SCOTUS all the time, though it may take a long time to work its way up there. So, even if the court of last resort itself doesn’t have the power to demand cases be brought to it, so long as someone appeals the case enough (whether it is citizens or agents of the state), the case will go to the court of last resort. That is what makes it a court of last resort.
This is where we disagree, I think. I don’t think that courts ought to have that power. My ideal is mediation. After all, the reason people bring disputes to a court is precisely because they want to avoid violent conflict. I don’t believe that courts should be binding, as they would not have resolved the conflict. This does not mean that I don’t believe violence shouldn’t be used. It’s just that so long as a third party, such as a judge, decides what the proper punishment should be, we can’t really know what the actual resolution would have been. I want to get rid of third parties ruling over others.
Let’s just take an extreme case to look at, such as murder. The only reason a murderer would go to mediation is because he does not want death by the family/friends of his victim. So he goes to mediation in order to resolve the dispute. If the murderer and the family of the victim cannot come to an resolution, the murderer is kind of screwed. Essentially, he will be put to death if he does not seek mediation and find a mutually agreeable solution with the family of the victim.
So there is the threat of violence looming over the murderer, and unless he resolves the dispute, he will be killed. The court itself does not need to order some arbitrary punishment in order to seek justice. After all, what would be justice for the victims family? Maybe they do desire the murderer be put to death. Maybe they are a poor family and they have rent to pay and food to put on the table, so they accept money as restitution instead of execution. It’s up to the family of the victim what they consider to be a resolution. But if it’s up to the judge, it may very well not line up with justice for the victim, which is what justice really ought to be about.
The form of law that I prefer is customary law. Law is formed by social norms and customs in a customary law society. In other words, the process of resolving disputes is the mechanism that ends up creating the law. Have you read about the Somali Xeer? They have a very interesting and robust customary law system that has been serving them well. It isn’t perfect, but it also hasn’t had much outside influence. Anyway, it’s nice to see that the standard of living in Somalia has been improving dramatically ever since the collapse of their state.
It is a flaw the nature of reality in general, not anarchism in particular. In any form of society, if someone is powerful enough, he will be able to avoid justice. Roderick Long addresses this concern here.
I realize that this was addressed to Autolykos, but I think my post above addresses this issue, specifically the example about the murderer and mediation.
… which is infinitely preferable to the present social order where the powerful never come to justice because they are the very ones who administer it.
Clayton -
Can there be such a thing as an ethical act without liberty? I brought this up here: Why is liberty a virtue? - #25 by Phi_est_aureum
The premise is that if an individual is not free, his actions cannot be considered ethical because he does so under duress, if you will. For example, just because one pays taxes (which are necessarily extracted through force), and those taxes are used to provide food stamps through government, one cannot claim they are doing a selfless thing (or otherwise, performing an ethical action) by feeding those in need. The act of paying this tax is merely a selfish act, because the person does not give so that the hungry can eat (which would be considered charity, a virtue in some people’s beliefs), but rather, the person pays to avoid fines, jail time, or some other act of aggression/coercion by the hands of the state. In essence, he pays the taxes because it is in his interest to do so; the fact that someone can eat with his tax money is merely a side-effect (after all, tax money can and often is wasted in the tangled mess of bureaucracy or otherwise diverted to sources it wasn’t originally intended for).
So what I’m proposing (or maybe just asking for insight from others on this proposition) is that while liberty itself is not a virtue, but is a condition under which humans may act, is liberty the only form through with virtues can be achieved? Or, is taxation still considered to be charity (are recipients of taxes, legal plunder, recipients of charity or beneficiaries of legal plunder)? And since many different virtues (or vices) are valued by many different people, does that not simply imply that liberty is a means to achieving values?
"… which is infinitely preferable to the present social order where the powerful never come to justice because they are the very ones who administer it.
Clayton -"
+1
The concept of “army” includes the phenomenon that Napolean described as electrifying men into self-sacrifice. A prerequisite for joining an army as we know it is subordinating all moral judgement to superior command. You are a killing device retaining of your human traits only the cognitive ability to outsmart the enemy on the battlefield. By contrast the only sort of army that I would fight in is one of temporary common interest, a sort of mercenary army where my only compensation is the tactical result, and I alone decide what actions are permissable in every single case to obtain that result.
Liberty is most definitely the ultimate goal and has innate value.
Starting to think Auto is sockpuppeting gotlucky
@Anenome - Is your ‘autarchy’ based on De Puydt’s ‘panarchy’ (a less confusing name in English) or are the similarities a coincidence?