now i have heard the theory’s for the idea of private protection, that we would have competing sets of police like organizations. now i consider myself an anarchist except in this aspect. the thing that i don’t see possible is how people can enforce different sets of laws in the same area, it is a paradox that one person would be following a set of laws in an area, but if somone is say doing crack in the same area. would they get arrested. it makes absolutely no sense to me and i would like to have it cleared up.
See this.
This follows from the pie-in-the-sky idea that anarchy will be an essentially flat society, with everybody making up their own rules for their dealings with the rest of the world as they go along. Since this does not provide the certainty needed for long-term planning, there will be both geographic territories and non-geographic associations whose rules you will be deemed to follow unless you want to get kicked out or lose your business. Long’s paper points out the lack of uniform rules in medieval Europe, so businessmen developed the entirely voluntary and uniform law merchant.
This gets back to the thread on “Punishment.” Nobody’s going to bother with inhumane, expensive and counter-productive prisons, particularly for “public order” or “vice” type offenses. If the community prohibits crack cocaine and they see you firing it up, you’ll just be escorted to the outskirts of town and told to leave.
All these places will be competing for human and financial capital, and this will be the check against stifling regulation on the one hand, and chaos on the other. I also foresee these different territories/associations (I call them “fees”) negotiating sojourners’ rights for their members when they’re working elsewhere. Thus, let’s say an Orthodox Christian who honors the feasts with a bottle of wine is working for a client in a Muslim sheikdom, he’ll be able to do so without getting kicked out.
i imagine that prisons might be reimagined as ‘rehabilition centres’., whereby those that transgressed contract law and become outcasts seperated from division of labour, might be challenged to perform some period of penance in an institution where they are set work, educated, and monitored until such a time as they are deemed fit to be pardoned and reintegrated
So long as the prisoners can produce output sufficient to cover the costs of their rehab in addition to the debt to their victim sure. But they’ll be competing with businesses that don’t have to worry about rehab costs for employees so that scenario is a little hard to imagine. Of course, it could also be a charity, and all the people willing to underwrite the costs of education, monitoring and therapy for criminals will be free to do so instead of pushing it off on taxpayers.
That’s right. Different sets of laws can’t be enforced at the same time on the same people.
Please read Rothbard’s “The Ethics of Liberty” regarding that issue.
That means that the market will tend to unify law, as it unifies CD/DVD specifications. But that doesn’t means that there will be only a set of laws. They will compete in the market. And there will be sets of laws for each religious belief, in order to resolve conflicts between members of the same religion, for example.
how would it help you if i did that?
He explains that people in reformatories are like slaves, because it is arbitrary who determines and when the criminal has completely recovered. If he never recovers (at least, according to “some specialists”), the criminal could stay there for all life, that being a punishment not proportional to the crime he commited. I’m sure Rothbard is better explaining this, so I recommend reading his book. [:P]
does that mean there wont be reformatories so once you are out of division of labour society then thats it. one strike and your out?
seems like an entrepeneurial problem, to demonstrate that there is some reasonable criteria for judging reform, this can be established through the market, of course the people that would fund it would have say, obviously if a reformatory got a rep for never reforming anyone, then that is a great incentive for an ‘exile’ to avoid engaging in a reformation contract with it!
its hardly a punishment if it helps him and he chooses it over choosing to rough it in the wildrerness
We were talking about reformatories as a way of dealing with crime. Of course that market will provide reformatories for those who want them (ugh).
Pretty much. People would only care about “reform” insofar as the victim is made whole and the criminal becomes a net producer rather than a net consumer: somebody who imposes costs on others. If the perp’s output can’t satisfy the judgment and can’t earn him a living wage, he will either be an outcast or individuals of a charitable bent will have to sponsor him to cover his net operating loss. Again, the difference would be that the costs have to be paid by the perp and his sponsors, they can’t be imposed on others via the State.
And exile may not be a panacea either. As an outlaw, the victim could put a bounty on the perp’s head. So the perp pays the locality x amount not to extradite or kill him. If the victim is able to up the ante, then the perp is SOL.
Of course, this is actually only a problem arising from a very small percentage of the population, i.e., real criminals who actually injure people or steal things. And with the State’s restrictions on the right to defend one’s self and one’s property lifted, criminals would become an even smaller problem.