No, not really. If you are going to discuss legal systems you are going to need to know some very basic history of them, so read up.
Thanks for admitting that you can’t answer my very simple questions, your excuses notwithstanding. Here are they again for someone else to have a stab at them if they so please:
Would I be coerced into accepting it? This “common” law, I mean. If yes, what’s the difference from uniform (monopoly) law? If not, why would I voluntarily submit myself to it? Or, who is going to coerce me and under what justification?
Z.
You’re still welcome to answer my questions. Would I be coerced into accepting this “common” law? If so, by whom and under what justification? If not, why would you assume that I would inevitably accept it voluntarily? If it would make it easier, assume that I am the best expert in “common” law that ever lived.
Z.
Maybe I can help. This used to be a little fuzzy to me also. Imagine this scenario:
You hire an Insurance company to cover you or compensate your heirs in the event of your murder. As a stipulation in the contract you must agree to not commit any murders yourself.
Now the insurance company might find it profitable to offer some form of personal defense services to you in order to prevent your murder in the first place. This could be profitable if they spent less on defense than they would have to pay out to you in the event of your death. You now have a PDA.
Now it gets interesting. Lets say you are assaulted by someone attempting to kill you. Assuming that this person also has hired a PDA and that they have a similar contractual agreement not to commit murder, your insurance company now has a claim against his/her insurance company. You won’t need to worry about finding a court that you both agree upon, because the 2 PDA’s would most likely already have an agreement of this type with each other.
PDA’s would have an incentive (profit) to select fair courts for these type of cases. If the potential murderer refused to show up for trial, he would have broken the contract with HIS insurance company. They would likely compensate your PDA and deal with him themselves.
These are simply idea’s. They do seem reasonable the more you think about them, although no one knows for sure what a free society would look like. Chew on this a bit and see if it makes sense to you.
Please. Thanks for taking the time to read, you obviously are trying to understand this fully.
You’d be “coerced” into accepting it, just as you’d be “coerced” into accepting contract law, by an arbitrator. Uniform law is when one set of laws is applied everywhere, whereas common law differs from place to place. You’d voluntarily submit yourself to it for largely the same reasons that have already been given.
Now please, if you have more “simple questions” about the workings of common law start a new thread or pm me.
We “skipped over it” because this is not a discussion about caging the beasts. (Look up Molyneux’s podcast of similar title, for one possible explanation of how this might work.)
It’s unnecessary to offset “common” with quotation marks. It’s simply common law. That’s the name for it. It’s not something we just made up here.
The short answer is “no”. You would not be coerced into accepting the decisions rendered under common law, especially from a polycentric/anarchist perspective, except insofar as you wish to remain a part of society. People interact with one another. And respectful people generally avoid disrespectful people as much as they can. This means that maybe your grocer no longer wants to sell you bread, or he does so only at a very high price. Perhaps the company from whom you purchase water and wastewater treatment simply decides to stop servicing you. So it’s possible that even though you don’t “accept” the decision, that many other people will, and this will make things very hard for you.
Further, if you’re talking about property rights, the moment you step off your own parcel of land, anyone else could apprehend you as a fugitive. So long as you stay holed up in your basement which is rapidly filling up with your own stale urine and feces, you wouldn’t have to worry about going to jail or paying any restitution or whatever.
So what would you consider to be injurious besides building a dam and then flooding everyone below me? Pollution? People can get water purifiers. Diverting water to water my property? There would still be plenty left for those downstream from me. If not, then it must be a desert and a very inhospitable place anyways, and probably no one living downstream from me. The only other thing I can think of is poisoning the water. That would probably be considered injurious.
I can’t pretend to answer this question aside from obvious cases like poison and pollution.
Or, you could get water purifiers for them. Why should they be obligated to buy them now that you’ve decided to pollute the stream?
Maybe there would be. Maybe there wouldn’t be. It is not up to you as an individual to decide this by yourself and for everyone else.
What we’ve neglected so far (and this seems very obvious to me now) is that if society were structured according to these ridiculous maxims that you propose, the first inhabitants would simply claim ownership of the river, upstream all the way to the source. That’s one very obvious and simple way of “resolving” this sort of dispute. But I don’t think anyone finds this likely, desirable, or optimal, for a number of reasons, so alternatives arise, and the prevailing alternatives suggest that people don’t “own” the water under most circumstances, or they have a very limited “ownership” thereof. This is simply the prie you pay to be a part of a “society”. If you want to go homestead a yet-undiscovered source of water, and pollute it to high heaven, knock yourself out. But all the other sources of water are going to be governed by some sort of community/society/etc.
I would suppose it would depend on the level of pollution.
Actually, it is up to me to decide what to do with my property. Or do think I have to get some kind of democratic approval from everyone else when I drink a glass of water or flush the toilet?
That is not what I am suggesting at all. When have I ever suggested that one could just claim ownership of other people’s property? Not only that, what river do you know of on this planet that has one source? All I am suggesting is that if I own a mile of land, and I have a river flowing across part of that land, then I have claim to all the water that flows over that part of the land. I can dam it up or divert it to irrigate my land. But neither of these activities would harm others. Not only that, but market forces would keep me from doing to much damage to the water, because people find good drinking water to be highly valuable. As such, there would be a high demand for clean water. Someone would provide it. I think you are making too much out of this. You make it seem like someone could hold hostage a whole river. Give me a break.
And how is this going to happen if there is no government?
(which is what I’ve been saying all along)
I’ve previously addressed this. The abridged answer is “no”.
The question of course is whether the water is your property. I do not believe it likely that whatever society you happened to live in would recognize a property right in the water as absolute as a property right to the land, or to an automobile.
It isn’t other people’s property if you’re the first inhabitant.
If people have an absolute right to the water flowing over their land, then the only absolute right to the water which has any meaning whatsoever is the right to control the source(s).
And if your ownership is absolute then you also have the right to prevent that water from flowing on to your land. Couldn’t you build a big levee around your property, causing adjacent parcels to flood? You own the land, right? This is obviously ridiculous. Couldn’t you build some super-duper water boiler and evaporate every molecule of water that passes your property? You have claim to all the water, right? This is also, obviously ridiculous.
Seriously? Is this going to turn in to another back-and-forth about common law? Please, no.
Pretend that the commons can’t be managed, if you will, but Ostrom just won a Nobel prize in Economics, in part for her analysis of economic governance of the commons.
assuming a singular ownable ‘source of a river’ i think any water that flows off the owners land, to downstream lands, is water abandoned but formerly owned by upstream owner, just like cattle/wildlife or what have you. any downstreamer can homestead abandoned water that arrives at his door and use it or abuse it as he sees fit.
now, you may object that living downstream at the furthest edge would suck. so maybe land prices there would simply be cheaper if you want to negotiate terms of receiving water from an upstreamer of a certain quantity and quality, negotiate for that, but be prepared to pay. I see this as the libertarian and market compatible solution. this is a ‘hard ownership’ position. such issues could be settled at the point of acquiring ownership of land, so no alarms and no surprises, only conflicts resolvable through appeal to the content of prior agreements on how to resolve them should they arise would arise. If people living all on a river felt that a riparian approach suited them better than the default ‘hard ownership’ they start with, they can institute that in a voluntary manner
Like I said, building a dam that floods the property of other people would be considered injurious, and as such, good cause for a lawsuit. As to a water boiler that can evaporate a whole river, why do you have to devolve into the fantastical? Even if such a thing were invented, and someone proposed to use it, everyone downstream would probably get together and take out the person using it, lock him up or kill him or something. Or, given how valuable water is, the people upstream would divert the river away from him .
If it’s your property and absolute, why? They other land owners don’t have a right to spill all that water into your riverbed.
Now you’re thinking! The same of course applies to any other course of action that those downstream deemed grossly inappropriate. All I’m saying is that those people and you, as a whole, will be likely to try and avoid this outcome by adhering to some sort of informal rules regarding the fair use of what is, essentially, a commons right to the water. I am not offering specifics of how this might be accomplished, only that Riparian rights and Prior Appropriation seem to me a good starting point. That is all.