I just thought of this objection to anarchocapitalism, I could easily imagine it as a farily common objection too, though I don’t know how or if it could be countered. I would be interested to hear other forum participant’s views on it.
In an entirely anarchic market order wouldn’t a problem exist, in the sense that those who are richer and more productive could often “cheat justice” by paying more to the dispute resolver, in the case that both parties choose to employ the same person/organisation for this task? Would the problem exist, but be minimised, given the need for dispute resolution organisations to maintain a reputation, and the incentives cheating would create for remuneration to whistleblowers by competitors?
Would this be less of a problem for disputes between 2 parties who utilise different private courts?
If anybody’s wondering, I’m not deluded enough to proclaim"Aha! We need a state!" given this objection, since I don’t see how that necessarily solves the problem, though I would be interested in your thoughts.
IMO, impartial arbitration is by far the #1 commodity that a DRO would be selling, so it would only take a small number of egregious miscarriages of justice before the DRO’s brand name is permanently sullied, just like it only took a small number of fatal infernos to permanently sully the reputation of the Pinto as a reliable method of personal transportation.
It might happen in some instances, but long term it’s just not a sensible strategy to tamper with the one product you sell that’s keeping you in business.
What makes this objection pertain specifically to anarcho-capitalism and not also to the State? How does the State evade this sort of objection exactly?
Now, after the above question is properly and correctly addressed, I can think of quite a few reasons to as why the State is by far more prone to the problems raised by your alleged objection.
I agree DD5, as I noted, from the viewpoint of the “customers” the creation of the state would not necessarily solve the problem, and as you have pointed out it would only allow the potential and likely perpetrators a violent monopoly. So of course, it would be more straightforward for the rich to “buy” justice, since their exchange partner would not likely suffer the kind of repurcussions that it might face under a voluntary system. A state may too “lose reputation”, however current states seem to do pretty well at bypassing this obstacle with efficient propaganda, partisanship and demagoguery that comes with most democracies.
Indeed, an additional unique characteristic of states, is that not only do states get remunerated by the rich through bribes, they doubly rob them too using demagogic egalitarianism and appeals to the envy and barbarism of the poor. Hence, they are able to rob and cheat both groups, all the while turning them against the other; it’s pure sycophantal genius.
With regard to anarchic conditions, I feel it might well be more beneficial in certain cases for people in poorer communities to not hire the services of a dispute resoluter who takes monetary remuneration, but perhaps something more akin to a “natural elite”, or community leader in the non-coercive sense, since it would be in their interests perhaps, to avoid the types of problems I’ve described above. Under a statist system, without individual choice, you can bet your sorry ass such an individual would never be picked.
Of course, I doubt it would be as simple as what I have described above.
Another worry is that the rich would rule. After all, won’t justice just go to the highest bidder in that case, if you turn legal services into an economic good? That’s a common objection. Interestingly, it’s a particularly common objection among Randians, who suddenly become very concerned about the poor impoverished masses. But under which system are the rich more powerful? Under the current system or under anarchy? Certainly, you’ve always got some sort of advantage if you’re rich. It’s good to be rich. You’re always in a better position to bribe people if you’re rich than if you’re not; that’s true. But, under the current system, the power of the rich is magnified. Suppose that I’m an evil rich person, and I want to get the government to do something-or-other that costs a million dollars. Do I have to bribe some bureaucrat a million dollars to get it done? No, because I’m not asking him to do it with his own money. Obviously, if I were asking him to do it with his own money, I couldn’t get him to spend a million dollars by bribing him any less than a million. It would have to be at least a million dollars and one cent. But people who control tax money that they don’t themselves personally own, and therefore can’t do whatever they want with, the bureaucrat can’t just pocket the million and go home (although it can get surprisingly close to that). All I have to do is bribe him a few thousand, and he can direct this million dollars in tax money to my favorite project or whatever, and thus the power of my bribe money is multiplied.
Whereas, if you were the head of some private protection agency and I’m trying to get you to do something that costs a million dollars, I’d have to bribe you more than a million. So, the power of the rich is actually less under this system. And, of course, any court that got the reputation of discriminating in favor of millionaires against poor people would also presumably have the reputation of discriminating for billionaires against millionaires. So, the millionaires would not want to deal with it all of the time. They’d only want to deal with it when they’re dealing with people poorer, not people richer. The reputation effects – I don’t think this would be too popular an outfit.
Worries about poor victims who can’t afford legal services, or victims who die without heirs (again, the Randians are very worried about victims dying without heirs) – in the case of poor victims, you can do what they did in Medieval Iceland. You’re too poor to purchase legal services, but still, if someone has harmed you, you have a claim to compensation from that person. You can sell that claim, part of the claim or all of the claim, to someone else. Actually, it’s kind of like hiring a lawyer on a contingency fee basis. You can sell to someone who is in a position to enforce your claim. Or, if you die without heirs, in a sense, one of the goods you left behind was your claim to compensation, and that can be homesteaded.
from Long’s 10 objections. I posted this and a bunch of other resources in a similar thread today. You should read the Tannehill’s Market for Liberty as well. I think that the new copyright owner made mises.org take it down, but I will send the PDF to anyone who PMs me.
Exactly. In a market for law the rich would be able to afford the best laws. And the “best laws” from their point of view, are laws allowing them to do what they please. By the way, that is exactly what privi-lege means : private law.
Of course, none of the economists here would admit such a gaping hole in their pet theories…
By “private”, privilege refers to special laws for certain (private) individuals, and other laws for others. It does not refer to “the private provision of justice”.
The only type of equality libertarianism is after is equality under the law, not the chimera of economic equality which brings about a special set of laws for the privileged ruling elite.
The only valid argument against #8 is that “people will still try to establish states”. This may be true, but it would just be dealt with the same as with currently existing states or the punishment of any gang of thugs.
I don’t think anyone would claim market justice = utopian justice. It doesn’t need to be, it just needs to be the case that market justice > state justice
I imagine that if an arbitrator thought that the bribe offered was worth more than all the future money he thought he could make in the future plus the cost of inconvenience for being treated as a bribe taker in a matter of justice, which I would imagine would come with a high level of ostracism.
One of the things I have been thinking about is debt inheritance and how exactly that would work. In the extreme case, say an grown orphan woman, whose parents were both only childs who gets pregnant from sperm from a sperm bank kills someone in cold blood while giving birth and then kills herself after (or just dies in childbirth). Would that child be born into a mountain of debt equal to the restitution that his mother would have had to pay? Does the dead man’s insurance just have to simply eat the cost?
Another thing to consider is this: Let’s suppose, for the sake of argument, that a rich man DOES buy off a private court and use it to his advantage. Now, we’re living in a stateless society and therefore courts are free and competing. What do you think the other courts will do if they catch wind of this (and no doubt they very much try and keep tabs on their opponents to use against them)? The answer is, obviously, absolutely tear into them in the media and such, and use the information to entice customers away from that court system to their own. After all, if they can be bought, how do you think they’ll treat you? This isn’t an option in a state society, which has a monopoly court system.
I imagine that if an arbitrator thought that the bribe offered was worth more than all the future money he thought he could make in the future plus the cost of inconvenience for being treated as a bribe taker in a matter of justice, which I would imagine would come with a high level of ostracism.
Here again more can be done than just ostracism. In common law tradition, anyone who brought ridiculous charges would have to pay for wasting the court’s time. Similarly, judges are open to punishment if they diverge too seriously from what is just.
So when my family sued a branch of an insurance conglomerate for not meeting their end of the bargain, we got $0? No. I remember us getting much more than that, thanks to he arbitration skills of our lawyers and the arbitration firm. It kept both parties from going to public court, which would have been much more costly in terms of greivance, not only for us, but the people who have to pay to support the public court system. In short, they make their money from satisfying all parties as much as possible, and not favoring the multi-billionaire conglomerate alone. That’s how firms tend to work in the market.
So what’s this about pet theories? It sounds like a troll to me.
And how does that not happen now? Right now, there is a monopoly on law, at one price level, and you have no alternative if you don’t like it.
They don’t need laws for that though. The only reason you would pay for a law, instead of paying the costs of doing what you please, is when the cost of law is lower. The cost of law can only be lower for you (and not the parties you seek advantage over) if there is a monopoly which you control or have access to. If the cost of law is equally low to everyone, or if there is a polycentric legal order, it becomes increasingly expensive for one person to gain a legal advantage over another.
Well, I think I just demonstrated that you didn’t actually perform an economic analysis. I however did.
This problem is not unique to AC… government faces this problem too. In AC’s case, the problem is much reduced, because the bulk of money spent on security and arbitration will come from the bulk of the people, who must therefore be catered to. Even if one company were to favor the rich, the poor and middle class will be free to form their own companies and some sort of arbitration process between the rich-favorers and the other companies will have to evolve for those companies to be profitable.
Are you saying that it happens now? Assuming it does, your solution is not really a solution, rather it would exacerbate the problem.
I don’t think so. Economic analysis shows that teh market would catter to the rich and powerful and they would be able to buy as much ‘justice’ as they wanted. Here :
Then we would have went to a public court to guarantee our interests. Instead, we circumvented the government apparatus for justice and took care of it ourselves, as adversaries, but still civilized.
Wergeld for a thrall, the price of a thrall. and the manumission price of a thrall were all equal, as might be expected. The price of a thrall presumably represents the capitalized value of his production net of room and board. It seems at first surprising that this should amount to only a year and a half of wages (also net of room and board), but we must remember that wages, according to Thorkell Johanneson, were lower in the early period, when thralldom was common; thralldom disappeared in Iceland by the early twelfth century, about when Gragas was being written.
It is worth noting that the wergeld for a thrall was considerably lower than for a free man. This is to be expected. The wergeld for a thrall was paid to his master and it was his master, not the thrall, who had some part in the political bargaining process by which, I have argued, wergelds were set. The value of a thrall to his master would be the capitalized value of his net product. But the value of a free man to himself and his family includes not only his net product but also the value to him of being alive. Food and board, in other words, are expenses to the owner of a thrall but consumption to a free man. Furthermore, one would expect that the costs of the thrall to the owner would include costs of guarding and supervision that would not apply to the free man’s calculation of his own value.
If we interpret the “ounce” of Njal’s Saga as a legal ounce, the usual wergelds for free men again seem somewhat low, ranging from 12 l/2 year’s wages for an ordinary man to twice that for a man of some importance.[55] Here again. we must remember that there is considerable uncertainty in our wage figures. Twelve and a half years’ wages might be a reasonable estimate of the value of a man to his family, assuming a market interest rate of between 5 and 10 percent, but it hardly seems to include much allowance for his value to himself. If we accept the interpretation in Magnusson and Palsson[56] of the ounce in which the wergelds of Njal’s Saga are paid as an ounce of unrefined silver, worth four legal ounces, the figures seem more reasonable.
I guess it’s just the anti-capitalist mentality to try to cast off responsibility.