I agree. If a man is not free to produce, he is not free to discharge his obligations (such as, a monetary penalty accepted in order to repay damage done to another). Imprisonment or even forced labor is odious.
However, if the consequences for continued non-payment are not severe (it used to be death in many places if you go back more than a couple hundred years), then people will commit torts and then refuse to pay the agreed monetary penalties. So, I expect that severe penalties (death, expulsion, etc.) would emerge for persistent non-payment of obligations.
Before I respond to your post, I believe it is likely you and I have actually read the same Rothbard article. However I have a number of problems with that article, namely that things aren’t quite so black and white.
But then you are saying that a widower who seeks retribution (in the form of capital punishment/justice/whatever term is most preferable) from someone who believes is guilty should ‘feel the full consequence of his actions’ if it turns out that person is innocent. That is quite possibly even worse because at least the professional arbiter is a neutral body whereas the grief-stricken widower is reaked by emotion. I know what you are probably thinking about it being rational action nonetheless but I find it hard to ignore the fact that some behaviour is highly emotional and bordering on animalistic (if not in actuality an animalistic impulse) in these situations.
Also, I don’t think it is a statist mindset to consider the scenario that there could be market demand for prosecution and even prison in a free market.
I never talked about ‘greater good’ (in fact it was you that brought it up just now) - I talked about the individual rights of would be victims. You cannot ignore when dealing with a situation that there are other potential victims who could suffer. ‘Society’ does not matter, I agree. My argument is not utilitarian; I have incorporated individualism into my approach.
When dealing with a dispute between two people, it is clearly necessary to consider potential ills done to others as well. A good teacher does not just allow two of her students to simply fight it out. Neither does she allow them to go unpunished because to do so would allow the boys to pick fights on other students.
The situation between two people in a free market dispute is no different; an arbitrator is necessary and the wider consequences must be considered. It affects me personally if everyone is able to settle their quarms by guns at dawn. But that wouldn’t happen in a free market since there would be a market demand for private agencies to intervene (I believe).
I know you have made no direct attack on arbitrators but this is the logical continuation of the argument that it is not necessary to consider the individual rights of others beyond the two involved in a dispute.
I honestly think this would be a catastrophe. ‘An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind’. For me, preventing the criminal doing further harm in an efficient and semi-humane (though considering that he has in fact caused great damage himself) is the most important thing.
In a market sense, the individual should be accountable in terms of losing property to debtors and losing business to competition for poor management of the firm, yes. But in a judicial sense I believe this needs to be toned down.
The logical continuation of your argument when you think about it is essentially that rapists should spend the exact same time as there victim being raped by an official committee of pain themselves as part of justice. After all, that is the exact same deed that was committed and retribution must be exactly the same as the deed committed.
Furthermore, since the rapist did not imprison his victim, he himself should not be imprisoned since this would be exceeding the initial crime initiated. He should be free to walk the streets and reoffend. Only murderers should be executed.
I know you aren’t arguing this but it is the most fullest, logical realisation (when you think about it) of one of Rothbard’s very own arguments that is in an article I believe you have probably read as well.
And this by itself is assuming that the ‘rapist’ is necessarily guilty. After all, many women have been known to lie.
Which clearly does not have a 0% reoffense rate. You appear to be most interested in (a) creating incentives not to committ crime and (b) justice. There is no sufficient evidence to prove that such incentives are effective. Furthermore you cannot undo evil. I am only interested in creating a 0% reoffense rate and the possibility of capital punishment there is sufficient evidence. Anything else (morality, justice, blah blah blah) for me is irrelevant.
One interesting question you ask me is, ‘what right do I have to imprison someone on suspicion alone’ well this can effectively be turned right back around; ‘what right do I have to execute someone on suspicion alone?’
In any criminal case, we are acting on suspicion alone. We can never know unless there is irrefutable evidence. In which case, capital punishment sounds good.
Don’t be so certain mi amigo, whether prisons are five star hotels or Jersey flop houses, I’m almost certain that’s the last thing arrested individuals care about.
The only reason they have “high class” luxury’s is because of tax payers money. In a free market no one in their right mind would be interested in funding a 5star hotel prison, unless it can produce a revenue, that is…
I don’t know if I would consider it high class, but I don’t know where you would get the implication that I would disagree with it. In lieu of prisons, what is the alternative? Slave labor and indenturede servitude?
You’re trying to get me to argue against people not wanting to lose money on dealing with crime? It’s clever, but it’s irrelevant. Of course they don’t… they probably want to make money…
You attacked me for supporting prisons and supported some sort of rehabilitation scheme. You said that even the USSR did not use prisons.
I said that they were effectively prisons in the USSR and much worse than any western prison. I also inferred that your rehabilitation centre (not community sevice) requires the detainment of a physical body (i.e. imprisonment). It doesn’t matter how humane it is; its still imprisonment.
The only alternatives are capital punishment (which I support when provided with concrete evidence of a crime that justifies this level of retribution), outlawry (which leaves the criminal open to attacks by vigilantes anyway and furthermore allows him to roam the streets freely), exile (which is a possibility if it is in a geographically excluded territory) and community service (which works fine with petty offenders but I would hardly trust paedophiles with the responsibility).
Some alternatives are reasonable but a lot are quite frankly chaos.
I was only postulating with the scenario of free market prisons. That said it would be a far more ‘humane’ system (and cheaper for the tax payer) if prisoners could work for the prison’s maintainance, security and their own welfare and trade with other prisoners. I don’t see why it is completely unreasonable.
I was personally scared someone would jump on me as a result of the system being too lenient, I mean prisoners could effectively have computers, books and video game consoles if they worked for them.
Yet instead of that, I am attacked because my plan would be too hardcore for these poor rapists and murderers rolls eyes.
Interestingly enough, I found this video on youtube recently which was surprisingly almost exactly the same to what I had personally been thinking about how prison services should run:
You attacked me for supporting prisons and supported some sort of rehabilitation scheme. You said that even the USSR did not use prisons.
That’s not what I attacked you for. And the Stalin part wasn’t directed at you at all.
I attacked you for endorsing prisons for profit; which amounts to little more than slavery.
I said that they were effectively prisons in the USSR and much worse than any western prison. I also inferred that your rehabilitation centre (not community sevice) requires the detainment of a physical body (i.e. imprisonment). It doesn’t matter how humane it is; its still imprisonment
If you could show me wherein I endorsed any such thing, I would be interested to know.
Alleged rapists and murderers who possibly just made a mistake in a moment of passion, rather than are just clinically anti-social (meaning unable to function in society at all, not the popular outcast usage).
No. It would improve prison conditions for a lot of prisoners who get beaten up, urinated on, bullied, intimidated and raped in the showers. They could sell their goods on the open market, use money, trade with other prisoners and pay for better security, single cells, private shower cubicals, etc. Well behaved prisoners would go to more secure units. So don’t play that game. State run prisons are a nightmare.
And again, you have given me no real alternative to prison (possibly because none exist).
Right
Right. You said:
There are far more humane ways to deal with crime than either slave labor or prisons.
“Socialist prison” doesn’t even make sense. Not even the USSR had prisons as we think of them. They had labor and re-education camps.
Which is of course nonsense because ‘labour and re-education camps’ presuppose imprisonment. You are indirectly suggesting they were better than modern day prisons in the western world which of course is utterly nonsensical.
Some ‘murderers’ (by definition they are no longer a murderer) commit crimes of passion when they kill someone out of revenge, fueled by emotion, etc. I have stated that earlier in this thread. Rapists do not ‘just [make] a mistake in a moment of passion’ - that is ridiculous and you cannot rehabilitate someone who is prepared to do that.
In any case, this doesn’t matter because my argument is not emotional as you would know if you read my posts but practical; the best solution is that which creates a 0% reoffence rate. End of. There is no such thing as crime deterrence, justice (wrongs cannot be undone - a dead man cannot be unkilled or his wife unwidowed) or rehabilitation in extreme case scenarios. Only practical solutions.
I’m not aware whether Epicurus is trollin’ or just plain silly. Apparently he has a obsession with slavery.
EDIT:
No, you don’t get it. It doesn’t matter what you tell him. It’s just that “profit” is immoral. That’s all there is to it. You’re not going to get through to him. Just wait and see, the semantics game will start all over again.
Actually, the “Rothbardian” components of my view come from his book Ethics of Liberty. That said, I reject the natural law approach per se because I think it ultimately entails a fallacious appeal to authority (this is most pronounced in Hoppe’s Argumentation Ethics which is downright circular).
Precisely. Otherwise, there will be over-production of retribution, that is, retribution against innocents will be rampant. This is not a value-laden observation, either, it is value-free.
Of course, I am assuming that people would ordinarily subcontract out such specialized work as retaliatory killing.
I think when you rightly understand the true nature of prosecution and imprisonment, you will realize that these are inherently statist. The literal prison is the granite foundation on which the “prison for your mind” is built. Without the ever-present threat of being caged for failing to pay your taxes, you would never willingly comply.
… who are not a party to the case at hand. If John is in a dispute with Paul, the rights of Tom, Dick and Harry are irrelevant and any appeal by either party the rights of Tom, Dick and Harry is just sophistry, red herring.
But not thoroughly enough.
That is precisely what I"m doing here. However, in a specific court case, I do not agree. If you dent my car, it’s a bullshit argument for me to say, “You must pay me $1,000,000 because people who dent cars are running rampant and nothing less will warn others to stop denting cars.” It’s not your job to be a sacrificial lamb for the “good of society”. In fact, it is not all the future denters that are in view, here, it is all the future dentees… they are the ones who will lobby for me to have you “severely punished” for your “crime” since they are the ones who reap the benefits in the form of reduced insurance premiums and the like. In reality, what is going on is wealth redistribution from denters to future dentees. This evidences itself in the high costs of driving a car which make it difficult for the poorest to have private transportion when automobiles and gasoline are both very inexpensive in absolute terms.
A court is not to its clients as a teacher is to its students.
Nope. Any consideration of the wider consequences is necessarily unjust.
Not only is it not necessary, it is necessary not to.
Well, you’re empirically and analytically incorrect. Retribution has long been a part of human social systems and feuds have always been the exception, not the norm, even in societies where direct retribution was relatively common compared to today (e.g. the Hatfields and McCoys).
The prevention of further harm nowhere enters the picture. The damages are about the victim - making the victim whole and satisfying the victim’s demands for retribution. Any other system of adjudication is redistributive (socialist).
Nope. I think that “justifiable violence” should be defined in terms of the violence that the victim would have been justified in committing against the attacker at the time of the attack. If you break into my house in the middle of the night, I am not reasonably entitled to chain you to the floor and begin whipping you to death but I am reasonably entitled to shoot you dead. Hence, breaking and entering should probably be a crime liable to lethal retribution (and historically has been). If you try to rape me, I am not reasonably entitled to “rape you back”, but I am reasonably entitled to kill you or do whatever it takes to fend you off. Yes, defining “reasonably entitled” is complex and dependent on social norms but that’s precisely what the law industry should be all about… fleshing out the reasons for why X but not Y are appropriate responses to offense Z. This allows the law to regulate what sorts of retribution are justifiable in response to what torts.
As I said, I’m not straight Rothbardian. I don’t believe that if you rape me I get to rape you twice. This is one area where Rothbard fell embarrassingly short of his usual intellectual rigor.
No, I think social norms should decide what sorts of retaliation are appropriate to what sorts of crimes. If you look back at history, retribution has rarely been strictly retribution in kind - “eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth” - but usually took the form of some ritualized retribution - flogging, stoning, and so on.
Well, I’ve read a lot more since I read Ethics of Liberty and I think Rothbard was pretty weak on this. I recommend you read up on Somali Xeer, there’s an excellent book on the subject by Michael van Notten I’ve been wanting to buy for some time.
No, I’m most interested in morally consistent enforcement of property rights. By “morally consistent” I mean that the system of property rights enforcement must be fully universalizable, that is, every party in the system must stand on a moral plane with all others. In the Statist system, the police, judges, prosecutors, politicians, government bureaucrats and so on are in a special moral category that is exempt from the same moral considerations that are applied to the parties in legal disputes. This is the ultimate, deepest root cause of the many problems in our legal system.
That’s the point - you had better be right. If you’re not, you will fall under outlawry (essentially, death sentence). You will want to be able to prove your case not to “convict” the criminal (a very Inquisition-esque concept, when you think about it) but so you can defend yourself if the relatives of the criminal later come back and attempt to sue you for committing murder.
You better have good enough proof to defend yourself against the criminal’s relatives.
This is an excellent lecture by Ben Powell on Somali social order, including some discussion of their legal system, Xeer. Listen to the lecture and try to clear your preconceptions of the Somalis as “backwards” and try to see just how nuanced and sophisticated their legal system is. It has the potential to reform your thinking on this whole subject.
I am just about to listen to that video (thanks) update I am 30 minutes in - didn’t make this post immediately but I just wanted to say that I did not mean to imply they were ‘backwards’ (in fact, I don’t believe I ever referred to them). In fact I have read ‘Somalia: Better Off Stateless’ by Peter Leeson, so I know they have done quite well. My grip is over the specific legal system you seem to propose. In particular, retribution for the person who wrongly accuses. Also, I believe there would be market demand for different solutions, thereby the real dispute is which system is most likely to be accepted in the market; your’s or mine?
I am not going to reply to your (rather lengthy, haha) post at the moment but I think that to get you to fully understand where I am coming from I am going to have to take your stance to an absurd logical extreme that could never happen; Lets say Person A is killed by our mystery murderer Person ? in New York square at 8 pm. Person B thinks it is Person C who did it; after all Person C has no alibi, and often takes strolls around New York square in the evening. He is also a highly suspect person. He launches a ‘prosecution’ (I don’t know how you want me to term it) with the aid, presumably (?) of a private arbitrator. Person B is outlawed and killed by vigilantes (presumably, this is what is meant to happen). So Person D comes along and says, ‘no, no, no’ it wasn’t Person B who was the original killer! And produces a whole heap of evidence proving his case? Then? Person C is prosecuted (to outlawry) for his failure to launch a succesful appeal and the chain continues. After all, someone else can come along now and launch an attack against Person D! If that happened in every murder scenario, there would presumably be a multiplication of deaths to follow up as a result. It wouldn’t take long for the population to rapidly diminish! What’s more is, people would be too scared to prosecute in the first place (so no retribution, anyhow - murderer walks free)… Also, outlawry essentially means that the murderer is free to walk the streets (not protected by the law) which can either mean (a) brutal (non-proportional to the original offence committed, even) death by vengeful vigilante or, (b) murderer is free to strike again. Can you see how such a situation would result in every man for himself?
From what I have taken from the video, so far, I have not heard anything about the ‘prosecutor’ being liable through death…
Also, I am opposed to outlawry because (a) the punishment caused by vigilantes could be non-proportional (I don’t know… acid is poured over outlaw who got into a drunken barfight and shot someone, say) and (b) outlaw is free to reoffend.
It’s perfect! This is precisely how to do good thought experiments. Read any Block, Rothbard, Hoppe, (David) Friedman… you will see they do these “absurd extremes” all the time because the limit cases are precisely what tests the validity of your ideas.
Right, so the consequences of accusing someone of murder are very grave (death). In fact, in a system with outlawry, accusing someone of murder is a good way to kill them without having to do it with your own hands.
Then that proves that Person B really didn’t do their homework and they got someone killed who had done no wrong. That is called “murder.” Killing someone who has done no wrong (nothing to deserve being killed) is the definition of murder. In legalese: “unjustifiable homicide.”
You seem to be implying that you could have a long series of "oops"s where Person E comes along and now shows that Person B was really right all along and now Person D is to be accused of murder, and so on. However, I disagree with this somewhat because the issue during a case against Person B is not whether they were right but, rather, whether they can prove their case. I imagine that “standards of evidence” would emerge (e.g. your “CCTV footage” which, by the way, is not nearly as conclusive as you seem to take it to be) that would set the criteria for when someone has sufficiently proved their case. So long as Person B holds evidence of that quality then he will be able to discharge any suit for wrongful death of Person C.
I think it would be a balance between the desire for retribution on the one hand (to catch and punish the killer) and fear of making a mistake on the other hand (accusing the wrong person and killing yet another innocent). There would actually be some negative feedback that would discourage the aggressive prosecution of innocents that has become characteristic of our current system.
No, not really. An outlaw who has committed a grave crime such as rape or murder will likely have many people (victim’s relatives) who are highly motivated to see his life ended. How could such a person just roam the streets to strike again when there is a bounty on his life? He would have to hide and he would probably be found and killed sooner or later.
There is no death penalty in Xeer, though there is outlawry. I’m not discussing a legal order equivalent to Xeer… rather, the essence of the difference between the legal order I’m discussing and the modern Statist legal order is that all legal action is initiated by private parties against other private parties. There is no concept of “society” or “the public” or any such thing, which is exactly how it is in Xeer. As soon as you abolish these fictitious entities from law, the character of law is changed dramatically. A “trial” is no longer a trial, it’s simply a mediated discussion. You are not “prosecuted” for your “crimes” you argue your case that you are not liable for the tort. And so on.
How does it matter whether an American or a Saudi Arabian is in control of the USA’s State force? Or whether the guy who actually is in charge is white or black or yellow or is also in charge of a centralised force on other geographically differentiated area? The thing is that there is such a central apparatus of coercion and it wishes such an institution like the FED exist.
Yes this is what I meant all along. So we don’t really have an issue anymore.
But then it only logically follows on from there that the Person B can only press charges against Person A in the first place if he has the correct standard of evidence, surely? In which case, the whole ‘hold the prosecutor liable by death’ is irrelevant, unless perhaps he deliberately deceives the private legal court.
In which case, what if there is deep, deep suspicion but no standard of evidence? Then we have a situation where we are not allowed to imprison Person A because that would be slavery but we cannot outlaw (i.e. kill) him either because that would be unjust.
Or are you saying that he doesn’t have to go through a court, he can just murder Person A himself or employ a private protection agency to do it for him?
So that perhaps (perhaps) solves the problem of the murderer reoffending (though there is still a chance he can reoffend whilst in hiding) but it doesn’t solve the vigilante problem where the punishment is disproportional to the original offence committed.
Sorry if I’m nitpicking on small details here, perhaps its the ‘statist mentality’ - I’m too used to there being prisons damn it!
But doesn’t a private party need to go through an established legal system? Would it not be violent and chaotic if every dispute was solved by ‘guns at dawn’, so to speak? What if two parties decide there going to skip all the legal rubbish and have a sword fight in the street?
I’m kind of citing Hobbes’ theory that an arbitrator is required to mediate the dispute between two parties. But the issue here is when one (or both) of those two parties decides they would prefer not to go through the arbitrator to solve their dispute.