[quoteuser=“liberty student”]
You’re confusing contract with law. Two different things.
[/quote]
I followed you up until this point. What do you mean by this? How are they separated?
Let’s assume a billionaire who is a serial killer. He will kill people and restitute them with his money. His budget would allow him to kill about 100 people to satisfy his sick perversion. It just doesn’t make sense.
People don’t become billionaires by frivolously spending their money. And even when they are billionaires they still rarely spend frivolously. While owning a jet and a giant house sure sounds like spending money frivolously, these things bring them more than 5 minutes of happiness unlike a murder would.
What you are proposing is that an individual becomes a shrewd business man, makes billions not killing anyone along the way, then all of a sudden decides to go on a murderous rampage to blow all his money in an evening. While technically he could do this, the chances of it actually happening are low enough that it’s an acceptable risk. You can put all the billionaires in the world on a short list. That’s out of 6B+ people on the planet. Murderer’s tend to fit a certain demographic and that demographic does not overlap the demographic of billionaires. This makes it statistically improbable that a billionaire will become a serial killer which means that you are more at risk of dying to lightning strikes, shark attacks or a meteorite than dying to a murderous billionaire.
Top that off with no gun laws meaning any of his victims may be able to defend themselves and kill him, the risk to reward ratio (a concept every good business man is familiar with) just aren’t in his favor. There are more efficient ways to get your jollies like sex and drugs.
I am all for killing murderers
http://www.lewrockwell.com/block/block34.html
So why are you worried?
The state kills 10s of millions, and we worry about some hypothetical evil businessman, as they are portrayed in movies.
Does anyone actually know of ONE evil businessman who plotted to kill millions in the 20th century? Not killed obviously, but even plotted?
I ask of course, because Mao, Stalin, Hitler among other tyrants sent a great many millions to their death. And none of those jerks were billionaire businessmen.
I followed you up until this point. What do you mean by this? How are they separated?
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This is a complicated topic. Without getting the thread too far off track, I’ll give you this to consider.
Men can make contracts, which involve a meeting of the minds, but men can’t make laws, because laws (properly applied) are iron, and no one has the moral authority to make rules for other people.
People don’t become billionaires by frivolously spending their money. And even when they are billionaires they still rarely spend frivolously. While owning a jet and a giant house sure sounds like spending money frivolously, these things bring them more than 5 minutes of happiness unlike a murder would. What you are proposing is that an individual becomes a shrewd business man, makes billions not killing anyone along the way, then all of a sudden decides to go on a murderous rampage to blow all his money in an evening. While technically he could do this, the chances of it actually happening are low enough that it’s an acceptable risk. You can put all the billionaires in the world on a short list. That’s out of 6B+ people on the planet. Murderer’s tend to fit a certain demographic and that demographic does not overlap the demographic of billionaires. This makes it statistically improbable that a billionaire will become a serial killer which means that you are more at risk of dying to lightning strikes, shark attacks or a meteorite than dying to a murderous billionaire. Top that off with no gun laws meaning any of his victims may be able to defend themselves and kill him, the risk to reward ratio (a concept every good business man is familiar with) just aren’t in his favor. There are more efficient ways to get your jollies like sex and drugs.
Add to that the fact that after the first couple of murders, nobody would want to do business with our hypothetical billionare anymore…
People don’t like serial killers. If he kills someone and just pays restitutes, people will get suspicious. If he continues his perversions, I’m quite sure that other people won’t like that. Allying with this killer would be huge loss to private police etc. so billionaire would have to be at least as profitable as the lost customers. He had to basicly buy all police force to be with him, and this would result to a rising demand for all else people(they don’t have protectors now) so new private police will emerge. Billionaire had to buy these too, etc. etc. It’s just impossible because it’s billionaire vs. 6 billion people.
And think about this - if some internet-philosophers can invent answers to these problems, what could full time private arbitators with monetary gains as their motivators be able to make?
Since there is a likelyhood the murderer will run if freed, this gives incentives for private ‘prison factories’ and such. What will likely happen is the insurance agency will post the criminal’s resume (crime, job skills, etc.) up for auction and then competing companies can bid for the criminal (like a slave auction). They have the right to force them to do the work until the debt is paid (probably life in the case of a murderer, maybe weeks for a burgler).
I was think more that ‘prisons’ would be places criminals would voluntarilly go because they have no job, are unisurable and are considered a pariah among the community…that is to say, they have nowhere else to go(similar to how somebody might willingly have themselves commited to a mental instution)
These prisons would help criminals find jobs, get them any help they need to be rehabilitated, and when/if they deem them fully ‘cured’ will vouch for the criminals allowing them to re-enter society with a ‘clean’ record.
Although theres no reason there wont be room for both sorts of ‘prisons’ in an anarcho-capitilist society…
I was going to answer your questions in the OP, but I will defer to Liberty Student’s response to them. He says essentially the same things there that I would’ve said.
I fear that you’re dropping the wider context. In all likelihood, a billionaire won’t have all or even most of his wealth in the form of money - not in today’s society and not in a free-market society. Most of his weatlh will be tied up in (far) less liquid assets. The estimated market values of those assets are subject to change at any time. He’s not entitled to sell any of his assets for a particular price or exchange it for something else in particular.
Should a man be successfully convicted of “murdering someone in cold blood”, the estimated market values of his assets will (again in all likelihood) sink like a stone in water. In fact, they may plummet so much that, even after he liquidates all of them, he cannot subsequently afford the restitution payments for a single victim. He still owns a lot of assets, but they’re all considered next to worthless now.
The point is that wealth is fleeting. There’s no guarantee that it will last.
While a billionaire’s assets are not liquid, they are generally priced according to market value and unless all of his assets are tied up in a single resource that suddenly becomes worthless due to technological advancement or a sudden new source of the resource it’s unlikely you will see much of a change in their actual value once liquidated. The only exception I can think of would be if the majority of the person’s assets were tied up in stocks in a company he runs in which case negative public opinion could hurt the company, though that is easily remidied by stepping down (and retaining ownership shares).
Regardless, a billionaire even with devalued assets can still afford to kill quite a few people at a normal life insurance rate ($1M).
What’s the market value of an asset owned by a mass-murdering billionaire? My point is, why should prospective buyers ignore the actions of the asset’s owner?
As I write this post, the house across the street from mine stands vacant. Before I bought my house, the other house’s owner (who had a wife and children) killed himself inside. While he didn’t harm anyone but himself, no one seems to want to buy the house - at least not at the current asking price. So what’s the market value of the house?
Regardless, there are a couple of other ways of looking at this. First off, even if he can afford the restitution payment for murdering someone right off the bat, he’ll likely be shunned by everyone who knows about what he did. And probably most people will know about it, because he’s probably a high-profile individual already (due to being a billionaire) and because there will probably be organizations with vested interests in making his crime publicly known. That alone could well depreciate his assets considerably.
Second, I think people in a free-market society will either be armed most/all of the time or they’ll have contracts with security companies who (unlike the police) would be obligated to arrive if/when called. On the first point, even in today’s world, the fact that many serial killers have targeted young, single women has led to a proliferation of self-defense classes and non-lethal weapons such as pepper spray. On the second point, today’s police officers aren’t obligated to protect specific individuals - they’re there to “enforce the law” and provide a “general deterrent” to committing crimes.