@Andris: Thanks, I appreciate the positive feedback. Even though I’ve only read some online articles, I think that Michael van Notten’s ideas really impacted me (especially ‘kritarchy’). Mises of course is hugely influential, especially on the methodological front. Hoppe also is hugely influential in providing an acidic reduction of the State to its barest attributes: monopolist of ultimate decision-making and force. Bastiat is also influential as he really strips things down to basics (I especially like his treatment of Wants & Satisfaction in Economic Harmonies). To an extent, my own experience with the court system (divorce) has been influential as I’ve witnessed first-hand and up-close how law really operates and how the court’s monopoly makes it slovenly and apathetic to the needs of what are really its clients, as well as the even more gross distortions that statutory law impose onto the process of dispute-resolution. Edited to add: I should also credit David Friedman though he’s a bit positivist for my tastes… he’s the first AC I read and really got me started down this road. His lecture on “Legal systems very different from our own” is extremely enlightening. I have read what is available online of “Law’s Order” which is valuable in expanding one’s mind in understanding that Western law hardly has a corner on good legal rules. As Friedman is fond of saying, we are only about 1,000 years behind the state of the art in law by virtue of our de facto prohibition of performance bonds.
A lot of this has been the result of my own thought process, as well. I posted a thread a long time back that had some of these ideas, though I would now disown a lot of what I wrote then. While propertarianism seems to me to get it right more than any other approach, I’ve been discontent with the propertarian approach because it’s clearly deficient. People get in disputes about lots of things that cannot usefully be reduced to a property dispute. Also, I felt that there was no good reason that we have to restrict praxeological analysis to the situation where both parties mutually agree to exchange (catallactics). The obvious benefit of restricting the analysis to catallactics is that the welfare function of catallactic exchange is easy to demonstrate - both people must be better off else they wouldn’t have voluntarily agreed to exchange. But then I thought how can there be so much of our lives that is affected by legal reality - directly or indirectly - if law is not playing an integral role in improving society? Mises and Bastiat both have very sunny views of the human capacity for cooperation but it is obvious to me that cooperation is only possible because many kinds of non-cooperation (stealing, murder, etc.) are severely sanctioned.
I thought to myself: if I’m living in a very primitive society and I get in an argument with one of my fellow men, what happens? There are no judges and may not even be a chief we can appeal to. So what do we do? We can fight. But if he’s much bigger than me, I won’t fight, I’ll just cave. If I’m much bigger than him, I’ll gladly fight him and probably win. But if you take a random sample of the population, odds are any two men will be about the same size, strength, ferocity, etc. So, I can safely say that I’ll probably be about as afraid of the guy I’m in a dispute with as he is of me. We each are going to be wary of the other. Since we’re human, we can do something that other animals can’t… we can speak and reason. It might consist of a mix of shouting and posturing with calm reason but that is much better than getting my skull bashed in over whatever it was we were arguing about. If we resolve our dispute without further violence, then we have succeeded in a kind of cooperative catallactic exchange. We both agreed together to exchange our present circumstances (fight/standoff) for a better set of circumstances (bargained settlement). I’d rather give up a little of my sustenance to avoid the uncertainty and risk of being involved in a man-to-man battle where I might get to keep everything or I might just lose everything.
This mutuality is the essential difference between the kind of exchange that occurs as a result of dispute-resolution and ordinary voluntary exchange. In ordinary voluntary exchange, each decision-maker is completely autonomous and his decision to exchange or not exchange is determined solely by internal factors within himself. But it is very difficult to get even two people to make one choice that they both agree is the best for the both of them taken together. Each party wants to keep everything and give up nothing. But the prospect of violent conflict if the issue is not settled peacefully drives them to bargain with one another. This is why I reject all forms of pacifism as anti-human. You cannot have social order without the cattle-prod of the prospect of violent conflict driving disputants to arbitrate their disputes. Thieves would simply keep the proceeds of their theft and social order would necessarily disintegrate.
What I believe was missing in my earlier analysis was this component of morality and means-ends analysis. Conflict really arises when my chosen means-ends interferes with someone else’s chosen means-ends. That is what conflict is. This is why morality is central to dispute-resolution. If I choose a particular course of action it is because I believe I am right to do so, that it is to my best and highest benefit to follow this course of action. And the same is equally true of another person who has chosen a course of action which conflicts with mine. Hence, we are not only involved in a dispute but we are each convinced, “I am the one who is in the right, I have the right to do as I’m doing and you are interfering with my rights.” I think this explains why normal people take legal disputes so personally. Statists implicitly appeal to this framework when they try to pit individual rights against the rights of the State or the rights of society as if the State has at least an equal right to act unimpeded as the individual does. But really, they are moral nihilists since they simply reduce the problem to might-makes-right by treating the overwhelming force applied by the State as either amoral or inevitable (like gravity… it might suck but you just have to deal with it). This is why Rothbard is right and David Friedman is wrong… the State isn’t just inefficient or wasteful, it’s downright evil in every sense in which humans use that word.
Clayton -