Property the concept is not a scarce resource. The concept must first be realized in order to label a thing property.
But what is an inconvenience? It is agent-relative. And what is the basis for the requirement of my obligation to you? Tradition? That is a loose answer. Also the basis for much of Western civilization can be traced back to two civilizations, the Greeks and the Romans. Now of course things have developed, been refined etc, but much of what our society has been based on isn’t ‘trial and error’ as if rights were some empirical science.
Such is the ‘might makes right’ doctrine. Animals live by the law of nature and therefore the right to have exclusive control over physical resources is established by violent behavior. Thus a right system is still established through the eyes of a human. Animals have no conceptualization of property so they know nothing but instinctual behavior.
Why should we care about the improvement of human welfare concerning the aggressor? Justice does not infer a positive sum when it is acted upon. Justice is concerning with the correcting of unjust acts to a state the previous being before the unjust act was committed. An aggressor will be punished regardless of what he/she accepts.
Law is, for all purposes, an idea. Natural rights do not just vanish if one refuses to admit to crimes committed. If a criminal steals a chocolate bar and refuses to accept the punishment then it is not justice nor is it moral to kill said person simply because you think they somehow deny human rights.
I’m using a definition as provided by Roderick Long. Please though I would like the citation for where Rothbard debunks this.
That is not a sufficient answer.
Where does Rothbard say this?
This completely disregards repentant individuals.
And Rothbard’s system does not have the threat of legitimate coercion through the court system? Whether it is a threat or the actual act of punishment, it is still the same principle of coercion. The question is whether it is a legitimate obligation or an illegitimate one.
So the aggressor picks his/her punishment? What if one does not pick a punishment and why is the aggressor the one who picks it? They are the violator, why should they be allowed to further abuse the wronged individual?
Well if sounds are meaningless then it follows that a certain sequence of them are just as meaningless. So words, sentences, interactions that are spoken, are completely meaningless or are so ambiguous that they could mean anything and really therefore nothing.
“Because “property” has meaning only within a social context, how it is to be owned and controlled defines the nature of a given society. An analysis of the concept must begin by identifying the functional elements of property, and inquiring into their personal and social implications. These elements—which will be explored at length in this and the following two chapters—are those of boundary, claim, and control. While these concepts will be discussed separately, it must be emphasized that they are as interconnected to an understanding of property as the heart, lungs, and circulatory system are to the functioning of the body. Our inquiry into each of these three elements will occasionally cross over from one to the other.”
He later says:
"The element of “claim” is the most philosophically controversial feature of property ownership. This is because all property, in order to be owned, must be claimed by someone, whether they be private persons (e.g., an individual, a corporation) or a political entity (e.g., the state). To claim ownership is to assert a right to decision-making control over an item of property…
A claim of ownership is the assertion of one’s will, addressed to others, to be the exclusive decision-maker over oneself or some resource; to have what one claims be immune from trespasses by other persons."
So “asserting one’s will”, “asserting a right” and “claiming ownership” over a resource mean the same thing. The concept of “property” cannot exist without the concept of “claim”, and “claim” means to assert a right. OK.
I’m trying to square this with what Hasnas says, quoted in my previous post:
“Over time, these rules become invested with normative significance and the members of the community come to regard the ways in which the rules permit them to act at their pleasure as their rights. Thus, in the state of nature, rights evolve out human beings’ efforts to address the inconveniences of that state. In the state of nature, rights are solved problems.”
By “normative significance”, does he mean
That the members of the community come to regard some claims as (objectively) ethical and some as unethical? Or just…
That the members of the community come to regard some claims as likely to be respected and some as likely not to be?
You contradict yourself here. Property is a system or strategy for assigning exclusive control of physical resources to individual actors. Animals exhibit exclusive control over physical resources, which means that property is very basic, more basic than law which presupposes the capacity for verbal reasoning.
Caring about an individual human’s welfare is beside the point. My point is that we can say why private law is preferable to monopoly law, namely, that it results in an improvement of human welfare by virtue of revealed preference. This is the same argument by which free exchange can be proven to be superior to coercive central planning. In central planning, there is no way to know whether transactions are improving human welfare (and, by virtue of their being coercive, we can assume that most exchanges are at best zero-sum) but we know that voluntary exchanges improve human welfare because each party to the exchange believed the exchange would improve his/her welfare.
Well, it is impossible to rewind the clock. The previous state of affairs to a murder cannot be restored. So, all punishments are gratuitous to one degree or another.
From ch. 19 of Ethics of Liberty:
"Let us illustrate this point. Suppose that Smith and Jones make a contract, Smith giving $1000 to Jones at the present moment, in exchange for an IOU of Jones, agreeing to pay Smith $1100 one year from now. This is a typical debt contract. What has happened is that Smith has transferred his title to ownership of $1000 at present in exchange for Jones agreeing now to transfer title to Smith of $1100 one year from now. Suppose that, when the appointed date arrives one year later, Jones refuses to pay. Why should this payment now be enforceable at libertarian law? Existing law (which will be dealt with in greater detail below) largely contends that Jones must pay $1100 because he has “promised” to pay, and that this promise set up in Smith’s mind the “expectation” that he would receive the money.
Our contention here is that mere promises are not a transfer of property title; that while it may well be the moral thing to keep one’s promises, that it is not and cannot be the function of law (i.e., legal violence) in a libertarian system to enforce morality (in this case the keeping of promises). Our contention here is that Jones must pay Smith $1100 because he had already agreed to transfer title, and that nonpayment means that Jones is a thief, that he has stolen the property of Smith. In short, Smith’s original transfer of the $1000 was not absolute, but conditional, conditional on Jones paying the $1100 in a year, and that, therefore, the failure to pay is an implicit theft of Smith’s rightful property." [Emphasis added]
*shrug
If the troublemaker is dead, he can’t make any more trouble. It was his own choice to opt out of civilized law and live according to the law of the jungle. In the jungle, might does make right.
Look up his chapter on punishment in Ethics of Liberty.
Not really. In this particular instance, that is not the question. In other words, if Bob steals Alice’s purse and refuses to go to court and, in the course of events, Alice’s PDA kills Bob, there is no question of whether that death was legitimate or illegitimate until, say, Bob’s parents sue the PDA. Bob refused to take the dispute to a court for peaceable settlement so Alice had no recourse but to brute force (through the agency of her PDA). Whether that force was justifiable is now a separate question requiring a separate court case.
Yes, a stipulated agreement means both parties voluntarily agreed to the terms of the agreement. Since, in my view of law, the only reason the parties are in court is because they both wanted to be, of course the aggressor must accept the terms of the resulting agreement.
A single voltage level (in a computer processor or network cable) is meaningless… it does not follow that a sequence of them are, therefore, meaningless. Sequences convey information. Information can convey meaning.
I know for a fact that Hoppe does account for this, which is why he explains that people only appeal for justice to those who have the means to enforce the punishment.
How have I contradicted myself? Through the eyes of a human we can see property enforcement. However, animals have no ability to conceptualize and behave instinctually. Animals have no concept of property or property rights.
Well you say one thing then say another. If human welfare is ‘beside the point’ then why it is shown as an improvement of private law over ‘state’ law?
Enforcement of law is not a positive sum transaction.
Well murder is more difficult. Obviously if we had something like a death machine like Walter Block mentions in which the life of the aggressor is taken and put in the body of the victim and the victim is now alive then that would be sufficient justice. However, since we don’t have such a machine then we are forced to deal with near hits.
That is the implicit contention of the law, the propounding of the good ie. morality. Why is murder illegal? You cannot answer without a value statement.
Just because one doesn’t agree to the punishment does not infer that death is the only acceptable outcome.
Can you be more specific?
You lack proportional justice. Just because Bob steals a purse does not infer that Bob forfeits his life. Your system lacks any civility and would degenerate into a kill or be killed system of law. It also lacks ‘innocent until proven guilty.’
And if I refuse to come to an agreement with my own punishment then you say I forfeit my life. You have to explain how I do such a thing by not coming to agreement with an opponent.
It is not meaningless in so far as it communicates a portion or perhaps all of the information. It is only meaningless if nothing comes to fruition.
OK, let’s back up to where I started. First, I began with the issue of disputes. Disputes arise between people. They can settle the disputes through martial contest or verbal reasoning. Since martial contest is so costly, there is a huge incentive to use verbal reasoning (at least, in the case of evenly matched parties). Disputes only arise over real (physical) conflicts. Real conflicts are property conflicts. When I say “property”, it should be understood that I’m using this in the philosophical sense as Rothbard or Hoppe do, not in the legal sense that a legal scholar would. Property, in property law, has a very specific meaning that is not what is in view here.
So, in a purely naturalistic sense, what is being called “property” at this point can be thought of chunks of the physical world; more broadly any physical resource, in line with Kinsella’s definition of property (property is a physical resource used in an embordering way). If two entities - they need not be human, they could be animals or even pieces of machinery or computers, try to use the same physical resource conflict occurs. This conflict has nothing to do with anger or other distinctly human emotions, it is solely the result of the fact of scarcity. There is only so much physical surface area on the planet so that two vehicles, for example, cannot occupy the same space at the same time. If two vehicles attempt to occupy the same space a conflict, or collision, will occur.
There are extensive protocols in computer systems (I am a computer engineer, so I think about the problem in those terms for my own sake) to avoid memory conflicts. Memory is scarce and (in single-ported memory, which most memory is), only one entity can read or write it at a time. So, if two separate entities try to access the same memory at the same time, conflict results. Protocols which divide up access to memory in time and space are implementing a kind of property in computer memory. The result of these protocols is that they assign exclusive control to one entity over any given piece of memory for any given time slot. Any protocol which permits the possibility of more than one entity accessing the same memory at the same time is susceptible to conflict and, possibly, failure.
Computers and cars have less “concept” of property than animals do. So, the concept I am talking about does not require the entities which are subject to it to be able to conceive of it just as the concept of gravity affects things which have no conception of gravity. Scarcity makes conflict, in the absence of rules for the avoidance of conflict, inevitable. Property is a conflict-avoidance strategy. Animals employ conflict-avoidance strategies. Hence, the use of conflict-avoidance strategies is very basic and does not require verbal reasoning. Human property, in particular, likely arose before humans could speak (though, obviously, not the very specific kinds of “property” which are the subject matter of property law).
The individual human’s welfare is beside the point - whether an aggressor is better off or worse off in a private law society is not important. It may be the case that many crimes are punished more severely in a private law society. That’s not important. What is important is that humanists must accept that a private law society is preferable to a monopoly law society if they want to consistently profess humanism. If you claim to care for human welfare (humanist) but reject private law in favor of monopoly law, you are either confused, ignorant or lying.
David Friedman makes a powerful case against you in Law’s Order. I recommend you read it, it is available online for free.
IIRC, Block holds the same eye-for-an-eye and tooth-for-a-tooth theory of restitution that Rothbard does. Frankly, I don’t think Rothbard is wrong about punishment, so much as he has the cart before the horse… what punishments will pertain in a private law society will not be known until we are already in a private law society. Friedman, in Law’s Order, discusses punishments in analogy to prices (I take exception to some of Friedman’s analysis on this point, but I think the idea that we can’t know what is the right punishment for any particular crime in the absence of a market of competing adjudicators is correct). The real issue I have with Rothbard (and Block) is whether punishment in a private law society should be understood as an individual being forced to “swallow his medicine” or, rather, an individual choosing to suffer punishment X instead of martial contest.
I don’t see how your reply refutes my claim that Rothbard specifically refutes the position that the purpose of the law is to enforce morality. That’s a hyper-conservative political position, it is not libertarian. No libertarian philosopher that I’m aware of holds that position.
Agreed! That’s why even direct retaliation must be proportional. But since you didn’t get any input to the form that the retaliation would take, it may very well be far more severe than if you had gone to court in the first place. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. [:)]
I’m not advocating the action in my illustration. I’m just trying to explain how I think the mechanisms of law in a private law society would operate with a concrete illustration.
I think it depends on the “market” for law services. If may emerge, in customary (common) law, that if you ignore six summons over a period of one year to a court hearing for a violent crime, you can be killed, then, yeah, the “punishment” for ignoring six summons over a period of one year to appear in a court for committing a violent crime could be death. That would be a pretty good incentive to get your butt into court if someone is accusing you of a violent crime, to defend yourself.
To translate this into concrete terms: Bob attempts to rape Alice in a dark alley. By a stroke of luck, Alice escapes and miraculously manages to get a photo of Bob’s face at the crime scene and she gets a rape kit done immediately to prove he was attempting rape. Alice’s PDA sends Bob a summons to appear in court for trial regarding the incident. Bob knows that Alice has basically conclusive proof that he tried to rape her. If he appears in court, he will certainly be punished. He can either appear or ignore the summons (or run away). Since he will certainly be punished if he appears, he decides to ignore the summons. Alice’s PDA sends summons after summons along with clear explanations of the possible consequence of ignoring the summons, a bit like a collections agency does. Finally, when Bob’s case has met the customary law criteria for grievous failure to appear in court to defend himself, and armed with the evidence that Bob did, in fact, attempt to rape Alice, Alice’s PDA gives a green light to put a bounty on Bob’s head. The specifics of customary law will determine whether the bounty is for Bob dead or Bob alive. Let’s say that customary law is that, in the case of rape accusations, death is appropriate. Bounty hunters go out with live ammo, one of them finds Bob, kills him, and brings back proof that he is dead to Alice’s PDA. At this point, Bob’s parents, who have always held that Bob was innocent and could not understand why Bob would not just go to court to clear his name, bring suit against Alice’s PDA. Since the accusation is murder, the suit actually accuses everyone who conspired to kill Bob, from Alice to the chain of individuals who authorized and performed Bob’s execution. To defend itself, Alice, and the bounty hunter(s) who are accused, Alice’s PDA will bring the evidence of rape and proof of its many attempts to summon Bob to a court to defend himself (proof of service would be very important in this situation). When the court finds that Alice has ample evidence that Bob did, in fact, try to rape her and that Bob was, in fact, summoned many times to appear in court to answer the accusations, after many attempts to resolve the matter in a non-violent manner, Alice’s PDA hired a bounty hunter to directly retaliate against Bob in a manner consistent with customary law, the court will rule against Bob’s parents and in favor of Alice’s PDA. Every effort was taken to give Bob a chance to clear himself of the accusations which had good, solid evidence to back them up but he refused. Alice and her PDA gave Bob the customary amount of summons to court. When all attempts to resolve the matter peaceably failed, only then was Bob killed. Bob’s death, in this fictional scenario, would be justifiable violence.
Here is a great example, linked from the LRC blog today, of the distinction between the statist view of law and a private law view.
Quote:
Lord Judge said the combination of events which culminated in the serious injury suffered by Salem were “highly unusual”.
He added; "This is not, and should not be seen as, a case about the level of violence which a householder may lawfully and justifiably use on a burglar.
"It is also clear that the violence to which Salem was subjected was not designed to ensure that he was detained and somehow kept pending the arrival of the police to be handed to them.
“So far as both these appellants was concerned the purpose of their violence was revenge - to teach at least one of the burglars a lesson… such violence is not lawful and no one at the trial suggested that it was.”
Mr. Hussain was imprisoned for, essentially, taking matters into his own hands. But what is actually wrong with that? Does the identity of the jailer or executioner matter? In a private law society, Mr. Salem’s advocates (e.g. his parents or family) would have brought suit against Mr. Hussain for a violent crime. Mr. Hussain could show that Mr. Salem did, in fact, burglarize and invade his home and imprison and terrorize him and his family.
Personally, I believe Mr. Salem got less punishment from Mr. Hussain than he actually deserved because the invasion of Mr. Hussain’s home and, particularly, the restraint of Mr. Hussain and his family was a threat of commission of the gravest of crimes, murder of an entire family. The most brutal crimes known to man usually begin in this way, with the man of the house restrained while his wife and children are raped and murdered before his eyes followed by himself. Mr. Hussain had good reason to believe that this was the crime with which Mr. Salem had threatened him and had Mr. Salem, in fact, committed such a crime, death would be a perfectly proportional punishment. Mr. Hussain did not beat Mr. Salem to death, only to the point of brain damage. If Mr. Hussain’s retribution were too severe, he should be punished for that, but not for self-administration of the retribution against Mr. Salem.
Following the principle - which I will attribute to Bastiat but I think is not original to him - that the collective can have no rights that the individual does not have, if the individual may not seek revenge, neither may the collective. Since punishment is retribution, the collective cannot punish. But the Lord Judge meted out a punishment (revenge) on Mr. Hussain, contradicting himself. The statist law monopoly is inherently duplicitous.
Well firstly, computers and animals cannot conceptualize the means of achieving their ends and decide which means best serves them. Secondly, you are neglecting my point about animals inability to recognize property. Their actions are strictly instinctual. Third, computers cannot act. They are objects.
You are personifying a piece of equipment. Protocols are the result of human action, not computer action.
Actually they have no concept of property because neither animals or objects have the ability to conceptualize. Only humans do. And your point about animals having the ability to engage in ‘conflict avoidance strategy’ presupposes that an animal is capable of formulating a set of means to achieve their end. It is not possible. Animal behavior is purely instinctual. Mice do not set elaborate traps for cats in order to defend themselves. Let’s leave the cartoon behavior for Saturday morning.
And some are capable of lying, cheating, being in a purposely confused and ignorant state.
Well he comes on here sometimes so I will be sure to ask him how he thinks restitution actually leads to a positive sum especially after a zero sum transaction which a rights violation must be.
Well first, I pointed out that Roderick Long gives this definition. The law is based on respect for rights and rights are morally enforceable obligations. Roderick Long is a philosopher and a libertarian so you know are aware of a libertarian philosopher who holds this position. Secondly, I honestly do not know why Rothbard thinks the law isn’t concerned with morality. Perhaps he thought it was something like ‘you can make people good Christian followers.’ Clearly the law is concerned with good, acceptable behavior and therefore is at its base a moral system.
If someone pulls a weapon on you then by all means defend yourself. However, your system seems to assume that if I were to steal a purse then it would be legitimate for the victim to shank me with a knife. You have not objected to this characterization nor have you really address my retort about the immorality of such a system so far. I will have to read the rest of the response to see if I get an answer.
That doesn’t address my points concerning proportional justice and ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ You seem to be shrugging your shoulders over the system you have built while saying ‘Well it’s not my idea.’
So tell me, why is it justice to coerce people into appearing at a trial. I mean that is essentially what you are propounding. Why not make it ‘If you don’t show up to your first summons, you get put to death’?
So you are advocating coercion before the guiltiness of the party has been established. Is or is not the presumption of innocence apart of common law?
Well this is a different tune. If Bob’s guiltiness has been established the justice can be enacted. To finish off the rest of this point, Bob’s parents could sue the protection agency and/or Alice for cruel punishment. It could be argued that the death sentence for a rapist is not proportional to the crime he committed.
I think Hasnas means that people come to feel entitled to such claims, and hence feel that certain rules “just ought to be.” He’s seeing normativity as arising from the well-known tendency of people to feel entitled to treatment that they enjoy for a period of time.
If you fix your neighbors’ computers every time they break, for free, then one time when they really needs your help and you say you are busy, they might get angry. They’ve come to have a sense of entitlement about enjoying your services. This is an unfortunate aspect of human nature, but I’m sure we’ve all experienced it. If that can happen over few weeks’ time (in fact I estimate it sometimes happens within about 20-30 seconds of meeting someone), imagine how it is when you grow up with a certain arrangement, or it lasts for several generations. Here is Hasnas:
Using Hoppe’s definition of the State, your first sentence here makes no sense. This organization that took an interest in monopolizing the courts was not a State until it accomplished this. Before then, it was a “pre-State”, which is really just a gang of thieves with ambition to become a State. The alliance with the intellectuals may occur before the State is established. What is certain is that the State needs the intellectuals to maintain that status, lest it become apparent that they are really just a highly-organized gang of thieves.
The State does not have a monopoly on force per se but it has a monopoly on deciding when and what force is jusified/legal/legitimate; this is simply a re-statement of the State’s monopoly on dispute-resolution. This monopoly is possible only because the majority of the population accept that the State is the only organization which should make this decision - i.e. that any other organization declaring when and what force is legitimate, and carrying out force outlawed by the government, is criminal, whereas the State is sovereign.
I see no particular reason why law should be unconcerned by verbal disputes about metaphysics or religion. It is not inconceivable. Slander is a law forbidding certain verbal acts. There are good reasons to believe slander would not likely be a law in a private law society, but it just might.
I don’t see why a Christian sect couldn’t live under a law system where uttering the words “God doesn’t exist” is, in itself, a crime, if that’s their preference. This is not to say however that law relates to more than “physical” conflicts, because a “verbal” conflict could be thought of as a “physical” conflict. It all depends where property boundaries are drawn. The Christian considers the entrance of a pattern of sounds into his eardrum as the same kind of violation of his boundaries as a knife being stabbed into his hand. So the dispute between the atheist and the Christian is a “physical” violation, when boundaries are drawn in this way.
What makes this a “real” dispute? Can you give an example of a dispute which is “not real”?
In this first sentence, Kinsella jumps from a useful general definition of property, over to asserting his preference for how property should be assigned, i.e. which claims in a dispute he considers are valid and which are not. His preference, of course, is for libertarian principles to be used to settle disputes. But the libertarian principle of homesteading/embordering (“first use”) is only one way of determining who should be the “first owner”. For example a law may assert that a certain class of goods - like heroin - always belongs to a particular organization (like the State), as soon as it comes into existence. Perhaps this sort of rule for determining “first owner” is unlikely to come about in private law, and its certainly repulsive to a libertarian, but such a principle of law is conceivable.
All this is true in a libertarian framework, but not when the concept of property is considered more generally. Laws assigning ownership of classes of goods, including intellectual property, are conceivable and there is no a priori reason why such laws could not exist in private law. (There are a great number of practical and economic reasons to think IP in private law is unlikely or even impossible). Why could a law that all ceramic dinner plates belong to X not conceivably exist in private law?
The issue of who owns the moon is irrelevant of course until a dispute over it’s use arises. You could assert a claim on the moon, and then take NASA to court for trespassing. Who knows what rule the court will uphold? A libertarian court would obviously say your claim is not legitimate and NASA’s claim is. But a non-libertarian court may rule the other way. If the general view of society is that your claim is stronger (maybe you are well-known and recognized as “Clayton, God of the Moon”), a court may uphold your claim. Why not?
Correct.
Do you mean to say that threats are not a “property conflict” (i.e. they are not a unilateral change of property boundaries) in themselves? I would disagree with this. I would say threats are a property conflict in themselves, e.g. a bar brawler shaking his fists at me is, in itself, a unilateral change of property boundaries. There is no necessary distinction between threats and “actual acts” of violence; risk doesn’t come into it. It all depends how property boundaries are drawn as to whether any particular shaking of fists is sufficient for a court to consider it a property violation.
Great insight.
This does not follow. Friedman writes to try and convince people that anarchic law is a good idea, and chooses to promote the idea by referring to social justice and social welfare. He assumes his reader cares about these things, so that they will support the idea. He does not assume that when the idea is implemented, it requires disputants to care about these things. In Friedman’s model, disputants are choosing to use courts out of self-interest.
I agree that Rothbard’s conception of law is unsatisfactory. He came up with a brilliant set of principles and arguments for what the law should be, in his opinion (and mine), but failed to consider broader and more varied conceptions of law and property.
“get away with” is not equivalent to “win a martial contest with”. The aggressor may have calculated that he will not be detected or caught.
This is a misrepresentation of what Kinsella is trying to do with estoppel theory. As I understand it, the scope is smaller: it is an argument for why libertarian courts should base their stipulated resolutions on retaliation, rather than restitution. That they should aim “make the aggressor suffer to the extent that his victim suffered (to the extent this is possible)”, rather than “make the victim whole again (to the extent this is possible)”. Kinsella is addressing his argument to libertarians, not to non-libertarians, and certainly not to criminals. He is giving reasons why libertarians should not feel unethical about use retaliatory force against an aggressor, beyond the point of restitution. (Roderick Long and Geoffrey Allan Plauche, for example, maintain that retaliatory force is un-libertarian).
I don’t see why it should matter, to a libertarian, why violence is becomes justifiable just because it is administered by a court as opposed to in a “martial contest”. An improvement in social welfare is not a good reason. Surely the question for a libertarian qua libertarian is: what amount of retaliatory force is justifiable, if any? A bubble-gum thief may choose to cooperate with a court because a martial contest would mean death and the court’s punishment for bubble-gum theft is “merely” torture. Does this make torture a justifiable use of force in retaliation to bubble-gum theft? Just because it was administered through “non-violent means (a court)” or improves social welfare? Estoppel theory, on the other hand, would say no it isn’t, because it is far from the principle of “equal suffering”. Long and GAP would of course argue that no retaliatory force is justifiable.
If your conclusion is correct, it is interesting to an anarchist qua anarchist though because it means in an anarchic system of law, with courts competing for customers, retributive violence may become the common principle used by the courts when they are stipulating resolutions.
Well it could. You are using his property (the road) and he has specified the rules that you must follow. In other words, he has drawn a set of boundaries over his property, and the Stop sign indicates that if you do not stop, you are unilaterally changing his property boundary. The contract (implicit as it may be) you have with him stipulates that going through his Stop sign will be considered a property violation. If he chooses to he can fine you, and if you go to court, the court will have to decide whether the fine is justifiable or not.
“The law is the organization of the natural right of lawful defense. It is the substitution of a common force for individual forces. And this common force is to do only what the individual forces have a natural and lawful right to do: to protect persons, liberties, and properties; to maintain the right of each, and to cause justice to reign over us all.”
Um, you highlighted the wrong sentences, “It is the substitution of a common [i.e. collective] force for individual forces.” Bastiat’s observation that the group can have no rights or powers which the individual does not is foundational. I did not specifically cite it in my article and that is an oversight I will correct, in the section on justifiable violence (it is a common myth that the group can justify uses of violence which an individual cannot justify, this is false).
I do not disagree with Bastiat. Do you feel that I have misquoted or abused him?