For example, I go out one morning, see an indigent, and kill him for pleasure. What happens now?
Is an entity willing and capable of meting out justice against me a de facto “government?”
The lack of a ruling elite does not mean the lack of the rule of law. Start with Long’s response to 10 common objections here.
I would have to imagine in a completely private society that most property owners would be wary of admitting murderers and psychopaths onto their property, so at best your indulgence would likely cost you access to roads, establishments, etc whose owners disapprove of murder, which would likely be most of them.
There’s more tools at our disposal than just boycotts or “excluding criminals from property” (extra-juridical measures). There’s absolutely no reason that security and justice can’t be handled privately. Consider this quote from here by Hoppe:
In this [Lockean-Rothbardian] intellectual tradition, property is defined as tangible, physical objects which have been “visibly” lifted out of the state of nature of un-owned goods through acts of appropriation and production. Through mixing one’s labor with specific resources, objectively ascertainable borders of property are established and specific objects connected to particular individuals. There are indicators of owned (as compared to unowned) objects and of who owns them (and who does not), for everyone to “read.” Moreover, the theory fulfills perfectly the requirement of being operational in that it traces all present property back to acts of “original appropriation” (up until which time there had only been “nature” or “unowned” resources). Based on this theory, man could indeed have acted from the beginning of time. (In distinct contrast, any theory that makes the assignment of property rights dependent on a “contract” or agreement or on State-declared law [legislation] does not allow man to act from the beginning on, but only after the conclusion of said contract or the arrival of the State. Accordingly, any such theory must be regarded as “technically” deficient.)
And how would all those institutions know that I’m a murderer?
How is that “problem” any different than under a state monopoly on the provision of justice?
Nobody ever has perfect knowledge of any historical event.
It is tempting to reply that nobody should be punished unless we are certain he is guilty. But by that standard, nobody would ever be punished; the strongest evidence establishes only a probability. Even a confession is not absolute proof: While our legal system no longer permits torture, it does permit plea bargaining, and an innocent defendant may prefer a guilty plea on a minor charge to risking a long prison term on a major one. Scientific evidence is no more conclusive; even if we somehow had a perfect match between the DNA of the suspect and the criminal, there would still be the possibility that someone at the lab made a mistake or that somewhere, perhaps unknown to him, the suspect has an identical twin. If we are to convict anyone at all, we must do it on evidence short of absolute proof.
From here.
Please actually read what I linked before you repeat the same fallacies.
“Anarchy is the completion, not the negation, of the rule of law.” - Long
“And how would all those institutions know that I’m a murderer?”
Presumably by running your identity against a privately maintained criminal database that they subscribe to in order to keep their paying customers from being exposed to dangerous individuals, so that they have a good experience and don’t get murdered and return.
Consider also the incentive private insurance companies would have to investigate and bring murderers to justice. It’s their money on the line when a murderer continues to murder their clients.
What I mean is, I haven’t admitted to being a murderer. You could figure it out with a lengthy and expensive investigation, but would you?
Oh, and I said this was an indigent. He didn’t have life insurance, or subscribe to any mercenary protection company.
My suggestion is that effectively nothing would happen, and I would get away with it. i.e., it would be roughly analogous to what happens with nations, who are more or less in a state of anarchy with regard to one another. Sure, if a country acts like a big enough dick (North Korea), most others stop doing business with them. If they become enough of a loose cannon to cause existential threats to everyone (Nazi Germany), others might band together to incapacitate them. But the United States or China, by virtue of being wealthy, can get away with a great many “crimes,” can they not? Just only kill indigents.
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So the idea is that people don’t want to get murdered, so they’ll pay to have murderes captured. There’s a public goods problem because everyone wants to free ride off everyone else paying to get murderers captured. To get around this, people take out insurance and transfer liabilities to the hands of the few, who, to reduce their liabilities, have an incentive to prevent as many murders as humanly possible.
In short, everyone wants to be protected. Its a good. It is provided by the market.
What I mean is, I haven’t admitted to being a murderer. You could figure it out with a lengthy and expensive investigation, but would you?
Oh, and I said this was an indigent. He didn’t have life insurance, or subscribe to any mercenary protection company.
Assuming you are found guilty, you bear the costs of capture (including re-capturing the funds, i.e. prison expenses, and investigative costs). So, any private security firm will balance their perceived chance fo success in getting a guilty verdict with how much it may expect to earn from having you do hard labor.
I doesn’t matter that the victim had no insurance or was not a subscriber. Even without any kin, any firm can take up the case. On this, read the works in this thread.
“What I mean is, I haven’t admitted to being a murderer. You could figure it out with a lengthy and expensive investigation, but would you?”
How would this be any different with or without a state? And where does the unstated assumption come from that the state has greater incentive to investigate a crime than a PI?
I don’t think the State expends a whole lot of resources investigating the murder of indigents, transients, prostitutes and the like. If you’re a rich mofo with a taste for human blood, you can probably kill pretty much with impunity as long as you choose your targets wisely. People without money and family connections have always been and always will be among the most vulnerable members of any society.
As an argument for two-tiered law, however, the possibility of murdering the poor and socially isolated is a pathetic argument. How does creating a special class of citizens granted special exemptions from the laws to which everyone else are held (government employees) solve anything??? It’s magical reasoning… “unicorns exist, therefore, there will be less crime” is logically equivalent to “government exists, therefore, there will be less crime.”
Clayton -
Skep,
I don’t think your example of the plight of the indigent highlights a difference between statist and anarchic societies. It highlights the problem of human indifference. Big government and big business both reflect human nature and can be as indifferent as the individual who walks past the indigent in the gutter. Only by actively cultivating a principle (“the good Samaritan myth”), do we attempt to change human nature in the individual, in the state and in the corporation.
The police and courts are there, they are just run competitively, not monopolistically. You are arrested and tried in court. It’s likely that your police/courts company already has an arrangement with other companies, and there would be procedures for each scenario.
The Myth of the Rule of Law by John Hasnas. In brief, law created by a monopoly will be politicized and, thus, always arbitrary and always changing. Politicized law is incompatible with the idea of the rule of law, in which no man is subject to the whims of another. As Bruno Leoni and others have pointed out, it is government law that can change any day, by the vote of the legislature. One day, the production of alcohol could be prohibited; not long after, it could be decriminalized. One day, short selling is allowed; the next, banned. How can we expect to adequately plan for the future when legislation is being passed almost every day? How can we say we’re a nation of laws and not men, when our legal system is based upon a group of men writing and interpreting the laws?
He concludes his piece:
The fact is that there is no such thing as a government of law and not people. The law is an amalgam of contradictory rules and counter-rules expressed in inherently vague language that can yield a legitimate legal argument for any desired conclusion. For this reason, as long as the law remains a state monopoly, it will always reflect the political ideology of those invested with decisionmaking power. Like it or not, we are faced with only two choices. We can continue the ideological power struggle for control of the law in which the group that gains dominance is empowered to impose its will on the rest of society, or we can end the monopoly.
Even better reading is Hasnas’s The Depoliticization of Law.
Micheal raised very good point. I heard similar saying, that today police kill people for using weed, next day weed is legalized and magically they don’t kill people for using weed. It’s absurd. You need only few people to tell the MAJORITY of people what is LEGAL or not and it magically becomes a LAW.
I will never understand how police officers are so retarded to not see this.