I quote Friedman:
Friedman’s suggestion makes a lot of sense. However is it libertarian? Why should a person whose wallet was stolen care how many thieves are caught in general?
The issue seems to be that stealing, in an economy of division of labor, can never be economical on any decent scale, but will do only for asocial individuals (of course, the statist corrosion of the division of labor makes stealing more economical). If it where the other way around, there would be no human society, but a war of all against all. Hence, we may safely assume that stealing will never become widespread, and when it does folks will be too busy fighting to survive to mull over such question.
But if theft will always be small-scale stuff, than reparations will in time tends towards the cost of ‘production’ of repossession, costs which will depend on the type of repossession that will come in vogue in society.
PS: and more generally, even if you catch one thief every 1000, and only 1 unit is stolen every time, you could not affect a punishment of 1000 units if the costs of doing business are, say, 10. otherwise many more companies would flock to your business and drive prices down. Hence, even with widespread theft (assuming some sort of society is still holding), profits will drive the punishment, not some efficiency calculation.
The amount of reparations a thief must pay to the victim should only be depedant on how much damage they caused the victim.
It would make no sense for it to be dependant on how (in)efficient the police are at capturing criminals.
In an-cap, that’s problem of lawmakers and not ours.
Please explain. Wouldn’t the law makers be made up of the or some an-cap’ists’?
Okay, let’s assume thieves acquired new technology, an invisibility cloak. The chance to catch a thief now has decreased to 1 for every 100,000 thieves. Thieves can be caught only when they remove the clock by mistake. Once this is done its very easy to catch the thief. However searching for thieves wearing an invsiibility cloak is completely futile.
In current society it is not very difficult to deal with this problem. You simply increase the punishment for thieves. For example you can execute all the thieves you’ve caught. That’s also how it would work according to Friedman.
However if you suggest that thet punishment for these thieves should be a restitution fee for the stolen goods + the “repocession” fee, then thieves will continue to operate because an average thief could make billions of dollars with a very small chance of being caught.
Than the division of labor will break down, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. Executing a guy who stole an apple (the fruit, not the piece of hardware) will just make everyone go for billions instead of apples. Or, as my microeconomics text put it, if you shoot parking offenders, than you create an incentive for them to shoot the cop beforehand for a minor parking infraction. In short, such punishment will accentuate the problem, not solve it.
If you insist on practicing thought experiments at Hogwarts, can you at least stop trying to apply your conclusions to reality?
The point I’m trying to make is that in some cases not only the victim is involved, but the entire society. For example if a woman doesn’t press charges against her rapist because she is afraid that her name will come out in the press (after all the libertarian society no one can forbid a newspaper to print her name), then the rapist will go free and will rape another woman. How can society protect itself from thieves with invisiblity cloaks, rapists who were not charged, and from other dangerous elements?
Regarding the rapist, it’s easy to imagine that the girl’s insurer (or the rapist’s insurer) would value anonymity above all else. So, ‘prosecuting’ would not be the same as publicising one’s case.
But, more generally, if for whatever reason the victim decides not to prosecute at all, than we can say that there has been no victim at all! Hence, the guy is not criminal and society need not protect itself from him. After all, who are we to say what constitutes aggression by the victim’s standards?
But would you want to live in a neighborhood in which a rapist is on the lose because the victim was either too shy, or mentally ill, or too afraid to charge him? I doubt that.
I assume that in this case the owners of the territory will simply banish the rapist. But since no one will accept him in his own territory, I assume he’ll have to move to some isolated islands with other criminals. In fact I believe in an-cap society such exile islands will be common.
Of course they will. But I was assuming that no one comes to know abort it. In that case, we can’t know a rapist is on the loose anymore than we can know that the guy walking by is a rapist.
Probably. I just wanted to point out that in stateless society internet philosophers aren’t only ones who are thinking which laws would work, paid fulltime people would be doing it too. So if there is some minor “BUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF X OCCURS, An-Cap won’t apparently work!”-stuff, I usualy got feeling that people don’t remember it all the time.
How does it make sense to hold a thief responsible for something he didn’t do?
You could say that by becoming a thief he became a great danger to society, because theives (in my example) are extremely difficult to catch.
There is no such thing as damage “to society,” only damage to multiple individuals’ property. Who else was damaged by a thief stealing gum? No one besides the owner of the gum.
Let us say 1 in 10000 gum thieves are caught, and gum costs $1. The police catch a gum thief… why does the owner of the business then get $10000 for slightly more than $1 in damages?
There is no reason to take into account the incompetency of the police to catch criminals, but only how much damage was caused by that thief.
“Who else was injured by the theif stealing gum.”
Perhaps the one stolen from was going to buy a soda, but since his gum was stolen, he has to buy more gum.
The soda manufacturer was hurt by the theif.
What would prevent this invisibility cloak from getting into the hands of non-thieves? Regardless, I was responding to your OP, which didn’t have that added context. As Tex2002ans wrote, how can “society” be hurt or even threatened?
I don’t think any coherent argument can be made for why the perpetrator should be ‘made an example of.’ Such thinking is inherently statist (I’m not saying Friedman is a statist - he clearly is not - but even Friedman occasionally lapses into collectivist language - “we” and “us” thinking). I think a perfectly clear argument can be made for restitution. However, I don’t know if there’s ever been a human society that was strictly restitutional. This leaves the question… whence lawful retaliation (punishment)? I don’t think lawful retaliation arises from the greater good, at least, not in the direct way which Friedman’s above argument would suggest. Rather, punishment arises from the victim’s demand for vengeance. If you kill my son, there really is no restitution that can be made. Any fine imposed on the perpetrator is inherently punitive. Yet victims strenuously demand such punishment even when they do not benefit from it (such as corporal or capital punishment).
The only explanation for this lies in human nature itself. Humans have an evolved retaliatory passion. If I had to guess, I would say this probably arose as a way for nature to get us to internalize the costs of violence onto the violent. In other words, if you kill my son and I kill you, your son is less likely to survive and pass on your homicidal genes where they can do further damage to our descendants. If the intra-species deadliness of homicidals is greater than the intra-species deadliness of vengeful relatives of homicide victims, we can expect the retaliatory trait to improve survival even though it involves one member of the species killing another.
This argument applies indirectly to the problem Friedman considers here. The evolved demand for vengeance is what motivates victims of theft to demand restitution and punishment of the perpetrator. It is my view that one of the roles of law is to limit the vindictive impulse. At some point, vengeance becomes its own crime and, intuitively, we sense that this point varies with the severity of the crime. “The punishment should be proportional to the crime.” If you steal bubble gum from my grocery store and I decapitate you (I think this is one of Friedman’s examples) who would say I have not committed murder? The original purpose of this vindictive impulse was to internalize the costs of very grave offenses (such as homicide, cuckoldry, etc.) and I think it has been repurposed to internalize the costs of torts onto the wrong-doer, which accomplishes the same purpose but in a much more discriminating way. Before law, Nature could only cull the population through vindictive homicide which means that only the most grave offenses could be punished. With law, we have a way to limit vengeance in a way that internalizes the costs of torts onto the wrong-doer without culling them from the population completely, meaning that much smaller offenses can be internalized, which rationalizes decision-making to take into account costs imposed on others in a much higher-resolution than can be attained with a vindictive-homicide system.
So, the purpose of lawful punishment is to satiate the victim’s demand for punishment as well as to limit the victim’s vindictive impulse. The wrong-doer agrees to pay such-and-such a fine above and beyond the amount of damage done in order to put the issue to rest (receive an agreement from the victim that any further retaliation constitutes its own tort). I also believe that the long-run equilibrium of this system is a punishment-free society. However, I disagree with Longites that we can jump straight from here to there. A punishment-free society is a little like a profit-free capitalist society in perfect equilibrium. It’s a well-known result of economics that the tendency of capitalism is to drive profit margins down over time and, in equilibrium, to zero. In the real world, of course, they are never completely zero and I think that punishment in the real world would never be zero although the tendency of a morally coherent legal system will be to drive punishments to smaller and smaller levels over time.
Clayton -
@ the OP
Some libertarians certainly think this principle is sound. See here.