Ancient iiiiicelaaand!
It is of course possible (actually quite probable) that no such father-and-son geniuses ever materialized, leaving the community in anarchy. I believe such was the case for native North Americans, Irish and Icelanders. But again, this explanation is not entirely satisfactory, just thet I’ve got.
Strange. This sort of reminds me of Mises’ regression theorem for money.
Here are some thoughts about how common law develops, from John Hasnas
[quote=“Hasnas, [Toward a Theory of Empirical Natural Rights]
(http://faculty.msb.edu/hasnasj/GTWebSite/SPPCPublishedArticle.pdf)”]
In the absence of civil government, most people engage in productive activity in peaceful cooperation with their fellows. Some do not. A minority engages in predation, attempting to use violence to expropriate the labor or output of others. The existence of this predatory element renders insecure the persons and possessions of those engaged in production. Further, even among the productive portion of the population, disputes arise concerning broken agreements, questions of rightful possession, and actions that inadvertently result in personal injuries for which there is no antecedently established mechanism for resolution. In the state of nature, interpersonal conflicts that can lead to violence often arise.
What happens when they do? The existence of the predatory minority causes those engaged in productive activities to band together to institute measures for their collective security. Various methods of providing for mutual protection and for apprehending or discouraging aggressors are tried. Methods that do not provide adequate levels of security or that prove too costly are abandoned. More successful methods continue to be used. Eventually, methods that effectively discourage aggression while simultaneously minimizing the amount of retaliatory violence necessary to do so become institutionalized. Simultaneously, nonviolent alternatives for resolving interpersonal disputes among the productive members of the community are sought. Various methods are tried. Those that leave the parties unsatisfied and likely to resort again to violence are abandoned. Those that effectively resolve the disputes with the least disturbance to the peace of the community continue to be used and are accompanied by ever-increasing social pressure for disputants to employ them.
Over time, security arrangements and dispute settlement procedures that are well-enough adapted to social and material circumstances to reduce violence to generally acceptable levels become regularized. Members of the community learn what level of participation in or support for the security arrangements is required of them for the system to work and for them to receive its benefits. By rendering that level of participation or support, they come to feel entitled to the level of security the arrangements provide. After a time, they may come to speak in terms of their right to the protection of their persons and possessions against the type of depredation the security arrangements discourage, and eventually even of their rights to personal integrity and property. In addition, as the dispute settlement procedures resolve recurring forms of conflict in similar ways over time, knowledge of these resolutions becomes widely diffused and members of the community come to expect similar conflicts to be resolved in like manner. Accordingly, they alter their behavior toward other members of the community to conform to these expectations. In doing so, people begin to act in accordance with rules that identify when they must act in the interests of others (e.g., they may be required to use care to prevent their livestock from damaging their neighbors’ possessions) and when they may act exclusively in their own interests (e.g., they may be free to totally exclude their neighbors from using their possessions). To the extent that these incipient rules entitle individuals to act entirely in their own interests, individuals may come to speak in terms of their right to do so (e.g., of their right to the quiet enjoyment of their property).
In short, the inconveniences of the state of nature represent problems that human beings must overcome to lead happy and meaningful lives. In the absence of an established civil government to resolve these problems for them, human beings must do so for themselves. They do this not through coordinated collective action, but through a process of trial and error in which the members of the community address these problems in any number of ways, unsuccessful attempts to resolve them are discarded, and successful ones are repeated, copied by others, and eventually become widespread practices. As the members of the community conform their behavior to these practices, they begin to behave according to rules that specify the extent of their obligations to others, and, by implication, the extent to which they are free to act at their pleasure. 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 of human beings’ efforts to address the inconveniences of that state. In the state of nature, rights are solved problems.
[/quote]
Discussion continues on pg. 127.
UPDATE: This recent essay delves deeper into the common-law argument against the State. It’s the best article I’ve ever read on the how and why of anarchy, and it makes the anti-State argument seem soooo easy.
No they didn’t. There was already some dominion given to Adam, just that there wasn’t another power ruling over him. That power was also centralized for there was only one. It is however interesting that Adam was given the mandate to rule over the earth and the animals.
It doesn’t say thou shalt rule over other people and tax them.
Great post AJ. But I think you are mistaking cause and effect. Interconnectedness, decentralization, education and advancement are not enablers of anarchy, they are the consequence of it. Or, to be precise, the consequence of incrementally increasing liberty, the extreme of which is anarchy. It is because of market liberalism that the world is more interconnected and decentralized. It is market liberalism that allows us to be more educated and advanced. The four forces are the symptom, not the cause. But you seem to be suggesting that we need more education and advancement to create anarchy. That makes it appear like you want anarchy as a good in itself. To put it in another way, if we could create a fully interconnected, decentralized, educated and advanced society by tomorrow, what would be the point of anarchy?
AnCap as a failure is manifest in the State (ie. mankind’s failure to rise to the occassion).
AJ, you are a man after my own heart. I having nothing to add (yet) except for this short discussion about empirical evidence:
-Anthony de Jasay
I think the I.D.E.A. factors mentioned in the OP are both enablers and consequences, so there is a snowball effect in their interplay. That is one reason I am fairly optimistic.
It’s kind of funny to see people discussing the origins of civilization w/o one reference to anthropology, anthropological theory, or existing (eithe rpast or present) indigenous societies… except one to Iceland, which was clearly not an anarchy if you’ve actually researched it (and if you can still twist your mind into it being one, it is a very poor example of one).
History is written by the victors. I seem to recall all the great centers of knowledge being burned to the ground in the past, so what great text of anthropology should we be refering to? I need answers from on high stat!
So; why do we have firms, if not becomes it makes certain things easier to do in a specific size of organization?
I’ve never seen everyone flat out deny the concept of economies of scale, to be honest. Nor do I see any reason to it. If you say that ‘economies of scale’ implies ‘world government’, than it seems you are attacking a straw man.
So; why do we have firms, if not becomes it makes certain things easier to do in a specific size of organization?
Because there are few entrepreneurs and many workers, i.e. there are many people who want a lump sum now without having to wait for the product they make to be sold than there are entrepreneurs. It is my impression that firms exist due to time preferences, not at all economies of scale. The very fact that one can find many ‘joint-ventures’ in the world today, where many firms pool capital into one operation, or syndicated loans where many banks pool funds into one projects, or co-insurance, where many insurers insure the same risk, is proof enough that technically what one firm can do, many smaller firms can do also. Markets work better than firms.
Nor do I see any reason to it. If you say that ‘economies of scale’ implies ‘world government’, than it seems you are attacking a straw man.
Assuming economies of scale ‘all the way up’ does lead one to world government. If a country of 300 millions incurs lower marginal costs in operating than one of 2 millions, than in the long run the smaller one will go bust and the bigger ones will ‘acquire’ them. Marginal costs could me minimized only in a world government. That the experience of Europe, the US and Japan vis a vis that of Switzerland, the UAE, Monaco, Lichtenstein, San Marino et al disproves economies of scale, at the very least in government, I believe need no further elucidation.
- Economies of scale do not exist. Never have, never will.
Eh, I’d be careful with that. Large production lines can plan out how to use resources and machinery to make a certain product. It’s the whole idea of the assembly line. High volume sales with low margins. The problem is that the larger the production line, usually the more and more uncertainty exists throughout time regarding everything from cost of resources and labor, to the demand actually present in the future at the point of sale.
Of course this means that at a certain point, you have a DIS-economy of scale, where your organization is too slow to respond to changes in market demand, and since your margins are already tight, there’s not much room for error. Smaller, more agile companies who don’t have as much capital invested in static production will pick up the slack. This is the acting force against the “natural monopoly”, and is the precise reason that Standard Oil fell from having a 90% profit share at the hieght of it’s “monopoly”, to 60% by the time the anti-trust legislation aimed at breaking said “monopoly” came around. The market had already destroyed it.
I feel I must qualify my point than. Technically speaking economies of scale could exist, yet what I fail to se is how does this technical point translate into aggregation of competitors. To take my examples again, many services that technically require a huge amount of capital, are actually provided by temporary (or indeed informal) associations of multiple firms, otherwise in competition. Note that this is a very different structure form a large firm owned by stockholders, in that such a structure allow for an internal market to a degree which a single firm could never.
Thus, ‘economies of scale’ do not translate into aggregation, and this is my point. The number of firms is only limited by the number of ‘entrepreneurs’ (defined by time preferences) and, of course, by artificial restriction as tariffs, licensing requirements, IP rights and so on.
Here is a good intro lecture on Max Weber, a man I am starting to really enjoy reading. He is like a proto Meger/Mises who focuses on sociology
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CNC3Ur2Uc6A
of particular concern to this thread would be what the lecture says about capitalism in florence vs england
It’s also illuminating to note the comparisons to personal slavery. I just read Frederick Douglass’ autobiography “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave” a couple days ago and I am still perplexed that slavery existed for many centuries before it was finally abolished. Assuming humanity eventually achieves anarchy at some point in the future, my guess is that they will look back at statism as we look back at personal slavery today. They will ask in disbelief, “Why in the world did people think that governments were moral or good?” as we ask in disbelief, “How in the world did people think that slavery was moral or good?”
Bruce Benson’s “The Enterprise of Law” has a lot of great history and a great bibliography for more reading.
I’m hopeful as you are that these factors could help change the fate of anarchy, but I personally think that the best solution is the promotion of non-aggression.
First of all, non-aggression is incompatible with the state (I’m not going to repeat the argument here; I’m not even sure if that is a controversial thing to say within libertarian circles, since it is simple to see that unilaterally imposing rules on someone is a violation of the NAP, and that states do that simply by virtue of where your mother happend to be when you were born), so I think it follows that the more people there are that are non-aggressive (either because they believe in the NAP, or because they just aren’t aggressive people to begin with, or because they have made an economic trade in which they have chosen to give up aggression in return for not being dealt with aggressively in return, it doesn’t really matter for this purpose), the more that anarchy can survive.
In the cast that most people are not aggressive, I think it follows fairly easily that anarchy will be stable, as the non-aggressors can defend themselves from the minority of aggressors without in turn using aggression on each other (which is the basic argument for minarchism as far as I can tell: we have to defend ourselves from the aggressors, something magic happens in the argument, and voila’, it is ok to agress against each other as a means to try to defend ourselves from the aggressors).
Anarchy by itself does not have to be libertarian, not if anarchy is described as the absence of anyone/group unilaterally asserting a monopoly on the initiation of force in a given geographical region. A network of assassins could exist in anarchy: they are not asserting a monopoly on the initiation of force, but they are certainly initiating force.
To me, that’s not good enough. So for me, it’s libertarianism first, and that leads to anarchy - and a stable anarchy at that - rather than anarchy first, and a hope that that leads to libertarianism.