Would AnCaps generally consider this a violation of the NAP?

Economics Political Theory
1

Always lots of fascinating stuff here and I know I’m playing catchup, so just bear with me:

Joe and Bob agree to a contract in which Joe agrees to provide Bob a service and Bob agrees to pay Joe. Joe provides the service. Bob welches. Joe hires people to extract the contracted amount from Bob by force (or alternatively, Joe’s protective force performs this service for him).

Is there debate about whether that is a violation of the NAP?

From my earliest days of being a Libertarian, it’s always felt like “fraud” was this redheaded stepchild tacked on to the end of libertarianism as an afterthought, and I’ve never quite grokked its relationship. The NAP I get, and of course I get that fraud - specifically, the breaking of contracts - is an undesirable thing, but I’ve never been able to see the link between fraud and a justification for violence. And yet, if I’m understanding some of the AnCap literature correctly, I think they advocate that this is a perfectly acceptable use of violence (note I’m purposefully avoiding the use of the term “initiation of force” here since in a lot of ways, that’s really the question: is Joe initiating the force, or is he simply responding with force legitimately to Bob’s fraud?)

I have to say that while I can see why Joe would be tempted to use force - he’s mighty pissed and he wants his freaking money that he earned fairly! - I still don’t see how a society in which violence is used in this situation is better than one in which it isn’t. Surely, there have to be alternatives, e.g. buy some freaking contract insurance upfront from a simple actuarial insurance company (splitting that upfront cost with Bob, of course); reputation systems will develop that will more than punish Bob sufficiently for his breach of contract (e.g. who will ever sign a contract with him again?); before entering into a contract with someone you don’t know well, get some sort of “deposit” from them;etc.

The more radical way of putting this is: it almost seems to me like the NAP isn’t enough. It’s not enough to simply say “don’t initiate force”. We advocate this because we think it would make a better world for us. But I want more than that. I want a peaceful world, one in which the only justification for violence is immediate self-defense from the same. No “defensive first strikes”. No “retaliatory violence because through your violence, you have said that you accept violence” (my poor paraphrase of Rothbard). Some of the AnCap literature seems to go to some lengths to justify violence that is far, far from an immediate self-defense need, and the resulting vision of society is… not one that I think I like as much as a more peaceful alternative.

And, fwiw, I think some of those visions are really, really hard sells with the general populace. A desire for peace is a surprising ubiquitous thing.

2

As long as Joe uses proportionate force, as generally accepted practice will suggest, he’s well within his rights.

3

Joe doesn’t use violence though, he just takes his property. That money is the property of Joe, not the property of property of Bob. Physically Bob might be the current possessor of that money, but legally it is the money of Joe. This situation is exactly as theft. Should you be able to take your property from a thief or not?

4

This is why you’d see dispute resolution systems set up to handle these situations.

Failing to live up to a contract would fall under common law, and there’s no reason why a common law system would not be put into place in even an anarcho-capitalist society.

5

“Joe doesn’t use violence though, he just takes his property. That money is the property of Joe, not the property of property of Bob. Physically Bob might be the current possessor of that money, but legally it is the money of Joe. This situation is exactly as theft. Should you be able to take your property from a thief or not?”

This is pretty much exactly what I meant when I said that ancaps seem to go to great semantic lengths to find ways to justify violence. Saying that this isn’t violence is ridiculous; the only question is whether it is justified violence. But clearly if Bob doesn’t want to give money to Joe and Joe or his agents violently wrest it away from him, it is violence. This mental gyration to define the money as “property of Joe” just seems way too dangerously close to an “excuse” to go do whatever you want to do to Bob because you’re pissed at him.

Your question about taking back your property from a thief is more intriguing. My first reaction is “of course”, but on further thought, I’m not sure that’s optimal. Note here that by optimal I mean “the kind of society I’d most like to live in” and, quite possibly, a significant portion of others would like to live in. I note first that even in today’s very violent and forceful state setup, one rarely gets back one’s stolen property. It just simply doesn’t happen. Even with a hugely funded, monopoly on force, the state cannot provide that service to us; it seems much less likely that a protective agency could regularly do that. By property in this specific context I’m thinking of the exact piece of property, not some equivalent, e.g. if a thief steals my photo albums, the chances of getting those photo albums back is miniscule, although with insurance there’s a reasonable chance that I’ll get back some monetary replacement. Given that the best we’re going to be able to do in 99% of the cases is to get back an equivalent, then there are all sorts of options for dealing with thieves that do not involve violence. Insurance, of course, is one that at least restitutes the victim, though it does not provide disincentives to the thief themselves. But clearly once an arbitrator has declared the thief guilty there are plenty of things that the rest of “society” can do (I use this term only as a lazy replacement for something like "the protective agencies and their clients in a nearby area that would have interactions with the thief) to provide disincentive that are basically of the form of withdrawing their consent to interact with the thief. The wold is just too interconnected for one to thumb their noses at it and still get by. At its extremes if “society” chooses not to supply the thief’s home with water and power, not to sell him food, etc., it’s a pretty terrible sentence. “Society” can bargain with such a thief, e.g. agree to keep allowing those things but at the price of the thief agreeing to wear a location collar or other privacy-invading (and thus security enhancing for the rest of us) item.

The alternative seems to be a potential for a neverending spiral of “hey, he violated my property coming to get his property, so now I get to escalate to get ‘my property’” back. Maybe that stays limited, maybe not, but I just think I’d rather try my hand with the society that is extremely minimal in justifying violence.

6

"

This is why you’d see dispute resolution systems set up to handle these situations.

Failing to live up to a contract would fall under common law, and there’s no reason why a common law system would not be put into place in even an anarcho-capitalist society."

I’m all for this, but I guess it begs the question: which arbitrators would you prefer, then, in such a free market, the ones that were extremely limiting in allowing for “justified violence”, or those that were pretty loose, pretty much allowing violence as long as there was a semantic argument that in some ways the victim of that violence “deserved it” or “asked for it” or were in the possession of what was rightly someone else’s property? I mean, in this specific case, Bob did not commit any violence, he simply failed to live up to his end of a contract. Would you want to use the services of an arbitrator who was ok with using violence against Bob in this case, knowing that you could be “Bob” in some future case? I sure wouldn’t.

7

It’s not a linguistic trick, Alternatives Considered.

  1. Joe and Bob agree to exchange money for a service.

  2. Joe exchanges service.

  3. Bob does not exchange money.

  4. Bob extorted Joe’s service from him without compensation.

  5. Any amount of money that Bob has that he doesn’t feel like paying is technically Joe’s money, per their agreement.

Keep in mind that force isn’t going to be used to kill Bob unless he tries to kill your bounty hunter or PDA representative or anything. If they signed a contract, then it would be assumed that there is a clause somewhere in there that says any fraud would be met by force asking for their money back. So he did technically “consent”. Keep in mind also that an-caps are not pacifists.

A non-violent way to deal with him would be to just blacklist him as being a cheat and nobody would want to do business with this person.

8

Do a forum search on “Dispute Resolution System in a Libertarian Society”. Lot’s of good stuff in that thread.

Essentially, a court would render judgement. It would then fall onto the individual in question to pay the fine/restore the property, appeal the decision or become an outlaw (one being outside the law). If he has decided to follow the way of the outlaw, then he must face all of the repurcusions of his decision from a society that would be set against him. I would believe the life of an outlaw in an anarcho-capitalist society would be as much if not more severe than a prisoner in a government-run legal system.

Also need to realize that there are a lot of arbitrary laws under government that creates a criminal justice system problem - government is very good at creating criminals.

9

You’re exactly right, K.J. If court cases were limited to actual defendants instead of crimes against the State and crimes involving your personal behavior, think of how less congested our court system would be.

10

This could be solved easily through insurance. Don’t make a contract with someone who isn’t insured. If Bob welches, his insurance company pays you and then they deal with Bob.

11

Escrow can help as well.

12

“This could be solved easily through insurance. Don’t make a contract with someone who isn’t insured. If Bob welches, his insurance company pays you and then they deal with Bob.”

Right, this is what I see the more I think about it: there are enough other ways to deal with what is originally a non-violent situation that do not involve violence that I am loath to be part of a system that would advocate introducing violence here.

That said, my concern here is what you mean by “the insurance company deals with Bob”: if that’s just a euphemism for “the insurance company now deals with Bob via violence”, I’m no happier. However, I doubt that is either necessary or optimal from the insurance company’s perspective: violence is really, really expensive. A good insurance company can turn a profit purely from good actuarial pricing, that is, they expect to take a certain number of losses and simply charge enough to cover them. Additionally, they too can exert some influence over Bob, e.g. a cartel of insurance companies could blacklist Bob so that they will not provide him insurance until, say, he makes good on his debt.

13

“Escrow can help as well.”

Can you expand on this so that I can understand what you mean?

14

“That said, my concern here is what you mean by “the insurance company deals with Bob”: if that’s just a euphemism for “the insurance company now deals with Bob via violence”, I’m no happier.”

Yeah thats not what I meant, I don’t think violence is necessary. You basically said what I was thinking with blacklisting or reputation etc.

15

How the hell is it a “mental gyration to define the money as ‘property of Joe’”? It’s pretty damn obvious. The exchange of owernership has already happened. It is Joe’s property.

You seem to be going to semantic lengths to justify theft. When one uses force to prevent another from enjoying his property, that is the initiation of violence. In your example, Bob initaited violence when he used force to prevent Joe from takinging possession of his money.

Joe asks Bob to hand over the money. Bob refuses. So far, no violence from either side. Next, Joe attempts to non-violently take the money. Bob physically prevents him. That’s the initiation of violence on Bob’s part. It’s not semantics. Bob is using force to prevent Joe from doing something that is not harmful to Bob or any one else. That’s aggression. Joe is simply defending himself and his property.

16

“Joe asks Bob to hand over the money. Bob refuses. So far, no violence from either side. Next, Joe attempts to non-violently take the money. Bob physically prevents him. That’s the initiation of violence on Bob’s part. It’s not semantics. Bob is using force to prevent Joe from doing something that is not harmful to Bob or any one else. That’s aggression. Joe is simply defending himself and his property.”

While I understand the theory of that argument, I just have to say that I find it unconvincing, even though I see that you are thoroughly convinced. Given a free market, I would choose to frequent protection services/arbitrators/etc that did not see Joe’s actions as justified, because they were violent even when there was no immediate need for self-defense. Surely, you can’t argue that Joe’s actions are “self-defense”, right? He was not in any way under an immediate threat of bodily harm.

This is what I said before: that for me, the NAP is not enough. It is too lax. It allows for too much violence, violence that isn’t necessary, precisely because it “justifies” violence in cases like this.

I’d love to see what would happen in a free market, e.g. would people flock to market agents that took the NAP as their starting point, or would they take the stronger starting point of an actual pledge to eschew vilence except in immediate self-defense of one’s body from violence.

17

Theft is violence. You are ignoring defense of one’s property aside from the body.

18

Also, I wanted to point this out specifically: “Joe asks Bob to hand over the money. Bob refuses. So far, no violence from either side. Next, Joe attempts to non-violently take the money. Bob physically prevents him. That’s the initiation of violence on Bob’s part. That’s aggression.”

I think it’s overwhelmingly clear that you have switched terms here. You went from “initiation of force” and “aggression” to “initiation of violence”. They are not the same thing to me, and because of that, this argument isn’t convincing to me. Violence is not an abstract thing, it’s a real, tangible thing, done to one’s body.

I mean, basically, with your interpretation, there is no real difference between “body” and “property”. I’ve read plenty of libertarian theory, so I’m aware that this is one of the philosophical schools of thoughts: that your body is first your “property”, and thus whatever it creates is also property. But what I’m saying is that that theory is missing something in the real world. something that would matter to me (and I think others) given a market choice: I want violence against “body” to be much more prohibited than violence against other “property”.

19

Reaching for the money in your possession that belongs to me is not violence. Your attempt to stop me is violence. It’s a “real, tangible thing, done to [my] body.”