6 ms·

I honestly don't get this. If there isn't a monopoly on laws and law enforcement, does that mean that victims of crimes should be able to shop around to get the

I honestly don't get this. If there isn't a monopoly on laws and law enforcement, does that mean that victims of crimes should be able to shop around to get the law enforcement agency that they want? Should the accused? Is there any historical precedent for anything like this actually working?

Crito 13y ago
There are currently thousands of different sets of laws and legal systems that you can choose to subscribe/submit to. Potential victims of crimes can shop around for the legal system that they prefer, and those who intend to commit crimes can do the same. Generally this "shopping around" cannot be done retroactively; there are a few exceptions to this however. The way that you pick the one that you wish to be associated with is to change your physical location. This has traditionally been an intuitive system (so intuitive that many people experience difficulty when trying to imagine alternatives) however it does not necessarily work well when there is no geographic relationship between victims and perpetrators.
- MartinCron 13y ago
  That doesn't do anything to answer my question about where libertarians stand on the question. I still don't get what a civilization without a "monopoly on laws and law enforcement" would look like.
  - pielud 13y ago
    As another reply has suggested, David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom is an excellent book which describes how private defense, law and dispute resolution might happen. This video is a good introduction to the ideas presented in the book http://youtu.be/jTYkdEU_B4o http://youtu.be/jTYkdEU_B4o
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    > That doesn't do anything to answer my question about where libertarians stand on the question. I still don't get what a civilization without a "monopoly on laws and law enforcement" would look like. Not a libertarian here, but one example regarding this might be medieval Iceland where such shopping around was encouraged and even the basis of the system, as was taking things into one's own hands and perpetrating blood feuds. Interestingly the difference between "murder" and "manslaughter" in Iceland had nothing to do with intent but rather that if you killed someone that was manslaughter, but if you failed to report it to the family of the victim properly in a timely manner, or you tried to hide the fact, then it was murder (and a far, far more serious crime). But then I suspect there's a reason why at that time, Iceland didn't have cities.
  - bmelton 13y ago
    I see a lot of examples, but I'm not seeing a lot of current examples to answer your question. For something recent, look to Detroit. The city's in a shambles, budget-wise and infrastructure-wise -- police response time is in the orders of hours, for emergency calls, weeks, or months, if at all, for non-emergency calls. Effectively, by some estimations, the state doesn't exist. To fill the gap left by a non-functioning police department, neighborhoods have started banding together to hire private security firms. This (of course) isn't a direct correlation, but from the numerous friends I have in the Detroit area, the difference is pretty stark. They feel safe, the 'police' forces are smaller and more dedicated and, perhaps the biggest difference, the private security firms actually "respect us as customers, instead of treating us like cattle in the way of whatever grand mission they're on" (copied and pasted from an email with a friend). I've read a number of articles on the subject, but while I can't find any of the ones I meant to reference, I did find this one, which I just skimmed through, and it's pretty neat all around: http://www.policymic.com/articles/44725/this-is-what-budget-cuts-have-done-to-detroit-and-it-s-freaking-awesome http://www.policymic.com/articles/44725/this-is-what-budget-...
  - JohnBooty 13y ago
    One possibility is mob rule in the absence of a strong central government - frontier justice, lynch mobs, posses, warlords, the whole thing. Think about how exciting that would be! I, for one, look forward to this possible Mad Max-style libertarian future... I mean who doesn't like improvised body armor with lots of spikes and things?
  - Crito 13y ago
    I am giving you an example (present, and historical) of multiple legal systems coexisting, where predators and ordinary people can shop around for the legal system that best fits their needs and desires. Whether that does or does not have anything to do with libertarianism, you can decide. Perhaps the most famous examples of legal systems exceeding traditional spatial and temporal bounds can be found in the aftermath of WWII. Adolf Eichmann for example was kidnapped in Argentina by Mossad agents and smuggled out of the country. This could be considered, in effect, a violation of of the Argentinian legal system's monopoly on law and order within the borders of Argentina. Does that have anything to do with libertarianism? I don't know; I don't really care. It's just an interesting example of monopolies on laws and law enforcement not being hard and fast. History is full of such examples.
  - baddox 13y ago
    "Laws" and "law enforcement" are just products, similar to any other service. If you can imagine what a civilization without a monopoly on food production, or house cleaning services, or medical services would look like, you should be able to imagine with a civilization without a monopoly on laws and law enforcement would look like. Most people believe that monopolies are not economically efficient for producing "ordinary" goods and services, but for some reason they don't believe the same is true for laws and law enforcement. I don't see much of a difference. Certainly the production of laws and law enforcement is not an easier task than the production of food.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      I don't think laws and law enforcement are products in this regard. There are, after all, certain functional requirements for people to live together in cities and two of these appear to be some sense of private property and protection against violent crime. Another is management of infrastructure. These three things regulate the space between households. The government, however defined, must monopolize them because otherwise you give tremendous power to the hands of private corporations. At least with a government there are political constraints that there are not with a corporation. However the argument over monopoly I don't think comes down to this. I haven't yet met a libertarian who thought that murder should be legal absent a contract to the contrary, nor have I yet met one that thought that big business should be able to control all roads and exclude whoever they want from travelling. If you would argue these things, I suppose you'd be the first at least that I have met. The disagreement I think is actually a disagreement that hasn't really been brought to in much of the Libertarian community. The problem with monopolies are scale and power problems and these are the same problems with government in the US today as well. We want to prevent monopolies by decentralizing power in the marketplace. The desire I think is to do the same in government space. So the argument is over a decentralized government model vs a heavily centralized government model. I think if folks came to realize that that is exactly what is desired, it would be easier for Distributsts and Libertarians to make common cause. After all, does it really matter whether a city is formally private or public sector? What does matter is that government power is distributed and that it is held most strongly where it is closest to the people.
  - big_youth 13y ago
    The idea is called polycentric law and the best resource would be David D. Friedman (Milton Friedmans anarchist son) and his classic book The Machinery of Freedom which describes how such a system would work.
aaronem 13y ago
Not in the slightest, but the besetting flaw of libertarians is the belief that history has nothing to teach them save what they desire to learn, and that the existence of government, in one form or another, throughout recorded human history, implies nothing whatsoever regarding the viability of their particular flavor of utopianism.
- baddox 13y ago
  Do you consider the history of government to be particularly positive? It doesn't seem that way to me.
  - username223 13y ago
    You can take your pick of places to live without functioning governments. Most of them are probably uninhabited islands or starving regions in Africa, but it's up to you.
    - baddox 13y ago
      That doesn't answer my question. It's clear that essentially every society on Earth is organized by a government. I was asking if that has been a positive thing. Widespread does not imply positive.
      - einhverfr 13y ago
        I think you can drop "essentially" from your statement and say "every society." I would point you back to Aristotle's "Politics" actually where he comes up with a theory of government as follows (heavily paraphrasing): 1. Men and women come together to form the social basis of society, namely the procreative household. This is the vehicle by which culture is passed on, and it is the economic center of the society (pre-industrialization at least). Consequently the procreative household is the engine of both culture and society, and the goal of the economy is to nourish the household. 2. Households come together and address their common problems by forming organizations to do this. This is the basis of the polis. (As an aside, Aristotle was not particularly hostile to same-sex sexual relationships, but saw marriage purely as a heterosexual institution due to the cross-generational imperatives. Also he had a very naive view of how gender power relationships actually worked in Greece.) Now, viewed from this perspective (and it is pretty much the total basis for all pre-industrial society everywhere), you have government being a union of married child-raising households (since adoption is a replacement for procreation where that is not possible). Law then exists to address the common problems between households, both in terms of violent crime and contract issues, but also shared commons and infrastructure. Now, this is very different to 20th and 21st century America and Europe. Government is not a union of isolated individuals, but if mini-state/businesses in the form of households. This sense of government formally passed from the US with the passage of the 19th Amendment but had been falling apart for a few decades prior under pressures from industrialization, and vestiges continue to be suppressed even today (one example is the argument over same-sex marriage, but another is the general hostility towards self-employment at the hands of Congress). A government which is a union of households, which respects near-total autonomy of the household is far weaker than a government which subjects the household to scrutiny by CPS, undermines retiring with the kids with social security, requiring most kids to go to public schools, and so forth because the union-of-households government cannot interfere to form culture. There are common problems that exist in a domain that a government must address. There is a social imperative to government. The real question is over the scope and nature of that government. Is government to be a social contract of individuals (but it's really a super-intrusive form of adherence contract since the individual can't really individually negotiate it)? Or is it a more limited institution in the service of households, not individuals? I think when you look at it, that's the real choice (i.e. between a Lockean/Humean government and an Aristotelian one), not between a government and anarchy. People always invent government.
interstitial 13y ago
Ask patent trolls about shopping around.
kybernetikos 13y ago
> Is there any historical precedent for anything like this actually working? Well, in some locations you might be able to buy 'protection' from a number of different organised crime groups. While it's not exactly a historic precedent, the Millet system also had some similiarities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_%28Ottoman_Empire%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_%28Ottoman_Empire%29
exratione 13y ago
Iceland, in the age of the sagas, 1000-1300 or so. Here is a link to layperson's overview: http://mises.org/daily/1121 http://mises.org/daily/1121
- MartinCron 13y ago
  That was a good read. Thank you for sharing it.
- username223 13y ago
  Gathering up your thegns and taking to the hronraede to deal out vengeance with fire and sword isn't exactly my idea of modern justice, but since you're citing the von Mises institute, you're probably not exactly modern. EDIT: sorry for the Latinate words, but the meodsetla calls.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    Well, it's more complex than that because at the end of the day, legal settlements would have to be made, and these were usually arranged between one godhi and another or alternatively with a trial by two juries (needing a "double majority" to reach a verdict of guilt). But Iceland was a country of laws and they solved a lot of problems based on such a distributed executive in ways we might find funny today. For example consider search and seizure law. The law didn't focus on who you couldn't search but rather who you had to search. My recollection of the Gragas was that the rules were that you had limits on the size of the search team and you had to search consecutive estates (i.e. no picking on who you thought was guilty, but you had to search every estate between the two you thought were likely perpetrators). This meant, effectively that you had better narrow it down before starting. Now there were other interesting crimes. Failing to baptize a baby within the time mentioned by law was nearly the equivalent of murder and certainly the equivalent of infanticide..... (As was, if I remember right, eating horse meat.)
- AndrewKemendo 13y ago
  As a recovered misean this is literally the only thing that "anarcho-capitalists" can point to; a tiny period of poorly documented and singularly referenced history. One data point, in a homogenous and relatively isolated region does not a grand idea make.
cuillevel3 13y ago
You could just move to another country and you'd be subject to their law. And that's probably because the idea of nationalism became important in the 18th century. Sure there are universal human rights, but that's still new and many countries don't honor them: minorities are often denied basic human rights, some countries still have the death penalty, etc.

Crito 13y ago

There are currently thousands of different sets of laws and legal systems that you can choose to subscribe/submit to. Potential victims of crimes can shop around for the legal system that they prefer, and those who intend to commit crimes can do the same. Generally this "shopping around" cannot be done retroactively; there are a few exceptions to this however. The way that you pick the one that you wish to be associated with is to change your physical location. This has traditionally been an intuitive system (so intuitive that many people experience difficulty when trying to imagine alternatives) however it does not necessarily work well when there is no geographic relationship between victims and perpetrators.

MartinCron 13y ago
That doesn't do anything to answer my question about where libertarians stand on the question. I still don't get what a civilization without a "monopoly on laws and law enforcement" would look like.
- pielud 13y ago
  As another reply has suggested, David Friedman's Machinery of Freedom is an excellent book which describes how private defense, law and dispute resolution might happen. This video is a good introduction to the ideas presented in the book http://youtu.be/jTYkdEU_B4o http://youtu.be/jTYkdEU_B4o
- einhverfr 13y ago
  > That doesn't do anything to answer my question about where libertarians stand on the question. I still don't get what a civilization without a "monopoly on laws and law enforcement" would look like. Not a libertarian here, but one example regarding this might be medieval Iceland where such shopping around was encouraged and even the basis of the system, as was taking things into one's own hands and perpetrating blood feuds. Interestingly the difference between "murder" and "manslaughter" in Iceland had nothing to do with intent but rather that if you killed someone that was manslaughter, but if you failed to report it to the family of the victim properly in a timely manner, or you tried to hide the fact, then it was murder (and a far, far more serious crime). But then I suspect there's a reason why at that time, Iceland didn't have cities.
- bmelton 13y ago
  I see a lot of examples, but I'm not seeing a lot of current examples to answer your question. For something recent, look to Detroit. The city's in a shambles, budget-wise and infrastructure-wise -- police response time is in the orders of hours, for emergency calls, weeks, or months, if at all, for non-emergency calls. Effectively, by some estimations, the state doesn't exist. To fill the gap left by a non-functioning police department, neighborhoods have started banding together to hire private security firms. This (of course) isn't a direct correlation, but from the numerous friends I have in the Detroit area, the difference is pretty stark. They feel safe, the 'police' forces are smaller and more dedicated and, perhaps the biggest difference, the private security firms actually "respect us as customers, instead of treating us like cattle in the way of whatever grand mission they're on" (copied and pasted from an email with a friend). I've read a number of articles on the subject, but while I can't find any of the ones I meant to reference, I did find this one, which I just skimmed through, and it's pretty neat all around: http://www.policymic.com/articles/44725/this-is-what-budget-cuts-have-done-to-detroit-and-it-s-freaking-awesome http://www.policymic.com/articles/44725/this-is-what-budget-...
- JohnBooty 13y ago
  One possibility is mob rule in the absence of a strong central government - frontier justice, lynch mobs, posses, warlords, the whole thing. Think about how exciting that would be! I, for one, look forward to this possible Mad Max-style libertarian future... I mean who doesn't like improvised body armor with lots of spikes and things?
- Crito 13y ago
  I am giving you an example (present, and historical) of multiple legal systems coexisting, where predators and ordinary people can shop around for the legal system that best fits their needs and desires. Whether that does or does not have anything to do with libertarianism, you can decide. Perhaps the most famous examples of legal systems exceeding traditional spatial and temporal bounds can be found in the aftermath of WWII. Adolf Eichmann for example was kidnapped in Argentina by Mossad agents and smuggled out of the country. This could be considered, in effect, a violation of of the Argentinian legal system's monopoly on law and order within the borders of Argentina. Does that have anything to do with libertarianism? I don't know; I don't really care. It's just an interesting example of monopolies on laws and law enforcement not being hard and fast. History is full of such examples.
- baddox 13y ago
  "Laws" and "law enforcement" are just products, similar to any other service. If you can imagine what a civilization without a monopoly on food production, or house cleaning services, or medical services would look like, you should be able to imagine with a civilization without a monopoly on laws and law enforcement would look like. Most people believe that monopolies are not economically efficient for producing "ordinary" goods and services, but for some reason they don't believe the same is true for laws and law enforcement. I don't see much of a difference. Certainly the production of laws and law enforcement is not an easier task than the production of food.
  - einhverfr 13y ago
    I don't think laws and law enforcement are products in this regard. There are, after all, certain functional requirements for people to live together in cities and two of these appear to be some sense of private property and protection against violent crime. Another is management of infrastructure. These three things regulate the space between households. The government, however defined, must monopolize them because otherwise you give tremendous power to the hands of private corporations. At least with a government there are political constraints that there are not with a corporation. However the argument over monopoly I don't think comes down to this. I haven't yet met a libertarian who thought that murder should be legal absent a contract to the contrary, nor have I yet met one that thought that big business should be able to control all roads and exclude whoever they want from travelling. If you would argue these things, I suppose you'd be the first at least that I have met. The disagreement I think is actually a disagreement that hasn't really been brought to in much of the Libertarian community. The problem with monopolies are scale and power problems and these are the same problems with government in the US today as well. We want to prevent monopolies by decentralizing power in the marketplace. The desire I think is to do the same in government space. So the argument is over a decentralized government model vs a heavily centralized government model. I think if folks came to realize that that is exactly what is desired, it would be easier for Distributsts and Libertarians to make common cause. After all, does it really matter whether a city is formally private or public sector? What does matter is that government power is distributed and that it is held most strongly where it is closest to the people.
- big_youth 13y ago
  The idea is called polycentric law and the best resource would be David D. Friedman (Milton Friedmans anarchist son) and his classic book The Machinery of Freedom which describes how such a system would work.

aaronem 13y ago

Not in the slightest, but the besetting flaw of libertarians is the belief that history has nothing to teach them save what they desire to learn, and that the existence of government, in one form or another, throughout recorded human history, implies nothing whatsoever regarding the viability of their particular flavor of utopianism.

baddox 13y ago
Do you consider the history of government to be particularly positive? It doesn't seem that way to me.
- username223 13y ago
  You can take your pick of places to live without functioning governments. Most of them are probably uninhabited islands or starving regions in Africa, but it's up to you.
  - baddox 13y ago
    That doesn't answer my question. It's clear that essentially every society on Earth is organized by a government. I was asking if that has been a positive thing. Widespread does not imply positive.
    - einhverfr 13y ago
      I think you can drop "essentially" from your statement and say "every society." I would point you back to Aristotle's "Politics" actually where he comes up with a theory of government as follows (heavily paraphrasing): 1. Men and women come together to form the social basis of society, namely the procreative household. This is the vehicle by which culture is passed on, and it is the economic center of the society (pre-industrialization at least). Consequently the procreative household is the engine of both culture and society, and the goal of the economy is to nourish the household. 2. Households come together and address their common problems by forming organizations to do this. This is the basis of the polis. (As an aside, Aristotle was not particularly hostile to same-sex sexual relationships, but saw marriage purely as a heterosexual institution due to the cross-generational imperatives. Also he had a very naive view of how gender power relationships actually worked in Greece.) Now, viewed from this perspective (and it is pretty much the total basis for all pre-industrial society everywhere), you have government being a union of married child-raising households (since adoption is a replacement for procreation where that is not possible). Law then exists to address the common problems between households, both in terms of violent crime and contract issues, but also shared commons and infrastructure. Now, this is very different to 20th and 21st century America and Europe. Government is not a union of isolated individuals, but if mini-state/businesses in the form of households. This sense of government formally passed from the US with the passage of the 19th Amendment but had been falling apart for a few decades prior under pressures from industrialization, and vestiges continue to be suppressed even today (one example is the argument over same-sex marriage, but another is the general hostility towards self-employment at the hands of Congress). A government which is a union of households, which respects near-total autonomy of the household is far weaker than a government which subjects the household to scrutiny by CPS, undermines retiring with the kids with social security, requiring most kids to go to public schools, and so forth because the union-of-households government cannot interfere to form culture. There are common problems that exist in a domain that a government must address. There is a social imperative to government. The real question is over the scope and nature of that government. Is government to be a social contract of individuals (but it's really a super-intrusive form of adherence contract since the individual can't really individually negotiate it)? Or is it a more limited institution in the service of households, not individuals? I think when you look at it, that's the real choice (i.e. between a Lockean/Humean government and an Aristotelian one), not between a government and anarchy. People always invent government.

interstitial 13y ago

Ask patent trolls about shopping around.

kybernetikos 13y ago

> Is there any historical precedent for anything like this actually working? Well, in some locations you might be able to buy 'protection' from a number of different organised crime groups. While it's not exactly a historic precedent, the Millet system also had some similiarities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_%28Ottoman_Empire%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millet_%28Ottoman_Empire%29

exratione 13y ago

Iceland, in the age of the sagas, 1000-1300 or so. Here is a link to layperson's overview: http://mises.org/daily/1121 http://mises.org/daily/1121

MartinCron 13y ago
That was a good read. Thank you for sharing it.
username223 13y ago
Gathering up your thegns and taking to the hronraede to deal out vengeance with fire and sword isn't exactly my idea of modern justice, but since you're citing the von Mises institute, you're probably not exactly modern. EDIT: sorry for the Latinate words, but the meodsetla calls.
- einhverfr 13y ago
  Well, it's more complex than that because at the end of the day, legal settlements would have to be made, and these were usually arranged between one godhi and another or alternatively with a trial by two juries (needing a "double majority" to reach a verdict of guilt). But Iceland was a country of laws and they solved a lot of problems based on such a distributed executive in ways we might find funny today. For example consider search and seizure law. The law didn't focus on who you couldn't search but rather who you had to search. My recollection of the Gragas was that the rules were that you had limits on the size of the search team and you had to search consecutive estates (i.e. no picking on who you thought was guilty, but you had to search every estate between the two you thought were likely perpetrators). This meant, effectively that you had better narrow it down before starting. Now there were other interesting crimes. Failing to baptize a baby within the time mentioned by law was nearly the equivalent of murder and certainly the equivalent of infanticide..... (As was, if I remember right, eating horse meat.)
AndrewKemendo 13y ago
As a recovered misean this is literally the only thing that "anarcho-capitalists" can point to; a tiny period of poorly documented and singularly referenced history. One data point, in a homogenous and relatively isolated region does not a grand idea make.

cuillevel3 13y ago

You could just move to another country and you'd be subject to their law. And that's probably because the idea of nationalism became important in the 18th century. Sure there are universal human rights, but that's still new and many countries don't honor them: minorities are often denied basic human rights, some countries still have the death penalty, etc.