| | Reply to Bill: I don't know... (A FIRST!!!!)
But I'm pretty sure that the British (common-law based) vs. French (Napoleonic Law) vs. the native (cannibals until the 1940's) law must have had some significant conflicts.
Reply to Sherman. A society of crooks and sociopaths will not be peaceful under any conceivable circumstances.
I agree that the typical anarcho-capitalist picture(s) leave a lot of things out. Probably the best basic source is still unfortunately the Tannehill's "Market for Liberty," as far as laying out those details. Part of the problem is that things change. What worked in medieval Ireland or the Hunza Valley - claimed to be historical examples of a working free-market anarchy - will require major upgrades to work in the urban information age. The Tannehill's sketch out a lot of practical-sounding ideas, but unfortunately not much has been done to extend their work, and it was written well before personal computing, much less the internet.
(Some of the things that the internet has made possible are directly relevant here, as in Letters of Credit, which allow secure transactions accross national borders. Letters of Credit were certainly available long before the internet, but the knowledge and transaction costs were prohibitive for most small to medium sized companies. In fact, LoC's bypass the unreliable state court systems. International trade has soared due to the information revolution's massive reduction of many transaction costs which often involved depending upon state agencies or bureaucrats. This has led some people to argue that anarchy is now possible(!), based on computers and other information age systems, ignoring the historical examples.)
What is sad is that the issue is important enough that it should be seriously addressed, but instead it gets bogged down in religious argumentation in the anarchy vs. state confrontation, especially in objectivist circles, or lost to politics in the Libertarian Party. (The Libertarian movement was an almost unbelievable fountainhead of intellectual innovation and ferment until the LP sucked up all the human energy and made finding more warm bodies to sign up and vote LP more important than all the still unresolved basic issues, such as children's rights, just for one example.)
But, assuming that you realize the intellectual usefulness of taking your opponent's position and trying to defend it, just imagine for a moment that a network of binding interpersonal contracts, enforced via a similar network of title agencies, insurance companies, arbitration services, security companies and investigative agencies could replace the monopoly state, without your predicted collapse into dog-eat-dog warring factions.
Given the HUGE dangers evinced by states over all recorded history, surely you would agree that ANY alternative that looked at all possible should be carefully scrutinized by any rational person interested in the issue of human survival, justice, peace, productivity, etc. Imagine for a moment that Rand had never been approached by Galambos with his "competing governments" idea...
And the benefits of such scrutiny would be not merely establishing further grounds to reject the possibility or to support - at minimum - further investigation and thought, but would very likely have positive applications in two or three related important areas, such as jurisprudence, the issue of just how much of the required state can actually be devolved to private agencies in the theorized ideal objectivist state, and possible new services that would supplement or improve security and freedom in that context.
I.e., in general, I think that most libertarians and objectivists who support the limited state position still hold the firm conviction that any state is to be regarded as a potential threat, like keeping a doberman with a past record of generations of breeding for gratuitous violence to protect onesself. Thus, efforts to find ways of safely removing power from the state should be welcomed.
It may be that the way that this will be worked out will be in virtual space. I note that someone was recently convicted of grand theft for stealing virtual merchandise from one of the online VRs. The cash value of the merchandise, which only existed as 1's and 0's on various computers was reportedly about EU4,000, based on the exchange rate between the virtual currency and the EU. Perhaps a Galt's Gulch in 2nd Life is a good starting point. Then the anarcho-capitalists can also purchase some land there and we'll see which system is viable.
|
|
