| | Ed -- thanks for your perceptive comments.
re this: "This is the cardinal thinking mistake of a pragmatist:
1) look at things that are around you
2) assume that the precise way that those things are -- as you perceive them fully and concretely -- is the only way that they must always be (take them as irreducible primaries).
3) proceed from these unquestioned, unqualified perceptions by taking baby steps from them with an unscrupulous, unbending logic"
You seem to be agreeing with the author here -- he seems to be making essentially this same point in the article here:
"But how can it possibly provide the order-generating and maintaining processes necessary for the peaceful coexistence of human beings in society? What would a free market in legal services be like?
I am always tempted to give the honest and accurate response to this challenge, which is that to ask the question is to miss the point. If human beings had the wisdom and knowledge-generating capacity to be able to describe how a free market would work, that would be the strongest possible argument for central planning. One advocates a free market not because of some moral imprimatur written across the heavens, but because it is impossible for human beings to amass the knowledge of local conditions and the predictive capacity necessary to effectively organize economic relationships among millions of individuals. It is possible to describe what a free market in shoes would be like because we have one. But such a description is merely an observation of the current state of a functioning market, not a projection of how human beings would organize themselves to supply a currently non-marketed good. To demand that an advocate of free market law (or Socrates of Monosizea, for that matter) describe in advance how markets would supply legal services (or shoes) is to issue an impossible challenge. Further, for an advocate of free market law (or Socrates) to even accept this challenge would be to engage in self-defeating activity since the more successfully he or she could describe how the law (or shoe) market would function, the more he or she would prove that it could be run by state planners. Free markets supply human wants better than state monopolies precisely because they allow an unlimited number of suppliers to attempt to do so. By patronizing those who most effectively meet their particular needs and causing those who do not to fail, consumers determine the optimal method of supply. If it were possible to specify in advance what the outcome of this process of selection would be, there would be no need for the process itself."
That is, he seems to be saying that people are falling into this pragmatic trap of trying to take baby steps away from the current system of government-generated law, law that is mostly not based on natural law, when such baby steps are not particularly feasible because of the fundamental structure of a non-market based monopoly of law where people are not allowed to choose between alternatives and purchase the code of laws that corresponds to their understanding of natural / objective law.
He seems to be saying that the current system of monopoly law means that others, who are overwhelmingly not Objectivists, will get to choose the code of law you must live under, and that you can't outvote them. The consequence is that you and I will invariably not get the natural / objective laws we want because we are outnumbered by the statists. Under a market system, it wouldn't matter that not many people are Objectivists, we will still get to purchase an Objectivist code of laws, just as it does not matter that hardly anyone chooses to purchase a Toyota Avalon -- I still got to purchase the Avalon that I now drive because under a marketplace system, I got the sole vote on what car I drive. No one else got to make that choice for me.
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"The public's identification of order with law makes it impossible for the public to ask for one without asking for the other. There is clearly a public demand for an orderly society. One of human beings' most fundamental desires is for a peaceful existence secure from violence. But because the public has been conditioned to express its desire for order as one for law, all calls for a more orderly society are interpreted as calls for more law. And since under our current political system, all law is supplied by the state, all such calls are interpreted as calls for a more active and powerful state. The identification of order with law eliminates from public consciousness the very concept of the decentralized provision of order. With regard to legal services, it renders the classical liberal idea of a market-generated, spontaneous order incomprehensible. I began this Article with a reference to Orwell's concept of doublethink. But I am now describing the most effective contemporary example we have of Orwellian "newspeak," the process by which words are redefined to render certain thoughts unthinkable."
