The most libertarian country in the world?

[Euclidean]

Now, with your specific example of a tort providing for labelling, you either have to have a law that allows the court to sanction the company beyond individual damages, or you have to accept that labelling won't always happen.  And here's why:

If, as is traditional, the individual can only sue for damages to himself...then you can get plenty of cases, peanut allergies being a good one, where the company will do a cost analysis that runs roughly like this:  "The cost of paying the 1 in a million person who will eat this and die is x.  The cost of labelling every product is x-1.  Therefore, it's cheaper to just pay damages to the few who are hurt by our packaging."

If you have a law that provides for damages beyond those incurred by the complainant, then you get exactly the same thing that a government agency does, regulation...except it's regulation by a judge who likely has zero expertise in the field, and will set damages and sanctions according to whatever he can vaguely divine from the briefs.  I can't imagine how that would be preferable to something like the FDA in any scheme.

The tort is not "labeling" the tort is negligence.  The dependent in that imaginary case owed the consumer a duty of care which was breached and therefore is liable.

To fix the cost benefit analysis issue I have three words for you: class action lawsuit.  I honestly don't know if you're familiar with the term, but class action lawsuits solve the cost benefit analysis problem nicely.  That's to say nothing of the bad press an entity would get for such a policy, which could wind up costing them even more revenue on top of all the settlements even if no one filed a class action suit.

The judge may not be an expert on the product in question, but in a liability case, only a few salient facts are usually relevant anyway.  The court decides on issues and principles, not technical specs.  Expert witnesses and professional attorneys can solve that problem and do so every day.  The court is an expert on law, and that's what's most relevant when a dispute arises.

And yes, I'd take that over the FDA, which acts so slowly it can take months to get life saving drugs on the market, which regularly denies chronically ill people with nothing to lose the right to take whatever medicines they may wish... need I go on?  I don't need or want a nanny government to tell me what's good and bad to put in my body, the onus is on me to find out.

The politician's standard need not be arbitrary-if he's accountable to someone for bad decisions, he has every incentive to make good ones.  And the alternatives are either regulation by judge (eek!) or regulation by cost analysis...at which poitn the peanut allergy guy just has to die and leave the damages (if you have more government intervention in the form of survivor or wrongful death statutes, that is) to his heirs.


At times, I find the moral aspects of libertarianism I find more troubling than the practical ones.

The trouble is, the politician is not accountable at all.  What's going to happen to him?  He doesn't get elected again?  Boohoo!

Also why are you so fixated on judges?  Juries are involved too, juries you personally are eligible to serve on.

The irony of this comment is that you are in part arguing the incompetence of the government to decide matters, and using that as a basis for arguing the government should decide matters.

Libertarianism is far more moral than statism for the central reason your idea involves forcing people to do things by force.  That's a whole other post however.

Why should the rest of us be forced to respect your rights to property, and to invest resources in protecting them?

Which argument would you like?

Natural rights argument?

Utilitarian argument?

Kant style argument?

This has been nailed down many times in many different approaches by better men than I.

The answer is: because most people think that's a reasonable thing to demand of individuals in a society.  You could just as easily say: "Why should I be forced to pay for police that protect that guy's house, when he's not willing to pay for regulations that protect my health?".

So tyranny of the majority is the solution you propose?  That there be no escape for conscientious objectors?

Your example is flawed; the police do not protect anyone's property and are not obligated to.  The property owner is responsible for protecting his property.  SCOTUS has ruled to that effect, a ruling I actually agree with because it's ridiculous to expect otherwise.

Also, by forcing that other party to pay for regulations that favor me, I am benefiting at his expense and profiting at gunpoint.  It's the same as if I put a gun in his face and took his cash.  Since you posed the question of the morality of libertarianism, I now must ask you how is that moral for me to force other people to give me their property via aggressive force?

  It ultimately will boil down to what either of you think is a reasonable demand by society against individuals-and I think the best, if still imperfect, way to settle that is through representative institutions to provide for a consensus position.  That way, you can try to convince others that your right to property deserves resources while their rights to safety do not...but in the end, whatever most agree on will be made law.

So tyranny of the majority is the solution, screw you if you don't agree even though you might be right and the majority might be wrong?  Did I get that right?

Well, if there's a market, there is certainly incentive to exceed standards.

Only when that market is a free market free of government interference.

This is an example of how government regulations can provide a baseline, so that products compete on features other than "may not be as likely to kill you as the other guy's product!"  I think there's at least a good case to be made that more innovation comes from those conditions, since consumers can worry about things other than complete fraud in their purchases.

Economic power has always come from a free market.  Even allegedly communist countries understand this and bend their ideology enough to harness a competitive marketplace to at least some limited degree, or else they will fall in short order.  And honestly, what you describe is already how it is.  Incompetent government oversight doesn't do a whole lot to raise the bar.

The problem is that private expertise has to be paid for-so it won't necessarily benefit the public in every case.

And HERE yes right here we get to the crux of the matter.  Private expertise is the best, why bother with any other kind?  Furthermore, why the heck is this "public" entitled to things they don't pay for?

Why are people entitled to things that other people pay for?  Why is it okay for you to make this government machine which steals money from one group and gives it to another?

The experts will be accountable to their incomes, not to the public. 

That is exactly what I'm counting on.  Good old fashioned human greed for money, wealth, power, knowledge, or convenience is a much stronger force for advancement and good than some morally bankrupt government.

And you also have the problem of the commons, where it's in no individual person's interest to pay for that kind of expertise...but would benefit everyone were everyone to contribute to the pot.   Which is exactly what government achieves by demanding payments.

If a dedicated minority of people want something to happen, it will happen.  Everything ever achieved in human history has followed that pattern.  A government mechanism is unnecessary.

No, government and state run programs are not the answer to everything, and they screw many things up.  But there are some things that the market does not do well...hence the reason for the prosperity of America.  We've got a pretty decent balance.

We don't have a decent balance at all.  How come I can't sit up on the back of a convertible and ride in it that way?  How come I can't open a business and decide if it will be a smoking institution or not?  How come I can lose control of my property if some bean counter thinks there's an endangered species living on it when I've never even seen that particular animal on that property?

The reason is statists want to control my life, but they can't irk me enough that the only possible coping mechanism is out right defiance or revolution.

[De Selby]

Euclidean,

The tort is not "labeling" the tort is negligence.  The dependent in that imaginary case owed the consumer a duty of care which was breached and therefore is liable.

Well, again, you have the problem here of resorting to a bondage system in order to make your libertarian ideals workable.  Duty is decidedly unfree-it is an obligation imposed on you from above.  And in the case of legal duties, you are literally talking about duties that were imposed on you personally by an ancient feudal system.  So how great is the pure free market, after all, if it can only yield benefits because of ancient feudal customs that might continue to be observed in its administration?

To fix the cost benefit analysis issue I have three words for you: class action lawsuit.

Again, you have regulation by judge.  If you really think that litigation is shorter, easier, and more accurate than administration....I strongly encourage that you read up on mass torts, the Daubert problem, and the "payoffs" that injured consumers get in this process.  The novel version of A Civil Action will teach you at least the basics of how ugly, unpredictable, and technical litigation is.  As a factual matter, it's quite possibly the worst method of regulating industry imaginable...and that makes sense, since it's not designed to regulate; it's designed to compensate for injuries.

I don't need or want a nanny government to tell me what's good and bad to put in my body, the onus is on me to find out.

The problem is that it's impossible for you as an individual to compel the necessary information from others. 

The trouble is, the politician is not accountable at all.  What's going to happen to him?  He doesn't get elected again?  Boohoo!

I like how you just write off "He loses his job!" as no big deal.  Not getting elected, to a politician, is the end of his career.  That's a pretty stiff penalty.

Also why are you so fixated on judges?  Juries are involved too, juries you personally are eligible to serve on.

This is a fact that makes regulation even worse when it comes from the Courtroom-just as judges are not experts in food/medicine/air safety, juries are likely to be even less sophisticated....yet they find all the facts personally.  They don't get to elect commissioners who create research groups and call on experts to decide the facts; they just get whatever two attorneys gave them in one trial.

Which argument would you like?

If you could convincingly show that any of the various proponents of your listed schools of thought had answered the question, you should seriously write it into a thesis.  You'll make quite a name for yourself in the philosophy departments around the country.

Your example is flawed; the police do not protect anyone's property and are not obligated to.  The property owner is responsible for protecting his property.  SCOTUS has ruled to that effect, a ruling I actually agree with because it's ridiculous to expect otherwise.

You're confusing protection of each individual's home from some crisis versus protecting property in general.  They do, for example, seize money that is owed to you, and enforce the judgments of the courts you were relying on above to care for your rights, so yes...they protect your property.

Since you posed the question of the morality of libertarianism, I now must ask you how is that moral for me to force other people to give me their property via aggressive force?

You tell me.  That's exactly what you're doing when you demand that they pay for and abide by the Courts that are going to protect your property rights, and in theory provide you with compensation for the damage that other people do to you.

My question is: Why is it okay for you to demand that everyone else sacrifice for that purpose, but totally out of bounds for someone else to demand that you sacrifice to provide for basic public regulations like product labelling???

So tyranny of the majority is the solution, screw you if you don't agree even though you might be right and the majority might be wrong?  Did I get that right?

Yes. It's certainly much better than "Whatever you think is fair to demand of others is the law."

Incompetent government oversight doesn't do a whole lot to raise the bar.

The point with that discussion was that there can be incompetent production and private enterprise too-and just like with government, when it's not accountable to the public, it won't be concerned with public goods.  The answer here is accountability, and for public accountability, there's only one reasonable system yet devised...the election.

And HERE yes right here we get to the crux of the matter.  Private expertise is the best, why bother with any other kind?  Furthermore, why the heck is this "public" entitled to things they don't pay for?

Private expertise is what you see on those ads for anti-aging creams: Dr. So and So recommends cream xyz because "studies confirm" that it will turn you from a wilted flower into a vibrant lily.  You are greatly overestimating the extent to which "private expertise" contributes to public information.

The public does pay for the lack of information, of things like oversight and product regulation-they get injured by the products, and they get fooled by misleading sales pitches, and they also suffer whatever externalities are created by the production and products.  A better question is: What right do you or anyone else have to impose costs on the public, while keeping all of the profits from your activities to yourself?

Good old fashioned human greed for money, wealth, power, knowledge, or convenience is a much stronger force for advancement and good than some morally bankrupt government.

Again, the problem with this is that you presume that the paycheck is connected to the public. It need not be so, and when it's not...you will answer to whatever interests provide the check.  And that private interest can easily be one that is decidedly harmful to the public good.

This is why, for example, there is no country on the face of the planet with a first world infrastructure, that does not have a history of extensive and overwhelming state intervention into the economy.  No, it doesn't solve every problem and it makes some worse...but it's telling that there is currently no example of a developed country without a history of regular state intervention into the economy.

How come I can't sit up on the back of a convertible and ride in it that way?  How come I can't open a business and decide if it will be a smoking institution or not?  How come I can lose control of my property if some bean counter thinks there's an endangered species living on it when I've never even seen that particular animal on that property?

For the same reason other people can't dump their garbage in your yard or turn your open convertible into a latrine: because the rest of us decided, via our representatives, that things should be so.  You are more than welcome to try to convince everyone that your right to ride in the convertible without a seatbelt should be respected, and others are welcome to convince you of the opposite.  At some point, we'll have to settle the dispute...and how should that be done?  "Mob rule" seems to be the best method available, and it's a good way of making the rules accountable to the public...which, imperfect though it is, is superior to making the rules accountable to whatever one guy says is the moral law of the universe

[doczinn]

The answer is: because most people think that's a reasonable thing to demand of individuals in a society.

What most people think is reasonable is a pretty poor standard when you're talking about stealing money from me. And when the people you're talking about are so gullible.

That way, you can try to convince others that your right to property deserves resources while their rights to safety do not

In asking that my property rights be respected, I'm not asking anyone to give me a dime, nor to spend one on my behalf. There's no right to anything that must be provided by someone else. Safety included. So yes, their "right" to safety deserves none of my resources. And morally speaking, I don't need to convince anyone of that. I only need to hold on to what's mine.

[Euclidean]

Well, again, you have the problem here of resorting to a bondage system in order to make your libertarian ideals workable.  Duty is decidedly unfree-it is an obligation imposed on you from above.  And in the case of legal duties, you are literally talking about duties that were imposed on you personally by an ancient feudal system.  So how great is the pure free market, after all, if it can only yield benefits because of ancient feudal customs that might continue to be observed in its administration?

That's not a "bondage" system at all.  Each individual has sovereign rights and to infringe on those rights is a crime.  That idea certainly does not come from the middle ages.  The proper function of government is to serve as a mechanism whereby such disputes and affronts are resolved.

There is a grain of truth in part of what you're saying: You are absolutely correct in that there is no perfect mechanism for resolving problems, which is exactly why the government should be as limited as possible because its decisions are binding.  What I don't understand is your twisted logic that we need to expand this institution.  The solution is to shrink the scope of government to minimize the possible abuses, not expand it to insure more.

Again, you have regulation by judge.  If you really think that litigation is shorter, easier, and more accurate than administration....I strongly encourage that you read up on mass torts, the Daubert problem, and the "payoffs" that injured consumers get in this process.  The novel version of A Civil Action will teach you at least the basics of how ugly, unpredictable, and technical litigation is.  As a factual matter, it's quite possibly the worst method of regulating industry imaginable...and that makes sense, since it's not designed to regulate; it's designed to compensate for injuries.

Compensation for injuries is all that's necessary or desirable however.  You're right, the judge's role is not to regulate it is to resolve disputes, and again you forget there's a jury involved.  Didn't I explain previously that it's far better for private entities to self regulate because of their superior expertise?

The problem is that it's impossible for you as an individual to compel the necessary information from others. 

Ah, but I don't have to "compel" it; that information will come forth.  There is a strong market for valuable information; most white collar jobs exist because of that fact.  There will always be somebody willing to provide information in exchange for compensation.  Heck, the people selling the product are probably going to give me at least some of the information for free because why should I buy something if I don't understand what it is and why it can help me?

Even if I couldn't afford to pay for the information I needed, odds are significant I could find it for free anyway.  Look at all the information one can glean from a simple internet forum if one is careful and critical.

I like how you just write off "He loses his job!" as no big deal.  Not getting elected, to a politician, is the end of his career.  That's a pretty stiff penalty.

Not really.  First of all the salary for a legislator in most states is minimal.  Even the POTUS doesn't really make a lot of money when you look at the big picture, because the people who are in the position to run for these offices are typically more or less independently wealthy or at least can support themselves on the $9000 a year they earn for being a state senator or such.  They don't need the money they get paid for being in office.  They could simply resume their career as a lawyer etc. and make a lot more money if they wanted money.

Furthermore, even if they aren't re elected, they don't lose the health benefits and pensions they voted in for themselves.  It's not personally devastating like one of us serfs losing our job.

This is a fact that makes regulation even worse when it comes from the Courtroom-just as judges are not experts in food/medicine/air safety, juries are likely to be even less sophisticated....yet they find all the facts personally.  They don't get to elect commissioners who create research groups and call on experts to decide the facts; they just get whatever two attorneys gave them in one trial.

You're ignoring the reality that when it's a question of legal remedy, the issue invariably comes down to a simple question of "Did X do this or not?"  You're also ignoring the myriad tools employed in the courtroom, such as the testimony of experts.

If you could convincingly show that any of the various proponents of your listed schools of thought had answered the question, you should seriously write it into a thesis.  You'll make quite a name for yourself in the philosophy departments around the country.

Well that's your opinion.  The fact that several people have independently arrived at the same or similar conclusions with persuasive arguments is good enough for me.

You're confusing protection of each individual's home from some crisis versus protecting property in general.  They do, for example, seize money that is owed to you, and enforce the judgments of the courts you were relying on above to care for your rights, so yes...they protect your property.

Enforcing the law is not protecting your property.  The police are not responsible for keeping someone from say spraypainting my delivery van.  Their job is to seek remedy by finding out who committed that crime and then bringing them in to face charges.  There's a significant difference between being an enforcing mechanism and being responsible for any individual's well being.

You tell me.  That's exactly what you're doing when you demand that they pay for and abide by the Courts that are going to protect your property rights, and in theory provide you with compensation for the damage that other people do to you.

Except that I am in the right to demand these things.

A key difference here is that if those people never infringed on my rights, they'd owe me nothing.  Absolutely nothing.  It's analogous to my passing a man on the street and he leaves me alone.  Nothing to see here.

Now if those entities or individuals do encroach on me, they pay for their aggression.  It's analogous to the man on the street tries to attack me and I injure him defending myself: he brought it on himself by committing an act of aggression.

In your system however I'm free to demand things from people who have not committed any crime against me.  That is analogous to the man on the street leaves me alone, but I injure him anyway and suffer no penalty for doing so.

My question is: Why is it okay for you to demand that everyone else sacrifice for that purpose, but totally out of bounds for someone else to demand that you sacrifice to provide for basic public regulations like product labelling???

I don't demand anyone sacrifice anything.  If I'm simply left alone, it will cost nobody a dime.  If I seek redress for an offense, it's one of two scenarios:

1.  I seek a criminal punishment, and as criminals prey on society in general, it's reasonable that we allow the government to prosecute them.  The same man who attacked me on the street is a threat to you too for all intents and purposes.  It should be noted however that I believe these courts should be funded voluntarily and not by force.  As I would voluntarily pay for this myself, I'm simply enlisting a service I have chosen to pay for.

2.  I seek a civil remedy.  Well, the onus is on me to pay for it.  The court costs etc. come out of my pocket.

You could argue I'm taking people's time by demanding a jury.  However, I also serve on juries, so I have repaid the service in kind.

So basically I'm not asking anybody for anything in either event.

Yes. It's certainly much better than "Whatever you think is fair to demand of others is the law."

Except that I haven't said that at all.  All I've said is that we need a mechanism to address infractions.  But at least you admit tyranny of the majority is what you favor.

The point with that discussion was that there can be incompetent production and private enterprise too-

And when there are, they go out of business.  The market corrects itself.  An incompetent government just continues on however.

and just like with government, when it's not accountable to the public, it won't be concerned with public goods.  The answer here is accountability, and for public accountability, there's only one reasonable system yet devised...the election.

Well this is a bit of a disconnect but I agree with the point that elections are an accountability mechanism of sorts, but only when a majority of people act.  That doesn't do anything to help minorities or individuals to whom the government is accountable.  Better the government be impotent to act over them at all except to protect their rights.

Also, where do you get this idea that a rational desire for personal or private success and the desire to do public good are mutually exclusive?

Private expertise is what you see on those ads for anti-aging creams: Dr. So and So recommends cream xyz because "studies confirm" that it will turn you from a wilted flower into a vibrant lily.  You are greatly overestimating the extent to which "private expertise" contributes to public information.

Using shyster advertising tricks as an example of "expertise" is laughable.  The only expertise there is advertising expertise or perhaps more accurately a lack thereof.

Do you really think that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had nothing to do with the advancement of personal computing technology?  That it was all the government?

Do you really think that the physicians who invent new surgical techniques and medicines have nothing to do with improvements in medicine?  It's all the government?

I could go on and on, but the point is that the only way the government facilitates contributions to "public information" is by facilitating by Article 1 Section 8's authority patents, copyrights, etc.  The government itself doesn't produce scientific knowledge or new innovations, motivated people do.

You might argue that in attending to the course of its duties the government inadvertently creates new knowledge, but does the US Army design its own weapons?  Nope, private companies do and it just happens to be under government contract.

The public does pay for the lack of information, of things like oversight and product regulation-they get injured by the products, and they get fooled by misleading sales pitches, and they also suffer whatever externalities are created by the production and products.

And they seek remedy in the courts.  Problem solved.

A better question is: What right do you or anyone else have to impose costs on the public, while keeping all of the profits from your activities to yourself?

First of all, how the heck am I imposing costs on anyone?

Second of all, you know what, you're right, I have absolutely no right to keep what I honestly earn by the toil of my own hand.  I should just mail all my checks to you or someone else from now on.

Again, the problem with this is that you presume that the paycheck is connected to the public.

Bzzzzzzzzt Wrong!  I don't presume or expect that at all.  I expect people to pursue their own interests and nothing else.

It need not be so, and when it's not...you will answer to whatever interests provide the check.  And that private interest can easily be one that is decidedly harmful to the public good.

And if they do harm somebody, we take them to court.

This is why, for example, there is no country on the face of the planet with a first world infrastructure, that does not have a history of extensive and overwhelming state intervention into the economy.  No, it doesn't solve every problem and it makes some worse...but it's telling that there is currently no example of a developed country without a history of regular state intervention into the economy.

The reason for this things isn't that government interference is helpful or necessary.  CATO reports and the many scholarly efforts to research laissez faire capitalism indicate the contrary.

The reason it exists is, to put it bluntly, people use the government to take things from other people by force, and to push political agendas which, as you seem so fond of putting it, don't benefit the public.  That's the inevitable consequence of tyranny of the majority.

For the same reason other people can't dump their garbage in your yard or turn your open convertible into a latrine: because the rest of us decided, via our representatives, that things should be so. 

Well you know what, screw them.  They're wrong.

You are more than welcome to try to convince everyone that your right to ride in the convertible without a seatbelt should be respected, and others are welcome to convince you of the opposite.

Convince me?  Yes, absolutely.  Force me?  I don't think so.

At some point, we'll have to settle the dispute...and how should that be done?  "Mob rule" seems to be the best method available, and it's a good way of making the rules accountable to the public...which, imperfect though it is, is superior to making the rules accountable to whatever one guy says is the moral law of the universe

There's an old joke... Democracy is two wolves and a lamb deciding what to have for dinner.  I think that just about sums up your position.

I oppose mob rule for the fact that it's simply tyranny and statism under another name.  Rather, I demand liberty.

Also, why do you keep referencing this "public" that we all seem to owe a debt of service to, and yet fail to acknowledge that I'm a member of it?

[De Selby]

Euclidean,

Your post is an example of what some were referring to above about how unrealistic and idealistic libertarianism is: Your post is primarily concerned with what the world would be like if you didn't have to invest anything in policing your property and other rights.  Yeah, if no one ever took from you or threatened you, we'd live in a utopia with no government.  But that's not reality; in the real world, protecting any right costs money.  But libertarians seem to be more interested in saying "But it's not fair!" than in coming up with a system that actually accounts for the money that will have to be spent to protect liberties. 

Each individual has sovereign rights and to infringe on those rights is a crime.

That is not what constitutes a duty.  Duties are things you owe to other people in your dealings with them or your own activities; they are not all nor necessarily tied to other people's "sovereign rights."  There is no sovereign right to have other people care for your well being...but that's precisely one of the duties that forms the basis of common law torts.

What I don't understand is your twisted logic that we need to expand this institution.  The solution is to shrink the scope of government to minimize the possible abuses, not expand it to insure more.

What I don't understand is how you can dismiss the very serious problems that purely private systems have in resolving disputes.  When the full costs of an activity are not born by the person who receives the full profits, you've got an automatic market incentive to impose more costs on others.  Your only proposed mechanism for dealing with this is the Courts....which is government, and is more arbitrary, inefficient, and less effective than representative institutions.  Courts are well aware of this-you will find "we don't do regulation, that's the job of the legislature" to be a common theme in decisions on civil disputes. 

There is a strong market for valuable information; most white collar jobs exist because of that fact.  There will always be somebody willing to provide information in exchange for compensation.

Ah, but what happens when there's a stronger market for the suppression of information? Here's a crazy theory: what if, realizing that the profits from concealing bad information about a product were greater than the cost of hiding it, companies invested money in concealing information?  Is that just unrealistic to you, or are you convinced that you personally will have the market pull to defeat any source of profit that might spend against your information-gathering efforts?

Look at all the information one can glean from a simple internet forum if one is careful and critical.

Wait, you mean the internet that was created by public subsidies and that operates with a significant amount of public subsidy and infrastructure?  The internet is a good example of a quantum leap in public benefit coming out of public, not private, investment.

Furthermore, even if they aren't re elected, they don't lose the health benefits and pensions they voted in for themselves.  It's not personally devastating like one of us serfs losing our job.

Considering the amounts of money spent on campaigns and personally spent by candidates, the facts do not support your view of an election.  But sure, you can have bad electoral systems too...the remedy is to work on improving it, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

You're ignoring the reality that when it's a question of legal remedy, the issue invariably comes down to a simple question of "Did X do this or not?"  You're also ignoring the myriad tools employed in the courtroom, such as the testimony of experts.

Again, see Daubert and what has happened to "expert testimony" since that decision.  In many cases it's no better than what you see on infomercials.  "Expert" in a court of law does not mean what "expert" means to the rest of us.  Yet another reason why litigation is not simple and not efficient.

Enforcing the law is not protecting your property. 

Yes, it is.  If there were no enforcement mechanisms for the Courts' rulings that you tout as effective, they would be meaningless.  A piece of paper from a judge, with no law enforcement infrastructure, will not help you if someone else causes you harm or takes what is yours.  So yes, enforcing the law is protecting your property.  The fact that there are other law enforcement activities that do not protect your property does not detract from this simple truth.

Now if those entities or individuals do encroach on me, they pay for their aggression.  It's analogous to the man on the street tries to attack me and I injure him defending myself: he brought it on himself by committing an act of aggression.

Yes, but you need other people to provide funds and support for this repayment to be even remotely realistic.  In a system where not one other person in the society contributes to remedying your personal harms, you will have zero remedy against others.  So whether or not the guy who causes the harm to you is in the wrong, isn't the relevant consideration.  It's the fact that you need other people to contribute their time, efforts, and dollars to your courts and marshalls and police just to protect you...and why should they do that?  Because you think it's fair and don't think the things they want from you are fair?

The fact that several people have independently arrived at the same or similar conclusions with persuasive arguments is good enough for me.

Mmm, no, from your list, only some of the "natural rights" theorists have even tried to make this case.  Every one of the other schools of thought/Philosophers you named argues the opposite about rights and duties.

In your system however I'm free to demand things from people who have not committed any crime against me.  That is analogous to the man on the street leaves me alone, but I injure him anyway and suffer no penalty for doing so.

Well, that's true of your system also, unless you think that Courts and judgments and police are free.  If you want all those privatized too, then you return to the problem above: your rights will amount to a cost analysis, and not to "sovereign rights that cannot be infringed."  So either you are demanding things from other people who didn't commit a crime against you, or you're creating a system where you don't actually have any sovereign rights...just a cost/benefit ratio that might or might not give others the incentive to protect you.

You could argue I'm taking people's time by demanding a jury.  However, I also serve on juries, so I have repaid the service in kind.

You're still forcing them into an agreement, if this is anything like the Court system we have today.  What if some other individual doesn't want to give his money or time to your Courts?  The fact that you give your time too doesn't make it any less mandatory.

Also, where do you get this idea that a rational desire for personal or private success and the desire to do public good are mutually exclusive?

I don't.  But they're not complimentary either.  There are plenty of examples of where rational desire for profit conflicts with public good-pollution, rare but dangerous product defects, and accounting for sensitive but rare consumers being great examples.  You get all the profits, and others bear the costs for those examples.

Do you really think that Steve Jobs and Bill Gates had nothing to do with the advancement of personal computing technology?  That it was all the government?

Do you really think that the physicians who invent new surgical techniques and medicines have nothing to do with improvements in medicine?  It's all the government?

Sure, private companies have a role.  But you seem to be ignoring the absolutely enormous amount of public funding that served as the basis for both computer technology and medical technology.  The level of private investment in developing both areas is peanuts compared to what the government has doled out in grants and contracts to advance the sciences...so yeah, not a good example for you here.

This sentiment:

You might argue that in attending to the course of its duties the government inadvertently creates new knowledge, but does the US Army design its own weapons?  Nope, private companies do and it just happens to be under government contract.

Is strange for a free market type to have.  The Defense establishment gave us the internet.  It is a huge technology farm, and it simply has no market except for the government.  Yes, there are private companies involved, but nearly 100 percent of their market is getting taxpayer funds....so it's definitely not a good example of market operations.  It's more an example of how effective it is for the government to take your money and toss it, in huge amounts, into whatever investments it sees as worthy.


You seem to be under the impression that scholarly studies prove that this kind of economy can develop without state intervention...but I see no example currently on the world scene today.  This is why I don't agree with absolutist positions like libertarianism-America has a proven track record of economic success with its balance between market forces and government regulation.  Whether or not you think it's fair for the economy to run this way almost seems to amount to idle complaining, when you stare the size of this economy in the face.  The fact is, if it weren't for billions of dollars in public subsidies, and public regulation of infrastructure, you probably wouldn't have this wonderful online forum to post your thoughts.

[Paddy]

You seem to be under the impression that scholarly studies prove that this kind of economy can develop without state intervention...but I see no example currently on the world scene today.  This is why I don't agree with absolutist positions like libertarianism-America has a proven track record of economic success with its balance between market forces and government regulation.  Whether or not you think it's fair for the economy to run this way almost seems to amount to idle complaining, when you stare the size of this economy in the face.  The fact is, if it weren't for billions of dollars in public subsidies, and public regulation of infrastructure, you probably wouldn't have this wonderful online forum to post your thoughts.

Exactly right.  Would a libertarian have done the same for altruistic or humanitarian purposes?

[Euclidean]

Your post is an example of what some were referring to above about how unrealistic and idealistic libertarianism is: (snip) But libertarians seem to be more interested in saying "But it's not fair!" than in coming up with a system that actually accounts for the money that will have to be spent to protect liberties. 

Except I just got done arguing about what government system should be in place to protect rights, not that there shouldn't be one.  Also, it wouldn't matter that protecting the right costs money if the mechanisms by which these services were paid for were voluntary rather than compulsory.

That is not what constitutes a duty.  (snip)There is no sovereign right to have other people care for your well being...but that's precisely one of the duties that forms the basis of common law torts.

I never said there was a "sovereign right to have other people care for your well being".  Forcing other people to care for your well being is, quite frankly, wrong.

The fact that torts may have been based on something besides natural rights or a similar principle in the past does not preclude tort reform in the present.  In addition, I can't really think of a single intentional tort which doesn't violate a natural right.  There may be one, I'm not a law expert and don't claim to understand the full breadth of currently existing torts.

Since the tort we've been discussing is negligence, let's address that for a second.  I'm taking my information from Roger Miller and Gaylord Jentz (professors of law in Texas at their respective institutions), so this isn't my "theory" of what constitutes negligence, this is how it actually is, currently.  Negligence occurs when four conditions are met:

1.  Did the defendant owe a duty of care to the plaintiff?

Miller and Jentz go on to state that a duty of care is "The duty of all persons, as established by tort law, to exercise a reasonable amount of care in their dealings with others.  Failure to exercise due care, which is normally determined by the 'reasonable person' standard, constitutes the tort of negligence."

2.  Did the defendant breach that duty?

3.  Did the plaintiff suffer a legally recognizable injury as a result of the defendant's breach of the duty of care?

4.  Did the defendant's breach cause the plaintiff's injury?

Nowhere in this text does it mention a sovereign right to have other people take care of you.  You are correct in that the tort is not necessarily based on the actual natural rights of the person, but as I already pointed out, there's no reason it can't be reformed if need be.

Also, the point of even mentioning a negligence suit was to point out to you that effective coping mechanisms already exist which can be adapted to the purpose I proposed, not to straighten out what negligence is, FWIW.

What I don't understand is how you can dismiss the very serious problems that purely private systems have in resolving disputes.

Except I haven't proposed a purely private system for resolving disputes, I've proposed government courts handle it.  Repeatedly.

When the full costs of an activity are not born by the person (snip) institutions.

Support your assertion with evidence then, it would strengthen your argument.  I can provide evidence that government bureaucracy costs a lot of money (duh!) and that we'd save that money if we didn't have that government bureaucracy.  That's rather simple, but can you prove we're better off with it somehow?

Courts are well aware of this-you will find "we don't do regulation, that's the job of the legislature" to be a common theme in decisions on civil disputes. 

Exactly!  The legislature should not have the power to resolve disputes, so you have to have courts settle arguments when they arise.  How is this a counterpoint to anything I've said?

Ah, but what happens when there's a stronger market for the suppression of information? Here's a crazy theory: (snip)concealing information?  Is that just unrealistic to you, or are you convinced that you personally will have the market pull to defeat any source of profit that might spend against your information-gathering efforts?

But how long can you persist with that house of cards?  Enron executives tried it, look how well it worked out for them.  They did something wrong and got caught, problem solved.  People don't like getting screwed, once someone finds out, it's over.  If someone is smart enough to figure a scam out, someone else is smart enough to bust it. 

Besides, there are criminals now who get away with that very thing despite the existence of your precious government agencies.  Getting rid of them won't change anything except that it will give interested people more resources with which to scrutinize those who might try to deceive them.  And I've never said that we need to eliminate the mechanism for enforcing necessary laws, just useless government regulations and bureaus.   Theft for example is still illegal in a libertarian system.

But this is all speculation anyway as you have no evidence that would happen to any degree more than it does already.  I also fail to see how curbing government waste would effect the efforts to punish people who do that.

Wait, you mean the internet that was created by public subsidies and that operates with a significant amount of public subsidy and infrastructure?  The internet is a good example of a quantum leap in public benefit coming out of public, not private, investment.

Yeah all those government owned computer companies and cable companies and phone companies gave us the internet.  It wasn't people competing to deliver a new service at all.

Considering the amounts of money spent on campaigns and personally spent by candidates, the facts do not support your view of an election.  But sure, you can have bad electoral systems too...the remedy is to work on improving it, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

So it costs money to get elected.  The guy who loses the election doesn't have to pay it back, so where's the accountability there?  There still isn't any.

Furthermore you have no idea what my view of an election is.  I've not made any such statement.  It's rather boring however.  My view on an election is the following: An election is a process by which a representative is elected by voting into a term in a government office.    An election is generally preferable to an appointment or some kind of monarchy in many government positions but not necessarily all.  That's it.

I agree with the latter statement completely however.

Again, see Daubert and what has happened to "expert testimony" since that decision.  In many cases it's no better than what you see on infomercials.  "Expert" in a court of law does not mean what "expert" means to the rest of us.  Yet another reason why litigation is not simple and not efficient.

That may be a valid criticism, but once again, what precludes us from fixing it?  You just said that we could reform bad electoral processes and I agreed with you.  Do I not get the same courtesy?

Yes, it is.  If there were no enforcement mechanisms for the Courts' rulings that you tout as effective, they would be meaningless.  A piece of paper from a judge, with no law enforcement infrastructure, will not help you if someone else causes you harm or takes what is yours.  So yes, enforcing the law is protecting your property.  The fact that there are other law enforcement activities that do not protect your property does not detract from this simple truth.

Enforcement does not equate to protection is the simple truth.  The enforcement only happens when one party has to be forced, and really, how much structure does that take?  The vast majority of people who lose in court don't try to simply not comply, because they know there's an enforcement agency.  The agencies in question are actually minuscule relevant to the size of their jurisdictions.  My town of 100k or so people has less ~50 cops.

Arguing that law enforcement protects your property is saying that those 50 cops monitor me and the 100k other people who live here and our possessions daily and make sure no harm befalls any of it.  They don't do that, and have no obligation to, and they shouldn't have any such obligation because that's madness.

The reality is that the cops only show up when something has happened to your property and the law needs to be enforced.  Sure every once in a while we get lucky and the cops actually catch the perpetrator in the act, but by and large all they can realistically be expected to do is to enforce the laws meted out by the other branches of government (which is a tall order in itself).

The authorities do not actively patrol my personal space nor do they monitor my worldly goods.  They don't protect my property from anything, they enforce the law.  If they happen to protect me while enforcing the law, that's just happy coincidence for me.

It's up to me to protect my property.  The onus is on me to lock my doors and windows, and be ready to force people to leave my home when they don't want to.  The police don't do that.

Yes, but you need other people to provide funds and support for this repayment to be even remotely realistic.  In a system where not one other person in the society contributes to remedying your personal harms, you will have zero remedy against others.

Except once again, that isn't what I've proposed at all.  I've proposed a system of government courts voluntarily funded just to address this very problem.

So whether or not the guy who causes the harm to you is in the wrong, isn't the relevant consideration.  It's the fact that you need other people to contribute their time, efforts, and dollars to your courts and marshalls and police just to protect you...and why should they do that?  Because you think it's fair and don't think the things they want from you are fair?

They should do it because I have voluntarily decided to hire such people on my own dime, and they sign contracts to the effect they are willing to perform such a professional service for compensation.

Mmm, no, from your list, only some of the "natural rights" theorists have even tried to make this case.  Every one of the other schools of thought/Philosophers you named argues the opposite about rights and duties.

It suffices to me that several different people from Hobbes on have come to the conclusion that by some mechanism, people have certain innate rights (even if we don't fully realize what they are).  It's a simple reality; the argument for where they come from may not be resolved but they still exist.

Well, that's true of your system also, unless you think that Courts and judgments and police are free.  If you want all those privatized too, then you return to the problem above: your rights will amount to a cost analysis, and not to "sovereign rights that cannot be infringed."  So either you are demanding things from other people who didn't commit a crime against you, or you're creating a system where you don't actually have any sovereign rights...just a cost/benefit ratio that might or might not give others the incentive to protect you.

That's some twisted logic indeed.

First I'll make this point:  You brought up the idea of privatizing law enforcement and the courts.  I never said any such thing.

Look it's very simple:  assume no one wrongs me.  No cost is incurred.

Someone does wrong me: I've already outlined a system for addressing the problem which is funded by volunteers who understand they may never benefit from it.

The way it is now:  everyone pays even if nothing ever happens to me.

Even if I am wronged and do need that system, the funds for it are forced from other people at gunpoint.

Continued...

[Euclidean]

You're still forcing them into an agreement, if this is anything like the Court system we have today.  What if some other individual doesn't want to give his money or time to your Courts?  The fact that you give your time too doesn't make it any less mandatory.

But we get back to a point we've both already made: no mechanism is perfect.  Also, no tangible resources a court would recognize are being taken from anyone.  Our government's courts rest on the right to a jury trial.  If you can think of a better system I'm all for it, because I sure can't.

In addition, due to the way juries are selected, people who are very much against the whole thing are extremely unlikely to survive the screening process.  Not a perfect solution either, but once again I can't think of anything better.

I don't.  But they're not complimentary either.  There are plenty of examples of where rational desire for profit conflicts with public good-pollution, rare but dangerous product defects, and accounting for sensitive but rare consumers being great examples.  You get all the profits, and others bear the costs for those examples.

The people whose property you pollute will boycott you, sue you and spread news of your misdeeds far and wide.  In addition, someone else will invariably come along and say "See, I can provide the same thing with less or no pollution at the same price point!" and you will lose out to this competitor.

Rare but dangerous defects - You will get sued something stupid by lawyers who realize the settlement isn't nearly as big as what they can get out of you in court.  Again, news of your misdeeds spreads far and wide, and lo and behold your competitor comes along and says "Hey look, my product's not dangerous!"

I honestly fail to see what the problem is here.

Sure, private companies have a role.  But you seem to be ignoring the absolutely enormous amount of public funding that served as the basis for both computer technology and medical technology.  The level of private investment in developing both areas is peanuts compared to what the government has doled out in grants and contracts to advance the sciences...so yeah, not a good example for you here.

Yeah what the government spends on say hydrogen powered cars is SO much more than what GM has put into it.  Sheesh.

But for the sake of argument, I'm not even going to bother looking up the figures despite the fact my gut tells me you're wrong and assume you're right because even if your assertion is correct, you're still in the wrong.  You still haven't addressed the #1 problem:  You're still forcing people to pay for things they might not want or benefit from.

You're also assuming the government is a better decider of what is desirable than the private competitive market.  You've already admitted (tacitly) that private expertise is better than government expertise, yet you support letting the government make the decision about what to fund.

Furthermore, if the government didn't have that money, someone else would.  You can't realistically expect me to believe that people don't want better faster stronger et cetera even in the absence of government funding.  Furthermore, letting private parties make these decisions lends itself to finding the most effective solutions because the problems they try to solve will be the problems they face, IE problems which have relevance to them.

Is strange for a free market type to have.  The Defense establishment gave us the internet.  It is a huge technology farm, and it simply has no market except for the government.  Yes, there are private companies involved, but nearly 100 percent of their market is getting taxpayer funds....so it's definitely not a good example of market operations.  It's more an example of how effective it is for the government to take your money and toss it, in huge amounts, into whatever investments it sees as worthy.

Yeah the internet has no market except the government... what?

Anyway you took what I said out of context.  My point was the actual knowledge comes from a private entity, not from the government.  I wasn't concerned about the funding situation when I made that remark.

Furthermore the government actually has business spending for national defense, so I don't really get my panties in a wad about the government paying for defense contracts especially when they go to the lowest bidder.

But it is certainly not "an example of how effective it is for the government to take your money and toss it, in huge amounts, into whatever investments it sees as worthy".  You have not supported that assertion.

You seem to be under the impression that scholarly studies prove that this kind of economy can develop without state intervention...but I see no example currently on the world scene today.  This is why I don't agree with absolutist positions like libertarianism-America has a proven track record of economic success with its balance between market forces and government regulation.  Whether or not you think it's fair for the economy to run this way almost seems to amount to idle complaining, when you stare the size of this economy in the face.  The fact is, if it weren't for billions of dollars in public subsidies, and public regulation of infrastructure, you probably wouldn't have this wonderful online forum to post your thoughts.

First of all I've already explained to you why that economy doesn't exist, it's not because it can't naturally, it's because tyranny of the majority has made it so that it can't artificially.  There's always been some greedy corrupt institution in place stealing from people, and they've just gotten better at it and changed with the times.  You can apologize for it all you want and write it off as "complaining" (kind of like how the founders of our country were "complainers") but I for one am tired of it and think it's time for some progress and some morals in government.

Also, I bet you my left big toe that this forum or an analog of it would exist. I willingly pay for internet access, I pay for internet content, etc.   An awful lot of people do.  The private market would fill that need and has filled that need, because the private market likes money.

Shootinstudent I'll give you this:

#1.  You're a true conservative in the truest meaning of the word.  I can respect that ideology.
#2.  I've concurred with you on several points.  None of them have really refuted my stance or yours either for that matter, but the fact remains this is the case.
#3.  You've done an excellent job of sticking to the topic and not resorting to ad hominem attacks.  Most people can't seem to manage that.  I may consider your logic twisted but at least it's an argument.
#4.  The reason I've gone to all this trouble is I think you're actually smart enough to challenge your own paradigm and improve your ideology some day.  I don't expect you to ever agree with me, or just read a thread on the internet and instantly change, but I think you're worth trying to argue with.

But I ask you stop making assertions that I said this or that, especially when I said just the opposite thing.  If you're not sure what I meant, ask.  It's fair to ask what I meant.

Exactly right.  Would a libertarian have done the same for altruistic or humanitarian purposes?

No they'd have done it for profit, a much stronger motivator.

Furthermore you've both ignored the point I made earlier that a pure libertarian state may not be fully viable, it's may be it's simply a direction towards which we should shift.  It's more convenient to simply dismiss new ideas than consider their merits and how they could be implemented to best effect, however.  My personal expectation has never been a full blown libertarian society, I don't think people are that inherently good and moral to let that happen.  That's simply my goal.  Rather, I have an expectation that by arguing the merits of a libertarian system I might shift the "bell curve" of political opinions away from statism and closer to freedom.

[Paddy]

My personal expectation has never been a full blown libertarian society, I don't think people are that inherently good and moral to let that happen.  That's simply my goal.  Rather, I have an expectation that by arguing the merits of a libertarian system I might shift the "bell curve" of political opinions away from statism and closer to freedom.

It's a noble motive and probably the best that can be done for now.  Our society is unfortunately comprised of self serving people who have never faced persecution, oppression, genocide.  All the realities that fill the rest of the world.  Our forefathers fought, shed blood and died for the gifts we take as rights. We're a weak people, but for the time, wealthy, and can afford a powerful military.  We are quickly squandering that wealth, and will be overrun.  Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

[Euclidean]

It's a noble motive and probably the best that can be done for now.  Our society is unfortunately comprised of self serving people who have never faced persecution, oppression, genocide.  All the realities that fill the rest of the world.  Our forefathers fought, shed blood and died for the gifts we take as rights. We're a weak people, but for the time, wealthy, and can afford a powerful military.  We are quickly squandering that wealth, and will be overrun.  Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it.

I can't say I disagree with that either.  We live in the most posh society to have ever existed in the history of the earth.  People in general have poor values and want bread and circuses regardless of the actual cost, even if it means imploring the most unethical mechanisms in existence to make it happen.

But I don't think we've quite crossed the point of no return either.  The problem is, as shootinstudent has pointed out, that the election process is only accountable to a majority, and the majority of people are as I describe them and would rather apologize for a corrupt system which benefits them rather than say "Well I admit this benefits me, but to gain it this way is inherently wrong". 

But I also believe anything good that's ever been accomplished has been accomplished by a slim minority of people, so I'm not giving up just yet.

[De Selby]

Euclidean,

I'm going to try to draw this down to your main points, so that it's easier to follow the discussion.  You cite any that I missed.

1.  Courts as "voluntary" institutions:

Also, it wouldn't matter that protecting the right costs money if the mechanisms by which these services were paid for were voluntary rather than compulsory.

You claim that you did not advocate privatizing courts; but then you turn around and seem to imply that the services of a Court are going to paid for only voluntarily?   How exactly do you have a reasonably impartial judicial system that draws its paycheck directly from the parties to a dispute?  It's hard to imagine in what way a "voluntarily paid" courtroom would not be a disaster.  If courts get payment only from cases, they have every incentive to make the law more complicated, so that more cases will arise, and doubly to make every case worth more money, so that the parties will have more incentive to pay the courts. 

If the Court isn't "paid for voluntarily", then by definition you are forcing other people to pay, as a public whole, to maintain the system that you think is going to defend your rights...and that lands you exactly in the camp you claim is wrong-the one that demands other people's money to maintain public services.

A subpart of this point is expressed here in your post:

I never said there was a "sovereign right to have other people care for your well being".  Forcing other people to care for your well being is, quite frankly, wrong.

You posted just below that the basic elements of negligence (not an intentional tort, btw...it's not negligent if you do it on purpose)...which include the presumed duty of care to others.  That is certainly a duty imposed on you by tort law, and it means much more than "just don't violate what Euclidean thinks are fundamental rights."  And if you want to start reforming it, then you've got the worst of both worlds.  You'd be using government, via whatever mechanism you want, to make changes to the law to change the decisions of Courts.  In effect, you've got exactly the same thing that we do now, except it's 100 percent filtered through courtrooms and litigation instead of through more efficient regulatory channels.  So now you've got the government monkeying with your life, but doing so via a process that is going to cost you a ton of money, and which is likely to compound all the problems of limited expertise, information, time, resources, and which may or may not (I'm not sure which you now support) be beholden to the very parties of a dispute for its paycheck.


2.  The Courts as an effective regulator of conduct:

Exactly!  The legislature should not have the power to resolve disputes, so you have to have courts settle arguments when they arise.  How is this a counterpoint to anything I've said?

This seems to be the opposite of what I said: Courts settle disputes as to what is or is not the amount of damage involved in a particular case.  What they do not do is decide beyond basic common law foundations what was the standard of conduct for a business, person, or other party involved in the case.  So, for example, Courts generally refrain from issuing decisions like "Businesses should've labelled this product"; whether or not something constitutes a marketplace necessity, or must be done, is the domain of elected officials.  The Courts use the regulations designed by legislators to adjudicate particular claims....so operating properly, they won't achieve the results you want them to in this example.  They'll just pay someone who was harmed by some activity (and that's assuming that the Court finds legal basis, such as a regulation, for construing a duty in the first place).

The counterpoint is that, absent some other regulatory scheme, the Court achieves very little beyond simply paying one individual's damages.  And you seem to have conceded the obvious point that there will be many cases where a profitable activity might repeatedly damage a small number of individuals, but in such a way that it's more profitable to continue the activity and just pay the few who are damaged instead of taking measures to prevent damage.

You also said:

The people whose property you pollute will boycott you, sue you and spread news of your misdeeds far and wide.  In addition, someone else will invariably come along and say "See, I can provide the same thing with less or no pollution at the same price point!" and you will lose out to this competitor.

Unfortunately, the above is a presumption that has no relationship to the reality of the cost-benefit analysis involved.  If the producer can provide the product more cheaply, and with greater profit, by polluting everyone a little bit and reaping 100 percent of the benefit for himself, he will keep on trucking...this problem is magnified in cases where his customers aren't the same ones being polluted.  So no, it is not "invariable" that someone else will come along to provide services that do not impact others.  It's completely variable, because it depends only on the cost versus benefit of the activity.  The fact that it might be sometimes profitable to keep imposing the cost on others, and reaping the profit for yourself, is an obvious one.

Sub2: The Enron example

But how long can you persist with that house of cards?  Enron executives tried it, look how well it worked out for them.  They did something wrong and got caught, problem solved.  People don't like getting screwed, once someone finds out, it's over.  If someone is smart enough to figure a scam out, someone else is smart enough to bust it. 

If you're going to pick an example of the Courts regulating conduct, or the market, you should pick one that doesn't hinge entirely on violations of a broad and extremely complicated regulatory regime.  Enron got into the trouble it did for violating the regulations of an enormous Federal bureaucracy.  There would have been nothing to catch if it weren't for the mountain of regulations that formed the basis of the case against the Corporation.

3: The innovation question

Yeah all those government owned computer companies and cable companies and phone companies gave us the internet.  It wasn't people competing to deliver a new service at all.

It was the product of massive public investment-ie, millions (in the old days) and billions (now) of yours and mine taken by the government, bundled into huge research and development grants and contracts, and then handed over to government labs, private labs, and private companies.  There is competition involved alright-most of the major technological breakthroughs this century have been the product of fierce competition for the gigantic taxpayer funded investments made by the government.  Very little has been the product of straight up competition on the market, which has primarily served to drive improvements to the breakthrough technologies developed with massive public investment.

But for the sake of argument, I'm not even going to bother looking up the figures despite the fact my gut tells me you're wrong and assume you're right because even if your assertion is correct, you're still in the wrong.  You still haven't addressed the #1 problem:  You're still forcing people to pay for things they might not want or benefit from.

This is back to the whole "But it's not fair!" business, which almost comically relegates the unprecedented economic growth this system has produced to a backseat consideration.   In addition, there's still the fact that you simply cannot explain to me how you will get a functioning court system that doesn't force others to pay for it.  If it's not funded by the public, and only by the parties...see above, you get a disaster of a Court system.  If it is funded impartially and with the right incentives to function as a fair arbiter of disputes...then you are forcing people to pay for it.  There is no way around that problem.

Furthermore, if the government didn't have that money, someone else would.

This is a tremendously faulty presumption.  Imagine:  "If the government didn't have that 1000 mile stretch of land to build a highway, someone else would",  It's obviously false.  You really need very little imagination to see how wealth and resources might be divided amongst private parties in such a way that it would be impossible, following rational self interest, for any one party to get all the others to contribute to an investment possible only with all of their funds.  You have the classic holdout, negotiation, and information problems to deal with there....so no, it's not even true (or likely) that someone else would be able to come up with the same amount of investment and organizational capacity as the government.

Anyway you took what I said out of context.  My point was the actual knowledge comes from a private entity, not from the government.  I wasn't concerned about the funding situation when I made that remark.

Ignoring the funding is what set you off course with the courts.  The fact is, the private entity would not have been able to do the work it did without the investment.  Everything costs money, and some things cost enormous amounts of money...more troubling still for your theory is the fact that developing uncharted technologies costs enormous sums of money and comes with tremendous risk of dead-end research.   So ignoring the funding means you will not understand a major component of developing technology: investment.

But it is certainly not "an example of how effective it is for the government to take your money and toss it, in huge amounts, into whatever investments it sees as worthy".  You have not supported that assertion.

Well, I guess you don't consider the internet, highways, communications lines, railroads, ports and airports, airplanes, automobiles, or satellites to be effective products of investment.  Apparently, anything that was produced "unfairly" is irrelevant.


4.  The Good government/Moral question:

There's always been some greedy corrupt institution in place stealing from people, and they've just gotten better at it and changed with the times. 

So surely, the way to stop these evildoers is to remove all public regulation from the hands of the tyrannical majority.   That way the private individuals who profiteer off of others would have to face the Courts (that they pay for) and the free market, which could possibly....yield them more profits than their damages to others cost?  It seems to be here the height of unrealistic idealism to say: "Well, we've never seen a system like this because people are generally greedy...so if we simply removed regulations that check individual activities, then there would be a big giant free economy that didn't harm individuals."


As for me personally, I consider myself more an independent than a conservative, although I find more conservative politicians and thinkers who fit my views generally.  Seriously, I have tried to be as faithful to your views as possible here, and I hope you'll correct any of your views that I misrepresented.  And I take the time to post because I just plain enjoy a good, long, polite discussion....the more complicated the better, it's like a workout for the brain .

Thanks.

[Euclidean]

Euclidean,

I'm going to try to draw this down to your main points, so that it's easier to follow the discussion.  You cite any that I missed.

1.  Courts as "voluntary" institutions:

You claim that you did not advocate privatizing courts; but then you turn around and seem to imply that the services of a Court are going to paid for only voluntarily? 

Correct.  Civic minded people would be given the choice of paying a voluntary tax to support the courts.

How exactly do you have a reasonably impartial judicial system that draws its paycheck directly from the parties to a dispute? 

The same way a paid mediator or arbitrator remains impartial now despite being paid by the parties he is deciding for.

It's hard to imagine in what way a "voluntarily paid" courtroom would not be a disaster.

But already people use arbitration and mediation which follows the voluntarily paid model, and both of those processes work.  A legal proceeding can function just fine when voluntarily paid for.

If courts get payment only from cases, they have every incentive to make the law more complicated, so that more cases will arise, and doubly to make every case worth more money, so that the parties will have more incentive to pay the courts. 

That might be conceivably be true if we set out that model, however as I just said I see it more like civic minded people will be voluntarily allowed to fund the courts by their own volition.  I for one never anticipate being up on criminal charges but it's still in my interest to fund a criminal court.

If the Court isn't "paid for voluntarily", then by definition you are forcing other people to pay, as a public whole, to maintain the system that you think is going to defend your rights...and that lands you exactly in the camp you claim is wrong-the one that demands other people's money to maintain public services.

Except I haven't demanded that at all, except in the case of civil cases, which I think is entirely reasonable.  Also, people that can't pay for civil remedies currently have options (charity basically, like how the NRA takes on certain court cases or the bar association of certain states may do some pro bono work).  That won't go away if we streamline the government, if anything there will be more of it since people won't pay so many taxes.

You posted just below that the basic elements of negligence (not an intentional tort, btw...it's not negligent if you do it on purpose)...which include the presumed duty of care to others.  That is certainly a duty imposed on you by tort law, and it means much more than "just don't violate what Euclidean thinks are fundamental rights."  And if you want to start reforming it, then you've got the worst of both worlds.  You'd be using government, via whatever mechanism you want, to make changes to the law to change the decisions of Courts.  In effect, you've got exactly the same thing that we do now, except it's 100 percent filtered through courtrooms and litigation instead of through more efficient regulatory channels.

No, the court wouldn't pass any laws at all.  We've established that.  They only decide questions of fault.  That's all that's desirable or necessary.  The definition of negligence as is comes from the common law, not my ideology.  You're the one who suggested the law was faulty, therefore I pointed out it can be fixed.

Regulation is not efficient.  It's highly inefficient if anything.

So now you've got the government monkeying with your life, but doing so via a process that is going to cost you a ton of money, and which is likely to compound all the problems of limited expertise, information, time, resources, and which may or may not (I'm not sure which you now support) be beholden to the very parties of a dispute for its paycheck.

The fact the courts cost a lot of money would actually be a great deterrant to government interference in general, which is the ultimate goal.

This seems to be the opposite of what I said: Courts settle disputes as to what is or is not the amount of damage involved in a particular case.  What they do not do is decide beyond basic common law foundations what was the standard of conduct for a business, person, or other party involved in the case. 

Nor should they.

So, for example, Courts generally refrain from issuing decisions like "Businesses should've labelled this product"; whether or not something constitutes a marketplace necessity, or must be done, is the domain of elected officials.  The Courts use the regulations designed by legislators to adjudicate particular claims....so operating properly, they won't achieve the results you want them to in this example.  They'll just pay someone who was harmed by some activity (and that's assuming that the Court finds legal basis, such as a regulation, for construing a duty in the first place).

No they don't regulate, exactly my point.  But stare decisis mandates that once someone successfully sues for something and wins, so will the next case which is similar to that one.  Keep hammering the offending party with penalties and pretty soon they'll be forced to change their modus operandi or go bankrupt.  I don't know how rich you think these companies are they can pay off every single case in the case of a particularly bad infraction, or fight/ pay off a class action lawsuit like it was nothing.

Oops out of time.

[Euclidean]

Okay I have a moment.  This is fun.

The counterpoint is that, absent some other regulatory scheme, the Court achieves very little beyond simply paying one individual's damages. 

Which is the only corrective mechanism we need.

And you seem to have conceded the obvious point that there will be many cases where a profitable activity might repeatedly damage a small number of individuals, but in such a way that it's more profitable to continue the activity and just pay the few who are damaged instead of taking measures to prevent damage.

Okay I can see where you might think that I implied that, so here I'll clarify.

If an entity can commit an infraction and then offer a settlement to the wronged party which that party is willing to accept, where's the problem?

I'm sorry I wrecked your widget (or perhaps more accurately that I got caught doing it).  You file a lawsuit, and I say to you look we both know how this is going to turn out, how about I offer you $50,000 in compensation right now so we don't have to both go through all that?  If you think that's fair and accept that offer, the problem is resolved.  You take the $50,000 and fix your widget and life goes on.  If that's agreeable to you, then the issue is settled.

Now realistically, I don't think the cost benefit problem is going to persist, because if I continually wreck widgets and pay $50k every time I do, and by some highly improbably circumstances everyone agrees to settle, I'm still being penalized.  But in the real world, eventually, if I don't change what I'm doing, it's going to catch up with me.  Eventually someone's going to say "Hey I have 100 people here whose widgets you've wrecked, they're pooling their resources and suing you for $10,000,000." or you're going to wreck the wrong person's widget and they're going to take you to the cleaners.

Also it's fair to point out that even with your sacred bureaucracies in place, companies still do exactly what you're complaining about, so really your approach only creates waste without really solving the very bone of contention you are picking.  But if those people are getting just compensation, I think that's about as fair as things can be.  Honestly, you can't even exist without harming other creatures (you do eat don't you?), and the most well intentioned person inevitably does something in their life that winds up hurting someone else in some way.  The question is does the system facilitate a redress of such grievances fairly?  If the answer is yes, then we've done what we can.  If the answer is no, we need to reform the mechanism in question until the answer is yes.

Unfortunately, the above is a presumption that has no relationship to the reality of the cost-benefit analysis involved.  If the producer can provide the product more cheaply, and with greater profit, by polluting everyone a little bit and reaping 100 percent of the benefit for himself, he will keep on trucking...this problem is magnified in cases where his customers aren't the same ones being polluted.  So no, it is not "invariable" that someone else will come along to provide services that do not impact others.  It's completely variable, because it depends only on the cost versus benefit of the activity.  The fact that it might be sometimes profitable to keep imposing the cost on others, and reaping the profit for yourself, is an obvious one.

But you're ignoring the fact that by polluting, he's doing something that damages somebody else's property.  The other party will seek a remedy in court.

Also, let me pose to you a question:  If Product A and Product B are the same in every way except the ways I'm about to specify they are different, both cost $1, and Product A is made from the skulls of orphans and its manufacture creates toxic waste, and Product B creates no pollution at all, which one will start to hedge out the market?  Producers will look for every advantage they can get.

Appealing to people's individual sense of morality is big bucks.  It doesn't have to be a completely perfect hypothetical example either to affect change.  Where I work we sell regular farm raised chicken, and also "free range" chicken, and even vegetarian alternatives to chicken.  We sell enough of the latter two products that I've noticed that several brands in the first category has had to change their modus operandi and stop adding fillers to be more competitive with the alternative products.  The people who think it's wrong to eat chickens, raise chickens in farm and/or add fillers to chicken have affected change.

If you're going to pick an example of the Courts regulating conduct, or the market, you should pick one that doesn't hinge entirely on violations of a broad and extremely complicated regulatory regime.  Enron got into the trouble it did for violating the regulations of an enormous Federal bureaucracy.  There would have been nothing to catch if it weren't for the mountain of regulations that formed the basis of the case against the Corporation.

Au contraire mon ami.  Or in English, you got that one plain wrong.

Enron was busted by an expert financial analyst named Daniel Scotto, who was not associated with any government regulatory agency or law enforcement.  He was hired by interested private parties to investigate, and lo and behold the superior skills he had achieved in the competitive market bore fruit.

Accountcy in general has in fact been self regulating for centuries with no government interference until the Gov't Boondoggle in Accountancy Act of 2002, which was an unnecessary knee jerk reaction to a political agenda.  The Enron people didn't follow proper accounting practices and ethics and got busted, showing how private expertise and self regulation coupled with a court system is all you need to solve problems.

It was the product of massive public investment-ie, millions (in the old days) and billions (now) of yours and mine taken by the government, bundled into huge research and development grants and contracts, and then handed over to government labs, private labs, and private companies.  There is competition involved alright-most of the major technological breakthroughs this century have been the product of fierce competition for the gigantic taxpayer funded investments made by the government.  Very little has been the product of straight up competition on the market, which has primarily served to drive improvements to the breakthrough technologies developed with massive public investment.

But why the middleman?  Why can't the public just pay for the services they want themselves?  That's more efficient, it's untainted by political corruption, and it's also voluntary.

This is back to the whole "But it's not fair!" business, which almost comically relegates the unprecedented economic growth this system has produced to a backseat consideration.

So you admit it's not fair but you're unwilling to do anything about it?  Is this a tacit endorsement of outcome based ethics?  Massive theft is okay so long as it accomplishes something that you are happy with?  If we could kill 10% of the population and somehow make $10 trillion dollars from it, that would be okay too?

You're ignoring the very real fact that people want more and better intrinsically.  I don't sit around and accept things as they are and just wait for the government to do something about it, I solve my own problems.  Things like this would exist even if the government didn't facilitate them.  The government getting involved only serves to channel the money to politically connected parties and not the most competent, who would win out in a private market and produce superior results for less cost.

In addition, there's still the fact that you simply cannot explain to me how you will get a functioning court system that doesn't force others to pay for it.  If it's not funded by the public, and only by the parties...see above, you get a disaster of a Court system.  If it is funded impartially and with the right incentives to function as a fair arbiter of disputes...then you are forcing people to pay for it.  There is no way around that problem.

I just clarified that's its funded by volunteers.  Not necessarily the parties in question either.  I can see where you might have been confused, that's a good point to bring up.

Also if parties can mediate and arbitrate with voluntarily paid for mediators, etc. there's no reason we can't do the same with an actual court trial.

This is a tremendously faulty presumption.  Imagine:  "If the government didn't have that 1000 mile stretch of land to build a highway, someone else would",  It's obviously false.  You really need very little imagination to see how wealth and resources might be divided amongst private parties in such a way that it would be impossible, following rational self interest, for any one party to get all the others to contribute to an investment possible only with all of their funds.  You have the classic holdout, negotiation, and information problems to deal with there....so no, it's not even true (or likely) that someone else would be able to come up with the same amount of investment and organizational capacity as the government.

Actually it's interesting you'd try to use that example, because I have the perfect example of why I'm right here.  Sometimes it's NOT a good idea to build that highway, and it shouldn't be built just because the government says so.

When resources are owned by another party than the government, a greater public good is affected.  Have you heard of the trans Texas corridor?  It's a horrible government boondoggle, the nasty details of which can be had here if you're interested why I'd call it that:

http://www.corridorwatch.org/ttc_2007/CW00000105.htm

The greatest deterrant that's keeping this abuse of government at bay is the fact that the land in question is owned by somebody else other than the government.  It's owned by a lot and I do mean an awful lot of people, who have claims big and small.  Their concentrated efforts to protect their own interests against this menace are doing the public good.

So to argue that the land is not owned by somebody else is patently ridiculous, and here I've shown how private entities owning the asset is superior.  On top of that your contention these people can't organize as effectively as the government is shown to be false; these people have been fighting the government effectively for years.  On the other hand it stands to reason if the TTC were actually a good idea, these same people would be the ones clamoring to make it happen because they'd profit selling their land off.  If they can muster the resources to fight the TTC, they can just as easily build it themselves if they wanted to.

A small moral minority of people who could actually profit from this if they were to lobby for the TTC instead of against it is holding off a corrupt majority.  This is a perfect example of liberty in action.

Ignoring the funding is what set you off course with the courts.  The fact is, the private entity would not have been able to do the work it did without the investment.  Everything costs money, and some things cost enormous amounts of money...more troubling still for your theory is the fact that developing uncharted technologies costs enormous sums of money and comes with tremendous risk of dead-end research.   So ignoring the funding means you will not understand a major component of developing technology: investment.

Never mind the fact you're still taking it out of context, but let's address the real issue here:  I agree that money makes research possible.  However, $12 million is $12 million regardless of where it comes from.  Why is it necessary to employ the government to make sure that $12 million is taken at gunpoint and then given to the most politically popular entity rather than the most competent?

You've not done anything here to substantially criticize my approach at all.  What you need to do to punch holes in "my" theory (as if though I came up with it) is explain how a government bureaucracy is more competent, moral, and efficient than competing private entities.  I don't think you, or anyone, can do that.

Well, I guess you don't consider the internet,

Commercially viable service, would have come about without the government's intervention anyway.

highways,

Commercially viable service, would have come about without the government's intervention anyway.  In fact, private roads are all over the place.

communications lines,

Commercially viable service, would have come about without the government's intervention anyway.

railroads,

Commercially viable service, would have come about without the government's intervention anyway.

ports and airports,

Okay I'll quit, I've made the point already.

airplanes, automobiles, or satellites to be effective products of investment.  Apparently, anything that was produced "unfairly" is irrelevant.

No the products themselves are not irrelevant.  But my method produces them ethically and efficiently.  Yours does not.

So surely, the way to stop these evildoers is to remove all public regulation from the hands of the tyrannical majority. 

Well, yes.  At least we agree on that.

That way the private individuals who profiteer off of others would have to face the Courts (that they pay for) and the free market, which could possibly....yield them more profits than their damages to others cost? 

Except that I haven't proposed that at all.  I've offered several suggestions for building an accountability system which we already know is viable in the real world.

It seems to be here the height of unrealistic idealism to say: "Well, we've never seen a system like this because people are generally greedy...so if we simply removed regulations that check individual activities, then there would be a big giant free economy that didn't harm individuals."

The economy harms nobody.  Individuals who choose to act in harmful ways harm others, not the economy.  Since I've already proposed ways to seek remedies from them, I don't see the problem.

As for me personally, I consider myself more an independent than a conservative, although I find more conservative politicians and thinkers who fit my views generally.  Seriously, I have tried to be as faithful to your views as possible here, and I hope you'll correct any of your views that I misrepresented.  And I take the time to post because I just plain enjoy a good, long, polite discussion....the more complicated the better, it's like a workout for the brain .

Thanks.

Conservative does not mean Republican, being politically conservative means you favor preserving the status quo.  To some degree we're all conservative, there's even conservative thinking in some of the ideas I've laid forth.

[Risasi]

Wow, the posts are getting huge!!


(I just HAD to break chain....  )

[Risasi]

BTW:

I haven't quite figured out yet how to stop "buying" the "services" forced upon me by federal, state, and local governments.

I have, stop making enough money to fall within "conscripted consumerist" status...


[EDIT] Not that I intend to do that right now...

[De Selby]

The same way a paid mediator or arbitrator remains impartial now despite being paid by the parties he is deciding for.

One problem for this theory is the market as it exists today: most parties have a choice of going to arbitration instead of going to a courtroom.  No one with a claim ever does it by choice, and I mean never.  The value of a claim that has to go to arbitration versus one that hits the courts varies by as much as 75 percent.  So no, paid mediators are neither necessarily impartial, nor are they good at compensating damages.  The only thing they are good at is mediating disputes quickly and cheaply-it's invariably the defendant party that benefits from this, so that further undercuts your theories that this is going to stop producers from damaging others.

That might be conceivably be true if we set out that model, however as I just said I see it more like civic minded people will be voluntarily allowed to fund the courts by their own volition.  I for one never anticipate being up on criminal charges but it's still in my interest to fund a criminal court.

But if you're following your profit motives, it's economically irrational for you to pay for something when you bet that everyone else will pay.  And if no one else will pay, it's equally irrational.  So either the profit motive doesn't exist, or your theory is unworkable.  This is the classic "Prisoner's dilemma".

Also, people that can't pay for civil remedies currently have options (charity basically, like how the NRA takes on certain court cases or the bar association of certain states may do some pro bono work).  That won't go away if we streamline the government, if anything there will be more of it since people won't pay so many taxes.

Yeah, but they don't currently suffice to provide remedies that discourage activity.  The civil courts do not do that, they just pay damages.

One issue you keep failing to address is the one of profit versus paid damages.  You keep saying that repeated lawsuits will force companies to change their behavior; but you do not deal with the problem of what happens when the lawsuits cost less than changing the behavior.  That as entirely reasonable scenario, that you yourself gave with a peanut allergy.  If company x saves 100 million a year by not bothering to find out which foods have peanut and label them, but only pays out a few million a year to dead victims (for example, if peanut allergies are relatively rare), then the economically rational thing to do is to keep killing the peanut-averse.  I'd like you to specifically address this problem in your next post-ie, answer the question: Where does this unyielding assumption that the cost of lawsuits will always be more than the benefit of the damaging behavior come from?

No, the court wouldn't pass any laws at all.  We've established that.  They only decide questions of fault.  That's all that's desirable or necessary.

Again, if this is true, you have the problem above: activities that kill/maim/or otherwise harm individuals, but that generate a larger profit than the cost of just paying damages when they happen, will continue. 

If you get courts that sanction companies by providing damages to deter activity, then you are dong more than deciding questions of fault-you're regulating from the bench by trying to figure out what amount of penalty judgment will cause the company to stop doing the bad thing.  And that, my friend, is one of the worst possible ways to go about regulating.  It is in every case more constrained by ignorance, more expensive, and more unpredictable than just having an agency that studies the problem and promulgates rules.

If an entity can commit an infraction and then offer a settlement to the wronged party which that party is willing to accept, where's the problem?

The problem is that the wronged party may be dead or injured, and in any case will get only what monetary damages it can prove to the Court.  So the cost to the one who did the damage is minimized, while the damage to one individual is potentially unlimited.  Add to that the potential profit involved in continuing the harmful behavior, and you've got a situation where people keep getting harmed, and the harmful behavior keeps generating a profit, so it continues.

"Wrecking the wrong person's widget" is pure legal fantasy.  There is no such thing as taking people to the cleaner's (absent regulatory statutes and legislatures that regulate by imposing stiff fines for conduct, that is) in the courtroom.  There is only paying damages; and if you want more than that, you've basically done exactly the same thing a regulatory agency does, except you compounded the problem by making the entire country's policy on that issue turn on the decision of one courtroom that likely has no expertise in the matter whatsoever.

In sum, to review: redressing one person's grievance, will not necessarily stop continuing harmful behavior.  So you do not solve the problem of pollution, bad labelling, and product defects by just paying the few who are maimed or killed.  The costs continue to be imposed, because the benefit is borne by the one entity, and the damages are imposed across many different parties. 

Appealing to people's individual sense of morality is big bucks.

This is more fantasy-if people are driven by economic self interest, they won't purchase this way.  And these are all the same people that you think are out to use the government to steal from you.  So really, the idea of this appeal in an unregulated market simply does not make sense.

Enron was busted by an expert financial analyst named Daniel Scotto, who was not associated with any government regulatory agency or law enforcement.  He was hired by interested private parties to investigate, and lo and behold the superior skills he had achieved in the competitive market bore fruit.

To reduce the enron case so that it ignores the role of the SEC, the Congress, and the US Attorney's office is to make it into something that did not happen.  Arthur Andersen was another "private party" investigating Enron, and look what happened with the best auditing money could buy at the time.  Read the indictments against Lay and Skilling, and you will see how deep and expansive the regulatory network was that caught Enron.  It was not by any means the work of a single private analyst.

Accountancy is not self regulating, but is subject to a quagmire of government regulations and rules, especially regarding Corporations, and it is backed up by constant litigation with regard to particulars.  If you removed the ABC's of Government from the equation, you simply could not paint a remotely accurate picture of the US corporate environment. 

That all means, again, that you have given an example of something that happened in the context of extensive government involvement and regulation.  Toppling Enron was by no means a private affair.

As to investment:

Why can't the public just pay for the services they want themselves?  That's more efficient, it's untainted by political corruption, and it's also voluntary.

You seem to have missed the point.  Because wealth is divided up, there is absolutely no guarantee that individuals will contribute to the massive levels that a government can provide.  It's not more efficient, it's less efficient, because the originator of a project needs to convince potentially millions of people to donate...and while that works great for a few charities, it has never worked on the scale of investment needed for things like NASA and the internet.

The reason is that, like above with the Prisoner's dilemma, any individual investor has every economic incentive to free ride.  If he thinks other people will contribute to develop a technology that he can buy on the market later, it's economically sensible not to contribute.  And if they won't, why would he?

The highway problem faces the above economic obstacle, and further that the value of cooperation increases as each new plot for a highway is purchased.  The reason there has not been a single highway built by private enterprise alone is that, if you need 100 plots of land to build it, every single plot owner has a strong incentive to be the last one to sell.  If you buy 99 plots, the last plot can hold out for an inordinate amount of money, knowing that your highway project just wasted all of its funds if you don't pay him nearly whatever he wants.  And when that happens...the highway doesn't get built, because no landowner in his right mind is going to be the first, second, or even third to sell. 

That is, of course, if you keep presuming that people are motivated by profit.

Your highway corridor example is a terrible one, because it shows just how easily someone trying to get everyone to voluntarily sell for his highway project can be derailed.   The Government, with the power of eminent domain, has trouble getting land to build highways....but a company with fewer resources, and no right of compulsion, is going to ever succeed how?

The only way your scheme is workable is if you assume that individuals do not act for profit, and do not act rationally.  If they do either, then no private highway project or cooperative investment project of the type currently funded by government will ever succeed.  And that's a good explanation, it turns out, for why there is no privately bought and built highway on the planet-you simply cannot, without the right to compel, get that many people to make a highway economically feasible. 

I think your confusion on the private roads comes from not knowing how they come to be-governments generally use eminent domain to gather up all the land, then they build the highway and sell it to a contractor who will use it as a revenue generator.  But that's only possible because the contractor had a government willing to take people's land to build the highway; without that, it never happens (and has never happened.)


Your list of commercially viable services are subject to the pitfalls I outlined above.  Just because something is commercially viable when complete, doesn't mean that developing said thing is economically viable without State compulsion.  You made no point at all with that list except to curiously leave out any example of any similar product coming about through purely private exercises. 

If commercial viability is enough, why isn't there any example of similar projects, like highways, being built for profit without any state compulsion? 

Your whole theory here is plagued by fundamentally misunderstanding the profit motive.  Free riding makes great economic sense, and no one individual has any interest in being the guy that starts a project which presumes that everyone else will not be a free rider.  So without some kind of compulsion and top-down organization, there are simply some projects that make no economic sense to individuals, like Ports, highways, and cable lines.  Without the right to force some people to curtail their property interests, you couldn't even have a nationwide network of phone lines (you need easements for that, and absent Gov't power, they cost money...)...so I really see nothing workable in what you've outlined above to solve the problems I already identified.

[Antibubba]

This has gotten very interesting!

But when I started this, I was referring more to the latter part of the article, about the Xeer:

------Highlights of the Xeer



There is time in this short talk to give you only some of the highlights of the Xeer. First, law and, consequently, crime are defined in terms of property rights. The law is compensatory rather than punitive. Because property right requires compensation, rather than punishment, there is no imprisonment, and fines are rare. Such fines as might be imposed seldom exceed the amount of compensation and are not payable to any court or government, but directly to the victim. A fine might be in order when, for example, the killing of a camel was deliberate and premeditated, in which case the victim receives not one but two camels.



Fines are used in another interesting way. It is expected that a prominent public figure such as a religious or political dignitary or a policeman or a judge should lead an exemplary life. If he violates the law, he pays double what would be required of an ordinary person. Also, it should be noted, since the law and crime are defined in terms of property rights, the Xeer is unequivocal in its opposition to any form of taxation.



Second, in order to assure that compensation will be forthcoming even in cases where the perpetrator is a child, or penniless, or crazy, or has fled abroad, the Xeer requires that every person be fully insured against any liability he might incur under the law. If an individual cannot make the required payment, a designated group of his kin is responsible. Van Notten describes in an interesting way how this happens:



A person who violates someone's rights and is unable to pay the compensation himself notifies his family, who then pays on his behalf. From an emotional point of view, this notification is a painful procedure, since no family member will miss the opportunity to tell the wrongdoer how vicious or stupid he was. Also, they will ask assurances that he will be more careful in the future. Indeed, all those who must pay for the wrongdoings of a family member will thereafter keep an eye on him and try to intervene before he incurs another liability. They will no longer, for example, allow him to keep or bear a weapon. While on other continents the re-education of criminals is typically a task of the government, in Somalia it is the responsibility of the family.





If the family tires of bailing out a repeat offender, they can disown him, in which case he becomes an outlaw. Not being insured, he forfeits all protection under the law and, for his safety, must leave the country.



Customary law is similar in this and many other respects throughout the world. An instance is told in the founding legend of my own Clan MacCallum in Scotland. The founder of the Clan supposedly was exiled 1,500 years ago from Ireland because he was a hothead whom his family disowned for embroiling them in fights. In the loneliness of his exile on the North Sea, he became a man of peace. He couldn't return to Ireland, as he was no longer under protection of the law and could have been killed with impunity. So he went instead to Scotland and there founded our clan.



A third point about the Xeer is that there is no monopoly of police or judicial services. Anyone is free to serve in those capacities as long as he is not at the same time a religious or political dignitary, since that would compromise the sharp separation of law, politics, and religion. Also, anyone performing in such a role is subject to the same laws as anyone else  and more so: if he violates the law, he must pay heavier damages or fines than would apply to anyone else. Public figures are expected to show exemplary conduct.



Fourth, there is no victimless crime. Only a victim or his family can initiate a court action. Where there is no victim to call a court into being, no court can form. No court can investigate on its own initiative any evidence of alleged misconduct.



Last, the court procedure is interesting. From birth, every Somali has his own judge who will sit on the court that will judge him should he transgress the law. That judge is his oday, the head of his extended family consisting of all males descended from the same great grandfather, together with their spouses and children. Several extended families make up a jilib, which is the group responsible for paying the blood price in the event a member kills someone of another jilib or clan. The oday, or judge, is chosen carefully, following weeks or months of deliberation by elders of the clan. He has no authority over the family but is chosen solely for his knowledge of human affairs and his wisdom, and he can lose his position if his decisions are not highly regarded in the community.



When an offense is committed, the offender goes first to his oday, who then forms a court with the oday of the plaintiff. If the two odays cannot resolve the matter, they form another court made up of odays representing additional families, jilibs, or clans. A virtue of each person knowing from birth who will be one of his judges, and vice versa, is that an oday knows each person in his extended family intimately and can observe and counsel him before what might seem to be a small problem escalates into a crime.



Once a court forms and accepts jurisdiction over a case, its first action is to appoint a recorder, who will repeat loudly during the hearing each important point made by the speakers. The court then announces when and where it will hear the case. When the court session opens, the court invites the plaintiff to state his case. The plaintiff has the right to appoint a representative to make the presentation on his behalf. During the presentation, the plaintiff has opportunity to confer with his family to make sure that he has not forgotten anything. When the plaintiff has finished, the court asks him to summarize his case and state his demands. Lastly, the court asks the defendant to present his defense and any counterclaims.



Then the court adjourns to deliberate on whether any witnesses should be heard. A disputed fact is admitted as evidence only when three witnesses have testified to its truth. The parties can also call in experts and character witnesses. If the victim has died or has been wounded, the court will instruct a religious dignitary to assess how the victim died or was wounded. These dignitaries assess injuries usually by applying the standards enumerated in the commentary of the twelfth-century Muslim scholar al-Nawawii's Minhaaj at-Talibiin. When the plaintiff has elaborated his case with witnesses and evidence, the defendant is given a chance to refute the plaintiff's charges, arguments, and evidence. It is not customary to cross-examine witnesses.



Finally, the court adjourns again to evaluate the evidence. If less than three witnesses support a fact, or if the witnesses contradict each other, the court will proceed to oath taking. There are several types of oaths. The simplest starts by the oath giver saying, "I swear by my virility." Alternatively, he can say, "I swear by Allah." A stronger oath is the so-called triple oath, in which he swears the same oath three times. A stronger oath yet is the one that is repeated 50 times. Also, there is the so-called divorce oath, in which the oath giver swears by his marriage(s). If it is later found out that he lied, his marriage(s) become null and void.



It should be noted that even when the plaintiff fails to convince the court of his case, the court will usually not rule in favor of the defendant until the latter has taken an oath of innocence.

[Len Budney]

In asking that my property rights be respected, I'm not asking anyone to give me a dime, nor to spend one on my behalf.

Exactly. You're only asking that people leave you alone. Nobody is losing anything, unless he thinks he already owns your stuff and that leaving you alone is "losing" his claim to your property.

--Len.

[doczinn]

You're only asking that people leave you alone.

And isn't that the whole point of libertarianism, anyway?

[Len Budney]

You're only asking that people leave you alone.

And isn't that the whole point of libertarianism, anyway?

Yep. I can't grasp how some people see it as a burdensome request.

--Len.

[De Selby]

In asking that my property rights be respected, I'm not asking anyone to give me a dime, nor to spend one on my behalf.

Exactly. You're only asking that people leave you alone. Nobody is losing anything, unless he thinks he already owns your stuff and that leaving you alone is "losing" his claim to your property.

--Len.

This is fine with I think most of the world, in theory.  But in the real world, ensuring that other people leave you alone costs money.  So does ensuring that they adhere to their agreements with you.  There are lots of people who don't care about your property, and they will do things that harm it and you if not effectively prohibited from doing so.  And that's where the idealistic libertarian falters-there's no way, without compulsion, to create a system that effectively provides you with protection from others.  And to boot, you can't get lots of projects that would otherwise provide you with enormous benefit, like highways and ports.

I like to be left alone and have my property too; but I also like generating more property in a successful economy, and I like having systems in place to keep others from infringing on mine.

[doczinn]

And that's where the idealistic libertarian falters-there's no way, without compulsion, to create a system that effectively provides you with protection from others.  And to boot, you can't get lots of projects that would otherwise provide you with enormous benefit, like highways and ports.

Again with the idea that the free market, while it can provide a dizzying array of goods and services that government can't, won't or doesn't even dream of providing, somehow is incapable of providing public safety or transportation.

I'm not even gonna bother to argue.

[Len Budney]

In asking that my property rights be respected, I'm not asking anyone to give me a dime, nor to spend one on my behalf.

Exactly. You're only asking that people leave you alone. Nobody is losing anything, unless he thinks he already owns your stuff and that leaving you alone is "losing" his claim to your property.

This is fine with I think most of the world, in theory.  But in the real world, ensuring that other people leave you alone costs money.

I'm not asking you to "ensure" anything. I'm only asking you to keep your mitts to yourself. Are you claiming that "costs money"?

There are lots of people who don't care about your property, and they will do things that harm it and you if not effectively prohibited from doing so.

I'm not asking you to worry about that at all. I'm willing look after my own person and property. (Hint: look at the upper-left corner of this page.)

And that's where the idealistic libertarian falters-there's no way, without compulsion, to create a system that effectively provides you with protection from others.

I never asked to be provided with any such thing. I've provided myself with 9mm protection of my own.

And to boot, you can't get lots of projects that would otherwise provide you with enormous benefit, like highways and ports.

More stuff I didn't ask for. Why do you insist on "giving" me things I never asked for, and then trying to force me to pay for them? Sounds like a protection racket.

I like to be left alone and have my property too; but I also like generating more property in a successful economy, and I like having systems in place to keep others from infringing on mine.

It's unfortunate that you're convinced you can't accomplish those things without subjecting me to your protection racket. Why do your "likes" in this regard carry the weight of law? There are lots of things I'd "like," but it never occurred to me to enslave you so as to secure my "likes."

--Len.

[De Selby]

And that's where the idealistic libertarian falters-there's no way, without compulsion, to create a system that effectively provides you with protection from others.  And to boot, you can't get lots of projects that would otherwise provide you with enormous benefit, like highways and ports.

Again with the idea that the free market, while it can provide a dizzying array of goods and services that government can't, won't or doesn't even dream of providing, somehow is incapable of providing public safety or transportation.

I'm not even gonna bother to argue.

Well, if you have an argument to make, I'd like to see it.  I don't see how you can possibly argue that something like a highway could ever possibly, in the absence of compulsion, be in the self-interest of one or a group of individuals.  The only way the public goods argument works in a free market is if you don't think people act to maximize gain; if they do, no such project will ever succeed.

Like I said though, I'm open to an example of any free-market highway, built free of compulsion.

[De Selby]

I'm not asking you to "ensure" anything. I'm only asking you to keep your mitts to yourself. Are you claiming that "costs money"?

Yes.  Because even if I don't come after your money, there are millions of people out there who don't think you have any property rights, and who won't deal with a system that relies on the honor code method.

It would be nice to think that asking other people to respect your property would lead to a successful society, but unfortunately it is hopelessly unrealistic.  And if you want to do anything more than politely ask, yes, it will cost money.

I'm willing look after my own person and property. (Hint: look at the upper-left corner of this page.)

The problem is that, thought through, this position will reduce both your enjoyment of your property and profits.  That's why most people don't support pure libertarian systems-they realize that having to spend all day at home personally warding off the millions who don't believe in property rights (especially not your property rights) will infringe on their enjoyment and amounts of property much more than a tax used to fund public enforcement systems.

I've provided myself with 9mm protection of my own.

This is useful for one limited scenario: a thief who sneaks into your house in the night.

Your 9mm does zero for people who lie to you about what they're selling, who don't pay you for things you do, and who take your cash out of the bank or turn your investments into someone else's property via paperwork.  It also doesn't remedy people who accidentally smash your car, accidentally release poisons that kill you or your family, or accidentally spill something that destroys your property value.  In the vast majority of situations where your property is at risk, a 9mm is perhaps the single most useless article you could have.

. Why do you insist on "giving" me things I never asked for, and then trying to force me to pay for them? Sounds like a protection racket.

Because I am rationally self interested-I realize that without compulsion on some level, there are some services that will never be provided.  If I pay to take care of property rights, the economically rational thing for you to do is not pay...that is, if you believe that personal benefit drives market economics.  So the only rational scheme under which I will contribute to a highway, a public police system, or a similar good...is if I know everyone else will be forced to pay, so that no one can free ride on my dollar.

It's unfortunate that you're convinced you can't accomplish those things without subjecting me to your protection racket.

I'm convinced alright, because the track record of the human race and some pretty insightful economists have made a fairly unbeatable case for it.