I should have done this in August. This will be my last post on this blog until May. I apologize for any inconvenience or displeasure this may cause any of the three or four of you.
But before I go, I must say Congratulations to the people of Egypt. Hopefully they can get the elections pushed forward. Seven months is a long time to wait under military rule.
I guess this is where I'm supposed to paste a powerful quote on continuous struggle, but I lack the time to find anything.
Friday, February 11, 2011
Sunday, February 6, 2011
Market Anarchism, Judgment-Proof Defendants, and Heathianism
If we were to redraw the political spectrum, it would be useful to classify it according to political or social "efficacy" - the strength of the system's positive or negative incentives which confront the individual. The more the individual's actions may be manipulated by the institutionalized relations, the more "efficacy" there is. Post-structuralism and Primitivism would be on the far left, with the least efficacy, and tyrannical, draconian, totalitarian states would be on the far right, with maximum efficacy. ("Maximum efficacy", here, does not mean that the system "works" or is productive, but rather that the typical risk-averse individual cannot possibly refuse the offers that the system does make - we could also call this "total non-refusability", if we don't mind sounding ungraceful).
The ideal "state" would maximize both freedom and efficacy, and would probably be a bit left of the middle of this spectrum. People with my political persuasion believe that this perfect balance can be achieved with competing Private Defense Agencies or Dispute Resolution Organizations that people would voluntarily subscribe to and may choose to unsubscribe from. Competition between these agencies would theoretically lead towards the best services at the lowest prices, and would provide a minimally-violent form of law enforcement. All crimes can be treated like torts, and instead of arresting, jailing, and imprisoning offenders, we could charge them a lot of money.
Protecting the poor against the rich wouldn't bee too much of a problem, since tort claims can be sold to people or groups who have more resources to sue. The prospect of making bank off of rich defendants offers the incentive to compensate poor claimants in exchange for their cause of action.
One of the problems that market anarchists spend a lot of time addressing is the judgment-proof defendant. If your perpetrator is dirt poor, then your cause of action is not marketable. PDA's, DRO's, Anglo-Saxon-style "hundreds", or other kinds of liability insurance groups can cover the costs of their members' wrongdoing and increase their offending members' rates. If the costs of continuing to cover a member's wrongdoing greatly excedes the benefit of his payments, the insurance company can drop him. The prospect of living in an anarchist world without coverage is supposed to be the implicit offer you can't refuse that incentivizes you to live peacefully. Once you lose your coverage, you supposedly have a very powerful incentive to sign some kind of probation contract so that you can get coverage immediately on the condition that you stay in a supervised environment.
But being judgment-proof would be a very sticky situation. When you aren't covered it would probably be very hard to get a job with someone who is covered (DRO's would demand that their subscribers make their business partners get coverage too, or at least offer them lower rates if they do), and when you don't have a job you can't make your payments. Given that people who lost their coverage are a real liability, options for them to reintegrate into "respectable" society would be limited, and quite a few of them may find it easier to just scrape by without any formalized structure to incentivize them to acquiesce to the conventional rights notions ("When you ain't got nothin' you got nothin' to loose"). Add to that mix the immigrant and migrant populations who would be too poor to afford conventional coverage and who would be moving around alot, and you have what a capitalist would call an entrepreneurship opportunity.
(Sure, the greater economic freedom in anarchy would lead to increased economic opportunity for the underserved, but that's a two-sided coin. Greater economic opportunity attracts more people who could use it, and that means a lot of poor people. Were it not for this, we could speculate that the occasional tortfeasance from a judgment-proof defendant would be so rare that the victim's DRO could compensate the victim at no noticeable cost to the DRO. But that might be more of a religious hope than a market outcome.)
The success of market anarchism would depend very much on whether low-cost and effective security and dispute resolution options are extended to excluded and underserved communities. These options may take the form of ecclesiastical courts, the ever-present matriarchal Latina, or - yes - gangs. One of the difficulties is that since migrants and vagabonds aren't settled down in any one community, they wouldn't have much of a reputation for security and dispute resolution providers to work off of. (Impunity for killing blacklisted people would not be much of an option, since killing the wrong person can make things volatile, besides being a wrongfull killing.) If market anarchism cannot fill this coverage gap, then there would be less of an incentive structure for poor people, and market anarchism would be further left on the efficacy spectrum than the social justice types would prefer.
The options that fill the coverage gap would probably be "public options" in security, which would assume contractual privity whether or not the plaintiff or defendant signed any contract or consciously and deliberately gave any indication of assent. This is tacit consent based on territory, and if this reminds you of the presumptiousness of tacit consent used in social contract theory, then you're thinking on my level.
If security and compensation options for underserved communities are not self-sufficient (and they probably won't be), the resources to fund them would have to come from somewhere else - possibly another DRO. We could fantasize that in a world where there are numerous DRO's and PDA's, the DRO's and PDA's would constantly try to one-up each other to provide appropriate services to the underserved. But it would be more likely that the different security companies would try to one-up each other in providing the appearance of appropriate services to the underserved - if their paying members demand that kind of charity in the first place, which they probably won't since it would mean higher premiums for them and they would rather subscribe to the company that charges lower premiums and doesn't provide that charity. This could mean that there would be little incentive to provide the formal services that would incentivize people in low-to-no income areas to refrain from agressing, and that would mean lower efficacy.
I think this worry would be widely shared among the populace of a freshly-decentralized region. And because of this common worry, there may be a significant consumer demand for jurisdiction based not on contract, but on territory. I admit that this is ironic. But we see it all the time today. If people could, they would defer onto everyone else the cost of their goodwill. That's what welfare is. And if they think this goodwill can benefit them, as welfare could in a "veil of ignorance" sense, then they would probably approach security services under the presumption that a local monopoly on police would reduce crime in an entire area and make one's own neighborhood and city safer than would competing police who cannot be forced to provide free services. Prospective security company subscribers would place more demand on a more municipal system, even though the lower amount of competition may mean higher fees.
I have earlier speculated that the formation of the functional equivalent of states is totally possible and even "legitimate" under pure Rothbardian capitalist anarchism. Just think of the water - the dissolution of the state in California could (and likely would) result in privately-held aqueducts that run from the Delta all the way down into the Central Valley, and they would likely demand in their adhesion contracts that all water-users along those aqueducts subscribe to one single DRO (doesn't Hayek or someone have a word for the state's intrusions creating more need for the state?). In my knee-jerk love for all things small, I recently suggested that the anarchist legal community adopt a 20 square mile ceiling on both contiguous property and contiguous jurisdiction. But if the concerns I raise earlier in this post turn out to have real merit, then maybe land monopolies should be accepted not just as real world capitalist phenomena that non-capitalist free marketeers should always strive to break up, but as institutions that people should accept and try to work with. Maybe free market left-libertarians should propose a mutualist cooperative model of the Heathian estate (which would, honestly, just be a mini-republic).
I already have rebuttals and qualfications, but I should stop now and give those in a later post.
The ideal "state" would maximize both freedom and efficacy, and would probably be a bit left of the middle of this spectrum. People with my political persuasion believe that this perfect balance can be achieved with competing Private Defense Agencies or Dispute Resolution Organizations that people would voluntarily subscribe to and may choose to unsubscribe from. Competition between these agencies would theoretically lead towards the best services at the lowest prices, and would provide a minimally-violent form of law enforcement. All crimes can be treated like torts, and instead of arresting, jailing, and imprisoning offenders, we could charge them a lot of money.
Protecting the poor against the rich wouldn't bee too much of a problem, since tort claims can be sold to people or groups who have more resources to sue. The prospect of making bank off of rich defendants offers the incentive to compensate poor claimants in exchange for their cause of action.
One of the problems that market anarchists spend a lot of time addressing is the judgment-proof defendant. If your perpetrator is dirt poor, then your cause of action is not marketable. PDA's, DRO's, Anglo-Saxon-style "hundreds", or other kinds of liability insurance groups can cover the costs of their members' wrongdoing and increase their offending members' rates. If the costs of continuing to cover a member's wrongdoing greatly excedes the benefit of his payments, the insurance company can drop him. The prospect of living in an anarchist world without coverage is supposed to be the implicit offer you can't refuse that incentivizes you to live peacefully. Once you lose your coverage, you supposedly have a very powerful incentive to sign some kind of probation contract so that you can get coverage immediately on the condition that you stay in a supervised environment.
But being judgment-proof would be a very sticky situation. When you aren't covered it would probably be very hard to get a job with someone who is covered (DRO's would demand that their subscribers make their business partners get coverage too, or at least offer them lower rates if they do), and when you don't have a job you can't make your payments. Given that people who lost their coverage are a real liability, options for them to reintegrate into "respectable" society would be limited, and quite a few of them may find it easier to just scrape by without any formalized structure to incentivize them to acquiesce to the conventional rights notions ("When you ain't got nothin' you got nothin' to loose"). Add to that mix the immigrant and migrant populations who would be too poor to afford conventional coverage and who would be moving around alot, and you have what a capitalist would call an entrepreneurship opportunity.
(Sure, the greater economic freedom in anarchy would lead to increased economic opportunity for the underserved, but that's a two-sided coin. Greater economic opportunity attracts more people who could use it, and that means a lot of poor people. Were it not for this, we could speculate that the occasional tortfeasance from a judgment-proof defendant would be so rare that the victim's DRO could compensate the victim at no noticeable cost to the DRO. But that might be more of a religious hope than a market outcome.)
The success of market anarchism would depend very much on whether low-cost and effective security and dispute resolution options are extended to excluded and underserved communities. These options may take the form of ecclesiastical courts, the ever-present matriarchal Latina, or - yes - gangs. One of the difficulties is that since migrants and vagabonds aren't settled down in any one community, they wouldn't have much of a reputation for security and dispute resolution providers to work off of. (Impunity for killing blacklisted people would not be much of an option, since killing the wrong person can make things volatile, besides being a wrongfull killing.) If market anarchism cannot fill this coverage gap, then there would be less of an incentive structure for poor people, and market anarchism would be further left on the efficacy spectrum than the social justice types would prefer.
The options that fill the coverage gap would probably be "public options" in security, which would assume contractual privity whether or not the plaintiff or defendant signed any contract or consciously and deliberately gave any indication of assent. This is tacit consent based on territory, and if this reminds you of the presumptiousness of tacit consent used in social contract theory, then you're thinking on my level.
If security and compensation options for underserved communities are not self-sufficient (and they probably won't be), the resources to fund them would have to come from somewhere else - possibly another DRO. We could fantasize that in a world where there are numerous DRO's and PDA's, the DRO's and PDA's would constantly try to one-up each other to provide appropriate services to the underserved. But it would be more likely that the different security companies would try to one-up each other in providing the appearance of appropriate services to the underserved - if their paying members demand that kind of charity in the first place, which they probably won't since it would mean higher premiums for them and they would rather subscribe to the company that charges lower premiums and doesn't provide that charity. This could mean that there would be little incentive to provide the formal services that would incentivize people in low-to-no income areas to refrain from agressing, and that would mean lower efficacy.
I think this worry would be widely shared among the populace of a freshly-decentralized region. And because of this common worry, there may be a significant consumer demand for jurisdiction based not on contract, but on territory. I admit that this is ironic. But we see it all the time today. If people could, they would defer onto everyone else the cost of their goodwill. That's what welfare is. And if they think this goodwill can benefit them, as welfare could in a "veil of ignorance" sense, then they would probably approach security services under the presumption that a local monopoly on police would reduce crime in an entire area and make one's own neighborhood and city safer than would competing police who cannot be forced to provide free services. Prospective security company subscribers would place more demand on a more municipal system, even though the lower amount of competition may mean higher fees.
I have earlier speculated that the formation of the functional equivalent of states is totally possible and even "legitimate" under pure Rothbardian capitalist anarchism. Just think of the water - the dissolution of the state in California could (and likely would) result in privately-held aqueducts that run from the Delta all the way down into the Central Valley, and they would likely demand in their adhesion contracts that all water-users along those aqueducts subscribe to one single DRO (doesn't Hayek or someone have a word for the state's intrusions creating more need for the state?). In my knee-jerk love for all things small, I recently suggested that the anarchist legal community adopt a 20 square mile ceiling on both contiguous property and contiguous jurisdiction. But if the concerns I raise earlier in this post turn out to have real merit, then maybe land monopolies should be accepted not just as real world capitalist phenomena that non-capitalist free marketeers should always strive to break up, but as institutions that people should accept and try to work with. Maybe free market left-libertarians should propose a mutualist cooperative model of the Heathian estate (which would, honestly, just be a mini-republic).
I already have rebuttals and qualfications, but I should stop now and give those in a later post.
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About Me
- Isaiah
- I am a part-time philosopher and a former immigration paralegal with a BA in philosophy and a paralegal certificate from UC San Diego.