This is one of the major reasons I do not identify myself as an anarcho-capitalist. I've read about free market courts and how they would work but (at least in my eyes) there is a fundamental flaw.Say I steal someones car in Baltimore and drive it up to Boston. The person I stole from would go to a free market court and press charges on me, ordering me to appear in court. What if I refuse? They can't do anything about it since I own myself and I am innocent until proven guilty.
How would you solve a dilemma such as this?
A couple of questions. How does the Boston agency assert any authority over the Baltimore thief in the absence of a contractual relationship between the thief and the Boston agency? Also, assuming that the thief has no contractual relationship with the Baltimore private security agency or the Baltimore private dispute agency, how could either assert any authority over the thief? The default judgment by the Baltimore agency is enforceable only if it has "jurisdiction" over the thief. How would it have such "jurisdiction" in the absence of a contractual relationship?
This scenario relates to the continual problem for anarcho-capitalists (and I would be one if I could get around certain problems like this): How do you assert authority over an alleged wrong-doer in the absence of a contractual relationship without resorting to legal fictions and implied contract theories? And how could you force someone to contract with a private dispute agency without first asserting non-contractual authority over him?
Thanks.
In your example, the situation is not that different from the citizens of two countries. If I commit a crime in "your" jurisdiction, I am liable under your laws. I may try to seek immunity by escaping to another jurisdiction. In that case, the two agencies have to coordinate whether the suspect will be extradited, tried in his home jurisdiction, or whether extradition will be refused entirely. It's very rare for two nations to go war over such a disagreement. It is common to have a pre-existing extradition treaty to facilitate such cases.
If the suspect is not a customer of any protection agency, then the Boston agency could just hire any bounty hunter in Baltimore to bring him in. This might seem unjust, but then the suspect has already indicated by his actions that he wishes to interact with the customers of another agency while refusing to mediate disagreements between them.
The worst case scenario is a customer unfairly accusing an "uninsured" person. But this just means that unless you want to be a total hermit, singing with a protection agency is a worthwhile investment.
Thanks for the helpful comment, and I agree with your conclusions as to what would probably happen. But that isn't materially different from what happens now with a government. Also, you say that the thief "has indicated by his actions that he wishes to interact with customers of another agency while refusing to mediate disagreements between them." But what if the alleged thief is innocent and hasn't indicated any desire to interact with the complainant?
The difficult issue of political theory that still remains is: Under what underlying grant of authority does the private agency act? In the example of the two nations, jurisdiction isn't a theoretical problem, because the alleged thief is a citizen of one of the nations and is therefore subject to the jurisdiction of one of the nations. But if no government exists, and no contractual relationship exists, this is quite different, especially if the alleged wrong-doer is innocent.
Here's a simplified example. You and I are citizens of Dallas. I was born and raised there but have never contracted with a private dispute agency. You (wrongly) think that I have stolen your car and you seek to bring me before your private dispute agency. I deny being a thief and deny the authority of your agency to determine my guilt or innocence. You and I have no contractual relationship. You get a default judgment and I deny the enforceability of the judgment. By what grant of authority does your agency execute on the judgment and take my property to make you whole for your loss?
Thanks again.
You are all thinking about it wrong. Of course you would have your things insured. And it is in the interest of the insurance company to not pay you for the insured item whenever it becomes stolen as it would be bad long-term business. They pay your insurance to begin with and your problem is out of the way. Meanwhile they would hire private investigators as they do today already trying to undo the wronging that has been comitted to you in order to make a bigger profit.
If the stolen car is found by the investigators the alleged thief's insurance company and my insurance company would come to determine the correct owner of the property by showing empirical proof of ownership. And if it is proven that it was my car the thief's insurance company would of course be demanded to pay my insurance back for what they payed me and their overhead and so on. If they refuse to do so the word will get out which lousy insurance company that doesn't take responsibility for their customers and no other insurance company will make any further transactions with such. If it was a good insurance company they would pay restitution to my insurance company and announce that the theif is no good client and companies would rasie his insurance fees. If he is without an insurance company he would be in a very bad situation as he would have no third party to cover financially for him when he screws up resulting in a much harder time to do business. His reputation would also decrease of course which would make some people refuse to do business with him.
Of course their is some people that would choose not to have an insurance company. Which is of course is a fine way to be living if one like it so. They would of course lack the third party financial backer which would make it more difficult to make people trust your ability to uphold contracts. And if someone refuses to arbitrate over property rights. Their reputation for being reliable people to do business with would plummet instantly.
Stealing for a living is also very risky in a society where people own guns. Some criminals may even want to volounatry seek "jail" to be protected from angry people.
Going back to your example, you can deny the authority of the agency all you want, but if it has the power to seize your property and the respect of the community when it does so, then it has the authority - because that's what authority is. That does not mean that customers can accuse any non-customer and seize their assets. There are both immediate and long-term costs which encourage due process and moderation. It may mean that it is in the interest of any non-isolated individual to nominate a dispute-resolution/insurance/protection agency on his behalf.
I think I'm with you here. In certain cases, a person might have to answer to a person or entity to defend himself or his property despite having no contractual or voluntary relationship with the claimant, much as he might if a government existed. But this is a rare case. In most situations -- in ordinary, day to day life -- all individuals have more freedom than under a government. So, having no government means that, in rare cases, one has no less liberty under anarcho-capitalism, but in most cases one has more liberty. Is this a fair summation?
If Smith has done no harm to Jones, but Jones nonetheless hires an agency to take Smith's car because, as Jones falsely claims, Smith has "stolen" it, then the agency and Jones have both aggressed against Smith. (The agency should have varified Jones's claim first.) What is Smith's recourse?
Smith can now sue Smith and perhaps the agency he hired as well. (If the agency knowingly stole the car for Jones, they should certainly be sued. Whether or not they ought to be sued if they simply did an insufficient job of verifying Jones's claim is debatable.) What if Jones doesn't show up to court, will it rule him de facto guilty? No, it will simply see Jones as not wishing to present any evidence of his innocence or any arguments therefor. Upon Smith proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the car is actually his, the court will award him both his car and the value of his car. (As Block writes, two teeth for a tooth.)
If Jones doesn't like this ruling, he can hire his own court. If that also rules in favour of Smith, Jones ought to give up. But let's say Jones has paid the judge off, and it rules in favour of Jones--now what?
The two judges get together and decide amongst themselves another judge to which the two men can turn, and that judge will be the final arbitor (unless the two men have agreed in advance that they want to go for best three out of five, or best four out of seven--but they'd be stupid to waste so much money on that).
I must admit that I have read very little on the subject, so this come exclusively from what seems reasonable to me.
My fundamental assumption is that we each possess our rights (here, property) so long as we do not violate the rights of others, but that any violation of the rights of another constitutes a forfeiture of our own rights in commensurate degree.
Consequently, if you steal someone's car, you never do gain a right to the car and also lose your right to goods of a value equivalent to the lost productivity of the other person due to his efforts to recover his car, within reason. The simples solution for him would be to come back and take the car and goods by force. This, however, is not in his best interests: if you are willing to steal his car, you might also be willing to defend it by force, and his action would have little perceived legitimacy if you chose to challenge his determination that you stole his car. Consequently, he could take the case to a private court to have them verify his claim. This court has jurisdiction over you not because you are subject to the court, but because you have no right to the car if you stole it, and thus the court needs no jurisdiction. Because the court has no claim over your liberty it cannot oblige you to attend, or to assign a penalty for non-attendance, but it can deliver a verdict in your absence.
lordmetroid:You are all thinking about it wrong. Of course you would have your things insured. And it is in the interest of the insurance company to not pay you for the insured item whenever it becomes stolen as it would be bad long-term business. They pay your insurance to begin with and your problem is out of the way. Meanwhile they would hire private investigators as they do today already trying to undo the wronging that has been comitted to you in order to make a bigger profit.
I'd like to draw attention to this post. Everyone is focusing on the story of the thief, but justice as an ideal is just vengence with window dressing, what really matters is people are compensated for harms.
If the dude who owned the car had insurance, his harm from having his car stolen would be rather small, he'd have to pay the deductible, and then his insurance would buy him a new car.
Of course his insurance company would investigate the claim, but when they found the most likely suspect had skipped town, they would look up his address using a credit check, and contact him, giving him 30 days to get in touch with him. He now faces a very difficult choice. He can either face up to what he did and get in touch with the insurance company to start making a plan for restitution, or he can abandon his identity and start over. Reputation is very important for your career, credit, and insurance. It is not uncommon for employers to run a credit and criminal background check against job candidates. To throw all of that away as an adult is costly.
But say this thief has a poor reputation already. He never pays his bills, and the banks want nothing to do with him. It is time to join the underground cash-only economy for him. He can now live only in high-crime areas, legitimate work is almost impossible to find, and the only bar that lets him drink there is frequented only by criminals and the bounty hunters looking for them. This car-thief would be safer in jail, hopefully he can find one that he can afford.
Ryan_Singer:Everyone is focusing on the story of the thief, but justice as an ideal is just vengence with window dressing, what really matters is people are compensated for harms.
What's so bad about vengeance? You're less inclined to mess with someone who holds a grudge.
Vengeance is a waste of resources for an individual. The modern world is too big to remember who bears a grudge and who doesn't. Prevention is more important, and smart people in a free world would invest in insurance and security, and use their resources after a tragedy to recover and reduce future exposure, instead of punishing this criminal, with no effect on the next one.
Vengeance belongs to God and Government for a reason, it is damn near useless for men.
danieljdavis: Ryan_Singer:Everyone is focusing on the story of the thief, but justice as an ideal is just vengence with window dressing, what really matters is people are compensated for harms.What's so bad about vengeance? You're less inclined to mess with someone who holds a grudge.
Everything!
We are anarchists because we object to the vengeance system that the State calls justice. Vengeance places punishing the criminal ahead of compensating the injured. The State robs the victim a second time in order to pay for the cage that holds the offender.If you belief penitentiaries to be a noble endeavor then you can not be an anarchist. A free market justice system would by necessity be compensatory rather than punitive.
Peace
Who said anything about prison? I do not find prison to be a just punishment for any crime, it imposes a cost on others, and it fails to make restitution.
You mention that what matters is the compensation of harms, but what about the harm to the insurance company? Just because they insure cars as a business does not mean that having to pay is not a harm. The insurance aggregates the risk that the crime may not be restituted, but it cannot eliminate harm. The criminal could abandon his identity, but then again so could criminals today, and they are quite often unsuccessful. He could still be found, in all probability. Additionally, because he caused the need for the expense of finding him, the burden of finding him would fall on him if caught, which would do little to encourage escape.
My expectation is that the best means of deterring crime is to ruthlessly enforce restitution, including the price of enforcement. This would condemn habitual criminals to a life of poverty, rather than merely letting them live at society's expense in prison.
I think you're hopping to some pretty unwarranted conclusions, Bostwick. I'm an anarchist. I think the state is immoral. I don't endorse prisons. It seems that either you are making some rather cavalier assumptions here or that you have a highly idiosyncratic understanding of the term "vengeance." Vengeance is simply retributive punishment. It can be directly executed (i.e., you punch me in the face; I punch you back and require you to pay for my medical bills) or indirectly executed (my protection agency or insurance company charges you double my medical bills, half for my restitution, half for punishment). Vengeance and restitution are not mutually exclusive, nor does the former necessarily have priority, whatever that would mean, over the latter.
In fact, I really like the restitutional/retributive system of the Torah: if someone murders your brother, you can be the "avenger of blood." The murderer is now an outlaw, and you're publicly recognized as the one to go kill him if you want. No executive branch necessary.
DanielJDavis,
I am inclined to believe you, but this is a point at which I in my thinking have reached an impasse. Do you have any specific reasoning for concluding that restitution should be double, half as restitution and half as punishment? Although the Pentateuchal law (still my model of an essentially anarchist society) may contain some insight, as the avenger of blood was not permitted to exact a blood-price in the Welsh fashion, but I still have uncertainties applying this to property harm.
danieljdavis: (i.e., you punch me in the face; I punch you back and require you to pay for my medical bills)
(i.e., you punch me in the face; I punch you back and require you to pay for my medical bills)
How do you justify your claim to be entitled to both reparations and retaliation? I assume we all agree on the validity of proportionality in sentencing. Yet you seek two seperate sentences, both "equal" to the crime.
Any "revenge," in order for it to be moral, must be passive. To forciably deny food to a criminal who has already made attoinment is to commit a new crime. Yet every person is free to choose to not trade with a convicted criminal, even if it would mean his death.
We are Libertarians and (Rothbarian) Anarchists because we reject violence and coercion as a means to an end. If you want an anarchistic judicial system, it must be based on the same morality and freedom of association that anarchy is based on.
JonBostwick:Any "revenge," in order for it to be moral, must be passive. To forciably deny food to a criminal who has already made attoinment is to commit a new crime. Yet every person is free to choose to not trade with a convicted criminal, even if it would mean his death. We are Libertarians and (Rothbarian) Anarchists because we reject violence and coercion as a means to an end. If you want an anarchistic judicial system, it must be based on the same morality and freedom of association that anarchy is based on.
I like you, Jon.
The whole punching in face story lacks detail. Where are we when you punch me? Let's tell three stories:
You punch me in the hallway in front of my apartment. I kick you in the balls and run into my apartment to call security. Security shows up, and escorts you out, letting you know that you are no longer allowed to visit people at my apartment complex, and security will use appropriate force to keep you from doing so.
You punch me in the face on the street in front of my daughters school. I kick you in the balls and run into the school. I call the schools security service. They show up, and escort you away, letting you know that you are no longer welcome near the school. Appropriate force will be used if you show your face on their cameras again.
You punch me in the face on the side of the road in the desert next to my car that has run out of gas. I shoot you with the gun in my glove compartment and continue waiting for AAA.
Basically, civilisation can have order without law. Whenever I am surrounded by institutions with contractual ties to me, I am safer than in the wild. If they also have contractual ties to you, they may atempt to arbitrate the situation, or, if one side refuses, they would probably sever ties with the refusing side to keep business running well.
Outside of civilisation, weapons are the best defence.
--
Ryan Singer
Ryan,
I was talking about sentencing, not self defense. I believe people are justified in killing in self defense. I have no problem with women shooting rapists, for example.
My point is that sentencing happens differently without government.
In the examples I gave, the sentence was arrived at without a court process at all(if the person was not also a resident of my apartment complex or a parent of a student at my daughters school, or through arbitration (if they were). Remember, whats fair is not whats important. What is important is that the residents of my apartment complex and the students at my daughters school are safe and happy enough to make the monthly payments.
If you are visiting the person's house, does he then gain a right to punch you? I still believe that inate rights are implicitly preserved, so that entering his property does not give him an automatic right to injure you unless it is an explicit condition of entry into the property, yet you cannot enforce any action against him if he injures you save what retaliation you can exact physically.
First of all, remember that if you are being attacked, you care more about recovering and future safety than retribution. I'm pretty sure this is the same scenerio, kick him in the balls and run away. If you need medical attention, seek it, and if you really think he needs to get punished, call your liability insurance company and tel them you want them to claim your medical bills against his renters policy.
Your company will call his, and make a claim, he will either accept the claim or reject it, if he rejects it, your insurance company and his will go into arbitration and use pre-defined rules to decide who pays. If his insurance ends up paying, his rates will go up to reflect the damage he might cause by punching other people.
So you believe that you do not have a right to punch people when they are on your property, if they are not intruding? Here I am concerned more with the abstract principle than in the actual result.
Here is where our ways must part. I still firmly believe in fundemental principles of justice, which are to be enforced in all situations. One could insure oneself against the harms of commiting an action that violates the rights of others without infringing justice, but that does not define justice. My definition of an anarchist society is one in which there is no government with the exclusive right to force, not one in which concepts of right and justice are abandoned.
Security would not be limited by localities. If someone hires a security firm, that firm isn't going to let that person be murdered for trivial reasons. No matter where it happens.
A person that preys upon visitors is not only going to be unable to hire security for himself, he would probably find himself liable.
You have to get past the idea that somehow people would be less safe without a state monopoly on security. People would be much safer!
I was not arguing for a state monopoly on security, which I believe to be both harmful and unjust. Neither am I arguing that preying upon visitors is likely. On the other hand, history tells us that humans will occasionally do the most amazingly irrational things, and I do not believe that any system in which right and justice breaks down when humans act irrationally is a correct evaluation of justice.
I think one should first how conflicts are solved usually. You'll find out that -in 90% of the cases- they are anyway resolved without a formal court. I see the problem with your example, but then there are similar problems with state-run courts as well.
Let's assume the person was identified, didn''t show up - In consequence he might be declared an outlaw which might get him banned in your area, but even in many other areas were there one does have agreements with.
Country clubs and other private organizations already work on a basis similar to this. You are asking for a society where the public domain is made private. Suddenly it will require a $250,000.00 yearly membership due to a club to visit Yellowstone Park. This, of course, will keep the thugs outs.
It is being argued that criminals will eventually be relegated to a black market underground. They will lose the ability to do business with respectable people and groups. What is to stop a mass murderer from killing someone nightly to eat from their fridge? Losing the ability to do financial transactions with society does not remove the ability to harm society. Since justice will be entirely economic, will a wealthy person merely pay compensation for killing a poor person?
Pennsuedo:Country clubs and other private organizations already work on a basis similar to this. You are asking for a society where the public domain is made private. Suddenly it will require a $250,000.00 yearly membership due to a club to visit Yellowstone Park. This, of course, will keep the thugs outs.
I sincerely hope that this was not directed at me. I would never be stupid enough to go through all the time and trouble to buy all of a prestine property like yellowstone park to market it to the small and shrinking crowd of country-club goers. If you would, I hope you use the stock market to raise money so I can short your stock. What a supremely stupid business idea, waste of a huge opportunity.
Many of the middle and upper crust of California and the surrounding area are very big on being "green" and enjoying "nature". Yellowstone is a perfect vacation destination for many of them. I say charge about $250/week/family, and you could earn much more money than a country club, which would probably earn less money than an interest-paying savings account.
Pennsuedo:It is being argued that criminals will eventually be relegated to a black market underground. They will lose the ability to do business with respectable people and groups.
Yes. And that is good.
Pennsuedo:What is to stop a mass murderer from killing someone nightly to eat from their fridge?
Insurance, private security protection, and, if needed, guns.
Pennsuedo:groups. What is to stop a mass murderer from killing someone nightly to eat from their fridge? Losing the ability to do financial transactions with society does not remove the ability to harm society.
True enough, but if you don't have an insurance company willing to vouch for you, it doesn't seem that expensive for an insurance company to kill you rather than pay more claims based on your crime.
Pennsuedo:Since justice will be entirely economic, will a wealthy person merely pay compensation for killing a poor person?
Nothing at all. Unless this rich person also contributed a lot to society (all earned money reflects a contribution to society), eventually he would go broke, or be cut off from his family money.
This is actually a better system than we have now. If a rich person kills somebody now, 90% he gets away with it because of his rich lawyers, and 10% he goes to jail. 0% does he have to pay compensation to the family of the victim.
Ryan_Singer: I sincerely hope that this was not directed at me. I would never be stupid enough to go through all the time and trouble to buy all of a prestine property like yellowstone park to market it to the small and shrinking crowd of country-club goers. If you would, I hope you use the stock market to raise money so I can short your stock. What a supremely stupid business idea, waste of a huge opportunity. Many of the middle and upper crust of California and the surrounding area are very big on being "green" and enjoying "nature". Yellowstone is a perfect vacation destination for many of them. I say charge about $250/week/family, and you could earn much more money than a country club, which would probably earn less money than an interest-paying savings account.
I'm aiming at no one in particular. My point is that social groups can and do often value status and association more than actual monetary gain. From a financial standpoint, it doesn't make sense to live in mansions on massive estates, yet that is exactly what the elite tends to do. Privatizing the public space is inviting exactly that kind of thing to happen to our public spaces.
Also, in this decentralized and market-driven politic, how do we come to have protections for the environment, the poor, the helpless? How does an orphaned child hire a protection company? One can argue that dumping radioactive waste into a nature reserve doesn't make economic sense, but it's a flimsy real world argument when looking at what business has been willing to do to make a buck.
Ryan_Singer: Pennsuedo:What is to stop a mass murderer from killing someone nightly to eat from their fridge? Insurance, private security protection, and, if needed, guns. Pennsuedo:groups. What is to stop a mass murderer from killing someone nightly to eat from their fridge? Losing the ability to do financial transactions with society does not remove the ability to harm society.True enough, but if you don't have an insurance company willing to vouch for you, it doesn't seem that expensive for an insurance company to kill you rather than pay more claims based on your crime.
So we would have companies deciding when it is cheaper to just kill someone? I guess that answers my question about orphans from the previous post. Sorry, kiddo, this is for the greater good.
Ryan_Singer: Pennsuedo:Since justice will be entirely economic, will a wealthy person merely pay compensation for killing a poor person? Nothing at all. Unless this rich person also contributed a lot to society (all earned money reflects a contribution to society), eventually he would go broke, or be cut off from his family money. This is actually a better system than we have now. If a rich person kills somebody now, 90% he gets away with it because of his rich lawyers, and 10% he goes to jail. 0% does he have to pay compensation to the family of the victim.
In this case, children born to criminal outsiders could be sold as property. And the wealthy could go hunting criminal outsiders like game animals since those people, by defnition, won't have protection beyond what they muster with guns. And the wealthy could afford drones or whatever technology is needed to assure that they aren't in real danger.
As for wealthy murdering insured poor, I suppose the wealthy would need to be smart enough to only kill who they can afford to compensate. Or, it seems it would be perfectly okay for them to bribe the authorities in the company representing the person they want to kill. Hush hush, you know.
Regarding pollution, you assume that the nature reserve would be public property. It wouldn't. The only reason we need such extensive environmental regulations is because so much land and water is public. Were it privatized, polluting it would be harming another, and they could pursue compensation (and the historical record shows that companies known as major polluters do not last long). Regarding orphans and the disabled, the church and similar private charities took very good care of them for centuries. Before you point to the occasional failures, remember that our present system is not perfect either. We must remember that imperfection is only grounds for change if the alternative is better.
Regarding murder, I take an entirely different approach than some others in that I believe that standards of justice would be upheld. Would you like to be known as the insurance company that went around murdering people it suspected of crimes? I think not. Instead, a system of councils would probably arise to give some legitimacy to whatever enforcement action is used, as has happened in almost every other semi-anarchist society in history. If you killed someone you suspected of murder, but could not prove it before a council, that would open you up for a blood-feud. If the council you chose had a reputation for assigning guilt to easily, the same would result. Equilibrium would be reached at a standard of justice that benefited neither party unduly, as everyone would fear to be unjustly punished or to fail to obtain justice.
Pennsuedo:What is to stop a mass murderer from killing someone nightly to eat from their fridge? Losing the ability to do financial transactions with society does not remove the ability to harm society.
The police. The fact that they would be employed by a community via voluntary exchange instead of taxation doesn't change their basic purpose.
Pennsuedo:So we would have companies deciding when it is cheaper to just kill someone? I guess that answers my question about orphans from the previous post. Sorry, kiddo, this is for the greater good.
Murderers will be murderers, and it would be possible for murderous organizations to flee from justice the same way they do today: By fleeing to locations which do not have agreements allowing fugitive recovery (Osama hid in Afghanistan for a reason, etc). Of course, this would be an extremely stupid thing to do for financial reasons. The areas of the world where people can get away with murder are of course extremely poor. Morals aside, murder does not make good economic sense for a society.
Justice will be served by self-defense, and firms hired to uphold justice. It may or may not be economic - that would depend on what sort of justice a society wanted. With the firm's profit's being dependent on how well they serve their customers by keeping crime down, I'd think the systems of justice could look far different than how they do today. As mentioned above, I'd hope the use of prisons would be cut down. The use of fines and economic penalties might be popular because they would decrease the cost of the protection to the firm's law-abiding customers. Care would of course have to be taken that the protection firm did not abuse their power in a similar manner to how traffic citations are used today. I'd imagine many decisions would still be made via the democratic process, if that is what customers demanded.
Pennsuedo:In this case, children born to criminal outsiders could be sold as property.
If they were being sold in a society where slavery is legal, sure. Thats no different from how things work today, but fortunately such societies are very rare. I don't think market anarchism would change this much. Markets reinforce morals, because moral behavior is needed to create wealth in a properly-protected free market, but they can't completely change the morals of society any more than democracy can.
Pennsuedo:And the wealthy could go hunting criminal outsiders like game animals since those people, by definition, won't have protection beyond what they muster with guns. And the wealthy could afford drones or whatever technology is needed to assure that they aren't in real danger.
If someone's crimes are so vile that they are expelled or flee from any protection firm, and the hunters lived in societies which did not criminalize the hunting you describe, then yes I suppose that is possible. However, most societies do not accept such behavior, even if it happens halfway across the world.
Pennsuedo:As for wealthy murdering insured poor, I suppose the wealthy would need to be smart enough to only kill who they can afford to compensate. Or, it seems it would be perfectly okay for them to bribe the authorities in the company representing the person they want to kill. Hush hush, you know.
Again, it depends on the laws of the society. I seriously doubt anyone would choose to live in a society where murder wasn't punished very harshly, just as few people would employ a person or firm that accepts bribes. Even within a firm, bribery would likely be punished as part of the employee's contract.
Remember, money is only one medium of exchange in markets. A market transaction is simply one that occurs voluntarily, and the goods received may not be tangible.
Webster: I was not arguing for a state monopoly on security, which I believe to be both harmful and unjust. Neither am I arguing that preying upon visitors is likely. On the other hand, history tells us that humans will occasionally do the most amazingly irrational things, and I do not believe that any system in which right and justice breaks down when humans act irrationally is a correct evaluation of justice.
I meant to be in agreement with you. Free market justice and security would defend human rights, regarldess of locality, much better than the State does today.
justinx0r:This is one of the major reasons I do not identify myself as an anarcho-capitalist. I've read about free market courts and how they would work but (at least in my eyes) there is a fundamental flaw.Say I steal someones car in Baltimore and drive it up to Boston. The person I stole from would go to a free market court and press charges on me, ordering me to appear in court. What if I refuse? They can't do anything about it since I own myself and I am innocent until proven guilty. How would you solve a dilemma such as this?
There is no ideal "solution", the problem in market anarchy is the same as it is with governments. If you refuse to appear in court, the police firm(s) which have jurisdiction over Boston would need an agreement with firms in Baltimore to be able to arrest you (or have you arrested, depending on the level of cooperation between the firms). If they did not have permission from the Boston firms, they would not be able to arrest you peacefully. Similar things happen between countries today.
If you hole up on your property and arm yourself, then of course the police firms will use whatever force they deem fitting to subdue you.
A significant different between market anarchy and governments is the network effect (wikipedia has a good article on this). Police firms have an incentive to follow compatible laws with other firms, in order to resolve situations like were just described. Also, similar laws provide utility for customers who do not want to be faced with radically different methods of law enforcement if they travel from Boston to Baltimore. Governments tend to expand and create similar standards through force. But the problem with governments is that these standards are rarely undone if they become obsolete. Industry standards like VHS, Laser Disc, and DVDs were or are being replaced as they become obsolete and the cost of replacing the standards becomes worth the gains. But there is no rational way governments can select the standards most beneficial to its citizens, and there is often extreme resistance to removing standards once they are in place.
You speak as if a firm needed jurisdiction to arrest someone. Why would jurisdiction be necessary if the firm does not have a monopoly on force in the area (in which case it just becomes a different form of government) and if no consent was required on the part of the person arrested?