Is "law and economics" really rad or just really awesome? I mean, it's way more brilliant than argumentation ethics, natural law, or other humbug deontologies.
[Suppose you] live in a state where the most severe criminal punishment is life imprisonment. Someone proposes that since armed robbery is a very serious crime, armed robbers should get a life sentence. A constitutional lawyer asks whether that is consistent with the prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. A legal philosopher asks whether it is just. An economist points out that if the punishments for armed robbery and for armed robbery plus murder are the same, the additional punishment for murder is zero—and asks whether you really want to make it in the interest of robbers to murder their victims. (David Friedman)
"I'm not a fan of Murray Rothbard." -- David D. Friedman
I will argue that dictations fail to meet the criterion of being law since they do not emerge from the resolution of disputes.
I've been exploring this idea as well. I think there is a great similarity between the process of law and the process of the market economy. Both must respond to a society of individuals whose preferences and circumstances change, requiring an endless process of trial-and-error. More importantly, the process is fundamental to the product; just as an industry cannot be removed from the market and successfully operated by the state, law cannot be removed from civil society and fabricated by the state. It is not a matter of manufacturing incentives to mirror those conditions found in 'nature'; it is qualities inherent in the process. A price is only a price if it emerges from the market, and a law is only a law if it emerges from mediation.
Friedman's explanation in The Machinery of Freedom of how the market could produce law was one of the final arguments that led me to embrace anarchism. I think he's great, though I too prefer the work being done by people like John Hasnas and Bruce Benson regarding the evolution of customary or, in Hasnas' words, depolicitized law.
Just because we can incentivize people in behaving in a certain way or not to behave in a certain way, doesn't make it just to do so. David works from a non-implicit moral framework. W
which is fine, except that some people don't seem to recognize their own prejudices. Which is irritating; because it leads them to conclusions that all you need is law & economics.
The state is not the enemy. The idea of the state is.
Hey Clayton I created a resource Malthus0's Place for exactly this kind of situation & as an extension of my Youtube channel. The Law, Legislation & Liberty PDF is filed under the Political Theory.
LL&L is a personal favourate of mine. Hope you enjoy it.
@Faustus: You rock!! I'm reading it already! Woohoo!
Clayton -
Hasnas has a few words as a primer to that book to disambiguate Hayek's use of common law versus customary law.
Why anarchy fails
Even more: Hayek & Cowboys: Customary Law in the American West by Andrew P. Morriss
And It Takes Two Invisible Hands to Make a Market: Lex Mercatoria (Law Merchant) Always Emerges to Facilitate Emerging Market Activity by Bruce L. Benson
Quit editing your posts with more content, AJ. I need to get to bed.
Going through Hasnas' "Hayek, the Common Law, and Fluid Drive," he praises Lon Fuller's essys collected in The Principles of Social Order; has anyone read it or other of Fuller's works and consider it worth picking up? B&N has it new at half price, $33.
And what about Hayek's LL&L? I like Hayek as economist, but have been underwhelmed with his writing as a social philosopher. I know I should read it eventually, but given how far behind I am on libertarian philosophy, does it deserve to be near the top of my reading list? Right now, Jan Narveson and some classical liberal authors occupy the top spot.
Also, de Jasay devotes a few pages to Hayek's conception here:
http://libertyactivism.info/uploads/6/64/Against_Politics_-_Anthony_de_Jasay.pdf (scroll to pg. 120)
Heheh, I'm not reading any of these yet, just posting them here because I've found them. Here's something on Fuller: Lon L. Fuller and the Enterprise of Law, and here's something at Google Books, plus a book of his called The Morality of Law.
Provide us url to your yt channel.
"I mean, it's way more brilliant than argumentation ethics, natural law, or other humbug deontologies."
No, it's not.
Yeah, Law and Economics is awesome.
What about Richard Epstein. He's awesome too
AJ: What are you using to post your P2P content with web URLs in that way? I assume that you are not actually uploading to a server but just creating a link that permits a P2P download from your machine to mine, initiated by clicking on the URL? Am I understanding? If so, that's freakin' awesome and I want to know how to do it.
Back to Friedman, his anarcho-capitalistic assertion is that privatized law-making would be a market process, and hence as "emergent" and self-organizing as any other free enterprise.
How would we reach privatized law from our current system of government provided law without running into Hayekian knowledge problems? I don't see how anyone could know what statelessness would look like a priori, and the emperical literature isn't really that promising.
I think you have it backwards... the law monopoly suffers from the Hayekian knowledge problem since the State's legislators and regulators cannot know all the facts that need to be known in order to prevent and resolve the innumerable disputes that will arise within the rules they construct and the State's judges are necessarily too few in number and too homogeneous (non-diverse) because their primary customer is the State itself (they are working for the State), not the disputants who come to them for arbitration and adjudication.
As for how we would reach privatized law from our current system of government, I think we first have to delve uncomfortably deep into human nature and the human psyche before it will be possible. The root problem is moral. Human beings are amenable to a dual-morality under specific circumstances (that the moral exceptionalist be a duly recognized 'alpha'). This widespread acceptance of dual-morality naturally leads to dual-law and, by extension, to trade privileges (monopoly and personal privilege is dual law in the realm of trade) and other personal and status-based privileges. Despite the supposedly widespread belief in democracy, our entire social order implicitly assumes the existence of elite classes bearing exceptional legal and moral privileges over the general population, whether these privileges are personal or official. At this point, I've basically given up on any possibility of short-term progress in the direction of liberty. Humans will only become freer after some number of generations have passed and those who are better at defending their property rights through cunning and avoidance of the expropriations of the State have been more successful at spreading their genes than those who have inured themselves into the State order.