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
Sure, but I don't think that trying to predict biological evolution puts you in "quack territory".
It does when you pinpoint the particular change as leading to an anarcho-capitalist world. You may as well believe in the new communist man.
Based on that you would have to conclude that any change from the circumstance is impossible. Which raises the question of why you would bother talking about this at all.
Well, it's not impossible, it's just going to take a really long time. I think there can be no doubt that governments today are in almost every way less powerful, as far as the individual citizen is concerned, than governments 5000 years ago or even 200 years ago. Yes, the State can bring unprecedented levels of force to bear on anyone who resists its will but its ability to keep the masses in line through fear or reverence has never been more weak, which explains why the government is so interested in controlling every aspect of the ordinary person's life. While it is true that control freaks may have as an end controlling the lives of others and governments certainly attract control freaks, the end of the prince qua prince is parasitic subsistence, not control of other people's lives. I don't think the powers that be care - or have ever really cared - what god I worship, what I buy and sell or how I raise my family. I don't even think the powers that be care how much wealth I have so long as they have more wealth and they don't feel threatened by me and their social status remains higher, however they feel social status is measured.
What makes governments powerful is the assent of the masses. While I agree with the Rothbardian insight that the masses don't think for themselves and they get their opinions from the opinion-molding class, I don't think that changing the minds of the opinion-molding class is a sufficient condition for eliminating government. It might cut government back immensely but government will remain so long as the vast majority of people assent to dual-law/morality and I think the only remedy for dual-law/morality is biological evolution since biological evolution is what gave it to us in the first place.
Of course, we do manage to keep rape down well below the levels to which it would pertain if our ancestral biology had the last word in the matter, so who knows, maybe there's more hope for the future than I have right now.
Clayton -
Clayton: What makes governments powerful is the assent of the masses. While I agree with the Rothbardian insight that the masses don't think for themselves and they get their opinions from the opinion-molding class, I don't think that changing the minds of the opinion-molding class is a sufficient condition for eliminating government. It might cut government back immensely but government will remain so long as the vast majority of people assent to dual-law/morality and I think the only remedy for dual-law/morality is biological evolution since biological evolution is what gave it to us in the first place.
Did you even read my response to you?
If I wrote it more than a few weeks ago, I probably hate it by now.
It might cut government back immensely but government will remain so long as the vast majority of people assent to dual-law/morality and I think the only remedy for dual-law/morality is biological evolution since biological evolution is what gave it to us in the first place.
Only problem is there is no reason to expect that to happen.
Now you really are beginning to scare me if you think that rape is a general predisposition. It says something about you, perhaps.
Well there are other conditions: technology, level of wealth, education, and so on. These are changing quickly.
Why anarchy fails
I'll ignore the baiting for the sake of discussion. I don't think that rape is a general disposition, quite the opposite. However, you know as well as I do that biology is not libertarian so the genes for forcible copulation have been passed down with varying degrees of success and survive to this day. Nevertheless, I do think that violent crimes, including rape, occur far less than they would otherwise as a result of the many innovations of human culture (intimidation, retaliation, law, and so on) which have the effect of internalizing the costs of such crimes.
Regarding what you said about family, I find it particularly odd. Bias toward immediate family is essentially smale scale xenophobia. If anything a change toward more family obsession would go with increased feudal duality. Unless you mean a strengthening of family inspired solely by the utility of people in close proximity, uninspired by the feeling of superiority based on accident of birth.
I have an essentially Hoppean view of the family. I may be a wee bit less libertarian than Dr. Hoppe, though I can't know for sure without having a conversation with him. Basically, child-bearing and rearing necessarily involves the use of coercion*. Hoppe has explained that the human family is a novel solution to the problem of internalizing the costs of reproduction onto both the male and the female whose genes are benefiting from reproduction. He characterizes tribal reproduction as essentially communal sharing of the costs of reproduction. The family, by contrast, privatizes the costs of child-rearing. Without coercive care from its parent or another adult, a young human child in the ancestral environment would have perished within hours, not days. With some qualifications, this is largely true in the modern world. Since a person's genes will never be propagated if their children do not survive at least to puberty, we are the descendants of mothers (and, more recently, fathers) who cared for their offspring. This will continue to be true for the foreseeable future. Parents who use an appropriate amount of coercion to keep their children alive will continue to enjoy a reproductive advantage over those parents who do not.
I think the human family is the easiest way to see that NAP breaks down and cannot be a sole criterion of human law. And once you get that foot in the door, you start to realize that the whole edifice of human law is irreducibly complex... there is no shortcut.
*I'm not using the word "coercion" as code-speak for corporal punishment... it is perfectly possible to raise children to adulthood without the use of corporal punishment but many acts that would qualify as coercive between adult peers are regular features of healthy parent-child interaction (for infants, toddlers and young children) and the complete absence of coercion of young children by adults would almost necessarily entail their death.
I know Hoppe's position on it. So, you are not necessarily talking about reinforcing family in any sort of jingoist/xenophobic sense? One can't be sure prima facie what anyone means by being pro-family.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnet_URI_scheme is one way to do that.